CAMBRIDGE, England — Historians have called it one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in English, and surely one of the greatest ever delivered by an Englishman, at a moment of national peril unparalleled in modern times.

Seventy years ago, on June 18, 1940, Winston Churchill , barely six weeks in office as Britain's prime minister and confronted with the threat of invasion from Nazi-occupied France, rose in the House of Commons and, in 36 minutes of soaring oratory, sought to rally his countrymen with what has gone down in history as his “finest hour” speech .

The speech — ending with the words “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour' ” — has resonated ever since. On both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, it has been hailed as the moment when Britain found the resolve to fight on after the fall of France, and ultimately, in alliance with American and Russian military might, to vanquish the German armies that had overrun most of Europe.

The original 23-page typescript of the speech, heavily edited by Churchill in scrawls of blue and red ink, rests now in one of 2,500 boxes of documents and artifacts, numbering more than a million in all, that cram the carefully guarded upper floors of the Churchill Archives Center of Cambridge University 's Churchill College, founded in 1960, five years before Churchill died.

In recent days, the speech and other related documents, including an admonishing letter about his ill-tempered behavior toward his staff from Churchill's wife, Clementine, and diary entries from the time by his private secretary, John Colville, have been pulled together and put on display for visiting scholars, journalists and others for the insights they offer into how Churchill wrote the speech — intensively redrafting it right up to the minute he rose to deliver it — and into his fractious and quarrelsome state of mind at the time.

The archive's timing relates, principally, to the anniversary of the speech, and to a wider series of commemorations being held across Britain to mark what Churchill, on that spring afternoon in 1940, described to the Commons as a battle that would determine “the survival of Christian civilization.”

Only two weeks before the speech, British naval vessels and a fleet of privately owned fishing and pleasure boats had completed the evacuation of 338,000 British, French and other Commonwealth troops from the risk of annihilation by German forces on the beaches at Dunkirk, a venture that many of the same boats replicated last month.

About a month after the speech, as Churchill foresaw, British fighter aircraft began confronting the German Luftwaffe in what became known as the Battle of Britain, another saga being celebrated this spring and summer with flying displays at airfields across Britain by wartime Spitfires and Hurricanes.

The renewed focus on Churchill's wartime leadership has evoked some contemporary resonance, too, from the fact that Britain is again facing a national crisis, this time with a recession-bound economy and perilous levels of national debt. Once again, the task of rallying the country has fallen to a new prime minister, David Cameron , a Conservative like Churchill and also in office little more than a month — and the head of a coalition that emerged from a parliamentary election, the first coalition government since the national unity government Churchill led from 1940 until his general election defeat in 1945.

That Mr. Cameron could succeed as Churchill did, and lead Britain back to the “broad, sunlit uplands” Churchill held out in his speech as the reward for victory against Hitler , is something many in Britain seem reluctant to believe, perhaps with more reason than the many skeptics who heard Churchill's address in 1940.

Churchill, after all, was already an iconic, if controversial, figure when he took office, and has long since taken his place in history's pantheon. In a poll of more than one million television viewers in 2002, he was voted the greatest Englishman who ever lived (outranking, among the first 10 finishers, Isaac Newton ; Diana, Princess of Wales ; and John Lennon).

What the Churchill College documents reveal, perhaps surprisingly for those accustomed to the confident sweep of Churchill's oratory, is the last-minute reworking that he applied to his speech, adding phrases here, rewriting others and adding yet others on the fly as he delivered the speech.

In the famous last passage of the speech, the phrase he used to describe the world into which Europe and the United States would be plunged if Hitler prevailed — “the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of perverted science” — were amended, perhaps in the last moments before he rose in the Commons, with red-ink handwriting that perfected the alliteration.

Equally intriguing, the final typescript of the speech is set out, at least in the final passage building up to “their finest hour,” in blank verse format, with five-line paragraphs set out in indented type, a form that the Churchill Archives Center's director, Allen Packwood, compared to the Old Testament Book of Psalms, regarded by many literary scholars as one of the seminal influences, with Shakespeare, on Churchill's literary and rhetorical style.

Mr. Packwood offered his own theory for the verse form: “Because it looks like poetry, it gave him, I think, the rhythm that brought life to his oratory. This was a man who raised the art of speechmaking to high literature.”

Another feature of Churchill's speechmaking that emerges from a study of his papers, Mr. Packwood said, was that unlike many contemporary politicians, he wrote his speeches himself. “Although there were people who supplied him with ideas, there were no speechwriters in the modern sense,” Mr. Packwood said. “This speech, like his others, was one man's creation.”

But the prime minister had help from other quarters, in the form of a correspondence with his wife that might have helped rein in the “black dog” moods that often beset him, which worked against the optimism and resolve in his speeches.

“My darling,” she wrote, shortly after the “finest hour” speech was delivered, “I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something I feel you ought to know. One of the men in your entourage, a devoted friend, has been to me and told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough, sarcastic and overbearing manner.” She added, “You will not get the best results by irascibility and rudeness, they will breed either a dislike or a slave mentality.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/world/europe/18churchhill.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Justices Allow Search of Work-Issued Pager

WASHINGTON — A California police department did not violate the constitutional privacy rights of an employee when it audited the text messages on a pager the city had issued him, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Thursday.

The decision represented only a preliminary effort to define public employees' Fourth Amendment rights in the digital era, and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy , writing for the court, took pains to say that it was narrow and closely tied to the facts.

Still, the decision puts government employees on notice that electronic communications on devices provided to them may not be subject to the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches, as long as their employers have “a legitimate work-related purpose” for inspecting the communications.

Justice Kennedy said the court was uncomfortable fashioning comprehensive legal rules, given the pace of technological and cultural change.

“The court must proceed with care when considering the whole concept of privacy expectations in communications made on electronic equipment owned by a government employer,” he wrote in a part of the opinion joined by every member of the court except Justice Antonin Scalia .

“Cellphone and text message communications are so pervasive that some persons may consider them to be essential means or necessary instruments for self-expression, even self-identification,” Justice Kennedy went on. “On the other hand, the ubiquity of those devices has made them generally affordable, so one could counter that employees who need cellphones or similar devices for personal matters can purchase and pay for their own.”

The decision did not address the privacy rights of people employed by private companies.

The case, City of Ontario v. Quon , No. 08-1332, involved a member of the police special-weapons team in Ontario, Calif. The officer, Sgt. Jeff Quon, used a pager issued to him by the Police Department to send and receive messages that were, in the trial judge's words, “to say the least, sexually explicit in nature.”

A city policy on computer, Internet and e-mail use made clear that the city had the right to monitor such communications. The policy allowed “light personal communications” but said “users should have no expectation of privacy or confidentiality.” Sergeant Quon signed a statement agreeing to the policy.

But the policy did not explicitly apply to text messages, and Justice Kennedy suggested that e-mail messages sent through the city's servers might be treated differently from pager messages sent via an outside company.

The Police Department's audit of pager messages, Justice Kennedy wrote, “was not nearly as intrusive as a search of his personal e-mail account or pager, or a wiretap on his home phone line, would have been.”

Sergeant Quon had argued that an informal policy instituted by a police lieutenant overrode the formal one, even if the formal one did apply to pager messages. The lieutenant for a time indicated that the pagers could be used for personal messages so long as the employees responsible paid for charges beyond a 25,000-character limit. The lieutenant eventually changed his mind, and the department's internal affairs divisions audited the messages Sergeant Quon had sent during work hours for two months.

Sergeant Quon and a second officer, and the sergeant's wife and mistress, sued the department, saying their Fourth Amendment rights were violated.

The Supreme Court has said that public employers have wide latitude to search their employees' offices and files. But it has also said that the Fourth Amendment has a role to play in affording the employees some privacy rights.

In Sergeant Quon's case, a jury found that the city had a good work-related reason to audit the messages — to see if the character limit made sense as a business matter. Given that jury finding, the trial judge ruled that the search had not violated the Fourth Amendment.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, reversed the decision, saying that there would have been less intrusive ways to conduct the audit. For instance, it said, Sergeant Quon could have been given notice of the change in the informal policy, or been allowed to audit himself.

Justice Kennedy assumed, without deciding, that Sergeant Quon had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Even so, he said, the city's search was not unduly intrusive.

The city, he wrote, “had a legitimate interest in ensuring that employees were not being forced to pay out of their own pockets for work-related expenses, or on the other hand that the city was not paying for extensive personal communications.”

Justice Kennedy dismissed the Ninth Circuit's proposals for less intrusive ways to conduct an audit as filled with “analytic errors.” The possibility of a less intrusive search, he said, did not make the search that took place unreasonable.

Justice Kennedy emphasized that the ruling as to Sergeant Quon was narrow, even as he explored the implications of it. In his concurrence, Justice Scalia criticized that approach.

“Applying the Fourth Amendment to new technologies may sometimes be difficult, but when it is necessary to decide a case, we have no choice,” Justice Scalia wrote. “The-times-they-are-a-changin' is a feeble excuse for disregard of duty.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/us/18scotus.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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DuPage Struggles to Handle Increased Need for Public Aid

Not far from million-dollar homes in DuPage County, a line of people spills through the doors of a public aid office in Villa Park, now the busiest branch of the Illinois Department of Human Services.

As many as 900 county residents come to the office every day looking for food stamps, emergency financial assistance and vouchers for medical care, said Phyllis Baxter, the site's administrator.

The surge in suburban poverty reflects the economic collapse for people who had been solidly middle class, including former homeowners with college degrees. It also underscores the changing demographics in some older commuter cities, now home to more Spanish-speaking immigrants and working-class families fleeing tough city neighborhoods. The state's second-busiest Human Services office is in Blue Island, just south of Chicago in Cook County.

Requests for help at the DuPage County office have soared by about 60 percent in the past five years, Ms. Baxter said. “They come through those doors,” she said, “and they'll say, ‘I lost my job. I need food. I can't pay my medical bills.' ”

The state, which is some $13 billion in debt, has been unable to increase the size of the office's 81-member staff, which leaves caseworkers scrambling to manage increasing workloads. “The stress level is off the charts,” Ms. Baxter said. “And, remember, plenty of our people have also got somebody in the family who has lost a job.”

Hue Tran has worked as a caseworker in DuPage County for 32 years. She said she had never seen anything like the overwhelming demands of the last two years.

“I just have to work faster,” Ms. Tran said. “The phones are ringing, people are lining up, they're demanding to know why they're not getting benefits.”

Ms. Tran and other social workers said many suburbanites, who were living comfortably not long ago, were upset that they now had to beg for help.

“Sometimes they get angry and then they apologize,” said Ms. Tran, who said she had counseled many people who had started crying. “I just tell them: ‘I understand. It's not your fault.' ”

Other caseworkers say they feel guilty that they cannot spend enough time on clients. Ebony Martin, 32, said that four years ago, when she came to the DuPage County office, she had a caseload of about 900. Today she has more than 2,300 cases.

“I made a color-coded chart that tells me these are the people that I must — absolutely must — get to today,” Ms. Martin said.

Kara Murphy, the executive director of Access DuPage , a nonprofit group that helps uninsured people find health care, said enrollment in the program had jumped 55 percent in the last two years, to about 11,600.

The sharp increase in the need for services has strained the social infrastructure in suburban areas like DuPage County, which for a long time served chiefly as bedroom communities for prosperous commuters and their families. DuPage County, which has nearly one million residents, is the region's second-most-populous county, after Cook. It has the area's highest median household income, more than $73,000, according to a 2007 report by the Heartland Alliance. The unemployment rate has grown to nearly 9 percent in 2010, nearly triple the rate of the early 1990s, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics .

Services for the working poor and the jobless can be scarce in the suburbs. Candace King, executive director of the DuPage Federation on Human Services Reform , said cities provided more programs to address poverty, like health clinics and food pantries . Housing costs tend to be higher in the suburbs, Ms. King said, and it can be difficult to rely on the smaller mass transit system.

“It is far better to be poor in Chicago than poor in DuPage,” she said.

Human Services officials say the 60 percent growth in caseload in DuPage County in five years has far outpaced the statewide increase of about 20 percent.

At a time when the suburbs have an increased need for programs for the poor, Ms. King said the state was so broke it could not afford to offer new services in places like DuPage County. “We're trying desperately to keep the ones that are here alive,” she said.

Ms. King estimated that 15 percent of the county's families earned less than $44,000 but more than the federal poverty level of $22,000. She said it is within that earnings range where aid organizations see families struggle. These people have “too much to get help, but not enough to get by,” she said.

Despite the dearth of social programs in DuPage County, many poor people have been leaving the city for the suburbs, according to demographers like Kenneth Johnson, a former Loyola University sociologist now at the University of New Hampshire . In many cases, parents of small children say they left Chicago to flee gangs.

LaTanya Chase, 28, grew up on the South Side of Chicago, but moved to the Austin neighborhood before settling in Glendale Heights four years ago. Ms. Chase, who works 24 to 30 hours a week at a CVS drugstore, learned quickly that she could not depend on suburban mass transit and would need a car.

But it was still worth moving to the suburbs, she said, because she does not have to worry about her 8-year-old daughter being caught in gang cross-fire while playing in the front yard.

“I'm here because I was looking for a better place for a child to grow up,” said Ms. Chase, who goes to the Villa Park office for food stamps and a health-care voucher. “It's as simple as that.”

The growing racial and ethnic diversity in DuPage County are changing the clichés about white havens for the country-club set. Census Bureau figures show particularly strong growth among Hispanics, about 12 percent of the county's population in 2008, up from 9 percent in 2000.

Officials at the Human Services office in Villa Park say its caseload of people who speak Spanish as a primary language has doubled, to about 15,000, over the past five years.

Joshua Drucker, a professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said the collapse of the home-building industry has hit Hispanics especially hard. Many Hispanic men do drywall and roofing work. Those jobs, Mr. Drucker said, which paid relatively well, have largely evaporated in the last two to three years.

The collapse of housing jobs sent Graciela Martinez, 37, to the Human Services waiting room with her four young children to receive food stamps. Much of the talking for the family was done by her oldest child, Amel — “I'm almost 8” — who wore a University of Wisconsin T-shirt and said he wanted to be a doctor.

Ms. Martinez said her fiancé, the father of the children, was a roofer whose work hours had shrunk to almost nothing. It became impossible to pay the rent, she said, so the family moved in with her sister in suburban West Chicago, an old railroad town with perhaps the longest-standing Mexican-American community in DuPage County.

One recent day at the Human Services office, people stood at the back of the long line on an asphalt parking lot that was baking in the sun. Later, when the skies darkened and the heavens opened, some people pushed inside to keep dry; others simply stood in the rain.

Ms. Baxter, the administrator, said the sense of despair among the clients could be heartbreaking.

“We've got to be able to give them some hope,” said Ms. Baxter, who sat behind a beige metal desk piled high with case forms. On the bulletin board, she had pinned the phrase, “Thy will, not mine, be done.”

“You see a lot of shame and embarrassment,” she said. “You see it with people who used to have money and now they're maybe losing everything. And you see the shame in people who have always been dirt poor, too.”

She said she told caseworkers to give people time to work through their emotions. “I know we're in a hurry,” she said, “but we've got to give them time to talk it out.”

She shook her head and lifted her eyes.

“Because they're hurting,” she said. “And they're so scared.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/us/18cncdupage.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Utah Executes Murderer by Firing Squad

DENVER — A five-member firing squad at the Utah State Prison took aim and fired .30-caliber bullets at a target pinned on the chest of Ronnie Lee Gardner, a convicted murderer, just after midnight on Friday. He was pronounced dead at 12:20 a.m. Mountain Time, after almost 25 years on death row, and several months as the center of international attention focused not so much on crime as his punishment.

It was the third firing squad execution in Utah — the only state actively practicing that form of punishment — since 1976, when the death penalty was restored by the United States Supreme Court .

“The execution warrant for Mr. Gardner has been served,” The Utah Department of Corrections said in statement.

Mr. Gardner, 49, was convicted in 1985 and sentenced to death for murdering a man in a botched courthouse escape attempt. Last minute appeals on Thursday filed by his lawyers with the United States Supreme Court, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver and Governor Gary R. Herbert were all rejected.

“Mr. Gardner has had a full and fair opportunity to have his case considered by numerous tribunals,” said Mr. Herbert, a Republican, in a letter refusing to stay the execution. “Upon careful review, there is nothing in the materials provided this morning that has not already been considered and decided.”

In the 1985 courthouse escape attempt and shootout — during a hearing about an earlier murder committed by Mr. Gardner at a Salt Lake City bar — he killed an attorney, Michael Burdell, and wounded a court bailiff. The family members of those victims, testifying at a hearing earlier this month before the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole, were divided on the question of punishment, with some favoring execution and some pleading that the defendant's life be spared.

Mr. Gardner's attorneys also argued that jurors in the case voted for the death penalty without hearing adequate testimony about the years of abuse he had suffered as a child.

But a member of Mr. Gardner's legal team, Dale A. Baich, said in a telephone interview a few hours before the execution that Mr. Gardner appeared to have accepted his fate.

“He's comfortable and he's at peace,” Mr. Baich said.

Only Utah, of the 35 states that impose the death penalty, still has death by shooting as an option, and then only for some. In 2004, the state legislature changed the penal code, mandating all executions thereafter by lethal injection. A person convicted of a capital crime who received his or her death sentence before the legal change took effect, however, can still choose between lethal injection and the firing squad.

Four other death row inmates, grandfathered in under the old law as Mr. Gardner was, have indicated that they may take the firing squad option if and when their time comes.

The last firing squad execution here was in 1996, when John Albert Taylor, convicted of raping and strangling an 11-year-old girl, was put to death. Mr. Gardner chose the firing squad as his means of execution, over lethal injection, in a hearing in April.

The only other state with a firing squad option in its penal code is Oklahoma, which would allow shooting of condemned prisoners only if lethal injection and electrocution are found unconstitutional.

Executions are not common in Utah. Mr. Gardner was only the seventh person put to death since 1976, compared to more than 450 in Texas. But in executions per capita — measured against Utah's much smaller population — the state ranked 19th highest in the nation, according to calculations last year by the Death Penalty Information Center , an anti-capital punishment group. Mr. Gardner ate his last meal on Tuesday, prison officials said, having decided to fast prior to his death .

The meal included steak, lobster tail, apple pie, vanilla ice cream and 7-Up, all prepared and served at the Utah State Prison, where the execution took place, about 20 miles south of Salt Lake City. After being moved to an observation cell on Wednesday night, Mr. Gardner spent his time sleeping, reading and watching the “Lord of The Rings” trilogy, the Utah Department of Corrections said on its Web site.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/us/19death.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Nebraska City Torn as Immigration Vote Nears

FREMONT, Neb. — In this city of 25,000, far from any international border, the fight over illegal immigration has boiled over.

This is ordinarily a serene place with polite politics and votes that sail through City Hall 8 to 0. But in a special election Monday, residents will decide whether to ban businesses from hiring illegal immigrants and bar landlords from renting to them. Residents demanded the vote, fighting off challenges by some of their elected leaders all the way to the State Supreme Court.

The election has opened a rare and raw divide. There are awkward silences for some who fear offending their neighbors (whose position they cannot be certain of), and, for others, volleys of suspicion.

Wanda Kotas, who pushed for the special election, said her family's cat, Mr. Sippi, was killed by a pellet gun not long after her efforts, an act she suspects is related. Kristin Ostrom, who has spoken against the referendum, said a rock was heaved through her front window, an old barbecue grill was dumped at her doorstep, and, this week, an e-mail message arrived promising in red letters to “shed blood” to take back the country. And Alfredo Velez, who once worked at one of Fremont's meatpacking plants and now owns a Mexican grocery, received an anonymous letter accusing him of harboring illegal immigrants, and said someone screamed at him on these neatly kept streets: “Go back to Mexico!”

The Hispanic population, while growing, still makes up less than 10 percent of Fremont, yet some say they blame illegal immigrants for what they see as a rise in crime here, the loss of good jobs for local residents and a shift in the culture.

Some complain about shoppers speaking Spanish at the Wal-Mart, businesses with phone messages saying “Press 1 for English,” and the need for two interpreters last fall at the annual “kindergarten round-up” where children meet their teachers.

Perhaps these are ordinary growing pains for Midwestern cities like Fremont, anchored by meatpacking plants with many immigrant workers, some of whom residents here suspect of being in this country illegally.

But the struggle has taken an unusual turn. After Fremont's political leaders rejected an ordinance intended to keep illegal immigrants out, residents fought back and insisted, finally getting approval in the Nebraska Supreme Court to take the matter straight to voters.

This is a legally complicated realm given the federal role in handling immigration; a lawsuit is all but certain if it passes. In other places where such immigration laws have been pondered (and often contested later), state lawmakers and local governing bodies have usually made the call, not citizens by referendum.

“In this very quiet little town where this hasn't been an issue, it's uncomfortable,” said Michelle Knapp, who opposes the anti-illegal immigrant law but acknowledges that she has at times only whispered her view. “You don't know what people are listening.”

The battle began two years ago when a City Council member suggested that the city should take on illegal immigration. As in other towns, leaders here said they were frustrated by what they viewed as a failure by federal authorities to manage the problem.

By July 2008, a second hearing on the City Council's proposal drew such a crowd that the meeting was moved to the high school auditorium (for the first time in memory) and the large crowd (under the watch of the police) voiced pointed views on all sides. The City Council waived plans for another hearing and instead voted, 4 to 4. Donald B. Edwards, the longtime mayor, gave an emotional speech, then voted no, to cheers and hoots.

“Everyone including myself is strongly against illegals,” Mr. Edwards told the crowd. “That's not the issue.” Every legal mind he consulted led him to believe that immigration was a federal matter and that city action would lead to costly litigation. “I can't change the law.”

This 1850s-era railroad and farming town , about 30 miles northwest of Omaha, included 165 Hispanic residents in 1990 by some estimates. The number is closer to 2,000 now. No one really knows how many illegal immigrants live here, but peoples' claims about statistics vary wildly.

Dean Skokan, the city attorney, who spoke on behalf of city officials who he said were barred by statute from voicing opinions on city time regarding ballot questions, says crime has risen over time. But he says he knows of no data compiled here on crimes by ethnicity or national origin.

But that is little comfort to residents like Jerry Hart, a retired Internal Revenue Service worker who recalls a time when Fremont's doors did not need locks.

The area's meatpacking plants — including Hormel, the largest employer and a presence since 1947 — look different, he said.

“How can you be against following the law,” said Mr. Hart, who spent months helping to collect more than 4,000 signatures to put the question on the ballot.

If the population changes have shifted the way Fremont feels, so has the coming anti-illegal-immigration referendum. Hispanic residents say they once felt welcomed here — or, at least, not noticed — but the increasingly loud political fight, they say, seems to have changed the tone.

“I know what they're thinking when they look at me: Am I legal? Am I illegal?” said Luis Canahui, who came here from Guatemala. “I can feel it.”

A woman who asked not to be identified because her legal status has run out grew tearful at what Fremont had once felt like to her. “I like this town, but this is the place for my kids, not for me anymore,” she said.

Opponents of the immigration law here nearly always cite practical considerations — the likely cost of litigation, above all — as the reason to reject it. One television spot, playing up the costs, shows a blank check signed by “Citizens of Fremont” and a narrator's booming voice: “Say no to needless spending! Say no to cuts in community services!”

City officials have said the cost of fighting court challenges — presumably, claims that the law would improperly infringe on federal authority — would probably run into the millions. Laws in towns like Hazleton, Pa., and Farmers Branch, Tex., remain in court, and other cities have, faced with legal fights, repealed laws or dropped plans for them .

Fremont's proposal, which was written with help from an author of Arizona's new anti-immigration law, would require Fremont businesses to use a federal database, E-Verify, to check new employees' information, and landlords to rent only to those who get a new city occupancy license (for $5) after turning over information to the police.

Skeptics, like Les Leech, the president of the Fremont Beef Company, said plants here already use E-Verify, but that does not stop those using stolen Social Security numbers. In March, immigration officials arrested 17 workers from Fremont Beef. “This ordinance will not change the complexion of this county one bit,” Mr. Leech said, “because E-Verify doesn't work.”

Oddly enough, the meatpacking plants, including Hormel, are just outside city limits, and would not be subject to the new law.

Supporters say it does not matter. “We have to start somewhere,” said John Wiegert, a resident. “Hiding under your desk in a city office isn't going to help.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/us/18nebraska.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Should Parents Be Jailed When Kids Drink?

By THE EDITORS

Dennis W. Ho for The New York Times

It's graduation party season, which means social host laws that hold parents responsible for teenage drinking are back in the news. Last week, two Harvard Medical School professors were arrested because teenagers were found drinking at their daughter's graduation party , though they said they did not see the alcohol.

How effective are these laws, which can impose fines or jail time for parents? Some parents believe it is better to have teenagers party at home so that adults can monitor the event and take away the car keys than have kids drinking elsewhere unsupervised. Is this a bad idea? Is there an alternative to social host laws?

• William Damon, Center on Adolescence, Stanford University
• David Jernigan, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
• Ruth C. Engs, professor, Indiana University
• Richard Bonnie, professor of law and medicine
• Angela Dills, economist
• David S. Anderson, professor, George Mason University
• David J. Hanson, professor, State University of New York, Potsdam
• Marsha Rosenbaum, Drug Policy Alliance
• James F. Mosher, lawyer

  Condoning Bad Behavior

  William Damon is a professor of education and director of the Center on Adolescence at Stanford University. His books include “The Moral Child,” “The Youth Charter” and, most recently, “The Path to Purpose.”

  Parents who sanction teenage drinking parties are making a huge mistake. These parents are encouraging the very behavior they are attempting to control. Even worse, they are communicating disrespect for legal authority to young people who are just forming their attitudes about how to behave in society.

  A parent's first message must be that we are obliged to obey the law.

  Laws on underage drinking in this country are clear. A parent certainly has the right to disagree with these laws; and discussions about such disagreements with children can foster critical thinking and civic awareness. But the parent's first message to a child must be that we are obliged to obey our society's laws even when we disagree with them.

  At the same time, legal enforcement of social host laws should be used sparingly as a last resort. It's heavy-handed, intrusive, and risks undermining relations between parents and children.

  A far better way is the youth charter approach that I have written about. Parents together assemble a list of homes that commit to hosting parties without alcohol or drugs. This list defines the territory that children are free to party in.

  Of course creating such a list requires parents to actually establish a sense of community around the needs of their children. I'd suggest that this is a social good in itself –- a social good that is in too short supply in today's society.

  The Myth of How Europeans Drink

  David Jernigan is an associate professor in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society and director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He has worked for the World Health Organization and the World Bank as an expert adviser on alcohol policies.

  According to the Surgeon General, there are 5,000 deaths per year in the U.S. among young people under 21 as a result of alcohol use. No parent wants their child to have an alcohol problem, be involved in an alcohol-related crash or sexual assault, fall off a balcony during spring break, or suffer from alcohol poisoning.

  Young people who start drinking before age 15 are five times more likely to develop alcohol problems.

  Yet parents are strikingly ignorant of what the research literature suggests will be effective in keeping our children out of trouble with alcohol.

  Many parents feel that young people will be safer if we keep them at home and supervise their drinking, or teach them to drink by having them drink with us. They shore up this conviction with a mental image of drinking patterns in European countries, where they assume that younger drinking ages and drinking with parents decreases youth drinking problems.

  In fact, the most recent research suggests that the opposite is true. Researchers followed 428 families in the Netherlands over a three-year period, and found that young people whose parents permitted drinking at home were more likely to drink more , to drink out of the home, and to develop alcohol problems over time.

  A recent study of 1,388 young people and their parents in Chicago followed the children from ages 12 to 14, and found that those who reported at age 12 receiving alcohol from their parents at home were significantly more likely by age 14 to have been drunk or to have had five or more drinks at a time in the past two weeks.

  Young people who start drinking before age 15 are five times more likely to develop alcohol problems. Keeping alcohol away from young people seems to have a clear result: it delays initiation of alcohol use.

  This is what the comparison with Europe really shows: countries with higher drinking ages (like the U.S., Sweden, Norway and Iceland) have much lower prevalence of drinking in adolescence (measured in surveys of 15-16 year-olds that are comparable across countries) than countries with lower drinking ages. The U.S. Surgeon General's 2007 Call to Action to Prevent and Reduce Underage Drinking reported that in nearly all the European countries surveyed, young people engaged in binge drinking more often than in the U.S.

  If providing alcohol to our children in the home is not the answer, what can parents do?

  First, we need to look at our own drinking behavior, because children imitate the alcohol consumption of their parents. Second, we should support 21 as a sensible drinking age, given what we have learned from our national history and about adolescent brain development.

  Third, we need to stay actively engaged with our children about alcohol use at least through the freshman year in college — research has shown both that the young people who were drinking in high school are the most likely to have alcohol problems in college, and that parental engagement is critical in helping young people make the transition from high school to college without getting into trouble with alcohol.

  Today, alcohol companies spend at least $4 billion per year on marketing, much of it placed where young people are far more likely to see it than their parents. New products are more attractive to youth and more dangerous: “alcopops” are most popular with the youngest drinkers, and alcoholic energy drinks, which pre-mix alcohol with caffeine and other stimulants, create a high-risk population of wide-awake drunks.

  The failure of alcohol taxes to keep up with inflation has made alcohol much more accessible to kids because it is now often cheaper than juice, soda or milk. Parents need to remember that today's young people live in a far different world than they did, and protect them accordingly.

  Learn Safer Drinking Habits

  Ruth C. Engs is professor emeritus at Indiana University. She has researched university student drinking patterns for over 25 years in the United States and on the international level. She is currently researching health reformers of the Progressive Era.

  “Social host” laws vary from state to state and on the whole they are largely unenforceable. High school graduates drinking at graduation parties has been a “rite of passage” among youth in the United States for decades. It is unlikely this behavior will change as it is ingrained in our culture.

  The drinking age in the United States should be lowered to age 18 in controlled environments.

  It is better to have young adults consume alcohol within the confines of a home where they can be monitored and driven home by parents or designated drivers, as opposed to having them go to unsupervised parties to get drunk. In many cultures outside of the U.S. parents routinely serve their children alcohol at home. Wine and beer are considered part of the diet.

  In my opinion, the age of alcohol consumption in the United States should be lowered to age 18 in controlled environments. These include restaurants, anytime or anyplace with parents, or in pubs where alcohol is consumed on the premise.

  However, I am opposed to allowing youth go to retail stores to buy booze to take home to get drunk because this is not responsible drinking. Parents of high school graduates certainly should not be condemned for holding graduation parties in a safe home environment in which drinking behaviors can be monitored.

  Don't Depend on Laws Alone

  Richard Bonnie is Harrison Foundation Professor of Law and Medicine and Professor of Public Policy at the University of Virginia. He chaired a study on underage drinking for the National Academy of Sciences, “Reducing Underage Drinking: A Collective Responsibility.”

  In 2003, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report, “Reducing Underage Drinking: A Collective Responsibility,” concluding that an essential component of a successful strategy is changing the attitudes and behaviors of adults.

  There is very little research on the effectiveness of social host laws, and what evidence exists is conflicting.

  Adults often facilitate or enable underage drinking directly by supplying alcohol to young people, by failing to take effective precautions to prevent it, by sending the message that alcohol use is to be expected, and by not adequately monitoring and supervising their children's lives, generally.

  The committee that wrote the report recommended an adult-oriented media campaign to educate parents and others that the negative consequences of underage drinking go beyond drunken driving, and that they have an obligation to do something about it. Although some steps in the direction of such a campaign have been taken over the past 5 years, it has not been implemented on the necessary scale.

  Efforts to target underage drinking have to address social availability through parents, friends, and strangers, as well as commercial access. We need to change social norms about underage drinking and erase the mistaken impression that parents are protecting their children by facilitating their use of alcohol.

  Some courts have expanded so-called “dram shop” liability principles so that they apply to non-commercial servers, including social hosts, employers, fraternities, and others that are not licensed to sell or serve alcohol.
  Under social host liability laws, adults who provide alcohol to a minor or serve an intoxicated adult can be sued through civil actions for injury caused by that minor or intoxicated adult.

  There is very little research on the effectiveness of such laws, and what evidence exists is conflicting. The conflicting findings may reflect the lack of a comprehensive program to make social hosts aware of their potential liability, which reduces the deterrent effect of these laws.

  Media campaigns should be an integral part of implementing social host liability laws. As a practical matter, however, social host liability is probably not the most effective legal tool for deterring parental complicity in underage drinking and reinforcing the desired social norm. Imposing a criminal sanction, especially a jail sentence, on a parent who hosts a drinking party for minors, may be more likely to attract media attention than an a less publicized civil award of damages.

  Still, states may want to consider enacting or strengthening civil social host liability statutes that allow negligence-based civil actions against those who provide alcohol to a minor who subsequently causes injury to others.

  Making Hosts Responsible

  Angela Dills , a visiting lecturer at Wellesley College, will be an assistant professor of economics at Providence College this fall.

  Most minors obtain alcohol from adults of legal drinking age. Most underage drinkers typically drink alcohol in their own or someone else's home. Social host liability laws for minors aim to stem this access to alcohol and its accompanying drinking and driving.

  Social host laws have substantially reduced drunk-driving fatality rates for minors.

  These laws penalize adults facilitating under-aged drinking if that drinking damages a third party. Parents who throw parties for their children, however, cite safety reasons as part of their motivation for hosting parties, preferring their teens and their teens' friends to drink in a supervised and safe locale.

  Both sides of the debate suggest that social host laws affect drunk-driving, albeit in opposite directions. How effective are these laws?

  I analyzed drunk-driving fatality data for 18 to 20-year olds from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. Over the last 30 years, an increasing number of states have enacted social host liability laws that impose penalties on adult hosts when the imbibing party is a minor.

  Over the same period, drunk-driving fatality rates among 18 to 20 year-olds have fallen substantially. However, in those states adopting social host liability, drunk-driving fatality rates for minors fell 9 percent more than states without these laws.

  Drunk-driving fatalities may decline because youths drink less, drive after drinking less, or both. Using data from the Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System, I find little or no effect of social host laws on the drinking behavior of 18 to 20 year-olds. However, social host liability laws are associated with a reduction in how frequently 18 to 20 year-olds drive drunk.

  Social host laws may not restrict under-aged access to alcohol but they do encourage adults to improve their monitoring of under-aged drinkers and to pressure those drinkers not to drive.

  Saying ‘No' Is Not Enough

  David S. Anderson is professor of education and human development at George Mason University.

  Social host laws are needed to communicate clearly that underage drinking is not acceptable. While a parent may have the intention of limiting a teenager's (and his or her friends') exposure to drunk driving by hosting a party, exposing teenagers to alcohol even in that setting can result in harm, like alcohol poisoning, sexual abuse, violence, drunk driving and more).

  To reduce teenage drinking, address their motivations.

  Underage drinking, though decreasing in recent years, is still extensive, as over 25 percent of high school seniors nationwide report drinking 5 or more drinks in a row at least once in the previous two weeks.

  While social host laws and other regulations make a difference I believe we also must have a comprehensive approach that emphasizes prevention, personal responsibility, skill-building, and early intervention in addition to laws and policies. We also need to find out why adolescents drink — and then address the underlying reasons for their decisions about alcohol use or non-use.

  George Mason University's research project, Understanding Teen Drinking Cultures in America , found that nearly half of the reasons (48 percent) teenagers gave for getting drunk were social, such as to bond or fit in with peers who are drinking; another 24 percent of the reasons were emotional, like the need to deal with boredom and stress.

  Our national telephone poll showed that parents are more likely than teenagers to think that teenagers get drunk out of curiosity and do not know their limits. From our focus groups, we found that parents are often unsure how to talk to their children about alcohol use.

  Teenagers and parents both report that alcohol education programs offer messages like ‘don't drink', ‘don't drink and drive,' ‘alcohol use is illegal under 21.' But our research shows that the messages of “don't drink” aren't sufficient to address teenagers' motivations for alcohol use and heavy drinking.

  Permit Drinking With Adults

  David J. Hanson is a professor emeritus of sociology at the State University of New York, Potsdam.

  Parent can prohibit drinking in their home and unintentionally drive their high schoolers to drink unsupervised in the woods, fields, older friends' apartments, and who-knows-where-else. The results are sometimes driving while intoxicated and tragic alcohol-related crashes.

  Parents should be able to host parties with alcohol if other parents give permission.

  Or parents can host gatherings in which they supervise and control the behaviors of the young people who attend to protect their safety and well-being. Some states already permit parents to serve alcoholic beverages to their own offspring under their direct supervision. Every state should do this. Federally-funded research has shown that drinking with parents can reduce overall alcohol consumption and alcohol-related problems.

  But no state permits a parent to serve alcohol to the minor of another, even with the explicit permission of the parent or guardian. This prevents parents from legally hosting gatherings at which underage attendees consume any alcohol, even if they obtain permission to act in loco parentis.

  Parents should have the right to extend to other parents permission to act on their behalf with regard to alcohol on conditions they specify so as to protect their young people. Societies that permit parents to serve alcohol to their adolescents tend to have fewer alcohol-related problems. People in these countries would agree that it's better to learn to drink in parents' houses than in fraternity houses.

  It's Not the Drinking, It's the Driving

  Marsha Rosenbaum is a medical sociologist and the founder of the Safety First project at the Drug Policy Alliance .

  Recently, a couple (both on the faculty of Harvard Medical School) were arrested under a “social host” law in New Hampshire because teenagers were caught consuming alcohol at their daughter's graduation party.

  If they can't drink at home, they'll drink on the street, in the park, on the beach. And they'll get there by car.

  Such social host laws were created in a well-meaning effort to prevent teenage drinking by making parents vulnerable to prosecution. But are they effective?

  Most would agree that teenagers would be better off if they abstained. But annual surveys consistently show that nearly 80 percent of high school students have consumed alcohol by the time they graduate.

  Let's face it, whether or not we approve, alcohol has become a normative part of American teenage culture. Another sobering reality is that the most lethal aspect of underage alcohol use, by far, is drunk driving.

  The prospect of teen drinking, combined with driving to and from parties, is terrifying. It is the primary reason that parents open their homes, take the car keys and provide an automobile-free, if not necessarily alcohol-free, gathering.

  I worry that out of fear, frustration and desperation, social host laws created to eliminate underage drinking by targeting otherwise law-abiding, responsible parents, may actually reduce teen safety.

  When I ask young people about social host laws that eliminate the availability of parentally supervised homes where they can party, none say they'll simply stop drinking. Instead, they say they'll move the party to the street, the local park, the beach or some other public place. And they'll get there by car.

  While we encourage and promote sober gatherings, parents should have a fallback strategy that makes sure drinking and driving don't mix. Arresting parents for trying to keep their teenagers safe is not the answer, and may ultimately do more harm than good.

  Shift Social Norms

  James F. Mosher is a leading scholar in the field of alcohol policy and the law. He has provided expert consultation to community groups, policy makers, and law enforcement on social host laws.

  Social host laws (sometimes referred to as house party laws) hold individuals responsible for underage drinking on property they own, lease or control. They recognize that the problems associated with underage drinking parties (a high-risk setting for binge drinking, drunken driving, sexual assault, and other forms of violence) are community problems that require a multifaceted public health approach.

  Homeowners should be expected to take steps to ensure that out-of-control teenage parties are not occurring on their property.

  Research is absolutely clear on this point: restricting the availability of alcohol to teens saves young lives. So does increasing alcohol taxes. Educational programs are important, but on their own have little or no effect on teen drinking, in part because of the massive advertising and marketing budget of the alcohol industry undermining the pro-health educational messages.

  Many parents and other adults don't realize how easily teen parties can get out of control. Even with the best intentions, adults who allow teens to party on their property are not only setting a poor example but are also endangering the safety of those attending as well as neighbors and others in the community.

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