Facing Long Mine Rescue, Chile Spares No Expense

SAN JOSÉ MINE, Chile — The government has consulted NASA about the extreme isolation of space. Chilean Navy officers have come to discuss the emotional stress of living in a submarine. Doctors stand at the ready with antidepressants . Even a tiny home theater is being funneled down in plastic tubes to occupy the 33 miners stuck in their subterranean home.

Chile is sparing no expense or attempted innovation in trying to rescue the miners trapped by a cave-in on Aug. 5, fully aware that the country — and the world — is closely watching the ordeal.

But like everything else being done to maintain the psychological health of the miners over the weeks or months they may remain nearly half a mile underground, officials will carefully control what they are exposed to, down to the messages they receive from their families or the kind of movies that might be projected on the wall of the mine.

“Movies are possible,” said Ximena Matas, a local city councilwoman. “But the psychologists will decide what movies they will see. It's up to them if something like ‘Avatar' would be too upsetting.”

No fewer than seven government ministers roam the dusty brown dirt of the makeshift camp outside the mine here in Chile's Atacama Desert, not to mention the countless politicians, millionaire donors and observers who almost outnumber the family members camping in tents.

With his popularity already slipping, President Sebastián Piñera has staked his nascent presidency on rescuing the miners, and is keeping up a full-court media press that reflects both his background as the billionaire former head of a media empire and the strategy that helped get him elected, analysts said.

“With a conviction that seemed to border on political suicide , the authorities bet all or nothing, and this time the returns will have incalculable reach,” Max Colodro Riesenberg, a professor at the University Adolfo Ibáñez, wrote in a newspaper column this week.

Government officials said they held a teleconference on Wednesday afternoon with five NASA specialists, among them doctors who put astronauts through tests that simulate the grueling isolation of a voyage to Mars.

Dr. Jaime Mañalich, the health minister, said he had urged NASA to send a team to “monitor what we are doing here” and announced Thursday that three or four NASA specialists would arrive in Chile next week to assist medical officials with the miners.

“This is a unique experience,” Dr. Mañalich said.

The miners are in relatively good spirits, officials say, but psychologists are concerned that both the miners and their families may soon suffer from post-traumatic stress once the euphoria wears off from establishing contact on Sunday. Psychologists are coaching family members and the miners on what they should say to each other and are filtering notes before they are sent down to the miners.

“They are giving good advice,” said Margarita Lagos Fuentes, 54, the mother of Claudio Lagos, a 34-year-old miner trapped below. “If they are in hell, why should we make it worse?”

Health workers are organizing a special exercise and recreation program to keep the men fit during their long wait. And they are instructing the miners about the need to distinguish between daytime and nighttime activities. Beyond the immediate 600-square-foot chamber the miners have sought refuge in, there are ample tunnels in which to move around and find a little privacy, mining company officials said.

For days after discovering the miners alive, officials carefully avoided telling them that it could take months to get them out, for the sake of preserving morale. Then on Wednesday, the health minister announced that officials had informed the miners that they would not be rescued before Chile's Independence Day on Sept. 18 and that “we hoped to get them out before Christmas.”

The miners reacted calmly to the news, Dr. Mañalich, the minister, said. “But we have the impression that in the days to come they are going to suffer from huge challenges regarding their psychological conditions.”

The miners finally got their first solid food on Wednesday afternoon — cereal bars — after four days of liquids. Because of the small size of the borehole, which is only about four inches in diameter, health workers have been struggling to send enough food and liquid, and hoped to be able to provide each miner with 800 calories on Thursday.

Before being discovered, the miners survived on tiny bites of emergency rations and have lost an average of about 20 pounds each. Just outside the borehole, a reporter asked Marcela Zúñiga, a nurse, when the miners would receive their first empanadas, a popular Chilean pastry usually stuffed with meat. “Those are being prepared by a special team in Santiago,” Ms. Zúñiga said.

Short notes from the miners have brought tears and laughter to family members above — like the one Orlando Contreras, 19, the brother of Pedro Contreras, 25, keeps in his wallet — quickly becoming cherished property. The miners have asked family members to send toothbrushes, clean underwear and, usually in jest, comforts like beer, bottles of wine and CDs. Omar Reygadas sent a note to his family asking for a steak and television “to kill the boredom.”

The miners have also been sending their credit and bank cards to family members via the tubes, which are pulled up by a winch. Government officials said they were starting to send them soccer updates and other news.

Psychologists are helping families choose who will make their first verbal communication with the miners on a modified telephone through the borehole, officials and family members said.

Only one family member will be allowed to speak to each miner, for up to five minutes each. A videocamera may also be connected by cable to officials above, allowing family members to see the miners themselves.

The mine has had a history of accidents and was forced to shut down briefly to make safety improvements, but its owners did not carry them out, according to some lawmakers and a risk prevention specialist who worked for the company.

The miners became trapped when two levels above them collapsed, leading them to seek refuge in a shelter about 2,300 feet deep. As the days passed, the nation grew increasingly skeptical that any of the miners had survived — let alone all of them.

Now officials face a new set of questions, including whether to send the miners, many of whom smoke, cigarettes . Ultimately, it was decided that they would be sent nicotine gum instead.

That was just fine with Mrs. Fuentes, the mother of Mr. Lagos. “I'm hoping they come out of there with a more mature attitude,” she said. “Forget about beer and cigarettes.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/world/americas/27chile.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Struggling Cities Shut Firehouses in Budget Crisis

SAN DIEGO — Fire departments around the nation are cutting jobs, closing firehouses and increasingly resorting to “rolling brownouts” in which they shut different fire companies on different days as the economic downturn forces many cities and towns to make deep cuts that are slowing their responses to fires and other emergencies.

Philadelphia began rolling brownouts this month, joining cities from Baltimore to Sacramento that now shut some units every day. San Jose, Calif., laid off 49 firefighters last month. And Lawrence, Mass., north of Boston, has laid off firefighters and shut down half of its six firehouses, forcing the city to rely on help from neighboring departments each time a fire goes to a second alarm.

Fire chiefs and union officials alike say it is the first time they have seen such deep cuts in so many parts of the country. “I've never seen it so widespread,” said Harold A. Schaitberger, the general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters .

The risks of cutting fire service were driven home here last month when Bentley Do, a 2-year-old boy who was visiting relatives, somehow got his hands on a gum ball, put it in his mouth, started laughing and then began choking.

“It blocked the air hole,” said his uncle, Brian Do, who called 911 while other relatives frantically tried to dislodge the gum ball. “No air could flow in and out.”

It is only 600 steps from the front door of the neatly kept stucco home where the boy was staying to the nearest fire station, just down the block. But the station was empty that evening: its engine was in another part of town, on a call in an area usually covered by an engine that had been taken out of service as part of a brownout plan.

The police came to the home within five minutes and began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, officials said. But it took nine and a half minutes — almost twice the national goal of arriving within five minutes — for the fire engine, with a paramedic and more medical equipment, to get there. An ambulance came moments later and took Bentley to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The San Diego Fire-Rescue chief, Javier Mainar, said it was impossible to say whether the delay contributed to Bentley's death on July 20. But he said there was no doubt that the city's brownouts, which take 13 percent of firefighters off the streets each day to save $11.5 million annually, led to the delay.

“You can just lock everything down and look at it sequentially, chronologically, as to what occurred,” Chief Mainar said in an interview. “There is no question that the brownout of Engine 44 resulted in Engine 38 having to take a response in that community, and because of that, Engine 38 was now out of position to respond to something that happened just down the street from their fire station.”

Fire service was once a sacred cow at budget time. But the downturn has lingered so long that many cities, which have already made deep cuts in other agencies, are now turning to their fire departments.

Some are trying to wrest concessions from unions, which over the years have won generous pension plans that allow many firefighters to retire in their 40s and 50s — plans that many cities say are unaffordable. Others want to reduce minimum-staffing requirements, which often force them to resort to costly overtime to fill shifts. Others are simply cutting service.

Analysts worry that some of the cuts could be putting people and property in danger. As the downturn has worn on, ISO , an organization that evaluates cities' fire protection capabilities for the insurance industry, has downgraded more cities, said Michael R. Waters, ISO's vice president of risk-detection services.

“This is generally due to a reduction in firefighting personnel available for responding to calls, a reduction in the number of responding fire apparatus, and gaps in the optimal deployment of apparatus or deficiencies in firefighter training programs,” Mr. Waters said in a statement.

Several fire chiefs said in interviews that the cuts were making them nervous.

“It's roulette,” said Chief James S. Clack of the Baltimore City Fire Department, which recently reduced the number of fire units closed each day to three from six. Officials saw that the closings in the 55-unit department were in some cases leading to longer response times. “I'm always worried that something's going to happen where one of these companies is closed.”

Early in his mayoralty, Michael R. Bloomberg of New York closed six fire companies to save money. This year, a threat to close 20 more — a 6 percent reduction in New York's fire companies — was averted when the city found savings elsewhere.

Several cities — including Lawrence — have said that they were forced to cut service because the unions failed to make concessions. Mr. Schaitberger, the union president, who was here for a union convention, said that protecting the pensions his members have won over the years was a top priority this year.

The pension issue has an added resonance in San Diego. The city was forced to consider a bankruptcy filing even before the Great Recession, and was barred from raising money by selling bonds to the public after officials disclosed that they had shortchanged the pension fund for city workers for years, even as they improved pension benefits. San Diego's pension fund has only two-thirds of the money it needs to pay the benefits promised to retirees, according to an updated calculation made by the city in the spring, and faces a shortfall of $2.1 billion.

So even before the recession and the brownouts, fire service in San Diego was stretched thin. A previous San Diego fire chief, Jeff Bowman, was hired in 2002 with a mandate to build up the department, but he resigned in 2006, after the pension-fueled fiscal crisis surfaced and it became clear that he would not get the money to build and staff the extra fire stations he believed were needed. “The question is whether fire protection is adequate, and in my opinion it's not,” he said in an interview.

After Bentley Do died, the City Council agreed to put a question on the ballot in November asking voters to approve a sales tax increase, which could be put in place only if the city adopts certain budget and pension reforms. The money could restore the fire service and help close a deep budget gap projected for next year.

But it would come too late for the Do family. Bentley, whose father, Nam Do, an American, was working in Vietnam as an architect, was just visiting San Diego with his mother, Mien Nguyen. Ms. Nguyen, who was six months pregnant, was here to take the oath of United States citizenship. She was sworn in the day after Bentley died, Brian Do, the uncle, said, but she fainted when she got her certificate and was taken to the hospital. Nam Do left his job in Vietnam to come here to grieve for his son, and goes to a temple every day, Brian Do said.

He said that the family had no plans to sue the city. “We're not blaming the city or blaming the Fire Department,” he said, “but the reason I speak out is because I want them to do a better job for other people.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27cuts.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Rumor to Fact in Tales of Post-Katrina Violence

NEW ORLEANS — In the days after Hurricane Katrina left much of New Orleans in flooded ruins, the city was awash in tales of violence and bloodshed.

The narrative of those early, chaotic days — built largely on rumors and half-baked anecdotes — quickly hardened into a kind of ugly consensus: poor blacks and looters were murdering innocents and terrorizing whoever crossed their path in the dark, unprotected city.

“As you look back on it, at the time it was being reported, it looked like the city was under siege,” said Russel L. Honoré, the retired Army lieutenant general who led military relief efforts after the storm.

Today, a clearer picture is emerging, and it is an equally ugly one, including white vigilante violence, police killings, official cover-ups and a suffering population far more brutalized than many were willing to believe. Several police officers and a white civilian accused of racially motivated violence have recently been indicted in various cases, and more incidents are coming to light as the Justice Department has started several investigations into civil rights violations after the storm.

“The environment that was produced by the storm brought out what was dormant in people here — the anger and the contempt they felt against African-Americans in the community,” said John Penny, a criminologist at Southern University of New Orleans. “We might not ever know how many people were shot, killed, or whose bodies will never be found.”

Broken levees left 80 percent of New Orleans submerged, but in unflooded Algiers Point, for instance, a mostly white enclave in a predominantly black neighborhood on the west bank of the Mississippi River, armed white militias cordoned off many of the streets.

They posted signs that boasted, “We shoot looters.” And the sound of gunfire peppered the hot days and nights like thunderclaps of a second storm.

Reginald Bell, a black resident, said in a recent interview that he was threatened at gunpoint by two white men there a few days after the storm. The men, on a balcony a few blocks from his home, yelled at him, “We don't want your kind around here!”

Then one of the men racked his pump-action shotgun, aimed it at Mr. Bell and dared him to be seen again on the streets of Algiers Point, Mr. Bell said. The next day, he said, the men confronted him on his porch while he sat with his girlfriend. They shoved guns — a shotgun and a long-nose .357 Magnum — in the couple's faces and reiterated their demand.

“There was no electricity, no police, no nothing,” said Mr. Bell, 41, sitting on his porch on a recent afternoon. “We were like sitting ducks. I slept with a butcher knife and a hatchet under my pillow.”

The West Bank area of the city was spared any flooding, but in the days and weeks after the storm, it was littered with fallen trees and, according to witnesses, with the bodies of several black men — none of whom appeared to have drowned.

“I done seen bodies lay in the streets for weeks,” said Malik Rahim, who lives around the corner from Mr. Bell and came to his aid. “I'm not talking about the flooded Ninth Ward, I'm talking about dry Algiers. I watched them become bloated and torn apart by dogs. And they all had bullet wounds.

“We've been screaming it from the top of our lungs since those first days, but nobody wanted to listen.”

Mr. Bell said that he went to the police not long after the confrontation with the two gun-wielding white men but no report or action was taken. It was not until last year when he was interviewed by a federal grand jury looking into civil rights violations in post-Katrina New Orleans that people seemed to pay attention, he said.

Some of the most serious accusations surfaced after investigations by The Times-Picayune and the nonprofit news organization ProPublica , which spotlighted much of the police violence and racially motivated violence around Algiers Point.

One case is that of a former Algiers resident, Roland J. Bourgeois Jr., who is white and was accused of being part of one of the vigilante groups. He was recently indicted by the federal government on civil rights charges in the shooting of three black men who were trying to leave the city. According to the indictment, Mr. Bourgeois, who now lives in Mississippi, warned one neighbor that “anything coming up this street darker than a brown paper bag is getting shot.”

The highest-profile case involving the police is the Danziger Bridge shooting in eastern New Orleans, where six days after Katrina, a group of police officers wielding assault rifles and automatic weapons fired on a group of unarmed civilians, wounding a family of four and killing two, including a teenager and a mentally disabled man. The man, Ronald Madison, 40, was shot in the back with a shotgun and then stomped and kicked as he lay dying, according to court papers.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu in May invited the Justice Department to conduct a full review of the city's Police Department. The Justice Department has also begun several civil and criminal investigations into post-Katrina violence involving the police and civilians.

Thomas Perez, an assistant attorney general, said the federal government was investigating eight criminal cases involving accusations of police misconduct. Many people in the city — including activists, victims and witnesses — had long contended that racial violence was being ignored by local law enforcement.

“We were dismissed as kooks for the last four years,” said Jacques Morial, a co-director of the Louisiana Justice Institute , a nonprofit advocacy organization, and the son of New Orleans' first black mayor. “I think what we are seeing now recalibrates the reality of Katrina, and I think it vindicates lots of folks.”

The city's police superintendent, Ronal Serpas, who took over the department in May, said he was troubled by what has come to light since the storm.

“We have to confront this and look at it head on,” Mr. Serpas said. “There have been far too many examples of men who have worn this badge and admitted in court to behavior that is an absolute insult to this city and to the men and women of this department who wear this badge with dignity and pride.”

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Rahim, 62, walked through the streets of Algiers and pointed out where, block by block, the militias had set up barricades and stood guard. He walked along the levee where the charred remains of Henry Glover were found in the trunk of a burned-out car, precipitating the indictment of three current and two former police officers.

“How can you remove the scars from the eyes of all the children who witnessed these atrocities?” Mr. Rahim asked.

General Honoré said that he had been asking himself questions, too.

“I think, every year there is more time for people to reflect on it,” he said. “I came out of Katrina with one perspective on it. And there isn't a month that goes by that I don't talk to someone who survived it who gives me a different perspective than I had before.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27racial.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Immigration Agency Ends Some Deportations

By JULIA PRESTON

Immigration enforcement officials have started to cancel the deportations of thousands of immigrants they have detained, a policy they said would pare huge case backlogs in the immigration courts.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said the new approach was part of a broad shift in priorities at the agency, to focus its efforts on catching and deporting immigrants who have been convicted of crimes or pose a national security threat. The policy — announced in an Aug. 20 memorandum from John Morton, the head of the agency — drew praise from immigrant advocates, who called it a common-sense strategy, and was denounced by several Republicans as evidence that the Obama administration was weakening enforcement and making it easier for illegal immigrants to remain in the country.

The change in emphasis at the immigration agency, which represents a significant break with longstanding practices, has awakened resistance among agents and detention officers on the ground, according to officials of the agency, which is known as ICE, and of the union representing those employees.

Mr. Morton's memorandum refers to a particular group of illegal immigrants: those who have been detained in ICE operations because they did not have legal status, but who have active applications in the system to become legal residents. The memo encourages ICE officers and lawyers to use their authority to dismiss those cases, canceling the deportation proceedings, if they determine that the immigrants have no criminal records and stand a strong chance of having their residence applications approved.

The policy is intended to address a “major inefficiency” that has led to an unnecessary pileup of cases in the immigration courts, Mr. Morton said. The courts have reported at least 17,000 cases that could be eliminated from their docket if ICE dismissed deportations of immigrants, like those married to United States citizens, who were very likely to win legal status, the memo says.

To resolve that number of deportation cases, officials will have to fix persistent breakdowns in coordination between two federal agencies that oversee the nation's overburdened and troubled immigration system, ICE officials acknowledged. On one hand, ICE enforces immigration law. Another agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services , is in charge of approving applications for immigration documents. When ICE opens a deportation case against an immigrant, it is heard in immigration court.

The courts are swamped under a backlog that reached a record in June of 247,922 cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group at Syracuse University that analyzes federal data. The average waiting time for cases in those courts was 459 days.

But immigration lawyers said they are currently waiting as long as two years to get a hearing date in some especially crowded immigration courts.

The new policy “is a pretty basic, common-sense thing to do,” said Helen Harnett, policy director for the National Immigrant Justice Center , a legal assistance group in Chicago. She said that if an immigrant's application for legal residence was ultimately denied, ICE could reinstate the deportation.

“This is for people who do have a path to legalize their status,” said Mary Meg McCarthy, director of the justice center. “This does not create a new path to legalization for anyone.”

But Republican lawmakers said the Obama administration was moving toward a de facto legalization program by allowing some illegal immigrants to remain here despite their violations of the law.

“Actions like this demoralize ICE agents who are trying to do their job and enforce the law,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley , Republican of Iowa. “Unfortunately, it appears this is more evidence that the Obama administration would rather circumvent Congress and give a free pass to illegal immigrants who have already broken our law.”

Mr. Morton's memorandum was first reported this week in The Houston Chronicle, which found that some immigrants in Texas had already seen their deportations canceled.

ICE officials said they arrived at the policy after conferring with immigration court officials. “This is not a backdoor amnesty,” said Beth Gibson, assistant deputy director of ICE. “It is really about efficient use of docket space and smart use of everybody's scarce resources.”

The agency has deported a record number of 167,000 immigrants with criminal convictions in the past year, ICE officials said, an increase of about 43 percent over the previous year.

However, dissension in the ranks at ICE surfaced on June 25, when a local of the American Federation of Government Employees representing some enforcement and detention officers announced that it had taken a vote of no confidence in Mr. Morton.

The director and other senior ICE officials had “abandoned the agency's core mission of enforcing United States immigration laws,” the local said in a news release, undertaking “reckless and misguided initiatives” while failing to alert Congress to the need for more manpower and funds for ICE.

Chris Crane, the president of the local, did not respond to an e-mail message on Thursday.

The national president of the federation, John Gage, said the union had not yet taken a position on the issues raised by the local. Mr. Gage said after several ICE locals had complained, he called a meeting next week of representatives of all of the federation's locals that represent ICE employees.

“I really would like to get some facts,” Mr. Gage said Thursday. “Our ICE officers have real concerns, but there is conflicting information. If there is any increased risk to our people, we will be all over it,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27immig.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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In Scandal's Wake, Police Turn to Quick, Cheap Test for Drugs

When Sgt. Chris Schaffer confiscates a brick of what he suspects is cocaine, he no longer sends the material to the San Francisco Police Department crime lab.

Instead, Sergeant Schaffer dips a toothpick into the white powder, inserts it into a glass vial and places it in a plastic bag with a chemical that tells him, based on color changes, whether the powder is cocaine.

“When you're putting someone in jail, that's a big deal. You want to be prepared,” said the sergeant, who wears jeans and a bulletproof vest while overseeing a plainclothes unit in the busy Bayview-Hunters Point precinct. “The test is just more ammunition to back you up.”

Sergeant Schaffer handles the testing himself because the drug analysis section of the department's crime lab no longer exists. It was shuttered in March after the authorities accused a longtime technician of stealing small amounts of cocaine. The scandal, one of the worst in the department's history, led prosecutors to dismiss hundreds of drug cases.

In the aftermath, nearly 700 officers were trained to use portable kits to test for cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. The “presumptive” tests, which cost about $1 each, were introduced into the field in April. Police officials hope that they will reduce the need for more comprehensive drug testing, which is now being outsourced to Alameda County at a cost to the city of $155 per case.

Presumptive tests have been standard practice for decades at police departments across the country, including ones in Alameda, San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties. But critics are concerned that the San Francisco police may be moving from one scandal to another. The city's public defender's office says the tests could lead to false arrests because some legal substances are known to yield a positive result for illegal narcotics.

In addition, with set time limits to complete the test and myriad ways to interpret the colors, experts say field-testing can be difficult to perform, especially under the often-stressful conditions of police work. The department has issued a seven-page manual to help officers with the portable kits.

“Like with everything we saw with the debacle in the crime lab, things are subject to human error,” said Teresa Caffese, chief attorney for the public defender's office. “Are we creating the potential for other injustices?”

The “debacle” involved the accusations in March that Deborah Madden, a former technician at the crime lab, was skimming cocaine and other drugs for personal use. Ms. Madden has not been charged with a crime.

The agency responsible for the lab's accreditation discovered other problems: a short staff, outdated equipment and testing procedures, inconsistent record-keeping, even a family of feral cats living at the facility.

An audit by the United States Department of Justice and the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office concluded that the drug analysis staff of three was overworked, handling about 14,000 cases a year. Technicians were struggling to process the caseload under a tight deadline — within 48 hours, the time allotted for prosecutors to file charges after a suspect's arrest.

Chief George Gascon shuttered the drug-analysis section of the lab and introduced presumptive testing in the hope that it would sharply reduce the number of cases sent out for lab work. Since more than 90 percent of drug cases in San Francisco are resolved with plea agreements or dropped charges, officials reasoned, they would need fewer lab tests, which prosecutors rely on in a jury trial to prove cases beyond a reasonable doubt.

“Prior, we were going straight to lab testing, which forced the crime lab to really generate a lot of work really quickly,” said Lt. Michael Connolly, who oversees operations for the S.F.P.D. “There's a cost in doing that, whereas now we get to pick and choose what cases are going to be tested.”

Police officials say field testing could lead to a reduction in lab tests to 4,000 a year, from 14,000. Moving forward from the scandal, police officials have said a reconstituted crime lab could easily handle the smaller caseload, an argument they have presented to the Board of Supervisors in pushing for a new facility.

A majority of the S.F.P.D.'s 850 officers have been trained by the Drug Enforcement Administration to perform the presumptive tests.

The timed test starts when a toothpick coated with the suspected drug is inserted into a vial inside a thick, transparent plastic bag. Once the bag is sealed, the vial is smashed, releasing chemicals from an ampul that mix with the substance. Different colors — green for heroin, purple for sodium nitrate (an ingredient in methamphetamine), light blue for cocaine — differentiate the substances, and some kits, depending on the color changes, require a second test.

But forensics experts say too many other substances — Tylenol PM, for example — can test positive for illegal drugs like cocaine. The District Attorney's Office said that prosecutors often ordered further testing to confirm results, but that suspects might accept plea agreements based only on presumptive testing. Even if a person admits guilt, defense lawyers said they worried about the precedent of plea agreements negotiated without the kind of thorough analysis that would serve as proof of a crime.

“If you get a color change, that's an indication that it's, let's say, cocaine,” said Jim Norris, former director of the San Francisco crime lab, who retired in 2004. “But there are chemical compounds that are similar in their structure to cocaine, and that's why it comes up on the test.”

One of the most notorious examples of misidentification was the 2007 arrest of Don Bolles, a punk rock musician, after a substance found inside his car tested positive for a date rape drug. The substance was later confirmed to be Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap, as Mr. Bolles had claimed, and the charges were dropped.

In addition to potential inaccuracies, Mr. Norris said false results might also be caused by improper execution of the tests.

The test is “simple, but it's not unbelievably simple,” he said. “There is some care you need to take. You want good lighting. There are time limits for how long you're supposed to let the chemicals react. There are fairly detailed instructions you need to follow.”

But the police say the tests are merely another piece of evidence that allows officers to establish probable cause and make an arrest.

“You're not conducting a jury trial when you put them in handcuffs,” Sgt. J. D. Nelson of the Alameda County Sheriff's Office said.

That sheriff's office and other local agencies, like the Berkeley Police Department, have used presumptive drug tests for more than 20 years. Neither department, nor the public defender's office in Alameda County, said it could recall a false positive test that had led to an arrest.

With Chief Gascon continuing to make reforms, the San Francisco Police Department is counting on presumptive testing to be an important tool in its counter narcotics strategy. The department faces resistance to a new crime lab from city supervisors who support outsourcing and are reluctant to dedicate scarce public funds to a new facility while public confidence is at an all-time low.

With urging from union officials, the Board of Supervisors decided to outsource the drug tests for another year while they considered a new lab. How successful presumptive testing proves to be at lowering the caseload may factor into their decision.

Defense lawyers, however, still struggle with the fact that officers are testing the evidence in most of the cases that go to court.

“Why can't we have a world-class crime lab with technicians, chemists who are trained to do this work?” Ms. Caffese said. “People can be impacted. People can be falsely arrested.

“We have to wait and see how it all plays out.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27bcdrug.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Aw, Wilderness!

San Jose, Calif.

ONE day in early 1970, a cross-country skier got lost along the 46-mile Kekekabic Trail, which winds through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. Unable to make his way out, he died of exposure.

In response, the Forest Service installed markers along the trail. But when, years later, it became time to replace them, the agency refused, claiming that the 1964 Wilderness Act banned signage in the nation's wilderness areas.

Despite the millions of people who have visited the country's national parks, forests and wildernesses this summer, the Forest Service has become increasingly strict in its enforcement of the Wilderness Act. The result may be more pristine lands, but the agency's zealous enforcement has also heightened safety risks and limited access to America's wilderness areas.

Over the last 45 years Congress has designated as wilderness 40 percent of the land in our national parks and one-third of the land in our national forests — more than 170,000 square miles, an area nearly as large as California, Massachusetts and New Jersey combined — as wilderness. In March 2009, President Obama signed a law protecting 3,125 more square miles, the largest expansion in more than a generation.

Wilderness, according to the act, is space “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Within those areas, the act forbids cars, roads, structures and anything else that could impair the “outstanding opportunities for solitude.”

At the same time, though, Congress wanted people to use the land for recreation, so it allowed access to wilderness areas for hunting, hiking, canoeing and climbing.

Over the decades an obvious contradiction has emerged between preservation and access. As the Forest Service, the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management — each of which claims jurisdiction over different wilderness areas — adopted stricter interpretations of the act, they forbade signs, baby strollers, certain climbing tools and carts that hunters use to carry game.

As a result, the agencies have made these supposedly open recreational areas inaccessible and even dangerous, putting themselves in opposition to healthy and environmentally sound human-powered activities, the very thing Congress intended the Wilderness Act to promote.

Part of the problem is that many of today's common outdoor activities were unheard of in 1964, including trail cycling and wind-powered skiing. In forbidding them, the agencies invoke the Wilderness Act's ban on “mechanical transport.” But the act's legislative history makes clear that Congress never intended to stop people from using their own power to travel or shepherd their children, or from using light mechanical assistance that leaves no lasting trace.

The agencies have even taken on Capitol Hill: in 1980 Congress authorized bicycling in Montana's Rattlesnake Wilderness, but the Forest Service refused to allow it.

The official resistance to wilderness signage, in particular, has become a safety issue. Every summer numerous backpackers, hikers and hunters get lost in the wilderness, with occasionally fatal results. In 2008, two experienced hikers along the Kekekabic Trail — the same Minnesota trail where the skier perished in 1970 — were lost for days and nearly ran out of food. The Forest Service listened to their complaints about the lack of signage but refused to act.

In response to the agencies' inflexibility, groups of outdoor enthusiasts have lined up against any expansion of wilderness areas — an unfortunate result, because these people should be the natural constituents of a wilderness protection program.

The Wilderness Act is a monumental achievement in national resource conservation. But unless federal agencies begin to interpret it more reasonably, it is an achievement that even fewer numbers of people will want, or even be able, to enjoy.

Ted Stroll is an attorney.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/opinion/27stroll.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From the Chicago Sun Times

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Homeland Security head praises city's security cameras  

August 27, 2010

BY FRAN SPIELMAN, City Hall Reporter

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Thursday ranked Chicago's Big Brother network of well over 10,000 public and private surveillance cameras as one of the nation's most extensive and integrated — and Mayor Daley wants to make it even bigger.

“Expansion of cameras citywide is one of the highest priorities that will help us here in the city of Chicago,” Daley said with Napolitano at his side.

“Cameras are the key. They are a deterrent. They solve crimes. It deals with terrorism. It deals with gangs, guns and drugs in our society.”

After touring the 911 emergency center that doubles as a clearinghouse for surveillance video, Napolitano pronounced Chicago's “very robust camera infrastructure” among the “top two or three” in the nation. Asked to identify rivals, she named only New York City.

“It's not just cameras, but they are inter-connected and then connected back here so they can really be utilized to target resources where they need to go and to tell first-responders what they're going to be confronting,” she said.

Pressed on whether the ever-expanding network is a good thing, the secretary said, “Absolutely. If you look at cities around the world — like London, for example, [and] Madrid has been employing more cameras — they are deterrents. But, they are also force-multipliers and they enable us to make the best use of our first-responders.”

Unlike so many other Cabinet secretaries who visit Chicago, Napolitano said, “I did not come on this trip bearing checks.”  But, she said she took “careful notes” on Chicago's needs.

Daley refused to reveal specifics of the wish list he delivered to Napolitano.

But, he once again made it a point to tout the $217 million 911 center that opened in 1995, after massive cost overruns.  

“Remember, we had the vision and the foresight and the stamina to build this. Very few cities ever combined their fire and police department and emergency under one roof. We have done this. Very few cities, not only in the United States, but the world have done that,” he said.

Every year, Daley uses the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to pronounce Chicago as safe as any major city can possibly be.

Approaching the ninth anniversary, Napolitano agreed.

“In a world where we cannot eliminate all risks, Chicagoans can be confident that every effort that I know of that can be made is being made to minimize the risk. And if something were to happen, their first-responders are prepared,” she said.

In a news release distributed at the press conference, Daley also announced that the Department of Homeland Security has decided to assign a “full-time liason” to Chicago. The mayor's chief-of-staff Ray Orozco, a former fire commissioner, already serves on a Homeland Security Task Force. That's an elite group of first-responders charged with evaluating the national strategy on emergency preparedness.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/cityhall/2641418,daley-homeland-security-cameras-082619.article

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From Google News

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U.N. Peacekeepers Unaware Of Mass Rapes In Congo

by Michele Kelemen

August 27, 2010

The United Nations Security Council is grappling with a troubling question in the Democratic Republic of Congo: How could U.N. peacekeepers not know about mass rapes taking place over a four-day period this summer?

The U.N. says it only found out about the atrocities more than a week after they ended and from an international aid group.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice sounded exasperated after a Security Council meeting Thursday. She says she raised pointed questions about the rapes in eastern Congo.

"It was a disturbing briefing, both for what we learned and what we don't know still," Rice said.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has sent top officials to investigate, and ambassador Rice says she and her colleagues have started brainstorming about how to step up communications between remote Congolese villages and U.N. peacekeepers.

"In many instances, those procedures have worked; in this instance clearly they did not," Rice said. "We need to know why and what mechanisms might be put in place to ensure that this type of horror is not repeated again and again."

The International Medical Corps — which alerted the U.N. of the rapes — first learned of security problems in the area through a U.N. email alert at the end of July, according to the humanitarian group's vice president Rebecca Milner.

"There was a notice that there were armed perpetrators in the area that was distributed through the humanitarian listserv," Milner said.

Then on August 3, a local leader came to her organization to seek help and when medical teams managed to get to the village in north Kivu province on August 6, they heard stories about how several hundred rebels gang raped women over the course of four days.

"Often the rapes took place in front of the women's children and husbands, in front of their families," Milner said.

Since, 156 women have received treatment, and Milner says the number of women coming forward is rising.

"The scale of this was really quite startling," Milner adds. "In our recent records, we haven't dealt with this number before."

U.N. officials are still looking into who knew what and when. The top U.N. official in Congo Roger Meece says there was a patrol that went through some villages in the area on August 2 but none of the villagers alerted the U.N. peacekeeping mission known as MONUSCO about the rapes.

In a video conference with reporters in New York, Meece speculated as to why this was the case: "Is it conceivable that local villagers were afraid of reprisals if they reported anything to MONUSCO? Possible. It is conceivable that they were ashamed of what has happened in some form? That's possible."

Privately, U.N. officials also worry about whether villagers don't trust U.N. peacekeepers.

There are only 80 peacekeepers at the outpost that covers the area where the attack occurred, and officials describe it as a vast region with impassable roads and very limited cell phone coverage. Sexual violence is a widespread problem there, and will likely remain so as long as rebel movements are fighting, according to the U.N.'s outgoing humanitarian chief John Holmes.

"The reality is that until these armed groups are dealt with once and for all, this risk is going to be there," Holmes said. "However well MONUSCO performs, they are not going to be able to stop every case of rape. They cannot be behind every bush."

The U.S. wants the U.N. to do a better job of at least knowing where civilians are at risk.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129465934

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Two men, Hiva Alizadeh (left) and Misbahuddin Ahmed, were charged in an Ottawa court on Thursday with terrorism offences.

Terror plot would have brought Afghan war home to Canada Mysterious ringleader and his hockey-playing co-conspirators planned to help fund Canada's enemies in Afghanistan and were just months away from waging their own terror on home soil, police say T he Canadian citizens accused of belonging to an Ottawa terrorist cell allegedly planned to fund the purchase of weapons for Canada's enemies in Afghanistan and had been trained to launch Afghan-style IED attacks in the Canadian capital. Had such a plot succeeded, it would have brought Canada's Afghan war home with murderous effect. Investigators yesterday revealed an alleged conspiracy that stretches from Ottawa across the globe to Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Dubai. Police named six men as belonging to the terror cell. Two were arrested in Ottawa on Wednesday and a third man, a doctor, was arrested in London, Ont., on Thursday. All three are Canadians. Three unindicted co-conspirators, whose citizenship is unclear, have not been charged by Canadian police and may be outside the country.

The group is accused of amassing schematics, components and instructions to build homemade bombs. They had built more than 50 electronic circuit boards that were to be used as remote-controlled triggers and were planning an attack that was just months away, according to police.

One member is alleged to have been trained in bomb-making, possibly a person who is believed to have travelled to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. One is also accused of gathering funds for foreign terror groups that would have been used to buy arms to target Canadian and allied troops in Afghanistan.

More on the accused, the charges and the alleged plot

Globe reporter Colin Freeze reports from Ottawa

Neither the RCMP nor CSIS would discuss what motivated the alleged plot or what its targets were, except to say that the group was a threat to the capital region and Canada's national security.

Hiva Mohammad Alizadeh, a 30-year-old who took electrical engineering classes in Winnipeg in 2008, is facing more charges than the others. In addition to being charged with facilitating a terrorist activity and possessing an explosive substance, he is accused of collecting property that will be used to benefit a terrorist group. The RCMP suggested the arrests were timed to prevent the accused from delivering the funds he is alleged to have collected.

Mr. Alizadeh is a somewhat mysterious figure. Even his lawyer on Thursday knew little of the man. Tall, with a long beard and unkempt hair under a wool prayer cap, he appeared in an Ottawa court on Thursday. Security officials said his activities had been monitored for more than a year.

His co-accused are described as family men, upstanding students, employees and citizens who loved hockey and were well-known figures in a Montreal ball-hockey league.

Khurram Sher, 28, is a physician who completed medical school and a pathology residency at McGill University in Montreal. He once appeared on the Canadian Idol television show, where he pretended to be a recent immigrant from Pakistan and was mocked by the judges for his performance. He organized charitable activities and was well-liked and respected in his community. He had recently been hired at a hospital in St. Thomas, Ont., and was arrested at his home in London, Ont., on Thursday.

Dr. Sher's former ball-hockey teammate, Misbahuddin Ahmed, 26, was arrested in Ottawa on Wednesday. He worked at the Ottawa Civic hospital as an X-ray technician and received excellent reviews from his colleagues.

Dr. Sher's former ball-hockey teammate, Misbahuddin Ahmed, 26, was arrested in Ottawa on Wednesday. He worked at the Ottawa Civic hospital as an X-ray technician and received excellent reviews from his colleagues.

Police would not say where the three unindicted co-conspirators are believed to be, although they may be travelling in any of the four countries named by the RCMP as being connected to this raid. One, Rizgar Alizadeh, has the same last name as one of the accused. Also named are James Lara and Zakaria Mamosta and person or persons unknown.

A decade after the 9/11 attacks changed America and the world, the latest arrests will be held up as evidence that the threat of extremism is undiminished. Six years ago, riot-squad officers stormed a suburban Ottawa house to arrest 24-year-old Momin Khawaja, unearthing a small arsenal of weapons and circuitry before successfully prosecuting him as a terrorist. Four years ago, police in Toronto raided homes of 18 young suspects, including a 20-year-old ringleader who videotaped himself testing a prototype bomb detonator.

Officials point out the latest accused are educated professionals clustered around 30 years old – and not, as in past busts, fanciful teenagers with violent fantasies.

Speaking in the Northwest Territories on Thursday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said it was not his place to comment on the case.”Unfortunately, this incident does serve to remind us that Canada does face some very real threats in the troubled world in which we live,” he added.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/terror-plot-would-have-brought-afghan-war-home-to-canada/article1687057/

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The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant.

It is a dangerous decision — one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle's underside.

After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA's actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)

In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno's privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the "curtilage," a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government's intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno's driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people's. The court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter." The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism." (Read about one man's efforts to escape the surveillance state.)

The court went on to make a second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS device has been planted, the government is free to use it to track people without getting a warrant. There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state — with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.

Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit's — including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.

In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's pro-privacy ruling was unanimous — decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. "1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last," he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell's totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: "Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."

Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York Times editorial board.

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2013150,00.html

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90 years later, equality issues unresolved

BY LAURA STAMPLER

Snitzer was excited to vote in her first election. But as a female Florida resident, she would have been barred from submitting her ballot less than a century ago.

This week marked the 90th anniversary of women winning the right to vote. The event was celebrated locally with a rememberence march down Lincoln Road, speeches, luncheons hosted by political candidates and presentations on the life of prolific Coral Gables feminist Roxcy Bolton.

It's difficult to imagine a time when women couldn't vote. Today, registered women voters outnumber men in both Miami-Dade and Broward counties -- where they made up 56 percent of voters in the last presidential election.

FLORIDA ACTED LATE

But it took decades of political fighting for women to see the ratification of the 19th amendment -- granting women the right to vote -- in the United States Constitution on Aug. 26, 1920. Florida's Legislature, however, did not symbolically ratify the amendment until 1969.

A joint resolution was made in Congress in 1971 to declare the anniversary of the amendment Women's Equality Day.

``Women's Equality Day is a celebration of a very long struggle of half the population to achieve the same level of recognition and power as the other half,'' said Miami Beach Mayor Matti Herrera Bower, who celebrated the event with South Floridians in a march down Lincoln Road on Thursday. ``It's also a recognition that that struggle is not over.''

While this week's milestone celebrates women's progress over the last century, it also raises the question of whether, 90 years later, equality has been reached, some activist say.

``What many people forget is that earlier in American history, women could not take custody of children, could not hold paying jobs, have bank accounts, go to college,'' said Deirdre Macnab, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida.

As of 2009, women only earned about 77 percent of their male counterparts' salary, with black women earning only 68.9 cents for every dollar earned by a white male and Hispanic/Latina women 60.2 cents, says the Institute of Women's Policy Research.

``We have this tendency to celebrate, but I don't know if I'd celebrate that it took that long to get women the right to vote,'' said Paula Xanthopoulou, fa ormer member of the Miami-Dade Commission for Women. ``Women's Equality Day was created to emphasize that women do not have equality.''

Many women's rights groups say the next step in the women's rights movement is securing gender equality to the U.S. Constitution. But the Equal Rights Amendment has been a nationally controversial topic, particularly in Florida.

The ERA was first introduced to Congress in 1923 and was not approved until 1972. The proposed amendment -- which would add 24 words to the Constitution disallowing discrimination based on sex -- then failed to be ratified by its 1982 deadline, coming up three short of the 38-state requirement. Florida was one of the states that didn't ratify it.

The ratification in 1992 of what became the 27th Amendment to the Constitution -- more than 200 years after it was proposed -- gave ERA activists hope that if three more state legislatures were to approve the ERA, the amendment could be ratified 30 years later.

A bill has been introduced to the Florida Legislature every year since 2003, but has never made it to a House committee and has only made it to Senate committees twice. While it passed in the committees, it was never heard by the Senate itself.

Many legislators find the ERA outdated and unnecessary given that gender equality has already been outlined in many state constitutions. Florida voters passed a similar statement of equality by a margin of 65 percent in 1998.

Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, who has spent much of her career successfully fighting the passage of the ERA, said it's an empty promise.

``On TV they give the false idea that [the ERA] will give women a raise and promotion, but it will have no impact on employment whatsoever because employment laws are already gender neutral . . . they could never show that it was going to benefit women in any way,'' she said in a phone interview with the Herald.

Schlafly believes that the ERA would open the door to what she deems to be negative institutionalized policies, including the proliferation of same-sex marriage and abortion, mandatory unisex bathrooms and a draft for women.

Rosa Naccarato, former chair of the Commission for Women, doesn't agree. She said Congress already has the power to draft women into the armed services under Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.

``And the ERA has nothing to do with same-sex marriage because marriage is not a gender-biased issue,'' Naccarato said.

Florida Rep. J.C. Planas, a male Republican, has sponsored the bill numerous times in the House, showing that the ERA is a bipartisan, gender neutral issue.

``The ERA for me was a no-brainer when you look at the fact that everything that would be given by ERA is already reflected in the Florida Constitution,'' Planas said. ``It is something that is extremely important to finally ratify.''

PALIN'S INFLUENCE

Planas does acknowledge the great political bounds that women have made in recent years.

``The tea party has been driven by a woman, Sarah Palin,'' Planas said. ``And women are at the forefront of Florida politics.''

With increasingly strong female Republicans, the often polarizing term ``feminist'' is getting a makeover.

Although Palin skirted around the term during the 2008 campaign season -- telling Katie Couric she was a feminist and Brian Williams that she wasn't -- she recently called for ``Mama grizzlies'' to unite in an ``emerging, conservative, feminist identity'' in a May 14 speech to the anti-abortion congressional group Susan B. Anthony List.

Palin tweeted a similar sentiment on Aug. 18, writing: ``Who hijacked term: `feminist'? she asked.

``It's funny because now everybody is fighting to be called a feminist,'' said Laura Morilla, program director of the Miami-Dade Commission for Women who is at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Palin.

``I guess that's good -- maybe it's not such a dirty word anymore,'' she said.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/27/1794307/90-years-later-equality-issues.html

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From the White House

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Women's Equality Day and the 90th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment

Today we celebrate Women's Equality Day and we mark the 90th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment. We honor those who made this day possible like Alice Paul and Ida Wells-Barnett and the countless women who fought for suffrage. They understood what we know now – that there is power in participation. We believe in the importance of voting. 

Since 1920, women have made enormous strides toward social, political, and economic equality in the United States. Today, women and girls comprise just over 50 percent of the United States' population.  Women now outnumber men in undergraduate education, as they now earn 57 percent of bachelor's degrees and they makeup nearly half of the U.S. workforce.

While we have made great strides, there is still more work to do. As President Obama noted in the Women's Equality Day Proclamation “we celebrate this important milestone and the achievements and shattered ceilings of the past, we also recognize the inequalities that remain and our charge to overcome them.” Women in the U.S. only earn a mere 77 cents for every dollar a man earns and the wage gap grows for women of color: African American women earn 69 cents and Latina women earn 62 cents for every dollar earned by a white male per week.  And women and girls continue to lag in key sectors that are critical to building our 21st century economy.  For example, women hold only 27 percent of jobs in science and engineering.

For these reasons and many more, the Obama Administration is focused on keeping up the fight for equality.  This is why we created the White House Council on Women and Girls.  The Council is working to institutionalize and embed an ongoing focus on women and girls as part of how the federal government develops policies, pursues programs, and works with Congress.  We strive to embed the fight for equality in all we do. Every day we stand on the shoulders of the women who went before us and we keep them in mind as we forge ahead for another 90 years.

You can learn more about Women's Equality by reading President Obama's Presidential Proclamation on Women's Equality Day . 

Valerie Jarrett is Senior Advisor to the President and Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/26/womens-equality-day-and-90th-anniversary-19th-amendment

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SBA Disaster Assistance: Then and Now

Tommy and Maria DeLaune are a prime example of small business owners who suffered a one-two punch from Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater BP oil spill.  They run Tommy's Seafood, a New Orleans seafood processor and wholesaler that employs about 20 people. 

When Hurricane Katrina hit, the business suffered major damage at its two facilities, including loss of equipment and inventory.  They applied for an SBA disaster loan in October 2005 but didn't get approved until May 2006 and the loan wasn't fully disbursed until October 2006, a year later.

They got hit again when the oil spill forced closures on fishing waters in the Gulf of Mexico, where their suppliers work.  Tommy and his wife Maria had to look 500 miles away to find more seafood to process, so they had higher expenses and lower profit margins.  This time around, however, their experience with SBA was “amazing,” according to Maria.  Their disaster loan was approved in just 16 days and it was fully disbursed just a month later . Additionally, SBA deferred their existing Katrina loan for 12 months so they can use more of their resources to deal with the financial strain caused by the oil spill.

Right now, hundreds of SBA staff are on the ground providing assistance through loans to business owners, homeowners, and renters in more than 40 locations across the country that have been hit by disasters.  SBA's disaster loan programs are a critical piece of the federal government's overall response in the wake of disasters, and we are providing these loans more quickly and effectively than ever before.

As we approach the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it is important to look back and take note of the agency's performance at that time. SBA was not prepared, nor fully equipped to effectively provide assistance in the wake of that disaster. But we've learned from our mistakes and, today, we have a much better disaster assistance program in place with increased staff, improved technology and training, and a streamlined loan process. 

What does that mean in real terms?

• It means we reduced the average processing time for disaster loans from over 70 days to just 10 days .
  
  
• It means we created a way for disaster victims to apply online for loans, and now 30% of applicants choose to use this method.
  
  
• It means we dramatically increased the capacity of our disaster loan processing centers (from 366 to 1,750 workstations) and our disaster credit management system (from 800 up to 10,000 users at the same time).
  
  
• It means we increased the number of SBA disaster staff from 800 to 1,200 . Additionally, we have more than 1,500 active reserve and 500 ready reserve on call when needed. And, it's important to note that in our last annual survey, 83 percent of the active reservists and 63 percent of the ready reservists said they were available to be deployed with 48 hours notice.

The overhaul of the SBA disaster assistance program since Katrina has resulted in vast improvements that are helping us and our federal partners meet the needs of disaster victims more quickly than ever – helping people like Tommy and Maria DeLaune.  Everyone at SBA remains committed to continuing to improve and strengthen this critical program. We know that it can – and is – making the difference in local communities across the country, helping families get back in their homes and helping businesses put employees back to work.

Karen Mills is Administrator for the U.S. Small Business Administration

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/26/sba-disaster-assistance-then-and-now

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From the Department of Homeland Security

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Readout of Secretary Napolitano's Visit to Montana

Release Date: August 25, 2010

Havre, Mont. - Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today visited Piegan, Sweetgrass, Sunburst and Havre, Mont., with Senators Max Baucus and Jon Tester and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Alan Bersin to tour CBP operations and meet with state and local officials, law enforcement personnel and private sector stakeholders regarding DHS' efforts to secure the Northern border.

"We have made critical security enhancements along our Northern border, investing in additional personnel, technology, and infrastructure to meet the security and operational requirements of our post-9/11 world," said Secretary Napolitano. "DHS is committed to working closely with our federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement partners and the citizens of Montana to protect the border while facilitating legal trade and travel."

Secretary Napolitano and the delegation toured CBP operations at the Piegan and Sweetgrass ports of entry to observe state-of-the-art technologies such as thermal camera systems and Mobile Surveillance Systems.

The group then traveled to Sunburst, Mont., to participate in a roundtable discussion with law enforcement regarding the Department's ongoing partnerships with federal, state, local, tribal and Canadian law enforcement agencies along the Northern border to combat transnational crime and illicit drug smuggling.

In Havre, Secretary Napolitano and the delegation participated in a town hall meeting to discuss a range of issues including partnerships with Canada on trusted-traveler programs and DHS' efforts to increase personnel along the Northern border to strengthen security and continue to facilitate legal travel and trade. DHS expects to have more than 2,200 Border Patrol agents deployed along the Northern border by the end of 2010—a 700 percent increase since 9/11—in addition to the approximately 5,800 CBP officers already stationed in Northern border states.

Secretary Napolitano also toured the Westside Great Falls Levee District with Senators Baucus and Tester and Commissioner Bersin—reiterating the Department's commitment to working with federal, state, local and tribal officials to develop practical solutions that address flooding problems without impeding economic development.

On Thursday, Secretary Napolitano will visit Chicago to deliver remarks to the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) at Fire-Rescue International 2010; visit key critical infrastructure sites; and join Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to meet with public and private sector stakeholders, law enforcement officials and first responders to discuss the Department's continued commitment to protecting our nation's transportation systems and critical infrastructure.

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1282774634096.shtm

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Readout Of Secretary Napolitano's Visit To Chicago

Release Date: August 26, 2010

CHICAGO—Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today traveled to Chicago to deliver remarks to the International Association of Fire Chiefs at Fire-Rescue International 2010, visit key critical infrastructure sites, and join Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to meet with public and private sector stakeholders, law enforcement officials and first responders to discuss the Department's continued commitment to protecting our nation's transportation systems and critical infrastructure.

"Homeland security begins with hometown security—and with the men and women on the frontlines who dedicate themselves to keeping our communities safe everyday," said Secretary Napolitano. "Through homeland security grants and the Recovery Act, we are helping local fire departments protect the jobs of veteran firefighters, rebuilding fire stations across the country, and providing first responders with the tools they need to do their jobs."

During her remarks to more than 3,000 fire chiefs, chief officers, and emergency service leaders at Fire-Rescue International 2010, Secretary Napolitano highlighted DHS' ongoing efforts to help fire departments across the country save jobs and acquire and maintain critical equipment through the Staffing for Adequate Fire Emergency Response (SAFER) grants, the Assistance to Firefighters Grants, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act-funded Fire Station Construction Grants—which have supported 113 fire station construction and renovation projects to date.

Secretary Napolitano also toured the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Union Station to discuss best practices and the vital role of the private sector in protecting critical infrastructure and transportation systems that ensure America's national security and economic stability.

Additionally, Secretary Napolitano joined Mayor Daley to tour the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications and met with public and private sector stakeholders, law enforcement officials and first responders to discuss the Department's commitment to protecting communities through programs such as the Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative—a partnership among federal, state, and local law enforcement and first responders to establish a standard process for identifying and reporting suspicious incidents and sharing information nationally so it can be analyzed to identify broader trends.

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1282844929447.shtm

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From the Department of Justice

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Attorney General Eric Holder Speaks at the Los Angeles Health Care Fraud Prevention Summit

Los Angeles ~ Thursday, August 26, 2010

Good morning. It's a pleasure to join Secretary Sebelius, Deputy Administrator Budetti, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, and U.S. Attorney Birotte in welcoming you. I want to thank each of you for your participation in today's discussion and for your partnership in the fight against health care fraud.

Looking around, I'm encouraged by the diversity of perspectives represented here. And I'm glad to see that top federal and state officials, administration leaders, federal, state, and local law enforcement officers, health care providers, as well as area patients, physicians, business executives, and caregivers have come together for this critical summit. Each one of us shares the same concerns about the devastating effects of health care fraud. We share the same goals of protecting potential victims, safeguarding precious taxpayer dollars, and ensuring the strength of our health care system. And – despite the commitment you represent and the great work being done across and beyond Los Angeles – we can all agree that it's time to take our nationwide fight against health care fraud to the next level.  

That's what today is all about. This summit is an important step forward – an opportunity to build on what has been discussed, and achieved, since Secretary Sebelius and I convened the first “National Summit on Health Care Fraud” in Washington in January. Last month, we kicked off a series of regionally-focused conversations in Miami, where we also announced the results of the largest federal health care fraud takedown in our nation's history. We decided that the next regional initiative should be held here in L.A., which – I don't have to tell any of you – unfortunately has become a “hot spot” for health care fraud schemes.

You all know what we're up against. In communities across this region, our health care system is under siege – exploited by criminals intent on lining their own pockets at the expense of American taxpayers, patients, and private insurers. Here in L.A., these crimes have reached crisis proportions, driving up health care costs for everyone and also hurting the long-term solvency of our essential Medicare and Medicaid programs.

But we are fighting back – in bold, innovative, and coordinated ways.

Last year brought an historic step forward in this fight. In May 2009, the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services launched the Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team, or “HEAT.” Through HEAT, we've fostered unprecedented collaboration between our agencies and our law enforcement partners. We've ensured that the fight against criminal and civil health care fraud is a Cabinet-level priority. And we've strengthened our capacity to fight health care fraud through the enhanced use of our joint Medicare Strike Forces.

This approach is working. In fact, HEAT's impact has been recognized by President Obama, whose FY2011 budget request includes an additional $60 million to expand our network of Strike Forces to additional cities. With these new resources, and our continued commitment to collaboration, I have no doubt we'll be able to extend HEAT's record of achievement. And this record is extraordinary.

In just the last fiscal year, we've won or negotiated more than $1.6 billion in judgments and settlements, returned more than $2.5 billion to the Medicare Trust Fund, opened thousands of new criminal and civil health care fraud investigations, reached an all-time high in the number of health care fraud defendants charged, and stopped numerous large-scale fraud schemes in their tracks.

We can all be encouraged, in particular, by what's been accomplished in L.A. Criminals we've brought to justice here – in the last year alone – include the owners of the City of Angels Hospital, who pleaded guilty to paying illegal kickbacks to homeless shelters as part of a scheme to defraud Medicare and Medi-Cal; a physician in Torrance who defrauded insurance companies by misrepresenting cosmetic procedures as “medically necessary”; an Orange County oncologist who pleaded guilty to fraudulently billing Medicare and other health insurance companies up to $1 million for cancer medications that weren't provided; a Santa Ana doctor who pleaded guilty to health care fraud for giving AIDS and HIV patients diluted medications; and a ring of criminals who defrauded Medi-Cal out of more than $4.5 million by using unlicensed individuals to provide in-home care to scores of disabled patients, many of them children.

These are just a few of many local schemes that have been – aggressively and permanently – shut down. And they're all proof that we can make measurable, meaningful progress in the fight against health care fraud. But we cannot do it alone. We need your help. We need your unique insights. And we will rely on your recommendations to help guide and enhance HEAT's critical work.

Despite all that's been accomplished since HEAT was launched, health care fraud remains a significant problem. At this very moment, for example, we know that an alarming number of scam artists and criminals are attempting to profit from misinformation about the Affordable Care Act .

That's why, early this summer, Secretary Sebelius and I wrote to all state attorneys general, urging them to develop outreach campaigns to educate seniors and other Medicare beneficiaries about how to protect themselves and help prevent scams. Each of you can be part of this and other public education efforts. Each of you can help to ensure that our hard-won health reform achievements are not exploited.

The good news is that the Affordable Care Act provides new resources and includes tough new rules and penalties to help stop and prevent health care fraud. We will continue to work vigorously with our law enforcement and private sector partners to ensure that those who engage in fraud cannot use this new legislation to steal from taxpayers, patients, seniors, and other vulnerable Americans. We will keep industry leaders informed about emerging fraud schemes and help institute effective compliance and anti-fraud programs. And we will punish offenders to the fullest extent of the law. That is our promise.

As we work to build on the progress that's been made, your presence here today gives me great hope about what we can accomplish together. Thank you all, once again, for joining us and for your ongoing commitment to protecting the American people and ensuring the strength and integrity of our health care system.

And, now, I'd like to turn things over to an extraordinary leader and partner in this work – the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer.

http://www.justice.gov/ag/speeches/2010/ag-speech-100826.html

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Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Lanny A. Breuer Speaks at the Los Angeles Health Care Fraud Prevention Summit

Thank you, Mr. Attorney General. It is a real pleasure to join you, Secretary Sebelius, and my friend and partner, U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte, Jr., for this, our second Regional Health Care Fraud Prevention Summit. The partnership between the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services has never been stronger. And that strength comes from a very tangible commitment from the highest levels of both Departments to the prosecutors and agents who work side-by-side, each and every day, to identify health care fraud as it is happening.

These Summits offer our agencies the opportunity to share our success stories, explain our innovative investigative approaches, and listen to and learn from your ideas and concerns. I see many of our Strike Force partners in the audience today – agents and investigators from the FBI; the Office of Inspector General for HHS; and the Bureau of Medi-Cal Fraud and Elder Abuse at the California Department of Justice – all whom work together to scour the available data and investigative files for fraud patterns, tracking down leads and bringing cases as quickly and responsibly as possible.

The results of these partnerships – across federal agencies and with state and local law enforcement – have been impressive. In the past three years, our team has filed criminal charges against more than 810 individuals around the country who have tried to bilk the Medicare program of approximately $1.9 billion in fraudulent claims. We have identified and prosecuted schemes involving promises of durable medical equipment (DME) supplies, like power wheelchairs, for those who never receive them; expensive HIV infusion treatments for individuals who do not need them; physical therapy and services that are never delivered; and home health agencies whose so-called "patients" are paid kickbacks in exchange for pretending that they need medical services. And, L.A. fraudsters account for nearly one hundred million dollars in these illegitimate claims to Medicare.

In 2007, the Criminal Division of the Justice Department refocused our approach to investigating and prosecuting health care fraud cases. Our investigative approach is now data driven: put simply, our analysts and agents review Medicare billing data from across the country; identify patterns of unusual billing conduct; and then deploy our "Strike Force" teams of investigators and prosecutors to those hotspots to investigate, make arrests, and prosecute. And a s criminals become more creative and sophisticated, we intend to use our most aggressive investigative techniques to be right at their heels. Whenever possible, we actively use undercover operations, court-authorized wiretaps and room bugs, and confidential informants to stop these schemes in their tracks.

The results have been unprecedented. Just last month, Attorney General Holder and Secretary Sebelius announced the largest federal health care fraud takedown since Medicare Fraud Strike Force operations began in 2007: 94 defendants in five cities were charged with fraud amounting to more than $251 million.

And we aren't just arresting these fraudsters – we are sending them to jail and we are taking back the money they stole from their victims. Last week, a federal judge in Detroit sentenced Dr. Jose Castro-Ramirez to 14 years in jail for his involvement in a scheme to defraud Medicare for various physical and occupational therapy scams. Moreover, the judge ordered the defendant to pay $9.4 million dollars in restitution. These stiff sentences, and steep restitution orders, send a clear message to those who might use these schemes to steal taxpayer dollars: that the country simply will not tolerate the looting of our Medicare program.

Here in Los Angeles, our work together has yielded tremendous results. Let me give you some examples of the successes the LA Strike Force has achieved:

• A 31-year-old Long Beach man was convicted in April for recruiting relatives and members of the Brook Street Gang, based in Santa Ana, to pose as owners of fake medical supply companies.  Those sham companies -- many of which were nominally owned and operated by gang members -- fraudulently billed Medicare for $11.2 million worth of unnecessary wheelchairs and equipment.
  
  
• In another case, an owner of a medical equipment supply company billed Medicare for power wheelchairs costing up to $7,000 each, on behalf of more than 170 beneficiaries, none of whom actually needed the wheelchairs. In all, he submitted $1.1 million in phony claims to Medicare. And, his acts were surprisingly brazen. Indeed, elderly and disabled Medicare beneficiaries testified at his trial that individuals known as "marketers" approached them on the street, at home, or even in church and convinced them to hand over their Medicare numbers and other personal information to the marketers in exchange for these free power wheelchairs. One beneficiary testified that an individual pretending to be from Medicare, but who was actually an associate of the defendant, threatened to terminate her Medicare benefits unless she accepted a power wheelchair that she did not need. In March, that defendant was sentenced to 9 years in prison and ordered to pay back the $526,000 he had received from Medicare, plus a $25,000 fine.
  
  
• Just this past May, Strike Force prosecutors here filed an indictment charging four defendants with a scheme involving numerous medical clinics in and around Los Angeles. These clinics allegedly billed Medicare for nearly $19 million in fraudulent claims by submitting claims for diagnostic and medical tests, power wheelchairs and accessories, orthopedic and diabetic shoes, and orthotics – all for beneficiaries who did not need them.

These cases make it abundantly clear why the Strike Force model is such a priority for the Criminal Division and for the Administration as a whole – both to protect Medicare funds for the people, some gravely ill, who desperately need medical services now, and to ensure that our children and their children do not find the coffers emptied by criminals. By aggressively targeting the fraud as it happens, we send an unmistakable message to would-be fraudsters that the federal government is paying attention. We are paying attention in New York, Miami, Detroit, Baton Rouge, Tampa and Houston. And we are paying attention here in Los Angeles; let me say that again – we are paying attention in Los Angeles.

Of course, we could not have achieved these tremendous results without the commitment and cooperation – not just in words, but in actions – of our law enforcement partners and the public. And although we certainly should celebrate our successes, we are here today because we know we cannot stop now and we must still do more. Indeed, we have just begun the real fight; and we are in this battle to win. By partnering together and by educating the public about the schemes used by fraudsters – here in L.A. and elsewhere in the country – we can ensure that the monies in our public fisc that are dedicated to providing health care for all Americans, go to the people who need them most, and not to line the pockets of criminals.

* * * * *

Today's law enforcement panel includes some of the people who are working on the front lines of this problem. They are here to talk to you about how law enforcement – prosecutors and agents – are combating this issue each and every day. Greg Andres – one of my Deputy Assistant Attorneys General in the Criminal Division – is here to lead this discussion. Thank you for letting me join you here today.

http://www.justice.gov/criminal/pr/speeches/2010/crm-speech-100826.html

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From ICE

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Get the Facts About Immigration Enforcement

5 Honduran men charged in drug smuggling operation
$80 million worth of cocaine seized

MIAMI - On Monday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agents in Miami arrested Loreto Norales Herrera, 33, Vidal Castillo Marin, 44, Pedro Francisco Perez Lobo, 43, Jose Arnulfo Euseda, 32, and Fredy Ricardo Romero, 43, all of Honduras, on charges of cocaine trafficking.

They made their initial appearances in court on Tuesday and attended a detention hearing Thursday at 10 a.m. before U.S. Magistrate Judge John O'Sullivan.

The criminal complaint charges the defendants with possession with intent to distribute cocaine on board a vessel subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. If convicted, they each face a maximum sentence of life in prison.

On Aug. 3, at approximately 1:59 p.m., the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Forward was conducting a routine maritime patrol in international waters off the Honduran coastline. During this patrol, the Cutter Forward approached a Honduran-flagged fishing vessel, named the Islena, approximately 15 nautical miles outside of Honduran territorial seas.

Later that afternoon, at approximately 6:25 p.m., a Coast Guard team boarded the vessel and observed approximately 11 bales on the deck of the vessel. These bales field-tested positive for the presence of cocaine. Further investigation led to the discovery of an additional 77 bales, for a total of 88 bales on board the vessel. Each bale contained numerous kilogram-sized bricks of cocaine.

The five crew members were then transported to Miami and arrested by ICE special agents. The 88 bales of suspected cocaine were moved to a secure facility, where it was determined that the cocaine weighed approximately 2,529 kilograms (or approximately 5,565 pounds), worth a street value of $80 million.

This investigation was conducted by ICE's HSI Marine Smuggling Unit in Miami, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Miami-Dade Police Department.

This case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Dustin M. Davis.

http://www.ice.gov/pi/nr/1008/100826miami2.htm

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From the FBI

ViCAP Fighting Violent Crime for 25 Years 08/26/10 When serial killers or rapists strike in different communities or even across multiple states, it may be hard to identify and capture them—because information about their crimes is stored separately in the files of various local police agencies. But for the past 25 years, the FBI's Vi olent C riminal A pprehension P rogram, or ViCAP, has been used by state and local law enforcement across the nation precisely to help find and stop such dangerous villains by drawing links between their seemingly unconnected crimes.

ViCAP is part of the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime , and both operate under the auspices of our Critical Incident Response Group .

He thought, “What if this information was contained in a searchable system?” He pitched his idea to the Department of Justice, and in the summer of 1985, Brooks became ViCAP's first program manager.

Since then, over 4,000 law enforcement agencies have submitted more than 90,000 individual cases. For privacy reasons, we can't discuss operational successes, but we can tell you there have been an untold number of leads generated for cases that might have otherwise gone cold. Countless suspects have been identified. And many missing persons have been located and unidentified human remains given names, thus bringing closure to their families. 

Major J.R. Burton of the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office in Florida, who is currently serving as chairman of the ViCAP National Advisory Board and who has been using the system for the past 15 years, said, “ViCAP gives local and state investigators real advantages—direct access to a national database, analytical support to help identify a suspect, and connectivity to the cases of law enforcement agencies nationwide.” In short, ViCAP is a win-win resource —for the agencies that use it to solve cases and for members of the public who are better protected at the end of the day.

Resources:
- ViCAP Goes Online

http://www.fbi.gov/page2/august10/vicap_082610.html

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