Gunmen kill 17 at party in Mexico

The attackers say nothing but open fire on revelers in Torreon. The party had been announced on Facebook by a gay group, but police suspect drug trafficking, not hate, motivated the assailants.

By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

July 19, 2010

Reporting from Mexico City

The announcement went out on Facebook, an open invitation summoning revelers to a birthday party at the Italia Inn in the northern Mexican city of Torreon.

But early Sunday, as musicians serenaded amid food, drink and dancing, gunmen burst into the party, blocked the exits and, saying not a word, opened fire, killing 17 men and women and injuring a similar number.

It was one of the highest single-incident death tolls since the beginning of Mexico's raging drug war, which has claimed nearly 25,000 lives from the time that President Felipe Calderon launched a military-led offensive against powerful narcotics cartels in December 2006.

The dead identified by Sunday afternoon were in their 20s and 30s, some related to one another, according to the prosecutor's office for the state of Coahuila, where Torreon is located. Coahuila borders Texas, and while beset by the same violence terrorizing other border states, has received less publicity.

Authorities confirmed the number of dead and said some of the 18 injured were in critical condition.

Pictures from the scene showed toppled white plastic chairs, scattered musical instruments and cups and plates and shoes strewn on a blood-splattered floor alongside a tented pool. Empty beer bottles were lined up on tabletops; bullet holes punctured the walls.

"The party was ongoing … when gunmen arrived in several vehicles, disembarked and, without uttering a word to those in attendance, opened fire," Jesus Torres, state attorney general, said in a statement. The assailants fled.

Investigators recovered 122 spent shells from high-velocity assault rifles.

Many of the partygoers at the event that began Saturday evening were attracted by an invitation that appeared on Facebook, according to reporters at the Torreon edition of Milenio newspaper and television. The posting included directions and a map.

Organizers of the party were a gay group, Milenio said, but the invitation specifically said the event was open to all. Although that raised the possibility of an anti-gay hate crime, most speculation centered on drug traffickers as the assailants.

Violence has surged in Coahuila, a smuggling transit point, and neighboring states as the longtime dominant Gulf and Sinaloa cartels battle the paramilitary Zetas. Mass shootings at clubs, bars, rehab clinics and other sites are now common in once-calm cities such as Torreon, as well as in other more troubled neighboring municipalities.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-attack-20100719,0,7327599,print.story

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People enjoy the sun at the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. “I like the space, the wildness of it,” one fan says.“I think it's even too controlled.... They shouldn't have closing hours.”

Grandiose Nazi airport becomes a wild and free park Luckily for cash-strapped Berlin, a new generation is happy to enjoy the unstructured landscape of Tempelhof Park as it is. By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times July 19, 2010 Reporting from Berlin When an airport that symbolized the sweep of 20th century German history shut down in the capital of this industrious nation two years ago, everyone had an idea about what to do with the colossal piece of prime real estate. Turn it into a shopping center and amusement park, one famous architect urged. Nonsense, others scoffed — we need more affordable housing. Or how about a scientific research center with giant satellite dishes connecting Berlin to the heavens?

Or maybe a giant artificial lake with a beach at one end?

Architects drew up plans. Politicians convened hearings. Editorialists wrote impassioned commentaries.

But in the end, the city's plans for Tempelhof Airport, built under Adolf Hitler as a grandiose monument to Nazi ambitions and Berlin's lifeline during a Cold War blockade that emotionally bound this nation to America, turned out to be in tune with the current laid-back, not to mention penny-pinching, zeitgeist of Germany.

It did nothing.

Oh, city workers painted some big white X's on the mile-long runways so some absentminded pilot doesn't land his 747 on them. Then Tempelhof reopened as a vast no-frills park, and grassy stretches that once bent back and forth with the ebb and flow of jet fuel exhaust now shelter flop-haired dreamers staring off into a blue sky dotted with kites.

"There are not many places where you can see the horizon in this city," said Renee Heyer, an unemployed 43-year-old printer, strolling by himself through the park on a lazy Sunday afternoon. "They don't have to build anything here. It's perfect the way it is."

Previously a testing ground for Orville Wright, Tempelhof Airport roughly traces Germany's evolution from Nazi extremism and pomposity through the resilience, austerity and conservatism of the Cold War, to a time of postwar affluence; and then onward to today's Germany, especially Berlin, where unemployment is high, expectations are low and cafes are full by early afternoon.

The park is almost completely flat and green, with a few clumps of trees connected by service roadways and a smattering of crisscrossing dirt trails.

On a recent afternoon, a woman on rollerblades pulled a bicycle along the park's main runway. Nearby, a family played Hacky Sack on a grassy stretch. And everywhere groups of children played, their moms watching, but not too closely.

At a shaded, woodsy area once used by American military personnel and their families for recreation, young boys played basketball and pot-bellied men sat in plastic chairs watching sports on a television set up next to the park's sole snack shop.

But mostly, Berliners wandered through the prairie-like fields of an oasis that at 950 acres is even bigger than New York's Central Park and almost 50% larger than the historic Tiergarten, the elegantly landscaped 19th century park at the city center.

"I like the space, the wildness of it," said Caspar Fischer, 29, an aspiring film and television producer. "I think it's even too controlled. I think they should let it even be more relaxed. They shouldn't have closing hours."

Among the largest structures in the world, the old terminal building was designed not by Hitler's top architect, Albert Speer, but almost worse, by a deputy who aspired to his pomposity. He created an ominous and imposing edifice, decorated with eagles that grasped swastikas which have long been scraped off. Today, it's separated from the park by a fence.

For now the airport building, stretching nearly 4,000 feet, will be left as it is. Some space is occasionally rented out for fashion shows or conferences, but it lies mostly empty, a hulking monument to an era most would like to forget.

The Allied forces knew they would need the airport after the war, so they mostly spared it in bombing runs that scorched much of Berlin. They probably couldn't have destroyed it easily even if they had wanted to: Nazi architecture tended to be as resilient as it was menacing. "He who builds bunkers throws bombs," said the graffiti written on a fortress-like Berlin air raid shelter that withstood numerous attempts to tear it down into the mid-1990s.

Tempelhof, of course, was at the end of President Truman's famous air bridge during the 1948-49 Soviet blockade of the Western-controlled section of the city. An abstract monument bearing the names of the 70 British and American "Candy Bombers" who died ferrying food and supplies to the city remains, its three fingers representing the three air routes stretching toward the sky.

As Cold War tensions eased, Tempelhof became a U.S. military base as well as the city's main civilian air link. And even as traffic moved to the more modern Tegel and later Schoenefeld airports, it continued to serve private planes and high-end travelers from other European cities.

By the last decade, however, Tempelhof's location in one of the most densely packed residential neighborhoods of Berlin made its continued use untenable. It shut its doors to all flights in 2008. A massive new international airport will draw all aviation outside the city by 2012.

For decades, Berlin's bombed-out empty spaces have drawn ambitious architects from all over the world. For a while, the fall of the Berlin Wall only seemed to accelerate the construction of space-age corporate headquarters and neoclassical glass-and-steel towers. The 4-year-old main railway station, already the biggest and busiest in Europe, is a translucent palace of glass, a shimmering monument to the nation's success and democratic values.

But Berlin just didn't have the bucks or wherewithal do anything so inventive with Tempelhof. So it did some minimal landscaping and dispatched rent-a-cops on bikes to patrol the place, posting dawn-to-dusk hours in what has turned into a tranquil mecca for everything on two wheels or two feet.

All this is in tune with a nation that continues to move away from its stern militarism of the early 20th century and the prim, hard-working asceticism of the postwar years.

On any given day in a country that once defined the Protestant work ethic, Berlin's youth flood flea markets where they while away entire days smoking hash, vegan-friendly restaurants are beginning to catch up with Imbiss snack shops selling sausage smothered in curry-flecked ketchup, and touchy-feely parents dote on their children.

The city says it plans to spend up to $70 million over the next few years to spruce up Tempelhof Park in preparation for a 2017 garden show. But who knows? Berlin is flat broke and the country is tightening its belt like never before. So says Chancellor Angela Merkel. Many say shelve any plans and just let the park be.

"It needn't be turned into anything," said Sarah Hartung, a 40-year-old psychologist and mother of two children, 2 and 4. "Just leave it! Just leave it as it is. And it doesn't have to be such an organized thing. It's a nice place to chill — a purpose-free environment."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-germany-tempelhof-20100719,0,983173,print.story

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ACLU wants to halt key part of California DNA crime program

As state forensic scientists savor their success in using DNA to nab a suspect in the Grim Sleeper case, a federal court is considering shutting down a DNA collection program the state says has helped solve several violent crimes.

"All of us on this panel have wrestled with this," said Judge Milan Smith, a George W. Bush appointee. "It is a very hard case." The hearing had been scheduled for 15 minutes. It lasted more than an hour.

Nearly half the states and the federal government now take DNA samples during arrests. Rulings nationwide on the constitutionality of the practice have been divided, and the issue is expected eventually to reach the U.S. Supreme Court .

Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown strongly defends DNA collection during felony arrests, which the state began in  January. He contends that nearly 1,000 DNA samples from unsolved crimes have been matched to DNA taken during arrests, many of them for nonviolent crimes.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/07/aclu-wants-to-curtain-key-part-of-california-dna-crime-program.html#more

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From the New York Times

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Call for Justice Sets Off a Debate

NEWBERRY, S.C. — Before dawn on June 2, law enforcement officials here say, a white man shot and killed a black co-worker at close range. Then, he tied his body to the back of a truck and dragged it for nearly 11 miles before the rope broke, leaving the mangled corpse of the victim, Anthony Hill, on a bloody patch of road.

On Saturday, black-clad members of the national New Black Panther Party marched to the courthouse steps to demand that the case be classified as a hate crime.

All that seems fairly straightforward, even par for the course. But on close examination, this story unfolds like origami in reverse, saying less about racism in the South than about the fraught posturing of the summer's raging national conversation on race.

“We keep finding these surrogates and calling them a racial dialogue, but instead it's just drama without a substantive discussion,” said Susan M. Glisson, the director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Oxford, Miss. “It's like that old saying, ‘You shed more heat than light.' ”

In recent days, the New Black Panthers have been at the center of an unrelated furor over what conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin say is reverse racism in the Obama administration. And the New Black Panther Party is itself a hate group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center . Even Bobby Seale, a leader of the original Black Panther Party of the 1960s, has called it “a black racist hate group” that is usurping the original Panther name.

Here in Newberry, a town better known for its college and its opera house in what was once the egg-and-dairy capital of South Carolina, the sight of beret-topped men with walkie-talkies and “black power” placards attracted curious spectators.

“It's really interesting that there's a hate group taking a position on calling something a hate crime,” said Rebecca Smith, a white retired auctioneer who sat with her husband on the sidewalk in front of their house, watching the march go by. “They kind of cancel each other out.”

The march and demonstration attracted several hundred of Newberry's black residents, who pumped their fists in the air and agreed to support the group's seven demands, including justice for Mr. Hill, reparations for slavery and “self-improvement in the black community.”

But several people, asked why they had come, did not bring up the killing. Instead, they talked about the need for better housing and programs for youth, the problem of gang violence and what they said was racial profiling by the police. Many exhorted the audience to become more involved in community activities and their children's lives.

“We're here to try to unify the community, especially black people,” said Tyrone Martin, a manager at a fiberglass plant.

Sheriff Lee Foster, one of a seemingly endless supply of law enforcement officers from a jumble of local and state agencies who were mustered to keep the Newberry peace, looked on unimpressed. “This is not about Anthony Hill,” he said. “This is something that they have hitched their wagon to, to allow them to advance their agenda.”

Indeed, the Hill case does not cry out as an example of racism or incompetence on the part of law enforcement officials. The man charged with his slaying, Gregory Collins, was smoked out of his mobile home with tear gas and arrested within hours of the body's discovery. A broken piece of rope was still tied to his truck, the police said.

South Carolina has no hate crime statute, so the Federal Bureau of Investigation was called in. Federal authorities must determine whether Mr. Collins will face an additional charge under the federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, named in part after a black man who in 1998 in Jasper, Tex., was dragged to death behind a pickup truck . A contingent of the New Black Panthers, armed with assault rifles and shotguns, protested in Jasper at the time.

If convicted of murder, Mr. Collins faces 30 years to life in prison. The prosecutor, Jerry Peace, said he did not yet know if the crime included the aggravating factors that would qualify it for the death penalty. Charles Grose, Mr. Collin's appointed lawyer, declined to comment.

It is not clear if the Newberry killing was, in fact, racially motivated. Mr. Hill, 30, and Mr. Collins, 19, worked and lunched together at a local poultry plant and appeared to be friends. The day before the killing, Mr. Collins picked Mr. Hill up at home and they went to a shooting range, Sheriff Foster said. They rented movies at Wal-Mart and repaired to Mr. Collins's house, the police said.

Rumors have swirled that the killing was actually a crime of passion involving a woman, but the police say they are still looking for a motive.

Rumors have also swirled, thanks largely to the Panthers' leader, Malik Zulu Shabazz, a lawyer from Washington, that Mr. Collins had Confederate battle flags and white supremacist paraphernalia and tattoos.

“It's obvious he's got information we don't have,” Sheriff Foster said of Mr. Shabazz. “We need to subpoena him to come before the grand jury to give evidence.” The police did find more than 20 guns in Mr. Collins's home.

Mr. Shabazz said that if a black victim is tied with rope and dragged by a white man, it is a hate crime on its face.

The national attention on the New Panthers has centered on a 2008 video showing two members, one with a baton, at a polling station in Philadelphia. The Justice Department dropped a voter intimidation case against them last year after obtaining an injunction against one of the men, King Samir Shabazz, saying the evidence did not support prosecution.

In recent days, commentators like Rush Limbaugh have delighted in showing a video of King Samir Shabazz, who the group says was suspended for a year, saying, “I hate white people. All of them. Every last iota,” and suggesting the killing of white babies.

But there were no such calls to violence on Saturday. “I'm being totally, totally mischaracterized,” Malik Zulu Shabazz said. “I have a broad appeal.”

Tiffany Gibson, 25, a black graphic designer, said the New Black Panthers had helped her form a group called the Newberry Black Unity Coalition.

The killing, she said, was a galvanizing event that she hoped would lead to community improvements. But, she added, “Gregory Collins's crime against Anthony Hill was murder. Gregory Collins's crime against the city of Newberry and all of South Carolina is terrorism.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/us/19panther.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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Creating Safer and Kinder Districts to Grow Old

New York City has given pedestrians more time to cross at more than 400 intersections in an effort to make streets safer for older residents. The city has sent yellow school buses, filled not with children but with elderly people, on dozens of grocery store runs over the past seven months.

The city has allowed artists to use space and supplies in 10 senior centers in exchange for giving art lessons. And it is about to create two aging-improvement districts, parts of the city that will become safer and more accessible for older residents.

People live in New York because it is like no place else — pulsating with life, energy and a wealth of choices — but there is some recognition among city planners that it could be a kinder and gentler place in which to grow old.

The city's efforts, gaining strength as the baby boomer generation starts reaching retirement age, are born of good intentions as well as an economic strategy.

“New York has become a safer city, and we have such richness of parks and culture that we're becoming a senior retirement destination,” said Linda I. Gibbs, New York's deputy mayor for health and human services. “They come not only with their minds and their bodies; they come with their pocketbooks.”

The round trip back to cities among empty nesters, rejoining those who simply grow old where they were once young, goes on, of course, across the country, and New York is not the only place trying to ease that passage. Cities like Cleveland and Portland, Ore., have taken steps to become more “age-friendly.” But perhaps never has a city as fast-paced and youth-oriented as New York taken on the challenge.

The Department of City Planning predicts that in 20 years, New York's shares of schoolchildren and older people will be about the same, 15 percent each, a sharp change from 1950, when schoolchildren outnumbered older residents by more than 2 to 1. By 2030, the number of New Yorkers age 65 and over — a result of the baby boomers, diminished fertility and increasing longevity — is expected to reach 1.35 million, up 44 percent from 2000.

Their economic power is significant. About a third of the nation's population is over 50, and they control half of the country's discretionary spending, according to a recent report by AARP , a group representing the interests of retirees. In some ways, the city has tackled the toughest challenges of making itself attractive to its older residents and those across the country who might consider retiring to the Upper East Side or Brooklyn Heights.

Crime has been in decline for close to two decades; the city has added more parkland than at any similar period in its history; and the 311 system has made dealing with the bureaucracy of government agencies and social services more manageable.

Now, the city is looking to enhance life here in more modest, but meaningful, ways. The New York Academy of Medicine adopted the idea of creating an age-friendly city from the World Health Organization in 2007, and went to the City Council and the Bloomberg administration for financial and political support. The academy has held more than 30 town hall meetings and focus groups with thousands of older people across the city. This summer, it is holding more intimate focus groups in East Harlem and on the Upper West Side.

What people say they want most of all is to live in a neighborly place where it is safe to cross the street and where the corner drugstore will give them a drink of water and let them use the bathroom. They ask for personal shoppers at Fairway to help them find the good deals on groceries. They want better street drainage, because it is hard to jump over puddles with walkers and wheelchairs.

“No bingo played here” could be Ms. Gibbs's motto. She is the conceptual artist behind the city's initiative, working with the Academy of Medicine. She is at the tail end of the boomer generation, having turned 51 on Sunday, her silvery bob a rebuke to fears of aging.

“The whole conversation around aging has, in my mind, gone from one which is kind of disease oriented and tragic, end- of-life oriented,” Ms. Gibbs said, to being “much more about the strength and the fidelity and the energy that an older population contributes to our city.”

One of her ideas is to hold a contest to design a “perch” to put in stores or on sidewalks where tired older residents doing errands could take a break. When boomers talk, she listens.

On Thursday, Dorian Block, a policy associate at the academy, held a focus group at the Carver Houses, a city housing project at 103rd Street and Madison Avenue in East Harlem. Sixteen people showed up. (Some meetings have drawn hundreds.)

They complained about broken elevators and litter, and some confessed to being lonely. They said that more stores should have public bathrooms. Now, said Dolores Marquez, 72, “I go to McDonald's and then I take a coffee because I have to go to the bathroom.”

The academy plans to incorporate the results of the focus groups into two pilot aging-improvement districts, one in East Harlem and the other on the Upper West Side, somewhat akin to business-improvement districts.

The exact details of how the districts will function are still being worked out, but the goal is to create a public-private partnership that would encourage businesses to voluntarily adopt amenities for the elderly. Examples could include window stickers that identify businesses as age-friendly; extra benches; adequate lighting; menus with large type; and even happy hour for older residents.

The new districts will be run by the academy, and eventually handed over to community groups and expanded to other neighborhoods, said Ruth Finkelstein, the academy's vice president for health policy. Some worry that what the Bloomberg administration is proposing is a menu of quick and dirty solutions for older residents while, in a tough economy, traditional services like senior centers and bus routes are being cut back.

“When we're talking about age-friendly, it should not only be the boomers who have retired from law firms, as opposed to the people who have worked all their lives and are now living in Brownsville,” said David Jones, president of the Community Service Society, which advocates for poor people and immigrants.

Fredda Vladeck, an expert at the United Hospital Fund in “naturally occurring retirement communities,” said she worried that the city would forget the frail older people. Ms. Gibbs said the point was to build on what is already there, and to make life better for everyone.

The city enlisted students at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service to develop a walking survey that, if adopted, will rate the city's age-friendliness by standards like the frequency of cracked sidewalks and hospitals.

Slowing the pace of life is tough in New York, where every red light is viewed as a challenge. But the city is trying. While most adults average four feet per second when crossing the street, older residents manage only three, transportation experts say. So signals have been retimed at intersections like Broadway and 72nd Street, where pedestrians now have 29 seconds to cross, four more than before.

Even senior centers are being redefined as places with artists in residence, like Judy Hugentobler, a sculptor from Staten Island. Ms. Hugentobler is teaching art classes at the Educational Alliance's Sirovich Senior Center, on East 12th Street, in exchange for being able to use the kilns, clay and glazes in her projects.

“Senior centers are great, but they have a stigma whether you like it or not,” said Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer of the Upper West Side. “It's just not for everybody. But what is for everybody is a bench. What is for everybody is discounts at the grocery store when you're over 65.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/nyregion/19aging.html?hp

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