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

From the Los Angeles Times

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

Gunmen kill Mexican mayor, wound daughter

Marco Antonio Leal Garcia is the second mayor assassinated in two weeks in the area, which has become a battleground between the Gulf and Zetas cartels.

The Associated Press

10:58 PM PDT, August 29, 2010

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico

Gunmen killed the mayor of a town in the drug-plagued Mexican border state of Tamaulipas on Sunday in a region where suspected cartel hitmen recently massacred 72 migrants, the government said.

Hidalgo Mayor Marco Antonio Leal Garcia was the second mayor to be assassinated in the past two weeks in the area, which has become a battleground between the Gulf and Zetas cartels.

President Felipe Calderon condemned the attack on Leal Garcia, which left the mayor's daughter wounded.

"This cowardly crime, and the reprehensible violent acts that occurred recently in this state, strengthen the commitment of the Mexican government to continue fighting the criminal gangs that seek to intimidate the families of Tamaulipas," Calderon's office said in a statement.

Leal Garcia's rural town, Hidalgo, has about 25,000 inhabitants. It lies southwest of a part of Tamaulipas where a massacre survivor said Zetas gunmen killed 72 Central and South American migrants last week.

Hidalgo is also near the border with Nuevo Leon state, where the mayor of another town, Santiago, was found murdered on Aug. 18. Local police allied with a drug gang are suspected in that killing.

There were no immediate details on a possible motive in Leal Garcia's slaying, but Calderon's reference to "criminal gangs" and the nature of the slaying suggest drug cartel involvement. Local media reported Leal Garcia was killed as he left his ranch.

Tamaulipas state security officials did not answer phone calls seeking comment.

Some cartels have been known to carry out targeted shootings that kill the intended victim, but not children riding in the same vehicle. Leal Garcia's daughter was reportedly shot in the leg.

Tamaulipas has seen at least two other killings of political figures this year. Rodolfo Torre, the front-running candidate for the state's governorship, was gunned down on a highway June 28, and in May, gunmen killed a candidate for mayor of the town of Valle Hermoso.

Calderon's administration promised to increase security in the area after a series of explosive devices were detonated in the Tamaulipas capital: Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas.

The Interior Department said it "energetically condemned" the explosions in Reynosa, but did not confirm local media reports that the explosions were caused by three hand grenades and that they had wounded roughly a dozen people. The department confirmed there were some victims, and offered to help them.

The Reynosa city government said on its Twitter site that "an explosive device" detonated downtown near the La Quebradita bar on Saturday, and advised residents to stay out of the area. Cross-border traffic was not affected.

The slaughter of the migrants was discovered last Tuesday in San Fernando, a town near Reynosa.

The Central and South Americans were apparently killed after they refused to work for the gang. Drug gangs have branched out into human trafficking for extortion and to recruit members.

Thirty-five had been identified by Sunday: 16 Hondurans, 13 Salvadorans, five Guatemalans and a Brazilian. Documents belonging to another Brazilian man were found at the scene of the killings, but his body has not been identified. The lone survivor, an Ecuadorean, escaped and reported the slaughter to the Mexican military.

Diplomats from the victims' home countries have traveled to Tamaulipas to get firsthand reports on the identification efforts. Most of those identified so far carried documents. But bodies found without documents present a much bigger challenge.

Guatemala offered to send a plane to pick up five victims identified so far from that country. Families of three said they received telephone calls earlier in the month demanding $2,000 for their relatives' release. Guatemala's foreign ministry said it was still trying to contact families of the other two dead.

Migrants hopping freight trains through Mexico to get to the United States are often subjected to kidnappings, beatings and extortion along the way.

A group of them protested Saturday in the railroad town of Arriaga in southern Chiapas state, where many migrants cross the border from Guatemala.

The Rev. Hayman Vazquez, a Roman Catholic priest who runs the Casa del Migrante shelter in Arriaga, said about 120 people marched along the railroad tracks to the city hall with banners reading "Please respect us," and "The kidnapping of migrants in Mexico is a humanitarian tragedy."

Vazquez said undocumented migrants continued to arrive at the shelter this week. Even when told of the massacre, most said they would still try to reach the U.S. because there are no opportunities in their home countries, he said.

Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes said Saturday he wants to meet with Mexico's Calderon to coordinate efforts to combat drug violence. More than 28,000 Mexicans have been killed in drug-related violence since Calderon launched an offensive against the cartels in late 2006.

"This war is not going to be won using the tools and methods traditionally used to fight crime," Funes said. "The challenge posed by the criminals requires other responses, other weapons, and intelligence."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fgw-mexico-mayor-20100830,0,1372953,print.story

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

Raising awareness of Pakistan's flood victims

For a disaster that has displaced millions, financial support has lagged behind that offered to victims of Haiti's quake. An Anaheim man and others started their own group, Americans for Flood Relief.

By My-Thuan Tran, Los Angeles Times

August 30, 2010

When monsoon rains began inundating regions of Pakistan, Anaheim resident Essam Ulhaq felt a wave of sadness. His parents' homeland was devastated. News images of displaced people became so painful to view that he stopped looking at them.

Ulhaq, 25, was shocked that some of his friends knew little of the disaster — never mind donating to relief efforts. He would tell them that millions were now homeless, that they needed all the help they could get. To raise awareness, he and some friends decided to start their own group, Americans for Flood Relief.

Such is the complicated story of aid to Pakistan, Ulhaq and others say. For a natural disaster that has displaced an estimated 20 million people and submerged one-fifth of the country, financial support has lagged far behind that offered to victims of the Haiti earthquake and other recent disasters.

The flooding has yet to capture the attention of celebrities and the international community, despite warnings from U.N. and State Department officials who say thousands are stranded without food, drinking water and shelter.

The U.S. government has committed $200 million for flood assistance, more than any international donor thus far, but private contributions have lagged behind those for other disasters, officials say. About $11 million has been raised by U.S. aid groups to date; in the first two weeks after the Haiti earthquake, such groups raised an estimated $560 million, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Reasons for the disparity vary: the global economic downturn, the nature of floods as slow-moving disasters, and the lower number of fatalities relative to major earthquakes.

But the biggest reason, according to one expert, is America's complicated relationship with Pakistan.

Adil Najam, a professor of global public policy at Boston University, said he believed "the myth of the bad Pakistan" has colored how Americans talk about the flood. "In Haiti, it was about a child in need," Najam said. "For this flood, it's Pakistanis, it's Muslims."

But Najam acknowledged that the political crisis in Pakistan, and a mistrust of its government inside and outside of the nation, has affected fundraising as well.

"A lot of the blame has to go to Pakistan itself," Najam said. "The government's credibility is so low that no one wants to give through them."

Najam, who writes a blog about Pakistan issues, said that after the 2005 earthquake that left 73,000 dead in the country's Kashmir region, a lot of money flowed from those of Pakistani descent to government agencies. However, that aid has not been matched by flood contributions.

Ulhaq, of Americans for Flood Relief, said he's seen many comments on Web forums about fear of corruption in Pakistan. The group advises giving to groups with proven track records. On Sunday, it held a rally at UCLA to raise awareness. A few dozen people heard speakers talk about the harsh conditions affecting flood victims.

Another factor in aid disparity is the fact that earthquakes generate much higher death tolls in a short time. Images of widespread devastation are more likely to generate offers of gifts and aid, some say.

"The flood is very gradual versus a big shock, like an earthquake," said Farshad Rastegar, chief executive of Los Angeles-based Relief International, which is raising funds for health clinics and food distribution in Pakistan's flooded areas.

The death toll in Pakistan has exceeded 2,000 — a fraction of the fatalities in the Haiti earthquake.

Rastegar said Relief International receives about 20 online donations a day, far behind the hundreds for the Haiti disaster. Donor fatigue is another reason aid is lagging, he said. "I think people are maxed out. Perhaps people feel they have given all they could in 2010."

To pick up the slack, Muslim organizations across the U.S. are trying to appeal to those who may have more personal ties to Pakistan. Islamic Relief USA, which has a branch in Buena Park, has dispatched volunteers to local mosques during nightly prayers, said Mostafa Mahboob, a spokesperson for the group.

The efforts have been effective within the Muslim community, he said, especially because Ramadan is a time of giving. Still, Mahboob said there has been much less support than for the 2005 Kashmir earthquake.

"When you look back to Kashmir, it wasn't just the Muslim communities responding. It was a much larger scale, and the whole world responded at a greater and faster rate," he said. "Even though it's the same country and the same population, the response is different."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-pakistan-aid-20100830,0,3424121,print.story

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

Emergency room visits by children for concussions suffered in competitive sports more than doubled over a five-year period, according to a study published in the journal Pediatrics.

ER visits for concussions soar among child athletes A new study underscores calls for better guidelines on protecting kids from brain trauma. By Melissa Healy Los Angeles Times August 29, 2010 The number of children in the U.S. seeking emergency medical care for concussions incurred playing competitive sports more than doubled in the five years leading up to 2005, according to a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics. Much of that increase came not from high school athletes who have been the mainstay of emergency-room visits for concussions, but from middle-schoolers and even elementary school students who have flocked to play on elite travel teams and in competitive youth leagues across the country. Fully 40% of the sports-related pediatric concussion patients seen in ERs were between the ages of 8 and 13, the study found.

Strikingly, the increase in concussions came against the backdrop of declining participation in organized sports among youth in those years, noted the research team from Rhode Island.

Combing through injury reports provided by hospitals, the researchers tallied 502,000 cases of children and teens visiting emergency departments for concussions between 2001 and 2005. Roughly half of those visits were for concussions related to sports and other recreational activities.

The true number was almost certainly higher, however, because studies that rely on ER visits to track brain injuries don't include cases in which parents waited to bring their children to a doctor the next day or never brought them to a physician at all, said UCLA pediatric neurologist Christopher Giza, who wasn't involved in the study.

The findings prompted the American Academy of Pediatrics to publish an updated "clinical report" outlining what is known about concussion care in children and adolescents.

That report, which also appears in the journal, underscores growing evidence that younger children's brains are not only more susceptible to injury, but those injuries may take longer to heal and can be more damaging than concussions in adolescents or adults.

A 2007 estimate by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested children and adults sustain as many as 3.8 million sports- and recreation-related concussions a year in the United States. But "data are significantly lacking about concussions in grade-school and middle-school athletes, which highlights the need for more research," wrote Drs. Mark E. Halstead and Kevin E. Walter on behalf of the academy's Council on Sports Medicine and Fitness.

Giza said Pediatrics' review of clinical findings on concussions will help forge consensus among coaches, parents and physicians about what to do when a child is dazed after a rough tackle or knocks heads hard with a teammate in a lunge for the ball.

"There's sort of an old-school notion that a kid gets his or her bell rung and toughs it out and keeps participating and bounces back," Giza said. But with evidence piling up that concussions are especially dangerous for younger kids, coaches should take "a more conservative approach," he said.

The Rhode Island researchers added that parents, coaches and physicians need better guidelines for recognizing brain trauma in younger kids, determining when and how long to sideline them and finding ways to protect them from long-term harm.

In May 2009, the state of Washington was the first to pass legislation requiring that any student-athlete suspected of having a concussion be removed from the game and not return to play until cleared by a licensed medical professional. Several states, including California, have since adopted similar laws.

http://www.latimes.com/health/la-sci-concussion-20100830,0,6400796,print.story

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

From the New York Times

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

For Arms Sales Suspect, Secrets Are Bargaining Chips

WASHINGTON — Accused of a 15-year run as one of the world's biggest arms traffickers, Viktor Bout is thought to be a consummate deal maker.

Now his future may hang on whether he can strike one last bargain: trading what American officials believe is his vast insider's knowledge of global criminal networks in exchange for not spending the rest of his life in a federal prison.

Justice Department officials were relieved on Aug. 20 when a Thai appeals court approved the extradition of Mr. Bout (pronounced boot), a Russian, from Bangkok, where he has been incarcerated since 2008. But they are wary of declaring victory in a long diplomatic wrangle with Russia until Mr. Bout actually arrives to face charges in Manhattan, a development that could be days or weeks away.

Immersed since the early 1990s in the dark side of globalization, Mr. Bout has mastered the trade and the transport that fuel drug cartels, terrorism networks and insurgent movements from Colombia to Afghanistan, according to former officials who tracked him. And he is believed to understand the murky intersection of Russian military, intelligence and organized crime.

“I think Viktor Bout has a great deal of information that this country and other countries would like to have,” said Michael A. Braun, chief of operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration from 2005 to 2008, when the agency was engineering the sting operation that led to Mr. Bout's arrest in Bangkok two years ago.

“It's a question of whether he sees his wife and kid again someday, after 10 or 15 or 20 years,” said Mr. Braun, now with Spectre Group International, a private security firm. “I think there's potential for a deal.”

Mr. Bout, who has lost about 70 pounds while imprisoned in Thailand, has shown no inclination to cooperate with investigators. In interviews, he has portrayed himself as an honest businessman who would transport whatever he was paid to carry, whether disaster relief supplies or attack helicopters. On his Web site he calls himself “a born salesman with undying love for aviation and eternal drive to succeed.”

He has labeled as “ridiculous” American charges that he agreed to sell shoulder-fired missiles to D.E.A. agents posing as members of a Colombian leftist guerrilla group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia , or FARC. “I have never traded in weapons,” he said in a statement released Friday. His wife, Alla, who has visited him in Bangkok with their teenage daughter, Elizabeth, has told reporters he traveled to South America “for tango lessons.”

But if the bravado falters when Mr. Bout faces prosecutors in New York, he has plenty to tell, said Douglas Farah, co-author of a 2007 book about him, “Merchant of Death.”

“He knows a great deal about how weapons reach the Taliban , and how they get to militants in Somalia and Yemen,” Mr. Farah said. “He knows a lot about Russian intelligence as it's been restructured under Putin,” he added, referring to Vladimir V. Putin , the Russian prime minister.

Rumors in Bangkok have suggested that the Russians and the Americans engaged in a bidding war over the American extradition request, with Russia offering Thailand cut-rate oil and Americans offering military hardware.

Both sides have denied such bargaining. Thai officials say they must process a second United States request for extradition on a separate indictment for money laundering before Mr. Bout can be put aboard the American jet that arrived last week to pick him up.

The legend of Mr. Bout, 43, a former Soviet Air Force officer and gifted linguist who speaks English, French, Arabic and Portuguese, may have outgrown even the facts of his career, the basis for the 2005 movie “Lord of War.” Operating a web of companies, at times calling himself Viktor Bulakin, Vadim Aminov or other pseudonyms, he rose in the global arms underworld after the Soviet collapse freed aging aircraft and huge weapons supplies.

“What you have in Viktor Bout is a prime figure in the globalization of crime,” said Louise I. Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University. “He epitomizes the new type of organized crime, in which the person is educated, has international ties and operates with the support of the state.”

By the mid-1990s, Mr. Bout's growing private air force had come to the attention of Western intelligence agencies. By 2000, when Lee S. Wolosky became director for transnational threats at the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, Mr. Bout's web of companies was turning up in country after country, Mr. Wolosky said.

“My colleagues who worked on Africa noticed that he was popping up in each conflict they were trying to resolve: Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola,” said Mr. Wolosky, now a lawyer in New York. “He had a logistics capability that was matched by very few nations.”

Mr. Bout developed ties with such notorious figures Charles Taylor of Liberia, bedded down next to his plane in African war zones and sometimes took payment in diamonds, bringing his own gemologist to assess the stones. His arms escalated the toll of the fighting. “Wars went from machetes and antique rifles to A.K.'s with unlimited ammunition,” Mr. Farah said.

Former American officials say they worked on a plan to grab the arms dealer and deliver him to either Belgium or South Africa to face criminal charges, a procedure known as “rendition to justice.” Before they could act, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks made Mr. Bout a lower priority.

Mr. Wolosky said he and his colleagues were astonished to learn from later news reports that Mr. Bout's companies were used as subcontractors by the American military to deliver supplies to Iraq in 2003 and 2004, earning about $60 million, by Mr. Farah's estimate.

“I read those reports with shock,” Mr. Wolosky said. “Personally, I attributed it to the disorder of the Iraq war effort.”

In Afghanistan before 9/11, Mr. Bout had long supplied Ahmed Shah Massoud , the ethnic Tajik warlord who spent years fighting the Taliban. Later, he supplied the Taliban, said former American officials, who believe his only real allegiance was to money.

In 2007, Mr. Braun, then the D.E.A. operations chief, said he was asked by Bush administration officials about prosecuting Mr. Bout. The agency lured him into a trap in which the agency said he agreed to sell surface-to-air missiles and other military gear to agency informants posing as FARC operatives.

At a meeting in a Bangkok hotel in March 2008, according to court records, Mr. Bout scribbled price estimates and doodled an aircraft, telling his ostensible customers “that the United States was also his enemy.”

“It's not, uh, business,” Mr. Bout said on tape, the records say. “It's my fight.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/world/30bout.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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

A Sikh Temple Where All May Eat, and Pitch In

AMRITSAR, India — The groaning, clattering machines never stop, transforming 12 tons of whole wheat flour every day into nearly a quarter-million discs of flatbread called roti. These purpose-built contraptions, each 20 feet long, extrude the dough, roll it flat, then send it down a gas-fired conveyor belt, spitting out a never-ending stream of hot, floppy, perfectly round bread.

Soupy lentils, three and a third tons of them, bubble away in vast cauldrons, stirred by bearded, barefoot men wielding wooden spoons the size of canoe paddles. The pungent, savory bite wafting through the air comes from 1,700 pounds of onions and 132 pounds of garlic, sprinkled with 330 pounds of fiery red chilies.

It is lunchtime at what may be the world's largest free eatery, the langar, or community kitchen at this city's glimmering Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of the Sikh religion. Everything is ready for the big rush. Thousands of volunteers have scrubbed the floors, chopped onions, shelled peas and peeled garlic. At least 40,000 metal plates, bowls and spoons have been washed, stacked and are ready to go.

Anyone can eat for free here, and many, many people do. On a weekday, about 80,000 come. On weekends, almost twice as many people visit. Each visitor gets a wholesome vegetarian meal, served by volunteers who embody India's religious and ethnic mosaic.

“This is our tradition,” said Harpinder Singh, the 45-year-old manager of this huge operation. “Anyone who wants can come and eat.”

India is not only the world's largest democracy, it also is one of the most spiritually diverse nations. It was born in a horrific spasm of religious bloodshed when British India was torn in two to create a Muslim homeland in Pakistan. Yet from the moment of its independence, India has been a resolutely secular nation and has managed to accommodate an extraordinary range of views on such fundamental questions as the nature of humanity, the existence of God and the quality of the soul.

Indeed, few places in India demonstrate so clearly the country's genius for diversity and tolerance, the twin reasons that India — despite its fractures and fissures — has remained one nation.

Sikhism , which emerged in the Punjab region of India in the 15th century, strongly rejects the notion of caste, which lies at the core of Hinduism .

The Golden Temple , a giant complex of marble and glittering gold that sits at the heart of this sprawling, hectic city near the border with Pakistan, seeks to embody this principle. Nowhere is it more evident than in the community kitchen, where everyone, no matter his religion, wealth or social status, is considered equal.

Guru Amar Das created the community kitchen during his time as the third Sikh guru in the 16th century. Its purpose, he said, was to place all of humanity on the same plane. At the temple's museum, one painting shows the wife of one of the gurus serving common people, “working day and night in the kitchen like an ordinary worker,” the caption says.

Volunteerism and community support are other central tenets of Sikhism expressed in the langar. When the Mughal emperor Akbar tried to give Guru Amar Das a platter of gold coins to support the kitchen, he refused to accept them, saying the kitchen “is always run with the blessings of the Almighty.”

Ashok Kumar, a Hindu with a scraggly beard, has been coming to the kitchen for the past five years — all day, almost every day — to work as a volunteer. “It is my service,” he explained, after reluctantly taking a very brief break from his syncopated tray sorting.

A white rag covered his head, and his hands were bound like a boxer's. His job is to man the heavy bucket that receives the dirty plates and bowls. He is the last man on a highly organized line that begins with collecting the spoons, dumping out any leftover food, then loading giant tubs of dirty dishes bound for the washing troughs.

Plates and bowls fly at him, but he never misses a beat, using a metal plate in each hand to deflect the traffic into the tub. Plates go around the rim, while bowls get stacked in the middle.

Mr. Kumar used to be a bookbinder.

“I feel happy here,” he said when asked why he had given up his old life.

Indians of all faiths come here to find a measure of peace largely unavailable in the cacophony of the nation's 1.2 billion people. Like the thousands of pairs of shoes left at the temple gates, the chaos and filth of urban life are left behind at the marble entrances.

The temple is a world of cleanliness and order — where the wail of the harmonium and the shuffling of bare feet are the only sounds, and every square inch is scrubbed many times a day.

It has not always been a peaceful place. A Sikh insurgency, which sought a separate homeland for Sikhs in Punjab, tore at India's heart in the 1970s and '80s. In 1984, Indira Gandhi , then the prime minister, ordered a bloody raid on the temple. Hundreds of militants were hiding there, and many were killed. The temple was also damaged. Sikh bodyguards later assassinated Mrs. Gandhi to avenge the attack on the temple.

Despite this history, Sikhs remain resolutely a part of India's mainstream, holding leading positions in the arts, government and business. India's current prime minister, Manmohan Singh , is a Sikh.

Pankaj Ahuja, who owns a medical supply shop in Rajasthan, was visiting the temple for the third time, this time bringing his wife and son, who had never been before. They took the Golden Temple Express train, and were sleeping in the pilgrims' dormitories, which are also free. The family is Hindu, but the temple has a special significance for them nonetheless.

“You have lots of religious places in this country,” said Mr. Ahuja's wife, Nikita. “But the kind of peace and cleanliness you find here you won't find anywhere else.”

Back home, cleaning floors would be considered degrading for someone of her status — people of low caste usually do such work. But here, Mrs. Ahuja happily scrubs floors.

“In normal life, I would ask, ‘Why should I do this?' It is shameful to clean floors,” she said. “But here, it is different.”

Indeed, she never gives a moment's thought to who prepared the food in the kitchen, even though in India's highly stratified caste traditions such matters are vital.

“It is more than food,” she said of the meals that she had eaten at the community kitchen. “Once you eat it, you forget who is cooking, who is serving it, who is sitting next to you.”

Anil Kumar, a 32-year-old Hindu, was up to his elbows in soapy water at one of the washing troughs.

“At home, I would never do this,” he said with a laugh. “It is my wife's work.”

But he said he tried to come for at least an hour every day to wash dishes. “It is not a question of religion,” he added. “It is a question of faith. Here I feel a feeling of peace.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/world/asia/30india.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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

Border Sweeps in North Reach Miles Into U.S.

ROCHESTER — The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.

“Are you a U.S. citizen?” agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. “What country were you born in?”

When the answer came back, “the U.S.,” they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister's in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.

He was one of hundreds of passengers taken to detention each year from domestic trains and buses along the nation's northern border. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrol's growth since 9/11, fueled by Congressional antiterrorism spending and an expanding definition of border jurisdiction. In the Rochester area, where the border is miles away in the middle of Lake Ontario, the patrol arrested 2,788 passengers from October 2005 through last September.

The checks are “a vital component to our overall border security efforts” to prevent terrorism and illegal entry, said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection. He said that the patrol had jurisdiction to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the border, and that one mission was preventing smugglers and human traffickers from exploiting inland transit hubs.

The patrol says that answering agents' questions is voluntary, part of a “consensual and nonintrusive conversation” Some passengers agree, though they are not told that they can keep silent. But others, from immigration lawyers and university officials to American-born travelers startled by an agent's flashlight in their eyes, say the practice is coercive, unconstitutional and tainted by racial profiling.

The Lake Shore Limited route is a journey across the spectrum of public attitudes toward illegal immigrants — from cities where they have been accepted and often treated as future citizens, to places where they are seen as lawbreakers the federal government is doing too little to expel.

The journey also highlights conflicting enforcement policies. Immigration authorities, vowing to concentrate resources on deporting immigrants with serious criminal convictions, have recently been halting the deportation of students who were brought to the country as children without papers — a group the Obama administration favors for legalization.

But some of the same kinds of students are being jailed by the patrol, like a Taiwan-born Ph.D. candidate who had excelled in New York City public schools since age 11. Two days after he gave a paper on Chaucer at a conference in Chicago last year, he was taken from his train seat and strip-searched at a detention center in Batavia, N.Y., facing deportation for an expired visa.

For some, the patrol's practices evoke the same fears as a new immigration law in Arizona — that anyone, anytime, can be interrogated without cause.

The federal government is authorized to do just that at places where people enter and leave the country, and at a “reasonable distance” from the border. But as the patrol expands and tries to raise falling arrest numbers, critics say, the concept of the border is becoming more fluid, eroding Constitutional limits on search and seizure. And unlike Arizona's law, the change is happening without public debate.

“It's turned into a police state on the northern border,” said Cary M. Jensen, director of international services for the University of Rochester, whose foreign students, scholars and parents have been questioned and jailed, often because the patrol did not recognize their legal status. “It's essentially become an internal document check.”

Domestic transportation checks are not mentioned in a report on the northern border strategy that Customs and Border Protection delivered last year to Congress, which has more than doubled the patrol since 2006, to 2,212 agents, with plans to double it again soon. The data available suggests that such stops account for as many as half the reported 6,000 arrests a year.

In Rochester, the Border Patrol station opened in 2004, with four agents to screen passengers of a new ferry from Toronto. The ferry went bankrupt, but the unit has since grown tenfold; its agents have one of the highest arrest rates on the northern border — 1,040 people in the 2008 fiscal year, 95 percent of them from buses and trains — though officials say numbers have fallen as word of the patrols reached immigrant communities.

“Our mission is to defend the homeland, primarily against terrorists and terrorist weapons,” said Thomas Pocorobba Jr., the agent in charge of the Rochester station, one of 55 between Washington State and Maine. “We still do our traditional mission, which is to enforce the nation's immigration laws.”

Legal scholars say the government's border authority, which extends to fixed checkpoints intercepting cross-border traffic, cannot be broadly applied to roving patrols in a swath of territory. But such authority is not needed to ask questions if people can refuse to answer. The patrol does not track how many people decline, Mr. Pocorobba said.

Asked if agents could question people in Times Square, which like most of the nation's population centers is within 100 miles of international waters, Mr. Pocorobba replied, “Technically, we can, but we don't.” He added, “Our job is strictly cross-border.”

Lawyers challenging the stops in several deportation cases questioned the rationale that they were aimed at border traffic. Government data obtained in litigation shows that at least three-quarters of those arrested since 2006 had been in the country more than a year.

Though many Americans may welcome such arrests, the patrol's costly expansion was based on a bipartisan consensus about border security, not interior enforcement to sweep up farmworkers and students, said Nancy Morawetz, who directs the immigration rights clinic at New York University.

One case she is challenging involves a Nassau County high school graduate taken from the Lake Shore Limited in Rochester in 2007. The government says the graduate, then 21, voluntarily produced a Guatemalan passport and could not prove she was in the country legally. A database later showed she had an expired visitor's visa.

Unlike a criminal arrest, such detentions come with few due process protections. The woman was held at a county jail, then transferred across the country while her mother, a house cleaner, and a high school teacher tried to reach her. The woman first saw an immigration judge more than three weeks after her arrest. He halved the $10,000 bail set by the patrol, and she was eventually released at night at a rural Texas gas station.

“I was shocked,” said the teacher, Susanne Marcus, who said her former student had been awarded a $2,000 college scholarship.

Another challenge is pending in the 2009 train arrest of the Taiwan-born doctoral student, who had to answer the agent after being singled out for intense questioning because of his “Asian appearance,” he said. His account was corroborated in an affidavit filed this month by another passenger.

Similar complaints have been made by others, including a Chicago couple who encountered the patrol on a train to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for the woman's graduation from Vassar College.

“At least in Arizona, you have to be doing something wrong to be stopped,” said the woman, a citizen of Chinese-American descent who said her Mexican boyfriend was sleeping when an agent started questioning him. “Here, you're sitting on the train asleep and if you don't look like a U.S. citizen, it's ‘Wake up!' ”

Mr. Pocorobba denied that agents used racial profiling; the proof, he said, was that those arrested had come from 96 countries. Agents say they often act on suspicion, prompted by a passenger's demeanor. Of those detained, most were in the country illegally — including the Mexican, 24, who admitted that he had sneaked across the southern border at 16 to find his father. Others were supposed to be carrying their papers, like a Pakistani college student detained for two weeks before authorities confirmed that he was a legal resident.

Some American-born passengers welcome the patrol. “It makes me feel safe,” volunteered Katie Miller, 34, who was riding Amtrak to New York from Ohio. “I don't mind being monitored.”

To others, it evokes travel through the old Communist bloc. “I was actually woken up with a flashlight in my face,” recalled Mike Santomauro, 27, a law student who encountered the patrol in April, at 2 a.m. on a train in Rochester.

Across the aisle, he said, six agents grilled a student with a computer who had only an electronic version of his immigration documents. Through the window, Mr. Santomauro said, he could see three black passengers, standing with arms raised beside a Border Patrol van.

“As a citizen I'm offended,” he said. But he added, “To say I didn't want to answer didn't seem a viable option.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/nyregion/30border.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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

Obama Pledges Commitment to New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS — President Obama on Sunday sought to assure this city, battered by two catastrophic disasters in five years, that federal efforts to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina would not waver even as the city struggles with the aftermath of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Speaking at Xavier University on the fifth anniversary of the hurricane that took 1,800 lives, Mr. Obama emphasized the resilience of New Orleans residents.

The legacy of Katrina, Mr. Obama said, must be “not one of neglect, but of action; not one of indifference, but of empathy; not of abandonment, but of a community working together to meet shared challenges.”

“There are some wounds that do not heal,” the president acknowledged. “There are some losses that cannot be repaid. And for many who lived through those harrowing days five years ago, there is a searing memory that time will not erase.”

Mr. Obama's trip to the gulf was his second in two weeks. The visits book-ended his family's 10-day vacation on Martha's Vineyard and served as a stark reminder of the challenges facing his presidency as Congressional Democrats and Republicans prepare for the midterm elections in November.

The excruciatingly slow effort to plug the BP oil spill — finally accomplished in July after 87 days — brought the president to the gulf numerous times in recent months as he sought to avoid the pitfalls that dogged the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina.

Arne Duncan, the education secretary, announced Saturday on the White House blog a plan to award $1.8 billion to rebuild New Orleans schools.

And Shaun Donovan, the housing secretary, said Sunday on “State of the Union” on CNN that the Obama administration had made progress in the past 18 months in returning families to their homes. Mr. Donovan said that 40,000 families were in trailers or on emergency housing vouchers when Mr. Obama took office, and that now “98 percent of those families are in permanent housing.”

The city's unemployment rate is 8.2 percent, compared with 9.5 percent nationally, but many of the jobs are in reconstruction. The unemployment rate dipped to 7.4 percent last year before creeping back up as the oil spill shuttered businesses and stalled livelihoods.

In an interview on Sunday with “ NBC Nightly News,” Mr. Obama acknowledged the economic and other difficulties in New Orleans and throughout the entire Gulf Coast region, though he said there had been “steady progress.”

He added: “We've still got a long way to go. And part of the reason that I wanted to come down here today, to mark the fifth anniversary, was just to send a message to the people of New Orleans, but also the entire Gulf Coast.”

The region was “hit pretty good over the last several years,” he said. “And all of America, not just people here, not just folks in the White House, but all of America, remains concerned and remains committed to their rebuilding.”

Most of the signs held by protesters who braved rain and wind to await Mr. Obama's arrival at Xavier on Sunday referred to the oil spill, which has been blamed for a drop in tourism, one of the city's mainstays. The spill also hurt the commercial fishing industry along the Gulf Coast and damaged fragile wetlands and wildlife sanctuaries.

But many local officials have criticized Mr. Obama's decision to impose a moratorium on deepwater offshore oil drilling. That moratorium is set to expire on Nov. 30.

Mr. Obama tacitly acknowledged that politicians could no longer talk about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina without including the aftermath of the oil spill. Much of his speech at Xavier was devoted to the spill and what his administration had been trying to do to limit the fallout.

“From the start, I promised you two things,” Mr. Obama said. “One is that we would see to it that the leak was stopped. And it has been. The second promise I made was that we would stick with our efforts, and stay on BP, until the damage to the gulf and to the lives of the people in this region was reversed. And this, too, is a promise that we will keep.”

Mr. Obama brought his family along to New Orleans on Sunday. Shortly after Air Force One touched down, the first family stopped for lunch at the Parkway Bakery and Tavern. Mr. Obama mingled with diners, and he and Mrs. Obama shook hands and took photos.

“We're still here, and we're just going to keep on building,” Mr. Obama said. “We're going to keep on working, all right?”

As he worked the room, a voice over the loudspeaker boomed, “Barack, pick up,” signaling that the family's lunch order was ready.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/us/politics/30obama.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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

With Neighbors Unaware, Toxic Spill at a BP Plant

TEXAS CITY, Tex. — While the world was focused on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a BP refinery here released huge amounts of toxic chemicals into the air that went unnoticed by residents until many saw their children come down with respiratory problems.

For 40 days after a piece of equipment critical to the refinery's operation broke down, a total of 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals, including the carcinogen benzene, poured out of the refinery.

Rather than taking the costly step of shutting down the refinery to make repairs, the engineers at the plant diverted gases to a smokestack and tried to burn them off, but hundreds of thousands of pounds still escaped into the air, according to state environmental officials.

Neither the state nor the oil company informed neighbors or local officials about the pollutants until two weeks after the release ended, and angry residents of Texas City have signed up in droves to join a $10 billion class-action lawsuit against BP. The state attorney general, Greg Abbott, has also sued the company , seeking fines of about $600,000.

BP maintains three air monitors along the fence around the plant and two in the surrounding community, and they did not show a rise in pollution during April and May, the company said. “BP does not believe there is any basis to pay claims in connection with this event,” said Michael Marr, a spokesman for the company.

But scores of Texas City residents said they experienced respiratory problems this spring, and environmentalists said the release of toxic gases ranked as one of the largest in the state's history.

Neil Carman of the Lone Star Sierra Club said the release was probably even larger than BP had acknowledged, because the company estimated that more than 98 percent of the pollution was burned off by a flare, an overly optimistic figure in the eyes of many environmental scientists.

He also said there were too few air monitors to accurately assess what had happened. “There are huge gaps in the monitoring network,” Mr. Carman said.

Dionne Ramirez, 29, who lives about a mile from the refinery, said she had little doubt that elevated pollution harmed her family. Not only have both she and her husband had coughs, but all three of their young sons have suffered from severe chest congestion, sore throats and endless coughing since April. Her 4-year-old had to be hospitalized for two nights because he could not stop coughing, she said.

When the news of the pollution was made public on June 4, Ms. Ramirez was irate. “I didn't know why they were getting sick or what was going on,” she said. “They are healthy little kids.”

Her experience was echoed by other families living in the shadow of the jumbled smokestacks, pipelines, cylindrical tanks and giant globes of the refinery. Nearly every household on one block of First Avenue, just a half-mile from the BP complex, had someone fall ill during May, residents there said.

“We all became real sick — throwing up, diarrhea, couldn't keep anything down — and we just thought it was something that was going around,” said Khristina Kelley, who lives with her husband and four children on the street. “But then everybody around here got it.”

Ms. Kelley said the release of chemicals was less troubling to her than the company's silence. “I'm worried that one day I'll take my kids to the doctor and something that could have been prevented wasn't prevented because we didn't know to the last moment,” she said.

Officials in Texas City said they were not informed of the scale of the release until it was over. BP said it met the requirements of state law by informing state officials of the release in writing on April 7, then filing a final report on June 4, after the equipment was fixed.

That final report said the release of chemicals had gone on for 959 hours, until May 16. Among other pollutants, the plant had released 17,000 pounds of benzene; 37,000 pounds of nitrogen oxides, which can cause respiratory problems; and 186,000 pounds of carbon monoxide. Another 262,000 pounds of various volatile organic compounds also escaped.

“The state's investigation shows that BP's failure to properly maintain its equipment caused the malfunction and could have been prevented,” the attorney general's office said in a statement.

Mr. Marr, the BP spokesman, declined to comment on those accusations.

The trouble started when a fire broke out on the seal of a hydrogen compressor, which traps noxious chemicals and returns them to be used as fuel in other parts of the plant. The compressor was part of the refinery's “ultracracker unit,” which can process 65,000 barrels of oil per day and mostly produces high-octane blending components for gasoline. The company sent the gases to a flare at the end of a smokestack, 300 feet in the air, hoping to burn off the hazardous chemicals. But a monitor at the top of the stack showed that the emissions were far higher than permitted.

The attorney general's office alleges in its complaint against BP that the fire started because workers had allowed iron sulfide to build up on the seal of the compressor.

Violations are nothing new at the plant, federal and state officials say. In 2005, an explosion at the refinery killed 15 people and injured more than 170, and BP was fined $87 million by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration for safety lapses that led to that blast. This month, BP agreed to pay $50.6 million, a record.

On air pollution, the refinery has a similarly checkered history, a pattern of breaking limits on air pollution and being slow to report those events, state officials claim in legal complaints. In 2009, Mr. Abbott, the attorney general, sued BP for violating clean-air standards 72 times in the previous five years.

Still, the refinery is a major employer in Texas City, a town with about 45,000 residents, modest frame houses, fast-food restaurants and dollar stores on the coastal plains across a channel from Galveston. The refineries dwarf the clapboard abodes of workers here, thrusting up into tropical skies in utilitarian ugliness and painting the azure with smoke. Those smokestacks mean jobs, and many people are skeptical about those claiming they have gotten sick.

“This is just money-hungry money grubbers is all it is,” said Pete Fernandez, a longtime resident. He called the lawsuits “frivolous — completely, totally frivolous.”

Yet some longtime refinery workers are among those suing. Robert L. Sukiennik, 45, has worked at a refinery operated by Valero here for two decades. In early May, he started to cough and felt weak. He finally saw a doctor in mid-July, who became alarmed at his white blood cell count. A CT scan a week later revealed abnormal spots on his kidneys, and he was referred to an oncologist for more tests. Leukemia was a possibility, he was told.

It is impossible to know for certain if Mr. Sukiennik's sudden decline in health is connected to the emissions from BP, but he says that the refinery has had so many troubles over the years, he is filled with suspicion that it might be the root of his problems.

“Every day they have some problem over there,” he said. “I don't think BP itself really cares about the community. They are not trying for safety; all they care about is the big bucks.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/us/30bprefinery.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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

Massacre in Tamaulipas

The full story of the massacre in Tamaulipas, in northeast Mexico, awaits telling by its one survivor. The early news accounts are horrifying: 72 people, said to be migrants from Central and South America on their way to the United States, are waylaid and imprisoned by drug smugglers on a ranch 100 miles south of Texas. They refuse to pay extortion fees and are executed. The survivor, shot in the neck, hears their screams for mercy as he flees. After a gun battle with the authorities, the killers escape in S.U.V.'s. The dead, 58 men and 14 women, are found piled in a room, discarded contraband.

The temptation may be to write this atrocity off as another ugly footnote in Mexico's vicious drug war. But such things do not exist in isolation. Mexico's drug cartels are nourished from outside, by American cash, heavy weapons and addiction; the northward pull of immigrants is fueled by our demand for low-wage labor.

Drug cartels, opportunistic capitalists, have leaped into the business of smuggling people. Illegal immigrants, known as pollos, or chickens, are in some ways better than cocaine bricks because they can be forced to pay ransom and be drug mules.

The American response to Mexico's agonies has mostly been a heightened fixation on militarizing the border — most recently, a $600 million bill offered by Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, and signed by President Obama. Enforcement without any overhaul of legal migration creates only the illusion of control. Without a system tied to labor demand, illegality, disorder and death proliferate.

Current temporary-worker programs are so cumbersome and bureaucratic they are almost unusable by employers. Unable to enter legally, and locked out of Texas and California by stringent border security, immigrants skirt the fence ever farther into the remote Arizona desert. Illegal crossings are down in the bad economy, but deaths this brutal summer are up. The pull of opportunity still beckons.

We have delegated to drug lords the job of managing our immigrant supply, just as they manage our supply of narcotics. The results are clear.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/opinion/30mon3.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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

From Google News

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

Police capture suspect in Utah deputy's killing

(AP) – 15 minutes ago

FREDONIA, Ariz. — The suspect in the shooting death of a Utah sheriff's deputy was captured early Monday in the rugged countryside near the Utah-Arizona border, authorities said.

Law officers arrested Scott Curley, 23, shortly after midnight near Kanab, Utah, after a resident alerted police.

"The caller advised that a suspicious person was trying to get into his home," said Jim Driscol, chief deputy of the Coconino County Sheriff's Department in Arizona.

The resident said he was awakened by barking dogs and looked out the window and saw a person with a rifle slung over his shoulder, Driscol said at a news conference held at Kanab, located just across the state line and about 10 miles north of Fredonia.

Seventeen law enforcement officers responded to the call and quickly located Curley, who surrendered without resistance, he said.

Curley is accused of shooting Kane County Sheriff's Deputy Brian Harris Thursday near the Utah-Arizona border during a foot chase.

The suspect then vanished into the surrounding wilderness and wasn't seen again by authorities until early Monday.

Deputies said that at the time of the arrest Curley was in possession of the rifle suspected to have been used in Harris' killing.

Authorities said he faces a first degree murder charge in Arizona.

The arrest came less than a day after authorities announced they were adding more law enforcement teams to hunt the fugitive down.

On Sunday, authorities asked residents in the Fredonia and Kanab areas to open their homes and outbuildings to searches by officers in tactical gear.

About 100 officers were in the field Sunday, and three helicopters were aiding in the search, according to a statement from Coconino County deputies.

Curley was suspected of trying to burglarize Fredonia High School and holding a janitor at gunpoint on Wednesday night. The janitor was unharmed, and Curley avoided authorities until Thursday.

Harris, 41, was tracking Curley, when he was ambushed and shot to death. Authorities said Curley shot at other police officers and missed before escaping.

Authorities said Curley suffered from depression and had few friends, but was familiar with the rugged countryside near Fredonia and searchers could pass 10 feet from him and never see him in hiding.

The U.S. Marshals Service has offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to Curley's capture. There was no word on the status of that reward early Monday.

Curley was being questioned by deputies early Monday. The Coconino County Sheriffs Office said it would seek his extradition from Utah.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gPb6-HQSb3LyLxWsxevfXgJINxswD9HTPDN82

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

2 of Alaska village's 4 officers fatally shot

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- A SWAT team and dozens of other law officers surrounded a house in a tiny Alaskan village where a gunman took refuge after he allegedly killed two local lawmen in an ambush, authorities said.

Hoonah police officers Tony Wallace and Matt Tokuoka died after the shooting late Saturday, said Bob Prunella, acting city administrator.

"We believe they were ambushed by the individual," Alaska State Troopers spokeswoman Megan Peters said.

This undated photo provided by the Hoonah Police Dept. shows officer Matt Tokuoka. Bob Prunella, acting city administrator for the village of Hoonah, says Tokuoka and fellow officer Tony Wallace died after a shooting late Saturday, Aug. 28, 2010.

This undated photo provided by the Hoonah Police Dept. shows officer Tony Wallace. Bob Prunella, acting city administrator for the village of Hoonah, says Wallace and fellow officer Matt Tokuoka died after the shooting. He said he doesn't know what led to the shooting.

John Marvin Jr., 45, barricaded himself in his home and Alaska State Troopers and other law enforcement agencies were at the scene Sunday and would maintain their positions through the night, authorities said.

Purnella said he didn't know what led to the shooting. Police officials said they were investigating motives but have not released any details.

There was no sign of a quick end to the standoff, Prunella said Sunday evening. It was unclear how long Marvin had been inside the home.

"This could go on for a while," Prunella said.

Peters said police are doing what they could to resolve the standoff peacefully.

"We don't want to have another tragedy on our hands," she said. "We don't want to lose another officer."

Troopers were urging residents in the shoreline community of about 800 to stay away from the area. Hoonah is situated on an island about 40 miles west of Juneau, the capital.

Tokuoka left the home of his father-in-law, George Martin, just before the shooting. The 39-year-old officer was off-duty and had spent the evening there before leaving with his wife and two children, Martin said.

Soon after they left, Martin heard two shots. Wallace was knocked down, and Tokuoka told his wife and children to get away and then he was shot as well, Martin said.

"I imagine he was trying to administer help to this other officer when he got hit," Martin said.

Wallace was on-duty at the time of the shooting. It was unclear why he was in the area.

Wallace, 32, died during surgery in Juneau and Tokuoka died early Sunday at a clinic in the Native village, according to Martin.

"The whole town's in shock," he said. "I've been getting calls all day. It's a bad situation."

Martin said his home is just a block and a half from Marvin's. He didn't know why the officers were ambushed but said police have had run-ins with Marvin in the past. He said Marvin lives alone.

Alaska State Troopers were leading a multi-agency response, and Peters said a warrant was issued for Marvin's arrest. The Coast Guard transported the Juneau Police Department's SWAT team to the village, Peters said.

Prunella said the deaths leave the Tlingit community with just two full-time officers - the police chief and a trainee. He said the southeast Alaska town of Wrangell sent some officers to help out as needed.

Wallace was originally from Ohio and one of the few hard-of-hearing officers in the nation, according to officials at Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York, where he attended the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. He also was a wrestler and was inducted into the university's Athletic Hall of Fame in 2008.

He first joined the Hoonah police force in 2006, left after seven months and then rejoined in 2008. He served as the small department's evidence officer, and was recently designated as a breath-test maintenance technician.

According to the law enforcement networking website http:/ / www.usacops.com, Tokuoka was a former Marine Corps staff sergeant who served in special operations. The Hawaii native had been with the department since spring 2009.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/30/AR2010083000445.html

.