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Return to hell: Finding the family who sheltered us in Mosul

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 11:32:00 +0000

Return to hell: Finding the family who sheltered us in Mosul

The last time I saw Mattar, she was running for her life, and she was angry.

Angry at the ISIS fighters shooting outside, angry at the soldiers hiding in her home, angry at her family's misfortune, to live in Iraq at a time like this.

And angry with me, for repeatedly telling her that back up units were on their way, though none had arrived.

Photojournalist Brice Lainé and I had embedded with a unit of Iraqi counter-terrorism troops as they pushed to take streets from ISIS in eastern Mosul. But things had gone badly wrong. Trapped in its maze of narrow, muddy side roads, our convoy was pinned down, our escape route blocked.

After our armored vehicle took a direct hit we dashed from house to house to get away from the encroaching ISIS fighters, eventually ending up in Mattar's home. There, the family, soldiers and journalists spent one of the most terrifying nights of our lives as explosions rocked the building and a deadly firefight raged outside.

Yet the family had fed us and the soldiers, made us tea, offered us blankets, and all the while Mattar had kept her sense of humor and her dignity.

Just seven years my senior, Mattar had become my "Mosul mom" in those hours, though she'd joked how unfair it was that I looked so much younger, and had not gone gray.

"Look! This is what being Iraqi does to you," she said, showing me the roots of her hair.

Then, at dawn, when the firefight erupted again, worse than ever, and an airstrike on the house next door had her family screaming in fear under the stairs, they had fled in panic, barefoot and without looking back, amid a hail of bullets and grenades.

I had not even had a chance to hug her goodbye, to say thank you.

We eventually escaped, went home, enjoyed the luxury of feeling safe, but what had happened to them?

For two months, Brice and I had worried about the soldiers who were with us that day, about the civilians who sheltered us, about Mattar and her family.

We had to go back and find out.

What Sheryl Sandberg gets right about life after death

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 11:28:00 +0000

What Sheryl Sandberg gets right about life after death

When Sheryl Sandberg's husband died suddenly two years ago at the age of 47, she noticed that her friends and co-workers were hesitant to talk about it and that she was reluctant to talk about it herself.

In her new book, "Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy," out next week, the Facebook COO and Lean In entrepreneur writes about the unexpected death of her husband, David Goldberg, and the mourning process that followed.

Peggy Drexler

It isn't the first time Sandberg has written about her experiences with love and loss. Less than a month after Goldberg's death, she took to Facebook to write a public post about the previous 30 days.

"I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice," she wrote at the time. "You can give into the void, the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts our ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning."

The post has since received nearly a million likes, inspiring 75,000 comments from men and women sharing their own stories of grief and loss. After that, Sandberg told The Guardian, "I didn't feel alone anymore."

She began to understand that it wasn't that people didn't want to talk to her. It was that they didn't know how.

So it's no surprise that Sandberg has progressed from writing a Facebook post to writing a grief memoir, a form of writing as old as time. In deciding to write a full-length book about her grieving process, Sandberg takes that dialogue a step further, making it even easier for those afraid to broach the subject with her to speak up. In other words, she creates a new avenue for communication.

But it's not just friends and family who benefit from this kind of prose. There's evidence that writing about yourself can be cathartic -- even if you never plan to share that writing with the world or anyone at all. Reflective writing has been shown to have both physical and emotional health benefits, including decreasing anxiety, rage and depression and increasing control and creativity.

Modern icons: Understanding London's architecture renaissance

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 11:23:00 +0000

Modern icons: Understanding London's architecture renaissance

There are old cities. There are new cities. London's strange and seemingly eternal attraction lies in its ability to be simultaneously both.

London is a city with Roman foundations and a street plan that emerges as a chaotic hybrid of arrow-straight Roman roads, winding medieval alleys, and marketplaces; but also well-meaning, if often half-hearted, attempts to make it grander, more beautiful -- or at least more rational. But it resists all attempts to overlay it with a sense of logic, just as it defies the efforts of successive generations to transform it, despoil it, or iron out the creases.

Through this chaos emerges one of the world's most persistently desirable, expensive, successful, and unpredictable cityscapes, a place that is constantly changing yet somehow always remains fundamentally London.

Each century seems to bring its radical transformations, from the Great Fire in the 17th to the elegant city squares of the 18th, the explosion of the suburbs of the 19th and the scars of war and the neophilia of modernism in the 20th. But the 21st century is arguably already bringing about the most radical shifts in scale and skyline that the city has seen since the medieval era.

While the post-Great Fire skyline was defined by the spires of Sir Christopher Wren's churches, culminating in the great dome of St Paul's Cathedral, the new cityscape is marked by supertall towers articulating the city's real estate status as the reserve currency of the global elite.e-w

And, as if to reimpose itself on a profile in which height in itself is no longer enough to make a statement, London has supercharged its architecture to make itself seen.

Cities with porcupine skylines are almost a cliché; what actually makes a city buzz happens in its streets and squares, its shops and bars, the chandelier-crowned restaurants and the subterranean dive bars. And that's been a different story, one expressed through a cocktail of the salvaged and the shiny, the particular and the generic.

In one interpretation, the city's streets are being homogenized, the plate glass windows and the glazed facades reducing the interface between public and private, interior and exterior to a banal membrane. But in a parallel route, architects and clients are weaving their buildings back into the historic fabric, the city streets becoming intriguing palimpsests in which the high tech gleams next to artfully maintained dilapidation.

Walls are being stripped of centuries of plaster and wallpaper and taken back to the bare bones of brick and steel; battered floors and ceilings are revealed as precious surfaces divulge their history through their degradation.

Many of the best new works in the city appear not as monuments or towers, as museums, or malls, but as pieces of infill -- considered, modest, occasional glimpses of a coherent, characterful architecture that has somehow emerged from this polyphony of voices, styles, and forms.

Eric Parry Architects' faience facade at 50 New Bond Street and 6a Architects' cast-iron shop front for Paul Smith's store in nearby Albemarle Street seem to represent a new, but also rather traditional, idea of ornament as inherent to structure, a willingness to merge experiment and art with the historic texture and the subtle but intriguing decorative character of the city.

Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance by Herzog & de Meuron

Adjaye Associates' Rivington Place, meanwhile, introduces what appears to be a memory of soot-stained industrial architecture scaled at the level of the street, while Herzog & de Meuron adopt the cheap, polycarbonate, and concrete language of industrial construction for their shimmering Laban Building.

The complexity of London's streetscape, the incoherence -- perhaps even absence -- of an overarching plan, the layering of historic strata, and the way in which modern megastructures are allowed to burst through the filigree lace of medieval scale and grain, mean that buildings are never experienced in a straightforward way.

Instead they are glimpsed poking above streets or reflected through shop windows or rain puddles.

London is not a city of monuments but a metropolis of glances and slightly hidden surfaces. Once obscured by the fog, it now fades into the drizzle or creates the backdrop for the ebbs and flows of the crowd absorbed more in their phones than the streets they are walking through.

The photographs here capture precisely—or perhaps impressionistically—that realm of glimpses and impressions, unexpected details and sudden surprises, a cityscape of infinite variety and constantly evolving aesthetics, which, no matter how well we think we know it, folds, collapses, and elides into new views and vistas even as we walk its endlessly intriguing streets.

Turkey's shell-shocked opposition struggles to find a way forward

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 11:19:00 +0000

Turkey's shell-shocked opposition struggles to find a way forward

Turkish citizens who did not want to give more powers to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a very hard Monday.

The referendum to abolish the post of the Prime Minister and to create an executive-led rather than parliamentary system had passed a few hours earlier, albeit by a narrow margin.

There was quiet discontent in Ankara, as if its pockets of opposition had been zipped tight.

Duysen Talas, a 28-year-old born in the capital, Ankara, was slouched over in a chair of the pro-Kurdish opposition party Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) headquarters.

Duysen Talas sits in HDP headquarters in Ankara on Monday.

Talas, like many of the country's 24 million "No" voters, woke up in a post-referendum haze -- looking for answers to a referendum tainted by complaints during the campaign, the voting and preliminary results.

Erdogan declared victory on Sunday night after state-run media Anadolu reported 51.4% voted for his "Yes" campaign.

The razor-thin majority of votes had opponents crying fraud and saying the "Yes" side would not have had so many votes and even could have lost, if the Turkish Supreme Board of Elections had followed its own protocol.

Official ballots with the words "Evet" ("Yes") or "Hayir" ("No") are seen at a polling station in Ankara on Sunday.

Even as the ballots were being counted on Sunday, the board decided to allow unstamped ballots to pass as legal votes -- a move that the opposition says gave the green light to voter fraud.

Tana de Zulueta, head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Council for Europe election monitoring group said the decision "significantly changed the ballot validity criteria, undermining an important safeguard and contradicting the law," amongst other campaign concerns.

Challenges to the result may come, but the there is no indication that it will not stand.

Diyar, a 60-year-old HDP member said, "Just like the previous elections the AKP has created a scene - manipulating the public through media by using the state-run news agency. (This fraud) was planned from the beginning."

As pro-Erdogan supporters flooded Ankara's streets in celebration last night, many opposition voices in the country's capital remained quiet -- fearful, perhaps of state-led retribution that's not held back with force or arrests against dissident voices since July 2016 when a failed coup rocked the country and at least 249 people died in a chaotic night of violence.

At HDP headquarters, Talas, who lives in Austria but had flown to Turkey for the referendum result, told CNN he "was expecting this fraud."

Turkey's referendum: One thing to know 01:01

He'd headed to the opposition offices to find out what demonstrations were planned, but didn't get the answer he was looking for.

Upstairs, HDP member of parliament and party spokesperson Osman Baydemir could not see beyond the result.

He recapped an unfair campaign in the lead up to the vote, a perception that the election monitors corroborated at a press conference in Ankara on Monday.

During the campaign, rallies and the official HDP campaign song were forbidden. Supporters were subject to state-led surveillance, and MPs and leaders were jailed without trial, Baydemir said.

In this stark political landscape, Erdogan accused the party of supporting terrorist group PKK and jailed 5,000 of their supporters -- including leaders Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag.

Demonstrating is not seen as an option for now. Instead, they -- as well as main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) -- will file their objections, demanding a recount of at least 37% of the votes.

Osman Baydemir, HDP spokesperson and MP at the party headquarters in Ankara on Monday.

CHP Deputy Chairman Erdal Aksunger told CNN that his party received complaints from a total of 10,833 polling stations on voting day. From misprinted ballots to the forcible removal of election observers, the referendum was carried out under "absolute illegality," he said.

Aksunger was not confident that their application for a recount -- let alone an annulment -- would yield a result. "In a country where there is rule of law, it should -- but here we have absolute illegality," Aksunger again stressed.

"We are going to make our official rejections of the vote count, but we don't think it's going to make a difference," Baydemir told CNN.

Foti Benlisoy, historian and author of "Gezi Uprisal: The Interesting Beginning of Turkey" told CNN that it's no surprise that the political actors are staying away from demanding action in a climate of fear.

Some protests, seen in Istanbul and Izmir on Sunday and Monday "are mostly coming from those people who have been working in their neighborhood's 'No' committees; the young people who have worked for "No' and believed that the result would be 'No,'" he said.

It is hard to say if these protests would spread to other cities, such as Ankara -- or if they would continue, he said.

Talas, who also would visit main opposition party CHP headquarters and was considering staying in Turkey to demonstrate, said he understood why the opposition wasn't planning action for fear of violence -- or in the worst case -- death, but that perhaps a show of solidarity could change that.

A man looks down at the capital city from one of Ankara's highest view points. President Erdogan arrived in the capital on Monday.

As Erdogan spoke at Ankara airport to supporters who cheered the backing of the President's proposal to bring back capital punishment, across town from the HDP offices at a cafe in a left-leaning university block, people sat in a leafy garden under a grey cloud.

Yasin K., a vegan chef, was smoking cigarettes with his two friends. He explained that the resistance would be a slow burner.

"We're in a strange position where we haven't reached the boiling point quite yet."

Yasin pointed to the "No" vote in Antalya -- a traditional pro-Erdogan stronghold.

The tourist town has suffered economic losses as a result of the country's deteriorating relations with Russia -- a country that provides the area with one of its main sources of income -- as well as a string of terror attacks that have made the country less desirable for holidaymakers.

Yasin predicted Erdogan would continue to make enemies abroad and that would continue to hurt Turkish people.

"The boiling point is going to be about the economy -- and it's coming. And that's going to be the end of Erdogan and AKP," he said.

Merve Semerci said she "panicked" when she saw the results but is hopeful the opposition will "come together to achieve the things that we need."

Merve Semerci, a 32-year-old art student came to discuss the results with her two friends who drank beers while they spoke of the "depressing" ballot controversy.

Although she "definitely thinks there was fraud," the slim margin between votes strengthened her resolve for a growing opposition.

"I don't think that people will continue to be silent against this high-pressure environment -- the oppressed will find the power in themselves again. But this time we will be moving slower and more calmly because of the experience we gained during and after the (Gezi) protests."

"Of course now our motivation and energy has taken a blow. But instead of going out to the streets right now, we have to find ways to renew ourselves and come together -- to give each other hope. We do feel oppressed right now but we know that we have to move strategically as well," she said.

Back at HDP headquarters, MP Baydemir offered a glimmer of optimism.

"Despite all these pressure politics, we've gained hope," he said.

"There are millions of people in this country that are against one man -- and they want justice," he said.

Later that evening, the Turkish Council of Ministers signed the decision to extend the state of emergency -- signed into place by Erdogan nearly nine months ago -- for an additional three months.

Trump congratulates Erdogan for referendum win

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 11:15:00 +0000

Trump congratulates Erdogan for referendum win

US President Donald Trump has become the first Western leader to congratulate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for winning a controversial referendum that grants him far-reaching, largely unchecked powers.

Trump called the Turkish leader on Monday shortly after international monitors delivered a harsh verdict on the referendum on constitutional changes. They found that the opposition campaign had been restricted and the media coverage was imbalanced, and that the electoral authority had unfairly changed the rules after polls had opened.

Turkey's shell-shocked opposition struggles to find a way forward

Trump joins a short list of leaders who have openly congratulated Erdogan, including Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Saudi King Salman.

His congratulations stands in stark contrast to the more cautious tone adopted by European leaders and a statement issued by the US State Department, which acknowledged the results but warned against further repression by the Turkish government of the political opposition.

"We look to the government of Turkey to protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of all its citizens -- regardless of their vote on April 16 -- as guaranteed by the Turkish constitution and in accordance with Turkey's international commitments," the State Department said in a statement.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, and US President Donald Trump.

"Democracies gain strength through respect for diverse points of view, especially on difficult issues."

The Turkish government has been widely condemned by Western nations for its repression of opposition figures following a failed military coup last year.

Europe sends warnings

European governments struck a more cautious note.

"The tight referendum result shows how deeply divided Turkish society is and that means a big responsibility for the Turkish leadership and for President Erdogan personally," Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said in a joint statement, calling for a "respectful dialogue" in Ankara with the opposition and all parts of Turkish society.

Turkey referendum: Related content

Erdogan's margin of victory in the referendum was razor-thin. Despite a state of emergency and a widespread crackdown on dissent, he succeeded in persuading only 51.4% of voters to back his constitutional upheaval.

The French government said it would "follow with great care" the international monitors' final report in coming weeks, particularly in relation to a reported last-minute change of rules by the electoral boards to allow ballots that had not been officially stamped. The change has raise concerns of "ballot-stuffing" -- where extra votes are cast illegally to manipulate results.

"Only the Turks can decide their political organization. But figures already published show that Turkish society is divided on this planned important reforms," it said, calling for "a free and sincere dialogue" in Turkey among all components of political and social life.

Erdogan has lashed back at the OSCE international monitors' initial findings, telling them to "know their place," Reuters reports.

He said that Turkey did not "see, hear or acknowledge" the observer mission's reports and accused some European countries of showing more opposition to the constitutional changes than Turkey's own opposition parties.

10 pythons, including two 15-feet-long, captured in 10 days in Florida Everglades

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 14:08:00 +0000

10 pythons, including two 15-feet-long, captured in 10 days in Florida Everglades

Ten pythons were captured and killed in less than two weeks in the Florida Everglades.

The largest snake captured measured 15-feet, 10-inches and weighed 135 pounds, according to a news release. The second largest snake was 15-feet, 2-inches. Snake wrangler Nick Banos told CBS News it weighed 144-pounds and could "easily take out a 170-pound man."

The captures are part of South Florida Water Management District's Pilot Python Elimination Program. Selected hunters are paid hourly, as well as $50 for pythons measuring up to 4 feet and an extra $25 for each foot measured above 4 feet, according to a release.

The program's "most successful" hunter is Barry Offenburger, who killed three pythons ranging from 13 to 6-feet within a week, the release says.

Reticulated pythons can grow between 20 and 25-feet-long and are able to kill humans in minutes.

Eric Trump: 'Nepotism is kind of a factor of life'

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 14:06:00 +0000

Eric Trump: 'Nepotism is kind of a factor of life'

To Eric Trump, nepotism is just a way of life.

At least that's how he tells it in an interview with Forbes, which published Tuesday.

"Nepotism is kind of a factor of life," he said in the February interview. "We might be here because of nepotism, but we're not still here because of nepotism. You know, if we didn't do a good job, if we weren't competent, believe me, we wouldn't be in this spot."

Eric, the second son of President Trump, was handed the reins to the Trump Organization, along with older brother Donald Trump Jr.

But even that took time, according to Eric Trump. It might have been a different story had his father become president four or eight years ago.

"I think we probably would have been too big of question marks for him," he said. "I think in so many of the deals that we've done, whether it be kind of all of the golf courses or the wineries or this or that — and the operations of them and hiring for them, the building of these buildings, the financing of these buildings and everything else that we do on a daily basis, I think hopefully we earned our stripes. And I think that’s ultimately why we’re in the seat we’re in."

President Trump has favored placing his children in positions of power. Last week, daughter Ivanka announced she was taking an unpaid position as assistant to the president. Her husband, Jared Kushner, serves as a senior adviser to Trump and is also unpaid.

100 years since U.S. entered WWI

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 14:05:00 +0000

100 years since U.S. entered WWI

This sunny Florida town has a shady reputation for fueling America’s illegal drug trade

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 14:03:00 +0000

This sunny Florida town has a shady reputation for fueling America’s illegal drug trade

DORAL, Fla. — In a leafy office park in the suburbs west of Miami, local undercover officers set up an elaborate sting inside the Sevilla Trading Corporation.

Beyond the neatly furnished front office, a courier working for drug dealers carted in a shoe box stuffed with thousands in drug cash collected on street corners in cities across the country.

A police informant counted the cash in a back room, divided it, then delivered it to computer stores down the street in the first step toward turning the dollars into pesos and sending them to drug kingpins in Colombia.

The investigation in Doral in 2002 was supposed to crack down on rampant laundering in the area and shut down the businesses taking in drug money. But in the following years, just the opposite happened.

Internal police records reviewed by USA TODAY Network show the drug groups quietly turned Florida’s fastest-growing suburb into a money laundering haven that has empowered the largest criminal organizations in the Americas to hide their illicit profits and dominate the narcotics trade in the United States.

Twelve miles from the looming skyscrapers of downtown Miami, the criminal groups have moved millions of dollars though the little-known maze of office parks just blocks from the prestigious golf course that bears President Trump’s name.

With the nation steeped in a heroin epidemic — thousands of overdose deaths each year — the laundering has allowed the criminal groups smuggling the drug into the United States to get their money out of the country once the narcotics are sold.

“It’s absolutely critical to them,” said John Tobon, an agent for the Department of Homeland Security in Miami.

In a community known mostly as a getaway from the urban problems of Miami, the flood of drug money has confounded law enforcement agencies.

"We always thought we would get to it at some point,” said Charlie Blau, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw the first money laundering sting in Miami. "We knew it would be a bigger problem.”

Federal agents say the criminal organizations use many methods to launder their money, including overseas bank wires and cash smuggling over the border.

They also have turned to other laundering areas, like the garment district in Los Angeles and the jewelry centers in New York City, to clean millions in drug profits.

But the export shops west of Miami remain among the oldest conduits in the country to launder money — and the most difficult to infiltrate and shut down.

Twice, local law enforcement task forces targeted the area, but no business owners were arrested nor were their shops closed.

Internal records of the most recent sting operation, in 2012, show for the first time the stunning amount of money that moved through the businesses and their importance to powerful drug organizations.

Tens of thousands in cash bundles were dropped off at a cellphone outlet tucked inside an aging storage center on the edge of town. Hundreds of thousands were wired into the bank account of a computer store with a glitzy showroom on one of Doral's busiest thoroughfares.

In just three years, at least $25 million in drug money was funneled through 201 exporters by the police sting — just a fraction of the total number of businesses that were used to launder hundreds of millions in the past decade, according to records and former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents.

Suburb haven or money-laundering hub?

In a city that once hosted one of the PGA's famous tournaments, the activities have perplexed local leaders. "Obviously, it’s not good for Florida. It's not good for Doral,” said Mayor Juan Carlos Bermudez. “It’s not representative of the majority of the businesses we have here."

For decades, the vast area near Miami — a sprawling suburb of 52,000 people with gated communities and lakes — has been home to export shops that sprung up to meet a booming demand for laptops and cellphones in South America.

Because of the ample office and warehouse space near Miami International Airport — the largest cargo hub in the nation serving Latin America — the number of export shops mushroomed.

Not only was it an ideal place to do business, but in time, it also came to serve the purpose of the criminal groups.

Unlike traditional laundering that relied on the banks to hide ownership of the money, this was different.

Under a system known as the "black market peso exchange," the drug groups turned to the exporters to launder their cash and make it more difficult to track.

In deal after deal examined by USA TODAY Network, the officers picked up money in New York, Chicago and other cities — in duffel bags and suitcases — and flew it to South Florida, where they stashed it in a police trailer.

What followed was one of the largest undercover operations carried out in the country.

After getting orders, the police delivered the money to the Doral exporters to pay for goods ordered by retail stores in Colombia.

The retailers received the goods, and then paid back the cartel the equivalent amount — in pesos.

Teacher had sex with student 22 times, records show

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 14:01:00 +0000

Teacher had sex with student 22 times, records show

INDIANAPOLIS — An Indiana high school teacher and former golf coach met a student for sex in two Indianapolis hotels 22 times since July, according to records filed in Marion Superior Court.

Five of those sexual encounters between Robert Chin and his student took place before the girl's 18th birthday, according to a preliminary probable cause affidavit.

The 40-year-old Avon, Ind., man was held without bond Tuesday in the Marion County (Ind.) Jail on a felony charge of child seduction, jail records show.

Prosecutors formally charged Chin with seven counts of felony child seduction, according to court records.

Chin told police that he was the head coach of the Ben Davis High School boys golf team and an assistant coach for the girls team. He said he taught honors English, critical thinking and other classes at the Indianapolis high school.

Police found Chin on Saturday in a room at a Clarion Hotel, where they say he arranged to have sex with the girl hours earlier, according to the court records.

Officers interviewed the 18-year-old at her home, where she told them she and Chin began "more than just a student-teacher relationship" shortly after fall break of her junior year.

She began having sex with Chin in July when they started meeting inhotel rooms in Indianapolis, the girl told police.

Registry records showed Chin had checked in to the Clarion Hotel 14 times between July and April. Three of those dates were when the girl was 17, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Detective David Miller wrote in the court documents.

Chin checked into another hotel eight times between August and February, according to the records. The girl was 17 on two of those dates, according to the records.

The age of sexual consent in Indiana is 16, but the child seduction law makes it a felony for an adult in a position of trust, including a coach, teacher or pastor, to have sex with a child they supervise who is younger than 18.

Tracey Horth Krueger, chief executive officer of the Indiana Coalition to End Sexual Assault, said the law is aimed at protecting vulnerable young people from authority figures who abuse and violate their trust.

"A 17-year-old is a kid in my opinion," said Horth Krueger. "This whole child seduction law is intended to protect kids from people who use their influence for sex."

Teachers have an ethical duty to protect their students from harm, Horth Krueger said. Any teacher who has sex with a student is in gross violation of professional ethics rules and the law, she said.

The records show that police were not done with the investigation. They seized Chin's computer and iPhone to look for explicit photos the girl told them she shared with her teacher. The department's Cyber Crimes Unit was looking for more evidence that could lead to child pornography charges, according to the records.

The girl also told police that she and Chin had sex in a hotel in Plainfield, Ind., which means more charges could be filed in Hendricks County, Ind.

Wayne Township Schools spokeswoman Mary Lang on Monday said Chin was no longer a coach at the school and that the district had begun the process of firing him.

US official says there's a 'fair chance' airstrike killed civilians in Mosul

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 07:47:00 +0000

US official says there's a 'fair chance' airstrike killed civilians in Mosul

The top US commander in Iraq said "there's a fair chance" that a US airstrike in west Mosul killed civilians on March 17.

"We have an investigation going on, but our initial assessment ... shows we did strike in that area, there were multiple strikes in that area, so is it possible that we did that? Yes, I think it is possible," Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend told reporters Tuesday.

"Because we struck in that area, I think there's a fair chance that we did it."

Mosul: 112 civilian bodies pulled from site of coalition airstrike

Townsend, commander of Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, said the US has sent experts to the scene of the airstrike in west Mosul to investigate allegations of civilian casualties.

He said investigators are assessing whether ISIS was fighting from the building with civilians in order to "lure" the US "deliberately, or they were just using them as human shields to try to protect their fighting position."

"We know ISIS were fighting from that position in that building. And there were people that you really can't account for in any other way why they would all be there unless they were forced there. So that's my initial impression, the enemy had a hand in this, and there's also a fair chance our strike had some role in it," Townsend said.