By early Wednesday, Jackson walked into a police station and confessed.
He did not know the victim, 66-year-old Timothy Caughman. He only knew that Caughman was black. That was enough.
“I didn’t know (Caughman) was elderly,” he said, explaining that his preferred victim would have been “a young thug” or “a successful older black man with blondes.”
On Monday, a week after the attack, a grand jury brought an indictment. Two of the four counts against Jackson included an unusual designation — murder, but qualified as “an act of terrorism.”
“James Jackson wanted to kill black men, planned to kill black men and then did kill a black man,” said Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, adding that he did it in New York, a diverse city, to send a message.
At the White House on the same day, a reporter questioned press secretary Sean Spicer about Caughman’s murder and, specifically, Jackson’s subsequent statements.
“So, what do you say to this?” American Urban Radio Networks reporter April Ryan said. “This is clear — it’s racism at its ugliest.”
Spicer offered a blanket condemnation of “hate crimes, other crimes, anti-Semitic crimes,” but never commented specifically on the attack in Manhattan, saying: “I don’t know all the details.”
President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed remains silent on the matter. In the days after the murder, Trump tweeted about “National Agriculture Day,” NASA and the GOP health care bill. After Jackson turned himself in, Trump sent out two messages about an attack in London that left four dead, including the alleged assailant.
“A great American, Kurt Cochran, was killed in the London terror attack,” Trump tweeted. “My prayers and condolences are with his family and friends.”
But nothing about Manhattan.
Caughman has been absent from the presidential social media feed. Jackson, too. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
A natural question follows. What separates the London attack from the one in New York? In both cases, individuals allegedly driven by hateful ideologies had committed deadly acts in their respective services — and done so in locations that would focus media attention.
“The deadly attack on Timothy Caughman was domestic, racist terrorism,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted on Tuesday. “Why is the White House afraid to call it a hate crime?”
Whatever Trump says — or doesn’t say — about Caughman’s killing, the broader reaction across the political spectrum and in the media can be reduced to a similar point: “terrorism” in the post-9/11 American vernacular has become shorthand for “Islamic terrorism.”
Think of the 2010 Austin terror attack.
Doesn’t ring a bell? You’re probably not alone.
When Andrew Joseph Stack III, a white Texan, flew a small airplane into the Internal Revenue Service office building in Austin seven years ago, killing himself and one person inside, authorities were careful not to describe the act as “terrorism.”
“Part of our jobs in law enforcement is not to overreact and cause undue panic,” Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said. “And with the information that we had, there was no need to alarm our colleagues around the country and community members by using the word ‘terrorism.’ That is why definitely I did not use it yesterday and I’m not using it today.”
But Stack’s own words, from his apparent suicide manifesto, were plain. He railed at length against the tax code, citing its finer points as “the measure of a totalitarian regime.”
The letter continued: “I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are.”
Stack had plotted to use deadly, spectacular violence in an effort to trigger a political reaction — in the service of political aims. It fit the federal definition of “domestic terrorism” to the letter.
But even then, during the first Obama administration, officials were loath to use the term. During an interview on The Diane Rehm Show weeks later, former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano sought to carve out a distinction.
“To our belief, (Stack) was a lone wolf,” she said. “He used a terrorist tactic, but an individual who uses a terrorist tactic doesn’t necessarily mean they are part of an organized group attempting an attack on the United States.”
Napolitano’s description mapped out, if tortuously, a clear difference. But it also reinvented the word. By her given logic, a single individual without material support from others could not — by definition — carry out a terror attack.
The rise of ISIS further complicated the matter. Based in Iraq and Syria, the group is often referred to as having “inspired” an attack. In the chaotic hours after, analysts and experts search for certain “hallmarks” to denote the ISIS influence. The perpetrators, in these cases, are not members of the group, nor lone wolves — they are something in between. An unwelcome nuance in charged times.
The full facts surrounding Jackson’s alleged murder of Caughman have not yet fully emerged. But if Jackson’s confession withstands the legal process, and especially if the charges as currently constructed are proven, today’s questions will linger on much longer.
Sen. John McCain said he won’t support a continuing resolution over defense spending
His comments come as leaders are making a serious effort to negotiate FY 2017’s appropriations
The Arizona Republican told CNN he wouldn’t vote for a continuing resolution, a funding bill that maintains the previous spending levels. When asked how far he would go, McCain said he only had one vote, but that he wouldn’t rule out a shutdown.
“If that’s the only option. I will not vote for a CR no matter what the consequences because passing a CR destroys the ability of the military to defend this nation, and it puts the lives of the men and women in the military at risk,” McCain said. “I can’t do that to them.”
McCain’s comments come as leaders are making a serious effort to negotiate the remaining appropriations bills for Fiscal Year 2017 that would likely include some of the new military spending that McCain is pushing for.
Congressional leaders are up against a tight deadline. After last week’s failure to pass the health care bill out of the House, there are questions about how much leaders can get passed even if their goal remains to finish appropriations bills instead of passing a continuing resolution. Congress has to come to an agreement before the government runs out of money April 28.
Raising the stakes? Congress is on recess for two weeks in mid-April.
McCain has long been an advocate for increased military spending and has voted for continuing resolutions in the past, but this time, McCain says he just won’t do it and that the military would be set back by another CR.
“I will not vote for a CR. I don’t care what’s in it,” he said.
McCain’s comments may put pressure on leaders to see that some rank-and-file members are serious. They won’t accept just another, last minute continuing resolution. If that’s the only option, there could be a shutdown ahead.
Their bodies are buried in the cemetery, I’m sure of it. I’ve seen the obituaries.
But neither man is dead.
No one in Shishmaref dies, I’m told — not really.
It’s about 9 a.m. as I trudge through the snow, past the cemetery and to a neighboring house. The sky is frozen in pre-dawn twilight. The sun won’t rise for hours.
An elder answers the door and welcomes me into a living room that smells of sourdough and coffee. On the shelves, above a big-screen TV: dozens of figurines carved from walrus ivory, a tradition in this 560-person Inupiat village. How meta, I think. Walrus ivory carved back into the shape of a walrus, as if the animal were reincarnated from its own tusks.
Even walruses have a second life here, apparently.
The man offers me a seat and a coffee mug.
I’m here to ask him about Esau.
Yes, one of the men in the cemetery.
But also the 19-year-old born with the same name — the hoodie-wearing kid with the faint mustache. The one, among many, who’s trying to imagine another future for this village.
A future away from this island.
The blue house
Shelton and Clara Kokeok live in a blue house at the edge of the village.
Everyone knows Shishmaref isn’t expected to last long.
Residents of this barrier island, located just south of the Arctic Circle, some 600 miles from Anchorage and only 100 miles from Russia, have been saying so for years.
To understand it, visit the tiny blue house at the edge of the land.
It’s the edge of the Earth, really. And it’s also the house where Norman grew up.
Norman, the second man in the cemetery.
Inside, an old woman sits in a wheelchair and an old man peers through the kitchen window at the Chukchi Sea. A cassette-radio buzzes with headlines from God-knows-where, but the man, Norman’s father, isn’t listening. Shelton Kokeok, a 72-year-old with palm-sized ears and a face that tragedy has worn into a grouper’s frown, is focused on the ocean. He scans it in a state of unease; creases etch his forehead. Shelton, who once was a light-hearted man, and whose kind eyes and infectious smile still hint at happier times, will be nervous until the water is frozen cement-hard. Today, in mid-December, it is the texture of a snow cone.
“It’s not really solid yet,” he tells me, forlorn. “Young ice, fresh ice, you know?”
These aren’t bored-old-man concerns.
The ice is disappearing.
And then there’s what happened to his son, Norman.
First, the ice.
Here, and across the Arctic, sea ice is forming later and thawing earlier.
That ice protects Shishmaref’s coast from erosion. Without it, punishing storms grab hunks of the land and pull it out to sea, shrinking and destabilizing the island.
Look at where the coast was in 2004 — and where it’s expected to be in 2053.
Shelton’s blue house is right on the edge of the receding coastline.
He worries it could fall in.
That happened to one of his neighbors.
A house fell off the edge of the land in 2006. The Kokeok home is shown in the background.
As the world warms — thanks largely to the 1,200 metric tons of carbon dioxide we humans are pumping into the atmosphere each second — the ice is disappearing. The planet has warmed about 1 degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution, when people started burning fossil fuels for heat and electricity, creating a blanket of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. But scientists say the Arctic, the far-north, is warming twice as fast as the rest of Earth.
“I miss that cold, cold weather,” says Hazel Fernandez. I meet her in a community hall; she’d rather be fishing on the ice but says it’s still too thin. “It’s too weird. It’s too warm.”
Outside, thermometers show temperatures in the mid-20s Fahrenheit, or about minus 4 Celsius. That’s freakishly warm for December, everyone tells me. I’m wearing two coats and ski pants, and residents of Shishmaref seem to find that hilarious. This isn’t cold, they say. Their sealskin hats and mittens, the fur-lined hooded parkas — those mostly stay at home.
Fernandez, in her early 60s, fondly remembers temperatures of 30- and 40-below Fahrenheit.
But mean air surface temperatures increased more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Arctic region between 1960 and 2011, according to the US National Snow & Ice Data Center. Arctic sea ice, measured since 1979, was at a monthly record low in January. And the September sea ice minimum is decreasing at a rate of 13.3% per decade.
The scientific consensus is that human pollution is driving these changes.
But it’s not the science or the charts that matter most to Shelton.
It’s not his blue house, either, perched precariously on the edge.
It’s his son, Norman.
It’s that day: June 2, 2007.
The day Norman fell through the ice and died.
Esau
The stories about Esau are easy to unearth.
Like people here, they never truly die.
“What was Esau like?” I ask the elder whose home is next to the white crosses and the cemetery, in the heart of this village of wooden homes and metal-sided buildings, a place where the winter landscape is an infinity of white, where there’s no running water or sewage service, where a shower costs $3.50 at the holiday rate, a 12-pack of Sprite $12.75. Most people prefer to live off the land, hunting seal, walrus and ptarmigan and fishing tomcod as their ancestors did.
The elder replies in a tone that is airy and patient, a voice measured through time.
Esau Weyiouanna was something of a renegade in Shishmaref, he tells me. He was an individual in a place that prides itself on community — an opinionated, outspoken man in a village where many would prefer to blend with the environment. In a photo that hangs on a friend’s wall today, Esau wears purple-and-green plaid and Napoleon-Dynamite bifocals, a knowing, understanding smile on his lips. His eyebrows are angled and inquisitive, like an owl’s.
The local church in Shishmaref, Alaska.
Allow the elder to share one story.
Decades ago, the Christian church decided to ban some of the village’s Inupiat traditions, which had been passed from one generation to the next for centuries, if not longer. The church believed some of these traditions defied the will of God and were incompatible with its teachings. Dancing, in particular, was banned. Children of Shishmaref no longer could gather with drums made of stretched walrus stomach to move their bodies in the same artful patterns their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents always had, the elder tells me.
Esau was the rare man who could see both sides of this dispute, the kind of man who straddled worlds both modern and ancient. He served on the church board, the elder says. But he also loved the Inupiat cultural traditions — particularly the dance. So he took a stand. Esau danced boldly and in public, the elder tells me, to remind the community of the value of culture.
Today, the elder says, children are taught this dance in the local school.
This portal to the past remains open because of Esau.
Renegade, reborn
Decades later, and nearing death, Esau tried to ensure his story would continue.
He walked up to a pregnant woman and touched her stomach.
How am I doing in there? he asked.
It was a startling question, but up here in a world of ice, where no one really dies, or not for long, the meaning was clear to the mother. She knew Esau’s body soon would be laid to rest in the cemetery, and that he would be reincarnated as the child still growing inside her.
Esau Weyiouanna was declared dead on October 29, 1997.
On November 16, the woman’s child was born.
The family, following tradition, named him Esau.
Esau Sinnok.
A village renegade, reborn.
Norman
Shelton and Clara Kokeok, with a photo of their deceased son, Norman, who fell through the ice in 2007.
Elders say the ice should have been safe that day in 2007.
Norman had been on a hunting trip and was heading back into town in the early morning of late spring, when lower latitudes would still be shrouded in darkness but when this village sees nearly eternal sunshine, the tilt of the Earth making it possible to hunt through the night.
Village elders and family members tell me he was crossing a narrow part of the lagoon that separates Shishmaref and its barrier island from mainland Alaska. It may sound strange to drive a snowmobile across ice-covered water in June. But elders tell me the ice should have been frozen solid that time of year — that there was no indication Norman would be in danger.
Now, everyone is less trusting.
Some haven’t gone hunting on the ice since.
Norman’s death was particularly hard on his father, Shelton, who keeps a photo of the young man, wearing a buzz cut and Reno-911 mustache, on his coffee table, facing the door for all to see. Norman was a second-chance child, one he taught to hunt seal and follow traditions Inupiat people had followed here for at least four centuries, if not many more. Yet, from birth, the boy had an air of tragedy about him, even if no one in the family dared say so aloud.
It was in the name: Norman.
Norman was named after Shelton’s brother, who died in a plane crash.
The tragedy brought Shelton together with Clara, who was married to his brother.
In the wake of the accident, the two mourners decided to marry. Love was at the heart of it, to be sure, but Shelton also felt a sense of duty — duty to occupy the loving, supportive station his brother had left vacant in Clara’s life.
When one man leaves, another stands in his place.
‘Like an old soul’
Esau Sinnok, 19, was adopted by his aunt, Bessi Sinnok.
The boy always seemed to possess knowledge from another life.
As a toddler, Esau Sinnok spouted off phrases in Inupiaq, the local language, even though no one had taught him to do so. Then, as a young boy, Esau was traveling with his birth mother across the empty landscape that surrounds Shishmaref. “That’s where I used to camp,” he told her. It was the very spot where his namesake, Esau Weyiouanna, used to stay.
It was as if the renegade elder were speaking through the boy.
A voice carried on the wind from one generation to the next.
People in the village treat it this way.
For many, it’s not just that young Esau reminds them of his namesake. It’s that Esau is the namesake elder, returned from the grave and walking among them. They sometimes call him “father” or “brother” or “cousin,” referencing their relationships with the elder who passed away.
Esau inherited the elder’s respected status, too. “He’s like an old soul,” says his adoptive mother, Bessi Sinnok. “He’s very outspoken, like his namesake. His namesake was very respected by lots of people and because of that he had already earned respect as he was growing up.”
Teenage Esau never knew this when he was young. Bessi Sinnok told me the village hid the history from him. She wanted her son to form his own identity.
Yet she watched as the elder’s personality seemed to emerge from the boy. Esau, who was nearly mute as a child, they say, bookish and reserved, grew to be an outspoken and free-thinking young man, much like the elder Esau — and much to the surprise of his family.
Two events helped encourage the shift.
One was a storm in 2006.
Esau remembers the waves crashing over his grandparent’s roof.
The small blue house at the edge of the land once seemed like it might stand forever.
After the storm, he tells me, “We thought the house would collapse.”
The other was the death of his uncle, Norman, the man who feel through the ice.
Esau was only 9.
“It really hurts,” Esau tells me. He’s now a 19-year-old college student with heavy eyes and mussy hair. “It really made me cry and wonder why he left so early. And there’s not a day that goes by that I do not think of him. He’s always on my mind. He’s always in my heart.”
‘Climate change is happening real fast’
Local meats, including seal, hang from drying racks in the village. Seal oil, made from blubber, is a staple.
A few years after Norman’s death, Esau moved into Shelton and Clara Kokeok’s blue house at the edge of the Earth. Esau tells me he wanted to help his grandparents with chores his uncle might have performed, which would have included things like getting ice for drinking water from the lake, washing clothes in the local “Washateria” and emptying the “honey bucket” toilet.
Shelton remembers telling his grandson how much the village had changed over the years, how the weather wasn’t cold like it used to be, how these storms seemed bigger now, how much of the land, including the neighbor’s house, had already disappeared — and how he might be next.
“When I built this house, there was still more ground out there,” Shelton says. “We’re right on the edge of the beach now … Climate change is happening real fast.”
But none of this made sense to Esau — not really — until his senior year of high school.
That’s when he took Ken Stenek’s science class.
Stenek, an affable, big-smiling guy with a wiry beard and a kettlebell figure, told the students about the greenhouse effect — how pollution, mostly from fossil fuels, hangs around in the atmosphere and acts like a blanket, heating the planet. They watched “An Inconvenient Truth,” the high-profile documentary featuring former Vice President Al Gore and a graph often called the “hockey stick.” That now-famous chart shows that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere haven’t been this high in hundreds of thousands of years.
Esau learned that a consensus of climate scientists — at least 97% — agree humans are causing rapid warming, and that continuing to pollute at current rates would be catastrophic, contributing to mass extinction, searing droughts, deadlier heat waves and more.
They also talked about the consequences for Shishmaref.
The “erosion” everyone in town was discussing?
That was related to the melting sea ice, the thawing of permafrost, the frequency of damaging storms. In short: By burning fossil fuels, people were helping destroy this village.
If you’d asked him the year before what he wanted to do with his professional life, Esau would have told you he wanted to be a petroleum engineer, like his brother. Good money, he’d say, unaware that extracting and burning fossil fuels like oil is contributing to the problem.
Now, however, Esau was learning the science.
He thought about his grandfather’s house.
His uncle’s death.
He believes that climate change had a hand in both.
‘Imminent’ threats
This education took him all the way to Paris.
Through Ken Stenek’s science class, Esau met researchers who were studying climate change and its consequences. And through those connections he became an Arctic Youth Ambassador, which is a program of two federal agencies and Alaska Geographic, a nonprofit. He learned that Shishmaref is not alone — that 31 villages in Alaska face “imminent” threats from erosion and other issues related to climate change, according to a Government Accountability Office report; and that 12 of them were exploring relocation options because of warming.
Esau started to wonder: Could Shishmaref actually survive the melting of the Arctic?
Was his village’s life nearing its end?
Or the start of a new beginning?
Those questions never occurred to Esau before, although they had been on the lips of older people in Shishmaref for years. They’re questions kept from young people, hoping to protect them, wanting them to grow up with a sense that the world is more certain than it is.
The Obama White House named Esau a Champion of Change for Climate Equity. He got to go to Washington. Then, he said, with help from the Sierra Club, an environmental group, he got to attend international climate change negotiations in Paris in December 2015. It was that meeting — which is often called “COP21,” since that’s simpler than “the 21st meeting of the conference of parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change” — where world leaders agreed, after decades of failure, to work together to end the fossil fuel era.
The target: Limit global temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees Celsius.
Basically, that means eliminating fossil fuels this century.
In Paris, hope filled the air — hope for a cleaner, safer future.
Esau, meanwhile, arrived in the French capital terrified.
It was just so different from Shishmaref.
“It felt a little claustrophobic to me, being in a big city for the first time,” he says. “It felt like I just can’t take a walk or go outside and walk without thinking of being threatened or beat up. When you walk around here, you don’t feel that. Everyone here is family. You get a sense of trust.” He was so afraid of Paris — its clustered buildings, sidewalks thick with people, streets clogged with smoking cars — that he did not dare leave the hotel without an escort.
The scale of the place got to him in other ways, too.
How much pollution are all these people creating?
How do you get all of them to change?
In a word: overwhelming.
Yet amid this chaos, Esau made another leap of understanding.
‘Before it completely erodes away’
Percy Nayokpuk owns one of two stores in town. “Climate change is happening,” he says.
Rae Bainteiti comes from Kiribati, a tropical island nation that could not be more geographically dissimilar from Shishmaref. Sun and sand vs. ice and snow. The two places are thousands of miles apart, separated by the vast Pacific Ocean and a half-world of latitude, with Shishmaref near the Arctic Circle and Kiribati near the equator. Yet when an interviewer sat Rae down with Esau in Paris, the two young men discussed the perils of a common threat.
Both may have to relocate because of climate change.
“My future generation of kids will be the last ones that will actually be on the island of Shishmaref before it completely erodes away,” Esau tells Rae in the Paris interview, which is posted on YouTube.
He looks directly at the other young man.
“It’s just really sad knowing that you probably have to relocate and migrate, too,” Esau says.
“Your country has to be stopped from melting so we don’t see water rising,” Rae replies.
The two share a laugh at the irony of the situation: As Arctic ice melts and oceans warm, sea levels around the world are rising. A host of locations, from Pacific islands like Kiribati to low-lying countries like Bangladesh and cities from New York to Shanghai will be threatened with coastal flooding — and possibly relocation, too — as people continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Already, Miami Beach, Florida, is installing pumps and raising street levels to try to hold the water back. That work is only the beginning of a $400-million-plus project. In 2016, the community of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, got a $48 million federal grant to relocate, in part because of rising seas. But this is the exception rather than the rule. Most local governments don’t have the money for infrastructure to hold rising tides back.
Experts say there are no programs — in the United States or internationally — designed specifically to plan and fund climate-driven relocations. Only a few moves have been funded with money designated for climate adaptation projects, said Elizabeth Ferris, research professor at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of International Migration.
“Governments are reluctant to think about planned relocations because everyone wants to stay where they are,” she told me. But “if it isn’t planned well, it just doesn’t work. It leaves people much worse off.”
“There’s no federal or state law — no institution in the United States — with a mandate for how are we going to manage relocation internally,” said Alice Thomas, the climate displacement program manager at Refugees International, a non-profit group. “It’s going to be enormously expensive. It’s going to be very vulnerable people … people who aren’t going to be able to cut their losses on their home when they can’t get flood insurance. Where will they go?”
In Shishmaref, the answer remains unclear.
Relocation
Local officials in Shishmaref discuss the possibility of climate relocation. They do not have the money to move.
August 2016.
Globally, it tied for the hottest month of the hottest year on record. In Shishmaref, residents went to the polls to decide whether they would relocate because of warming.
The answer: Yes, by a margin of 89 to 78, according to local officials.
But the August 16 vote did not solve Shishmaref’s trouble. Far from it.
Annie Weyiouanna, local coordinator for the Native Village of Shishmaref, tells me the tribe has no money to fund the move. And this isn’t the first time the village has held a relocation vote. They did so in 2002, as well. Nothing changed. No one in the village today is packing. And Weyiouanna has tried to stop using the word “relocation” — or uses it minimally, sometimes correcting herself — because she worries it will signal to funding agencies in the state and federal governments that the village will be gone soon and doesn’t need help with grants or infrastructure. The reality is that no one knows how long the village will be stuck.
Perhaps forever, some worry, or until the island is gone.
“They are not safe right now, and their lives are in danger because of the storms that are coming in,” said Robin Bronen, executive director of the Alaska Institute for Justice and a senior research scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She was referring to Shishmaref as well as Newtok and Kivalina, Alaska, which face similar circumstances. “(T)hey just need a large sum of money to get them to the places that they’ve chosen so they can be safe.”
Shishmaref has identified two potential sites for a new version of the community. Both are inland, meaning hunters and fishers would not be able to access the sea as easily. Some people in the community — particularly elders — believe the move threatens the tribe’s Inupiat identity.
Away from the coast, are they still the same people?
Why should they move when others are driving climate change?
Esau has wrestled with these questions, too. His grandparents, Shelton and Clara, the couple in the blue house at the edge of the Earth, who lost their son to the ice, do not want to leave. They want to stay in their home — in the community they know so well — no matter the risks.
Esau worries about them.
“If you ask the older generations like my grandfather, their views are totally different,” he tells me. “They want to stay on this island forever and ever. And I respect that decision. They’re my elders.
“But, to me, I think we have to relocate so that our future generations can still be alive.”
Norman, age 7
In the winter, the skies in Shishmaref appear to be frozen in twilight.
On my last day in Shishmaref, Esau and I paid his old science teacher a visit.
We found Ken Stenek in a cream-colored house with Christmas lights on the roofline. He lives on a part of the island where houses are newer. Some were moved from the side where Esau’s grandparents live, and where coastal erosion is more threatening.
Standing in his home, I couldn’t help but think about the cemetery.
About the two men — Esau and Norman — who are buried there.
Two young people, bearing those names, were standing in the room with me.
There was Esau Sinnok, standing in the entryway, of course.
But also Norman, sitting on the sofa in the living room.
Norman Stenek, age 7.
The boy was named after Esau’s uncle, the one who fell through the ice.
When I visited, young Norman seemed more interested in a tablet computer than a conversation with a random reporter, and I can’t blame him for that. Still, the encounter sticks with me.
It made me wonder: What will his life be like?
His name — Norman — carries a tragic legacy. The death in the plane crash. The fall through the ice. Will this 7-year-old live to see the rest of the village drown beneath the waves, too?
Will the same happen to millions of coastal residents during his lifetime?
And what about Esau?
Sometimes I think the weight of this tragedy falls on his young shoulders. His namesake was a local agitator and his uncle’s death drove him into activism. The strength of his voice — his power to command attention — has surprised a village where few care to stand out from the crowd. He speaks out against fossil fuels, saying that the world must rush to a future with 100% renewable, clean energy. It may be too late for Shishmaref, he says, but what about other communities in similar straits? How many people will pollution force from their homes?
“I don’t blame it on one person, or a group of people. It’s all our fault,” Esau tells me. “It’s not the 1940s anymore. We can’t use fossil fuels anymore to heat our homes and use for our energy.
“We can transition from dirty fossil fuels to renewable energies.”
But how much weight can a 19-year-old bear?
The rest of us must realize our role in this tragedy.
Responsibility for Shishmaref’s plight falls on those in the industrialized world who continue to pollute the atmosphere with carbon, knowing it will warm the climate, melt the ice and make it less likely Shishmaref will survive. It falls on the Trump administration, which has moved to defund and upend climate change initiatives instead of planning for a transition to cleaner power sources, like wind and solar. It falls on politicians who know the scope of the impending climate relocation crisis but have done little to make adequate plans or secure appropriate funding.
Shishmaref is part of America, even if it’s rarely treated that way.
It is a place where people never really die, where the cemetery on that hilltop in the center of the island is full of people like Norman and Esau who are kept alive by names and stories. The question now is whether villages, like people, can be reincarnated.
Can Shishmaref be reborn?
Sadly, it’s a question the village cannot answer on its own.
Trump’s social media director, Dan Scavino, said late Tuesday on Twitter that the president has been tweeting from “his new iPhone” for the past couple of weeks. But a tweet bearing the hallmarks of Trump’s combative style came from an Android device as recently as Saturday.
The matter has potential national security implications.
During the early weeks of his presidency, Trump came under scrutiny over reports he was continuing to use his old, unsecured Android phone to send tweets to the 27 million followers of his @realDonaldTrump account.
“The national security risks of compromising a smartphone used by a senior government official, such as the President of the United States, are considerable,” two Democratic senators wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis last month asking for more information about the president’s mobile devices.
At the time of his inauguration, Trump was reported to have traded in his Android phone, believed to be a Samsung, for a secure device. But @realDonaldTrump tweets marked as coming from “Twitter for Android” kept appearing.
The concern, according to the senators, is that hackers may be able to break into an unsecured device and “turn on audio recording and camera features, as well as engaging surveillance tools that allow location and other information tracking features.”
Earlier this month, the Android-marked tweets dried up for a while and more iPhone tweets appeared. Some news organizations suggested the president might have switched phones.
But on Saturday, a typical Trump tweet with the Android tag popped up, declaring that “ObamaCare will explode.”
The White House declined to say whether any of the devices being used by Trump were secure.
“We don’t discuss the security measures that are or have taken place,” press secretary Sean Spicer told CNNMoney by email Wednesday.
Intelligence officials went to great lengths to provide former President Barack Obama with a secure BlackBerry that he could use to communicate with his advisers.
Security researchers say it’s tougher to compromise iPhones than Android devices, but not impossible.
Trump used an iPhone early in his campaign, a time when he also criticizedApple(AAPL, Tech30) for making products overseas. In February 2016, he called for a boycott of Apple products over the tech giant’s refusal to help the FBI break into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers.
“I use both iPhone & Samsung. If Apple doesn’t give info to authorities on the terrorists I’ll only be using Samsung until they give info,” he tweeted. Apple didn’t back down, and Trump eventually appeared to stop tweeting from an iPhone.
Some observers had used Trump’s iPhone abstinence as a way of guessing which tweets from the @realdonaldtrump account he’d actually written himself.
Android-marked tweets, believed to be direct from Trump, tended to be angrier and use all caps liberally. More restrained tweets, often promoting Trump events, would be posted from an iPhone, presumably by aides.
Now, both styles of tweet are coming from iPhones, with a little Android still mixed in.
CNNMoney (Hong Kong)First published March 29, 2017: 11:08 AM ET
Paul Callan: Democrats and others want intelligence committee chair to resign for odd late-night visit to White House
Callan: Nunes should do so; US has right to expect more circumspect behavior from head of committee in charge of America’s secrets
In the full technicolor version of this fantasy, the cuffs would next be fastened on Trump, ending the progressives’ enduring Trumpian nightmare.
It’s clear that a lot more information is required before anyone can fairly judge the propriety and legality of Nunes’ actions. What we do know is that shortly after this visit to view classified information, Nunes perhaps surprised even the President by requesting a meeting. He failed to tell the House Intelligence Committee about this meeting with the President, an action for which he recently apologized.
Nunes tried to explain all of this to Wolf Blitzer earlier today, fielding specific questions about the White House visit. The chairman hedged on some questions and flatly declined to answer other inquiries, invoking the need to protect “sources and methods” and still “classified” information.
As chairman of the intelligence committee, enjoying among the highest of security clearances, the chairman would clearly be committing a crime if he publicly disclosed classified information. Answers that appear to be specious and deceptive may fit that description or in fact just be an intelligence chairman trying to protect classified information as well as “sources and methods.” This can only be legally evaluated when more is known about the contents of the mysterious documents that are now causing such a controversy on Capitol Hill.
Many Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee as well as others in Congress, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, are calling for Nunes’ resignation, or recusal from any further role in the House committee’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s contacts with the Russians and the issues relating to the President’s Twitter-announced claim that President Obama ordered wiretaps on Trump Tower.
Nunes should seriously consider stepping aside, as his own actions have now become the center of an ever-widening and distracting controversy.
Though at this point there is no evidence that the chairman acted illegally, the country has the right to expect far more circumspect behavior from the chairman of the House committee in charge of America’s secrets. It’s a little late for him to be learning that secrecy is paramount in the business of investigating the intelligence community.
The missteps of Nunes and the inappropriate tweets of the President appear to be drawing both men into the dark fantasies of Trump opponents across the country. One lesson they both should have learned by now is that the denizens of America’s spy apparatus are nicknamed “spooks” for good reason.
President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence spoke with several House members over the weekend to discuss a path forward, a senior administration official and Republican official with knowledge of the discussions told CNN. And House Speaker Paul Ryan — despite saying Friday that “Obamacare is the law of the land” — appears ready to keep going as well.
Trump himself isn’t giving up.
“I know we’re going to make a deal on health care, that’s such an easy one,” Trump told a bipartisan group of senators and spouses at a White House reception Tuesday night.
The fact remains, however, that House Republicans aren’t in a different position than they were on Friday. The math is the same. Republican leaders are still struggling to satisfy two diametrically opposed forces: moderates who want to see to government lend more support to middle and low-income people to buy health insurance and conservatives who want to see Obamacare repealed more fully so that even popular regulations like the one requiring insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions disappear.
“At the end of the day, I don’t know that the weekend did much to change anything. I think it was a missed opportunity. I think it was an unforced error,” said Arkansas Republican Rep. Steve Womack.
“We’re mending our wounds right now,” Rep. Chris Collins, a Republican from New York told reporters Tuesday.
But Republicans can’t go back to their voters and say they’ve given up. Moving on from repealing Obamacare would mean Republicans may have to admit defeat and face a sobering new reality, in which, they were not able to deliver on the policy goal that united them and catapulted them to victory in the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016.
“Opposition to government run health care has been a foundation of the Republican party for three or four generations now, so it is difficult to see House Republicans walk away from efforts to protect the American people from this awful law,” said Michael Steel, former spokesman for ex-House Speaker John Boehner. “At the same time, after last week, it’s difficult to see how the entire conference can find a unified position.”
“I think the divisions that have existed for some time look and feel particularly acute now that we have a Republican President,” Steel added.
White House downplaying role
Those divisions came out perhaps most dramatically when Trump got involved in the negotiations. Now, the White House is keeping its role much lower key than it did during the final push last week and insisting it is letting rank-and-file members of Congress drive discussions on health care, which are ongoing between a small group of House Freedom Caucus members and members of the moderate Tuesday Group.
The senior administration official told CNN that the White House believes its threats to move past health care have helped jolt House GOP members into action.
“All last week he was calling them. Now they’re calling him,” the official said.
White House press secretary Sean Spice publicly downplayed Tuesday any suggestion that there was a concerted effort to resurrect health care, only going as far as saying that there were continued conversations and exchanging of ideas.
“Have we had some discussions and listened to ideas? Yes,” Spicer told reporters in the briefing room. “Are we actively planning an Immediate strategy? Not at this time.”
On Tuesday, House GOP leaders also projected more optimism that something could still be done to dismantle the Affordable Care Act even as the political dynamics remained unchanged.
“I think we’re closer today to repealing Obamacare than we’ve ever been before, and are surely even closer than we were Friday,” House Majority Whip Steve Scalise said Tuesday morning.
Ryan vowed members would continue working although he didn’t offer any specific timeline.
In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was more frank that it was time to get to other issues.
“It’s pretty obvious we were not able, in the House, to pass a replacement. Our Democratic friends ought to be pretty happy about that because we have the existing law in place, and I think we are just going to have to see how that works out,” McConnell said. “We believe it will not work out well, but we’ll see. They have an opportunity now to have the status quo, regretfully.”
McConnell complemented Trump’s and Ryan’s efforts and then concluded his remarks on the debacle with four words: “Sorry that didn’t work.”
GOP base doesn’t want to give up
The concept of giving up is hard for many Republican rank-and-file members to swallow. Those who would have voted yes wish they could have gotten their colleagues there too. Members of the House Freedom Caucus, meanwhile, who were opposed to the bill, are grappling now with public admonishment from their new President.
“We’re gonna get a ‘yes,’ we’re gonna get to ‘yes.’ It will be a better bill and I think everybody is going to be very happy in the end,” said Rep. David Brat, a Republican from Virginia and a member of the Freedom Caucus.
“I think we have plenty of time. We can fix this,” said Idaho Republican Rep. Raul Labrador, another House Freedom Caucus member.
Texas Republican Rep. Randy Weber, a member of the House Freedom Caucus who opposed the GOP health care bill said Tuesday he thought that the GOP conference could find a way to get a revised Obamacare bill through the House if they all got in a room and put their heads together.
“We need to stay here on the weekend and have an all-day conference,” Weber said, noting that the one-hour weekly meetings weren’t enough time to work through the sticking points.
Weber, who didn’t vote for Ryan for speaker in January, even complimented Ryan and said that he texted the speaker over the weekend when some conservative media figures pushed for him to step down and told him “don’t even think about it. You’re doing a good job. My prayers and my support are with you.”
Still hard to govern
Womack said Republicans need to keep moving and show they can govern with their majorities in the House and Senate and Trump in the White House.
“The people who were ‘yes’ on the health care bill were reminding Paul this is something we promised and we got to push in that direction,” Womack said. “It’s more a reflection of the need to show that we can do something with our governing majority, but again it comes back to numbers. If you don’t have the votes, you don’t have the votes.”
But Trump and Ryan say they want to go to tax reform next, but that’s not going to be any easier.
“How do you move forward?” said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Republican from Florida. “If you can’t do this, can you then do tax reform? If you think this is complicated and controversial, wait ’til we get into tax reform.”
I recognized the dress immediately. It had been his older sister’s — cast away, no doubt, in a donation bag that was never donated.
I didn’t race outside, tear the dress off and proffer admonishments. I watched, instead, as his makeshift wand of willow danced through the air — a little princess going from flower bed to flower bed casting enchantments over the marigolds.
I let our child continue playing undisturbed, but before I returned to my soup, I did what we all do when we see something adorable: I grabbed my phone and snapped a photo.
Later that night, my husband and I went to dinner with another couple we didn’t know well. As a fellow mom will do, the wife asked to see photos of our children, so I took out my phone and began swiping through recent family shots.
“Aren’t their children adorable?” she exclaimed, grabbing the phone out of my hands and showing photos to her husband.
Before I could get my phone back, they had discovered the photo from that afternoon.
I saw them exchange puzzled looks, then the wife said: “This is your son?”
‘Indulgence and permission are two different things’
Sensing their disapproval, I smiled and responded as calmly as I could, “Yes, he likes to play princess sometimes.”
“You really shouldn’t encourage that behavior,” the wife said with the grave compassion usually reserved for a potentially terminal illness. “When our son was little, he liked to play dress-up, too, but we didn’t indulge it. Not one bit. I even hired a male nanny! And now our son is completely normal! A strapping teenage boy — very popular with the girls — nothing odd about him at all!”
“You can’t indulge it,” the husband concurred. “That’s the key. It’s no different than enforcing bedtime. Children are very malleable. You can shape them, but not if you indulge their every whim.”
I politely thanked them for their (unsolicited) advice and my husband deftly changed the topic, but as I lay in bed later that night I couldn’t stop thinking about the the word “indulgent.”
My child at play.
Was it really indulgence to allow our child the freedom to express himself? It’s not as if he was shooting a BB gun at the neighbor’s pet cat, or throwing sand in another kid’s face.
Since that incident, I’ve had the word “indulgent” leveled at me many times by various detractors who disagree with the unconditional love and support my husband and I have offered our now-eight-year-old transgender daughter, as if that choice was the same as offering her an extra slice of chocolate cake even though we knew she already had seconds.
And here’s what I would say to those people: when it comes to parenting, indulgence and permission are two different things.
When we indulge a child, we let them get away with something — usually a behavior considered reprehensible by others. When we offer a child permission, we give them the reassurance that what they are doing is okay.
I like to think that the permission we gave Samuel to play as he saw fit in his early years paved the path for later emotional security.
On the eve of his sixth birthday, after a four-year battle with self-hatred and depression, he felt safe enough to transition from living as a boy to living as a girl. It was like witnessing a second birth.
And now we have a daughter who greets each day with excitement. Her name is Sadie, and she’s just as precious to us as her male counterpart was, only much, much happier.
What if we had punished Samuel instead of embracing Sadie?
I sometimes ask myself what would have happened if we had taken our dinner companion’s advice. What if we had shamed our son, or punished him? What if we had refused to let him out of his room unless he agreed to behave like a traditional boy?
In those early years of our child’s life, when my husband and I searched the Internet for information about children who claim to be the opposite gender than their anatomy indicates, we found these two statistics: Forty percent of transgender people attempt suicide each year, whereas a child who is accepted by his or her family is eight times less likely to attempt suicide later in life.
Better to be labeled as over-indulgent parents for letting our son play princess, we told ourselves, than to have a dead child.
If you worry that you, or someone you know, is indulging a young child by allowing him or her to cross-dress or do otherwise non-stereotypical activities, think again. Child development experts claim that children understand their gender identity as young as age 2.
But most children lack the vocabulary to articulate how they feel when they are so young. Their only recourse at gaining understanding may be to don a tutu as a boy, or to wear a Superman costume as a girl.
If your young child or student is a boy who likes traditional girl things, or a girl who likes traditional boy things, it doesn’t mean that he or she is transgender. It might mean nothing at all, or it might indicate that the child is what experts call “gender fluid.” It could be a phase, or it could be something more permanent.
No matter the reason, a child’s gender exploration isn’t something to punish.
Of course the nonconforming child’s behavior may be something you fear, and possibly for good reasons. You might live in a community that lacks understanding and compassion. You might be part of a religious group that doesn’t accept transgender identity as a possibility.
It doesn’t matter. Support that child anyway.
‘We’re living our lives, just like you’
Some may decry this decision, as if you are aiding and abetting a criminal. Nothing could be further from the truth. You are aiding and abetting the crucial work we all do in trying to figuring out who we are and why we’re here.
Like me, like my husband, like hundreds of other parents who have faced their young children’s gender dysphoria, you must push past fear and replace it with curiosity. And then you need to start learning, and connecting with other families who are going through similar experiences.
And if you don’t know any gender nonconforming children, or if you think the parents who support nonconforming children are mentally ill, child-abusing monsters — all things we have been called — I would wager a bet that if you came over to visit some afternoon, you might be surprised at how similar we are to you.
You might notice my teenage daughter’s school books and SAT prep manual scattered around. You might hear the sound of my younger daughter’s squeals as our dogs chase her around the house. You might notice we have the same favorite show playing on our TV, and if you look closely enough, you might see the imprint in the sofa where my husband naps as he pretends to watch.
What you wouldn’t notice is that one of my two daughters is transgender. You wouldn’t notice because there is nothing to notice.
We’re living our lives, just like you: struggling to keep things balanced, trying to look on the bright side, trying to get enough sleep, to drink enough water, to remember to brush our hair before we leave the house, to floss before bed, to say please and thank you, to apologize when wrong.
Those of us who are raising transgender children know it is time for us to be brave; to step forward; to introduce ourselves to you and welcome you into our lives; to prove that we haven’t indulged our children but merely chosen to love them.
Updated clinical guidelines published Tuesday in the journal Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery say they’re not appropriate for earwax removal. In fact, information for patients in the guidelines say no to putting anything “smaller than your elbow in your ear.”
Regardless, most of us hoard a stash of the soft-tipped paper sticks; they seem so perfectly suited to that dirty job.
So the authors of the guidelines — an advisory panel of the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery — have injected a little bit of freshness into the usual advice, giving more explanation as to “Why not?” They even included a consumer representative on the panel.
“We really have come to appreciate that clinicians are not the only users of (the guidelines), that patients are really interested in their own care and people are really taking ownership of their own care,” said Dr. Seth Schwartz, chairman of the guideline update group for the academy.
Here’s why not: Cotton swabs, hair pins, house keys and toothpicks — the many smaller-than-our-elbow-objects we love to put in our ears — can cause cuts in our ear canals, perforate our eardrums and dislocate our hearing bones. And any of these things could lead to hearing loss, dizziness, ringing or other symptoms of ear injury.
Instead, most people can just let nature do its job. Our bodies produce earwax to keep our ears lubricated, clean and protected: Dirt, dust and anything else that might enter our ears gets stuck to the wax, which keeps any such particles from moving farther into the ear canal. Our usual jaw motions from talking and chewing, along with skin growth within the canal, typically helps move old earwax from inside to the outside the ear, where it is washed off during bathing.
The guidelines published in 2008 were overdue for an update. While new randomized trials have been included, “nothing very dramatic” has changed, other than an improvement in the methodology itself, said Schwartz: “The process has become a little more transparent in the way we actually write the guidelines now. We are more clear about why the decisions we made are made and what data there is to support it.”
Patient are apparently interested in the nitty-gritty of ear care: More than 50,000 people downloaded the old guideline, Schwartz said.
“It’s kind of amazing how many people were interested in reading that,” he said.
The do’s and don’ts
To be “a little bit more patient-friendly,” the guidelines now include lists of “Do’s and Don’t’s” for everyone and a list for people who have had problems with cerumen impaction, the official term for earwax buildup, a condition that is more common among the elderly, according to Dr. James Battey, director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
Impaction can occur when the ear’s self-cleaning process doesn’t work very well. The resulting waxy buildup blocks the ear canal, causing difficulty hearing.
“For those with impacted ear wax, the use of cotton-tipped swabs may push the earwax deeper into the ear canal and harm the eardrum,” Battey said. He added that “about 2% of adults with impacted earwax may go the doctor with hearing loss as their symptom.”
“Impacted earwax is best addressed by a health care professional,” he said.
In the all-important “Don’t” section, you’ll find warnings against “overcleaning” your ears. Excessive cleaning may increase earwax impaction, according to the authors.
“It’s cultural” to want clear ears, Schwartz said, but “wiping away any excess wax when it comes to the outside of the ear is enough to keep it clean.”
Another warning in the new guidelines: Do not use ear candles. Not only can they cause “serious damage” to your eardrum, “there is no evidence that they remove impacted cerumen,” wrote the authors.
“Home therapies are fairly effective,” Schwartz said, adding that the “whole host” of over-the-counter wax-softening drops as well as home-use irrigators are effective and safe. “Even drops of water in the ear can be effective to soften the wax,” he added.
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Still, among the items on the “Do” list is to ask your health care provider about how to treat earwax impaction at home, since “you may have certain medical or ear conditions that may make some options unsafe.”
“It’s not a bad thing to have wax in your ears. Everybody does and should. It’s more of an issue when it becomes too much,” Schwartz said. The guideline definition of “too much” is an operational one: If you have symptoms — such as pain, drainage, bleeding or hearing loss — then you have a problem.
“If it’s causing symptoms, absolutely go to your doctor,” Schwartz said, repeating what is likely the most important “Do” list recommendation. Still, some people attribute their symptoms to wax buildup when it’s just not the case.
Among older people, “hearing loss becomes very, very common,” said Schwartz.
In fact, aging, along with infections and exposure to loud noise, is one of the most common causes of acquired hearing loss, according to Battey.
Yet many people cannot imagine that they’ve begun to lose their hearing, and as a result of this disbelief, Schwartz said, “a patient has wax cleared, and then their doctor needs to look deeper.”
District Attorney Brent Cooper of the 22nd Judicial Circuit wants to change that, and he hopes state lawmakers consider Elizabeth’s case when they convene next year, he told CNN on Tuesday. Through an attorney, Elizabeth’s father, Anthony Thomas, said he wants the law changed immediately.
The way it’s written now, the statute lets children older than 12 decide whether to leave their families, unless their removal or confinement “is accomplished by force, threat or fraud.”
Police say 50-year-old Tad Cummins, who taught Elizabeth in a forensics class at Culleoka Unit School, absconded with the freshman March 13, weeks after a student claimed to see the two kissing in Cummins’ classroom.
The investigation led authorities to Decatur, Alabama, later that day before the two vanished.
As it stands, to prove the kidnapping of a victim who is 12 or older, Cooper said, he’d have to prove that Elizabeth was unlawfully removed or had her freedom restricted.
Further, to prove that Elizabeth was unlawfully removed, he’d need to demonstrate to a jury that Cummins employed “force, coercion, fraud or something to that effect,” the prosecutor said.
“What we run into here, of course, is this child is 15 and, according to reports, at least initially, she left of her own free will,” he said.
The issue was especially concerning at the outset of the investigation, Cooper said. Cummins was charged only with sexual contact with a minor by an authority figure, a misdemeanor. Investigators worried that if police stopped the pair out of state, they’d be released because authorities couldn’t detain them, let alone extradite Cummins, on a misdemeanor warrant.
Cooper ultimately felt comfortable adding the aggravated kidnapping charge after deciding that Cummins allegedly groomed his victim and was armed, the latter being a prerequisite for aggravated kidnapping. (Grooming is the act of establishing a connection with a child with the goal of defusing her or his inhibitions toward sexual abuse.)
The prosecutor says the present law could pose obstacles once he has Cummins in a courtroom.
“Under current law, it’s really going to depend what the testimony of Ms. Thomas is,” Cooper said, explaining that if she claims she left on her own volition, the defense will argue Cummins is not guilty of kidnapping.
Cooper will then have to introduce circumstantial evidence that Elizabeth was coerced. The district attorney is confident the communications between Elizabeth and Cummins show “he was definitely trying to influence her in his favor,” he said.
“This grown man was using his knowledge and life experience to basically attract her and to convince her to be with him,” he said.
In discouraging anyone who might blame Elizabeth for her plight, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director Mark Gwyn, too, discounted the notion that there was a mutual romance.
“She is 15, a child. He is 50, a grown man. This is and was not a romance. This was manipulation solely to the benefit of Tad Cummins,” Gwyn said.
Attorney Jason Whatley, who is representing Elizabeth’s father, told CNN the kidnapping statute might not matter in Cummins’ case, especially if he crossed state lines with Elizabeth. He predicted the ex-teacher would face “scores of charges once we find him.”
“I think Tad Cummins will have violated so many laws, I think he’s finished,” Whatley said.
Elizabeth Thomas: The 15-year-old has light brown or blond hair and hazel eyes. She is 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighs 120 pounds. She was last seen wearing a flannel shirt and black leggings.
Tad Cummins: The 50-year-old has brown hair, brown eyes and a gray goatee. He is 6 feet tall and weighs about 200 pounds. He is believed to be armed.
Vehicle: Silver Nissan Rogue, Tennessee tag 976-ZPT
Reward: $1,000
Who to call: 1-800-TBI-FIND
Source: Tennessee Bureau of Investigation
The Tennessee Legislature is already in session, and the deadline for introducing legislation has passed, Cooper said. Before lawmakers convene again in January, the prosecutor intends to meet individually with legislators to convince them the law needs changing, he said.
An ideal law, he said, would presume that if the victim were younger than 18, she or he could not leave on their own accord. It would be similar to statutory rape laws that place the onus on adults not to break the law, he said.
Whatley says he concurs the law needs to be changed, but as a lawyer who also does defense work, he has reservations about the age limit. He’d hate seeing an 18-year-old accused of kidnapping for taking a 17-year-old on a date after the 17-year-old’s parents forbade it, he said.
Perhaps the correct age is 16 and above, he said, suggesting that the amendment be called “Elizabeth’s Law.”
Amending the law makes sense, Cooper said, when you consider that, in Tennessee, children younger than 18 can’t consent to sex, rent cars or enter into legal contracts.
“This is a much bigger life choice than trying to buy a car,” he said of Elizabeth’s case. “I think it would be a simple fix.”
But there’s one tweet that several assembled Trump voters — who expressed varying degrees of enthusiasm for the President — could agree on.
According to many of his supporters, Trump was wrong about “Saturday Night Live” being unwatchable and Alec Baldwin’s impersonation not being good.
“He has no sense of humor,” one tweeted.
“Humor at its best,” another said.
“Alec Baldwin did a fabulous job!”
Trump has more than 27 million followers on his personal Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump. Another 16 million people follow his official presidential account, @POTUS.
To some, including Trump himself, Twitter offers a chance to bypass media that they see as biased or dishonest — and an opportunity for the country’s leader to engage with the masses in the moment.
“I feel it’s a great way to reach out to your constituents and create a give-and-take, because people obviously respond to his tweets, retweet the tweets,” said Ilene Wood of Emmaus, Pennsylvania. “In general, I’m in favor of it.”
Emma Leach, who became a die-hard fan of then-candidate Trump after attending a campaign rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, says Trump’s use of Twitter energizes younger people, such as herself.
A few years ago, Leach said, she could have asked a friend what Obama did in office that day, and she wouldn’t have known.
“But today she’ll know what Trump tweeted or what Trump did or what executive order happened,” Leach said. “She’s involved now.”
Of the Trump voters that CNN spoke with in eastern Pennsylvania, two months into Trump’s term, most didn’t mind that the President uses such an unorthodox method of communication.
“It’s like a modern-day constituent letter,” Leach said. “They’re tweeting at their president, they’re voicing their opinion, and they’re more politically involved.”
But the immediacy is a double-edged sword.
“In some situations, that’s an excellent thing because he’s able to get the word out very quickly and perhaps get reactions and responses back,” said Wood. “But at the same time, it creates a possibility of engaging your mouth before you’ve engaged your brain.”
Scott McCommons of Altoona, is a lifelong Democrat who crossed party lines to vote for Trump and follows Trump on Twitter.
“I think he rants and raves. He doesn’t think about it,” said McCommons, who said his opinion of Trump has changed for the worse, in large part because of his tweeting. “I think he can do a lot better things with his time.”
McCommons said he now regrets his vote, going so far as to tweet at Trump, “Your twitter rants are out of control – I voted for you to make America great again, run the country sir!”
It’s not Twitter, It’s the topic
It’s a common theme among these Trump supporters: they wish the President would stick to the theme of leading the country.
“He needs to tone it down and forget about Snoop Dogg, forget about Arnold Schwarzenegger. We don’t really care about them, do we?” said Ray Starner, who always wanted to see a businessman lead the country. Now, Starner said he would prefer to see Trump focus on jobs, health care and uniting the country.
Also taking a toll on Trump’s base? Baseless accusations.
Several supporters expressed disappointment at Trump for tweeting before he has all the facts, including his tweet, “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during this sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
Mark Hanna is a former law enforcement officer who follows the news, but not all of Trump’s tweets. When he saw media reports about the wire tapping accusations, he said: “Even if he felt that way, I don’t think he should have tweeted it.”
Trump’s tweets offer some insight into the President’s thinking and the man himself, and his use of social media can even supplement mainstream media.
Checking Twitter became a regular part of McCommon’s day, he said. “It used to be my favorite thing to do in the morning because I wanted to see what he had to say. I wanted to see if it matched up with what I heard on TV, from the news media, from his press conferences, to see if he was being honest.”
While supporters might not trust everything the President tweets, they generally have faith in Trump himself.
It was just last Thanksgiving that Hanna heard of Twitter for the first time. By the evening’s end, his son had set up a Twitter account for him.
“My first tweet was to Donald Trump, at the dinner table. I said ‘Congratulations on winning the election, and I’m looking forward to you leading our country,'” Hanna said.
It’s a sentiment he still holds.
“The good far outweighs the bad to me,” Hanna said. “I’m thinking Trump 2020.”
