Governors avoid debate on Arizona's immigration law

The topic's not on their convention agenda, but it's on everyone's mind as demonstrators rally nearby.

By Michael Memoli, Tribune Washington Bureau

July 10, 2010

Reporting from Boston

Arizona's sweeping illegal immigration law has reignited debate throughout the country about calls for comprehensive reform. But as the nation's governors gathered this weekend, the topic was absent from their agenda, even as demonstrators rallied nearby.

Organizers of the National Governors Assn.'s summer meeting said there was no conscious effort to avoid the topic, but they conceded that differences among state leaders made it an unlikely discussion point.

"Governors have different points of view, [and] we're a consensus-based organization," said Gov. Jim Douglas (R-Vt.), the organization's chairman. "My view, and I know some of my colleagues' views, is what's happening in Arizona — regardless of what you feel about it — points to the need for a federal solution."

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed Arizona Senate Bill 1070, did attract attention and was swarmed by reporters at the first public event of the meeting. Brewer said that some of her colleagues had expressed support for Arizona's action and were eagerly tracking the U.S. Justice Department's lawsuit seeking to block it.

"They do understand the problems that we face," said Brewer, a Republican . "People want the federal government to do their job, and if they won't do it, the states will do it."

While governors have offered differing opinions on Arizona's law, there was widespread agreement that the federal government needed to act.

"I thought a couple years ago we were on the road to finding one," Douglas said, referring to a failed effort by President George W. Bush in 2007. "Well, it didn't happen. So we've got to find a way to recognize the reality of the problem while respecting laws of our country."

Even some of Brewer's Republican colleagues were cool to the idea of passing similar laws in their states. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, for instance, said he did not want to further burden local law enforcement with what is a federal concern. Others said the states faced more pressing issues, particularly with regard to budgets.

"It's still an issue of national importance, but it's not — at least in some parts of the country — as hot as it was," Gov. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) said.

Groups opposed to the Arizona measure organized a march on the convention site. The Washington-based ANSWER Coalition expected more than 1,000 to attend, but only several hundred gathered for the rally. Heavy rain further diminished the turnout.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-immigration-protests-20100711,0,6840008,print.story

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Grim Sleeper arrest marks big advance for controversial DNA evidence July 10, 2010 Frustrated by their inability to find the notorious killer known as the Grim Sleeper, whose DNA was not in a law enforcement database, Los Angeles police this spring asked the state to look for a DNA profile similar enough to be a possible relative of the killer. In April, state computers produced a list of 200 genetic profiles of people in the database who might be related to the alleged serial killer. Among the top five ranked as the most likely relatives was a profile that shared a common genetic marker with the crime-scene DNA at each of 15 locations that the crime lab examined. Scientists knew that a profile with that sort of matching pattern indicated a parent-child relationship. To winnow the candidates further, and knowing that their suspect had to be a man, they tested the DNA of the 200 offenders whose profiles resembled the crime-scene DNA to determine if any appeared to share the Y chromosome, which boys inherit from their fathers. There was one match, and it was the same profile that had shared all 15 markers on the first round of testing. Excitement swept the room at the state DNA laboratory in Richmond where the match was made. Jill Spriggs, chief of the state's Bureau of Forensic Services, recalls a feeling of "amazement" when she learned of the breakthrough: The two rounds of tests almost certainly had located a son of the suspect -- the first high-profile U.S. case cracked by a technique known as familial DNA searching. . Click here to read Maura Dolan's story on the DNA evidence used in the Grim Sleeper case.  RELATED: THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF DNA EVIDENCE: Check out Dolan's and Felch's investigation about the growing use of DNA evidence in the courtroom. Read the entire series, plus photos, graphics and more. . http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/

Quality counts

English learners must be taught the language at a more complex level to ensure their academic, and therefore socioeconomic, success later.

By Alice Callaghan

July 11, 2010

The continued segregation of impoverished English learners in failing inner-city schools harms students as well as the abiding interest of society to have educated citizens capable of participating in all social and economic opportunities. Low economic status and low educational achievement go hand in hand.

Proposition 227 ended the 25-year failed program of transitional bilingual education, in which students were taught all or mostly in their native language during their first years in school. With little exposure to a rich English vocabulary and English grammatical structures, students never developed complex language skills. Most English learners are born in the United States and have been in school since kindergarten. Learning in Spanish — most English learners are Spanish-speaking — was of little value in developing academic English and helping these learners keep up with English speakers who continued to progress in their language skills. The schools' primary job isn't to promote home language and heritage cultures, but rather to teach academic competence in English so students can flourish scholastically.

Teaching English by teaching in English was the necessary first step in helping these students achieve academic literacy. The post-Proposition 227 concern we must now turn to is teaching English learners the complex academic English needed to succeed in school.

Las Familias del Pueblo, a community center that I started in downtown Los Angeles, has a two-classroom charter school for kindergartners and first-graders. Its structured English immersion program is organized around the belief that poor children can achieve at the same academic level as their more affluent peers when provided the same educational opportunities. All 40 students in the school are poor enough to qualify for free meals. All are Latino and all started school as English learners. All live in households below the poverty line.

Each year, our first-grade students are redesignated as English fluent. That's not surprising; the school offers two years of a highly academic, structured English instruction. It also has an extended year of 198 days — compared with 173 days in the Los Angeles Unified School District — and an extended day of 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The work of readying these students for a bright academic future is a matter of constant study and improvement on our part. Most of our students go on to Brentwood Science Magnet, one of this city's best and most integrated schools. Even so, as Las Familias tracked their progress, it became clear that some children struggled to complete challenging academic work requiring more sophisticated background knowledge and English skills.

Academic language is not the same as everyday speech. We were teaching academic English in our school, but not strongly reinforcing it in a systematic and intentional way. By the age of 3, English learners and other disadvantaged students possess less than one-third of the vocabulary acquired by children living with educated parents, even in their native languages. Here's the kind of talk I hear from mothers at Lacy Park in San Marino: "Look at those palm trees. I like the tall skinny one in the middle. Which one do you like?" Overheard at a park in East Los Angeles: "Go play." "Stop running." Richer use of language and concepts in early years, no matter what language it's in, is key to mastering academic English.

To remedy this, our charter school added two language programs designed to systematically teach the background knowledge, vocabulary and complex sentence structure English learners are lacking.

It is a pernicious excuse to say children fail because they are English learners. Many students remain classified as English learners for fiscal reasons. In 2006, one local elementary school with 1,419 students designated 1,123 of them as English learners. It received $413 for each English learner — $522,429 a year. Just 44 students were redesignated as fluent in English that year.

In truth, English learners and most poor children fail because they are not taught English well.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-callaghan-english-20100711,0,4652001,print.story

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The Spanish road to English

Skilled teachers build on what students already know.

By Bruce Fuller

July 11, 2010

Should teachers immerse California's rainbow of students in English to close achievement gaps — a linguistic cold shower of sorts — or lift literacy by scaffolding up from their home languages?

It's a false dichotomy, says Ashley Aguilar, a savvy junior at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. She must ace several English tests to enter UC Santa Barbara, her dream college. But she holds her native Spanish dear as well. "It will be better that I am bilingual," Aguilar said. Her language skills will open doors to jobs. Her mother works in the diverse city of Bell, where being bilingual "is a super big plus."

The problem is that parents with few resources — especially those in neighborhoods where only Spanish is heard — send their children to schools that are failing to boost English proficiency. After six years of schooling, less than two-fifths of Spanish-speaking pupils become literate in English statewide, according to a study released in May.

At El Monte High School, four-fifths of English learners still cannot speak and write in English proficiently after six years in the system. The Los Angeles Unified School District serves a fifth of California's 1.6 million students classified as English learners, mostly Spanish speakers.

Proposition 227 — the English-only initiative approved by voters in 1998 — aimed to fix this problem. It requires schools to teach students primarily in English, unless parents prefer Spanish-dominant classrooms. Only 8% opt out of English-only.

But the polarizing debate about bilingual versus English immersion focuses on the wrong problem. It distracts policymakers from investing in new teachers with rich pedagogical skills and deep cultural knowledge.

English learners in Los Angeles have made discernible progress. Reading scores among Latino fourth-graders have climbed by two-thirds of a grade level since 2002, according to federal assessments. Still, just 13% are proficient in written English, and scores for eighth-graders remained flat over the same period.

Outside the political clamor, researchers are illuminating what works inside schools and what doesn't to narrow language disparities. People on both sides of the bilingual debate might be surprised at what the studies show.

Teacher quality matters most. Whether children are taught at first in English-only or Spanish-dominant classrooms doesn't much matter. The latter model — with teachers building from home language to steadily move students toward English — shows slightly better results, according to a recent review of 18 experiments in which pupils were randomly assigned to either type of classroom. But that was true only in carefully engineered bilingual programs with top-notch teachers, and even then the advantage was small. A second study, tracking L.A. pupils, yielded similar results.

What matters most are invigorating teachers who engage students, advance rich oral language in both languages and team up with parents to motivate their children. Mexican American high schoolers, like others, respond to teachers who set high expectations and employ motivating classroom activities that engage the students' own ideas and language skills, according to Robert Ream at UC Riverside.

Denying what children know is costly. A generation of work by Harvard University's Catherine Snow shows that skilled teachers who advance rich oral language in Spanish among young children, accenting awareness of sounds and grammatical patterns, are most effective at advancing English proficiency.

But even as Latino enrollments grow, the state's teacher preparation programs are turning out fewer candidates with bilingual skills and cross-cultural awareness. The number of new teachers earning bilingual credentials has fallen during the last decade from 1,829 to 1,147 per year, according to the California Teacher Commission.

Build from strong families. Some educators blame poverty for their failure to boost English proficiency. Their argument is that parents either don't care or lack home resources to lift children's achievement. But recent findings from UC Berkeley reveal that Latino children, whether poor or not, enter kindergarten with levels of enthusiasm and social agility that rival their white peers.

We know that high-quality preschools can narrow gaps in oral language and pre-literacy skills before children start school, including efforts financed by First 5 L.A. In middle school, immigrant youths who remain tight with their families are more strongly engaged in the classroom, as detailed by UCLA psychologist Andrew Fuligni.

Small, innovative schools may help. Local leaders, like Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Yolie Flores, vice president of the L.A. Unified school board, now bank on charters and small schools to lift Latino literacy. Inventive teachers will open five human-scale high schools on the new Esteban Torres campus this fall, liberated from bureaucratic and union rules. There is some evidence that these smaller schools engage students more and better track their progress.

Still, evidence remains mixed on whether charter or Torres-like pilot schools can outperform garden-variety public schools. And charters continue to enroll a smaller percentage of English learners than the district average. All schools are reeling from severe budget cuts in Sacramento, losing more than one-sixth of their operating funds over the last three years.

Language isolation is the real culprit. Progress in the schools is just one piece of the puzzle. The biggest driver of language disparities is the isolation of so many Southland children in Spanish-speaking enclaves. Even Garfield's Ashley Aguilar admits with a nervous giggle, "I speak Spanglish to my friends," the linguistic currency that offers teenagers an identity, a feeling of solidarity.

Vibrant bilingual communities thrive in parts of Los Angeles. But building neighborhoods of many tongues requires affordable housing and schools that attract middle-class parents.

Back at Garfield High, Ashley emphasized how her favorite teachers, both Latinas, "make you feel like you are part of a family," quickly adding, "but they put academics first." Yes, we need artful teachers who hammer on English literacy. But more deeply, we must advance civic spaces that nurture this sense of belonging, from inventive schools to bilingual town squares. Otherwise, we can keep talking past one another.

Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley, is the author of "Standardized Childhood."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-fuller-english-20100711,0,7082622,print.story

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'Familial searching,' its promise and perils

DNA crime-fighting tools can help crack cases, but authorities must put proper procedures in place.

By David Lazer and Frederick R. Bieber

July 10, 2010

It was an unfinished slice of pizza that led to the identification of Lonnie David Franklin Jr. as the prime suspect in the Grim Sleeper murder investigation. But the pizza was just the final clue leading to his arrest.

The key break in the investigation, intermittently conducted over 25 years, came when investigators found a close — but not perfect — match between the DNA recovered at multiple crime scenes and a man being held in a California prison. Such a near-match strongly indicated that the person wanted by police was a close relative of the man in prison, and police soon focused on the man's father, Lonnie Franklin. They put him under surveillance, obtained his discarded pizza and found that his DNA matched that recovered at a Grim Sleeper crime scene.

Four years ago, in the journal Science, we described how a data-mining technique known as "familial searching" could be used for efficient identification of possible crime suspects when traditional investigative efforts fail. The paper (which we wrote along with UC Berkeley mathematician Charles Brenner) explained how crime laboratories might benefit from searching not just for perfect matches, but also for close ones, when trying to connect DNA from unsolved crimes to the DNA of known offenders whose genetic profiles are held in local, state and national databases. Because relatives share common DNA profiles, close matches can implicate family members as possible crime suspects.

The importance of this technique was clearly demonstrated this week in Los Angeles. Yet currently in the U.S., familial searching is allowed only in California and parts of Colorado. As experience with familial searching increases, other states will probably embrace the technique. And as they do, it is imperative that policies be carefully crafted to ensure both efficiency and accuracy in case selection, statistical thresholds and follow-up testing and investigation.

Familial searching extends the size and reach of the nation's DNA databases to effectively include the parents, children and siblings of the 8 million offenders and arrestees whose DNA profiles are already stored in databases. Additional technologies, including Y-chromosome genotyping and examination of mitochondrial DNA, can provide analyses even further out on the family tree. Extending the reach of databases to possibly tens of millions of additional individuals brings great opportunities for solving crimes. But it also raises concerns.

By utilizing these techniques, officials have the ability to reach far beyond the pool of those mandated to provide DNA samples. This sparks legitimate privacy considerations. It also magnifies concerns that African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately represented in offender databases, although this also can mean that the benefits of familial searching will accrue to these overrepresented groups. This case demonstrates that point, as Franklin and all of the Grim Sleeper's known victims are African American.

Because of the chance that someone unconnected to a crime might appear to be related to the perpetrator, extra laboratory testing steps are always needed to narrow the list of potential suspects to avoid intrusions and conserve investigative time and resources.

But California has demonstrated how these concerns can be addressed in a way that limits the potential for intruding in the privacy of uninvolved parties, yet allows investigators to utilize an important crime-solving technique. The state limits familial searching to high-priority cases when other investigative methods have failed, requires additional Y-chromosome typing and makes use, if available, of non-forensic information in order to identify additional evidence bearing on relatedness.

The Grim Sleeper case will undoubtedly become the poster child case for proponents of familial searching around the country, and indeed, those who oppose any use of familial searching must justify not using these methods when there is lingering ongoing danger to the public. Still, states should put safeguards in place as California has done before embracing the technique.

The collection of DNA by law enforcement officials has expanded over the last decade. Initially, databases included only the DNA of those convicted of a narrow array of violent crimes. Then it was expanded to all convicted felons, and then, in California and many other states, to those arrested — but not necessarily convicted — of qualifying crimes.

Familial searching is a quantum leap because it expands the potential for DNA scrutiny to millions who have not even been suspected of a crime. And it demands a question: If it is just the capricious hand of fate that separates those of us under surveillance from those who are not, what is the justification for not creating a universal database as the only equitable solution?

Although there are many inside and outside the United States who have made cogent arguments supporting creation of a universal database, we would not support such an extension of state authority.

These are issues our system will grapple with over time. But in the interim, it is essential that states tread deliberately and carefully as they expand DNA analysis to include familial searches. Only in doing so can our public institutions both protect our individual rights while at the same time bring to justice dangerous criminals.

David Lazer is an associate professor of political science and computer science at Northeastern University and the editor of the book, "DNA and the Criminal Justice System." Frederick Bieber is a medical geneticist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-lazer-grim-sleeper-dna-20100710,0,578227,print.story

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From the New York Times

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In Haiti, the Displaced Are Left Clinging to the Edge

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Hundreds of displaced families live perilously in a single file of flimsy shanties planted along the median strip of a heavily congested coastal road here called the Route des Rails.

Vehicles rumble by day and night, blaring horns, kicking up dust and belching exhaust. Residents try to protect themselves by positioning tires as bumpers in front of their shacks but cars still hit, injure and sometimes kill them. Rarely does anybody stop to offer help, and Judith Guillaume, 23, often wonders why.

“Don't they have a heart, or a suggestion?” asked Ms. Guillaume, who covers her children's noses with her floral skirt when the diesel fumes get especially strong.

Six months after the earthquake that brought aid and attention here from around the world, the median-strip camp blends into the often numbing wretchedness of the post-disaster landscape. Only 28,000 of the 1.5 million Haitians displaced by the earthquake have moved into new homes, and the Port-au-Prince area remains a tableau of life in the ruins.

The tableau does contain a spectrum of circumstances: precarious, neglected encampments; planned tent cities with latrines, showers and clinics; debris-strewn neighborhoods where residents have returned to both intact and condemnable houses; and, here and there, gleaming new shelters or bulldozed territory for a city of the future.

But the government of Haiti has been slow to make the difficult decisions needed to move from a state of emergency into a period of recovery. Weak before the disaster and further weakened by it, the government has been overwhelmed by the logistical complexities of issues like debris removal and the identification of safe relocation sites.

In some cases, the government has also been politically skittish about, say, creating new slums or encouraging people to return to undamaged homes when the ground beneath them could move again.

In others, it has taken charge but gotten bogged down. Since early May, President René Préval has personally focused, in granular detail, on returning about 11,600 Haitians camped in front of the National Palace to the Fort National neighborhood. But while Fort National is now a beehive of cleanup activity, no transitional shelters have been erected there yet.

In contrast, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency, working directly with a hands-on mayor in the Carrefour municipality in metropolitan Port-au-Prince, has already moved more than 500 families from its large tent city into simple pine houses whose concrete foundations incorporate recycled debris.

“Even though I lost my mom in the earthquake, I feel so content, so comfortable and so lucky to have this place,” Ketly Louis, 33, said, welcoming visitors into her new home on the site of the old home that collapsed on her mother.

International organizations here, while empathetic because of the difficulty of issues like land ownership, criticize the government for creating obstacles of its own. Significant delays in clearing supplies through customs, for instance, slow recovery efforts even as they earn the government substantial fees for storage.

And with hurricane season under way and many tents and tarpaulins needing replacement or reinforcement, some humanitarian groups complain about what they see as the government's failure to articulate a clear resettlement strategy.

“Everywhere I go, people ask me, ‘When will we get out of this camp?' ” said Julie Schindall, a spokeswoman in Haiti for the international aid group Oxfam. “And I have no answer. There needs to be communication on how all this camp business is going to be resolved.”

Haitian and United Nations officials urge patience in the aftermath of what they call the largest urban disaster in modern history. They point to accomplishments in providing emergency food, water and shelter and averting starvation, exodus and violence.

“What hasn't happened is worth noting,” said Nigel Fisher, deputy special representative of the United Nations secretary general in Haiti. “We haven't had a major outbreak of disease. We haven't had a major breakdown in security.”

Also, they note, the Haitian government, while juggling the sometimes conflicting pressures from international donors, is handicapped by the destruction or damage of most of its ministries and the large numbers of civil servants killed. “I defy any country on earth to be fully functional at this stage after such a disaster,” said Imogen Wall, spokeswoman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In Aceh, Indonesia, after the tsunami of 2004, which left the national government intact, it took more than two years to get the displaced population out of tents, Ms. Wall said.

Mr. Fisher said: “In terms of speed, it's never fast enough. But this matches what has happened around the world in comparable situations.”

Perilous Settlements

That is little comfort to the residents of the median strip on the Route des Rails.

Since the earthquake, displaced people apparently with no alternatives have planted tenuous roots in the most unsettling places — atop a municipal dump, inside a graveyard, on the bank of a soccer field flooded with contaminated water.

But the median-strip encampment demonstrates acutely both how miserable many settlements are and how they have become hidden in plain sight. Every day, thousands of drivers pass by the threadbare shanties on this coastal thoroughfare.

Only a quarter of the more than 1,200 post-earthquake camps are managed externally by aid organizations; the rest fend for themselves. In the Route des Rails encampment, that means relying on Luma Ludger, the camp leader, who keeps meticulous records in a handwritten ledger — and prays.

“God takes care of us,” Mr. Ludger said. He pointed across the highway. “And we also have those latrines.”

In March, Islamic Aid, a French organization, set up the latrines, which require users to dash through traffic, especially trying for the many camp residents who have diarrhea. The Red Cross also came by and handed out hygiene kits.

“They told us it was very dangerous to be here, and asked what they could do for us,” Mr. Ludger said. “I told them we need land. They said, ‘Wow, we cannot help with that' and gave us toothpaste.”

Gerta Mojene, a mother of four, asked a reporter how to find a safer place to live. Asked where she might want to go, Ms. Mojene lowered her reddened eyes and said, “Wherever you send me.”

Mr. Ludger said that the mayor had spoken of evicting the median-strip squatters for their safety but had not proposed a substitute location. “Life here is a game of chance, you know,” he said.

A couple dozen residents have been seriously injured by vehicles; they wear casts and slings. At least three have been killed, among them, relatives said, the father of a baby born on the median strip on the evening after the earthquake.

The baby's name is Katastrof Natirèl — Natural Disaster.

A Presidential Priority

By early spring, when many tent cities appeared to be getting entrenched, President Préval decided to make the large one on the Champ de Mars his personal priority. He wanted to demonstrate the logic of the government's plan to return displaced people to their original neighborhoods, in this case Fort National. He wanted to show progress and be associated with results.

But Mr. Préval created instead a showcase for the difficulties involved in finding a quick alternative to the camps. Fort National, a densely layered hilltop area badly hit by the quake, proved an especially difficult place to clean up and repopulate first.

The president's motivation for focusing on the Champ de Mars camp was at least partly political. The raggedy tent city, with its piles of garbage, puddles of standing water, swarms of mosquitoes, packs of thieves and an increasingly restive population, sits in the front yard of the smashed National Palace.

At the camp itself, where residents strip and bathe in the open, squatting over small plastic tubs, many remain unaware that they have become the president's pet project. “Nobody tells us anything,” said Micheline Félix, 30. “It seems like they're just waiting for us to wash away with the first big rain.”

But since May, right next door, Mr. Préval has presided over regular, often lengthy meetings of the Champ de Mars-Fort National working group; they begin at 7 a.m. and finish “when the president rises,” said Shaun Scales of the International Organization for Migration.

According to Leslie Voltaire, Haiti's special envoy to the United Nations, the operating theory was that those with intact homes would be provided some kind of incentive to move back; those with reparable homes would get materials and assistance to fix them; and those with destroyed homes would be given transitional shelters in Fort National or moved to a planned settlement outside Port-au-Prince.

It soon became apparent, however, that Fort National was in very bad shape. In an engineering survey, some 55 percent of its structures received a red tag, meaning they were unsafe and destined for demolition. That is much higher than the average of 24 percent red tags elsewhere.

At the same time, only 18 percent of the homes in Fort National were tagged green, or immediately reinhabitable — compared with 47 percent in other areas surveyed.

Further, rubble removal, a $500 million problem facing the recovery effort, has proved especially difficult in Fort National. International experts say it would take three to five years to remove all the debris from Haiti if 1,000 or more trucks worked daily; fewer than 300 trucks are hauling rubble now. But those trucks cannot penetrate much of Fort National, which has only one main road and lots of steep alleys. In some places, even wheelbarrows cannot be used. Rubble has to be carried out pail by pail, which at least provides jobs.

Tortue Larose, 27, who earns $5 a day cleaning up Fort National, stood at the partly cleared summit of the neighborhood recently, pointing at a speck of green plastic in the dirt: “See that green?” he said. “That's where my house was. That's where I was born. That's where I intend to die.”

Where to dump the rubble that fills Mr. Larose's buckets presents another problem. There is no debris plan for Fort National just as there is no master plan for rubble removal, said Eric Overvest, the United Nations Development Program's country director. Normally, he said, a rubble plan is developed within a month of a major disaster. Port-au-Prince, the capital, did not have a pre-earthquake land use plan, complicating matters.

Still, in almost six months the government has identified only one rubble site, the municipal dump called Truitier. More sites are needed — as are decisions on whether rubble will be recycled and how.

Additionally, debris contains personal effects, and sometimes bodies; it also has a potential monetary value if it is to be reused. “It's not just the rubble, it's the question of rubble ownership,” Mr. Scales said. Most in Fort National are renters but the rubble technically belongs to the property owners. And sorting out who owns what land, and getting their permission to excavate has proved difficult, Mr. Scales said.

“It isn't a case of going straight onto land with an excavator,” he said.

For those few whose homes in Fort National are intact, the government has to determine what kind of relocation package to offer. Will they subsidize tenants or landlords? Will they help pay back rent or negotiate some forgiveness? What help will be given those whose homes are reparable and how can repairs be aligned with a building code that has yet to be released? If a one-room transitional shelter is erected where a multifamily dwelling stood, who gets it?

Each issue has generated protracted debate. One international disaster expert, who requested anonymity because he did not want to offend Haitian officials, offered what he called “a microexample” of why bigger questions take a long time to resolve. It involved a flier instructing people on how to secure their tents during the hurricane season.

The government emergency management agency first asked that the phrase “hurricane-proof” be deleted, he said, worried about guaranteeing protection, and then that any reference to strong winds be removed. Finally, only rain could be mentioned and even then the flier did not get approved before hurricane season began.

“It's as if they imagined themselves to be in a brick and mortar world of real liability,” the disaster expert said. “I think it's more than lack of capacity by the government. They're looking at the political landscape, weighing each word like David Axelrod with a focus group.”

Still, many hope that the Champ de Mars process at least lays the groundwork for a speedier resolution of similar problems elsewhere.

And some residents of Fort National, tired of waiting for the government to act, have already moved back, even into dwellings that have been condemned or would be unsafe in a storm.

Negriel Dumas built a roughhewn shack for his family on the barren hilltop. “It's better to be here with the smell of the dead bodies than to be down at that camp where it stinks of pee,” he said.

Aggressive Advocates

In late April, Rachelle Derosmy's family of four moved into one of the first transitional shelters to be completed in the Port-au-Prince area. It is a simple pine house, painted grey, with two windows, a concrete foundation and an inclined metal roof fastened with hurricane straps.

“Rain used to fall like a monsoon into our tent,” Ms. Derosmy, 24, said, standing in her 150-square-foot home, which is still bare. “We feel so much better now, more secure. We hope in the future to have beds, too.”

Ms. Derosmy's new home is in Carrefour, where most of the 1,300 transitional shelters in metropolitan Port-au-Prince have been built. That is partly because Carrefour's mayor has taken an active role in resolving land issues and partly because the Adventist Development and Relief Agency, long based there, has aggressively negotiated with local officials and landlords. It also settled more quickly than some other aid groups on a shelter design.

Transitional shelters are simple wood or steel-frame structures that offer more space, privacy and protection than tents or tarps. They are meant to last three to five years, tiding over a displaced population while permanent homes are repaired or built. But some disaster experts are ambivalent about them, as is the Haitian president, according to a senior government official. President Préval worries that transitional shelters might never be replaced, the official said, adding, “He thinks he will be attacked for creating new bidonvilles,” or slums.

International experts estimate that Haiti will need 125,000 transitional shelters; so far, just over 5,500 shelters have been completed, mostly in the countryside where land issues are simpler.

In Carrefour, the Adventist agency has set up a well-oiled production workshop, where imported wood is cut and assembled into kits then constructed and painted on site by local workers. Anton De Vries, a South African engineer who runs the shelter operation, which is co-sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development , said he was determined to provide a home for every family in the Adventist-run tent city.

Tall and cheery, Mr. De Vries recently bumped into a local landlord, Henry Frantz St. Surin, on a construction site and displayed some of the hale-and-hearty diplomatic skill that has served him well here. “Thank you for your contribution,” he said in a booming voice. “You are one of the few people who allow others to use their land. I'm sure God will bless you.”

Mr. De Vries also crossed paths with one of his new shelter recipients. “Yoo-hoo!” Ms. Louis cried out to him. She ushered him inside, showing off her décor, a mélange of cloth flowers and stuffed animals, and explained why she preferred her new house to her old one: “If another earthquake happens, this one is not going to kill me.”

Mr. De Vries said his biggest frustration had been bartering with customs authorities. “We work in very close partnership with the Haitian government,” he said with a tight smile. He said that he did not understand why the government did not fast-track emergency supplies and housing materials through its port. He has managed to free 21 shipping containers, enough to complete just over 500 shelters. But another 21 containers have been “held hostage” by the customs agency for more than three weeks now — at a storage fee of almost $16,000 so far.

The port problem has pushed Mr. De Vries to buy local wood. Concerned about deforestation, he did not want to. But he is determined to keep building.

Talk Versus Action

For two months after the quake, Haiti's architects and planners worked in Pétionville to prepare the post-disaster needs assessment and action plan required to obtain international financial support for the reconstruction of Haiti.

Their dreams were grand. They envisioned Haiti 2030 as a self-reliant, democratically stable, decentralized and reforested land with decent housing and education for all, a national highway network, a hearty fruit and tuber industry, animal husbandry, industrial zones and tourism.

“The government is doing good things in thinking to the future,” said Mario C. Flores, director of disaster response field operations for Habitat for Humanity . “I only wish that all those aspirational plans would become operational.”

At a conference in New York on March 31, donors promised Haiti $5.3 billion over the next 18 months. Two weeks later, although questions about giving up control to foreigners arose, the Parliament approved the creation of an interim reconstruction commission to be led by former President Bill Clinton , the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, and Jean-Max Bellerive, Haiti's prime minister. It took another couple of months to pick its 26 Haitian and international members, and the search for an executive director is still under way.

The reconstruction commission met for the first and only time so far in mid-June.

After that meeting, a Haitian journalist asked why there had been so much talk and so little progress. Mr. Bellerive mentioned road-building and other projects in the countryside and said, “There is a lot being done actually but some of it may not be visible if you confine yourself to the Port-au-Prince area,” where the bulk of the destruction occurred.

Earlier in the spring, Mr. Bellerive and Mr. Voltaire, who is an architect and urban planner, had visited Mr. Clinton at his home in Chappaqua, N.Y. At one point, Mr. Clinton kept getting distracted by incoming e-mail messages. According to Mr. Voltaire, Mr. Clinton said, “If I receive one more suggestion for the ideal house for Haiti, I will explode.” And Mr. Bellerive said, “You, too?”

After that, the government hired a London firm to solicit and sift through proposals for “the best, safest and most sustainable housing designs of the future. “In October, several dozen model homes will be built and displayed at a housing expo in Oranger, Haiti. People will be selected to live in the prototypes and to evaluate them, Mr. Voltaire said.

Eventually, permanent housing will be built, he said, at one of a few sites that the government is seizing through eminent domain and hoping to turn into new population centers.

One of those sites is Corail-Cesselesse, about 10 miles north of Port-au-Prince, where the first planned tent city was installed in April on a chalky gravel plane. Hastily created for displaced people who seemed most at risk from flooding or landslides in another camp, it is now home to about 5,000 who live in an orderly grid of white tents far from their bustling urban neighborhood.

Some aid groups criticize the location. “That site does not represent clear strategic thinking on the part of the government,” said Ms. Schindall of Oxfam. “It's like the Sudan. There's not a tree in sight. And people feel marooned. They are having major issues finding income-generating activities and soon they are going to have trouble feeding themselves. It's inevitable.”

But several residents interviewed seemed willing to tolerate the camp's remoteness because living there puts them in line for the transitional shelters that are supposed to be erected there, and then for the permanent houses that may follow.

Jean Mérite Pierre, a mason, asked visitors to accompany him to the barren land.

“Look at all this space,” he said, sweeping his arms over an empty lot. “All those people who died lived in houses that collapsed like dominoes. So even if we are uprooted, life could be better here. We were renters, almost all of us. Here, maybe we can own a house someday. That's what they say. You have to believe them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/world/americas/11haiti.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Synthetic Marijuana Spurs State Bans

ST. LOUIS — Seated at a hookah lounge in the Tower Grove district, Albert Kuo trained his lighter above a marbleized glass pipe stuffed with synthetic marijuana . Inhaling deeply, Mr. Kuo, an art student at an area college, singed the pipe's leafy contents, emitting a musky cloud of smoke into the afternoon light.

Mr. Kuo, 25, had gathered here with a small cohort of friends for what could be the last time they legally get high in Missouri on a substance known popularly as K2, a blend of herbs treated with synthetic marijuana.

“I know it's not going to kill me,” said Mr. Kuo, who likened the drug's effects to clove cigarettes . “It's a waste of time, effort and money to ban something like this.”

On Tuesday, Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, signed a bill prohibiting possession of K2. Missouri is the nation's eighth state this year to ban the substance, which has sent users to emergency rooms across the country complaining of everything from elevated heart rates and paranoia to vomiting and hallucinations .

Investigators blame the drug in at least one death, and this month, Gov. Mike Beebe of Arkansas, a Democrat, signed an emergency order banning the substance. Similar prohibitions are pending in at least six other states, including Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Ohio, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures .

“It's like a tidal wave,” said Ward Franz, the state representative who sponsored Missouri's legislation. “It's almost an epidemic. We're seeing middle-school kids walking into stores and buying it.”

Often marketed as incense, K2 — which is also known as Spice, Demon or Genie — is sold openly in gas stations, head shops and, of course, online. It can sell for as much as $40 per gram. The substance is banned in many European countries, but by marketing it as incense and clearly stating that it is not for human consumption, domestic sellers have managed to evade federal regulation.

“Everybody knows it's not incense,” said Barbara Carreno, a spokeswoman for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration . “That's done with a wink and a nod.”

First developed in the lab of a Clemson University chemist, John W. Huffman , K2's active ingredients are synthetic cannabinoids — research-grade chemicals that were created for therapeutic purposes but can also mimic the narcotic effects of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

In a statement, Mr. Huffman said the chemicals were not intended for human use. He added that his lab had developed them for research purposes only, and that “their effects in humans have not been studied and they could very well have toxic effects.”

Nevertheless, pure forms of the chemical are available online, and investigators believe that many sellers are buying bulk quantities, mixing them with a potpourrilike blend of herbs and labeling the substance K2.

“It's not like there's one K2 distributor — everybody is making their own stuff, calling it K2 and selling it, which is the most unnerving aspect,” said Dr. Christopher Rosenbaum, an assistant professor of toxicology at the University of Massachusetts who is studying the effects of K2 in emergency room patients.

The American Association of Poison Control Centers reports that so far this year there have been 567 K2-related calls, up from 13 in 2009. But investigators add that no one is really certain what is in K2, and people are arriving at emergency rooms with symptoms that would not normally be associated with marijuana or a synthetic form of the drug.

“I don't know how many people are going for a box of doughnuts after smoking K2, but they're sure getting some other symptoms,” said Dr. Anthony Scalzo, a professor of emergency medicine at the St. Louis University who first reported a rise in K2-related cases and is collaborating with Dr. Rosenbaum in researching K2's effects. “These are very anxious, agitated people that are requiring several doses of sedatives .”

Dr. Scalzo, who is also the medical director for the Missouri Poison Control Center, added that although tests had found cannabinoids in K2, it was unclear “whether the reaction we're seeing is just because of dose effect, or if there's something in there we haven't found yet.”

That question remains at the center of an investigation into the death of David Rozga, an Iowa teenager who last month committed suicide shortly after smoking K2. Mr. Rozga, 18, had graduated from high school one week earlier and was planning to attend college in the fall.

According to the police report, Mr. Rozga smoked the substance with friends and then began “freaking out,” saying he was “going to hell.” He then returned to his parents' house, grabbed a rifle from the family's gun room and shot himself in the head.

“There was nothing in the investigation to show he was depressed or sad or anything,” said Detective Sgt. Brian Sher of the Indianola Police Department, who led the investigation. “I've seen it all. I don't know what else to attribute it to. It has to be K2.”

But many users say they are undaunted by reports of negative reactions to the drug. K2 does not show up on drug tests, and users say that while they would like to know what is in it, they would take their chances if it means a clean urine test.

The Missouri ban, which goes into effect Aug. 28, prohibits several cannabinoids that investigators have found in K2 and related products. Nevertheless, investigators and researchers say that bans like the one in Missouri are little more than “Band-Aids” that street chemists can sidestep with a slight alteration to a chemical's molecular structure.

“Once it goes illegal, I already have something to replace it with,” said Micah Riggs, who sells the product at his coffee shop in Kansas City. “There are hundreds of these synthetics, and we just go about it a couple of them at a time.”

Investigators say that a more effective ban might arise once the Drug Enforcement Administration completes its review of cannabinoids, placing them under the Controlled Substances Act. Currently, however, only one such substance is controlled under the act , though the agency has listed four others as “chemicals of concern.”

“It's hard to keep up with everything,” said Ms. Carreno of the D.E.A., adding, “The process of scheduling something is thorough and time consuming, and there are a lot of gifted chemists out there.”

Meanwhile, states are largely on their own when it comes to controlling this new breed of synthetic cannabis, which often comes down to a game of cat-and-mouse where law enforcement agents, politicians, users and their families must formulate new responses as each iteration of a drug comes to market.

“Where does a parent go to get answers?” asked Mike Rozga, who said he learned of K2 only after his son's death. “We talk to our kids about sex. We talk to our kids about drugs, and we talk to our kids about drinking and being responsible. But how can you talk to your kids about something you don't even know about?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/us/11k2.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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The Hard Work of Gun Control

Thirteen days ago, the Supreme Court undermined Chicago's ban on handguns by applying the Second Amendment to the states, ruling that people have a right to protect their homes with a gun. Four days after that, Chicago passed another handgun restriction that edged right up to the line drawn by the court. And on Tuesday, a group of gun dealers and enthusiasts sued the city again to overturn the new law.

Bullets are flying on city streets, but the vital work of limiting gun use has become a cat-and-mouse game. Beleaguered citizens deserve better from both sides.

We strongly disagreed with the reasoning that led the court to find an individual right to bear arms in the Second Amendment, ending handgun bans in Washington, D.C., in 2008 and everywhere else last month. Nonetheless, the law of the land is now that people have a constitutional right to a gun in their home for self-defense.

That right can be limited, the court explicitly said, with reasonable restrictions. But it provided very little guidance as to what is reasonable, leaving lawyers, lawmakers and judges to thrash it out in a bog of lawsuits that could take many years to clear.

Cities and states have a need to be extremely tough in limiting access to guns, but they need to do it with more forethought than went into the Chicago ordinance. Lawmakers there sensibly limited residents to one operable handgun per home, with a strict registration and permitting process. But residents are not allowed to buy a gun in the city. They must receive firearms training, but ranges are illegal in the city. Chicago lawmakers sloughed off on the suburbs the responsibility to regulate sales and training. As a result, more people will travel more miles to transport guns.

The law is likely to draw heightened equal-protection scrutiny from skeptical judges at all levels. Chicago would have been better off allowing gun sales under the strict oversight of the police department, which could then better check the backgrounds and movements of every buyer and seller. The District of Columbia passed a largely similar ordinance last year after its law was struck down by the court. But it permits sales at the few gun shops in the district, and a federal judge upheld that ordinance after it was challenged. It could stand as a model for other cities.

As flawed as the Chicago regulation is, the lawsuit challenging it is entirely over the top. It disputes virtually every aspect of the law as a violation of the Second Amendment and poses ludicrous hypothetical situations to show that everyone needs a gun. “If an elderly widow lives in an unsafe neighborhood and asks her son to spend the night because she has recently received harassing phone calls,” the lawsuit complains, “the son may not bring his registered firearm with him to his mother's home as an aid to the defense of himself and his mother.” Putting granny in the middle of a neighborhood firefight is preferable to having her simply call the police?

The gun lobby is going to attack virtually every gun ordinance it can find, if only to see what it can get away with now. (Last week, the same lawyers who brought the Chicago and Washington cases sued North Carolina, challenging a law that prohibits carrying weapons during a state of emergency.)

Lawmakers need not match the lobby's obduracy. Cities and states should counter with tough but sensible laws designed to resist legal challenges and keep gun possession to a minimum.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/opinion/11sun1.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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