'It was a terrifying time'

More than 100 women died during a 10-year period that serial killers roamed South L.A.

By Scott Gold and Andrew Blankstein, Los Angeles Times

August 4, 2010

On a Monday morning in the spring of 2007, a prosecutor named Truc Do stood to tell a jury about the world in which Chester Turner had killed — and to offer a requiem for a dark chapter in the heart of Los Angeles.

Turner lived with his mom on Century Boulevard, drank fortified wine and made a sporadic living delivering pizzas and selling crack. His murderous binge, which took the lives of 10 women, began in 1987, a perilous time in South Los Angeles.

Jobs had vanished. Crack cocaine, a new drug so powerful and profitable it was worth dying over, ravaged the neighborhood. Gangs carved up the streets. The LAPD recorded a violent crime every eight minutes. It was a world, the prosecutor told the jury, in which "life itself is degraded."

It was a world in which people could be killed with impunity.

The recent arrest of another man accused of being a serial killer active in that era, Lonnie David Franklin Jr. — allegedly the long-sought Grim Sleeper — prompted jubilation and noisy public pronouncements. The celebrations served to obscure, once again, a terrible truth about South Los Angeles: During a 10-year period beginning in 1984, multiple serial killers operated there, all of them targeting young, poor, African American women.

All told, between 1984 and 1993, LAPD detectives estimate that more than 100 women, almost all African American, were killed in South L.A. and the surrounding neighborhoods.

Some of the cases have been solved; others remain open. Detectives say many are tied to five serial killers operating in the area.

Franklin, 57, has been charged with 10 counts of murder. Turner, 43, is on death row after raping and strangling 10 women, one of whom was six months pregnant. Louis Craine was convicted of strangling four women between 1984 and 1987; he later died in prison, at 31. Michael Hughes , 54, was accused of killing eight, four in South L.A. and nearby Inglewood. And Daniel Lee Seibert confessed to killing 13 across the United States, two of them in South L.A.; he died in prison, at 53, in 2008.

Police believe they killed several additional women as well.

Biological evidence suggests that at least two more men, who have not been apprehended, were each responsible for at least four more deaths, officials said. That would mean at least seven serial killers were preying on women in the same neighborhood at roughly the same time.

During the years in which they were active, the South Los Angeles killers never earned the noir nicknames of the region's other infamous killers — the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler.

Those other crimes were notorious sagas that gained national attention and had parts of the metropolis in a state of panic. By contrast, few people in South L.A., including parents of victims, were even aware of a serial killer operating in their neighborhood — much less five or more. While the more publicized cases had distinctive hallmarks, in South L.A. there were so many people being killed, almost all of them from the margins of society, that it was difficult for neighbors or police to pinpoint any patterns.

The rapes and murders of dozens of young women were, effectively, lost in the crime wave.

"Could you imagine — more than 100 women killed and nobody notices?" said Margaret Prescod, who founded an organization 24 years ago to press for a more aggressive response to the killings and now hosts a radio show. "Could you imagine it in Beverly Hills? Palos Verdes?"

South Los Angeles was once a storied African American community. The nation's first hotel financed by African American businessmen was built in 1928 on South Central Avenue. West Coast jazz was pretty much invented in the surrounding clubs, and a revolutionary notion — of middle-class African American families — was nurtured there.

But the neighborhood could never fully shake off its entrenched poverty and bouts of violence. At times, as in the riots of 1965, the area degenerated into civic collapse.

Over time, the factories and union jobs, which had drawn thousands of African American families from Louisiana, Texas and elsewhere, vanished. Public housing moved in, freeway projects divided communities, and residential segregation deepened. Membership in gangs skyrocketed.

By Nov. 18, 1984, when 30-year-old divorcee Sheila Rae Burton , who also used the name Burris, was found stabbed to death on Maie Avenue — making her the first victim linked positively to one of the serial killers, though authorities suspect the killings began before that — South L.A. was in crisis.

That year, Los Angeles police investigated 757 murders, 240% more than they investigated in 2009, and 51,247 violent crimes, 216% more than they investigated in 2009. And they did it with 2,000 fewer officers than they have today.

Veteran LAPD Det. Sal LaBarbera, who was assigned to the 77th Street Division in the mid-1980s, was once dispatched to five homicide scenes in one night.

"It was triage," he said. "I took the first one. My partner took the second. We were leapfrogging each other.... We would process the crime scene and complete our reports in time to go to the next crime scene and do it all over again."

"It was a terrifying time," Det. Cliff Shepard said. "Homicide detectives were overwhelmed."

It would take nearly 20 years, Police Chief Charlie Beck said, for the city to recover "our faith in our ability to affect the outcome." At the time, he said, "it seemed like the situation was hopeless and we would never recover from the downward spiral."

Three-strikes laws and civil injunctions against gangs — two effective law enforcement tools that target career criminals and curtail gang activity — hadn't yet been adopted.

Technology that police take for granted now wouldn't arrive for years. Forget DNA analysis, which would eventually break three of the serial killer cases — detectives are quick to say that they had to use pay phones to coordinate responses to shootings.

Gang members were setting aside revolvers for semiautomatic handguns — so instead of manually reloading, they could swap out magazines of bullets, giving rise to the drive-by shooting.

The LAPD, too, was a different organization than it is today. Officers in South L.A. had adopted paramilitary tactics, crashing through the walls of suspects' homes and wearing balaclava hoods during raids.

Racial animosity and two-way distrust between residents and the police, which would boil over in the 1992 riots, was palpable and meant little cooperation from the community during law enforcement investigations. "It was us against them," said Carol Sobel, a prominent attorney who has fought in court to diversify the department.

Crack, meanwhile, was creating important cultural changes on the streets — particularly for women who were addicts, prostitutes or mentally ill, as were many of the serial killer victims.

Hundreds of addicts became "strawberries"— trading casual sex for small rocks of crack. In previous years, prostitutes had been offered some modicum of protection by their pimps or at least by working in the area's many cheap hotels. Now, driven by addiction and expediency, many forsook any notion of safety, taking clients to abandoned houses, vacant lots and dead-end alleys, which is where their bodies began turning up.

Regina Washington , 27, six months pregnant, was found in a garage off South Figueroa Street. Myrtle Collier , 37, in an alley in Lawndale. Verna Williams , 36, in a stairwell of 68th Street Elementary School.

Barbara Ware grew up in a stable household; her father owned a furniture store on West Florence Avenue. She was a high school graduate. She was raising a daughter. She roller-skated Saturdays and went to church Sundays.

But she too succumbed to crack. On Jan. 10, 1987, her body was found in an alley off East 56th Street, a plastic bag draped over her head, trash covering her body. She was 23.

Ware was the fourth of Lonnie Franklin's victims , according to investigators — but 21 years went by before her parents learned her death was tied to a serial killer.

"At that time, it was just another young African American lady," said her stepmother, Diana Ware. "It didn't get a lot of attention."

She took a breath, then noted that Barbara Ware's daughter is now 30 and has a daughter of her own. "Barbara would be a grandmother," Diana Ware said.

Whether the city could have done more to combat the serial killers at the time remains a touchy issue.

Police bristle at the suggestion. LaBarbera, the LAPD detective, said all of the cases were investigated with "vigor." Police officials say they first formed a task force in 1986 to tackle the killings, assigning 49 detectives who logged 4,800 tips and solved dozens of felonies, including two murders — even if they didn't solve the serial killings right away.

That task force disbanded in 1988, but in 2001, the LAPD created its cold-case unit, charged with examining 9,000 unsolved murders dating to 1960. In 2007, a homeless man found the body of 25-year-old Janecia Peters in a dumpster off Western Avenue. DNA analysis linked that killing to two others that had already been connected to a 1987 slaying, which had, in turn, been linked to seven other deaths through ballistics evidence.

An investigation team dubbed the 800 Task Force, named after the room number in the LAPD's former headquarters where the detectives worked, was formed to examine the connections. That work, and an experimental DNA dragnet, eventually led to the arrest of Lonnie Franklin, the alleged Grim Sleeper — an arrest, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said, which demanded "two decades of exhaustive detective work."

But for Prescod, a founder in 1986 of the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, the relief that came with the latest arrest was tempered by decades of frustration — and the sense that more could have been done.

Prescod's organization had to lobby and cajole to get a reward established in the killings, to get the LAPD to coordinate its efforts with other law enforcement agencies, to get authorities to release to the public a composite sketch of one killer.

For several years, the city insisted on using the label "Prostitution Murders" to refer to the killings. That was not accurate — many, but by no means all, of the victims were prostitutes, and some were also mothers or nursing students — but it wasn't just an issue of semantics, Prescod argued. By portraying the victims of the killers for so many years as the "dregs of society," she said, "it gave a false sense of security to women who were not doing those kinds of things."

Truc Do, the former prosecutor, said the victims of the South L.A. killers weren't always the most sympathetic cases — and, she agreed, that shouldn't matter. Do has since gone into private practice; she is a litigator with the L.A. firm Munger, Tolles & Olson.

"You've got victims that some people may not feel sympathy for, because they had a drug addiction, or prostituted their bodies to feed that addiction," Do said. "It's human nature. But these victims were prey. And they were so vulnerable."

Prescod also cited incidents in which the investigation fell short. Police have acknowledged that they failed to aggressively follow through after a man called 911 to report seeing Barbara Ware's body being hauled out of a van in 1987. Police did eventually release a tape of the call — 22 years later. Authorities also missed an opportunity to catch the alleged Grim Sleeper because his DNA was not collected as required under a 2004 law.

The only woman known to have escaped an attack by the Grim Sleeper gave police a detailed description of his unusual orange Ford Pinto with white racing stripes. Police appear to have canvassed Franklin's street after that, but failed to see he had an orange Pinto. Franklin continued to drive the car for years; neighbors never reported it, though the Pinto was cited in posters at laundromats and markets.

Perhaps the holes in the investigation, Prescod argued, could help explain how most of the killers were so brazen and lived such public lives. Franklin showed one acquaintance a box of women's underwear he kept behind his house. In one case, Chester Turner walked no further to kill than around the corner from his cheap hotel. He also reportedly attended a post-funeral dinner at the family of one victim.

"Lessons can be learned from this," Prescod said. "There is no excuse to have a hierarchy of value in human life."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-serial-killers-20100804,0,5322433,print.story

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Death toll in Mexico's drug war raised to 28,000

At least 28,000 people have been killed in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched a campaign against organized crime and drug traffickers 3 1/2 years ago, the director of Mexico's national security agency said Tuesday  (link in Spanish). Guillermo Valdes, director of the agency known by its Spanish acronym CISEN, offered the number during an official Dialogue on Security with Calderon present.

"It's inevitable that we must accept that violence keeps growing," Valdes said, according to a transcript.

CISEN's figure on deaths in Mexico since December 2006 significantly raises the previous government figure of 24,000, used last month by the federal attorney general.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2010/08/death-toll-drug-war-mexico.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LaPlaza+%28La+Plaza%29

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Missouri voters approve challenge to federal healthcare law

The ballot measure challenges the requirement that Americans buy insurance starting in 2014. It is likely to have little practical effect, but underscores continued GOP hostility to the new law.

By Noam N. Levey, Tribune Washington Bureau

August 4, 2010

Reporting from Washington

Striking a largely symbolic blow at President Obama's healthcare overhaul, Missouri voters approved a ballot measure Tuesday challenging the new law's requirement that Americans buy health insurance starting in 2014.

The proposition, which sought to deny the federal government the authority to penalize people for not getting insurance, is expected to have little practical effect on implementation of the healthcare law.

But the Missouri measure represented the first electoral test for the landmark legislation that Obama signed in March. And it underscored continued hostility to the law from Republican voters.

Tuesday's vote was held in conjunction with the state's Democratic and Republican primaries, but GOP voters were expected to dominate the balloting because their primary included several contests that stirred greater interest.

In November, voters in Oklahoma and Arizona will also consider amendments to their state constitutions that would attempt to head off the insurance mandate.

"There is just a backlash against everything Washington right now," said C.C. Swarens, executive vice president of the Missouri State Medical Assn., which backed the Missouri ballot initiative, known as Proposition C. The group was among several state doctors' groups that diverged from the American Medical Assn., which supported the federal healthcare law.

Opposition to the law has remained particularly intense among Republicans, with nearly 8 in 10 in a recent national USA Today/Gallup survey saying it was a "bad thing."

Public opinion in general remains divided on the law, with several recent surveys suggesting that support may be inching up even as substantial numbers of Americans still favor repealing all or part of it.

But many healthcare and legal experts expect that the real challenge to the law will be settled in the courts. GOP officials in 21 states, including Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, are pursuing a series of legal challenges, arguing that the insurance requirement represents an unconstitutional expansion of federal government power.

One of those lawsuits — by Virginia Atty. Gen. Kenneth Cuccinelli — cleared an early hurdle this week when a federal judge denied a move by the Obama administration to have it dismissed.

Supporters of the healthcare law, including many policy experts, think a mandate with fines for people who do not comply is vital to preventing healthy people from purchasing insurance only after they get sick, thereby pushing up costs for everyone.

But as midterm congressional campaigns heat up, the administration and its allies were wary of raising the profile of a political battle they anticipated they would lose.

And leading backers of the healthcare law, including senior Democrats, consumer advocates and national medical groups, steered clear of the Missouri ballot fight.

The Missouri Hospital Assn., which opposed Proposition C, spent more than $400,000 on mailers that warned that eliminating the mandate could push up costs for hospitals and others who must pay to care for those without insurance.

"We understand that the issue is very controversial," said Dave Dillon, a spokesman for the association. "We thought what was important was to educate voters."

http://www.latimes.com/health/la-na-healthcare-missouri-20100804,0,7961083,print.story

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9 Dead In Manchester, Conn. Workplace Shooting

By DAVID OWENS and DAVE ALTIMARI

August 3, 2010

MANCHESTER

Omar Thornton almost slept through his 6 a.m. wakeup call Tuesday, springing to life only after the teenage brother of his girlfriend nudged him awake.

The 34-year-old kissed his girlfriend Kristi Hannah goodbye, told her he loved her, and then left her East Windsor apartment for work at Hartford Distributors Inc. in Manchester, where he was to meet about 7 a.m. with company and union officials about allegations that he had stolen beer from the beverage wholesaler.

Within hours, he was lying dead on an office floor, having taken his own life as police closed in after a rampage that left eight co-workers dead and made him the biggest mass murderer in state history.

As police worked to unravel what caused Thornton to snap and randomly shoot co-workers as they fled out a back door into nearby woods or sought refuge under desks and other furniture, Hartford Distributors workers consoled each other as they learned who had made it out safely and who had not.

One of Thornton's victims described him as coolly pulling out a gun after the meeting and opening fire.

"He shot at me twice and hit me a couple times," Steve Hollander, chief operating officer of the family-owned business, told The Associated Press. "By just the grace of God, I don't know how he missed [killing] me."

Thornton then "went out on this rampage," Hollander said. "He was cool and calm. He didn't yell. He was cold as ice. He didn't protest when we were meeting with him to show him the video of him stealing. He didn't contest it. He didn't complain. He didn't argue. He didn't admit or deny anything. He just agreed to resign. And then he just unexplainably pulled out his gun and started blasting."

Thornton ran through the warehouse and loading dock area, where up to 40 people were loading cases of beer for morning deliveries, shooting some and letting others live — such as a handicapped woman helplessly sitting at her desk, pleading for her life.

"He ran right by me with the gun," one employee said. "I don't know why he didn't shoot me, too. People were pleading with him to put the gun down and to stop, but he was in his own world at that point."

Vinny Quattropani was at the warehouse, nearing the end of an overnight shift, when he greeted Thornton in a break area, said his father, Mark Quattropani, a 29-year veteran forklift operator for the company who was on vacation Tuesday.

The father said his 20-year-old son was loading beer onto a motorized jack when he saw Thornton about 30 feet away, near a loading dock.

"He saw Omar raising the gun in his direction, not at him, and heard shots," Mark Quattropani said. "He turned to look to see where he was shooting, then he saw Doug [Scruton] hanging off his forklift."

The dead included Bryan Cirigliano and Victor James, fellow drivers and union representatives who fought to save Thornton's job. Craig Pepin, another longtime driver and a soccer coach in his hometown of South Windsor, was killed when he called out to warn co-workers. Scruton and another man who worked in the warehouse, William Ackerman of South Windsor, were also fatally shot. Also killed was Edwin Kennison Jr. of East Hartford. Two victims remained unidentified late Tuesday.

Hollander suffered two gunshot wounds and was treated and released at Hartford Hospital. An unidentified employee remains in critical condition in the intensive care unit at Hartford Hospital.

Thornton killed "many good people today for absolutely no reason at all, people who've never said an unkind word to him," Hollander said. "He was just shooting at anyone that was near him, and just cruelty beyond cruelty."

"Ten seconds before he started shooting, if you had asked me, does he look like he's going to react in any way? I would have said no, he seems calm," Hollander said. "It makes no sense, the people he killed. Why would somebody do such a thing? They were his co-workers, they never … harmed him in any way."

"All of these people were at work, just trying to do their jobs," said Chris Roos, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 1035 in South Windsor.

John Hollis, a legislative liaison for the Teamsters union, said he had been told that Thornton was caught on a video camera in the warehouse stealing beer. Hollis said the purpose of the meeting was to confront Thornton. Cirigliano, the union president, had been "fighting tooth and nail for this guy to get another opportunity," Hollis said.

Manchester Police Chief Marc Montminy said that at the meeting, Thornton had been given the option of resigning or being fired and "was being escorted from the building when the shots rang out."

"At that point, he just snapped and just shot people around him. I think he just shot indiscriminately," said Hollis, who arrived at the warehouse about a half-hour after the shooting.

Thornton had with him a bag, which Hollis said must have contained the handgun. "That's not uncommon, for beer drivers to have a bag for their lunch … and to take their invoices along," Hollis said.

The shooting started shortly after 7:30 a.m. when there were 35 or 40 people in the office and warehouse, said Brett Hollander, the company's director of marketing. "Our shifts were just changing," Hollander said.

At the massive warehouse near the Manchester-South Windsor line, police dealt with a chaotic scene — employees fleeing, a fire inside the building caused when Scruton's forklift truck tipped over, dead and wounded people inside and outside the building and a gunman on the loose inside. The first officers to enter the building found what one described as " heart-breaking carnage."

Police from Manchester and several neighboring communities, including a SWAT team from East Hartford that had been in the midst of a training exercise, converged on the 77,000-square-foot building at 131 Chapel Road and immediately began searching for the gunman.

"The police entered with several different elements of a SWAT unit to clear the building," Montminy said. "They had searched the [warehouse] area and were starting to concentrate on the office area when they found the suspect dead of a gunshot wound." Police did not fire their weapons and Montminy said it appeared that Thornton had killed himself.

After the shootings, Thornton called his mother and told her he had shot some people, that he loved her and his girlfriend, and that he was sorry, said Joanne Hannah of Enfield, whose daughter dated Thornton for the past eight years.

Hannah said that Thornton, who is black, had complained about racial harassment at work. Hannah said that Thornton told her a racial epithet had been written and a noose drawn on a bathroom wall and that Thornton had taken photos of them with his cellphone.

Roos said that Thornton never filed a complaint about racial harassment with the union.

"There has never been a racial discrimination complaint made to the union and there has not been one made to any state or federal office that I'm aware of," Roos said.

Hollis said that the Hollander family "wouldn't tolerate that type of thing."

School buses transported employees away from the site about 9:30 a.m. to Manchester High School, where family and friends gathered and detectives interviewed witnesses and survivors. There were also counselors and clergy to assist family members and employees.

Longtime employee Doug Norwood said he was arriving for work when he saw people fleeing the building. Four co-workers leaped into his Jeep and told him to leave.

Norwood said he took one man home and then circled around a nearby shopping plaza with the others. As they drove, he said they listened to reports coming from inside Hartford Distributors via cellphone.

Norwood said he knew Thornton, but not well. Norwood, a driver who has worked for Hartford Distributors for 24 years, said he had tried to help Thornton adjust to the job when he first joined the company.

"He never really embraced the fraternal aspect of being a beer driver," Norwood said as he sat outside his Manchester home with a few friends Tuesday afternoon, contemplating the day's horror.

Norwood said he didn't know when he would be able to go back to work.

Thornton spent his life in and around East Hartford, Manchester and Hartford. Friends said he didn't smoke or drink and was close to his family. He had no criminal record and had only two speeding tickets, which caused his commercial driver's license to be suspended for three months in early 2009. He also possessed a valid pistol permit. He did experience financial trouble, including a personal bankruptcy in 2000.

Several political leaders, including U.S. Rep. John Larson, D-East Hartford, and Gov. M. Jodi Rell visited the scene Tuesday.

Larson, who is close to the Hollanders and some of the Teamsters officials, said "the Hollander family is one of the most venerated families in the Hartford area." The family has owned the business since 1955, when it was headed by Jules Hollander, father of current President Ross Hollander. His children, Brett and Samara Hollander, also work at the company, as does a cousin, Steve Hollander, who was wounded.

Hollis said that when he arrived at the scene, he stood with Ross Hollander, Roos and Larson. Hollis said the four men hugged each other as the enormity of the tragedy unfolded before them.

"The tears were flowing in all of our eyes," Hollis said. "We talked about some people who we knew for many years, who we knew had been shot. This is a tragedy that will never, never be totally understood."

http://www.courant.com/community/manchester/hc-manchester-working-0804-20100803,0,2209765,print.story

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From the New York Times

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More Workers Face Pay Cuts, Not Furloughs

The furloughs that popped up during the recession are being replaced by a highly unusual tactic: actual cuts in pay.

Local and state governments, as well as some companies, are squeezing their employees to work the same amount for less money in cost-saving measures that are often described as a last-ditch effort to avoid layoffs.

A new report on Tuesday showed a slight dip in overall wages and salaries in June, caused partly by employees working fewer hours.

Though average hourly pay is still higher than when the recession began, the new wage rollbacks feed worries that the economy has weakened and could even be at risk of deflation . That is when the prices of goods and assets fall and people withhold spending as they wait for prices to drop further, a familiar idea to those following the recent housing market.

A period of such slack economic demand produced a lost decade in Japan, and while it is still seen as unlikely here, some policy-making officials at the Federal Reserve recently voiced concern about the possibility because the consequences could be so dire.

Pay cuts are appearing most frequently among state and local governments, which are under extraordinary budget pressures and have often already tried furloughs, i.e., docking pay in exchange for time off. Warning that they will have to lay off people otherwise, many governors and mayors are pressing public employee unions to accept a reduction in salary of a few percentage points, without getting days off in exchange.

At the University of Hawaii , professors have accepted a 6.7 percent cut. Albuquerque has trimmed pay for its 6,000 employees by 1.8 percent on average, and New York's governor, David A. Paterson , has sought a 4 percent wage rollback for most state employees. State troopers in Vermont agreed to a 3 percent cut. In California, teachers in the Capistrano and Pacheco school districts have accepted salary cuts.

“We've seen pay freezes before in the public sector, but pay cuts are something very new to that sector,” said Gary N. Chaison, an industrial relations professor at Clark University. Outsize pension costs and balanced budget requirements are squeezing many states as tax revenue has come up short.

It is impossible to say how many employers have cut workers' pay, because the government does not keep such statistics. Economists say a modest but growing number of employers have ordered wage cuts, especially in the public sector. In a 2010 survey by the National League of Cities, 51 percent of the cities that responded said they had either cut or frozen salaries of city employees, 22 percent said they had revised union contracts to reduce some pay and benefits, and 19 percent said they had instituted furloughs.

Some businesses are also cutting workers' pay, often to help stay afloat or to eliminate their losses, although a few have seized on the slack labor market and workers' weak bargaining power to cut pay and thereby increase their profits and competitiveness.

Economists note that wages continued to increase in 2008 after the recession began, even adjusted for inflation. But those wages have been flat for the last 18 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics .

Mr. Chaison says the latest wave of private-sector pay cuts is reminiscent of those in the early 1980s, when many companies — especially those with unionized work forces — cut wages in response to a recession, intensified competition from imports and new low-cost competitors spawned by government-backed deregulation. Now, as then, companies frequently say that compensation for unionized workers, in both wages and benefits, is out of line. For instance, the Westin Hotel in Providence, R.I., after failing to reach a new contract with its main union, has sliced wages 20 percent, saying its previous pay levels were not competitive with those at the city's many nonunion hotels.

Factory owners sometimes warn that they will close or move jobs to lower-cost locales unless workers agree to a pay cut. In its most recent union contract, General Motors is paying new employees $14 an hour, half the rate it pays its long-term workers.

Sub-Zero, which makes refrigerators, freezers and ovens, warned its workers last month that it might close one or more factories in Wisconsin and lay off 500 employees unless they accepted a 20 percent cut in wages and benefits. Management warned that it might transfer those operations to Kentucky or Arizona, saying it needed lower costs because sales were weaker than hoped.

The pain is felt across industries. At the Seattle Symphony, musicians have taken a 5 percent pay cut, while ABF Freight System, a major trucking company, has asked the Teamsters to agree to 15 percent less. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has lowered pay 6 percent, while Newsday has gotten its staff to accept a 5 to 10 percent pay cut.

While most of the pay cuts seem to hit unionized workers, David Lewin, a professor of management at the University of California, Los Angeles , who has written extensively on employee compensation, says some cuts are also quietly taking place among nonunion employers.

Reed Smith, a firm with 1,500 lawyers, has cut salaries for first-year associates in major cities to $130,000 from $160,000. Warren Hospital, a nonunionized facility in Phillipsburg, N.J., ordered pay cuts of 2 to 4 percent because lower Medicaid reimbursements had squeezed the hospital's finances.

Fast-rising pension and health costs are making benefit costs grow more rapidly than wages, some employers say, and cutting wages is often easier than other ways to pare labor costs. But some workers say these cuts are unfair at a time when corporate profits and employee productivity have risen strongly.

Sometimes unions and their workers cooperate with management on pay cuts, hoping to recoup some wage increases when conditions improve. In Madawaska, Me., 460 unionized workers accepted an 8.5 percent wage cut in May to help keep their paper mill in business.

“Workers, of course, do not like to have their pay cut, but I think that workers' major concern now is, ‘Do I have a job?' ” Professor Lewin said. “If the unemployment rate were lower, we'd see a lot more resentment toward pay cuts.”

But workers sometimes fight back — particularly if an employer doesn't show signs of distress.

In Albuquerque, where the mayor pushed through pay cuts to bridge a $66 million budget deficit, the largest union of municipal workers is suing, arguing that the mayor's plan should include furloughs.

The mayor, Richard J. Berry, rejected that idea. “You want to keep people employed. You want to preserve public services. And you don't want to raise taxes,” he said. “When you're trying to lower the cost of government while maintaining services, furloughs don't do the trick.”

Albuquerque would have to trim at least 100 jobs without the cuts, he said, which top out at 3.5 percent for employees earning more than $90,000. Those earning under $30,000 will not be affected.

At the Mott's apple juice and sauce plant in Williamson, N.Y., 30 miles east of Rochester, 300 unionized workers have been on strike since May 23 over management's demands for a $1.50-an-hour wage cut, a reduction in company 401(k) contributions and higher employee contributions to health insurance. The strikers are seething over management's demands because the plant has been profitable and Mott's corporate parent, the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, reported record profits last year.

“They keep piling more and more work on us, but they want to pay us less and less,” said Michele Morgan, a Mott's employee. “It's a slap in the face.”

Chris Barnes, a company spokesman, said the Mott's employees were overpaid, at $21 an hour, given that the average in the area for food manufacturing workers was $14 an hour. The union disputes those figures.

“Our only objective,” Mr. Barnes said, “was to continue to enhance the competitiveness and flexibility of our operations.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/business/economy/04paycuts.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

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After Haiti Quake, the Chaos of U.S. Adoptions

BAXTER, Minn. — Beechestore and Rosecarline, two Haitian teenagers in the throes of puberty, were not supposed to be adopted.

At the end of last year, American authorities denied the petition of a couple here, Marc and Teresa Stroot, to adopt the brother and sister after their biological father opposed relinquishing custody.

Reluctantly, Mr. and Mrs. Stroot, a special-needs teaching assistant and a sales executive with four children of their own, decided to move on.

Then on Jan. 12, a devastating earthquake toppled Haiti 's capital and set off an international adoption bonanza in which some safeguards meant to protect children were ignored.

Leading the way was the Obama administration, which responded to the crisis, and to the pleas of prospective adoptive parents and the lawmakers assisting them, by lifting visa requirements for children in the process of being adopted by Americans.

Although initially planned as a short-term, small-scale evacuation, the rescue effort quickly evolved into a baby lift unlike anything since the Vietnam War. It went on for months; fell briefly under the cloud of scandal involving 10 Baptist missionaries who improperly took custody of 33 children; ignited tensions between the United States and child protection organizations; and swept up about 1,150 Haitian children, more than were adopted by American families in the previous three years, according to interviews with government officials, adoption agencies and child advocacy groups.

Among the first to get out of Haiti were Beechestore and Rosecarline. “It's definitely a miracle,” Mrs. Stroot said of their arrival here, “because this wasn't going to happen.”

Under a sparingly used immigration program , called humanitarian parole, adoptions were expedited regardless of whether children were in peril, and without the screening required to make sure they had not been improperly separated from their relatives or placed in homes that could not adequately care for them.

Some Haitian orphanages were nearly emptied, even though they had not been affected by the quake or licensed to handle adoptions. Children were released without legal documents showing they were orphans and without regard for evidence suggesting fraud. In at least one case, two siblings were evacuated even though American authorities had determined through DNA tests that the man who had given them to an orphanage was not a relative.

“I feel a weird sense of survivor's guilt,” said Dawn Shelton of Minnesota, who hopes to adopt the siblings. “So many people died in Haiti, and I was able to get the life I've wanted.”

In other cases, children were given to families who had not been screened or to families who no longer wanted them.

The results are playing out across the country. At least 12 children, brought here without being formally matched with new families, have spent months in a Pennsylvania juvenile care center while Red Cross officials try to determine their fate. An unknown number of children whose prospective parents have backed out of their adoptions are in foster care . While the authorities said they knew of only a handful of such cases, adoption agents said they had heard about as many as 20, including that of an 8-year-old girl who was bounced from an orphanage in Haiti to a home in Ithaca, N.Y., to a juvenile care center in Queens after the psychologist who had petitioned to adopt her decided she could not raise a young child.

Dozens of children, approaching the age of 16 or older, are too old to win legal permanent status as adoptees, prompting lawmakers in Congress to consider raising the age limit to 18.

Meanwhile, other children face years of legal limbo because they have arrived with so little proof of who they are, how they got here and why they have been placed for adoption that state courts are balking at completing their adoptions.

One Kansas lawyer said he satisfied a judge's questions about whether the Haitian boy his clients had adopted was an orphan by broadcasting announcements on Haitian radio stations over two days, urging any relatives of the child to come forward if they wanted to claim him.

Another couple seeking to adopt, Daniel and Jess McKee of Mansfield, Pa., said Owen, 3, who can dribble a basketball better than children twice his age, arrived from Haiti with an invalid birth certificate — it shows him as 4 — a letter in French signed by a Haitian mayor that declared him an orphan, and stacks of handwritten medical records from his time in a Haitian orphanage.

Their prospective daughter, Emersyn, also 3, came with no documents at all.

“As things stand,” Mrs. McKee said, “I'm basically going to show up in court and tell a judge, ‘These kids are who I say they are,' and hope that he takes my word for it, because if he asks me to prove it, I can't.”

Later, she added, “I guess the government said, ‘Let's just get the kids out of Haiti, and we'll worry about the details later.' ”

Decisions Made in Haste

Administration officials defended the humanitarian parole program, saying it had strict limits and several levels of scrutiny, including reviews of adoption petitions by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security in Washington and Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital.

But they also acknowledged that the administration's priority was getting children out of harm's way, not the safeguards the United States is obligated to enforce under international law.

Matt Chandler, a spokesman at the Department of Homeland Security, said the evacuations were done in the best interests of children who faced “an uncertain and likely dangerous situation that could worsen by the day, if not by the hour.”

Whitney Reitz, who oversaw the parole program at the Department of Homeland Security, acknowledged that the decisions were hastily made.

“We did something so fast,” Ms. Reitz said at a conference in New York in March. “We did something that normally takes a couple of years and that we normally do with excruciating care and delay. There's so much time for deliberation in the way the program normally goes, and we condensed all that into a matter of days.”

There is no evidence to suggest that the evacuations were driven by anything other than the best of intentions. And with untold numbers of unaccompanied children in Haiti, the hemisphere's poorest country, left fending for themselves or languishing in institutions, it is not hard to make the case that those who were evacuated are better off than they would have been in the hemisphere's poorest country.

Many now live in the kind of quiet, scenic towns depicted in Norman Rockwell paintings. They are enrolled in school for the first time. They have grown inches, gotten eyeglasses and had their cavities filled.

And they are learning what it feels like to have a mother and father wake them up every morning and tuck them into bed every night.

But child protection advocates like Marlène Hofstetter at Terre des Hommes, an international child advocacy organization, contend that those ends do not justify the means. Rushing children out of familiar environments in a crisis can worsen their trauma, she said. Expediting adoptions in countries like Haiti — where it is not uncommon for people to turn children over to orphanages for money — violates children's rights and leaves them at risk of trafficking, she added.

“I'm certain that one day these children are going to ask questions about what happened to them,” Ms. Hofstetter said. “I'm not sure that telling them their lifestyles were better in the United States is going to be a satisfactory answer.”

Even though the humanitarian parole program has officially ended, it remains a source of tensions between American-run orphanages in Haiti and international child protection organizations.

The advocates, led by Unicef , have refused to place children who have lost their parents or been separated from them in some foreign-run orphanages, fearing they would be improperly put into the adoption pipeline before they had the chance to be reunited with surviving relatives.

And the pro-adoption groups, led by the Joint Council on International Children's Services , accuse the advocates of using endless, often unsuccessful, attempts to locate the children's biological relatives to deny tens of thousands of needy Haitian orphans the opportunity to be placed in loving homes.

“ Unicef 's idea is to house children in tents, and tell them that maybe in five years their relatives will be found,” said Dixie Bickel, who has run a Haitian orphanage called God's Littlest Angels for more than two decades. “What kind of plan is that?”

Washington Feels Pressure

Concerns about child trafficking led China, after its 2008 earthquake, and Indonesia, after the 2004 tsunami, to suspend all international adoptions, despite intense pressure by pro-adoption groups in the United States, according to Chuck Johnson at the National Council for Adoption.

After January's quake, Haiti, though, was hardly able to stand on its own feet, much less push back, Haitian officials acknowledged. Orphanage directors with political connections in Washington said they saw an opportunity to turn the tragedy into a miracle. Some issued urgent pleas, saying that the children in their care had had been left without shelter, and that the orphanages' limited stocks of food and water made them prime targets for looting.

In the United States, adoptive parents contacted anyone they knew who might have money, private planes and political connections to help them get children out of Haiti. Evangelical Christian churches, which have increasingly taken up orphan care as a tenet of their faith, were also mobilized. Before long, legislators and administration officials were getting calls from constituents.

Senator Mary L. Landrieu , a Louisiana Democrat and adoptive mother, has been a champion of the cause and pushed administration officials to help bring Haitian children here after the quake. “I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if there are some errors that were made,” Senator Landrieu said in an interview about the rescue effort, “but you want to err on the side of keeping children safe.”

On Jan. 18, less than a week after the earthquake hit, the secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, announced that the United States would lift visa requirements for those orphans whose adoptions had already been approved by Haitian authorities and those who had been matched with prospective parents in the United States.

The requirements were written so broadly, adoption experts said, that almost any child in an orphanage could qualify as long as there were e-mails, letters or photographs showing that the child had some connection to a family in the United States. And by the time Ms. Napolitano announced the program, military flights filled with children were already in the air.

“The standard of proof was very low,” said Kathleen Strottman, executive director of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute, a nonprofit group that is a leading voice on American adoption policy. “That's why the administration ended the program as quickly as they did,” she added, “because they worried the longer it was open, the more opportunities they would give people to manufacture evidence.”

Obstacles to Adoption Vanish

Over the next several weeks, orphanages big and small were nearly emptied, whether or not they had been affected by the earthquake.

The staff at Children of the Promise, about 90 miles from Haiti's capital, barely felt the temblor. But 39 of the 50 children there were approved for humanitarian parole, even though none of them had been affected by the disaster and the orphanage had not yet received the proper license to place children.

Rosemika, 2; Alex, 1; and Roselinda, 1, offer a look at the typical humanitarian parole case. Rosemika's mother died before the quake. The other two children were given up for adoption because their parents could not provide for them.

Jenny and Jamie Groen, a missionary couple from Minnesota who were volunteering at the orphanage, had fallen in love with the children and decided to adopt them.

Under normal circumstances the couple would have had to get special permission from Haiti's president to adopt because they are both 28, and the government requires at least one of the prospective parents to be older than 35.

After the quake, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive summarily signed off on their adoption — as he did with all humanitarian parole petitions submitted to him by the United States — without checking the Groens' qualifications.

Meanwhile, the couple rushed back to the United States for the background checks and home study their own country required for them to take children into their care. And they submitted e-mails, photographs and a Dec. 2 newspaper clipping to prove that their commitment to adopt the children predated the earthquake.

During a recent visit to the orphanage in Haiti, surrounded by peasant hovels and sugar-cane fields, Ms. Groen, now pregnant, said she and her husband were still trying to absorb how quickly they were going from an empty nest to a full one.

It has been a whirlwind for the children's biological relatives as well. The girls' relatives still regularly visit the orphanage. “That's the thing that's so different about Haiti,” Ms. Groen said. “It's not full of unwanted children. It's full of children whose families are too poor to provide for them.”

That appeared to be the predicament shared by Beechestore, 14, and Rosecarline, 13, who are going through all the turmoil of adolescence, exacerbated by a confusing legal tug of war.

In the spring of 2008, their biological father had told the American authorities that he had placed the children for adoption only because he thought they would be educated in the United States and then returned to Haiti. Once he understood the implications of adoption, he refused to give them up.

In November 2009, American authorities formally notified the Stroots that their adoption petition had been denied.

By then, the Stroots were spent — emotionally and financially. The effort to adopt the children had taken four years and $40,000. Rather than appeal, the Minnesota couple decided it would be best for everyone to end their efforts.

Then the earthquake hit. Homeland Security, which earlier had denied visas to the children, reversed course without consulting the children's biological father or the Stroots. “One day, we're being told we can't have the kids,” Mrs. Stroot said. “The next minute, we're getting a call telling us we need to get them winter coats. It was crazy.”

In late July, a Minnesota judge awarded the Stroots legal custody of the children. Neither the previous denial nor the views of the children's biological father were mentioned during the proceeding, the Stroots said.

Since then, the newly expanded family has moved on to more mundane matters, like dentist appointments, vaccinations and back-to-school shopping.

“God got done in 10 days,” Mr. Stroot said, “something human beings couldn't do in years.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/world/americas/04adoption.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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4 Believed Dead in China School Attack

BEIJING — Three children and at least one teacher were reported on Wednesday to have died in a Tuesday afternoon knife attack at a kindergarten in eastern China , the sixth in a string of school assaults this year that has stunned the nation and sent government officials scrambling to suppress public outrage.

The latest attack, in the city of Zibo in Shandong Province, also was reported to have injured 11 other people, including two seriously wounded children, according to accounts of the attack on Chinese Web sites. Police officers were said to be uncertain of the number of attackers, but one, described as a 27-year-old man, was reported to have turned himself in.

As occurred after other recent knifings, the government swiftly slapped a news blackout on the incident, blocking all accounts of the attacks on the Internet and banning all photographs of the bloodshed.

Reports of the Zibo attack offered varying tolls of the dead, the injured and the number of assailants.

Since March 23, when a man fatally stabbed eight children outside a Fujian Province elementary school, at least 18 children — all of kindergarten or primary-school age — and 5 adults have died in the bizarre series of attacks. Including preliminary reports from Tuesday's assault, at least 66 other children have been wounded, including 5 who were clubbed with a hammer by a man on April 30.

Most of the assaults have occurred along China's urbanized east coast, where wealth disparities are most visible and social pressures presumably at their peak. The government convened a panel of 22 experts in April to investigate the attacks, and schools across China have installed surveillance cameras and stepped up security.

But analysts have yet to find a coherent theme to the assaults, aside from speculation by criminologists and sociologists that some are so-called copycat attacks and that they highlight the lack of adequate mental-health care in a nation where psychiatrists are rare and mental hospitals are often warehouses for the sick.

State-run media reacted to the first attack last March with anger, grief and a series of articles that sought to explain what could motivate such a horrific crime. But as the attacks continued, censors clamped down on news coverage and played up state efforts to combat violence and social upheaval.

The assault on Tuesday was not reported until Wednesday morning Beijing time, and most traces of news reports had been expunged from the Internet by mid-afternoon. Various officials in Zibo, a city of about 670,000 some 230 miles south of Beijing, declined to comment or said they did not know about the attack when reached by telephone.

The attack apparently took place about 4 p.m. Tuesday when, as security guards at were on a break, up to three men entered the suburban Boshan district experimental kindergarten and stabbed two teachers, then turned on the children.

Internet accounts said the school's deputy director died, and some reports said that as many as 20 people had been slashed before the attacker or attackers fled. Two teachers who sought to shield the children from the assault were reported to be among those who were seriously wounded.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/world/asia/05china.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Lawyers Seeking Terror Suspect's Case Sue U.S.

WASHINGTON — A group of human rights lawyers want to stop the Obama administration from authorizing the military and the C.I.A. to kill the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki , an American citizen believed to be hiding in Yemen.

But the group has found itself in a Catch-22-like bind: because the government has designated Mr. Awlaki a terrorist, it would be a crime for the lawyers to file a lawsuit challenging the government's attempts to kill him.

On Tuesday, the lawyers waded into that thicket. After they filed a lawsuit challenging a Treasury Department regulation that requires them to obtain permission to provide uncompensated legal services benefiting Mr. Awlaki, who has been accused of terrorism ties but has received no trial, the government suggested it was inclined to approve their application for a license. It had been pending for 11 days.

“The same government that is seeking to kill Anwar al-Awlaki has prohibited attorneys from contesting the legality of the government's decision to use lethal force against him,” says the complaint, filed jointly by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Should the lawyers overcome that hurdle, they would be in a position to seek court resolution of some of the most central legal disputes in the war against Al Qaeda — including whether the whole world is a battlefield subject to combat rules, or whether Qaeda suspects far from the armed conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq must, in the absence of an imminent threat, be treated as criminals entitled to trials.

The Treasury Department noted that its regulation allows lawyers to provide, without seeking a specific license, some legal services to people designated as terrorists, if not a lawsuit challenging a targeted-killing order.

Adam J. Szubin, director of the department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, said it would “work with the A.C.L.U. to ensure that the legal services can be delivered.”

In July, when the department labeled Mr. Awlaki a specially designated global terrorist, Stuart A. Levey, its under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said Mr. Awlaki posed a threat to national security.

“Anwar al-Awlaki has proven that he is extraordinarily dangerous, committed to carrying out deadly attacks on Americans and others worldwide,” Mr. Levey said then. “He has involved himself in every aspect of the supply chain of terrorism — fund-raising for terrorist groups, recruiting and training operatives, and planning and ordering attacks on innocents.”

It has been widely reported that the Obama administration placed Mr. Awlaki on a target list earlier this year, after a Nigerian man who was charged with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25 told interrogators that Mr. Awlaki had directed him to undertake the attack.

Mr. Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contends that his son is not the terrorist the administration portrays him to be. He retained the two groups on July 7 to pursue a legal challenge to his son's inclusion on a list of people to be killed by American forces or agents without a trial.

Working without compensation, the groups began developing a lawsuit over whether the executive branch could lawfully carry out such a killing in the face of the Constitution's protection against deprivation of life “without due process of law.”

But on July 16 — before the groups were ready to file such a lawsuit — the Office of Foreign Asset Control announced that it was applying the global terrorist designation to Mr. Awlaki. That blocked his assets and made it a crime for Americans to engage in transactions with him or for his benefit without a license.

The groups applied for a license on July 23, stressing that there was no time for delay. But the government issued no response until its statement to the press on Tuesday after they sued.

The lawsuit filed on Tuesday seeks a ruling that the requirement to obtain such a license in these circumstances is illegal. The suit contends that the regulation exceeds the Treasury Department's statutory authority, violates the lawyers' own constitutional rights, and lacks sufficient standards and safeguards. It also says, however, that the groups would accept a ruling simply ordering the government to issue a license immediately.

“Targeting Americans for execution without any form of due process while at the same time obstructing lawyers' ability to challenge that policy is fundamentally un-American,” said Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union .

Lawyers for the groups acknowledge that they could face many legal obstacles beyond the licensing requirement. The government could try to block the intended lawsuit by, for example, challenging the standing of Mr. Awlaki's father to sue, or by asserting that the dispute cannot be litigated because the targeted-killings policy is a matter of state secrets.

Mr. Awlaki, 39, was once an imam at mosques in the United States who had a reputation as a moderate. But in 2004, he moved to Yemen and produced a series of sermons and writings calling on Muslims to wage violent war against the United States. Many of the sermons have circulated widely on the Internet.

Officials contend that since 2004, Mr. Awlaki has evolved from serving as an inspirational figure to Islamist jihadists to a more “operational” role.

In designating him last month for its global terrorist list, the Treasury Department said that Mr. Awlaki had pledged an oath of loyalty to the leader of Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch, had recruited people to join the group, had facilitated terrorist training camps in Yemen, had solicited funding for terrorism and had helped to focus the branch's attention “on planning attacks on U.S. interests.”

Vincent Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights , argued that international law did not permit a government to kill people far from combat zones, calling that assassination. And in the case of a United States citizen like Mr. Awlaki, he contended, such a policy also violates the Constitution's Fifth Amendment — and is a dangerous precedent.

“The governmental talking points around what is at stake does not make constitutional law,” Mr. Warren said. “We are trying to take this out of the realm of Sunday morning talk shows and put these issues before a court so the government can set forth the evidence.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/world/asia/04terror.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Mosque Plan Clears Hurdle in New York

As New York City removed the final hurdle for a controversial mosque near ground zero, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg forcefully defended the project on Tuesday as a symbol of America's religious tolerance and sought to reframe a fiery national debate over the project.

With the Statue of Liberty as his backdrop, the mayor pleaded with New Yorkers to reject suspicions about the planned 13-story complex, to be located two blocks north of the World Trade Center site, saying that “we would betray our values if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else.”

“To cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists — and we should not stand for that,” the mayor said.

Grappling with one of the more delicate aspects of the debate, Mr. Bloomberg said that the families of Sept. 11 victims — some of whom have vocally opposed the project — should welcome it.

“The attack was an act of war — and our first responders defended not only our city but also our country and our Constitution,” he said, becoming slightly choked up at one point in his speech, which he delivered on Governors Island. “We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights — and the freedoms the terrorists attacked.”

But even as the mayor called for the mosque to be embraced, those opposed to the project pledged to aggressively fight it, using both litigation and public pressure. A prominent Republican and foreign policy analyst said he was working with business, civic and political leaders to organize a campaign to persuade architects, contractors and donors to steer clear of the project. He said they would also aggressively scrutinize any donors who supported it.

The Republican, Daniel Senor, a former high-ranking official with the coalition government in Iraq, said that anybody who works with the center “needs to know there is going to be a real stigma associated with this project.”

“Do they really want to be involved with something so detrimental, that might set New York back?” he asked.

Lawyers representing a firefighter who survived 9/11 also said they would file a lawsuit on Wednesday to block the city's approval.

The plan for the complex, which began as a local zoning dispute, has quickly snowballed into an intense national debate about the nature of Islam and the meaning of the Sept. 11 attacks.

National Republican leaders, like the former House speaker, Newt Gringrich, and Sarah Palin, the 2008 vice presidential nominee, assailed the proposal, calling it offensive. On Friday, the Anti-Defamation League , an influential Jewish civil rights group, declared its opposition, distressing many in the interfaith community.

The disagreement has underscored how differently the World Trade Center site is viewed by those in New York and those outside of it.

In the city, the space has returned, haltingly, to the urban grid, sprouting new office towers and train stops. But beyond New York's borders, it looms as a powerful symbol of the war on terror and the lives lost on that day.

Those opposed to the project have argued that building a Muslim community center so close to the site where radical Muslims killed about 2,750 people is as much a political statement as a religious gesture, and have demanded that developers find a different location.

Bill Doyle, whose 25-year-old son, Joseph, was killed in the attacks, said many families who lost loved ones at the site were “incensed” about the mosque, viewing it as a tribute to the terrorists behind the hijackings. Part of their anger stems from their broader frustration over redevelopment of the site, and plans for a memorial that would be located beneath street level.

“High up in the air you have a 13-story mosque, outshining the memorial itself,” Mr. Doyle said. “It's almost a slap in the face.”

Proponents, eager to address the raw feelings the issue has aroused, emphasize that the center would focus on interfaith dialogue, include members of other religions on its board, and feature what its developer called “a Sept. 11 memorial and contemplation space.”

Sharif El-Gamal, the developer, said he was reaching out to elected officials, community groups and opponents to directly explain the center's mission and allay any fears about it.

But it has been challenging. On Tuesday, at the final Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing on the project, Mr. El-Gamal said he tried to introduce himself to a Republican candidate for governor, Rick A. Lazio, a vocal opponent of the project.

“He just looked at me and walked by,” Mr. El-Gamal said.

On Tuesday morning, the project received its final city approval when the landmarks commission voted 9 to 0 to deny granting historic protection to the building in Lower Manhattan where the $100 million center would be constructed.

Opponents, who have turned out in large numbers to speak out against the plan at public hearings this summer, seemed resigned to losing the vote, and few showed up to protest. After the commission voted, scattered members of the audience shouted “Shame on you!” and “Disgrace!” One woman carried a sign reading, “Don't Glorify Murders of 3,000; No 9/11 Victory Mosque.”

There were signs that the intense backlash had left moderate American Muslims uneasy about the plan for such a large center near ground zero.

“There is some ambivalence within the community,” said Hussein Rashid, a visiting professor of religious studies at Hofstra University who specializes in Islam in America. “We still want to know who is going to be involved in this. So far, we have heard from just a few Muslim voices. If this is meant to be a community center, who in the community will be involved?”

The mosque presented a potentially challenging political situation for Mr. Bloomberg. Some of his most fervent supporters — religious Jews, working-class whites in the boroughs outside Manhattan and conservative Republicans — opposed the idea.

But Mr. Bloomberg loathes what he sees as old-school ethnic politics. And from the start, he viewed it as a simple question of law and American values, privately expressing consternation at those who sought to block the project. As the fight over the proposal intensified, he encouraged aides to find an occasion for him to deliver a major speech on the topic.

Even some of his friends disagreed with him. But behind the scenes, Mr. Bloomberg was heartened to hear that some of the families of Sept. 11 victims supported his position, and told him so at a fund-raiser for the memorial at the site two weeks ago, aides to the mayor said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/nyregion/04mosque.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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A Monument to Tolerance

OPINION

It has been disturbing to hear and read the vitriol and outright bigotry surrounding the building of a mosque two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. So it was inspiring when New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission voted 9 to 0 on Tuesday to reaffirm one of the basic tenets of democracy: religious tolerance.

Instead of caving in to the angry voices — many but not all of them self-promoting Republican politicians — commissioners paved the way for construction of the mosque and Islamic center. It was not just the right thing to do, it was the only thing to do.

The attacks of Sept. 11 were not a religious event. They were mass murder. The American response, as President Obama and President George W. Bush before him have said many times, was not a war against Islam.

It was not surprising that Republican ideologues like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin came out against the mosque. A Congressional candidate in North Carolina has found it to be a good way to get attention and, yes, stoke prejudice against Muslims. We expect this sort of behavior from these kinds of Republicans. They have been shamelessly playing the politics of fear since 9/11.

Some of the families of the victims of the attacks, who deserve our respect and sympathy, are uneasy about the mosque. But it would be a greater disservice to the memories of their loved ones to give into the very fear that the terrorists wanted to create and, thus, to abandon the principles of freedom and tolerance.

There was simply no excuse for the behavior of the Anti-Defamation League, which eagerly piled on with the opponents of the mosque. It should not be built “in the shadow” of the World Trade Center, the group said, because it would “cause some victims more pain.” It was distressing to see the rationalization of bigotry used by an organization that has been fighting discrimination of all kinds, especially during some of the worst days of the Ku Klux Klan.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg got it just right in a speech on Governors Island, within view of the Statue of Liberty. He called the proposed mosque “as important a test of separation of church and state as any we may see in our lifetime, and it is critically important that we get it right.” The plans for the $100 million center should encourage those who want Muslims and non-Muslims in America to find common ground.

Mayor Bloomberg noted in his speech that in the United States and in “the freest city in the world,” the owners of the building have the right to use their property as a house of worship. “The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right,” he said. We agreed with his assessment that the lawsuits being threatened against the mosque should be easily thrown out. The local community board has given the Muslim center approval as well.

This hasn't stopped Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for governor, from turning the landmark commission's vote into a nasty little photo-op for his campaign. “This is not about religion,” he said. “It's about this particular mosque.”

Mr. Lazio has it wrong. We're curious where in the Constitution he finds the power for the government to deny anyone the right to build a “particular” mosque or church or synagogue or any other house of worship.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/opinion/04wed1.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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The Hunt for American Decency in the Arizona Quicksand

OPINION

The federal judge who struck down most of Arizona's new immigration law last week wasn't trying to strike a blow for immigrants' rights, about which her ruling said little. She wasn't dictating what immigration laws should look like or how strict they should be. She was making a much more fundamental argument, one that has regularly emerged in America's long and often ugly history in dealing with noncitizens and other vulnerable minorities.

The message was that Arizona cannot have its own immigration or foreign policy. It cannot tell the federal government how to enforce its laws. It is not up to any state to seize the power to upend federal priorities, particularly to wield a blunt enforcement tool that will do harm to Hispanics, citizens or not, who live in certain neighborhoods, wear certain clothes, drive certain vehicles and speak Spanish or accented English.

One excuse offered up for Arizona's mindless new law was that it is just trying to do a job the federal government refused to do. But the law, SB1070, is far more pernicious than that. It begins with a grandiose statement of its purpose: “to make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state and local government agencies in Arizona.” “Attrition through enforcement” is a theory cooked up in right-wing think tanks — that mass deportation is unnecessary, because with enough hostile laws and harsh enforcement, illegal immigrants will all decide to go home.

That's a product of delusion and cruelty. But it's also an article of faith among the Arizonans who have yanked the white-hot center of the national immigration debate to Phoenix, like the law's author, State Senator Russell Pearce; Gov. Jan Brewer, who has surfed the law to high poll ratings and a meeting with President Obama; and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who marches immigrant prisoners through the streets of Phoenix and vows to keep raiding Hispanic neighborhoods, law or no law.

District Judge Susan Bolton said it wasn't up to these people to determine America's immigration policy.

Professor Hiroshi Motomura of U.C.L.A. Law School, who has written often about America's immigration history, said the Obama administration had a compelling justification for bringing the case, and Judge Bolton was exactly right to rule in the administration's favor.

“It has been one of the essential roles of the federal government in U.S. history since the Civil War to make sure that states don't act in ways that exclude or marginalize certain individuals — often by race and ethnicity,” he said. “By acting in this case, the Justice Department is asserting its historical role that states and localities aren't given the power that might enable them to harm individuals and communities in those ways. By bringing this lawsuit, the federal government has done something essential for national cohesion.”

Right now, in Phoenix anyway, things seem to be coming apart, with marches and peaceful protests coming face to face with simmering rage.

Last Friday, Sheriff Arpaio's deputies arrested Salvador Reza, a leader of immigrant-rights protests, for reasons that a prosecutor later could not explain. Video shows Mr. Reza standing quietly in a parking lot, a good distance from a protest across the street, when a cordon of armed officers surrounds, handcuffs and hauls him off. It was a scene from another decade or country.

Thomas Saenz, the president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, links Arizona's struggle to the civil rights era. He calls the state's politicians the new nullifiers, descendants of the southern segregationists who fought for Jim Crow with the debased theory that states had the power to invalidate federal law. It took federal action and protesters stirring the nation's conscience to make the point: You cannot treat people this way.

Mr. Saenz notes the strangeness of Arizona's politicians denouncing immigrants' lawlessness while baring their own contempt for the Constitution. Is he exaggerating? Here's Ms. Brewer on Fox News: “It's unfortunate that it takes a little city or a little state like Arizona to fight the United States federal government, but that's what we're up to.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/opinion/04wed4.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From the White House

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President Obama Signs the Fair Sentencing Act

This morning the President signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduces the disparity in the amounts of powder cocaine and crack cocaine required for the imposition of mandatory minimum sentences and eliminates the mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of crack cocaine.  It also increases monetary penalties for major drug traffickers.

MR. GIBBS:  Well, let me see if there's any guidance on it.  I will say this, April, I think the signing of today's bill into law represents the hard work of Democrats and Republicans coming -- this is a good example -- of coming together and making progress on something that people had identified as a glaring blight on the law.

Look, I think if you look at the people that were there at that signing, they're not of the political persuasions that either always or even part of the time agree.  I think that demonstrates the, as I said, the glaring nature of what these penalties had -- the glaring nature of what these penalties had done to people and how unfair they were.  And I think the President was proud to sign that into law.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/03/president-obama-signs-fair-sentencing-act

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Protecting Middle-Class Consumers from Unfair Business Practices

As the American economy is starting to pull out of the deep recession that greeted us when we got to the White House, there are still far too many working people struggling to pay their bills and support their families. And the last thing we need at a time like this is deceptive, abusive business practices designed to take advantage of struggling middle-class Americans.

That's why Vice President Biden held a Middle Class Task Force meeting on Thursday to talk about stronger consumer protection to protect American households from deceptive practices.   The VP was joined by Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, who came to our Task Force meeting to announce new rules that will protect consumers of debt relief services .

These debt relief companies promise to get consumers out of debt, but too often it turns out that they collect excessive fees even as they fail to deliver on their too-good-to-be-true promises, leaving struggling Americans in even worse shape than before. Among other protections, the new rules Chairman Leibowitz announced last week will ban advance fees, ensuring that debt relief companies actually deliver on their promises by reducing a consumer's debt before they can collect payment.

This new FTC rule is a perfect example of the kind of simple, common-sense changes we need to protect American consumers and strengthen the middle class. That's why the Middle Class Task Force enthusiastically supports the work that's being done by the FTC and other independent agencies to strengthen consumer protection during these tough economic times.

Jared Bernstein is Chief Economic Advisor to the Vice President

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/03/protecting-middle-class-consumers-unfair-business-practices

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10 Ways the VA is Serving our Vets – and More

The Administration is committed to serving our veterans as well as they have served us. With Vietnam veteran, wounded warrior and lifetime DAV (Disabled American Veterans) member Secretary Shinseki at his side, President Obama talked to Disabled American Veterans in Atlanta, Georgia about historic commitments to our veterans and their families.

President Obama charged Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Ric Shinseki with building a 21st century VA. Here's what VA is doing to serve our vets:

1. It's easier for about 200,000 Vietnam veterans who may have been exposed to Agent Orange to get the health care and benefits they need.
2. Co-pays for the catastrophically disabled have been eliminated and the half-million Priority 8 veterans will have their VA health care access restored.
3. Funding for veterans health care across the board has dramatically increased – this includes improving care for rural veterans and women veterans.
4. Funding delays for veterans medical care are over. VA is working overtime to create a single lifetime electronic record that our troops and veterans can keep for life.
5. VA is hiring thousands of new claims processors to break the backlog once and for all and, for the first time ever, veterans will be able to go to the VA website and download their personal health records with one simple click. It will also be easier for vets to check on the status of their claims online or even from their cell phones.
6. Today, there are about 20,000 fewer homeless veterans than there were before this Administration took office. We're not stopping until every veteran who has fought for America has a home in America.
7. The newest veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq will have the support and counseling they need to transition back to civilian life. This includes funding the post-9/11 GI Bill, which is already helping nearly 300,000 veterans and family members pursue their dream of a college education.
8. VA is helping with job training and placement for veterans trying to find work in a tough economy.
9. Unprecedented resources are being directed to treat the wounds of today's wars -- traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder. The Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act not only improves treatment for traumatic brain injury and PTSD, it gives new support to the caregivers who put their own lives on hold to care for their loved one.
10. The Administration is making it easier for those suffering from PTSD to qualify for VA benefits. A veteran can now establish a claim based on his or her own testimony of events that caused PTSD without the requirement of corroborating evidence -- no matter what war you served in.

We salute and honor the men and women in uniform and their families back home. To learn more about VA's commitment, read the Q and A below or see the fact sheet detailing President Obama's commitment to Veterans, service members and military families.

What is VA doing to reduce the size of the claims backlog and help Veterans to access their benefits more quickly?

• By 2015, Veterans, dependents and survivors will not wait more than 125 days for a decision on their claim and that claims will be processed with 98-percent accuracy rate.
• VA has expanded its workforce in the Veterans Benefits Administration by over 3,500 people, has begun accepting on-line applications for initial disability benefits, initiated an innovation competition, launched over 30 pilot programs and initiatives to identify best practices, and invested over $138 million in a paperless Veterans Benefits Management System that will be deployed in Fiscal Year 2012.
• Additionally, VBA has awarded a $9 million contract to “fast track” Veterans' claims for service-connected illnesses associated with Agent Orange herbicide exposure during the Vietnam War.

How is VA helping separating Service members transition from DoD to VA?

• VA is working with DOD on the Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record Initiative and is making steady progress.
• VA expanded its Benefits Delivery at Discharge program and established a “Quick Start” program to expedite benefits processing for separating Service members.
• In 2009, the Disability Evaluation System pilot program expanded to 27 sites. At these sites, VA and DoD use a single separation examination and rating for separating Service members in lieu of two separate examinations usually required of our outgoing military, dramatically reducing processing time.

What has VA done to help Veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress?

• VA increased its exceptional mental health programs budget and hired more than 1,000 additional mental health professionals in 2009 to meet the important need for mental health screenings and treatment.
• This July, VA published a rule to relax the requirement for evidence of proof for Veterans who pursue a claim for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
• Physician veterans can now establish a claim based on his or her own testimony of events that caused PTSD without the requirement for corroborating evidence.
• For Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), a new disability rating system was fielded to greatly improve how claims are evaluated.
• Additionally, the Veterans National Suicide Prevention Hotline ( 1-800-273-TALK begin_of_the_skype_highlighting   1-800-273-TALK end_of_the_skype_highlighting ) has received more than 293,000 calls and interrupted more than 10,000 potential suicides since it began in 2008.
• Over 150 professional staff monitor the lines 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, to ensure any Service member, Veteran or family member in crisis can talk to someone who can help.
• In 2009, VA expanded the Hotline to include a Suicide Prevention Chat Room ( www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org ), where Service members and Veterans can use the Web to seek assistance.

What is the administration doing to improve employment options for veterans?

• The Secretaries of VA and Labor are co-chairing the first Intergovernmental Council on Veterans Employment, working with the Office of Personnel Management to reform federal hiring practices in order to expand Veteran employment opportunities. What has VA done for those exposed to Agent Orange?
• VA established a presumptive service connection for Vietnam Veterans exposed to herbicides, including Agent Orange, with hairy-cell leukemia and other chronic B-cell leukemias, Parkinson's disease, and ischemic heart disease.
• About 200,000 Veterans have already been identified as potentially eligible for disability compensation.
• VA has also awarded a $9 million contract to “fast track” Veterans' claims for service-connected illnesses associated with Agent Orange herbicide exposure during the Vietnam War.

What is VA doing to improve access to health care for Veterans living in rural areas?

• VA is working to improve access to health care for Veterans living in rural areas by recruiting and retaining medical professionals with the requisite expertise to provide the world class care our Veterans have earned, they're improving the availability of education and training for those serving rural Veterans, and optimizing the use of emerging technologies and research.
• VA awarded over $200 million in rural health projects in 2009.
• In FY 2010, an additional $250 million was allocated to support rural outpatient clinic development, fee-basis care and clinical programs.
• Important rural health initiatives planned or underway include mobile clinics, home-based primary care, tele-health expansion, mental health services and education and training to best serve our nation's Veterans living in rural or highly rural areas.

What is VA doing to better serve Women Veterans?

• VA knows that women make up 15 percent of today's military, and that the population of women Veterans using VA is increasing at a rapid pace.
• VA is evaluating and expanding care for all women Veterans. The Veterans Health Administration has provided comprehensive multi-residency training to over 500 providers in women's health.
• By 2013, VA will have implemented comprehensive primary care for women Veterans at all facilities.
• VA employs full-time Women Veterans Program Managers at 144 health systems.
• VA has also expanded outreach programs for women Veterans, with local and national health conferences and forums, active web communications, local information initiatives such as posters and newsletters, and a proactive Women Veterans Advisory Committee on Women Veterans.
• Most recently, VA held a Forum for Women Veterans and advocates for Women Veterans at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial at Arlington on 28 July.

What is VA doing to end Veteran homelessness?

• VA's intense campaign to end Veteran homelessness in five years has secured broad support at federal, state and local levels in both the public and private sectors.
• This campaign is centered around:
  • Outreach and education to Veterans who are homeless, or at risk of becoming homeless;
  • The strategy of prevention—controlling growth, even as VA reduces the homeless population;
  • Strengthening the availability of primary, specialty, and mental health care, including substance-use disorders—which is why VA is opening five new domiciliary residential programs to assure access to treatment;
  • Increased housing opportunities and appropriate supportive services tailored to the homeless Veteran;
  • Greater financial and employment support as well as improved benefits delivery—everything from increasing the number of Veterans working in the federal government, to improved placement of Veterans in private sector jobs, to growing the number of high-performing Veteran-owned and service-disabled Veteran-owned small businesses competing for government contracts. o And finally, expansion of these critically-important community partnerships.
• The Obama Administration and Congress have joined VA in their commitment with the necessary funds; VA invested nearly $400 million in 2009 to serve over 35,000 Veterans and more than 5,000 spouses and children through outreach initiatives, a 15 percent increase from the previous year.
• More than 8,300 Veterans are in permanent housing with dedicated case managers and access to high-quality VA health care.
• In 2010, VA is allocating $39 million to fund 2,200 new transitional housing beds through grants to local providers.
• To better understand the causes of homelessness and coordinate efforts to end it, VA organized many collaborative events including the National Summit on Veteran Homelessness in November 2009, with more than 1,200 attendees from across federal, state and local levels in both the public and private sectors.

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