By Faye Fiore, Los Angeles Times

August 8, 2010

Reporting from College Park, Md.

When Paul Brachfeld took over as inspector general of the National Archives, guardian of the country's most beloved treasures, he discovered the American people were being stolen blind.

The Wright Brothers 1903 Flying Machine patent application? Gone.

A copy of the Dec. 8, 1941 "Day of Infamy" speech autographed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and tied with a purple ribbon? Gone.

Target maps of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, war telegrams written by Abraham Lincoln and a scabbard and belt given to Harry S. Truman? Gone, gone and gone.

Citizens of a democracy must have access to their history, Brachfeld understood. But what kind of country leaves its attic door open, allowing its past to slip away? His solution: Assemble a team of national treasure hunters.

They are two earnest federal agents and a bookish historian dutifully scouring Civil War collector shows, dealer inventories and the Internet for bits of Americana that wind up on an EBay auction block. They sift through leads from disgruntled divorcees ("I was going through his junk and I found this document…") and set straight do-gooders convinced they've just gotten hold of the Gettysburg Address.

It is mission impossible by any measure; the National Archives keeps watch over 10 billion federal, congressional and presidential records. The most famous -- the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights -- are enshrined in the magnificent granite headquarters blocks from the White House. But they are a sliver of the nation's important stuff, much of it shelved or boxed all over the country. (Indeed, the dismantled pieces of Parkland Hospital's Trauma Room 1, where President Kennedy was pronounced dead, are in an underground cave in Kansas that no one intends to open.)

Now the Archival Recovery Team, as the treasure hunters are formally known, is asking the American people to help find what rightfully belongs to them. They published a pamphlet on how to recognize an historical federal document, and who to call if you find one. The Wright Brothers patent -- lost or stolen in the '80s, no one knows for sure -- was May's featured missing item on the archives' Facebook page.

"We have taken theft out of the shadows," Brachfeld said, recalling the days when embarrassing losses were kept secret. "We want people to know we live, we exist. If it's gone, we want it back. And if it's stolen, we will do our best to send whoever took it to jail."

This day, Brachfeld and his team are gathered around a conference table here at Archives II, a big, bland building in the Maryland suburbs that belies the history between its climate-controlled walls: Jackie Kennedy's blood-stained pink Chanel suit, the deed of gift for the Statue of Liberty, Eva Braun's photo albums.

Mitchell Yockelson, a veteran archivist, is the team's historical brains. He decides what belongs to the nation and what doesn't. Special agents Kelly Maltagliati and Dave Berry are the law enforcement brawn. They carry guns and raid houses.

Much has changed since Brachfeld, who came out of the Secret Service internal affairs, took the job a decade ago and was alarmed by a string of brazen thefts, some by trusted archives staff.

In 2001, Shaun Aubitz, in charge of preparing exhibits of the Philadelphia holdings, took virtually all of the collection's presidential pardons and the deed to the hillside home of Robert E. Lee, whose front yard became Arlington National Cemetery. A dealer Aubitz tried to sell to became suspicious and reported him. When Brachfeld looked Aubitz in the eye and asked, "Did you take more than we'll ever know?" Aubitz only winked.

A few years later, a buyer shopping on EBay spotted Civil War documents he had seen in Washington's archives collection and alerted authorities. A history buff named Howard Harner confessed to smuggling more than 100 of them out of the archives' research room in his clothes over a six-year period, slicing off valuable signatures with a razor blade. Forty-two were recovered from his home; the team is still searching for the rest.

Security tightened. Surveillance cameras scan the premises at all of the archives' 44 facilities and presidential libraries. Guards patrol. No purses, briefcases or jackets are allowed in the research rooms. Registrars keep track of what goes out and who signed for it. When Archivist of the United States David Ferriero showed up at his downtown Washington office one Sunday morning, the cameras caught him "breaking in" -- and he runs the place.

The easiest course would be to lock it all away and be done with it. But the National Archives prides itself on balancing public access with historic preservation, inviting American citizens "to see for themselves the workings of the federal government." All you have to be is 14 or older with proper identification and a research card that takes minutes to get. A homeless man who used to come regularly to the Washington building got the same access as filmmaker Ken Burns.

"We had one senior manager who wanted to strip everybody naked who came through here," Brachfeld said. "In 99.9% of cases that would stop it. But God help America if it came to that.''

The archives' paper records alone could circle the earth 57 times. There are battlefield maps, Confederate muster rolls, World War II Navy deck logs, grainy footage of Japanese planes strafing U.S. battleships in the Pacific. All of it belongs to the people, and the people have a right to look, even if that means things occasionally walk out the door in somebody's sock.

A lot of what's stolen seems obscure -- a letter to a Civil War saddle-maker -- but can be worth hundreds of dollars on the collectors' market. A Lincoln signature fetches thousands, and a few were recently unearthed by amateur researchers plodding through arcane court-martial records here in Maryland.

"You're in here and you say, 'Holy cow, there's a Lincoln.' You might start thinking about it," said Brachfeld, who, after a decade on the job, suspects just about everybody. "I could be taking documents out of here every single day, given my access."

Inspectors general have pursued thieves in the past. Ronald Reagan's high school yearbook was stolen from his Simi Valley presidential library years ago by an employee who was turned in by her roommate. The culprit resigned and the book was returned without fanfare.

Brachfeld sought a higher profile, believing the public has a right to know what it has, what's missing, and who took it. His office made headlines when it went after Sandy Berger, President Clinton's national security advisor, who admitted in 2005 to stealing and destroying highly-classified documents related to the Sept. 11 attacks. Berger got community service and a $50,000 fine.

Around the same time, a Civil War buff shopping for a birthday gift on EBay found original letters to the Frankford Arsenal, which supplied munitions to the Union Army. He called archives. Agent Maltagliati traced the seller to an intern at the Philadelphia branch named Denning McTague, set up a sting and raided his row house. Under questioning, McTague tearfully confessed to smuggling 164 documents in a yellow legal pad. All but three were recovered.

With that, Brachfeld decided it was time to dedicate a staff to keeping the nation's valuables in the nation's hands. The three are as much about tactical outreach as high drama crime-fighting, though the team was the subject of a Harlequin romance novel. ("A real bodice-ripper," Yockelson said.)

"We hope people will call us and say, 'We have something, I would like to give it back,'" said Yockelson, believed to be the only "investigative archivist" in the country. "The goal of my job is to make things whole again, to fill in the gaps of history."

The magnitude of the problem is impossible to measure. The National Archives did not exist until 1934. There has never been nor will there ever be the staff to catalog every item in a collection that predates the Revolution and is still growing. (Few cared about Elena Kagan's personal letters until she was nominated to the Supreme Court; now they'll belong to the archives.)

It's hard to know what's missing when they don't know precisely what they have -- which is precisely what compels some people to steal: If archives keeps it in a box, why shouldn't I enjoy it in my basement? The treasure hunters accept no excuses. What belongs to the National Archives belongs to the American people. All of them. If it's gone, they want it back.

"People ask, is it still happening? How much? Is it continual or sporadic?" Brachfeld said. "We don't know. But Big Brother is watching."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-treasure-hunters-nu-20100809,0,1109609,print.story

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By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times

August 8, 2010

William Wells arrived at the emergency room at St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach on April 9 mortally wounded. The 60-year-old had been stabbed more than a dozen times by a fellow nursing home resident, his throat slashed so savagely he was almost decapitated.

Instead of focusing on treating him, an employee said, St. Mary nurses and other hospital staff did the unthinkable: They snapped photos of the dying man and posted them on Facebook.

Four staff members were fired and three disciplined, according to a St. Mary spokeswoman. At least two nurses were involved, but none was fired, a union spokesman said.

Hospital officials in California and elsewhere have faced an uneasy relationship with Facebook and other forms of social networking. Managers, struggling to prevent staffers from posting patient information on the sites, have developed no-tolerance policies and blocked employees from using Facebook and similar websites at work. The restrictions are being enforced as hospitals tout such sites as a way to boost their images and reach more patients.

Shoring up patient privacy is particularly important for hospitals, including Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center and Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Southern California, that have faced investigations in recent years after employees improperly accessed patient records, including some for celebrity patients.

"It's bad enough if it's an unauthorized person checking something for curiosity's sake. It's another thing to have that then broadcast to dozens or even hundreds of people if not the Internet itself," said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access, a Sacramento-based patient advocacy group. "People have an expectation of privacy."

In June, five nurses were fired at Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside after hospital managers discovered they had been discussing patients on Facebook. Hospital officials reported the incident to the California Department of Public Health, according to hospital spokeswoman Courtney Berlin. The department is investigating, a spokesman said.

Last month, Tri-City required employees to sign a new social media agreement concerning such sites as MySpace, Zoho and Eventful, among others, that noted, "Even if the patient is not identified by name or by the medical record number the information you disclose may identify that patient."

Tri-City officials would not disclose what the nurses wrote on Facebook.

The nurses have appealed their firings, insisting they did not violate patient privacy, according to Chuck Idelson, a spokesman for California Nurses Assn., which represents the nurses. Idelson also declined to say what the nurses wrote that led to the dismissals.

Three year ago, Tri-City officials fired five nurses and five staff members for taking cellphone photos of a suicidal patient and patient X-rays.

In the incident at St. Mary Medical Center, nurses and staff posted a photograph of Wells on their public Facebook accounts for about two days before fellow staffers reported them to hospital officials, according to an employee who saw the photo and Facebook posts. Hospital staffers also circulated the photo in text messages, said the employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of being fired.

Hospital spokeswoman Daa'iyah Jordan confirmed that staffers posted a photograph of a patient online, but would not identify the staffers or patient or say where the photo was posted. She said hospital officials notified the patient's family and regulators at the California Department of Public Health.

The department is investigating that incident, along with eight other potential breaches of patient information at the hospital this year, according to Ralph Montano, a department spokesman.

Facebook spokesman Simon Axten said he could not confirm when the photo was posted or removed, citing the company's confidentiality policy.

Wells died soon after the photo was taken, his suspected attacker was arrested and his death ruled a homicide, according to an autopsy report. His death is being investigated by Long Beach police and the California Department of Social Services, according to the department's spokeswoman, Lizelda Lopez. His relatives declined to comment.

Nurses often use their own Facebook pages and other social networking sites to trade information, seek advice and vent, according to Idelson, the union spokesman. He said he believes it is rare for nurses to post unauthorized patient photographs. He said union officials urge nurses never to post patient-related information online, calling sites intended for social networking "an open book."

"People may think they're protected so that what they post can only be seen by a friend or family member, but life has proved otherwise," Idelson said.

Rebekah Child, a registered nurse at Cedars-Sinai's emergency room, blogs for http://www.scrubsmag.com and said she knows many nurses who write about patients on Facebook, some while they are working.

"I've seen nurses say, 'The patient in bed nine' and somebody could figure out who they're speaking about, or, 'This patient came in with a heart attack,' " she said.

Many hospitals are adopting no-tolerance policies for the release of patient information online, which covers everything from patient names to seemingly innocuous details such as weight. Los Angeles County's Department of Health Services, for example, requires employees to sign an agreement that they will not release patient information through any non-county website.

"If you're giving any data about a patient at all, you've breached the privacy," said Pam Lane, vice president of health informatics with the California Hospital Assn. "People are doing it and they are losing their jobs."

The state does not track online breaches of patient privacy separately from other breaches.

So far this year, 686 breaches of patient privacy have been reported at hospitals statewide and substantiated by investigators at the California Department of Public Health, including four by healthcare workers, Montano said.

Last year, 1,407 such breaches were substantiated, including 18 by healthcare workers, he said.

He said the department has issued eight fines for such privacy breaches totaling more than $1.1 million since two state laws governing patient privacy took effect last year.

News of the Facebook posting at St. Mary coincided with the hospital's launch of a massive online marketing campaign last month that will include a new Facebook page, Twitter account and appearances by doctors on YouTube.

It joins 49 other hospitals statewide with a presence on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or blogs, a fraction of the state's 425 hospitals but more than in any other state except New York, according to Ed Bennett, director of Web strategy at University of Maryland Medical System. The group has grown to include hospitals in every state, 744 as of last month, Bennett said, about 15% of the nation's hospitals.

Bennett has tracked the rise of social networking among hospitals on his blog for the last two years, as the interactive world increasingly caters to the healthcare industry. For instance, the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) talks added a TEDMED conference in San Diego and Austin's SXSW Interactive Festival added Health 2.0 panel.

He said officials at many of the nation's leading hospitals, including the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, are attempting to safeguard patient privacy as they expand their presence on social networking sites by raising awareness among staffers about how privacy protections such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act apply online.

"We already have guidelines; social media is simply another form of communication. It's no different from e-mail or talking to someone in an elevator," Bennett said. "The safe advice is to assume anything you put out on a social media site has the potential to be public."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-facebook-20100809,0,5049805,print.story

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By John M. Glionna and Ethan Kim

Los Angeles Times

August 9, 2010

Reporting from Yichang, China and Seoul

In a pointed example of escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula, North Korea on Monday fired more than 100 rounds of artillery into the waters off its west coast, according to South Korea's Defense Ministry.

The move came one day after the North seized a South Korean fishing boat and its seven-man crew that officials claimed had violated North Korea's exclusive economic zone.

In recent days, North Korea had vowed "strong physical retaliation" in response to South Korea's launching last week of five days of naval training exercises near the disputed sea border between North and South. The exercises ended Monday.

South Korea had also participated last month in a series of joint naval exercises with U.S. forces. Pyongyang has routinely said that it considers such operations as preparations for an invasion.

Analysts said it was still too early to link the boat seizure and the shell firings as any comprehensive North Korean response.

"That's what they said they were going to do, come back with some physical response, but if that's what they had in mind, it's too hard to tell at this point," said Daniel Pinkston, an expert in North-South relations for the think tank International Crisis Group.

He said it was important to know where the fishing boat had been taken into custody. The shells fired Monday landed above the Northern Limit Line, a sea boundary between North and South, as North Korea's previous artillery had done, officials said.

Tensions have remained high since late March, when North Korea torpedoed a South Korean military ship on patrol near the naval border, killing 46 crewmen aboard.

Although a South Korean-led investigation of the incident has pinpointed North Korea as responsible for the sinking, Pyongyang has denied any involvement.

During a briefing late Monday, the South Korean Defense Ministry confirmed that the North had fired the shells into the Yellow Sea and that authorities had evacuated fishing boats in the area, according a source who asked not to be identified.

North Korea first fired some 10 shots around 5:30 p.m., then 100 shots between 5:52 and 6:14 p.m., South Korean officials said. The South's navy raised its alert status and sent warning broadcasts to the North at 5:49 p.m. officials said.

Earlier Monday, South Korea had demanded the release of both the 41-ton fishing boat and its crew -- four South Korean and three Chinese fishermen. The crew had been briefly questioned at sea Sunday before being taken to North Korea's eastern port of Songjin, according to the South Korean coast guard.

South Korean officials said Monday that they were trying to check if the boat had entered North Korea waters. The area is also where the navies of the rival Koreas fought three bloody gun battles in recent years.

Unification Ministry spokesman Chun Hae-sung said Pyongyang had yet to provide any information on the fishermen.

"The government yesterday urged North Korea to take swift action (on the fishermen) in line with an international law and practice and I'm reiterating that," he said.

In 2009, four South Korean fishermen were detained for a month after allegedly entering North Korean waters.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fgw-north-korea-artillery-20100810,0,3852895,print.story

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From the New York Times

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India Asks, Should Food Be a Right for the Poor?

JHABUA, India — Inside the drab district hospital, where dogs patter down the corridors, sniffing for food, Ratan Bhuria's children are curled together in the malnutrition ward, hovering at the edge of starvation. His daughter, Nani, is 4 and weighs 20 pounds. His son, Jogdiya, is 2 and weighs only eight.

Landless and illiterate, drowned by debt, Mr. Bhuria and his ailing children have staggered into the hospital ward after falling through India 's social safety net. They should receive subsidized government food and cooking fuel. They do not. The older children should be enrolled in school and receiving a free daily lunch. They are not. And they are hardly alone: India's eight poorest states have more people in poverty — an estimated 421 million — than Africa's 26 poorest nations, one study recently reported .

For the governing Indian National Congress Party, which has staked its political fortunes on appealing to the poor, this persistent inability to make government work for people like Mr. Bhuria has set off an ideological debate over a question that once would have been unthinkable in India: Should the country begin to unshackle the poor from the inefficient, decades-old government food distribution system and try something radical, like simply giving out food coupons, or cash?

The rethinking is being prodded by a potentially sweeping proposal that has divided the Congress Party. Its president, Sonia Gandhi , is pushing to create a constitutional right to food and expand the existing entitlement so that every Indian family would qualify for a monthly 77-pound bag of grain, sugar and kerosene. Such entitlements have helped the Congress Party win votes, especially in rural areas.

To Ms. Gandhi and many left-leaning social allies, making a food a legal right would give people like Mr. Bhuria a tool to demand benefits that rightfully belong to them. Many economists and market advocates within the Congress Party agree that the poor need better tools to receive their benefits but believe existing delivering system needs to be dismantled, not expanded; they argue that handing out vouchers equivalent to the bag of grain would liberate the poor from an unwieldy government apparatus and let them buy what they please, where they please.

“The question is whether there is a role for the market in the delivery of social programs,” said Bharat Ramaswami, a rural economist at the Indian Statistical Institute. “This is a big issue: Can you harness the market?”

India's ability, or inability, in coming decades to improve the lives of the poor will very likely determine if it becomes a global economic power, and a regional rival to China, or if it continues to be compared with Africa in poverty surveys.

India vanquished food shortages during the 1960s with the Green Revolution , which introduced high-yield grains and fertilizers and expanded irrigation, and the country has had one of the world's fastest-growing economies during the past decade. But its poverty and hunger indexes remain dismal, with roughly 42 percent of all Indian children under the age of 5 being underweight .

The food system has existed for more than half a century and has become riddled with corruption and inefficiency. Studies show that 70 percent of a roughly $12 billion budget is wasted, stolen or absorbed by bureaucratic and transportation costs. Ms. Gandhi's proposal, still far from becoming law, has been scaled back, for now, so that universal eligibility would initially be introduced only in the country's 200 poorest districts, including here in Jhabua, at the western edge of the state of Madhya Pradesh.

With some of the highest levels of poverty and child malnutrition in the world, Madhya Pradesh underscores the need for change in the food system. Earlier this year, the official overseeing the state's child development programs was arrested on charges of stealing money. In Jhabua, local news media recently reported a spate of child deaths linked to malnutrition in several villages. Investigators later discovered 3,500 fake food ration booklets in the district, believed to have been issued by low-level officials for themselves and their friends.

Inside the district hospital, Mr. Bhuria said he had applied three times for a food ration card, but the clerk had failed to produce one.

“Every time he would say, ‘We will do it, we will do it,' ” Mr. Bhuria recalled. “But he never did.”

A farmer, Mr. Bhuria fell into deep debt six years ago after he mortgaged his land for a loan of 150,000 rupees, or about $3,200. Like most people in the district, Mr. Bhuria is a Bhil, a member of a minority group whose customs call for the family of the groom to pay a “bride price” before a wedding. Mr. Bhuria spent most of his loan on his brother's wedding and was left landless, yet he and his wife kept having children. They now have six.

He and his wife migrated with their children to work as day laborers in the neighboring state of Gujarat. Working in Gujarat is common for farmers from Jhabua, but since none can use their ration booklets outside their home villages, they struggle to feed their families. When migrants returned to plant their fields in July, the malnutrition wards began to fill up at the district hospital.

“This is a cycle,” said Dr. I. S. Chauhan, who oversees the wards. “The mother is also malnourished. And they are migrant workers. They work all day and can't care for their children.”

Moneylenders are common across rural India, often providing loans at extortionate rates. Some farmers hand over food booklets as collateral. Sitting in a small shop, Salim Khan said people approach him for loans when a child is sick or if they need cash to travel for migrant work.

“Until they repay me,” he said, “I keep their ration card.”

He uses the cards to buy grain at government Fair Price Shops at the subsidized rate of about 2 rupees, or 4 cents, a kilogram. He resells it on the open market for six times as much. The margin represents interest on the loan. He has held the ration cards of some migrants for seven years. “Sometimes I'll have 50 cards,” he said. “Sometimes I'll have 100 or 150. It's not just me. Other lenders do this, too.”

He said he was willing to lend slightly more money to the most destitute because their yellow ration booklets made him eligible for the full 77 pounds of grain, the most available in a tiered rationing system. “The yellow ones are best for me,” he said.

This is just one of the illegalities that permeate the system, according to people in Jhabua. Bribery is also common; government inspectors are known to extort monthly payments from the clerks who sell the subsidized grain. Some clerks pay small bribes to local officials to get their jobs or keep them. In turn, moneylenders slip money to clerks to let them use the ration cards to collect the subsidized grain, sugar and fuel.

In a cavernous government warehouse, bags of grain are stacked almost 15 feet high, awaiting trucks to carry loads to different Fair Price Shops. R. K. Pandey, the manager, blamed local men for the persistent malnutrition in the district, saying they often sell the subsidized wheat on the open market and buy alcohol. He also noted that the Bhil population favored corn, not wheat, so besides buying alcohol, they also sell the grain to buy corn.

Efforts are under way to reform the national system. Officials in the state of Chhattisgarh have curbed corruption by tracking grain shipments on computers, so that officials cannot steal and resell it.

Many social advocates, suspicious of market solutions, say that such reforms prove that the system can be improved. But pro-market advocates say that issuing either food coupons or direct payments would circumvent much of the corruption and allow recipients more mobility and freedom of choice. They point to the eventual creation of a new national identity system — in which every person will have a number — as a tool that can make such direct benefits possible.

These sorts of debates seem like abstractions in much of Jhabua, where poverty and hunger are twinned. At the malnutrition ward, Dr. Chauhan said that Jogdiya, the tiny 2-year-old, had pneumonia, diarrhea and possibly tuberculosis. His health had been steadily deteriorating in recent weeks, but his father, Mr. Bhuria, had no money for either food or medicine. He had gone to Gujarat in mid-July in search of migrant work but then quickly returned after Jogdiya and Nani became sicker. A relative had warned him not to go, saying his children were too sick.

But he had felt he had no choice. “We didn't have anything to eat,” he had said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/world/asia/09food.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Hamburg Mosque Used by 9/11 Plotters Is Shuttered

BERLIN — The authorities in Hamburg said Monday that they had shut down the mosque there where several of the hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks had met because it remained a source of radicalization nearly a decade later.

The Masjid Taiba mosque, known at the time of the hijackings in 2001 as Al Quds mosque, was “closed effective immediately,” according to a statement by the Hamburg Interior Ministry.

The mosque's closing came after a group of radicalized young people associated with the mosque, most of whom were German citizens with roots in Muslim countries, traveled last year to the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Police searched the mosque and the apartments of leading members starting at 6 a.m., and seized the group's assets. Photographs published on the Web site of the daily newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt showed police carrying computers out of the mosque in Hamburg's St. Georg neighborhood.

“Today we closed the Taiba mosque because young men were being turned into religious fanatics there,” said Christoph Ahlhaus, secretary of the interior for the city of Hamburg, at a news conference Monday. “Behind the scenes, a supposed cultural organization shamelessly used the freedoms of our democratic rule of law to promote holy war.” The mosque achieved worldwide notoriety in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mohamed Atta , Marwan al-Shehhi, and other members of 9/11 plot used the mosque on Steindamm, near Hamburg's main train station, as a meeting place.

A report released in May by the Interior Ministry said that the mosque “remains the central attraction for the Jihadist scene.” According to the Interior Ministry report, a group of 11 people who met at the mosque traveled from Hamburg to the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan in March 2009, probably with the goal of training at a militant camp there. One of the 11 was detained in Pakistan and sent back to Germany.

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Ralf Kunz, said that the mosque had been under observation since 2001, but that the investigation intensified after the group's trip last year. In order to clear the high bar for banning an organization, particularly a religious one, “intelligence work was necessary, and that can take time,” Mr. Kunz said.

“We gathered enough material that the court ruled we could perform our searches there and that we could ban the organization,” Mr. Kunz said.

German intelligence officials have expressed concerns over the growing number of young Germans drawn into the militant Islamist scene and the possibility that they could return from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region to commit acts of terror.

In addition to closing the mosque, the authorities banned the cultural association that ran it, which was founded in 1993. The name of the mosque was changed from Al Quds to Taiba in 2008.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/world/europe/10germany-.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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U.S. Victims Identified as Bodies Arrive in Kabul

KABUL, Afghanistan — After a three-day journey, the 10 bodies arrived back here on Sunday and were laid out in the morgue of the Afghan National Army's military hospital. F.B.I. agents and their counterparts from Britain, Germany and Afghanistan confirmed that they were all members of an American-based relief group, the authorities said.

The killings of the Nuristan Eye Camp Expedition, a medical team from the relief group, the International Assistance Mission , brought to 17 the number of aid workers killed in Afghanistan this year, with another 19 abducted, according to the Afghan NGO Safety Office, a group that gives security advice to the 1,500 aid groups registered in the country.

Some victims' names were still being withheld while their next of kin were notified, but by Sunday night five of the six American victims had been identified by friends and family members.

There was Tom Little, 61, an optometrist from Delmar, N.Y., leader of the expedition and a well-known figure in aid circles here with 34 years in Afghanistan. He was known by clients and friends as Dr. Tom and was a veteran of such expeditions.

His old friend Dan Terry, 64, had been doing relief work in Afghanistan even longer, since 1971. Mr. Terry had just recovered from knee surgery, and had looked forward to joining the arduous hike over a 16,000-foot pass to reach a remote valley, providing eye care and other medical services. He died with the others when unknown gunmen shot them all.

There was also Thomas Grams, 51, a dentist who had given up his practice in Durango, Colo., to work full time dispensing free dental care, and had been in Afghanistan the last five years. Hiking over a pass in the Hindu Kush was a lesser challenge for him; he once trekked halfway up Mount Everest to provide dental care to a Buddhist monastery, friends said.

Another victim, Glen Lapp, 40, a nurse from Lancaster, Pa., was nearing the end of a two-year-long assignment in Afghanistan, sent by the Mennonite Central Committee; he had managed the International Assistance Mission's provincial eye care program. “The main thing that expats can do is to be a presence in the country,” he wrote to his sponsors. “Treating people with respect and with love and trying to be a little bit of Christ in this part of the world.”

The Associated Press identified the fifth American victim as Cheryl Beckett, 32, of Knoxville, Tenn. She was described as a pastor's daughter who had spent six years in Afghanistan and specialized in nutritional gardening and mother-child health.

The sixth American, a man, had yet to be identified; nor have the two Afghans who were killed. The German victim was a 35-year-old woman from Saxony, the German Foreign Ministry confirmed.

Britain identified its citizen as Karen Woo, 36, a surgeon who gave up her private clinic job to do relief work in Afghanistan, and whose fiancé was waiting for her in Kabul so they could return to Britain to get married, according to news reports from Britain.

“They were unarmed,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said. “They were not being paid for their services. They had traveled to this distant part of the world because they wanted to help people in need.”

The team was killed by gunmen in Badakhshan Province as they were on their way back from the area; both the Taliban and a loosely allied insurgent group, Hizb-i-Islami, claimed responsibility, each saying the victims were Christian missionaries trying to convert Afghans.

Although the mission says it is a Christian-based charity, everyone here who knew the victims say proselytizing was the last thing they were interested in.

“Dan Terry and Tom Little were men of faith and made no secret of that,” said Kate Clark, a friend who works as a political analyst in Kabul. “But you don't manage to survive in a country like Afghanistan for 30 or 40 years and try to convert people.”

The American ambassador, Karl W. Eikenberry , spoke abut the attack in a videotaped address to the Afghan people on Sunday. “Their murder demonstrates the absolute disregard that terrorist-inspired Taliban and other insurgents have for your health,” he said. “They don't care about your future.”

Many aid workers expressed hope that the slayings did not represent a shift in the Taliban policy of allowing unarmed relief workers to do their jobs unmolested. The police have not ruled out robbery, and the mission's executive director, Dirk Frans, said he doubted the insurgents' claims of responsibility were genuine.

“I don't think it's a change in policy,” said Nic Lee, director of the Afghan safety office, who said the Taliban had tried to leave relief workers alone because they provided services to areas they controlled that no one else could. “We have not advised NGOs that it's some kind of strategic shift, and we think it has no implications for Badakhshan or for the rest of the country.”

Mr. Lee said that attacks on aid workers had actually decreased by 35 percent in 2010 compared with last year, reversing past trends, even as overall violence increases. Much of that decrease, however, appeared to be a result of greater precautions by aid groups, including withdrawal from particularly dangerous areas, he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/world/asia/09afghan.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Radical Cleric Is Arrested in Indonesia

JAKARTA, Indonesia — A radical cleric was arrested in Indonesia on Monday, accused of having ties to terrorist training activities and to militants plotting a series of attacks on Indonesian authorities and foreigners, police officials said.

The cleric, Abu Bakar Bashir , was arrested in West Java along with five bodyguards, a National Police spokesman, Edward Aritonang, said at a news conference. Mr. Bashir “had an active role” in preparing the training of a militant network at a camp in Aceh Province, Mr. Aritonang said.

The arrest of Mr. Bashir comes amid continued efforts by Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, to clamp down on terrorism since the July 2009 bombings at two luxury Jakarta hotels that left at least nine people dead.

The authorities in Jakarta said the network was discovered earlier this year. Dozens of suspects linked to that cell have been arrested or killed in recent months.

The group is believed to have wanted to carry out bombing attacks on the National Police headquarters, the West Java police mobile brigade headquarters, international hotels and “more than two” foreign embassies, Mr. Aritonang said.

Mr. Bashir “knew all the connections, training and plans that happened in Aceh, because he routinely received reports from managers in the field,” Mr. Aritonang said.

The cleric's arrest was linked to the arrest last weekend of five people in separate raids in West Java, Mr. Aritonang said. The police found ammunition and bomb-making materials during those raids, he said.

In one place, police officers found a bomb that had to be detonated, Mr. Aritonang said. In another location they found a vehicle that was being prepared as a car bomb. Police said they were searching for a French man who is believed to have bought the car, along with his Moroccan wife.

Indonesian authorities have been laying the groundwork for Mr. Bashir's arrest for months by alleging he was involved in financing the Aceh group, one of the cleric's lawyers said.

“What we know is that he was tied in as a fund-raiser,” said Ahmad Michdan, the lawyer. “Where he got the money from we don't know. Abu Bakar Bashir doesn't have any money.”

The United States has portrayed Mr. Bashir, 71, as an important operative for Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia. Mr. Bashir is one of the founders of Jemaah Islamiyah , a radical Islamic organization based in Indonesia. The group was responsible for an attack on a Bali nightclub that killed 202 people in October 2002.

American and Australian officials have argued that he had a direct role in the Bali attack and the 2003 bombing of a Jakarta hotel.

Mr. Bashir was acquitted of terrorism charges in a trial in 2003 for the Bali attack. However, he was convicted on a passport violation. After serving a sentence, he was released, but the United States and Australia pressed Indonesia to file new charges.

Mr. Bashir was let out of prison in 2006 after serving more than a year for criminal conspiracy.

In 2008, he established the group Jamaah Ansharut Tauhid, or J.A.T. Three senior members of that group were arrested in May on suspicion of helping finance a training camp in Aceh. Authorities broke up the camp last February.

Members of J.A.T. have denied a connection between their group and terrorist activities.

Indonesia has received praise on the international stage for its battle against militant groups. A report by the International Crisis Group said that the jihadist movement in Indonesia was marked by increasing disunity, in part because of police crackdowns.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/world/asia/10indo.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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The Senate on Thursday approved a long-awaited child nutrition act that intends to feed more hungry kids and make school food more nutritious, and it provides for $4.5 billion over the next decade to make that happen.

Called the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, it passed the Senate unanimously and now moves on to the House, where passage is also expected. National child nutrition programs are set to expire Sept. 30.

The legislation will expand the number of low-income children who are eligible for free or reduced-price school meals, largely by streamlining the paperwork required to receive the meals. And it will expand a program to provide after-school meals to at-risk children.

Food sold in schools will be required to meet new nutrition guidelines, whether sold in the school lunch lines or in vending machines. Schools still may be allowed to sell pizza and other favorites, though they may have to substitute healthier ingredients to qualify.

School vending machines and à la carte lines, however, may be prohibited from selling candy bars and high-sugar sodas that have long provided revenue for extracurricular programs.

To help schools cover the costs of healthier foods, the bill provides for the first non-inflationary increase in the reimbursement rate for federal-sponsored school meals— the amount local districts are repaid by the federal government — since 1973. The increase amounts to an additional 6 cents for every meal.

The legislation “will finally put us on a path toward improving the health of the next generation of Americans, providing common-sense solutions to tackling childhood hunger and obesity ,” said Senator Blanche Lincoln , Democratic of Arkansas and the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, in prepared remarks. “In this budget environment, with record deficits, we have been able to produce a bill that is fully paid for and will not add a dime to the deficit.”

The Senate bill was applauded by nutrition advocates, who have long complained that federally sponsored school lunch programs provided food that didn't meet the government's own nutrition guidelines.

“The Senate bill changes the school food landscape in ways that are all positive,” said Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest , in a press release. “Put simply, it will get junk food out of, and put more healthy food into, America's schools. It preserves the free and reduced-cost meals that many families depend on in an economic downturn.”

Michelle Obama , who has pushed for the bill's passage as part of her “Let's Move” agenda for children, also applauded the Senate's action.

“While childhood obesity cannot be solved overnight, with everyone working together, there's no question that it can be solved — and today's vote moves us one step closer to reaching that goal,” the first lady said in a statement released by the White House.

http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/senate-passes-child-nutrition-act/?ref=us

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Students Spared Amid an Increase in Deportations

The Obama administration, while deporting a record number of immigrants convicted of crimes, is sparing one group of illegal immigrants from expulsion: students who came to the United States without papers when they were children.

In case after case where immigrant students were identified by federal agents as being in the country illegally, the students were released from detention and their deportations were suspended or canceled, lawyers and immigrant advocates said. Officials have even declined to deport students who openly declared their illegal status in public protests.

The students who have been allowed to remain are among more than 700,000 illegal immigrants who would be eligible for legal status under a bill before Congress specifically for high school graduates who came to the United States before they were 16. Department of Homeland Security officials said they had made no formal change of policy to permit those students to stay. But they said they had other, more pressing deportation priorities.

“In a world of limited resources, our time is better spent on someone who is here unlawfully and is committing crimes in the neighborhood,” John Morton, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement , said in an interview. “As opposed to someone who came to this country as a juvenile and spent the vast majority of their life here.”

Still, Republicans say the authorities should pursue all immigrants who are here illegally.

“The administration appears to want to pick and choose what laws they will follow and which ones they don't,” said Representative Brian P. Bilbray, Republican of California, who is chairman of a House immigration caucus. “They are trying to legislate from the White House,” he said.

The administration is debating how to handle immigration now that the chances for a broad overhaul that President Obama supports have faded for this year.

The issue of illegal immigrant students has become pressing because young immigrants have staged increasingly frequent and defiant protests to demand passage this year of the piece of the overhaul that would benefit them.

Lawmakers who support that legislation have asked the administration to halt student deportations until Congress takes it up. But most Republicans are opposed to any action that would weaken enforcement against illegal immigration.

An internal Homeland Security memorandum, released last month by Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, set off a furor among his fellow Republicans because it showed immigration officials weighing steps they could take without Congressional approval to give legal status to some illegal immigrants — including suspending deportations of students.

The moratorium had been requested by Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate, and Senator Richard G. Lugar , Republican of Indiana, the leading sponsors of the student legislation, called the Dream Act.

But a White House official said that the administration had decided against the moratorium, preferring to push for the student bill, which could grant legal status to more than 700,000 young immigrants here illegally.

“Legislation does far more for Dream Act students than deferring deportations would, in that it puts them on a path to citizenship,” said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal policy debate.

Instead of a general moratorium, immigration authorities appear to be acting case by case to hold up deportations of young immigrants.

“We have not had a single student whose case we handled who has been deported,” said Juan Escalante, a spokesman for the Dream Is Coming , an organization that has waged petition campaigns and sit-ins to stop student deportations. “Obviously, there is some sort of pattern there in the fact they are not deporting students.”

According to figures from the immigration enforcement agency, known as ICE , the Obama administration has accelerated the pace of deportations over all. In 2009, the authorities deported 389,834 people, about 20,000 more than in 2008, the final year of the Bush administration.

Last year, Mr. Morton announced the agency's new priorities, directing agents to focus on capturing immigrant criminals. In the past 10 months, ICE has deported 142,526 immigrants convicted of crimes, a record number, the figures show.

At the same time, deportations of immigrants with civil violations, but no crimes, dropped by 24 percent. (Under immigration law, being in the United States without legal status is a civil violation, not a crime.)

The figures confirm “an enormous shift in targeting toward criminals,” said Susan B. Long, co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which analyzes federal law enforcement data.

The vast majority of students who are illegal immigrants have clean criminal records, and they would have to keep it that way to qualify to become legal under the Dream Act. To meet its terms, immigrants must also have graduated from high school and lived in the United States for at least five years, and they must complete two years of college or military service.

Last month, the Migration Policy Institute , a nonpartisan research group in Washington, estimated that 726,000 young immigrants would be immediately eligible for legal status under the Dream Act, a big increase over earlier estimates.

Lawmakers from both parties say the student bill draws wider support than the broader overhaul — but still not enough to make it likely to pass before the election. Many young immigrants were brought to the United States illegally as small children by their parents. Often they learn of their illegal status only years later, when they are old enough to apply for a driver's license or to attend college.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said in recent days that he was willing to bring up the Dream Act separately, but that he did not have the 60 votes required to bring it to the floor.

Some students, after years of hiding, have concluded that it may now be safer for them to come out in the open about their illegal status. Immigration authorities have appeared to respond to the students' public campaigns, student leaders said.

“What we have seen is it is better to be out there,” said Carlos Saavedra, national coordinator of the United We Dream network, which links dozens of immigrant student groups from around the country.

On Thursday, after phone calls and petitions from more than 50 local student groups, immigration authorities deferred for one year the deportation of Marlen Moreno, a Mexican immigrant living in Arizona who has two children who are American citizens and who would qualify to become legal under the Dream Act.

Last month, students held a weeklong protest in Washington that ended with a mock graduation ceremony on Capitol Hill, where hundreds of immigrants wearing caps and gowns declared their illegal status.

Immigration agents have taken no action against 21 immigrant students who were arrested on July 20 by the Capitol Police in sit-in protests in Senate offices, according to David Bennion, their immigration lawyer. Several were detained in the offices of Senator Reid and Senator John McCain of Arizona, a Republican.

Earlier in the summer, students campaigned on behalf of Eric Balderas, a 19-year-old Mexican-born biology major at Harvard who was arrested by immigration agents in San Antonio in June when he was about to fly back to Cambridge after visiting his mother. With Harvard officials and Senator Durbin also weighing in, ICE deferred his deportation indefinitely.

ICE has not held up deportations of young immigrants who have committed more serious crimes or were previously deported.

Two immigrants who declared their illegal status during a sit-in in May in the offices of Mr. McCain in Tucson — Mohammad Abdollahi, 24, born in Iran, and Yahaira Carrillo, 25, born in Mexico — were briefly detained by ICE. But the agency has not filed charges against them in immigration court that would advance their deportations, their lawyer, Margo Cowan, said last week.

Ms. Carrillo, who has returned to her home in Kansas City, Mo., said she felt relieved after she went public with her illegal status. Now a student at Rockhurst University she has been living in the United States since she was 7.

“I don't have to hide,” she said. “I don't have to make excuses as to why I can't take certain jobs or scholarships. What is the worst that can happen to me now? I'm already in deportation proceedings.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/us/09students.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Vulnerable Refugees, Losing a Lifeline

In less than two months, unless Congress acts quickly, thousands of refugees who fled for their lives from places like Iran, Cuba, Russia, Somalia and Vietnam — and who are now elderly, disabled and poor — are about to learn the cold limits of compassion.

As part of its welfare overhaul in 1996, Congress placed a five-year limit on the time that refugees could receive benefits that vulnerable citizens receive, like Supplemental Security Income, cash assistance to the elderly and the severely disabled. This was supposed to be ample time for people to become citizens, to continue their eligibility for aid, but it quickly became clear that that was a mistake. For a host of reasons — old age, infirmity, poverty, the difficulty of learning English, on top of backlogs, crushing paperwork and high administrative fees — thousands of people would be unable to meet the deadline.

The deadline was lengthened in 1997 to seven years. In 2008, at the urging of President George W. Bush and with bipartisan support, Congress provided another two-year respite. But nobody in the current Congress has stepped up to fix the problem again, and on Oct. 1, about 3,800 refugees will reach the end of their lifeline. The letters are already going out.

As advocates for refugees explain, those affected by the looming deadline are not like other immigrants, and are unusually vulnerable. They did not come here for jobs. They are all by definition survivors of persecution, torture or warfare. Some were targets of Saddam Hussein, others victims of sex trafficking. Many have no relatives here. Some are homebound, and were already past 70 when they arrived, too late to learn English, highly unlikely to complete the years-long path to gaining citizenship. They are all old, ill or disabled, and the country that welcomed them is the only benefactor they have.

The amounts that these refugees receive are not large — no more than $674 a month for an individual and $1,011 a month for a couple. If any shreds of bipartisanship still exist in Washington, along with the belief that the United States should remain a true haven for those fleeing persecution, then Congress and President Obama will renew their support for a bill to extend benefits to elderly and disabled refugees. In time, they should adopt the permanent solution: finally delinking naturalization and artificial time limits from the granting of lifesaving assistance to these refugees.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/opinion/09mon4.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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