Student who was arrested for doodling on school desk sues city for excessive force

The 12-year-old schoolgirl handcuffed and arrested in February for doodling on her desk plans to sue the city.
A lawyer for Alexa Gonzalez and her mother officially notified the city that they'll seek $1 million in damages for the alarming incident inside Junior High School 190 in Queens.
The legal papers describe Alexa's ordeal as an excessive use of force and a violation of her rights. "We want to stop this from happening to other young children in the future," said the family's lawyer, Joseph Rosenthal.
Using an erasable lime-green marker, Alexa scribbled the message "I love my friends Abby and Faith," Alexa's mom, Moraima Camacho, told the Daily News in February. "The whole situation has been a nightmare."
The notice filed against the city education department and the NYPD reveals Alexa was subjected to harsh treatment even before her arrest.
She was "physically dragged by a teacher and an assistant principal" to the dean's office, the legal papers claim.
School safety officers searched her by placing "their hands inside the rear and front pockets of her jeans."

Despite the fact that officers "knew, or should have known that it was a soluable, erasable marker," police officers were summoned to arrest her, the papers note.
Alexa was perp-walked out of the school in front of her classmates with her hands locked in metal handcuffs behind her back.
Alexa's mother pleaded with the officers to accompany her daughter to the police precinct, but Camacho was told to go home and wait for a call.
Officers placed Alexa in "an enclosed room" at the precinct and handcuffed her to a pole for more than two hours, the papers note.
City lawyers declined to comment, but city officials acknowledged in February the arrest was a mistake.
Alexa is not the first kid to seek justice for excessive force. The family of Chelsea Fraser, then 13, sued the city too after she was arrested for writing "okay" on her desk at Brooklyn's Intermediate School 201.
After then-5-year-old Dennis Rivera was handcuffed for throwing a fit in kindergarten, his family sued for $15 million in damages.
Their lawsuit is ongoing, as is a class-action lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union in January on behalf of city middle- and high-school students.

David Mikael Taclino
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Guardians of the free Republics, which mailed ominous letters to governors, compare selves to Gandhi

Leave office now – peacefully.
An anti-government group that recently sent letters to all 50 governors demanding they leave office within three days claims that their ideology is non-violent and inspired by the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi.
The Guardians of the free Republics stated in a letter that they are a peaceful organization and stress faith over armed conflict, the Christian Science Monitor reported.
"We would simply like to urge patriots everywhere to champion their faith instead of force, and allow The Restore America Plan an uneventful 30 to 60 days for visible implementation which will ultimately end the bogus prosecutions and terrorist activities once and for all," wrote Sam Kennedy, a member of the organization.
The letters sent out this week by Guardians of the free Republics asked the governors to leave office within three days or they would be removed. There were no details regarding how exactly that would be achieved.
The FBI warned that the letters could incite violence and some states beefed up security.
The letters arrived a few days after members of a Christian militia were arrested in several Midwestern states and charged with plotting violent acts against local police.
The Guardians are believed to be part of a "sovereign citizen" movement that is anti-capitalist, against taxation and demanding the abolishment of the Federal Reserve Bank.
Although most anti-government movements lately have been from militant organizations, The Guardians are believed to be a peaceful organization spawned from the anti-IRS Posse Comitatus movement of the 1980s.
The group's ultimate goal is to “restore America” to a government which is unable to tax its citizens.

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Staten Island woman with heart defect dies trapped in elevator inches from floor when power failed

A Staten Island woman with a congenital heart defect died after she was trapped in an elevator  during a power failure in her apartment building Friday.

Trapped in the darkness and just inches from her floor, Danielle Goldberg panicked - and suffered a fatal heart attack, her devastated family said.
"She lived her life to the fullest until the elevator took her away from us," said her father Arthur Goldberg, 57.
"She was just two seconds away (from home)," he said. "She was in the pitch dark and she probably was scared out of her mind with nobody around to help her."
Danielle Goldberg was born with pulmonary stenosis, which impacts blood flow within the heart, and returned from a doctor's appointment Friday morning to her home in the Tysens Park Apartments, her family said.
She was riding the elevator to the apartment she shares with her parents and brother when the power in her building went out at 11:35 a.m., officials confirmed.
As the small elevator plunged into darkness, a terrified Danielle Goldberg called her mother, who tried to calm the scared woman before calling 911.
Steven Goldberg, Danielle's brother, then ran from the family apartment to the sealed elevator and desperately dialed her sister trapped inside.
"She said 'Steven, I'm scared," Steven Goldberg remembered his sister saying before the cell connection was lost. "It was terrifying."
Steven Goldberg, 29, dashed down five flights of stairs to a neighboring building in the complex to flag down a maintenance worker to help.
The men ran back upstairs and used a crowbar to pry open the elevator doors - only to find a Danielle Goldberg sprawled lifelessly inside.
"I went in there, and I was trying to give her CPR," said neighbor Patricia Sanchez, 49. "I checked for a pulse and there wasn't one."
"I cried and I cried," said Sanchez.
Paramedics arrived at 12:13 p.m., five minutes after receiving the 911 call, and began treating her. They rushed her down the stairs and raced her to Staten Island University Hospital, but she could not be revived.
"Everybody in my family is very saddened by this ordeal," said Steven Goldberg. "Hopefully nothing like this will happen again."
ConEd officials confirmed that 1,800 customers in the New Dorp section of Staten Island lost their power at 11:35 a.m. Friday when a cable went down. For most people, including those in the Tysens Park Apartments, power was restored at 1 p.m.
The failure is under investigation, ConEd said. Management at the private apartment complex could not immediately be reached.

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Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say

With job openings scarce for young people, the number of unpaid internships has climbed in recent years, leading federal and state regulators to worry that more employers are illegally using such internships for free labor.
Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. Last year, M. Patricia Smith, then New York’s labor commissioner, ordered investigations into several firms’ internships. Now, as the federal Labor Department’s top law enforcement official, she and the wage and hour division are stepping up enforcement nationwide.
Many regulators say that violations are widespread, but that it is unusually hard to mount a major enforcement effort because interns are often afraid to file complaints. Many fear they will become known as troublemakers in their chosen field, endangering their chances with a potential future employer.
The Labor Department says it is cracking down on firms that fail to pay interns properly and expanding efforts to educate companies, colleges and students on the law regarding internships.
“If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,” said Nancy J. Leppink, the acting director of the department’s wage and hour division.
Ms. Leppink said many employers failed to pay even though their internships did not comply with the six federal legal criteria that must be satisfied for internships to be unpaid. Among those criteria are that the internship should be similar to the training given in a vocational school or academic institution, that the intern does not displace regular paid workers and that the employer “derives no immediate advantage” from the intern’s activities — in other words, it’s largely a benevolent contribution to the intern.
No one keeps official count of how many paid and unpaid internships there are, but Lance Choy, director of the Career Development Center at Stanford University, sees definitive evidence that the number of unpaid internships is mushrooming — fueled by employers’ desire to hold down costs and students’ eagerness to gain experience for their résumés. Employers posted 643 unpaid internships on Stanford’s job board this academic year, more than triple the 174 posted two years ago.
In 2008, the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 83 percent of graduating students had held internships, up from 9 percent in 1992. This means hundreds of thousands of students hold internships each year; some experts estimate that one-fourth to one-half are unpaid.
In California, officials have issued guidance letters advising employers whether they are breaking the law, while Oregon regulators have unearthed numerous abuses.
“We’ve had cases where unpaid interns really were displacing workers and where they weren’t being supervised in an educational capacity,” said Bob Estabrook, spokesman for Oregon’s labor department. His department recently handled complaints involving two individuals at a solar panel company who received $3,350 in back pay after claiming that they were wrongly treated as unpaid interns.
Many students said they had held internships that involved noneducational menial work. To be sure, many internships involve some unskilled work, but when the jobs are mostly drudgery, regulators say, it is clearly illegal not to pay interns.
One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots.
At Little Airplane, a Manhattan children’s film company, an N.Y.U. student who hoped to work in animation during her unpaid internship said she was instead assigned to the facilities department and ordered to wipe the door handles each day to minimize the spread of swine flu.
Tone Thyne, a senior producer at Little Airplane, said its internships were usually highly educational and often led to good jobs.
Concerned about the effect on their future job prospects, some unpaid interns declined to give their names or to name their employers when they described their experiences in interviews.
While many colleges are accepting more moderate- and low-income students to increase economic mobility, many students and administrators complain that the growth in unpaid internships undercuts that effort by favoring well-to-do and well-connected students, speeding their climb up the career ladder.


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Plane Crash in NJ 1 killed, 1 injured

One man was killed and another seriously injured when a small plane crashed Saturday in northern New Jersey.

The two were the only people aboard the Cessna 172, a four-seat, fixed-wing propeller plane, said Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Holly Baker.

According to West Milford police, the single-engine plane plane went down around 12:04 p.m. It ended up near a residential, wooded area in the Passaic County community of West Milford. One man was pronounced dead there a short time later, while the other was flown via helicopter to a nearby trauma center.

Their names were not disclosed, pending notification of relatives.

It was not clear what caused the crash, which occurred near the Greenwood Lake Airport in West Milford. Authorities did not immediately know if the plane had taken off from the airport or was trying to land at the site.

The National Transportation Safety Board will investigate.

It was unknown if the plane was taking off or landing at Greenwood Lake Airport, or if the plane was even at the airport at any point Saturday.

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Need a Cab? New Analysis Shows Where to Find One

 It is a question that taxi-seekers in New York often ponder: Is there some kind of secret formula for where to find a cab in this town?
Turns out, there is.
The most popular corners to catch a yellow cab in Manhattan can now be pinpointed, at any hour of any day of the week, thanks to a record of 90 million actual taxi trips that have been silently tracked by the city.
On a Saturday at 11 p.m., it is easier to hail a cab on the nightclub-and-bar-filled Lower East Side than at Grand Central Terminal. Columbus Circle gets more passenger pickups than the Port Authority bus station. And make sure you are in the right neighborhood: taxi rides are 25 times as likely to start in the West Village as in Washington Heights.
The Taxi and Limousine Commission hopes the information, collected by GPS, can be used to create helpful tie-ins for customers, like a new smartphone program that lets mobile users locate the ideal nearby corner to hail a cab.
But the data also present a grand urban portrait, the first detailed record of a fast-moving, yellow-hued transit network that offers a curbside view of how New Yorkers move around and where they do it.
Take the morning rush. Topping the list for 9 a.m. Monday cab hails are, not surprisingly, Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central, the great commuter gateways to the city’s major business district.
But not far behind are two Manhattan intersections seemingly far from the hubbub: York Avenue at 72nd Street, and Tenth Avenue at 43rd.
Each can get as many morning taxi hails as a spot on Vanderbilt Avenue, directly adjacent to Grand Central.
The numbers, tabulated from a six-month period, tell a tale of a changing city.
A thicket of high-rise condominiums has grown up along 10th and 11th Avenues in Midtown, creating a pocket of marooned commuters who may hop a cab rather than trek to the train.
And residents of Yorkville, long starved for subway access, commonly commute by taxi to Midtown or the financial district.
Late-night and weekend patterns are distinctly different. At 3 a.m. on a Sunday, passengers stumble into more cabs at 10th Avenue and 27th Street in Chelsea than anywhere else in the city. About as many taxi trips begin there at that hour on average as at 9 a.m. on a weekday at the Seventh Avenue entrance to Penn Station.
Taxi trips may also offer a more objective guide to night-life trends than Zagat: late-night pickups in the meatpacking district dominate other popular areas like Sheridan Square and St. Marks Place. The East Village barely cracks the top 10 on early Sunday mornings, but if you need a cab, try Third Avenue and 11th Street.
Using the city’s GPS data, Sense Networks, a SoHo software analytics firm, examined the pickup point of every New York City cab ride taken in the first six months of 2009. The result was a free mobile application called CabSense, which was released this week for iPhones and Android phones.
The program lets would-be taxi riders see a map of nearby street corners, ranked by the number of taxi hails they attract at that hour, on that day of the week. The company says it developed an algorithm to take into account parades, street construction and other factors that could skew the numbers.
“You always argue with your friends about it — I think you should stand on Sixth, I think you should stand on Seventh,” said Blake Shaw, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University who oversaw the data analysis for CabSense. “To be able to say you’re 50 percent more likely to get a cab on Seventh, that’s unique.”
Over all, the No. 1 place to get a cab in the five boroughs, according to statistics compiled by Sense Networks for The New York Times, is Penn Station, one of the busiest train stations in the world. (The airports were not included in the data.)
Columbus Circle, with its popular shopping mall, its jumbo Whole Foods store and its entrance to Central Park, ranks second. Next are the Port Authority and Grand Central.
Less obvious spots also show up in the top 10, including Lexington Avenue at 86th Street (near an express subway stop) and Avenue of the Americas at 23rd (at the PATH train), along with the southeast corner of Central Park by the Apple Store and F. A. O. Schwarz.
Based on the statistics, the Upper East Side has a more cab-dependent culture than its neighbors across Central Park: more than two million trips started on the Upper East Side last May, nearly twice as many as on the Upper West Side.
On Tuesdays at 5 p.m., Lexington Avenue at 60th Street is the most common corner for cab hails after Penn Station.
But that poses a puzzle: Why is that corner far more popular than the corner just one block north, at 61st Street, which at that hour gets about one-third as many hails?
“It’s called Bloomingdale’s,” said Samuel I. Schwartz, a traffic consultant. “Bloomingdale’s probably leads the pack of large-department-store customers who use taxis.”
And what about one block south, which also has a Bloomingdale’s exit but has fewer cab pickups? Mr. Schwartz, a former cabbie himself, pointed out that 59th Street, at that hour, “is a bear,” choked by motorists bound for the Queensborough Bridge.
“This is like the rats in the maze — they learn quickly how to get the food,” Mr. Schwartz said.
A neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown confirms what most New Yorkers already know: it is easier to get a cab below 96th Street in Manhattan, and much harder anywhere else.
Still, the numbers can be eye-opening.
Last May, in the entire month, about 554,000 yellow taxis picked up passengers in the East Village; in Inwood at the northern end of Manhattan, pickups numbered only 860, according to the data compiled by Sense Networks.
Taxis on the Upper West Side picked up nearly 90 times as many rides as cabs farther uptown in Washington Heights, which picked up about 14,000 rides during that month. “Oh wow,” Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat, who represents Washington Heights, said when informed of those numbers. “You caught me by surprise. That’s very, very low. I thought it was higher than that.”
Muhammad Ayub, a cabbie for two years, said Friday that he preferred Penn Station and the Port Authority in the morning rush. Asked if he ever picks up rides in Washington Heights, Mr. Ayub grinned. “Where is that?” he asked with a smile.
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Rabbits' Disappearance From Central Park A Mystery

Though abandoned pet rabbits perennially turn up after each Easter in what's affectionately called New York's backyard, a wild cottontail hasn't been spotted in the park for about four years.

"I've been here for 17 years, and there were not many when I got here," Regina Alvarez, director of horticulture for the Central Park Conservancy, a nonprofit that manages the huge Manhattan park for the city, said in an e-mail. "But I would see them once in a while."

Only time will tell if they are gone for good, said Sarah Aucoin, director of Urban Park Rangers for the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.

Cottontails seek habitats with lots of food sources and thick brush for protection, so it's possible there are still some hiding out. Rabbits have lived on the land since before the park was established 161 years ago.

Because bunnies "mate like rabbits," if there are still a few, "we'll see an increase, definitely," Aucoin said.

Jeffrey Croft, of the watchdog group NYC Park Advocates, said at least two other New York City parks have seen rabbits disappear in recent years.

The Eastern Cottontail used to be plentiful on Randall's Island, between the Harlem and East rivers, but Croft said the population there vanished as its parkland was rehabilitated and redeveloped, and some natural fields were replaced with artificial turf.

Rabbits have also disappeared from Calvert Vaux Park in Brooklyn near Coney Island, he said.

Bunnies are vulnerable to a number of hazards, including weather, predators and automobiles — all features of urban parks, said state wildlife biologist Alan Hicks.

A recent storm took out large trees throughout Central Park, and several city streets cut through it. Hawks and falcons are a common sight there, and a random coyote is not out of the question. One was spotted in the park in 2006.

But Aucoin said she didn't think an increase in predators was to blame, because they generally don't decimate their own food source, she said.

"That's not smart, evolutionarily speaking," she said. "That predator population would die off if they didn't have anything to eat."

So since no one has the answer, officials are doing what they can to encourage repopulation. The city has been working to remove invasive plants and planting others to make the park more livable for small animals, including rabbits, Aucoin said.

"When people see a wild animal, even if it's just a bunny, it helps people connect to the environment in a more tangible way," she said. "That's a really important relationship we're trying to encourage here in the city."

But if you're dying to see a bunny in the park, visit on Monday.

Some people give them to their children as pets, discover they require feeding and cleaning, and set them free in the park, Aucoin said. When that happens, park rangers rescue the domesticated bunnies and take them to a shelter.

"It's a horrific problem," said Mary Cotter, who teaches veterinary technology at LaGuardia Community College in Queens and has founded a rabbit rescue group in the city.

Her group put up posters around the city reading, "Setting Your Pet Rabbit Loose Doesn't Make Her 'Free.' It Makes Her 'Food.'"

"Domestic rabbits do not survive in the park," she said. "The ones that are caught and are taken to a shelter are the lucky ones."

Central Park has been a national landmark since 1963.

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MTA offers $20,000 to workers who leave voluntarily, retirees take advantage

Some MTA workers are cashing in on the authority's money problems.
Several administrative workers slammed the brakes on their retirements after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced it would give up to $20,000 to workers who voluntarily leave, the MTA confirmed.
The nearly retired workers remained eligible for the windfalls because their retirement papers weren't fully processed, the authority says.
MTA spokesman Jeremy Soffin said he believed only a "small number" of employees rescinded retirement papers to get the big payday, but he didn't have an exact count.
The MTA plans on slashing administrative payroll by 15% and anticipates 600 to 700 positions will be vacated.
The authority is offering one week of base pay for every year on the job. Workers who wouldn't get the maximum under the formula would still get $20,000 if they have at least 10 years on the job.
"Anyone who doesn't take it has to have their head examined," the union official said.

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Vatican waited years to defrock Arizona priest

The abuse cases of two priests in Arizona have cast further doubt on the Catholic church's insistence that Pope Benedict XVI played no role in shielding pedophiles before he became pope.
Documents reviewed by The Associated Press show that as a Vatican cardinal, the future pope took over the abuse case of the Rev. Michael Teta of Tucson, Ariz., then let it languish at the Vatican for years despite repeated pleas from the bishop for the man to be removed from the priesthood.
In another Tucson case, that of Msgr. Robert Trupia, the bishop wrote to then-Cardinal Ratzinger, who would become pope in 2005. Bishop Manuel Moreno called Trupia "a major risk factor to the children, adolescents and adults that he many have contact with." There is no indication in the case files that Ratzinger responded.
The details of the two cases come as other allegations emerge that Benedict — as a Vatican cardinal — was part of a culture of cover-up and confidentiality.
"There's no doubt that Ratzinger delayed the defrocking process of dangerous priests who were deemed 'satanic' by their own bishop," Lynne Cadigan, an attorney who represented two of Teta's victims, said Friday.
The Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, called the accusations "absolutely groundless" and said the facts were being misrepresented.
He said the delay in defrocking Teta was caused by a hold on appeals while the Vatican changed regulations over its handling of sex abuse cases. In the meantime, he said, cautionary measures were in place; Teta had been suspended since 1990.
"The documents show clearly and positively that those in charge at the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith ... have repeatedly intervened actively over the course of the 90s so that the canonic trial under way in the Tucson diocese could dutifully reach its conclusion," Lombardi said in a statement.
In the 1990s, a church tribunal found that Teta had molested children as far back as the 1970s, and the panel determined "there is almost a satanic quality in his mode of acting toward young men and boys."
The tribunal referred Teta's case, which included allegations that he abused boys in a confessional, to Ratzinger. The church considers cases of abuse in confessionals more serious than other molestations because they also defile the sacrament of penance.
It took 12 years from the time Ratzinger assumed control of the case in a signed letter until Teta was formally removed from ministry, a step only the Vatican can take.
Teta was accused of engaging in abuse not long after his arrival to the Diocese of Tucson in 1978. Among the eventual allegations: that he molested two boys, ages 7 and 9, in the confessional as they prepared for their First Communion.
Teta was removed from ministry by the bishop, but because the church's most severe punishment — laicization — can only be handed down from Rome, he remained on the church payroll and was working with young people outside the church.
In a signed letter dated June 8, 1992, Ratzinger advised Moreno he was taking control of the case, according to a copy provided to the AP from Cadigan, the victims' attorney. Five years later, no action had been taken.
"This case has already gone on for seven years," Moreno wrote Ratzinger on April 28, 1997, adding, "I make this plea to you to assist me in every way you can to expedite this case."
It would be another seven years before Teta was laicized.
Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said Teta was ordered defrocked in 1997. But Teta appealed, and the appeal remained on hold until the new regulations took effect in 2001.
"Starting in 2001, all the appeals that were pending were promptly taken up, and Teta's case was one of the first to be discussed," Lombardi said.
But this still took time, he said, because the documentation that had been presented was "especially voluminous." The sentence was upheld and in 2004 Teta was laicized.
The case of Trupia shows the fragmented nature of how Rome handled such allegations before 2001, when Ratzinger dictated that all abuse cases must go through his Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.
Before then, files were sent to varied Vatican departments, as they were in the case of Trupia. Moreno suspended Trupia in 1992, but again faced delays from the Vatican in having him formally removed from the church.
Documents show at least two Vatican offices — the Congregation for the Clergy and the Apostolic Signatura, the highest judicial authority of the Catholic Church — were involved in the case at least as early as 1995.
Moreno pleaded with the Congregation for the Clergy to do something, writing, "We have proofs of civil crimes against people who were under his priestly care" and warning Trupia could "be the source of greater scandal in the future."
Ultimately, the case landed in Ratzinger's office.
On Feb. 10, 2003, a day after the Arizona Daily Star reported that Trupia was living in a condo near Baltimore, driving a leather-seated Mercedes-Benz with a rosary hanging from the rearview mirror, Moreno wrote to Ratzinger again.
Sick with prostate cancer and the beginning stages of Parkinson's disease, Moreno was approved for early retirement by Pope John Paul II.
Before he was replaced, the bishop wrote Ratzinger yet again. Moreno's replacement, Bishop Gerald Kicanas, sent similar requests to Ratzinger and his subordinates.
"My experience — and as I've looked at the records in our serious cases — the Vatican actually was prodding, through the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and Cardinal Ratzinger, to try to get this case going," Kicanas said.
Finally, in August 2004, Trupia was laicized.
"The tragedy is that the bishops have only two choices: Follow the Vatican's code of secrecy and delay, or leave the church," Cadigan, the victims' lawyer, said Friday. "It's unfortunate that their faith demands that they sacrifice children to follow the Vatican's directions."
Trupia's former attorney, Stephen A. Shechtel of Rockville, Md., said Friday that he never dealt with the church on his client's behalf and that Trupia was aware he would be defrocked and didn't fight it.
Bishop Gerald Kicanas, Moreno's replacement, defended the Vatican's handling of the Arizona cases, citing the prolonged process of internal church trials that he acknowledged could be "frustratingly slow because of the seriousness of the concerns."
Kicanas said suggestions that Ratzinger resisted addressing the issues of sexual abuse in the church were "grossly unfair."
"Cardinal Ratzinger, as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was always receptive, ready to listen, to hear people's concerns," Kicanas said. "Pope Benedict is the same man."

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Residents of NJ city say cops worse than criminals

Josephine Skinner's grandson Dequan was 11 or 12 years old a few summers ago when she says he had a run-in with a Camden police officer who neighbors claim terrorized them for years.
As the youth crossed the street to buy a soda at a store, she said Officer Jason Stetser — known on the streets as "Fat Face" — sprang from his cruiser.
"He grabbed my grandson and said he had $100 of stuff on him," Skinner said. "They tried to lock him up."
For years, residents say some police officers have bullied them in this impoverished city, making cases by planting drugs on suspects, falsifying police reports, and conducting searches without warrants. Now four officers, including Stetser, are being investigated by a federal grand jury.
And prosecutors say they've had to drop charges or vacate convictions in 185 criminal cases because of possibly corrupt police work — meaning scores of criminals could end up returning to drug-infested streets.
Another of Skinner's grandchildren, 15-year-old Artice Skinner, said he witnessed the episode between Stetser and Dequan and saw Stetser hold out his hand, overflowing with crack cocaine that the police officer said came from Dequan's pocket.
Skinner said Dequan was released after an aunt explained that he wasn't the neighborhood child police were looking for.
"The cops were more of a problem than the crime was," said Josephine Skinner.
Their Waterfront South neighborhood has breathed a little easier since November, when Stetser and at least three other officers were taken off the streets as authorities began their investigation.
Stetser's lawyer, Richard Madden, declined to comment.
Among those suspended was 29-year-old patrolman Kevin Parry. On March 19, he admitted in court that he stole drugs from some suspects, planted them on others, bribed prostitutes with drugs for information, conducted searches without warrants, lied on police reports and in testimony, and roughed up suspects. He acknowledged 50-70 acts of police misconduct from May 2007 to October 2009.
Residents say it was not uncommon for some officers to greet locals by punching them, using force to intimidate. The threat of criminal charges was the main police currency.
In Waterfront South, lovingly tended row homes sit uneasily alongside crumbling empty ones and monstrous warehouses loom beyond back yards. The stench from a nearby sewage plant hangs in the air. Daffodils have begun to bloom in a trash-strewn vacant lot.
A church group has painted poetry on sheets of plywood nailed over windows of vacant buildings — like Pablo Neruda's lines, "I want to do with you what the spring does with cherry trees."
The same day Parry pleaded guilty last month, authorities spoke publicly about the investigation for the first time. Camden County Prosecutor Warren Faulk said several officers were being investigated by the federal grand jury. Only Parry has been criminally charged.
Faulk also revealed that 185 cases had been compromised because of possibly corrupt police work. It's not that all the suspects weren't guilty, he said, but that without using the reports of the officers, there was no more credible evidence.
Lawyers have now begun filing claims notifying the city of their intention to sue based on the actions of Parry and the other officers.
The investigation has cast doubt — at least in Josephine Skinner's neighborhood — over even more drug cases.
Bodega owner Manuel Torres says that he thinks his sons, Jonathan and Sterling, were set up by police for their drug arrests a few years ago. Neither has had his conviction vacated.
The scandal is the latest blow to crimefighting in a city that can ill afford it.
In report after report, Camden ranks as one of the nation's most dangerous cities. Known as the drug marketplace for locals and suburbanites, the city has a constant presence of U.S. Marshals and state police, along with city police.
But, there have been some promising signs. The murder rate began falling in the summer of 2008 when police reworked their schedules and strategies. They started using more sophisticated data to figure out when and where crime was highest. They used that information to make sure they had more officers on the streets at those times.
Residents of Waterfront South said their problems with the police predated those changes.
Among those whose drug convictions were vacated in December was Josephine Skinner's 46-year-old son, Mark. He said he had been arrested in November 2005, just weeks after he was released from jail on a previous drug-dealing conviction.
Mark Skinner said that 2005 arrest came as he sat on the stoop in front of his mother's home, and that police — including Stetser — slammed him against the wall. Police failed to find drugs on him or in the house, then showed up with a trash bag full of small orange bags of crack worth about $4,000.
He said he pleaded guilty to get a three-year sentence, rather than risk up to 20 years with no chance of parole for a decade if he'd been found guilty at trial.
"I did three years for nothing," he said as he stood on the corner of Broadway and Viola Streets, near a new maritime museum — and a well-known drug spot.
The neighborhood has plenty of stories about problems caused by the police in recent years.
Jamar Dorsey, then a 20-year-old student at Camden County College, said Stetser planted marijuana on him in 2007 and threatened him with drug charges if he didn't lead Stetser to more drugs or weapons.
When Dorsey said he didn't know where drugs could be found, he was charged.
He pleaded guilty to drug possession, taking three years of probation instead of risking a stiffer penalty at trial — even though it meant losing his college financial aid and dropping out of college.
"Who were they going to believe?" Dorsey said. "Me or him?"
Another neighbor, Michelle Kellum, said her disabled son, Gregory, was 15 when he went to a corner store with money from his disability check. Stetser threw him in the back of a police car and took the money, she said, a little more than $100.
Kellum said the officer let her son go after she showed a receipt to prove where the money came from.
"Fat Face had everybody terrified," she said. "You wouldn't see anybody walking out here" when he was around.
And in the end, she said, the questionable police work failed its main objective — taking drugs off the streets.

David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer

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SKorea stops underwater search for missing sailors

South Korea's military ended its underwater search for dozens of sailors missing from a navy ship that sank following a mysterious blast eight days ago, an official said Saturday.
Families of the sailors asked the military to suspend the operation for fear of additional casualties among divers after one died and as chances of finding survivors grew increasingly unlikely after the discovery of the body of one of the sailors.
The decision came hours after divers discovered the body of a senior chief petty officer in the ship's rear area, the first of the 46 missing sailors to be found.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff said it stopped the underwater search out of respect for the families' request and will work to recover the 1,200-ton Cheonan.
Officials have said the salvage effort could last a month.
The vessel sank following an explosion March 26 during a routine patrol. Fifty-eight crew members, including the captain, were rescued soon after.
The ship broke into two pieces after the explosion. No cause has been determined for the blast and, despite some speculation, there has been no confirmation of North Korean involvement in the sinking, which occurred near the countries' disputed sea border in the Yellow Sea off the west coast of the Korean peninsula.
Defense Minister Kim Tae-young has said that a floating mine dispatched from North Korea was one possible explanation for the blast. A mine left over from the 1950-53 Korean War may also have struck the ship, he said.
Other officials say the cause of the explosion can only be determined after the sunken ship is recovered.
The sinking was one of South Korea's worst naval disasters. In 1974, a ship sank off the southeast coast in stormy weather, killing 159 sailors and coast guard personnel. In 1967, 39 sailors were killed by North Korean artillery.
Since the ordeal began, the families of the missing Cheonan sailors have expressed anger at the navy over what they saw as the slow pace of the rescue operation.
Separately, South Korea's coast guard found the bodies of two of nine fishermen whose boat disappeared as it sailed toward fishing grounds after helping to search for debris and possible survivors from the Cheonan.
The bodies of one South Korean and one Indonesian fishermen were discovered Saturday after contact was lost with the boat late Friday, said coast guard official Lee Kyo-min. The search was continuing for another Indonesian and six other South Korean crew members of the fishing boat.
Also, a funeral ceremony was held Saturday for a military diver who died during an attempt earlier in the week to reach the missing Cheonan sailors possibly trapped in the ship.

David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer

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Afghan upper house backs Karzai election decree

The upper house of Afghanistan's parliament backed a decree by President Hamid Karzai on Saturday that limits foreigners' role in elections, giving him a victory in a dispute that has led to a quarrel with the White House.
A complicated procedural row over how to run a September parliamentary election has emerged as a major bone of contention in the country, prompting an anti-Western tirade by Karzai on Thursday that drew a sharp rebuke from Washington.
Karzai issued his decree in February stripping the United Nations of the authority to appoint the majority of members of an election fraud watchdog, claiming that power for himself.
The elected lower house of parliament voted unanimously on Wednesday to overrule Karzai's decree. But the upper house's leadership excluded the lower house's proposal from its own agenda on Saturday, meaning the veto will not come up for a vote there, and apparently ensuring that Karzai's decree still stands.
Fazl Hadi Muslimyar, first deputy head of the upper house, told Reuters the body's leaders had concluded that parliament lacked the power to rule on electoral laws within a year of an election, and therefore could not place the veto on the agenda.
Ahmed Behzad, a member of the lower house and a critic of Karzai, accused the president of pressuring the upper house to back his decree. Karzai appoints a third of upper house members.
"I think there was pressure from the palace, from Mr Karzai, on the senate on this," Behzad told Reuters.
QUARREL WITH WHITE HOUSE
The dispute over foreigners' role in elections led this week to a war of words between Karzai and Washington, exposing the troubled relationship between the veteran Afghan leader and the Western countries with 120,000 troops protecting him.
The morning after the lower house rejected his decree this week, Karzai delivered a strongly-worded speech accusing Western officials of bribing and threatening election staff, perpetrating vote fraud and trying to weaken him and parliament.
In an unprecedented display of indignation, the U.S. State Department called Karzai's accusations "preposterous" and the White House demanded an explanation. Karzai phoned Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday to defuse the dispute.
Before Karzai's decree, the United Nations had appointed foreigners to serve as the three-member majority of the five-seat election fraud watchdog.
The body became the center of attention during last year's disputed presidential election, when its foreign members overturned Karzai's victory in the first round, throwing out a third of his votes because of fraud.
Karzai was declared the victor anyway in November when his opponent backed out of a second-round run-off, but the three-month stand-off battered his reputation in the West.
After claiming the power to appoint the entire five-member watchdog in February's decree, Karzai partially relented last month, offering to let the United Nations appoint two members -- a minority -- rather than the three-member majority as before. Diplomats say they are not sure if that compromise now stands.
Concern remains that procedural wrangling could delay September's vote. The United Nations mission in Kabul said it was important to settle the rules soon.
"We must avoid a vacuum where Afghan election management authorities do not have clarity as to the law they are supposed to implement," said Dan McNorton, spokesman for the United Nations mission in Kabul.

David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer

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Suicide Bomber Hometown, rattled

When a 16-year-old girl married a militant Islamist separatist entangled in a long-running and bloody struggle against Russian government forces, her relatives in this dusty North Caucasus village say they disowned her immediately.
They knew they could face torture from Russian security forces or even death for associating with the militants, and they knew their Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova, still just a schoolgirl, could easily be killed.
But they never expected her to be dispatched to Moscow as a suicide bomber to blow herself up on a subway train.
Abdurakhmanova, whose husband was killed by government forces in December, and another young widow have been accused of carrying out Monday's twin suicide bombings, which killed 40 people and injured 90. They were the first suicide attacks in the capital since 2004.
Both women were from the North Caucasus, a patchwork of predominantly Muslim provinces and home to a fierce Islamic insurgency that has been fueled by frequent killings, kidnappings and torture of residents by government forces.
Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov claimed responsibility for the subway attacks, saying they were retaliation for the deaths of four garlic-picking villagers who were slain on Feb. 11.
In Kostek, a poor rural village in the province of Dagestan where Abdurakhmanova grew up, a piercing silence hangs in the air. Men on the main square stare transfixed at newcomers, then turn away whispering. The village feels dangerous even for those who live in the provincial capital, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) away.
Abdurakhmanova's suicide attack has brought unwanted attention.
"We turned our back on her when she married that one about two years ago," said a 20-year-old man, Abdurakhmanova's cousin, who refused to give his name for fear of reprisals.
"We didn't have anything to do with Dzhanet and we never wanted to" after her marriage, he said before disappearing into their grandmother's single-story brick home, one of the nicest in the village.
On Friday, a leading Russian newspaper published a photo of the doe-eyed teenager, partly veiled, in the embrace of a bearded man — both grasping handguns.
The report said Abdurakhmanova met her husband, Umalat Magomedov, in an Internet chat and that he then set up a meeting and drove her away by force when she was still 16.
After her husband's death, Abdurakhmanova may have fallen under the influence of Islamists, who try to persuade widows and other relatives to sacrifice their lives to avenge their slain husbands, sons and brothers.
The daily Moskovsky Komsomolets said a burned shred of a letter in Arabic found on Abdurakhmanova's body promised a "meeting in heaven." It was unclear who wrote the letter.
Her fellow suicide bomber was believed to be 20-year-old Markha Ustarkhanova from Chechnya, the newspaper said.
The militants, who once fought for Chechnya's independence, are now seeking to create an Islamic state across the North Caucasus. In Dagestan, they carry out attacks almost daily.
On Saturday, three militants opened fire on police in a drive-by shooting, killing one and injuring another. Two other suicide bombers struck Wednesday near Dagestan's border with Chechnya, killing 12 people. Another explosion there Thursday killed two suspected militants.
Umarov, the rebel leader, said the Moscow bombings were retribution for the deaths of four villagers, "some of the poorest people" in the impoverished region.
"These people were mercilessly destroyed," he said in a video message posted Wednesday.
The four garlic pickers died along with 18 suspected Islamic militants in a three-day shootout in the mountainous forests that straddle the North Caucasus provinces of Ingushetia and Chechnya.
The Memorial rights group on Saturday said the four villagers were caught in the crossfire and then dragged away and executed while gathering the wild garlic shoots to sell at local markets. Memorial said pictures taken on a mobile phone camera showed one of the victims, Shamil Katayev, lying dead in the snow, a trail of dried blood running from his nose to the back of his head.
"That shooting was just lunacy," said Alexander Cherkasov, a Memorial spokesman. "And that lunacy was used to justify terrorism."
President Dmitry Medvedev urged even harsher measures Friday to crack down on terrorism, including targeting people who even help the militants by feeding them or doing simple chores, such as washing their clothes.
However, Russian police and security forces have long been accused of seizing people suspected of aiding militants. Some people have been tortured and many have disappeared. Rights activists trying to document the abuses also have been killed, kidnapped or threatened.

David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer

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