Some Companies using criminal records or bad credit reports for job screening tactics challenged as illegal

WASHINGTON Companies using criminal records or bad credit reports to screen out job applicants might run afoul of anti-discrimination laws as the government steps up scrutiny of hiring policies that can hurt blacks and Hispanics.A blanket refusal to hire workers based on criminal records or credit problems can be illegal if it has a disparate impact on racial minorities, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The agency enforces the nation’s employment discrimination laws.”Our sense is that the problem is snowballing because of the technology allowing these checks to be done with a fair amount of ease,” said Carol Miaskoff, assistant legal counsel at the EEOC.

With millions of adults having criminal records – anything from underage drinking to homicide – a growing number of job seekers are having a rough time finding work. And more companies are trying to screen out people with bankruptcies, court judgments or other credit problems just as those numbers have swollen during the recession.Just ask Adrienne Hudson, a single mother who says she was fired from her new job as a bus driver at First Transit in Oakland, Calif., when the company found out she had been convicted seven years earlier for welfare fraud.

Hudson, 44, is fighting back with a lawsuit alleging the company’s hiring practice discriminates against black and Latino job seekers, who have arrest and conviction rates far greater than whites. A spokesman for First Transit said the company does not comment on pending litigation.”People make mistakes,” said Hudson, who is black, “but when they correct their mistake, they should not be punished again outside of the court system.”

Justice Department statistics show that 38 percent of the U.S. prison population is black, compared with about 12 percent of the general population. In 2008, African-Americans were about six times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. The incarceration rate for Latinos was 2.3 times higher than whites.If criminal histories are taken into account, the EEOC says employers must also consider the nature of the job, the seriousness of the offense and how long ago it occurred. For example, it may make sense to disqualify a bank employee with a past conviction for embezzlement, but not necessarily for a DUI.

Most companies tend to be more nuanced when they look at credit reports, weeding out those applicants with bad credit only if they seek senior positions or jobs dealing with money. But if the screening process weeds out more black and Hispanic applicants than whites, an employer needs to show how the credit information is related to the job.

About 73 percent of major employers report that they always check on applicants’ criminal records, while 19 percent do so for select job candidates, according to a 2010 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management.The same survey found that almost half of major companies conduct credit checks for some job candidates, such as those who would be in a position of financial trust. Another 13 percent perform credit checks for all potential workers.

Last fall, the EEOC sent a strong message to employers when it filed a class-action lawsuit against Freeman Companies, a Dallas-based events planning firm, alleging the company discriminated against blacks, Hispanics and males by rejecting job seekers based on credit history and criminal records. Freeman has denied the charges.The growth of online databases and a multimillion dollar background check industry have made it easy for employers to find out reams of information about potential hires. Companies see the checks as another way to weed out unsavory candidates, keep a safe work environment and prevent negligent hiring claims.

“Past indiscretions may be an indicator of future behavior, especially in the criminal context,” said Pamela Devata, a Chicago employment lawyer who has represented companies trying to comply with EEOC’s requirements.Devata said employers nationwide have seen the EEOC become more active in investigating employer hiring practices. The scrutiny has caused many companies to reevaluate their screening process and move to a case-by-case standard.

Ariela Migdal, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project in New York, said a person might have a blemish that has nothing to do with the job he or she is seeking. And records sometimes are inaccurate or not updated to reflect that someone arrested later had charges dropped or a conviction overturned or expunged, she said.”Somebody with an old conviction that has been rehabilitated doesn’t have any greater likelihood of committing a crime, so its irrational to use that against them,” Migdal said.

Ron Heintzman, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, said he’s seen dozens of job candidates disqualified “for reasons that were just ridiculous.” His union, with 13,000 members in First Transit, is paying for the lawsuit that Hudson filed last month against the company which operates bus service in Oakland and several other major cities.

In Hudson’s case, she was fired after just two days on the job as a bus driver because of a 7-year-old felony welfare fraud conviction. The conviction was later dismissed under California law, but her lawsuit, filed in federal court last month, claims the company has a policy to deny employment no matter how old the conviction, the applicant’s prior work history or whether it is related to the job.

(This version CORRECTS name of American Civil Liberties Union.)(AP)

Obama, you went back on your promise to promote family values,said Michael Chavez of Houston

Opponents of Arizona’s new immigration law had a message for President Barack Obama at a rally Saturday at the Capitol in Austin.”Obama, you went back on your promise to promote family values,” said Michael Chavez of Houston.
“Deporting and separating family members is not an American value,” he said. Arizona’s immigration law, known as SB 1070, makes being an illegal immigrant a state crime and requires legal immigrants to carry papers that confirm their legal status.

Chavez, a veteran, said that people should remember Mexican immigrants are fighting for the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several generations of his family have fought for the United States, including his grandfather, who fought in World War II, and his son, who just returned from Iraq, he said.The rally  National Day of Action Against SB 1070  drew a few hundred people, in contrast to the thousands of people who attended a rally at the Capitol against SB 1070 on May 1.

Many supporters in Austin went to Phoenix to participate in the protest there Saturday, said Amalia Martinez, a member of the Austin Immigrant Rights Coalition.Speakers at the rally said Obama should have already pushed the immigration reform he promised in his campaign through Congress.”If he wants to be re-elected, he needs to stop SB 1070,” Martinez said.

People from Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and even Phoenix came to the rally in Austin.Justine Hecht said she and her boyfriend, Joe Sawinski, both from Phoenix, were just passing through Austin on a trip when they decided to come to the rally.They had already protested against the law in Arizona, but they said it was easier to express their views in Austin.”There’s just so much tension in Arizona right now,” Hecht said.

About 11 members from the Southwest Public Workers Union in San Antonio attended the rally, including Chavel Lopez, who said the Arizona law is racist.Jeff Gillum, who also attended the rally, said he supported Arizona’s law.”Immigrants have put a drain on health care and law enforcement,” Gillum said.The Austin City Council decided May 13 to end its business and travel ties with Arizona to protest the new law.Speakers at Austin’s rally Saturday said some Texas state legislators wanted to pass the same law as Arizona.”We will stop it in Texas, and we will stop it in Arizona,” said Gloria Rubac of Houston.”This is a civil rights issue for all of us.”

Seattle becomes 11th city to boycott Arizona immigration law

the Seattle City Council unanimously voted to boycott Arizona by ending official city travel there and resolving, when practical, to cut off future contracts with Arizona-based businesses. That makes Seattle the 11th city to endorse a boycott of the state in opposition to its controversial immigration law. Five of the boycotting cities are in California: Los Angeles tops the list as the biggest, and its boycott could deliver the most painful blow to Arizona’s economy, as the city has $58 million in existing contracts with Arizona companies, according to the L.A. Times.

In pending city votes, some members of Dallas’s city council are considering a boycott, along with the municipal governments in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Berkeley, California.Tourism officials and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer are pleading with opponents of the law not to boycott, saying innocent people could lose their jobs. But Democratic Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva has led the calls for boycotts of his own state, arguing that pressure needs to be put on officials to repeal the law, much as similar economic initiatives spurred the state to officially recognize the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday when it was the last state to withhold such recognition.

Legal challenges to the Arizona measure could well render the boycott campaign moot, however. Since the law, which makes it a state crime to be an illegal immigrant, is already facing five legal challenges, it may be overturned before it can go into effect July 23.Here’s a list of the cities that have announced travel and/or city-contract boycotts so far:

• Seattle, Washington• El Paso, Texas• Austin, Texas• Boston, Massachusetts• St. Paul, Minnesota • Boulder, Colorado• San Diego, California• West Hollywood, California• San Francisco, California• Los Angeles, California• Oakland, California

And here is a roster of groups that have announced travel boycotts, via Arizonaboycottclearinghouse.com

Austin boycott travel through Arizona

AUSTIN  In a unanimous decision, the Austin City Council passed a ban Thursday morning on travel to and business with Arizona in protest of a new immigration law in that state.”I’m concerned that if they go to Arizona, as far as we know, we can’t tell for sure that they’ll be subjected to harassment and even the potential for false arrest,” saidcouncilmember Bill Spelman . “I’d like to be able to maintain their security by sending them elsewhere.”

Austin became the latest in a growing list of cities that are boycotting Arizona in some capacity to protest the law, which makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally and requires local law enforcement to ask for documentation from people they suspect are in the country illegally.Spelman said the city had 45 trips to Arizona last year, in which they spent about $50,000. And while he said that is not a lot of money, Spelman also said it’s $50,000 they could be spending someplace else.

Some Austinites like the idea, saying it will hurt some Arizona businesses that won’t benefit from the City of Austin’s business travels and the money spent while there.”I am in support of the ban, the resolution, because it is discriminatory what’s happening in Arizona,” said Gus Pena.The council convened at 10 a.m. Thursday, taking up a resolution Austin Mayor Pro Tem Mike Martinez first proposed two weeks ago.

The Austin Immigrant Rights Coalition showed up at the meeting in support of the city’s proposed resolution.”We believe it’s an assault on the civil liberties of Latinos in the state of Arizona,” said Caroline Keating, of the coalition. “We will do everything to make sure something similar does not happen in this state.”

The drafted proposal came as some Texas lawmakerspromise to propose similar leglsiation in Texas next year, and opposition is mounting in Austin, Dallas and other cities.On Wednesday, City Manager Marc Ott sent a memo to the council regarding Austin’s business in Arizona. In the past year, city officials made 45 trips to Arizona at a cost of $42,898. The trips were made by officials from departments including Austin Energy, police and water department.

“The City will be sending 5 employees to Arizona for 3 separate events during the month of May,” the memo says. “Commitments to the trips were made prior to the passage of the Arizona immigration law.”The memo also says that the city “has no contracts or investments” with the state of Arizona.San Francisco and Los Angeles have both passed resolutions banning official travel to and business with Arizona, and encouraging residents to show their displeasure with the law by boycotting it as well.

The new law allows police to ask for documentation of citizenship if they have “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in the country illegally. The law does not define “reasonable suspicion.” Opponents of the law, signed last week, say that among other things, it gives police license to harass minorities who lawful citizens but who may not carry around proof of citizenship in their normal routine.While Spelman said the primary concern is City employees’ safety, he said the decision also comes with a message.”I’m sure it will also send a message that we think this is a mistake,” he said. “It’s bad for the Arizona economy and terrible for Arizona law enforcement, and it’s just the wrong direction for us to be going in as a country.”(KXAN)

Dallas will join immigration law protests in Arizona

More than two dozen North Texas residents are headed for Arizona to join protests against that state’s new immigration law.The trip is organized by the Megamarch Committee, the same group that held a march through downtown Dallas on May 1 to promote an immigration reform bill that would legalize millions of undocumented workers and their families.Committee members said they want to show support and lend expertise to Latino activists in Arizona.

The Arizona law gives police broad powers to check the paperwork of anyone they suspect is in the country illegally. Critics say it will lead to racial profiling, while advocates say it’s necessary because the federal government has failed to stop illegal immigration.”We have a responsibility to continue our struggle for justice for everybody, so what threatens our brown brothers and sisters is also a concern for us,” said the Rev. Peter Johnson, who was boarding a charter bus in Oak Cliff early Thursday.

The North Texas bus riders, including both immigrants and American-born citizens, were to hook up with immigration-rights activists in El Paso and Las Cruces, N.M. Organizers say they will drive in a caravan to Nogales, Ariz., where a demonstration is scheduled Friday on the international bridge leading into Nogales, Mexico.

The group, which says all of its demonstrations will be peaceful, returns Sunday.”I’m first-generation but the rest of my family is from Mexico, so I want to help them,” said Raul Garcia, a Dallas painting contractor who carried a poster of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a revered religious symbol for Mexican Catholics, in a stylized pose reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty.

“We’re going over there to open their eyes, to let them know that we’re hard-working people just like them and that we deserve to be treated with dignity. The fact is that (immigrants) contribute a lot to our community.”

Daniela Sánchez, a 23-year-old recent graduate of the University of North Texas, said she hopes the national attention being drawn to Arizona will actually foster debate on a national immigration reform bill that includes legalization for undocumented immigrants.”I do believe we need some kind of immigration reform, but what (Arizona) has done is really unfair,” said the Plano resident. “We’re living in a society that is more diverse and multicultural than ever before and it’s time everyone in government acknowledges that.”

Arizona's controversial immigration law will spark scores of people to protest in May 1 rallies nationwide and add urgency to pleas for federal immigration reform

CHICAGO Immigrant rights activists hope Arizona’s controversial immigration law will spark scores of people to protest in May 1 rallies nationwide and add urgency to pleas for federal immigration reform.Dozens of marches are planned for Saturday in cities across the country from Los Angeles to Dallas to New York.”What happened in Arizona proves that racism and anti-immigrant hysteria across the country still exists. We need to continue to fight,” said Lee Siu Hin, a coordinator with the Washington, D.C.-based National Immigrant Solidarity Network.

Activists believe opposition to Arizona’s new law  which requires authorities to question people about immigration status if there’s reason to suspect they’re in the country illegally could be the catalyst needed to draw record-breaking crowds similar to those four years ago.

That’s when more than a million across the country united to fight federal legislation considered anti-immigrant. Though the bill, which would have made being an illegal immigrant a felony, was unsuccessful, it triggered massive marches across the nation.Since then, the May 1 movement has fractured and attendance has dropped sharply as attempts to reform federal immigration policy fizzled. In 2006, nearly half a million people took to Chicago’s streets. Last year, fewer than 15,000 participated.But after the Arizona law was signed into law last week, immigration reform advocates have seen a flurry of activity.

Relying on online social networking, churches and ethnic media to mobilize, activists have called for a boycott of Arizona businesses and protested outside Arizona Diamondbacks baseball games. Earlier in the week, two dozen activists chanting “Illinois is not Arizona” were arrested for blocking traffic outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in suburban Chicago.While supporters say the law is necessary because of the federal government’s failure to secure the border and growing anxiety over crime related to illegal immigration, critics say it’s unconstitutional and encourages racial profiling and discrimination against immigrants or anyone thought to be an immigrant.

Activists fear that without federal legislation in place to address the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S., other states will follow Arizona’s lead and pass similar legislation.”If Republicans and Democrats do not take care of this albatross around our necks, this will in fact be the undoing of many, many years of civil rights struggle in this country,” said Jorge-Mario Cabrera, a spokesman for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, where a downtown march is planned on Saturday. “I’m hoping that there is enough fire in people’s hearts and minds to urge them to be mobilized.”

But chances the federal government will step in this year seemed slim.President Barack Obama, who had once promised to tackle immigration reform in his first 100 days but has pushed back that timetable several times, said this week that Congress may lack the “appetite” to take on immigration after going through a tough legislative year.

Meanwhile, activists say problems with a broken immigration system continue to affect millions  raids on workplaces create mistrust of authorities and separate families with mixed immigration status, employers take advantage of immigrant labor and thousands of college students are left in limbo.That includes 19-year-old Patricio Gonzalez who immigrated to the U.S. from Argentina at age five with his family on a tourist visa. It expired and his family wasn’t able to gain legal status.The Memphis teen said he had to drop out of college last fall because he wasn’t eligible for most student aid and couldn’t afford tuition.

“Do you know how difficult it is to see all your friends getting their education, and you’ve grown up with these people for years, they’re part of your family?” he said. “We’re creating lost generations — kids who grow up hopeless with no sense of betterment.”Activists aren’t alone in their opposition, a fact May 1 organizers hope will draw out even more people to rallies on Saturday which also is International Workers Day.California legislators have mulled canceling contracts with Arizona in protest. Denver Public Schools has banned work-related travel to Arizona. And several legal challenges, preventing the bill from going into effect this summer, are in the works.

Immigrant rights activists also say they’re stepping up other forms of action including more civil disobedience tactics. In Chicago, several college students plan to publicly “come out” as illegal immigrants on a downtown stage on Saturday.
“It’s time to come together and show that undocumenteds have dignity. They’re human,” said Douglas Interiano, a spokesman of Reform Immigration for Texas Alliance, which is helping plan Saturday’s march in Dallas.

He projected up to 100,000 could march in Texas with similar events planned in El Paso, Houston, Austin and San Juan. Organizers in California predicted up to 100,000 marching in downtown Los Angeles, too.”Given what’s happening in Arizona now it’s crucial for us to speak out and denounce what’s happening,” said Veronica Mendez, an organizer with the Workers Interfaith Network in Minneapolis, Minn., where there’s a Saturday rally. “We all have the same hopes and goals.”(AP)

Illegal immigrants plan to leave over Arizona because of the law

PHOENIX Many of the cars that once stopped in the Home Depot parking lot to pick up day laborers to hang drywall or do landscaping now just drive on by.Arizona’s sweeping immigration bill allows police to arrest illegal immigrant day laborers seeking work on the street or anyone trying to hire them. It won’t take effect until summer but it is already having an effect on the state’s underground economy.”Nobody wants to pick us up,” Julio Loyola Diaz says in Spanish as he and dozens of other men wait under the shade of palo verde trees and lean against a low brick wall outside the east Phoenix home improvement store.

Many day laborers like Diaz say they will leave Arizona because of the law, which also makes it a crime to be in the U.S. illegally and directs police to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to suspect they are illegal immigrants.Supporters of the law hope it creates jobs for thousands of Americans.”We want to drive day labor away,” says Republican Rep. John Kavanagh, one of the law’s sponsors.An estimated 100,000 illegal immigrants have left Arizona in the past two years as it cracked down on illegal immigration and its economy was especially hard hit by the Great Recession. A Department of Homeland Security report on illegal immigrants estimates Arizona’s illegal immigrant population peaked in 2008 at 560,000, and a year later dipped to 460,000.The law’s supporters hope the departure of illegal immigrants will help dismantle part of the underground economy here and create jobs for thousands of legal residents in a state with a 9.6 percent unemployment rate.

Kavanagh says day labor is generally off the books, and that deprives the state of much-needed tax dollars. “We’ll never eliminate it, just like laws against street prostitution,” he says. “But we can greatly reduce the prevalence.”Day laborers do jobs including construction, landscaping and household work for cash paid under the table. Those jobs have been harder to find since the housing industry collapsed here several years ago.

Standing near potted trees and bushes for sale at a Home Depot in east Phoenix, Diaz, 35, says he may follow three families in his neighborhood who moved to New Mexico because of the law. He says a friend is finding plenty of work in Dallas.Diaz says he has too much to lose by staying – he’s supporting a wife and infant son back home in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, across the border from El Paso, Texas.”They depend on me to survive,” he says. “I’m not going to wait for police to come and arrest me.”Jose Armenta, a 33-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico’s western coast, is already planning to move to Utah within the next 20 days because of a combination of the economy and the new law.”A lot of people drive by,” he says as he watched nearby cars speeding past, “and they yell, ‘Hey, go back to Mexico!'”

Analysts say it’s too soon to tell what lasting effects the law will have on the state’s underground work force, which also includes baby sitters, maids and cooks.A study of immigrants in Arizona published in 2008 found that non-citizens, mostly in the country illegally, held an estimated 280,000 full-time jobs. The study by researcher Judith Gans at the University of Arizona examined 2004 data, finding that they contributed about 8 percent of the state’s economic output, or $29 billion.Losing hundreds of thousands of unskilled laborers wouldn’t hurt the state’s economy in the short term, but it could limit the economy’s ability to grow once it recovers, says Marshall Vest, director of the Economic and Business Research Center at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management.Legal workers who are willing to take any available job now will become more choosy if the unemployment rate falls back to low levels seen before the recession hit.

“That’s really the question, as to whether the existing population is willing to work those (low-level) jobs,” Vest says. “I think economics provides the answer. If job openings have no applicants, then businesses need to address that by raising the offered wage.”Some illegal immigrants, however, intended to stick around.Natalia Garcia, 35, from Mexico City, says she and her husband – a day laborer – will stay so their daughters – both born in the U.S. – can get a good education and learn English. The couple have been living in Arizona illegally for the last 10 years.”Mexico doesn’t have a lot of opportunities,” she says. “Here, we work honestly, and we have a better life.”Olga Sanchez, 32, from southern Mexico, lives in Phoenix illegally with her two brothers, who are 21 and 17. While the youngest boy is in high school, all three work and send money back home to their parents.

“This law is very bad for us,” says Sanchez, who gets about $250 a week cleaning three houses. “I’m afraid of what’s going to happen.”She says the family is going to wait and see if the law takes effect and what the fallout will be before deciding whether to leave. The law is certain to be challenged in court; Phoenix, Tucson and Flagstaff already are considering lawsuits.”All I ask from God is a miracle for us to stay here and work,” she says.(AP)

U.S. natural gas industry officials on Thursday defended a controversial drilling technique

U.S. natural gas industry officials on Thursday defended a controversial drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing as the industry braces for possible new government regulations.Hydraulic fracturing injects millions of gallons of water, sand and a proprietary mix of chemicals up to two miles underground where it breaks open fissures in the gas-bearing shale to allow the gas to be extracted.Some environmental groups claim the technique, which is often referred to as “fracking”, is unsafe and threatens supplies of drinking water, but the industry claims its practice is safe.

“There is no known instance where fracking has contaminated someone’s drinking water,” said Will Brackett, the managing editor of the Powell Barnett Shale Newsletter, speaking on an industry panel sponsored by the George W. Bush Institute and Southern Methodist University’s Cox Maguire Energy Institute.Bush, the former U.S. president and Texas oil man, said more natural gas drilling would create more U.S. jobs. Bush did not touch on the hydraulic fracturing debate.

“When you explore for natural gas, when you develop natural gas, when you lay pipelines for natural gas, Americans are working,” Bush said in opening remarks to the conference.Earlier this month, the top U.S. environmental regulator said she was “very concerned” about the practice. The Environmental Protection Agency last week said it will conduct a study of drinking water impacts, which could mean new regulations on a booming area of the energy sector.

An industry scramble to develop vast shale deposits that are estimated to contain enough natural gas to meet U.S. needs for up to a century has brought drilling rigs within the limits of cities like Dallas and Fort Worth.

A bill in Congress would require gas companies to disclose the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing and give the EPA oversight of the industry, which is now regulated by the states.

Industry officials dismissed any suggestion that their drilling practices were dangerous.”We have had some issues in less than half a dozen cases and they have been mostly mistakes and it is not clear that the issue is directly related to the fracking process itself,” said Randy Foutch, chairman and CEO of privately-held Laredo Petroleum.

Some residents who live near gas rigs in states from Pennsylvania to Wyoming say their water has become undrinkable since drilling companies fractured the wells and they complain of sickness and skin rashes after using the water.

Removing gas from shale rock accounts for 15 to 20 percent of U.S. natural gas production and provides a relatively clean energy source for the United States, which is trying to reduce its dependence on foreign oil.(Reuters)

New York The abrupt transformation of Colleen R. LaRose from bored middle-aged matron to "JihadJane," her Internet alias

New York The abrupt transformation of Colleen R. LaRose from bored middle-aged matron to “JihadJane,” her Internet alias, was unique in many ways, but a common thread ties the alleged Islamic militant to other recent cases of homegrown terrorism: the Internet.

From charismatic clerics who spout hate online, to thousands of extremist websites, chat rooms and social networking pages that raise money and spread radical propaganda, the Internet has become a crucial front in the ever-shifting war on terrorism.”LaRose showed that you can become a terrorist in the comfort of your own bedroom,” said Bruce Hoffman, professor of security studies at Georgetown University. “You couldn’t do that 10 years ago.”

“The new militancy is driven by the Web,” agreed Fawaz A. Gerges, a terrorism expert at the London School of Economics. “The terror training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan are being replaced by virtual camps on the Web.”

From their side, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are scrambling to monitor the Internet and penetrate radical websites to track suspects, set up sting operations or unravel plots before they are carried out.

The FBI arrested LaRose in October after she had spent months using e-mail, YouTube, MySpace and electronic message boards to recruit radicals in Europe and South Asia to “wage violent jihad,” according to a federal indictment unsealed this week.That put the strawberry-haired Pennsylvania resident in league with many of the 12 domestic terrorism cases involving Muslims that the FBI disclosed last year, the most in any year since 2001. The Internet was cited as a recruiting or radicalizing tool in nearly every case.

“Basically, Al Qaeda isn’t coming to them,” Gerges said. “They are using the Web to go to Al Qaeda.”

In December, for example, five young men from northern Virginia were arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of seeking to join anti-American militants in Afghanistan.A Taliban recruiter made contact with the group after one of the five, Ahmed Abdullah Minni, posted comments on YouTube praising videos of attacks on U.S. troops, officials said. To avoid detection, they communicated by leaving draft e-mail messages at a shared Yahoo e-mail address.

Hosam Smadi, a Jordanian, was arrested in September and accused of trying to use a weapon of mass destruction after he allegedly tried to blow up a 60-story office tower in downtown Dallas. The FBI began surveillance of Smadi after seeing his anti-American postings on an extremist website.And Ehsanul Islam Sadequee and Syed Haris Ahmed, two middle-class kids barely out of high school near Atlanta, secretly took up violent jihad after meeting at a mosque.

“They started spending hours online — chatting with each other, watching terrorist recruitment videos, and meeting like-minded extremists,” the FBI said in a statement after the pair were convicted of terrorism charges in December.

Prosecutors alleged that the pair traveled to Washington and made more than 60 short surveillance videos of the Capitol, the Pentagon and other sensitive facilities, and e-mailed them to an Al Qaeda webmaster and propagandist.

U.S. authorities also closely monitor several fiery Internet imans who use English to preach jihad and, in some cases, to help funnel recruits to Al Qaeda and other radical causes.The best known is Anwar al Awlaki, an American-born imam who is believed to be living in Yemen. U.S. officials say more than 10% of visitors to his website are in the U.S.

Among those who traded e-mails with Awlaki were Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged with shooting and killing 13 people in November at Ft. Hood, Texas, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit on Christmas Day.

Mahdi Bray, executive director of the MAS Freedom Foundation, part of the Muslim American Society, noted that many extremist websites featured fiery images, loud music and fast-moving videos of violence and death.”They use video games and hip-hop to bring young people in, sometimes in very benign ways,” he said. “Then they make this transition by showing all the horrific things” and by then, some would-be recruits are hooked.

Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said his group had struggled to compete with the instant attention that grisly videos of beheadings, roadside bombs or masked men with weapons draw on the Internet.”They get the backdrop of the Afghani mountains or the battlefields of Somalia,” he said. “We’re speaking from conference centers and quiet halls. Somehow, we have to figure out a way to make our message more newsworthy. We’ve issued YouTube videos, and it barely gets a couple of hundred hits.”

North Texans, already reeling from a record day of snowfall

North Texans, already reeling from a record day of snowfall, were braced this morning for a tough commute.Throughout the region, temperatures at 5 a.m. were hovering right around freezing – but falling fast. As they dip into the high 20s by sunrise, roads, bridges, and overpasses – many of them already caked in snow – could freeze, making driving treacherous. “It is strongly encouraged not to venture out this morning unless absolutely necessary,” the National Weather Service warned.

If ice on the highways weren’t trouble enough, the Weather Service also warned that patchy fog was possible during the morning commute.People who must drive this morning should allow plenty of extra time to reach their destinations. Anyone planning to fly out of Dallas should check first on the status of flights, as many airlines were expected to delay or cancel routes. By this afternoon, temperatures will rise to the high 30s, meaning dangerous ice patches would start to thaw. The forecast for Saturday calls for sunny skies and highs in the 50s.

Snow continues to fall early today, mainly to the east of Interstate 35. In many counties east of the Dallas area, the snow was reported to be heavy. Thursday’s record snowfall – officially more than 11 inches – left tens of thousands of people throughout North Texas without electricity. Those outages, scattered throughout the region, also have knocked out traffic signals at scores of intersections. Drivers approaching those intersections were urged to use extreme caution. With very few exceptions, school districts, private schools, community colleges and universities throughout the region were closed today. The City of Dallas had already declared today as a “furlough day,” closing all nonessential city offices as a cost-saving measure.