Washed It!

Fire engulfed a high-rise apartment building under renovation in China’s business center of Shanghai on Monday, killing at least eight people, injuring more than 90 and sending some residents racing down scaffolding to escape.

A witness said building materials caught fire, and the blaze spread to scaffolding and then to the 28-story building, which houses a number of retired teachers, the official New China News Agency reported.

More than 80 fire trucks were called to battle the blaze, Shanghai state television said, and streams of water could be seen flowing into the building, which appeared to be gutted.

The fire appeared to have been put out about six hours later, and firefighters could be seen taking bodies from the building.

Photos posted online showed a man clinging to the scaffolding. A building resident identified as Mr. Zhou told Hong Kong broadcaster Phoenix TV that he and his wife were napping in their 23rd floor apartment when they smelled smoke. He said they climbed down the scaffolding four stories before being rescued by firefighters.

At one point helicopters could be seen hovering over the building, and witnesses said at least one resident was rescued, but thick smoke hampered further efforts. By evening the helicopters were gone.

The city government said in a statement that 100 people were rescued, but it was not clear if that included the 90 people the news agency said were hurt.

A doctor at Shanghai’s Jing’an Hospital surnamed Zhang said more than 20 seriously hurt people had been admitted for treatment.

The state-run news website Eastday.com cited a construction worker surnamed Qian who escaped from the 28th story as saying crews were installing energy-saving insulation when the fire occurred.

Qian said thick, rolling smoke clouds surrounded the building and the room she was in filled with smoke, making it difficult to breathe, the report said. She said she called the city’s emergency hot line and then used a wet towel to cover her mouth and nose as she ran down a fire escape.
Shanghai high-rise fire kills at least 8, injures 90

His white shirt pressed, the chef glides through the crowd like a ship in full sail, checking tables, nodding to waiters. His world is full of hurry but he is not rushed. He sits down in the shade, wiping his brow amid a lunchtime crowd of gunrunners, clan elders, beggars and bankers.

They drift down unnamed roads toward his tables, the air sweet with meat, crushed vegetables, sprigs of spearmint. Scores of diners at a time cram elbow to elbow slurping and scooping at the edge of town, where big trucks haul white stone down from the mountains.

They know Abdulkarim Harazi has three wives, 18 children, a worn dagger and the humor of a man not done in by adversity. When he speaks, his customers, sopping broth with soft bread, listen, knowing that no matter how circuitous or embellished the tale, there’ll be wisdom waiting at the end.

“You handle a big family with justice,” says Harazi, pausing the way he does, eyes bright with mischief. “Justice means sleeping with one wife one night and another wife the next. This brings balance. Justice can’t control some things, though, like the passion of the heart.”

Harazi’s fires spit blue flames and hum like storms, searing blackened bowls filled with a traditional meat dish called fasha and a stew known as saltah. Thick with chilies, herbs, onions, potatoes, coriander and maybe a speck of cilantro, the meals bubble and cool beneath conversations of impatient men.

“Quality and cleanliness are the keys” to a fine meal, Harazi says.

His waiters have blistered fingers and gold-trimmed caps. From sunrise to just before dusk, they serve 1,300 pounds of beef and 660 pounds of vegetables to 4,000 diners at the Fakhi restaurant. Nobody rests, not the ladle men, nor the dicers, knives chopping, oil hissing at the culinary crossroads of the capital, where, for a brief moment and a few dollars, businessmen sit with junkmen for a taste that’s the same to everyone.

The main floor is shaded and dim, the tables long. Finding a seat requires cunning and swiftness and dodging men with quick hands. Some have guns, most have daggers. Outside, down steps faded by sunlight, more tables are lined beneath narrow shelters and there’s a feeling of an army encamped beneath the hills circling the city. From the road, amid clatter and the glow of fires, the word is that eating lunch anywhere else would be a pitiful miscalculation.

The men — not a woman in sight — speak of private misfortunes and national troubles. A land of deserts, rock ridges and sea coves, Yemen is both beautiful and tormented. Rebellions rattle north and south, Al Qaeda fighters roam the outlands and the Americans are talking about missile strikes and the cost of terror. Poorest country in Arab world, that’s what they keep saying, a place of thin wallets and drought. Here, though, you polish your spoon, stay away from the flame and eat.

“It’s simple,” says Harazi. “The cost of living is too high and the country is too unstable. It’s all about food and worry these days. There’s no hope because you can’t see anyone improving around you. I try to do the best for my children. Education, they must have that.”

He’s a solid man with thick hands and black stubble, settling into his chair like a priest hearing confessions. He knows that life needs places like this restaurant, reliable and intimate as home but without home’s predictability. You never know who might pull up on a motorcycle or amble in from the fringes. Harazi’s eyes gather them all, watching, ever watching.

By midafternoon the men are restless, waiting to dip into crinkly bags of shiny narcotic khat leaves that will mellow them out until way past sunset. It’s a ritual as common as sleeping or waking. Nearly everyone at the restaurant finishes lunch and chews khat, cheeks bulging, eyes calm, the world suddenly fixable.

“Khat makes you forget about things,” says Harazi. “Khat gives you many ideas, but behind them is no planning.”

He laughs.

Wheels spin through gravel; a tribal leader in an SUV arrives in the parking lot, draped by dust and a well-armed entourage. Diners pause. No shots fired. Spoons resume. The leader, kissing cheeks, slapping backs, finds a seat.

“Look at that,” Harazi says, “Barack Obama doesn’t have as many bodyguards.”

“How many employees do you have?” someone asks.

Harazi looks around and whispers.

“One hundred, but if the taxman comes, only 20.”

Food for thought at one culinary crossroads in Yemen

At Sami Abu Hossein’s cramped bookstore, the hundred or so book titles listed on a wall aren’t bestsellers. They’re banned.

And the cheery Abu Hossein can you get you any of them, sometimes in the few minutes it takes to sit down and drink a cup of thick-brewed Turkish coffee.

“There are three no-nos,” the owner of Al Taliya Books explains with a big smile. “Sex, politics and religion. Unfortunately, that’s all anyone ever wants to read about.”

He laughs uproariously.

“These are all the banned ones,” he says, gesturing to the list taped to the wall above the store entrance, books on sexuality to ones that critically examine the life and times of the prophet Muhammad, the most taboo topic in the Arab world.

“We have them,” he says, grinning broadly, “but don’t tell anyone.”

The tubby father of five seems to get a tremendous kick out of bucking the rules. (Not that they’re strictly enforced; he’s never been arrested or even summoned by the authorities.)

His partner in thought crime is Hossein Yassin, a self-described Marxist in a worn beige linen suit. Abu Hossein summons his wiry 48-year-old comrade in for the really tough jobs.

Yassin jokes that he’s the Special Forces for getting banned or hard-to-find books. He makes allusions to a murky past as an underground revolutionary. He says he calls upon a network that stretches across the Middle East to locate and transport hard-to-find titles.

“I can get any book,” he boasts. “But don’t ask how I get them.”

The most widely requested banned book remains “The Satanic Verses,” the 1988 novel that suggested some parts of the Koran weren’t God’s words and thereby earned its author, Salman Rushdie, a fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the hatred of pious Muslims worldwide.

Other top requests include “23 Years,” by the Iranian scholar Ali Dashti, which questions miracles ascribed to Muhammad in the Koran; and “The Joke in the Arab World,” by the Egyptian writer Khaled Qashtin, a sarcastic view of the Middle East, its rulers and customs.

Abu Hossein’s shop, in the capital’s rambling but lively downtown, also sells nonblacklisted books. His shelves are filled with titles from serious political studies about the Middle East to romance novels and pirated software manuals.

But his shop is known as the place in Amman to get forbidden fruits of knowledge.

Censoring books in the age of the Internet may seem like a quaint idea. Even the government official in charge of restricting them recently announced in a newspaper article that “stopping books from reaching the people is a page we’ve turned.”

The censor, Abdullah Abu Roman, occasionally stops by the bookstore to hobnob with Abu Hossein. So do plainclothes security officials. Abu Hossein serves them his Turkish coffee. They very politely ask him for the copies of the forbidden books. He hands them over. It’s all very civilized.

“Allah maakon,” he bids them farewell. God be with you.

“They are very sensitive to politics and criticism of politicians,” says Abu Hossein, who has been working at his family shop for decades. “But there are some books that are banned arbitrarily. Sometimes a censor will ban a book for a sentence he doesn’t like.”

A thickly bearded man wearing a headdress and flowing white dishdasha walks in. He’s one of the regulars, a Saudi religious scholar named Thaer Balawi who perhaps enjoys the challenge of subjecting his puritanical Salafist beliefs to the scrutiny of critical intellects. “You can’t stop an idea by censoring it,” he says.

“Mamnoueh maqroubieh,” goes the Arabic proverb. All that is forbidden is desired.

Abu Hossein recalls a memoir by a former interior minister that the censors immediately forbade for its sensitive revelations. It became a bestseller. But later, the political sands shifted, and the book was removed from the blacklist. Now it hardly sells.

In walks Raed Toguj, iPod ear buds firmly in place, a Web designer in his 20s with a penchant for philosophy and social theory. Censorship, he says, is a product of political ideology. “What I see as the solution is critical thinking,” he says.

Toguj acknowledges that the Internet has made his task superfluous. Many banned books are already available for download, and those with money can order copies from online bookstores abroad.

But Abu Hossein and his customers insisted that there’s something special about holding a book in your hand, feeling its pages, gabbing with the bookseller and fellow seekers of knowledge, like Carol Kaplanian, a 29-year-old doctoral student writing a thesis on honor killings of women in the Middle East, picking through a pile of books on gender relations.

The afternoon wears on. Abu Hossein keeps serving cups of coffee for his guests, the Salafist, the communist, the feminist and the Web dude with a passion for philosophy. They sift through titles and chat quietly, their murmurs softened by the stacks of books surrounding them.

daragahi@latimes.com
In Jordan, a bookstore devoted to forbidden titles

With their eyes on the 2012 election, Republicans are preparing to maximize conflict with Democrats over healthcare in the new Congress and minimize potential compromises, according to GOP strategists, lawmakers and lobbyists.

That strategy is setting the stage for a bitter stalemate on Capitol Hill over the next two years as the president and senior congressional Democrats dig in to defend their signature achievement.

But Republican leaders and strategists think a renewed battle over healthcare will help the party expand its electoral gains and drive President Obama from the White House.

“Republicans have successfully challenged the healthcare legislation once,” said GOP strategist Frank Luntz. “They’ll do it again.”

Luntz, a leading architect of the Republicans’ successful campaign to cast the healthcare legislation as a ” Washington takeover,” said Democrats would suffer further if they tried to defend the law. “Democrats have more to lose,” he said.

In practical terms, the GOP approach will probably mean little congressional input over how the law is actually implemented. The Obama administration will retain broad authority to refine the law on its own, working with businesses, consumer groups, healthcare providers and state regulators, healthcare experts say.

While lawmakers deadlock on Capitol Hill, GOP leaders already have a target list of Democratic senators who are up for reelection in two years in traditionally red states including Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and Virginia.

“The next couple of years, in some ways, become about the 2012 elections,” Republican healthcare lobbyist Dean Rosen said last week at an Alliance for Health Reform briefing in Washington.

The GOP tactics mirror those deployed by Democrats after their 2006 electoral sweep.

Then, Democratic House and Senate leaders who had won majorities on a promise to challenge President George W. Bush’s Iraq war strategy bullied congressional Republicans by repeatedly forcing them to vote to support the unpopular war.

The Democrats’ legislative campaign ultimately collapsed. Bush used his veto pen to block legislation mandating troop withdrawals. Within a year, the Bush administration’s effort to stabilize Iraq with a troop surge showed signs of success.

Many Democrats think they too will be vindicated as the public sees more of the benefits of the new healthcare law.

Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, warned that Republicans risked a backlash if voters perceived them as more interested in scoring political points than in responding to voters’ concerns.

“There is no particular love for the Republican Party in the electorate,” he said at a recent Health Affairs forum. “Republicans are going to have to earn [voters'] support and earn their respect, and the way you do that is by governing responsibly.”

Most of the healthcare law’s major benefits — including its guarantee of coverage to all Americans — do not go into effect until 2014. And there are few signs the law is getting more popular.

In the interim, Republicans, who think the law was crucial to their electoral gains, are increasingly confident they can showcase its shortcomings and further weaken already tepid public support for Democrats.

“They are looking for ways to be very aggressive,” said Michael Franc, who works closely with congressional Republicans as head of government relations for the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Republicans provided a preview of their strategy before the midterm election as House GOP leaders forced Democrats to vote in June and September on proposals to repeal provisions of the healthcare law.

GOP leaders have indicated they intend to do more when they control the flow of legislation in the House next year, with likely votes to defund the law and excise controversial parts such as cuts in Medicare spending and a new mandate requiring Americans to get health insurance.

Republicans are spoiling for a healthcare fight

A plume of chromium-tainted groundwater is once again bearing down on residents of Hinkley, Calif., where more than a decade ago an underdog battle with Pacific Gas & Electric Co. spawned a multimillion-dollar settlement and the Oscar-winning film “Erin Brockovich.”

The border of the plume has shifted 1,800 feet beyond a containment boundary set by PG&E in 2008, spreading higher levels of hexavalent chromium, a cancer-causing heavy metal isotope linked to stomach cancers and other health hazards, according to state water officials. The isotope also has been discovered in a lower aquifer that, until recently, PG&E believed was protected from contaminated groundwater above it by a thick layer of clay, the officials added.

In 1997, PG&E paid 660 Hinkley residents $333 million to settle lawsuits alleging injuries including intestinal tumors and breast cancer from chromium-laced waste water that had seeped from the utility’s disposal ponds between 1951 and 1966, winding its way into the community’s drinking wells.

PG&E’s handling and reporting of the migrating plume is under investigation by the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, the state regulatory agency responsible for protecting the area’s water.

“We definitely know there are violations, and that what PG&E is doing right now to contain the plume is not enough,” said Lauri Kemper, assistant executive officer for the water board. “We have the authority to impose fines of up to $5,000 per day for each day the plume exists outside of the boundary set in 2008.”

Kemper said the water board has retained a state water attorney to help prepare a legal case against the utility, a process that could take six months.

Utility officials acknowledge that parts of the plume have spread but say it is being controlled by ongoing cleanup efforts. They deny that its spread has violated any legal agreements and said more scientific research is needed to determine whether spikes in concentrations of hexavalent chromium, also known as chromium 6, detected in many local wells could be linked to the plume or to natural occurrences.

“These concentrations remain within the realms of naturally occurring background concentrations,” said Robert C. Doss, PG&E principal engineer. “There is no way to determine whether our plume is having an impact or not.”

A hearing on the matter has been scheduled for May 2011.

Doss said he understands that the situation “represents a worry about the health of Hinkley families and their investments.” But he also suggested that critics have exaggerated the health hazards posed by contamination in the plume’s outer edges and have mistakenly interpreted its constantly changing shape as “overall growth.”

The amoeba-like plume is about 2 1/2 miles long and a mile wide, and advancing west and northwest at a rate of about a foot a day, officials said.

“In some places the plume grows and then shrinks, in others it might sprout a lobe as it responds to hydrological pressures,” Doss said.

As for PG&E’s remediation efforts in Hinkley, Doss said, “It’s fair to say what we are doing now needs to be supplemented to bring it up to a final cleanup. But we take exception to any assertions that the measures we’ve taken have not had a positive effect on the problem.”

Many property owners in this dusty agricultural town about five miles west of Barstow in San Bernardino County are frustrated with PG&E’s efforts to contain the plume and the water board’s apparent hesitation to charge the utility with civil violations.

“Obviously, the community would be happy to see us file civil liability complaints against the company,” Kemper said. “We are considering that internally. But we haven’t yet because we are busy every day trying to stay on top of the situation to ensure they are continuing to clean up this plume.”

“They’ve had 23 years to fix this problem,” said Carmela Gonzalez, 44, a lifelong resident who was not part of the original Hinkley lawsuit. “Instead, they’ve allowed the contamination plume to grow and put fear in the hearts of Hinkley residents that they are still not safe and that their property is worthless.”

Added Gonzalez: “People around here no longer trust the water board to do right by Hinkley. PG&E should be helping residents get out of here if they want to by giving them reasonable compensation for their losses.”

Some of the hundreds of plaintiffs in the earlier case are exploring their options, given that they signed agreements barring them from discussing details of their settlements. Some residents, who were not involved in that case, talk of launching another class-action lawsuit.

Lillie Stone and her husband, Jim, who is disabled, live on fixed incomes and want PG&E to buy their property at a reasonable price, or pay to help them relocate. Neither received any settlement money from the original Hinkley case.

Tainted PG&E groundwater plume again threatens residents of Hinkley, Calif.

Roxanne Brummell has thrived in what many consider the toughest new testing ground for teachers in the nation.

The fifth-grade teacher in Washington, D.C., earned a “highly effective” rating under the district’s controversial system that rewards — and sometimes fires — teachers based in part on their students’ progress on standardized tests. In just seven months, she helped boost her students’ reading scores by an average of 24%.

Brummell’s reward: a $20,000 bonus and recognition at district award ceremonies.

Brummell, a Guyana native, likes the acknowledgment and the data-driven feedback. But she frets that the district is relying too heavily on standardized tests and isn’t doing enough to help teachers who are struggling.

As for the bonus, she almost didn’t accept it. One condition was that she give up various rights if laid off in a budget crunch.

“I love it, but it has its flaws,” she said of the district’s evaluation system, as she recovered from a busy day of explaining improper fractions.

Her complex feelings reflect the nationwide ambivalence toward the growing movement to hold teachers more accountable for what their students actually learn. Until now, evaluations typically have involved a school administrator making a quick, pre-announced visit to a teacher’s classroom. But in major districts including Washington’s, New York’s and Houston’s — and perhaps soon, Los Angeles’ — officials are using a method called “value-added” to bring a measure of objectivity to the process.

Value-added assesses a teacher’s effectiveness at raising students’ performance on standardized tests compared with how they did in previous years. Virtually no one endorses the method as the sole measure of an instructor.

For states to qualify for certain federal grants, the Obama administration is requiring that they link teacher evaluations to student performance. At least 27 states have passed or are considering legislation to meet that requirement.

“There is an absolute laser focus on teacher evaluation in this country now — I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Rob Weil of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 2,200 school districts.

But the trend has stirred opposition. Some educational experts and union leaders say that value-added is not reliable enough for high-stakes decisions on firing, tenure or pay; that it is a narrow gauge of teaching; and that it pressures instructors to “teach to the test.”

Supporters say it is one important tool to be used in combination with others, perhaps including end-of-course tests or reviews of student work. How much weight to give it, what stakes to attach, how many years of data to consider and even how to calculate the scores are not settled questions, leaving much room for discussion and debate.

At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is studying many of these questions, senior program officer Steve Cantrell said concerns that the method may inaccurately assess some teachers must be balanced against the likelihood that it will improve the chances for children to have an effective instructor. “If you shift the perspective from what is best for adults to what is best for students, then it’s super clear that value-added can improve the system over time,” he said.

In Los Angeles, the teachers union has adamantly opposed using value-added in teacher evaluations — but a school district panel named by the superintendent has recommended that it go forward. The debate erupted in August, when The Times published a database of the value-added scores of about 6,000 elementary school teachers based on seven years of testing data, prompting union protests and vows by the district to raise the issue during contract negotiations. It was the first time in the nation such information had been made public.

In New York, the city school district’s recent announcement that it would release value-added scores to the media drew an immediate court challenge from the teachers union. Underscoring warring perspectives within the district, a Brooklyn public school on Friday sent a notice to parents urging them to protest the release, saying: “OUR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS ARE NOT TEST SCORES!!”

Perhaps nowhere has the approach drawn more attention — and outrage — than in Washington, which has probably taken value-added further than any other district in the country.

Former Chancellor Michelle Rhee said she came to the nation’s capital three years ago knowing her changes would wreak political havoc. But she said she was willing to take on a system that was giving passing evaluations to 95% of teachers even as only 8% of students were performing at grade level in mathematics.

“How can you have a system where you’re that misaligned?” Rhee asked in a recent interview. “For me, it’s always about putting this in the lens of children and families … as opposed to making this a fight between groups of adults.”

She rolled out value-added analysis last year for a group of teachers in fourth through eighth grades. This year, administrators fired 75 of those teachers with poor appraisals and gave more than 700 others rated minimally effective one year to improve. The district also rewarded more than 630 “highly effective” educators with bonuses ranging from $3,000 to $25,000.

For L.A., possible lessons in D.C.’s controversial teacher evaluation system

Newly elected Assemblyman Jeff Gorell is on a mission, it just wasn’t the one he expected.

In March, the freshman Republican from Camarillo, a Navy reservist, will trade his business suit for combat fatigues and report for a year’s duty in Afghanistan. Never mind that he hasn’t yet hired a staff, opened an office or introduced legislation.

He’s still working out a more basic question: How will he run his office during his 12-month absence?

Gorell briefly considered asking the Legislature to pass an emergency bill allowing him to nominate a temporary replacement. When it became clear that would violate the state’s constitution, he decided instead to take a leave of absence, relying on staff and friendly Republican colleagues to attend to business in his Ventura County district.

The former prosecutor and college lecturer, 40, acknowledges it’s not the ideal way to launch a political career. But he’s accepted his pending deployment with the same earnestness that has made him widely appealing in his conservative-leaning 37th district.

“It’s a misfortune of timing,” said Gorell, a moderate who’s holding office for the first time. He easily defeated Democrat Ferial Masry for the district covering Camarillo, Thousand Oaks, Moorpark and Simi Valley. “I’m going to work really hard to prove that I will be the hardest-working legislator in the building. I’ll get as much done in 31/2 months as most do in 12.”

Gorell is the first legislator in California to be deployed for active duty since World War II, though legislators in other states have found themselves in the same predicament 51 times since Sept. 11, 2001, according to the chief clerk of the Assembly’s office.

Army Reservist Tom Umberg was absent from the final months of his 2004 campaign for the Assembly as he helped prosecute terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But the Orange County Democrat was back home by the time his Assembly term began.

Federal and state laws mandate that Gorell can return to his job once his tour ends. But states are handling what to do in legislators’ absence in different ways. Texas and five other states allow for a temporary fill-in. Legislator-soldiers in Pennsylvania, on the other hand, have taken leaves of absence.

A California military code written during the Korean War mentions the option of a temporary replacement if the Legislature authorizes it. But the state has never taken that step, Gorell said, and after consulting with lawyers he determined it probably wouldn’t be legal because the state’s constitution says vacancies must be filled by special election.

Assembly Speaker John A. P

The U.S. Department of Justice has warned the Los Angeles Police Department that its investigations into racial profiling by officers are inadequate and that some cops still tolerate the practice.

As evidence of the ongoing problem, Justice officials pointed to two LAPD officers who were unknowingly recorded during a conversation with a supervisor being dismissive of racial profiling complaints.

“So, what?” one said, when told that other officers had been accused of stopping a motorist because of his race. The second officer is heard twice saying that he “couldn’t do [his] job without racially profiling.”

The officers’ comments, Justice officials found, spoke to a “perception and attitude of some LAPD officers on the street” and suggested “a culture that is inimical to race-neutral policing.”

The Justice Department’s concerns, which were conveyed in a recent letter obtained by The Times, are a setback for the LAPD, which remains under federal oversight on the issue. In order to rid itself of the federal scrutiny — which police officials have increasingly come to resent — the LAPD must assuage the Justice Department’s concerns.

The harsh assessment has also fed into internal tensions as members of the Police Commission, the civilian panel that oversees the LAPD, grow impatient with the pace of department efforts to more aggressively address the politically and socially explosive issue that has long dogged the city’s police.

Police Chief Charlie Beck disputed the Justice Department findings, saying they were based on cases that predated strict investigative guidelines put into place last year. He also rejected the suggestion that the candid comments of the two officers caught on the recording reflected a pervasive problem.

“It is a huge leap to paint the entire department with that brush,” Beck said. “And it is just not true. It’s not that type of department. We have a tough history that we must overcome and that takes time, but … the vast, vast majority of Los Angeles police officers today police in the right ways for the right reasons.”

Nonetheless, accusations of racial profiling — “biased policing” in modern LAPD lingo — have continued to hamper the department as it has worked to leave behind a reputation for racism and excessive force.

Profiling complaints typically occur after a traffic or pedestrian stop, when the officer is accused of targeting a person solely because of his or her race, ethnicity, religious garb or some other form of outward appearance. About 250 such cases arise each year, but more damaging is the widely held belief, especially among black and Latino men, that the practice is commonplace.

In the letter to city and police officials, the Justice Department expressed “continuing concerns about the overall quality of … investigations of biased policing.” Federal officials criticized investigators for “going through the motions” and found they “simply take ordered statements from officers and then run down a checklist of required questions without following up on key points or asking fundamental questions one would expect.”

In one case the Justice Department reviewed, patrol officers passed a Latino man driving in the opposite direction and did a U-turn to pull him over for a broken brake light. After asking the driver if he was in a gang and checking to see if he had any outstanding warrants, the officers let him go with a warning.

“The investigating officer never asked the officers involved what prompted them to look behind them to actually observe a non-working brake light,” the Justice officials wrote. “The investigator accepted the officers’ single-word answers of ‘No’ to the question whether race was a factor in the stop.”

“They are criticizing us for the way we used to do things,” Beck said in an interview.

He said significant progress has been made, not only in the investigations but also with regard to officers’ attitudes. Still, he said he was concerned about the tape-recorded comments of the two officers, adding that a misconduct investigation has been opened. In that case, the officers were taped by a supervisor who neglected to turn off a recording device after interviewing two other officers accused of racial profiling.

The Justice Department did not respond to calls for comment.

Until last year, the LAPD was under a federal consent decree that the Justice Department imposed in 2001 after the Rampart corruption scandal. It required the Police Department to complete sweeping reforms on many issues and to submit to near-constant audits and monitoring.

The U.S. District Court judge who lifted the decree found that the department had completed most, but not all, of the required reforms. On racial profiling, the judge called on federal authorities to remain in an oversight role for a time to assess the quality of the LAPD’s investigations and the Police Commission’s ability to monitor the issue.

Justice officials sounded an alarm after a report in May from the inspector general, the commission’s watchdog, concluded that the LAPD generally was doing an adequate job. Justice officials criticized the inspector general’s office for “not asking more substantive and probing questions.”

In an effort to satisfy the Justice Department, Nicole Bershon, who took over as inspector general in May, is expected to release a detailed report at the end of the month that reviews 10 recent racial profiling investigations. The cases were handled by a special team of investigators the LAPD formed this year to look at complaints accusing police of searching or detaining a person because of race or ethnicity.

Police commissioners have grown frustrated with the department’s work on racial profiling. At a meeting earlier this month, the commission’s president, John Mack, and Commissioner Rob Saltzman questioned whether police officials were doing enough. They noted that no officer has been found guilty of racial profiling by an LAPD investigation for years, despite numerous complaints each year.

Police leaders have long argued that because racial profiling hinges on what an officer was thinking in the moment, it is all but impossible to determine if he or she racially profiled someone unless there is a confession. When the commanding officer of the Internal Affairs Division offered that explanation to the commission, Mack dismissed it.

“I’ve heard many times that we can’t get inside an officer’s head, but somehow, some way, we need to figure out a way to get to the facts,” Mack said. “I’m not talking about a witch hunt, but I am talking about reaching a point where we can say with confidence that these claims have been very fairly and very thoroughly investigated.”

joel.rubin@latimes.com

Justice Department warns LAPD to take a stronger stance against racial profiling

Autobiography of Mark Twain

Volume 1

Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, et al.

University of California Press: 738 pp., $34.95

Having created a quintessentially American brand of humor and style of literature, Mark Twain (1835-1910) can now add to his myriad accomplishments the title of America’s first blogger. No matter that the “Autobiography of Mark Twain,” edited by a team led by Harriet Elinor Smith, weighs in at more than 5,000 pages. Volume One, covering the period from 1870 to 1906, and clocking in at a bit over 700 pages (including 200 pages of notes), is being published to coincide with Twain’s 175th birthday, Nov. 30.

But what a blog it is: A prose paean to Twain’s enormous energy level, his incessant need to express himself, and, on a parallel track, his unwavering narcissism. He rejected traditional means of orderly exposition in favor of creating a freewheeling record of his thoughts, unrestrained and unfiltered except by the King — himself.

No American author has ever captured the imagination the way that Twain did and continues to do a century after his death at 74. (Average life expectancy for men at the time was 47.) He was the first American global celebrity, with his signature claiming a higher price than President Roosevelt’s (to Twain’s delight, since he did not much care for Teddy). His great accomplishment in creating a distinct American sense of self and attitude is well described by Charles Kuralt: “If I had to say as much about America as I possibly could in only two words, I would say these two words: ‘Huck Finn.’”

Composing his mammoth “Autobiography” took Twain, on and off, more than 35 years of a life that included much satisfying success as well as devastating losses. He started writing installments the same year he married Olivia Langdon, in 1870, when he was 35. His first effort described the land investment his father had made, a purchase that weighed upon Twain like a millstone due to the annual taxes he had to pay after his father’s death. (In an ironic twist, after the land was sold, oil was discovered there.) While sustaining such a self-focus over such a long time would be an improbable passion for most mere mortals, Twain, despite his extremely modest beginnings in Florida, Mo., was not a humble guy. Indeed, he deemed his accomplishments so numerous and spectacular that by the end of his life he found the best analogy was comparing himself with Halley’s Comet: “The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”

Never one to rest for any prolonged period of time, by the time of his death, Twain had managed to cross the Atlantic 29 times, completed an around-the-world lecture tour at age 59, written more than 50,000 letters, scores of short stories, some 3,000 newspaper and magazine articles and more than 30 books.

Twain’s “Autobiography” offers a m

For years in her native Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi has been known simply as “The Lady,” a pro-democracy stalwart and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has languished for years in an arbitrary solitary confinement imposed by the nation’s ruling military junta.

Although she was snatched from the public limelight, residents of the former Burma have always known this about the charismatic Buddhist activist, now 65: She would not be broken by the military generals she has long defied.

On Saturday, Suu Kyi proved them all right. She was finally released from the mildewing, two-story villa where she has spent much of her house arrest, spanning 15 of the last 21 years.

Whether in prison or not, supporters say, she has remained a quiet but defiant symbol of struggle against political repression for residents of the impoverished Southeast Asian nation.

Always cutting a slight figure, the daughter of a national hero who had generations earlier campaigned for Burma’s independence from Britain endured personal hardship to uphold her political principals, often going years without seeing her husband or sons.

But as popes, presidents and activists called unsuccessfully for her release, she never wavered. Once asked if she thought her story had the makings of a Greek tragedy, she responded: “Don’t be silly. I don’t go in for melodrama.”

She later added: “I look upon myself as a politician. That’s not a dirty word, you know. Some people think that there is something wrong with politicians. Of course, there is something wrong with some politicians.”

Time and again, Suu Kyi showed her mettle since taking up the democracy struggle in 1988.

Spending much of her early life abroad, Suu Kyi had returned home that year just as street protests erupted against a quarter-century of military rule. The daughter of martyred independence leader Gen. Aung San, she quickly assumed a leadership role.

Then 44, she campaigned for the government to stage proper elections and became the first secretary general of the fledging National League for Democracy.

Explaining why she risked prison or worse by taking on the nation’s military, she responded: “I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on.”

Her unsuccessful efforts to stop a brutal military suppression that killed thousands of protestors, repeatedly facing own armed soldiers, gained her worldwide notoriety, including the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, being proclaimed by the Nobel committee as “an outstanding example of the power of the powerless.”

But Suu Kyi’s sons, Alexander and Kim, accepted the award in Oslo on behalf of their mother who, seen as a threat by the country’s new military rulers, was detained in 1989 on national security charges.

She spent the next six years under house arrest at the family home at 54 University Avenue, enduring various periods in detention since then. Over the years, she has waged repeated hunger strikes to call attention to the military’s brutal repression of protesting students.

But Suu Kyi endured. When her husband, British scholar Michael Aris, died in London in March 1999, they had only seen each other a handful of times since her first house arrest a decade earlier.

Press reports have painted her life in captivity as austere. Rising each day at 4 a.m., she meditated, read and listened to one of five radios that were her only link to the outside world. She had no telephone, no television, no Internet. Her mail, if delivered at all, was heavily censored.

Once an accomplished pianist, Myanmar’s muggy equatorial heat long ago warped her instrument. Her only companionship: two long-serving, mother-and-daughter assistants.

Recent months have brought particular frustration. Suu Kyi was just a few weeks away from being released last year when she had an unexpected visit by an American, John Yettaw. She was found guilty of harboring anti-government elements and her sentence was extended.

At the time, one of her assistants told reporters: “It has been a hard life, she has sacrificed a lot. But she is used [to it] now. And she keeps working, waiting for the day she will be released.”

john.glionna@latimes.com
Suu Kyi outlasted her oppressors