Heather Guay, director of volunteers for Empower Nepali Girls, discusses why Nepali girls are sold into brothels. Photo by Ashley Luu/Daily Titan Staff Writer

Video by Ashley Prager

The 11th Annual Women’s Center Conference hosted a series of global perspectives on violence against women at the Titan Student Union Saturday, March 6.

Attendees were able to choose from a variety of seminars that included presentations on the trafficking of women and girls, women’s perspectives of violence in Africa, violence against women in oppressive states and empowering lower caste girls in Nepal.

Katharine Daniels Kurz, creator of The Women’s International Perspective Inc. (WIP), an Internet news service, was the keynote speaker and discussed why women should be empowered as architects of peace.

“As our world appears to be unraveling, women and children continue to suffer the highest price and pay the greatest consequences as a majority are victims of violence and poverty,” Kurz said.

Contributing to WIP were 150 women from 35 different countries. The site’s stories are based on their own experiences, from journalists connecting with people to experts who hold key information for a successful future, Kurz said.

“I can see the clarity in their (female authors’) eyes. A future for all women and children to lead healthy, productive lives,” Kurz said.

Kurz said that her vision for WIP is to change what we value as a society by getting men and women involved and embracing the global movement. She explained that one day, grave and severe issues of our time will be behind us.

“We will embrace women’s voices and perspectives as the world comes to understand their value,” Kurz said.

Jeffrey Kottler, professor of counseling, and Heather Guay, director of volunteers for Empower Nepali Girls, aspire to build the next generation of female professionals in Nepal.

“Girls are not valued because of culture, economics and religion,” Guay said.

Based on Kottler’s PowerPoint presentation, Nepal is one of the bottom 10 nations in the world where 90 percent of the population has no access to healthcare, and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), malnutrition and maternal mortality are the leading causes of death.

One of Kottler’s team members, Kiran Regmi, who is an obstetrician and gynecologist, interviewed Nepali women to find out about the high mortality rate.

Women who went to the hospital for a complicated childbirth would return to their villages and tell people not to go because, “they put snakes in your arms,” Kottler said in reference to intravenous therapy (IV).

Kottler said that male doctors knew nothing about bedside manner, touched their patients inappropriately and did not inform them about anything.

Nepali women warned, “Don’t ever go back to that place. They will humiliate you. It’s shameful. You’ll be treated like an animal. It’s better to die,” Kottler said.

Girls between ages 8 to 10 are kidnapped, stolen, purchased or taken to brothels. Between ages 12 to 14, some will be infected with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and will be unable to treat it, Kottler said.

“If you can provide them (girls) with a future and hope, and convince their family members that they’re a resource and can make a difference, then that is the single best intervention to prevent this,” Kottler added.

Cindy Alvarez, a human services major, said that she decided to volunteer to gain insight and awareness about women’s international issues.

“People get to learn information about what’s happening internationally because we’re always stuck in our bubble of California, and we don’t get to know what’s happening elsewhere,” Alvarez said.

Kevin Cook, 25, suggested the utilization of Google to e-mail or research people or organizations to see how students can help.

“Watching videos, hearing individual stories, draws you to a certain region,” Cook said.

Solutions to global problems are achievable and sustainable to everyone, Kurz said.

“If we want to end violence against women worldwide, we’ve got to empower women,” Kurz added.

A vehicle sits crushed in downtown Concepción an hour after the first quake hit Feb. 25. Photos courtesy of FlickR/Pablo | T

An 8.8 magnitude earthquake, releasing 500 times more energy than the Haitian earthquake earlier this year, hit Chile shortly after 1:30 a.m. Feb. 27, causing widespread devastation and a constantly rising death toll in the South American country.

Liza Álvarez Valdez, a 26-year-old alumna who double majored in Latin American studies and anthropology, spent a year studying in Chile through the school’s study abroad program. She heard about the earthquake on Saturday morning.

“I heard about it on NPR, and it just caught my attention. It’s such a large quake,” Álvarez Valdez said. “You don’t often hear about Chile.”

While in Chile, she said that she did experience earthquakes, though they were minor.

“There’s a lot of seismic and tectonic activity in that region. There’s two plates that collide there – the Nazca plate and the South American plate. One would come to expect it.” Alvarez Valdez said.

Álvarez Valdez said that compared to Southern California, Chile is a country well equped to handle earthquakes.

“Although the earthquake in Chile was far greater (than the one in Haiti), it’s a country that has better prepared architecture.”

She did mention, however, that she is not sure how the older buildings and smaller cities fared.

“When I was in Chile, I learned about the (9.5 magnitude) earthquake they had in 1960,”  Álvarez Valdez said. After hearing of the widespread devastation that the quake caused, she was nervous to hear about what this one may do.

Álvarez Valdez said that she still keeps in contact with the friends she made while studying in Chile through the Internet. Since the quake, she has sent e-mails out, but has not heard from anyone.

Sophomore Tamara Khoury’s aunt and Palestinian ambassador for Chile, Dr. Mai Al Kaila, was in the country’s capital city of Santiago at the time of the earthquake. Though Khoury said that her family did have contact with Al Kaila soon after the earthquake, they only “spoke briefly” – bracing for aftershocks, Al Kaila searched for a shelter to stay in.

“She was caught off guard, due to not experiencing earthquakes in Palestine,” Khoury, 20, said of her aunt.

Al Kaila, who was by herself at the time, has been the Palestinian ambassador for Chile for about five years. According to Khoury, this means she gets help from the government in the event of a disaster such as this one.

“Her major concern is the poorer communities there, because there’s no one to take care of them like there are to take care of her,” said Khoury.

Soon after the earthquake struck Chile, tsunami warnings and advisories were put into effect throughout the entire Pacific basin. The islands of Hawaii braced for waves that were expected to reach up to seven feet high. Fortunately, the warning was lifted and no tsunamis were reported.

Khoury, whose sister lives in Hawaii, was relieved. “She said the waves were about three feet higher than normal, which I guess isn’t that bad,” Khoury commented.

This earthquake is the second-largest quake to hit that region, the biggest being the 9.5 magnitude quake in 1960.

“I heard on the news that there was some destruction,” Álvarez Valdez added. “I wonder how the students that are there this year are doing.”

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.

Graphic courtesy of MCT

The U.S. Military launched its first attack on Taliban havens in Marjah, Afghanistan Feb. 14.

Almost 6,000 U.S. Marines are leading the joint campaign, called Operation Moshtarak­ (‘moshtarak’ means together in the Dari language) with the Afghan National Army. This operation is in response to President Obama’s Dec. 2 2009 call for 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan.

While some feel the president’s decision to bring more troops into Afghanistan go against his campaign’s promises, Choudhury Shamin, Cal State Fullerton political science professor, thinks President Obama had no other option.

“Whether there is a pro or con or not you have to do it, you cannot sit idle,” Shamim said. “They (the Taliban) have become more powerful in the last eight years,” due in part to the opium business,”the province was the hide out or base of the Taliban and (where they) grow the most opium and from that opium trade the Taliban gets money… Not doing anything is not an option.”

Some may feel that international conflicts don’t concern them, but Scott Spitzer, an assistant professor of political science at CSUF, feels differently.

“(It’s) always important for young people to know where our money is going and what the president is doing on behalf of the U.S. and it is important for us to know that it has long term effects,” Spitzer said. “The world is a closely intertwined place; the success or failure we have in fighting terrorist forces could make the world safer or unstable.”

Since the Feb. 14 launch, U.S. troops and Pakistani forces have captured two important Taliban leaders: Mullah Abdul Salam and military commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. The Taliban’s spiritual leader and supreme commander Mullah Mohammed Omar has yet to be captured, according to the Los Angeles Times.

When asked what she thought about the offensive’s capture of these Taliban members, Elaine Yetemian, 21-year-old English major, expressed her fear of what the Taliban’s retaliation might be.

“Sometimes if they capture them, it creates more danger because we’re going to piss them off even more and then they’re going to try and do something to attack us,” said Yetemian. “It’s going to bite us in the butt, I think.”

According to iCasualties.org, the independent Web site that tracks troop fatalities since 2001, the number of U.S. casualties is now at 1,006. There have been over 100 deaths in 2010 so far.

Spitzer stressed the importance of not being apathetic, an education in world issues and of being respectful to others who may have relatives or friends in the military.

“Vietnam was far away as well. It (raised) concerns and turned into a tremendously emotional issue for young people in the late ’60s. I’m not saying Afghanistan is going to be like that, but any time the U.S. is involved militarily someplace, it can destabilize the entire globe,” Spitzer said. “We are the world power. We can use our power to improve and stabilize things in far-flung places or we can create a quagmire that will divide the country. It is up to us to hold our leaders accountable, who’s to say they will do actions in our interest or according to our values.”

Graphic courtesy of MCT

Despite the number of casualties, Capt. Jocelyn Simmons, the Reserve Officer Training Corps. (ROTC) battalion executive officer and assistant professor of military science, supports the president’s decision and is ready to go to war.

“As far as feelings of being sent to or our fellow troops being in Afghanistan, we are here to receive and execute missions. We stand ready to serve the commander-in-chief to the best of our ability,” Simmons said.

Peace won’t come soon for the troops in Afghanistan. The operation is proposed to last at least 12 to 18 months, 18 months being the most likely.

For Yetemian, peace doesn’t seem probable.

“There’s no such thing as peace in today’s society,” Yetemian said. “That’s just unrealistic.”

Shamim has hope for the U.S. troops and believes they will be able to defeat the Taliban.

“This offensive may not go on for a long time but the strategy is to build an Afghan army that will be able to tackle the Taliban. And as long as that is not done the U.S. and NATO will have to be there,” Shamim said.

Photo courtesy of MCT

Twelve undergraduate students, one graduate teaching assistant and one professor will be traveling over 8,000 miles to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), Vietnam for Cal State Fullerton’s first international field trip.

Communications professor and member of the Asian American Studies Program Council Jeffery Brody has teamed up with Project Vietnam to expose broadcast and print journalism majors to an international setting and give them the chance to be foreign correspondents.

“I thought it would be an excellent program, considering I have researched Vietnamese Americans and Vietnam, to take a group of journalism students there so they can participate in the program and write stories about the program as well as feature stories about Vietnam,” Brody said.

Project Vietnam has aided needy regions since 1996, aiming to improve healthcare assistance and services, as well as provide medical training for professionals. The 14 travelers will participate in providing medical aid to the rural poor and will document their experiences on their Web site, vietnam.dailytitan.com.

Students were picked for the trip based on their print, broadcast and multimedia abilities as well as recommendations from other journalism faculty.

“Vietnam is so different from the U.S. and I am looking forward to being able to immerse myself in a culture that is so drastically different from my own,” said senior broadcast journalism major Anna Gleason.

The majority of time spent will be at the Mekong Delta in Ben Tre where students will be visiting rural villages, orphanages, schools and dental and surgical clinics, as well building a home for a homeless person.

“While in Vietnam, we’ll be putting together videos for the Daily Titan as well as working with the different groups associated with Project Vietnam that will be setting up for either the dental, surgical or medical teams, helping them with taking vital signs such as blood pressure and pulse and any other little tasks they need done while we are there,” Gleason said.

The students’ articles, pictures, blogs and videos will be updated regularly on the Vietnam Web site.

“I hope to gain some great photos for my portfolio,” said senior photo journalism student Andrea Kellogg. “I’m excited to really put what I have learned in school to the test and challenge myself.”

Brody’s 20-year relationship with pediatrician Dr. Quynh Kieu, the dynamic force behind the missions, led to Brody’s interest in the nine-day field trip. To make the opportunity feasible, Project Vietnam gave the students a break on the room and board package. Brody also obtained subsidized funding from the Instructionally Related Activities (IRA) committee, which sponsors overseas trips.

“There are a lot of opportunities because they’re going to see this country with fresh eyes. I told the students to jump in and do as much work as possible, far and beyond what they would normally do in a school week. They need to shine and excel, and work on their portfolio and show prospective employers that they can handle themselves in a foreign country,” Brody said.

This will be Brody’s fourth time to Vietnam. He would like to return to Vietnam with students next year if funding allows.

Brody expressed that he hopes the students will learn a great deal from their experience.

“I hope they will learn what it takes to be a foreign correspondent in a developing country, establish some empathy for the people who are living there and experience a journalistic adventure and come back with very touching stories,” he said.

Jeffrey Kottler with Inu, the first girl to receive a scholarship from Empower Nepali Girls. After nine years of support, she will be attending a university in the Fall. Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Kottler

Just last week, Jeffrey Kottler was somewhere among the snow-capped peaks that rise out of the small country of Nepal, nestled between India and China. However, his trip wasn’t exactly one of rest, relaxation or sightseeing.

Every winter, Kottler travels to Nepal to deliver monetary donations and prevent young girls from being sold by their families as sex slaves.

Kottler, a professor of counseling at Cal State Fullerton, makes this annual trip to visit the children that his nonprofit foundation helps.

As a counselor and psychologist, Kottler first traveled to Nepal to instruct health workers on how to use counseling techniques and concepts in their work.

Then his attention was drawn to a deeper issue found in Nepal’s beautiful mountains – young girls being sold into sex slavery out of monetary necessity. It is estimated that 7,000 Nepalese girls are kidnapped and sold each year as sex slaves, some as young as 8 years old.

“It’s so emotionally overwhelming to see the conditions in which these girls live in – there’s always somebody crying,” Kottler said.

Leah Brew, chair of the counseling department, said when Kottler discovered that there were girls who were faced with the prospect of going into sex slavery, he immediately tried to find a way to better their lives.

According to Brew, Kottler found out that for a very small amount of money, he could significantly improve the quality of life of one girl by helping her attain an education. In this way, she would not be faced with the option of sex slavery.

“If they could afford to go to school then they wouldn’t take that path,” Brew said.

The new options created for these girls are in part made possible by The Madhav Ghimire Foundation. Along with Kiran Regmi, an obstetrician in Nepal, and Digumber Piya, a community activist and philanthropist, Kottler co-founded an organization that would help provide educational opportunities for those girls who had been neglected by their own country.

“I don’t think it matters where we devote our time and energy,” Kottler said. “it’s just horrific to think that a 9-year-old girl is going to be sold into slavery, work in a brothel and be raped.”

The Madhav Ghimire Foundation has provided, and continues to provide, scholarships to needy children from rural villages in Nepal. Members of the foundation raise funds to provide children with academic fees, uniforms and supplies needed for an academic year. In addition to the monetary assistance these children receive, the volunteers and team members working with the foundation pay visits to each child and their families several times each year.

“To me, Jeffrey just represents what Americans do – reach out to the world when they need help,” said Lori Phelps, a human service lecturer. “It’s wonderful to have someone of Jeffrey’s notoriety here,” she added.

Kottler, the author of over 60 books in the subjects of psychology, education and counseling, was one of Phelps’ idols.

“I used to teach counseling at a private school sometimes on the weekends and I used Kottler’s books,” Phelps said. “He’s very reachable and you know, human.”

His colleagues and co-workers acknowledge that Kottler’s dedication and passion for the things he does is one way in which he mentors and teaches his profession.

“The man never stops working,” said Alison Quigley, administrative support coordinator at the department of counseling. “When he’s here on campus he’s teaching, he’s writing a book, he’s helping somebody else or he’s running his foundation,” she said.

“He loves what he does. He loves being there,” Quigley said. “Now it’s just a part of his life.”

Daily Titan Staff Writer

One of the many Toyota vehicles on campus that was parked outside the College Park building. Following the recall of 2.3 million Toyotas, many owners feel torn about their cars. Photo by Daniel Enos/For the Daily Titan

Finance and marketing professors say that while the recall of 2.3 million select Toyota Division vehicles will hurt Toyota financially, it will benefit the company in the long run.

“The recall decision will actually save Toyota much more than it loses through avoidance of much higher legal costs and loss of goodwill. By responding in an upstanding manner, Toyota has demonstrated that it indeed has its customer’s best interests in mind, even beyond the purchase counter,” marketing professor Ray Benedicktus said. “Quarterly earnings may be affected … but there should be little effect for Toyota long term.”

“Toyota’s stock price hit a recent high of $91.14 per share on Jan. 15. Since then, mostly when their brake problems have been in the news, their price is down to $73.49 – a 19 percent drop in value,” finance professor Mark Stohs said.

This isn’t the first time Toyota has announced a recall of its vehicles. In 2005, Toyota Camrys were recalled due to defects in seat belts. In 2006, Corollas were recalled due to defects in headlights. In 2007, 15,600 Tundra trucks were recalled due to problems related to driveshaft parts that weren’t heat-treated properly. That same year, Corollas were recalled due to problems with accelerator pedals.

“I had to take my car back because they recalled the seat belts,” said Anna Coria, a 22-year-old biology major and owner of a 2007 Toyota Yaris.

Toyota has stopped the production of affected vehicles until the problem is fixed. The vehicles affected by the recall include certain 2009-10 RAV4s, certain 2009-10 Corollas, 2009-10 Matrixes, 2005-10 Avalons, certain 2007-10 Camrys, certain 2010 Highlanders, 2007-10 Tundras and 2008-10 Sequoias.

“I think that Toyota is a really good brand. I’ve never had a problem with my car,” said Donna Barrera, 19, a pre-nursing student who also owns a Toyota.

The issue that causes pedals to stick in a partially-open position involves a friction device in the pedal that adds resistance. The device includes a shoe that rubs against an adjoining surface when the pedal is operated. Over time, these surfaces may begin to stick and release and, in some cases, the friction could increase to a point that the pedal is slow to return to the idle position or the pedal sticks, leaving the throttle partially open.

Toyota’s engineers have developed a solution that involves reinforcing the pedal assembly in a way that eliminates the excess friction that causes the pedals to stick. A steel reinforcement bar will be inserted to reduce surface tension and excess friction.

In addition to this recall, Toyota is also in the process of recalling vehicles in which floor mats have trapped the accelerator pedal in certain Toyota and Lexus models. This problem will be fixed by reconfiguring the shape of the accelerator pedal and the floor mat, which will increase the space between them.

“Toyota can recover from this, but their missteps will mean that it will take time,” Stohs said.

Daily Titan Staff Writer

Michelle Dal and Elise Lurkin enjoying dinner at the Cantina Lounge during the Sigma Tau Delta English Honors Society's benefit for Haiti. Photo by Nick Marley/Daily Titan Photo Editor

Following the devastating earthquake in Haiti on January 12, aid from all corners of the world has been pouring in to the troubled nation.

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake has left about 1.2 million homeless and 200,000 confirmed dead, with some estimates putting the death toll as high as 400,000.

Aid has been slow to arrive in Haiti due to damage at the airport and seaport.
Now Cal State Fullerton students are offering their help.

Thursday, the Sigma Tau Delta English Honors Society hosted a fundraiser in conjunction with the Cantina Lounge to help raise money for earthquake victims in Haiti.

During the event, called “Tacos for Haiti,” the restaurant gave 20 percent of each bill to Red Cross relief efforts for every student who brought a flier to the Cantina Lounge between 11 a.m. and 10 p.m.

“Our organization was looking for a way to reach out this semester and help the community, and the earthquake was a good cause for us to rally around as it affects not just us, but the world,” Sigma President Rachel Trillo said.

Fliers were distributed around the Humanities building and University Hall, along with Sigma’s table at Discoverfest.

“Well, Sigma has never done anything like this before, and when we were thinking about doing this fundraiser we were told by other campus organizations to talk with the Cantina Lounge,” Sigma event organizer Denise Cobian said. “So we called the Cantina Lounge and Tamara Cruz put everything together.”

Cruz is the Cantina Lounge’s special events director.

“We do a lot of work with student groups on campus,” Cruz said.

Among that work is helping student groups reach the highest number of participants possible.

“Cruz said Thursday is the best time to reach a large amount of students,” Cobain recalled of her advice.

Not just anytime on Thursday.

“We have found Thursdays between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. we have a lot of students coming in after class,” said Cruz.

Also known colloquially as “college Friday,” for most students Thursday is the last weekly day of class.

“We offer 20 percent because we know with the budget problems a lot of groups had their funding reduced, if not cut completely, and we want to be able to help them raise money for their causes,” Cruz said.

“Whether it’s a fundraiser or something for a class project we’re willing to work with students,” Cruz said.

Trillo is hoping to raise “a few hundred dollars” by the end of Thursday night, and noted that all of the money raised will be donated to the red cross.

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.

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)

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

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.)
___
(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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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

(LiPo Ching/San Jose Mercury News/MCT)

By Mike Swift and John Boudreau

San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

(MCT)

Jan. 13–Responding to a highly sophisticated cyberattack on opponents of the Chinese government, Google said Tuesday that it is no longer willing to operate a government-censored search engine in China — and may shut down its Chinese operations altogether.

Google’s stunning announcement could cost the company billions of dollars in lost future revenues, since experts said it’s unlikely the Chinese government — which broadly filters Web content and blocks access to social networking sites such as Facebook — will back down and open up what has been dubbed “the Great Firewall.”

But the search giant’s move may pressure other U.S. Internet companies doing business in China to take a stance on government

censorship, and it will almost certainly complicate U.S.-China relations.

In a lengthy posting on its official company blog Tuesday afternoon, Google said it had uncovered a “highly sophisticated and targeted” cyberattack in December originating in China against Google and at least 20 other companies in which hackers attempted to gain access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Google said those attacks, combined with Google’s subsequent discovery that the Gmail accounts of dozens of Chinese human rights advocates in the United States, Europe and China were being “routinely accessed” by unknown third parties, prompted the company to reassess whether the world’s leading search site should continue to operate

in the world’s biggest Internet market.

“We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results,” David Drummond, Google chief legal officer, said in the posting. “These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered — combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web — have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.

“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all,” the post continues. “We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

Google’s withdrawal from China would come with a major financial cost; its stock was already sinking in after-hours trading Tuesday. While Google is a distant second to the Baidu search engine in China, the rapid growth of the Chinese market means future lost revenues could be enormous.

“Its future value certainly will be huge, just by virtue of the sheer size of the market. The opportunity cost to Google might be many billions of dollars over time if they were to pull out — almost certainly,” said analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. “I just think it’s kind of a courageous move of integrity.”

The surprising move could reset Google’s image back to its “Don’t Be Evil” idealism after recently taking on, in the eyes of some, the appearance of an Internet juggernaut seeking to control the world’s information.

“In a world in which we are so used to public relations massaging of messages, this stands out as a direct declaration. It’s amazing,” said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School and co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The Berkman center worked with Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and United Kingdom-based mobile phone company Vodafone, as well as human rights organizations and investment groups, to develop a code of conduct for operating in countries that censor Internet activity.

“There is something special about the Google brand and the accommodations it made with the Chinese government to let Google.cn go forward was almost in friction with that. I sense an almost relief from the company saying, ‘Why do we have to do this?’ ” Zittrain said. “I think the Chinese are going to say, ‘Bye-bye Google.’ But just think about what happens if Google’s engineers set about making information as accessible as possible in China.”

Other analysts, however, said Google’s lack of traction in the Chinese market might have made the decision easier.

Google’s declaration and the accusation of China-based cyberattacks will further complicate U.S.-China relations, said Susan Shirk, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration responsible for U.S. relations with China. “It adds to the already difficult agenda we have with China. It’s not going to be easy.

“I presume that Google has pretty strong evidence, otherwise they would not make this public statement and declare battle with Beijing,” Shirk said.

A Google spokeswoman said the company would not reveal the identity of the other companies targeted, but said they included companies from the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors.

Google does not have evidence that the Chinese government was behind the attacks, she said, but “we do know it originated in China.”

San Jose software-maker Adobe Systems is investigating what appears to be a related incident, which Adobe described in a statement as “a sophisticated, coordinated attack against corporate network systems managed by Adobe and other companies.” Adobe said it didn’t appear that any sensitive information had been compromised.

While Google filtered some information on its Chinese Web site, Google.cn, its filtering efforts were far less extensive than those of its China rival, Baidu.com, the country’s largest search engine, said Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on Chinese censorship.

“It certainly has been looking like it has been in a no-win situation,” she said, adding that Google had apparently concluded: “If we are making public declarations about upholding our users’ interests, at some point we have to stand up for our users’ interests.”

Google, which refused to place its servers in China and did not offer services that required it to collect personal data on users, most likely believed the hacking put users at risk, MacKinnon said.

The move, she added, “is an unprecedented situation” and will reverberate in China.

“It certainly sends a message to people in China when the world’s biggest Internet company says China’s policies for controlling the Internet are not acceptable,” she said. “When Google stands up and says things have gone too far in China — people are going to think seriously about that.”

Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him on Twitter at Twitter.com/swiftstories.

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