Senate Blocks Bill for Young Illegal Immigrants

NEW YORK TIMES
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
The Senate on Saturday blocked a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for certain young illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children, completed two years of college or military service and met other requirements, including passing a criminal background check.

The vote by 55-41 in favor of the bill, which is known as the Dream Act, effectively kills it for this year, and its fate is uncertain. The measure needed the support of 60 senators to cut off a filibuster and bring it to the floor.

Most immediately, the measure would have helped grant legal status to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant students and recent graduates whose lives are severely restricted, though many have lived in the United States for nearly their entire lives.

Young Hispanic men and women filled the spectator galleries of the Senate, many of them wearing graduation caps and tassels in a symbol of their support for the bill. They held hands in a prayerful gesture as the clerk called the roll and many looked stricken as its defeat was announced.

President Obama had personally lobbied lawmakers in support the bill. But Democrats were not able to hold ranks. Mr. Obama, in a statement, called the outcome “incredibly disappointing” and said that he would continue fighting to win approval of the bill.

“It is not only the right thing to do for talented young people who seek to serve a country they know as their own, it is the right thing for the United States of America,” Mr. Obama said. “Our nation is enriched by their talents and would benefit from the success of their efforts.”

“The Dream Act is important to our economic competitiveness, military readiness, and law enforcement efforts,” he said, adding, “It is disappointing that common sense did not prevail today but my administration will not give up.”

In a floor speech, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, a main champion of the Dream act, urged a yes vote. “Thousands of children in America who live in the shadows and dream of greatness,” he said. “They are children who have been raised in this country. They stand in the classrooms and pledge allegiance to our flag. They sing our ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ as our national anthem. They believe in their heart of hearts this is home. This is the only country they have ever known.”

But opponents of the measure said it was too broad and would grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.

Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican senator from Alabama who led the fight against the bill said, “This bill is a law that at its fundamental core is a reward for illegal activity.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator who voted for the bill said, “I support the goal of the Dream Act which is to enable children who were brought to the United States by their parents to earn citizenship through service in the armed forces or pursuit of higher education,” Ms. Murkowski said. “ I do not believe that children are to blame for the decision of their parents to enter or remain in the United States unlawfully. The reality is that many of these children regard America as the only country they ever knew. Some were not even told that they were unlawfully in the United States until it came time for them to apply for college. America should provide these young people with the opportunity to pursue the American dream. They have much to offer America if given the chance.”

Ms. Murkowski also expressed an openness to dealing with the wider immigration issue. “ I firmly believe that Congress needs to embrace the wider immigration question, starting with securing our borders, and I plan to work with my colleagues on this issue in the new Congress,” she said.

Senate Repeals ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

NEW YORK TIMES
By CARL HULSE
WASHINGTON — The Senate on Saturday voted to strike down the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military, bringing to a close a 17-year struggle over a policy that forced thousands of Americans from the ranks and caused others to keep secret their sexual orientation.

By a vote of 65 to 31, with eight Republicans joining Democrats, the Senate approved and sent to President Obama a repeal of the Clinton-era law, known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a policy critics said amounted to government-sanctioned discrimination that treated gay, lesbian and bisexual troops as second-class citizens.

Mr. Obama hailed the action, which fulfills his pledge to reverse the ban, and said it was “time to close this chapter in our history.”

“As commander in chief, I am also absolutely convinced that making this change will only underscore the professionalism of our troops as the best-led and best-trained fighting force the world has ever known,” he said in a statement after the Senate, on a preliminary 63-to-33 vote, beat back Republican efforts to block final action on the repeal bill.

The vote marked a historic moment that some equated with the end of racial segregation in the military.

It followed an exhaustive Pentagon review that determined the policy could be changed with only isolated disruptions to unit cohesion and retention, though members of combat units and the Marine Corps expressed greater reservations about the shift. Congressional action was backed by Pentagon officials as a better alternative to a court-ordered end.

Supporters of the repeal said it was long past time to abolish what they saw as an ill-advised practice that cost valuable personnel and forced troops to lie to serve their country.

“I don’t care who you love,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said as the debate opened. “If you love this country enough to risk your life for it, you shouldn’t have to hide who you are.”

Mr. Wyden showed up for the Senate vote despite saying earlier that he would be unable to do so because he would be undergoing final tests before his scheduled surgery for prostate cancer on Monday.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and his party’s presidential candidate in 2008, led the opposition to the repeal and said the vote was a sad day in history.

“I hope that when we pass this legislation that we will understand that we are doing great damage,” Mr. McCain said. “And we could possibly and probably, as the commandant of the Marine Corps said, and as I have been told by literally thousands of members of the military, harm the battle effectiveness vital to the survival of our young men and women in the military.”

He and others opposed to lifting the ban said the change could harm the unit cohesion that is essential to effective military operations, particularly in combat, and deter some Americans from enlisting or pursuing a career in the military. They noted that despite support for repealing the ban from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other military commanders have warned that changing the practice would prove disruptive.

Senator Lieberman said the ban undermined the integrity of the military by forcing troops to lie. He said 14,000 people had been forced to leave the armed forces under the policy. “What a waste,” he said.

The fight erupted in the early days of President Bill Clinton’s administration and has been a roiling political issue ever since. Mr. Obama endorsed repeal in his presidential campaign and advocates saw the current Congress as their best opportunity for ending the ban. Dozens of advocates of ending the ban — including one severely wounded in combat before being forced from the military — watched from the Senate gallery as the debate took place.

In Kentucky, Noah’s Ark Theme Park Is Planned

NEW YORK TIMES
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Facing a rising tide of joblessness, the governor of Kentucky has found one solution: build an ark.

The state has promised generous tax incentives to a group of entrepreneurs who plan to construct a full-size replica of Noah’s ark, load it with animals and actors, and make it the centerpiece of a Bible-based tourist attraction called Ark Encounter.

Since Gov. Steven L. Beshear announced the plan on Wednesday, some constitutional experts have raised alarms over whether government backing for an enterprise that promotes religion violates the First Amendment’s requirement of separation of church and state. But Mr. Beshear, a Democrat, said the arrangement posed no constitutional problem, and brushed off questions about his stand on creationism.

“The people of Kentucky didn’t elect me governor to debate religion,” he said at a news conference. “They elected me governor to create jobs.”

The theme park was conceived by the same Christian ministry that built the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., where dioramas designed to debunk evolution show humans and dinosaurs coexisting peacefully on an earth created by God in six days. The ministry, Answers in Genesis, believes that the earth is only 6,000 years old — a controversial assertion even among many Bible-believing Christians.

Although the Creation Museum has been a target of ridicule by some, it has drawn 1.2 million visitors in its first three years — proving that there is a sizable paying audience for entertainment rooted in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

On Friday, The Lexington Herald-Leader, Kentucky’s second-largest newspaper, criticized Mr. Beshear in an editorial for a plan that it said would result in low-wage jobs and a poor image for the state.

“Anyone who wants to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible has that right,” the editorial said. “However, the way the Beshear administration handled this makes it appear Kentucky either embraces such thinking or is desperate to take advantage of those who do.”

The developers of Ark Encounter, who have incorporated as a profit-making company, say they expect to spend $150 million, employ 900 people and attract 1.6 million visitors from around the world in the first year. With the Creation Museum only 45 miles away, they envision a Christian tourism corridor that would draw busloads from churches and Christian schools for two- and three-day visits.

“It’s our opportunity to present accurate, factual biblical information to people about a subject that they’re really interested in,” said Mike Zovath, a senior vice president of Answers in Genesis.

But some advocates of separation of church and state say that by providing tax incentives to an explicitly Christian enterprise, Kentucky is violating the constitutional prohibition on government establishment of religion.

Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional scholar and founding dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, said: “If this is about bringing the Bible to life, and it’s the Bible’s account of history that they’re presenting, then the government is paying for the advancement of religion. And the Supreme Court has said that the government can’t advance religion.”

He added, “The fact that it’s an economic development plan doesn’t excuse it.”

Republicans achieve top goal in Obama tax-cut plan

DELL NEWS
By CHARLES BABINGTON

WASHINGTON (AP) - Republicans control neither the House nor the Senate - and certainly not the White House. But they largely dictated the terms of President Barack Obama's proposed tax-cut compromise, which disgruntled congressional Democrats want to discuss in closed meetings that are likely to be rowdy.

Republicans prevailed on their biggest demand: continuing Bush administration tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, despite Obama's 2008 campaign promise to let them expire for households earning more than $250,000 a year. Obama, while acknowledging Democratic unrest, agreed to extend the tax breaks for two years, whereas Republicans wanted a permanent extension.

House and Senate Democratic leaders were noncommittal on the proposal, saying they would discuss it in closed caucus meetings Tuesday. Vice President Joe Biden, a key player in seeking a compromise, scheduled a rare visit to the Senate Democrats' weekly luncheon the same day.

Obama explained Monday that the concession was the only way to prevent a congressional impasse that would cause the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 to expire for all taxpayers. With 9.8 percent of Americans unemployed, he said, that would be "a chilling prospect."

Liberal groups were furious at his willingness to bend, but Obama said he rejects "symbolic victories" that hurt average Americans.

His plan also would renew jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed, and grant a one-year reduction in Social Security taxes paid by workers but not by employers.

The president had barely stopped speaking before top Republicans applauded his proposals, while most Democrats kept a sullen silence.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., thanked Obama for "working with Republicans on a bipartisan plan to prevent a tax hike on any American and in creating incentives for economic growth."

Because they hold solid majorities in both chambers, Democrats must provide many votes for the tax package to become law, even if Republicans overwhelmingly support it.

Some Democrats quickly denounced the plan. "Senate Republicans have successfully used the fragile economic security of our middle class and the hardship of millions of jobless Americans as bargaining chips to secure tax breaks for the very wealthiest among us," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.

The emerging agreement includes tax breaks for businesses that the president said would contribute to the economy's recovery from the worst recession in eight decades.

The proposed Social Security tax cut would apply to virtually every working American. For one year they would pay 4.2 percent of their income, instead of 6.2 percent, to the government retirement program, fattening U.S. paychecks by $120 billion in 2011.

Someone earning $40,000 a year would receive a $800 benefit, and a $70,000 earner would save $1,400, officials said. More than three-fourths of all Americans pay more in these so-called payroll taxes than in federal income taxes.

The White House said money from other sources would be shifted so the Social Security trust fund loses no revenue.

Obama said he reluctantly made another concession to Republicans, concerning the estate tax. It would tax estates worth more than $5 million at a rate of 35 percent, a GOP goal. Democrats favored a $3.5 million threshold, with a 45 percent tax on anything higher.

Obama's willingness to compromise with Republicans comes a month after the GOP won resounding victories in congressional, gubernatorial and state legislative elections. They will control the House in the new Congress that convenes next month. In the Senate, they will easily be able to filibuster any provisions they oppose.

Addressing his liberal critics Monday, Obama said, "Sympathetic as I am to those who prefer a fight over compromise, as much as the political wisdom may dictate fighting over solving problems, it would be the wrong thing to do."

"I'm not willing to let working families across this country become collateral damage for political warfare here in Washington," he said.

Under his plan, unemployment benefits would remain in effect through the end of next year for workers who have been laid off for more than 26 weeks and less than 99 weeks. Without an extension, 2 million individuals would have lost their benefits over the holidays, the White House said, and 7 million would have done so by the end of next year.

Obama's proposal also would extend a variety of other tax breaks for lower and middle-income families, including the Earned Income Tax Credit and the child tax credit.

Celebrating Secession Without the Slaves

NEW YORK TIMES
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
ATLANTA — The Civil War, the most wrenching and bloody episode in American history, may not seem like much of a cause for celebration, especially in the South.

And yet, as the 150th anniversary of the four-year conflict gets under way, some groups in the old Confederacy are planning at least a certain amount of hoopla, chiefly around the glory days of secession, when 11 states declared their sovereignty under a banner of states’ rights and broke from the union.

The events include a “secession ball” in the former slave port of Charleston (“a joyous night of music, dancing, food and drink,” says the invitation), which will be replicated on a smaller scale in other cities. A parade is being planned in Montgomery, Ala., along with a mock swearing-in of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy.

In addition, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and some of its local chapters are preparing various television commercials that they hope to show next year. “All we wanted was to be left alone to govern ourselves,” says one ad from the group’s Georgia Division.

That some — even now — are honoring secession, with barely a nod to the role of slavery, underscores how divisive a topic the war remains, with Americans continuing to debate its causes, its meaning and its legacy.

“We in the South, who have been kicked around for an awfully long time and are accused of being racist, we would just like the truth to be known,” said Michael Givens, commander-in-chief of the Sons, explaining the reason for the television ads. While there were many causes of the war, he said, “our people were only fighting to protect themselves from an invasion and for their independence.”

Not everyone is on board with this program, of course. The N.A.A.C.P., for one, plans to protest some of these events, saying that celebrating secession is tantamount to celebrating slavery. “I can only imagine what kind of celebration they would have if they had won,” said Lonnie Randolph, president of the South Carolina N.A.A.C.P.

He said he was dumbfounded by “all of this glamorization and sanitization of what really happened.” When Southerners refer to states’ rights, he said, “they are really talking about their idea of one right — to buy and sell human beings.”

The secession events are among hundreds if not thousands that will unfold over the next four years in honor of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial. From Fort Sumter to Appomattox, historic sites across the South, and some in the North, plan to highlight various aspects of America’s deadliest conflict — and perhaps its least resolved.

Most historians say it is impossible to carve out slavery from the context of the war. As James W. Loewen, a liberal sociologist and author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” put it: “The North did not go to war to end slavery, it went to war to hold the country together and only gradually did it become anti-slavery — but slavery is why the South seceded.”

In its secession papers, Mississippi, for example, called slavery “the greatest material interest of the world” and said that attempts to stop it would undermine “commerce and civilization.”

Four in 10 say marriage is becoming obsolete

MSNBC
By HOPE YEN
The Associated Press
As families gather for Thanksgiving this year, nearly one in three American children is living with a parent who is divorced, separated or never-married. More people are accepting the view that wedding bells aren't needed to have a family.

A study by the Pew Research Center highlights rapidly changing notions of the American family. And the Census Bureau, too, is planning to incorporate broader definitions of family when measuring poverty, a shift caused partly by recent jumps in unmarried couples living together.

..About 29 percent of children under 18 now live with a parent or parents who are unwed or no longer married, a fivefold increase from 1960, according to the Pew report being released Thursday. About 15 percent have parents who are divorced or separated and 14 percent have parents who were never married.Within those two groups, a sizable chunk — 6 percent — have parents who are live-in couples who opted to raise kids together without getting married. According to the Pew survey, 39 percent of Americans say marriage is becoming obsolete. And that sentiment follows U.S. census data released in September that showed marriages hit an all-time low of 52 percent for adults 18 and over.

When asked what constitutes a family, the vast majority of Americans agree that a married couple, with or without children, fits that description. But four of five surveyed pointed also to an unmarried, opposite-sex couple with children or a single parent. Three out of five people said a same-sex couple with children is a family. "Marriage is still very important in this country, but it doesn't dominate family life like it used to," said Andrew Cherlin, a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University. "Now there are several ways to have a successful family life, and more people accept them."

The changing views of family are being driven largely by young adults 18-29, who are more likely than older generations to have an unmarried or divorced parent or have friends who do. Young adults also tend to have more liberal attitudes when it comes to spousal roles and living together before marriage, the survey found.

But economic factors, too, are playing a role. The Census Bureau recently reported that opposite-sex unmarried couples living together jumped 13 percent this year to 7.5 million. It was a sharp one-year increase that analysts largely attributed to people unwilling to make long-term marriage commitments in the face of persistent unemployment.

Other findings:

•34 percent of Americans called the growing variety of family living arrangements good for society, while 32 percent said it didn't make a difference and 29 percent said it was troubling.
•44 percent of people said they have lived with a partner without being married; for 30-to-49-year-olds, that share rose to 57 percent. In most cases, those couples said they considered cohabitation as a step toward marriage.
•62 percent said that the best marriage is one where the husband and wife both work and both take care of the household and children. That's up from 48 percent who held that view in 1977.

A push to add gays to school policies on bullying

By DAAREL BURNETTE II, Star Tribune
The Minnesota School Board Association is advising school districts across the state to expand their harassment and violence policy to specify several more groups, including gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) students.

The association also is pushing for boards to put more pressure on school officials to intervene when they witness bullying. "We wanted to make it clear that safety is important for all students no matter sex, race, creed or sexual orientation," said Greg Abbott, School Board Association spokesman. The recommendation will likely be controversial as its 335-member districts decide whether to act on the association's recommendation.

"Our concern with the proposed revision is that it only targets certain types of bullying and not all forms of bullying," said Tom Prichard, the president of Minnesota Family Council. "Singling out sexual orientation often leads to use of curriculum which promote homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage. Such efforts don't address the problem of bullying, which we all agree must be stopped."

The association's updated harassment policy prohibits any form of harassment or violence "on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, familial status, and status with regard to public assistance, sexual orientation or disability." The association also is now recommending that districts take "disciplinary action" if school officials don't report bullying.

In September, Anoka-Hennepin School District came under national fire after it updated its bullying policy to include GLBT students with a clause that told teachers to stay neutral on the issue of homosexuality.

"People are itching for a fight on this one because it's so high profile right now," said Jim Roth, who specializes in education law at St. Mary's University and Hamline University.

The School Board Association's Abbott said the proposed wording isn't new, it's from Minnesota's historic human rights legislation passed in 1993. That law made Minnesota the first state to ban employment discrimination based on both sexual orientation and gender identity.

Since then, politicians have worked to expand that language to include other groups through multiple bills that have largely failed in Congress. (Federal and state statutes override school district policies.)

Although there has not been a lawsuit, advocacy groups and politicians have been grappling in recent months with the question of what role, if any, schools play in preventing bullying.

A written policy might clarify issues for teachers who aren't sure what their role is, Roth said.

Lee suing Toyota for what he lost

STAR/TRIBUNE
The attorney for Koua Fong Lee isn't sure how much three years of a man's life are worth, but he's setting his sights high.

Attorney Bob Hilliard wondered: How do you put a price tag on missing the first three years of your children's lives or on depriving your family of your support?

A lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in St. Paul on behalf of Lee and his family against Toyota Motor Corp. didn't specify a dollar figure. And Hilliard, an attorney from Corpus Christi, Texas, wouldn't speculate Tuesday about what he might ask a jury to award. But he noted that a verdict against Ford Motor Co. in 1987 came in at "over $100 million."

The federal lawsuit was filed on behalf of Lee; his wife, Panghoua Moua; their four children, and his brother and father, who were injured in a 2006 crash that ultimately killed three people and sent Lee to prison. The suit alleges that Toyota knew about safety problems in its cars but failed to fix them or warn customers.

The suit was not unexpected but was a long time coming. A week ago, U.S. Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan ruled that Lee could intervene in a lawsuit brought against the automaker by Bridgette Trice, whose 7-year-old daughter, Devyn Bolton, died as a result of the accident caused by Lee's 1996 Camry.

Celeste Migliore, national business and field communications manager for Toyota Motor Sales USA, said in a statement: "We sympathize with all of the families affected by this incident, and we did not oppose Mr. Lee's plan to file his complaint against Toyota in this related federal court case. However, Toyota believes that any unintended acceleration allegations are without merit. The 1996 Camry involved in this case has never been subject to an acceleration-related recall and is designed to meet or exceed all Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards."

Lee, 33, of St. Paul, was driving his family home from their Minneapolis church on June 10, 2006, a sunny Saturday afternoon, and took the Snelling Avenue exit ramp off Interstate 94. Lee insisted from the start that he frantically pressed the brake pedal, but instead of slowing down, the car sped up. Experts estimated it was going up to 90 miles per hour when it slammed into an Oldsmobile Ciera. The driver, Javis Trice Adams, 33, and his son, Javis Adams Jr., 9, died at the scene. Devyn was left a quadriplegic and died about 18 months later.

Lee was convicted of criminal vehicular homicide and sentenced to eight years in prison. At that time, few people had heard about sudden unintended acceleration, one of a series of problems that caused a massive recall of newer Toyota models starting in the fall of 2009.

That recall prompted Lee's case to be reopened, and after listening to a dozen people testify that they, too, had experienced runaway engines or sudden acceleration in their Toyotas, a Ramsey County judge ruled last summer that he should get a new trial. Shortly thereafter, prosecutors dismissed the charges against him.

The lawsuit said Lee required psychological counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder because of both the accident and his imprisonment and that he now requires sleep medication. It said his wife and four children suffered "severe emotional distress."

It said that "well before the subject accident," Toyota was aware of sudden unintended acceleration problems in its vehicles because "hundreds of other similar incidents ... had been previously reported both to Toyota and to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration."

"Despite this knowledge," the lawsuit said, "Toyota never made any significant changes to improve the acceleration and the electrical system." An easily installed brake override system that was available in other cars in the same model year could have fixed those problems, Hilliard said Tuesday.

"I have come to the conclusion that the older-model Toyotas will become more and more susceptible to sudden unintended acceleration as they age," Hilliard said. "Toyota makes their cars to last forever. They create a car that will last long enough for a defect to occur. Then they don't fix the defect.

"Seriously, what is the value of what happened to Koua?" Hilliard asked. "If Mr. Toyoda [Toyota president Akio Toyoda] says OK, I'll come to the United States and I'll submit myself to jail for three years, we'll call it even."

Climate scientists prepare to take the fight to skeptical politicians

STAR/TRIBUNEBy NEELA BANERJEE, Tribune Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Faced with increasing political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and have vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

"We're scared," said John Abraham, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, who is organizing a clearinghouse of experts for the media and others probing climate change. "I think a lot of scientists are scared the window of opportunity is closing. Scientists have not done a good job in communicating the dangers of climate change and the degree of certainty that we're undergoing. And we have an ethical responsibility to communicate effectively."

The efforts reveal a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media. Many now say they are willing to go toe-to-toe with their critics, some of whom gained new power after the Republicans won control of the House Nov. 2.

On Monday, the American Geophysical Union, the country's largest association of climate scientists, plans to announce that 700 climate scientists have agreed to speak out as experts on questions about global warming and the role of man-made air pollution. Some are prepared to go before what they consider potentially hostile audiences on conservative talk-radio and TV shows.

Abraham, who last spring wrote a widely disseminated response to climate-change skeptics, is organizing a "Climate Rapid Response Team," which so far has more than three dozen leading scientists to defend the scientific community's consensus on global warming. Others are also preparing a handbook on the human causes of climate change, which they plan to start sending to U.S. high schools as soon as this fall.

During the recent election campaign, skepticism about climate change became a rallying cry for many Republican candidates. Of the more than 100 new GOP members of Congress, 50 percent are climate-change skeptics, according to an analysis of campaign statements by the Center for American Progress.

Prominent Republican congressmen such as Darrell Issa, R-Calif., Joe Barton, R-Texas, and F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wis., have pledged to investigate the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Abraham, who said his work on the clearinghouse is his own time, acknowledged that the assertiveness by scientists runs a risk of drawing the issue even further into politics.

"But it already is a politicized issue," he said. "What we really need is good information to make tough decisions. We're not promoting a partisan view ... All we're trying to do is provide good information about global warming so people whose job it is to come up with solutions can come up with good ones."

Republicans gain House control with big wins; Obama calls Boehner, underscoring power shift

STAR/TRIBUNEBy CALVIN WOODWARD , Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Republicans drew on the support of independents and the energy of tea party activists to fashion a resounding victory in the House in midterm elections, increased their strength in the Senate and quickly served notice they intend to challenge President Barack Obama with a conservative approach to the economy.

"We hope President Obama will now respect the will of the people, change course, and to commit to making changes they are demanding," Ohio Rep. John Boehner, the House speaker-in-waiting, told cheering partisans as GOP gains mounted Tuesday night.

Obama called Boehner to offer congratulations, and also telephoned Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and top Democrats in a series of conversations that reflected the shifting balance of power.

The Republican leaders penciled in a late-morning news conference, to be followed a short while later by Obama's own meeting with reporters at the White House.

But with the economy still struggling to shake off the effects of the worse recession in decades, the Federal Reserve was expected to unveil a new program designed to further lower interest rates on mortgages and other loans. The hope is that would eventually prompt companies to step up hiring and create new jobs.

Incomplete returns showed the GOP picked up at least 60 House seats — the biggest party turnover in more than 70 years — and led for four more, far in excess of what was needed for a majority. About two dozen races remained too close to call.

On their night of triumph, Republicans also gained at least six Senate seats, and tea party favorites Rand Paul in Kentucky, Mike Lee in Utah and Marco Rubio in Florida were among their winners.

Not all the tea party insurgents won. Christine O'Donnell lost badly in Delaware, for a seat that Republican strategists once calculated would be theirs with ease. And in Nevada, Majority Leader Harry Reid dispatched Sharron Angle in an especially costly and brutal campaign in a year filled with them.

Town watches in horror as Somali Islamist militants execute 2 girls

STAR/TRIBUNEBy MOHAMED OLAD HASSAN , Associated Press
MOGADISHU, Somalia - The two accused spies died amid a fusillade of bullets from a firing squad organized by a hardline Islamist militia. The condemned pair were only girls, aged 15 and 18, and their grieving relatives say they were uneducated, usually stayed at home and could not have spied for anyone.

Horrified residents of the town of Belet Weyne, in western Somalia, were forced to watch the execution by al-Shabab on Wednesday. One woman fainted as the girls were gunned down by 10 masked executioners.

"Those who watched the event could not bear the painful experience. Two very young girls were shot as they watched and no one could help," said Dahir Casowe, a local elder.

Al-Shabab is linked to al-Qaida and has carried out whippings, amputations and executions to enforce its own strict interpretation of Islam. But this was the first public execution of girls in Belet Weyne, which al-Shabab took over just over a year ago.

Only shortly before the executions, Sheik Mohamed Ibrahim sentenced the girls to death for spying for government soldiers fighting al-Shabab. The only qualifications Ibrahim needed to be appointed a judge by al-Shabab were that he be male and know the Quran.

Abdiwali Aden, a witness, told The Associated Press by phone that al-Shabab militiamen had walked through Belet Weyne's streets, using microphones and handheld speakers to order residents to attend the pending executions.

Later, Ayan Mohamed Jama, 18, and Huriyo Ibrahim, 15, wearing veils and blindfolds, were brought before the hundreds of gathered residents. As they were mowed down with assault rifles, the girls shouted "There is no God but Allah," said a witness who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals. A woman fainted, said Da'ud Ahmed, another witness.

Ayan's father, Mohamed Jama, said she had gone missing for two days. Then a week ago relatives informed him that she was in the custody of al-Shabab. Jama said he went to try and see his daughter but was not allowed to.

"Al-Shabab officials there told me that she was captured during fighting between the militants and the government soldiers outside the town and that she would be brought before court. As I waited for good news, she was killed on Wednesday. I am shocked and cannot say more," said Jama.

Osman Ahmed, one of Huriyo's cousins, said the girls came from poor families who could not afford to send them to school so they stayed at home. "There was no way uneducated young girls could spy for anybody," Ahmed said.

Sheik Yusuf Ali Ugas, the governor of the Hiran region who was appointed by al-Shabab, told the crowd over a loudspeaker that the girls were captured during fighting and that they admitted to spying. But Sadia Osman, who witnessed the execution, said one of the girls proclaimed her innocence.

Ugas warned residents against using their mobile phones or cameras to photograph the execution, saying they risked amputation if they did so. He indicated there may be more executions.

Use of Drug Challenged in Death Penalty Case

NEW YORK TIMES
Arizona plans to execute Jeffrey Landrigan next week, but his lawyers are arguing that one of the drugs that the state intends to use to end his life may not be good enough.

The planned execution of Mr. Landrigan, convicted of murder in 1990, coincides with a shortage of the anesthetic used in the state’s execution protocol, sodium thiopental. The thiopental shortage has already caused delays in executions around the country. Arizona officials have the drug, but defense lawyers for Mr. Landrigan are asking to stay the execution until the state reveals where it got its supply.

If Arizona obtained the drug from an overseas supplier, they argue, it may be substandard and violate Food and Drug Administration rules for importation. Kent Scheidegger, legal director for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a group that supports the death penalty, said that arguing over the safety of a drug for executions is “absurd.”

“As long as it’s a real drug manufacturer and not mixed up in somebody’s garage, it doesn’t matter where it came from,” Mr. Scheidegger said. While the Food and Drug Administration is supposed to determine whether drugs are safe and effective, he said, “in this case, safe and effective are opposites.”

Shelly Burgess, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A., said that imported drugs must go through an approval process before being used in the United States, but added that executions are “clearly not under our purview or authority.”

Megan McCracken, an adviser on lethal injection issues to the death penalty clinic at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, argued that the origin of the drug used was nonetheless important under the law.

She cited the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, and a 2008 decision by the Supreme Court. In that case, Baze v. Rees, the court left room for challenges to execution methods that involve a demonstrated risk of severe pain compared with available alternatives.

To Ms. McCracken, the lack of information about the drug opens Arizona to a challenge under the Baze decision. “Its provenance matters,” she said. “I don’t think you can say that thiopental is thiopental is thiopental.”

Judge Roslyn O. Silver of United States District Court on Thursday asked the state to voluntarily reveal where the drug had come from. She set the matter for oral argument on Monday.

The state, in a brief filed Friday, declined to identify the source of the drug, citing state confidentiality laws intended to shield those involved in executions from harassment by death penalty opponents. It denied that the drug to be used was substandard, and suggested that the criticism of the drug was an “improper delay tactic.”

The state, the brief said, “takes its responsibility to carry out an execution seriously and has attempted to construct a protocol to carry out executions as humanely as possible.”

Kent E. Cattani, an Arizona assistant attorney general, said that the supply of the drug obtained by the state was effective, and noted that the protocol in place involved several methods for determining that the inmate was unconscious before administering the final drug. While an important concern with the administration of powerful anesthetics is that the patient might receive too much, Mr. Cattani explained, “it’s obviously not a consideration here.”

In fact, the amount that is given to inmates is more than 10 times the recommended dose for surgical procedures. “There’s little or no chance that he would regain consciousness,” he said.

If the judge insists on knowing the origins of the drug, he said, “we would ask that it be disclosed under seal.” To Ms. McCracken, the state’s response was inadequate, akin to saying, “Just trust us,” she said.

Tougher laws, safer cars: Fatal crashes involving teen drivers fall by a third over 5 years

STAR TRIBUNE
By MIKE STOBBE , Associated Press

ATLANTA - Fatal car crashes involving teen drivers fell by about a third over five years, according to a new federal report that partly credits the drop to tougher state limits on younger drivers.

The number of deaths tied to these accidents fell dramatically from about 2,200 in 2004 to 1,400 in 2008, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.

The CDC looked at fatal accidents with drivers who were 16 or 17. There were more than 9,600 such incidents during the five-year span and more than 11,000 people died in the crashes.

The rate of these fatal crashes has been declining since 1996. CDC officials credit a range of factors, including safer cars with airbags and highway improvements.

But experts say a chief reason is that most states have been getting tougher, curbing when teens can drive and when they can carry passengers.

"It's not that teens are becoming safer," said Russ Rader, spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an Arlington, Va.-based research group funded by auto insurance companies.

"It's that state laws enacted in the last 15 years are taking teens out of the most hazardous driving situations," such as driving at night or with other teens in the car, he said.

Graduated driver's licensing programs, as they are called, began appearing in 1996 and now 49 states have them. Some are more restrictive than others, which may be one reason why death rates vary by state, Rader said.

The CDC found that Wyoming had the highest death rate, with about 60 traffic fatalities involving 16- and 17-year-old drivers per 100,000 people that age. New York and New Jersey, which have rigorous driving restrictions on teens, had the lowest rates, at about 10 per 100,000.

New Jersey and New York the most restrictive licensing programs — New Jersey essentially bans kids from driving until they are 17, and New York City prohibits teen driving until 18. Wyoming has a graduated driver's licensing program, but it's somewhat lax. For example, younger teens are allowed to drive until 11 p.m., while other states force them off the roads starting at 9 p.m., Rader noted.

Chilean Miners Rescued

NEW YORK TIMES
The 33 miners who had been trapped underground for more than two months all returned to the surface late on Oct. 13th after a successful rescue operation that inspired Chile and riveted the world. The miners traveled up a narrow, nearly half-mile rescue shaft in a specially designed capsule. The final phase of the long rescue effort took roughly 22 hours. Luis Urzúa, the shift leader who organized the miners’ lives while they were underground, was the last to come up.

Many of the miners came bounding out of their rescue capsule as pictures of energy and health, able not only to walk, but, in one case, to leap around, hug everyone in sight and lead cheers. Their apparent robustness was testimony to the rescue diet threaded down to them through the tiny borehole that reached them on Aug. 22, but also to the way they organized themselves to keep their environment clean, find water and get exercise. Another factor was the excellent medical care they received from Chilean doctors who ministered to them through tubes leading 2,300 feet into the earth.

BACKGROUND: On Aug. 5, 2010, a gold and copper mine near the northern city of Copiapó, Chile caved in, trapping 33 miners in a chamber about 2,300 feet below the surface. For 17 days, there was no word on their fate. As the days passed, Chileans grew increasingly skeptical that any of the miners had survived — let alone all of them. But when a small bore hole reached the miners’ refuge, they sent up a message telling rescuers they were still alive.

A video camera threaded deep underground captured the first images of the miners, all apparently in good health. The discovery sparked jubilant celebrations nationwide as rescue efforts energized the country, which owes its prosperity to the rich copper mines in its northern region.

The miners later used a modified telephone to sing Chile’s national anthem to the hundreds of teary-eyed relatives celebrating above. In Santiago, the capital, motorists honked their car horns and people cheered wildly on subway platforms.

News reports suggested that ventilation shafts had survived the mine’s collapse, allowing enough fresh air to reach the chamber where the miners were trapped. The miners were able to use heavy equipment to provide light and charge the batteries of their head lamps, and they drank water from storage tanks to survive.

School Sued over Nose Piercing

TWEEN TRIBUNE
The American Civil Liberties Union claims in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that a North Carolina school violated the constitutional rights of a 14-year-old student by suspending her for wearing a nose piercing.

The lawsuit from the state chapter of the ACLU seeks a court order allowing Ariana Iacono to return immediately to Clayton High School, which has kept her on suspension for four weeks since classes started.

The complaint hinges on Iacono's claim that her nose piercing isn't just a matter of fashion, but an article of faith. She and her mother, Nikki, belong to a small religious group called the Church of Body Modification, which sees tattoos, piercings and the like as channels to the divine.

"This is a case about a family's right to send a 14-year-old honor student to public school without her being forced to renounce her family's religious beliefs," wrote lawyers from the ACLU and the Raleigh firm Ellis & Winters in a brief supporting the lawsuit.

The Johnston County school system has a dress code banning facial piercings, along with short skirts, sagging pants, "abnormal hair color" and other items deemed distracting or disruptive.

But the dress code also allows for exemptions based on "sincerely held religious belief," and says, "the principal or designees shall not attempt to determine whether the religious beliefs are valid, but only whether they are central to religious doctrine and sincerely held."

That's where the school stepped over the line, the lawsuit alleges, saying officials repeatedly dismissed explanations of the Iaconos' faith by the family and their Raleigh minister.

"We followed all the rules, so I don't understand why the school is being so unreasonable," Nikki Iacono said. "The dress code policy allows for a religious exemption, and I explained to the principal and various school officials how my daughter's nose stud is essential to the expression of our family's religious values."

Terri Sessoms, spokeswoman for Johnston County schools, said the district had received notice of the lawsuit, but officials can't comment on disciplinary actions involving individual students.

Ariana Iacono has been suspended four times since fall classes started, missing 19 out of 28 school days so far. On Monday, the school system denied an appeal of her most recent suspension, and told her she'd have to attend South Campus Community School, an alternative facility for students with disciplinary and other problems. She still wouldn't be allowed to wear the nose piercing in the other school.

Nikki Iacono, 32, joined the Church of Body Modification in 2009, and her daughter followed a year later. Their minister, Richard Ivey, thinks school officials are dismissing a little-known belief system simply because it's unfamiliar.

"I'm shocked that it's gone this far, but I guess I'm not surprised they'd be so quick to stick with their first judgment and not hear anyone else's reasoning," he said.

Could California's Prop. 19 lead to pot legalization across the U.S.?

TIME MAGAZINE
Next month, Californians will vote on Proposition 19: the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010. Prop 19 would make recreational use of marijuana entirely legal — and allow cash-strapped cities to raise funds by taxing it. Completely legalizing pot may sound like a radical idea, but not to the people who are actually going to decide: the latest Public Policy Institute of California poll found that 52% of likely voters support Prop 19, with just 41% who oppose it.

In fact, Prop 19 is polling better than Senator Barbara Boxer or her Republican opponent, Carly Fiorina. It is also outpolling the gubernatorial candidates, Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Meg Whitman. It is gaining support as the election grows nearer — and it has the backing of the state Service Employees International Union, perhaps the state's most powerful union.

One of the main arguments for rethinking marijuana laws is economic. A new study by the libertarian Cato Institute found that turning cannabis into a regulated commodity would save $8.7 billion in law-enforcement costs annually, while generating $8.7 billion in revenue.

Supporters of Prop 19 argue that in these dire fiscal times, when the state has been laying off teachers and hospitals have been firing nurses, putting low-level pot users through the legal system is a luxury California cannot afford. Governor Schwarzenegger — who opposes Prop 19, which he believes goes too far — said when he signed the pot-infraction law that bringing criminal charges for pot possession is a waste of "limited resources" in a time when the state faces "drastic budget cuts." The governor may also have been thinking about conditions in his state's prisons, which house twice as many inmates as they were designed to hold, and were ordered last year to reduce the overcrowding.

But the biggest factor driving the pro-legalization movement is simply changing attitudes. People today are more skeptical of the claim that pot is a gateway drug and that people who use it are destined to move on to harder substances. In fact, a study published last month in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior found that life factors like employment status and stress were stronger predictors of whether teenagers would use other illegal drugs than whether they had smoked marijuana.

Many supporters of legalization acknowledge that marijuana has bad health effects. They just argue that it is hypocritical to make pot use a crime, when alcohol — which has well-documented links to automobile fatalities, domestic abuse and birth defects — remains legal. The alcohol industry has been contributing to the "Say No on Prop 19" campaign, no doubt worried that if pot is legalized, it will cut into beer and liquor sales.

Army investigators seize photos of soldiers posing with Afghan corpses, severed body parts

STAR/TRIBUNE
By GENE JOHNSON , Associated Press
SEATTLE - Those who have seen the photos say they are grisly: soldiers beside newly killed bodies, decaying corpses and severed fingers. The dozens of photos, described in interviews and in e-mails and military documents obtained by The Associated Press, were seized by Army investigators and are a crucial part of the case against five soldiers accused of killing three Afghan civilians earlier this year.

Troops allegedly shared the photos by e-mail and thumb drive like electronic trading cards. Now 60 to 70 of them are being kept tightly shielded from the public and even defense attorneys because of fears they could wind up in the news media and provoke anti-American violence.

"We're in a powder-keg situation here," said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute for Military Justice and a military law professor at Yale University. Since the images are not classified, "I think they have to be released if they're going to be evidence in open court in a criminal prosecution," he said.

Maj. Kathleen Turner, a spokeswoman for Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Seattle, where the accused soldiers are stationed, acknowledged that the images were "highly sensitive, and that's why that protective order was put in place."

At least some of the photos pertain to those killings. Others may have been of insurgents killed in battle, and some may have been taken as part of a military effort to document those killed, according to lawyers involved in the case.

Among the most gruesome allegations is that some of the soldiers kept fingers from the bodies of Afghans they killed as war trophies. The troops also are accused of passing around photos of the dead and of the fingers.

Four members of the unit — two of whom are also charged in the killings — have been accused of wrongfully possessing images of human casualties, and another is charged with trying to impede an investigation by having someone erase incriminating evidence from a computer hard drive. "Everyone would share the photographs," one of the defendants, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock, told investigators. "They were of every guy we ever killed in Afghanistan."

The graphic nature of the images recalled famous photos that emerged in 2004 from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those pictures — showing smiling soldiers posing with naked, tortured or dead detainees, sometimes giving a thumbs-up — stirred outrage against the United States at a critical juncture. The photos were a major embarrassment to the American military in an increasingly unpopular and bloody war.

In a chilling videotaped interview with investigators, Morlock talked about hurling a grenade at a civilian as a sergeant discussed the need to "wax this guy."

Morlock's attorney, Michael Waddington, said the photos were not just shared among the defendants or even their platoon. He cited witnesses who told him that many at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in Kandahar Province kept such images, including one photograph of someone holding up a decapitated head blown off in an explosion.

On Sept. 9, Army prosecutors gave a military representative of the defendants, Maj. Benjamin K. Grimes, packets containing more than 1,000 pages of documents in the case. Included were three photographs, each of a different soldier lifting the head of a dead Afghan, according to an e-mail Grimes sent to defense lawyers.

Later that day, before the documents could be shared with the defense lawyers, the prosecutors returned to Grimes' office and demanded to have the packets back, Grimes wrote, according to a copy of the e-mail first reported by The New York Times. The prosecutors cited national security interests and a concern that the photos could be released to the media.

Michael T. Corgan, a Vietnam veteran who teaches international relations at Boston University, said it should be no surprise that, even after Abu Ghraib, some soldiers take gruesome pictures as war souvenirs.

"They're proof people are as tough as they say they are," Corgan said. "War is the one lyric experience in their lives — by comparison every else is punching a time clock. They revel in it, and they collect memories of it."

Census reveals 'new poor' in many Twin Cities suburbs

By JEREMY OLSON, Star Tribune
Poverty and joblessness rose sharply in many Twin Cities suburbs last year, according to U.S. census estimates released Tuesday, along with a rise in what advocates call the "new poor'' -- families whose financial stability has crumbled in the economic recession.

In Anoka County, for example, the unemployment rate shot up to 6.8 percent in 2009 from 3.3 percent in 2008. Child poverty in Dakota County more than doubled, to 8.2 percent in 2009, while the rate of uninsured residents increased in Washington County from 5 percent in 2008 to 6.7 percent in 2009.

While the suburbs' numbers may be lower than those in Minneapolis and St. Paul -- urban cores accustomed to battling poverty -- their increases from 2008 to 2009 are what struck many population experts.

"Now poverty is reaching up and snatching people down into it," said Robert Odom, president of Minneapolis-based Love Inc., which mobilizes churches to confront social problems in their communities. "They were pretty secure, living the American dream, and now it's been snatched from them."

The new census data also showed increases in the number of adults who have never married, and a decline in the number of women who gave birth. State Demographer Tom Gillaspy said both are hallmarks of the recession and its impact on people's life choices.

In the big picture, Minnesota remains among the most prosperous and healthy states in the nation, Gillaspy said. However, the data show that the recession and the wave of job cuts that started in 2008 did hurt the state in 2009.

According to the census figures: Minnesota's median household income fell from an inflation-adjusted $56,767 in 2008 to $55,616 in 2009. The state's share of manufacturing jobs continued to slide. The rate of adults without jobs rose from 3.5 percent in 2008 to 5.8 percent in 2009.

The state also saw its rate of residents without health insurance increase from 8.4 percent in 2008 to 9.1 percent in 2009. Only Minnesota and Alaska showed statistically significant increases.

Suburban counties are "moving from a very prosperous kind of attitude to one of very great concern," Gillaspy said. "If you're living out there, even if you have a job, you're going to notice people around you who are losing their jobs or losing their homes."

Advocates for the homeless said more suburban families are coming to urban homeless shelters. Families in Anoka found it so difficult to secure beds in downtown Minneapolis that area churches are now sheltering some of them. The street outreach coordinator for St. Stephen's Human Services in Minneapolis said she has responded to calls of homeless families living in cars in retail parking lots in Edina and Plymouth, and a woods in Minnetonka.

While the census data are a year old, the trends appear to be continuing into 2010, even though the recession technically ended last year.

Anoka County saw a 41 percent increase in food assistance cases from January to July this year. Many families that lost jobs in 2008 benefited from the federal economic stimulus package, which extended unemployment benefits. Now those extended benefits have run out, said Edna Hoium, a veteran social services administrator in Anoka County.

"I would say this is as bad as it's been. It's certainly a longer duration," she said. "It does appear to me to have hit a higher number of people who have never been in our system before."

Gubernatorial candidates debate education

STAR/TRIBUNE
Republican Tom Emmer and Independence Party candidate Tom Horner went on the offensive during Thursday's gubernatorial debate on education, attacking Education Minnesota, the state teachers union, and its choice for governor, DFL candidate Mark Dayton.

Though all three candidates agreed that effective teachers and principals are key to improving education, they differed significantly over how to keep good educators in schools, flush out bad ones and fund needed reforms.

Emmer said that when he talks with business and higher education leaders, he hears a common theme: "We're not producing what we have to out of our K-12 system." Horner and Emmer called for change in the state's teacher tenure system, one of the most hotly debated issues in education.

Despite pressure to consider such change, Education Minnesota has clung tightly to tenure, which affords teachers great protections after a three-year probationary period.

Dayton, who has the union's endorsement, agreed that banishing "bad teachers and bad principals" is key, but argued that wholesale change is not necessary. He'd opt to use a scalpel rather than a saw to refine the law, he said.

Emmer also pledged to support alternative-teacher licensure, another proposal that Education Minnesota has opposed. Supporters of alternative licensure are pushing for quicker, more direct methods of getting more people without teaching degrees into classrooms, especially in subjects where there are teacher shortages such as science, math and world languages.

Horner accused Emmer of double-talk on early childhood education, saying that he had voted against funding for such programs. Emmer referred to a single vote on the issue as a snapshot of his record.

"A six-year record isn't a snapshot; it's a motion picture," Horner shot back.

Dayton attacked Emmer's plan to deny education funding increases for the next two years, arguing that his stance would continue the trend of underfunding public education.

With the state's growing student population, Emmer's plan to hold funding "harmless" by not increasing or decreasing it, would actually do more harm than good, Dayton said, by not adjusting for inflation. "This is an investment in the future of our state," he said.

In his closing statement, Emmer made his platform clear: He believes that more spending won't solve the problems. "Politicians have been making promises my whole life," he said. "This is about recognizing that we have limited resources."

Despite Setback, Gay Rights Move Forward

NEW YORK TIMES
Efforts that could lead to a reversal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that prohibits openly gay soldiers from serving in the military may have stalled in the United States Senate, but the legal fight is advancing in the federal courts along with other important gay rights litigation.

In addition to the military policy, two laws restricting gay rights — the federal Defense of Marriage Act and the California ban on same-sex marriage — have been declared unconstitutional by federal judges in recent months.

The three recent decisions on gay rights issues suggest that federal judges are increasingly willing to strike down what they see as antigay bias embodied in legislation, said Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean at the University of California, Irvine. “Federal judges are no longer persuaded that a moral condemnation of homosexuality justifies government discrimination,” he said.

The path ahead for the litigation in all three cases is long, difficult to predict and risky, legal experts say. The ultimate question is whether a majority of justices on the United States Supreme Court will agree with the district court judges’ interpretation of the court’s own rulings in cases like Lawrence v. Texas, a case that struck down a state sodomy law.

In the 6-to-3 majority opinion in Lawrence, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote of due process rights associated with “autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression and certain intimate conduct.”

While Justice Kennedy argued that the decision did “not involve whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter,” Justice Antonin Scalia angrily predicted in dissent that the majority opinion would, in fact, justify homosexual marriage.

To Richard Epstein, a libertarian legal scholar at New York University, the logic of the Kennedy opinion in Lawrence inexorably leads to a grant of rights against discrimination. “There’s just no way, once you start down that road, that you’re going to get off of it,” he said. “If you can’t criminalize it, you can’t discriminate against it.”

While saying that he is “no seer,” he predicted that if the three cases made their way to the Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy would ultimately write majority opinions that upheld the three recent district court opinions.

The district court judges are reflecting an increasingly obvious shift in public opinion, said Andrew Koppelman, a professor of law at Northwestern University. “The gay rights movement has been a spectacularly successful movement for cultural change,” he said. “A few decades ago these people were cultural pariahs. It was taken for granted that gay people are mentally ill, contaminated and unclean. Now the cultural valence has flipped — it is that view of gay people which is itself stigmatized.”

As life-tenured appointees, judges can look beyond politics to posterity, Professor Koppelman said. “Right now it seems like a good bet that if you are friendly to gay rights claims,” he said, “future generations will honor you for that.”

President Obama has had an effect as well, said Jennifer Pizer, director of the national marriage project of the Western regional office of Lamba Legal, a public interest legal group for gay issues. Activists have criticized the president for the Justice Department’s defense of the federal laws being challenged, but he has also urged the repeal of laws that discriminate against gay men and lesbians.

“Having the president repeatedly say these rules discriminate and cause harm — so the discussion shifts to choice of processes for removing them rather than justifying them — seems to have changed the discussion,” she said.

On that, Ms. Pizer and Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, agree, though he deplores the trend. “I think he’s creating an environment in which the courts feel comfortable pushing the envelope with these decisions,” Mr. Perkins said.

Afghan elections marked by violence, low turnouts and fraud

FERMOYLE'S NOTE: We have forces in Afghanistan that are trying to help the government there gain control, because we don't want to see the Taliban take over again. (The Taliban sheltered Al Qaeda before and after they planned 9/11.) There are grave concerns, however, that the government we are trying to help is corrupt and incompetent and will be unable to ever gain support of the people there.

NEW YORK TIMES
By ROD NORDLAND and ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: September 18, 2010

KABUL, Afghanistan — Hundreds of polling stations either closed or came under attack and at least 10 civilians were killed in Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections on Saturday, even as officials insisted the vote was generally safe nationwide.

The city of Kandahar seemed particularly hard hit. Explosions were heard every half hour through the morning, and 31 rockets were fired by insurgents, according to an intelligence official there, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. Kandahar Gov. Tooryalai Wesa toured polling places to encourage voters to turn out, but his own convoy was hit by a roadside bomb, slightly damaging his armored car but hurting no one.

Nationwide, authorities could only confirm that 92 percent of the planned 5,816 polling centers had opened as planned, and no word had been heard from the other 8 percent, raising concerns that security conditions had forced them to close, according to the Independent Election Commission. The commission had previously canceled about 1,000 polling centers because the authorities could not secure them.

Halfway through the voting day, even in a safe neighborhood of downtown Kabul, only 150 men and 130 women had cast their ballots at the Naderia High School. But there was little violence in the capital, and late in the day, long lines began to form at some of the centers around the city.

Outside the capital, in the rural Guldara District in Kabul Province, village polling places were lightly attended. And in one spot, only four women voted, other than official election observers. In the more populated district center, however, 650 people, including 150 women, had voted, and others were streaming in an hour before polls closed at 4 p.m.

In Kandahar, the Taliban papered the city with nightletters on the eve of the election, warning people not to vote in “Americanized elections” and that anyone doing so would be a target.

In Dand District just outside the city, polling places set aside for women had not received a single voter, although several hundred men had cast ballots. In the center of the city, another women’s polling center had attracted only 23 voters in the morning.

Kandahar is the traditional stronghold of the Taliban where NATO and Afghan forces have stepped up military operations recently.

Those who did vote in Kandahar were nervous. “I am so scared to come to the polling station,” said Shafiqa, 49, “my family insisted I not come, but I have to because this is my country and I want to use my vote for someone I like.”

In Kunduz Province, northern Afghanistan, 16 civilians were injured during election-related violence, some while casting their votes and others in their homes when rockets were fired into them by insurgents. A statement posted on a pro-Taliban website claimed the insurgents had attacked more than 100 polling centers.

However, the Afghan monitoring organization, the Free and Fair Elections Foundation, said generally the elections were safe. “Though there were numerous attacks, none were severe enough to disrupt voting on a wide scale,” F.E.F.A. said in a statement.

There were numerous accounts of fraud.

In the first reported instance of fraud, a woman who worked for the I.E.C. in Lashkar Gah, Helmand Province, was arrested with 1,500 fake voter registration cards, according to Dawood Ahmadi, the spokesman for the Helmand governor’s office. He said the employee, whom he did not name, was the daughter of a female candidate, Habiba Sadat.

In Paktika Province, a man was arrested for trying to use 1,600 fake voter registration cards on behalf of a parliamentary candidate, Rahmatullah Wahid Yar, according to Rohullah Samoon, the spokesman for the governor.

At a polling center at the Ghazi Khan High School in Kunduz city, journalists and election observers watched as I.E.C. officials and supporters of some of the candidates locked the doors for two hours and filled out ballots themselves.

F.E.F.A. also said that in nearly 3,000 polling centers — about half of the total — its monitors discovered that the ink used to mark voters’ fingers to prevent repeated voting was easily washed off, even though it was supposed to have been indelible.

Obama Declares an End to Combat Mission in Iraq

WASHINGTON — President Obama declared an end on two weeks ago to the seven-year American combat mission in Iraq, saying that the United States has met its responsibility to that country and that it is now time to turn to pressing problems at home.

In a prime-time address from the Oval Office, Mr. Obama balanced praise for the troops who fought and died in Iraq with his conviction that getting into the conflict had been a mistake in the first place.

“We have sent our young men and women to make enormous sacrifices in Iraq, and spent vast resources abroad at a time of tight budgets at home,” Mr. Obama said. “Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn the page.”

Seeking to temper partisan feelings over the war on a day when Republicans pointed out that Mr. Obama had opposed the troop surge generally credited with helping to bring Iraq a measure of stability, the president offered some praise for his predecessor, George W. Bush. Mr. Obama acknowledged their disagreement over Iraq but said that no one could doubt Mr. Bush’s “support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security.”

Mr. Obama spoke for about 18 minutes, saying that violence would continue in Iraq and that the United States would continue to play a key role in nurturing a stable democracy there. He celebrated America’s fighting forces as “the steel in our ship of state,” and pledged not to waver in the fight against Al Qaeda.

Over the last decade, “we have spent over a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas,” he said. “And so at this moment, as we wind down the war in Iraq, we must tackle those challenges at home with as much energy and grit and sense of common purpose as our men and women in uniform who have served abroad.”

The United States still has 49,700 soldiers in Iraq. That is less than a third of the number of troops in Iraq during the surge in 2007. Under an agreement between Iraq and the United States, the remaining troops are to leave by the end of 2011, though some Iraqi and American officials say they think that the agreement may be renegotiated to allow for a longer American military presence.

The remaining “advise and assist” brigades will officially concentrate on supporting and training Iraqi security forces, protecting American personnel and facilities, and mounting counterterrorism operations.

Planned Koran Burning Draws International Scorn

NEW YORK TIMES
The international outcry over a tiny Florida congregation’s plan to burn copies of the Koran on Sept. 11 intensified on Thursday, drawing vocal condemnations from world leaders and touching off angry protests in corners of the Muslim world.

Officials in Muslim countries urged restraint, seeking to head off any violent reactions if the Florida church goes ahead with its plans to set fire to several copies of the Koran on the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks this Saturday.

Meanwhile, President Obama joined a litany of high-ranking American officials to condemn the Koran burning, saying that the act, amplified by a global media, could put American troops at risk and fan anger against the United States. Mr. Obama called the planned event “a destructive act” and said it would be a “recruitment bonanza for Al Qaeda.”

American embassies and consulates were reviewing their security policies, and several diplomatic missions in the Muslim world posted statements prominently on their Web sites condemning the planned event. The State Department issued a travel alert on Thursday saying the burning could catalyze violent anti-American demonstrations.

In 2005, violent protests erupted in Afghanistan and Pakistan world after Newsweek published report — one it later retracted — saying that American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed a Koran down the toilet. At least 17 deaths were blamed on the riots.

Terry Jones, the pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center in Florida who is at the center of the Koran uproar, has so far resisted calls to cancel the bonfire.

The relationship between the United States and the Muslim world, deeply strained by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been further aggravated in recent months by a furious debate over an Islamic group’s plans to build a community center two blocks from the World Trade Center site.

The president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, condemned the planned burning as despicable and said it could cause “irreparable damage to inter-faith harmony and also to world peace.” Leaders in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, and India urged President Obama to intervene.

But American officials have said they could do little to prevent the congregation from exercising its constitutional right to free speech.

In Nigeria, which has been wracked by violence between the predominately Muslim north and Christian south, President Goodluck Jonathan posted a message on his Facebook page saying that burning the Koran would “assault the sensibilities of our Muslim brothers and sisters.”

Addressing Mr. Jones, Mr. Jonathan wrote, “Be mindful of the Golden Rule taught by Jesus Christ: Do unto others as you would want others to do unto you.”

The French, British and German governments, all with troops serving in Afghanistan, have joined the condemnations.

Senate confirms Elena Kagan to Supreme Court

The Oval
By J. Scott Applewhite, AP
Chalk up another legacy for President Obama, as the Senate confirms Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.

Kagan, who will be the fourth woman in history to serve on the high court after she is sworn in on Saturday, won the job on a Senate vote of 63-37.

"I am confident that Elena Kagan will make an outstanding Supreme Court justice," Obama said in a brief statement from Chicago. He also noted that for the first time in history, the nine-member court will have three female justices serving at the same time; Kagan will join Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's first high court appointee.

Currently the U.S. Solicitor General, Kagan has "earned her place at the top of the legal profession," said Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

Kagan's background as a Supreme Court law clerk, as well as stints in the Senate and in the Clinton and Obama administrations, also gives her "experience in all three branches of our government," Leahy said. "This is unique."

Kagan watched the vote from her office at the Justice Department.

Only five Republicans voted in favor of Kagan's nomination. Last year, just nine Republicans voted for Sotomayor.

Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass, one of Kagan's home state senators, voted against her. Brown had joined Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in introducing the former Harvard Law School dean to the Judiciary Committee, but he was carefully non-committal during that appearance.

In a statement, Brown cited Kagan's lack of judicial experience. "When it comes to the Supreme Court, experience matters," he said. "No classroom can substitute for the courtroom itself."

Kagan also lost the vote of one Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

The 63-37 tally is the third closest Supreme Court vote since the rejection of Robert Bork in 1987; only justices Clarence Thomas (52-48) and Samuel Alito (58-42) had narrower confirmations.

Other Democrats portrayed Kagan as a hard-working groundbreaker who opened doors for conservatives to join the faculty of Harvard Law School Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., called her "a superbly qualified nominee" and defended her lack of judicial experience by noting that more than one-third of the nation's justices came to the high court "without having worn a judge's robe."

In addition to her lack of judicial experience, Republicans bashed Kagan for espousing liberal views on abortion and gun control. In Kagan, Obama has appointed "someone who shares his progressive, elitist vision and is willing to advance it from the bench," warned Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Kagan's ascension as the 112th Supreme Court justice may not mean that much in terms of the court's philosophical direction. She replaces retired Justice John Paul Stevens, part of a four-person liberal bloc that includes Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Obama appointee Sotomayor, who joined the court last year.

Chief Justice John Roberts leads a five-member conservative group that includes Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito; Kennedy is sometimes a swing vote in close cases.

In his statement, Obama noted that the Senate Judiciary Committee conducted 17 hours of hearings on Kagan, and that she answered more than 500 questions from the senators.

"I'd say they got a pretty good look at Elena Kagan," Obama said.

Obama Picks Kagan as Justice Nominee

NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON — President Obama nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan as the nation’s 112th justice, choosing his own chief advocate before the Supreme Court to join it in ruling on cases critical to his view of the country’s future.

After a monthlong search, Mr. Obama informed Ms. Kagan and his advisers on Sunday of his choice to succeed the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.

In settling on Ms. Kagan, the president chose a well-regarded 50-year-old lawyer who served as a staff member in all three branches of government and was the first woman to be dean of Harvard Law School. If confirmed, she would be the youngest member and the third woman on the current court, but the first justice in nearly four decades without any prior judicial experience.

That lack of time on the bench may both help and hurt her confirmation prospects, allowing critics to question whether she is truly qualified while denying them a lengthy judicial paper trail filled with ammunition for attacks. As solicitor general, Ms. Kagan has represented the government before the Supreme Court for the past year, but her own views are to a large extent a matter of supposition.

Perhaps as a result, some on both sides of the ideological aisle are suspicious of her. Liberals dislike her support for strong executive power and her outreach to conservatives while running the law school. Activists on the right have attacked her for briefly barring military recruiters from a campus facility because the ban on openly gay men and lesbians serving in the military violated the school’s anti-discrimination policy.

Replacing Justice Stevens with Ms. Kagan presumably would not alter the broad ideological balance on the court, but her relative youth means that she could have an influence on the court for decades to come, underscoring the stakes involved.

In making his second nomination in as many years, Mr. Obama was not looking for a liberal firebrand as much as a persuasive

Arrest Made in Times Square Bomb Case

NEW YORK TIMES
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM, MARK MAZZETTI and PETER BAKER
Federal agents and police detectives arrested a Connecticut man, a naturalized United States citizen from Pakistan, shortly before midnight Monday for driving a car bomb into Times Square on Saturday evening in what turned out to be an unsuccessful attack, Justice Department officials announced.

The man, Faisal Shahzad, 30, was taken into custody at Kennedy Airport on board an Emirates flight to Dubai, according to the airline and an early-morning statement Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. delivered at the Justice Department in Washington. Two other passengers were removed from the plane, Emirates said, but it was unclear whether they were connected with the bombing attempt.

Mr. Shahzad was believed to have recently bought the 1993 Nissan Pathfinder that was found loaded with gasoline, propane, fireworks and fertilizer in the heart of Times Square, a person briefed on the investigation said. Charges against Mr. Shahzad, who had returned recently from a trip to Pakistan, were not announced, but he was expected to be charged Tuesday in federal court.

“Over the course of the day today, we have gathered significant additional evidence that led to tonight’s arrest,” Mr. Holder said. “The investigation is ongoing, as are our attempts to gather useful intelligence, and we continue to pursue a number of leads.” He continued, “But it’s clear that the intent behind this terrorist act was to kill Americans.”

Pakistan’s interior minister, Rehman Malik, said Tuesday that his country would cooperate with American officials as they continued their investigation, Reuters reported. In a statement, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg thanked law enforcement officials, saying their “swift efforts led to this arrest after only 48 hours of around-the-clock investigation.”

“I hope their impressive work serves as a lesson to anyone who would do us harm,” he said. The authorities began focusing on Mr. Shahzad after they tracked the sport utility vehicle to its previously registered owner in Bridgeport, Conn., who had advertised it for sale on several Web sites. The former owner said the buyer paid cash, and the sale was handled without any formal paperwork.

The former owner told investigators that it appeared the buyer was of Middle Eastern or Hispanic descent, but could not recall his name. It was unclear how agents from the Joint Terrorist Task Force identified Mr. Shahzad. Federal authorities provided few details on Monday night about the suspect or the scope of any conspiracy in the failed attack.

The authorities have been exploring whether the man or others who might have been involved in the attempted bombing had been in contact with people or groups overseas, according to federal officials.

Officials cautioned that the investigation of possible international contacts did not mean they had established a connection to a known terrorist group. “It’s a prominent lead that they’re following, the international association,” said a senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation. “But there’s still a lot of information being gathered.”

Mr. Shahzad was taken into custody after he was identified by the Department of Homeland Security’s United States Customs and Border Protection, according to a joint statement issued by the office of the Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the southern district of New York, the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department.

Mr. Shahzad was already aboard Emirates flight 202 to Dubai when officials called it back before departure, the airline said. All of the passengers were taken off the plane, and they, their luggage and the Boeing 777 were screened before the flight was allowed to depart, about seven hours late, at 6:29 a.m.

President Obama was notified of the arrest at 12:05 a.m. by his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, the sixth time he had been briefed on the case over the past day, said Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary.

Early Tuesday, at Mr. Shahzad’s former home in Shelton, Conn., just outside Bridgeport, a neighbor said that Mr. Shahzad and his wife, Huma Mian, spoke limited English and kept mostly to themselves. The couple had two young children, a girl and a boy, said the neighbor, Brenda Thurman.

Ms. Thurman said the couple had lived at the house at 119 Long Hill Avenue for about three years before moving out last year. Mr. Shahzad left around May, she said, and his wife followed about a month later.

The recent sale of the Pathfinder began online. An advertisement that appears to be for the vehicle, which had 141,000 miles on the odometer and was listed for sale at $1,300 on at least two Web sites, emphasized that it was in good condition — “CLEAN inside and out!!” — with a recently repaired alternator and a new gas pump, distributor and front tires.

The police earlier on Monday sifted through footage from 82 city cameras mounted from 34th Street to 51st Street between Avenue of the Americas and Eighth Avenue, and from untold number of business and tourist cameras.

Investigators initially focused on a man who appeared to be in his 40s who was seen on one video, walking away from the area where the Pathfinder was parked and through Shubert Alley, which runs between 44th and 45th Streets. He looked over his shoulder at least twice and pulled off a shirt, revealing a red T-shirt underneath.

The New York police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said investigators still wanted to speak to that man but acknowledged that he might not be connected to the failed bombing.

Gulf Coast Towns Brace as Huge Oil Slick Nears Marshes

NEW YORK TIMES
By LESLIE KAUFMAN and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
COCODRIE, La. — Oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico unabated Saturday, and officials conveyed little hope that the flow could be contained soon, forcing towns along the Gulf Coast to brace for what is increasingly understood to be an imminent environmental disaster.

The spill, emanating from a pipe 50 miles offshore and 5,000 feet underwater, was creeping into Louisiana’s fragile coastal wetlands as strong winds and rough waters hampered cleanup efforts. Officials said the oil could hit the shores of Mississippi and Alabama as soon as Monday. The White House announced that President Obama would visit the region on Sunday morning.

Adm. Thad W. Allen, the commandant of the Coast Guard, who is overseeing the Obama administration’s response to the spill, said at a news conference Saturday evening that he could not estimate how much oil was leaking per day from the damaged underwater well. “There’s enough oil out there that it’s logical it’s going to impact the shoreline,” Admiral Allen said.

The imperiled marshes that buffer New Orleans and the rest of the state from the worst storm surges are facing a sea of sweet crude oil, orange as rust. The most recent estimate by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded on April 20 and sank days later, was gushing as much as 210,000 gallons of crude into the gulf each day. Concern is mounting that the flow may soon grow to several times that amount.

The wetlands in the Mississippi River Delta have been losing about 24 square miles a year, deprived of sediment replenishment by levees in the river, divided by channels cut by oil companies and poisoned by farm runoff from upriver. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita took large, vicious bites. The questions that haunt this region are how much more can the wetlands take and does their degradation spell doom for an increasingly defenseless southern Louisiana?

Many variables will dictate just how devastating this slick will ultimately be to the ecosystem, including whether it takes days or months to seal the leaking oil well and whether winds keep blowing the oil ashore. But what is terrifying everyone from bird watchers to the state officials charged with rebuilding the natural protections of this coast is that it now seems possible that a massive influx of oil could overwhelm and kill off the grasses that knit the ecosystem together.

Healthy wetlands would have some natural ability to cope with an oil slick, said Denise Reed, interim director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of New Orleans. “The trouble with our marshes is they’re already stressed, they’re already hanging by a fingernail,” she said. It is possible, she said, that the wetlands’ “tolerance for oil has been compromised.” If so, she said, that could be “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Let teens drink? Parents wrestle with the question

(CNN) -- Martha was tough on her children when it came to alcohol in their early teens. When she saw beer at a party her then-14-year-old daughter was attending, she broke it up and told all the kids to call their parents. When her son was about the same age, she grounded him for a month after learning he had a drinking episode.

But her outright prohibition softened when her children reached their late teens. She lives in Georgia, a state that allows parents to let their underage children -- but no one else's -- have alcohol in their own homes. She lets her now-18-year-old son have a beer or a little wine at home, in part to kill curiosity, but won't serve his friends.

Suspecting alcohol will be part of his senior prom experience, she's having him take a limo. While planning to escort him and his friends to a rented beach house for spring break this year, she expected to have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy, but she wouldn't furnish alcohol, and she'd take away their car keys.

It's probably unrealistic, she says, for parents to forbid alcohol to older teens outright. Instead, she teaches moderation, safety and responsibility. "If you can be around your child and monitor them all the time and watch everything they do, and if it works for you and them, then [prohibit it]," said Martha, an Atlanta-area resident who spoke on condition that her last name be withheld. "But I think, given what's out there, you have to teach them how to be safe and considerate of others."

U.S. law requires states, as a condition of getting highway funds, to prohibit people under 21 from buying or publicly possessing alcohol. Some states have situational exceptions, but no state allows people to furnish alcohol to an underage person who isn't their child, ward or spouse, said Mike Hilton, deputy director of the division of epidemiology and prevention research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Yet minors find a way get alcohol elsewhere. About 10.1 million people ages 12 to 20 in the United States -- more than a quarter of that age group -- drank at least once in a certain month's period in 2008, according to that year's National Survey on Drug Use and Health. More than 30 percent of underage drinkers said they paid for their most recent drink; for those who didn't pay, the most common source was 21 or older and not a relative, according to the survey for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

With matters of health, safety, morality and legality to consider, what goes through parents' minds when they determine what stance to take with their children on alcohol? Debbie Taylor says she told her son, Casey, that she didn't want him to drink while underage, but if he ever did, he was not to drive. She wishes her message had been different.

Casey Taylor, of Casper, Wyoming, was 18 when he died of alcohol poisoning in July 2002. Just two months out of high school and one month into living away from home with a roommate, he had succumbed to a challenge from friends to chug a large amount of rum, his mother said. His blood-alcohol content, she said, was 0.41 percent.

Debbie Taylor said she'd never caught her son -- an honor roll student and varsity football player and wrestler -- drinking, but she twice found rum bottles hidden in her garage when he was 17 and suspected they were his. The first one she threw away. The second, she left.

"My reasoning for leaving the second bottle there was that all of the kids are doing it, and I did it growing up," Taylor, 52, said.
"If I could go back, I would make it absolutely clear that I didn't want him drinking at all -- that he was underage, that it is not legal," she added. "That's what I did with his younger brother [then 16] after Casey died. It was made perfectly clear to him that I didn't want him drinking at all until he was 21. And he didn't."

Taylor joined Mothers Against Drunk Driving in 2003 and is now the Wyoming chapter's spokeswoman. She said she now believes teens aren't ready to drink. MADD supports the minimum drinking age of 21 years, citing numerous studies showing that it has reduced alcohol-related fatalities and injuries since it was federally mandated in the 1980s, and arguing that drinking can be harmful to teens' still-developing brains.

Laura Dean-Mooney, MADD's national president, said parents can prevent underage drinking by discussing rules and consequences often and early -- starting around fourth grade, when peer pressure starts to kick in. "The tricky thing with letting kids in their late teens drink is that you're not always going to be home every time they choose to drink. You're not always going to be there to take away the keys," she said when asked whether she could understand parents who argue that absolute prohibition isn't the way to go.

As for Martha of Georgia, she says she generally discourages her 18-year-old from drinking and reminds him it's against the law outside her supervision at home. Putting him in school activities and encouraging him to study hard -- she says he's a straight-A student -- helps keep him out of trouble. "He has a good grounding in what's healthy and what's not. That's what I taught my children -- how to live with balance," she said. "I've seen people go extreme in either direction [with alcohol], and I don't think either one is totally healthy."