By Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times

August 18, 2010

In a contentious 4-1 vote, Los Angeles County supervisors Tuesday ordered county departments to cooperate with an investigation into what they called the "inappropriate disclosure of confidential child welfare information" to the Los Angeles Times regarding the deaths of children who were being monitored by county workers.

Tuesday's vote came after supervisors acted in closed session in recent weeks to begin an investigation — without disclosing the action to the public. In a letter last week to the supervisors, William T Fujioka, the county's chief executive, raised concerns that the previous closed-door discussions may have violated the Brown Act, a state law that protects the public's right to participate and be informed of meetings of local legislative bodies.

For more than a year, The Times has reported on the deaths of children whose families had previously come to the attention of the county Department of Children and Family Services because of allegations of abuse or neglect.

The investigation ordered by the supervisors came after the department's director, Trish Ploehn, complained that information obtained by The Times was causing a morale problem in her agency, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said at Tuesday's meeting.

Yaroslavsky, the lone no vote, rebuked Fujioka and top child services officials for wasting time on pursuing a way to "plug the leaks."

"The obsession with leaks, seems to me, exceeds the obsession with child deaths," Yaroslavsky said.

"You can try till you're blue in the face to try to identify who leaked what. And all the energy that is spent on that is energy that is not spent on trying to figure out what is going wrong in the Department of Children and Family Services," he said. "Why does a social worker who knows enough to pull a kid who has threatened to commit suicide, an 11-year-old kid, why didn't they pull that kid from his parent? It's a legitimate question."

"We haven't really focused on that question. We focused on the leaks," he said.

Yaroslavsky was referring to the Times report last month on the suicide of 11-year-old Jorge Tarin , who hanged himself in a closet of his Montebello home on June 8. Jorge killed himself just hours after county workers were sent to the home to interview him after he told a school counselor that he wanted to kill himself. It was the last in a string of visits by county social workers, who had previously noted drugs, violence and neglect in homes Jorge had lived in since infancy.

The Times reported that county officials who left that day without Jorge were unaware that his stepfather, who opened the door, was barred under a court order from living in the home — among the facts that might have led them to remove the boy.

On Tuesday, Fujioka adamantly denied that county officials were more concerned about whether "confidential information is leaked" than fixing problems in the department. But, he said, "we have an equal obligation to those families to keep some of this information confidential."

Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas called Yaroslavsky's rebuke a "cheap shot" and defended the inquiry as necessary because "the quote unquote leaks do in fact compromise the effective management and pursuit of problems in DCFS. They are not helping address the problems. They are creating more in the way of distraction."

Supervisor Gloria Molina said the county is "not trying to hide anything from anyone with regard to, regretfully, these children's deaths." However, she said officials are bound by law to keep some information confidential.

After The Times began writing about child deaths, the disclosure of records slowed dramatically, despite a 2007 state law that made the release of such documents mandatory in most cases. Of the 23 most recent deaths resulting from abuse or neglect, the department has released records in only two cases, and those records were limited.

Earlier this month, a senior deputy county counsel declared the topic of child fatalities off-limits at a meeting of the county's Commission for Children and Families when commissioners asked for basic statistics regarding the deaths. County Counsel Andrea Ordin said later that her deputy erred by squelching the discussion and promised that the data would be released, but the department has yet to do so.

Fujioka said he plans to complete his investigation by the end of this week.

Ordin said she believed Tuesday's public discussion and vote fixes any potential Brown Act violation.

Jim Ewert, legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Assn., disagreed. To resolve a Brown Act violation, he said, the county would have to revoke its earlier, illegal decision first, which was not done Tuesday.

The one-hour discussion on the investigation shed light on a personnel matter related to Ploehn, discussed behind closed doors four weeks ago. The failure to disclose that discussion could be another Brown Act violation, Ewert said.

Ordin disagreed, saying proper notification was made, but she declined to point to a specific agenda item on the matter.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0818-child-services-20100818,0,1116484,print.story

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Days after a vacationing President Obama swam in gulf waters and tasted fish caught off the coast of Florida, scientists with the Natural Resources Defense Council said the gulf oil spill probably still will have far-reaching health effects on both seafood and people.

The commentary , published online Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., examined the potential effects of the oil spill on workers, residents and seafood coming out of the Gulf of Mexico. The  report followed seafood testing done by the Food and Drug Administration indicating that levels of the heavier toxic substances in oil that can kill marine life were well below federally set limits.

The paper was written by Dr. Gina Solomon, director of UC San Francisco's Occupational and Environmental Medicine Residency Program and a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Dr. Sarah Janssen, also with UCSF and a senior scientist with the NRDC. They pointed to the known effects of crude oil's lighter chemicals, which are released into the air once the oil reaches the ocean surface. Such "volatile aromatic hydrocarbons" can cause breathing problems as well as harm to the central nervous system. Benzene exposure has been linked to leukemia, and toluene to birth defects, Solomon said in a phone interview.

In Louisiana, Solomon added, hundreds of cleanup workers reported headaches, vomiting, trouble breathing and chest pain -- all possible symptoms of exposure to the airborne chemicals. The dispersants used to clear oil from the water's surface have been known to cause dermatitis and skin infections, she added.

The heavier parts of crude that don't make it into the atmosphere, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, can poison fish and shellfish, Solomon said, especially the latter. Invertebrates such as oysters, shrimp and crabs have far more trouble than vertebrate animals in purging the chemicals from their systems.

Solomon also pointed to studies that documented mental health effects, such as high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, in the wake of oil spills. (On Monday, BP announced $52 million in grants to five gulf states for mental health services.)

"The biggest of these issues depends on who you are talking to, and when," Solomon said. "Last month was air quality, this month was seafood safety -- maybe next month will be mental health."

To assess the potential health fallout, Solomon drew on data from previous oil spills. She pointed, for example, to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, in which 15% of the filed 1,811 workers' compensation claims were for respiratory problems.

But, the scientists wrote in the JAMA paper, "no information is available in the peer-reviewed literature about longer-term health effects of [the Exxon Valdez] spill."

And without copious amounts of study from past spills, Solomon said, it's difficult to advise people about whether they should eat shrimp, find other work, or even leave town. 

"People are looking for clear guides," Solomon said, "and the guide right now is in shades of gray, not black and white."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/08/gulf-oil-spill-possible-health-effects.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GreenspaceEnvironmentBlog+%28Greenspace%29

By Haris Tarin

August 18, 2010

When my parents decided to leave their war-ravaged homeland of Afghanistan in the 1980s, they had the option of migrating to a number of different countries, but sought one that they could make their "home." You see, my father was a government official in the Afghan Education Ministry, before the Russian invasion and the subsequent takeover by the Taliban. He was tasked with modernizing the Afghan educational system while also ensuring that core, centuries-old Afghan values were preserved.

The assignment took him all over the world — from Australia to India to Malaysia and a host of other Muslim-majority countries. Yet no nation left a lasting impact on him until his visit to the United States in 1972.

During his extensive travels from coast to coast and many places in between, he established friendships he never imagined were possible with people of a different faith, culture and skin color. He marveled at the openness and welcoming nature of the American people and government. Little did he know then that in a matter of three decades, he and my mother would choose the U.S. as their adopted homeland, and that he would be buried in its soil.

As young children, we would ask him why he chose this country. He would calmly respond: "The acceptance of my faith that I received in my travels through this country, I would not be able to find anywhere else."

He would tell us about the people who respected his religious practice of praying five times a day and created spaces for him to pray in. He would fondly recall how warm and open people were.

Yet today, I am afraid for my children. I am afraid that when they turn the TV on, or listen to the radio (which I now turn off when we are in the car), they will receive a very different message from the one my father shared with us. The message they hear today is of intolerance. Whether it be about an Islamic center in New York blocks from ground zero or a mosque in Temecula, their faith is being openly and viciously maligned, and they themselves are made to feel responsible for the attacks on 9/11.

My children were born here, and they consider themselves as wholly American, but I fear that the current discourse about their faith and their houses of worship will have a devastating effect on them.

My father knew something greater about America than what is spouted by Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and the host of professional bigots who have built a cottage industry out of Muslim-baiting. He knew that the power of America is in its acceptance and openness.

Gingrich is right about one thing. There are no churches or synagogues in places such as Saudi Arabia. But that is precisely the reason so many Muslim immigrants like my father chose not to make a home there or in other similarly restrictive countries. He knew that his children would be better able to worship in a culture of freedom and openness.

I am secretly relieved that my father did not live long enough to see the current controversy surrounding the center in New York City. I am happy that his experience of his adopted homeland was one of friendship and acceptance. I am proud that his best friends, my godparents, are American Jews who loved my father and brought us to the U.S., hosting us in their home until we were able to settle in.

But I'm left wondering: What do I tell my 10-year old daughter, Hanan, and my 8-year-old son, Rayyan, when they ask me why fear-mongers in Tennessee, New York, Florida and California don't want a mosque or Muslims as their neighbors?

Both for their sakes and my own, I will share with them their grandfather's stories. I will encourage them to become active citizens who will ensure that the tolerance and openness their grandfather experienced decades ago in America will be cherished and maintained for others who yearn for it in the decades to come.

I will refuse to allow the voices of fear to minimize my father's experiences and degrade the America he fell in love with. My children deserve better. We all do.

Haris Tarin, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, is the director of the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-tarin-mosque-20100818,0,4757928,print.story

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OPINION

Tim Rutten

August 18, 2010

In "A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge," the 18th century philosopher George Berkeley posed the first version of a question people have pondered ever since: If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, has it really fallen?

A pair of Los Angeles County bureaucrats and their allies on the Board of Supervisors apparently have decided no, which is why they're working overtime to deny the public access to information concerning the mounting body count among children consigned to the care of the Department of Children and Family Services. County Chief Executive William Fujioka and Trish Ploehn, the department's director, apparently are convinced that the real problem at the DCFS is not the repeated mistakes and malfeasance that kill some of the most tragically vulnerable children in our community, but the public anger that results when people find out just how those deaths occurred.

Thus, Fujioka and Ploehn, disturbed by a series of Times articles on the dead children, have induced the supervisors to direct all county departments to join a witch hunt, or, as they call it, "an inquiry related to the inappropriate disclosure of confidential child welfare information and, in consultation with the county counsel, report back on the findings." The theory here is that if you cut off reporters' information, so that nobody knows exactly how the children died, it's as if they're not dead. No matter how agonizing a child's end, a vast bureaucratic silence will absorb his or her cries, and it will be as if they never lived — or died — at all. If any sound escapes, it will be that faint official splash that first echoed when Pilate washed his hands.

Fujioka is canny enough to know that the shameful is best accomplished in secret, so he initially proposed this inquisition to a closed session of the board last week. County Counsel Andrea Ordin was present but sat silently through what was an obvious violation of the Brown Act, which dictates that all but carefully delineated aspects of the public's business must be done in public. Still, Fujioka and Ploehn refuse to be deterred: They came back for an open approval of their witch hunt Tuesday. Only Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky opposed the inquiry, arguing that the board ought to focus on DCFS' problems.

Their dogged pursuit of alleged leakers stands in contrast to their lethargy when it comes to the latest series of Times' reports, which concern the tragedy of 11-year-old Jorge Tarin. As Garrett Therolf recently reported, the boy went to his school counselor one morning and said his life was "unbearable." According to school records, Jorge said that classmates bullied him and that his mother repeatedly struck him with a hanger and a shoe while his stepfather held him down. He said he wanted to kill himself "because I'm tired of people hitting me all the time."

A team from the county Mental Health Department was summoned, but the boy, who previously had spent 15 months in foster care because his mother and stepfather beat him, was ultimately sent home.

A social worker and police arrived at the family apartment shortly afterward. As The Times reported, the social worker did not have one of the new notebook computers that might have allowed access to a database showing that the stepfather, who answered the door, was under a court order forbidding his residence in the apartment. However, the social worker did know that Jorge previously had suffered abuse; that he had been removed from his family for more than a year; that he had alleged the abuse had resumed; and that he had threatened suicide.

Still, after a brief interview, the social worker left, leaving Jorge in the apartment. A short time later, while the rest of the household watched a Lakers game, the boy went into the closet of his mother's bedroom, took a jump rope and hanged himself.

Ploehn has insisted that no mistake was made in the case, and no action has been taken. Somehow, though, decent minds may wonder exactly what it would have taken to remove that poor, tormented little boy to safety? Did the social worker have to come in and find him with the noose around his neck?

If you were running a department that operated like that, neither you nor your boss would want anybody to know either, which is exactly why Fujioka and Ploehn are trying to turn the DCFS into a forest where nobody hears.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0818-rutten-20100818,0,5194698,print.column

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From the New York Times

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A Dutch City Seeks to End Drug Tourism

MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands — On a recent summer night, Marc Josemans's Easy Going Coffee Shop was packed. The lines to buy marijuana and hashish stretched to the reception area where customers waited behind glass barriers.

Most were young. Few were Dutch.

Thousands of “drug tourists” sweep into this small, picturesque city in the southeastern part of the Netherlands every day — as many as two million a year, city officials say. Their sole purpose is to visit the city's 13 “coffee shops,” where they can buy varieties of marijuana with names like Big Bud, Amnesia and Gold Palm without fear of prosecution.

It is an attraction Maastricht and other Dutch border cities would now gladly do without. Struggling to reduce traffic jams and a high crime rate, the city is pushing to make its legalized use of recreational drugs a Dutch-only policy, banning sales to foreigners who cross the border to indulge. But whether the European Union 's free trade laws will allow that is another matter.

The case, now wending its way through the courts, is being closely watched by legal scholars as a test of whether the European Court of Justice will carve out an exception to trade rules — allowing one country's security concerns to override the European Union's guarantee of a unified and unfettered market for goods and services.

City officials say they have watched with horror as a drug tolerance policy intended to keep Dutch youth safe — and established long before Europe's borders became so porous — has morphed into something else entirely. Municipalities like Maastricht, in easy driving distance from Belgium, France and Germany, have become regional drug supply hubs.

Maastricht now has a crime rate three times that of similar-size Dutch cities farther from the border. “They come with their cars and they make a lot of noise and so on,” said Gerd Leers, who was mayor of Maastricht for eight years. “But the worst part is that this group, this enormous group, is such an attractive target for criminals who want to sell their own stuff, hard stuff, and they are here too now.”

In recent years, crime in Maastricht, a city of cobblestone lanes and medieval structures, has included a shootout on the highway, involving a Bulgarian assassin hired to kill a rival drug producer.

Mr. Leers used to call the possibility of banning sales to foreigners a long shot. But last month, Maastricht won an early round. The advocate general for the European Court of Justice, Yves Bot, issued a finding that “narcotics, including cannabis, are not goods like others and their sale does not benefit from the freedoms of movement guaranteed by European law.”

Mr. Leers called the ruling “very encouraging.” Coffee shop owners saw it differently.

“There is no way this will hold up,” said John Deckers, a spokesman for the Maastricht coffee shop owners' association . “It is discrimination against other European Union citizens.”

If Maastricht gets its way, many other Dutch municipalities will doubtless follow. Last year, two small Dutch towns, Rosendal and Bergen op Zoom, decided to close all their coffee shops after surveys showed that most of their customers were foreigners.

The situation has not made for good neighborly feelings. Many residents of border towns criticize Belgium, France and Germany for tolerating recreational drug use but banning the sale of drugs. “They don't punish small buyers,” said Cyrille Fijnaut, a professor at the University of Tilburg law school. “But they also don't have their own coffee shops, so that leaves us as the suppliers. Our policy has been abused, misused, totally perverted.”

As business has boomed, many of the Dutch coffee shops — dingy, hippie establishments in the '80s and '90s with a few plastic tubs of marijuana on the shelves — have become slick shops serving freshly squeezed orange juice and coffee in fine china.

The Easy Going Coffee Shop has a computer console at the door where identification documents proving that customers are 18 or older are scanned and recorded. Tiny pictures on driver's licenses are blown up to life-size on a screen, so guards can get a good look at them. Behind the teller windows, workers still cut the hashish with a big kitchen knife, but all sales are recorded on computerized cash registers.

Mr. Bot's ruling last month is only an early step in determining whether Maastricht can enforce a Dutch-only policy. A final ruling by the full court is expected by the end of the year.

But Mr. Bot's finding, a veritable tirade on the evils of drugs, surprised many legal scholars, who expected the European Union's open market rules to trump any public order arguments, as they have in other cases. Sweden, for instance, which has a long history of struggling with alcohol abuse, was obliged to take down most of its anti-alcohol laws restricting store hours and sales, as they were seen as impinging on free trade.

Polls show that a majority of the Dutch still believe that the coffee shops should exist. But the Netherlands once had 1,500 of them; now, there are about 700. And every year, the numbers decline, according to Nicole Maalste, a professor at the University of Tilburg who has written a book on the subject. “Slowly, slowly they are being closed down by inventing new rules, and new rules,” Ms. Maalste said.

Much of the criminality associated with the coffee shops, experts say, revolves around what people here call the “back door” problem. The government regulates what goes on in coffee shops. But it has never legalized or regulated how the stores get the drugs they sell — an issue that states in the United States that have legalized medical marijuana are just beginning to grapple with.

In recent years, the tremendous volume of sales created by foreigners has prompted an industry of cultivating cannabis and other drugs within the Netherlands — some estimate that it is now a $2 billion a year business — much of it tangled in organized crime and money laundering operations, experts say.

Advocates for legalized sales and coffee shop owners argue that trying to restrict foreigners will only encourage them to buy illegally in the streets. They also say that coffee shops have other selling points: they pay 450 million euros a year in taxes and provide thousands of jobs.

Mr. Deckers, the shop association spokesman, said coffee shop owners were so skeptical that the European Union would allow restrictions on sales based on nationality that they encouraged the city to get a ruling on the subject. They doubt Mr. Bot's arguments will stand. “We know he is wrong,” Mr. Deckers said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/world/europe/18dutch.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

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Lawmakers in Mexico to Debate Drug Fight

MEXICO CITY — President Felipe Calderón on Tuesday summoned legislators to participate later this week in his continuing discussions with all of Mexico 's political establishment about how to win the war against the drug cartels.

With the pace of killings rising, officials have backed off their effort to persuade Mexicans that the mounting death toll was proof that the government was succeeding in disrupting the cartels. Instead, Mr. Calderón set up the high-level forums in an effort to show that the Mexican government was willing to engage its critics and listen to suggestions.

“What I ask, simply, is for clear ideas and precise proposals on how to improve this strategy,” he said during one of the meetings last week, when he heard from governors, judges and mayors. The legislators are invited for Thursday.

But for the people on the front lines, particularly in northern Mexico, the discussions of money-laundering, police reform and efforts to steer young people away from gangs are distant.

The government said earlier this month that 28,228 people had been killed since the government began its crackdown on drug cartels at the end of 2006. Of those, 2,076 were local, state or federal police officers, according to the Public Security Ministry.

The past few days have offered only more violence — murders that the police and prosecutors are unlikely to solve.

On Tuesday, newspapers gave prominent coverage to a video , released by the Public Security Ministry, in which a suspected member of the Ciudad Juárez drug gang La Línea, Rogelio Amaya Martínez, says that his gang is recruiting attractive young women to carry out killings. “They are pretty, good-looking adolescents, to fool our adversaries more,” Mr. Amaya Martínez said.

In the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa, five prisoners were found dead Tuesday in the state prison in Culiacán, the capital. So far, 26 prisoners have been killed in the jail, according to the prison director, Carlos Suárez.

In Ciudad Juárez, the border city that has been ground zero of the war against the cartels, a bloody weekend left 51 people dead between Friday and Sunday, according to a state police spokesman, The El Paso Times reported .

Among the dead were six people who were killed when gunmen burst into a private party and began shooting.

In the northern state of Nuevo León, gunmen kidnapped Mayor Edelmiro Cavazos of Santiago, a colonial town that is a weekend getaway for Monterrey residents. He was taken from his house at midnight on Sunday. Mayor Cavazos had been trying to clean up the town's corrupt police force, said Nuevo León's governor, Rodrigo Medina.

Monterrey, Mexico's third largest city and its industrial capital, spent much of the weekend paralyzed by roadblocks set up by rival drug gangs after a shootout to prevent the police from pursuing the gunmen. Local news media reported that gunmen forced motorists from their cars and drivers from their trucks so they could use the vehicles to close off the roads.

In Oaxaca, seven bodies were found Sunday piled atop the bed of a pickup truck. The state secretary for public security said the victims, all men, were going hunting when they were surprised by an armed group.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/world/americas/18mexico.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Somalis No Longer Face Federal Piracy Charges

A federal judge in Virginia on Tuesday threw out piracy charges against six Somali men captured after an attack on a Navy ship off the coast of East Africa, saying the government had not shown that the men's actions violated American piracy law.

The incident occurred April 10 in the Gulf of Aden, when a skiff approached the Ashland and, according to the government's case, someone on the skiff fired a shot at the ship. The Ashland responded with fire that destroyed the skiff and killed one of the passengers.

The remaining men on board were captured and indicted on eight counts that included piracy, which an 1819 law said was “defined by the law of nations” and carries a life sentence.

Lawyers for the defendants asked Judge Raymond A. Jackson of Federal District Court to dismiss the piracy charge, saying it did not apply to the incident because the Supreme Court decision dealing directly with the statute's definition of piracy, United States v. Smith in 1820, called it “robbery at sea.” The incident, they argued, did not fit the description.

Judge Jackson wrote that “the definition of piracy in the international community is unclear” and that “the court's reliance on these international sources as authoritative would not meet constitutional muster and must therefore be rejected.”

Judge Jackson, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton , concluded that the government “failed to establish that any unauthorized acts of violence or aggression committed on the high seas constitutes piracy” as defined under federal law.

Robert Rigney, a lawyer for one of the Somalis, Mohammed Abdi Jamah, applauded the judge's decision, saying, “How do you prosecute people when nobody knows what the criminal law is?”

Seven other charges, including assault and “attack to plunder a vessel,” remain against the men, but piracy carried the toughest sentence.

Geremy Kamens, assistant federal public defender for the Eastern District of Virginia, said, “We're very pleased with Judge Jackson's opinion, and we look forward to presenting our defense at trial on the remaining counts.”

Eugene Kontorovich, an expert in international law and piracy at Northwestern University law school whose work is cited in the opinion, said Judge Jackson's decision was “part of a much bigger debate over what is the status and what is the force of international law as part of United States law.” But in this case, Mr. Kontorovich explained, the United States does have clear criminal standards, and “I think the judge has got it completely wrong.”

Dana J. Boente, first assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said, "We're going to move forward with the prosecution of this case, review the decision and determine what options we have."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/us/18pirates.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Governor Seeking Talks on New Site for Muslim Center

Gov. David A. Paterson 's staff is continuing to try to interest organizers of a planned downtown Muslim community center and mosque in an alternate site, but no formal talks have been held, a spokesman for the governor said on Tuesday.

The planners of the Muslim center, set to be built two blocks from ground zero, said in a statement that they were discussing the project with many officials but that they had no plans to build the center elsewhere.

They said no meeting had been scheduled with the governor, who has offered state land to be used as an alternate site.

“We are working with the developers on a staff level,” Morgan Hook, Mr. Paterson's communications director, said in an e-mail, “but there have not been any formal discussions between the governor and imam or developer. However, we expect to have a meeting scheduled in the near future.”

The group planning the center, known as Park51 , said in its statement: “To the best of our knowledge, a meeting has not been scheduled. We appreciate the governor's interest as we continue to have conversations with many officials.”

The planners have continued to speak with representatives of civic groups and politicians as they seek to build support for the project, which has prompted a national debate over freedom of religion, Islam and the Sept. 11 attacks.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the religious scholar behind the effort, is out of the country and not expected back this week. Asked about news reports on Tuesday that Imam Feisal would meet with Mr. Paterson this week, the imam's wife, Daisy Khan, said, “Not correct.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, one of the center's most vigorous defenders, has argued that the planners' right to build it is a matter of religious freedom and is central to American values.

On Monday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the planners of the center had agreed to build it at another site.

In an interview after the report appeared, Sharif el-Gamal, the real estate developer for the project, said the organizers had not discussed the possibility of a move, formally or informally.

“We're not moving,” Mr. Gamal said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/nyregion/18muslim.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Pennsylvania: No Charges Over Secret Photos

Federal prosecutors will not file charges against a school district or its employees over the use of software to monitor students remotely. Zane David Memeger, a United States attorney, said investigators had found no evidence of criminal intent by Lower Merion School District employees who activated tracking software that took thousands of images on school-provided laptops. A student and his family sued the district in February, claiming officials invaded his privacy. That case continues. The district has acknowledged capturing 56,000 screen shots and Webcam images so it could locate missing laptops.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/us/18brfs-NOCHARGESOVE_BRF.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Immigration Bait and Switch

Secure Communities, an immigration enforcement program created under President George W. Bush and now being greatly expanded by President Obama, is billed as an effort to catch and deport “the worst of the worst,” the violent criminals, drug and gun smugglers, gang members and other dangerous aliens. That would be excellent, if true. It doesn't seem to be.

The Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, the Center for Constitutional Rights, a public-interest legal organization, and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network analyzed arrest and deportation statistics and other data on Secure Communities they obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The records, covering the program from its inception in October 2008 through June 2010, lend disturbing credence to fears voiced by immigrant advocates and some law-enforcement officials.

The program requires agencies to automatically run fingerprints through federal immigration databases for anyone they arrest. Critics warned that it would be an indiscriminate dragnet — ensnaring illegal immigrants without criminal records, and encouraging racial profiling. Sheriff Michael Hennessey of San Francisco objected to Secure Communities, saying it targeted too many noncriminals and would have a dangerous “chilling effect” on the willingness of communities to work with local law enforcement.

It turns out the critics were right.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement records show that a vast majority, 79 percent, of people deported under Secure Communities had no criminal records or had been picked up for low-level offenses, like traffic violations and juvenile mischief. Of the approximately 47,000 people deported in that period only about 20 percent had been charged with or convicted of serious “Level 1” crimes, like assault and drug dealing.

The national average of Secure Communities deportees with no criminal records was about 26 percent, but that figure also varied wildly around the country. It was 54 percent in Maricopa County, Ariz., whose sheriff is notorious for staging indiscriminate immigration raids. In Travis County, Tex., it was 82 percent.

The Obama administration has deployed Secure Communities in 544 jurisdictions in 27 states, including every county along the southern border. It plans to have the entire country participating by 2013. Secure Communities “focuses our resources on identifying and removing the most serious criminal offenders first and foremost,” said John Morton, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The program now appears to be quite different from that: an effort to yoke local police into a broad campaign of civil immigration enforcement, maximizing the detention and deportation of the people whom Mr. Obama says he wants to give a chance to pay their debt to society and earn their right to become Americans.

Secure Communities won't make the country more secure, not the way it is working. Police departments that don't want to participate should be able to opt out. The Obama administration needs to fix it or jettison it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/opinion/18wed3.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From ICE

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TAMPA, Fla. - Fifteen men were arrested Thursday though Sunday and charged with traveling to Polk County, Fla., from various locations in Florida to meet a minor for sex, or for related crimes, during an extensive undercover operation conducted by the Polk County Sheriff's Office, with assistance from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the State Attorney's Office, Florida Attorney General's Office, Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), Citrus County Sheriff's Office, and the Lakeland and Plant City police departments.

"This investigation reveals the disturbing truth that some adults will go to great lengths to sexually exploit minors," said Susan McCormick, special agent in charge of ICE's Office of Homeland Security Investigations in Tampa. "Through our partnerships with state, local and other federal law enforcement agencies, ICE will continue to search out those who use the Internet to sexually exploit innocent children."

During the operation, nearly every suspect answered online advertisements posted by undercover detectives on an Internet advertising website seeking guidance their daughters described as girls aged 10 to14 years old.

The 15 suspects who were arrested had answered the ads, expressing an interest in responding to the house to engage in sexual acts with the girls, some of them saying they were willing to "teach" the children how to have sex. Some of the men also expressed an interest in having sex with the "mom" and the "child" at the same time.

After the suspects initially answered the ads, they then engaged the undercover detectives in subsequent emails, instant messages, and telephone calls, during which time the detectives offered the suspects to come to an undercover location in Polk County.

When the suspects arrived at the undercover location, they were placed under arrest.

"Despite the repeated warnings and media coverage of past operations, these perverted men freely chatted with undercover detectives who posed as men and women online. These men expressed specific desires to prey upon who they believed were innocent children," said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd. "Some of the men even sent pornographic images of themselves to the detectives, and made very specific requests about what they wanted these children to do to them. We have proven once again that there are still predators out there, willing to use any means necessary to harm your children, and we will not stop conducting operations like these until these predators are behind bars."

Arrested on Thursday were: Brandon Cashen, 31, of Orlando, Fla.; Kevin Scott, 35, of Sarasota, Fla.; Joshua Adam Hunt, 19, of Plant City, Fla.; Jason Shulman, 36, of Lake Mary, Fla.

Arrested on Friday were: Javier Alberto Diaz, 23, of Kissimmee, Fla.; Robert Ferguson, 23, of Maitland, Fla.; and Tommy Dupre, 33, of St. Cloud, Fla.

Arrested on Saturday were: Donald Knuckles, 68, of Lake Placid, Fla.; Dominick Overeem, 40, of Orange City, Fla.; and William Jackson, 29, of Tampa.

Arrested in Sunday were: Gregory Alan Archambault II, 32, of New Port Richey, Fla.; Leon Brisson, 43, of Tampa, Fla.; Mark McClure, 43, of Brandon, Fla.; Raymond Damon, 43, of Plant City, Fla.; and Robert Chan, 38, of Dunedin, Fla.

ICE encourages the public to report suspected child predators and any suspicious activity through its toll-free hotline at 1-866-347-2423. This hotline is staffed around the clock by investigators. Suspected child sexual exploitation or missing children may be reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an Operation Predator partner, at 1-800-843-5678 or http://www.cybertipline.com .

This case is also part of the Department of Justice's Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in 2006 that is designed to protect children from online sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the U. S. Attorney's Offices and DOJ's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the internet, as well as identify and rescue victims. For more information on Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov .

http://www.ice.gov/pi/nr/1008/100816tampa.htm

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From the DEA

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Cuidad Juarez Trafficker Extradited from Mexico

AUG 17 -- EL PASO – Joseph M. Arabit, Special Agent in Charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration–El Paso Division and United States Attorney John E. Murphy announced the extradition from Mexico of Felipe DOMINGUEZ-Vargas, a purported member of the Juarez Drug Cartel.  This morning, August 16, 2010, DOMINGUEZ made his initial appearance in federal court in El Paso, Texas and waived his detention hearing. DOMINGUEZ will remain in custody pending trial.

On August 10, 2010, DOMINGUEZ was extradited from Mexico to the United States to stand trial for federal drug trafficking offenses. DOMINGUEZ is the subject of an indictment filed in May 2009 in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, charging him with the following offenses:  six counts of conspiracy to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute heroin, cocaine and marijuana.

According to the indictment, from October 2007 until March 2009, DOMINGUEZ was responsible for the importation of over 1 kilogram of heroin, 5 kilograms of cocaine and over 100 kilograms of marijuana into West Texas for distribution in other parts of the United States.  In order to smuggle the illegal narcotics, primarily through El Paso County, DOMINGUEZ and his co-conspirators utilized a variety of vehicles as well as body carriers.  If convicted, DOMINGUEZ faces 10 years to life imprisonment for the importation of heroin and cocaine as well a maximum fine of $4,000,000. For the importation of marijuana, DOMINGUEZ faces 5 years to 40 years imprisonment as well as a maximum fine of $2,000,000.

DOMINGUEZ was arrested by Mexican authorities in November of 2009. On August 10, 2010, DOMINGUEZ was extradited into the United States, released to Agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration and Deputies of the United States Marshal Service and transported to a secure location.

The DEA El Paso Division encourages parents, and their children to visit the following interactive websites at www.justhinktwice.com , www.GetSmartAboutDrugs.com and www.dea.gov .

http://www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/states/newsrel/2010/elpaso081710.html

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27 Miami-Dade Residents Charged in Narcotics Trafficking

Operation at Miami International Airport

AUG 17 -- MIAMI – Mark R. Trouville, Special Agent in Charge, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Miami Field Division, Wifredo A. Ferrer, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Anthony V. Mangione, Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations, Miami Field Office, and James K. Loftus, Director, Miami-Dade Police Department, announced federal narcotics charges against twenty-seven members of an international drug trafficking organization that operated primarily through Miami International Airport.

Charged in five separate indictments were Nelson Albarracin , 52,   Angel Reyes , 41, Renzo Oberto , 31, Josue Rubio , 39, James Pena , 49, Yunier Perez Cruz , 37, Reginald Richard , 37, Alfredo Barreto , 49, Balbino Armando Ramos , 49, Jose Alfonso Medina , 34, Robert Marquez , 29, Michael Boveda , 29, Hasiel Gonzalez Rodriguez , 32, Lazaro Nunez , 43, Elio Sanchez , 37, Carlos Ramones , 32, Hugo Morales , 41, Luis Neda, 30, Jose Neda , 37, Francisco Gonzalez , 47, Rolando Rubio , 47, Carlos Antonio Jorges Mendez , 59, Alexander Suarez , 26, Francisco Jose Sotelo , 64, Milton Humberto Felix , 46, Jorge Luis Rodriguez , 38, and Alexander Valdes , 39.  Eighteen defendants were arrested and appeared in Magistrate Court today.  Nine of the defendants remain at large.  Detention hearings are scheduled for next week. 

This joint investigation began in the spring of 2007 and focused on long-term narcotics traffickers importing drugs, including cocaine and heroin, through Miami International Airport for subsequent distribution in Miami.  As a result of this proactive investigation, the defendants were charged with federal narcotics violations, including importation and possession and distribution of cocaine and heroin.  If convicted, the defendants face a maximum statutory penalty of ten years to life in prison, without the possibility of parole.

U. S. Attorney Wifredo A. Ferrer stated, “The smuggling of any contraband through MIA threatens our domestic security.  The smuggling of narcotics is no exception.  This prosecution is one example of what we can accomplish when we work together to make our airports safer and more secure.”

“This case demonstrates that drug smuggling organizations will utilize any means available to smuggle narcotics into the United States,” said Anthony Mangione, Special Agent in Charge of the Homeland Security Investigations office in Miami.  “ICE works closely with our federal and state partners to target the means and methods used by drug traffickers and to dismantle those organizations.”

“Access to a secure transportation network, such as an international airport, gives drug traffickers an open window to bring drugs into our communities,” said Mark R. Trouville, Special Agent in Charge, Miami Field Division.  “These windows were closed through the collaborative efforts of DEA and our law enforcement partners.”

http://www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/states/newsrel/2010/mia081710.html

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