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Doc: 00440326 DB: research–d–2006–4 Date: Fri Dec 29 14:21:23 2006

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pD8MAMLCO0 12-29-2006 14:21:23*F BC-Hip-Hop Car Stunts:Hip-hop car stunt –

pD8MAMLD04 12-29-2006 14:21:24 F BC-Hip-Hop Car Stunts:Hip-hop car stunt –

Copyright 2006 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

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Hip-hop car stunt – 'ghost riding the whip' – claims at least 2 lives

Eds: Moving on general news and entertainment services.

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By GARANCE BURKE

Associated Press Writer

MODESTO, Calif. (AP) – "Ghost riding the whip" – a stunt in which a driver gets out of his car and dances around and on top of the slowly moving vehicle to a thumping hip-hop beat – has gotten at least two people killed, led to numerous injuries and alarmed police on the West Coast and beyond.

A fad among devotees of a West Coast strain of hip-hop music called "hyphy," the stunt has been celebrated in song and performed in numerous homemade videos posted on YouTube.

"It did not take Einstein to look at this thing and say this was a recipe for disaster," said Pete Smith, a police spokesman in Stockton. "We could see the potential for great injury or death."

Earlier this month, Davender Gulley, a ghost-riding 18-year-old, died after his head slammed into a parked car while he was hanging out the window of an SUV in Stockton, police said. In October, a 36-year-old man dancing on top of a moving car fell off, hit his head and died in what authorities said was Canada's first ghost riding fatality.

The stunt has also led to numerous minor injuries.

Hyphy was born in the San Francisco Bay cities of Oakland, Richmond and Vallejo in the late 1990s, and devotees often hold late-night car rallies called "sideshows" where crowds perform risky stunts, including ghost riding.

"Ghost riding" refers to the absence of a driver. "The whip" is urban slang for your car. Typically, the driver drops the car into neutral and dances around and on top of the vehicle while it inches forward.

Sometimes it is a solo act; sometimes a half-dozen or more passengers get out and dance, too. The stunt is usually performed late at night, on a deserted road or in a parking lot.

The Vallejo-bred rapper E-40 introduced mainstream listeners to ghost riding with the single "Tell Me When to Go," whose lyrics describe how to pull it off. Another single, "Ghostride It," by Oakland rapper Mistah F.A.B., offers a step-by-step guide: "Pull up. Hop out, all in one motion. Dancing on the hood, while the car still rollin'."

The antics have gone nationwide thanks in large part to YouTube, where a search for ghost riding turns up hundreds of grainy videos of young people pulling the stunt. The videos were shot from Portland, Ore., to Chicago and many places in between, and judging from the backdrops, the phenomenon has crossed over from the inner city to the suburbs.

Joe Calderon, 17, of San Diego, posted a YouTube video of himself dancing alongside his moving, driverless 2005 Mazda. "We love that style of music," he said. But "my mom wasn't too thrilled about it."

Another video shows a man sitting on the roof of his fast-moving pickup truck and leaping clear seconds before it crashes into a telephone pole.

Where record labels see hyphy as hip hop's next big thing, police see a menace.

Stockton police said they have written more than 1,500 citations and impounded about 400 vehicles since late March for sideshow antics.

The spontaneous nature of the sideshows – which are staged on interstates, in deserted parking lots, and on downtown streets – keeps police guessing. Departments have spent millions in overtime policing the outlaw rallies.

Even F.A.B. concedes that sideshows have gotten out of control. He said he would like to stage sideshows in large arenas where organizers could charge admission.

"It would be like a ghetto NASCAR," he said.

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Associated Press Writer Ron Harris contributed to this report.

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aD8NNT9182 03-08-2007 04:16:53 BC-Indian Clinics:

aD8NO0QVO0 03-08-2007 08:19:59 BC-Indian Clinics, 1st Ld-Writethru:

aD8NO3LROF 03-08-2007 11:33:51 BC-Indian Clinics, 2nd Ld-Writethru:

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AP Enterprise: Some health clinics deny care to urban American Indians, patients say

Eds: CORRECTS the name of the act to Indian Health Care Improvement Act of 1976, sted American Indian Health Care Improvement Act of 1976. CORRECTS that Indian Health Service regional office sent letter last fall, sted Bureau of Indian Affairs. ADDS comments from Senate hearing in Washington. EDITS to conform and tighten.

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By GARANCE BURKE

Associated Press Writer

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) – After tribal elder Vera Quiroga was turned away from the very clinic she had helped to found, she had little choice but to drive to a far-off reservation for her dental work.

The reason, she said, is that the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs doesn't recognize her as a Yaqui, even though her children and grandchildren have tribal documentation.

"They said if you don't have federal paperwork you can't get service anymore," said Quiroga, 82.

While federal law requires taxpayer-funded tribal clinics to serve all patients of Indian ancestry, some have recently stopped admitting those who can't document their federal tribal status, patients and clinic officials tell The Associated Press.

Federal officials deny that qualified patients are being turned away and say they're doing all they can to ensure a health program for urban Indians isn't shut down entirely. The Indian Health Service oversees 33 clinics nationwide that provide free or discounted medical services to city-dwelling Indians.

But Martin Young, chairman of the board of the Santa Barbara clinic where Quiroga was denied care, said it received a letter last fall from the IHS regional office in Sacramento instructing it to stop offering free health services to patients from unrecognized tribes or who don't have a bureau identification card.

It has since turned away about 200 patients, he said.

An Indian Health Service spokesman said the letter explained who was eligible for care, but did not instruct Santa Barbara to withhold services. However, clinic managers in Tucson, Ariz.; Wichita, Kan.; and Boston reported getting similar directives.

"IHS is suddenly saying that you can't serve this Indian even though he looks Indian, and his family says he's Indian and has all of this history of being Indian, but he doesn't have this piece of paper," said Susette Schwartz, director of the Hunter Health Clinic in Wichita. "We need some consistency."

Under the Indian Health Care Improvement Act of 1976, Congress funds health care programs for members of tribes recognized by states or the federal government, as well as their descendants. Many states recognize tribes the federal government does not.

In California, the right to government-supported medical care is extended a step further, to those whose ancestors lived here in 1852 and are "regarded as an Indian by the community."

Phyllis Wolfe, who oversees urban Indian programs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said clinics that are granted federal dollars must follow federal guidelines. Program officials did not answer requests to clarify any possible exceptions.

Wolfe could not explain why the clinics would have changed their policies. "I don't believe they would do that, but I can't say that that's not been done," she said.

At a Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing Thursday, commitee chairman Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said current laws allow providers to care for all urban Indian patients.

"We shouldn't be having people turned away from these health clinics because they don't have a piece of paper," said Dorgan, who said he had also heard reports of patients being turned away for care.

"There are legal discussions about the constitutionality," he said. "We need to find a way to address them."

The U.S. Supreme Court could see subsidizing care for patients who can't prove their federal status as a violation of equal protection laws, Deputy Assistant Attorney General C. Frederick Beckner III told the committee. Those concerns were not likely to block the reauthorization of the 1976 act, he said.

Nationwide, more than 60 percent of American Indians and Alaska natives live in urban areas, according to the U.S. Census. For the poorest of them, the clinics are a lifeline, a place to get treatment delivered by doctors well-versed in native culture.

The urban clinics are managed by local contractors with funding from Indian Health Service. President Bush's 2008 budget proposal would eliminate the program's $32.7 million annual allocation altogether.

Under the circumstances, federal officials say, the cash-strapped clinics are doing everything they can to care for all patients in need.

"We recognize that the urban Indian population is in need of care and we don't want to disenfranchise any native Americans who are living in urban areas," said Paul Redeagle, deputy director of the Indian Health Service office in Sacramento. "We're currently working with the urban programs in California to resolve their problems."

Redeagle said his office had looked into questions about the management of the Santa Barbara clinic and found no proof of wrongdoing.

That's no consolation to Quiroga, who helped start the clinic in the 1970s. She said her already limited finances are taxed by regular 40-mile trips to the tribal lands of the Santa Ynez Band of Mission Indians.

In Boston, workers at the North American Indian Center said they were told not to treat the Mashpee Wampanoag of Cape Cod, whose ancestors shared Thanksgiving dinner with the Pilgrims. But they were allowed to keep offering free health services to the tribe's members after they read the text of the 1976 law to their federal funders.

"We actually got requests from IHS to deny service to the Mashpees," said Barbara Namias, who oversees community health programs at the Boston clinic. "We had to refer them back to the legislation."

Lisa Flores, an environmental planner and documented Pascua-Yaqui member who attended diabetes counseling classes at a now-defunct Fresno clinic, has given up on getting native-focused care in her area.

"From a tribal perspective we're all supposed to take care of each other," she said. "Now that they closed it, the question then becomes: Are you unworthy of health care?"

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Associated Press Writer Erica Werner in Washington contributed to this report.

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Doc: 00428249 DB: research–d–2007–1 Date: Wed Mar 28 21:27:31 2007

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pD8O5ATL80 03-28-2007 14:07:17 BC-Abandoned Babies:Town mourns death of a

pD8O5B39G2 03-28-2007 14:19:18 BC-Abandoned Babies, 1st Ld-Writethru:Town

pD8O5B4M00 03-28-2007 14:22:16 BC-Abandoned Babies, 2nd Ld-Writethru:Town

pD8O5DHF0D 03-28-2007 17:06:04 BC-Abandoned Babies, 3rd Ld-Writethru:Town

pD8O5HC0O0 03-28-2007 21:27:31*F BC-Abandoned Babies, 4th Ld-Writethru:Town

Copyright 2007 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

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BC-Abandoned Babies, 4th Ld-Writethru,0726

Town mourns death of abandoned newborn as authorities search for mother

Eds: CHANGES description of bench in lede.

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By GARANCE BURKE

Associated Press Writer

OROSI, Calif. (AP) – The first newborn was discovered swaddled in a blanket on an outdoor bench, an umbilical cord still hanging from his tiny body. Then, at neat 11-month intervals, two more abandoned babies were found in parked pickup trucks in the same neighborhood.

This week, DNA tests established all three babies were almost certainly born to the same mother.

Now, in a heartbreaking mystery that has transfixed this central California farm community of 7,300, investigators are trying to find the mother and figure out what drove her to such desperate lengths.

"How can the relatives not see this girl pregnant, and then see that she's not pregnant anymore and not ask where's the baby? Somebody must know something," said Hortencia Espino, 81.

All three newborns were found within a two-block radius. The first two – a boy and a girl – survived and are now wards of the state.

The third baby was found dead of exposure on the cold night of Dec. 3. She was enveloped in a sweatshirt in the bed of a pickup parked near the high school, some 60 miles southeast of Fresno. The coroner concluded she was alive for less than a day.

On Wednesday, a Catholic church held a baptism and funeral Mass in Spanish and English for the baby girl, who was dubbed "Angelita DeOrosi," or Orosi's little angel.

Later, under the shade of a corrugated plastic awning, sheriff's officials and grandmothers delicately sifted handfuls of dirt onto her white coffin before it was lowered into the earth.

Marely Pena, who found the infant in her father's truck, cried behind dark glasses.

"I ask myself every day what if she had been alive. We could have saved her," said Pena, 25. "I just hope the mother comes forward to please just make us feel at ease."

Orosi, a town encircled by fig and lemon orchards, has long been the kind of place where everyone seemed to know each other. But that is changing, with new housing developments going up and a burgeoning gang problem that has led to a rise in violent crime.

As upset residents built makeshift shrines in honor of Angelita, authorities interviewed local women they thought might be involved. But DNA testing eliminated them as the babies' mother.

After exhausting all leads, officials are asking the community for help finding the parents and are offering a $5,000 reward. Police said the mother could face criminal charges. But they also said they want to make sure she doesn't do it again and isn't in some kind of distress.

Investigators would not speculate as to the reasons for the abandonment, such as whether the mother might have been a prostitute or a rape victim.

"Whether the mother is in a physical state of danger or a mental state where she feels she can't ask for help, our heart goes out to her," Karen Franzen, manager of Dopkins Funeral Chapel in Dinuba, which donated a casket and cemetery plot for Angelita.

The first deserted newborn was found on Feb. 10, 2005, a barely breathing boy with a body temperature of just 85 degrees. On January 8, 2006, a resident discovered a full-term baby girl inside a pickup two blocks away, clothed in an undershirt and pants.

On Monday, sheriff's officials announced the DNA results. The first two babies probably had the same father, but Angelita was fathered by a different man.

California and 46 other states allow parents to legally abandon a child at a hospital or other designated safe zones within 72 hours of birth, no questions asked.

Since California's law went into effect in 2001, parents have safely surrendered 182 babies at fire stations, emergency rooms and other safe havens, according to state officials.

"This little community is a family. We know pretty much everyone else's business and they know ours," said Eugene Etheridge, principal of Orosi High School. "It's concerning that this could happen again when the most precious thing we have is our children."

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Doc: 00092058 DB: research–d–2007–2 Date: Fri Apr 20 17:40:53 2007

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CD8OKJ6P82 04-20-2007 17:40:53*F BC-NA-GEN--US-Transgender Prom King:In Fre

Copyright 2007 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

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In Fresno, a transgender student runs for prom king

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By GARANCE BURKE

Associated Press Writer

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) – When school officials announce the name of the Fresno High School prom king on Saturday, Cinthia Covarrubias will be wearing a tuxedo just like the six boys vying for the honor.

School officials this week added the 17-year-old's name to the ballot for prom king, reversing a previous district policy that allowed only males to run for king and females for prom queen.

Gay youth advocates called it a landmark victory for campus gender expression and said they believe it is the first time in the U.S. that an openly transgender student has run for prom royalty.

Covarrubias, who wears black-and-white Vans shoes, baggy shorts and close-cropped brown hair, sometimes identifies herself as Tony. Her date, a close female friend, plans to wear a black dress and red corsage to the prom at an outdoor reception hall surrounded by man-made waterfalls.

"I would never have run for anything if I had to wear a dress," Covarrubias said.

She considers herself transgender, an umbrella term that covers all people whose outward appearance and internal identity do not match their gender at birth.

"My freshman year I just started feeling different," she said. "When I decided to change to be like this, all of a sudden I said, 'Wow, I feel OK. I feel like finally I'm being me.'"

She has no current plans, however, to permanently alter her gender through hormones or surgery.

A native of Jalisco, Mexico, Covarrubias said she has bucked rigid expectations of how a girl in her culture should behave. Explaining the meaning of terms like "queer" and "transgender" to her parents and eight siblings has at times been painful, she said.

Covarrubias said she was honored that her classmates nominated her for prom king last Friday, but administrators quickly dampened her enthusiasm by saying she could only run for queen.

Tiffani Sanchez, a science teacher who advises the school's Gay-Straight Alliance, complained.

"Cinthia is still really learning who she is," she said. "We want her to know that there's a safe space for her here and we support her."

On Wednesday, school officials shifted course, saying the district's lawyers had recommended adding Covarrubias' name to the ballot to comply with a state law protecting students' ability to express their gender identity on campus.

"We always want to do the right thing by our students," Vice Principal Sheila Uriarte said. "This is why we came to this decision."

The law, passed in 2000, requires schools to protect students from discrimination on the basis of their sexuality, gender or "gender expression."

Gay and lesbian advocates say that means creating a comfortable environment for students like Covarrubias to cross-dress.

"It's really important for an individual student like Cinthia to be able to feel she has the same access to participate in this rite of passage," said Carolyn Laub, director of the Gay-Straight Alliance Network. "We are growing as a society to accept much more diversity in gender expression, and that's a positive thing."

Some students criticized the decision to put Covarrubias on the ballot.

"I like lesbians, but they shouldn't be allowed to run for king," said senior Erich Logan, 18, as he stood outside the high school building.

But Leanne Reyes, 16, said Covarrubias had her vote.

"It's not like the stereotype where the king has to be a jock and he's there with the cheerleaders anymore," said Reyes, a senior. "We live in a generation now where dudes are chicks and chicks are dudes."

Covarrubias is giddily looking forward to the prom, but acknowledged being a little nervous.

"I'm happy I actually made a difference about changing the law and the policy so you can run for your choice," Covarrubias said.

AP Photos
AP Graphic PESTICIDE DRIFT
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Doc: 00204668 DB: research–d–2007–2 Date: Tue May 15 19:32:34 2007

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LD8P510601 05-15-2007 15:55:04 BC-CA--Pesticides-Schools:

LD8P5464G1 05-15-2007 19:32:34*F BC-CA--Pesticides-Schools, 2nd Ld-Writethr

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AP Enterprise: Activists say kids not protected from pesticides

Eds: CLARIFIES details on study in 16th graf. Version also moving nationally.

AP Photos

AP Graphic PESTICIDE DRIFT

By GARANCE BURKE

Associated Press Writer

STRATHMORE, Calif. (AP) – On Grandparents Day, Domitila Lemus accompanied her 8-year-old granddaughter to school. As the girls lined up behind Sunnyside Union Elementary, a foul mist drifted onto the playground from the adjacent orange groves, witnesses say.

Lemus started coughing, and two children collapsed in spasms, vomiting on the blacktop.

An Associated Press investigation of state and federal data found that over the past decade, hundreds, possibly thousands, of schoolchildren in California and other agricultural states have been exposed to farm chemicals linked to sickness, brain damage and birth defects. The family of at least one California teenager suspects pesticides caused her death.

But the government does little to monitor poisonous chemicals applied near thousands of schools. There are no federal laws specifically against spraying near schools, and advocates say California and the seven other states that have laws creating buffer zones around schools to protect them from pesticides don't do enough to enforce them.

"The regulations are inadequate. In the vast majority of cases, people who didn't follow the laws received at best a $400 fine," said Margaret Reeves, a scientist with the Pesticide Action Network, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco.

The pesticide industry says it is committed to safety, and regulators say they are doing their best to enforce the laws.

"Everyone wants to protect children," said California Department of Pesticide Regulation spokesman Glenn Brank. He said his agency is doing what it can to enforce the law with a shortage of agricultural inspectors.

In the Strathmore incident last November, grandparents said the spraying was being done less than 150 feet from the children. Tulare County authorities fined an unlicensed pest removal company $1,100 for spraying a restricted weed killer that morning. But no action was taken over what witnesses said happened to the children, who have since recovered without apparent lasting effects.

Because no one reported the incident as a case of pesticide drift, county agricultural inspectors never swabbed the jungle gym or took grass samples, making it impossible to establish whether pesticide had, in fact, drifted onto the playground.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency does not keep comprehensive national figures on students and teachers sickened by drifting pesticide. But eight states voluntarily submitted data to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control showing that 126 students and teachers were sickened by drifting agricultural pesticides between 1998 and 2005, according to the AP's analysis.

In California, the No. 1 farm state and the one with the best records, there were 590 pesticide-related illnesses at schools from 1996 to 2005, according to state figures analyzed by the AP. More than a third of those were due to pesticide drift, the figures show. Activists say that those numbers are low and that many cases are never reported.

In California's long, flat interior, spraying season lasts seven months, from March through September. When citrus trees blossom and grapevines climb trellises, Lemus prays to the Virgin Mary that her granddaughter won't come home with her eyes watering and head pounding, unable to breathe.

Tulare County, where she lives, is one of the nation's most fertile farm regions, with more than half the schools within a quarter-mile of agricultural fields, according to the nonprofit Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment.

As suburbs push close to farmland, the rate of pesticide poisoning among children nationwide has risen in recent years, according to a 2005 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study found that 40 percent of all children sickened by pesticides at school were victims of drift – pesticide carried on the breeze.

Research on pregnant women exposed to common pesticides has suggested higher rates of premature birth, and poor neurological development and smaller head circumferences among their babies.

A study due to be released Wednesday by the Pesticide Action Network will report that the urine of pregnant women in Lindsay, a small town just north of Strathmore, contained levels of a breakdown product of the insecticide chlorpyrifos that were above what EPA considers "acceptable." The survey, done at the height of the 2006 spraying season, also found high levels of pesticide in the air.

Brank said he had not seen the survey and could not offer comment.

The effects on children of small, repeated exposures over a long period of time are unclear, said University of California, Berkeley epidemiologist Brenda Eskenazi.

But acute pesticide poisoning can cause nausea, blurred vision, an abnormally fast heart rate, paralysis and death.

Chrissy Garavito, a 15-year-old high school sophomore, died in Fontana in 1997 of a heart rhythm disturbance her mother believes was triggered by exposure to chemicals sprayed at the school. Authorities never confirmed that pesticides contributed to her death.

In 2001, pesticide poisoning nearly killed Elena Dominguez, then a sixth-grader in Wenatchee, Wash.

One day, after playing Frisbee during gym class across the street from an apple orchard, she passed out at her desk.

"She was in a stupor," said her mother, Cindy Dominguez. "She couldn't talk, her eyes were rolling back in her head."

Emergency room doctors dismissed Elena's abnormally fast heart rate as a symptom of dehydration, gave her intravenous fluids and sent her home. Three weeks later, it happened again.

"I was at a track meet and all of a sudden I felt really, really tired," said Elena, now 18. "I made it to the finish line and just fell over."

Investigators found her clothes were soaked in the pesticide Endosulfan I; it had been picked up from residue on the grass and absorbed into her bloodstream through her skin. Officials later found five other pesticides on school grounds and fined the apple grower for forging his applicator's license.

The Dominguez family sued the orchard owner and the Wenatchee school district, which established rules requiring students to stay inside after a spraying, among other things. State officials believe it is the only district in Washington with such limitations.

But keeping students inside may not be enough. Two years ago, 600 students and staff members were evacuated from an Edinburg, Texas, elementary school after pesticides drifted from a cotton field into the school's air conditioning system. Thirty-nine people developed nausea and headaches.

EPA officials say they have no real idea how often pesticides waft onto school grounds. The EPA must register pesticides before they are sold, but federal law does not restrict where they can be sprayed.

"We implement the laws that Congress gives us," said Ruth Allen, an EPA epidemiologist.

Once the EPA approves a product, federal law requires manufacturers to report any "unreasonable adverse effects on the environment of the pesticide" that their products cause.

CropLife America, a national organization representing suppliers of farm pesticides, said their use near schools is well-regulated.

"We're really committed to public safety," said spokeswoman Donna Uchida. "Any kind of use of a pesticide has a labeling requirement that is imposed to protect human health and the environment."

California has some of the strictest pesticide laws in the nation. Under state law, growers and pest control companies can be fined if pesticide drifts from a field and sickens people.

A 2002 state law allows county authorities to establish a no-spray buffer zone of a quarter-mile around schools. But Tulare County has not done so. State officials said they did not know how many counties have set up such buffer zones.

Lemus and environmentalists are pushing for pesticide-free zones throughout California.

"Why don't they tell us they'll spray beforehand so we can bring our children inside?" Lemus said.