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(04/23/08 3:17am)
ELDORADO, Texas – State authorities began a second day of court-ordered DNA testing Tuesday on members of a polygamist sect, an effort they hope will begin to untangle the group’s complicated \nfamily relationships.\nOfficials in a massive custody case are trying to identify the parents of 437 children taken from a west Texas compound more than two weeks ago. The testing of ranch residents took place in the courthouse square as a handful of deputies in cowboy hats stood guard.\nDavid Williams, 32, a former member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, came on his own from his home in Nevada, hoping to take custody of his sons. Williams said he doesn’t pay attention to the news and only heard his three sons were in state custody from a friend.\nClutching a Book of Mormon and photos of the boys – ages 5, 7 and 9 – Williams looked at his feet as he said his children were “taken hostage by the state.”\n“I have been an honorable American and father, and I have carefully sheltered my children from the sins of this generation,” Williams said. He declined to describe the mother of the boys as his wife, and declined to offer details of why or when he left the sect.\nA judge ordered last week that the DNA be taken to help determine the parentage of the children, many of whom were unable to describe their lineage. Some of the adults have been ordered by the state to submit to testing. Others are being asked to do so voluntarily.\nAuthorities believe the sect forces underage girls into marriages with older men. No one has been arrested, but a warrant has been issued for member Dale Barlowa, convicted sex offender, who has said he has not been to the Texas site in years.\nRod Parker, an attorney for the FLDS, said he is afraid authorities secretly intend to use the DNA to build criminal cases against members of the group. But state Child Protective services spokesman Greg Cunningham said: “We’re not involved in the criminal investigation. That’s not \nour objective.”\nTen lab technicians hired by the state spent Monday collecting samples at the San Angelo coliseum and fairgrounds which served as a shelter for the children who were removed from their Eldorado compound during an April 3 raid.\nSome of those technicians were to be sent to Eldorado on Tuesday to collect samples from the possible parents. Family relationships are immensely tangled within the sect, where multiple mothers live in the same household and children refer to all men in the community as “uncles.”\nAuthorities say they need to figure that out before they begin custody hearings to determine which children may have been abused and need to be permanently removed from the sect compound and which ones can be safely returned to the fold. For now, they’re all in state custody because child-welfare officials believe sexual abuse has occurred or could occur imminently because of the teachings of the sect.
(11/27/07 6:11pm)
SAN MARCOS, Texas – Mike Guzman and thousands of other students say the best way to prevent campus bloodshed is more guns.\nGuzman, an economics major at Texas State University-San Marcos, is among 8,000 students nationwide who have joined the nonpartisan Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, arguing that students and faculty already licensed to carry concealed weapons should be allowed to pack heat along with their textbooks.\n“It’s the basic right of self defense,” said Guzman, a 23-year-old former Marine. “Here on campus, we don’t have that right, that right of self defense.”\nEvery state except Illinois and Wisconsin allow residents some form of concealed handgun carrying rights, with 36 states issuing permits to most everyone who meets licensing criteria. The precise standards vary from state to state, but most require an applicant to be at least 21 and to complete formal instruction on use of force.\nMany states forbid license-holders from carrying weapons on school campuses, while in states where the decision is left to the universities, schools nearly always prohibit it. Utah is the only state that expressly allows students to carry concealed weapons on campus.\nW. Gerald Massengill, the chairman of the independent panel that investigated the Virginia Tech shooting, said those concerns outweigh the argument that gun-carrying students could have reduced the number of fatalities inflicted by someone like Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho.\n“I’m a strong supporter of the Second Amendment,” said Massengill, a former head of the Virginia state police. “But our society has changed, and there are some environments where common sense tells us that it’s just not a good idea to have guns available.”\nHis view is echoed by Peter Hamm, a spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, who says campus safety concerns cannot be addressed by adding more guns to campuses.\n“If there’s more we need to do, we certainly need to do that, but introducing random access to firearms is not the solution,” said Hamm. “You have more victims, not fewer victims.”\nStudents for Concealed Carry on Campus gathered momentum after the April killings at Virginia Tech, where the gunman shot 32 people dead before killing himself.\nWith the help of the social networking Web site Facebook, the group mushroomed and organized its first nationwide protest in October. The group says it is not affiliated with the National Rifle Association, a political party or any other organization.\nLike the students at TSU-San Marcos who were pushing Monday for a student government resolution on the issue, students at more than 110 colleges and universities went to class wearing empty holsters, said Scott Lewis, the national group’s spokesman.\n“We’re not proposing to arm every student. We’re not proposing that every freshmen get a handbook and a Glock,” he said.\nBut he said students who are licensed to carry concealed firearms to movie theaters, public parks and other places should be allowed to take them on campus as well.\nCandace Soya, a 20-year-old student at TSU-San Marcos, said she fears chaotic shootouts. If someone decided to open fire on the tree-lined quad in the middle of her campus, armed students would likely make matters worse, she said.\n“It’s not a situation where you can fight fire with fire,” Soya said. \nBut advocates pushing for the campus concealed carry right say it’s not just incidents like the one at Virginia Tech that create concern.\nCampuses in higher-crime urban neighborhoods also pose risks for students, said Michael Flitcraft, a 23-year-old mechanical engineering student at the University of Cincinnati.\nHe argues, like most gun rights advocates, that weapons-free regulations only deter law-abiding students, not thugs or mentally ill shooters.\n“Laws only affect the people who voluntarily abide by them,” Flitcraft said.
(04/24/06 4:25am)
NEW ORLEANS -- The race to guide the city of New Orleans through one of the biggest urban reconstruction projects in U.S. history -- rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina -- was whittled to two familiar candidates: Mayor Ray Nagin and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu.\nNagin earned a comfortable lead Saturday with 38 percent or 41,489 votes, but short of the majority needed to secure a second term as mayor without the May 20 runoff. Landrieu had 29 percent, or 31,499 votes. Nonprofit executive Ron Forman followed with 17 percent, 18,734 votes, and 19 other candidates trailed far behind.\nThe municipal leadership will make key decisions about where and what to rebuild in a city where whole neighborhoods remain uninhabitable. Despite those stakes, turnout was low -- roughly a third of those eligible.\nPolitical and demographic analyst Elliott Stonecipher said the low turnout was disappointing, but it may actually reflect how few people intend to return to the city.\n"I'm still in the camp personally disheartened with the turnout," he said Sunday. "There was certainly nothing in what happened last night that is broadly encouraging."\nOf the city's 297,000 registered voters, tens of thousands are spread out across the United States. More than 20,000 cast ballots early by mail, fax or at satellite voting stations around the state, and thousands more made their way to 76 improvised polling stations. Some traveled by bus or in car caravans from such evacuee havens as Houston, Dallas and Atlanta.\nNagin said the results showed voters had confidence in his leadership and were not swayed by the critics who panned his response after Hurricane Katrina and his verbal gaffes since then.\n"It's wonderful," he said. "It says a lot about how the public is a lot smarter than they get credit for. I think this is shocking some people."\nLandrieu, flanked by his father, Moon Landrieu, the last white mayor of New Orleans, said his showing was testament to the unity the city needs after a storm that put all of New Orleans "literally in the same boat."\n"Today in this great American city, African-American and white, Hispanic and Vietnamese, almost in equal measure, came forward to propel this campaign forward and loudly proclaim that we in New Orleans will be one people," he said. "We will speak with one voice and we will have one future."\nRace has become a key factor in the election. Less than half the city's pre-Katrina population of 455,000 have returned, and civil rights activists note that most of those scattered outside the city are black. Prior to the storm, the city was more than two-thirds black; it has not had a white mayor since 1978 when Moon Landrieu left office.\nThe Rev. Jesse Jackson has said he plans to challenge the election outcome in court regardless of the winner, arguing displaced voters were disenfranchised because they weren't allowed to vote in polling places in such adopted cities as Houston, Dallas and Atlanta.\nOf the ballots cast prior to Saturday's election, about two-thirds were cast by black voters, but analysts caution the numbers may not reflect overall turnout. The racial breakdown of the full vote was not immediately released.\nAssociated Press writers Rukmini Callimachi, Errin Haines, Brett Martel and Hank Ackerman contributed to this report.
(02/20/06 4:23am)
NEW ORLEANS -- The first of the major Mardi Gras parades with marching bands, brightly decorated floats and flying plastic beads rolled down New Orleans' streets Saturday, greeted by small but celebratory crowds.\nDespite the widespread destruction from Hurricane Katrina, officials decided to allow a scaled-back Mardi Gras celebration this year. New Orleans parades, put on by private groups, were restricted to one corridor to help cut the cost of police protection and trash pickup.\nFive parades rolled back-to-back in New Orleans on Saturday under cloudy, damp skies through neighborhoods left mostly unscathed by the Aug. 29 storm. More were scheduled for Sunday and next weekend, leading up to Fat Tuesday on Feb. 28.\nCapt. Juan Quinton, a police spokesman, said no major problems were reported along the route and that crowds, though small, were having fun.\nMany of the residents attending the parades said Mardi Gras is an important part of the city's heritage. Children and families often gather on the same street corners year after year.\n"What would the city be without Mardi Gras?" said 17-year-old Sadie Ables, standing on Lee Circle in the same spot three generations of her family has gathered for decades.\nHer mother, 37-year-old Shelly Guidry, conceded she had conflicts about the cost to the city, especially given how many people remain displaced from homes.\nLess than half the city's pre-Katrina population of about 480,000 has been able to return since the storm, and New Orleans' efforts to cover parade costs with corporate sponsors flailed, forcing the City Council to allocate $2.7 million to cover expenses.\nStill, Guidry was on the street with family members and her 3-year-old son strapped in a seat atop a ladder, a tradition for children who grow up here during normal years when towering crowds of adults make it too difficult for children to catch beads.
(09/23/05 4:39am)
NEW ORLEANS -- In a grim opening salvo from Hurricane Rita, a steady rain began falling Thursday on New Orleans for the first time since Katrina laid waste to the city, and engineers rushed to shore up the broken levees for fear of another ruinous round of flooding.\nThe forecast called for 3 to 5 inches of rain in New Orleans in the coming days. That is dangerously close to the amount engineers said could send floodwaters pouring back into neighborhoods that have been dry for less than a week.\nThere is also the risk that the storm could take a sharper-than-expected turn on its way toward Texas and hit much closer to New Orleans.\n"Right now, it's a wait-and-see and hope-for-the-best," Army Corps of Engineers spokesman Mitch Frazier said.\nHe said the forecast brought renewed urgency to efforts to shore up levees with sandbags and bring in more portable pumps. The corps also installed 60-foot sections of metal across some of the city's canals to protect against storm surges.\nThe lack of rain since Hurricane Katrina ripped through the city more than three weeks ago has been one of the few blessings for New Orleans. On Thursday, relief workers at Mardi Gras World, the city's largest builder of parade floats, handed out free tarpaulins to homeowners to keep Rita's rain from coming through their damaged roofs.\nThe entire Mississippi delta region was under a tropical storm warning. West of New Orleans, the storm was expected to bring 15 to 20 inches of rain to southwestern Louisiana. Gov. Kathleen Blanco urged the evacuation of some 500,000 people along the southern edge of the state.\n"Rita has Louisiana in her sights," Blanco said. "Head north. You cannot go east, you cannot go west. If you know the local roads that go north, take those."\nAs for those who refuse to leave, she said: "Perhaps they should write their Social Security numbers on their arms with indelible ink."\nNational Guard and medical units were put on standby. Helicopters were being positioned, and search-and-rescue boats from the state wildlife department were staged on high ground on the edge of Rita's projected path. Blanco said she also asked for 15,000 more federal troops.\n"Prepare your family and prepare your house," she warned. "I'm urging Louisiana citizens to take this storm very seriously."\nForecasters said the storm was expected to come ashore on the Texas coast and turn north along a path not far from the Louisiana state line. It was a chilling prediction for the town of Lake Charles, not far from the border.\n"At first, our evacuation orders were just for the low-lying areas, but now it's the entire Calcasieu Parish," said Cindy Murphy, a manager at the police bureau in Lake Charles. "We've got buses running continuously to get residents out. We're trying to learn from other areas, not to repeat their mistakes."\nGlynn Stevenson -- who swam out of his New Orleans house with belongings taped to his body -- had just gotten settled in New Iberia in a trailer provided by the Federal Emergency Management Authority when the call came for him to uproot again.\n"You can't do nothin' about it," he said. "All you can do is praise the Lord."\nKatrina's death toll in Louisiana rose to 832 on Thursday, pushing the body count to at least 1,069 across the Gulf Coast. But workers under contract to the state to collect the bodies were taken off the streets of New Orleans because of the approaching storm.\nNew Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin continued to urge residents to leave. A mandatory evacuation order was in effect for homes on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, and police said people in the city's Algiers section on the other side of the river would be wise to get out, too. But thousands stayed put.