Brief on Cleric’s Case Uses State Secrets Argument

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday asked a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit seeking to stop the government from killing an American citizen accused of ties to Al Qaeda. In a legal brief, which was filed shortly before midnight, the administration included the contentious argument that litigating the matter could reveal state secrets. The lawsuit was filed by the father of Anwar Al-Awlaki , a radical Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico and is believed to be hiding in Yemen. Officials accuse the younger Mr. Awlaki of planning attacks for Al Qaeda’s Yemen branch, and he is believed to be on a “targeted killings” list for the military and the Central Intelligence Agency. The lawsuit seeks an injunction to block the government from killing him . It contends that without an imminent threat, killings away from a combat zone are extrajudicial executions. And it rejects the notion that the United States’ war against Al Qaeda extends to Yemen. Within the administration’s legal team there is wide consensus that it is lawful to target Mr. Awlaki. But some lawyers had disagreed on what arguments they should muster to have the lawsuit dismissed. In the end, the faction favoring a more expansive approach won out. While the government’s brief did not confirm that Mr. Awlaki was being targeted, it contended, among other things, that his father, Nasser al-Awlaki, had no legal standing, that targeting decisions are for the executive branch to determine and that litigating the matter would jeopardize state secrets. The brief also included a classified annex. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. approved making the state-secrets argument. Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, said it was necessary in this case. “The attorney general reformed the use of the state secrets privilege to guarantee it is only invoked when absolutely necessary, and never to cover up government wrongdoing," Mr. Miller said. "In this case, the plaintiff has demanded the government disclose a wide variety of classified information that could harm our national security. It strains credulity to argue that our laws require the government to disclose to an active, operational terrorist any information about how, when and where we fight terrorism.” In a joint statement, the two legal groups representing Nasser Al-Awlaki -- the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitution Rights, said: “The idea that courts should have no role whatsoever in determining the criteria by which the executive branch can kill its own citizens is unacceptable in a democracy. In matters of life and death, no executive should have a blank check." On Saturday, the A.C.L.U. attorney Jameel Jaffer added: “They're really asking for a blank check. They want to set secret criteria under which Americans are added to government kill lists and to determine for themselves whether those criteria are satisfied in any particular instance. It's a truly remarkable proposition, and one that surely would surely have been greeted with alarm had it been made by the last administration. One thing that's notable about their brief is that it conflates two distinct questions: the question of what the relevant legal standards are and the question of whether those standards are satisfied in any given case. Perhaps even they are uncomfortable with their argument that courts should play no role in articulating the legal standards. (Not so uncomfortable that they didn't make the argument, though.)” Mr. Miller of the Justice Department also said: “Purportedly on behalf of a terrorist who has dedicated his life to harming U.S. citizens, this lawsuit asks for an American court to block the government from protecting its own citizens. The lawsuit, which never denies that Anwar Al-Awlaki an active leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, asks a court to take the unprecedented step of intervening in military matters and directing the President how to manage military action - all for the benefit of a leader of a foreign terrorist organization. If Anwar Al-Awlaki wishes to access our legal system, he should surrender to authorities and be held accountable for his actions.” (Here are links to the late-filed brief , along with three public declarations in support of the assertion of the state-sercrets doctrine by Robert M. Gates , the Secretary of Defense; Leon E. Panetta , the director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and Leon Panetta, and James R. Clapper , the Director of National Intelligence.)

Classified Information and State Secrets


The Roanoke Island Colony: Lost, and Found?

Abstract: MERRY HILL, N.C. — Under a blistering sun, Nicholas M. Luccketti swatted at mosquitoes as he watched his archaeology team at work in a shallow pit on a hillside above the shimmering waters of Albemarle Sound. On a table in the shade, a pile of plastic bags filled with artifacts was growing. Fragments of earthenware and pottery. A mashed metal rivet. A piece of a hand-wrought nail. They call the spot Site X. Down a dusty road winding through soybean fields, the clearing lies between two cypress swamps teeming with venomous snakes. It is a suitably mysterious name for a location that may shed light on an enigma at the heart of America’s founding: the fate of the “lost colonists” who vanished from a sandy outpost on Roanoke Island, about 60 miles east, in the late 16th century. On and off for three years, Mr. Luccketti and colleagues with the First Colony Foundation have been excavating parts of the hillside, hoping to find traces of the colonists. As if clues in a latter-day treasure hunt, hidden markings on a 16th-century map led them to the spot on the sound’s western shore, which Mr. Luccketti had previously surveyed. Mr. Luccketti, 66, chose his words carefully as he described the fruits of their latest work. “I’m trying to make sure that I say this correctly,” he said. “We have evidence from this site that strongly indicates that there were Roanoke colonists here.” In Chapel Hill, N.C., on Tuesday, the foundation will reveal its findings, which have been submitted for peer review, and the theory that at least a few of the settlers moved inland to Site X. The announcement, along with separate findings from another excavation on a coastal island, is sure to stir excitement. Some scholars who have seen the evidence are supportive of the findings, but at least one sees the evidence as too slight to draw firm conclusions. All agree that more digging is needed. The new findings are likely to set off a new round of questions: Why would some of the settlers have split off to the inland site? Where did they go after that? And what became of the rest of the Roanoke colonists? “We need to know more,” said Eric Klingelhofer, a vice president for research at the foundation and a history professor at Mercer University in Macon, Ga. “This whole story is a blank — a blank page, a blank chapter of history, and I think archaeology is the only way to come up with answers.” The story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke has long lent a spooky note to grade schoolers’ study of American history. In 1587, an intrepid Englishman named John White took more than 100 settlers to Roanoke Island, which lies inside the chain of barrier islands that is today called the Outer Banks. It was Sir Walter Raleigh’s second attempt to colonize North Carolina, but the first to include civilians and families. White’s granddaughter, Virginia Dare, was the first child born in the New World to English parents, just a few weeks after their arrival. A resupply trip sent White back to England, but a naval war with Spain delayed his return. When he finally came back, three years after he left, the settlers had vanished, but they had left behind cryptic clues: the word “Croatoan” carved into a fence post, and the letters “CRO” on a tree. Many people believe these referred to what is now Hatteras Island, 50 miles south. A search run by a separate group has been going on there for the last several years. Image Clay Swindell, an archaeologist, scraped through an excavation block at the site. Credit Travis Dove for The New York Times Part tragedy, part mystery, part historical curiosity, the fate of the colony and Virginia Dare has spawned a folkloric cottage industry, a mix of sober scholarship, wild speculation and at least one outright hoax . A widely held theory — though unproven — is that colonists hitched themselves to area tribes and gradually assimilated. The most tantalizing clue in centuries as to the Lost Colonists’ fate came in 2012, after the British Museum re-examined one of White’s coastal maps for the First Colony Foundation. X-ray spectroscopy and other imaging techniques revealed that a patch hid a four-pointed blue and red star on the western end of Albemarle Sound. That spot, near the outlets of the Chowan River and Salmon Creek, roughly corresponded to White’s oblique reference to a site 50 miles inland, which he mentioned in testimony he gave after trying to return to the colony. James Horn, a foundation board member, had written a book hypothesizing that the location, with its protected harbor and a nearby Native American village, could have been a destination. The idea was without concrete evidence, though; while the map appeared to support it, only shovels in the ground could confirm it. The fact that the property was undisturbed was something of a miracle. Tucked into economically depressed and largely rural Bertie County, the land had been slated for development into more than 2,000 luxury condominiums, restaurants and a marina, but the plan collapsed after the financial crisis of 2008. North Carolina law requires archaeological surveys before large coastal developments can proceed. By coincidence, the developers had hired Mr. Luccketti’s outfit, the James River Institute for Archaeology, to survey the site in 2007. The dig had turned up many Native American artifacts, which are common in the region — but also some European artifacts. At the time, Mr. Luccketti hypothesized that they had been left by later European settlers, from a nearby plantation or the homestead of a trader who arrived in the mid-1600s. But the recent insights from the British Museum’s analysis of the map prompted the foundation to re-examine the 2007 findings from Merry Hill and other dig sites in the region. A key to identifying the earliest colonial life was a type of ceramic known as Surrey-Hampshire Border ware, which was no longer imported to the New World after the Virginia Company dissolved in the early 17th century. The reconsideration of the Site X artifacts led to a decision to explore further. With the landowner’s cooperation, archaeologists began sifting the soil again in 2012. Slowly, the pits gave up their secrets. In just the small areas excavated, the hillside has yielded an unusually high concentration of Border ware and other colonial artifacts, such as a food-storage jar called a baluster, a hook used to stretch hides, a buckle, and pieces of early gun flintlocks called priming pans. No signs of a fort or other structures have been found, but the aggregate of the artifacts convinced the archaeologists that at least a few of the colonists wound up there. Mr. Luccketti insists on the caveat that only a small number — fewer than a dozen — were present for an indeterminate amount of time. “It wasn’t the relocated colony — I keep emphasizing that — and we need to do some more work here to understand,” he said. There are theories for other locations where colonists might have scattered to, including the one farther south, on Hatteras Island. That site has been known since the 1930s and in the past has yielded intriguing metal items such as a signet ring, part of a horse bridle, two 17th-century coins and part of the firing mechanism for a gun. Image Nicholas M. Luccketti, principal archaeologist at the James River Institute, holding Border ware fragments pulled from the ground near Merry Hill, N.C. Credit Travis Dove for The New York Times Over the last few years, a British archaeologist,Mark Horton, has led an excavation there. He, too, has found unusual artifacts , such as a rapier hilt, late 16th-century gun hardware and part of a slate writing tablet. Many of the 16th-century items were mixed in with artifacts from almost a century later, though, making it nearly impossible to date them. And no Border ware pottery — a telltale sign of habitation — has been found on the Hatteras site. Mr. Horton, whose findings have not been published or peer reviewed, posits that colonists made their way south to Hatteras around 1590 and assimilated with the tribe there. After years of cohabitation, European items could have been gradually discarded long after they were brought to the site, which would account for their being mixed in with later detritus, he said in an interview. “I don’t necessarily see that what we’ve found on Hatteras rules out their site, or vice versa,” he said. Mr. Luccketti also said the two were not mutually exclusive; if the colonists split up, they could have ended up in multiple locations. But he says he believes Site X has stronger evidence of lost colonists because of the ceramics found there. Carter L. Hudgins, the director of the graduate program in historic preservation at Clemson/College of Charleston, said, “Any evidence that helps open the door to this mystery, even if it’s just a little bit, is something folks have been looking for at least since John White’s return to the site in 1590.” While not directly affiliated with the foundation, Dr. Hudgins has volunteered at Site X and other foundation projects over the years. Others are more circumspect. Charles R. Ewen, the president of the Society for Historical Archaeology and director of the Phelps Archaeology Laboratory at East Carolina University, says he wants incontrovertible proof of 16th-century occupation, such as a European grave from the period. He is also unconvinced that colonists removed to the Hatteras site, although the findings there could indicate contact between colonists and Native Americans. “I know we want a definitive answer, and there’s just not enough evidence yet from either site to say that, yes, this is where some of the lost colonists went,” he said. “I’m not cynical, but I haven’t seen enough evidence to say, yeah, you bet, I’m on board with that.” For now, the foundation hopes to find funding to secure the 15 acres to excavate it thoroughly. Michael Flannelly, whose company owns the land, said he hoped to find a way for the archaeological work to proceed while allowing nearby land to be developed. “It’s a 430-year-old mystery, and if I can be a part of solving that mystery, that’s something I’m interested in,” he said. As the sun reached its zenith one day last week, the work began to slow. Mr. Luccketti retired to the shade, sweat dripping from his brow. Soon the pit would be filled, the sifting screens packed up and the work paused until the future of the site could be determined. “Everyone has encouraged us that what we’re finding is really exciting and terribly significant,” he said, “and we just need to do some more here.”

Archaeology,Anthropology
Roanoke Island
First Colony Foundation
Historic preservation
Nicholas M. Luccketti
Walter Raleigh
John White
Albemarle Sound


Apple Study on Job Creation Spurs an Economic Debate

Abstract: Apple has made its first attempt to quantify how many American jobs can be credited to the sale of its iPads and other products, a group that includes the Apple engineers who design the devices and the drivers who deliver them — even the people who build the trucks that get them there. On Friday, the company published the results of a study it commissioned saying that it had “created or supported” 514,000 American jobs. The study is an effort to show that Apple’s benefit to the American job market goes far beyond the 47,000 people it directly employs here. Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., released the study on its Web site but declined to say why it published the results. The company’s employment practices have come under closer examination . Apple and other high-tech companies, including Internet companies, employ relatively few people compared with other stalwarts of American business, like General Motors and General Electric in their heyday. Apple, which is now the world’s most valuable company, has created more jobs overseas, approximately 700,000 through a network of suppliers that make iPhones, iPads and other products. The accuracy of the Apple jobs calculation in the United States may well be debated among economists for years. “Apple has a big effect, and big is about as precise as I can make it,” said Gary P. Pisano, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. “It’s hard to say the exact size.” David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , said via e-mail that the “entire business of claiming ‘direct and indirect’ job creation is disreputable” because most of the workers Apple is taking credit for would have been employed elsewhere in the company’s absence. “But of course, they might not have been as well paid or gratified with their work,” Mr. Autor said. “We’ll never know.” Mr. Autor also said that Apple should not be held accountable for employment problems in the United States. “Generating the conditions that give rise to high rates of employment and wage growth is the domain of policy makers, not individual companies,” he said. A number of companies, including Microsoft , have commissioned similar research aiming to tally up such indirect employment, by suppliers and other partners. The use of “job multipliers” has become common practice, sometimes by businesses lobbying for tax breaks from local and state governments. But the calculations of such multipliers are often fiercely debated both in economic and political terms. For instance, the Congressional Budget Office , which calculated the impact of the 2009 federal stimulus on jobs, has set estimates that vary between as few as 1.6 million jobs and as many as 8.4 million jobs. Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania , says companies often have a stronger case when quantifying their effects on a regional economy, rather than on the entire national economy. It does matter to a state, for example, whether a big business is there, though it might not matter nationally if the business moves to a different state, he said. The Analysis Group, the consulting firm Apple hired, concluded that 257,000 jobs were in companies that work directly with Apple, including employees in Kentucky and New York at Corning , a company that creates glass for the iPhone , and people at a Samsung plant in Texas . The Analysis Group arrived at that figure by analyzing how much Apple spent on goods and services in the United States in 2011 and applying that information to a formula developed by the federal government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis called an “employment multiplier.” The group used this multiplier to calculate direct and indirect employment figures from Apple’s spending, though it omitted any jobs created through spending by those people on, say, nannies, vacation homes or restaurants. Among the outside jobs Apple said it helped support were the delivery services that bring packages of Apple devices to its retail stores and directly to customers’ homes. Norman Black, a spokesman for United Parcel Service , said the company estimated that for every 40 new packages a day transported through its system, the company hired one more person. He declined to say how many packages Apple shipped through U.P.S. and, therefore, how many jobs could be credited to the company. “They rely on us for a lot of shipping,” Mr. Black said. “There’s no question that as they roll out and launch products, that’s creating new jobs in the U.S.” Apple’s study said the company also supported an additional 210,000 jobs among companies creating apps for Apple devices like the iPhone and iPad . The study based that figure on the 466,000 app-related jobs that TechNet, a high-tech lobbying group, recently estimated existed in the United States. Apple’s study estimated that 45 percent of that figure could be credited to development of software for Apple devices, based on an analysis of online job listings. While several economists and employment experts agree that Apple has an economic impact that goes beyond the people it directly employs, they said it was difficult to conclude from Apple’s study what the company’s benefit is to the overall jobs market. “They certainly have a big economic impact, as does every other firm,” Mr. Cappelli said. “If you say, ‘If there had been no Apple, those people would not have jobs,’ that’s not true.” As an example, Mr. Cappelli said that if there were no iPad, the $500 an Apple customer would have spent on the device most likely would not have been put into savings, but rather spent on some other product or service. That impact could have been more or less than Apple’s. Apple is, however, an innovative company that created a market for tablets and radically increased demand for smartphones.

Jobs
Computers and the Internet
US Economy
Economy
iPad
iPhone


In ‘My Beloved Brontosaurus,’ Brian Switek Looks at How Dinosaurs Have Changed

Abstract: At age 5, Brian Switek was a Stegosaurus. In a green jumpsuit, with floppy fabric plates sewn along the back, he was set to perform in an Allosaurus vs. Stegosaurus battle at his preschool’s Dinosaur Night. But at the moment of his scripted defeat and mock death at the claws of the Allosaurus boy, the grown-up Mr. Switek recounts in this charming book, young Brian broke character and announced to the audience that Stegosaurus was actually the superior dinosaur. While Allosaurus was fast and fierce, “those attributes would have been of little use against the prominent plates and bone-piercing tail spikes of Stegosaurus.” The teachers must have been furious. The assembled mothers and fathers laughed. Many thousands of children go through a dinosaur phase, of course. But it usually ends, as Mr. Switek writes, “once we discover team sports and kissing under the high school bleachers.” For him, though, the phase persisted as an obsession. Now 30, he blogs about dinosaurs, discusses them on radio and television, and even moved to Utah to live near their fossil remains. He has done his fieldwork and homework and is widely recognized as a reliable and lucid authority on all things dinosaurian. We are beneficiaries of Mr. Switek’s undiminished passion, on display in “My Beloved Brontosaurus.” The book is a delight, coming along when so much has changed in our understanding of dinosaurs, ever since the beginning of a renaissance in dinosaur studies in the 1970s and ’80s. About that title: It is both a memory and a metaphor. The long-necked Brontosaurus, once the epitome of what it was to be a dinosaur, never existed . In their haste to proclaim another species, fossil collectors in the 19th century misidentified the first scrappy remains; only much later were they discovered to belong to a dinosaur properly called Apatosaurus. No sooner was young Brian hooked on dinosaurs than this iconic representative suffered a second extinction — at the hands of science. Image Credit Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times Mr. Switek, never forgetting his lost love, uses Brontosaurus as a traveling companion through a book about how much our dinosaurs have changed, noting that “the same process that destroyed the titan has revealed clues about prehistoric lives that we never expected to find.” At every turn, it becomes clear that these are not your grandfather’s dinosaurs. Some were hulking behemoths like Supersaurus and Argentinosaurus, well over 100 feet long, but humbler and more diverse creatures keep turning up. Some were probably scaly, but quite a few were covered in feathers. Others were misjudged: they were not always the sluggish, dimwitted tail-draggers knee-deep in swamps, obviously bound for extinction. New lines of evidence, Mr. Switek writes, strongly suggest that dinosaurs were active, fast-growing creatures that would have required high metabolic rates. Dinosaur physiology remains a debated subject. “With a tenure spanning the past 230 million years,” he ventures, “dinosaurs must have had a physiology that was immensely adaptable.” The passage of 230 million years refers to one of the most arresting discoveries, overturning what in one respect dinosaurs are most famous for: their extinction. Dinosaurs evolved around 230 million years ago — presumably benefiting from the Permian mass extinction, only to become victims of the Cretaceous extinction, 66 million years ago. But not all died out: Most paleontologists now agree modern birds are dinosaur descendants. Mr. Switek promises more than he delivers in the chapter on dinosaur sex life. What little is known of eggs, nests and maturation rates is interesting, but not even the best-preserved remains retain any sign of their reproductive organs. As for the actual sexual act, males of some species may have followed practices of today’s lizards and alligators, throwing a foreleg over the female’s back. But what about Kentrosaurus , a relative of Stegosaurus? “If a male Kentrosaurus tried to throw his leg over the back of a crouching female,” the author said, “he’d castrate himself on her sharp spikes.” No skeletons have been found of dinosaurs in flagrante. Other books have dealt with new dinosaur research, but like museum exhibits on the subject, they quickly become outdated. This may be the one book for catching up on what has become of the dinosaurs you thought you knew from grade school. Mr. Switek and his brontosaur spiritual sidekick take you to dig sites, museums and laboratories to experience the rapid changes in dinosaur paleontology. His account is spiced with history of bone wars in the American West, odd facts and asides. For example, there is no such thing as an intercostal clavicle, the bone Cary Grant is frantically searching for in “Bringing Up Baby.” Be prepared for surprises. While you were growing older, dinosaurs underwent an astonishing transformation. Just ask the next 5-year-old you meet.

Dinosaur
Paleontology
Books
Brian Switek


Palin, in Iowa, Signs Book but Sidesteps Politics

Abstract: WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — The visit was, according to the official line, just a book signing — a chance for Sarah Palin to scrawl her signature for a few hundred fans on copies of her latest work. But against a backdrop of unceasing speculation about her future and coming after recent interviews in which Ms. Palin acknowledged that, yes, she was thinking about running and, yes, she thought she could win, her return to the state expected to play a central role in determining the next Republican nominee for president took on, intentionally or not, a distinctly political flavor. The line of autograph seekers that snaked around the Borders bookstore buzzed with the same two questions that trail Ms. Palin these days: Would she and should she? Those expecting clarity, however, would leave disappointed. “Thank you for your encouragement,” was all she told them. During her three-hour visit, Ms. Palin was insulated from both the crowd and the news media. She arrived and left through a separate entrance and spent her time behind a black curtain at the back of the store, though two of her daughters wandered freely, signing autographs. People were required to leave their cellphones and cameras before approaching Ms. Palin. Reporters were prohibited from asking questions, though photographers were allowed to take pictures. “It really bothered me, actually,” said Todd Steinberg, 52, a medical worker from nearby Johnston, who described himself as a committed supporter. “I’d like to see her not be so closed or censored with her public appearances.” If anything, the visit mostly offered a reminder that Ms. Palin — a paid Fox News commentator, star of a reality television program and mother of a dancing star — sure knows how to draw a crowd, pulling in at least five times the number of people who turned out here the previous week for Newt Gingrich. Donna Otis, 66, a small-business owner from Des Moines, said: “There’s a draw for her I can’t explain. You want to see Sarah.” There was a mix of strong opinions as to whether Ms. Palin, a former Republican nominee for vice president and governor of Alaska, should declare herself a candidate. (A poll here over the summer of likely Republican voters found that Ms. Palin was viewed favorably by 58 percent and unfavorably by 39 percent, with just 3 percent undecided.) “I would like her to run and I would definitely vote for her,” said Mary Kirkpatrick, a retired United Parcel Service worker from Des Moines, clutching a newly purchased copy of Ms. Palin’s book, “America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag” (Harper), which was published on Tuesday. “But there is no need to rush right now because she’s doing things like this and her face is constantly on TV.” Kristin Blackman, 39, took the opposite view, saying that Ms. Palin was an effective advocate for the views of conservative Christian women. “I don’t necessarily want to see her in office,” she said. “I like the role she’s in right now.” The start of the political season here has been slower and more tentative then usual. Ms. Palin and her political plans, whatever they may be, continue to loom large over a slowly assembling field of possible candidates eager to be the party’s choice to take on President Obama. But while others have begun lining up support, Ms. Palin has developed a reputation for being inaccessible, leading some to question how serious she is about running. “There are a lot of people who are willing to engage with her, but right now its almost impossible,” said Craig Robinson, who was political director for the Iowa Republican Party during the last caucus and now runs the Web site The Iowa Republican . “If I wanted to reach out, I wouldn’t know how to do it.” This is Ms. Palin’s third visit to the state since the last presidential campaign. She will return again on Thursday at the end of her nine-day, 13-state book tour for an appearance in Spirit Lake. Her events here have been criticized for being mostly staged, with less of the give-and-take seen as critical in a state where voters are used to meeting politicians in person. Amy Linney, general manager of the bookstore, said that when Mr. Gingrich and former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas held far smaller book signings at the store, “there weren’t as many stipulations.” But after signing more than 500 books, Ms. Palin left her table to approach the stragglers who had been told they had arrived too late. With a beaming smile, she patiently signed more books and urged the crowd to watch her show the next night. And she sidestepped a question from a reporter about when she would decide to run. “Oh my goodness!” she said. Then another person asked for her autograph. “Thanks for changing the subject for me,” she said.

Palin Sarah
Presidential Election of 2012
Polls and Public Opinion
Books and Literature
Iowa
America By Heart (Book)


Welcome to Our Town. Wish We Weren’t Here.

Abstract: TREECE, Kan. — Mayor Bill Blunk sees no reason for sugar-coating his opinion when asked to describe this town. “It’s dead,” he said. “Wasted land.” Almost anywhere else on the map, such bluntness could cost a politician re-election. But not here. Mr. Blunk has the near-unanimous support of the population, 140 people or so, who are perhaps singular among residents of municipalities in that they all want out of theirs. “I’d be happy to go as anyone,” said Randall Barr, a retired sand company worker. “You can’t do anything with this land. What good is it?” For most of the early part of the 20th century, this little city in the southeast corner of Kansas had the feel of a rollicking boom town, its prosperity coming from land rich in lead, zinc and iron ore. Part of a vast mining district where Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma meet, Treece and its twin city across the Oklahoma state line, Picher, became the unofficial capitals of a zone that in its heyday produced more than $20 billion worth of ore — much of it used for weaponry to fight World Wars I and II. But when the last of the mines closed in the 1970s, Treece was left sitting in a toxic waste dump of lead-tinged dust, contaminated soil and sinkholes. On a hot summer day, children can be seen riding their bikes around enormous mounds of chat — pulverized rock laced with lead and iron. It is the waste product left over from mining that is the cause of so many problems here. Uncontrolled, it blows in the wind. Treece and Picher — which is the much larger of the two towns, once home to 20,000 people and separated from Treece by only a gravel road, the state line — became part of adjacent Superfund sites that the Environmental Protection Agency has been trying to clean since the 1980s. In Picher, the remediation of the land has proved daunting. In a move without many precedents, the federal government decided to buy out and relocate nearly the entire population, which had dwindled to 1,800 by 2000, leaving a dusty ghost town where the social and economic hub of the area used to be. But the buyouts stopped at the Oklahoma line. Treece remains similarly contaminated, but now even more isolated. Officials in Kansas have been practically begging the federal government to move Treece’s impoverished people, mostly the children and grandchildren of old miners, but to no avail. “You can turn and see one block away is Oklahoma, unsafe,” said Pam Pruitt, the city clerk. “They got bought out, and we didn’t? It’s incredibly unfair. The people here, if they wanted to leave, they can’t. They can’t sell their property. They can’t get bank loans to fix them up. They’re just stuck.” The E.P.A. does not see it that way. The agency favors rehabilitation of the tainted soil in Treece, which mainly entails cleansing the top layer of sediment. Senator Pat Roberts , Republican of Kansas and a staunch advocate of the buyouts, said he likened the strategy to “throwing a fancy rug over a hole in the floor.” He believes that it would be more efficient to simply move the people, which would cost an estimated $3.5 million. Nonetheless, the agency says that it can accomplish the soil cleansing in 10 years and that Treece residents are safe in the meantime. In Picher, however, government scientists found that extensive waste deposits could not be remediated for several decades, and that residents would be at risk during the cleanup, hence the need for government-assisted relocation. “They are two independent sites from the way we look at it,” said Mathy Stanislaus, the assistant administrator for solid waste at the E.P.A. Mr. Stanislaus said that in Picher, the residential areas were interspersed with mining waste sites, but that in Treece, the residential areas were away from pollutants. Still, he said, the agency is “taking a hard look” at the residents’ concerns and will continue to evaluate their situation. Such explanations do nothing to ease the worry of the people in Treece. In addition to living in fear of lead and other poisons, they lost their stores, gas stations, some public services, jobs and their social outlet with the demise of Picher. That town ceased to be an official entity on Sept. 1. Only a few die-hard residents remain, unconvinced of the health risks or unhappy with their buyout offers. They live in a gothic landscape of varying degrees of disrepair. A few residents walked away from well-kept properties just last week, while most others took buyouts years ago, leaving dozens of houses to collapse upon themselves. Stray dogs wander. Faded signs announce places that are no longer: the Picher Mining Museum, the Church of the Nazarene, a 24-hour truck stop. “I had a perfectly good house,” said Vickey Phillips, who moved out of Picher four years ago. “But they said it was full of lead.” The psychological impact of Picher’s move on Treece has been overwhelming. “They are in essence one town,” said Senator Sam Brownback , Republican of Kansas, who grew up north of Treece and is pushing for the buyouts. “Yes, there’s a state line that divides them, but that’s a man-made distinction. It is very much one town.” About 100 miles northeast of Tulsa, Treece is entirely residential, with the only public building being its two-room clapboard City Hall. Most of the population, which has a poverty level more than twice the national average, is feeling increasingly depressed about the isolation and a sense of creeping abandonment. “There’s nothing here but a City Hall, honestly,” said Regina Palmer, 24. A 1993 study found that 34 percent of the children tested in Picher had blood lead levels exceeding the point at which there is a risk of brain or nervous system damage. Government efforts to do something to clean the chat piles began in earnest then. But similar studies have never been done in Treece. Only now is the E.P.A. testing the air quality and lead levels in residents’ blood. Agency officials arrived in town last week. “It’s about 10 years too late,” Mayor Blunk said. Glenda Powell is among those hoping for a buyout. “My father was one of the last miners,” she said. “He died of cancer , and so did my mom — bad lungs. This has always been home, and I don’t know where we’d go, just a place where we can breathe.”

Picher Oklahoma
Waste management
Mining
HazMat
EPA
Oklahoma
Kansas


Israel: 4 Palestinians Charged in Killing of U.S. Woman

Abstract: Four Palestinians were charged on Wednesday with the murder of an American tourist, Kristine Luken, who was killed in a forest outside Jerusalem in December. Ms. Luken, an evangelical Christian in her mid-40s, had been hiking with a friend who was also stabbed, but survived. Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman, said that the attackers came from the West Bank, and that they were suspected of at least one other murder. One of the group said that the attacks began as revenge for the killing of a senior Hamas official in a Dubai hotel room a year ago, Mr. Rosenfeld said.

Jerusalem (Israel)
Murders and Attempted Murders
Palestinians


China: 4 Face Trial on Organ Trafficking Charges

Abstract: The first Chinese trial involving organ trafficking could take place next month in Beijing, according to a report in China Daily, an official English-language newspaper. Four men have been charged with paying living people for organs and then reselling the organs. If found guilty, the men would be sentenced to at least five years in prison. China Daily reported that last year, about a third of 10,000 organ transplants in China involved living donors, almost six times the number in 2008.


A 9/11 Widow Balances Her Family, a Job and Islam

Abstract: Nearly every Sept. 11 since Sept. 11, Hadidjatou Karamoko Traoré has made sure that her three children were dressed in their best clothes, and taken them from their tidy brick home in the Bronx to the pit where the World Trade Center stood, and where her husband, their father, worked and died. After the attacks, all that was found of Abdoul-Karim Traoré , a cook at the Windows on the World restaurant, were his leather wallet, his identification cards and a few coins. “I like to go down there and pray and see the place and remember,” said Mrs. Traoré, a native of Ivory Coast who came to the United States in 1997. “When I go there, I feel closer to him. And him to me. I pray for him, too.” When she prays, she calls God Allah. Mrs. Traoré, 40, says praying in the pit feels entirely natural, even if some of those standing with her — widows and widowers, parents and children — blame her religion for the destruction of that day. “That’s not fair,” she said. “It’s not because of Allah that these buildings fell.” Mrs. Traoré is the widow of one of roughly 60 Muslim victims — cooks, businessmen, emergency responders and airline passengers — believed to have died on 9/11. It is a group that has been little examined, and no precisely reliable count of their ranks exists. But their stories, when told, have frequently been offered as counterweights in the latest public argument over terrorism and Islam. Mrs. Traoré works the overnight shift as a nurse’s assistant at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx. She loves to cook: peanut sauce and doughy fritters are her specialties. She has a wide smile and a raspy laugh. Her life, a juggling act of homework, bills and prayer, is one Sept. 11 story — the kind of personal account Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and others have sought to highlight amid the debate over a planned Islamic community center near the pit where Ms. Traoré prays every September. Over the past nine years, Mrs. Traoré has lived a kind of dual life. She is a 9/11 widow struggling to raise her children, cope with her loss and tame her anger. The trials of her days would ring familiar to single mothers and fathers from Staten Island to Washington. But she is also a Muslim woman, both devoted to her faith and conscious of the discomfort it can evoke in her adopted homeland. She wears Western clothes when she shops at Costco. But she wears a robe and head scarf when she visits her mosque in the Bronx . When she is in her religious attire, she can sense a shift as people on the street appear to regard her with suspicion. “When people run away from me, I feel sad,” she said. “But I understand why they’re doing that. What happened was terrible.” Her two sons, Souleymane, 11, and Siaka, 9, attend a Roman Catholic school near their home. During prayer, they sit in the back of the classroom with the few other non-Catholic students. They feel comfortable there, but they, too, have hidden their religion from schoolyard bullies. Mrs. Traoré received government money from the Sept. 11 compensation fund, and she said she was both unsurprised by and grateful for the American generosity. Mrs. Traoré is also frustrated and troubled, she said, that so many Americans find it impossible to separate the pious of her faith from its fanatics. But it has not buckled her beliefs. “I’m proud to be Muslim,” she said. “I’m going to be Muslim until God takes my spirit.” Africa and New York Mrs. Traoré met her husband in 1990 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. He was a handsome mechanic, she worked at a health clinic, and they quickly fell in love. They married in 1992, and she was pregnant the next year. Before their daughter was born, however, Mr. Traoré moved to New York in search of a better life. Mrs. Traoré followed four years later. They lived, at first, in the Parkchester section of the Bronx. She braided women’s hair and spent most of her time with other West Africans. She felt comfortable in the city and never felt the need to hide her religion. Mr. Traoré first worked delivering groceries; later he got a job as a cook at the restaurant inside the American Museum of Natural History, and then came the opportunity at Windows on the World. He worked the 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. shift, which allowed him to make extra money delivering USA Today in the early morning. Mr. Traoré never met his daughter, Djenebou , a quiet 17-year-old who now looks after her brothers as something of a surrogate parent. Unable to move to the United States with her mother, she grew up with relatives in Ivory Coast, and came to New York in 2002 after receiving “humanitarian parole.” Their home, a jumble of New York and Africa, is filled with the laugh track of Disney Channel sitcoms and the smell of peanut stew. A pile of shoes lies by the door — leopard-print Timberland boots, shiny high-top sneakers, slippers, sandals and high heels. Mrs. Traoré keeps hand-drawn Mother’s Day cards taped to her bedroom door and posters of Mecca taped to the living room walls. Those walls could use a fresh coat of paint, and the ragged carpet has seen better days. But the family is busy, and the house is well loved, a refuge from the rough streets of Hunts Point outside. Mrs. Traoré is strict — she keeps her children indoors or in their small backyard — and she tries to limit television to an hour a day. Djenebou spends much of her time checking Facebook and juggling instant messages, but her sessions are routinely interrupted by the call to prayer, which Mrs. Traoré has set to issue from the family laptop’s speakers. Mrs. Traoré wants her children to pray, but that can take some nudging. They pray together in her bedroom, and they have long, quiet conversations about their religion. And on Fridays, they visit a ground-floor mosque nearby on Southern Boulevard that sits opposite a graffiti-covered junkyard, down the street from El Mundo Department Store. “I tell them we have to believe in God, you have to pray,” she said. While she finishes her overnight shift at the hospital, the children get themselves up and prepare their bowls of cereal. She calls when she is five minutes away so they can jump in the car and race to school. “We’re always late,” she said. “Always, always.” She sleeps until 3 p.m., and then picks them up from after-school programs, prepares dinner, reviews homework and checks backpacks before leaving for another night shift. “I’m the father and mother now,” she said. ‘He Went to Work’ Mrs. Traoré can barely discuss Sept. 11, 2001, without tears pooling in her eyes. “He went to work,” she said. “That’s it.” She remembers her husband praying and getting dressed for his first job of the day, delivering newspapers, but it was too early for them to speak. She woke up at 8 a.m. for what was to be her second day of formal English classes. Though she had spent four years in New York, she knew only rudimentary phrases. As she was hurrying to leave, her brother-in-law called to ask if Abdoul had gone to the World Trade Center. Yes, of course. Like always. He told her to turn on the television. She saw the towers burning, but she could not understand what the newscasters were saying. She began crying, dialing her husband’s cellphone “again, again, again.” Relatives rushed to the apartment to translate the TV for her. For two weeks, Mrs. Traoré barely slept. She called her husband’s phone repeatedly and visited a string of hospitals in search of him. She did not tell her children what she most feared. “I just said he went away,” she remembered. “I said he’s coming, he’s coming.” Souleymane, then 3, struggled. He insisted, for whatever reason, on sleeping on sheets that were perfectly white. A social worker advised her to tell the children what happened, and nine years later they still have not made peace with their father’s death. “I want to ask why they did that,” Souleymane said on a recent afternoon. “If they were mad at somebody, they could have sorted it out instead of starting a war.” Mr. Traoré’s remains were never found, but his wallet was recovered intact, as if he had only forgotten it on the nightside table. For years, Souleymane kept it as a totem. Soon after the attacks, the family moved from Parkchester to a three-story home in Hunts Point that Mr. Traoré had found before he died. His brother, a taxi driver, lives on the top floor. A family friend from Ivory Coast lives on the second floor. Mrs. Traoré has support. She is not one to live in the past, even if her busy life allowed for more reflection. “Life has never been normal, but it’s better,” she said. “I still miss him. But it’s not horrible like before.” ‘Everything Has Changed’ If the attacks forever upended her family, they also altered her understanding of America, and her place in this country. “After 9/11, everything has changed,” she said. “At the beginning after 9/11, they were saying terrorists are all Islamic people. But terrorists and the religious people are different. God doesn’t say kill people.” At home, the river of mail and bills never stops, a deluge her husband managed so smoothly. She still struggles with English. Perhaps the one part of her world that has remained fixed is her faith. “My children are Muslim and my parents are Muslim,” she said. “I read the Koran and I am proud.” Islam, indeed, acts as the ballast of her life. “It puts me in the right direction, and it protects me from doing bad things,” she said. She does not blame God for her husband’s death. “That was my husband’s destiny,” she said. If they had stayed in Ivory Coast, she reasons, perhaps he would have fallen fatally ill. “I’m praying to God to make me strong to protect them and raise them,” she said of her children. “I believe God is helping me because my children here are growing and they’re healthy and I’m doing my work.” “I move closer to prayer, closer to God, and I thank him,” she said. “I keep praying to God to make me strong.” On Friday, she will have a birthday party for Siaka. He has asked for ice cream cake. On Saturday, Sept. 11, the family will return to ground zero. And she will pray to Allah.

September 11 (2001)
Terrorism
Islam
Widows and Widowers
Windows on the World


With Plane Still Missing, Legal Moves for Payouts Start

Abstract: BEIJING — For 10 days, Monica R. Kelly and her American law firm’s aviation lawyers have stalked the dim hallways of the Lido Hotel here to make their pitches to relatives of passengers aboard missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. They tell the families that a court in the United States could potentially award millions of dollars per passenger in a lawsuit against the Boeing Company, which built the missing jet, a Boeing 777-200. In a hotel suite, Ms. Kelly uses a model of a Boeing 777 to show families how the plane might have malfunctioned. “It’s not an issue of whether families will be compensated,” Ms. Kelly said recently while munching on French fries with her 12-year-old son at a restaurant across the street from the Lido. “It’s a question of how much and when.” But Ms. Kelly admitted that Flight 370 was a uniquely difficult case. “We’ve done more than 43 plane crashes,” she said, “and there’s never been a situation like this one, ever.” Complicating the prospects for a legal case against Malaysia Airlines, Boeing or other parties is the mystery surrounding the plane’s disappearance after it left Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, en route to Beijing on March 8. No one can say with certainty that the plane has crashed, even though the Malaysian government has said satellite data shows that the flight “ended” in the southern Indian Ocean. International search efforts have yielded no debris. Still, the rush is on to secure compensation for families of the flight’s 227 passengers , about two-thirds of whom are Chinese. Insurance companies here have already made payments to some relatives. On top of that, the families can expect to receive compensation from Malaysia Airlines because of guarantees in an international treaty. They can also opt to sue the airline for more damages, or sue Boeing or a component manufacturer. Any lawsuit could take years to conclude. Ms. Kelly’s firm, Ribbeck Law, made two filings in a court in Chicago, where it is based, to try to force Boeing to divulge more information, but both were dismissed. The judge threatened to impose sanctions against the firm for making inappropriate filings. The Search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Map of the new search area, which is about 700 miles to the northeast of the previous search areas. Ribbeck Law has sent six employees to Beijing and six to Kuala Lumpur, where families of passengers have gathered in hotels. Rival firms have also been contacting families. “The next step is getting insurance payments, not lawsuits,” said James Healy-Pratt, a partner and head of the aviation department at Stewarts Law , based in London. Some Chinese families are reluctant to immediately pursue lawsuits or take the payment that airlines generally award in the event of a plane crash, as mandated by international law in the Montreal Convention. Many refuse to accept the fact that the passengers are dead and insist that the Malaysian government is orchestrating an elaborate cover-up. Wang Le, whose mother was on Flight 370, said that he was starting to cope with her death, but that “it’s not the time for compensation yet.” “Talking about lawsuits or whatever — we still don’t know where the plane is,” he said. Some of the Flight 370 families are accepting insurance payments as a first step. The China Life Insurance Company , the biggest such company in China, said on its website that it had 32 clients on the flight and that it had paid out $670,400 to cover seven of them as of March 25. It said the total payment for all the clients would be nearly $1.5 million. At least five other Chinese insurance companies have also made payments. Since Malaysia is bound by the Montreal Convention, the families are also entitled to a minimum compensation from Malaysia Airlines, up to $174,000 per passenger. The airline or its insurer might try to persuade a family to agree not to sue in exchange for a payment. But lawyers discourage families from signing such waivers. (Crew members are usually not covered by the treaty, but their families can get workers’ compensation and file lawsuits.) The payouts are made by a consortium of companies that are known as reinsurers. In this case, the lead company is Allianz Global Corporate and Specialty , part of Allianz of Germany. The company said it and other reinsurers had already begun making claims payments. Two years after another aviation mystery, the crash of an Air France Airbus in the Atlantic in 2009, a French judge determined that the airline’s mandatory payout under the Montreal Convention would be 126,000 euros per passenger, about $180,000. Air France says it has since reached confidential settlements with most of the families of passengers aboard that flight. Families agreeing to the settlements cannot seek any further compensation, even if the continuing French criminal investigation leads to a trial and damages are awarded by a judge. Airbus has not made any payouts and would face such damages only if it is found liable in a trial. The amounts awarded in lawsuits related to Flight 370 could vary by the jurisdiction of filing. American courts offer plaintiffs a better chance of winning multimillion-dollar settlements, several aviation lawyers said. Those courts assign greater economic value to individual lives than do courts in other countries, and they regularly impose punitive damages on companies. Jurisdictions for lawsuits are dictated by the Montreal Convention. The most a Chinese court has awarded plaintiffs in a fatal plane crash case is about $140,000 per passenger, for an accident involving Henan Airlines in 2010. Zhang Qihuan, a lawyer who has been talking to relatives of those on Flight 370, said a court probably would not award more than that in any accident, to avoid setting a precedent. But he said families could settle for a much higher amount out of court if they agreed to keep quiet. Some lawyers say it is too early to begin discussing lawsuits because there is insufficient evidence to establish why the plane disappeared. Forensic analysis of the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder — the black boxes — or debris from the plane might help sustain a case. Malaysian officials have not accused anyone of wrongdoing. Robert A. Clifford, an aviation accident lawyer based in Chicago, said he had been contacted by a lawyer in Texas claiming to speak for a Flight 370 family. But he emphasized that no one should rush into litigation. “You don’t have to knee-jerk it, go out, file something,” he said. “This is a process, not an event, and this race is not always won by the swift.” Malaysian officials and Malaysia Airlines are girding themselves for legal and financial fallout from the plane’s disappearance. Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s defense minister and acting transportation minister, said last week that the government had asked the country’s attorney general to begin assessing the legal implications of the loss of the plane. The chief executive officer of Malaysia Airlines, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, told reporters last week that the company had already begun discussing compensation with the family members and with “various legal parties.” Malaysia Airlines has already offered $5,000 to each family to help deal with immediate financial strains, including travel costs. The airline said on Monday that it had adequate insurance coverage to meet “all the reasonable costs” that might arise from the plane’s loss. Ms. Kelly, the lawyer, said families never believe that money can make up for their loss. But in one of her cases, she said, the husband died while flying with a mistress, and “the wife was happy to receive the money.”

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
Malaysia Airlines
China
Malaysia
Hishammuddin Hussein
Plane Crashes and Missing Planes
Boeing
Reparations


Illinois House Impeaches Governor

Abstract: SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois was impeached by state lawmakers on Friday, setting the stage for a trial in the Senate, where the governor vowed he would prove his righteousness. “I am confident that at the end of the day I will be properly exonerated,” Mr. Blagojevich, 52, said at a Chicago news conference in which he cast himself as something of a martyred populist. The State House of Representatives deliberated less than an hour and a half before voting 114 to 1 to impeach Mr. Blagojevich, making him the first Illinois chief executive to face such a trial. On Thursday, a 21-member bipartisan House committee unanimously recommended the same, citing an abuse of power in the ordinary work of government. In the Senate, where the trial is expected to begin Jan. 26, lawmakers will face the difficult task of separating the political theatrics of the governor’s problems from the legal accusations against him, which have yet to be proved in court or even brought in a formal indictment. It is unclear whether the case against Mr. Blagojevich, a two-term Democrat, will be grounds enough for senators to convict him. The State Constitution does not define a standard for an impeachable offense. For a governor to be removed from office, two-thirds of the Senate — 40 of the 59 members — must vote to convict him. “This is an extraordinary step to take when you’re doing something like impeachment, which is in effect reversing the will of the voters in the last election,” said Senator Kwame Raoul, a Chicago Democrat. “You want to set the bar high.” Still, no one — not even Representative Milton Patterson, a Democrat who voted against impeachment, saying he needed more information — defended Mr. Blagojevich on the House floor. The governor was roundly denounced on various fronts, including for his arrest last month on federal corruption charges involving, among other things, scheming to sell the United States Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. “This governor has breached the public trust,” said Representative Barbara Flynn Currie, a Democrat, who was chairwoman of the impeachment committee. Several hours after the vote, Mr. Blagojevich, a two-term Democrat, called the news conference at his downtown Chicago office. He denounced the state legislature, quoted inspirational poetry and recited a litany of accomplishments. He said that the impeachment was a “foregone conclusion,” and suggested that lawmakers were less concerned with the criminal allegations against him than with his policies — all driven, he said, by the Golden Rule — of helping children get health care, providing cheaper medicines from Canada to those in need, pressing for property tax relief and allowing women to get mammograms. To promote those accomplishments, he brought to stand beside him a dozen Illinois residents who he said had benefited from his policies. They included a man in a wheelchair wearing a neck brace and two young children who played on the floor throughout his remarks. “Is that an impeachable offense?” he asked repeatedly, after describing ways he had helped individuals. Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn later said Mr. Blagojevich had sidestepped the real point. “The governor did not address the central issue, which is the abuse of power,” Mr. Quinn said. “That is really the essence of the charges against him and he’ll have to address them in the Illinois Senate.” Before the impeachment vote, legislators — who had been called back to Springfield for a special session — had spent the morning discussing the merits of their case against Mr. Blagojevich. Because he has not been convicted of a crime, the committee that recommended impeachment cut a broad swath, making its case on what members called a pattern of the abuse of power in day-to-day government operations. Lawmakers relied in part on the criminal complaint against Mr. Blagojevich but were denied by federal prosecutors more detailed evidence in their investigation, leaving a hole, some say, in the strength of the impeachment case as it moves to the Senate. The lawmakers did pay special attention, they said, to transcripts of federal wiretaps that were included in the complaint and that appear to show Mr. Blagojevich bartering over the Senate seat in language that is coarse and unambiguous. Among the key findings of the impeachment committee was that Mr. Blagojevich often tied official actions to campaign donations. The committee also stated that he routinely circumvented the legislature, expanding an important state health care program, for instance, without legal legislative authority. He also entered into a contract for flu vaccines with the knowledge that the vaccines would never be received, the committee said, citing another example of a wrongheaded decision and the abuse of power. Jeffrey Shaman, a professor with expertise in constitutional matters at DePaul University College of Law, said the evidence against the governor appeared extremely damaging but not absolutely so. “Of course the legislature would have a stronger case for removing the governor if they had evidence of criminal wrongdoing,” Professor Shaman said. “Short of that, they seem to be relying on gross improprieties. It’s a bit questionable whether that’s a strong enough case to remove him from office.” Impeachments of governors are rare; the last governor to be impeached was Evan Mecham of Arizona, who was removed from office in 1988. As a formality, when the newly elected Illinois General Assembly is sworn in on Wednesday, the House will vote again before formally sending the impeachment resolution to the Senate. In the meantime, officials in Washington say, it is likely that the stalemate over the appointment of Mr. Obama’s successor in the Senate will be resolved. Jesse White, the Illinois secretary of state, continued to refuse to co-sign Mr. Blagojevich’s appointment, saying Mr. Blagojevich was too tainted by scandal to pick the next senator. But officials from Mr. Blagojevich’s office on Friday sought instead a more standard certified document from Mr. White’s office, simply acknowledging the governor’s appointment request. Mr. White issued that document, which also included his signature (though mass produced by a machine, his office said) and the state’s seal. That document, some said, may assuage concerns in the Senate over its rules requiring additional certification to seat Mr. Blagojevich’s appointee, Roland W. Burris, and most likely will lead to recognition in the Senate of Mr. Burris as the state’s junior senator. Mr. Burris testified Thursday in Springfield that he had made no deals with Mr. Blagojevich for the appointment. “This ballgame is in the hands of the United States Senate,” Mr. White said. “It’s no longer in the hands of Illinois.”


Rhymes With ‘Pick-Em’

Abstract: “If it’s a fruit and it grows out here, we grow it,” said Prudence Wickham Heston of the roughly two dozen varieties that her family cultivates at Wickham’s Fruit Farm, on the North Fork bordering Peconic Bay. Since 1680, the Wickham family has owned and managed the nearly 300 acres of land, with several family members currently living in homes on the periphery of the farm. If you plan to pick your own, baskets wait at the white clapboard farm stand, where you can get directions to the field with the ripest fruit. (Late July is prime peach-picking time; apples begin around early September.) A short walk takes you to the nearby peach orchard, but you’ll need to hitch a ride on the farm wagon to some of the apples and other fruits farther afield. Prices fluctuate according to the market; fruit is priced by the pound for peaches, by the half bushel for apples. If you are willing to pay slightly more, you can forgo the picking and buy fruit at the stand, along with a wonderful variety of preserves like watermelon rind pickles ($6 for a 16-ounce jar) and clove-spiced peaches ($12 a quart). The farm’s 36 beehives produce honey sold in jars for $4.95 a pound. Cheeses chosen to complement the farm’s fruit can be found on the shelves of the refrigerated Cheese Cellar, a walk-in cooler that is richly stocked with treasures like local Catapano goat cheese and aged Italian pecorino stagionato (cheeses range from $8 to $50 a pound). The daily harvest is put to good use in fruit pies ($12.50 for a large one) and freshly made doughnuts (sweetened with the farm’s cider) at $2.95 a half-dozen. Wickham’s Fruit Farm, 28700 Main Road, Cutchogue; (631) 734-6441. Pick-Your-Own open Monday to Saturday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m; farm market open until 5 p.m. Closed Sundays. Call ahead for information on what is ripe and picking conditions. Open May 1 to late December. SUSAN M. NOVICK


Special Victims Squad in Focus With Strauss-Kahn Case

Abstract: In some ways, last weekend was not especially remarkable for the New York Police Department ’s Special Victims Squad. About 30 new cases came in, typical for the citywide unit of 190 specially trained investigators and supervisors. But of those cases, among the 6,000 sex-based cases that the squad handles each year, none carried the notoriety of the one that accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn , the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, of sexually attacking a housekeeper at a Manhattan hotel. For some, the arrest of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who was taken into custody aboard an Air France jet at Kennedy International Airport, drew comparisons to television shows like “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” or “C.S.I.” On television, the investigators might have dashed off to the airport to capture Mr. Strauss-Kahn themselves. In reality, three detectives from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey took him off the plane and handed him over to detectives from the Midtown South precinct in Manhattan, who in turn delivered him to the Special Victims Squad. Indeed, the real-life detectives of the Special Victims Squad do not solve their cases in the span of an hourlong television show; their work is done more deliberately, often in the quiet spaces of police squad rooms or private hospital bays. “The people who work in this field are dedicated to it, but I don’t think any one of them would call it glamorous,” said Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman. “It is often very gritty and difficult work that they engage in, with impressive results.” Some of their cases are well known: the so-called preppie murder, the Central Park jogger rape, the rape and murder of Imette St. Guillen by a SoHo bar bouncer. Others are not nearly as celebrated; last weekend, in the midst of the Strauss-Kahn case, the city’s special victims detectives swung around the five boroughs, absorbing the accounts of victims of all ages. They dealt with a 10-year-old girl in East Harlem who told the squad’s investigators that her older cousin raped her, Mr. Browne said. They also looked into the case of a 4-year-old in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, who told her mother that her uncle had pulled down her underpants. The police found the man, who admitted that he had tried to have sex with the girl and had planned to flee to Mexico, the police said. He was arrested. Yet few cases could more ably illustrate the importance of the squad than Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest. Uniformed officers from the Midtown South precinct were the first to arrive at the hotel, the Sofitel New York, near Times Square, and they recorded the hotel housekeeper’s first account of what had occurred. Once it was clear her claim involved felonious sexual contact, Mr. Browne said, they called in the members of the Manhattan Special Victims Squad. After Mr. Strauss-Kahn was apprehended at the airport, he was taken to the squad’s Manhattan headquarters, on East 123rd Street. He stayed there overnight on Saturday, sitting for much of the time in a chair, with his feet up on another one, and declining initial offers of food. His accuser was also brought to the squad’s office, where she identified him in a police lineup on Sunday afternoon. And when the first official documents from the court paperwork emerged, detailing the accusations, they emphasized the words of a Special Victims Squad detective, Steven Lane, upon which they were based. New York City formed its Special Victims Squad a few months after the first such unit in the United States was established, in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, said Linda A. Fairstein, who spent about a quarter-century as Manhattan’s chief sex crimes prosecutor. She said the detectives in the unit had a special skills set that helped them in dealing with victims who were often frightened or reluctant to speak. Ms. Fairstein said the experience they gained in dealing with just these kinds of cases helped them understand the complications they could pose and the kind of skepticism such charges often encountered among the public. “The idea is that these detectives are specially trained, one, to deal with the investigation of these cases, which have very specific and often nuanced details,” she said, “and, secondly, is their manner, to deal with victims who are generally, in most circumstances, emotionally traumatized because of the intimate nature of the assaults.” Each of the city’s boroughs has a Special Victims Squad. There are even more specialized units, some for children and one that keeps tracks of sexual offenders who are deemed likely to be repeat offenders and to track down prior offenders who do not register as required under sex-offender registration laws. Mr. Browne said the detectives chosen for such work were among the most experienced and had more seniority. They must undergo additional special training in areas like collecting DNA evidence , interviewing traumatized victims, preserving crime scenes and understanding the psychology of rapists and other sex offenders. They must understand the process for examining the victims physically, although nurses do the actual examinations and are also “cross-trained in child abuse and child sex abuse,” Mr. Browne said. The investigative work can often hinge on physical or forensic examinations, starting with basic elements like clothing. “If someone grabs you, there may be skin cells or some other forensic evidence on the clothing,” Mr. Browne said. Then, depending on the nature of the attack, a medical professional known as a sexual assault nurse examiner — someone with extensive training in examining victims of sexual assaults — will perform tests like swabbing the inside of the mouth, or conduct detailed examinations of other areas. As Ms. Fairstein said, a sex-attack victim must be examined “over every inch of her body, head to toe, and back to front.” The medical team, after making sure victims are not physically injured, will also take photographs of them, Mr. Browne said. He said the detectives prepared notes on the victim’s condition, to accompany the photographs and the victim’s account. Mr. Browne said 18 hospitals in the city had sex assault response teams, made up of sexual assault examiners and counselors to speak with the victims. In the case on Saturday, after the housekeeper told the detectives of the Special Victims Squad what had occurred, she was taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, which has one of the sex assault response teams, he said. All the forensic work is done inside hospitals and police laboratories, and getting final results of DNA evidence tests takes at least eight days and usually longer. Therein lies another difference between television and realty. “Unlike TV,” Mr. Browne said, “it does not happen between commercial breaks.” Ms. Fairstein agreed, saying that television’s depiction of police investigative work was often “glammed-up or exaggerated.” But she emphasized that in Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s case, the New York police moved with “amazing speed.” Even so, the real-life arrest probably could not compare with the television-ready plots where crimes are committed and solved in an episode. That, Ms. Fairstein said, is not how “any police department I am aware of works.”

Strauss-Kahn Dominique
Forensic Science
Sex Crimes
Police Department (NYC)
New York City


LeBron James Seethes, and Nets Are Hotter, Winning 5th in Row

Abstract: LeBron James spent much of Friday night fuming. Almost as soon as he stepped on the court, he was jawing at the referees, shooting them incredulous glares. He slammed the ball to the floor early in the fourth quarter when his teammate Michael Beasley committed an offensive foul. He told a heckler along the baseline to sit down. But after four quarters of impassioned play and a tense overtime period, James could only sit on the Miami bench with a faraway stare as the Nets outlasted the Heat to notch a rousing 104-95 win in double overtime at Barclays Center. The suddenly surging Nets (15-21) stretched their winning streak to five games as an angered James could only take his team so far. He led a fourth-quarter comeback to erase a double-digit deficit. But he barreled into Shaun Livingston with 36 seconds left in the first overtime and was called for a charge — his sixth foul of the game. He finished with 36 points, 7 rebounds and 5 assists, and still the Nets could feel as if they did their job. “Switches, trying to get up into him, making him feel uncomfortable,” Shaun Livingston said about the Nets’ efforts to unnerve James. “Those guys, if they start feeling good, teams are in for a long night.” James boiled over with 8 minutes 37 seconds left in regulation, when Mirza Teletovic wrapped him in a two-handed headlock on a drive to the basket — a flagrant foul 1. James jumped into Teletovic’s face and needed to be restrained by his teammates. “He went around the neck; it’s not a basketball play,” said James, who also accused Andrei Kirilenko of flopping on a number of occasions. James made the two ensuing free throws to cut the Nets’ lead to 3 points. He scored 13 points in the fourth quarter — 9 after Teletovic’s foul — and tied the game at 89-89 when he made one of two free throws with 40.8 seconds remaining. Paul Pierce put up a step-back 3-pointer at the buzzer, but it rattled out of the basket, sending the game into overtime. Norris Cole then forced a second overtime when he dribbled the length of the court and, with 3.3 seconds on the clock, sank a pull-up jumper from the top of the key to tie the game at 93-93. Pierce missed another fall-away jumper at the buzzer. But the second overtime — without James — proved anticlimactic as the Heat managed just 2 points in the period. James was asked how it felt to have to sit and watch his team unravel. “It was great,” he said sarcastically. “You should know the answer.” Image Paul Pierce scored 23 points Friday. The Nets’ offense has looked more fluid since he began starting at power forward. Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times The Nets’ spirits, meanwhile, were soaring. They had prevailed over the Heat, 101-100, way back on Nov. 2, their home opener. Before the game, they marveled at how long ago that first game seemed. The team’s look and feel have changed so much since then; it has experienced so much adversity. So even though it is early — not even halfway through the N.B.A. season — the Nets’ second win over the Heat, the defending champions, should give them some confidence. “It’s very high at this point,” said Joe Johnson, who led the Nets with 32 points, “and that’s where we want to keep it.” The Nets did many things right. They outrebounded the Heat, 49-39. They had 17 second-chance points compared with the Heat’s 2. Pierce finished with 23 points. Livingston played more than 51 minutes and finished with 19 points and 11 assists. Since 2014 began, the Nets have looked like a wholly changed team. Often running smaller lineups — starting with Pierce at power forward and Kevin Garnett at center — the offense has taken on a new fluidity. Their defense has become swarming and suddenly impenetrable. Erik Spoelstra, the Heat’s coach, said he was not surprised. “When they were going through their struggles last month, everyone was ready to make strong conclusions about them or anybody in the Eastern Conference, and I just kind of rolled my eyes,” Spoelstra said. “It was way too early, way too premature. They have a lot of talent.” The night, all around, had an altered feel. For one thing, both teams wore jerseys with players’ nicknames on the back. The back of Garnett’s jersey read Big Ticket. James wore King James. Kirilenko went with the Cyrillic spelling of his name. (Some players could not use their first choice nicknames. The Nets’ Mason Plumlee wanted Ma$e but was told the name was trademarked by the rapper. He went with Plums instead.) And Barclays Center, lukewarm so many nights, was pulsating with energy from the start. Pregame pyrotechnics left a thick haze hanging over the court, and Johnson and James provided some early heat from the floor. Johnson made eight shots before finally missing one. James finished the first quarter with 16 points, on 5-for-6 shooting. But he went scoreless in the second, and even he admitted his attitude dipped. “I apologized to my teammates at halftime,” James said. “I told them that my frustration and my body language was all wrong.” Miami was missing three regular starters. Dwyane Wade, who played 39 minutes during a loss to the Knicks on Thursday night, was ruled out with left knee soreness. Mario Chalmers (Achilles’ tendinitis) and Shane Battier (sore quadriceps) were also unavailable for the Heat. The onus to produce a win was all on James. And he almost did, before the Nets got under his skin once and for all. REBOUNDS Deron Williams (sprained left ankle) sat out Friday night and was not expected to play Saturday night.

Basketball
Brooklyn Nets
Miami Heat
LeBron James
Joe Johnson


Fallen Journalist Finds Solace and Success in Poetry

Abstract: Sometimes, the words come to her on the Garden State Parkway or on the Outerbridge Crossing, snippets of verse that capture a flash of light, an eruption of color, a piercing cry. She recites the words aloud, burning them into memory, as she steps out of the faculty parking lot at the College of Staten Island and climbs the stairs to her second-floor office. She recites the words because she wants to hear how they hit the air, to feel how they roll off the tongue, to know if they are discordant shards or melodious fragments of a sonorous whole. Where’s that girl going? Past slant sag porches, pea shuck, twangy box guitars begging under purple dayfall. She is Patricia Smith, Staten Island’s literary sensation, a poet, an English professor and a star on the national stage. Last month, she won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry , awarded by the Library of Congress to luminaries such as James Merrill , Louise Glück and Mark Strand . In April, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. “Extraordinary,” Lee Papa, the interim chairman of the English department at the College of Staten Island , said last week. It is all the more extraordinary if you consider her story. Patricia Smith, the nationally acclaimed poet, is also Patricia Smith, the disgraced former journalist who plunged into a black hole of her own making in 1998. She was a columnist for The Boston Globe, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a lauded wordsmith who resigned after admitting that she had invented characters and quotes in a scandal that prompted self-examination at newspapers across the country. Since then, she has salvaged a successful writing life from the ashes and quietly closed the door on her past. There is no mention of her years in journalism on her faculty bio page or on her personal website . Wearing hoop earrings and bluejeans in her office, she is animated and passionate as she describes her students, the rhythms of her work and the poems that create new worlds on the page. But when talk turns to her old life, her warm smile vanishes. Suddenly, she is brusque and guarded, a woman determined to shed the burden of her own history. “It’s been 16 years, you know,” said Ms. Smith, 59. “People have to give you a chance to be who you are now." Some people who claw their way out of the abyss turn their fall into a strand of their personal narrative. But Ms. Smith does not aspire to be the star of anyone’s tale of reinvention. A Poem by Patricia Smith Ms. Smith reads, “One Way to Run From It,’ a poem about the millions of African Americans who moved out of the South during the Great Migration. She does not talk about how her journalism career imploded, how her marriage fell apart afterward or how she sank into depression over her self-inflicted wounds. (In the past, she has suggested that she fabricated characters in her columns because she was stretched too thin, juggling poetry and other personal projects along with her newspaper job. She told me, “I really would just prefer to move forward.” ) So she does not linger on her emotional journey from there to here, as she moved from Boston to New Jersey, with stops in between; found work, for a time, as a columnist at Ms. Magazine; remarried; raised a granddaughter; earned a Master of Fine Arts degree; and soared to a level of literary success that has eluded many writers not to mention other fallen journalists, such as Janet Cooke , Stephen Glass , Jayson Blair and Mike Barnicle. ( Mr. Barnicle resigned from The Globe , shortly after Ms. Smith did, when editors found no evidence of the existence of two people he had written about.) There was life then and there is life now. And there is poetry, the bridge that carried her from one place to another. blood dirt streaking her thick ankles and bare feet, she is always running, screech raucous, careening, dare and games in her clothesline throat The poems kept coming, she said. In truth, they were always there, though in the beginning they were something of a sideline to her work as a journalist. By the time she resigned from The Boston Globe, Ms. Smith had already published three books and won four National Poetry Slams. But as she struggled to find her way forward, poetry increasingly became her balm, her elixir and her obsession, the work that soothes, energizes and consumes her. “It’s how I breathe and speak to the world,” she said. In 2006, Ms. Smith published “Teahouse of the Almighty,” a National Poetry Series selection that explores sex and sexuality and African-American art, among other themes. Then came “Blood Dazzler” in 2008, about Hurricane Katrina, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her latest book, published in 2012, is “Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah,” a memoir in verse, which I’ve quoted from in this column. It won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 2013 and, last month, the Bobbitt prize. “A tour de force,” said Mark Jarman, the noted poet who served as a judge for the Bobbitt prize. Walter V. Robinson, who discovered Ms. Smith’s fabrications in the 1990s and is currently The Globe’s editor at large, said that he marvels at her transformation. “The fact of the matter is that in life, for all of us, we are judged very much by how we bounce back from adversity,” Mr. Robinson said. “In that sense, I’m really heartened by what’s happened in her life.” In February, Ms. Smith will read from “Jimi Savannah” at the Library of Congress. She is juggling several new projects, including one that will pair dramatic monologues with 19th-century photographs of African-Americans. She has found a welcoming home for her work at the College of Staten Island, which is part of the City University of New York. In October, she earned tenure, two years early. The English department celebrated her recent honors by hanging fliers that read, “Congratulations to Professor Patricia Smith.” Mr. Papa said the tenure committee looked past her journalistic transgressions because they had no relevance to her current work. If Ms. Smith has her way, she will outlive them, outrun them. In “Jimi Savannah,” she described her mother, who left the South for a new life in Chicago. But to me, the verses also carry echoes of Ms. Smith’s own flight from the past, the turbulent odyssey that has swept her to new places, taking wing on that blue restless that drums her. Twisting on rusty hinge, that old porch door whines for one long second ′bout where she was. But that girl gone.

Poetry
Patricia Smith
Boston Globe
New Jersey
Staten Island
College of Staten Island


Surge in Natural Gas Has Utah Driving Cheaply

Abstract: SALT LAKE CITY — The best deal on fuel in the country right now might be here in Utah , where people are waiting in lines to pay the equivalent of 87 cents a gallon. Demand is so strong at rush hour that fuel runs low, and some days people can pump only half a tank. It is not gasoline they are buying for their cars, but natural gas . By an odd confluence of public policy and private initiative, Utah has become the first state in the country to experience broad consumer interest in the idea of running cars on clean natural gas. Residents of the state are hunting the Internet and traveling the country to pick up used natural gas cars at auctions. They are spending thousands of dollars to transform their trucks and sport utility vehicles to run on compressed gas. Some fueling stations that sell it to the public are so busy they frequently run low on pressure, forcing drivers to return before dawn when demand is down. It all began when unleaded gasoline rose above $3.25 a gallon last year, and has spiraled into a frenzy in the last few months. Ron Brown, Honda’s salesman here for the Civic GX, the only car powered by natural gas made by a major automaker in the country, has sold one out of every four of the 800 cars Honda has made so far this year, and he has a pile of 330 deposit slips in his office, each designating a customer waiting months for a new car. “It’s nuts,” Mr. Brown said. “People are buying these cars from me and turning around and selling them as if they were flipping real estate.” Advocates for these cars see Mr. Brown’s brisk sales as a sign that natural gas could become the transport fuel of the future, replacing much of the oil the nation imports. While that remains a distant dream, big increases recently in the country’s production of natural gas do raise the possibility of making wider use of the fuel. To a degree, it is already starting to happen in Utah, where the cost savings have gotten the public’s attention. Natural gas is especially cheap here, so that people spend about 87 cents for a quantity of gas sufficient to propel a car approximately the same distance as a $3.95 gallon of gasoline. The word about natural gas cars has been spreading in news reports and by word of mouth, and so many people in Utah are now trying to get their hands on used natural gas vehicles that they are drying up the national supply. Used car lots are stocking up, and beginning to look like county government parking lots with multiple lines of identical white Civic GXs once used in out-of-state fleets. Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. got into the act last year, spending $12,000 out of his own pocket to convert his state sport utility vehicle to run on natural gas. “We can create a model that others can look to,” Mr. Huntsman said in an interview. “Every state in America can make this a reality.” In fact, some unique factors apply in Utah. Natural gas prices at the pump here are controlled and are the cheapest in the country, while the price of conventional gasoline is one of the highest. Questar Gas, the public utility, has compressed-gas pumps around the state open to the public, a fueling infrastructure that few states can match. Special factors or not, the sudden popularity of natural gas vehicles here demonstrates their potential, according to advocates like T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oil billionaire who is financing a national campaign promoting wind power and natural gas to replace imported oil. “Utah shows that the technology is here and the fuel works and the fuel is better than foreign oil,” Mr. Pickens said. Natural gas cars produce at least 20 percent less greenhouse gas per mile than regular cars, according to a California study. No official figures are available on how many natural gas vehicles Utah has, in part because so many people go to garages that install conversion kits that are not certified by the Environmental Protection Agency and are therefore illegal. (Governor Huntsman has expressed concern, and some in the installation business have requested that the E.P.A. close down the unauthorized operations; the agency says it does not comment on possible investigations.) But Questar estimates the number at 6,000 and growing by several hundred a month. That is small compared with the 2.7 million vehicles registered in the state, but natural gas executives and state government officials say it makes Utah the fastest-growing market in the country for such cars. Cars fueled by compressed natural gas have been available intermittently in the United States for decades, and have found wide use in fleets, but have never attracted much consumer interest. The situation is markedly different abroad. Of the eight million natural gas vehicles operating worldwide, only about 116,000 were in the United States, mostly as fleet vans, buses and cars, according to a 2006 Energy Department estimate. Congress mandated the use of fleets capable of using alternative fuel cars for governments and some energy companies in the early 1990s, but public interest petered out as gasoline prices plummeted. Over the years, all the major car companies except Honda dropped their production in the United States. The cars have two major disadvantages — a shortage of fueling stations and limited range. (A typical natural gas car goes half as far on a full tank as a gasoline car.) Utah is one of the few states where a driver can travel across the state without being out of range of a station. The situation is a Catch-22: Carmakers do not want to make natural gas cars when few filling stations are set up for them, and few stations want to install expensive equipment to compress gas with so few cars on the road. Hundreds of stations supply compressed gas in a few states like California, New York and Arizona, but most are either closed to the public or charge only modestly less than regular gasoline prices. Retail natural gas prices in some states are triple the price in Utah. The only state that comes close to Utah’s low gas prices is Oklahoma, and a surge of natural gas car buying is going on there, too. The natural gas industry and some politicians are pushing to open up the market to gas-powered vehicles across the country. Even in states without fueling stations, a few drivers have switched by spending several thousand dollars to install a home gas compressor. A proposal on the ballot in California this fall would allow the state to sell $5 billion in bonds to finance rebates of $2,000 and more to buyers of natural gas vehicles. Legislation has been introduced in Congress to offer more tax credits to producers and consumers and mandate the installation of gas pumps in certain service stations, with the goal of making natural gas cars 10 percent of the nation’s vehicle fleet over the next decade. “If the incentives are right and the fuel and cars are available, natural gas can work,” said Gordon Larsen, supervisor for natural gas vehicle operations at Questar Gas. But he said that any drop in gasoline prices douses enthusiasm among drivers considering the switch. With gasoline hovering just below $4 a gallon for unleaded regular here, interest in the Salt Lake City area is strong. Questar reports that the volume of natural gas pumped at its 21 filling stations is up 240 percent this year from last, after a 50 percent rise in 2007. Demand has grown so fast that the compressors at many of Questar’s stations run low during the day, forcing drivers to settle for half a tank or fill up during off-peak hours. The natural gas car surge in Utah is because of several factors. Questar has had filling pumps around the state to fuel its own fleet of service vehicles since the 1980s, and because it had excess capacity, it opened those stations to the public. Natural gas prices are cheap because under Utah regulations, the utility is obliged to offer about half of the gas that it sells to its retail customers at the cost of production. The state and a few municipalities are preparing to open more filling stations. If the trend continues, it could eventually lower the environmental impact of driving in Utah. For now, demand for compressed-gas cars is outstripping supply. “People get into a frenzy and they just have to buy,” said Rick Oliver, owner of a company that converts vehicles. He said that in a recent online auction, a Utah buyer paid $19,000 for a 2001 Civic GX with 50,000 miles — the price a buyer of a new GX would pay after state and federal tax credits. Gary Frederickson, a 48-year-old computer technician, has bought six natural gas vehicles on Craigslist over the last year, flying as far as Portland and Oakland to pick up the cars. One 1998 Ford Contour he bought for $3,000 in effect cost him nothing because he will receive a $3,000 state tax credit for buying an alternative fuel car. “It’s crazy to be in Utah and have access to 85-cent-a-gallon fuel and not take advantage of it,” he said before a recent 2-cent increase.

Automobiles
Gas (Fuel)
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Utah
Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)