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From the Los Angeles Times

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Caught behind enemy lines

Reynosa, on the Texas border, is a city under the control of cartels. Traffickers brazenly patrol its streets, setting up roadblocks, harassing citizens, gunning down enemies and even censoring the news. Those who can flee have. Others find ways to cope.

By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

November 6, 2010

Reporting from Reynosa, Mexico

It starts at the airport. A burly guy in a hoodie drapes himself over the barrier that leads out of the parking lot. Watching. Just watching.

Most taxi drivers are on the drug cartels' payroll, ordered to spy on visitors and monitor the movements of the military and state investigators. Their license plates brazenly shed, they cruise streets dotted with paper-flower shrines marking the dead. Watching.

In the main downtown plaza, in front of City Hall and the cathedral, about a dozen guys in baggy pants with sunglasses on their heads hang out alongside the shoeshine men. They eye passersby, without speaking.

This is a city under siege.

It's a city where you avert your eyes when men clean their guns in the middle of the plazas.

Where schoolchildren are put through the paces of pecho a tierra drills, literally, "chest to the ground" — a duck-and-dive move for when the shooting starts.

Where you try to remain invisible; you never know who is standing next in line at the grocery store or the 7-Eleven.

Where a middle-aged man muses that it's turned out to be a good thing, after all, that he and his wife never had children.

The Times spent a week recently in Reynosa, passing time with and talking to a dozen residents, to learn how they cope under cartel rule. All were terrified to speak of their experiences and agreed to do so only under the strictest anonymity. Most did not want to be seen in public with a foreign reporter and would meet only in secret. One insisted on meeting across the nearby border in the United States.

"You go around with Jesus in the mouth," one man says.

Meaning, you pray.

*

Reynosa is the largest city in Tamaulipas, a harrowing state bordering Texas that is all but lost to federal government rule.

The Burger Kings and California-style shopping malls give the city a sense — a false sense — of normalcy. Cars circulate down wide streets. Evangelical churches and donut shops and beauty parlors are open for business.

But Reynosa, with a population of about 700,000, may be the single largest city in Mexico under the thumb of the cartels.

Drug traffickers with the powerful Gulf cartel have long dominated Tamaulipas. In Reynosa, residents more or less coexisted with the traffickers, sometimes joining them, sometimes skirting them. No authority dared challenge them.

The arrangement was shattered early this year when the paramilitary wing of the cartel, the Zetas, split furiously from their patrons, and the two ruthless groups declared war on each other. It was when, as people here put it, the devil jumped.

Battles raged in the spring and early summer, with uncounted scores of people killed. The Gulf cartel fought the Zetas, and the Mexican army fought them both. Bombs and grenades exploded at nightclubs, television stations and city offices. The man who was likely to be the state's next governor was assassinated in broad daylight, along with most of his entourage.

Combat still erupts regularly. But Reynosa is as much a prison camp as a war zone. Army patrols periodically pass through — listening to the bad guys listening to them on radio frequencies — and on the outskirts man roadblocks and hand out leaflets pleading for citizens' cooperation.

The Gulf cartel has control of the city, but Zetas lurk for about 60 miles in any direction. Highways between major Tamaulipas cities are extremely dangerous, stalked by one gang or the other. People speak using terms of war, like "refugees" and "displaced." Even the mayor is displaced. (He fled to Texas.)

The cartels have infiltrated everything: from city hall and the police department, through border customs agencies and all the way down to taco vendors and pirated CD stands.

"There is a great sense of uneasiness in the city," said Armando Javier Zertuche, a psychologist who also serves as secretary of economic development for Reynosa. "It used to be that if someone got kidnapped or killed, you knew they had something to do with [drug trafficking]. Now, with this war, everyone is at risk. It has fallen on top of regular citizens."

*

The Commuter

Her stomach clenched when she saw the big white cars ahead in the road, blocking the way. Maybe it's the army, her husband suggested, noting the gunmen were wearing camouflage. But she knew.

She had already been grabbed by the traffickers twice in the last few months. How she survived the third time, she doesn't really know. But survival now is the goal of every day.

She commutes regularly between Reynosa and her home city, a couple of hours away: The work is better in Reynosa. She uses all sorts of tactics to try to be safe, keeping in constant radio contact with loved ones, hiding her money in her underwear, even using U.S. roads to commute between Mexican cities.

"My life has changed totally," she says, speaking in a hotel room with a television on to cloak the conversation. "To drive on the highways is to tempt death."

She and her husband had not driven far out of Reynosa that morning in September, westward along the "Riberena" riverside highway that occasionally glimpses Texas, when they were confronted by the armed men.

The men, gruff, cursing, communicating with their comandante by radio, reeked of marijuana. One was branded, like a head of cattle, with the letter Z, for Zetas.

They threw her husband against the hood of the car, rifled through her purse and packages, demanded to know who they were and where they were going and gestured wildly with their AK-47s. They demanded to see her husband's papers, as though they were the authority. She felt herself beginning to pass out.

"You know who we are?" growled one of the men.

They stole the couple's cellphones and toiletries and CDs but, for some reason, let them go. She and her husband climbed back into their car and drove for nearly 10 miles in utter silence.

"This is out of the government's hands," says the commuter, 46 and wound tightly. "Mexico has been sacrificed and sold to the narcos. It is the narcos who have the power."

In their quiet moments, the commuter and her husband don't chat about work or movies or family. They talk about how to behave when confronted by gunmen. Remain calm and passive. Don't show defiance. Assume no help will arrive.

"The narcos rule our lives," she says. "They order. We must obey."

*

The Dentist

Every morning when the dentist leaves for work, her mother says a prayer: "Dear God, let my children remain invisible to the eyes of the bad men."

She rushes to finish all her tasks in the daytime, to avoid going out at night. Friends have been kidnapped, and everyone has a story of being caught in a gun battle. Her family frequently receives telephoned threats.

"The saddest part is that our authorities have washed their hands of this. If you have a problem, you have nowhere to go," says the dentist, who is 41, tall, with long, dark hair. "We are abandoned and alone."

She is seated in the back section of an empty coffee shop at a nearly deserted shopping mall. She lowers her voice when the kid mopping up comes close. She stops talking until he moves on.

She would like to open up her own dental office instead of working for the state, where she tends to those who can't afford private healthcare. But then she'd have to pay piso — extortion money to the traffickers. Her uncles, a family of bakers, pay weekly sums to the gangsters to avoid having their bakeries torched, or worse. One uncle refused, and they kidnapped and held his son until he forked over the cash.

That means the dentist's plans are on hold. That spares her one dilemma: whether to fill the cavities in the mouths of narcos.

For all the fear, intimidation and what she calls psychosis, life must go on. And so it does in fits and starts. She has ventured out at night a few times lately, always in the company of friends and usually meeting at someone's house. And always super-vigilant, watching the cars sharing the streets, casting an eye into the distance to avoid roadblocks, erected either by the military or the gangs.

Nothing is done in a casual or spontaneous way.

"You even have to be careful of your friends and workmates," she says. "You don't know who they might be related to."

*

The Journalist

There are other parts of Mexico where cartels also hold sway, like blood-soaked Ciudad Juarez, or drug-trafficking central Culiacan, and where journalism remains strong and active. Not Reynosa.

Throughout the state of Tamaulipas, in fact, journalists practice a profound form of self-censorship, or censorship imposed by the narcos. The gun battles and grenade attacks that raged for months were rarely, if ever, covered in the largest local newspapers.

It is also the only place in Mexico where reporters with international news media have been confronted by gunmen and ordered to leave.

"I spend all day tweeting," says a young Reynosa journalist who, like most here, is on the payroll of both his television station and the city government.

Social media networks such as Twitter have taken the place of newspapers and radio reports, with everyone from city officials to regular people tweeting alerts about a gun battle here, a blockade there. It is a kind of ad hoc warning system, but it is not journalism.

The reporter says everyone knows what can be written about and what must be ignored. Asked if his life in Reynosa is scary, he pauses for a long while, puts his head in his hands and rubs his brow.

"Not scary. Not comfortable."

Four local journalists disappeared from Reynosa in March. Only one was heard from again; the others are presumed dead. (One of those purportedly ran a news website for the Gulf cartel.)

Mexico's major television network, Televisa, has given security training to all of its employees in Tamaulipas. On-air broadcasters are told to change their clothes before leaving the building so they can't be easily identified. Everyone is told to drive nondescript cars.

Journalists know their newsrooms have been infiltrated and their publications are watched. They routinely receive telephoned warnings when they publish something the traffickers don't like; more often, they avoid anything questionable. In Ciudad Victoria, the state capital, the Zetas now have a "public information" branch that regularly sends news releases to the local papers. The papers know they have to publish the releases: editors were rounded up a while back by the Zetas who used wide planks to beat them into submission.

It is a kind of instinct, knowing at a gut level what the cartel wants divulged, the young journalist says.

"Everyone knows the limits."

*

The Mother

The store with the copy machines is just three blocks away, but the mother doesn't let her 13-year-old son go alone. Recruiters for the drug traffickers cruise the neighborhoods in their SUVs, armed to the teeth, "fishing" for youngsters.

A 12-year-old in her son's class was recently kidnapped. He eventually reappeared, a few cities over, but is so traumatized that he remains under psychiatric care.

Outdoor recesses have frequently been canceled; school itself is often called off or interrupted when battles break out. And in their free time, kids collect spent shells as souvenirs.

When life is so tenuous, the mother says, you seek value in agony. Her son has gotten a lot closer to her, not bothered by and in fact welcoming her frequent calls to check on him.

"That youthful rebelliousness that you would expect at his age is gone," she says.

She's a native of Tamaulipas, her 14 brothers and sisters scattered all over the state. Holidays always meant the family got together. No more.

We lost Easter week, she says, because the fighting was so heavy.

"Now we are worried about Christmas," she says. "The narcos have appropriated family activities. Even that they have taken away from us."

*

The Businessman

The shootout at the baseball stadium was the last straw.

The businessman was there with his wife and young children, sitting a few rows from the mayor. The wife began to sob. The 9-year-old said, "Let's move."

And so they left Mexico.

The businessman, his wife and three children moved about a mile from their home in Reynosa, across the border to Hidalgo, Texas. "How long have we been here?" he asks his son inside their new home. "Four weeks, Papi ."

The only furniture in the living room is a couch, a flat-screen television and a bookcase. On top of the bookcase is a large, gold-trimmed black sombrero, a memento of home, the businessman says.

"I don't want my kids to forget Mexico."

He is a senior executive in his company, a good job with good pay and status. But it is a company with a certain public face, and he can no longer put his family at risk. He will continue to commute back to Reynosa daily, at least for the time being.

"Reynosa is a minefield," he says. "You can be threatened by a soldier or by a criminal, or just stumble upon a gunfight. Anyone who can, escapes."

No one is formally counting how many people have fled, but one city official said it could be about 10% of Reynosa's population.

"One block over, there's another family from Reynosa. And a couple blocks farther, there are four more," the businessman says. "You run into people you know at stoplights."

One time, a visitor from Mexico City came to his office. It didn't take long for the phone to ring. It was the drug traffickers, asking who the visitor was. They ordered him to stop talking to the visitor.

He has changed his cellphone number four times in the last eight months to elude threatening calls.

The businessman and his family aren't sure how many people were killed at the baseball stadium that day. No one ever knows these things with certainty. But the shooting forced the businessman into exile, a huge decision to leave his home of a lifetime.

The adjustment is clearly difficult. The children mope about, friendless, unsure of what to do. The wife is despondent, nervous. "You have to learn to start your life over," she says.

He says exile will last just two years, because after the Mexican presidential elections in 2012, the next government will make a deal with the narcos and "this war we did not ask for" will be over.

It will be back to the norm: the narcos, peacefully, in charge.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-cartel-rule-20101106,0,4904933,print.story

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New face of terror has Yemenis scratching their heads

Anwar Awlaki, whom U.S. authorities have linked to the Ft. Hood killings, is said to be hiding in the mountains in Yemen. But a sampling of men in Sana say they don't know who he is, and some call him — and his Al Qaeda branch — a political invention.

Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times

November 7, 2010

Reporting from Sana, Yemen

"Anwar Awlaki?"

Mmmmm.

"Is he a doctor? I don't think I know him."

Americans may regard the U.S.-born cleric with the beard and hard stare as a new face of terror, but when you mention Awlaki in the Yemeni capital, it's as if you've asked someone to solve a complicated bit of arithmetic. Eyes narrow, faces scrunch.

"I don't know who he is. I work all day and don't watch a lot of TV," said Ibrahim Abdulrab, standing over an ironing board with a pile of shirts at his feet.

The radical preacher is on the CIA's assassination list and is believed to be hiding with Al Qaeda fighters in Yemen's mountainous tribal lands. He is implicated in a number of plots, including inspiring a U.S. Army psychiatrist who is charged with killing 13 people a year ago at Ft. Hood, Texas, and the recent attempt to blow up aircraft with packages of concealed explosives.

Internet videos, website manifestos and pundit rhetoric are splicing Awlaki into the American consciousness. But he is largely unknown here or referred to as an apparition hiding in a distant crevice. Even his Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is scoffed at by many as an invention, a ploy by Washington and Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to advance larger agendas.

Rumors dart like sparrows across this city, flitting through conversations, sermons and newsrooms. Perceptions are shaped by conjecture and thinly drawn asides. They highlight the ideological and emotional divides between the U.S. and the Middle East on matters ranging from drone strikes in Pakistan to the elusive characters and strange blueprints of global terrorism.

"Al Qaeda in Yemen? A myth," said Mohammed Asari, a university student dressed in a blue blazer and sitting on a motorcycle. "I haven't seen them. They're mentioned on the news, but I don't trust the news. It's full of liars."

He slipped on his sunglasses and rode away, just as another student, Isa Ahmed, strolled into an alley past rows of books for sale on blankets. "Al Qaeda is not real," he said. "They've been created for political reasons. We don't know what's going on or what exists and what doesn't."

In an electronics store, pecking away at a laptop on a slow morning before prayers, Khaled Farih offered a theory.

"Al Qaeda is an Israeli gang using Islam as a cover," he said. "They want to defame Islam through terrorist acts. Yemen has a lot of enemies and they're all looking for gaps to slip through and destroy us. Al Qaeda might also be the work of the secessionists who want to divide Yemen."

Many Yemenis believe that Saleh, a shrewd tribesman who has ridden atop this country's rambunctious politics for three decades, is inflating the strength of Al Qaeda's regional branch as a ruse to attract Western aid. His government has attempted to link terrorist elements to an intensifying separatist movement in the south that analysts fear could ignite a civil war.

But nobody knows; figuring out reality here is like reading road signs in the fog. Besides, there are too many other problems: joblessness, corruption, malnutrition, human rights abuses and questions like how a man such as Abdulrab, who charges about 24 cents for each shirt he irons, feeds his family.

Don't complain too loudly. The beggar at your elbow may be a spy. Interlopers are everywhere, listening, making phone calls. Or so it seems. Yemenis love intrigue, folding and unfolding possibilities, sketching scenarios to fit a confusing world beyond the old city's fortress walls.

But what of Awlaki? A Yemeni judge on Saturday ordered his "forcible arrest." But despite his website and eloquent missives, Awlaki, known for public relations savvy and quoting from the Koran and Charles Dickens, drew barely a hint of recognition from shopkeepers, waiters and computer engineers along Sana's streets and alleys.

"Never heard of him," said Adnan Lotef, who served flat bread and tin plates of beans at a cafe not far from men with paint rollers and shovels waiting on corners and hoping for a day's work.

Down the sidewalk, past a stand of bags of yesterday's popcorn, a kettle steamed in a tea shop. Asad Hussein had no customers, but customers come and go, and much of life is spent in the lulls between.

He took a seat.

"Anwar Awlaki?" he said. "Yes, I know who he is. He is not of Islam. He is not a real Muslim. His behavior against the world is not right. We should do no harm to one another. It's Allah who should decide whether we go to heaven or hell, not Awlaki."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-qaeda-awlaki-20101107,0,1302857,print.story

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Mother of missing student gets closure after nine years of wondering

Nancy Ekelund was holding out hope that Lynsie would be found alive. But last week a friend of the Fullerton College student admitted to killing her and showed police where she was buried.

By Nicole Santa Cruz, Los Angeles Times

November 7, 2010

For nine years, nine months and 13 days, Nancy Ekelund would remove a small yellow Post-it note from her desk at work and replace it with a new one. Each slip of paper represented a day that her daughter, Lynsie, was missing.

But last Wednesday around 1:50 p.m., she received a phone call that would halt that practice.

It was from the Placentia Police Department; officers wanted her to come home as soon as possible. At first, Ekelund was excited. She thought maybe police would be delivering good news about her daughter, who disappeared Feb. 17, 2001, after a night out with friends. "When I drove up and I looked through the car window, I knew she would be standing there," she said.

Instead, police informed her that Christopher McAmis, 31, of Fullerton had confessed to the attempted rape and strangulation of Lynsie Ekelund, a 20-year-old journalism student. McAmis had maintained his innocence for years, telling authorities that he dropped the Fullerton College student off near her northern Orange County home after she accompanied him on a trip to San Diego. But last week, when detectives presented him with fresh evidence, McAmis led them to where he had buried her in Santa Clarita. McAmis has been charged with murder and remains in custody.

"All of a sudden, they are here, and they had the worst news I'd ever expect to hear," Nancy Ekelund said, sitting stunned in her living room the night after police uncovered human remains believed to be those of her daughter.

Ever since Lynsie Ekelund vanished, her mother had always held out hope that she was alive somewhere. The two were almost inseparable after a car accident left Lynsie, then 5, partially paralyzed. She had 28 orthopedic surgeries throughout her life.

"She just wanted to be normal," Nancy Ekelund said. "I don't think she ever felt she was."

After her daughter disappeared, Nancy Ekelund published a cookbook to raise money for the search. She printed more than 16,000 color fliers and distributed each one herself. Every year at the Orange County Fair, the thin, soft-spoken woman with a high-pitched voice would stand at the entrances and hand out fliers. She flew to New York and appeared on various talk shows, including those hosted by Montel Williams and John Walsh.

"I didn't know what else to do," she said. "I was doing anything to keep her name out there."

For seven years, she drove around with various posters on her car featuring Lynsie's face. It became normal for other drivers to tap her bumper while trying to see the poster's details.

"The last couple years, I really felt that she was alive," she said, adding that people still told her that they saw Lynsie. Her license plate reads "MISING L." On her rear window, a white sticker proclaims, "Memories become treasures."

"Now I know she's not hurting anymore," she said.

Now, Nancy Ekelund said she is preparing for a long legal battle as prosecutors try to convict McAmis on murder charges.

"It's a closure to whether she's alive or not," she said. "But it's the beginning of the legal part."

Although the news is painful, Ekelund said, "we don't have to spend the rest of our lives wondering."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-missing-student-mother-20101107,0,1097097,print.story

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Veterans fighting the enemy within

A brief film shows three men struggling against a death wish after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Steve Lopez

November 6, 2010

The Marine from Downey had the muzzle of an assault rifle in his mouth and was ready to pull the trigger when his fellow Marines saved him. Back home, he tried to overdose on Valium and he once called a suicide hotline with a gun in his hand and police at his door.

The Air Force man from the Los Feliz area says he has twice downed everything in his medicine cabinet and blacked out. Each time, he was surprised to wake up and find he was still alive.

The two men and I have gathered on a recent Saturday morning in an office at the VA in West Los Angeles to watch a short, powerful film about their service, their death wishes and their struggle to stay alive.

The Marine, Roger, sits next to me and weeps through much of the film.

"Something was taken away from me when I was out there, when I got hurt," the Roger on the screen is saying. "And I get mad, but they did take something away from me and it's affecting everybody in my family."

John, who was an Air Force radar specialist, seems tortured anew as he watches himself.

"I think anybody that's ever tried to commit suicide comes to a wall where they've tried everything else and they don't believe that anything will work, that anything will get better, and they're just done," John says in the film.

Tana Teicheira, who runs the suicide prevention program at the VA, studies Roger and John's reactions to the 20-minute video, stopping the film at times to make sure they're OK and to remind them they don't have to do this.

Roger, 33, and John, 35, insist they want to be here, not just for their own needs, but as a service to all the others who come home from Iraq and Afghanistan with invisible wounds. Like many combat vets, they've known nightmares, angry outbursts, insomnia, brain freezes and suffocating depression.

It seems a pity that during months of mid-term campaigning marked by heated battles over the size of government, there was no mention of the staggering costs, fiscal and otherwise, of two enduring wars. Nor any talk of doing more for those who come home in need of help.

A lot of men and women resume their lives without medical needs. But the VA reports that in the 12-month period ending in September 2009, there were 1,868 suicide attempts — and 98 deaths — among men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among active duty personnel, a recent Department of Defense report found, an average of one active duty member committed suicide every 36 hours between 2005 and 2009.

The VA also reports that the suicide rate is lower for those in treatment, and Teicheira is hoping to soon distribute the film so Roger and John — and a third veteran who's featured in the video — can help others fight past the military culture of denying or burying the hurt. She also intends to use the film as training for mental health professionals, so they can better identify suicidal tendencies.

"Vets are at twice the risk of the general population," says Teicheira.

Roger had the flesh blown off his hands in Fallujah when his unit came under attack. Either shrapnel or bullets flew through his face and rattled his skull. The assault was so intense that he had to wait eight hours to be safely evacuated to a hospital.

In the Air Force, John had no hand-to-hand combat but often came under fire on three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He suffered a head injury when his pilot took evasive action and the plane dropped out of the sky like a rock, slamming John's head into the ceiling.

Roger came home to a wife who was divorcing him and a daughter he couldn't embrace, maybe because he'd become too desensitized, or too aware of human fragility.

Often, Roger and John say, they get lost in mid-sentence or can't remember what they were supposed to buy at the store.

"I forget what I'm talking about," Roger tells me.

"Exactly," says John.

"I feel like an idiot," adds Roger, who says he was a high school honors student.

John couldn't find a job or a girlfriend after coming home, and his family connections were fractured. He fumed over a military diagnosis that he was bipolar before he enlisted, rather than traumatized by combat tours. After a struggle, he got a disability designation that pays him enough to scrape by.

"I cried a lot and it was surreal to me," John says in the movie, adding that his father had always preached that men don't cry. "I was crying during AT&T commercials and things like that, that you just shouldn't be crying" about.

John ended up in therapy after his second suicide attempt. Roger, who had the police at his door, says he wanted to "go out shooting" and commit "suicide by cop." But someone on the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, (800) 273-TALK begin_of_the_skype_highlighting   (800) 273-TALK end_of_the_skype_highlighting , helped keep him alive and he surrendered to police.

John and Roger now see VA psychiatrists. They're learning to talk to friends and family instead of sinking, alone, into darkness.

Roger, who just found work as an electrician, fights through the physical pain from his war injuries each day. He says he's better now, but he knows his troubles haven't ended.

"I'm still a stranger in a civilian world," he says.

Roger is in a new relationship now, with a newborn, and he's trying to stay alive for both his children. In the movie, he says he would have killed himself if not for his daughter.

He says she asks him, "Are you OK, Daddy?" And he says yes, even when he's not.

"Just to see a smile on her face."

The documentary in which John and Roger participated has been broken into two parts and posted on YouTube. On the YouTube home page, search for suicide prevention, a simple question.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopezcolumn-20101107,0,7803587,print.column

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Coroner's official criticizes Sheriff's Department for moving Mitrice Richardson's remains

Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter says he was 'very clear' in telling detectives not to move the skeleton before coroner's investigators arrived. A sheriff's official says that with nightfall approaching, detectives feared animals might get to the remains.

By Robert Faturechi, Los Angeles Times

November 7, 2010

A Los Angeles County coroner's official criticized sheriff's deputies for removing the remains of Mitrice Richardson from a rugged ravine without permission, saying the deputies' actions may have violated the law and undermined the thoroughness of the coroner's investigation.

Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter said he was "very clear" with sheriff's officials and could not think of another case in which a police agency had moved entire skeletal remains without coroner's approval.

A sheriff's spokesman acknowledged that deputies removed Richardson's body from the scene without the coroner's permission, but said they did so because detectives were concerned that it was getting dark and that animals might destroy the remains.

The 24-year-old Richardson drew national media attention in September 2009 when she disappeared after being released from the sheriff's Lost Hills/Malibu station about midnight, without her car, purse or cellphone. Nearly 11 months after her disappearance, her remains were spotted in a remote Malibu Canyon ravine.

Initially, sheriff's officials believed that only a skull and possibly a couple of other bones were there. Winter said that at that point, sheriff's officials were told they could move the bones only after coroner's officials reviewed photos of the scene and gave clearance.

After some leaves were brushed aside, Richardson's entire skeleton was discovered, "at which time I told detectives not to touch it," Winter said. "We've never given authorization to pick up entire skeletal remains."

Winter said that sheriff's officials consented and that he was shocked to hear just minutes later that the bones had been lifted into a helicopter and were headed back to the station.

Sheriff's homicide Capt. Dave Smith disagreed, saying investigators had been given coroner approval to retrieve the skull and a couple of other bones. But when the skull was pulled up, the rest of the skeleton was unearthed. At that point, he said, detectives were racing against nightfall and could not risk staying overnight in the wilderness after human scent from his team and the remains was stirred up.

"Our main concern was the animals were going to get to her remains that night," he said.

He said any pleas from coroner's officials not to remove the entire skeleton did not reach sheriff's investigators at the scene because radio and phone reception around the ravine was poor. Smith said that in dangerous situations, like the one that night, government code allows for removal without coroner authorization.

Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said that four minutes after detectives decided to put the bones into the bag, they received directions from Winter to put them back.

"We said, 'We can't do that and we're not going to do that,' " Whitmore said. "Once you have moved bones or evidence … you can't then put it back. That's a manipulation and that's not done."

Whitmore acknowledged that detectives did not ask for clearance to move whole skeletal remains once they were discovered, and "perhaps we should have."

"That's something to look at," he said.

Issues with the sheriff's handling of the remains were first reported by the Malibu Surfside News. A recently released coroner's report documented Winter's account.

"Against the direction of Assistant Chief Winter, LASD Detectives collected the remains and air-lifted them," the report reads.

Winter said state law may have been violated, pointing to a specific government code that describes the authority and responsibilities of the coroner in handling dead bodies.

An autopsy was unable to determine Richardson's cause of death. Even if her remains had been recovered by coroner's investigators, Winter said, the cause of death probably would still not have been determined. But he said the deputies' actions may have affected the thoroughness of the coroner's analysis.

Coroner's investigators, he said, are trained in conducting detailed skeletal recoveries and keeping tabs on minutiae like nearby insect movement that might be factored into later analysis.

When coroner's investigators were taken by helicopter to the area the next day, they could not find the site where the bones were discovered. It wasn't until about two weeks later, he said, when coroner's officials again searched the ravine, that they found several bones left behind by detectives.

Richardson was arrested at Geoffrey's restaurant in Malibu after acting bizarrely and saying she was unable to pay her $89 dinner tab. Her family has repeatedly criticized sheriff's officials for releasing her from custody in the dark without her car — which had been impounded — cellphone or purse. Investigators said she was spotted three times in the canyon area in daylight hours that morning. After that, she was never heard from again.

Winter said Richardson's family has complained to him that untrained sheriff's investigators were allowed to retrieve her remains.

"We're in hot water," he said. "We're getting questions from her family.… What am I supposed to say?"

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-mitrice-richardson-remains-20101107,0,7258536,print.story

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OPINION

Help the planet: Stop wasting food

Producing it and then getting rid of leftovers require a lot of fossil fuel. Just taking a few simple steps can ease the problem.

By Jonathan Bloom

November 7, 2010

Let me guess: You're concerned about the environment. You recycle, buy the right light bulbs, drink from a reusable water bottle (preferably one made of metal) and wish you could afford a hybrid. You try to remember your reusable shopping bags when you go to the market and feel guilty when you don't.

But there's something you could be doing that would make a much bigger difference, and it's not one of those really hard things like carpooling to work or installing solar panels on your roof.

All you need to do is minimize your food waste. If you buy it and bring it home, eat it. That alone is one of the easiest ways to aid the environment.

About 40% of the food produced in the United States isn't consumed. Every day Americans waste enough food to fill the Rose Bowl. And our national food waste habit is on the upswing: We waste 50% more food today than we did in 1974.

Squandering so much of what we grow doesn't just waste food; it also wastes the fossil fuel that went into growing, processing, transporting and refrigerating it. A recent study estimated conservatively that 2% of all U.S. energy consumption went to producing food that was never eaten. To give you a sense of perspective, every year, through uneaten food, we waste 70 times the amount of oil that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico during the three months of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

That waste of resources continues after we throw away food. There is the energy required to haul the discarded food to the landfill. And once there, food decomposes and creates methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent a heat trapper than carbon dioxide. Landfills are the second-largest human-related source of methane emissions, and rotting food causes the majority of methane there. It's climate change coming directly from your kitchen.

Not only will cutting your food waste help the planet, but it also will make you a slightly more ethical person. The number of hungry people, in Los Angeles and the state, is steadily increasing. From 2005 to 2009, the amount of Los Angeles County residents receiving food assistance swelled by 46%. Meanwhile, Angelenos throw away about 18 million pounds of food every day. At supermarkets, restaurants and, of course, our homes, we're discarding a potential solution for our neighbors' needs.

Avoiding waste will also save you money. The average family of four, conservatively, throws out an estimated $1,350 annually. Cutting that food waste in half and giving the money to a soup kitchen would provide 700 meals. Though many of us feel unable to donate much money these days, we could keep the pantries of relief organizations better stocked by keeping ours less full.

Food waste crosses racial, class and gender lines. It's a systemic problem rooted in our culture of abundance and busy lifestyle. But it's also one we can change. And, happily, that change starts with simple actions:

Chances are you're already conscientious about food in several ways. You probably know what a "locavore" is, and you shop at a farmers market once in a while. You buy organic — at least a few items — and perhaps observe Meatless Monday. But a few easy strategic changes in your kitchen will yield a real effect on our world. All that's required is doing the seemingly self-evident: Keep your food out of the trash.

Jonathan Bloom is the author of "American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It)." He lives in North Carolina, where he writes the blog WastedFood.com.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bloom-food-waste-20101107,0,64479,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Yemen Judge Orders Arrest of Qaeda-Linked Cleric

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A Yemeni judge on Saturday ordered the “forcible arrest” of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who is believed to play an important role in the regional branch of Al Qaeda.

Mr. Awlaki, who is thought to be hiding among fellow tribesmen in Yemen 's remote Shabwa Province, failed to appear Tuesday at a trial where he was accused of killing a foreigner. It is rare for a Yemeni judge to order the arrest of a defendant so soon after his failure to appear.

Yemen has been under increased American pressure to act decisively against Al Qaeda since powerful explosives were discovered Oct. 29 in two separate packages being sent by air cargo to the United States. On Friday, Al Qaeda's regional branch, known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, claimed responsibility for the plot in an Internet posting, confirming what American officials had suspected since the plot was discovered.

The United States took the unusual step this year of authorizing the killing of Mr. Awlaki, an American citizen. Mr. Awlaki, whose eloquent sermons on Islam have long been available on tapes and on the Internet, has been the subject of intense American scrutiny since he was linked to Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in Fort Hood, Tex., last year, and to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian charged with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound jetliner last Dec. 25.

Mr. Awlaki has called for violent jihad against the West. He is thought to play primarily an inspirational role in Al Qaeda, and it is not yet clear whether he had anything to do with the air freight plot.

On Tuesday, Mr. Awlaki was charged in absentia as a co-defendant at the trial of another man, Hisham Assem, who is accused of killing a Frenchman at an oil compound in September. Mr. Assem has denied those charges. Prosecutors have said Mr. Assem was in contact with Mr. Awlaki.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/world/middleeast/07yemen.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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18 Bodies in Acapulco Grave Identified as Kidnapped Men

MEXICO CITY — The 18 bodies discovered in a mass grave just outside Acapulco have been identified as those of most of the 20 men who were kidnapped as they arrived last month for a brief vacation at the Pacific beach resort city, Mexican state authorities said Saturday.

The fate of the men, who were from the neighboring state of Michoacán, was a mystery for more than a month. An anonymous tip last week led the authorities to the grave in a coconut grove on Acapulco's outskirts.

The grave held the bodies of 18 men, Guerrero State authorities said. Two had been shot; the rest were apparently beaten to death. There is still no trace of two more men who were part of the group seized by the armed kidnappers.

Relatives who arrived from Michoacán to identify the men were preparing to take their remains home, the Guerrero State prosecutor said. Although the authorities in Guerrero suggested that the men had been linked to drug gangs, their families described them as working men. Five of them were brothers who owned an auto repair shop, and five were their employees.

The Michoacán authorities said none of the men had police records and suggested they were victims of mistaken identities.

That seemed to be confirmed last week by a video posted on YouTube showing two men who confessed to the kidnapping and the killings as part of a feud between two drug gangs. The bodies of the two self-confessed assassins were found near the mass grave, with a note saying they had killed innocent people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/world/americas/07mexico.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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In School Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda

HELENA, Mont. — Alarmed by evidence that gay and lesbian students are common victims of schoolyard bullies, many school districts are bolstering their antiharassment rules with early lessons in tolerance, explaining that some children have “two moms” or will grow up to love members of the same sex.

But such efforts to teach acceptance of homosexuality, which have gained urgency after several well-publicized suicides by gay teenagers, are provoking new culture wars in some communities.

Many educators and rights advocates say that official prohibitions of slurs and taunts are most effective when combined with frank discussions, from kindergarten on, about diverse families and sexuality.

Angry parents and religious critics, while agreeing that schoolyard harassment should be stopped, charge that liberals and gay rights groups are using the antibullying banner to pursue a hidden “homosexual agenda,” implicitly endorsing, for example, same-sex marriage.

Last summer, school officials here in Montana's capital unveiled new guidelines for teaching about sexuality and tolerance. They proposed teaching first graders that “human beings can love people of the same gender,” and fifth graders that sexual intercourse can involve “vaginal, oral or anal penetration.”

A local pastor, Rick DeMato, carried his shock straight to the pulpit.

“We do not want the minds of our children to be polluted with the things of a carnal-minded society,” Mr. DeMato, 69, told his flock at Liberty Baptist Church.

In tense community hearings, some parents made familiar arguments that innocent youngsters were not ready for explicit language. Other parents and pastors, along with leaders of the Big Sky Tea Party, saw a darker purpose.

“Anyone who reads this document can see that it promotes acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle,” one mother said at a six-hour school board meeting in late September.

Barely heard was the plea of Harlan Reidmohr, 18, who graduated last spring and said he was relentlessly tormented and slammed against lockers after coming out during his freshman year. Through his years in the Helena schools, he said at another school board meeting, sexual orientation was never once discussed in the classroom, and “I believe this led to a lot of the sexual harassment I faced.”

Last month, the federal Department of Education told schools they were obligated, under civil rights laws, to try to prevent harassment, including that based on sexual orientation and gender identity. But the agency did not address the controversy over more explicit classroom materials in grade schools.

Some districts, especially in larger cities, have adopted tolerance lessons with minimal dissent. But in suburban districts in California, Illinois and Minnesota, as well as here in Helena, the programs have unleashed fierce opposition.

“Of course we're all against bullying,” Mr. DeMato, one of numerous pastors who opposed the plan, said in an interview. “But the Bible says very clearly that homosexuality is wrong, and Christians don't want the schools to teach subjects that are repulsive to their values.”

The divided Helena school board, after four months of turmoil, recently adopted a revised plan for teaching about health, sex and diversity. Much of the explicit language about sexuality and gay families was removed or replaced with vague phrases, like a call for young children to “understand that family structures differ.” The superintendent who has ardently pushed the new curriculum, Bruce K. Messinger, agreed to let parents remove their children from lessons they find objectionable.

In Alameda, Calif., officials started to introduce new tolerance lessons after teachers noticed grade-schoolers using gay slurs and teasing children with gay or lesbian parents. A group of parents went to court seeking the right to remove their children from lessons that included reading “And Tango Makes Three,” a book in which two male penguins bond and raise a child.

The parents lost the suit, and the school superintendent, Kirsten Vital, said the district was not giving ground. “Everyone in our community needs to feel safe and visible and included,” Ms. Vital said.

Some of the Alameda parents have taken their children out of public schools, while others now hope to unseat members of the school board.

After at least two suicides by gay students last year, a Minnesota school district recently clarified its antibullying rules to explicitly protect gay and lesbian students along with other target groups. But to placate religious conservatives, the district, Anoka-Hennepin County, also stated that teachers must be absolutely neutral on questions of sexual orientation and refrain from endorsing gay parenting.

Rights advocates worry that teachers will avoid any discussion of gay-related topics, missing a chance to fight prejudice.

While nearly all states require schools to have rules against harassment, only 10 require them to explicitly outlaw bullying related to sexual orientation. Rights groups including the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, based in New York, are promoting a federal “safe schools” act to make this a universal requirement, although passage is not likely any time soon.

Candi Cushman, an educational analyst with Focus on the Family, a Christian group, said that early lessons about sexuality and gay parents reflected a political agenda, including legitimizing same-sex marriage. “We need to protect all children from bullying,” Ms. Cushman said. “But the advocacy groups are promoting homosexual lessons in the name of antibullying.”

Ellen Kahn of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, which offers a “welcoming schools” curriculum for grade schools, denied such motives.

“When you talk about two moms or two dads, the idea is to validate the families, not to push a debate about gay marriage,” Ms. Kahn said. The program involves what she described as age-appropriate materials on family and sexual diversity and is used in dozens of districts, though it has sometime stirred dissent.

The Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, which runs teacher-training programs and recommends videos and books depicting gay parents in a positive light, has met opposition in several districts, including the Chicago suburb of Oak Park.

Julie Justicz, a 47-year-old lawyer, and her partner live in Oak Park with two sons ages 6 and 11. Ms. Justicz saw the need for early tolerance training, she said, when their older son was upset by pejorative terms about gays in the schoolyard.

Frank classroom discussions about diverse families and hurtful phrases had greatly reduced the problem, she said.

But one of the objecting parents, Tammi Shulz, who describes herself as a traditional Christian, said, “I just don't think it's great to talk about homosexuality with 5-year-olds.”

Tess Dufrechou, president of Helena High School's Gay-Straight Alliance, a club that promotes tolerance, counters that, “By the time kids get to high school, it's too late.”

Only a handful of students in Helena high schools are openly gay, with others keeping the secret because they fear the reactions of parents and peers, students said.

Michael Gengler, one of the few to have come out, said, “You learn from an early age that it's not acceptable to be gay,” adding that he was disappointed that the teaching guidelines had been watered down.

But Mr. Messinger, the superintendent, said he still hoped to achieve the original goals without using the explicit language that offended many parents.

“This is not about advocating a lifestyle, but making sure our children understand it and, I hope, accept it,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07bully.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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U.S. Workers Are on Alert After Breach of Data

WASHINGTON — Federal workers at the General Services Administration are on alert against identity theft after an employee sent the names and Social Security numbers of the agency's entire staff to a private e-mail address.

The agency, which manages federal property, employs more than 12,000 people. Officials apologized to employees for the incident in a letter dated Oct. 25 — almost six weeks after the breach occurred. The agency said it had paid for employees to enroll in a one-year program to monitor their credit reports, along with up to $25,000 in identity theft insurance coverage.

The letter was signed by Casey Coleman, the chief information officer, and Gail Lovelace, the agency's senior privacy official. Neither returned calls or e-mails for comment.

Sara Merriam, a spokeswoman for the agency, said in a statement on Wednesday: “Ensuring the security of employee data is no small challenge in large organizations. We will continue to evolve our protocols to protect the employee information entrusted to us.”

Documents show that officials first notified employees on Sept. 28. But workers who spoke with The New York Times said they did not learn of the incident until early November, when the letters arrived in the mail. Previous notices had been sent as security alert e-mails, which employees said they received frequently and often ignored.

According to interviews and documents obtained by The Times, technicians discovered the e-mail with names and Social Security numbers while reviewing logs on Sept. 22, a week after the message was sent, and deleted it from the recipient's e-mail account and laptop.

The agency explained to employees that one worker had apparently transmitted the file containing the personal data by accident while seeking “work-related assistance,” and that it had not been forwarded. Those involved had cooperated, and the computer that received the data was scrubbed clean by agency technicians.

Still, Jack Hanley, who presides over a council representing the roughly 4,000 General Services employees who are members of the National Federation of Federal Employees union, said the agency's delay in notifying employees had put them at greater risk. Additionally, he said, employees would remain vulnerable after the one-year period.

“Some of them have come to our office who have worked years to clean up their credit and have just got mortgages approved,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “And now if someone messes with their credit, they're going to lose.”

According to the documents, the agency inspector general is investigating the incident. The inspector general, Brian Miller, did not return calls for comment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07breach.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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$27.5 Million for 9/11 Workers

A group of workers who claimed they suffered health problems as a result of being exposed to debris from ground zero during its removal and transfer to a landfill on Staten Island stand to receive $27.5 million in a settlement announced on Friday.

The workers are a subgroup of the more than 10,000 plaintiffs who must decide whether to accept a far larger settlement with the city and its contractors over respiratory illnesses and injuries that they say they sustained because the defendants failed to ensure the safety of the workers after the Sept. 11 attack.

Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of United States District Court in Manhattan, who is overseeing the mass litigation, said in an order issued Friday that the plaintiffs affected by the latest settlement could claim money from it only if they opted into the larger settlement with the city.

That settlement, up to $712.5 million, requires the approval of 95 percent of the plaintiffs by Monday to be valid.

The workers affected by the smaller settlement had sued the city and Weeks Marine Inc., a marine transportation company, charging that they were exposed to contaminants at the piers or on the barges that ran between the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan and the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island during the debris removal.

Judge Hellerstein said that Lloyd's of London and London Insurance Companies, which insured the city and the barge company, agreed to pay $27.5 million to the workers and contribute an additional $500,000 for administrative costs. He said individual settlement amounts would be paid according to the type and the severity of injuries and under the same rules as those used for the larger settlement, which will be paid by the W.T.C. Captive Insurance Company from a federally financed fund.

Last month, lawyers for the plaintiffs also reached a separate, $47 million settlement with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, owner of the World Trade Center, on behalf of another subgroup of more than 9,000 workers. That settlement, however, is not contingent upon acceptance of any other agreement.

In all cases, the judge has found the settlements “fair and reasonable.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/nyregion/07suit.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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American Sikhs Decry Screenings

WASHINGTON — Three national Sikh advocacy and civil rights organizations have said federal transportation officials plan to always search turbans at airport screening stations, even if wearers pass through state-of-the-art body imaging scanners.

The groups are calling on their constituents to lobby Congress and the Transportation Security Administration to overturn what they said was an “unjust policy.”

Officials from the Sikh Coalition, United Sikhs and the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund went public on Friday about their meeting several weeks ago with representatives of the Department of Homeland Security and the T.S.A.

“All of us jointly feel there are definitely some elements of racial profiling here,” said Jasjit Singh, associate director of the legal defense fund, a civil rights group in Washington.

Hansdeep Singh, a senior staff lawyer for United Sikhs, based in New York, said the meeting in Washington was arranged to hear about how new “advanced imaging technology” scanners would affect Sikhs, who had hoped the devices would eliminate the need for extra screening that they say they are subjected to at airports.

“We went in there with high hopes,” Mr. Singh said.

But the Sikhs said they were told that the turbans will be treated “as a per se anomaly,” Mr. Singh said. That will give security officers the discretion they already have — to conduct additional screening of the turbans, which they usually do already, according to the Sikhs.

They said T.S.A. officials declined, because of security reasons, to tell them whether the scanner is incapable of seeing through a turban, which typically has layers of fabric.

When selected for further screening, Sikhs have the option of having their turbans patted down by a T.S.A. officer or patting down their own turbans, after which their hands are inspected for trace chemicals. They will also be screened with a hand-held metal detector, which they say is a new level of screening.

Unlike metal detectors, body scanners can detect objects made with other materials, like plastic and ceramic.

They are designed to identify explosives, like the type used by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a transcontinental airliner over Detroit last Christmas. The scanners cannot detect all explosives, however.

There are more than 300 body scanners in place at 65 airports, according to the T.S.A. Web site. An additional 450 scanners are set to be installed by next year.

A T.S.A. spokeswoman, Sterling Payne, would not comment on the Sikhs' accusations, or say whether there had been any change in procedures.

“Removal of all headwear is recommended, but the rules accommodate those with religious, medical or other reasons for which the passenger wishes not to remove the item,” Ms. Payne said. “If the officer cannot reasonably determine that the clothing or head covering is free of a threat item, individuals will be referred for additional screening.”

With the new body scanners, Ms. Payne said, officers still “screen bulky items to ensure they do not contain a threat, which includes the use of a hand-held metal detector.”

The advocacy groups met with Margo Schlanger, the officer for civil rights and civil liberties at the Department of Homeland Security, and Kimberly Walton, a special counselor to the T.S.A. administrator, John Pistole.

The T.S.A. regularly updates its screening procedures and sometimes declines to publicly discuss its security methods.

“While you're spending that much time on Sikh Americans, who have absolutely no incidents of terrorism in the country, other people are getting through,” Jasjit Singh said.

Sikhs and T.S.A. officials previously worked out a protocol for removing turbans in private.

“In our faith, it's the equivalent to being forced to be naked, effectively,” Mr. Singh said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07turban.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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OPINION

Long Live Lady Luck

One of the most striking things about our recent midterm elections is that foreign policy played absolutely no part in the voting — and for that we have Lady Luck, and some good intelligence work, to thank. In fact, in the past year we've won the lottery five times in row. How often does that happen?

Let's review: We got incredibly lucky that the Al Qaeda-inspired Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was unable to detonate the explosives sewn into his underpants, as his Delta airliner, with 278 passengers, was approaching the Detroit airport last Christmas Day. Ditto for Faisal Shahzad, whose homemade bomb packed into a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder failed to go off after he detonated it in a crowded Times Square on May 1. In February, thanks to good intelligence work, Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant, pleaded guilty in a New York courtroom to plotting with Al Qaeda to kill himself — and as many other people as possible — by setting off a bomb in a New York City subway near the anniversary of 9/11.

Then, last week, security teams removed packages from cargo planes in Britain and the United Arab Emirates bound for Chicago. Inside, they found bombs wired to cellphones and hidden in the toner cartridges of computer printers. The bombs, timed to go off when the planes were over America, were believed to have been built by the same Saudi jihadist, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who designed the Christmas Day underwear bomb. An intelligence tip from the Saudis upset that plan.

Imagine if all five had gone off? We would be checking the underwear of every airline passenger, you would have to pass through metal detectors to walk into Times Square or take the subway, and the global air cargo industry would be in turmoil, as every package would have to be sniffed by a bomb-detecting dog.

So, yes, we won the lottery five times in a row — and that's just the attempts we know about. But one of these days, our luck is going to run out because the savage madness emanating from Al Qaeda, from single individuals it inspires over the Web and from its different franchisees — like the branches in Yemen and Iraq — is only increasing.

A week ago, a Baghdad church was attacked. Here is how The Associated Press described it: Seven or eight Al Qaeda-linked Muslim militants “charged through the front doors of the church, interrupting the evening Mass service. They rushed down the aisle, brandishing their machine guns and spraying the room with bullets. They ordered the priest to call the Vatican to demand the release of Muslim women who they claimed were being held captive by the Coptic Church in Egypt. When the priest said he could not do that, the gunmen shot him and turned their guns on the congregation, killing most of those in the front pew.” When the Iraqi police moved in to rescue the worshipers, scores more were killed in the shootout. Last Friday, pro-Taliban bombers blew up two moderate mosques during Friday prayer in northwestern Pakistan, killing more than 60 worshipers.

When Muslim jihadists are ready to just gun down or blow up unarmed men, women and children in the midst of prayer — Muslim or Christian — it means there are no moral, cultural or religious restraints left on the Islamic fringe. It's anything goes. And it's becoming routine.

What to do? So many, but not all, of the suicide bombers come from failing, humiliated societies that generate huge numbers of “sitting-around people,” who are easy prey for recruiters offering martyrdom and significance in the next life. We need to do what we can to eliminate their sources of energy. That means finishing our business in Afghanistan and Iraq, and settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and getting our military out of that region. But these will never be sufficient. There is a civil war in Islam today between the forces of decency and modernism and the suicidal jihadists. This stuff only stops when the Muslim forces of decency triumph — and delegitimize and crush the barbarism of Al Qaeda. It takes a village, and it's going to take a while.

Meanwhile, we need to focus on the things we can control. For starters, we're going to have to learn to live with more insecurity. Terrorism is awful, but it is not yet an existential threat. And we can't let our response to it be to shut down our open society or tear ourselves apart with recriminations. Like the Israelis and Brits, we need to keep up our guard, learn from our mistakes, but also learn to bury our dead and move on.

Finally, we need to dry up the funding for terrorist groups, and the mosques, schools and charities that support them. And that means working to end our addiction to oil. It is disgusting to listen to Republican politicians lecturing President Obama about how he has to stay the course in Afghanistan while they don't have an ounce of courage to vote to increase the gasoline tax or renewable energy standards that would reduce the money we're sending to the people our soldiers are fighting.

I know. None of this seems very relevant right now. But it will — the day our luck runs out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/opinion/07friedman.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From the Chicago Sun Times

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Oakland residents awaken to broken windows, debris

November 7, 2010
ASSOCIATED PRESS

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Looking out her front window in a usually quiet residential neighborhood in this city, Deanna Goldstein's knees began to shake.

More than 100 protesters were hemmed in by police in riot gear. A trash can was blazing on the street.

"I came home early from downtown to get away from the craziness, but the craziness came to me," she said.

In the past, the violent protests over a white transit officer's slaying of an unarmed black man trashed downtown Oakland businesses. But after Johannes Mehserle on Friday received the minimum two-year sentence for slaying Oscar Grant, angry demonstrators marched into residential areas near Lake Merritt for the first time, putting innocent people in harm's way.

Police arrested 152 protesters, including seven juveniles, on suspicion of crimes including vandalism, unlawful assembly and disturbing the peace.

Oakland police spokesman Jeff Thomason said 56 of those arrested were from outside the city. Investigators will be reviewing video and photographs of protesters damaging property to help prosecutors file charges, he said.

A "Justice for Oscar Grant" community meeting Saturday night at the Olivet Missionary Baptist Church in Oakland drew about three dozen people, including at least one person who was arrested Friday.

Yvette Felarca said she was taken into custody while simply standing in the crowd with a megaphone. "I was arrested for protesting and demanding justice for Oscar Grant," she said.

After the meeting, Minister Keith Muhammad expressed disappointment with the sentence, as well as the judge's decision in the case.

Police said they were not anticipating more violence.

"But we're prepared for it, just in case," said Sgt. Bobby Hookfin. Hookfin did not elaborate on what those preparations were.

Residents who woke up to broken car windows and littered streets were left asking why protesters chose their neighborhood and how it became engulfed in violence.

Nai Saelee, 28, said she was shocked to see that her neighborhood, made up of mostly one- and two-story homes and low-rise apartment complexes, was affected.

The school teacher was kept from getting to her house by a police cordon, and later found the front windshield of her car damaged.

"I'm glad I wasn't here," she said outside her home Saturday, as Oakland City trash collectors made their way through the area picking up debris.

The arrests began around 8 p.m. on Friday after officers were pelted with rocks and bottles. One officer had his gun taken from him in a fight and another was hit by a car and suffered what police described as a non-life-threatening injury, Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts said.

He said the violence was confined to a "small number of people" and most protesters remained peaceful. There were no additional reports of unrest overnight.

"People do not have a right to tear this city up," Batts said in a statement. "Oakland already has a lot of pain, and it's not fair. This city has been torn up too many times."

The Mehserle case drew comparisons to the 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers, which inflamed a racial divide and led to rioting.

The shooting of Grant by Mehserle on a train station platform on New Year's Day 2009 was captured on cell phone video taken by bystanders and widely broadcast on television and the Internet.

Police arrested more than 100 people during protests in January following the incident in which windows of downtown Oakland businesses were smashed, trash cans and cars were set on fire and police were pelted with bottles.

A jury in July convicted Mehserle of involuntary manslaughter, prompting another round of protests that resulted in arrests and looting and trashing of stores along the city's wide downtown streets.

Hookfin said the damage from Friday's protests was far less than the destruction following the verdict in July.

Prosecutors had sought a second-degree murder conviction against Mehserle, who has contended he mistakenly shot Grant with his gun, instead of his Taser.

Grant's uncle, Cephus Johnson, said he was heartened to see what he characterized as mostly peaceful protests for his nephew.

"What I was told was that it was really more positive than negative," he said. "It brings smiles not just to my face but the (entire) family's face to know that this is a movement that people are committed to."

http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/2872974,oakland-riot-train-110710.article

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Boy's killing harkens back to troubled times in L.A.

November 7, 2010
ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Arms flexed in a muscleman pose, Aaron Shannon Jr. was getting ready for a Halloween party while his grandfather snapped photos of him in a Spiderman costume.

Suddenly, the click of the camera lens was replaced by the pop, pop of gunfire and the 5-year-old boy was shot in the head.

The Oct. 31 attack — blamed on misdirected gunfire from suspected Crips gang members raiding Bloods turf — harkened back to the carnage of the 1980s and early '90s when brazen young men patrolled the streets of the area once called South Central and gave little thought to living or dying.

Then, Aaron's death likely would have flared the Crips-Blood rivalry even further and been followed by a retaliation shooting, then another and so on.

"In the old days, this would have been a massive bloodbath," said Guillermo Cespedes, head of the city's gang reduction program. "An incident like this, even a couple of years ago, would have created many more days of violence."

But it hasn't. Immediately after the shooting, at least a half dozen city-funded gang interventionists, experts who are often former gang members, and other volunteers hit the streets in a bid to prevent retaliation.

Residents incensed by the killing of a child were quick to provide details to police, who on Friday announced the arrest of Marcus Denson, 18, and Leonard Hall, 21. Both are alleged members of the Kitchen Crips, which for years has been warring with a subset of the Bloods known as the Swans.

Deputy Chief Patrick Gannon estimated as many as 15 additional shootings were stopped.

The boy's shooting and the days that followed have served as both a reminder of the strife that is all too common in the hardscrabble neighborhoods of South Los Angeles, and a sign of how much has changed.

The alley wall behind Aaron's house is covered in gang graffiti and several residents say they regularly hear gunfire and live in fear.

Aaron was standing with friends and relatives in the neatly kept yard of his family's yellow stucco duplex when the shooting occurred. The bungalow is in the heart of gangland but no one in the family is connected to a gang.

One block from the house is South Central Avenue, a busy corridor leading to downtown that cuts through industrial areas and impoverished communities of auto-repair shops and low-slung food marts. In Aaron's neighborhood, the road bisects Crip and Blood territories.

Javi Ramirez, who owns a carwash at the end of Aaron's road, said there's a persistent threat of violence and gang members occasionally take shots at each other across South Central Avenue.

"I'm losing a lot of customers," he said. "(Gang members) don't care if they hit anyone else."

Police are unsure of a motive, but say two men walked up the alleyway behind the house and one of them fired about a half dozen shots when he saw the group assembled in the yard. Aaron was struck in the head and died the next day.

"He was the sweetest little boy you would ever meet," said Ralph Shannon, 52, an uncle who struggled to hold back tears as he stood by a large lemon tree next to where Aaron had been shot.

Another uncle, Terrence Shannon, 27, was hit in the wrist and Aaron's grandfather, William Shannon, 55, was shot in the left leg.

"I heard the shots," said Aaron's great-grandmother Bennie Shannon, 76, who bought the family duplex in 1976 and saw violence soar in the early '90s. "I went to see if it was gunshots or fireworks. That's when I saw."

Aaron was the 32nd person killed in the 12 square miles of LAPD's 77th Street area this year. That homicide rate, while still alarming, is the neighborhood's lowest in decades and a fraction of the 161 slain at the height of the crack epidemic in 1991.

In the late 1980s, children were sometimes cut down by stray gunfire, but such shootings have become rare, Detective Chris Barling said. Under gang honor codes, children are seldom targeted.

"The boundaries are still defined ... but they are not as reactionary with the violence," Barling said. "There's not the soldiers out there protecting them as viciously as they were."

The Crips and Bloods grew in number in the 1970s and their grip on South Central peaked as the crack epidemic spread in the 1980s. Immortalized in numerous movies, including the 1988 "Colors," the gangs came to define a generation of Los Angeles gangster.

Since then, the gangs' populations have thinned considerably and they have been replaced by Latino gangs such as Florencia 13. Some Crips and Bloods are in jail, others moved to Palmdale and other desert communities east of Los Angeles as the Latino population grew.

Where once the gangs controlled huge swaths of south Los Angeles, now they only dominate across a patchwork of turfs. On occasion, they will even collaborate to protect themselves against rival Latino gangs, civil rights attorney and gang expert Connie Rice said.

"The Crips and Bloods are waning," Rice said. "In the next 15 years, there won't be any black gangs that have any sizable control in Los Angeles."

It is difficult to know how many Crip and Blood gang members there are today, but they make up a dwindling percentage of Los Angeles County's estimated 90,000 gang members, sheriff's Lt. Chris Marks said.

Rice noted that prison-based gangs, which increasingly influence activities of street gangs, ordered a stop to drive-by shootings. Such attacks have dropped dramatically.

Residents may still fear coming forward, but they're more cooperative, noted Barling, who has worked 24 years in the area. City officials renamed South Central as South Los Angeles in 2003 to re-brand an area once synonymous with urban strife.

Rivalries remain but even the colors associated with Blood and Crip gangs have started to fade. The Blood red color and the blue favored by Crips are less important, Capt. Dennis Kato said.

"It's not going to get you killed like it was before," Kato said. "Now you will see Crips that have red on them."

http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/2872980,boy-killed-los-angeles-110710.article

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From the Washington Examiner

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Man wrongly convicted of murder struggles after release

Maurice Sykes spent most of his time behind bars trying to convince anyone who'd listen that he was wrongfully imprisoned.

After 11 years, the D.C. Appeals Court agreed. A three-judge panel found in 2006 that the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia withheld evidence until the last moment that could have proven Sykes' innocence in the slaying of diplomat's son outside the Bulgarian Embassy in Northwest Washington.

Prosecutors subsequently dropped the charges.

Now, Sykes, 42, of Capitol Heights, is suing the District for $10 million, saying he was denied his constitutional right to due process and falsely imprisoned.

And the case that landed him in prison, then was thrown out for prosecutor errors, is changing the way criminal law is practiced in the District.

"It was a lesson to prosecutors: If you sit on exculpatory material until the last moment, it's coming back to bite you," said one former assistant U.S. attorney for the D.C. office.

"Good Superior Court criminal defense attorneys have known about the Sykes decision from the day it was announced and have been relying on the precedent that it set ever since," said Michael Starr, of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.

For Sykes, the pain of his incarceration has not abated years after his release.

"I went from a college guy to somebody in prison," Sykes said.

A former member of the Bowie State University band, Sykes says he suffers from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. He says he can't find meaningful employment and believes police are still out to get him.

Prosecutors said they could not comment about Sykes' criminal trial or lawsuit.

The appeals court's decision to free Sykes turned on a legal principle known as the Brady rule, which requires that prosecutors hand over any evidence that might clear the defendant of guilt. The Sykes opinion meant that the timing of handing over the material mattered.

"There's not a person in the defense bar in D.C. that doesn't know about the Sykes case," said Bernie Grimm, who represented Sykes at trial. "It resulted in a structural change in the way the assistant U.S. attorneys provide Brady information."

Sykes was one of three men who were tried together in the 1995 murder of 21-year-old Evgeny Mihailov, who was shot and killed at the steps of the Bulgarian Embassy at 22nd and R Streets. Sykes' family testified that he was in North Carolina for his great-grandmother's funeral at the time of the killing.

All three men were found guilty of multiple charges, and Sykes was sentenced to 30 years to life.

According to appeals judges, prosecutors relied heavily on the testimony of a paid informant named Ralph Williams.

At the trial, Williams testified that he was gambling with two men at a Capitol Heights boarding house on the night of Mihailov's slaying when Sykes and two other men showed up and bragged about the killing. Williams said the two men he was gambling with could confirm his story.

But nearly a year earlier, the other two men provided testimony to a grand jury that the appeals courts said contradicted Williams' statements.

Prosecutors didn't mention these two witnesses to the defense until two days before the trial, but the judge allowed the trial to continue. And the transcripts of their testimony weren't turned over to the defense until two weeks into the trial after the prosecution revealed that it could not find either witness, including one who had accidently been released from jail.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/Man-wrongly-convicted-of-murder-struggles-after-release---1073305-106786273.html

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