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From the Los Angeles Times

Billions of U.S. dollars later, Colombia gets the upper hand in battle on rebels, drugs

Plan Colombia appears to have brought more security to a nation the Pentagon once said was on the road to being a narco-state. But dissenters say the crackdown has a dark side involving human rights abuses.

By Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times

September 26, 2010

Reporting from Puerto Leguizamo, Colombia

Ten years after the U.S. began pouring billons of dollars into a largely military program in Colombia, the nation's armed forces have gotten the upper hand in the fight against leftist rebels and their powerful drug cartel allies.

Here on the Putumayo River 350 miles south of Bogota stands a bulked-up naval base with 40 patrol boats and more than 1,000 marines and soldiers. Air cover from Blackhawk helicopters, Brazilian-made Super Tucano bombers, and Israeli-produced Kfir fighter jets is available from the nearby Tres Esquinas air base.

Their mission is to deny FARC rebels, narcos and arms traffickers use of a corridor on Colombia's border with Peru and Ecuador.

"We're destroying the FARC's financial foundation and providing security to legal river traffic at the same time," said base commander marine Gen. Rafael Colon. "We are trying to make the presence of the state felt in places it wasn't before."

On the 10th anniversary of the program known as Plan Colombia, the South American nation appears more secure. U.S. aid has included four heavily armed boats that officers call the "Monsters of Putumayo," 150-foot vessels armed to the gills that look like fearsome waterborne spaceships from a "Star Wars" set. Washington also has provided special forces training, intelligence gathering and the gift of 82 UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters.

The Colombian military has used that muscle to push rebels into remote areas. The number of Colombian "boots on the ground" has risen 60% to 447,000 soldiers and cops. (Plan Colombia limits the physical U.S. presence to no more than 800 uniformed military trainers and 600 contractors, none of whom can take part in combat.)

Colombian national police claim to be present in all 1,100 counties, up from 950 in 2000. Violent crime has dropped to a fraction of what it was in 2002, when there were an average of 10 kidnappings a day.

Still, progress in the war on drugs has been mixed.

Coca production has dropped 58% from its estimated peak a decade ago, according to the U.N.'s 2010 World Drug Report. That's progress, but not as much as many had hoped, considering that pilots under Plan Colombia have sprayed defoliants on more than 1 million acres of coca fields.

Critics argue that the extensive eradication program has simply pushed coca production to neighboring countries, notably Peru.

But for Colombians, the situation is far improved from the late 1990s when a Pentagon study warned that their country could become a narco-state in five years. In the words of one observer, Colombia's armed forces were "playing for a tie and losing."

Colombia's economy now ranks as one of Latin America's most vibrant, according to the World Bank. The government released statistics this month showing that year-to-date foreign investment, airline traffic and car sales have all increased by double-digit percentages.

The power of the FARC, or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, was implicit in the election of President Andres Pastrana, who won office in 1998 promising he would negotiate a political settlement. He handed over control of a demilitarized "clear zone" as an act of good faith, but the rebels used the area to gather strength. Pastrana's successor, Alvaro Uribe, campaigned promising to defeat the rebels.

FARC greeted Uribe on his inauguration day in 2002 with a mortar and rocket attack. But most of Plan Colombia and its progress came during Uribe's eight years in power, which ended last month.

In recent years, Plan Colombia's emphasis has shifted somewhat. Military aid once made up about 80% of the funding; now it's closer to 60%, said Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, a left-leaning think tank.

Supporters of Plan Colombia say military gains are not irreversible. Hearts and minds remain to be won, especially in the rural areas where poor youths have few alternatives to growing coca or joining an insurgency or drug trafficking gang.

"A pill won't do the job, a long-term treatment is needed," said marine Capt. Cesar Martinez, a base operations officer at Leguizamo.

The FARC now relies more on hit-and-run tactics than brazen assaults. Rebels launched attacks this month in remote areas across the country that killed 37 police officers and soldiers. Eight were police at an outpost not far from Leguizamo. But unlike a decade ago, the Colombian armed forces struck back. They reported killing 22 guerrillas in an airstrike Sunday, including a top regional commander.

The aggressive military response has been accompanied by human rights violations. A study released this year by the New York-based peace group Fellowship of Reconciliation found that the Colombian military may have committed 3,000 extrajudicial killings from 2002 to 2009. Many were so-called false positives that involved the slayings of innocent civilians who were tagged as rebels killed in action.

Many were committed by units that had received U.S. military funding even after "credible evidence" of human rights violations had been presented, said John Lindsay-Poland, the organization's research director.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-plan-colombia-20100926,0,717653,print.story

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Why Mexico is not the new Colombia when it comes to drug cartels

Comparisons took on a new urgency after a statement by Hillary Clinton, but a careful look at tactics, targets and the nature of the foe shows they're apples and oranges.

By Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times

September 25, 2010

Reporting from Mexico City

Car bombs. Political assassinations. Battlefield-style skirmishes between soldiers and heavily armed adversaries.

Across big stretches of Mexico, deepening drug-war mayhem is challenging the authority of the state and the underpinnings of democracy. Powerful cartels in effect hold entire regions under their thumb. They extort money from businesses, meddle in politics and kill with an impunity that mocks the government's ability to impose law and order.

The slaying of a gubernatorial candidate near the Texas border this year was the most stunning example of how the narco-traffickers warp Mexican politics. Mayors are elected, often with the backing of drug lords, and then killed when they get in the way.

Journalists are targets too. After a young photographer was gunned down in Ciudad Juarez Sept. 17, his newspaper, El Diario de Juarez, issued a plaintive appeal to the cartels in a front-page editorial. "We ask you to explain what you want from us," the newspaper said. "You are at this time the de facto authorities in this city because the legal authorities have not been able to stop our colleagues from falling."

As the death toll from drug-related violence nears 30,000 in four years, the impression that Mexico is losing control over big chunks of territory — the northern states of Tamaulipas, Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon and Durango at the top of this list — is prompting comparisons with the Colombia of years past. Under the combined onslaught of drug kingpins and leftist guerrillas, the South American country appeared to be in danger of collapse.

The Colombia comparison, long fodder for parlor debates in Mexico, gained new energy this month when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the tactics of Mexican cartels looked increasingly like those of a Colombia-style "insurgency," which the U.S. helped fight with a military and social assistance program known as Plan Colombia that cost more than $7 billion.

But is Mexico the new Colombia? As the Obama administration debates what course to take on Mexico, finding the right fix depends on getting the right diagnosis.

Clinton cited the need for a regional "equivalent" of Plan Colombia. After 10 years, the rebels' grip in Colombia has been reduced from more than a third of the country to less than a fifth. Violence is down and, with improved security, the economy is booming. However, tons of cocaine are still being produced and there have been widespread human rights abuses.

Clinton acknowledged that the program had "problems" — but said that it had worked. Irked Mexican officials dismissed Clinton's Colombia comparison as sloppy history and tartly offered that the only common thread was drug consumption in the United States. And while the two cases share broad-brush similarities, there also are important distinctions, including Mexico's profound sensitivity to outside interference.

Here is a breakdown of the two experiences:

The Nature of the Foe

Colombia's main leftist rebels, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, waged war in the name of Marxist ideology, calling for an overthrow of the traditional ruling oligarchy. Separately, the country faced a campaign of violence by drug cartels. To fund the insurgency, the rebels first took a cut from coca producers and traffickers – and then starting running their own drug labs and forming partnerships with the traffickers.

In contrast, the main aim of Mexican drug gangs is to move merchandise without interference from authorities. In many places, traffickers manipulate governors and mayors — and the police they control. Their ability to bully and extort has given them a form of power that resembles parallel rule.

But the goal is cash, not sovereignty. Drug lords don't want to collect trash, run schools or pave the streets. And very often, the violence the gangs unleash is directed against each other, not the government.

Mexico also is a much bigger country. While its social inequities are glaring, there is no sign of a broad-based rebel movement with which traffickers could join hands.

"We've got a criminal problem, not a guerrilla problem," said Bruce Bagley, who chairs the international studies department at the University of Miami in Coral Gables. "The drug lords don't want to take over. They want to be left alone. They want a state that's pliable and porous."

Territory

At the peak of Colombia's insurgency, the FARC controlled a large part of the country, including a Switzerland-size chunk with defined borders ceded to it by the government as a demilitarized zone known as the despeje, or clearing.

Mexico's drug gangs have relied on killing and intimidation tactics to challenge government control over large swaths by erasing a sense of law and order.

In the border state of Tamaulipas, a gubernatorial candidate who was heavily favored to win a July election was gunned down less than a week before the vote. Violence in neighboring Nuevo Leon state prompted the U.S. State Department last month to direct employees to remove their children from the city of Monterrey, a critically important and affluent industrial center.

In Clinton's words, U.S. officials worry about a "drug-trafficking threat that is in some cases morphing into, or making common cause with, what we would consider an insurgency."

But there are no borders defining any drug cartel's domain, making it difficult, even within regions, to say how much of the country lies outside effective government control on any given day. There is no force that appears anywhere near capable of toppling the government and, so far, no zone the Mexican army cannot reach when it wants.

Instead, cartel control is more fluid. It is measured in the extent to which residents stay indoors at night to avoid roving gunmen; the degree to which Mexican news media steer away from covering crime so they don't anger the trafficking groups.

The sense of siege hopscotches across Mexico like windblown fire across a landscape.

Targets and Tactics

During the worst days of Colombia's bloodshed, cartel hit men and guerrillas carried out spectacular bombings and assassinations that targeted judges, politicians, police and businesspeople.

Mexico, despite a steadily rising death toll, has seen nothing of that nature. Cartel gunmen have killed scores of police and some prosecutors. Police officers have been killed in the line of duty, or because they were moonlighting for one criminal group or another. But they have not been targeted as part of a sustained effort to topple the government.

Most of the killing stems from open warfare between heavily armed cartels.

The cartels have in a few instances resorted to car bombs and grenade attacks that raised fears they were turning to Colombia-style terrorist tactics.

U.S. officials were alarmed when a remote-controlled car bomb exploded in violence-racked Ciudad Juarez in July, killing a police officer and three other people. Two more bombs exploded in the weeks that followed. Attackers hurled grenades into an Independence Day crowd in Morelia, capital of the western state of Michoacan, in September 2008, killing eight people.

There have been no other such direct, terrorist-style assaults against civilians, but the drug gangs' wanton use of muscle and extreme violence nonetheless has sown terror across much of the country. Gory images of beheaded victims left by feuding gangs have added to a feeling of impotence and mistrust of government authorities.

Even though many Mexicans support the government's anti-crime campaign, the result is a society even more reluctant to join in.

State weakness

Colombia for years was outmatched by the power of foes who capitalized on porous borders, an army in tatters and weak government bodies. In his day, drug kingpin Pablo Escobar even managed to get himself elected an alternate member of Colombia's Congress.

Mexico's military, while stretched thin, is more reliable than Colombia's was at the start. But its police and court system, for many years rife with corruption, have proved ill-equipped to confront drug cartels. Widespread graft means that the criminals and the authorities often are one and the same, blurring the battle lines.

Under the former ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, drug trafficking was allowed to flourish, and was at times even orchestrated by corrupt officials. Now, the federal government under President Felipe Calderon and his conservative National Action Party is purging corrupt police. But problems persist at the state and local level, and the justice system is overwhelmed by drug gangs armed with billions of dollars in profits and battlefield weaponry. Prosecutions have been few, convictions fewer.

Officials say it could take Mexico decades to create a trustworthy law enforcement system. In the meantime, Calderon has deployed 50,000 troops to take on the cartels. The troops' actions have raised widespread allegations of rights abuses and suspicion that some units may have been penetrated by traffickers. Lopsided arrest figures have triggered accusations that the government is favoring some cartels over others, a charge the president denies.

Despite its weak institutions, Colombia had a stronger civil society that ultimately rose up to demand and support government action. Colombian newspapers stood up to the violence. In 2002, Colombians elected President Alvaro Uribe, who promised to defeat the insurgents and traffickers rather than compromising with them. The government's willingness to tackle money laundering and seize traffickers' assets was considered a turning point.

Calderon took a page from Colombia by extraditing record numbers of drug suspects wanted in the U.S., reducing the odds that they could buy their freedom from leaky Mexican prisons. But he has done little to tackle money laundering.

These deficiencies could contribute to a fundamental breakdown in the state more closely parallel to Colombia. However, Calderon's government says that won't happen because it is tackling Mexico's institutional weaknesses head-on. "The important thing is we are acting in time," security affairs spokesman Alejandro Poire said.

Designing a prescription

In Colombia, U.S. policymakers put military advisors and special forces troops on the ground to address a drug problem that was largely based on production — one that could be attacked in large measure through wide-scale eradication.

But in Mexico, where the problem is equally one of breaking distribution networks, a Plan Colombia-style military role seems far less likely.

Clinton appeared to suggest that the U.S. military could help, "where appropriate." But sending U.S. troops would be anathema in Mexico, with its bitter history of foreign interventions and a wariness of the United States.

These are sensitivities well known to U.S. diplomats. In 2007, when Presidents Bush and Calderon negotiated the terms of a $1.4-billion U.S. security-aid program for Mexico, they called it the Merida Initiative to avoid echoes of Plan Colombia. And no U.S. officials have called for American boots on the ground in Mexico.

Although the Merida plan initially emphasized helicopters and other equipment aimed at fighting the drug trade, U.S. cooperation is now geared toward softer assistance, such as helping train and professionalize Mexican police cadets, prosecutors and judges.

Asked to lay out the probable next step in U.S. help, a senior American official here answered: "Institution building, institution building, institution building."

Some experts take issue with Clinton's upbeat characterization of the Colombia program, which has drawn numerous allegations of human rights abuses by the revamped Colombian army and right-wing paramilitaries.

The FARC may hold less than a fifth of Colombia, but it has not been eliminated. And while the country's largest drug cartels, those centered on Medellin and Cali, were crushed, scores of smaller ones took their place. Colombian cocaine production remains robust, according to most studies.

Bagley regards Plan Colombia as an unsuitable model for Mexico, which he said should focus on cleaning up corruption and creating a trustworthy justice system.

"They're misdiagnosing this," he said. "They're telling us Colombia was a success and you can export this to Mexico. And you can't."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-colombia-20100926,0,852091,print.story

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More tidings from the Unabomber

A rural publisher issues a book with Theodore Kaczynski's latest apocalyptic messages, but that doesn't mean he has an audience.

By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times

September 26, 2010

Reporting from Port Townsend, Wash.

When the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig disaster sent a torrent of toxic oil into the Gulf of Mexico, there was at least one person — sitting at the moment in a federal penitentiary in Colorado — briskly penning, "I told you so."

Failures of technology don't get much bigger than this, and Theodore Kaczynski, whose murderous, 17-year revolution against technology as the Unabomber got him sentenced to life in prison, couldn't resist pointing out the calamitous collision between man's elaborate inventions and the natural world.

"As long as modern technology continues to progress, there will be human-caused disasters of one kind or another," he said in a letter from prison. "The greater the powers unleashed by technology, the bigger the disasters get."

Here's what Adam Parfrey, who runs a small publishing house in rural Washington state, thought when he got the letter in June: There is very little about that statement that isn't true.

Next question: Is Kaczynski not crazy after all? Or are lunatics — in this case, Kaczynski, the iconic madman of the technological age — our most fearless soothsayers, unchained by moral equivocation and doubt?

More than 14 years after he was arrested at his cabin in western Montana and convicted of the wave of mail bombs that killed three people and injured 23, Kaczynski believes the time is ripe for his apocalyptic message — that no good can come from the converging paths of humanity, biotechnology, deforestation, chemical pollution, advanced computer intelligence, nuclear weapons and climate change.

Parfrey agrees on the timing, if not on everything Kaczynski has to say, and has published a new edition of Kaczynski's writings.

"It was really pretty remarkable material. He's a very opinionated, a very brilliant man, and a bit sociopathic, as you know," Parfrey said. "To make people pay attention, he was willing to go beyond that dotted line. On the other hand, he got his work into the New York Times and Washington Post, didn't he?"

The initial publication of the Unabomber's "manifesto" in those two newspapers in 1995 was the publishing equivalent of extortion: Print his long, rambling treatise on the evils of technology, the Unabomber offered, and the bombings would stop. Kaczynski's brother recognized the style and the message and turned him in.

Since his incarceration, Kaczynski, 68, has carried on a wide-ranging correspondence with several people, the latest of them Parfrey at his offbeat publishing imprint, Feral House.

For years Parfrey operated out of Los Angeles' Silver Lake neighborhood, publishing intriguing titles on topics no one else wanted to touch: Satanism, serial killers, extreme Islam, a "secret history" of NASA that reveals the purported discovery of architectural remnants on the moon.

"Feral House articulate[s] the worldview of a global post-punk intelligentsia trembling with premillennial dread," wrote the LA Weekly, which also chronicled the eclectic, avant-gardish art salons hosted by Parfrey and his wife, Jodi Wille.

Parfrey and Wille three years ago decamped for the Pacific Northwest, a place where they could tap into the rainy artistic vibe of this picturesque port town and practice the survive-off-the-land skills they were touting in books like "Urban Homesteading."

Parfrey was first contacted about the Kaczynski writings by David Skrbina, a University of Michigan philosophy professor who had corresponded with the imprisoned Unabomber. Skrbina had persuaded Kaczynski to put together their correspondence, his new essays and a fully corrected version of the manifesto into a new book, much of which had been printed in Europe in 2008. Parfrey agreed to publish it under the title "Technological Slavery." Neither Kaczynski nor Skrbina get any money from the book; Feral House has pledged to share part of its proceeds with the American Red Cross.

From the beginning, Parfrey and Skrbina struggled with the moral dilemma of giving wider voice to a man who had committed murder and mayhem in the name of his beliefs. In the end, neither saw any need to rationalize Kaczynski's crimes, which they view as reprehensible.

"If you look at human history, there are criminals and murderers that have put out amazing works of art and writing that have assisted us," Parfrey said.

Kaczynski's victims, meanwhile, await an auction of the convicted bomber's personal property, including tens of thousands of pages of writings, journals and correspondence seized by federal agents from his cabin. Proceeds by court order will go to the victims.

"I can say that his book will soon be overtaken by the release of the auctioned papers, which will be a much fuller look that will allow people to judge whether his ideas had merit or not," said San Francisco attorney Steven Hirsch, who is representing the victims.

The new book, published in June, has met with little fanfare.

"I read his manifesto in 1995, and after hearing about the book, I glanced at it again today," said Adam Keiper, editor of the New Atlantis, a journal published by the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, which explores the implications of technological advancement. If the manifesto were submitted to a serious publisher, "it wouldn't even have merited a formal rejection — it would have been thrown away," he said. "It's full of rubbish claims and the most juvenile kind of philosophizing."

But Skrbina says those who have focused on the sometimes disjointed style have missed what he believes is a persuasive argument, that society has cost itself dearly by overvaluing technical ingenuity and ever-expanding consumption. "A high material standard of living consists not in cars, television sets, computers or fancy houses, but in open spaces, forests, wild plants and animals and clear flowing streams. As measured by that criterion, our material standard of living is falling rapidly," Kaczynski writes.

"I don't see a big groundswell of any kind developing" around Kaczynski, Skrbina concedes. "But the problems have only grown since he first wrote about them."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-unabomber-20100926,0,3346021,print.story

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New facility highlights Black Worker Center's mission

Program seeks to reverse unemployment and loss of traditional employers by helping African Americans get construction jobs.

By Martha Groves, Los Angeles Times

September 26, 2010

Beads of sweat dotted Terrence Mason Jr.'s forehead Saturday morning as he brushed white primer on a metal pipe outside the faded South Los Angeles building that houses the Los Angeles Black Worker Center.

Mason, a sheet metal worker, was among dozens of electricians, painters and other construction workers who showed up in work boots and hard hats, tool belts strapped around their hips, to lend their skills to fixing up the center's new headquarters in the Paul Robeson Community Center on South Vermont Avenue.

The occasion was a "day of service and community" to spotlight a fledgling movement aimed at promoting local hiring policies that create career construction jobs for black workers.

"We're fighting to reverse the black job crisis," said Lola Smallwood Cuevas, project director of the UCLA Downtown Labor Center and a creator of the Black Worker Center, where the mission is to study and highlight the needs of African Americans in the Los Angeles labor market. Landlord Oneil Cannon, 93, offered a year's free rent in exchange for renovations.

There was a time when African Americans in Southern California could find jobs in aerospace, automaking and other industries that could boost their families into the middle class. But by 1985, many of those jobs, along with janitorial and hospitality work, had evaporated.

Data show that black workers have also been hit hardest by the recession. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that black unemployment in August was 16.3%, contrasted with 8.7% for whites, 12% for Latinos and 9.6% overall. The overall unemployment rate in California was higher, at 12.4% last month, according to the state Employment Development Department.

Under a withering sun Saturday, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas told the assembled group that $900 million of public projects were scheduled to begin soon, not including Phase 2 of the Expo light-rail line and other transit projects also expected to generate thousands of jobs.

"There's a lot of work," he said. "We ought to have access to it.… We don't want to do it … catch as catch can."

With big transit projects and LAX renovations in the near future, Cuevas said training programs would be crucial to ensuring a flow of new workers into the job market.

Among the volunteers was Alisha Doyle, 27, who is learning how to work with power tools and apply for apprenticeships through a program called WINTER, Women in Non Traditional Employment Roles.

Madelyn Broadus, who last week received her journeyman's license as a sheet metal worker but, like many other volunteers, is unemployed, said her goal was to get more women like herself into well-paying construction jobs. A Boston University graduate, Broadus said she got the "bug" for construction after never earning more than $18.50 an hour as a mortgage loan processor.

Broadus, who previously worked on L.A. Live and the downtown Marriott hotel, said supervisors often "don't know where to put me." But she added she was capable and eager. "I will put my life on the line," she said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-black-construction-20100926,0,7236775,print.story

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There's a 'public safety crisis' in state's home healthcare program, governor says

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday called the state's inability to stop scores of convicted felons from working in its home healthcare program a "public safety crisis" and demanded that lawmakers take action to address the situation.

The governor made his comments in a letter to legislative leaders after The Times reported that people convicted of such crimes as rape, murder and elder abuse are paid to provide services for some of the most vulnerable Californians in their residences.

Data provided by state officials show that at least 210 workers and applicants with felony convictions flagged by investigators as unsuitable for the In Home Supportive Services program are nonetheless scheduled to resume or begin employment. State and county investigators have not reported many others whose backgrounds include violent crimes because the rules of the program, as interpreted by a judge this year, permit felons to work in the program.

In the letter, the governor said numerous attempts by the administration to "engage" the Legislature on the issue have failed.

"I am hard pressed to imagine that any member of the Legislature would allow a convicted sex offender to take care of their own grandmother in a nursing home," Schwarzenegger wrote. "But if the Legislature continues to resist making changes in the law, the Legislature is essentially saying it is OK for that to occur to someone else's grandmother in their own home."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/09/gov-arnold-schwarzenegger-sees-public-safety-crisis-in-californias-home-healthcare-program.html

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Women experience delays in getting biopsies in some L.A. County-run hospitals

Though the wait times do not violate state or U.S. laws, they add to patient stress and don't bode well for the county's ability to adapt to national health reform, advocates say.

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times

September 26, 2010

Doramay Bailey got the bad news last year. Her annual mammogram at the county's Martin Luther King, Jr. Multi-Service Ambulatory Care Center in Willowbrook revealed a lump in her left breast. She needed a biopsy to determine whether she had cancer.

But when she called to schedule an appointment at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, the disabled 58-year-old grandmother got more bad news. She was told the soonest she could be seen was February, five months later.

Bailey is one of many women who have encountered increasingly long waits for biopsies at Harbor-UCLA, while those seeking biopsies at other hospitals are treated within weeks, if not sooner. The delays do no violate state or federal law, but patients and advocates say they cause excessive stress, and do not bode well for the county's ability to adapt to national healthcare reforms.

Demand for county medical services has increased across the board over the last several years, due in great part to people losing jobs and employer-sponsored health insurance.

Hospital officials insist that claims of excessive delays for biopsies are exaggerated but acknowledge the number of patients seeking care at the county's Department of Health Services has surged, as fewer private providers, especially specialists, are willing to treat patients without private insurance.

"More and more people are not doing these things on uninsured patients and that leaves more on our doorstep," said Carol Meyer, the department's chief network officer.

A Harbor-UCLA doctor, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said the average wait time for breast biopsies was eight to nine weeks.

Vanessa Wright, 53, of Hawthorne, had a mammogram at MLK on Sept. 16, 2009, that showed a lump in her right breast. She could not get an appointment for a biopsy at Harbor until March 12.

The home health aide and mother of four said she spent the intervening months worrying about whether she had cancer and, if so, who would care for her aging aunt and disabled daughter.

"I knew a woman who had breast cancer and she just shriveled up," Wright said. "You think of that, all the stress and anxieties, when you're waiting."

County officials insisted recently that the average wait time was only one to four weeks. But Meyer conceded that because of the large number of uninsured patients — many referred from private hospitals — Harbor's radiologists are clearly "overwhelmed."

Of Harbor-UCLA's three radiologists, only two have time to conduct biopsies one day a week. Together, they do an average of 17 biopsies a week, about 900 a year, Meyer said.

The situation was further complicated last year after MLK's sole contract radiologist left on long-term leave and was not immediately replaced, Meyer said. Since then, MLK doctors have been referring four to six women to Harbor each week.

"We know that there's more demand than we have staff and capacity for," Meyer said.

There are no federal or state requirements or professional guidelines specifying how soon a woman should receive a breast biopsy.

But Dr. Carol Lee, who leads the breast commission at the American College of Radiology, said she was "surprised" and "puzzled" that women would be forced to wait months for biopsies. Lee said the average wait at most hospitals ranges from a day to a few weeks, including hospitals that serve low-income, uninsured patients.

"You want to do it as soon as possible so that the woman doesn't have to worry," she has cancer, Lee said.

Dr. Lawrence Bassett, a researcher and breast imaging expert at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, said his patients often receive breast biopsies the same day they are ordered, or within two weeks at the most.

"I can't imagine any place taking that long to do the biopsy," he said. "If we told a patient they had to wait a month, they'd be going to St John's or Cedars."

Meyer said private doctors and hospitals do not face the same demands as those in the county system.

"They determine what patients they get to see. They don't have a never-ending stream of patients in need," she said.

When Bailey finally had a biopsy Feb. 18, the test showed she had stage four cancer. The doctor told her she probably had two to three years to live, she said.

Upset by the delay, Bailey sought treatment at the private City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, which is 45 minutes by bus from her South Los Angeles Home. But she said the trip was worth it because she has been treated promptly — she already has received four courses of chemotherapy.

"They just took too long at Harbor to do anything," Bailey said.

Bailey's oncologist at City of Hope, Dr. Thehang Luu, said a quicker biopsy would not have prevented Bailey from developing metastatic breast cancer or improved her prognosis. But it would have allowed Bailey to start chemotherapy sooner.

"Certainly, the sooner you treat, the better," Luu said.

Charlotte Robnett, 50, of Los Angeles and a friend were both referred to Harbor-UCLA for biopsies after they received mammograms at MLK in November. She said it took months for them to get appointments at the hospital. When they finally got biopsied, it showed her friend had cancer, but Robnett did not.

Robnett said she felt relieved — and frustrated.

"I think if I had insurance I wouldn't have had to wait so long," she said.

Meyer said county officials plan to hire a new contract radiologist at MLK this fall, but have had trouble finding one trained to perform the type of ultrasound-guided breast biopsies done at Harbor-UCLA. They are also in negotiations with a contractor to begin supplying equipment to the hospital for MRI-guided breast biopsies.

Meyer said county health officials realize that as more patients become insured under national healthcare legislation in coming years, county facilities will have to improve their efficiency or risk losing patients to private hospitals.

"We are going to be looking at reducing wait times and improving customer services in an effort to meet the goals of healthcare reform," Meyer said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-biopsies-20100926,0,2728475,print.story

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China's growing military clout and East Asia's future

As our economic power declines, how the U.S. deals with the rise of China's status could determine whether East Asia's future is one of peace or war.

OPINION

by Doyle McManus

September 26, 2010

Now that China has become a global economic power, it's beginning to throw its weight around Asia as a military power as well. That's making China's neighbors — and the United States — nervous. And for good reason.

China and its neighbors disagree over who owns hundreds of islands in East Asia's seas – and, more important, vast offshore areas around those islands that could yield oil, gas or minerals.

In the South China Sea, parts of whose waters are claimed by many nations, a Chinese-built submersible set a record last summer by diving more than two miles to survey the seabed and to plant a Chinese flag on the bottom. China is building a big naval base on Hainan island, and Chinese patrol boats have seized Vietnamese fishing boats and detained their crews for fishing in disputed waters.

In the East China Sea, China and Japan have clashed over the uninhabited, Japanese-held Senkaku islands (China calls them the Diaoyu islands) and over each country's naval movements through the Miyako Strait.

And in the Yellow Sea to the north, China objected vociferously to planned U.S.-South Korean naval maneuvers, leading the United States to postpone the operation while insisting that it would occur at a later date.

The whole situation has Washington alarmed. "[China's] military capacity has been growing by and large unabated," Adm. Robert F. Willard, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, told Congress earlier this year, adding that some moves "appear designed to challenge our freedom of action in the region."

The Chinese say they're acting to regain sovereignty over islands and waters that they contend were once theirs, stolen by foreign powers when their country was weak. (Their neighbors dispute those claims.) China wants the United States, the distant power that has regulated Asia's balance of power since World War II, to butt out.

During a just-completed 10-day trip to China and the Pacific, I heard Chinese officials and scholars denounce the U.S. military presence in Asia with rhetoric that seemed resurrected from the Cold War.

I heard things like this: "We see the Obama administration forming close relationships with other countries against China," said Liu Guijin, an advisor to China's Ministry of Foreign Commerce. "I think it will be destabilizing."

Or this: "Suddenly, the United States is behaving aggressively toward China," complained Fan Gang, a leading Beijing economist and former government official.

And, in the middle of what increasingly sounds like Cold War-era saber-rattling — or, worse, the military rivalries of the late 19th century — smaller countries in East Asia are trying to figure out what it means for their future.

Some, like Vietnam and Singapore, have asked the United States to keep a big military force in Asia to counterbalance Chinese power. "America plays a role in Asia that China cannot replace," Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told the Wall Street Journal last week.

On Friday, President Obama met with Southeast Asian leaders at the United Nations, and aides said he would reaffirm the U.S. position opposing the use of force in the South China Sea.

Some China-watchers suggest that Beijing's new aggressiveness in the region is evidence that the Chinese military, which tends to be hawkish, has gained new influence over foreign policy. "The military has its own interests," a Chinese diplomat told me a bit undiplomatically. "The greater the tensions, the bigger budget they get."

For now, China seems to be simply testing its neighbors — and the United States — to see what it can get away with at a time when the Obama administration has its hands full in Afghanistan. But that may turn out to be a counterproductive foreign policy. Because of China's truculence, U.S. relations with Japan, Korea and Vietnam have almost never been better.

There are signs that China is softening its stance, at least for the moment. Premier Wen Jiabao made a point of telling reporters before his meeting with Obama on Wednesday: "Our common interests far outweigh our differences." And China has agreed to discuss restarting military-to-military contacts with the United States, which were suspended after the U.S. announced a $6.4-billion arms sale to Taiwan in January.

Over the long run, though, China's new assertiveness is likely to continue. The underlying causes —growing economic power, a gnawing need for oil and mineral resources, a history of well-founded grudges against foreign imperialists, a normal dose of old-fashioned nationalism — are still there.

And when the Chinese look at us (as they do) and see a diminishing economic power and a government that's going broke, they wonder how long we're going to pay for a big, expensive fleet patrolling off their coast.

The last time a new economic power rose in Asia and acquired great-power military clout, it was the 19th century and the new power was Japan. That story turned out badly — for Japan, China and everyone else.

Managing the impact of China's rise to great-power status — and with it, the loss of our own near-monopoly over military power in the Pacific — is one of the great challenges of U.S. statecraft in our time. How the process turns out could determine whether East Asia's 21st century is marked by peace or war.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-column-china-militarism20100926,0,2039468,print.column

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From the New York Times

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U.S. Gift for Iraqis Offers a Primer on Corruption

BAGHDAD — The shipment of laptop computers that arrived in Iraq 's main seaport in February was a small but important part of the American military's mission here to win hearts and minds. What happened afterward is a tale of good intentions mugged by Iraq's reality.

The computers — 8,080 in all, worth $1.8 million — were bought for schoolchildren in Babil, modern-day Babylon, a gift of the American taxpayers. Only they became mired for months in customs at the port, Umm Qasr, stalled by bureaucracy or venality, or some combination of the two. And then they were gone.

Corruption is so rampant here — and American reconstruction efforts so replete with their own mismanagement — that the fate of the computers could have ended as an anecdote in a familiar, if disturbing trend. Iraq, after all, ranks above only Sudan, Myanmar, Afghanistan and Somalia on Transparency International's annual corruption index.

But the American military commander in southern Iraq, Maj. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, was clearly furious. Even if the culprits are not exactly known, the victims are: Iraqi children and American taxpayers. He issued a rare and stinging public rebuke of a government that the United States hopes to treat as an equal, strategic partner — flawed, perhaps, but getting better.

In a statement, he demanded an investigation into the actions of “a senior Umm Qasr official,” who, even now, has not been identified.

The disclosure embarrassed the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki , who, in the middle of a protracted political fight to win a second term , could hardly have welcomed the headlines.

“They are stealing the computers of students,” the newspaper Al Nasiriya declared, voicing a populist outrage at Iraq's government that is becoming fairly common.

It also put the United States Embassy in Baghdad in a bind. Diplomats here, like their counterparts in Afghanistan, have found themselves forced to address — delicately — the misdeeds of a nominally democratic government that American military force brought to power.

The embassy promptly took charge of making statements about the affair, and then stopped making any, preferring to handle the matter diplomatically — that is, with as little public fuss as possible.

General Brooks's spokeswoman referred questions back to the embassy. The original statement disappeared from the Web site of the American military in Iraq — “in error,” according to a spokesman; after inquiries, it was reposted Saturday.

The laptops arrived in two shipments, on Feb. 20 and Feb. 23. The original shipping documents mistakenly listed the computers' destination as Umm Qasr, not Babil, which caused confusion. By April, though, the American military had tracked them down and repeatedly tried to clear them through customs and truck them to Babil.

Then, in August, Iraqis auctioned off 4,200 of the computers — for $45,700. The whereabouts of the rest are unknown.

Prodded by the Americans and Iraqi officials in Babil, Mr. Maliki ordered an investigation by the Commission on Integrity, a besieged independent watchdog whose investigations have led to clashes with Mr. Maliki and other senior officials.

Investigations involving official malfeasance here have a mixed record at best, rarely resulting in criminal charges, let alone convictions, especially when they involve senior officials.

Mr. Maliki's, though, produced results — of a sort.

In early September, the auctioned computers were recovered, according to Iraqi officials, who nevertheless declined to discuss how or where. They had been sold to a businessman in Basra, Hussein Nuri al-Hassan. He could not be found last week at the address he gave when buying the computers..

None of the officials, most of whom would speak only on the condition of anonymity, could explain what happened to the rest of the computers.

And officials in Baghdad, Basra and Umm Qasr, when asked about the auction, continued to deny wrongdoing, saying the computers were sold according to established rules governing imports left unclaimed after 90 days.

Last week there was another breakthrough — of a sort.

Iraqi officials in Basra and Baghdad said that arrest warrants had been issued for 10 customs employees at Umm Qasr, all low-level officials. Six were said to have been detained. The officials refused to identify them, though. Nor were the charges made public, leaving the details of the case as shrouded in mystery as many facts are in Iraq.

“We are still investigating,” an official from the Commission on Integrity said. “We cannot give anymore information now, but soon you will receive a lot of information about this issue.”

The director of customs at Umm Qasr, Salah Edan Jassim, was transferred out of his job two weeks ago, but officials denied that it was related to the computers. Neither he nor his deputy, Abid al-Hussein Aleibi, appears to be in legal jeopardy.

Mr. Aleibi, in an interview in Umm Qasr on Thursday, acknowledged that the seaport, a crucial lifeline for oil headed out to the Persian Gulf and imports coming in, was overwhelmed, hobbled by a lack of accounting systems, sporadic electricity and aging equipment.

He also said that one of the shipping containers had been opened at some point while in customs, which could explain the fate of the other still missing computers, or not.

“We here at the port of Umm Qasr have problems with port management,” he said.

A spokesman for the embassy, David J. Ranz, expressed satisfaction with the investigation thus far.

“We are very pleased that they are taking action to apprehend those who stole laptops from Iraqi children,” he said in an e-mail. “There's more to be done, but these 10 arrests are a good start and reflect the growing strength and competence of anticorruption authorities in Iraq, particularly the Commission on Integrity.”

Still, seven months after the computers arrived, no child has used one. The recovered computers are now in the possession of the Americans, awaiting the resolution of the mystery over the missing ones.

It is possible, however, to see a bright side of the affair.

Today's Iraq may be corrupt, saddled with a bureaucracy from Saddam Hussein 's era that has changed little, and hobbled by a political impasse that has blocked the formation of a new government nearly seven months after parliamentary elections. But Iraqis — the media, politicians, average citizens — are freer than ever to denounce the wrongdoing of bureaucrats and thieves, even if to little effect.

Qassim al-Moussawi, the chairman of the education committee in Babil's provincial council, said government corruption was “bleeding the body of Iraq.”

“It is necessary that the investigation continue,” he added, “and it should be made public so everyone will know the truth.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/world/middleeast/26iraq.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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9/11 Conspiracy Theory Not as Popular as Ahmadinejad Says by Robert Mackey New York Times As my colleagues Neil MacFarquhar and Liz Robbins report , at the United Nations on Thursday, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claimed that “the majority of the American people, as well as most nations and politicians around the world agree” that “some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated” the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. According to Mr. Ahmadinejad, the attacks were staged “to reverse the declining American economy” and to justify a military presence in the Middle East “to save the Zionist regime” of Israel. Mr. Ahamdinejad, who has also questioned the reality of the Holocaust, has apparently endorsed this conspiracy theory about the 9/11 attacks on at least two occasions earlier this year. In March, he reportedly told intelligence officials in Tehran, “The September 11 incident was a big fabrication as a pretext for the campaign against terrorism and a prelude for staging an invasion against Afghanistan.” The following month, he wrote to the U.N. secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to ask him to open an investigation into the attacks, claiming that they were “carried out as the main pretext to attack the Middle East.” The prepared text of Mr. Ahmadinejad's remarks (embedded below) released by his government did not carry any footnotes, so it is unclear where he got the idea that majorities of Americans, or the citizens of other nations, endorse the conspiracy theory that Al Qaeda was not responsible for the attacks. The most comprehensive international poll on the subject was carried out in 2008 by WorldPublicOpinion.org , a collaborative project of research centers in various countries managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which asked more residents of 17 countries the question, “Who do you think was behind the 9/11 attacks?” Their answers were grouped into four categories: Al Qaeda; the U.S. government; Israel; other.

When the poll findings were published, Reuters reported , “the survey of 16,063 people in 17 nations found majorities in only nine countries believe Al Qaeda was behind the attacks.” But there were also no countries in which a majority blamed the American government. The researchers found the most support for the idea that the U.S. government was responsible for the attacks in Turkey and Mexico — but just 36 percent of Turks and 30 percent of Mexicans endorsed the theory.

While Americans generally buy into as conspiracy theories as much as people of other nations, polls have consistently found that most people do not endorse conspiracy theories about the attacks. Indeed, if most Americans thought Islamic terrorists were not behind the destruction of the World Trade Center, it would be hard to understand why so many of them are opposed to the construction of an Islamic center two blocks away from the site.

Links to several published polls on the question can be found in a Wikipedia entry on the subject. To take one recent example, in March, a poll by Angus Reid Public Opinion found relatively little support for a central contention of many conspiracy theorists, noting that, “Only 15 percent of respondents think claims that the collapse of the World Trade Center was the result of a controlled demolition are credible.”

Last year, Public Policy Polling found that just 14 percent of Americans agreed with the statement, “President Bush intentionally allowed the 9/11 attacks to take place because he wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.”

So, where did Mr. Ahmadinejad get the idea that most people in the United States and abroad believe that that American government staged the 9/11 attacks? Until someone asks him that question directly, it is impossible to say, but one possible explanation springs to mind: from the Internet. Regular readers of the Web can tell you that it would be easy to get the impression that most people on the planet believes in 9/11 conspiracy theories, particularly judging by the volume and intensity of what is written supporting that idea in comment threads and blogs.

But people familiar with the Web as a business know that only a vanishingly small percentage of the people who read articles and blog posts also submit comments. So, if Mr. Ahmadinejad has been spending time reading the comments beneath in blog posts, and takes them as an accurate reflection of global opinion, his statement today at the U.N. might make perfect sense, even while being almost certainly wrong.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/911-conspiracy-theory-not-as-popular-as-ahmadinejad-says/?ref=world

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Drop-Offs Aid Effort to Clear Medicine Cabinets

WORCESTER, Mass. – It was not as big a draw as the playground or the hot dog truck, but the drug collection program at a busy downtown park here on Saturday still netted a few hundred bottles of prescription pills as part of a broader one-day effort to clean out the nation's medicine cabinets.

From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., people young and old delivered bag after bag of pills, including the types of powerful painkillers and anti- anxiety drugs that the Drug Enforcement Administration , which coordinated the program nationally, was hoping for. More than anything, the goal was to empty homes of legal but dangerous drugs that the authorities say are driving addiction and crime around the country.

“We're getting a cocktail of just about everything,” said Milton Tyrrell, a special agent for the D.E.A. in Worcester who was supervising the collection in Russell Park.

Some of those who showed up did not want to identify themselves or discuss what brought them out, silently dumping their pills into boxes provided by the D.E.A. and hurrying off. Others said they were dropped off drugs that had belonged to relatives who were now dead, or elderly people who had let medicines pile up in their homes for too long.

“My 99-year-old aunt read about it in the paper and cleaned out all her medicine cabinets,” said Judy Hayden of Worcester, who brought mostly blood-pressure medications. “Thank God they're doing this, because it seems like the whole city is on pills.”

Nationally, there were more than 4,000 drop-off locations – mostly police departments, but also sports complexes, big-box stores, strip malls and even a race track. In Worcester, Mr. Tyrrell listed Vicodin, Percocet and Lorazepam, which is taken for anxiety, among the drugs collected, as well as less potent medications that had been sitting in people's bathrooms for decades.

Mary Whitehead Santos of Charlton, who dropped off two shopping bags full of pills, said her son, a physician, had talked her into doing so. Some of the drugs she deposited into the collection boxes had been prescribed in the mid-80s, she said.

“I kept hanging onto them thinking, ‘They've got to be good for something,”' she said, laughing. “My son kind of forced me out here, I guess. I'm not bringing the hard-core stuff that they're looking for, but it's good to finally be rid of it.”

In East Boston, a neighborhood of Boston that has struggled with addiction problems, the police station serving as a drop-off spot did not see much activity – possibly, officials there said, because the city only got the word out over the last week or two. Still, Joe Favale, a retired police officer, brought two bags that his girlfriend and a friend of hers had assembled. The bags contained three bottles of oxycodone, a highly addictive painkiller, as well as drugs for migraine headaches , asthma , acid reflux and other ailments.

“She wouldn't throw it out because she was concerned for the environment,” Mr. Favale said of his girlfriend. “I myself was totally unaware that you shouldn't throw the stuff away. When I have a couple of pills left over, I'm used to putting them down the garbage disposal.”

While the main goal of the take-back day was to reduce the volume of pills in households, law enforcement officials said the environmental benefits were important, too. The collected drugs will be incinerated instead of flushed down toilets, which can release them into the water supply.

Mr. Favale, who said he retired from the Boston Police Department in 2007, said he was taken aback by how big a problem prescription drug trafficking had become.

“The whole time I worked here in the 80s and 90s,” he said, “the concern was street drugs – reefer, cocaine, stuff like that.”

Matthew Murphy, assistant special agent in charge of the D.E.A.'s New England field division in Boston, said he had heard anecdotally that many sites in the region had an “overwhelming” response.

Mr. Murphy said that in Massachusetts, the National Guard would transport all of the drugs collected to five incineration sites and most would be destroyed by day's end.

“We didn't know what to expect,” he said. “But the public has been great; we had to go to trash bags in some cases because we ran out of boxes. We've had people show up and bring pharmaceutical products they've had around for 30 years.”

Mr. Murphy said he had heard about oxycontin and oxycodone, some of the most addictive opiate painkillers, being dropped off at several locations around New England. Even if only a small amount of that type of drug was collected, he said, the whole effort would be worthwhile.

“Any amount of that is great to get off the streets,” he said. “For us, that's huge.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/us/26drugs.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Experts Question Shooting of Arizona Deputy

PHOENIX (AP) — Two nationally known forensic pathologists are questioning a sheriff's deputy's version of how he was shot in the remote desert south of Phoenix, adding to suspicions by some that the incident was a hoax timed to stoke the debate over illegal immigration.

Deputy Louie Puroll of Pinal County told investigators he was following a group of smugglers carrying bales of marijuana on April 30 when he was ambushed by men firing AK-47 rifles. Deputy Puroll said he was grazed by a bullet in the back in what he described as a running gun battle.

The pathologists, Dr. Michael Baden of New York and Dr. Werner Spitz of the Detroit suburbs, examined photographs of the wound released by the sheriff's office. They told The Associated Press on Friday that they had concluded that the bullet was fired from inches away, not at least 25 yards as Deputy Puroll had said.

Their opinion was first reported by The Phoenix New Times.

It is “a close wound, not a distant wound, based on the appearance of the skin around the wound, which is normally what we forensic pathologists look at,” said Dr. Baden, a former New York City chief medical examiner who is currently working for the New York State Police. “We're talking inches, not yards.”

Dr. Spitz, a former chief medical examiner of Detroit's Wayne County and author of a death investigation textbook, held the same opinion.

“There's almost no doubt that this is a muzzle-contact-type injury, with the muzzle flame singeing the skin right where the bullet went by,” Dr. Spitz said.

When asked if the bullet could have been from 25 yards away, he said, “No, it was not from one yard away.”

Deputy Puroll's shooting intensified the debate in Arizona and the nation about the dangers of immigrant and drug smugglers in southern Arizona. It came just days after Gov. Janet Brewer signed a sweeping law giving law enforcement officers the power to question people they suspected of being illegal immigrants and to arrest them.

The major parts of that law have been delayed by a federal judge on constitutional grounds.

The shooting immediately raised questions from observers who believed it was odd that the deputy was alone in the remote desert, supposedly looking for armed drug smugglers without backup. And a dragnet thrown up by more than 100 officers in the area about 50 miles south of Phoenix found no suspects and no bales of marijuana, although it did turn up more than a dozen illegal immigrants.

Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County was out of town in meetings on Friday, but his spokesman released a statement saying that the Sheriff's Office stood behind the official investigation and that physical evidence supported the deputy's account.

There were no burn marks on Deputy Puroll's shirt and his wound had no stippling, which is caused from burnt gun powder coming from the barrel of a gun when fired at a close distance, the statement said.

“The article that is critical of the investigation was written by a reporter who was able to solicit opinions of those with differing views,” the statement said. “After a review all of the evidence in this case, the Pinal County Sheriff's Office has closed this criminal investigation and concluded that it occurred as Deputy Puroll reported it.”

Dr. Baden said it appeared that Deputy Puroll's shirt did have what appeared to be powder burns. The New Times reported that it was not sent to the state police laboratory for examination.

The area where Deputy Puroll was patrolling when he was shot is a well-known smuggling corridor for drugs and illegal immigrants.

Shortly after the shooting, Sheriff Babeu discounted those questioning his deputy. The sheriff did change department policy to prohibit deputies from patrolling remote areas alone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/us/26arizona.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Police Chief Charged in Attempted Rape of Girl

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — A North Dakota police chief has been charged with 52 felonies accusing him of molesting and attempting to rape a girl over the course of about five years, the authorities said.

Randall Hoffman, the chief of police in the small community of Elgin, about 90 miles southwest of Bismarck, is accused of having sexual contact with the girl beginning in 2005, according to a criminal complaint that was released on Friday. It accuses Mr. Hoffman of engaging “in at least 50 sexual acts” with the girl, who is now 17, from August 2008 until this month and then trying to rape her on Wednesday.

Mr. Hoffman, 55, a former state district judge, is charged with a single count each of gross sexual imposition and continuous sexual abuse of a child. The sex abuse charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He also faces 50 counts of corruption or solicitation of a minor, each of which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

Elgin is a community of about 700 people, and Mr. Hoffman was its only police officer, prosecutors said. He had been chief since 2005, Mayor Duane Schatz said, and has been on administrative leave since his arrest on Wednesday.

Mr. Hoffman, who is being held at the Mercer County jail in Stanton, appeared by video on Friday before Judge Thomas J. Schneider of South Central District Court in Bismarck, who set his bail at $500,000. Mr. Hoffman's next court appearance is scheduled for Oct. 11.

Jim Vukelic, the Grant County state's attorney, said at the bail hearing that the number of charges against Mr. Hoffman were “purposely underestimated” and that there was “strong corroboration” for accusations detailed in a Bureau of Criminal Investigation affidavit in the case. Judge Schneider ordered the document sealed.

Mr. Hoffman was a state district judge in Jamestown for almost five years before resigning in April 1999 after a disciplinary complaint accused him of showing disrespect for the court system. He had criticized another judge's handling of his divorce case.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/us/26deputy.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From the Chicago Sun Times

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A mother's pain drives plan to fight violence in streets

by Mark J. Konkol

Chicago Sun Times

September 26, 2010

Anjanette Albert says changing the culture of violence in Chicago will have to start with parents at home -- and she wants to help.

A year ago, her son was brutally murdered walking home from Fenger High School, and the world watched it on You-Tube.

A grainy cell phone video showed Derrion Albert being beaten with a board, kicked and punched by an angry mob until he was lifeless on the 111th Street sidewalk.

On Saturday at St. Sabina Church, Anjanette Albert was the quiet host of the first Parent Resource Exposition, an event she helped organize with the Black Star Project.

She hopes the gathering -- aimed at connecting inner-city parents with services that might help them keep their kids from becoming victims, or killers -- will become an annual event.

Albert was overcome with emotion and too choked up to talk during a panel discussion on how a child's murder affects mothers. (The panel included Carolyn Wortham and Pamela Hester-Jones, who also lost sons to violence.)

But on Friday, the first anniversary of Derrion's murder, Albert talked about how she still struggles to deal with her boy's death.

"Today is the day my son died," Albert said tearfully. "That's never going to change. It's going to be there next year and the year after that. It's always going to be an emotional day."

The first weeks after the murder were overwhelming. Derrion was another example of good kids caught in the middle of street violence. Her son's videotaped killing caught the attention of President Obama, who sent advisers to Chicago to take aim at escalating teen violence.

Albert still fights to keep pain from consuming her. She says she needs to be strong for her daughter, a 12-year-old who attends a Chicago public school.

"The grief can't get me. I still have to be a mother to my daughter. I make sure I'm there every day to drop her off and pick her up," she said. "I'm not late. I stand outside with the kids to make sure nothing is going on. It's scary knowing that something like what happened to Derrion could happen again."

She hopes the parent resource exposition helps people who want help in keeping their kids safe but do not know where to find it.

"This is not a game, so we got to do something," Albert said. "I'm really glad we're trying to bring people together. We're doing it for Derrion."

RELATED STORIES Editorial: Up to all of us to help kids in need

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/2746404,CST-NWS-albert26.article

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