No clues found about missing Escondido teen

Federal, county and local police agencies in Escondido have concluded a two-day search for clues connected to last year's disappearance of 14-year-old Amber Dubois at a small pond in Kit Carson Park, which is two miles north from where Poway High School senior Chelsea King went missing last week.

Law enforcement officials said a body discovered Tuesday in a shallow grave on a tributary of Lake Hodges is that of King, though a positive identification has yet to be made. The 17-year-old high school senior went missing Feb. 25 after going for a jog at the lakeside park.

Meanwhile, authorities in Escondido say they were focusing their search efforts at Kit Carson Park after receiving a recent report that children had found what looked like human hair in a plastic bag last May, about two months after Amber Dubois had been reported missing.

"Investigators located a portion of the bag that we believe may have been the bag the youth discovered in May 2009," said Escondido Police Lt. Craig Carter in a statement. "Detectives have concluded that no evidence of hair was present in or around the recovered bag."

Authorities said no other evidence was found in the search.

Dubois, who was 14 when she disappeared, was last seen walking to Escondido High School in the morning of Feb. 13, 2009. Her case has received renewed attention after a registered sex offender was arrested in the rape and murder of Chelsea King.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/

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An Epic Spree of Mischief

New York Politicians Extend Era of Malfeasance With a Fresh Wave of Scandals

ALBANY, N.Y.—The Empire State this week managed a rare trifecta of disgrace.

First, Gov. David A. Paterson became embroiled in dueling scandals that ran the gamut of allegations from corruption to obstruction of justice to perjury.

Next was Rep. Charles Rangel, the dean of New York's delegation, who relinquished the chairmanship of the prestigious House Ways and Means Committee after an ethics panel chastised the Harlem Democrat for accepting corporate-sponsored junkets to the Caribbean.

And when news broke that Rep. Eric Massa, a freshman Democrat from Western New York, had abruptly decided to resign amid allegations of sexual harassment, a week of scandal assumed a sordid grandeur.

"We've never seen anything like this," said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran political consultant. "This is like a full-employment program for law enforcement."

Like the translation of the state's Latin motto, "Excelsior," the number of political scandals has spiraled ever upward. The alleged misdeeds of Messrs. Paterson, Rangel and Massa are the capstones of a spree of mischief.

In the past four years, New Yorkers have seen another governor, Eliot Spitzer, ensnared by a prostitution scandal; a state comptroller resign over an ethics scandal; a Republican state Senate majority leader convicted of federal corruption charges; a New York City Council member pleading not guilty to a 13-count federal corruption indictment that included an allegation of fraudulently billing $177 for a bagel sandwich and a soda; an assemblyman sentenced to prison for stealing from Little Leaguers; a state senator who was expelled from office after he was convicted of a misdemeanor assault against his girlfriend; an assemblyman caught taking bribes from hospital executives; and an assemblywoman found guilty of throwing scalding coffee into the eyes of a staffer.

Of course, New York doesn't have a monopoly on malfeasance.

Rod Blagojevich, who was caught on tape appraising the value of President Barack Obama's former job—a seat in the U.S. Senate—may soon become the fourth Illinois governor to serve time in prison since the 1970s. A recent university study asserted that the state's Cook County has been a "dark pool of political corruption for more than 140 years."

New Jersey, California, Louisiana and Connecticut also have written scandalous chapters in contemporary politics, but increasingly it seems that New York has broken away from the pack.

Considering New York's proud prominence in American history, the fall from grace has been especially painful.

Messrs. Paterson and Spitzer slept in the same executive mansion as did Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. George Washington in 1784 wrote a letter to New York City's mayor in which he described the state as the "seat of the empire" and prayed it would "set such examples of wisdom and liberality."

When Mr. Spitzer, a former attorney general, resigned two years ago, lawmakers in Albany were shocked but assumed that ordinary business would swiftly resume. As the pandemonium persisted, a sense of dread has taken hold, say legislators. "We're exhausted. We're depressed. We wonder if there's a way out," said Danny O'Donnell, a Democratic assemblyman from Manhattan.

"It's just awful," said Mr. Pataki. "It makes me feel terrible for the state and the people of New York."

His predecessor in office is no less anguished: "I'm sad about it," said Mr. Cuomo. "I'm sad for the people involved who are bruised, injured, embarrassed, and angry."

Joseph Meany, a former State Historian of New York, said New Yorkers need to keep things in perspective. "I don't accept the notion that there's something especially corrupt about New York. Is this worse than the days of Boss Tweed? I don't know," he said, referring to the notorious 19th century boss of Tammany Hall.

According to Mr. Sheinkopf, who advises Democratic lawmakers in the Legislature and the City Council, the scandals are a symptom of an insulated political culture that has lost sight of a guiding mission. "There's no great ideas here. What we have is just the acne of permanent government employment," he said.

Mr. Pataki, a Republican who served three terms in office, identified the culprit as a lack of competition in New York's local elections. Since 1982, only 39 incumbents in the state Legislature have been defeated in elections, which are held every two years.

"When you become comfortable and complacent, it creates a sense of entitlement that can lead people to act unethically, and illegally," he said.

Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, has long urged legislators to support a constitutional convention that he says could produce a more responsive government. But the chances of lawmakers getting behind such a convention, proposals for which have received scant backing in the past, seem remote.

"You can't insist that things are dysfunctional at a fundamental level without doing something about it," said Mr. Cuomo, whose son, Andrew, New York's attorney general, is seen as the front-runner to win the governorship in November.

"You have people with pristine reputations like our former governor who turn out to be hypocrites and violate the very laws they spent their lives prosecuting," Mr. O'Donnell said, referring to Mr. Spitzer's public stance on prostitution.

"And you have people from humble backgrounds who come here for the right reasons, but grow frustrated that there are all these people around them getting rich from the work that we do. They think, why shouldn't I have some of that?"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704869304575103802953340446.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_3#printMode

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The Last of the Golden Swindlers

In his five-decade criminal career, Thomas F. Quinn has stolen an estimated $500 million. He's served minimal jail time. Now the government is getting tougher on financial fraudsters, and his luck may be about to change.

Thomas F. Quinn's alleged aliases have included Georgios Samaras, Robert Dzigi, Tasos Douros and Pele Lechien. "Chien" is French for dog and Pele was supposedly the name of a Quinn pooch.

Rare footage of accused con man Thomas Quinn's luxurious French villa. WSJ's John Emshwiller reports. Video courtesy of Pascal Henry.

Even in the face of authorities, Mr. Quinn remained maddeningly elusive. At one Securities and Exchange Commission session, Mr. Quinn insisted on only answering questions by blinking his eyes, says a former agency attorney who was there. After a few questions and blinks, the proceeding was halted as a pointless exercise.

During his swindling career, Mr. Quinn helped run a giant boiler-room operation out of a villa overlooking the French Riviera, had a champion racehorse and was alleged to have helped former financier Martin Frankel pull off one of history's largest insurance frauds. U.S. authorities say he stole an estimated $500 million total.

His record, which includes three SEC injunctions and two federal criminal convictions, stretches back to 1966 when regulators barred the 28-year-old Mr. Quinn from the brokerage business for peddling shares of a bogus Florida land company. In 1992, a federal judge called Mr. Quinn an "incorrigible" recidivist whose business activities "appear to be devoted exclusively to securities fraud." Yet he has served a total of only about six years in prison—with most that in France.

All of that could change now. Last November, at the age of 72, he was arrested by federal agents as he stepped off a plane from Ireland at John F. Kennedy Airport and charged with helping orchestrate a $50 million telecommunications fraud. If convicted, Mr. Quinn could face more than 20 years in prison. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and his attorney declined to comment. Mr. Quinn is currently in a federal prison outside of Dallas, awaiting a trial that is scheduled for February 2011.

Mr. Quinn stands as one of the few remaining members of a class of swindlers who cut their teeth during a golden age of securities fraud. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the stock market, having weathered the Great Depression and a world war, was flying high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, after plunging to near 40 in the 1930s, soared to nearly 1,000 by early 1966. Expanding jet travel and telecommunications allowed financial criminals to set up in distant places to cheat victims near and far.

For much of the past half-century, people like Mr. Quinn could bank on the fact that even when caught they were unlikely to draw lengthy prison stays. Judges and others in law enforcement often viewed white-collar criminals as less of a threat to society than other types of offenders. Mr. Quinn's first criminal conviction for securities fraud in a New York federal court in 1970 earned him a six-month sentence. For his 1993 U.S. conviction in a Nevada federal court for securities fraud related to the international boiler-room operation, Mr. Quinn received no additional jail time beyond what he'd already served in Europe.

Many of Mr. Quinn's generation have passed. In more than a quarter-century of stock fraud, Ramon D'Onofrio collected six criminal convictions and seven SEC injunctions but only about 12 months in prison. Even after a 1990 heart transplant, he nabbed one last conviction on fraud-related charges—and no prison sentence. He died about a decade ago.

Arnold Kimmes, who law-enforcement officials say was a longtime Quinn confederate and was believed by the California attorney general to have ties to organized crime, died in 2008 after a fraud career that dated back to the 1940s, interrupted by only a few years in prison.

But Mr. Quinn faces his latest criminal case in a legal landscape that has grown increasingly intolerant of financial fraudsters, partly due to public anger over waves of financial scandals, from the Wall Street insider-trading schemes of the 1980s to Enron Corp.'s collapse in 2001. More law-enforcement resources are going to fight fraud, penalties are tougher and judges are more willing to hand out stiff sentences. Bernard Madoff got 150 years for his epic Ponzi scheme, while former Enron President Jeffrey Skilling got a quarter-century. The appeal of Mr. Skilling's conviction was recently argued before the Supreme Court.

During decades of pursuit, authorities found Mr. Quinn to be a tough nut to crack. Mr. Quinn frequently used aliases and fake passports, say investigators. Stan Whitten, a retired SEC official who spent a good chunk of seven years chasing the swindler, was never able to nab him, or even meet him. "Tommy seemed like a guy incapable of doing something in a legal manner," he says.

He could also be charming. Chicago attorney Steven Scholes deposed him while serving as a receiver for the SEC on a Quinn-related case in 1996. During a break, a plane pulling an advertising banner flew by and Mr. Quinn volunteered to read the distant message: "Leave Tommy alone," he intoned. Mr. Scholes says he couldn't help but laugh.

"Just forget me," Mr. Quinn said when this reporter reached him briefly in 1995 by calling a residence he was using in Long Island. "I've got a lot of trouble and a lot of personal grief. I'm just trying to get on with my life. I'm not in the securities business and never will be again."

Mr. Quinn was born and raised in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, the only son of an Irish-American truck driver and an Italian-American housewife.

He "was the focal point of the family," says Joseph Sorrentino, a boyhood friend who remained in touch with Mr. Quinn and went on to become a prosecutor in the Los Angeles District Attorney's office. Mr. Quinn's mother supplemented the family income by running three businesses, including selling jewelry and clothing out of the garage. Mr. Sorrentino recalls that he would sleep over at the Quinn home because it was one of the few that had air conditioning.

Mr. Quinn was an A-student at his Catholic school and an altar boy. He was known around the neighborhood as the local "genius," says Mr. Sorrentino, who himself went on to Harvard Law School. As an undergraduate at St. John's University in New York, Mr. Quinn studied philosophy and from memory "would quote passages from Thomas Aquinas on ethics," his friend adds.

Still, he once stole some beer for a party by passing himself as a delivery man at a supermarket, says Mr. Sorrentino. He also says his friend once bought hot dogs for the neighborhood kids by flashing the corner of a $10 bill to the vendor—who didn't discover until too late that all Mr. Quinn had was a fragment of the bill.

Mr. Sorrentino recalls once gazing at the Empire State Building with Mr. Quinn. "I saw a tall building. Tom saw himself in a suite at the top," he says.

Several years ago, Mr. Quinn came to Los Angeles for a visit. The two took a long walk that included a stop at the home of a former Quinn employee who was suffering from a serious illness. Mr. Quinn delivered an envelope with cash for him and his family. "For friends, he was like a one-man welfare state," says Mr. Sorrentino.

Mr. Quinn didn't talk business with his prosecutor friend. Instead, they reminisced about their Brooklyn days, which "seemed like a comfort zone for him," says Mr. Sorrentino.

With a law degree from St John's, Mr. Quinn was admitted to the New York bar in 1962 and that same year became the president of a small brokerage firm, Thomas Williams and Lee, Inc.

According to a 1966 SEC court filing, he peddled as a no-risk investment the stock of a Florida land company that had little revenue or cash and listed assets that "were almost completely illusory." The injunction barred him from the securities business for "flagrant fraudulent practices."

He married and divorced a childhood sweetheart. He met his second wife, Rochelle Rothfleisch, while she was working as a hairdresser, says Mr. Sorrentino. Mr. Quinn visited her shop in connection with a venture he had selling a new kind of hair-spraying device. His two marriages produced five children.

Though Ms. Rothfleisch's name showed up on brokerage and bank account records in Quinn-related deals, she was never charged with wrongdoing. Ms. Rothfleisch died in 2004. "She said she was just signing things when Tommy asked her to," recalls one investigator who interviewed Ms. Rothfleisch. "She was just enjoying the ride."

The ride included travel, fabulous homes and even a champion racehorse named Grey Swallow—which won the Irish Derby in 2004 along with a purse of €736,000 (almost $900,000 at the time).

During the 1980s he set up shop in France, where he helped run a boiler-room stock scam in which telephone salesmen pitched largely worthless stocks to investors around the world, authorities say. The Quinns lived in a villa called Le Mas des Roses, in the hilltop village of Mougins. The villa had a waterfall, pool and gardens along with commanding views of Cannes and the Mediterranean, according to visitors. The couple also rented an apartment in Paris on the exclusive Avenue Foch.

But his boiler-room operation attracted the attention of French authorities, who in 1988 arrested Mr. Quinn and seized records from the villa. Copies of those records, photocopies of which were viewed by The Wall Street Journal, show a man who kept extensive, tightly packed handwritten notes of cash and stock transactions with a bevy of names, some of them alleged Quinn aliases. Yet occasional signs of more mundane interests surfaced. One page shows a list of U.S. utilities with their stock prices and notation "good for capital appreciation."

In the late 1990s, Mr. Quinn's name popped up as investigators poured through the records and wreckage of the giant insurance scam headed by Mr. Frankel, who is serving a 16-year federal prison sentence for looting over $200 million from insurance companies. Mr. Quinn wasn't criminally charged in that case. But a lawsuit filed in Mississippi federal court by five state insurance commissioners alleges he helped Mr. Frankel hide his scam.

Alan Curley, a Chicago attorney representing the insurance commissioners, says that records obtained through his investigations show that Mr. Frankel wired millions of dollars to Quinn-connected accounts, including $2.9 million sent to a bank on the Pacific island of Vanuatu. Mr. Quinn's lawyer declined to comment on the suit.

Now Mr. Quinn's long career could be drawing to a close.

In the current fraud case, Mr. Quinn and confederates allegedly stole millions in 2005 from giant telecommunications companies. The defendants allegedly bought on credit ever greater amounts of phone-line capacity from the big companies, resold it and then failed to pay their telecom suppliers—a scheme known as a "bust out." The scam cost victim companies over $50 million, according to government court filings, with about $21 million in pilfered funds ping-ponged around Europe before heading to bank accounts in Beirut. Mr. Quinn helped set up and finance the scheme, prosecutors say in court filings.

Officials at the U.S. Attorney's office in Dallas, which is prosecuting Mr. Quinn, decline to discuss how they developed the case. A court filing by prosecutors shows that the government used wiretaps to gather evidence. That filing said evidence showed that Mr. Quinn tried to cover up his role in the scheme and was linked to an attempt to pay a witness to leave the U.S. to avoid being questioned.

Court documents show that a grand jury charged Mr. Quinn last May with 12 counts of conspiracy and fraud, but the indictment was sealed for fear he would go into hiding if he learned of the charges. U.S. authorities worked with British and French authorities to apprehend Mr. Quinn, including one attempt to arrest him at the Nice airport in October.

Mr. Curley says that he had never been able to find Mr. Quinn to serve him with the lawsuit papers. With Mr. Quinn back in federal custody, the attorney finally succeeded in January.

Another old case is getting new life, too. Upon learning of his recent arrest, the SEC filed papers in Chicago federal court to enforce a 1994 judgment against Mr. Quinn related to some of his alleged stock-fraud activities for $26 million, which the agency calculates is now at $56 million with interest. The agency court filing calls him "an incorrigible securities law recidivist and career criminal."

In a court filing, lawyers for Mr. Quinn challenged that characterization. Though he "made mistakes as a younger man," Mr. Quinn is "far from a career criminal" and has "fulfilled his debts to society and then some." The filing calls the current criminal case against him "cryptic at best."

Prosecutors contend that Mr. Quinn is a "serious flight risk." One government court filing estimated he has "likely pocketed" over $500 million in his "sordid history of perpetrating fraud scheme after fraud scheme against citizens of this country and Europe."

Mr. Quinn is believed to have properties in four countries and multiple bank accounts, the government said. While federal agents took two passports from him, Mr. Quinn could be in possession of others, said a government filing. In the months before his arrest, prosecutors said Mr. Quinn had made trips to Turkey, the Maldives and the United Arab Emirates, which does not have an extradition treaty with the U.S. "Quinn is well-informed of countries having extradition treaties with the United States," said one filing.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704187204575101863502272290.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_6#printMode

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OPINION

'They Need to Be Liberated From Their God'

The 'Son of Hamas' author on his conversion to Christianity, spying for Israel, and shaming his family.

Nashville, Tenn.

'I absolutely know that in anybody's eyes I was a traitor," says Mosab Hassan Yousef. "To my family, to my nation, to my God. I crossed all the red lines in my society. I didn't leave one that I didn't cross."

Now 32, Mosab is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founder and leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Throughout the last decade, from the second Intifada to the current stalemate, he worked alongside his father in the West Bank. During that time the younger Mr. Yousef also secretly embraced Christianity. And as he reveals in his book "Son of Hamas," out this week, he became one of the top spies for Israel's internal security arm, the Shin Bet.

The news of this double conversion has sent ripples through the Middle East. One of Mr. Yousef's handlers at the Shin Bet confirmed his account to the Israeli daily Haaretz. Hamas—already reeling from the assassination of a senior military chief in Dubai in January—calls his claims Zionist propaganda. From the Israeli prison he has occupied since 2005, Sheikh Yousef on Monday issued a statement that he and his family "have completely disowned the man who was our oldest son and who is called Mosab."

For the past two years, Mosab Yousef has lived near San Diego, where he's kept a low profile out of concern for his security. The U.S. is currently weighing his application for political asylum, and until his confession to espionage and the publicity blitz that accompanied it this week, only knew him as the son of a terrorist who sometimes attends evangelical churches in California. The book is intended to launch a new life in America.

Mr. Yousef, whose large, engaging eyes sit prominently on an oval face, says he was confused for many years himself, and realizes many people will be as well. His family has been shamed and old friends refuse to believe him. The book, a Le Carréesque thriller wrapped in a spiritual coming-of-age story, is an attempt to answer what he says "is impossible to imagine"—"how I ended up working for my enemies who hurt me, who hurt my dad, who hurt my people."

"There is a logical explanation," he continues in fairly fluent English. "Simply my enemies of yesterday became my friends. And the friends of yesterday became really my enemies."

The first half of his memoir describes a childhood in Ramallah marked by close familial ties and the Israeli occupation. He describes a kind and unusual Muslim father who cooks dinner, treats his mother well, and cares for his neighbors. An imam trained in Jordan, Sheikh Hassan Yousef rises to prominence in their hometown, and in 1986—along with six other men including the wheelchair-bound cleric from Gaza, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin—forms Hamas at a secret meeting in Hebron. The first Palestinian Intifada—or uprising—breaks out the following year. Mosab did his part, throwing stones at Israeli settlers and army vehicles.

"Most people heard about Hamas after Hamas started carrying out terrorist attacks," he says now, speaking near his agent's home here in Nashville. "Hamas started out as an idea. Let's say a noble idea—resisting occupation." Those early clashes with the Israelis begat worse violence, and the cemetery near his house began to fill up with cadavers. Palestinians also turned on each other. A corrupt and authoritarian Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) sparred with the rising Hamas and other groups. All of them used accusations of "collaboration" as an excuse to torture and kill rivals or the weak.

Mr. Yousef traces his awakening to his first sustained exposure to Hamas cruelty. In 1996, he was arrested by the Israelis for buying weapons. He says he was beaten and tortured badly in custody. It was then that the Shin Bet approached him. He says he thought about becoming a double agent. "I wanted revenge on Israel," he writes. But when he was sent to serve his term at the Megiddo prison in northern Israel, he says he was more shocked by the way the maj'd , Hamas's security wing, dealt with other prisoners.

"Every day, there was screaming; every night, torture. Hamas was torturing its own people!" he writes. The Muslims he met in jail "bore no resemblance to my father" and "were mean and petty . . . bigots and hypocrites."

By agreeing to work with the Shin Bet, he got out of prison early. He says he was curious about the Israelis and fast abandoned his idea to become a double agent. Though he took money from Shin Bet and stayed on their payroll for a decade, his handlers in the early years didn't ask much of him. They encouraged him to study and be a model son. His code name was the Green Prince: green as in the color of the Islamist Hamas flag, and prince as the offspring to Hamas royalty.

During those quiet years he met a British cabbie in Jerusalem who gave him an English-Arabic copy of the New Testament and invited him to attend a bible study session at their hotel. "I found that I was really drawn to the grace, love and humility that Jesus talked about," he says in "Son of Hamas."

As a spy, Mr. Yousef wasn't fully activated until the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000. A few months before at Camp David, the late PLO chief Yasser Arafat had turned down the Israeli offer of statehood on 90% of the West Bank with East Jerusalem as the capital. According to Mr. Yousef, Arafat decided he needed another uprising to win back international attention. So he sought out Hamas's support through Sheikh Yousef, writes his son, who accompanied him to Arafat's compound. Those meetings took place before the Palestinian authorities found a pretext for the second Intifada. It came when future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Mr. Yousef's account helps to set straight the historical record that the uprising was premeditated by Arafat.

Mr. Yousef tells me that he was horrified by the pointless violence unleashed by politicians willing to climb "on the shoulders of poor, religious people." He says Palestinians who heeded the call "were going like a cow to the slaughterhouse, and they thought they were going to heaven." So, as he writes in the book, "At the age of twenty-two, I became the Shin Bet's only Hamas insider who could infiltrate Hamas's military and political wings, as well as other Palestinian factions."

Mr. Yousef claims some significant intelligence coups for himself, and he says he isn't telling the world everything. Early on, he was first to discover that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a terrorist group born during the second Intifada, was made up of Arafat's guards, who were directly funded by international donors. He says he found the most lethal Palestinian bomb maker and foiled assassination plots against President Shimon Peres, then foreign minister, as well as a prominent rabbi. He says he broke up cells of suicide bombers about to attack Israel. And he helped convince his father to be the first prominent Hamas leader to offer a truce with Israel.

His handler—a "Captain Loai," now retired from the Shin Bet—corroborated many of these stories to Haaretz. The paper said the Shin Bet considered Mr. Yousef "the most reliable and most senior agent."

Mr. Yousef strains to justify himself, but ultimately "the question is whether I was a traitor or a hero in my own eyes."

So we're back to why ?

The motivation, he says, was to save lives.

"I'd seen enough killing. I was a witness to lots of death . . . Saving a human life was something really, really beautiful . . . no matter who they are. Not only Israeli people owe me their lives. I guarantee many terrorists, many Palestinian leaders, owe me their lives—or in other words they owe my Lord their lives."

He says he used his influence at Shin Bet to get the Israelis to try to arrest Hamas and other Palestinian figures rather than blow them up with missile strikes. He says he saved his father from the fate of Sheikh Yassin and other Hamas leaders whom the Israelis killed by secretly arranging to have him arrested. "I know for sure that my father is alive today, he still breathes, because I was involved in this thing," he says.

Mr. Yousef has some of the evangelist in him, even as he insists he is not a particularly devoted Christian and is still learning about his new religion. He wants Palestinians and Israelis to learn what he did from the Christian God.

"I converted to Christianity because I was convinced by Jesus Christ as a character, as a personality. I loved him, his wisdom, his love, his unconditional love. I didn't leave [the Islamic] religion to put myself in another box of religion. At the same time it's a beautiful thing to see my God exist in my life and see the change in my life. I see that when he does exist in other Middle Easterners there will be a change.

"I'm not trying to convert the entire nation of Israel and the entire nation of Palestine to Christianity. But at least if you can educate them about the ideology of love, the ideology of forgiveness, the ideology of grace. Those principles are great regardless, but we can't deny they came from Christianity as well."

Mr. Yousef says he felt burned out and decided to stop working for the Shin Bet in 2006, against their wishes. He made his way to friends in southern California whom he'd met through bible study.

As the son of a Muslim cleric, he says he had reached the conclusion that terrorism can't be defeated without a new understanding of Islam. Here he echoes other defectors from Islam such as the former Dutch parliamentarian and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Do you consider your father a fanatic? "He's not a fanatic," says Mr. Yousef. "He's a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he's doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn't matter if he's a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don't want to admit this is an ideological war.

"The problem is not in Muslims," he continues. "The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to."

These are all dangerous words. Of the threats issued to his life by Islamists, he says, "That's not the worst thing that can happen to you. I'm OK with it, I'm not afraid. . . . Palestinians have reason to kill me. Some Israelis may want to kill me. My goal is not to defeat my enemy. It is to win over my enemy."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703915204575103481069258868.html#printMode

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From Fox News

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Courts Cracking Down on Texting Jurors

New instructions are being adopted and electronics are being banned from courtrooms as jurors using their portable electronic devices continue to cause mistrials, overturned convictions and chaotic delays in court proceedings.

SAN FRANCISCO - Enough with the tweets, the blogs, the Internet searches.

That's the message being communicated by courts across the country as jurors using their portable electronic devices continue to cause mistrials, overturned convictions and chaotic delays in court proceedings.

Last year a San Francisco Superior Court judge dismissed 600 potential jurors after several acknowledged going online to research the cCourriminal case before them.

Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon challenged her misdemeanor embezzlement conviction after discovering five jurors "friended" one another on Facebook during the trial.

And a federal judge in Florida declared a mistrial after eight jurors admitted Web surfing about a drug case.

But the rules for jury service in state and federal courts alike are evolving to grapple with this 21st century issue. New jury instructions are being adopted and electronics are being banned from courtrooms.

In January, the federal court's top administrative office, the Judicial Conference of the United States, issued so-called "Twitter instructions" to every federal judge, which are designed to be read to jurors at the start of the trial and before deliberations.

"You may not use any electronic device or media" in connection with the case, the recommended federal instructions admonish. They also bar visits to "any Internet chat room, blog, or website such as Facebook, My Space, LinkedIn , YouTube or Twitter."

The guidelines were developed "to address the increasing incidence of juror use of such devices as cellular telephones or computers to conduct research on the Internet or communicate with others about cases," according to a memo to federal judges from the committee's chief, U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson of Topeka, Kan.

"Such use," the judge noted, "has resulted in mistrials, exclusion of jurors, and imposition of fines."

While federal judges can ignore those guidelines, some state judges are not so free.

The Supreme Court in Michigan ordered judges there starting Sept. 1 to order jurors to refrain from using cell phones, computers and other electronic devices to discuss cases before them.

San Francisco Superior Court on Jan. 1 began including such instructions after some of the 600 jurors said they went online because there were no explicit prohibitions against such independent research.

"You may not do research about any issues involved in the case," the new instruction states. "You may not blog, Tweet, or use the Internet to obtain or share information."

A California legislator last month introduced a bill that would charge wayward jurors with a crime.

Several courts from Fort Wayne, Ind. to sparsely populated Malheur County in eastern Oregon have gone so far as to completely ban electronic devices.

After electronic communications caused two mistrials, St. Paul, Minn., residents called to jury duty are now warned: "DO NOT BRING WIRELESS COMMUNICATION DEVICES : PHONES, PAGERS, AND PDA'S. Phones are available in the Jury Assembly Room."

The issue first surfaced a few years ago, but has only in the last few months garnered widespread attention because of the increased number of high-profile and disruptive incidents.

"Everyone now has the technology," said New York media lawyer Eric Robinson, who blogs about the issue for Harvard University's Citizen Law Media Project Web site. He said so many people obsessively "tweet" throughout the day that it has almost become an unconscious action.

Robinson said until such behavior is labeled as bad etiquette, tweeting and blogging jurors will continue to frustrate judges.

He said two appeals courts in Maryland and one in New Jersey have so far reversed criminal convictions because of jurors use of technology.

While federal judges hope the new jury instructions will significantly limit jury problems, the National Center for State Courts in Williamsburg, Va., said state judges continue to grapple with how best to deal with the issue.

"The thing that makes the electronic media issue a little different is that it so accessible and anonymous," said Greg Hurley, an analyst at the center. " Jurors face exposure if they go to the library or drive by a crime scene — but there's little risk in going online."

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/tech/ci.Courts+Cracking+Down+on+Texting+Jurors.opinionPrint

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American Al Qaeda Spokesman Praises Fort Hood Killer

March 07, 2010

Associated Press

CAIRO — 

Al Qaeda's American-born spokesman has called on Muslims serving in the U.S. armed forces to emulate the Army major charged with killing 13 people in Fort Hood.

Adam Gadahn, who was raised in California, describes Maj. Nidal Hasan as a pioneer who should serve as a role model for other Muslims.

He urges Muslims in America to carry out attacks against U.S. and Western targets.

The video posted on a radical Islamic web site on Sunday featured Gadahn, also known as Azzam al-Amriki, dressed in white robes and wearing a white turban.

Gadahn converted to Islam and joined Al Qaeda and was charged with treason in 2006. There is a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,588282,00.html

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Iran's Ahmadinejad: Sept. 11 Attacks a 'Big Lie'

March 06, 2010

Associated Press

TEHRAN, Iran — 

Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday called the official version of the Sept. 11 attacks a "big lie" used by the U.S. as an excuse for the war on terror, state media reported.

Ahmadinejad's comments, made during an address to Intelligence Ministry staff, come amid escalating tensions between the West and Tehran over its disputed nuclear program. They show that Iran has no intention of toning itself down even with tighter sanctions looming because of its refusal to halt uranium enrichment.

"September 11 was a big lie and a pretext for the war on terror and a prelude to invading Afghanistan," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by state TV. He called the attacks a "complicated intelligence scenario and act."

The Iranian president has questioned the official U.S. version of the Sept. 11 attacks before, but this is the first time he ventured to label it a "big lie."

In 2007, New York officials rejected Ahmadinejad's request to visit the World Trade Center site while he was in the city for a U.N. meeting. The president also sparked an uproar when he said during a lecture in New York that the causes and conditions that led to the attacks, as well as who orchestrated them, still need to be examined.

At the time, he also told Iranian state TV the attacks were "a result of mismanaging and inhumane managing of the world by the U.S," and that Washington was using Sept. 11 as an excuse to attack others.

He has also questioned the Sept. 11 death toll of around 3,000, claiming the Americans never published the victims' names.

On the 2007 anniversary of the attacks, the names of 2,750 victims killed in New York were read aloud at a memorial ceremony.

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,588255,00.html

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Paramedics Hail 'Hero' Boy From Ariz. Bus Crash

Saturday , March 06, 2010

Associated Press

SACATON, Ariz. — 

A bilingual 4th grader hurt in an Arizona bus accident that killed six people and injured more than a dozen others translated from an ambulance stretcher for busy rescue workers as they hurried to set up a triage center, authorities said Saturday.

Oscar Rodriguez of Las Vegas, Nev., was labeled a hero by firefighters and paramedics for helping them communicate with non-English speaking passengers just after Friday's pre-dawn crash on an interstate.

They presented him with gifts and a certificate that reads "Hero of the day" during a visit with him at a Phoenix hospital Saturday.

"This kid stayed calm and was brave more than any other veteran I've worked with," said Kenneth Leslie, a paramedic who, with his partner, was the first to arrive at the scene.

The bus was traveling from the central Mexican state of Zacatecas to Los Angeles.

It entered the United States at El Paso, Texas, and was headed to Phoenix to change drivers when it hit a pickup truck, veered onto the left shoulder of the road, overcorrected and rolled. The roof of the bus was crushed and its windows were knocked out.

Rodriguez, 11, was one of 22 passengers aboard the bus when it crashed at about 5:30 a.m. MST on the Gila River Indian Reservation, some 25 miles south of downtown Phoenix.

Rodriguez and 15 others suffered injuries, including head injuries and broken spines and pelvises. More than a dozen people remained hospitalized Saturday, including the bus driver who was among nine listed in critical condition at area hospitals.

Maricopa Medical Center hospital spokesman Michael Murphy called Rodriguez "a real trouper" and said he was in good condition. He didn't offer specifics on Rodriguez's injuries.

Federal transportation officials said the bus, owned by Van Nuys, Calif.-based Tierra Santa Inc., was operating illegally. The company was told in April and again in December not to transport passengers across state lines.

The Arizona Department of Public Safety has wrapped up its investigation, and spokesman Bart Graves said details will be released sometime next week.

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,588274,00.html

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From MSNBC

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Haiti quake opens window on dismal prisons

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The skinny teenager appears nervous, and with reason: He is waiting for a tap on the shoulder that could send him back to the dismal prison where he spent four years without being charged or seeing a judge.

He is one of more than 5,000 prisoners who fled their cells after January's devastating earthquake and are now being rounded up by Haitian police and returned to a system notorious for appalling conditions and delays.

Legal experts say the earthquake has given the country a chance to reform its judiciary, which has been the source of international condemnation for years. But the young man on the run, who insists he is innocent, is afraid any solution will come too late for him.

"I'd like to be able to go to them and just say, 'You were wrong, let me be free,'" said the 19-year-old, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of his legal situation. "But I'm scared that they'll just lock me up again."

Justice Minister Paul Denis acknowledged that the justice system is guilty of "extremely serious" human rights violations and agreed the problem is particularly bad for juveniles. Authorities will seek to speed up the process in the future, he added, though no one has yet offered a formal plan for rebuilding the judiciary.

'Unacceptable situation'

Still, Denis said the country is seeking to round up all the prisoners who were either released or escaped during the Jan. 12 earthquake under circumstances that remain murky.

"It's an unacceptable situation, but what can I say, it's the law. They must give themselves up and will without doubt be re-arrested," Denis told The AP at his temporary office in a prefab building behind the collapsed Ministry of Justice.

There are conflicting accounts about what happened on the night of the earthquake. A guard, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity, said the prisoners began to riot and set fire to the building. The guards, faced with the choice of shooting or releasing them amid the chaos and aftershocks, chose to let them go.

The teen, who only gave the AP his first name, Guy, supported the guard's story, saying the prisoners shook the bars and screamed for help as the walls shuddered. Some prisoners set a fire to force their release.

"We thought we were going to die," Guy said.

U.N. officials say eight of the country's 17 prisons were destroyed or damaged, and 60 percent of the 9,000 prisoners fled — including 300 considered very dangerous. Some were notorious gang leaders, while hundreds were jailed supporters of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted in a violent rebellion in 2004.

4,300 in prison built for 800

Denis said that as of Wednesday about 160 had been recaptured. Two more were arrested Friday as they tried to cross the border into the neighboring Dominican Republic.

Haiti has reopened its national penitentiary in the largely destroyed downtown. The prison built for 800 held 4,300 at the time of the earthquake, which the Haitian government says killed at least 230,000 people.

Many prisoners and detainees suffered from a lack of basic hygiene, malnutrition and poor quality health care, the U.S. State Department said in a 2009 report on human rights. Incidents of preventable diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis "remained a serious problem," it said.

At the end of 2008, 88 percent of the country's 316 incarcerated juveniles had been held three years without charges or trial, according to the report.

Guy was charged with criminal association — a catchall violation used against everyone from political prisoners to the 10 American missionaries arrested on Jan. 29 for trying to bring 33 children out of the country without the proper papers after the quake.

Two of the Americans are still in custody, but a judge has said he would probably release them soon.

Never appeared before judge

Guy said he was arrested in March 2006 when he was 16 and never appeared before a judge. He had been walking with a friend who was carrying a pistol when they were stopped by police; his friend escaped.

It was impossible to confirm the details of his story, but lawyers and experts on Haiti said it sounded sadly familiar.

The U.S.-based Rural Justice Center conducted a survey of 1,000 prisoners at the penitentiary before the quake and determined that only about 2 percent should have actually been in prison. Most of the rest had already been in custody longer than the sentence for the crimes they were detained for. Or they were held without adequate justification in the first place.

One man was arrested for dancing with the wife of a policeman, said Dorvil Odler, a Haitian lawyer who helped conduct the survey. He served three years. Even after being ordered released by a judge, the man was still in custody at the time of the earthquake.

Denis said he has been working since he became justice minister in November to get magistrates to rule more quickly on minor infractions. His predecessor also tried, but met resistance because magistrates didn't want more work, said Maurice D. Geiger, director of the New Hampshire-based Rural Justice Center.

Rich 'never go to jail'

"If you're rich, you never go to jail because you bribe a policeman," Geiger said. "I spoke to one judge about a lawyer paying a bribe to just get his client's case onto the judge's docket. His response was 'If he has enough money to hire a lawyer, he has enough money to just pay me and he won't need a lawyer.'"

Guy shudders at the thought of going back. He was jailed in a cell of 20 prisoners, who squeezed onto five narrow mattresses placed side by side on the floor at night.

In the day, they leaned the mattresses along the wall for more space.

"That is a place where no one should be allowed to live," he said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35741965/ns/world_news-haiti_earthquake/print/1/displaymode/1098/

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1-person towns to Census: Count me in

MONOWI, Neb. - The founding fathers must have chuckled at the impossibility of the job when they etched it into the Constitution: Count every man, woman and child along every back road and big-city avenue in the entire country.

From Key West to Nome, today's Americans will largely get the founders' joke yet again as the U.S. Census embarks on its once-a-decade count this year — they're accustomed to approximations of how many people plod their shared corner of the world.

Why does it really matter, after all, that a Nebraska town comprised of a tavern, a few crumbling houses, four street lamps, and one drivable, dirt street be counted exactly right?

Or even at all?

"Because I live in it," said Elsie Eiler, who is Monowi's entire population. Yet Census Bureau estimates from this summer say that there are two Monowians.

"Where's this other person?" Eiler said. "Let me know. ... I don't want to come back to my house at 11 or 12 and see someone else there."

Others across the country who live in the tiniest of tiny towns, from Indiana river country to the wind-swept Wyoming plains, feel the same way as Eiler about census counts and estimates. Proudly holding onto their identities, with the line between existence and disappearance of their villages so narrow, they insist every person counts.

So they want them counted right.

One too many?

The Census Bureau estimates that there are four incorporated towns with just one person. But when contacted by The Associated Press, residents in three of those places say they aren't the lonely souls the census says they are. The population of the fourth — Hoot Owl, Okla. — could not be verified by the AP.

"Who's that one?" said Thomas Saucier of Goss, Miss., one of the supposed one-person towns. "There's 50 right here in Goss!"

Told that some estimates of the country's most microscopic towns haven't gone over too smoothly, an official of the federal count got a bit chapped herself.

"We're doing the whole country," said Barbara Vandervate of the Census Bureau. "If we could do one state a month, it'd be much easier to count everybody."

And another thing: "If people don't answer the questions, guess what? They don't get counted."

A resident of one of the supposedly one-person towns — New Amsterdam, Ind., listed that way in the 2000 census and in last summer's bureau estimate — concedes that people there may have something to do with the statistical snafu. Mary Faye Shaffer cut the Census Bureau little slack, and said the town is bent on getting an accurate count this time around.

In the general store that she owns — the only business in town, unless you count "a bait shop that's there if they want to be there" — Shaffer tallies residents of New Amsterdam until she reaches 19.

She proudly mentions the couple who moved to town after retiring from Wal-Mart, and she brags about the beauty of the area, mentioning how she can see the scenic Ohio River from her backdoor.

But bring up the census, and her melodic Southern accent hits some sharp notes.

"It's embarrassing — 'You live in a town with one person?'" Shaffer says people say to her.

"People call here just because they think there's only one person. You wouldn't think the government would screw up this bad."

'He seemed very confused'

Shaffer surmises that the count went wrong in 2000 because the town doesn't have a post office. That means residents have listed nearby towns that have post offices as their addresses.

Townsfolk met with a census official last year and spread the word for everyone to write on their census forms that they live in New Amsterdam, regardless of different mailing addresses.

Will this year's counts straighten out such things? They aren't holding their breath in Lost Springs, Wyo.

Last year, a man with the Census Bureau came to the town, which is located in eastern Wyoming.

"He seemed very confused," said Leda Price, who runs a bar, hunting camp and catering business, "among other things," in Lost Springs. The only other business is a general store across the street that also has a post office. A big annual event in town is a pitch tournament, which recently drew a couple dozen people.

Population estimates from last summer repeated the finding of the the 2000 census: Pop. 1, as it says on the road sign entering town.

But Price says she's lived there 37 years and there's always been more than one person. The town actually had five people when the 2000 census was done, she said, though there are population ups and downs.

In fact, the tally recently spiked 33 percent: A woman moved in with a man who has lived in Lost Springs for some time, increasing the population to four from three.

People ask Price why she doesn't scratch out the road sign and put in the correct number. It's become a sign of her frustrating dealings with the census.

"I tried for a long time to straighten it out and it was like talking to a brick wall," Price said of her discussions with the Census Bureau in recent years.

Minor mistakes look huge

There's not always someone around to fight an inaccurate count.

Take Erving's Location, N.H., said to have one resident in both the 2000 census and the estimate last summer.

"There's never been anyone there," said Sue Collins, county administrator for Coos County, N.H., who has lived in the area that includes the alleged town for 25 years.

The Census' Vandervate said the bureau will try its best this year to rid the count of population ghosts that spook residents of the tiniest towns. But she acknowledges, as any reasonable person must, that there will be mistakes.

"And the minor mistakes," she said, "can look huge to people in a tiny place."

Back in Monowi, tucked in the rolling hills that abut the Missouri River in northeast Nebraska, Eiler sits in the Monowi Tavern where she sells beer for $2 a bottle and makes $2.50 hamburgers on a 35-year-old, four-burner stovetop.

She describes a previous battle with the Census Bureau to be counted right: After the 1990 census, she wrote to the now-deceased broadcaster Paul Harvey, enlisting his help. He mentioned the miscount on his popular radio show.

But nothing changed.

Unique resident

Eiler became the town's only resident when her husband, Rudy, died six years ago. She lives in a mobile home next to a library constructed in memory of her husband, and makes the short walk past a long-closed grocery store every day on her way to the bar. She stays until at least 10 p.m.

Besides bartending and cooking for regulars who are as unvarnished as the splintered, plywood floors in the bar, Eiler works on town business like the annual budget — about $500 a year, mostly the electric bill.

It's done at "city hall." That's an old desk at the end of the 30-foot bar, near a table where Bill Spelts has taken his usual spot.

There's plenty of beer seven miles down the road in Lynch, where Spelts lives. He comes to the Monowi bar, he says with a crooked grin and laughs from his cronies, "because the beer is 25 cents cheaper."

But the real reason he and the others show up day after day, year after year, is resting her head on her hand as she watches the bull fly.

"Because of Elsie," Spelts says seriously without looking at the woman to his left, Monowi's unique resident.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35738780/ns/us_news-life/print/1/displaymode/1098/

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Test your knowledge of U.S. facts and figures:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35709817/ns/us_news-life/

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