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From the Los Angeles Times

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The Lady would not be broken

Suu Kyi, Myanmar's just-freed pro-democracy activist, spent 15 of the last 21 years in confinement, separated from her family and largely cut off from the world. But she would not give up her struggle.

By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times

November 14, 2010

Reporting from Seoul

For years in her native Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi has been known simply as The Lady.

Although the pro-democracy stalwart and Nobel laureate has languished for years in confinement, residents have always known this about Suu Kyi: She would not be broken by the regime she has long defied.

The slight 65-year-old activist proved them right Saturday as she was freed from an imprisonment that had stolen 15 of her last 21 years.

Whether detained or not, supporters say, she has remained a quiet but determined symbol of struggle against political repression in the impoverished Southeast Asian nation, also known as Burma.

The daughter of a national hero who generations earlier had campaigned for Burma's independence from Britain, she faced intense personal hardship to uphold her political principles, sometimes going years without seeing her husband or sons.

But as popes, presidents and activists called unsuccessfully for her release, she never wavered. Once asked whether she thought her story had the makings of a Greek tragedy, she responded: "Don't be silly. I don't go in for melodrama."

She later said, "I look upon myself as a politician. That's not a dirty word, you know. Some people think that there is something wrong with politicians. Of course, there is something wrong with some politicians."

Time and again, Suu Kyi has showed her mettle since taking up the democracy struggle in 1988.

Spending much of her early life abroad, she returned home that year just as street protests erupted against a quarter of a century of military rule. She quickly assumed a leadership role, campaigning for the government to stage proper elections and becoming the first general secretary of the fledgling National League for Democracy.

In 1990, the party won 82% of the seats in national assembly elections, but the military government refused to hand over power.

Explaining why she risked prison or worse by taking on the nation's military, she responded, "I could not, as my father's daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on."

Her efforts to stop the brutal military suppression that killed thousands of protesters in 1988, repeatedly facing soldiers, gained her worldwide fame. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, being proclaimed by the Nobel committee as "an outstanding example of the power of the powerless."

But Suu Kyi's sons, Alexander and Kim, accepted the award in Oslo on behalf of their mother, who was detained in 1989 on national security charges.

She spent the next six years under house arrest at the family home at 54 University Ave., and has faced various periods in detention since then. Over the years, she has waged a number of hunger strikes.

But Suu Kyi endured. When her husband, British scholar Michael Aris, was dying in London in 1999, the regime wouldn't let him enter the country, hoping that she would leave to see him. She refused, knowing that she would not be allowed to return.

They had seen each other only a few times since her first house arrest a decade earlier.

News reports have painted her life in captivity as austere. Rising each day at 4 a.m., she meditated, read and listened to one of five radios that were her only link to the outside world. She had no telephone, no television, no Internet. Her mail, if delivered at all, was heavily censored.

She was once an accomplished pianist, but Myanmar's muggy heat long ago warped her instrument. Her only companionship was that of two long-serving assistants, a mother and daughter.

Recent months have brought particular frustration. Suu Kyi was just a few weeks away from being released last year when she received an unexpected visit by an American intruder, John Yettaw. She was found guilty of harboring anti-government elements and her sentence was extended.

At the time one of her assistants told reporters, "It has been a hard life, she has sacrificed a lot. But she is used [to it] now. And she keeps working, waiting for the day she will be released."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-suu-kyi-profile-20101114,0,2499680,print.story

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Justice Department warns LAPD to take a stronger stance against racial profiling

Beck says the findings are out of date. The department remains under federal oversight on the bias issue.

By Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times

November 14, 2010

The U.S. Department of Justice has warned the Los Angeles Police Department that its investigations into racial profiling by officers are inadequate and that some cops still tolerate the practice.

As evidence of the ongoing problem, Justice officials pointed to two LAPD officers who were unknowingly recorded during a conversation with a supervisor being dismissive of racial profiling complaints.

"So, what?" one said, when told that other officers had been accused of stopping a motorist because of his race. The second officer is heard twice saying that he "couldn't do [his] job without racially profiling."

The officers' comments, Justice officials found, spoke to a "perception and attitude of some LAPD officers on the street" and suggested "a culture that is inimical to race-neutral policing."

The Justice Department's concerns, which were conveyed in a recent letter obtained by The Times, are a setback for the LAPD, which remains under federal oversight on the issue. In order to rid itself of the federal scrutiny — which police officials have increasingly come to resent — the LAPD must assuage the Justice Department's concerns.

The harsh assessment has also fed into internal tensions as members of the Police Commission, the civilian panel that oversees the LAPD, grow impatient with the pace of department efforts to more aggressively address the politically and socially explosive issue that has long dogged the city's police.

Police Chief Charlie Beck disputed the Justice Department findings, saying they were based on cases that predated strict investigative guidelines put into place last year. He also rejected the suggestion that the candid comments of the two officers caught on the recording reflected a pervasive problem.

"It is a huge leap to paint the entire department with that brush," Beck said. "And it is just not true. It's not that type of department. We have a tough history that we must overcome and that takes time, but … the vast, vast majority of Los Angeles police officers today police in the right ways for the right reasons."

Nonetheless, accusations of racial profiling — "biased policing" in modern LAPD lingo — have continued to hamper the department as it has worked to leave behind a reputation for racism and excessive force.

Profiling complaints typically occur after a traffic or pedestrian stop, when the officer is accused of targeting a person solely because of his or her race, ethnicity, religious garb or some other form of outward appearance. About 250 such cases arise each year, but more damaging is the widely held belief, especially among black and Latino men, that the practice is commonplace.

In the letter to city and police officials, the Justice Department expressed "continuing concerns about the overall quality of … investigations of biased policing." Federal officials criticized investigators for "going through the motions" and found they "simply take ordered statements from officers and then run down a checklist of required questions without following up on key points or asking fundamental questions one would expect."

In one case the Justice Department reviewed, patrol officers passed a Latino man driving in the opposite direction and did a U-turn to pull him over for a broken brake light. After asking the driver if he was in a gang and checking to see if he had any outstanding warrants, the officers let him go with a warning.

"The investigating officer never asked the officers involved what prompted them to look behind them to actually observe a non-working brake light," the Justice officials wrote. "The investigator accepted the officers' single-word answers of 'No' to the question whether race was a factor in the stop."

"They are criticizing us for the way we used to do things," Beck said in an interview.

He said significant progress has been made, not only in the investigations but also with regard to officers' attitudes. Still, he said he was concerned about the tape-recorded comments of the two officers, adding that a misconduct investigation has been opened. In that case, the officers were taped by a supervisor who neglected to turn off a recording device after interviewing two other officers accused of racial profiling.

The Justice Department did not respond to calls for comment.

Until last year, the LAPD was under a federal consent decree that the Justice Department imposed in 2001 after the Rampart corruption scandal. It required the Police Department to complete sweeping reforms on many issues and to submit to near-constant audits and monitoring.

The U.S. District Court judge who lifted the decree found that the department had completed most, but not all, of the required reforms. On racial profiling, the judge called on federal authorities to remain in an oversight role for a time to assess the quality of the LAPD's investigations and the Police Commission's ability to monitor the issue.

Justice officials sounded an alarm after a report in May from the inspector general, the commission's watchdog, concluded that the LAPD generally was doing an adequate job. Justice officials criticized the inspector general's office for "not asking more substantive and probing questions."

In an effort to satisfy the Justice Department, Nicole Bershon, who took over as inspector general in May, is expected to release a detailed report at the end of the month that reviews 10 recent racial profiling investigations. The cases were handled by a special team of investigators the LAPD formed this year to look at complaints accusing police of searching or detaining a person because of race or ethnicity.

Police commissioners have grown frustrated with the department's work on racial profiling. At a meeting earlier this month, the commission's president, John Mack, and Commissioner Rob Saltzman questioned whether police officials were doing enough. They noted that no officer has been found guilty of racial profiling by an LAPD investigation for years, despite numerous complaints each year.

Police leaders have long argued that because racial profiling hinges on what an officer was thinking in the moment, it is all but impossible to determine if he or she racially profiled someone unless there is a confession. When the commanding officer of the Internal Affairs Division offered that explanation to the commission, Mack dismissed it.

"I've heard many times that we can't get inside an officer's head, but somehow, some way, we need to figure out a way to get to the facts," Mack said. "I'm not talking about a witch hunt, but I am talking about reaching a point where we can say with confidence that these claims have been very fairly and very thoroughly investigated."

Arnett Hartsfield, 92, holds his turnout coat, now on display at the African American Firefighters Museum.

A 'rookie' looks back on a full life As a firefighter, soldier, attorney and professor, Arnett Hartsfield has transcended the racism that once stunned him. by Bob Pool Los Angeles Times November 14, 2010 For 70 years Arnett Hartsfield has been called a rookie. And for most of that time, the truth behind the nickname haunted him. He was the 80th black man to join the Los Angeles Fire Department when he signed up in 1940. At the time he was a UCLA student aiming for an engineering career who needed the job to support his new wife. But when he reported for duty and was sent to an all-black fire house downtown, he couldn't believe what he was getting into.

"That hit me so hard. I wasn't used to being segregated. My family had moved here from Seattle, where we didn't have colored neighbors. My family was integrated — the only grandfather I ever saw was an Irishman from Belfast," said Hartsfield, now 92.

At Station 30 at the corner of Central Avenue and 14th Street, he sized up his co-workers.

"I was going to UCLA and I looked down on these men. I was thinking they've never even heard of the general quadratic equation. I was thinking I'll be their officer in a few years."

It didn't take Hartsfield long to discover he was wrong about a few things. First of all, he wasn't likely to be promoted any time soon.

The segregated Fire Department had only two black stations. The only way an African American firefighter could advance in rank was to be promoted to another black man's spot. Since there were no leadership positions for blacks beyond the job of captain, nobody was rising in rank.

He learned his lesson about his station-mates at his first smoky fire. He and another firefighter entered the blazing structure and Hartsfield's eyes began burning. Soon, he was choking and gasping for breath.

The other fireman's nickname was Snake because of the way he crawled across the floor of burning homes with a fire hose.

"He said, 'Get down here, rookie. This is where the goodness is,' " Hartsfield recalled. "I got down and he looked into my blurry eyes and said, 'They didn't teach you this at UCLA, did they?' "

"Rookie" became Hartsfield's nickname. He would carry it for the rest of his career.

Hartsfield was on duty at Station 30 when Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941. He was quickly called up for military service. Because he had been in the ROTC at Manual Arts High School, he was commissioned as an Army infantry lieutenant.

The Army was segregated too. To his frustration and dismay, he was attached to a black supply unit and sent to unload ships in the Pacific.

After the war, Hartsfield returned to his segregated station house. He was still working there in 1953 when court rulings and the national mood were shifting to the belief that segregation was discriminatory.

The next year the city began transferring blacks into all-white fire stations. African American firefighters quickly encountered harassment and physical threats in their new assignments, and Hartsfield and about 30 others formed a group called the Stentorians to support integration.

Feces were smeared on one black fireman's bunk pillow. A "whites only" sign popped up on a firehouse kitchen door. African American firefighters were shunned by white colleagues in some places.

Things got so bad the Stentorians mounted a round-the-clock patrol of downtown's Station 10, where relations were particularly hostile.

Looking back, Hartsfield now figures he had it relatively easy. "Most of the black firefighters couldn't put their food in the station house refrigerator. It would get contaminated if they did."

But at his integrated station, Hartsfield's food was left alone, although white firemen would not eat with him.

"I had a decent captain. He took me aside and said this isn't coming down from the department, but don't go in the kitchen when they're in there. For five years I ate after they were through," he recalled.

"I never heard the N-word — the men called me 'Calhoun,' from 'Amos 'n' Andy.' "

One black firefighter took to carrying a pistol. "I noticed a bulge in his pocket and asked what it was. He said, 'It's my .45.' I was riding in a car with him and I knew if we got stopped my career in law would be over. Fortunately, we weren't."

By then, Hartsfield had enrolled in law school at USC, relying on the GI Bill to cover his tuition and book costs. He was mapping out a career change but still needed to keep working as a firefighter to put food on the table for his wife and three children.

Hartsfield, whose undergraduate degree was in pre-engineering, remembers struggling and taking a summer session law course. He was dismayed to learn that the class would be taught by a visiting scholar from Louisiana. The southern professor would probably kick him out of class, he remembers worrying at the time.

Instead, with the visiting professor's help, "I went from almost failing to Law Review. I was the lowest man there, but I was on Law Review," Hartsfield said.

He earned his USC law degree in 1955. In early 1961 he quit the Fire Department to practice law fulltime.

His work as an attorney lead to a new job: professor of black studies at Cal State Long Beach. Hartsfield said he tried not to dwell on his years in the department. He sometimes talked to his students about the discrimination he and other black firefighters experienced in L.A. But he was quick to explain that back then, "it wasn't just the Fire Department — it was bad everywhere."

"I encouraged my students not to look down on the Fire Department, that it's a darn good job," he said.

He taught for some 26 years, leaving the university at age 70.

During retirement, Hartsfield felt the pull of his days at the Los Angeles Fire Department. Over time, he became more involved with the Stentorians, the black firefighters group that today has about 400 members from the city and county fire departments, according to Brent Burton, a Los Angeles County fire captain who is president of the group.

Hartsfield said he's come to believe it was important to memorialize his experiences in the department, as painful as some of them were. In 1997, he helped open the African American Firefighters Museum in the long-abandoned Station 30 building. He still volunteers three days a week there, where his original Bakelite helmet and a turnout coat emblazoned "Rookie" are among the displays.

"Back then, when I was working, I was bitterly complaining all the time. As long as I was busy complaining, all I saw was the dark side: I can't promote," he said. "During the ugly integration fight, I was known to the chief and the white firemen as the 'damn [black] agitator.' "

The Rookie said he now appreciates what went right in his life. "In three years in the infantry, I never was even shot at, thanks to prejudice and segregation," he said.

He better understands the segregation mind-set now too, pointing to an incident in his young marriage when he became angry and frustrated while he and his wife were bowling.

"I looked up and my wife's score was ahead of mine. At that stage of my life, no woman was ever supposed to be ahead of me in an athletic contest," he said. "I wanted to catch up and put her in her place. It wasn't that I hated her: We were married 50 years and 22 days and had five children."

After wife Katherine died 20 years ago he remarried. "My present wife Jeanne is a retired R.N. What better than that could an old man want?" he asked with a laugh.

He even takes a charitable view of the infamous 2004 incident in which a black firefighter was fed spaghetti secretly laced with dog food at a fire house. "Hazing has always been part of a fireman's life," Hartsfield said.

Things have gotten better, he said. "We've had two black chiefs, 20 black chief officers, a black chairman of the joint chiefs, a black man and black woman as secretary of State and now we have a black president."

Two years ago, he was honored by the city for his work.

"I was the rookie all my career, and I ended up with the Fire Department's first Lifetime Achievement Award," he said.

It was handed to him by the department's first African American chief, Douglas Barry, said the Rookie.

"One man's lifetime has extended from exclusion to inclusion," Hartsfield said.

"A puppy's eyes open in seven days. It took me 50 years to finally figure out I've been blessed."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-black-fireman-20101114,0,2673344,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven' in U.S., Report Says

WASHINGTON — A secret history of the United States government's Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.

It describes the government's posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official's drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government's mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis.

Perhaps the report's most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency's involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.'s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government's collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.

The report also documents divisions within the government over the effort and the legal pitfalls in relying on testimony from Holocaust survivors that was decades old. The report also concluded that the number of Nazis who made it into the United States was almost certainly much smaller than 10,000, the figure widely cited by government officials.

The Justice Department has resisted making the report public since 2006. Under the threat of a lawsuit, it turned over a heavily redacted version last month to a private research group, the National Security Archive, but even then many of the most legally and diplomatically sensitive portions were omitted. A complete version was obtained by The New York Times.

The Justice Department said the report, the product of six years of work, was never formally completed and did not represent its official findings. It cited “numerous factual errors and omissions,” but declined to say what they were.

More than 300 Nazi persecutors have been deported, stripped of citizenship or blocked from entering the United States since the creation of the O.S.I., which was merged with another unit this year.

In chronicling the cases of Nazis who were aided by American intelligence officials, the report cites help that C.I.A. officials provided in 1954 to Otto Von Bolschwing, an associate of Adolph Eichmann who had helped develop the initial plans “to purge Germany of the Jews” and who later worked for the C.I.A. in the United States. In a chain of memos, C.I.A. officials debated what to do if Von Bolschwing were confronted about his past — whether to deny any Nazi affiliation or “explain it away on the basis of extenuating circumstances,” the report said.

The Justice Department, after learning of Von Bolschwing's Nazi ties, sought to deport him in 1981. He died that year at age 72.

The report also examines the case of Arthur L. Rudolph, a Nazi scientist who ran the Mittelwerk munitions factory. He was brought to the United States in 1945 for his rocket-making expertise under Operation Paperclip, an American program that recruited scientists who had worked in Nazi Germany. (Rudolph has been honored by NASA and is credited as the father of the Saturn V rocket.)

The report cites a 1949 memo from the Justice Department's No. 2 official urging immigration officers to let Rudolph back in the country after a stay in Mexico, saying that a failure to do so “would be to the detriment of the national interest.”

Justice Department investigators later found evidence that Rudolph was much more actively involved in exploiting slave laborers at Mittelwerk than he or American intelligence officials had acknowledged, the report says.

Some intelligence officials objected when the Justice Department sought to deport him in 1983, but the O.S.I. considered the deportation of someone of Rudolph's prominence as an affirmation of “the depth of the government's commitment to the Nazi prosecution program,” according to internal memos.

The Justice Department itself sometimes concealed what American officials knew about Nazis in this country, the report found.

In 1980, prosecutors filed a motion that “misstated the facts” in asserting that checks of C.I.A. and F.B.I. records revealed no information on the Nazi past of Tscherim Soobzokov, a former Waffen SS soldier. In fact, the report said, the Justice Department “knew that Soobzokov had advised the C.I.A. of his SS connection after he arrived in the United States.”

(After the case was dismissed, radical Jewish groups urged violence against Mr. Soobzokov, and he was killed in 1985 by a bomb at his home in Paterson, N.J. )

The secrecy surrounding the Justice Department's handling of the report could pose a political dilemma for President Obama because of his pledge to run the most transparent administration in history. Mr. Obama chose the Justice Department to coordinate the opening of government records.

The Nazi-hunting report was the brainchild of Mark Richard, a senior Justice Department lawyer. In 1999, he persuaded Attorney General Janet Reno to begin a detailed look at what he saw as a critical piece of history, and he assigned a career prosecutor, Judith Feigin, to the job. After Mr. Richard edited the final version in 2006, he urged senior officials to make it public but was rebuffed, colleagues said.

When Mr. Richard became ill with cancer, he told a gathering of friends and family that the report's publication was one of three things he hoped to see before he died, the colleagues said. He died in June 2009, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. spoke at his funeral.

“I spoke to him the week before he died, and he was still trying to get it released,” Ms. Feigin said. “It broke his heart.”

After Mr. Richard's death, David Sobel, a Washington lawyer, and the National Security Archive sued for the report's release under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Justice Department initially fought the lawsuit, but finally gave Mr. Sobel a partial copy — with more than 1,000 passages and references deleted based on exemptions for privacy and internal deliberations.

Laura Sweeney, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the department is committed to transparency, and that redactions are made by experienced lawyers.

The full report disclosed that the Justice Department found “a smoking gun” in 1997 establishing with “definitive proof” that Switzerland had bought gold from the Nazis that had been taken from Jewish victims of the Holocaust. But these references are deleted, as are disputes between the Justice and State Departments over Switzerland's culpability in the months leading up to a major report on the issue.

Another section describes as “a hideous failure” a series of meetings in 2000 that United States officials held with Latvian officials to pressure them to pursue suspected Nazis. That passage is also deleted.

So too are references to macabre but little-known bits of history, including how a director of the O.S.I. kept a piece of scalp that was thought to belong to Dr. Mengele in his desk in hopes that it would help establish whether he was dead.

The chapter on Dr. Mengele, one of the most notorious Nazis to escape prosecution, details the O.S.I.'s elaborate efforts in the mid-1980s to determine whether he had fled to the United States and might still be alive.

It describes how investigators used letters and diaries apparently written by Dr. Mengele in the 1970s, along with German dental records and Munich phone books, to follow his trail.

After the development of DNA tests, the piece of scalp, which had been turned over by the Brazilian authorities, proved to be a critical piece of evidence in establishing that Dr. Mengele had fled to Brazil and had died there in about 1979 without ever entering the United States, the report said. The edited report deletes references to Dr. Mengele's scalp on privacy grounds.

Even documents that have long been available to the public are omitted, including court decisions, Congressional testimony and front-page newspaper articles from the 1970s.

A chapter on the O.S.I.'s most publicized failure — the case against John Demjanjuk, a retired American autoworker who was mistakenly identified as Treblinka's Ivan the Terrible — deletes dozens of details, including part of a 1993 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that raised ethics accusations against Justice Department officials.

That section also omits a passage disclosing that Latvian émigrés sympathetic to Mr. Demjanjuk secretly arranged for the O.S.I.'s trash to be delivered to them each day from 1985 to 1987. The émigrés rifled through the garbage to find classified documents that could help Mr. Demjanjuk, who is currently standing trial in Munich on separate war crimes charges.

Ms. Feigin said she was baffled by the Justice Department's attempt to keep a central part of its history secret for so long. “It's an amazing story,” she said, “that needs to be told.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14nazis.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Somali Pirates Free British Couple

NAIROBI, Kenya – The British couple who had been kidnapped by Somali pirates and held in captivity in a remote, swelteringly hot patch of central Somalia for more than a year were finally released, Somali officials said Sunday.

The couple, Paul and Rachel Chandler, were hijacked at sea last October while sailing in a small yacht in the Indian Ocean in a trip they described to friends as “the trip of a lifetime.”

British media reports indicated that a ransom of several hundred thousand dollars had been paid, and low-resolution video footage posted on Sky News on Sunday showed the couple arriving at the heavily-guarded compound of a Somali-American official who was instrumental in getting the couple freed.

Mohamed Aden, the Somali-American official, told Sky News that the Chandlers “are very happy and very, very excited to be alive and have their freedom back. ”

The pirates, who had physically abused the Chandlers and kept them locked up separately for months, handed the couple over to Mr. Aden's militia sometime around midnight on Sunday, Somali officials said, and by Sunday morning they arrived in Adado, a town in central Somalia under Mr. Aden's control.

The Chandler's ordeal seems to have been complicated and prolonged by the fact that the Chandlers were not wealthy and had few valuable assets besides their 38-foot sailboat, which the pirates snatched and then abandoned off the coast of the Seychelles.

Several people, including members of the Somali diaspora in London, had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay off the pirates but according to Somali officials, that money got diverted and ended up being stolen by middlemen.

According to Somali officials, the Chandlers were quickly flown from Adado to Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, where they were expected to meet with Somalia's president. Then they are expected to fly to Nairobi to be debriefed by British officials before going back to London.

Somalia's piracy problem seems to be growing, despite dozens of naval ships trying to essentially ring off the country's pirate-infested coastline.

According to Ecoterra International, an organization with offices in East Africa that keeps track of Somali piracy, pirates are currently holding hostage more than 25 foreign ships and 500 people.

Some of the ships have been hijacked hundreds of miles offshore, closer to India than to Africa. The crews are often held at gunpoint for months while ransom negotiations play out. The ransoms are getting bigger, drawing more young men from Somalia's ruined economy — the country has not had a functioning central government for nearly 20 years — into the piracy business.

Last week, a band of pirates received what is widely believed to be a record ransom — around $10 million — for a hijacked South Korean supertanker, the Samho Dream. The ship had been commandeered in April and anchored for months off the city of Hobyo, in central Somalia, in plain sight of the beach.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/world/africa/15pirates.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Deaths in County Jails Raise Calls for Health Care Standards

Robert Foster did not budge when a Gregg County jailer slid open the bean hole to deliver his lunch one day last August. The obese inmate was sprawled on the floor, his breakfast untouched. When the jailer opened the door, a stench wafted out of the cell. Mr. Foster's flesh was cold. He had no pulse.

Mr. Foster, 57, who had diabetes and a heart condition, was one of more than 280 county jail inmates in Texas who died from illnesses while in custody over a four-and-a-half-year period, according to data provided by the Texas attorney general and analyzed by The Texas Tribune. The number of illness-related deaths in county jails comes close to the number of deaths in state penitentiaries — despite the fact that county lockups house half as many inmates, on average, and keep them for much shorter periods.

Sheriffs say they are doing everything they can to care for people who come to them with a multitude of physical and mental illnesses that are often exacerbated by drug and alcohol addiction. And, the sheriffs say, they are struggling to meet the health care needs of more inmates at a time when budgets are dwindling.

There are no state standards for health care in county jails, but criminal justice advocates and correctional facility experts say the large number of illness-related deaths prove rules are needed. “People aren't dying of old age in jails,” said Michele Deitch, a jail conditions expert and professor at the University of Texas at Austin's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. “Those numbers are more likely to be reflective of medical care concerns.”

The data analyzed by the Tribune related to more than 1,500 deaths that occurred in law enforcement custody statewide from January 2005 through September 2009. Nearly 500 of those deaths were inmates who were in the custody of the state's 254 sheriff's departments. Some were the result of high-intensity pursuits or suicides that occurred before an offender was arrested. Some happened during the course of the arrest, when a person was shot, subdued with a Taser or restrained by officers.

But more than half of the deaths reported by county law enforcement, 282, happened as a result of an illness contracted before or during incarceration. Many inmates died of heart conditions; some of cancer or liver and kidney problems; and others of afflictions ranging from AIDS and seizure disorders to pneumonia.

Like Mr. Foster — who when he died had been in jail for about 10 weeks on deadly conduct charges — many inmates come into county lockups with conditions that have been neglected for years because of poverty, substance abuse or mental illness, said Sheriff Maxey Cerliano of Gregg County. From 2005 to 2009 there were six deaths in his 916-bed jail, where the average daily population was about 790. Most of those deaths resulted from health problems the inmates had before they got to the jail.

“While those are treated in the jail,” Mr. Cerliano said, “sometimes they're just unable to sustain life.”

Gregg County, in rural East Texas, spends about $1 million a year — out of a total annual public safety budget of about $15 million — to employ eight medical employees and pay for medication, health care equipment and supplies. The county doctor, Mr. Cerliano said, is always on call and visits the jail once a week.

Although illness-related deaths were fairly steady among county jails during the nearly five years analyzed — an average of 70 per year statewide — health care costs rose significantly. In counties with populations of 1 million or more, like Harris, Dallas, Bexar and Tarrant counties, average jail health care expenditures tripled from about $5 million in 2005 to nearly $15 million in 2009, according to a survey by the Texas Association of Counties. “They're not costs the county can avoid in any way,” said Tim Brown, the association's senior analyst.

In small counties, Mr. Brown said, one seriously ill inmate can cause health care costs to skyrocket. That's the situation in rural Ector County, where, according to published reports, one inmate with terminal cancer is awaiting trial on murder charges and has accumulated more than $140,000 in treatment costs.

“Not just well people get arrested,” said Sheriff Mark Donaldson of Ector County. “Some people are in bad shape.” He added that it is “our responsibility to take care of them.”

The Texas Commission on Jail Standards, which regulates county lockups across the state, is charged with ensuring that the facilities meet basic life and structural safety standards. When it comes to health care, though, county jails are required only to have a plan to provide medical attention to inmates. No standards dictate how that care ought to be provided.

“Everybody has an ethical obligation to do the right thing,” said the commission's director, Adan Muñoz, who was formerly sheriff of Kleberg County. “How they do it is up to them.”

That is not good enough, Ms. Deitch said. Without consistent standards, she said, jails find themselves strapped for resources and staff, choosing the cheapest forms of medication and treatment. Because inmates in county facilities typically get released quickly on bail or are sent to a state prison, local officials tend to think of inmate health care as a problem that someone else will deal with. They try to push the cost and the responsibility down the line.

“Jails have never felt that compunction unless they're sued,” Ms. Deitch said.

Dallas County was sued by the family of an inmate with bipolar disorder who died of pneumonia because the prisoner never had a health checkup during the 18 months she was in jail while awaiting trial. On the night she died, said Scott Medlock, the family's lawyer and director of the prisoners' rights program at the Texas Civil Rights Project, there was one nurse on duty to care for 3,000 inmates.

In 2005, the United States Department of Justice threatened to take over the county's jail facilities when serious health and safety violations were discovered. Lupe Valdez, a former jailer, took over that year as Dallas County sheriff, and there have been significant changes at what is the sixth-largest lockup in the nation.

The county partners with Parkland Hospital to provide medical care, there is a dialysis facility and a staffed infirmary on site. Medical attention is available at all times. This year — after spending at least $138 million on improvements — the jail passed its state inspection for the first time in nearly seven years. “A lot of times they get better care here than they do out on the streets or at home,” said Kim Leach, the sheriff's spokeswoman.

Diana Claitor, director of the Texas Jail Project, said that is rare. Inadequate health care complaints are the ones she hears most often from county jail inmates and their families. “A whole lot of these people would not have died in the outside world,” she said.

The problem is the perception that inmates come into county jails with health problems that result from their own behavior. “There is an attitude that they don't deserve good health care,” Ms. Claitor said.

Ms. Claitor and Mr. Medlock agree that state jail health care standards would be laudable. But they question how effective such rules would be at the county level because the Commission on Jail Standards has little enforcement power.

The only sanction that can be applied against a failing facility is to close it down, a drastic result that rarely occurs. Ms. Claitor proposes an independent ombudsman for county jails to help inmates and their families get medical attention. Mr. Medlock said what is needed is a wholesale change in local law enforcement's approach to inmate care. Counties, he said, should find ways to keep fewer people behind bars, releasing those awaiting trial who are nonviolent and finding appropriate treatment for the mentally ill. They should also invest more in preventive health care, implementing national incarceration standards not only to save inmates' lives, but also to save counties' pocketbooks from the costs of serious illness and litigation.

“These people have broken the law,” Mr. Medlock said, “but they certainly haven't earned the death penalty, which is what some of them are getting.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14ttjails.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Backers of Legal Marijuana Find Silver Lining in Defeat of California Measure

SAN FRANCISCO — Proposition 19, which would have legalized marijuana in California, received more votes than the Republican nominee for governor, Meg Whitman.

It also received untold news coverage, bringing the debate a new level of legitimacy in the eyes of many supporters. And while it lost — with 46 percent of the vote — its showing at the polls was strong enough that those supporters are confidently planning to bring it back before voters in California, and perhaps other states, in 2012.

“We're going to win,” said Aaron Houston, the executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, a nonprofit group in Washington. “And we're going to win a whole lot sooner than anybody thinks.”

But for all that heady talk, proponents of legalization still face a series of stiff challenges, including winning over older members of the electorate — who overwhelmingly rejected the measure — as well as wary elected officials from both political parties. And while most advocates say that Proposition 19 was a high-water mark for the movement, many admit that the road to legalization will also require new campaign ideas, more money and a tighter, more detailed message to overcome persistent cultural concerns about the drug.

“The Prop 19 campaign really did not do anything to help people get over their fear of marijuana, the substance,” said Steve Fox, director of government relations for the Marijuana Policy Project, a national organization that has helped pass medical marijuana laws. “If people believed marijuana is a dangerous drug that people shouldn't use before the campaign, that is probably how they felt at the end of the campaign.”

In California, Proposition 19's showing was exactly in line with a pre-election Gallup survey that found 46 percent of Americans' favoring legalization. That support has been growing for years, particularly in the Western states, where 58 percent now support legalization, according to Gallup.

But in an off-year election, one critical demographic for the “Yes” side simply did not show up in California: the youth vote. “It appears that the bump that we hoped for, those hopes were overstated,” said Ethan Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for liberalizing drug laws. “Clearly, we were overly optimistic.”

Mr. Nadelmann said long-term trends were in the legalization movement's favor, as were public perceptions of who marijuana users are. Now, he said, the drug is associated with “medical users, middle-class parents, nonrebellious youth.”

But while Mr. Nadelmann said the presidential campaign in 2012 would undoubtedly draw more young voters, he also cautioned that trends can be fickle.

“Let's not forget something: in 1979, people thought that marijuana was on its way to being legal,” said Mr. Nadelmann, referring to state and federal efforts to decriminalize the drug during the Carter administration. “And you know what? It got flipped down. Support dropped.”

Mr. Nadelmann was just one of several leaders who met last weekend for a so-called mile-high summit meeting, a combination pep rally and post-mortem in Denver. And while much of the talk was optimistic — particularly about Colorado, which will most likely vote on legalizing marijuana in 2012 — there were also some hard facts to confront, including that Proposition 19 lost even though supporters heavily outspent opponents.

Mr. Nadelmann said that spending by supporters — about $4 million — was tiny by California standards. But he said major donors would need to see more progress before committing to any future race. “Don't expect big money unless the numbers are there in the polling,” he said.

There is also the issue of support, both political and among two demographic groups important in any statewide campaign here. No top-of-the-ticket candidate from either party in California supported Proposition 19, and the measure did not do well in Los Angeles — just 47 percent voted “yes” — or with Latino voters, particularly older ones, who voted against the proposition in large numbers, according to exit polls.

The measure also failed in many counties where marijuana is legally grown — medical use of the drug has been legal in the state since 1996 — leading to a suspicion that some growers opposed legalization because they feared it would lead to a drop in price and in profits.

There seemed to be something of a consensus that Proposition 19 — which would have legalized possession up to an ounce, but left many regulatory details to localities — may not have been drafted tightly enough to win. The “No” campaign had consistently slammed the measure as a “jumbled, legal nightmare” and questioned estimates of the potential tax revenue that legalization would have brought in.

Roger Salazar, a spokesman and strategist for the campaign against the proposition, said the results showed that “details were important to the voters.”

“I think the proponents of the measure overplayed their hand on taxation and control,” Mr. Salazar said in an e-mail. “The measure itself did not include these components, and as soon as voters figured that out, they turned against it.”

Mr. Fox said that future campaigns would also need to address more visceral concerns, including the idea that people “think that marijuana is harmful.”

“You can run great campaigns, but when people finally get out there to vote, it's a little bit of a gut check,” Mr. Fox said in Denver. “You have to incorporate into the campaign more messages that are going to make people feel that marijuana isn't as bad as they think it is and that marijuana users aren't as bad they think they are.”

Critics of the Proposition 19 campaign included leaders in the medical marijuana movement, some of whom were ambivalent about the measure. Steve DeAngelo, the founder of the Harborside Health Center, an Oakland medical marijuana facility, said in an opinion article in The Sacramento Bee on Saturday that the proposition's loss “was neither unexpected nor surprising.”

“Voters will not welcome cannabis into their communities until it is demonstrated that it can be done in a way that is not threatening to the health and welfare of their families,” he wrote.

But medical marijuana laws — which are on the books in 14 states and the District of Columbia — did not fare much better than Proposition 19. Voters rejected measures in Oregon and South Dakota, but a measure in Arizona passed by a tiny margin as the vote count ended Saturday, The Associated Press said.

For all of that, however, many activists saw the campaign as worth it, saying that Proposition 19 helped educate voters and brought the issue of legalization into the mainstream. And in Denver, several speakers said a victory at the ballot box — either in California, Colorado or another state — was just around the corner.

“We are on the precipice,” Mr. Houston said, before adding, “It's just a question of how we do it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14pot.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Thought of Shifting Police Officers Reopens Debate

As city elections approach, Superintendent Jody Weis's proposal to shift more police officers to crime-ridden areas has reignited an intense debate among aldermen.

Black aldermen, many of whom represent high-crime wards, said the extra help was long overdue, while most white aldermen vowed to fight any plan to shift officers, fearing an uptick in crime in their communities. It is an emotional political fight that has recurred repeatedly when the city has been faced with both high-profile crime and static, or even shrinking, police resources.

“This is common sense,” said Alderman Anthony Beale, chairman of the Police and Fire Committee. “When you have rapes, murders and assaults, you have to move resources.”

Alderman Margaret Laurino (39th Ward) said she was “going to fight to keep police.” A resident of her ward was recently beaten to death during a home burglary, Ms. Laurino said, and “that just reinforces it for me.”

Aldermen say they know little about where the new deployments will be — or what the staffing is now — because the Police Department refuses to share the information with them.

Police officials reported last week that overall crime in the city had dropped for the last 22 months, but a flare-up of violence — including the killings of three police officers — shook the city over the summer. Mr. Weis has been under pressure to undo the city's bloody image, a task Chicago police chiefs have been burdened with since the days of Al Capone.

Mr. Weis must navigate these challenges with an ever-leaner department. As of mid-October, there were 11,187 police officers, a drop of more than 400 since 2005, according to city records. Budget officials have said that police hiring will probably not keep up with retirements next year.

Staffing is typically based on finding the right number of officers to respond to calls while maintaining a visible presence and sticking to a budget.

It is not simple. One problem is measuring the relationship between police visibility and crime prevention, said William Stenzel, who led the Center for Public Safety at Northwestern University for 26 years and now consults on staffing for police agencies. “What you want to have happen is nothing,” Mr. Stenzel said, “but how do you prove later that it was because of police presence?”

In addition, Mr. Stenzel said, it is prohibitively expensive to hire enough officers to respond to every call immediately. The Police Department still accounts for nearly a quarter of Chicago's $6.2 billion annual budget.

“If you want to lower your expense, which means lowering your staffing levels, you're talking about less reactive policing, which means longer response times,” Mr. Stenzel said.

Police officials said the department last made major alterations to its deployment strategy in 1978, when some beats were redrawn to reflect crime and demographic trends. In general, a beat is the area patrolled by one squad car. The beats were drawn smaller in higher-crime areas.

Police officials have announced plans to redraw the beat map significantly at least six times since the late 1970s — most recently last year — but each time the plans were dropped.

“We looked at beat realignment, and we decided it wasn't worth the trouble,” said Phil Cline, the police superintendent from 2003 to 2007. “Beat realignment is just about politics.”

Mr. Cline said the department had other ways to send officers to areas in need.

“The best approach to urban policing,” he said, “is to layer your resources,” with the beat as the first layer. Additional cars patrol groups of beats as needed. Other officers work across beat boundaries in gang or tactical units. Still more are assigned to mobile teams that can flood “hot” areas.

Mr. Cline said that the layering strategy worked and that homicides and other crimes dropped sharply on his watch. But he was forced to retire after officers in one of the mobile units — the Special Operations Section — were implicated in a series of crimes, including a murder plot. The unit was disbanded in 2007, though the next year Mr. Weis created a similar one with a new name, the Mobile Strike Force.

The Police Department continues to rely on mobile units, and other officers are frequently moved from their regular assignments to help out elsewhere. For example, patrol cars are regularly sent from the Northwest Side to hot spots on the West Side.

Mark Donahue, president of the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, said he was not sure what Mr. Weis meant by resource reallocation. “They don't want to call it beat realignment because the aldermen will get their shorts in a knot,” Mr. Donahue said.

Mr. Weis did not give the Council details last month, saying, “We anticipate in the very near future having a resource reallocation that will better balance the workload of our officers throughout the entire city.”

Maureen Biggane, the superintendent's spokeswoman, emphasized that Mr. Weis was not considering drawing new police beats. She said he hoped to announce specifics of the reallocation plan by the first of the year.

Mr. Beale, the police committee chairman, said Mr. Weis had good reason for permanently shifting some officers. “In some areas,” he said, “officers are averaging one call in an eight-hour shift when you have officers responding to 25 calls in an eight-hour shift in other areas.”

Still, the idea of reallocation troubles aldermen from lower-crime communities.

“I can see a car or two being pulled to help for a special event — let's say if the Cubs win the World Series and they need some extra police over at Wrigley Field,” said Alderman Pat Levar (45th Ward). “But our community pays taxes, and they deserve police protection, too.”

Clouding the debate is the department's reluctance to reveal even basic information about police deployment. Department officials denied a request for current data on the grounds that disclosure could pose a security risk. They also denied a request for deployment data from 2008, saying they do not keep such records because officers are shifted too often.

Mayor Richard M. Daley and Mr. Weis have said they moved hundreds of officers to street duty from desk jobs in the past year after commissioning an efficiency study. But department officials will not say where the officers were assigned. They also declined a request for the study.

Council members say their access to department information is not much better. “Everything is a secret, and I don't understand it,” said Alderman Walter Burnett Jr. (27th Ward).

Ms. Biggane said aldermen had not been kept in the dark.

“The superintendent attends meetings regularly with aldermen to listen to their concerns and to keep them apprised of developments and strategies in the department,” she said. “Once a firm plan is outlined regarding resource allocation, it will be addressed with aldermen.”

It is most likely to be a tough sell to members representing the North and Northwest Sides. Mr. Levar said he would not support any major change to deployments until he had current data.

Until then, he will continue to use his own means of estimating staffing levels in his ward.

“I drive around and see on a Sunday night, for instance, that there are a lot of squad cars in the parking lot of the police station,” he said. “That tells me we don't have enough manpower here.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14cncpolice.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Exposé Hits Hard at Death Penalty System

James Warren writes a column for the Chicago News Cooperative

In our collective myopia, we may assume the Illinois death-penalty system is fixed.

After all, the past decade brought exposés of men unjustly on death row, then-Gov. George Ryan's imposing a moratorium on executions, then-State Senator Barack Obama and others' pushing through reforms and Mr. Ryan's commuting the death sentences of 157 in 2003, to worldwide acclaim.

Today's reality is as mixed and melancholy as the legacy of Mr. Ryan, the Republican who had an honorable epiphany on capital punishment but was sent to prison on corruption charges prompted by a more ignoble streak.

“It doesn't look too fixed to me,” said Leigh B. Bienen, a senior lecturer at Northwestern University School of Law and a member of the Illinois Capital Reform Study Committee. Created by the legislature in 2003, the committee is headed by Thomas P. Sullivan, a Chicago lawyer, and just issued its sixth and final report to deafening news media silence.

The report found that taxpayers spend huge sums on prosecution of an inordinate number of death-penalty cases, though we've seen 18 death sentences since 2003; that prosecutors seek the penalty as a bargaining ploy in pursuit of a lesser guilty plea and sentence, and that $64 million has been spent on civil damage awards to men whose death row convictions were reversed.

In addition, a related law review article by Mrs. Bienen details dyspepsia-inducing costs via data she procured from the state and Cook County treasurer's offices.

Since 2000, she learned, $100 million in taxpayer money has been spent via the Capital Litigation Trust Fund. That honey pot was meant to ensure defense counsel in capital cases, especially in places where public defender offices aren't staffed adequately and must enlist private lawyers.

But prosecutors made sure that the fund would also pay for their often-ample nonsalary expenses, including those for investigators, not just for private defense counsel and the nonsalary expenses of public defenders.

We've had 8,000 murders in Illinois since 2000, brought capital charges against 500 defendants and seen just 17 sentenced to death. Two of those cases were reversed on appeal, and two defendants committed suicide in prison. And the fund has paid out $100 million.

Mrs. Bienen's breakdown offers a view of both the perverse economic incentives inspired by the fund and the variances in county practices — especially startling since, as studies nationwide show, it's far more expensive to pursue the death penalty than to keep an inmate in prison for life.

St. Clair County has a per-capita murder rate of 13.36 per 100,000 citizens, and it prosecuted 17 capital cases from 2000 to 2008. By comparison, DuPage County, with a per-capita murder rate of 0.93, prosecuted 21. Madison County, with a rate of 4.24, prosecuted 18, while Sangamon County, with a rate of 4.59, prosecuted 3.

How about this: Jefferson County got $2.5 million to prosecute 2 capital cases — neither wound up in a death sentence — while Macon County got $943,858 to prosecute 14.

Cook County is the state's homicide champion, accounting for 75 percent of murders, and consistently charges murders as death penalty cases, triggering the state payments to both sides. But the county brings few capital cases to trial, often procuring a plea to a lesser charge.

Indeed, you're three times more likely to be sentenced to death outside Cook County, Mrs. Bienen wrote.

There's no centralized system to review or monitor arbitrary local decisions to seek the death penalty, unlike the federal system where the United States attorney general has to sign off if a jurisdiction wants to pursue a capital case.

Law enforcement officials fought off such proposals in Springfield. At the same time, they concede that reforms Mr. Obama won and that they first opposed — notably electronic taping of police interrogations of homicide suspects — have proved a good idea.

So we don't get retribution, deterrence or rehabilitation but, instead, inducements to pursue capital cases. Counties get a virtually bankrupt state to pick up a fat tab and “to maintain a very expensive and dysfunctional system of capital punishment,” Mrs. Bienen wrote.

Scott Turow, the lawyer and author, who is a former member of Mr. Ryan's Commission on Capital Punishment, said, “I used to think that cost arguments were not worthwhile, because you can't get to them without resolving the issue of whether the death penalty is actually deterrence.

“But assuming it's not a deterrent — which the data suggest — it's worth asking how much we're willing to pay just to appease a sense of public vengeance.”

This issue was once deemed front-page news. No longer. Interested citizens, including newspaper editors, can find the committee's 160-page final report, issued last month, on the Web site of the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.

Mrs. Bienen's opus will also be in Volume 100, No. 4, of the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14cncwarren.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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OPINION

Here's a Woman Fighting Terrorism. With Microloans.

LAHORE, Pakistan

An old friend of mine here fights terrorists, but not the way you're thinking. She could barely defeat a truculent child in hand-to-hand combat, and if she ever picked up an AK-47 — well, you'd pray it was unloaded.

Roshaneh Zafar is an American- educated banker who fights extremism with microfinance. She has dedicated her life to empowering some of Pakistan's most impoverished women and giving them the tools to run businesses of their own. The United States should learn from warriors like her.

Bullets and drones may kill terrorists, but Roshaneh creates jobs and educational opportunities for hundreds of thousands of people — draining the swamps that breed terrorists.

“Charity is limited, but capitalism isn't,” Roshaneh said. “If you want to change the world, you need market-based solutions.” That's the point of microfinance — typically, lending very poor people small amounts of money so that they can buy a rickshaw or raw materials and start a tiny business.

Roshaneh grew up in elite circles here in Lahore and studied business at the Wharton School and economics at Yale. After a stint at the World Bank, she returned to Pakistan in 1996 to start her microfinance organization. She called it the Kashf Foundation.

Everybody thought Roshaneh was nuts. And at first nothing went right. The poor refused to borrow. Or if they borrowed, they didn't repay their loans.

But Roshaneh persisted, and today Kashf has 152 branches around the country. It has dispersed more than $200 million to more than 300,000 families. Now Roshaneh is moving into microsavings, to help the poor build assets, as well as programs to train the poor to run businesses more efficiently. She is even thinking of expanding into schools for the poor.

Microfinance is sometimes oversold as a silver bullet — which it's not. Careful follow-up studies suggest that gains from microloans are often quite modest.

Some borrowers squander money or start businesses that fail. Some micro-lenders tarnish the field because they're incompetent, and others because they rake in profits with sky-high loan rates. Microfinance has also generally been less successful in Africa than in South Asia.

Yet done right, microfinance can make a significant difference. An outside evaluation found that after four years, Kashf borrowers are more likely than many others to enjoy improved economic conditions — and that's what I've seen over the years as I've visited Kashf borrowers.

On this trip, I met a woman named Parveen Baji, who says she never attended a day of school and until recently was completely illiterate. She had 14 children, but five died.

Ms. Parveen's husband, who also never attended school, regularly beat her and spent the family savings on narcotics, she says. The family's only possessions were four cots on which they slept, crammed three or four to a cot, in a rented apartment.

“One night all my children were hungry,” she remembered. “I sent my daughter to ask for food from a neighbor. And the neighbor said, ‘you've become a beggar,' and refused.”

Then Ms. Parveen got a $70 loan from Kashf and started a jewelry and cosmetics business, buying in bulk and selling to local shops. Ms. Parveen couldn't read the labels, but she memorized which bottle was which. As her business thrived, she began to struggle to learn reading and arithmetic — and proved herself an ace student. I fired math problems at her, and she dazzled me with her quick responses.

Ms. Parveen began to start new businesses, even building a laundry that she put her husband in charge of to keep him busy. He no longer beats her, she says, and when I interviewed him separately he seemed a little awed by her.

Eventually, Ms. Parveen started a restaurant and catering business that now has eight employees, including some of her daughters. She bought a home and has put some of her children through high school — and a son, the brightest student, through college. She has just paid $5,800 for a permit for him to move to London to take a health sector job.

Ms. Parveen tried to look modest as she told me this, but she failed. She was beaming and shaking her head in wonder as she watched her son speak English with me, dazzled at the thought that she was dispatching her university-educated son to Europe. “Microfinance has changed my life,” she said simply.

That's an unusual success story. But the larger message is universal: helping people start businesses, create jobs and support education is a potent way to undermine extremism.

We Americans overinvest in firepower to defeat extremism and underinvest in development, and so we could learn something useful from Roshaneh. The toolkit to fight terrorism includes not only missiles but also microfinance and economic opportunity.

The antonym of “militant” is often “job.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/opinion/14kristof.html?ref=opinion

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OPINION

Leaves of Grass

Eureka, Calif.

THE day after voters in California rejected an initiative to legalize marijuana, a package arrived at the bookstore I own with my husband: eight ounces of premium bud. This was not a gift from a grateful customer, nor was it a new product we'd brought in for the holiday season. The package came from a grower here in Humboldt County who had decided it would be amusing to use our bookstore as the return address.

And it might have gone directly to a buyer in Austin, Tex., except that the grower had used a little too much packaging, pushing it over the Postal Service's weight limit. Stamped packages weighing more than 13 ounces have to be handed over in person at the post office, not dropped anonymously in a mailbox. And so the padded envelope and its aromatic contents were returned to sender — in this case, our antiquarian bookstore, which is better known for shipping signed first editions and vintage bird lithographs than Humboldt County's most famous agricultural product.

At first we couldn't believe our luck. Rare book dealers are in the business of buying low and selling high, but never had we had the opportunity to take that phrase quite so literally. Anyone else might have been inclined to keep the package for personal use, but we're shopkeepers facing a busy holiday season. We can't afford to let the next few weeks drift away in a cloud of smoke.

Being retailers, we weren't immune to the temptation to sell our windfall. One of our regular customers walked in just after we'd opened the package; he offered us enough cash to cover our rent through the end of the year. But although medical marijuana laws and a tolerant attitude by law enforcement make the drug practically legal here, we weren't quite ready to take the next step and start dealing from behind the counter.

Strangely enough, though, the idea that a bookstore could keep itself in business by selling marijuana might explain why someone chose to put our return address on the package to begin with.

Two months ago, a local weekly, The Arcata Eye, asked if it could run an excerpt from a novel I had written a few years ago in which digital books had become so popular that bookstores everywhere were forced to shut their doors. Only one remained open: a creaky old antiquarian bookstore in northern California much like my own. The shop, finding itself in the national spotlight, could no longer hide the fact that it had been selling something other than books for years.

Soon the story about the bookstore that tucks marijuana between the pages of old books appeared in The Eye; it was part of a fictionalized series about life in cannabis country that ran as the state debated the failed referendum, Proposition 19, which would have allowed licensed retailers to sell marijuana to people over 21 for recreational use.

I like to think that pot growers read the newspaper, and read novels, and enjoy contemplating the fine line between fiction and fact. I envisioned one packing the week's shipments and facing the persistent conundrum of what imaginary return address to print on the envelope. In a moment of inspiration, he or she must have realized that it would take only a few strokes of the pen to bring my novel to life. And so it was that our bookstore — at least according to the fiction written across a padded envelope weighing slightly over 13 ounces — made its first shipment of marijuana.

We hope this will also be the last shipment. In the end, we didn't smoke it or sell it or give it to our employees as a holiday bonus. We called the police and asked them to come pick it up. This is a laughable move in Humboldt — it was difficult to persuade the officer to bother making the trip down to the store at all — but we realized that we needed to establish some sort of plausible deniability before a drug-sniffing dog got a whiff of another package with our address on it.

Besides, the voters of California have made it clear they aren't ready for a bookstore that sells pot — for now.

Amy Stewart is the author, most recently, of “Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/opinion/14stewart.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From the Chicago Sun Times

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Ohio town awaits word on 2 missing women, 2 kids

November 14, 2010

ASSOCIATED PRESS

HOWARD, Ohio (AP) — Residents of a central Ohio town held out hope Sunday that a mother who disappeared last week along with her two children and a friend would turn up after authorities found an "unusual amount of blood" found in her home.

Authorities in Howard planned an update on the case Sunday afternoon in the disappearance of 32-year-old Tina Herrmann, her 41-year-old friend Stephanie Sprang, and Herrmann's 13-year-old daughter, Sarah Maynard, and 10-year-old son, Kody Maynard.

Herrmann's pickup truck was found Thursday night in a nature area near Kenyon College, about 60 miles north of Columbus. Knox County Sheriff David Barber had said Friday that there was no indication of an abduction and that the friend's vehicle was found parked at Herrmann's home, about seven miles away.

He followed Saturday by saying that authorities had found blood in the home.

"The one thing I can say about it is that it's an unusual amount," Barber said. "It isn't from someone stubbing their toe or cutting their finger, you know, or peeling an apple or something like that."

He did not say who investigators believe was injured. The state Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation was collecting evidence at the home, he said.

Investigators have combed land, sky and a private lake about a half-mile from Herrmann's home. The state Highway Patrol, FBI and Center for Missing and Exploited Children were helping investigate.

Neighbors were increasingly concerned. Josh and Alicia Lawson helped search woods and valleys Saturday afternoon for any clues.

"Everybody knows somebody that knows them, being a small town," Alicia Lawson said. "I just hope they show up and it's all been a huge misunderstanding, but it's starting to feel like that isn't going to happen."

Gene Lybarger, whose children played sports with the missing boy and girl, said his 11-year-old daughter is taking it hard.

"She spent the night with a friend and, when I was dropping her off, she came up and hugged me. She was crying," he said. "I told her, 'Let's just wait and see.'"

Investigators continued to question people and evaluate evidence, but Barber said no activity had shown up on the women's cell phone or credit card accounts.

"We're asking people to keep a guarded but optimistic attitude about how this case is going to unfold," he said.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/2892858,ohio-missing-family-111410.article

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From the Washington Examiner

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Four convicted in 2008 gang violence spree

Four members of a violent Northeast Washington crew were convicted for a rash of violence, including the death of one man during afternoon rush hour.

Prosecutors said the men belonged to the Todd Place Crew and were among the first defendants to be convicted under a criminal street gang law passed by the D.C. Council in 2006.

Three of the defendants -- Joseph "Boogie" Jenkins, James "Pee Wee" Bates and Darnell "Peanut" Anderson -- also were convicted of first-degree murder while armed, assault with a deadly weapon, firearms and other charges. The fourth defendant, Edward Warren, was convicted of obstruction of justice and weapons offenses.

Jenkins, 29, Bates, 28, and Anderson, 24, all face up to life in prison. Warren faces up to 25 years.

"These verdicts close the chapter on the Todd Place Crew's role," U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. said.

In the spring and early summer of 2008, the gang was in the midst of a turf war with the T Street Crew around North Capitol Street and Rhode Island Avenue in Northeast Washington.

In a four-month span, prosecutors said, the Todd Place Crew was responsible for a series of shootings that led to one death and the wounding of 12 other people -- including innocent bystanders.

After the April 14 slaying of Todd Place Crew leader William Foster, the gang set out the next day in separate vehicles to exact revenge, prosecutors said. One group came upon rival Gary O. English and gunned the 34-year-old down as he was walking home from work as a Comcast technician, prosecutors said.

The street war continued.

Three days later, two people were shot on the 1200 block of Brentwood Road NE. On May 10, a T Street Crew member was shot nine times on the 1700 block of North Capitol Street; the gunmen fired more than 26 times in all.

On May 26, two more T Street Crew members were shot on a porch on the 200 block of Randolph Place NE.

Finally, on July 25, six people, including two T Street members, were shot outside a home on the 1700 block of Lincoln Road NE.

The four T Street Crew were convicted under a 2006 law that makes it unlawful for gang members to "knowingly and willfully participate in any felony or violent misdemeanor" for the benefit of the gang.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/crime/Four-convicted-in-2008-gang-violence-spree-1542888-107585653.html

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Lebanese police arrest radical Muslim cleric sentenced to life in prison on terror conviction

BEIRUT — A radical Muslim cleric was arrested Sunday at his home in northern Lebanon two days after a military court sentenced him in absentia to life in prison in a terrorism trial, authorities said.

Omar Bakri Mohammed was taken into custody without a struggle in the city of Tripoli, police and security officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

Mohammed, who holds Syrian and Lebanese citizenship, lived in Britain for 20 years where he headed the now-disbanded radical Islamist group al-Muhajiroun.

He left Britain for Lebanon in 2005 and the British government barred him from returning.

Lebanese officials said Bakri was among 54 people sentenced Friday in trials of militants who fought deadly clashes with the Lebanese army in 2007. Bakri was convicted of "belonging to an armed group with the aim of carrying out terrorist acts and plotting to kill Lebanese soldiers."

Judicial officials said Bakri was sentenced to life because of his failure to show up for his trial.

Bakri insisted he never received a summons.

In a telephone interview with The Associated Press on Friday, he said the charges were "lies and fabrications."

Bakri also said his lawyer informed him he had 15 days to turn himself in and appeal the ruling.

It was not immediately clear why authorities did not arrest Bakri earlier. He appears often on Lebanese TV stations as a guest on political talk shows and does not live in hiding.

Bakri became a focus of British attention after he said he would not inform the police if he knew Muslims were planning attacks such as the July 7, 2005, bombings in London that killed 56 people.

The cleric, who also has been criticized in Britain for his fiery sermons, said his Muslim faith prevented him from reporting fellow Muslims to the British police.

Britain later said it had barred Bakri from returning to that country because his presence was not "conducive to public good."

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/world/lebanese-police-arrest-radical-muslim-cleric-after-he-is-sentenced-in-absentia-107913919.html

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