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From the Los Angeles Times

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Mexico: La Familia offers to cease January 'activities' in public letter

The Mexican drug cartel La Familia has offered in a public letter to refrain from "any activities" for the first month of 2011 in order to support its claim that the federal authorities, not the cartel, are responsible for violence gripping its home-base state of Michoacan.

The letter purportedly signed by the group began appearing in Michoacan on Saturday night, local news reports said. It starts with a formal new year's greeting, then says La Familia will maintain a "withdrawal" for the first month of 2011 to "keep demonstrating to the authorities, the federal government and especially the people of Michoacan that La Familia Michoacana is not responsible for the criminal acts that the authorities and federal government report in the media."

Federal authorities say La Familia has been severely weakened since an operation in early December that resulted in the death of the cult-like group's spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, or "El Mas Loco."

La Familia often directs messages to "Michoacan society" in public letters or on banners known as narcomantas that are hung over bridges. The messages reflect the group's quasi-populist view of its operations, insisting regularly that the cartel works to protect the people of Michoacan from rival drug-trafficking groups and from the government.

In some sections of the state, the argument appears to have taken hold.

After Moreno's death -- which hasn't been confirmed conclusively because his body was not recovered -- a civilian peace march in the city of Apatzingan turned into an impromptu rally for the slain drug lord, featuring signs expressing support for La Familia in general. In a November letter, the group offered to disband if the federal government could "guarantee" the safety of Michoacan's people.

Last week, the government captured a La Familia cell leader known as "The Mustache." Fran­cis­co Lo­pez Vi­lla­nue­va, authorities said, was formerly a member of the rival drug group the Zetas before switching sides and joining the Michoacan cartel.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2011/01/la-familia-michoacan-letter-truce.html

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Huntington Beach police use Facebook in hopes of solving 1968 slaying

The woman's body was found more than 42 years ago in a dirt field in Huntington Beach, her throat slashed with a sharp instrument. She had been beaten and sexually assaulted, police said.

On Tuesday, the Huntington Beach Police Department released photos on its Facebook page that may be linked to the slaying in an effort to drum up leads in the case. The photos were found in a purse about a quarter-mile from the crime scene, police said, and had not been previously released.

"If we can figure out who she was, we can find out what she was doing that day ... and maybe find out who that suspect is," Lt. Russell Reinhart told The Times.

Dubbed "Jane Doe," the woman was found March 14, 1968, in the field near Newland Street and Yorktown Avenue. She was white or Latina, 20 to 25 years old, and about 5 feet 4 inches tall with dark, shoulder-length hair and brown eyes, police said.

At the time, detectives thought the woman was picked up from another area and left at the scene, police said. Several tire tracks were found near her body.

About half an hour after the body was found, two boys playing in an oil field near Huntington Street and Utica Avenue found a white purse with a matching wallet. Inside were six black-and-white wallet-sized photos, including one of a young boy with a cowboy hat, who was crying.

Detectives have worked on the case over the years. Investigators developed a "DNA hit" on a male suspect but have been unable to identify that person, Reinhart said.

He said detectives are hoping that the photos lead them one step closer to solving the crime.

"If nothing else," Reinhart said, "maybe we can get some closure to the family."

Anyone with information is asked to call Det. Mike Reilly at (714) 536-5940 . 

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

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A weapon against drug cartels

President Obama should give the ATF authority to require gun dealers near Mexico to report multiple purchases of high-powered rifles; tracing the guns will help fight violent drug cartels.

January 5, 2011

Mexico has some of the strictest gun laws in the hemisphere. Citizens are permitted to buy low-caliber firearms for self-protection or hunting, but only after a background check and approval by the defense ministry; they must also purchase the guns directly from the ministry. The goal of this parsimonious approach to allotting firearms is a society free from gun violence. Unfortunately for Mexico, however, its weapons management strategy is sabotaged by an accident of location — its residence next door to the gun capital of the world.

The United States is awash in guns. Americans own an estimated 283 million guns, and 4.5 million new ones, including 2 million handguns, are sold each year, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Nor are these weapons confined to U.S. borders and households. Officials say that they are pouring south into Mexico, into the hands of violent drug cartels.

As part of its effort to halt the flow, the ATF has asked the White House for emergency authority to require gun dealers near the border in four states — California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas — to report multiple purchases of high-powered rifles. Specifically, the agency wants 8,500 retailers to report any sales of two or more long rifles of .22 caliber or higher to the same customer within a five-day period.

President Obama should not hesitate to move forward with this regulation, no matter how loudly the gun lobby objects. Those who truly support securing the border understand that the greatest danger comes not from poor people seeking work but from heavily armed drug cartels and ruthless human traffickers. The only question is whether tracing the weapons would be an effective crime-fighting tool, and history says it would. When Congress passed a handgun reporting requirement in 1975 and the ATF stepped up enforcement in 1984, thousands of weapons were — and still are — traced to illegal activity and crime rings that were brought to prosecution.

Nor should the administration tremble at pro-gun saber-rattling about an infringement of 2nd Amendment rights. The regulation would not prohibit sales, purchases or ownership. Also, tracing is conducted only after a crime has been committed, not before.

One objection that cannot be dismissed is that the new rule would create more paperwork for some border-adjacent gun retailers. No business likes new red tape from Washington, but with the national security of two countries involved, the trade-off is worth the inconvenience.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-guns-20110105,0,1523606,print.story

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Don't deny detainees their day in court

Indefinite detention of post-Sept. 11 detainees without charge or trial is not the American way.

by Amos N. Guiora and Laurie R. Blank

January 4, 2011

The idea that every person deserves his or her "day in court" is a fundamental principle in the United States and many countries worldwide. Yet more than nine years after 9/11, the United States remains paralyzed not just about how to give the thousands of detainees in U.S. custody around the world their day in court but about whether to give them that day in court.

Multiple judicial forums have been created to try nonstate actors who have perpetrated war crimes from Rwanda to Sierra Leone to Cambodia to the former Yugoslavia — to give them their day in court. That makes the failure to answer this question for post-9/11 detainees particularly perplexing and deeply troubling.

Two successive administrations have been incapable of answering what should be the most basic questions: if, how and where to try terrorists. In the meantime, post-9/11 detainees languish in indefinite detention. The result is a fundamental and overwhelming violation of the rights of individuals who are no more than suspects, in either past or (more problematic) future acts.

The Obama administration now intends to issue an executive order establishing indefinite detention without trial for detainees at Guantanamo Bay. This decision will formalize this violation of basic rights. Denying individual accountability will now be official U.S. policy and law.

The claim that granting prisoners the right to file petitions for habeas corpus and receive regular reviews is sufficient is disingenuous. At best, that only addresses detention status. It does not facilitate resolution of individual accountability, the principle that requires that an individual have the opportunity for adjudication of his or her guilt or innocence. It is wrong morally, not to mention legally.

The first step, therefore, is to determine that individuals detained post 9/11 deserve their day in court, just like domestic criminals and perpetrators of war crimes. The next step is to implement a mechanism that can do so fairly and effectively. Speedy resolution is, by now, wishful thinking at best.

Unfortunately, for the last nine years, the U.S. has skipped the first step and has let narrow political considerations devoid of morality, legality and decency determine the nature of the second step. Decision-makers talk of constitutional law and a "beacon on the hill," but acting on that talk seems to present overwhelming challenges. Principles have been discarded in the name of expediency.

Just as crimes grant the state the power to punish, so the state owes the detainees a duty of resolution, a duty to give them their day in court and either prosecute or release, convict or acquit. In the absence of an effective framework to do so, the state is engaging in unconscionable behavior — with an immunity largely granted by Congress and courts alike. Supreme Court and congressional acquiescence in the face of executive power has historically ill-served the American people.

Those who argue that indefinite detention accords with the treatment of prisoners of war gloss over two key distinctions: POWs are held in protective custody and released at the end of hostilities, whereas post-9/11 detainees are held in de facto punitive detention and terrorism has no end to trigger release. Those who want to argue that we are at war with Al Qaeda and other terrorists fail to consider that the law of war and principles of morality in armed conflict do not countenance such an approach, where detainees face the prospect of generational, even lifetime, detention without charge or trial.

Indefinite detention completely undermines the basic notion of individual accountability, thus constituting a fundamental miscarriage of justice. The United States, uncertain whether the detainees are criminals or more akin to fighters in an armed conflict, must still grant them the basic right to a day in court. Without that, individual accountability is simply eliminated, effectively saying that the adjudication of individual liability is burdensome, perhaps even irrelevant.

This is not the American way; rather, it is a repudiation of American values. Whether one supports criminal trials or the creation of a national security court, the time has come to decide and adjudicate.

Amos N. Guiora, a professor of law at the University of Utah's S.J. Quinney College of Law, is the author of "Freedom from Religion: Rights and National Security." Laurie R. Blank, director of the International Humanitarian Law Clinic at Emory University School of Law, is the co-author of "Law of War Training: Resources for Military and Civilian Leaders."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-guiora-detention-20110104,0,7030881,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Birthright Citizenship Looms as Next Immigration Battle

NOGALES, Ariz. — Of the 50 or so women bused to this border town on a recent morning to be deported back to Mexico, Inez Vasquez stood out. Eight months pregnant, she had tried to trudge north in her fragile state, even carrying scissors with her in case she gave birth in the desert and had to cut the umbilical cord.

“All I want is a better life,” she said after the Border Patrol found her hiding in bushes on the Arizona side of the border with her husband, her young son and her very pronounced abdomen.

The next big immigration battle centers on illegal immigrants' offspring, who are granted automatic citizenship like all other babies born on American soil. Arguing for an end to the policy, which is rooted in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, immigration hard-liners describe a wave of migrants like Ms. Vasquez stepping across the border in the advanced stages of pregnancy to have what are dismissively called “anchor babies.”

The reality at this stretch of the border is more complex, with hospitals reporting some immigrants arriving to give birth in the United States but many of them frequent border crossers with valid visas who have crossed the border legally to take advantage of better medical care. Some are even attracted by an electronic billboard on the Mexican side that advertises the services of an American doctor and says bluntly, “Do you want to have your baby in the U.S.?”

Women like Ms. Vasquez, who was preparing for a desert delivery, are rare.

Still, Arizona — whose tough law granting the police the power to detain illegal immigrants is tied up in the courts — may again take the lead in what is essentially an effort to redefine what it means to be an American. This time, though, Arizona lawmakers intend to join with legislators from other states to force the issue before the Supreme Court.

This coalition of lawmakers will unveil its exact plans on Wednesday in Washington, but people involved in drafting the legislation say they have decided against the painstaking process of amending the Constitution. Since the federal government decides who is to be deemed a citizen, the lawmakers are considering instead a move to create two kinds of birth certificates in their states, one for the children of citizens and another for the children of illegal immigrants.

The theory is that this could spark a flurry of lawsuits that might resolve the legal conflict in their favor.

“This is not a far-out, extremist position,” said John Kavanagh, one of the Arizona legislators who is leading an effort that has been called just that. “Only a handful of countries in the world grant citizenship based on the GPS location of the birth.”

Most scholars of the Constitution consider the states' effort to restrict birth certificates patently unconstitutional. “This is political theater, not a serious effort to create a legal test,” said Gabriel J. Chin, a law professor at the University of Arizona whose grandfather immigrated to the United States from China at a time when ethnic Chinese were excluded from the country. “It strikes me as unwise, un-American and unconstitutional.”

The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, was a repudiation of the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, that people of African descent could never be American citizens. The amendment said citizenship applied to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

In 1898, the Supreme Court, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, interpreted the citizenship provision as applying to a child born in the United States to a Chinese immigrant couple.

Still, some conservatives contend that the issue is unsettled. Kris Kobach, the incoming secretary of state in Kansas and a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who has helped draft many of the tough immigration regulations across the country, argued that the approach the states were planning would hold up to scrutiny.

“I can't really say much more without showing my hand,” Mr. Kobach said in an e-mail. “But, yes, I am confident that the law will stand up in court.”

The legal theories are lost on Laura Gomez, 24, who crossed into Arizona from Mexico five years ago while expecting and is now pregnant with her second child. But like many other pregnant women in Arizona who are without papers, she has been following the issue with anxiety.

“It doesn't seem fair to just change the rules like that,” Ms. Gomez said.

Despite being called “anchor babies,” the children of illegal immigrants born in the United States cannot actually prevent deportation of their parents. It is not until they reach the age of 21 that the children are able to file paperwork to sponsor their parents for legal immigration status. The parents remain vulnerable until that point.

Maria Ledezma knows as much. Just off a bus that deported her from Phoenix to the Mexico border town of Nogales, she was sobbing as she explained the series of events that led her to be separated from her three daughters, ages 4, 7 and 9, all American citizens.

“I never imagined being here,” said Ms. Ledezma, 25, who was brought to Phoenix from Mexico as a toddler. “I'll bet right now that my girls are asking, ‘Where's Mom?' ”

Blended families like hers are a reality across the United States. A study released in August by the Pew Hispanic Center found that about 340,000 children were born to illegal immigrants in the United States in 2008 and became instant citizens.

In April, Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, one of those pushing for Congressional action on the issue, stirred controversy when he suggested that children born in the United States to illegal immigrants should be deported with their parents until the birthright citizenship policy was changed.

“And we're not being mean,” Mr. Hunter told a Tea Party rally in Southern California. “We're just saying it takes more than walking across the border to become an American citizen. It's what's in our souls.”

Immigrant advocates say intolerance is driving the measure. “They call themselves patriots, but they pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they support,” said Lydia Guzman, a Latino activist in Phoenix. “They're fear-mongerers. They're clowns.”

Like many states, Arizona is suffering a severe budget crisis, prompting even some lawmakers who have supported immigration restrictions in the past to question whether it is the right time for another divisive immigration bill. They say the state's fiscal issues need to be resolved before Arizona jumps back into a controversial immigration debate.

“I was born and raised in New York,” responded Mr. Kavanagh, who is chairman of the Appropriations Committee of the Arizona House. “I can ride a subway, drink coffee, read the newspaper and make sure my pockets are not picked all at the same time.”

Scholars who have studied migration say it is the desire for better-paying jobs, not a passport for their children, that is the main motivator for people to leave their homes for the United States.

Even Ms. Vasquez, who was preparing for a desert delivery, agrees with that. While she preferred to have her child be born in the United States, she said, it was the prospect of a better economic future, with or without papers, that had prompted her and her family to cross when they did. “I'll try again — but once the baby's born,” she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/us/politics/05babies.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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15-Year Sentence for 1968 Plane Hijacking

The crime evoked a touch of nostalgia, tracing back to an era when political activism and crime sometimes went hand in hand. Hijackings, especially to Cuba, seemed commonplace.

Luis Armando Peña Soltren was one of three men accused of hijacking of Pan American Flight 281, bound for Puerto Rico but taken to Cuba on Nov. 24, 1968. The other two men have long since pleaded guilty and served their sentences.

After 40 years living as a fugitive in Cuba, Mr. Soltren, now 67, received his sentence in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Tuesday.

He walked slowly into the courtroom, with short, silvery hair and bowed shoulders. Then he stood before Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein and read for 15 minutes from a piece of paper.

Through an interpreter, he apologized to the court, to his family and to the passengers and crew of the plane he helped hijack. Mr. Soltren, who surrendered to United States authorities in 2009 and pleaded guilty in 2010 to conspiracy to commit air piracy, interfering with flight crew members and kidnapping, attributed his misdeeds to “lack of experience, lack of patience and lack of maturity.”

He then asked the judge for leniency, saying, “I beg you to please take into consideration my age today and that I turned myself in voluntarily, completely voluntarily, to justice in this country.”

Judge Hellerstein was unmoved, sentencing Mr. Soltren to 15 years in a federal prison without the possibility of parole. His lawyers had asked for a sentence of no more than four years.

“I try to imagine how I would feel if someone put a knife to my throat or a gun to my back, and I wonder how many nightmares would follow,” Judge Hellerstein told the defendant. “I wonder even in your private moments with God whether there can ever be enough remorse.”

The proceeding resolved one of the more unusual hijacking stories in recent decades, one that Mr. Soltren said was motivated by familial ties rather than political ideology. He said that he joined a group of radical Puerto Rican nationalists in hijacking Flight 281, because he wanted to visit his ailing father in Cuba. And, he said, he returned to the United States — where prison time was all but assured — because he wanted to be with his wife, who left Cuba for the United States in 2004.

State Department officials said that the Cuban government had given its authorization for Mr. Soltren, who is a United States citizen, to leave Havana, but that no negotiations over the matter had taken place. His return was not part of any formal extradition process, the officials added. Mr. Soltren had been in contact with the United States Interests Section in Havana for some years and had expressed a desire to return, government officials said.

During the hijacking, Mr. Soltren and two other men took control of the Boeing 707 armed with knives and guns that they had smuggled aboard. They ordered the pilot to divert the flight to Havana, and as the plane approached José Martí International Airport, it received an escort from Cuban MiG-21 air force jets. Nobody was injured during the hijacking, and the crew and passengers were returned to the United States.

The others who joined Mr. Soltren on the plane, José Rafael Rios Cruz and Miguel Castro, were sentenced in the mid-1970s to 15 and 12 years in prison, respectively, for threatening the lives of flight crew members, but served sentences of seven years and four years.

A fourth man who was not on the flight, but was described then as a leader of the Puerto Rican independence movement, was charged as a co-conspirator, but was acquitted at trial.

In a letter to Judge Hellerstein, Mr. Soltren's lawyer, James Neuman, asked that his client serve fewer than four years in prison. He wrote that Mr. Soltren was sincerely remorseful and had begun contacting United States authorities in 1979 with the aim of surrendering.

“Unlike his co-defendants, Mr. Soltren never committed any other crime and was never even arrested, before or after this hijacking,” Mr. Neuman wrote. “No conceivable justification exists for treating Mr. Soltren more harshly than his co-defendants.”

But federal prosecutors asked in their own letter for “a lengthy term of imprisonment.” They wrote that Mr. Soltren should not be credited with trying to return to the United States before 2009 because he ended various earlier communications with the authorities when they did not agree to conditions that he had established for his surrender.

In addition, prosecutors said, Mr. Soltren had behaved violently aboard Flight 281, holding a knife to the neck of a flight attendant and pointing a .38 caliber Colt Cobra at the flight engineer.

“The defendant's crimes placed in grave danger more than one hundred people,” the prosecutors wrote, adding: “The occupants of the airplane were required to endure a period of substantial fear.”

After issuing his sentence, Judge Hellerstein permitted Mr. Soltren's wife, Silvia González Peña, and one of his four daughters, Yanira, to speak briefly with him before he was led from the courtroom.

Mr. Soltren, wearing dark-blue prison clothes, slumped in a wooden chair and appeared to blink back tears as the two women spoke to him in a mixture of Spanish and English.

“I love you so much,” Yanira said. Mr. Soltren nodded and a moment later he rose and returned to a cell.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/nyregion/05hijacker.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Milwaukee Archdiocese Seeks Chapter 11

The Roman Catholic archbishop of Milwaukee, Jerome E. Listecki, announced Tuesday that the archdiocese had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, saying it would allow the church to continue its ministry while giving fair compensation to the victims of sexual abuse by priests.

But advocates for the victims say the church's real motivation is to avoid disclosing information about priests accused of abuse and officials who covered it up.

The bankruptcy filing comes just before the deposition of an important church official, Auxiliary Bishop Richard J. Sklba, who until his recent retirement served alongside three successive archbishops of Milwaukee. A lawyer for Bishop Sklba was trying to have that deposition sealed.

Other officials expected to be deposed include the former archbishop of Milwaukee Timothy M. Dolan, now archbishop of New York. The bankruptcy filing will almost certainly delay the depositions, although they could eventually proceed.

Twenty-three alleged victims have sued or announced their intention to sue the archdiocese for fraud. Mediation sessions between the archdiocese and the victims' lawyer, Jeffrey Anderson, who has handled hundreds of abuse lawsuits against the church, ended in a stalemate last month after just two meetings.

The victims had demanded that the archdiocese agree to 14 abuse prevention policies, the most contentious of which was releasing the names and personnel files of every priest accused of abuse. Mr. Anderson said some accused priests might still be in ministry.

But a church spokesman, Jerry Topczewski, said the archdiocese had already released the names of diocesan priests that had been judged by its independent review board to have been “credibly accused” — the standard used by most diocesan review boards.

The archdiocese offered the victims a settlement of $4.6 million, but Mr. Anderson said he would not discuss monetary compensation until the archdiocese met the victims' demands for transparency.

With mediation at a stalemate, the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy to avoid spending more time and money on lawyers, Mr. Topczewski said. Another decisive factor was a court's ruling in November that insurance companies were not bound to contribute to a financial settlement.

Milwaukee is the eighth American diocese, out of 194, to file for bankruptcy protection. The others are Davenport, Iowa; Fairbanks, Alaska; Portland, Ore.; San Diego; Spokane, Wash.; Tucson; and Wilmington, Del.

“This action is occurring,” Archbishop Listecki said in a letter to parishioners, “because priest-perpetrators sexually abused minors, going against everything the church and the priesthood represents. As a result, there are financial claims pending against the archdiocese that exceed our means.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/us/05milwaukee.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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Fake White House holiday e-mail is cyber attack

WASHINGTON (AP) — It looked like an innocent e-mail Christmas card from the White House.

But the holiday greeting that surfaced just before Christmas was a ruse by cybercriminals to steal documents and other data from law enforcement, military and government workers — particularly those involved in computer crime investigations.

Analysts who have studied the malicious software said Tuesday that hackers were able to use the e-mail to collect sensitive law enforcement data. But so far there has been no evidence that any classified information was compromised.

The targeted e-mail attack comes as the federal government is desperately trying to beef up its cybersecurity after the release of thousands of State Department cables and military documents by the WikiLeaks website. Federal authorities want to improve technology systems and crack down on employees to prevent the theft or loss of classified and sensitive information.

The red holiday e-mail card, with its brightly decorated Christmas tree, prompted recipients to click on a link, which would then download the ZueS malware — a well-known malicious code that is often used to steal passwords and other online credentials, primarily to poach Internet banking information. The malware was created several years ago and is widely available for criminals to acquire and adapt. It has been used to steal millions of dollars.

In this case, however, the code downloaded a second payload that is designed to steal documents from the recipient's computer, accessing Microsoft Word and Excel files.

Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence for Atlanta-based SecureWorks, a computer security consulting company, said the attack was somewhat small and targeted to a limited number of groups with law enforcement, military and government affiliations.

It was small enough, he said, to suggest that is was sent out manually and not by a large network of infected computers. He said it was not large enough to be picked up by cybersecurity spam traps or sensors.

Alex Cox, principle research analyst for NetWitness, a cybersecurity firm in northern Virginia, said the e-mail was sent out just a day or so before Christmas, delivered by a control server in Belarus. He and Jackson said they believe this ZueS version was created by the same people who launched a similar but much larger attack last February.

Cox, who discovered the ZueS-infected malware last year when it infected at least 74,000 computers, said it's hard to determine how many people were affected or how many documents were stolen in this latest attack.

Jackson said at the hackers stole at least several gigabytes of data.

Analysts learned of the e-mail attack last week and have spoken with federal authorities about it.

Homeland Security Department spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said officials are aware of the ZueS e-mail and are monitoring it along with other similar malware attacks that have been tracked for some time.

Cox and Jackson would not disclose details on who was attacked or what documents may have been compromised but agreed that the hackers probably were after the documents, rather than any banking or financial passwords.

One theory, said Jackson, is that the hackers were looking for information about law enforcement cases and investigative techniques related to cybercrime so that they could sell it to other criminals.

The e-mail attack, however, underscores the continuing vulnerability of government workers and their computer systems to versions of the ZueS malware. Hackers can easily tweak the code each time so that it does not trigger antivirus software.

"Criminals have found that if they change the files in small ways it can slip past antivirus software," said Jackson.

While ZueS-related attacks are fairly common, this latest one stood out because of the use of the White House connection to lure recipients in and the targeted way it went after law enforcement, analysts said.

One U.S. official said that the code was rather poorly written. The hackers could only get easily accessible documents and not those filed deep within layers of folders on the hard drive, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing investigations.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j5oQaAZrgTMUw2qBSXfGIwoiJNLg?docId=c9fce16894ae4286a319b88c9811af72

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Elisa Baker says Zahra died Sept. 24

Zahra Baker was likely killed on Sept. 24, and her body disposed of the following day, according to new search warrants released Tuesday. She was not reported missing until about two weeks later.

Elisa has also been arrested on several other charges unrelated to Zahra's disappearance. Adam was arrested, as well, on several charges unrelated to the case, but is out of jail on bond.

In the search warrants, Elisa maintains that Adam dismembered Zahra's limbs and they disposed of them in several locations.

All search warrants in the Zahra Baker investigation were unsealed Tuesday.

Using, the GPS location in her cell phone, investigators could show that on Sept. 25, Elisa was in the areas where parts of Zahra have been recovered. Those areas include a bone and her prosthesis on Christie Road and part of her remains on Dudley Shoals Road, both in Caldwell County. From the information provided by Elisa, Adam was not in the area where Zahra was disposed of, according to his GPS location.

The search warrants also state that Elisa Baker purchased a bed prior to Oct. 12, when Angie Foster was interviewed by Capt. Thurman Whisnant and Sgt. Brett Porter with the Hickory Police Department. The investigators were speaking to the woman about the disappearance of Zahra, according to a search warrant from Oct. 19. In the warrant, it says Foster had spoken with Elisa several times about the purchase of a bed, although she was uncertain of the exact day Elisa bought it.

Investigators requested the records for several people who could be involved in the case, including the person Elisa was having an affair with and one of Elisa's former husbands, Aaron Young.

The search warrants also said Elisa and Aaron were not divorced before she and Adam were married. According to a Nov. 29 search warrant, Elisa told Adam that Aaron was her brother.

Investigators asked for access to cell phone numbers for several people, including Aaron Young. However, no one has been arrested yet in connection with the case.

http://www2.hickoryrecord.com/news/2011/jan/04/14/judge-unseals-all-warrants-baker-case-ar-666013/

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