Pakistani Taliban behind Times Square bombing attempt, White House says

U.S. citizen Faisal Shahzad was trained and funded by a militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda, Atty. Gen. Eric Holder says.

By Kathleen Hennessey and Richard A. Serrano, Tribune Washington Bureau

May 10, 2010

Reporting from Washington

The U.S. citizen who attempted to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square on May 1 was trained and funded by a Pakistani militant group that works closely with Al Qaeda to plot attacks against the U.S., top Obama administration officials said Sunday.

"We've now developed evidence that shows that the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack," Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said on ABC's "This Week." "We know that they helped facilitate it. We know that they probably helped finance it. And that he was working at their direction."

The assertion was repeated by senior White House counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan, who said it appeared as though 30-year-old Faisal Shahzad was "operating on behalf of the Tehrik-e-Taliban, the TPP."

"It's a group that is closely allied with Al Qaeda," Brennan said on " Fox News Sunday." "They train together, they plan together, they plot together. They are almost indistinguishable."

A government source who is close to the investigation said Sunday that the Pakistani Taliban instructed Shahzad to always pay cash and never ask for or receive receipts for his transactions. "He was told to leave no paper trail at all," said the source, who requested anonymity because FBI interrogations are still underway with the suspect.

"He paid cash for his gun, and he paid cash for the van he acquired," the source said. "He was told to be very careful about not letting anything track back to him. No receipts, and no paper. No nothing."

He added that officials are trying to determine how much Taliban money was provided to front the operation, who put up the funds and how it was paid out to Shahzad.

Brennan said the Pakistanis had so far "been very cooperative" in the investigation.

"There are a number of terrorist groups and militant organizations operating in Pakistan, and we need to make sure that there's no support being given to them by the Pakistani government. We will continue this dialogue," he said. "The Pakistanis understand the seriousness of this, and we are going to continue to interact with them, but also maintain pressure on them and inside of Pakistan."

Officials were still investigating the extent of Shahzad's connection to the Pakistani Taliban, but believed he was trained during his visits to Pakistan. Brennan said he could not comment on whether the group recruited Shahzad — a Pakistani-born naturalized U.S. citizen — because his American passport allowed him to travel easily between the two countries.

Holder and Brennan defended the administration's anti-terrorism strategy, although Holder said for the first time that he would be recommending changes to the Miranda rules that warn suspects of their rights.

Holder defended the way Shahzad was interrogated in the hours after his capture. Authorities interviewed Shahzad for hours before reading him his Miranda rights, employing what's called the "public safety" exception. But, Holder said, the rule, which allows interrogators to obtain information about immediate threats, is outdated in the age of international terrorism and may not provide agents with the "necessary flexibility."

"I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public safety exception, and that's one of the things we're going to be reaching out to Congress to do — to come up with a proposal that is both constitutional but that is also relevant to our time and the threat that we now face," he said.

Shahzad was arrested as he tried to flee the country on a flight to the Middle East late Monday, 53 hours after an SUV packed with explosives was discovered in Times Square. Although Obama administration officials initially described Shahzad as a lone wolf, since his arrest a fuller picture of his connection to militants has emerged. Shahzad appears to have been radicalized during his time living in the U.S. and allegedly contacted the Pakistani Taliban via the Internet.

The Pakistani Taliban, which initially took credit for the Times Square plot but then retracted the claim, is often described as an offshoot of the Afghan Taliban and has largely been known to be focused on attacking the Pakistan government. The Times Square plot indicates that the group has broadened its reach and goals.

A leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mahsud, was the target of multiple drone strikes last year. Mahsud is reportedly the architect of a series of suicide bombings and raids on markets, mosques and security installations in the latter half of 2009 and is believed to be involved in attacks against the Pakistani government and Americans.

Asked whether the attempted bombing was specifically motivated by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Brennan said only that the TPP has "targeted U.S. interests and Pakistani interests in Pakistan. They have threatened to carry out attacks against us, including here in our cities. So this is something that has been on their agenda, and they are determined to carry out those attacks."

Mahsud appeared last month in a video threatening to plot attacks in American cities. Holder said intelligence authorities had been skeptical of the group's previous claims.

"We didn't think that necessarily was their aim," he said on "This Week." "We certainly have seen with the Shahzad incident that they have not only the aim, but the capability of doing that, and that's why they have taken on, I think, a new significance in our anti-terror fight."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ny-bomb-20100510,0,2789478,print.story

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Digging up chemical weapons in D.C.

After World War I, munitions including shells of poisonous liquid mustard were buried in a then-rural area. The cleanup has forced evacuations at American University and prompted concerns about illness.

By Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times

May 9, 2010

Reporting from Washington

Greg Nielson pushed a joystick, and a video camera zoomed in on three men in moon suits and gas masks as they prepared to blow up a weapon of mass destruction less than five miles from the White House.

Later, the crew slid the rusting World War I artillery shell into a small steel vault and sealed the door. They detonated a shaped explosive charge to cut the projectile open, and pumped in reagent to neutralize its contents: liquid mustard, an infamous chemical warfare agent.

The process is "as safe as sliced bread," said Nielson, the operation leader, at a control panel in a nearby trailer. "Maybe safer."

The destruction of five poison-filled shells and 20 other suspect items ended last week. But the strange saga of America's most unusual hazardous waste site is far from over.

Since 1993, the Army Corps of Engineers has removed 84 chemical-filled shells and more than 1,000 conventional munitions, plus at least 44,000 tons of contaminated dirt and debris, from the verdant campus of American University and the manicured lawns of Spring Valley, one of Washington's most prestigious neighborhoods.

The toxic trash dates from 1917 and 1918, when the military leased the then-rural campus and nearby farms to test gruesome gases. After the war, soldiers and scientists buried lethal leftovers in unmarked pits, calling the area Death Valley.

A developer renamed it Spring Valley, and mansions sprouted. Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush lived here before they entered the White House. U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), among other top officials and foreign diplomats, reside here now.

The Pentagon says 5,000 old arsenals and other former defense sites may hold hazardous waste. But the bomb hunt here "is the No. 1 priority," said Col. David Anderson, the Army Corps district commander. "This is the nation's capital."

The Army has spent $180 million and expects to spend $15 million more to finish the job, Anderson said.

So far, government agencies and independent studies have not found adverse health effects on American University students or the 4,000 or so residents of Spring Valley.

"Overall, community health is very good," said Beth Resnick, coauthor of a 2007 study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "Cancer rates overall are low. Mortality rates are low."

She said a new study may focus on several people who lived near the burial pits and reportedly suffered rare cancers, blood disorders and other ailments. It's not known if military waste played a role.

For now at least, the oak-shaded streets buzz with lawn mowers, not public outcry. Property values are stable, and activists acknowledge that few residents share their suspicion that the Army Corps has downplayed dangers and concealed data, a charge the Army denies.

"They're deliberately misleading people," said Nan Wells, who represents part of Spring Valley in local government. "They just want to leave."

Tom Smith, another Army Corps critic, said many residents have become complacent. "We've grown a little too accustomed to having the Army in our backyards, literally in our backyards, for the last 17 years," he said.

The yard that causes the most concern is between the official residence of South Korea's ambassador, Han Duk-soo, and the white-columned house of American University's president, Cornelius Kerwin. Previous digs unearthed more than 300 munitions and chemical weapons debris on the South Korean property and toxic chemicals beside the AU house.

A high fence with barbed wire guards the current excavation, known as Pit 3. A two-story, tent-like structure covers the hole to prevent leaks. It also hides the men in hazmat suits and breathing apparatus on a winding street of stately homes and purple azaleas.

Engineers believed the digging was almost finished until they uncovered more than 500 pounds of jugs, beakers and other laboratory glassware this spring. On March 29, a broken bottle spewed smoke inside the containment tent.

Tests show the fumes came from arsenic trichloride, which is poisonous by inhalation, skin contact or ingestion. Known as "arsenic butter," the compound was used to boost the lethality of mustard, a blister agent that reportedly caused more than 1 million casualties in World War I, and to produce lewisite, dubbed the "dew of death," and other chemical warfare agents.

The find was deemed so perilous that work has been halted until Army engineers can determine how to safely proceed.

"The concern is they may find a lot more, and there's a real question whether the air pollution controls are adequate," said Paul Chrostowski, an environmental scientist who monitors the cleanup for the university.

Kerwin, the university president, was forced to abandon his home for two years when his yard was dug up. He and his wife moved back last fall after tests showed the hazard was gone.

"We may have to change our analysis now," Chrostowski said. "He may have to move again."

The long-forgotten ordnance first made news in 1993 when workers digging a utility line unearthed an arsenal. Two years later, after removing 141 munitions, the Army Corps declared the danger over.

But local historians and amateur sleuths found old photos, logbooks and other records that suggested hazardous waste and explosives were scattered over 661 acres. Excavations, evacuations and lawsuits have ebbed and flowed ever since.

Crews have dug up arsenic-laced lawns and spread clean soil at about 140 homes so far, and more are planned. They recently began searching for debris by the reservoir that supplies drinking water to Washington after rusting artillery and mortar shells were found in the weeds.

"It's taken years to understand the magnitude and scope" of the pollution, said Steve Hirsh, the Spring Valley project manager at the Environmental Protection Agency. "This is really a unique problem."

The long cleanup has put the university in an uncomfortable spotlight. School officials must balance public safety with public relations, taking pains not to spark undue alarm among the 11,000 students and their parents, as well as prospective students.

In 2001, the university evacuated its campus day-care center and closed nearby athletic fields after dangerous levels of arsenic were found in the soil.

Medical tests of the toddlers and others proved normal. But the day-care center stayed shut until last year, long after the contaminated dirt was scooped up and hauled away. Artificial turf was laid on the sports fields, and a girls lacrosse team practiced there on a recent morning.

Not far away, a backhoe clawed at the soil behind a former fraternity house. Now used by campus police, the building overlooks a ravine that was once a dump. The Army will drill under the building this summer to look for more pollution.

David Taylor, assistant to the university president, said he was eager to see the Army complete the cleanup. "We told them: 'Do it right. Do it thoroughly. And then wrap it up.' "

The work draws little apparent interest among students. Only a dozen people showed up when six experts gathered recently to give presentations on the cleanup. A senior, Michael Ginsberg, had organized the panel as part of his honors project.

"Most students don't even know there were chemical weapons here," Ginsberg, 21, said in frustration.

Kent Slowinski, a landscaper, leads informal tours of waste sites on campus and in Spring Valley. He starts at the school's McKinley Building, where a plaque by the door reads "Birthplace of Army Chemical Corps."

"You'll notice it doesn't say anything about developing or testing chemical weapons on dogs, goats and other animals," he said grimly.

Five chemical rounds have been rendered harmless since April 16. All were destroyed on a patch of federal property behind Sibley Memorial Hospital, about a mile from campus. Three held the poisonous gas arsine, one had liquid mustard and one carried lewisite. Another 60 to 80 conventional munitions will be turned to scrap this summer.

"We considered transporting off-site," said Dan Noble, the Army Corps' project manager. "But you risk traffic accidents. This is by far the safest way to do it. Here we have complete control."

The fenced compound looks like a construction site. Front-end loaders rumble by stacks of blue barrels, filled with arsenic-laced dirt, that will be hauled to a hazardous waste dump. More fences, cameras and an infrared laser help protect chemical rounds and other unsafe materials destined for destruction.

"Some soldier was probably walking out here 90 years ago and a sergeant comes up to him and says, 'Hey you, the war's over. Dig a hole. Get rid of all this!' " said Anderson, the Army Corps district commander. "Could they ever imagine it would come to this?"

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-chem-bomb-20100510,0,6556071,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Obama to Nominate Kagan as Justice

WASHINGTON — President Obama will nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan as the nation's 112th justice, choosing his own chief advocate before the Supreme Court to join it in ruling on cases critical to his view of the country's future, Democrats close to the White House said Sunday.

After a monthlong search, Mr. Obama informed Ms. Kagan and his advisers on Sunday of his choice to succeed the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens . He plans to announce the nomination at 10 a.m. Monday in the East Room of the White House with Ms. Kagan by his side, said the Democrats, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the decision before it was formally made public.

In settling on Ms. Kagan, the president chose a well-regarded 50-year-old lawyer who served as a staff member in all three branches of government and was the first woman to be dean of Harvard Law School. If confirmed, she would be the youngest member and the third woman on the current court, but the first justice in nearly four decades without any prior judicial experience.

That lack of time on the bench may both help and hurt her confirmation prospects, allowing critics to question whether she is truly qualified while denying them a lengthy judicial paper trail filled with ammunition for attacks. As solicitor general, Ms. Kagan has represented the government before the Supreme Court for the past year, but her own views are to a large extent a matter of supposition.

Perhaps as a result, some on both sides of the ideological aisle are suspicious of her. Liberals dislike her support for strong executive power and her outreach to conservatives while running the law school. Activists on the right have attacked her for briefly barring military recruiters from a campus facility because the ban on openly gay men and lesbians serving in the military violated the school's anti-discrimination policy.

Replacing Justice Stevens with Ms. Kagan presumably would not alter the broad ideological balance on the court, but her relative youth means that she could have an influence on the court for decades to come, underscoring the stakes involved.

In making his second nomination in as many years, Mr. Obama was not looking for a liberal firebrand as much as a persuasive leader who could attract the swing vote of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and counter what the president sees as the rightward direction of the court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Particularly since the Citizens United decision invalidating on free speech grounds the restrictions on corporate spending in elections, Mr. Obama has publicly criticized the court, even during his State of the Union address with justices in the audience.

As he presses an ambitious agenda expanding the reach of government, Mr. Obama has come to worry that a conservative Supreme Court could become an obstacle down the road, aides said. It is conceivable that the Roberts court could eventually hear challenges to aspects of Mr. Obama's health care program or to other policies like restrictions on carbon emissions and counterterrorism practices.

With all signs pointing to a Kagan nomination, critics have been pre-emptively attacking her in the days leading up to the president's announcement. Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado , Boulder, writing on The Daily Beast, compared her to Harriet E. Miers , whose nomination by President George W. Bush collapsed amid an uprising among conservatives who considered her unqualified and not demonstrably committed to their judicial philosophy.

M. Edward Whelan III, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, wrote on National Review's Web site that even Ms. Kagan's nonjudicial experience was inadequate. “Kagan may well have less experience relevant to the work of being a justice than any entering justice in decades,” Mr. Whelan wrote.

Ms. Kagan defended her experience during confirmation hearings as solicitor general last year. “I bring up a lifetime of learning and study of the law, and particularly of the constitutional and administrative law issues that form the core of the court's docket,” she testified. “I think I bring up some of the communications skills that has made me — I'm just going to say it — a famously excellent teacher.”

Ms. Kagan was one of Mr. Obama's runners-up last year when he nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the court, and she was always considered the front-runner this year. The president also interviewed three other candidates, all federal appeals court judges: Merrick B. Garland of Washington, Diane P. Wood of Chicago and Sidney R. Thomas of Montana.

Ms. Kagan had several advantages from the beginning that made her the most obvious choice. For one, she works for Mr. Obama, who has been impressed with her intelligence and legal capacity, aides said, and she worked for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. when he was a senator. For another, she is the youngest of the four finalists, meaning she would most likely have the longest tenure as a justice.

Ms. Kagan was also confirmed by the Senate just last year, albeit with 31 no votes, making it harder for Republicans who voted for her in 2009 to vote against her in 2010.

The president can also say he reached beyond the so-called “judicial monastery,” although picking a solicitor general and former Harvard law dean hardly reaches outside the Ivy League , East Coast legal elite. And her confirmation would allow Mr. Obama to build on his appointment of Justice Sotomayor by bringing the number of women on the court to its highest ever (three, with Justice Sotomayor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ).

Moreover, in his selection of finalists, Mr. Obama effectively framed the choice so that he could seemingly take the middle road by picking Ms. Kagan, who correctly or not was viewed as ideologically between Judge Wood on the left and Judge Garland in the center.

Judge Garland was widely seen as the most likely alternative to Ms. Kagan and the one most likely to win easy confirmation. Well respected on both sides of the aisle, he had a number of conservatives publicly calling him the best they could hope for from a Democratic president. Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, a Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, privately made clear to the president that he considered Judge Garland a good choice, according to people briefed on their conversations.

But Mr. Obama ultimately opted to save Judge Garland for when he faces a more hostile Senate and needs a nominee with more Republican support. Democrats expect to lose seats in this fall's election, so if another Supreme Court seat comes open next year and Mr. Obama has a substantially thinner margin in the Senate than he has today, Judge Garland would be an obvious choice.

As for Ms. Kagan, strategists on both sides anticipate a fight over her confirmation but not necessarily an all-out war. The White House hopes the Senate Judiciary Committee can hold hearings before July 4, but some Congressional aides were skeptical. Either way, Democrats want Ms. Kagan confirmed by the August recess so she can join the court for the start of its new term in October.

A New Yorker who grew up in Manhattan, Ms. Kagan earned degrees from Princeton, Oxford and Harvard Law School, worked briefly in private practice, clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall , served as a Senate staff member and worked as a White House lawyer and domestic policy aide under President Bill Clinton . She was nominated for an appeals court judgeship in 1999, but the Senate never voted on her nomination.

She has been a trailblazer along the way, not only as the first woman to run Harvard Law School but also as the first woman to serve as solicitor general. Her inexperience as a judge makes her a rarity in modern times, but until the 1970s many Supreme Court justices came from outside the judiciary, including senators, governors, cabinet secretaries and even a former president.

If the Senate confirms Ms. Kagan, who is Jewish, the Supreme Court for the first time will have no Protestant members. In that case, the court would be composed of six justices who are Catholic and three who are Jewish. It also would mean that every member of the court had studied law at Harvard or Yale .

Like her former boss, Justice Marshall, who was the last solicitor general to go directly to the Supreme Court, Ms. Kagan may be forced to recuse herself during her early time on the bench because of her participation in a number of cases coming before the justices. Tom Goldstein, publisher of ScotusBlog, a Web site that follows the court, estimated that she would have to sit out on 13 to 15 matters. Mr. Whelan argued that it would be significantly more than that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10court.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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At Front Lines, AIDS War Is Falling Apart

KAMPALA, Uganda — On the grounds of Uganda 's biggest AIDS clinic, Dinavance Kamukama sits under a tree and weeps.

Her disease is probably quite advanced: her kidneys are failing and she is so weak she can barely walk. Leaving her young daughter with family, she rode a bus four hours to the hospital where her cousin Allen Bamurekye, born infected, both works and gets the drugs that keep her alive.

But there are no drugs for Ms. Kamukama. As is happening in other clinics in Kampala, all new patients go on a waiting list. A slot opens when a patient dies.

“So many people are being supported by America,” Ms. Kamukama, 28, says mournfully. “Can they not help me as well?”

The answer increasingly is no. Uganda is the first and most obvious example of how the war on global AIDS is falling apart.

The last decade has been what some doctors call a “golden window” for treatment. Drugs that once cost $12,000 a year fell to less than $100, and the world was willing to pay.

In Uganda, where fewer than 10,000 were on drugs a decade ago, nearly 200,000 now are, largely as a result of American generosity. But the golden window is closing.

Uganda is the first country where major clinics routinely turn people away, but it will not be the last. In Kenya next door, grants to keep 200,000 on drugs will expire soon. An American-run program in Mozambique has been told to stop opening clinics. There have been drug shortages in Nigeria and Swaziland. Tanzania and Botswana are trimming treatment slots, according to a report by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders .

The collapse was set off by the global recession 's effect on donors, and by a growing sense that more lives would be saved by fighting other, cheaper diseases. Even as the number of people infected by AIDS grows by a million a year, money for treatment has stopped growing.

Other forces made failure almost inevitable.

Science has produced no magic bullet — no cure, no vaccine, no widely accepted female condom . Every proposal for controlling the epidemic with current tools — like circumcising every man in the third world, giving a daily prophylactic pill to everyone contemplating sex or testing billions of people and treating all the estimated 33 million who would test positive — is wildly impractical.

And, most devastating of all, old-fashioned prevention has flopped. Too few people, particularly in Africa, are using the “ABC” approach pioneered here in Uganda: abstain, be faithful, use condoms.

For every 100 people put on treatment, 250 are newly infected, according to the United Nations ' AIDS-fighting agency, Unaids.

That makes prospects for the future grim. Worldwide, even though two million people with the disease die each year, the total keeps growing because nearly three million adults and children become infected.

Even now, the fight is falling short. Of the 33 million people infected, 14 million are immuno-compromised enough to need drugs now, under the latest World Health Organization guidelines. (W.H.O. guidelines are conservative; if all 33 million were Americans, most clinicians would treat them at once.)

Instead, despite a superhuman effort by donors, fewer than four million are on treatment. Just to meet the minimal W.H.O. guidelines, donations would have to treble instead of going flat.

Uganda is a microcosm of that: 500,000 need treatment, 200,000 are getting it, but each year, an additional 110,000 are infected.

“You cannot mop the floor when the tap is still running on it,” said Dr. David Kihumuro Apuuli, director-general of the Uganda AIDS Commission.

Some battles will still be won. Middle-income countries with limited epidemics, like India, Brazil and Russia, can probably treat all their patients without outside help. China almost certainly can. South Africa might; it has a raging epidemic but is rich by African standards.

But for most of Africa and scattered other countries like Haiti, Guyana and Cambodia, it seems inevitable that the 1990s will return: walking skeletons in the villages, stacks of bodies in morgues, mountains of newly turned earth in cemeteries.

As he tours world capitals seeking donations, Dr. Michel D. Kazatchkine, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria , said he had become “hugely frustrated.”

“The consistent answer I hear is: ‘We love you, we hear you, we acknowledge the fund's good results, but our budget is tight, our budget is cut, it's the economic crisis.' ”

No commander in the global fight openly concedes that the war is over, but all admit to deep pessimism.

“I don't see the cavalry riding to the rescue,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci , an AIDS researcher who leads one of the National Institutes of Health .

“I'm worried we'll be in a ‘Kampala situation' in other countries soon,” said Ambassador Eric Goosby , the Obama administration's new global AIDS coordinator.

“What I see is making me very scared,” agreed Michel Sidibé, executive director of Unaids. Without a change of heart among donors, Mr. Sidibé said, “the whole hope I've had for the last 10 years will disappear.”

Donors give about $10 billion a year, while controlling the epidemic would cost $27 billion a year, he estimated.

His predecessor, Dr. Peter Piot , said he had seen optimism soar and then fade.

Hopes rose from 2001 to 2003 when cheap generic antiretroviral drugs became available, Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations formed the Global Fund and President George W. Bush initiated the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or Pepfar.

“Then, we were at a tipping point in the right direction,” Dr. Piot said. “Now I'm afraid we're at a tipping point in the wrong direction.”

AIDS2031, a panel he convened to look ahead to the epidemic's 50th anniversary, issued a pessimistic report in November that concluded: “Without a change in approach, a major epidemic will still be with us in 2031.” Because of population growth, it said, there may still be two million new infections a year even then.

According to the Uganda AIDS Commission, the lifetime bill for treating one Ugandan AIDS patient, counting drugs, tests and medical salaries, is $11,500.

Donors have decided that is too much, that more lives can be saved by concentrating on child-killers like stillbirth, pneumonia , diarrhea , malaria , measles and tetanus . Cures for those killers, like antibiotics , mosquito nets, rehydration salts, water filters, shots and deworming pills, cost $1 to $10.

Under its new Global Health Initiative, the Obama administration has announced plans to shift its focus to mother-and-child health . The AIDS budget was increased by only 2 percent.

The British government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also said they would focus support on mother-child health.

“The political winds have changed,” said Sharonann Lynch, chief author of the Doctors Without Borders report. “And I don't believe for a minute it's just the economic downturn. I think world leaders feel the heat is off and they're fatigued.”

American taxpayers have been particularly generous to Uganda, paying for 88 percent of its drugs; Ugandans know it.

Karen Morgan, an American who runs a laboratory at the hospital where Ms. Kamukama was turned away, said: “Just today, a patient came up to me in the parking lot and said, ‘Thank you, American.' I said, ‘For what?' He said ‘For my medicine. You care if I live or die.' ”

Nearby, in a tent on the hospital lawn, Moses Nsubuga, a D.J. known as Supercharger, rehearsed his troupe, the Stigmaless Band, composed entirely of teenagers on AIDS drugs.

One of their songs is “America, Thank You So Much.”

Dr. Peter Mugyenyi, the hospital's founder, helped the Bush administration form its AIDS plan and sat beside Laura Bush during the State of the Union address as it was announced.

The loss of donor interest “makes me frantic with worry,” Dr. Mugyenyi said. “Once word spreads that there is no treatment, people do what they did in the past: go to the witch doctors and buy fake treatments.”

He offers copies of e-mail messages he exchanged with American aid officials. One reminds him that he has been instructed to stop enrolling new patients and asks for an explanation of reports that he is treating 37,000 when only 32,000 are authorized. Another asks him not to announce publicly that his funds have been frozen.

He admits slipping pregnant women and young mothers like Ms. Kamukama into treatment slots “contrary to instructions.”

“Morally, I can't turn them away,” he said.

He has another reason. Family members like Ms. Kamukama and her cousin will often share one set of pills, an act of love that leads to disaster. Incomplete treatment means both will probably die, but may first develop drug-resistant AIDS and pass it on.

American officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed the financing freeze.

“The decision was made late in the Bush administration to cap Uganda at $280 million,” one said. “That's an industrial amount of money.”

United States Embassy officials debated adding $38 million, he said, but cabinet-level Ugandan ministers had been caught stealing from other donors and, though forced to repay the money, were not jailed. The government “hasn't shown the leadership or commitment to transparency to earn additional funds,” the official added.

Also, he said, Uganda contributes too little. Oil was recently discovered near Lake Albert and the government promised to spend the royalties on roads and electricity, but did not mention AIDS.

“And now the paper says they're buying Russian jets,” another official added with obvious disgust. Uganda is negotiating for a $300 million squadron of Sukhoi fighter-bombers.

For doctors on the front line, the frustration is palpable.

Dr. Natasha Astill is a British AIDS specialist working at a hospital on the edges of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, in a mountain valley with pygmy settlements close by fancy gorilla-tourist lodges. It is so remote that the drugs that reached Kampala in 2003 did not get here until 2007.

After a long day in which she and a nurse saw 118 patients, many huddling together in the examining room to avoid the storm pounding on the tin roof, she broke down in tears. All day she told subsistence farmers she could not, for example, treat the white fungal thrush filling their mouths unless they could pay $1 a day — more than they earn.

She can still give free antiretrovirals to a few; while her hospital's American funds are frozen, it still gets some drugs from the Ugandan Ministry of Health and cash gifts from wildlife tourists and the singer Elton John . But soon this hospital, too, will make a waiting list.

“It makes me angry,” she says. “It feels horrible. Sometimes you wonder if you're doing people favors. You start them on drugs, you give them hope, and then you're not sure you can keep it up. We all knew these drugs are for life.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/world/africa/10aids.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Traces of Explosive Found on Sunken S. Korean Ship

SEOUL, South Korea — Forensic experts investigating the wreckage of a South Korean warship that sank near the sea border with North Korea have found traces of an explosive component commonly used in torpedoes and mines, South Korea 's defense minister said on Monday.

The 1,200-ton corvette, the Cheonan, sank on March 26 after a mysterious blast split the ship in half. The South Korean government has said a torpedo attack was the likely cause of the blast, and many South Koreans believe the North was responsible.

North Korea has denied any involvement in the sinking.

“It is true that traces of RDX, a chemical substance used in making torpedoes, have been found,” Defense Minister Kim Tae-young said on Monday, referring to a component common to many military explosives. “There is a high possibility of a torpedo attack but it's still too early to announce” the definitive cause of the blast, he said.

The material was found on the ship's smokestack and in samples of sand from the sinking site, said Rear Adm. Moon Byung-ok, a spokesman for the investigation team. He noted that RDX is also used in making mines.

During the briefing on Monday, neither Mr. Kim nor Admiral Moon mentioned North Korea. Forty-six South Korean sailors were killed or remain missing in the incident.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/world/asia/11korea.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Along Gulf, Many Wary of Promises After Spill

GULFPORT, Miss. — People who live along the Gulf Coast know that a promise of money is not nearly as nice as it sounds. It means waiting and waiting, and raising a fuss, and then waiting some more, and consulting lawyers and talking to bureaucrats, and still waiting, and in some cases just giving up.

And now, after almost five years of fighting insurance companies and government agencies to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina , they are contemplating the prospect of going through all of that again.

It is too early to tell how the maddeningly unpredictable oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico will affect the economies that depend on the ocean and its edible inhabitants. And it is too early to judge how BP will act in providing compensation for economic losses. But recent experience does not provide comfort.

“The insurance industry and big corporations have a history of stall, deny and kind of wait you out,” said Kevin Buckle, who works for Ship Island Excursions, a charter boat company here. Mr. Buckle had such a bad experience after Hurricane Katrina that he has been pushing for a state insurance bill of rights. Like most everyone else, he is in a wait-and-see mode.

BP says it has a “robust process to manage claims” and “is committed to pay legitimate claims” for loss or damage caused by the spill, all in addition to footing the cleanup costs.

There is a toll-free telephone number to call, and if the claim is small enough — generally, immediate loss of pay fits this category — an operator can walk a person through the process and have the claim paid within 48 hours, said Bill Salvin, a company spokesman. Any person accepting such a payment does not waive any rights against future litigation or claims. Larger claims, Mr. Salvin said, would require an investigation by adjusters.

So far, around 4,700 claims have been filed, a BP spokesman said, with a little over 800 paid, almost all of them for loss of income.

Along the bayous of southern Louisiana and along the docks of Mississippi harbors, it is difficult to find someone who has even heard that the toll-free number exists. And those who have called often report difficulty getting through to an operator. So BP is enlisting churches and community groups to get the word out, as well as setting up offices in vacant storefronts along the coast to deal with claimants in person.

This sounds good to coastal residents. But they want it in writing.

“I mean, Exxon came out and said the same stuff after Valdez,” said Jim Hood, the attorney general of Mississippi, who describes himself as a “veteran of the insurance wars” after Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Hood said he was cautiously optimistic after his conversations with BP's lawyers, who are expected to formalize some of their assurances in writing early this week.

The question of liability is likely to be unsettled for some time. BP officials said that the $75 million limit on the company's liability, as set forth in the law that governs oil spills , is “not relevant” in this case, and some United States senators seem to agree, having proposed legislation that would retroactively raise the cap to $10 billion.

But with several companies involved in the drilling rig that caused the spill, including the rig's owner, Transocean , there will most likely be protracted legal battles that will determine who actually owes whom for what. For now it is BP, the self-acknowledged “responsible party,” that is spending the money.

BP is, obviously, interested in where that money goes, hence the need for adjusters on the large claims and the comment by Tony Hayward, the company's chief executive, to The Times of London: “This is America — come on. We're going to have lots of illegitimate claims.”

It is true that fraud cases related to Hurricane Katrina continue to trickle into federal courts. But the burden of the term “legitimate claims” has given some people pause. The unease is especially keen here, given the often arbitrary-seeming reasons for denials of coverage after the storm and the fact that many of those likely to be affected by the slick lack the legal education — or in the case of the large community of Vietnamese, the language ability — to know what kind of agreements they have made.

The worries were heightened by early incidents that BP officials have tried to put behind them. In one case, BP officials were making boat owners, many of whom have been temporarily put out of work by the spill, sign agreements to work in the cleanup effort that included waivers of certain kinds of liability. BP dropped the clauses, which Mr. Hayward referred to as a “misstep,” but not without facing widespread public outrage and a ruling in Federal District Court.

Then the Alabama attorney general condemned reports that a BP employee had offered quick $5,000 settlements for economic damages in exchange for waivers of future liability. Several BP spokesmen said they were not aware that such an offer was ever made, though Mr. Hayward appeared to confirm it last week when he told reporters it was a “screw-up” by a few employees.

A response this big is going to have glitches, Mr. Salvin said. While this is true, these particular glitches worried coastal residents because they conformed to the worst fears.

“That's the kind of deal they would do,” said Brent Coon, a lawyer who sued on behalf of victims of the BP Texas City refinery explosion in 2005 that left 15 dead, and who has filed a suit in this disaster as well. “Let's go ahead and just buy them off quick and cheap now before they realize how bad this is going to be.”

Meanwhile, a fleet of lawyers is already massing, with new class-action suits being filed seemingly by the hour. Even some plaintiff attorneys here worry that fishermen could see badly-needed claims payments eaten up by the fees of less-scrupulous lawyers.

But the last five years have taught vigilance.

“I don't trust much,” said Loc Nguyen, 46, smoking Marlboro Reds on the stern of his shrimp boat in the harbor of Pass Christian, Miss. “If you want money, you have to go see lawyer first.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/10claims.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Holder Backs a Miranda Limit for Terror Suspects

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Sunday it would seek a law allowing investigators to interrogate terrorism suspects without informing them of their rights, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. flatly asserted that the defendant in the Times Square bombing attempt was trained by the Taliban in Pakistan .

Mr. Holder proposed carving out a broad new exception to the Miranda rights established in a landmark 1966 Supreme Court ruling. It generally forbids prosecutors from using as evidence statements made before suspects have been warned that they have a right to remain silent and to consult a lawyer.

He said interrogators needed greater flexibility to question terrorism suspects than is provided by existing exceptions.

The proposal to ask Congress to loosen the Miranda rule comes against the backdrop of criticism by Republicans who have argued that terrorism suspects — including United States citizens like Faisal Shahzad , the suspect in the Times Square case — should be imprisoned and interrogated as military detainees, rather than handled as ordinary criminal defendants.

For months, the administration has defended the criminal justice system as strong enough to handle terrorism cases. Mr. Holder acknowledged the abrupt shift of tone, characterizing the administration's stance as a “new priority” and “big news” in an appearance on NBC 's “Meet the Press.”

“We're now dealing with international terrorists,” he said, “and I think that we have to think about perhaps modifying the rules that interrogators have and somehow coming up with something that is flexible and is more consistent with the threat that we now face.”

The conclusion that Mr. Shahzad was involved in an international plot appeared to come from investigations that began after his arrest and interrogation, including inquiries into his links with the Taliban in Pakistan.

“We know that they helped facilitate it,” Mr. Holder said of the Times Square bombing attempt. “We know that they helped direct it. And I suspect that we are going to come up with evidence which shows that they helped to finance it. They were intimately involved in this plot.”

Mr. Holder's statement, and comments by President Obama 's counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan , were the highest-level confirmation yet that the authorities believe the Pakistani branch of the Taliban was directly involved. Investigators were still pursuing leads based on what Mr. Shahzad has told them, and the officials did not describe their evidence in detail.

Mr. Brennan appeared to say even more definitively than Mr. Holder did that the Taliban in Pakistan had provided money as well as training and direction.

“He was trained by them,” Mr. Brennan said. “He received funding from them. He was basically directed here to the United States to carry out this attack.”

He added: “We have good cooperation from our Pakistani partners and from others. We're learning more about this incident every day. We're hopeful we're going to be able to identify any other individuals that were involved.”

Even before the attempted Times Square attack, the administration had been stretching the traditional limits of how long suspects may be questioned without being warned of their rights.

After the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound jet on Dec. 25, for example, the F.B.I. questioned the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab , for about 50 minutes without reading him his rights. And last week, Mr. Brennan said, the F.B.I. interrogated Mr. Shahzad for three or four hours before delivering a Miranda warning.

In both cases, the administration relied on an exception to Miranda for immediate threats to public safety. That exception was established by the Supreme Court in a 1984 case in which a police officer asked a suspect, at the time of his arrest and before reading him his rights, about where he had hidden a gun. The court deemed the defendant's answer and the gun admissible as evidence against him.

Conservatives have long disliked the Miranda ruling, which is intended to ensure that confessions are not coerced. Its use in terrorism cases has been especially controversial because of concerns that informing a suspect of his rights could interrupt the flow of the interrogation and prompt him to stop disclosing information that might prevent a future attack.

Rudolph W. Giuliani , the former New York City mayor and Republican presidential candidate, said Sunday on “This Week” on ABC that he supported Mr. Holder's proposal. However, he also suggested that enacting it would not quell conservative criticism, arguing that it would be even better to hold suspects like Mr. Shahzad as military detainees for lengthier interrogation.

“I would not have given him Miranda warnings after just a couple of hours of questioning,” Mr. Giuliani said. “I would have instead declared him an enemy combatant, asked the president to do that, and at the same time, that would have given us the opportunity to question him for a much longer period of time.”

Any effort to further limit the Miranda rule will be likely to face challenges. In a 2000 case, the Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 to strike down a statute that essentially overruled Miranda by allowing prosecutors to use statements defendants made voluntarily before being read their rights.

Despite the political furor over reading terrorism suspects their Miranda rights, it is not clear that doing so has had a major impact on recent interrogations.

For example, even after Mr. Shahzad was read his rights, he waived them and continued talking. With Mr. Abdulmutallab, who is accused of trying to light a bomb hidden in his undergarments, the pre-Miranda interrogation lasted until he was taken into surgery for the burns he suffered. Afterward, he did not resume cooperating and was also read his Miranda rights, although the sequence of events is uncertain. Relatives later persuaded him to start talking again.

In Congressional testimony last week, Mr. Holder defended the legality of the delays in both cases, noting that the Supreme Court had set no time limit for use of the public-safety exception. But on Sunday, he seemed to indicate uneasiness about the executive branch unilaterally pushing those limits, and called for Congressional action to allow lengthier interrogations without Miranda warnings in international terrorism cases.

“If we are going to have a system that is capable of dealing in a public safety context with this new threat, I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public safety exception,” Mr. Holder said. “And that's one of the things that I think we're going to be reaching out to Congress to do: to come up with a proposal that is both constitutional but that is also relevant to our time and the threat that we now face.”

Philip B. Heymann, a Harvard law professor and high-ranking Justice Department official in the Carter and Clinton administrations, said the Supreme Court was likely to uphold a broader emergency exception for terrorism cases — especially if Congress approved it. “Not having addressed how long the emergency exception can be, the Supreme Court would be very hesitant to disagree with both the president and Congress if there was any reasonable resolution to that question,” he said.

Still, Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union , said Congress had no authority to “chip away” at the Miranda ruling because it was based in the Constitution. He predicted that any effort to carve a broader exception would be vigorously contested.

“The irony is that this administration supposedly stands for the rule of law and the restoration of America's legal standing,” he said. And Virginia E. Sloan, president of the bipartisan Constitution Project, said the existing public safety exception to Miranda seemed to be working, so there was no need to erode constitutional protections in ways that could later be expanded to other kinds of criminal suspects.

“It makes good political theater,” she said, “but we need to have a clear problem that we are addressing and a clear justification for any change. I haven't seen that yet.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10holder.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From MSNBC

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For more kids, dinner comes from Uncle Sam

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. - While the other preschoolers were warming up to the vegetable pesto lasagna, 3-year-old Avery Bennett dove in with no hesitation.

"Can I have some more lasagna?" Bennett said from her booster seat. "I love it."

She moved on to her seconds, and the other kids at the evening care program in Brattleboro were also chomping down the dish made of spinach, peppers, carrots, tomato, fresh basil and cheese.

More low-income school kids could soon have access to free nutritious dinners like the lasagna that Avery loved. A U.S. Department of Agriculture program in Vermont, 12 other states and the District of Columbia provides reimbursements for the suppers, served at after-school programs for at-risk kids in communities where at least 50 percent of households fall below the poverty level.

"What it allows us to do is provide those kids with an extra nutritious meal before they go home because some kids go home to nothing," said Susan Eckes, director of child nutrition programs for the Food Bank of Northern Nevada in McCarran, Nev.

Around the country, about 49,000 children benefit from the after-school meals each day. The program is expected to cost a total of $8 million from 2009 to 2013, the USDA said.

With more families losing jobs and homes, the need is growing, officials said.

The number of Americans who live in food-insecure households — which at times don't have enough nutritious food — rose from 36 million people in 2007 to 49 million in 2008, according to the most recent report from USDA's Economic Research Service.

Among those, 16.7 million were children, up from 12.4 million in 2007.

Nearly one in four children in the U.S. are food insecure and about one in five live in poverty, according to a report from Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks around the country.

"As the economy gets worse, we're seeing more and more kids," said Beth Baldwin-Page, executive director of the Boys & Girls Club of Brattleboro.

In East Prairie, Mo., kids who may have skipped the meal from time to time are coming every day, said Lester Gillespie, youth program director at the Susanna Wesley Family Learning Center, which serves 150 meals a day at two sites to kids age 5 to 18.

A lack of nutritious food, especially in the first three to five years, can have lasting effects on the health and development of children. Filling their stomachs with nutritional meals helps them learn and concentrate, officials have said.

"What we've noticed is that when kids are eating nutritional meals, they tend not to get involved in negative activities such as doing graffiti or committing delinquent acts because when their stomach is full they make good decisions," said Gillespie.

Programs in Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Wisconsin, the District of Columbia and now in Vermont are eligible for reimbursement for suppers.

The USDA requires the sites to offer nutritionally balanced suppers with milk, a protein, fruit, vegetables and bread or a grain item.

Delaware, where the supper program is one of the fastest-growing child nutrition programs in the state, has gone a step further, prohibiting the use of any grain product that contains more than 6 grams of sugar or any product where more than 35 percent of calories are derived from fat.

The Brattleboro Boys & Girls Club started offering dinners on its own two and a half years ago. When it learned the supper program was being expanded to Vermont, it applied for and just starting getting the federal reimbursement of $2.68 per meal.

Three days a week, the club offers dinners feeding 40 to 60 kids on a Thursday night to up to 100 on Friday.

"It's popular. Unfortunately, it's necessary," said Ricky Davidson, unit director.

"We see families getting evicted left and right. They don't have a place to live, let alone cook food," Baldwin-Page said.

Bernie Parent, 18, of Brattleboro has relied on the meals since he and his mother became homeless last year.

Now living on his own in an apartment, going to high school, and working at the Boys & Girls Club, he still relies on the three free dinners each week.

"It helps out a lot," he said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37051309/ns/health-kids_and_parenting/print/1/displaymode/1098/

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DA seeks hate crime charges in NM swastika case

FARMINGTON, N.M. - Prosecutors in northwestern New Mexico said they will pursue hate crime charges against three men accused of branding a swastika on a mentally challenged man's arm using a heated metal clothes hanger.

Jesse Sanford, 24, William Hatch, 28, and Paul Beebe, 26, were charged Friday with kidnapping, aggravated battery causing great bodily harm and other felony charges. The men were jailed with bond set at $150,000 cash.

"We'll explore every conceivable available avenue in charging them with a hate crime because what happened to the victim was so horribly wrong," said Chief Deputy District Attorney Sarah Weaver.

The three white men are accused of forcing the 22-year-old victim from the Navajo Indian reservation into a car on April 29 and driving him to an apartment. Besides branding the man's arm there, police say the suspects shaved a swastika into his hair and drew degrading words and pictures on his body with permanent marker.

Afterward, the trio allegedly kicked the victim out of the apartment, and a nearby convenience store clerk called 911.

Police took the victim to San Juan Regional Medical Center, where hospital employees washed off the degrading speech and pictures. A local barbershop cut the man's hair to remove the swastika, police Sgt. Robert Perez said.

Officers obtained search warrants for the apartment and the men's vehicle. Insignia associated with white supremacist beliefs were found in the apartment, Perez said.

"We haven't identified this as a gang-related crime. That is still under investigation," Perez said. "But they appear to be associated in some fashion to the white supremacist movement."

Sanford told police the victim came into a McDonald's restaurant where the three men worked and was looking for a place to stay. Sanford claimed that the victim, who wanted a haircut and a tattoo, "wanted the swastika design because it was a tribal symbol," according to court records.

It was unclear whether the three suspects had attorneys.

New Mexico's hate crime law would add one year to the sentence for each charge if the men are convicted. The suspects face up to 35½ years in prison, including a mandatory 18 years for kidnapping, if convicted of all the charges and the hate crime enhancement.

The New Mexico Crime Victims Reparation Commission will help the victim with any medical, emotional or psychological issues that come about as a result of this crime, Weaver said.

Farmington detectives also spoke with a plastic surgeon and were trying to make arrangements to have the damage to the victim's right bicep removed, Perez said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37053787/ns/us_news/print/1/displaymode/1098/

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