Washed It!

Defections from Meg Whitman’s ranks on the part of women, Latinos and nonpartisan voters have fueled a surge by Jerry Brown in the race for governor, according to a new Los Angeles Times/USC poll.

The shift comes after a tumultuous month for the Republican candidate that has led some voters to question her veracity and her handling of accusations by an illegal immigrant housekeeper.

Brown, the Democratic attorney general and former governor, led Whitman 52% to 39% among likely voters, the poll found. His advantage has more than doubled since a Times/USC poll in September.

The abrupt movement in the race for governor came as Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer held onto her 8-point margin over Republican Carly Fiorina in the U.S. Senate contest. Boxer’s 50% to 42% lead was statistically unchanged from September’s 51% to 43% edge.

For both Democrats, the month between the two polls found the party’s strongest supporters rallying to the candidates’ sides: liberals, women and Latinos either solidified or expanded their backing for Brown and Boxer. Nonpartisan voters, whom Republicans had counted on to overcome the Democratic advantage in voter registration, moved away from the two Republican candidates, and moderate voters also tilted toward the Democrats.

Paula Bennett, a schoolteacher in the Sacramento-area town of Acampo, said she was drawn to Brown in part by the blizzard of cash Whitman has thrown at the race.

“I like the little guy; he didn’t have the money behind him like she did,” she said in a follow-up interview, adding that she sided with Brown for the same reason that she favors a mom-and-pop establishment over a retail behemoth.

“We don’t shop at Walmart. We shop at the local store. He just seemed like more of a down-home candidate.”

Although she is Republican, Bennett is also siding with Boxer. She said she was offended by both Whitman’s and Fiorina’s infusions of personal cash into their races.

“That message that they’re sending to people is a very bad choice,” she said. “We’re looking to people to act their values rather than throw money at causes. People are holding their money really closely and those candidates are really splurging.”

Most of the nation has seen pronounced enthusiasm by Republican voters as the midterm elections approach. In California, however, Democrats have gained strength and GOP motivation has ebbed slightly in the last month, the poll showed. The current standings represent a reassertion of a more typical profile for the state after an election year convulsed by a foundering economy, widespread discontent about the future and record-breaking spending by Whitman, who has dropped more than $141 million of her own money into her campaign.

The poll was conducted for The Los Angeles Times and the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences from Oct. 13 to 20 by the Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republican firm American Viewpoint. It included a random sample of 1,501 California voters, including 922 likely voters. Results for likely voters have a margin of sampling error of 3.2 points in either direction, with a larger margin for subgroups.

The survey was taken as the two gubernatorial candidates pummeled each other over the state’s airwaves and flooded telephone lines and mailboxes with entreaties for the election — now nine days away. And it came at the close of a particularly difficult period in the race for Whitman.

A turning point appears to have been the Sept. 29 announcement by her former housekeeper, Nicandra Diaz Santillan, that she had been employed by the former EBay chief for nine years, a period during which she said Whitman became aware of her illegal status. Whitman countered that she had not known of Diaz Santillan’s status until shortly before firing her in 2009, and she released copies of falsified documents presented to her by Diaz Santillan.

Diaz Santillan, accompanied by attorney Gloria Allred in a series of sob-wracked news conferences, displayed a copy of a 2003 government document sent to Whitman and her husband that could have alerted them that their employee was using a false Social Security number.

The subsequent days of controversy upended Whitman’s carefully nuanced position on illegal immigration and whipsawed her between voters who thought she was too easy on Diaz Santillan and those who thought the housekeeper deserved better than banishment. Whitman slipped among both groups in the new poll.

Among likely Latino voters, support for Brown grew from a 20-point lead in September to a 34-point advantage in the new survey. His lead among women voters expanded from 9 points to 21 points. Among nonpartisan voters, who in California register as “decline to state” and tend to recoil from tough stances against illegal immigrants, Brown’s lead over Whitman grew from 6 points to 37 points.

At the other end of the ideological scale, Whitman’s standing among conservatives ebbed slightly, from 77% to 70%. She continued to outdistance Brown among those voters, although his support grew slightly from 16% to 21%.

Overall, by 52% to 41%, voters said that Whitman had not handled the housekeeper controversy well. The same key voter groups — women, independents and Latinos — offered the harshest verdicts. When asked how Brown had handled the matter, voters were more divided, with 37% saying he did well and 43% saying he did not. Among independent voters, a plurality approved of Brown’s actions.

Jerry Brown’s lead doubles in a month; little change in Senate race

Suicide attackers burst into the main United Nations compound in the western city of Herat on Saturday, setting off a battle with Afghan police and troops. All four assailants were reported killed, but the U.N. said there were no casualties among its staff.

The incident roiled the aid community in Afghanistan at a time when a number of international humanitarian and development groups are considering curtailing or halting projects in response to an upcoming ban by President Hamid Karzai on the use of private security guards. Western diplomats are pressing the Afghan leader to ease the restrictions, which are to take effect at the end of the year.

The attack in Herat, the biggest city in western Afghanistan, began with a detonation at one of the complex’s entry gates, according to provincial officials, and three assailants then managed to push their way inside. One or more of them wore a burqa, or a body-length veil, said Naqib Armin, a spokesman for the provincial governor.

The compound, on the city’s edge near the airport, houses several U.N. agencies which employ both foreign and Afghan staff. There would have been about 40 people inside at the time, said U.N. spokesman Dan McNorton.

One of the attackers was killed at the outset of the strike when he set off explosives inside a car, provincial authorities said. Two others apparently detonated their suicide vests, and the last was shot dead by police.

Herat province is considered a relatively calm part of the country — so much so that it is being considered as one of the first places where the NATO force will attempt to hand over security responsibility to Afghan forces.

With Western military officials claiming major success in driving the Taliban from strongholds in Kandahar province, however, the insurgency has been making a push into parts of the country that were previously considered relatively safe, such as the north.

Attacks inside Kandahar have diminished since the Western military offensive began in earnest about a month ago, but insurgents are still able to move about despite the security cordon around the city. A motorcycle-borne suicide bomber at a main traffic circle in the city killed one passer-by and injured two others on Saturday, provincial authorities said.

Outside Kandahar city, veteran New York Times photographer Joao Silva was seriously injured Saturday when he stepped on a buried bomb, the newspaper reported on its website. Although NATO officials say Taliban fighters have been mainly driven out of the district, Arghandab, the insurgents have seeded the area with IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, which are the principal killer of Western troops.

Most of the 30,000 American troops who arrived this year under President Obama’s “surge” are deployed in the south, mainly in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

NATO troops were not involved in responding to the attack in Herat, said Lt. Col. Regina Winchester, a spokeswoman for the International Security Assistance Force. However, witnesses said Western forces were seen helping cordon off the scene, and a NATO helicopter circled overhead. NATO troops in the west of Afghanistan are under Italian command.

McNorton, the U.N. spokesman, said it was “too early to speculate” about steps the world body might take in response to the attack on its compound. The U.N. sent hundreds of foreign staffers out of the country after a Taliban attack last October on a U.N. guesthouse in the capital, in which five of its foreign staff were killed.

This year has been a perilous one for foreign aid workers in Afghanistan. In August, insurgent gunmen killed a 10-member medical team, including six Americans, in Badakhshan province, in the north. Earlier this month, a Scottish development worker was killed during an attempt by American troops to rescue her after she was abducted by the Taliban.

laura.king@latimes.com
Suicide attackers hit U.N. compound in Afghanistan

A massive leak of classified U.S. documents from the Iraq war Friday details hundreds of incidents in which American troops found evidence that Iraqi security forces were abusing prisoners, including reports that U.S. soldiers did not always take steps to stop the violence.

The accounts of prisoner mistreatment by Iraqi forces are the most explosive element of the nearly 400,000 classified reports made public by WikiLeaks in one of the largest leaks of classified material in American history.

Though abuse of prisoners in Iraqi custody has been documented in the past, the WikiLeaks documents reveal details on cases in which U.S. troops became aware of the incidents.

In one case, the U.S. military interrogated a detainee picked up by the Iraqi army in July 2006 in Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. The detainee, who is referred to as DAT 326, told the U.S. soldiers how he had been abused for hours by his Iraqi captors — a claim backed by a U.S. medical exam.

“DAT 326 states he was told to lay down on his stomach with his hands behind his back, which is when the Iraqi soldiers allegedly stepped, jumped, urinated and spit on him,” a report said.

The incident was first reported by Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite television channel that was given advance access by WikiLeaks to the documents, along with a few other news organizations.

Al Jazeera said the U.S. military unit decided not to investigate because the incident involved only Iraqi forces. “Due to no allegation or evidence of U.S. involvement, a U.S. investigation is not being initiated,” the report said, according to the news channel.

As a whole, the leaked documents, known in the U.S. military as “significant activities” reports, describe in minute detail what U.S. troops in Iraq encountered on a daily basis from 2003 to this year— including casualty notifications, routine descriptions of attacks, sensitive intelligence tips and accounts of meetings.

WikiLeaks, a secretive organization that seeks to provide a venue for whistle-blowers to expose government and corporate wrongdoing, made the documents public despite warnings by the Pentagon that disclosure of the classified materials could put U.S. troops and their coalition partners at risk.

WikiLeaks said in a statement that the documents provide “the first real glimpse into the secret history of the war that the United States government has been privy to throughout.”

U.S. officials, who have been bracing for the release of the documents for weeks, denounced WikiLeaks for ignoring appeals in recent days to not make the material public. But they also downplayed the significance of the disclosures, describing the material as raw information that would contribute little to the public’s understanding of the war.

“We strongly condemn the unauthorized disclosure of classified information,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said in a statement. He described the reports as “snapshots of events, both tragic and mundane,” that do “not bring new understanding to Iraq’s past.”

In addition to prisoner abuse, many files document U.S. concerns that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was providing training and giving weapons to Shiite Muslim militias in a proxy war aimed at killing U.S. troops and Iraq’s minority Sunni Muslims. There are also numerous mentions of civilian casualties.

WikiLeaks said its analysis of casualties mentioned in reports determined that 109,032 people have died in Iraq over the last seven years, including 66,081 civilians, 23,984 insurgents, 15,196 Iraqi soldiers and police officers and 3,771 U.S. and allied personnel.

Those numbers could not be verified, but they are comparable to those compiled by other groups, including Iraq Body Count, which keeps a casualty count based on media reports and military statements. The WikiLeaks total is higher than a tally released this month by the Pentagon, which said that 76,939 Iraqi civilian and security force members had died in the conflict.

The leaked documents refer to a U.S. military order, known as FRAG0 242, which said there was no obligation to investigate alleged incidents of prisoner abuse unless they involved U.S. troops. The existence of the order was reported by Al Jazeera and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which also received an advance look at the documents.

The Guardian said the order dated to June 2004, but Al Jazeera notes the first mention of FRAGO a year later. It is not clear whether the order was superseded by later decrees.

Starting in late 2005, U.S. commanders began cracking down on abuses by Iraqi forces, though their reports make clear they did not investigate every case.

In June 2006, according to one report, U.S. troops discovered evidence of “unchecked torture” at a police station in Husaybah in western Iraq.

Blood was found on a cell floor, and wire for electric shock and a rubber hose were kept in the station’s area for detainees. The report noted that U.S. soldiers were making surprise visits to the station and demanding to inspect its logbooks.

Based on the WikiLeaks findings, the human rights group Amnesty International is concerned that U.S. soldiers violated international law when they “handed over thousands of detainees to Iraqi security forces who, they knew, were continuing to torture and abuse detainees on a truly shocking scale,” said Malcolm Smart, the group’s director for the Middle East and North Africa.

WikiLeaks did not reveal who provided it with the documents, but a U.S. Army intelligence analyst who was stationed in Iraq until this year has been charged with improperly downloading vast amounts of classified material, including files that were later made public by WikiLeaks.

A team of more than 100 U.S. government analysts has for weeks been reviewing files they expected WikiLeaks to release, looking for names of Iraqis who assisted the U.S. and other sensitive details. That information has been forwarded to U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in Iraq, in hopes of minimizing the damage.

Even so, the Pentagon’s Morrell said, the leak does “expose secret information that could make our troops even more vulnerable to attack in the future. Just as with the leaked Afghan documents, we know our enemies will mine this information looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources, and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment.”

In July, WikiLeaks made public tens of thousands of similar classified U.S. reports about the war in Afghanistan.

david.cloud@latimes.com

ned.parker@latimes.com
WikiLeaks documents indicate U.S. forces failed to stop prisoner abuse by Iraqis

NPR’s decision to fire news analyst Juan Williams for remarks he made about Muslims on airliners was not only roundly criticized by conservatives Thursday, but also was viewed with alarm by some Muslim American activists and scholars.

Williams said Monday on Fox News‘ “The O’Reilly Factor” that he worries when he sees Muslims in traditional garb on airplanes. NPR fired Williams on Wednesday, saying that his comment violated the news organization’s ethics guidelines and undermined his credibility.

Some prominent Muslims expressed concern Thursday that his firing would widen a gulf between Muslims and non-Muslims in the United States.

“The greater American public remains unsure about Islam and very often hostile about Islam,” said Akbar Ahmed, chair of Islamic Studies at American University, who examines the divide in his new film and book, “Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam.”

Ahmed said he was disappointed by Williams’ comments. But he added that NPR’s abrupt firing “does not bring the temperature down against Muslims…. Now the debate is, are we being oversensitive to Muslims?”

The flap over Williams’ remarks is the latest example of how the topic of Islam has become a political live wire in this midterm election year.

An emotional fight over the construction of an Islamic community center blocks from the site of the destroyed World Trade Center in New York erupted into a national controversy this summer and became fodder for campaign ads that have aired in Iowa and North Carolina.

At the same time, a threat by a Florida pastor to burn copies of the Koran swelled into an international issue, drawing condemnation from leaders, including President Obama.

The latest furor began last week when Fox News host Bill O’Reilly made an appearance on ABC’s “The View” and declared, “Muslims killed us on 9/11.” That prompted co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar to walk off the stage.

That was the incident O’Reilly and Williams were discussing Monday night when Williams said, “I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried.” He also noted that it was not fair to cast all Muslims as extremists.

“We as a country are engaged in a very wild and wooly conversation about Islam and Muslim Americans,” said Suhail Khan, a conservative activist who is a Muslim American, noting that minorities such as Catholics, Jews and Japanese Americans have faced similar hostility throughout U.S. history. “Sometimes the conversation is thoughtful and sometimes it’s ugly.”

But Khan said NPR overreacted in letting Williams go. “While Juan’s comments may have been a little rough around the edges, he was voicing an honest opinion and trying to articulate his personal questions and struggles with perceptions in regards to Muslims,” he said.

The decision drew an avalanche of complaints against the media organization. By Thursday evening, more than 5,400 comments had been posted on NPR.org, many of them angrily accusing the organization of political correctness. Conservative leaders such as Newt Gingrich and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee called for cuts to NPR’s funding.

NPR receives no direct federal money for its operations, but between 1% and 3% of its $160 million budget comes from competitive grants awarded by publicly funded entities such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts

Dana Davis Rehm, NPR’s senior vice president for communications, said that Williams had been warned several times in the past for comments that violated ethics guidelines that prohibit NPR journalists from participating in programs “that encourage punditry and speculation rather than fact-based analysis.”

“We felt we really didn’t have an alternative,” she said. “And it was not without regret and it was not a decision that was made lightly by any means.”

In a piece for FoxNews.com, Williams called his firing “an outrageous violation of journalistic standards and ethics by management that has no use for a diversity of opinion, ideas or a diversity of staff.” He said his discussion with O’Reilly included “no support for anti-Muslim sentiments of any kind.”

Fox News moved aggressively to turn the controversy to its advantage, signing Williams to an expanded role at the cable news network.

matea.gold@latimes.com
Prominent Muslims fear NPR analyst’s firing may fan hostility

SAN DIEGO (AP) — The military is accepting openly gay recruits for the first time in the nation’s history, even as it tries in the courts to slow the movement to abolish its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

At least two service members discharged for being gay began the process to re-enlist after the Pentagon’s Tuesday announcement.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in California who overturned the 17-year policy last week was likely to reject the government’s latest effort to halt her order telling the military to stop enforcing the law.

The Justice Department will likely appeal if she does not suspend her order.

The Defense Department has said it would comply with U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips’ order and had frozen any discharge cases. Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said recruiters had been given top-level guidance to accept applicants who say they are gay.

Recruiters also have been told to inform potential recruits that the moratorium on enforcement of the policy could be reversed at any time, if the ruling is appealed or the court grants a stay, she said.

Gay rights groups were continuing to tell service members to avoid revealing that they are gay, fearing they could find themselves in trouble should the law be reinstated.

“What people aren’t really getting is that the discretion and caution that gay troops are showing now is exactly the same standard of conduct that they will adhere to when the ban is lifted permanently,” said Aaron Belkin, executive director of the Palm Center, a think tank on gays and the military at the University of California Santa Barbara. “Yes, a few will try to become celebrities.”

An Air Force officer and co-founder of a gay service member support group called OutServe said financial considerations are playing a big role in gay service members staying quiet.

“The military has financially trapped us,” he said, noting that he could owe the military about $200,000 if he were to be dismissed.

The officer, who asked not to be identified for fear of being discharged, said he’s hearing increasingly about heterosexual service members approaching gay colleagues and telling them they can come out now.

He also said more gay service members are coming out to their peers who are friends, while keeping their orientation secret from leadership. He said he has come out to two peers in the last few days.

“People are coming out informally in their units,” the officer said. “Discussions are happening right now.”

An opponent of the judge’s ruling said confusion that has come up is exactly what Pentagon officials feared and shows the need for her to immediately freeze her order while the government appeals.

“It’s only logical that a stay should be granted to avoid the confusion that is already occurring with reports that the Pentagon is telling recruiters to begin accepting homosexual applicants,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group based in Washington that supports the policy.

The uncertain status of the law has caused much confusion within an institution that has historically discriminated against gays.

Before the 1993 law, the military banned gays entirely and declared them incompatible with military service. There have been instances in which gays have served, with the knowledge of their colleagues.

Twenty-nine nations, including Israel, Canada, Germany and Sweden, allow openly gay troops, according to the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay rights group and plaintiff in the lawsuit before Phillips.

The Pentagon guidance to recruiters comes after Dan Woods, the group’s attorney, sent a letter last week warning the Justice Department that Army recruiters who turned away Omar Lopez in Austin, Texas may have caused the government to violate Phillips’ injunction. Woods wrote that the government could be subject to a citation for contempt.

Military recruiters told to accept gay applicants, as gov’t appeals court decision

The Supreme Court intervened again Monday in a lawsuit against a former George W. Bush administration official, agreeing to decide whether former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft is entirely shielded from claims that he misused the law to arrest terrorism suspects under false pretenses.

Obama administration lawyers appealed on Ashcroft’s behalf and asserted that it would “severely damage law enforcement” if the nation’s top law enforcement official could be held liable for abusing his authority.

In the last five years, civil libertarians have tried, without much success, to sue former Bush administration officials for overstepping the law. These suits have run into a series of procedural barriers. For example, those who accused the government of wiretapping their phones without a search warrant had their cases thrown out of court on grounds they could not prove they had been wiretapped. Others who said they were wrongly arrested and tortured had their claims dismissed when the government invoked the “state secrets” privilege.

Last year, the Supreme Court shielded Ashcroft from being sued by Muslim immigrants in the New York area who said they were arrested and abused in jail after the 9/11 attacks, even though they had no involvement in a terrorism plot. In a 5-4 decision, the high court ruled that the suit against Ashcroft must be dismissed because the plaintiffs could not prove he ordered them to be abused.

The new case arose when Lavoni Kidd, a former football star at the University of Idaho, was arrested and shackled at Washington’s Dulles International Airport in March 2003. He was not taken into custody because he was suspected of a crime, but because he was a supposed “material witness” in another case.

Federal law permits the government in special situations to hold someone as a “material witness” in a pending case. Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union accused Ashcroft of a “gross abuse” of this authority. They say he misused the law to arrest innocent people, even when the government lacked the required “probable cause.”

After the 9/11 attacks Ashcroft announced he would use all the legal authority at his disposal to capture terrorists. Hundreds of Muslim men were arrested and held on immigration charges. That option was not available in Kidd’s case because he is a U.S. citizen.

He had converted to Islam in college and changed him name to Abdullah Al-Kidd. He had cooperated with the FBI after the 9/11 attacks and answered questions about another Muslim man in Idaho who was under investigation in connection with his website.

Several months had elapsed since Kidd had heard from the FBI, but when he bought a round-trip ticket to travel to Saudi Arabia, where he had a study scholarship, the FBI moved to have him arrested. An FBI agent wrongly told a magistrate that Kidd had bought a one-way first-class ticket. The magistrate ordered Kidd arrested and held as a witness. A few days later, then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III testified in Congress and mentioned Kidd’s “arrest” as one of the bureau’s recent successes.

Kidd was strip-searched repeatedly and shackled for more than two weeks in a high-security cell where the lights were kept on, according to his complaint. He was then released, but his passport was taken. In 2005, Kidd sued Ashcroft and other officials, contending they had violated his constitutional rights by arresting him without probable cause.

Ashcroft moved to dismiss the suit, arguing that as the nation’s chief prosecutor, he was absolutely immune from such claims. But a federal judge in Idaho and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to dismiss the suit. Judge Milan Smith said it was “repugnant to the Constitution” for the government to say it “has the power to arrest and detain or restrict American citizens for months on end, in sometimes primitive conditions, not because they have committed a crime, but merely because the government wants to investigate them for possible wrongdoing.”

This ruling, if allowed to stand, would have allowed the case against Ashcroft to proceed toward a trial.

But Acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal appealed to the high court and argued that top prosecutors should be shielded from answering such allegations. “Absolute immunity applies regardless of the prosecutor’s intent,” he said.

The justices announced they will hear the case of Ashcroft vs. Al-Kidd early next year and decide whether the doctrine of prosecutorial immunity requires that the suit be dismissed. New Justice Elena Kagan said she would stay out of the case.

david.savage@latimes.com

Supreme Court to hear civil liberties suit against John Ashcroft

Airline passengers can expect ticket prices to be 7% to 18% higher this holiday season than last year, as an economic recovery — however modest — spurs growing demand for air travel.

Travelers can also look forward to more crowded flights: The airlines have added few new planes or routes in the last several years.

“I expect prices to be quite high compared to the last couple years, as demand is strong and supply is weak,” said Rick Seaney, chief executive of the travel website FareCompare.

Already, airlines are packing more passengers per plane, with the nation’s top carriers recording 86.3% of all seats filled in June — the highest rate in 10 years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

About 41 million Americans are expected to fly during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season, making it one of the busiest travel seasons of the year.

Passengers took advantage of bargains last year, when airlines dropped prices to the lowest levels in decades to entice recession-battered travelers back into the air. But now, travel experts say, demand has begun to pick up, partly a result of pent-up demand and growing optimism about the economy.

“Travel demand for the peak travel days is increasing, driving prices higher as availability diminishes,” said Jack E. Richards, president and chief executive of Pleasant Holidays, a travel agency in Westlake Village.

For example, a nonstop round-trip ticket from Los Angeles to New York departing the day before Thanksgiving and returning the following Sunday was running between $641 and $881 on the major airlines. According to a spokesman for the travel website Expedia, those prices were about 20% higher than last year.

For travelers hoping to relax in the sun, a round-trip ticket from Los Angeles to Cancun, Mexico — departing the Wednesday before Christmas and returning the Monday after — cost about $561 to $939. Those prices were up about 31%, the Expedia spokesman said.

The prices are so high that Marilyn Fils, a frequent traveler from Tarzana, canceled plans to meet her daughter in New York for Christmas.

“I expected somewhat

Dead these hundred years, Mark Twain would wholly understand the dispute between the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Imperial Irrigation District over water flowing into the Salton Sea.

In the West, Twain is famously reported to have quipped, whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting.

In the world of water, Metropolitan and Imperial are behemoths, for different reasons. When these two clash, as they have done repeatedly in recent decades, other water agencies in the West fret and wait for the fallout. At stake is a lot of water and a lot of money.

Metropolitan serves more people (19 million) than any other water district in California. Farm-rich Imperial gets more Colorado River water (3.1 million acre-feet) than any agency in the seven states that depend on the river.

Their latest dispute is at the level of strongly worded letters and tart comments. But water-war-tested lawyers are at the ready on both sides.

Metropolitan says Imperial is trying to wiggle out of a complex water sales agreement signed in 2003 that had taken the arm-twisting of two presidential administrations to cobble together. Imperial, whose officials signed the 2003 agreement only reluctantly, says Metropolitan is just being a water hog.

Both sides appealed to the federal Bureau of Reclamation. The bureau, while seeming to tilt toward Metropolitan, sent a kind of “can’t we all get along?” letter last week to both sides suggesting a meeting between top officials.

The flashpoint is Imperial’s decision to pump some of its allotment of Colorado River water directly into the smelly, salty Salton Sea, that environmental invalid that straddles Riverside and Imperial counties and is loved by fishermen and migrating birds.

Metropolitan, caught unawares by Imperial’s decision, insists that the river water belongs to its thirsty constituents in coastal Southern California.

It helps to know that distrust of the Los Angeles-based MWD is embedded in the political and cultural DNA of the Imperial Valley.

Some of the early farm families came to the Imperial Valley from the Owens Valley after its water was — pick your word — “appropriated,” “stolen,” “acquired” by Los Angeles.

Brian Brady says he was well aware of the turbulent history of Imperial Valley vs. MWD when he took the job as general manager of the Imperial Irrigation District two years ago.

But that’s not what’s behind the latest dispute, he said.

“There are longstanding cultural feelings and biases of Imperial Valley residents in relation to urban Southern California,” he said. “My job is to live up to the contractual conditions of the [2003 water deal] without regard to those feelings.”

Without contacting his board of directors, Brady decided to send 41,250 acre-feet of water directly into the Salton Sea to help reduce its salinity and to slow down the sea’s overall decline. That much water could satisfy the needs of 80,000 families for a year.

The 2003 agreement requires Imperial to send water into the sea — water conserved through fallowing of farm land or installation of water-conservation devices.

Brady says the district can afford to send water directly into the sea because Imperial Valley farmers this year — due to the national economic slump — have reduced their acreage and thus do not require their full allotment of Colorado River water.

Under the 2003 agreement — as well as a 1931 agreement — Metropolitan is entitled to any portion of Imperial’s gigantic share of the Colorado River that Imperial does not employ for “beneficial uses.” When MWD heard of the plan to send water directly to the sea, it cried foul.

“We’re concerned [Imperial] is trying to change the agreement,” said MWD General Manager Jeffrey Kightlinger. “We’re taking a big hit. This is a lot of water.”

A fresh battle between Southern California water adversaries

An argument over sacrificing goats during a Hindu festival triggered a stampede that killed 10 people Sunday in a packed temple in northern India, officials said.

More than 40,000 people, many inebriated, had taken their goats to the Tildiha village temple in Bihar state to offer sacrifice and prayers to the goddess Durga on the last day of the Navratri festival.

As the worshipers lined up before the butcher, a scuffle broke out and some people were trampled, Banka district spokesman Gupdeshwar Kumar said.

“People were vying with each other to get their goats sacrificed first, and they had a verbal duel with the butcher,” Kumar said.

Four women and six men died in the stampede, and 11 were injured, three of them critically, Banka district police director Neelmani said. The injured were being treated in hospitals.

Villager Umesh Kumar, 35, said the temple was so full, “people didn’t have any place to walk around … and there was a commotion when people tried to have their goats sacrificed.”

The district spokesman said some 30,000 goats were sacrificed at the temple Saturday.

The 10-day Navratri festival honors Durga, the Mother Goddess in the Hindu religion.

The village in Banka district is about 120 miles southeast of Bihar’s state capital, Patna.
Fight at goat sacrifice sparks fatal stampede in India

Just a day after 33 Chilean miners were freed from their underground prison, they were in good health overall, officials said Thursday, with some of the men set to be released from the hospital by the end of the day. As Chilean President Sebastian Pi