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From the Los Angeles Times

Marijuana plants rise above a ragged wooden fence in Fresno. Pot cultivation is on the rise in the Central Valley, where many farmers have been hard-hit by the recession.

Central Valley's booming medical marijuana crop draws violence As farmers turn to lucrative pot amid the recession, robberies and shootings put law enforcement and locals on edge. The region is heavily conservative, but some of those affected say the solution is to legalize it. by Diana Marcum, Los Angeles Times October 2, 2010 Reporting from Lindsay, Calif. The father was clearly worried. Behind him, his son was tossing medical marijuana plants into a truck — part of a hasty move out of this small farm town after a deadly shooting. The week before, on a mid-September night about 11:30 p.m., Robert Craven had gotten a call from his son, who lives a half-mile away down a country road. The son said his neighbors, who also grew medical marijuana, were being robbed. There were four gunmen.

"I flew over there locked and loaded, there was already an ambulance coming down the road," said Craven, 45, a pig farmer and Little League coach.

The son had gone next-door armed with a handgun. One of the gunmen grabbed him from behind and the son fired over his shoulder, according to police reports. Authorities deemed the shooting self-defense. He killed a 17-year-old suspected gang member.

Now he's on the run from threats of retaliation.

It's harvest season in California's Central Valley, and that includes medical marijuana. Pot-growing used to be more the domain of free-thinking, freely-puffing places such as Humboldt County along the state's northern coast. But in recent years, with some legal cover, this conservative, agricultural valley has sprouted a new favorite crop and a new crop of troubles.

"There's so much of it that we can't even get a handle on the quantity," said Capt. Jose Flores of the Fresno County Sheriff's Department.

"We're the No. 1 agricultural valley in the world. Then you add this recession where there are people who know how to grow things who are desperate to augment their livelihood, unclear laws that allow growing marijuana, doctors who will write a prescription for anything, and for the past three years it's been open season on marijuana-growing in our rural setting," he said. "We're a very fertile valley."

Medical marijuana cards might shield growers from law enforcement, but not from robbery. In the past month in the Central Valley there have been at least five confrontations with growers, two of them fatal. In one Fresno incident, a woman in her 70s used a machete to ward off two thieves. One of the thieves fired a round that wounded an 82-year-old man who lived in the home.

Citing the Valley violence, Fresno County's Board of Supervisors on Sept. 14 passed an emergency ban on outdoor medical marijuana cultivation.

Proposition 19, an initiative on the November ballot, would legalize non-medical marijuana in California and allow it to be regulated and taxed. A Public Policy Institute of California poll released Thursday showed majorities in the San Francisco Bay Area and much of Southern California support Prop. 19, while a majority in the Central Valley do not.

In the Lindsay shooting, police arrested two men on suspicion of robbery and kidnapping. A third is wanted for questioning.

Craven thought medical marijuana cards protected his 22-year-old son and his son's friends. They all had plants, they all had prescriptions (his son's was for migraine headaches). Craven didn't much like their pot-smoking, but they were grown men and he'd been most worried about them getting in trouble with the law. He hadn't thought of robbers.

"I mean, why that house?" he said. "You're going to have trouble finding a place around here that doesn't have a grow."

Across the street, Maria Sanchez, a grandmother, had a medical card. Her squat, showy pot plant grew among her rose bushes.

"I don't smoke it. I use it in tea. I use the leaves and just a tiny bit of bud. I have really bad arthritis," she said.

Her son, Socorro Sanchez, 31, also had a prescription and his own plants.

"I make edibles, like rice crispy treats," he said. "You make marijuana butter and when a recipe calls for oil you replace it with the butter. It's for my epilepsy."

Around the bend, behind a two-story barn-style home was at least a half-acre of marijuana in a partly open shed next to fields of pumpkins, flowers, tomatoes, corn, jalapeños and cilantro.

Up and down country roads near Lindsay, at the base of the Sierra foothills in Tulare County, a soft breeze carried the distinctive odor of budding marijuana plants, as if the smell of a rock concert had been distilled in herbal tea, then wafted over earth and fertilizer. Tulare County requires marijuana to be cultivated within a protective structure, but this seems to be often loosely interpreted as arbors or hedges. It's easier and cheaper to grow marijuana outside in the sunshine.

In Fresno, at an outdoor marijuana garden next to Brown's Floral and across the street from the city's oldest park, the scent was even stronger.

Ten-foot-tall plants were easily visible over a ragged wooden fence. A posted sign with a drawing of a gun read: "Never mind the dog. Beware the owner."

"When the wind kicks up, boy do you smell it then," said Reuben Tolentino, who works in the flower shop. "On breezy days we used to say, 'Smells likes trouble.' "

Trouble came Sept. 8 when their neighbor Phayvahn Dydouangphan, 47, shot 40-year-old Stanley Wallace, who later died.

Police say Dydouangphan heard his dogs bark about 6:30 a.m. and found six or seven men in his yard, uprooting plants. He fired a shotgun at them. As they tried to drive away, he fired again, hitting Wallace in the head. Dydouangphan will stand trial on a murder charge.

"I don't know how you could not have known something like this was going to happen," said 70-year-old flower shop owner Donna Brown. "It was like someone put candy in my driveway and told all the kids, 'It's not for you.' "

Brown is a fixture in the neighborhood. She lets homeless friends and others who are down-and-out park on her property. She also extended kindness to the police officer who watched over the marijuana next-door after the shooting.

"He was there for two days, so I took him over a sandwich and a Coke. He said, 'Thank you. You just don't know how terrible it is for a cop to have to guard a pot farm.' "

Brown says she's voting in favor of Proposition 19, which critics say could increase marijuana consumption and further confuse legalities by clashing with federal law.

"How could it get any more insane than it already is?" Brown said. "A man died over a plant, next to my floral shop. Just legalize it already."

Richard Hanni, a 49-year-old homeless man who does chores around the shop, said the marijuana garden next-door — which has earned the corner the nickname "flower-pot" — is atrocious. Not just for the deadly violence or for being right across the street from a city park where a choo-choo train makes it way through Storyland, but for the state of the feathery, spindly plants.

"There was no need to let them get that tall. Those buds should be three times bigger," he said. "Now, last year, they had a real nice-looking garden. Mostly pumpkins. People did steal a few pumpkins. But the difference is they knew how to grow those right and no one got killed."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-pot-crop-20101003,0,2760627,print.story

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Gunmen kidnap 22 in Acapulco

The Mexican tourists from a neighboring state were reportedly seized as they looked for lodging.

By Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times

October 3, 2010

Reporting from Mexico City

Gunmen kidnapped a group of 22 Mexican men in the tourist resort of Acapulco, Mexican media reported Saturday.

News reports said the group, from the neighboring state of Michoacan, was seized by gunmen shortly after arriving in the resort city Thursday.

The accounts cited information from the prosecutor's office in the coastal state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located. Repeated attempts to reach state officials were unsuccessful.

The motive was unknown.

A man traveling with the group reported the kidnapping. He told authorities the men were tourists from the western city of Morelia and were looking for a hotel when they were seized.

More than 300 people have been killed in and around Acapulco during the last four years because of fighting between rival drug-trafficking groups.

Amid Mexico's escalating drug war, mass kidnappings are not uncommon as gangs battle one another over turf and control of smuggling routes to the United States. The victims often turn up dead.

It is unusual, though, for gunmen to seize as many as 22 people at once, and there was no immediate sign that this kidnapping was related to drug trafficking.

In other developments, Mexican media reported that 14 people were killed in a shootout Friday between rival gangs in the northern state of Durango.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-kidnap-20101003,0,7266650,print.story

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16 suspected illegal immigrants adrift in boat rescued off the Southern California coast

The Navy and Coast Guard teamed up Friday to rescue 16 suspected illegal immigrants adrift in a small boat about 40 miles off the Southern California coast, officials said Saturday.

The crew of the amphibious assault ship Boxer saw the immigrants at about noon waving their arms to signal distress. Those on the small boat said it had lost power about 10 p.m. Thursday.

Notified by the Boxer, the Coast Guard dispatched the cutter Petrel, which took the boat in tow and brought it into the harbor at Oceanside. The 16 people aboard were taken into custody Friday night by the U.S. Border Patrol.

Capt. Thomas Farris, commander of the Coast Guard's San Diego sector, said the Boxer's crew "likely saved the lives of those aboard an ill equipped vessel trying to enter the country illegally."

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

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Texters, you'd be better off driving drunk

Studies show that driving while texting is more dangerous than driving under the influence. Our laws and penalties don't reflect that.

OPINION

By Michael Fumento

October 3, 2010

"Border collie jill surveying the view from atop the sand dune." Those were the last words of Malibu plastic surgeon Frank Ryan, best known for "reconstructing" reality TV star Heidi Montag. It's not quite up there with "Et tu, Brute?" Yet it seemed important enough for him to text it just before driving off a cliff in August. Jill survived.

We don't know what the message was in a 2007 accident involving the sender and her four fellow New York high school cheerleaders. But it probably wasn't worth slamming head-on into a truck, killing them all. And the 2008 Chatsworth train collision, in which 25 people died and more than 100 were injured, was officially attributed to the engineer of the Metrolink commuter train being distracted by text messaging.

Unfortunately, laws intended to deal with the problem of texting while driving, a major topic at the Transportation Department's Distracted Driving Summit on Sept. 21, reflect vital misunderstandings about why a cellphone combined with a moving vehicle can be so deadly and how to deal with it.

Texting while driving can be more dangerous than driving while swigging Jack Daniels, according to studies. In a 2009 survey, Car and Driver magazine tested two of its staffers under a variety of conditions. It found that on average, driving at 70 mph, one man braking suddenly while legally drunk (0.08 blood alcohol content) traveled 4 feet beyond his baseline performance. But reading an e-mail while driving sober, he traveled 36 feet beyond the baseline result and 70 feet while sending a text. In the worst case while texting, he traveled 319 feet before stopping.

Yet 66% of respondents to a 2007 Harris Interactive poll admitted they've texted while driving, even as 89% said it should be banned. And it's the youngest drivers, who already are in far more than their share of road accidents and deaths, who do it most, according to government and insurance industry reports.

There are no reliable studies regarding deaths associated with driving and texting. But consider that in 2002, when texting was still a novelty, cellphone usage killed an estimated 2,600 Americans, according to a study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. Yet texting and driving is 17 times more dangerous than just talking on a phone, according to a 2009 Virginia Tech study. And we sent about 15 times the number of messages in 2009 as we did in 2005, according to one wireless industry report.

One possible explanation for why we can't seem to keep our paws off those tiny keyboards is that surveys show that a vast majority of American drivers believe themselves to be above average — and not just in Lake Wobegon. Hence the belief that we need to ban thee but not me.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's idea of putting cigarette-pack type warning labels on cellphones is as worthless as it sounds. We don't need text education. We need legal coercion. Yet 20 states still don't ban texting and driving, and only eight plus the District of Colombia ban talking on hand-held phones while driving. None ban hands-free phones.

However, the mere existence of laws alone is not enough. Almost twice as many Californians in a new Automobile Club of Southern California survey say they now use cellphones while driving than admitted to doing so before it became illegal 20 months ago. And texting laws in four states surveyed have done nothing to reduce reported collisions, according to figures released by an affiliate of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Why? Penalties are a joke and enforcement is essentially nonexistent. A first offense is merely a $20 fine in California, and $50 for subsequent violations. By contrast, a first DUI conviction in the state carries a jail sentence of four days to six months, a fine as high as $1,000, a six-month license suspension and more.

Enforcement efforts are virtually nonexistent because everyone thinks it's so difficult. Yet equipment that detects outgoing radiofrequency signals is neither new nor cost-prohibitive and no more invasive than traffic control cameras, radar or radar detector spotters. But even such low-tech "equipment" as human eyeballs can work. Results from two pilot programs released Tuesday by the Department of Transportation show that. During a yearlong test, using a combination of public service announcements and programs in which officers were specifically watching out for drivers using cellphones, hand-held cellphone use while driving dropped 56% in Hartford, Conn., and 38% in Syracuse, N.Y.; texting while driving declined 68% and 42%, respectively.

"The laws are simple to enforce," says Jennifer Smith, president of Focus Driven, patterned after the highly effective Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Yet none of this will have any effect if we don't recognize that the specific cause of the distraction "isn't your hands or eyes but your head," as University of Illinois cognitive scientist Daniel Simons puts it. "Texting requires you to take your mind off the road." Indeed, hands-free phones may induce a fatally false sense of complacency "if you falsely believe that you will notice what's on the road while focusing attention on your phone or a keyboard," Simons adds. That's why studies repeatedly show hands-free phones to be just as dangerous as hand-helds.

But current state laws universally allow hands-free phones, except in a few places for certain categories such as teens and bus drivers. And yes, there are voice-to-text apps that allow verbal text messaging, which some promote as a safer alternative.

For now, all you can do is control your own conduct, including downloading software that automatically blocks outgoing messages while turning off alerts for incoming ones. No message is worth dying for.

Michael Fumento is a freelance journalist, author and attorney who specializes in health, science and safety issues.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-fumento-texting-20101003,0,5950129,print.story

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From the New York Times

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U.S. to Issue Terrorism Alert for Travel to Europe

The State Department plans to issue an alert on Sunday urging Americans traveling to Europe to be vigilant about possible terrorist attacks, an American official said Saturday.

The decision to caution travelers comes as counterterrorism officials in Europe and the United States are assessing intelligence about possible plots originating in Pakistan and North Africa aimed at Britain, France and Germany.

A travel alert would merely urge extra caution during a specific time and would not discourage Americans from visiting Europe. The official, who did not want to be identified speaking about internal government deliberations, said a stronger “travel warning” that might advise Americans not to visit Europe was not under consideration.

European officials have been concerned about the impact on tourism and student travel from any official guidance to American travelers.

The Associated Press first reported on Saturday the possibility that the State Department might caution travelers to Europe.

American intelligence officials said last week that they were pursuing reports of possible attacks against European cities , including information from a German citizen of Afghan origin captured in Afghanistan in July. The German, said to be named Ahmed Sidiqi, 36, from Hamburg, had traveled to the Waziristan region of Pakistan and received firearms and explosives training, a senior European official told The New York Times.

Mr. Sidiqi described plans for attacks by small armed groups in European cities, the official said. Other officials have said such attacks might be modeled on the 2008 assault in Mumbai. Those attacks, attributed to a radical Islamic group based in Pakistan, killed at least 173 people.

In August, the State Department renewed a “worldwide alert,” saying officials remained “concerned about the continued threat of terrorist attacks” against Americans overseas. Any new alert would presumably be more narrowly focused.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/world/europe/03security.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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For Female Marines, Tea Comes With Bullets

MARJA, Afghanistan — They expected tea, not firefights.

But the three female Marines and their patrol were shot at late on a recent day, when a burst of Kalashnikov rifle fire came from a nearby compound. The group hit the ground, crawled into a ditch and aimed its guns across the fields of cotton and corn.

In their sights they could see the source of the blast: an Afghan man who had shot aimlessly from behind a mud wall, shielded by a half-dozen children. The women held their fire with the rest of the patrol so as not to hit a child, waited for the all-clear, then headed back to the base, survivors of yet another encounter with the enemy.

“You still get that same feeling, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I'm getting shot at,' ” said Lance Cpl. Stephanie Robertson, 20, speaking of the firefights that have become part of her life in Marja. “But you know what to do. You're not, like, comfortable, because you're just — ” She stopped, searching for how to describe her response to experiences that for many would be terrifying. “It's like muscle memory.”

Six months ago, Lance Corporal Robertson arrived in Afghanistan with 39 other female Marines from Camp Pendleton, Calif., as part of an unusual experiment of the American military: sending full-time “female engagement teams” out with all-male infantry patrols in Helmand Province to try to win over the rural Afghan women who are culturally off limits to outside men.

As new faces in an American counterinsurgency campaign, the female Marines, who volunteered for the job, were to meet with Pashtun women over tea in their homes, assess their need for aid, gather intelligence, and help open schools and clinics.

They have done that and more, and as their seven-month deployment in southern Afghanistan nears an end their “tea as a weapon” mission has been judged a success. But the Marines, who have been closer to combat than most other women in the war, have also had to use real weapons in a tougher fight than many expected.

Here in Marja — which, seven months after a major offensive against the Taliban , is improving but remains one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan — the female Marines have daily skirted the Pentagon rules restricting women in combat. They have shot back in firefights and ambushes, been hit by homemade bombs and lived on bases hit by mortar attacks.

None of the 40 women have been killed or seriously injured, and a number have worked in stable areas where the shooting has stopped, but many have seen good friends die.

One of the women, Cpl. Anica Coate, 22, was on patrol in early September in southern Marja five feet behind Lance Cpl. Ross S. Carver, 21, when he was shot through the mouth and killed by an insurgent sniper. Corporal Coate was the first to reach him, but she could not stop the bleeding. A week later, at a memorial service in Marja for her friend and two other Marines killed around the same time, she said she would not volunteer for the female engagement teams again.

“It's not the living conditions, it's not the mission, it's this,” she said, gesturing toward a memorial display of boots, rifles and dog tags belonging to the dead Marines. She was, she said quietly, “too much of a girl to deal with these guys getting killed.”

There have been many other strains as well, not least some male officers who question the female Marines' purpose and young infantrymen who remain resentful of the attention from commanders and the news media that the women have received. Stress, rough conditions and patrols in 100-plus-degree heat have caused almost all of the female Marines, like their male counterparts, to lose weight in Afghanistan, some nearly 20 pounds. A number of the women have seen their marriages end or their boyfriends leave them.

“It was starting ahead of time, but this definitely didn't help the marriage,” said Lance Cpl. Sorina Langer, 21, who was divorced during her deployment in one of the most dangerous areas of Marja. “He saw it as walking out.”

For Capt. Emily Naslund, 27, the women's commander, the sacrifices and the frustrations have been worth it. As a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and a state champion runner in high school, she is the kind of alpha female, athletic and competitive, who seeks out the Marine Corps as the ultimate proving ground. But she readily says that she has relied on daily prayers — she is the daughter of a Minnesota stockbroker and a flight attendant who went to church every Sunday — and faith in God to get her through. Out on foot patrols, she said, “my life's in his hands.”

She offered no assessment of the long, grinding war, other than to call it “slow,” and to say she tried not to pay attention to critics of the war at home. She was enthusiastic, though, about her small piece within the war. “This is going to be the highlight of my life,” she said.

As she explained it, “You've got 19- and 20-year-olds walking around in the world's most dangerous place, knowing what could happen to them, and they're willing to do that anyway, and they're willing to do that with passion.”

All in a Day's Work

The September night was unusually cold when Captain Naslund's alarm rang through the stillness. “It's 3:15, guys,” she said softly to Lance Corporal Robertson and Cpl. Christina Oliver, 25.

None had slept well. They had traveled from a larger combat outpost with only their summer sleeping bags, and the unexpected chill — they were outdoors on cots in a mud-walled compound serving as a small patrol base — had kept them shivering for much of the night.

They were apprehensive about the day's mission, a clearing operation in the village of Sistani, a Taliban haven on the far western edge of Marja that the Marines had not been to before. Units from Company F, Second Battalion, Sixth Marines, along with Afghan Army troops, were to spend the day securing a polling site and searching every compound in the village ahead of parliamentary elections. The female Marines were to follow close behind to talk to Afghan women. Capt. Manuel Zepeda, the Company F commander, expected the group at some point to take fire.

“They know pretty much nothing about these compounds and the people that live in them,” Captain Naslund had told Corporal Oliver and Lance Corporal Robertson as she briefed them before the mission.

It was critical, she said, to get a sense from the men as well as the women of Sistani of “where they sit, who do they support, how are they seeing the elections, how do they see Marja in general?” To the surprise of some commanders, the female Marines have sometimes connected more readily with Afghan men than have male Marines. Capt. Brandon Turner, the commander of G Company in southern Marja, said, “You put a lady in front of them, they'll start blabbing at the mouth.”

Captain Naslund and the two others headed out at dawn behind another unit, wading through one of the irrigation canals that have helped make this 75-square-mile farming district the heart of Afghan opium poppy production. With Afghan Army troops in the lead to ask villagers if the Marines could search their buildings — the units were under orders not to kick down doors — the morning stayed quiet.

By midafternoon, the female Marines had searched one terrified woman in a baby-blue burqa on the back of her husband's motorcycle and had talked, through their Afghan-American female interpreter, to more than a dozen other Pashtun women. Some of them were frightened and refused to give their names — “I'd be nervous, too, if I had five chicks in my living room with weapons,” Captain Naslund said after one meeting, referring to her team. But other Afghan women were friendly, if wary.

Inside compounds crowded with children, cows and goats, the Marines had removed their helmets but left on their body armor and kept their M4 rifles nearby. They mixed in simple questions about the ages of a woman's children with a more pointed one: what does your husband do for a living?

Most of the women said their husbands were farmers out working the fields. But the Marines suspected that some, either insurgents or their supporters, had slipped away when news had gotten out that the Americans were in town. When one woman said her husband was in Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban, Captain Naslund replied, “Oh, we'd love to meet him.”

The Marines were heading back to the patrol base in the late afternoon when the Kalashnikov rifle shots rang out, sending the patrol scattering for cover. “They just shoot and run, that's all that was,” Lance Corporal Robertson said dismissively afterward.

But the next day when she and the others were back in Sistani, an Afghan man served them tea, asked for a new pump for his well and told them, “If the Taliban find out we're taking care of you, they'll cut our throats.”

His words seemed an ominous warning: on the way back to the base, word came over the radio of a potential Taliban ambush. On edge, the female Marines avoided the area, walking through a pungent field of five-foot-tall marijuana plants instead.

By the afternoon they were meeting with Marine commanders and village men outside the local mosque, where Captain Zepeda introduced them: “We realize there are needs within the community that also involve women, so we have brought some women here.” The meeting ended two hours later when the closing prayer of the mullah mixed in with the bleats of nearby goats and the unmistakable buzz of American surveillance drones overhead.

Sidestepping Restrictions

In July, the female Marines were abruptly called back from their 16 outposts to more secure military installations in Helmand for a legal review to determine if they were in compliance with Pentagon directives on women in combat. The timing, more than halfway through their deployment, bewildered them.

In a telephone interview last week, Maj. Gen. Richard Mills, the commander of the 20,000 Marines in Helmand, said he had called the women back after he was contacted by Pentagon officials because a congressman — neither he nor Marines in Washington would identify him — “had shown some interest in what exactly the females were doing.” General Mills acknowledged that the female engagement teams are “out on the point of the spear many times.”

Current Pentagon policy bars women from joining combat branches like the infantry, armor and Special Forces, and Congress in the past has sought to restrict military women's roles even more. But in a common side step during nearly a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, women are “attached,” rather than assigned, to combat units. The female engagement teams simply say they “accompany” Marine infantry units on their patrols.

The review ended after three weeks, when lawyers and Marine commanders clarified some rules: the teams could not go on foot patrols primarily intended to hunt and kill the enemy, and they were not allowed more than “temporary stays” at the combat bases where they had been living for months.

When a debate broke out over what constituted a “temporary stay,” General Mills decreed it as 45 days. To fulfill the letter but hardly the spirit of the guidelines, the female Marines now travel from their combat outposts every six weeks for an overnight stay at a big base like Camp Leatherneck, then head back out the next morning.

To Captain Naslund, the legal hoops are absurd when there are no front lines — and when members of her team are taking fire almost daily on foot patrols.

“The current policy on women in combat is outdated and does not apply to the type of war we are fighting,” she wrote to her parents, friends and this reporter in an e-mail after the legal review in July. Since then, she has grudgingly accepted that the Marine Corps, which promotes an image as the most testosterone-fueled service, is a long way from allowing women in the infantry, and that she will live within the guidelines.

“If someone gets hurt, they're going to come back and say, ‘Were you within the D.O.D. policy on women in combat?' ” Captain Naslund said. “And if the answer is no, someone's going to get fired. And it's going to be someone pretty high up. Not because someone died, but because someone died when they weren't obeying the rules.”

Male commanders in Helmand acknowledge that they sometimes hold the female Marines back to avoid potential problems. Captain Zepeda, for example, said he had deliberately kept the women behind the lead unit for the clearing of Sistani. The next day he said he had made sure that the women were routed around the possible Taliban ambush, in part to avoid a firefight before the meeting with village elders. But he might have sent an all-male infantry unit straight into it to try to inflict casualties on the enemy.

But over all, “they're Marines first,” said Lt. Col. Kyle Ellison, the commander of 1,000 Marines in the Second Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment, in southern Marja. “I don't see a difference.”

Beaches and BMWs Ahead

“I'm going out of my mind, let's get on the bus,” Corporal Coate said just before Lance Corporal Carver's memorial service got under way. More than the others, she is nervously counting the days until the end of her deployment in mid-October.

The replacements for the female Marines arrived this past week in Helmand, 45 young women, again out of Camp Pendleton. Over the next days, the old team will introduce the new team to the Pashtun women they have built relationships with and hope the contact continues.

The departing Marines, meanwhile, have made vacation plans. Captain Naslund, who, like the others, stashed away most of her pay over the past seven months, has bought a BMW online and will pick it up before a vacation to Hawaii or Fiji. Lt. Natalie Kronschnabel, a team commander, is getting out of the Marines and will spend the next year in Italy. Corporal Oliver and Lance Corporal Robertson are making plans to spend New Year's Eve in Times Square.

Looking back, Captain Naslund said she was not surprised that Corporal Coate would not want to repeat the experience. “After you see some of the stuff Marines see, you don't want to go through that ever again, and then you start questioning, is it worth it, are we here for a reason?” she said.

She said she told Corporal Coate: “Yes, this happened to you, but this is what's happening in Afghanistan. This is awesome, you're making a difference here.”

As for what that difference is, Captain Naslund did not hesitate. “Just making a small improvement in somebody's life, that means something,” she said. “And if that means that someday women don't have to wear a burqa, great. If it means that they're getting beat up and they've got some place to go to tell somebody, great. Or if they have a well in their compound that they didn't have before, that's going to make a big difference.”

In the end, she said, “They're going to remember what we did.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/world/asia/03marines.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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A Code for Chaos

IN June, a Belarus-based computer security firm identified a new computer malware program, Stuxnet , which was repeatedly crashing the computers of one of its clients. Then, last month, a German security researcher suggested that the program's real target might be the Iranian nuclear program — and that clues in the coding suggested that Israel was the creator. Since then, there has been growing alarm about the worm, as its target and sophistication have become more apparent. The code has appeared in many countries, notably China, India, Indonesia and Iran. It appears designed to attack a certain type of Siemens industrial control computer, used widely to manage oil pipelines, electrical power grids and many kinds of nuclear plants. The question is: Just how dangerous has this worm and cyberwarfare become?

How widespread is cyberwarfare?

A 2007 F.B.I. report asserted that 108 countries had at least some offensive cyberwarfare capabilities. And there has been widespread speculation that a secret cyberwar “arms race” is under way as a number of countries build sophisticated software and hardware attack capabilities. Most recent wars and military engagements, like Russia's quarrel with Estonia in 2007 or with Georgia in 2008 , have been accompanied by a “cyberwar” engagement, in which government and financial Web sites have been targeted.

What was the earliest case of cyberwarfare?

In his book “At the Abyss,” Thomas C. Reed, a former secretary of the Air Force , described a software program known as a Trojan horse, in which industrial control software was covertly added by the United States to equipment being shipped to the Soviet Union from Canada. When the equipment was installed in a trans-Siberian gas pipeline in June 1982, it suddenly went haywire, touching off a huge explosion and fire, according to Mr. Reed.

Another episode in January 1990, the collapse of AT&T 's long-distance network, also raised suspicions of sabotage.

But security experts have been concerned about potential cyberattacks since the 1970s, during the early days of the Arpanet, an experimental, military-financed research network that was the predecessor to the Internet. There was great concern about a network connection — a now old-fashioned 9600 baud modem — that had been installed by scientific researchers linking Moscow and the United States, via a mathematics research center in Vienna. When national security officials discovered the link, financing to the center was canceled.

How is Stuxnet different?

Stuxnet is the first widely analyzed malware program that is intended to jump from Windows-based computers to a specialized system used for controlling industrial equipment, like electric power grids, manufacturing plants, gas pipelines, dams and power plants. Previously, most high-profile cyberattacks have focused on Web sites and corporate or military networks.

At least, that's true when it comes to proven cyberattacks. But there has also been speculation about episodes that could have been caused by sabotage. For example, The Los Angeles Times reported in 2001 that intrusions into the network that controlled the electrical grid were traced to someone in Guangdong Province, China. Later reports of other electric grid attacks have often included allegations that the break-ins were orchestrated by the Chinese, although no proof has been produced.

In the case of Stuxnet, what are arguments for and against Israel's involvement?

Ralph Langner, a German security researcher, was the first to point out that it appeared that the Stuxnet program had been tailored to attack a nuclear facility or a uranium enrichment plant. And several hints in the code suggest Israeli authorship, including a possible allusion to the Book of Esther, which describes Jewish retaliation against a Persian threat, and a number — 19790509 — that appears to refer to the date of the execution of an Iranian Jew by a firing squad in Tehran.

But many military and intelligence analysts, including several with direct knowledge of Israeli intelligence operations, have said it is unlikely that either an Israeli or United States operation would leave such blatant clues. That leaves the possibility that someone wanted to plant evidence pointing incorrectly to Israeli involvement. Most computer security specialists say the authorship of the program may never be discovered.

What kind of attack do computer security experts fear most?

There has been widespread fear about attacks that jam or damage large financial networks, the electric power grid, power plants, transportation systems or any of the modern infrastructure underlying industrial economies.

In many cases, the first step in securing these systems has been to insure that they are entirely separated from the Internet. However, even if they are separated from the Internet, in many cases they use internal networks based on the Internet protocol, as well as common computing equipment, like Microsoft and Intel -based computers. That means they remain potentially vulnerable to a “sneakernet” attack, in which a malicious program is physically carried into an isolated network either accidentally or by an intruder.

Can this kind of attack be done by a lone hacker?

In the case of Stuxnet, computer security specialists generally agree that it was not the work of one person but rather a team of sophisticated programmers. Many who have examined the malicious code have stated that it would have required an organization with substantial financial resources to develop, test and then release such a program. Certainly nations with cyberwar capabilities are potential suspects, but they are not the only possible creators. China, Israel and the Palestinians are all known to have irregular cyberarmies of motivated hackers with significant skills.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/weekinreview/03markoff.html?ref=world

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Iran Says It Arrested Computer Worm Suspects

TEHRAN — Iran has arrested an unspecified number of “nuclear spies” in connection with a damaging worm that has infected computers in its nuclear program, the intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, said Saturday.

Mr. Moslehi also told the semiofficial Mehr news agency that the ministry had achieved “complete mastery” over government computer systems and was able to counter any cyberattacks by “enemy spy services.”

Iran confirmed last week that the Stuxnet worm, a malicious self-replicating program that attacks computers that control industrial plants, had infected computers in its nuclear operations. Officials said it had been found in personal computers at the Bushehr nuclear plant, a power generator that is not believed to be part of a weapons program, and that it had not caused “serious damage” to government systems.

While the origins of the worm remain obscure, many computer security experts believe it was created by a government with the intent of sabotaging Iran's nuclear program , which Western countries believe is aimed at creating a nuclear weapon. The United States and Israel have cyberwarfare programs and both countries have sought to undermine Iran's nuclear enrichment program, but neither has commented on the Stuxnet worm.

Iran has portrayed the worm as a cyberattack by Western powers and Israel intended to derail the country's nuclear program, which the government says is for peaceful purposes.

“All of the destructive activities perpetrated by the oppressors in cyberspace will be discovered quickly and means of combating these plans will be implemented,” Mr. Moslehi said. “The intelligence Ministry is aware of a range of activities being carried out against the Islamic Republic by enemy spy services.”

He provided no further details on the arrests, which could not be independently verified.

Hamid Alipour, an official at the state-run Iran Information Technology company, has said that the worm is spreading. “This is not a stable virus,” he said last week. “By the time we started to combat it three new variants had been distributed.” He said his company hoped to eliminate it within “one to two months.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/world/middleeast/03iran.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Smugglers of Drugs Burrow on Border

NOGALES, Ariz. — Drone aircraft patrol the United States-Mexico border from the skies. Fast boats look out for smugglers at sea. And tens of thousands of Border Patrol agents use trucks, horses, all-terrain vehicles and bicycles to stop unauthorized crossers on land.

But there is another route across the border, one in which smugglers slither north. As enforcement efforts have increased and border barriers have been built, tunneling has gained in popularity, with Nogales becoming the capital.

On Thursday, the Border Patrol was filling an underground tunnel that had been discovered right under the immigration checkpoint in Nogales. But even before the concrete was poured to make that tunnel inoperative, another subterranean passageway was discovered a block away.

The second tunnel, which had been used to bring bales of marijuana from Mexico, will be filled as well. There are patches, in fact, all across this city, where the authorities have tried to tap the tunnels that traffickers build off the extensive underground storm drain system that connects Nogales with another city by the same name across the fence in Mexico.

With profit margins so huge, drug traffickers pushing their wares across the border are an enterprising lot. No matter how much the United States government pours into the region to stop them, there always seem to be novel attempts to elude detection.

And the two Nogaleses are where drug trafficking has literally gone underground. Burrowing from one country to the other happens elsewhere along the border, particularly in the smuggling zone around Tijuana. But officials say most of the tunnels discovered along the entire stretch of the border are from the Mexican Nogales to the American one.

“We are in the lead in the tunnel business,” said Chief Jeffrey Kirkham of the Nogales Police Department.

It is the geography of the region that makes tunneling so common here, as the Mexican side sits at a slightly higher elevation and water flows north through generations-old underground channels. “Through the downtowns of both cities, the drainage flows through a tunnel and then at some point goes into an open channel on the U.S. side,” said Sally Spener, spokeswoman for the International Boundary and Water Commission, a binational body that oversees water issues between the United States and Mexico.

Over the last four years, at least 51 unauthorized tunnels, or more than one a month, have been found in the two border cities. Some are short, narrow passageways that require those navigating them to slither. Others are long, sophisticated underground thoroughfares strung with electric cables and ventilation hoses.

Last year, a resident tipped off the authorities to a tunnel that extended 48 feet into Mexico and 35 feet into the United States, making it one of the longest ever found in Nogales.

One high-end tunnel found in 2005 farther west in Calexico, Calif., originated in the master bedroom of a Mexican home and extended to a garage on the American side. It had a phone line and air conditioning, and the authorities estimated that dozens of truckloads of dirt had to be removed to build it.

Although migrants heading north sometimes use tunnels, the passageways are more often considered the handiwork of drug smugglers. That means residents, especially on the Mexican side, sometimes look the other way when they observe surreptitious tunneling for fear of attracting the attention of criminals.

On the Arizona side, specially trained Border Patrol agents monitor the drains, entering the dark underworld that crisscrosses the border and looking for unauthorized offshoots dug by hand.

The air is cool down below. The only sound comes from the chirping of bats and the flow of water, a mixture of storm runoff and sewage. It seems a good place to hide.

“I'm one foot from the border,” Kevin Hecht, a Border Patrol agent standing in the dark in a stream of pungent water, said as he shined his flashlight around. “Down here, you look for signs of movement. You look for digging.”

Farther down the drain, David Jimarez, a Border Patrol spokesman, squatted in a tunnel and peered into a two-foot offshoot. “They crawl on their bellies,” he said. “They're like a snake.”

How the tunnels are discovered varies. The one filled with concrete last week was found when the front tire of a bus sank into the pavement, revealing a weak spot that was caused by tunneling. There have been cases, officials say, of manholes popping up in the middle of roadways, with furtive eyes peering out. The owner of a Nogales warehouse last year discovered a tunnel in his border-front property.

Sometimes the diggers make too much noise. In June, a security guard at the DeConcini Port of Entry reported hearing strange sounds emanating from a storm drain that ran from the border fence north to Interstate 19. It turned out to be a tunnel just large enough to fit a smuggler.

“It's a netherworld down there,” said Roy Bermudes, the assistant police chief in Nogales. “If you turn off your flashlight, you can't see your hand in front of your face.”

Chief Bermudes used to enter the tunnels regularly when he led the police SWAT team that provided backup to city workers doing underground repair work. He recalls hearing a noise while underground and aiming his rifle in front of him, only to discover a Mexican military squad doing a similar patrol. After a brief standoff, the guns on both sides were lowered.

Eventually, as the danger grew, the city handed over patrol duties to the Border Patrol, which has installed underground cameras and motion detectors.

It is not just the flow of drugs that concerns the authorities here. The tunneling weakens roadways, sometimes causing them to buckle, and puts buildings at risk.

“There is a joke in Nogales that someday its entire downtown will collapse into a giant sinkhole due to the many drug tunnels in the city,” Hugh Holub, a former public works director in Nogales, wrote recently .

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/us/03tunnels.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Growing Anti-Immigrant Sentiments in an Unlikely State

CRETE, Neb. — Nebraska may appear to be an unlikely setting for swelling anti-immigrant sentiment.

This agricultural hub is far removed from any border. It has long been more preoccupied with bolstering its population than keeping people out. And immigrants, legal and otherwise, have been fixtures for years in the fields and meatpacking plants here, helping this state put meat and vegetables on dinner tables around the country.

But even as the state enjoys relative economic health — unemployment, at 4.6 percent, is the third lowest in the nation — illegal immigration has taken a more central and more divisive place in the politics of communities like this one, visibly transformed by an influx of immigrant newcomers.

That shift in political dialogue has been propelled here by Gov. Dave Heineman — even before it was a national issue. Four years ago, Mr. Heineman, a Republican, made his unyielding opposition to illegal immigration a central part of his underdog campaign for governor.

Now, as a popular incumbent heavily favored to win, he recently announced that one of the first acts of his second term would be to press for a law that would make it easier for local police officials to arrest illegal immigrants, which he said would be closely modeled on the controversial law adopted in Arizona that is now being challenged by the Obama administration in court.

“I'm very adamant about this — the federal government has failed to solve the immigration issue,” Mr. Heineman said in a recent interview in his offices in Lincoln, where the shelves are stocked with college football paraphernalia and the ceilings and walls are adorned with murals celebrating cultures from around the world. “Next January I believe in every state in America there will be an Arizona-type law introduced.”

In an election cycle defined by concerns over jobs and mortgages, government spending and debt, the issue of illegal immigration has become a common talking point on the campaign trail.

Candidates running for office in a dozen states have pledged to introduce legislation similar to the Arizona law, according to a count by the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which supports the passage of such laws. But while some of those efforts are given slim chances of passing, such a law is favored by a large majority of Nebraskans.

This summer, Fremont, where Mr. Heineman got his start on the City Council, barred businesses from hiring illegal immigrants and landlords from renting to them — a contentious battle that unnerved Hispanic residents across the state.

Residents here say that Crete, a city of 6,000 that is dominated by the meatpacking plant looming over downtown, does not share the conflicts that have affected other communities with growing Hispanic populations. Still, there is a palpable unease when talking about immigration.

“We're just getting too many Hispanic people in town,” said Gerry Boller, 78, who works at the counter at New Beginnings Thrift Store on Main Avenue. “It seems like they come in and take over.”

At Super Latina, a grocery store next door, Jose Banos, the 36-year-old owner, said that when he moved here from El Salvador 15 years ago, there were no stores that catered to the Hispanic community. Now his is one of many.

But immigrants are worried by the situation in Fremont and the talk of replicating the Arizona laws, and some are talking about leaving.

“Arizona needs the law more than we do because on the border, problems with immigrants come with other problems, like guns and drugs,” Mr. Banos said. “Here in Nebraska, it's a whole different story. Immigrants in Nebraska are coming for work.”

Just over a decade ago the state's two most prominent Republican elected officials — Chuck Hagel , then a senator, and Mike Johanns , a governor who is now in the Senate — banded together to successfully pressure federal authorities not to create a program aimed at cracking down on the hiring of illegal immigrants in the state's meatpacking plants.

Since that time the number of foreign-born residents — the majority of whom are Hispanic — has increased drastically, more than 40 percent since 2000, according to census estimates. The number of illegal immigrants grew more than 50 percent in that time to 45,000, according to estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.

But even if concern about these new arrivals simmered across the state, it did not become a central part of the political dialogue until 2005, when Mr. Heineman was elevated from lieutenant governor to the top post after Mr. Johanns resigned to be United States agriculture secretary.

Mr. Heineman's tenure was expected to be short. The next year, in the Republican primary, he faced the University of Nebraska 's much-beloved football coach turned congressman, Tom Osborne. But Mr. Heineman proved a more deft campaigner and lavished attention on the issue of illegal immigration.

“It was the defining issue of his campaign,” said David J. Kramer, a lawyer and former state Republican chairman who also ran for office that year. “It was the issue that made the difference between him winning and losing.”

As governor, Mr. Heineman has emphasized that the state welcomes immigrants, as long as they are legal. He has battled repeatedly, though so far unsuccessfully, to rescind in-state college tuition rates for children who grew up in the state but are in the country illegally.

He put in effect a system to perform mandatory checks of those applying for government benefits to ensure that they are not illegal immigrants. And, more recently, he upset some of his anti-abortion supporters by ending a program that provided prenatal care for pregnant women who are in the country illegally.

But while Mr. Heineman's previous efforts addressed circumstances that affected dozens if not hundreds of illegal immigrants, an Arizona-style law would be far more sweeping.

Mike Meister, a Democrat who is running against Mr. Heineman, has strongly opposed the proposal, which he said was “clearly unconstitutional” and would waste money by forcing the state to fight an inevitable lawsuit. Mr. Meister, a lawyer who is trailing badly in the polls, accused Mr. Heineman of using the proposal as a wedge issue.

“He is pandering to the least common denominator,” Mr. Meister said. “Our fear of difference.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/us/politics/03nebgov.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Drug Makers Accused of Ignoring Price Law

WASHINGTON — Drug manufacturers often flout a federal law that requires them to provide the government with pricing data needed to calculate discounts on medications prescribed for poor people under Medicaid , federal investigators say in a new report.

The information is not submitted at all, is filed late or is incomplete, the investigators said, and as a result Medicaid overpays for prescription drugs.

The problem, they said, could become more significant under President Obama 's new health care law, which increases the amount of the discounts and promises to add millions of people to the Medicaid rolls.

In a new initiative intended to force compliance, Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services , who led the investigation, said he would impose civil fines on drug manufacturers that fail to meet their price-reporting obligations.

Under federal law, the government can impose penalties of $10,000 a day on a drug manufacturer that fails to provide the information “on a timely basis.”

The government has had this authority since 1990 but has not used it, the inspector general said.

Mr. Levinson said he found that more than three-fourths of drug manufacturers did not fully comply with the law requiring them to provide price data. They are supposed to file monthly and quarterly reports on what wholesalers paid them for drugs eventually sold to retail pharmacies.

Medicaid spends tens of millions of dollars a year on drugs made by companies that did not submit the required price data to the government, Mr. Levinson said. Without price data, the federal government cannot compute rebates, and states may be unable to collect them.

As a condition of having their drugs covered by Medicaid, pharmaceutical companies must agree to provide discounts in the form of rebates. Drug companies pay the rebates to state Medicaid programs. The federal government and the states share the cost of Medicaid — roughly $400 billion in the last year — and share the savings that result from the rebates.

Ann Leopold Kaplan, deputy general counsel of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America , a trade group, said drug companies “take compliance issues very seriously.” But, she added, “reporting of the average manufacturer price is very complex,” and the task has been made more difficult by many recent changes in laws.

Under the health care law, the minimum rebate on brand-name drugs dispensed to Medicaid recipients was increased to 23.1 percent of the average manufacturer price, from 15.1 percent. The minimum rebate on generic drugs was increased to 13 percent, from 11 percent.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the changes could save the federal government more than $35 billion over 10 years. Major drug companies are already reporting adverse effects on their revenues. However, drug companies stand to gain many customers with the scheduled Medicaid expansion in 2014.

Medicaid officials contend that “they do not currently have the resources” to identify all the manufacturers that fail to submit the data, Mr. Levinson said. He recommended that Medicaid officials aggressively pursue such manufacturers. Medicaid officials agreed to do so, but would not discuss enforcement plans.

The prices reported by drug manufacturers “play a critical role” in determining what the government pays for prescription drugs, Mr. Levinson said. They are used to calculate the rebates owed to states under Medicaid and to establish discounts on drugs bought by community health centers and hospitals serving large numbers of poor people. In addition, federal officials can use the data to set limits on what Medicaid will pay pharmacies for the generic versions of certain brand-name drugs.

In another report, the Congressional Budget Office said that Medicare could save substantial amounts of money through greater use of generic drugs.

About 65 percent of prescriptions in Medicare's outpatient drug program are already filled with generic drugs, the budget office said. Medicare could achieve additional savings by encouraging people to “switch to the generic form of a different drug in the same therapeutic class,” the report said.

A pharmacist must ordinarily obtain the consent of the prescribing physician before substituting a generic drug for a brand-name product that is not chemically equivalent, the report said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/us/03drug.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Bullying, Suicide, Punishment

TYLER CLEMENTI may have died from exposure in cyberspace. His roommate and another student, according to police, viewed Mr. Clementi's intimate encounter with another man on a Webcam and streamed it onto the Internet. Mr. Clementi, an 18-year-old violinist in his freshman year at Rutgers University , jumped off of the George Washington Bridge , and now the two face serious criminal charges, including invasion of privacy.

The prosecutor in the case has also said that he will investigate bringing bias charges, based on Mr. Clementi's sexual orientation, which could raise the punishment to 10 years in prison from 5.

But the case has stirred passionate anger, and many have called for tougher charges, like manslaughter — just as outrage led to similar calls against the six students accused of bullying Phoebe Prince, a student in South Hadley, Mass., who also committed suicide earlier this year .

What should the punishment be for acts like cyberbullying and online humiliation?

That question is as difficult to answer as how to integrate our values with all the things in our lives made of bits, balancing a right to privacy with the urge to text, tweet, stream and post.

And the outcry over proper punishment is also part of the continuing debate about how to handle personal responsibility and freedom. Just how culpable is an online bully in someone's decision to end a life?

It is not the first time cruel acts and online distribution have combined tragically. In 2008, Jessica Logan, 18, hung herself after an ex-boyfriend circulated the nude cellphone snapshots she had “sexted” to him.

Public humiliation and sexual orientation can be an especially deadly blend. In recent weeks, several students have committed suicide after instances that have been described as cyberbullying over sexual orientation, including Seth Walsh, a 13-year-old in Tehachapi, Calif., who hanged himself from a tree in his backyard last month and died after more than a week on life support.

A survey of more than 5,000 college students , faculty members and staff members who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender published last month by the advocacy group Campus Pride found that nearly one in four reported harassment, almost all related to sexual orientation and gender identity.

Warren J. Blumenfeld, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at Iowa State University and an author of the Campus Pride study, also conducted a smaller survey of 350 nonheterosexual students between the ages of 11 and 22 and found that about half of the respondents reported being cyberbullied in the 30 days before the survey, and that more than a quarter had suicidal thoughts.

“Those students who are face-to-face bullied, and/or cyberbullied, face increased risk for depression, PTSD, and suicidal attempts and ideation,” Professor Blumenfeld said.

But punishment for people who do such a thing is still up for debate. In the Rutgers case, New Jersey prosecutors initially charged the two students, Dharum Ravi and Molly W. Wei, with two counts each of invasion of privacy for using the camera on Sept. 19. Mr. Ravi faces two additional counts for a second, unsuccessful attempt to view and transmit another image of Mr. Clementi two days later.

If Mr. Ravi's actions constituted a bias crime, that could raise the charges from third-degree invasion of privacy to second degree, and double the possible punishment to 10 years.

Still, for all the talk of cyberbullying, the state statute regarding that particular crime seems ill suited to Mr. Clementi's suicide.

Like most states with a cyberbullying statute, New Jersey's focuses on primary and high school education, found in the part of the legal code devoted to education, not criminal acts. The privacy law in this case is used more often in high-tech peeping Tom cases involving hidden cameras in dressing rooms and bathrooms. State Senator Barbara Buono sponsored both pieces of legislation, and said the law had to adapt to new technologies. “No law is perfect,” she said. “No law can deter every and any instance of this kind of behavior. We're going to try to do a better job.”

Still, the punishment must fit the crime, not the sense of outrage over it. While some have called for manslaughter charges in the Rutgers case, those are difficult to make stick. Reaching a guilty verdict would require that the suicide be viewed by a jury as foreseeable — a high hurdle in an age when most children report some degree of bullying.

Besides, finding the toughest possible charges isn't the way the law is supposed to work, said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University who specializes in cybercrime. “There's an understandable wish by prosecutors to respond to the moral outrage of society,” he said, “but the important thing is for the prosecution to follow the law.”

The fact that a case of bullying ends in suicide should not bend the judgment of prosecutors, he said. Society should be concerned, he said, when it appears that the government is “prosecuting people not for what they did, but for what the victim did in response.”

Finding the right level of prosecution, then, can be a challenge. On the one hand, he said, “it's college — everybody is playing pranks on everybody else.” On the other, “invading somebody's privacy can inflict such great distress that invasions of privacy should be punished, and punished significantly.”

There is also the question of society's role. Students are encouraged by Facebook and Twitter to put their every thought and moment online, and as they sacrifice their own privacy to the altar of connectedness, they worry less about the privacy of others.

Teenagers “think that because they can do it, that makes it right,” said Nancy E. Willard, a lawyer and founder of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use .

Impulsiveness, immaturity and immense publishing power can be a dangerous mix, she said. “With increased power to do things comes increased responsibility to make sure that what you're doing is O.K.,” she said.

That is why Daniel J. Solove, author of “The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor and Privacy on the Internet,” said society needed to work on education.

“We teach people a lot of the consequences” of things like unsafe driving, he said, “but not that what we do online could have serious consequences.”

That sounds good, of course, but adults still drive recklessly after all that time in driver's ed. And it is easy and cheap to say that “kids can be so cruel at that age,” but failures of judgment can be found almost anywhere you look.

After all, what are we to make of Andrew Shirvell, an assistant attorney general in Michigan who devoted his off hours to a blog denouncing the openly gay student body president at his alma mater, the University of Michigan ? His posts include accusations that the student, Chris Armstrong, is a “radical homosexual activist” and a photo of Mr. Armstrong doctored with a rainbow flag and swastika. He told Anderson Cooper that he is “a Christian American exercising my First Amendment rights.”

On Friday, the attorney general's office announced that Mr. Shirvell was taking personal leave pending a disciplinary hearing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/weekinreview/03schwartz.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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