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From the Los Angeles Times

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More bones found in ravine where Mitrice Richardson was discovered

Another search of the rugged Malibu canyon turned up remains that could be fragments of her ribs, fingers and wrist. Richardson's family pushes for more testing to determine how the 24-year-old died.

by Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times

February 13, 2011

Authorities found eight bones believed to belong to Mitrice Richardson on Sunday while combing the rugged Malibu Canyon ravine where the missing 24-year-old's remains were found in August, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

The bones, some of which are believed to be fragments of Richardson's ribs, fingers and wrist, were found six months after the bulk of her remains were removed by the Sheriff's Department. Richardson's family, which has long criticized the department's handling of the case, hopes the discovery will spur authorities to exhume Richardson's body and conduct further testing that could determine how the young woman died after she was released from the sheriff's Malibu station in September 2009.

"Today, we were able to find some more of my daughter's remains, so we can put them with the rest of her remains," said Latice Sutton, Richardson's mother. "More importantly, I hope that they see the importance of going back and doing all the tests that I requested — the proper testing."

Richardson was arrested at Geoffrey's restaurant in Malibu after being unable to pay an $89 dinner tab and acting bizarrely. She was released from the sheriff's station after midnight — without her car, purse or cellphone — and vanished.

Her family has filed suit against the county and the Sheriff's Department, alleging negligence and wrongful death. Since November, when Sutton visited the area where her daughter was discovered and found a finger bone, the family has been urging investigators to revisit the site.

"If I can go up there and find a finger bone while I'm up there memorializing her, then a thorough job was not done," she said, adding that she couldn't "describe how angry it makes me" to have to push for a more thorough investigation.

Authorities have been unable to determine a cause of death but say they have seen no evidence of foul play.

Sutton believes that her daughter was sexually assaulted and murdered before being dumped in the ravine and that finding a neck bone, the hyoid, could reveal if her daughter had been strangled. She said she does not believe the bone was among those found Sunday.

The coroner's office blasted the Sheriff's Department for moving the remains before coroner's investigators could examine them, saying the actions may have violated the law and undermined the thoroughness of the coroner's inquiry. Steve Whitmore, a sheriff's spokesman, said the coroner's office had granted permission to move the body.

Whitmore said Sunday that 99% of Richardson's remains were collected shortly after their discovery but that the coroner's office had long wanted to search the area again. Rainy conditions hampered previous efforts, but sunny, dry weather allowed investigators to visit the site by helicopter on Sunday, their fourth visit since Richardson's remains were discovered.

"The coroner wants to go back there and make sure we've found everything," he said.

Six coroner's investigators, one sheriff's homicide investigator, four sheriff's search-and-rescue personnel, a human-remains detection dog and a sheriff's liaison to the family were lowered from the chopper into the ravine about 9:30 a.m. and spent nearly five hours searching an area roughly as large as a typical living room.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-mitrice-richardson-20110214,0,2644631,print.story

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What are the ties that bind us?

Multiculturalism breeds terrorism, British Prime Minister David Cameron said, opening an absurd new chapter in the debate over assimilation.

by Gregory Rodriguez

February 14, 2011

Multiculturalism breeds terrorism. That's what British Prime Minister David Cameron said Feb. 5 in a high-profile speech in Germany, thereby opening up an absurd new chapter in the never-ending debate over how much to embrace, exalt and protect cultural differences in Britain and beyond.

Now I'm no fan of multiculturalism, which is essentially the belief that ethnic minorities should be encouraged to maintain their traditions. In Britain, that encouragement extends to state funding for ethnic organizations to ensure cultural continuity for the nation's immigrants. The U.S. employs soft "multiculti" — mostly sloganeering about the glories of diversity.

Common sense tells us that too much emphasis on tribe, ethnicity or previous nationality can be at odds with the common purpose and cohesion of a nation with a large, diverse population. But suggesting that taxpayer support of the corner Bangladeshi knitting circle or a Muslim civil rights organization causes homegrown terrorism is a little like saying sex education creates rapists.

What's interesting about Cameron's speech, however, is not the hyperbole but the poor logic. His solution for dealing with the challenges of diversity, and his confusion about causes and effects, may only make matters worse.

In his speech, Cameron decried multiculturalism's "hands-off tolerance" of some cultural behaviors — he used the example of forced marriages — that are antithetical to Western values. Instead, Britain needs to win the hearts and minds of newcomers with the ideals of personal liberty and individualism, combating multiculturalism-induced rootlessness that can cause some to find a home in political extremism.

Cameron gave his anti-multiculti prescription a name: "muscular liberalism" — a reference to the political philosophy that venerates personal liberty, not to American partisanship. "Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality," Cameron said, would provide "a clear sense of national identity that is open to everyone," especially to young Muslims who are caught between cultures.

The only problem is that the freedoms Cameron champions, worthy as they are, hardly constitute firm "roots." Anglo American liberalism is essentially a collection of abstract ideas, and abstractions simply aren't as effective as bloodlines and religious ritual when it comes to bringing people together as a nation.

The ideology of individual liberty, admits Nancy Rosenblum, a Harvard political scientist and an adherent of liberalism, can produce a "disaffected experience" because "ordinary men and women cannot recognize themselves in it."

In other words, it may not be multiculturalism that breeds rootlessness, but liberalism itself.

A 2010 study on homegrown terrorism by researchers at Duke University and the University of North Carolina bears this out. The researchers found that losing one's familial, traditional cultural identity was a more likely route to radicalization than maintaining those ties. Trying to adopt the values of the new, mainstream culture can sometimes create the kind of alienation that can lead to extremism. To fight the type of terrorism that Cameron fears, the study recommends community-building measures, like multiculturalism, to strengthen ethnic identity.

In reality, neither Cameron nor the multiculturalists have the answer for creating cohesion in modern, diverse, globalized states. Multiculturalists think ethnic cultural continuity will somehow mask the wrenching and sometimes dangerous break with the past that newcomers face. Cameron fantasizes that a reinvigorated, hard-sell approach will make abstract liberal ideals into a tie that binds as tightly as ancient tribal or religious bonds.

Here's the dirty little secret of the Western world: Exalted political ideals notwithstanding, Western democracies have historically fallen back on whatever tribal, racial, ethnic or religious solidarity they can drum up to solidify their identities. France, for instance, had liberte, egalite and fraternite , but what mattered most was the ne plus ultra of ethnic Frenchness. In Britain and the U.S., national unity has been built as much on whiteness as any other factor.

The truth is, without relying on some form of old-fashioned tribalism — or perhaps the unifying effect of a war — we have no idea exactly how the rapidly diversifying nations of the West will cohere moving forward. The only thing we can know for certain is that both sides of the debate over multiculturalism are fooling themselves.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rodriguez-multiculti-20110214,0,5262551,print.column

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From the New York Times

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In Spokane, a Mystery With No Good Solution

SPOKANE, Wash. — The bomb was sophisticated and potentially deadly, but it did not detonate. No one was hurt, and no one has been arrested. So Spokane became a mystery.

“To me, it's that God's gracious hand moved,” said Chief Anne Kirkpatrick of the Spokane Police Department. “This was a bomb of significance that would have caused devastation.”

Nearly a month after a cleanup crew found the live bomb along the planned route of a large downtown march honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the F.B.I. is investigating the incident as an act of domestic terrorism. And Spokane has cycled from shock to relief to reassessment: have the white supremacists who once struck such fear here in the inland Northwest returned at a new level of dangerousness and sophistication?

“We don't have that kind of intelligence level to make that kind of explosive,” said Shaun Winkler, a Pennsylvania native who recently returned to the region to start a landscaping company and a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

Mr. Winkler lives not far from Hayden Lake, Idaho, where he once was among the followers of Richard Butler, a white supremacist and Aryan Nations leader who spent more than two decades proclaiming the inland Northwest to be the capital of a new white homeland. Mr. Butler died in 2004 after losing the 20-acre Aryan Nations compound in a lawsuit and losing many of his followers, as well.

More than 200 white supremacists were once based at Hayden Lake, but Mr. Winkler, echoing assessments by human rights advocates, said that “only a very small handful are still around.” He said his new group had about a dozen members. Several of them recently picketed taco stands in nearby Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and distributed racist, vulgar fliers at North Idaho College. The college now owns the Hayden Lake property and calls it a “peace park.”

“We believe in protecting ourselves, but we certainly aren't going to advocate bombing people,” said Mr. Winkler, 32, adding that he had been interviewed by the F.B.I. about the bomb in Spokane, about 40 miles to the southwest. “That's a pretty extreme measure even from our end. It's going to be more of an under-the-radar person, a lone-wolf type.”

The bomb, partly concealed by two T-shirts and stored in a Swiss Army brand backpack, was found on a bench on the King holiday, Jan. 17, by contract sanitation workers less than an hour before the planned start of the march. The march went on but was rerouted. The region's bomb squad responded and some people were evacuated, but most people were unaware of the bomb until later in the day.

The device is being analyzed by F.B.I. experts in Virginia. Various news reports, most citing anonymous sources, have said that it contained metal pellets covered in a chemical, possibly rat poison, and that it could have been detonated remotely. Frank Harrill, an F.B.I. spokesman in Spokane, described the bomb as “capable of killing or injuring multiple people” but would provide no further details.

Chief Kirkpatrick said the bomb was far more dangerous than a pipe bomb found near a federal courthouse in Spokane last March. No arrests have been made in that case either.

In 1996, a pipe bomb exploded outside Spokane City Hall. No one was injured; two white supremacists were later convicted in the case.

This time, Chief Kirkpatrick said, “It's scary the level of the calculation that was involved.”

In the weeks since the bomb was found, investigators have asked people to check cellphone photos and video that might have been taken in the area at the time. They have also returned to the scene at the same time on a subsequent Monday, hoping to gather information from people who routinely travel the area.

“Oh, I wish, I wish I had seen something,” said Kandy Conrad, who works at Auntie's Bookstore, directly across Washington Avenue from the bench where the bomb was found and who parked nearby that morning. “All I was thinking about was did I have to put money in the meter, because it was a holiday.”

“I'm much more aware of my surroundings now,” Ms. Conrad said.

Since the bomb was found, officials in Spokane have organized meetings with various community leaders to look for ways to publicly respond, whether through some kind of one-time event or a continuing campaign. Tony Stewart, a longtime civil rights campaigner in northern Idaho whose work helped shut down the Aryan Nations there, is among those involved in the discussions.

“Tony told us it's always best to stand up to bullies, and that's kind of our point,” said Marlene Feist, a spokeswoman for the City of Spokane. “This isn't representative of our community as a whole. We are an accepting place, and we are a good place to raise families and live and work and retire.”

“We have had issues in Spokane, but primarily they have been in northern Idaho,” Ms. Feist said. “We kind of get painted with the same brush.”

The two areas largely function as a connected region, and they are demographically similar. Spokane County is about 91 percent white and less than 2 percent black. Kootenai County, just across the state line in Idaho, is 95 percent white and less than 1 percent black.

A week before the bomb was found, the Spokane City Council approved a contract to build a new road that will be the city's first street named for Dr. King. Previous efforts to rename existing streets were rejected. The application for the street name was submitted by Ivan Bush, the former director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Family Outreach Center in Spokane and one of the organizers of the Jan. 17 march.

Mr. Bush said he helped organize the city's first march honoring Dr. King, in 1984.

“There were 49 of us back then, and we marched from the jailhouse to the federal courthouse,” said Mr. Bush, 60. “Now we have thousands.”

Asked whether the increase in numbers meant that Spokane had made progress, he said, “Yeah, but we need deeper progress.”

While not everyone is convinced that racism was a factor in the bomb incident — the march included many prominent elected officials who are white, including the mayor and county commissioners — Mr. Bush is among many people who find it impossible to believe that it was not.

The city should be more assertive in confronting the questions of racism stirred by the bomb, Mr. Bush said. For him, the days in the 1980s and 1990s when it was common to see white supremacists openly promoting their views feel like they were “just yesterday.”

“We've moved beyond those days as far as active, visible things,” Mr. Bush said. “But we need to pull the covers back and take a look at what's underneath. I think if we did that, we would find that those sentiments are very much prevalent.”

Mr. Winkler, the Klansman, said he still believed that the region was a good place to nurture a racist movement. And as for the bomb in Spokane, he added, “Even though we wouldn't have participated in that, it certainly wouldn't have hurt my feelings if it did go off.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/us/14spokane.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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