Boy killed in 'choking game' prompts warnings about dangerous practice

The death of a 12-year-old Santa Monica boy who was playing a choking game has experts warning about the dangerous practice.

The goal of the game -- also known as "space monkey," "sleeper hold" and "funky chicken" -- is to restrict the blood flow to the brain and cause a quick euphoric sensation.

To accomplish it alone, a necktie, belt or other type of binding are used to put pressure on the carotid artery in the neck. The other method involves using a partner, who can apply pressure to the neck or chest until the subject passes out.

Officers found the boy in full cardiac arrest April 20 at his home in the 800 block of 18th Street after receiving an emergency call. He was transported to a local hospital, where he was taken off life support two days later and pronounced dead, the Santa Monica Police Department said.

Det. Maury Sumlin, of the Santa Monica Police Department, told KTLA News an autopsy and interviews with friends led to that conclusion. Police say the case is being investigated as an accidental death.

Officials at the boy's school said they planned to talk to parents about the issue soon. The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District notified students and parents at the school about the boy's death April 21 but called it only a "tragic accident." District Superintendent Tim Cuneo told KTLA there was no indication the game had become a trend among students.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/04/boy-killed-in-choking-game-prompts-warnings-about-dangerous-practice.html

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Taliban flogging video may show different girl, but message is the same

The Taliban did beat Chand Bibi publicly, and whether or not her ordeal was the one shown in a notorious video, the footage awakened Pakistan to the extent of the militant group's reach.

By Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times

April 29, 2010

Reporting from Kala Kalay, Pakistan

With each stroke of the teenage Taliban militant's lash, the girl's muffled cries pierced the air of this Swat Valley town. The men in the crowd watched silently, aching to intervene but frozen by gunmen pacing in front of them with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders.

A year later, those men say the images from that day remain etched in their memories. The teenage militant wore white. The girl, a 17-year-old named Chand Bibi, stood behind a hastily made screen of sheets and shawls as she was flogged. She kept crying out, "Why? Why?"

But the rest of the world saw something quite different in a fuzzy, two-minute video shot by a lawyer that purported to show Chand Bibi's flogging.

That video, made famous in the age of YouTube and cellphone downloads, stunned the country and gave the world a disturbing view of the plight of Pakistanis trapped in Taliban-controlled regions such as the Swat Valley.

Did the video show another flogging, or was it even staged? And if so, does it matter?

Activists say it doesn't. The Taliban did flog Chand Bibi publicly, they point out, after the young woman and her fiance had been seen together in her house, which in the view of insurgents was a violation of Islamic law.

And whether her ordeal was the one shown on the notorious video or not, it awakened a nation that had underestimated the extent of the Taliban's reach.

"It was the catalyst," said Talat Farooq, executive editor of Criterion, a Pakistani current affairs magazine published in Islamabad. "When people spoke out about this, the tide turned and made it possible for the army to move into Swat."

In great detail, the man who says he took the video, Swat Valley lawyer Shaukat Saleem, described what he saw and how he recorded the event. Chand Bibi was stretched out on the ground face down, with men holding her down by her feet and arms, he said.

A Taliban commander in a turban and gray tunic knelt down and flogged the girl 30 times. Saleem says he secretly filmed the event using a cellphone he hid in his coat. To make an opening for the lens, he cut a hole into the coat's fabric.

"Whenever the lash came down, she would cry, ‘They are killing me! They are killing me!' " Saleem said in an interview in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. "Tears were coming to my eyes. My whole body was in shock, but I steadied myself because I wanted to capture this video at any cost."

Villagers in Kala Kalay say that, indeed, they saw Chand Bibi, as well as her fiance, flogged by the Taliban. But that is where the accounts diverge. Villagers say they have never heard of Saleem, and believe the video probably was of another flogging, either elsewhere in Pakistan or in Afghanistan.

"Obviously, that video isn't of this flogging," said Jaffar Khan, Kala Kalay's mayor. "If [Saleem] claims it is, let him come here and say where it happened. He won't be able to."

Villagers say the couple were detained by the Taliban after someone reported seeing them alone together in her house, said the fiance's cousin, who asked not to be named. They were held in separate houses for six days and questioned.

Then, on a cloudy March afternoon, Taliban militants marched the fiance, Adalat Khan, and Chand Bibi out onto a patch of dirt near a line of fruit stalls and grocery stores, villagers said.

"The Taliban militant who flogged the boy said, ‘The punishment we are giving to this girl and boy is not for adultery, because we don't have evidence of that. But it's a warning,' "Khan's cousin said

Khan, flogged first, was given 35 lashes. Then screening was put up to shield the crowd's view of the girl. A teenaged Taliban insurgent walked up to her and struck her 17 times with the strap, villagers said.

"Everyone in the crowd was silent," said Mohammed Ullah Khan, a 35-year-old CD store owner whose shop had been blown up by insurgents. "There was this feeling among us that we were witnessing brutality, but no one could do anything. It was power and force on one side, and total helplessness on the other."

Chand Bibi and her family fled the village after the flogging. When Saleem was telephoned and asked to explain the discrepancies between his version of what happened and the Kala Kalay villagers' accounts, he hung up.

Even if Saleem's video was staged or depicted a different flogging, it had the effect of transforming Pakistan's collective mind-set at a crucial time.

Before the video, much of the country had been indifferent to the Taliban's conquest of Swat, a picturesque valley flanked by forested mountainsides, a favorite tourist getaway for Pakistanis. The Taliban gradually took over the region and imposed a strict code that barred girls from attending school, banned barbers from shaving customers and shut down all CD and music shops. Beheadings of opponents were common, as was the display of executed corpses in the main plazas of cities and towns.

In Kala Kalay, the Taliban was both reviled and feared. "They issued an order that everyone walking down the street had to keep their head lowered," said Khan, the mayor. If a militant had his eye on a young Swati woman, Khan said, "he'd simply approach family and say, ‘I'm taking this girl.' "

Once the video appeared on the Internet and on newscasts, Pakistanis took to the streets to call for military action in Swat.

"You had women policymakers cajoling the menfolk that something needed to be done," said Asma Jahangir, chairwoman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. "People were less willing to sit back and do nothing."

The Pakistani military mounted an all-out offensive against militants that routed the insurgency from the valley within nine weeks. Pockets of militants remain holed up in remote hillsides and woods, but refugees have returned, schools have reopened and for the most part everyday life in Swat has resumed.

The flogging video wasn't the only catalyst for the restoration of normality in Swat, but it played a crucial role, Farooq said. While there may be doubts about its veracity, the message pushed the right buttons.

"I don't think that the purpose was to deceive people," Farooq said. "The purpose was to show what was happening. OK, maybe it wasn't Chand Bibi. But it happened to a woman, and in a very undignified way."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/asia/la-fg-pakistan-flogging-20100429,0,4909489,print.story

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Afghan Taliban getting stronger, Pentagon says

A Pentagon assessment, while expressing confidence in U.S. strategy, says the movement has flourished despite repeated assaults.

By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times

April 29, 2010

Reporting from Washington

A Pentagon report presented a sobering new assessment Wednesday of the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, saying that its abilities are expanding and its operations are increasing in sophistication, despite recent major offensives by U.S. forces in the militants' heartland.

The report, requested by Congress, portrays an insurgency with deep roots and broad reach, able to withstand repeated U.S. onslaughts and to reestablish its influence, while discrediting and undermining the country's Western-backed government.

But the Pentagon said it remained optimistic that its counter-insurgency strategy, formed after an Obama administration review last year, and its effort to peel foot soldiers away from the Taliban will show success in months to come.

The assessment follows a U.S.-led offensive in Afghanistan's Helmand province and the capture of several senior Taliban leaders, developments portrayed by the Pentagon as a boost to the momentum behind allied troops in the nearly 9-year-old war. Those successes backed the view that President Obama's decision to deploy 30,000 additional U.S. forces had begun to show positive results.

The next phase of U.S. strategy is expected to begin in the coming weeks, as U.S. and Afghan forces step up operations around the city of Kandahar, the spiritual capital of the Taliban movement.

The new report offers a grim take on the likely difficulty of establishing lasting security, especially in southern Afghanistan, where the insurgency enjoys broad support. The conclusions raise the prospect that the insurgency in the south may never be completely vanquished, but instead must be contained to prevent it from threatening the government of President Hamid Karzai.

The report concludes that Afghan people support or are sympathetic to the insurgency in 92 of 121 districts identified by the U.S. military as key terrain for stabilizing the country. Popular support for Karzai's government is strong in only 29 of those districts, it concludes.

U.S.-led military operations have had "some success in clearing insurgents from their strongholds, particularly in central Helmand," the report said. But it adds: "The insurgent tactic of re-infiltrating the cleared areas to perform executions has played a role in dissuading locals from siding with the Afghan government, which has complicated efforts to introduce local governance."

The report concurs with earlier findings by the U.S. commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, and others that violence in Afghanistan began to level off in the first months of 2010. But the Pentagon also notes that Afghan insurgents consider 2009, Obama's first year in office, to be their most successful year because of their ability to increase the level of violence.

The report issued Wednesday examines the period between October and the end of March, and is the first since the Obama administration put its new strategy in place.

A senior Defense official who briefed reporters on the report said violence increased last year in part because of the additional U.S. troops.

"The level of violence has gone up in our judgment … because we have more forces confronting the Taliban in more areas," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The official acknowledged the assessment of the insurgency was more pessimistic than in previous assessments. "This is a very serious and sober report," he said.

There are currently about 87,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan, a number expected to rise to 98,000 by the end of August.

Military officials expect insurgents to try and further step up the use of roadside bombs to increase NATO casualties in 2010. Following the announcement of the U.S. troop surge, insurgent leaders shifted from direct attacks to roadside bombs and other indirect assaults.

The insurgency has easy access to fighters, small arms and explosives for roadside bombs, the report notes, giving fighters a "robust means" to sustain military operations.

"A ready supply of recruits is drawn from the frustrated population, where insurgents exploit poverty, tribal friction, and lack of governance to grow their ranks," the report said.

The report also notes that insurgents' tactics are increasing in sophistication and the militants have also become more able to achieve broader strategic effects with successful attacks. The Taliban continue to use threats and targeted killings to intimidate the Afghan population.

At the same time, Taliban shadow governments, which can include courts and basic social services, have strengthened, undermining the authority of the Afghan government, according to the report.

Taliban leaders also have undermined the credibility of the central Afghan government by leveling accusations of corruption -- many of them accurate -- against local and regional officials, the report said. Information operations and media campaigns are a particular strength, the report said.

Obama administration officials angered by inefficiency and corruption have been at odds with Karzai's government for months. The relationship soured especially after widespread allegations of fraud surfaced in last August's presidential election.

Obama delivered a critique on corruption during a trip to Kabul in March. White House aides publicized it, angering Karzai. Good governance is a key element of new U.S. counterinsurgency strategy.

The Pentagon also expects insurgent leaders to try and expand their operations in western and northern Afghanistan this year to try and decrease Afghan participation in this year's parliamentary election.

U.S. and allied officials have stressed the importance of improving the Afghan security forces. But the report notes that efforts to enhance the Afghan national army have made "slow progress" over the last year, due largely to "high attrition and low retention" of recruits.

U.S. commanders said Afghan troops who supported Marines in the battle to end Taliban control of Marja early this year were better than those who fought in similar circumstances last year, but still need much more training.

Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, the Marine commander in the Marja operation, said he would give some Afghan units an A-minus or B-plus. But others, particularly those with soldiers fresh from basic training, performed much worse.

Despite the view of an insurgency gaining in strength, the western military effort also has some important advantages, the report said. A survey conducted in March showed 52% of Afghans blame insurgents for insecurity in the country, while a minority blame the Afghan security forces.

"This perception provides an opportunity for the Afghan Government, with the support of the international community, to improve its legitimacy and enhance popular perceptions of the government," the report said.

The assessment also reported "fissures" among insurgent groups, particularly at the local level. As a result, insurgents often have difficulty coordinating their operations.

The report also said that insurgent attacks on Afghan civilians continue to undermine its efforts.

U.S. officials have taken steps to reduce unintended civilian casualties, but similar orders by Taliban leaders have had little effect, according to the Pentagon report.

Between October and March, the insurgency was responsible for 157 civilian deaths while NATO and Afghan security forces were responsible for 68, according to the report.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-fg-0429-us-afghan-20100429,0,1615302,print.story

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Humanitarian aid caravan is attacked in Oaxaca

One person has been confirmed dead after an attack on an international humanitarian caravan near an autonomous municipality in Mexico's southern state of Oaxaca, several news outlets are reporting . The three-vehicle caravan was taking food and supplies Tuesday to San Juan Copala , a small Triqui ethnic community that has been blockaded by paramilitaries as part of a sustained conflict with the self-declared autonomous government of San Juan Copala.

Details on the attack remain scarce because Oaxacan state authorities have not been able to confirm the incident as of Wednesday and the area still appears to be blockaded, said Kristin Bricker, an independent American freelance journalist with extensive experience covering southern Mexico. Bricker has a report on the attack here .

On Tuesday afternoon, as the caravan passed the nearby town of La Sabana, gunmen hiding in roadside brush opened fire on the travelers, wounding at least 15 and reportedly kiling two, news reports said, citing non-official sources. German, Finnish, Italian, and Belgian citizens were traveling with the group as observers or volunteers. At least two journalists in the caravan have been reported " disappeared ."

"This is far from the first time they've killed people from San Juan Copola," Bricker told La Plaza. "And it's not the first time they've attacked a caravan."

Al Jazeera has a report on the incident in English, noting that the community has been subjected to a series of attacks and blockades by suspected paramilitaries in recent years, resulting in several deaths. The gunmen in Tuesday's attack have been identited as members of a paramilitary group known by its Spanish acronym UBISORT. The group is said to be tied to the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), La Jornada reports .

The group is labeled a paramilitary organization by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees , but UBISORT has distanced itself from the incident, according to this report .

"UBISORT prior to the caravan sent out a communique saying they were not going to let the caravan pass through La Sabana, and they were not responsible for what could happen," Bricker said.

Bricker said one Mexican citizen is confirmed dead, identified as Alberta Cariño, director of the community radio group CACTUS , which was hit by an attack in 2008 that left two women dead . In the San Juan Copala attack this week, a Finnish citizen is also believed to have been killed but that report has not been confirmed.

The caravan group consisted of representatives of CACTUS, the state teacher's union, and APPO, the umbrella organization that led a popular uprising against Oaxaca state Gov. Ulises Ruiz in 2006. American independent journalist Brad Will was among those who died in confrontations between the APPO and government-alligned forces in the course of the conflict.

* UPDATE: The Associated Press has confirmed the death of Finnish citizen Jyri Antero Jaakkola in the San Juan Copala attack.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2010/04/oaxaca-caravan-deaths.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LaPlaza+%28La+Plaza%29

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Mexico's treatment of immigrants slammed

Tens of thousands of Central Americans enter Mexico illegally every year, most with the hope of continuing on to the United States. But many stay in Mexico, at least for a time, where they may be beaten, killed, raped, kidnapped by criminal gangs, put in jail or shaken down by corrupt Mexican officials.

That is the grim conclusion of a new report by Amnesty International, Invisible Victims: Migrants on the Move in Mexico.

"It is one of the most dangerous journeys in the world," the human rights organization says. 

Amnesty International called on Mexican authorities to act urgently to protect migrants "who are preyed on by criminal gangs while public officials turn a blind eye or even play an active part" in the widespread abuse.

The government responded quickly, saying it "shared [Amnesty's] concern" and was working to find ways to ease the harrowing plight of migrants, among whom there is a growing number of women and children.

Many who set out for the United States from Guatemala, Honduras and other Central American countries end up staying in Mexico because they run out of money or learn that opportunities in the U.S. have dried up. As we reported   last year, this poses a dilemma for Mexico, even as the government here is demanding better treatment for its nationals in the United States:

The treatment of immigrants has become a divisive and embarrassing issue for Mexico. A country that has historically sent millions of its own people to the U.S. and elsewhere in search of work, Mexico has proved itself less than hospitable to Central Americans following the same calling.

The Amnesty report says that up to 60% of female migrants suffer some form of sexual abuse; migrants are routinely forced to pay bribes; detention centers are woefully overcrowded, and victims are too terrorized to make formal complaints, rendering them "invisible."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2010/04/mexicos-treatment-of-immigrants-slammed.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LaPlaza+%28La+Plaza%29

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‘Quiet Heroes' photo exhibit celebrates elderly survivors

The L.A. Artcore collection of black-and-white portraits, many of immigrants who fled war, is meant as a tribute to the subjects' long lives and perseverance.

By Anna Gorman

Los Angeles Times

April 29, 2010

Their expressions are solemn, their smiles subtle, their postures proud. One clenches his fists in the air, another stares intently at the Bible.

There is a 96-year-old former Thai tennis champion who helped found the Wat Thai Temple in North Hollywood. An 88-year-old Polish woman who helped hide Jews during World War II. An 88-year-old Iranian professor who said, "Tragedy has made my softer skin hide behind a harder one."

Their photographs and stories are part of a new exhibit called "Quiet Heroes/Over 80." The exhibit at the L.A. Artcore Brewery Annex near downtown Los Angeles runs through Sunday. The photographer, Barry Shaffer, said he wanted to create a tribute to people who have endured war and conflict, left homes behind and survived in a rapidly changing world.

"They have lived long lives, they have emigrated here, created families, created communities," Shaffer said. "They have coined the ‘American dream.' "

There are 37 intimate black-and-white portraits — 34 of immigrants from around the world, including Vietnam, Australia, El Salvador and Armenia. There are also two African Americans in the exhibit and one Native American, a descendant of the original settlers who founded Los Angeles.

They include teachers, religious leaders, delivery people, civil servants, factory workers, authors and doctors. They are all from the Los Angeles area. Many have great-grandchildren. Eight have died since being photographed.

Shaffer said the project was his "naive" way of trying to find some answers about why there was still so much intolerance and conflict around the world.

"Who better to ask these questions than those who have experienced that?" he said.

Shaffer said that among the recurrent themes he heard in conversations with his subjects were the importance of strong leaders, faith and education.

Late last week, Nlongi Mfwilwakanda, 88, from the Congo, held onto his walker and looked around the room at the portraits.

"I see people who have fought to open doors of consideration and acceptance of one another," he said.

Mfwilwakanda recalled learning the alphabet by writing with his fingers in the dirt under a tree. In 1961, he said, he came to study at USC and met President Kennedy as part of a group of students from Africa. In the Congo, he worked as a schoolteacher and administrator, helping establish a network of Protestant schools.

Now, he lives in Pasadena and works as a minister.

Wearing thick glasses and a silver tie, Mfwilwakanda speaks often of the influence of faith in his life and said, "Every life should have a legacy."

"From Africa and writing on the ground to this position is a long journey," he said.

His daughter, Martine A. Mfwilwakanda, said seeing her father's portrait was touching to her.

"He taught me faith and perseverance," she said. "My father is like AAA for me. Every time I need advice, I call him."

Alisa Cohen, 83, was born in Ukraine and lived in Uzbekistan, Poland, Israel and South Korea before arriving in the U.S. more than 20 years ago. As a young girl in Uzbekistan, Cohen said, she didn't have access to soap, water, electricity or even much food.

"People were dying from starvation," she said. "All the food was going to the Army."

Even now, Cohen said, she doesn't waste anything, not even crumbs.

Cohen, who lives in Northridge and teaches piano, spends her free time square-dancing and doing aerobics. Seeing her portrait for the first time, she said she barely knew it was her.

"I never look in the mirror," she said. "I am older in the mirror. Inside I feel young."

With her gray hair pulled neatly into a bun, Cohen walked slowly around the room and read the words of those photographed. "These are people who went through very difficult lives," she said.

Shaffer and his wife, Barbara, a marriage and family therapist, began the project in 2006 and sought out their subjects at restaurants, community groups, churches, nail salons and street fairs.

"We didn't know who we were going to meet," she said. "We didn't know if they were rice farmers or self-made billionaires."

They conducted lengthy interviews, asking questions such as: Other than good luck and genes, what are the ingredients to living a long life? What life lessons do you apply to handle the hardships and obstacles of life? What advice do you have for younger generations?

Aroon Seeboonruang, 96, the former tennis champion from Thailand, walked into the exhibit with a cane. When he saw himself on the wall, he made a thumbs up and said, "I look handsome."

But then he turned to Shaffer and laughed. "That looks like an old man!"

"Something was wrong with the camera," Shaffer told him, smiling. "It had to be."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0429-over80-20100429,0,4843854,print.story

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Mayor pushes for ID checks

Allan Mansoor says the tougher enforcement he seeks has nothing to do with divisive law recently enacted in Arizona.

By Joseph Serna and Mona Shadia

In the shadow of a national debate on Arizona's controversial new law targeting illegal immigrants, Costa Mesa Mayor Allan Mansoor announced Wednesday that he wants his city to crack down on undocumented workers and drivers.

“Costa Mesa is not a sanctuary city and is, in fact, a rule-of-law city when it comes to immigration,” Mansoor, who is running for state Assembly, said during a news conference at City Hall.

Mansoor said there are “loopholes” in local, state and federal laws that allow illegal immigrants to remain in this country even when they're contacted by police.

He also posed questions he wanted answered concerning how the city should deal with immigrants at the local level:

Should Costa Mesa police accept a photo ID issued to emigrants from the Mexican consulate as a valid form of identification?

Should officers have more training on how to handle foreign nationals and how to question them on their citizenship status?

Will Costa Mesa require companies contracting with the city or businesses applying for a license here be required to verify their employees' citizenship status?

Mansoor said he wants city staff to have answers to these questions at study sessions in coming weeks.

In California, a person stopped by police driving with a suspended license will most likely be detained and have their car impounded, police said. A person driving without a license can be detained, but, more often than not, will receive a ticket.

Mansoor asserts that most unlicensed drivers are illegal immigrants and therefore the state needs to close the disparity in how police treat unlicensed drivers versus those with suspended licenses.

Many U.S. banks accept the “Matricula Consular,” a form of ID issued by the Mexican consulate to Mexican citizens emigrating from Mexico both legally and illegally. Mansoor said he disagrees with the practice and wants to see what the city can do about it.

If a person cannot provide valid ID when they're stopped by police, they're usually detained and their identity is determined at police headquarters and their immigration status can be checked too, he said.

But there are times when the federal immigration agent is not on duty at the city jail.

“The point I was trying to make is that there are some loopholes,” Mansoor said.

Last year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent assigned to Costa Mesa's jail detained 356 people on suspicion of violating immigration laws. Of those, 103 were arrested for felonies, 253 for misdemeanors.

The mayor talked about “proactive training” for police officers in verifying citizenship and questioning people they stop.

The idea of training officers on immigration questioning was reminiscent of his controversial 2005 proposal to have officers enforce federal immigration laws, but Mansoor disagreed with the characterization.

“If the ICE agent is there, great, you'll be screened,” he said. “If he's not, I want to make sure we're ‘pro-actively' finding out, are you here illegally?” he said. “I would ask our president and our Congress to address these things, but I know they would not. Many of them have no desire to uphold our immigration laws or realize the negative impacts of illegal immigration at the local level.”

The city should also explore requiring businesses operating in the city to use E-Verify, a free federal program that checks the eligibility of potential employees and the validity of their Social Security number, Mansoor said.

Resident Naui Huitzilopochtli, who attended the news conference, said that Mansoor's event was nothing but a publicity stunt.

“He's probably trying to imitate the Arizona law, SB 1070,” Huitzilopochtli said. “He's running for Assembly, and I think he's getting desperate, so he's trying to get publicity for himself.”

Mansoor repeatedly stated that his move to address immigration issues in Costa Mesa has nothing to do with Arizona's law, which requires police officers to check immigration status and makes it illegal for undocumented individuals to be in the state, or his campaign for the 68th Assembly District seat being vacated by Assemblyman Van Tran (R-Westminster).

But when asked for details on how he proposes to solve illegal immigration, Mansoor offered no specifics.

Danny Garcia, an illegal immigrant who's lived in Costa Mesa for two years, said the mayor's initiative will only do harm.

“I came here for a better life, to take care of my family,” Garcia said, standing on a Costa Mesa street looking for work. “I have three daughters, a wife, and my mom and dad. We stay here for work, we don't do nothing. I'm not a troublemaker. I have a good life here. We work two to three days a week.”

Costa Mesa Councilwoman Wendy Leece said she wants the city to debate the mayor's ideas.

“I definitely support his stating that we are a rule-of-law city and not a sanctuary city, and I'm interested in discussions on the issues that he brought up, especially E-Verify,” she said.

http://dailypilot.com/articles/2010/04/29/politics/dpt-immigration042910.prt

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Arizona immigration fight to move to the courtroom

The ACLU and other groups say the key legal issue is whether the state law interferes with the federal government's duty to handle immigration, which sunk Proposition 187 in California.

By Teresa Watanabe and Anna Gorman

Los Angeles Times

April 29, 2010

As the furor over Arizona's strict new immigration law escalates, immigrant advocates are preparing to move the fight to the courtroom, where their legal challenges have successfully sunk other high-profile laws against illegal migrants.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Immigration Law Center are set to announce in Phoenix on Thursday plans to challenge the measure. U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder said this week that he was considering a possible legal challenge to the law.

The law, which is set to take effect in midsummer, makes it a state crime for illegal migrants to be in Arizona, requires police to check for evidence of legal status and bars people from hiring or soliciting work off the streets.

The key legal issue, according to lawyers on both sides, will be one that also was at the center of the court fight over Proposition 187 in California — whether the state law interferes with the federal government's duty to handle immigration.

The announcement of legal action, one of several expected as attorneys across the country scrutinize the law for weaknesses, comes after days of frantic e-mails, conference calls and lengthy strategy sessions. Attorneys haven't finalized a date when a court challenge would be filed, but said it would be before the law takes effect.

"The entire country has been galvanized," said Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. "People within the legal community are trying to figure out what we can do…. We have seen an enormous amount of energy responding to this."

Attorneys who successfully challenged laws against illegal immigrants in California, Texas and elsewhere argue that the Arizona law faces a similar fate because of the federal/state issue. Immigrant advocates also argue that the law could violate guarantees of equal protection if selectively enforced against certain ethnic groups.

"The Arizona law is doomed to the dustbin of other unconstitutional efforts by local government to regulate immigration, which is a uniquely federal function," said Peter Schey, a Los Angeles attorney who led successful challenges to the 1975 Texas law denying illegal migrant children free public schooling and the 1994 California initiative that would have barred public services to illegal migrants. Schey said he also planned to file a separate lawsuit.

But the attorney who helped write the Arizona law said he carefully crafted the measure to avoid those constitutional issues.

Kris Kobach, a University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor who handled immigration law and border security under U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft during the Bush administration, said the law does not seek to regulate immigration but merely adds state penalties for what are already federal crimes.

Under the legal doctrine of "concurrent enforcement," he said, states are allowed to ban what is already prohibited by federal law. As an example, he said, the courts have upheld efforts by Arizona, California and other states to enact sanctions against employers who hire illegal migrants.

Kobach, who is running as a Republican candidate for Kansas secretary of state, also dismissed claims that the bill will result in racial profiling. He said he took care to include an explicit ban on using "race, color or national origin" as the sole basis for stopping someone to ask for papers.

"I anticipate that anyone who challenges the law will throw everything but the kitchen sink at this to see if it will stick," Kobach said. "But this is consistent with federal law."

Indeed, immigrant advocates raise several legal questions. The portion of the law that prohibits laborers from soliciting work in public places is particularly vulnerable, said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The organization has successfully challenged similar laws in Arizona and California. In 2008, a federal judge ruled that an Arizona town could not enforce an anti-solicitation ordinance that advocates said infringed upon the free speech rights of day workers.

In addition, there probably will be due-process claims because police officers won't know who would be eligible for immigration relief, Saenz said. Many arrested won't have the opportunity to make their claims in U.S. Immigration Court.

"There are a lot of people who are going to be arrested and swept into this dragnet who have every right to be in this country," he said.

Even before lawsuits are filed, immigrant advocates are seeking a commitment from federal officials that they will not enforce the law.

On Tuesday, Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee that the law could distract the agency from using its resources to go after serious criminals.

"We have concerns that at some point we'll be responsible to enforce or use our immigration resources against anyone that would get picked up in Arizona," said Napolitano, who noted that she had vetoed similar measures as Arizona governor.

Another lawsuit may come from one of Arizona's own elected officials. Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon said this week that he planned to file a lawsuit.

"I have under the charter the ability given to me by the people to file a lawsuit on behalf of the people," Gordon said Tuesday to cheers from a packed City Council meeting and one angry cry of "socialism!"

As both sides gear up for their legal battle, the wild card is the panel of judges who will end up deciding the case.

Judges have ruled differently on key immigration questions. In 2007, a federal judge ruled that a Pennsylvania city couldn't punish landlords who rent to illegal immigrants and employers who hire them. A federal judge also ruled against a Texas measure that sought to ban landlords from renting to illegal migrants.

Advocates didn't succeed, however, in getting the courts to block another Arizona law, which shuts down businesses for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. In 2008, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco refused to stop the law before it took effect, saying that businesses and immigrant rights groups hadn't shown an adequate need for delaying enforcement.

Schey said he was not confident that legal challenges against the Arizona case would prevail in today's political and legal climate. The U.S. Supreme Court is a very different panel today than it was when a narrow majority of 5 to 4 struck down the 1975 Texas law denying free schooling to unauthorized migrant children.

"It's a far cry from a slam-dunk case," Schey said. "It's a very close call with the current composition of the Supreme Court. What's really needed here is federal leadership."

But Erwin Chemerinsky, UC Irvine's law school dean, argued that the Arizona law is a far more brazen attempt to regulate immigration than either the Texas or Proposition 187 cases. The Texas law was overturned primarily on equal protection grounds, while the California law was struck down as an unconstitutional attempt to usurp federal immigration responsibility.

"It is so firmly established that only the federal government can control immigration that I don't see it," he said, referring to chances that courts would uphold the Arizona law. "Even with a conservative court and a lot of sympathy to Arizona's concerns, I don't see it."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-arizona-law-20100429,0,6679074,print.story

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Killer gets life sentence for burning homeless man to death

Ben Matthew Martin is sent to prison without the possibility of parole for dousing John McGraham with gasoline and setting him on fire with a road flare.

By Jack Leonard, Los Angeles Times

April 29, 2010

Police were initially baffled when someone killed a popular and friendly homeless man by dousing him with gasoline and setting him on fire in the Koreatown area of Los Angeles.

But homicide detectives soon zeroed in on Ben Matthew Martin, a man obsessed with cleanliness who also had a history of run-ins with the homeless.

Martin, they discovered, had worked at a barbershop near the crime scene and was known for yelling at street people who lingered in the area. In the summer of 2008, he was fired when his boss learned he had struck a homeless man with a bag of towels and kicked him in the back. The victim, John McGraham, was a fixture in the densely populated neighborhood west of downtown Los Angeles, where residents and merchants would bring him food and clothes.

Three months later, prosecutors say, Martin returned with a can of gasoline and an emergency road flare seeking revenge on McGraham, 55.

On Wednesday, Martin, 31, sat silently with his head bowed in a downtown courtroom during an emotional hearing as a judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Behind him sat friends and relatives of McGraham — some wearing "Justice 4 John" shirts with a photo of the bearded man. Susanne McGraham Paisley sobbed as she told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Terry A. Bork how she often wondered about her brother's last thoughts as he tried to escape the man pouring gasoline on him.

"Many people saw my brother as a homeless person, a bum," she said while holding a large picture of a young, clean-shaven McGraham smiling broadly. "This is how we remember him — a human being who had a life with aspirations and dreams."

Paisley said she hoped her brother's killing, which at the time made headlines across the country, would stir renewed empathy for the homeless.

"There are a lot of people who as a result might take a different look at the homeless," she said. "John was kind and thoughtful and didn't want to hurt anyone."

Homeless advocates say the Oct. 9, 2008, killing highlighted the dangers of living on the streets.

McGraham was one of 27 homeless people killed in 2008 by non-homeless suspects across the country, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, which tracks such attacks.

Martin's attorney, Los Angeles County Deputy Public Defender Regina A. Laughney, stated in a court filing this week that her client took "full responsibility for his actions" by pleading guilty last month.

The crime, she wrote, could be explained in part by Martin's "well-recognized and documented history of psychological illness." She said co-workers described him as "not normal" and "not right … mentally."

She declined to elaborate Wednesday.

Martin told a probation officer that he had been diagnosed as bipolar but did not take medication, according to a court report.

In the 1980s, McGraham worked as a bellhop at the old Ambassador Hotel before he fell into a depression and lost his job. He rebuffed his family's efforts to take him in and made the streets his home for two decades.

He spent most of his last days near 3 r d Street and Vermont.

Martin worked nearby at the Star Barber Shop for about a year, the shop's manager, Jose Rodriguez, said in an interview this week. Rodriguez tried to teach Martin how to cut hair but said Martin was "a very slow learner." He spent most of his job ensuring that the shop — with its framed photos of the Twin Towers and Statue of Liberty — was spotless. The work fit well with Martin's personality.

"He was very clean all the time," Rodriguez said.

But when Rodriguez learned that his employee had chased and beaten McGraham in the summer of 2008, he immediately let him go.

At the scene of the killing, police discovered a gasoline can, a bucket used to pour gas on the victim, and a pair of black Nike gloves that smelled of gasoline, according to court records. Tests on the gloves found DNA that was linked to Martin, who had convictions for embezzlement, a drug offense, reckless driving and disturbing the peace.

Several people who witnessed the attack picked out a photo of Martin as the assailant.

LAPD homicide Dets. Mike Whelan and Grace Garcia traced the serial number on the gasoline can to a Pep Boys store on Hollywood Boulevard. Store records showed it had been bought along with a plastic bucket and a road flare hours before the attack.

A customer at the store tentatively identified Martin as the man who made the purchase. Martin, police discovered, lived near the store.

"I can't think of a more horrible way to die," Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Renee Rose said after Wednesday's hearing. "It's one of the most heinous crimes you can commit on another human being."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-homeless-murder29-20100429,0,2569821,print.story

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Legalization must be part of immigration reform

A path to citizenship for those already here illegally is crucial.

Tomás R. Jiménez

April 29, 2010

Opponents of comprehensive immigration reform argue that legalization rewards bad behavior. They contend that illegal immigration is a crime that merits punishment and expulsion, not amnesty. The logic is that if we respond with tough enforcement, illegal immigrants will finally get that they aren't welcome here and go back to their home countries. This kind of reasoning is what's behind laws like the one recently passed in Arizona, which requires law enforcement personnel to determine whenever possible the immigration status of suspected illegal immigrants.

But immigrants aren't going home. We know this from experience. Despite high-profile raids, beefed-up border enforcement and the worst economy since the Depression, the size of the illegal immigrant population has declined by only a small fraction. At this pace, the time it would take to realize the pipe dream of removing illegal immigrants through forced and voluntary deportations could be measured in light-years.

Given that immigrants are here to stay, it is in everyone's interest for them to assimilate — to learn English, embrace U.S. social and civic customs and become part of the economic fabric. And if that is the goal, we need to have immigration reform that goes beyond fences, high-tech surveillance, more Border Patrol officers and a guest worker program. We need a path to legalization for those who have built lives here.

Why? Because illegal status inhibits not only the assimilation of those who are here illegally but of future generations who are U.S.-born citizens. Research has consistently found that illegal immigrants and their descendants have a much tougher time gaining a social and economic foothold.

On the other hand, we know that legalization has a positive effect on assimilation. The legalization program contained in the last major immigration overhaul, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, facilitated the assimilation of millions of immigrants and their children. A 2007 Merage Foundation report written by UC Irvine sociologists shows that the children of formerly illegal immigrants who obtain green cards face a brighter future and stand to contribute much more than those whose parents remain undocumented.

According to the study, U.S.-born Mexican Americans whose fathers came illegally but later obtained legal permanent residency were 25% less likely to drop out of high school, 70% more likely to graduate from college, 13% more likely to prefer English at home, and their earnings were 30% higher than those whose fathers were illegal at the time of the survey.

Part of what holds the children of illegal immigrants back is that they can never quite look forward. Parents cannot fully participate in their children's lives in ways that help them realize their full potential. As children enter adulthood, many have to take care of the financial needs of their immigrant parents, whose illegal status makes them extremely vulnerable to the vagaries of the job market, the healthcare system and housing. The situation is worse for those who were brought as young children to the United States without documentation. They suffer from the double penalty of their parents' and their own illegality.

As Congress drags its feet on immigration reform, illegal immigrants continue to put down roots and the ranks of children who suffer the penalties of their parents illegal status swells. According to a recent Pew Hispanic Center report, almost half of all illegal immigrant households are couples with children, and the overwhelming majority of the children — 73% — are U.S. citizens. The number of U.S.-born children with at least one illegal immigrant parent grew to 4 million in 2008 from 2.7 million in 2003, a 48% increase. Another 1.5 million children with at least one illegal immigrant parent are themselves illegal.

Withholding legalization imposes slow social and economic death on illegal immigrants and their children. Failure to implement comprehensive immigration reform leaves thousands of people who consider the United States their home in the shadows. It also deprives us of the opportunity to develop a better-trained workforce and to realize all the benefits, both social and economic, that a fully assimilated immigrant population can contribute. Legalization is the most crucial component of what Americans need and what they deserve: comprehensive immigration reform.

Tomás R. Jiménez is an assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University and an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author of "Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-jimenez-20100429,0,1245419,print.story

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From the Daily News

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Childrens' homicides, suicides up in LA County

Child homicides in Los Angeles County soared 31 percent and suicides jumped 70 percent from 2007 to 2008, a troubling trend that experts say may be a consequence of the economic downturn.

The annual report released today by the Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect said 34 children were killed by parents, relatives or caregivers in 2008, compared with 26 the previous year.

Suicides among local youths jumped from 10 to 17.

The ICAN study period coincided with the mortgage meltdown, leading to the collapse of the real-estate market and triggering a deep recession. Some experts suggested a link between money troubles and increased violence against children.

"We do know that financial difficulty has a negative impact on family functioning and the often-stressful work of being a parent," said Trish Ploehn, director of the county Department of Children and Family Services.

"This stress often reverberates through and affects all the members of a family - and sadly, sometimes it finds the family's weakest link. Knowing this, it is important that we don't wait until bad things happen; it is imperative that we reach families before matters escalate."

Still, some experts pointed to additional statistics that indicated not all the news was bad.

Deanne Tilton Durfee, executive director of ICAN, noted that the number of child homicides in 2007 was significantly below the 15-year average of 39, which may help explain the significant increase for 2008.

And the number of reports of child abuse and neglect in the county fell slightly from 167,325 in 2007 to 166,745 in 2008.

However, she still suggested that the stress of losing a home or job could have been a factor in some of the cases.

"It could be a result of the economy," Tilton Durfee said. "There were 18 domestic violence-related child homicides. More than half involved the father, stepfather or mother's boyfriend versus seven involving the mother.

"Men, in general, have been the primary perpetrators in child abuse homicides and, in general, are not trained or skilled at taking care of very young children."

Tilton Durfee said she was particularly troubled by the dramatic jump in suicide among youths.

"I think that may very well have to do with the economy and with the increased usage of the Internet - exacerbating or intensifying negative messages to children," she said. "It could have to do with cyber-bullying, the Internet and drugs."

Tracy Webb, a senior trial attorney for child abuse in the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office, noted a "huge increase" in recent years in Internet-related crimes against children.

"Now that children have cell phones with cameras and Internet access, it's a hugely fertile ground for sex offenders and other predators to prey on children," Webb said.

The City Attorney's Office is working with local schools to educate teachers and parents about Internet predators and the growing problems with "sexting" and cyber-bullying, which is the use of online technology to harass, intimidate, stalk or verbally assault others.

"One of the things we are trying to pay attention to is whether, God forbid, the suicides we're seeing have any relationship to cyber-crime," Webb said.

The report's authors also noted that mental health and school budgets were cut significantly in 2008, which may have affected suicide prevention efforts. The previous five years had seen a continual decline in the numbers of youths who took their own lives.

Disturbingly, 12 of the 17 youths who committed suicide hanged themselves, the report said. A dozen also had experienced the recent loss of a boyfriend, girlfriend or other friend, although the report did not say whether those two figures were related.

Three of the youths tested positive for drugs, three experienced academic problems, three had received special education services and two had school discipline or truancy problems. Three of the youths had a criminal or juvenile delinquency record.

Of the 34 child homicides in 2008, 14 had prior contact or an open case with DCFS, up from 12 in 2007.

Despite this increase, Tilton Durfee said DCFS and other agencies in the county are working better now than they ever have in preventing child abuse and neglect.

"There is much more that can be done, which is why there is an inter-agency focus on the new issues related to cyber-crimes, suicides and homicides," she said. "The need for inter-agency information sharing is a key issue now and that's why we have such a focus on cross-reporting and making sure whatever one agency knows about a child or family is also known by every other agency."

Over the last year, Ploehn said DCFS has enhanced its units that investigative allegations of abuse and neglect.

"The focus has been on quality interactions with families, more comprehensive interviews, making sure families have access to community and other resources, and fostering trusting relationships between social workers and the children and families they serve," Ploehn said.

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_14978948

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California drivers not complying with texting ban, AAA says

An Auto Club safety researcher said "the results are disappointing" and show that the initial decrease in texting behind the wheel, measured after ban was first implemented, has nearly disappeared.

"The fact that we're seeing a statistically significant rise in texting despite the state ban indicates that additional efforts are needed to help deal with the problem," said Steven Bloch, the organization's senior researcher.

"It's just over a year after California's texting ban was implemented, and texting is rising toward the level it was before the law," Bloch said.

Before the texting law went into effect in January 2009, three Auto Club surveys conducted in 2008 consistently showed that about 1.4 percent of motorists were texting, Bloch said. Surveys conducted in May and July of 2009 showed that texting had dropped about 70 percent, to about 0.5 percent.

But the latest month-long survey, which was just completed, showed that about 1.1 percent of California motorists were actively texting while driving.

The Auto Club supports a proposed law that would increase the texting fine to $100, plus penalty assessments. The current law calls for $20 for a first offense and $50 for subsequent offenses.

Senate Bill 1475 would also impose one point on a motorist's driving record. In California, eight points can lead to a suspended license.

"Moving violations typically require the (Department of Motor Vehicles) to impose a point, and there is little reason that this dangerous traffic violation should be treated differently than others," Bloch said.

Courts and juries are recognizing the danger of texting and driving, Bloch said.

In one case this month, Martin Kuehl, 42, of Costa Mesa, was sentenced to four years in prison for killing a pedestrian while texting and driving, Bloch said. The prosecutor used cell phone records and witness accounts to show that Kuehl was texting behind the wheel during the half hour leading to the fatal crash.

The Auto Club survey also examined the level of hand-held and hands-free cell phone usage. These results show little change in use levels since the last surveys were conducted in 2009, Bloch said.

Nevertheless, the percentage of people clasping a handset to their heads while driving is about 60 percent lower than the last survey of such behavior conducted before the state cell phone driving law was changed in June 2008.

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_14975233

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From the New York Times

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In Jail, Hate-Crime Killer Doesn't Seem So Hateful

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — From behind the plexiglass separating prisoner and visitor, Jeffrey Conroy recounted confronting two white men outside a convenience store in October 2007 during his junior year in high school.

A Hispanic man had left a bicycle outside the store, and one of the white men had sat on the bike and released the kickstand as if he was about to take it away. The men were laughing. Mr. Conroy, a standout on his school's wrestling team, said he warned them not to steal the bike, or that they would have a problem with him. He said he did so because he felt bad for the Hispanic man, whom he believed to be an immigrant day laborer.

“I guess he didn't have a car or anything,” he said.

One year later, Mr. Conroy and six of his friends would come upon two other Hispanic men near a parking lot of the train station in Patchogue, an encounter that would end far differently.

Prosecutors said Mr. Conroy and his friends surrounded and attacked the two Hispanic men as part of the sport they had made out of hunting and beating up Latinos, an activity the authorities said they referred to as “beaner hopping” and “Mexican hopping.”

Last week, a jury in State Supreme Court found Mr. Conroy guilty of first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime in connection with the death of one of the Hispanic men, Marcelo Lucero , and guilty of attempted assaults on three other Latino men. On the manslaughter charge, he faces a minimum of eight years and a maximum of 25 years when he is sentenced by Justice Robert W. Doyle on May 26.

In interviews with Mr. Conroy, his father, his friends, his lacrosse coaches and his lawyer, one portrait of him emerges: that of a friendly, athletic teenager willing to stick up for others, of someone who counted several Hispanics among his closest friends, including the girl he had been dating off and on for years, Pamela Suarez, who is Bolivian.

Then there is the young man that prosecutors, Latino advocates and even some of the jurors see: a gullible, aggressive teenager with a swastika tattoo on his thigh who stabbed Mr. Lucero in the chest that night out of anger, and then lied in court when he blamed someone else for the crime.

In a one-hour interview on Monday at the Suffolk County jail, Mr. Conroy was at times reflective and apologetic, humble and hopeful. He sat behind the plexiglass in a beige booth and leaned down low to talk into the speaker hole.

He turned 19 in January and it shows. Though dressed in a green prisoner's uniform, he still has the face, the demeanor and the vocabulary of a boyish teenager.

He spoke of his love and concern for his family: After the guilty verdict was announced in the courtroom, Mr. Conroy recalled, he turned and saw two of his sisters in tears, and told them not to worry, that everything would be all right.

He spoke of the future he hopes to have with Ms. Suarez, a freshman at Stony Brook University : They talked about one day getting married when she visited him on Saturday (“We're going to have three kids,” he said, smiling.) He spoke of the narrow jail cell where he spends 22 hours a day: “I can stretch both my arms and touch both walls.” And he spoke of praying in his cell, for his family and for Mr. Lucero's family.

He said he feels sadness and sympathy for the Luceros, and for Mr. Lucero's younger brother, Joselo Lucero, a presence in the courtroom throughout the trial. “I would just look at him and then I would look away,” Mr. Conroy said. “I feel bad for him. I got a brother, too. I couldn't imagine him dying.”

The interview was granted by Mr. Conroy's lawyer, William Keahon, on the condition that Mr. Conroy not answer questions about the night of the stabbing. Mr. Keahon said Mr. Conroy planned to appeal the conviction.

Mr. Conroy had signed a five-page written confession to the police in which he admitted stabbing Mr. Lucero on Nov. 8, 2008, and bloodstains on the blade of the knife that the police found on him minutes after the stabbing matched Mr. Lucero's DNA.

But at the trial, Mr. Conroy testified that he did not stab Mr. Lucero and that another teenager, Christopher Overton, told him that he was the one who stabbed Mr. Lucero. Mr. Conroy said in court that Mr. Overton asked him to take the knife because Mr. Overton was out on bail awaiting sentencing on a felony conviction.

Mr. Overton's mother and his lawyer have denied the accusation, and a few of the jurors said in interviews that they found Mr. Conroy's testimony unbelievable. Many of those who knew him and his family, however, said they did believe him.

“People are going to say I'm naïve,” said Marc Negrin, 52, a close friend of Mr. Conroy's father. “People are going to say I'm stupid. People are going to say he's my best friend's son. They can say all that. But you know what, I'm a grown man. I've got three healthy kids that all do great in school. I'm a good judge of character. And he said he didn't do it and I believe him. Because he's never given me, in all the years I've known his family, never given me a reason to think any different. He's never lied.”

Throughout the trial, Mr. Conroy emerged as a brazen, impulsive and, as his lawyer admitted to the jury, at times a foolish young man.

Mr. Conroy said he had his best friend give him a tattoo of a swastika on his thigh a few months before the stabbing “as a joke,” and because his friend had dared him to do it.

The day before the stabbing, Mr. Conroy got into a fight with a friend, because that teenager was spreading rumors that Mr. Conroy had a sexually transmitted disease.

At the police precinct, a detective asked Mr. Conroy why he would fight one of his friends, and Mr. Conroy replied, “Same reason I'm here now,” because I'm a jerk, though Mr. Conroy used a more vulgar phrase, the detective testified.

Mr. Conroy was a 17-year-old senior at Patchogue-Medford High School at the time of the attack. He lived in Medford with his parents, three sisters and a brother. His mother, Lori Conroy, works at a bank and had taught Sunday school for seven years at her church.

His father, Robert Conroy, is a former Kmart assistant operations manager now on disability who is a leader in organizing youth sports in Medford and Patchogue.

In 2005, Robert Conroy co-founded a nonprofit youth sports league for children ages 5 to 13, and if his son had a second home, it was at the league's athletic fields two miles from his house. Jeffrey Conroy was too old for the league when it started, but he helped his father care for the park and became a mentor to many of the children. He helped coach 11-year-old football players at age 16, and spent one summer improving one boy's lacrosse skills, because the boy's mother had asked him to help her son.

“At work I have to try to explain to people how this is that I know this kid and love this kid,” said Matthew Cleary, 40, a league board member and family friend who works for the Long Island Rail Road. “I know a Jeffrey that when I was cutting the lawn he would come out and say, ‘I'll finish.' I know a Jeffrey that — that's my 12-year-old son that looked up to him like a brother — and if he was to curse, Jeffrey would smack him off the back of the head and say, ‘Don't curse, your mother's upstairs.' That's the Jeffrey I know.”

Last week, four days after the verdict was announced, Robert Conroy went to his youngest son's lacrosse game at the high school and then watched one of his league's lacrosse teams practice at the park. He has remained involved in the community throughout the trial — he came up with the idea to rename the park in honor of a Marine and former Medford resident killed in Afghanistan — and has long believed his oldest son and his family have been falsely branded as racists.

“He's not what everybody has portrayed him to be,” Robert Conroy said. “He's a good kid.”

Mr. Conroy's life was typical of what it's like growing up in the predominantly white middle-class towns and villages of eastern Long Island, but his experiences also had shades of diversity. He listened to Jay-Z, Nas and other black hip-hop artists. His half-sister from his father's previous marriage is part Puerto Rican. One of his best friends is Turkish.

“I'm nothing like what the papers said about me,” Mr. Conroy said. “I'm not a white supremacist or anything like that. I'm not this serious racist kid everyone thinks I am.”

Under the state's hate-crime law, the prosecution was not required to prove Mr. Conroy was anti-Hispanic, but only that he had selected his victims because of their race or national origin.

The growing numbers of day laborers, many of whom are illegal immigrants, have created racial tensions on eastern Long Island. Mr. Conroy said he never formed an opinion on the issue. “I don't have any problems with it,” Mr. Conroy said.

The trial made clear that Mr. Conroy was not, initially at least, the most aggressive of the teenagers on that November night. Mr. Conroy neither came up with the idea to go look for Hispanics to beat up nor did he suggest that they drive to Patchogue to look for victims; one or more of the other teenagers did. He testified that his plan was to watch his six friends beat up another Hispanic person but not to take part in the fighting himself.

Mr. Cleary, the family friend, said it seemed as if Mr. Conroy was a follower at times, though he thought of himself as a leader.

“It's a terrible Jekyll and Hyde story to me, and I don't believe a lot of it,” Mr. Cleary said. “I believe that he got roped into events that others had started, and being 17 and filled with testosterone, sometimes you do things that get the best of you before you can think about it clearly.”

Mr. Conroy can imagine his life now were he not in jail. He said he would be playing midfield on a college lacrosse team, either at the State University at Albany or at Plattsburgh. And his thigh would no longer have the swastika.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/nyregion/30patchogue.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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Welcome to Arizona, Outpost of Contradictions

PHOENIX — Arizona is well accustomed to the derision of its countrymen.

The state resisted adopting Martin Luther King 's birthday as a holiday years after most other states embraced it. The sheriff in its largest county forces inmates to wear pink underwear, apparently to assault their masculinity. Residents may take guns almost anywhere, but they may not cut down a cactus. The rest of the nation may scoff or grumble, but Arizona, one of the last truly independent Western outposts, carries on.

Now, after passing the nation's toughest immigration law, one that gives the police broad power to stop people on suspicion of being here illegally, the state finds itself in perhaps the harshest spotlight in a decade.

The law drew not only the threat of a challenge by the Justice Department and a rebuke from the president, but the snickers of late-night comedians. City councils elsewhere have called for a boycott of the resort-driven state; one trade group of immigration lawyers has canceled a conference planned for Scottsdale at a time when the state is broke and desperate for business. Meanwhile, a continuous protest is taking place at the State Capitol.

Bruce D. Merrill, a polling expert here, is tired of picking up his phone. “Usually it is somebody asking me, ‘What the hell is going on in Arizona?' ” Mr. Merrill said.

But while Arizona may have become a cartoon of intolerance to much of America, the reality is much more complex, and at times contradictory. This state is a center of both law and order and of new age om. Red-meat-loving. Red-rock-climbing.

Arizona is home to some of the toughest prison sentencing laws in the country, and one of the cleanest campaign finance laws, too. Voters overwhelmingly re-elected Janet Napolitano , a Democrat, as governor the same year they returned the conservative senator Jon Kyl to Washington. The current Republican governor signed this law, but is also pushing for a tax increase.

Further, while Arizona may seem on the fringe with its immigration law, the measure mirrors the 1994 battle in California over a voter-approved law that Gov. Pete Wilson signed barring illegal immigrants from getting health care, public education and other services. Like California then, Arizona is taking its own tack instead of waiting on the federal government to change policies.

“The political and emotional landscape is almost identical,” said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California , who served as an aide to Mr. Wilson. “History doesn't repeat itself, it just moves east.”

The table was set for the passage of the new law by a confluence of factors, say residents, political scientists and businesspeople in Arizona. Those factors include shifting demographics, an embattled state economy and increased violence in Mexico, as well as the perception that the federal government has failed to act. Arizonans find that particularly irksome, given that Ms. Napolitano is now head of the Department of Homeland Security .

Hispanics make up 30 percent of the population here, up from roughly 25 percent in 2000, according to census data. As the state's economy, largely dependent on construction and development, has slumped, hostility toward illegal immigrants has increased in recent years. “More people now seem to think Hispanics are taking jobs from Anglos,” said Mr. Merrill, the polling expert.

Further, laws like the immigration statute and another new law requiring political candidates to prove citizenship are generally written by the hard-right lawmakers who dominate the Legislature — with far-left-of-center minority members opposing them — but neither side reflects the relatively centrist political views of most residents.

More than 30 percent of registered voters here are independents, double the proportion in 2000. “People have been leaving both political parties, which leaves the remainders in the party much more ideological,” Mr. Merrill said.

Residents are unnerved by the violence in Mexico and the heavy drug trade and illegal immigrant trafficking in Arizona. Most studies have shown illegal immigrants do not commit crimes in a greater proportion than their share of the population, and Arizona's violent crime rate has declined in recent years. But in this state any crime tied to illegal immigrants gets notice.

Half of the drugs seized along the United States-Mexico border are confiscated in Arizona, and it is a major hub for human smuggling. Last month, Robert Krentz, 58, a member of a prominent ranching family, was killed on his property 20 miles from the border, and the police said the gunman was probably connected to smuggling.

“People outside of Arizona are not living in this state and don't understand the issue,” said Mona Stacey, a computer technician from Mesa. “Most of them coming across are mostly good, Catholic families getting over here. But you also have the drug lords and the smugglers. It makes the good guys look bad, and you don't know who is who.”

Conversations here about the new law tend to begin or end with a reference to Ms. Napolitano, who personified the state's blended politics. As governor, she backed the posting of National Guard troops on the border, expanded the use of the state police in antismuggling operations, and pressed Washington for an overhaul of immigration law.

When it came to the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio , however — a staunch supporter of immigration enforcement and one of the highest profile figures on the issue — she took a largely hands-off approach.

Now, as Homeland Security secretary, she has played up the administration's devotion of resources to the border, while resisting pressure to put National Guard troops there.

This, too, is an echo of California circa 1994. There, Proposition 187, the measure limiting services for illegal immigrants, was struck down by the courts (a possibility here, too, say legal experts). The Clinton administration responded with Operation Gatekeeper, an effort to strengthen the border in California. It ended up pushing trafficking east, and as a result, Arizona posts the highest number of people arrested for crossing along the 2,000-mile border.

The former director of Operation Gatekeeper has just been appointed President Obama 's Customs and Border Protection commissioner.

With more rallies opposing the law set for Thursday, Sheriff Arpaio has planned another of his controversial sweeps to net illegal immigrants.

“Arizona is the most unpredictable political patch of earth I've ever seen,” said Chip Scutari, a former political reporter who now runs a Phoenix public relations firm. “It's the land of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's tough-as-nails Tent City, and super-liberal Congressman Raul Grijalva calling for a boycott of his own state. That's Arizona.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/us/29arizona.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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Attacker Stabs 28 Chinese Children

BEIJING — An unemployed man entered a kindergarten in eastern China 's Jiangsu Province on Thursday morning and stabbed 28 kindergarten students and three adults, critically wounding at least five children, local authorities and state news agencies reported.

It was the second mass stabbing of young students in two days, and the third in less than a month.

Many of the wounded children were just 4 years old and shared the same classroom, according to initial reports by the state-run Xinhua news agency. The adult victims included two teachers and a security guard.

Police officers identified the assailant as Xu Yuyuan, a 47-year-old former insurance agent. According to Xinhua, he began attacking children with a knife about eight inches long around 9 a.m. at the Zhongxin Kindergarten, a middle-class school in Taixing, about 570 miles southeast of Beijing.

Little other information was immediately available. Taixing propaganda officials did not respond to telephone calls.

Thursday's attack occurred a day after a 33-year-old man in the southern province of Guangdong stabbed 15 fourth- and fifth-graders at a primary school in Leizhou. None of those students were seriously wounded. The authorities said that attacker, identified as Chen Kangbing, had taught at nearby school but had been on leave since 2006, apparently because of mental illness.

On March 23, Zheng Minsheng, 42, stabbed eight primary school students to death in Fujian Province, also on China's east coast, as they waited with parents for classes to begin. Some Chinese press reports stated that Mr. Zheng also had mental problems, but most state media said no such evidence existed.

Mental illness remains a closeted topic in modern China, and neither medication nor modern psychiatric treatment are widely used. An analysis of mental health issues in four Chinese provinces, published in June in the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that 91 percent of the 173 million Chinese adults believed to suffer mental problems never received professional help.

Those murders created a nationwide sensation, stirring calls for a school safety crackdown. Mr. Zheng was executed on Wednesday after what one legal expert, the former Peking University law professor and civil rights advocate He Weifang, said was an unusually speedy trial.

There was no immediate explanation as to why the three attackers chose young students as their targets. While assaults in schools are not particularly common, an eerily similar series of five knife attacks took place in August and September 2004 in schools and a child-care center. Three of the attacks occurred on China's east coast.

In February 2008, two students at another Leizhou school were stabbed to death by a former student who then killed himself by jumping off the school building.

In the current string of knifings, which took place hundreds of miles apart, “probably there was some kind of copycat element,” Liu Jianqing, a professor of criminal psychology at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “People in similar predicaments emulate this because of the impact of the mass media these days.”

The assaults likely were also acts of self-destruction by the attackers, he said, because such crimes stand a high chance of drawing a death sentence in Chinese courts.

Beyond mental illness, some experts like Mr. He said that rising strains in China's fast-changing society may have a role in the growing number of violent crimes. Most of the school assaults have occurred on the developed, urban east coast, where both the cost of living and income inequality are high.

The man executed on Wednesday, Mr. Zheng, wanted revenge on “rich” and “powerful officials” in Nanping, where he lived, Xinhua quoted his neighbors as saying in a recent lengthy article about the murders.

He selected the primary school where the slayings took place because it was the city's finest, the article stated.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the province where Leizhou is located. It is in Guangdong Province, not Shandong. An earlier version of this article also misstated the percentage of mentally ill people thought not to have received professional help in China. The correct figure is 91 percent, not 98 percent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/world/asia/30china.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Obama Says Passing Immigration Bill May Be Difficult

By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama conceded Wednesday that Congress may not have the appetite to deal with the hot-button immigration issue this year, but he vowed to continue to press lawmakers to at least begin work soon on a comprehensive bill to overhaul the country's immigration system.

In a rare interview with reporters aboard Air Force One , Mr. Obama said it was vital that Congress address the immigration issue, lest more state measures like the tough new law in Arizona sprout up.

But he acknowledged that the road to a comprehensive immigration bill was an uphill one. “It's a matter of political will,” he said, adding that Congress might not have the stomach for another tough battle after the bruising fight over health care and the prospect of another battle over a climate change bill.

“We've gone through a very tough year, and I've been driving Congress pretty hard,” Mr. Obama said.

But the president said that “we need to start a process, at least,” adding that he wanted to come up with a proposal that could win broad public support.

To succeed, Mr. Obama said, he will need some backing from Republicans, a tough task in an election year.

“I've made calls to Republicans,” Mr. Obama said. “I think I can get a majority of Democrats, but I need some help from Republicans.”

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid , a Democrat who is locked in a bruising re-election campaign in Nevada, has promised Hispanic voters in his state that he will take up immigration legislation this year, addressing both border security and citizenship.

But on Wednesday, he told reporters that the climate change bill would probably come before immigration because that legislation had already been drafted.

He added, however, that Senator Charles E. Schumer , Democrat of New York, had an outline of an immigration bill that could soon be completed.

The immigration issue has become a lightning rod for both Republicans and Democrats, who are embroiled in a fight over a new Arizona law giving the police the authority to detain people they suspect are illegal immigrants.

Asked whether the White House, which has strongly criticized the Arizona bill as a possible infringement of civil rights, planned to challenge the measure, Mr. Obama said Wednesday, “We're examining it now.”

He added, “I understand the frustrations of the border states,” but said that is why the country needed a comprehensive immigration overhaul.

Meanwhile, former President Bill Clinton waded into the debate on Wednesday with the bravado of someone never facing election again.

“I don't think there's any alternative but for us to increase immigration,” he said, both to help the economy grow and to fix the long-term finances of Medicare and Social Security .

“I just don't see a way out of this unless that's part of the strategy,” he added in his remarks at a meeting on fiscal policy in Washington.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/us/politics/29immig.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Volunteers Report on Treatment of Immigrant Detainees

It is the routine violations that have been most shocking to the small bands of suburban volunteers who visit immigration detainees in New Jersey jails.

Things like visits cut short after 15 minutes, following two-hour waits outside in the rain. Transfers from jail to jail that isolate detainees for months, even when volunteers are asking to see them. And the pillows — only five pillows for more than 100 detainees, who had devised a seniority system to share them.

The shortage of pillows really got to Daniel Cummings, a high school teacher who began visiting the Middlesex County Adult Correctional Institute last spring as part of a local group formed after the death of a 72-year-old detainee there.

“To me, that was such a basic issue,” Mr. Cummings said Wednesday of the pillow shortage, contrasting the everyday injustices he sees as a jail visitor with the Obama administration's promise to transform the immigration detention system into “truly civil” detention . “Like, let's treat these people as humans.”

The voices of citizen volunteers like Mr. Cummings, 26, fill a new report that points to harsh conditions and arbitrary visiting restrictions imposed by a half-dozen New Jersey jails where Immigration and Customs Enforcement holds thousands of noncitizens each year while it tries to deport them.

Many of the restrictions could be changed immediately, the report contends. It is to be released on Thursday by the American Friends Service Committee , the New York University Immigrant Rights Clinic and New Jersey Advocates for Immigrant Detainees, a coalition of religious and advocacy groups.

The report also describes how volunteer visitors have been trying to fill the gap in accountability: advocating for a seriously ill detainee denied his heart medication for weeks, foiling what it called the cover-up of one guard's abuse and persuading jailers to supply the pillows required under detention standards.

But the pillow victory was short-lived. When the Middlesex County Freeholders dropped the county's contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement last fall, all the detainees in its jail were transferred. Many ended up at the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark, where they have neither pillows nor access to visits from the volunteers, the report said.

Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Wednesday evening that they had not seen the report, but pointed to measures and plans to increase oversight and address detainee mistreatment.

“This administration is committed to immigration detention reform and has taken important steps to fundamentally change the detention system,” Brian P. Hale, a spokesman, said in an e-mail message.

Volunteers were unable to reach most of the transferred detainees because of restrictive visiting rules that change from jail to jail, said Karin Wilkinson, the leader of Middlesex First Friends, the group that Mr. Cummings joined. It enlisted two law students in the N.Y.U. rights clinic, Ruben Loyo and Carolyn Corrado, whose efforts were also stymied for months. But what the students learned in the process led them to write the report.

“In theory, I knew a lot about detention,” said Mr. Loyo, 24, who worked on a detention-reform bill last summer as a Congressional intern. “But the reality — I really didn't know the reality of immigration detention.”

Among the most distressing situations, Mr. Loyo said, was that of Angela Joseph, a New Yorker who for three years had devoted hours each week to get 15-minute visits with her brother Warren Joseph at the Hudson County jail, where there are no weekend visits and weekday visits end at 6:15 p.m.

Mr. Joseph, a Trinidadian-American, a decorated veteran of the Persian Gulf war who had served eight years in the Army and suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome, eventually won his fight against deportation. A federal court ruled that his conviction for carrying a gun across state lines was not an aggravated felony under immigration law. But after three years of unnecessary detention, Mr. Loyo said, the victory was bittersweet.

The citizen volunteers, who have stepped up their efforts to penetrate the jails, are mostly drawn from churches and synagogues , said Gregory Sullivan, 78, a retired banker, who leads First Friends, one of the oldest groups.

Others are motivated by political activism . “These are just ordinary citizens of New York and New Jersey that we bring in,” he said.

Most of the restraints imposed on immigration detainees by jails are the rules set for their criminal-justice population, he said.

“In their haste to dump detainees in the county jails because it's convenient and cheap,” Mr. Sullivan said, Immigration and Customs Enforcement “overlooked the discrepancies with the standards ICE itself has proclaimed.”

Mr. Sullivan's group is beginning to expand its visits from the Elizabeth Detention Center to the Hudson County Correctional Institute, in Kearny But the Essex County and Bergen County jails have rebuffed efforts to institute a sign-up sheet for detainees to request visits, he said. At the Monmouth County Correctional Institute, Ms. Wilkinson's group has been unable to set up regular visits like those it arranged in Middlesex.

Even a brief outside presence is meaningful to those locked away far from relatives ; 84 percent of them have no lawyer, and none have any way to know when they will be freed, Ms. Wilkinson said.

In one case that Ms. Wilkinson followed, an African man fighting to stay in the United States because of fear of persecution at home was abruptly transferred to the Essex jail on the same day that an immigration judge ruled in his case. Two weeks passed before he learned that the judge had ruled against him, leaving him only 15 days, instead of 30, to file an appeal.

“He was so upset that his court papers hadn't come, he wrote me a six-page letter,” Ms. Wilkinson said. “He wrote, ‘It's unjust justice.' ”

Two weeks ago, she was able to visit him at Essex, a huge jail topped by concertina wire. But that entailed standing in line for more than two hours, she said, for less than 20 minutes' conversation through a plexiglass barrier.

“You wait outside,” she said. “Men, women, children in the rain.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/nyregion/29visitors.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From the white House

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Transparency at Work: Making Your Workplace a Safer Workplace

Each day 14 workers die in our country from traumatic injuries. That means more than 5,000 people are killed on the job every year.  Tens of thousands more die each year of work related diseases. In addition, more than 4.6 million are seriously injured. While those numbers are alarming enough, what troubles me is that most – if not all of these – are injuries and fatalities that could have been easily prevented.

Yesterday, on Workers Memorial Day , we remembered those killed on the job and recommitted ourselves to ensuring that future tragedies are prevented. As a part of this effort and the Department of Labor's continued emphasis on greater transparency , through the White House Open Government Initiative, we released 15 years of valuable data detailing workplace exposure to toxic chemicals.

This Chemical Exposure Health Data is comprised of measurements taken during the course of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspections and includes exposure levels to hazardous chemicals including asbestos, benzene, beryllium, cadmium, lead, nickel, silica, and others. 

Making this dataset available to the public for the first time will offer new insight into the levels of toxic chemicals commonly found in workplaces, as well as how exposures to specific chemicals are distributed across industries, geographical areas and time. This information will ultimately lead to a more robust and focused debate on what still needs to be done to protect workers in all sectors, especially in the chemical industry.

So what does this mean for you? For starters, those of you who are technically inclined, please help develop software (e.g. search and visualization tools) to enable all of us to know if any chemical hazards have been reported in our workplace or see which occupations have a greater risk of exposure to certain chemicals. This information is also a great way to make sure that companies and businesses in your area are doing all that they can to minimize chemical exposure as your neighbors. You could even combine our data with other useful datasets like the National Institutes of Health “ Haz-Map ” database to help diagnose exposure related illnesses more quickly. If you build any useful tools using this data, let us know by submitting your tool via the Developer's Corner on Data.gov . Most importantly, whether you're a software developer, an employer, or a worker – with this data you'll be able to arm yourself with the information you need to make your workplace a safer workplace. 

The mission of the Department of Labor as a worker protection agency is more clear and needed than ever and opening this data to the public is a valuable means of strengthening the tools available to us. With a renewed emphasis on protecting workers and businesses that do the right thing, our goal is simple: Save Lives. 

Dr. David Michaels is the Assistant Secretary for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, U.S. Department of Labor.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/28/dol-releases-valuable-data-honor-workers-memorial-day

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From the FBI

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Delta Flight 273 Passenger Charged with Interfering with Flight Crew and Making False Bomb Threats on Aircraft

BANGOR, ME—Derek Michael Stansberry, a U.S. citizen and resident of Riverview, Fla., was charged today in a criminal complaint in the District of Maine with interfering with flight crew members and willfully making false threats about an explosive device on an aircraft, U.S. Attorney Paula D. Silsby announced.

Stansberry, 27, a passenger on Delta flight 273 from Paris to Atlanta on April 27, 2010, was arrested yesterday after the flight was diverted to Bangor, Maine, in connection with his alleged illegal activities. Stansberry is expected to make his initial appearance in federal court in Bangor, but a time for the hearing has not yet been set. He faces a potential sentence of 20 years in prison for interfering with flight crew members and five years in prison for making false threats about an explosive device on an aircraft.

“Making false bomb threats on an aircraft and interfering with the flight crew are serious crimes that have serious consequences,” said U.S. Attorney Silsby. “Today's charges should serve as a reminder that the federal government will not tolerate this activity. This case also highlights the extensive resources required to address threats that prove to be false -- resources that could be better utilized addressing real threats.”

According to an affidavit filed in support of the criminal complaint, during the course of the flight, Stansberry passed a note to the flight attendant stating, among other things, that he was not an American citizen, that his passports and identity were fake, that he would leave his wallet and passport on the aircraft and “Please let my family know the truth…”

The flight attendant provided the note to a Federal Air Marshal on the plane. Stansberry was then moved to the back of the plane and taken into custody by the air marshals without incident. According to the affidavit, Stansberry told the air marshals that he had dynamite in his boots, which were located in his backpack, and that a pressure plate switch would detonate the dynamite. Stansberry also allegedly stated that there were explosives in his laptop.

According to the affidavit, the air marshals took custody of the laptop and the boots, placed them at the rear of the plane and built a bunker around these items to dampen the effects of any potential explosion. Stansberry remained in custody as the flight was diverted to Bangor.

Upon arrival in Bangor at approximately 3:30 p.m., Stansberry was removed from the aircraft and taken into FBI custody. Passenger and crew were also removed from the aircraft. The Bangor Police Department bomb squad searched the entire plane and all carry-on and checked luggage. Preliminary field tests indicated traces of explosives on Stansberry's boots and checked luggage. No explosive devices were located on the plane or in the luggage.

The affidavit alleges that, after being searched and brought to the holding area at the airport, Stansberry stated that he held high-level government clearances and was in possession of classified documents. He also allegedly stated that he believed people on the plane were following him, ridiculing him and using interrogation techniques on him, although these people never spoke directly to him or asked him any questions.

According to the affidavit, Stansberry said he decided to claim he had a bomb in order to divert attention from himself and the fact that he had classified information.  He said he did not actually possess any explosive device and that he did not have the ability to make one.  During the interview, Stansberry indicated that he had taken one Ambien earlier in the day. A report by the Federal Air Marshals indicated that Stansberry had stated to an air marshal that he had taken eight Ambien and had previously used Valium but not on this flight.

This investigation is being conducted by the FBI, Federal Air Marshals, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Transportation and Security Administration and the Bangor Police Department. The prosecution is being handled by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Maine.

The public is reminded that a criminal complaint contains mere allegations. Defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law.

http://boston.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel10/bs042810.htm

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Grand Jury Indicts Two Men for Mailing Hoax Anthrax Letters

BIRMINGHAM—A federal grand jury today indicted two men in connection with a series of hoax anthrax letters that were mailed in Alabama this month and in March, U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, U.S. Postal Inspector Frank Dyer and Federal Protective Service Threat Management Branch Chief Curtis Huston announced.

The first 15 counts of the 24-count indictment charge CLIFTON LAMAR “CLIFF” DODD, 38, of Lincoln, with mailing 15 hoax letters between March 6 and April 5 that contained a threat in the form of white powder that reasonably could have been perceived as the biological toxin, anthrax.

One of those letters was delivered to U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby's office in the Robert S. Vance Federal Building in Birmingham on March 8. Other recipients of the white-powder letters DODD is charged with sending include Alabama Sen. Jim Preuitt of Talladega, two Talladega County state court judges, Talladega County Sheriff Jerry Studdard, several Talladega County Jail inmates who were in the jail at the same time as DODD, and police investigators from both the Lincoln and Oxford police departments who previously had interviewed DODD, according to the indictment and an arrest affidavit filed Monday in U.S. District Court.

Counts 16-23 of the indictment charge DODD and MILSTEAD EARL “MICKEY” DARDEN, 38, of Lincoln, with mailing eight other anthrax hoax letters on Saturday, April 24. Count 24 of the indictment charges the two men with conspiring to send the threatening hoax letters mailed April 24.

As part of the conspiracy, the indictment charges that DARDEN allowed DODD to put together those eight letters while sitting in DARDEN's car, and that DARDEN drove DODD to the Pell City Post Office to mail them.

Postal inspectors arrested DODD and DARDEN on April 24 after they deposited eight letters in an outdoor drop box at the Pell City Post Office and the letters were found to contain white powder, according to the arrest affidavit.

This case was investigated by the U.S. Postal Service, the FBI, the Federal Protective Service and the Talladega County Sheriff's Office. It is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Whisonant.

Members of the public are reminded that an indictment contains only charges. A defendant is presumed innocent of the charges and it will be the government's burden to prove a defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.

http://birmingham.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel10/bh042810.htm

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Florida Couple Charged in Forced Labor and Document Servitude Conspiracies

WASHINGTON—Sophia Manuel and Alfonso Baldonado Jr. have been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges arising from a human trafficking scheme to hold Filipino nationals in forced labor in country clubs and hotels in Southeast Florida, the Justice Department announced.

According to the indictment, defendants Manuel, 41, and Baldonado, 46, owners of Quality Staffing Services Corporation of Boca Raton, Fla., conspired to obtain a cheap, compliant and readily available labor pool. The indictment details the defendants conspired to hold the workers in their continued service, for little or no pay, and housed them in substandard conditions without adequate food or drinking water.

The indictment alleges that the defendants used false promises to entice the Filipino nationals to incur debts to pay up-front recruitment fees; and then compelled the workers to remain in the defendants' service, despite inadequate work or income to pay off the debts, using a scheme of threats to have the workers arrested and deported with no way to repay their debts, confiscation of the workers' passports and rules and controls restricting the workers' freedom of movement and communications with outsiders.

Sophia Manuel is also charged with visa fraud and making false statements to the government to procure foreign labor certifications and visas under the H2B guestworker program.

This case is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the U.S. Department of Labor - Office of Inspector General; the U.S. Department of State - Bureau of Diplomatic Security; the state of Florida Department of Law Enforcement; and the state of Florida Office of the Attorney General.

This case is being prosecuted by trial attorney Susan French of the Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and Assistant U.S. Attorney Shaniek Maynard of the Southern District of Florida.

http://miami.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel10/mm042810.htm

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