Apparent car bomb prompts emptying of Times Square

A T-shirt vendor alerts police to a smoking SUV, and investigators find propane tanks, fireworks, gasoline and more inside. "I think the intent was to cause a significant ball of fire," the police commissioner says.

From the Associated Press

May 2, 2010

NEW YORK — Police found an "amateurish" but potentially powerful bomb in a smoking sport utility vehicle in Times Square, then cleared the streets of thousands of tourists milling through the landmark district so they could dismantle it, authorities said Sunday.

"We avoided what we could have been a very deadly event," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. "It certainly could have exploded and had a pretty big fire and a decent amount of explosive impact."

Investigators removed three propane tanks, consumer-grade fireworks, two filled 5-gallon gasoline containers, and two clocks with batteries, electrical wire and other components, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said at a news conference early Sunday. A black metal box resembling a gun locker was also recovered.

"I think the intent was to cause a significant ball of fire," Kelly said.

Bloomberg called the explosive device "amateurish" but potentially deadly, noting: "We are very lucky."

A white robotic police arm broke windows of the black Nissan Pathfinder to remove any explosive materials after a T-shirt vendor alerted police to the smoking vehicle at about 6:30 p.m. Heavily armed police and emergency vehicles shut down the city's busiest streets, teeming with taxis and theatergoers on one of the first summer-like days of the year.

A Connecticut license plate on the vehicle did not match up, according to authorities, who did not know a motive. Police interviewed the Connecticut car owner, who told police he had sent the plates to a nearby junkyard, Bloomberg said. Police are reviewing surveillance video and looking for more.

After the vendor noticed smoke coming from the SUV, police cleared buildings and streets at the so-called "Crossroads of the World"; the area remained closed hours later. Officers were deployed around the area with heavy weapons on empty streets in the heart of busy midtown Manhattan.

Shelly Carlisle, of Portland, Ore., said police crowded into her Broadway theater after the curtain closed on "Next to Normal," a show on the same block where the SUV was found.

"At the end of the show, the police came in. We were told we had to leave," Carlisle said. "They said there was a bomb scare."

The car was parked on 45th Street, and the block was closed between Seventh and Eighth avenues as a precaution, police said. Times Square lies about four traffic-choked miles north of where terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, then laid waste to it on Sept. 11, 2001.

The block that was closed is one of the prime blocks for Broadway shows, with seven theaters housing such big shows as "Billy Elliot" and "Lend Me a Tenor."

The curtain at "God of Carnage" and "Red" opened a half-hour later than usual, but the shows were not canceled, said spokesman Adrian Bryan-Brown.

Katy Neubauer, 46, and Becca Saunders, 39, of Milwaukee, were shopping for souvenirs two blocks south of the SUV when they saw panicked crowds.

"It was a mass of people running away from the scene," Neubauer said.

Said Saunders: "There were too many people, too many cops. I've never seen anything like it."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg left early from the White House correspondent's dinner Saturday night. A news conference was planned in New York for early Sunday.

President Barack Obama, who attended the annual gala, praised the quick response by the New York Police Department, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said. He has also directed his homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, to advise New York officials that the federal government is prepared to provide support.

Brennan and others will keep Obama up to date on the investigation, Shapiro said.

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York responded along with the NYPD, said agent Richard Kolko.

Authorities had no suspects and no motive early Sunday in the latest threat to New York, where a Colorado man recently pleaded guilty to plotting an attack on the subway system to coincide with the eighth anniversary of Sept. 11.

Officials said the device found Saturday was crudely constructed, but Islamic militants have used propane and compressed gas for years to enhance the force of explosives. Those instances include the 1983 suicide attack on the U.S. Marines barracks at the Beirut airport that killed 241 U.S. service members, and the 2007 attack on the international airport in Glasgow, Scotland.

In 2007 the U.S. military announced that an al-Qaida front group was using propane to rig car bombs in Iraq.

Times Square has been a frequent target, if not for potential terrorists, then for rabble-rousers.

In December, a van without license plates parked in Times Square led police to block off part of the area for about two hours. A police robot examined the vehicle, and clothes, racks and scarves were found inside.

In March 2008, a hooded bicyclist hurled an explosive device at a military recruiting center in the heart of Times Square, producing a flash, smoke and full-scale emergency response. No suspect was ever identified.

In December, police evacuated thousands of holiday tourists from Times Square after finding a white van that had been parked there for days without license plates and blacked-out windows. No bombs were found, and police later said they overlooked the van because it contained a parking placard for a nonprofit police group.

Police have spent years trying to crack down on street hustlers and peddlers preying on tourists. But there have been two major gunfights in recent months. A street hustler armed with a machine pistol exchanged shots in December, shattering a Broadway theater ticket window, before police fatally shot the man.

Four separate instances of shootings and more than 50 arrests on a mile-long stretch of Manhattan last month around Times Square prompted the mayor to call the mayhem "wilding."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-naw-times-square-20100502,0,211697,print.story

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L.A.'s May Day immigration rally is nation's largest

As many as 60,000 immigrants and their supporters join a peaceful but boisterous march through downtown to City Hall, waving flags and holding signs blasting the harsh new immigration law in Arizona.

By Teresa Watanabe and Patrick McDonnell, Los Angeles Times

May 1, 2010

Galvanized by Arizona's tough new law against illegal immigrants, tens of thousands of marchers took to the streets in Los Angeles on Saturday as the city led the nation in May Day turnout to press for federal immigration reform.

As many as 60,000 immigrants and their supporters joined a peaceful but boisterous march through downtown Los Angeles to City Hall, waving American flags, tooting horns and holding signs that blasted the Arizona law. The legislation, which is set to take effect in midsummer, makes it a crime to be in Arizona without legal status and requires police to check for immigration papers.

Though the crowd was roughly half as large as police had projected, it was the largest May Day turnout since 2006, when anger over federal legislation that would have criminalized illegal immigrants and those who aid them brought out more than 1 million protesters nationwide. Since then, most activists have deemphasized street actions in favor of change at the ballot box through promoting citizenship and voter registration.

But this year is different. Outrage over the Arizona law, continued deportations and frustration over congressional delay in passing federal immigration reform prompted activists nationwide to urge massive street protests on this traditional day of celebrating workers' rights.

That call was heeded by marchers like Yobani Velasquez, a 32-year-old Guatemala native and U.S. legal resident. He said the Arizona law energized him to come out and join the Los Angeles march.

"It's a racist and unfair law," said the Sun Valley truck driver. "It hurts parents and children."

Rallies in more than 90 other cities drew thousands of people from New York to Phoenix. In Washington, D.C., thousands cheered as 35 immigration rights advocates, including U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), were arrested in front of the White House after they disobeyed police orders by sitting on the sidewalk along Pennsylvania Avenue, calling on President Obama to move immigration reform forward.

But the national epicenter for opposition to the Arizona law has become Los Angeles. City officials have called for a boycott of the state, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has likened the law to Nazism, and activists put aside past differences to stage a unified march. Five coalitions representing more than 150 labor, faith and immigrant rights organizations worked closely with Spanish-language media to publicize the call to rally, according to Angelica Salas of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

"There was unanimous sentiment nationally and locally that we have to mobilize strong on May 1," Salas said. "It's a message to President Obama that we want immigration reform and an end to massive deportations of our community, and a special message to Republicans to stop getting in the way of reform and supporting hateful laws in Arizona."

But Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nonprofit group that supports tighter controls on illegal immigration, said most Americans don't support that message.

"What the public wants is enforcement of our immigration laws," Mehlman said. "They don't want people who break the law to be rewarded."

At the march's City Hall endpoint, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa took the stage to raucous cheers. Speaking in English and Spanish, he called Los Angeles a "bilingual city" and expressed strong support for immigrants' rights.

Afterward, Mahony took the microphone. "Everyone in God's eyes is legal," he said. "We are all standing with our immigrant brothers and sisters."

Police reported only two arrests for minor offenses as the orderly crowd marched under sunny skies. Street vendors hawked American flags and bacon-wrapped hot dogs with onions and peppers. Union members blew horns and chanted "no human being is illegal" over the rhythmic melodies of a mariachi band.

In a major theme of the day, one man wore a white T-shirt reading "Todos Somos Arizona," or "We Are All Arizona."

Leon Franco, 38, a Sylmar construction worker who installs tile and marble flooring, draped an American flag around himself as he prepared to march Saturday morning.

"In Mexico, there's no way to get ahead," said Franco, a legal U.S. resident from the Mexican state of Hidalgo who moved to the United States in 1993. "Back home, I had a very poor life. If it wasn't for this country, I don't know where I'd be."

A year ago, Franco's wife, Rosa Moreno, an illegal immigrant, was arrested in Los Angeles and deported to her home state of Sonora in Mexico. Since then, Franco said, he has had to be "mother and father" to his stepson, Daniel Estrada, 14, and son, Johnny Franco, 12.

"My kids would like to have their mother here with them," he said. "I'm here because we don't want to happen to other kids what has happened to these two," pointing to his sons.

Morena Villanueva, 42, a Guatemala native, an illegal immigrant and a former carwash worker, held up a banner that read: "Wash away injustice."

She said her son, Luis Humberto Robles Villanueva, 21, was killed Thursday in Guatemala, and tearfully told how she couldn't return home to bury him.

"If I go back to Guatemala, I could never come back," she said. "My hope is that another parent will never have to suffer the way I have, to be unable to bury their child because they are illegal."

Victoria Vergara, a 53-year-old Mexico native and U.S. resident for 27 years, stood with a group of workers from the Westin Bonaventure and other hotels. Her brother, an illegal immigrant who runs a used-car business in Chicago, is afraid U.S. authorities will shut down his business and deport him after more than two decades here, she said.

"I was lucky. I was able to get amnesty in the 1986 law and now I'm an American citizen," she said. "We want President Obama to know that it's time to help these hard-working people who don't have papers, who have worked hard all their lives in this country and want to be good Americans."

The marchers also included African American union members, Korean drummers dressed in colorful traditional garb and even a white educator hoisting a sign that read "Gringos for Immigrants' Rights."

One illegal immigrant from South Korea, who asked to be identified by his first name, Jeff, said he came to protest the "broken-down immigration system."

"This does not just affect Latinos," said Jeff, wearing a white shirt that crossed out the word "minutemen." "This affects all communities."

In the hot seat of Arizona, rallies in Tucson and Phoenix drew hundreds of protesters.

In Tucson, organizers released a flock of doves and hundreds of white balloons, and Aztec dancers performed. Rally speakers included labor organizer Dolores Huerta and singer Linda Ronstadt.

Rep. Raul Grijalva, the Arizona congressman who has called for an economic boycott of the state, was received with boisterous cheers. "We are going to fight this law," he told the crowd.

A couple of dozen counter-protesters carried signs that read "Deport Illegal Mexicans," "Remember the Alamo, Mexico," "Boycott Mexico" and "Mexico Out of US."

Claudia White, 56, a Tucson resident and naturalized Mexican immigrant who organized the counter-protest, said she supported the Arizona law because she worried about the consequences of what she called "open-border policies." Recent immigrants, she said, show "less of an interest in how this country was originally set up — where everybody is an individual and doesn't identify as part of a group or a block or a race."

In Phoenix, where many activists were too exhausted by the fight against the bill to plan a unified event, a few thousand people poured onto the broad lawn in front of the state Capitol for what became a sort of daylong festival against SB 1070.

Vendors sold ices and mangoes, anarchists handed out literature about the right of indigenous people to travel freely, and families wheeled strollers carrying toddlers who chanted " Si se puede !"

A handful of people supporting the law trickled in during the day and often had to leave under police escort after being surrounded by agitated demonstrators.

Amelia Sally, a 35-year-old customer service representative, held a sign that read: "Got Your Papers? If So ... Welcome." She was disheartened at the way demonstrators around the country were bashing her state.

"Arizona's finally taking a stand," she said. "We've been begging for help."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/immigration/la-me-0502-immig-rally-20100502,0,6289124,print.story

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At the White House, divisions over immigration

Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, concerned about political ramifications, urges caution in pursuing an overhaul. Other aides disagree, and Obama has signaled a willingness to move more quickly.

By Peter Nicholas, Tribune Washington Bureau

May 2, 2010

Reporting from Washington

Top aides to President Obama are divided over the urgency of passing an immigration overhaul, with Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel worried that pushing such a volatile issue in an election year could eat into the Democrats' congressional majority.

Other aides don't want to wait. And Obama himself is more willing than his chief of staff to risk the political fallout that may come from providing a path to legal status for the estimated 12 million people living in the U.S. illegally, according to people familiar with the views of both men.

The divergent opinions within the White House underscore the difficulty of the immigration issue, particularly during campaign season. Complicating the question is the tough new anti-immigration law in Arizona, which makes it a state crime to lack immigration paperwork and requires police to determine whether people they stop are in the country legally. The law has intensified calls for Obama to make good on a campaign promise and address the nation's strained immigration system quickly, before more states step into the void.

Emanuel's concerns are twofold, people familiar with his reasoning said. He is worried about moving ahead with a bill that could produce a voter backlash against Democrats running in conservative districts. As a former Democratic congressional campaign chairman, Emanuel helped recruit some of these candidates in the 2006 elections that returned the House to Democratic control.

He is also concerned that the votes to pass an immigration bill simply aren't in place.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said in an interview that he had discussed the immigration issue with Emanuel and believes that, "like the president, he supports the goal of comprehensive immigration reform."

"But Rahm is a pragmatist and a realist, and he's going to want to see a path to passage," Durbin added. "And that's what we're trying to find."

The internal debate may account for the inconsistent messages coming out of the White House. Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One the other day, Obama aired a viewpoint that sounded as if it might have come from Emanuel. He said that after a year of exhausting policy debates, Congress may lack the "appetite" to take up immigration. That suggested the president was prepared to wait until 2011, at the earliest.

One day later, in response to an immigration blueprint issued by Senate Democrats, the White House released a statement that sounded a different note. "We can no longer wait to fix our broken immigration system," it said.

Those who've spoken to Emanuel about immigration said he has long seen it as a dangerous issue for Democrats.

"Over the years, Rahm has expressed reservations about immigration reform and what it would do to the larger [Democratic] coalition," said Henry Cisneros, who served in the Clinton administration with Emanuel.

In previous roles, Emanuel has envisioned a slower timetable for passing an immigration bill than the one Obama has laid out. In 2007, he told an immigration reform advocate that Republican presidents had botched the issue, making it difficult for a future Democrat in the White House to pass a bill until the second term.

Juan Salgado, chairman of the board of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said that Emanuel made this point when the pair spoke at a conference in 2007.

"He basically said there was no way this is happening in a first term," Salgado said in an interview. "My reaction was, he's wrong and we're going to prove him wrong."

An Emanuel aide, when asked about that comment, noted that he made it "before becoming chief of staff to President Obama."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-immigration-20100502,0,5092368,print.story

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South Los Angeles Latinos and blacks find unity in worship

Members of predominantly African American and Latino churches along Crenshaw Boulevard hold joint services in an effort to overcome differences.

By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times

May 1, 2010

One is a Pentecostal, mostly African American congregation of 22,000, led by a world-renowned bishop with global ministries that extend to Africa and Haiti.

The other is one of the largest Latino evangelical churches in the city, whose Spanish-language ministries serve more than 4,000 members, most of them Salvadoran and Mexican immigrants and their children.

Located just four blocks apart along Crenshaw Boulevard in South Los Angeles, the two mega-churches — West Angeles Church of God in Christ and Iglesias de Restauracion — had never broken bread together, as cultural and linguistic differences kept them apart.

But that all changed Thursday night, when more than 1,500 believers from both churches worshiped together in what organizers billed as a historic attempt to overcome black-brown differences through shared faith and a sacred covenant to jointly address the violence, poverty and health problems that afflict both communities.

"This is the beginning of something great!" West Angeles Bishop Charles E. Blake roared as the crowd whooped and clapped and one person blew a shofar in evening services at his cathedral. "Our languages are different, but our hearts are the same!"

The Rev. Rene Molina, whose Restauracion is affiliated with El Salvador's largest church of 150,000 followers known as Mission Elim International, spoke in fiery Spanish as his son translated, telling congregants that their shared love for one God trumped all divisions.

The exhilaration was evident in the pews as well. Marlene Morales, a Mexican American teenager, said she was moved by the cross-cultural unity she had never experienced at Carson High School, where she said black-brown segregation, racial slurs and fights are common.

And Pat Campbell, an African American airport security worker who said many of her black friends had left the neighborhood because of the growing Latino presence, said the evening seemed like an answered prayer.

"I've been praying for this for a long time," she said. "I want to get along, work together and break down divisions."

The unity event, held on the anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, capped two years of what began as careful, tentative outreach between eight black and Latino pastors first brought together by the Rev. Alexia Salvatierra of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice. Salvatierra had been working with an evangelical Christian network of 1,200 Latino congregations in Southern California seeking allies in the fight for immigration reform.

During the initial encounters, she said, there were blunt confessions of mistrust between the two sides. African American candor sometimes offended Latinos used to a more indirect communication style. And black traditions of living out Scripture through social action caused unease among some Latino pastors who were taught to keep the spiritual and secular worlds separate, Salvatierra said.

The differences between leaders reflected tensions between their respective communities. Campbell, for example, said many of her African American neighbors grumble about perceived job competition from Latinos and ubiquitous Spanish speaking. And both sides lament the black-brown violence.

In the last six weeks, for instance, police say at least three shootings have occurred between black and Latino gangs in the Crenshaw/West Adams area. One of them resulted in the killing of a Latino passerby.

But Salvatierra said the guiding light that has bonded the pastors' group — which has blossomed into more than 120 members— is Jesus' words in John 17:23:

"May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me."

In a news conference Thursday at Restauracion, pastors from both sides drew parallels in the pain their communities are suffering. The Rev. Norman Copeland, presiding elder for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, spoke of the mutual pain of family separation — for Latinos, through deportations; for blacks, through slavery in the past and incarceration today.

Others cited the lack of good jobs and quality supermarkets in the neighborhood, causing both communities economic distress and health problems, including obesity and diabetes.

Then both congregations filed into Restauracion's sanctuary, where Blake took the pulpit after lively music reflecting both cultural traditions. Hundreds then streamed down Victoria Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard in a procession, hailed by honking cars, to West Angeles. There, Molina preached as the night came to a euphoric climax.

The next steps have not yet been charted out, but everyone seemed to have ideas for action. Morales and Campbell both cited the need to bring Latino and African American youth together through sports or other activities. Salvatierra threw out the idea of prayer networks to focus on each other's biggest concerns: blacks praying for Latino families facing deportation; Latinos praying for jobs and stability for African Americans released from prison. Some pastors are proposing a more extended retreat for the two congregations to continue building spiritual bonds.

On Thursday, it seemed momentous enough that the two neighbors had at long last come together.

"Most important is to let people know it doesn't matter what color you are or language you speak, we can be together," said Nelson Umana, an El Savador native who works at a Burbank golf course. "We go to the same God."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0501-unity-20100501,0,4429993,print.story

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Somber memorial for Marines, sailors killed in Afghanistan

A somber ceremony Friday at Camp Lejeune, N.C., honored the 90 Marines and sailors killed in the last 12 months in Afghanistan, including those from Southern California's Camp Pendleton and Twentynine Palms.

"These Marines [and sailors] did not die in vain," Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson said. "They died for something greater than themselves. They died for something that generations will remember."

Nearly 900 Marines and sailors were wounded in the same time period as U.S. troops battled Taliban fighters for control of Helmand Province.

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

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A can-do president vs. a do-nothing mood

The president's ambitious agenda may be at odds with the American people's anti-government mood.

Doyle McManus

May 2, 2010

This just in: Americans don't trust their government.

A spate of recent polls has found that faith in the federal government has sunk to near-record lows. In one survey, only 22% of those polled said they trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. More people said the federal government has a negative impact on their lives than said it has a positive one. Even relatively popular agencies such as the Defense Department and the Social Security Administration have seen their standings slip.

The last time those numbers sank so low was 1994, when then- President Clinton's Democrats ran into trouble with voters over healthcare. In case you've forgotten what happened in that year's congressional election, it was a Republican landslide.

What accounts for today's sour mood? Just what you'd expect. The economy's improvement has so far delivered early profits to Wall Street but little comfort to Main Street. The president who promised bipartisan solutions for the economy pushed through a healthcare bill that only one party supported. And in Congress, the two parties remain locked in nasty election-year bickering.

These problems aren't all Obama's doing, of course. The economy pitched into recession long before his inauguration. Republican leaders in Congress deliberately polarized the legislative branch. And trust in government has been on a gradual decline, with only periodic remissions, for decades.

But Obama's policy choices have made the problem sharper. In 2008, before his election, voters split evenly on whether they wanted a bigger government with more services or a smaller government with fewer services. This year, it's not even close: in a Pew Research Center poll released this month, 50% said they want smaller government and only 39% said they wanted bigger government. The voters' newly conservative cast has even led to an uptick on noneconomic issues: More voters say they want to increase restrictions on abortion and decrease regulation of guns.

"People are going in a conservative direction in reaction to a president they perceive as liberal," said Andrew Kohut, who directed the poll.

No matter who is to blame, the public's anti-government mood has become one of Obama's biggest problems. And the consequences extend well beyond the likely drubbing his Democrats will suffer at the polls in November.

Obama still has an ambitious agenda he'd like to enact, including financial sector regulation, energy legislation and education and immigration reform. He still needs to implement his landmark healthcare reform law. And looming over all these is the federal government's growing fiscal crisis: Social Security and Medicare spending is about to soar while tax revenues lag.

If voters don't think the federal government is capable of solving problems, Obama is going to have a hard time winning their support for higher taxes and lower benefits — sacrifices that are necessary for a better future.

In a sense, Obama is a victim of his own initial achievements. In his first 15 months, he focused on enacting ambitious new programs, and largely succeeded. Shoved to a back burner, partly because of the recession, was the "conservative" side of his agenda: fixing the deficit and making government more efficient.

Obama's strength, so far, has been in designing big initiatives and using his Democratic majority to enact them. His weakness has been in politics: convincing voters that these were good things to do.

That's quite a shift from our last Democratic president. Obama has passed big things and gotten little public credit. Clinton passed small things but managed to extract every possible ounce of public appreciation for them. It helped enormously, of course, that Clinton's first term coincided with/ended in a robust economic recovery. By the time he faced reelection in 1996, the public's trust in government — and in him — had rebounded nicely from its 1994 low.

Part of the reason was that Clinton (putting aside his Oval Office improprieties) seemed to know instinctively what would play well with voters. In his very first months in office, Clinton launched a highly visible project to "reinvent government" and put Vice President Al Gore in charge. Gore attacked the assignment with wonky zest. At one point, he demolished an ashtray on the David Letterman show to demonstrate the lunacy of procurement requirements.

The project was part management science, part vaudeville — and all politics. It was aimed deliberately at voters who didn't trust the federal government, attempting to show them that the government could actually reform itself. When Clinton ran for reelection in 1996, one of his favorite pitches to voters was that he had reduced the size of the federal bureaucracy to its lowest level since John F. Kennedy.

The Obama administration has a similar initiative, called "modernizing government," but you've probably never heard of it. It's hidden in the Office of Management and Budget under a team of former corporate wizards, including the federal government's first-ever "chief performance officer."

They are smart people with good ideas, some of which have even been implemented. (Applicants for citizenship can now track their application status on a website.) Others have stalled. ("If you can book dinner [at a restaurant] online, then why shouldn't you be able to make an appointment at your local Social Security office the same way?" Obama asked at a White House conference in January. You still can't do it.)

Obama's worthy "modernizing government" effort hardly matters if it's invisible to all those voters who don't trust their government to do anything right. Maybe it's time to smash an ashtray or two.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-20100502,0,7541470,print.column

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From the Daily News

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Arizona touches a nerve

On Saturday, thousands marched in downtown L.A. and many other cities to protest the nation's first substantive anti-illegal- immigrant law, Arizona's SB 1070.

The blowback against the Arizona law has been fierce. Big mouths like me are fair game. I support the law and have said so publicly, so the public has responded.

Along with the usual "Nazi," "fascist," "hatemonger" invective pouring in via e-mail, I've also been told to go do things to myself that would strain the tendons of the most limber Cirque du Soleil performer. On the other side, Councilwoman Janice Hahn and Mayor Failure have probably also heard from constituents who differ.

However, the billowing rage uncorked after the passage of SB 1070 in Arizona now threatens to consume the entire country. It's a perfect political storm fueled by anger on all sides after years of posturing by Washington cowards with local politicians performing the rain dance.

Next year's Major League Baseball All-Star game is scheduled for Phoenix. Commissioner Bud Selig is now under the gun to move the game. Suddenly jocks are caught in the cross hairs of an issue our so-called leaders have dodged and bungled for decades. Why are ballplayers being asked to solve a problem Congress won't even touch?

No boycott will ever change this critical fact: For years the people of Arizona have begged the federal government for help and had their legitimate grievances dismissed as bigotry. Sound familiar, L.A.?

Phoenix is currently the kidnapping capital of North America, with drug cartels grabbing hostages hundreds of miles from the border. The cost to Arizona taxpayers has been enormous. When a beloved rancher, Robert Krentz, was murdered by an illegal immigrant on land his family has worked for a century, the people finally had enough.

As the palest of white guys, it's unlikely the police will ever pull me over as a suspected undocumented anything. I get it. However, while concerns over civil liberties are legitimate, they aren't insurmountable. We have settled law that establishes ground rules for what the police can and can't do, and since the whole world will be watching, it won't take "CSI: Tucson" to expose rogue cops.

We can't allow fear of what might happen to prevent us from fixing what is happening.

The people are in the streets. The people are engaged. Where are our leaders?

http://www.dailynews.com/opinions/ci_15000905

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From the New York Times

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Scare Reveals Other Side of Times Square

On a typical warm weekend night, Times Square teems with visitors: theater fans taking a post-show stroll down Broadway; tourists staying in high-rise hotels; suburban teenagers who gather to gawk at the jumbo-sized neon signs that fill the square with light.

But when the police noticed white smoke billowing from a dark-green Nissan Pathfinder on 45th Street near Seventh Avenue, and then discovered the makings of a crude car bomb inside, the normal hubbub was replaced by a different sort of spectacle.

Twelve blocks, from West 43rd Street to West 48th Street between Sixth Avenue and Eighth Avenue, were cordoned off with metal barricades. The streets and pedestrian malls were filled with ambulances, fire trucks and cars and vans full of police officers. Teams of officers wearing helmets and carrying automatic rifles stood on corners. The bomb squad showed up with a remote-controlled robot and officers wearing blast-proof suits.

Onlookers assembled, leaning against the barricade, posing for pictures and asking one another what was going on. The neon lights still flickered, competing with the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles. Tourists still showed up for a glimpse of the square. But for a few hours in the dead of night, with traffic diverted and throngs dispersed, the center of Times Square was quiet. Well, almost quiet.

Bruno St. Clara, a 25-year-old carpenter from Brazil, wandered through the crowd near the police substation on West 43rd Street. He said he had walked north from his hotel on West 34th Street.

“We saw on television that there was a bomb,” he said. “I just wanted to check it out.”

Outside the sealed-off zone, plenty of other travelers were second-guessing their decision to book a room in Times Square. The New York Marriott Marquis Hotel, around the corner from where the Nissan was parked, had been evacuated, and people staying there spent the better part of the night waiting to hear when they would be permitted to return.

Then there were those who willingly lingered, captivated by the drama playing out in front of them. Christina Paiva, from Carle Place, on Long Island, spent her 17th birthday glued to the barricades with a group of friends. Originally, they said, they had planned to visit M& M World at West 48th Street and Broadway, but they found themselves instead directed south by police officers as emergency vehicles arrived, lights flashing and sirens blaring.

“It's very upsetting,” Ms. Paiva said.

But why had the group chosen to stay?

“It's scary,” Sabrina Papez, 17, clarified. “But it's also intriguing.”

As the hour grew later, the crowd thinned. An ABC news ticker near 44th Street read: “NYC's Times Square evacuated in bomb scare.” The Dow Jones ticker reported on the Kentucky Derby. Around 2 a.m. a group of friends from Walled Lake, Mich., arrived, eager to see Times Square.

“I expected it to be overwhelmingly crowded,” said Erica Mitchell, 23.

Her friend, Chelsea Gaunt, agreed.

“I never knew a city could be this quiet,” she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/nyregion/03scene.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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The ‘Wanted Dead' Option in the War on Terror

BAGHDAD — You can hardly blame Iraq's beleaguered prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki , for trumpeting the killing of the two leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq last month as a lethal blow to the local terrorist franchise.

“Decapitation,” as it is called, has long been seen as the silver bullet of counterterrorism. Military commanders and especially political leaders rarely resist the temptation to embrace the strategy — think, “ Osama bin Laden , Dead or Alive” — as the short road to the end of a war on terror.

But it rarely is so easy. The reported killing in January of Pakistan's Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud , by an American drone not only failed to defuse the fight there; as officials said last week, the reports may not even have been true.

Still, Mr. Maliki's optimism may not be entirely misplaced, because in some circumstances decapitations can work. Understanding what those conditions are also helps explain why the war in Iraq may end differently from that in Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda in Iraq is hardly defeated, but recent academic research on decapitation as a strategy suggests that in this case, it may in fact have put the group closer to demise — not so much because the airstrikes were accurate as because Iraqis have lost respect for the group.

“Decapitation does not have a great historical track record in ending groups on its own,” Audrey Kurth Cronin, an author and professor at the National War College in Washington, wrote in an e-mail message. But her new book, “How Terrorism Ends” (Princeton University Press), outlines circumstances in which terrorist groups over the last two centuries have run their course. “When decapitation is most effective,” she added, “it's due to a number of things.” And in Iraq, the single most significant factor has been the erosion of Al Qaeda 's popularity in recent years.

At the height of the violence here, the group effectively governed cities, villages and even entire regions, with the explicit or at least tacit support of Iraqis. “They controlled territory the size of New England in 2006,” says Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation in Washington.

As the Taliban does now in swaths of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Iraqi group could operate openly, recruit fighters and raise its own funds (in the Iraqi case, by running, or extorting money from, oil fields and even phone companies), as it used terrorism to wage an insurgency against an occupying power.

Ultimately, though, Iraqis soured on the group's Islamic ideology, its foreign leadership and its use of indiscriminate violence, which killed as many Iraqi civilians as it did American “occupiers.” That, as much as the American “surge” in troops in 2007, was what changed the dynamic in Iraq.

“The Al Qaeda in Iraq brand,” Mr. Bergen said, “is horribly tarnished,” reflecting the idea that terrorism, at heart, is a campaign for consumer loyalty.

Which is where decapitation fits in. The question now is whether the group can recover from the loss of two leaders: Abu Ayyub al-Masri , an Egyptian who served as the military commander, and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the chief ideologue.

A recent statistical analysis by Jenna Jordan of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism that appeared in the journal Security Studies found that the removal of a terrorist leader succeeded in defeating a group only 17 percent of the time. Having studied 298 killings or arrests of leaders from 1945 through 2004, Ms. Jordan concluded that “the marginal utility for decapitation is actually negative,” because martyrdom can actually rally the troops.

Still, she found that other factors, like the age and size of the group, could change the odds: The smaller and younger a terrorist group, for example, the more likely that decapitation could work.

While the central Qaeda group led by Mr. bin Laden has been around for decades, the Iraqi franchise emerged only after the 2003 invasion.

And it has been shrinking. A wave of arrests — apparently based on fortuitous intelligence — seems to have decimated its ranks, depriving the group of fighters who might have risen and taken over. Meanwhile, officials say, ordinary Iraqis have become more willing to come forward with tips, which are essential to a counterterrorism strategy.

It's telling that while Al Qaeda in Iraq's political arm acknowledged the deaths of the two men last week, it has not yet announced their replacements, as Al Qaeda in Iraq did in 2006 after the death of its founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi .

“One of the differences this time, we believe, is there are less charismatic and combat-proven leaders remaining in Al Qaeda that can step up and assume that leadership role as effectively as in the past,” said Brig. Gen. Ralph O. Baker, deputy commander of American forces in Baghdad.

He added that the group's captured leaders have been surprisingly cooperative with Iraqi interrogators, an indication that zeal within the group is less than it once was. The same may be true of support from the international jihad. “When Al Qaeda was a highly effective organization, Osama bin Laden would often talk about Iraq,” Mr. Bergen said. “In his recent statements, he doesn't talk about it.” Iraq, he added, “is no longer the good war for them.”

Of course, declarations of success in Iraq have been premature before, and Iraq remains horrifically violent. Other extremist groups, and Iraq's political disarray, almost guarantee more carnage.

As Ms. Cronin says, though, terrorist groups are not indestructible. That may be why some officials here think Iraq and the United States may, at last, have turned a corner on A.Q.I., as she calls the Iraqi Qaeda group. “No one can say a group has definitely ‘ended,' except in retrospect,” she wrote. “And some groups are more violent in their closing phase. But I do believe that A.Q.I.'s days are numbered.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/weekinreview/02myers.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Immigration Advocates Rally for Change

WASHINGTON — In protests fueled by anger over a tough anti-illegal immigrant law in Arizona, tens of thousands of demonstrators joined marches and rallies Saturday in cities across the country, calling on Congress to pass an immigration overhaul.

In Los Angeles, the police said the crowd had peaked at 50,000. Protesters numbered 25,000 in Dallas, more than 10,000 in Chicago and Milwaukee, in the thousands in San Francisco and here in Washington, D.C., according to the police and independent estimates. Organizers said rallies and vigils were held in more than 70 places around the country.

In Washington, Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, Democrat of Illinois, was arrested after staging a sit-in on the sidewalk in front of the White House with about three dozen other people, in front of a crowd of thousands.

At a rally before he was arrested, Mr. Gutierrez, speaking in English and in Spanish, evoked memories of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

“There are moments in which you say, ‘We will escalate this struggle,' ” he said. “Today they will put handcuffs on us. But one day we will be free at last in the country we love.”

In all, 35 people were arrested in the sit-in, the United States Park Police said.

At rally after rally across the nation, protesters chanted “shame, shame, Arizona,” and carried signs saying, “Todos Somos Arizona,” or “We are All Arizona.”

The bigger demonstrations were far larger than planners had anticipated in March, when the events were first announced. The protests were originally called by immigrant advocates who had set May 1 as the deadline for Congress to introduce overhaul legislation that would include measures to give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants.

But organizers said the Arizona legislation, which was signed into law April 23, had been a watershed event for disparate advocate organizations, transforming them into something akin to a civil rights movement with a national profile.

The Arizona law made it a crime to be present in the state without legal immigration status and authorized the police to question people about their status based on a suspicion that they might be illegal immigrants.

Supporters of the law, including Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, a Republican, said the state had to act because the federal government had failed to enforce the immigration laws. Critics across the country said the law would lead to racial profiling and spread fear in immigrant communities.

In Los Angeles, protesters marched through the streets and held a crowded rally downtown, just down the street from the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

Demonstrators waved American flags and signs, including one that said: “We Latinos are the Jews of the 21st century.” Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa told the crowd that a federal immigration overhaul was long overdue.

“Let me be clear about those laws that make suspects out of people based on the color of their skin,” Mr. Villaraigosa said. “They have no place in our great country.”

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles drew cheers when he said, “Everyone in God's eyes is legal.”

“Every time we have an economic downturn, there is a new attack on immigrants,” Cardinal Mahony said.

One Los Angeles protester, Dorien Grunbaum, 67, a teacher at a community college in the city, said she was there “primarily to support the immigrants in Arizona. I'm disgusted by what's happening there,” Ms. Grunbaum said.

No overhaul legislation has been introduced in Congress, and President Obama said last week that lawmakers “may not have the appetite” for a volatile debate on immigration this year. A group of Democratic senators on Thursday presented an outline for an overhaul bill, written primarily by Senator Charles E. Schumer , Democrat of New York.

In Washington, Mr. Gutierrez sat crossed-legged on the sidewalk in front of the White House at about 3 p.m., holding a small American flag and wearing a white T-shirt with red letters that read, “Arrest me not my friends.” The protesters each held letters that spelled out the message, “Obama, stop deporting our families.”

Mr. Gutierrez was handcuffed behind his back with plastic cuffs by the Park Police, and he walked in silence when an officer led him away along the black wrought-iron fence in front of the White House. Among others arrested with him were Jaime Contreras, director for Washington, D.C., of the Service Employees International Union ; Joshua Hoyt, Ali Noorani, Deepak Bhargava, and Gustavo Torres, leaders of immigrant advocate organizations; and Gregory Cendana, president of the United States Student Association.

The protesters were arrested for violations of a regulation requiring people to keep moving when they pass in front of the White House, said Sergeant David Schlosser, a spokesman for the Park Police.

In Chicago, Mr. Obama's hometown, thousands of people marched through downtown with signs that said, “Being brown is not a crime” and “Hey Obama! Don't deport my mama.”

Many of the Chicago protesters expressed frustration at what they saw as the president's lack of action on immigration.

Dulce Blanco, 48, was at the rally with a church group. She said she voted for Mr. Obama after attending a meeting where he said he would pass immigration reform. “If they don't pass reform, we won't vote for Obama again,” she said in Spanish.

Guadalupe Concepcion, a 22-year-old student in Chicago, began to cry during one of the speeches. She said she had been an illegal immigrant until she married her husband and that her parents faced discrimination because they are not here legally.

“The Arizona law is just plain racist,” she said. “It happened with African-Americans in the past, and now they want to do the same thing with us.”

Addressing the Chicago crowd, the Rev. Jesse Jackson encouraged a boycott of Arizona, saying the law would encourage racial profiling. “Arizona has become the Selma,” he said. “It is a showdown.”

In downtown Dallas, demonstrators gathered at the Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, named for the patroness of Mexico, and marched to City Hall. Many carried American flags, or draped them over their shoulders.

Among the widening reverberations from the Arizona law, the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, a historically black organization whose members included Rev. Martin Luther King , Jr. and Justice Thurgood Marshall , announced that it was moving its annual convention in July to Las Vegas from Phoenix. The fraternity said it had been expecting as many as 10,000 people, including members and their families, to come to the meeting.

The fraternity's board decided that it could not host a meeting in a state with “a law that could put the civil rights and the very dignity of our members at risk during their stay in Phoenix,” said Herman Mason, the general president.

In Phoenix on Saturday, a far smaller and more subdued crowd of about 1,000 people gathered by 3 p.m. on the lawn at the State Capitol.

Most had handmade signs, including one with Governor Brewer wearing a black witch hat and reading “Jan Brewer: Arizona's wicked witch of the West.”

The rally was primarily peaceful with the mostly Latino crowd marching around the Capitol, but a few arguments broke out with people who supported the law.

One demonstrator, Martina Paz, 42, of Phoenix, held a photograph of her 23-year-old son, Adan Buelna, who she said was in the Army stationed in Texas and was waiting to be deployed to the Middle East.

“My son will be protecting the rights and liberty of people on the other side of the world, but who is going to protect our rights here in Arizona,” Ms. Paz said.

She said that she feared that even though she and her husband have submitted applications to become legal residents, they will be stopped by the police and possibly be deported.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/us/02immig.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Children's Tylenol and Other Drugs Recalled

A unit of Johnson & Johnson has voluntarily begun a recall of certain children's over-the-counter liquid medicines because of manufacturing deficiencies, the Food and Drug Administration said on Saturday.

The deficiencies may affect the potency, purity or quality of the products, the agency said in a statement . It said it was investigating the plant where the products were made to make sure there were no other problems.

Consumers should stop using certain lots of infants' and children's Tylenol, Motrin, Zyrtec and Benadryl products because some of them may contain more of the active drug ingredient than specified, the Johnson & Johnson unit, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, said in a statement late Friday. Other products involved in the recall may contain foreign particles or inactive ingredients that may not meet testing requirements, the company said.

“The particles may be solidified product ingredients or manufacturing residue such as tiny metal specks,” Marc Boston, a McNeil spokesman, said.

McNeil did not undertake the recall because of adverse health reactions to the products, the company said, but it advised consumers to stop using them.

Although the potential for serious medical problems is remote, McNeil said, parents and caregivers should not give the products to children.

The recall involves all unexpired lots of seven products in 43 different flavors and sizes. These include Tylenol Infants' Drops, Children's Tylenol Suspensions, Infants' Motrin Drops, Children's Zyrtec liquids in bottles and Children's Benadryl Allergy liquids.

McNeil has posted a full list of the recalled product lots on a dedicated Web site : mcneilproductrecall.com . The recall comes after federal health regulators cited McNeil on Friday morning for manufacturing violations found during a routine inspection at a company facility in Fort Washington, Pa., an F.D.A. spokeswoman said. This is the second major recall this year for McNeil. In January, after receiving reports of moldy smells emanating from over-the-counter medicines made at a plant in Puerto Rico, the company recalled several hundred lots of adult and children's products. The earlier recall involved certain lots of Benadryl, Motrin, Rolaids, Simply Sleep, St. Joseph Aspirin and Tylenol.

McNeil has a hotline, (888) 222-6036, available 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern time, Monday through Friday and on weekends from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. But due to high call volumes, a reporter who called the hotline at different times on Saturday was unable to reach a customer service representative. A recorded message directed callers to the company's Web site and later disconnected. McNeil said it was working to respond to the high call volumes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/business/02drug.html?adxnnl=1&ref=us&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1272790809-P9h51DBxOk7oB0VB4BTEaw

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From MSNBC

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World's workers rally on May Day

ISTANBUL - Tens of thousands of workers marched in cities from Hong Kong to Istanbul Saturday to mark international worker's day, demanding more jobs, better work conditions and higher wages.

About 140,000 jubilant workers gathered in Istanbul's Taksim Square in the first celebrations at the site since dozens of people died there in a May 1 gathering more than three decades ago.

The demonstrations in Istanbul, which sits on both European and Asian continents, marked a special victory for the Turkish unions, which had been denied access to the Taksim Square since 1977, when 34 people died after shooting triggered a stampede. The culprits were never found and workers on Saturday demanded an inquiry into the deaths of the demonstrators.

Most of the annual May Day marches were peaceful, but in the Chinese territory of Macau police used water cannons and pepper spray against rowdy protesters who tried to break away from the approved route. Hong Kong radio RTHK reported at least eight people injured, including a photographer.

Athens also witnessed riots, with police using tear gas to disperse demonstrators who threw firebombs and stones in a large May Day rally against austerity measures needed to secure loans for near-bankrupt Greece. In Switzerland, Zurich police used water cannons in an attempt to disperse dozens of stone-throwing protesters as unions and politicians protested against "excessive" Swiss banking bonuses.

German police detained 250 neo-Nazis who attempted to attack them in downtown Berlin, while they braced for further clashes after sundown.

Massive turnouts

Nadine Pusch, a spokeswoman for Berlin police, said 7,000 officers were scattered throughout the city in an effort to ensure peaceful demonstrations.

Overnight in Hamburg, 17 officers were injured in clashes on the eve of May 1 and at least nine demonstrators were detained, the German news agency ddp reported Saturday.

The turnout in Cuba was massive, as expected, and authorities claimed the march by hundreds of thousands of Cubans amounted to approval of the island's communist system amid mounting international criticism over human rights.

Thousands joined peaceful May Day marches in Stockholm, where opposition leader Mona Sahlin blamed the center-right government for failing to stem rising unemployment and eroding the nation's cherished welfare system. Sahlin is hoping to become Sweden's first female prime minister after national elections in September.

Several thousand demonstrators in Paris also took to the streets amid concerns about conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy's plans to overhaul the pension system.

In Manila, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo announced she had ordered the labor secretary to speed up negotiations between unions and employers on a 75-peso ($1.67) increase in daily minimum wage.

In Indonesia's capital, thousands of workers marched on the presidential palace, shouting: "Workers unite! No more layoffs!" Rally organizer Bayu Ajie said a free-trade agreement with China had cost jobs, decreased wages and encouraged corruption. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono promised to create safer working conditions and improve job prospects if the workers maintained political and economic stability.

Thousands of Communist demonstrators, carrying red balloons, red Soviet flags and portraits of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin, called for the Russian government's resignation over rising prices and unemployment in Moscow. Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov led hundreds of opposition activists in a separate rally. They also called for the ouster of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whom they accuse of stamping out democracy. A few thousands also rallied in Ukraine's capital.

Wealth in the hands of a few

In Seoul, South Korea, Tokyo and Taiwan, thousands marched for better working conditions and permanent jobs. Jeong Ho-hee, spokesman of the Korean Confederation of Trade Union, vowed to fight against long working hours and high death rate related to industrial accidents.

In the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, several hundred workers protested a proposed 4 percent goods and services tax while about 1,000 protesters, including janitors, construction workers and bus drivers, demanded the government in Hong Kong to introduce a minimum wage of 33 Hong Kong dollars ($4.30).

This freewheeling capitalist Chinese enclave is one of the world's wealthiest cities, but critics say its wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few.

"A lunch box at a fast-food restaurant costs about HK$30 ($4). It's an insult if you can't afford a lunch box after working for an hour," pro-democracy legislator Leung Yiu-chung said on the sidelines of Saturday's protests.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36886675/ns/world_news/print/1/displaymode/1098/

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Smugglers suspected in deputy shooting

PHOENIX - Law officers apprehended 17 suspected illegal immigrants while hunting for suspected pot smugglers who shot and wounded a sheriff's deputy in a remote desert area 50 miles south of Phoenix.

Pinal County sheriff's Lt. Tamatha Villar says three of those captured match descriptions given by the deputy. They were being questioned Saturday morning.

The violent episode came amid nationwide debate over the state's tough new immigration law.

Pinal County Deputy Louie Puroll was patrolling alone Friday afternoon in a rugged area about 50 miles south of Phoenix when he came upon a band of suspected smugglers, authorities said.

At least one of five suspects opened fire on the 53-year-old lawman, tearing a chunk of skin from just above his left kidney. The officer was found after a frantic hourlong search, Pinal County sheriff's Lt. Tamatha Villar said.

The wound was not serious and Puroll was released Friday night from Casa Grande Regional Medical Center.

State and federal law enforcement agencies deployed helicopters and scores of officers to search a 100 square-mile zone for the suspects. The Arizona Republic newspaper reported officials said more than one of the choppers came under fire during the manhunt.

The Pinal Sheriff's department told The Associated Press that the hunt lasted into the early morning hours Saturday but no arrests had been made.

The shooting was likely to add fuel to an already fiery national debate sparked when Gov. Jan Brewer on April 23 signed a law cracking down on illegal immigration in the state.

A backlash over the law has surged with civil rights activists, concerned it will lead to racial profiling, calling for protests and a boycott of the state.

Increasing anger

The new law's passage came amid increasing anger in Arizona about violence, drug smugglers, illegal immigration drop houses and other problems that some say are caused by poor border security. The issue gained focus a month ago when a southern Arizona rancher was shot and killed by a suspected illegal border crosser.

Arizona politicians called Friday's shooting an outrage and urged the federal government to do more to secure the border with Mexico.

Video: Arizona immigration debates rages

"Regardless of the outcome of tonight's manhunt and investigation, Arizona is now confronted by some of the most vicious and dangerous narco-terror organizations the world has seen," Brewer said in a statement.

Rep. Kirkpatrick, a Democrat whose district includes part of Pinal County, said the violence "should show the rest of the country what we Arizonans have known for too long — the unsecured border poses a very real and very immediate danger."

Puroll, a 15-year department veteran, had been carrying out smuggling interdiction work before finding the bales of marijuana and encountering the five suspected smugglers, two armed with rifles.

"He was out on his routine daily patrol in the area when he encountered a load of marijuana out in the desert. He obviously confronted the individuals and took fire," Villar told The AP.

The Republic quoted Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu as saying about 30 bullets were fired at the deputy, who returned fire with a semiautomatic rifle and a handgun.

The area is a well-known smuggling corridor for drugs and illegal immigrants headed from Mexico to Phoenix and the U.S. interior.

"(Puroll) is a search-and-rescue deputy, so its not uncommon for them to work those areas A) looking for drugs and B) looking for people who need assistance out there," Villar said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36884616/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/print/1/displaymode/1098/

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