Thousands of investigations based on child abuse tips go unresolved

L.A. County's child welfare agency has a backlog of some 3,700 cases open 60 days or more. Department and union officials say they're 'at a breaking point' with current staffing levels.

By Garrett Therolf, Los Angeles Times

May 15, 2010

Los Angeles County's child welfare system has failed to complete investigations into child abuse hotline tips involving more than 18,000 children within the time mandated by the state, according to county records.

Because of the backlog, state regulators recently extended L.A. County's deadline for completing investigations from 30 days to 60, but Department of Children and Family Services officials have been unable to meet the new timeline as well. Some 3,700 cases — many involving multiple children — have been open two months or longer without determining whether abuse or neglect is taking place in the home.

The delays — which might leave children in dangerous situations until social workers complete their work — are the result of too few staff burdened with a litany of new tasks intended to reduce the deaths of children whose families already had come under the department's scrutiny.

"The social worker staff simply cannot keep up with everything we are asking them to do," department Director Trish Ploehn said. "All of the things that equate with quality do take time."

John Tanner, executive director of Service Employees International Union Local 721, which represents the social workers, said, "The emergency response system is at a breaking point. We have to reinvent it to best help social workers ensure child safety."

The crisis began last year after The Times reported that more than a dozen children had died of abuse or neglect in each of the two previous years after coming to the attention of the department. Internal investigations subsequently determined that most of those cases involved errors by the department that probably contributed to the fatalities, and that the errors were concentrated in the unit that handles emergency response.

Department officials responded by ordering more interviews, additional managerial oversight and other duties intended to improve the thoroughness of investigations.

But the work proved to be too much for the county's 596 emergency response unit workers — up only 80 from a year ago. They are charged with investigating about 160,000 tips that arrive each year through the child abuse hotline. Since July, about 7.5% of the cases opened based on those tips remained unresolved after 60 days or more.

A recent internal study also found systemic flaws in the unit's investigations.

The study found that evidence was often insufficient to fairly judge the situation or had been improperly gathered. Children were interviewed alone in only 66% of cases. And social workers on average spoke with fewer than two so-called collateral contacts — neighbors, friends, school officials and healthcare providers who know the children best.

On the positive side, it concluded that workers correctly assessed the evidence they gathered in 93% of cases.

Further complicating the investigators' work are the department's persistent technology problems. Computer databases with information about family histories are notoriously incomplete and cumbersome to use.

When workers go out into the field, they are not able to access the databases because they have no county-issued cellphones and little information about the child other than an Internet map printout for the last known address.

Despite an investment in laptop computers for field work, most social workers are not trained to use them and do not take them in the field because of unresolved connectivity issues, department spokesman Nishith Bhatt said.

Ploehn has worked for much of the past year to rebuild the emergency response unit. She expanded the unit's training program and ordered many cases to go through an extra layer of review by senior staffers who are held accountable for the inquiries' conclusion and often send investigations back for further work before closing a case.

As a result, investigators are filing far fewer unsubstantiated cases, a factor cited by California Department of Social Services Director John Wagner in his decision to temporarily suspend the 30-day deadline.

"This is significant, as it recognizes the extensive child safety enhancements we have implemented to ensure quality investigations and the time it takes for a social worker . . . to actually complete the required tasks," Bhatt said.

It's difficult to determine how much additional staff is needed, particularly in a time of steep budget cuts throughout many county departments.

In February, Ploehn told The Times that she would add 300 workers to the emergency response unit to aid completion of the investigations. But last month, in a presentation to the county's Commission for Children and Families, she reduced that target to 100 additional workers.

In a recent interview, Ploehn said she needs funding for 133 more workers — which would bring the total added to about 210 from a year ago — in order to bring caseloads to acceptable levels. The estimated cost of making those hires is $15.7 million.

"We have basically done all the reshuffling we can do internally," Ploehn said. "Our board and CEO are juggling a number of priorities and we need to make the case why these additional staff are critical."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-child-abuse-20100516,0,2320330,print.story

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Obama honors law enforcement officers killed in line of duty

President Obama paid tribute Saturday on behalf of a grateful nation to law enforcement officers who made the ultimate sacrifice while safeguarding their communities.

Americans “rely on a certain order in our lives, a certain security that lets us sleep safely in our beds, walk around our neighborhoods without fear and to go about our daily lives without being a victim of crime. That sense of security doesn't come on its own,” he said in brief remarks on the West Lawn of the Capitol during Peace Officers Memorial Day, which honors officers killed in the line of duty.

“What makes it possible, what makes freedom possible, are the law enforcement officials,” he said.

The event is part of National Police Week, an annual tribute to law enforcement service and sacrifice.

The president said he was proud of law enforcement officials who chose their careers out of a sense of “a professional responsibility to our wives and husbands, to give our children a better chance at life.”

Obama spoke of a higher calling that motivated these officers to protect people and to fulfill that mission every day despite the uncertainty of what that next duty call might bring.

“Everyday people go about their lives, they wake up, sit down for breakfast, send kids off to school, head into the office or office factory floor and, after an honest day's work, they return home ready to do it all over again in the morning,” said Obama, who was joined at the event by Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr.

“We often take it for granted, this cycle of life.” But, he added, “Chance can change everything overnight.”

Figures from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund show that officer deaths declined from 138 in 2008 to 116 in 2009. That's the fewest line-of-duty deaths since 1959, when there were 109, according to the data.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/dcnow/2010/05/obama-honors-law-officers-killed-in-line-of-duty.html

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From the New York Times

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For Car Bomb Suspect, a Long Path to Times Square

This article was reported by Andrea Elliott , Sabrina Tavernise and Anne Barnard , and written by Ms. Elliott.

Just after midnight on Feb. 25, 2006, Faisal Shahzad sent a lengthy e-mail message to a group of friends. The trials of his fellow Muslims weighed on him — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the plight of Palestinians, the publication in Denmark of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.

Mr. Shahzad was wrestling with how to respond. He understood the notion that Islam forbids the killing of innocents, he wrote. But to those who insist only on “peaceful protest,” he posed a question: “Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?

“Everyone knows how the Muslim country bows down to pressure from west. Everyone knows the kind of humiliation we are faced with around the globe.”

Yet by some measures, Mr. Shahzad — a Pakistani immigrant who was then 26 years old — seemed to be thriving in the West. He worked as a financial analyst at Elizabeth Arden, the global cosmetics firm. He had just received his green card, making him a legal resident in the United States. He owned a gleaming new house in Shelton, Conn. His Pakistani-American wife would soon become pregnant with their first child, whom they named Alisheba, or “beautiful sunshine.”

Four years later, Mr. Shahzad stands accused of planting a car bomb in Times Square on a balmy spring evening. After his arrest two days later, on May 3, while trying to flee to Dubai, the few details that surfaced about his life echoed a familiar narrative about radicalization in the West: his anger toward his adopted country seemed to have grown in lockstep with his personal struggles. He had lost his home to foreclosure last year. At the same time he was showing signs of a profound, religiously infused alienation.

But the roots of Mr. Shahzad's militancy appear to have sprouted long before, according to interviews with relatives, friends, classmates, neighbors, colleagues and government officials, as well as e-mail messages written by Mr. Shahzad that were obtained by The New York Times. His argument with American foreign policy grew after 9/11, even as he enjoyed America's financial promise and expansive culture. He balanced these dueling emotions with an agility common among his Pakistani immigrant friends.

As Mr. Shahzad became more religious, starting around 2006, he was also turning away from the Pakistan of his youth, friends recalled, distancing himself from the liberal, elite world of his father, Bahar ul-Haq, a retired vice marshal in the Pakistani Air Force.

And while in recent years Mr. Shahzad struggled to pay his bills, it is unclear that his financial hardship played a significant role in his radicalization. He still owned his home and held a full-time job when he began signaling to friends that he wanted to leave the United States.

In April 2009, the same month Mr. Shahzad got his United States citizenship, he sent an e-mail message to friends that foreshadowed his militant destiny. He criticized the views of a moderate Pakistani politician, writing, “I bet when it comes to defending the lands, his opinion would be we should do dialogue.” The politician had “bought into the Western jargon” of calling the mujahedeen, or foreign fighters, “extremist,” wrote Mr. Shahzad, who urged the recipients of the message to find “a proper Sheikh to understand the Quran.”

One of the recipients responded by asking Mr. Shahzad which sheikhs he followed.

Writing in Urdu, Mr. Shahzad replied, “My sheikhs are in the field.” A few months later, he abruptly quit his job and left for Pakistan, where, officials say, he was later trained in bomb-making by the Pakistani Taliban.

But precisely what combination of influences — political, religious and personal — drove Mr. Shahzad to violence remains a mystery, even to those close to him.

“We all know these things, what the geopolitical problems are,” said Mr. Shahzad's father-in-law, M. A. Mian, 55. “Every day we sit in our living rooms with our friends and we discuss these issues.”

“But to go to this extreme, this is unbelievable,” he said, adding: “He has lovely children. Two really lovely children. As a father I would not be able to afford to lose my children.”

Military Upbringing

Faisal Shahzad grew up somewhat rootless. He identified proudly with his tribal Pashtun heritage, yet knew little of his father's ancestral village, Mohib Banda, a collection of mud huts ringed by sugar and wheat fields in northwestern Pakistan. Mr. Shahzad's father, Mr. Haq, had entered the Pakistani Air Force as a common airman before climbing the ranks as a fighter pilot who excelled at midair acrobatics, with posts in England and Saudi Arabia.

By the time Mr. Shahzad was 12, his father had been transferred from Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to the Pakistani city of Quetta, followed by Rawalpindi. As the son of a senior military officer, Mr. Shahzad was swaddled in privilege, tended to by chauffeurs, servants and armed guards in an insular world made up almost exclusively of military families. Mr. Shahzad's household was a blend of strict and liberal; Mr. Haq, who spoke British-accented English and drank alcohol socially, was stern with his children and quick to anger, friends and former colleagues recalled.

When Mr. Shahzad entered high school in the mid-1990s, his family had settled in Karachi, a throbbing mega-city in the south. By then, Pakistan had plunged into chaos. As political instability and sectarian violence roiled the country, many Pakistanis blamed the United States. After propping up the Pakistani military dictator, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, in the 1980s, the American government was now imposing hefty sanctions in retaliation for Pakistan's nuclear program. The economy stalled as anti-Americanism spread.

Mr. Shahzad came of age during Pakistan's state-sponsored jihad against India's military in the breakaway region of Kashmir — a conflict that granted legendary status to Pakistani jihadists. “We used to see the mujahedeen as heroes,” said one graduate of Mr. Shahzad's high school, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “When I look back, I think, ‘What was I thinking? What were we all doing?' But in that era, it made sense. We all wanted to do something.”

It is unclear how formative these events were for Mr. Shahzad, who continued to lead a somewhat sheltered existence, living with his family in a neighborhood of stately homes fringed by palm trees and bougainvillea. His school, located on a military base, taught the same rigid curriculum — with an anti-Western slant and a strict form of Islamic studies — imposed nationally by General Zia.

After graduating, Mr. Shahzad enrolled in Greenwich University, a business school in Karachi known for drawing affluent underachievers with fancy cars. Mr. Shahzad proved a mediocre student. (In high school, he had gotten D's in English composition and microeconomics, according to a transcript.) But what he lacked in academic prowess he made up for in ambition, friends recalled; he was determined to finish his degree in the United States. Taking advantage of a partnership between his college and the University of Bridgeport, in Connecticut, Mr. Shahzad applied for a student visa.

On Jan. 16, 1999, at the age of 19, Mr. Shahzad left Pakistan for a new life in America.

Driven to Success

The wide, maple-shaded streets leading to the University of Bridgeport seem a long way from Karachi. The quiet, tidy campus overlooks a tranquil stretch of the Long Island Sound, where ferries pass in the distance.

When Mr. Shahzad started classes there, more than a third of the college's students were foreigners — 15 of them from Pakistan. Mr. Shahzad stood out. He walked with a confident air, showing off his gym-honed muscles in tight T-shirts. He carried the air of a privileged upbringing, coming off as aloof and, at times, snobbish.

While the Pakistani students stuck together, playing cricket and collecting free meals at the campus mosque, Mr. Shahzad had a wider circle of friends and a fuller social calendar. A skilled cook, he drew students to his dorm room with the scent of his simmering lobia, a Pakistani lentil dish. He worked out obsessively and, on weekends, hit New York City's Bengali-theme nightclubs. He loved women, recalled a former classmate, and “could drink anyone under the table.” He showed little interest in Islam.

Mr. Shahzad rarely seemed pressed for cash — he had a large television in his dorm room and drove a Mitsubishi Galant. But he still looked for work. Nimble with his hands — he would later take to gardening and painting — he landed a job designing intricate gold pendants for a jeweler at a mall in Milford. While Mr. Shahzad did not seem to distinguish himself academically, he came across as witty, street smart and “fast on his feet,” recalled one classmate. He and his Pakistani peers were chasing the same dream, the classmate said: “Back then, it was all about fast cars and becoming something.”

While Mr. Shahzad seemed eager to carve out a life in his host country, his anger at America flared early. The classmate recalled walking into Mr. Shahzad's apartment a few days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to find him staring at news footage of the planes hitting the towers.

“They had it coming,” Mr. Shahzad said, according to the friend, a Pakistani-American. The friend said Mr. Shahzad believed that Western countries had conspired to mistreat Muslims. “He would just go off,” said the friend, adding that he paid little heed to Mr. Shahzad's eruptions, dismissing them as a product of his fierce Pashtun pride.

“He was always saying, ‘If these people come to my land, it's not going to be good,' ” the friend recalled.

By late 2001, Mr. Shahzad seemed focused on his American future. Having graduated from the University of Bridgeport with a bachelor's degree in computer applications and information systems, he was working as a clerk for Elizabeth Arden in Stamford. The following year, while holding the same job, Mr. Shahzad began taking night courses at the University of Bridgeport's business school. He had bought a black Mercedes, as well as a $205,000 condominium in Norwalk. Two years later, Mr. Shahzad sold the apartment at a $56,000 profit.

His broker, Keven Courbois, was struck by Mr. Shahzad's sense of responsibility, given that he was only 25. “I thought it was great: Look at this guy who is handling a condo on his own,” Mr. Courbois said.

At times, Mr. Shahzad seemed deeply frustrated with his job at Elizabeth Arden, complaining to a friend that the company never raised his $50,000 salary. (The company declined to discuss Mr. Shahzad's employment.)

In July 2004, three months after selling his condo, Mr. Shahzad bought the gray, two-story house in Shelton, in a quiet, hilly neighborhood of well-tended flower beds and rambling older homes. He was preparing for marriage. His parents agreed on a suitable match: Huma Mian, an ebullient 23-year-old from Denver who had recently graduated with a degree in accounting, and whose Pakistani-American father was a prominent oil industry engineer and economist.

On Dec. 25, 2004, they held a lavish wedding in Peshawar, Mr. Shahzad's ancestral turf, celebrating with a rare touch of modernity: the women and men danced together.

Mr. Shahzad's “bachelor days” were behind him, the former classmate recalled. He was ready to settle down.

New Religiosity

Two years later, when Mr. Shahzad wrote the e-mail message telling friends that Muslims must defend themselves from “foreign infidel forces,” he seemed to be living a stable suburban life. That June, he took a new job as an analyst at the Affinion Group, a financial marketing firm in Norwalk, telling a friend that his annual income had jumped to $70,000. Two months later, he finished his master's degree in business. On weekends, Mr. Shahzad hosted barbecues, mowed his lawn and played badminton in the yard. His wife was pregnant.

Mr. Shahzad had long been critical of American foreign policy. “He was always very upset about the fabrication of the W.M.D. stunt to attack Iraq and killing noncombatants such as the sons and grandson of Saddam Hussein,” said a close relative. In 2003, Mr. Shahzad had been copied on a Google Groups e-mail message bearing photographs of Guantánamo Bay detainees, handcuffed and crouching, below the words “Shame on you, Bush. Shame on You.” The following year, Igor Djuric, a real estate agent who helped him buy his house, recalled that Mr. Shahzad was angered by President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq.

If anything struck Mr. Shahzad's friends and family as different, it was his new religiosity. He no longer drank, and was praying five times a day, stopping into mosques in Stamford, Norwalk and Bridgeport. Some of his friends thought nothing of it; plenty of Pakistani immigrants went through more spiritual phases. What set Mr. Shahzad apart, they said, was not his Islamic devotion, but the particular religious frame through which he had begun to interpret world events.

His 2006 e-mail message echoed the same arguments found on militant Internet forums: that the West is at war with Islam, and Muslims are suffering humiliation because they have strayed from their religious duty to fight back.

“The crusade has already started against Islam and Muslims with cartoons of our beloved Prophet,” wrote Mr. Shahzad, who went on to quote verses from the Koran as proof of what “Allah commands about fighting for Islam.”

During casual conversations with friends, Mr. Shahzad had taken to citing Islamic theology. He was a fan of Ibn Taymiyyah, a 14th-century scholar who inspired a puritanical following, and Abul Ala Mawdudi, a chief architect of the Islamic revival and founder of Pakistan's largest Islamic political party, Jamaat-e-Islami.

On visits home, Mr. Shahzad began to clash with his father.

Mr. Haq had long been wary of political Islam, and found his son's evolution troubling, friends recalled in interviews. The scrutiny went both ways. Mr. Shahzad glared when Mr. Haq once asked him to fetch water to mix with his whiskey, a family friend recalled. “He wanted to change his father,” said the classmate.

By late 2008, Mr. Shahzad seemed to oscillate between contentment and frustration. He doted on his two small children, even changing diapers to the amazement of his more patriarchal relatives. But he felt demeaned at work, complaining of a manager who used to “insult him,” a close relative recalled. He felt that American Muslims were treated differently after 9/11, said the classmate.

“He used to say that when they refer to us, they say ‘Americans of Pakistani origin' — they don't say ‘Americans with German origin,' ” the relative recalled. “These kinds of things, they were all the time cooking in his head.”

During a visit to Pakistan in 2008, Mr. Shahzad gave perhaps the clearest indication yet that he was heading down a militant path. He asked his father for permission to fight in Afghanistan, friends of the father and the relative recalled. Mr. Haq denied the request and appealed to the friends for help in managing his son, they said.

The following year brought a turning point. Back in Connecticut, Mr. Shahzad told his former classmate that he was ready to leave the United States. He was tired of his commute. He found it stressful to keep up mortgage payments on a single income, even though he had urged his wife not to work, said Dr. M. Saud Anwar, a pulmonologist in Connecticut who shares acquaintances with Mr. Shahzad.

“He was like, ‘Why am I paying so much for everything — why am I even here?' ” the classmate recalled.

As time went on, Mr. Shahzad's pride kept him from asking for money from either his family or his wife's, according to a close relative and the classmate. His plan was to wait until he became an American citizen, so he could find lucrative work with an American company in the Middle East and live among Muslims, the classmate recalled.

Mr. Shahzad got his citizenship on April 17, 2009. That same month, he sent the e-mail message to friends saying that his “sheikhs are in the field.” (Dr. Anwar provided portions of the e-mail message, which he obtained from Mr. Shahzad's friend, to The Times and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.)

Return to Pakistan

Over the next few months, Mr. Shahzad and his wife held yard sales. The marriage appeared to be strained; Mr. Shahzad was pressuring his wife to wear a hijab, Dr. Anwar said. He also insisted that the family return to Pakistan while he searched for a job in the Middle East; his wife wanted him to find the job first, recalled the close relative.

On June 2, Mr. Shahzad called his wife from Kennedy Airport. He said that he was leaving for Pakistan, and that it was her choice whether she wanted to follow him, the relative recalled. Ms. Mian refused. Later that month, she packed up her children and moved to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where her parents were living.

Mr. Shahzad stayed with his parents in Peshawar. He appears to have stopped paying his mortgage; the bank foreclosed on his Connecticut home in September. One month later, at a family gathering in Peshawar, Mr. Shahzad seemed angered by the American-led drone strikes along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, a close friend said. He was “condemning the attacks and the government for not doing anything about it,” the friend said.

Mr. Haq was reassured about his son's plans when Mr. Shahzad agreed to start working in the family's farming business. “He bluffed them,” said one of the father's friends. In December, he left home, saying he would be back in a couple of days, the relative recalled. He never returned.

By then, according to federal investigators, Mr. Shahzad had set himself on a course to attack Times Square.

When he returned to the United States on Feb. 3, he circled back to his first days in America. Looking for work, he dropped by to see the jeweler who had hired him in college. He took out a lease on a small apartment just miles from the university campus. His movements over the next few months remain largely a mystery.

Last week, his landlord, Stanislaw Chomiak, walked through Mr. Shahzad's apartment, pointing out the spot where he had been building a wooden replica of a mosque. He looked around, as if searching for clues. Mr. Shahzad had been nice, pleasant — a perfect kind of tenant. He had even lined the burners of the stove with aluminum so they would not get tarnished.

“Where are you going to find a guy like this?” the landlord said. “Nice guy and look what happens.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/nyregion/16suspect.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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Fighter Jets Escort Plane to Vancouver

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) -- Canadian fighter jets escorted a Cathay Pacific airliner coming from Hong Kong to a safe landing in Vancouver International Airport on Saturday following a bomb threat, officials said.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police said that passengers had been safely taken off the plane and that nothing of concern had been found in the baggage.

''This is incident is being taken very seriously,'' Cpl. Sherrdean Turley, adding the threat regarding Flight CX838 was called in to police at about 10:45 a.m. local time (1745 GMT).

Canadian F-18 Hornet fighter jets intercepted the Airbus A340 with 283 passengers and 14 crew members aboard and flew alongside it until it landed around 1:40 p.m. local time (4:40 p.m. Eastern time, 2040 GMT).

''As a precaution, NORAD fighters escorted the aircraft until it landed safely in Vancouver,'' said North American Aerospace Defense Command's Maj. Holly Apostoliuk.

Passengers told CTV News they were not informed of any problems during the flight.

One passenger told CTV News the fighters appeared about 80 miles (128.74 kilometers) from Vancouver.

''I was scared,'' he said. ''He was near to our plane, very near to our plane.''

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/15/world/AP-CN-Canada-Plane-Threat.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=world&adxnnlx=1274004004-W7D/7ap7uj3E9xA5sEk9sA&pagewanted=print

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Metal Thievery Evolves, in Scale and in Technique

PIERCE, Colo. — Scrap metal thieves are not known for sophistication. From drug addicts in the 1970s ripping copper plumbing from walls to scrap-yard regulars of more recent years who proffer whatever fell off a truck, stealing hunks of coil or reinforcing bar has mostly been about having a strong back and a willingness to get dirty, law enforcement experts say.

The thieves who struck the Tucker dairy farm this year were different.

Start with the possession of a cherry-picker utility truck, which they apparently deployed to reach the tops of the 18-foot-tall poles bringing electricity to the farm. The thieves knew how to take down fully-charged electricity lines without getting killed and then, the police said, had a big enough team to roll up hundreds of pounds of wire from the half-mile-long crime scene and make their getaway. The case has not been solved.

“In the past, you had amateurs,” said Charles R. Tucker, 61, who runs the family operation with his brother, Iven, 62. “These guys were pros.”

Metal crime is being nudged into the 21st century by technology, high commodity prices and bad economic times, law enforcement officials and insurance experts say.

“Before, it was go check the pawnshops and scrap yards,” said Jim Sauerwein, a senior investigator for the Harvey County Sheriff's Office in south-central Kansas. “Now it's picture phones, the Internet and eBay.”

The metabolism of the market for stolen metal has accelerated as well, Mr. Sauerwein said. His rule of thumb in tracing a theft these days is that whatever is stolen has probably changed hands as many as four times within 48 hours of its disappearance.

New law enforcement tools in stanching the stolen metal market — hundreds of millions of dollars a year in value, according to insurance industry estimates — is also revealing how geographically nimble the new wave of criminals has become.

Last year, for example, a huge trailer-mounted portable generator, with a G.P.S. unit mounted on its frame, was stolen from a construction site in Kansas. The police could determine only that the rig was taken sometime between quitting time on Friday and the resumption of work on Monday. But by then, according to the G.P.S. unit, the generator was already in Mexico.

“Heavy equipment, construction equipment, it all goes south,” said Deputy Travis Clinesmith of the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office in Wichita, Kan. “That's the pattern we're seeing.”

The scale of theft is up too.

This month, for example, a man named Matthew T. Jones pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Wichita to transferring and transporting up to $1.1 million in stolen farm equipment from five states, including Wyoming (a 30-foot trailer), Nebraska (a John Deere tractor) and Oklahoma (a combine).

In Washington and California this winter, thieves using metal-cutting saws raided fruit orchards, hacking out and carting away half-ton engines used to power wind machines that blow warm air through the trees for frost prevention.

“Thieves seem willing to go to any length,” said a report last year by the National Insurance Crime Bureau, an association of insurance and transportation companies. “Thieves have removed wiring from traffic and railway signals and even posed as utility workers in order to remove large sections of thick utility cable from sewers beneath city streets.”

Economic stress in many corners of rural America is compounding the effect of the crime wave. At least half a dozen dairies in Colorado declared bankruptcy last year.

Mr. Tucker said that his 350-cow operation was treading water financially. The metal loss, about $8,000, including new circuit breakers needed to bring the farm up to code, would not help. Insurance covers about two-thirds of the cost, he said.

Providing yet another twist of the knife, commodity prices for metal have gone up as prices that farmers get for their products, notably wholesale milk, have declined. One line on the graph made farmers more attractive as targets; the other compounds the damage of their losses. Copper prices hit highs this spring not seen since the summer of 2008, before the worst of the recession.

Scrap metal dealers are feeling the heat as well, in preventing thefts on their own property — some have recently hired 24-hour guards — and in protecting themselves from legal trouble for buying stolen property. One big problem is that metal in hunks or coils or machinery in pieces is generic and hard to track.

But the police often have no better luck with farm or industrial machinery that is not broken up. A report last fall by the National Equipment Register, a company that works with insurers, and the National Crime Insurance Bureau said that only 21 percent of the heavy equipment stolen in 2008 was ever recovered.

Sometimes, old-fashioned body language can still be a crime-fighting tool. “If somebody looks suspicious, we will ask questions,” said Mike Rosen, the president of Atlas Metal and Iron, a family-owned company in Denver. “ ‘If we're going to buy this,' we'll say, ‘we're going to take an ID and take a picture of the ID.' Some people change their minds and go away after that.”

And there are indications, anecdotally, of new patterns. A wave of metal theft here in Colorado — about 20 crimes this year all clustered near Pierce, about 60 miles north of Denver — appears to have waned in the last few weeks.

“We don't really have an explanation,” said Undersheriff Margie Martinez of the Weld County Sheriff's Office. “We have asked farmers to be more cognizant. That could be part of it.”

Or perhaps, other local law enforcement officials said, the thieves have simply moved on. Last week in Harvey County, Kan., for example, about 400 miles east of here, $2,000 worth of liquid oxygen metal-cutting torches were stolen from a company that restores and salvages tractor-trailer rigs.

Inspector Sauerwein, who is working on the case, said he thought the torches were stolen not for the metal they are made of, but for use by a criminal gang. Armed with such tools, he said, a skilled team could disembowel to untraceable bits almost any piece of equipment in hours.

“If we start having bigger or more metal thefts, then they're probably using the torches,” he said.

Mr. Tucker, for one, is not waiting around for a second hit. His new power lines were buried underground.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16farms.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Free Kentucky's Forgotten 44

Most people in Kentucky are unaware that “seducing or enticing slaves to leave their lawful owners” was once such a grievous crime that scores of abolitionists suffered long years behind bars for their common-sense daring. One of them was forgotten in his cell until five years beyond the end of slavery and the Civil War. Others emerged to tell of bleeding under the warder's lash in a “jaws of hell” torment delivered by the state as the appropriate penalty for urging blacks to find freedom.

Modern Kentucky is blessed that some citizens — including an archivist and a public defender — are roiled enough to be campaigning for a just postscript to that horrendous era: an official pardon for 44 abolitionists long dead and gone. The campaign is a welcome contrast to thoughtless proclamations that embarrass Old South statehouses with salutes to a Confederate history often omitting the towering facts of slavery.

“To be totally forgotten — where nobody today even remembers their names — it seems an incredible injustice,” James Prichard, a retired state archivist, told The Lexington Herald-Leader about his research on the 44, 24 of them whites. Mr. Prichard's work inspired Rodney Barnes, the public defender in Frankfort, and Jared Schultze, a Kentucky-born college intern determined to set his state's history right.

Distracted though he is by current criminality, Mr. Barnes presses for the pardons as time-defying challenges for the halls of justice. “These people are heroes — they did the right thing,” said Mr. Barnes, laboring for this chance for Kentucky to stand tall. The office of Gov. Steve Beshear admits to being “intrigued” and is reviewing the pardon request.

Cold cases from slavery days truly come alive in the details Mr. Prichard has gathered. Tales of Tom Johnson, “a free man of color” who fell in love with Amanda, the property of F. B. Merriman of Marion County. The freed slave was imprisoned for wooing Amanda into elopement. And the black matriarch Julett Miles, who doubled back from freedom in Ohio when she heard her enslaved family was up for resale in Kentucky. She did three years for the crime of “stealing” some of her own children. She was buried with her history, until now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/opinion/16sun4.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From Fox News

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Toy Gun Sold in U.S. Can Easily be Converted to the Real Thing

Felons, illegal immigrants and all others banned from buying a gun in the United States have a new alternative if they're looking to get their hands on a firearm: Just buy a toy.

A FoxNews.com investigation reveals that a popular recreational pellet gun can be converted easily to a real semi-automatic weapon. And while the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is already aware of the issue, these “toys” -- new, top-of-the-line airsoft rifles -- continue to be sold throughout the country.

Like paintball without the paint, the propane-powered airsoft guns are designed to shoot quarter-inch plastic pellets and are generally used for recreation or in military and law enforcement training.

When the ATF seized a shipment of 30 of these guns in October from a port in Tacoma, Wash., it said they could be “readily convertible” to machine guns. But gun experts called that claim absurd and said the ATF was overstepping its bounds.

Now one of those critics is reversing his position, saying at least one airsoft manufacturer has taken the quest to be authentic a little too far.

“The airsoft can be converted to an AR-15,” firearms manufacturer Leo Gonnuscio told FoxNews.com after testing the make and model of airsoft guns seized by the ATF.

Having concluded that several other airsoft guns could not be converted to fire real ammunition, Gonnuscio said he was surprised to find that he was able to to transform this particular gun to the real thing  -- and with “minimal work,” because its bottom half, or “receiver,” is so similar to an AR-15's.

To make the airsoft receiver function just like an AR-15's, Gonnuscio said, “All you have to do is drill one hole.” 

And once that's out of the way, the rest is even easier. The AR-15 receiver is the only part of the semi-automatic rifle that is given a serial number, and is the only part that is regulated. All the remaining parts of the real thing can be purchased by anyone – any kid, criminal or terrorist.

The cost of buying the Taiwan-made airsoft gun and all the parts needed to convert it to an AR-15 comes to roughly $1,100 -- more than the cost of some real AR-15s. But someone who can't clear a background check or has been refused a gun for any other reason could use this method to make his own lethal weapon, Gonnuscio said.

Making it into a machine gun, he said, would require yet another conversion, and the makeshift gun would likely be able to fire only 15-20 rounds before it stopped working due to the pressure it would have to withstand while firing in an automatic fashion.

But as semi-automatic weapon, Gonnuscio said, “It may not last forever, but they've got a gun to get the job done that they were assigned to do, and nobody knows the wiser.”

The ATF has made no reported moves to regulate or seize any more of the airsoft guns, which continue to be sold in stores around the country, and it appears to be bowing to critics and reconsidering its stance on the guns' convertibility.

“We're having to take a serious look at this, so it's just something that we're reviewing, and I'm hoping we'll have some information that we can make available to the public certainly very soon,” ATF spokesman Drew Wade told FoxNews.com.

But firearms expert Len Savage said the ATF is taking a “serious look” at the wrong issue -- or, more specifically, the wrong part of the gun.

The reason it's possible to make these airsoft receivers function as real receivers is that all an AR-15 receiver does is hold the gun together, Savage said. So with enough gun knowledge, almost anything can be made into a receiver.

“There's a line of AR-15 firearms out there where the lower (the receiver) is made entirely of injection molded plastic … It could be made of cardboard and scotch tape,” he said.

The most important part of an AR-15, and the most difficult part to replicate, he said, is the upper half of the gun -- which is unmarked, unregulated and readily available for purchase.

"The ATF is regulating the wrong part as a firearm receiver, not the part that goes bang," Savage said.

“The upper is what contains the barrel, the breech or bolt, that's what contains all the pressure,” he added.

The reason the lower half of the AR-15 is the part with the serial number, and thus classified as the receiver, is that when the gun was created it was up to the manufacturer to choose the location of the gun's serial number, he said. Because the bottom of the gun has a flat surface, it was the easiest to mark.

And though federal law has since defined a gun's receiver as the part “which provides housing for the hammer, bolt, breechblock and firing mechanism,” Savage says the bureau has continued to mark and regulate the lower part of the AR-15 to avoid confusion.

“In the stream of commerce, you'd have uppers that were marked and regulated and then lowers that were marked and regulated, you could see the confusion on a dealer basis” in determining which parts require licensing and which don't, Savage said.

But even though the upper half of the gun can be bought by anyone, Gonnuscio still says that banning the airsoft receivers and implementing a few new rules for airsoft manufacturers could be a good start to keeping unregulated AR-15s off the street.

“I would hope that the ATF applies pressure to the manufacturers of these airsoft guns to redesign them so they cannot be converted," he said. "Make them move the pin holes ... so that an upper can't be attached to it without major machining. 

"Fill in some of that gap so that they would literally have to chuck this thing up in a mill and totally reconfigure it to work. Tighten up the magazine well so a regular magazine won't fit in it.”

And because the U.S. is such a big market for these airsoft guns, Gonnuscio said, a foreign manufacture would change the product if its current design were banned here.

“There are tons of good uses for these guns: We use them for training, kids do reenacting with them, kids get out there and play just like the old days. We played BB gun wars when we were kids and we survived. These are little plastic balls that are shot by electricity or propane.

"So let them have their toys. Just make sure they're still toys.”

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/05/06/exclusive-toy-gun-sold-easily-turned-real-thing/print

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Outrage at secret probe into 47,000 innocent flyers

By Jason Lewis

May 16, 2010

Police secretly investigated the travel habits, family, friends and backgrounds of 47,000 innocent people last year after they bought plane tickets to fly into and out of Britain.

The intrusiveness has provoked fury among civil liberties campaigners and now may be stopped by Britain's new coalition Government.

The flyers were singled out by the ‘terrorist detector' database, introduced by Labour, monitoring millions of British tourists and other travellers.

Checks included scrutiny of the police national computer, financial records and analysis of ‘known associates' before people were cleared for travel.

Police secretly investigated the travel habits of 47,000 innocent people last year

Yet it is understood the £1.2billion system has never led to the arrest of a terrorist – and police now use it to target ‘sex offenders and football hooligans'.

Police have also used it to produce 14,000 intelligence reports on travellers for ‘future use'. They can be shared by security services worldwide.

‘Suspect' requests likely to lead to innocent holidaymakers receiving ‘red flags' as potential terrorists include ordering a vegetarian meal, asking for an over-wing seat and travelling with a foreign-born husband or wife.

The system will also ‘red flag' anyone buying a one-way ticket and making a last-minute reservation and those with a history of booking tickets and not showing up for flights.

A history of travel to the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iran will also trigger an alarm. The new figures, produced by the Association of Chief Police Officers, cover the ten months to this February.

Police arrested 2,000 people – out of a total of 48,682 investigated – after they were flagged up by the computer system.

It is tied into airlines' ticketing networks and makes judgments about travel habits and friends and family to decide if passengers are a security risk.

All information passengers give to travel agents, including home address, phone numbers, email address, passport details and the names of family members, is shared with an unknown number of Government agencies for ‘analysis' and stored for up to ten years.

The Home Office claims the system has led to arrests of murderers and rapists – and to 1,000 people being denied entry to Britain.

But it refused to say if any terrorists had been caught by the system, despite it being a counter-terrorist measure.

Even as the ‘profiling' system went live, its reliability was being called into question. An internal Home Office document revealed that during testing one ‘potential suspect' turned out to be an airline passenger with a spinal injury flying into Britain with his nurse.

Last night a police source said the e-borders system was proving an invaluable tool to covertly track terrorists and their associates and had also led to large numbers of serious criminals being brought to justice.

The highly-placed source acknowledged that because travel data was being examined on an ‘industrial scale', ‘mistakes were made' but said the system was designed to minimise intrusion into innocent lives.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1278782/Outrage-secret-probe-47-000-innocent-flyers.html?printingPage=true

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From MSNBC

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New terror monitors: parking attendants

LAS VEGAS - Parking attendants and meter maids could be the nation's latest line of defense against terrorist attacks.

A new government program aims to train thousands of parking industry employees nationwide to watch for and report anything suspicious — abandoned cars, for example, or people hanging around garages, taking photographs or asking unusual questions.

Organizers say parking attendants and enforcement officers are as important to thwarting attacks as the two Times Square street vendors who alerted police to a smoking SUV that was found to contain a gasoline-and-propane bomb.

"We can no longer afford as a nation to say, 'It doesn't impact me or my family, so therefore I'm not getting involved,'" Bill Arrington of the Transportation Security Administration told parking industry professionals at a convention this week in Las Vegas. "We're saying, 'Please, sir, get involved.'"

The program has been in the works for about a year and gave its first presentation at the convention, attended by hundreds of people who run parking operations for cities, universities, stadiums and other places around the country.

Funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and administered by TSA, the program teaches parking lot operators to watch for odd activities that could precede an attack by days or months: strange odors such as diesel from gasoline vehicles, cars parked where they shouldn't be, people who seem to be conducting surveillance by taking photos or drawing sketches.

Would-be terrorists may attempt to gain access to sensitive places or materials by applying for jobs or asking employees strange questions, said Jeff Beatty, a former FBI and CIA agent who led the training in Las Vegas.

Post-9/11

The program is part of a larger effort by the government since 9/11 to enlist ordinary people — airline passengers, subway riders, bus drivers, truckers, doormen, building superintendents — to serve as the eyes and ears of law enforcement.

Beatty said the idea is not to turn ordinary people into government agents. "You're not going to be Jack Bauer. You're not going to be James Bond," he said. But he said terror attacks like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people often are preceded by warning signs.

For example, Timothy McVeigh parked a getaway car in an alley near the Oklahoma City federal building with a note asking that it not be towed. He practiced walking from where he would park the truck to his car to time how long it would take to escape.

Similarly, in the attempted Times Square bombing, the SUV was parked illegally on the street, its engine running.

Garages nationwide stepped up security after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, in which terrorists parked an explosives-laden truck in an underground garage. Six people were killed and hundreds injured.

On the lookout

Many parking lot managers across the nation are already keenly aware of the threat and train their employees on what to watch for.

In New York, Jose Vega, manager of a Central Parking System garage near Times Square, said the police come by once a year to brief the employees.

"They tell us to look for abandoned cars," Vega said.

Tom Lozich, executive director of corporate security for MGM Mirage, which owns all or part of 11 casino-resorts on the Las Vegas Strip, said all new hires, including parking valets, housekeepers and casino cashiers, are trained to watch for signs of terrorism.

City employees who write parking tickets and operate lots in Boulder, Colo., will go through the antiterror training. Molly Winter, the city's parking services director, said: "A lot of this is just developing a sense of personal responsibility about things that just don't seem right."

But some parking lot attendants say they are not the best people to identify suspicious activity.

Nancy Montanez, an attendant in a Miami parking garage, said she spends most of her time scanning tickets, running credit cards and printing receipts.

"It's a good idea, but it would be kind of difficult because when the cars come here, they're not here for really long," she said. "They're here maybe not even a minute during the period of time that I charge them and they exit."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37154988/ns/us_news-security/print/1/displaymode/1098/

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U.S. struggles to ward off evolving cyber threat

WASHINGTON - The United States is losing enough data in cyber attacks to fill the Library of Congress many times over, and authorities have failed to stay ahead of the threat, a U.S. defense official said on Wednesday.

In a sobering assessment, the Defense Department's Jim Miller said more than 100 foreign spy agencies were working to gain access to U.S. computer systems, as were criminal organizations.

Terrorist groups also had cyber attack capabilities.

"Our systems are probed thousands of times a day and scanned millions of times a day," said Miller, principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy.

He said the evolving cyber threat had "outpaced our ability to defend against it."

"We are experiencing damaging penetrations -- damaging in the sense of loss of information. And we don't fully understand our vulnerabilities," he said.

His comments came as the Obama administration develops a national strategy to secure U.S. digital networks and the Pentagon stands up a new military command for cyber warfare capable of both offensive and defensive operations.

The Senate last week confirmed National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander to lead the "Cyber Command," and Miller suggested the organization had its work cut out for it.

Among its challenges are determining what within the spectrum of cyber attacks could constitute an act of war.

Miller said the U.S. government also needed to bolster ties with private industry, given potential vulnerabilities to critical U.S. infrastructure, like power grids and financial markets.

Staggering losses

Hackers have already penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and have stolen intellectual property, corporate secrets and money, according to the FBI's cybercrime unit. In one incident, a bank lost $10 million in cash in a day.

"The scale of compromise, including the loss of sensitive and unclassified data, is staggering," Miller said. "We're talking about terabytes of data, equivalent to multiple libraries of Congress."

The Library of Congress is the world's largest library, archiving millions of books, photographs, maps and recordings.

U.S. officials have previously said many attempts to penetrate its networks appear to come from China.

Google announced in January that it, along with more than 20 other companies, had suffered hacking attacks that were traced to China. Google cited those attacks and censorship concerns in its decision to move its Chinese-language search service from mainland China to Hong Kong.

Preparing for the worst

Miller took an example from the Cold War playbook to explain how the United States military would need to prepare for fallout from a cyber attack, which could leave cities in the dark or disrupt communications.

In the 1980s, the Pentagon concluded that the military needed to prepare to operate in an environment contaminated by the use of weapons of mass destruction.

"We have similar situation in this case. We need to plan to operate in an environment in which our networks have been penetrated and there is some degradation," he said.

One of the challenges Miller singled out was the development of enough U.S. computer programmers in the future.

"In the next 20 to 30 years, other countries including China and India will produce many more computer scientists than we will," he said. "We need to figure out how to not only recognize these trends but take advantage of them."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37115813/ns/technology_and_science-security/print/1/displaymode/1098/

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