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From the Los Angeles Times

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'Error-free' hospitals scrutinized

State health officials question whether a lack of reports required by a 2007 law means a lack of incidents.

by Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times

November 27, 2010

California public health officials are scrutinizing hospitals that claim to be error-free, questioning whether nearly 90 facilities have gone more than three years without any significant mistakes in care.

Eighty-seven hospitals — more than 20% of the 418 hospitals covered under a law that took effect in 2007 — have made no reports of medical errors, according to the California Department of Public Health.

The high percentage has raised concerns that errors have gone unreported. Some patient advocates say it is an indication that hospitals are unwilling to police themselves. State officials have given hospitals until Tuesday to verify their records as error-free or to report errors, as required by law.

Jamie Court, president of the Santa Monica-based advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, called it "almost inconceivable" that so many hospitals were error-free for the last three years.

"This is a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil problem. If you're not looking, you're not going to find any," Court said. "But if you are looking, you're more than likely to find some, regardless of the size of the hospital."

State law outlines 28 medical errors that hospitals must report to the state because they place patients at risk of death or serious injury. After investigating, the state can issue fines of $50,000 for the first incident, $75,000 for the second and $100,000 for the third or subsequent error at the same hospital. The state must be notified of such errors within five days of the incident, with fines of up to $100 a day for delays.

The state has substantiated reports of 1,100 medical errors since the law took effect in 2007. During that period, the state has fined 112 hospitals for medical errors, and 39 of those have appealed.

State Sen. Elaine Alquist (D- Santa Clara), who wrote the medical error law, said she was concerned that errors are going unreported.

"What are the chances that nearly a quarter of California's hospitals didn't have a single medication, surgical or safety error since the reporting requirement became law?" Alquist asked.

Among the hospitals with no reported errors are about a dozen state facilities, accounting for more than 1,055 beds, including the massive Atascadero and Patton state hospitals.

Two dozen of the hospitals are in the Los Angeles area, each with fewer than 200 beds. Some of the largest and best-known include Community Hospital of Long Beach, Temple Community Hospital in Los Angeles, Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA in Westwood and Shriners Hospitals for Children Los Angeles.

Resnick hospital officials said it was not surprising that psychiatric facilities would have few errors, because they do not handle the high-risk surgical cases seen at acute-care hospitals. There were 19 psychiatric hospitals on the list of those not reporting errors.

Karen White, Temple Community's risk manager, said the 150-bed hospital and other small facilities on the list also handle fewer high-risk patients because they do not have emergency rooms or obstetrics departments.

White said she was pleased that Temple Community had no reportable medical errors.

"Hopefully there will be more and more people on the list every year," she said.

In some cases, however, hospitals may have been listed incorrectly. Debby Rogers, vice president of quality and emergency services at the California Hospital Assn., said her office contacted all of the hospitals on the list, and officials at some said they had reported medical errors. She would not identify those hospitals.

Although state law defines preventable medical errors, Rogers said many hospital officials are unclear about which incidents should be reported.

For instance, hospitals are required to report when an object is left in a patient after surgery. But if the surgeon discovers the object before he or she finishes sewing up the patient and removes it, Rogers said, should that incident be reported to the state? Hospitals should err on the side of caution and report anything that might be an adverse event, a state spokesman said.

"There's confusion. I don't know that I would say there's underreporting or overreporting . Probably there's a little bit of both," Rogers said.

So far, 66 hospitals have been fined for failing to report errors, including at least one on the no-errors list: the San Diego Hospice and the Institute for Palliative Medicine. The state-licensed hospital was fined $12,700 in May 2008 for failing to report a medication error the year before, according to state records.

Melissa DelaCalzada, spokeswoman for the hospital, said it did not initially consider the incident a medical error and disputed the state's findings. The facility later paid the fine and submitted a plan of correction to the state.

California Hospital Assn. officials said they are working with the state Department of Public Health to clarify how it defines reportable errors in its regulations.

The department is hiring a University of California faculty expert in public data reporting to review medical error data and gauge potential underreporting, said spokesman Ralph Montano. The post will be funded out of $250,000 in fines collected from hospitals last fiscal year, money earmarked for patient safety, Montano said.

Anthony Wright, executive director of Sacramento-based Health Access, said he hopes the list of error-free hospitals can be verified and one day used to prevent the state-defined medical errors, also called "never events."

"If there are hospitals that are getting zero errors, which is the goal, we should find out what they're doing right so we can replicate it," Wright said.

"But we should also tease out the difference between people who are having the systems in place to prevent 'never events' from happening and those that are just not reporting."

http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-hospital-errors-20101128,0,5659077.story

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Death has cast a long shadow over Hollywood

Publicist Ronni Chasen's slaying in Beverly Hills is the latest in a string of deaths that date to at least 1922, when director William Desmond Taylor was found fatally shot in his bachelor pad near 4th and Alvarado streets.

by Steve Harvey

November 28, 2010

Several days after Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen was found shot to death in her Mercedes-Benz, a friend voiced the hope to KNBC-TV news that the case wouldn't turn into "another Black Dahlia."

The friend was referring to the 1947 slaying of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, which has never been solved.

Of course, mysterious deaths with links to Hollywood date to at least 1922, when debonair director William Desmond Taylor was found slain in his fashionable bachelor pad near the corner of 4th and Alvarado streets.

Taylor's valet cried out the news that morning and an actress neighbor quickly notified the director's acquaintances, including those in the habit of writing love letters.

By the time officers arrived, author Sidney Kirkpatrick wrote in The Times, there "appeared to be a party at Taylor's bungalow: Paramount actors, actresses and executives rummaging through bedroom drawers and closets, a butler washing dishes and an unnamed extra walking out the front door with a case of bootleg gin.

"Everyone in the bungalow seemed to be looking for something, except the host, who was neatly laid out on the living room floor with a bullet hole in the middle of his back."

"Persons of interest" abounded: an actress with a crush on Taylor; an actress' mother with a crush on Taylor; an actress' drug dealer; a thieving valet (who may have secretly been Taylor's brother); a wife whom Taylor had deserted in the East; and a soldier from his wartime regiment whom Taylor had court-martialed for theft.

Police were pretty sure the butler didn't do it, but they were certain of little else. No one was ever arrested.

Mystery has also surrounded cases in which the authorities concluded no homicide took place.

In "Deadly Illusions," for instance, authors Samuel Marx and Joyce Vanderveen argue that director Paul Bern did not shoot himself in 1932, as the coroner had ruled. They contend that an ex-lover did in Bern, the husband of bombshell actress Jean Harlow.

In another case, the body of beautiful actress Thelma Todd was discovered in December 1935 in her Lincoln Phaeton convertible in a garage near her cafe in Pacific Palisades.

The coroner ruled she died of carbon monoxide poisoning after turning on the ignition and striking her head on the steering wheel.

But others theorized she may have been killed by a film director or an abusive ex-husband or even minions of Lucky Luciano, whom she had angered by refusing to allow casino gambling on the property.

Todd's death followed a series of show-business scandals, and "the studio bosses were worried that many of the Americans who paid to see movies wouldn't tolerate yet another," wrote authors Marvin Wolf and Katherine Mader in "Fallen Angels."

"An official finding of death by her own hand, accidental, or otherwise, put an end to speculation about murder.... A neat and tidy solution."

Then there was the case of George Reeves, TV's " Superman," who died in 1959 not by jumping out a window — as one urban myth has it — but by gunshot.

It was ruled a suicide and connected to Reeves' inability to land serious roles after his "Superman" days.

But in "Hollywood Kryptonite," authors Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger assert that he may have been killed on orders of a studio executive whose wife was having an affair with Reeves.

No one, of course, thought the 1978 bludgeoning death of Bob Crane — the star of TV's "Hogan's Heroes" — in a Scottsdale, Ariz., apartment was anything but murder.

In 1994, John Henry Carpenter, a friend of Crane's and a longtime suspect, was tried for the slaying but acquitted.

Prosecutors alleged that Carpenter, who was with Crane the night before the killing, had had a falling out with the actor.

Their case hinged in part on a photograph of a speck found on the door of Carpenter's rental car, which prosecutors said was fatty matter from Crane's skull.

Unfortunately, the speck was lost before the trial started. "What was the speck?" asked the jury foreman later.

Officially, the case remains unsolved.

The Times' Larry Harnisch attributes fascination with the Black Dahlia case to the fact that the killing was a "gruesome, unsolved murder of an attractive victim with a haunting nickname."

She picked up the nickname because of her black outfits and black hair and because a movie of that era was titled "The Blue Dahlia."

Short's mutilated body was found Jan. 15, 1947, in a vacant lot on Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park area.

More than 50 delusional characters confessed. No one was ever arrested.

Over the years, the villain has variously been identified as a pipe salesman, a doctor, a cop, a mobster, a cafe owner and an actor.

Meanwhile, it is too soon to predict the outcome of the investigation into the Nov. 16 slaying of Ronni Chasen. But, as the above cases illustrate (all too brutally), not every Hollywood story has a happy ending. And some have no ending at all.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1128-then-20101128,0,3565331,print.story

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Buffalo Soldier Andrew Q. Isaacs, 87, is photographed at his Inglewood home in July. “We are trying to keep the legacy alive,” said Isaacs, who was an active member of the Inglewood group until he recently relocated to Sacramento. “We want people to remember us.”

Keeping the Buffalo Soldiers on memory's front lines They were the first black regiments of the U.S. Army. With each passing year, as their numbers dwindle, the veterans renew their commitment to ensuring their contribution to American military history is never forgotten. by Ann M. Simmons Los Angeles Times November 28, 2010 They participated in cross-country cattle drives, escorted wagon trains and stagecoaches through often volatile territories of the Wild West and fought in the Spanish-American War and both world wars. The first African American regiments of the U.S. Army were commonly known as Buffalo Soldiers. Today, they are among a rapidly shrinking group of veterans who with each passing year renew their commitment to ensuring that their contribution to American military history is recognized — and never forgotten.

"Our aim is to perpetuate the memory of the Buffalo Soldiers and tell the true story of what happened," said Bruce E. Dennis, 86, vice president of the Inglewood-based Greater Los Angeles-area chapter of the 9th and 10th (Horse) Cavalry Assn.

Authorized by an act of Congress in 1866, the 9th and 10th Cavalry, and later the 24th and 25th Infantry, formed the first African American regiments of the U.S. Army. They were initially led by white officers and constituted about 10% of troops who guarded the western frontier for more than two decades, according to the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston.

The total number of original Buffalo Soldiers still living nationwide is unclear, but there are more than two dozen chapters of 9th and 10th Cavalry associations across the country. They include branches in San Diego and the Inland Empire, where the local Buffalo Soldiers Heritage Assn. is raising funds for a memorial at Riverside National Cemetery.

In recent years, participation in the monthly meetings of the Inglewood group has waned, but the mission of the handful of original surviving members remains the same: to educate the public about their historic significance.

"We are trying to keep the legacy alive," said Andrew Q. Isaacs, 87, who was an active member of the Inglewood group until he recently relocated to Sacramento. "We want people to remember us."

Dennis said the men are often invited to speak at schools and to participate in holiday parades and other events.

The ex-soldiers delight in telling how the nickname Buffalo Soldiers came about. Some say it was bestowed on African American soldiers by Native American warriors, who respected their fierce fighting ability, Isaacs said. Others believe that Native Americans likened the short curly hair of black troops to that of the buffalo, or were referring to the heavy buffalo coats worn by the soldiers in winter.

"Many of the soldiers they show in the movies, when the cavalry comes riding to the rescue, they would have been black," said Waldo E. Henderson, 86, another surviving L.A.-area Buffalo Soldier, noting that such details are often ignored.

Every year, Buffalo Soldier chapters from the around the country convene at a national convention to socialize, celebrate the association's founding and honor veterans of past service.

The horse cavalry regiments were deactivated during World War II, and its soldiers were deployed to various service units, according to historical records. But they remained Buffalo Soldiers.

Dennis, Henderson and Isaacs acknowledged that they were little acquainted with the history of the 9th and 10th Cavalry when they enlisted — or were drafted — into the Army. The role of Buffalo Soldiers in U.S. military history was rarely acknowledged, they said.

Isaacs, who enlisted in the 10th Cavalry in 1940, received his basic training at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., where he learned how to ride and take care of horses. He loved the Army. It fostered discipline and camaraderie. He later worked for a colonel—keeping the officer's boots and equipment polished and his horse groomed for extra pay.

"It was better than doing regular, routine chores," he said. "The colonel I worked for was a good man."

Isaacs eventually spent time in Arizona, Louisiana, California and the Solomon Islands. He was discharged in 1945 with the rank of technical sergeant.

Henderson, 86, resented being drafted into the Army. He was studying English at Langston University, Oklahoma's sole black college, and had planned to become a schoolteacher. He didn't want to interrupt his education "to go fight somebody," especially not in a segregated Army, he said.

Henderson still bristles when he recalls the humiliating treatment black soldiers received.

Traveling through Southern states such as Texas, Alabama, Georgia and Virginia, African American soldiers were ordered to lower the blinds on the train "because whites didn't want to see black soldiers in uniform," Henderson said.

"And the horses were allowed to get off the train to exercise, but the cavalrymen were not," he added.

For Dennis, a former master sergeant who served in the same 10th Cavalry platoon as Henderson, his most memorable assignment was the two years he spent in the small Italian town of Santa Maria. His duties included checking the food and ammunition boxes and loading them onto trains bound for the front. At least 60 Italians were assigned to work for him, recalled Dennis, who even had a housekeeper, a cook and laundry service.

"It made us feel much more important," he said. "These Italians had never seen black soldiers before. The white soldiers had told them that we had tails."

To add insult to injury, Dennis helped build prisoner-of-war camps near the Italian town of Pisa for more than 2,000 captured German troops, who he said were treated better than the black cavalrymen.

"It was horrible," he said. "They issued all the German POWs with brand-new fatigues. My unit got patched, used fatigues."

In 1948, President Truman signed an executive order calling for "equality of treatment for all persons in the armed services," regardless of race, religion or national origin.

"Truman did a very profound thing for black soldiers. We started to get the same respect," said Henderson, who was discharged with the rank of technical engineer.

In 1992, retired Gen. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dedicated a monument to the Buffalo Soldiers at Ft. Leavenworth, where the 10th Cavalry was born.

Isaacs, Dennis and Henderson attended the celebration.

Henderson said the dedication changed his feelings about the Army.

"We had no recognition before," he said. "It changed the whole view of black soldiers. I can proudly say now that I was a Buffalo Soldier."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-buffalo-soldiers-20101128,0,577345,print.story

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Justice tough to find for Chinese who got HIV/AIDS through tainted blood

Tian Xi is among 1 million Chinese infected by transfusions at government-run hospitals. One million more were infected donating blood. The government has yet to apologize or investigate the coverup.

by Barbara Demick

November 27, 2010

Reporting from Xincai, China

It was just a small bump on the head, the result of one boy pushing another against a desk. It was such an unremarkable occurrence in a third-grade classroom that it should have been forgotten a day later, buried in the recesses of childhood memory.

Who could have imagined that it would dictate the course of Tian Xi's life and of those around him?

After the incident, the 9-year-old was sent home from school to rest. That night he threw up, so his mother took him to Xincai People's Hospital No. 1, where a young doctor fresh out of medical school diagnosed a mild concussion and recommended a transfusion for a quicker recovery.

His parents collected their savings, the equivalent of six months' salary, to buy four bags of blood. They didn't want their son, a top student who they were sure would be the first in their family to attend a university, to miss too much school.

It was April 1996, and few people in this small city in Henan province had ever heard of HIV/AIDS.

Now 23 years old and weighing only 112 pounds — the result of the early stages of AIDS — Tian is confined to a detention center in Henan province. He is charged with storming uninvited into the offices of the director of the hospital where he was infected with human immunodeficiency virus and sweeping everything off the top of the desk with his arm. A fax machine, computer and water cooler were broken in the Aug. 2 incident. He is to be sentenced soon.

"He just wanted to sit down and talk about what happened to him because of a mistake made by the hospital," said his father, Tian Demin, 53, sitting on a squat metal stool in the single room where he and his wife live off a back alley — the rest of their house has been rented out to raise money for their ailing son.

The room, with tile flooring and a ceiling fan, looks less like a home than a law office stuffed with legal papers, medical reports and many dog-eared petitions that their son has written imploring various government officials for help.

Tian Xi is one of perhaps 1 million Chinese infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, as a result of blood transfusions at government-run hospitals. About 1 million more people were infected through the process of donating blood. Although the cases date back to the 1990s, the Chinese government has yet to offer an apology or investigate a massive coverup that allowed the disease to spread exponentially after it was well known that the blood supply was tainted.

Besides free retroviral drugs, victims have received almost no compensation. When they've tried to file lawsuits, courts have in most cases either rejected their claims or refused to accept the cases. As a result, victims usually petition officials — an archaic system dating back to imperial times in which the aggrieved would travel to the capital to implore the emperor for help.

"It's the worst way of handling things," says Li Xige, 42, a former post office employee from a nearby town in Henan province who received tainted blood during a caesarean section in 1995. The girl she gave birth to died at age 8. She and a younger daughter are sick with AIDS.

Li did get compensation eventually (she is prohibited from disclosing the amount), but only after repeated petitions to President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, a stint in prison, another under house arrest and suicide threats.

"If you don't fight, you'll get nothing," Li said. "It would be better for the government to come up with a plan for all us who are sick or who lost children."

China's handling of AIDS patients is a case study of a dysfunctional legal system in which victims have no other recourse but to take the fight for justice into their own hands — a lonely, embittered struggle that often puts them and their defenders on the wrong side of Chinese law.

If anything, the political space for AIDS activism has shrunk. Hu Jia, one the best-known AIDS activists, is serving a 3½-year sentence for "inciting subversion of state power." His wife announced this month that she was closing the charity he'd founded because of constant harassment by police and tax authorities. Several prominent AIDS activists have fled to the United States.

"Ten years ago, we still could research AIDS; now it is extremely difficult," said Wan Yanhai, a former public health official and head of a nongovernmental organization who fled in May and now lives in Washington. He believes the heightened sensitivity is because two out of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, Li Changchun and Li Keqiang, served as Communist Party secretaries in Henan province, the epicenter of the scandal.

"These are extremely powerful people who could be held responsible for the blood scandal," Wan said. "That's why so many of us have had to leave China."

The roots of the scandal go back to the mid-1980s, even before there was a term in Chinese for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Trying to protect its blood supply against what was considered a decadent Western disease, the Chinese government banned the import of blood products and, in the spirit of Deng Xiaoping's economic liberalization, decided to go into the blood business itself.

By 1992, blood collection stations sprouted throughout the countryside. Poor farmers were encouraged to sell their blood to get rich quick. "Extend your arm. Expose a vein. Make a fist. And it's 50 yuan [$7.50]" was a popular slogan.

The blood stations often extracted the valuable plasma — which could be sold abroad for medication — and then re-injected the donors with leftover blood so they'd be able to give blood again without becoming anemic. Before re-injection, the staff often mixed the blood of various donors without screening for disease.

In Zhoukou county, about 60 miles away from where Tian Xi's family lives, a doctor assigned to a blood station noticed a high rate of hepatitis among blood donors in 1994 and warned the Ministry of Health. Then, in 1995, the doctor examined a blood donor, who tested positive for HIV.

"I was very worried. If just one person was infected, everybody was at risk," recalled the doctor, Wang Shuping. On her own initiative, she collected blood samples from 52 donors and had them tested for HIV. Thirteen were positive.

"We've got to close the blood collection stations immediately and inform the donors. People are in big danger," Wang said she told her superiors. The response, she said, was thugs sent to vandalize her clinic.

She fled China in 2002 and now lives in Utah.

Official silence turned mistakes into tragedies that begat more tragedies, as blood donors infected each other when their pooled blood was re-injected. They in turn infected spouses, children and blood recipients.

At the same time, hospitals were encouraging patients to get blood transfusions whether they needed them or not, offering doctors who sold blood commissions of $1 or $2 per bag.

"So many people were selling blood, you needed somebody to buy it," said Tian Xi's mother, Chen Minggui, 48. "We think that's what happened with my son. When he bumped his head, he didn't lose one drop of blood, but in the hospital they gave him a transfusion of four bags."

Tian spent seven days in the hospital recuperating and receiving well-wishers. He was a popular boy; even the mother of the boy who'd pushed him came to visit and offered to help Tian's family pay for the medical treatment. Tian's mother declined the offer.

"Nah. Boys will be boys," she said she told the other mother. "Besides, Tian Xi is going to be fine."

Within a few years, Tian's health deteriorated. He frequently got sore throats and unexplained fevers. He often missed school. He was once among the top 10 students in a class of 2,000, but his ranking fell to the top 300, respectable but not good enough for Tsinghua or Peking universities, the Chinese equivalent of Harvard and Yale, to which he aspired. He lost so much weight that his cheekbones jutted out of a skeletal head.

"Tian Xi is studying too hard. Make sure he eats more," his mother recalled the neighbors telling her.

Despite heavy government censorship, news reports about AIDS among blood donors began appearing in 2000. Tian's parents didn't pay attention: Although of modest means, they didn't associate with the kind of poor villagers who sold their blood to make money. They barely remembered their son's hospitalization. But, in 2004, they received notice from the hospital that everybody who'd had transfusions should get tested for HIV as a precaution.

Tian got his results July 19, 2004. By a strange coincidence, it was the same day the results were released from the gaokao, the all-important test Chinese high schoolers take to apply to university. He'd done well enough to go to a decent, if not top tier, university in Beijing — and he had one of the most dreaded diseases.

"He was crying all the time. He wanted to kill himself," his mother said.

Against all odds, Tian did go to college, studying software engineering in Beijing. Henan authorities initially agreed to some aid — about $1,400 a year to subsidize his education. The university helped him rent a room in a basement off campus in Beijing because it didn't want him in the dormitories. But the assistance stopped in 2009 when he graduated.

Unable to get a job with his poor health, and unable to afford expensive medications for hepatitis C, which he also contracted with the transfusion, he remained in Beijing, bringing his petitions to the Health Ministry, the Supreme Court and any government offices he could approach without being arrested.

Tian's petitions were an irritant to Henan officials, who pressed him to stop his campaign and return home. Finally, on July 23 of this year, Tian received a text message from Xincai county's Communist Party secretary, Gu Gouyin, asking him to come home from Beijing to negotiate a settlement.

"I will help you find a solution to your problems," the message read.

When Tian arrived for an appointment in Xincai, Gu had been called out of town for business. They rescheduled, and again Gu failed to show up.

"He realized it was a trap. Tian Xi had been lured down here because he was embarrassing people by petitioning in Beijing," said his father, who added that his son had only brought a month's supply of his retroviral drugs from Beijing and had initially gone to People's Hospital No. 1 to request medication, which the facility refused to supply.

The family doesn't deny that Tian Xi behaved badly, not only knocking equipment off the director's desk but also showing up repeatedly at the hospital, trying to visit the director at home and vandalizing an office door.

"Tian Xi's case is symbolic. There are so many patients who were just seeking compensation and got into the same kind of trouble because they ran out of legal options," said Liang Xiaojun, Tian's Beijing-based lawyer.

Wan Yanhai, the former health official turned activist, said blood recipients have gotten less compensation than blood donors.

"The blood donors lived in the same villages. They got together and attacked government offices. They became powerful," Wan said. "The blood recipients are scattered all over the country. They are isolated and don't have a group identity."

Even today, many transfusion recipients who might be HIV positive have not been tested and have not been notified that they are at risk.

Wan said tainted blood might have been used for transfusions as late as 2004, and that well over 1 million people could have been infected.

Official statistics, however, are lower. The Health Ministry reported that 740,000 people were living with HIV/AIDS as of the end of 2009, and that 220,000 others had died of the disease.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-blood-20101128,0,4613004,print.story

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Teen held in alleged Portland bomb plot

FBI agents say Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia, planned to detonate explosives during a tree lighting downtown. But he'd been working all along with undercover agents, an affidavit says.

by Bob Drogin and April Choi, Los Angeles Times

November 28, 2010

Reporting from Washington and Corvallis, Ore.

In August, the FBI says, 19-year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud told two men who claimed to be Al Qaeda operatives that he had considered violent jihad since he was 15, and that he now was ready to commit mass slaughter.

Mohamud, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia, said he wanted to set off a bomb during the lighting of a giant Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving in an outdoor plaza in downtown Portland, Ore. The festive ceremony on the busiest shopping day of the year normally draws thousands of people.

"You know, the streets are packed," said Mohamud, at the time a student at Oregon State University in Corvallis. When one of the men responded that "a lot of children" would attend, according to an FBI affidavit, he replied, "Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm looking for."

Mohamud — tall, thin and known for enjoying rap music and pickup basketball — reportedly shrugged off concerns about security at the event, explaining: "They don't see it as a place where anything will happen.... It's on the West Coast, it's in Oregon, and Oregon's like you know, nobody ever thinks about it."

But the two men were undercover FBI agents, and audio and video recorders captured that conversation and many others like it. Mohamud now sits in federal custody — the latest alleged domestic terrorist to fall for an elaborate FBI sting — after months of secret surveillance and a grisly plot worthy of Jack Bauer.

A 38-page FBI affidavit released Saturday paints Mohamud as highly determined and deadly serious. He is charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. He is due in court Monday.

"The threat was very real," said Arthur Balizan, special agent in charge of the FBI in Oregon. "Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale."

According to the FBI, they arrested Mohamud after he dialed a cellphone that he thought would detonate a huge bomb — six 55-gallon drums, diesel fuel and a large box of screws — in a large white van parked near the tree lighting.

But the bomb was a fake built by the FBI, and the packed crowds who enjoyed a youth choir and a symphony orchestra at Friday's holiday celebration at Pioneer Courthouse Square were never in danger, authorities said.

Mohamud appears to have joined a growing list of amateurs who have shown more fervor than smarts in their apparent plots against America. His alleged operation unfolded under the careful supervision, and with the direct assistance, of undercover FBI agents.

Aided by good luck and good intelligence, U.S. authorities have disrupted or uncovered at least 15 homegrown terrorist conspiracies over the last two years, often by penetrating the scheme at an early stage and carefully orchestrating the results.

Two domestic attacks have produced casualties — the shooting deaths of 13 people at Ft. Hood, Texas, and the slaying of an Army recruiter in Little Rock, Ark., both last year. Another plot, involving a failed car bomb in New York's Times Square in May, was traced to a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen, who was arrested and pleaded guilty.

The alleged plot in Portland also would have carried the potential for mass slaughter.

According to the affidavit:

The FBI began tracking Mohamud in August 2009 when they discovered he was e-mailing a former Oregon student who was living in Pakistan's lawless northwest region, where Al Qaeda has a stronghold. The Associated Press reported that the bureau was led to Mohamud by a tip from someone concerned about him.

By December, Mohamud was trying to visit the area. His friend, who was not named in court documents, urged him to contact an associate named Abdulhadi to arrange the trip. But Mohamud repeatedly mixed up the Hotmail address with the password, and the e-mails bounced back.

Apparently frustrated, Mohamud tried to fly to Kodiak, Alaska, on June 10. He already was on a no-fly list, however, and was stopped from boarding at Portland International Airport. He told the FBI that he had hoped to go to Yemen, but couldn't obtain a visa or ticket, so had gotten a summer fishing job in Alaska instead.

Two weeks later, an FBI undercover agent contacted Mohamud and pretended to be Abdulhadi, providing an e-mail address that the FBI controlled. Mohamud and the agent met for the first time on July 30 in downtown Portland.

Mohamud boasted that he had written in support of violent jihad for an online, English-language propaganda magazine called Jihad Recollections, using the pen name Ibnul Mubarak.

The FBI later recovered the three articles, including one titled "Getting in shape without weights." It seeks to introduce Pilates training to those preparing "physically for jihad."

Mohamud also submitted an article to Inspire, an extremist magazine published by the media arm of the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. Samir Khan, a Pakistani-American, allegedly ran Jihad Recollections from his parents' home in Charlotte, N.C. He moved to Yemen last year and now is believed to edit Inspire.

Mohamud told "Abdulhadi" that he "initially wanted to wage war in the U.S." The FBI agent told Mohamud he could not tell him what to do, but suggested several options, including going "operational" or becoming a shaheed, or martyr. Mohamud said he wanted to build a car bomb, but would need help.

At Oregon State, about 80 miles south of Portland, Mohamud had a benign profile. "He wasn't the most social person, but he wasn't anti-social," said Omar Mohamed, president of the Muslim Student Assn. "He seemed like a pretty normal guy."

Mohamud also was not known for being particularly pious. "From what I understand, he wasn't the most religious person," Mohamed said. "He didn't regularly go to mosque."

And unlike some Muslim students, he was known to attend college parties where alcohol was served, though it was unclear whether Mohamud actually drank.

On Aug. 19, Mohamud and "Abdulhadi" met again — in a bugged hotel room — and "Abdulhadi" brought another undercover FBI agent, who claimed to be an expert in explosives. Mohamud told them that he had begun thinking of jihad when he was 15.

The FBI affidavit then goes on to say how he described his plan to bomb the Nov. 26 event.

"They have a Christmas lighting and some 25,000 people that come," he said. They should "be attacked in their own element with their families celebrating the holidays," he added, quoting Osama bin Laden.

He said he had scouted where Black Friday shoppers streaming from nearby stores would likely gather in the busy outdoor square. The tree lighting was scheduled for 5:30 p.m., "so I was thinking that would be the perfect time."

The trio met again Sept. 7. This time, the undercover agents asked Mohamud to buy the bomb components. They gave him $2,700 in cash to rent an apartment where they could all hide, and $110 to cover the cost of the bomb parts.

Over the next few weeks, the affidavit says, Mohamud mailed them a Utiliteck programmable timer, two Nokia cellphones, stereo phone jacks, a toggle switch and other gear, mostly from Radio Shack. One package also had a pack of gum and a scrawled note: "Good Luck with ur stereo system Sweetie. Enjoy the Gum."

They held more meetings in early October in Corvallis, and Mohamud gave them a computer thumb drive with Google street-view photographs of his preferred parking spot, the attack site and escape routes. And he enthused again about his plan.

"It's going to be a fireworks show… a spectacular show… New York Times will give it two thumbs up."

According to the university, Mohamud stopped attending the school that month.

On Nov. 4, Mohamud and the two agents drove to a remote location near the coast west of Corvallis, supposedly to test the homemade bomb design. In reality, federal agents remotely detonated a device.

On the way home, he recalled the Sept. 11 attacks. "Do you remember when 9/11 happened, when those people were jumping from skyscrapers? … I thought that was awesome." He said he hoped people attending the tree lighting would "leave either dead or injured."

That afternoon, the undercover agents helped Mohamud record a video statement. Explaining that he wanted to dress "Sheik Osama style," he donned a white robe and camouflage jacket. He then read a lengthy testimonial to jihad on camera. According to an FBI transcript of the statement, Mohamud, who was born in Mogadishu, briefly mentions his parents and suggests they had tried to steer him on another path in life. Arabic phrases are set off in brackets:

"To my parents, who held me back from jihad in the cause of Allah. I say to them [by Allah] if you — if you make allies with the enemy, then Allah's power [the glorified and exalted] will ask you about that on the day of judgment, and nothing you can do can hold me back."

In a follow-up meeting, their seventh, he gave the FBI agents hard hats, safety glasses, and reflective vests and gloves. He said they would wear the gear before the attack as a disguise, and put traffic markers around the parked van.

Abdulhadi, the first FBI agent, picked up Mohamud at about noon Friday, and they went to inspect the bomb. Built by FBI technicians, it appeared impressive. But the explosives, the detonation cord and the blasting caps all were inert.

"Beautiful," Mohamud said.

At 4:45 p.m., they drove the van to Yamhill and Sixth Street and parked. Police had secretly kept the space open. Mohamud attached the blasting cap and flipped the toggle switch to arm the bomb, then put on his hard hat.

They walked several blocks, got in another car and drove to a pre-selected parking lot. Mohamud quickly dialed the number to detonate the bomb. When they didn't hear anything, he got out of the car to look for a better signal, and FBI agents swarmed in for the arrest.

An Oregon State student directory listed an apartment address for Mohamud in the Portland suburb of Beaverton. A woman who answered the apartment door declined to speak with a reporter. Hanging to the right of the door was a heart-shaped sign with the words "Bless this home."

When Mohamud attended Oregon State, he was not a member of the Muslim Student Assn. and rarely attended events held by the group. But Mohamed, the association president, recalls that Mohamud had recently attended "Night of the Crescent: Understanding Muslims," a program aimed at showing that "Muslims in general are not scary people. They are neighbors, your best friends. We're not all scary men with beards."

That was Nov. 17. The next day, Mohamud met with the undercover agents to continue planning the attack.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-portland-bomb-plot-20101128,0,2859515,print.story

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Students want the Dream Act to become reality

With Congress expected to vote soon on immigration reform, a new generation of undocumented scholars who were raised in California are shedding their secrecy and speaking about their lives.

by Diana Marcum, Special to the Los Angeles Times

November 28, 2010

The student body president at Cal State Fresno. The drum major at UCLA. Student senators, class presidents, team captains and club officers at community colleges.

Scores of student leaders across California are illegal immigrants who came to this state as children.

With Congress expected to vote as early as this week on immigration reform that would give these students a pathway to legal status, a new generation of scholars who were raised in California but not born here are shedding their secrecy and speaking about their lives.

They have a sense of urgency. If the bill, known as the Dream Act, does not pass before a more conservative Congress takes power in January, it is unlikely to pass for years to come.

"At first my parents said, 'What are you doing? You're risking so much,' " said David Cho, the UCLA drum major. "But I told them, 'It's not only me. There are thousands of students like me trapped in a broken system. Unless our generation speaks out, the politicians won't tackle it. They have to see our faces.' "

Cho, 21, who conducts the 250-member UCLA marching band in front of 75,000 people at the Rose Bowl, came to the U.S. from South Korea at the age of 9. It wasn't until he was accepted to UCLA that his father showed him a letter saying the family's visa wasn't valid.

"I grew up here, worked hard, got into UCLA. And there I was staring at this letter telling me to go 'home,' when this is home," Cho said. "My whole world flipped upside down."

With no papers, Cho can attend school but not legally work, drive or receive financial aid. He sleeps on a friend's couch or sometimes at the UCLA library. He tutors SAT students 30 hours a week for cash. More than once he's depended on charitable "food closets" on campus to get something to eat.

He has a double major in international economics and Korean, maintains a 3.6 grade-point average and is on schedule to graduate a quarter early. He plays seven musical instruments.

He was terrified the night before he first stood at a rally in Los Angeles for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act and said: "I'm undocumented."

"I didn't know what would happen to me. Maybe I'd be deported," he said. "It seems funny now, but I wrote a will — a long, last letter to my family and friends."

Two weeks ago, when an anonymous tip forced Cal State Fresno student body president Pedro Ramirez to admit he is an illegal immigrant, it caused a national furor.

But William Perez, a professor at Claremont Graduate University who specializes in education and immigration, said undocumented student leaders are not uncommon.

He followed a group of 200 undocumented students primarily in California from high school through college and found that 78% held some sort of leadership position, from editor of the yearbook to captain of a sports team. Twenty-nine percent had a role in student government. Twelve percent were student body presidents.

"It wasn't what I was expecting to find. We always hear that poverty and legal struggles are predictors of academic failure," Perez said.

"I was scratching my head. I double-checked and triple-checked my numbers. But the more I presented my research, the more I came to believe this is the way the students expressed their American self-identity. People were telling them, 'You don't belong. You can't contribute.' This was their way of refuting that."

Maria Duque, 19, student body vice president at Fullerton College, has always been open about her illegal immigrant status. It was part of her platform when she ran for office.

"Speaking out and not being afraid is the only way of bringing change and a better life for my family, myself and all the others like me," she said.

Duque's parents, an accountant and a medical equipment supplies saleswoman, brought her to the U.S. at the age of 5 when Ecuador's economy collapsed. They lived in a garage the first year. Her father worked nights and her mother days in a furniture factory. From kindergarten on, Duque got herself ready for school each morning. She graduated from high school with a 4.4 GPA.

"I'm working so hard for the Dream movement.... I wouldn't say I get discouraged, but sometimes I get tired," she said.

"My dad always gets me back up. He constantly says, 'Juventud que no hace temblar al mundo no es juventud — youth that doesn't make the world tremble is no youth.' "

The Dream Act would give legal residency to immigrants who arrived before the age of 16, resided in the U.S. for at least five years, graduated from high school and completed two years of college or honorable military service. They would be subject to background checks and could not have a criminal record. Even if granted residency, they would not be eligible for federal grant scholarships. When enacted, the law would apply to those under 35.

Some 825,000 out of 2.1 million students who could be eligible would be likely to obtain permanent legal status, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization. California has by far the largest number of potential beneficiaries, 553,000.

The bill was first introduced in 2001, but it has just been in the last two years — particularly the last two months — that a significant number of students who had gone to great lengths to protect their secret have been revealing their immigration status.

"There's a feeling that it's now or never. With all this anti-immigration sentiment growing, if it doesn't pass in the lame duck session of Congress, it might be years and years," said Ernesto Zumayo, a UCLA senior and Dream activist.

So the college sons and daughters of gardeners, nannies, and factory and field workers are stepping from the shadows and onto the stage.

"Their greatest concern about revealing their identities was never themselves, but their families," said Zumayo, 24. "Now the feeling is that if they don't speak out to help pass the Dream Act, what did their families sacrifice for?"

Zumayo's mother brought him to the U.S. from Ensenada, Mexico, when he was 18 months old. He grew up in East L.A. and is the only one in his family to attend college. He was 8 or 9 when he first heard of UCLA and decided that someday he would go there.

Before transferring, he was student body president at Rio Hondo College in Whittier. He confided to very few people that he was an illegal immigrant. Close friends pressured him to speak out. He balked before going public.

"I didn't want this label on me where people would suddenly think I didn't count," he said. "I felt sad when the Fresno State student body president was forced to come out as undocumented. I know the trauma, the inner conflict. But I kept thinking about my mother coming over here. She was 21."

Now, Zumayo said, it's all building to a finale. "Congress is about to vote. I'm about to graduate. If it doesn't pass...." He doesn't finish the sentence.

Bryon Castillo, 31, is a cook at a restaurant in Fresno. He has a bachelor's degree in social work he can't use.

He was smuggled into the U.S. from Guatemala when he was 11. He didn't realize he had no Social Security number until he tried to apply to college. He went to the Army recruiting station and found they couldn't take him either.

"I ended up in construction work and washing dishes," he said.

In 2001, when California passed AB 540, which allows undocumented California students to pay in-state rather than out-of-state tuition, Castillo went back to school. He worked a full-time job and two part-time jobs while attending Cal State Fresno and interning at a community college.

"I wanted to help students from around here transfer to four-year schools, get them into a school environment," he said. "I kept thinking something would happen with the immigration laws by the time I graduated."

It didn't. Recently, Castillo had to pass up a management job at the restaurant because he was afraid they would find out his status.

"People at work are always saying, 'What are you doing here, man? You're so smart. You have your degree.' I tell them, 'My passion is cooking!' It's not. I went to school to get out of the kitchen, but you have to play it off, you know?"

He said he's awed by the latest wave of undocumented students who have gone public with their status.

"They've got, like, these insane GPAs, they run for office and work, and they stand up and say who they are," he said. "Personally, I lost hope for myself, but I haven't lost hope for them."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dream-act-20101128,0,2023637,print.story

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Can a nation divided be secure?

The 'us-versus-them' effort to disrupt holiday air travel fizzled, but the underlying mentality is still there.

by Cathleen Decker, Los Angeles Times

November 27, 2010

Last week brought another glimpse of a truly American scene. At airports in California and around the nation, Thanksgiving travelers were greeted by activists urging them to bring things to a screeching halt by refusing to go through body scanners and instead to demand manual pat-downs, a more time-consuming method of screening.

The idea was to pressure the Transportation Security Administration, the federal agency in charge of passenger protection, and the airlines to rescind restrictions — including the high-tech scanners and invasive pat-downs — that went into effect this fall as the high travel season approached.

Certainly some people were concerned about the effects, even if none are known, of the minute levels of radiation used during the scanning. Some were put off by the new pat-downs.

But some of the brouhaha also seemed to fit right into the country's us-against-them mentality. And it got wall-to-wall attention, despite the fact that polls showed all along that Americans were overwhelmingly supportive of the security measures.

A nation founded on a disdain for authority has seemed to go out of its way lately to exercise that muscle. Parents reject the advice of doctors to vaccinate their children, arguing that father and mother know best. People in several states overthrow the political establishment to nominate candidates who pledge to stiff-arm government.

In California, voters insist the budget can be drastically cut without any harm to their favorite programs, because they don't trust the politicians who tell them it just isn't possible.

In most cases, this approach serves to delay any sort of sober reckoning over how, for example, to make sure medicines are safe, or to stem the fiscal bleeding in California or to make sure airline passengers are ever more secure as they fly.

The reaction was typified by this bracing headline last week in a local paper:

"TSA: We are not perverts."

----

Brian Michael Jenkins looked on with dismay, if not surprise. To the longtime authority on terrorism, the weeks-long brouhaha over the TSA tactics stemmed from a witches' brew: New moves by security agents. Holiday passengers who, unlike regular travelers, were surprised by the new system. Long-time opponents of airport security who saw an opening to attack. And a 24/7 media machine that can blow almost anything out of proportion.

Jenkins, based at Santa Monica's Rand Corp., blamed much of the mess on "the news media, particularly the electronic media and the blogs, making it a story."

"We get terrorism and sexual titillation all in the same paragraph. That's irresistible to the media," he said.

Timing is everything in the security business. On Christmas Day last year, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up an airliner nearing Detroit with explosives hidden in his underwear, a move that led to the heightened tactics. Had that just occurred, any discussion of more stringent security would be moot.

"There's no question that as the most recent terrorism event fades into memory, people slide into a kind of complacency, and security measures that were welcomed — even demanded — by people at the time become irksome, and people react against them," Jenkins said.

TSA spokesman Nico Melendez said part of the problem has been educating passengers about what to expect, an effort that can be hard to pull off at this time of the year, when infrequent flyers abound.

"It's kind of a weird period of time," he said. "Every holiday season comes around and we forget people come to the airport who may not have flown in the last 10 years and may not even know what the TSA is," he said.

Ignorance of what to expect is one thing, but as the coverage wore on last week, in seeped a bit of the attitude that has dominated politics of late.

"I think our nation is headed into a nation of controlling the people, telling us what to do. Our rights have been taken away from us," Lori Lamb, an actor who supported the effort to boycott the scanners, told The Times at LAX on Wednesday.

That view turns on its ear the whole theory of security in the post- 9/11 age: Stopping crime, domestically, requires cops on the beat who get assertive back-up from neighborhood-watch civilians. Security in the skies depends on cooperation between the authorities and passengers who spot and take action. If the two groups are in discord, the system can stumble.

"We have come to a state in our own society where we've conjured a deep separation between ourselves and the government, and it's sort of us versus them," said Jenkins. "And that strikes me as a bit off because I think that ultimately, our defenses against terrorism are not going to be found in the body scanners, the pat-down, this or that procedure. I think our security rests ultimately upon our own courage, our own unity, our own self-reliance, our own sense of community."

The "us-versus-them" sentiment in this country, he said, shifts the discussion from which tactics should be used by screeners to whether they're groping passengers. He said he was unaware of Europeans responding the same way to the adopting of similar measures there.

"What was once the home of the brave has become a nation in many respects of cringing angry people, and that in itself to me is ultimately the greatest threat to our liberties. We can look at a scanner and say, 'Does this work?' That's an issue we can address. The idea that everyone has turned this into an assault on government.... Everything is a reality show today. It's all fabricated drama."

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Jenkins spoke on Tuesday night, as cable shows and the Internet were still rampaging on the subject. In the end, the protest fizzled.

Of the tens of thousands of passengers who streamed into LAX on Wednesday, only 204 opted not to undergo the body scans and instead asked for a manual pat-down, a figure lower than on most days, according to TSA spokesman Melendez

Since the new procedures went into effect nationwide, he said, 42 million passengers have gone through TSA screening, and only 3,000 have filed formal complaints.

As if the fever had broken, everyone seemed to be feeling better on Wednesday. Passengers reported less hassle than usual from TSA personnel.

"My impression was they put all their nicest, friendliest staff members on today," passenger Victor Allen told The Times after arriving at John Wayne Airport in Orange County.

They felt the same way about us.

"Passengers were overwhelmingly supportive, complimentary and reassuring to our work force," said Melendez. "There's a recognition of the scrutiny and the pain of the last two weeks."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-theweek-20101128,0,6774420,print.story

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Cross-border pot smuggling tunnel has sophisticated features

November 27, 2010

The drug tunnel found this week on the U.S.-Mexico border has several sophisticated features, officials said.

The tunnel, discovered in a San Diego warehouse district, was one of the longest ever discovered and had several unique features that highlighted traffickers' evolving approach to ferrying drugs across the border. The floor of the passageway was lined with tongue-and-groove wooden boards that served as a level surface for the cart-and-rail system. There was an underground room, about 10 feet by 20 feet, where smugglers offloaded the marijuana bales from the cart before hoisting them to the surface.

And there were two tunnel branches, which authorities speculated allowed smugglers alternate exit points in case of surveillance.

The cross-border tunnel, which started in a residence in Tijuana, stretched nearly half a mile and split into two passageways, with the branches emerging at separate warehouses nearly 800 feet apart.

The tunnel was within a block of a subterranean passage found three weeks ago, where authorities seized more than 25 tons of marijuana, the second-largest marijuana seizure in U.S. history.

With Thursday's haul of 20 more tons, authorities said they had dealt a significant double blow to Mexican organized-crime groups. The amount seized was the equivalent of about 17 million marijuana joints, said Ralph Partridge, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration office in San Diego.

Authorities believe the drugs found in the tunnels this month belonged to separate cells of the Sinaloa drug cartel, which has long used northern Baja California as a staging ground for smuggling drugs into California. The discovery on Thursday morning came after U.S. agents stopped a tractor-trailer loaded with marijuana bales that had just left a warehouse on Marconi Drive.

Inside the empty warehouse space, which had a "For Rent" sign out front, agents found an opening cut into the concrete floor. They traversed the tunnel to the second opening in a warehouse a few blocks away on Via de la Amistad.

To find the opening on the Tijuana side, Mexican Army soldiers traveled the entire 2,200-foot passage, which featured lighting and ventilation systems. They surfaced in the kitchen of a residence where a family lived. Authorities said six people were arrested in Mexico.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/11/marijuana-smuggling-tunnel-shows-great-sophsitication-with-rail-system-and-multiple-routes-authorite.html

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From the New York Times

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U.S. and South Korea Begin Joint Naval Exercises

by MARTIN FACKLER

SEOUL, South Korea — The United States and South Korea began naval exercises on Sunday that were meant as a warning to North Korea for recent provocations, including last week’s deadly artillery attack on a island populated by South Koreans in the Yellow Sea.

At the same time, China stepped up its diplomatic efforts to cool tempers in the region, with a senior envoy holding a meeting on Sunday morning with South Korea’s president and Beijing announcing that it had invited a senior North Korean official for talks this week. China also called for an emergency meeting of the so-called six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program, news agencies reported.

North Korean artillery was heard Sunday on the island, though no shells landed there and South Korea considered it just a drill, according to a spokesman for South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. The North Koreans also shot off artillery on Friday, after a visit by an American general to the island, called Yeonpyeong.

The announcement of the naval exercises last week raised already heightened tensions, angering both North Korea and its patron, China, and stirring intense speculation in the South Korean news media about whether the North would respond violently.

After the announcement, China warned against “any military act” in its exclusive economic zone without permission, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. But virtually all the waters to the west of the Korean Peninsula fall within that 200 nautical mile limit. It was not immediately clear if the American and South Korean flotilla, which included the United States aircraft carrier George Washington, had sailed into that area.

China’s diplomatic efforts came after days of entreaties from Washington and its allies to exert a moderating influence on North Korea.

The Chinese envoy, state counselor in charge of foreign affairs, Dai Bingguo, met with South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, as part of a previously unannounced visit to Seoul, according to a senior South Korean official.

China’s diplomatic initiative also included the planned talks with Choe Tae-bok, chairman of North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly, who will pay an official visit to China starting Tuesday.

The United States has hoped that China would use its leverage over North Korea to restrain it from any further attacks, but so far China has not rebuked the North’s leaders, at least in public. And when China did finally make a strong public statement late last week on the attack — the one warning against military actions in its economic zone — it directed its pique at the United States for the naval exercises.

The show of force was designed both to deter further attacks by the North and to signal to China that unless it reins in its unruly ally, it may see an even larger American presence in the vicinity.

The flurry of diplomacy over the weekend followed days of recriminations by both Koreas. On Saturday, North Korea accused South Korea of using civilians as human shields around military bases on the island. The accusation, reported by the North’s official news agency, is apparently an effort to redirect South Korean outrage over the barrage, which killed two civilian construction workers and two South Korean marines.

“If the U.S. brings its carrier to the West Sea of Korea at last, no one can predict the ensuing consequences,” the report said, using the Korean name for the Yellow Sea.

Also on Saturday, at least two protests were staged in Seoul that criticized both North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, for the attack and South Korea’s president for what many here see as the military’s failure to make more than a token response.

The bombardment of the island was the first attack on a civilian area since the 1950-53 Korean War, and it enraged the South Koreans far more than previous provocations by the North, including its nuclear weapons tests and the sinking in March of a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors. Despite the findings of an international investigation, North Korea denies responsibility for the sinking.

The North has said that Tuesday’s attack was carried out in response to South Korean artillery drills earlier that day on the island, which sits within sight of the North Korean mainland. On the morning of the attack, North Korea warned South Korea not to conduct the drills.

Citing those warnings, North Korea said it had made “superhuman efforts to prevent the clash at the last moment.” It also offered an uncharacteristic show of remorse, calling the civilian deaths “very regrettable.”

The comments were apparently an attempt to present the North’s view of events to the South Korean public, which has reacted to Tuesday’s attack with uncharacteristic vehemence toward the North.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/world/asia/28korea.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Rio Police Begin to Invade Gang Haven

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

November 28, 2010

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Rio police backed by helicopters and armored vehicles started invading a shantytown complex long held by traffickers on Sunday, slowly moving their way through small alleys amid heavy gunfire.

Black-clad officers from elite police units began entering the Alemao slum complex, with TV images showing police and army helicopters flying low to support the men on the ground as hundreds of drug gang members tried to hold their position.

The faceoff comes after a week of widespread violence in Rio, with more than 100 cars and buses set on fire and at least 35 deaths, mostly of suspected traffickers.

Hundreds of soldiers on armored vehicles were also in place to support the operation, seen as a key move in a long-standing campaign to push criminals out of slums where they have long ruled with impunity.

Police and troops stated moving up the slum inside armored vehicles as residents watched from their windows in shacks packed along steep hills.

Hundreds of soldiers in camouflage and elite and regular police had been surrounding the Alemao, sheltering behind the armored vehicles. They exchanged intermittent, heavy gunfire with gang members at many of the 44 entrances to the slum.

More than 1,000 police and soldiers had been prepared to storm the shantytown complex as about 600 armed gang members remained trapped inside. Authorities had been saying the invasion was inevitable if the gang members did not give themselves up.

"The gang members decided not to surrender," Police spokesman Henrique Lima Castro Saraiva said, adding they "would not stand a chance" against the security forces.

The invasion came after Rio saw its calmest night in a week, with only one volley of gunfire heard overnight in the slum.

Police said there was gunfire around 1 a.m., but after that mostly silence. In the rest of the city, for the first time in more than a week there were no vehicles burned — what had become a hallmark sign of the gang's bloody protest against a tough policing program.

In a week of widespread violence blamed on the gangs, authorities have seized one slum once thought virtually impenetrable. More than 200 armed gang members fled that offensive and ran to the nearby Alemao complex of a dozen slums that are home to at least 85,000 people, followed by security forces on Friday.

Saraiva had said the deadline for the gang members to surrender was "when the sun sets" on Saturday. He said the gang members were "exhausted, hungry, thirsty, stressed out" and had not been able to bring in more ammunition.

Rio de Janeiro's governor, Sergio Cabral, has vowed repeatedly to break the back of drug gangs that have ruled hundreds of shantytowns in the city of 6 million people.

Vila Cruzeiro, a slum neighboring Alemao, was occupied by police on Thursday.

A man who was born and raised in Vila Cruzeiro and still lives there with his mother welcomed officers when they took the hillside. He wants them to set up permanent posts to keep control of the community.

"Those of us who work, who are not involved with the (drug) traffic, we have nothing to fear," said the man, who didn't want to be identified for fear of retaliation, because he wasn't sure law enforcement would be able to hold on.

The human rights organization Amnesty International complained that police had been too heavy-handed in their offensive, but many Rio residents seemed to welcome the aggressive stance. People applauded as armored vehicles rolled by and voiced hope that a new push would reclaim areas of their city that had been lawless for years.

Cabral, the governor, said police taking Vila Cruzeiro was a sign of a new Rio.

"We have demonstrated to those who don't respect the law ... the pre-eminence of a democratic state governed by the law," he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/11/27/world/americas/AP-LT-Brazil-Rio-Violence.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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War Machines: Recruiting Robots for Combat

by JOHN MARKOFF

FORT BENNING, Ga. — War would be a lot safer, the Army says, if only more of it were fought by robots.

And while smart machines are already very much a part of modern warfare, the Army and its contractors are eager to add more. New robots — none of them particularly human-looking — are being designed to handle a broader range of tasks, from picking off snipers to serving as indefatigable night sentries.

In a mock city here used by Army Rangers for urban combat training, a 15-inch robot with a video camera scuttles around a bomb factory on a spying mission. Overhead an almost silent drone aircraft with a four-foot wingspan transmits images of the buildings below. Onto the scene rolls a sinister-looking vehicle on tank treads, about the size of a riding lawn mower, equipped with a machine gun and a grenade launcher.

Three backpack-clad technicians, standing out of the line of fire, operate the three robots with wireless video-game-style controllers. One swivels the video camera on the armed robot until it spots a sniper on a rooftop. The machine gun pirouettes, points and fires in two rapid bursts. Had the bullets been real, the target would have been destroyed.

The machines, viewed at a “Robotics Rodeo” last month at the Army’s training school here, not only protect soldiers, but also are never distracted, using an unblinking digital eye, or “persistent stare,” that automatically detects even the smallest motion. Nor do they ever panic under fire.

“One of the great arguments for armed robots is they can fire second,” said Joseph W. Dyer, a former vice admiral and the chief operating officer of iRobot, which makes robots that clear explosives as well as the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. When a robot looks around a battlefield, he said, the remote technician who is seeing through its eyes can take time to assess a scene without firing in haste at an innocent person.

Yet the idea that robots on wheels or legs, with sensors and guns, might someday replace or supplement human soldiers is still a source of extreme controversy. Because robots can stage attacks with little immediate risk to the people who operate them, opponents say that robot warriors lower the barriers to warfare, potentially making nations more trigger-happy and leading to a new technological arms race.

“Wars will be started very easily and with minimal costs” as automation increases, predicted Wendell Wallach, a scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and chairman of its technology and ethics study group.

Civilians will be at greater risk, people in Mr. Wallach’s camp argue, because of the challenges in distinguishing between fighters and innocent bystanders. That job is maddeningly difficult for human beings on the ground. It only becomes more difficult when a device is remotely operated.

This problem has already arisen with Predator aircraft, which find their targets with the aid of soldiers on the ground but are operated from the United States. Because civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan have died as a result of collateral damage or mistaken identities, Predators have generated international opposition and prompted accusations of war crimes.

But robot combatants are supported by a range of military strategists, officers and weapons designers — and even some human rights advocates.

“A lot of people fear artificial intelligence,” said John Arquilla, executive director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School. “I will stand my artificial intelligence against your human any day of the week and tell you that my A.I. will pay more attention to the rules of engagement and create fewer ethical lapses than a human force.”

Dr. Arquilla argues that weapons systems controlled by software will not act out of anger and malice and, in certain cases, can already make better decisions on the battlefield than humans.

His faith in machines is already being tested.

“Some of us think that the right organizational structure for the future is one that skillfully blends humans and intelligent machines,” Dr. Arquilla said. “We think that that’s the key to the mastery of 21st-century military affairs.”

Automation has proved vital in the wars America is fighting. In the air in Iraq and Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft with names like Predator, Reaper, Raven and Global Hawk have kept countless soldiers from flying sorties. Moreover, the military now routinely uses more than 6,000 tele-operated robots to search vehicles at checkpoints as well as to disarm one of the enemies’ most effective weapons: the I.E.D., or improvised explosive device.

Yet the shift to automated warfare may offer only a fleeting strategic advantage to the United States. Fifty-six nations are now developing robotic weapons, said Ron Arkin, a Georgia Institute of Technology roboticist and a government-financed researcher who has argued that it is possible to design “ethical” robots that conform to the laws of war and the military rules of escalation.

But the ethical issues are far from simple. Last month in Germany, an international group including artificial intelligence researchers, arms control specialists, human rights advocates and government officials called for agreements to limit the development and use of tele-operated and autonomous weapons.

The group, known as the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, said warfare was accelerated by automated systems, undermining the capacity of human beings to make responsible decisions. For example, a gun that was designed to function without humans could shoot an attacker more quickly and without a soldier’s consideration of subtle factors on the battlefield.

“The short-term benefits being derived from roboticizing aspects of warfare are likely to be far outweighed by the long-term consequences,” said Mr. Wallach, the Yale scholar, suggesting that wars would occur more readily and that a technological arms race would develop.

As the debate continues, so do the Army’s automation efforts. In 2001 Congress gave the Pentagon the goal of making one-third of the ground combat vehicles remotely operated by 2015. That seems unlikely, but there have been significant steps in that direction.

For example, a wagonlike Lockheed Martin device that can carry more than 1,000 pounds of gear and automatically follow a platoon at up to 17 miles per hour is scheduled to be tested in Afghanistan early next year.

For rougher terrain away from roads, engineers at Boston Dynamics are designing a walking robot to carry gear. Scheduled to be completed in 2012, it will carry 400 pounds as far as 20 miles, automatically following a soldier.

The four-legged modules have an extraordinary sense of balance, can climb steep grades and even move on icy surfaces. The robot’s “head” has an array of sensors that give it the odd appearance of a cross between a bug and a dog. Indeed, an earlier experimental version of the robot was known as Big Dog.

This month the Army and the Australian military held a contest for teams designing mobile micro-robots — some no larger than model cars — that, operating in swarms, can map a potentially hostile area, accurately detecting a variety of threats.

Separately, a computer scientist at the Naval Postgraduate School has proposed that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency finance a robotic submarine system that would intelligently control teams of dolphins to detect underwater mines and protect ships in harbors.

“If we run into a conflict with Iran, the likelihood of them trying to do something in the Strait of Hormuz is quite high,” said Raymond Buettner, deputy director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School. “One land mine blowing up one ship and choking the world’s oil supply pays for the entire Navy marine mammal program and its robotics program for a long time.”

Such programs represent a resurgence in the development of autonomous systems in the wake of costly failures and the cancellation of the Army’s most ambitious such program in 2009. That program was once estimated to cost more than $300 billion and expected to provide the Army with an array of manned and unmanned vehicles linked by a futuristic information network.

Now, the shift toward developing smaller, lighter and less expensive systems is unmistakable. Supporters say it is a consequence of the effort to cause fewer civilian casualties. The Predator aircraft, for example, is being equipped with smaller, lighter weapons than the traditional 100-pound Hellfire missile, with a smaller killing radius.

At the same time, military technologists assert that tele-operated, semi-autonomous and autonomous robots are the best way to protect the lives of American troops.

Army Special Forces units have bought six lawn-mower-size robots — the type showcased in the Robotics Rodeo — for classified missions, and the National Guard has asked for dozens more to serve as sentries on bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. These units are known as the Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System, or Maars, and they are made by a company called QinetiQ North America.

The Maars robots first attracted the military’s interest as a defensive system during an Army Ranger exercise here in 2008. Used as a nighttime sentry against infiltrators equipped with thermal imaging vision systems, the battery-powered Maars unit remained invisible — it did not have the heat signature of a human being — and could “shoot” intruders with a laser tag gun without being detected itself, said Bob Quinn, a vice president at QinetiQ.

Maars is the descendant of an earlier experimental system built by QinetiQ. Three armed prototypes were sent to Iraq and created a brief controversy after they pointed a weapon inappropriately because of a software bug.

However, QinetiQ executives said the real shortcoming of the system was that it was rejected by Army legal officers because it did not follow military rules of engagement — for example, using voice warnings and then tear gas before firing guns. As a consequence, Maars has been equipped with a loudspeaker as well as a launcher so it can issue warnings and fire tear gas grenades before firing its machine gun.

Remotely controlled systems like the Predator aircraft and Maars move a step closer to concerns about the automation of warfare. What happens, ask skeptics, when humans are taken out of decision making on firing weapons? Despite the insistence of military officers that a human’s finger will always remain on the trigger, the speed of combat is quickly becoming too fast for human decision makers.

“If the decisions are being made by a human being who has eyes on the target, whether he is sitting in a tank or miles away, the main safeguard is still there,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch, which tracks war crimes. “What happens when you automate the decision? Proponents are saying that their systems are win-win, but that doesn’t reassure me.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/science/28robot.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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				3 Missing Mich. Boys Feared To Be In Danger by The Associated Press MORENCI, Mich. November 28, 2010 Police were searching Sunday for three young brothers who haven't been seen since their father tried to hang himself, and investigators unraveling the man's strange story fear the boys are in grave danger. At the heart of the investigation is a perplexing account by the father, 39-year-old John Skelton, who told investigators he'd left the boys in the care of a woman with whom he had an online relationship. Yet by late Saturday, officers had no luck finding the woman.
These undated photoes provided by The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children show the Skelton brothers, Tanner, 5, Alexander, 7, and Andrew, 9, who police in Morenci, Mich., say were given by their father to a woman he met over the Internet. Police were told that he asked the woman to return the boys to their mother. The woman is believed to be driving a silver van. Morenci is 75 miles southwest of Detroit and just north of the Ohio state line.

Skelton was being treated at a hospital in Ohio for "mental health issues" on Saturday, one day after he tried to kill himself, said Morenci Police Chief Larry Weeks. Morenci is about 75 miles southwest of Detroit and just north of the Ohio state line.

Skelton told investigators Friday that he didn't want the boys in his house when he committed suicide, so he asked a woman named Joann Taylor to take them to their mother, who is separated from Skelton. Weeks said Saturday that officers haven't been able to confirm that Taylor exists.

An Amber Alert was issued Friday for Skelton's sons: 9-year-old Andrew, 7-year-old Alexander and 5-year-old Tanner.

When asked if Skelton was a suspect in the boys' disappearance, Weeks said: "We haven't ruled anything out, yet."

Skelton said he met Taylor several years ago and that the two had been involved in an online relationship. She was believed to live in Jackson or Hillsdale counties in southern Michigan.

But officers Saturday had no success tracking down a woman by that name or the silver van Skelton said she was driving.

"The bulk of our action has been putting together a timeline and trying to locate this Joann Taylor," said Weeks, whose agency was joined in the search by Michigan State Police and the FBI.

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The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children:

http://www.MissingKids.com

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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131638478

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Travel Q&A: Helping children with new airport security measures

by Ann Tatko-Peterson

Contra Costa Times

Q: I am taking my three children (ages 10, 7 and 2) to visit family in New York during the winter break. I've heard alarming stories about young children being aggressively patted down by (Transportation Security Administration) agents. How can I prevent this from happening to my children?

A: The increased airport security measures with full-body scanners and invasive pat-downs have a lot of travelers worried. While debate continues over whether these measures go too far, passengers are forced to abide by the new rules.

That doesn't mean travelers -- especially those with children -- can't take steps to make the screening process easier.

A TSA spokesman said that children 12 or younger will receive a "modified pat-down" only if extra screening is required.

Such was deemed the case in two incidents involving children caught on video. In one, a 3-year-old is seen screaming, "Stop touching me," as a female screener pats her down. In a second, a male TSA screener pats down a shirtless 8-year-old boy. In both cases, the officers administered pat-downs only after the children set off the metal detector.

The first step is explaining to children how airport screening works before arriving at the airport. Act out what will happen so they are prepared.

At the airport, have your children empty their pockets and remove their belt, jacket, shoes and anything else metal -- including hair barrettes. To simplify the process, have children wear slip-on shoes.

Also, all toys and personal items must be placed on the X-ray conveyor belt. Explain to your children that they will be reunited with the toy shortly. In the above-mentioned case, the 3-year-old tried to walk through the detector with her teddy bear, which set off the alarm.

Then, have each child wait until the agent signals him or her to walk through the metal detector.

The TSA also advises that children who don't need assistance walk through the detector separately. Should you set off the machine while carrying a child, then the agent will have to screen both of you. Be sure to place any baby carriers or slings on the X-ray belt as either may trigger the metal detector alarm.

Should you or your child be selected for additional screening, it's important to know your rights. You can request that the screening be conducted in private and that a witness be present.

Even with children younger than 12, a screener will pass the back of his or her hand over the genital area. While few parents are comfortable with this, child psychology experts suggest refraining from showing outrage or distress as this will further alarm your child. Explaining how a pat-down works before arriving at the airport also may make the experience less traumatic for a child.

http://www.mercurynews.com/travel/ci_16687414?nclick_check=1

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Threats against Obama: Michael Stephen Bowden is just the latest

Nearly 1 in 10 US presidents have been assassinated or wounded in office. The Secret Service has made more than a dozen arrests in the past two years for threats against Obama. Retiree Michael Stephen Bowden is the latest.

by Patrik Jonsson

November 26, 2010

The arrest of former New York City cop Michael Stephen Bowden for telling a Secret Service agent he'd like to put President Obama up against a wall and shoot him underscores the daily threat matrix for a job that is much more dangerous than, say, the harrowing experience of Bering Sea fishermen as dramatized on the popular TV show "The Deadliest Catch."

Nearly 1 in 10 presidents have been assassinated or shot while in office (the last being Ronald Reagan, in 1981), with another 11 escaping assassination attempts unscathed.

The Secret Service has been particularly busy chasing down threats to Mr. Obama, who faced a barrage of death threats and at least one credible assassination plot while a presidential candidate and since taking office in January 2009.

Last summer, author Ron Kessler wrote that Obama was receiving 30 death threats a day. Other reports state that federal agents had seen a 400-fold increase in threats from President George W. Bush's last year in office. Secret Service head Mark Sullivan later pushed back at that assertion, saying "threats are not up" in the Obama era.

Nevertheless, in the past two years the Secret Service has arrested more than a dozen Americans for posing credible threats to the president. Because of concerns about his safety, candidate Obama received Secret Service protection earlier than any other presidential hopeful in US history. The Secret Service doesn't publicize most threats, fearing that they could inspire copycat attempts.

The most famous Obama assassination plot involved two neo-Nazi skinheads in Tennessee, who were accused in late 2008 of planning to shoot 88 black people, behead another 14, and then kill Obama. Both men pleaded guilty this year to charges of conspiring to kill Obama.

According to the law, "Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits for conveyance in the mail or for a delivery from any post office or by any letter carrier any letter, paper, writing, print, missive, or document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States ... shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."

Vermont comedian Chris King was arrested Oct. 8 for tweeting: "I am dying inside. And I am plainly stating to you that I am going to kill the president.” Such "death tweets" on the social media network Twitter have figured in several high-profile threat arrests.

"Read literally, the threats-against-the-president statute could apply to someone overheard mouthing off in a bar ..., though authorities aim to prosecute only those individuals deemed to pose credible threats," writes Andy Bromage for Seven Days, a Vermont-based news website. "In King’s case ... his repeated threats online, his mental condition and the fact that he owned guns ... persuaded authorities he posed a risk."

While the vast majority of threats are not serious, authorities ignore threats at the president's peril. In 1994, few people took Francisco Martin Duran seriously when he said he planned to assassinate President Bill Clinton. On Oct. 29, 1994, Mr. Duran unloaded 29 rifle rounds into the White House, injuring no one. In 2001, Secret Service agents shot and then arrested Robert Pickett, an Indiana man, after gunshots were heard outside the White House fence while Mr. Bush was in residence..

Despite such dangers, Secret Service protection insulates presidents from everyday life, which can affect their job performance. "You cannot shake the bubble," writes former presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal, about Obama's political problems. "And the worst part is that the army of staff, security and aides that exists to be a barrier between a president and danger ... winds up being a barrier between a president and reality."

Mr. Bowden, an ex-N.Y.C. policeman and firefighter who had retired to South Carolina, didn't write down his threats, but Secret Service were alerted by a Veterans Administration counselor after Bowden said he "was thinking of traveling to Washington, D.C., to shoot the president because he was not doing enough to help African-Americans."

Bowden, who is white, didn't deny the threat when talking to Secret Service officers, and even went on to tell them, "If I had the opportunity, I would shoot [Obama] myself. If I had the opportunity to get Obama against the wall and shoot him, I would." A small arsenal of loaded weaponry was found in Bowden's South Carolina home.

After making a court appearance, Bowden is undergoing mental evaluation through the federal prison system. His son told news outlets that Bowden, in his seventies and in deteriorating health, isn't physically capable of carrying out the threat.

http://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/print/content/view/print/345794

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