Starting Points

Jan 13, 2010

Looking Past the Facade of Italian City After Riots

ROSARNO, Italy — The official figures show there are 1,600 agricultural workers in this town, all but 36 of them Italians. The reality, exposed by the raw and violent riots here last week, was far different: Some 1,200 foreigners, most of them Africans, earned about $30 a day under the table picking oranges and clementines. Now that the town is largely cleared of foreign labor, the fruit remains on the trees.

In other places, $30 is not a living wage. But this is one of the poorest parts of Italy, and many local people do not earn much more, even if most will not pick fruit.

“Who is taking care of us?” asked Maria Amato, 39, a homemaker. “Until days ago, we didn’t exist.”

In a broad sense, the worst immigrant rioting ever seen in Italy — shocking here not only because of the anger of migrants, some of whom clashed with local residents, but also for the attacks on them by townspeople — cuts to the heart of the nation’s difficult evolution from a place of emigrants to one of immigrants.

But it is also a story fixed to this place. The economy is so weak here that locals and immigrants are competitors. In a town where people are reluctant to reveal their last names and often their first, a mysterious element complicates any full understanding of the riots: the ongoing strength of the Calabrian Mafia, or ’Ndrangheta, which has deep roots in agriculture. The son of a local organized crime boss was arrested and accused of wounding a policeman in the riots, suggesting that the mafia may have orchestrated the locals’ response to the immigrants’ violence.

“It’s a very, very complicated situation,” said Francesco Campolo, a police prefect who is one of three interim commissioners appointed by the region to govern Rosarno since the arrest last year of the mayor, who was charged with having organized crime ties.

This week, the absence of the immigrants, 1,200 of whom were whisked by bus and train to detention centers over the weekend, was clear. On Tuesday, firefighters demolished a former factory that served as seasonal housing for many migrants. It stood, just barely, a long roofless space of tin shacks, dirty mattresses, hand-me-down clothes, mud and garbage.

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Authorities are investigating these central questions: How did the protests become so violent? Who, if anyone, orchestrated the citizens’ retaliation? And who benefits from the immigrants’ temporary or perhaps permanent disappearance from the area?

Alberto Cisterna, who oversees Calabria at Italy’s National Anti-Mafia Commission in Rome, called Rosarno the Corleone of Calabria, where clans of the ’Ndrangheta exert “extraordinary control.”

Official estimates indicate that the ’Ndrangheta did 44 billion euros, or more than $60 billion, in 2008, in international drug and arms trafficking, public works fraud, usury and prostitution.

Many authorities say that in a town where the ’Ndrangheta is strong, the presence of the immigrant workers must have been welcome, or at least convenient.

They note that agriculture is not profitable if transportation and labor costs are high and producers pay about 75 cents for a carton of fruit.

In any case, most agricultural outfits may have Italians on the official rolls, but they pay migrant workers under the table to harvest the fruit — if it is harvested. For years state authorities have not cracked down on the arrangement.

Calabria, like other southern Italian regions rich in agriculture, has long benefited from hefty European Union agricultural subsidies. To prevent fraud in which small acreage yielded puzzlingly large harvests, in 2007 the European Union changed its rules to base subsidies on the number of hectares planted rather than the tons produced.

The result, some authorities hypothesize, is that it may be more lucrative for some Calabrian landowners to let their harvests rot on the tree and collect the subsidies than to pay pickers. In theory, the migrants may have become less useful and, possibly, less tolerated.

Still, over nearly two decades, their presence had become part of the fabric of Rosarno, whose 16,000 residents included an estimated 2,500 immigrants. This week some local shops were hurting for the migrants’ business.

Image by scottmontreal via Flickr

“Before Christmas I baked a whole batch of sandwich rolls just for them,” said Letizia Condulucci as she worked the counter at her family’s bakery.

Like many Rosarno residents, she vehemently defended what the townspeople had done over the years to help the migrant workers and was outraged that they had wounded residents. “Ninety-nine percent of us helped them,” she said. And in the riots, she said, “they destroyed the town.”

On Monday evening, Rosarno residents held a peaceful protest, marching through the city’s flat concrete grid with a sign that read: “Abandoned by the state, criminalized by the media. Twenty years of cohabitation isn’t racism.”

But conversations with residents revealed a more complex reality. Many used an oft-heard phrase in Italy: “We’re not racist, but ....” Ultimately, they tended to say that maybe things were better without the immigrants, since it was hard enough for the Italians to make a living.

The city commissioners say that the riots were fueled by wild rumors on both sides. The immigrants had heard that local residents killed an immigrant, while local residents had heard that immigrants had wounded a pregnant woman so badly that she lost her baby. Both rumors were false, the commissioners say.

Still, the violence was dramatic. After immigrants struck residents and shops with sticks and burned and smashed cars, residents began responding with violence. By late Saturday night, most immigrants feared for their safety and voluntarily boarded buses and trains that took them to immigrant detention centers elsewhere in southern Italy, Rosarno authorities said.

Those with residency permits, which Doctors Without Borders says could be as many as half, were free to leave. Alessandra Tramontano, the director of Doctors Without Borders’ seasonal workers program in Italy, said the group was “worried” about where the immigrants would go and “how they will manage the winter, which historically had been spent in Rosarno.”

Meanwhile, early Tuesday morning, a special team of Italian firefighters was using demolition equipment to take down the factory where many had been squatting in conditions widely denounced as inhumane.

Mr. Campolo, one of Rosarno’s commissioners, said that even before the riots, the city had received state money to remove the immigrant encampment, which sits next to a middle school, and build a playground and sports fields.

It also plans to build a meeting center, with some health care facilities and dormitories, for the migrant workers. Mr. Campolo said the city planned to go ahead with the project. “Of course,” he said, “for the immigrants, when they come back.”

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome.

Terrorist Plots in U.S. in 2009 Are Called Amateurish and Unconnected

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By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — As terrorist plots against the United States have piled up in recent months, politicians and the news media have sounded the alarm with a riveting message for Americans: Be afraid. Al Qaeda is on the march again, targeting the country from within and without, and your hapless government cannot protect you.

But the politically charged clamor has lumped together disparate cases and obscured the fact that the enemies on American soil in 2009, rather than a single powerful and sophisticated juggernaut, were a scattered, uncoordinated group of amateurs who displayed more fervor than skill. The weapons were old-fashioned guns and explosives — in several cases, duds supplied by F.B.I. informants — with no trace of the biological or radiological poisons, let alone the nuclear bombs, that have long been the ultimate fear.

And though 2009 brought more domestic plots, and more serious plots, than any recent year, their lethality was relatively modest. Exactly 14 of the approximately 14,000 murders in the United States last year resulted from allegedly jihadist attacks: 13 people shot at Fort Hood in Texas in November and one at a military recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark., in June.

Such statistics would be no comfort, of course, if an attack with mass casualties succeeded some day.

Nor do they excuse the acknowledged missteps at the United States’ bulked-up security agencies that helped allow a makeshift bomb to be carried onto a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day — the attempted attack that set off the flood of news coverage.

But even that near miss, said Mark M. Lowenthal, assistant director of the Central Intelligence Agency for analysis from 2002 to 2005, may offer indirect evidence of the enemy’s diminished strength, compared with the coordinated attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“Sending one guy on one plane is a huge step down,” Mr. Lowenthal said. “They’re less capable, even if they’re still lethal. They’re not able to carry out the intense planning they once did.”

Counterterrorism experts inside and outside the government are intensely debating the meaning of the flurry of plots last year, and there is no settled consensus. Somalia and Yemen have emerged decisively as jihadist hot spots that may pose a direct threat to the United States. C.I.A. drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas have by no means ended the threat from there, as the Dec. 30 suicide bombing that killed seven C.I.A. employees in nearby Afghanistan grimly underscored. The Internet continues to prove a powerful tool for radicalization, as long-distance propagandists stir the ire of young Muslims about American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But Mr. Lowenthal and others who urge a calmer, more strategic assessment of the recent rash of violent schemes insist that the country is far safer than it was in 2001. They also argue that since the goal of terrorism is to spread terror, hyperbole about threats only does the extremists’ work for them.

“We give comfort to our enemies,” said Charles E. Allen, a 40-year C.I.A. veteran who served as the top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security from 2007 to early last year. Exaggerated news coverage and commentary, he said, “creates an atmosphere of tension and fear, and to me that’s exactly the wrong way to go.”

Mr. Allen said the United States needed “resilience” in the face of the terrorist threat. He noted with admiration that public transportation barely paused in London in 2005 when 52 people were killed by four suicide bombers attacking the subway and a bus.

“I believe in heightened attention to security; I just don’t believe hysteria is useful,” Mr. Allen said.

The 10 jihadist plots or attacks inside the United States in 2009 — a count by Bruce Hoffman, who studies terrorism at Georgetown University — had no evident links to one another and little in common beyond their apparent ideological motive.

The deadliest was allegedly carried out by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of the Fort Hood shootings, who does not appear to have been directed by any group, though he exchanged e-mail messages with a radical cleric in Yemen. Schemes broken up in Newburgh, N.Y.; Springfield, Ill.; Raleigh, N.C.; Boston; and Dallas seem to have developed independently and largely under surveillance from the F.B.I.

More disturbing to counterterrorism officials were two cases with ties to Pakistan’s tribal region, where Osama bin Laden and the remaining core of Al Qaeda are thought to be hiding. They involved Najibullah Zazi, the former Manhattan coffee vendor accused of traveling to Pakistan for explosives training, and David C. Headley of Chicago, who is charged with aiding the 2008 assault on Mumbai and plotting attacks in Denmark.

The term “Al Qaeda,” used as a catchall in many of the plots, blurs important distinctions. By most accounts, apart from possibly the Zazi case, none of the 2009 cases appears to be directly tied to “Al Qaeda central,” as experts refer to the Pakistan-based group led by Mr. bin Laden.

Others involved ersatz “Qaeda” agents who actually worked for the F.B.I. Still others, including the Christmas Day attempt, had links to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a loosely linked affiliate of Mr. bin Laden’s group in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Audrey Kurth Cronin of the National War College said Qaeda affiliates borrow the name to enhance their appeal but are usually more interested in local goals than in the global jihad proclaimed by Mr. bin Laden.

“The proper response is to stop calling all these plots ‘Al Qaeda,’ ” Ms. Cronin said. “We’re inadvertently building up the brand.”

In 2008, in his book “Leaderless Jihad,” Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist and former C.I.A. officer who has long studied terrorism networks, wrote that Al Qaeda was in decline, to be replaced by dispersed terrorists for whom it provided mostly inspiration. The new generation of extremists, he believed, would be less skilled and would likely pose less of a threat than the network responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Dr. Sageman said he saw no reason to revise that judgment today. The plots of the last year should be carefully analyzed and the findings used to improve counterterrorism, not turned into fuel for thoughtless anti-Muslim panic and discrimination, he said.

“If we overreact and upset 1.5 billion Muslims,” Dr. Sageman said, referring to the global total, “then we’ll have a lot bigger problem on our hands.”

More chorizo to love

Image by avlxyz via Flickr

By Patricia Jinich
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, January 13, 2010; E01

Right off the bat, you must understand: I heart chorizo. Especially the kind I grew up eating in Mexico. It comes in deep-burnt-reddish links of fresh, moist, exotically seasoned ground meat that, once fried, becomes crisp and filling bites with bold flavors and a thousand uses.

My oldest son's quick choice for breakfast is chorizo fried just until it browns and crisps, with a side of white toast. Add some lightly beaten eggs as the chorizo is starting to brown and some ripe and creamy avocado slices on the side, and that's my kind of rich-tasting brunch dish. Of course chorizo is delicious in sandwiches, in tacos and quesadillas, on top of enchiladas, in mashed potatoes, as a topping for heartier salads, in some of the tastiest bean dishes I have tried, in pastas with a ton of personality and on pizzas with pickled jalapeño peppers on top.

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I am really trying to stop myself here.

When I moved to the United States, more than a dozen years ago, I was thrilled to find chorizo in international grocery stores. Lately, I have been intrigued and surprised to see that my Mexican chorizo is now accompanied by many other kinds in the refrigerated sections of bigger, more mainstream stores: Argentine, Colombian, Guatemalan, Salvadoran and Honduran chorizos have arrived. Like the Mexican kind, some of those varieties are being made with chicken, turkey or beef in addition to pork. There is even kosher chorizo, made with beef, at Koshermart in Rockville and vegan chorizo at Trader Joe's (which I haven't felt the urge to try). Many come in spicy, spicier, spiciest and hotter than hot.

Through Sunday afternoon asados, or grilling parties, at friends' houses and trips to Argentina, I had become familiar with the garlicky chorizo Argentinians are so proud of. But I was clueless about the other kinds. So I shocked my regular grocer by buying a variety of links, then cooked them at home to sample the differences, filling my kitchen with chorizo-tinged smoke. Later, on a cold and rainy day in November, I set out to explore the chorizo universe, including local manufacturers, in this part of the Americas.

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It was clear from the start that Latin chorizos share a common difference from Spanish ones. Most Latin chorizos are made with heavily spiced, freshly ground meat, and they must be cooked. Spanish chorizos typically are dried and smoked cured links of chopped meat, seasoned mainly with garlic and paprika; they tend to be ready-to-eat and have a salami-like soft and chewy bite.

Although Spaniards introduced the pig and the techniques of making chorizo to most of Latin America, through the centuries chorizos were adapted with local flavors and ingredients. (The Spaniards, for their part, borrowed paprika from those new lands and made it one of their signature chorizo seasonings.) Interestingly, the version that took root in Latin soil was raw and uncured, which is the least-common kind in Spain.

Latin chorizos differ greatly from one another in flavor. Mexican is the spiciest of the lot. It also has the most complex layering of flavors, and I won't deny that it's my favorite. Mexican chorizos can have variations as well, but they generally contain dried chili peppers such as ancho, pasilla, guajillo and/or chipotle; a mix of spices that might include oregano, cumin, thyme, marjoram, bay leaf, cinnamon, coriander seed, allspice, paprika, achiote and cloves; most times garlic and sometimes onion; and always vinegar, which makes the meat flake or crumble as it browns and gives it a welcome hint of acidity.

If you like really spicy sausage, Chorizo Cabal of Fairfax produces a Mexican one called Perrón, which translates from Mexican-Spanish slang as brave or aggressive. It's clear as soon as you see the label: A fierce dog looks ready to give you the bite of your life.

For a chorizo that isn't spicy but has a colorful pungency, the way to go is Salvadoran. That happens to be the favorite of Clifford Logan Jr., vice president of the Logan Sausage Co. in Alexandria. His company sold 50,000 to 60,000 pounds of its Latin-style fresh chorizos in the Washington area last month. Logan is so passionate about chorizos that when asked to describe them, he seemed to be poetically describing bottles of wine: "The Salvadoran," he began, with a deep romantic sigh and a sudden distant gaze, "has a robust flavor and a subtle finish."

It seems that around Washington, Mexican and Salvadoran chorizos have been wrestling for bragging rights for a long time. Chorizo Cabal sells more Salvadoran chorizo than Mexican (except in grilling season, when the Argentine chorizo is most popular); Logan Sausage sells twice as much Mexican chorizo as Salvadoran. But the choice has as much to do with flavor and recipes as with the local immigrant population and the popularity of each cuisine. Companies often start to produce chorizos based on where the owner or employees come from; immigrants nostalgic for the flavors of home find a way to replicate their native recipes.

The companies' Mexican, Honduran and Salvadoran chorizos are made with vinegar, yet the Honduran kind is much more sedate. The Guatemalan, Logan says, is somewhere in between the Salvadoran and Honduran, flavor-wise. Betty Guerrero, who runs Chorizo Cabal, agrees, and revealed to me that a bit of spearmint is added to Cabal's Guatemalan spice mix. Colombian chorizo is plain and quite salty. The Argentine kind has white wine and a heavy dose of garlic in its mix, as well as oregano, nutmeg and a bit of cayenne or crushed red pepper flakes. It seems to me that Argentine-style chorizo really lets the flavor of the meat shine through. (See "Use this for that," above.)

Of course, different brands and regions have different variations, which some purists question, especially when borders are crossed. Guerrero says, "My mother tells me that this is not the way chorizo is made in Mexico, that I am changing the ingredients, that I am changing its ways." But Guerrero, an experienced chorizo maker, says her company sells about 50,000 pounds of chorizo per month.

One thing I have noticed is that chorizos made in the United States have less fat than those I knew and ate in Latin America. Logan and Guerrero confirmed that, saying their chorizos are made with no more than 20 percent fat. Typically, Mexican chorizo contains at least 30 percent fat. Whole Foods Market makes its own chorizo with no more than 15 percent fat, according to company spokeswoman Katie Hunsberger.

Another thing purists might question is why parts of the chorizo-making process are simplified here. For example, chorizo shops in Mexico soak and puree whole dried chili peppers and add fresh garlic and onion. Chorizo makers here, including Cabal and Logan, generally use custom-made prepared spice mixes that come with already-ground chili peppers and dehydrated garlic.

According to these producers, the mixes not only are convenient but also help ensure quality: "Dried garlic imparts flavor and doesn't turn black as quickly as fresh garlic does," Clifford Logan says. They also promote consistency. Hunsberger says that Whole Foods works with Barron's spices to create a spice mix for its house brand.

No wonder chorizo makers are hesitant to share ingredient information. Their recipes are treated as highly classified state secrets that outsourced spice companies are legally forbidden to share. Dealing with such sacred formulas also may explain why many chorizo companies have longstanding and loyal employees.

Or maybe they just heart chorizo, like me.

Recipes

Cowboy Beans (Frijoles Charros)

Mexican-Style Pasta With Tomato Sauce and Chorizo

Potato, Scallion and Chorizo Crispy Tacos Thresher

Warm Sweet Potato Salad With Chorizo

Use this for that

Tips on how to use the different kinds of chorizo

Jinich is a cooking teacher and chef at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington.

Michael Gerson - Where has Obama's inspiring oratory gone?

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By Michael Gerson
Wednesday, January 13, 2010; A19

Along with President Obama's declining public standing has come a declining rhetorical reputation. There is, of course, a relationship between the two. Even Ronald Reagan seemed a less-than-great communicator after the 1981-82 recession, with his job approval rating in the 30s. And few would be criticizing Obama's speeches if unemployment were at 6 percent. Success is the best eloquence.

But Obama's rhetorical challenge runs deeper than the recession. In the most unexpected development of his presidency, what was once universally recognized as Obama's greatest political strength -- his oratory -- now seems a serious weakness.

The swift rise of Barack Obama was primarily a literary phenomenon. His accomplishments did not come on the Senate floor; they came at Barnes & Noble. His two autobiographies, along with his 2004 speech at the Democratic convention, raised expectations of a rhetorical golden age. One early profile in New York magazine referred to Obama as "our national oratorical superhero -- a honey-tongued Frankenfusion of Lincoln, Gandhi, Cicero, Jesus, and all our most cherished national acronyms (MLK, JFK, RFK, FDR)."

But Obama went from this exaggerated expectation to his current workmanlike utterances on health care and Afghanistan without an intervening period of remarkable eloquence. His acceptance speech was flat and typical. His inauguration was an extraordinarily historic moment -- which went uncelebrated by a comparably historic utterance. Obama's speeches to Congress and the American people have generally been explanatory rather than inspirational. His demeanor at West Point -- in a speech arguing for new sacrifices in the Afghanistan war -- was so stone-cold sober that one was left longing for happy hour.

Nothing has been more damning than the praise of Obama's defenders. James Fallows of the Atlantic says, "I'm not saying that his big set-piece speeches are cliche-free. . . . Often they're not even that 'well written,' in a fancy-phrasemaking sense." And further: "Indeed, I can hardly remember any phrase or sentence from any speech Obama has ever given." Obama does not need "fine language" or "rhetorical polish" because he has the "eloquence that comes from original thought." Another defender has praised Obama's avoidance of "gratuitous bids" for a Bartlett's citation. Another concludes, "Maybe we don't need an inspiring president right now."

Unasked is the question: Why can't original thought and intellectual seriousness also be expressed in speeches that are well written, cliche-free, polished, inspiring and memorable?

There are passages from Obama speeches that embody all these things -- parts of his Nobel Prize speech come to mind. But they mainly serve as reminders of what is too often missing. Even Obama's well-constructed lectures -- such as his Philadelphia race speech or his Cairo remarks -- are marred by a transparent rhetorical ploy. In Obama's running seminar, a flawed thesis and a flawed antithesis are always resolved by the synthesis of Obama himself -- the speaker as Hegelian culmination of history. In this way, Obama manages to be both academic and arrogant. Instead of exploring the genuinely historic nature of his time, he veers toward messianism. His arrival is "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

But Obama's largest rhetorical failure has come at times of crisis -- when a president's words matter most, and the time to craft them is most limited. His reactions to the Fort Hood murders and the Christmas Day attack were oddly disconnected from the emotions of the country he represents. His speech at Fort Hood was strong on paper but delivered with all the passion of remarks to the Chamber of Commerce. His recent White House speech on the terrorist threat was bureaucratic and bloodless. Both grief and resolve seem beyond his rhetorical range. People once thought Obama could sound eloquent reading the phone book. Now, whatever the topic, it often sounds as though he is.

His defenders, once again, elevate this into a virtue. He is an emotionally disciplined grown-up. But at least since Reagan, the rhetorical expectations of an American president have included not only mental toughness but empathy -- the ability to wear the nation's emotions on his sleeve. People want their president to be both the father and the mother of his country -- a talent shared by politicians as diverse as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (whose speeches I once helped write).

Obama's model, instead, is the coolness of Coolidge. It is old-fashioned. It may even be admirable. It is hard to call it effective. With every speech, a realization grows: A president lacking in drama may also be lacking in inspiration.

mgerson@globalengage.org

Security forces find huge cache of explosives in Baghdad, impose partial curfew

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By Leila Fadel and Aziz Alwan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 13, 2010; A08

BAGHDAD -- Iraqi security forces shut down large portions of the capital Tuesday after arresting at least 25 men and seizing more than 400 pounds of explosives that insurgents allegedly had been planning to use in a major attack.

Iraqis woke up to partial curfews and vehicle bans in their neighborhoods, setting off rumors that a military coup was underway and that a popular Sunni legislator had been assassinated.

But Baghdad law enforcement officials said the curfew was enacted, in part, as a show of force by security personnel. Col. Qassim al-Ameri of the Interior Ministry, which oversees Iraqi police, said officers found the explosives during morning raids. Security officials suspect the explosives may have been part of a plan to launch an attack ahead of parliamentary elections in March.

Although police routinely find explosives in Iraq, Tuesday's find was substantial. Iraqi security forces hailed their discovery of the cache and their ability to shut down parts of the capital, saying their efforts were a testament to the ability of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government to maintain security.

"It proves that the Baghdad Operations Command can close all of Baghdad's exits when the situation requires it," Ameri said. "Maliki is proving that he controls Baghdad at any minute."

Ameri warned that the Interior Ministry planned similar curfews and vehicle bans in the city in the coming days to preempt any election-related violence.

By Tuesday afternoon, government spokesmen had defused rumors of a coup.

"The government calls on the people to understand these measures, which included preemptive operations, partial curfews and tightening of security measures, all of which are aimed at protecting people's lives," Ali al-Dabbagh, a government spokesman, said at a news conference.

Since August, a series of high-profile attacks have devastated the capital and killed more than 300 people. Most have targeted government buildings.

Another major attack would have been particularly damaging to members of Maliki's coalition running in parliamentary elections. The coalition's candidates are campaigning on a security platform.

The discovery of the explosives on Tuesday was part of what will be an ongoing security effort to crack down on insurgent hideouts and showcase Maliki's military might, Ameri said.

Violence is expected to escalate in the run-up to the elections. Also Tuesday, a leading member of the Sons of Iraq, a group of U.S.-allied Sunni militiamen, was fatally shot in Babil province south of the capital. Ali Ayed al-Janabi died instantly in the town of Mussayeb. Another member of the group was injured in an attack at his home.

Special correspondent Saad Sarhan contributed to this report.

28 percent of accidents involve talking, texting on cellphones

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By Ashley Halsey III
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 13, 2010; A06

Twenty-eight percent of traffic accidents occur when people talk on cellphones or send text messages while driving, according to a study released Tuesday by the National Safety Council.

The vast majority of those crashes, 1.4 million annually, are caused by cellphone conversations, and 200,000 are blamed on text messaging, according to the report from the council, a nonprofit group recognized by congressional charter as a leader on safety.

Because of the extent of the problem, federal transportation officials unveiled a organization Tuesday, patterned after Mothers Against Drunk Driving, that will combat driver cellphone use. The group, FocusDriven, grew out of a meeting on distracted driving sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation in the District last year.

Virtually everyone owns a cellphone, and it's evident to anyone who drives regularly that huge numbers of people, including some who support a ban, use them while driving. Persuading people to break that habit could be a tall order for FocusDriven.

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"It's hard because everyone's addicted to their cellphone," said FocusDriven's president, Jennifer Smith, a Texan whose mother was killed by a man who ran a red light while talking on his cellphone. "That's where we come in. We put a real, human face to it. We're going to put the pressure on legislatures."

Enforcement of a texting ban requires officers to observe an act that usually is conducted in a driver's lap, and hands-free devices make it possible to talk on cellphones without being observed. More than 120 studies of cellphone use suggest that using hands-free devices doesn't eliminate the distraction caused by a phone conversation.

"It's not easy to enforce [a ban], but it's not impossible," said Chuck Hurley, executive director of MADD, who attended Tuesday's announcement of the new group's formation. "The main reason people talk on their cellphones is because they can. Eventually, [signal blocking] technology will address that."

Smith said law enforcement needs stronger laws and better tools to enforce them.

"Using a subpoena to get cellphone records has got to be a standard procedure," she said. "Perhaps cars should have a data recorder, like [an airplane's] crash recorder to use in these cases."

Whether the political will to enforce bans on cellphone use while driving exists is another matter.

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Bans on text messaging while driving illustrate the challenge. Nineteen states and the District have banned it, but in four of those states, Virginia, New York, Washington and Louisiana, the laws require that an officer have some other primary reason for stopping a vehicle.

"That makes it impossible for police to enforce it effectively," said Illinois state Sen. John J. Cullerton (D), a leading traffic safety advocate. "It's a convenient way to compromise and get bills passed in state legislatures."

Hurley put it more bluntly:

"Secondary enforcement is a huge problem," he said. "It is a sign of weak politicians. It saves very few lives."

Maryland bans drivers sending text messages but allows drivers to read them or enter phone numbers in their cellphones. Virginians stopped by police are off the hook if they say they were dialing a phone number or using a GPS device on their phone.

The challenge of legislating cellphone use by drivers is greater than similar auto safety initiatives such as those in favor of seat belts and child car seat use or against drunken driving. In each of those instances, the public safety issue was more clearly understood and, ultimately, enforcement led drivers to comply.

Hurley, who spent 21 years with the National Safety Council before joining MADD, has been involved with virtually all major traffic safety campaigns for more than three decades.

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His experience suggests that new laws and educational campaigns, such as trumpeting the startling numbers the National Safety Council released Tuesday, don't provide sufficient incentive for most drivers to change their habits.

"A lot of goodwill is created, and people die just the same," he said. "Education alone is a proven failure. Education and enforcement are a success."

He cites seat belt use as an example. The "Buckle Up for Safety" campaign was well received, but only 13 percent of drivers complied. The "Click It or Ticket" campaign has been much more effective, he said.

Public campaigns featuring mothers whose children died in crashes where drinking was a factor caught public attention, but the Operation Strikeforce efforts that employed sobriety checkpoints hammered home the consequences of drunken driving.

Hurley said the best first step for FocusDriven will be to get employers to ban use of text messaging and cellphones when driving. President Obama last year imposed a texting ban on all federal employees while using government vehicles or using government-issued phones in their own vehicles.

Many say U.S. race relations have improved under Obama, but divides remain

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By Michael A. Fletcher and Krissah Thompson
Wednesday, January 13, 2010; A04

President Obama has ignited a surge of optimism among African Americans as they assess race relations and their prospects for the future, but the hope for reconciliation that accompanied the election of the nation's first black president remains far off.

The first year of Obama's presidency has brought the country face to face with troubling racial schisms just as often as it has promoted racial understanding.

In some ways, Obama has become a mirror for every American's racial attitudes -- reflecting perceptions, stereotypes, fears, hopes and the nation's complicated racial history. In a report released by the Pew Research Center on Tuesday, blacks, whites and Hispanics showed an inclination to racially identify him from their own vantage point.

A majority of the African Americans who responded to the Pew survey said they believe Obama's election has improved race relations, though that number has shrunk since the heady days just after the election. Thirty-two percent of whites and 42 percent of Hispanics think relations have improved since then.

Obama's presidency, however, has at times unearthed racial frictions and inspired difficult conversations that otherwise might have gone unspoken.

This week, it was the news of a private exchange between Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and the authors of the new book "Game Change," in which the senator spoke well of Obama's chances for election because he is "light-skinned" and has no "Negro dialect."

Reid apologized repeatedly for the remarks, and Obama quickly accepted, seeming eager to move beyond an unwelcome distraction. Reid is a "good man" who simply used "inartful language," the president told TV One's Roland Martin, adding that Reid has always been "on the right side of history."

His aides, meanwhile, have declined to expand on the lingering issues raised by the controversy, though others have.

"Light-skinned is equated with good, an ability to pass, to fit in the mainstream," said Peniel E. Joseph, a Tufts University historian and author of a new book about the shifting racial attitudes that allowed for Obama's election as the nation's first black president. "He's light enough and mainstream enough to appeal to a broad audience. Those who are not really stand out in a conspicuous way as 'the other.' "

Douglas Wilder was subject to similar scrutiny when he ran for Virginia governor two decades ago, becoming the first African American in the country elected to that office. He likened Reid's comments to those made by white voters he would meet in rural southwest Virginia who said that they would vote for Wilder but that they were not sure whether other whites would. Wilder found that notion implicitly racist and believed Reid's comments uncovered his own stereotypes. "Reid was saying: 'It's okay with me because the fair skin and that lack of dialect gets over with me,' " he said.

Since taking office, Obama has mostly declined to engage in the racial analyses that have come with his historic presidency. With the nation dealing with double-digit unemployment rates and the threat of global terrorism, White House aides view race as little more than a diversion. Only once last year did Obama intentionally step into the nation's racial crucible.

"He's not somebody who pours gasoline on racial controversies," said Darrell M. West, the vice president and director of governance studies at Brookings.

"I think he understands that he's the one who gets burned when that happens," West said.

Obama created a storm last year when he spoke about racial profiling and said police officers in Cambridge, Mass., acted "stupidly" in arresting Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. outside his own home. The president's comments, made in response to a question at a news conference, eclipsed the health-care reform debate for a week and forced a much-hyped "beer summit" at the White House with Obama, Vice President Biden, Gates, and the arresting officer, Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley.

Obama's choice not to discuss the topic fails to take the country to more meaningful discussion about race, said Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton. Glaude said his own reflections on the first year of Obama's presidency sent him to a passage from James Baldwin's "Many Thousands Gone" essay, in which the writer speaks of an American desire to make "the Negro face" blank, washing away "the guilt" of the past.

That is a continuation of the posture Obama struck as a candidate. When he was running for office, Obama, who is biracial but identifies as African American, rarely addresses racial issues. That has led some analysts to label him a "de-racialized" black politician.

"Obama basically is a bargainer and appeals to whites by communicating to them that he will not see them as racist," said Shelby Steele, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "Someone such as Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson . . . would be off-putting to whites. Obama sort of cleanses himself of that. And whites are grateful."

Still, Obama is not immune from some stubborn racial attitudes. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November, research participants were shown three photos of Obama -- one in which his skin tone was darkened, one in which it was lightened and one in which it was unaltered. Participants were then asked to rate how well each photo represented who Obama "really is."

Those who shared political affiliation with the president tended to think the lightened photos were more representative. People who did not share his political views chose the darkened photos.

Obama's supporters point out that many of his policies, such as extending unemployment benefits and greatly expanding education aid and health-care coverage, benefit a broad spectrum of economically struggling Americans and many are disproportionately black. That, they say, is more important than rhetoric.

Nearly a year after taking office, Obama retains the support of nearly 90 percent of African Americans, while his approval rating among whites has dropped precipitously, going from 61 percent in February to 41 percent last month, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

African Americans also have experienced an increase in optimism with Obama in the Oval Office. Though it is disproportionately affected by the bad economy, job losses and foreclosures, the new Pew poll found that the African American community's assessment of its prospects has risen more dramatically during the past two years than at any time in the past quarter-century.

Nearly twice as many blacks now, 39 percent, as in 2007 say that the "situation of black people in this country" is better than it was five years earlier. Similarly, 56 percent of blacks and nearly two-thirds of whites say the standard-of-living gap between whites and blacks has narrowed in the past decade.

"We expected that there may be an Obama effect, and it was really quite dramatic, which isn't to say that this era as measured in this survey means that all is fine between blacks and whites," said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.

Polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.

In Massachusetts, Republican Brown steps up campaign for Kennedy's Senate seat

Image via Wikipedia

By Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 13, 2010; A01

Fueled by the energy of conservative activists, a solid debate performance and a 24-hour, $1.3 million Internet fundraising haul, Massachusetts state Sen. Scott Brown (R) has thrown a major scare into the Democratic establishment in his bid to win next Tuesday's special Senate election over once heavily favored Attorney General Martha Coakley.

The intensified activity around the campaign to fill the seat of the late senator Edward M. Kennedy (D) highlights the degree to which the race has taken on national significance. A victory, or even a narrow loss, by Brown in the competition for the symbolically important seat would be interpreted as another sign that voters have turned away from the Democrats at the start of the midterm election year.

More urgently, a Brown win would give Republicans 41 seats in the Senate and the ability to block President Obama's health-care initiative and much of the Democrats' 2010 congressional agenda. Strategists on both sides concede that a Brown victory would drastically reshape the calculus of the health-care debate, which is now in its final stages.

Brown still has some distance to go to pull off an upset, but Democrats now recognize they were wrong not to have taken his challenge more seriously from the start and are vowing not to let the race slip away out of neglect and a lack of aggressiveness.

"We believe at the end of the day the attorney general is going to win the race, but we're not going to take our foot off the gas," said Eric Schultz, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Eric Fehrnstrom, a top adviser to Brown, said: "I think it's a tight race, but Scott Brown still has to be considered the underdog. But clearly there's panic setting in on the other side, and they're jumping in with both feet."

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Democrats have buttressed Coakley's campaign this week, adding fresh money and personnel to her operation and vowing to go after the Republican far more aggressively than they have to date.

The DSCC bought $500,000 in advertising time for the contest, and national Democrats sent a pair of experienced strategists -- Michael Meehan and Hari Sevugan -- to Massachusetts to help lead the attack on Brown and oversee the final days of Coakley's campaign. Democrats also have sent fundraising e-mails from Obama and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).

Brown countered by announcing he had raised $1.3 million in the previous 24 hours through an Internet appeal. A sizable portion of that money will pay for television ads that combat the Democrats' stepped-up attacks.

Polls have offered a muddled picture of the race. On Sunday, the Boston Globe put Coakley's lead at 15 percentage points. But that came after two automated polls, whose methodology is not always as reliable, showed a far closer contest -- one gave Coakley a nine-point advantage, the other showed a virtual dead heat.

On Monday, national Democrats released the results of an internal survey showing Coakley's lead at 14 points, but their actions since have belied the idea that she is comfortably ahead. A pair of internal polls taken for the parties showed the gap between the candidates in the mid-single digits.

Democratic strategists in Massachusetts and Washington said they remain confident that Coakley will prevail, given the huge Democratic registration advantage in the state and the attorney general's appeal to female voters. But they blamed Coakley and her campaign for letting up over the holidays and allowing Brown to change the dynamic of the race.

More than the Coakley campaign's performance may be at work in Massachusetts. Brown's operation benefits from the fact that Republican and conservative voters appear more motivated, as they were in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections in November. The accelerated activity by Democrats is designed in part to mobilize party voters and remind them of the stakes in Tuesday's balloting.

Coakley and Brown held their last debate Monday night, and while no clear winner emerged, Brown most often appeared to be taking a more aggressive posture. The two traded accusations on taxes, health-care reform and economic policy, with Coakley charging that Brown would take the country back to the economic policies of the George W. Bush administration.

Brown challenged Coakley, who opposes Obama's plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, on national security and terrorism, arguing that she was wrong to support the administration's decision to try self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed in civilian court. After the debate, he also criticized Coakley for declaring that terrorists "are gone" from Afghanistan in explaining her support for an exit strategy.

Hoping to appeal to Massachusetts's long Democratic tradition, the Coakley camp began running a negative ad Monday attacking Brown as someone who would march "in lockstep with Washington Republicans." He responded Tuesday with his own ad in which he said she had decided "that the best way to stop me is to tear me down" and called on voters to reject her tactics.

China faces backlash from 'netizens' if Google leaves

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 13, 2010; 10:06 AM

BEIJING -- Google's threat to shut down its Chinese Web site and offices over cyber-attacks and censorship puts the government here in the awkward position of choosing between its devotion to restricting information and the possible ire of the roughly 80 million Chinese who use the search engine.

Few political and Internet analysts doubt that China's government will stick to its tough stance and reject Google's proposal to stop censoring its Web site.

But Google's audience of Chinese "netizens," a few of whom placed flowers outside the company's offices here in Beijing, is large enough to make the government's likely stance a touchy one.

"This would adversely affect a lot of people, not just the technorati elite that is Western-oriented anyway," said Kaiser Kuo, an independent technology consultant. "The government could face a serious backlash this time."

Image by bfishadow via Flickr

On Wednesday, the Google story was the top trending topic on a Twitter-like microblog situated on the Chinese site Sina.com, with about 60,000 people weighing in, before the conversation was taken down. The overwhelming majority of commenters were upset at the prospect of losing Google's China-based service; some lashed out at the government while others begged Google to stay. A smaller but substantial number wished the company good riddance.

"This will make the extent of Chinese censorship a lot clearer even to ordinary Chinese people who are not aware of it," said Jeremy Goldkorn, who does the blog and runs an Internet research firm. He also runs a Web site called danwei.org, which has been blocked since July.

"Many people think Google should negotiate with the Chinese government," said Zhou Shuguang, a blogger who has done investigative reporting across the country and has used the name Zola.

But he said that "the withdrawal from China will wake up more Chinese and make more people discover that China lacks freedom on the Internet and the government has very strong censorship online. There are no benefits to people at all if Google continues to make concessions with Chinese authorities."

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The government has backed down once before in the past year when faced with outcries on the Internet. It reversed its insistence that the makers of personal computers sold here install Green Dam, a filtering software. But the software, largely copied from a foreign company, was shown to slow down and damage computers. Huge numbers of people, most apolitical, protested online and the government backed down.

Another Internet campaign aimed at getting municipal governments to make their budgets more transparent has made some progress. The city of Guangdong made its budget more open, as did a district of Shanghai, though the Shanghai-wide municipal government refused.

But businesspeople in Beijing were pessimistic, as were many people at Google itself, about the prospect of a crack in what is known as the Great Firewall of China. "China can't lose face over this, and it's not going to let anybody run an open search engine," said an industry source close to Google.

The government has shut down or blocked thousands of Web sites before. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are all blocked. Just this week, the General Administration of Press and Publication boasted of taking down 136,000 non-registered Web sites and more than 1.5 million pieces of "bad information." It also said that it shut down 15,000 pornographic Web sites.

For now, the government has said only that it would seek more information from Google. Just about the only comment in official channels came in the form of a signed opinion article on the People's Daily Web site, a style of editorial that does not carry the well-considered weight of an unsigned editorial, which is usually vetted by top Chinese leaders. The article compared Google to a "spoiled child" and said that even if it stormed out of China, it would be back because of the importance of the Chinese market.

Other pro-government comments online said that Google, which lags far behind the Chinese-based search engine known as Baidu, was simply dressing up a business decision in moral clothing. Baidu has about two-thirds of the market. Some independent analysts have estimated a 30 percent or so market share for Google, but well-placed industry sources said the actual number is closer to 20 percent and has never been more than 26 percent.

Dan Brody, who set up Google's China office and who now runs an Internet media investment firm here called Koolanoo Group, estimates that Google has about $300 million to $400 million in revenue in China.

Brody said that that revenue pales next to the revenue Google earns elsewhere. Moreover, he said, if Google loses even a small percentage of users in Europe or the United States because it is seen as making too many compromises with China's government, then the company could lose much more revenue than it's earning in China.

"From a business and moral perspective, user trust in the West is so important to them," Brody said.

Another industry source close to Google said on condition of anonymity that although the firm's market share has lagged, "this isn't something being used as a smokescreen."

The company has clashed with the Chinese government since it set up google.cn in 2005. Google agreed to remove information that China's leaders might find too sensitive. But Google and the government differed over what should fall into that category.

Last summer the company was sharply criticized in state-run media for providing access to "pornography." The industry source said that in addition to well-publicized incidents, Chinese officials were making weekly demands for items to be removed. He said when the cyber attacks were discovered "it was the last straw."

If Google closes down its Chinese site, or if the Chinese government closes it down, Chinese users could still try to use the U.S.-based site. But China's government could impede access. Currently, the U.S. site works more slowly and access to many pages is blocked.

Where would that leave the Chinese market and China's estimated 370 million Internet users?

The closing of Google's China site would boost Baidu and Sina, most industry analysts said, and hurt Google in the long-running rivalry.

Despite expensive outreach campaigns at universities and secondary schools, Google has had trouble catching up to the domestic competitors. Analysts say Chinese Internet users favor the crowded, busy sites of Baidu and Sina to the no-nonsense sparseness of Google's homepage. Baidu and Sina also feature bulletin boards and music downloading services that are not available on Google. Moreover, surveys have shown that most Chinese have trouble spelling Google or don't know its Chinese name, guge, which means valley song.

There is also a nationalistic component to the other companies' success. A Baidu ad played on those sentiments by portraying a bumbling foreigner at a wedding speaking Mandarin poorly. A character known as Tang Baihu then talks circles around the foreigner, who is dressed awkwardly in Chinese traditional clothing.

Google China, which was based in Beijing's high-tech corridor near the main universities, has also suffered from high turnover over the past five years and the company recently was forced to replace a number of its locally hired, Mandarin-speaking staff with managers from its headquarters in California. The head of Google China, Kai-Fu Lee, who was recruited away from Microsoft, quit in September.

Ironically, however, the departure of Google is no guarantee of harmony on the Chinese Internet given the vast scope of content on the Web. This week Baidu's site was attacked by hackers who claimed to be from Iran.

"This is a lose-lose solution for both Google and China," said Hu Yong, associate professor specializing in online media at the School of Journalism and Communication at Beijing University.

"For Google, China is a huge market with very big business potential because China has a large number of netizens," Hu said. "For Chinese netizens, it's a bad result as well. A search engine is very important for the free transportation of information online. And we need competition," he added, otherwise "the number information sources will decrease."

Post researchers Zhang Jie and Wang Juan contributed to this report.