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| NEWS of the Week |
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on some issues of interest to the community policing and neighborhood activist across the country
EDITOR'S NOTE: The following group of articles from local newspapers and other sources constitutes but a small percentage of the information available to the community policing and neighborhood activist public. It is by no means meant to cover every possible issue of interest, nor is it meant to convey any particular point of view ...
We present this simply as a convenience to our readership ... |
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Hate-crime arrests in Azusa evoke memories of attacks years ago
More than 50 gang members were indicted two weeks ago on charges that include waging a terror campaign against Azusa's black population. Relief is mixed with memories of racial attacks that remain unsolved.
Dion Smith moved to Azusa because he liked the sleepy suburb, nestled at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, with easy access to canyon trails where he would go walking.
The small San Gabriel Valley city felt like home — until the night of Dec. 5, 2001. That night, someone hurled a Molotov cocktail through the window of the house where Smith and his family were sleeping. The bottle did not ignite, and Smith, his wife and their 6-year-old daughter were unharmed. But soon after, they decided to leave Azusa for nearby Covina.
The Smiths were one of three black families attacked that night in what police described as brazen racially motivated crimes. Police long believed that a predominantly Latino gang hell-bent on getting blacks out of Azusa was behind the firebombings — but they could never prove it.
Federal authorities two weeks ago released an indictment of 51 members of the Azusa 13 gang on a host of charges that include waging an organized terror campaign against Azusa's black population beginning in 1992.
The indictments and subsequent arrests brought a sense of relief to Azusa's small black community — only 3% of the city's population — and to victims such as Smith who have moved away. But it was also a reminder of racial attacks that remain unsolved.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-azusa-hate-20110619,0,3459731,print.story
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Mexico launches high-profile crackdown on lower-grade crime
The eight-day push by state and local police targets car thefts, muggings and other offenses. It makes for great PR, but Mexicans are skeptical.
Police across Mexico have awakened in recent days to a bold new assignment: enforcing the law.
The country's 31 governors and the mayor of Mexico City are leading an eight-day offensive aimed at lower-grade offenses that most irk ordinary Mexicans, like car thefts and muggings.
The high-profile crackdown, which began Monday, is being touted as an unprecedented bid by state authorities across Mexico to join hands, if temporarily, against the nation's crime epidemic. The drive, named after the acronym of the governors' association, is called CONAGO 1, sounding more like a deep-space probe than a splashy hunt for bad guys.
But it comes wrapped in pretty bows and ribbons. There have been photo opportunities of police in pressed uniforms posing next to rows of freshly buffed cruisers. Officials have held regular press briefings to explain how big a bite they've taken out of crime.
State and local police in convoys have set up roadblocks, checked motorists' papers and swapped information with one another across state lines through electronic databases. The push is paying off, they say. By Saturday, authorities had arrested 3,305 suspects, seized 116 guns and recovered 1,122 stolen cars, including a Hummer from Miami.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-police-20110619,0,6471034,print.story
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Op-Ed
Drug war: One cartel falls, another rises
The crushing of Colombia's powerful Cali cartel was a triumph, but it left a power vacuum that Mexico's brutal drug lords were only too willing to fill.
Forty years after President Nixon declared war on drugs, the soaring body count from narco-violence in Mexico seems to mock the very notion of progress in that effort. But what is most discouraging about the rampant brutality across our border is that it's largely a consequence of one of the drug war's greatest triumphs.
Colombia's Cali cocaine cartel, once the richest and most powerful crime syndicate in the world, fell as a direct result of U.S.-led law enforcement and diplomatic pressure about a decade ago. Its toppling remains one of the most significant blows inflicted on modern organized crime.
But the giant cartel's collapse left a power vacuum, and Mexican drug gangs are still fighting, with often grisly methods, to determine who will fill it.
The Cali cartel could be as ruthless as any other, but it preferred bribery to violence in the normal course of business. The vertically integrated corporate-style enterprise was run by four billionaires who reigned over a global monopoly that controlled every aspect of the drug trade, from jungle coca production to New York street sales.
In its prime, the cartel was a $7-billion-a-year criminal masterpiece that had bought off an entire country. Colombia was the original "narco-democracy" and a haven for narco-gangsters.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rempel-drug-war-20110619,0,6730768,print.story
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Editorial
Promoting rehabilitation for criminals
The notion that rehabilitation should play no role in sentencing or the length of incarceration needs to be revisited.
You don't have to be soft on crime to believe in the rehabilitation of criminals. But a federal judge who tried to ensure that a convicted defendant would participate in a drug rehabilitation program had his wrist slapped last week by the Supreme Court. The ruling was a faithful application of federal law, but it should motivate Congress to rethink its approach to incarceration.
After a federal jury convicted Alejandra Tapia of smuggling illegal immigrants across the U.S-Mexico border, U.S. District Judge Barry T. Moskowitz sentenced her to more years in prison than called for under federal sentencing guidelines. The rationale, Moskowitz said, was to enable Tapia to enter an inmate drug rehabilitation program with a long waiting list. The judge's heart was in the right place, but the Supreme Court found that lengthening Tapia's sentence for that purpose was illegal.
Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Elena Kagan held that "a court may not impose or lengthen a prison sentence to enable an offender to complete a treatment program or otherwise to promote rehabilitation." The reason was simple: Federal law says that "imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation."
The decision makes sense. But the larger principle behind it is troubling: the notion that rehabilitation should play no role in sentencing or the length of incarceration.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-rehab-20110620,0,2393946,print.story
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Editorial
Either scrap or revamp Secure Communities
The program was meant to nab dangerous illegal immigrants with criminal histories. It hasn't worked out. It's time to scrap it or revamp it.
Gov. Jerry Brown is under increasing pressure to suspend California's participation in the controversial federal immigration enforcement program known as Secure Communities. The program requires state and local police to share the fingerprints of anyone who is arrested with federal officials, who then check them against their own databases to determine the arrestee's immigration status.
In theory, Secure Communities sounds like a sensible idea. It was sold to Congress as a way for the federal government to use its limited resources to nab dangerous immigrants who have a history of criminal convictions. But that's not the way it has been used. Instead, nearly half of those deported under the program since 2008 have been undocumented immigrants with no criminal records at all, or who had been convicted of misdemeanors. In California, more than 8,000 people deported between October 2008 and January 2011 under the program had never been convicted of a crime.
Instead of making communities more secure, Secure Communities may actually make them less so. Police in San Jose, San Francisco and elsewhere insist that the program will make their jobs harder because immigrants will be reluctant to report crimes or cooperate with investigations for fear that any contact with the authorities could lead to their arrest and deportation.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-secure-20110615,0,1639745,print.story ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Mexico says leader in kidnapping, killing of 72 migrants arrested
Mexican police say Edgar Huerta Montiel, 22, confessed to leading the capture of two truckloads of undocumented migrants in Tamaulipas state, and the killing of 10 of the victims. He also allegedly told of ordering the kidnapping of six busloads of passengers in San Fernando, Mexico.
Mexican authorities on Friday announced the arrest of the man they say directed the kidnappings of 72 Central and South American migrants found slain in northern Mexico last year.
Federal police said Edgar Huerta Montiel, 22, told them he led the capture of two freight trucks packed with undocumented migrants in the state of Tamaulipas, then killed 10 of the victims.
Huerta, described as an army deserter who works for the Zetas drug gang, allegedly told police he also ordered the kidnappings of six busloads of passengers in the rural town of San Fernando.
Captives were taken to safe houses and tortured for information, including whether they were working for the Gulf cartel, a rival gang, said Ramon Eduardo Pequeno, head of the anti-drug division of the federal police.
Tamaulipas, which borders Texas, has seen some of Mexico's worst violence amid fighting between the gangs and the inability of Mexican authorities to establish order.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-fg-mexico-arrest-20110618,0,4991290,print.story
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Pentagon Bomb Scare: Is the Suspect a Lone-Wolf Terrorist?
An international investigation is under way today to find out whether the Marine Corps Reserve lance corporal who was arrested early Friday morning for carrying suspected bomb making materials near the Pentagon is simply an unstable, misguided young man, or a cold-blooded lone wolf terrorist.
"We don't know what a lone wolf, al Qaeda-inspired operative looks like. We don't know where they hang out, we don't know really what motivates them," former FBI agent Jack Cloonan said. "So when you don't know that, you've got a talent pool of people that is so huge, it stresses law enforcement. We just don't know what they look like and what they want to do."
The United States was lucky in this incident, because police were able to arrest the man in question, 22-year-old Ethiopian-American Yonathan Melaku, who was recently charged with breaking into 27 cars in suburban Washington. But so-called lone wolf terrorists are generally very difficult to catch.
"It gets very close to that whole issue of profiling," Cloonan said. "We don't want to say as law enforcement that we're going to look for every Arab male age 21 to 35. We really can't do that. Profiling is not that effective in this regard."
FBI investigators have been dissecting Melaku's life since his arrest, but as of yet have found no links to terrorist organizations, although he was carrying pro-al Qaeda literature.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/pentagon-bomb-scare-suspect-lone-wolf-terrorist/story?id=13874200
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Supreme Court says age matters in police questioning
Reporting from Washington -- The Supreme Court bolstered the rights of juveniles for the second year in a row, deciding by a 5-4 vote that police officers who remove a student from class for questioning about a crime usually must warn him or her of the right to remain silent.
The decision Thursday did not set a strict rule for all cases involving police questioning of minors, but the justices said young people deserved extra protection because they would feel they had no choice but to answer.
"It is beyond dispute that children will often feel bound to submit to police questioning when an adult in the same circumstance would feel free to leave," wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor. "Seeing no reason for police officers or courts to blind themselves to that common-sense reality, we hold that a child's age properly informs the Miranda custody analysis."
The decision reopens the case of a 13-year-old student from Chapel Hill, N.C., who was taken from his seventh-grade class by a police officer and questioned about several burglaries in his neighborhood. The student, identified only as J.D.B., eventually confessed.
He later contended his confession should not have been used because he was not warned of his rights. But he lost in a 4-3 decision by the North Carolina Supreme Court, which said the age of the suspect did not matter.
http://mobile.latimes.com/p.p?m=b&a=rp&id=424794&postId=424794&postUserId=7&session
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Former NYPD/LAPD Chief Warns Crime Could Worsen Nationwide
A combination of tight budgets at municipal and state government levels plus "poorly socialized youth" (LBJ's Great Grandkids) could result in the reversal of the downtrend in crime across the country over the last 20 years, says William Bratton, who is the only person to have ever led the two largest police forces in the U.S., NYPD and LAPD. He is currently vice chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, and chairman of Kroll, a leading risk-consulting firm.
Freakonomics asked Bratton to comment on the current crime situation and he wrote:
Extended and severe downturns that engender long-term unemployment rates of 15 or 20 percent in poor and minority communities can have criminogenic effects, not only because they foreclose economic opportunities, but also because they perpetuate an underclass culture that fails to educate and socialize young men. As these young men grow, they become the foot soldiers for crime of all kinds, including drug dealing, robberies, burglaries, auto theft, and other larcenies, as well as targeted and random shootings in the public square.
Such extended downturns are also likely to cause revenue shortfalls at the state and local levels that may result in sharp cuts to policing and other government services, as is already happening now...
If the police are disabled in this way just as a larger pool of crime-prone youth comes on the scene, you might see a repeat nationwide of the circumstances that drove crime in New York City in the late 1970s and 1980s. Disabled significantly by the New York City fiscal crisis and subsequent layoffs of police personnel, the NYPD failed to contend with the emerging crack epidemic of the early 1980s, and violent crime surged. With these dual factors – poorly socialized youth and weakened police departments – simultaneously at work, the long-term outlook for crime could worsen significantly, and the positive crime trends of the past 20 years could be reversed. |
What's going to happen is that the private sector will more and more seek out and use private sector alternatives to make up for the lack of protection provided by government police forces. This will mean most new crime will be in the government controlled areas such as subways and sidewalks. The Age of Wilding may be upon us.
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2011/06/former-nypdlapd-chief-warns-crime-could.html
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LA City Councilman Paul Krekorian advocates neighborhood panel reforms
Capping an 18-month study, City Councilman Paul Krekorian on Wednesday proposed a series of reforms to update the city's management of neighborhood councils.
"This was an unprecedented study to try to deal with the most common complaints we have heard about," Krekorian said, as he introduced four motions designed to deal with the problems:
Provide better training for neighborhood council board members.
Streamline the funding process to provide quicker approvals and long-term guarantees.
Restructure management of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment.
Streamline the grievance procedure. |
Krekorian said the proposals will go to the Education and Neighborhoods Committee he chairs for further development.
http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_18281913
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California struggles to save inmate firefighter program
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - California officials are struggling to save a program that has 4,300 inmates fighting wildfires each year, the most of any state.
They say the program is crucial to fighting massive fires, but it's endangered by Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to shift responsibility for lower-level offenders from state prisons to county jails.
The governor proposed the shift to save money and comply with a federal court order to reduce prison crowding. The same lower-level offenders who would be released or shifted to local jails are generally the ones who qualify for the fire camps.
Officials say the program won't be affected this year because the inmate shift has not yet been funded. They say the program is even more vital because budget cuts have eliminated 730 seasonal firefighters this year.
http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_18281173
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Booze cited as main driver of violent crime
In recent months, there has been widespread speculation about the dramatic drop in violent crime over the last 30 years. Among the explanations tossed around are the aging population, abortion, better law enforcement and forensics technology, and ‘Three Strikes' and other sentencing laws that have filled the prisons.
But Professor Robert Nash Parker has a far simpler explanation: Blame it on the alcohol.
“The reason why our crime rate is down over 30 years is that 1982 was the peak of [alcohol] consumption in the U.S. over our recent history,” Parker said.
The University of California, Riverside Sociology professor and the co-director of the school's Robert Presley Center for Crime and Justice Studies, Parker has spent much of his career studying the link between violent crime and various forces in society.
And one force stands out above all the others, Parker said — and not just in our recent history. Parker said he has data for the U.S. going back to the 1930s, for California going back to the 1960s, and also for many other countries. Across the board, he said, a rise of alcohol consumption is followed by a rise in violence, and a drop is followed by a drop. The U.S. data since Prohibition shows six matching jumps, he said.
http://www.capitolweekly.net/article.php?xid=zs41r4d3t6lqd8
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OPINION
If You're Worried About Crime, You're a Racist
The Sacramento Bee would have you believe that if you favor taking a hard line on crime, you are no better than the reprobates from America's past who argued for slavery.
Michelle Alexander and Ruth Wilson Gilmore spent more than 800 words in the June 5th Sacramento Bee to make the point I just made in my headline with eight. But whether laid out pithily in eight words or belabored for 800 — or 8,000 for that matter — twaddle is still twaddle.
The authors begin their piece as follows: “The fearmongering responses to the U.S. Supreme Court declaring California's prison system ‘cruel and unusual' in violation of the Eighth Amendment were predictable.”
My most recent piece concerned this very topic, and indeed I struck a note of concern — “fearmongering,” in the authors' view — over the ramifications to California that might follow in the wake of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata. And if my reaction was predictable, no less so was that of Alexander and Gilmore, both of whom have written books ( here and here) in which they condemn the American criminal justice system as racist.
Yes, I admit to being less sanguine than are Alexander and Gilmore at the prospect of 46,000 convicted felons being loosed upon an unwary populace, but contrary to their assumptions (and is there any doubt what they would assume about me?), I am unconcerned with the melanin content of these criminals' skin.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/if-you%E2%80%99re-worried-about-crime-youre-a-racist/?singlepage=true
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Report describes gun agents' 'state of panic'
Federal gun agents, concerned about weapons sales to Mexican drug suspects, begged to make arrests but were rebuffed, according to a congressional report on a controversial investigation.
Seattle -- Federal gun agents in Arizona -- convinced that "someone was going to die" when their agency allowed weapons sales to suspected Mexican drug traffickers -- made anguished pleas to be permitted to make arrests but were rebuffed, according to a new congressional report on the controversial law enforcement probe.
Agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told congressional investigators that there was "a state of panic" that the guns used in the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in January and two U.S. agents in Mexico a month later might have been sold under the U.S. surveillance operation.
"I used the word anxiety. The term I used amongst my peers is pucker factor," Larry Alt, special agent with ATF's Phoenix field division, told investigators preparing a joint staff report for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The report will be released Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
Neither of those shootings was ultimately linked to the "Fast and Furious" probe, though two weapons sold to a suspect under surveillance were found at the scene of the fatal shooting of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry near Nogales, Ariz., in December.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-0615-gunrunner,0,3424418,print.story
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Police look at killer Mack Ray Edwards in Ramona Price cold case
Nearly 50 years ago, a 7-year-old girl named Ramona Price took a Saturday morning stroll on a quiet lane on the outskirts of Santa Barbara.
She never returned -- and now police think she may have encountered Mack Ray Edwards, a heavy-equipment operator thought to have killed 15 to 20 children before confessing to six of the murders and hanging himself in his San Quentin prison cell.
On Wednesday morning in Santa Barbara, cadaver dogs will scour the area around a bridge spanning the 101 Freeway at Winchester Road. Edwards -- who was described by his Sylmar neighbors as a "quiet, very nice guy" –- worked on that bridge around the time Ramona vanished.
INTERACTIVE : Track serial killers in South L.A.
Edwards' monstrous legacy is still unfolding. Three years ago, authorities excavated a ramp off the 23 Freeway in Moorpark, seeking the bones of 16-year-old Roger Dale Madison, who disappeared in 1968. They were unsuccessful.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/06/police-look-at-connection-to-serial-killer-mack-ray-edwards-in-ramona-price-case.html
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The War on Drugs Turns 40
In 1971 Richard Nixon declared abuse of narcotics public enemy number 1. Trillions later his views are alive and well.
Police officers, judges, and prison guards opposed to drug prohibition gathered in Washington, D.C., Tuesday to mark an eye-opening milestone: the 40th Anniversary of President Richard Nixon's War on Drugs. "America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse," Nixon declared in a June 17, 1971 press conference . "In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive." Just two years later he escalated his rhetoric yet again, asserting that "this Administration has declared all-out, global war on the drug menace," and creating the Drug Enforcement Agency. Ever since we've been doubling down on the strategy. It has never succeeded, even when we've gone much farther down the "get tough" road than Nixon ever did.
Though the size and cost of the DEA is but a fraction of total spending in the War on Drugs, you'd think its utter failure to stop drug use or the global drug trade would've prevented this from happening:
Almost every year the DEA budget and staff are expanded, never mind if the organization is succeeding or failing at its mission. This isn't the DEA's fault. The illicit trade in narcotics is a black market that cannot be eliminated in a free society. But why do legislators continue to increase its size?
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/the-war-on-drugs-turns-40/240472/
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Cartel corruption reaches into the ranks of U.S. border agents, officials say
Mexican drug cartels are increasingly luring U.S. border agents into smuggling operations with offers of cash and sex, authorities acknowledged in Washington last week.
Top officials in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security told a Senate subcommittee during a hearing on Thursday that Mexican drug-trafficking organizations are attempting to generate "systematic corruption" among the ranks of U.S. customs and border patrol agents, forcing the agency to open hundreds of internal investigations on employees.
Charles Edwards , acting inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security , told the subcommittee that corruption on the border has taken the form of "cash bribes, sexual favors, and other gratuities in return for allowing contraband or undocumented aliens through primary inspection lanes or even protecting or escorting border crossings," according to a transcript of the official's testimony.
Since 2004, authorities have made 127 arrests or indictments against border employees for acts of corruption "including drug smuggling, alien smuggling, money laundering, and conspiracy," said Alan Bersin , the U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner.
The figure is small relative to the size of the U.S. border force -- more than 20,700 officers.
But as previously reported by La Plaza , the Customs and Border Protection agency, which operates within the Department of Homeland Security, has doubled the size of its ranks since 2004 in the push during the Bush administration to beef up security on the border. Only one in 10 of those recent hires underwent polygraph tests, an investigation by the Associated Press found. Of those tested, 60% were deemed unsuitable for hiring, suggesting that many agents now patrolling the U.S. border with Mexico may have joined "with corruption already in mind."
"CBP found that its workforce was younger, less experienced, and in need of seasoned supervisors," Bersin said of the hiring boom.
The commissioner added: "The accelerated hiring pace under which we operated between 2006 and 2008 –- and, frankly, mistakes from which we are learning –- exposed critical organizational and individual vulnerabilities within CBP."
Bersin said the agency was seeking to correct the corruption issue, pointing to a widening caseload of investigations into criminal misconduct among agents and employees. Last year, Congress passed the Anti-Border Corruption Act of 2010 , which requires that all applicants to law enforcement positions in U.S. Custom and Border Protection be screened by a polygraph test.
The corruption revelations come as Washington prepares to confront another scandal related to the drug war in hearings scheduled this week. Monday, Rep. Darrel Issa (R-Vista) is set to lead the first congressional hearing on the government's failed "Fast and Furious" operation, in which hundreds of assault weapons were permitted to "walk" into Mexico and into the hands of cartel hitmen in an effort to track them to high-profile drug targets.
The program continued despite the vigorous protests of agents in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, The Times has reported . Whistleblowers claim it contributed to the extreme violence that has gripped much of northern Mexico. One of the operation's guns was involved in the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona last December, and another was traced to the shooting death of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent, killed on a road in Mexico in February.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2011/06/border-customs-hearing-corruption-agents.html
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Editorial Law enforcement and cellphone searches
A bill by state Sen. Mark Leno intelligently balances the needs of police to gather evidence from cellphones with the historic limitations on their power to search.
On an April afternoon in 2007, a Ventura County sheriff's deputy arrested Gregory Diaz after he allegedly sold Ecstasy to an undercover informant. Diaz was taken into custody and initially denied any wrongdoing, but deputies had seized his cellphone, and they examined it without a warrant. When they did, they found a text message reading "6 4 80." A deputy interpreted that to mean Diaz was offering to sell six tabs for $80. Shown the text message and the deputy's interpretation of it, Diaz admitted selling the drugs. When a court ruled that the text message would be admissible, Diaz pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years' probation.
That ended the immediate issue, but the Diaz case has continued to cause controversy and difficulty for courts and legislators. The California Supreme Court upheld Diaz's conviction, but others have questioned the warrantless search of Diaz's cellphone and argue that it opens the door for police abuse. Among those concerned is state Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), who introduced a bill to overturn the Supreme Court's decision and require officers to secure a warrant, based on a showing of probable cause, before they search a phone. Leno's bill, SB 914, intelligently balances the needs of police with the historic limitations on their power to search; it has passed the Senate and deserves approval by the Assembly as well.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-cellphone-20110614,0,7151694,print.story
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Hacker group breaks into Senate website
A group that has previously hacked into the websites of Fox.com, Sony and PBS broke into the public website of the U.S. Senate over the weekend, but did minimal damage.
The Senate sergeant of arms revealed the cyber break-in Monday but said the intruder, LulzSec, did not break into the Senate computer network.
“Although this intrusion is inconvenient, it does not compromise the security of the Senate's network, its members or staff,” Deputy Sergeant at Arms Martina Bradford said in a statement. “Specifically, there is no individual user account information on the server supporting senate.gov that could have been compromised.”
Bradford said that “each Senate member and committee maintains its own presence on senate.gov and may not always incorporate recommended security protocols,” and that the sergeant of arms staff was conducting a “ review of all the sites hosted on senate.gov, urging the individuals responsible for those sites to conduct their own review and continuing to take other actions to safeguard the Senate's public Web presence.”
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/90051432?Hacker%20group%20breaks%20into%20Senate%20website
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Taking a Stand against Elder Abuse
June 15th, 2011 marks the 6th Annual World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. This is an important opportunity for Americans and people around the world to recommit ourselves to ending elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation.
Elder abuse, like domestic violence and child abuse, is a public health crisis that crosses all socio-economic lines. Millions of older Americans are abused, neglected, or exploited each year – often by someone they know – and an estimated 84 percent of these incidents are not reported.
Elder abuse and exploitation is an issue that must be addressed. As Americans enjoy longer lives and the senior population continues to grow, abuse will likely grow with it. And, sadly, during hard economic times the prevalence of financial exploitation increases.
One way this administration is committed to fighting elder abuse is through the Elder Justice Act, which was signed into law by President Obama last year. The Elder Justice Act provides the first-ever authorization of Federal resources for adult protective services demonstrations to test the best methods of identifying, responding to, and preventing elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation. In fact, the President's 2012 Budget proposes $16.5 million in first-time funding for this purpose.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/06/13/taking-stand-against-elder-abuse
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Op-Ed
E-Verify works; let's use it
The voluntary program allows employers to electronically verify the work eligibility status of new employees, whose Social Security and alien ID numbers are checked against U.S. records. A photo-matching tool also deters fraud.
Over the last few years, our economy has faced unprecedented challenges, and millions of Americans have lost their jobs. For two years, the unemployment rate has hovered around 9%.
While 26 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed, 7 million individuals work illegally in the United States. On top of all the challenges Americans face today, it is inexcusable that Americans and legal workers have to compete with illegal immigrants for scarce jobs.
Fortunately, there is a tool available to preserve jobs for legal workers: E-Verify. But the program is voluntary. Congress has the opportunity to expand E-Verify — including making it mandatory — so more job opportunities are made available to unemployed Americans.
Created under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, E-Verify is a Web-based system that allows employers to electronically verify the work eligibility of newly hired employees. The Social Security numbers and alien identification numbers of new hires are checked against Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security records to weed out fraudulent numbers and help ensure that new hires are legally authorized to work in the United States.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gallegly-everify-20110613,0,7035481,print.story
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Op-Ed
Jim Newton: What we have is a failure to communicate
The Los Angeles Regional Interoperable Communications System is supposed to link all of L.A. County's first responders. But its status is uncertain. Blame sloppiness, recriminations and politics.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, public safety leaders in Southern California concluded that the need for a unified emergency communications system was so grave that they had to build it in such a way as to avoid the traditional pitfalls for huge, multi-agency projects: sloppiness, recriminations and politics. Ten years later, they are on the verge of commissioning such a system, but their efforts are beset by sloppiness, recriminations and politics.
The huge undertaking goes by the ungainly acronym LA-RICS, short for the unwieldy full name: The Los Angeles Regional Interoperable Communications System. Once built, it is supposed to supply a wireless voice and data system that will link all of Los Angeles County's first responders — 50 law enforcement agencies and 31 fire departments.
In theory, a common communications system would not only protect the region in the event of a terrorist attack or major natural disaster but could smooth responses to more routine crises. The LA-RICS website notes that the response to a 2002 shooting at Los Angeles International Airport was hampered by the different communications systems employed by airport police and those used by local and federal agencies with units at or near the airport. LA-RICS could solve that.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-newton-column-20110611,0,3240163,print.column |
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