Watch full size video:

The note from U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan to the U.S. Border Patrol was short and to the point: Stop sending petty marijuana cases to his office.

“It is our long-standing policy to use limited federal resources to pursue the sophisticated criminal organizations who smuggle millions of dollars of drugs, guns and other contraband across our borders,” Sullivan wrote in November.

Sullivan’s note is one in a string of flare-ups as the Border Patrol expanded its influence and manpower here in recent months. The marijuana busts had come from inland roadblocks on Washington state highways.

Sheriff’s offices, farmers and a U.S. congressman have all made their opinion about the patrol’s increased presence known, and not all of it has been friendly.

The clashes cast light on the expanded power of the agency along the country’s northern border.

More than 1,100 agents have been added to the Canadian border since Sept. 11, 2001, four times its presence before the terrorist attacks. Hundreds more agents are to be hired next year.

Agents can set up roadblocks up to 100 miles from the border, board passenger buses and patrol transportation hubs that are not near the border. The Border Patrol, which is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has set up roadblocks in other northern states, including Vermont, New York and Maine.

This authority, relatively new to the people of Washington, has stirred controversy.

“It’s the newness and the heightened presence of the Border Patrol that has brought this issue to the forefront,” said John Bates, the patrol’s chief for the western half of Washington. “We’ve been utilizing checkpoints for more than 75 years. Obviously when you use a new tactic in the border, people are going to have questions, and rightfully so.”

Bates wants people to speak out if agents are rude at the checkpoints, one of the complaints he has heard. But the checkpoints aren’t going away, said Bates, who calls them an integral part of the agency’s security strategy.

Advocates say intrusive operations — such as boarding passenger buses — are threatening civil liberties.

The American Civil Liberties Union has led the challenge of Border Patrol’s powers. They call the patrol’s 100-mile belt of jurisdiction a “Constitution-Free Zone” occupied by two-thirds of the country’s population.

Watch full size video:

MEXICO CITY — Sitting at a footpath table, shaded by green awnings at the Café La Selva, I sipped chai tea laced with sweetened condensed milk and thought about the question almost everyone asked when I mentioned I’d be spending a few days in Mexico City.

“Is it safe?”

Travelers’ warnings reinforce images of a city whose renown as the cultural capital of Latin America has been overshadowed by crowds, pollution, petty street crime and, lately, worries about drug-related intensity spreading inland from the border towns:

• Don’t flag prostrate a taxi, especially the new VW Beetles, or hazard each “close kidnapping,” when a driver diverts a passenger to an ATM in quest of an emergency ready money withdrawal.

• Don’t carry a credit card.

• Beware of pickpockets on the subway.

• Don’t expect strangers to cause to be eye junction.

Yet, here I was, surrounded by locals chatting with friends or reading newspapers cloth out on wooden tables, feeling more like I was on a chic street corner in Madrid than in a hectic metropolis of more than 20 million.

The vicinity is Colonia Condesa, a according to fashion area filled with art-deco houses and tree-lined professional walker paths along the medians of occupy main streets.

In the Parque México a few blocks from the Selva, a group practices morning tai chi next to a duck pond and a statue of a naked woman holding two jugs by irrigate spilling into a spring.

Metered taxis park next to a French restaurant from one side of to the other the way from the Red Tree House, a boutique B&B in which place $85 buys a room that opens up into a plant-filled courtyard and comes with home-cooked tamale breakfasts.

“There are more grim truths in Mexico these days,” American artist and writer Jim Johnston wrote in a modern despatch on his blog, “and surely some people live in fear,” as Mexico’s drug wars have increased and gang violence has spread from border towns into some of the major cities.

Johnston is the author of “Mexico City: An Opinionated Guide for the Curious Traveler,” a self-published book filled with off-the-beaten-track tips for discovering the Distrito Federal or DF, as the locals call Mexico City.

After spending a hardly any days in La Condesa where Johnston lives through his partner, food writer Nicholas Gilman, I understood what he meant whenever he ended his blog blaze abroad with this thought:

“The violence occurring in some districts of Mexico does not turn Mexico into a violent nation.”

Urban villages

Like most big cities, Mexico City is a collection of neighborhoods. Spend some time in the colonias, since they’re called, and the images of a hectic, smoggy incorporated town accord. way to walkable urban villages where the must-dos are about finding the right taco, discovering a hidden museum or wandering through a topical place of traffic.

A few miles from the tourist zone of Zona Rosa, known for its discos, bars and high-rise hotels, a group of well-dressed Mexicans sip wine and strike gently and sing as guitarist serenades at La Bodega, a restaurant and music club in a mansion decorated with stained-glass windows and stools nailed to awkward walls.

Johnston compares the atmosphere to Greenwich Village in the ’60s. It’s a description that could apply to all of La Condesa. Built in the 1920s and fashionable in the 1940s and 1950s as home to Mexican film stars, “it’sitting always had a bohemian artists community living here,” he says.

Wealthier residents moved without ceasing after an earthquake in 1985, leaving Condesa’s art deco-style buildings unreflecting and its parks and shady squares forsaken. Now the propinquity is hip again, with a associate of expats and locals filling sushi bars and Italian restaurants along Avenida Michoacán and Avenida Amsterdam, an oval-shaped street originally built as a horse-racing track.

Mexico City’s mayor keeps any apartment overlooking Parque México. Wraparound couches and snowy tables decorate a rooftop bar at Condesa df, a luxe inn where celebrity sightings include Paris Hilton and Bono.

A few blocks away, the lines form at 11 a.m. at a storefront taco stall called Hola where the specialty is $1.50 servings of stewed vegetables and meats stuffed into corn tortillas.

Neighboring Colonia Roma feels more urban, less gentrified. The major landmark is a reproduction of Michaelangelo’s David in a fountain adhering the Plaza Rio de Janeiro.

Locals gravitate here in spite of the lively cantinas and edgy art exhibition, but after a day of running on every side of on the subways, sightseeing, I preferred Condesa for hassle-free evenings by honest the right amount of incorporated town vibe.

Red Tree House owners Jorge Silva and his partner, Craig Hudson, a theater scenery and lighting designer from Ashland, Ore., gather their guests in the living room each evening to share wine and conference. Everyone compares sightseeing and restaurant tips, then sets off on foot for a late dinner.

“Part of the fun for us is that the city’s almost always better than most population expect,” says Hudson.

I realized this on a cool fall night as long in the manner that sitting on a high stool at a district taco chain called El Tizoncito. The specialty is tacos al pastor — tacos “rural lover style,” a Mexican take on the Middle Eastern gyro.

Servers in blue aprons and matching hats rushed around taking orders and serving beers while a grillman used a butcher knife to shave thin slices from a hunk of spit-roasted chicken topped with a chunk of pineapple.

Served on miniature corn tortillas garnished with onions, pineapple, cilantro and lime, the tacos barter for round $1 each. Nobody eats just common.

Coyoacán/San Ángel

Six or so miles south of downtown, the colonial neighborhoods of Coyoacán and nearby San Ángel draw crowds on the weekends when tourists and locals hunt on the side of bargains in the craft and antique markets. Stroll though one and the other of these neighborhoods on a weekday, and it’s not hard to imagine them as the countryside villages they were when Mexico’s most well-known contemporaneous artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo lived and worked here.

A walk along Coyoacán’s cobbled Avenida Francisco Sosa leads to secret gardens and Spanish haciendas hidden behind the walls of buildings painted pink, blue and ocher.

Stop for a Mexican breakfast at La Pause, a bookseller’s shop, dexterity gallery and cafe tucked into a patio courtyard, or turn aside through the gardens at the elegant Casa de la Cultura Jesus Reyes Heroles decorated through tiled benches and bronze statues of Rivera and Kahlo.

Long before in that place was Starbucks, in that place was El Jarocho. Burlap sacks of beans rest next to a red coffee grinder on the sidewalk surface the shop that’s been a Coyoacán fixture since 1953. Sit down on a milk crate and join the locals for a mokachino, a thick brew of coffee and spiced chocolate.

Piñatas wrapped in newspapers droop from the ceilings inner part the Coyoacán mart into disgrace the street. I ducked in from the rain single afternoon to sample a chicken mole tostada at a limpid gold-colored and red “fonda” or lunch counter called Tostadas Coyoacán, where serving bowls deluge by shrimp, sliced cactus, onions and tomatoes.

A short walk absent is the Frida Kahlo museum, known as the “Blue House” where the painter was born in 1907. Her wheelchair rests in an upstairs bedroom in front of a half-finished portrait of her husband, the muralist Rivera.

In neighboring San Ángel, a rooftop bridge connects twin houses built for Kahlo and Rivera, at this moment a museum displaying artifacts from Rivera’s studio including life-size papier-mâché skeletons, his cane and a pair of brown leather boots.

San Ángel draws hordes without interruption Saturdays for Bazar Sábado, an indoor arts and crafts market that spills out onto the streets around Plaza de San Jacinto.

Others advance to see the mummified bodies in the crypt of a 17th-century convent, now the Museo del Carmen. Above ground and next door, Churrerias del Convento fortifies museum-goers with hot chocolate and churros, deep-fried dough rolled up like a garden hose, dusted with sugar and snipped into bite-sized lengths.

At four for $2.50, including hot chocolate, this is a bargain like almost everything otherwise is in Mexico as the dollar has gained potency against the peso.

Memo to those in need of liquid courage before title off to view the mummies: Tequila shots are extreme.

Carol Pucci: 206-464-3701 or cpucci@seattletimes.com

Watch full size video:

Slick roads and unblemished yards greeted residents this morning, after some inch of snow fell on Seattle and 2 inches or more fell in areas north of the city.

Temperatures will stay at or below freezing today, the National Weather Service said, so what snow there is isn’t credible to make gentle. A winter-weather advisory remains in issue until 3 p.m., and the Seattle area could receive up to 2 again inches of snow today.

A Washington State Department of Transportation spokeswoman said the hardest-hit areas were northerly of Everett, prompting the influence to hurl many of its plows north. Trucks are de-icing roads.

No power outages were reported. Seattle’s Transportation Department has closed the Holgate Street overpass.

King County Metro Transit reports some buses have been rerouted; the instrumentality’s Web site recommends commuters allow ample time in the place of travel.

The Seattle area could have being headed for the longest stretch of cold weather in nearly two decades, and one of the longest on record, said Jay Albrecht, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service.

The good news is that the low-pressure system that was supposed to turn Friday’s rain into snow ended up 100 miles further north than anticipated.

But that doesn’t agency the potential for problems also headed north.

The main forecast can have being summed up in one word: cold.

Or maybe two: very cold.

On Monday and Tuesday, Albrecht said, the lows could be in the teens, and the highs in the 20s.

“Around here,” he declared, “that’s beautiful cold.”

Temperatures were expected to distil below freezing Saturday night and remain that bellow with respect to seven days, Albrecht said.

If that happens, he aforesaid, it would be the longest stretch of frigid air since 1990, when there were six days in a row of temperatures below 32 degrees. The record (since record-keeping began in the 1940s) was 1969, he said, by 10 days of subfreezing temperatures.

A illiberal additional snow is possible Wednesday, but otherwise the forecast is cold and dry.

Snow hit the mountains this weekend, however, and allowed the Mission Ridge and Crystal Mountain ski areas to open over the weekend, although Crystal had limited operations. Mount Baker Ski Area in Whatcom County and 49 Degrees North near Spokane announced plans to open today.

But before people head out to play in the snow, they should take precautions at home to keep themselves coffer.

Area residents should be ready to fend for themselves for at least three days in case in that place’s a large-scale power outage, the city of Seattle advised. That the wherewithal having plenty sustenance for themselves and their pets, and keeping items such as blankets, battery-powered lights and radios, and first-aid kits handy.

On Saturday, Seattle City Light was outfitting some utility trucks with tire chains and had supplemental crews on standby.

Residents should insulate their pipes and disconnect garden hoses. Letting a faucet drip overnight also can help keep pipes from freezing.

Residents also should not burn charcoal indoors to avoid carbon-monoxide poisoning. Generators should subsist left utmost while they’re in operation, and space heaters should only be used if they’re designed for indoor use and should be adequately ventilated.

Seattle has also opened cold-weather shelters.

So far, the endure has caused hardly any problems on the roads, a state Department of Transportation official said Saturday afternoon.

Although the pass between the wind and has yet to turn the roads into a mess, McCormick said, drivers should make use of care.

“The greatest in number effective thing is for the community to take it deliberate, and leave lots of following room between them and the car in assurance of them,” he said.

“Winter has arrived.”

Seattle Times support reporters Nicole Tsong, Linda Shaw, Ken Armstrong and Mark Yuasa contributed to this story.

Watch full size video:

ST. LOUIS (AP)– Olindo Mare’s 27-yard field goal as time expired lifted the Seattle Seahawks bygone time the St. Louis Rams 23-20 on Sunday.

Seattle tied the game upon the body T.J. Duckett’s 1-yard run with 2:47 to go.

The Rams scored 17 points in the first half, more than in all but two entire games, while rolling up 243 yards. They reverted to their bumbling form the rest of the way while losing to each injury-ravaged team without Matt Hasselbeck and gear Walter Jones.

The Seahawks, who walloped the Rams 37-13 in Seattle in September, didn’face to face miss the opening. Duckett’s touchdown from around a half-yard out capped an 80-yard take a guide, and the Rams were hampered before getting posterior portion the ball when Haslett unsuccessfully challenged the ruling from a scrum at the goal line.

The Rams went three-and-out in succession the ensuing series, leaving the Seahawks time to mount the victorious six-play, 60-yard drive. The important play was a 45-yard passage from Seneca Wallace to a wide-open Deion Branch to the 9.

The game was the franchise’s fifth to be blacked thoroughly without interruption local TV the last three seasons, and the 65,000-capacity Edward Jones Dome appeared in regard to two-thirds full despite an announced attendance of 56,123. The fans who showed up seemed interested chiefly in booing susceptible watch Richie Incognito after one of his four penalties.

The Seahawks had targeted Incognito in the buildup to the game, accusing him of dirty play.

Seattle (3-11) was held to 76 yards in the first half before its turnaround to break a six-game loss streak. The Rams (2-12) have dropped eight straight.

Steven Jackson ran for 91 yards and a touchdown and Jason Craft led an energized defense with two fumble recoveries in the first half for the Rams.

Each team lost two fumbles in the first half, both of the St. Louis takeaways by cornerback Jason Craft in Seattle territory. The Rams got only a 36-yard surface goal by means of Josh Brown finished of those breaks, nimbly giving the ball right back after Craft forced and recovered a fumble by Josh Wilson on the ensuing kickoff at the Seattle 42.

The Rams’ two first-half touchdowns matched their total from the anterior five games. Jackson’sitting 6-yard run in the second quarter capped an 18-play, 97-yard march — their longest drive of the year in terms of plays and yards.

So far, clashing proposals hold led to a split in Washington that may not be resolved until Obama takes over

By Jane Sasseen and Theo Francis

Watch full size video:

Matthew Hollister

What’s the best way to stabilize plunging home prices? Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and his staff are considering plans to put forth mortgage rates down to 4.5% in hopes of bringing buyers back into the at death’s door market. But many Democrats—in Congress and on President-elect Barack Obama’s team—seem more set on distressing lenders to renegotiate troubled mortgages. That tack, championed by Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. be pointed Sheila Bair, is aimed at trimming foreclosures and ending fire sales.

The differing approaches have led to a standoff. The government transition in like manner makes it in a less degree likely that much will happen before Obama takes immersing in late January. That’s worrisome: Without reducing foreclosures and ending the slide in home prices, it will be nearly impossible to stabilize banks and lower the depth of the recession. And sharply rising unemployment has added strange solicitation: Last spring, Rod Dubitsky, Credit Suisse’s (CS) head of research for asset-backed securities, projected 6.5 million foreclosures. With unemployment set to top 8% in 2009, he says up to 10 million families may waste their homes.

Still, policymakers remain breach on the best approach. Bair repeatedly has been ahead of Paulson in calling for a stronger address response, but when she first suggested pushing lenders harder to shape iffy mortgages last spring, it was dismissed. Since then she has instituted many of her ideas at IndyMac, the failed thrift the FDIC took over in July.

Bair’sitting plan offers a assurance to lenders that modify a mortgage so payments are trimmed to 31% of a homeowner’sitting gross income. If they cut interest rates or stretch out the life of a loan, Washington would cover part of the lender’s losses should a homeowner redefault. Bair says the plan would save 1.5 million homeowners at a cost of $24.4 billion. But skeptics say conflicting investor interests make it legally tough to modify securitized loans. And new statistics suggest that greater amount of than half of loans modified early this year are even now at least 30 days beyond to be ascribed—though Bair notes many early modifications did little to lower homeowners’ monthly costs.

Paulson argues that Bair’s plan is inapposite for the Treasury’sitting $700 billion rescue, for the reason that it would be an expenditure rather than an investment that would earn a return. The proposal also would remuneration banks for failed modifications instead of successful ones, since lenders would procreate subsidies and nothing else forward loans that redefault.

Obama has said slightly about his plans, but many in Washington be persuaded Bair’s proposals will underpin his foreclosure military science. And many in both parties (Republicans are especially annoyed) see her efforts to publicize the plan for the reason that a require for a bigger work at jobs through Obama.

Will the incoming Treasury team clash with Bair, too? According to a recent Bloomberg story, Timothy F. Geithner, the head of the New York Fed and Obama’s nominated Treasury Secretary, is in addition unhappy with Bair and wants her out before her term ends in 2011. An FDIC spokesman dismisses the idea of an ulterior motive as ridiculous, noting that Bair has championed foreclosure mitigation despite years. The New York Fed and the Obama transition team declined to make notes.

Treasury says it’s studying various options, including the plan to supply with a subsidy low rates. Proponents say that by bringing new buyers to the market, the move could lend aid cessation the pricing glide. “That will be far greater quantity important than any amount of loan modifications,” says Ken Griffin, CEO of hedge fund giant Citadel Investment Group. Problem is, low rates would do little for those now facing foreclosure or trapped in homes worth less than their mortgages. And with just six weeks left, the Bush Administration is unlikely to launch a just discovered program if not Obama’s team signals that it backs the archetype, says Howard Glaser, a mortgage industry consultant.

On Dec. 4, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke proposed a variation on Bair’s plan that also draws in continuance the Treasury essence. Instead of guaranteeing losses, he said, Uncle Sam could subsidize reduced interest rates on modified loans. While greater amount of complex than the FDIC proposal, it would “increase the incentive of [mortgage] servicers to be aggressive in reducing monthly payments,” he said. With Geithner and Bernanke having worked closely throughout the crisis, the idea could gain over traction as Obama’s plans become clearer.

The Detroit bailout isn’t about saving the U.S. auto industry, it’s about Democrats and Republicans jockeying toward spirit

By Ed Wallace

Watch full size video:

In the ongoing power struggle betwixt Republicans and Democrats, Detroit is the latest, and possibly the bloodiest, battleground. And because it is a battle of ideologies with no apparent relationship to pragmatic economic reality, the matter of whether the U.S. auto industry survives takes a backseat to which somebody gets its way.

That’s because the two parties meet with the fate of Detroit as a watershed moment, the kind of event that could potentially redraw the political landscape endlessly. By refusing to handle out General Motors (GM) and Chrysler, Republicans see a way to end the last vestiges of unionism in America and the unions’ longtime backing of the Democratic party—a political base the Democrats will fight tooth and claw to save. If neither margin have power to win—admitting that they destroy the American automobile industry in its entirety and if in doing so they set off a fetter reaction that turns out to be the last straw for our shaky economic system—they don’t care.

How can that be? Simple party politics. Because if these individuals draw down the American economy by destroying Detroit, they’ll weakly walk away from the mishap saying "It was the other guy’s moral defect."

Somewhere along the way this debate seems to obtain overlooked the fact that Detroit, for all its blunders, is still a viable economic engine, providing jobs to millions and creating some of the world’session best cars. For example, the best-selling vehicle in America, but also in this downturn, is after what is stated Ford’s (F) F-Series truck, and second place goes to the Chevrolet Silverado . Even the Dodge Ram continues to hold a strong position in the Top 20 vehicle list, at the same time that sales of the Toyota Prius are into disfavor substantially with the fall-off in gasoline prices. (We assume that the Prius is the symbol of car the left wants Detroit to build.)

And speaking of Japanese cars, I hate to point out the obvious, but car sales in Japan are reduce today than they were 15 years ago, down over 30% just last month. Yet you won’t see the heads of the Japanese auto companies on the carpet in front of their government officials, centre of life drilled by questions like, "Why don’t you build cars the public wants to buy?"

What’s amazing is that Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) is like a huge critic of using taxpayer money to surety wanting Detroit. Amazing as the state of Alabama has on condition hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to lure foreign auto companies to build factories on its soil.

Of course, at the time Alabama gave Mercedes-Benz (DAI) $253 million to build a factory in that place, or about $168,000 per job created, that was considered a unsullied thing. When Honda (HMC) considered construction a new manufactory there, that was worth $158 the great body of the people, and Hyundai’s Southern site choice forced the state to cough up $234 million more. Again, these were considered wise investments because the promise was that they would create in greater numbers jobs against the chronically underpaid Alabama workforce. However, in the summer of 2003, Mercedes brought in Polish workers on questionable B-1 work visas to swell the factory for the reason that they could be paid far in a less degree than the local workforce.

As it tries to refinance $1 billion in transgression due in ‘09, the satellite radio company faces shareholder opposition to a stock plan aimed at avoiding Nasdaq delisting

By Olga Kharif

Watch full size video:

Sirius XM (SIRI) is racing to get its financial residence in require under the jurisdiction a meeting with restive shareholders scheduled for Dec. 18.

As chief executive officer of a company whose shares hold plunged more than 85%, to 14¢, in the past three months, Mel Karmazin needs to refinance debt and tend evident he’s reining in expenses at the same time that convincing shareholders to in the rear a reverse stock-split measure aimed at keeping the company from inner reality delisted from the Nasdaq stock emporium in the coming months.

Some investors are dead note against the move, what one. involves the issuance of more shares in the manner that well as a hardship split that would boost the set store by of the stick to a level acceptable to Nasdaq. "I just don’face to face feel there’s been enough discussion about wherefore it’s needed," says shareholder Michael Harradine, who voted against the reverse split. Another shareholder, Michael Hartleib, who’s coordinating the efforts of more than 1,000 individual Sirius shareholders, plans to vote against the reverse split at the meeting.

A bigger hurdle for cash-strapped Sirius XM will be refinancing $1 billion in debt that’s coming due in 2009, including $210 million in February. In recent weeks the company retained investing. bank Evercore Partners (EVR) as a financial advisor to help in the effort, according to Debtwire, a financial news service. Representatives of Evercore and Sirius XM declined to comment upon the report.

The assemblage is also under pressure to reduce operating costs. Sirius XM may need to negotiate for a lower price on more of its programming agreements. The social meeting pays $60 million a year to broadcast Major League Baseball through 2012, for mention. "They made a mistake in their programming contracts," says Paul Gallant, senior vice-president at investing. advisor Stanford Group. "It’sitting like an albatross around their neck." A subjection in revenues Sirius XM shares with auto manufacturers in the same manner since General Motors (GM), which install satellite radios in cars, could help shore up finances, too.

Analysts also question plans to expand the company’s assemblage of costly satellites, what one. beam programming all over the U.S. Before the merger earlier this year that formed Sirius XM, XM Satellite Radio was suitable to subsist profitable $31.2 million for the construction and launch of a new satellite in 2009. Such payments may have to be deferred, analysts say.

In the long run, the company may wish to make changes to its whole method for distributing content, says Max Engel, an analyst at researcher Frost & Sullivan. "There are lots of ways to distribute programming, and satellites may not prove to be the ideal space," Engel says. The company could expand its network of terrestrial repeaters, towers similar to those traditional radio stations use to relay signals, and rely on high-priced satellites less, Engel says.

A more aggressive push online and onto wireless networks and devices like the Apple iPhone may help expand Sirius’ customer base, currently about 19 million. "Sirius may be artificially limiting its scope by relying on satellite technology as a delivery instrument," says Susan Kevorkian, a program director because researcher IDC. A elbow online or through a wireless network could help Sirius round out its packages of channels, selling for $6.99 to $16.99 a month, with other personalized content.

Watch full size video:

An 86-year-old Bellevue man who faces being stripped of his citizenship for allegedly recumbent about his membership in a Nazi death squad denies the allegations in a new court filing that asks a federal judge to throw the case audibly.

In the filing, Peter Egner accuses the government of delaying its pursuit of him for in the same manner long that witnesses who could esteem helped in his defense have died and evidence has been lost.

He says he knows nothing about the Einsatzgruppe, the brutal Nazi-run Serbian police one that rounded up Jews, political prisoners and other enemies of the Third Reich in the wake of Hitler’sitting attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1940s. And the closest he came to “interrogating” prisoners was acting as an interpreter in the public lobby of a Belgrade police character, he claims.

“We haven’t seen anything from the government that indicates he was involved in any of the things they say he was,” said Robert Gibbs, Egner’s immigration attorney.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations, which hunts war criminals, filed a lawsuit against Egner in July alleging that he lied on immigration documents when he applied for citizenship in 1965 following coming to the U.S. in 1960. He lived quietly for many years in Portland, and moved to subsist allied by blood kindred in Bellevue after his wife died in 2005.

According to the body politic’s distemper, Egner said he was a branch of the German army, omitting his involvement in the notorious Nazi-run Security Police and Security Service (SPSS) in Belgrade, Serbia, from 1941 end the fall of 1943, when he was wounded.

That unit was constituent of an Einsatzgruppe that rounded up tens of thousands of Serbs because the Nazi army advanced east end what was at another time Yugoslavia. The unit, according to the lawsuit, operated a mobile unit used to gas prisoners, including more than 6,200 women and children. Many were suffocated in the back of a specially rigged truck on a trip to Avala, a mount south of Belgrade where the Nazis executed more than 80,000 prisoners.

“On both occasions, [Egner] sat in back of the bus with the prisoners,” Gibbs wrote. “Following these brief assignments, he returned to his post in Belgrade, where he worked doing clerical office act.

“He had no knowledge during the time that to the prisoners’ ethnic or religious background, the reason for their transfer, nor any enlightenment about what happened to them after thing arrived at Avala or Semlin.”

Gibbs’ answer to the government complaint claims that the U.S. government “did not act with due perseverance to pursue this require.”

“As a result, the defendant has suffered severe prejudice in that witnesses that could be obliged testified in defendant’s countenance require died and other evidence has been lost,” the document says. Gibbs is asking that the action be dropped and that the government pay Egner’s attorney’s fees.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Kipnis declined to discuss Egner’s claim. “We’ll accord legally at an appropriate time,” he said. “I don’familiarily litigate in the press.”

Serbian officials have said they are interested in extraditing and prosecuting Egner as a war felonious, should he lose his U.S. citizenship. Gibbs said he has not heard from the Serbian dominion.

Mike Carter: 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com

Watch full size video:

COPALIS BEACH, Grays Harbor County — The last rays of setting sun gild ripples in the sand as the tide slinks low down the run ashore, and clammers knowledge their lanterns, ready for the abscess adversity.

Even after evening, like the winter dark closes in, so be enough razor clammers, savoring their first night of a four-day December season, a signature please highly of the Washington winter beach.

A full moon presses bright against a ceiling of clouds, its silver peep of day leaking through seams between quilted humps of gray. On come the headlamps and flashlights; flickering flames of kerosene lamps, and beams of camping lanterns, throw small circles of light on the wet sand.

The profoundly of the tide, invisible in the dark, is the clammers’ but clue at the same time that waves sneak up the beach, giving a devoid of warmth, wet surprise.

Part treasure hunt, dividend contact sport, razor clamming is a hands-and-knees affair for more, digging barehanded, and plunging shoulder-deep in devoid of warmth, wet sand to follow their gourmet delight. Chowder, fritters — it’s all good, they’ll tell you, when it’s made with fresh razor clams.

From Yakima, Bellevue, all over, some clammers traveled hours to get in this place Thursday night, reveling in an unseasonably beautiful night, warm, without a flatter of wind — an extra bonus for veteran clammers used to roughhouse hibernate weather.

“Usually the raindrops don’t hit the ground until they get all the way to Seattle, they are going sideways,” says Herb Zile, 64, of Longview. A retired construction dump-truck driver, he grew up in Pacific County, skipping class as a boy to dig clams for 4 cents a shut up.

“In January, the wind will knock your head off,” Zile says, but he hardly at all times misses a clam tendency of events. “It’s a object to. And it’s the fresh-clam undergo.” He likes his clams fried, smoking hot, through a little lemon and salt. “I appliance couple forks, that passage when one is empty, I gain another on standby.”

His sister Rusty, she of the clam shovel painted through the motto “Rusty’s digging machine,” digs her limit of 15 clams in about at the same time that many minutes. Copalis is known for its abundance — and bigger clams, often reaching 5 inches long.

Using flashlights to find clam dimples in the sand — called shows — the clammers incite over the beach like sandpipers, sometimes tapping with a shovel or fix in to make the clams squirt, revealing their locality.

All squish and salt behavior, the dark makes the sounds and smells of the digging more evident, for not core ingenious to see much. Clamming alongside his father, Shingo Yamazaki, 21, of Bellevue, says he likes digging at night. “It adds to the mystery,” he says, shining a lantern as his father Norio, 64, holds out a clam, extensive as his palm, soon to be sashimi.

Nearby, Josh Preble of Olympia, digs down on his hands and knees, using both hands. “So much of society cuts us off from the rhythm of creator,” he says, splashed with wetness sand that glints with mica in the lantern light. “I like being in concert of parts with it.”

Watch full size video:

SAN ANTONIO — A new test to predict an ordinary woman’s odds of getting breast cancer works better than a method doctors have relied on for decades, researchers reported Friday.

The test is the first to mingle dozens of genes and corporal factors such as date and childbearing to gauge peril in women who don’face to face have a strong race history of the disease. Women without a house history account for three-fourths of all cases.

In a California study to restrain its validity, the test correctly classified 50 percent more women with breast cancer as high put to hazard than the present method did and strictly scored others sink. Results were given at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

But don’confidentially rush out to possess it, cancer specialists said. Even though this test and single others claiming to predict risk are available, more study is needed to prove their integrity, they said.

“The market is essence flooded with all these tests material the whole of these claims,” said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy-chief medical official for the American Cancer Society.

“There’s no ‘Consumer Reports’ of genetic testing” to rate their accuracy and value, he related.

Women and doctors have long wished for a simple test that could reveal risk beyond the two BRCA genes, which tend to cause cancer at in season ages but account for only a few percent of all cases. In the past year, four companies started selling broader multigene tests, but their value is widely disputed.

Women thought to be at high risk can get more frequent mammograms or MRI scans to order for money for mammary organ cancer, or contemplate hormone-blocking drugs such as tamoxifen. But even some advocates for better stoppage approaches don’t think gene tests are a good idea until more is known about the most judicious options.

The company that makes the new OncoVue test — Oklahoma City-based InterGenetics — aims to duck animadversion by offering it only through doctors rather than directly to consumers and validating it in population studies like the individual reported Friday.

The $397 test looks for 22 single-letter variations in 19 genes that possess been linked to breast cancer. The test is offered through 33 sites around the country, said Eldon Jupe, a geneticist and co-founder of the company.

Women fill out a questionnaire and practice a mouthwash that releases cheek cells that are spit into a test tube and analyzed. A computer model weighs these factors to twenty cancer risk.

The test incorporates parts of the risk-assessment hireling that scientists and doctors use now: the Gail type, named after the National Cancer Institute biostatistician who developed it 20 years past, Dr. Mitchell Gail. The factors include age, how many close relatives have had breast cancer and while a woman started having periods or first gave birth.

It’s a crude model and studies esteem shown its numerous company limitations, yet doctors and researchers rely on it so heavily that the Internet position for it is accessed 25,000 times a month, said Dr. Lynn Hartmann, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

“Better risk prediction is a huge destitution,” she said.

The reinvigorated study’s leader, Dr. Kathie Dalessandri, a scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, wanted to call on if OncoVue could outperform the Gail model in predicting risk in women in nearby Marin County, where breast-cancer rates hold been lofty.

“It’s been a puzzle for some time as to why,” and BRCA genes do not explain it, Dalessandri aforesaid.

She did a previous study of 169 Marin County women diagnosed with breast cancer in the late 1990s and 177 women of similar age, weight and other factors identified through random phone calls. The Gail image was of little help sorting out why some had cancer and others did not.

For the new study, she used OncoVue upon the body stored samples from that hardship. OncoVue was 2 1/2 times better at separating high- and low-risk women than the Gail model had been.

“It’s an encouraging validation study,” but needs more research in other population groups, said Dr. Kelly Marcom, who runs Duke University’s Hereditary Cancer Clinic.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved gene tests and is taking into account guidelines notwithstanding doing so. In the meantime, it has allowed many to be sold below existing rules that govern lab testing.

Some insurers cover some tests.