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From the Los Angeles Times

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New York jury trying Al Qaeda suspect is at risk of deadlock

A juror asked to be dismissed, saying she felt 'attacked' as the lone holdout in two days of deliberations in the case against Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, accused of bombing U.S. embassies in Africa.

By Carol J. Williams and Geraldine Baum, Los Angeles Times

November 16, 2010

Reporting from Los Angeles and New York

The first civilian trial of a Guantanamo Bay terrorism suspect appeared deadlocked Monday when a juror asked to be dismissed because she felt "attacked" for being a lone holdout in reaching a verdict.

The potential for a hung jury and mistrial in the case of alleged Al Qaeda accomplice Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani threatened to further undermine the Obama administration's objective of trying "high-value" terror suspects in U.S. federal courts, including Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan declined to dismiss Juror No. 12 from his courtroom in Lower Manhattan and ordered the panel to resume deliberations despite the reported 11-1 impasse.

The juror did not indicate in her note to the judge whether the majority was in favor of conviction or acquittal of the Tanzanian charged with murder and conspiracy in the 1998 Al Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The coordinated attacks killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured thousands.

President Obama signed executive orders two days after taking office vowing to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility within a year and review prosecution options for the remaining terrorism suspects. In June 2009, Ghailani became the first foreign prisoner transferred from Guantanamo to the U.S. mainland for trial.

Political opposition to federal court trials for the terrorism suspects has since surged, with Congress enacting a barrier to relocating foreign detainees to U.S. soil. New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo have said they are against holding the trials in a city still deeply scarred by the 2001 World Trade Center attack.

Others object to trying the most dangerous suspects in federal courts because the defendants would be accorded more rights than in the military commissions created at Guantanamo to try those accused of war crimes against U.S. and other forces fighting terrorism on foreign battlefields.

Of the 174 prisoners still at Guantanamo, only one remains under indictment for war crimes. U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said last week that the administration was close to a decision on how to proceed with the Sept. 11 suspects still held at the U.S. base in southern Cuba.

Ghailani's jury had been deliberating less than two days when the unidentified juror sent a note to Kaplan asking to be excused or replaced by an alternate. The judge reminded the panel to consider the case in consultation with one another, urging the jurors to "not hesitate to change an opinion when convinced that it is erroneous."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ghailani-trial-20101116,0,2508872,print.story

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"Food Justice" : a playbook for the future of food

The Los Angeles riots in 1992 spurred a group of UCLA students and professor Robert Gottlieb to survey residents in low-income areas of the city. The result surprised them; at the top of the list of what residents said they needed most was: Food.

“It was sort of an epiphany for me,” Gottlieb said.

“Food Justice” (The MIT Press, 2010) by Gottlieb and his co-author, Anupama Joshi, is a look at global food production, inequities in food access, farm worker rights, sustainability and food's overall impact on the environment.

Both historical lesson and guide for those looking to get involved in their own communities, the book is written in two parts -- the first is a deep dive into where the American and global food network has been, including a look at the decline of the small family farm in the last century; the second part is a playbook, with examples of what efforts groups throughout the nation are currently making.

While offering a framework for those new to the farm-to-table concept, the book also explains why food remains central to human rights campaigns. It spells out why food has become political.

For instance, the lack of supermarkets and organic options in low income neighborhoods remains an issue. (Even in Los Angeles). “Food deserts” was a term first used in the 1990s to describe the areas where there is no access to fresh, affordable food or supermarkets. The authors connect the dots between this lack of access to fresh food and health issues, including obesity. Or “globesity,” as the United Nations termed the global overweight problem.

The authors describe a system out of balance: Even as the number of those identified as overweight worldwide has grown at exponential rates, those identified as hungry (now more than 1 billion people) has also risen. For many eaters, it seems to be feast-on-fast-food or famine -- neither good alternatives.

Beside legislative changes, in the next year, Gottlieb would like to see greater community connection.

“It would be great if the culinary programs in L.A. could be connected to school gardens, which in turn could be connected to the school cafeteria, which in turn could connect students to learning the value of preparing food,” he said.

The emergence of urban farms and community gardens is a bright spot in the burgeoning interest in connecting more personally with food. “More of them [community gardens and urban farms] are starting to exist, but not a whole lot in comparison to how many could exist," Gottlieb said. "As land becomes abandoned, municipal governments are looking at gardens and farms as a land use and community development strategy. But some of the policies haven't caught up yet -- in zoning, in use of water, in business licensing. I'm optimistic about that area though.”

Through examples such as the Rethinkers in New Orleans, a group of middle schoolers who decided to transform their school district's cafeteria options to be healthier and locally grown, the authors show how there are nationwide changes afoot toward more positive food association.

Seeking to repair inequities is still an emerging movement, but the book provides the groundwork and gives language to something vital to everyone's every day.

Note: Gottlieb currently teaches urban and environmental policy at Occidental College and is director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute. Joshi is the co-director of the National Farm to School Network. You can follow their updates on the food justice movement at http://www.foodjusticebook.org.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/11/food-justice-robert-gottlieb-anupama-joshi.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GreenspaceEnvironmentBlog+%28Greenspace%29

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DNA tests reveal mother of babies whose remains were found in old trunk.

Los Angeles authorities now know the two infants belonged to nurse Janet M. Barrie. But the identity of the children's father and why their bodies were kept for decades in a steamer trunk are mysteries.

By Kate Linthicum, Los Angeles Times

November 16, 2010

After months of detective work, police have solved one of the mysteries surrounding the mummified remains of two babies discovered in the basement of a Westlake apartment building.

DNA tests prove that the dead infants, who were found in a steamer trunk wrapped in newspaper from the 1930s, were the children of the trunk's owner, Janet M. Barrie.

The new evidence — coupled with a preliminary autopsy that found no signs of trauma — has led police to close the case that, since the discovery last August, has captivated mystery-lovers and armchair detectives around the world. But, police said, there will always be unanswered questions.

Among them: Who was the babies' father? And why did Barrie, who died in 1994, keep the bodies tucked among her possessions for so many years?

The babies' bodies were found by two women cleaning the basement of an apartment building near MacArthur Park. When they came upon the old trunk, they broke its lock with a screwdriver. Inside was a trove of antique books and clothing — and two leather doctor's satchels, each holding a small body.

The discovery made headlines across the world, and amateur genealogists offered the police plenty of theories. Detectives considered quite a few — including one scenario that the trunk had belonged to a relative of "Peter Pan" author J. M. Barrie. But eventually, using census and voting records, they tied the trunk to Janet Barrie, who was not related to J.M.

Detectives then tracked down Barrie's niece, Marlene Brown, in Alberta, Canada, and asked her to submit a DNA sample so they could determine whether the babies were Barrie's. Brown told them what she knew about her aunt, who lived in the Westlake building for decades as a live-in nurse for Mary Knapp, the ailing wife of a dentist named George Knapp.

Brown remembers her mother, Barrie's sister, talking about Barrie's unusual living arrangement with the Knapps and says her mother once hinted that her sister was having an affair with the dentist. "She said, 'I bet you when his wife passes away, she will marry him,'" Brown recalls.

That is, in fact, what happened after Mary's death in 1964. But Knapp died four years after he and Barrie wed. When Barrie died 27 years later, her ashes were interred in the same urn as those of the Knapps at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park.

Brown has wondered about the identity of the father and how the babies died. The autopsy could not say for sure how old the bodies were, whether the babies were carried to term or if they were aborted or died naturally. The police also couldn't find relatives of George Knapp to try to determine paternity.

"It's a strange case," said Brown, who in a way is grateful for the investigation. It reconnected her with a cousin with whom she had lost contact years ago.

While working out the logistics of collecting the DNA samples, an investigator with the Los Angeles County coroner's office mentioned to Brown that police had tracked down another relative.

John Holmes, 67, lives in Vancouver, Canada. He and Brown played together as children, but they lost touch over the years.

The case, Brown said, "has a real good ending as far as we're concerned. It put us back together again."

Brown never met Barrie. But Holmes remembers his aunt well.

In the late 1980s, he helped move her and his mother, who had been living with Barrie in Los Angeles, back to Vancouver. Barrie died there during surgery for a hernia.

Holmes remembers his aunt as a proud and feisty woman. A Scottish-born coal miner's daughter, she was one of 13 brothers and sisters. When she was 14, the family immigrated to Diamond City, Alberta, after her father saw an advertisement that said in Canada the streets were paved in gold. They were poor, Holmes said, but Barrie had big dreams.

Despite her family's misgivings, she moved to Winnipeg and went to nursing school. Holmes remembers her telling him once, "I showed them." Barrie moved to Los Angeles in the 1920s. And although she stayed in touch by sending postcards and Christmas presents — including an annual subscription to National Geographic magazine for Holmes and his siblings — her life in the United States was a mystery to the family.

According to 1930 census records, Barrie lived for a time with two other women in an apartment building in Westlake. Her occupation was listed as "private nurse."

It's unclear where she met the Knapps or when she started working for them. But voting records show the three of them living in the Westlake building as early as 1948.

Holmes said it was possible that Barrie had the children with another man.

"The social stigma of having a child out of wedlock was different than it is today," he said. "Maybe she just couldn't let go of the children. Maybe there was an attachment."

He was fond of his aunt and described her as "an independent woman, especially for her time." She drove a boxy Dodge roadster, used to frequent the horse races, and belonged to the Ebell Club, a progressive women's social group. Holmes hopes the case won't tarnish her reputation.

"You don't know the real story behind the story, you know what I mean?" he said. "They were her babies, we know that. But everything else, you can only speculate."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-basement-babies-20101116,0,2904401,print.story

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Illegal immigrants can qualify for in-state college tuition, court rules

Critics say the California law that state Supreme Court justices upheld conflicts with a federal ban on undocumented immigrants getting college benefits based on residency. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is expected.

By Maura Dolan and Larry Gordon, Los Angeles Times

November 15, 2010

Illegal immigrants who graduated from state high schools can continue to receive lower, in-state tuition at California's public universities and colleges, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously Monday.

The ruling is the first of its kind in the nation. California is one of 10 states that permit undocumented immigrants to receive in-state tuition, which can save them $23,000 a year at the University of California.

"Throughout the country, the California court decision will have reverberations," said Daniel J. Hurley, director of state relations and policy analysis for the American Assn. of State Colleges. He predicted that it would discourage challenges to similar policies in other states.

Federal law prohibits illegal immigrants from receiving college benefits based on residency and not provided to all citizens.

A lawyer for the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, which sided with the challengers in the case, said the ruling failed to acknowledge "clear tension between federal law and the state's special financial benefits for illegal immigrant students." The case is expected to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"California is not in sync with the federal mandate against giving Brownie points for being an illegal immigrant," said Ralph Kasarda, an attorney with the foundation.

But state officials insist that there is no conflict with federal law. Under California's nonresident tuition exemption, approved in 2001, public colleges can offer in-state tuition to those who attended California high schools for at least three years. Some of those students are illegal immigrants. Others are U.S. citizens who attended high school in California but whose families may now live elsewhere, or those who moved out of the state to study or attended boarding schools in California.

The Immigration Reform Law Institute, the Washington, D.C.-based group that challenged California's law, contends that more than 25,000 undocumented students attend the state's public colleges and that lower tuition for illegal immigrants costs the state more than $200 million annually.

The state's colleges and universities say that more than 41,000 students, less than 1% of total enrollment, qualify for the lower tuition under California law but that many of those are U.S. citizens.

At the 10-campus University of California, about 2,019 students paid the in-state tuition provided by the law, according to statistics for the 2008-09 school year. About 600 are believed to be undocumented, UC officials said.

About 3,600 Cal State students qualified for in-state tuition under the law, which saves them about $11,000 a year.

California's community colleges enroll about 36,000 students who pay the lower fees as a result of the law, which saves them an average of about $4,400 a year. Cal State and community college officials said they did not know how many of those are illegal immigrants but that those students too deserve an education.

"The higher the number of degree-holders living in our state, the more likely we are to meet future workforce demands," said statewide community colleges Vice Chancellor Terri Carbaugh.

Undocumented students expressed relief at the ruling. Illegal immigrants are not entitled to government financial aid.

Diego Sepulveda, 23, a fourth-year, undocumented student at UCLA, said he would have been unable to pay the higher tuition. He commutes by bus from his family's Huntington Park home to the Westwood campus and depends on his factory worker parents, part-time jobs and some private donations to help pay the bills.

"I'm breaking a lot of the barriers my family never thought it was possible to do," said Sepulveda, who hopes to attend law school.

University officials also were gratified. "Through their hard work and perseverance, these students have earned the opportunity to attend UC," said UC President Mark G. Yudof. "Their accomplishments should not be disregarded or their futures jeopardized."

Christine Helwick, general counsel for the Cal State system, said most undocumented students entered the United States when they were young and attended schools here. "It would have been foolhardy to tell them they are no longer welcome when they get to higher education," she said.

A state appeals court had unanimously overturned the tuition law on the grounds that it conflicted with a federal prohibition against giving illegal immigrants benefits based on residency.

Justice Ming W. Chin, one of the more conservative members of the California Supreme Court and the son of Chinese immigrant potato farmers, said in Monday's ruling that state law was not based on residency and therefore did not conflict with the federal prohibition.

"Every nonresident who meets [the law's] requirements — whether a United States citizen, a lawful alien or an unlawful alien — is entitled to the nonresident tuition exemption," Chin wrote.

The case was brought on behalf of citizens who are paying the higher out-of-state tuition rates. The group contended that lower tuition could not be offered to illegal students and denied to some citizens.

But Chin said the court was not making policy, simply interpreting the law on "a controversial subject."

"It cannot be the case that states may never give a benefit to unlawful aliens without giving the same benefit to all American citizens," Chin wrote.

Two similar laws have been challenged in Texas and Nebraska, where lawsuits are pending in the lower state courts.

A federal lawsuit against a Kansas in-state tuition law, also filed by the citizens' rights group, was dismissed on the grounds the group lacked legal authority, or standing, because it was not directly hurt by the law. The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision.

Kris W. Kobach, senior counsel of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, called Monday's ruling "superficial" and accused the California court of "bending over backwards to defeat the intent of Congress." He said that high national interest in the subject might win the U.S. Supreme Court's attention.

But Ethan Schulman, who represented the University of California in the case, called the ruling "solid" and noted that six of the seven justices on the state high court were appointed by Republican governors.

The UC Regents this week will consider a proposal to raise undergraduate fees by 8%, or $822, for next school year, to $11,124 annually. Last year, UC hiked its fees by 32%. Cal State trustees last week voted to increase tuition for all students 5% for the rest of this school year and an additional 10% for next year. Basic full-time undergraduate tuition next year will rise to $4,884.

Sofia Campos, 20, co-chairwoman of a UCLA organization that helps fellow undocumented students, called the ruling "a victory" but said she can barely get by even with in-state tuition. The fourth-year student, whose family is from Peru, said she had to drop out of school for a quarter to work and took low-cost community college courses at night so she would not fall behind.

If the court had overturned the law, immigrant students "would have been pushed out of higher education," the Eagle Rock resident said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-illegal-students-20101116,0,2796380,print.story

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Slain Riverside Officer Ryan Bonaminio pleaded for his life, officials say

District attorney files first-degree murder charges against Earl Ellis Green and is weighing whether to seek the death penalty.

By Phil Willon, Los Angeles Times

November 16, 2010

A Riverside police officer pleaded for his life before he was fatally shot by a state prison parolee who had led the patrolmen on a high-speed pursuit and foot chase last week, the Riverside County district attorney said Monday.

Dist. Atty. Rod Pacheco on Monday filed a first-degree murder charge against Earl Ellis Green, 44, for the "assassination" of the 27-year-old officer. The prosecutor said his office is weighing whether to seek the death penalty.

Officer Ryan Bonaminio was chasing Green through the city's Fairmount Park when he slipped and fell and, while in a "vulnerable position," he was attacked by Green and had his gun taken away, Police Chief Sergio Diaz said.

"It is clear from the evidence and several witnesses that Officer Bonaminio pleaded for his life before he was murdered," Pacheco said at a news conference in Riverside on Monday. "This defendant ignored those pleas and shot him. He considered it carefully and made his choice.

"He could have run, he could have kept going," Pacheco said. "Instead, he turned, grabbed the gun and shot him."

A Riverside County Superior Court judge on Monday postponed Green's arraignment until Dec. 16 and, at the request of the defense attorney, ordered a mental health evaluation of the Rubidoux resident, a violent felon with convictions dating to 1990.

The murder charge includes two special circumstances that make Green eligible for the death penalty: the murder of a police officer and murder to avoid imminent arrest. Green also was charged with vehicle theft and possession of a firearm by a felon.

Bonaminio, an Iraq war veteran who had been with the Police Department since 2006, was on routine patrol the night of Nov. 7 when he tried to pull over a stolen semi-truck believed to have been involved in a hit-and-run collision near the 60 Freeway. Green, the alleged driver, sped south on Market Street before pulling over in front of Fairmount Park and running into a field.

As Green ran up an embankment toward a church parking lot, the officer slipped on grass that was still wet from a rainstorm, authorities said. Investigators declined to say whether Bonaminio lost his gun when he slipped or had it wrestled away while he was attacked.

Bonaminio's father, who attended the news conference, said at the very least Green deserves to serve a life sentence in a place such as Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, not one of the "Beverly Hills" state prisons in California. When asked if he wanted his son's killer to face the death penalty, he said he was content to let the justice system decide — but his true feelings were readily apparent.

"He assassinated my son. He does not deserve to be breathing the same air as you and I are breathing right now," his father said. "It's just that simple with me. I just want justice for my son. That's all I want."

Green has been arrested at least 13 times in Riverside County and received multiple convictions for spousal abuse as well as car theft, drug dealing, receiving stolen property and battery of a police officer. He was paroled from state prison in February 2009 after serving more than half of a three-year sentence for vandalizing a former girlfriend's property, according to court records.

A family member in Rubidoux reported that Green threatened to kill him the week the officer was killed, and that the incident was reported to the Riverside County Sheriff's Department. The police chief, when asked whether state parole agents should have immediately taken Green into custody, said it would be unfair to second-guess decisions made by overworked parole officers handling massive caseloads.

The funeral for Bonaminio is scheduled for 10 a.m. Tuesday at Grove Community Church in Riverside. He will be interred at Riverside National Cemetery.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-riverside-officer-20101116,0,225525,print.story

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Woman arrested in San Diego on charge of providing money to Somali terrorists

A woman has been arrested in San Diego on federal charges of providing money and other assistance to a terrorist group in Somalia that is trying to topple that government and create an Islamist state.

Nima Ali Yusuf, 24, was arrested Friday, according to federal prosecutors. She is charged with aiding Al Shabab, listed by the State Department as a terrorist group. Al Shabab claimed responsibility for bombings in Uganda that killed 76 people, including an American, during the World Cup finals last July.

Three San Diego men also face charges of helping the group: Saeed Moalin, 33; Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud, 38; and Issa Doreh, 54. All remain in custody.

Al Shabab is known to have ties to Al Qaeda, according to U.S. officials.

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

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Shades of the 'old' LAPD

The department can't ignore racial profiling, even it's by only a few officers.

November 16, 2010

The U.S. Justice Department's stern warning to the Los Angeles Police Department that its system for investigating complaints of racial profiling is inadequate should stir the Police Commission to action. There is too much history in this city for even isolated incidents of profiling to go unpunished, and the Justice Department has identified troubling instances of perfunctory investigations into serious allegations of abuse.

As the commission moves to demand swift and tough review of those complaints, however, it should note that the department has traveled many miles toward addressing these concerns. Today's LAPD is a far cry from that of the early 1990s, when some officers openly boasted of hostility toward minorities. As those with long memories will recall, it was common for LAPD officers responding to domestic disturbances involving black or Latino families to refer to them as "NHI," the chilling shorthand for "No Humans Involved." And Chief Daryl F. Gates was infamous for his observation that African Americans responded differently than "normal people" to being choked with a police baton.

Today, the department has a chief who has properly deplored such behavior and a rank-and-file notably more diverse than at any time in the LAPD's history. Indeed, of the 9,931 officers on the department's payroll as of last month, about one-third are white (and 710 of those are women). Latinos constitute the largest number of officers in the department, just as Latinos compose the largest segment of the city itself.

In its warning letter, the Justice Department cites a conversation that was recorded without the knowledge of those involved. Told of complaints of profiling against two officers, one colleague responded: "So what?" Another insisted that he "couldn't do [his] job without racially profiling." Those are disturbing remarks, made more so by the fact that no LAPD officer has been reprimanded for racial profiling in recent years. Interviewed by The Times' Joel Rubin, Chief Charlie Beck insisted that the vast majority of LAPD officers take charges of racial profiling seriously and that the comments of those two should not taint the entire department. That is certainly true, but even isolated cases undermine public confidence in the police. The taped exchange is a reminder that racial profiling will only disappear when racism itself no longer exists.

In the meantime, the LAPD needs to maintain aggressive vigilance in investigating complaints and disciplining those officers who still don't grasp the gravity of the injustice they perpetuate when they single out minorities for police action.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-lapd-20101116,0,5277536,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Seven Charged in Kosovo Organ-Trafficking Ring

PRAGUE — At least seven people have been charged with participating in an international organ-trafficking network based in Kosovo that sold kidneys and other organs from impoverished victims for up to $200,000 to patients from as far away as Israel and Canada, police and senior European Union officials said Monday.

According to the indictment, the traffickers lured people from slums in Istanbul, Moscow, Moldova and Kazakhstan with promises of up to $20,000 for their organs. Law enforcement officials say many never received a cent. The operations were performed at a private clinic in a run-down neighborhood on the outskirts of Pristina, the Kosovar capital.

While the ring was first discovered two years ago, the global scale of the network and its victims is only now becoming clear.

Officials said the ringleader was a highly regarded surgeon and professor at Pristina University Hospital, Dr. Lutfi Dervishi. The clinic was run by his son, Arban. Also charged was Ilir Rrecaj, a senior official in Kosovo's Health Ministry when the ring was broken. They and two others are accused of crimes including trafficking in humans and body parts, unlawful medical activity, participating in organized crime, and abuse of office. All were released on bail.

The charges have shaken Kosovo, which has been struggling to integrate with the West since it declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. The case is also a test of the nascent legal institutions and rule of law as Kosovo seeks to overcome a culture of endemic lawlessness and corruption that has reached the highest levels of government.

The trafficking network's tentacles reached far. Warrants were issued for a Turkish doctor and an Israeli financier, and two other doctors, an Israeli and a Turk, were named as co-conspirators.

The police said the ring had its roots at a medical conference in 2006 in Istanbul, where Dr. Dervishi met the Turkish doctor being sought, Yusuf Sonmez. Law enforcement officials describe Dr. Sonmez as a notorious international organ trafficker.

The Medicus clinic had been founded by a European philanthropist who aided ethnic Albanian doctors during the war in Kosovo in 1999. Dr. Dervishi, police officials said, secretly transformed it into a hub for illegal organ transplants, which were performed by Dr. Sonmez.

The indictment was first reported by The Associated Press. In it, a European Union prosecutor, Jonathan Ratel, said that in 2008, 20 foreign nationals living in “extreme poverty or acute financial distress” were “recruited with the false promises of payments.”

The police said they broke the ring in November of that year, when a young Turkish man, Yilman Altun, was found at the Pristina airport, weak and frail. Mr. Altun told the police that his kidney had been stolen. When the police raided the Medicus clinic, they discovered an elderly Israeli man who had received Mr. Altun's kidney.

European Union officials said that the indictment in the case had been filed in district court in Kosovo and that a preliminary hearing was expected by the end of the year. If a judge confirms the charges, a trial will follow.

The European Union has a large law enforcement mission in Kosovo to combat crime and corruption. But that fight has proved difficult, with suspicions of bribes, money laundering, organized crime, fraud and now organ trafficking, ensnaring high-level government officials.

Several countries are examining the Kosovo ring, with police investigators combing through the phone records, computer hard drives and bank transfers of those charged. European Union officials said the recipients paid for the kidneys by bank transfers, helping lead the police to the main suspects.

Western law enforcement officials said they suspected the ring might be part of a larger criminal network whose nexus was in Israel. In September, five doctors from South Africa were charged with participating in an international kidney-trading syndicate in which dozens of poor Brazilians and Romanians were paid for kidneys for wealthy Israelis. Analysts said the organ-trafficking case was part of a disturbing global trend in which unscrupulous traffickers take advantage of the growing waiting lists of desperate patients and the vulnerability of poor people further buffeted by the international financial crisis.

In the United States, more than 109,000 people are on the waiting list for organ transplants, mostly kidneys, and 18 die each day, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing , which manages the American transplant system.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/world/europe/16kosovo.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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F.D.A. Expected to Act on Alcoholic Energy Drinks

A year after it began reviewing whether energy drinks that combine alcohol and caffeine are safe or legal, the Food and Drug Administration is expected to take a stand on the drinks as soon as Wednesday, according to law enforcement officials in several states.

The agency declined to say what it would do, but several food safety lawyers who once worked for it said a likely option was to use warning letters to inform manufacturers that the drinks were adulterated and, therefore, not safe.

With new reports of young people falling ill or dying after drinking the potent blends of alcohol and caffeine, state and federal regulators have been pressured to address the matter. Several states have moved to ban the drinks on their own, and this weekend New York's largest beer distributors agreed to stop delivering caffeinated alcoholic beverages to retailers by Dec. 10. Some state officials, meanwhile, have criticized the F.D.A. for not completing its review sooner.

“To be very blunt, there's just no excuse for the delay in applying standards that clearly should bar this kind of witch's brew,” said Senator-elect Richard Blumenthal , Democrat of Connecticut, who as the state's attorney general has led a campaign against the drinks.

At issue for the F.D.A. is whether adding caffeine to alcoholic beverages is “generally regarded as safe,” an agency designation that requires accepted scientific evidence.

Asked about the status of the F.D.A.'s review, Beth Martino, a spokeswoman for the agency, said only that it was continuing. “We're taking a careful and thorough look at the science and the safety of these products,” Ms. Martino said.

The state law enforcement officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the F.D.A.'s investigation publicly, said they did not know what conclusions had been reached.

Four Loko, the top-selling caffeinated alcoholic drink, has been blamed for several deaths over the last several months, a period during which the brand's availability spread to all but three states. In August, an 18-year-old in Palm Coast, Fla., died after drinking Four Loko in combination with diet pills. The following month, a 20-year-old in Tallahassee, Fla., started playing with a gun and fatally shot himself after drinking several cans of Four Loko over a number of hours.

The drink, sold in fruit flavors like blue raspberry and lemon-lime, has an alcohol content of 12 percent and includes as much caffeine as a cup of coffee. It is sold in 23.5-ounce cans.

Although there is little research on the effects of mixing caffeine and alcohol, several studies have suggested that people get more intoxicated and engage in riskier behavior when they drink the combination beverages than when they drink alcohol alone. Caffeine masks the effects of alcohol, doctors say, tricking users into believing they can keep drinking well past the point of drunkenness.

Phusion Projects, which makes Four Loko, has said that drinking premixed alcohol and caffeine is no different from drinking a few glasses of wine with dinner and having coffee afterward. But Dr. Mary Claire O'Brien, a professor of emergency medicine at Wake Forest University , warned the F.D.A. last year that the combination was dangerous. Dr. O'Brien said that ingesting both substances at the same time had a much more potent effect than either one by itself.

“There's a particular interaction that goes on in the brain when they are consumed simultaneously,” she said. “The addition of the caffeine impairs the ability of the drinker to tell when they're drunk. What is the level at which it becomes dangerous? We don't know that, and until we can figure it out, the answer is that no level is safe.”

Several food safety experts said the length of the F.D.A. review indicated the complexity of the problem.

“It suggests this is turning out to be a difficult issue for them to get a handle on,” said Ricardo Carvajal, a lawyer at Hyman, Phelps & McNamara in Washington and a former associate chief counsel at the F.D.A.

A warning letter to the manufacturers would serve as “a shot across the bow,” Mr. Carvajal said. Such letters would probably give the companies a deadline to reformulate the drinks voluntarily or take them off the market.

“Then it would be up to the manufacturers to decide if they are going to fold or fight back,” said Mr. Carvajal, who left the F.D.A. in 2007.

He said the F.D.A. had been more aggressive about issuing warning letters since Margaret Hamburg became commissioner in 2009.

It is less likely, Mr. Carvajal and others said, that the F.D.A. will seize the beverages and ask a court to order manufacturers to stop selling them.

Marc Scheineson, a lawyer with Alston & Bird in Washington and a former associate commissioner of the F.D.A., said seizure was a “last resort.”

“The F.D.A. doesn't like to use it because you have to go to court and convince the Department of Justice to agree to take the case,” Mr. Scheineson said.

Neither possibility would be good news for Phusion Projects, a small Chicago company whose success is due almost entirely to Four Loko, one of only three beverages it makes.

After its founding in 2005 by three recent college graduates, the company rapidly expanded distribution and sales with a grass-roots marketing campaign directed toward college students. It hired college students to work as interns, provided them with cases of its drinks and urged them to pass out samples at bars near their campuses.

“We were essentially hired to throw parties and introduce the product to our friends,” said Rachael Minucciani, who was an intern at Phusion Projects in 2006, when she was a senior at Ball State in Muncie, Ind. “They said, ‘Take the product, take the merchandise and run with it.' ”

Four years later, the company has 90 employees, and had annual sales of $144 million in the year that ended on Oct. 31, according to the SymphonyIRI Group, a market research firm based in Chicago. Those totals do not include sales at liquor stores or retailers that require memberships like Sam's Club. Young people appear to be drinking Four Loko at an astounding rate, based on testaments posted daily on Facebook pages that pay tribute to the beverage.

The popularity of such drinks has caught college officials, doctors, lawmakers and federal regulators off guard. Long accustomed to fighting alcohol abuse among young people, officials are now scrambling to confront the new and less understood threat of combining high amounts of alcohol with caffeine.

In one case in September, a 19-year-old arrived at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia complaining of crushing chest pains and shortness of breath. Doctors determined he was having a heart attack, but the usual examinations did not reveal the cause.

The young man reported that he had spent the night drinking Four Loko. Dr. Robert McNamara, chairman of the emergency medicine department at Temple's medical school, concluded that the drink had probably led to the heart attack.

“We've seen this with cocaine and speed and other stimulants, but not with an alcoholic drink,” Dr. McNamara said. “Our advice when he left the hospital was, ‘Don't ever drink Four Loko again.' ”

A few weeks ago, Jennifer Machado, a junior at the University of California, Santa Cruz , attended a party where the theme was “Edward Four Loko Hands.” Some guests held cans of Four Loko in each hand. “It does a number on my body,” said Ms. Machado, who did not participate because of her bad experiences with Four Loko.

Donald Misch, director of the Wardenburg Health Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said he worried about calling too much attention to Four Loko. “There's a fear that the more we talk about it then the more people would be inclined to give it a try,” Mr. Misch said.

But Daniel Ferguson, whose 18-year-old niece, Nicole Celestino, went into cardiac arrest and died in August after combining Four Loko and diet pills, said the more publicity the drink received, the better.

“No one in our family who was over the age of 20 had ever even heard of Four Loko,” Mr. Ferguson said.

In recent days, amid reports of young people stockpiling the drink in anticipation of its being banned, a new Facebook tribute page, called R.I.P. Four Loko, has been created. As of Monday night, the page had 8,500 friends.

One person posted a picture of about 20 stacked Four Loko cans and the words “Stock up.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/us/16drinks.html?ref=us

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45 Years Later, an Apology and 6 Months

James Bonard Fowler is 77 now, but in 1965 he was a young Alabama state trooper facing the rising tide of the civil rights movement.

On Monday, at the Perry County Courthouse in Alabama, that past came calling: Mr. Fowler, who is white, pleaded guilty to the 1965 killing of a black man whose death led to the historic civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery.

Mr. Fowler will face six months in prison for the fatal shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old civil rights marcher who died after a confrontation with the police in Marion, Ala. His death inspired the first of the famous Selma marches the next month, an event that also ended in violence.

In the courthouse Monday, with Mr. Jackson's family watching, Mr. Fowler apologized for the shooting and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor manslaughter, but insisted that he had acted in self-defense, believing that Mr. Jackson was trying to grab his gun.

“I was coming over here to save lives,” he said. “I didn't mean to take lives. I wish I could redo it.”

The plea agreement brought to an end a case that had crept through the justice system for decades. In the 1960s, two grand juries investigated the killing but chose to not pursue charges. Then in 2004, Mr. Fowler confessed to a reporter for The Anniston Star that he had fired the gun.

“Jimmie Lee Jackson was not murdered,” he said in the interview. “He was trying to kill me, and I have no doubt in my mind that under the emotional situation at the time, that if he would have gotten complete control of my pistol, that he would have killed me or shot me. That's why my conscience is clear.”

But Mr. Fowler's plea on Monday suggests that he was not certain he would win the case in a courtroom. The district attorney who prosecuted the case, Michael Jackson, said he planned to try to convict Mr. Fowler of murder but was satisfied with the less severe manslaughter ruling.

“Time was starting to run out,” Mr. Jackson said. “We wanted to make sure justice was done before he died.”

Others questioned whether the sentence was harsh enough. The Perry County commissioner, Albert Turner Jr., told the Anniston newspaper that the agreement was “a slap in the face of the people of this county.”

But John Fleming, the Anniston Star reporter to whom Mr. Fowler confessed, said the plea had brought “an appropriate end” to the case for a region still grappling with its civil rights history. “One thing we've never experienced in the South is anything close to a truth and reconciliation commission,” he said. “What happened today was a moment of that experience.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/us/16fowler.html?ref=us

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Katrina Victims in Mississippi Get More Aid

GULFPORT, Miss. — Federal and state officials and housing advocates announced on Monday the creation of a $133 million program to address housing problems that remain for poor Mississippi residents five years after Hurricane Katrina .

The announcement comes after months of negotiations by officials from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Mississippi governor's office and housing advocates on the coast, and could bring to a close a long-running dispute about the state's spending of federal grant money after the hurricane.

“We're pretty happy about it,” said Reilly Morse, a senior lawyer at the Mississippi Center for Justice, a nonprofit group. But, Mr. Morse added, it did not come easy.

Housing advocates have long criticized the state for not spending enough of its $5.5 billion in federal grant money on low-income residents, but that criticism reached a fever pitch in 2007 when Mississippi announced it was redirecting $600 million of federal money to refurbish and expand the shipping port here.

Mr. Morse and a group of public-interest lawyers filed a suit against HUD, charging that the diversion was an unlawful use of federal disaster money, especially with serious housing problems remaining. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in January, but the lawyers appealed the decision.

Mississippi had set up a variety of programs to address housing problems after the storm, and state officials argued that these were adequate. But in a series of meetings starting in April, housing advocates and HUD officials began to convince state officials that there were many Mississippians, especially poor ones, who had been left out.

“The assumption was that all of these unique programs were taking care of everything, including the hard cases,” said Gerald Blessey, a former mayor of Biloxi who was appointed by Gov. Haley Barbour to oversee post-hurricane housing issues. “When we started to look under the hood, we found that there was a number of hard cases that were not being taken care of.”

Over the summer, Mr. Morse worked with state officials to design a program around a list of 4,400 such hard cases in Mississippi. People in need of help had to fall below a certain income level and the problem had to be directly caused by the hurricane. In all the cases, some kind of adjustment needed to be made to the rules governing hurricane assistance.

Taking a random sample of these cases, estimators visited houses to assess damage. Based on those figures, they calculated that $93 million would be needed to close the financing gaps in the case list.

“Once the governor was convinced of that point by research and analysis, he was willing to make that move,” said Fred Tombar, a senior HUD official who oversees Gulf Coast recovery.

Mr. Morse and HUD officials also insisted that there were an unknown number of Mississippians who had been overlooked or had not applied for assistance, many of whom lived inland but nonetheless suffered severe damage from the storm. The governor agreed to set up an aggressive outreach program to find people who might qualify for assistance, and to set aside $40 million in a reserve fund for these cases.

All of the money in the new program comes from existing Hurricane Katrina assistance programs; any money left over in the reserve fund will join the nearly $600 million now dedicated to port expansion.

Some of the recipients will be poor residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed by hurricane winds, but who did not have homeowner's insurance . This marks a departure from the assistance plan that Mr. Barbour put before Congress in 2005, which excluded people who did not have homeowners' insurance. (The federal grants in this program were mainly directed to people whose homes were swamped by the storm surge, but who lived outside the federally designated flood plain and thus were not required to carry federal flood insurance.)

In a news conference on Monday, Mr. Barbour said this new program came about largely because HUD was willing to show flexibility on that point.

“This administration made the decision that they felt like people who were damaged by wind, even though we had made that agreement with Congress, should be covered if they were poor,” he said. “That is why there's a change.”

Mr. Morse, however, said that the state had been reluctant to show flexibility and that it was the lawsuit that, to a large degree, had moved the discussions forward.

The appeal of the lawsuit was dropped when officials agreed to the creation of the new program at the end of October. Arguments were to have started last Friday in federal appeals court.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/us/16mississippi.html?ref=us

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Court Rules Gun Use in Drug Crimes Means Added 5 Years

WASHINGTON — People convicted of possessing a gun while selling drugs are subject to five-year mandatory minimum sentences on top of most of other sentences, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The ruling was the first signed decision of the term, and it was unanimous. But the court's newest member, Justice Elena Kagan , did not participate, having disqualified herself in light of her work as United States solicitor general.

The decision involved two defendants whose cases had been consolidated. One of them, Kevin Abbott of Philadelphia, was convicted of drug trafficking, of a related gun charge with the 5-year minimum and under a law requiring a 15-year minimum sentence for career criminals. Only the latter two charges figured in his sentence, and the trial judge added them together for a total of 20 years.

The second defendant, Carlos R. Gould of Wichita Falls, Tex., pleaded guilty to a drug charge involving cocaine with a 10-year minimum sentence and the related gun charge with a 5-year minimum. The trial court gave him a little more than the minimum on the drug charge — 11 years and 5 months — and then added five years for the gun charge.

The question in the case was what Congress meant when it revised a 1968 federal gun control law in 1998 by, among other things, adding a new preface saying the five-year minimum for having or using guns while selling drugs applied “except to the extent that a greater minimum sentence is otherwise provided.”

Mr. Abbott argued that his 15-year-sentence for being a career criminal was such a greater minimum sentence and that it should cancel out the additional five years for the gun charge. Mr. Gould said the same thing about his 10-year sentence.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court, said the defendants' approach, which also relied on federal sentencing guidelines, might make sense as a matter of policy.

“We do not gainsay that Abbott and Gould project a rational, less harsh, mode of sentencing,” she wrote. “But we do not think it was the mode Congress ordered.”

It was implausible, Justice Ginsburg wrote, to think Congress had altered the law in 1998 in the direction of leniency. All Congress meant to say in 1998 was that defendants subject to a mandatory minimum sentence of more than five years for a particular crime — that of having or using a gun in connection with a drug crime — need only serve the longer sentence.

Congress did not mean to say, Justice Ginsburg went on, that any longer minimum sentence for unrelated crimes also canceled out the five-year gun sentence.

“We doubt that Congress meant a prefatory clause, added in a bill dubbed ‘an act to throttle criminal use of guns,' to effect a departure so great from” the 1968 law's purpose, she wrote. That purpose, she said, was “insistence that sentencing judges impose additional punishment.”

Indeed, she wrote, a broader reading of the disputed words could result in “sentencing anomalies,” including the possibility that “the worst offenders would often secure the shortest sentences.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/us/16scotus.html?ref=us

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EDITORIAL / OPINION

How to Kill the Meth Monster

Newport, Ore.

THE latest bad news from the world of methamphetamine is that makers of the drug have perfected a one-pot recipe that enables them to manufacture their highly addictive product while on the move, often in their car. The materials they need — a two-liter soda bottle, a few cold pills and some household chemicals — are easily obtained and easily discarded, often in a trash bag dumped along the highway.

There is, however, a simple way to end this mobile industry — and, indeed, most methamphetamine production. We've tried it in Oregon, and have seen how well it works. Just keep a key ingredient, pseudoephedrine, out of the hands of meth producers.

Pseudoephedrine is a nasal decongestant found in some cold and allergy medicines. In 1976, the Food and Drug Administration allowed it to be sold over the counter, inadvertently letting the genie out of the bottle. Afterward, the meth epidemic spread across the nation, leaving destroyed lives and families in its wake.

Sales of products containing pseudoephedrine in the United States now amount to nearly $600 million a year. Yet, according to the pharmaceutical industry, only 15 million Americans use the drug to treat their stuffed-up noses, and these people typically buy no more than a package or two ($10 to $20 worth) a year.

Over the years, Congress and state legislatures have passed laws meant to prevent the diversion of pseudoephedrine to meth production. But such efforts have amounted to only temporary Band-Aids.

In 2006, Congress required pseudoephedrine products to be moved behind the counter, set daily and monthly limits on the amount that can be sold to any one customer and required retailers to keep a log of sales. But meth users quickly learned to evade these controls by making purchases in several different stores — a practice known as “smurfing.”

In an effort to avoid having more stringent controls placed on the drug, the pharmaceutical industry is lobbying Congress to require electronic tracking of pseudoephedrine sales, as some states already do. This makes it harder for an individual smurfer to collect large quantities of the drug. But meth users get around the tracking system by banding together in cooperatives, with each member buying pseudoephedrine products in amounts small enough to evade detection. These group smurfers then contribute their portion to the pot in exchange for cash or a share of the cooked-up meth. Or, in the West, they feed the “super labs” run by drug trafficking organizations in Central California.

In Kentucky, an electronic tracking law that went into effect in 2008 has had no effect on the number of meth labs there, and only 10 percent of them are found by electronic tracking. The number of police incidents involving meth labs has actually increased by more than 40 percent.

The only effective solution is to put the genie back in the bottle by returning pseudoephedrine to prescription-drug status. That's what Oregon did more than four years ago, enabling the state to eliminate smurfing and nearly eradicate meth labs. This is part of the reason that Oregon recently experienced the steepest decline in crime rates in the 50 states.

Earlier this year, Mississippi also passed a law requiring a prescription to get pseudoephedrine. Since July, the number of meth labs in that state has fallen by 65 percent.

In 2009, Mexico, which had been the source of most of the methamphetamine on the streets of the United States, went further, banning pseudoephedrine entirely. The potency of meth from Mexico has since plummeted. This is great news. But now the ball is back in our court.

These pseudoephedrine prescription requirements apply to only 15 pharmaceutical products and their generic equivalents — medicines like Sudafed 12 Hour, Aleve D and Advil Cold and Sinus. Most cold and allergy medicines on store shelves are not affected, because they contain no pseudoephedrine.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has proposed legislation to require prescriptions for products with pseudoephedrine nationwide, and Congress should enact it without delay. American families, too many already devastated by the meth epidemic, deserve no less.

Rob Bovett, the district attorney for Lincoln County, Ore., was the primary author of Oregon's anti-methamphetamine laws.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/opinion/16bovett.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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OPINION

This Raging Fire

When I was a kid my Uncle Robert, for whom I was named, used to say that blacks needed to “fight on all fronts, at home and abroad.”

By that he meant that while it was critically important to fight against racial injustice and oppression, it was just as important to support, nurture and fight on behalf of one's family and community.

Uncle Robert (my father always called him Jim — don't ask) died many years ago, but he came to mind as I was going over the dismal information in a new report about the tragic conditions confronting a large portion of America's black population, especially black males.

We know by now, of course, that the situation is grave. We know that more than a third of black children live in poverty; that more than 70 percent are born to unwed mothers; that by the time they reach their mid-30s, a majority of black men without a high school diploma has spent time in prison. We know all this, but no one seems to know how to turn things around. No one has been able to stop this steady plunge of young black Americans into a socioeconomic abyss.

Now comes a report from the Council of the Great City Schools that ought to grab the attention of anyone who cares about black youngsters, starting with those parents who have shortchanged their children on a scale so monstrous that it is difficult to fully grasp.

The report, titled “A Call for Change,” begins by saying that “the nation's young black males are in a state of crisis” and describes their condition as “a national catastrophe.” It tells us that black males remain far behind their schoolmates in academic achievement and that they drop out of school at nearly twice the rate of whites.

Black children — boys and girls — are three times more likely to live in single-parent households than white children and twice as likely to live in a home where no parent has full-time or year-round employment.

In 2008, black males were imprisoned at a rate six-and-a-half times higher than white males.

The terrible economic downturn has made it more difficult than ever to douse this raging fire that is consuming the life prospects of so many young blacks, and the growing sentiment in Washington is to do even less to help any Americans in need. It is inconceivable in this atmosphere that blacks themselves will not mobilize in a major way to save these young people. I see no other alternative.

The first and most important step would be a major effort to begin knitting the black family back together. There is no way to overstate the myriad risks faced by children whose parents have effectively abandoned them. It's the family that protects the child against ignorance and physical harm, that offers emotional security and the foundation for a strong sense of self, that enables a child to believe — truly — that wonderful things are possible.

All of that is missing in the lives of too many black children.

I wouldn't for a moment discount the terrible toll that racial and economic injustice have taken, decade after decade, on the lives of millions of black Americans. But that is no reason to abandon one's children or give in to the continued onslaught of those who would do you ill. One has to fight on all fronts, as my Uncle Robert said.

Black men need to be in the home, providing for their children. The community at large — including the many who have done well, who have secured a place in the middle or upper classes — needs to coalesce to provide support and assistance to those still struggling.

Dorothy Height, the longtime president of the National Council of Negro Women, who died in April at the age of 98, always insisted that blacks “have survived because of family.” And she counseled: “No one will do for you what you need to do for yourself.”

There are many people already hard at work on these matters, but leadership is needed to vastly expand and maximize those efforts. Cultural change comes hard, and takes a long time, but nothing short of a profound cultural change is essential. Let the message go out that walking down the aisle carries with it great responsibilities but can also be great fun, and watching your kid graduate with honors is a blast.

Black children can't wait for Washington to get its act together. They don't have time to wait for the economy to improve. They need mom and dad and the larger community to act now, to do the right thing without delay.

This is not a fight only for blacks. All allies are welcome. But the cultural imperative lies overwhelmingly with the black community itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/opinion/16herbert.html?ref=opinion

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EDITORIAL

Searching Your Laptop

Federal courts have long agreed that federal agents guarding the borders do not need a warrant or probable cause to search a traveler's belongings. That exception to the Fourth Amendment needs updating and tightening to reflect the realities of the digital age.

The government has a sovereign right and responsibility to secure the borders. The recent discovery of two powerful package bombs being shipped to the United States is a reminder of the many dangers out there.

There is also a big difference between government agents scanning items for explosives or looking through a suitcase full of clothing, and searching through the hard drive of a laptop computer containing work papers, financial records, e-mail messages and Web site visits.

Although the number of travelers whose devices are searched is small compared with the many millions who cross American borders each year, the problem is real. Between October 2008 and June 2010, more than 6,600 travelers — nearly 3,000 of them American — were subjected to such searches, according to government records released in response to a Freedom of Information request.

The George W. Bush administration first authorized border agents to seize and view the contents of laptops, smartphones, and other devices and copy and share data with other government agencies without need for any individualized suspicion of wrongdoing.

The Obama administration has tweaked the policy, requiring approval from supervisors to hold a seized device for more than five days, for example. The fundamental flaw remains: it permits the government to engage in indiscriminate and invasive fishing expeditions.

The Supreme Court has yet to confront the issue. But in a disappointing ruling in 2008, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco said that agents at a border need not meet even the low threshold of reasonable suspicion to justify a warrantless laptop search. The ruling reversed a lower court's finding that laptops are “an extension of our own memory” and too personal to allow government searches without some reasonable and articulable suspicion.

The American Civil Liberties Union has now filed a lawsuit challenging the policy on behalf of press photographers, criminal defense attorneys and a doctoral student in Islamic studies whose laptop was searched and confiscated this spring.

Congress should not wait for resolution of the case. It should approve legislation along the lines of the Travelers' Privacy Protection Act proposed two years ago in the Senate.

It would have confined border laptop searches involving American citizens and residents to situations where agents have a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity and require a higher standard of probable cause and a warrant or court order when a laptop is held for more than 24 hours. The measure also set strict limits on disclosure and sharing of information from devices seized at the border and requires the Department of Homeland Security to report regularly to Congress and the public on its search policies and practices.

The Senate bill's leading sponsor, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, was defeated in this month's election. His three Democratic co-sponsors — Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Maria Cantwell of Washington — should press the issue in the new Senate.

The challenge, as ever, is to strike a balance that grants sufficient leeway to protect the nation's borders without allowing the intimate details of people's lives and work to be searched, seized and copied on a whim.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/opinion/16tue1.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From the Chicago Sun Times

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1 in 10 has gone to bed hungry

November 16, 2010

In the past year, one in 10 Americans said they went to bed hungry at least once, according to a yearly survey that highlights trends and attitudes of Americans toward hunger.

More than one in four (28 percent) say they or someone they know had to make a choice between providing food for their family or paying their bills, according to the research commissioned by Hormel Foods.

The percentage who say they are very concerned about the number of Americans who do not have enough to eat rose to 46 percent from 38 percent a year ago. About 65 percent said they have donated to a food charity.

Also, 18 percent say they are struggling to pay essential bills or cannot pay those bills without borrowing.

http://www.suntimes.com/business/currency/2897332,CST-NWS-HUNGER16.article

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From the Washington Examiner

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Daniel Popeo: The ACLU is courting terrorism and disaster

Where else but in America would your involvement in numerous terrorist plots earn you both a spot on an international “most wanted” list and the pro bono assistance of legal activists in federal court?

Such is the situation involving Anwar al-Awlaki, a militant Islamist cleric based in Yemen. Al-Awlaki and his “al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” group have been tied to the massacre at Fort Hood, the attempted Christmas Day airplane bombing over Detroit, and last month's plot to blow up Chicago-bound cargo planes.

U.S. security officials' authorization of lethal action against al-Awlaki inspired two “public interest” groups, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), to file a constitutional challenge on behalf of al-Awlaki's father.

The lawsuit, which seeks an injunction preventing attacks on al-Awlaki, opens an alarming new front in legal activists' campaign to judicially impose their myopic view of “civil liberties” on U.S. anti-terror decisions.

Over the past nine years, these ideologues have, with the help of the courts, secured criminal defendant rights for enemy combatants; invalidated parts of the USA Patriot Act; and forestalled invaluable surveillance activities.

Rather than spending time deterring the next terrorist attack, government officials have had to defend detainment decisions, fight the disclosure of highly sensitive national security information, and judicially justify the transfer of terror suspects to other nations.

Now the ACLU and CCR are going one step further – they seek direct judicial involvement in military strategy. Their suit argues that because al-Awlaki is an American citizen (raised in New Mexico), no U.S. operation can take aim at him unless officials prove in court that he poses an “imminent” threat and there are no means other than lethal force that can reasonably neutralize the threat.

On November 8, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. devoted three hours to hearing arguments in this case. In its briefs and at the hearing, the Obama Administration urged the court to dismiss the suit based on the limited procedural ground that al-Awlaki's father cannot lawfully “stand in the shoes” of his son as a plaintiff.

Such a dismissal would do little more than encourage activists to secure a better plaintiff and sue ain. That's why Washington Legal Foundation, representing a group of retired military officers, filed a friend-of-the-court brief asking the court to reach the merits of the case.

The WLF argues the case should be disposed of on the grounds that the suit raises protected “state secrets,” and that decisions such as whom to target during wartime are not within the judicial branch's authority.

Perhaps not coincidentally, on the very same day as his lawsuit was argued, al-Awlaki released a chilling video on jihadist websites, where he declared, among other things, “Do not seek any permission when it comes to the killing of the Americans . . . They are the party of the devil and fighting them is the personal duty of our times. We [have] reached that moment when it is either us or them.”

The unconventional war thrust upon America by fanatics like al-Awlaki has provided legal activists with a long-awaited opportunity to advance radical legal theories, which were previously relegated to scholarly journal articles and law school class hypotheticals. But when those ideas pique the interest of judges, they cease being academic curiosities and become live threats to national security.

For instance, suits like the one brought on behalf of al-Awlaki could severely curtail the use of unmanned Predator drones, leading to more U.S. military and civilian casualties once courts force anti-terror operations to rely on more land assaults.

Additionally, successful civilian court challenges to the detainment of terror suspects can return enemy soldiers to the battlefield. In fact, numerous former Guantanamo Bay detainees already populate the upper ranks of the Yemen-based al Qaeda group's leadership.

America has reached a fork in the road, and the time has come for us to make a decisive choice. We can treat terrorists like common criminals who are entitled to Miranda rights and criminal trials, providing them an unparalleled platform for propaganda and a rich source of intelligence for the architects of future attacks.

Or we can be fully committed to ensuring the security of our nation by defeating misguided legal campaigns and returning control over national and homeland security decisions to the executive and legislative branches.

With so little margin for error, can America afford to have the judiciary and agenda-driven lawyers deciding how to keep us safe from foreign terrorism?

Examiner contributor Daniel J. Popeo is chairman and general counsel of the Washington Legal Foundation.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Daniel-Popeo-Courting-terrorism-108387219.html

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FBI offers clues, $20k to help find sniper

The person responsible for shooting at military buildings in Northern Virginia might have skipped work recently or could be going through a divorce, federal authorities said Monday as the FBI posted a $20,000 reward for information that leads to his or her conviction.

Five buildings have been targeted by a late-night sniper since mid-October. The last reported shooting was Nov. 2 at a Coast Guard recruiting station in Woodbridge.

"We are following every lead that comes in and continue to call for the assistance of the public in helping us identify the person or persons responsible," said John G. Perren, acting assistant director in charge of the FBI's Washington field office. "We are confident that someone out there has additional information that will be helpful to this investigation."

The FBI said the shooter might exhibit certain characteristics that the public may have noticed.

The five shootings occurred during the overnight and early morning hours of Oct. 16-17, Oct. 19, Oct. 25-26, Oct. 28-29 and Nov. 1-2. The shootings occurred at the National Museum of the Marine Corps, the Pentagon, a U.S. Marine Corps recruiting facility and a U.S. Coast Guard recruiting facility.

The FBI has confirmed that shots were fired by a single weapon.

Authorities have not released the type or caliber of the weapon, but investigators previously said it appeared that the shots were fired from a high-powered rifle.

Anyone with information can contact the FBI's Washington Field Office at 202-278-2000 or e-mail Washington.Field@ic.fbi.gov

All information will be kept strictly confidential, authorities said.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/crime/FBI-offers-clues_-_20k-to-help-find-sniper-1574471-108248404.html

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From the Department of Homeland Security

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Secretary Napolitano and TSA Administrator John Pistole Announce Expansion of the "If You See Something, Say Something Campaign"

WASHINGTON—Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Administrator John Pistole today announced the expansion of the nationwide "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign in the National Capital Region and to the nation's hotel and lodging industry—raising public awareness and strengthening security in America's tourism and travel industry in anticipation of the busy holiday travel season.

The "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign—originally implemented by New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority and funded, in part, by $13 million from DHS' Transit Security Grant Program—is a simple and effective program to engage the public and key frontline employees to identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to the proper transportation and law enforcement authorities.

"As Americans head into the busy holiday travel season, it is important to remember that every individual has a role to play in keeping our country safe and secure," said Secretary Napolitano. "The ‘If You See Something, Say Something' campaign encourages travelers and those who work in the hotel industry to identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to the proper law enforcement authorities."

Secretary Napolitano and Administrator Pistole joined Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier, Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Police Chief Stephen Holl and Metro Transit Police Department Police Chief Michael Taborn in announcing the launch of "If You See Something, Say Something" advertisements in DC-area airports, public transit, movie theaters, gas stations and on local radio stations.

"The partnerships we build in communities and with travelers are critical to supporting our security mission," said TSA Administrator Pistole. "We saw with the failed Times Square attack the impact alert travelers can have and we ask for the public's continued partnership to help keep our skies safe."

Recognizing the critical role of the hospitality industry in protecting travelers, Secretary Napolitano also highlighted DHS' new "If You See Something, Say Something" partnership with the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AH&LA)—announced by Deputy Secretary Jane Holl Lute in New York City on Saturday.

With the assistance of AH&LA, DHS offered threat briefings to industry stakeholders, created a web-based training tool for employees, and has created public education materials to help the hotel industry manage security at their facilities and encourage hotel employees to identify and report suspicious activities and threats. These materials are available at www.dhs.gov/cfsector

Since the beginning of the summer, DHS has worked with state and local officials to leverage best practices from the law enforcement community while engaging the public in identifying and reporting suspicious activity through the national Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) initiative—an administration effort to train state and local law enforcement to recognize behaviors and indicators related to specific threats and terrorism-related crime—and the expansion of "If You See Something, Say Something" to communities throughout the country, launching new partnerships with organizations including AH&LA, Amtrak, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), the general aviation industry and fusion centers.

In the coming months, the Department will continue to expand the "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign nationally with public education materials and outreach tools designed to engage America's businesses, communities, and citizens to remain vigilant and play an active role in keeping the county safe.

For more information, visit www.dhs.gov

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1289842248570.shtm

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