Sara Tasneem, 37, once had big plans for her future.

“When I was a freshman in high school,” she said. “I had made a decision that I wanted to join the Air Force and go to law school.”

Instead, Tasneem’s American-born father gave her to a man to be married.

Tasneem, who was 15, was visiting her father during the summer recess. Normally she lived with her mom.

“My dad had become involved in a very … it’s basically kind of like a cult. It’s separate from the religion of Islam; it’s different in its practices and beliefs.” Tasneem continued. Tasneem is not her real name, but one she used to protect her identity. “Growing up in the group, it was your role as a girl that you would just be a wife and a mom.”

16 and pregnant

Her dad told her she had arrived at an age when she was drawing the attention of boys, and she had to marry because sex outside of marriage was forbidden. Tasneem was spiritually married to a man 13 years her senior and taken away to her husband’s country, which she does not want to disclose.

The pair returned to the U.S. when she was 16 and pregnant with her first child. They were legally married in Reno. Tasneem said her husband, like her father, was abusive.

“I got really depressed, and I just remembered seeing kids my age going to school and thinking I want to be one of those kids. Why can’t I go to school?” Tasneem said.

‘Not stable’ marriages

The United Nations considers marriage before age 18 to be a human rights violation. While the highest numbers occur in the least developed nations, child marriage is also a reality in the United States. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles Fielding School of Public Health looked at data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and found from 2010-2014, about 78,000 Americans between the ages of 15 and 17 said they were married.

“It’s a problem because they are less likely to finish high school, 31 percent more likely to land in poverty in adulthood, and for girls, their health is threatened when they give birth young and the health of their babies is threatened,” said Jody Heymann, the study’s co-author, dean of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, and founding director of the World Policy Analysis Center.

Heymann said the data showed one aspect of U.S. child marriages that is different from other countries.

“One of the things that’s different about the United States and the rest of the world or much of the world is that boys are getting married young, too. It’s largely in the United States, children under 18 marrying other children,” Heymann said.

Rates of child marriage in US

The data showed that per 1,000 children, nearly 7 underage girls were married and nearly 6 boys.

The study showed higher numbers of children of American Indian and Chinese descent were married. Immigrant children were more likely than U.S.-born children to have been married. Child marriages were also not unique to any one religion.

“There are child marriages across all ethnic groups and countries of origin, but those children who come from families that originated in Latin America, the Middle East or East Asia do have higher rates of child marriage. It is also the case that children whose parents are born here in the United States still have far higher rates than would be acceptable,” Heymann said.

The numbers also varied across regions in the U.S. In West Virginia, Hawaii and North Dakota, more than 10 in 1,000 children reported being married at the time of the survey.

Maine, Rhode Island and Wyoming have much lower rates of child marriage with less than 4 in 1,000.

The research found 20 percent of married children were living with their spouses; most of the rest were living with their parents.

“In 1 out of 4, by the time they turn 18, they are already divorced or separated,” said Heymann. “These are not stable unions.”

‘I felt robbed’

Tasneem’s mother came to the U.S. from Guyana as part of an arranged marriage when she was 19. When Tasneem was 5 years old, her parents divorced, and her mother left Islam.

Tasneem had two children with her husband before she was able to get a divorce.

“I really felt robbed. I felt robbed of my education and to this day I’m fighting to get my education back so it’s a very long process because not only are you 10 steps behind your peers but now you’re saddled with the responsibility of taking care of children on your own for the most part,” Tasneem said.

Her children are grown, and she recently remarried. Getting to this point has not been easy.

“There’s really no way to make somebody whole after taking away their freedom,” Tasneem said.

She is now getting her graduate degree. She wants to be an advocate for women’s rights and fight human rights abuses.
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The Kushner family real estate firm has amassed more than half a million dollars in unpaid fines for various New York City sanitation and building violations, much of that bill incurred while President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner was running the company.

City figures compiled for The Associated Press by a tenant watchdog group show that most of the fines, $350,000, stretched over the past five years. And just last month the company was fined $210,000 for filing false construction documents.

The hundreds of violations in dozens of its buildings ranged from the seemingly minor, “loose rubbish,” to the serious, such as not getting permits for electrical work or failing to notify authorities of work that could disturb asbestos. Most of the fines were for a few hundred dollars apiece. But in many cases the company failed to show up for required court hearings, triggering additional penalty fines atop interest payments that allowed the bill to grow.

“This is a company that will cut corners at any cost, even if it comes at the expense of its residents and the rule of law,” said Aaron Carr, executive director of Housing Rights Initiative, which compiled the data.​

​Kushner: tally misleading

The Kushner Cos. said the tally is misleading because many of the fines are actually the fault of tenants illegally renting their apartments through Airbnb, and businesses in its buildings not cleaning up properly. It said the fines for illegal renting alone total $110,000.

“Every significant property owner in New York gets fined at some point for something and a snapshot at any point in time does not tell the whole story,” the Kushner Cos. said in a statement. It added that it has made good on hundreds of other fines totaling nearly $600,000 over the same five years.

The city’s $210,000 penalty against the Kushner Cos. last month came after an AP report in March that the company filed dozens of applications for construction permits claiming it had no low-paying, rent-stabilized tenants when, in fact, it had hundreds. Those false filings allowed the company to avoid tougher city oversight to keep landlords from harassing tenants to get them to move out so they can raise rents.

The Kushner Cos. said it will fight this latest penalty in court. It doesn’t have to be paid until that fight is settled.​

Court hearings ignored

The data on the company’s unpaid, older bills show it was fined after not appearing at scheduled court hearings more than 450 times stretching back to early 2013, much of that for sanitation violations for dirty sidewalks and not disposing of trash properly. In these “no-show” cases, the city typically doubles or triples the amount originally fined. 

Any unpaid fines within 60 days of a judgment by a court or a “no show” at a hearing is kicked to the city’s Department of Finance, which then can tap private agencies to collect the debt. A department spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment from the AP.

Asked about the Kushner bill, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer said, “No landlord with outstanding violations should get away with escaping the consequences — not even if they’re related to the president.”

Big landlords, big bills 

City data suggest the Kushner Cos. is hardly alone among major landlords with big bills for unpaid fines. Landlord Steven Croman racked up $1 million in unpaid fines before his 2017 guilty plea for fraud, according a tenant advocacy group Cooper Square Committee. 

In general, the city has had a tough time collecting from landlords, restaurant owners, stores and others. In July, unpaid fines of all types in the city reached $1.5 billion, much of that from building code and construction violations.

And those landlords and others who are fined have a powerful incentive not to pay: If a fine isn’t collected in eight years, it expires and doesn’t need to be paid. In the year through June 2017, $94 million in fines expired.

The Kushner Cos. figure for unpaid fines doesn’t include those by contractors hired in its buildings, but that’s a distinction that often means little to tenants.

Ceiling collapse

At Kushner-owned 331-335 East 9th Street, Trident Structural Corp. was fined for several violations including one in 2013 for working without a permit. Trident still owes more than $10,000 from work at those buildings and the Kushner Cos. owes $4,000.

Sloppy work resulted in Uta Winkler’s ceiling collapsing twice, the first time sending gallons of water into her apartment and spreading mold that made her sick.

“It was like out of a fire hydrant,” said Winkler, who withheld rent payments in protest. “Nobody from the management company called me. Nothing. It was unreal.”

The Kushner Cos. said it “immediately remediated” when it found out about the water damage, but couldn’t comment any further because of litigation over Winkler’s rent.
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Wildfires in the U.S. have charred more than 10,000 square miles so far this year, an area larger than the state of Maryland, with large fires still burning in every Western state including many that are not fully contained.

Whether sparked by lightning or humans, fire has long been a force shaping the landscape of the U.S. West.

Hot, dry winds can whip flames into firestorms that leave behind charred wastelands prone to erosion and mudslides. Other fires clear out underbrush, open the forest floor to sunlight and stimulate growth.

Government agencies in recent decades effectively upended that cycle of destruction and rebirth. Fire suppression policies allowed fuels to build up in many Western forests, making them more susceptible to major fires.

Those influences are magnified as development creeps ever deeper into forests and climate change brings hotter temperatures. Recent images of subdivisions ablaze thrust the power and ecological role of wildfires into the spotlight.

A look at the environmental effects of wildfires:

Smoke and ruin

Most immediately fire brings destruction.

Temperatures from extreme fires can top 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to kill all plant life, incinerate seeds hidden beneath the surface and bake the soil until it becomes impervious to rain.

The lifeless landscape becomes prone to severe erosion, fouling streams and rivers with silt that kills fish and other aquatic life. Torrents of muddy debris following fires last year in Southern California killed 21 people and destroyed 129 homes.

U.S. Geological Survey scientists say the problem is getting worse as the area burned annually by wildfires increases. A study last year concluded sediment from erosion following fires would more than double by 2050 for about a third of western watersheds.

Smoke from this summer’s Western wildfires — a potential health hazard for at-risk individuals — prompted the closure of Yosemite National Park for more than two weeks and drifted to the East Coast , according to NASA. Recent research says it also impacts climate change as small particles spiral into the upper atmosphere and interfere with the sun’s rays.

Climate questions

Scientists broadly agree wildfires are getting bigger in North America and other parts of the world as the climate warms. But still emerging is how that change will alter the natural progression of fire and regrowth.

The time interval between wildfires in some locations is getting shorter, even as there’s less moisture to help trees regrow. That means some forests burn, then never grow back, converting instead into shrub land more adapted to frequent fire, said Jonathan Thompson, a senior ecologist at Harvard University.

“They get stuck in this trap of repeated, high-severity fire,” Thompson said. “Through time we’ll see the California shrub land shifting north.”

Similar shifts are being observed in Colorado, Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park and Glacier National Park in Montana, he said.

The relationship between climate and fire cuts both ways. A longer fire season and bigger fires in the boreal forests of Alaska and Canada are burning not just trees but also tundra and organic matter in soils, which hold roughly a third of the Earth’s terrestrial carbon, said David Peterson, a former U.S. Forest Service research scientist.

The carbon enters the atmosphere and contributes to higher temperatures, leading to bigger fires that release yet more carbon.

Bird in the balance

Life and property still top the list of priorities for firefighters, but in recent years another asset has been deemed worth extra protection in many Western states: a chicken-sized bird known as the greater sage grouse.

Fires burned an estimated 3,240 square miles (8,390 square kilometers) of the bird’s sage bush habitat in 2017 and have burned almost 2,400 square miles (6,215 square kilometers) so far in 2018.

When sage brush burns, it’s often replaced with a plant from Europe called cheatgrass, which crowds out native plants and is more prone to burning.

That’s challenging government efforts to keep greater sage grouse off the endangered species list, which could restrict economic development.

Areas considered crucial to the bird’s survival now get extra attention: A military-type Blackhawk helicopter is under government contract to deploy quick-reaction teams to snuff out sage brush fires in portions of Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Oregon.

Regeneration

A turning point in public understanding of the ecological importance of fire came in 1988 , when 1,240 square miles (3,200 square kilometers) of Yellowstone National Park burned.

The devastation, punctuated by images of wildlife fleeing flames, fed into the perception of wildfires as a menace to be battled.

The events drew criticism of the park’s “let it burn” policy. Officials didn’t immediately squelch lightning-caused fires that June because they did not pose an immediate threat to life or property, but eventually ended up deploying 10,000 firefighters.

By that fall, seedlings already were emerging in some burned out areas. Park biologist Roy Renkin recalls a visitor reacting with surprise a decade later when he told her a thick stand of young trees emerging from a burned area had come back on their own.

Lodgepole pines are commonly cited as an example of forest resiliency. The fire’s heat releases seeds from the pine’s cones.

Several species of woodpeckers thrive on insects attracted to fire-killed trees. A plant called fireweed is specially adapted to take root in fire-damaged soils, multiplying rapidly and forming carpets of pink petals against a blackened backdrop.

“It’s isn’t all death and destruction,” Renkin said. “These forests have evolved with fire.”

 
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A U.S. service member has been killed and another wounded in an apparent insider attack in eastern Afghanistan, according to a statement Monday from the NATO-led Resolute Support mission.

Resolute Support and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan Commanding General Scott Miller says “the sacrifice of our service member, who volunteered for a mission to Afghanistan to protect his country is a tragic loss for all who knew and all who will now never know him.”

He added, “Our duty now is to honor him, care for his family and continue our mission.”

The statement said the service member was the sixth American killed in Afghanistan this year.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the administration was monitoring the situation and President Donald Trump had been briefed by Chief of Staff John Kelly.

The wounded service member was said to be in stable condition.

The names of the service members were not released.
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