Is the U.S.-backed drug war in Mexico working? By almost any account or any measure, the answer is no. Though high-ranking authorities on both sides of the border continue to support Mexico's military-led enforcement strategy against the country's powerful drug trafficking cartels, the facts remain stark, L.A. Times correspondents Tracy Wilkinson and Ken Ellingwood say in a special report published Sunday.

The cartels are stronger, more violent, and transnational. Here are the worrisome highlights from the story:

In addition to all this, attacks on journalists and human rights workers have skyrocketed, and so have claims of human rights abuses committed by Mexico's military. Still, the administration of U.S. President Obama plans to supply Mexico with more than $1 billion in aid under the Merida Initiative. A recent congressional report warns of lack of oversight on how that aid is spent. Only 9% of Merida Initiative funds have been delivered so far.

Now, the question of whether Mexico should legalize drugs, as former President Vicente Fox now advocates, is in many ways a moot proposal. A legalization of drugs in Mexico would have no effect on the illicit drug trade and market without a concurrent plan in the United States, many experts say.

Then ... what is?

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

By Associated Press

August 12, 2010

LEESBURG, Va. (AP) — Police say a person of interest has been arrested in connection with a string of stabbings that left five men dead and wounded more than a dozen in Michigan, Virginia and Ohio.

In a news release, police in Leesburg, Va., say a person of interest has been arrested and is being held on unrelated charges.

Leesburg Police Officer Chris Jones says authorities believe the man could be the suspect and has ties to Leesburg and Flint, Mich. Jones says police "have information that he was trying to leave the country."

The attacks started May 24 in Flint.

Police had been focusing on that area until Leesburg police reported three similar attacks last week. Toledo, Ohio, authorities also say a stabbing in that city Saturday appears to be linked to the Michigan cases.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-us-serial-stabbings,0,1150246,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Chinese Hospitals Are Battlegrounds of Discontent

SHENYANG, China — Forget the calls by many Chinese patients for more honest, better-qualified doctors. What this city's 27 public hospitals really needed, officials decided last month, was police officers.

And not just at the entrance, but as deputy administrators. The goal: to keep disgruntled patients and their relatives from attacking the doctors.

The decision was quickly reversed after Chinese health experts assailed it, arguing that the police were public servants, not doctors' personal bodyguards.

But officials in this northeastern industrial hub of nearly eight million people had a point. Chinese hospitals are dangerous places to work. In 2006, the last year the Health Ministry published statistics on hospital violence, attacks by patients or their relatives injured more than 5,500 medical workers.

“I think the police should have a permanent base here,” said a neurosurgeon at Shengjing Hospital. “I always feel this element of danger.”

In June alone, a doctor was stabbed to death in Shandong Province by the son of a patient who had died of liver cancer . Three doctors were severely burned in Shanxi Province when a patient set fire to a hospital office. A pediatrician in Fujian Province was also injured after leaping out a fifth-floor window to escape angry relatives of a newborn who had died under his care.

Over the past year, families of deceased patients have forced doctors to don mourning clothes as a sign of atonement for poor care, and organized protests to bar hospital entrances. Four years ago, 2,000 people rioted at a hospital after reports that a 3-year-old was refused treatment because his grandfather could not pay $82 in upfront fees. The child died.

Such episodes are to some extent standard fare in China , where protests over myriad issues have been on the rise. Officials at all levels of government are on guard against unrest that could spiral and threaten the Communist Party's power.

Doctors and nurses say the strains in the relations between them and patients' relatives are often the result of unrealistic expectations by poor families who, having traveled far and exhausted their savings on care, expect medical miracles.

But the violence also reflects much wider discontent with China's public health care system. Although the government, under Communist leadership, once offered rudimentary health care at nominal prices, it pulled back in the 1990s, leaving hospitals largely to fend for themselves in the new market economy.

By 2000, the World Health Organization ranked China's health system as one of the world's most inequitable, 188th among 191 nations. Nearly two of every five sick people went untreated. Only one in 10 had health insurance .

Over the past seven years, the state has intervened anew, with notable results. It has narrowed if not eliminated the gap in public health care spending with other developing nations of similar income levels, health experts say, pouring tens of billions of dollars into government insurance plans and hospital construction.

The World Bank estimates that more than three in four Chinese are now insured, although coverage is often basic. And far more people are getting care: the World Bank says hospital admissions in rural counties have doubled in five years.

“That is a steep, steep increase,” said Jack Langenbrunner, human development coordinator at the World Bank's Beijing office. “We haven't seen that in any other country.”

Still, across much of China, the quality of care remains low. Almost half the nation's doctors have no better than a high school degree, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development . Many village doctors did not make it past junior high school.

Primary care is scarce, so public hospitals — notorious for excessive fees — are typically patients' first stop in cities, even for minor ailments. One survey estimated that a fifth of hospital patients suffer from no more than a cold or flu . Chinese health experts estimate that a third to a half of patients are hospitalized for no good reason.

Once admitted, patients are at risk of needless surgery; for instance, one of every two Chinese newborns is delivered by Caesarean sections, a rate three times higher than health experts recommend.

Patients appear to be even more likely to get useless prescriptions . Drug sales are hospitals' second biggest source of revenue, and many offer incentives that can lead doctors to overprescribe or link doctors' salaries to the money they generate from prescriptions and costly diagnostic tests. Some pharmaceutical companies offer additional under-the-table inducements for prescribing drugs, doctors and experts say.

An article in November in The Guangzhou Daily in southeastern China cited one particularly egregious example of unnecessary treatment: a patient paid roughly $95 for a checkup, several injections and a dozen different drugs, including pills for liver disease . He had a cold.

The Health Ministry has ordered hospitals to reduce prices of specific drugs 23 times in a decade, but the World Bank says hospitals have responded, in part, by ordering higher-priced alternatives.

Some experts fear that the newly opened spigot of government insurance money will inspire further excesses, rather than reduce the financial risk of illness for most Chinese. Indeed, one study shows only a slight drop in the share of household spending devoted to health care — 8.2 percent in 2008, down from 8. 7 percent in 2003.

“Their protection may not really be improving with insurance,” said Mr. Langenbrunner of the World Bank. “That is the scary part.”

Doctors seem as unhappy as patients. They complain that they are underpaid, undervalued and mistrusted. One in four suffers from depression, and fewer than two of every three believe that their patients respect them, a survey by Peking University concluded in October.

In June, more than 100 doctors and nurses in Fujian Province staged their own sit-in after their hospital paid $31,000 to the family of a patient who died. The doctors were upset because after the patient died the relatives took a doctor hostage, setting off a bottle-throwing melee that injured five employees.

Like some other cities, Shenyang has been seeking ways to ward off disturbances, including setting up hospital mediation centers. Still, the city reported 152 “severe conflicts” between patients and doctors last year.

At Hospital No. 5, the memory of a January attack remains fresh. After a doctor referred a patient with a temperature to a fever clinic — standard practice in China — frustrated relatives beat the doctor and several nurses with a mop and sticks.

Now a banner strung across the hospital's main lobby exhorts: “Everyone participate in the sorting out of the law and order problem!”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/world/asia/12hospital.html?pagewanted=print

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Births to Illegal Immigrants Are Studied

About 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 — or 8 percent — had at least one parent who was an illegal immigrant, according to a study published Wednesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.

Because they were born in this country, the babies of illegal immigrants are United States citizens. In all in 2008, four million children who were American citizens had at least one parent who was in the country illegally, the Pew study found.

Children of illegal immigrants make up 7 percent of all people in the country younger than 18 years old, according to the study, which is based on March 2009 census figures, the most recent data on immigrant families. Nearly four out of five of those children — 79 percent — are American citizens because they were born here.

About 85 percent of the parents who are illegal immigrants are Hispanic, the Pew Center said.

The study comes as lawmakers in Washington have been debating whether to consider changing the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to anyone born in the United States. The controversy began after Senator Lindsey Graham , Republican of South Carolina, said in July that he might offer an amendment to revoke birthright citizenship for the American-born children of illegal immigrants.

Mr. Graham's comments touched a nerve with many Americans, who called in to talk shows to question whether the children of immigrants who have violated the law by remaining in the United States should be granted citizenship. But it was less clear that there was strong support for altering the Constitution to address the problem.

A nationwide survey in June by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a group affiliated with the Hispanic Center, found that 56 percent of those polled opposed changing the 14th Amendment, while 41 percent supported it.

The study by the Pew Hispanic Center casts light on an issue raised by Mr. Graham that prompted the current debate. In an interview with Fox News last month, he said that many illegal immigrants were crossing the border to have babies in this country to gain citizenship for their children. “They come here to drop a child,” Mr. Graham said.

The Pew figures show that most illegal immigrant mothers did not arrive recently.

More than 80 percent of mothers in the country illegally had been here for more than a year, the figures show, and more than half had been in the country for five years or more, said Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center and the co-author of the study, along with Paul Taylor , the center's director.

“The combination of the growing undocumented population through 2007, with more staying in the country longer, creates a situation where we have seen increasing numbers of these births over the last six or seven years,” Mr. Passel said. “Because the immigrants are staying here, this is a young population, and they get married and form families.”

Some researchers noted that the Pew figures did not identify families where both parents were illegal immigrants. “If anything, the Pew report highlights how complicated this issue is, given that so many unauthorized immigrants live in families that include U.S. citizens and legal immigrants,” said Michele Waslin, senior policy analyst for the Immigration Policy Center , a group that supports legalization for illegal immigrants.

Republican leaders and conservatives have been divided over Mr. Graham's proposal for a constitutional amendment.

“What the Pew estimate underlines is that this is a big problem,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies , a research group that advocates reduced immigration . “It really is a subversion of national independence for people who break into your country then to demand that their kids be U.S. citizens.”

But Mr. Krikorian does not favor an immediate effort to amend the Constitution's citizenship clause. He said he wanted to see tougher enforcement to reduce the number of illegal immigrants.

“The point is to shrink the illegal population and prevent new illegals from coming in,” he said, “before it's appropriate to have the constitutional debate.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/us/12babies.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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U.S. Plans More Aid for Jobless Homeowners

In an acknowledgment that the foreclosure crisis is far from over, the Obama administration on Wednesday pumped $3 billion into programs intended to stop the unemployed from losing their homes.

The housing market, which usually helps lead the country out of a recession , is this time helping hold the recovery back. Interest rates are at record lows, but too few can afford to buy or refinance. Unemployed homeowners who live in communities where values have fallen sharply are often unable to sell. Their foreclosures weaken neighborhoods and create a vicious circle by further undermining the market.

To try to break this pattern, the Treasury Department said it was adding $2 billion to its Hardest Hit Fund, roughly doubling its size. The fund, first announced by President Obama in February and expanded in March, goes to housing finance agencies in various states to create local aid programs.

Most of the state programs from the first two rounds are barely under way, but Treasury officials said it was clear that more funds were needed.

“In this very deep recession, people have tended to be out of work a little longer,” Herbert M. Allison Jr. , assistant secretary for financial stability, said. “That's why we think this additional relief for people searching for a job is so important.”

The second program, announced by the Department of Housing and Urban Development , will draw on $1 billion authorized by the new financial overhaul law.

The agency said it would work with local aid groups to offer bridge loans of up to $50,000 to eligible borrowers to help them pay their mortgage principal, interest, insurance and taxes for up to 24 months. The loans will be interest-free.

Until now, the Hardest Hit Fund had been projected to help about 140,000 borrowers. Treasury officials said that number would grow with the new infusion of money, but offered no estimate. HUD also did not say how many homeowners would be eligible for its program.

If the new money is spent in the same way as the previous money, both programs would eventually aid about 400,000 borrowers — a large number, but not when set against the 14.6 million unemployed or three million contemplating foreclosure.

Over the last two years, the government has deployed many programs to help housing. It pushed interest rates down, offered tax credits and set up an ambitious mortgage modification program. Yet housing remains feeble and seems poised after a brief respite this year to become weaker again.

“I think all these government programs are helpful, but I wouldn't look for them to cure the recession or even what ails housing,” said the economist Karl E. Case. “At best, they're preventing things from getting much worse.”

The Hardest Hit Fund will draw on the $45.6 billion set aside for housing in the Troubled Asset Relief Program , the rescue measure begun at the height of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008. Initially, the fund gave $1.5 billion to five hard-hit states: Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan and Nevada. The second round in March of $600 million went to North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island and South Carolina.

The expanded list of states eligible for the latest funding includes Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi and New Jersey, as well as the District of Columbia. Each state's share of the money is based on its population.

Many of the programs involve direct assistance. Ohio, for instance, said it would use its $172 million to aid 15,356 homeowners by helping bring delinquent mortgages current for owners experiencing hardship because of a loss of income. The assistance will last up to 12 months.

The other housing money in the Troubled Asset Relief Program is earmarked for the modification programs ($30.6 billion) and a Federal Housing Administration refinancing program ($11 billion). The administration can shift money between the programs only until Oct. 3, the two-year anniversary of the program.

HUD said it was in the process of determining which communities would receive its money and how exactly the process would work. “We're still in the design phase,” said Bill Apgar, HUD senior adviser for mortgage finance.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/business/12treasury.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From ICE

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" We knew these operations were different from the states. There was a feeling of heightened awareness of our surroundings and increased tension in the air. Shootings and murders are taking place all over the city on a daily basis. When we were driving to a location downtown to look for gang members, we saw a body with a gunshot wound to the head lying on the sidewalk. " - Chuck Reed, ICE video production specialist

In Honduras, on assignment for Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Video Production Specialist Chuck Reed kept his camera rolling nearly nonstop for three days in May during Operation Double Impact . While Reed is routinely behind the lens of live police action, the prospect of filming ICE/HSI agents and Honduras National Police (HNP) as they scoured the Tamara Prison and the Honduras streets, targeting Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the 18th Street (M-18) gangs, made him "a little nervous."

The MS-13 and M-18 gangs engage in almost every conceivable criminal enterprise, including weapons and drug trafficking and human smuggling and trafficking. They violently protect their illicit interests through murder, murder for hire, kidnapping, blackmail, extortion and assassination. Frequently traveling between the U.S. and their home countries (usually somewhere in Central America or Mexico), these highly-mobile transnational gang members create a revolving door effect, perpetuating the north-south circular flow of gang activity.

A global and sophisticated anti-gang strategy is, therefore, critical to law enforcement. This fact was the impetus for expanding into Honduras, ICE's most effective tool in the fight against transnational street gangs -- Operation Community Shield (OCS) . Since 2005 when OCS was first launched, ICE has partnered with federal, state and local law enforcement to identify, investigate, disrupt and dismantle violent street gangs. ICE is like no other federal law enforcement agency in that it is empowered by law with the authority to remove (deport) criminal aliens. Thus, ICE's OCS is a powerful force in the fight against transnational gangs.

Establishing a new Operation Community Shield Task Force (OCSTF) based in Honduras this past February, the ICE National Gang Unit, in conjunction with the ICE Assistant Attaché Honduras and the Narcotics Affairs Section of the Department of State, created the first OCS international alliance.

"Our OCSTF in Honduras is fostering and promoting clear, guided core law enforcement principles for Honduras National Police (HNP) gang units in their early stages of development," said Christopher Merendino, the International Program Manager of ICE/HSI Transnational Gangs. "Working together, disrupting these gangs in targeted areas and collecting intelligence, ICE and the HNP are bridging the gaps in combating gang activity and building a strong international crime-fighting network that will be difficult for gang members to elude."

After four months of ICE's mentoring and capacity building teaching the vetted HNP officers of the newly-formed task force the art of gang intelligence collection and sharing, as well as proven ICE enforcement strategies, the OCSTF put their lessons to work.

Reed videotaped and took still shots within the Tamara Prison, which housed MS-13 and M-18 gang members in four different compounds. But getting inside the prison was not an easy feat as task force members had to pry open the prison doors, which the inmates had locked. ICE Assistant Attaché in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Javier Pacheco, who helped coordinate the OCSTF in Honduras, was on the scene. Pacheco said the inmates "were not used to anyone invading their space. They own the prisons."

With limited time and the clock ticking, task force members had time to search only part of one M-18 compound. Law enforcement officers seized knives, narcotics and cell phones (the latter of which provided valuable call data that can be used for further gang investigations). Out of 180 inmates searched, the task force was able to fingerprint approximately 30 gang members using the latest digital scanning technique, the ICE CrossMatch Mobile IDENT.

"Our goal is to document every single MS-13 and M-18 member that is housed in the Honduras prison system," said Pacheco. Having fingerprints, photos and other identifying gang member information on file and sharing this information with law enforcement on both sides of the border is essential to stopping the problem of gang activity.

After the prison raid, OCSTF officers saturated the gang-plagued Comayaguelo Market, a place where gang members sell drugs, rob pedestrians and hold meetings. Officers arrested 33 gang members on Honduran federal and state criminal violations, including narcotics and firearms charges. They seized narcotics, cell phones and a vehicle. They also seized more than 1.8 million counterfeit DVDs and CDs with an estimated street value of $2 million. This latter crime is an intellectual property rights (IPR) violation and is also under ICE's jurisdiction.

Reed lauded the "great working relationship" between ICE and the HNP. "We could never have gone into the prison, conducted the IPR operation or conducted any of the gang operations without the cooperation of the HNP and the Minister of Security," said Reed. "The ICE vetted unit worked tirelessly to make the operation a success. Although there was a language barrier, I felt as if I got to know these agents. I was thoroughly impressed with their work ethic and their ability to get the job done."

Pacheco, who has served in Honduras as the ICE Attaché for more than a year says he's met "some of the best police officers in Honduras. They are focused on their mission. They are loyal and dedicated to their job. They believe in what they are doing and believe that they can make a difference."

In fact, Pacheco says Operation Double Impact has already made a difference. "We are starting to see the mentality evolve," said Pacheco. "More people are coming forward to their local precincts and sharing information and providing leads. We are seeing more arrests and greater quality of arrests -- not just the street thugs, but the gang leaders are being reported."

From his experience, Pacheco says that children join gangs in order to survive. "It's a pressure thing. A gang that owns the community pressures the kids to join."

The solution is education at an early age," Pacheco said. He cited a Honduran government and State Department backed community policing program designed to offer children guidance and keep them out of gangs.

Reed recorded the events of Operation Double Impact as part of his job for ICE. The entire experience, however -- dangerous, adrenaline spiked and ultimately purposeful and fulfilling -- will also be filed in Reed's memory bank. "It's something I'm never going to forget." Reed said.

Continuing with the success of the Honduran OCSTF, ICE is in the process of establishing an OCSTF in Kingston, Jamaica.

http://www.ice.gov/pi/nr/1008/100811washingtondc.htm

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