US plant ruins 15 million J&J coronavirus vaccine doses: report

WASHINGTON - About 15 million doses of the single-shot coronavirus vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson were ruined in a factory error in the United States, The New York Times reported -- a blow to the company's efforts to quickly boost production.

When contacted by AFP, the pharmaceutical giant said it had identified a batch of doses at a plant in Baltimore run by Emergent BioSolutions "that did not meet quality standards" but did not confirm the specific number affected. 

The company also said the batch "was never advanced to the filling and finishing stages of our manufacturing process." 

"Quality and safety continue to be our top priority," it said.

The Times report however signaled that issues with quality control could affect future output, with the Food and Drug Administration expected to investigate. 

The FDA told AFP it was "aware of the situation" but declined to comment further.

Johnson & Johnson said it was sending more experts to the site to "supervise, direct and support all manufacturing of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine," which would allow it to deliver an additional 24 million shots "through April."

The Emergent BioSolutions plant had not yet been authorized by US regulators to manufacture a "drug substance" for the J&J vaccine, the company said, but US media reported that it was expected to produce tens of millions of doses in the near future.

The J&J vaccine has won praise for its single dosage and because it does not need to be frozen -- unlike the shots from Moderna and Pfizer -- making distribution much simpler. 

"We continue to expect to deliver our Covid-19 vaccine at a rate of more than one billion doses by the end of 2021," J&J said.

Agence France-Presse

New York Times digital 'NFT' article sells for $563,000

NEW YORK, United States - A New York Times columnist on Thursday sold one of his articles in digital form for $563,000, the latest example of the craze surrounding "non fungible tokens," which collectors are snapping up.

Keven Roose's article entitled "Buy This Column on the Blockchain" was itself aimed at trying to test the market as to what sort of items would sell in the form of an "NFT."

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a digital object, such as a drawing, piece of music, photo, or video, with a certificate of authenticity created by blockchain technology.

This authentication by a network of computers is considered inviolable. 

The virtual object, which is actually a computer file, can be exchanged or sold with its certificate.

NFTs have become popular in the past 6 months, as wealthy collectors turn to the digital market during the pandemic.

On Monday, the first message ever posted on Twitter sold for $2.9 million when its sender, Twitter co-founder and chief Jack Dorsey, accepted the winning bid at auction.

Earlier this month, a digital collage by American artist Beeple sold for $69.3 million at Christie's, setting a new record for an NFT.

"Why can't a journalist join the NFT party, too?" asked Roose in his column.

At the end of the 24-hour auction, a collector calling himself Farzin won the article with 350 Ethereum, a major cryptocurrency, worth $563,000. 

"Fully just staring at my monitor laughing uncontrollably," Roose, a tech columnist, wrote on Twitter after the sale.

Roose had indicated that the proceeds, after the 15 percent fee deducted by the Foundation platform on which the auction was organized, would go to charities supported by The New York Times. 

Agence France-Presse

Mastercard, Visa halt processing payments on Pornhub

Mastercard Inc and Visa Inc on Thursday stopped processing payments on Pornhub after a New York Times article said many videos posted on the adult website depicted sexual assault of children.

Mastercard said it was permanently ending the use of its cards on the sex videos site after its investigation confirmed the presence of illegal content on the platform. Visa said it was suspending payments till an investigation was completed.

"We are instructing the financial institutions who serve MindGeek (Pornhub parent) to suspend processing of payments through the Visa network," Visa said in a statement.

Pornhub did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The New York Times article had also described some videos on the site as recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls.

Pornhub has denied the allegations but said it had banned video downloads and was allowing only certain partner accounts to upload content.

-reuters-

Liberty University brings back its students, and coronavirus, too

LYNCHBURG, Virginia — As Liberty University’s spring break was drawing to a close this month, Jerry Falwell, its president, spoke with the physician who runs Liberty’s student health service about the rampaging coronavirus.

“We’ve lost the ability to corral this thing,” Dr. Thomas Eppes said he told Falwell. But he did not urge him to close the school. “I just am not going to be so presumptuous as to say, ‘This is what you should do, and this is what you shouldn’t do,’” Eppes said in an interview.

So Falwell — a staunch ally of President Donald Trump and an influential voice in the evangelical world — reopened the university last week, igniting a firestorm. As of Friday, Eppes said, nearly a dozen Liberty students were sick with symptoms that suggest COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Three were referred to local hospital centers for testing. Another eight were told to self-isolate.

“Liberty will be notifying the community as deemed appropriate and required by law,” Falwell said in an interview Sunday when confronted with the numbers. He added that any student returning now to campus would be required to self-quarantine for 14 days.

“I can’t be sure what’s going on with individuals who are not being tested but who are advised to self-isolate,” said Kerry Gateley, health director of the Central Virginia Health District, which covers Lynchburg. “I would assume that if clinicians were concerned enough about the possibility of COVID-19 disease to urge self-isolation that appropriate screening and testing would be arranged.”

Of the 1,900 students who initially returned last week to campus, Falwell said more than 800 had left. But he said he had “no idea” how many students had returned to off-campus housing.

“If I were them, I’d be more nervous,” he added, because they live in more crowded conditions.

For critical weeks in January and February, the nation’s far-right dismissed the seriousness of the pandemic. Falwell derided it as an “overreaction” driven by liberal desires to damage Trump.

Although the current crisis would appear epidemiological in nature, Eppes said he saw it as a reflection of “the political divide.”

“If Liberty sneezes, there are people who don’t like the fact that Liberty sneezed,” he said in an interview. “Mr. Falwell called me to listen to a view that wasn’t exactly his. Great leaders do that type of thing.”

The city of Lynchburg, Virginia, is furious.

“We had a firestorm of our own citizens who said, ‘What’s going on?’ ” said Treney Tweedy, the mayor.

Some Liberty officials accuse alarmed outsiders of playing politics. Tweedy has called Falwell “reckless.” And within the school, there are signs of panic.

“I’m not allowed to talk to you because I’m an employee here,” one student living on campus wrote in an email. But, he pleaded, “we need help to go home.”

Under the Falwell family’s leadership, Liberty University has grown in five decades from a modest Baptist college to an evangelical powerhouse with cash investments and endowments of nearly $2 billion, nearly 46,000 undergraduates and a campus that sprawls across Lynchburg and neighboring counties in Virginia. Total enrollment, including online students, exceeds 100,000.

The institution is a welcome and generous presence in this Blue Ridge Mountain region, where the percentage of Lynchburg residents living in poverty is twice the state average. Liberty and its Thomas Road Baptist Church donate goods and services; its medical students conduct free health screenings; and its students participate in city beautification, maintenance and charity projects.

The university was founded by Falwell’s famous father as a bastion of social conservatism, one that was unabashedly combative as it trained what it called “Champions for Christ.” If anything, the younger Falwell has made it more so since his father’s death.

The mayor and city manager here, Bonnie Svrcek, felt relieved two weeks ago, when Falwell assured them that he fully intended to comply with Virginia’s public health directives and close the school to virtually all students, most of whom were scattering for spring break. Then he changed his mind.

“We think it’s irresponsible for so many universities to just say ‘closed, you can’t come back,’ push the problem off on other communities and sit there in their ivory towers,” Falwell said Wednesday on a radio show hosted by a far-right conspiracy theorist, Todd Starnes.

“We’re conservative, we’re Christian, and therefore we’re being attacked,” he said.

Michael Gillette, a former mayor of Lynchburg and a bioethicist now working with its hospitals on rationing scarce ventilators, disagrees.

“To argue that criticism of Liberty is based on political bias is unfounded and unreasonable,” he said. “Liberty just did not take this threat as seriously as others have.”

Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, Lynchburg city officials and a growing number of Liberty students, parents and employees have urged Falwell to reverse course, but such pleas have only prompted a stream of often conflicting statements.

“Our messages did change throughout the week as the governor’s orders changed. We had to adapt,” Falwell said.

Falwell initially said only international students or those with nowhere else to go would remain. Then he welcomed back a much larger group of about 1,900 students to campus housing last week, in addition to faculty members and staff. Others returned to off-campus rentals in Lynchburg.

Students who remained at home had to return last week to clean out their rooms, a requirement that was later relaxed. Faculty members were at first ordered back to campus, even though they would be teaching online. Then some were allowed to work from home. Falwell also waffled on whether the school would issue refunds to students who did not return for the semester before announcing Friday that most would receive a $1,000 credit for next year’s bills.

Falwell and his administration have worked to tamp down dissent. After a Liberty undergraduate, Calum Best, wrote on his personal Facebook page that students should receive refunds, he said Liberty’s spokesman, Scott Lamb, called his cellphone to berate him. Asked about the call, Lamb said he was simply objecting to an error in the post, and Best was “spinning.”

After Marybeth Davis Baggett, a professor, wrote an open letter asking the university’s board of trustees to close the campus, Falwell mocked her on Twitter as “the ‘Baggett’ lady.”

Jeff Brittain, a Liberty parent, wrote on Twitter, “I’m as right wing as they get, bud. But as a parent of three of your students, I think this is crazy, irresponsible and seems like a money grab.” Falwell replied, calling him a “dummy.”

All of this has left even his critics scratching their heads.

“It’s honestly hard to figure out what his motives are,” Best, the student who wrote the Facebook post, said in an interview. “If he had purely political motives, he’s being way more conservative than even Trump is being right now. Trump is at least allowing doctors to say their piece. Jerry is not. It kind of shocks me at this point.”

On campus, the administration says it is adhering to Virginia’s public health mandates, but students are flouting them. While security guards appear to be enforcing state advisories requiring a 6-foot distance from others and gatherings of no more than 10 people, students are still assembling in closer proximity to eat, play sports, study and use dormitory restrooms. Decals slapped on furniture that say “Closed for Social Distancing” have wound up on laptops and car bumpers. Study tables are farther apart, but shared computer terminals remain. While some students are trying to adhere to social distancing guidelines, they live in group houses, pile onto city buses and crowd the few businesses that remain open in Lynchburg.

It was not supposed to be this way. As the number of reported cases of the coronavirus in Virginia began rising, Tweedy said Falwell personally assured her that the school would not fully reopen. “We have some students who cannot go anywhere or they have nowhere to go,” she recalled his telling her. “The number on that day was 300 or so students, and even if it was a few more, we said, ‘OK, well, thank you.’ ”

But as spring break drew to a close in mid-March, all Liberty students were encouraged to return.

“We never discussed numbers, and I never told them the dorms would be closed,” Falwell said Sunday. “We’re going to have to agree to disagree on what was said.”

Falwell runs Liberty his own way, and his word is law. Professors are not tenured and can be fired at will. The administration controls the student newspaper.

Falwell echoes Trump’s talking points on the coronavirus, which he often calls the “flu.”

“It’s just strange to me how many are overreacting” to the pandemic, Falwell said on “Fox & Friends” on March 10. “It makes you wonder if there is a political reason for that. Impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller report didn’t work, and Article 25 didn’t work, and so maybe now this is their next attempt to get Trump.”

Lynchburg is particularly ill-prepared to become a hot spot. Hospitals in the region have a total of 1,174 beds, only 55 of them intensive care, according to a recent analysis by the Harvard Global Health Institute. Those must serve 217,000 adults, nearly 50,000 of whom are 65 or older. Tests for the coronavirus remain in short supply.

Falwell has played down the dangers of his decision in interviews with the news media, where he has even suggested that the coronavirus is a North Korean bioweapon. On Fox News, he blithely asserted that the cure rate for COVID-19 “is 99.7% for people under 50,” adding that “we have talked to medical professionals, numerous medical professionals, before we made this decision.”

An archived version of Liberty’s website said those medical professionals included the school’s own public health faculty and campus health providers as well as “Dr. Jeffrey Hyman of Northwell Health, New York’s largest health care provider.”

When contacted by The New York Times, Northwell Health denied that Hyman provided any formal guidance to Liberty, adding that he is not an infectious disease specialist. In a statement, the hospital system said that Hyman was a personal friend of the Falwell family who told them in private conversation “that reconvening classes would be a ‘bad idea.’”

c.2020 The New York Times Company

The anonymous whistleblower who has threatened Trump's presidency

WASHINGTON - Only a handful of people know his or her identity, but the whistleblower whose complaint threatens to implode Donald Trump's presidency is already being lauded as both a hero and a traitor.

Six weeks after submitting a damning complaint about Trump that was made public Thursday, neither the president nor his intelligence chief knows their name or job, much less Democrats who have made the complaint the basis of an impeachment probe of the US leader.

The New York Times reported Thursday that the person is a man who works for the Central Intelligence Agency and had been seconded for a time to the White House.

The whistleblower's explosive complaint depicts Trump using his official powers to pressure Ukraine's president to get dirt on former vice president Joe Biden, currently the most likely Democrat to face Trump in next year's presidential election.

Democrats have accused the president of abuse of power in seeking foreign interference in a US election, two years after Russia meddled in the 2016 vote to help Trump's campaign.

The complaint only identifies the whistleblower as a member of the sprawling US intelligence community, 16 separate bodies with 100,000 people.

But it suggests the person is a skilled analyst deeply knowledegable about Eastern European politics with strong contacts in the White House.

'BY THE BOOK'

He or she recruited attorney Andrew Bakaj, a specialist in national security and whistleblower law, to help prepare the August 12 complaint for the inspector general of the intelligence community.

"I don't know the identity of the whistleblower. I just hear that it's a partisan person," Trump said earlier this week.

"I don't know who the whistleblower is," acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, the leader of the intelligence community, said Thursday.

Federal whistleblowers have strong protections under a special law governing officials wanting to report wrongdoing by colleagues or superiors, but they have to go through a strictly defined process.

Maguire said the person acted "by the book."

"I think the whistleblower did everything in the right way," he told the House Intelligence Committee.

TRUMP: 'ALMOST A SPY'

But protecting the person could be hard. Bakaj has agreed to have them appear behind closed doors at the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to answer questions about the complaint.

Trump has already launched a campaign of personal attacks, accusing the whistleblower of relying on secondary reports from others in the intelligence community and holding a bias against the president.

"Who is this so-called 'whistleblower' who doesn't know the correct facts. Is he on our Country's side," Trump asked in a tweet this week.

And on Thursday, Trump appeared to threaten them.

"They're almost a spy," Trump said in a private meeting, according to a recording published by the Los Angeles times.

"You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now."

PRAISE FOR COMING FORWARD

But many others praised the person for risking their career and possibly personal safety by coming forward.

"I want to thank the whistleblower for their courage. They didn't have to step forward," said Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in a hearing on the complaint Thursday.

Bakaj would not confirm The New York Times report that the whistleblower works for the CIA.

But he assailed the newspaper for endangering the person.

"Any decision to report any perceived identifying information of the whistleblower is deeply concerning and reckless, as it can place the individual in harm's way," The New York Times quoted Bakaj as saying.

"The whistleblower has a right to anonymity."

The nonprofit group Whistleblower Aid opened a public donation site seeking funds for the person's legal fees on Wednesday.

"The US intelligence officer who filed an urgent report of government misconduct needs your help," the group said.

"This brave individual took an oath to protect and defend our Constitution."

One day after the launch, the site had raised more than $79,000 from around 2,200 donors.

pmh/it

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Six men tell their stories of sexual assault in the US military

Sexual assault in the military is a problem widely recognized but poorly understood. Elected officials and Pentagon leaders have tended to focus on the thousands of women who have been preyed upon while in uniform. But over the years, more of the victims have been men.

On average, about 10,000 men are sexually assaulted in the American military each year, according to Pentagon statistics.

Overwhelmingly, the victims are young and low-ranking. Many struggle afterward, are kicked out of the military and have trouble finding their footing in civilian life.

For decades, the fallout from the vast majority of male sexual assaults in uniform was silence: Silence of victims too humiliated to report the crime, silence of authorities unequipped to pursue it, silence of commands that believed no problem existed, and silence of families too ashamed to protest.

Women face a much higher rate of sexual assault in the military — about seven times that of men. But there are so many more men than women in the ranks that the total numbers of male and female victims in recent years have been roughly similar, according to Pentagon statistics — about 10,000 a year. And before women were fully integrated into the armed services, the bulk of the victims were men.

For generations, the military wasn’t looking for male sexual assault victims, so it failed to see them, according to Nathan W. Galbreath, deputy director of the Defense Department’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. Only in 2006, after the office began surveying service members, he said, did the military learn that at least as many men as women were being assaulted.

“That was surprising to senior leadership,” Galbreath said.

“Everyone was so sure the problem was a women’s issue.”

A report published in May indicates that while the share of male victims who come forward has been rising recently, an estimated 4 out of 5 still do not report the attack.

For tens of thousands of veterans who were assaulted in the past, the progress made in recent years offers little comfort. The damage has already been done. Many have seen their lives buckle under the weight of loathing and bitterness, and have seen decades pass before what happened to them was acknowledged by anyone — including themselves.

Here are the stories of six of those men. The Department of Veterans Affairs has reviewed each man’s case and formally recognized him as a victim of service-connected sexual assault. The military branches in which each man served were asked to comment for this article, but declined to discuss specific cases.

PAUL LLOYD, 30
Enlisted in the Army National Guard, assaulted in 2007

Paul Lloyd was pushing a cart through the supermarket near his home in Salt Lake City, looking for light bulbs, when he stopped to sniff a variety of scented candles on a nearby shelf. Suddenly his hands were over his face, and he sank to the floor, sobbing.

One candle smelled just like the shampoo he had been using in the shower at Army basic training in 2007, when he was beaten and raped by another recruit.

“Some little thing can happen, and you’re back in that little 3-by-3 square shower,” he said later. “It’s hell, and there’s no escape from it.”

Lloyd joined the Army National Guard at 17. When he was assaulted in the shower one night after everyone else had gone to bed, he said, he told no one. Even when he ended up in the hospital the next day with internal bleeding and a torn rectum, and doctors asked him what had happened, Lloyd, who was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said he simply shrugged.

“I felt like I couldn’t say anything,” he said. “I would look like a total failure — to my family, to my platoon, to myself.”

During the years when Lloyd was in the Army, only 3% of male victims reported sexual assaults, according to Defense Department estimates. The percentage has increased nearly sixfold since then, but the vast majority of men who are sexually assaulted still never report it.

Lloyd earned top scores in marksmanship and physical fitness, and wanted a career in the military, but he said a sense of betrayal and disgust at being raped started to gnaw at him. When he was given leave for Christmas, he decided not to return. He hid out at his sister’s house for a month before the National Guard found him. He was taken back to boot camp and eventually discharged for misconduct.

At home, he told no one about the attack. He stopped going to church, he said, fell into drinking and struggled to hold a job. He questioned his own sexuality. His family wondered why he couldn’t keep his act together.

It took five years for him to decide to tell them what had happened.

"They saw me as broken for a long time,” he said. “When I told them I’d been raped, they said, ‘Finally, it all makes sense.’ ”



BILL MINNIX, 64
Enlisted in the Air Force, assaulted in 1973

Bill Minnix was too ashamed to tell his family why he was kicked out of the Air Force in 1973, and they were too ashamed to ask.

What would people at church say? What would the neighbors think?
He didn’t speak a word to anyone about having been raped, he said — not for the next 40 years.

He had enlisted at 17, and was a few weeks into radar technician school when a group of older enlisted men and officers took some new recruits to an off-base resort. In a private bungalow, after a round of drinking, Minnix said, the older men told the recruits it was time for their initiation.

“At first there was laughing and nervous joking, and then there was silence,” Minnix said. “I was scared to death. And we got forced into sex acts none of us wanted.” He said the teenagers were made to perform oral sex or were sodomized. “What an awful thing, when you go back to the base the next day and you are facing these people,” he said.

Minnix struggled to make sense of what had happened in the bungalow. Real men don’t get raped, he told himself, they fight back. He found he was unable to concentrate on his work, and started to do poorly in radar school. He was desperate to get out of the Air Force.

“I couldn’t stand being there,” said Minnix, who lives in Bend, Oregon. “I didn’t feel I could report it to anyone. The best thing to do was run.”

He sighed and added, “I’ve essentially been running for most of my life since then.”

Minnix deserted, was caught a week later, and then deserted again. The Air Force put him in jail and threatened to prosecute him if he didn’t agree to leave the service voluntarily with a less-than-honorable discharge. He took the discharge.

Once he was out, he spent most of his adult life in what he calls “a black box,” shut off from the world by anger and shame. He burned through jobs and two marriages, drinking to numb his own loathing.

His parents never spoke to him again. They died not knowing the truth.

In recent years, through counseling provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs, Minnix has been able to come to terms with what happened. He has remarried and has joined a local veterans’ group called the Oregon Band of Brothers. He drove his Jeep in the local Veterans Day parade in 2018.

"That filled a big void for me,” he said. “I had military service taken away from me. For years, when I heard the anthem or saw the parades, I would cry. I can feel like a veteran now.”

HEATH PHILLIPS, 48
Enlisted in the Navy, assaulted in 1988

Heath Phillips stepped in front of a crowd of hundreds of soldiers at Fort Hood in central Texas. He took a breath, and then shared a secret that had gnawed at him for 25 years.

“My name is Heath Phillips,” he said, “and I was sexually assaulted when I was in the United States Navy.”

In 1988, when Phillips was 17, he arrived at his first ship, and a group of sailors offered to take him out for a night on the town.

They traveled to Manhattan, he said, and he woke up on the floor of a hotel room to see one of the men ejaculating on his face while others were trying to pull off his pants. Phillips writhed out of their grip and locked himself in a bathroom.

He reported the attack to the ship’s master at arms the next day, he said, but the master at arms just looked at him skeptically.

“Were you drinking?” Phillips recalls him saying. “Do you know that you can get in trouble for underage drinking?”

Phillips said he was sent back to his bunk in the bowels of the ship, where he slept just a few feet from the attackers. For months, he said, they beat and raped him repeatedly.

Phillips said he went to the master at arms again and again, often with black eyes and split lips, to complain about the abuse.

“He always accused me of lying,” Phillips recalled. “He would say I had no proof. I think he just didn’t want to deal with it.”

Phillips deserted, was arrested and sent back to the ship, and deserted again, and again. Eventually he was forced out of the Navy with an other-than-honorable discharge for running away so many times.

For decades, he said, he told no one else what had happened to him. But in 2009, he received counseling at a veterans’ hospital, and came to realize that silence might only allow assaults in the military to go on unchecked.

He became a vocal member of advocacy groups and met with lawmakers. A congressional investigation supported his account. And he started telling his story at military bases — something that petrified him at first, but that he now sees as a vital part of healing.

“I got my military career cut short, and that’s not right,” he said after addressing the soldiers at Fort Hood. “But I still love the military. By speaking out, I am serving in a different way.”

BILLY JOE CAPSHAW, 56
Enlisted in the Air Force, assaulted in 1980

The few years Billy Joe Capshaw spent in the Army were the worst years of his life, he said, but to this day he wears an Army veteran baseball cap. He said it deflects unwanted questions from strangers about the marks on his face.

“It explains the scars,” he said. “They don’t ask.”

In 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested and confessed to raping and killing 17 young men and boys, some of whom he then dismembered and ate. The news media soon learned that Capshaw had been Dahmer’s roommate in the Army, and descended on Hot Springs, Arkansas, where Capshaw lives.

At a news conference before a bank of reporters, Capshaw described the heavy-metal posters Dahmer decorated their room with, and the W.C. Fields jokes Dahmer liked to tell.

But he did not mention the vials of lorazepam and ketamine that he said Dahmer often used to sedate him. Or the metal bar he said Dahmer used to beat him, or the motor-pool rope to tie him down, or the scars, still visible on Capshaw’s cheeks after nearly 40 years, from Dahmer trying to muffle his screams with a clenched hand.

“I couldn’t,” Capshaw recalled, shaking his head, in an interview this spring. “You say you’ve been raped by another man, people blame you, they shame you. They just don’t get how something like this can happen.”

Capshaw joined the Army at 17 and was stationed at Baumholder Army Garrison in Germany in 1980 when he was assigned to share a room with Dahmer, who was then an Army medic.

Within days, he said, Dahmer was beating him, drugging him and keeping him locked in their room. At one point, Capshaw jumped from the second-story window to escape, and ended up in the hospital with a cracked pelvis. But he never said a word about what was going on, even to the doctor who examined him.

“It developed into a Stockholm syndrome-type situation,” Capshaw said. “He totally controlled me. He didn’t let me leave the room. He would beat me and rape me. But we would also play chess, he would buy me books and suture up my wounds. I don’t know how to explain it.”

Dahmer was discharged from the military in 1981 for alcohol abuse. Capshaw was discharged a few months later, his military record shows.

For five years after his discharge, Capshaw said, he didn’t leave his mother’s house. He stayed awake for days at a time trying to stave off nightmares, so tense that he could barely swallow solid food. He didn’t tell his family what had happened. In a small town, he worried, he’d never be able to get out from under the whisperings if word got out.

“For a long time, the only person I ever told was my best friend, and his response was, ‘I’ll never tell anybody,’” Capshaw said. “He didn’t, neither. That’s a pretty good friend — he knew it would hurt me, it would get around.”

After years of therapy, Capshaw decided in 2010 that hiding what happened would not help him. With the assistance of his psychiatrist, he created a website to tell the story of what he had gone through and how he had begun to heal.

JACK WILLIAMS, 71
Enlisted in the Air Force, assaulted in 1966

“If you report this, no one will believe you,” an Air Force drill sergeant told Jack Williams in boot camp.

It was 2 a.m. in the sergeant’s office, Williams recalled. The sergeant had just choked Williams, who was 18, until he passed out, he said, and then had raped him over a desk while dozens of other recruits slept in the next room.

It was 1966. The military had no response and prevention program, as it does today, and there were no protections for troops who reported assaults. Homosexuality was not just forbidden in the ranks, it was seen as a national security threat.

“If you came forward and said you were raped, people would have thought you were a queer or a child molester — you were treated like it was your fault,” said Williams, who now lives in Everett, Washington.

After the attack, Williams said, he did all that he felt he could do. He took a shower and went back to bed.

The sergeant raped him twice more during basic training, he said. Each time, Williams stayed quiet, determined to make it through boot camp.

But as soon as Williams graduated, he reported what had happened to Air Force authorities, expecting them to jail his attacker and start an investigation.

The anger still trembles in his voice decades later when he describes the Air Force’s response.

“No investigator ever called me,” he said. “Nothing was ever done.”

Instead, his chain of command began to complain about his performance, he said, because the rapes had left him with damaged kidneys and a torn rectum, and because he was missing too much training in order to get treatment. He was soon forced out of the Air Force for being medically unfit, his service record shows.

Today, veterans like Williams are coming forward in growing numbers to demand that the Department of Veterans Affairs provide treatment and compensation for the harm done to them.

Some 61,000 veterans, including Williams, are now formally recognized by the department as having been sexually traumatized during their service, and the number of claims filed each year has surged by 70% since 2010.

A monthly check is poor compensation, though, for decades spent in limbo.

“I had a future, I wanted to serve my country, and I was good at what I did,” Williams said. “That was all taken away from me.”

ETHAN HANSON, 29
Enlisted in the Marine Corps, assaulted in 2014

Ethan Hanson has avoided taking showers since he left the Marine Corps in 2014. Instead, he runs an inch and a half of warm water in a bathtub, then rinses quickly with a plastic cup, with each splash evoking a painful moan.

“When I do come into contact with steam, hot water, anything that makes my skin slippery,” he said as he looked around the bathroom in his house in Austin, Minnesota, “honestly, it makes me want to vomit.”

Hanson was one of a group of Marine recruits who were sexually assaulted in the showers during boot camp at Camp Pendleton, California. Like many of the sexual assaults on servicemen, it was a hazing exercise, meant to humiliate and intimidate young troops.

According to a Rand Corp. study, 1 in 3 men who are sexually assaulted in the military describe the offense as hazing or bullying — twice the rate reported by women who are sexually assaulted.

It happened to Hanson after an exhausting morning running the obstacle course. The platoon was showering when a drill instructor marched into the steamy room, angry that he had heard talking.

He ordered the 60 naked recruits to pack themselves into a tight line against the wall, genitals pressed up against backsides. After holding them in that position for several minutes, he ordered them to run to the other side of the room and line up again, then back to the first side.

“It was back and forth for more than an hour,” Hanson said.

In the following days, several of the recruits reported the episode to their chain of command, and the drill instructor was prosecuted.

Hanson has a copy of the Marine Corps investigative report confirming that the episode took place.

Hanson graduated from basic training and tried to move on, but soon afterward he saw a Marine dressed like the drill instructor, and had a panic attack.

He told his superiors that he was suicidal, and was sent to a Navy hospital. But when his mental health did not improve after four weeks, the Marine Corps forced him out of the service, noting on his discharge papers that it was for “failure to adapt to military life.”

“It’s their way of saying, it’s my fault, not theirs,” Hanson said of the discharge. “If I was injured in training, they would have to treat me and compensate me. But they said this was a preexisting condition.”

The Department of Veterans Affairs has since formally recognized his case as one of service-connected sexual trauma.

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ICE deported him to a country he’d never seen. He died 2 months later.

IRBIL, Iraq — Life was a struggle for Jimmy Aldaoud. He was bipolar and schizophrenic, and battled depression and diabetes. He got into trouble, frequently landing in jail or on the street in and around Detroit, where he grew up.

Then, in June, he was deported to Iraq, and life got even more difficult. He had never set foot there before, his family said. He did not understand Arabic. He did not have enough medicine.

And he was alone. His three sisters did not even know he had been sent there until he called them from the city of Najaf.

Aldaoud, 41, died in Baghdad on Tuesday, after days of vomiting blood and begging to return to the United States.

“He was sort of doomed from the beginning,” said Edward Bajoka, an immigration lawyer who is in touch with Aldaoud’s family.

Aldaoud’s experience illustrates the dire consequences that noncitizens living in the United States may face if they are deported to countries they have not seen in decades, or ever. Aldaoud was officially an Iraqi, but he was born in a refugee camp in Greece and entered the United States legally in 1979 at the age of 6 months.

Almost as soon as Aldaoud left the airport in Najaf, Iraq, he would have been unable to read the signs or understand the conversations all around him. Everything from the scorching summer sun to the electricity cuts that punctuate the days would have been strange.

“He was literally crying every day,” his sister Rita Aldaoud, 30, said in an interview, adding that Aldaoud told her he would rather be back in an American jail.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Detroit said in an unsigned statement that Aldaoud, whose name is sometimes spelled Al-Daoud, was ordered removed from the United States in May 2018 after at least 20 criminal convictions over the previous two decades, including assault with a weapon, domestic violence and home invasion. While awaiting deportation, he was released in December with a GPS tracker, but he cut it off, the agency said. Local police arrested him in April on a larceny charge, and he was finally deported on June 2.

After about two weeks in Iraq, Aldaoud lamented his harrowing situation in a video that was posted on Facebook.

“They wouldn’t let me call my family, nothing,” he says of U.S. immigration officers in the video. “I begged them. I said: ‘Please, I’ve never seen that country. I’ve never been there.’”

Aldaoud, sitting on the ground, says he had been sleeping in the street and struggling to find food. “I’ve got nothing over here, as you can see,” he says.

In the video, a cross tattoo can be seen on his forearm. Aldaoud is a Chaldean Catholic; in mainly Muslim Iraq, Christians are a minority that has shrunk considerably since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Shortly after the video was posted, the Rev. Martin Hermiz, spokesman for Iraq’s Christian Endowment, found Aldaoud’s cellphone number and called him to ask if he needed help.

“He said, ‘No — if anyone wants to help me, let Trump know my situation here in Iraq so maybe he can have mercy on me and bring me back to America,’” Hermiz recalled, adding that Aldaoud also turned down an offer to stay in a church, saying he wanted to live alone and pay his rent himself.

The small apartment Aldaoud found was in a working-class Christian neighborhood of Baghdad, where there are churches and women can walk comfortably without headscarves.

Hermiz said he did not hear from Aldaoud again, but he did get a call from a friend of Aldaoud, who said he had taken Aldaoud to a Baghdad hospital because he was vomiting blood. The hospital gave him medication and sent him home, Hermiz said.

Rita Aldaoud said her brother had similar symptoms in the past when his blood sugar spiked. In the last few days of his life, his family grew worried about his health. When they called him, she said, “he would answer and say, ‘I can’t talk,’ and you could hear he was throwing up.”

A Baghdad neighbor found him dead in his apartment Tuesday morning.

Politicians have expressed outrage at ICE before over the deaths of asylum-seekers who have been killed after being deported.

“We knew he would not survive if deported,” said Miriam Aukerman, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan.

Rep. Andy Levin, a Democrat who represents the district in metropolitan Detroit where Aldaoud used to live, said he did not have to die. “His death could have and should have been prevented, as his deportation was essentially a death sentence,” Levin said in a statement.

Aldaoud has had trouble believing that her brother could have been deported to a country in which he had never set foot.

“It’s baffling, I don’t understand it,” Rita Aldaoud said. “We’re still dumbfounded, to be honest.”

“It was a shock to find out he’d passed, but to be honest, I didn’t know how he would make it there,” she added.

For now, Aldaoud’s body is in the Baghdad morgue. An Iraqi court has ordered an investigation into the cause of his death, and Dr. Ziad Ali, the country’s forensic medical examiner, said he thought it would be another month before pathology and tests are complete.

No one is sure what will happen to his body after that, Hermiz said: “We are looking for relatives to receive him, but what a pity it is that there are no relatives to receive him here in Iraq.”

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Tinder Gold offers smarter swiping at a price

“Tinder’s definitely not a game,” said Elie Seidman, the company’s chief executive, in a recent interview. “At the core, it’s about human connection.”

If you squint, though, the app doesn’t look so different from the countless mobile games on the market. Tinder has a clear objective and explicit rules. At any time of day, there are tens of millions of people playing, er, swiping, on the dating app. And, like the games with which it competes for screen time, Tinder charges users who want a leg up.

For example, in Clash of Clans, a mobile game in which you build and defend a village, you can use real money to buy “gems,” the basic currency of that game. On Tinder, you can buy extra “super likes” (which alert others that you are enamored of them) and “boosts” (which make your profile more visible to people in the area).

Or, to really increase your chances, you might subscribe to Tinder Gold for about $30 a month. (The price depends on multiple factors, including where you live and how many years you have walked the Earth searching for a partner.)

Tinder Gold grants users access to a feature called “Likes You,” which gives them a list of people who have swiped right on them. Suddenly, there’s no futile swiping whatsoever. Instead, you’ve got a (hopefully long) list of strangers with whom you’re guaranteed to match. It’s something like god mode, for a dating app.

“The structure of those in-app purchases are highly similar to the structure of in-app purchases for games, in that you have those special abilities,” said Randy Nelson, the head of mobile insights at Sensor Tower, an analytics firm. “A direct line can be drawn from the boosts and power-ups in a game to the boosts and power-ups in Tinder.”

Tinder has leveraged these to great effect since introducing Tinder Gold in 2017. It has become, according to Sensor Tower and App Annie, another analytics firm, the top-grossing nongaming app in the world.

And it’s only getting bigger: Tinder announced on Tuesday that it had added more than 500,000 subscribers worldwide in the last quarter, for a total of more than 5 million people paying for Tinder Gold or the less expensive Tinder Plus.

Back in 2015, according to Sensor Tower, the App Store’s top 10 grossing apps for the second quarter were all games. But in 2016, a subscription app, Spotify, entered the mix. In the second quarter of 2019, four nongaming apps — Tinder, Netflix, YouTube and Tencent Video — are in the top 10, along with games like Honor of Kings and Candy Crush Saga.

Tinder’s pricing structure splits the difference between those games and something like YouTube, whose premium package removes irritating advertisements and allows access to otherwise unavailable content.

Tinder is run by Match Group, the behemoth that owns most of the dating apps one might use, with the exception of Bumble. Another Match Group company, OkCupid, introduced Likes You as an option for paying customers starting in 2012. But Tinder’s founders were reluctant to incorporate it.

Gary Swidler, the chief financial officer of Match Group, said that “there was concern about breaking that core foundational principle of the double opt-in.”

The app’s current chief has no such qualms.

“They were mistaken,” Seidman said. (Several of the app’s founders, including Sean Rad, a former chief executive, are in a legal dispute with Match and its parent company, IAC.)

Most people think of Tinder as a free app, and it is free to most of its millions of users. Brent Thill, an analyst who covers the company for Jefferies Technology Group, said that Match Group overall had more than 80 million users. (The company does not release specific numbers for each app.)

Swidler said that roughly 70% of Tinder’s revenue comes from subscriptions; the other 30 percent comes from à la carte features, along with a small amount from advertising.

Some experts who had expressed doubt in Match Group have recently shifted gears. Goldman Sachs had advised investors to sell its stock in February, citing the likelihood of Tinder Gold subscribers ending their subscriptions and Facebook’s gearing up in the dating space. But in May, Goldman analysts adjusted their estimate, calling their previous view “myopic” in light of Match’s consistent subscriber growth.

That growth comes as Match Group continues to expand into new markets, building up its user base around the world.

“You get a huge advantage by getting a lot of free users,” Swidler said, explaining the company’s “product first, then monetization” strategy. Essentially, the larger the pool of people using Tinder, the more who might eventually pay for certain benefits. If they get frustrated enough.


2019 New York Times News Service

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Judith Krantz, whose tales of sex and shopping sold millions, dies at 91

Judith Krantz, who almost single-handedly turned the sex-and-shopping genre of fiction into the stuff of high commerce, making her one of the world’s best-selling novelists if not one of the most critically acclaimed, died on Saturday at her home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. She was 91.

Her publicist, John Tellem, confirmed the death.

Though she did not publish her first book until she was 50, Krantz reigned for decades afterward as the international queen of poolside reading. Her 10 novels — beginning with “Scruples” in 1978 and ending with “The Jewels of Tessa Kent” in 1998 — have together sold more than 85 million copies in more than 50 languages.

Most became television movies or miniseries, many of which were produced by Krantz’s husband, Steve Krantz.

What drove Krantz’s books to the tops of bestseller lists time and again was a formula that she honed to glittering perfection: fevered horizontal activities combined with fevered vertical ones — the former taking place in sumptuously appointed bedrooms and five-star hotels, the latter anywhere with a cash register and astronomical price tags.

A hallmark of the formula was that it embraced sex and shopping in almost equal measure, with each recounted in modifier-laden detail.

“Recklessly she flung herself out of her clouds of chiffon plumage only to appear in her resplendent flesh, lying totally naked on a pile of horse blankets, laughing softly as she watched Stash Valensky, momentarily bewildered and taken by surprise, struggle out of his dinner jacket,” Krantz writes in her second novel, “Princess Daisy” (1980). “Soon, very soon, he was as naked as she. He savaged her abandoned flesh with an urgency, almost a cannibalism, he hadn’t known in years.”

Elements of Krantz’s formula had existed piecemeal in earlier fiction for women, conspicuously in the work of Jacqueline Susann, the author of “Valley of the Dolls” (1966) and other steamy novels of the 1960s and ’70s. But Krantz was almost certainly the first writer to combine the steam and the shopping in such opulent profusion — and to do so all the way to the bank.

In a sense, Krantz was a fantasy novelist. Her heroines — invariably rich, thin, savvy, ambitious and preternaturally beautiful — are undisputed princesses, their castles the opulent hotels, condominiums, casinos and boutiques of New York, Paris, Beverly Hills and Monte Carlo.

Her narratives are rife with sacred objects: a hurtling catalog of brand names that offers readers a Cook’s tour of high-end material culture.

A passage from “Scruples” reads: “They went to other collections, chez Saint Laurent and Lanvin and Nina Ricci and Balmain and Givenchy and Chanel, the seats less good, sometimes quite bad, for impecunious countesses are not treated with much respect in the great couture houses.”

“I’ve never written about real people,” Krantz told Town & Country magazine in 1998, adding: “In a way, I write Horatio Alger stories for women.”

CAREER WOMEN AS HEROINES

Krantz’s novels embody a sexual politics at once feminist and retrograde. Her heroines are career women striding through glamorous realms of fashion, publishing, art and retailing. They are sexually assertive, as apt to tear off a man’s bespoke silk shirt as they are to have their own bodices ripped.

Yet in book after book, the heroine’s overriding goal is to find true love with a hero who is superlatively handsome, staggeringly virile and stupendously rich.

Not surprising, Krantz’s novels took regular drubbings from reviewers. The English novelist and critic Angela Carter once likened reading them to “being sealed inside a luxury shopping mall whilst being softly pelted with scented sex technique manuals.”

To such criticisms, Krantz brought a generous dose of self-awareness.

“I write the best books that I know how; I can’t write any better than this,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. “People think that because I had a good education, I’m not writing on the level that I should. They think I’m harboring some slim little intellectual volume, that I am really Isaac Bashevis Singer in disguise.”

In the end, Krantz appeared to have the last laugh. Of all the luxury brands that loom large in her books, there is none larger or more luxurious than the Judith Krantz brand itself — a brand, impeccably built, that allowed her to lead the jet-setting, Chanel-clad life of a character in a Judith Krantz novel.

FASHION

Judith Bluma-Gittel Tarcher was born in Manhattan on Jan. 9, 1928; her middle name means “lovely flower” in Yiddish. Her father, Jack, ran his own advertising agency and was later a vice president of the Madison Avenue powerhouse Doyle Dane Bernbach. Her mother, Mary (Brager) Gittel, was a lawyer who became an executive of the Legal Aid Society. Her younger brother, Jeremy, grew up to found the publishing house J.P. Tarcher, which specializes in New Age and self-help books. (She also had a sister, Mimi.)

Young Judy was reared in a Central Park West apartment awash in Renoir, Degas and Soutine and attended the private Birch Wathen School (now the Birch Wathen Lenox School) on the Upper East Side. But her mother, wanting her not to take wealth for granted, dressed her in unfashionable clothes, a condition, Krantz later said, that made her deeply unpopular at school.

“I didn’t have romantic fantasies; I had clothes fantasies,” she told Redbook magazine in 2000. “I thought that if I had absolutely perfect clothes, everyone would like me.”

After earning a bachelor’s degree in English from Wellesley in Massachusetts, Krantz worked as a fashion publicist in Paris before returning to New York. She married Steve Krantz in 1954. He would go on to produce “Fritz the Cat” (1972), the first X-rated full-length animated film, and the romantic comedy “Cooley High” (1975).

MAGAZINE WRITER

Krantz became an accessories editor at Good Housekeeping and later wrote for women’s magazines, including Cosmopolitan.

For one article for Cosmo, she was assigned to compile readers’ sex fantasies. In doing so she added a few of her own, only to be told by the magazine’s editor, Helen Gurley Brown, that her fantasies were far too racy for Cosmo to print. Years later, Krantz cheerfully repurposed them for one of her novels.

At her husband’s urging, Krantz turned her vivid imagination to fiction in the late 1970s. With the aid of a vigorous publicity campaign by a press agent she had hired, “Scruples,” issued by Crown Publishers, reached No. 1 on The New York Times Best Seller List in the summer of 1978.

By the end of 1979, the novel had sold more than 220,000 copies in hardcover and more than 3 million in paperback. That year, in a highly publicized transaction, Bantam Books bought the paperback rights to “Princess Daisy” for $3.2 million, then a record for a softcover sale.

Krantz, who moved to Southern California with her family in the early 1970s, lived for many years in an 8,000-square-foot Bel Air home that was a riot of chintz, the silver snuff boxes and 19th-century opaline glass she collected, Chanel suits — she owned at least 40 — and Hermès . (“In a changing world, for a woman who loves handbags, Hermès is a rock in a raging storm,” Krantz wrote in “Sex and Shopping: The Confessions of a Nice Jewish Girl,” her cannily titled memoir of 2000.)

Krantz is survived by her sons, Tony and Nicholas. Steve Krantz died in 2007. Her brother, Jeremy Tarcher, died in 2015.

© 2019 New York Times News Service

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Golf looks to a Tiger Woods boom 2.0

Through Tiger Woods’ 11 years in the wilderness between major tournament wins, professional golf searched for a successor.

Would it be Phil Mickelson, the once-snakebit lefty who is actually older than Woods but who got over the hump in 2004 to become his most formidable early-career challenger? How about Rory McIlroy, the phenom from Northern Ireland, whose brutal collapse in the final round of the 2011 Masters was immediately followed by his first major championship? Or maybe Jordan Spieth, whose Masters win in 2015 tied Woods for the 72-hole record?

Ultimately, it ended up being all of them, and therefore none of them. Each had a handful of major tournament wins and at times looked as if he could dominate the sport. But none emerged as the next Tiger. Golf itself stagnated as Woods struggled, his shadow looming in a way that was almost as impactful as his presence had been for the previous decade.

Now that Woods is back on top, the question is whether the sport can take advantage of his twilight years to build something that survives when his career finally does end.

Jay Monahan, the commissioner of the PGA Tour, believes the sport is well positioned to capitalize on the re-emergence of Woods. He pointed to the new schedule, with the PGA Championship held in May, and a long-term, $2 billion international television rights agreement with Discovery.

“It’s not like you change your business in a moment like this,” Monahan said. “You think about how you get to a moment like this and put your tour and product in the best possible position.”

By most metrics, golf peaked in the early 2000s, at the height of the first Tigermania. According to Gallup, in 2000, 5% of Americans surveyed said golf was their favorite sport to watch. By 2017, that number was 1%. Golf was tied with volleyball, boxing, gymnastics, motocross, figure skating and rodeo.

According to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, 29.5 million Americans played a round of golf in 2007. In 2017, that number was 23.8 million, a decline of 19.3% .

Unlike most other sports, which believe fans respond most to parity, Woods’ dominance was electrifying for golf. From June 1997 — when he first became the world’s No. 1-ranked golfer — to October 2010, only four golfers besides Woods were ranked No. 1, for a total of less than a year and a half. Woods was ranked first for two different five-year streaks in that time.

Since October 2010, 11 golfers have been ranked No. 1, and only committed golf fans and golfers can name more than a few of them.

The money available to golf professionals, however, continues to grow, and if Woods keeps winning, he will do something few athletes get to: Profit from the explosive growth in revenue that the athlete himself drove.

In professional sports, athletes benefit from the stars of the preceding generation driving interest. Magic Johnson earned less than $24 million in his entire career; LeBron James earned $33 million this season.

In 2019, the top prize at each tournament on the PGA Tour — even the Corales Puntacana Resort and Club Championship — is more than Woods earned for winning the 1997 Masters. The FedEx Cup bonus pool has doubled, to $70 million.

The massive growth in professional golf’s revenue over the past two decades is not due solely to Woods, but he was certainly its biggest driver. In the nearly 11 years between major wins for Woods, in which he was revealed to be a serial adulterer, pleaded guilty to reckless driving, had four back surgeries and did not even enter a major for two years, numerous segments of the business of golf struggled.

Nike, the company that has paid Woods hundreds of millions of dollars and whose red shirts he religiously wears on tournament Sundays, dived into the business when Woods turned pro in 1996 and signed him to an apparel endorsement contract. At the time, Nike manufactured only a limited selection of golf clothing, not equipment.

Three years later, Nike began manufacturing golf balls, and three years after that, golf clubs. Woods, who had used Titleist clubs, started using Nike equipment. But as Nike’s golf business crested with the Tiger wave, it too crashed amid Woods’ down years.

Revenue in Nike’s golf division peaked in 2013 — the year Woods had two top-10 finishes at majors and looked to have gotten his career back on track, until he either missed the cut or did not enter 15 of the next 18 majors. In 2016, the company announced it was exiting the golf equipment market. Around the same time, Adidas sold off its money-losing TaylorMade golf division.

Tim Derdenger, a professor of marketing and strategy at Carnegie Mellon’s business school and a scratch golfer who has written numerous papers on Woods and celebrity endorsements, said the golf world could learn a great deal from how consumers and golfers reacted to Woods.

As an endorser who at one point was collecting some $50 million a year in sponsorship deals, Woods had what marketing experts call a “golden halo effect,” Derdenger said. Initially, people wanted to buy products associated with Woods because they aspired to identify with him. Those deals largely went away after Woods’ sordid 2009, but if the halo effect returns, so will the sponsorships.

Derdenger said Woods also provided “informational value” — people believed the apparel and equipment he endorsed was of high quality, as long as he was high in the world golf rankings.

“There was still value in Nike retaining Tiger Woods because of this extra endorsement effect that wasn’t eroded from the scandal,” Derdenger said.

Woods has a similar effect on the tournaments he enters. When he is competing and on the leaderboard, fans view it as a quality event worthy of their attention. Saturday’s television ratings were the highest for the third round of a tournament since 2015, and Sunday’s viewership was solid considering start times were moved up hours to accommodate inclement weather.

Whether those viewers included minorities who will become golfers, as so many predicted in the late 1990s, is another question. According to the National Golf Foundation, minorities in 2017 made up 18 percent of all U.S. golfers, while they made up 25 percent of new golfers. Two decades ago, just 6 percent of new golfers were minorities.

“There is more diversity in the game than there was 10 years ago,” said Pete Bevacqua, the president of the NBC Sports Group and a former chief executive of the PGA of America. “I don’t think those numbers are good enough yet, but golf is aware of it and trying to make it better.”

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NY Times, Wall Street Journal win Pulitzers for Trump probes

NEW YORK - The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were awarded Pulitzer Prizes on Monday for their separate investigations of President Donald Trump and his family.

The Times won the prestigious journalism award for explanatory reporting for its probe of the Trump family's finances that "debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges," the Pulitzer Prize Board announced during a ceremony at New York's Columbia University.

Coverage of Trump's secret hush money payments to two women during his 2016 presidential campaign who claimed to have had affairs with him earned the Journal a national reporting nod.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel won the Pulitzer for public service for its coverage of failings by school and law enforcement officials before and after the February 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

In the breaking news category, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was honored for its coverage of the October 2018 shooting at a synagogue in the city that left 11 people dead.

Hannah Dreier of ProPublica won the prize for feature writing for a series of stories about immigrants from El Salvador living on New York's Long Island caught up in a crackdown on MS-13 gang members.

The Associated Press won a Pulitzer for international reporting for its coverage of the war in Yemen.

Reuters was honored for international reporting for its coverage of atrocities committed against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

Reuters also won in the breaking news photography category for pictures of migrants travelling to the United States from Central America.

In other categories, "The Overstory" by Richard Powers won the Pulitzer for fiction and "Fairview" by Jackie Sibblies Drury won the prize for drama.

The Pulitzer for history was awarded to David Blight for "Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom" while the biography prize went to Jeffrey Stewart for "The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke."

The poetry prize was won by Forrest Gander for "Be With."

In general non-fiction, the prize went to Eliza Griswold for "Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America."

The music award went to Ellen Reid for her operatic work "p r i s m."

Special citations were awarded to soul legend Aretha Franklin for her contributions to music and to the staff of the Capital Gazette newspaper of Annapolis, Maryland, which lost five employees in a June 2018 shooting.

cl/oh

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