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From the Los Angeles Times

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20 killed over weekend in Mexican border city

Seven were slain outside a home where people attended a party, Chihuahua state officials say. Eleven others were also killed Saturday, and two police officers were shot to death Sunday.

Associated Press

November 8, 2010

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico —

At least 20 people were killed in drug-gang violence over the weekend in this northern border city, including seven found dead outside one house.

The seven men were believed to have been at a family party when they were gunned down Saturday night, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the attorney general's office in Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is located. Five were found dead in a car, and the other two were shot at the entrance of the home.

Eleven other people were also killed Saturday in the city, including two whose bodies were found dismembered, Sandoval said. On Sunday, two city police officers, a man and a woman, were shot to death.

Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, has become one of the world's deadliest cities as the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels wage a bloody turf battle. More than 6,500 people have been killed since the start of 2008.

In the southern city of Oaxaca, meanwhile, police found a human head in a gift-wrapped box left Saturday night on the side of a cliff popular for its view of the picturesque colonial center.

Reporters at the scene saw a threatening message left with the box signed, "the last letter Z," an apparent reference to the Zetas drug gang.

Mexican officials describe the Zetas — former hit men for the Gulf cartel who broke away this year — as a sort of franchise with units across the country. But officials say some of those groups are copycats using the Zetas' name to intimidate victims of extortion and kidnappings.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-juarez-20101108,0,6330774,print.story

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White House considers Yemen drone strikes, officials say

Two weeks after an attempt to bomb U.S.-bound cargo jets, the Obama administration is said to be debating a plan to attack militants directly. Winning Yemeni support may prove difficult.

By David S. Cloud, Tribune Washington Bureau

November 7, 2010

Reporting from Washington

The Obama administration is debating a plan to begin drone strikes against militants in remote areas of Yemen, a move that would represent a major escalation of U.S. involvement there, according to two U.S. officials.

Use of missile strikes by unmanned drones is one of several options that administration officials have been discussing in recent days in response to an attempt by militants in Yemen to place explosives on cargo jets bound for the U.S. two weeks ago, the officials said.

The U.S. has been flying unmanned aircraft over Yemen since earlier this year, but the drones have been used for surveillance and not for attacking militants who have taken refuge in the country's rugged hinterlands.

The option under consideration by the White House would escalate the effort, enlisting Yemeni government support for drone strikes and developing more intelligence sources about where militants are hiding, the officials said.

The plan, along with other options, is expected to be debated by senior officials in coming weeks. The two U.S. officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.

A senior Obama administration official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said Sunday that the U.S. was "engaged in a robust dialogue with the Yemeni government about a range of things, and have been even before the recent events."

The prospect that the strikes would go forward remains unclear. Winning Yemeni approval for airstrikes carried out exclusively by the U.S. could prove difficult.

In a rare admission Sunday, Yemeni Foreign Minister Abubakr Qirbi told CNN that U.S. drones were used in "surveillance operations" and there was "intelligence information that is exchanged about the location of the terrorists by the Americans."

But in a sign of the sensitivity Yemen feels about allowing U.S. military operations, he said that recent airstrikes against militant hide-outs had been conducted by the Yemeni air force.

The Washington Post reported Sunday that the U.S. had been flying drones over Yemen for several months but had not fired any missiles because it lacked sufficient intelligence on militants' locations.

It has not previously been reported that the Obama administration is considering seeking the approval of the Yemeni government to launch such strikes. CIA officials declined to comment Sunday night.

The discovery last month of a plot to blow up airliners with bombs hidden inside computer printers has forced officials to reassess the U.S. approach in Yemen, amid growing evidence that an Al Qaeda faction in the Arabian Peninsula is intent on attacking the U.S. and its allies.

But the use of drone strikes in Yemen carries risks, including the possibility that an escalation of the campaign could worsen unrest within Yemen, especially among tribes that are giving sanctuary to militants. Such a move could also weaken Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose grip on power is showing signs of slippage.

If a campaign of drone strikes begins, the U.S. also would have to be careful not to be maneuvered by Saleh into going after his opponents among Yemen's powerful tribes.

Enlisting the support of Saleh is considered vital before deciding whether to proceed, the two U.S. officials said, because he has shown a willingness to break off cooperation if the U.S. undertakes operations on Yemeni territory without his approval.

If approved, U.S. involvement in Yemen could come to resemble its effort in Pakistan, where the CIA has been carrying out an escalating campaign of drone strikes against militants in the tribal areas, with unacknowledged assistance from the Pakistani government.

The effort in Yemen is unlikely to ever reach the scale as the one in Pakistan, where multiple strikes have been occurring every week. There are believed to be fewer militants in Yemen and far fewer drones available, since most of the CIA's resources are focused on Pakistan.

One of the issues U.S. officials are debating is whether Pentagon equipment and personnel should be placed under CIA control for the purpose of carrying out an expanded covert program in Yemen, the two officials said.

The U.S. has been providing equipment and training to Yemeni armed forces, and a small number of U.S. Special Forces troops are in the country to assist with the effort and with developing intelligence on the whereabouts of militants.

But administration officials have decided that the growing threat from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an offshoot of Al Qaeda that is believed to be responsible for the latest plot, requires ramping up U.S. covert operations, the officials said.

Until now, the relatively small number of attempts by the U.S. and the Yemeni government to kill militants in Yemen have been carried out by other means — either by bombs dropped from conventional aircraft or cruise missiles fired from U.S. Navy vessels. In other cases, Yemeni security forces have undertaken ground operations against suspected militant hide-outs.

U.S. Predator and Reaper drones are considered likely to produce better results because they can linger unseen for hours over a single location to gather intelligence and can immediately respond when an opportunity arises to fire a missile. Drone strikes are also considered more precise than other airstrikes and thus less likely to cause civilian casualties.

In his only public comments, President Obama on Oct. 29 emphasized the need to work cooperatively with Yemen's government.

"Going forward, we will continue to strengthen our cooperation with the Yemeni government to disrupt plotting by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and to destroy this Al Qaeda affiliate," Obama said. "We'll also continue our efforts to strengthen a more stable, secure and prosperous Yemen so that terrorist groups do not have the time and space they need to plan attacks from within its borders."

Forensic analysis of the cargo bombs indicated they were constructed by Ibrahim Hassan Asiri, a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who is also believed to have built the devices used in two previous attempted attacks, including a failed effort to blow up a U.S. airliner in December.

Asiri is also believed to have built the bomb used by a suicide attacker last year against Saudi Arabia's intelligence director.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-na-yemen-drones-20101107,0,2002805,print.story

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Yemen tribal leaders can make or break Al Qaeda

As the U.S. contemplates military options against the Islamist extremists, it risks running afoul of traditions, thus perhaps deepening resentment of America and further weakening Yemen's government.

By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times

November 6, 2010

Reporting from Sana, Yemen

They race through mountain passes and across deserts and cities, daggers stuffed in their belts and heavily armed bodyguards at their side, exuding a sense of power that for centuries has defined Yemen's dangerous and cunning political landscape.

This nation's tribal leaders, grandiose personalities with often disparate interests, are a key to stability from the sand-swept border with Saudi Arabia to the edges of the Red Sea. They are the men with the potential to break Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or allow it to flourish, depending on whispered deals, money and territorial gambits.

As the U.S. contemplates the possibility of drone strikes and other high-tech military options against the Islamist extremists, it will have to consider the risk of running afoul of ancient traditions and thereby possibly fueling deeper resentment of America and further weakening Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh's besieged government.

"If the U.S. intervenes uninvited, the jihad door will open and it will be easier for people to support Al Qaeda," said Mohammed Salhi, a young tribal leader sitting with his compatriots as dusk fell over the hills ringing the capital. "The militants will grow stronger and stronger."

"We are Arabs," said Mohammed Safwan, a friend of Salhi's from another tribe. "It is our custom to support the weak and those fighting the outsider."

Al Qaeda's strength in the hinterlands here is calibrated on ancestral ties, rural justice and Islamic codes. Local militants, along with scores journeying in from as far off as Afghanistan, have found refuge on these lands, not necessarily over shared jihad or ideological aims, but because tribes and families will not abandon them to soldiers and tanks.

Such blood and religious bonds are similar to allegiances in the militant havens of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where U.S. airstrikes thunder almost daily. But unlike in those countries, where key tribes endorse and aid Al Qaeda's mission, many of Yemen's clans are less fanatical and remain open to negotiation with a government that for years has provided them with payoffs and public works.

Saleh's government fears that wider U.S. military intervention — Washington is providing funds, equipment and advisors —could prove counterproductive by radicalizing the tribes. Clan leaders were infuriated by airstrikes in December that killed 41 civilians in the southern province of Shabwa. Yemeni officials said the attack came from a U.S. drone. Washington has not commented on the incident.

"There are tribal ties with some terrorist elements," said Tarek Shami, a ranking official with the ruling General People's Congress. "We're telling them, 'We want you to turn the terrorists over or there will be more military operations.' But they fear the fighters will be handed over to the U.S., and we're saying, 'No, they'll be tried in Yemen.'"

Al Qaeda has been skillful at exploiting tribal grievances with the country's corrupt government, which runs on patronage and inside deals for the politically connected, for its own benefit. But talks between government and tribal leaders, along with military incursions that have swept through villages, are forcing clans to reassess the value of harboring Al Qaeda figures, such as the U.S.-born radical cleric Anwar Awlaki and the group's bomb maker Ibrahim Hassan Asiri.

Yemen announced this week that over the last month, 29 suspected Al Qaeda fighters surrendered in the southern province of Abyan. On Wednesday, Al Qaeda urged Awlaki's tribe not to cooperate with Saleh's government, which it claims is a U.S. puppet. The group's statement followed a meeting between tribal leaders and Yemeni officials.

"If the U.S. steps in, some tribesmen will be extremely happy," said Jar Salehi, a former intelligence officer and tribal leader, referring to how clans would take advantage of a wider war. "There would be chaos, fighting, looting and stealing. Tribesmen have everything in their arsenals except tanks and airplanes."

He and other young, educated clansmen lounged in a sitting room, their faces aglow behind laptops. They chewed khat, a narcotic leaf enjoyed by most Yemenis, and spoke of tribal rules, conspiracies and last week's failed plot to blow up U.S.-bound aircraft.

They said Al Qaeda's prowess is exaggerated and that many of their countrymen believe the group is a fiction created to advance American interests. They had been hardened by living in a land of ceaseless tumult: Al Qaeda firefights, a rebellion in the north, a secession movement in the south, high unemployment, malnutrition and drought. But they most preferred spinning intrigue and political scenarios.

"What about the timing of this bomb plot?" said Salhi, who is the editor of a news website. "Maybe it was designed to help President Obama in the elections."

"Or maybe it helps Saudi Arabia look good since its intelligence agents supposedly tipped off the U.S.," said another.

What about Al Qaeda's role?

"Yes," said Salhi, "Al Qaeda tries to find sympathetic tribesmen to give them shelter. This doesn't mean the whole tribe is sympathetic. Once they're invited in by family, you can't disown them. But if you can convince the tribes, they can convince their sons to turn themselves in."

That could take time. The U.S. is growing impatient with Saleh's corrupt government. Yemen's recent military campaigns have pounded villages, spawning refugees but netting few Al Qaeda fighters. Western intelligence agencies worry that Yemen could tumble into being a failed state at the intersection of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, where another Al Qaeda branch is battling the government of Somalia. Such instability would endanger neighboring countries and further jeopardize the pirate-laden shipping lanes around the Arabian Peninsula.

"Al Qaeda is growing. Fighters are coming in from Afghanistan and Iraq," said Hakim Almasmari, publisher and editor of the Yemen Post. "Saleh has limited power. He's trying to help but that's all he can do."

Shami, the ranking party official, said much of it comes down to Yemen's tribes: "We know how to deal with them," he said. "This is a very sensitive society when it comes to religion and Islam. Tribesmen once listened to the Islamists, but the government has been able to convince them that Al Qaeda is far from religion."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-yemen-tribes-20101106,0,1720249,print.story

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Charity uses boxing to help girls build self-confidence

The women behind KnockOuts for Girls transform lives by providing training, discipline and scholarships.

By Nate Jackson, Los Angeles Times

November 7, 2010

The last thing Cece CuzaHoward ever thought she would learn was how to throw a decent punch. Raised in a devout Quaker household, she found the whole concept of boxing foreign.

"I'm religiously nonviolent.... I didn't have an interest in boxing before," CuzaHoward, 19, said.

Two years ago, CuzaHoward was a high school junior when KnockOuts for Girls came scouting at the Boys and Girls Club of Venice, where she was a regular. KO4G, as it is known, was looking for girls interested in learning to box and earning scholarships.

After a brief application process and weeks of bobbing, weaving and throwing jabs after school in the club's recreation room, CuzaHoward, received $3,000 from KO4G as its first scholarship recipient. The L.A. native who was raised by a single mother is now a sophomore at Tulane University in New Orleans and studying to complete an accelerated master's program in linguistics.

Founded by Pattianna Harootian and Lydia Castro in 2007, KO4G is a nonprofit boxing charity specializing in training, fundraising and providing scholarships for underprivileged girls.

Its core volunteers are models, amateur boxers and professionals who aren't above using sex appeal to generate support. The group's fliers, website promotions and events often feature young women in boxing gloves and bikinis — a marketing advantage most charities lack. Still, the organization says its commitment to helping girls like CuzaHoward is genuine.

"I've always done a lot of volunteer work," said Harootian, 40, of Costa Mesa. "There's just so many opportunities for women with an organization like this that we've started."  

After five years teaching English and drama at schools in L.A., Boston and Washington, D.C., Harootian was introduced to boxing as a hired amateur competitor for a TV show called "Perfect 10 Model Boxing."

A year later, after the show was canceled, she reached out to friends and several other Perfect 10 boxers to start KO4G. The board of directors includes Harootian, Tanjareen Martin, Nina Ann Phan, Erika Flores, Wendy Augustine and Lexy Katzer.

"I never thought of boxing as something that would change my life," Harootian said.

Although earning a paycheck to fight was her original motivation, training and competing in the sport provoked a major lifestyle change. As a kid, she'd grown up shy and skinny. She said she also had an eating disorder, low self-esteem and limited athletic ability.

"It brought me discipline and structure and really gave me focus," Harootian said. "My life started improving and going in a positive direction.... I just wanted to share that with people."

For the last three years, KO4G has been expanding its programs to suit girls and women of all ages. Its free, six-week classes teach boxing basics in L.A., Orange County, San Diego and Arizona. (The classes do not involve sparring, although instructors do stage demonstration bouts.)

Weekly classes are followed by discussions in which instructors attack insecurities about body image and female stereotypes. It's a confidence booster that KO4G instructor Jill Morley finds effective.

"It's more about getting them in touch with the part of themselves that can fight back," said Morley, a former New York Golden Gloves contender instructing KO4G classes at the Boys and Girls Club in Santa Monica.

Some volunteers, such as Martin, 31, cite personal reasons for training young girls on how to defend themselves. Before helping to start the program, she had escaped an abusive relationship with an ex-fiance who broke into her house and beat her severely after she tried to break up with him.

"I've always said that because I didn't die from that experience that I'm here for something greater, to be a light for everyone else to see," Martin said.

KO4G's L.A. chapter has also held weekly classes at the Boys and Girls Club in Venice. And every year, the chapter is invited to teach a number of one-day classes at places like the Mar Vista Family Center in Culver City.

At 5 p.m. on a recent Monday, a squad of 17 giggly pre-teens gathered in Mar Vista's dance studio, fitted with pink, red and blue gloves. Tennis shoes squeaked on the linoleum floor as Harootian and eight of her KnockOuts held up punching pads while girls like Diana Valencia, 12, clobbered them with a newly learned one-two punch combo.

"Ducking and punching are my favorite parts," Diana said.

While much of its community service takes place with gloves on, the organization also touts nine other programs aimed at providing food, toys and supplies to needy children.

In the past, KO4G's Make a Kid Smile program helped social worker Ana Perez in the Bellflower United School District raise money for clothes, Thanksgiving dinners and a school-sanctioned field trip to Disneyland for low-income students.

Last year, Perez said, the organization pitched in to buy new clothes for a girl who was graduating at the top of her sixth-grade class but didn't have a decent dress to wear for the class ceremony.

"It's nice that they're focused on girls especially," Perez said. "It makes them feel special for a day. Sometimes, one special day is all they have."

Despite their passion, Harootian and the KnockOuts realize that most of their students probably won't pursue boxing professionally or even as amateurs. For now, they're content to provide girls a place to develop athleticism and self-confidence.

CuzaHoward said she still isn't much interested in boxing but that KnockOuts taught her a lot about enterprising social advocacy. Now, she said she wants to start a nonprofit of her own.

After the BP oil spill, she sought advice from Harootian and Martin on starting an organization dedicated to holding charity events for social and environmental issues in the gulf region.

She said Harootian and Martin still call her occasionally to check on her progress. "I realized that I could do something just like these women did, even if I'm not necessarily interested in boxing," CuzaHoward said. "I can do something with what I'm interested in that can make a difference and help people."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-knockoutsforgirls-20101108,0,6106597,print.story

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A runway to self-esteem for women veterans

An improvised fashion show in Los Alamitos celebrates women's military service. Sponsored by GI Hope and Amvets, the event is designed to make the returning veterans feel welcome and special.

By Alexandra Zavis, Times Staff Writer

November 7, 2010

Until two weeks ago, Lindsay Higgins was sleeping on friends' sofas and park benches.

But on Sunday evening, the 25-year-old former soldier donned a swirling black and cream evening gown and sashayed down the runway at an improvised fashion show in Los Alamitos celebrating women's military service.

"I felt like I could be a model," she said, beaming.

The event held at the California Wok restaurant was organized by GI Hope and Amvets, which advocate for veterans and help them locate services such as transitional housing, career advice, and mental health and substance abuse treatment.

"It's very important to us that our women veterans feel special, feel beautiful and feel honored," said Kenya Lawson, who runs GI Hope.

As more women serve in combat zones, the number who end up homeless after they leave the military has nearly doubled in the last decade to about 6,500 nationwide, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Although they make up about 5% of the homeless veteran population, studies have found they are up to four times more likely to lose their homes than their civilian counterparts.

Women veterans become homeless for the same reasons as their male counterparts: difficulties adapting to civilian life after the trauma of combat, a tough job market, and alcohol and drug addiction. But many have the additional burden of being single parents or recovering from sexual abuse.

"Our women veterans deserve to come back and have services there for them and it is not happening as quickly as we would like," said Ann Reeder, a women veterans coordinator for Amvets.

Higgins said she battled drug addiction and mental health problems after leaving the Army in 2004. She did not know help was available until a friend referred her to the Department of Veterans Affairs. She is now in transitional housing and receiving treatment through the New Directions nonprofit.

Theresa Pane, a 50-year-old former Air Force chaplain's assistant who spent months living in her van after fleeing an abusive marriage last year, wasn't sure how she felt about the sparkly blue dress she was asked to model Sunday.

"It's so not me," she said anxiously. "But blue is my favorite color."

The Greater Light Baptist Church in Santa Ana provided the fashions, which ranged from colorful African ensembles to businesslike suits. Hairstylist Traci Garrett, whose ex-husband battled with post-traumatic stress disorder after he was pulled out of a burning vehicle in Iraq, snipped and curled behind a screen.

Several dozen veterans and their friends cheered on the models. Proceeds from the event will go toward housing female veterans and building their self-esteem, the organizers said. GI Hope is trying to raise $500,000 over the next year to open a housing complex for homeless female veterans and their families, with onsite services.

"A lot of them have lost custody of their kids and in order to regain custody, they need a permanent address," Lawson said.

She is already planning the next show, which will take place in May.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-women-vets-20101108,0,6914762,print.story

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From the New York Times

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For Afghan Wives, a Desperate, Fiery Way Out

HERAT, Afghanistan — Even the poorest families in Afghanistan have matches and cooking fuel. The combination usually sustains life. But it also can be the makings of a horrifying escape: from poverty, from forced marriages, from the abuse and despondency that can be the fate of Afghan women.

The night before she burned herself, Gul Zada took her children to her sister's for a family party. All seemed well. Later it emerged that she had not brought a present, and a relative had chided her for it, said her son Juma Gul.

This small thing apparently broke her. Ms. Zada, who was 45, the mother of six children and who earned pitiably little cleaning houses, ended up with burns on nearly 60 percent of her body at the Herat burn hospital. Survival is difficult even at 40 percent.

“She was burned from head to toe,” her son remembers.

The hospital here is the only medical center in Afghanistan that specifically treats victims of burning, a common form of suicide in this region, partly because the tools to do it are so readily available. Through early October, 75 women arrived with burns — most self-inflicted, others only made to look that way. That is up nearly 30 percent from last year.

But the numbers say less than the stories of the patients.

It is shameful here to admit to troubles at home, and mental illness often goes undiagnosed or untreated. Ms. Zada, the hospital staff said, probably suffered from depression. The choices for Afghan women are extraordinarily restricted: Their family is their fate. There is little chance for education, little choice about whom a woman marries, no choice at all about her role in her own house. Her primary job is to serve her husband's family. Outside that world, she is an outcast.

“If you run away from home, you may be raped or put in jail and then sent home and then what will happen to you?” asked Rachel Reid, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who tracks violence against women.

Returned runaways are often shot or stabbed in honor killings because the families fear they have spent time unchaperoned with a man. Women and girls are still stoned to death. Those who burn themselves but survive are often relegated to grinding Cinderella existences while their husbands marry other, untainted women.

“Violence in the lives of Afghanistan's women comes from everywhere: from her father or brother, from her husband, from her father-in-law, from her mother-in-law and sister-in-law,” said Dr. Shafiqa Eanin, a plastic surgeon at the burn hospital, which usually has at least 10 female self-immolation cases at any one time.

The most sinister burn cases are actually homicides masquerading as suicides, said doctors, nurses and human rights workers.

“We have two women here right now who were burned by their mothers-in-law and husbands,” said Dr. Arif Jalali, the hospital's senior surgeon.

Doctors cited two recent cases where women were beaten by their husbands or in-laws, lost consciousness and awoke in the hospital to find themselves burned because they had been shoved in an oven or set on fire.

For a very few of the women who survive burnings, whether self-inflicted or done by relatives, the experience is a kind of Rubicon that helps them change their lives. Some work with lawyers who are recommended by the hospital and request a divorce. Most do not.

Defiant and Depressed

Engaged at 8 and married at 12, Farzana resorted to setting herself on fire when her father-in-law belittled her, saying she was not brave enough to do so. She was 17 and had endured years of beatings and abuse from her husband and his family.

Defiant and depressed, she went into the yard. She handed her husband their 9-month-old daughter so the baby would not see her mother burning. Then she poured cooking fuel on herself.

“I felt so sad and such pain in my heart and I felt very angry at my husband and my father- and mother-in-law, and then I took the matches and lit myself,” she said.

Farzana's story is about desperation and the extremes that in-laws often inflict on their son's wives. United Nations statistics indicate that at least 45 percent of Afghan women marry before they are 18; a large percentage before they are 16. Many girls are still given as payment for debts, which sentences them to a life of servitude and, almost always, abuse.

A bright child whose favorite subjects were Dari language and poetry, Farzana dreamed of becoming a teacher. But she had been promised in marriage to the son of the family that was providing a wife for her brother, and when she turned 12, her in-laws insisted it was time to marry. Her future husband had just turned 14.

“On the marriage day, he beat me when I woke up and shouted at me,” she said. “He was always favoring his mother and using bad words about me.”

The beatings went on for four years. Then Farzana's brother took a second wife, an insult to Farzana's in-laws. Her mistreatment worsened. They refused to allow her to see her mother, and her husband beat her more often.

“I thought of running away from that house, but then I thought: what will happen to the name of my family?” she said. “No one in our family has asked for divorce. So how can I be the first?”

Doctors and nurses say that especially in cases involving younger women, fury at their situation, a sense of being trapped and a desire to shame their husbands into caring for them all come together.

This was true of Farzana.

“The thing that forced me to set myself on fire was when my father-in-law said: ‘You are not able to set yourself on fire,' ” she recalled.

But she did, and when the flames were out, 58 percent of her body was burnt. As a relative bundled her raw body into a car for the hospital, her husband whispered: “If anybody asks you, don't tell them my name; don't say I had anything to do with it.' ”

After 57 days in the hospital and multiple skin grafts, she is home with her mother and torn between family traditions and an inchoate sense that a new way of thinking is needed.

Farzana's daughter is being brought up by her husband's family, and mother and daughter are not allowed to see each other. Despite that, she says that she cannot go back to her husband's house.

“Five years I spent in his house with those people,” she said. “My marriage was for other people. They should never have given me in a child marriage.”

A Common Option

Why do women burn themselves rather than choose another form of suicide?

Poverty is one reason, said Dr. Jalali. Many women mistakenly think death will be instant. Halima, 20, a patient in the hospital in August, said she considered jumping from a roof but worried she would only break her leg. If she set herself on fire, she said, “It would all be over.”

Self-immolation is more common in Herat and western Afghanistan than other parts of the country. The area's closeness to Iran may partly explain why; Iran shares in the culture of suicide by burning.

Unlike many women admitted to the burn hospital, Ms. Zada showed no outward signs of distress before she set herself on fire. Her life, though, was hard. Her husband is a sharecropper. She cleaned houses and at night stayed up to clean her own home — a nearly impossible task in the family's squalid earthen and brick two-room house buffeted by the Herati winds that sweep in a layer of dust each time the door opens.

To her family, she was a constant provider. “Before I thought of wanting something, she provided me with it,” said Juma Gul, 32, her eldest son, a laborer who earns about $140 a month. “She would embroider our clothes so that we wouldn't feel we had less than other people.”

As he spoke, his 10-year-old twin sisters sat near him holding hands and a picture of their mother.

In the hospital, Ms. Zada rallied at first, and Juma Gul was encouraged, unaware of how hard it is to survive such extensive burns. That is especially true in the developing world, said Dr. Robert Sheridan, chief of surgery at the Shriners Burn Hospital in Boston and a trauma surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The greatest risk is sepsis, a deadly infection that generally starts in the second week after a burn and is hard to stop, Dr. Sheridan said. Even badly burned and infected patients can speak almost up to the hour of their death, often giving families false hopes.

“She was getting better,” her son insisted.

But infection had, in fact, set in, and the family did not have the money for powerful antibiotics that could give her whatever small chance there was to survive. Juma Gul eventually managed to beg and borrow the money, but not before the infection spread.

Two weeks after his mother set herself on fire, he stood by her bed as she stopped breathing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/world/asia/08burn.html?_r=1&ref=world

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Why Did You Burn Yourself?

HERAT, Afghanistan — “Why did you burn yourself?” asks the doctor. “If I threw myself from a building, I'd break an arm or a leg, but I wanted to die,” Halima answers. “That's why I set myself on fire. I thought I would die instantly.”

As an answer it is more how than why, but it is enough for Dr. Arif Jalali, the senior surgeon at The Burn and Plastic Surgery Center of Herat Regional Hospital, in western Afghanistan. Afghan women who arrive here have either set fire to themselves, or their families did it to them. Halima did it to herself.

But why, at just 20 years of age? Halima's circumstances, like those of many of burn victims here, have to be painstakingly pieced together by the doctors and nurses.

It is hard at any time to see another human being's suffering, but the burns center is pain of a different order. There is every noise a human being can make to express pain — cries, whimpers, groans, pleadings — as bandages are removed, burns cleaned and then wrapped again to protect them from infection. The women inside grip the hands of anyone nearby, digging their fingernails into the nurses' arms, into my hand if I offer it.

Halima, it turns out, is the second wife of an opium addict, and her desperation seems to be rooted in competition for her addict husband's affections. His first wife uses her wages as a schoolteacher to buy him an especially pure kind of opium called crystal. Halima, who has no education, cannot match such a gift.

I had met her only a few minutes earlier when I arrived at the hospital in Herat, western Afghanistan. She was crouched at the door of the burn center, bandaged and still wearing her hospital-issued pajamas, with a couple of male relatives beside her. She moved stiffly out of the way as we stepped around her to enter the building, and as we did so she begged us to say something to the doctors to let her in.

To let her back in, it later emerged, for Halima had already been treated here and ran away. So now she knows the treatment will be painful, but also knows it is her only chance.

Running away from the only treatment available is not unusual here. As of late August, around 20 percent of the women hospitalized for burns left without the doctors' permission. They wait until no one is watching and shuffle out of the building supported by relatives who then bundle them into cars and take them home. They leave almost always at the behest of these relatives.

The psychology of self-burning is difficult to understand, even for the nurses and doctors who work with it every day. It can take weeks to figure out how a woman was burned, and whether she fears those tending her, or trusts them.

Through a combination of shame and fear, women lie about how they were burned. In Halima's case, after telling me her husband was a drug addict, she begged me not write it down. Her husband brought her back to the hospital, but only reluctantly, and the woman tending Halima is the husband's first wife. Halima falls silent each time the woman approaches her with water or juice.

“Young women especially set themselves on fire thinking that if they burn themselves then ‘everyone will be kind to me.' What she does not realize is that setting herself on fire will disable her and deform her, the husband will think she is useless and will get another wife. Afterward, she is nothing,” says Dr. Shafiqa Eanin, one of the women doctors at the center. “When they burn themselves, the relatives say, ‘do not tell the doctors that you burned yourself because they will give you an injection and you will die.'“

Social and familial pressure also plays a huge part in their decision to abandon treatment. For the runaways, there is most likely only the most marginal care when they go home, as well as an overwhelming awareness of her family's shame over what she has done. Sometimes the women have burned themselves. Sometimes they have been been burned by those relatives, who do not want the truth to emerge. In both cases the families have the, usually mistaken, idea that they can care better for the woman at home, and reinforce this notion with fear and deceit.

“When they burn themselves, the relatives say, ‘do not tell the doctors that you burned yourself because they will give you an injection and you will die.'“ Dr Eanin added.

The fact is that the hospital is the one place they are safe. It is one of the cleanest places in the country. No one wears their own shoes inside and everyone wears a hospital issued smock and cap. There is no way to reproduce that environment even in a well off person's home, let alone in the poor villages where many of the patients live.

Although the patients and their families think that they can keep the wounds clean, in Afghanistan where dirt, dust and flies layer every surface even in the most privileged homes, it is near impossible to keep anything sterile outside a strictly regulated hospital environment.

Complicating matters is that it is expensive for a woman to stay in the hospital because although the treatment itself is free, families have to pay for most of the medicines after the woman is released. “They do not want to spend much money for the wife anyway, so they think, ‘why should I spend any money for her now that she is disabled' by the burns,” said Dr. Eanin.

Halima's body is about 35 percent burned, but many of the burns are relatively superficial and if there is no infection, the hospital staff can save her. If she stays in the hospital.

At her bedside Dr. Jalali asks her, “In future — if you feel sad or disturbed — will you do this again?”

“No I will not,” says Halima. “I did not know.”

She did not know what? She did now know that she would not die? She did not know how painful it would be ? She did not know that she would be scarred? She did not know anything about all that would happen after she struck the match? There are more questions than answers here. Slowly it emerges that Halima dreams that her husband will abandon the first wife in their rural village and move with Halima to live in the city.

“My husband and I never fought, we are soulmates,” she says, as if to prove that everything is well.

Dr. Jalali shakes his head. “She left at the urging of her husband,” he says. Most of all the women here need psychological help, he explains. “There is no education for women, they can't analyze their problems,”. “There are rules in our communities, some traditions, wrong traditions. They exchange women for sheep, women for cows; there are forced marriage, our villages sell and buy women with bags of opium.”

He dreams of starting a prevention campaign, of getting social workers to go out to the villages, of having a skin stapler which can make the truly tiny stitches that leave few scars, of a hospital with a bigger staff so that everyone was not always tired. But the main problem is addressing the cause, not better remedies.

“For women in forced marriages there is no chance,” he says.

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/why-did-you-burn-yourself/

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U.S. Revises Offer to Take Sudan Off Terror List

WASHINGTON — President Obama has told Sudan that if it allows a politically sensitive referendum to go ahead in January, and abides by the results, the United States will move to take the country off its list of state sponsors of terrorism as early as next July, administration officials said Sunday.

The offer, conveyed to the Sudanese authorities over the weekend by Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, represents a significant sweetening of the package of incentives the administration offered to Sudan in September for its cooperation with the vote.

Under a peace agreement that ended years of civil war in Sudan, the government in Khartoum agreed to a referendum, now scheduled for Jan. 9, in which the people of southern Sudan will decide whether to secede from the north. They are expected to vote overwhelmingly to do so.

But as the date for the vote nears, there are persistent reports of foot-dragging by the Sudanese authorities in preparing for it, as well as fears of a new outbreak of violence if the north does not honor the results. Dividing Sudan is hugely complicated, since most of its oil fields lie in the south.

In September, the administration presented Sudan with incentives ranging from modest steps like the delivery of agricultural equipment to more sweeping measures, including debt relief, normalized diplomatic relations, the lifting of sanctions and the removal of Sudan from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, which it has been on since 1993.

Administration officials said then that they did not expect to take that last step until late 2011 or 2012, one official said, because it was also linked to a resolution of the violence in the Darfur region. But now the United States has made it contingent only on the referendum. The Sudanese government, another official said, had pushed in recent weeks for more clarity in the incentives.

“I believe a broad agreement is within reach if they act with the sense of urgency that is necessary to seize this historic opportunity,” Mr. Kerry said in a statement on Sunday as he left Sudan.

Sudan has long petitioned to be removed from the State Department list, which also includes Iran, Cuba and Syria. Under President Bill Clinton, the administration designated its placement there on the grounds that it harbored Osama bin Laden and other terrorists. But in recent years, Sudan has cooperated in counterterrorism efforts.

Over time, Sudan's designation has been expanded to include its role in mass killings in Darfur. Economic sanctions against Sudan remain linked to the violence in Darfur, officials said, and cannot be lifted without approval from Congress. Earlier this week, Mr. Obama renewed those sanctions. The president can remove Sudan from the terrorism list after notifying Congress.

The United States, an official said, will not relax “our commitment to solving the problems that have dogged Darfur.”

The administration's offer does not depend on resolving another sticking point: a separate plebiscite by people in the contested border region of Abyei to decide to join northern or southern Sudan. The two sides have not agreed on the terms of that vote, also scheduled for January.

With diplomats still struggling to break the impasse, administration officials said they recognized that the plebiscite on Abyei may have to be deferred until after the broader vote on independence by southern Sudan.

North Korea was the last nation the United States removed from the terrorism list. That was done by the Bush administration in 2008, in an effort to encourage Pyongyang to be more pliant in talks over its nuclear program — a goal that has been largely unmet, given North Korea's recent intransigence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/world/africa/08sudan.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Stowaway Has Canada and Hong Kong Scrambling

HONG KONG — A bizarre case of a young Asian man successfully boarding a plane disguised as an elderly Caucasian man has the governments in Hong Kong and in Canada scrambling to review their security procedures at airports and placed an airline under scrutiny for its passenger screening procedures.

The story of the Asian man in his 20s who stowed away aboard a Hong Kong-to-Vancouver flight continues to play prominently in newspapers and TV news broadcasts as well. And it has captivated a public puzzled over how screening staff at airports would fail to halt a person who wore a silicone mask disguised to be significantly older than his actual age of a different race.

“It is hard to tell by the photos, they are blurry, but the mask seems quite real,” said Gracy Hon, a Hong Kong makeup artist. Quick to point out that she is not an expert in special-effects makeup, Ms. Hon said it was conceivable with masks to deceive people who are rushed and not paying attention. “It did fool airline staff, after all,” she said.

On Sunday, a spokeswoman for the Hong Kong government said that the Immigration and Security authorities were still investigating how the young man managed to board an Air Canada jetliner on Oct. 29 in Hong Kong under disguise. No additional government statements would be made until the review was complete, she said.

What is known is that the man boarded the plane wearing the disguise and presenting a U.S. passport of a Caucasian man born in 1955. The aging face contrasted with the traveler's “young-looking hands,” according to a Canadian Border Service bulletin issued over the case. Sometime during the flight the man removed his disguise, further alerting airplane staff who notified the Canadian authorities. Border officers met the man as he arrived in Vancouver.

The Hong Kong authorities over the weekend identified the man as coming from mainland China. The traveler has requested asylum, and an immigration hearing is expected this week in Canada to hear his appeal, possibly as early as Monday, according to Canadian news reports.

No link to terrorism has been suggested in the case.

In addition to the security review in Hong Kong, the Canadian government said it was reviewing its border security for international travelers, as well as Air Canada's screening procedures.

Security checks for international travelers at the Hong Kong airport, a major transit point between Asia and North America, are generally extensive.

Passengers are usually required to present their passports and boarding passes multiple times before boarding a plane — to guards before entering a departures hall, at metal-detection checkpoints and then to an immigration official. The final check of boarding passes and passport identification comes at the plane's boarding gate, staffed by airline personnel.

The security checks, however, may be reduced or even useless if a passenger first arrives at the airport with his own identification, and then, once in a secure area, puts on a disguise and uses different identification.

The Hong Kong authorities said over the weekend that the young Asian man was transiting through Hong Kong. If so, he may not have needed to go through immigration.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/world/asia/08flight.html?ref=world

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Kindness of a Stranger That Still Resonates

CANTON, Ohio — The event was a reunion for people who were never supposed to meet, commemorating an act of charity that succeeded because it happened in secret.

Helen Palm sat in her wheelchair on the stage of the Palace Theater and read her plea for help, the one she wrote in the depths of the Great Depression to an anonymous stranger who called himself B. Virdot.

“I am writing this because I need clothing,” Ms. Palm, 90, read aloud on Friday evening. “And sometimes we run out of food.”

Ms. Palm was one of hundreds who responded to an advertisement that appeared Dec. 17, 1933, in The Canton Repository newspaper. A donor using the pseudonym B. Virdot offered modest cash gifts to families in need. His only request: Letters from the struggling people describing their financial troubles and how they hoped to spend the money. The donor promised to keep letter writers' identities secret “until the very end.”

That end came last week at the city's famed 84-year-old Palace Theater, at a reunion for families of B. Virdot's recipients. About 400 people attended. For the older people, it was a chance to remember the hard times. For relatives of the letter writers, it was a time to hear how the small gifts, in the bleakest winter of the Depression, meant more than money. They buoyed the spirits of an entire city that was beginning to lose hope.

Of the 150 people in Canton who received checks, most for as little as $5, from B. Virdot, Ms. Palm is the only one still alive, and the only one to learn the anonymous donor's true identity. “I thought about B. Virdot a lot” in the years after 1933, Ms. Palm said. “I was really surprised when I learned his real name.”

His secret lasted 75 years. Then, in 2008, a Canton native named Ted Gup received a suitcase stuffed with his late grandfather's papers, including letters addressed to one B. Virdot.

Mr. Gup, an investigative journalist formerly with The Washington Post, discovered that B. Virdot was his grandfather, Samuel J. Stone, who escaped poverty and persecution as a Jew in Romania to build a successful chain of clothing stores in the United States. He created the name B. Virdot by combining the names of his daughters, Barbara, Dorothy and Mr. Gup's mother, Virginia.

Mr. Gup used the letters as the basis for a book, “A Secret Gift,” just published by Penguin Press. Relying on newspaper archives and government documents over the last two years, he found and interviewed more than 500 descendants of the letter writers.

Taken together, the letters from families struggling through the Great Depression create a larger story of a city and a nation struggling to accept a new notion: that without help they might not survive, no matter how hard they worked.

“In many cases these were individuals with their backs against the wall, watching their children go hungry every night,” Mr. Gup said in a phone interview last week.

At a time when accepting charity was seen as a moral failure, Mr. Stone's promise of anonymity shielded the letter writers from shame. An unemployed woman caring for her sick daughter and disabled sister wrote to Mr. Stone, “If I thought this would be printed in the papers I would rather die of hunger first.”

Kenneth Richards was dumbfounded when Mr. Gup tracked him down to his home outside Canton and told him that his mother, Mattie Richards, had received a check from B. Virdot.

“I really didn't believe him because my mother just wouldn't ever ask anybody for help,” Mr. Richards, 72, said. “Here was a woman I never knew.”

The stigma against handouts continues in Canton, once a thriving manufacturing city that spent the last three decades watching factories close. James Macey lost his job as a waiter last month when the restaurant he was working at, Cheeseburger in Paradise, closed. He applied for more than 15 jobs before requesting unemployment assistance on Friday.

“I waited two weeks because I didn't want to apply for unemployment,” Mr. Macey, 25, said. “It's embarrassing.”

Canton's tradition of charity continues, too. Mr. Macey's pastor at Cathedral of Life Church offered him $250 to scrub the church's floors. Insisting that was too much money for four hours of work, Mr. Macey requested $100. The pastor, M. Dana Gammill, asked him to accept $150.

Many people need such help in Canton. More than half the city's children live below the federal poverty line, according to the Census Bureau, up from 38 percent in 2008. More than 3,000 people called the United Way for help in October, a 33 percent increase over last year, the agency said.

Frustration over 10.4 percent unemployment in surrounding Stark County has caused more political instability than Canton has known in generations. John Boccieri, a conservative Democrat, won the seat in Congress from the local district in 2008, only to lose to Jim Renacci, a Republican, last week. “People are scared,” said David B. Cohen, a political scientist at the University of Akron. “When the economy is bad, the party in power gets punished.”

In 1933, the fear was visceral. J. L. White, father of seven children, wrote in his thank-you note to B. Virdot that he was considering suicide just before he received the gift.

For other families, Mr. Stone's gift provided the only holiday cheer that bleak winter. Olive Hillman used the $5 check to buy her 8-year-old daughter a doll with a porcelain face and leather arms.

“I was thrilled to get it,” said the daughter, Geraldine Hillman Fry, now 85. “It really was the only doll that I ever had in my life, so it meant a lot to me.”

At Friday's reunion, people talked about how Mr. Stone's example of generosity resonates today.

“I think there's a message here that people in Canton know how to get through the hard times by pulling together,” Mr. Gup said.

Days before Christmas 1933, with Mr. Stone's gift in hand, Edith May took her 4-year-old daughter Felice to a five-and-dime store and bought her a wooden horse.

Seventy-seven years later, Felice May Dunn owns two farms and 17 Welsh ponies.

“In my life it made a big difference,” Ms. Dunn, 80, recalled. “It was my favorite toy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/us/08canton.html?ref=us

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Mental Health Visits Rise as Parent Deploys

Young children in military families are about 10 percent more likely to see a doctor for a mental difficulty when a parent is deployed than when the parent is home, researchers are reporting Monday in the most comprehensive study to date of such families' use of health insurance during wartime.

Visits for mental health concerns, like anxiety and acting out at school, were the only kind to increase during deployment; complaints for all physical problems declined, the study found.

Researchers have long known that deployment puts a strain on families, particularly spouses. Experts said the new study, being published in the journal Pediatrics and including more than half a million children, significantly fills out the picture of the entire family as multiple deployments have become a norm.

“This study gives us an excellent beginning to understand what's happening” in military households, said Benjamin Karney, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It's pretty amazing that they were able to look at essentially the entire military population and strongly document something we suspected was happening but didn't know for sure.”

In the study, a research team led by Dr. Gregory H. Gorman of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences analyzed the health records of 642,397 children ages 3 to 8 with parents in the military. It compared the frequency of health visits from 2006 to 2007 when a parent was deployed with those when the parent was home.

The researchers found that the children saw a doctor or other health professional about six times a year and about once every two years for a mental health reason. During deployment of a parent, however, the visit rate dropped by about 11 percent for physical problems but rose by 11 percent for psychological complaints. Stress, anxiety and attention-deficit problems were among the more common diagnoses, and mothers were far more likely than fathers to take a child to a doctor.

“It's not clear yet whether kids are in fact suffering more mental problems when a parent is deployed, or that mothers are more attendant to any shift in behavior,” Dr. Karney said. “That's the next question we have to ask.”

The rates were highest for 7- and 8-year-olds in two-parent families. This may be because when single parents deploy, children are left with caregivers who are less sensitive to changes in behavior and therefore less likely to seek treatment, the study's authors suggested.

“These findings are especially important for nonmilitary pediatricians, who provide almost two-thirds of outpatient care for the children of military parents,” they concluded.

Despite the strain of duty, military marriages tend to be relatively stable, research suggests. In a recent study, Dr. Karney and John S. Crown of the RAND Corporation found time deployed was associated with a lower risk of divorce for most of the military, at least from 2002 to 2005.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/us/08child.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Where Marijuana Is a Point of Pride

NEDERLAND, Colo. — Millions of Americans expressed their feelings about marijuana last week. In Colorado, 24 communities voted to ban or restrict shops selling legal medical marijuana. In California, voters wrestled with the question of legalization for recreational use — with issues of health, crime and taxes all coming into play — then voted no.

But here in Nederland, it was just another beautiful day high in the mountains.

Marijuana has been mainstream in this outpost of the counterculture, 8,000 feet in the Rockies and an hour northwest of Denver, since the days of Bob Marley's cigar-size “spliffs” and the jokes of Cheech and Chong.

And to judge by the numbers, things have not changed all that much.

An explosion of medical marijuana sales over the last year in Colorado as well as the District of Columbia and the 13 other states where medical use is allowed has certainly brought a new element into the mix. Dispensaries like Grateful Meds, one of seven medical marijuana providers in Nederland, population 1,400, now have legal compliance lawyers on retainer and sales tax receipts in the cash drawer.

But marijuana is still marijuana, and Nederland's perch overlooking what John Denver immortalized as “the Colorado Rocky Mountain high” has not budged.

State records show that by some coincidence, the concentration of medical marijuana patients and dispensaries selling medicinal cannabis is higher here in Colorado's old hippie heartland than in any other corner of the state.

In Gilpin County, for example, which begins at Nederland's doorstep, almost one in 20 residents qualify for cannabis treatment — the highest level in Colorado and more than three times the statewide average. State law, passed by voter referendum in 2000, allows marijuana treatment for a list of maladies, from cancer to chronic pain, if a doctor verifies the need.

And doctors have obliged. The sick-enough-for-marijuana pattern extends in a broad band from Nederland west through an archipelago of communities that were equally tinctured by tie-dye a generation ago and are now cornerstones of the state's resort and tourism industry.

Summit and Pitkin Counties, home to ski towns like Breckenridge, Keystone and Aspen, pride themselves on a healthy outdoor youth culture, but they also have a disproportionate amount of debilitating pain diagnosed in men in their 20s, state records show.

“Who would think there would be such severe pain among young men in Colorado?” said Ron Hyman, the state registrar of vital statistics and director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment's medical marijuana program.

Nederland residents like Hal Mobley, 56, who was on his way to get a haircut on a recent morning, asked pretty much the same thing. Marijuana is part of the life here, he said — no more available, no less, and no different in its use, he thinks, than it has been for decades.

“It's for pain?” he said, squinting into the bright sun.

Well, it is also good medicine for the Nederland town budget. Tax revenues are way up, in ways that would make many a more buttoned-down town treasurer envious — partly from more tourists spending money in the restaurants and shops, but even more so from marijuana sales.

In June alone, while many communities around the nation were still sputtering through economic doldrums, sales taxes collected in Nederland came in a robust 54 percent above those of June 2009. Without the tax collected on marijuana, the increase would have been 22 percent.

“It's been here, probably in an illegal capacity, for a long time, but now there's an opportunity for industry,” said Nederland's mayor, Sumaya Abu-Haidar. “There's an opportunity for free enterprise, an opportunity for people to make a living in a way that wasn't available before.”

Philip Dyer, 45, a local musician, put it another way. The government, he said, “has finally gotten smart enough to regulate it and get their piece.”

Supporters of medical marijuana say the pattern — medical use most predominant in places of historically high recreational use — is simply a reflection of better knowledge about the drug and its properties. People in communities where marijuana has been accepted, they say, know more about its medical benefits than those in other parts of the state where medical marijuana patients are rare.

Still, residents here say that despite a kind of marijuana status quo on paper, things are changing.

A demographic shift in recent years, with more families, professionals, tech workers and telecommuters moving here, has created tensions, town officials say, over questions of growth, development, tourism — and marijuana, with many of the newcomers less enthusiastic than the old guard about Nederland's ganja-tinged reputation.

Earlier this year, Nederland became the third community in Colorado to decriminalize recreational marijuana use. But the vote, mostly symbolic because recreational use is still illegal under state and federal law, deeply divided the community. Legalization passed, but by only 41 of the 477 votes cast. A proposal to hold a cannabis festival in town hit a bigger wall of opposition and was voted down.

“When people think of Nederland as this stoner town, if you will, that is not accurate,” Mayor Abu-Haidar said.

But the town still has a reputation for having good marijuana, a point of pride that the legal compliance lawyer for Grateful Meds, Susan Eisman, was happy to talk about during a tour of the shop. Whereas many dispensaries have perhaps five strains of marijuana to choose from, Grateful Meds has 30, and serves about 300 patients.

“We have patients coming from all over Colorado,” Ms. Eisman said. “And a lot of it is the quality and quantity and the selection and the reputation.

“A patient just the other day came all the way from Longmont, an hour away, because he liked a particular strain and he can't get it anywhere else.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/us/politics/08pot.html?ref=us

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OPINION

Speech and Harm

As every public figure knows, there are certain words that can not be uttered without causing shock or offense. These words, commonly known as “slurs,” target groups on the basis of race, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status and sundry other demographics.  Many of us were reminded of the impact of such speech in August, when the radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger repeatedly uttered a racial slur on a broadcast of her show. A public outcry followed, and ultimately led to her resignation. Many such incidents of abuse and offense, often with much more serious consequences, seem to appear in the news by the day.

We may at times convince ourselves, as Dr. Laura may have, that there are  inoffensive ways to use slurs.  But a closer look at the matter shows us that those ways are very rare. Slurs are in fact uniquely and stubbornly resistant to attempts to neutralize their power to hurt or offend.

To be safe, we may ask ourselves how a targeted member, perhaps overhearing a slur,  would react to it. Doing so, we will almost always find that what may have seemed suitable most definitely is not.

But why are slurs so offensive? And why are some more offensive than others?  Even different slurs for the same group vary in intensity of contempt. How can words fluctuate both in their status as slurs and in their power to offend? Members of targeted groups themselves are not always offended by slurs - consider the uses of appropriated or reclaimed slurs among African-Americans and gay people.

The consensus answer among philosophers to the first question is that slurs, as a matter of convention, signal negative attitudes towards targeted groups. Those who pursue this answer are committed to the view that slurs carry offensive content or meaning ; they disagree only over the mechanisms of implementation.  An alternative proposal is that slurs are prohibited words not on account of any particular content they get across, but rather because of relevant edicts surrounding their prohibition. This latter proposal itself raises a few pertinent questions: How do words become prohibited? What's the relationship between prohibition and a word's power to offend? And why is it sometimes appropriate to flout such prohibitions? 

Let's start with conventional meaning.

Does a slur associated with a racial or ethnic group mean something different from the neutral conventional name for the group, for example, African-American or Hispanic?  The Oxford English Dictionary says a slur is a “deliberate slight; an expression or suggestion of disparagement or reproof.” But this definition fails to distinguish specific slurs from one another, or even distinct slurs for the same group. Still, from this definition we may infer that slurs supplement the meanings of their neutral counterparts with something offensive about whomever they reference. This information, however meager, suffices to isolate a flaw in trying to pin the offensiveness of a slur on its predicative meaning.

Anyone who wants to disagree with what “Mary is Hispanic” ascribes to Mary can do so with a denial (“Mary is not Hispanic.”).  If the use of a slur was offensive on account of what it predicates of its subject, we should be able to reject its offense simply by denying it. But replacing “Hispanic” with a slur on a Hispanic person does not work - it is no less inflammatory in the denial than the original is.  Therefore, however slurs offend, it is not through what they predicate of their subjects.

Another fascinating aspect of slurs that challenges the view that their meaning renders them offensive pertains to their effect in indirect speech.  Normally, an utterance can be correctly reported by re-using the very expressions being reported on, as in a quote in a book or a newspaper. What better insurance for accuracy can there be in reporting another than to re-use her words? Yet any such report not only fails to capture the original offense, but interestingly, it guarantees a second offense by whoever is doing the reporting.  What's gone wrong? We expect indirect reports to be of others, not of ourselves. This limit on reporting slurs is significant. Is the offense of another's slurring inescapable?  Is it possible that we can recognize the offense, but not re-express it?  How odd.

Is there someplace else to look for an account of why slurs are offensive? Could it be a matter of tone? Unlike conventionalized content, tone is supposed to be subjective.  Words can be different in tone but share content.  Might tone distinguish slurs from neutral counterparts?  No one can deny that the use of a slur can arouse subjective images and feelings in us that a use of its neutral counterpart does  not, but as an account of the difference in offensive punch it can't be the whole story.

Consider a xenophobe who only uses slurs for picking out a target group. He may harbor no negative opinions towards its members; he may use slurs only among likeminded friends when intending to express affection for Hispanics or admiration for Asians but these uses remain pertinently offensive. The difference between a slur and its neutral counterpart cannot be a matter of subjective feel.

A major problem with any account that tries to explain the offensive nature of a slur by invoking content is how it can explain the general exhortation against even mentioning slurs. A quoted occurrence of a slur can easily cause alarm and offense. Witness the widespread preference in some media for using phrases that describe slurs rather than using or mentioning them. This is surprising since quotation is usually just about the form or shape of a word. You can see this in statement like “ ‘Love' is a four letter word.” This suggests that it is something about the form or shape of other four letter words makes them unprintable.

Another challenge to the content view is raised by the offensive potential of incidental uses of slurs, as witnessed by the Washington D.C. official who wound up resigning his job over the outcry that his use of the word “niggardly” provoked.  In 1999, the head of the Office of Public Advocate in Washington, DC used it in a discussion with a black colleague. He was reported as saying, “I will have to be niggardly with this fund because it's not going to be a lot of money.”  Despite a similarity in spelling, his word has no semantic or etymological tie to the slur it may invoke; mere phonetic and orthographic overlap caused as much a stir as standard offensive language.  This is not an accidental use of an ambiguous or unknown slur, but an incidental one. Or take the practice of many newspapers (in case you haven't noticed my own contortions in presenting these materials) that slurs cannot even be canonically described as in “the offensive word that begins with a certain letter….”

What conclusions should we draw from these constraints? One suggestion is that uses of slurs (and their canonical descriptions) are offensive simply because they sometimes constitute violations on their very prohibition.  Just as whoever violates a prohibition risks offending those who respect it, perhaps the fact that slurs are prohibited explains why we cannot escape the affect, hatred and negative association tied to them and why their occurrences in news outlets and even within quotation marks can still inflict pain. Prohibited words are usually banished wherever they occur. This explains why bystanders (even when silent) are uncomfortable, often embarrassed, when confronted by a slur. Whatever offenses these confrontations exact, the audience risks complicity, as if the offense were thrust upon them, not because of its content, but because of a responsibility we all incur in ensuring certain violations are prevented; when they are not, they must be reported and possibly punished. Their occurrences taint us all.

In short, Lenny Bruce got it right when he declared “the suppression of the word gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.”  It is impossible to reform a slur until it has been removed from common use.

Words become prohibited for all sorts of reasons — by a directive or edict of an authoritative figure; or because of a tainted history of associations, perhaps, though conjuring up past pernicious or injurious events. The history of its uses, combined with reasons of self-determination, is exactly how “colored,” once used by African-Americans self-referentially, became prohibited, and so, offensive.  A slur may become prohibited because of who introduces or uses it.  This is the sentiment of a high school student who objected to W.E.B. Dubois' use of  “Negro” because it “is a white man's word.”

What's clear is that no matter what its history, no matter what it means or communicates, no matter who introduces it, regardless of past associations, once relevant individuals with sufficient authority declare a word a slur, it is one .  The condition under which this occurs is not easy to predict in advance. When the Rev. Jesse Jackson proclaimed at the 1988 Democratic National Convention that from then on “black” should not be used, his effort failed. Many African-Americans carried positive associations with the term (“Black Panthers,”  “Black Power,” “I'm black and I'm proud.”) and so Jackson's attempt at prohibition did not stick.

Once appropriation is sufficiently widespread, it might come to pass that the prohibition eases, permitting — under regulated circumstances — designated outside members access to an appropriated use. (For example, I have much more freedom in discussing the linguistics of slurs inside scholarly journals than I do here.) Should this practice become sufficiently widespread, the slur might lose its intensity.  How escape clauses are fashioned and what sustains them is a complex matter — one I cannot take up here.

Ernie Lepore, a professor of philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, writes on language and mind. More of his work, including the study, “Slurring Words,” with Luvell Anderson, can be found here.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/speech-and-harm/?pagemode=print

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