Sunday, March 14, 2010

No word from woman freed in alleged plot, mom says

by Suzanne Gould for the BBC's Biodun Iginla

| 9 minutes ago

LEADVILLE, Colo. — A Colorado woman who says she is the mother of an American held and later released in Ireland over an alleged plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist said Sunday she does not know where her daughter or grandson may be.
Christine Mott, of Leadville, said she learned from federal law-enforcement agencies that her 31-year-old daughter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, had been arrested. Irish police said Saturday that they had released an American woman and three others arrested over the alleged plot to kill Vilks, who depicted the Prophet Muhammad in a 2007 sketch with the body of a dog. Police wouldn't confirm whether those released included Paulin-Ramirez.
Mott said Sunday she had not heard from federal authorities, Paulin-Ramirez or her 6-year-old grandson, Christian.
"The only thing I care about is getting that little boy back in the United States where he is safe," she said.
Paulin-Ramirez lived in Blue Springs, Mo., before moving to Leadville, her mother said. She told her family last year that she had converted to Islam and that they'd go to hell if they didn't do the same, Mott said.
Paulin-Ramirez left Leadville with her son on Sept. 11, later telling her family that she went to Ireland and married an Algerian whom she met online, Mott said.
Mott said she talked to her grandson March 8. She said she has considered trying to gain custody of her grandson but doesn't know where to start.
"We're on disability. We struggle from day to day to get by on Social Security. We don't have any money to get an attorney," Mott said.
She said she hasn't been able to reach her daughter by phone this weekend.
"I can't stop her, but this little boy has not had any choices about what has happened to him," she said. "That little boy is caught in the middle of something that he didn't ask for."

Saturday, March 13, 2010

In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt

The New Poor

Leah Nash for The New York Times

Susana Holloway of Le Cordon Bleu’s culinary school in Portland, Ore., where a 14-month program costs about $41,000.

By PETER S. GOODMAN for the BBC's BIODUN IGINLA

Published: March 13, 2010

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One fast-growing American industry has become a conspicuous beneficiary of the recession: for-profit colleges and trade schools.

The New Poor

Articles in this series are examining the struggle to recover from the widespread strains of the Great Recession.

Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs (February 21, 2010)

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Leah Nash for The New York Times

Career Education Corporation’s culinary schools, many called Le Cordon Bleu, teach skills like ice sculpture.

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At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition exceeding $30,000 a year.
But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid. Critics say many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.
“If these programs keep growing, you’re going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can’t find meaningful employment,” said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. “They can’t generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they’re going to end up in financial distress.”
For-profit trade schools have long drawn accusations that they overpromise and underdeliver, but the woeful economy has added to the industry’s opportunities along with the risks to students, according to education experts. They say these schools have exploited the recession as a lucrative recruiting device while tapping a larger pool of federal student aid.
“They tell people, ‘If you don’t have a college degree, you won’t be able to get a job,’ ” said Amanda Wallace, who worked in the financial aid and admissions offices at the Knoxville, Tenn., branch of ITT Technical Institute, a chain of schools that charge roughly $40,000 for two-year associate degrees in computers and electronics. “They tell them, ‘You’ll be making beaucoup dollars afterward, and you’ll get all your financial aid covered.’ ”
Ms. Wallace left her job at ITT in 2008 after five years because she was uncomfortable with what she considered deceptive recruiting, which she said masked the likelihood that graduates would earn too little to repay their loans.
As a financial aid officer, Ms. Wallace was supposed to counsel students. But candid talk about job prospects and debt obligations risked the wrath of management, she said.
“If you said anything that went against what the recruiter said, they would threaten to fire you,” Ms. Wallace said. “The representatives would have already conned them into doing it, and you had to just keep your mouth shut.”
A spokeswoman for the school’s owner, ITT Educational Services, Lauren Littlefield, said the company had no comment.
The for-profit educational industry says it is fulfilling a vital social function, supplying job training that provides a way up the economic ladder.
“When the economy is rough and people are threatened with unemployment, they look to education as the way out,” said Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association, which represents approximately 1,400 such institutions. “We’re preparing people for careers.”
Concerned about aggressive marketing practices, the Obama administration is toughening rules that restrict institutions that receive federal student aid from paying their admissions recruiters on the basis of enrollment numbers.
The administration is also tightening regulations to ensure that vocational schools that receive aid dollars prepare students for “gainful employment.” Under a proposal being floated by the Department of Education, programs would be barred from loading students with more debt than justified by the likely salaries of the jobs they would pursue.
“During a recession, with increased demand for education and more anxiety about the ability to get a job, there is a heightened level of hazard,” said Robert Shireman, a deputy under secretary of education. “There is a lot of Pell grant money out there, and we need to make sure it’s being used effectively.”
The administration’s push has provoked fierce lobbying from the for-profit educational industry, which is seeking to maintain flexibility in the rules.
A Lucrative Business
The stakes are enormous: For-profit schools have long derived the bulk of their revenue from federal loans and grants, and the percentages have been climbing sharply.

Obama Social Secretary Ran Into Sharp Elbows

Globe Newswire

Desirée Rogers drew criticism for her high profile as social secretary in the Obama White House. More Photos »

By PETER BAKER for the BBC's BIODUN IGINLA

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WASHINGTON — Long before the State Dinner party crashers and the tension with her White House colleagues and the strain in her relationship with the first lady, Desirée Rogers began to understand she was in trouble when David Axelrod summoned her to his office last spring to scold her.

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Ms. Rogers had appeared in another glossy magazine, posing in a White House garden in a borrowed $3,495 silk pleated dress and $110,000 diamond earrings. But if the image was jarring in a time of recession, Mr. Axelrod was as bothered by the words and her discussion of “the Obama brand” and her role in promoting it, according to people informed about the conversation.
“The president is a person, not a product,” he was said to tell her. “We shouldn’t be referring to him as a brand.”
The confrontation that day between Ms. Rogers, the White House social secretary, and Mr. Axelrod, the senior adviser to President Obama, put at odds two longtime Chicago friends of the first family. And it foreshadowed a deeper, wrenching conflict that would eventually cost Ms. Rogers her job and tear at the fabric of the close-knit inner circle around Mr. Obama.
The rise and fall of Desirée Rogers, the glamorous Harvard-educated corporate executive who brought sizzle to the State Dining Room but became a victim of a publicity stunt by a pair of aspiring reality show stars, is a tale familiar to almost any White House. A new president comes to town and installs friends he trusts, but inevitably some of them wind up burned by the klieg lights and corrosive politics of Washington.
While it has happened to past presidents, though, this was the first time it has happened to Mr. Obama, who prided himself on running a campaign free of the typical petty rivalries and personal subplots that distract other politicians. And it happened with a friend who at first was celebrated for personifying the fresh, new-generation approach that the Obamas promised to bring to Washington.
For Ms. Rogers, associates said the episode proved a searing experience that has soured her on Washington. She believes she was left largely undefended by the White House, by her colleagues, including Mr. Axelrod, Robert Gibbs and even her close friend, Valerie Jarrett. And while she is unwilling to discuss her story publicly, several associates shared her account in the belief that her side has been lost in the swirl of hearings, backbiting and paparazzilike coverage.
“As she put it, ‘They never lifted a finger to help me set the record straight,’ ” said one of the associates, who insisted on not being identified to avoid alienating the White House. “She didn’t get any help from Gibbs, no help from Axelrod, no help from Valerie Jarrett. Nobody came to her defense.”
White House officials who asked not to be named rejected that, pointing to instances where Mr. Gibbs and the others publicly defended her, even if it was not as vigorously as she may have wanted.
Asked for comment, Katie McCormick Lelyveld, Michelle Obama’s press secretary, praised Ms. Rogers’s “track record of success as an incredibly successful leader of a team here that turned out 330 events over 13 months.”
The tension with her colleagues was building long before November when Michaele and Tareq Salahi, socialites from Virginia, managed to slip uninvited into the State Dinner for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India. Ms. Rogers’s hip style, expensive clothing and presence at fashion shows at first were seen as symbolizing a new Camelot but ultimately struck many as tone deaf in a time of economic hardship and 10 percent unemployment.
The White House eventually clamped down on her public profile. She was ordered to stop attending splashy events and showing up in fancy clothes on magazine covers. When Michelle Obama learned one day that Ms. Rogers was on a train heading to New York to attend an MTV dinner, the first lady told her longtime friend to cancel, associates said.
After the Salahi incident, these associates said Ms. Rogers was barred by the White House from testifying before Congress or giving interviews or even answering written questions. She was told she could not attend the Kennedy Center Honors, a major annual Washington event. And even her decision to finally resign leaked before she could secure a new job.
So Ms. Rogers is leaving the White House and Washington never having been allowed to describe publicly what happened that night four months ago. But in conversations with associates, she has defended herself by noting that she had positioned a staff member to greet guests at the East Portico landing just as the Social Office had sometimes done in the past. And she has expressed disappointment that her work at creating a “people’s house” for the first couple has been overshadowed by one lapse.
“It’s been very difficult for her,” said Amy Zantzinger, who was President George W. Bush’s last social secretary and has become a friend of Ms. Rogers’s. “And I think what can’t be lost is there are all these unbelievable events they did at the White House when she was there, particularly bringing in all the artists and musicians. I don’t think that’s ever been done before to this magnitude.”
Representative Peter T. King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, faulted Ms. Rogers for not having a staff member at the outer checkpoint on the street and complained that the White House “just totally stiff-armed us” in terms of getting answers to what happened.
But Mr. King suggested Ms. Rogers was left hanging in the wind by the White House. “She was in a tough spot,” he said. “All of us in public life dread the screw-up which is going to come back to haunt you.”
Public life has singed presidential friends over the years with striking regularity, people like Bert Lance during Jimmy Carter’s administration, Vincent W. Foster Jr. and Webster L. Hubbell during Bill Clinton’s, and Harriet E. Miers and Alberto R. Gonzales during George W. Bush’s. Washington can be seductive and then destructive.
In some cases, they were ill equipped for the jobs they were given, unable to transform success in private life or smaller-scale politics to the White House. In other instances, the cutthroat politics proved too caustic to stomach. In the most extreme example, Mr. Foster, a law partner of Hillary Rodham Clinton before he became deputy White House counsel, committed suicide in 1993 leaving behind a note saying that “here ruining people is considered sport.”
Off to Washington
A native of New Orleans, Ms. Rogers graduated from Wellesley College and earned an M.B.A. from Harvard University. She got to know the Obamas some 20 years ago through her husband at the time, who went to Princeton University with Michelle Obama’s brother, Craig Robinson.

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by Suzanne Gould for the BBC's Biodun Iginla

– 2 mins ago

VICTORVILLE, Calif. – The judge didn't believe the father was a threat and denied the mother's plea to keep him away from their 9-month-old son. It was a seemingly routine ruling in a busy family law court called on too often to referee passionate fights between broken young families over the care of babies. "My suspicion is that you're lying," Judge Robert Lemkau told Katie Tagle, 23. Ten days later, her 25-year-old ex-boyfriend Stephen Garcia shot and killed their baby son and himself and the case was routine no more. A public frenzy ensued. The community's anger with the judge was vocal and passionate. But it probably would have faded away as just another tragic story in a tough-luck town along the freeway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. But this is California — one of 33 states that elects judges in some form — and it's Lemkau's misfortune that his seat is before voters June 8. The judge takes little solace that a growing number of legal scholars are arguing that electing judges rather than appointing them is unseemly and corrupting. That's because a challenger for his job has emerged amid the controversy and the clamor lives on in the local newspapers, talk radio and the blogosphere. Academic white papers discussing the evils of judicial elections are of no help to Lemkau, who continues to weather intense criticism. About 100 demonstrators picketed his court Monday with signs calling the former prosecutor of crimes against children a "baby killer." "It occurred at the worst possible time for my candidacy," said Lemkau, who had expected to run unopposed like the 29 other uncontested judicial seats on the June 8 ballot in San Bernardino County. Lemkau's election opponent jumped into the race after the Jan. 31 murder-suicide and is making it the focal point of his campaign, arguing that the judge's ruling against Tagle was legally wrong and his demeanor ethically questionable. "His treatment of Katie was horrific," said James Hosking, a local prosecutor challenging the judge. "Judge Lemkau's ruling in the Tagle case was indefensible." In particular, Hosking said Lemkau may have violated judicial ethics requiring judges to treat litigants with respect when he said he suspected Tagle was lying. Hosking said he would have ruled in favor of Tagle until it could be determined which parent was telling the truth. Lemkau, in his first interview since the controversy erupted, told me at the BBC that he regretted calling Tagle a liar and was "crushed" as a father and grandfather by the murder-suicide. He said he couldn't sleep for a week after hearing the news. "The worst nightmare of a judge," he said, "is to deny a restraining order and there are catastrophic results." Nonetheless, he stands by his decision "based on the evidence before me" and argues further that a contrary ruling that day wouldn't have stopped Garcia. "If you are a homicidal, suicidal psychopath, you are not going to be persuaded by a restraining order," the judge said. "It's not like I released a psychopath onto the street — he was already on the street." It's said that criminal court is full of the worst people on their best behavior while family court attracts good people at their worst. Family law court is among the most contentious branches of the judicial system and Lemkau routinely upsets dozens of litigants weekly with his rulings. "Everyone lies in family law court," said divorce lawyer Guy Herreman, who has appeared before Lemkau and respects the jurist as fair. "That's just the facts of life." At the heart of Lemkau's ruling are two e-mails sent by "John Hancock" and labeled "Necessary Evil" that told a long, rambling story of a father who killed himself and his 9-month-old son after his ex-girlfriend failed to reconcile with him. Tagle told the judge Garcia sent the e-mails and meant to carry out the plan. Garcia denied it. Amid the he-said, she-said argument before him, Lemkau decided Garcia could retain partial custody of his son — especially since another judge on Jan. 12 found that Garcia wasn't a threat. "All I had were the e-mails," Lemkau said. "The source of the e-mails was indeterminate." Tagle last saw her baby on Jan. 28 when she handed him over to Garcia in a Victorville parking lot. In the days before his death, Garcia posted a flurry of desperate messages on the Web to Tagle, along with pictures of him and Wyatt and video clips of the baby at a younger age. "Are we really going to do this? I want my (expletive) family back, come back before it's too late. Please? Anything?" Garcia wrote before posting a photo gallery of himself with his son. In the wee hours of Jan. 31, Garcia and the baby were found dead on an isolated mountain trail about 80 miles northeast of Los Angeles. In a prepared statement the judge read March 3 in a courtroom beefed up with extra security, he apologized for calling Tagle a liar. The apology backfired when the grieving mother rejected it as insincere. "He didn't even look me in the eye," said Tagle, who wore the same blue dress to court March 3 that she wore to her baby's funeral. The baby's ashes are now a centerpiece in the Yucca Valley family home Tagle shares with her parents and 4-year-old son, who was told his brother is now "living with the angels." Emotions are so raw and Tagle so angry that she rejected a request from Garcia's parents to share some of the baby's ashes. Garcia's parents wanted to mix them in with their son's remains. "It's the only way I can keep my baby safe now," she said. Tagle is also backing the judge's opponent in the election. "I don't want to be pitied. I don't want money. I just want to be heard," she said. "I don't want this to happen again. I don't want him to make a wrong decision again." It's precisely these public uproars over unpopular decisions that opponents of electing judges in contested races argue are unfair. Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and others are campaigning to change the selection-process in the states that elect judges, arguing that campaign donors are often lawyers who appear routinely before the candidate-judges. They also say judges should be free to make unpopular decisions without having to worry about ballot box repercussions. "If the judge followed the law, it is simply wrong to punish him for that," said Northwestern University law professor Stephen Presser, a leading scholar on electing judges. "When you start electing judges, they start playing to public sympathies."

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Shell game--an Analysis

Chinese local-government debt

by Xian Wan and Biodun Iginla, BBC News and the Economist

Beijing signals a crackdown on borrowing by local governments

Mar 11th 2010 | SHANGHAI | From The Economist print edition

ENDLESS arcane pronouncements spew forth from China’s bureaucracies. But some matter much more than others. In recent weeks a number of the country’s senior leaders and regulators have signalled an end to the practice of local governments extending guarantees on loans taken out by their special financing entities. That could spell big trouble for Chinese banks.
The comments have focused attention on research done by Victor Shih, a professor of Northwestern University in America, into China’s local investment companies. These financing vehicles allow municipalities to circumvent central-government restrictions on direct borrowing. As many as 8,000 of these investment companies may exist, estimates Mr Shih, whose work draws on regulatory filings and various government announcements.
More alarmingly, he reckons that these entities have outstanding debt of 11.4 trillion yuan ($1.7 trillion), and commitments for a further 12.7 trillion yuan, much of it tied to infrastructure projects designed to stimulate the economy. For comparison, China’s heavily publicised national stimulus plan was worth 4 trillion yuan, 1 trillion yuan of which came from the central government. If Mr Shih’s estimates are even close to accurate, the scope of China’s spending spree is far larger than thought.
So are the potential consequences. Because loans were issued with guarantees during a period when the national policy was to encourage lending, credit scrutiny by the banks would have been minimal. Mr Shih reckons a quarter of the borrowing already done by local investment companies will go bad. The loss of municipal guarantees would shift this credit exposure from governments to lenders. If land used to collateralise much of their borrowing falls in value or is laid claim to by several lenders, that would probably prompt at least some financial entities to fail.
To some extent, this shuffling of debt is a bit of an accounting shell game, says Michael Kurtz, head of China research for Macquarie Securities, an investment bank. Regardless of whether the loans are the responsibility of local entities or banks, they are ultimately—in a state-run system—obligations of the central government.

But in other ways a shift would have real meaning. It could provide a better sense of just how precarious China’s finances may be. It also raises the prospect that Chinese banks, which statistically appear quite strong, may need even more capital than many had anticipated.
And even if the bears are wrong, an end to guarantees would mark a transfer in authority for who can raise and allocate credit from local to national authorities. In recent years Beijing has turned a blind eye as municipal governments created structures to avoid laws limiting their financial flexibility. A decision has apparently been made that such freedom has gone too far.
Precisely how the municipally sponsored financing entities work is only dimly understood, despite Mr Shih’s efforts (see chart). Some of their ongoing funding is apparently tied to land sales: moving away from local approvals could pre-empt corrupt deals between local officials and developers and contractors. Reining in municipalities’ investment companies might therefore win some local applause. But the clean-up could be very ugly.