~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From the Los Angeles Times

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Five years after Katrina, New Orleans still caught between storms

Rebuilding efforts have turned it into a hopeful start-up city, but troubling new — and old — problems abound.

August 29, 2010

Reporting from New Orleans and Atlanta

Tim Williamson was asked this month to assess the state of his native New Orleans after the disaster.

"After the disaster?" the nonprofit-group chief executive quipped, with a seen-it-all mordancy that's as common in the city as a potholed side street. "Which one?"

The last few months have provided a roller-coaster run-up to Hurricane Katrina's fifth anniversary, which New Orleans was to observe Sunday with solemn prayers, a reunion of Superdome survivors, and a jazz funeral for the more than 1,800 dead along the Gulf Coast.

In early 2010, there was a feeling that the funeral band, come Aug. 29, would have more reasons than ever to make its traditional shift from a dirge to a joyful noise. New Orleans' unemployment rate was lowest of any large metro area in the nation. A new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, had been elected with the support of blacks and whites. And the Saints had won the Super Bowl.

Then came April, the BP gusher and a four-month lamentation.

"The oil spill was such a reality check," said Eli Ackerman, a New Orleans activist and blogger who recently moved to New York. "It was a reminder that this was a region that never got over the storm. That in some sense, it's always going to be between storms."

Today this 292-year-old city finds itself defined, in many ways, by a state of between-ness — with its people living daily between states of celebration and mourning, optimism and despair, progress and stagnation.

Defying pessimistic projections of 2005, many displaced residents showed their faith in the city by returning home. With nearly 1.2 million people, the New Orleans metro region has recovered 91% of its pre-storm population, while the city proper is at 78%, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.

It's not the only good news: Average wages have increased 14% from 2004 to 2008. And thanks in part to radical school reforms, more than half of the city's public school students attend a school that meets state standards, compared with 28% in 2003-04.

But even the most ardent civic boosters acknowledge that New Orleans remains saddled with both the problems Katrina wrought and the equally enduring scourges that predated the deluge. More than 64,000 buildings in the city remain blighted. Last week, the nonprofit homeless advocacy group UNITY released a report that found that homelessness had doubled since Katrina, and that as many as 6,000 people were living in abandoned buildings.

The scandal-ridden police department soon will probably be closely monitored by the Justice Department, at the request of Mayor Landrieu, who took office in May. The per capita murder rate is the highest in the nation.

"The crime is still terrible. There's streets down in the 7th Ward that's killing zones. So when they say we're back, and everything's up and running, well, I just have to wonder," said Melvin Navarre, a retired armored-transport branch manager who rebuilt his house in troubled New Orleans East.

Kirk Joseph, a noted sousaphone player and former member of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, said life in post-storm New Orleans remains a hassle and that some "nonsense stuff" still needs to be fixed.

"But there's hope, man," he added.

If nothing else, the flood-prone city is more heavily fortified. The Army Corps of Engineers has built about 70% of a new perimeter of massive walls, floodgates and levees. The levees have been fortified with clay and covered with rock and concrete paving to prevent them from washing away in the event that they are overtopped.

Reform goes beyond flood control. Katrina catalyzed citizens, national think tanks and some government entities to tear apart outdated or tragically broken city functions. Voters unified an antiquated tax-assessment system in which seven assessors had run little fiefdoms that led to inconsistency and allegations of cronyism. The criminal justice system has seen numerous changes, including a top-to-bottom modernization of the public defender's office.

The public school system, once one of the worst-performing and worst-managed in the nation, was largely re-imagined by a post-storm act of the Legislature that put more than 100 low-performing campuses in a state-run Recovery School District. Today, 61% of students attend charter schools, the highest rate in the nation, according to a report by the Brookings Institution. City schools are now non-unionized, and, in most cases, parents must choose the school they want their children to attend.

The system is not without problems, or critics: Many on the left were dismayed by the dismantling of the teachers union. Families who lose lotteries for spots at popular schools must often bus their kids across town. The Southern Poverty Law Center last month sued the state for failing to adequately educate 4,500 special-needs students.

But overall, Brookings found that this system has demonstrated "sustained" academic growth since Katrina, based on standardized tests.

More tangible results can be found on campuses like the New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy, an accumulation of trailers joined by wooden boardwalks on a vacant lot.

The school in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods — 92% of its 240 students come from low-income families — yet in the two years since it opened in 2008 it has outperformed most other local schools.

The school was the brainchild of Principal Ben Marcovitz, 31, who earned his master of education degree at Harvard University before being drawn to New Orleans after Katrina. Like many others in the city, he believes that long-term solutions to New Orleans' most intractable problems start in the classroom.

Schools like this one have blossomed on what Williamson, the nonprofit group CEO, touts as the city's new "frontier for entrepreneurship."

"What Katrina did, in a sense, is it made New Orleans a start-up city, and everyone here became an entrepreneur — where everybody had to identify our problems and come up with solutions," said Williamson, who runs the Idea Village, a local business incubator.

The Brookings anniversary reports indeed show a sharp increase in business start-ups, although researchers warn that such numbers sometimes reflect the turmoil workers go through during periods of shock and recession.

The storm stirred up other positive social consequences. Frederick Weil, a Louisiana State University researcher, found that although post-Katrina New Orleanians score below the national average on many measures of civic engagement, they were 24% more likely to attend a public meeting.

Before Katrina, print shop owner Arthur "Bubba" Boisfontaine never attended public meetings. "Whether it was good or bad politically, you really just accepted whatever happened," he said. After floodwaters inundated the area, Boisfontaine led the rebuilding of his local park when government was slow to respond.

Now his weeknights are crammed with community and government meetings.

In his first state of the city address last month, Landrieu laid the city's problems on the table with a sobering candor. New Orleans, he said, was "in peril." Though the outgoing administration of former Mayor C. Ray Nagin had told Landrieu that the city faced a $35-million deficit, the new mayor's staff found that mismanaged budgeting had obscured the real deficit, which was nearly twice that.

One dramatic sign of government ineptitude: There has been no hot water in City Hall for two years.

Post-storm data affirm that this Deep South city — so long informed by the stark divides between blacks and whites, haves and have-nots — remains so today. The Brookings report shows that black and Latino household incomes are, respectively, 44% and 25% lower than those of whites.

To drive around town in 2010 is to toggle among different levels of recovery.

There are modest neighborhoods, such as the Lower 9th Ward and New Orleans East, with long stretches of half-wrecked houses and empty lots with grass pushing through cracks in concrete.

There are the high-water, high-income, high-profile neighborhoods of Uptown and the Garden District, which suffered mostly wind damage during the storm. And there's the French Quarter, pristine as ever, beautiful and bustling.

And there is Lakeview, a newer, upper-middle-income neighborhood of 7,000 small, graceful homes laced with wide, park-like boulevards. Lakeview was badly flooded, but today it's hard to tell it ever happened.

Among Lakeview's residents is Sandra Mann, a divorcee who had dabbled in volunteer work before Katrina, who found herself completely on her own after the disaster. She moved from rental house to rental house while she fought the insurance companies and agonized about what to do with her ruined, two-story townhome.

She spent five days in the hospital with a nervous breakdown before deciding that the only way she'd ever get her life back was to get her home back. "At the end of August of 2006, I fixed myself a cocktail, sat on my couch in my apartment and thought, you've never built a house before," she said. "You don't know how to build a house. But you can do it. And in three and a half months, I did it."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-katrina-20100829,0,1437416,print.story

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A U.S. 'legacy of waste' in Iraq

The $53-billion reconstruction effort is not without its successes. But poor planning, violence and a failure to consult Iraqis derailed many projects, which may offer lessons in Afghanistan.

By Liz Sly, Los Angeles Times

August 29, 2010

Reporting from Khan Bani Saad, Iraq

The shell of a prison that will never be used rises from the desert on the edge of this dusty town north of Baghdad, a hulking monument to the wasted promise of America's massive, $53-billion reconstruction effort in Iraq.

Construction began in May 2004 at a time when U.S. money was pouring into the country. It quickly ran into huge cost overruns. Violence erupted in the area, and a manager was shot dead in his office. The Iraqi government said it didn't want or need the prison. In 2007 the project was abandoned, but only after $40 million of U.S. taxpayer money had been spent.

The prison is just one of the more vivid examples of what is likely to be "a significant legacy of waste" in the reconstruction program, said Stuart Bowen, the head of the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which audited the project as well as many others littering the battered Iraqi landscape.

As U.S. combat operations officially end this week and Washington's reconstruction effort winds up, Iraqis complain that America is leaving little behind to show for an investment that President Bush promised in 2003 would parallel the post- World War II Marshall Plan in its scope and accomplishments.

"I am very sorry because America spent a lot of money without any tangible results," said Ali Baban, Iraq's minister of planning, who is responsible for overseeing the projects now being handed over to the Iraqi government. "The Iraqi people heard a lot about American assistance, but really they didn't touch it or feel it."

Many things went wrong, officials say, looking back on seven years of missteps and successes that could offer lessons for similar efforts in Afghanistan, where reconstruction expenditures are expected to surpass those of Iraq next year.

Under pressure to produce results quickly, the U.S. awarded no-bid contracts to companies with little knowledge of the country they were hired to help. Projects were haphazardly planned and poorly executed. As the insurgency erupted, projects were either destroyed or the costs of providing security to continue them ballooned. And perhaps most important, officials say, Iraqis were not consulted as to which projects actually would be useful.

Baban said the Iraqi government has taken on only 300 of the 1,500 reconstruction projects handed over so far by the U.S. The rest have been "put on the shelf," he said, because they are too shoddy to continue, aren't needed, or are incomplete and lack the documentation such as plans and contracts that the Iraqis would need to finish them.

By no means was all of the money ill spent, Bowen said. About $20 billion has been plowed into training and equipping the Iraqi security forces, an investment he said is generally seen to have paid off, in the form of an army and police force judged reasonably capable of taking over day-to-day security as U.S. combat troops go home.

But when it comes to the broader ambitions of the reconstruction program, success is harder to pin down.

+++

Perhaps nothing symbolizes the failure of America's aspirations in Iraq more than the lack of electricity. Back in 2003, the newly installed U.S. occupation authority announced plans to increase Iraq's power generation to 6,000 megawatts a day by the summer of 2004, deemed enough to give Iraqis a big boost compared with the Saddam Hussein era.

Six summers and $4.9 billion in U.S. taxpayer money later, Iraqis are sweltering in temperatures that routinely hit 120 degrees with no more than a few hours of electricity a day in most places. Domestic production has peaked at around 5,500 megawatts, public anger is growing, and demonstrations protesting the lack of power have turned violent.

U.S. officials blame the shortfall in part on soaring demand, now estimated at 14,000 megawatts, as consumer goods have flooded into Iraq's newly free market. After more than a decade of sanctions and three wars, Iraq's infrastructure was found to be far more decrepit than originally thought. The postwar looting in 2003 took a huge toll on what remained of the existing power network. And then the insurgency erupted, frequently targeting U.S. efforts to get the network going.

But mistakes were made too, said Iraq's deputy electricity minister, Raad Haras. Only 20% of a network of U.S.-built distribution stations in Baghdad's Sadr City district are functioning; the rest were either substandard or blown up by insurgents, he said. A power plant in southern Baghdad is operating at 50% capacity because it wasn't designed to withstand Iraq's searing temperatures.

"They didn't consult us," he said. "They sometimes did a good job, but sometimes not."

++

The story was similar in other sectors. A recent audit cites the example of an unfinished slaughterhouse in Basra — price tag $5.6 million — that was undertaken without securing a supply of water to wash away the blood.

The $32.5-million cost of a sewage treatment facility for the war-ravaged city of Fallouja, begun in 2005 by the U.S. military, has mushroomed to $104 million, and will now reach only 4,300 homes instead of the 24,500 originally envisioned, if it ever reaches any homes at all. Although the treatment plant is almost complete, the contract did not include a pipeline to connect the plant to the town.

"I asked the Americans, what is the benefit of building such a project without building the pipeline?" said Fallouja's council head, Hamid Ahmed Hashem.

Iraqis marvel at the price tag attached to many of the ventures. The 94-bed Children's Hospital in Basra, launched with much fanfare by then-First Lady Laura Bush in 2004, was originally pegged for completion in 2005 at a cost of $37 million. It remains unfinished, and the cost has spiraled to $171 million, $110 million of which was provided by U.S. taxpayers.

When it does open, perhaps next month, the state-of-the-art hospital will be a good one, Health Minister Saleh Hasnawi said.

"But it was very, very expensive," he said.

Security accounted for a huge portion of the costs, said Charles Ries, who headed the economics section at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in 2007-08. He estimates that 30% of the money spent on reconstruction went toward paying foreign security contractors to guard sites and personnel, a cost that Iraqis wouldn't have incurred.

Although corruption has been found, it does not account for a large amount of the squandered money, officials say. Audits so far have resulted in 43 indictments, 34 convictions and the restitution of $70 million worth of embezzled funds.

But the failure to consult Iraqis or to reach out to local firms was significant, Ries said. Under the Marshall Plan, the U.S. gave money to Europeans to carry out projects.

"In Iraq, we appropriated a lot of money early and programmed it ourselves, with no consultation with the Iraqis, in a whole big hurry," he said. "Consequently, the Marshall Plan went a whole lot better."

+++

Yet the United States cannot be held responsible for all the reconstruction shortfalls in Iraq, U.S. and Iraqi officials say. The Iraqi government has committed even more money to the effort than the U.S. — at least $97 billion — though it is unclear how much of that has actually been spent because the government has not audited its own accounts.

In many instances, it was assumed that the Iraqi authorities would provide the finishing touches to technically sophisticated projects. Often they didn't, a reflection of the broader dysfunction of the Iraqi government as well as the failure to consult Iraqis on what they wanted and would use, officials say.

Successes tend to have been simpler in scope and smaller in scale. Several Baghdad parks renovated by the U.S. military for about $2 million apiece are jammed with people every day, as is a swimming pool in Sadr City. Micro-grants to shopkeepers of a few thousand dollars each helped regenerate the economy in Baghdad after the U.S. troop buildup in 2007 tamped down violence.

A $34-million pipeline exclusion zone — a system of berms, ditches and barbed wire — largely worked to deter insurgent attacks on Iraq's oil exports. Yet the country's overall oil production has not yet reached prewar levels, despite U.S. expenditures of $2 billion on improving oil infrastructure.

There are some larger-scale successes, too. Several projects in the mostly peaceful Kurdish north are functioning well. The supply of drinking water has increased, and after many hiccups, a $343-million network of primary healthcare clinics is mostly functioning.

"There's a difference between 'could we have done better?' and 'did we do nothing at all?' I think it's somewhere in between," said Ginger Cruz, the deputy head of the Special Inspector General's office.

"There was a significant amount of waste, but there's a ton of infrastructure across the country that's paid for by America," she said.

One of the lessons of the entire effort is that big is not always best, Ries said. "The smaller the amount of money you spend, the more difference you can have," he said.

Another, said Bowen, is that trying to rebuild a country in the middle of a raging insurgency is not a good idea.

Project execution and management have improved in recent years, and the U.S. now does consult with Iraqis, he said. About $2 billion remains to be spent, and that is likely to go toward the kind of efforts that have proved effective, such as training Iraqis to carry out projects, rather than big-ticket infrastructure.

"But unfortunately," he said, "billions of dollars have already been spent and billions have been wasted."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-reconstruction-20100829,0,964793,print.story

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Looters and the lessons of Katrina

Declaring war on looters can compound a disaster, as New Orleans learned. Private property is not as important as people's lives.

By Rebecca Solnit

August 29, 2010

Do you support the death penalty for minor thefts? Of course not. But what about your mayor and police chief? Will they, when the inevitable big earthquake hits Los Angeles or San Francisco, sometime in the next few decades declare open season on thieves?

It's happened before. On the morning of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the city's previously progressive mayor issued a proclamation, printed up as a broadside and plastered throughout the city, authorizing law enforcers to "shoot to kill" looters.

You may want to dismiss this as the quaint barbarism of another age, but a scathing new report by the nonprofit investigative news organization ProPublica, PBS' " Frontline" and New Orleans' Times-Picayune newspaper documents that five years ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans police officers were explicitly told that they could fire on thieves. As one captain put it to his officers at a morning roll call captured on videotape, "We have authority by martial law to shoot looters."

In San Francisco in 1906, the police behaved pretty well, but then the U.S. Army marched in and imposed its own version of order. One man was bayoneted by a soldier after taking supplies at the invitation of the proprietor of a grocery doomed to burn. A bank cashier was shot trying to open his own bank's safe. A man trying to rescue someone trapped in the rubble was shot dead after being mistaken for a looter. Estimates of those killed by the authorities run as high as 500, but actual numbers will never be known because the bodies of the killed were thrown into the flames and the bay.

During Hurricane Katrina, as investigative journalist A.C. Thompson's work documented — and subsequent federal indictments charged — authorities again crossed far over the line. According to one indictment, in the chaotic days following the flooding, police officer David Warren shot an African American man, Henry Glover, because he might have been picking up some stolen goods. Glover's brother and a good Samaritan took the bleeding man to a nearby school in their car, but rather than helping the gunshot victim, the U.S. attorney alleges, police there beat the men who transported him and then incinerated the car, reducing Glover, a father of four, to a few charred bones. The officers charged with killing Glover, burning his body and covering up their actions have all entered pleas of not guilty.

The Glover case was not an anomaly. The Times-Picayune and ProPublica documented numerous instances of police opening fire on citizens during the flooding, and 16 officers have been charged with crimes, including the shooting deaths of three people.

"Looting" is an inflammatory word that is equated with rampaging, marauding hordes and all the other cliches we've learned from disaster movies and overwrought media coverage of disasters. But most people behave well in disasters. If the crisis is prolonged, many of them engage in what I think of as foraging or requisitioning. You might too if L.A.'s electrical grid and economy were shut down by a disaster and there was no other way to get food, water, medicine and other vital supplies. Those things are not for sale in a major disaster; your credit card and often even your cash mean nothing. People take stuff, but it usually doesn't look like the mob and panic scenarios the movies and the media tend to promote.

You'd choose picking up goods from a damaged chain store over watching children fade away from hunger or seniors go into crisis without their medications, wouldn't you? To obtain urgently needed medical supplies, the head of a cable-car company and his attorney son became "looters" in San Francisco in 1906. Among those who "looted" in the flooded city of New Orleans days into the Katrina catastrophe were paramedics, tourists and an attorney stranded there after bringing his son to his first semester at Tulane University.

It's probably been drilled into you that you should have emergency supplies — water, flashlights, etc. — for the next earthquake. But there's more to survival equipment. Cities need to have policies on what will be expected of law enforcement in a disaster.

In New Orleans, the mayor chose to switch officers from search and rescue to protecting property from "looters," even though thousands of residents were still stranded in the most dire conditions in modern American disaster history.

It was a decision that may have cost many lives. It's one no mayor should ever make again. Those in charge presume that the public has gone berserk — that the crisis is not a hurricane or an earthquake but mobs rampaging in the streets — and that they need to "take the city back" or reimpose order at the point of a lot of guns. Ordinary citizens are turned into enemies — and corpses. Those who should protect and serve often act like an occupying army.

One of the things we can learn from Hurricane Katrina is that the people in charge need to prioritize human life over private property. They need to understand that most people actually behave with altruism, generosity, creativity and solidarity in a disaster, and that even those taking things from the wreckage of a shop may be engaging in necessary activities for survival. Officials need to make a firm commitment that we don't have the death penalty without benefit of trial for minor property crimes — in ordinary times or extraordinary times.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of, among other books, "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-solnit-katrina-looting-20100829,0,2391461,print.story

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From the New York Times

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Qaeda in Iraq Says It Was Behind Latest Attacks

By ANTHONY SHADID

BAGHDAD — Insurgents affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility on Saturday for a wave of car bombings, roadside mines and hit-and-run attacks this week in at least 13 Iraqi cities and towns, a deadly and relentless campaign whose breadth surprised American military officials and dealt a blow to Iraq’s fledgling security forces.

At least 56 people were killed in the attacks, in which insurgents deployed more than a dozen car bombs. Two of the assaults wrecked police stations in Baghdad and Kut, a city southeast of the capital, though American and Iraqi officials said measures taken by the security forces had prevented the attacks from inflicting an even higher toll.

The statement from the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group for the Qaeda militants, was posted on one of its Web sites. It called the assaults “the wings of victory sweeping again over a new day.” It said it had attacked “the headquarters, centers, and security barriers of the apostate army and police.”

For weeks, officials had warned that insurgents might try to escalate attacks during the holy month of Ramadan, which began in August, capitalizing on months of stalemate over forming a new government here. Popular frustration has risen sharply this summer, as scorching temperatures accentuate shortages of electricity and drinking water, whose shoddy delivery remains one of Iraqis’ long-standing grievances.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki ordered the security forces on high alert Friday, saying that insurgents were planning more attacks across the country “to kill more innocents and spread panic.” He urged a public that has yet to bestow much confidence in the security forces to cooperate with them in an effort to stanch coming attacks.

“We call upon citizens to open their eyes, to observe the movements of those terrorists, to abort their evil planning and inform on any suspect movements as soon as possible,” said the statement, which was broadcast Friday night on television.

On Wednesday, the United States will formally end what it describes as combat operations in the country, assuming a training and advisory role for the nearly 50,000 troops who will remain here through next summer. The administration has described the date as a turning point in the war, though it remains somewhat ceremonial. The levels the American military will maintain still represent a formidable force here, and while most combat has indeed ended, troops will still take part in what it calls counterinsurgency.

American military officials have said the most formidable Sunni insurgents may number just in the hundreds. While they said they knew that attacks like Wednesday’s were still possible, they were nevertheless struck by the breadth of the campaign, which hit towns and cities from southernmost Basra to restive Mosul in the north.

“The potential for violence, what I would characterize now as primarily terrorist acts here, is quite significant, and the ability of terrorist acts to have an impact on the political life of this country is still a significant risk,” James F. Jeffrey, the new American ambassador to Iraq, told reporters at the embassy this week.

But, he added, “This does not change our assessment that the security situation, by every statistic that we have looked at, is far better than it was a year or two ago.”

At the scene of the worst bombing in Baghdad, where explosives piled in a blue pickup toppled a police station and sheared the top floors off a block of houses, residents on Saturday walked aimlessly through houses in which they could no longer sleep. They were angry that no one from the government had visited and that no one had offered help.

“Each day is worse than the day before, each year is worse than the year before,” said Sabah Abu Karrar, 45. He walked over bricks that were once his wall, and he quoted a saying cited often in calamity. “There is no power or strength except through God.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/world/middleeast/29iraq.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Retirement Haven Hunts Youthful Violators

By MARC LACEY

SUN CITY, Ariz. — From behind the wheel of his minivan, Bill Szentmiklosi scours the streets of Sun City in search of zoning violations like unkempt yards and illegal storage sheds. Mostly, though, he is on the lookout for that most egregious of all infractions: children.

With a clipboard of alleged violations to investigate, he peers over fences and ambles into backyards of one of America’s pioneer retirement communities, a haven set aside exclusively for adults, where children are allowed to visit but not live.

Mr. Szentmiklosi, 60, a retired police officer who settled here four years ago, has remade himself as the chief of Sun City’s age police, the unit charged with ensuring that this age-restricted community of sexagenarians, septuagenarians and even older people does not become a refuge for the pacifier-sucking, ball-playing or pimple-faced.

One recent morning, as he slowly wheeled between ranch homes and palm trees, Mr. Szentmiklosi kept a sharp eye on the driveways and yards, surveying for any obvious signs of youth. It could be a stray ball, a misplaced pint-size flip-flop. In sniffing out children, he said, he relies on his three decades as an officer.

But it is when he strides up to a home, dressed in shorts, sandals and a polo shirt, and knocks on the door that his detective work really begins. He tells the suspected violator that a neighbor has complained and he asks gentle questions to get to the bottom of things, all the while peering around for signs of youthful activity. His work is helped by a simple reality: children are hard to hide.

They leave tracks and make unique sounds. Newborns bellow, toddlers shriek and teenagers play music that is not typical around Sun City.

Mr. Szentmiklosi and his fellow child-hunters have their work cut out for them. The number of age violations in Sun City, a town of more than 40,000 residents outside Phoenix, has been rising markedly over the years, from 33 in 2007 to 121 in 2008 to 331 last year, a reflection of a trend at many of the hundreds of age-restricted communities nationwide.

This year’s figures are expected to be even higher, said Mr. Szentmiklosi, who knows that despite his patrols Sun City is probably harboring more children that have not yet been detected. The economic crisis is aggravating the problem, he said, forcing families to take desperate measures to cut costs, even if it means surreptitiously moving into Grandma and Grandpa’s retirement bungalow.

The vigorous search for violators of Sun City’s age rules is about more than keeping loud, boisterous, graffiti-scrawling rug rats from spoiling residents’ golden years, although that is part of it. If Sun City does not police its population, it could lose its special status and be forced to open the floodgates to those years away from their first gray hair.

The end result would be the introduction of schools to Sun City, then higher taxes and, finally, an end to the Sun City that has drawn retirees here for the last half-century.

At 50, Sun City is not old by the standards of Sun City, where the average resident is in his or her early 70s.

To remain a restricted retirement community, at least 80 percent of Sun City’s housing units must have at least one occupant who is 55 or older, allowing for younger spouses or adult children. But the rules are clear on one thing: no one, absolutely no one, who is a teenager, an adolescent, a toddler, a newborn, any form of child, may call Sun City home.

“Visits are O.K. as long as they’re limited,” said Mr. Szentmiklosi, who describes himself as a doting grandfather and insists that he does not have an anti-child bone in his body. “You can have children visit for 90 days per year. That means if you have 10 grandchildren, each one can visit, but they can only stay nine days each.”

Mr. Szentmiklosi, the compliance manager for the Sun City Homeowners Association, said that although the city was scrupulous, it remained compassionate. For instance, it allowed a young woman with an infant who was renting a home without the association’s knowledge a year to move out.

But the association also plays hardball, issuing fines and threatening legal action to pressure youthful violators to leave. One reason Sun City is so vigorous is because of what happened on the other side of 111th Avenue, one of the main roads traversing the neighborhood.

Although Del Webb, who developed Sun City in 1960, gets credit for inventing the idea of a community of active retirees, the concept actually started years before on an adjacent tract in what was called Youngtown. But the developers there were not diligent in drawing up their legal paperwork. A challenge by the family of a teenage boy led the state to strip Youngtown of its age restrictions in 1998.

So on one side of the road, little people can be seen running around. On the other side, many people remember the Great Depression, and not from reading about it in a book.

“It was so much quieter before,” said Librado Martinez, 80, a retired machine operator who lives on the Youngtown side of the line and has to put up with children playing ball in the park in front of his house. “You heard no screams before.”

That peace is what Sun City residents want to keep. They rose up last month to block a charter school, which is not governed by the same rules as other public schools, from moving in.

“They were concerned about children roaming the streets and terrorizing things,” said Marsha Mandurraga, who works for the school’s founder.

To prevent future incursions, Sun City’s leaders are using their clout to urge state legislators to change the law to keep Sun City school-free.

“I’ve raised kids,” said Chris Merlav, 61, breathing through an oxygen tank and resting on the side of a Sun City pool designed for walking, not swimming. “After a while you get to the point where you don’t want to be bothered anymore.”

Mr. Merlav, who moved here from Rochester, had evidence at hand that he was not anti-child. His 20-year-old stepdaughter, Danielle Anastasia, was lounging in the pool with him. She understood the desire of Sun City residents to be with people their own age. “It’s like me hanging with my college friends,” she said.

Some of Sun City’s more hard-line anti-child activists can sound as though they somehow bypassed youth completely.

“There are people here who have never had children, don’t care for children and don’t particularly want children around,” said Jan Ek, who runs Sun City’s seven recreation centers, eight golf courses, two bowling centers and assorted other entertainment venues, some of which sometimes open up for child visitors.

At Sun City’s museum, the resident historian, Bill Pearson, 62, played a videotape used to lure retirees to the development in the 1960s.

The narrator said then what many residents still say now: “Of course we love them and enjoy their visits, but you deserve a little rest after raising your own.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/us/29childrenbox.html?ref=us

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Medical Use of Marijuana Costs Some a Job

By JENNIFER MASCIA

Residents in 14 states and Washington can now appeal to their doctors for prescriptions for medical marijuana to help them with their pain.

Their employers, however, may not be so understanding.

In some cases, workers have been fired for failing drug tests despite having prescriptions saying, in effect, that what they are doing is legal according to the laws of their states.

Though the number of such cases appears to be small, they are exposing a new legal gray area, with workers complaining of rights violations and company officials scratching their heads over how to enforce a uniform policy for a drug that the federal government has not recognized as having a legitimate medical purpose.

“The current state of affairs puts employers in a very difficult situation,” said Barbara L. Johnson, an employment lawyer in Washington. “But the reality is that there are no federal guidelines like there are when dealing with other types of prescription medications.”

Some workers have learned about this legal quandary first-hand, at the cost of their jobs.

Nick Stennet, 20, has a congenital disorder called Poland’s syndrome, which left him without a chest muscle on the right side of his body and with a right hand with fingers substantially shorter than those on his left.

Doctors prescribed one or two inhalations of marijuana each night before bed to relieve severe muscle stiffness and shooting pains in his arms.

Mr. Stennet said he told the human resources manager at the Home Depot in Hilo, Hawaii, about his prescription when he was being hired. But after his drug test came back positive for tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the active chemical in marijuana, he was out a job.

“Why would they send me down there when they know I am going to test positive?” he said. “I feel like they put me through ridicule when it was so avoidable.”

Steve Holmes, a Home Depot spokesman, said the company followed federal guidelines for its drug policy. Employees are allowed to take a leave if they choose to use marijuana to combat the side effects of treatment for a serious ailment. When they return, however, the THC must be out of their systems.

“It’s a safety issue for us,” Mr. Holmes said.

Cynthia Estlund, a professor of labor and employment law at New York University, said that only one state that had legalized medical marijuana had taken the additional step of saying explicitly that it was unlawful to fire someone for using a lawful substance.

At the same time, Ms. Estlund said, “Nothing in the law tells employers what to do, so they don’t have to fire them under federal law.”

That is the objection raised by Scott Michelman, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of his client, Joseph Casias.

In 2008, Mr. Casias, a father of two who medicates with marijuana to relieve the pain of inoperable brain and sinus cancer, was named associate of the year at the Wal-Mart in Battle Creek, Mich. But when he injured his knee last year, company policy required a drug test. The positive result cost him his job.

In June, the A.C.L.U. filed a complaint in state court on his behalf, citing wrongful termination. He is seeking reinstatement and damages.

“The cancer is not what’s keeping him from earning a living — Wal-Mart is,” Mr. Michelman said. “There’s actually no law to require Wal-Mart to do what they did.”

Greg Rossiter, a spokesman for Wal-Mart, said: “This is obviously an unfortunate situation all around. But we have to consider the overall safety of our customers and our associates.”

On the broader legal question, Mr. Rossiter added: “As more states allow this treatment, employers are left without guidelines.”

Only the Rhode Island Medical Marijuana Act offers protection to medical marijuana cardholders for students, employees and tenants. Michigan’s law does not compel an employer to make accommodations for marijuana consumption “in any workplace” or for “any employee working while under the influence of marijuana,” according to the legislation.

While that addresses marijuana smoking at work or just before work, the Michigan law does not speak to what employees can do away from work. Mr. Michelman of the A.C.L.U. said he believed that there was no gray area and that federal law does not govern the relationship between a private employer and an employee.

“There is only one law governing this situation, and that’s Michigan law,” he said.

John Vasconcellos, a California state senator who was a leading advocate for medical marijuana legislation there, said lawmakers had not anticipated such a collision of state and federal law in employment practices.

“I think they’re hiding from common sense, and they’re hiding from the science that shows it might help their employee be more healthy and feel less pain,” Mr. Vasconcellos said of companies that fired employees with medical marijuana registry cards, prescriptions or endorsements from doctors.

In Colorado, the right to use medical marijuana for a debilitating medical condition is protected by the State Constitution — though with limitations — making it unique among states where it is legal. But Brandon Coats, 30, a phone operator at Dish Network who has used a wheelchair since he was paralyzed in a car accident 14 years go, was fired after a random drug test came back positive.

Mr. Coats’s doctors had recommended medical marijuana to control his involuntary muscle spasms and seizures after prescription drugs were no longer effective for him. A few puffs before bed allows him to work comfortably the next day, said his lawyer, Michael Evans.

Mr. Evans said that Mr. Coats — who, he said, had consistently received good performance reviews — was terminated for conduct that was legal and outside of work.

In an e-mail, Francie Bauer, the company’s corporate communications manager, said: “Dish Network does not comment on the specifics of employee matters. As a national company with more than 21,000 employees, Dish Network is committed to its drug-free workplace policy and compliance with federal law, which does not permit the use of marijuana, even for medicinal purposes.”

The issue has not worked its way through the Colorado courts.

Some companies have begun to recognize marijuana as a legitimate therapy. Jian Software, based in Chico, Calif., recently consulted with the National Organization of Marijuana Reform Laws, or Norml, in an effort to institute a drug policy that accounts for the medicinal use of marijuana.

This is necessary, said R. Keith Stroup, legal counsel for Norml, because the courts have not yet held that medical marijuana users enjoy “a legally enforceable, fundamental right” to smoke.

“Employers in states that have legalized the medical use of marijuana under state law unfortunately remain free to fire employees who test positive for THC,” Mr. Stroup said in an e-mail. “It is terribly unfair to these patients, but at this time it is not illegal.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/us/29marijuana.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From Google New

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Protestors in France

100 cities protest stoning sentence in Iran Jaffa joins global protest against Islamic Republic's capital punishment policy, urging release of Iranian woman convicted of adultery who faces brutal death sentence Dudi Cohen Some 20 people gathered at a Jaffa café on Saturday to protest Iran's capital punishment policy, joining thousands around the world who held similar rallies. Iran is rated 2nd in the world in the number of citizens' executions it conducts, second only to China. During the protest, held at the Dina café, a declaration was read out calling for the release of Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani and other Iranian prisoners awaiting the death sentence. A version of the statement was read out in more than 100 cities worldwide marking the international day against stoning in Iran. Ashtinani was convicted of adultery after having sexual relations with two of her husband's murderers. Her sentence has been suspended following international protest.

Currently, 24 Iranians, mostly women, await the stoning death sentence.

The Jaffa event was organized by Elifelet, a left-wing activist from Tel Aviv who writes a blog about human rights in Iran. Elifelet said she was approached by the international organization against stoning in Iran and asked to arrange a meeting to raise awareness for the issue in Israel.

http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3945120,00.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Why so many Americans are hostile toward Islam

By MARGARET TALEV

McClatchy Newspapers

Nearly a decade after Sept. 11, less than a third of the country feels favorably toward Islam. Most Americans reflexively oppose an Islamic cultural center near ground zero, and the lower the Christian president's approval ratings, the higher the percentage of people who think he's Muslim.

Why?

Beyond the simplistic debate - are we patriots or bigots? - pollsters, historians and other experts say that the nation's collective instincts toward Islam have been shaped over decades by a patchwork of factors. These include demographic trends, psychology, terrorism events, U.S. foreign policy, domestic politics, media coverage and the Internet.

Estimates of U.S. Muslims range between 2.5 million and 7 million, or about 1 percent to 2 percent of the population. There's no official data on U.S. Muslims' geographic distribution, but mosques are concentrated in metropolitan areas.

Most Americans are Christian, and most don't have much direct exposure to Muslims. A quarter of Americans say they know "nothing at all" about Islam, the Pew Research Center found earlier this month, and of non-Muslims polled, 58 percent said they don't know any Muslims.

It's natural for people who don't know Muslims to draw strong stereotypes from Sept. 11 and feel them reinforced by recent scares such as the Fort Hood, Texas, shootings and the Times Square bomb plot, said Leonie Huddy, the president of the International Society for Political Psychology and a political scientist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

"One of the things we know about cross-relationships of any kind is they become more positive as people have more personal contact with each other," Huddy said.

A Gallup survey last year found that Americans who don't personally know any Muslims were twice as likely to acknowledge "a great deal" of anti-Muslim prejudice. Republicans and those without college educations tend to be less favorable toward Islam.

Muslims are "very much the new outsider," said John Esposito, the founding director of Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. "We've had Christian cults that have committed acts of violence; killings of abortion doctors. (Oklahoma City bomber Timothy) McVeigh. (However,) we have a gut context in which we place it. Muslims don't fit that profile."

So what shaped modern American impressions of Muslims?

Long before Sept. 11, other high-profile terrorist attacks inflamed the public imagination. Consider the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, the 1988 mid-air bombing of Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which took 270 lives, and the rise of suicide bombers throughout the Middle East.

While most Muslims aren't terrorists, most terrorist attacks on U.S. targets or allies over the past 40 years were committed by aggressors who were Muslim or Middle Eastern. Then came Sept. 11, 2001, and a decade of U.S. wars in Muslim lands.

"There have been so many acts of terrorism connected to radical Muslims that it's not surprising Islam has a public relations problem," said John Radsan, a former assistant general counsel for the CIA of Iranian descent who's a professor at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn.

While many hijackings, hostage-takings and killings of the 1970s and 1980s were by secular Palestinians, including those in Munich, Radsan and others said that most Americans don't make such distinctions.

In addition, many Americans' first impression of Islam came in the 1960s with the Nation of Islam's role in the black separatist movement. That framed their impression of Islam in the context of racial antagonism.

Moreover, during the Soviet war in Afghanistan during the 1980s, the U.S. concluded that Islam could be politically valuable to American interests. When the CIA funneled money and arms to the Mujahedeen, the theory was that "Muslim fervor was a good thing because we could use Islam against the Soviets," Radsan said. There was the notion of a common bond between Muslims and Americans versus the Soviets: " 'People who believe in God' against a 'godless empire.' " However, it also enhanced the stereotype of Muslims as extremists.

Beyond that, Muslim and Middle Eastern men tend to be portrayed negatively in popular culture. Some critics say that media coverage of Islam focuses too much on terrorism. Two extensions of that argument are that non-terrorism news doesn't often feature Muslims and that the news doesn't provide enough context about anti-American sentiment until a situation blows up.

"Most Americans up until the Iranian revolution did not experience Muslims," Esposito said.

Iran's 1979 revolution overthrew the Shah, whom Muslim revolutionaries denounced as a "U.S. puppet" installed by the CIA. There was little U.S. public understanding of the CIA's role in the 1953 overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian leader and the resultant widespread Iranian public anger toward the U.S.

"When we saw people shouting 'Death to America' ... we had no context to put that in," Esposito said.

U.S. political and cultural leaders also help shape public attitudes.

After Sept. 11, President George W. Bush took great pains to distinguish between Islam in general and terrorists who are Muslim. Initially, polls found the U.S. public made that distinction. A Pew survey soon after Sept. 11 asked whether Islam encourages violence more than other faiths, and Americans were twice as likely to say no than yes. Within a couple of years, however, that distinction was gone. Most Americans thought that Islam did encourage violence more.

"Events are filtered through the media and the reaction by others" as well as people's pre-existing views, said Alan Cooperman, of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Public leaders' reactions to the planned Islamic cultural center two blocks from the World Trade Center site offer the latest example.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama supported the project's developers' right to proceed, and Obama spoke out against religious discrimination. However, the president sent a mixed message when he said the next day that he wasn't commenting on the wisdom of the project's location - a neighborhood filled with bars, restaurants, a strip club and an off-track betting parlor.

The outspoken opposition of prominent Republicans - including Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin - connects the Sept. 11 attacks to Islam. The issue could become divisive in some elections this November.

The Internet and social networking applications have bypassed the traditional media filter and magnified the influence of fringe activists on public perceptions of Islam.

Ihsan Bagby, an associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky, said conservative Christians long have been a source of anti-Islamic rhetoric, but more secular voices are now in the mix. Bagby cited Pam Geller, a blogger who's warned of "Islamization" of America and is a strident opponent of the New York Islamic cultural center. Bagby said that Americans' long-held suspicions of Muslims are "made more virulent by these groups."

Anti-Muslim feelings aren't likely to decline substantially until American attitudes improve toward the religion itself, said Dalia Mogahed, the executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies.

Muslims are the most negatively viewed faith community in the country, Gallup found. However, Pew polling finds that Americans also think that Muslims face the most discrimination of any U.S. religious group, which could imply a sense of sympathy.

There are modest indications that Americans are becoming more familiar with Islam even if they don't think they are, and that this may continue as the U.S. Muslim population grows. For years, Pew has asked Americans whether they know Muslims' name for God and their equivalent of the Bible. The percentage of Americans familiar with Allah and the Quran was 33 percent in 2002, but 41 percent by last year. Still, Islam's favorability has declined.

Pew's Cooperman said that when polling is considered overall, "I just could not make a case that in general U.S. public opinion has either hardened or softened" toward Muslims.

Still, U.S. history offers some hope for positive change. Catholics and Jews once experienced severe discrimination that's ebbed with time. So have U.S. ethnic minorities persecuted during eras of war with their homelands - consider the internment of Japanese-Americans and the persecution of German-Americans in the 20th century.

http://www.kansascity.com/2010/08/29/v-print/2184496/why-so-many-americans-are-hostile.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From Family Security Matters

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Terror Imams and Their Extremist Mosques

August 28, 2010 - Dr. Michael Ledeen

Whatever we may think about Imam Rauf and his Manhattan project, sooner or later we are going to have to face a serious problem: what to do about the hundreds of radical mosques in this country. It’s a serious problem because, as Bernard Henri Levi wrote some years ago, every terrorist has a mosque. Indeed, some became terrorists because of what they were told in mosques. Many young, alienated Muslims found the meaning of life by joining jihad, and they were encouraged to become terrorists by radical imams and ayatollahs.

We in Greater Washington know a thing or two about this process, through the story of the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church. The Center employed Imam Anwar Awlaki as its prayer leader from 2000 to 2002. Awlaki met privately with two of the 9/11 hijackers in closed-door meetings, and radicalized three American terrorists: the Fort Hood killer, Major Nidal Malik Hasan; the “Christmas Day bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab; and the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad. Now designated as a key member of al-Qaeda, Imam Awlaki is hiding in Yemen.

Take another local case: An Iranian-American imam named Muhammad al-Asi was for several years the head of the Muslim Community School and the Islamic Education Center in Potomac, Maryland. He was also briefly the imam at the Islamic Center of Washington. The Islamic Education Center distributes literature direct from Tehran, including the Ayatollah Khomeini’s celebrated death sentence on the novelist Salman Rushdie, and sells anti-Semitic tapes from Switzerland that praise Khomeini as a latter-day Hitler. Al-Asi has been honored at an official dinner in Tehran, with Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamene’i, presiding.

We’re not talking about a handful of mosques, and the schools associated with them. As of 9/11, there were at least 1,200. Most are radical. The American Sufi leader Sheik Hisham Kabbani, who founded the Islamic Supreme Council of America to combat the influence of radical (Saudi) Wahhabis in the United States, testified at a State Department hearing that 80 percent of the nation’s mosques were under radical influence or outright control.

It’s safe to say that most of Awlaki’s words, like al-Asi’s, were religious, and that, even if law enforcement officials had known about them, they could not have acted. That’s because we avidly defend free speech, and religious speech is specially protected. All manner of self-proclaimed religious leaders are free to preach. I wouldn’t change it; I cherish it. On the other hand, I don’t want the likes of Mr. Awlaki exploiting “protected speech” to inspire and recruit terrorists. And there is no doubt that those schools and mosques are breeding grounds for future terrorists. In some cases they are actual pieces of the terror network itself.

What to do? We can’t criminalize religious speech, but it’s folly to give radical Muslim clerics an unchallenged opportunity to indoctrinate their followers. There is a great range of “Muslim doctrine,” much of it admirable. On the other hand, the terror imams didn’t invent the Koranic language they used to indoctrinate the killers. We have to expose and condemn them, and their doctrines.

We don’t want to undo our Constitutional protection of speech, but the same First Amendment that protects radical imams enables us to defend our culture and our lives against them.
Some will no doubt say that we non-Muslims have no “standing” to attack their beliefs, but Americans have historically spoken out against ideas — political, religious, artistic, literary, whatever — that we find odious. It’s self-defeating to remain silent in the face of evil and those who advocate it, whoever or whatever they are.

Lots of people in the West have, as a brilliant book explains in elegant detail, been paralyzed by guilt, and dare not criticize our enemies. This disgusting and dangerous censorship goes by the Orwellian name of “political correctness,” and underlies a great deal of the crisis we’re in. It pretends to show sympathy by forbidding criticism of most anyone (except a conservative, a Christian, or a Jew), but in fact it is the opposite: we show no respect to Muslim Americans by pretending their ideas do not matter to us.

Many scholars of Islam yearn for an Islamic “Reformation” that would modernize the faith and enable Muslims to participate more fully in the modern world. Perhaps we can help. Yes, they can say whatever they wish. And we can tell them what we think about it. It’s called free speech and vigorous debate.

Faster, please.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. Michael Ledeen is the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is also a contributing editor at National Review Online.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.7195/pub_detail

.