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From the Los Angeles Times

Authorities search for members of cult-like Palmdale group reported missing in feared suicide plot

Five adults and at least eight children are reported missing after leaving a prayer meeting, officials say.

By Patrick J. McDonnell and Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times

September 19, 2010

Authorities launched a major search for five members of a cult-like group in Palmdale and at least eight children who were reported missing after leaving a prayer meeting early Saturday in a feared mass suicide plot, according to Los Angeles County sheriff's officials.

The group was believed to be traveling in three vehicles: a white 2004 Nissan Quest, a 1995 white Mercury Villager and a newer-model, silver-colored Toyota Tundra, according to the California Highway Patrol, which issued an alert for them.

"It is believed, through further investigation, that [their] intentions are to commit mass suicide," said a California Highway Patrol alert, which was based on information from sheriff's officials.

Documents left behind by the group do not specifically mention suicide but contain references to "going to heaven" and the "end of the world," said Sheriff's Capt. Mike Parker.

Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said the children were ages 3 to 17, including six boys and two girls. The adults and children were reported missing Saturday afternoon by the husbands of two women in the group, officials said.

"We do not think this is a hoax. We don't know that this is a potential suicide, but we know that it's real and we're going to find them," Whitmore said.

The adults, including three sisters, belong a religious sect that broke off from a Palmdale church whose name was unknown, Whitmore said.

Among those missing, the CHP alert said, is Reyna Marisol Chicas, 32, described as the leader of the group.

Sheriff's patrol cars and several helicopters were scouring the Antelope Valley for the group, officials said.

The husbands walked into a Palmdale sheriff's station at 2 p.m. carrying a bag of belongings the missing people left behind, including identification, cash, cellphones, deeds to homes and letters, according to Whitmore.

"The letters essentially state that they [the missing persons] are all going to heaven shortly to meet Jesus and their deceased relatives," the alert said. "Numerous letters found say goodbye to their relatives."

Parker said one of the husbands told deputies that he feared that the adults had been "brainwashed."

The group was last seen on East Avenue R4 in Palmdale at about 1 a.m. Saturday, the CHP alert said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0919-suicide-20100919,0,6444413,print.story

Updates

Authorities late Saturday released the names of more than a dozen missing people -- including nine children --linked to a cult-like group.

Update, 12:48 a.m.:
While the search continues, sheriff's Capt. Mike Parker cautioned that letters left behind do not mention suicide. Parker says the information left in a purse refers to the rapture, the end of the world and "going to heaven." He says the missing people have no history of violence or harming themselves. Sheriff's deputies began investigating when two husbands reported about 1:45 p.m. that they believed their wives had gone off with the cult-like group led by Reyna Chicas. One of the men told investigators he was ordered to guard and pray over a purse. But after some time he became concerned and looked inside. There he found five cell phones, many IDs, deeds and letters. The husbands told investigators they believed Chicas had brainwashed those missing and they may be at risk. The cult-like group formed among a small part of a local Christian church, and all its members are of El Salvadoran descent. The adults missing include three sisters and an adult son.

Update, 12:11 a.m.:
One person previously listed as a missing child is in fact an adult, so the missing include eight children.

Law enforcement officials, fearing of a mass suicide, launched a major search. The group was believed to be traveling in three vehicles: a white 2004 Nissan Quest, a 1995 white Mercury Villager and a newer-model, silver-colored Toyota Tundra, according to the California Highway Patrol, which issued an alert for them. The group was last seen at 1:00 a.m. Saturday at a prayer meeting in a Palmdale church at 158 East Avenue, R-4.

Here are the names of the missing, from the California Highway Patrol:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/

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Illegal immigrants pour across border seeking work

Sound familiar? It's happening in China, where rapid growth has led to a shortage of workers to fill low-skill jobs. But the Chinese don't seem to be concerned.

By David Pierson, Los Angeles Times

September 19, 2010

Reporting from Aidian, China

The illegal immigrants come seeking higher wages, steady employment and a chance at better lives for their families. They cross the border in remote stretches where there are no fences or they pay traffickers to sneak them past border guards.

Then they work as maids, harvest crops or toil hunched in sweatshops.

As familiar as this sounds, this is not the United States or Europe, but China, which is attracting an increasing number of undocumented workers to fill the bottom rungs of its booming economy. Tens of thousands of foreigners from Southeast Asia, North Korea and even faraway Africa are believed to be working here illegally.

Among the most active areas for the furtive crossings is China's 800-mile southern borders with Vietnam, whose people are drawn by jobs in China that may pay twice as much as they do at home.

"People are struggling for money in Vietnam. They look at China and think it's rich," said Anh Bang, a 23-year-old Vietnamese clothing merchant who travels legally to China several times a month but empathizes with those who enter without documents. "In China they can find a job easily and earn so much more."

Labor shortages in China's export-heavy eastern coastal regions are driving demand for foreign workers. So are Chinese workers' calls for higher wages, which are cutting into employers' profits.

"This is an economic phenomenon," said Zhang Wenshan, a professor of law at Guangxi University who has studied the rise of illegal workers. "It's globalization. Labor costs are increasing in China. This is hard on employers who don't necessarily need sophisticated laborers. So a lot of foreigners are motivated to come here.… It's like how many Chinese have gone to the U.S. to seek better lives."

It's an unlikely reversal for a country that until recently seemed to have an endless supply of cheap labor. But rapid development and urbanization are just as quickly raising workers' expectations. Young, rural Chinese have fled the farms for cities. Factory workers are choosing to strike rather than accept minimal pay. In their wake they're leaving openings that foreign workers are eager to fill.

With their numbers still relatively small and China's economy growing rapidly, illegal immigrants so far haven't been the lightning rod that they are in the United States. China has no social safety net to speak of, so there's no resentment of immigrants using public services.

Still, tensions are growing. The Chinese government, historically wary of foreigners, has granted permanent residency to only a few thousand migrants in the last three decades. Sporadic roundups of illegal workers are on the rise. Friction between authorities and African merchants exploded into a riot last year in the southern city of Guangzhou after police were accused of harassment.

Controlling the influx of illegal workers isn't easy, even for an authoritarian state. China shares a border with 14 countries. The nation famous for its Great Wall has virtually no fencing or barriers along this boundary, which stretches 13,670 miles through tropical forests, mountains and deserts.

"Beijing will start worrying if they're not worrying already," said Demetri Papademetriou, president of the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. "But no country that reaches the status of China's economy doesn't go through this."

For many Vietnamese, the quest for the Chinese Dream often begins in border communities such as Aidian, a shabby village of 8,500 in the province of Guangxi, an under-developed region along the border with Vietnam.

On a recent rainy afternoon, two young men wearing basketball jerseys sat on plastic stools on the Chinese side of the border collecting 10,000 Vietnamese dong, about 50 cents, from a steady flow of people entering from the Vietnamese side. The visitors showed no documents, even though a passport and visa are required by law. The men collecting the entrance fees declined to say whom they worked for.

Wei Haiguang, a contractor whose business is just up the street from the border crossing, said corruption in the region was endemic. He said friends of his had helped guide Vietnamese workers into China at the bidding of employment agents, who pay about $30 for each laborer. Most of the foreigners are young, 17 to 20 years old.

The government "won't ever be able to control the border," said Wei, a stocky 38-year-old wearing Buddhist bracelets and an ivory pendant. "There's too many small roads and passes. Besides, who else is going to work in the fields?"

The job of Chinese authorities is particularly challenging here because it's tough to tell who's who. Members of the Zhuang ethnic minority group dominate parts of Guangxi and share a heritage and a distinct language with natives of northern Vietnam. Many Vietnamese also speak Cantonese, which helps them navigate the factory towns of Guangdong, where the language is the native tongue.

"There's really no big difference between the Vietnamese and us," said Qin Zhongjiang, who runs a health center in Chongzuo, a city 40 miles from the border whose central bus station often serves as a pick-up point for undocumented workers.

Chinese farmer Lu Qixue hires Vietnamese laborers before the autumn sugar cane harvest. For as long as five grueling months, the foreign workers put in 10-hour days thwacking sugar cane stalks with scythes.

"They work slowly and we always have to train them, but we can't find enough skilled Chinese," said Lu, a rail-thin 58-year-old village chief with gravelly stubble. "If we don't hire the Vietnamese we won't be able to grow as much."

A capable Chinese worker is paid about $9 a day. A Vietnamese hire gets just over $5. Lu said he has no choice but to rely on the illegal help because his three sons have no interest in working the fields. Two are contractors and one is a taxi driver.

"I don't want to carry sugar cane down the mountain," said his youngest son, Lu Xinghuan, 26, who aspires to own a trucking company. "It's hard work."

Labor activists said the increasing use of undocumented foreigners is undermining gains made with China's 2008 labor law regulating working hours and workplace conditions.

"These [foreign] workers have no legal protection at all and are often complicit with their employers in keeping their presence out of sight of the authorities," said Geoffrey Crothall, a spokesman for China Labor Bulletin. "If they are discovered they will be sent straight back to Vietnam unless the boss pays off the police. We have seen the same situation with child labor in the past."

Officially, businesses that hire undocumented aliens are fined as much as $7,352. Workers are fined $147 and face deportation.

Despite the crackdowns it remains to be seen whether illegal immigration will spark much resentment among the Chinese. Zhu Guanqiao, a restaurant owner from Guangzhou, was in Guangxi province recently on his way to a vacation in Vietnam. Waiting to cross the border with his 10-year-old son, he said he sympathized with the Vietnamese workers.

"Everyone has to eat," said Zhu, 38, standing near a border gate in the Chinese city of Pingxiang. "The Vietnamese are poor and their living standards are lower than ours. We're a richer country now. If they come here just to work, I think we should let them."

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-china-illegal-immigration-20100919,0,3456280.story

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Save the parks

As the state's budget continues to wobble out of control, it makes sense for us to make our parks the places where we draw the line, the institution we rally behind.

OPINION

By Bob Sipchen

September 19, 2010

Seen through a dive mask from the surging kelp beds near Mendocino on a recent weekend, the sunlit coast was a glorious smudge of redwoods, sea caves and the iconic bridge that carries Highway 1 arching over Russian Gulch State Park.

Combine that with the sound of pounding surf and the delicate flavor of abalone freshly pried off the rocks and you'll understand why my wife, Pam, and I were so happy when a group of friends invited us, three years ago, to join the ritual Labor Day weekend feast that has brought them to this campground every year since 1985.

But what really inspires me as I write this defense of the California State Parks system and the November ballot measure that just may save it are memories conjured by the antiseptic aroma of bleached concrete in the campground showers and restrooms. It's a scent I experienced as a sunburned kid at San Elijo State Beach near San Diego, and as a hitchhiking college student on a rainy morning at Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park near the Oregon border.

Along with the sight of rangers in snappy hats and well-maintained signs and stairways, that scent symbolized responsibility. It made me proud that I lived in a state where people took care of the property they shared.

In his recent PBS series, filmmaker Ken Burns declared the national parks "America's Best Idea." California has had at least a dozen great ideas, including the kosher burrito, aerospace and flip-flops as semi-formal fashion. But even as an alumnus of our excellent university and college system, I'd have to put our state parks at the top of the list.

The first fence probably went up in California soon after those first European explorers bumped into this place. Trees continued to topple as people, quite naturally, scrambled to parcel up the spectacular landscape. Today, however, even the relatively few folks with the means to own a piece of rocky shore, oak savanna, boulder-strewn desert or forested mountainside must feel blessed that leaders had the good sense to set aside such a fine sampling of the state's bounty for everyone. If it weren't for state parks, all most of us would see of the coast, for example, would be tall and tasteful redwood fences.

Over the years, however, the state's budget has grown increasingly battered ,and many of California's 278 state parks, beaches and historic parks have fallen into disrepair. Railings have rotted. Trails have washed out. Parks are at risk of closing, and the state has cut hours at more than a few. I've read that sewage leaks have turned some parks into odiferous health risks. More than $1 billion worth of maintenance and repairs are long past due.

Proposition 21, the State Parks and Wildlife Conservation Trust Fund Act of 2010, would raise $350 million or more a year for our parks. Anyone registering a vehicle in California would pay an extra $18. That would raise enough money to hire back rangers, boost interpretive programs and mend plenty of those ubiquitous cast-iron grills.

And we'd get something in return: Vehicles registered in the state would be entitled to free day-use of the parks, which, according to the state's legislative analyst, could lure more visitors who would spend more on concession sales and camping fees, boosting revenues even more.

Tellingly, there's no official opposition to this measure. If you browse the Web you'll find a few crabby posts along the lines of "Don't ask me to subsidize the hippies and their tree-hugging madness." Such people need to push back from their computers and visit a park.

I've watched at-risk urban kids dive screaming into a cold creek while on their first backpacking trip at Henry W. Coe State Park near San Jose, and I've surfed with investment bankers at San Onofre State Beach in southern Orange County. Pitch a tent at Malibu Creek State Park and you sample a landscape Halle Berry pays millions to inhabit; Watts Towers of Simon Rodia State Historic Park provides uplift from within a notoriously downtrodden neighborhood.

Stumbling out of a Costco tent to the scent of sizzling bacon, on a cool morning with fog lifting off the forest, you won't miss the fluffy robes and pillow mints of a Ritz-Carlton.

Our own kids pretended to be impoverished miners swaggering down the dusty, ghost-town streets of Bodie State Historic Park and eccentric billionaires surveying the gilded fountains at Hearst Castle. They've stroked sea urchins in tide pools, watched meteors blaze across the desert sky and heard scrub jays squawking from trees with trunks as big around as the body of a 747.

Walk through a state park and you'll notice something: People tend to be happy there. In just the past two months I have danced at an Asilomar State Beach wedding reception and barbecued burgers at Doheny State Beach while, in the distance, a pastor baptized new Christians in the waves.

At Russian Gulch last weekend, I passed a campsite packed with Harley-Davidsons and pickup trucks plastered with imaginative anti-environmentalist slurs. These campers couldn't have missed my Sierra Club hat. Still, following campground etiquette, several called out friendly "hellos."

Parks, after all, are the state's egalitarian pressure relief system. They're where otolaryngologists and fry cooks go to shed stress, hang out with friends and live for a few days in ad hoc neighborhoods defined by picnic tables and fire rings rather than socioeconomics. At this moment, when people lucky enough to have jobs are working harder than ever, our parks provide an indispensible boost to our collective morale.

Because feelings and memories tend to burrow deeper into the mind after nature has relaxed us, the relatively small amount of time most of us spend in the parks we love plays a disproportionately large role in shaping our identity as Californians. That's why, as the state's budget continues to wobble out of control, it makes sense for us to make our parks the places where we draw the line, the institution we rally behind. Each yes vote on Proposition 21 will be a small but symbolic gesture that Californians can again be counted upon to take care of what's ours.

Bob Sipchen is the Sierra Club's national communications director and editor in chief of its Sierra magazine.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-sipchen-state-parks-20100919,0,1487865,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Left Behind in Venezuela to Piece Lives Together

CIUDAD GUAYANA, Venezuela — The first scavengers one sees in Cambalache, a sprawling trash dump on this city's edge, are the vultures. Hundreds drift through the veil of smoke that rises from the refuse each day at dawn.

The carrion birds vie with children and their parents for scraps of meat discarded by Ciudad Guayana's more fortunate residents. Those toiling under the vultures' wake mutter to one another in Warao, an indigenous language spoken in the nearby delta where the Orinoco , one of the world's mightiest rivers, meets the Atlantic.

“I'm hungry, and my children are hungry,” said Raisa Beria, 25, a Warao who came here to scavenge for clothes and food.

In one outing this month, Ms. Beria found some rotting chicken still in the packaging from Arturo's , a Venezuelan fast-food chain. Her daughter, Eugenia, 4, grasped a chicken wing. Flies circled around her small hand. “This is how we live,” Ms. Beria said in accented Spanish.

Such harrowing scenes of misery are supposed to be receding into Venezuela 's history. The country claims in figures it gives the United Nations that it vies with historically egalitarian Uruguay for Latin America's most equitable income distribution, as a result of oil-financed social welfare programs.

Moreover, President Hugo Chávez has made empowerment of indigenous groups a pillar of his 12-year rule. He has financed indigenous health care projects, an indigenous university and a new ministry for indigenous peoples, who are estimated to number about half a million in Venezuela.

Officials said this year that Venezuela's tribes had reasons to celebrate the “end of exclusion” because “equality, rights and peace now reign.” Still, if Cambalache's squalor is any indication, some indigenous people still face a more vexing reality than his government's words suggest.

Reflecting Venezuela's political complexity, most of the Warao interviewed here expressed loyalty to Mr. Chávez, even as they ate out of Ciudad Guayana's garbage. The people interviewed cited their access to some social programs, including literacy projects, as reasons for their allegiance, while others professed more visceral sentiments including pride that Mr. Chávez had affirmed that his own grandmother was a Pumé Indian.

Politics aside, about 300 Warao now live in shacks and tents on Cambalache's edge, near the banks of the Orinoco. Most migrated from Delta Amacuro, an impoverished state of labyrinthine swamp forests that is home to thousands of Warao.

Scholars who study the Warao people say they put down stakes here around the early 1990s, when a cholera epidemic killed about 500 people in the delta. Many Warao there live in homes built on stilts and eat a diet based on a tuber called ure.

In the delta, oil drilling and demand for heart of palm, the vegetable harvested from the inner core of palm trees, put more pressure on Warao areas. Ciudad Guayana, a Brasília-like industrial city designed by planners from Harvard and M.I.T. in the 1960s, absorbed various Warao communities fleeing poverty.

Some Warao wander the broad avenues here, begging for food. Others sell wares like bracelets at intersections. Others subsist at Cambalache, located minutes from boutiques selling luxury goods and the headquarters of government factories adorned with huge photos of Mr. Chávez.

At Cambalache, the Warao scavenge for food, aluminum, copper wiring and clothing. The daily struggle they describe is a Hobbesian nightmare.

They say thieves prey on those who sell scrap metal to dealers. Some Warao women, they say, sell their bodies to outsiders, contributing to reports of H.I.V. infections in the community. Some perish under the trash-compacting trucks, including a 14-year-old boy who was crushed to death in July.

Faced with these conditions, the Warao here adapt. Adults carry knives tucked into their belts. They shrug at Cambalache's stench and at the ash from its daily fires, which clogs the airways of those working at the dump.

Bands of Warao children sift through the piles of garbage. On a recent hazy morning, a girl plucked from the trash a half-consumed plastic bottle of Frescolita, a Venezuelan soft drink whose flavor resembles cream soda, and quenched her thirst with what remained inside.

Christian Sorhaug, a Norwegian anthropologist who has lived among the Warao, doing field work here during the past decade, said, “Cambalache is the worst place I have ever seen in my life.”

Entire families arrive at sunrise each day, chasing after trucks that unload fresh cargoes of trash. One truck that arrived at Cambalache this month had painted on its side the name José Ramon López, Ciudad Guayana's mayor, under the words “Socialist Beautification Plan.”

The authorities know about the Warao who live at Cambalache. Their living conditions are a highly sensitive issue.

The mayor's office, which refers to the area where the Warao live as “UD-500,” said in a statement that it was planning to build more homes for the indigenous families

Warao leaders and researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, informed federal health officials in 2008 of an outbreak of a rabieslike disease that killed dozens in Delta Amacuro, only to have the authorities refuse to see them, attack them in speeches, try to discredit their findings and open a criminal investigation into their report .

A Cuban doctor working for the government provides basic health care to residents, forwarding Warao with serious diseases like tuberculosis and measles to public hospitals. Wilhelmus van Zeeland, 69, a Dutch priest who works with the Warao at Cambalache, said health care programs had helped lower deaths from sanitation-related diseases since he arrived here in 1999. Corporación Venezolana de Guayana, a state-owned industrial conglomerate, recently donated 15 cinderblock houses to the Warao here.

Pedro La Rosa, 42, who is considered the leader of the Warao at Cambalache, said at least 30 more homes were needed. “We're never going to leave this place,” he said in an interview. “We've claimed this land and made our life in this dump, and this is where our future rests.”

The Warao keep arriving at Cambalache, dividing themselves between squatters who stay and those who come for a few weeks to scavenge goods to sell back in the delta.

Sometimes it is hard to tell who belongs to which group.

As the smoke from Cambalache's fires blew across the Orinoco, Ismenia La Rosa, 41 — unrelated to Pedro La Rosa — welcomed a visitor to her tent among those the Warao call “floaters,” for their urge to return home to the delta's swamp forests.

She cradled her newborn son, merely six days old and still lacking a name. He was her fifth child, she said, with an exhausted expression that revealed neither happiness nor sorrow. “My son was born in Cambalache,” she said. “I think this is where he'll stay.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/world/americas/19venez.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1284886836-7AHFfzXfoijpaqTCaCpyQA&pagewanted=print

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U.S. Hiker Travels Home From Iran

MUSCAT, Oman (AP) — An American woman released from Iran after more than 13 months in custody began her journey back to the United States on Saturday after asking her supporters to “extend your prayers” to her fiancé and another American man who remain in Tehran accused of spying.

In a brief statement, the woman, Sarah E. Shourd , 32, thanked Oman — an ally of both Iran and the United States — for mediating the $500,000 bail that led to her freedom on Tuesday. But she made no mention of her ordeal inside Tehran's notorious Evin Prison or any health problems — which her mother has said include a breast lump and precancerous cervical cells.

Earlier in Tehran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he was hopeful that the United States would release several Iranians it was holding now that Ms. Shourd had been freed.

The three Americans were detained in July 2009 hiking along the Iraqi border. Iran has issued espionage-related indictments, which could bring trials for the two men and proceedings in absentia for Shourd. Their families say that if they crossed the border, they did so unintentionally.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/world/middleeast/19iran.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Two Cousins, Two Paths -- Thomas McLaughlin, left, was given a promising experimental drug to treat his lethal skin cancer in a medical trial; Brandon Ryan had to go without it.

New Drugs Stir Debate on Basic Rules of Clinical Trials by Amy Harmon New York Times September 19, 2010 Growing up in California's rural Central Valley, the two cousins spent summers racing dirt bikes and Christmases at their grandmother's on the coast. Endowed with a similar brash charm, they bought each other matching hardhats and sought iron-working jobs together. They shared a love for the rush that comes with hanging steel at dizzying heights, and a knack for collecting speeding tickets.

And when, last year, each learned that a lethal skin cancer called melanoma was spreading rapidly through his body, the young men found themselves with the shared chance of benefiting from a recent medical breakthrough.

Only months before, a new drug had shown that it could safely slow the cancer 's progress in certain patients. Both cousins had the type of tumor almost sure to respond to it. And major cancer centers, including the University of California, Los Angeles , were enrolling patients for the last, crucial test that regulators required to consider approving it for sale.

“Dude, you have to get on these superpills,” Thomas McLaughlin, then 24, whose melanoma was diagnosed first, urged his cousin, Brandon Ryan. Mr. McLaughlin's tumors had stopped growing after two months of taking the pills.

But when Mr. Ryan, 22, was admitted to the trial in May, he was assigned by a computer lottery to what is known as the control arm. Instead of the pills, he was to get infusions of the chemotherapy drug that has been the notoriously ineffective recourse in treating melanoma for 30 years.

Even if it became clear that the chemotherapy could not hold back the tumors advancing into his lungs, liver and, most painfully, his spine, he would not be allowed to switch, lest it muddy the trial's results.

“I'm very sorry,” Dr. Bartosz Chmielowski , the U.C.L.A. oncologist treating both cousins, told Mr. Ryan's mother, Jan. He sounded so miserable that afternoon that Mrs. Ryan, distraught, remembers pausing to feel sorry for the doctor.

Controlled trials have for decades been considered essential for proving a drug's value before it can go to market. But the continuing trial of the melanoma drug, PLX4032, has ignited an anguished debate among oncologists about whether a controlled trial that measures a drug's impact on extending life is still the best method for evaluating hundreds of genetically targeted cancer drugs being developed.

Defenders of controlled trials say they are crucial in determining whether a drug really does extend life more than competing treatments. Without the hard proof the trials can provide, doctors are left to prescribe unsubstantiated hope — and an overstretched health care system is left to pay for it. In melanoma, in particular, no drug that looked promising in early trials had ever turned out to prolong lives.

PLX4032 shrinks tumors in the right patients, for a limited time. But would those who took it live longer? No one knew for sure.

“I think we have to prove it,” said Dr. Paul B. Chapman , a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who is leading the trial. “I think we have to show that we're actually helping people in the long run.”

But critics of the trials argue that the new science behind the drugs has eclipsed the old rules — and ethics — of testing them. They say that in some cases, drugs under development, PLX4032 among them, may be so much more effective than their predecessors that putting half the potential beneficiaries into a control group, and delaying access to the drug to thousands of other patients, causes needless suffering.

“With chemotherapy, you're subjecting patients to a toxic treatment, and the response rates are much lower, so it's important to answer ‘Are you really helping the patient?' ” said Dr. Charles L. Sawyers , chairman of human oncology at Sloan-Kettering. “But with these drugs that have minimal side effects and dramatic response rates, where we understand the biology, I wonder, why do we have to be so rigorous? This could be one of those defining cases that says, ‘Look, our system has to change.' ”

Dr. Richard Pazdur, director of the cancer drug office at the Food and Drug Administration , said in a recent interview that the new wave of drugs in development — especially for intractable cancers like melanoma — might require individual evaluation. “This is an unprecedented situation that will, hopefully, be increasingly common, and it may require a regulatory flexibility and an open public discussion,” he said.

And doctors say that for them, the new wave of cancer drugs is intensifying the conflict between their responsibility to their patients and their commitment to gathering scientific knowledge for generations of the critically ill.

Of course, no single pair of patients can fairly represent the outcomes of a trial whose results are not yet known. Rather, the story of Thomas McLaughlin and Brandon Ryan is one of entwined paths that suddenly diverged, with a roll of the dice.

At times beseeching and belligerent, Mr. McLaughlin argued his cousin's case to get the new drug with anyone he could find at U.C.L.A. “Hey, put him on it, he needs it,” he pleaded. And then: “Who the hell is making these decisions?”

He believed he should trade places on the trial with Mr. Ryan, who was pursuing his contractor's license and had just bought a four-bedroom home in Bakersfield. “Brandon has everything going for him,” he told his Aunt Jan.

But Mr. Ryan told his mother he was glad that Mr. McLaughlin, who has a young son and daughter, was the one getting the promising drug. “Tommy has the kids,” he said. “They need him around.”

Path to a Second Trial

The debate over the controlled testing of PLX4032 began in June 2009, around the time Mr. McLaughlin awakened with what felt like an explosion under his right armpit.

The drug, manufactured by Roche, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, was designed for melanoma patients whose tumors carry a particular mutation, and the company reported that month that nearly all 32 such patients in the drug's first clinical trial, called Phase 1, had seen their tumors shrink.

The reprieve was all too brief: most saw their tumors begin to grow again within the year. Still, The New England Journal of Medicine called the drug “a major breakthrough” for people with advanced melanoma, whose median survival is eight months after diagnosis. A second, or Phase 2, trial, aiming to validate the results in more patients, was already in the works. And in meetings that summer, several oncologists urged Roche to seek accelerated approval from the F.D.A. The agency allows a manufacturer to sell a drug based on early promise so long as it proceeds with the traditional controlled trial comparing it with the standard treatment.

But with patients already begging doctors for the drug, it seemed unlikely that anyone would join a trial with only a 50-50 chance of getting PLX4032 once it was already on the market. Unless the trial was conducted before approval, it seemed, there would be no chance to get definitive data on its effectiveness.

Some melanoma specialists familiar with the drug would have traded the data for faster access to the drug. “I know all that I need to know based on the results we already have,” said Dr. Keith Flaherty of Massachusetts General Hospital , who led the early clinical testing. “My use of this drug is not going to be informed by testing it against a drug we all hate and would rather never give a dose of again in our lives.”

The standard chemotherapy used in melanoma, dacarbazine, slowed tumor growth in 15 percent of patients for an average of two months. By contrast, PLX4032 had halted tumor growth in 81 percent of patients for an average of eight.

It was conceivable that when the cancer started up again, it would progress much faster in patients who had taken the new drug, wiping out any extra time they might have gained. But even if so, many doctors believed that if the drug provided relief by shrinking tumors — like the one Mr. McLaughlin soon learned was pressing against a nerve in his arm — that would improve their patients' lives.

The trial, moreover, would cost $100 million and delay the possibility of F.D.A. approval by at least two years. To some doctors, it seemed a waste of time and resources that would be better used for trials testing what everyone most cared about: how to prolong the remissions.

There was reason to believe that combining PLX4032 with other drugs — some from competitors — would make it more effective. But researchers had to rely on Roche for permission until the drug was available for sale, and the company had not been forthcoming.

Dr. Chapman of Sloan-Kettering came up with a new tack: an unconventional bid to speed the drug's approval, rooted in the observation that patients weeks or days from death could get out of bed and off oxygen when given PLX4032, sometimes for months. The doctors working with the drug referred to this as the Lazarus effect; it was unheard of with dacarbazine.

A trial that cataloged PLX4032's effect on the well-being of the sickest patients, Dr. Chapman argued, would probably yield fast, tangible results. For him, it represented a chance to give patients symptomatic relief, even if the drug turned out not to prolong life.

“Even without a survival benefit, maybe we could show that it helps people,” he urged. “If you could get Aunt Sadie to the wedding and off of oxygen, that would be great.”

But company officials feared that might lead to approval for only a narrow group of the sickest patients. The surest way to get the F.D.A's endorsement for a broader market was a controlled trial. And with its competitors rushing to get similar drugs to market, the findings of such a trial might give Roche an advantage in marketing its version as the only one proven to prolong survival.

On Sept. 1 last year, the company submitted its plan to the F.D.A. for the traditional, randomized, controlled trial of PLX4032. It would involve 680 patients, half of them in a control group. Dr. Chapman would be the lead investigator for more than 100 sites in the United States, Europe and Australia. Because of the different ways the drugs were dispensed — one by mouth and one by infusions — doctors and patients, it was decided, would both know who got which drug.

The following week was when Mr. Ryan learned that his cousin might have a health problem. He called Mr. McLaughlin from a job site in Colorado, to tell him about his new Dodge Ram, a truck he knew Mr. McLaughlin had long coveted.

He invited Mr. McLaughlin to come stay with him: there was plenty of welding work, and he could help break in the truck. But Mr. McLaughlin, who had no health insurance , had finally visited a doctor about the pain under his arm. It was melanoma, and he would need surgery to remove some lymph nodes.

“Wow,” Mr. Ryan said, suddenly silent. “You have cancer?”

Two Men's Struggles

Mr. McLaughlin's surgery, it seemed, had come too late. In the weeks following, small tumors popped up across his body, including one on his collarbone and one on his triceps.

When Mr. Ryan discovered a swollen node under his own right armpit in October, his mother was not taking any chances. She begged him to go to the emergency room in Colorado. Even so, when the verdict was melanoma, both families were shocked.

Was it genes? Their mothers, after all, were sisters. But there was no history of cancer in the family.

Environment? The boys had fought, played and competed with each other since childhood: who could hold his breath the longest, do the highest cannonball dive, suck down a Slurpee fastest, win their grandfather's approval? They had ranged across California on iron-working jobs, eating the same food, drinking the same large quantities of beer, promising, in a rare moment of seriousness, that each would bury the other with his hardhat when the moment came. Coincidence?

Compared with most cancers, melanoma strikes a disproportionate number of young people; it is the sixth most common cancer in the United States.

There was no way to know.

Last Thanksgiving, Mr. McLaughlin greeted Mr. Ryan with the usual bear hug. “Looks like we're doing this together,” he said.

Not ones for excessively talking things over, they left it at that.

Yet both cousins, like the other family members, believed then that Mr. Ryan stood a far better chance of surviving the disease than his cousin. His cancer was rated Stage 3, with no evidence yet that it had spread to distant parts of his body. Mr. McLaughlin, at Stage 4, had a tumor ominously near his liver. And Mr. Ryan had health insurance, while Mr. McLaughlin had none.

It was the mutated gene that the U.C.L.A doctor found in Mr. McLaughlin's cancer cells in December that turned his luck around. Called B-RAF, it goes awry in half of the 68,000 Americans who develop melanoma each year, for reasons not well understood, signaling cells to grow uncontrollably.

The mutation meant that he would be eligible for PLX4032's new trial, so the cost of the drug and doctors' visits would be paid by Roche. And it turned out he would get the pills even before the controlled study began, on a small test of the drug's interaction with common drugs like caffeine and cough syrup. Judging by the response of patients to PLX4032 in the first trial, Mr. McLaughlin was almost certain to respond. But the medication, the doctors at U.C.L.A warned him, might cause a rash and fatigue and would probably make his skin extremely sensitive to the sun.

“They told me to get a job where I could be inside all the time,” Mr. McLaughlin told Mr. Ryan with a grin; perhaps no one else could better understand how ridiculous it seemed for someone who had spent his whole life outdoors.

Because the slots in the trial were reserved for patients with the most advanced cancer, Mr. Ryan was not eligible — yet. But because he had few symptoms, it hardly seemed to matter. After surgery to remove his cancerous lymph nodes and radiation, he was preparing to return to work.

“Dude, I had ALL of my lymph nodes out,” Mr. Ryan boasted to his cousin over a Mexican-style Christmas dinner at their grandmother's home in Santa Maria, not passing up an opportunity at one-upmanship. “How many did you have out again, 11?”

Mr. McLaughlin, fingering the tumor that felt like a knot under his arm, might not have been in top form that evening. But he mustered a scoffing reply: “So you had all of them taken out and only four had tumors?”

The following week, he took his first pills.

But even as the tumor on Mr. McLaughlin's collarbone began to melt away, a faint spot on Mr. Ryan's lung began to grow.

A Life-or-Death Debate

The discontent among some oncologists over the design of the PLX4032 trial spilled over at a scientific meeting sponsored by the Melanoma Research Alliance in late February.

The ethical review boards at dozens of prestigious cancer research institutions had signed off on the trial, and the leading melanoma oncologists had embraced it: after all, it was the only way to get the most promising drug available for their patients.

But with the trial now under way, a few attending the Las Vegas meeting had already had to tell patients they had been assigned to the trial's chemotherapy control group. And some had begun to question whether an ethical code that calls for doctors to be genuinely uncertain about which of a trial's treatments will be more effective had been breached when it came to PLX4032 versus dacarbazine.

After Dr. Chapman presented the recent data from the drug's promising first trial to a packed room, Dr. Neal Rosen, a friend and Sloan-Kettering colleague, stood up.

“Excuse me,” Dr. Rosen said with unusual formality. “But if it was your life on the line, Doctor, would you take dacarbazine?”

The room was silent.

“My goal,” Dr. Chapman shot back, “is to find out as quickly as possible in as few patients as possible whether this works. If we never know, then we're never going to be able to build on anything.”

One of the melanoma field's senior clinicians, Dr. Chapman had lived through trial after trial of drugs that failed to live up to early promise. Almost every oncologist knew, too, of a case nearly 20 years earlier when bone marrow transplants appeared so effective that breast cancer patients demanded their immediate approval, only to learn through a controlled trial that the transplants were less effective than chemotherapy and in some cases caused death.

“Making patients' tumors go away is gratifying,” Dr. Chapman told critics. “But that's not the business I'm in. I'm in the business of making people live longer. That's what I want to do.”

Several of the most veteran melanoma doctors agreed with him. But others argued that oncologists had an ethical obligation to push both the F.D.A. and Roche to make the drug more immediately available.

Some of the strongest criticism came from laboratory researchers who study the biology of the disease and see the drug as fundamentally different from its predecessors. The previous red herrings, they argued, never had such a high response rate. Few other drugs had shrunk tumors in as high a percentage of patients with melanoma or any other solid tumor as PLX4032 had in its first human trial.

“Many of my colleagues who are outstanding clinical investigators have been able to convince themselves that this is a fair thing to do,” Dr. David E. Fisher, a leading melanoma biologist at Massachusetts General, said of the controlled trial. “My personal view is it's nuts. I don't know anyone who hasn't shuddered at the concept that we can't let patients on the control arm cross over because we need them to die earlier to prove this point.”

In the meantime, some doctors were searching for other trials that could help patients worsening in the chemotherapy group of the Roche trial, even at the risk of undermining its results. Several lobbied to get such patients slots on a new trial of a PLX4032 competitor, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline.

“It's much easier to tell patients, ‘We'll try this for six weeks; if it's working, great, if not, we'll shift you right away to the other trial,” said Dr. Jeffrey A. Sosman of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville. “That's how I'm going to be able to live with the randomization.”

The reason to prevent patients in the chemotherapy group from subsequently getting PLX4032 was to ensure a clean comparison. But who could prevent them from trying treatments that might well help them live longer? At least one melanoma patient left Sloan-Kettering's care to join the Glaxo trial at New York University .

In April, Mr. McLaughlin donned a bandanna, a sun hat, a long-sleeved shirt and pants and went to a job building fences on a nearby ranch. The pills, he had vowed, would not prevent him from working outside.

Mr. Ryan's health, by contrast, was declining. He returned from work only to sleep. Often, when his mother called, he was too tired to come to the phone. “Sleeping, Mom,” he would text her. Or “You have no idea what this feels like, Mom.” Or just, “I hurt.”

His doctor in Bakersfield moved up a scheduled scan.

At the same time, a debate grew heated over Roche's decision to withhold PLX4032 from many patients not eligible for the trial because they had already been treated with chemotherapy.

The F.D.A. regularly approves such programs, known as “compassionate use,” for promising experimental drugs. But Roche feared a prospective trial candidate might undergo chemotherapy just to qualify for compassionate use and get PLX4032 with no strings attached.

In an emotional moment, Dr. Donald Lawrence of Massachusetts General Hospital e-mailed colleagues about Roche's decision last spring, under the subject line “moral outrage.”

“Just had yet another conversation with a [patient] with a B-RAF mutation who will die in the next month or so because he can't get PLX4032,” he wrote. “I feel we need to muster the support of our patients and lobby both Roche and the F.D.A. Compromising the Phase III trial is not justification for withholding an effective drug from dying patients.”

But Dr. Michael Atkins, director of the cancer clinical trials office at Beth Israel Deaconess Cancer Center in Boston, urged him to consider what he thought was the greater good: “Even though it is painful, I think completing a clean Phase III trial and determining if there truly is a survival benefit for PLX would have major value for the field and future patients.”

A Bitter Blow

On the morning of May 12, Mr. Ryan and his mother drove to U.C.L.A. The cancer had spread throughout his body. Yet that weekend, the family was filled with hope. Dr. Chmielowski had found the same gene mutation that Mr. McLaughlin had in one of Mr. Ryan's tumors. He was finally eligible for the trial.

But the computer made its assignment the following Tuesday, making sure that he would not be getting his cousin's “superpills.”

Mr. Ryan's mother picked up the call while her son was undergoing radiation for the tumor on his spine. He was on oxygen.

“I'm sorry,” Dr. Chmielowski repeated as she cried into the phone.

There must be someone higher up to whom she could talk, she said.

There was not, he told her. It was completely random. No one could change it.

“Who else has this drug?” Mrs. Ryan demanded. “We will go wherever we have to go.”

There was nowhere to go, the doctor explained. Once Mr. Ryan had been randomly assigned to the control group at one place, the other hospitals testing the melanoma drug would not give it to him. U.C.L.A. had turned away such patients, too.

The doctor did not tell Mrs. Ryan about the Lazarus effect — that for someone as sick as Mr. Ryan, PLX4032 was probably the best chance to control his symptoms while doctors searched for something better.

The doctor could not know, of course, whether Mr. Ryan really would have fared better on the Roche drug, or whether Mr. McLaughlin's disease would have been held in check just as well with the chemotherapy. Obeying the trial's protocol meant withholding the drug from patients like Mr. Ryan, and that, Dr. Chmielowski would later explain, “is awful.”

He told Mrs. Ryan, if the chemotherapy could stabilize her son for just a month or so, there were two new trials opening that might help him.

“What gives them the right to play God?” Mrs. Ryan exploded at home later that night. “It doesn't make sense to say, ‘We want you for a statistic' instead of giving them a chance at life.”

Mr. Ryan started his infusion the next day. But a week later, he was hospitalized, unable to breathe on his own and in horrible pain.

“Bud brownies,” Mr. McLaughlin prescribed when he arrived to visit, having already signed himself up for medical marijuana use. “You get out of here, and I'll make them for you.”

He rated the nurses, trying to make Mr. Ryan laugh.

“Maybe you should just say you want to split some of your pills with her and she'll hop into bed with you,” he suggested after one left the room. A few minutes later, “No, that one's a little cuter.”

Then he reminded his cousin of the time Mr. Ryan had thrown a bolt up to where he was sitting atop a wall for a welding job adjacent to a golf course. Mr. Ryan missed his mark by several feet and the bolt landed on the other side, shattering the windshield of another contractor's truck.

“I'm like, ‘You just tagged that guy's freakin' truck,' ” Mr. McLaughlin recounted for the other family members in the hospital room. On his side of the wall, Mr. Ryan had picked up a stray golf ball. “And then the guy walks out and Brandon goes, ‘Looks like those golfers hit your windshield.' ”

In his hospital bed, Mr. Ryan was beginning to smile.

“And the guy gets in the truck,” Mr. McLaughlin finished, “and takes off for the golf course.”

Two weeks later, at his cousin's funeral in mid-June, Mr. McLaughlin placed Mr. Ryan's hardhat in his coffin and helped carry it to the grave.

Mr. McLaughlin has now been taking PLX4032 for nine months. He is awaiting his next CT scan .

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/health/research/19trial.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Missouri Tells Judges Cost of Sentences

ST. LOUIS — When judges here sentence convicted criminals, a new and unusual variable is available for them to consider: what a given punishment will cost the State of Missouri.

For someone convicted of endangering the welfare of a child, for instance, a judge might now learn that a three-year prison sentence would run more than $37,000 while probation would cost $6,770. A second-degree robber, a judge could be told, would carry a price tag of less than $9,000 for five years of intensive probation, but more than $50,000 for a comparable prison sentence and parole afterward. The bill for a murderer's 30-year prison term: $504,690.

Legal experts say no other state systematically provides such information to judges, a practice put into effect here last month by the state's sentencing advisory commission , an appointed board that offers guidance on criminal sentencing.

The practice has touched off a sharp debate. It has been lauded nationally by a disparate group of defense lawyers and fiscal conservatives, who consider it an overdue tool that will force judges to ponder alternatives to prison more seriously.

But critics — prosecutors especially — dismiss the idea as unseemly. They say that the cost of punishment is an irrelevant consideration when deciding a criminal's fate and that there is a risk of overlooking the larger social costs of crime.

“Justice isn't subject to a mathematical formula,” said Robert P. McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County.

The intent behind the cost estimates, he said, is transparent: to pressure judges, in the face of big bills, into sending fewer people to prison.

“There is no average case,” Mr. McCulloch said. “Every case is an individual case, and every victim has the right to have each case viewed individually, and every defendant has that right.”

Supporters, however, say judges would never focus exclusively on the cost of a sentence or turn their responsibilities of judgment into a numerical equation.

“This is one of a thousand things we look at — about the tip of a dog's tail, it's such a small thing,” said Judge Gary Oxenhandler, presiding judge in the 13th Judicial Circuit Court and a member of the sentencing commission. “But it is almost foolish not to look at it. We live in a what's-it-going-to-cost? society now.”

The shift here comes at a dire time for criminal justice budgets around the country, as states try to navigate conflicting, politically charged demands: to keep people safe and also cut costs. Michigan has closed prisons. Arizona considered putting its prison system under private control. California has searched for ways to shrink its incarcerated population.

Legal scholars predict that policies similar to the one in Missouri — which, unlike some other measures, might encourage cutting costs before inmates are already in prison — may soon emerge elsewhere.

Months ago, members of the Missouri Sentencing Advisory Commission, a group of lawyers, judges and others established by state lawmakers years ago, voted to begin providing judges with cost information on individual cases.

Judge Michael A. Wolff of the State Supreme Court, chairman of the sentencing commission, said judges had been asking for such data. By last month, Judge Wolff said, the computer algorithm was up and running, and the commission made note of it to the legal community in its August newsletter, “Smart Sentencing.”

The concept is simple: fill in an offender's conviction code, criminal history and other background, and the program spits out a range of recommended sentences, new statistical information about the likelihood that Missouri criminals with similar profiles (and the sentences they received) might commit more crimes, and the various options' price tags.

Judge Wolff said that some judges might never look at the price tags (though they are available to anyone, and some defense lawyers have begun mentioning them) and that judges ultimately did whatever they wished (within statutory limits) on sentences. Missouri's sentencing commission makes recommendations only. And as Judge Wolff sees it, sentencing costs would never be a consideration in the most violent cases, just in circumstances where prison is not the only obvious answer.

“This is just more information,” Judge Wolff said.

Fewer than half the states have sentencing commissions like Missouri's. In many cases, the commissions grew out of concerns, starting in the late 1970s, about racial and geographic disparities in sentences.

Now, however, the groups find themselves also weighing fiscal issues, like everyone else. Consider the theme of a meeting of the national association of sentencing commissions in August: “Sound Sentencing Policy: Balancing Justice and Dollars.”

Leaders of several commissions in other states said they had yet to consider a plan like Missouri's. Some voiced concern about the ramifications, the methodology — even the price tag of calculating sentencing price tags.

Lots of states measure the costs of imprisonment and of new criminal laws, but on a generic scale. Many states, for instance, calculate the average cost of housing a prisoner, but that is rarely mentioned with down-to-the-dollar figures for a specific person as a judge picks a sentence.

To some, the concept sounds crass, and carries the prospect of unwanted consequences. Might a decision between life in prison and a death sentence be decided some day by price comparison? (Absolutely not, Missouri officials say, and besides, the computer model does not attempt to compute the cost of capital punishment.) Could the costs of various sentences become so widely known as to affect the decisions of jurors?

Numerous legal experts on sentencing issues said Missouri's new policy made sense. Economic considerations play roles in all sorts of legal decisions, Rachel E. Barkow, a law professor at New York University , said, so why not let judges understand the cost of their choices?

Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at The Ohio State University, said: “One of the flaws in the operation of our criminal justice system is not only the failure to be attentive to cost but an arrogance that somehow you can never put a price on justice. Long missing has been a sober realization that even if we get significant benefits from incarceration, that comes at a significant cost.”

Others, like Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah , argue that Missouri's plan counts certain costs but fails to measure others — the societal price, for instance, if someone not incarcerated commits another crime.

“No one can put a price tag on being a victim,” said Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association.

Still, money worries loom. This year, in an annual address , even the chief justice of Missouri's Supreme Court, William Ray Price Jr. , warned that the system would be threatened if budget cuts persisted.

“Perhaps the biggest waste of resources in all of state government is the over-incarceration of nonviolent offenders and our mishandling of drug and alcohol offenders,” he said.

Mr. McCulloch, the prosecutor, said the state's prisons were filled with anything but harmless people. “You show me the college kid with a perfect record and a dime bag of weed who has been sent to prison, and I'll get him out,” he said. “Find me him.”

When Missouri lawmakers meet next year, Mr. McCulloch says that he expects he and others may push to abolish the sentencing commission.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/us/19judges.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Message to Muslims: I'm Sorry

Many Americans have suggested that more moderate Muslims should stand up to extremists, speak out for tolerance, and apologize for sins committed by their brethren.

That's reasonable advice, and as a moderate myself, I'm going to take it. (Throat clearing.) I hereby apologize to Muslims for the wave of bigotry and simple nuttiness that has lately been directed at you. The venom on the airwaves, equating Muslims with terrorists, should embarrass us more than you. Muslims are one of the last minorities in the United States that it is still possible to demean openly, and I apologize for the slurs.

I'm inspired by another journalistic apology. The Portland Press Herald in Maine published an innocuous front-page article and photo a week ago about 3,000 local Muslims praying together to mark the end of Ramadan. Readers were upset, because publication coincided with the ninth anniversary of 9/11, and they deluged the paper with protests.

So the newspaper published a groveling front-page apology for being too respectful of Muslims. “We sincerely apologize,” wrote the editor and publisher, Richard Connor, and he added: “we erred by at least not offering balance to the story and its prominent position on the front page.” As a blog by James Poniewozik of Time paraphrased it: “Sorry for Portraying Muslims as Human.”

I called Mr. Connor, and he seems like a nice guy. Surely his front page isn't reserved for stories about Bad Muslims, with articles about Good Muslims going inside. Must coverage of law-abiding Muslims be “balanced” by a discussion of Muslim terrorists?

Ah, balance — who can be against that? But should reporting of Pope Benedict's trip to Britain be “balanced” by a discussion of Catholic terrorists in Ireland? And what about journalism itself?

I interrupt this discussion of peaceful journalism in Maine to provide some “balance.” Journalists can also be terrorists, murderers and rapists. For example, radio journalists in Rwanda promoted genocide.

I apologize to Muslims for another reason. This isn't about them, but about us. I want to defend Muslims from intolerance, but I also want to defend America against extremists engineering a spasm of religious hatred.

Granted, the reason for the nastiness isn't hard to understand. Extremist Muslims have led to fear and repugnance toward Islam as a whole. Threats by Muslim crazies just in the last few days forced a Seattle cartoonist, Molly Norris, to go into hiding after she drew a cartoon about Muhammad that went viral.

And then there's 9/11. When I recently compared today's prejudice toward Muslims to the historical bigotry toward Catholics, Mormons, Jews and Asian-Americans, many readers protested that it was a false parallel. As one, Carla, put it on my blog: “Catholics and Jews did not come here and kill thousands of people.”

That's true, but Japanese did attack Pearl Harbor and in the end killed far more Americans than Al Qaeda ever did. Consumed by our fears, we lumped together anyone of Japanese ancestry and rounded them up in internment camps. The threat was real, but so were the hysteria and the overreaction.

Radicals tend to empower radicals, creating a gulf of mutual misunderstanding and anger. Many Americans believe that Osama bin Laden is representative of Muslims, and many Afghans believe that the Rev. Terry Jones (who talked about burning Korans) is representative of Christians.

Many Americans honestly believe that Muslims are prone to violence, but humans are too complicated and diverse to lump into groups that we form invidious conclusions about. We've mostly learned that about blacks, Jews and other groups that suffered historic discrimination, but it's still O.K. to make sweeping statements about “Muslims” as an undifferentiated mass.

In my travels, I've seen some of the worst of Islam: theocratic mullahs oppressing people in Iran; girls kept out of school in Afghanistan in the name of religion; girls subjected to genital mutilation in Africa in the name of Islam; warlords in Yemen and Sudan who wield AK-47s and claim to be doing God's bidding.

But I've also seen the exact opposite: Muslim aid workers in Afghanistan who risk their lives to educate girls; a Pakistani imam who shelters rape victims; Muslim leaders who campaign against female genital mutilation and note that it is not really an Islamic practice; Pakistani Muslims who stand up for oppressed Christians and Hindus; and above all, the innumerable Muslim aid workers in Congo, Darfur, Bangladesh and so many other parts of the world who are inspired by the Koran to risk their lives to help others. Those Muslims have helped keep me alive, and they set a standard of compassion, peacefulness and altruism that we should all emulate.

I'm sickened when I hear such gentle souls lumped in with Qaeda terrorists, and when I hear the faith they hold sacred excoriated and mocked. To them and to others smeared, I apologize.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/opinion/19kristof.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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One Strike and They're Out

OPINION

Schools are right to expel students who carry weapons or who otherwise pose a safety threat. But they have taken “zero tolerance” to extremes, suspending ever larger numbers of children for merely disruptive or nonthreatening behavior. Suspension rates for black male children are disproportionately, devastatingly high.

A new report published by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that in 2006, more than 30 percent of black male middle school students in 15 urban districts were suspended from school. In Milwaukee and Florida's Palm Beach County, suspension rates for black males were said to exceed 50 percent.

Based on federal school data, the research found that the percentage of students suspended at least once in grades K through 12 has nearly doubled over the last four decades — to 6.9 percent in 2006 from 3.7 percent in 1973. The suspension rate for black children in that time jumped to 15 percent from 6 percent.

The racial disparities in middle schools were especially alarming. In 2006, 28 percent of black boys and 18 percent of black girls were suspended, compared with 10 percent of white boys and 4 percent of white girls.

The data does not include why children were suspended. But previous studies suggest that an overwhelming majority of all races are suspended for behavior like truancy, disrupting class, abusive language or getting into shoving matches.

The federal suspension data is not comprehensive — which means that the real situation is likely worse. School reports to the federal government do not reflect multiple suspensions, so that students who may have been thrown out 10 times were counted as having been suspended only once.

The federal government clearly needs to do a better job of collecting information on this issue and pushing the states and localities to fix the problem. The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights should also look at the districts with the worst racial disparities.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/opinion/19sun3.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From the Chicago Sun Times

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Time running out on justice for boy who was shot

A bullet left Martrell, 4, partially paralyzed -- no-snitching code lets suspect walk streets

Martrell Stevens has made great strides since an errant bullet left him partially paralyzed two years ago at the age of 4.

He can swim, take steps with the aid of a walker and play wheelchair basketball.

But the wheels of justice have ground to a halt. The shooter remains free. Witnesses know who committed the crime, but one of them won't cooperate with detectives, said Martrell's mother, LaKeesha Rucker.

"I don't understand this no-snitching thing," she said. "That guy is still out there saying 'I put people in wheelchairs. That's what I do.' "

On May 23, 2008, Martrell was sleeping in the front seat of his mother's sport-utility vehicle when a bullet ripped through his right side, missing his heart by an inch. The bullet struck his spine and punctured a lung. He has endured multiple surgeries to remove bullet fragments.

Rucker said she believes the shooting stemmed from an argument across the street from her mother's home in the 6400 block of South Bishop in the Englewood neighborhood. The shooter returned to the block after arguing with a teenage girl and her father that day, Rucker said. The suspect started yelling at Rucker's brother-in-law, who was standing outside but wasn't involved in the original quarrel.

The 26-year-old suspect shot and wounded her brother-in-law in what Rucker believes was a case of mistaken identity. Then he aimed at Rucker and fired.

At the time, Martrell was buckled into the front seat while Rucker was putting his older brother and younger sister into the car. Rucker sped away to safety and wasn't aware Martrell was shot until she saw blood bubbling from his mouth.

"He's lucky to be alive," she said.

The suspect, a convicted armed robber with more than 20 arrests, has been spotted in the same area recently.

One witness has identified the man as the shooter and police believe they have enough evidence for charges, police spokesman Roderick Drew said. But the Cook County state's attorney's office wanted more evidence, Drew said. Another witness refused to cooperate with police, stalling the case, he said.

The statute of limitations for non-fatal shootings is three years. So police have until May to bring charges.

"We will look at this case again," Drew said.

Since the shooting, Mar-trell has grown stronger. While his upper body is fully functional, he has limited control of his lower body. He plays wheelchair basketball and swims in a program through the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. He has a special bicycle. And when equipped with leg braces and special shoes, he can use a walker.

But he can't wash himself and still suffers other medical complications from the shooting. And it's difficult getting him into the bathroom and down the stairs because their home is not equipped with ramps and wide doors.

The emotional damage continues, too.

"He asks questions like, 'Why did he do this to me?' and 'Why am I the one he put in a wheelchair?' " Rucker said.

This fall, Martrell returned to second grade at Dumas Technology Academy at 67th and Ellis near his South Shore home.

Dumas became compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act this year, allowing him to return. New concrete ramps were built, an elevator was installed, bathroom doors were widened and lunchroom tables can now accommodate a wheelchair.

"It wasn't done just for Martrell, but this was a concern for us," Dumas Principal Macquline King said. "We're glad to have Martrell back."

King said she remembers when Martrell was shot. She saw a report on TV that a child was wounded, but because it happened miles away in Englewood she didn't think it was one of her students. She was officially notified the next day and visited Martrell in the hospital.

"The children drew pictures about violence. It was very sad. It was a real-life lesson about guns," King said.

One morning last week, Martrell got up at 5:30 as usual. His mother, who works as a janitor, dressed him in his school uniform. He ate cornflakes and watched "SpongeBob SquarePants."

After 7 a.m., his mother helped Martrell down the front stairs and he waited for her to load the SUV with his wheelchair and walker. His siblings, LaWilliam, 9, and Kamisha, 3, got into the vehicle with him.

Dumas employee Darnell Frazier met them outside school. He rolled Martrell to the lunchroom where he sat by himself sipping milk until the rest of his classmates filed in. Martrell gave a thumbs down to the ham-and egg breakfast, which he didn't touch.

Many of the students still don't know why he uses a wheelchair. "I don't tell them because it's a secret," he whispered.

Before the first bell, Frazier wheeled Martrell to the playground, where he watched older boys play softball.

When Martrell went to class, he sat in the front row.

Several times his hand shot up when teacher Juanita Martin asked a question.

"He is fitting in," Frazier said. "Nobody is treating him any different. He is pretty independent and wants to do things on his own."

Still, his mother said no child should experience what Martrell has endured.

"Kids are getting hurt and no one wants to come forward," she said. "If you can't protect your kids, who can you protect?"

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