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From the Los Angeles Times

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Lawsuit challenges curfews imposed by gang injunctions

In their ongoing battle against the city's entrenched gangs, prosecutors and the Los Angeles Police Department have relied increasingly in recent years on a favorite bureaucratic weapon: Court-ordered injunctions.

The injunctions aim to severely curtail gang activity by, among other things, prohibiting gang members from socializing with each other, carrying weapons and wearing certain clothing inside "safe zones" that typically encompass neighborhoods where the gangs are active. Those who don't comply can be arrested and charged.

A federal lawsuit filed earlier this month in Los Angeles, however, has taken aim at the nighttime curfews included in 21 of the 50 injunctions in effect within the city. The terms of the curfews, which prohibit going outside after 10 p.m., are so broad and vague as to violate a person's constitutional rights, said Olu Orange, the attorney behind the lawsuit.

The city, Orange said, has willfully ignored an appellate court ruling finding that similarly worded gang curfews violated people's due process rights. In that ruling, the California Supreme Court found that an injunction against an Oxnard gang did not adequately define what it meant for someone included in the injunction to be "outside" during the curfew hours.

The wording was "so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning," the court found.

The city's other gang injunctions also impose curfews but use wording that is more specific and less restrictive, Orange said.

A spokesperson for the city attorney's office could not be reached for comment.

The latest lawsuit stems from the arrest of Christian Rodriguez, a teenage boy who lives in the Mar Vista Gardens housing project –- a stronghold of the Culver City Boys gang.

Rodriguez is not a gang member, his attorney said, but was placed under the injunction because of an older brother's ties to the gang. LAPD anti-gang officers arrested Rodriguez late one night in June 2009 when they found him with friends at the housing project's handball courts. He was charged with violating curfew.

The criminal charges against Rodriguez were dropped, but Orange said a broader challenge to the curfews is necessary. Orange said he will try to have the case designated as a class action, which would allow anyone ever arrested for a curfew violation under the 21 gang injunctions to join the lawsuit. Beyond seeking a change to the wording of curfew clauses, Orange said he planned to argue that any person arrested for a curfew violation was entitled to compensation for having his or her constitutional rights violated.

The lawsuit is the latest challenge to gang injunctions. They also have come under fire by critics who say there is not an adequate process by which people can petition to have their names removed from injunction lists.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/02/lawsuit-challenges-curfews-imposed-by-gang-injunctions.html

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Warning issued after rape suspect escapes military custody

Authorities issued an alert Monday for a U.S. Army private and Palmdale native who escaped from military custody in Georgia and is believed to have raped a 15-year-old girl from Los Angeles County.

Daniel Brazelton, 20, was being transferred from military to civilian custody last week when he took off from a van stuck in traffic, according to local news reports in Georgia.

Capt. Mike Parker of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said detectives with the Special Victims Bureau are concerned Brazelton might try to make his way back to Palmdale, where he grew up.

"Investigators believe he is possibly armed with a handgun and is considered dangerous," Parker said. "He most likely is receiving help in evading law enforcement and may be attempting to return to L.A. County."

Parker said the victim's family has been notified about Brazelton's escape.

Anyone with information is asked to call 911 or contact the sheriff's Special Victims Bureau at (877) 710-LASD or (877) 710-5273.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/02/la-sheriffs-issue-warning-after-rape-suspect-escapes-from-military-custody.html

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From the New York Times

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Police Departments Downsize, From 4 Legs to 2

CHARLESTON, S.C. — He was a 10-year veteran of the Charleston Police Department, specializing in patrolling this city's palmetto-lined streets, improving community relations and keeping big crowds in check — until his unit was disbanded, a victim of budget cuts.

So this month he was put out to pasture, quite literally.

Napoleon lost his policing job, along with the other five police horses here, as Charleston joined the growing number of cities that have retired their horses and closed their stables to save money. The Great Recession is proving to be the greatest threat to police mounted units since departments embraced the horseless carriage.

This month, the clip-clop of police hooves was silenced both on the cobblestones here and on the streets of Newark, a much harder-hit city whose department recently laid off 163 officers. The downturn has also claimed the mounted units in San Diego; Tulsa, Okla.; Camden, N.J.; and Boston, whose police horses dated to the 19th century and were regulars at Fenway Park.

“It seems like horses are always among the first to go when it comes to budget cuts,” said Mitchel P. Roth, a professor of criminology at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Tex., who has studied mounted patrols over the centuries.

When the Police Executive Research Forum released a report recently asking, “Is the Economic Downturn Fundamentally Changing How We Police?” it featured a mounted officer on the cover.

Supporters of mounted patrols mourn their loss, and fault overzealous oat-counters at city halls across the nation. Romantics have a nostalgic attachment to police horses, and many police officials value them, saying that when dealing with crowds, one mounted officer is as effective as 7 to 10 officers on foot. They are highly visible, these officials say, and can deter crime, and their popularity with the public is a welcome change from the mistrust that many departments battle.

But others see the horses as a costly bit of sentimentality, and as departments make previously unthinkable cuts, like furloughing and laying off police officers, they are re-evaluating the role of the police horse in the 21st century. In Charleston, officials decided that many of the unit's duties could be carried out at less expense without the horses. It was not a question of getting rid of the department's four-legged members in order to save its two-legged ones: the force here has actually been growing, and violent crime has gone down.

Nor was it a case of reversing someone else's policies. Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., who has been in office since 1975, established the city's mounted unit early in his tenure, when Charleston — whose horse-drawn carriages are big draw for tourists — joined other cities in adding horses to provide a more approachable police presence, to help with crowd control and to deter crime. At its height, the unit had 14 horses. Mr. Riley said that many of those functions could now be handled in other ways, with more officers on the streets and evening summer camps for adolescents and by using technology.

“It was kind of like the times had changed. And the reasons that you found them beneficial, those reasons had been replaced by other good, solid policing techniques,” he said in an interview.

Charleston's police chief, Gregory Mullen, said that some of the unit's duties would be handled by officers on bicycles or on futuristic electric scooters called T3s, which look like a cross between a Roman chariot and a Segway. He said that he had been working to get more officers on the street by hiring administrative workers for desk duty, and that disbanding the mounted unit would help.

Officers in the mounted unit, by necessity, spent a couple of hours of each shift getting their horses ready, traveling with their mounts to their posts and then getting them bedded down. They rarely spent eight hours on patrol. “When we started to look at that, it was a lot less expensive for us to operate bicycles and electric vehicles and other things than it was to maintain the housing and feed and care for the animals,” the chief said.

Closing the unit, he added, will save $250,000 a year. But it was a blow to some in this history-loving city.

“It's just heartbreaking,” said Alice Forshaw, 68, who was the mounted unit's groom for nearly 20 years before she retired.

A look through her scrapbooks brought back memories: Horses like Royal's Rogue, Heavy Ned, Easy Alibi. A former chief who loved to ride the horses, even after he was thrown from one. The out-of-town jobs that took the unit to the inaugurations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and to the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. And Moonshine, a police horse who was killed by a drunken driver and whose memorial service was held in a church.

Now Ms. Forshaw has a living souvenir. The city let her adopt Napoleon, who is 16 years old. He was walking around the backyard of her home in Cordesville, S.C., about 45 minutes north of the city, tentatively making friends with her other horse and receiving a police pension in hay and feed. “He likes the freedom,” Ms. Forshaw said.

In Newark, the police director, Garry F. McCarthy, said he would like to bring back a few horses, and is trying to privately raise money to do it. “They are a valuable element to policing,” he said. “The problem is I just couldn't afford it.”

Mounted units often attract charity: the Baltimore department, which got a donation from the 7-Eleven company, now calls one of its horses Slurpee.

But for many departments, including the one in San Diego, the biggest cost was not the animals or their feed, it was deploying police officers on horseback instead of on other duties. “We had to balance it against being able to keep officers in the patrol cars, and making sure we had enough officers on hand to answer emergency calls,” said Assistant Chief Chief Bob Kanaski of San Diego. Officers there now patrol Balboa Park on all-terrain vehicles.

But there are still passionate defenders of mounted police. In New York, Deputy Police Commissioner Paul J. Browne said that the added visibility of the city's mounted officers was helpful last May when two Times Square street vendors wanted to report smoke rising from a crude car bomb on 45th Street, which ultimately failed to explode. “They looked around,” he said, “and the first thing they saw of anyone in authority was two mounted police officers, who responded and cleared the area of bystanders before the bomb squad arrived.”

New York has one of the largest units in the nation, with 79 officers and 60 horses, but it is smaller than it was a decade ago, when there were 130 officers and 125 horses.

Philadelphia closed its unit in 2004 to save money. Now its police commissioner, Charles Ramsey — who came to value horses for both crowd control and community relations in his previous job as the police chief in Washington — is trying to raise $2.4 million to revive it. “One of my officers once said, ‘Nobody ever tried to pet my police car, but they line up to pet my horse,' ” he said. “And it's true.”

He has already received a donation of four trained police horses — from Newark.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/us/15horses.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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In Love With Each Other, and With a New Country

Amr Abdo and his wife, Ghada Bayoumy, had “mixed feelings” about the big step they were about to take. Born in Egypt and wed there, but living in the United States the past 15 years, they were moments away from becoming newly minted Americans on Monday.

Their emotions turned out not to be terribly mixed at all, merely gradations of joy — over becoming American citizens and over watching the transformation taking place in their homeland.

“It's very exciting,” Mr. Abdo, a computer engineer in Fishkill, N.Y., said of the Egyptian revolution. “We hope the whole world is the same. It doesn't make any sense that people don't rule themselves.” Indeed it doesn't, said Ms. Bayoumy, a schoolteacher. “We are proud,” she said, “that our own family is on track to get rid of oppression.”

Minutes later, the two of them raised their right hands and recited the 140 words of an oath of allegiance that made them officially part of a new family, the American family. They were among 18 couples who took part in a naturalization ceremony held in an auditorium of the federal building in Lower Manhattan.

It was Valentine's Day, an occasion that Andrea J. Quarantillo, director of the New York office of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, did not want to let go to waste.

By Ms. Quarantillo's estimate, she has sworn in tens of thousands of new citizens over the past 14 years, here and in other cities. But it never hurts to add some spice to a familiar ritual, she said, to “call attention to the good work we do, and honor those we naturalize.”

So Valentine's Day became a day for couples. If love was in the air, why not love for country as well? There was even a rose (artificial, unfortunately) for each of the women.

“It's very renewing,” said Ms. Quarantillo, whose four grandparents came from Italy. The anti-immigrant mood that is abroad in the land? “This,” she said of the naturalization ceremony, “is probably one of the best things that the United States government does.”

The 36 men and women who swore fealty to America came from 14 countries. Egypt was not alone in having had an uprising that showed a despot to the door, or even to an early grave.

There were couples from the Philippines, where the dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos was overthrown in the “people power” rebellion of 1986, and from Romania, where the malevolent Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu and his loathed wife, Elena, were removed from power and executed in 1989. Two couples began life in Albania, where the Communist regime finally collapsed in 1990.

Gabriel and Lucia Popian, married 30 years ago, said that they were “in the middle of the revolution” that led to the toppling of the Ceausescus. Their apartment, they said, was near a central square in Bucharest where much of the action took place in December 1989. They live in Yonkers now, artists specializing in the restoration of monuments.

Do they ever make return trips to their old land? Ms. Popian responded as if nothing worse could have been suggested. “No,” she said. “Never.”

A couple from the Philippines, Alex and Socorro Leopando, had given up on their country by the time Marcos and his shoe-loving wife, Imelda, were forced to go.

The Leopandos, who live in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., felt it was time to leave after the 1983 assassination of Benigno S. Aquino Jr., an opposition leader who was shot to death by Marcos's soldiers as he returned to Manila from exile in the United States. (His wife, Corazon C. Aquino, later became the Philippines' president, and his son, Benigno S. Aquino III, is the present president.)

“When Mr. Aquino was assassinated, it was chaotic,” said Mr. Leopando, who is a bookkeeper. “We decided, ‘Better get out of here.' ”

Other Filipinos had similar thoughts and left, he said. His wife added, “I think Egyptians may have the same idea.” It wouldn't surprise her, she said, if uncertainty about the future of that country sends many people heading for the exits, perhaps with the United States as a final destination.

They could do no better than to begin life anew here, the Popians said. After Romania, they spent time in Australia and in Italy before making their way to this country in 1999.

“It's the truest words: here, you still can do what you want,” Ms. Popian said. That point was reinforced by her husband. “America,” he said, “is still a living dream.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/nyregion/15nyc.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Bridging a Gap Between Fear and Peace

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — The short trek from danger to calm starts before dawn. First, there is the grind of a turnstile — total cost: 3 pesos, or 25 cents — then thousands of legs push forward, broomlike, onto the Paso del Norte bridge and away from Ciudad Juárez.

It takes about 250 long strides to reach the middle, where the United States begins and the view changes slightly: a large billboard advertising Bud Light, in Spanish, practically blots out the sun.

Most of the 14,000 people here who cross over the Rio Grande daily seem to barely notice. This mound of a bridge, which American officials estimate to be the busiest of all cross-border footpaths between Mexico and the United States, used to be just a simple connector between the shopping districts of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. But these days, it has deeper meaning.

At no time in recent history has the reality gap between the two cities been wider. By some estimates, El Paso is now the safest big city in the United States; Ciudad Juárez is among the most dangerous in the world. Murders dominate the headlines on one side, economic growth and car accidents make news on the other.

The result is a morning walk north that can sound and feel like the line for an amusement park. The chatter among women waiting to shop is peppered with laughter. Children bounce. Vendors hawk food while a woman in a white dress with a guitar belts out humorous songs about why some are allowed to cross faster than others.

“It's just so much calmer and better over there,” said Janet Burcia, 18, on her way from her home in Ciudad Juárez to visit her grandmother in El Paso. “I go whenever I can.”

Access and speed, however, vary. On the right side of the bridge, in a line with waits of up to two hours, are Mexican citizens, including those with border crossing cards granted by the American Consulate to those not considered at risk of illegally remaining in the United States because of work or family. On the left, with far shorter waits — and fancier clothes — are people like Ms. Burcia, an American citizen born in Texas, and students who go to schools in El Paso.

Spending time in the United States is, of course, no guarantee of safety; last week, three Ciudad Juárez teenagers, including two American citizens who had attended schools in El Paso, were gunned down at a car dealership on the Mexican side of the border.

Still, the number of students crossing appears to be growing. Last April, after noticing an increase in morning foot traffic, United States Customs and Border Protection assigned a special lane to students who cross between 7 and 9, a result of a push by Mexican parents to place their children in American schools.

On one recent morning, Damaris Girón, 18, shy, in a blue pleated skirt and wearing heavy makeup, was one of many carrying book bags on the bridge. She said that all 25 of her classmates at a Methodist school in El Paso lived in Ciudad Juárez.

“There are more parents who are afraid,” she said. Not that she was especially pleased with the commute. “I get tired,” she added, “with all the back and forth.”

But she appeared to be one of the few unhappy crossers. Alejandra Cabral, 19, beamed when asked about the heavy engineering textbook she carried. Ms. Cabral said that she was in her second year at the University of Texas at El Paso, and that she planned to stay in Ciudad Juárez when she graduated.

“I want to do something like what they do at NASA,” she said.

Most people in line had simpler plans.

Leticia Valenzuela, 53, was on her way to buy special milk and medicine for a child with a severe stomach illness.

Jose Hernandez, 21, was waiting with his skateboard, which he uses to get to work at a hospital in El Paso. Although he is a United States citizen, with an American father and a Mexican mother, he said he was in the slow line because thieves in Ciudad Juárez had stolen his car and his American passport.

Elizabeth Torres, 40, and her mother, Virginia Chavez, 59, were simply on their way to have a little fun. “The first thing we're going to do is have some breakfast,” said Ms. Torres, an office administrator. “Then we're going to shop.”

Like many others in the line, Ms. Torres struggled to articulate what it now means to cross from one place to the other. One on hand, it is still routine — from the mountains on either side of the border, Ciudad Juárez and El Paso look like one city. On the other hand — Ms. Torres exhaled and loosened her arms to show how much more relaxed people feel on the El Paso side.

“We don't even have to hold tightly to our bags,” Ms. Torres's mother said.

That is, until the day ends. By sundown, when the desert sky burns the orange-pink of a Georgia O'Keeffe painting, the foot traffic picks up again, heading in the opposite direction. Once empty arms are now full, with bags from Wal-Mart and American Eagle Outfitters.

A guitarist still sings, but this time it is a man, and the Mexicans walking by are no longer in a rush. There is no special line to hurry into Ciudad Juárez. No one on the Mexican side is checking to make sure people's documents are in order.

At dusk, the laughter has turned to silence. Each step across the bridge seems to be just a little bit slower, each smile a little harder to see.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/world/americas/15juarez.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Arizona: Border Activist Is Convicted

Shawna Forde, the leader of a border security group, was convicted of first-degree murder Monday in the 2009 shootings of a man and his daughter.

Ms. Forde, claiming to be a law enforcement officer, barged into the Flores home in Arivaca with accomplices. Raul Flores and his daughter, Brisenia, 9, were killed.

The jury also convicted Ms. Forde of the attempted murder of Gina Gonzalez, Mr. Flores's wife. Trials for Jason Bush and Albert Gaxiola, accused of accompanying Ms. Forde, are scheduled for this spring.

Prosecutors said the attackers considered Mr. Flores a drug smuggler and wanted to use his drug proceeds for a paramilitary organization to seal off the border to immigrants.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/us/15brfs-BORDERACTIVI_BRF.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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House Votes to Extend Patriot Act Provisions

WASHINGTON — The House on Monday voted to reauthorize and extend through Dec. 8 three ways in which Congress expanded the Federal Bureau of Investigation's counterterrorism powers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Last week, an effort to extend these provisions of the so-called Patriot Act and a related intelligence law failed to pass after falling just short of the two-thirds' majority needed under a special rule. On Monday, however, the bill was able to pass with only a simple majority — and it did so, 275 to 144.

The provisions allow investigators to get “roving wiretap” court orders allowing them to follow terrorism suspects who switch phone numbers or providers; to get orders allowing them to seize “any tangible things” relevant to a security investigation, like a business's customer records; and to get national-security wiretap orders against non-citizen suspects who are not connected to any foreign power.

Without new legislation, the provisions would expire on Feb. 28. House Republicans pressed the short-term extension so the Judiciary Committee, which is now under Republican control, could hold hearings on them.

During the debate on Monday, most Republicans argued in favor of the bill, while many Democrats criticized it. Still, the debate did not break down entirely along partisan lines.

Sixty-five Democrats voted for it, including Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, who argued that he thought it would be better to go even further and extend the provisions through 2013 — as the Obama administration wants to do.

And 27 Republicans voted against it, including Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, who said the American people had “a legitimate fear of out-of-control prosecutors and out-of-control spy networks.”

Because there is little time left before the provisions expire, it is likely that the Senate will approve the House's bill — putting off a larger debate over the provisions until later in the year.

Senators have been debating their own proposals, which include reauthorizing the provisions through 2013 but imposing greater safeguards on them, or making the provisions permanent without modifications.

Congress overwhelmingly passed the original Patriot Act in October 2001. Over time, it became a symbol of eroding civil liberties and privacy rights for those who believed that government power had expanded too far. Supporters of the law have often accused its critics of exaggerating its risks and of being willing to endanger the country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/us/politics/15terror.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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OPINION

Villages Without Doctors

For the next few weeks, I'll be writing about an idea that can make people healthier while bringing down health care costs, both in poor countries and in the United States.

The strategy is to move beyond doctors — to take the work of health care and shift down from doctors and nurses to lay people, peers and family. In the United States and other wealthy countries, lay people can fill in the gaps in left by doctors' care. In poor countries, people with no or little formal medical training are successfully substituting for doctors and nurses.

This is fortunate, as villagers in many developing countries rarely see doctors or nurses. Especially in English-speaking parts of Africa and south Asia, doctors and nurses are often poached by better pay and conditions offered by Canada, the United States, Britain and Australia. Half the doctors trained in Ethiopia or Zambia, for example, have emigrated. (And each doctor who goes from, say, Kenya to Britain represents a transfer of about $600,000 from a poor country to a wealthy one.)

Even doctors who don't leave the country tend to stay in cities, where they treat patients who can pay. The distribution of nurses is only slightly more equitable. Rural villages do not tempt them.

But are doctors and nurses necessary to improve rural health? Two very successful programs in desperately poor parts of India's Maharashtra state say no. SEARCH (the Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health), in the district of Gadchiroli, and the Comprehensive Rural Health Project, in the district of Jamkhed, both recruit ordinary women to take care of their villages' health. They have had a huge impact on the health and prosperity of their villages.

The Jamkhed program works with India's most downtrodden people. Its trainees are women, many of them members of the Untouchable caste, many illiterate. When I visited the program in 2008, I met Jamkhed health workers who are lepers and those who were married at the age of two and a half.

While Leelabai Amte is a higher-caste Maratha, not an Untouchable, she was totally illiterate when she became a village health worker — she has since learned to read and write. She was married at 10 and had her first son at 13. Today, however, she is a respected authority figure in her village of 6,000 people, Halgaon. Amte was 60 when I met her, a very thin woman with thick glasses and no front teeth.

Twice a day, at nine in the morning and six at night, she set off through the streets of Halgaon, carrying a blood pressure cuff and a baby scale in her black shoulder bag, along with a log book. She visited the newborns she had delivered, pregnant women, old people. Her first stop one morning in January was the home of a three-day-old baby boy. Amte watched the baby suckle and then tied him in a cloth sling and hooked it to her scale. He was three and a half kilos, nearly eight pounds — a remarkable gain over his three-kilo birth weight. She murmured approvingly. “Don't put anything on the umbilical cord,” she said. “And keep the child in the sunlight in the morning.”

“Twenty years ago, mothers waited three days to breast-feed their babies,” she said – a superstition that deprived babies of valuable colostrum and reduced the mothers' supply of milk. Today, Amte has banished this and dozens of other superstitions from Halgaon. When she started working in Halgaon in 1977, families had six or seven children. The children often had scabies and other skin diseases. They were unvaccinated and often sick. Night blindness due to Vitamin A deficiency was everywhere. Tuberculosis and leprosy were common, and their sufferers were ostracized. People attributed illness to curses from the gods.

Today there is no more infant mortality, and TB and leprosy are gone. Mothers eat better — the average birth weight of a baby has gone from about four and a half pounds to six and a half. New mothers are taught how to feed and care for their babies. Children get regular immunizations. Now almost every mother knows how to treat diarrhea and fever.

At a busy corner in the center of town, Amte was in the middle of a crowd of about 20 men, talking about installing toilets in Halgaon's houses. Village women in India do not speak out to men, but Amte does. In the street she saw the husband of one of her pregnant patients — a woman overdue for her prenatal visit to the program's hospital. “Why is your wife not coming to the hospital?” she scolded him. “We'll check everything, give her blood tests.” The man had the grace to look sheepish. “I've been busy with farming,” he told Amte. “Next month I'll bring her.”

All of the Jamkhed women say that the most important thing they do is teach others. Amte has trained three village women to deliver babies. At one house she quizzed a high-school girl. “If a child has a fever, what do you do?” Amte asked.

“Cold compresses,” said the girl promptly.

“And diarrhea?”

“You give oral rehydration mixture.”

“Do they teach you about health in school?” asked Amte. “Do they tell you about safe drinking water and keeping yourself clean?”

“No,” the girl replied. “You are the one who talks about that.”

The Jamkhed program was founded in 1970 by Raj and Mabelle Arole. Mabelle (who died in 1997) and Raj were first and second in their class respectively at a prestigious Indian medical school. They shared not only medical talent, but a dissatisfaction with the kind of medicine they were being taught — curative medicine, the kind useful for wealthy countries.

They moved back to Jamkhed, near where Raj was born, a location they chose largely for its desolation. They decided that doctors were not the way to help rural villages. The vast majority of sickness in rural areas could be prevented with clean water, waste-disposal systems and more diverse farming. Villages need to end deadly superstitions about health. They need to end discrimination against women and Untouchables, and to learn about hand-washing, nutrition, breast-feeding and simple home remedies. Doctors do none of these things.

“Rural problems are simple,” Raj Arole told me. “We do not need experts. An array of women like village health workers is enough, properly trained and supported.” The very prestige and distance of doctors worked against them. The Aroles found that lack of education was an advantage for village health workers. They knew how their neighbors lived and thought.

The Aroles went to various villages and asked each to choose a woman to send to the program's headquarters in Jamkhed, which is also the name of the district's major city, to learn to be a health worker. Mabelle and the couple's daughter, Shobha, now a doctor who runs the program, conducted the training.

Teaching the women health skills was the easy part. Illiteracy was not an overwhelming problem. The real problem was the women's complete absence of confidence. Their entire lives had been lessons in keeping their heads down. They had to gain confidence from each other.

Starting out, none of the women could imagine that their neighbors would ever listen to their advice. There was no magic in it. The answer turned out to be the expected factors: time, demonstrable success and support. There were months, sometimes years of frustration, tempered by the soothing words of more experienced health workers who had gone through the same thing. But eventually, mothers of sick children called the Jamkhed worker out of desperation, when going to the temple didn't work. Their success in curing a child's diarrhea or delivering a baby after a difficult labor was the turning point. After that, people started listening when they talked about clean water, breastfeeding and nutrition as well.

Indian statistics have long shown that Jamkhed villages are far healthier than their neighbors. A new study published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization found that Jamkhed's program has reduced child deaths by 30 percent but had no significant effect on neonatal deaths — those in the first month of life.

SEARCH, by contrast, focuses on more traditional medicine. Like Jamkhed, SEARCH was founded by a husband-and-wife team of Indian doctors who studied public health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Abhay and Rani Bang. But there are differences. SEARCH is newer, founded in 1985. It requires its health workers to have more education —literacy at least, and some of the women have finished 10 th grade. SEARCH trains them to work with mothers in their homes to have healthy children. The health workers visit pregnant women repeatedly, attend births, teach mothers about how to keep their babies healthy and check in on the children often. They diagnose and treat illnesses, and even administer injectable antibiotics to treat blood infections.

The Bangs carry out numerous studies of their work. In 1999, they published an article in the medical journal Lancet, showing that their home-based care program reduced neonatal and infant mortality by 50 percent.

That caught the attention of the Connecticut-based humanitarian agency Save the Children. “Neonatal mortality was an important and neglected health issue,” said David Oot, associate vice president for health and nutrition at Save the Children. “But the deaths occur at home without exposure to the formal health system. So people thought there was little you could do.”

SEARCH proved there was a lot you could do. For the past 10 years, SEARCH has worked with Save the Children to study new ways community health workers can work with mothers, and teach these methods to others. On Saturday, I will look at what makes Jamkhed and SEARCH so successful when similar programs have failed elsewhere, and how their ideas are now reaching millions of people around the world.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/villages-without-doctors/?ref=opinion

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From Google News

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Mom, tot found dead in dumpster

by Laurel J. Sweet, O'Ryan Johnson and Natalie Sherman

BROCKTON — The bodies of a young Ecuadorean and her toddler son were found stuffed in a Dumpster behind their downtown apartment house, and authorities said yesterday the mother and child may have been there for days.

“It's a terrible crime scene, especially when you think about what happened to a small child and his mom. I mean, who would do that to a 2-year-old child?” said Plymouth District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz.

Until autopsies determine the cause and manner of their deaths, Cruz refused to speculate on what evil may have befallen Maria Avelina Palaguachi-Cela, 25, and Brian Palaguachi, 2, except to say the mother was last seen at her home at 427 Warren Ave. on Thursday.

“We do not believe this is a random act,” Cruz said.

No arrests have been made.

A New York cousin of the child's father — day laborer Manuel Caguana — told the Herald last night Caguana was questioned by police, but had been working “far, far away” for about two weeks when his son and Palaguachi-Cela were found by cops Sunday night.

The baby's father had called his family repeatedly last week “and there was no answer, no answer. So he was worried,” said the cousin, who is also named Manuel Caguana. “He was like, my wife, my son, where are they?”

When the father returned home, “everything was quiet, clean, just as he had left it, so he was shocked when the police came and told him she was dead,” Caguana said.

The family “were good people,” the cousin added. “They were always going to church.”

Denise Agnello, who lives across the street from Palaguachi-Cela's spearmint-colored triple-decker, said the young woman lived with a man, whom she saw police talking to after the gruesome find.

Agnello said detectives questioned her, too. When she asked what was going on, “All they said to me was, ‘We found a young woman in the Dumpster in a duffel bag, dead,' ” she said.

Cruz refused to comment on whether a duffel bag was involved or how the remains were positioned —in part, he explained, because police don't know if the presumed crime scene was disturbed. “My understanding,” he said, “is the bodies involved in this were fully intact.”

Agnello said she usually saw Palaguachi-Cela — a quiet, petite woman — on a daily basis, but not in the past week.

“Right across the street — it's just awful,” she said.

According to Manuel's cousin, Manuel Caguana and Palaguachi-Cela originally met as neighbors in Ecuador and reconnected in the United States. Manuel had been living in New York, but moved to Massachusetts “for love” of Palaguachi-Cela, his cousin said.

The couple had been married for about four years but, the cousin said, Palaguachi-Cela had a prior relationship with a man who he believes may also live in Massachusetts.

http://news.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1316867&format=text

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15 to get Presidential Medal of Freedom

WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 (UPI) -- Former President George H.W. Bush, poet Maya Angelou, and sports greats Stan Musial and Bill Russell will receive the highest U.S. civilian award Tuesday.

They will join 11 others at the White House in receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- which recognizes people who have made "an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors." The other recipients include former civil rights leader U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., visual artist Jasper Johns and billionaire investor Warren Buffett, the White House said.

President Barack Obama will also give the award, not limited to U.S. citizens, to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French-born U.S. cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Auschwitz concentration-camp survivor and humanitarian Gerda Weissmann Klein. Rounding out the list are labor leader John J. Sweeney, civil rights activist Sylvia Mendez, former diplomat and Very Special Arts non-profit founder Jean Kennedy Smith and Natural Resources Defense Council founder John H. Adams.

Optometrist Tom Little -- who led a humanitarian eye camp in Afghanistan before being killed with nine other humanitarians Aug. 6, allegedly by Taliban fighters -- will receive the award posthumously.

The presentation, set to begin at 1:30 p.m. EST, will be streamed live online at www.whitehouse.gov.

Bush, president from 1989 to 1993, was vice president under Ronald Reagan and CIA director. He also served as U.S. ambassador to China and the United Nations, and was the U.S. Navy's youngest aviator during World War II.

Angelou, called "America's most visible black female autobiographer" by scholar Joanne Braxton, is best known for her six autobiographical volumes that focus on her childhood and early adult experiences.

Musial, a Baseball Hall of Famer and record 24-time All-Star selection, played 22 seasons for the St. Louis Cardinals, accumulating 3,630 hits and 475 home runs.

Russell, who played center for the Boston Celtics, "almost single-handedly redefined the game of basketball," the White House said. He was also the first black coach of a major U.S. sport.

Lewis, serving in the House since 1987, was head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, playing a key role in ending segregation, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington.

Johns, the first visual artist to win the national honor in 34 years, is best known for his 1954-1955 American flag painting. His subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture.

Buffett, sometimes called the "Oracle of Omaha," is one of the world's most successful investors and a notable philanthropist, pledging to give away 99 percent of his fortune.

Merkel is Germany's first female chancellor and the first Eastern German to lead the reunified country. Ma is considered the world's greatest living cellist. Klein is recognized for sharing powerful message of hope, inspiration, love and humanity.

Sweeney, president emeritus of the AFL-CIO, worked his way up the labor movement from jobs as a domestic worker and bus driver. Mendez played an instrumental role at age 8 in a landmark 1946 desegregation case that paved the way for the U.S. civil rights movement.

Smith, sister of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy, is a former U.S. ambassador to Ireland who founded VSA to help people with disabilities engage with the arts. Adams' 41-year tenure as an environmental leader "is unparalleled," the White House said.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/02/15/15-to-get-Presidential-Medal-of-Freedom/UPI-99531297762200/

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From the White House

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Keeping Military Families Close to Our Hearts

Every February, couples and families take a special day to share their commitment and affection on Valentine's Day. This year, I had the opportunity to spend my Valentine's Day with soldiers and military families to share my appreciation for all they do and to reaffirm the Administration's commitment to support our service members and their families.

I traveled to Fort Stewart, Georgia, with Army Chief of Staff General George Casey and his wife Sheila. Fort Stewart is home to the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, and more than 5,000 soldiers from the base are deployed overseas. Visiting with the families was a great privilege, and the pride that each of them had in the service of their loved ones was plain to see.

For families, being apart on a day like today can be especially tough. Some of our service members in the Navy put together a special video of Valentine's messages from home to sailors, aviators, and Marines abroad.

I hope that every American keeps in their thoughts and prayers the brave men and women of our armed forces and the families who eagerly await their safe return. Those families bear a heavy burden and bear it gladly, but it's our role as friends and neighbors to make sure they don't bear it alone.

As a military mom, I know how a simple act of kindness can make a difference.

Please take a minute to visit Serve.gov to find ways you can help support our military families.

--Jill

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/02/14/keeping-military-families-close-our-hearts

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From the Department of Homeland Security

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Keeping Our Kids Safe From Home Fires

Posted by: Glenn Gaines, Acting Administrator for the U.S. Fire Administration

Every winter, we see the number of fires in homes or apartment buildings rise, especially as families turn to alternative sources of heating during the winter months. This year is no exception – and a new report released today by the U.S. Fire Administration finds that the threat of serious injury or death from residential fires is especially high for young children under the age of five.

In fact, as USA Today reports this morning, according to this new study, 52 percent of all child fire deaths in 2007 involved children under the age of four, a slight increase from the most recent study previously conducted in 2004.

This is a figure that should be going down – not up. This latest report reveals a deeply troubling trend, and should serve as a wake up call for all of us. These deaths are preventable, and working together we can educate each other and save lives. You can read the full report here.

That's why today, FEMA, USFA, the National Commission on Children and Disasters, and a host of our other partners across the public health, children's advocacy and emergency management fields, are teaming up to raise awareness about these threats and how families can keep their homes and loved ones safe.

Our goal is to make sure that all members of the public have access to important information about simple steps we all can take to protect against the two leading causes of home fires during winter months: heating and cooking.

So – how can you get involved?

Join us – and our various partners in this – in helping us spread the word.

Visit our Kids Fire Safety page on www.ready.gov/kidsfiresafety.

Check out our new widget -- and post it on your website: http://www.ready.gov/kidsfiresafety/join.html.

And join our online conversation. We want to engage anyone with good or innovative tips about how you, your local fire station, or your community is helping protect families from home fires. Join us our discussion on Twitter by using #kidsfiresafety. As always, you can follow FEMA @FEMA or Administrator Fugate @craigatfema.

Or leave us a comment below. And as you stay warm in our remaining winter months, remember to stay safe!

http://blog.fema.gov/2011/02/keeping-our-kids-safe-from-home-fires.html

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From the DEA

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Seven Defendants Charged with Conspiring to Aid the Taliban

NEW YORK – Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrator Michele M. Leonhart and Preet Bharara, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced today the unsealing of charges against seven defendants for conspiring to provide various forms of support to DEA confidential sources whom they believed to be representatives of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The seven defendants are: Maroun Saade, Walid Nasr, aka "David Nasr," Francis Sourou Ahissou, aka "Francois," Corneille Dato, aka "Pablo," Martin Raouf Bouraima, aka "Raul," Alwar Pouryan, aka "Allan," aka "Alberto," and Oded Orbach, aka "Dedy," aka "Jesse".

As alleged in the charging documents unsealed today in Manhattan federal court, the assistance the defendants allegedly agreed to provide the Taliban took various forms. Some of the defendants agreed to receive, store, and move ton-quantities of Taliban-owned heroin through West Africa, portions of which they understood would then be sent to the United States. Some defendants agreed to sell substantial quantities of cocaine that the Taliban could sell at a profit in the United States. Saade, along with U.S. citizens Pouryan and Orbach, agreed to sell weapons to the Taliban, including surface-to- air missiles ("SAMs"), to be used to protect Taliban-owned heroin laboratories against United States attack in Afghanistan.

"Today we eliminated an entrenched global criminal network, preventing it from moving ton quantities of cocaine, laundering millions in drug money, and trading arms to the Taliban to undermine the rule of law and kill Americans. West Africa has emerged as a place where drugs and terror intersect,” said DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart. “Working alongside our courageous partners there, and around the world, we will continue to uncover, disrupt, dismantle, and bring to justice narcoterrorist organizations like this one."

"As alleged, the defendants charged today, including two U.S. citizens, were prepared to provide millions of dollars in dangerous narcotics and lethal weapons to men they believed represented the Taliban. This alleged effort to arm and enrich the Taliban is the latest example of the dangers of an interconnected world in which terrorists and drug runners can link up across continents to harm Americans,” said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. “We will continue to work with our trusted law enforcement partners here and abroad to incapacitate and hold accountable anyone who takes steps to assist enemies of the United States."

According to the Indictment and Complaint unsealed today: Beginning in the summer of 2010, the defendants communicated with confidential sources ("CSs") working with the DEA who purported to represent the Taliban. The communications occurred by telephone, via email, and in a series of audio recorded and videotaped meetings over several months in Benin, Ghana, Ukraine, and Romania. During meetings with the CSs beginning in June 2010 in Benin and Ghana, Saade, Nasr, Dato, and Bouraima agreed to receive and store multi-ton shipments of Taliban-owned heroin in Benin. Thereafter, these four defendants agreed to transport the heroin to Ghana, from where they understood portions of the heroin would be sent on a commercial airplane to the United States to be sold for the financial benefit of the Taliban.

During these meetings, defendants Saade, Nasr, Ahissou, Dato, and Bouraima also agreed to sell multi-kilogram quantities of cocaine to the Taliban that they could then sell at a profit. Like the heroin, the defendants understood that portions of the cocaine sold to the CSs would be transported to the United States by commercial airline and then sold in this country.

During meetings in Ghana, Ukraine, and Romania beginning in October 2010, defendants Saade, Pouryan, and Orbach, at different times, agreed to arrange the sale of weapons, including SAMs, to the CSs for the Taliban's use in Afghanistan. Saade introduced the CSs to Pouryan, whom Saade described as a weapons trafficker affiliated with Hezbollah. The CSs thereafter engaged in a series of meetings with Pouryan and Orbach during which Pouryan and Orbach discussed specifications, pricing, and the provision of training for the sale of various weapons, including, among others, SAMs, anti-tank missiles, grenade launchers, AK-47s, and M-16s.

Five of the defendants – Saade, Nasr, Ahissou, Dato, and Bouraima – were arrested in Monrovia, Liberia, in coordination with Liberian authorities, on February 10 and 12, 2011, and were transferred thereafter by the Government of Liberia to the custody of the United States.

The two remaining defendants – Pouryan and Orbach – were arrested in Bucharest, Romania, in coordination with Romanian authorities, on February 10, 2011, where they remain pending extradition to the United States.

The charges contained in the Indictment and Complaint are merely accusations and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

http://www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/pressrel/pr021411.html

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