CALIFORNIA
Cops suspicious of kidnap suspect
University police say daughters seemed robotic in meeting that helped lead to rescue of girls and their mother, who was abducted at age 11
BERKELEY — The blond girls Phillip Garrido introduced as his daughters were pasty white, even though it was the end of summer, and seemed rehearsed, robotic and unusually submissive.
They called Garrido “Daddy.”
Two University of California, Berkeley, police employees who interviewed Garrido and his daughters last week said at a news conference Friday they knew something was wrong because the girls obviously were not normal.
Police said Garrido fathered the girls with Jaycee Dugard, whom they say he kidnapped 18 years ago when she was 11, and kept them imprisoned in his backyard.
Garrido and the girls showed up on the Berkeley campus Monday and met with Lisa Campbell, manager of special events for the UC police department.
Garrido told her he wanted to hold a campus event he called “God’s Desire,” which he frenetically described as having to do with schizophrenia and the FBI.
Campbell, 40, a former Chicago cop, said Garrido was “clearly unstable,” but the girls were even more striking.
Clothed in drab dresses, with penetrating blue eyes that matched their father’s, they were “non-responsive” and exuded no energy, she said.
Campbell asked Garrido to return the next day then went to UCPD Officer Ally Jacobs, 33, and told her something was not right with the three.
Jacobs described the girls as “‘Little House on the Prairie’ meets robots, clones.” Police arrested Garrido on Wednesday, and both Campbell and Jacobs have been lauded for helping free Dugard and her daughters.
— Maura Dolan, Tribune Newspapers
IRAQ
Powerful Shiite leader is mourned after cancer death
Mourners carry the coffin of one of the country’s most powerful Shiite leaders, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, through Baghdad on Friday. Hakim, who died Wednesday of lung cancer in Tehran, was a symbol for many of the re-emergence of Iraq’s Shiite political majority after decades of oppression under Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led regime. Islamic tradition usually requires the dead to be buried swiftly, but Hakim’s body was taken on a three-day mourning tour ending with burial Saturday in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Muslim outreach criticized
The U.S. military is bungling its outreach to the Muslim world and squandering good will by failing to live up to its promises, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer wrote Friday.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there is too much emphasis on telling the U.S. story and not enough on building trust and credibility.
“We hurt ourselves and the message we are trying to send when it appears we are doing something merely for the credit,” Mullen wrote in an essay published in a military journal. “We hurt ourselves more when our words don’t align with our actions.”
A survey of two dozen nations this spring found that positive public attitudes toward the U.S. have surged in much of the world since President Barack Obama’s election, but not in most of the Arab and Muslim world.
VIRGINIA
Deaths rock campus again
BLACKSBURG — In what has become a sadly familiar ritual, about 100 students huddled together Friday on the Drillfield at the heart of the Virginia Tech campus, weeping and singing hymns as they mourned two slain classmates.
Heidi Childs, 18, and David Metzler, 19, were found fatally shot Thursday morning in a national park about 15 miles from campus. Police said Friday that they had no suspects.
The deaths of the young couple, which took place during the first week of classes, shook a community that has endured a string of tragedies. In April 2007, it became the site of the worst mass killing by an individual in U.S. history when a troubled student fatally shot 32 people and himself. In January, a student was decapitated in a campus cafe, and a classmate was charged.
MICHIGAN
Deportation bid is backed
GRAND RAPIDS — A federal appeals court panel voted 2-1 last week to uphold the government’s deportation effort against a Kurdish immigrant from Turkey who is a restaurateur in southwestern Michigan.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati issued the opinion against Ibrahim Parlak, whom prosecutors say failed to disclose his involvement with a Turkish organization that the Department of Homeland Security considers a terrorist group.
Besides not disclosing the ties, Parlak did not mention a conviction in Turkey when he applied for a green card, prosecutors say.
NEW MEXICO
No charges for Richardson
SANTA FE — New Mexico’s top federal prosecutor confirmed Friday that no charges will be brought against Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson and his former top aides after a probe of an alleged pay-to-play scheme prompted him to withdraw his nomination as U.S. commerce secretary.
But U.S. Atty. Greg Fouratt said the decision not to bring charges “is not to be interpreted as an exoneration of any party’s conduct.”
In a letter sent to defense attorneys, Fouratt said a yearlong investigation “revealed that pressure from the governor’s office resulted in the corruption of the procurement process” so that state bond deal work went to a Richardson political donor in 2004.
Richardson spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said in a statement Friday that Fouratt’s letter “is wrong on the facts and appears to be nothing more than sour grapes.”
ARGENTINA
U.S. troop plan debated
BARILOCHE — South American presidents wrangled for hours Friday over a pending deal to expand the U.S. troop presence in Colombia, closing their meeting with a statement that foreign troops should not be allowed to threaten any of the region’s nations.
The leaders also planned to forge an agreement that would enable the UNASUR group to inspect military bases in each member country to confirm that promises are being kept.
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe appeared to go along with the base supervision idea.
Throughout the day, Uribe defended his U.S. military alliance against tough criticism, saying the U.S. was alone in answering his nation’s call for help against drug traffickers and terrorists.
NEW JERSEY
Gaddafi stay scrapped
NEWARK — U.S. Rep. Steve Rothman said late Friday that a representative of the Libyan government assured him that Muammar Gaddafi won’t stay in Englewood, N.J., when he visits the United States next month to address the UN General Assembly, a visit that has sparked angry protests.
The Libyan government has been renovating an estate there ahead of Gaddafi’s first U.S. visit. But Gaddafi is unwelcome in New Jersey, which lost 38 residents in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, widely believed to be the work of Libyan intelligence.
— Tribune news services
