Japanese court convicts a US Marine in sexual assault, sentencing him to 7 years in prison
TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese court said Wednesday it has found a U.S. Marine guilty of sexually assaulting a woman on Okinawa, sentencing him to prison terms, in a case that has triggered anger and safety concerns on Japan's southern island, which has a heavy American troop presence.
The Naha District Court said Lance Cpl. Jamel Clayton, 22, of Ohio, was sentenced Tuesday to seven years in prison in the case.
Clayton was found guilty of attacking the woman in her 20s in the Yomitan village on the main Okinawa island in May, 2024, chocking her from behind, sexually assaulting her and causing her injuries.
In sentencing, Judge Kazuhiko Obata said the victim's testimony, provided remotely and anonymously, was highly credible even though the defendant denied his charges brought by the prosecutors, who demanded 10 years in prison, according to Kyodo News.
It was one of a string of sexual assault cases last year in which the arrests of the suspects were initially withheld by local authorities on grounds of protecting the victims' privacy, triggering anger and criticisms of coverups.
Okinawa, where one of the fiercest battles of World War II was fought 80 years ago and under U.S. occupation until 1972, remains home to the majority of about 50,000 U.S. troops stationed in Japan under a bilateral security pact. The island, which accounts for only 0.6% of Japanese land, hosts 70% of U.S. military facilities.
Frustration runs high on Okinawa because of its continued burden with the heavy U.S. presence that includes noise, pollution, aircraft accidents and crime related to American troops.
Defense Minister Gen Nakatani, who attended Monday's 80th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Okinawa, raised concerns about recent sexual assault cases involving U.S. service members when he met with Lt. Gen. Roger Turner, the commander of III Marine Expeditionary Force, requesting discipline and preventive measures.
There has been growing calls for a revision to the Status of Forces Agreement that gives the United States the right to investigate most accidents and crimes that occur on Japanese soil.
Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba 's Cabinet on Tuesday adopted a statement showing that the Japanese prosecutors dropped criminal cases against more than 300 U.S. service members in the last decade between 2014 and 2024, including a sexual assault case in Okinawa in 2020.
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Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
‘My son went to get flour. He came back in a coffin': As the world focuses on Iran, Palestinians are being shot dead seeking aid
'My son went to get some flour for his family, but came back in a coffin and a death shroud.' These are the words of father-of-six Iyad Abu Darabi describing how Israeli forces killed his 25-year-old son Mussa in southern Gaza in the first few weeks of June. Desperate and starving, the young man had snuck off against his family's wishes to collect food from a specially designated distribution site backed by Israel and run by the deeply controversial US-based non-profit Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Almost all aid going into Gaza now runs through the American aid group, which started operations in May following a months-long Israeli blockade of nearly all food and aid. Food is handed out at overcrowded and deadly sites overseen by American private security contractors and the Israeli army. Gazans have described the sites as 'American death zones' because of the contractors who patrol them. The foundation has been shrouded in secrecy, with obscure sources of funding and several changes in leadership and management since its launch. Gaza's health ministry said that Israeli forces opening fire on crowds trying to reach the GHF food distribution points have killed nearly 400 Palestinians and wounded more than 3,000 since aid deliveries were reinstated in late May. Several videos from the sites show people cowering or running from gunfire, struggling to carry bags of food as they escape. Despite the carnage, the Trump administration is said to be considering funding the organisation to the tune of $500m (£370m) through the recently downsized US Agency for International Development (USAID). This week though, the world's focus has been on the growing clashes between Israel and Iran. The two sides have traded thousands of missiles, drones and bombs in a conflict that threatens to engulf the entire Middle East and draw in countries from around the world. It has overshadowed the desperate events in Gaza, where the two-million-strong population is trapped in a snare of famine, according to the United Nations. An unprecedented Israeli bombardment of the tiny 35-mile-long strip has killed over 55,000 people since Hamas militants' bloody attacks on southern Israel in October 2023. Mussa was just one of hundreds who have lost their lives in the desperate search for food. Witnesses and families of those killed say Israeli forces opened fire on the massive crowds gathered that day as hungry civilians scrambled for food in a desert wasteland. He was hit by tank fire, and killed instantly alongside women and children, Iyad says. 'The aid is a death trap for young people: in a barren land surrounded by fences, the gates are opened for tens of thousands to fight over supplies without any order. Israel leaves people fighting each other over food,' Iyad says in desperation. 'He went without my knowledge and because of extreme hunger. But this is not aid, it is an opportunity for more killing.' The Israeli military has admitted firing warning shots at people gathered for aid, but denies targeting civilians in Gaza or turning aid distribution sites into 'death traps'. It told The Independent that at least one incident is 'under review'. 'The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and operates to minimise harm as much as possible to them, while maintaining the safety of our troops,' it added. The GHF said this incident did not occur at a GHF site, and in a press release on Monday claimed it had distributed more than three million meals at its four sites 'without incident'. The latest – and deadliest – incident took place on Tuesday. The health ministry said that 59 people were killed and more than 200 wounded while waiting for United Nations and commercial trucks to enter the territory with desperately needed food. Palestinian witnesses said that Israeli forces carried out an airstrike on a nearby home before opening fire towards the crowd in the southern city of Khan Younis. While the shooting did not appear to be related to the newly launched Israeli-backed GHF network — it is an indication of the deadly struggle Palestinians face every day to get food, at a time when a kilo of sugar is now $70. Randa Youssef, 42, a single mother-of-three, says her cousin Mohammed was killed on 5 June while attempting to get food from a GHF site in Rafah. She said Mohammed was due to be married just three days later. 'He was shot in the back and fell to the ground. There was no means of transport. He bled to death for three hours amid continuous gunfire,' Randa explains. 'We can't afford the basic necessities. A kilo of sugar costs $70 today. That's why we risk our lives. My son sometimes cries. I honestly don't know what to feed him. 'This American aid is deliberate chaos.' The Biden administration paid lip service to trying to convince Israel to allow aid into Gaza without achieving much in the way of results, but the Trump administration has largely taken a hands-off approach. Israel cut off the supply of most food and aid to Gaza in March, causing hunger to skyrocket across the Strip. Humanitarian groups have warned that most of Gaza's 2.2 million people are at risk of starvation unless aid deliveries are ramped up. The GHF system began in May, but aid groups have warned it is wholly insufficient to meet the needs of the population. The UN and other humanitarian organisations have also warned of the risk of friction between Israeli troops and civilians seeking supplies, and continue to call for an immediate ceasefire and unrestricted aid access. Former officials from the US state department and USAID who have worked on emergency aid delivery described the new system as 'grotesque', 'dangerous' and part of a larger plan to use aid to control the movement of Palestinians. 'What is so infuriatingly tragic about this is that it's playing out exactly as any experienced humanitarian could have predicted,' said Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw famine relief for three years during the Obama administration and is now president of Refugees International. 'When you have an aid distribution model that is premised on forcing huge crowds of desperately hungry people to cluster directly adjacent to IDF military installations, you're going to get massacres,' he added. Mr Konyndyk said it was 'not a coincidence' that most of the distribution sites were in the south of Gaza, at a time when the Israeli army was trying to force Palestinians out of the north of the territory. 'A basic principle of humanitarian response is you move the aid as close to you can to where the people are. They're doing the opposite of that, the diametric opposite of that, which suggests that they want to draw people to the south,' he said. 'I think that is highly suggestive of the longer-term agenda here,' he added. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans last month to force Palestinians to move to southern Gaza after his security cabinet approved an expanded military operation in the northern and central parts of the territory. 'There will be a movement of the population to protect them,' he said of the operation. Stacey Gilbert, who resigned from the state department in 2024 over the Biden administration's failure to hold Israel accountable for blocking aid to Gaza, called the sites 'another stunt'. 'It's a stunt like the air drops. It's a stunt like the floating pier debacle. These are all ways that both the Biden administration, now the Trump administration, are using to try to obscure the fact that they're going to these extraordinarily dangerous and extraordinarily expensive efforts because Israel is blocking aid. There's no other way to see it,' she told The Independent. 'It is so humiliating and undignified and just dangerous, straight out dangerous for everyone involved,' she added. Ms Gilbert, too, believes the sites are located primarily in the south to draw Palestinians away from the north. 'This is trying to draw them all to one area, to get them away from the area that Israel doesn't want them in,' she said. Despite hundreds of deaths at the GHF sites and an insufficient level of aid getting into Gaza, the Trump administration appears to be leaving the door open to backing it financially. A state department spokesperson told The Independent that the GHF was 'an independent organisation. It does not receive USG funding.' 'Nevertheless, we are constantly looking for creative solutions to get aid into Gaza without it being looted by Hamas,' the spokesperson added. Israel insists the new system was necessary because aid was being diverted to Hamas under the previous long-established system, managed by the United Nations, a charge denied by the UN and by Hamas. For Salwa al-Daghma, from the southern city of Khan Younis, 'this aid is a morsel of food soaked in blood'. Her brother Khaled, a father-of-five, was shot dead by a sniper earlier this month at another GHF site in Rafah when he tried to get just a kilo of flour for his children – the youngest just over two years old. Again, Israeli forces opened fire on the massive crowds when chaos broke out. 'He was hit by a bullet directly in the head. His brain came out the other side, and he was killed instantly,' she said. 'Israel closed the crossings and banned food, and they came to us with a method to kill our children and families. 'This is a death trap, not an aid point. They don't want to help us – they are actually killing us.'
Atlantic
23 minutes ago
- Atlantic
A Military Ethics Professor Resigns in Protest
Seven years ago, Pauline Shanks Kaurin left a good job as a tenured professor at a university, uprooted her family, and moved across the country to teach military ethics at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. She did so, she told me, not only to help educate American military officers, but with a promise from the institution that she would have 'the academic freedom to do my job.' But now she's leaving her position and the institution because orders from President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, she said, have made staying both morally and practically untenable. Remaining on the faculty, she believes, would mean implicitly lending her approval to policies she cannot support. And she said that the kind of teaching and research the Navy once hired her to do will now be impossible. The Naval War College is one of many institutions—along with the Army War College, the Air War College, and others—that provide graduate-level instruction in national-security issues and award master's degrees to the men and women of the U.S. armed forces. The Naval War College is also home to a widely respected civilian academic post, the James B. Stockdale Chair in Professional Military Ethics, named for the famous admiral and American prisoner of war in Vietnam. Pauline has held the Stockdale Chair since 2018. (I taught for many years at the Naval War College, where I knew Pauline as a colleague.) Her last day will be at the end of this month. In January, Trump issued an executive order, Restoring America's Fighting Force, that prohibits the Department of Defense and the entire armed forces from 'promoting, advancing, or otherwise inculcating the following un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational theories,' such as 'gender ideology,' 'race or sex stereotyping,' and, of course, anything to do with DEI. Given the potential breadth of the order, the military quickly engaged in a panicky slash-and-burn approach rather than risk running afoul of the new ideological line. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in New York, for example, disbanded several clubs, including the local chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers. Other military installations, apparently anticipating a wider crackdown on anything to do with race or gender, removed important pages of American history about women and minorities from their websites. All of this was done by bureaucrats and administrators as they tried to comply with Trump's vague order, banning and erasing anything that the president and Hegseth might construe as even remotely related to DEI or other banned concepts. Some Defense Department workers 'deemed to be affiliated with DEI programs or activities' were warned that Trump's orders 'required' their jobs to be eliminated. Many professors at military institutions began to see signs that they might soon be prohibited from researching and publishing in their fields of study. Phillip Atiba Solomon: Am I still allowed to tell the truth in my class? At first, Pauline was cautious. She knew that her work in the field of military ethics could be controversial—particularly on the issues of oaths and obedience. In the military, where discipline and the chain of command rule daily life, investigating the meaning of oath-taking and obedience is a necessary but touchy exercise. The military is sworn to obey all legal orders in the chain of command, but when that obedience becomes absolute, the results can be ghastly: Pauline wrote her doctoral dissertation at Temple University on oaths, obedience, and the 1969 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which a young U.S. officer and his men believed that their orders allowed them to slay hundreds of unarmed civilians. For more than 20 years, she taught these matters in the philosophy department at Pacific Lutheran University, and once at Newport, she wrote a book on the contrasting notions of obedience in military and civilian life. When the Trump order came down, Pauline told me that Naval War College administrators gave her 'vague assurances' that the college would not interfere with ongoing work by her or other faculty, or with academic freedom in general. But one day, shortly after the executive order in January, she was walking through the main lobby, which proudly features display cases with books by the faculty, and she noticed that a volume on LGBTQ issues in the military had vanished. The disappearance of that book led Pauline to seek more clarity from the college's administration about nonpartisanship, and especially about academic freedom. Academic freedom is an often-misunderstood term. Many people outside academia encounter the idea only when some professor abuses the concept as a license to be an offensive jerk. (A famous case many years ago involved a Colorado professor who compared the victims of 9/11 to Nazis who deserved what they got.) Like tenure, however, academic freedom serves crucial educational purposes, protecting controversial research and encouraging the free exchange of even the most unpopular ideas without fear of political pressure or interference. It is essential to any serious educational institution, and necessary to a healthy democracy. Conor Friedersdorf: In defense of academic freedom Professors who teach for the military, as I did for many years, do have to abide by some restrictions not found in civilian schools. They have a duty, as sworn federal employees, to protect classified information. They may not use academic freedom to disrupt government operations. (Leading a protest that would prevent other government workers from getting to their duty stations might be one example.) And, of course, they must refrain from violating the Hatch Act: They cannot use government time or resources to engage in partisan political activity. But they otherwise have—or are supposed to have—the same freedoms as their colleagues in civilian institutions. Soon, however, jumpy military bureaucrats started tossing books and backing out of conferences. Pauline became more concerned. Newport's senior administrators began to send informal signals that included, as she put it, the warning that 'academic freedom as many of us understood it was not a thing anymore.' Based on those messages, Pauline came to believe that her and other faculty members' freedom to comment publicly on national issues and choose research topics without institutional interference was soon to be restricted. During an all-hands meeting with senior college leaders in February, Pauline said that she and other Naval War College faculty were told that the college would comply with Hegseth's directives and that, in Pauline's words, 'if we were thinking we had academic freedom in our scholarship and in the classroom, we were mistaken.' (Other faculty present at the meeting confirmed to me that they interpreted the message from the college's leadership the same way; one of them later told me that the implication was that the Defense Department could now rule any subject out of bounds for classroom discussion or scholarly research at will.) Pauline said there were audible gasps in the room, and such visible anger that it seemed to her that even the administrators hosting the meeting were taken aback. 'I've been in academia for 31 years,' she told me, and that gathering 'was the most horrifying meeting I've ever been a part of.' I contacted the college's provost, Stephen Mariano, who told me in an email that these issues were 'nuanced' but that the college had not changed its policies on academic freedom. (He also denied any changes relating to tenure, a practice predicated on academic freedom.) At the same time, he added, the college is 'complying with all directives issued by the President and Department of Defense and following Department of the Navy policy.' This language leaves Pauline and other civilian faculty at America's military schools facing a paradox: They are told that academic freedom still exists, but that their institutions are following directives from Hegseth that, at least on their face, seem aimed at ending academic freedom. In March, Pauline again sought clarity from college leaders. They were clearly anxious to appear compliant with the new political line. ('We don't want to end up on Fox News,' she said one administrator told her.) She was told her work was valued, but she didn't believe it. 'Talk is cheap,' she said. 'Actions matter.' She said she asked the provost point-blank: What if a faculty member has a book or an article coming out on some controversial topic? His answer, according to her: Hypothetically, they might consider pulling the work from publication. (Mariano denies saying this and told me that there is no change in college policy on faculty publication.) Every government employee knows the bureaucratic importance of putting things on paper. Pauline's current project is about the concept of honor, which necessarily involves questions regarding masculinity and gender—issues that could turn the DOD's new McCarthyites toward her and her work. So she now proposed that she and the college administration work up a new contract, laying out more clearly—in writing—what the limits on her work and academic freedom would look like. She might as well have asked for a pony. Administrators, she said, told her that they hoped she wouldn't resign, but that no one was going to put anything in writing. 'The upshot,' according to her, was a message from the administration that boiled down to: We hope you can just suck it up and not need your integrity for your final year as the ethics chair. After that, she told me, her choices were clear. 'As they say in the military: Salute and execute—or resign.' Until then, she had 'hoped maybe people would still come to their senses.' The promises of seven years ago were gone; the institution now apparently expected her and other faculty to self-censor in the classroom and preemptively bowdlerize their own research. 'I don't do DEI work,' she said, 'but I do moral philosophy, and now I can't do it. I'd have to take out discussions of race and gender and not do philosophy as I think it should be done.' In April, she submitted a formal letter of resignation. Initially, she had no interest in saying anything publicly. Pauline is a native Montanan and single mom of two, and by nature not the type of person to engage in public food fights. (She used to joke with me when we were colleagues that I was the college's resident lightning rod, and she had no interest in taking over that job.) She's a philosopher who admires quiet stoicism, and she was resolved to employ it in her final months. But she also thought about what she owed her chair's namesake. 'Stockdale thought philosophy was important for officers. The Stockdale course was created so that officers would wrestle with moral obligations. He was a personal model of integrity.' Even so, she did not try to invoke him as a patron saint when she decided to resign. 'I'm not saying he would agree with the choice that I made,' she told me. 'But his model of moral integrity is part of the chair.' She kept her resignation private until early May, when a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Graham Parsons—another scholar who teaches ethics in a military school, and a friend of Pauline's—likewise decided to resign in protest and said that he would leave West Point after 13 years. Hegseth's changes 'prevent me from doing my job responsibly,' he wrote in The New York Times. 'I am ashamed to be associated with the academy in its current form.' Hegseth responded on X, sounding more like a smug internet troll than a concerned superior: 'You will not be missed Professor Parsons.' The episode changed Pauline's mind. She felt she owed her friends and colleagues whatever public support and solidarity she could offer them. Nor are she and Parsons alone. Tom McCarthy, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Maryland, recently resigned as chair of the history department rather than remove a paper from an upcoming symposium. And last month, a senior scholar at the Army War College, in Pennsylvania, Carrie Lee, also handed in her resignation, a decision she announced to her friends and followers on Bluesky. Jason Dempsey: Hegseth has all the wrong enemies Lee told me in an email that she'd been thinking of leaving after Trump was elected, because it was apparent to her that the Trump administration was 'going to try and politicize the military and use military assets/personnel to suppress democratic rights,' and that academic freedom in military schools was soon to 'become untenable.' Like Pauline, Lee felt like she was at a dead end: 'To speak from within the institution itself will also do more harm than good. So to dissent, I have little choice but to leave,' she said in a farewell letter to her colleagues in April. I asked Pauline what she thinks might have happened if she had decided to stay and just tough it out from the inside. She 'absolutely' thinks she'd have been fired at some point, and she didn't want such a firing 'to be part of the legacy of the Stockdale Chair.' But then I asked her if by resigning, she was giving people in the Trump administration, such as Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought—who once said that his goal was to make federal workers feel 'trauma' to the point where they will quit their jobs—exactly what they want: Americans leaving federal service. She didn't care. 'When you make a moral decision, there are always costs.' She dismissed what people like Vought want or think. 'I'm not accountable to him. I'm accountable to the Lord, to my father, to my legacy, to my children, to my profession, to members of the military-ethics community. So I decided that I needed to resign. Not that it would change anyone's mind, but to say: This is not okay. That is my message.' At the end of our discussion, I asked an uncomfortable question I'd been avoiding. Pauline, I know, is only in her mid-50s, in mid-career, and too young simply to retire. She has raised two sons who will soon enter young adulthood. I asked her if she was worried about her future. 'Sure,' she said. 'But at the end of the day, as we say in Montana, sometimes you just have to saddle up and ride scared.'
San Francisco Chronicle
23 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Pope Leo XIV affirms celibacy for priests, demands 'firm' action on sex abuse
ROME (AP) — Pope Leo XIV affirmed Wednesday that priests must be celibate and insisted that bishops take 'firm and decisive' action to deal with sex abusers, as he gave marching orders Wednesday to the world's Catholic hierarchs. Leo met in St. Peter's Basilica with about 400 bishops and cardinals from 38 countries attending this week's special Holy Year celebrations for clergy. A day after he gave an uplifting message of encouragement to young seminarians, Leo offered a more comprehensive outline of what bishops must do to lead their flocks. It's an issue the former Cardinal Robert Prevost would have long pondered given his role as the prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for Bishops. In that job from 2023 until his election in May, the Chicago-born Prevost vetted bishop nominations for Pope Francis, identifying the type of leader who would further Francis' view of a church where all are welcome and dialogue is the decisive form of governance. History's first American pope reaffirmed Wednesday that the primary role of bishops is to forge unity in his diocese among clergy and to be close to his flock in word and deed. Bishops must live in poverty and simplicity, generously opening their homes to all and acting as a father figure and brother to his priests, Leo said. 'In his personal life, he must be detached from the pursuit of wealth and from forms of favoritism based on money or power,' he said. Bishops must remain celibate 'and present to all the authentic image of the church, holy and chaste in her members as in her head,' he said. Referring to cases of abuse, he said bishops 'must be firm and decisive in dealing with situations that can cause scandal and with every case of abuse, especially involving minors, and fully respect the legislation currently in force.' It was the second time in a week that Leo has commented publicly on the abuse scandal. On Friday night, in a written statement to a crusading Peruvian journalist who documented gross abuses in a Peruvian Catholic movement, Leo said there should be no tolerance in the Catholic Church for any type of abuse. He identified sexual and spiritual abuses, as well as abuses of authority and power in calling for 'transparent processes' to create a culture of prevention across the church. Francis, who in many ways placed Leo in position to succeed him, had also reaffirmed celibacy for Latin rite priests while acknowledging it was a discipline of the church, not doctrine, and therefore could change. But he refused appeals from Amazonian bishops to allow married priests to address the priest shortage in the region. Prevost spent two decades as a missionary and bishop in Peru and would know well those arguments. But on Wednesday he reaffirmed the celibate priesthood as the 'authentic image' of the church. ___
