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From the Los Angeles Times

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Arizona colleges accused of immigrant discrimination

Before this year, Phoenix-area community colleges asked legal immigrants to show a green card before hiring them. The Justice Department calls the policy 'document abuse' and seeks damages.

By David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau

September 4, 2010

Reporting from Washington

Employers who hire illegal immigrants can be fined, but the Obama administration warned this week that they also can be fined for asking legal immigrants to show their green cards before hiring them.

The Justice Department's civil rights division sued the Maricopa County Community Colleges in Arizona, seeking damages from schools for having "intentionally committed document abuse discrimination."

Prior to this year, the local colleges in the Phoenix area asked job applicants who were not U.S. citizens to show a driver's license, a Social Security card and their permanent resident card, commonly called a green card.

The Justice Department said a valid driver's license and a Social Security card are usually sufficient to show that a person is authorized to work. Requesting a green card amounts to "immigration-related employment discrimination," said Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Federal law forbids treating "authorized workers differently during the hiring process based on their citizenship status," Perez said. He said the department's Office of Special Counsel would bring legal actions against employers who impose "unnecessary and discriminatory hurdles to employment for work-authorized noncitizens."

Amid the fierce controversy over immigration, the Obama administration has launched three lawsuits this summer to protect the rights of Latinos and legal immigrants — all three targeting Arizona.

In July, the administration successfully blocked Arizona's law that authorized state and local police to check the immigration status of persons who were arrested. On Thursday, it sued Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio seeking documents that could show he has illegally targeted Latinos in the course of his immigration sweeps.

The suit against the Maricopa community colleges, announced Monday, and could affect employers across the nation.

"Employers are getting very mixed messages from the government," said Jessica Vaughan, a policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies.

On one hand, employers have been told they need to do more to verify that their workers are legal and authorized to work in the United States. Federal immigration law says hiring "an unauthorized alien" can result in fines of up to $3,000 per worker. However, another provision of the same law bars employers from requesting "more or different documents" than are needed to prove a noncitizen's legal status.

In the Maricopa college case, the Justice Department said it wanted "full remedial relief" for 247 noncitizens who applied for jobs with the community college district between August 2008 and January of this year, plus a civil penalty of $1,100 for each of them.

"We are extremely disappointed by the Justice Department's action. We had no intent to discriminate against any foreign national, and we feel we have been singled out for the maximum penalty under the law," said Charles Reinebold, a spokesman for the community colleges. "There was no actual harm here. This was a paperwork error, and we revised it after it was brought to our attention."

Vaughan said she was "very surprised the administration would resort to a lawsuit. In the past, the emphasis has been on mediation to resolve these issues."

But others applauded the administration's move to enforce the anti-discrimination parts of the immigration law.

Gening Liao, a lawyer for the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles, said the law itself is clear.

"If you bring in a driver's license and a Social Security card, those documents are sufficient. Employers are prohibited from asking for extra documents or different documents," she said. "This is blatant discrimination, and we get calls about it all the time. We hope to see more lawsuits like this."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-immigration-employers-20100904,0,4410558,print.story

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A window for immigration reform

Illegal immigration has ebbed with the faltering economy. It's a lull Congress should use to fix the broken immigration system in the U.S.

OPINION

September 3, 2010

The number of immigrants entering the United States illegally has plummeted in tandem with the economy, with the greatest slowdown occurring between 2007 and 2009, according to a report issued Wednesday by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center. Also, the number of people apprehended at the border is down dramatically, and furthermore, an estimated 1 million illegal immigrants have left the country. But the report, coming as the immigration reform debate turns increasingly ugly, is a timely reminder of how perception lags reality.

Even as Arizona passes draconian anti-immigrant laws and prominent Republicans seek to disenfranchise American-born children of illegal immigrants, the truth is that illegal immigration has not been this low since the middle of the decade. Between 2000 and 2005, an average of 850,000 people a year entered the United States illegally, according to the report; that number fell to 300,000 in 2007 to 2009. Some states saw particularly steep declines, including Nevada, Florida and Virginia. Arizona, Colorado and Utah saw a combined decline of 130,000 illegal immigrants. The number of people entering the country today is not insignificant, but the trend is clear. The best way to characterize this period is as a lull.

Hours after the report was released, the Obama administration credited its tough enforcement measures for the decline, citing its crackdown on employers, stepped-up deportations and plentiful staffing of the Border Patrol. Analysts of migration patterns, however, say the single largest factor is probably the economy. According to the Pew researcher who wrote the report, 90% of migrants without documentation who decide to cross the border succeed. They just aren't trying right now.

Crossing the border from Mexico has rarely been more difficult: It now requires the services of a coyote, and the price has jumped to $7,000 to as much as $10,000, depending on the departure point. The least patrolled route is to the east, but crossing those desert lands is only for the desperate. Violent drug cartels have diversified into human trafficking, adding a new danger to the journey, as the horrific massacre of 72 migrants from Central and South America in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas demonstrates. And once migrants arrive, there is little or no work. The unemployment rate for illegal immigrants is now higher than that of native-born and legal workers — a switch from the norm in the earlier part of the decade.

Congress should be using this period to negotiate a fix for the broken immigration system. Despite fewer arrivals, 11 million illegal immigrants remain in the United States, and reform is crucial. But instead of addressing current conditions, the country is awash in political rhetoric more suited to conditions in years past. It is a missed opportunity. Because as soon as the economy rebounds, so will illegal immigration.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-immigrants-20100903,0,6022663,print.story

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From the New York Times

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The Peanut Solution

Like most tales of great invention, the story of Plumpy'nut begins with a eureka moment, in this case involving a French doctor and a jar of Nutella, and proceeds through the stages of rejection, acceptance, evangelization and mass production. The product may not look like much — a little foil packet filled with a soft, sticky substance — but its advocates are prone to use the language of magic and wonders. What is Plumpy'nut? Sound it out, and you get the idea: it's an edible paste made of peanuts, packed with calories and vitamins, that is specially formulated to renourish starving children. Since its widespread introduction five years ago, it has been credited with significantly lowering mortality rates during famines in Africa. Children on a Plumpy'nut regimen add pounds rapidly, often going from a near-death state to relative health in a month. In the world of humanitarian aid, where progress is usually measured in subtle increments of misery, the new product offers a rare satisfaction: swift, visible, fantastic efficacy.

Plumpy'nut is also a brand name, however, the registered trademark of Nutriset, a private French company that first manufactured and marketed the paste. It was not the intention of Plumpy'nut's inventor, a crusading pediatrician named André Briend, to create an industry around Plumpy'nut. Briend, his friends say, was always personally indifferent to money. (Also, apparently, to publicity — he declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article.) One element of genius in Briend's recipe was precisely its easy replicability: it could be made by poor people, for poor people, to the benefit of patients and farmers alike. Most of the world's peanuts are grown in developing countries, where allergies to them are relatively uncommon, and the rest of the concoction is simple to prepare. On a visit to Malawi, Briend whipped up a batch in a blender to prove that Plumpy'nut could be made just about anywhere.

Others, however, quickly realized that the miracle product had more than just moral value. Nutriset has aggressively protected its intellectual property, and the bulk of Plumpy'nut production continues to take place at Nutriset facilities in France. ( Unicef, the world's primary buyer, purchases 90 percent of its supply from that factory, according to a 2009 report prepared for the agency.) Internationally, there has been a vituperative debate over who should control the means of production, with India going so far as to impose sharp restrictions on Plumpy'nut, calling it an unproven colonialist import. Elsewhere, local producers are simply ignoring the patent. In Haiti, two manufacturers are making products similar to Plumpy'nut independently of Nutriset: one is Partners in Health, the charity co-founded by the prominent global-health activist Paul Farmer. Partners in Health harvests peanuts from a 30-acre farm or buys them from a cooperative of 200 smallholders. It's planning to build a larger factory, but for now the nuts are taken to the main hospital in Cange, where women sort them in straw baskets, roast them over an outside gas burner, run them through a hand grinder and mix all the ingredients into a paste that is poured into reusable plastic canisters. Peanuts in Haiti and throughout the developing world have a high incidence of aflatoxin, a fungus that can sicken children, especially fragile ones. But Partners in Health says the product, which it calls Nourimanba, is safe.

When I visited one of the charity's outpatient clinics in July, 1-year-old Elorky Decena was silent and listless as a nurse hooked a scale over the clinic's doorway and put him in an attached harness. A month before, he was found to have severe acute malnutrition, a condition characterized by extreme stunting and wasting that afflicts an estimated 20 million children worldwide. The nurse announced that he had gained more than four pounds on a diet of Nourimanba.

Patents are meant to offer incentives to innovators by giving them a time-limited right to exclusively exploit their ideas for profit. But many say that lifesaving products should be treated by a different set of rules. There has been a long and bitter argument, for instance, over the affordability of patented AIDS drugs in Africa. Critics have made a similar case against Plumpy'nut, which is fairly expensive, costing about $60 per child for a full two-month treatment. “We were concerned because of the way Nutriset was managing their intellectual property,” said Stéphane Doyon, a nutrition specialist with Doctors Without Borders, a medical charity. “We felt that there was the possibility for the creation of a monopoly.”

“Poverty is a business,” Patricia Wolff, a St. Louis pediatrician, said. She founded Meds and Food for Kids, the other local producer of fortified nut paste in Haiti. When I first spoke with her in May, Meds and Food for Kids was struggling to raise money to expand its operations, and Wolff complained mightily about the difficulties she faced because of Nutriset's market dominance. “There's money to be made,” she said, “and there are people who have that kind of way of thinking.” Two months later, Wolff made a tentative deal for Meds and Food for Kids to become a Nutriset franchisee. In the end, she said, she couldn't afford to battle hunger on her own.

In the United States, Plumpy'nut's sole manufacturer and chief promoter is a 38-year-old mother of four from Barrington, R.I. Navyn Salem doesn't have a background in medicine or aid work. She first glimpsed the potential of Plumpy'nut three years ago on “ 60 Minutes.” Since then, Salem has devoted herself to making the product for export to needy nations like Haiti. Though her Providence factory, a joint venture with Nutriset, has all the trappings of a business, selling its wares to relief agencies under the name Edesia Global Nutrition Solutions, the operation is registered as a nonprofit foundation and was established with seed money from Salem and her husband, Paul, a private-equity financier. Dancing along the nebulous line between capitalism and charity, Salem casts herself as a marketer, offering a neatly packaged solution to a tragic and no longer intractable malady. On a Tuesday in May, she brought her message of good news to a Mother's Day benefit in Midtown Manhattan.

“This is not my ZIP code,” Salem said as she stood in the East Side Social Club, a wood-paneled restaurant, amid a jostling crowd of bejeweled women pinching noontime flutes of Champagne. She met one of the party's hosts, Lauren Bush, the former model and niece of the most recent ex-president, a couple of years ago at a conference of the Clinton Global Initiative. Now Bush and her mother, Sharon, were selling a specially designed line of teddy bears — a big one called Plumpy and a small one called Nut — to raise money to purchase the product for children in Africa.

When it came time to eat their own meal, a three-course lunch­eon, the party guests found seats at tables set with elaborate centerpieces, made up of stuffed bears and Plumpy'nut packets. As volunteers sold raffle tickets for a Dior handbag, Salem delivered a practiced speech. Earnest and attractive, with wide brown eyes, she told the audience that her father, a member of an Indian merchant family, grew up in Tanzania. “There are over a billion people in our world that are malnourished,” Salem said. “It's a shocking statistic. The good news is there's a very simple solution.” And that, she said, was Plumpy'nut. “It's really revolutionary, because it doesn't need to be mixed with water or refrigerated,” Salem continued. “And the most miraculous part is, it will transform a child from literally skin and bones to certain survival in just four to six weeks.”

This transformation, seen in before-and-after photos — on one side a sick and wasted child, on the other, a chubby, smiling one — was the promise that captured imaginations far beyond the technocratic community of specialists that originally developed Plumpy'nut. “People love a silver bullet,” says the prominent nutritionist Steve Collins. Salem's decision to devote a portion of her family's fortune to the cause was impressive, but she is hardly the only person who was touched by the substance's potential. At the benefit, many of the attendees said they had seen the same inspiring “60 Minutes” segment, in which Anderson Cooper compared the paste to penicillin, concluding that it “may just be the most important advance ever” in the realm of childhood malnutrition. After Salem spoke, she began squeezing dabs of Plumpy'nut onto plates and passing them around, assuring the partygoers that the brownish goo was surprisingly tasty, with the consistency and sweetness of a cookie filling. Everyone ate it right up.

Plumpy'nut proved so palatable and so valuable that it was only natural that other interests were now trying to take a bite. “You want to hear about the bad stuff?” Salem whispered. There was a lot to talk about. Outside the restaurant, beyond the protective cordon of appreciation, rival factions were fighting over a less innocent — though perhaps no less important — issue: who should profit? Plaintiffs were suing, accusing her partners at Nutriset of anticompetitive practices to protect their position atop a $200 million marketplace. Doctors, foreign-aid organizations and agribusinesses were staking competing claims, each invoking the interests of the world's most fragile children. “Forget all the politics,” Salem pleads. “I'd like to erase them all.” But try as she might, she can't wish away the questions of property and law.

Everyone, it seemed, wanted to own a bit of Plumpy'nut.

At the beginning, the problem was devilishly simple: malnutrition was killing millions in poor countries — it's thought to be responsible for a third of all deaths of children under 5. And yet the global medical community was expending little effort to develop improved treatments. In the early 1990s, the accepted regimen for severe acute malnutrition — a watery mixture fed through a tube — was 30 years old and was unable to prevent the deaths of 20 to 60 percent of patients in hospitals. Frustrated, a small group of doctors began searching for a better way to get nutrients into starving children. One of them was André Briend.

According to legend, Briend hit upon the inspiration for Plumpy'nut one morning at the breakfast table, when, after years of vainly mixing nutrients into cookies, pancakes and yogurt, he opened a jar of Nutella, and the idea came to him: a paste! Like most such stories, this one is not completely true — or rather, it elides many years of false starts, research, scientific collaboration and infighting. The first advance came in the form of F100, a dried high-energy milk that was fortified with a mix of vitamins and minerals that were designed to counter the specific biochemical effects of malnutrition in children. F100 had to be mixed with water, though, which in poor countries was apt to be rife with bacteria. It also tasted unpleasant. As a childhood-nutrition expert attached to a French government institute, Briend came up with the idea of mixing F100 together with peanuts, milk, sugar and oil. The concoction was full of protein and fat, which insulated its nutrients from oxygen and humidity and masked their unappetizing flavor.

The true advance lay not in the formulation, however, but in the way the paste could be put to work. Earlier treatments had to be administered in a hospital setting, which meant a long, expensive stay away from home for both mother and patient, so children were rarely brought in for treatment until they were already extremely weak and susceptible to all the pathogens that lurk in third-world health facilities. What Briend and a few other specialists envisioned was a treatment that could be administered at home, by families instead of doctors. For medical professionals, this required a radical shift in mind-set. Briend searched the world for someone willing to conduct field tests, cautioning that collaborators in his experiments, as he put it in a 2000 message to a malnutrition Listserv, “should be ready to accept a road with trial and errors.”

One doctor who decided to take a risk was Mark Manary, a pediatrician and professor, who was working at a hospital in Malawi. His malnutrition ward was crammed full of dozens of children lying on mats. “It was really an incredible burden,” Manary recalled. “These kids are deathly ill, you're doing whatever you can for them, and you think you're on the right track, and then you come in the next morning and four of them have died.” Manary emptied out the ward, sending his patients home with Plumpy'nut. Many malnutrition experts were horrified. “It seemed dangerous to them, and it made them afraid,” said Manary, who recalled that one eminent figure stood up at a conference and said, “You're killing children.” In fact, when the results were analyzed, it was found that 95 percent of the subjects who received Plumpy'nut at home made a full recovery, a rate far better than that achieved with inpatient treatment.

The Malawi test emboldened Doctors Without Borders, which recognized that treating children outside clinical settings would allow a vastly scaled-up response to humanitarian emergencies. In 2005, it distributed Plumpy'nut to 60,000 children with severe acute malnutrition during a famine in Niger. Ninety percent completely recovered, and only 3 percent died. Within two years, the United Nations endorsed home care with Plumpy'nut as the preferred treatment for severe acute malnutrition. “This is an enormous breakthrough,” said Werner Schultink, chief of nutrition for Unicef. “It has created the opportunity to reach many more children with relatively limited resources.” Nonetheless, Schultink estimates that the product reaches only 10 to 15 percent of those who need it, because of logistical and budgetary constraints.

Briend's invention may satisfy a need, the hunger of children, but that doesn't directly correspond to economic demand, which is set by buyers — the donor nations and international agencies that spend billions of dollars on food aid and famine relief. This is the gap Navyn Salem is hoping to fill. Her mission is threefold. First, her plant manufactures Plumpy'nut for sale. Second, she is trying to use publicity and humanitarian appeals to persuade the customer base — the foreign-aid donors — to allocate more money to purchase and distribute the product. Finally, and most ambitiously, she is advocating the use of Plumpy'nut and a number of spinoff products to address a wider array of challenges, including malnutrition prevention. The broadened market, in theory, could be enormous: The World Bank, in a recent report, recommended that aid agencies scale up their spending on such programs, which currently stands at $300 million annually, to $6 billion a year. The U.S. Agency for International Development, which administers the $2.2 billion Food for Peace program, has been examining the usefulness of Plumpy'nut and products similar to it. American food aid must comply with stringent regulations meant to encourage domestic procurement, a requirement Navyn Salem is perfectly placed to meet.

Salem's interest in philanthropy was intensified after reading a biography of Farmer, the crusading physician, with whom she subsequently traveled to Rwanda, but it took Plumpy'nut to galvanize her thoughts. “We talk about AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and how detrimental they are, these terrible epidemics, but then I realized that malnutrition was killing more than all of them combined,” Salem said. “And we know how to fix it.” She didn't know much about famine relief or the insular community of nutritionists who deal with it, but she had a professional background in advertising and marketing, and she wanted to do something that drew on what she saw as her natural entrepreneurial strengths. “I thought, Let's figure out if we can run a business that saves thousands and thousands of lives,” she said. Salem's factory, located in an industrial area of Providence just off Interstate 95, cost $2 million to start. In March, right around the time she opened for business, she gave me a tour. The front lobby was decorated with large photos of grinning African children that Salem took on her trips to Rwanda and Tanzania. We donned blue smocks, hairnets and booties and entered the sanitized factory floor, where two workers, a Burundian and a Liberian, were using scoops to weigh out portions of sugar. “Most of our production staff are refugees who were recently resettled in Rhode Island,” Salem said. After the Plumpy'nut was mixed, it was run through overhead pipes into a contraption that squirted it into foil packets, which were sealed and ejected onto a conveyor belt, where workers packed them for shipping. In an adjacent warehouse, there were pallets of boxes labeled for delivery to Haiti, Yemen and Nicaragua.

Salem led me to a gleaming stainless-steel tank, which was about as tall as she was and hot to the touch. She opened a door on top, and a fragrant peanut smell wafted out as we craned to look in. “Here it is,” Salem said. “The magic stuff.”

That magic is the property of Nutriset. To trace how a family-run company based in a small town in the Normandy countryside ended up owning the patent to one of the world's most promising humanitarian interventions, you have to go back to André Briend. He never knew anything about manufacturing food, so at the time he was trying to demonstrate the worth of Plumpy'nut, he signed a consulting agreement with Nutriset, which specialized in making therapeutic milk products. He and the company's founder, a food scientist named Michel Lescanne, were listed as inventors on the 1997 French patent. The patent has since been registered in 38 countries, including much of Africa.

“Michel is a guy who probably holds hundreds of patents, he thinks up things all the time, but he didn't have a viable business” before Plumpy'nut, said Mark Manary, who now runs a nonprofit group that manufactures the product under license in Malawi. “So André and I were all about this as a therapeutic opportunity, and Michel was like, ‘This is an entrepreneurial opportunity.' ” Lescanne's expertise was invaluable when it came to engineering the taste, texture and shelf life of Plumpy'nut.

For its contribution, Nutriset has been richly rewarded. Last year, the company produced around 14,000 metric tons of Plumpy'nut and related products, more than a tenfold increase over the amount it made in 2004, registering $66 million in sales. The family-owned company has paid out millions in dividends, according to an internal document, although the company claims the money has largely been reinvested in expanding the business. The state institute where Briend did his research receives 1 percent of sale proceeds, Nutriset says, while the inventor himself has renounced any ownership interest.

A few years ago, after some pressure from buyers, Nutriset announced that it would take a more liberal stance on licensing the product — but only in the developing world. Its affiliate network has since expanded to 11 countries, most of them in Africa. But when it comes to Europe and North America, the company has been aggressive about protecting its interests. When Salem first approached Nutriset about obtaining a license to make Plumpy'nut, she says she received a frosty reception, even though her original idea was to build a factory in Tanzania, her father's birthplace. After meeting with Salem and her husband, the company relented, although the plan changed a bit in the process. The locus of their new joint venture, Edesia, was shifted to Rhode Island, so that it could satisfy domestic-sourcing requirements for U.S. government aid.

“Our idea with Edesia is for it to really be an incubator,” said Adeline Lescanne, Michel's daughter and the deputy general manager of the company. She said the company was investing its profits in research into a new generation of ready-to-use therapeutic foods, or R.U.T.F., as they are called in the jargon of the foreign-aid community. The new lines would be designed to prevent malnutrition, not just cure it. “It's a kind of pity that there is not a lot of research on new R.U.T.F.,” Lescanne said. “There are only people fighting to produce this product.”

Nutriset's critics say that line of argument is disingenuous, because the Plumpy'nut patent is so broad as to encompass just about any kind of nut-based nutritional paste. “There are other people that would like to enter into the business,” Ben Tabatchnick, who runs a New Jersey-based kosher soup company, said. “But everybody is afraid of being sued.” Last year, Tabatchnick went to France to talk to Nutriset about his plans to develop ready-to-use therapeutic foods on a for-profit basis. “I had a meeting with them that lasted about 10 minutes, and they threw me out of the room,” he told me. Afterward, Nutriset sent him a pair of ominous letters, indicating that it had found “some similarities” between Plumpy'nut and his product, Nutty Butta.

Nutriset has sent similar saber-rattling correspondence to a number of other potential competitors. Lescanne told me that Nutriset's vigilance over its intellectual property has a benevolent purpose. Between now and the time the patent is scheduled to expire, in 2017, the company wants to focus on building its network of affiliates in countries like Congo, Mozambique and Niger. (Salem's plant in Tanzania is supposed to open later this year.) “We have to protect this network,” Lescanne said. “We are a bit afraid that big industrial companies will come.” In recent months, to take one example, PepsiCo Inc. has talked publicly about playing “a more decisive role” in bringing ready-to-use foods to needy populations. This has raised hackles: in a recent journal article titled “ The Snack Attack,” three nutritionists warned that Pepsi-branded therapies would potentially be “potent ambassadors for equivalently branded baby foods, cola drinks and snack foods.”

“What we don't want,” Salem told me, “is for General Mills to take over and put our Ethiopian producer out of business.” Opponents of the patent, however, say that Nutriset is just trying to avoid competition that would cut into its bottom line. Recently, a handful of companies have set up shop in countries where, because of the vagaries of various treaties, the Plumpy'nut patent is not in force. In the United States, two would-be competitors have taken a more confrontational route. They filed a lawsuit with the federal district court in Washington, D.C., seeking to have the patent invalidated.

The plaintiffs are a Texas-based manufacturer called Breedlove Foods and the Mama Cares Foundation, the charitable arm of a snack-food manufacturer based in Carlsbad, Calif. Both are small nonprofit organizations with strong ties to Christian aid organizations. But Nutriset's defenders suspect that larger corporate interests are lurking in the background. In the French press, the patent dispute has been portrayed as a case of a plucky Gallic company besieged, as Le Monde put it, by “ ‘légions' Américaines.”

In fact, there is a not-so-hidden instigator behind the case: the American peanut lobby. A few years ago, a Unicef official gave a presentation to an industry trade group, forecasting dramatically increasing demand for peanut pastes. That got the growers excited. They looked at Nutriset's patent and came to the conclusion that, as a technical matter, Plumpy'nut was really nothing more than fortified peanut butter. “People have been making this stuff for centuries,” Jeff Johnson, a board member of the Peanut Institute, said. “It's nothing new.” Johnson is the president of Birdsong Peanuts, one of the country's largest shelling operations. Through a friend, he heard about Breedlove Foods, which was based in Lubbock, close to one of his processing plants. Johnson met with the company and proposed a challenge to Nutriset.

“It's a cotton-pickin' shame that they decided to take the stance that they have with the intellectual-property issue,” said David Fish, Breedlove's chief executive, whose lawsuit contends that the patent is hurting starving children. But even some Nutriset critics have questioned the motives behind the lawsuit, pointing out that America has a long and controversial history of dumping its agricultural surpluses on poor countries through food aid. “If you want to develop countries out of third-world status,” Fish replies, “they've got to come out and compete on the open market.”

"Plumpy! Plumpy!”

With the shouted order from Rosemond Avril, an agent of a charity group, workers began unloading cardboard boxes full of foil packets from the back of a rusty blue truck. It was a sweltering Haitian morning, and next to a hive of canvas tents, the women of Bineau-Lestere were lined up beneath the branches of a gnarled quenepa tree. They were a handful of the millions displaced by last January's earthquake, which had turned the nearby city of Léogâne into a jagged pile of concrete. Their camp, thrown up amid fields of sugar cane, was surviving on aid. On this morning, the U.N.'s World Food Program was distributing Supplementary'Plumpy, a slightly weaker formulation of the original product, to mothers with children between 6 months and 35 months.

Haiti wasn't starving, but experts were still concerned about the perilous condition of its children. Even before the earthquake, an estimated quarter of them were chronically malnourished, and now many breadwinners were dead, livelihoods disrupted and much of the country's commercial infrastructure destroyed. By administering Supplementary'Plumpy to children in the age group most vulnerable to severe malnutrition, the World Food Program was trying to keep a bad situation from turning into a crisis. Across Haiti, the agency was distributing such aid to 500,000 people, and the results of a survey suggested that malnutrition levels had remained stable. “This is all new,” said Myrta Kaulard, country director for the World Food Program in Haiti. “It's preventative action.”

Darting around the scrum of women and toddlers, as a relief worker announced instructions in Creole through a bullhorn, Navyn Salem snapped pictures with her Nikon. She looked on with satisfaction as one jug-eared little boy ripped open a packet and squeezed the light brown paste into his mouth. She clicked the photo, and before long it was on its way to the Facebook page of Edesia Global Nutrition Solutions.

Salem had flown to Haiti a few days earlier aboard a private jet, lent by her husband, on a characteristically blurry mission: part sales call, part fact-finding tour. Edesia was sending its products to agencies in Haiti, the World Food Program among them, but what interested Salem most was the prospect of using ready-to-use foods to address conditions beyond severe malnutrition. She and Maria Kasparian, her second-in-command at Edesia, were shuttling from one charity to another in a loaned van, carrying boxes of free samples and brochures promoting three products designed to be taken as daily supplements. “Everyone knows Plumpy'nut,” Salem said before the trip, “but what we're really trying to do is push these others, to address malnutrition sooner.”

Scientists have shown that there is, in the words of The Lancet, “a golden interval” for childhood nutrition that occurs before the age of 2. “This is the period when brain growth is very extensive and babies are developing their immune systems,” said Kathryn Dewey, a professor in the department of nutrition at the University of California, Davis. Stunting that persists after age 2 is generally irreversible, while improved nutrition in early childhood correlates to greater educational success. One study, in Guatemala, showed that boys given a nutritional supplement as babies made 46 percent higher wages as men. Dewey has been testing whether Nutributter, one of Nutriset's new (and patent-protected) products, might achieve similar results. “There has to be a way to break the cycle of poverty and malnutrition that has plagued these populations for hundreds and hundreds of years,” she said. “That's the more grandiose vision of where this is headed.”

In Haiti's Artibonite Valley, Ian Rawson, the managing director of the Hôpital Albert Schweitzer, took Salem to see malnutrition inpatients — “our failures,” he called them — in a dimly lighted ward where they lay beneath a mural of parrots. Many of the children were unnaturally small and had patchy, orange-tinted hair, a classic sign of protein deficiency. “This,” Rawson said, waving a packet of Plumpy'nut, “is our immunization.” He was applying for a U.S. government grant to distribute Nutributter in the surrounding mountains, where poverty is dire, 9 out of 10 adults can't read and acute malnutrition rates can top 35 percent. “It seems simple to me,” he said. “What's the downside to me giving every child who's over 4 months old a tube of Nutributter per day?”

Advocates of the preventive approach foresee a future in which children around the world consume a daily packet of nutrient-filled paste. “It's not just for poverty-stricken people,” Salem said. “It's just like I give my children a multi­vitamin.” Of course, this changes the nature of the intervention from an emergency treatment to a habitual routine and also dramatically escalates its prospective cost to donors. As a practical matter, Salem says, supplements will probably have to reach children through consumer markets, perhaps with subsidies. Edesia is conducting testing in Tanzania to see whether Nutributter could be sold in stores.

Some experts, however, warn that enthusiasm may be running ahead of the science. “In their rush to be innovators, I think a lot of agencies are using ready-to-use supplementary foods without evidence,” said Steve Collins, who was a pioneering advocate of home-based care for severe malnutrition. “I wouldn't want to see a new world order where poor people are dependent on packaged supplementary foods that are manufactured in Europe or the United States.”

His wariness reflects a larger ideological divide over the proper distribution of profit. Nutriset says it is committed to opening more developing-world franchises, a strategy that brings down shipping costs and hence prices, but the majority of its network's inventory still comes from France, and now, with the entry of Edesia, Nutriset is going to be expanding exports from the United States. Collins asks, “How are they addressing the need for poor people in Haiti not to be dependent on outside intervention in the first place?”

This question hung, unanswerable, over Salem's journey through Haiti. Salem went there with a promise to donate a shipping container filled with $60,000 worth of Nutriset-patented products to Partners in Health, the charity run by her friend Paul Farmer. While grateful, the organization still preferred to manufacture its own product, Nourimanba, with the profits accruing to local farmers. But even this program was more a principled exercise than a development strategy. Haiti's endemic problem of malnutrition wasn't something you could solve with peanuts. Partners in Health also took Salem on a couple of home visits. At a one-room shack in Cange, a mother presented her 3-year-old daughter, saying she had gained 11 pounds on a regimen of Nourimanba. But the mother complained that there was no help for other serious problems she faced, like the fact that she had no job and the tin roof of her shack leaked.

Out in the hills, down a muddy path shaded by coconut palms, the health workers checked in on a small wooden farmhouse. Two children living there were on a regimen of ready-to-use food — and six were receiving nothing. The older ones watched as their little sister wolfed down an entire cup of peanut paste for the benefit of the visitors. The children's grandmother, who was looking after them, was asked why malnutrition had been diagnosed in these two and the others not. She said she couldn't really say, except that there simply wasn't enough food to go around. There was no foil-wrapped answer to the maddening persistence of poverty. All that existed was a determination to meet the challenge with all the fallible tools of human ingenuity.

“We're trying to put ourselves out of business,” said Salem, still brimming with optimism, after the trip. “That would be the best-case scenario.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/magazine/05Plumpy-t.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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U.S. Withholds Millions in Mexico Antidrug Aid

MEXICO CITY — The United States will withhold about $26 million promised for Mexico 's drug war because of concerns that the country has not done enough to protect its people from police and military abuse .

It is the first time that the United States, citing human rights concerns, has held back a portion of the financing for Mexico under the Merida Initiative , a three-year-old, $1.4 billion effort to help Mexico and Central American nations fight drug trafficking organizations.

Under the program, 15 percent of the money for Mexico is allotted on the condition that the country improve the accountability of the federal and local police; ensure civilian investigations and, if warranted, prosecutions of allegations of abuse by the police and the military; and ban testimony obtained through torture or other mistreatment.

The State Department, in a report delivered to Congress on Friday, said it would release $36 million from earlier budgets. But it said it would withhold 15 percent of the $175 million allocated in the most recent budget.

“No society can enjoy domestic peace and security without a functioning justice system supported by appropriately trained and equipped law enforcement and justice personnel who are respectful of human rights and rule of law,” said a State Department spokesman, Harry Edwards.

The State Department called on the Mexican Congress to pass legislation strengthening the authority of the country's national human rights commission and subjecting military service members accused of human rights abuses to civilian prosecution.

The Mexican government, in a statement, called the findings an affront to its sovereignty. “The Merida Initiative is based on shared responsibility, mutual trust and respect for each country's jurisdiction,” the statement said.

Nik Steinberg, Mexico researcher for Human Rights Watch , said, “Any withholding of funds would be a step in the right direction, but given the total impunity for military abuses and widespread cases of torture, none of the funds tied to human rights should be released.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/04/world/americas/04mexico.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Six Convicted of Sexual Crimes at Portuguese Children's Home

MADRID — Six people were convicted of child sexual abuse in a Lisbon court on Friday, in a trial that lasted nearly six years and shocked people in Portugal and beyond.

A three-judge panel found the defendants guilty of raping and sexually abusing minors at a state-run institution for needy children, and of running a ring for pedophiles. A seventh defendant, charged with allowing her home to be used for sexual abuse, was acquitted.

The charges involved the rape and sexual abuse of 32 children who were residents of the home in Lisbon, part of a network of institutions for children called Casa Pia. The crimes took place in the 1990s, but they first came to light in 2002, when a former resident accused Carlos Silvino, a former driver and gardener at the home, of raping him.

The accusation prompted others to come forward to say that they, too, had been raped and sexually abused. The allegations included accounts of sex parties attended by prominent personalities. The defendants included Carlos Cruz, a former star television anchor, who was sentenced to seven years in prison, and Jorge Ritto, a retired ambassador, who received a sentence of six years and eight months.

Mr. Silvino was the only defendant to have confessed, admitting to more than 600 crimes, including child sexual abuse, aggravated rape and procuring minors for others in return for payment. Mr. Silvino received the heaviest sentence, 18 years in prison. Mr. Cruz and most of the other defendants said they would appeal their convictions. Mr. Cruz contended that the case against him had been built on “lies and manipulation.”

Other scandals involving child sexual abuse have emerged across Europe, many involving accusations of abuses by Roman Catholic priests. In May, for example, a German special investigator released a report saying that 205 former students said they had been abused in the country's Jesuit schools, including the prestigious Canisius College in Berlin.

Casa Pia was founded in 1780 to help care for needy children. Five of the 32 people who came forward to say they had been raped or abused as children were in court on Friday to hear the reading of the verdict. Some are now in their 20s.

“This was a nightmare trial that left many people feeling that there would never be any sentencing, with some very good defense lawyers doing everything that they could to delay things for a very long time,” said José Manuel Fernandes, a former editor of Público, a Portuguese newspaper. “With this very important verdict, I think the public will now feel that sometimes at least even the powerful can get convicted for their crime.”

A failure to reach a verdict would have “made people here very angry” and would have seriously undermined faith in the country's judicial system, Mr. Fernandes said. More than 800 witnesses and experts testified in court over the lengthy trial, providing sometimes gruesome details of physical abuses. The verdict ran to thousands of pages.

A court ordered the Portuguese government in 2006 to pay more than $2.5 million in compensation to former residents of Casa Pia for failing to protect them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/04/world/europe/04portugal.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Zoning Law Aside, Mosque Projects Face Battles

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

In disputes over the construction and expansion of mosques in California, New York, Tennessee and elsewhere, supporters of the projects tend to invoke constitutional principles of religious freedom.

But to experts in land-use planning, the area of law that directly concerns the controversies scattered across the nation, the way to resolve such conflicts is in a more modern document than the Constitution. These fights are often all but moot, from a legal perspective at least, because of a federal law with an ungainly acronym.

“Every planner and zoning lawyer I've talked to about this is saying the same thing — Rluipa,” said Daniel Lauber, a past president of the American Planning Association.

The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act , whose initials are commonly pronounced Ruh-LOO-pa, was approved unanimously by Congress in 2000. Its chief sponsor was Senator Orrin G. Hatch , Republican of Utah.

The law sets a high bar for any government action that would impose zoning or other restrictions on a religious institution. Any such action must serve a “compelling government interest” while also being “the least restrictive means” of furthering that interest, the law says.

Despite the clear advantage that the law gives to religious institutions, disputes over the construction of mosques have emerged around the country.

In Murfreesboro, Tenn., an arson at the site of a mosque project has raised tensions. In Temecula, Calif., some mosque opponents brought dogs to a protest, thinking it would offend Muslims who believe the animals to be unclean. Backers withdrew the planned expansion of a mosque in Brentwood, Tenn., after critics raised their voices.

The opposition often reflects America's complicated attitudes toward the Middle East, in which passions run high and even basic facts are treated as objects of contention. The conservative New English Review stated the fundamental question as “whether Islam is a religion or a political doctrine seeking domination with a thin veneer of religious practices.”

To some experts, opposition to construction of the mosque and community center near ground zero, especially by religious organizations, seems surprising.

“It is quite interesting that some of the current opponents of the mosque construction, specifically Jewish leaders and conservative Christians, were formerly quite ardent supporters of the religious freedom offered by the religious land use act,” said Scott L. Thumma, a sociology of religion professor at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.

The controversy does not split neatly along political lines. Some Democrats, including the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid , have voiced concern over plans to build the Islamic center, while Republicans like Mr. Hatch insist that the government stick to the principles of religious liberty for which the law stands.

“Clearly, the proponents of the mosque have a legal and a constitutional right to build a house of worship on private property,” Mr. Hatch said in a statement, referring to the project in Manhattan.

Like Senator Reid and President Obama , however, Mr. Hatch noted that having a legal right to build the project did not necessarily mean that it was wise to do so.

“The question in this case is whether, given the inflamed passions of the community — including those of many people who lost family members on 9/11 — building the mosque at that location is a good idea,” he said.

Opponents of new mosque construction often cite factors other than religion, like parking and traffic, when houses of worship expand. But religion often remains part of the mix. In a statement on the mosque protest in Temecula, William Rench, the senior pastor of the nearby Calvary Baptist Church, said, “Our primary concern is that the land adjacent to our property is wholly inadequate and unsuited for the proposed 25,000-square-foot Islamic worship center.”

The rest of the statement concerns Islam itself. “It seems logical to me that we would be opposed to Islam based on its fundamental teachings and on documented stories of the terror that radical Islam promotes,” Mr. Rench wrote.

In an interview, Mr. Rench said that questions of national and local security should override land-use rules, though in the case of the mosque next door, “I don't think they represent the more extreme elements of Islam.” Still, he added, “how are we going to get assurances that it's never going to be an issue?”

Mahmoud Harmoush, the imam of the mosque, said that accusations of radicalism “really are not worth responding to,” and that despite the importance of Shariah, or Islamic law, to their faith, “we are bound by the law of the land,” just as someone who learns to drive in Britain must drive on the right side of the road in the United States.

No one knows what will happen in coming years or the next generation, Mr. Harmoush said, but “the future could be much better than Mr. Rench is imagining.” The mosque might, he said, for example, provide overflow parking for the church.

Patrick Richardson, the planning and development director for the City of Temecula, called the issue “very straightforward.”

“This is nothing related to politics or religion,” he said, “and the law basically precludes us from making that part of the decision-making process.”

The mosque will come up for its first public hearing in November, after the proponents complete a traffic study recommended by the city.

“I can't say I'm surprised that there is controversy about this,” Mr. Richardson said. “I'm probably a little more disappointed than anything.”

In Willowbrook, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, plans for a mosque and community center have run into opposition that has focused locally on grounds of parking, traffic and water runoff. But anti-Muslim Web sites have tried to fold that opposition into the broader fight over Islam.

Dr. M. A. Hamadeh, a pulmonologist who is the president of the Muslim Educational and Cultural Center of America, which is building the mosque, said news of other conflicts around the country troubled him.

“This is the greatest country in the world, and the greatness is based in freedom — freedom of religion, freedom of association, and of separation between state and religion,” Dr. Hamadeh said. “In order to continue to be a great country, we have to continue to uphold these values.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/04/us/politics/04build.html?pagewanted=print

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Scientist Sets Off Security Scare, Not His First, at Miami Airport

MIAMI (AP) — A scientist detained at Miami International Airport on Thursday night because of a suspicious item in his luggage had once been charged with illegally transporting bubonic plague, a senior law enforcement official said.

Officials shut down most of the airport overnight, roused hotel guests from their beds and detained Thomas Butler, 70, until Friday morning, when he was released without charges, the official said.

Tests on the canister found nothing dangerous, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. Nicholas Kimball, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman, said the item resembled a pipe bomb.

Mr. Butler became the focus of a federal investigation in 2003 when he reported that 30 vials of plague samples possibly had been stolen from his Texas Tech University laboratory.

He was acquitted of smuggling and illegally transporting the germ, and of lying to federal agents about the missing vials. Jurors found him guilty of the mislabeling and unauthorized export of a FedEx package that contained plague samples he sent to Tanzania.

He was also convicted of fraud and theft and sentenced to two years in prison for defrauding Texas Tech about illegally negotiated contracts he had with pharmaceutical companies.

The law enforcement official said that a Transportation Security Administration inspector noticed an odd container on Thursday as Mr. Butler, who had been teaching at a Saudi Arabian university, was going through customs. The inspector ran his name through a database and discovered that he had been tried on the plague-related charges. Officials decided to evacuate the airport and detain Mr. Butler.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/04/us/04miami.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From the Chicago Sun Times

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(A followup to an article from yesterday)

Arsonist: ‘I cannot forgive myself'

FEDERAL COURT | 2 get prison for fire that scarred 2 young sisters for life

September 4, 2010

BY NATASHA KORECKI and RUMMANA HUSSAIN Staff Reporters

Five-year-old Alondra Reyes, badly burned in a fire that was intentionally set two years ago, asked a judge to lock the arsonists away “until they have no more birthdays.”

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer made sure Margarita “Flaca” Gonzalez and Rafael Polanco won't celebrate any birthdays outside prison for a long time.

Pallmeyer sentenced Gonzalez to 25 years and Polanco to 17 1/2 years for torching the building where Alondra and her sister, Ariel, lived because of a lovers' spat involving the girls' mother.

The sentence was handed down after both Gonzalez and Polanco apologized for the crime.

“I cannot forgive myself for being so selfish. Ariel and Alondra, I'm so very sorry for my actions,” Polanco said to the sisters, who weren't in court.

Gonzalez, 27, turned her back, tears streaming down her face, when images of the injured Ariel and Alondra were shown in the courtroom.

The mother of five called the photos “unbearable” to look at. Her worst fear, she said, was her own children learning that she was responsible for hurting other kids.

“I don't want my own children to be scared of me,” a sobbing Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez is the half-sister of Heriberto Viramontes, who faces charges that he fractured the skulls of two women with a baseball bat as they walked home in Bucktown in April. One of the woman, Natasha McShane, an exchange student from Ireland, was left in a coma and hospitalized for months.

Days before the fire on Nov. 7, 2008, the girls were all smiles trick-or-treating on Halloween. Just a week later, the girls were hanging on to life, left with injuries so severe they were barely recognizable, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Nasser said..

Doctors were so sure Alondra was going to die that they gave her mother a lock of her hair and a book on how to say goodbye to a child, Nasser said.

On Thursday, Pallmeyer was told the girls must wear protective gear for 23 hours a day and be shielded from the sun because their skin is so tender.

“I'm mad that I'm burned. I'm mad that I have to wear a mask,” 8-year-old Ariel Reyes wrote in a letter to the court. “I'm not like any other girl. . . . I can't stand in the sun.”

Pallmeyer acknowledged the sentence could not compensate for the physical and psychological pain the girls must endure because of the “silly vendetta” and “absurd and distasteful jealousy” over a “man who certainly wasn't worth it.”

“They're little girls. They didn't deserve this,” the judge said while ordering Gonzalez and Polanco to pay $2.2 million in restitution when they are released from prison.

Gonzalez and Polanco, 28, had been involved in other arsons before they set fire to Janelle Fermaintt's car and apartment, at 5686 N. Elston, authorities said.

Gonzalez, the mastermind of the plot, used the couple's “weapon of choice” to get back at Fermaintt, who had been romantically involved with both Polanco and a jailed man Gonzalez was interested in, Nasser said. She called the arsonists “thoughtless, selfish and cowardly” for targeting a building where they knew at least 20 people lived.

Although Gonzalez's lawyer, Patrick Boyle, didn't absolve his client for actions that were far from “honorable,” Boyle said Gonzalez was remorseful and had often expressed how she wished she died in her sleep the night before the crime.

“These are not crocodile tears,” he said.

Outside the courtroom, Fermaintt and her mother said Gonzalez and Polanco got off easy.

“These girls and my daughter have to deal with this for the rest of their lives. They should have gotten life,” said Fermaintt's mother, the grandmother of Alondra and Ariel, who declined to give her name.

The girls' father, Juan Reyes, and their stepmother, Susana Lugo, had also hoped for a longer sentence but said their main concern now is to continually console the girls and ensure them that they are “beautiful no matter what.”

“These little girls have to live the rest of their lives with these scars,” Juan Reyes said.

“It's hard for them to go to school. . . . It's hard for us when they come home, telling us their problems, and we can't do nothing about them.”

Lugo said they will tell the children what unfolded in court but said it was hard to explain why this happened to them. They tell the girls there are “bad people out there who don't think about what they do,” Lugo said.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2670586,fire-girls-burned-sentencing-090310.article

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From the White House

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Weekly Address: President Obama Honors America's Workers; Outlines Steps Taken to Strengthen the Middle Class

WASHINGTON – In his weekly address, President Obama reaffirmed his commitment to America's workers and the middle class.  Even before the current recession hit, the middle class had been hurting from stagnant incomes and declining economic security.  To repair the economy and strengthen the middle class, the administration has invested in infrastructure projects that will lead to jobs in the private sector, taken emergency steps to prevent the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of teachers and cops, and cut taxes for 95 percent of working families.  The President is fighting to pass a law that will provide tax breaks for folks who create jobs in America.  

The full audio of the address is HERE . The video can be viewed online at www.whitehouse.gov .

Remarks of President Barack Obama
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Weekly Address
Washington DC

On Monday, we celebrate Labor Day. It's a chance to get together with family and friends, to throw some food on the grill, and have a good time.  But it's also a day to honor the American worker – to reaffirm our commitment to the great American middle class that has, for generations, made our economy the envy of the world.

That is especially important now.  I don't have to tell you that this is a very tough time for our country.  Millions of our neighbors have been swept up in the worst recession in our lifetimes.  And long before this recession hit, the middle class had been taking some hard shots.  Long before this recession, the values of hard work and responsibility that built this country had been given short shrift.

For a decade, middle class families felt the sting of stagnant incomes and declining economic security.  Companies were rewarded with tax breaks for creating jobs overseas.  Wall Street firms turned huge profits by taking, in some cases, reckless risks and cutting corners.  All of this came at the expense of working Americans, who were fighting harder and harder just to stay afloat – often borrowing against inflated home values to pay their bills.  Ultimately, the house of cards collapsed.

So this Labor Day, we should recommit ourselves to our time-honored values and to this fundamental truth: to heal our economy, we need more than a healthy stock market; we need bustling main streets and a growing, thriving middle class.  That's why I will keep working day-by-day to restore opportunity, economic security, and that basic American Dream for our families and future generations. 

First, that means doing everything we can to accelerate job creation. The steps we have taken to date have stopped the bleeding: investments in roads and bridges and high-speed railroads that will lead to hundreds of thousands of jobs in the private sector; emergency steps to prevent the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of teachers and firefighters and police officers; and tax cuts and loans for small business owners who create most of the jobs in America. We also ended a tax loophole that encouraged companies to create jobs overseas. Instead, I'm fighting to pass a law to provide tax breaks to the folks who create jobs right here in America.

But strengthening our economy means more than that.  We're fighting to build an economy in which middle class families can afford to send their kids to college, buy a home, save for retirement, and achieve some measure of economic security when their working days are done.  And over the last two years, that has meant taking on some powerful interests who had been dominating the agenda in Washington for far too long.

That's why we've put an end to the wasteful subsidies to big banks that provide student loans.  We're going to use that money to make college more affordable for students instead. 

That's why we're making it easier for workers to save for retirement, with new ways of saving their tax refunds and a simpler system for enrolling in retirement plans like 401(k)s.  And we're going to keep up the fight to protect Social Security for generations to come.

That's why we stopped insurance companies from refusing to cover people with pre-existing conditions and dropping folks who become seriously ill. 

And that's why we cut taxes for 95 percent of working families, and passed a law to help make sure women earn equal pay for equal work in the United States of America. 

This Labor Day, we are reminded that we didn't become the most prosperous country in the world by rewarding greed and recklessness.  We did it by rewarding hard work and responsibility.  We did it by recognizing that we rise or we fall together as one nation – one people – all of us vested in one another.  That is how we have succeeded in the past. And that is how we will not only rebuild this economy, but rebuild it stronger than ever before.

Thank you. And I hope you have a great Labor Day weekend.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/09/04/weekly-address-president-obama-honors-americas-workers-outlines-steps-ta

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Seniors Already Seeing Lower Prescription Drug Costs

The Affordable Care Act is working to help bring down the cost of prescription drugs for seniors enrolled in the Medicare Part D prescription drug program and today, we got more good news for our seniors.

This afternoon, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that Medicare prescription drug plan premiums for 2011 will stay similar to rates beneficiaries are currently paying this year.  The average premiums in 2010 were $29 per month – in 2011 we expect average monthly premiums to be just a dollar more.  All beneficiaries should check to make sure that the plan offerings that will be available in 2011 are right for them when information on those plans becomes available in October.

While there has been almost no change in premiums for 2011, people with Medicare will see big improvements in drug coverage next year. Under the Affordable Care Act, they will see lower prescription drug costs, if they fall into the coverage gap or “donut hole.”  This year, people with Medicare who are in the donut hole are receiving one-time $250 rebate checks.  Next year, they will receive 50% discounts on brand-name drugs and in each year their costs will be reduced even more until the donut hole is closed in 2020 - meaning that after 2020 there will be no more coverage gap, and people with Medicare will just pay their normal cost-sharing amount until they reach the annual out-of-pocket limit.

The Affordable Care Act also means less disruption for people with Medicare.  Low-income seniors often have to change prescription drug plans every year to find a plan with no premium.  Now, more beneficiaries with limited income will be able to keep their plan if they want to while continuing to have a wide range of plans to choose from if they want to change plans.

And just like President Obama promised – guaranteed benefits for the seniors and persons with disabilities who rely on Medicare won't change.

The Affordable Care Act was designed to strengthen the Medicare program and ensure that it will continue to provide health security to our seniors for many years to come.  Today's announcement – just like the recent news that the Affordable Care Act will help extend the life of the trust fund by 12 additional years – is good news for them and their children.

The Affordable Care Act also means less disruption for people with Medicare.  Low-income seniors often have to change prescription drug plans every year to find a plan with no premium.  Now, more beneficiaries with limited income will be able to keep their plan if they want to while continuing to have a wide range of plans to choose from if they want to change plans.

General information about premiums and benefits for each Part D and Medicare Advantage (MA) plan will be announced in September on www.cms.gov , and more detailed information to help beneficiaries review their plan options will be available in October at www.medicare.gov. In addition, each autumn, the comprehensive Medicare & You handbook and other program updates are mailed directly to beneficiaries' mailboxes with important information about health plans, prescription drug plans, and rights and protections to help people with Medicare, their families and caregivers review coverage options. And more information on how the Affordable Care Act will continue to strengthen and improve Medicare is available at www.HealthCare.gov , a new web portal.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/09/04/seniors-already-seeing-lower-prescription-drug-costs

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From ICE

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8 arrested in South Carolina gang enforcement action

COLUMBIA, S.C. - Eight associates of the Surenos 13 gang are facing new criminal charges or removal from the United States, following a joint anti-gang enforcement action Wednesday led by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in Columbia, the York County Sheriff's Office and the Rock Hill Police Department.

The operation took place in and around the York County/Rock Hill area in South Carolina.

The arrests were made as part of Operation Community Shield, an ongoing initiative by ICE HSI's National Gang Unit, in which the agency uses its powerful immigration and customs enforcement authorities in a coordinated strategy to attack and dismantle criminal street gangs across the country.

"Street gangs pose a threat to public safety in South Carolina," said Brock Nicholson, acting special agent in charge of the ICE HSI office in Atlanta. "With each gang member we arrest and remove from the United States, we're making a positive impact in our communities and improving public safety."

As part of the initiative, ICE partners with other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to target the significant public safety threat posed by transnational gangs.

Agents and officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) also assisted in the operation.

One of the individuals arrested will face federal criminal prosecution by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of South Carolina for felony re-entry after deportation, a federal violation that carries a potential penalty of up to 20 years in prison. That individual, a 32-year-old Honduran national, is also an aggravated felon with prior convictions for criminal possession of stolen property and rape.

The other seven are being processed for removal from the United States.

Since Operation Community Shield began in February 2005, ICE agents nationwide have arrested more than 18,000 gang members and gang associates. As part of the effort, ICE HSI's National Gang Unit identifies violent street gangs and develops intelligence on their membership, associates, criminal activities and international movements to deter, disrupt and dismantle gang operations.

Transnational street gangs have significant numbers of foreign-born members and are frequently involved in human and contraband smuggling, immigration violations and other crimes with a connection to the border.

To report suspicious activity, call ICE's 24-hour toll-free hotline at: 1-866-347-2423 or visit www.ice.gov .

http://www.ice.gov/pi/nr/1009/100903columbia.htm

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ICE repatriates 98 immigration violators to Asia on Seattle charter flight
Filipinos, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Malaysians, Indonesians and Japanese returned to their countries

SEATTLE - In a chartered flight that originated in Seattle on Aug. 31, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) returned 96 immigration violators to the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan and Cambodia; 66 of them had committed criminal offenses in the United States.

ICE's Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) coordinated the flight that returned 66 Filipinos, 18 Indonesians, 5 Cambodians, 4 Malaysians, 2 Japanese, and 1 Vietnamese nationals to their respective countries. The group included 79 males and 17 females. These individuals came into ICE custody from locations throughout the United States and were housed at various detention facilities across the country before being transported to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Wash., shortly before the flight.

Among the 66 who had been convicted of criminal offenses while living in the United States, their crimes included homicide, felony drug trafficking and possession, rape and other sex crimes, aggravated assault, weapons possession, grand theft, and burglary.

"This year, ICE expects to remove a record number of criminal aliens from the country and charter flights like this are a big part of making that happen," said ICE Director John Morton. "The United States welcomes law-abiding immigrants, but foreign nationals who violate our laws and commit crimes in our communities should be on notice that ICE is going to use all its resources to find you and send you home."

ICE officers and medical staff with the Division of Immigration Health Services accompanied aliens on the flight.

ICE routinely uses special air charters to transport aliens who have final orders of removal from an immigration judge. Staffed by ICE ERO officers, these air charters enable the agency to repatriate large groups of deportees in an efficient, expeditious, and humane manner.

During the first 11 months of fiscal year 2010, ICE has removed over 350,000 individuals from the United States, nearly half of whom had criminal convictions.

For more information, visit www.ice.gov .

http://www.ice.gov/pi/nr/1009/100903washingtondc2.htm

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From the FBI

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FAKE FUNERALS, EMPTY CASKETS A Different Kind of Scam 09/03/10 It's a morbid tale involving phony death certificates, staged funerals with paid actors, and coffins buried with no bodies, but in the end, it's just a financial fraud scheme like thousands of others we investigate every year. Earlier this month in Los Angeles, the fourth and final member of an insurance fraud ring was convicted in federal court. Jean Crump—a former mortuary employee—was found guilty of joining three other women in a scheme to defraud insurance companies by filing $1.2 million in phony life insurance policy claims.

Also victimized were several financial assignment companies, often used by funeral homes and mortuaries to advance cash for funeral expenses in exchange for a portion of the deceased's life insurance policies.

How the scam worked : In one instance, Crump and/or her co-schemers purchased life insurance policies for “Jim Davis,” naming his supposed “nephew” and “niece” as beneficiaries.

Mr. Davis conveniently had an untimely demise, and the conspirators created false documents, including a death certificate with a doctor's forged signature, to collect his life insurance. They also prepared grossly inflated bills for different amounts from a mortuary to cover the man's funeral and burial costs and wired the bills to two different assignment companies. Both assignment companies paid the mortuary (one nearly $30,000 and the other just over $16,000), but of course the money went right into the hands of the criminals—the mortuary was owned and operated by Lydia Pearce, one of the four charged in the investigation. And an insurance company paid out more than $230,000 in life insurance to Mr. Davis' so-called nephew.

The criminals went so far as to purchase a burial plot for Mr. Davis and bury him, without a headstone . But despite the extravagant funeral described on paper for the financial assignment companies—including an ornate casket and elaborate floral arrangements—the funeral was a simple affair, attended by several phony family members recruited to play the part of mourners in case anyone was watching. 

Each member of the fraud ring brought her own expertise to the table : Crump and Pearce, with their mortuary experience, knew all there was to know about funerals and death documents. Phlebotomist Faye Shilling knew the ins and outs of filing insurance claims, and notary Barbara Ann Lynn used her stamp to make the fake documents look legitimate.

How the scam unraveled . Two insurance companies began looking more closely at the claims and hired an investigator to ask questions. The con artists were so unnerved by this that they had the coffin supposedly holding the remains of Jim Davis unearthed. They filled the casket with a mannequin and cow parts to ensure the proper weight and then sent it to a crematory. Then, they filed phony paperwork stating that he had been cremated and had his ashes scattered over the Pacific Ocean.

The FBI's Los Angeles office eventually became involved. Upon closer inspection of the life insurance policies, death certificates, funeral bills, and financial information of the ring members, our investigators gathered the evidence needed to charge the four women—whose scheme ultimately met its own demise.

http://www.fbi.gov/page2/september10/fraud_090310.html

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