http://www

the photos from this article looked good. i didnt understand all the technical spanish words so i dont know if it is a good article. i suspect it is just a bunch of government propaganda the spanish newspaper printed word for word.

http://www.prensahispanaaz.com/index.asp?id=4518

Proliferan laboratorios clandestinos Metanfetaminas, peligro en el vecindario

Cada año, el uso de drogas sintéticas acaba con la vida de miles de personas en todo el país.

Samuel Murillo

Héctor “N” comenzó a fumar mariguana cuando tenía doce años. A los 15, el deseo de tener una sensación más fuerte lo llevó a probar el “crystal”, también conocido como metanfetaminas. A pesar de varios intentos por dejar la adicción a esa droga no ha sido posible y el deterioro que sufre su cuerpo y su mente es cada vez más notable. A pesar de su edad, 21 años, este joven ha estado en la cárcel en varias ocasiones, debido a su grave adicción. El daño no solamente lo sufre él en su organismo, sino también sus familiares, quienes no pueden ocultar su dolor de ver cómo la droga consume lentamente la vida de Héctor.

Esta realidad es la que enfrentan miles de familias en todo el país debido al creciente índice de consumidores de la llamada droga del siglo. Las metanfetaminas son drogas que estimulan temporalmente el sistema nervioso. De acuerdo con el jefe de la DEA en Arizona, Timothy J. Landrum, su consumo ha ido en aumento al grado de convertirse en un problema de salud pública a nivel mundial. La Agencia Federal Antinarcóticos realiza esfuerzos sobrehumanos para impedir que ésta y otras drogas lleguen a manos de la juventud estadounidense. Sin embargo, esta lucha contra los productores de metanfetaminas no es nada fácil, admite el jefe de la DEA. Cada vez es más frecuente la detección de laboratorios clandestinos en vecindarios de las comunidades.

El problema en casa

De acuerdo con Landrum, la estrecha coordinación que existe entre la DEA con agencias federales, estatales y locales a nivel internacional ha ayudado a obstaculizar cada vez más el tráfico de drogas hacia este país. Pese a estos esfuerzos, el gran problema que enfrentan hoy en día es la creciente demanda de esta droga entre jóvenes y por ende la proliferación de laboratorios clandestinos prácticamente en cualquier área de las ciudades. La DEA, con apoyo de diversas agencias locales y estatales, ha desmantelado muchos de estos laboratorios, comúnmente localizados en casas ubicadas en zonas residenciales. Los laboratorios clandestinos representan una amenaza latente, una bomba de tiempo, debido al inminente riesgo de una explosión que podría afectar a varias casas alrededor en el vecindario.

La proliferación de estos lugares donde se procesan drogas sintéticas se debe también a la facilidad con que se pueden adquirir en el mercado los productos que sirven como ingredientes para elaborarlas.

Daño colateral

Las metanfetaminas generan adicción desde su inicio y, con el tiempo y el uso constante, la reducción de los niveles de dopamina en el cerebro ocasionan síntomas parecidos a los de la enfermedad de Parkinson, un trastorno grave que afecta el control del movimiento.

Al momento de la inhalación o la inyección a través de las venas, el adicto experimenta una intensa sensación conocida como “rush” o “flash” (arrebato o fogonazo).

Pero ese rato de placer tiene efectos tan dañinos que pueden conducir a una muerte segura. Los efectos inmediatos son notables en el sistema nervioso y se manifiestan a través de irritabilidad, insomnio, confusión, temblores, convulsiones, ansiedad, paranoia y agresividad. Para atacar el notable incremento en el número de adictos, el jefe de la DEA sostiene que es urgente que la sociedad en general contribuya en la educación y prevención sobre los efectos dañinos que ocasionan las metanfetaminas. “Es un trabajo de todos. Padres de familia, maestros, autoridades, todos debemos formar un frente común para contrarrestar este gran mal que está afectando el futuro de nuestros hijos”, enfatizó.

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http://www.prensahispanaaz.com/index.asp?id=4598

Los antiinmigrantes, malo para todos:Sinema

Edmundo Apodaca

La presencia de los minuteman o de cualquier otro grupo antiinmigrante, e incluso de algunos funcionarios racistas, es malo para el futuro económico y la educación de la sociedad.

En opinión de la representante demócrata Kyrsten Sinema, quienes se expresan contra la comunidad inmigrante lo único que reflejan es su falta de conocimiento sobre la verdadera aportación de esas familias a la economía y a la cultura de este país.

Además, dijo, es imposible sacar de Estados Unidos a los millones de inmigrantes “que viven en el sótano, en la oscuridad, porque entonces la situación económica de Estados Unidos se vendría abajo, debido a la enorme aportación que hacen al crecimiento y desarrollo de la Nación”.

Sinema expuso que en realidad los inmigrantes ponen más en la economía que lo que reciben. Su aportación permite que las ciudades y los estados puedan soportar sus programas de seguridad pública de obras y servicios que puedan ser financiados sin mayores problemas, porque el dinero que se les quita por impuestos, seguro social y otros gravámenes, no pueden recuperarlos y el gobierno federal los puede distribuir a nivel nacional.

“Ese dinero que dejan de recibir lo meten al presupuesto general para reparación de calles, Policía, bomberos.

Eso es realmente aportar, y no queremos entenderlo.”

Para la representante demócrata, es un error de algunos políticos pretender quitarles oportunidades de educación a los inmigrantes.

Si logran avanzar ese tipo de ideas, el estado es el que saldrá perdiendo, ya que se deteriorará el nivel educativo de sus habitantes.

Expuso que es necesario que cada vez más y más inmigrantes asistan a la universidad.

Si no van a la escuela, si no se educan, no podrán progresar.

Entonces no podrán contribuir con más impuestos al estado y, por consiguiente, aumentarán los niveles de pobreza y, por tanto, la obligación del gobierno de destinar más recursos para atender a las familias en condiciones de marginación.

Es un círculo vicioso del cual puede salir la comunidad inmigrante el día que le den oportunidad de resolver su situación migratoria, dijo Kyrsten Sinema, quien se opone a las propuestas de los legisladores republicanos para combatir con mayor rigor a los trabajadores migratorios.

Insistió en que el éxito de un pueblo de mide por la cantidad de gente educada, preparada, capacitada para el mejor desempeño de sus tareas. Esto mejora la economía y le da un valor agregado al estado o al país.

Esto, dijo, no lo han visualizado los políticos y los grupos que promueven sanciones más severas, más fuertes contra la comunidad inmigrante.

Lo que tiene que hacer el estado es promover la educación y sancionar a quien no quiera ir a la escuela a prepararse.

Eso sería realmente una idea revolucionaria que impulsaría la educación, el crecimiento económico, y Arizona sería un pueblo preparado, ejemplo mundial de lo que es realmente un gobierno justo.

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our favorite socialist Kyrsten Sinema gets in the news again. a translation by google follows.

http://www.prensahispanaaz.com/index.asp?id=4598

Los antiinmigrantes, malo para todos:Sinema

Edmundo Apodaca

La presencia de los minuteman o de cualquier otro grupo antiinmigrante, e incluso de algunos funcionarios racistas, es malo para el futuro económico y la educación de la sociedad.

“Ese dinero que dejan de recibir lo meten al presupuesto general para reparación de calles, Policía, bomberos.

Eso es realmente aportar, y no queremos entenderlo.”

Para la representante demócrata, es un error de algunos políticos pretender quitarles oportunidades de educación a los inmigrantes.

Si logran avanzar ese tipo de ideas, el estado es el que saldrá perdiendo, ya que se deteriorará el nivel educativo de sus habitantes.

Expuso que es necesario que cada vez más y más inmigrantes asistan a la universidad.

Si no van a la escuela, si no se educan, no podrán progresar.

Esto, dijo, no lo han visualizado los políticos y los grupos que promueven sanciones más severas, más fuertes contra la comunidad inmigrante.

Lo que tiene que hacer el estado es promover la educación y sancionar a quien no quiera ir a la escuela a prepararse.

Eso sería realmente una idea revolucionaria que impulsaría la educación, el crecimiento económico, y Arizona sería un pueblo preparado, ejemplo mundial de lo que es realmente un gobierno justo.

http://www.prensahispanaaz.com/index.asp?id=4598 the antiimmigrants, bad for todos:Sinema Edmundo Apodaca the presence of minuteman or any other group antiimmigrant, and even of some racist civil employees, he is bad for the future economic and the education of the society. In opinion of the democratic representative Kyrsten Sinema, who express against the community immigrant the only thing which they reflect is its lack of knowledge on the true contribution of those families to the economy and the culture of this country. In addition, it said, it is impossible to remove from the United States to the million immigrants "who live in the cellar, in the dark, because then the economic situation of the United States would come down, due to the enormous contribution which they make to the growth and development of the Nation". Sinema exposed that in fact the immigrants put more in the economy than what they receive. Its contribution allows that the cities and the states can support to their programs of public work security and services that can be financed without greater problems, because the money that take off to them by taxes, social insurance and other burdens, cannot recover them and the federal government can distribute them level to national. "That money that lets receive puts it to the general budget for repair of streets, Police, firemen. That is really to contribute, and we do not want to understand it." For the democratic representative, it is an error of some politicians to try to clear opportunities to them of education to the immigrants. If they manage to advance that type of ideas, the state is the one that will leave losing, since the educative level of its inhabitants will be deteriorated. He exposed that it is necessary that more and more and more immigrants attend the university. If they do not go to the school, if they are not educated, they will not be able to progress. Then they will not be able to contribute with more imposing to the state and, therefore, they will increase the levels of poverty and, therefore, the obligation of the government to destine more resources to take care of the families in conditions of marginalization. It is a vicious circle which the day can leave the community immigrant that gives opportunity him to solve their migratory situation, said Kyrsten Sinema, that is against the proposals of the republican legislators to fight with greater rigor the migratory workers. He insisted on which the success of a town of measures by the amount of educated people, prepared, enabled for the best performance of his tasks. This improvement the economy and gives a value him added to the state or to the country. This, said, they have not visualized it the politicians and the groups who promote more severe sanctions, stronger against the community immigrant. What must make the state is to promote the education and to sanction to that it does not want to go to the school to prepare itself. That would be really a revolutionary idea that it would impel the education, the economic growth, and Arizona would be a prepared town, world-wide example of which is really a government just.

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http://phoenixnewtimes.com/Issues/2005-12-01/news/news.html

Life Teen Founder Busted

Monsignor Dale Fushek faces 10 misdemeanor counts of sexual misconduct with boys and young men

By Robert Nelson

Published: Thursday, December 1, 2005

Monsignor Dale Fushek, once second-in-command of the Phoenix Diocese and founder of the nation's top church-based program for Catholic teenagers, has been arrested on 10 misdemeanor counts involving sexual misconduct with teenage boys and young men.

The charges stem from the accounts of six men who all say they were drawn into unwanted sexual situations by Fushek when they were involved with Fushek's Life Teen program at St. Timothy's Catholic Church in Mesa between 1985 and 1994.

The Maricopa County Attorney's five-page criminal complaint against Fushek reads like a Reader's Digest condensation of New Times' investigative piece "Cross to Bare," published last February. The cover story detailed the sometimes lurid life in the inner sanctum of the Life Teen program Fushek created at St. Tim's in the mid-1980s.

Four of the six men cited in the criminal complaint first spoke publicly for that story, which outlined what one victim called "Dale's tried-and-true method for getting teenage boys in bed with him."

The charges include five counts of contributing to the delinquency of minors, three counts of misdemeanor assault and two counts of indecent exposure.

"Acting in his capacity as a Catholic priest," the complaint reads, "Dale Joseph Fushek used a relationship of trust to perform criminal acts, including but not limited to sexual activities, improper sexual discussions and physical contact, upon vulnerable minor and adult victims."

The complaint states that in the mid-1980s, Fushek contributed to the delinquency of a minor, Marc Tropio, by engaging in discussions including "questions by defendant about Marc Tropio's masturbatory conduct and/or other sexual activities. At the time, Dale Joseph Fushek misrepresented them as part of the Catholic sacrament of confession. The physical contacts included defendant inviting Marc Tropio into his bed then engaging in kissing and snuggling. Said contact was unwelcome by Marc Tropio."

The five other victims describe a similar pattern of conduct, one that began with Fushek engaging certain teenage boys in his parish in explicit sexual discussions that eventually led to what victims perceived as unwanted sexual advances by the priest.

Through his attorney, Mike Manning, Fushek denies any inappropriate contact with any of the six alleged victims.

In a January discussion with New Times, Paul Pfaffenberger, leader of the Arizona chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, summed up the coming story and criminal complaints.

"We're beginning to hear this same story again and again," Pfaffenberger said. "That there was unwanted sexual contact by Dale Fushek, and that it came about through this very manipulative grooming process associated with Life Teen. There is definitely a pattern of behavior beginning to form."

Prosecutors have not finished their investigation of Fushek, says Barnett Lotstein, special assistant county attorney. The misdemeanor charges needed to be filed now, he said, to avoid problems with the one-year statute of limitations on the misdemeanors.

"There may be more charges in the future," he said.

There are essentially two tiers of allegations against Fushek -- soft-core and hard-core.

At the time of the New Times story, the amount of evidence supporting the misdemeanor charges was much greater than evidence supporting felony charges.

The six men accusing Fushek in the misdemeanor complaints are all credible witnesses, mostly men in their 30s with families and professional careers and little to gain except embarrassment from coming forward with their stories.

Most didn't know each other before this year, and all tell chillingly similar stories. Most have friends or family members who can substantiate their versions of events.

At the same time, however, none claims that Fushek ever forced the physical relationship beyond inappropriate discussions, creepy canoodling and his own nudity.

The county attorney investigation began, however, because of much more serious charges in a lawsuit filed in January by a former Life Teen member named Billy Cesolini.

Cesolini claims to have recovered memories of convicted pedophile Mark Lehman performing oral sex on him in 1985 at the rectory at St. Tim's while a fellow priest, Fushek, watched and masturbated. Cesolini was 14 at the time.

Manning, Fushek's attorney, called Cesolini "delusional" and his claims "laughable."

Prosecutors have been tight-lipped about the ongoing investigation of those considerably more serious charges.

The strength of felony criminal charges likely would hinge on testimony from Mark Lehman.

Lehman spent 10 years in prison for sexually assaulting several children in the late 1980s. He might have served more time if not for a letter to the judge by Dale Fushek asking for leniency.

Lehman could not be reached for comment for this story. In February, however, when reached at his central Phoenix home, Lehman said he could not speak on advice from his attorney.

"I would very much like to tell the whole story to you," he said then. "But the way the world is, I've been told I can't."

At the time, New Times learned of two other former priests who had claimed to have witnessed alleged assaults by Fushek. New Times failed to locate those two priests. It is unknown if county prosecutors have interviewed these men in relation to more serious charges.

Bishop Thomas Olmsted suspended Fushek from public duties last December, when Cesolini and his attorney first approached the diocese. Six months later, Fushek resigned under pressure as pastor at St. Tim's.

Fushek's star first began to fade with the fall of his mentor, former bishop Thomas O'Brien, who, after a series of New Times stories and another investigation by then-County Attorney Rick Romley, signed an agreement granting him immunity from criminal charges if he would take a reduced role in the church and admit that he allowed priests accused of sexual misconduct to continue working with minors. He also admitted to transferring problem priests to new parishes without alerting parishioners about the priests' past. In several cases, priests accused of sexual contact with a minor at one parish allegedly continued abusing children at successive parishes.

After signing the agreement, O'Brien then began stating that he had not actually agreed to the seemingly apparent terms of the agreement. That debate was quickly silenced when O'Brien was arrested in a hit-and-run incident that left a man dead. O'Brien resigned as bishop and was later convicted of the crime.

Deputy county attorney Barbara Marshall asked that Fushek be held on $50,000 bond because, she said, "based on past experience with similar defendants, we feel that flight is a serious risk."

Indeed. Besides O'Brien's run from the scene of a fatal accident, three Valley priests -- Patrick Colleary, Joseph Henn and Joseph Briceno -- have left the country and refused to return to face charges.

Instead of bond, however, Maricopa County Commissioner Barbara Hamner had Fushek placed under house arrest at his home where he will wear a bracelet monitoring his whereabouts. He was also ordered to surrender his passport.

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http://phoenixnewtimes.com/Issues/2005-12-01/news/Bird.html

The Bird

Dead Man Driving

Unless you believe in ghosts, a traffic-busting photo contraption screwed up in Mesa.

Published: Thursday, December 1, 2005

Did James Hamburg come back to life and run a red light in Mesa? Hmmm . . .

Dead Man Driving

In one way, the ticket James Hamburg got for running a red light on Country Club Drive in October wasn't so unusual. He was heading south when the light at University Drive turned red, and he kept going. Woo hoo! The camera snapped his picture, and the Mesa Police Department sent him a ticket.

In another way, it was very unusual -- because James Hamburg is dead. In fact, if the City of Mesa's police report and his own family are to be believed, he's been dead five years.

The Bird isn't shitting you: James' elderly widow got her late husband's photo-radar ticket in the mail last month. At home recovering from heart surgery, she frantically dialed her son, Steven Hamburg, a retired firefighter.

"I don't know if this is a cruel joke, or what," Lorraine Hamburg told her son, who rushed over to ogle the ticket himself. And there his dead father was, behind the wheel of the family sedan. And, holy crypt-keeper, Batman! Steven's mother was in the passenger seat.

The Bird would have called local "medium" Allison "I See Dead People" DuBois (the inspiration for the TV show starring Patricia Arquette called Medium) and demanded to know what Steven's dead father was doing driving his mom around town, because corpses are notoriously bad drivers (if you don't believe The Bird, noodle around Sun City for half an hour).

But our Steven had already called Mesa police, and that's when things got really wiggy. The younger, and still-alive, Hamburg says he explained the situation to Detective Terri Dorn, but she refused to drop the ticket unless he offered proof that his dad was no longer breathing, and thus unable to operate a motor vehicle in the state of Arizona. Hamburg says he faxed over the death certificate (which The Bird itself has seen with its own beady little eyes) but never heard anything back from Dorn.

So Hamburg did what anyone whose dead father was being accused of being a bad driver would do: He tattled to the press.

When The Bird contacted Mesa police, Sergeant Chuck Trapani claimed that Dorn never got the death certificate from Steven Hamburg. But the coppers finally did a little digging and discovered that James Hamburg was, indeed, quite dead. Then, on November 15, Mesa's finest asked the court to dismiss the ticket. End of story, they hoped.

But Steven Hamburg's posthumous plight has The Bird scratching its plumed noggin. If that was truly Steve's late father at the wheel, doesn't that mean the ticket was at least five years old, and that Mesa's red-light-running camera equipment is seriously flawed? Or does it mean we're living in a cheesy George Romero flick, where carcasses pilot Plymouths through the tonier burbs?

If Mesa's red-light mean machine is spitting out five-year-old citations and claiming they're new, it could mean a major scandal (and what defense attorney wouldn't love that possibility?). Which may be why Trapani's department did still more digging and discovered that archived tickets are destroyed after three years.

So, in a routine straight out of a rerun of the old Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV show, Trapani's boys enhanced the photo of the dead guy. They also determined that one of the buildings in the background of the snapshot hadn't been built yet when Hamburg died.

The police investigation, in fact, involved tracking down the structure's building certificate, which was issued (insert scary organ music here!) last November.

"There is no doubt in anyone's mind that the car was driven through the light on October 10," Trapani squawked to The Bird. "The only question is who's driving the vehicle."

Someone (Dracula? The Mummy? Kolchak star Darren McGavin?), Trapani swears, must have taken Mrs. Hamburg out for a spin.

Steven Hamburg begs to differ.

Thanks to her heart surgery, he says, his mother isn't out running around in cars, and certainly not with strange men. She's nearly 80, for Bela Lugosi's sake! And Hamburg knows mom didn't slip out of the house and just forget to tell him, because her daughter-in-law, Hamburg's wife, was using the elderly woman's car all that day.

"I know where the car was, I know where my dad was, and I know where my mom was!" Hamburg declares. "These things are not on the same track. And this is just ridiculous."

The whole thing comes down to just one question: Is the guy in the photograph James Hamburg? If so, Mesa police have got a lot of explaining to do, the sort of explaining that a new building permit's not going to cover.

Not only did the cops cite someone five years after he died, but they didn't even do the due diligence of pulling his DMV records to see if he was driving with a valid driver's license. (As it turns out, he wasn't. James Hamburg's license expired in 2002, which was two years after he died, but three years before he was ticketed.)

And if it isn't James Hamburg, who in the name of Frankenstein is it?

The guy driving the car (see photograph) looks uncannily like the late James Hamburg (see inset photograph, of Hamburg with his wife). And James Hamburg didn't have a twin brother. He didn't have a brother, period.

Unless, of course, he really had an identical twin brother he kept hidden from his kids, but not his wife. And so she met up with the secret brother five years after her husband's death, and he took her for a spin down Country Club Drive -- and blew through a red light.

But right now, Mesa's sticking to its story. If bird brains wanna believe a ghost was driving that sedan, then so be it.

Because if its "flawless" photo contraption screwed up this time, how many other times has it screwed up? And is such photo equipment in other cities, say, Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, screwing up, too? How much fine money from supposed red-light runners could those dratted attorneys get back?

Talk about scary.

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http://phoenixnewtimes.com/Issues/2005-12-01/news/feature.html

Judicial Blacklash

The County Attorney's Office declared war on a respected judge after he called a prosecutor's actions racist

By Paul Rubin

Published: Thursday, December 1, 2005

Warren Granville is about the last judge anybody expected to become the target of attack dogs from the Maricopa County Attorney's Office.

Granville was a prosecutor for two decades before he became a judge in 2000. He takes the city bus to the downtown Phoenix courthouse every day, walks to his chambers, puts in a day, goes home, then does it all over again.

The judge is famously soft-spoken and doesn't stand much on ceremony. Last year, for example, he mastered Gerry Spence during a hearing in a little-publicized murder case, chuckling at the famed Wyoming attorney's jokes but kindly letting him know who was boss.

The judge likes to keep things as light as possible, and his staff feels comfortable enough to poke fun at him when the need arises.

Though Granville may seem something of a milquetoast at first blush, he's not. Unlike a surprising number of jurists, this one isn't afraid to take a stand.

And last summer, a few months after the conclusion of the State of Arizona vs. Patrick Nolan Ivey criminal trial, Warren Granville felt that need.

On May 26, a jury had convicted the 20-year-old Phoenix man of breaking into a Paradise Valley home armed with a handgun. The jurors also acquitted Ivey of armed robbery and of kidnapping a young man who was the victim of the late-night break-in.

Because of Arizona's mandatory sentencing laws, Granville was compelled to sentence Ivey to a minimum of seven years in prison, which he did.

But after sitting through pretrial hearings and a trial that lasted several days, the judge was troubled by a number of things he'd observed. So, as Ivey's sentencing date neared, he did what judges in criminal cases tend to do on a day-to-day basis:

Granville first told the case prosecutor that he was leaning toward invoking a law that allows newly convicted inmates to petition the Board of Executive Clemency and then the governor for a reduction of their sentences within 90 days after going to prison.

Called 603-L, that law was enacted in the mid-1990s to deal with mandatory prison sentences that a judge believes are "clearly excessive."

Then, on August 15, the judge issued his written findings of fact in the Ivey case, and he didn't mince words.

Granville said race and economics had been a factor in the way that the County Attorney's Office had honed in on Patrick Ivey, an indigent black man.

The judge didn't like that one bit.

And, not surprisingly, those in charge at the county prosecutor's office didn't take kindly to being called racists.

Game on.

Judge Granville's explanation of why he was invoking the 603-L provision in the Ivey case was a showstopper.

Based on the trial testimony of home-invasion victim Michael Lawson, the judge wrote that "a number of Brophy [Prep] graduates bought, used and exchanged drugs with one another. [But] in this instance, the State chose to not prosecute the affluent individuals, and prosecute or threaten to prosecute the black, indigent individuals."

Granville suggested that Lawson, who had won immunity from the prosecutor in exchange for his testimony against Ivey, was one of those alleged druggies.

The judge said prosecutor Jennifer Linn "had reason to believe that four Brophy graduates had engaged in possession and exchanging marijuana. No charges were filed against any of them."

He noted that scheduled defense witness Tyriq Manley had declined to testify on Ivey's behalf only after prosecutors threatened to charge him if he did: "In the exercise of its discretion, the State refused to grant Mr. Manley use immunity so he could testify on [Ivey's] behalf."

Granville then pointed out that victim Lawson and another man who testified for the prosecution without fear of being charged for crimes related to this case were "white and wealthy . . . Mr. Ivey and Mr. Manley are black and indigent."

The judge said Ivey's seven-year sentence was excessive and unfair because of "the defendant's age, family circumstances and lack of criminal history as an adult."

He concluded that "the State was able to secure Mr. Ivey's conviction through the craven exercise of its discretion by granting immunity, limiting its prosecutorial focus and denying immunity. Under these circumstances [Ivey's] mandatory minimum sentence is clearly excessive and unfair. He is being the only one held to answer for criminal conduct that the State had reason to believe involved several others."

A week later, Granville sentenced Patrick Ivey to seven years in prison. But the judge also issued a special order under the 603-L law that allowed Ivey to petition the clemency board within 90 days.

On September 13, deputy county attorney Linn filed a testy 10-page objection to the judge's allegations. She offered that one of the "Brophy graduates" the judge had referred to in his memorandum actually was African-American, and that another still-uncharged suspect in the Paradise Valley heist also was black.

Linn wrote that when Granville first had indicated he was going to be discussing race in his 603-L findings of fact, "this was very shocking, as . . . race had never been an issue in the trial."

Linn contended that the reason Ivey had been the only person charged in the case was because of evidentiary problems, not her or her office's alleged bias against poor black people.

Yet it wasn't as if the judge thought that Patrick Ivey had been wrongfully convicted. He wrote in his memorandum that "there was ample evidence supporting the jury's verdict."

But Granville says he was appalled by what he perceived as the kid-gloves manner in which the prosecutor had treated certain people in the case who happened to be white, as compared with the hardball tactics she allegedly had employed with Patrick Ivey and Tyriq Manley.

"You've got to realize that the county attorney['s office] holds all the cards in these instances," Granville tells New Times. "It does the charging, decides what to offer, if anything, in terms of a plea bargain, and determines what witnesses to give deals to. I respect that. Heck, I did it myself for years and years. But in this case, I felt obliged to write my findings of fact [for the clemency board], though I knew Ivey was swimming upstream even if I issued a 603-L ruling."

That's because the governor always has the final say about whether prisoners deserve to have their sentences commuted. Statistics provided by the clemency board show that, since the board's creation in 1994, Governor Janet Napolitano and her predecessors have rarely granted commutations, even with the panel's unanimous recommendation.

News of Granville's strongly worded 603-L ruling became the talk of the courthouse, and the East Valley Tribune published a pair of brief stories about the case.

The daily newspaper's editorial board took a stand against the judge, writing that "Granville believes the poor crook got such a bad rap that he's invoked a loophole in Arizona's tough sentencing law that could spring the creep early."

State clemency board chairman Duane Belcher says that the 603-L law "isn't a loophole by any means. It's a statute that our Legislature devised after we abolished parole in 1993 to allow for the possibility that mandatory sentencing might not result in a just result in every case. The law at least can be looked at as a tool, a safety valve for prisoners who may not have any other recourse."

The Tribune's editorial went on: "County Attorney's Office spokesman Barnett Lotstein called Granville's actions in this case 'judicial activism at its worst.' We would go further and question Granville's fitness as a judge."

Granville half-jokingly defines "judicial activism" as occurring "when a judge rules against you. In this case, I guess that makes me, God forbid, a 'judicial activist.'"

Lotstein, a special assistant to County Attorney Andrew Thomas, tells New Times that Granville "had no right to accuse our young prosecutor or our officer of racism when there was absolutely no evidence of racism. It was an absolutely inappropriate commentary by Warren and without basis of fact, and I can tell you that Andy [Thomas] was shocked and outraged by it."

Perhaps emboldened by the anti-Granville reaction by the media (or at least the reaction of the editorial-desk jockeys at the Mesa daily), the upper echelon at the County Attorney's Office decided to do more than mouth off.

Top county prosecutors tried to bring the judge down.

Official judicial complaints usually concern alleged personal improprieties and slacking off on the job. This time, it was a dispute between a judge and a prosecutor concerning the judge's potent impressions of a case that the prosecutor actually had won.

On August 30, Sally Wells, chief assistant to County Attorney Thomas, filed a complaint against Granville with the Arizona Commission on Judicial Conduct.

It called for sanctions against the judge for what Wells called "unethical" behavior. She alleged that Granville had badly misstated the facts of the case, and then had leaked his 603-L ruling to the media, either directly or through the court's public relations staff.

Wells also accused Granville of injecting race into the case because he hadn't wanted to sentence just one of the co-conspirators (the only one charged to this day) to an extended prison term.

"We believed and still believe that the judge injected his accusations of racism simply to try to get us to change the way we were approaching the case," the County Attorney's Office's Lotstein explains. "But we felt that the defendant [Ivey] was a bad person who deserved to go to prison for what he'd done."

On August 9, 2004, Paradise Valley police responded to reports of a "home invasion" inside a gated residence on East Claremont Drive.

The alleged victim was Michael Lawson, a young man in his late teens living there in his parents' guesthouse.

An officer noted that the guesthouse's interior was in a state of disarray. Lawson claimed two captors had stuck duct tape over his mouth for much of their hourlong invasion.

At first, he said, he had no idea why or how two men he didn't know had picked him and his remote residence for their armed robbery.

The officer wrote that Lawson "seemed to be very calm about the incident," even though he was describing a frightening event in which one of his captors allegedly threatened him with a gun.

Another Paradise Valley officer wrote that Lawson told him at the scene that he'd been getting calls on his cell phone from an old high school friend named "Rob" who'd wanted to hook up before leaving for college. The two had graduated from Brophy Prep in 2003, but apparently hadn't spoken in some time.

Lawson said he'd gotten a cell phone call from someone who identified himself as Rob at the gate at about 1:30 a.m. He'd walked up the driveway to open it up.

There, Lawson said, the two men, both of whom were black, asked him to let them in for some water. One of the men told him that Rob was waiting out in one of the cars.

Actually, Rob wasn't even in the state of Arizona.

As the trio walked toward the guesthouse, one of the men, whom Lawson later identified as Patrick Ivey, pulled out a gun and told him it was a robbery.

Inside the guesthouse, the men duct-taped Lawson's hands behind his back, and collected two duffle bags' worth of goods, including a laptop computer and a separate computer monitor, a stereo amp, a DVD player and other valuables.

Lawson described a fairly benign interaction under the circumstances. For example, he admitted that the robbers had agreed not to steal certain items, including his electric guitar. More important, the men had left without injuring Lawson.

At first, Lawson told police that he probably wouldn't be able to identify either of the two men.

He also let detectives check into the calls on his cell phone, which provided the case's first big surprise.

Yes, someone had phoned Lawson from the same number four times before the invasion, including just moments before the intruders asked for the water.

But it hadn't been Rob.

The phone number led to another ex-Brophy classmate of Lawson's, Gerad Punch.

Punch had been a high school basketball star who was about to start his second year at Furman University in South Carolina on an athletic scholarship.

How Lawson could have mistaken Rob's voice for Punch's is a mystery.

But either he really did get conned by Punch, or he lied to police and later to the jury at Patrick Ivey's trial.

Rob, by the way, is white. Punch is black.

Punch told the police he didn't know anything about a home invasion.

But fingerprints inside the guesthouse and other evidence led police to a friend of Punch's, Patrick Ivey, who also was pals with another Phoenix man, Dion Williams, who soon became directly linked to the case.

Apparently, neither Ivey nor Williams knew Michael Lawson, and neither had attended Brophy Prep.

On October 4, 2004, Paradise Valley police arrested Patrick Ivey outside his west Phoenix apartment complex. A search of his apartment uncovered several possibly stolen items, including a flat-screen computer monitor that Lawson later identified as his.

That evening, Detective John Corcoran and a colleague interviewed Ivey at the Paradise Valley police station.

The chatty suspect confessed to the crimes at the guesthouse, admitting that he and Dion Williams had been hurting for money and that Gerad Punch had devised a plot to get them some.

Ivey said Punch had suggested the rip-off of a rich-kid "pot dealer" he knew from high school, Michael Lawson.

Sounded like a plan.

Punch soon made the first of a series of calls to Lawson on his cell phone. Punch pretended he was Rob, another former Brophy classmate.

The plot was falling into place. Ivey said Lawson readily had agreed to find some marijuana for the alleged Rob. (Much later, Lawson admitted as much to police and then to the jury, though he denied being a dealer himself.)

Ivey said Punch had found Lawson's address in a Brophy Prep yearbook. The three men -- Ivey, Williams and Punch -- had driven into Paradise Valley from Phoenix in two cars.

Ivey admitted that he'd been carrying a semi-automatic handgun, which he claimed had been unloaded (though Lawson couldn't have known that).

He said Punch had waited behind as Lawson let Ivey and Williams into the family compound.

Ivey said he and Williams had confronted Lawson about the marijuana supposedly promised to Rob in the earlier cell calls. Lawson said he'd have to call around to get the weed, because he didn't have any on-site.

According to Ivey's trial attorney, Dan DeRienzo, Lawson made two calls to another Brophy classmate during the home invasion to try to score the drugs.

But Ivey said he and Williams didn't dally too long at the Paradise Valley home. They filled their two duffle bags with Lawson's property, and split.

After Ivey's confession, police booked him for armed robbery, kidnapping and residential burglary.

Based on his statement, they arrested Dion Williams a few hours later. Williams told detectives that he didn't know anything before he clammed up and invoked his right to an attorney.

Gerad Punch also remained free.

Michael Lawson identified Ivey in a photographic lineup, but he couldn't finger Williams in a separate lineup and claimed not to have seen Punch on the night of the robbery.

Williams soon was released from custody, the charges against him dropped.

Instead of getting a multi-defendant indictment, the County Attorney's Office nailed Patrick Ivey alone as the perpetrator of the home invasion.

Then, as Ivey's trial approached earlier this year, Linn decided not to offer him a deal in exchange for his testimony against supposed co-conspirators Williams and Punch.

Dan DeRienzo says he knew he was in for it soon after he was appointed to represent Patrick Ivey.

Then with the county public defender's office, DeRienzo has been a lawyer since 1986, and considers himself skilled at the art of pretrial plea negotiation, a must in criminal defense.

"As things unfolded, it became clear that this was a case that should have been pled," says DeRienzo, now in private practice in Prescott. "But Ms. Linn was being unreasonable in everything. I mean, my guy was the one who pretty much solved the case for the police. The basketball player was, 'I didn't do it,' and he's still free for being dishonest. Same goes for Williams. My guy said, 'This is what happened,' even though that confession was suppressed. I'd ask her, 'Jennifer, why aren't you offering this guy anything, so maybe he'll turn on the other two?' She wouldn't budge."

Last January 4, Linn sent DeRienzo an e-mail about a settlement conference that the defense attorney had been trying to arrange with another judge, which is standard procedure:

"My thoughts are as follows. There is no offer. Settlement conferences are not supposed to be set without first asking the prosecutor, especially where there is no offer, as it is a waste of valuable judicial resources."

DeRienzo snapped back that "the rule does not require the defendant's attorney to obtain the prosecutor's permission in order to enter into good-faith settlement negotiations. . . . In fact, a long and costly trial, followed by long and costly appeals is a waste of judicial resources."

Tensions escalated even more after Judge Granville granted the defense motion to keep Ivey's police confession from the jury.

Months later, Linn wrote in her objection to Granville's 603-L ruling in Ivey's favor that the judge had chosen "to believe the admitted liar [Ivey] over the detective [Corcoran] with 30 years of law enforcement experience and suppressed the confession."

But the court record and interviews with both Granville and defense attorney DeRienzo suggest a much different scenario.

"It was not Ivey's word against the detective's," DeRienzo says. "That's an absolute falsehood."

Detective Corcoran testified at a pretrial hearing that he twice had given Ivey his Miranda warnings, first on the way to the police station and then on videotape before he began his interrogation of the suspect.

However, the videotape shows that Corcoran did instruct Ivey that he had the right to remain silent and that anything he said might be used against him in court. But the detective neglected to tell Ivey of his right to an attorney, instead reminding the young man to consider "all that other stuff" before agreeing to waive his legal rights.

Corcoran claimed at the hearing that he had given the correct Miranda warning the first time, outside the station. But he stumbled badly on the stand when the prosecutor asked him to restate the Miranda warning for the judge.

Before the trial began, Linn agreed to grant immunity from prosecution to Michael Lawson in exchange for his testimony. But in light of what Linn later wrote in her objection to Granville's 603-L findings, the reason for the deal remains unclear.

Linn wrote that "the Paradise Valley police did not find any drugs, drug paraphernalia or anything else related to the drug trade at Michael Lawson's house. . . . Lawson testified that he does not sell drugs, that he did not know what two ounces of marijuana looked like and that he only agreed to do a very stupid thing to help out someone he thought was [Rob]."

So why the deal?

Then there was Rob -- who really does exist. He was the former Brophy student pulled into the case when Gerad Punch, according to the prosecution, masqueraded as him in the phone calls to Lawson.

Rob's only reason for testifying at trial was to say that he hadn't even been in Arizona at the time of the home invasion. To be on the safe side, Rob's parents hired Tom Henze and Mike Gallagher -- two of Arizona's most high-priced attorneys -- to represent him in court.

Linn later tried to make the point that she hadn't granted Rob immunity from possible prosecution, even though his attorneys repeatedly had asked for it.

But the highly remote possibility that Rob might be charged with something had ended after Judge Granville ruled that the lawyers couldn't question Rob at trial about his involvement, if any, in drug use or sales.

"It certainly didn't make any sense that the prosecutor seemed to be fixated on one guy -- my guy -- when you had so much garbage in the case to wade through," DeRienzo says. "But that's what I was facing."

In his opening statement last May, Dan DeRienzo promised jurors that they'd hear important defense testimony from Tyriq Manley, a friend of Patrick Ivey's.

Ivey had told police in his suppressed confession that he'd sold the stolen computer monitor to Manley. Manley had corroborated that in his own interview with detectives.

Then, according to prosecutor Linn, "Mr. Manley changed this story."

He sure did. He suddenly was fingering Gerad Punch as the one who had sold him the pilfered monitor.

Linn later claimed she had been duty-bound to ask Judge Granville to appoint a lawyer to represent Manley, rather than let him implicate himself on the stand for trafficking in stolen property and lying to the police.

DeRienzo says that his adversary "is so full of it! Here's what really happened: The monitor was found in Manley's bedroom. I asked him where he'd gotten it. He told me he'd gotten it from Punch, not from Ivey. Once the confession was suppressed, our defense was that our guy didn't do it, Punch was the guy. So we disclosed [Manley] as a witness, and the prosecutor got to ask him questions.

"One of Linn's questions was, 'When Punch gave this monitor to you, did you think that it might be stolen?' He said he didn't think so, though he'd bought it at a good rate. Then she says she's thinking about charging him with knowingly possessing stolen property. Tyriq freaked, and his lawyer told him he'd better not testify, so he didn't. Here they were giving immunity to their druggie victim and also making sure we couldn't ask Rob about drugs. But then when I came up with a witness, she made what I considered veiled threats about prosecuting him."

Granville took this all in from his vantage point on the bench:

"The prosecutor fought awfully hard to keep Manley from being a witness by not offering him immunity, at the same time as she was making sure that her key witness Lawson and [Rob] had clear sailing. At some point, and it was not a spur-of-the-moment thing, something just hit me about this case in terms of race as well as economics."

Dan DeRienzo says Michael Lawson's testimony during the trial raised new questions.

"We had Lawson's phone records, so we know he called another Brophy guy to try to set up a drug deal," DeRienzo says. "That was no problem for him because Brophy guys always buy and sell weed to each other. He'd told Rob, or the guy he supposedly thought was Rob, 'Come on over, I'll get you some weed.' He then called a pal of his who was in Scottsdale playing poker, as I recall, and started the process of hooking him up with some pot."

DeRienzo adds that the detectives had shown Lawson a photo of Gerad Punch shortly after the home invasion, after Punch's name came up in the cell phone records.

"Lawson told them at first that he didn't know who the guy was, though they'd graduated together," the attorney says. "We always suspected that he knew from the git-go that Punch was Punch, not Rob. After the trial, the jurors asked why Lawson hadn't been prosecuted for perjury for lying to the cops. I couldn't answer that one."

Patrick Ivey didn't testify, and neither did Tyriq Manley. The broken promise to jurors on the latter certainly cost the defense potential points in what had become quite a horse race.

"This whole incident was over drugs, and it wasn't a classic home invasion," DeRienzo says. "The jurors knew that. Patrick was pissed off that this rich Brophy kid who had had everything handed to him on a silver platter was making even more money dealing drugs -- and now he didn't even have any drugs at his house when the three guys showed up. Patrick obviously made a serious mistake."

The panel deliberated over a period of a day and a half before returning its verdicts: Guilty of residential burglary. Not guilty of armed robbery and kidnapping.

Says Ivey's attorney, DeRienzo: "First-degree burglary is entering or remaining unlawfully in someone's home intending to commit a felony. I think that the jury may have concluded that Patrick had been there to buy drugs, which is a felony, and that it had turned into an argument over money." "Would [the] state consider dropping [the] allegation of dangerousness to afford Mr. Ivey an opportunity on probation?" the judge asked the prosecutor. "If not, the court will consider invoking 603-L on grounds of the state's choices regarding immunity, the fact that others involved [weren't] prosecuted or punished, and [Ivey's] age and [lack of] criminal history. If invoked, I would be obliged to make my findings on the record. Just a heads up."

Linn responded the following day that "the State will not drop the allegations of dangerousness, as we do not feel probation is appropriate."

Granville replied that "non-dangerous offenses can go to prison, too. In any case, you do what you believe is right. I'll do what I believe is right."

In a letter to New Times from a state prison facility in Yuma, Patrick Ivey wrote recently that "the prosecutor had the decision to drop the dangerousness of the crime so I might have had a chance to be placed on probation, maybe after doing some more jail time. Judge Granville tried to reason with her to do so. She refused, citing her inhibitions due to her supervisor. I feel that is a lie, and she intended to give me as much time as she could."

On Ivey's original sentencing date of July 2, the judge said during a bench conference that his proposed 603-L findings in the case would involve race, and advised Linn she could try to convince him otherwise.

"I was just trying to give her an idea of what I was inclined to do, to give her a chance to take it up the chain or to play chicken and not back down. I'll often tell lawyers, 'These are what my facts are. Tell me why my facts are wrong.'"

But Linn didn't respond to Granville in writing until after the judge actually sentenced Ivey on August 22. At that hearing, the judge announced that he believed "the sentence required by law is clearly excessive and [Ivey] may petition the Board of Executive Clemency for a commutation of sentence within 90 days after [he] is committed to [prison]."

In her belated pleading to Granville, the prosecutor referred to Ivey's confession, to his alleged juvenile criminal history, and to other matters, including the defendant's supposed lack of remorse.

Granville says he considered Linn's memorandum much as he treats letters in support of a defendant.

"If you think a judge is wrong on the law or on the facts of a case, write a memo on the law or the facts and submit it as quickly as possible," he says. "She put things in her pleading that I couldn't consider at sentencing, such as the confession, because I had precluded it. Her presentation was too little and too late."

Judge Granville informed his two supervisors, Jim Keppel and Barbara Mundell, presiding judge over all of the county courts, when he learned that the County Attorney's Office had filed its judicial complaint against him.

He says he asked the pair if they wanted to transfer him to another assignment, perhaps civil or juvenile or family law. They told him to stay put.

"I know Warren well and have the ultimate respect for him as a fair, impartial and professional judge," says Keppel, the county's chief criminal judge. "I just don't know of anything that Warren did in this particular case that merited anything close to how the County Attorney's Office reacted."

Though the judicial complaint by Thomas' chief assistant, Wells, was tantamount to a declaration of war against the judge, it didn't turn out to mean anything on a day-to-day level.

In September, the month after Wells filed her complaint against Warren Granville, prosecutors exercised their right to have county judges in 32 criminal cases removed for various reasons. That month, defense attorneys removed judges in 22 cases.

But no one on either side of the legal fence asked for Judge Granville's removal in any of the 406 cases he had pending in his court.

The 19 death-penalty cases currently before Granville are nine more than the next-closest judge.

"If they think I'm so unfair and biased over there at the County Attorney's Office, then why have they continued to appear in my courtroom?" the judge asks. "I must be doing something right, because lawyers on both sides keep on showing up in my court."

Judges in criminal cases routinely alert both parties informally about how they're leaning in a given case.

"Sure, I'll tell them what direction I'm leaning in," says Presiding Criminal Court Judge Jim Keppel, another former prosecutor turned jurist. "At least that will give them a heads-up so they can try to change my mind or present testimony at a [pre-sentencing] hearing."

That's what Warren Granville says he had in mind when he e-mailed Jennifer Linn (and copied Dan DeRienzo's successor in the case) last June 27.

Special Assistant County Attorney Lotstein, who used to be Granville's supervisor when the two men worked at the Arizona Attorney General's Office, explains that away by saying that "we never have suggested that Warren is a bad judge or a bad guy, just that he made a terribly offensive ruling in this case by calling us racists. Maybe he woke up on the wrong side of the bed that day. All I know is that he deeply upset a young prosecutor who doesn't have a racist bone in her body."

That prosecutor, Linn, returned to Granville's court just a few weeks after Ivey's sentencing to try another armed robbery and kidnapping case.

A jury acquitted each of the defendants she was prosecuting.

Last week, Granville received a letter from the judicial commission about the results of the County Attorney Office's complaint against him.

The commission cleared him of any judicial misconduct.

But the panel also chided Granville for his "sweeping statements" about the County Attorney's Office and said it was "concerned about the quantum of evidence" to support his accusations of racism.

In the future, the commission said, the judge should avoid making such "inflammatory" statements.

"I love being a judge, and I think I'm a fair guy," Granville says. "But when you sign up as a judge, you have to act like a judge. I call it like I see it, and I plan to continue to do just that."

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so the cops cited this guy for killing his cats. then the government killed the remaining 35 cats at the guys home? i dont get it????

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1204B1-talker04.html

1 kitten survives in house where 96 cats were found dead

Dec. 4, 2005 12:00 AM

One kitten is the lone survivor among 131 cats found at a west Phoenix house.

Ninety-six cats were found dead Friday at Scott Antunez's house, including 92 sealed in plastic bags inside a freezer that was not working, Arizona Humane Society spokeswoman Angela Stringfellow said.

Thirty-five cats were alive, but all except the kitten have since been euthanized because they were uncontrollably wild and attacked animal medical technicians, Stringfellow said.

Police have cited Antunez, who lives near 85th Avenue and Palm Lane, with six misdemeanors on suspicion of animal cruelty and neglect, Stringfellow said.

Society officials are performing necropsies on the cats to look for signs of intentional harm.

- Josh Kelley

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saddam gets a fair trial??? yea sure!!! by the puppet government the american empire installed in iraq. "This is a law made by America and does not reflect Iraqi sovereignty."

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/index.php?sty=54597

Saddam yells at judge in unruly session

Associated Press

December 5, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Saddam Hussein's defense team walked out of court Monday, the former leader yelled at the judge, and Saddam's half brother shouted "Why don't you just execute us!" in an often unruly court session that also saw former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark speak on behalf of the deposed president.

After the lawyers walked out, Saddam, shaking his right hand, told the judge: "You are imposing lawyers on us. They are imposed lawyers. The court is imposed by itself. We reject that."

Clark said he needed only two minutes to present his argument. But Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin at first said only Saddam's chief lawyer could speak. Amin said the defense should submit its motion in writing and warned that if the defense walked out then the court would appoint replacement lawyers.

Saddam and his half brother Barazan Ibrahim then chanted "Long live Iraq, long live the Arab state."

Ibrahim stood up and shouted: "Why don't you just execute us and get rid of all of this!"

When the judge explained that he was ruling in accordance with the law, Saddam replied: "This is a law made by America and does not reflect Iraqi sovereignty."

It was the third court session in the trial of Saddam and seven co-defendants - accused in the 1982 killing of more than 140 Shiites after an assassination attempt against the president in Dujail - where Saddam at times appeared to be in control of the court as much as the judge presiding over the trial.

After the walk-out and a 90-minute recess to resolve the issue, the court reconvened and Amin allowed Clark and ex-Qatari Justice Minister Najib al-Nueimi to speak on the questions of the legitimacy of the tribunal and safety of the lawyers.

"Reconciliation is essential," Clark told the court. "This trial can divide or heal. Unless it is seen as absolutely fair, and fair in fact, it will divide rather than reconcile Iraq."

At that point the judge reminded Clark that he was to speak only about the security guarantees for the defense lawyers - two of whom have been assassinated since the trial began Oct. 19.

Clark then said all parties were entitled to protection and the measures offered to protect the defense and their families were "absurd." Clark said that without such protection, the judicial system would collapse.

Al-Nueimi then spoke about the legitimacy issue, arguing that court is not independent and was in fact set up under the U.S.-led occupation rather than by a legal Iraqi government. He said the language of the statute was unchanged from that promulgated by the former top U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and was therefore "illegitimate."

After the lawyers spoke, the first witness to take the stand, Ahmed Hassan Mohammed, began his testimony. He said that after an assassination attempt on Saddam, security agencies took people of all ages from age 14 to over age 70.

"There were mass arrests. Women and men. Even if a child was 1-day-old they used to tell his parents, 'Bring him with you,"' Mohammed said. He said he was taken to a security center where "I saw bodies of people from Dujail."

"They were martyrs I knew," Mohammed said, giving the name of the nine whose bodies were there.

The first witness earlier exchanged insults with Saddam's half brother, telling him "you killed a 14-year-old boy."

"To hell," the half brother, Ibrahim, replied.

"You and your children go to hell," the witness replied.

The judge then asked them to avoid such exchanges.

"There was random arrests in the streets, all the forces of the (Baath) party, and Thursday became `Judgment Day' and Dujail has become a battle front," the witness said, sometime fighting back tears. "Shootings started and nobody could leave or enter Dujail. At night, intelligence agents arrived headed by Barazan" Ibrahim.

At this point Ibrahim interrupted him, saying that "I am a patriot and I was the head of the intelligence service of Iraq."

<#==#>

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AZ_SCOTUS_INSANITY_AZOL-?SITE=AZMES&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Dec 5, 2:39 PM EST

Supreme Court will review insanity case

By GINA HOLLAND

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether a teen convicted of killing an Arizona police officer had a fair chance to argue that he was insane, renewing debate about insanity defenses.

Justices over the past decade have repeatedly declined to consider cases involving insanity claims.

In a surprise, the court said it would take up the case of Eric Michael Clark, who has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He was a 17-year-old high school student when he shot Officer Jeff Moritz during a traffic stop in Flagstaff, Ariz., on June 21, 2000.

There was evidence that Clark believed his town had been taken over by aliens and that he was being held captive and tortured before the killing.

His lawyer, David Goldberg, told justices that the state insanity law is unconstitutional because it restricts what evidence can be introduced at trial.

"This court has never directly addressed this issue of national importance," Goldberg said.

Arizona changed its laws after John Hinckley's acquittal by reason of insanity in the March 1981 shooting of President Reagan and three others outside a Washington hotel.

Arizona assistant attorney general Michael O'Toole said in a filing that "even if the states are required to provide an insanity defense to criminal defendants, this court's prior decisions make clear that no one particular test is required."

In 1994, the court let stand Montana's abolition of insanity as an affirmative defense for criminal defendants. But then three years ago justices refused to review a Nevada Supreme Court decision that defendants have a right to use insanity defenses.

At issue in the Arizona case is the use of evidence in contesting whether a defendant was so mentally ill that he or she did not know the crime was wrong.

Clark was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison in the officer's death. Arguments in his case will be held next spring.

The case is Clark v. Arizona, 05-5966.

---

On the Net:

Supreme Court: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/

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hey kevin:

i think laro is allowed to xerox stuff in his prison. thats because i have seen something on his commissarry forms that seem to say they can buy "copy" cards to xerox stuff.

i dont remember seeing anything like that on your commissary forms form either the maricopa county jail or the state prison in tucson. are you allowed to xerox or copy stuff?

thanks

<#==#>

i wonder is this a violation of the 5th amendment. the city if forcing you to give a third party (the pharmacy) information which is turned over to the police? i guess it doesnt matter. if it is it will be just one more of the 1000's of unconstitional laws on the books

http://www.azcentral.com/health/news/articles/1206phxmeth.html

Phoenix laws on cold pills in effect

Buyers must put name in log book

Monica Alonzo-Dunsmoor

The Arizona Republic

Dec. 6, 2005 12:00 AM

If you've got the sniffles and are looking for an over-the-counter remedy, be prepared to whip out photo identification and share some personal information with the store clerk or pharmacist.

Two new Phoenix laws that take effect today require customers who buy any cold medication containing pseudoephedrine to write down their name, date of birth and address in a log book that shop owners will turn over to police each month. Retailers also will track the quantities of pseudoephedrine that customers buy.

Phoenix officials laud the new restrictions as a way to ratchet up their fight against methamphetamine. Pseudoephedrine is a crucial ingredient in cooking the illegal drug.

"Meth is a huge, huge problem in our community and really across the nation," Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris said. "I think these laws are going to be effective because they're going to be a deterrent. Anything that makes it more difficult to get the materials to make methamphetamine is going to make it effective."

In the past 12 months, law enforcement officials busted nearly 150 meth labs in Phoenix.

Phoenix police Sgt. Don Sherrard said the logs will be a useful tool for the narcotics detectives.

"It will give us direct information and let us spot trends in purchases," he said. "And it works on the paranoia that methamphetamine naturally creates. If they have to show ID, it's going to stop a lot of them from doing that."

Retailers also are required to keep products that contain pseudoephedrine locked up or behind the counter.

Cottonwood, Tucson and Camp Verde have approved similar laws, but Phoenix appears to be the first to include a forfeiture clause. That means that if police spot products with pseudoephedrine on open shelves instead of being restricted from public access, police can seize the medications and destroy them. The ordinance allows police to give one warning to store officials, and court hearings could be held before the products are destroyed.

"I think that it might help some," said Frank Roberts, 39, of Phoenix. "And I think the police have really put a big dent in meth. They've restricted so many of the ingredients that the drug is not as potent as it was two years ago. But they're never going to get it completely off the streets."

Customers without a current driver's license or passportor without a tribal, military or state-issued identification card will not be able to buy the products at all.

Jose Chavez, 19, of Phoenix sees a flaw in the law because it doesn't allow people without identification to get simple remedies.

"What if you don't have ID?" he said. "It's going to be tough to get the medication you need for your family.

"And (the laws) might help, but if people are sick, they're not going to want to be waiting in line," he said. "They're going to want to get in and out. It's going to be an inconvenience."

Karen Giroux, director of retail regulatory agency relations for Bashas' grocery stores, said that it's likely that once consumers learn more about why the new laws are in place, there may be less frustration.

<#==#>

the systems is corrupt! laro does a victimless crime and gets two years. this pig steals $80,000 and only does a year in jail.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/1206ag-corrupt06.html

Embezzler gets year term

The Arizona Republic

Dec. 6, 2005 12:00 AM

A former investigator for the Arizona Attorney General's Office was sentenced Monday to 366 days in federal prison for embezzling nearly $82,000 from the state law enforcement agency.

According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, David A. Bauer, 53, of Glendale, claimed in expense reports that he was using the money to pay off informants and buy narcotics during undercover stings.

However, FBI agents determined that the defendant was depositing the money in personal bank accounts.

Bauer, a former Phoenix police detective, initially was charged with 14 counts, including wire fraud, theft and money laundering.

He pleaded guilty in May to theft and is expected to begin serving his sentence as soon as the Bureau of Prisons assigns him to a facility.

Paul Charlton, U.S. attorney for Arizona, said the prosecution signifies a relentless effort to stop corruption by government officials.

"Bauer abused the public's trust," Charlton said.

"As a result he lost his job, his reputation and now his liberty."

<#==#>

dirty tricks the FBI uses when it gets confessions. and a good reason on why you should ALWAYS refuse to talk to the police and take the 5th!!!!

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1206fbitaping.html

FBI's policy drawing fire

Interrogations not taped

Dennis Wagner

The Arizona Republic

Dec. 6, 2005 12:00 AM

In the pursuit of criminals, FBI agents across the nation routinely use DNA tests, fingerprints, ballistics, psychological profiling and the world's most advanced forensic methods.

But a little-known policy at the Federal Bureau of Investigation keeps investigators from using one of the simplest and most effective tools in law enforcement: the tape recorder.

That policy appears in Section 7 of the FBI's "Manual of Investigative Operations and Guidelines": "Use of tape recorders for the purpose of recording the statements of witnesses, suspects and subjects is permissible on a limited, highly selective basis, and only when authorized by the SAC (special agent in charge)."

Standard FBI procedure calls for at least two agents to conduct interrogations: one asking questions and the other taking notes. The notes are used later to produce a typed summary known as Form 302.

When agents testify months or years down the road, they rely on 302s, and memory. As a result, jurors and judges hear recollections and interpretations, not what was actually said. And the defense lawyer often follows up with a cross-examination designed to impugn the agent's memory, competence or integrity.

Critics say the FBI practice leads to botched investigations, lost evidence, unprofessional conduct and damaged credibility for America's justice system.

The policy emerged as a problem for defendants, judges and juries during federal trials of Osama bin Laden, Oklahoma City bombing defendant Terry Nichols, TV star Martha Stewart and lesser-known figures.

When terrorism suspects were rounded up after the Sept. 11 attacks, their statements were not recorded.

When agents conducted a marathon interrogation of Nichols, learning of his involvement with Timothy McVeigh, not a word was retained on tape.

Responding to questions about the policy, William David Carter, an FBI spokesman in Washington, D.C., wrote in an e-mail that taping is strictly limited because it "can inhibit full and frank discussion or can end an interview entirely."

Yet most other U.S. enforcement agencies leave taping to the discretion of investigators - some even encourage officers to record interrogations - without any problem.

Phoenix Police Department policy, for example, instructs violent-crimes detectives to "make every attempt to audio- or video-tape suspect and critical witness interviews in felony investigations."

Officers in Tucson, Mesa, Glendale and Scottsdale routinely tape interviews, as do detectives at the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and at the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

Carter refused to provide a copy of the entire policy, claiming it is an "internal FBI document." He said he did not know when the rule was instituted or by whom. He did not respond to other detailed questions on the policy.

Carter did say that recording interviews may be a "sound enforcement policy" if the subject is comfortable with a tape machine. However, he added, "The FBI believes that it would unduly burden ongoing criminal investigations and impede immediate law-enforcement responses to fast-breaking criminal events to require that all witness statements be recorded."

Motive unclear

Thomas P. Sullivan, a former U.S. attorney from northern Illinois who has studied the issue for several years, described the FBI practice as "baffling" and "sorely out of date."

"I don't get it," said Sullivan, now a defense lawyer. "They have the most sophisticated electronic equipment you can think of in the federal government, and yet they don't use the most simple equipment."

In his research for Northwestern University School of Law, Sullivan queried police agencies in 43 states and found that recorded interrogations are a benefit to police and the justice system. He also noticed a clear trend toward taping.

"Sooner or later, the federal government will get on board," he said. "I've talked to more than 400 police departments and sheriff's offices where recordings are used. I can't remember anyone who didn't like it.

A. Melvin McDonald Jr., a criminal-defense lawyer who once served as the top federal prosecutor in Arizona, referred to the FBI policy as "insane."

"It blows my mind trying to think of a rational reason for it," McDonald said. "They are usually on the cutting edge, and to say, 'We're not going to do this,' just makes no sense. . . . It's Investigations 101. I don't ever question a criminal-defense witness without taping it."

Some defenders of the FBI policy suggest that taping and transcribing interviews would become a logistical nightmare and a waste of money for an organization with 11,000 agents.

Sullivan said recorded interviews actually save money because they result in more guilty pleas, fewer defense motions to suppress confessions and fewer lawsuits over wrongful prosecution. Moreover, if FBI agents used tape recorders they wouldn't have to double-team their interviews, so staffing costs would be cut in half.

Steve Drizen, legal director at Northwestern Law's Center for Wrongful Convictions, offered another possible motive: "The main reason why the FBI does not want to record is that they do not want to let the public or juries see how brutal their psychological interrogation tactics can be."

Frederic Whitehurst, an FBI supervisor-turned-whistle-blower, said: "By not having the real data, the evidence of what was actually said, they can control the interpretation, the spin on it. . . . And you have no way to tell if they're making a mistake."

For those who doubt that FBI agents would forget, leave things out or twist the truth, Whitehurst points to the words of Danny O. Coulson, a high-level administrator at the bureau. In his book, No Heroes: Inside the FBI's Secret Counter-Terror Force, Coulson described how he became the target of a criminal probe after a botched case and agreed to be interviewed only if he could submit a sworn statement as part of the case file.

"I had seen too many criminal investigations in which FBI agents conducted interviews and then paraphrased their subject inaccurately because they were unfamiliar with the complicated subject matter or had their own spin on the case already."

Pros and cons

Jana D. Monroe, special agent in charge for the FBI in Arizona, said she authorizes taping on a case-by-case basis and considers it a useful strategy in some circumstances.

Monroe encourages agents to record interviews of juvenile defendants and child-abuse victims in Indian country to document that no coercion or prompting was used.

That rationale does not apply to most cases. In sworn testimony, FBI agents routinely find themselves defending the policy, as well as the accuracy of their Form 302 notes and memories.

Monroe noted that some U.S. attorneys have begun to press the FBI for a rule change, adding, "I don't know what the future will bring."

However, she worried that tape recordings could undermine prosecutions in some cases by revealing lies and psychological ploys that agents sometimes use during interrogations. "That might not look real good to jurors."

On the other hand, there is evidence that the FBI's no-taping practice is a turnoff for those charged with rendering verdicts.

Early this year, a federal jury in Philadelphia acquitted a banker accused of lying to agents because the only evidence was the agent's scribbled notes and testimony. "We wouldn't have been here if they had a tape recorder," one juror told the Associated Press.

The issue also proved troubling in Nichols' 1998 federal trial. Under oath, agents acknowledged that Nichols refused to sign a Miranda form but claimed he waived his rights to an attorney. Defense attorney Ronald Woods challenged that account by Agent Scot Crabtree and demanded to know why investigators failed to tape 9 1/2 hours of questioning with a suspect in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Jurors convicted Nichols of conspiracy but found him not guilty of murder at the Alfred P. Murrah Building. Afterward, jury forewoman Niki Deutchman told reporters the lack of recordings was a key weakness in the government's case.

Harvey Silverglate, a Boston defense attorney, said he despises the FBI policy because it allows agents to twist statements made by witnesses and suspects but also because it puts the nation at a greater risk of terrorism by undermining the bureau's intelligence-gathering mission.

"The system is not put together for efficiency or accuracy," Silverglate said. "It's put together for ease of prosecution. And in an age of terrorism, it actually poses a threat to national security."

Taping required

Illinois, Maine, New Mexico and Washington, D.C., have adopted statutes that require taping. Supreme court justices in Alaska, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey and New Hampshire have ordered police to record suspect interrogations.

Detectives in Mesa, Scottsdale, Chandler, Peoria and Gilbert record interviews with felony suspects at least half the time.

So do their counterparts in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Denver, Miami, Portland, Houston and hundreds of other communities.

Sullivan, who has surveyed police agencies nationwide, said most have no formal policy, so it's up to investigators. However, he said the taping of interviews is a clear trend nationwide.

Neil Nelson, a police commander and interrogations consultant in St. Paul, Minn., said recording leads to better investigations, more crimes solved, enhanced professionalism and less time spent in court.

Nelson started using a recorder during the 1980s because he couldn't keep track of suspect statements when his narcotics team busted crack houses. Now, all police in Minnesota are required to tape suspect interviews by court order.

"It is the best tool ever forced down our throats," Nelson said. Nelson, Sullivan and others dispute the argument that audio or video recording interferes with investigations or makes defendants clam up.

A 1998 study for the International Association of Chiefs of Police reported "little conclusive evidence" that videotaping affected suspects' willingness to talk. Instead, researchers found, "the majority of agencies that videotape found that they were able to get more incriminating information from suspects on tape than they were in traditional interrogations."

The law in many states, including Arizona, allows detectives to record interviews without a suspect's permission or knowledge. Even when a tape machine is visible, Nelson said, suspects usually blab away. And in cases when a defendant gets uptight or refuses to speak, agents can simply turn off the device and take notes.

Ultimately, Nelson said, recorded interviews shield detectives from allegations of misconduct.

"Taping preserves the integrity of the officers and the interrogation process. What you say on tape, you have to be careful. You can't be like Sipowicz on NYPD Blue and expect to have a career in law enforcement."

<#==#>

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1207rice07.html

CIA-prison questions trail Rice

Europe is irate over secret jails

Joel Brinkley

New York Times

Dec. 7, 2005 12:00 AM

BUCHAREST, Romania - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was criticized Tuesday about covert prisons and a mistaken, secret arrest as she grappled with what has become an incendiary issue in Europe.

She declined to answer most questions about the issue posed in two European capitals.

Europe has been roiled by reports that the United States maintained secret jails for terror suspects in Europe and by anger over the U.S. practice of "rendition," or transferring, terrorism suspects in secret detention centers in countries outside Europe that routinely use torture.

The anger has made it harder for Rice to repair already strained relations with many European nations at odds with U.S. policy on Iraq, like Germany, where she met with the new chancellor, Angela Merkel, hoping for a fresh start.

Merkel said at a news conference that Rice had admitted making a mistake when the United States abducted a German citizen, Khaled al-Masri, on suspicions of terrorism and held him in detention for five months. But aides to Rice scrambled to deny that, saying instead that Rice had said only that if mistakes were made, they would be corrected.

Masri filed suit in a U.S. court on Tuesday against a former CIA director and three companies he charged were involved in secret flights carrying terrorism suspects. He has said he was tortured and that on Sunday he was denied entry to the United States, where he had hoped to file his lawsuit in person.

State Department officials confirmed that he had been denied entry but said he would be allowed into the country if he applied again.

As Europeans continue to investigate whether torture or detention of terrorism suspects took place on European soil, Rice assured Merkel that "the United States does not condone torture."

"It is against U.S. law to be involved in torture or conspiracy to commit torture," Rice said. "And it is also against U.S. international obligations."

But the U.S. definition of torture is in some cases at variance with international conventions, and the administration has maintained in recent years that U.S. law does not apply to prisoners held abroad.

The CIA's inspector general found last year that the agency's treatment of terrorism detainees constituted cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, as the international Convention Against Torture defines it. The United States is a signer of that treaty, though with some reservations.

An opinion by the Justice Department, issued in August 2002, said interrogation methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death" could be allowable without being considered torture.

The administration disavowed that classified legal opinion in the summer of 2004, after it was publicly disclosed. But it remains unclear how many of the interrogation techniques authorized in the 2002 opinion are still in CIA use.

Congress is debating an amendment, passed in the Senate last month, that would prohibit abuse of terrorism suspects. But the White House is insisting that the CIA be exempted from any such ban.

In Romania, Rice signed a military cooperation agreement that would allow U.S. forces to train with Romanian troops at the Mihail Kogalniceanu air base, which Human Rights Watch identified as a likely location of one prison.

Rice also would not address an ABC News report that prisoners were whisked away from the air base in Romania shortly before she arrived in the country.

Associated Press contributed to this article.

<#==#>

the american empire police state in iraq is better then the saddam police state? yea sure!

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1207iraq-abuse07.html

Abuse widespread in prisons in Iraq

Dan Murphy

Christian Science Monitor

Dec. 7, 2005 12:00 AM

BAGHDAD - After a U.S. raid on a secret Iraqi government jail last month revealed some detainees were tortured and abused there, Interior Minister Bayan Jabr insisted that abuse claims were exaggerated and that torture will not be tolerated in the new Iraq.

U.S. soldiers and some Iraqi officials disagree. They say that not only is prisoner abuse widespread but that much of it is carried out by Jabr's subordinates. Efforts to bring the problem under control during the past year have largely been frustrated by indifference from senior Iraqi officials, they say.

Privately, half a dozen U.S. officers have acknowledged to the Christian Science Monitor that prisoner abuse by Iraqi police is common.

Now, one officer is speaking out. Major R. John Stukey, a U.S. Army doctor who served in Baghdad from January to June, frequently visited Interior Ministry facilities on the east side of Baghdad to assess the health of prisoners. He says he personally treated about a dozen men who had been tortured and observed an environment of overcrowding and neglect.

Many more of his patients alleged torture, but in most cases this couldn't be verified, since he often saw them for the first time months after their initial arrests and interrogations.

In one east Baghdad facility run by Iraq's Interior Ministry, a few miles from the secret jail that was raided by U.S. forces on Nov. 13, Stukey says about 220 men were held in filthy conditions in a space so crowded that many couldn't lie down to sleep.

Stukey visited the facilities with members of the 720th U.S. Military Police Battalion. The MPs filed frequent reports to their commanders about the ill treatment and, Stukey says, did what they could to prevent torture and improve the prisoners' conditions.

"We did report what we saw, but it was like trying to put out a forest fire with a bucket of water," said Stukey by telephone at Fort Rucker, Ala., where he is based.

Officials from the 720th, now back at its base in Fort Hood, Texas, did not respond to requests for comment.

Coalition troops, fighting a deadly insurgency, say that they don't have the manpower to compel better behavior from their Iraqi partners, and that to do so would require them to court frequent conflict with their closest allies inside the country.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Monday that the United States "does not authorize or condone torture of detainees." The United States has also signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture. But administration officials have also argued that the treaty rules on "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment do not apply outside U.S. territory."

The tension over the U.S. position was illustrated at a press conference with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs, on Nov. 29.

When Pace said, "it's absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member if they see inhumane treatment being conducted to intervene to stop it."

Rumsfeld said, "I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it's to report it."

To this, Pace replied, "If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it."

Since that exchange, Rumsfeld has ordered military commanders to clarify the rules for how U.S. troops should respond if they witness abuse of detainees.

<#==#>

those plastic toy guns are really dangerous!!!!! well at least it gives jobs to cops who hunt down children with these dangerous plastic pistols.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1206az-schoolfakegun06-ON.html

Tempe High locked down; fake gun found

Associated Press

Dec. 6, 2005 02:40 PM

Tempe High School was locked down for two and a half hours Tuesday after a student carried a plastic gun in his pants to school. The student could be charged with interrupting an educational facility and school officials are handling disciplinary action.

Sgt. Dan Masters says six officers went to the school about 11 a.m. Students were locked into their classrooms and a search started.

Officers and school officials went into every room, searching every student and backpack. That's when a male who's a junior at the school handed over a plastic toy pistol.

Masters says nothing else was found and the school reopened at 1:30 p.m. .

The unidentified teen could face criminal charges for disrupting classes. Masters says he likely faces discipline or expulsion under the district's zero tolerance policy for weapons possession.

<#==#>

too bad. he probably would have been a good freedom fighter. maybe he still will be - but not as a lawyer.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AZ_MURDERER_LAWYER_AZOL-?SITE=AZMES&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Dec 7, 12:12 PM EST

Arizona Supreme Court denies murderer's bid to become lawyer

By MICHELLE ROBERTS

Associated Press Writer

PHOENIX (AP) -- The Arizona Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a convicted murderer who graduated from law school could not be admitted to the State Bar because he didn't show good moral character.

James Hamm, who served 17 years in prison for shooting one of two men killed in a drug-related robbery, had asked the court to allow him to practice law even though the State Bar of Arizona had recommended against his application, citing the seriousness of the crime he committed and his failure to own up to his past.

The court heard oral arguments in October but unanimously sided Wednesday with the bar association.

"Although this court has not adopted a per se rule excluding an applicant whose past includes such serious criminal misconduct, we agree with those jurisdictions that have held that an applicant with such a background must make an extraordinary showing of rehabilitation and present good moral character to be admitted to the practice of law," wrote Chief Justice Ruth McGregor.

The court said it was concerned that Hamm had not taken full responsibility for his part in the Tucson murders. It also cited Hamm's failure to pay child support for a son he had before he was sent to prison.

<#==#>

this libertarian gives an interesting legal view on how to side step the laws that prevent same sex marriages.

This is one of those areas that I did more research in a few years ago.

I discovered more about marriage and the recognition of marriage by the

state than any paralegal should ever need to know.

The law and the courts have made a distinction between a common law

marriage and a marriage at common law.

A common law marriage is one of co-habitation over time. Many

states don't recognize them including Arizona (although there have been

some exceptions here in Arizona and the other states that purport not

recognize them)

A marriage at common law is one in which the union is solemnized in

a formal ceremony before witnesses. The only thing that is absent is

the marriage license. All of the states do recognize this type of

marriage for all purposes, although the bureaucratic bumblers feign

otherwise. The current state of the jurisprudence prohibits third

parties, including the state from collaterally challenging the validity

of this type of marriage. Only the couple to the marriage itself can

have the marriage set aside, either through divorce or annulment.

In fact all Arizona Law does is punish the person who performs the

ceremony without first receiving the license from the couple. I have

found the law to be virtually the same in all the states.

So what I have been suggesting to gay couples is to stop demanding

that the state issue the license and sanction the marriage. Simply go

about and have the ceremony without the license and then start

asserting

rights and claims as they arise. In other words live and be married.

When someone balks at recognizing the marriage particularly the state

agencies, that's when they go about challenging ARS 25-101.C. which

purports to declare same sex marriages void. The statute may prohibit

the issuance of the license, but it cannot declare void a same sex

marriage where no license was obtained and all other aspects of the

marriage ceremony were performed.

I also tell the couples they're going to have to avoid the radical

hardliners at least on this issue and not demand recognition

immediately. It's got to be a near stealthy, small steps at a time

adventure. The fact is many companies in this valley already provide

health and insurance benefits for the non-employee partner of a same

sex

marriage. While I tell them I don't believe they should be seeking

"state sponsored" benifits (I tell them I'm libertarian), I know they

will anyway (hey they're usually liberal socialists), if they do, they

need to approach it under the radar so to speak.

Most of the couples I have advised are usually fairly well off, so

the company benifits and their income is sufficient to avoid state

support mechanisms. Most of the back lash against the same sex

marriage

movement has occurred because of the radical hardliners demanding

recognition now. The movement should have listened to the predecessor

group that was discriminated against as recently as 30 years ago.

Inter-racial marriages. Most of the inter-racial marriages were done

without licenses, were done under the radar, and only came out swinging

when a challenge was necessary. As a result, all of the states finally

yielded and repealed their interracial prohibitions when society itself

realized that there was no real threat to society.

BTW the reason I know this works with non-marriage licenses

marriages is my wife and I have been married without a license for 23

years this week. We've obtained "state benefits" as a married couple

the past and have been turned down for state benefits. Not because we

don't have the license, but because we refused to get Social Security

Numbers for the kids.

So despite the claims to the contrary, the state doesn't possess

the

monopoly it thinks it does in the area of validating marriages. It

appears the jurisprudence is sufficiently established that if the same

sex marriage movement would now tone it down and go stealthy, they will

discover in a few years (15-20 at the most), that all the states will

eventually have to yield. That of course assumes any gummint structure

remains as the current crop of socialists rapidly pushes this nation

into the abyss.

g'day

> I still don't have a clue what you are talking about

> when you use the phrase "non-government marriage." Equally, I don't

know

> what you mean that one can "get" one in any state. Therefore I can't

> assess whether your statement is "factual" or not.

> You give a hint as to what you are talking about when

> you refer to a "private" marriage. I will go out on a limb and assume

> you are referring to situations when people say to each other "we are

> married now" without state sanction. When that occurs (excluding the

> special case of common law marriages where recognized) there are no

> legally enforceable rights or obligations established solely by

virtue

> of that declaration. Since the state claims monopoly power over the

> legal creation and enforcement of marriage derived rights, such

> declarations are "not worth very much" to the declarants in terms of

> rights and obligations in our current legal scheme. To pretend

otherwise

> is fantasy.

> To deal with your other question: There are indeed

> potential wide ranging legal/economic consequences (both positive and

> negative!)inherent in being married in the manner sanctioned by the

> state.

> It doesn't make any sense to ask whether any of these

> facts are "libertarian" or not. As a matter of fact, as a libertarian

> oppose the current legal scheme on a number of levels. Unfortunately,

> that doesn't mean that the scheme doesn't exist. Neither does it mean

> that your idea of "non-government marriage" (whatever you mean by

that)

> has any significant legal consequence for the participants.

> -----Original Message-----

> From: lpaz-discuss@yahoogroups.com

[mailto:lpaz-discuss@yahoogroups.com]

> On Behalf Of greenspj

> Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 6:28 PM

> To: lpaz-discuss@yahoogroups.com

> Subject: [lpaz-discuss] Re: This sort of libertarian converage

worries

> me

> The miss on subject notwithstanding, to address your question

below...

> a) What I said is a factual statement, to wit...

> "can get non-government marriages right now in any of the 50 states."

> b) To your statement

> "Any "marriage" that is not recognized as such by governments ... is

not

> worth very much."

> To whom? And why?

> Are you CONFIRMING my point that conference of wedded status by

> government comes with $$$ or $$$-value attached?

> Or are you saying that it is government marriages that have value,

and

> private ones do not?

> Or both?

> And how is that view IN ANY WAY libertarian?

> <buttrick@s...> wrote:

> >

> > I don't know what you mean by your statement that

people

> "can get

> > non-government marriages right now in any of the 50 states." Any

> > "marriage" that is not recognized as such by governments that claim

> > monopoly power over marriage and divorce rights (and that would be

> > all 50 states) is not worth very much. Please clarify what you mean

> > a "non-government marriage."

<#==#>

one racist pig sues another racist pig!!

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1208haab08.html

Reservist arrested in migrant case sues Arpaio

Robert Anglen

The Arizona Republic

Dec. 8, 2005 12:00 AM

An Army reservist arrested in April for holding seven undocumented workers at gunpoint is suing the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office for false imprisonment, emotional distress and abuse of process.

In a Maricopa County Superior Court lawsuit, Patrick Haab also accused Sheriff Joe Arpaio of acting with an "evil hand" and "being guided by an evil mind" for disclosing Haab's military records.

At the time of his arrest, Haab described himself as an Iraq war veteran. But military records showed he had been sent home for a mental health evaluation without ever serving in Iraq. They showed Haab was on the verge of being kicked out of the military, suffered from paranoia, threatened to commit suicide, pulled a knife in an altercation with fellow soldiers and reportedly told an officer that he wanted to kill all Muslims, including a soldier in his own unit.

In his lawsuit, Haab claims that Arpaio released the records to The Arizona Republic only after the county attorney refused to charge Haab with any crime.

"The sensitive medical and mental health information regarding (Haab) was only obtained and divulged to bring harm, ridicule and embarrassment," he claimed in the suit, adding that the sheriff's investigation had been closed by the time the documents were made public.

The Republic had sought Haab's military records since his arrest and had filed public records requests with the county and the U.S. Army before publishing a story about the records in August.

On April 10, a Maricopa County sheriff's deputy arrested Haab and charged him with seven counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after he drew his pistol on seven immigrants at a desolate Interstate 8 rest stop.

In interviews, Haab said he had stopped to relieve his dog when seven men rushed out of the darkness, making him fear for his life. He said he followed the men to their vehicle, ordered them to lie on the ground at gunpoint and called police.

Arpaio said Wednesday that Haab's lawsuit was frivolous.

County Attorney Andrew Thomas later dismissed charges against Haab because of a state law that allows citizens to make an arrest when a felony has been committed. According to Thomas, all seven of the immigrants were committing felonies: the smuggler in planning the operation and the six immigrants in "conspiring" to illegally cross the border.

Haab's arrest and subsequent release triggered a storm of protest on both sides of the immigration issue and has prompted a review by the U.S. Department of Justice to determine if Haab violated federal civil rights laws.

<#==#>

http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/1208TaserAssault08-ON.html

Cop allegedly uses Taser on partner in fight over soda

Associated Press

Dec. 8, 2005 07:00 AM

HAMTRAMCK, Mich. - A police officer has been charged with using a Taser on his partner during an argument over whether they should stop for a soft drink.

Ronald Dupuis, 32, was charged Wednesday with assault and could face up to three months in jail if convicted. The six-year veteran was fired after the Nov. 3 incident.

Dupuis and partner Prema Graham began arguing after Dupuis demanded she stop their car at a store so he could buy a soft drink, according to a police report.

The two then struggled over the steering wheel, and Dupuis hit her leg with his department-issued Taser, the report said. She was not seriously hurt.

Hamtramck police union lawyer Eugene Bolanowski said he expected Dupuis to hire a private lawyer.

Hamtramck is a city of 23,000 surrounded by Detroit.

<#==#>

iraqi freedom fighters getting good at putting there PR on the web!!!!!

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-12-06-insurgent-postings_x.htm

Posted 12/7/2005 12:04 AM

Iraq insurgents escalate war of words on cyber-battlefield

By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY

BAGHDAD — Insurgents in Iraq have launched a publicity blitz. They increased the number of Web postings to 825 last month from 145 in January, according to the U.S. military. Most postings detail insurgent bombings or attacks on Iraqi and U.S. forces.

The Web postings are also growing more sophisticated and frequently include video, soundtracks and professional editing, Army Maj. Gen. Richard Zahner, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Iraq, said Tuesday.

Many of the messages are from al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group led by terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is behind some of the deadliest attacks and kidnappings. "It is the centerpiece of their effort," Zahner said of the publicity campaign. Zarqawi "has always been excellent at it. Lately, he's been turning it faster."

Concerned that insurgents were gaining an advantage in the information war, the U.S. military has stepped up efforts to counter the publicity onslaught from the insurgents.

"The information environment has become a battlefield in a very real way," said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman. "There was a decision early on that this was not something we could allow to go uncontested." He said efforts have accelerated to combat insurgents' media campaign.

Some of those efforts have generated controversy. The U.S. military is looking into reports that Iraqi news media were paid to run stories generated by the U.S. military without revealing the source. At the center of the controversy is a Washington-based contractor, the Lincoln Group, which was paid by the Pentagon to promote positive news about U.S. efforts in Iraq.

Johnson said the military is reviewing the allegations.

Nearly all insurgent groups operating in Iraq have media teams responsible for posting statements on the Internet and creating videos for Web and television broadcasts, said Col. Pat McNiece, an intelligence officer.

Some groups post lies. A group called the Victorious Sect Army uses fancy computer graphics, but U.S. officials have been unable to verify that it carried out any of the attacks claimed in its Web postings, McNiece said.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq has the most sophisticated media team and sticks close to the facts, at times even following up with corrections, McNiece said.

Sometimes a terrorist group will steal a video from another insurgent website in an effort to take credit for an attack, said Rita Katz, director of the Washington-based SITE Institute, which monitors terrorists' websites. Terrorist groups are eager to take responsibility for attacks. "Videos are coming by the dozen from Iraq," Katz said.

In general, insurgents want to promote a picture of Iraq in chaos to foster the idea that insurgents are winning, Zahner said.

Insurgent messages often target Iraq and the Arab world, McNiece said. The messages are used as a recruiting tool for militants and as a way to raise money for the insurgency, he said.

"They don't kill anybody," McNiece said of the messages. "But they certainly help the terrorists shape perception in the Arab world. It's a problem."

The U.S. government monitors websites but rarely makes an effort to shut them down because it's so easy for terrorists to set up new ones, said Ben Venzke of IntelCenter, a Washington-area think tank that monitors terrorist declarations and does work for U.S. intelligence.

"If you shut it down, it will be back in about five seconds in a million other locations," Venzke said.

There may also be intelligence value in watching the sites.

"Occasionally, it would be more beneficial (for the government) to leave the site online in order to gather intelligence information," Katz said.

For militants, it's important to publicize the attacks, widening the impact of a bombing or a kidnapping to help influence public opinion. Insurgents sometimes rehearse suicide missions with the group's cameraman to find the best angle to capture the attack on tape, Zahner said. Cameramen then join militants on missions. They film the attacks, then edit and post them on websites, sometimes within a matter of hours, he said.

As roadside bombs become more sophisticated, so do the methods to record them. Recently, insurgents synchronized a roadside bomb with a remote-controlled video camera to film the explosion, Zahner said. "It's a virtual jihadist experience," he said. "That's what gets them the money. That's what gets them the recruits."

Contributing: John Diamond in Washington

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the problem is the schools shouldnt be wresling with this alleged problem. they shouldnt be doing it at all. both the 1st amendment of the federal constitution and the arizona constitution forbid mixing religion and government!

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1207nocarols.html

Schools wrestling with holiday concerts

Anne Ryman

The Arizona Republic

Dec. 7, 2005 12:00 AM

Teachers call it the "December dilemma."

Holiday decorations appear in the classrooms, and choruses and bands prepare for their annual winter concerts.

Educators then must wrestle with a question that has grown thornier in recent years: How much of the music and decorations can have a religious theme?

Can the chorus sing Silent Night? Can the Christmas tree have a star? Can there be a creche or a Menorah?

From a legal standpoint, the guidelines are fairly clear: It's OK to have religious motifs if they're for educational purposes. But the details can get tricky.

And that has given rise to a patchwork of approaches across Arizona and the rest of the nation. It also has generated lawsuits in some states and caused parents and advocacy groups to press for changes.

This year, the Scottsdale-based Alliance Defense Fund,a Christian legal group, has lined up 800 attorneys nationwide to be ready to sue if a school prohibits religious Christmas songs in its concerts. It needs a complaint from a parent to intervene. The group contacted more than 9,000 school districts this year reminding them that the U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled that public schools must ban religious songs.

On the other side, the American Civil Liberties Union also is poised to act. In 2004, it sued a Louisiana school district for displaying a nativity on campus and including religious songs in its holiday program. The suit was later dismissed.

The skirmishes are part of the continuing war over separation of church and state. But unlike other battles, such as the Ten Commandments in a courthouse, this one hits people close to home, as parents feel their kids are being denied or subjected to affirmation of a particular faith.

Schools often fall into two camps: They quietly avoid religious songs in favor of more generic tunes such as Frosty the Snowman and Jingle Bells. Or they offer a sprinkling of songs from different religions and fill much of the concert with secular holiday songs.

"Some years it works out better than others," said Judith Durocher, choral director at Pinnacle High School in northeast Phoenix. She expects criticism this year because the winter concert has more religious songs than usual. The concert will feature a Hanukkah song and Benjamin Britten's A Ceremony of Carols, which features several religious old English songs.

In contrast, Yavapai Elementary School in Scottsdale avoids religious Christmas music altogether.

This year's concert will include It's Beginning To Look a Lot Like Christmas, Jingle Bells and Santa Claus, You Are Much Too Fat.Others are a Hanukkah song, a Spanish song and an African song.

"We don't do Silent Night," Principal Wendy Cohen said. "You have to be real sensitive you don't infringe."

Schools that offer a mix of music tend to weigh the numbers carefully.

Julia Kelly, principal of Las Sendas Elementary in Mesa, said most of its concert must be non-religious tunes along the lines of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer or Santa Claus is Coming to Town.

"It doesn't mean you can't have a piece of religious music thrown in there," she said.

The upcoming orchestra concert features a Christmas hymn, O Come, All Ye Faithful, and an Israeli folk song, Dreidel.

Arizona School for the Arts in Phoenix takes a more direct approach.

Parents are told up front that students will study religious music because much of vocal music is religious text, said Mark S. Francis, the school's founder and executive director. This year's concert will not include any overtly religious songs, but past concerts have included pieces from Handel's Messiah.

Some parents say it's unfortunate that schools feel the need to ban Christmas songs.

"They should feel free to sing any songs that are pretty," said Linda Gomillion, whose daughter attends Pinnacle in the Paradise Valley Unified School District.

Schools in the district don't ban religious Christmas songs. But they're advised that if they include one, they should balance it with songs from other cultures, said Jeff Smith, Paradise Valley's director of curriculum and instruction. Principals should use "winter concerts" or "holiday concerts" instead of Christmas concerts.

Scottsdale parent Jody Stachel, who is Jewish, said she doesn't mind if schools leave out religious songs entirely and have children sing holiday songs about snow and winter. But if a school decides to perform a Christmas song, it's a good idea to include a Hanukkah song, she said.

Holiday decorations also can be a minefield for schools.

In the Paradise Valley district, schools cannot prominently display a Christmas tree with ornaments and a star.At Mesa's Las Sendas, Christmas trees, wreaths and garlands are allowed, but not nativity scenes.

In the Yavapai school office, there is a small pine tree, snowmen, a Menorah, reindeer, Spanish greeting cards that say "Feliz Navidad," a Kwanzaa brochure, a sign that says "Peace" and a stuffed Grinch.

Principals say the shift away from religious themes began in the mid-1980s out of respect for children who don't celebrate Christmas. Schools walk a fine line: The First Amendment prohibits public schools from promoting religion, but also prohibits them from inhibiting religion.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled explicitly on religious songs in schools. Attorneys often rely on a 1980 appeals court decision that upheld the use of religious songs in schools for educational purposes.

That has given advocacy groups a basis on which to attack any bans.

Mike Johnson, senior legal counselor for the Alliance Defense Fund, calls concerts such as Yavapai's, which excludes religious Christmas songs, "political correctness run amok."

Johnson said it's legal to perform religious songs such as O Little Town of Bethlehem and to call concerts Christmas concerts. It's also OK to have Christmas trees, he said, because the symbol is viewed as non-religious.

The organization has intervened in several cases to press its cause.

In Texas last year, it sued the Plano Independent School District in federal court after the district prohibited students from wearing red and green to winter parties and banned students from exchanging candy canes with religious messages on them.

The group also intervened in an uproar last year when an Oklahoma City-area school banned a nativity scene and the hymn Silent Night from the holiday play. Lakehoma Elementary School also removed Christmas references and symbols but kept ones for Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. Silent Night was later added back in.

Arizona has not had a similar high-profile case in years.

The law is also fairly clear on decorations in public schools. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled a nativity scene is constitutional if displayed for a non-religious reason such as to celebrate the holiday. But attorneys advise schools that it's best to display a variety of holiday symbols just to be safe.

There is no magic formula for schools to follow, said Jeremy Gunn, director of the ACLU's Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief in Washington, D.C. But schools can avoid problems if they respect all religions and not single out or promote one, he said.

Charles Haynes, senior scholar with the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va., said some schools try to duck the issue completely by avoiding religious songs or displays.

"A lot of people are frustrated that there are a lot of schools that haven't worked this through." Haynes said.

Reach the reporter at anne.ryman@arizonarepublic.com (602) 444-8072.

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Another shooting of a alleged terrorist like the London shooting of Charles de Menezes?????

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/1208air-shooting08.html

Fatal shooting by air marshal 1st since post-9/11 enforcement

Officials followed procedure, homeland spokesman says

Amy Driscoll, Lesley Clark and Trenton Daniel

Knight Ridder Newspapers

Dec. 8, 2005 12:00 AM

MIAMI - The shooting of a Florida man returning from a church trip to South America who said he had a bomb in his backpack was the first time an air marshal shot at a passenger or suspect since the government stepped up the presence of the law enforcement officers on planes after Sept. 11, 2001, according to Department of Homeland Security officials.

The shooting took place within earshot of other horrified passengers, who reported hearing multiple shots fired. Rigoberto Alpizar, 44, a U.S. citizen from Maitland, Fla., died on the scene. He had arrived in Miami from Quito, Ecuador, earlier Wednesday with a woman officials believe was his wife.

Just before the shooting, passengers reported seeing the man running wildly down the aisle of the plane with a woman in pursuit yelling that he was "sick."

Passenger John McAlhany, in Seat 24-C, said the man "came running from the back."

"He must have been doing 1,000 miles an hour," McAlhany said. "He knocked over stewardesses."

McAlhany, a Sebastian, Fla., construction worker on his way home from a fishing trip in the Keys, noticed the man acting erratically during the boarding process.

"When we got on the plane, he got off, then came back on with his wife," McAlhany said. "He didn't look stable."

Law enforcement officers surrounded the plane after the shooting. Inside, McAlhany said passengers were ordered to crouch under their seats. He said that when he tried to pop up for a look, a flight attendant ordered him to get back down.

He said the man apparently left a backpack on the plane, adding that the other passengers were treated roughly when law enforcement boarded the plane after the shooting.

"They put a gun to the back of my head and said, 'Put your hands on the seat,' " he said. "That was more scary than anything else."

He said the passengers were taken off the plane and confined to a conference room "with a lot of other people."

The plane had arrived from Medellin, Colombia, and was to depart for Orlando at 2:18 p.m., but the flight, American 924, was subsequently canceled, according to the Orlando airport's Web site.

"None of the other 113 passengers onboard were affected or were ever in any danger. This was an isolated incident," the airline said in a news release, adding that it would have no other comment.

The marshals "followed procedure by the book," said Brian Doyle, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman.

Alpizar's brother-in-law, Steven Buechner, said he was a native of Costa Rica and met Buechner's sister, Anne, when she was an exchange student there. Relatives said the couple had been married about two decades. Neighbors described Alpizar as a pleasant man who worked in a home-supply store.

Associated Press contributed to this article.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1208marshals08.html

Marshal's actions get mixed reviews

Keith L. Alexander

Washington Post

Dec. 8, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Wednesday's shooting death of American Airlines passenger Rigoberto Alpizar at Miami International Airport by a federal air marshal was cited by some congressional leaders and air security experts as the first successful - if deadly - example of the government's ramped-up commercial airline security efforts.

But others said that opening fire on passengers who threaten airline travel could lead to even worse consequences for bystanders.

"This shows that the program has worked beyond our expectations," said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the House transportation subcommittee on aviation. "This should send a message to a terrorist or anyone else who is considering disrupting an aircraft with a threat."

Prior to Wednesday's shooting, Mica said there remained further debate in Washington on whether the program should be expanded.

But some security experts question whether killing the passenger - whose wife, according to other passengers, said he was mentally troubled - was justified.

Federal air marshals are not trained to negotiate with suspected terrorists, Mica said, especially passengers who claim they are carrying an explosive device, as Alpizar said Wednesday. Mica said the marshal acted appropriately.

"Air marshals don't have time for counseling or interviewing passengers. They have to make split-second decisions based on the current threat," Mica said.

In the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, numerous lawmakers and airline industry officials participated in congressional hearings that led to expanding the federal air marshal program through additional hiring and training.

At that time, there were 33 air marshals monitoring 30,000 domestic flights a day. Now, following the congressional push, several thousand marshals ride on both domestic and international flights.

Aviation security consultant Douglas Laird of Laird & Associates said shooting a suspect who claims to be carrying an explosive device could cause a greater threat to passengers if that suspect detonates the bomb after being shot.

"It's a terrible call," said Laird, a former Northwest Airlines security director.

Wednesday's shooting was yet another example of why the air marshal program should be expanded through additional training and staffing, said Jon Adler, national executive vice president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, an organization made up of 24,000 law enforcement officers, including 1,300 air marshals.

Adler said that after the Sept. 11 attacks, a greater emphasis was placed on defensive tactics and marksmanship in air marshal training. Although Adler said the marshal in Wednesday's shooting acted "appropriately," he added that greater training is necessary.

"It's a continued effort," Adler said.

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643 more police thugs will be sent to arizona to bully us

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1207newagents.html

Border Patrol to beef up

643 new agents expected in Ariz.

Mike Madden

Republic Washington Bureau

Dec. 7, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - The Border Patrol will send 643 new agents to Arizona by next October, an increase of about 22 percent that federal officials say will help slow the tide of illegal immigration.

The increase announced Tuesday would give Arizona more than 3,500 agents, more than a quarter of the Border Patrol's entire force. Last year, more than half of the 1.2 million arrests the Border Patrol made were in Arizona.

In all, there will be 1,700 new agents added and be deployed to California, Texas and New Mexico, bringing the total number to nearly 13,000, Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar said.

Arizona will get the largest share of the 1,700 new agents, with 440 going to the Tucson Sector and 203 going to Yuma. The Tucson Sector also will get $35 million for new roads, barriers, lights and fencing, Aguilar said.

The increase is part of the Bush administration's plan for dealing with illegal immigration. Although the additional border agents may help, officials say it would take a crackdown on employers who hired illegal workers to really address the problem.

The Border Patrol has increased the number of agents by 8,000 agents since 1986, not including the 1,700 announced Tuesday. Still, more than half a million undocumented immigrants arrive in the United States every year, according to a report released Tuesday by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan public policy center in Washington.

Ray Borane is the mayor of Douglas, a border community in southeastern Arizona located along one of the country's busiest routes for illegal immigration. He called the latest increase in agents "a waste of time, money and effort."

"If (you) really want to stop the illegal immigration problem through enforcement, you've got to focus on the workplace," Borane said.

Jose Garza, spokesman for the Tucson Sector of the Border Patrol, said most of its additional agents will be deployed along the international border with Mexico to serve as a deterrent to illegal immigration. The Tucson Sector remains the most popular route for illegal immigration in the country. New agents also will be used to beef up highway checkpoints, add roving patrols and increase units to patrol airports and bus terminals in Phoenix, Garza said.

"The message we are trying to send out is the likelihood of you being apprehended in Tucson Sector is very high," Garza said.

A steady buildup of Border Patrol agents from about 700 in 1996 to about 2,300 this year has helped reduce the flow of illegal immigration through the Tucson Sector. During the last fiscal year, Border Patrol agents assigned to the Tucson Sector made 438,932 apprehensions, down 11 percent from the year before, Garza said.

The buildup in Tucson has pushed traffic west to the Yuma area. During the past fiscal year, Border Patrol agents there made 138,486 apprehensions, a 41 percent increase from the year before, said Ben Vik, a patrol spokesman.

In the past, the Border Patrol has had trouble recruiting and retaining agents. Officials say they may have to speed recruitment and training to deliver the agents promised by next fall. Only 479 are enrolled in its academy now.

"By the end of the fiscal year (Sept. 30), these agents will be assigned, either on the ground, in training or in some semblance of training on the ground," Aguilar said.

The plan for new agents comes as Congress prepares for what will likely be a fierce debate over immigration. The House will consider legislation next week to increase security along the border and require employers to verify that prospective workers are in the country legally.

Congress included money to hire the new agents in the Department of Homeland Security's fiscal 2006 budget and in legislation to pay for the Iraq war. President Bush broadly outlined the administration's plan in stops in Arizona and Texas last week. Both Democrats and Republicans say immigration could be a major campaign issue in elections around the country next year.

Arizona lawmakers said the new agents could help.

"For years, we've been trying to get the federal government to understand the size and scope of our border problem in Arizona and commit the necessary resources to deal with it," said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. "It's very gratifying to finally see all that effort begin to pay off."

But Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz., said the Border Patrol can't stop illegal immigration on its own.

"It's good news as far as it goes," he said. "I would just caution everyone to not be completely taken in by these numbers. It's simplistic to believe our broken immigration system can be fixed at our borders alone."

Reporter Daniel Gonzalez contributed to this article.

<#==#>

Religious zelots on Scottsdale City Council try to shut down Scottsdale topless bars

http://phoenixnewtimes.com/Issues/2005-12-08/news/Bird.html

The Bird

Boobs in Scottsdale

Attention, fight fans: The Bird would like to direct your attention to Scottsdale, where anxious strippers are gearing up for a battle that may prove epic. In this corner, the City of Scottsdale, armed with the best legal advice money can buy and a burning desire to save its citizens from bare breasts. In the other corner, billionaire porn star Jenna Jameson, who sports the best bosom money can buy.

Jameson, who's lived in the Valley since 2000, recently purchased a one-quarter interest in Babe's, a hot local strip club. She's hired happening designer Jeff Low -- the guy who designed Scottsdale's so-hot-it's-cool club SIX -- and word is, there are plans to relaunch the place as Club Jenna.

If Jameson's recent wins -- a best-selling autobiography; a Web site hawking everything from vibrators to hoodies; and (what else!) a reality TV show on the Playboy Channel -- are any indication, Club Jenna ought to be an instant smash. That is, if the Scottsdale City Council minds its own damn business.

Which doesn't seem likely. Last week, The Bird got a freshly printed copy of Scottsdale's opening salvo: a proposed ordinance that would (yikes!) ban liquor from any establishment with topless dancing.

The city already has a three-foot rule, keeping drooling customers far from the goods. Now it would be six feet. And although the general custom is for strip clubs that can't serve liquor to go all nude, the proposal would close that loophole, too.

So: No lap dances. No booze.

It's hard to imagine how any strip club could survive. In fact, it probably couldn't, according to Todd Borowsky. Borowsky owns Skin Cabaret, the other strip club in Scottsdale. He's been quietly doing business for three years, he says, without complaint from cops or citizens. But his prominent new neighbor has changed all that.

After Jameson's interest in Babe's was announced, cops began dropping by both strip clubs -- and not to party. Borowsky now faces seven criminal citations for red-tape infractions like not submitting a floor plan and not maintaining an employee log.

"Before Babe's sold, we had no problems whatsoever," Borowsky bleated to The Bird. "Now all of a sudden there are 15 articles in the newspaper, and council members are making comments -- this is 100 percent connected."

Naturally, City of Scottsdale spokesman Mike Phillips says this is all hooey. The city has been planning to update its strip club laws for some time, he swears.

Oh. Okay.

Behind the scenes, though, are indications that this is no routine nightclub shakedown. Besides the draconian nature of Scottsdale's plan -- no liquor at a titty bar? -- there is the man behind the ordinance, rumored to be one Scott Bergthold, a household name to people who remove their blouses for money (or at least those who employ them).

For years, Bergthold ran the Community Defense Counsel, a nonprofit group based in Scottsdale devoted to -- surprise! -- closing down strip clubs. Now he's in Tennessee where, according to his Web site, he runs a law practice devoted to -- say it with me, now! -- closing down strip clubs.

Bergthold is a smart feller. Reached by phone, he knew without being told that The Bird was calling about "that Scottsdale matter." Then he said he didn't have time to talk anymore.

Phillips, the Scottsdale spokesman, doesn't know if Bergthold is involved in the ordinance, and he's quick to stress that the ordinance is only a list of various legally defensible "options," and that there's no pressure for the Scottsdale City Council to actually adopt any of them.

The council is expected to discuss the ordinance December 12. Members could approve it then, or they could take a tip from The Bird: Stall a little, you guys. Wait until the angry mob of horny heteros is distracted by stuff like football or the next Jenna Jameson video, and slip it through then.

<SNIP>

<#==#>

wants some laughs on how government idiots brag how they have made the world a better place to live but when in reality they have solve zero problems and made the world a far worse place to live - then read this article.

http://phoenixnewtimes.com/Issues/2005-12-08/news/feature.html

Bad Medicine

Locking up cold medicine makes the politicians feel good -- but it won't put a dent in

Arizona's meth habit

By Sarah Fenske

Published: Thursday, December 8, 2005

If you're super bored, or really desperate, you can make crystal meth from Tylenol Cold/Severe Congestion cool-burst caplets.

You need denatured ethanol, or acetone, or anhydrous ammonia. You need iodine crystals and red phosphorous.

And then you need 16,560 Tylenol caplets -- a purchase that alone will set you back $3,857, plus tax.

But if you get enough of those ingredients, and buy those 690 boxes of Tylenol, and spend hours boiling and filtering and then filtering all over again, you could, conceivably, end up with crystal meth.

One ounce of crystal meth.

An ounce that would cost you $400, tops, on the street.

And that is precisely why crystal meth users, no matter how badly addicted, aren't known to spend their time boiling and filtering Tylenol Cold/Severe Congestion cool-burst caplets.

There are better ways to get the drug. Cheaper ways.

Even the addicts in Arizona who "cook" their own crystal meth -- and the Drug Enforcement Agency is convinced there aren't too many left, now that cheap, potent Mexican meth has flooded the market -- don't use Tylenol Cold/Severe Congestion. They know they can get nine times the yield from Sudafed.

And that's why it's so bizarre that the city councils in Phoenix and Scottsdale have enacted tough new ordinances that restrict stuff like, well, Tylenol cold medicine. And that businesses like Walgreens are putting it behind the counter even in places without such laws.

Here's how it works:

As of this week, customers in Phoenix who want to buy decongestants containing any amount of pseudoephedrine must go to the pharmacy or another area where the product is kept under lock and key.

They're limited to three boxes, per month.

They'll have to show ID and sign a logbook.

And every month, the pages of the logbook will be faxed to the Phoenix Police Department, so the police can keep track of who's buying Tylenol Cold/Severe Congestion, and Aleve Cold and Sinus, and Robitussin.

If any store sells one of those products, and doesn't follow the rules, the cops can seize the stuff, legally.

That's the new law.

Welcome to the politics of Arizona's crystal meth crisis.

These days, politicians are so eager to look like they're doing something to stop the demon drug that they're locking up decongestants that are rarely, if ever, used in meth production.

And, yeah, they look tough. Hey, they're fighting big pharmaceutical companies and taking on child-killing meth cooks!

But it's mostly smoke and mirrors.

"This idea of regulating pseudoephedrine is 10 years late," says Jim Molesa, a DEA agent based in Flagstaff. Molesa is considered the leading authority on Mexican meth in Arizona.

"It's laughable," he says. "Are you that out of touch that you can't grasp the issue? Every community needs a comprehensive treatment program."

Indeed, with meth pouring in from Mexico and the local lab problem mostly under control, the idea of devoting so many resources to fight meth cooks is showy distraction, not effective public policy.

And what it's distracting us from is a complete mess.

The two key state officials who should be leading the charge on the state's meth crisis have dropped the ball in wildly different ways.

Governor Janet Napolitano, a Democrat who's been so successful at running this red state that Republicans can't even come up with a serious gubernatorial challenger for 2006, has basically ignored the problem.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Terry Goddard, also a Democrat, has made crystal meth his crusade. But by focusing on labs -- the one meth-related problem in Arizona that's actually been declining for years -- his actions reek of political opportunism.

For Goddard, targeting meth labs has become a one-dimensional Western. The politicians and lawmen are in one corner, with their white hats and good intentions. In the other, the evil drug companies and their lackeys, who care nothing about the abuse of children.

Those who oppose his plan for taking on meth labs, he claimed in one press release, have capitulated to the "pharmaceutical industry."

But the truth is much more complicated.

There are pharmaceutical companies on both sides of the issue.

The new Phoenix ordinances, in fact, follow the game book of one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies: Pfizer, the company that makes Sudafed.

The medicine that's actually used in meth labs.

Meanwhile, the real truth of Arizona's meth problem is being ignored.

Despite good indication that a significant number of Arizona residents have struggled with meth addiction for at least eight years, officials have yet to run an effective, statewide public health campaign about the dangers of the drug.

Our leaders haven't even figured out who's using meth, much less how to target potential addicts before they start.

Meanwhile, meth addicts are stuck with an inadequate treatment system that's seeing more and more users every year -- a system that no one is willing to fund enough to do the job properly. Not insurance companies, and not the government. (See "Meth Treatment.")

These are large, complicated problems, problems that defy easy sound bites. Problems that can't be solved by the next election cycle.

Which is why no one should be surprised that our politicians have chosen to focus on Tylenol Cold/Severe Congestion cool-burst caplets instead.

Just because Arizona's crystal meth has been around for years doesn't mean it's stagnant. In fact, in the past five years, two big things have happened.

First, meth-lab busts in the state have dropped 68 percent since 2000 -- meaning, police believe, that far fewer addicts are cooking their own stuff.

Second, in that same period, Arizona has seen a 62 percent increase in people seeking treatment for meth addiction -- meaning more Arizonans than ever are using, and are desperately seeking ways to stop.

Fewer people are cooking meth; more people are abusing meth.

But Arizona lawmakers aren't talking about that.

Instead, they're talking about Oklahoma, and pseudoephedrine.

A common ingredient in over-the-counter cold and flu medicine, pseudoephedrine was designed as a decongestant -- specifically, a decongestant that, unlike its predecessor, ephedrine, couldn't be easily made into crystal meth.

But meth addicts are nothing if not dogged, and many became skilled at extracting pseudoephedrine from Sudafed tablets, combining it with stuff like red phosphorous and iodine, and making meth right in their kitchens.

Such "tabletop" labs became all the rage in heartland states four years ago. Oklahoma, while heavily hit, was far from alone. Places like Missouri and Oregon were also decimated.

The effect was devastating. Labs can be hazardous to firefighters, toxic to kids, and destructive to neighborhoods.

And then there are meth addicts themselves: Many become paranoid, amoral and violent.

Oklahoma law enforcement busted 399 labs in 2000, according to Drug Enforcement Administration records. By 2003, that number was up to a staggering 1,068.

Desperate, state lawmakers seized on a bold plan to stop meth cooks. In April 2004, Oklahoma began restricting sales of any tablet containing pseudoephedrine, which basically meant Sudafed and Claritin-D. Customers had to go to a pharmacy and sign a logbook, and they were strictly limited to nine grams of the stuff per month.

There was no precedent for a law like that. But it worked.

In just two months, the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics announced that the number of meth-lab busts per month had dropped 71 percent. They've continued to drop since.

Newspapers around the country reported the stunning development, and in no time, six states passed similar legislation. Congress, too, is considering a bill. (Oregon went even further in August, by limiting pseudoephedrine purchases to customers with a valid prescription.)

Naturally, Arizona was interested.

After all, the state has a serious meth problem.

In 2003, for example, 40 percent of inmates at the Maricopa County Jail tested positive for meth -- a number that's more than doubled since 1999.

Recent studies from Quest Diagnostics, which administers workplace drug tests, show that Arizona has one of the country's highest rates of workers testing positive for meth.

And meth-related deaths are up sharply this year from 2004. (See "Meth Fatalities," Paul Rubin, November 3, 2005.)

Last winter, Representative Tom O'Halleran, a Republican from Sedona, introduced legislation modeled on the Oklahoma plan in the state House of Representatives.

But there was one good reason to resist the plan, made clear in law enforcement statistics.

Arizona didn't have a meth lab problem. It had a meth use problem.

In 2000, according to DEA records, Arizona discovered almost as many tabletop labs as Oklahoma: 384. Respectively, the states had the fifth and sixth highest number of busts in the country.

But while Oklahoma's numbers shot up in 2001, finally peaking in 2003 thanks to its pseudoephedrine laws, Arizona busts started declining in 2001, for entirely different reasons.

They've steadily decreased every year since.

Last year, according to DEA statistics, Arizona reported just 122 meth-lab busts statewide. That's a drop of 68 percent from 2000 -- virtually the same as Oklahoma's more recent success, only without any tough new laws.

Even though Oklahoma's law has been in effect for more than a year, in fact, Arizona continues to see fewer meth-lab busts. And that's despite having some two million more residents than Oklahoma.

There are a few possible explanations for the decrease.

One may be that Arizona has had a pseudoephedrine law for years. It's not as tough as Oklahoma's, and it hasn't earned any headlines, but since 1999, it's been a felony in Arizona to buy or sell more than 24 grams of the stuff in a single purchase. Clerks can also face jail time if they sell pseudoephedrine to anyone they know plans to make meth out of it.

Police, too, worked hard to get the word out about tabletop labs. Phoenix Police Sergeant Don Sherrard, who supervises meth-lab busts, says that a federal grant allowed the department to get the message out: Information about the dangers of meth labs was printed on grocery bags and presented to community groups.

The public responded.

Neighbors of meth cooks, Sherrard says, "started calling us more. And we did put quite a few people in jail."

Perhaps the biggest reason, though, is one that few people outside the drug trade would see as a plus: Addicts aren't cooking meth anymore because they don't have to.

Instead, they can just buy the stuff ready-made, from dealers with a Mexican connection.

Of the half-dozen current and former meth addicts who discussed their use with New Times, only one had ever attempted to manufacture meth, and that was years ago.

"Are you kidding?" asked one, a 20-year-old kid named Joe who's been using since his freshman year in high school. "Nobody even knows how to make it."

The survey, while admittedly unscientific, is backed up by the DEA.

"These Mexican gangs are providing hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds of meth," says Tom Marble, clandestine lab coordinator for the DEA's Phoenix division. "A large number of labs have closed. But more people than ever are addicted to meth.

"In reality, the Mexican meth outnumbers the local stuff 100 to 1 -- and it's introduced people to using who'd never dream of making their own."

And it's not just in border states like Arizona.

It's even happening now in Oklahoma.

As part of a series on crystal meth, the Portland Oregonian reported earlier this year that Oklahoma's pseudoephedrine laws had brought about an unexpected consequence. Drug investigators told the newspaper that immediately after the laws went into effect, the Mexican cartels moved in.

And why not? The laws may have decimated the drug supply, but the demand was still huge.

Indeed, despite all the ink that's been spilled on the success of Oklahoma's legislation, it's worth remembering that the oft-cited "71 percent reduction" measures one thing only: the number of meth-lab busts.

There's been no correlation, in Oklahoma, to a drop in meth use.

Property crime hasn't dropped, nor have arrests for use.

Tucson Police Captain David Neri attended a recent conference where he heard from fellow officers in states where Oklahoma-style legislation has been approved.

"They all demonstrated drastic reduction in the tabletop labs," Neri says. "But the sad truth is that the usage stats don't change."

In every case, Mexican gangs moved in to sate the demand.

By earlier this year, it should have been clear to anyone studying the meth issue that Arizona had a problem that Oklahoma-style legislation wasn't going to fix.

Drugs coming from Mexico. People using. People needing treatment.

But no one in Arizona government seemed particularly interested in studying the problem. No one was discussing the issues of use and abuse.

What they were talking about was additional restrictions for pseudoephedrine. Just like Oklahoma.

The chief proponent of adopting the Oklahoma laws here has been Attorney General Terry Goddard. He got the plan endorsed by no fewer than 50 law enforcement agencies, including every county attorney in the state except one. (The holdout? Maricopa County's own Andy Thomas, who did not return calls for comment.)

Goddard even teamed up with a Republican, state Representative O'Halleran, to sell the plan in the House. It helped that O'Halleran is a former narcotics detective.

But though O'Halleran introduced the legislation, Republican leadership assigned it to three different committees, none of whose leaders would give it a hearing, much less a vote.

Meanwhile, the state Senate passed a weaker version. The Senate plan, proposed by Barbara Leff (R-Paradise Valley), was notable for its harsh punishment of meth cooks who worked with children present: They would face sentences as lengthy as child molesters, with a presumption of 20 years in prison and no chance of parole.

But while Leff's bill limited purchases to nine grams of tablet pseudoephedrine, it junked the idea of the logbook. And that nine-gram limit was per purchase, not per month.

To Goddard, who was intent on nothing less than the full Oklahoma plan, that was a total cop-out.

"It's not even halfway there," he says.

When Leff's version was sent to the House for its approval, O'Halleran made his last stand. He tacked on amendments, adding the logbook and the "per month" requirement.

The House easily approved the plan.

But Leff had the last word. The amended version was sent back to her to see if she'd agree to the changes.

She wouldn't.

The new state law would have no logbook and no new per-month limit.

In interviews with New Times, both Goddard and O'Halleran blamed lobbyists for the retailers associations and pharmaceutical companies.

And both groups, admittedly, fought O'Halleran's bill. But Leff says they had nothing to do with her personal feelings about it.

"I think what the attorney general wanted was stupid," she says. "I have done my homework. We shouldn't make laws that sound good when we know they aren't going to work."

But though Leff thought she'd settled the issue, she had a rude awakening ahead, as did the retailer and food marketing associations.

Goddard was so intent on getting tougher pseudoephedrine laws that he couldn't even wait for the next legislative session. He didn't wait until Leff's plan became law, on October 31.

In an interview with New Times, he notes that 60 percent of cases handled by Child Protective Services involve parents using meth. (That's different from making meth, but he doesn't mention that.)

"It is horrifying," Goddard says. "It is every day. And it has to stop. I don't believe we have the luxury of waiting another year."

Beginning in late summer, Goddard made a series of visits to cities around the state and asked them to pass ordinances of their own -- just like the Oklahoma law.

In his presentation to Phoenix leaders this past August, Goddard didn't mention the falling numbers of meth labs. He didn't talk about people who need treatment.

He talked about children found in meth labs, dirty and desperate. (In the past six years, investigators have found 263 children in Maricopa County labs, according to records provided by the Phoenix Police Department.)

"We don't solve the problem by cutting back on pseudoephedrine," Goddard acknowledged. "But we do make a tremendous impact."

In September, the Phoenix City Council approved the legislation. Sedona, Pinetop, Tucson and Scottsdale have since followed suit. Glendale is also considering it.

"If you know you have a solution to the problem," asks Phoenix City Councilman Dave Siebert, "how can you not do it?"

The legislation Goddard pushed for the state would have only restricted tablet-form pseudoephedrine, leaving out the majority of products that use the ingredient, which are liquids and gel caps. That's what Oklahoma did, after all.

But after he pushed the Phoenix City Council to act, the council decided to do more.

Much more.

The idea came from the cops.

Sherrard, the Phoenix police sergeant, advised the city council on its pseudoephedrine ordinance. And, like any good cop, he thought it might be better to be ahead of the curve.

He'd seen meth cooks evolve to get around new laws before -- the blister packs that Sudafed is sold in, in fact, were created because no one thought tweakers would have the patience to pop out thousands of tablets before cooking them. But the clever cooks actually devised a machine to do the popping.

"They're ingenious," Sherrard says.

So he suggested the Phoenix City Council go a little further. With tablets banned, meth cooks, he reasoned, were sure to turn to gel caps and liquid cold medicines with pseudoephedrine. He asked the council to restrict those, too.

"For the first time in law enforcement history, I thought we could be a little proactive instead of playing catch-up," he says. (Iowa, too, was ahead of the curve, passing laws to restrict all pseudoephedrine earlier this year.)

But a study published in the DEA-funded Microgram Journal in January 2005 suggests that Sherrard's idea of "proactive" may be closer to "over-the-top."

Funded by McNeil Consumer & Specialty Pharmaceuticals, which makes Tylenol, the study reported that, yes, virtually any form of pseudoephedrine -- liquid cold medicines, gel caps, even combo products like Tylenol Cold that are packed with other active ingredients -- could eventually be turned into crystal meth.

But it wouldn't be cheap: By the time Sudafed is converted to meth, about half of the pseudoephedrine is left.

For medicine like Tylenol Cold/Severe Congestion, it's more like 5 percent, according to the Microgram study.

And that's in a controlled lab, using the best practices available. Some law enforcement tests have only been able to get a 25 percent yield from Sudafed; their results from products like Tylenol Cold would likely be even lower.

Police officers in both Tucson and Phoenix admit they're not actually seeing such products in meth labs. Neither does the DEA.

"The source really hasn't changed," Marble says. "They're using blister packs of Sudafed."

But the Phoenix City Council wasn't talking about any of that. At the committee meeting to discuss the proposed ordinance, the idea of applying the restrictions to all pseudoephedrine was taken as a given.

The ordinances passed unanimously.

Beginning this week, as they go into effect, hundreds of products untouched by Oklahoma's law will be affected.

Bashas' grocery stores, for example, sell 156 different products with pseudoephedrine, from Dimetapp to Motrin, says Karen Giroux, director of regulatory agency relations for the Chandler-based chain.

They'll all have to move behind the counter. In every case, customers will have to sign the log.

Giroux says Bashas' has decided to stop carrying a large percentage of the products.

"We just don't have space for all of them," she says.

To politicians who haven't read the studies, who assume all cold medicine is one easy step away from crystal meth, a decision like that counts as good news.

"If we can get it down to just six products with pseudoephedrine, I think that's great," says Phoenix Councilman Siebert. "Instead of a dozen, let's only have a few."

Even if it wasn't just the inconvenience to consumers, though, there may be another unintended consequence of including so many products.

It involves the logbook.

Unlike in Oklahoma, where customers only had to sign when they were buying Sudafed or Claritin-D, customers in Phoenix will have to sign when they purchase things like Tylenol Cold.

Or Robitussin.

Or 150 other products.

It's going to be a fat book.

The ordinance requires the stores to fax the contents of the logbook to the police department each month. But the city council didn't earmark any funds for a database to record them, or even an officer to punch the data into a computer.

At this point, it's unclear how the reams of paper will be processed -- or if they will be processed, at all.

"Hey, the ordinance says they have to send it to the chief of the police," says Sherrard. "That means it's not my problem."

He's joking, of course, but he admits the city doesn't have a plan in place, yet.

"We'd like to come up with a database," he says. "But it's not going to be easy."

Even while Arizona lawmakers work feverishly to stop the state's few remaining meth labs, the state's meth use problem festers.

Unlike the lab issue, it's not easy to get sound bites about the direness of this situation. In some cases, it's impossible even to get a returned phone call.

Instead, on the questions of prevention, key state agencies seem to have dropped the ball.

The one part of O'Halleran's bill that might have had a big impact -- funding a major meth prevention initiative, targeted at kids ages 6 to 16 -- is the one piece that's been virtually forgotten today.

Leff's bill asked the state to identify successful meth prevention programs in other states and try to implement them here. It also called for the state to solicit donations to take on the issue of meth prevention and distribute them to worthy nonprofit companies.

But even though Governor Napolitano signed the bill into law, she doesn't appear to have put anyone on the case. Her spokeswoman knew nothing about any effort to identify such programs or fund them.

The state health department's Office of Tobacco Education and Prevention Program ran a highly successful anti-tobacco campaign in the mid- to late '90s. It achieved a 24 percent drop in the number of kids smoking.

But the health department hasn't attempted a similar campaign on meth use. "That's a law enforcement issue," says spokesman Mike Murphy.

The governor's substance abuse division, too, has hardly been active: It hasn't updated its "events calendar" in more than a year.

Despite repeated requests over a three-week period, Napolitano's substance abuse division director, Rob Evans, declined an interview to discuss what his staff is doing about meth.

It may be because they're just not doing all that much.

Indeed, even though arrest statistics show that meth has been a serious problem in Arizona for at least eight years, the state has yet to even accurately assess the problem. Lawmakers have been content to trot out the same sound bites instead of taking the time to figure out what's really going on.

Take, for example, the oft-repeated claim that Arizona leads the nation in meth use for kids ages 12 to 17.

That's a number that Attorney General Goddard consistently uses in presentations and promotional material, attributing it to U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona. The Arizona Republic has repeated it no less than five times.

The problem? It's totally bogus.

Goddard's spokeswoman, Andrea Esquer, says the source of the claim is a speech that Carmona made in Tucson last March.

But Carmona's planned remarks for the event show what he actually said: Arizona youth are tops when it comes to all stimulant use -- which includes meth, yes, but also cocaine. The Tucson Citizen, which covered the event, quotes Carmona stating just that.

As it turns out, the study Carmona was citing measures stimulant use as a whole, says Leah Young, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Health and Human Services Department. It doesn't have a breakdown for meth.

It's a small example, but indicative of the bigger issue: No one in Arizona has bothered to quantify what the state's problem is.

That makes it hard to tell which plans are working, much less find a big-picture solution.

Take, for instance, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America's pilot project for meth and Ecstasy health education.

Phoenix was one of two cities chosen for the project, which uses pediatricians to get information about the dangers of meth to teenagers. (The other city was St. Louis.)

The Partnership found amazing results for Ecstasy, says Arizona program director Shelly Mowrey. "From 2002 to 2004, Ecstasy use went down 56 percent among high school students," she says. "We were just jumping up and down."

The meth initiative didn't cause a similar reaction. The Arizona Criminal Justice Commission Youth Use Survey, an exhaustive study of eighth, 10th, and 12th graders, doesn't ask about crystal meth directly -- only the more generic "stimulants."

The 2004 survey shows that stimulant use is actually up from 2002, from 2.2 percent to 3 percent of high school seniors.

But because "stimulant" is the category in question, it's not clear what that means. Are more kids trying meth? Do kids even know that meth is, technically, a stimulant?

"The numbers on meth are kind of sketchy," Mowrey admits.

The Partnership talked to the survey leaders and asked them to break out meth as a topic for questioning in the future, Mowrey says. They've agreed.

But even with that change, 2006 will be the earliest data available. It won't be until 2008 that researchers will be able to tell if use is rising or falling.

By then, Arizona's meth crisis will be in its 10th year.

As of this week, the result of Arizona's fight against meth should be on display at drugstores and grocers across Phoenix.

The shelves that once held hundreds of name-brand decongestants, with endless varieties of day or night, cold and/or flu, children's versus extra strength, are basically down to one option: Sudafed PE.

Sudafed PE is Pfizer's tweaker-proof decongestant. It's pseudoephedrine-free -- the first product to hit the market that proudly proclaims it doesn't contain the key ingredient in crystal meth. (Instead, it uses an ingredient called phenylephrine, which is where the "PE" comes from.)

The new medication has earned Pfizer plenty of good ink. In press interviews, Terry Goddard and other politicians have praised Sudafed PE as an alternative to regular Sudafed.

In their telling, the new option is the perfect example of why ordinances like Phoenix's won't hit consumers too hard.

"It's a new product that has no meth-producing ingredients," Goddard told KAET-TV's Michael Grant on air in April. "Those will be available if this bill passes, no problems for consumers. They have exactly the same diagnostic or medicine effect."

But Sudafed PE is actually the perfect example of why ordinances like Phoenix's will hit consumers.

Because, despite what Goddard says, there's good indication the new stuff doesn't work.

Pfizer tried for years to develop a form of pseudoephedrine that couldn't be made into meth, spokeswoman Erica Johnson says, spending millions of dollars in the process. But that effort proved impossible, and the company abandoned it, as Johnson confirms.

Only then did Pfizer roll out Sudafed PE.

Not because the development process worked.

But because it didn't.

To make PE, Pfizer simply replaced pseudoephedrine with an agent called phenylephrine. Like pseudoephedrine, phenylephrine has been approved for use since 1972, when the Food and Drug Administration first set the rules for over-the-counter medications.

It's been rarely used in oral decongestants since. And there's good reason why.

Leslie Hendeles, a doctor of pharmacy at the University of Florida, says the existing research indicates clearly that it doesn't work.

Hendeles, who compared phenylephrine and pseudoephedrine for Pharmacology in 1993, says the studies are clear: Phenylephrine is absorbed rapidly into the liver. Only 38 percent of the medicine makes it into the bloodstream -- which is key for it to work.

Plus, the FDA only allows a dose of 10 milligrams of phenylephrine in any over-the-counter product. That's one-sixth of what's allowed for pseudoephedrine.

At that level, Hendeles says, phenylephrine is no better than a placebo.

"In my scientific opinion, at the allowable dose, not enough gets into the bloodstream to be effective as a decongestant," he says. "As a topical nasal solution, it's very effective. But as an oral product, it's not going to work."

Pfizer spokeswoman Erica Johnson acknowledges that the company has no scientific studies showing that the new Sudafed PE works. (Anecdotally, she says consumers claim "comparable relief.")

Because the new product is sold over the counter, the FDA confirms, the company won't have to do any studies.

But most customers don't know that. And that gives Sudafed PE an enviable place on the shelves: In Phoenix, it will be one of the only decongestants that customers don't have to request from clerks or sign a logbook to purchase.

Its development may be one reason Pfizer -- far from trying to block pseudoephedrine restrictions, as some politicians have suggested -- actually supported ordinances like Phoenix's.

Pfizer says the company's position on laws like Phoenix's is a matter of fairness.

"Our position has always been, 'If you're going to put pseudoephedrine products behind the counter, you've got to put all pseudoephedrine products behind the counter,'" says spokeswoman Johnson. "All forms. Tablets, gels, and liquids."

It's a strategy that seems to be working. In April, Target became the first company to voluntarily put all products behind the counter. Walgreens followed suit later this spring, spokeswoman Carol Hively says.

Johnson says the company will continue to offer regular Sudafed behind the counter. "Some customers may not find enough relief with Sudafed PE," she says. "They can choose to return to the stuff with pseudoephedrine."

But in some cases, they may not have the choice.

A number of drug companies, including Tylenol's maker, quickly realized the benefits of making a pseudoephedrine-free product. They plan to reformulate their products to take out pseudoephedrine in time for next year's cold season, says McNeil spokeswoman Kathy Fallon.

"They realize customers are not always going to think to ask for this stuff if it's behind the counter," says Jenny Van Amburgh, a doctor of pharmacy at Northeastern University.

"It's definitely an access issue."

The inaugural meeting of the Phoenix City Council meth task force attracted serious media attention.

No fewer than eight television cameras were packed into the small conference room. At least a half-dozen print journalists scribbled into their notebooks.

The membership included all the right players: representatives from the police department, treatment community, and politicians.

Attorney General Goddard spoke about the "crisis in our midst."

He repeated that statistic about how Arizona is number one in meth use for kids ages 12 to 17. "I don't think we've even got an idea of how prevalent it is in our communities," he said.

The task force members were seated around a table, and each one got a chance to speak. Each talked about the ravages of meth. Each expressed hope that the new legislation would help.

And then Jeffrey Taylor spoke. Outreach coordinator for the Phoenix Rescue Mission, he sees the poorest and most desperate meth users every day.

He talked about needing more treatment options in jail. He talked about how Arizona needs more inpatient rehab centers.

And everyone nodded, and smiled, and then went back to pseudoephedrine.

Some members have bounced around ideas since. One of Mayor Phil Gordon's aides found a video online called "Meth Is Death." It was put together by the Knox County Attorney General's Office, in Tennessee; some Phoenix officials have discussed doing a local version here.

The task force meeting, though, was in August.

And the only thing they've done since is hold a press conference, a TV-ready affair in front of a home busted in April as the site of a meth lab.

The sole topic: Phoenix's new pseudoephedrine ordinance, and their next goal -- making it state law.

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1209brit-torture09.html

British court rules against evidence obtained through torture

Sarah Lyall

New York Times

Dec. 9, 2005 12:00 AM

LONDON - Thrusting itself into the middle of a stormy international debate, Britain's highest court declared Thursday that evidence obtained through torture, no matter who had done the torturing, is not admissible in British courts. It also said that Britain has a "positive obligation" to uphold anti-torture principles abroad as well as at home.

"The issue is one of constitutional principle, whether evidence obtained by torturing another human being may lawfully be admitted against a party to proceedings in a British court, irrespective of where, or by whom, or on whose authority the torture was inflected," said Lord Bingham, writing the lead opinion for the Law Lords, roughly equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court. "To that question I would give a very clear negative answer."

The ruling dealt specifically with the case of 10 men who were detained and held without charge in Britain on suspicion of being terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. But although the question at hand applied only to English law, several of the lords explicitly referred, not at all flatteringly, to the standards of evidence applied in the United States in the fight against terror.

Speaking of English national pride in its common-law rejection centuries ago of torture as a means to an end, Lord Hoffman brought his argument forward to the current era.

"In our own century," he wrote, "many people in the United States, heirs to that common-law tradition, have felt their country dishonored by its use of torture outside the jurisdiction and its practice of extralegal 'rendition' of suspects to countries where they would be tortured."

Human rights groups applauded the ruling as a landmark decision that set out a civilized blueprint for how British courts should conduct themselves in terror cases.

"The Law Lords' ruling has overturned the tacit belief that torture can be condoned under certain circumstances," Amnesty International said in a statement. "This ruling shred any vestige of legality with which the U.K. government had attempted to defend a completely unlawful and reprehensible policy, introduced as part of its counterterrorism measures."

It was unclear Thursday what practical effect the ruling would have. Human rights groups that had brought the case said it will force the government to do three things: re-evaluate any pending or future terrorism cases to determine explicitly that evidence had not been extracted by torture; stop seeking to deport terror suspects to countries where they might be tortured; and investigate the possible use of British airspace and airports by the United States in transporting terror suspects to countries where torture may be used.

But in a statement, the British home secretary, Charles Clarke, said the ruling will have no substantive effect on the 10 terror suspects whose cases were at issue. Nor, he said, will the lords' judgment have any bearing on the government's anti-terrorism policies.

The 10 men are known informally as the Belmarsh detainees, after the prison where many of them were held. Last year, a lower court ruled that evidence against them that may have been obtained under torture in other countries was usable in English courts and that the government had no obligation to ask how the evidence had been gathered.

In strong language that referred to centuries of English law and to the moral weight of international treaties and obligations, a seven-member panel of the Law Lords struck down that decision.

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1209patriotact09.html

Lawmakers compromise on Patriot Act extension

Andrew Zajac

Chicago Tribune

Dec. 9, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - House and Senate negotiators approved an extension of the controversial USA Patriot Act on Thursday, but a bipartisan group of senators pledged to try to block final passage, and at least one lawmaker, Sen. Russell Feingold, threatened a filibuster.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said the new legislation, which would extend and modestly alter a group of anti-terror laws hastily passed following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was "not a perfect bill, but a good bill."

"There is no justification for not fixing this thing now," said Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat. "There was a unanimous vote in the Senate to change it in important areas and the conference committee disregarded the view of the Senate, ran amok, and said we are going to try to jam this thing through, and that is plain unacceptable."

Feingold vowed to filibuster the bill if it came to the Senate floor in its current form, but conceded that Republicans might be able to get enough votes to cut off debate. He said he was troubled by three provisions in the act: allowing the government to have access to people's library and business records without proof of a direct connection to terrorism, overly broad search authority, and the use of so-called "national security letters" to demand information from businesses and then require them to keep it secret.

Both the House and Senate are expected to vote on the bill next week.

While there is little debate from Feingold or anyone else in Congress about the need for police agencies to have enhanced information-gathering powers to thwart terrorism, the Patriot Act has been shadowed by unease about whether there were enough safeguards built in to keep authorities from abusing power.

As a hedge against government overreach, lawmakers specified that 16 provisions of the act would expire at the end of the 2005 unless renewed, setting the stage for the current debate.

Initially, the strongest push for reforms came from an unusual coalition of conservatives and liberals who are civil libertarians and dub themselves Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances.

By October, reformers received an unexpected boost from powerful corporate business interests, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, worried about the breadth of government requests for information and a lack of an adequate judicial process to contest demands for records.

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another police murder like when the london cops shot Charles de Menezes on the subway??? its starting to look that way. Rigoberto Alpizar who was murdered by the air marshals on an airplane is mentally ill and forgot to take his meds.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/1209airplane-shooting09.html

Air passengers recall tension, then gunfire

Curt Anderson

Associated Press

Dec. 9, 2005 12:00 AM

MIAMI - The passenger shot to death by air marshals in Miami had been agitated before boarding the plane and was singing Go Down Moses as his wife tried to calm him, a fellow passenger said Thursday.

"The wife was telling him, 'Calm down. Let other people get on the plane. It will be all right,' " Alan Tirpak said.

"I thought maybe he's afraid of flying."

Tirpak took his seat, and Rigoberto Alpizar, 44, and his wife eventually boarded the plane. Then, a few minutes before the plane was to pull away, Alpizar bolted up the aisle and onto the jetway, where two air marshals confronted him.

"He was belligerent. He threatened that he had a bomb in his backpack," said Brian Doyle, spokesman for the U.S. Homeland Security Department. "The officers clearly identified themselves and yelled at him to 'Get down, get down!' Instead, he made a move toward the backpack."

Agents are trained to shoot to stop a threat, and the situation on the jetway at Miami International Airport on Wednesday appeared to pose one, said John Amat, a deputy with the U.S. Marshals Service in Miami.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan also said Thursday that the two air marshals appeared to have acted properly when they shot to kill.

Both air marshals were hired in 2002 from other federal law enforcement agencies and are now on administrative leave, as is routine, Doyle said. Miami-Dade Police were investigating the shooting, and the Medical Examiner's Office was performing an autopsy on Alpizar. Officials say there was no bomb, and they found no connection to terrorism.

Alpizar's sister-in-law, Jeanne Jentsch, read a short statement from the family Thursday describing him as "a loving, gentle and caring husband, uncle, son and friend." He was from Costa Rica but became a U.S. citizen several years ago, she said.

The statement did not address Alpizar's mental condition. Other passengers have said Alpizar's wife, Anne Buechner, said he was bipolar, a disorder also known as manic-depression.

"She was yelling 'That's my husband, that's my husband. I need to get to my husband!' " Mary Gardner said. "She said, 'My husband is bipolar. He didn't take his medicine.' "

Mike Beshears heard her say, "My husband is sick. I've got to get my bags."

Then the shots rang out, and a flight attendant stopped her and guided her to a seat, he said.

"She was very apologetic," Beshears said of Alpizar's wife. "She was explaining to us as we sat there in the row. She felt it was her fault, that she had convinced him to get on board, that he wasn't ready."

Buechner did not speak publicly Thursday. She works for the Council on Quality and Leadership based in Towson, Md., a non-profit organization focused on improving life for people with disabilities and mental illness, the organization said in a statement.

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Insert your lawyer joke here …

Lemme see if I have this straight: James Hamm was turned down for admission to the Arizona Bar because they say he doesn’t have the “moral qualifications” to be a lawyer!

I have no words. Insert your own joke.

Ken Doerfler

Glendale, Arizona

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1209ChinaShooting09-ON.html

Chinese village sealed off after protesters shot by police

Associated Press

Dec. 9, 2005 12:45 PM

BEIJING - Hundreds of riot police armed with guns and shields have surrounded and sealed off a southern Chinese village where authorities fatally shot demonstrators this week, villagers said Friday.

Although riot police often use tear gas and truncheons to disperse demonstrators, it is extremely rare for security forces to fire into a crowd - as they did in putting down pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 near Tiananmen Square. Hundreds, if not thousands, were killed.

During the demonstration Tuesday in Dongzhou, a village in Guangdong province, thousands of people gathered to protest the amount of money offered by the government as compensation for land to be used in the construction of a wind power plant.

Police started firing into the crowd and killed several people, mostly men, villagers reached by telephone said Friday. The death toll ranged from two to 10, they said, and many remained missing.

State media have not mentioned the incident and both provincial and local governments have repeatedly refused to comment.

This is typical in China, where the ruling Communist Party controls the media and lower-level authorities are leery of releasing information without permission from the central government.

All the villagers said they were nervous and scared, and most did not want to be identified for fear of retribution. One man said the situation was still "tumultuous."

A 14-year-old girl said a local official visited the village Friday and called the shootings "a misunderstanding."

"He said he hoped it wouldn't become a big issue," the girl said by telephone. "This is not a misunderstanding. I am afraid. I haven't been to school in days."

She added: "Come save us."

Another villager said there were at least 10 deaths.

"The riot police are gathered outside our village. We've been surrounded," she said, sobbing. "Most of the police are armed. We dare not go out of our home."

"We are not allowed to buy food outside the village. They asked the nearby villagers not to sell us goods," the woman said. "The government did not give us proper compensation for using our land to build the development zone and plants. Now they come and shoot us. I don't know what to say."

One woman said an additional 20 people were wounded.

"They gathered because their land was taken away and they were not given compensation," she said. "The police thought they wanted to make trouble and started shooting."

She said there were several hundred police with guns in the roads outside the village Friday. "I'm afraid of dying. People have already died."

The number of protests in China's vast, poverty-stricken countryside has risen in recent months as anger comes to a head over corruption, land seizures and a yawning wealth gap that experts say now threatens social stability. The government says about 70,000 such conflicts occurred last year, although many more are believed to go unreported.

The clashes also have become increasingly violent, with injuries sustained on both sides and huge amounts of damage done to property as protesters vent their frustration in face of indifferent or bullying authorities.

"These reports of protesters being shot dead are chilling," Catherine Baber, deputy Asia director at Amnesty International, said in a statement. "The increasing number of such disputes over land use across rural China, and the use of force to resolve them, suggest an urgent need for the Chinese authorities to focus on developing effective channels for dispute resolution."

Amnesty spokeswoman Saria Rees-Roberts said Friday in London that "police shooting people dead is unusual in China and it does demand an independent investigation."

Like many cities in China, Shanwei, the city where Dongzhou is located, has cleared suburban land once used for farming to build industrial zones. State media have said the Shanwei Red Bay industrial zone is slated to have three electricity-generating plants - a coal-fired plant, a wave power plant and a wind farm.

Shanwei already has a large wind farm on an offshore island, with 25 turbines. Another 24 are set for construction.

Earlier reports said the building of the $743 million coal-fired power plant, a major government-invested project for the province, also was disrupted by a dispute over land compensation.

Authorities in Dongzhou were trying to find the leaders of Tuesday's demonstration, a villager said.

The man said the bodies of some of the shooting victims "are just lying there."

"Why did they shoot our villagers?" he asked. "They are crazy!"

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1210combatant10.html

U.S.: Padilla's indictment alters status for detention

Mark Sherman

Associated Press

Dec. 10, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - U.S. citizen Jose Padilla's legal challenge to his three-year stay in a military jail without charges should be dismissed because he now stands accused of a crime, the Justice Department told a federal Appeals Court on Friday.

The filing with the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., is an attempt by the administration to avoid a Supreme Court showdown over its controversial policy of detaining U.S. terror suspects indefinitely and without charges.

The government refused to rule out that it could reclassify Padilla in the future as an "enemy combatant," which would again deprive him of most rights granted to criminal defendants.

"In that unlikely event, petitioner would have ample opportunity to challenge any such military custody at that time," the government said in legal papers signed by Solicitor General Paul Clement.

Padilla's lawyers declined to comment Friday, but they have said they want the Supreme Court to rule on the administration's power to detain him indefinitely without charges, regardless of his status.

The government wants the Appeals Court to approve Padilla's transfer from military custody to a federal civilian jail in Miami, where he was indicted last month on charges that he was part of a North American terrorist support network that sent money and fighters abroad.

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you can always trust the government to tell you the truth??? well not really. they made up this lie to get people to donate money.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1210charity10.html

Agency makes up story to get money

Pam Easton

Associated Press

Dec. 10, 2005 12:00 AM

HOUSTON - It was a heart-wrenching story: A 10-year-old boy named John, separated from his mother since the hurricane, was living with other foster children in an emergency shelter. He had one Christmas wish: to go home.

"But there's no way I'll get gifts for Christmas. I don't even believe in Santa anymore," he said.

The Brazosport Facts ran the profile on its front page Nov. 29 as part of its Fill-a-Stocking series, which features a different foster child each day from Thanksgiving through Christmas and solicits donations for a local charity to help fulfill the child's wish.

But the story was a work of fiction.

State caseworkers apparently made it up to tug at readers' heartstrings.

Dan Lauck, a reporter with KHOU-TV in Houston, discovered the story was phony after calling state officials to request an interview with the child. He believed that if the boy's story was told on television, the youngster might find his mother.

Lauck said his requests were repeatedly denied because of what he was told were privacy concerns. Eventually, he was told that the boy was living with relatives. Finally, an agency spokesman told him the profile had been made up.

Caseworkers with state Child Protective Services in Brazoria County, outside Houston, were responsible for writing the profiles for the newspaper's charity drive, which has been a holiday fixture in the 19,000-circulation paper since 1982.

CPS has apologized to the paper, which immediately suspended its series and returned the $1,070 collected so far this year from donors.

Publisher Bill Cornwell said the newspaper trusted the agency to present accurate stories and believed only minor changes, such as names and ages, were made to protect the children's privacy. Given privacy issues related to foster children, Cornwell said, there was only so much verification the newspaper could do.

CPS is investigating how it all happened, spokesman Patrick Crimmins said.

Lauck said it does not appear the CPS caseworkers had any bad intentions.

"They were just trying to tell stories that would clearly tug at the heart . . . ," Lauck said. "But they did it in a way that misled the public."

Bob Steele, a former TV news director, said the problem could have been averted if the profiles had been done by reporters.

"The integrity of the paper is damaged, the good cause that was intended is eroded and those in need are then not served as they should be," Steele said.

Cornwell said his newspaper is now trying to determine whether previous stories were falsified, too. He said he does not understand why a caseworker would resort to fiction, since foster children's real stories are compelling enough.

Meanwhile, he said some readers are frustrated with the newspaper for canceling the series.

"We are not going to walk away from the kids' needs monetarily," Cornwell said. But he said: "We are out to get to the bottom of the situation so people can trust what they read."

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5 months after scotland yard pigs murdered Jean Charles de Menezes on a subway by shooting 7 bullets into his head we are told the london cops MIGHT be charged with a crime. I'm not holding my breath waiting for any charges and i doubt they will ever charge the pigs with murder.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1918789,00.html

The Times December 10, 2005

Tube death police may be charged, says head of inquiry

By Stewart Tendler, Crime Correspondent

POLICE marksmen and senior Scotland Yard officers who were involved in the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes could face criminal charges, senior investigators warned yesterday.

Nick Hardwick, chairman of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), said he expected a report on the botched counter-terror operation at Stockwell Underground station in South London to be sent to the Crown Prosecution Service within weeks.

This is the clearest indication yet that a number of officers who mistook the Brazilian electrician for a suicide bomber could be brought to court.

The remarks “dismayed” the de Menezes family, who accused the IPCC of leaking details of their inquiry after promising that they would remain confidential. A spokesman for the family said: “The IPCC criticised Scotland Yard for briefing the media and say they are investigating why police gave their misleading version of what happened in the station, and now they appear to be doing the same.”

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, also criticised the IPCC last night for its admission that it had still not questioned the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair. Mr Davis described this admission as “inexplicable”. He said: “The public expect no stone to be left unturned in this inquiry. The last thing anyone wants is to encourage conspiracy theories about a cover-up.”

The inquiry would not confirm last night whether it had received a written statement from Sir Ian. A separate IPCC inquiry is being held into the Scotland Yard chief’s handling of the affair. This was announced last week, after the de Menezes family lodged an official complaint alleging that he and other senior officers made false public statements after the shooting.

Mr Hardwick said that a separate investigation had yet to begin, but any disciplinary measures would be a matter for the police authority overseeing Scotland Yard.

He insisted that the IPCC had spoken to everyone it needed to for the inquiry into the shooting itself, but would not say why Sir Ian was not among those interviewed.

He said. “We are confident we know, second by second, what happened on that train.”

Questioned about reports that some of the CCTV tapes from the Tube station platform may have been missing, Mr Hardwick said: “We are comfortable that we have all the tapes that exist. We have always said the tapes are significant.”

John Cummins, a senior investigator, admitted there had been “problems” with some of the equipment, but did not elaborate further. He said that no film had been withheld by Scotland Yard or anyone else.

The family has expressed concern that some of the CCTV equipment covering the platform and vital areas of Stockwell station were said to be out of order on the day.

Police have used the film to reconstruct Mr de Menezes’s last journey from the time he boarded a bus near his South London home until the time he arrived at Stockwell Tube. The inquiry team would not reveal what gaps there were in the CCTV coverage. Mr Cummins told how investigators had traced and spoken to all 30 passengers in the train carriage at the time of the shooting as well as witnesses from the station. The team had taken 600 written statements.

Mr de Menezes, 27, was shot seven times in the head by anti-terror officers who were part of an operation to find a team of suicide bombers that had botched a series of attacks on London transport 24 hours earlier. Mr Hardwick said: “I am confident we will be able to answer the questions that arise out of the incident on July 22, but the distinction is we are not going to deal with the wider questions of how London is policed or this very difficult terrorist situation.”

He said that the IPCC had already sent recommendations to Scotland Yard about counter-terrorist operations and the deployment of marksmen.

Nine officers, including Commander Cressida Dick, who had the responsibility to give any command to open fire, have been told that they are under investigation. Mr Hardwick said that the IPCC had to decide whether its findings indicated that criminal offences might have taken place.

Its report could include an indication of the specific offences the IPCC believes may have been committed.

But Mr Hardwick underlined that the IPCC had a lower standard of test than the CPS. The report would say only that an officer “may” have committed an offence and the CPS would have to decide whether to bring charges.

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Laro Nicol didn't hurt anybody nor did he steal or try to steal anything but he got TWO years in a federal prison for a victimless federal crime. This federal government employee who was involved in ransporting 20 kilograms of cocaine only got a year and a half. The system stinks. I think all drugs should be legalized, but this woman who committed what is a very, very major federal crime only got a slap on the wrist and Laro who did nothing wrong got TWO YEARS

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1210fbisting.html

Sergeant gets prison, court martial in drug case

Associated Press

Dec. 10, 2005 12:00 AM

TUCSON - A sergeant at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base has been sentenced to more than a year and a half in federal prison and will be dishonorably discharged from the military for her part in an FBI drug-running sting.

Staff Sgt. Charisse Smith was sentenced Thursday after she pleaded guilty to transporting 20 kilograms of cocaine with another service member.

Smith, 26, also was fined $4,000. She is the seventh Davis-Monthan service member court-martialed in connection with the sting, dubbed Operation Lively Green.

At the time of the offense, Smith was assigned to the Tucson air base's 355th Equipment Maintenance Squadron, where she worked loading ammunition onto military jets.

Smith and another staff sergeant were accused of moving bricks of cocaine from Nogales, Ariz., to Tucson in a military vehicle in November 2002.

Operation Lively Green led to the arrests of dozens of southern Arizona military and civilian government workers on cocaine-running, conspiracy and corruption charges.

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Sheriff Joe Arpaio will be forcing religious music on the inmates in Tent City Jail and other Maricopa County jails

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1210merryxmas1210.html

Americans demanding end to generic holiday

Sensitivity has taken the fun from Christmas, many say

Jaimee Rose

The Arizona Republic

Dec. 10, 2005 12:00 AM

If this were allowed to continue, we'd soon be stringing "holiday" lights on the "holiday" tree, wishing each other "Merry Winter" and going "celebration" shopping at the department store's Seasons' Greetings sale.

But now, after years of all this "holiday" grinching, Americans are revolting and demanding Christmas back.

This week, fury erupted after the White House Christmas card omitted the word Christmas yet again, including wishes instead for a happy "holiday season."

Retailers facing boycotts over a lack of Christmas signage have caved, with Lowe's agreeing to take down "holiday tree" signs and Target on Friday agreeing to use "Christmas" in its advertisements.

The glittering spruce on the Capitol lawn in Washington reclaimed its Christmas tree title this year after a decade as a generic "holiday" monument.

Even Sheriff Joe Arpaio joined the fray, announcing Thursday that he'll be playing religious holiday music all day, every day in Tent City Jail and other Maricopa County Sheriff's Office jails. He'll include songs by the Chipmunks for the atheists, he says.

The so-called "war on Christmas"(and there's even a thusly titled new book) has been stewing for years. But now, with both activists and average Joes digging in their Christmas stocking heels, with the beginning of Hanukkah sharing Dec. 25 with Christmas, this seems to be the year we're going to have it out.

And when 96 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas, according to a Fox News poll, many people are left wondering why there just can't be peace on Earth.

"This should be a great time of year. Everybody should be happy," says Gilbert Mayor Steve Berman, an anomalous politician who rebuffs politically correct holiday pleasantries in favor of "Mayor-ry Christmas" cards. "If you take these things too seriously, you lose a lot of the fun."

Wary Christmas

But in a rapidly diversifying America, we are rushing to be politically correct and sensitive, and often appropriately so. We've sidestepped our habits of "letting these mainstream cultures steamroll over everything else," says Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University in New York. "Christmas was not immune to that."

Over the past 30 years, he says, America's December holidays indeed have evolved: Menorahs are displayed in public places and Kwanzaa was created in 1966 and added to the calendar.

In 2001, we had the first holiday postage stamp honoring Eid, an Islamic festival marking the end of Ramadan.

And somewhere along the line, Christmas almost became an insensitive word.

Disputes about Christmas are practically older than Christmas itself, Thompson notes. The winter celebration we consider Christmas was originally a pagan custom predating Christ. Gifts were given, candles lit and evergreens hung to honor the winter solstice.

The holiday morphed into Christmas around A.D. 300, when Roman Emperor Constantine assigned the holiday a Christian meaning and latched it onto a very popular existing celebration.

Additionally, religious scholars agree that Jesus Christ was likely born in the spring, not on Dec. 25.

However, it is "the American tradition" to honor this day as the birthday of Christ, says Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss. "And whether it actually is or not is irrelevant. It's the fact that there is a day set aside to commemorate that event."

The Christmas quest

And so Wildmon will continue on his organization's quest to put "Christmas" back into the holiday season. The group is behind the consumer boycotts of retailers like Target and Sears that downplay Christmas in advertisements and in-store displays.

This year, 700,000 people joined the Target boycott, Wildmon says, and the retailer acquiesced. After hearing from the association, Sears and Lowe's stores put Christmas back on signs. Next year, Wildmon is expecting more Christmas cheer from Wal-Mart.

"Let's don't change everything to be generic," Wildmon says. "Kids don't run downstairs at 5 a.m. on New Year's Day. People buy Christmas gifts. They go Christmas shopping. This is the Christmas season, and we don't need to purge it from our stores and our schools and the culture of the public."

He also criticizes things like the "winter program" at an elementary school in Dodgeville, Wis. The event featured the familiar lilting notes of Silent Night, with a new name and new lyrics. Cold in the Night goes like this: "Cold in the night, no one in sight, winter winds whirl and bite."

Should anyone have wished to complain about this attack on Christmas, there's a Scottsdale-based national network of more than 800 attorneys "poised to fight the battle for Christmas," says Jeremy Tedesco, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund, which trains lawyers nationally on Christmas-related litigation.

"It's ridiculous that we have to be even debating in our society if it's OK to say 'Merry Christmas,'" Tedesco says. "Congress says Christmas is a federal holiday. The Supreme Court has never said you can't say 'Merry Christmas.' Schools can call 'winter break' 'Christmas break.' They can include sacred music in holiday programs."

This year, the Alliance Defense Fund mitigated a case involving a public library in Memphis, Tenn., that was allowing a Nativity to be displayed provided the religious icons of Joseph, Mary and the Baby Jesus were omitted. The holy family has since been allowed back under the roof.

There is still, however, that argument for sensitivity.

"It's not about discriminating against Christians by not saying 'Merry Christmas,' " says Dawn Wyland, interim director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona. "It's about being inclusive by saying 'happy holidays.' "

You've got mail

That's the mailbox wisdom of politicians from President Bush to Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, whose annual greeting wishes the "happiest of holiday seasons" to a mailing list 8,000 strong. (Hallmark, by the way, reports that "Merry Christmas" wishes still represent the majority of the 2,200 cards the company offers each year.)

"When elected officials send out cards," says Scott Phelps, a spokesman for Gordon, "it's always been a 'holiday' card because you're elected by folks of all faiths."

Such thought is appreciated by people like Phoenix resident Arthur Lazar, who gets so incensed when wished a "Merry Christmas" that he wishes a "Happy Hanukkah" right back.

"They laugh or storm off," says Lazar, 51. "I'm Jewish, and the point is I want people to realize that not everybody celebrates Christmas."

But when Michelle Hawkins tries offering "happy holidays" to her clients at Creative Quest in Glendale, "some of them have been saying, 'No, you mean 'Merry Christmas," says Hawkins, 57, of Goodyear.

Things have gotten worse this year, she says. The paper-arts store hosted a holiday cardmaking event and faced a revolt when each of the 10 samples said "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."

"Our customers are upset about this Christmas thing," she says. "They say you should be able to say 'Merry Christmas,' and I agree, but you can't always know."

And thus it is that Phoenix chef Mark Tarbell sends out his annual holiday card to clients with neutral goodwill. Past favorites include "Season's Eatings," and "Scatter Joy."

This year, "we don't have a saying yet because we're doing an e-mail card," Tarbell says. "We're going to save trees, man."

Honestly, Tarbell adds, "I am not opposed to saying 'Christmas.' It is what it is."

He then placed a reporter on hold for 90 seconds while he consulted with his "legal counsel" over whether or not that was OK to say out loud.

Reach the reporter at jaimee.rose@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8923.

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http://www.azcentral.com/community/scottsdale/articles/1206sr-iraqopinions06insideZ8.html

Scottsdale CC plans 2nd Iraq 'teach-in'

Public forum aims to shed light on current events

Elias C. Arnold

The Arizona Republic

Dec. 6, 2005 12:00 AM

SCOTTSDALE COMMUNITY COLLEGE - More than two years after the start of the Iraq war, a group of professors is planning a "teach-in" to help students better understand the state of the war and the challenges that lie ahead.

"We've been there (two) years now. Let's take a look at things," said Mark Klobas, a history instructor who is organizing the event.

The decision to hold Scottsdale Community College's second Iraq war teach-in comes as some members of Congress have called for a plan to bring U.S. troops home.

It also follows the recent benchmark of 2,000 U.S. military personnel killed in a war that more often is being compared by some with Vietnam, which spawned dozens of teach-ins at campuses throughout the nation in the '60s and '70s.

SCC held its first Iraq war teach-in in April 2003, a month after the start of the war.

Revisiting the teach-in had more to do with how much time has passed since the first teach-in than with recent events, Klobas said.

Vietnam War teach-ins, which mostly gave voice to an anti-war perspective, were a way to teach people about what was going on in an era before cable TV and the Internet.

The goal of the SCC teach-ins, which will be in either February or March, is to shed light on current events and extend learning outside the classroom, Klobas said.

Leonard O'Brian, a philosophy professor who participated in the first teach-in, said bringing questions about the war out into a public forum exposes both panelists and students to ideas they might not have considered otherwise.

O'Brian said his hope is that talking with people about these issues will get students thinking about what's happening elsewhere in the world.

Up until now, he said, Americans have largely been passive about the war, with the burden falling almost entirely on those who have lost family members.

"It's easy to drive around in our luxury cars imagining that the rest of the world is so blessed," O'Brian said. "We've got to struggle with this thing. We've got to bring our heads out of the sand."

Brandon Pullen, an undeclared sophomore, said the calls for a pullout and the casualties haven't changed his opinion about the war.

"I still stand behind our troops just because I think there's a lot going on over there that the public doesn't understand," he said.

Victor Carona, a computer-engineering freshman, said he now agrees with the calls for a pullout.

"I thought it was a good idea to get rid of all the bad guys, but now it's too much," he said. "We're kind of taking over the country."

Reach the reporter at elias.arnold@scottsdalerepublic.com or (602) 444-2219.

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Trigger happy pigs even murder each other!!!!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/10/AR2005121000309.html

Suit Over R.I. Police Shooting Rejected

By RAY HENRY

The Associated Press

Saturday, December 10, 2005; 3:50 AM

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- A police department's training was not to blame for the death of an off-duty black officer, who was fatally shot by two white colleagues, a federal jury ruled.

Sgt. Cornel Young Jr., 29, was in plain clothes in 2000 when he was killed outside a diner as ran to respond to a fight.

Leisa Young, mother of Sgt. Cornel Young Jr., listens as her lawyer, Barry Scheck, right, speaks to the media outside federal court in Providence, R.I. Friday, Dec. 9, 2005. A federal jury decided that the Providence Police Department did not violate the civil rights of her son, a black police officer accidentally shot to death by two white colleagues who mistook him for a suspect. Sgt. Cornel Young Jr., 29, was off duty and in plain clothes on Jan. 28, 2000, when he was killed outside a diner as he ran to respond to a fight. The shooting sparked charges of racism in the city's police department. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola) (Elise Amendola - AP)

The shooting sparked charges of racism on the police force and led the department to drop a requirement that officers carry their guns while off duty.

Young's mother, Leisa Young, claimed in a $20 million lawsuit that the department had not properly trained one of the officers to recognize off-duty or undercover officers. That officer, Michael Solitro, had been on the force for eight days.

While jurors decided the department's training was not to blame for Young's death, they agreed the training could be improved, juror Thomas Flinn said after the ruling Friday.

Solitro and his partner, Carlos Saraiva, were previously cleared of any criminal wrongdoing by a state grand jury.

Leisa Young left the courtroom without comment after the verdict, then cried quietly on the courthouse steps before getting into a car and leaving with her lawyers.

Her attorney, Barry Scheck, called the ruling disappointing and said he would appeal, adding, "The struggle continues."

City Solicitor Joseph Fernandez called Young's death a "painful loss for the city."

"We're neither unhappy or happy," he said. "The main thing today is to take time to remember the life of Cornel Young Jr., his service to his city, his service to his family and for his community."

Young's father, police Maj. Cornel Young, who did not join his ex-wife's lawsuit but said he supported it, was the highest-ranking black officer in Providence when his son was killed. He testified that the risk of misidentification was particularly great for minority officers.

Young Jr. was eating inside the restaurant when a fight broke out between two women and spilled outside. A friend of one of the women pulled a gun and got into a car, and Young drew his gun and ran outside. Solitro and his partner arrived and opened fire, thinking Young was a suspect.

Though both officers shot Young, the trial focused exclusively on whether the police department improperly trained Solitro, thereby violating Young's civil rights.

At the time of the shooting, Providence police were required to carry their guns off duty and intervene when they saw an immediate threat to life or property. Carrying a gun is now optional for off-duty officers, and they are encouraged instead to try to be good witnesses if they see a crime.

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The school principle resigns over this issue but i bet Phoenix cop William Buividas will never be punished or fired for using excessive force in the incident!

http://www.azcentral.com/families/education/articles/1213washington13.html

Shackling of girl prompts resignation

Principal made troubled girl take medicine

Lindsey Collom

The Arizona Republic

Dec. 13, 2005 12:00 AM

An elementary school principal has resigned amid allegations she and a school psychologist restrained a troubled 8-year-old and forced the child to take prescribed medication in front of her classmates.

Washington Elementary School District board members on Monday voted unanimously to accept Cherri Rifenburg's resignation. The board also met in executive session with legal counsel to discuss the fate of school psychologist Burke Bretzing, but no action was taken.

Rifenburg's lawyer, Kay Hunnicutt, said her client chose to resign to "provide stability" for faculty and staff at Lakeview Elementary School, which has been under scrutiny since the incident.

Authorities said it began Nov. 15 when a woman called 911 to say she could not control her daughter. Phoenix police Officer William Buividas, 22, responded to the woman's home and handcuffed the girl with her mother's permission.

Buividas then escorted the woman as she drove her child to school. There, Rifenburg and Bretzing allegedly assisted the officer in restraining the girl as her third-grade classmates watched. School administrators have acknowledged that the principal and psychologist forced the child to take prescribed medication.

Phoenix police are investigating whether Buividas used excessive force. He remains on patrol.

Rifenburg and Bretzing were placed on paid administrative leave; neither has been back to work since.

Roni Snell, whose daughter is a former Lakeview student, said the incident "disgusts the heck out of me."

"It breaks my heart that a kid can get treated like that. There's got to be someone to speak for that 8-year-old girl," Snell said. " . . . I've got a child in junior high. Is this going to happen while she's in school?"

District spokeswoman Karyn Morse said the girl has not returned to class, but officials hope to place her in another school "that is successful for her."

In a letter to the district's governing board president, Rifenburg said she would complete doctoral studies and plans to teach at the collegiate level. She will remain an employee until April 15 and serve in a capacity as determined by the superintendent. She will receive her full salary and benefits.

Hunnicutt said her client is saddened by the situation and plans to issue a statement today.

"She's hurt," Hunnicutt said. "She really cares about kids."

Reach the reporter at lindsey .collom@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8557.

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