Racial strife escalates in Staten Island

In a working-class area, 10 Mexicans have been attacked by blacks since April in suspected hate crimes. Some community leaders say tensions have grown along with anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S.

By Tina Susman, Los Angeles Times

August 22, 2010

Reporting from New York

There's no doubt in Christian Vazquez's mind why he was beaten up as he headed home from work late one night, and it wasn't for the $10 the attackers stole from him.

"They were after me because I was a Mexican," the 18-year-old said, his left eye still swollen shut from the assault July 31 while he was walking through Staten Island's Port Richmond neighborhood. As his attackers punched him, they yelled, "Go home!" and anti-Mexican slurs, according to the police report, which had a familiar ring.

That's because Vazquez was the 10th Mexican victim of a suspected hate crime in the neighborhood since April. "Why this is happening? If you ask 10 different people, you might get 10 different answers," said Ed Josey, president of the Staten Island branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, during a march Aug. 6 led by religious and civic leaders to condemn the violence.

"The impression that Staten Island is a place of hate and violence — that's just not true," said state Sen. Diane Savino as marchers stood in a small Port Richmond park.

Borough President James Molinaro has attributed the violence to criminals looking for easy prey, not ethnic violence. "It could have been anybody," he said of the victims.

But police say that of 11 assaults on Mexicans in Port Richmond since April, 10 are considered bias-related, and those 10 involved blacks attacking Mexicans.

Citywide so far this year there have been 222 suspected hate crimes, compared with 125 by this time last year, according to the New York Police Department. The Borough of Staten Island has accounted for 26; there had been 11 by this time last year.

Ana Maria Archila said the officials' comments point up the challenge of tackling an ugly issue that some in the so-called forgotten borough, where leaders have been struggling to increase tourism, would rather see played down.

Archila is a co-director of Make the Road New York, one of several groups involved in efforts to resolve the problem. "It's extremely insular and it's extremely isolated," she said of Staten Island, a mostly suburban island of 491,000. Best known for the orange ferry that carries commuters and tourists the five miles between Lower Manhattan and the borough, its population is overwhelmingly white — 75% — but it has a growing Latino population now estimated at about 15%.

Archila and Jacob Massaquoi, a leader in Staten Island's African immigrant community, said tensions had grown along with anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, something they blame on Arizona's crackdown on undocumented residents and conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. "Their rhetoric is very personal, very inflammatory," Massaquoi said.

It probably doesn't help that some of the people leading reconciliation efforts have sparred publicly. In a Wall Street Journal interview last month, Josey said Mexican-owned businesses in Port Richmond were failing to hire blacks, sparking a retort from Molinaro, who accused the black leader of being biased himself. When the Bronx borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr., led a march for black-Latino reconciliation through Port Richmond earlier this month, Assemblyman Matthew Titone and Savino accused him of using Staten Island for personal publicity.

And after the Aug. 6 rally, Josey questioned why the Mexican consul general felt it necessary to weigh in on the situation. "Historically speaking, black-on-black crime has been something that happens and doesn't raise much attention. Now it's blacks attacking others, and a government representative from another country shows up," he said.

So far, Archila said, the official response has been focused on "very short-term solutions." These include putting 130 additional police in Port Richmond, a working-class district in the shadow of the Bayonne Bridge linking Staten Island to New Jersey, with a population that includes roughly equal numbers of blacks and Latinos. Watchtowers have gone up, police vans and cars sit on most streets, and police on horseback clop down the main drag, Port Richmond Avenue.

But the attack on Vazquez occurred despite these measures.

And on Wednesday, in a Staten Island neighborhood a few miles from Port Richmond, a Mexican teen-ager was robbed by a young black man armed with a knife who used racial slurs, police said. A 17-year-old was arrested.

Despite some leaders' attempts to paint Port Richmond as having no more problems than other economically distressed neighborhoods, local residents say it's not that simple.

Port Richmond has long been a gathering spot for Mexican day laborers, who would spend part of the year here before returning to Mexico. The tightening of borders after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks prompted many to settle permanently in Port Richmond, changing the neighborhood's face, said the Rev. Terry Troia of Project Hospitality, a nonprofit community service group.

"That was a German bakery last year," she said, pointing at the Cafe Con Pan bakery on Port Richmond Avenue, one of several businesses with signs in Spanish. The elementary school's Latino population has boomed to nearly 70%. Meanwhile, the recession has closed recreational outlets for young people and slashed opportunities for summer jobs, increasing chances that teens will take to the streets to blow off steam, said the area's City Council representative, Debi Rose. The nine people arrested so far in the suspected bias cases are all 18 or younger.

Troia said with rising numbers of other immigrants — the area just got a Halal pizza joint catering to Muslims — thugs could find new scapegoats if the current tensions are not tamped down. "If people can get angry at Mexicans coming here, people can get angry at the next group coming here," Troia said, "and then, nobody is safe."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-staten-island-attacks-20100822,0,2653672,print.story

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Lt. Sean Malinowski oversees the department's crime analysis unit. He's spent years immersing himself in the world of predictive technology and has advised U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder on the subject.

Stopping crime before it starts Sophisticated analysis of data can sometimes tell police where criminals are headed. It's academic now, but the LAPD plans to get involved. By Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times August 21, 2010 The future of crime fighting begins with a story about strawberry Pop-Tarts, bad weather and Wal-Mart. With a hurricane bearing down on the Florida coast several years ago, the retail giant sent supply trucks into the storm to stock shelves with the frosted pink pastries. The decision to do so had not been made on a whim or a hunch, but by a powerful computer that crunched reams of sales data and found an unusual but undeniable fact: When Mother Nature gets angry, people want to eat a lot more strawberry Pop-Tarts. Officials in the Los Angeles Police Department are using the anecdote to explain a similar, but far more complicated, idea that they and researchers say could revolutionize law enforcement.

As police departments have gotten better at pushing down crime, we are looking now for the thing that will take us to the next level," LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said. "I firmly believe predictive policing is it."

Predictive policing is rooted in the notion that it is possible, through sophisticated computer analysis of information about previous crimes, to predict where and when crimes will occur. At universities and technology companies in the U.S. and abroad, scientists are working to develop computer programs that, in the most optimistic scenarios, could enable police to anticipate, and possibly prevent, many types of crime.

Some of the most ambitious work is being done at UCLA, where researchers are studying the ways criminals behave in urban settings.

One, who recently left UCLA to teach at Santa Clara University near San Jose is working to prove he can forecast the time and place of crimes using the same mathematical formulas that seismologists use to predict the distribution of aftershocks from an earthquake.

Another builds computer simulations of criminals roving through city neighborhoods in order to better understand why they tend to cluster in certain areas and how they disperse when police go looking for them.

"The naysayers want you to believe that humans are too complex and too random — that this sort of math can't be done," said Jeff Brantingham, a UCLA anthropologist who is helping to supervise the university's predictive policing project.

"But humans are not nearly as random as we think," he said. "In a sense, crime is just a physical process, and if you can explain how offenders move and how they mix with their victims, you can understand an incredible amount."

The LAPD has positioned itself aggressively at the center of the predictive policing universe, forging ties with the UCLA team and drawing up plans for a large-scale experiment to test whether predictive policing tools actually work. The department is considered a front-runner to beat out other big-city agencies in the fall for a $3-million U.S. Justice Department grant to conduct the multiyear tests.

LAPD officials have begun to imagine what a department built around predictive tools would look like.

Automated, detailed crime forecasts tailored to each of the department's 21 area stations would be streamed several times a day to commanders, who would use them to make decisions about where to deploy officers in the field.

For patrol officers on the streets, mapping software on in-car computers and hand-held devices would show continuous updates on the probability of various crimes occurring in the vicinity, along with the addresses and background information about paroled ex-convicts living in the area.

In turn, information gathered by officers from suspects, witnesses and victims would be fed in real time into a technology nerve center where predictive computer programs churn through huge crime databases.

If any of this ever becomes reality, it will be in large part because of Lt. Sean Malinowski, a bookish, soft-spoken former Fulbright scholar who oversees the department's crime analysis unit. With the blessing of former Chief William J. Bratton and now Beck, Malinowski has spent the last few years immersing himself in the world of predictive technologies.

In law enforcement circles, where confusion and skepticism about predictive policing run deep, he has established himself as one of only a few people who know both what it is to be a cop and how predictive technology could fit into the job. Malinowski was recently summoned to Washington by U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder, who wanted a tutorial on the topic.

It is not by chance that the LAPD is pursuing predictive technologies. No city in the U.S. stands to gain more from the potential payoff than Los Angeles.

The city is one of the most severely under-policed in the country, with just shy of 10,000 police officers on its payroll. At any given time, only a fraction of them are on duty, spread across 469 square miles that are home to more than 4 million people. Predictive tools, if they work, would allow the LAPD to get more out of its meager force.

The use of crime data by police agencies is nothing new. Many big-city departments today make decisions on how to deploy officers based, in part, on computer mapping programs that track crime patterns and hot spots as they develop.

The LAPD and other agencies have become adept enough at channeling this flow of information from officers in the field that crimes committed in the evening are included on the next day's crime maps.

No matter how quickly crimes are plotted, however, these mapping programs leave cops stuck in reaction mode. They show where crimes have occurred in the past, but police still must make educated guesses about where future crimes will occur.

George Mohler and Martin Short believe they can change that.

In a yet-to-be-published research paper he wrote while at UCLA, Mohler, a mathematician, makes the case that the time and place of past crimes can be used to determine where and when future crimes are most likely to occur. To do this, he argues, police need to start thinking of crimes the way seismologists think of earthquakes and aftershocks.

Mohler's theory stems from a peculiar aspect of crime. Much as an earthquake sets off aftershocks, some types of crimes have a contagious quality to them.

When a home is burglarized, for example, the same house and others in its immediate surroundings are at much greater risk of being victimized in the days that follow. The phenomenon is called an exact or near-repeat effect.

The same dynamic can explain the way rival gangs retaliate against one another. And, although it is harder to pin down in more complex crimes that are motivated by passion or other emotions, experts believe it holds true there as well.

Mohler wasn't all that interested in what it is about criminals that makes this so. He focused instead on adapting the math formulas and computer programs that seismologists use to calculate the probability of aftershocks, fitting them to crime patterns. (Aftershocks can occur hundreds of miles from an epicenter and many months after an earthquake, while the elevated risk of burglaries and other crimes tends to subside over a matter of weeks and several city blocks.)

Using LAPD data, Mohler tested his computer model on several thousand burglaries that occurred in a large section of the San Fernando Valley throughout 2004 and 2005. The results, he said, were far more effective than anything on the market today.

The program divided the Valley area into patrol zones that were each roughly the size of several neighborhood blocks and then calculated which zones had the highest probability of experiencing burglaries the next day.

In one test, in which Mohler assumed there were enough cops to patrol 10% of the area, the model accurately identified the zones where the officers should have gone in order to thwart about a quarter of all the burglaries that occurred that day.

Mohler's approach is a bare-bones dissection of time and space. His former officemate is using high-level math to get inside criminals' minds.

Martin Short earned a doctorate in physics but, like Mohler, he spends much of his time thinking about crime. His research is based on a foundational, common-sense theory in criminology. In it, little attention is given to the social, economic or psychological factors — such as poverty, revenge, greed — that can motivate someone to commit a crime. Instead, criminals are viewed as rational decision-makers who commit crimes only when they come across opportunities that meet certain criteria.

For a crime to occur, the theory holds, a would-be criminal must find a target that is sufficiently vulnerable to attack and that offers an appealing payout. An empty house with no alarm on a poorly lighted street, for example, has a much higher chance of being burglarized than one with a barking dog on a busy block.

Short's computer models simulate this decision-making process and give him the chance to decipher how crime clusters form in certain areas that criminals consider prime for plunder. The present models are random and theoretical and therefore not capable of real-world predictions. But with enough funding and computer power, Short said, a far more sophisticated model could be built to replicate actual buildings in real neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Then, he suggested, the decisions of the computerized criminals could be used to predict the movements of actual criminals.

Like any radical, unproven idea, predictive policing has its share of skeptics. Some question whether any amount of number-crunching can replace the intuition and street smarts that a cop develops over time.

"There is the science of policing, and there is the art of policing," said LAPD Deputy Chief Michael Downing, who relies heavily on technology as the head of the department's counterterrorism efforts but remains wary of predictive policing.

"It is really important that we learn how to blend the two. If it becomes all about the science, I worry we'll lose the important nuances," he said.

It remains to be seen whether work like Mohler's and Short's can translate into helping cops make day-to-day decisions. The science has progressed only so far.

Much of the work at UCLA and other universities focuses on burglaries, because there are a lot of them and their times and locations are easy to pin down. Building predictive tools capable of addressing rarer and more complex crimes, such as homicides and rapes, will be far more complex.

Malinowski knows as well that the LAPD will have to overcome significant obstacles. Perhaps most pressing is the need to dramatically upgrade the department's technology infrastructure and improve the way it collects crime data.

And there is a public relations battle that must be won. Malinowski is trying to preempt the likely concerns of civil rights advocates who worry that predictive policing could be used to profile and harass individuals before they do anything wrong. He is quick to say that the technology will not turn the city into a real-life version of "Minority Report," a 2002 science fiction film in which cops arrest people for crimes they are about to commit.

"This will be the opposite of a dragnet, where we just go out and pick up everybody because they're on a certain street corner at the wrong time. We'll be basing our decision on facts. It will be dispassionate," he said. "We still have a Constitution, and we're still going to be arresting people based on probable cause, not on the probability that they'll commit a crime."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-predictcrime-20100427-1,0,5743182,print.story

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Latrice Sutton, left, mother of Mitrice Richardson, holds a candle for her daughter at a vigil in Inglewood.

Friends and relatives remember Mitrice Richardson At a gathering in Inglewood, they hold a candlelight vigil for the Cal State Fullerton graduate who disappeared in September and whose remains were found in Malibu Canyon on Aug. 9. By Carla Hall, Los Angeles Times August 21, 2010 Outside the mortuary chapel at the Inglewood Park Cemetery, Lauren Sutton held a single sunflower. "It's her favorite flower," she said of Mitrice Richardson, the young woman whose remains lay in a rose-bedecked coffin inside the chapel. Sutton, the sister-in-law of Richardson's mother, added, "They're so bright and sunny, and that was so her."

On Friday, friends, family and well-wishers came to Inglewood to pay their respects to Richardson — who had been missing for nearly a year before her remains were discovered Aug. 9 in a ravine in Malibu Canyon.

"Even though we are here to say goodbye to her," Sutton said, "we are asking the community to help us seek justice for her."

Richardson's disappearance after being released from a Los Angeles County sheriff's station at night without a car or phone triggered public outrage and two negligence lawsuits.

But Friday's events were mostly a chance for people to remember the Cal State Fullerton graduate who would have turned 25 in April.

In the chapel, photos of her flashed on a video screen with the message "just a pinch of life that was Mitrice," said Larry Sutton, her stepfather, who helped raise her.

Later, at dusk in a parking lot outside the nearby Forum, a crowd of about 80 gathered, wrapped in sweaters and shawls against the cool air, struggling against the wind to light candles for a vigil. Richardson's mother, Latice Sutton, and other family members sat in a row of chairs as a recording of Aretha Franklin's version of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" played.

Psychologist Ronda Hampton told the crowd how she reluctantly took Mitrice on as an intern and ended up dazzled by her.

"She was bright, quick. She was compassionate," Hampton said. "I knew this girl has a gift — she's going to be a psychologist."

In the back of the crowd, Richardson's father, Michael, stood wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of his daughter. He embraced friends who came by to chat.

He spoke of coping with her death after her long disappearance: "God did it in a way I could accept — over 10 months."

Richardson was arrested at Geoffrey's restaurant in Malibu on Sept. 16 after acting bizarrely and saying she was unable to pay her $89 dinner bill. She was released from custody shortly after midnight from the sheriff's Lost Hills/Malibu station.

In her absence, she became a fixture on cable TV talk shows and the focus of debate over the sheriff's station's seemingly thoughtless decision to release a young woman without a car or phone near a rugged canyon.

Her parents and critics contend that she should have been held longer for a mental health evaluation because of her behavior at the restaurant.

Her decomposed remains were found in Malibu Canyon by park rangers searching for illegal marijuana plants.

Sheriff's officials say there was no sign of foul play. Nor do they believe she fell to her death. The Los Angeles County coroner's office estimated that her remains had been there at least six months, or possibly the entire time she had been missing.

On Friday, Jordan Allen, a staff pastor from Faithful Central Bible Church, quoted Scripture to the crowd: "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning."

He looked at the family gathered in front: "It sounds comforting unless you happen to be the ones sitting in this front row....The morning will come when you'll be able to get up and make it from sunup to sundown without breaking down. And you'll remember the joy."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-mitrice-richardson-20100821,0,2998685.story

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Mission accomplished?

The U.S. combat role in Iraq ends Tuesday. What exactly did we gain in seven years of fighting?

August 22, 2010

Those who have lived through the Iraq war have never been certain whether they were at the beginning, middle or end of hostilities. Preparations for the U.S.-led invasion began well before the March 2003 launch of "shock and awe." American forces toppled Saddam Hussein within weeks, but rather than bringing an end to the combat as expected, the collapse of the regime and subsequent dismantling of the Iraqi army gave rise to an insurgency and brutal sectarian conflict. Now, as the United States formally concludes its combat role on Aug. 31, it is time once again to ask: What was the U.S. mission in Iraq, and what was accomplished?

Hussein was a ruthless dictator whose henchmen tortured the political opponents they didn't execute. He invaded Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. He tried to build nuclear weapons, and he used chemical weapons against Iran as well as against his own citizens, killing at least 5,000 Kurds in Halabja alone in March 1988. All told, more than 180,000 Kurdish men, women and children were slaughtered in his Anfal campaign in the north. Meanwhile, the regime drained marshes and starved hundreds of thousands of Shiite Arabs out of the south. These were horrible crimes committed over decades, many of them long before President George W. Bush decided to seek a "regime change." But did they warrant a U.S. invasion?

The Bush administration made the decision to go to war in Iraq in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks that were plotted by Al Qaeda from Afghanistan and carried out by Saudis, not by Iraqis. It offered many reasons for turning its sights on Iraq. First, Bush made the radical case that the attacks in the United States justified preemptive strikes against potential threats to Americans. He said it was necessary to disarm Hussein, who allegedly was hiding a program to develop weapons of mass destruction in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions. The administration claimed a connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda and warned that Hussein could provide the terrorists with WMD. Neoconservative ideologues added that removing Hussein would open the way for a democratic government in Iraq and have a ripple effect throughout the Middle East — domino democracy — that would stabilize the region.

Opponents of the war ascribed other motives to Bush: He sought to "finish the job" for his father, who stopped short after driving Hussein out of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War, or, as many Iraqis believed, he wanted to get his hands on Iraqi oil.

At least 4,415 American troops died in combat, and tens of thousands were wounded. Iraqi casualties have been harder to count. The Iraq Body Count's website puts the civilian death toll between 97,000 and 106,000; hundreds of thousands were wounded, and many others displaced, forced into exile. The Bush administration initially calculated that the war would run $50 billion. Seven years later, the bill is tallied at about $750 billion, and nearly as much likely will be needed to tend to the physically and psychologically wounded service members who have returned. By any measure, the price has been high in blood and treasure, and in the damage to American moral authority.

From the beginning, this page argued against the war, saying the administration had failed to prove that Hussein had WMD or a connection to the 9/11 perpetrators. Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld famously responded to skeptics by asserting that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." The administration pointed to suspect aluminum tubes and alleged mobile bio-laboratories, and went to war despite the opposition of most of its allies and without United Nations approval.

After the fall of Hussein, it quickly became clear that the administration had been seeing things it wanted to find rather than finding the truth. There were no WMD; no 9/11 plotters in Iraq. Bush had taken the country to war on false pretenses. The United States was not safer after the war, because there had been no imminent threat before it. Arguably, Americans were more at risk. Al Qaeda exploited Iraqi resentment of U.S. troops, who were viewed as occupiers rather than liberators by much of the Muslim world. Abuses committed by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison fanned anger and anti-Americanism. Though Al Qaeda was not a force in Iraq before the war, it was after. And rather than stabilizing the region, the war shook a strategic balance. Hussein's Sunni regime had served as a useful if unsavory counterweight to the Shiite government of Iran.

After the invasion, Tehran began to hold sway over the Shiite majority that rose to power in Iraq, as U.S. prestige dimmed with its failure to deliver security, electricity and stability. This page supported the U.S. troop "surge" as a way to pacify the country, allow an Iraqi government to assume power and bring an end to the war. But the country is still unstable. Now, as the U.S. draws down its forces, its influence is waning, and Iran is just one of the neighbors jockeying to fill the void.

Hussein was captured, tried in an Iraqi court and hanged. Iraqis today have greater freedoms of expression and political organization, markedly free and fair elections, and a more open economy. And yet they have traded Hussein's well-ordered tyranny for the chaos of sectarian violence — quotidian bombs, assassinations and civilian bloodshed.

Democracy has not taken firm root in Iraq, let alone spread across the Middle East as the neoconservatives predicted. This spring's election produced a deadlocked parliament that has been unable to form a new government; Shiite leaders don't agree with one another on a leader, much less with Kurds and Sunnis. Seven years after the fall of Hussein, they have yet to figure out how to share power, land and the country's oil wealth.

So while many Iraqis say they are relieved the Hussein regime is gone, others say toppling the dictator wasn't worth the pain, and some even long for another strongman to restore calm. Many Iraqis and Americans fear the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops will not mark the end of the Iraq war serve as the prelude to a civil war that spills over borders and throughout the region. That would be a colossal disaster.

Iraq may recover. Its sectarian communities may overcome centuries of distrust and violence and find a way to unite the nation. But if they do so, it will be to the credit of the Iraqi people, and will be despite the U.S. occupation, not because of it. The war can be considered a victory in just one sense: It removed Hussein. In all other respects, the war in Iraq was a misadventure that compromised U.S. national interests, and was too costly for too little return.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-iraq-20100822,0,3695485,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Technology Leads More Park Visitors Into Trouble

Cathy Hayes was cracking jokes as she recorded a close encounter with a buffalo on her camera in a recent visit to Yellowstone National Park .

“Watch Donald get gored,” she said as her companion hustled toward a grazing one-ton beast for a closer shot with his own camera.

Seconds later, as if on cue, the buffalo lowered its head, pawed the ground and charged, injuring, as it turns out, Ms. Hayes.

“We were about 30, 35 feet, and I zoomed in on him, but that wasn't far enough, because they are fast,” she recounted later in a YouTube video displaying her bruised and cut legs.

The national parks' history is full of examples of misguided visitors feeding bears, putting children on buffalos for photos and dipping into geysers despite signs warning of scalding temperatures.

But today, as an ever more wired and interconnected public visits the parks in rising numbers — July was a record month for visitors at Yellowstone — rangers say that technology often figures into such mishaps.

People with cellphones call rangers from mountaintops to request refreshments or a guide; in Jackson Hole, Wyo., one lost hiker even asked for hot chocolate.

A French teenager was injured after plunging 75 feet this month from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon when he backed up while taking pictures. And last fall, a group of hikers in the canyon called in rescue helicopters three times by pressing the emergency button on their satellite location device. When rangers arrived the second time, the hikers explained that their water supply “tasted salty.”

“Because of having that electronic device, people have an expectation that they can do something stupid and be rescued,” said Jackie Skaggs, spokeswoman for Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

“Every once in a while we get a call from someone who has gone to the top of a peak, the weather has turned and they are confused about how to get down and they want someone to personally escort them,” Ms. Skaggs said. “The answer is that you are up there for the night.”

The National Park Service does not keep track of what percentage of its search and rescue missions, which have been climbing for the last five years and topped 3,500 in 2009, are technology related. But in an effort to home in on “contributing factors” to park accidents, the service recently felt compelled to add “inattention to surroundings” to more old-fashioned causes like “darkness” and “animals.”

The service acknowledges that the new technologies have benefits as well. They can and do save lives when calls come from people who really are in trouble.

The park service itself has put technology to good use in countering the occasional unruliness of visitors. Last summer, several men who thought they had managed to urinate undetected into the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone were surprised to be confronted by rangers shortly after their stunt. It turns out that the park had installed a 24-hour camera so people could experience Old Faithful's majesty online. Viewers spotted the men in action and called to alert the park.

In an era when most people experience the wild mostly through television shows that may push the boundaries of appropriateness for entertainment, rangers say people can wildly miscalculate the risks of their antics.

In an extreme instance in April, two young men from Las Vegas were killed in Zion National Park in Utah while trying to float a hand-built log raft down the Virgin River. A park investigation found that the men “did not have whitewater rafting experience, and had limited camping experience, little food and no overnight gear.”

“They told their father that they intended to record their entire trip on video camera as an entry into the ‘Man vs. Wild' competition” on television, investigators wrote.

Far more common but no less perilous, park workers say, are visitors who arrive with cellphones or GPS devices and little else — sometimes not even water — and find themselves in trouble. Such visitors often acknowledge that they have pushed themselves too far because they believe that in a bind, the technology can save them.

It does not always work out that way. “We have seen people who have solely relied on GPS technology but were not using common sense or maps and compasses, and it leads them astray,” said Kyle Patterson, a spokesman for Rocky Mountain National Park , just outside Denver.

Like a lot of other national parks, Rocky Mountain does not allow cellphone towers, so service that visitors may take for granted is spotty at best. “Sometimes when they call 911, it goes to a communications center in Nebraska or Wyoming,” Mr. Patterson said. “And that can take a long time to sort out.”

One of the most frustrating new technologies for the parks to deal with, rangers say, are the personal satellite messaging devices that can send out an emergency signal but are not capable of two-way communication. (Globalstar Inc., the manufacturer of SPOT brand devices, says new models allow owners to send a message with the help request.)

In some cases, said Keith Lober, the ranger in charge of search and rescue at Yosemite National Park in California, the calls “come from people who don't need the 911 service, but they take the SPOT and at the first sign of trouble, they hit the panic button.”

But without two-way communication, the rangers cannot evaluate the seriousness of the call, so they respond as if it were an emergency.

Last fall, two men with teenage sons pressed the help button on a device they were carrying as they hiked the challenging backcountry of Grand Canyon National Park. Search and rescue sent a helicopter, but the men declined to board, saying they had activated the device because they were short on water.

The group's leader had hiked the Grand Canyon once before, but the other man had little backpacking experience. Rangers reported that the leader told them that without the device, “we would have never attempted this hike.”

The group activated the device again the next evening. Darkness prevented a park helicopter from flying in, but the Arizona Department of Public Safety sent in a helicopter whose crew could use night vision equipment.

The hikers were found and again refused rescue. They said they had been afraid of dehydration because the local water “tasted salty.” They were provided with water.

Helicopter trips into the park can cost as much as $3,400 an hour, said Maureen Oltrogge, a spokeswoman for Grand Canyon National Park.

So perhaps it is no surprise that when the hikers pressed the button again the following morning, park personnel gave them no choice but to return home. The leader was issued a citation for creating hazardous conditions in the parks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/science/earth/22parks.html?_r=1&ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Balancing Act for Imam in Muslim Center Furor

Not everyone in the Cairo lecture hall last February was buying the imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's message. As he talked of reconciliation between America and Middle Eastern Muslims — his voice soft, almost New Agey — some questioners were so suspicious that he felt the need to declare that he was not an American agent.

Muslims need to understand and soothe Americans who fear them, the imam said; they should be conciliatory, not judgmental, toward the West and Israel.

But one young Egyptian asked: Wasn't the United States financing the speaking tour that had brought the imam to Cairo because his message conveniently echoed United States interests?

“I'm not an agent from any government, even if some of you may not believe it,” the imam replied. “I'm not. I'm a peacemaker.”

That talk, recorded on video six months ago, was part of what now might be called Mr. Abdul Rauf's prior life, before he became the center of an uproar over his proposal for a Muslim community center two blocks from the World Trade Center. He watched his father, an Egyptian Muslim scholar, pioneer interfaith dialogue in 1960s New York; led a mystical Sufi mosque in Lower Manhattan; and, after the Sept. 11 attacks, became a spokesman for the notion that being American and Muslim is no contradiction — and that a truly American brand of Islam could modernize and moderate the faith worldwide.

In recent weeks, Mr. Abdul Rauf has barely been heard from as a national political debate explodes over his dream project , including, somewhere in its planned 15 stories, a mosque. Opponents have called his project an act of insensitivity, even a monument to terrorism.

In his absence — he is now on another Middle East speaking tour sponsored by the State Department — a host of allegations have been floated: that he supports terrorism; that his father, who worked at the behest of the Egyptian government, was a militant; that his publicly expressed views mask stealth extremism. Some charges, the available record suggests, are unsupported. Some are simplifications of his ideas. In any case, calling him a jihadist appears even less credible than calling him a United States agent.

Growing Up in America

Mr. Abdul Rauf, 61, grew up in multiple worlds. He was raised in a conservative religious home but arrived in America as a teenager in the turbulent 1960s; his father came to New York and later Washington to run growing Islamic centers. His parents were taken hostage not once, but twice, by American Muslim splinter groups. He attended Columbia University , where, during the Six-Day War in 1967 between Israel and Arab states like Egypt, he talked daily with a Jewish classmate, each seeking to understand the other's perspective.

He consistently denounces violence. Some of his views on the interplay between terrorism and American foreign policy — or his search for commonalities between Islamic law and this country's Constitution — have proved jarring to some American ears, but still place him as pro-American within the Muslim world. He devotes himself to befriending Christians and Jews — so much, some Muslim Americans say, that he has lost touch with their own concerns.

“To stereotype him as an extremist is just nuts,” said the Very Rev. James P. Morton, the longtime dean of the Church of St. John the Divine, in Manhattan, who has known the family for decades.

Since 9/11, Mr. Abdul Rauf, like almost any Muslim leader with a public profile, has had to navigate the fraught path between those suspicious of Muslims and eager to brand them as violent or disloyal and a Muslim constituency that believes itself more than ever in need of forceful leaders.

One critique of the imam, said Omid Safi , a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina , was that he had not been outspoken enough on issues “near and dear to many Muslims,” like United States policy on Israel and treatment of Muslims after 9/11, “because of the need that he has had — whether taken upon himself or thrust upon him — to be the ‘American imam,' to be the ‘New York imam,' to be the ‘accommodationist imam.' ”

Akbar Ahmed , chairman of Islamic studies at American University, said Mr. Abdul Rauf's holistic Sufi practices could make more orthodox Muslims uncomfortable, and his focus on like-minded interfaith leaders made him underestimate the uproar over his plans.

“He hurtles in, to the dead-center eye of the storm simmering around Muslims in America, expecting it to be like at his mosque — we all love each other, we all think happy thoughts,” Mr. Ahmed said.

“Now he has set up, unwittingly, a symbol of this growing tension between America and Muslims: this mosque that Muslims see as a symbol of Islam under attack and the opponents as an insult to America,” he added. “So this mild-mannered guy is in the eye of a storm for which he's not suited at all. He's not a political leader of Muslims, yet he now somehow represents the Muslim community.”

Andrew Sinanoglou, who was married by Mr. Abdul Rauf last fall, said he was surprised that the imam had become a contentious figure. His greatest knack, Mr. Sinanoglou said, was making disparate groups comfortable. At the wedding, he brought together Mr. Sinanoglou's family, descended from Greek Christians thrown out of Asia Minor by Muslims, and his wife's conservative Muslim father.

“He's an excellent schmoozer,” Mr. Sinanoglou said of the imam.

Mr. Abdul Rauf was born in Kuwait. His father, Muhammad Abdul Rauf, graduated from Cairo's Al-Azhar University, the foremost center of mainstream Sunni Muslim learning. He was one of many scholars Egypt sent abroad to staff universities and mosques, a government-approved effort unlikely to have tolerated a militant. He moved his family to England, studying at Cambridge and the University of London; then to Malaysia, where he eventually became the first rector of the International Islamic University of Malaysia.

As a boy, Feisal absorbed his father's talks with religious scholars from around the world, learning to respect theological debate, said his wife, Daisy Khan . He is also steeped in Malaysian culture, whose ethnic diversity has influenced an Islam different than that of his parents' homeland.

In 1965, he came to New York. His father ran the Islamic Center of New York; the family lived over its small mosque in a brownstone on West 72nd Street, which served mainly Arabs and African-American converts. Like his son, the older imam announced plans for a community center for a growing Muslim population — the mosque eventually built on East 96th Street. It was financed by Muslim countries and controlled by Muslim diplomats at the United Nations — at the time a fairly noncontroversial proposition. Like his son, he joined interfaith groups, invited by Mr. James of St. John the Divine.

Hostage Crisis

Unlike his son, he was conservative in gender relations; he asked his wife, Buthayna, to not drive. But in 1977, he was heading the Islamic Center in Washington when he and Buthayna were taken hostage by a Muslim faction; it was his wife who challenged the gunmen on their lack of knowledge of Islam.

“My husband didn't open his mouth, but I really gave it to them,” she told The New York Times then.

Meanwhile, the younger Mr. Abdul Rauf studied physics at Columbia. At first, he recalled in interviews last year, it was hard to adjust to American social mores. By 1967, he and a Yale student, Kurt Tolksdorf, had bonded at summer school over their shared taste in women and fast cars. But Mr. Tolksdorf said his friend never subscribed to the “free love” of the era.

When the 1967 war broke out in the Middle East, Mr. Tolksdorf said, Mr. Abdul Rauf reacted calmly when Israeli students tried to pick a fight. A classmate, Alan M. Silberstein, remembers debating each day's news over lunch.

“He was genuinely trying to understand the interests of American Jews — what Israel's importance was to me,” he said. “There was a genuine openness.”

In his 20s, Mr. Abdul Rauf dabbled in teaching and real estate, married an American-born woman and had three children. Studying Islam and searching for his place in it, he was asked to lead a Sufi mosque, Masjid al-Farah. It was one of few with a female prayer leader, where women and men sat together at some rituals and some women do not cover their hair. And it was 12 blocks from the World Trade Center.

Divorced, he met his second wife, Ms. Khan, when she came to the mosque looking for a gentler Islam than the politicized version she rejected after Iran's revolution. Theirs is an equal partnership, whether Mr. Abdul Rauf is shopping and cooking a hearty soup, she said, or running organizations that promote an American-influenced Islam .

A similar idea comes up in the video of his visit to Cairo this year. Mr. Abdul Rauf, with Ms. Khan, unveiled as usual, beside him, tells a questioner not to worry so much about one issue of the moment — Switzerland's ban on minarets — saying Islam has always adapted to and been influenced by places it spreads to. “Why not have a mosque that looks Swiss?” he joked. “Make a mosque that looks like Swiss cheese. Make a mosque that looks like a Rolex.”

In the 1990s, the couple became fixtures of the interfaith scene, even taking a cruise to Spain and Morocco with prominent rabbis and pastors.

Mr. Abdul Rauf also founded the Shariah Index Project — an effort to formally rate which governments best follow Islamic law. Critics see in it support for Taliban -style Shariah or imposing Islamic law in America.

Shariah, though, like Halakha, or Jewish law, has a spectrum of interpretations. The ratings, Ms. Kahn said, measure how well states uphold Shariah's core principles like rights to life, dignity and education, not Taliban strong points. The imam has written that some Western states unwittingly apply Shariah better than self-styled Islamic states that kill wantonly, stone women and deny education — to him, violations of Shariah.

After 9/11, Mr. Abdul Rauf was all over the airwaves denouncing terrorism, urging Muslims to confront its presence among them, and saying that killing civilians violated Islam. He wrote a book, “ What's Right With Islam Is What's Right With America ,” asserting the congruence of American democracy and Islam.

That ample public record — interviews, writings, sermons — is now being examined by opponents of the downtown center.

Those opponents repeat often that Mr. Abdul Rauf, in one radio interview , refused to describe the Palestinian group that pioneered suicide bombings against Israel, Hamas , as a terrorist organization. In the lengthy interview, Mr. Abdul Rauf clumsily tries to say that people around the globe define terrorism differently and labeling any group would sap his ability to build bridges. He also says: “Targeting civilians is wrong. It is a sin in our religion,” and, “I am a supporter of the state of Israel.”

“If I were an imam today I would be saying, ‘What am I supposed to do?' ” said John Esposito, a professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University . “ ‘Can an imam be critical of any aspect of U.S. foreign policy? Can I weigh in on things that others could weigh in on?' Or is someone going to say, ‘He's got to be a radical!' ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/nyregion/22imam.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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U.S. Anti-Islam Protest Seen as Lift for Extremists

WASHINGTON — Some counterterrorism experts say the anti-Muslim sentiment that has saturated the airwaves and blogs in the debate over plans for an Islamic center near ground zero in Lower Manhattan is playing into the hands of extremists by bolstering their claims that the United States is hostile to Islam.

Opposition to the center by prominent politicians and other public figures in the United States has been covered extensively by the news media in Muslim countries. At a time of concern about radicalization of young Muslims in the West, it risks adding new fuel to Al Qaeda 's claim that Islam is under attack by the West and must be defended with violence, some specialists on Islamic militancy say.

“I know people in this debate don't intend it, but there are consequences for these kinds of remarks,” said Brian Fishman, who studies terrorism for the New America Foundation here.

He said that Anwar al-Awlaki , an American-born cleric hiding in Yemen who has been linked to several terrorist plots, has been arguing for months in Web speeches and in a new Qaeda magazine that American Muslims face a dark future of ever-worsening discrimination and vilification.

“When the rhetoric is so inflammatory that it serves the interests of a jihadi recruiter like Awlaki, politicians need to be called on it,” Mr. Fishman said.

Evan F. Kohlmann, who tracks militant Web sites at the security consulting firm Flashpoint Global Partners, said supporters of Al Qaeda have seized on the controversy “with glee.” On radical Web forums, he said, the dispute over the Islamic center, which would include space for worship, is lumped together with fringe developments like a Florida pastor's call for making Sept. 11 “Burn a Koran Day.”

“It's seen as proof of what Awlaki and others have been saying, that the U.S. is hypocritical and that most Americans are enemies of Islam,” Mr. Kohlmann said. He called the anti-Islam statements spawned by the dispute “disturbing and sad” and said they were feeding anti-American sentiment that could provoke violence.

While some critics of the Islamic center have carefully limited their objection to its proximity to the site of the Sept. 11 attacks, and have rejected any suggestion that they are anti-Muslim, the issue has tapped into a well of suspicion and hostility to Islam across the country.

Many Republican politicians, including Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin , have said that the proposed location of the center showed insensitivity to the victims of 9/11.

Others political leaders, including President Obama , Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Gov. Christopher J. Christie of New Jersey, have defended the right of Muslims to build the center or warned against anti-Muslim hysteria.

The dispute has tapped strong emotions in the wake of a series of terrorist plots and attacks over the last year aimed at American targets, several of them inspired or encouraged by Mr. Awlaki. The events included the killing of 13 people in November at Fort Hood, Tex., by an Army psychiatrist, Nidal Malik Hasan; the failed attack on a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25 by a young Nigerian man; and the attempted bombing of Times Square in May by Faisal Shahzad, a financial analyst who had worked for a Connecticut cosmetics company.

Mr. Awlaki, whose Web diatribes calling for attacks on the United States have turned up repeatedly in terrorism investigations, has sought to counter the notion that American tolerance extends to Muslims.

In a March posting, Mr. Awlaki, who lived in the United States for nearly 20 years, predicted that America would become “a land of religious discrimination and concentration camps.”

“Don't be deceived by the promises of preserving your rights from a government that is right now killing your own brothers and sisters,” he wrote. “Today, with the war between Muslims and the West escalating, you cannot count on the message of solidarity you may get from a civic group or a political party, or the word of support you hear from a kind neighbor or a nice co-worker. The West will eventually turn against its Muslim citizens!”

Dalia Mogahed of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies said the outcry over the proposed center “plays into Awlaki's arguments and Osama bin Laden 's arguments” by suggesting that Islam has no place in the United States.

She said that extreme anti-Muslim views in the United States ironically mirror a central tenet of extreme Islamists: “That the world is divided into two camps, and they're irreconcilable, and Muslims have to choose which side they're on.”

Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker and a potential 2012 presidential candidate, said in a Fox News interview that “Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington,” a comment that drew criticism for appearing to equate those proposing the Islamic center with Nazis.

Asked about the view that such remarks could fuel radicalism, Mr. Gingrich sent an e-mail response on Friday that did not directly address his critics but said that “Americans must learn to tell the truth about radical Islamists while being supportive of and inclusive of moderate Muslims who live in the modern world, respect women's rights, reject medieval punishment and defend American laws and the American Constitution.” He added that he believed “it is possible to be a deeply religious Muslim and a patriotic American.”

Muqtedar Khan, an associate professor of political science at the University of Delaware, said he was not sure the Islamic center dispute alone would radicalize anyone. But he said it was “demoralizing” for Muslims like him who defend the United States as an open and tolerant society.

“For the first time, anti-Islamic rhetoric has gone mainstream,” he said. “What this really does is weaken the moderates and undermine their credibility.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/world/21muslim.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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For Social Security, a Birthday Makeover

Social Security, now celebrating its 75th birthday, is receiving mixed diagnoses. Some analysts think the program is on solid fiscal ground for decades to come, while others fear that the impending retirement of the baby boom generation precipitates a crisis. In either case, it is always worth considering innovations to make the program more efficient and equitable. The Op-Ed page editors asked six experts to recommend specific fixes that could be part of a comprehensive reform package for the nation's largest social insurance program.

Here are the replies:

Employers Should Pay Up

OPINION

Do you want to know how much LeBron James pays in Social Security taxes each year? Bill Gates? Oprah? Your dermatologist? $6,622. That's the maximum anyone pays in Social Security taxes, because earnings above $106,800 are not taxed.

By slowly raising the cap — say, 2 percent each year, though increasing it faster would raise more revenue — so that it eventually covered 90 percent of all income, we could eliminate roughly a third of Social Security's projected shortfall . Next year, people like Mr. James would pay slightly more than they pay now while eventually receiving slightly higher benefits.

That would help restore a balance to our tax base that has disappeared over the past few decades, as incomes among top earners have grown so much more than incomes among those earning below the cap. Indeed, 16 percent of earnings in this country are completely untaxed by Social Security — a huge windfall for the rich and a terrible shortfall for the benefits program.

Better yet, we could close about 70 percent of the shortfall if we immediately eliminated the cap on the employer side. Both employers and employees pay a 6.2 percent Social Security tax on earnings only up to $106,800. Instead, employers should pay their share of the tax on their employees' full salaries.

Look at it this way: If we got rid of the employer cap, the Miami Heat would need to shell out about $900,000 in Social Security taxes on Mr. James's reported $14.5 million salary next year.

That would go a long way toward shoring up Social Security's finances, while maintaining the historic link between employee contributions and benefits.

— MONIQUE MORRISSEY, economist at the Economic Policy Institute

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OPINION

Over the next two decades, 78 million Americans will quit working, quit paying into the Social Security system and start drawing benefits, straining the resources of our public pension system.

Is there a way to persuade them to stay in the labor force — continuing to contribute their skills and talent — and postpone their Social Security payments?

Yes, there is, and Chile is showing us how. Sixty-two percent of Chilean men ages 60 to 69 were still in the work force in 2004, compared with 46 percent of American men that age. Among men ages 70 to 74, 31 percent of Chileans were still working, but only 19 percent of Americans.

Why the difference? Chile has a public retirement system, but after retirement age — 65 for men, 60 for women — people who keep working are no longer required to contribute to a pension fund. This increases their net wages, strongly encouraging them to continue working. Since 1981, when Chile put the system in place, labor force participation rates for men ages 65 to 70 have risen 13 percentage points.

Chilean public pensions are set up differently from Social Security. Workers contribute 10 percent of their wages to an individual account and choose a fund in which to invest it, earning a market rate of return. In retirement, workers can receive inflation-protected annuities or withdraw the money gradually. Workers can receive payments early (and stop contributing), once their retirement accounts are large enough to provide a pension that is at least 70 percent of their average wages and 150 percent of the government-guaranteed minimum benefit. But a man under age 65, or a woman under 60, who has not reached this target replacement rate cannot receive benefits — and therefore must keep working.

In contrast, Americans can start receiving Social Security benefits at age 62, but if they keep working, they must keep contributing. And if they earn more than a minimum amount, they also see a reduction in their current monthly benefit. Both the early pension option and the earnings penalty discourage work.

Disabled Chilean pensioners, who, like disabled Americans, receive benefits before reaching retirement age, are likewise allowed to work and keep any wages earned, in addition to their disability benefits.

In a similar fashion, Chilean widows receive both their own pension benefits and their survivor's benefit — unlike American widows, who must choose one or the other. That means Chilean women get a higher expected return on their contributions to the pension system, which helps explain why labor force participation rates for older women in Chile are growing even faster than those for men.

By postponing the age at which the pension can start, reducing the payroll tax on people over 65 and eliminating other penalties for work, the United States could also encourage older people to work. This would increase national income, expand the tax base, ease the financial burden on Social Security and help to finance pensions for our increasingly long lives.

— ESTELLE JAMES, senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis

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OPINION

Representing South Florida in Congress, I regularly hold town meetings with retirees. Inevitably, the first question from the crowd is one I often ask myself, “Why are folks in Washington lying about Social Security?”

There is a bizarre consensus that dismantling this cherished program by raising the retirement age or cutting benefits would somehow fix the federal budget. But that would only inflict harm on the millions of Americans who rely on Social Security to survive.

Instead, Congress should enact gradual changes to ensure that Social Security continues to meet its obligations for future generations, including when my children start to retire in 2063. That is why I recently introduced the Preserving Our Promise to Seniors Act , which would embrace the program and improve its benefits.

The legislation addresses the program's inadequate cost-of-living adjustments, which fail to keep up with the rising cost of seniors' necessities. These adjustments are currently based on the Consumer Price Index — the average cost of a basket of goods for the American worker.

But the index undercounts things that the American worker spends little on but that eat up a disproportionate share of retirees' income, for example, expensive prescriptions or medical equipment like home oxygen machines.

By creating a separate consumer price index tailored to their needs, retirees wouldn't see the buying power of their Social Security checks shrink in the face of higher Medicare premiums or other expenses.

That is not the only way this legislation would boost those checks. For the first time, income above $106,800 would be used to determine monthly benefits — and those who pay more into the system would receive higher benefits upon retirement.

This legislation would also close the long-range solvency gap predicted in 2037 by phasing out the $106,800 cap on income subject to the payroll tax. Over seven years, a few more weeks of taxes would be added to the paychecks of the highest earners until they joined the 95 percent of Americans who already contribute year-round.

My constituents who rely on Social Security after a lifetime of hard work are a testament to the wisdom of our nation's most successful domestic program. In an era of disappearing pensions, declining home values and high unemployment, we ought to build on Social Security, not take it apart.

— TED DEUTCH, Democratic congressman from Florida

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Cut Benefits, but Do It Fairly

OPINION

How do we maintain Social Security in the fairest way? Consider progressive indexing, which would preserve benefits for the bottom third of wage earners who rely on the program for almost all of their retirement income, but recalculate the benefits of higher-paid workers who have other sources of retirement income — including 401(k)s and IRAs — that are tax-subsidized by the federal government.

To calculate initial benefits at retirement, Social Security currently takes workers' average career earnings and increases them by the rate at which average wages rose during their careers, a mechanism called wage indexing. Once workers start receiving benefits, they are increased annually by the amount that consumer prices rose in the prior year, called price indexing.

Under progressive indexing, by contrast, the initial benefits of the top earners would be calculated by price indexing, while the initial benefits for the bottom third would still be calculated by wage indexing (a grace period would be put in place for workers within three years of retirement). The initial benefits for the middle third would be calculated by a blend of price and wage indexing.

Progressive indexing would reduce the long-term Social Security deficit from $4.7 trillion to between $1.2 trillion and $1.7 trillion, depending on the design of the middle-income blend. Why? Because over the span of a worker's career, wages tend to rise about 1 percent faster than prices.

In short, progressive indexing would preserve Social Security benefits for the neediest workers while allowing the benefits of other future retirees to grow at the rate of consumer prices or higher.

— ROBERT C. POZEN, chairman emeritus of an investment management firm and senior lecturer at Harvard Business School

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62 Is Too Young

OPINION

One of the few ideas for cutting Social Security benefits that seems to have bipartisan support is raising the normal retirement age to perhaps 70. (It has recently risen to 66 for people born after 1942, and it will rise to 67 for people born after 1959.) Because such an age increase would need to be phased in over a long period, it doesn't generate as much opposition as other cost-saving measures or tax increases.

The problem is that hardly anyone retires at the normal retirement age. According to the Social Security Administration, 43 percent of men and 48 percent of women on Social Security in 2008 began drawing benefits at age 62. An additional 15 percent of men and women started at age 63 or 64. In short, about two-thirds of those eligible are retiring before the normal retirement age.

What many people may not realize is that Social Security benefits are actuarially adjusted so that people get roughly the same lifetime benefits regardless of when they retire from age 62 to 70, so if you start earlier, you receive a smaller monthly check. Those turning 62 and starting to receive Social Security this year will get 25 percent lower monthly benefits than if they waited until age 66. And that means for life; benefits are not raised when an early retiree reaches the normal retirement age.

This reduction will only get larger. People born after 1959 who retire at 62 will get 30 percent lower payments.

The actuarial adjustment also means that when people delay retirement it doesn't save Social Security anything in the long run. Those who delay retirement beyond the normal age receive benefits that are 8 percent higher per year of delay, until age 69. Consequently, if the goal is to reduce Social Security's long-term financing problem, we need to think seriously about raising the early retirement age.

— BRUCE BARTLETT, former Treasury Department official in the George H.W. Bush administration and columnist for The Fiscal Times

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The Fix: Plenty of Young People

OPINION

Social Security should invest in collateralized debt obligations backed by subprime mort ... oops, that doesn't work. Actually, Social Security is not that bad off. It is in much better shape than state and local pensions or Medicare. In fact, it is in better shape than the rest of the federal budget, which has been borrowing the surplus that Social Security accumulated over many years and is now fretting because it will soon have to pay the money back. Got that? I didn't think so. Let's try again.

Before “fixing” Social Security, we should think about what it is that we want to cure. The actuarial problem in Social Security is that, instead of each generation supporting itself, as in a normal pension system, in Social Security each generation supports its elders. Therefore, any generation has the power to bankrupt the system simply by failing to adhere to the Biblical injunction to “go forth and multiply.” If we baby boomers would have had no children, Social Security would be over, although our savings on education would be considerable. Seriously, though, we did have too few kids. So the system needs tinkering — and it will always need tinkering as demographic patterns shift from one decade to the next.

We could end the problem forever by raising taxes to pay for the older generation's retirement, allowing each future generation to save for itself. Then it wouldn't matter how many babies anyone had. But this solution, though theoretically the purest, would cost a double-plus lot of money right now. Merely tinkering to maintain the system as is, though not so pure, would not be onerous: for instance, we could raise the payroll tax by a percent or so.

We should also make use of a perfectly legal way to steal other societies' young people — by legalizing undocumented immigrants and permitting more immigration. It would be a foolproof way to lessen the actuarial load. In contrast, societies that go the closed-door route (see Japan) guarantee that their own citizens will be working overtime to support Grandma and Grandpa.

Finally, there is the “problem” that Social Security was invented by the federal government, which some people hate. The cure for this would be to legislate Social Security out of existence. According to its foes on the ideological right, it would be worth eliminating social insurance to people who are disabled or elderly, or whose private pensions have folded, or whose 401(k)s have melted away, because Social Security, the post office and other federal institutions are the root of all evil. It's unlikely that people on Social Security agree.

— ROGER LOWENSTEIN, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and author of “While America Aged”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22intro.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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An Iranian flag flutters Friday at an undisclosed location in Iran next to a surface-to-surface Qiam-1 (Rising) missile

Iran unveils bombing drone By the CNN Wire Staff August 22, 2010 (CNN) -- Iran unveiled the first long-range military drone manufactured in the country on Sunday, state media reported. The unmanned aerial vehicle is capable of carrying out bombing missions against ground targets and flying long distances at a high speed, Press TV said. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attended the unveiling of the drone, dubbed the "Karrar," in a ceremony marking Iran's Defense Industry Day. In February, Iran inaugurated the production line for two types of drones with bombing and reconnaissance capabilities, the semiofficial Fars news agency reported. Iran has manufactured its own tanks, armored personnel carriers, missiles and fighter planes since 1992, according to Press TV.

The country successfully tested a radar-evading drone with bombing capabilities in June 2009, Press TV said.

In March 2009, U.S. military officials said U.S. fighter jets in Iraq shot down an unmanned Iranian spy drone aircraft.

At the time, most major state-run media outlets in Iran did not carry news of any incident involving an Iranian drone and Iraq's national security adviser declined to comment.

Unmanned vehicles have become a staple of modern combat.

U.S. military officials have said remotely-controlled drones minimize risk and allow troops to spy on and attack enemy combatants.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/08/22/iran.drone.unveiled/#fbid=ElhxYeFndmM&wom=false

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Scottish ministers freed Megrahi last year because they claimed he would die from cancer within three months

US calls for Lockerbie bomber to return to jail The White House has called for the man convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing to be returned to prison in Scotland. President Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, said the US had expressed "strong conviction" to Scottish officials that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi be brought back to jail. Scottish ministers freed Megrahi, who has cancer, citing medical advice that he would likely die in three months. Analysts say the anniversary of his freeing adds weight to the US call.

He added: "We've expressed our strong conviction that Megrahi should serve out the remainder - the entirety - of his sentence in a Scottish prison."

Mr Brennan said the US had had productive discussions with Libyan officials and would use "diplomatic channels to convey our sentiments on a broad range of issues to include Mr al-Megrahi".

The BBC's Steve Kingstone, in Washington, says that US position is not new, but it carries additional force - coming form President Obama's counter-terrorism adviser on the anniversary of Megrahi's release.

Megrahi was welcomed in Libya after his release from Scotish prison in 2009

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also said in a statement on Friday that the US continued to "categorically disagree" with the decision to release Megrahi. "As we have expressed repeatedly to Scottish authorities, we maintain that al-Megrahi should serve out the entirety of his sentence in prison in Scotland. We have and will continue to reiterate this position to the Scottish and Libyan authorities," she said. The Scottish government says the decision to free Megrahi was taken in good faith. Following his release from a Scottish prison in August 2009, Megrahi got a hero's welcome in Tripoli. Of the 270 people who died in the bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, 189 of them were Americans.

'Outstanding questions'

Meanwhile, a group of US senators says a "cloud of suspicion" still hangs over Megrahi's release.

Senator Robert Menendez called on Britain and Scotland to answer a number of "outstanding questions" over the case.

Mr Menendez said there was anger and frustration in the US that the convicted bomber was "still very much alive and very much free".

In letters to UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, the four US senators setting up an inquiry into issues around the release have reiterated what they call the "persisting uncertainty about medical, legal and diplomatic issues related to" the release.

Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill, who took the decision to release Megrahi, has said that he is prepared to meet the US senators.

He said: "What's quite clear is the people of Scotland think the decision should be made here in Scotland, by the justice secretary, and they do believe it was made in good faith without any intervention, or indeed any consideration, of political, diplomatic or economic considerations."

Mr MacAskill has always maintained the decision to release Megrahi followed due process and was in keeping with the ideals of the Scottish justice system.

Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison in 2001 for the bombing.

Analysis

The US senators are asking for two things. First, they want the Scottish government to produce supporting documents, explaining why they concluded Megrahi had only three months to live. As yet, there is no public evidence to indicate that any individual specialist gave that prognosis.

Second, the senators want the UK government to set up a public inquiry into the broader circumstances of Megrahi's release. They hope to learn more about the contacts between British government ministers and BP, as the oil company lobbied in favour of a Prisoner Transfer Agreement with Libya.

Separately, the White House has renewed a long-standing call for Megrahi to be returned to Scotland, to complete the entirety of his sentence. But there is no sense of how it expects to achieve that. And the administration has stopped short of calling for a public inquiry, or for the release of specific medical records.

In letters to UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, the four US senators setting up an inquiry into issues around the release have reiterated what they call the "persisting uncertainty about medical, legal and diplomatic issues related to" the release.

Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill, who took the decision to release Megrahi, has said that he is prepared to meet the US senators.

He said: "What's quite clear is the people of Scotland think the decision should be made here in Scotland, by the justice secretary, and they do believe it was made in good faith without any intervention, or indeed any consideration, of political, diplomatic or economic considerations."

Mr MacAskill has always maintained the decision to release Megrahi followed due process and was in keeping with the ideals of the Scottish justice system.

Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison in 2001 for the bombing.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11045140

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Union workers say 'no' to mosque jobs

Protesters to rally against planned Islamic center in New York By the CNN Wire Staff August 22, 2010 New York (CNN) -- Protesters will gather Sunday near the site of the 2001 terror attacks in Manhattan to demonstrate against plans to build an Islamic community center and mosque a few blocks from ground zero. The Islamic center's leaders say the $100 million facility calls for a community center including a mosque, performing arts center, gym, swimming pool and other public spaces. It will be built near where the World Trade Center was destroyed by Islamic extremists on September 11, 2001. The attacks killed more than 2,700 people. Some New Yorkers say an Islamic center near the site is a painful affront. Protests will take place Sunday from 11 a.m. ET, rain or shine, said the Coalition to Honor Ground Zero, which is organizing the rally. Firefighters, families of the September 11 victims, first responders and residents of the neighborhood will join the protests, the organizers said on their website.

Plans to build the center near the site have stirred emotions nationwide. A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released earlier in August marked nationwide opposition to the proposed facility at 68 percent.

"What that tells me is the wounds of 9/11 haven't healed, and I think if they haven't, perhaps we can find ways to bring about that healing by perhaps creating a situation where people will feel more comfortable," New York Gov. David Paterson said last week.

Paterson said there is no local, state or federal statute that prevents the construction of the facility.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/08/22/new.york.mosque.protests/#fbid=ElhxYeFndmM&wom=false

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