Suicide bombers hit two Moscow subway stations

At least 35 people are killed and many hurt as two female suicide bombers blow themselves up.

From the Associated Press

12:04 AM PDT, March 29, 2010

Moscow

Two female suicide bombers blew themselves up on Moscow's subway system as it was jam-packed with rush-hour passengers Monday, killing at least 35 people and wounding more than 30, the city's mayor and other officials said.

Emergency Ministry spokeswoman Svetlana Chumikova said 23 people were killed at the Lubyanka station in central Moscow. The station is underneath the building that houses the main offices of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the KGB's main successor agency.

A second explosion hit the Park Kultury station about 45 minutes later. Chumikova said at least 12 were dead there.

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said both explosions were believed to have been set off by female suicide bombers as the trains entered the stations. In the first case, officials said the explosion was on the train; there was no immediate information on the location of the second blast.

"The first data that the FSB has given us is that there were two female suicide bombers," Luzhkov told reporters at the Park Kultury site.

Russia's top investigative body also said terrorism was suspected.

The last confirmed terrorist attack in Moscow was in August 2004, when a suicide bomber blew herself up outside a city subway station, killing 10 people.

Responsibility for that blast was claimed by Chechen rebels and suspicion in Monday's explosions is likely to focus on them and other separatist groups in the restive North Caucasus region.

The Moscow subway system is one of the world's busiest, carrying around 7 million passengers on an average workday, and is a key element in running the sprawling and traffic-choked city.

The blasts practically paralyzed movement in the city center as emergency vehicles sped to the stations. Helicopters hovered over the Park Kultury station area, which is near the renowned Gorky Park.

Passengers, many of them in tears, streamed out of the station, one man exclaiming over and over "This is how we live!"

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-moscow-blast29-2010mar29,0,5589127,print.story

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Search teams fan out to look for Mitrice Richardson

Richardson, 24, was last seen Sept. 17 at the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff's Station. Volunteers searched skid row, Calabasas, Malibu, Santa Monica and Hollywood for the Cal State Fullerton graduate.

By Carla Rivera

March 29, 2010

Breahna Dawson last saw Mitrice Richardson during a service at the Pomona church they both attend. Dawson remembers the young woman's warm greeting and bright smile. There wasn't much conversation, but she appeared happy and at peace, Dawson said.

In the six months that Richardson has been missing, Dawson and other members of New Direction Community Church have prayed daily for her safe return and spent many hours passing out fliers.

On Sunday, several church members joined a group of volunteers in skid row in downtown, part of an expanded search that included teams in Malibu, Calabasas, Santa Monica and Hollywood. They walked neighborhood streets asking passersby if they had seen Richardson. "We just hope that she's safe, we don't want to think anything more than that," said Rhonda Minter, another church volunteer. "We just hope that someone is watching over her."

Richardson, 24, a Cal State Fullerton graduate, vanished after being released from the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff's Station after midnight on Sept. 17, 2009. She had no car, no purse and no cellphone. She had been arrested at a Malibu restaurant for not paying a dinner bill and was reported by staff to have been acting strangely. Authorities have searched the rugged hills and canyons of Malibu several times without finding a trace of her.

Chip Croft, an independent video producer who helped to coordinate Sunday's event, said there have been several credible sightings of Richardson downtown. With numerous homeless shelters, single-room occupancy hotels and social service centers, skid row is a place where someone like Richardson, who is thought to have had no money and may have been suffering from emotional problems, might end up, Croft said.

"I've been chasing leads all over town," said Croft, who has also put up several videos on YouTube concerning Richardson. "We had a good lead down here in December, but it turned out not to be the right woman."

Even as he spoke, his cellphone rang with news from Hollywood of a woman reporting that someone who looks like Richardson was living in her apartment building. Richardson's aunt, Lauren Sutton, was sent to check out the tip.

Standing near the corner of 6th and San Pedro streets, Quincy Robertson said that after he saw a picture of Richardson on a flier at the Midnight Mission, he remembered seeing someone resembling her on nearby Gladys Avenue back in December. It is easy to spot someone who is new in the area, he said.

"Most of the time they look lost," Robertson said. "From her picture, she don't look like the type that's just going to walk away from what she's got. I hope and pray she finds her way back home."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-mitrice-search29-2010mar29,0,1656998,print.story

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Three arrested in Midwest after FBI raids

At least one of the raids is said to target a Christian militia group in Michigan. Other raids take place in Ohio and Indiana. Some of those arrested face gun charges.

Associated Press

March 29, 2010

Adrian, Mich.

The FBI said Sunday that agents conducted weekend raids in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio and arrested at least three people, and a militia leader in Michigan said the target of at least one of the raids was a Christian militia group.

Federal warrants were sealed, but a federal law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity said some of those arrested faced gun charges and officials were pursuing other suspects.

FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said there had been activity in two southern Michigan counties near the Ohio state line. She wouldn't say whether they were tied to the raids in the other states.

FBI spokesman Scott Wilson in Cleveland said agents arrested two people Saturday after raids in two Ohio towns. A third arrest Sunday in northeast Illinois stemmed from a raid Saturday just over the border in northwest Indiana, both part of an ongoing investigation led by the FBI in Michigan, according to a statement from agents in Illinois.

George Ponce, 18, who works at a pizzeria next door to a home raided in Hammond, Ind., said he and a few co-workers stepped outside for a break Saturday night and saw a swarm of law enforcement officers.

"I heard a yell, 'Get back inside!' and saw a squad member pointing a rifle at us," Ponce said. "They told us the bomb squad was going in, sweeping the house looking for bombs."

He said another agent was in the bushes near the house, and law enforcement vehicles were "all over." He estimated that agents took more than two dozen guns from the house.

Michael Lackomar, a spokesman for the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia, said one of his members got a frantic phone call Saturday evening from members of Hutaree, a Christian militia group, who said their property in southwest Michigan was being raided by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

"They said they were under attack by the ATF and wanted a place to hide," Lackomar said. "My team leader said, 'No thanks.' "

The team leader was cooperating with the FBI on Sunday, Lackomar said. He said his militia wasn't affiliated with Hutaree, which says on its website that it is "prepared to defend all those who belong to Christ and save those who aren't."

"We believe that one day, as prophecy says, there will be an Anti-Christ. All Christians must know this and prepare, just as Christ commanded," Hutaree's website says. "Jesus wanted us to be ready to defend ourselves using the sword and stay alive using equipment."

An e-mail sent to the group by the Associated Press wasn't returned Sunday, and phone numbers for the group's leadership were not immediately available.

Berchtold, the FBI spokeswoman in Michigan, said she could neither confirm nor deny whether the raids were connected to Hutaree.

Lackomar said none of the raids focused on his group, which is affiliated with the Michigan Militia, a larger umbrella group. Lackomar said about eight to 10 members of Hutaree had trained with his group twice in the last three years. The Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia holds monthly sessions on survival training and shooting practice, Lackomar said.

Police swarmed a rural, wooded property about 7 p.m. Saturday outside Adrian, about 70 miles southwest of Detroit, said Evelyn Reitz, who lives about half a mile away.

She said several police cars, with lights flashing, were still there Sunday evening and 15 to 20 officers were stationed in the area.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fbi-raids29-2010mar29,0,5168373,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Obama Team Is Divided on Tactics Against Terrorism

WASHINGTON — Senior lawyers in the Obama administration are deeply divided over some of the counterterrorism powers they inherited from former President George W. Bush , according to interviews and a review of legal briefs.

The rift has been most pronounced between top lawyers in the State Department and the Pentagon, though it has also involved conflicts among career Justice Department lawyers and political appointees throughout the national security agencies.

The discussions, which shaped classified court briefs filed this month, have centered on how broadly to define the types of terrorism suspects who may be detained without trials as wartime prisoners. The outcome of the yearlong debate could reverberate through national security policies, ranging from the number of people the United States ultimately detains to decisions about who may be lawfully selected for killing using drones.

“Beyond the technical legal issues, this debate is about the fundamental question of whom we are at war with,” said Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor who specializes in war-power issues. “The two problems most plaguing Obama in the war on terrorism are trials for terrorists and taking the fight beyond Afghanistan to places like Pakistan and Yemen. This issue of whom we are at war with defines both of them.”

In the years after the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Bush claimed virtually unlimited power as commander in chief to detain those he deemed a threat — a view so boundless that his Justice Department once told a court that it was within the president's lawful discretion to imprison as an enemy combatant even a “little old lady in Switzerland” who had unwittingly donated to Al Qaeda .

But President Obama and his team, which criticized such claims as an overreach, have sought to demonstrate that the executive branch can wage war while also respecting limits imposed on presidential power by what they see as the rule of law.

In March 2009, the Obama legal team adopted a new position about who was detainable in the war on terrorism — one that showed greater deference to the international laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions , than Mr. Bush had. But what has not been known is that while the administration has stuck to that broad principle, it has been arguing over how to apply the body of law, which was developed for conventional armies, to a war against a terrorist organization.

An examination of that conflict offers rich insight into how the team of former law professors and campaign lawyers, nearly all veterans of the Clinton administration, is shaping important policies under Mr. Obama.

In February 2009, just weeks after the inauguration, John D. Bates, a federal judge overseeing several cases involving detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, asked a provocative question: Did the new administration want to modify Mr. Bush's position that the president could wield sweeping powers to imprison people without trial as wartime detainees?

Career Justice Department lawyers handling Guantánamo lawsuits feared that rolling back the Bush position might make it harder to win. And the new acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel — David Barron, a Harvard law professor and co-author of a lengthy law review critique of Bush administration claims that the commander in chief can override statutes — worried that Judge Bates had given them too little time to devise the answer.

But the White House counsel, Greg Craig, a campaign adviser to Mr. Obama who had been a foreign policy official in the Clinton administration, saw this as an important opportunity to demonstrate a break with Mr. Bush. And at a White House meeting, Mr. Obama weighed in, declaring that he did not want to invoke unrestrained commander-in-chief powers in detention matters.

With the president's directions in hand, Mr. Obama's Justice Department came back on March 13, 2009, with a more modest position than Mr. Bush had advanced. It told Judge Bates that the president could detain without trial only people who were part of Al Qaeda or its affiliates, or their “substantial” supporters. The department rooted that power in the authorization granted by Congress to use military force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. And it acknowledged that the scope and limits of that power were defined by the laws of war, as translated to a conflict against terrorists.

But behind closed doors, the debate flared again that summer, when the Obama administration confronted the case of Belkacem Bensayah, an Algerian man who had been arrested in Bosnia — far from the active combat zone — and was being held without trial by the United States at Guantánamo. Mr. Bensayah was accused of facilitating the travel of people who wanted to go to Afghanistan to join Al Qaeda. A judge found that such “direct support” was enough to hold him as a wartime prisoner, and the Justice Department asked an appeals court to uphold that ruling.

The arguments over the case forced onto the table discussion of lingering discontent at the State Department over one aspect of the Obama position on detention. There was broad agreement that the law of armed conflict allowed the United States to detain as wartime prisoners anyone who was actually a part of Al Qaeda, as well as nonmembers who took positions alongside the enemy force and helped it. But some criticized the notion that the United States could also consider mere supporters, arrested far away, to be just as detainable without trial as enemy fighters.

That view was amplified after Harold Koh, a former human-rights official and Yale Law School dean who had been a leading critic of the Bush administration's detainee policies, became the State Department's top lawyer in late June. Mr. Koh produced a lengthy, secret memo contending that there was no support in the laws of war for the United States' position in the Bensayah case.

Mr. Koh found himself in immediate conflict with the Pentagon's top lawyer, Jeh C. Johnson, a former Air Force general counsel and trial lawyer who had been an adviser to Mr. Obama during the presidential campaign. Mr. Johnson produced his own secret memorandum arguing for a more flexible interpretation of who could be detained under the laws of war — now or in the future.

In September 2009, national-security officials from across the government packed into the Office of Legal Counsel's conference room on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, lining the walls, to watch Mr. Koh and Mr. Johnson debate around a long table. It was up to Mr. Barron, who sat at the head of the table, to decide who was right.

But he did not. Instead, days later, he circulated a preliminary draft memorandum stating that while the Office of Legal Counsel had found no precedents justifying the detention of mere supporters of Al Qaeda who were picked up far away from enemy forces, it was not prepared to state any definitive conclusion.

So with no consensus, the legal team decided on a tactical approach. For as long as possible they would try to avoid that hard question. They changed the subject by instead asking courts to agree that people like Mr. Bensayah, looked at from another angle, had performed functions that made them effectively part of the terrorist organization — and so were clearly detainable.

The appeals court has not yet ruled on Mr. Bensayah's case. But the hours and effort that high-level officials expended on wrestling over adjustments to the reasoning in his case — only to reach the same outcome, that he was detainable without trial — dovetailed with a pattern identified by critics as varied as civil libertarians and former Bush lawyers.

“I think the change in tone has been important and has helped internationally,” said John B. Bellinger III, a top Bush era National Security Council and State Department lawyer. “But the change in law has been largely cosmetic. And of course there has been no change in outcome.”

But at a recent American Bar Association event, Mr. Koh argued that the administration's changes — including requiring strict adherence to anti-torture rules and ensuring that all detainees are being held pursuant to recognizable legal authorities — have been meaningful. The United States, he said, can now defend its national-security policies as fully compliant with domestic and international law under “common and universal standards, not double standards.”

“We are not saying that we don't have to fight battles,” he said. “We're just saying that we should fight those battles within the framework of law.”

Last week, in another speech, Mr. Koh also for the first time outlined portions of the administration's legal rationale for targeted killings using drone strikes, which some scholars have criticized. His remarks, however, focused on issues like whether it was lawful to single out specific enemy figures for killing — not defining the limits of who may be deemed an enemy.

But Mr. Feldman, the Harvard professor, said the detention debate also had “serious consequences” for the targeted killings policy because, “If we're at war with you, then we can detain you — but we can also try to kill you.”

That said, he cautioned, additional factors complicate the analysis of selecting lawful targets. Among them, it is not clear whether Mr. Obama is more willing in classified settings to assert that, as commander in chief, he can use drone strikes to defend the country against perceived threats that cannot be linked to the Congressionally authorized war against Al Qaeda.

And even in detention matters, Bush-era theories have remained attractive to some. This January, two appeals court judges appointed by Mr. Bush — Janice Rogers Brown and Brett M. Kavanaugh, both of whom had been singled out by Democrats after their nominations as too ideological — reopened the debate by unexpectedly declaring, in another Guantánamo case, that the laws of armed conflict did not limit the president's war powers.

In the Justice Department, career litigators who defend against Guantánamo lawsuits wanted to embrace that reasoning, arguing it would help them win. Judges have sided with detainees seeking release in some 34 of 46 cases to date — though the decisions largely turned on skepticism about specific evidence, not the general legal theory about who was detainable.

But political appointees — including Mr. Barron, Mr. Koh and even Mr. Johnson — criticized the reasoning of the appeals court ruling as vulnerable to reversal and argued that the administration should not abandon its respect for the laws of war.

In classified briefs filed in several detainee cases this month, officials said, the Justice Department adopted an ambivalent stance. It cited the ruling as a precedent while also reasserting its own contradictory argument that the laws of war matter. The debate would go on.

“We'll see how the cases develop,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in an interview in February, in the midst of that latest round. But, he added, “I don't think we are going to deviate from our argument.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/us/politics/29force.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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Coverage Now for Sick Children? Check Fine Print

WASHINGTON — Just days after President Obama signed the new health care law, insurance companies are already arguing that, at least for now, they do not have to provide one of the benefits that the president calls a centerpiece of the law: coverage for certain children with pre-existing conditions.

Mr. Obama, speaking at a health care rally in northern Virginia on March 19, said, “Starting this year, insurance companies will be banned forever from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions.”

The authors of the law say they meant to ban all forms of discrimination against children with pre-existing conditions like asthma , diabetes , birth defects , orthopedic problems, leukemia, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease . The goal, they say, was to provide those youngsters with access to insurance and to a full range of benefits once they are in a health plan.

To insurance companies, the language of the law is not so clear.

Insurers agree that if they provide insurance for a child, they must cover pre-existing conditions. But, they say, the law does not require them to write insurance for the child and it does not guarantee the “availability of coverage” for all until 2014.

William G. Schiffbauer, a lawyer whose clients include employers and insurance companies, said: “The fine print differs from the larger political message. If a company sells insurance, it will have to cover pre-existing conditions for children covered by the policy. But it does not have to sell to somebody with a pre-existing condition. And the insurer could increase premiums to cover the additional cost.”

Congressional Democrats were furious when they learned that some insurers disagreed with their interpretation of the law.

“The concept that insurance companies would even seek to deny children coverage exemplifies why we fought for this reform,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman , Democrat of California and chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV , Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the Senate commerce committee, said: “The ink has not yet dried on the health care reform bill, and already some deplorable health insurance companies are trying to duck away from covering children with pre-existing conditions. This is outrageous.”

The issue is one of many that federal officials are tackling as they prepare to carry out the law, with a huge stream of new rules, official guidance and brochures to educate the public. Their decisions will have major practical implications.

Insurers say they often limit coverage of pre-existing conditions under policies sold in the individual insurance market. Thus, for example, an insurer might cover a family of four, including a child with a heart defect, but exclude treatment of that condition from the policy.

The new law says that health plans and insurers offering individual or group coverage “may not impose any pre-existing condition exclusion with respect to such plan or coverage” for children under 19, starting in “plan years” that begin on or after Sept. 23, 2010.

But, insurers say, until 2014, the law does not require them to write insurance at all for the child or the family. In the language of insurance, the law does not include a “guaranteed issue” requirement before then.

Consumer advocates worry that instead of refusing to cover treatment for a specific pre-existing condition, an insurer might simply deny coverage for the child or the family.

“If you have a sick kid, the individual insurance market will continue to be a scary place,” said Karen L. Pollitz, a research professor at the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University .

Experts at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners share that concern.

“I would like to see the kids covered,” said Sandy Praeger, the insurance commissioner of Kansas. “But without guaranteed issue of insurance, I am not sure companies will be required to take children under 19.”

A White House spokesman said the administration planned to issue regulations setting forth its view that “the term ‘pre-existing' applies to both a child's access to a plan and his or her benefits once he or she is in a plan.” But lawyers said the rules could be challenged in court if they went beyond the law or were inconsistent with it.

Starting in January 2014, health plans will be required to accept everyone who applies for coverage.

Until then, people with pre-existing conditions could seek coverage in high-risk insurance pools run by states or by the secretary of health and human services. The new law provides $5 billion to help pay claims filed by people in those pools.

Federal officials will need to write rules or guidance to address a number of concerns. The issues to be resolved include defining the “essential health benefits” that must be offered by all insurers; deciding which dependents are entitled to stay on their parents' insurance; determining who qualifies for a “hardship exemption” from the requirement to have insurance; and deciding who is eligible for a new long-term care insurance program.

As originally conceived, most of the new federal requirements would have taken effect at the same time, in three or four years. The requirements for people to carry insurance, for employers to offer it and for insurers to accept all applicants were tied together.

But as criticism of their proposal grew, Democrats wanted to show that the legislation would produce immediate, tangible benefits. So they accelerated the ban on “pre-existing condition exclusions” for children.

Consumers will soon gain several other protections. By July 1, the health secretary must establish a Web site where people can identify “affordable health insurance coverage options.” The site is supposed to provide information about premiums, co-payments and the share of premium revenue that goes to administrative costs and profits, rather than medical care.

In addition, within six months, health plans must have “an effective appeals process,” so consumers can challenge decisions on coverage and claims.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/health/policy/29health.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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After Gang Crackdown, Police Become Targets

HEMET, Calif. — By the time four city trucks were set ablaze next to Hemet City Hall last week, the police here had become familiar with their new life under siege.

The arson was the most recent episode during four months of threats of violence and attempted attacks against peace officers in the city that officials say are reprisals for crackdowns on local motorcycle gangs.

Now this city of tract homes and trailer parks in Riverside County , about 80 miles east of Los Angeles, is on edge, with barricades and an iron fence going up around the Police Department downtown, “to prevent someone from lobbing a grenade or something in the window,” Police Chief Richard Dana said in an interview.

“We go around with a target painted on our backs,” Chief Dana said Friday. “Now, an officer walks out from roll call, then gets on his knees to look under his car and see that there's no bomb there.”

The Hemet Police Department, the state attorney general's office and federal agencies have raised a $200,000 reward for any information leading to an arrest and conviction in the attacks.

The trouble started for Hemet officials shortly after a gang task force began “putting pressure” on the Vagos motorcycle gang late last year by checking members for potential parole violations, said John Hall, a spokesman for the district attorney's office. “This group has parole violators and violent people,” he said. “There's a history of bar fights, identity theft, drug sales.”

On Dec. 31, someone used plastic tubing to reroute a natural gas pipeline to spew fumes into the headquarters of the county's gang task force unit in Hemet, Chief Dana said. Two officers entered the building, but smelled fumes and decided not to flip a light switch that might have ignited the building.

On Feb. 23, someone hooked a homemade gun to a gate outside the same building, rigging it to fire. One bullet whizzed past the head of an officer who tried to enter, missing him because the gate did not open fully.

On the morning of March 5, a crude pipe bomb was found strapped beneath an unmarked police car used by task force members as it sat parked outside a convenience store.

Just before sunrise on March 17, officers from local, state and federal agencies conducted a raid on Vagos members suspected of parole violations. Days later, a 911 caller threatened to blow up a patrol car within 48 hours “in retaliation for the raid,” Mr. Hall said. No attack took place.

In January, the Hemet police said that they suspected members of Vagos, the largest motorcycle gang in the state, with 600 members, as being behind the gas line booby trap, but Chief Dana said that the investigation in that case had expanded to other groups as well.

The Riverside County District Attorney's office continued to focus on Vagos as a group with potential ties to the attacks, Mr. Hall said Friday.

“The Vagos are a typical violent gang,” he said. “Vagos is a gang we've put pressure on. This was targeting gang task force members. Vagos has a history of trying to infiltrate and affect law enforcement operations.”

Pat Palafox, the Vagos president, said there was “no connection between Vagos and any attacks.”

He said those arrested during the March 17 raid “weren't current members of the club.”

“Vagos is a brotherhood,” said Mr. Palafox, 47. “We support each other. Like any organization, there are people off the grid. But Vagos get harassed by police more than any other motorcycle clubs, or any gangs around here.”

The city of Hemet is about 27 square miles of flat streets and low buildings near the base of the San Jacinto Mountains, where land abutting the yellow hills is cheap compared with Los Angeles and San Diego.

“That brought young families,” Chief Dana said, “but it also drew people wanting to take advantage.”

A housing boom in the last decade nearly doubled the population to more than 100,000, he said.

The gang task force — an amalgam of the local police, sheriff's deputies and state and federal agencies — has used parole sweeps to monitor the county's mix of white supremacist groups and street and motorcycle gangs.

“Clearly, we irritated somebody somewhere along the line,” Chief Dana said. “However, I would've done it anyway. I don't like gang members. I don't like them making people scared to go to the store.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/us/29calif.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From MSNBC

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Foster parents feel the pinch in many states

INDIANAPOLIS - Indiana is trying to shift hundreds of foster children with medical, emotional or behavioral problems into cheaper care for children without special needs, a move that cuts payments to families who care for the state's most challenged children.

The change would give foster families less money to pay for therapy, food and clothing and other costs. And some fear that fewer families could volunteer for the job in the future because they'd have to cover the bills themselves.

Foster parents who provide homes for special-needs children are paid up to $100 a day. Under the state's new plan, many would receive $25 or less.

"Twenty-five bucks a day — it's not a lot," said foster parent Terry Blackburn of Brownsburg, Ind., who has fostered more than 100 children with his wife, Ruth. "If you go buy a pair of shoes and a pair of pants for the kid, you've already spent your $25."

The changes, made quietly without public attention, come as officials are attempting to cut $56 million from the cost of providing for the more than 10,000 children who are in the state's care because they could not remain with their families. The Department of Child Services announced plans in late 2009 to cut payments to those who provide homes for the children by 10 percent. Overall, the cuts would reduce the state's costs by about 8 percent by June 2011.

Many other states, including Arizona, California, Missouri, Ohio and Utah, also have cut spending on children's services because of budget problems. Some states have reduced payments to foster homes or group facilities or considered laying off caseworkers.

'Getting pounded'

"The states are getting pounded, and this is one of the few times I've seen child welfare really get hit," said Michael Petit, president of the advocacy group Every Child Matters.

According to children's advocates, Indiana put its new policy on special needs children into effect at the beginning of the year when it directed private agencies that specialize in finding foster homes for hard-to-place children to begin offering traditional foster care as well. Then, the state began shifting special-needs children into the lower-cost care.

Children who have special needs include pregnant teenagers, victims of sexual abuse, infants born to drug-addicted moms, those with severe medical problems or with behavioral problems that lead them to act violently.

According to placement agencies, a 1-year-old boy born with cocaine and marijuana in his system and behavioral problems was placed in traditional care at one facility. Two siblings who had been sexually abused by relatives, including an 11-year-old girl who vandalized her foster home and threatened her foster mother, also were reclassified.

The state wouldn't say how many children have been reclassified. But one placement agency official said almost half his special-needs children were downgraded; another official said all the children at some agencies were affected.

DCS Director James W. Payne said in a Dec. 1 letter to providers that the agency had "reluctantly" ordered the 10 percent cut. Indiana's reimbursement rate for the traditional care, which would drop from $25 to $22.50, would remain among the nation's highest, he said. His letter did not mention shifting the special needs children.

"These have been incredibly difficult deliberations and everyone involved recognizes the magnitude of the decisions being made," the letter said.

Cuts blocked for now

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the cuts and reclassifications after foster parents and private agencies filed suit. The state is appealing the order.

Citing the litigation, DCS spokeswoman Anne Houseworth declined to comment on the cost-cutting measures. But she said the state's goal is to provide children the care they need while paying less when appropriate.

Foster parents and children's advocates say if the state prevails in court and proceeds with its plan, many children who need help won't receive it, and some won't find homes at all.

"They can't just lump all foster children together as one classification. It just doesn't work," said Judy Hurst of Carthage, Ind., who has cared for more than 300 foster children with severe needs in the last 20 years.

Hurst said she does not know how she and her husband, Denny, could continue at the lower rate.

They keep the doors locked and security cameras rolling at their house east of Indianapolis. Foster children have stolen from them or damaged their home. The Hursts currently are caring for a pregnant teenager and a boy Hurst describes as "probably the most abused child we've had in our 20 years."

"We've devoted our whole life to other peoples' kids," she said. "We don't want to stop doing this. We don't want to stop working with kids."

Chris Morrison, executive director of the Indiana Foster Care and Adoption Association, said foster and adoptive families can't shoulder the costs of the special therapy needed.

"There's this philosophy that's trying to be promoted that you're adopting out of love and therefore all of this should come out of your pocket. It's not a genuine reality," she said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36075351/ns/us_news-life/print/1/displaymode/1098/

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