New York mosque controversy worries Muslims overseas

Some can't understand the fuss over a house of worship and how a democracy promoting religious freedom could even be having such a debate. Others are offended at the conflation of the 9/11 attacks with all Muslims.

By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times

August 23, 2010

Reporting from Beirut

The heated debate across America over construction of the so-called ground zero mosque is reverberating across the globe, with the potential of creating a worldwide black eye for the United States.

Many Muslims abroad are miffed by the stateside debate, largely conducted by non-Muslims, that has grown so loud as to become a topic of discussion on talk shows and newspapers from Bali to Bahrain, from Baghdad to Berlin. The proposed Cordoba House has become a symbol of America's fraught relations with the world's 1.5 billion Muslims.

"Rejecting this has become like rejecting Islam itself," said Ahmad Moussalli, a professor of Islamic Studies at the American University of Beirut. "The United States has historically been distinguished by its tolerance, whereas Europe, France, Belgium and Holland have been among those who have rejected the symbolism of Islam. Embracing it will be positively viewed in the Islamic world."

Since the Sept. 11 attacks and the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America has spent millions trying to improve its image among Muslims, especially in the Arab world, from where the Sept. 11 hijackers and their leaders came. Coincidentally, the leader of the proposed Muslim community center, the Kuwaiti-born scholar Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is currently touring the Persian Gulf states on a U.S. State Department-funded trip to promote goodwill for America.

Like most non-Americans, Muslims across the world barely understand the vagaries of U.S. politics, including the wedge issues and posturing that turn midterm elections into mud fights. Commentators from the Middle East to South Asia to Indonesia to Nigeria praised Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg for coming to the defense of the community center, even as the president hedged his apparent initial support for the project.

Obama has "placed ethics and principles ahead of politics that not only enhances his credibility to the Muslims only but also his stature as a statesman to the rest of the world," read an opinion piece in the Daily Star of Bangladesh.

But in interviews conducted mostly in the Arab world and in commentaries by newspapers throughout the Muslim world, many emphasized that the United States will be judged ultimately not on a building in Lower Manhattan but on whether it is able to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and leave Iraq and Afghanistan in peace.

"Is not exerting serious effort to implement pledges towards the Palestinian cause and state more useful with regard to showing the U.S. adherence to rights, freedom and justice?" Rajih Khouri wrote in the Aug. 19 issue of An-Nahar, a Lebanese daily.

The proposed center, a sort of Muslim YMCA with a pool and a prayer room situated two blocks from the World Trade Center site, is not a huge topic of debate on websites that draw frenetic commentary over the Arab-Israeli conflict or tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

Houses of worship are humdrum affairs in the Muslim world and many ordinary Muslims wonder primarily whether the mosque is "needed," meaning simply whether Muslims in that neighborhood now have nowhere else to pray. Some appear baffled that anyone in their right mind would scoff at a $100-million private-sector investment at a time of global economic crisis.

"To me and many Muslims, this mosque is like any other mosque in any part of the world," said Houriya Baleegh, a 55-year-old Cairo housewife. "It does not mean much to Islam having a mosque at ground zero."

Indeed, some say it's a bad idea to construct the building so close to the site of the twin towers, whose fiery destruction at the hands of 19 Muslim extremists is etched into the minds of people all over the world.

"Building a mosque there will increase hatred between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West," said Gamal Awad, a professor at Cairo's Al Azhar University. "It will further connect Islam with a horrible event."

But many Muslims tuning in to the debate see a demonization of their religion by some Americans, who have been painting the 1,400-year-old faith as a dangerous political ideology. They bristle at the ignorance of politicians who argue that the structure should not be allowed because Muslims don't allow churches in their countries. Despite tensions between Christians and Muslims in some countries, Saudi Arabia is the only country to specifically bar churches.

Muslims worry that the campaign has become caught up in the same racially tinged clash-of-civilizations campaigns to ban Muslim women in France from wearing Islamic garb or Muslims in Switzerland to build minarets on their houses of worship.

"What is important is the symbolic dimension to the issue," said Zaki Saad, a former leader of the Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, called the Islamic Action Front. "When they connect all Muslims to Sept. 11, that means they connect terrorism and extremism to Islam. This is a form of discrimination and unacceptable."

Fazel Maybodi, a moderate Iranian cleric and supporter of the opposition movement, has seen fellow political travelers jailed and tortured by dogmatic Islamist extremists who now have the upper hand in Iranian politics. Citing verses from the Koran arguing for peaceful coexistence among Muslims, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, he said the Lower Manhattan center could help reinforce more moderate trends within Islam. "A mosque in ground zero is good for promotion of democracy and peaceful coexistence of people all over the world," he said.

While some conservative American critics allege the building would serve as a "victory mosque" to the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center, Muslims contend that the project could serve as a bridge not only to non-Muslims, but to reach out to those of their faith who may have lost their way.

Those in Osama bin Laden's Wahabbi school consider the Sufism espoused by Abdul Rauf a degenerate form of the religion. And in April, Iraqi authorities said they uncovered a Sept. 11-style Al Qaeda plot to fly planes into mosques revered by Shiite Muslims in the cities of Najaf and Karbala, underscoring the disdain the extremist network holds for Muslims who don't adhere to its puritanical Sunni brand of Islam.

"It is very important to have mosques and Islamic learning centers, especially abroad," said Bassem El Tarrass, a Lebanese cleric who preaches at several mosques. "If there is no mosque, people will go the Internet to learn about Islam, and perhaps come across extremists like the ones who carried out Sept. 11."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-0823-mosque-muslim-react-20100823,0,7773313,print.story

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Cities levy an array of taxes on visitors

Also: Upgrades to travel-expense software separate base airfares from fees; and short-faced dogs may die more on planes.

By Hugo Martín, Los Angeles Times

August 23, 2010

Anyone who has recently traveled to a major U.S. city knows the shock of finding a hotel, car rental or restaurant bill laden with extra charges.

It's a growing trend among cities to add bed taxes, airport concession taxes and other charges to visitors' bills in order to fund tourism marketing campaigns, airport improvements and other projects.

Combined with sales taxes, the extra travel taxes add about $28 a day to the cost of a visitor's lodging, car rentals and meals in the nation's top 50 destination cities, according to a new study by the education and research arm of the National Business Travel Assn.

Some cities charge more than others.

The cities with the highest overall tax burden on travelers in the central-city area were Chicago ($38.75 a day, on average), New York ($36.53), Boston ($36.47) and Seattle ($34.46), according to the study.

When sales taxes are excluded, Los Angeles ranked among the 10 cities with the lowest travel taxes charged in the central city areas. But a recent proposal to add a 1.5% assessment fee to hotel bills could bump L.A. off the list.

The cities in which travelers face the lowest overall tax burden are Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Fort Myers, Fla.; Portland, Ore.; and Detroit.

"Rest assured," warned Michael W. McCormick, executive director of the travel group, "companies are taking notice of these unfair burdens when determining how and where to spend their business travel, meetings and events dollars."

• Travel software separates fees

With airlines adding more fees for luggage, meals and other extras, several technology and travel management firms have recently unveiled upgrades to travel-expense software to better distinguish the fees from the cost of basic airfares.

Travelocity Business, the business travel division of Travelocity, and TRX Inc., the Atlanta travel technology business, are among the companies to announce new fee-tracking programs this month.

What this means for business travelers is that your company's travel managers can now identify the total cost of such fees, making it easier to adopt policies to accept or reject the payment of certain fees. Travel managers can also get a better picture of which airlines pile on the most fees.

"Clearly, fees have evolved into a sizable piece of what a corporation pays for travel," said Yannis Karmis, president of Travelocity Business. "As it becomes bigger and bigger, we try to understand a better way to manage that spending."

• Dog deaths on airplanes

The U.S. Transportation Department doesn't know how many dogs have traveled on commercial airlines, but it recently tallied how many have died on planes in the last five years.

The analysis showed that a surprising number of the dogs that died on commercial flights were "short-faced" dogs, such as pugs and bulldogs. Airlines are required to report pet deaths but not the total number of pets transported.

Of the 122 dogs that have died on commercial planes since May 2005, about half were short-faced, including 25 English bulldogs, 11 pugs, six French bulldogs, two boxers and two Pekingese.

Still, the federal agency said that in general, it is safe to transport pets by plane.

Dogs with short faces may be at higher risk because such breeds are prone to respiratory problems and typically don't breathe as efficiently as other breeds, said Kimberly Anne May, a veterinarian and spokeswoman for the Illinois-based American Veterinary Medical Assn.

Such dogs may struggle to breathe and to cool off when anxious and confined in tight, overheated spaces such as the cargo hold of an airplane, she added. "They have a tough time moving air well."

The veterinarian group suggests taking dogs on plane trips only if absolutely necessary and says it's good to avoid flying with pets in the middle of the day, when temperatures are highest.

It also suggests transporting smaller pets in the plane's cabin if possible, rather than booking them in cargo. "It's just something to keep in mind," May said.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-travel-briefcase-20100823,0,7256248,print.story

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Opponents of an Islamic cultural center and mosque planned to be built near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan cheer Sunday during a demonstration.

In New York, hundreds protest planned Islamic center 'Build it somewhere else,' says one protester about the project blocks from the former World Trade Center. Nearby, counterdemonstrators protest what they see as bigotry. By Nicole Santa Cruz, Los Angeles Times August 23, 2010 Reporting from New York Kathy O'Shea lost her firefighter nephew in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York. Only the nameplate from his helmet was found. That painful memory was one reason she joined several hundred people Sunday to protest a proposed Islamic community center and mosque that would be built about two blocks from the site of the fallen World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. "Everyone has closure when they lose someone," said O'Shea, a paralegal. "We'll never have closure."

About a block away, counterdemonstrators organized by the Coalition to Stop Islamophobia supported the right to build the center. Police kept the groups apart.

Dr. Ali Akram, 39, a Brooklyn physician, came with his three sons and an 11-year-old nephew waving an American flag. Scores of Muslims were among the 2,700 who died in the New York attack, he said, calling those who oppose the center and mosque "un-American."

"They teach their children about the freedom of religion in America, but they don't practice what they preach," Akram told the Associated Press.

O'Shea said she believes in religious freedom. "It's not about that," she said. "Just don't build it here; build it somewhere else."

The proposed $100-million community center and mosque has sparked nationwide debate. President Obama has supported developers' right to build it, citing religious freedom, as has New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Gov. David Paterson has suggested building it on state-owned land elsewhere.

Politicians who oppose the project include Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was New York mayor at the time of the attacks; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who is facing a difficult reelection campaign; and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

One of the organizers of the community center, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is in the Middle East on a trip funded by the State Department to promote religious tolerance. He told a gathering at the U.S. ambassador's residence in Bahrain on Sunday that he took heart from the dispute, saying "the fact we are getting this kind of attention is a sign of success."

"It is my hope that people will understand more," the Associated Press quoted him as saying.

But among the project's opponents in New York on Sunday, understanding appeared to be in short supply. At the event, organized by the Coalition to Honor Ground Zero, protesters chanted, waved American flags and held handmade signs, and clapped and sang along as loudspeakers blared "God Bless the USA" and "God Bless America."

Marco Larios, an unemployed carpenter, said he would rather pick up bottles in the street than earn a "bloody check" from constructing the community center.

"They want to build a memorial to the terrorists before a memorial to the victims," he said.

Bradley Maurer, 40, said he thought the project's developers had a right to build whatever they wanted, but not here. The location is too provocative.

"This is right in our face," said Maurer, holding a sign with a photo of the World Trade Center rubble.

Charlotte Wahle, 89, said the mosque wouldn't be a house of prayer. "We don't want Islam to take over," she said.

Mary Novotny's 33-year-old son, Brian, was killed in the attacks on the twin towers. She called the area holy ground.

"The knife was stuck in; they're twisting it," said Novotny, a retired nurse, before joining other protesters in chanting, "Stop the mosque."

A block away at the counterprotest, T-shirt designer Nechesa Morgan held a sign reading, "America! When did it become OK to be a bigot and a racist again?"

Her sign sparked a conversation with pedestrians. One man agreed with Morgan and said the opposition was based on intolerance.

"This bigotry has just gotten so out of control," Morgan said.

Dalia Mahmoud, a member of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, likened the opposition to the mosque to anti-Semitism.

"America is better than that," she said.

A bystander, Joan Shangold, said the debate showed Americans' ignorance about Islam.

"It's not sacred ground that we're standing on," she said, noting that the best place to get a view of the former World Trade Center site is a nearby Burger King.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-0823-mosque-protest-20100823,0,6429365.story

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Blogger beware: Postings can lead to lawsuits

A false sense of Internet security can mean legal quagmires for critics who are careless about facts.

By David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau

August 23, 2010

Reporting from Washington

The Internet has allowed tens of millions of Americans to be published writers. But it also has led to a surge in lawsuits from those who say they were hurt, defamed or threatened by what they read, according to groups that track media lawsuits.

"It was probably inevitable, but we have seen a steady growth in litigation over content on the Internet," said Sandra Baron, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center in New York.

Although bloggers may have a free-speech right to say what they want online, courts have found that they are not protected from being sued for their comments, even if they are posted anonymously.

Some postings have even led to criminal charges.

Hal Turner, a right-wing blogger from New Jersey, faces up to 10 years in prison for posting a comment that three Chicago judges "deserve to be killed" for having rejected a 2nd Amendment challenge to the city's handgun ban in 2009. Turner, who also ran his own Web-based radio show, thought it "was political trash talk," his lawyer said. But this month a jury in Brooklyn, N.Y., convicted him of threatening the lives of the judges on the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In western Pennsylvania, a judge recently ruled a community website must identify the Internet address of individuals who posted comments calling a township official a "jerk" who put money from the taxpayers in "his pocket." The official also owned a used car dealership, and one commenter called his cars "junk." The official sued for defamation, saying the comments were false and damaged his reputation.

In April, a North Carolina county official won a similar ruling after some anonymous bloggers on a local website called him a slumlord.

"Most people have no idea of the liability they face when they publish something online," said Eric Goldman, who teaches Internet law at Santa Clara University. "A whole new generation can publish now, but they don't understand the legal dangers they could face. People are shocked to learn they can be sued for posting something that says, 'My dentist stinks.' "

Under federal law, websites generally are not liable for comments posted by outsiders. They can, however, be forced to reveal the poster's identity if the post includes false information presented as fact.

Calling someone a "jerk" and a "buffoon" may be safe from a lawsuit because it states an opinion. Saying he wrongly "pocketed" public money could lead to a defamation claim because it asserts something as a fact.

"A lot of people don't know how easy it is to track them down" once a lawsuit is filed, said Sara J. Rose, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in Pittsburgh.

The Supreme Court has said that the 1st Amendment's protection for the freedom of speech includes the right to publish "anonymous" pamphlets. But recently, judges have been saying that online speakers do not always have a right to remain anonymous.

Last month, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Nevada judge's order requiring the disclosure of the identity of three people accused of conducting an "Internet smear campaign via anonymous postings" against Quixtar, the successor to the well-known Amway Corp.

"The right to speak, whether anonymously or otherwise, is not unlimited," wrote Judge Margaret McKeown.

Quixtar had sued, contending the postings were damaging to its business. The judge who first ordered the disclosure said the Internet had "great potential for irresponsible, malicious and harmful communication." Moreover, the "speed and power of Internet technology makes it difficult for the truth to 'catch up to the lie,' " he wrote.

Media law experts say lawsuits over Internet postings are hard to track because many of them arise from local disputes. They rarely result in large verdicts or lengthy appeals to high courts.

Goldman, the Santa Clara professor, describes these cases as the "thin-skinned plaintiff versus the griper." They begin with someone who goes online to complain, perhaps about a restaurant, a contractor, a store, a former boss or a public official. Sometimes, one person's complaint prompts others to vent with even sharper, harsher complaints.

"There's a false sense of safety on the Internet," said Kimberley Isbell, a lawyer for the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University. "If you think you can be anonymous, you may not exercise the same judgment" before posting a comment, she said.

Not surprisingly, the target of the online complaints may think he or she has no choice but to take legal action if the comments are false and malicious.

"These can be life-changing lawsuits. They can go on for years and cost enormous amounts in legal fees," Goldman said.

He is particularly concerned about teenagers and what they post online. "Teenagers do what you might expect. They say things they shouldn't say. They do stupid things," he said. "We don't have a legal standard for defamation that excuses kids."

Media law experts repeat the advice that bloggers and e-mailers need to think twice before sending a message.

"The first thing people need to realize, they can be held accountable for what they say online," Baron said. "Before you speak ill of anyone online, you should think hard before pressing the 'send' button."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-blogger-suits-20100823,0,1152196,print.story

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From the New York Times

Venezuela, More Deadly Than Iraq, Wonders Why

CARACAS, Venezuela — Some here joke that they might be safer if they lived in Baghdad. The numbers bear them out.

In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela , there were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed above 16,000.

Even Mexico's infamous drug war has claimed fewer lives.

Venezuelans have absorbed such grim statistics for years. Those with means have hidden their homes behind walls and hired foreign security experts to advise them on how to avoid kidnappings and killings. And rich and poor alike have resigned themselves to living with a murder rate that the opposition says remains low on the list of the government's priorities.

Then a front-page photograph in a leading independent newspaper — and the government's reaction — shocked the nation, and rekindled public debate over violent crime.

The photo in the paper, El Nacional, is unquestionably gory. It shows a dozen homicide victims strewn about the city's largest morgue, just a sample of an unusually anarchic two-day stretch in this already perilous place.

While many Venezuelans saw the picture as a sober reminder of their vulnerability and a chance to effect change, the government took a different stand.

A court ordered the paper to stop publishing images of violence, as if that would quiet growing questions about why the government — despite proclaiming a revolution that heralds socialist values — has been unable to close the dangerous gap between rich and poor and make the country's streets safer.

“Forget the hundreds of children who die from stray bullets, or the kids who go through the horror of seeing their parents or older siblings killed before their eyes,” said Teodoro Petkoff, the editor of another newspaper here, mocking the court's decision in a front-page editorial. “Their problem is the photograph.”

Venezuela is struggling with a decade-long surge in homicides , with about 118,541 since President Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a group that compiles figures based on police files. (The government has stopped publicly releasing its own detailed homicide statistics, but has not disputed the group's numbers, and news reports citing unreleased government figures suggest human rights groups may actually be undercounting murders) .

There have been 43,792 homicides in Venezuela since 2007, according to the violence observatory, compared with about 28,000 deaths from drug-related violence in Mexico since that country's assault on cartels began in late 2006.

Caracas itself is almost unrivaled among large cities in the Americas for its homicide rate, which currently stands at around 200 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to Roberto Briceño-León, the sociologist at the Central University of Venezuela who directs the violence observatory.

That compares with recent measures of 22.7 per 100,000 people in Bogotá , Colombia's capital, and 14 per 100,000 in São Paulo , Brazil's largest city. As Mr. Chávez's government often points out, Venezuela's crime problem did not emerge overnight, and the concern over murders preceded his rise to power.

But scholars here describe the climb in homicides in the past decade as unprecedented in Venezuelan history; the number of homicides last year was more than three times higher than when Mr. Chávez was elected in 1998.

Reasons for the surge are complex and varied, experts say. While many Latin American economies are growing fast, Venezuela's has continued to shrink. The gap between rich and poor remains wide, despite spending on anti-poverty programs, fueling resentment. Adding to that, the nation is awash in millions of illegal firearms.

Police salaries remain low, sapping motivation. And in a country with the highest inflation rate in the hemisphere, more than 30 percent a year, some officers have turned to supplementing their incomes with crimes like kidnappings.

But some crime specialists say another factor has to be considered: Mr. Chávez's government itself. The judicial system has grown increasingly politicized, losing independent judges and aligning itself more closely with Mr. Chávez's political movement. Many experienced state employees have had to leave public service, or even the country.

More than 90 percent of murders go unsolved , without a single arrest, Mr. Briceño-León said. But cases against Mr. Chavez's critics — including judges, dissident generals and media executives — are increasingly common.

Henrique Capriles, the governor of Miranda, a state encompassing parts of Caracas, told reporters last week that Mr. Chávez had worsened the homicide problem by cutting money for state and city governments led by political opponents and then removing thousands of guns from their police forces after losing regional elections.

But the government says it is trying to address the problem. It recently created a security force, the Bolivarian National Police , and a new Experimental Security University where police recruits get training from advisers from Cuba and Nicaragua, two allies that have historically maintained murder rates among Latin America's lowest.

The national police's overriding priority, said Víctor Díaz, a senior official on the force and an administrator at the new university, is “unrestricted respect for human rights.”

“I'm not saying we'll be weak,” he said, “but the idea is to use dialogue and dissuasion as methods of verbal control when approaching problems.”

Senior officials in Mr. Chávez's government say the deployment of the national police, whose ranks number fewer than 2,500, has succeeded in reducing homicides in at least one violent area of Caracas where they began patrolling this year.

Still, human rights groups suggest the new policing efforts have been far too timid. Incosec, a research group here that focuses on security issues, counted 5,962 homicides in just 10 of Venezuela's 23 states in the first half of this year.

Meanwhile, the debate over the morgue photograph published by El Nacional is intensifying, evolving into a broader discussion over the government's efforts to clamp down on the news outlets it does not control.

The government says the photograph was meant to undermine it , not to inform the public. The authorities are also threatening an inquiry into “Rotten Town,” a video by a Venezuelan reggae singer that shows an innocent child struck down by a stray bullet. For all the government's protests, the video has spread rapidly across the Internet since its release here this month.

Given the government's stance in these cases, many here worry it is focusing on the messenger, not the underlying message.

Hector Olivares, 47, waited outside the morgue early one morning this month to recover the body of his son, also named Hector, 21. He said his son was at a party in the slum of El Cercado, on the outskirts of Caracas, when a gunman opened fire.

Mr. Olivares said Hector was the second son he had lost in a senseless murder, after another son was killed four years ago at the age of 22. He said he did not blame Mr. Chávez for the killings, but he pleaded with the president to make combating crime a higher priority.

“We elected him to crack down on the problems we face,” he said. “But there's no control of criminals on the street, no control of anything.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/world/americas/23venez.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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At Least 150 Women Raped in Weekend Raid in Congo

By JOSH KRON

GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo — A mob of Rwandan rebels gang-raped at least 150 women last month during a weekend raid on a community of villages in eastern Congo, United Nations and other humanitarian officials said Sunday.

The United Nations blamed the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or F.D.L.R., for the attack. The F.D.L.R. is an ethnic Hutu rebel group that has been terrorizing the hills of eastern Congo for years, preying on villages in a quest for the natural resources beneath them.

The raided villages are near the mining center of Walikale, known to be a rebel stronghold, and are “very insecure,” said Stefania Trassari, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “Rape is something we get quite often.”

But she and other United Nations and humanitarian officials said that this attack was unusual because of the large number of victims and the fact that they were raped by more than one attacker simultaneously.

On the evening of July 30, armed men entered the village of Ruvungi, in North Kivu Province.

“They told the population that they were just there for food and rest and that they shouldn't worry,” said Will F. Cragin, the International Medical Corps' program coordinator for North Kivu, who visited the village a week after their arrival.

“Then after dark another group came,” said Mr. Cragin, referring to between 200 and 400 armed men who witnesses described as spending days and nights looting Ruvungi and nearby villages.

“They began to systematically rape the population,” he said, adding, “Most women were raped by two to six men at a time.”

The attackers often took the victims into the bush or into their homes, raping them “in front of their children and their families,” Mr. Cragin said. “If a car passed, they would hide.”

The rebels left on Aug. 3, he said, the same day the chief of the area traveled through the villages and reported horrific cases of sexual violence. “We thought at first he was exaggerating,” Mr. Cragin said, “but then we saw the scale of the attacks.”

Miel Hendrickson, a regional director for the International Medical Corps, which has been documenting the rape cases, said, “We had heard first 24 rapes, then 56, then 78, then 96, then 156.”

“The numbers keep rising,” she said. The United Nations maintains a military base approximately 20 miles from the villages, but United Nations officials said they did not know if the peacekeepers there were aware of the attack as it occurred. A United Nations military spokesman, Madnoje Mounoubai, said information was still being gathered.

The F.D.L.R. , which began as a gathering of fugitives of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, has grown into a resilient and savage killing machine and an economic engine in the region.

The United Nations, Congo and Rwanda began a military offensive against the group in early 2009, but since then, humanitarian organizations say, cases of rape have risen drastically .

“It's awful,” Ms. Trassari said. “The numbers are quite worrying.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited eastern Congo in 2009 to raise awareness about widespread rape in the region, calling it “evil in its basest form,” and the United States pledged $17 million to the Congolese government to fight sexual violence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/world/africa/23congo.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Proposed Muslim Center Draws Opposing Protests

Around noon on Sunday, Michael Rose, a medical student from Brooklyn, approached some of the hundreds of protesters who had gathered near ground zero to rally against a mosque and Islamic center planned for the neighborhood.

Mr. Rose, 27, carried a handwritten sign in favor of the mosque — “Religious tolerance is what makes America great,” it read — and his presence caused a stir. An argument broke out, punctuated by angry fingers pointed in the student's face.

One man, his cheeks red, leaned in and hissed that if the police were not present, Mr. Rose would be in danger.

Before any threats could be carried out, the police intervened, dragged Mr. Rose away from the crowd and insisted that he return to the separate area, one block away, where supporters of the project had been asked to stand.

Minutes later, as Mr. Rose was still shaking off the encounter, he turned to find the red-cheeked man back at his side. The man had followed the student up the street, and the two now stared at each other for a tense moment.

Then the man stuck out a hand and, in a terse voice, said, “I'm sorry.”

“You have a right,” he told Mr. Rose. (He would not give his name.) “I am sorry for what I said to you. I disagree with you completely, but you have a right.”

The dual protests on Sunday, against and for the Islamic center, part of a complex on Park Place called Park51 , had taunts, tensions and the occasional minor scuffle. Around 500 opponents of the mosque stood in a cordoned-off area, singing patriotic songs and speaking of a hijacked Constitution, while about 200 supporters held a counterprotest nearby.

As the rallies went on in Lower Manhattan, one of the main organizers of the Islamic center, Daisy Khan , said in a televised interview that the opposition to the plan was akin to discrimination against Jews.

“This is like a metastasized anti-Semitism,” Ms. Khan said on the ABC morning program “ This Week .”

“That's what we feel right now. It's not even Islamophobia; it's beyond Islamophobia. It's hate of Muslims, and we are deeply concerned,” she said.

But Sunday's exchange of words, although harsh at times, never led to blows or other violence. No arrests or injuries were reported by the authorities.

“The rain was the biggest problem,” a spokesman for the police said.

That calm prevailed, in a charged atmosphere two blocks north of ground zero, was due in large part to a sizable and wary police deployment. Dozens of officers kept watch and aggressively stopped members of either side from approaching the other.

Those efforts did not keep activists like Mr. Rose from trying. He said he had waded into the opposing crowd “to get a better sense of what the protesters were saying or thinking.”

Was he surprised by their message? Mr. Rose shook his head. “There was nothing that Newt Gingrich isn't saying,” he said.

But in interviews, some protesters said they had arrived not to advance a political agenda, but to express their belief that the center's organizers had ignored the interests of the public.

“I'm upset at how this whole thing was handled,” said Dominick DeRubbio, 25, nephew of David P. DeRubbio , a firefighter who died in the World Trade Center. “The level of defiance is running high. They're saying, ‘We're doing this whether you like it or not.' ”

Other protesters insisted that while they supported religious freedoms, the location of the planned Islamic center was an incursion on the rights of those who deemed ground zero a hallowed space.

“It's a disgrace to have a mosque at this sacred site,” said Kali Costas, who said she was a member of the Tea Party.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/nyregion/23protest.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Tighter Medical Privacy Rules Sought

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is rewriting new rules on medical privacy after an outpouring of criticism from consumer groups and members of Congress who say the rules do not adequately protect the rights of patients.

Democratic lawmakers and a few Republicans have denounced the rules, saying they fall short of offering patients the fullest protections possible. Hospitals and insurance companies, seeking to maintain greater control over patient notification, generally support the rules. The White House finds itself caught in the middle.

The rules specify when doctors, hospitals and insurers must tell patients about the improper use or disclosure of information in their medical records. Such breaches appear to have become more frequent, with the growing use of health information technology, social media and the Internet.

Kathleen Sebelius , the secretary of health and human services, issued temporary rules, with the force of law, in August last year. After analyzing comments from the public, she developed final rules and submitted them to the White House Office of Management and Budget for approval in May.

At the urging of the White House, Ms. Sebelius recently withdrew the rules to allow for further consideration.

“We decided to pull it back,” said Georgina C. Verdugo, director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services . “We had second thoughts. We hope to issue a final regulation this fall.”

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse , a watchdog group, estimates that more than five million people have been affected by breaches of medical information in the last 18 months.

Causes include the theft of laptop computers, the loss of paper records, the posting of data on Web sites and the curiosity of hospital employees snooping for information on sports stars and other celebrities.

Congress increased privacy safeguards when it provided tens of billions of dollars to promote the use of electronic health records under the economic recovery bill signed by President Obama in February 2009.

In writing the temporary rules, Ms. Sebelius closely followed the text of the law except in one important respect: Health care providers and health insurance plans would have to notify patients of a privacy breach only if they found that the violation posed “a significant risk of financial, reputational or other harm to the individual.”

“No notification is required” if a hospital or an insurer believes, after a risk assessment, that the patient will not be harmed, the rules said.

Deven McGraw, director of the Health Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology , a civil liberties group, said the standard proposed by the administration was severely flawed.

“Harm is in the eye of the beholder,” Ms. McGraw said. “How does a hospital or an insurance company know whether an improper disclosure will harm an employee's chances for promotion or endanger a victim of domestic abuse?”

Defending its proposal, the Department of Health and Human Services had said that some kind of “harm threshold” was essential. Otherwise, it said, consumers might be flooded with notices warning about innocuous or insignificant violations of privacy.

Some senior members of Congress said they had explicitly considered and rejected a standard like the one adopted by Ms. Sebelius. “This is not consistent with Congressional intent,” they said in a letter to her.

The letter was signed by six lawmakers including Representatives Henry A. Waxman , Democrat of California and chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee; Joe L. Barton of Texas, the senior Republican on the committee; and Pete Stark, Democrat of California and chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health.

Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, said hospitals and insurers were often reluctant to notify patients. “Few things could be more damaging to an institution's reputation than having to admit that it has lost or somehow allowed others to intrude into its patients' private medical data,” she said.

In July, Colorado notified 110,000 Medicaid recipients that information about them was on a computer hard drive taken “without permission” from a state government office. The data indicated whether, for example, women were receiving prenatal care or treatment for breast or cervical cancer .

In the last nine months, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee has notified nearly one million people that their privacy could be compromised by the theft of 57 computer hard drives from a call center in Chattanooga. The hard drives included recordings of telephone calls, Social Security numbers and diagnostic information about some subscribers.

In Massachusetts, four hospitals acknowledged this month that paper records for thousands of their patients had been improperly thrown out at a public dump north of Boston. The records included results of tests performed by pathologists and clinical laboratories.

“We were shocked and outraged,” said Nancy A. Coley, a spokeswoman for one of the hospitals, Holyoke Medical Center. “We wondered how our records could be out in the Boston area 90 miles away. We found that the records came from a billing agency used by a group of pathologists who did work for the hospital.”

In California, Ralph E. Montaño, a spokesman for the State Department of Public Health, said officials had substantiated 2,093 violations of medical privacy in the last 20 months, including 26 “malicious breaches.”

The department has imposed $1.1 million in fines on six hospitals and is still investigating hundreds of cases, Mr. Montaño said.

Courtney Berlin, a spokeswoman for Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside, Calif., said several hospital employees were recently disciplined for “using Facebook to post their personal discussions concerning hospital patients.”

The University of Texas at Arlington said it had recently notified 27,000 people of a possible “data compromise” involving their prescription drug records. The information, including drug names and diagnostic codes, was stored on a computer file server that was not properly secured, university officials said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/health/policy/23privacy.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From the Chicago Sun Times

Muslims say West Ridge mosque plan facing heat

But community leaders say objection is economic, not religious  

August 23, 2010

BY VERNON CLEMENT JONES Staff Reporter

Muslims ready to convert a once-bustling West Ridge eatery into a mosque say they're facing opposition that churches and synagogues in the neighborhood have not. But objecting neighbors say their opposition is economic.

"In America, everybody has the opportunity to practice their religion and where they want to," said Ahmed Shakil, a member of the Faizan E Madina Islamic Education Center. "If this was a church or a synagogue they would not have these objections, I don't think."

Community residents opposed to the mosque moving into the now-closed U Lucky Dawg drive-thru at 6821 N. Western Ave. reject allegations they're being unfair.

"There is no bigotry involved here," said Amie Zander, president of the West Ridge Chamber of Commerce, over the weekend. "Our sole objection is that we want this prime location to remain a commercial site, paying property tax."

Other residents expressed concerns about possible traffic and parking congestion during peak times. They also are concerned that the site -- given its prime location and ample off-street parking -- is capable of attracting a big-name restaurateur and jobs.

The North Side controversy has so far avoided the rancorous debate plans for another mosque -- two blocks from Ground Zero -- have ignited.

That may soon change, residents worry, awaiting a Chicago zoning decision that could come as early as today.

The current owners of the West Ridge restaurant, which has sat vacant since January 2009, entered into a sales agreement with Faizan E Madina earlier this summer. The congregation of mostly Pakistani and Indian immigrants is looking to relocate from its "cramped" quarters in a strip mall on North Ridge Avenue, member said. The sale hasn't yet closed.

While commercial zoning already allows for houses of worship along Western, the mosque needs the same special use permit a slew of other storefront churches, synagogues and mosques in the neighborhood already have. Most are housed in buildings once used as retail space and none -- including a synagogue now preparing to open at Pratt and California -- attracted opposition from the Chamber of Commerce or the volunteer group leading area redevelopment, the West Rogers Park Community Organization.

http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/religion/2626288,CST-NWS-mosque23.article

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From Google News

Suspect in 'Grim Sleeper' killings to enter plea

LOS ANGELES—The man suspected in the "Grim Sleeper" slayings of 10 women was expected to plead not guilty Monday at his scheduled arraignment in front of a Los Angeles judge.

An attorney for Lonnie Franklin Jr. has said he will plead not guilty to 10 charges of murder and one charge of attempted murder.

Prosecutors have not decided if they will seek the death penalty.

Private attorney Louisa Pensanti, who is working for free and said she has experience handling multiple murder cases, took over two weeks ago for the public defenders assigned to Franklin's case.

Franklin's arraignment had been scheduled for July 27, but an undisclosed conflict of interest for his public defender and the later switch to Pensanti led Superior Court Judge Hilleri G. Merrit to delay it until Monday.

Merritt has said the trial process could last three years.

Franklin is accused of killing a total of 10 women during two periods: 1985 to 1988 and 2002 to 2007. The 14-year pause led to the killer's nickname of "Grim Sleeper." Police are looking at more than 30 other cold case files to see if they can tie him to other unsolved slayings.

Franklin was captured on July 7 after police linked his DNA to evidence left with the slain women, all of whom were killed within a few miles of his South Los Angeles home.

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_15865662?nclick_check=1

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