Homeless people can find compassion at the beach

When the ACLU sued three Southern California beach cities over their treatment of homeless people, the municipalities protested. But they've also made changes.

By Catherine Saillant

March 17, 2010

When a civil rights group sued three of Southern California's wealthiest coastal cities last year, alleging police harassment of the homeless, the howls of indignation were swift and loud.

Santa Monica city officials pointed to a long record of helping the destitute along its world-famous shoreline, including extensive social programs and a new and innovative homeless community court.

Santa Barbara has a year-round homeless shelter and allows those down on their luck to sleep in city-designated parking lots, a program being replicated by other municipalities.

And in artsy Laguna Beach, two life-size statues along South Coast Highway memorialize the late Eiler Larsen, a bearded, wild-haired and sometimes homeless man who called out greetings to townspeople and tourists for 33 years.

Laguna Beach City Manager Ken Frank, in comments that echoed across the three cities, accused the American Civil Liberties Union of penalizing "cities that are a little more liberal in their political leanings and generally have more of a social conscience."

Since the filings, Laguna Beach and Santa Barbara have quietly worked out agreements to provide more housing and support services for people on the streets. They've also agreed to stop what ACLU chief counsel Mark Rosenbaum claimed was a policy of citing homeless people for sleeping on sidewalks and beaches and to stop giving frequent orders to people to move on.

Santa Monica is still fighting the lawsuit. But it, too, has informally ended its practice of issuing citations and bench warrants to the homeless and is negotiating to provide more permanent housing, Rosenbaum said.

Overall, he said, the cities have stopped treating homelessness as a problem for the courts and have begun tackling it with more housing and more services.

"Since these talks began, we've had no reports of any arrests or bench warrants being issued in the three cities," Rosenbaum said. "That is a credit to the city officials."

Officials in all three cities said that they violated no civil rights and that the lawsuit filings did not spur action. Expanded social programs and additional beds were already in the pipeline when the ACLU filed separate suits against the cities beginning last spring, officials in all three cities said.

"They were not right legally," Santa Barbara City Atty. Steve Wiley said of the ACLU's case. "But it was easy to reach agreement because we were planning on doing most of these things anyway. It's just the right thing to do."

Santa Barbara's construction of a new low-cost housing project started two weeks ago and two more are in the planning stages, adding a total of 150 beds, Wiley said. The one-room units will probably rent for $300 to $400 a month, he said.

Santa Barbara is also working with nonprofits and social service workers to seek out homeless people in encampments and determine whether they can be served by social programs, he said.

Laguna Beach agreed to rescind an anti-camping ordinance and set up a program allowing homeless people to sleep overnight in a portable shelter purchased by the city, said John Pietig, assistant city manager. It hired a nonprofit to run the 50-bed shelter and provide services at a cost of $250,000 to the city, he said.

Before the city got the shelter open, however, word spread that the no-camping law was gone, and homeless men began to fill the city's picturesque parks and beaches, Pietig said. The city launched nightly police patrols to keep drunken fights, vandalism and public urination under control, he said.

In November, Laguna Beach established curfews and banned a wide range of activities in city beaches and parks, including camping, lodging, storing personal belongings, lingering around restrooms, drinking alcohol and smoking. Officials said they believe the revised anti-camping law will pass constitutional muster. The city also began busing the homeless to sleep in the portable units set up in a gravel parking lot on the edge of town.

City leaders hope the new law and the shelter for local homeless people will minimize complaints from residents and run-ins with police.

Santa Monica disputes the ACLU's contention that city restrictions on sleeping in public places are a violation of civil rights. Still, Santa Monica leaders have met with the ACLU to discuss other approaches, such as expanding services for the homeless, Rosenbaum said.

Once referred to as the "People's Republic of Santa Monica," the city of 90,000 has moderated its politics in recent years. Yet it remains a place where the less fortunate have opportunities to find help.

One of them is the city's homeless community court, much like the more familiar drug courts, aimed at diverting people arrested on minor offenses out of the justice system and into supportive services.

The city has also adopted a plan to end homelessness, and one of its latest efforts is tallying the homeless population every six months. Those identified as most at risk of dying on the streets are put on a priority list for housing and other services, said Julie Rusk, a social services manager.

On a recent night, the outreach team found an 81-year-old woman who had been on the streets for at least 15 years, Rusk said. She's now living in a skilled nursing facility.

The ACLU's Rosenbaum said he won't argue that Santa Monica and the other cities have made genuine attempts to help vagrants. But that doesn't mean it's OK to let police harass those who remain on the streets, he said.

The ACLU has filed similar lawsuits in recent years. In 2007, Los Angeles settled its case by agreeing to find shelter for some of the estimated 48,000 homeless people spread across the county. Since July 2007, housing for 237 formerly homeless people has been built and 1,011 more units are in the pipeline, said Kim Thompson of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

The ACLU has also sued Fresno and San Diego, alleging that they destroyed possessions of homeless people during sweeps of encampments. In Fresno, city officials were accused of confiscating blankets, bicycles, medications, legal documents and, in one case, a woman's wheelchair.

Fresno agreed in 2008 to halt the practice and paid $2.3 million in the class-action settlement. The San Diego case is ongoing.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-beach-homeless17-2010mar17,0,4249688,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Pope Offers Apology, Not Penalty, for Sex Abuse Scandal

By RACHEL DONADIO

VATICAN CITY — Faced with a church sexual abuse scandal spreading across Europe, Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday apologized directly to victims and their families in Ireland , expressing “shame and remorse” for what he called “sinful and criminal” acts committed by members of the clergy.

But the pope did not require that Roman Catholic leaders be disciplined for past mistakes as some victims were hoping, nor did he clarify what critics see as contradictory Vatican rules that they fear allow abuse to continue unpunished.

“You have suffered grievously, and I am truly sorry,” the pope said in a long-awaited, eight-page pastoral letter to Irish Catholics. “Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated.” He also criticized Ireland's bishops for “grave errors of judgment and failures of leadership.”

The letter was written in language that was at once impassioned, personal and sweeping. And the pope did take the relatively rare step of ordering a special apostolic delegation to be sent to investigate abuse in unspecified dioceses in Ireland.

But even that decision raised questions among many who wondered what the investigators might unearth beyond what the Irish government found in two wide-ranging and scathing reports released last year. One report found systemic abuse in church-run schools; another said the church and the police in Ireland had systematically colluded in covering up decades of sexual abuse by priests in Dublin.

The pope has apologized before for sexual abuse scandals, most notably when meeting with victims in the United States in 2008. But the letter once again showed the difficulties facing Benedict, as a problem that he felt he had already decisively addressed appears to be intensifying, with hundreds of new allegations of sexual abuse surfacing. The crisis also stands to damage Benedict's central goals of fortifying the church and fighting secularism in Europe.

The letter was especially anticipated, coming after weeks of damaging reports in several countries that brought the scandal close not only to the leader of Ireland's church, but also to the pope himself.

Last week, a psychiatrist who treated a priest decades ago in a German archdiocese run by the future pope said he had repeatedly warned that the priest, who was accused of sexually abusing boys, should never work with children again. The priest was re-assigned to parish work almost immediately after his therapy began, and one of Benedict's deputies at the time has taken responsibility for that decision. Less than five years later, the priest was accused of molesting other boys, and in 1986 was convicted of sexual abuse.

The pope did not address that case in his letter to the Irish, nor did he call for Cardinal Sean Brady , the head of the Irish church, to resign. Cardinal Brady said last week that he would step down if the pope asked, after revelations that he took part in a church investigation in 1975 in which two children were forced to sign secrecy oaths.

The letter also remained tightly focused on Ireland — to the dismay of many victims' groups around the world — even as the crisis has widened to include Catholics in Austria, the Netherlands and Germany.

“I find that deceitful because we know that this is a global and systemic problem in the global church,” said Colm O'Gorman, the co-founder of a victims' group who said he was sexually abused by a priest as a teenager in Ireland in the early '80s. “It's all about protecting the institution and, above all, its wealth.”

“The greatest contribution the pope could have made was to stop the abuse of victims, and he's not even done that,” he added.

In recent years, the Catholic Church in the United States has paid over $2 billion in abuse settlements. In Ireland, some parishes have said they may have to take up a Sunday collection to help fund abuse settlements.

For many Catholics, the letter offered a critical test of whether the pope can stem a crisis that has shaken the credibility and authority of the Roman Catholic Church in other parts of the world. Even as Benedict urged Irish clergy to cooperate with civil justice authorities, the abuse scandals have put to the test a Vatican culture of protecting its own even in the face of crimes against civil and canon law.

While many Irish Catholics were hoping for concrete measures after the government reports that criticized Vatican norms for dealing with the abuse, Benedict instead offered a prescription for how to renew their faith. He urged all Irish clergy to go on a spiritual retreat and suggested that dioceses set aside special chapels where Catholics could pray for “healing and renewal.”

“There's a strong tendency to approach this as a problem of faith, when it is a problem of church management and a lack of accountability,” said Terrence McKiernan, founder and president of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks church records on abuse cases.

In a statement, the group said the “most glaring” omission in the letter was Benedict's “failure to acknowledge his own culpability,” adding that, “he pointedly does not include himself in his criticism of church leaders.”

In a news conference on Saturday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, defended the pope's statements, saying the document was intended as a pastoral letter, not an outline of “administrative or juridical measures.”

Indeed, Benedict spoke movingly and directly to the pain of victims. “Many of you found that, when you were courageous enough to speak of what happened to you, no one would listen,” the pope wrote.

He added, “I know some of you find it difficult even to enter the doors of a church after all that has occurred.”

The pope told abusers to “submit yourselves to the demands of justice, but do not despair of God's mercy.”

The letter is to be read aloud in churches across Ireland on Sunday.

In a homily Saturday after reading the letter, Cardinal Brady made no reference to the possibility of resigning. “Let us pray that the Holy Father's pastoral letter will be the beginning of a great season of rebirth and hope in the Irish church,” he told worshipers at a morning Mass in St. Patrick's Cathedral in Armagh, Northern Ireland.

Beyond revealing decades of abuse, the Irish government's reports issued last year found that the church did not routinely inform civil authorities about priests who had committed felonies. Four Irish bishops offered their resignation in the wake of the publication of the report on Dublin in November, but the pope has accepted only one.

As reports of abuse cases have spread, many questions have been raised about the line between Vatican secrecy and civil judicial process.

Some Irish church officials have said the problem has been deepened by confusion over the interpretation of a 2001 directive by Benedict, then a cardinal, reiterating a strict requirement for secrecy in handling abuse cases. The directive also gave the authority for handling such cases to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; Benedict was prefect of the congregation from 1982 until becoming pope in 2005.

Some see an inherent contradiction between the directive and the Vatican's telling local dioceses to cooperate with civil justice. The Vatican says that its secrecy norms help protect the victims.

In his letter, Benedict spoke of “a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches,” to violations of canon law.

The pope attributed that problem in part to “a misplaced concern for the reputation of the church and the avoidance of scandal.” And he said that bishops should “continue to cooperate with the civil authorities in their area of competence.”

In the case in Germany in 1980 that made headlines recently, Benedict, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, allowed a priest who was accused of molesting boys to move to Munich for therapy. The diocese he oversaw did not notify civil authorities of the sexual abuse allegations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/world/europe/21pope.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Rethinking Sex Offender Laws for Youth Texting

In Iowa, Jorge Canal is on the sex offenders registry because, at age 18, he was convicted of distributing obscene materials to a minor after he sent a picture of his penis by cellphone to a 14-year-old female friend who had requested it.

In Florida, Phillip Alpert, then 18, was charged with distributing child pornography and put on the sex offenders registry because after a fight, he sent a photograph of his nude 16-year-old girlfriend by e-mail to dozens of people, including her parents.

In most states, teenagers who send or receive sexually explicit photographs by cellphone or computer — known as “sexting” — have risked felony child pornography charges and being listed on a sex offender registry for decades to come.

But there is growing consensus among lawyers and legislators that the child pornography laws are too blunt an instrument to deal with an adolescent cyberculture in which all kinds of sexual pictures circulate on sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Last year, Nebraska, Utah and Vermont changed their laws to reduce penalties for teenagers who engage in such activities, and this year, according to the National Council on State Legislatures, 14 more states are considering legislation that would treat young people who engage in sexting differently from adult pornographers and sexual predators.

And on Wednesday, the first federal appellate opinion in a sexting case recognized that a prosecutor had gone too far in trying to enforce adult moral standards.

The opinion upheld a block on a district attorney who threatened to bring child pornography charges against girls whose pictures showing themselves scantily dressed appeared on classmates' cellphones.

“There's a lot of confusion about how to regulate cellphones and sex and 16-year-olds,” said Amy Adler, a law professor at New York University. “We're at this cultural shift, not only because of the technology, but because of what's happening in terms of the representation of teen sexuality as you can see on ‘ Gossip Girl.' ”

There are real risks that sexually explicit pictures, meant to be shared only with a friend or partner, will make their way into wide publication on the Internet and into the hands of sexual predators.

Last year, a 14-year-old New Jersey girl was arrested and charged with possession and distribution of child pornography after posting dozens of sexually explicit photographs of herself on MySpace.

Such cases, lawyers say, are far afield from what the child pornography laws were intended for. So, too, was the case of Mr. Canal, which was upheld last year by the Iowa Supreme Court.

Mr. Canal was 18 when he sent the picture of his erect penis to a 14-year-old schoolmate, along with another picture of his face, with the text “I love you” on it. The girl, identified only by her initials, thought she erased the image, but her parents found it and passed it to the police.

“The child pornography law was about protecting children from pedophiles,” Professor Adler said. “While sexting is bad judgment, it's simply not what the Supreme Court had in mind when it crafted the child pornography law. It just doesn't make sense that in a lot of the sexting situations, the pornographer and the victim are one and the same person.”

As a practical matter, young people are rarely, if ever, jailed under the child pornography laws for the practice.

Some of the 14 states considering legislation would make sexting a misdemeanor, while others would treat it like juvenile offenses like truancy or running away.

“Many jurisdictions are creating a separate offense for these situations,” said Mary Leary, a law professor at Catholic University. “They're moving it to family or juvenile court. The more choices available to a prosecutor, including diverting the case entirely from the juvenile justice system, the better.”

She and many others believe that some criminal penalties should remain on the books.

Jesse Weins, chairman of the criminal justice department at Dakota Wesleyan University, said that because the legal code functioned as a guide to acceptable behavior, “there should be something there, even if oftentimes it doesn't make sense to prosecute.”

But there are those who favor decriminalization.

“Generally this should be an education issue,” said Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union. “No one disputes that sexting can have very bad consequences, and no parent wants kids sending out naked images. But if you've got thousands of kids engaging in this, are you going to criminalize all of them?”

One recent survey found that about one in five teenagers reported having engaged in sexting. Another found that almost half the boys in coed high schools had seen a picture depicting a female classmate nude.

There are two basic scenarios. In one, a teenager shares a nude picture, usually with a romantic partner. In the other, a partner, or more commonly an ex-partner, distributes the image.

The new Nebraska law makes that distinction, giving a pass to children under 18 who send out their own photograph to a willing recipient who is at least 15. On the other hand, a teenager who passes the photograph on to friends could face a felony child pornography charge and five years in prison.

The Tunkhannock, Pa., case that produced Wednesday's court ruling illustrates how complicated such cases can be. Those pictures were discovered by the school authorities, who confiscated the students' cellphones and turned them over to the district attorney.

Mr. Walczak, the girls' lawyer, said that he planned to file a separate lawsuit charging that the school search of material on confiscated phones breached students' privacy.

The district attorney told parents of the students involved — both those in the images and those whose phones contained the images — that their children could be prosecuted for child pornography unless they took part in an after-school program.

The program, divided by gender, involved random drug tests, probation and classes in which the girls would “gain an understanding of what it means to be a girl in today's society,” by, among other things, writing essays on why their actions were wrong.

Only three of more than a dozen families refused to join the program — those of two girls, ages 12 and 13, who were pictured wearing bras at a slumber party, and of a third girl who was shown emerging from the shower with a towel wrapped under her breasts. The parents say the photographs were not pornographic, a question no court has yet considered. And there has been no evidence that any of the three girls played a part in circulating the photographs.

The parents went to court, claiming that prosecution would amount to retaliation for refusal to join the program.

“We need laws that deal with sexting more holistically, based on the facts of a particular situation,” said Professor Weins, who has written a law review article on the subject. “And that's not how the child pornography laws work.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/us/21sexting.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From Fox News

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Haiti Quake May Have Shaken How Developing World Gets Food

Decades of inexpensive imports -- especially rice from the U.S. -- punctuated with abundant aid in various crises have destroyed local agriculture and left impoverished countries such as Haiti unable to feed themselves.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti  -- The earthquake not only smashed markets, collapsed warehouses and left more than 2.5 million people without enough to eat, it may also have shaken up the way the developing world gets food.

Decades of inexpensive imports -- especially rice from the U.S. -- punctuated with abundant aid in various crises have destroyed local agriculture and left impoverished countries such as Haiti unable to feed themselves.

While those policies have been criticized for years in aid worker circles, world leaders focused on fixing Haiti are admitting for the first time that loosening trade barriers has only exacerbated hunger in Haiti and elsewhere.

They're led by former U.S. President Bill Clinton -- now U.N. special envoy to Haiti -- who publicly apologized this month for championing policies that destroyed Haiti's rice production. Clinton in the mid-1990s encouraged the impoverished country to dramatically cut tariffs on imported U.S. rice.

"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake," Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else."

Clinton and former President George W. Bush, who are spearheading U.S. fundraising for Haiti, arrive Monday in Port-au-Prince. Then comes a key Haiti donors' conference on March 31 at the United Nations in New York.

Those opportunities present the country with its best chance in decades to build long-term food production, and could provide a model for other developing countries struggling to feed themselves.

"A combination of food aid, but also cheap imports have ... resulted in a lack of investment in Haitian farming, and that has to be reversed," U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes told The Associated Press. "That's a global phenomenon, but Haiti's a prime example. I think this is where we should start."

Haiti's government is asking for $722 million for agriculture, part of an overall request of $11.5 billion.

That includes money to fix the estimated $31 million of quake damage to agriculture, but much more for future projects restoring Haiti's dangerous and damaged watersheds, improving irrigation and infrastructure, and training farmers and providing them with better support.

Haitian President Rene Preval, an agronomist from the rice-growing Artibonite Valley, is also calling for food aid to be stopped in favor of agricultural investment.

Today Haiti depends on the outside world for nearly all of its sustenance. The most current government needs assessment -- based on numbers from 2005 -- is that 51 percent of the food consumed in the country is imported, including 80 percent of all rice eaten.

The free-food distributions that filled the shattered capital's plazas with swarming hungry survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake have ended, but the U.N. World Food Program is continuing targeted handouts expected to reach 2.5 million people this month. All that food has been imported -- though the agency recently put out a tender to buy locally grown rice.

Street markets have reopened, filled with honking trucks, drink sellers clinking bottles and women vendors crouched behind rolled-down sacks of dry goods. People buy what's cheapest, and that's American-grown rice.

The best-seller comes from Riceland Foods in Stuttgart, Arkansas, which sold six pounds for $3.80 last month, according to Haiti's National Food Security Coordination Unit. The same amount of Haitian rice cost $5.12.

"National rice isn't the same, it's better quality. It tastes better. But it's too expensive for people to buy," said Leonne Fedelone, a 50-year-old vendor.

Riceland defends its market share in Haiti, now the fifth-biggest export market in the world for American rice.

But for Haitians, near-total dependence on imported food has been a disaster.

Cheap foreign products drove farmers off their land and into overcrowded cities. Rice, a grain with limited nutrition once reserved for special occasions in the Haitian diet, is now a staple.

Imports also put the country at the mercy of international prices: When they spiked in 2008, rioters unable to afford rice smashed and burned buildings. Parliament ousted the prime minister.

Now it could be happening again. Imported rice prices are up 25 percent since the quake -- and would likely be even higher if it weren't for the flood of food aid, said WFP market analyst Ceren Gurkan.

Three decades ago things were different. Haiti imported only 19 percent of its food and produced enough rice to export, thanks in part to protective tariffs of 50 percent set by the father-son dictators, Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier.

When their reign ended in 1986, free-market advocates in Washington and Europe pushed Haiti to tear those market barriers down. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, freshly reinstalled to power by Clinton in 1994, cut the rice tariff to 3 percent.

Impoverished farmers unable to compete with the billions of dollars in subsidies paid by the U.S. to its growers abandoned their farms. Others turned to more environmentally destructive crops, such as beans, that are harvested quickly but hasten soil erosion and deadly floods.

There have been some efforts to restore Haiti's agriculture in recent years: The U.S. Agency for International Development has a five-year program to improve farms and restore watersheds in five Haitian regions. But the $25 million a year pales next to the $91.4 million in U.S.-grown food aid delivered just in the past 10 weeks.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization also distributed 28 tons of bean seeds in mountainous areas this month, with plans this week to distribute 49 tons of corn.

The G8 group of the world's wealthiest nations pledged $20 billion for farmers in poor countries last year. The head of the FAO called this week for some to be given to Haiti.

President Barack Obama's administration has pledged to support agriculture in developing nations. U.S. Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana has sponsored legislation to create a White House Global Food Security coordinator to improve long-term agriculture worldwide, with a budget of $8.5 billion through 2014.

Even Haiti's most powerful food importers have joined the push for locally produced food.

"I would prefer to buy everything locally and have nothing to import," said businessman Reginald Boulos, who is also president of Haiti's chamber of commerce.

But one group staunchly opposes reducing food exports to Haiti: the exporters themselves.

"Haiti doesn't have the land nor the climate ... to produce enough rice," said Bill Reed, Riceland's vice president of communications. "The productivity of U.S. farmers helps feed countries which cannot feed themselves."

http://www.foxnews.com/world/the-americas/ci.Haiti+Quake+May+Have+Shaken+How+Developing+World+Gets+Food.opinionPrint

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Authorities to Resume Search for Natalee Holloway

A police diving team will soon do preliminary work at the spot where officials believe an underwater photo of remains was taken by an American couple. 

ORANJESTAD, Aruba – Authorities will search once again for a missing U.S. teen after an American couple took an underwater picture of what they believe might be Natalee Holloway's remains, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors' office told The Associated Press on Saturday.

A police diving team will soon do preliminary work at the spot where officials believe the picture was taken, spokeswoman Ann Angela said.

It is too early to say whether the tip is more viable than the other numerous ones authorities have received, Angela said.

"It could be a skull, it could be a stone, it could be anything," she said. "That's what we're trying to figure out."

The couple cannot pinpoint the exact location, but a local resident believes he can find the spot, Angela said.

"We are a very small island with lots of people diving or snorkeling, so it's not unusual for one of us to see an underwater picture and recognize the location."

Angela said she could not reveal where or when the dive would take place so as not to attract onlookers.

On Thursday, a newspaper in Pennsylvania reported that a photo taken last fall by the visiting couple, John and Patti Muldowney, of Manheim, Pa., had been turned over to the FBI .

No one answered calls Saturday to a telephone number listed for the couple.

The search is one of many that authorities have launched to find Holloway's body since the Mountain Brook, Alabama , teen disappeared while on vacation in Aruba in 2005. The 18-year-old was last seen leaving a bar with Joran van der Sloot on the final night of a high school graduation trip.

Van der Sloot has been detained several times as police continue to investigate the case.

A Dutch TV station recently aired a paid interview in which van der Sloot claims Holloway accidentally fell from a balcony and that he disposed of her body in a swamp.

He had previously told an undercover reporter that she died unexpectedly while they were kissing and he dumped her body in the ocean.

Aruban prosecutors say they lack evidence to charge van der Sloot.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/the-americas/ci.Authorities+to+Resume+Search+for+Natalee+Holloway.opinionPrint

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Mexico's drug war takes growing toll on Americans

MEXICO CITY

MEXICO CITY (AP) — More Americans in Mexico are falling victim to a wave of drug violence sweeping the country, a change driven home by the recent killing of a U.S. Consulate employee and her hu...

MEXICO CITY (AP) — More Americans in Mexico are falling victim to a wave of drug violence sweeping the country, a change driven home by the recent killing of a U.S. Consulate employee and her husband who were gunned down after leaving a children's birthday party.

The number of U.S. citizens killed in Mexico has more than doubled to 78 in 2009 from 37 in 2007, according to the U.S. State Department's annual count. No figures were available for the first two months of 2010.

While only some of the killings are specifically listed as "executions" or "drug-related," the increase in homicides appears to be related to drug battles. In Ciudad Juarez, the northern border city hardest hit by drug violence and where the consulate employee was killed, homicides of Americans rose to 23 in 2009 from two in 2007.

The annual murder rate for the estimated 500,000 American citizens in Mexico at any one time has risen — but still remains lower than in some U.S. cities: about 15 per 100,000. Baltimore's 2009 homicide rate was 37 per 100,000 residents.

American deaths make up only a tiny fraction of Mexico's 17,900 drug-related killings since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched a military-led drug war.

On Saturday, a clash among armed men left eight people dead in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa. The bodies of seven men were found inside two cars along a highway connecting the cities of Culiacan and Mazatlan, said Sinaloa prosecutors' spokesman Martin Gastelum. An eighth victim, dressed in a fake federal police uniform and holding a grenade, was found near the cars, Gastelum said.

The government says the majority of those killed were involved in the drug trade. But an increasing number of bystanders are dying in the crossfire, and Americans are among them.

Tania Lozoya, 15, of El Paso, Texas, was killed by a stray bullet at her aunt's house across the border in Ciudad Juarez in May 2009, after gunfire broke out when two men chased another man into the backyard of the residence.

In December, a California assistant school principal, Augustin Salcedo, was killed after he was abducted from a restaurant along with five other men while he and his wife were visiting her hometown of Gomez Palacio, in the northern state of Durango. The motive for the mass abduction remains unclear.

Other Americans appear to have been specifically targeted.

U.S. anti-kidnapping expert Felix Batista was abducted by gunmen in December 2008 in the northern city of Saltillo, where he had gone to advise local businessmen on how to avoid becoming victims of the country's wave of kidnappings. He has not been found.

"I see it as, my brother was interfering with their profit margin," said Batista's sister, Jackie Batista. "That's their line of business. Other than drugs, it's kidnapping, so people want to know how to keep themselves safe, and that intrudes into their profit margin."

More than a year after his disappearance, nobody knows for sure who took Batista.

The prosecutors' office in the state of Coahuila, where Saltillo is located, confirmed that no trace of Batista has been found, and they now consider it an inactive case.

"I think that's my biggest fear," Batista said. "That this case will never be resolved. ... Excuse the phrase, and I hate to use it, that it has gone to the grave with those people who were involved."

Americans whose relatives have become victims of Mexico's drug war have established an informal group to support one another and stay informed about what is happening south of the border. "America needs to wake up and smell the kidnappings, smell the drug war," Batista says.

She frequently keeps in touch with San Antonio, Texas resident Jose Esparza, whose two brothers and sister were kidnapped in the northern Mexico town of Cuencame more than a year ago; all were U.S. residents and had spouses or children who are U.S. citizens. As with Felix Batista, there has been no request for ransom, and no sign of the victims.

Esparza says that in Texas alone he has heard from about 10 other people with relatives or friends who disappeared in Mexico.

He and others say they have obtained little or no response from Mexican authorities. Esparza now places his faith in the possibility the U.S. may begin to directly investigate the cases.

"Unless the U.S. government gets involved, nothing is ever going to happen," he said.

FBI officials are aiding Mexican authorities in the investigation into the March 13 killings of U.S. consular employee Lesley A. Enriquez, 35, who was four months pregnant, and her husband, Arthur H. Redelfs, 34.

They were gunned down in their white SUV on a Ciudad Juarez street as they were leaving the birthday party of a child of a U.S. Consulate employee. Their 7-month-old daughter was found wailing in the back of the vehicle.

Investigators are following several lines of investigation as to why gunmen followed the couple's vehicle and a second white SUV that left the same party and was hit in a separate, nearly simultaneous attack. Jorge Alberto Salcido, the husband of a Mexican employee of the consulate, was killed in that assault.

One theory being investigated is that assailants may have been ordered to attack a white SUV, staked out the wrong party and then opened fire on the wrong vehicles.

Another line of investigation is that Redelfs was being targeted because of his work at an El Paso prison, which is holding several members of the Aztecas gang, believed responsible for the attacks.

More than 200 federal, state and local law enforcement officers swept through El Paso on Thursday, picking up suspected members of the gang in an effort to find new leads in the killings.

Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes does not think the victims were targeted because of their U.S. ties. "I do not think this was a message to the consulate," Reyes said.

But Enriquez's cousin Vicky Torres doesn't see it that way.

"It's a message for the United States, like a challenge: 'Don't you mess around, you Americans, because this will happen,'" she said.

Lourdes Batista, the kidnap victim's wife, says she hopes the crimes will be a wake-up call for the American public.

"I pray that it will be," she said. "We're fighting a war across a big ocean, but what about here? What about our neighbor?"

(This version CORRECTS the total number of deaths in the drug war to 17,900 instead of 17,000). )

http://www.foxnews.com/world/ci.Mexico%27s+drug+war+takes+growing+toll+on+Americans.opinionPrint

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Greeting Cards Gone Wild

Don't be surprised these days, when you're searching for that perfect Easter, Mother's Day or birthday card, if you run across a little soft porn on the shelves.

The photo shows a couple lying in bed, seductively entwined. The words accompanying it detail a sexual fantasy.

It's not a page out of a steamy magazine. It's the front of a greeting card, prominently displayed close to wholesome birthday cards for friends and family.

Don't be surprised these days, when you're searching for that perfect Easter, Mother's Day or birthday card, if you run across a little soft porn on the shelves.

Greeting cards have come a long way since they came on the scene some 150 years ago. Loving sentiments abound, but the more sexually explicit variety has increased dramatically in the last few decades.

"If you'd shown these to my grandmother 40 years ago, she would have been in shock," says Chris Gacek, senior fellow with the conservative Family Research Council.

Cards showing bare behinds, barely covered breasts, lewd sentiments and off-color humor are pushing the envelope of decency. They're meant for adults only, but anyone can buy them.

What's more, anyone can see them -- including children.

In one Manhattan pharmacy, a card that shows a man's very hairy, bare behind sits right above a card with a rubber ducky on the front and another with a cartoon character. All the cards are at a toddler's eye level.

Today, regulating bodies monitor just about every area of public consumption. There are decency standards for television, radio and cable. Movies are rated by the Motion Picture Association of America. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has parental warnings on CDs. And many states and municipalities regulate the public display of adult magazines.

But the greeting card industry has no controls.

Jack Withiam, of the Executive Committee of the Greeting Card Association, says any kind of government controls over the written word are a violation of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. "Let the marketplace play itself out," he says.

"And if people are not buying a certain card, I assure you retailers are not going to carry it. And I would think that if they have objections about cards, that they may be offensive to them, they may start separating them in their retailer stores. But I don't think you can regulate or legislate that kind of decision."

Hallmark agrees. As the greeting card giant celebrates its 100th anniversary, its spokeswoman, Linda O'Dell, says "cards have always reflected what's going on in the culture."

In the 1940's and '50s, Mother's Day cards were filled with images of mom cooking in the kitchen or ironing in the den. A Father's Day card showed dad golfing or tinkering with the car.

But gender roles have changed, and greeting cards have followed suit. The trend toward raunchy, humor-filled cards shows how society's moral standards have changed as well.

Gacek blames a culture dominated by sexual images. "All this stuff sort of pervades through the culture, whether it's billboards or greeting cards, book covers.... It has an effect and they all sort of rise or sink together."

Greeting cards, in effect, have operated below the radar, because the bigger issue for an organization like the Family Research Council has been fighting pornography and obscenity. For the federal government to prosecute even adult obscenity, Gacek says, "it has to involve child pornography, or some kind of incredibly deviant behavior."

He says if that's the threshold for what's deemed illegal or inappropriate, then the book and greeting card publishing industry have a lot of wiggle room.

But the off-color, make you blush, potty mouth cards are only a small part of the $7.5 billion greeting card business. And O'Dell explains that it's about reaching and touching someone special, in a special way. Not everyone's going to get the joke.

"When you have cards that are relevant to a wide range of people," she says, "you're going to find people that it offends. Our intention is to have a wide variety in the spirit of kindness."

But Gacek still would like it if they weren't out in the open, where everyone can see them.

"The industry might segregate those cards," he said, "put them in a wrapper or something, so you know something about them or avoid them, and that I think would be fair. They should at least do that."

http://www.foxnews.com/us/society/ci.Greeting+Cards+Gone+Wild.opinionPrint

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Evidence Found Rotting in Closed Ill. Police HQ

Nearly 200 guns, narcotics and rape kits rotting in an unplugged refrigerator were left behind by a police department that shut down two years ago. 

CHICAGO - A sheriff's department in suburban Chicago has been shocked to find a roomful of evidence left behind by a village police department that shut down two years ago -- including a moldy sexual assault kit that authorities said linked a man to the 2006 rape of a 13-year-old girl, nearly 200 guns and hundreds of bags of narcotics, officials said Friday.

In all, seven rape kits had been left rotting in an unplugged refrigerator in the former Ford Heights Police Department, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said. The guns had not been registered with the state as having been seized by police, and Dart's spokesman Steve Patterson said none of the DNA evidence found matches anyone in the state's database.

"You're not talking about ineptness, neglect, you're talking about outrageous conduct of a police department that didn't care about the residents out there," Dart said.

His deputies have been patrolling Ford Heights for the past few years after financial problems forced the village to lay off most of its 16 police officers. The sheriff's department took over completely in 2008, after two years of sharing duties with what was left of the police department, because the last few Ford Heights officers simply stopped showing up for work, Dart said.

"They just vanished," he said. Cook County deputies didn't use the police department's headquarters, because the former chief, Earl Bridges, continued working in some capacity regarding code enforcement. But Dart said he became uncomfortable with Bridges remaining in the building after it became clear the sheriff's department would be handling law enforcement in Ford Heights for the foreseeable future.

"At that point, I said enough's enough, he's got to go, we're taking over," said the sheriff, who ordered Bridges to leave last spring.

That was when deputies opened the door to the evidence room.

Detectives were stunned by what they learned about the sexual assault of the girl -- and the apparent lack of any meaningful investigation of a case in which there was a great deal of evidence against one man.

"What happened to this girl is unconscionable," said Dart, whose office arrested 27-year-old Marquis Deering this week. "She thought nothing was going to happen to him."

Ford Heights police never interviewed Deering, whose criminal history includes 15 arrests since 2001 and a conviction for aggravated vehicular manslaughter, Dart said. He said it's unclear whether they ever interviewed the girl.

Ford Heights police received a report from police in nearby Chicago Heights who interviewed the girl at a Chicago Heights hospital, Dart said. They also received a state crime lab report that concluded DNA linked Deering to the assault.

"They had it," Dart said. "And they did nothing with it."

Bridges could not be reached for comment. A woman who answered the phone at a listing for an Earl Bridges refused to comment before hanging up the telephone. Ford Heights Mayor Charles Griffin did not immediately return calls for comment.

The girl told Dart's detectives that she was walking home when Deering offered her a ride in a van. She said he indicated he had a weapon, forced her to drink alcohol until she became unconscious and drove her to a house where he assaulted her.

Deering is being represented by the Cook County Public Defender's Office. It did not have an immediate comment Friday.

Dart's office said in a news release that Deering, who is in state prison and was scheduled to be released next week, initially denied the allegations, then said he had sex with the girl but did not rape her. He has been charged with criminal sexual assault, and his bond set at $100,000.

Dart's office is investigating whether Deering may be involved in other sexual assaults.

The sheriff said his office also is looking into whether criminal charges can be brought against anyone at the Ford Heights Police Department, but he acknowledged that's not likely.

"It's hard to come up with the required criminal intent," Dart said.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/crime/ci.Evidence+Found+Rotting+in+Closed+Ill.+Police+HQ.opinionPrint

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From MSNBC

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NYC couple: Cops have wrong address — again

NEW YORK - An elderly Brooklyn couple say they're tired of hearing the phrase, "Police! Open up!"

Walter Martin, an 83-year-old World War II veteran, and his wife Rose, 82, tell the New York Daily News police have come looking for criminals at their house about 50 times in the past eight years.

It's not clear why.

The Daily News reported its computer search showed 15 other people living at the Marine Park address. The Martins don't know any of them.

Police arrive from all over — from Staten Island precincts to the Bronx — and bang on the door of the Martins' two-story home searching for a different suspect — from alleged murderers to robbers to rogue cops — nearly every time, according to the Daily News.

"I'm really worried," Rose Martin told the paper. "How could so many people get my address and how could cops be coming from so many different precincts?"

Police puzzled

The couple said one of the most bizarre mix-ups came on Oct. 10, 2006, when police and FBI agents rolled up, hunting for then-cop Angel Negron, who was later charged with raping his 14-year-old stepdaughter. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was fired.

"That is one I can't get over," Walter Martin said, unable to understand how the NYPD could not know how to quickly find one of its own.

Even police don't understand why the couple's home continues to be a target.

"Our identity theft squad is investigating the matter," Inspector Ed Mullen, an NYPD spokesman, told the Daily News. He said the NYPD's identity theft squad is investigating.

Earlier this week, officers pounded on both their front and back doors.

Walter Martin says they're respectful — but it still makes his blood pressure soar.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35929337/ns/us_news-weird_news/print/1/displaymode/1098/

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