A frame made from a surveillance video released by New York police shows a man, right, pick up a bag after removing a shirt in an alleyway. (NYPD / May 3, 2010)

N.Y. police search for suspect in Times Square bomb scare The tourist spot returns to business while officials scour hours of surveillance footage of the failed attack, which many say amounts to a form of terrorism. By Tina Susman, Los Angeles Times May 3, 2010 Reporting from New York A car bomb left in Times Square made of easily purchased items, including alarm clocks and gasoline, could have sent a "significant fireball" hurtling through one of the world's busiest tourist spots, police said Sunday as they searched for a man caught on film who might be linked to the failed attempt. The incident, coming months after a foiled plot by Afghan immigrants to blow up New York subways, underscored the vulnerability of heavily policed Times Square, which since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been under close watch by police and scores of surveillance cameras

"We're very lucky. We know we live in a dangerous world," said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Sunday, describing the incident as a "further reminder of the dangers we face."

After a night that saw most of the theater district under lockdown, Times Square on Sunday was jammed again with tourists, street vendors and shoppers who seemed to view the incident as an unavoidable result of a perilous world.

"No matter what they say about safety, there's no real safety," said Fati Adam, who was in town for the day from neighboring Connecticut. "Even with all the police around, these things happen."

"Look how busy the place is," she added, glancing at the throngs of people jostling for space on the sidewalks beneath a blazing sun. "How can you police everything?"

Police are hoping that hours of footage from cameras positioned around Times Square — packed with major hotels, theaters, stores and office towers — will help identify the driver of the dark green Nissan Pathfinder that came to a stop on West 45th Street near Broadway at 6:28 p.m. Saturday.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said one camera captured images of a man walking swiftly down Shubert Alley, about half a block from the SUV, glancing over his shoulder in a "furtive manner." Police were searching for the man, described only as white and in his 40s.

Kelly said the man's actions "could be perfectly innocent," but he made clear that his mannerisms drew investigators' attention as they watched the video.

Police also planned to meet with a tourist from Pennsylvania who filmed the policeman on horseback who first responded to calls of a suspicious vehicle. The tourist told police he might have video of the person who was driving the SUV.

An Islamist website on Sunday said the Pakistani Taliban had claimed responsibility for the bomb, but there was no independent confirmation of the claim, and Kelly said there was no evidence to support it.

A monitoring group later said the Pakistani Taliban released a video — apparently dated early April — of their leader promising an attack on major U.S. cities "in some days or a month." The video did not specifically mention the New York bombing attempt..

IntelCenter, which keeps track of militant media messages, said the nearly nine-minute video appeared credible.

In a city notorious for its lack of parking, the SUV that glided to the curbside in the heart of Times Square on a traffic-choked Saturday night was bound to draw attention.

Within minutes, street vendors had become curious about the unattended vehicle with the tinted back windows. Duane Jackson left his handbag stall and trotted across West 45th Street to peer into its front windows, seeing keys dangling from the ignition.

Lance Orton, a T-shirt vendor, spotted smoke coming from the Pathfinder and alerted a policeman on horseback. In the ensuing minutes, fear spread through the crowds. A series of loud "pops" rang out from the Nissan. Smoke began pouring from the vehicle. People scrambled to get away.

"I ran like everybody else," Jackson said.

Nobody was injured Saturday, and police quickly closed most of the area and brought in a robot to scour the vehicle for explosives.

Kelly said it was unclear why the bomb did not detonate as planned, but he said the Pathfinder concealed a lethal mix of plastic cans filled with gasoline, M-88 firecrackers, three propane tanks, two alarm clocks, wires and a 70-pound metal gun box holding bags of a material "granular in nature."

Police later said the material was fertilizer, which in some forms can be used to make explosives, such as those used by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing of April 1995 that killed 168 people. However, police said the fertilizer in the SUV was nonexplosive.

Still, Kelly said he was told that had the bomb gone off, "the vehicle itself would have at least been cut in half. We were lucky it didn't detonate."

FBI agent George Venizelos, speaking at a news conference Sunday, agreed: "A lot of lives were probably saved."

Kelly said the license plate on the SUV did not match the vehicle but instead belonged with a vehicle traced back to a Connecticut junkyard.

The mayor described the Times Square bomb as "amateurish" in the immediate aftermath of the incident, and on Sunday, Bloomberg said there was no indication it was the work of an international terrorist group.

Other officials described it in more serious terms as the details of the car's contents became known, and most agreed that the incident amounted to a form of terrorism, be it a homegrown lone wolf or someone acting on behalf of an international group such as Al Qaeda.

"We're taking this very seriously," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on CNN's "State of the Union." "We're treating it as if it could be a potential terrorist attack."

Times Square's regulars and visitors appeared to take it in stride Sunday. The man who calls himself the Naked Cowboy, who wears only briefs and a cowboy hat while roller-skating through the tourist spot, had no shortage of giggling tourists posing for pictures with him.

Street vendors said that business was no worse than usual and that the drop in tourism caused by the recession and the eruption of a volcano in Iceland — which disrupted air travel — had created more problems than the failed bomb.

"You're never even safe in your own kitchen. There's always a butcher knife or a bread knife around," said Jackson, dismissing the idea that the spot where he has worked as a vendor for the last six years might be too risky. "It's the same here."

Times Square appeared to have more uniformed officers on patrol than usual Sunday. The Associated Press reported that the Transportation Security Administration had increased random screenings of passengers on outbound flights along the East Coast, quoting an unidentified Homeland Security official.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-newyork-car-bomb-20100503,0,7123956,print.story

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Both sides in Arizona's immigration debate use crime argument

Statistics show foreign-born residents commit fewer crimes, but backers of an illegal immigrant law say public safety is their key motivation.

By Nicholas Riccardi

6:32 PM PDT, May 2, 2010

Reporting from Phoenix

By many measures, Arizona has become safer since illegal immigrants began pouring into the state in the 1990s.

Crime has dropped all across the country since then, but the decrease has been as fast or faster in Arizona. The rate of property crimes in the state, for example, has plummeted 43% since 1995, compared with 30% nationwide.

That's no surprise to those who study immigration — both sides, whether for or against increased immigration, agree that immigrants tend to commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans.

Nonetheless, authors of a controversial new law against illegal immigration here have long cited the need to fight crime as a key reason behind SB 1070, or the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act. The law makes it a state crime to lack immigration papers and requires police to determine whether people they stop are in the country illegally.

Backers repeatedly have cited the killing of two Phoenix police officers by illegal immigrants since 2007, or the recent slaying of a cattle rancher near the Mexican border by a drug smuggler. State Rep. John Kavanagh, a co-sponsor of the law, said of illegal immigrants, "They bring a lot of crime with them." On Friday, that argument got more momentum when a deputy sheriff was wounded in a gun battle with men suspected of being drug smugglers from Mexico.

The SB 1070 proponents also point to incarceration rates as a sign that illegal immigrants may contribute excessively to crime in Arizona.

Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris said about 10% of his department's arrests are illegal immigrants — a number close to the estimated percentage of undocumented migrants in the local population — but the Maricopa County sheriff's office, which runs the jail for Phoenix and surrounding cities, said 20% of its inmates are illegal immigrants. Fifteen percent of state prisoners are illegal immigrants.

The bill's proponents contend that criminals in Mexico are increasingly heading north through Arizona.

"A large portion of [illegal immigrants] are coming here seeking a life and, quite frankly, fleeing the violence in Mexico," said Brian Livingston, executive director of the Arizona Police Assn., who added he was persuaded to back SB 1070 by calls from a Latina complaining that no one arrested illegal immigrant gang members in her neighborhood. "Amongst those people are criminal elements who prey on those people," he said.

"Those are what we're targeting with this bill," Livingston said. "We're targeting the smugglers who prey on the good element of the Mexican population."

Phoenix has become a hub of human trafficking, and now it has kidnapping numbers that rival cities in Mexico because of smugglers who hold illegal immigrants hostage in drop houses in the city. The city's crime rates are comparable with those of other big cities, but the presence of well-armed trafficking groups colors the picture.

"It may be safer in Beirut than Phoenix," said Mark Spencer of the Phoenix Law Enforcement Assn., citing a report that some illegal immigrants were selling grenades on the black market.

Harris, the Phoenix police chief, who opposes SB 1070, said proponents of cracking down on illegal immigrants vastly overstated that population's criminality.

"Saying that if you get rid of the illegal immigrants, you'll get rid of 80% of the crime, which I've heard, that's not true," he said, dismissing the rhetoric as political opportunism. "All you have to do in Arizona is come out with anything that's anti-immigrant and you will be in good shape in the polls."

What most in law enforcement here do agree on is that the victims of crime by illegal immigrants tend to be other immigrants. Community activists argue that the new law will make it worse for law-abiding immigrants because few immigrants, whether documented or not, will want to deal with police.

"No one's going to call the cops," said Alfredo Gutierrez, a former state Senate majority leader who opposed the bill. He said law-abiding immigrants of all types were fleeing the state out of fear of being subjected to racial profiling.

"They're getting rid of the folks who would report the crooks," Gutierrez said. "The crooks are staying. This is like heaven for them."

John Garcia, a political science professor at the University of Arizona who studies immigration and crime, said that illegal immigrants' disproportionate numbers in the criminal justice system might reflect steps Arizona has long taken to criminalize their presence — steps that have peaked with SB 1070.

In 2006, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio interpreted a state law making human smuggling a felony as also making it a crime to be smuggled, and he began prosecuting truckloads of illegal immigrants being transported through the state. Arpaio has made catching illegal immigrants a priority.

Gutierrez said he was not surprised to find a greater proportion of illegal immigrants committing crimes. "There's a greater mix of bad folks coming up who don't care if they're caught," he said. And as more law-abiding immigrants fear talking to authorities, the state will become more welcoming to criminals, he said.

Of the lawmakers who warn of illegal immigrants committing more and more crimes, Gutierrez said, "They're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-arizona-crime-20100503,0,243867,print.story

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Can a new prison save a town?

Many California towns welcome new correctional facilities — and the jobs that come with them — hoping they'll revive the local economy. But the results can be disappointing.

By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times

May 3, 2010

Reporting from Mendota, Calif.

Wanda Leung sits at her restaurant's cash register, flipping through a newspaper. It's lunchtime, but the turquoise stools at the counter are empty.

Drought has stripped the area of farm jobs. Men in cowboy hats wander the dusty streets looking for work. Every month, Leung takes $1,000 out of her bank account to pay the bills and keep her Lucky Restaurant open.

"This town is dead already," said the Chinese immigrant, who once earned enough from her business to put her two children through college.

Like other merchants in this town 35 miles west of Fresno, Leung is hoping her fortunes will change when the federal government opens a 1,100-inmate prison just down the road, bringing jobs and paying customers to the area.

"That's what we're waiting for," Leung said. "People aren't going to last much longer."

Never mind the prospect of guard towers, razor wire and even the occasional jailbreak — small towns in many parts of California are welcoming prisons, and the jobs that come with them, with open arms.

At least six counties and two cities have approved measures to allow new prisons in their jurisdictions, according to the state Department of Corrections, which is overseeing a $6-billion prison expansion program that includes construction of at least 35 new facilities.

But while prisons often do bring more customers to local restaurants, gas stations and other businesses, the overall economic benefits are mixed, some experts say.

Well-paid prison employees usually live some distance from the low-income areas that tend to attract prisons, and usually don't spend their salaries in town, said Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a USC professor who has studied how prisons affect California towns. Employers also avoid setting up shop anywhere near prison walls.

"Prisons do not provide the kind of economic stimulus that so many towns thought they were going to get when they agreed to have one," she said. "I'm not going to pretend a job isn't a job, but another development path would have produced a more robust set of jobs."

What's more, real estate values typically decline near prisons because people don't want to live near them, said Terry Besser, a professor at Iowa State. Her research found that unemployment rose 16% between 1990 and 2000 in towns with new state prisons but fell 5% in towns without. Retail sales grew 84% in the same time period in towns with the new prisons, she found, but they grew 128% in those without.

Small towns want prisons because "they're struggling and they think this is a home run," Besser said. "But when prisons locate there, the unemployment rate goes up, the percentage of people in poverty goes up, and the average wages go down across the board."

In Mendota, however, city leaders are confident they made the right call in pushing federal officials to build the massive gray-block structure along State Route 33, on land where farmers once grew crops. The agricultural slowdown has made the town seek a new economic driver.

"We kept going to D.C. with all these different people pleading our case, saying this area needs something, and they finally got tired of us," said Mayor Robert Silva, standing in a field outside the prison. "Although it's a sad thing to say we have to rely on a prison for economic development."

Construction was completed in April, and although the opening date has not yet been set, hiring is well underway.

Fliers around town advertise career opportunities for secretaries, sheet metal mechanics and dental officers. The prison will eventually employ 359 workers, many of whom will make more than $80,000 a year. That's nearly double Fresno County's median household income of $43,534, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Merchants in this sleepy town of 10,000 think the prison will spark an economic turnaround.

"We need some sort of presence that's positive," said Joseph Riofrio, a onetime Mendota mayor who owns a local grocery store. The town has problems with public drunkenness and fights that Riofrio says will disappear once the town is crawling with correctional officers.

More people coming through Mendota has to be good for business, even if they're coming to the prison, said Gil Ramirez, a floral designer at Los Amadores, which sells flowers and trinkets for special occasions.

"There are going to be a lot of people coming to town now, and they'll buy more flowers," he said.

Mendota also tried to get a state prison, without success. But other towns will get a chance as the state implements AB 900, the law signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. It allocates $2.6 billion to build secure re-entry facilities for people serving the last year of their terms and $1.2 billion for jail construction, said Deborah Hysen, chief deputy secretary of facility planning and construction for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Hysen said Folsom, which already has two prisons, has agreed to host another facility, as have cities such as Fairfield and Apple Valley. The counties of Kern, Madera, San Bernardino and San Diego are in final negotiations to sell land to the state for the construction of prison facilities.

That local governments are eager to get prisons is not surprising to the Corrections Corp. of America, which runs 65 prison facilities around the country. It has found that for every 450 people employed by a prison, about 180 spinoff jobs are created for local businesses.

"Communities that have a focus on economic development are increasingly realizing that a prison brings a number of benefits," said company spokeswoman Louise Grant.

There are few signs of that in Delano, Calif., home to 10,160 inmates in two state prisons, North Kern and Kern Valley. The latter, completed in 2005, is the latest addition to the California prison system.

Bill Hylton, a retired city employee who owns a coffee shop in Delano, said the prison hasn't brought many jobs or economic benefits to the town of 50,000. Farmworkers who make up a large portion of the local workforce lack the education and proof of legal residency needed to get hired at the facilities. The city's unemployment rate is still high, at 41.9%.

Most of the guards live outside Delano, Hylton said, so they don't spend much money at his place or with other merchants in town.

"The Department of Corrections tells you all these good things that will come to town when it's all completed, but the things they tell you aren't there," he said, sitting at a table with a red-and-white checkered cloth in his coffee shop, where he says business is "lousy."

Delano City Manager Abdel Salem said that the economic impact of the prison has been a hot topic in town, but no one has been able to quantify whether it's been a positive presence.

"Overall, I'm leaning towards the prison having a benefit to the community, but no one ever really proved it," he said.

New prisons also bring a rise in nearby crime, or at least the expectation of it.

Blandina Nuno, who owns a flower shop on Delano's Main Street, says she moved her family to nearby Allensworth because she didn't like the looks of some of the relatives and friends of inmates who were hanging around town once the prison opened.

"It's brought more crime to town, and it hasn't helped the economy," said Laura Hernandez, a Delano resident and worker at Delano Sporting Goods, which has looms that embroider sportswear in the middle of the shop.

In Mendota, some are also skeptical about the new prison's benefits — including migrant workers who can't imagine getting hired for a government job.

"There isn't work there — they want people who have papers," said Herman Alfaro, a 37-year-old father of three hanging out in one of the town's pool halls, where dozens of men chatted in Spanish.

Older workers are largely excluded too: Applicants for most of the jobs must be 37 or younger, under federal rules designed to prevent people from qualifying for lucrative government pensions after a relatively short career.

Juan Luis Trejo, 28, who lost his job at a peach cannery a few weeks ago, said he wouldn't bother applying for a prison job because he lacks the education required. He was sitting in the small Employment Development Department office in Mendota on a slow afternoon, looking for a job to help support his wife and 6-month-old son, who live in Mexico. Though fliers advertising prison jobs are stacked on a counter nearby, he isn't optimistic.

"This town has lots of unemployment," he said. "It's very difficult to find anything."

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-0503-prisons-20100503,0,5807446,print.story

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Volunteers pitch in across Southern California for Big Sunday events

Projects for the two-day effort, stretching from Santa Barbara to San Diego, include planting vegetables at a school garden and cleaning up trash at a beach.

By Carla Rivera, Los Angeles Times

May 3, 2010

It was a perfect Sunday for sunning at the beach or watching the Lakers begin their latest playoff series at Staples Center. But West Los Angeles resident Michael Mikael opted for something he found more invigorating: refurbishing a music room at a South Los Angeles youth center.

A few miles away at 24th Street Elementary School, Teri Young had driven from Thousand Oaks to help plant tomatoes, peppers and lettuce in the school garden so that residents of the urban neighborhood near the 10 Freeway could have a patch of green to enjoy.

Mikael and Young were among those who donated their time and energy to mark Big Sunday, which started in Los Angeles in 1999 as a one-day event. It now covers two days, with more than 50,000 volunteers working on more than 500 projects from Santa Barbara to San Diego, organizers said.

In Dana Point, below the cliffs of the Ritz-Carlton hotel, volunteers cleaned trash from Salt Creek Beach. At Phoenix House Monrovia, a women's sober living facility, volunteers painted the outside of the building and then joined the residents for a barbecue picnic. Dozens of volunteers descended on the Breed Street Shul in Boyle Heights to help clean, paint and create a mural for the historic synagogue.

Elsewhere, volunteers planted trees along Highland Avenue in Hollywood and cleaned up De Longpre Park; students from Campbell Hall, a private North Hollywood school, did yardwork for seniors in the neighborhood and collected e-waste for recycling; and hundreds of volunteers around town manned lemonade stands, dog biscuit booths and nail polish kiosks, the proceeds going to charity.

"The great thing about Big Sunday is that everyone can find a way to give," said David Levinson, founder of the event. "Sometimes people have more time than money and sometimes more money than time. And we have a community now that has been doing this for years. They know that this year they may be able to give $1,000 and next year old clothes from their closet."

At A Place Called Home, a youth center on South-Central Avenue, hundreds of volunteers painted and refurbished the entire 10,000-square-foot facility over the weekend — a project that would otherwise have taken weeks to complete and used up funds that will instead provide young people with meals, dance and music programs and college scholarships.

"We're very appreciative of Big Sunday," said Executive Director Jonathan Zeichner, as paintbrushes swept the sides of buildings and hammering resounded in the background.

Mikael and five friends — all designers and artists at the Los Angeles firm Saunders Art + Design — worked in the music room, building and installing storage units for musical instruments.

"When I see this number of people get together, working for nothing, it makes me realize how much potential humanity has," Mikael said. "To be able to provide something structurally sound for these kids provides great value in our lives."

At the 24th Street School, more than 300 other volunteers joined Young in pruning, planting and watering a spring crop that included squash, corn, potatoes, eggplant and onions.

"It's teaching children to watch things grow and get their minds off other things that maybe aren't so great," said Young, 66, who was joined by her brother Irwin Levine, 70, of Big Bear and niece Lisa Levine, 36, of North Hollywood.

Nearby, Paul Park was helping to prepare a plot of bare soil for planting.

"It's great to be able to come out and help another group of kids," said Paul, 12, who came with about 25 other young volunteers from the Church of Peace in Mid-City. "It makes me feel really good, 'cause it's the right thing to do."

http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/topofthetimes/topstories/la-me-big-sunday-20100503,0,6583426,print.story

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Roman Polanski: 'I can remain silent no longer'

May 2, 2010

In his first public statement in months, filmmaker Roman Polanski said Sunday that his possible extradition to the United States over a 33-year-old sex-crime case is authorities' attempt "to serve me on a platter to the media of the world."

Polanski, who has been held in Switzerland since September, published the statement in an online magazine run by French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, one of his longtime supporters.

In it, Polanski argues that the case against him is unjust, citing discrepancies in court procedure and the fact that the victim in the case has requested that proceedings against Polanski be dropped.

"I can remain silent no longer because the California court has dismissed the victim's numerous requests that proceedings against me be dropped, once and for all, to spare her from further harassment every time this affair is raised once more," Polanski wrote.

He also takes aim at Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, who last year revived attempts to sentence Polanski in the case, which stemmed from his arrest in 1977 after having sex with a 13-year-old girl.

Polanski said Cooley, who is running for California attorney general, is "campaigning for election and needs media publicity!"

The Oscar-winning director was arrested in 1977 and charged with various offenses, including rape. He pleaded guilty to having unlawful sex with a minor and spent 42 days in a California state prison during a psychiatric evaluation, but he fled the country before final sentencing.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/05/roman-polanski-speaks-out-about-his-possible-extradition-to-the-us.html

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Distracted drivers, he's got just the ticket for you

Los Angeles Police Officer Kamaron Sardar's mission is to get the message across to distracted drivers that there are no good excuses for breaking this law.

by Steve Lopez

May 3, 2010

If you happen to be one of the countless numbskulls out there who text while driving and talk on cellphones without hands-free devices, too distracted to know red from green or fast from slow, I've got news for you, Cookie.

LAPD traffic officer Kamaron Sardar is going to get you.

He's observant. He's motivated. He's good.

And I am going to cheer him on.

I was not exactly deputized, but on the theory that four eyes are better than two, I went out last week with Sardar to catch annoyingly distracted drivers, and you know who you are.

Did you not get the memo, nearly TWO YEARS AGO, that it's illegal to talk on a phone without a hands-free device? And what makes you think you're so important that you have to text while driving, putting everyone around you at risk?

Ys. I M Tlkng 2U!

"I'd say it's increasing," said Sardar, who turns out to be not just a cop of Kurdish ancestry but a Renaissance man and philosopher, as well.

I asked why he thinks people are breaking the law more now, and that's when I discovered Sardar's philosophical bent. Our sadly misguided society is addicted to dehumanizing notions of connectedness, he explained.

"People don't like down time," continued Sardar, who, by the way, is a paleontology buff and leads tours at the Natural History Museum. "They don't see the value of being alone with themselves."

I love this guy. Oh, and did I mention that he's a sometime vegan, whose father is an artist and whose stepmother is a Buddhist?

Everyone is text-happy, Sardar said, but if you're not a motorcycle cop who can split traffic and come right up on the culprit, it's hard to nail somebody who's thumbing away with their hands down low. Cellphone gabbers are much easier to spot, he said. And a lot of them drive almost exactly like drunk drivers, weaving, altering speeds and changing lanes without looking.

On Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, we saw a few suspects headed east — hands against their heads — while we were headed west, but it was too hard to turn around in time to do anything about it. Sardar said the black-and-white itself, with lights on top, makes it tough to sneak up on anyone.

So he parked on a side street along Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz, next to Mustard Seed restaurant, and we watched the cars go by.

Don't worry, Sardar told me. This is L.A., and we would not fail.

Five minutes into it, boom!

Eat your heart out, Starsky and Hutch.

Red and blue lights flashing, Sardar ran down a guy in a black truck who had his phone attached to his ear, yakking away.

"He's STILL on the phone," Sardar said as he got out of the car with me right behind him.

The suspect, medium build, 40ish, said his name was David.

"I didn't know why he was pulling me over," he said when I asked why he kept talking on the phone.

David insisted he can drive safely while talking and that he is too technologically challenged to bother with a hands-free device. The really dangerous drivers, he said, are the ones texting.

Tell it to the judge, Davey.

Fact: Distracted driving causes an estimated 6,000 fatalities each year in the U.S., and some of the more common distractions include texting, phoning or fiddling with a GPS.

Fact: An estimated 500,000 people are injured each year by distracted drivers.

Fact: A first-offense citation like the one Sardar wrote Dave costs way too little to be a deterrent. The ticket, court costs and penalties total only about $76.

Fact: I'd raise it to $500.

While Sardar was writing the ticket, a woman sped by in a black Volvo, holding a phone to her head. Sardar looked at me and we shook our heads. They're everywhere, an epidemic of self-indulgence.

We drove up Hillhurst, then back down toward our secret side-street. Sardar, with his eagle eye, spotted another one going north on Hillhurst, and we were all over him.

Nick, the driver of a silver Ford truck, claimed he had his phone on speaker.

Did he think we were both blind? My partner and I saw that phone glued to Nick's ear, and he admitted, under questioning by me, that he's had two prior citations for talking while driving.

"I'm just goin' through a hard time," said Nick, who claimed he was on the phone with his attorney trying to work out visitation rights to see his two kids.

"That sounds really important," said Sardar. "So why not pull over to have that conversation?"

In roughly one hour, we had written — actually, Sardar did all the paperwork — four citations. It was fish in a barrel, and I'd like to think we may have prevented any number of collisions out there on our mission to enforce and educate.

Maria, a 29-year-old woman in a black Mercedes, claimed she was being called by her doctor's office because she was late for an appointment.

Doctor's office? You're going to end up in a hospital, Maria, if you don't pay attention to your driving.

The most distraught guy we nabbed was Arthur, one of those typically oblivious drivers who was practically stopped in the middle of Hillhurst, phone to his ear.

Arthur said he was a messenger from Glendale and he was getting $7 to deliver a package to an address he couldn't find. That's why he was on the phone. He almost had a stroke when I told him the ticket would cost him 10 delivery fees.

Arthur had a passenger who didn't speak English.

"He's a magician," Arthur told me, and his friend demonstrated by throwing his voice.

"Good," I said. "Let's see if he can make your ticket disappear."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/crime/la-me-lopezcolumn-20100503,0,740641,print.column

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From the Daily News

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Ariz.'s largest paper: Pols failed on immigration

By The Associated Press

05/02/2010

PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona's largest newspaper criticized U.S. Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl and a host of other elected officials in a rare front-page editorial Sunday, saying the politicians have failed to find solutions to illegal immigration.

The state has become the target of calls for boycotts since adopting a law that requires local and state law enforcement officers to question people about their immigration status if there's reason to suspect they're in the country illegally.

"The federal government is abdicating its duty on the border. Arizona politicians are pandering to public fear," The Arizona Republic said in a full-page editorial. "The result is a state law that intimidates Latinos while doing nothing to curb illegal immigration."

Doug MacEachern, an editorial writer for the Republic, said the newspaper has put editorials on the front page over the years but this was the first time one filled the front page.

"It's of sufficient importance that we thought it required something very over-the-top to grab people's attention," he told The Associated Press on Sunday.

The editorial appeared one day after thousands marched against the law in Phoenix and Tucson, Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, among other cities.

McCain was once a champion of comprehensive immigration reform but has abandoned his principles while he fights off a GOP primary challenge this year from former U.S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth, the Republic said.

McCain spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said the senator has long believed the U.S. needs to secure the border first, and it's "not even close to an election year conversion."

"Sen. McCain has been calling for secure borders for over three years as the violence on the border continues to increase and spill over to our side of the border," Buchanan said Sunday.

Kyl has also dropped efforts for comprehensive reform and is no longer willing to work with Democrats on the issue now that he's a member of the Senate Republic leadership, the paper said.

"We already had several editorials setting out our objections to the new law, and this addresses the umbrella issue of a lack of leadership that really has played out over a number of years," MacEachern said.

The editorial also named Gov. Jan Brewer, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and former governor and current Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

"Ensconced in a Democratic administration, she forgot all the arguments she once used to demand the Bush administration address immigration reform and reimburse Arizona for the costs of the broken border," the Republic said. "Put in charge of Obama's effort to craft immigration reform, she couldn't get the thing out of neutral."

Napolitano, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," said more resources were being poured into securing the border than ever before.

"Every resource that can be put at that border is being put at the border. Every security is being made," Napolitano said. "But we still need comprehensive immigration reform."

The newspaper called for reform that allows for current undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship, secures the borders and puts tough sanctions in place for employers who hire undocumented immigrants.

On the Net:

The Arizona Republic: www.azcentral.com

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_15003400

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LAPD: No bomb threats here, but we're prepared

Daily News Wire Service

05/02/2010

The LAPD is prepared in the event of a bomb incident like the one in New York City, a police captain said today.

LAPD Capt. Horace Frank told reporters that there was no reason to believe a bomb threat was imminent in Los Angeles, and that there was "nothing specific we're going to do" beyond the normal state of continued vigilance.

Frank said the LAPD uses a "trifecta approach," which involves well- trained police officers, one of the country's largest bomb detection units, and community engagement.

The last factor includes creating community awareness, the type of atmosphere that led a New Yorker to immediately call police Saturday night when he saw smoke coming out from cargo in an SUV parked at Times Square, Frank said.

"The issue here is being cautious and aware," he said.

Training includes frequent police drills, and the LAPD bomb squad is fortified with close association with similar squads operated by the FBI and Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, Frank said.

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_15003138

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From the New York Times

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Police Seek Man Taped Near Bomb Scene (Video on site)

by Michael M. Grynbaum, William K. Rashbaum and Al Baker.

Law enforcement officials offered a more detailed description of the makeup of the failed car bomb found in Times Square on Saturday night, and said they were reviewing surveillance footage that showed a white man who appeared to be in his 40s walking away from the area as he looked over his shoulder and removed a layer of clothing.

Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, said on Sunday that the materials found in the Nissan Pathfinder — gasoline, propane, firecrackers and simple alarm clocks — also included eight bags of a granular substance, later determined to be nonexplosive grade of fertilizer, inside a 55-inch-tall metal gun locker.

The bomb, Mr. Kelly said, “would have caused casualties, a significant fireball.”

Had it exploded, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, “It would have been, in all likelihood, a good possibility of people being killed, windows shattered, but not resulting in a building collapse.”

While the authorities said they were treating the failed bombing — described as a “one-off” by Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary — as a potential terrorist attack, they said there was no evidence of a continued threat to the city.

Additional patrols will be placed in Midtown, Mr. Kelly said, but no significant increase in the city’s police presence was planned.

F.B.I. agents and detectives had identified and were seeking to interview the owner of the Pathfinder, which was traced to Connecticut. The owner’s name was not made public.

No motive had been determined in the attempted bombing, and federal and local officials said there was no evidence to support a claim of responsibility issued Sunday by a Pakistani Taliban group that has a reputation for making far-fetched attempts to take credit for attacks.

The police and F.B.I. officials are also investigating a separate tip received by a news organization, but Mr. Kelly said it had not turned up any suspects.

Investigators were reviewing surveillance footage that showed an unidentified man walking away from West 45th Street, where the Nissan Pathfinder had been parked. The police said the man was a “person of interest.” The man was seen in Shubert Alley, which runs between 44th and 45th Streets, looking furtively over his shoulder and removing a dark shirt, revealing a red one underneath, officials said. The man then stuffed the dark shirt into a bag, officials said.

Asked if he considered the failed bombing the work of terrorists, Mr. Kelly said: “A terrorist act doesn’t necessarily have to be conducted by an organization. An individual can do it on their own.”

Mr. Kelly held his briefing as Times Square experienced an uneasy return to normalcy after a night of high drama that saw the evacuation of thousands of tourists and theatergoers. All Broadway shows ran as scheduled on Sunday, playing on streets where, just hours before, onlookers watched behind orange netting as a police bomb squad used a robot to break into the smoke-filled Pathfinder, which was discovered about 6:30 p.m.

Two street vendors had flagged down a mounted police officer after they noticed smoke coming from the Pathfinder, which had been parked haphazardly at the curb with its engine running and its flashers on. The area was cleared so the police could examine the vehicle, which was first seen on video surveillance cameras at 6:28 p.m., heading west on West 45th Street.

The Pathfinder was brought to a forensics center in Jamaica, Queens, where investigators were scouring it for DNA evidence and hairs, fibers and fingerprints. No fingerprints have yet been found, officials said, but analysis was in its early stages.

F.B.I. agents and detectives from the Joint Terrorist Task Force were also trying to determine where the three canisters of propane and two red plastic five-gallon containers of gasoline in the Pathfinder had been purchased.

The gun locker, which weighed about 75 pounds empty and upward of 200 pounds with the eight bags of fertilizer in it, could provide important clues because it was likely to be more easily traced than many of the other items found in the S.U.V.

The weight of the locker and the material inside raised questions as to whether it might have required more than one person to load it into the vehicle.

Identifying the owner of the Pathfinder — an important development, according to one official — was achieved through the S.U.V.’s vehicle identification number, which had been stripped from the car’s dashboard but was stamped on other car parts, like the engine block and axle.

Initially, investigators believed the last owner was in Texas and had donated the car to a charity in North Carolina, one official said. But that information proved to be incorrect.

The license plate on the S.U.V. was connected to a different vehicle that was awaiting repairs in Stratford, Conn., where F.B.I. agents and the local police awoke the owner of the repair shop at 3 a.m. Sunday.

The shop owner, Wayne LeBlanc, who runs Kramer’s Used Auto Parts, said that the authorities had seized a black Ford F-150 pickup truck. “We’re trying to help them identify who took the plates,” he said.

The S.U.V. had no E-ZPass, but license plate readers and cameras at the area’s tollbooths were being checked to determine where the car had entered Manhattan, one official said.

Most of the ingredients of the explosive device could have been bought at a home-supply store. The canisters of propane were similar to those used for barbecue grills. The firecrackers were consumer-grade M-88s sold legally in some states, including Pennsylvania.

The device was found in the back of the S.U.V., Mr. Kelly said, with the gasoline cans closest to the back seat and the gun locker behind them. The fertilizer was in clear plastic bags bearing the logo of a store that the police declined to identify.

The wires from battery-powered fluorescent clocks ran into the gun locker, where a metal pressure-cooker pot contained a thicket of wires and more M-88s, Mr. Kelly said.

“The detonation device, it was believed that the timers would ignite the can of explosives, and that would cause the five-gallon cans to go on fire and then explode the propane tanks and have some effect on that rifle box,” Mr. Kelly said.

Investigators believed that the fuses on the firecrackers had been lighted, but they did not explode, officials said. The burning fuses apparently ignited a portion of the Pathfinder’s interior, causing a small fire that filled the inside with smoke, one law enforcement official said.

Another official said that pops heard by a firefighter as he approached the vehicle might have been made by the fireworks failing to fully detonate.

Investigators were reviewing similarities between the incident in Times Square and coordinated attacks in the summer of 2007 at a Glasgow airport and a London neighborhood of nightclubs and theaters. Both attacks involved cars containing propane and gasoline that did not explode. Those attacks, the authorities believed, had their roots in Iraq.

“You can find similarities among different attacks, but there is nothing that we have at this point that has established that link,” Mr. Browne said.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that “so far, there is no evidence that any of this has anything to do with one of the recognized terrorist organizations.”

Meanwhile, a Homeland Security official said that the Transportation Security Administration had increased security outside airports to counter threats like car bombs.

The agency held a conference call Sunday night with federal officials at airports in the New York City region to discuss increased security at departure gates.

The authorities said they are studying hundreds of hours of surveillance footage from more than 80 cameras, including images of the man leaving the scene of the S.U.V. that were shot by a tourist in Times Square. Detectives flew by helicopter to Pennsylvania to interview the tourist.

The police and F.B.I. officials were also investigating a 911 call placed around 4 a.m. Sunday that described the failed bombing as a diversion before a bigger explosion, two law enforcement officials said, although Mr. Kelly said there was no record of that call.

The S.U.V. was parked near the headquarters of Viacom, fueling suspicions that the attack was related to a controversy surrounding “South Park,” the Comedy Central cartoon program that recently censored an episode that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad. Viacom owns Comedy Central, and police have not ruled out the connection.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/nyregion/03timessquare.html?hp

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A Dread Revived: Terror in the Trunk

By RAY RIVERA

For years it has been a weapon of choice in hot spots across the globe, from Iraq to Sri Lanka to Colombia: Cars or trucks loaded with explosives, detonated in busy markets, public squares and government buildings.

Since 9/11, both law enforcement officials and typical New Yorkers have worried and wondered — why not here? They were simpler propositions than hijacked planes, and they could, as a result, have an even more destabilizing effect on the city and its residents.

Saturday night, however crudely imagined and ultimately botched, the threat of a car bomb hit New York — brought home on a busy street off Times Square in the form of a smoking Nissan Pathfinder loaded with propane, gasoline, fireworks and bags of what the authorities described as nonexplosive fertilizer.

The roughly fashioned device — wired with clocks and designed to, in the words of the police, “cause mayhem” — was dismantled before it could do harm. But for New Yorkers, it was an unsubtle and unsettling reminder that threats could be lurking in the trunks or back seats of any of the thousands of vehicles that push their way into the city every day.

“You know it’s coming,” said Konstantine Pinteris, 42, a Greenwich Village psychotherapist who lives on the Lower East Side. “It’s in the back of your mind. All the time.”

Counterterrorism officials are ever wary of vehicular threats, as evidenced by the sidewalk barriers blocking access to sensitive buildings across the city, and by the Police Department’s determination to place hundreds of surveillance cameras in the city’s financial district.

And of course, the country is no stranger to huge vehicle bombs. The 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people. The first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 killed 6. In both, hundreds were injured.

But since 9/11, as car bombs have wreaked varying degrees of havoc in Baghdad and Kabul, Peshawar and Glasgow, New York has been free of that particular menace. Eerily so, for many.

“One of the things that’s striking is they’re incredibly effective,” said Gary LaFree, the director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. “They’re very lethal. So why not in the U.S.? That’s a great question.”

Lethal yes, in part because of their everyday quality and their mobility, said Jim Cavanaugh, a bomb expert who retired last month as head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive’s Nashville field division.

“We call them vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices,” he said. “That’s sort of the inside baseball vernacular, but basically it’s a car bomb, and of course the reason the car is used is the delivery. It can carry the weight.”

From 1970 through 2007, terrorists used car bombs at least 1,495 times, according to research by the terrorism response center in Maryland. The center tracked 876 in the Middle East and North Africa, 212 in Western Europe and 163 in South Asia.

Among the biggest culprits were the Irish Republican Army, the Basque Fatherland and Freedom in Spain, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the center found.

New Yorkers on Sunday had contradictory reactions to the failed attack. Many said they had grown accustomed to the fear of terrorist attacks, and they could not say they were truly surprised. Others, who said they had gotten used to the fact that no terrorist strike had succeeded in the city since the Sept. 11 attacks, were now suddenly faced with a reminder of how suddenly and randomly it could happen.

Roy Otwell, 53, who sells contemporary furniture accessories and lives several blocks from Times Square, said he always felt currents of apprehension whenever he crossed a bridge or drove through tunnels into Manhattan. The fear gripped him too when he walked through Times Square.

“I always thought that it would be a logical place,” said Mr. Otwell, who has lived in New York for five years. “That it would represent the center of the world to the rest of the world, even though for locals, it’s not that at all.”

Peter Nash, 65, a neuroscientist who lives on the Upper West Side, said he had been expecting another terror attack in New York since 9/11. He said he had taken precautions like renting a safe deposit box outside the city for important papers, keeping an emergency pack (flashlight, duct tape, plastic bags, canned foods) in his apartment, and arranging rendezvous points with friends.

“It’s just a matter of time,” he said. “It’s the nature of terrorist organizations that they don’t do creative things and worthwhile things; they destroy. The only thing that surprises me is they haven’t been more successful.”

Robert W. Gottlieb, 68, a lawyer who was smoking a cigar near the Conservatory Water model boat pond in Central Park, said the risk of terror was “just something that we live with.”

On 9/11, he said, “they focused on New York, but in reality, terrorists could walk into department stores all over this country and blow them up.”

Whoever left the bomb in Times Square picked a spot that is already assumed to be a target and where it was likely someone would spot it, Mr. Gottlieb said.

He said the driver of the Nissan simply could have parked it at a meter on Madison Avenue “and I don’t know who would be left.”

But Michael Sheehan, the New York City Police Department’s top counterterrorism official from 2003 to 2006, said one reason car bombs have been rare in the United States is that they are harder to make and set off than people might think.

“They haven’t been able to do anything, and the reason is quite simply, in the U.S., they have not had the access to the training to put together a sophisticated bomb,” Mr. Sheehan said.

Sara Duffy, 40, an interior designer who lives in the West Village, heard about the Times Square bomb on Sunday while at Washington Square Park with her two young daughters. Ms. Duffy, a lifelong New Yorker, said that she could still remember the smell of the smoke after 9/11, and that she worried about another attack for months afterward.

But she said that she had made an effort to put that worry behind her, and that at times lately, she had even thought that maybe airport security was too vigilant. “I feel like I have to protect my kids from feeling frightened all the time,” she said.

After hearing about the Times Square bomb, she said: “I think it’s a little alarming. I walk there all the time, but still I refuse to bow down to it.”

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

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Bomb Squad Has Hard-Won Expertise

By KAREEM FAHIM

To most people there, it was a sophisticated, technologically advanced response to a looming catastrophe. But the police reaction to the report of a car bomb in Times Square on Saturday night was more than a century in the making, drawing on the expertise of a unit that has seen its share of lean times over the years, and tragedies.

A robot that looked like a moon rover was the latest issue, and an officer wore the most advanced Kevlar suit. Both were used after the authorities learned of a box with smoke pouring from it in the back of a Nissan Pathfinder sport utility vehicle parked on West 45th Street.

After the 9/11 attacks, the Police Department’s Bomb Squad came to be seen as the vanguard of the city’s terror response. On Saturday night, in its highest-profile test since then, they responded with flying colors, according to the unit commander, Lt. Mark Torre. They had been preparing for decades.

When the unit, created in 1903 and led by Lt. Giuseppe Petrosino, was called the Italian Squad, the bombs were sticks of dynamite, instruments of extortion used by the Black Hand to intimidate Italian merchants and residents.

Over the years, and depending on the perceived threat, the unit was called the Anarchist Squad and the Radical Squad, according to an article about the Bomb Squad printed in Spring 3100, an internal Police Department magazine. On July 4, 1940, two Bomb Squad detectives were killed trying to defuse a bomb planted in the British Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair.

In the 1940s and ’50s, the unit chased the Mad Bomber, George Metesky, as he waged his battle against Con Edison with dozens of explosive devices. In the 1960s and 1970s, they were called simply the Bomb Squad, and they were spread thin. Dozens of well-known militant groups, including the F.A.L.N and the Weathermen, planted bombs all over the city, at times almost as fast as the technicians could be dispatched to deal with them.

Several of the unit’s members were killed or injured. A demolition expert in the unit, Officer Brian J. Murray, was killed in 1976 as he tried to defuse a bomb left at Grand Central Terminal. On Dec. 31, 1982, bombs set outside police headquarters and other locations maimed two squad members.

When William F. McCarthy became the Bomb Squad’s commander in 1984, the memory of the Police Headquarters bombing was still fresh, but it had done nothing to diminish the fearlessness of some of his officers. They were, he said, an “incredibly talented and competent risk takers.” The sense of humor tended toward the macabre, and the prevailing ethos was “hardly kumbaya,” he said.

More than half the squad then had served in Vietnam, and included Bronze Star and Purple Heart winners and 13 Marine Corps combat engineers. Lieutenant McCarthy, who had been the commander of the Organized Crime Unit, knew nothing about bombs, but more than a little about discipline. “I was a strong boss,” he said. “These were powerful personalities.”

Lieutenant McCarthy stayed in the unit until 1987, and helped write guidelines for bomb disposal that became the national standard. The guidelines started with a warning: “The history of bomb disposal is scarred by injury and death.” He added that the adoption of new safety techniques and tools seemed to occur only after accidents or tragedies.

After Sept. 11, the unit — which is charged with investigating suspicious items and helping in bombing investigations — was thrust into the forefront of the city’s law enforcement agencies, said Lieutenant Torre, who joined the Bomb Squad in 1993, and became its commander in 2002.

Immediately after the attacks, the Bomb Squad was besieged by calls about suspicious packages. Today the calls are fewer, and the unit responds to 200 to 300 suspicious packages a year. But in the post 9/11 world, there have been more requests to help with security sweeps or to get advice on security matters.

Lieutenant Torre said that millions of dollars in grants had let the unit buy new equipment, including some of the tools used in Times Square on Saturday.

In an interview, Richard Esposito, a journalist and co-author of “Bomb Squad,” a 2007 book about the New York unit, said many of its investigators retired after 9/11, and “a lot of fresh blood came in.” They studied bombings overseas, and gathered information on improvised explosive devices. The unit got new X-ray devices, bomb suits and computers. It also got more money.

Lieutenant Torre would not say how many people are in the squad — “We don’t like to show all our cards” — but said it was the oldest and largest municipal bomb squad in the country. Admission into the unit is highly selective, he added, noting that in some years, they have accepted 1 in 10 applicants. New members apprentice for more than a year and train for six weeks at an F.B.I. Hazardous Devices School in Huntsville, Ala.

“I could not have been prouder of the performance and success of my people last night,” Lieutenant Torre said.

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

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U.S. Is Pushing to Deter a Mideast Nuclear Race

By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

The opening Monday of a monthlong United Nations conference to strengthen the main treaty meant to halt the spread of nuclear arms is likely to be dominated by Iran’s president denouncing the West and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warning that if Tehran gets the bomb, the rest of the Middle East will soon follow.

But far less visibly, the Obama administration has been mounting a country-by-country campaign to go beyond the treaty and ensure that Iran’s push toward atomic mastery does not ignite a regional nuclear arms race. In recent months, diplomats have been holding meetings in Washington and shuttling to the Middle East in pursuit of agreements that will let countries develop nuclear power while relinquishing the right to make atomic fuel that could be turned into bombs.

Since the 189 signatories of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty last gathered in New York five years ago, many of the world’s oil-rich nations have begun thinking about or ordering nuclear power plants, arguing that the reserves that made them rich will not last forever. But the United States worries that their fear of an Iranian bomb could lead them to use the same nuclear-fuel technology to develop weapons of their own.

The American strategy, begun during the Bush administration, is to pre-empt that possibility. “We think that’s the right formula for the Middle East,” Ellen Tauscher, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said in an interview on Friday.

Late last year, the Obama administration closed the first deal, with the United Arab Emirates, which is preparing to build a $20 billion reactor complex on its Persian Gulf coast. Diplomats are negotiating similar agreements with Jordan and Bahrain and have the outlines of a deal with Saudi Arabia.

Most everyone, including President Obama’s aides, agrees that the United Nations conference will not fix the glaring weaknesses in the nonproliferation treaty, which have let Iran move to the edge of a nuclear-weapons capability. Rewriting the treaty is “harder than changing the U.S. Constitution,” Gary Samore, Mr. Obama’s top adviser on nuclear arms, said last week.

Instead, the administration is trying to entice Middle Eastern states out of enriching uranium for reactor fuel and later scavenging spent fuel for plutonium, a step known as reprocessing. Both are allowed by the treaty, and both can become clandestine means of making atom-bomb fuel. Instead, the countries would buy the fuel from international suppliers, reducing the chance of conversion to bomb-grade material.

“The less enrichment and reprocessing the better,” Ms. Tauscher said.

David A. Kay, a nuclear specialist who led the fruitless search for unconventional arms in Iraq, applauded the strategy. “It’s an attempt to close up the holes in the N.P.T.,” he said in an interview. “Equally, if not more so, it’s an attempt to isolate the Iranians.”

Iran and some other nations at the United Nations conference, including Egypt, have a different agenda: to force the region’s one nuclear-weapons state, Israel, to acknowledge its atomic arsenal and sign on to the nonproliferation treaty.

Egypt has championed a proposal to make the Middle East a zone free of nuclear arms, a goal that the Obama administration says it supports, but only in the context of a broader regional peace.

Egypt, which has announced plans for several nuclear power reactors, is pressing for a conference on the nuclear-free zone next year. Its president, Hosni Mubarak, has spoken out bluntly about the alternatives, implying that his country might feel the need to develop nuclear weapons. “We don’t want nuclear arms in the area, but we are obligated to defense ourselves,” he said in 2007 after discussing the Iranian nuclear program with Israel’s prime minister then, Ehud Olmert. “We will have to have the appropriate weapons.”

Today, of the world’s 430 operating nuclear power reactors, none are in the Middle East. One reason is that the area’s oil reserves led many countries to consider nuclear power superfluous. But there is another reason: when countries began to build reactors, suspicions ran so high that they usually got bombed.

In 1981, Israeli jets bombed an Iraqi reactor at Osirak. Sixteen years later, in September 2007, they destroyed a reactor secretly under construction in Syria.

In both cases, Israel feared the purpose of the reactors was to produce plutonium that could fuel bombs.

But Israel was not alone. During the Iran-Iraq war in the mid-1980s, Saddam Hussein repeatedly ordered the bombing of an Iranian reactor project at Bushehr. Later, Iraq also fired missiles at a reactor that Israel built in the 1950s at Dimona to make plutonium for warheads. The Iraqi missiles missed.

Only now is Iran preparing to switch on a reactor at Bushehr. Under an agreement worked out during the Bush administration, Russia is providing the fuel, and all the spent fuel is to be shipped back to Russia. Few believe Bushehr will provide Iran a path to a bomb, as long as the deal with Russia remains in force.

But beyond Bushehr, the history of Iran’s nuclear program underscores the weaknesses of the nonproliferation treaty. It also explains the rationale behind the American effort to persuade countries to renounce the making of atomic fuel.

While the treaty puts no limits on the making of atomic fuel, it requires countries to forswear all military goals and submit to a range of international inspections. Cheating, though, has proved difficult to detect and almost impossible to punish. What has provoked demands for Iran to halt enrichment — along with three rounds of United Nations sanctions and the threat of another — is its history of deception and continuing refusal to answer central questions about its nuclear program.

Iran is enriching uranium at two plants at Natanz, is building a third near the city of Qum and has announced its intention to build 10 more. Iran says it needs them to fuel 20 future reactors.

It would be far cheaper, though, for Iran to buy the fuel on open markets. Iran has also admitted to experiments in reprocessing and scavenging plutonium. Its intent, it says, is not to make weapons but to acquire radioisotopes for nuclear medicine.

For these and other reasons, many of Iran’s Arab neighbors, along with Israel and the West, believe that its true goal is having a weapons ability. And so to many analysts, the growing interest among Persian Gulf nations for nuclear programs reflects a desire for a military edge.

Still, there is another motivating factor: the economics of oil.

When prices are high, gulf countries would prefer to sell their oil at great profit rather than burn it for power. A study done by the International Atomic Energy Agency and a group of gulf states concluded that nuclear power made sense for the region when the price of oil exceeded $50 a barrel. Today it is above $80, and with the world economy gradually recovering, many expect it to go higher.

Every country in the region except Lebanon is planning to build nuclear reactors or has declared an interest in doing so.

This year, Turkey signed deals with Russia and South Korea for preliminary studies of a complex on the Black Sea and another on the Mediterranean, with total power of up to 10,000 megawatts — equal to 10 large reactors.

Last month Jordan announced a competition between three bidders for a 1,100-megawatt reactor. And Saudi Arabia announced the establishment of an atomic city, named after the king, to promote nuclear power.

The gulf nation furthest down the atomic road — and the one that the United States calls the “gold standard” for nonproliferation — is the United Arab Emirates.

In April 2008, the Emirates signed a tentative agreement with the Bush administration to give up enrichment and reprocessing in exchange for access to the global market in nuclear technologies. A year later, the Emirates signed an accord that gave the International Atomic Energy Agency the right to search nuclear-related facilities throughout the country. Iran has withdrawn its agreement to the same accord.

The Obama White House endorsed the Bush administration accord and sent it to Congress, which approved it last summer. On Dec. 17, the Emirates and the United States signed an agreement that made it legal to sell advanced nuclear technology to the country.

Ten days later, the Emirates awarded a South Korean company the contract to build four 1,400-megawatt reactors — quite large by industry standards. They are to begin making power between 2017 and 2020.

The reactors are to be hardened against military and terrorist strikes. The Emirates has said nothing publicly, though, about whether it plans to set up antiaircraft or antimissile batteries, as Israel has done around its Dimona reactor and Iran around Bushehr.

The Obama administration has been taking its case to academics and other Middle East specialists. In January, Ms. Tauscher spoke at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. And in March, the deputy energy secretary, Daniel B. Poneman, told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “As countries in the Middle East look at developing civil nuclear programs, the United States can promote the highest standards for safety, security and nonproliferation.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/world/03nuke.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Can Ghosts Bring Life to Jonestown Cult Compound?

By SIMON ROMERO

JONESTOWN, Guyana — Carlton Daniels was sweating as he sliced through the jungle with his cutlass. He pointed at some bushes and said a chimpanzee named Mr. Muggs had once lived there in a cage. Then he emerged in a clearing, proclaiming, “Welcome to the People’s Temple Agricultural Project.”

Better known as Jonestown, where more than 900 Americans committed suicide or were murdered one night in 1978 at the behest of the cult leader Jim Jones, the site yields few signs of remembrance. Rains, termites and scavengers have laid waste to its buildings. Vines camouflage its rusting vehicles, including an old flatbed truck and a tractor.

But while nature seems intent on erasing the utopian experiment that went tragically awry here, some enterprising souls in Guyana, South America’s only English-speaking nation, have another idea. They want Jonestown reborn as a tourist destination and are even getting some tepid help from the government, which spent more than 30 years largely trying to live it down.

Indranauth Haralsingh, director of the Guyana Tourism Authority, came here late last year to put up a plaque saying, “In memory of the victims of the Jonestown tragedy, November 18, 1978, Jonestown, Guyana.”

Some who live on Jonestown’s edge, in the squalid mining town of Port Kaituma, could not be happier.

“Something more ambitious, a full-blown memorial of sorts, should have been founded years ago,” said Mr. Daniels, 64, a wiry shopkeeper who ranks among Port Kaituma’s top authorities on Jonestown, having met Mr. Jones on different occasions as a postal agent here in the 1970s.

“Imagine,” Mr. Daniels said in a lilting West Indian accent while relating how Mr. Jones’s pet chimpanzee, Mr. Muggs, was used to terrorize disobedient followers, “Jonestown could become a world-renowned center for the study of cults and what makes them tick.”

Poverty offers another motivation for those trying to move ahead with tourism at Jonestown. Despite recent economic growth, the country, whose official name remains the Cooperative Republic of Guyana, is still recovering from the doctrinaire isolationism that made it the ideal place for Mr. Jones to establish his remote utopian enclave.

“Jonestown was actually a wonderful place,” said Gerald Gouveia, 54, who as a young army pilot would fly senior Jonestown members to Port Kaituma. “They were hard-working idealists who wanted a community free from nuclear destruction, but their dream got twisted when they placed their leader in such reverence that it got to his brain.”

Mr. Gouveia, now one of Guyana’s top businessmen, wants to take visitors to Jonestown on his small airline. He flies his own planes, and on a trip to Port Kaituma he pointed out the spot on the airstrip where Leo J. Ryan, a congressman from California who came to investigate abuse claims in Jonestown, was shot dead by cult gunmen. Three journalists and a defector were also killed in the encounter.

Those killings put into motion the exhortation by Mr. Jones that culminated in his night of mass suicide and murder.

“I myself placed the American congressman’s corpse in the body bag,” Mr. Gouveia said. “We can’t just erase from our consciousness the events that transpired here, as that would be an insult to all the victims who perished in this place.”

Talk first surfaced a few years ago about promoting Jonestown, a strategy that people here call “dark tourism.” One New York investor even drew up an investment plan with a Jonestown survivor to create a 10-acre project including a museum, a restaurant, a cafe, a souvenir shop and living quarters for employees.

But the project, which would require government approval, has not materialized. Some Guyanese ascribe this to Jonestown’s remoteness. Officials are also reluctant to draw attention to Jonestown, trying instead to retool Guyana’s image as a responsible environmental steward, most recently through a deal in which Norway pays Guyana to preserve forests.

“The government’s green initiatives,” said David Dabydeen, Guyana’s delegate to Unesco, “redeem us from a crime which was overwhelmingly committed by Americans on Americans.”

Asked about plans for tourism at Jonestown during an interview in Georgetown, Samuel Hinds, Guyana’s prime minister, said, “It’s something I could live with.” He added, “I know there are people talking about restoration, but it would probably have to be a total recreation from pictures.”

Some scholars who are trying to explain Jonestown to new generations say commercial tourism at the site would constitute disrespect for its victims.

“Jim Jones was a master manipulator who created a siege mentality,” said Julia Scheeres, a California author who is writing a history of Jonestown. “Let the place be a peaceful field covered with flowers.”

For now, Jonestown seems plucked from Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us,” a book that imagines how the remnants of civilization would crumble as nature reclaimed land freed from man’s grasp. The forbidding bush stands in contrast to the muddy roads of Port Kaituma, about seven miles away, bustling with pork-knockers (miners, in Guyanese English), gold-buying shops, flophouses and brothels.

“We’d like some diversification, and that’s where tourism would fit in,” said Dane Peters, 46, owner of Port Kaituma’s Beacon’s Hotel. He said he built the plaque at Jonestown last year to attract visitors. “We need to start somewhere, with something small,” he said.

At another boarding house, the Triple-R Sky View International Hotel, the owner, Rio Cadorna, agreed about Jonestown’s potential. “What this area really needs is a casino,” said Mr. Cadorna, 64, an immigrant from the Philippines. “We could justify it if we had some high-quality foreign visitors flowing in.”

Yet while Port Kaituma’s merchants dream of riches, the task of memorializing Jonestown still falls largely on Mr. Daniels, the former postal agent.

He witnessed Jonestown’s rise and fall, arriving here in 1962 as a servant at the country club for British engineers who once mined manganese in the area. The British, along with their grounds for playing badminton and lawn tennis, are long gone now, too, Mr. Daniels pointed out.

“The bush swallows everything,” he said, swinging his cutlass at a barbed plant he called iguana’s tail. He delved into Jonestown minutiae, explaining that it was not actually Kool-Aid used to mix Mr. Jones’s cyanide potion but a knockoff called Flavor Aid.

At one spot, Mr. Daniels stopped and seemed to have a chill run down his spine, despite the blistering heat. He said that was where a sign once hung, above Mr. Jones’s throne, in Jonestown’s pavilion. It read, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/world/americas/03jonestown.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Empathetic Judge in 9/11 Suits Seen by Some as Interfering

By MIREYA NAVARRO

Over nearly three decades as a litigator at a downtown law firm, Alvin K. Hellerstein shared a view of the World Trade Center towers with dozens of other colleagues in an office building on Maiden Lane.

Yet as a United States District Court judge in Manhattan, he has had a singular perspective on the towers — specifically, the suffering that has lingered long after the terrorist attacks that leveled them in 2001.

As the federal judge who has overseen the wrongful death, property damage and personal injury lawsuits arising from 9/11, Judge Hellerstein, 76, has developed a visible empathy for both the families of the victims and for the workers who fell ill after the rescue and cleanup efforts.

“He had my clients in his chambers for over one hour to listen to them,” said Norman Siegel, a lawyer for families seeking to recover human remains from the debris that was carted off to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. “He, more than anyone, understands deeply the pain.”

Yet in eight years of 9/11 oversight, many who have appeared before him say that Judge Hellerstein has also grown determined to put his own stamp on financial settlements reached between a plaintiff and defendant. And recently the city and lawyers have been smarting over his clout.

On March 19, the judge stunned lawyers on both sides by rejecting a $657.5 million settlement reached in individual suits brought against New York City by more than 10,000 rescue and cleanup workers who say their health was damaged at ground zero.

Saluting the workers as “heroes,” he said that the compensation was inadequate, the terms were poorly understood by the plaintiffs and lawyers should not expect to extract their fees from the $657.5 million payout. He would also reduce those fees.

While some plaintiffs cheered, their lawyers and those for the city were dismayed to see a settlement that was two years in the making fall apart.

What is more, Judge Hellerstein had waded into untested legal waters: such intervention is not the norm in cases that are not a class action, legal experts say. Last month the city filed an appeal challenging his authority, even as it returned to the table to negotiate new terms.

The struggle over control of the settlement has underscored two different, but not necessarily contradictory views of the judge: the compassionate jurist driven by a sense of social responsibility and with a wealth of experience with victims’ suffering, and the aggressive judge unwilling to cede ground on cases he has shepherded for years.

Judge Hellerstein declined repeated requests for an interview. Still, his decisions and remarks on the bench appear to shed some light on his philosophy.

A Bronx native and Columbia Law School graduate who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1998, Judge Hellerstein has shown independence and a strong adherence to the First Amendment and to transparency, for example. He ordered the government to release videos and photos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after the American Civil Liberties Union sued under the Freedom of Information Act. In a 1999 decision against the New York Police Department that was later overturned, he ruled that members of the Ku Klux Klan could wear their traditional masks at demonstrations.

Charles G. Moerdler, a friend and former co-partner at the firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, said that Judge Hellerstein, an Orthodox Jew who has been active on the board of several Jewish organizations, was motivated by “a very high standard of morality and decency.”

As a litigator representing banks and large corporations, he said, the judge was willing to tell a bank client being sued by an investor over money losses to reconsider its position. “He’d say, I can litigate this, and I can fight this, but in fairness, this person was injured,” Mr. Moerdler said.

Judge Hellerstein lost several former clients in the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11. But legal experts suggest that he has a bigger motivation for championing the ground zero victims: he may see his handling of the 9/11 cases as his legacy.

“This is history for him,” said Arthur Miller, a professor at New York University School of Law who specializes in federal procedure. “This is an awesome responsibility. He wants to be the person who brought peace to this entire situation. He would not be human if he didn’t feel a personal interest in this.”

At the March hearing, Judge Hellerstein called the ground zero cases he had handled his “greatest challenge.”

“This is different,” he told the lawyers in spurning the settlement terms. “This is 9/11.”

But lawyers who have sparred with Judge Hellerstein suggest that his moral compass and commitment to doing what he thinks is right have sometimes led him to overreach.

Just as he rejected the settlement in the workers’ case for giving too little, he has spurned settlements of individual suits filed by survivors of the airline passengers killed on 9/11 for giving too much in comparison with similar cases, some noted.

Donald A. Migliori, a lawyer for survivors in airline-related cases whose settlement amounts were reduced, said that such intervention was unusual in a non-class-action suit. “It’s a very frustrating thing for lawyers,” he said. “He’s guided by a concept of fairness that’s not in the law.”

Mr. Migliori said he did not appeal Judge Hellerstein’s stance because his clients wanted to put the litigation behind them.

But lawyers for New York City are more determined. They went to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to try to challenge Judge Hellerstein’s authority for blocking the settlement.

They argue that the judge has no legal basis to try to approve, reject or modify a private, hard-won deal that took about two years to broker and that both sides consider fair.

The city was particularly alarmed that Judge Hellerstein was trying to get the city’s insurer to pay the contingency fees for the plaintiffs’ lawyers, which would sharply raise the ultimate cost of the settlement by tens of millions of dollars.

And the lawyers for the plaintiffs now face a tougher time trying to sell the settlement to their clients, 95 percent of whom must approve the agreement if it is to take effect.

“We have extracted every penny from the city that we can get,” said Marc J. Bern, one of the lawyers.

But now both sides are trying to hammer out modifications to the settlement to try to satisfy the judge and ensure that it will be accepted by most plaintiffs. In advocating for more money, Judge Hellerstein has emerged as their chief protector, some of the 9/11 workers say.

“He’s keeping it fair,” said one plaintiff, Ernest Vallebuona, 45, a retired police detective who developed lymphoma after 9/11.

Some plaintiffs disagree with the judge.

Joe Greco, 41, a retired police detective who said he needed to use a breathing machine up to five times a day for his asthma, said that he appreciated Judge Hellerstein’s effort to look after his interests but that he wished the judge had not interfered.

People struggling with serious illness need to ensure their families’ financial well-being, he explained. They “want this thing settled,” he said. “We’re on borrowed time right now.”

But John Feal, who works as an advocate for the 9/11 workers through his FealGood Foundation, counters that Judge Hellerstein himself has emerged as a ground zero hero.

“The judge is now like Elvis in the 9/11 community,” he said. “For years these guys have been neglected, and now there’s someone who cares.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/nyregion/03judge.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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