Graphic explains how a shift in the ocean's floor can trigger a tsunami. MCT 2010.

By Alia Wilson

Santa Cruz Sentinel

(MCT)

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Officials are closing beaches across Santa Cruz County in California and warning residents to stay off jetties after the National Weather Service announced a tsunami advisory following the massive 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile Saturday.

Devastating waves aren’t expected to hit the California coast, but officials don’t want to take any chances.

Diana Henderson, a forecaster with the National Weather Service, said an advisory is issued when waves are expected to increase in height by less than a meter. She said waves are expected to hit the Santa Cruz coastline around 1:25 p.m. PST.

“We’re not by any means evacuating people,” Henderson said. “We advise everyone to pretty much stay away from the water.”

Henderson said Santa Cruz could be hit harder than other areas.

“Santa Cruz is in a precarious place,” she said. “This tsunami is coming from the south and Santa Cruz is south-facing so there may be more damage compared to other areas. It will be hitting Santa Cruz right in the face.”

Henderson said waves are expected to reach 3.3 feet at the highest.

“It won’t be just one single wave, it could be an inundation and may last a good portion of the day,” she said. Santa Cruz Harbor Patrol began putting written notices on people’s boats around 6 a.m. local time.

“We don’t know how this is going to affect us but we are planning for the worst and hoping for the best right now,” Harbormaster Chuck Izenstark said. “We are doing the best we can to advise all live-aboards, the general public and beachgoers that there is a tsunami advisory. We are going out to close beaches and jetties to the public until the event is cleared.”

Harbor Patrol officers were patrolling beaches and warning people of the advisory on Saturday. An evacuation plan is also in the works as a precaution. State Parks officials closed all the state beaches in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties early Saturday morning and moved about 30 people from the campground at Seacliff State Beach to higher ground, according to State Parks Lifeguard Supervisor Chip Bockman.

Bockman said the beaches probably would remain closed for a couple hours past the advisory period because there may still be strong currents and waves.

“Were erring on the side of safety and keeping the beaches closed,” he said. “(People should) stay high and dry above beach level and off the sand at least a couple hours past the advisory period.”

Santa Cruz Fire and its Marine Rescue Division were to shut down Main Beach and Cowell Beach at 1 p.m. until the advisory passes. The Boardwalk and the Santa Cruz wharf stay open.

“If it was a tsunami warning rather than advisory it would be our policy to evacuate the wharf,” Battalion Chief Matt McCaslin said. “But because it’s an advisory we’re comfortable with leaving the wharf open.”

The beaches in Capitola also closed although some restaurants along the Esplanade were still open. The patio at Margaritaville remained open as the staff prepared for a normal business day.

“The sun’s out, people are in here, I don’t think anything will happen,” Assistant General Manager Jeremy McCarthy said. “Police came down at 10:30 this morning to let us know we will be getting an automated call about the advisory. I asked if we needed to sandbag it up but the police said they highly doubt anything will happen. So our doors are open.”

Capitola police are patrolling the beaches and the Village to advise people about the warning.

“We are prepared to close off streets if necessary,” Sgt. Matt Eller said. “Most businesses are closing up shop on their own doing. Right now, we are informing the public and will go from there.”

In September 2009, Coastal California, including Santa Cruz County, was included in a tsunami advisory after an 8.0 temblor struck American Samoa. The advisory prompted State Parks rangers and lifeguards to close beaches early and relocate some campers in low-lying areas; however, the tsunami size was measured in inches.

The National Weather Service’s tsunami advisory includes the entire West Coast.

The weather service is advising everyone in coastal counties to stay away from beaches and shorelines Saturday afternoon when a tsunami producing strong currents and a series of potentially dangerous waves was expected to hit the coast at around 1:25 p.m.

The advisory includes the Bay Area counties of San Francisco, Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Marin, Monterey, Contra Costa, Napa, Sonoma, Santa Clara and Alameda.

In November 2006, quake-generated wave action rocked the harbor after an 8.1-magnitude undersea temblor in Japan. The surge lasted about six hours, turning the water from blue-green to brown in the harbor and snapping the dock lines on a handful of boats.

There have been six tsunamis large enough to cause significant damage along the coast of California over the past 200 years, according to Gary Griggs, Santa Cruz Sentinel columnist and director of the Institute of Marine Sciences and Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California-Santa Cruz.

In that period, 16 people died as a result of the tsunamis; one of the deaths was in Santa Cruz. On April 1, 1946, a man drowned while walking along Cowell Beach when water rose 15 feet above normal quickly from a large earthquake in the Aleutian Trench off Alaska, according to Griggs.

Crescent City on the state’s North Coast was hit hard by a tsunami from the huge Alaskan earthquake of 1964. Water levels rose 8 feet, and much of the low-lying downtown area was inundated as waves washed 2,000 feet inland, drowning 11 people and destroying 150 businesses, according to Griggs.

In Santa Cruz, water levels at the harbor surged 11 feet. A 38-foot boat and a dredge sunk.

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(c) 2010, Santa Cruz Sentinel (Santa Cruz, Calif.).

Visit the Santa Cruz Sentinel on the Web at http://www.santacruzsentinel.com.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

McClatchy Newspapers

(MCT)

Retired Sgt. Maj. Samuel Rhodes, an Iraq war veteran, spends time with his horses at his home in Harris County, Georgia, January 29, 2010. "The one thing that I've found when talking to soldiers and leaders, a lot of the response has been this is the first time we've had a senior leader who has dealt with this talk about it," Rhodes said. Photo courtesy of Mike Haskey/Columbus Ledger-Enquirer/MCT

WASHINGTON — Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Samuel Rhodes keeps pictures of the dead in his pockets.

They’re the faces of young soldiers whose eyes stare out resolutely from photocopied pages worn and creased by the ritual of unfolding them, smoothing them flat and refolding them.

They’re the faces of men who, haunted by problems at home or memories of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the dead children, the fallen comrades and the lingering smell of burnt flesh — pressed guns to their heads and pulled the triggers or tied ropes with military precision and hanged themselves.

The pictures remind Rhodes of how close he came to joining them and how, sometimes when the sadness presses in, dark and suffocating, he still mentally pens suicide notes.

“How many times have I written that letter in my head? I still think about suicide, but when I start thinking about it I have to think, ‘What’s the impact on everyone I care about?’ ”

It’s been roughly five years since Rhodes came home from his third tour in Iraq. And despite a highly decorated 29-year career in the Army, a new book, more than a hundred speaking engagements and praise from the likes of Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, for his efforts in suicide prevention, Rhodes still wrestles with his own demons. When he speaks to crowds and gently holds up the photos of fellow servicemen who’ve committed suicide, it’s as if he’s holding up a mirror.

“It’s not about me,” he tells soldiers. “Every one of us can tell our own story. Start telling it. Change the culture of silence.”

Rhodes, 49, is among a small cadre of senior non-commissioned officers and officers who are opening up about their journeys back from the brink of suicide — efforts that top military commanders applaud as they battle a suicide epidemic. The open support from the military’s uppermost ranks for openly discussing a topic long considered taboo is a revolution triggered largely by both greater awareness and pressure to curb record-high suicide rates.

This month, the Defense Department reported that there were 160 reported active-duty Army suicides in 2009, up from 140 in 2008. Of these, 114 have been confirmed, while the cause of death in the remaining 46 remains to be determined. The increase in military suicides includes men between the ages of 18 and 30, mid-career officers and, increasingly, women.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other military leaders have said the increase is likely related to repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan and to the stigma long associated with seeking treatment for mental health problems. Many soldiers are embarrassed to seek help and worried that doing so will hamper their prospects for advancement.

In response, the Pentagon has poured millions of dollars into new suicide-prevention programs and thousands of hours on helping soldiers suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Through programs such as the Real Warriors Campaign, with its catchphrase of “Resilience. Recovery. Reintegration,” the military encourages soldiers to help others by sharing their stories of sorrow.

Veterans such as Rhodes put a different face on grief.

“The one thing that I’ve found when talking to soldiers and leaders, a lot of the response has been, ‘this is the first time we’ve had a senior leader who has dealt with this talk about it,’ ” Rhodes said. “At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how much money we put into this system to change policies and whatever else. At the end of the day, it’s leadership.”

For Rhodes — who grew up in Ringgold, Ga., and lives in the shadow of Fort Benning, near Columbus, Ga., where he once commanded troops — the Iraq war was a greedy ghost that stole him away for 30 months and gnawed at his marriage and his sanity.

He lost both during his third tour. Rhodes’ sky cracked open in April 2005.

“The first hundred days, we didn’t have a boy get a scratch. Then we lost two guys when their suits caught on fire. It started then. Then a couple days later we lost a few more.”

Then the unit lost two captains — younger men with children and career aspirations.

“We arrived at the scene, and that was the first time I saw a human body in so many dismemberments. A young private walked over to me with a hand and said, ‘What do I do with this?’ I took his ring off and said, ‘Put this over in that bag.’ ”

In all, he watched 37 soldiers die during his time in Iraq. Rhodes pushed on through heavy fighting, fatigue and a grief so deep that it threatened to swallow him whole.

Then one day, everything went dark.

“I woke up on the helicopter, and a young soldier put a card in my pocket and said, ‘You’ve been serviced by Angel Flight.’ ”

Rhodes was flown to a military hospital in Baghdad and was diagnosed with PTSD. He made what he calls “a deal with the devil” and was offered an opportunity to slow down and receive counseling.

He was also prescribed medication for depression, which he rarely took. Soon he started sleepwalking.

“I’d tie myself to my bunk at night. One time I was found on top of my bunk and was brought back down.”

Back home, his wife, Carol, found that she could relax only after 10 at night, figuring that the Army would never bring her news of her husband’s death any later than that. His son, Sam, dropped out of college and joined the Army in the hopes of fighting alongside his father in Iraq.

That November, Rhodes was sent to Fort Benning to help lead a brigade. By day, he was a stalwart commander, barking out orders and in full control. At night he’d go back to his now empty apartment — he and Carol had divorced — drink and think about whether in death he might find some sort of respite from the nightmares and the overwhelming guilt he felt because he’d survived and others hadn’t.

“I went to a friend’s house, a retired veteran, I got a gun from him with bullets, and the next day I was trying to figure out when and where to do it.”

Col. Charles Durr, the brigade commander, sensed that Rhodes was having problems and pulled him aside.

“He spent the day with me, and he recognized I was having issues; he didn’t know I was considering suicide,” Rhodes said. “It was just a very positive day. He told me I was doing a good job. When somebody says something positive to you and reinforces you’re doing good things, it makes it seem better.”

Slowly, painfully, Rhodes found his way back.

He met Cathy, a friendly Army IT specialist who made him feel new. They married in a small, spur-of-the-moment ceremony in Fort Benning’s chapel, then dashed off for a whirlwind honeymoon in Las Vegas.

It was willfully impulsive, and it was the closest thing to normal he’d felt in a long time.

He also rediscovered a love of horses and found catharsis in stoking their smooth coats and silently unburdening all his troubles on his quiet, gentle companions.

Rhodes also came to realize that his father, William Rhodes, a highly decorated World War II veteran who’d saved the life of future Georgia governor Marvin Griffin in combat, also suffered from PTSD and drank to deal with his demons.

Fearing a generational curse, Rhodes told his son, who’s currently serving in Iraq, about his own and his grandfather’s problems, and he prays that the military’s changing attitude about mental health might help spare Sam his father’s and grandfather’s fate.

He decided that he might be able to help others, too. So one day, following a presentation on suicide prevention in the Army, Rhodes went up to the facilitator and said, “I think I can help.”

He has. Rhodes receives hundreds of e-mails every week from soldiers who pour out their hearts with secrets they don’t feel they can tell their spouses or their commanding officers. He encourages them to get help, and every once in a while they do.

“The other week, we were at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and we were walking into the building, an old theater, this E-7 (Sergeant 1st Class) was sitting there with his sunglasses. (Rhodes) said hi to him ’cause the guy looked disturbed,” Cathy Rhodes said. “People came up after the presentation. This one soldier came up to him and had taken off his sunglasses, and he said, ‘Sergeant Major, I want to thank you.’ That really touched my heart.”

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(c) 2010, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

Visit the McClatchy Washington Bureau on the World Wide Web at www.mcclatchydc.com.

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GRAPHIC (from MCT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20100129 Army SUICIDES

ARCHIVE GRAPHIC on MCT Direct (from MCT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20100119 Military suicides

Los Angeles Times

(MCT)

This 2010 Camry is one of the models Toyota recalled. Photo courtesy of Davide Dewhurst/Toyota/MCT

LOS ANGELES — A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will hold a hearing Feb. 25 to investigate Toyota’s massive recalls related to vehicles that can accelerate out of control.

The subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, chaired by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., on Thursday issued exhaustive data requests to both Toyota and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Citing “persistent consumer complaints of sudden unintended acceleration,” the committee made the request in a letter sent to NHTSA Administrator David Strickland and Toyota.

The probe began earlier this week after Toyota said it would stop production and sales of eight of its most popular vehicles, including the Camry and Corolla, while it developed a remedy for a sticking accelerator-pedal system that can cause unintended acceleration.

“I am concerned by the seriousness and scope of Toyota’s recent recall announcements,” said Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif. “Our hearing will help us better understand how quickly and effectively Toyota and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration responded to consumer complaints about the safety of the recalled Toyota vehicles.”

In an interview, Stupak said that he remained uncertain whether Toyota’s assessment of the problem and its solution were adequate. In the letters to Toyota and NHTSA, Stupak asked for a comprehensive timeline of what the two organizations knew about sudden-acceleration problems and when they knew it.

The panel wants an analysis of NHTSA’s early-warning system, a statistical forecasting tool that was put in place over the last decade to signal the very kinds of problems that Toyota vehicles have experienced. That system apparently failed to flag the problem.

The letter also asks for data on every complaint, petition, report and technical analysis that might be relevant to Toyota sudden-acceleration events.

Meanwhile, Toyota’s recall for sticky accelerator pedals expanded worldwide Thursday, as the Japanese automaker said it would pull vehicles from Europe and China.

An unspecified number of models and vehicles will be affected in Europe, but production will not be halted there because changes had already been adopted in newly made cars, the automaker said.

In China, the government’s product-safety group said on its Web site that the recall will include more than 75,000 RAV4 sport utility vehicles built between March 19, 2009, and Jan. 25. Toyota has about a 7 percent market share in China, where the RAV4 was second only to Honda’s CR-V in SUV sales as of November.

On Tuesday, Toyota issued an unprecedented stop-sale order and halted production on eight of its most popular models: 2009 and 2010 RAV4, 2009 and 2010 Corolla, 2009 and 2010 Matrix, 2005 to 2010 Avalon, 2010 Highlander, 2007 to 2010 Tundra, 2008 to 2010 Sequoia and some models of the popular Camry.

The company then said on Wednesday that it had added another 1.1 million vehicles to a recall announced in the fall relating to floor mats that can jam accelerator pedals.

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(Ken Bensinger of the Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.

Visit the Los Angeles Times on the Internet at http://www.latimes.com/

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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GRAPHIC (from MCT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20100128 AUTO TOYOTA

Los Angeles Times

(MCT)

LOS ANGELES — J.D. Salinger, one of contemporary literature’s most famous recluses, who created a lasting symbol of adolescent discontent in his 1951 novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” has died. He was 91.

Salinger died of natural causes Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., his son Matthew said in a statement released by the author’s literary representative.

Perhaps no other writer of so few works generated as much popular and critical interest as Salinger, who published one novel, three authorized collections of short stories and an additional 21 stories that only appeared in magazines in the 1940s. He abandoned publishing in 1965, when his last story — “Hapworth 26, 1924″ — was published by The New Yorker. Rarely seen in public and aggressively averse to most publicity, he was often called the Howard Hughes of American letters.

His silence inspired a range of reactions from literary critics, some characterizing it as a form of cowardice and others as a cunning strategy that, despite its outward intentions, helped preserve his mythic status in American culture. Still others interpreted his withdrawal as the deliberate spiritual stance of a man who, shying from the glare of celebrity, immersed himself in Eastern religions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Hindu Vedantic philosophy.

His stories — heavily autobiographical, humorous and cynical — focused on highly idiosyncratic urban characters seeking meaning in a world transformed by the horrors of World War II, in which Salinger was a direct participant.

His stellar fictional creation was Holden Caulfield, the teenage anti-hero of “The Catcher in the Rye,” who was, like Salinger, unsuccessful in school and inclined to retreat from a world he perceived as disingenuous and hostile to his needs.

A prototypical misfit, Caulfield apparently became a fixation for the criminally disturbed, including Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon, and John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan. But Caulfield also cared about children and other innocents, exhibiting moral outrage and a compassion for underdogs that resonated with the generation that came of age in the 1960s.

When renowned psychiatrist Robert Coles lived among civil rights activists in the South in the late 1950s and early 1960s, “scarcely a day went by that Salinger’s name wasn’t mentioned,” he recalled in an article for The New Republic almost two decades later. Tom Hayden, the former ’60s radical and California legislator who read “Catcher” as a teenager, called Caulfield one of several “alternative cultural models,” along with novelists Jack Kerouac and actor James Dean, whose life crises “spawned not only political activism, but also the cultural revolution of rock ‘n’ roll.”

“Catcher” began to appear on college reading lists in the 1960s along with Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22″ and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” but critic John Seelye, among other analysts, would later conclude that in “acting as a transcendental Special Prosecutor of Adult Values and making straight the way for the protest movements of the ’60s,” Salinger led the way.

In the ensuing decades “Catcher” became one of the most-banned and most-taught books in the country. Salinger also created the neurotic Glass family, who first appeared in stories published in the 1940s and ’50s. Among the best-known are two long pieces published in The New Yorker in the 1950s and later combined in the book “Franny and Zooey” by Little, Brown in 1961. The Glasses also were featured in the collections “Nine Stories” (1953) and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour: An Introduction” (1963).

An unauthorized collection, “The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J.D. Salinger,” was mysteriously published in 1974 and went out of print after some 25,000 copies were sold. It contained 21 pieces that originally appeared in magazines in the 1940s but that Salinger never wanted reprinted. The bootlegged edition so outraged the author that he broke two decades of silence when he sued to stop its sale.

In a rare interview, Salinger not only condemned the pirating but tried to explain his extraordinary reluctance to share his writing with readers.

“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” he told The New York Times in 1974. “It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

In 1997, the announcement by a small literary press that it would reprint his last work — the novella-length “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which was originally published in 1965 — caused excitement among a legion of hungry Salinger devotees. But the book never materialized, its cancellation as mysterious as the author who had led a hermitic life on a 99-acre estate in New Hampshire since 1953.

Fans regularly traveled to the remote New England hamlet to find Salinger but rarely made contact. He lived on a hill behind high walls, where a sign warned trespassers to keep out. He steadfastly ignored almost all interview requests and aggressively discouraged biographers’ efforts to examine his life. He would not allow his photograph or personal information to appear on his book jackets. He even refused fan mail. “He just doesn’t want anything to do with the rest of us,” Lillian Ross, the longtime New Yorker writer and Salinger friend, once noted.

Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City on New Year’s Day, 1919. His Scotch-Irish mother, Marie Jillich, changed her name to Miriam when she married Sol Salinger, a well-to-do importer of meats and cheeses. Jerome, known as Sonny, and his sister, Doris, who was eight years older, grew up on the fashionable East Side of Manhattan.

Sonny attended several public schools and the private McBurney School, racking up poor grades at all of them. According to biographer Paul Alexander, McBurney officials offered this withering appraisal when they kicked him out: “Character: Rather hard-hit by (adolescence) his last year with us. Ability: plenty. Industry: did not know the word.”

In desperation, his father sent him to Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. It was there, holding a flashlight under the covers of his dormitory bed, Salinger first began to write. His grades improved, and in 1936 Valley Forge awarded him what was to be his only diploma.

He attended New York University for a year, interrupting his studies to work as an entertainer on a cruise liner, then spending several months in Europe to learn about the family import business. Meanwhile, he was writing stories, sending them off to magazines and collecting rejection letters.

In 1939, he entered Pennsylvania’s Ursinus College, where he wrote drama reviews and a humorous column called “The Skipped Diploma” for the campus newspaper. He pulled average grades but dropped out after nine weeks.

Back home in New York, he enrolled in a class at Columbia University that would launch his career as a writer. It was taught by Whit Burnett, editor of the influential Story magazine, where such writers as William Saroyan, Norman Mailer and Carson McCullers had made their debuts. Burnett agreed to publish “The Young Folks,” one of the stories Salinger, then 21, had written for the class. A year later, a Salinger story appeared in Collier’s magazine and then one in Esquire.

In April 1942, five months after Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, Salinger joined the Army but did not stop writing. He carried his typewriter all over Europe, reportedly even taking it with him into foxholes, and had several stories published in the Saturday Evening Post.

In 1944, Salinger, who was serving in counterintelligence, landed with the 4th Infantry Division at Normandy on D-Day and stayed on through some of the war’s bloodiest campaigns, including the Battle of the Bulge. According to unauthorized biographer Ian Hamilton, the young writer may have experienced a nervous breakdown in July 1945, after fighting for nearly a year during the advance on Berlin. He was hospitalized in Nuremberg, where he wrote to his new friend, Ernest Hemingway, that he faced the possibility of a psychiatric discharge; he was presumed to have earned a regular discharge before returning to civilian life in November of that year.

Stories Salinger published around this time concerned soldiers on the verge of emotional collapse, including the first story narrated by Holden Caulfield. Published in Colliers in December 1945, it was titled “I’m Crazy.”

Just before he left the Army, Salinger married a French woman named Sylvia, about whom little is known. She was thought to be a doctor with Nazi ties who, according to the author’s daughter, Margaret Salinger, “hated Jews as much as he hated Nazis.” The eight-month marriage ended in mid-1946 during a vacation in Florida, in a hotel much like the one Salinger would describe two years later in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

Considered one of his finest stories, it features the sage but mentally fragile Seymour Glass, who is just released from an Army hospital and on holiday in Florida with his bride, and ends in an inexplicable tragedy. The same year that his marriage ended, Salinger received welcome news: The New Yorker had finally decided to publish a story of his that it had been holding for five years. The main character of “Slight Rebellion Off Madison Avenue” was Caulfield, again in the middle of a nervous breakdown. “Slight Rebellion” later became the basis for a chapter in “The Catcher in the Rye.”

Salinger soon began to write exclusively for the New Yorker. Among the pieces that appeared there during the period leading up to 1951 was “For Esme — With Love and Squalor,” narrated by a man very much like Salinger. The main character is a counterintelligence officer who seeks temporary refuge from World War II by taking tea in an English establishment. There he meets and is deeply affected by a precocious teenage girl named Esme and promises to write a story for her. The rest of the story seals his promise and brings a gift of redemption. It is one of Salinger’s most beloved works, reportedly eliciting more reader response than any other story he had written.

Then, in 1951, came “The Catcher in the Rye.”

Salinger spent 10 years writing the novel, which opens with 17-year-old Caulfield in a California mental hospital describing three days he had spent in New York after flunking out of school for the third time. The rest of the book shows Caulfield as he heads for collapse in a series of adventures and misadventures that veer between the screamingly funny and the desperately sad.

The novel is written entirely in the vernacular of an upper-middle-class, adolescent Manhattanite of the era. Caulfield litters his sentences with a lazy “and all” (as in how his parents “were occupied and all before they had me” or how they were “nice and all”) and is generous with obscenities. He is kind to children but distrusts most everyone else, calling anyone or anything he dislikes “crumby” or “phony.”

The book quickly earned a spot on The New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for 30 weeks. The Book-of-the-Month Club made it a main selection, an unusual honor for a first-time novelist. “Read five pages,” club editor Clifton Fadiman wrote, and “you are inside Holden’s mind, almost as incapable of escaping from it as Holden is himself.”

Time magazine also praised it, noting that it offered “some of the most acidly humorous deadpan satire since the late great Ring Lardner.” Similarly, S.N. Behrman, writing in The New Yorker, said Salinger’s humor made the book “one of the funniest, expeditious (novels) in the history of juvenilia.”

But T. Morris Longstreth in the Christian Science Monitor condemned it as “not fit for children to read” and said Caulfield was “preposterous, profane, and pathetic beyond belief.” James Stern in The New York Times adopted a voice similar to Salinger’s protagonist when he wrote that the book “gets kind of monotonous. And (Salinger) should’ve cut out a lot about those jerks and all at that crumby school.” A memorable barb came from Norman Mailer, who wrote, “I seem to be alone in finding (Salinger) no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.”

Instead of basking in the glow of celebrity, Salinger went to England to avoid publicity. After the novel went into its second printing, he ordered Little, Brown to remove his photograph from the book jacket. Future editions would rank among the plainest in publishing history. In 1953, he left Manhattan for New Hampshire, holing up in a remote rural spot of the sort that Holden Caulfield longed to escape to.

Salinger’s interest in Zen Buddhism deepened, and there were indications that he considered becoming a monk. The first literary manifestations of Salinger’s Buddhist influences appeared in the collection “Nine Stories.” Each story is a puzzle, like the Zen koan that Salinger chose to open the volume. It reads, “We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Eudora Welty, writing in The New York Times, said that in “Nine Stories” Salinger displayed “the equipment of a born writer — his sensitive eye, his incredibly good ear, and something I think of no other word for but grace.” Charles Poore in The New York Times was less charitable, calling the stories “disjointed, uneasy little dreams,” while Sidney Monas in the Hudson Review took exception to Salinger’s “peculiar conceptual separation of the child from the adult, as though they were of different species, not merely different ages.”

Despite the mixed reviews, the collection spent three months on The New York Times bestseller list.

In this later period, Salinger focused on the various members of the eccentric Glass family, which consisted of Irish-Jewish vaudevillians Bessie and Les and their seven brilliant children: the tragic Seymour; his brothers Buddy (whom Salinger called his “alter-ego and collaborator”), twins Walt and Wake, and Zooey; and his sisters Boo Boo and Franny, the youngest of the brood. Fans lined up at newsstands whenever a new Glass story was published in The New Yorker. “I love working on these Glass stories,” Salinger wrote in an author’s note when the book “Franny and Zooey” came out in 1961. “I’ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill.”

“Franny and Zooey” spent six months on The New York Times bestseller list despite some of the harshest reviews of Salinger’s career. Some critics found his obsession with the Glasses unhealthy. “To be confronted with the seven faces of Salinger, all wise and lovable and simple, is to gaze into a terrifying narcissus pool,” Mary McCarthy wrote, while John Updike said the author’s adoration of his characters “robs the reader of the initiative upon which love must be given.”

Critic Alfred Kazin pronounced the Glasses too “cute,” but he acknowledged that their creator had a gift. “No American fiction writer in recent memory has given so much value, by way of his hypnotized attention, to the little things that light up character in every social exchange,” Kazin wrote in 1973. “Salinger has been the great pantomimist in our contemporary fiction.”

Even Updike allowed that when “all reservations have been entered in the correctly unctuous and apprehensive tone, about the direction (Salinger) has taken, it remains to acknowledge that it is a direction, and the refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.”

Salinger’s last published word on the Glasses came in the long and rambling “Hapworth 16, 1924.” Consisting largely of a letter from camp written by an unbelievably precocious, 7-year-old Seymour, the story met with much critical disdain.

Nonetheless, the announcement more than three decades later that the story would be republished as a book made headlines across the country. It prompted New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani to reassess the Glass saga, including “Hapworth,” which she concluded was “a sour, implausible, and, sad to say, completely charmless story.”

Shortly after her essay appeared, Orchises Press, the tiny Alexandria, Va., publishing company that had planned to reissue “Hapworth,” announced that publication had been indefinitely postponed. The author, as usual, had no comment.

Salinger was tall (over 6 feet) and darkly handsome. He married his second wife, Claire Douglas, in 1955, when she was a 19-year-old Radcliffe student and he was a 34-year-old rising literary star. The marriage produced two children: Margaret Ann, born in 1955, and Matthew, born in 1960.

Margaret Salinger, who became a lay minister, penned a stinging memoir called “Dream Catcher,” published in 2000. In it she describes an extremely lonely childhood. “My father discouraged living visitors to such an extent that an outsider, looking in, might have observed a wasteland of isolation.” To fill the hours, her mother read stories to her, she said, while her father “spun tales of characters, both animal and human, who accompanied us throughout our day.”

Douglas, who became a Jungian psychologist, sued for divorce in 1967, and Salinger did not contest.

In addition to his son, daughter and three grandchildren, Salinger is survived by his third wife, Colleen O’Neill, whom he was believed to have married in the late 1980s. Little is known about her except that she had worked as a nurse and was about 50 years younger than Salinger.

The most infamous of his liaisons came in 1972, when the then-53-year-old author began corresponding with Yale University undergraduate Joyce Maynard, who was being touted in the press as her generation’s Holden Caulfield after the publication of her celebrated New York Times Magazine cover story, “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life.” When Salinger invited Maynard to live with him in New Hampshire, she dropped out of school and moved in for 10 months.

Although rumors of the affair had been widely circulated, Maynard, who eventually became a columnist and novelist, did not go public with it until two decades later.

She devoted several chapters of her 1998 memoir, “At Home in the World,” to their relationship, writing of their inability to have sexual intercourse due to a medical condition of hers, his absorption in homeopathy and his devotion to Reichian therapy. According to Maynard, Salinger also regularly induced himself to vomit after eating pizza or other foods he deemed unhealthy, and he taught her to do the same.

Their relationship ended after a Time magazine reporter obtained Salinger’s unlisted phone number and asked him to comment on a story about Maynard, who had a book coming out. Salinger, apparently incensed by this intrusion, kicked her out of the house a short time later.

In 1999 Maynard put 14 of his letters to her on the auction block, explaining that she needed the money to pay her children’s college tuitions. The correspondence was purchased for $156,000 by California philanthropist Peter Norton, who announced that he would return the letters to their author.

A decade earlier, Salinger had successfully barred biographer Ian Hamilton from using other letters in his 1988 book, “In Search of J.D. Salinger.” But Salinger’s lawsuit ironically resulted in broad public access to the very correspondence he was trying to suppress: In order to protect his letters, Salinger had to place them on file in the copyright office in New York, where anyone could read them for a modest fee.

In a deposition for the Hamilton case, Salinger stated that he was still writing fiction. According to Maynard, Salinger had completed at least two books by the early 1970s but kept the manuscripts in a safe, far from prying eyes and publishers. He told Maynard that publishing was an “embarrassment.” “The poor boob who lets himself in for it might as well walk down Madison Avenue with his pants down.”

What critic George Steiner once called “The Salinger Industry” — the curiosity and speculation surrounding the enigmatic author and his works — continued to thrive into the early 2000s, when some critics felt compelled to pronounce that Salinger was no longer relevant, that “Catcher” was a “minor classic” at best, or that “Franny and Zooey” was the more skillful work. “Zooey,” writer Janet Malcolm declared in The New York Review of Books in 2001, “is arguably Salinger’s masterpiece.”

Other writers were inspired by him, such as W.P. Kinsella, who made Salinger a character in his 1999 novel “Shoeless Joe,” and John Guare, who paid homage to him in his 1990 hit play “Six Degrees of Separation.” Bestselling author Don DeLillo told Esquire magazine that “Mao II,” his 1991 novel about a reclusive novelist, was born in the instant that he noticed a tabloid photograph of Salinger with a haunted look on his face.

Novelist Herbert Gold once asked Salinger for permission to reprint one of his stories in an anthology. Salinger actually wrote back, Gold recounted in the 2002 book “Letters to J.D. Salinger,” edited by Chris Kubica and Will Hochman. His answer, however, was no.

Gold lost the letter but 40 years later still remembered Salinger’s enigmatic last words on refusing a place in the anthology:

“I have my reasons.”

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(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.

Visit the Los Angeles Times on the Internet at http://www.latimes.com/

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

Steve Jobs debuts Apple's new iPad at the Yerba Buena Gardens Theater in San Francisco, California, Wednesday, January 27, 2010. (Karl Mondon/Contra Costa Times/MCT)

By Mark Milian

Los Angeles Times

(MCT)

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs didn’t ascend the stage sporting a robe and full beard to announce the most anticipated tablet since Moses’. But the crowd at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco received the introduction of the iPad with a roar of thunderous applause.

Perhaps the worst-kept secret since, well, the iPhone, the iPad is a 9.7-inch touch-screen computer, starting at $499 and available in March. It resembles an oversized iPod touch.

“We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical and revolutionary new product,” Jobs said early on to ease the throngs of technology journalists and analysts who knew what was coming.

After a brief on-stage run-through of the features, Jobs plopped down on a black leather couch to demonstrate how you might use the device at home. Grab the iPad off the kitchen table and browse the Web or buy movie tickets.

The iPad stands as the middle ground between a full-blown laptop computer and an iPhone.

“It’s so much more intimate than a laptop and so much more capable than a smart phone,” Jobs said.

The iPad contains Apple’s App Store, so the 140,000 or so applications already available for the iPhone and iPod Touch will run on the tablet — scaled up to fit the bigger screen.

The iPad has a 10-hour battery life, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and comes in versions that hold 16 gigabytes, 32 gigabytes and 64 gigabytes. They cost $499, $599 and $699, respectively.

“We want to put this in the hands of lots of people,” Jobs said. “We have met our cost goals.”

Separate versions that support AT&T 3G wireless Internet cost $629, $729 and $829 for 16 gigabytes, 32 gigabytes and 64 gigabytes respectively. Customers can sign up for AT&T’s 3G without a contract. A 250-megabyte-per-month plan (that’s not very much data) costs $14.99, and unlimited Internet access costs $29.99. Subscribers also get access to AT&T’s Wi-Fi hotspots, including Starbucks.

A software development kit will be available immediately to software makers to design apps specifically for the iPad. Some developers have already begun revising their software for the larger screen and more powerful processor.

Apple has revised its own software that ships with the device. The iPad version of iTunes resembles a hybrid between the desktop version and the one on the iPhone. The calendar has big text and buttons. YouTube supports high-definition video.

Apple also showed off a version of its iWork software — a competitor to Microsoft Office — built for a touch-screen. It includes Keynote, Pages and Numbers — the Apple equivalents of PowerPoint, Word and Excel, respectively. Each costs $9.99 and can be downloaded from the App Store.

“Watching one is nothing like getting one in your hands,” Jobs said after a demo.

The device is half-an-inch deep and 1.5 pounds — “that’s thinner and lighter than any netbook.” Earlier, Jobs lambasted netbooks, those tiny, inexpensive laptops that have become so popular recently.

“Is there room for a third device?” Jobs said before introducing the gadget. “Now, some people have thought, ‘That’s a netbook.’ The problem is, netbooks aren’t better at anything. … They’re slow. They have low-quality displays.”

Like an iPhone, users input data by touching an on-screen keyboard. A keyboard accessory with a dock turns the iPad into a sort of laptop. And a case that acts as a stand — to watch video without holding the device — will also be available.

Jobs says the iPad is better than laptops and phones (and yeah, netbooks) for consuming video, music, Web browsing and reading e-books (no e-paper, though, so it’s not as easy on the eyes as a Kindle).

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(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.

Visit the Los Angeles Times on the Internet at http://www.latimes.com/

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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GRAPHICS (from MCT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20100127 Apple earnings; 20100127 Apple iPad

The Seattle Times

(MCT)

SEATTLE — U.S. citizens may get into Canada with a birth certificate and picture ID.

But they’ll need more than that to get back home.

Such inconsistencies could result in hassles for unprepared Americans traveling to British Columbia by car, train or boat during the Winter Olympic Games next month.

Officials with the Canada Border Services Agency say that while they try to inform visitors about the U.S. government’s re-entry requirements, it’s not their duty to ensure every American coming into Canada has the appropriate documents to get home.

“It’s our responsibility to make sure people meet admissibility requirements for Canada,” spokeswoman Faith St. John said. “As long as they meet those … ”

U.S. regulations that took effect last June require all visitors entering or re-entering the United States by land or sea to present a valid passport or other approved secure document: a passport card, an enhanced driver’s license or what’s known as a “trusted traveler” card, such as a NEXUS card.

There are a few exceptions — including for active-duty service people traveling with military orders, and legal permanent residents, who must use their green cards.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, travelers have largely been compliant — 98 percent along the northern border, higher among Canadians than Americans.

Even so, “We still have a person or two who shows up without proper travel documents; they may have a driver’s license and birth certificate, which is all they need to enter Canada,” said Chief Thomas Schreiber of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Blaine, Wash. But it’s not enough to re-enter the U.S.

While the U.S. can’t very well leave Americans stranded in Canada, those whose citizenship can’t be easily confirmed are often forced to endure the sometimes-long lines and further questioning of a secondary inspection.

“Obviously, we’re not in the business of preventing U.S. citizens and lawful residents from returning home,” Schreiber said.

Schreiber himself tells of traveling not long ago to Victoria with his wife and his mother-in-law, who was visiting from out of town, and realizing upon their return to the U.S. that his mother-in-law didn’t have her passport.

“So you can work that to your advantage sometimes,” he joked.

Together the U.S. and Canada have been trying to get the word out about what’s required to cross the border in both directions for the Games, which run between Feb. 12 and 28. Neither has a good handle on the number of people who might be traveling by train, car or even vessel from the U.S. into Canada.

St. John said the Canada Border Services Agency is prepared to accommodate the 1 million or so people it normally might process during a busy summer month.

Schreiber, of Border Protection, points out that the Games are occurring during what is traditionally a slow time of the year at the border, and he expects Americans attending the Games — at least those living relatively close to the border — to return home late in the day, when traffic is even lighter.

He expects border traffic to average “no more than a busy summer day.”

“We believe most people will fly into Vancouver,” said Joanne Ferreira, Border Protection’s spokeswoman in Washington, D.C.

“We expect some will fly to Seattle and drive to Vancouver. We believe there’s a huge number of travelers in the Northwest region who will drive through Seattle to get to Vancouver. Our message to them all is to have proper documents to get back home.”

Regardless of how they plan to get to Canada, U.S. citizens don’t need a passport to enter. They may use their birth certificates or naturalization certificates along with photo ID. Legal permanent residents of the U.S. may use their green cards.

But those same Americans will need more than a birth certificate to get home.

If they are flying back, the only acceptable document is a passport. But if they are traveling by land or sea, a passport card would do, as would an enhanced driver’s license or a NEXUS card or other trusted-traveler card.

There are times when Americans show up at the border with none of these documents, Schreiber said.

In such instances, officers try to determine if the person is a lawful U.S. citizen or permanent resident by asking for a birth certificate and ID or to see whatever documents they may have used to get into Canada in the first place.

“When we encounter someone whose ID can’t be firmly established, we compare them against the FBI database,” which includes digital fingerprints.

“A lot of times these are people who are fugitives from the law.”

Travelers who are inadmissible to Canada because of a criminal background shouldn’t expect to get a break just because they may have a ticket to the Games, St. John said.

Foreign nationals can be refused admission for any reason — including a DUI conviction with a blood-alcohol reading in excess of .08, reckless or dangerous driving, drug possession or trafficking, shoplifting or fraud.

“Rejections occur every day at the border,” she said. “It’s not going to be any different during the Olympics.”

She suggests travelers to the Games do some research before heading to Canada.

What you are trying to bring into Canada might also create a hassle at the border — including importing certain kinds of fruit or vegetables, large sums of money or weapons.

“Firearms is an area where we provide that warning — especially to Americans,” St. John said, noting that Canada’s firearm laws are different from those in the U.S. Travelers who fail to declare that they are carrying a weapon could be prosecuted and risk losing both the weapon and their vehicle.

As for the money, it you’re carrying $10,000 or more, you are required to declare it to border officials.

“It’s not illegal to bring it in; you won’t be taxed on it,” St. John said. “You just need to report it.”

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(c) 2010, The Seattle Times.

Visit The Seattle Times Extra on the World Wide Web at http://www.seattletimes.com/

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

McClatchy Newspapers

(MCT)

WASHINGTON — The Barack Obama who will deliver the State of the Union address Wednesday night faces a grimmer, more dubious audience than the popular new president who was riding high when he first addressed Congress last February did.

Then, Obama was celebrating the passage of a $787 billion economic stimulus and expecting Democrats soon to control 60 seats in the Senate, enough to fend off Republican filibusters and allow passage of a massive overhaul of the American health care system.

Now he labors under 10 percent national unemployment and a 48 percent job approval rating in the latest Gallup tracking poll. The stimulus’s true cost is now projected at $862 billion, and no health care overhaul has passed yet. The Democrats lost their slam-dunk Senate supermajority when Republicans won the special election last week in Massachusetts. A testy electorate also seems eager to boot many Democrats out of Congress in this year’s midterm elections.

Obama’s address, his first official State of the Union, is expected to acknowledge these shifts and deliver a sharpened populist appeal to the middle class and independent voters, along with a focus on creating jobs and reining in government spending.

“I think the key in this speech, what he’ll discuss more than anything, is getting our economy moving again,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday.

The president also is likely to underscore his commitment to a health care bill, but to put it in the context of how it will serve the nation’s economic well-being.

“The number one issue by far is jobs and the economy,” said Cliff Young, a pollster at Ipsos Public Affairs. “People are worried about their pocketbooks. Foreign policy is still on the radar, but it’s way down on the list. It’s domestic issues.”

Obama needs to be empathetic about people’s problems and offer concrete solutions without overpromising, Young said. “There’s a malaise, a sense that the government has not been able to get things done. The longer it lasts, the more likely he becomes known as the guy who can’t get things done.”

Aides already have said that the president will call for a three-year freeze on non-security discretionary spending. Republicans question his sincerity, however, with House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio saying that Americans should be “skeptical about his sudden change of heart.”

Bob Lehrman, former Vice President Al Gore’s chief speechwriter, who teaches about the craft, said that Obama must acknowledge voters’ doubts while standing his ground.

“On the one hand, he has to say, ‘I understand the voters who are unhappy and I agree with them. I can see why they’re unhappy.’ That’s one of the most potent ways of showing an audience you’re a credible person, is to admit the other side has a point,” Lehrman said.

“On the other hand, he cannot say, ‘So I’m abandoning all the things I wanted to do.’ He has to say, ‘I will keep fighting for the things I campaigned for that brought me to the White House: jobs, health care, climate change.’ ” He also can take credit for containing the economic crisis.

Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, said in an interview Tuesday that the jobs issue “cuts across independents, Republicans and Democrats. That’s not a partisan thing; it’s an American thing.” It’s the same for health care, he said.

The details may have partisan ramifications, however. Trumka wants Obama to say that he’ll pay for job creation by taxing “Wall Street and the super-rich.”

Trumka and his members want to hear the president call for expanding collective bargaining. They also want him to push the Senate publicly to use the so-called budget reconciliation process to force through health policy changes on bare majority votes.

Another key audience for Obama is Congress, where bipartisanship rarely exists and Democrats are deeply concerned about their re-election prospects this fall.

Even as the president finalizes his prepared remarks, new economic challenges keep coming. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday set the fiscal 2010 deficit at $1.35 trillion and projected that the national debt will reach $8.8 trillion this year, 60 percent of the gross domestic product. That threatens to drag down future economic growth.

Also on Tuesday, the Senate rejected an Obama-backed concept of creating a commission that would recommend ways to cut the federal debt. That rejection could prompt the president to create such a panel by executive order. Obama is to offer his fiscal 2011 budget on Monday.

Like past presidents, Obama is expected to touch on a list of issues before him, among them:

—Sending more troops to war in Afghanistan.

—Dealing with terrorist threats on U.S. soil.

—Assisting Haiti after the earthquake.

—Improving education.

—Addressing issues important to his Democratic base that so far have had to wait, such as immigration, carbon emissions and gay rights.

“The problem is he has two very different audiences: independents, who want to be reassured that he heard the message of Massachusetts, and progressives, who worry that Obama has forgotten the lessons of 2008 and their desire for fundamental changes in American policy,” said Darrell West, an expert on governance at the Brookings Institution, a center-left policy research center in Washington.

“He needs both of them to be successful.”

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(McClatchy Newspapers correspondent David Lightman contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2010, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

Visit the McClatchy Washington Bureau on the World Wide Web at www.mcclatchydc.com.

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GRAPHIC (from MCT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20100126 STATE UNION

McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

Haitian boys fly kites over the Daihatsu tent camp on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Monday, January 25, 2010. Photo courtesy of Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times/MCT

MONTREAL — Rebuilding Port-au-Prince could take a decade or longer and ultimately completely reform the way Haiti is organized, foreign leaders said at a conference Monday.

Conference members also used the meeting as a microphone for an urgent need now in the quake-shaken nation: tents.

“Anybody who’s got those tents, get in touch with us,” said John Holmes, United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.

Haiti’s prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, told envoys from 19 other countries and international organizations that the Jan. 12 earthquake crippled not just the city of Port-au-Prince, but the entire country. In the future, he said, Haiti’s authority and its resources must be decentralized.

“In 30 seconds, Haiti lost 60 percent of its GDP gross domestic product,” Bellerive said. “We need to review the whole country.”

Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, urged his colleagues to stay committed to Haiti’s reconstruction.

“It is not an exaggeration to say that 10 years of hard work — at least — awaits the world in Haiti,” Harper said. “We must hold ourselves and each other accountable for the commitments we make.”

While the conference is focused on long-term reconstruction, Bellerive also passed along a more urgent appeal for immediate assistance from Haiti’s president, Rene Preval.

Bellerive said his country needs at least 200,000 tents to provide shelter to those left homeless by the earthquake.

He also stressed the need for medical care, saying hospitals and clinics in other regions of the country are nearly filled with patients. And he asked for prosthetics and orthopedic specialists to treat the thousands of people who lost limbs to injury.

“I could continue on all of these emergencies, there are many,” Bellerive said. “It is very difficult for me to talk reconstruction when we do not take these other matters into account.”

In Haiti, the Preval government said the need for tents was dire because the country’s first rainy season begins in about 10 days.

It issued an urgent international plea Monday for tens of thousands more six- to eight-person tents to shelter Haitians in and around the capital of Port-au-Prince.

Meantime, the International Organization for Migration, the intergovernment group coping with the homeless crisis, said it has only received about two-thirds of the $30 million it sought in a Jan. 15 appeal.

Holmes, the U.N. official, said about 500,000 Haitians had received food, and another 200,000 had received water.

Holmes also said the main water system in Port-au-Prince is now operating again. However, even before the earthquake, the water system failed to reach much of the city’s residents. More critically, Holmes said, relief agencies will focus on providing ready-to-eat meals for thousands of displaced people for at least the next two weeks.

He said the food problem has been complicated by the lack of shelter; without cooking facilities, the homeless have little use for staples such as rice.

By Monday morning, IOM estimated, some 692,000 people were living in 591 scattered settlements — tent cities set up, many spontaneously, to shelter people left homeless by the 7.0 earthquake that destroyed many communities on Jan. 12.

“It is likely that this figure is much higher, even though many people have left the capital to seek shelter in other towns and villages,” the IOM said.

In other developments, Monday:

—The United Nations said it had so far hired 5,000 Haitians in quake-torn areas, at $4 a day plus food rotations, to sweep roads and crush debris into smaller pieces. About 40 percent of the workforce was women. The U.N. planned to hire another 5,000 by week’s end.

—Aid continued to flow to the country. A pair of Miami Herald reporters headed to the Dominican Republic Monday morning spotted a steady flow of food and other goods coming into Haiti in containers stacked on semi-trailers.

—The European Union in Brussels said it was sending 350 military police — Italian, French and Dutch — to handle crowd control and aid distribution in Haiti to help make sure international aid reaches the needy. The military police will work under the U.N’s Haitian mission, which is coordinating the relief effort.

—U.N peacekeepers, wielding batons, riot shields and huge sacks of rice and beans, set up a food distribution check point in front of the Haitian National Palace. The plan was to hand out our 60 tons of food for 14,000 hungry citizens.

When the food trucks arrived in a heavily armed convoy, three lines of people snaking down Osval Durana Street erupted into cheers. The peacekeepers were also distributing cooking oil.

—The International Committee of the Red Cross said life was returning to the streets and camps of Port-au-Prince. “Hospitals are still overcrowded and often short of supplies,” said Simon Schorno, ICRC spokesman in Haiti, “but the long lines one saw in front of their gates only a few days ago have disappeared.”

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(Charles reported from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Hiaasen from Montreal.)

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(c) 2010, The Miami Herald.

Visit The Miami Herald Web edition on the World Wide Web at http://www.miamiherald.com/

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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GRAPHIC (from MCT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20100125 Relocate HAITI

McClatchy Newspapers

(MCT)

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The most interesting thing about Urban Meyer’s “I’m back” news conference Saturday was not something he said but rather his actions.

Meyer took the time to shake reporters’ hands, something he never does. He smiled. He cracked jokes. He’s fattening up. He’s still taking a break after National Signing Day on Feb. 3, but he said at halftime of the Florida men’s basketball game Saturday that he plans to coach spring football.

Florida defeated South Carolina, 58-56, on a last-second three-pointer by junior forward Chandler Parsons. The buzzer beater came less than an hour after Meyer spoke candidly with reporters in a corridor of the O’Connell Center.

“I keep hearing about this time off, and the people I’m closest to are going to demand I take some time off, but I tried that already,” Meyer said. “I tried a day and a half, and it didn’t work.”

Meyer said that he has gained 20 pounds since the end of football season, when his deteriorating health contributed to his decision to suddenly quit his job. Meyer changed his mind the following day and instead decided to take an indefinite leave of absence. At the time, he said he didn’t know if he was ever going to coach again, but he wanted to leave open the opportunity for coming back.

Meyer apparently couldn’t stay away. He never took any time off and instead began recruiting immediately after the Gators’ victory against Cincinnati in the Sugar Bowl.

This latest twist of As Urban Meyer’s World Turns comes 10 days before National Signing Day. Meyer and the UF program on Saturday played host to prospect Ronald Powell of Moreno Valley, Calif., on an official visit. Powell is the No. 1-rated recruit in the nation, according to rivals.com. He is being pursued by Florida and Southern California, which is now coached by Meyer’s archenemy, former Tennessee coach Lane Kiffin.

“It’s game day,” Meyer said. “It’s game day for 10 days.”

Meyer said that he will undergo tests on his heart in February but wouldn’t elaborate. When asked if he was undergoing stress tests, Meyer said, “Everything.”

“I’m not going to get into it publicly,” Meyer said.

Nearly as odd as Meyer’s offseason drama has been the way the UF football program has responded to it. It hasn’t affected the program negatively. In fact, the opposite has been true. Florida annihilated Cincinnati in the bowl game, and quarterback Tim Tebow set a BCS bowl record for total yards.

Not long after the bowl victory, Florida’s recruiting class began coming together. Meyer recently received commitments from several of the nation’s top prospects, including safety Matt Elam of West Palm Beach Dwyer, who was recently named the state’s Mr. Football. Elam, who already is enrolled at UF, was recognized at halftime of Saturday’s basketball game for his award.

Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley said that he was happy “with the direction” the football program is headed but also said Meyer “knows what he has to do, and there are still some things he has to do.”

One of Meyer’s most important tasks of the past month was replacing longtime defensive coordinator Charlie Strong, who is now the coach at Louisville. Meyer said he hired former Dolphins inside linebackers coach George Edwards after consulting with Dolphins coach Tony Sparano and former defensive coordinator Paul Pasqualoni.

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(c) 2010, The Miami Herald.

Visit The Miami Herald Web edition on the World Wide Web at http://www.herald.com/

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

WASHINGTON – Looking to signal at least one step toward reining in huge federal budget deficits, President Barack Obama will propose a three-year freeze in nonsecurity discretionary spending, senior administration officials said Monday.

His budget proposal, to be unveiled in part with Wednesday’s State of the Union speech and in detail next week, will urge Congress to keep overall spending at $447 billion a year for agencies other than those charged with national security and mandatory-spending programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

The freeze would take effect with the 2011 fiscal year starting Oct. 1, and wouldn’t affect the $787 billion economic stimulus plan already being implemented, the officials said.

It also wouldn’t affect a $154 billion jobs plan pending before Congress and backed by Obama, the officials said. One aide said that plan would be exempt because it would take effect this year, before the freeze.

Administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to not upstage the president, said that the three-year freeze would save $250 billion over a decade – if it’s approved by an election-year Congress.

After three years, the total spent would be the lowest as a percentage of the total economy in 50 years. Spending on those agencies has increased by an average of 5 percent a year since 1993, the officials said.

Still, officials acknowledged that the savings wouldn’t come close to eliminating the deficit and balancing the budget. “We’re not here to tell you we’ve solved the deficit,” one official said.

Republicans criticized the proposed freeze as window dressing.

“It highlights just how big of a hole the stimulus bill created,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. “It takes a three-year spending freeze to save about $250 billion – or one third of the deficit created by the stimulus alone, not counting interest, which averages $100 million every day.”

Annual deficits as of last year are forecast to total $7.1 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, adding to a total federal debt expected to reach $13.6 trillion by 2019.

The part of the budget that would be frozen represents an eighth of the total annual budget, spent on such operations as the Departments of Commerce, Education, Interior and Justice and agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.

They represent one-third of the annual discretionary spending that Congress approves every year. The rest of the annual discretionary spending would be exempt from the freeze, including the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security as well the Department of Veterans Affairs and international operations.

Also exempt: entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security that are on auto-pilot and don’t require annual approval by Congress. They’re also the largest cause of long-term deficits.

Obama this week endorsed proposals in Congress for a deficit commission that would recommend spending cuts or tax increases to bring down long-term deficits, and whose recommendations Congress would have to vote on by year’s end, up or down. The Senate is to vote Tuesday on the commission proposal.

While the freeze would shave only a sliver from the total deficits over the next 10 years, officials called it an important first step, one they said they hope will lead to others.

“At some point, you do have to draw a line, and say we need to re-orient what we’re doing,” one top official said. “This is more about being penny wise.”

The freeze would be measured overall and would not be applied across the board. Obama will propose increased spending for some agencies, cuts for others, and eliminating some, officials said.

“This is not a blunt instrument,” one official said. “Some agencies will be up, some agencies will be down. … What we want to do is get as much as we can from taxpayer money. What that means is re-orienting towards the programs that are working and where the needs are and moving away from things that are redundant, duplicative and inefficient.”

Getting Congress to go along in an election year will be a challenge, the Obama officials said. “Do I think this is going to win kudos on Capitol Hill? No,” a second official said.

Still, he noted that Obama managed to persuade Congress to stop spending on the F-22 fighter jet, something Congress had insisted on in the past despite requests by the Pentagon to stop it.
___
(c) 2010, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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Los Angeles Times

A crater is left by the car bomb outside the Hamra Hotel in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, January 25, 2010. Coordinated bombings left at least 31 people dead at popular hotels in Iraq's capital on Monday. Photo courtesy of Laith Hammoudi/MCT

(MCT)

BAGHDAD – Militants bombed three hotel compounds in eastern Baghdad Monday.

The coordinated attacks, which took place within minutes of one another, targeted facilities that host political events and are home to businessmen and news agencies. It was the latest high-profile attack in Baghdad ahead of national elections in early March.

At least 31 people were killed and 89 wounded in the bombings, according to security officials. The first car bomb exploded by the Sheraton in eastern Baghdad at 3:40 p.m.

The blast was quickly followed by an explosion outside of the Babylon hotel, where the government and political parties hold meetings. Soon after, a car bomb blasted the Hamra hotel compound, home to several international news agencies, including the Los Angeles Times.

Witnesses at the Hamra said checkpoint guards had come under fire from a few men dressed in business suits. During the firefight, the gate to the compound was opened and a white Kia van entered and exploded in a section of the compound with private homes. The blast ripped open a huge crater.

Witnesses said the impacts of the blasts, within a space of minutes, badly damaged the hotels and nearby buildings, and the fatalities could rise as bodies are pulled out of the rubble.

The attacks follow three major bombings since August on government facilities that killed more than 350 people and have created a chilling effect in Baghdad, where people had started to believe the situation was improving.

Previous bombings have targeted government facilities, but these attacks appeared aimed at international news agencies, nonprofit organizations, businessmen and organizations or groups doing business in Iraq. With the rise in violence, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government has come under heavy criticism, and discontent has risen among the populace.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but the coordinated attacks bore the mark of al-Qaida.

“It is a signature of al-Qaida,” Saad Mutalabi, an adviser to the Iraqi Cabinet, told Al-Jazeera. “I don’t think any of the political forces in Iraq would commit such an atrocity. It would not benefit any of them.”

The attack also coincided with the imminent execution of Ali Hassan Majid, the notorious defense minister of former President Saddam Hussein, who was nicknamed “Chemical Ali” for his role in the gassing of rebellious Kurds in the late 1980s.

The bombings follow a controversial decision by an Iraqi legislative authority to bar more than 500 candidates with alleged ties to Hussein’s Baath Party from March 7 parliamentary elections.

Vice President Joe Biden visited Iraq in recent days to persuade Iraqis to reverse the ruling, which many fear could reignite sectarian tensions between the country’s majority Shiite Muslims and once-dominant Sunni Arab minority.
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(Staff writers Ned Parker in New York and Borzou Daragahi in Beirut contributed to this report.)
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(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
Visit the Los Angeles Times on the Internet at http://www.latimes.com/
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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The Orlando Sentinel

(MCT)

Movies have long been the easy answer to every parent’s favorite question — “What do we do with the kids this weekend?”

Hollywood knows that, which is why we’ve got lots of all-ages-friendly titles looking at us in 2010 — animation, an epic, cute talking critters and wimpy kids.

So get out your calendars and plan the custody weekends. Remember to recycle your 3D glasses, and that there’s no use praying that a “Cats & Dogs” sequel won’t be in your future.

Feb. 12: “Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” — Rick Riordan’s fantasy novels are given the Chris “Harry Potter” Columbus treatment in what could be the first film in a series, starring Logan Lerman.

March 5: “Alice in Wonderland” — Johnny Depp is “as mad as a hatter” in Tim Burton’s fantastical 3D treatment of Alice’s adventures through the looking glass.

March 26: “How to Train Your Dragon 3D” — This is an animated version of Cressida Cowell’s book about a Viking lad who trains a dragon to be fierce.

April 2: “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” — Jeff Kinney’s books about a self-described middle school “wimp” comes to the big screen with Zachary Gordon in the title role.

Also opening April 2: “Furry Vengeance” — When Ken Jeong and Brendan Fraser put their development on a nature preserve, nature fights back in this animals-behaving-badly farce.

April 22: “Oceans” — Disney’s newest nature documentary is about the wonders of the world’s imperiled oceans.

May 21: “Shrek Forever After” — Rumpelstiltskin helps Shrek find his inner ogre and see what life without the fair Fiona would be like in this 3D toon.

June 4: “Marmaduke” — Owen Wilson is the voice of the dog in this comedy based on the newspaper comic.

June 11:”The Karate Kid” — Will and Jada’s son, Jaden Smith, has the title role in this remake, with Jackie Chan as the new kid’s new mentor, Mr. Han.

June 18: “Toy Story 3″ — Woody and the gang have been donated to a pre-school in this 3D animated sequel.

July 9: “Despicable Me” — Steve Carell voices the villain in this animated comedy about orphans who try to foil plans to steal the moon.

July 30: “Cats & Dogs: Revenge of Kitty Galore” — More talking dog secret agents battling super-villain cats.

Aug. 13: “Ramona and Beezus” — Joey King and Selena Gomez star in this adaptation of Beverly Cleary’s novels about a pest of a little sister.

Nov. 5: “Megamind” — This 3D animated comedy is about an evil genius (voiced by Will Ferrell) whose world is turned upside down when he accidentally kills his superhero nemesis (Brad Pitt).

Nov. 12: “Rapunzel” — A hairy animated Disney princess tale, in 3D. Wide release is Thanksgiving week.

Nov. 19: “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1″ — Harry’s exit from the fantasy film stage is split into two parts, beginning with this one.

Dec. 10: “The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader” — Can Fox and a “name” director (Michael Apted) breathe new life into the fantasy series based on the C.S. Lewis novels?

Dec. 17: “Yogi Bear” — Dan Aykroyd voices a Mr. “Smarter Than Your Average Bear” in this mix of animation and live action.

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(c) 2010, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).

Visit the Sentinel on the World Wide Web at http://www.orlandosentinel.com/.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

President Barack Obama, flanked by Cabinet members, delivers remarks on financial reform in the Diplomatic Reception Room January 21, 2010 in Washington, DC. Obama announced measures to narrow the size and scope of banks and their investment activities. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/MCT)

By Kevin G. Hall and Steven Thomma

McClatchy Newspapers

(MCT)

WASHINGTON — Trying to ride a wave of public anger at Wall Street, President Barack Obama on Thursday proposed tough new restrictions designed to limit the size of the nation’s largest commercial banks and reduce the risks they take in complex and exotic investments.

The president stopped short of urging a return to the days when commercial banks just lent money and were locked out of investment activities. However, his proposal Thursday, likely to play well in the heartland, is designed to rein in what are viewed as Wall Street excesses.

Flanked by his economic team, congressional leaders and the towering former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who’s long been urging much of what Obama announced, the president took aim at Wall Street, today’s political pinata.

“While the financial system is far stronger today than it was one year ago, it is still operating under the exact same rules that led to its near collapse,” Obama said before cameras at the White House. “My resolve to reform the system is only strengthened when I see a return to old practices at some of the very firms fighting reform; and when I see record profits at some of the very firms claiming that they cannot lend more to small business, cannot keep credit card rates low and cannot refund taxpayers for the bailout. It is exactly this kind of irresponsibility that makes clear reform is necessary.”

Financial markets didn’t like what they heard. The Dow Jones Industrial Average cratered more than 224 points as the president concluded his speech. The Dow closed down 213.27 points to 10,389.88, its worst showing since Oct. 30.

But Wall Street critics welcomed Obama’s proposal.

“The basic idea … is a really, really good step,” said Dean Baker, a co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal research center.

It came just days after the Democrats lost a Senate seat in Massachusetts, as Obama strives to assure voters that he’s siding with working people rather than the wealthy elite and searches for ways to redirect voters’ anger away from him to others, such as big bankers.

Americans are angry at bankers and Wall Street, as they get huge bonuses while the rest of the country struggles to hold jobs and recover from the recession.

In a recent CBS poll, a vast majority of Americans — 70 percent — said they were angry or bothered by the bonuses.

Worse, Americans think by 72-19 percent that taxpayer money that bailed out the big banks was used to help Wall Street fat cats rather than homeowners and working people.

In a news briefing ahead of Obama’s announcement, senior White House officials said the president’s proposals sought to make explicit what was implied in financial regulatory overhaul legislation that already had cleared the House of Representatives.

That legislation, shepherded by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., would grant regulators broader powers to break apart financial institutions that were deemed so large that their failure would threaten the financial system.

“It’s designed to constrain future growth” in the size of these institutions, a senior staffer said, speaking only on the condition of anonymity because the president hadn’t yet spoken.

The administration hopes that the new proposal, which Obama called the “Volcker rule,” will be added to the Senate’s version of the financial regulation bill. The proposal prohibits commercial banks from conducting proprietary trading in securities and other investments. If they invest in stock markets or commodities exchanges on behalf of clients, they wouldn’t be allowed to do it for their own benefit, too.

“This proprietary trading issue is a lot more complex than is being presented,” warned Douglas Elliott, a former investment banker who’s now a financial researcher for the Brookings Institution, a center-left research center.

Many banks invest in securities because they’re easier to cash in than loans are if the bank has a quick need for cash. Preventing banks from trading in securities, Elliott said, may make the banks less stable.

The Financial Services Roundtable, the lobby for the financial sector, put out a statement immediately after the president’s speech calling it bad policy.

“The proposal will restrict lending, increase risk, decrease stability in the system and limit our ability to help create jobs,” said Steve Bartlett, the group’s president.

The administration’s proposal also would extend the 10 percent cap on how much of a market share of insured deposits any one bank can have to a wider range of investment activities. This addresses the evolution of the banking sector into activity beyond lending, White House officials said.

Banks also wouldn’t be allowed to invest in or own hedge funds or private equity funds. Hedge funds pool contributions from the very wealthy and institutional investors such as pension funds. Private equity firms also are closed pools of capital, used to purchase companies or invest in exotic financial instruments.

Frank said Thursday on CNBC television that banks must get up to five years to spin off their investments so that they wouldn’t be forced to sell them quickly at fire-sale prices.

Still, some analysts worry that banks will just find a way to evade the limits.

“When you put a system of regulation in place, they (Wall Street) figure out ways to get around it. It’s an invitation to change corporate structures that may move stuff more off the radar screen,” Vincent Reinhart, a former top economist at the Federal Reserve, said of the proposed prohibition on hedge fund activity by banks.

A wiser approach, he suggested, would be to create stronger firewalls between activities that banks conduct, and impose higher cash-reserve requirements on each part of a bank’s business.

“I empathize that the firms are too complicated, markets can’t discipline themselves, (firms) can’t run themselves, you can’t supervise them,” said Reinhart, who’s now a senior researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research center.

However, the administration’s approach, he said, amounts to “being on the right side of the mob.”

Taking on bankers will be a key part of Obama’s political message going into this midterm congressional election year, when the Democrats hope that a tidal wave of voter anger won’t cost them their majority control of the House and the Senate.

“I think that’s a lot of what 2010 is going to be about,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Sunday after Obama railed against banks in Massachusetts in a vain effort to stave off defeat for the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate there.

“People are going to have to decide whether the people they have in Washington are on the side of protecting the big banks, whether they’re on the side of protecting the big oil companies, whether they’re on the side of protecting insurance companies or whether they’re on the people’s side. I think what he laid out today is what you’ll hear him talk a lot about.”

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(c) 2010, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

Visit the McClatchy Washington Bureau on the World Wide Web at www.mcclatchydc.com.

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GRAPHIC (from MCT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20100121 Obama banks

Workers at Cardinal Glass in Northfield, Minnesota, retrieve sheets of glass from a line where coatings were applied for energy efficiency, January 14, 2010. Cardinal just received a 7.7 million dollar tax credit under the stimulus plan to develop coatings for solar panels. (Glen Stubbe/Minneapolis Star Tribune/MCT)

By Dee DePass

Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

(MCT)

MINNEAPOLIS — Last year, Randy Hagen, president of Solar Skies Mfg in Starbuck, Minn., laid off four of his 14 workers after orders stalled for the rooftop solar collectors he makes. Government rebates promised last year under the Obama administration’s green jobs initiative never won final approval, so consumers didn’t buy.

“Everyone who is considering buying a solar thermal system in Minnesota was hoping there may be some rebate stimulus dollars available to them,” Hagen said. “(But the) proposed rebate for solar thermal has not yet been approved by the Department of Energy. … This has literally halted solar thermal sales and has directly hurt our business. … Yet everyone perceives that if you are in renewable energy you should be doing well.”

The Obama administration’s call for green jobs as an economic savior initially sparked hope for economic recovery. But the federal funds have only dribbled into the sector, held up by various shades of bureaucratic red tape and the lingering credit crisis. As a result, projects stalled and workers got pink slips as banks froze credit, venture capital firms slowed sector investments and government rebates snagged. By year-end, green-sector job freezes and losses far outweighed gains.

Among the victims: the plodding light-rail project in St. Paul, Minn.; the massive layoffs at Suzlon’s wind turbine plant in Pipestone, Minn., and the deep job cuts at New Flyer’s hybrid bus plant in St. Cloud, Minn., the site Vice President Joe Biden visited last year to herald the administration’s green initiatives.

“The green economy has definitely been no stranger to the recession,” said Joshua Low, spokesman for the Blue Green Alliance that links steelworkers with green commerce. “But we are building a lot of the right infrastructure and right policies right now. … The (hope) is that the recovery acts as a major down payment on building a stronger green economy.”

Last year’s federal “cash for clunkers” program and rebates for energy-efficient window replacements boosted car and window sales and prompted worker callbacks at Andersen Windows and Doors. Thanks to state mandates, Xcel Energy-funded wind farms continue to sprout in Minnesota and Iowa.

Dan McElroy, commissioner for the Department of Employment and Economic Development, noted that $107 million in federal funds and $300 million in state funds drove water and sewage treatment projects last year. “That flowed very smoothly” creating a “significant number” of jobs, McElroy said. But funding for energy-related and rural broadband wireless projects that were slated to receive federal stimulus money has been slower to come. Most problems stemmed from the fact that the plans were so new that federal rules and processes had to be written from scratch, he said.

Still, environmentalists point to fresh federal stimulus plans and new state efforts that bode well for 2010. If successful, they could reignite hope and hiring and shift the green economy from neutral to forward.

But economists warn that rebates for building insulation, solar, wind and energy conservation projects won’t be enough to pull down the nation’s jobless rate. National unemployment remains stubbornly high at 10 percent, and economists forecast it won’t drop to 8 percent until 2012 or 2013. They also predict Minnesota’s rate, now 7.4 percent, will soon rise to 8 percent.

“We, as a state, have gotten a more realistic view of the contribution that green jobs can make to the state’s economy,” said state economist Tom Stinson. “They are not going to solve all the state’s economic problems. They are going to help around the edges … (but) they are unlikely to have much impact on big-picture job growth.”

Still, green programs continue to be a high-profile part of the Obama agenda. In early January, the administration announced $2.3 billion in tax credits for solar and wind power projects and energy management efforts such as residential Cash-for-Caulking rebates. Obama also called for an additional $5 billion for clean energy manufacturers and tax credits for small “green” businesses.

“The new stimulus dollars should help. We hope it really comes this time,” said Hagen of Solar Skies. “Once the rebates come through, we intend to get back up to where we were (employment-wise) for sure. We know there are some pent-up jobs that didn’t get deployed in 2009 because of pent-up funds. But I think these jobs will come.”

Cardinal Glass in Northfield, Minn., just learned it will receive $7.7 million of new federal funds to convert its residential-glass factory into a solar glass-coating plant. The change will take six months, retain jobs and bring high-tech and higher-paying positions to Northfield, said Marketing Vice President Andy Jensen. That’s a plus, since the plant lost 30 of its 120 workers to the housing recession in two years.

“I am not saying we were going to close the Northfield facility. But the solar operation will bring life back into that operation,” Jensen said. “It will start off with 90 people and we anticipate the industry will grow at 30 percent annually. What that might mean for the Northfield community … has got to be a positive thing.”

Lynn Hinkle, policy director of the new Minnesota Solar Energy Industry Association said the government’s renewed commitment to green jobs means a surge in solar installation jobs.

“We will end up with 300 solar installations (in homes and small businesses) as a result of the federal rebates that will start being deployed by the state’s Office of Energy Security in the next month,” Hinkle said. “Those 300 installations mean 300 rooftops and 300 teams of workers that will start probably in the spring. The plan is to install solar panels and solar collectors for thermal energy. And you will see a lot of (photo voltaic) and solar electric installations.”

Wayne Gjerde, who finds commercial uses for factory waste for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, cheered the fact that California-based eCullet Inc. just signed a lease to open a recycled-glass-sorting business in St. Paul with about 20 workers.

Meanwhile, Bro-Tex Inc. is doubling its carpet recycling capacity in St. Paul and adding some jobs this year. The bankrupt VeraSun ethanol plant in Janesville, Minn., has new owners who restarted that plant with 55 workers in November. Paper recyclers such as the giant Rock Tenn also expect some growth this year.

As a result, “we expect to have additional jobs as the economy comes back and expands. Stay tuned,” Gjerde said. It’s a sentiment echoed by others.

In White Bear Township, Veeco Instruments is doing well, considering the times.

“Sales are increasing. … And we have made fairly good headway even with the recession,” said marketing manager Molly Doran. Veeco, which has grown to 90 employees in two years, makes photo-voltaic “thin films” that solar cell manufacturers use to make solar energy panels that can seamlessly integrate into roofing tiles, windows, siding, laptop computers and more. The films are more efficient than traditional silicone solar cells and demand is growing as panel makers gear up with the new technology.

Veeco is still waiting for federal stimulus money that it applied for last year. In the meantime it is benefiting from Minnesota law, which requires 20 percent of all electrical power come from renewable sources by 2012.

“I think in 2009 (the industry) fell a little bit because people were tightening their belts and the stimulus process has been a little more lagging than they hoped that it would be,” Doran said.

Veeco’s application for a federal “emerging renewable energy” grant was accepted in December.

“We got word that funds should come toward the end of January,” she said.

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(c) 2010, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Visit the Star Tribune Web edition on the World Wide Web at http://www.startribune.com

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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A goat walks past the wreckage of the Sainte Rose de Lima church in Leogane, Haiti, Wednesday, Jaunary 20, 2010. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald/MCT)

By Frances Robles

McClatchy Newspapers

(MCT)

LEOGANE, Haiti — Downtown Leogane, post-earthquake, is hard to exaggerate about.

You can say it looks like explosives were dropped on it, or that the devastation from last week’s quake was apocalyptic. Perhaps the United Nations assessment team’s estimate captures the scene: 80 percent to 90 percent of the city’s buildings were wiped out.

The church, the school, the bank and just about every other structure in this sugar-growing region of 134,000 people is now a pile of rocks.

Thousands of industrious quake victims are foraging through the rubble. Tin roofs are being ripped off and people are running off with whatever wood they can scavenge. Townspeople say Haitian authorities abandoned them, so they’re taking the recovery into their own hands.

“No rescuers have come visit, the municipal offices are all gone, and the police station is not functioning,” said Latouche Johnson, a motorcycle taxi driver. “There were two police officers who just left. Nothing is working. We don’t even know where the mayor is.”

The sound in the air is of a town rebuilding. There’s a constant banging of hammers as people move rocks and steal wood to build refugee camps and roofs with their stolen loot.

But Leogane has rebuilt before. It burned down in 1803 when freedom fighters refused to hand it over to French troops. It was a quake epicenter in 1770.

This time, the local police estimated 10,000 people were killed, according to the United Nations. About 500 of them were at the St. Rose de Lima school, which was filled with children, priests and nuns.

But as the world’s media has descended on the nation’s capital, the people of this southern port city 20 miles west of Port-au-Prince say that in the crucial days after the devastating quake, nobody came to help them. They buried their own dead.

“People come and take our pictures but do not ask any questions to find out how we are doing,” said Jacob Tales, a shoemaker who wore no shoes.

He sat in front of the mass destruction that was St. Rose de Lima repairing shoes. His foot was wrapped in a dirty torn bed sheet in an attempt to cover the infected wound on his right foot. He sat beside a pile of broken dusty shoes and fixed them one by one. “You have to be sad with all of this,” he said.

Haiti’s minister of communications, Marie Laurence Lassegue, said that when the quake struck Haiti eight days ago, Leogane was the place hardest hit. She insisted aid had arrived.

“The situation of Leogane is a situation that is traumatic,” she said. “The United Nations, the government, the private sector have all gone to Leogane.”

Japanese, Argentine and Canadians were in town this week, handing out everything from food packets to tarps. A chaotic scene in the town square erupted Wednesday when United Nations soldiers distributed the sought-after sheeting.

The Canadian ship Athabaskan arrived off Leogane, bringing water, equipment, survey teams and a first-aid center.

But no scene was more dramatic than the arrival of the United States Marines, who were perched in formation in a circle around a local field. In the middle of the field was a large chopper where box after box of water and other goods were unloaded by uniformed Marines. Townspeople stared in silence.

“Now that the Marines are here, I hope they will do something, do something for the country,” said Anoster Marceille, an out-of-work bus driver. “They came here yesterday, but so far I haven’t seen them go anywhere. I hope they give me a job, food — everything.” He got there at 5 a.m. to watch them deploy.

Even as enormous boxes were unloaded, townspeople said they had yet to get any help.

“Of course they have come to give out aid, but you have to be a strong powerful man to get it, because they are fighting too much,” Rosemarie Mervil, 29, said as she munched on a piece of ice. “I do not fight. I got pushed to the ground.”

Velieze Malord, who said she was 45 but appeared closer to 60, was still clutching the care-package ticket given out to each person the day before. At barely four feet tall and 100 pounds sopping wet, she was too small to wrestle starving quake victims.

“Do you think I can still use this ticket?” she asked.

Mervil said the food was gone and the ticket was worthless.

“My town was destroyed totally and my house was destroyed totally,” Mervil said. “I haven’t had anything to eat. But this town can recover. As long was we find aid, help, real help, we can recover.”

Terry Webb, a member of the United Nations team that visited Leogane on Saturday and again Wednesday, said the scene at Leogane stood out from other neighboring towns, where the municipalities functioned, scouts ran errands and emergency management teams worked.

“Because of the destruction — 80 to 90 percent was destroyed — it seems it’s a completely different dynamic from other cities we have visited,” Webb said. “Most of the infrastructure was completely taken out. And I mean that literally — taken out.”

St. Rose de Lima”s Father Marat Gurand said the first food arrived Tuesday.

“Today I got some and maybe tomorrow,” he said. “But that’s not all we need. We need money. People need help rebuilding their houses. How many days can we pass with this problem? I don’t know. You tell me.”

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(Herald staff writers Jacqueline Charles in Haiti and Niala Boodhoo and Jennifer Lebovich in Miami contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2010, The Miami Herald.

Visit The Miami Herald Web edition on the World Wide Web at http://www.herald.com/

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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GRAPHIC (from MCT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20100120