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March 27, 2011

Mexico City an unlikely draw for those fleeing drug war violence

Traffickers are aware of the risks of major provocations in Mexico City, home to the federal police, army, navy and intelligence services, not to mention many of the cartel leaders' families.

When the highway shootouts and roadblocks by gunmen in her hometown finally became too much, Karla Garza found sanctuary in the unlikeliest of places: the big, bad capital, Mexico City.

Garza, a 21-year-old marketing student, switched campuses in December after her parents decided that even with its rampant robberies and kidnappings, Mexico City was safer than their home in Monterrey, a once-quiet northern city that for months has served as a battlefield for warring drug gangs.

"Ten years ago, my parents never would have imagined sending me to live in [Mexico City]. It would have been insane," Garza said. Now, though, "the bad news is coming from Monterrey."

Mexico City used to be an emblem of runaway crime, viewed by many Mexicans as a viper pit that was best avoided if you didn't want to be mugged or forced at gunpoint to withdraw money from ATMs and hand it over. But four years of drug violence across much of the rest of the country suddenly has Mexico City looking like an island of tranquillity, despite its rampant petty crime.

"We haven't had heads cut off. We don't have blockades. We don't have houses on fire. We don't have bombs. We don't have shooting in the streets," said Eduardo Gallo, president of the anti-crime group Mexico United Against Crime. "We have some robberies, but we don't see armed people in vans and trucks chasing each other."

Los Angeles Times

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Rapes of Women Show Clash of Old and New India

GHAZIABAD, India — The young lovers met at a secluded spot next to a field of wheat at the edge of this sprawling suburb of New Delhi, where the timeless India of mustard fields and bullock carts abuts the frantically rising apartment towers of the budding middle class. They went seeking solitude, but instead found themselves at the violent cusp of old India and new.

There, according to the police, five drunken young men from a nearby farming village accosted the couple last month, beating the young man and gang-raping the woman. It was the latest in a series of brutal sexual assaults and gang rapes of women in India's booming capital and its sprawling suburbs.

In each case there has been an explosive clash between the rapidly modernizing city and the embattled, conservative village culture upon which the capital increasingly encroaches. The victims are almost invariably young, educated working women who are enjoying freedom unknown even a decade ago. The accused are almost always young high school dropouts from surrounding villages, where women who work outside the home are often seen as lacking in virtue and therefore deserving of harassment and even rape.

“If these girls roam around openly like this, then the boys will make mistakes,” the mother of two of those accused in the rape said in an interview, refusing to give her name.

It is a deeply ingrained attitude that has made New Delhi, by almost any measure, the most dangerous large city in India for women. The rate of reported rape is nearly triple that of Mumbai, and 10 times as high as Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, according to government records. A survey completed last year by the government and several women's rights groups found that 80 percent of women had faced verbal harassment in Delhi and that almost a third had been physically harassed by men.

New York Times

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A Girl's Nude Photo, and Altered Lives

LACEY, Wash. — One day last winter Margarite posed naked before her bathroom mirror, held up her cellphone and took a picture. Then she sent the full-length frontal photo to Isaiah, her new boyfriend. Both were in eighth grade.

They broke up soon after. A few weeks later, Isaiah forwarded the photo to another eighth-grade girl, once a friend of Margarite's. Around 11 o'clock at night, that girl slapped a text message on it.

“Ho Alert!” she typed. “If you think this girl is a whore, then text this to all your friends.” Then she clicked open the long list of contacts on her phone and pressed “send.”

In less than 24 hours, the effect was as if Margarite, 14, had sauntered naked down the hallways of the four middle schools in this racially and economically diverse suburb of the state capital, Olympia. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of students had received her photo and forwarded it.

In short order, students would be handcuffed and humiliated, parents mortified and lessons learned at a harsh cost. Only then would the community try to turn the fiasco into an opportunity to educate.

Around the country, law enforcement officials and educators are struggling with how to confront minors who “sext,” an imprecise term that refers to sending sexual photos, videos or texts from one cellphone to another.

New York Times

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F.B.I. Casts Wide Net Under Relaxed Rules for Terror Inquiries, Data Show

WASHINGTON — Within months after the Bush administration relaxed limits on domestic-intelligence gathering in late 2008, the F.B.I. assessed thousands of people and groups in search of evidence that they might be criminals or terrorists, a newly disclosed Justice Department document shows.

In a vast majority of those cases, F.B.I. agents did not find suspicious information that could justify more intensive investigations. The New York Times obtained the data, which the F.B.I. had tried to keep secret, after filing a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

The document, which covers the four months from December 2008 to March 2009, says the F.B.I. initiated 11,667 “assessments” of people and groups. Of those, 8,605 were completed. And based on the information developed in those low-level inquiries, agents opened 427 more intensive investigations, it says.

The statistics shed new light on the F.B.I.'s activities in the post-Sept. 11 era, as the bureau's focus has shifted from investigating crimes to trying to detect and disrupt potential criminal and terrorist activity.

It is not clear, though, whether any charges resulted from the inquiries. And because the F.B.I. provided no comparable figures for a period before the rules change, it is impossible to determine whether the numbers represent an increase in investigations.

New York Times

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March 26, 2011

It's Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know

A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.

But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.

The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.

Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones. Unlike many online services and Web sites that must send “cookies” to a user's computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to sit back and hit “record.”

“We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” said Sarah E. Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University's architecture school. “We don't even know we are giving up that data.”

New York Times

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Southern Lawmakers Focus on Illegal Immigrants

Some of the toughest bills in the nation aimed at illegal immigrants are making their way through legislatures in the South.

Proposed legislation in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, where Republicans control the legislatures and the governors' mansions, have moved further than similar proposals in many other states, where concerns about the legality and financial impact of aggressive immigration legislation have stopped lawmakers.

Dozens of immigration-related bills showed up early in legislative sessions across the South. Some were aimed at keeping illegal immigrants from college or from marrying American citizens. Most died quickly, but three proposals designed to give police broader powers to identify and report illegal immigrants are moving forward.

The conservative political landscape, and a relatively recent and large addition of Latinos, both new immigrants and legal residents from other states, have contributed to the batch of legislation, say supporters and opponents of the proposed laws.

“The South has become a new gateway for immigrants,” said Wendy Sefsaf of the Immigration Policy Center, a research organization. “People see the culture shift, and they are a little bit freaked out.”

The Hispanic population in Alabama, for example, has increased by 144 percent since 2000, according to new census figures. In Mississippi, the numbers jumped by 106 percent, and in North Carolina by 111 percent. Over all, however, numbers remain small. Only about 4 percent of the population in Alabama is Hispanic. In South Carolina, the figure is 5 percent.

New York Times

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Trying to Save a City, or at Least a Part

DETROIT — In a city where residents are still fleeing at a historic rate, there is no shortage of clichéd reminders that this place has been redefined by abandonment: crumbling factories, blocks filled with boarded-up houses, and empty streets overgrown with weeds.

But here, along the tidy, tree-lined streets that wind through a collection of neighborhoods known as Grandmont Rosedale, where owning one of the stately brick homes has long been a local symbol of success for the city's striving middle class, residents are digging in to fight the flight and hold their community together.

They chip in for services the city has trouble affording, like snow plowing. They band together for neighborhood crime patrols. They run sports leagues, hold block parties and circulate community letters. And they try to keep the place filled with people.

Marsha Bruhn, a longtime resident and retired director of the Detroit Planning Commission, watched with alarm as several nearby houses fell into disrepair after their owners departed. First she paid to have the lawns mowed. Then she ran off squatters. Finally, she took a bolder step: buying, renovating and reselling two houses. And she is in the process of trying to buy a third.

“I did it because I was tired of what was happening,” Ms. Bruhn said. “It was having a negative impact on my property, on our street and our neighborhood. I want to be part of the solution.” The dedicated corps of local volunteers is having some success, though victories in Detroit are measured by a different standard.

Once the fourth-largest city in America, with a peak population of 1.85 million, Detroit now ranks 18th, with 713,777 residents, according to census data released this week.

New York Times

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The Shame of New York's Group Homes

Nearly four decades ago, amid repeated scandals, New York State closed the huge state hospitals that essentially warehoused the developmentally disabled. Now, an investigation by The Times has shown that New York's group homes for the disabled — thousands of widely dispersed, state-licensed residences that were intended to replace and mitigate the cruelty of the warehouses — have themselves gone to rot.

The system, as Danny Hakim reported, operates with little oversight and tolerates shocking abuses. Employees who sexually attack, beat, berate or neglect patients can do so with little risk of punishment. Crimes are not reported, accusations are ignored by senior officials, repeat abusers are shuffled from home to home. A web of union rules shields problem employees.

There were 13,000 allegations of abuse in group homes in 2009 alone, though fewer than 5 percent were referred to law enforcement. The state Office for People With Developmental Disabilities prefers to investigate such matters internally, even though, as The Times reported, it does not use standard evidence-gathering techniques and its investigators generally lack training.

The results speak for themselves. The Times reviewed 399 disciplinary cases involving 233 state workers accused since 2008 of serious offenses like physical abuse and neglect. Each case involved substantiated charges against a worker who had already been disciplined at least once. In one-quarter of the cases involving physical, sexual or psychological abuse, the workers were transferred to other homes. The state tried to fire 129. Against stiff resistance from the Civil Service Employees Association, it fired only 30.

New York Times

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Martinsville student is shot at school; suspect is 15

MARTINSVILLE, Ind. -- Dylan Gregory and his classmates hid under their desks in a locked classroom. An administrator whisked Sierra Smith past police cars clustered around the school's entrance.

Deborah Lewis realized only after she got home that the two quick pops she had heard as she drove away from her son Jacob's school were gunshots.

"I called him and he said, 'Mom, it was 20 feet from me,' " she said, tearing up.

Students and parents struggled to make sense Friday of the shooting of one 15-year-old boy -- allegedly by another -- inside the doors of West Middle School just before classes started.

The Morgan County prosecutor's office expects to file charges against the suspect as early as Monday, Deputy Prosecutor Bob Cline said.

The victim, Chance Jackson, an eighth-grader at the school, was in critical but stable condition after undergoing surgery at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, police said.

Police found and arrested the suspect, who had fled on foot, a few miles from the school less than an hour after the shooting, Indiana State Police spokesman Sgt. Curt Durnil said. A search dog later found a handgun south of the middle school, near a shopping center.

IndyStar.com

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Get prepared for earthquake that could hit the area

The 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami earlier this month decimated parts of Japan: More than 25,000 people are either dead or missing, with the number expected to rise. Buildings were toppled and villages washed away. And this occurred in a country widely held as one of the best prepared for a natural disaster.

The horrifying results and images have forced cities, states and countries all over the world to again ask the question, what if it happened here?

Bellevue Emergency Management hosted a forum Wednesday to discuss that exact question. Disaster preparation officials emphasized geological similarities to the area of Japan where the quake struck on March 11. The latest death/missing persons toll could have been more if it weren't for the extensive pre-planning that was done in Japan.

"Japan is probably the most prepared place in the world," said Bellevue Emergency Manager Luke Meyers. “They do things that we have not even thought about in our country. They have a real level of commitment. Their level of resolve and preparedness is something we should all admire.”

Like Japan, Western Washington sits on a subduction zone, a spot where an oceanic tectonic plate collides with, and slides underneath, a continental plate. The earthquakes occur when rocks break and crumble.

The zone rests approximately 50 miles off the coast, and has produced several large earthquakes in the past, including the 2001 Nisqually quake that measured a 6.8 magnitude. "We sit on a very similar situation to Japan," Meyers said.

SeattlePI.com

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March 25, 2011

Border battle over illegal immigration shifts to beaches

U.S. and Mexican authorities try to stem a rising tide of illegal immigration by boat.

The immigrants heard the engine slow as the pilot steered through breakers. Twelve hours earlier, they had shoved off from a beach near Ensenada. Now, they were bobbing off Red Beach at Camp Pendleton. Out in the darkness, California beckoned.

"Jump out!" barked the pilot.

The 17 immigrants climbed over the side of the rickety boat, stumbling and splashing their way through the surf where U.S. Marines usually charge ashore in armored vehicles during amphibious assault exercises.

"I couldn't run because I had been sitting in the boat for so long," said Maribel Ruiz. "But the pilot kept yelling, 'Run! Run! Run!' It was terrible."

Ruiz, a 40-year-old mother of two, ended up face down on the sand as U.S. Border Patrol agents lighted the beach with high-powered beams and corralled her and the other Mexican illegal immigrants. The pilot turned the boat around and sped off toward Mexico.

Similar scenes are playing out with increasing frequency along the Southern California coast as smugglers launch more immigrant and drug-filled vessels than ever before toward the state — about one every three days on average. Vessels still land at San Diego-area beaches but are also traveling as far north as Huntington Beach and Newport Beach. Drug smugglers venturing even farther have been caught on Catalina Island and Santa Rosa Island, off the Santa Barbara coast.

Last year, 867 illegal immigrants and smugglers were arrested at sea or along the California coast, more than double the number in 2009. Border authorities have had to redeploy agents from the land border to the coast, where they scan the ocean with night-vision goggles and give chase across dunes instead of fields.

"I used to think that the [border] was the fence....All of a sudden this has become the front line in our efforts," said U.S. Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Steve McPartland at the San Clemente station, speaking to boaters and residents at Dana Point Harbor.
Los Angeles Times

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Mexico news companies agree to drug war coverage guidelines

The 10-point accord, covering more than 700 outlets across Mexico, calls on news-gathering organizations to find ways to protect their journalists and to avoid glorifying crime bosses.

Many of Mexico's top media companies agreed Thursday on first-ever guidelines for covering a drug war that has drastically increased risks for journalists. The 10-point accord, covering more than 700 outlets across the country, calls on news-gathering organizations to find ways to protect their journalists and avoid glorifying crime bosses.

The guidelines also urge news organizations to unite against threats to journalists, such as by jointly publishing stories. Under the agreement, the companies should draw up standards for showing violent images, such as decapitated bodies, and provide more context when reporting on drug violence.

Mexico's drug war, launched by President Felipe Calderon in late 2006, has put Mexican news organizations in a tough spot: They have been attacked or threatened by drug gangs and also accused by the government and others of sensationalizing carnage that has killed more than 35,000 people. "The media have a responsibility to act with professionalism and question ourselves about the potential implications of how news is handled," the six-page agreement says.

But written guidelines may do little practical good in zones such as the northern state of Tamaulipas, where drug gangs have already in effect muzzled news organizations, leaving residents in the dark about the violence raging around them. Many people in these places rely on social networks, such as Twitter, to trade information on street shootouts and other incidents.

More than 30 journalists have been killed or have disappeared in Mexico since Calderon began the crackdown, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Los Angeles Times

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U.S. border towns safe, Homeland Security chief says

Janet Napolitano insists security along the border with Mexico 'is better now than it has ever been.'

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Thursday that security on the southern U.S. border "is better now than it ever has been" and that violence from neighboring Mexico hasn't spilled over in a serious way.

Napolitano spoke at the Bridge of the Americas border crossing after a meeting with the mayors of the border towns of El Paso, Nogales, Ariz., and Yuma, Ariz. Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade Francisco Sanchez and Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin also were present.

Napolitano said the Department of Homeland Security will deploy 250 more border agents and expects to have 300 more under the agency's next budget if it is approved. She said Homeland Security is investing "millions of dollars in the side of commerce and trade" to improve infrastructure and technology along the border.

She added, however, that there is a need to correct wrong impressions about the border region. Napolitano said border towns are safe for travel, trade and commerce. She said the total value of imports crossing the Southwest border was up 22% in fiscal year 2010. "There is a perception that the border is worse now than it ever has been. That is wrong. The border is better now than it ever has been," she said.

The perception that the violence in Mexico has spilled over to bordering U.S. cities is "wrong again," Napolitano said. Violent crime rates have remained flat or decreased in border communities in the Southwest, she said. However, she recognized that "there is much to do with [their] colleagues in Mexico in respect to the drug cartels" that are largely responsible for the unprecedented wave of violence in that country.

El Paso Mayor John Cook said his city has been ranked the safest city in the country of its size, despite being across the border from Ciudad Juarez, which is at the center of Mexico's drug cartel violence. "The lie about border cities being dangerous has been told so many times that people are starting to believe it, but we as border communities have to speak out," Cook sad.

Los Angeles Times

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Hispanic population tops 50 million in U.S.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports the Hispanic population has surpassed 50 million and accounted for more than half of the 27.3-million population increase in the last decade.

The Hispanic population in the United States grew by 43% in the last decade, surpassing 50 million and accounting for about 1 out of 6 Americans, the Census Bureau reported Thursday.

Analysts seized on data showing that the growth was propelled by a surge in births in the U.S., rather than immigration, pointing to a growing generational shift in which Hispanics continue to gain political clout and, by 2050, could make up a third of the U.S. population.

"In the adult population, many immigrants helped the increase, but the child population is increasingly more Hispanic," said D'Vera Cohn, a senior writer at the Pew Research Center.

In 2010, Hispanics made up 23% of people under the age 18, compared with 17% in 2000. In California, 51% of children are Hispanic, up from 44% in 2000.

Overall, Hispanics accounted for more than half of the 27.3 million U.S. population increase since 2000.

About 75% of Hispanics live in the nine states that have long-standing Hispanic populations — Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York and Texas.

That figure is down from 81% in 2000, indicating the population has begun dispersing to other parts of the country, particularly in the Southeast, Cohn said.

Los Angeles Times

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L.A. County leads U.S. in hunger study

More than 1.7 million Los Angeles County residents struggled with hunger in 2009, more than in any other county in America, according to new research published by Feeding America, the country's largest network of food banks.

The study, called Map the Meal Gap, uses statistics collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Census Bureau and other agencies to profile food insecurity across America.

“It's hard to imagine in a nation that grows much of the world's food that people cannot always afford to feed themselves or their kids,” said Vicki Escarra, Feeding America's president and chief executive.

“But the fact is that domestic hunger is a serious problem.”

The study found that there are people in every county who at times can't provide enough food for an active and healthy life for every household member -- the USDA measure for food insecurity. Rates ranged from 5% in Steel County, S.D. to 38% in Wilcox County, Ala.

At nearly 17%, the rate in Los Angeles was about the same as the national average. But in nearby Imperial County, it climbed to more than 31%

Los Angeles Times

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Accused serial killer put on accelerated track toward trial

The case against accused serial killer Lonnie David Franklin Jr. was put on an accelerated track toward trial Thursday, when he was arraigned on a grand jury indictment charging him with killing 10 women.

Franklin, 58, was arrested in July, and prosecutors filed charges accusing him of killing the 10 women over two decades, beginning in the 1980s.

Typically, the next step in the legal proceedings would have been for prosecutors to present evidence against Franklin at a preliminary hearing to convince a judge that there was sufficient reason to order Franklin to stand trial. Eight months after the arrest, however, the date for a preliminary hearing still had not been set. Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley opted to take a different route, turning instead to a grand jury.

After hearing six days of testimony by 40 witnesses, the jurors found that there was sufficient evidence against Franklin, who will now proceed directly to a criminal trial. A trial date was not set.

Franklin allegedly killed seven women between 1985 and 1988 and three between 2002 and 2007 -- all in South Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Times

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San Gabriel shuts down makeshift maternity ward catering to 'birthing tourism'

From the outside, they were typical Southern Californian townhouses with bright white walls and Spanish tile roofs. But inside, a new kind of international business thrived -– maternity wards for wealthy expectant mothers from across the Pacific.

For a fee, Chinese women received room and board and a chance to deliver their babies in the United States and become mothers to instant U.S. citizens.

Southern California has become a hub for this growing phenomenon, known as birthing tourism. One such business was busted earlier this month when code enforcement officials from the city of San Gabriel responded to a complaint about noise and an unusual number of pregnant women in a quiet Palm Avenue neighborhood.

When officials went to the location, they found about 10 mothers and seven newborns living in three townhouses that had been illegally converted into maternity wards.

"The people were sitting and eating at a table, all the babies were in bassinets with a nurse attending to them," said Jennifer Davis, community development director for the city of San Gabriel.

"They had moved walls around without proper permits; they did interior work that can sometimes create unsafe environments afterward," Davis said. "And it's a business in a residential neighborhood. They are not permitted to operate there." The Chinese mothers have since left the U.S. or moved into hotels, officials said.

Los Angeles Times

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Second thoughts of a 'hanging judge'

A death sentence in California rarely leads to an execution. Let's stop the charade.

In 1978, the first time Jerry Brown was governor of California, he appointed me to a judgeship in the Superior Court of Orange County. It was a gutsy move on his part, a liberal Democrat naming a right-wing Republican to the bench. I served there until 1993, after which I sat on assignment on death cases throughout California.

During that time, I presided over 10 murder cases in which I sentenced the convicted men to die. As a result, I became known as "the hanging judge of Orange County," an appellation that, I will confess, I accepted with some pride.

The 10 were deemed guilty of horrifying crimes by their peers, and in the jurors' view as well as mine they deserved to die at the hands of the state. However, as of today, not one of them has been executed (though one died in prison of natural causes).

I am deeply angered by the fact that our system of laws has become so complex and convoluted that it makes mockery of decisions I once believed promised resolution for the family members of victims.

That said, I have followed the development of legal thinking and understand why our nation's Supreme Court, in holding that "death is different," has required that special care be taken to safeguard the rights of those sentenced to death. Such wisdom protects our society from returning to the barbarism of the past. And though I find it discomfiting and to a significant degree embarrassing that appellate courts have found fault with some of my statements, acts or decisions, I can live with the fact that their findings arise out of an attempt to ensure that the process has been scrupulously fair before such a sentence is carried out.

I can live with it and, apparently, so can the men I condemned. The first one, Rodney James Alcala, whom I sentenced to die more than 30 years ago for kidnapping and killing 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, was, just last year, again sentenced to death for killing Samsoe and four other young women who, it has subsequently been determined, were his victims around the same time.

Los Angeles Times

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Delayed Miranda Warning Ordered for Terror Suspects

WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation has instructed agents to interrogate suspected “operational terrorists” about immediate threats to public safety without advising them of their Miranda rights to remain silent and to have an attorney present.

A three-page F.B.I. memorandum, dated Oct. 21, 2010, also encouraged agents to use a broad interpretation of public safety-related questions. It said that the “magnitude and complexity” of the terrorist threat justified “a significantly more extensive public safety interrogation without Miranda warnings than would be permissible in an ordinary criminal case.”

“Depending on the facts, such interrogation might include, for example, questions about possible impending or coordinated terrorist attacks; the location, nature and threat posed by weapons that might post an imminent danger to the public; and the identities, locations, and activities or intentions of accomplices who may be plotting additional imminent attacks,” the memo said.

In the Miranda case, the Supreme Court ruled that if prosecutors want to use statements made by the defendant while in custody against him, police must have warned him of his rights before those statements were made. The court later created an exception for answers to questions about immediate threats to public safety.

The practice of reading Miranda warnings to terrorism suspects arrested in the United States has led to political disputes. In particular, Republicans, seeking to portray the Obama administration as soft on terrorism, criticized the reading of a Miranda warning to the main suspect in the failed bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009.

Obama administration officials said the warnings had not prevented interrogators from gaining intelligence from such suspects, and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, testified in July 2010 that agents were already using a broad interpretation of the public safety exception to the Miranda rule in terrorism cases.

New York Times

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Readout of Secretary Napolitano's Visit to El Paso

Washington, D.C. — Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano today traveled to El Paso, Texas, to visit the Bridge of the Americas at the El Paso Port of Entry, meet with El Paso business leaders and border mayors, and highlight how the Department of Homeland Security's unprecedented efforts to strengthen border security have facilitated trade and travel along the Southwest border.

"The Obama administration is committed to fostering a secure and prosperous border region," said Secretary Napolitano. "I'm proud to join with local leaders on the ground to get the message out that the border is open for business."

During the visit and meeting with local business leaders, Secretary Napolitano was joined by Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade Francisco Sanchez, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Alan Bersin and El Paso Mayor John Cook, as well as Mayor Arturo Garino of Nogales and Mayor Al Kreiger of Yuma, Ariz., who reiterated their shared commitment to strengthening security and economic growth in the border region. The business leaders discussed their ideas on ways to further facilitate commerce along the Southwest border and underscored the importance of combating misperceptions about the safety and security of border communities in order to grow the region's economy.

The Obama administration has made great strides in ensuring that legal trade and travel flows across the border as quickly as possible—working with local leaders to update infrastructure and reduce wait times at our Southwest border ports of entry while increasing security. More than 1,700 private-sector partners in Mexico are enrolled in the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) trusted-shipper program, and CBP is deploying 250 new officers to ports along the border as a result of the FY 2010 Border Security Supplemental.

These unprecedented investments have yielded real results, with import values for CBP's El Paso Field Office increasing 40 percent from fiscal year 2009 to fiscal year 2010, as well as a 22 percent increase in the total value of imports crossing the Southwest border into the United States during that same period.

Dept of Homeland Security

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Attorney General Launches Law Enforcement Officer Safety Initiative

WASHINGTON – In the wake of an increase in law enforcement officer fatalities, Attorney General Eric Holder launched a law enforcement officer safety initiative today, directing every U.S. Attorney to meet with federal, state and local law enforcement officials in their districts to ensure the department's resources are made available to help stem officer deaths. In addition, Attorney General Holder convened a meeting of law enforcement officers in Washington, D.C., to solicit input for further action to improve officer safety.

“Our law enforcement officers put themselves in harm's way every day to ensure the safety and security of the American people in cities and communities across the country, and we need to do everything we can to protect them,” Attorney General Holder said.

After a two-year decline in law enforcement fatalities, 2010 was one of the deadliest years on record for law enforcement in nearly two decades. Since the beginning of this year, 27 law enforcement officers around the country were killed either by firearms or felonious assaults, including Deputy U.S. Marshal Derek Hotsinpiller in West Virginia, Deputy U.S. Marshal John Perry in Missouri and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Jaime Zapata in Mexico. This is an increase of more than 13 % in fatalities over 2010, when 20 officers were killed by firearms or felonious assault at this same point in time.

In his memo to U.S. Attorneys, Attorney General Holder laid out several steps for them to take immediately:

Ask local prosecutors to identify the “worst of the worst” – offenders with criminal histories who cycle in and out of local jails and state prisons – and discuss whether any of these repeat offenders may be prosecuted under federal law for offenses that make the offender eligible for a stiffer sentence.

Dept of Justice

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Sex Trafficking Ring Leader Sentenced to 40 Years in Prison Amador Cortes-Meza Smuggled Victims from Mexico; Forced Them into Prostitution

WASHINGTON – Amador Cortes-Meza, 36, of Tlaxcala, Mexico, was sentenced today by U.S. District Judge Richard W. Story to serve 40 years in federal prison followed by five years of supervised release on charges of sex trafficking of minors; sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion; transporting minors for the purpose of prostitution; smuggling aliens into the United States for purposes of prostitution; and conspiracy to do the same, announced the Department of Justice.

Cortes-Meza was also ordered to pay restitution to the victims in the amount of $292,000. The sentencing follows Cortes-Meza's conviction on these charges on Nov. 21, 2010 after a trial.

“The victims suffered sexual abuse, physical assaults, threats of harm to their families, and daily degradation all because of this defendant's greed and callous disregard for them as individuals. The court's sentence clearly reflects the seriousness of these awful sex trafficking crimes,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “We are committed to prosecuting sex traffickers and vindicating victims' rights, as they were vindicated today.”

U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia Sally Quillian Yates said, “No one wants to believe that there are people who will enslave other human beings and require them to commit innumerable commercial sex acts. Yet this intolerable crime is happening right in our own neighborhoods in metropolitan Atlanta. This defendant tricked young girls and juveniles into leaving their families in Mexico, beat them, and forced them into more than 20 acts of prostitution a night here in Atlanta. These survivors courageously testified against the defendant and played a significant role in bringing him to justice. This defendant earned every day of his 40 year sentence.”

Dept of Justice

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139 convicted criminal aliens and fugitives arrested in ICE enforcement surge

MANASSAS, Va. - Following an enforcement surge by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), Virginia State Police, and U.S. Marshals Service along with 10 local law enforcement agencies, ICE arrested 130 foreign nationals with criminal records and eight fugitives in the Northern Virginia area.

During a three-day operation that concluded Tuesday, ICE ERO officers located and arrested 130 criminal aliens with prior convictions for a variety of crimes, including rape, assault, burglary and narcotics possession and eight fugitives and three re-entry cases.

"We are a nation with a proud history of immigration. If you come here lawfully, work hard, and play by the rules, the United States welcomes you with open arms," said ICE Director John Morton. "For those who come here unlawfully and commit crimes at the expense of their neighbors and their communities, we will not rest until we find you and send you home."

"Once again through our working relationship with ICE, Virginia has had the opportunity to continue to safeguard its communities from convicted criminals," said Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell. "Despite the legal permanent resident status of some of these individuals, their crimes clearly violated the conditions allowing them to legitimately remain in this country. Removing them from our neighborhoods prevents them from victimizing our Virginia residents and businesses again. I applaud the fine work of our local, state, and federal law enforcement."

ICE

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Kingsford, Michigan Man Arrested on Charges in Connection with Explosive Components Found at Federal Building in Detroit

A 42-year old man from Kingsford, Michigan, located in the Upper Peninsula, was arrested this morning on charges relating to explosive components found at the McNamara Federal Building in Detroit on February 26, 2011, announced United States Attorney Barbara L. McQuade. McQuade was joined in the announcement by Andrew G. Arena, Special Agent in Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Arrested was Gary John Mikulich. Mikulich will be making an appearance in federal court in Marquette tomorrow morning. Mikulich is an engineering graduate of Michigan Tech University who has long complained of the FBI generally, and FBI Detroit in particular. Specifically, Mikulich frequently complains to local law enforcement officers about the FBI's "card system." This "card system" is responsible, according to Mikulich's complaints to local law enforcement officers, for the murder of Mikulich's father and thousands of other people.

Mikulich and his vehicle match the description of an individual who purchased a Husky brand tool bag and a GE timer used in the commission of the crime alleged in the complaint. Mikulich made the purchase of these items from the Home Depot store in Iron Mountain, Michigan, on February 14, 2011. Moreover, Mikulich's white Oldsmobile was spotted in Livingston County–450 miles from his home and just 50 miles from Detroit–in the early morning hours of February 25, 2011.

Also, search warrants were executed this morning at Mukulich's residence and his vehicle. The complaint charges one count of 18 U.S.C. section 844(f), maliciously attempting to damage or destroy, by means of an explosive, any building, vehicle, or other personal or real property in whole or in part owned or possessed by, or leased to, the United States, or any department or agency thereof. A conviction of this offense carries a penalty of 5-20 years in prison or a $250,000 fine, or both. Any sentence would ultimately be imposed under the United States Sentence Guidelines according to the nature of the offense and the criminal background, if any, of the defendant.

A complaint is only a charge and is not evidence of guilt.

Detroit FBI

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March 24, 2011

EGYPT: Rights group alleges military forced captured female protesters into taking 'virginity tests'

Female activists detained during the Egyptian army's evacuation of Tahrir Square on March 9 told human-rights organizations that they were beaten, tortured and forced to take virginity tests while in military custody.

Salwa Hosseini, 20, who was taken by soldiers to a military prison on the outskirts of Cairo, told Amnesty International that she and fellow female detainees were strip searched, photographed while naked and subjected to electric shocks. Hossein added that female guards warned the captured women they would be charged with prostitution if they didn't take medical tests to prove they were virgins.

"Forcing women to have 'virginity tests' is utterly unacceptable. Its purpose is to degrade women because they are women," Amnesty International said. "The Egyptian authorities must halt the shocking and degrading treatment of women protesters. Women fully participated in bringing change in Egypt and should not be punished for their activism."

The human-rights group alleges the tests were carried out by a male doctor and that one woman, who claimed to be virgin while tests proved otherwise, was beaten and given electric shocks.

"The army officers tried to further humiliate the women by allowing men to watch and photograph what was happening, with the implicit threat that the women could be at further risk of harm if the photographs were made public," Amnesty's statement added.

Los Angeles Times

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Bill to bar prison cellphones passes key vote in California Senate

After adding the threat of jail time for prison workers caught supplying cellphones to inmates, the Public Safety Committee approves the bill.

Reporting from Sacramento -- A proposed law against taking cellphones into California prisons passed a key vote Tuesday, but the measure would exempt prison employees — considered a main source of phones used to arrange crimes from behind bars — from screening by metal detectors as they go to work.

Requiring prison guards to stand in line for airport-like security checks would cost the state millions, according to legislative analysts. That is because members of the politically powerful corrections officers union are paid for "walk time" — the minutes it takes to get from their cars, or the front gate, to their posts inside the prisons.

Amid the state's budget crisis, any proposal that would cost money is a "dead end," said Bill Mabie, spokesman for state Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima), sponsor of the cellphone bill.

The Senate Public Safety Committee approved Padilla's measure, which would make smuggling a cellphone to an inmate a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $5,000 fine. The measure now heads to the Appropriations Committee.

As written, the bill, SB 26, did not apply the threat of jail time to prison employees, but the Public Safety Committee added that provision Tuesday.

"These cellphones are being brought in primarily, it appears, by people employed by our corrections system," said committee Chairwoman Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley). "To me this is not only a very egregious offense, but a breach of public trust."

Hancock made the comments after listening to Padilla and Terri McDonald, chief deputy secretary of adult operations for California prisons, list crimes directed by inmates with smuggled cellphones, including murders, kidnappings, drug deals and witness intimidation.

Los Angeles Times

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L.A.'s massage parlor mess

It's not enough to plead poverty, Los Angeles officials owe it to residents to enforce certification requirements to prevent the city becoming a haven for prostitution.

Can't Los Angeles do anything right? First it was billboards, legal and illegal, conventional and digital, that proliferated across the city as seemingly powerless officials fretted about what to do. For a while, every official action seemed to make matters worse. Then it was marijuana dispensaries that were suddenly everywhere, encouraged by inaction from City Hall. Belated attempts to regulate and police them were struck down in court. Dispensaries opened, closed and opened again.

Now it is, allegedly, prostitution, as self-described massage parlors have rapidly opened their doors within city limits, particularly in Eagle Rock and other northeastern neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The problem, as The Times' Kate Linthicum reported Wednesday, is that Los Angeles didn't keep up with a 2009 state law changing certification requirements for legitimate massage therapists. The law swept aside local regulation of therapists in favor of uniform state certification, but it allowed cities to demand that massage businesses show their state credentials. Other cities in the region required businesses to do just that, but in Los Angeles, officials merely asked the businesses if they were state certified. Presumably, many that had no state approval said "yes" because they didn't have to show any proof.

It's not enough to plead poverty. Yes, Los Angeles is under severe budget stress and has had to cut funding for the city attorney's office and other departments and agencies that otherwise might keep an eye on permitting. But the same is true of neighboring cities that still seem to muster enough attention to protect their neighborhoods.

Some may be tempted to dismiss the proliferation of massage parlors as not a big deal, on the grounds that they're merely places for consenting adults to engage in personal business, sexual or otherwise, behind closed doors. That's naive. Whether prostitution should be legal is not the issue. Currently, it's not, and Los Angeles' failure to pay attention has now made its streets the destination for massage customers from cities that no longer tolerate such establishments.

In other cities, officials are cracking down on the exploitation of women, many of them underage, whose illegal immigrant status makes them virtual slaves in the sex industry. But just as City Hall's regulatory and enforcement ineptitude drew "medical" marijuana dispensaries that brushed aside state law and engaged in straightforward sales to customers with or without medical need, massage parlors have arguably made northeast Los Angeles the region's prostitution capital. Angelenos certainly want their city leaders to bring in more jobs, but this is not what they had in mind.

Los Angeles Times

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Drug Wars Push Deeper Into Central America

SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — Josue Oviedo looked into his sister's fading eyes as she fought to speak her last words.

“She was trying to tell me something,” he said, a day after the funeral for Daisy Oviedo Mejía, 22, who died in a storm of bullets while watching her brother play soccer a few weeks ago. “But she couldn't. I gave her mouth-to-mouth but there was too much blood.”

Ms. Oviedo, a primary school teacher who liked to dance and sing with her students, was one of four people killed that day when gunmen opened fire at a park, the second such massacre here since November. She was innocent, the authorities said, another casualty in the violence and social ills rocking Central America as criminal groups turn the region into a main artery for funneling cocaine north to the United States.

Traffickers have used Central America as a stopover point since at least the 1970s. But the aggressive crackdowns on criminal organizations in Mexico and Colombia, coupled with strides in limiting smuggling across the Caribbean, have increasingly brought the powerful syndicates here, pushing the drug scourge deeper into small Central American countries incapable of combating it.

Most of the known cocaine shipments moving north, 84 percent of them, crossed through Central America last year, according to radar tracking data from American authorities — a sharp increase from 44 percent in 2008 and only 23 percent in 2006, the year President Felipe Calderón of Mexico took office and began his assault against the drug gangs in his country.

Responding to the pressure — and opportunity — the cartels have spread out quickly. Five of Central America's seven countries are now on the United States' list of 20 “major illicit drug transit or major illicit drug producing countries.” Three of those, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras, were added just last year.

New York Times

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Control Tower Unresponsive to 2 Planes in Washington

Two passenger airliners landed at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington without clearance or guidance from the airport's control tower early Wednesday, and officials were looking into the possibility that the air traffic controller on duty had fallen asleep.

One of the planes, an American Airlines Boeing 737 from Dallas, approached the airport around midnight but aborted its landing and circled the airport after pilots got no response from the tower. About 15 minutes later, a United Airlines Airbus 320 from Chicago also tried unsuccessfully to establish contact with the tower. Both planes made contact with a regional tower that guided them in, and both landed safely, said Peter Knudson, a National Transportation Safety Board spokesman.

Mr. Knudson said that it was unclear why the Reagan controller had not responded, and that the agency was looking into the possibility that the person had fallen asleep. In a statement, Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said the agency was looking into “staffing issues and whether existing procedures were followed appropriately.”

Both planes followed an established procedure for landing at an airport with unstaffed towers, which occurs at some smaller airports that do not have controllers in the early morning. When the first plane, American Airlines Flight 1012, approached the airport and did not get a response from the tower, the pilots radioed a regional center — the Potomac Terminal Radar Approach Control facilities. Workers there then tried unsuccessfully to reach the tower by phone. As the plane circled the airport, its pilots tuned into the control tower radio frequency, broadcasting their position, speed and distance to alert other planes as Flight 1012 came in for a landing.

That procedure helped clue in the pilots of the second plane that arrived 15 minutes later from Chicago. Mr. Knudson said that shortly after it landed, the controller at Reagan “became responsive.” Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary, said he had instructed the F.A.A. to study staffing levels at other airports, and told the agency to put two air traffic controllers on duty during the midnight shift at Reagan. “It is not acceptable to have just one controller in the tower managing air traffic in this critical air space,” he said.

New York Times

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Virginia: 160 Immigrants Arrested

More than 160 foreign citizens, most of them illegal immigrants with criminal records, were arrested in Northern Virginia over a three-day enforcement surge.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency announced the arrests in Manassas, where political leaders have faulted it for failing to aggressively enforce immigration laws.

New York Times

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For al-Qaida, Detroit was just the cheapest flight

When an admitted al-Qaida operative planned his itinerary for a Christmas 2009 airline bombing, he considered launching the strike in the skies above Houston or Chicago, The Associated Press has learned. But tickets were too expensive, so he refocused the mission on a cheaper destination: Detroit.

The decision is among new details emerging about one of the most sensational terrorism plots to unfold since President Barack Obama took office. It shows that al-Qaida's Yemen branch does not share Osama bin Laden's desire to attack symbolic targets, preferring instead to strike at targets of opportunity. Like the plot that nearly blew up U.S.-bound cargo planes last year, the cities themselves didn't matter. It's a strategy that has helped the relatively new group quickly become the No. 1 threat to the United States.

After the failed bombing and the arrest of suspected bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the question of why Detroit was targeted had gone unanswered. It was previously reported that Abdulmutallab did not specifically choose Christmas for his mission.

Abdulmutallab considered Houston, where he attended an Islamic conference in 2008, current and former counterterrorism officials told the AP. Another person with knowledge of the case said Abdulmutallab also considered Chicago but was discouraged by the cost. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

While the target and timing were unimportant, the mission itself was a highly organized plot that involved one of the FBI's most wanted terrorists and al-Qaida's go-to bomb maker, current and former officials said. Before Abdulmutallab set off on his mission, he visited the home of al-Qaida manager Fahd al-Quso to discuss the plot and the workings of the bomb.

Associated Press

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March 23, 2011

Report faults Army in 2001 anthrax mailings

Officials missed signs of alarming mental problems in Dr. Bruce Ivins, the scientist suspected in the deadly bioterrorism attacks.

The Army scientist believed responsible for the 2001 anthrax letter attacks that killed five people and crippled mail delivery in parts of the country had exhibited alarming mental problems that military officials should have noticed and acted on long before he had a chance to strike, a panel of behavioral analysts has found.

The anthrax attacks, the nation's worst bioterrorism event, "could have been anticipated — and prevented," the panel said.

The analysts also concluded that confidential records documenting Bruce E. Ivins' psychiatric history offered "considerable additional circumstantial evidence" that he was indeed the anthrax killer. A copy of the panel's 285-page report was obtained by The Times.

Ivins "was psychologically disposed to undertake the mailings; his behavioral history demonstrated his potential for carrying them out; and he had the motivation and means," the Expert Behavioral Analysis Panel said.

The anonymous, anthrax-laced letters, sent to news organizations and two U.S. senators in October and November 2001, raised fears of a second wave of terrorism after the Sept. 11 hijackings. Anthrax that leaked from one of the letters forced the closure of a Senate office building for three months. Fear of further contamination prompted a six-day shutdown of the House of Representatives and disrupted operations of the Supreme Court.

Los Angeles Times

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Erotic massage parlors proliferate in L.A. communities

Eagle Rock, Glassell Park and other areas have seen an explosion of massage parlors after a new state law on therapist certification. Fifteen have popped up on one two-mile stretch of Eagle Rock Boulevard.

First it was pot shops. Now it's erotic massage parlors. In the last two years, they've proliferated in the city — just as dispensaries did, and for a familiar reason. In both cases, Los Angeles failed to quickly assess and act upon the ramifications of a new state law.

Police say they've seen numerous illicit massage parlors open in Hollywood, Koreatown and the San Fernando Valley. But the biggest explosion has been in Eagle Rock, which is a community that was also inundated with medical marijuana dispensaries.

An online directory of erotic massage establishments lists nearly 30 in Eagle Rock and Glassell Park, including 15 on a two-mile stretch of Eagle Rock Boulevard. One of them, Surprise Massage, advertises "Fairytale Oriental Massage" with "Sexy Pretty Asian Girls NOW."

"You can drive down the street and see one on every block," said Michael Larsen, the president of the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council. "Our community is being inundated with prostitution."

The problem is connected to a 2009 state law that created voluntary state certification for massage therapists. The intent was to make it easier for legitimate massage therapists to work anywhere in the state.

Los Angeles Times

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Parents in Japan comb through school that's now a graveyard

Students and teachers at Ookawa Elementary School in Ishinomaki, Japan, knew just what to do in an earthquake. Yet nearly 100 of them died as the tsunami swept in.

Tatsuhiro Karino paused at the top of the muddy hill, took his wife, Masako, by the hand and led her slowly down to the ruins of the elementary school that entombed the body of their daughter, Misaki.

Dwarfed by four mammoth cranes digging into the wreckage, the 40ish construction worker gently pulled a veil over his wife's face to shield her from the dust and whiff of death.

But he couldn't protect her from this: the grim task of locating the body of their 8-year-old child, among the 94 students and teachers killed when their school was leveled March 11 in nature's twin strike of shaking ground and torrential wave.

The couple, who also lost their 11-year-old son, Tetsuya, in the devastation, Tuesday joined a clutch of fellow parents asking the same maddening question: How could so many children among the 108 at the school have perished when they followed all the safety rules for a natural disaster?

Authorities in this coastal town attribute the deaths to a turn of events no one had anticipated. With its first violent jolt, the magnitude 9 earthquake killed 10 teachers at Ookawa Elementary School, plunging the students into chaos.

Los Angeles Times

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Illegal immigrants disguised as U.S. Marines fail to get through border checkpoint

Thirteen illegal immigrants disguised themselves as U.S. Marines –- donning battle dress uniforms and caps -- in a failed attempt to get through a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint last week east of San Diego, authorities said.

The driver of the white van carrying the immigrants and another man, both U.S. citizens, were arrested March 14 at the I-8 checkpoint near Campo and charged with alien smuggling, according to U.S. Border Patrol officials.

Three of the illegal immigrants were detained as witnesses, while the rest were returned to Mexico, officials said.

The van drew suspicion in part because it had an altered U.S. Government license plate, authorities said. The investigation is being conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

The immigrants all had Marine-style haircuts and the name tag "Perez" on the their camouflage uniforms, U.S. Marine Corps officials said.

Such ploys have a long history along the border. Over the years, immigrants have disguised themselves as hard-hatted contractors and utility repairmen, and smugglers have painted and placed decals on cars to look like Border Patrol or other government vehicles.

Los Angeles Times

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Race Issues Rise for Miami Police

MIAMI — The video, shot with a hand-held camera, shows brawny Miami police officers breaking down doors and hauling handcuffed African-American suspects off some of the city's toughest streets. “We hunt,” one officer says in the five-and-a-half-minute clip. “I like to hunt.”

But it was not a source of embarrassment for Miami's police chief, Miguel A. Exposito. The video was part of a reality television pilot, “Miami's Finest SOS,” a project with the enthusiastic backing of Chief Exposito. “Our guys were proactively going out there, like predators,” he says during his cameo in the video, which surfaced online in January.

A few weeks later, a Miami police officer shot and killed a black man during a traffic stop at North Miami Avenue and 75th Street in the Little Haiti neighborhood. The man, Travis McNeil, 28, was unarmed and never left the driver's seat of his rental car when he was shot once in the chest, members of his family said.

Mr. McNeil was the seventh African-American man to be shot and killed by Miami police officers in eight months. The shootings in this racially polarized city have led to marches on the Police Department's headquarters and calls for a Justice Department investigation, and the city manager has initiated an investigation into the chief's record.

After pushing for action for weeks, the families of the seven shooting victims will speak at a City Commission meeting on Thursday. Some families are demanding that Chief Exposito be dismissed.

New York Times

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U.S. Returns Young Girl, a Citizen, to Guatemala

Leonel Ruiz, a landscaper in Brentwood, N.Y., was waiting at Kennedy International Airport on the early morning of March 11 for his 4-year-old daughter, Emily, to arrive home from a trip to Guatemala. The plane arrived hours late, but Emily was not on it, and neither was her grandfather, who was supposed to be escorting her back.

It took several hours for Mr. Ruiz to learn what had happened. Emily, a United States citizen, and her grandfather, a Guatemalan traveling with a valid work visa, had been detained by immigration authorities at Dulles International Airport near Washington, where the plane had been diverted because of bad weather. The officials had told Emily's grandfather that because of an immigration infraction two decades ago, he would not be allowed to stay in the country.

That has left Emily, a pigtailed native of Long Island, in an unusual limbo. As a citizen, she has the right to re-enter her country. But her parents are illegal immigrants, which has complicated the prospect of a reunion.

Today, Emily is in Guatemala, her parents are struggling to bring her home, and lawyers and federal officials are arguing over parental responsibility and citizenship rights. The Ruizes find themselves on the front lines of a heated immigration debate: how to treat families in which the parents are here illegally, while their children, born in the United States, are citizens.

The case comes as elected officials across the country have pushed for bills to end automatic citizenship for children, born here, who are sometimes referred to pejoratively as anchor babies. Immigrant advocates say the proposals are antithetical to American ideals.

New York Times

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Holder Meets With Police Chiefs

Police chiefs from around the country, meeting Tuesday with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., supported longer prison terms for gun-carrying felons as a way to combat a rise in police deaths in the line of duty.

Mr. Holder directed the 93 United States attorneys nationwide to identify repeat offenders for possible prosecution under federal law that would make them eligible for stiffer sentences. Last year, 162 officers died in the line of duty, up from 117 in 2009.

This year, 49 have lost their lives, a 20 percent rise from the same time last year.

New York Times

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March 22, 2011

El Salvador becomes drug traffickers' 'little pathway'

The country finds itself enmeshed in an expanding narcotics trade, a shift brought on by better enforcement of sea routes; a new, U.S.-funded highway; and gangs with roots in Los Angeles.

The Mexican drug gangs rapidly infiltrating Central America call El Salvador "El Caminito," the little pathway.

Once a bystander in the region's narco-business, this tiny country now finds itself enmeshed in an expanding drug trade, a shift brought on in part by the presence of a new, U.S.-funded highway that provides an overland route for shipping cocaine north.

For years, traffickers used speedboats and small submarine-type vessels to move drugs from Colombia to northern Guatemala or Mexico, using water routes to circumvent much of Central America. But with government sea patrols improving and new cartels creating competition in parts of Guatemala, some Mexican gangs have switched to moving their shipments overland through Central America, using the new roadway through El Salvador.

The cartels' infiltration of the country has been abetted by ruthless street gangs with roots in Los Angeles and secretive networks left over from El Salvador's civil war. And with its use of the U.S. dollar as its official currency, the nation is a money launderer's paradise.

Those conditions have turned a country still struggling to emerge from the nightmare of a long civil war into a new setting for the Mexican drug cartels' violent turf wars. When President Obama arrives here Tuesday for talks with Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes, the regional struggle with security and organized crime will be a focus of their discussions.

"Mexican organized crime is a threat in all of Central America," the Salvadoran attorney general, Romeo Barahona, said after meeting with his counterparts in Mexico to share intelligence on the mounting crisis.

Los Angeles Times

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Former Israeli President Katsav gets 7 years in rape case

The tearful politician tells judges, 'It's a lie,' and storms out of court. Other charges include sexual harassment and obstruction of justice.

Israel's former President Moshe Katsav was sentenced Tuesday to seven years in prison for rape, sexual harassment and obstruction of justice, capping an emotionally charged trial that many Israelis viewed as a national embarrassment.

A Tel Aviv panel of judges, who found Katsav guilty in December, said their sentence was intended to show that no one is above the law in Israel and that rape is a serious crime. "The defendant is a symbol," Judge George Karra said as he read the sentence. "The fact that Katsav committed the acts while serving in a high-ranking post is reason to judge him severely."

He added that rape is crime that "ruins souls" and that Katsav's sexual harassment "trampled the dignity" of female government employees who brought the complaint against him. Katsav, who was forced from office in 2007 over the charges, could have received as few as four years and as many as 20 years, legal experts estimated.

As the sentence was read, a shaken, tearful Katsav lashed out judges, saying, "It's a lie. You're wrong. The girls know they lied." He stormed out of court with his sons, past a group of women picketing in support of the victims. Katsav's attorneys vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court.

An attorney for one of the victims — whose name was not released — expressed satisfaction. "The punishment suits the gravity of the acts," Danny Srur told Israel's Channel 1. "There is no doubt that [my client] feels a sense of relief and satisfaction."

Los Angeles Times

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Judge orders mental exam for Jared Loughner

Jared Lee Loughner, the suspect in the deadly Tucson shooting rampage, will be evaluated at a specialized facility in Missouri. The examination will determine whether Loughner is competent to stand trial, not whether he was sane at the time of the attacks, the judge said.

A judge on Monday ordered the suspect in the January shooting rampage in Tucson to undergo a mental evaluation at a specialized facility in Missouri as soon as possible. The evaluation will be videotaped and provided to prosecutors and defense attorneys, U.S. District Judge Larry Burns said late Monday. The judge ordered that the evaluation be conducted no later than April 29.

Jared Lee Loughner has pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from the Jan. 8 attack in Tucson that killed six and injured 13, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. The Democratic congresswoman remains at a rehabilitation center in Houston, recovering from a bullet wound to the brain.

Prosecutors had argued that Loughner's exam should be conducted at a so-called medical referral center that provides forensic services and has increased resources, and recommended the federal Bureau of Prisons facility in Springfield, Missouri.

Loughner's lawyers have said the exam should be done by an outside expert at a Tucson prison and wanted assurances that the evaluation doesn't expand into a review of their client's sanity. Lead defense attorney Judy Clark wrote in a court filing last week that moving Loughner would harm the defense team's efforts to develop an attorney-client relationship.

Burns agreed that the Springfield facility is the best place for the exam, and ordered that the scope of the exam should be limited to whether Loughner is competent to stand trial, not whether he was sane at the time of the shooting.

Los Angeles Times

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9th Circuit rules that fibs can be protected speech

The appeals court strikes down the 2005 Stolen Valor Act that makes it a crime to lie about top military decorations. The action also vacates a Pomona man's sentence for falsely claiming to have been awarded the congressional Medal of Honor.

"Saints may always tell the truth, but for mortals living means lying."

Those were the words of Chief Judge Alex Kozinski in Monday's decision by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that the Stolen Valor Act is an unconstitutional restraint on free speech and a threat to every citizen who fibs to embellish his or her image, avoid embarrassment or perpetuate a child's belief in Santa Claus.

The court struck down both the 2005 act of Congress and the fines and sentence meted out to a Pomona man convicted on criminal charges for falsely claiming to have been awarded the congressional Medal of Honor.

The Stolen Valor Act made it a crime punishable by up to a year in jail to falsely claim to have received high military decorations, as Xavier Alvarez did at a public meeting of the Three Valleys Municipal Water District in 2007.

But Alvarez's groundless boast of heroic service in the U.S. Marine Corps doesn't fall under any of the exceptions to 1st Amendment protection of words that are false, as with fraud and defamation, the full appeals court said in refusing to reconsider a 2-1 decision last year to invalidate the act in the court's nine-state region.

"If false factual statements are unprotected, then the government can prosecute not only the man who tells tall tales of winning the congressional Medal of Honor, but also the JDater who falsely claims he's Jewish or the dentist who assures you it won't hurt a bit," Kozinski wrote in defense of the 1st Amendment.

Los Angeles Times

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New York's Prisons Fall Short, Again

Perhaps as many as three-quarters of New York State's 57,000 prison inmates need drug counseling or treatment to have a chance at productive, crime-free lives once they are released. A three-year study of drug and alcohol abuse programs in the New York State Department of Corrections suggests that prisons are failing to provide adequate treatment programs for the tens of thousands of inmates who need them.

The study by the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit group, examined drug treatment programs at 23 of the state's nearly 68 facilities. It found that the programs varied wildly in effectiveness and that most departed significantly from best practices laid out by the addiction research division of the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

The New York prison programs have several deficiencies in common. They fail to screen candidates based on the severity of their problems, which means they wastefully enroll large numbers of people in intensive programs they don't need. They also routinely enroll poorly motivated inmates, which limits effectiveness. In a particularly glaring oversight, they fail to coordinate prison treatment programs with those offered in the communities to which the inmates will return.

The correctional association's researchers found model treatment programs in at least four state prisons, including Hale Creek in upstate Fulton County. According to the report, these prisons use a three-phase system that begins with a six-month residential treatment program, in which the targeted inmates live in a separate prison dorm. This is followed by an integration component, under which people typically receive treatment during work release. Finally, newly released men and women are formally enrolled in community programs.

According to the study, the Department of Corrections could improve drug treatment without spending any more than the estimated $19 million it currently devotes to this problem by deploying the existing staff in better designed programs. The result would be better drug treatment, safer communities and less recidivism.

New York Times

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From Google News

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ICE Launches Self-Verify

The U.S. government presented Monday E-Verify Self Check, an online service that will enable workers to check their own immigration status and correct any errors on their documents. The service will be launched initially in Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Mississippi, Virginia and the District of Columbia, and extended to 16 other states next year, the Department of Homeland Security said.

The authorities aim to make the Self Check service available nationwide in the future. "E-Verify is a smart, simple, and effective tool that allows us to work with employers to help them maintain a legal workforce," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said. "The E-Verify Self Check service will help protect workers and streamline the E-Verify process for businesses."

Napolitano said that illegal immigration in the United States is chiefly a problem of supply and demand on the labor market, but that the U.S. government is committed to stopping undocumented immigrants from being hired.

E-Verify Self Check is a "voluntary, free, fast and secure service" that gives users the opportunity to submit corrections of any inaccuracies in their Homeland Security and Social Security Administration records before seeking employment, DHS said.

U.S. authorities have expanded E-Verify's capabilities with measures to prevent passport fraud, since it now compares photos on these documents with those in the State Department database.

Latino Fox News

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Arizona Is Immigration Debate's Ground Zero With Hispanic Majority In View

Jay Stewart carries a handgun to protect his family from smugglers who move illegal drugs and people through the desert near his home south of Phoenix. Miguel Espinoza crossed the border 17 years ago to escape a Mexican territory where drug lords rule.

The men, a 46-year-old airline pilot with two children and a 32-year-old landscaper with four, are in different ways part of the Arizona's future. The makeup of the state, a flash point in the U.S. debate over immigration, changed so much in the last decade that if birth rates and other factors hold steady, Arizona will be majority Hispanic in a generation, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institute in Washington.

The 2010 census found 43.2 percent of Arizonans under 18 were Hispanic and that whites were for the first time in a minority in that age group, at 41.6 percent. The ethnic and generational changes set the stage for Arizona to become a “test case” for responding to demographic trends as the U.S. becomes more diverse and increasingly Hispanic, said Jeff Milem, an education professoror University of Arizona in Tucson.

“Arizona seems to be in the forefront,” he said. “We've got to lay the groundwork now for people to come together.”

For Stewart, Espinoza illustrates the complexity of the issue. In the U.S. illegally, the landscaper is considering agreeing to deportation so he can apply from Mexico for residency. If not for Espinoza's four children, Stewart said, he would be happy to see him banished.

Bloomberg.com

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March 21, 2011

An about-face on front-facing child safety seats

Doctors now say children should use rear-facing safety seats until at least age 2

Chicago -- The nation's largest organization of pediatricians is telling its members and parents that children riding in cars should remain in rear-facing child safety seats at least until their second birthday — and preferably even longer.

This reverses advice many pediatricians gave parents for years that children's car seats should be turned around shortly after their first birthday.

The new policy from the American Academy of Pediatrics, published Monday in the Pediatrics medical journal, is bolstered by research that shows children under 2 are 75% less likely to die or be severely injured in a crash if they are in rear-facing child restraints.

Equally important, the academy recommends that children remain in seats with five-point safety harnesses as long as possible and should change to booster seats that rely on adult seat belts only when they exceed the height and weight limits for the five-point harness.

Five-point harnesses, which run across children's shoulders and hips and buckle between their legs, provide more protection than seat belts because they distribute the crash forces evenly over the strong, bony parts of children's bodies.

The pediatricians also recommend that children remain in booster seats until they are 4 feet 9 — a height most children don't reach until they are between 8 and 12 years old.

Los Angeles Times

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OPINION

Libya: It's not our fight

Regardless of its good intentions, the U.S. intervention in Libya will be depicted once again as aggressive, predatory and anti-Muslim.

Once again the United States is bombing a Muslim country to liberate its people from their own sanguinary rulers. Once again we are told that innocent civilians are being massacred and that the United States must intervene as a matter of moral duty, in its capacity as a great and good nation. But in this case — even as part of a broader, U.N.-sanctioned coalition to enforce a no-fly zone — the U.S. should not have intervened at all.

No humanitarian appeal should ever be lightly dismissed, and indeed many Americans justifiably recall with deep regret the failure of the Clinton administration to intervene against the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when a few thousand lightly armed soldiers on the ground could have saved hundreds of thousands.

So why is Libya different? Why shouldn't the United States intervene there?

First, because it has oil and gas, and any U.S. military action will be seen by many people around the world as motivated exclusively by the urge to steal the country's resources. Absurd, of course, but the enemies of the United States will repeat that accusation, all too plausible for most people around the world, who cannot imagine that any government would be benevolent enough to expend blood and treasure to disinterestedly help foreigners, and foreigners of another religion to boot.

It is no use arguing that the military control of a territory and the ownership of its natural resources are very different things for any law-abiding occupier. That U.S. military forces made no attempt to seize, or even dutifully secure, Iraq's oil installations during or after the 2003 invasion is a fact known to few, and even when known it is dismissed as irrelevant, or as so much calculated deception. It is because the accusation is so widely believed that Iraqi political leaders have gone out of their way to negotiate oil contracts with non-U.S. companies, to demonstrate that they are not American puppets. (Shenhua Group, Sinochem, Unipec and China National Offshore Oil are all no doubt grateful to the United States for having given them access to Iraq's oil, even if they have not offered to contribute to the trillion-dollar cost of that intervention so far.) Whatever the United States does in Libya, it will only add to its undeserved but by now entrenched reputation as the predatory aggressor of our times.

Los Angeles Times

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Trial to Open in Lawsuit Connected to Hospital Deaths After Katrina

A jury trial set to open on Monday will weigh whether one of America's largest health care corporations should be held accountable for deaths and injuries at a New Orleans hospital marooned by floodwaters after Hurricane Katrina.

The class-action suit is expected to highlight desperate e-mail exchanges, not previously made public, between the hospital and its corporate parent.

“Are you telling us we are on our own and you cannot help?” Sandra Cordray, a communications manager at Memorial Medical Center, which sheltered some 1,800 people, wrote to officials at the Tenet Healthcare Corporation's Dallas headquarters after begging them for supplies and an airlift.

The suit, brought on behalf of people who were at the hospital during the disaster, alleges that insufficiencies in Memorial's backup electrical system and failed plans for patient care and evacuation, among other factors, caused personal injury and death.

The complaint also focuses attention on the lack of comprehensive emergency preparedness requirements for the nation's hospitals. Proposed regulations aimed at addressing “systemic gaps” identified after Katrina were scheduled for release by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in January, but have been delayed. President Obama's budget proposal trims spending on a national hospital preparedness program by $42 million, or about 10 percent from current levels.

The bodies of 45 patients were discovered at Memorial Medical Center after the August 2005 storm, far more than at any other hospital, and some doctors subsequently acknowledged that they had injected patients with drugs to hasten their deaths. No criminal charges were brought. Last year, a relative of a patient who died filed a civil claim of euthanasia against a Memorial doctor. It was dismissed and is on appeal.

Staff members at Memorial said they did their best in the face of inhuman conditions.

New York Times

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EDITORIAL

False Confessions

Douglas Warney, a person of limited mental capabilities who has been diagnosed with AIDS and AIDS dementia, served nine years in New York State prisons for a murder he did not commit. Now the state is seeking to compound the injustice by denying Mr. Warney compensation, even though there is a state law to provide redress for people who are wrongly convicted. New York's highest court, which is considering his case, should not permit it.

Mr. Warney was convicted in 1997 based on a false confession that contained incriminating details the police said only the real killer could know. Mr. Warney's wrongful conviction rested on that signed confession. There was no physical, eyewitness or forensic evidence tying him to the crime, and he was exonerated in 2006 by DNA evidence that showed the murder was actually committed by a man Mr. Warney had never met.

New York State has primarily argued, and lower state courts have rashly agreed, that Mr. Warney's false confession makes him ineligible for compensation because the Unjust Conviction and Imprisonment Act bars recovery for those whose own misconduct caused their conviction.

That limit was meant to weed out deliberate misconduct to gain some tactical advantage, say a confession intended to conceal a loved one's guilt. Mr. Warney's false confession was not the product of misconduct. It was the reaction of a particularly susceptible individual to common police interrogation techniques that sometimes cause innocent people to confess. That phenomenon was illuminated in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the American Psychological Association.

Peter Neufeld of the Innocence Project, who represents Mr. Warney, says roughly a quarter of DNA exonerations in New York have involved false confessions.

New York Times

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Slain officer always gave 110 percent

FOND DU LAC, Wis. -- The aunt of the Fond du Lac police officer who lost his life in the line of duty says her nephew was focused on serving and protecting his community.

Twenty-eight-year-old Craig Birkholz was fatally shot and another officer was critically injured during a six-hour standoff at a suspect's house Sunday.

Birkholz's aunt, Patty Brown of Kenosha, says her nephew "always gave 110 percent" and was "exceptional young man." Brown says Birkholz aspired to join the FBI and saw his service as a police officer as a stepping stone to that goal.

The Fond du Lac Reporters says Birkholz joined the Army after graduating from Kenosha's Tremper High School. Then he joined the Army and served tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. Birkholz married in 2009.

The Fond du Lac Reporter's report can be found at: http://bit.ly/gpZLSy

Chicago Tribune

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