On this Memorial Day, a father's pain and pride

The week has been especially difficult for Steven Xiarhos, whose son died last year in Afghanistan. But he wants to remind others: 'Never forget that people have died for you and for that flag.'

By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times

May 31, 2010

When his son deployed to Afghanistan in May 2009 from Camp Lejeune, N.C., Steven Xiarhos had a bad feeling. He didn't sense the same excitement from the Marines that he did when they left for Iraq.

"They were going into hell, and they knew it," Xiarhos said. "You could see it in their faces."

But when his son reached Afghanistan, he let his family know he was assigned to travel in the so-called MRAP, the sturdiest of Marine vehicles, built to withstand the roadside bombs that are the enemy's weapon of choice.

Then on July 23 came the awful news: Cpl. Nicholas Xiarhos, 21, had died of injuries from an improvised explosive device that had detonated beneath his Humvee.

There had been a reassignment of vehicles, and the MRAP had been needed elsewhere in the convoy.

The Marine driving the Humvee was killed instantly. The gunner's leg was blown off, a Navy corpsman was injured. Xiarhos, initially trapped inside the wreckage, was airlifted to a field hospital.

"He fought on and fought on and fought on and never gave up," his father said. "But three hours later he was gone."

The week leading to this first Memorial Day since his son's death was difficult for Steven Xiarhos and his family. Memories of that premonition at Camp Lejeune are mixed with torturous speculation about what would have happened if the vehicles had not been switched.

But those things will not be uppermost in Xiarhos' mind Monday as he addresses a Memorial Day gathering in Yarmouth, Mass., where he is a police lieutenant.

"I want to remind people that when they see a veteran, they should go shake his hand or buy him a cup of coffee," Xiarhos said. "And when the national anthem is played at the ballgame, stand up and put your hand on your heart: Never forget that people have died for you and for that flag."

The months since Nicholas Xiarhos' death have been a blur for the family: an emotional memorial service for 13 Marines killed during the deployment, a chance meeting in Boston with a surgeon who was at the field hospital when Xiarhos was rushed in, a private meeting with President Obama.

"We have no anger against anyone or any thing," said Steven Xiarhos, his voice breaking slightly. "Just sadness and pride."

Nicholas Xiarhos had served in Iraq with the 1st Battalion, 9th Regiment, and narrowly missed being killed in 2008 when a suicide truck laden with explosives tried to crash into the Marine compound in Ramadi.

Two Marines standing post refused to budge and let loose a blast of gunfire. Both were killed in the explosion when the driver loosened his grip on the "dead man's switch." Dozens of Marines and Iraqi soldiers were saved.

The heroic example of Marines protecting other Marines was not lost on Xiarhos. When he returned home and learned a buddy in another unit was deploying to Afghanistan, he applied for a transfer.

After weeks of persistence, Xiarhos was granted his transfer to the 2nd Battalion, 8th Regiment headed for Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold. Other Marines had requested a similar transfer but had been rejected.

"Nick felt he had really lucked out," his father said.

His first weeks in Afghanistan were upbeat. His father recalled, "He told his mother, 'Don't worry, Mom. I'm living the dream.' "

That motto is now on his gravestone.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-marine-memorial-20100531,0,2312272,print.story

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EDITORIAL

Verses for the fallen

To express our gratitude, we offer words from poets Siegfried Sassoon and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

May 31, 2010

On Memorial Day, we honor those who have died in defense of the nation. To express our gratitude, we offer these words from poets Siegfried Sassoon, who wrote from the trenches in World War I, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose famous ode to patriots of the American Revolution has become a staple of this holiday.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-memorial-20100531,0,3280469,print.story

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Mexico-bound flight diverted to Montreal after U.S. denies airspace access

A man with an outstanding warrant is removed from the flight and arrested in Canada, officials say. He is not identified.

The Associated Press

May 31, 2010

WASHINGTON

An Aeromexico flight from Paris to Mexico City was diverted to Montreal on Sunday when the U.S. denied the flight access to its airspace after a man named in an outstanding warrant was reported aboard, an official said.

The man, whose name officials did not release, was removed from the plane at Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport and arrested, said Lauren Gaches, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration.

Other passengers on Aeromexico Flight 006 from Charles De Gaulle Airport to Mexico City International Airport were re-screened and allowed to re-board the flight, Gaches said.

As a matter of policy, the TSA does not confirm or deny whether a person appears on a government watch list.

"The United States' ability to refuse entry into its territory of any flight it deems to present a threat to its security is recognized by numerous countries and is consistent with international agreements," Gaches said.

Montreal airport official Marie-Claude Desgagnes said the plane was allowed to take off shortly after 10 p.m. EDT. It was expected to arrive in Mexico City about 3:30 a.m. EDT.

TSA referred questions to Aeromexico and Canadian authorities.

A spokesman for Canada Border Services, Dominque McNeely, said there was not an incident on the aircraft and that law-enforcement officials boarded the plane around 2:30 p.m. and took the suspect into custody.

"The flight landed and we had excellent cooperation with everyone involved," he said.

McNeely said the man was being detained in Montreal and a detention hearing would be held within the next 48 hours.

A Royal Canadian Mounted Police official said officers assisted Canada Border Services but declined to provide further details.

In Mexico City, a woman who answered the phone at Aeromexico late Sunday said no one was available to talk to the news media.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-naw-flight-diverted-20100531,0,1249902,print.story

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LOS ANGELES TIMES / USC POLL

Californians split on Arizona's illegal immigration crackdown

Of the voters surveyed, 50% support Arizona's law and 43% oppose it; there were sharp divides along lines of ethnicity and age. And since the BP spill, support for new oil drilling has diminished.

By Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times

May 31, 2010

California voters are closely divided over the crackdown on illegal immigration in Arizona, with sharp splits along lines of ethnicity and age, according to a new Los Angeles Times/USC poll.

Overall, 50% of registered voters surveyed said they support the law, which compels police to check the immigration status of those they suspect are in the country illegally, while 43% oppose it. That level of support is lower than polls have indicated nationwide.

But attitudes among the state's voters are not uniform. Strong majorities of white voters and those over 50 support the Arizona law, while Latinos and those under 30 are heavily opposed.

Arizona's adoption of the law in April stirred passions and protests across the nation, with cities including Los Angeles voting to boycott the state. The matter has turned into a pressure point in electoral battles, including the Republican gubernatorial primary in California. But the poll shows that most voters, even those with ardent feelings about the measure, said they were unlikely to reject candidates based solely on their immigration stances.

Those who oppose the law were more likely to say they would only support a candidate who agreed with them on that issue, with 1 in 3 making the Arizona law a litmus test for their vote. Supporters of the Arizona law were more likely to say they were voting on other issues.

Gina Bonecutter, 39, a Republican and fervent supporter of the Arizona measure, said she was frustrated by what she sees as unwillingness by recent immigrants to acclimate to American culture. The Laguna Hills mother and part-time educational therapist said large numbers of illegal immigrants are hurting public schools, one of the reasons she placed her four children in private school.

"What I'm seeing today is immigrants coming here, wanting us to become like Mexico, instead of wanting to become American," she said. "That's never going to work."

But in the GOP primary, Bonecutter is supporting Meg Whitman, who opposes the Arizona law, instead of Steve Poizner, who supports it. Poizner has made his support of the law a defining issue in the race, but among his supporters only 9% said they chose the candidate because of his immigration stance.

With the state's finances in dire straits, Bonecutter said Whitman's business background is more important.

On the other side of the issue, Daisy Vidal, 23, of Banning said Arizona's law will lead to racial profiling and she would never vote for a politician who supported it. A registered Democrat, Vidal is a first-generation American, born after her family immigrated to the United States legally in the mid-1980s.

"There should be some type of pathway to citizenship," said the Cal State San Bernardino student. "This whole country was started by immigrants."

The survey of 1,506 registered voters was conducted between May 19 and 26 for The Times and the University of Southern California College of Letters, Arts and Sciences by the Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republican firm  American Viewpoint . The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 2.6 percentage points for the overall sample and slightly larger for smaller breakdowns.

The survey also showed a notable shift in how California voters view offshore oil drilling. The BP oil spill that has sent millions of gallons of crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico dominated headlines during the polling period, and voters by a 48%-to-41% ratio said they opposed new drilling off the coast.

That marks a reversal from recent years, when California voters reeling from rising gasoline prices had favored new drilling. The opposition marks a return to Californians' long-standing position, which dates back to the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill that etched images of dead birds and fouled beaches into residents' collective memories.

Bernard West, 74, a registered Republican, said the catastrophe in the Gulf, where the government and BP have been unable to stop the deep-water oil spill for more than a month, shows what's at stake.

"If we had a similar situation here, it would be devastating," said the retired accountant from Petaluma, north of San Francisco.

Geography played a role in voters' attitudes toward drilling. A majority of those who, like West, live in counties near the coast opposed new drilling, while 52% of those who live in inland counties supported it.

David Russell, a registered Democrat from West Point, about 60 miles east of Sacramento, said increasing domestic oil production is vital to the nation's security.

"The less that we buy oil from foreign countries and depend upon them, the better off we are," said the 64-year-old retired engineer.

One subject that voters overwhelmingly agreed upon, across party, race, age and geography, was their support for the open-primary measure on the June ballot. If Proposition 14 is approved, candidates from all parties would run during a primary open to all registered voters, and the top two vote-getters would battle it out in the general election.

A similar measure was approved by the state's voters several years ago but was struck down in court. This time, the measure has been tailored to meet legal objections. The state's major political parties are against the measure, but unlike previous times the idea has been up for a vote, they have not spent significant funds opposing it.

About 52% of voters support the measure, while 28% oppose it. Support is particularly high among voters who declined to align with a political party, such as Cheryl Santos, a 47-year-old market researcher from Los Altos in Santa Clara County.

The current system results in extremists winning party nominations and leads to a "paralyzing" partisanship in Sacramento, Santos said. That partisanship has led to the state's inability to deal with its fiscal crises, she added.

"Both sides are just digging in. No one compromises on anything anymore," she said. "It will help make the candidates more moderate."

Those who oppose Proposition 14 note that the current primary system ensures that each party is represented in the general election. If Proposition 14 passes, the Democrats' voting edge in California would mean that other parties will lose their voice, said Roberta Houston of San Diego.

"We'd have two Democrats running against each other," said the 70-year-old Republican and retired teacher. "It's absolutely ridiculous."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/immigration/la-me-0531-poll-20100531,0,2292652,print.story

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WASHINGTON — Our family next week is going to watch the debut of the Washington Nationals' new pitching sensation, Stephen Strasburg. However he does, there is one certainty: At the end of the third inning, a capacity crowd will rise and cheer the veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq in attendance.

Forty years ago, during Vietnam, veterans would have been booed.

As Americans commemorate Memorial Day, the culture has come a long way in celebrating the warriors, whatever one thinks of the war. Veterans returning from Vietnam were called baby killers and war criminals; Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, remembers feeling uneasy wearing his uniform in public.

Today, veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq are celebrated at sporting events, in Memorial Day parades and by politicians of all persuasions. The Department of Veterans Affairs' budget has doubled in the past eight years, and is up almost a third from three years ago.

Top officials from the administration of President Barack Obama — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Admiral Mullen and Eric K. Shinseki, the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs — win plaudits from the veterans' community. This wasn't the case with several of their predecessors.

Yet problems, big problems, persist. With the volunteer military there often seems to be a disconnect between veterans, as well active personnel, and much of the rest of society. This is in stark contrast to the post-World War II era, when veterans formed the core of most communities.

“It's better than Vietnam, but we still face a disconnect. There is too much apathy,” says Paul Rieckhoff, the executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, who served as a platoon leader in Iraq. “On Memorial Day, most Americans go to the mall or the beach. We go to the cemetery.”

The Obama administration, he says, is pretty good on veterans' policies while lacking, especially at the presidential level, passion and more commitment. “There should be a national call for action,” he declares, addressing concerns ranging from jobs to homelessness to mental health.

There are substantive issues. The unemployment rate among veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq is more than 13 percent. There are more than 100,000 homeless veterans, and women face special challenges. There are humongous mental-health deficiencies; the Pentagon estimates that about 20 percent of those who have served in these wars will suffer from mental health issues.

And the Department of Veterans Affairs is too bureaucratic. Currently, there are more than a half-million disability claims with the department; more than one-third have been pending more than four months. “The average veteran walking into the V.A. does not see much change,” Mr. Rieckhoff said.

He said that Mr. Shinseki, who he believes is genuinely committed to changing the culture of the department, “has to put more points on the board.” Mr. Shinseki was an enlightened choice for Mr. Obama. He lost part of his leg fighting in Vietnam and rose to the rank of four-star general. As army chief of staff in 2002, he told Congress that several hundred thousand troops were necessary for a successful mission to topple Saddam Hussein. That infuriated the defense secretary under President George W. Bush, Donald H. Rumsfeld, who ignored him — causing great damage to the country and the armed forces — and then tried to humiliate him.

Mr. Shinseki is a genuine hero, especially to much of the veterans' community. “Eric Shinseki is a soldier's soldier and a veterans' veteran,” said Representative Chet Edwards, a Texas Democrat and the chairman of the Veterans Affairs appropriations subcommittee. “His heart and soul is with the care of troops.”

The availability of more resources, a process that began before this administration, has made a difference. Over the past three years, the department has added 3,384 doctors, 14,426 nurses and 145 community-based outpatient clinics. The clinics are particularly important to the many veterans who live in rural areas without a nearby V.A. hospital.

For almost 30 years, veterans who had to drive long distances were only reimbursed 11 cents a mile. Mr. Edwards led the effort several years ago to boost that to 41 cents a mile. For some veterans, that extra $30 for a 100-mile roundtrip made the difference between getting necessary treatment or not.

Also significant was the creation, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, of a new G.I. educational bill, patterned after the post-World War II measure that many believe was a big force in the United States' economic surge. This year, almost half a million veterans will be enrolled in the program.

Yet for whatever progress, glaring gaps and chronic flaws persist. The G.I. education bill doesn't cover vocational and technical training. After World War II, hundreds of thousands, even millions, of veterans went to trade schools, filling the nation's critical labor needs; there is a similar need today.

And there has been little progress on the above-average joblessness for returning veterans. A Senate proposal by Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, and Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, would give employers a $6,000 tax credit for hiring recently discharged veterans. The White House is noncommittal on any veterans-centered jobs measure, though Mr. Shinseki supports the notion, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, a big backer of veterans, has expressed her support for a veterans' jobs summit meeting.

And mental health, long given short shrift by the department, is a serious concern, with the Pentagon estimating that one-fifth of the more than one million veterans will be afflicted. “With the multiple deployments and many types of confrontations, mental health will be the signature wound of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next 50 years,” Mr. Edwards said.

Mr. Shinseki has set a goal of eliminating homelessness among veterans within five years; there are an estimated 107,000 homeless veterans today, down from 131,000 last year. He is taking action to make the agency more sensitive to women, who soon will make up 15 percent of the military; today, there are some veterans' facilities without women's bathrooms. A tougher task will be fulfilling Mr. Shinseki's vow to streamline the department's cumbersome bureaucracy and its inexcusable internal delays and waits for benefits. If he succeeds, the negative perceptions described by Mr. Rieckhoff will start to change, and future Memorial Days will be better for all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/31iht-letter.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Some of the Sept. 11 commission's most glaring warnings about gaps in homeland security continue to be ignored six years after they were hailed as indispensable to the defense against terrorism.

Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chairman and vice chairman of the commission, recently reminded the nation of crucial unfinished business. Perhaps most mind-boggling in these days of relentless communications is the continuing inability of first responders to communicate with each other on common radio frequencies. Police officers and firefighters lost their lives in the attack on New York City precisely because of that.

Congress also has failed to improve its oversight of government intelligence by cutting back on the cacophony of 100-plus committees claiming jurisdiction. The risk that a terrorist might unleash toxic clouds endangering hundreds of thousands of lives is nearly as great today as it was before the 2001 attacks.

Instead of adopting strict, mandatory security measures, Congress, so far, has failed even to renew a list of voluntary precautions due to expire in October.

The House passed a measure in November to renew the law but narrowed the categories of companies required to consider safer technologies and report their status to homeland security officials. A companion measure is in the works by Senator Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, but it has not surfaced on the chamber's priority list as time dwindles. Senate failure to act will roll the issue over to start from scratch in the next Congress.

Some companies, like Clorox, have been exemplary in reducing risks by phasing out chlorine gas with a safer substitute. But most companies have refused to follow. The risks here are too high to ignore. Voluntary compliance is not enough. In addition, the environmental watchdog Greenpeace points out that homeland security safeguards on the nation's 2,400 drinking water and waste-water treatment plants, many of which use chlorine gas, are exempt from the rules.

The threat of attacks on the homeland is real and present. The nation has gotten lucky twice in recent months when attempts to bring down a plane over Detroit and to explode a bomb in Times Square failed. If that luck runs out, the nation is going to be asking why Washington hasn't done more. The White House and Congress should be asking those questions, and addressing these gaps, right now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opinion/31mon2.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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U.S. to Aid South Korea With Naval Defense Plan

WASHINGTON — Surprised by how easily a South Korean warship was sunk by what an international investigation concluded was a North Korean torpedo fired from a midget submarine, senior American officials say they are planning a long-term program to plug major gaps in the South's naval defenses.

They said the sinking revealed that years of spending and training had still left the country vulnerable to surprise attacks.

The discovery of the weaknesses in South Korea caught officials in both countries off guard. As South Korea has rocketed into the ranks of the world's top economies, it has invested billions of dollars to bolster its defenses and to help refine one of the oldest war plans in the Pentagon's library: a joint strategy with the United States to repel and defeat a North Korean invasion.

But the shallow waters where the attack occurred are patrolled only by South Korea's navy, and South Korean officials confirmed in interviews that the sinking of the warship, the Cheonan , which killed 46 sailors, revealed a gap that the American military must help address.

The United States — pledged to defend its ally but stretched thin by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — would be drawn into any conflict. But it has been able to reduce its forces on the Korean Peninsula by relying on South Korea's increased military spending. Senior Pentagon officials stress that firepower sent to the region by warplanes and warships would more than compensate for the drop in American troop levels there in the event of war.

But the attack was evidence, the officials say, of how North Korea has compensated for the fact that it is so bankrupt that it can no longer train its troops or buy the technology needed to fight a conventional war. So it has instead invested heavily in stealthy, hard-to-detect technologies that can inflict significant damage, even if it could not win a sustained conflict.

Building a small arsenal of nuclear weapons is another big element of the Northern strategy — a double-faceted deterrent allowing it to threaten a nuclear attack or to sell the technology or weapons in order to head off retaliation even for an act of war like sinking South Korean ships.

In an interview last week, Adm. Mike Mullen , chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff , said that the joint training exercise with South Korea planned just off the country's coast in the next few weeks represented only the “near-term piece” of a larger strategy to prevent a recurrence of the kind of shock the South experienced as it watched one of its ships sunk without warning. But the longer-range effort will be finding ways to detect, track and counter the miniature submarines, which he called “a very difficult technical, tactical problem.”

“Longer term, it is a skill set that we are going to continue to press on,” Admiral Mullen said. “Clearly, we don't want that to happen again. We don't want to give that option to North Korea in the future. Period. We want to take it away.”

American and South Korean officials declined to describe details of the coming joint exercises, except to say that they would focus on practicing antisubmarine warfare techniques and the interdiction of cargo vessels carrying prohibited nuclear materials and banned weapons.

To counter the unexpected ability of midget submarines to take on full warships, the long-term fix will mean greatly expanding South Korea's antisubmarine network to cover vast stretches of water previously thought to be too shallow to warrant monitoring closely — with sonar and air patrols, for instance. That would include costly investment in new technologies, as well as significant time spent determining new techniques for the South Korean military.

North Korea presents an adversary with a complicated mix of strengths and weaknesses, said senior American officers.

According to a recent strategic assessment by the American military based on the Korean Peninsula, the North has spent its dwindling treasury to build an arsenal able to start armed provocations “with little or no warning.” These attacks would be specifically designed for “affecting economic and political stability in the region” — exactly what happened in the attack on the Cheonan, which the South Korean military and experts from five other countries determined was carried out by a North Korean midget submarine firing a powerful torpedo.

Admiral Mullen and other officials said they believed the Cheonan episode might be just the first of several to come. “North Korea is predictable in one sense: that it is unpredictable in what it is going to do,” he said. “North Korea goes through these cycles. I worry a great deal that this isn't the last thing we are going to see.”

High-ranking South Korean officials acknowledge that the sinking was a shock.

“As the Americans didn't anticipate 9/11, we were not prepared for this attack,” one South Korean military official said. “While we were preoccupied with arming our military with high-tech weapons, we have not prepared ourselves against asymmetrical-weapons attack by the North.”

The South Korean military was well aware that the North had submarines — around 70, according to current estimates. But the focus had been on North Korea's using larger conventional submarines to infiltrate agents or commandos into the South, as it had in the past, not on midget submarines sophisticated enough to sink a major surface warship.

“We believe that this is the beginning of North Korea's asymmetrical military provocations employing conventional weapons,” said the South Korean official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the military's internal analysis. “They will use such provocations to ratchet up pressure on the U.S. and South Korea. The Cheonan sinking is an underwater terrorist attack, and this is the beginning of such attacks.”

Though it is considered unlikely, the threat of a conventional war with North Korea is still an issue, too, officials said.

The American military's most recent “strategic digest” assessing both the strengths of the United States-South Korea alliance and the continuing threat from the North notes that North Korea's military is “outfitted with aging and unsophisticated equipment.”

Even so, 70 percent of North Korea's ground forces — part of the fourth-largest armed force in the world — remain staged within about 60 miles of the demilitarized zone with the South. In that arsenal are 250 long-range artillery systems able to strike the Seoul metropolitan area.

“While qualitatively inferior, resource-constrained and incapable of sustained maneuver, North Korea's military forces retain the capability to inflict lethal, catastrophic destruction,” said the assessment, approved by Gen. Walter L. Sharp, commander of American and United Nations forces in South Korea.

There are about 28,500 American forces in South Korea today, significantly fewer than before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The South Korean military has maintained its armed forces at a consistent number between 600,000 and 700,000, and has steadily modernized based on its economic dynamism.

The North has an active-duty military estimated at 1.2 million, with between five million and seven million in the reserves.

But many are poorly trained, or put to work building housing or seeking out opponents of Kim Jong-il 's government. The best trained, best equipped and best paid of them are North Korea's special operations forces, numbering about 80,000 and described by the American military as “tough, well-trained and profoundly loyal.” Their mission is to infiltrate the South for intelligence gathering and for “asymmetric attacks against a range of critical civilian infrastructure and military targets.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/world/asia/31koreanavy.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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U.S. Presses Pakistan for More Data on Travelers

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is increasing pressure on Pakistan to provide the United States with much broader airline passenger information, a crucial tool that American investigators use to track terrorist travel patterns, but a step that Pakistan has resisted, American officials said Sunday.

Pakistan, like other countries, currently provides the names of airline passengers traveling to the United States. But the administration is pressing for information on Pakistanis who fly to other countries, to feed into databases that can detect patterns used by terrorists, their financiers, logisticians and others who support them, the officials said.

Pakistan has for several years rebuffed this politically unpopular request as an invasion of its citizens' privacy. But the issue is now on a “short list” of sticking points between the two countries — including some classified counterterrorism programs, a long-running dispute over granting visas to American government workers and contractors in Pakistan, and enhanced intelligence sharing — that have intensified since the failed Times Square car bombing on May 1, two senior administration officials said. The two officials and several others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the continuing negotiations.

The United States currently has a range of confidential agreements with countries governing how much information each will share about its citizens traveling on commercial airliners. Many countries share only information about passengers traveling to the United States, while others, including several in the Caribbean, have agreed to share more information about other countries that their residents visit.

In the case of Pakistan, American officials are seeking details like the recent travel histories of airline passengers and how they paid for their tickets.

President Obama has given his top aides a deadline of the next few weeks to resolve the issues with Pakistan, the officials said. That pressure to deliver results has prompted senior officials like Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, and Leon E. Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to warn senior Pakistani leaders of the risks to the country's relationship with the United States if a deadly terrorist attack originated in their country.

Some American aides have told Pakistani officials that the United States might be forced to increase airstrikes in Pakistan in the event of such an attack, though two senior American military officials said there was no special planning under way for such action.

“Terrorists are enemies of both Pakistan and the United States, who need to discuss how to enhance cooperation and that is what we are doing,” Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, said in a text message on Sunday. “Pressuring an ally is not the way forward, and both sides understand that.”

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declined to comment Sunday on any military planning, and said American and Pakistani officials were working closely to hunt Qaeda leaders who are hiding in Pakistan's tribal areas.

“We're very concerned about that part of the world,” Admiral Mullen said on “Fox News Sunday.” “That's where Al Qaeda leadership lives. We know that. And we're working with Pakistan and, quite frankly, with Afghanistan to continue to put pressure on that leadership.”

In their visit to Islamabad two weeks ago, General Jones and Mr. Panetta presented Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari , and other top civilian and military officials with a description of links between the Pakistani Taliban and Faisal Shahzad , the Pakistani-American arrested by the American authorities as the main suspect in the Times Square case, an administration official said.

General Jones and Mr. Panetta thanked the Pakistanis for their cooperation in the investigation, but they also prodded their hosts to take tougher steps against the Taliban and other groups, and to resolve several issues that Pakistan has delayed.

The United States is proposing to open a new consulate in Quetta, in southwestern Pakistan, where the C.I.A. would most likely have a sizable presence.

The White House also wants Pakistan to end a months long dispute over refusing to grant visas to American government workers and contractors in the country.

“In the wake of the failed Times Square terrorist attack and its direct links to extremist groups based in Pakistan, the president instructed General Jones and Director Panetta to go deliver a clear message to Pakistani authorities of the need to step up our counterterrorism cooperation to prevent an attack on the homeland and to address a common terrorist threat,” Michael A. Hammer, a National Security Council spokesman, said in an e-mail message on Sunday.

The airline passenger issue, which General Jones and Mr. Panetta also raised in their meetings, is particularly contentious but has remained largely out of public view. “We are offering to assist the Pakistanis with their border control challenges, including providing them technology and expertise that will allow them to better manage and monitor travel into and out of Pakistan for security purposes,” said a senior administration official.

Analysts at the National Targeting Center in northern Virginia, an arm of United States Customs and Border Protection, could, for example, examine the travel patterns of Pakistanis with known links to militant groups who fly to Persian Gulf countries where donors to Al Qaeda and the Taliban live.

But it would be explosive with Pakistani public opinion for the government to be seen as cooperating with the United States on the identities of Pakistani passengers. A recent poll by a Western embassy in Islamabad showed that only 4 percent of the respondents had a favorable view of the United States, so sharing individual names with the American government would be immensely unpopular.

“We know this is sensitive for the Pakistan government, and we're trying to strike the right balance,” a senior administration official said.

The renewed urgency in the negotiations comes against the backdrop of evidence that both Mr. Shahzad and Najibullah Zazi , a former airport shuttle bus driver arrested last fall as the main suspect in a failed plot to bomb three New York City subway lines, received training in Pakistan's tribal areas.

The talks also come about two months after Mr. Obama approved a new security protocol for people flying to the United States. The intelligence-based security system was created to raise flags about travelers whose names do not appear on no-fly watch lists, but whose travel patterns or personal traits create suspicions. The system is intended to pick up fragments of information — family name, nationality, age or even partial passport number — and match them against intelligence reports to sound alarms before a passenger boards a plane.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/world/asia/31terror.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Child Brides Escape Marriage, but Not Lashes

KABUL, Afghanistan — The two Afghan girls had every reason to expect the law would be on their side when a policeman at a checkpoint stopped the bus they were in. Disguised in boys' clothes, the girls, ages 13 and 14, had been fleeing for two days along rutted roads and over mountain passes to escape their illegal, forced marriages to much older men, and now they had made it to relatively liberal Herat Province.

Instead, the police officer spotted them as girls, ignored their pleas and promptly sent them back to their remote village in Ghor Province. There they were publicly and viciously flogged for daring to run away from their husbands.

Their tormentors, who videotaped the abuse, were not the Taliban , but local mullahs and the former warlord, now a pro-government figure who largely rules the district where the girls live.

Neither girl flinched visibly at the beatings, and afterward both walked away with their heads unbowed. Sympathizers of the victims smuggled out two video recordings of the floggings to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission , which released them on Saturday after unsuccessfully lobbying for government action.

The ordeal of Afghanistan's child brides illustrates an uncomfortable truth. What in most countries would be considered a criminal offense is in many parts of Afghanistan a cultural norm, one which the government has been either unable or unwilling to challenge effectively.

According to a Unicef study , from 2000 to 2008, the brides in 43 percent of Afghan marriages were under 18. Although the Afghan Constitution forbids the marriage of girls under the age of 16, tribal customs often condone marriage once puberty is reached, or even earlier.

Flogging is also illegal.

The case of Khadija Rasoul, 13, and Basgol Sakhi, 14, from the village of Gardan-i-Top, in the Dulina district of Ghor Province, central Afghanistan, was notable for the failure of the authorities to do anything to protect the girls, despite opportunities to do so.

Forced into a so-called marriage exchange, where each girl was given to an elderly man in the other's family, Khadija and Basgol later complained that their husbands beat them when they tried to resist consummating the unions. Dressed as boys, they escaped and got as far as western Herat Province, where their bus was stopped at a checkpoint and they were arrested.

Although Herat has shelters for battered and runaway women and girls, the police instead contacted the former warlord, Fazil Ahad Khan, whom Human Rights Commission workers describe as the self-appointed commander and morals enforcer in his district in Ghor Province, and returned the girls to his custody.

After a kangaroo trial by Mr. Khan and local religious leaders, according to the commission's report on the episode, the girls were sentenced to 40 lashes each and flogged on Jan. 12.

In the video, the mullah, under Mr. Khan's approving eye, administers the punishment with a leather strap, which he appears to wield with as much force as possible, striking each girl in turn on her legs and buttocks with a loud crack each time. Their heavy red winter chadors are pulled over their heads so only their skirts protect them from the blows.

The spectators are mostly armed men wearing camouflage uniforms, and at least three of them openly videotape the floggings. No women are present.

The mullah, whose name is not known, strikes the girls so hard that at one point he appears to have hurt his wrist and hands the strap to another man.

“Hold still,” the mullah admonishes the victims, who stand straight throughout. One of them can be seen in tears when her face is briefly exposed to view, but they remain silent.

When the second girl is flogged, an elderly man fills in for the mullah, but his blows appear less forceful and the mullah soon takes the strap back.

The spectators count the lashes out loud but several times seem to lose count and have to start over, or possibly they cannot count very high.

“Good job, mullah sir,” one of the men says as Mr. Khan leads them in prayer afterward.

“I was shocked when I watched the video,” said Mohammed Munir Khashi, an investigator with the commission. “I thought in the 21st century such a criminal incident could not happen in our country. It's inhuman, anti-Islam and illegal.”

Fawzia Kofi, a prominent female member of Parliament, said the case may be shocking but is far from the only one. “I'm sure there are worse cases we don't even know about,” she said. “Early marriage and forced marriage are the two most common forms of violent behavior against women and girls.”

The Human Rights Commission took the videotapes and the results of its investigation to the governor of Ghor Province, Sayed Iqbal Munib, who formed a commission to investigate it but took no action, saying the district was too insecure to send police there. A coalition of civic groups in the province called for his dismissal over the matter.

Nor has Afghanistan's Interior Ministry replied to demands from the commission to take action in the case, according to the commission's chairwoman, Sima Samar. A spokesman for the ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Forced marriage of Afghan girls is not limited to remote rural areas. In Herat city, a Unicef-financed women's shelter run by an Afghan group, the Voice of Women Organization, shelters as many as 60 girls who have fled child marriages.

A group called Women for Afghan Women runs shelters in the capital, Kabul, as well as in nearby Kapisa Province and in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, all relatively liberal areas as Afghanistan goes, which have taken in 108 escaped child brides just since January, according to Executive Director Manizha Naderi.

Poverty is the motivation for many child marriages, either because a wealthy husband pays a large bride-price, or just because the father of the bride then has one less child to support. “Most of the time they are sold,” Ms. Naderi said. “And most of the time it's a case where the husband is much, much older.”

She said it was also common practice among police officers who apprehend runaway child brides to return them to their families. “Most police don't understand what's in the law, or they're just against it,” she said.

On Saturday, at the Women for Afghan Women shelter, at a secret location in Kabul, there were four fugitive child brides. All had been beaten, and most wept as they recounted their experiences.

Sakhina, a 15-year-old Hazara girl from Bamian, was sold into marriage to pay off her father's debts when she was 12 or 13.

Her husband's family used her as a domestic servant. “Every time they could, they found an excuse to beat me,” she said. “My brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my husband, all of them beat me.”

Sumbol, 17, a Pashtun girl, said she was kidnapped and taken to Jalalabad, then given a choice: marry her tormentor, or become a suicide bomber. “He said, ‘If you don't marry me I will put a bomb on your body and send you to the police station,' ” Sumbol said.

Roshana, a Tajik who is now 18, does not even know why her family gave her in marriage to an older man in Parwan when she was 14. The beatings were bad enough, but finally, she said, her husband tried to feed her rat poison.

In some ways, the two girls from Ghor were among the luckier child brides. After the floggings, the mullah declared them divorced and returned them to their own families.

Two years earlier, in nearby Murhab district, two girls who had been sold into marriage to the same family fled after being abused, according to a report by the Human Rights Commission. But they lost their way, were captured and forcibly returned. Their fathers — one the village mullah — took them up the mountain and killed them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/world/asia/31flogging.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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International Court May Define Aggression as Crime

PARIS — More than 100 nations, contingents of human-rights groups and lawyers from around the globe, will begin a meeting on Monday in Kampala, Uganda, tackling issues that could fundamentally expand the power of international law.

The thorniest question on the agenda, one certain to dominate the conference, is a proposal to give the International Criminal Court in The Hague the power to prosecute the crime of aggression.

If approved, it could open the door to criminal accusations against powerful political and military leaders for attacks the court deems unlawful. Those could range from full-scale invasions to pre-emptive strikes.

The court, the world's first permanent criminal court, already has a mandate to prosecute three groups of grave crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Adding aggression to this list “would be a game-changer in international diplomacy,” said Noah Weisbord, a member of the expert group that has drafted a definition of the crime for the meeting.

Another proposal on the agenda would allow the court to prosecute leaders who use weapons with poison, gases, liquids or bullets that cause unnecessary suffering during domestic conflicts and crowd control by the army or police. These weapons are already forbidden in international conflicts.

Many of the court's 111 member countries have said that they favor adding the crime of aggression to its mandate. They include Germany and numerous small countries that see the change as a form of legal protection. But others, including Britain and France are opposed, arguing that it would overwhelm the court and trap it in political disputes.

The United States, Russian and China, which cannot vote because they have not joined the court and are in Kampala only as observers, are strongly against expanding the court's purview and are expected to work hard behind the scenes to postpone any action on the issue. Several diplomats said that those three countries, which along with France and Britain hold United Nations Security Council veto power, do not want to see a court with powers that could weaken the Council's influence.

The momentum appears to favor adopting some sort of change, but the outcome is far from certain. Adoption would require a majority to agree on a definition of the crime of aggression and the terms under which it could be prosecuted.

Proposals still face many hurdles, with delegates and rights groups lobbying hard on all sides of the issue before the meeting. This is the first conference at which amendments are allowed to the Rome statute that created the court in 1998.

“Many people figure the stakes are very high here from different perspectives,” Richard Dicker, a director of Human Rights Watch , said in a telephone interview from Kampala, where many more delegates and lobbyists than expected had already arrived. “I don't recall such large and high-level attention ever focused on international justice.”

The meeting comes at a time when other temporary tribunals that have dealt with atrocities in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, are winding down. Once they finish their work, the International Criminal Court will be the main permanent authority to deal with large-scale crimes against civilians in cases where national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute.

Leading up to the meeting, supporters and critics have argued on panels and papers that the court, which opened its doors in 2002 and has started only two trials, should focus on becoming more efficient and on the complex tasks before it, rather than risk getting bogged down so soon in the intensely political issue of aggression.

“Just as one nation's terrorist is another nation's freedom fighter, one state's just war is bound to be another state's unjust war,” Mr. Weisbord wrote recently in an article explaining some complexities of defining aggression.

The crime of aggression was originally written into the court's statute, but delegates disagreed on a definition, and the issue was shelved until this conference. Experts who have spent seven years hammering out a draft definition, have purposely left some gray areas to leave room for life-saving operations, like NATO 's intervention in Kosovo.

“The major powers will not agree on a definition of aggression because that would mean taking a clear stand on categories of self-defense, like using force to prevent an attack or even a threat,” said Antonio Cassese, a scholar and judge who has served at two international tribunals. “Recent U.N. documents consider pre-emptive self-defense unlawful, and I agree.”

Harold Koh, the United States State Department legal adviser and a co-chairman of the American delegation in Kampala, told a meeting of international lawyers in Washington this month that “if we accept a definition, we need to fix it,” adding, “it has to take into account the many ways in which force can be lawfully exercised.”

“The British, French, Chinese, Russians all intensely disliked the definition of aggression,” Mr. Koh said, “and they were even more concerned about diluting the power of the Security Council.”

Washington, among others, would insist on having the Security Council decide if aggression took place before any court action. But many delegates want to bypass the Council because, as one delegate, who was not authorized to speak publicly, put it, “giving the Security Council the on-and-off switch would undercut the independence of the court.”

Pacifists are pleading for aggression to be added to the court's list of crimes, even if the definition is not all-encompassing. Benjamin B. Ferencz , a former prosecutor of Nazi crimes in Nuremberg, and a life-long antiwar campaigner, told Mr. Koh at the Washington meeting: “We are already on the verge of a consensus. Don't push your luck, let's not look for trouble, let's go with it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/world/31icc.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Economic Gains

MEMPHIS — For two decades, Tyrone Banks was one of many African-Americans who saw his economic prospects brightening in this Mississippi River city.

A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college.

Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure.

“I'm going to tell you the deal, plain-spoken: I'm a black man from the projects and I clean toilets and mop up for a living,” said Mr. Banks, a trim man who looks at least a decade younger than his 50 years. “I'm proud of what I've accomplished. But my whole life is backfiring.”

Not so long ago, Memphis, a city where a majority of the residents are black, was a symbol of a South where racial history no longer tightly constrained the choices of a rising black working and middle class. Now this city epitomizes something more grim: How rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress.

The median income of black homeowners in Memphis rose steadily until five or six years ago. Now it has receded to a level below that of 1990 — and roughly half that of white Memphis homeowners, according to an analysis conducted by Queens College Sociology Department for The New York Times.

Black middle-class neighborhoods are hollowed out, with prices plummeting and homes standing vacant in places like Orange Mound, White Haven and Cordova. As job losses mount — black unemployment here, mirroring national trends, has risen to 16.9 percent from 9 percent two years ago; it stands at 5.3 percent for whites — many blacks speak of draining savings and retirement accounts in an effort to hold onto their homes. The overall local foreclosure rate is roughly twice the national average.

The repercussions will be long-lasting, in Memphis and nationwide. The most acute economic divide in America remains the steadily widening gap between the wealth of black and white families, according to a recent study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University. For every dollar of wealth owned by a white family, a black or Latino family owns just 16 cents, according to a recent Federal Reserve study.

The Economic Policy Institute 's forthcoming “The State of Working America” analyzed the recession-driven drop in wealth. As of December 2009, median white wealth dipped 34 percent, to $94,600; median black wealth dropped 77 percent, to $2,100. So the chasm widens, and Memphis is left to deal with the consequences.

“This cancer is metastasizing into an economic crisis for the city,” said Mayor A. C. Wharton Jr. in his riverfront office. “It's done more to set us back than anything since the beginning of the civil rights movement.”

The mayor and former bank loan officers point a finger of blame at large national banks — in particular, Wells Fargo . During the last decade, they say, these banks singled out blacks in Memphis to sell them risky high-cost mortgages and consumer loans.

The City of Memphis and Shelby County sued Wells Fargo late last year, asserting that the bank's foreclosure rate in predominantly black neighborhoods was nearly seven times that of the foreclosure rate in predominantly white neighborhoods. Other banks, including Citibank and Countrywide, foreclosed in more equal measure.

In a recent regulatory filing, Wells Fargo hinted that its legal troubles could multiply. “Certain government entities are conducting investigations into the mortgage lending practices of various Wells Fargo affiliated entities, including whether borrowers were steered to more costly mortgage products,” the bank stated.

Wells Fargo officials are not backing down in the face of the legal attacks. They say the bank made more prime loans and has foreclosed on fewer homes than most banks, and that the worst offenders — those banks that handed out bushels of no-money-down, negative-amortization loans — have gone out of business.

“The mistake Memphis officials made is that they picked the lender who was doing the most lending as opposed to the lender who was doing the worst lending,” said Brad Blackwell, executive vice president for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage.

Not every recessionary ill can be heaped upon banks. Some black homeowners contracted the buy-a-big-home fever that infected many Americans and took out ill-advised loans. And unemployment has pitched even homeowners who hold conventional mortgages into foreclosure.

Federal and state officials say that high-cost mortgages leave hard-pressed homeowners especially vulnerable and that statistical patterns are inescapable.

“The more segregated a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeowners will face foreclosure because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities,” Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's civil rights division, told a Congressional committee.

The reversal of economic fortune in Memphis is particularly grievous for a black professional class that has taken root here, a group that includes Mr. Wharton, a lawyer who became mayor in 2009. Demographers forecast that Memphis will soon become the nation's first majority black metropolitan region.

That prospect, noted William Mitchell, a black real estate agent, once augured for a fine future.

“Our home values were up, income up,” he said. He pauses, his frustration palpable. “What we see today, it's a new world. And not a good one.”

Porch View

“You don't want to walk up there! That's the wild, wild west,” a neighbor shouts. “Nothing on that block but foreclosed homes and squatters.”

To roam Soulsville, a neighborhood south of downtown Memphis, is to find a place where bungalows and brick homes stand vacant amid azaleas and dogwoods, where roofs are swaybacked and thieves punch holes through walls to strip the copper piping. The weekly newspaper is swollen with foreclosure notices.

Here and there, homes are burned by arsonists.

Yet just a few years back, Howard Smith felt like a rich man. A 56-year-old African-American engineer with a gray-flecked beard, butter-brown corduroys and red sneakers, he sits with two neighbors on a porch on Richmond Avenue and talks of his miniature real estate empire: He owned a home on this block, another in nearby White Haven and another farther out. His job paid well; a pleasant retirement beckoned.

Then he was laid off. He has sent out 60 applications, obtained a dozen interviews and received no calls back. A bank foreclosed on his biggest house. He will be lucky to get $30,000 for his house here, which was assessed at $80,000 two years ago.

“It all disappeared overnight,” he says.

“Mmm-mm, yes sir, overnight,” says his neighbor, Gwen Ward. In her 50s, she, too, was laid off, from her supervisory job of 15 years, and she moved in with her elderly mother. “It seemed we were headed up and then” — she snaps her fingers — “it all went away.”

Mr. Smith nods. “The banks and Wall Street have taken the middle class and shredded us,” he says.

For the greater part of the last century, racial discrimination crippled black efforts to buy homes and accumulate wealth. During the post-World War II boom years, banks and real estate agents steered blacks to segregated neighborhoods, where home appreciation lagged far behind that of white neighborhoods.

Blacks only recently began to close the home ownership gap with whites, and thus accumulate wealth — progress that now is being erased. In practical terms, this means black families have less money to pay for college tuition, invest in businesses or sustain them through hard times.

“We're wiping out whatever wealth blacks have accumulated — it assures racial economic inequality for the next generation,” said Thomas M. Shapiro, director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.

The African-American renaissance in Memphis was halting. Residential housing patterns remain deeply segregated. While big employers — FedEx and AutoZone — have headquarters here, wage growth is not robust. African-American employment is often serial rather than continuous, and many people lack retirement and health plans.

But the recession presents a crisis of a different magnitude.

Mayor Wharton walks across his office to a picture window and stares at a shimmering Mississippi River. He describes a recent drive through ailing neighborhoods. It is akin, he says, to being a doctor “looking for pulse rates in his patients and finding them near death.”

He adds: “I remember riding my bike as a kid through thriving neighborhoods. Now it's like someone bombed my city.”

Banking on Nothing

Camille Thomas, a 40-year-old African-American, loved working for Wells Fargo. “I felt like I could help people,” she recalled over coffee.

As the subprime market heated up, she said, the bank pressure to move more loans — for autos, for furniture, for houses — edged into mania. “It was all about selling your units and getting your bonus,” she said.

Ms. Thomas and three other Wells Fargo employees have given affidavits for the city's lawsuit against the bank, and their statements about bank practices reinforce one another.

“Your manager would say, ‘Let me see your cold-call list. I want you to concentrate on these ZIP codes,' and you knew those were African-American neighborhoods,” she recalled. “We were told, ‘Oh, they aren't so savvy.' ”

She described tricks of the trade, several of dubious legality. She said supervisors had told employees to white out incomes on loan applications and substitute higher numbers. Agents went “fishing” for customers, mailing live checks to leads. When a homeowner deposited the check, it became a high-interest loan, with a rate of 20 to 29 percent. Then bank agents tried to talk the customer into refinancing, using the house as collateral.

Several state and city regulators have placed Wells Fargo Bank in their cross hairs, and their lawsuits include similar accusations. In Illinois, the state attorney general has accused the bank of marketing high-cost loans to blacks and Latinos while selling lower-cost loans to white borrowers. John P. Relman, the Washington, D.C., lawyer handling the Memphis case, has sued Wells Fargo on behalf of the City of Baltimore, asserting that the bank systematically exploited black borrowers.

A federal judge in Baltimore dismissed that lawsuit, saying it had made overly broad claims about the damage done by Wells Fargo. City lawyers have refiled papers.

“I don't think it's going too far to say that banks are at the core of the disaster here,” said Phyllis G. Betts, director of the Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action at the University of Memphis , which has closely examined bank lending records.

Former employees say Wells Fargo loan officers marketed the most expensive loans to black applicants, even when they should have qualified for prime loans. This practice is known as reverse redlining.

Webb A. Brewer, a Memphis lawyer, recalls poring through piles of loan papers and coming across name after name of blacks with subprime mortgages. “This is money out of their pockets lining the purses of the banks,” he said.

For a $150,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points — the typical spread between a conventional and subprime loan — tacks on $90,000 in interest payments over its 30-year life.

Wells Fargo officials say they rejected the worst subprime products, and they portray their former employees as disgruntled rogues who subverted bank policies.

“They acknowledged that they knowingly worked to defeat our fair lending policies and controls,” said Mr. Blackwell, the bank executive.

Bank officials attribute the surge in black foreclosures in Memphis to the recession. They say that the average credit score in black Census tracts is 108 points lower than in white tracts.

“People who have less are more vulnerable during downturns,” said Andrew L. Sandler of Buckley Sandler, a law firm representing Wells Fargo.

Mr. Relman, the lawyer representing Memphis, is unconvinced. “If a bad economy and poor credit explains it, you'd expect to see other banks with the same ratio of foreclosures in the black community,” he said. “But you don't. Wells is the outlier.”

Whatever the responsibility, individual or corporate, the detritus is plain to see. Within a two-block radius of that porch in Soulsville, Wells Fargo holds mortgages on nearly a dozen foreclosures. That trail of pain extends right out to the suburbs.

Begging to Stay

To turn into Tyrone Banks's subdivision in Hickory Ridge is to find his dream in seeming bloom. Stone lions guard his door, the bushes are trimmed and a freshly waxed sport utility vehicle sits in his driveway.

For years, Mr. Banks was assiduous about paying down his debt: he stayed two months ahead on his mortgage, and he helped pay off his mother's mortgage.

Two years ago, his doorbell rang, and two men from Wells Fargo offered to consolidate his consumer loans into a low-cost mortgage.

“I thought, ‘This is great! ' ” Mr. Banks says. “When you have four kids, college expenses, you look for any savings.”

What those men did not tell Mr. Banks, he says (and Ms. Thomas, who studied his case, confirms), is that his new mortgage had an adjustable rate. When it reset last year, his payment jumped to $1,700 from $1,200.

Months later, he ruptured his Achilles tendon playing basketball, hindering his work as a janitor. And he lost his job at FedEx. Now foreclosure looms.

He is by nature an optimistic man; his smile is rueful.

“Man, I should I have stayed ‘old school' with my finances,” he said. “I sat down my youngest son on the couch and I told him, ‘These are rough times.' ”

Many neighbors are in similar straits. Foreclosure notices flutter like flags on the doors of two nearby homes, and the lawns there are overgrown and mud fills the gutters.

Wells Fargo says it has modified three mortgages for every foreclosure nationwide — although bank officials declined to provide the data for Memphis. A study by the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and six nonprofit groups found that the nation's four largest banks, Wells Fargo, Bank of America , Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase , had cut their prime mortgage refinancing 33 percent in predominantly minority communities, even as prime refinancing in white neighborhoods rose 32 percent from 2006 to 2008.

For Mr. Banks, it is as if he found the door wide open on his way into debt but closed as he tries to get out.

“Some days it feels like everyone I know in Memphis is in trouble,” Mr. Banks says. “We're all just begging to stay in our homes, basically.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/economy/31memphis.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Frank Buckles was 16 when he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917, and is now America's last remaining World War I military veteran.

The Last Doughboy's Final Fight by Richard Rubin 05/30/2010 In 1917, Frank Buckles, 16, fudged his age, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and got himself sent to France so he could be a part of the biggest news story of his young life -- the Great War. Now, at 109, having enjoyed the life of a gentleman farmer in West Virginia for more than half a century, he finds himself famous as America's last living World War I veteran. And he's recently become an activist.  Buckles' cause is the creation of a National World War I Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. As the last living American veteran of that war, he says, "I know that I am a representative of all those who have gone before me. Those veterans, especially those who made the supreme sacrifice, should be remembered."

What Do We Owe Our Veterans?

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