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From the Los Angeles Times

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Fear runs deep for Syrian Americans

Worries of reprisal lead many to shy away from taking part in local solidarity rallies.

by Raja Abdulrahim, Los Angeles Times

April 16, 2011

After the Egyptian revolution began in January, Garden Grove resident Samira Hammado, her Egyptian husband and their five children attended weekly demonstrations in Los Angeles and Orange County, often joining more than a hundred people gathered to support the protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

But when anti-government protests broke out recently in Hammado's native Syria, she found herself one of just a few dozen Southern Californians who showed up regularly for small Syrian solidarity demonstrations.

At one rally in Anaheim, they faced off against protesters backing the authoritarian regime of President Bashar Assad. Some took photos of the anti-regime demonstrators, threatening to cause trouble for their families still in Syria. A few people hid their faces behind sunglasses or signs. Many others said they had stayed away after hearing rumors that Syrian security agents would monitor the protests.

After Hammado later posted some anti-regime comments on Facebook, she said a friend asked her, "Aren't you afraid?"

"I don't know why the fear is still in our hearts, still even with the distance," said Hammado, 44, who is a stay-at-home mom.

When anti-government protests erupted across the Middle East this spring, it was unclear whether Syria would join. No one attended the first planned protest in Damascus in early February. And Assad quickly announced several reforms — including raising public worker subsidies, lowering food prices and allowing greater access to such previously banned websites as Facebook and YouTube — in what was seen as an attempt to placate Syrians before they rose up.

But a number of Syrian Americans and Syrian expatriates interviewed said the main factor in delaying Syrian participation in the anti-government protests — at home and abroad — has been the fear many hold toward the regime and its secret police. They point to the brutal response by Assad's father to an anti-government uprising in 1982, when security forces killed more than 10,000 people in the city of Hama.

Since March 15, however, protests across Syria have continued to grow. On Friday, thousands turned out in demonstrations in several cities, including the capital, Damascus.

Now, many Syrian Americans say they are waiting to see Assad's response to the protests in their homeland before deciding whether to support them publicly in this country. On Saturday, solidarity protests are planned in many U.S. cities, including in West Los Angeles.

"We were raised on this fear. It was a package we brought with us from Syria," said one man, who immigrated to the U.S. decades ago but asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. When he asked other Syrians if they would be willing to be interviewed, he said they laughed.

Hammado was 12 and living with her family in Idlib, a village on the outskirts of Aleppo, when her two oldest brothers were arrested and accused of membership in the opposition Muslim Brotherhood.

She said her family has never seen the men again and doesn't know if they are alive.

When Assad became president after his father's death in 2000, he promised to release political prisoners. For days, Hammado's mother couldn't sleep, saying she wanted to be awake in case her sons came home.

"She died and her heart was burning," said Hammado, who left Syria in 1989 and has returned just once.

Now, whenever Hammado calls her two sisters and two brothers who still live in Syria, they assure her that everything is fine, although she knows they are afraid to speak openly.

Were she still living there, she said, she doesn't know if she would be willing to join the protests in which at least 200 are said to have been killed since the unrest began. But here, she feels compelled to attend the rallies held in solidarity.

"Our families are over there fighting with their blood and this is the least we can do," she said. "Honestly they are heroes. Death doesn't matter to them anymore."

At her children's weekend Islamic school, she has chided other mothers who have cautioned her against speaking publicly about the protests.

"A few more people wake up out of that fear every day; it's not automatic," said Mohja Kahf, a Syrian American author and professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas. She said it would take time to change people's "enslaved mentality."

"We have an ocean in between and still we're going to be afraid?" asked Samir Hammado, Samira's older brother who lives in Pomona. "That's what brought us to this situation that we are so afraid that we cannot even speak to ourselves."

Samir Hammado, who works in insurance, hasn't been back to Syria since he left in 1985, believing he would be arrested upon his return. At one point during the uprisings in the early 1980s, he said, he and five of his brothers were all in prison, though he was released within days.

From time to time, he said, his family in Syria is still questioned about him and two brothers who now live in Canada.

At night, after her children have gone to bed, Samira Hammado goes online to read the latest news and posts on Facebook. A few days ago, in response to a post by Syrian presidential advisor Bouthaina Shaaban that threatened to "cut off the hand" of those who intervene in Syria, Hammado commented that all who have killed Syrian youth who call for freedom should have their own hands cut off.

Hammado's Facebook account is not under her real name, however. "We didn't want to cause them any problems," she said of her family.

But Hammado decided to allow her name to be published for this account, after weighing the potential for harm against what others like her are risking in Syria.

"Maybe — God willing — by the time I go back, there will be a new leader," she said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-syria-fear-20110416,0,4901518,print.story

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From the New York Times

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At Mexico Morgue, Families of Missing Seek Clues

MATAMOROS, Mexico — The last time anybody heard from Josué Román García was last August, after he and his older brother stopped for dinner in an isolated town about 90 miles south of the Texas border. His final known words went out via text message, from inside the trunk of a car.

“They just kidnapped us in San Fernando,” Mr. Román, a 21-year-old student, wrote to a friend. He warned against calling, and added, “If anything happens, just tell my parents, ‘thanks, I love them.' ”

On Wednesday, his father, Arturo Román Medina, answering calls on a cellphone that stores that brief note, arrived at the morgue in this border city, hoping and fearing that he would find his sons. For two weeks now, the authorities have been bringing in bodies from mass graves around San Fernando, 145 corpses at last count, and with each new grave discovered, another crowd appears, seeking news of missing loved ones, clutching photographs, holding out their arms to give blood for a DNA sample.

They are looking for closure, but as their gathering has grown into the hundreds, it has hardened a perception that government authorities have fought desperately to dispel: parts of northern Mexico, including most of this state, Tamaulipas, have been lost to criminal gangs, and for quite some time.

Even after government promises of more security following the discovery of a mass grave holding the remains of 72 Central and South American migrants last summer, also in San Fernando, Tamaulipas remains a state that experts describe as ungoverned — or simply failed.

Open war between the Gulf Cartel and its former enforcers, the Zetas, means that the roads here are still filled with gang lookouts on motorcycles, who report back to cartel leaders, residents say.

Gunmen believed to be tied to the Zetas assassinated the lead candidate for governor last year and later forced a mass exodus from a small town near the Texas border. Extortion payments have become more regular than taxes, security analysts say, while many of the authorities are either terrorized or bought off: 16 municipal police officers have been arrested so far in connection with kidnappings and killings.

“It is one of the places where clearly state, federal and local authorities are not in control,” said Eric Olson, a security expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. “It's tragic, it's unfortunate, but it's a reality.”

For the Mexican government, few things are as sensitive as an American pointing out lost territory. When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton likened Mexico's drug trafficking last year to an insurgency, “where the narco-traffickers control certain parts of the country,” Mexican lawmakers responded with fierce condemnation.

The tensions only worsened after Carlos Pascual, the American ambassador, questioned Mexico's crime-fighting abilities in diplomatic cables, quoting a former high-ranking Mexican official who “expressed a real concern with ‘losing' certain regions” of the country to cartels. Mexico's president, Felipe Calderón , was so infuriated by that cable and others that he insisted on pushing out Mr. Pascual, who resigned last month.

And yet, despite promises of help, the families and residents here say they have seen little progress in Tamaulipas. Instead, they have witnessed squabbling between top officials — Tamaulipas is governed by political rivals to the president's party — and lackluster enforcement.

Mr. Román, the father of two missing sons, complained that government checkpoints were always in the same place and easy for criminals to avoid. Alfonso Ortega, whose brother Martín disappeared a year ago on his way to Matamoros, described a galling lack of urgency.

“The government is not moving,” Mr. Ortega said. “It's not doing anything.”

The authorities believe the Zetas are behind the murders in San Fernando, though they have only theories about the motives: kidnappings for ransom, perhaps, or attempts at forced recruitment.

Regardless, experts say the trouble in Tamaulipas stems partly from the gang's history. Its leaders started out as enforcers, so when they split with their former patrons in the Gulf Cartel a few years ago, the Zetas could not rely on historic ties with drug suppliers or traffickers. To thrive and expand, they branched out to other crimes, including extortion, migrant smuggling and the siphoning of oil and gas from pipelines in the area.

Many of the gang's early leaders served in the Mexican military, and they have used their experience to create a level of intimidation that outmatches most rivals'. No local newspaper dares to print the photos the government has issued for the 17 suspects in the latest San Fernando killings.

Mr. Román, a burly man in rubber sandals who has driven back and forth countless times from his home in Mexico City to prod the authorities, is just one of many here with once hidden tales of fear, a sullen bureaucracy and overwhelmed investigators.

He said that all the official attention now focused on identifying the dead here has made his sons' loss even more painful. “They don't help you look for your sons when they are alive,” he said.

Indeed, the morgue and the prosecutor's office next door are now the area's main hubs of activity. This week, dozens of people shifted uncomfortably on chairs in tiled hallways, their sadness subdued as they waited to give statements.

Next door, bodies came and went. At one point, a refrigerated truck with dozens of corpses wrapped in black plastic left for Mexico City, where additional investigators would continue the process.

Those waiting here looked exhausted beyond grief or anger. “I just ask God to bring him back, even if he's dead,” said Ana María López, whose husband disappeared in the border city of Reynosa on March 11.

Nicolasa Carvajal López said she had come from Dallas, where she lives, because she feared the worst for her brother Bolívar Santamaría López. He boarded a bus in his home state, Guerrero, on March 29 along with five friends bound for Reynosa, where they planned to cross into Texas.

The men promised to call when they arrived at the border. When they did not, Mr. Santamaría's wife and the other relatives forced the news out of the bus company: the bus had been stopped by gunmen in San Fernando and all the men and boys had been forced off.

“We were pooling our money,” said Ms. Carvajal, covering her face with her hand as she explained that all 10 of her brother's siblings in the United States had paid for his trip. “He was coming to make a living.”

She pointed to several photos of her missing brother. He was 45, strong, with a sandy-colored mustache. “I still have hope that he will call me and say, ‘Hey there, Sis, here I am,' ” she said.

The authorities have told the families to be patient, that many people are missing. And once again, they have pledged to make the area safe.

On Tuesday, José Francisco Blake Mora, Mexico's interior minister, promised to secure all the roads around San Fernando and to prosecute the killers.

But few of those who are arrested in Mexico are ever convicted. And Msgr. Faustino Armendáriz, the bishop of Matamoros, doubted that the government was doing enough. “By their fruits, you shall know what is being done,” he responded with biblical flourish. Then, he ticked off the towns of his diocese. “When you pass through,” he said, “there is a great sense of vulnerability.”

He added that drug gangs had sown fear into the people of his diocese for more than a year. Now, he prays for change — and demands that the government keep its promises.

“We have to hope that this time they act on all their declarations,” he said, referring to the state and federal governments. “We have to demand that there are conditions to live in security.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/world/americas/16mexico.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

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Somali Pirates Release Some Prisoners

MOGADISHU, Somalia — After receiving more than $3 million in ransom, Somali pirates released a hijacked ship and some of its crew, but kept the Indian crew members to try to win the release of pirates held by India, pirates and residents said.

“We are holding the Indian nationals to exchange for our colleague prisoners that the Indian government is holding currently in their prisons,” a pirate named Ahmed said.

The Indian Navy has been aggressively patrolling the shipping lanes off East Africa, where piracy has been rampant, and has captured more than 100 pirates. Last month, the Indian Navy reported capturing 61 pirates as they fled a hijacked vessel that caught fire after navy patrols attacked it in the Arabian Sea off Kochi, India.

The ship released Friday, the Indian-owned Asphalt Venture, was hijacked late last year. The ship was held off the Handule area of Harardhere, a pirate hub.

It was not clear how many Indian crew members the pirates still held.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/world/africa/16somalia.html?pagewanted=print

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T.V.A. Considers Improvements for 6 U.S. Nuclear Reactors

WASHINGTON — The Tennessee Valley Authority said Thursday it was considering millions of dollars of improvements to protect its six nuclear reactors from earthquakes and floods.

It is the first American reactor operator to announce safety changes that it is weighing since an earthquake and tsunami set off a nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan last month. Other operators have said publicly that they might have to make changes, but they have avoided saying what those were.

The T.V.A. issued a fact sheet saying that it was considering reducing the amount of fuel in its spent fuel pools by transferring older fuel to passively cooled “dry casks” and adding additional backup diesel generators.

It also listed three changes that are less commonly discussed: improving electrical switchyards to make them more resistant to earthquakes, adding small generators to recharge cellphone batteries and keep the lights on, and reinforcing the pipes that provide cooling water to spent fuel pools.

Of the six reactors operated by the T.V.A., three are boiling water reactors that resemble the Fukushima reactors. The authority said that none of its reactors are in areas where an earthquake risk is high. But it said it was looking at “potential vulnerabilities from a chain of events, such as damage from a tornado or earthquake combined with flooding from a dam failure.”

Nuclear critics have argued that all plants should be required to undertake such analyses of simultaneous events, although the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has generally rejected such hazards as too unlikely for such studies to be mandated. The commission's staff recently began a 90-day review of how prepared American reactors are for severe accidents, but the first progress report on that effort is not expected until early next month.

The spent fuel storage problem has been debated for years. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences to look into the problem, and in 2005 the academy reported that the pools might in fact be vulnerable to terrorism. It said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should evaluate whether some of the fuel should be moved to dry casks.

Lately some members of Congress have suggested more use of dry casks.

When spent fuel is removed from a reactor, it continues to generate heat and must be kept submerged for about five years. But after that it can be sealed inside a steel can that is filled with inert gas to prevent rust; the can is then loaded into a small concrete silo with air vents. Air circulating around the can keeps the fuel well below the melting point.

American reactor operators have so far resorted to that technique only when their pools have reached capacity. The pools were designed in an era when nuclear engineers thought the fuel would be hauled away from reactors after a few years for recycling or burial and are therefore quite small; most reactors have installed new equipment in their pools to be able to squeeze in more than was originally intended. But some engineers say that this raises the risk that if the pool were emptied, the fuel could heat to the point that the metal it contains is ignited.

Thinning out the pools by removing old fuel would still leave the hottest materials in place but would reduce the chance of fire.

Robert Alvarez, a former Energy Department official, calculated recently that removing the backlog of fuel older than five years from the spent fuel pools of all 104 operating reactors would cost $3.5 billion to $7 billion and take several years to accomplish.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/science/earth/15nuclear.html?pagewanted=print

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Riding Along With the Cops in Murdertown, U.S.A.

A sign taped to the entrance of police headquarters says it all: “Closed weekends and holidays.” Every weekday, the doors are locked at dusk.

It's not that the cops here are scared; it's just that they're outmanned, outgunned and flat broke.

Flint is the birthplace of General Motors and the home of the U.A.W.'s first big strike. In case you didn't know this, the words “Vehicle City” are spelled out on the archway spanning the Flint River.

But the name is a lie. Flint isn't Vehicle City anymore. The Buick City complex is gone. The spark-plug plant is gone. Fisher Body is gone.

What Flint is now is one of America's murder capitals. Last year in Flint, population 102,000, there were 66 documented murders. The murder rate here is worse than those in Newark and St. Louis and New Orleans. It's even worse than Baghdad's.

After the door is unlocked and I enter police headquarters, it is easy to see why. There are only six patrolmen on duty for a Saturday night. So broke is Flint that the city laid off two-thirds of its police force in the last three years. The front desk looks like a dusty museum piece.

I am assigned to ride along with Officer Steve Howe, a 20-year-veteran of the department. Caucasian. Late 50s. Medium build. Mustache. Clump of very well-kempt salt-and-pepper hair.

I sign a release form and am given a bulletproof vest.

“Isn't that a little bit much?” I ask the sergeant on duty.

“You have to sign your life away,” he tells me.

Cops can be a suspicious, insular lot when it comes to reporters. But Howe and the others are blunt and self-effacing. “We ain't cops anymore,” Howe says. “We're librarians. We take reports. We don't fight crime.”

He guides me through the yellowing jail cells upstairs that had to be closed down recently because of lack of manpower. “If you break into someone's house, we can't hold you,” he says with a straight face. “If you've got a weapon or you've murdered somebody, then county will take you. I don't see any light at the end of this tunnel. Only darkness.”

We leave headquarters and head out into the night. Howe turns up the heat in his Chevy cruiser and switches on the computer.

“That's something,” I say hopefully. “Some squad cars in Detroit don't even have computers.”

“Hold on a sec,” he says. “Let it warm up.”

When it does, I see that there are more than 12 runs stacked up, including a kidnapping call that is more than six hours old. A home-invader call is two hours old. A “man with a gun” call is 90-minutes old.

“Sometimes, we don't get to a call for two days,” he says. Last fall, an elderly couple called after being held up at gunpoint in their driveway. The police arrived on the scene five hours later.

Traffic tickets?

“Don't make me laugh,” he says.

We drive 50 miles through the evening, and the city flashes by us in all its monotony. Liquor store. Gas station. Liquor store. Hi-C, 25 cents. Catfish steaks, $1.25. Regular unleaded, $3.65.

The action isn't heavy tonight, either. Domestic disputes, mostly. A woman will not let her brother into the house, having already destroyed his furniture with a pipe and thrown his clothing into the snow. Another man has beaten his girlfriend and locked himself inside a neighbor's house. Howe takes reports. The kidnapping call gathers dust.

We pass by an abandoned Victorian with a sign neatly spray-painted on the peeling door: “Please don't burn.”

“Sorry, slow night,” Howe apologizes. “Last weekend we had four murders.”

Nature calls. Howe pulls into the 7-Eleven for a toilet break and a Big Gulp. As we get out of the car, I see a blue flash of light near the side of the store and the sound of gunfire. A shadow runs toward the apartment complex.

“Back in the car!” Howe barks at me.

Someone might have just become the 14th homicide victim of 2011, and winter hasn't even broken yet.

Howe calls in: “Shots fired.” He gives the following description: A shadow wearing a hood. And in less than two minutes, the entire Flint police force on patrol swarms the area. All six of them. They find no gun and no victim. They do, however, round up a fidgety kid in a hood, but since he doesn't have a gun, they kick him loose.

Frustrated, Howe heads back to the car and watches the kid walk away. Two more people are killed in Flint the following week.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17YouRhere-t.html

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From Google News

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Did Long Island serial killer taunt sister of victim?

(CBS/WCBS) - A report has been published saying that that the possible Long Island serial killer may have taunted the teenage sister of victim Melissa Barthelemy, a prostitute whose body was among four found by police last December.

Pictures: Long Island serial killer's victims?

According to The New York Times, officials say Barthelemy's sister received a series of phone calls from Barthelemy's phone that terrorized the family.

Barthelemy's mother, Lynn, told the paper that the calls all lasted less than 3 minutes, and that the man kept the family "hopeful" until the last call.

"In the final call, he said he had killed her," Lynn Barthelemy told the Times. The paper reports that when Barthelemy's sister told the caller she wanted to see her sister again, he said he'd killed her after having sex with her, then hung up and didn't call back.

Crews have uncovered at least 10 sets of human remains along the coastline in both Nassau and Suffolk Counties, including a skull, the bones of a toddler and the remains of four missing prostitutes.

Law enforcement sources told CBS News there may be two patterns and two killers, perhaps separating the first four remains, who have all been identified as prostitutes who advertised on Craigslist, and the six sets of remains that were more recently found.

Those six sets of remains are being DNA tested in an attempt to identify them. If and when they are identified, investigators will try to locate family members for more information about the victims' backgrounds with the hope that it will lead them to the victims' killer.

Complete Coverage of the possible Long Island serial killer on Crimesider

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20054363-504083.html

From the White House

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President Obama Releases the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

Today, President Obama released the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) (PDF).This Strategy seeks to improve security in cyberspace and e-commerce. We can see how this plays out in at least two areas. First, passwords alone are not secure enough, which contributes to online fraud and identity theft. It is also inconvenient to have to remember dozens of passwords to access different online services. Second, it is difficult for individuals to prove their true identity when they want to perform a sensitive transaction online, like banking or accessing health records. These problems are limiting the full economic potential of the Internet, because certain services cannot easily be moved online. NSTIC envisions a private sector led effort to create a new infrastructure for the Internet, built on interoperable, privacy-enhancing, and secure identity credentials. This new infrastructure is centered around choice. First, you don't have to use it at all. If you do, you can choose when or how to use it.

For example, you might get a "digital credential" bundled with your cell phone plan that resides as an application on your smart phone. It would remain inactive when you are just browsing the web. But with a single, short PIN or password, you could use your credential on the phone to do a range of transactions from logging in to your favorite online game as “anon01” where you do not want to reveal your real name to accessing your tax information where you do. To see an animated example of this system, visit the NSTIC program office's home page .

But not everybody wants a smart phone. Under this strategy, you will be able to choose from many different identity providers: perhaps your bank, your health care provider, your email provider, or any other preferred organization. We seek to create an ecosystem of many different providers, so that there is an option that suits every individual who wants to participate. Individuals can also choose between different credentials, or ways of logging in: cell phones, keychain “fobs,” smart cards, and many others – in fact, there will undoubtedly be ways that have not yet even been invented.

At today's release event, held in the Hall of Flags at the Chamber of Commerce, I spoke along with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Senator Barbara Mikulski, Director of the National Economic Council Gene Sperling, and Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Jane Lute. What an impressive list of high ranking officials from all across government! This breadth of participation underscores the importance of the Strategy – and its potential to improve the daily lives of individuals as well as contribute to our economic growth and competitiveness.

I also had the opportunity to tour exhibits of some ground-breaking, public/private initiatives that are putting us on the path to achieving the goals of NSTIC. These innovative solutions give us a glimpse of the future: a future in which the government and the private sector can strip away inefficient red tape and in which people can conduct their daily business online easily, securely and with more privacy.

Indeed, I have much more to say about how we seek to improve online privacy with the NSTIC. Look for my post about it in the next few days.

Howard A. Schmidt is the Cybersecurity Coordinator and Special Assistant to the President

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/04/15/president-obama-releases-national-strategy-trusted-identities-cyberspace

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