West Wing Reads - ‘You Have to Pay With Your Body’: The Hidden Nightmare of Sexual Violence on the Border

‘You Have to Pay With Your Body’: The Hidden Nightmare of Sexual Violence on the Border  “On America’s southern border, migrant women and girls are the victims of sexual assaults that most often go unreported, uninvestigated and unprosecuted,” Manny Fernandez reports in The New York Times. “The stories are many, and yet all too similar. Undocumented women making their way into American border towns have been beaten for disobeying smugglers, impregnated by strangers, coerced into prostitution, shackled to beds and trees and — in at least a handful of cases — bound with duct tape, rope or handcuffs.” Click here to read more. “America’s factories are hiring again,” Chip Cutter writes in The Wall Street Journal. “After years of job losses, U.S. manufacturing employment has risen for 18 straight months among those holding production or nonsupervisory jobs, the longest stretch of gains since the mid-1990s. Employers have added 274,000 non-managerial manufacturing jobs since July 2017, Labor Department figures show.” Vice President Mike Pence writes that last Friday, “the defense secretary released a legislative proposal at the president’s direction to establish the Space Force, within the Air Force, as the sixth branch of the armed forces . . . Today, the threats and opportunities in space are changing more rapidly than at any other point since the Cold War. And we must change along with them.” In Fox News, White House Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro writes that today “President Donald J. Trump will sign an executive order to help sea veterans seamlessly transition into the United States Merchant Marine. By simultaneously expanding veteran opportunities for great jobs at great wages while strengthening our Merchant Marine, this action embodies a key principle of the Trump administration: economic security is national security.” “The North Korean political and military Rubik’s Cube has confounded Democratic and Republican administrations for 70 years,” Army Major General Bob Dees writes in USA Today. “Trump’s courageous decision to walk away from negotiations rather than accept Kim’s demand for sanctions reliefs showed that he will not make the same mistake as his predecessors by offering unreciprocated concessions to the rogue state.”