Black School Violence: Where’s the National Guard When You Need It?

Black School Violence: Where’s the National Guard When You Need It?

From The State of White America-2007

Release Date: April 5, 2007

Prepared by and for the National Policy Institute by Nicholas Stix, Project Director

By Nicholas Stix

I. Introduction

V. Education: Pseudo-Pedagogy, Real Hatred; Part I: The Autum of White America?

Part II: Where’s the National Guard When You Need It?

The Autum Ashante incident is just the tip of the iceberg of black supremacy in education, in which blacks daily harass, assault, rob, and on occasion, murder white students and personnel in thousands of American public schools. Since school officials typically cover up in-school racial attacks, and black racial terror against white youngsters is not limited to school grounds, to give an accurate picture of what white youngsters are up against, it will be necessary to include attacks that have taken place off of school grounds. Let us look at some representative cases.

On June 17, 2005, The Capital newspaper reported on an unnamed 17-year-old white student’s travails in Meade High School in Annapolis.[i]

On January 28, 2005, the boy had been “ambushed” in the hall by 10-15 black boys, who took turns punching him in the head, while jumping up and down and chanting, “White boy, white boy, I go!”

According to Circuit Court Master Erica Wolfe, in charge of juvenile and family cases, the black school officials who investigated the case, Principal Joan A. Valentine and Assistant Principal Bonita Sims, provided “virtually useless” witness statements that lacked witnesses’ names. Valentine refused to provide the names until Wolfe ordered her to. One black student witness then committed “perjury” on the witness stand. Wolfe said she had no alternative but to acquit the defendants.

Principal Valentine and Assistant Principal Sims were neither criminally prosecuted for obstruction of justice nor were they so much as reprimanded by school officials. The student perjurer was also not charged.

On the afternoon of March 30, 2005, six white Catholic school girls who were playing basketball in the eponymous park in Marine Park, Brooklyn were assaulted by a mob of some 30 black teenagers who had just been dismissed from Marine Park Middle School.[ii]

The black mob shouted racial epithets – “black power!,” “honky bitches!,” “white crackers!,” and sarcastic references to Rodney King, which the attackers mistakenly attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. (“Martin Luther King said we should all get along”). Avoiding the larger girls, the mob focused its energy on the tiniest white girl, who, when I later interviewed her, appeared to be approximately 4’11” and 95 pounds, ripping chunks of hair out of her head, giving her head trauma, and tearing her shoulder muscle.

None of New York’s daily newspapers saw the story as fit to print, and police ignored the victims’ recounting of the racial epithets, although the circumstances were such that the taunts were merely the icing on the cake.

It took the perseverance of the victims’ parents, and the courageous reporting of journalist Marianna Hernandez at the small, community newspaper, the Brooklyn Skyline, to make the NYPD, family court prosecutors, and the New York media, take notice of the attack.[iii]

Palmdale, CA. Sometimes black racism turns deadly. On April 12, 2005, at a Palmdale concession stand, white, 15-year-old baseball fan Jeremy Rourke “teased” black 13-year-old baseball pitcher Greg Harris, whose team had just lost for the first time that season. Harris responded by grabbing a baseball bat, and beating Rourke to death. As is usual in black-on-white attacks, baseball league officials insisted that race had nothing to do with it.[iv]

New York City. On a less dramatic note, in April 2005, white New York City sixth grader Aurora Heim-Salgado and her parents filed a police report against an Asian boy who, according to her parents, “called her a ‘white bitch’ and knocked her to the ground with a punch to the back.”

When the authorities at Heim-Salgado’s school, Wagner Junior High School, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, refused to take charges of anti-white racism seriously, the family filed a police report.

Aurora’s father, Gregory Salgado said, “If it was a black kid attacked by white students, it would be an uproar. The school refused to accept that there is a reverse-racism problem.”

The New York Post reported, “Over the next 12 hours, the school suspended the Asian boy, cops gave him a juvenile-delinquency ticket, and the district superintendent ordered the school on a fast track to becoming a bully-free zone.”

The Salgados charged that Aurora was the frequent victim of racial attacks; however, it is highly unlikely that school officials would have taken such quick action against a black or Hispanic boy. [v]

Jacksonville, FL. On September 22, 2005, Florida TV station WJXT Jacksonville reported on a black-on-white assault in the city’s Sandalwood High School.

“According to the arrest report, Jean Belizaire, 18, struck a 17-year-old girl in the back of the head with a rolled up package of papers with such force that she became dizzy and nauseous.

“When questioned by police, Belizaire, who is black, admitted striking the girl because she was white.

“Belizaire is charged with battery. While that charge is normally a misdemeanor, when the hate crime notation is added it becomes a felony.

“He is being held in jail with bond set at $1,000.

“Police said at least 28 Sandalwood students have been arrested school began on Aug. 8. The school was on lockdown most of last week and the school remains under a heightened state of security.” [Emphasis by Web site.] [vi]

New York City. Perhaps because 2005 was a mayoral election year, New York City saw an uptick in press reports of violent attacks by black students on white children. Once the election was over, the reporting also ended.

On September 24, 2005, the New York Post reported on the Staten Island bias attack by four black girls and one black boy on white 13-year-old Christina Kenny. The black teenagers came up behind Kenny a block away from her home. She reported one of the girls punched her in the face, and that one attacker held her down while another girl smashed a bottle over her eye. The girls also ripped out her hair, stomped on her ribs, and the boy kicked her in the head and the neck. Kenny recounted, “They kept kicking me and punching me saying, ‘You’re a white bitch, you think you’re so pretty.’”[vii]

At last report, Christina Kenny was in danger of losing the sight in her wounded eye, due to a detached retina.

Only one day later, a group of three black and one Hispanic New York City public school girls was arrested “for taking part in a racially charged attack on two [white] parochial-school students on a city bus.” The black and Hispanic girls punched one of the white girls repeatedly in the face. According to police, one of the attackers initially said, “Look at the f—ing white cracker b-----s,” and the girls continued “to rant racial epithets and slurs” during the attack. The victim was left with a black eye and bruises on her lip.[viii](There’s that epithet “cracker” again, which black supremacist Councilman Charles Barron insists black children are unfamiliar with.)

On October 3, four black Brooklyn middle school students, aged 11 to 15, followed a 12-year-old white boy out of school at dismissal time, and beat and robbed him of his cell phone, while calling him a “cracker.”

[ix] (“Cracker,” yet again!)

And on October 10, the Daily News reported on Lisa Brown, who had moved her family from Oklahoma to Brooklyn, NY, in order to help her Brooklyn-born, social worker husband find work and her 12 and 13-year-old sons experience diversity. I kid you not. As the Daily News’ Kathleen Lucadamo reported,[x]

“Brown enrolled her sons, Sloan, 12, and J.T., 13, at Ebbets Field Middle School in Crown Heights. But when the boys, who are white, showed up, their mom said, they got a chilling indication of what was to come.

“‘Oh my gosh, we are going to have fun this year,’ a security guard muttered, according to Brown….

“Sloan was beaten mercilessly, called ‘cracker’ and ‘white boy,’ and chased into traffic by his new classmates, his family said.” [Cracker.]

Lisa Brown reported that when she called Ebbets Field M.S. principal Marge Baker, “the principal refused to take the calls,” and that the NYPD’s 71^st Precinct also ignored her complaints.

Police denied the racial nature of the attacks, and none of the racist black students or administrators responsible for the brutalizing of Lisa Brown's sons was arrested, fired, or disciplined. Brown transferred her sons to another public school.

Spokane, WA. In mid-November 2005, Tyson Leroy Brown, a 21-year-old black, was arrested in Spokane. Brown allegedly walked up to a 15-year-old white student on lunch break across the street from Lewis and Clark High School, knocked him unconscious, and kicked him while he was on the ground. Brown was arrested “on suspicion of malicious harassment, a Class C felony hate crime,” and had an unrelated outstanding warrant for his arrest from Oregon. Brown reportedly said, “I want to beat up one of these white boys,” and according to an affidavit from one of the arresting officers, “I should have kicked him until he’d never get up … I’m a racist, and I hate all you white boys.”[xi]

Davenport, IA. On March 2, 2006, Iowa's Quad City Times reported on the arrest of Anthony Matthew Hall-Clark, a 16-year-old black student, for allegedly walking up to a white student waiting at a bus stop, punching him in the face, breaking his jaw, and running away. Hall-Clark was identified by a school official who witnessed the attack and was charged with “felony willful injury causing serious injury.”

Police said there has been an ongoing series of incidents at the bus stop in the 1700 block of Main Street, a block south of Locust Street, and the incidents have escalated in their level of violence.

“According to a Davenport police report, school officials told police a group of black students has been trying to make it a ‘black-only’ bus stop and has been picking on the ‘frailest’ white students.”

Oddly enough, Tim Wernentin, the principal of Davenport Central High School, claimed not to know anything about the racial character of the attacks.[xii]

Chicago. On March 29, during an assembly in Chicago’s Kennedy High School, four black students ganged up on a white honors student, broke his jaw, and threw feces at him. The black students were part of a wave of recent black transfers to what had until then been a fine school.

Chicago Sun-Times reporter Rosalind Rossi uncritically repeated Chicago Police spokeswoman Monique Bond’s claim that “there doesn’t appear to be any indication that this would be a hate crime,” and herself covered up the racial aspects of the violence, by speaking of non-black “immigrant” students, while studiously avoiding the school’s growing racial problem.

In a reprise of a forty-year-old song, rather than expel or transfer out the racist black attackers, the school transferred out the white victim, who was one of the school’s star students.

But Kennedy’s students had not yet been properly socialized to accept black racial terror as their lot in life. And so, the following week, in the face of administrators’ fecklessness, 150 Kennedy students went out on strike and demonstrated opposite the school against the violence. Students carried signs saying, “Does Someone Have to Die?’” and “We’re Scared of School.” Students said “they’d even welcome cops in the classroom to stem rising violence.”[xiii]

Peoria, IL. Only days after the demonstration at Kennedy, Jessica and Joe Sweeney transferred their nine-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son out of Peoria’s Glen Oak Primary School, following a death threat by a box cutter-wielding black girl against their nine-year-old daughter. The death threat followed months of racial epithets and threats of violence.

That same day, the Sweeney’s eight-year-old son suffered “a large bruise on his arm from being shoved to the ground and called a ‘stupid white boy.’”

“Jessica pulled both kids out of the school immediately.

“I’m done. I’m done putting her life at risk because you won’t do anything.”

The Sweeneys had repeatedly complained to school authorities at Glen Oak Primary and Peoria School District 150 about the racial persecution their children were enduring; school officials did nothing.

Oddly enough, in writing about the Sweeneys, white Peoria Journal Star columnist Terry Bibo refused to mention that the attackers were black, and felt the need to defend the Sweeneys in advance against charges of racism, as if they were the perpetrators, rather than the victims of racism. Bibo emphasized out that the Sweeneys’ half-black older son has “attended District 150 schools and thrived.” Apparently, the only whites with moral standing are those who have mixed-race children.[xiv]

Newhall, CA. On April 28, 2006, dozens of black and Hispanic students joined in a mob attack on white students at Hart High School. Los Angeles Daily News reporter Sue Doyle refused to use the phrases “ganged-up on” or “attacked,” instead using “teamed up” and “fought,” respectively, as in “Witnesses said black and Latino classmates teamed up together and fought white students during lunch in retaliation for a fight between two teens at the school on Thursday when racial names were called.”[xv]

New York City. In 2003, New York City schools were gripped in a wave of violence that was carried out almost entirely by black and Hispanic students – the same black and Hispanic violence that has oppressed New York schools for over forty years. Although the local news media usually refused to identify racist attacks on whites, it was still extraordinary that they would publish the stories at all.

Beach Channel High School, in Rockaway Park, Queens, was cited in 170 official “occurrence reports” for violent incidents from September through mid-December, 2003 alone. And Beach Channel was not even the most violent high school in the area, a dubious honor held by Far Rockaway High School.[xvi]

The New York Times was so disturbed – not by the violent reality, but by local tabloids’ refusal to cover it up – that in an attempt at spreading disinformation, the newspaper ran an article claiming that all over the U.S., students were being improperly arrested by school authorities for misbehaviors that did not rise to the level of a crime (e.g., violating school dress codes).[xvii]

Had the newspaper counterpoised such frivolous arrests to the prevalence of violent school attacks that resulted in no arrests, it might have performed a public service. Instead, its strategy was a case of, “a half-truth is a whole lie.” (The Times rarely if ever publishes stories of racial attacks on white students, but given that the Daily News and New York Post were publishing such accounts, Times staffers apparently felt they had to do something.)

Philadelphia. On November 13, 2001, in George Washington High School, a gang of black boys jumped one white boy and beat him so badly that he required brain surgery for a blood clot on the brain. Seven suspects were arrested in the attack, whose obvious racial character was denied by authorities.

“Although the assault was the third racial attack at the school in two weeks, the school district’s chief safety executive Dexter Green says ‘there was no obvious motive.’ Kathy Gremo, the victim’s mother, thinks the attack was clearly racial. ‘He was on his way to the lunch room and eight or so black kids jumped on him and beat him,’ she says.” [xviii]

Mount Morris Township, MI. The most notorious racial attack against a white child was undoubtedly the February 29, 2000 murder of white six-year-old Kayla Rolland, by her black six-year-old classmate, Dedrick Owens, in their first-grade classroom at Theo J. Buell Elementary School. Dedrick, a sociopath who already had a history of beating children and stabbing them with pencils, took out a gun he had brought, loaded the weapon’s clip,[xix] aimed the gun at Kayla, with whom he had scuffled the day before, and said, “I don’t like you.” The plucky little girl responded, “So what?” Dedrick shot her in the neck or the chest, depending on the news account, killing her.

The young murderer even knew to run to the bathroom, and hide the murder weapon.

The media initially refused to so much as report on the respective races of the killer and his victim, and refused ever to consider the racial aspect of the murder.

Some white victims have achieved a slight measure of justice, after years of pursuing redress. Or so it would seem.

In 1995, when white student Rebecca Porcaro entered Seattle’s Rainier Beach High School, she was greeted with “White slut. Stupid white girl. White bitch, go back to Bellevue. This is our school.”[xx]

After four years of racial terror in and out of class, Porcaro graduated and sued the Seattle Public Schools. In 2001, the school district settled with Porcaro, paying her $40,000, agreeing to train all high school teachers and administrators on “peer harassment, including race and gender harassment,” and formally apologizing to her.

Incredibly, “District spokeswoman Lynn Steinberg said the complaint was the only one of its kind the district’s deputy general counsel can remember in her 10 years with the district.”

Rebecca Porcaro’s victory proved, unfortunately, to be pyrrhic. In the fall of 2004, the Seattle Public Schools hired Caprice Hollins to be its first “equity and race relations” director.[xxi]

Hollins, who is biracial (black and white), set up a Web page on “Equity and Race Relations,” replete with “Definitions of Racism” which defined “racism” as something that only whites could be guilty of.

“Racism:
“The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites). The subordination is supported by the actions of individuals, cultural norms and values, and the institutional structures and practices of society.”[xxii]

The rest of the Web page continued along the same lines, even identifying “having a future time orientation,” “individualism,” and standard English as “racist.”

Hollins’ Web page also asserted that “race” is a “pseudo-biological category.” Thus, for Caprice Hollins, training in “race harassment” could only be about harassment by one non-existent entity (whites) against other non-existent entities (non-whites).

Andrew J. Coulson of the libertarian Cato Institute, publicized and ridiculed Hollins’ racism:[xxiii]

“See if this sounds familiar: a government agency redefining a highly charged word to advance a particular ideology. ... Um, note to the Seattle School Board and administration: George Orwell’s novel ‘1984’ was a cautionary tale, not a how-to book. And the folks trying to control people’s thoughts through state manipulation of the language -- they were the bad guys.”

Acutely embarrassed, the Seattle Public Schools immediately pulled Hollins’ Web page,[xxiv] but without, as of this writing, having pulled Caprice Hollins, whose anti-white racism presumably remains unchanged. And sophistic statements by school district spokesman Peter Daniels left no doubt that he and the school system share Hollins’ racism:

“It did not have enough context for people not working on this issue, and it was poorly written ... It’s about institutional racism, particularly in an educational setting. There are particular structures and practices in place that disadvantage other students who are not of the Caucasian or white majority. It’s really examining our own practices and education, but that wasn’t very clear.”[xxv]

Actually, the problem was that Hollins’ statement was all too clear.

Coulson called school officials’ response to being exposed, “a non-apology apology… My sense was that the definition was extremely offensive, but there was not much sympathy for those who were offended.”[xxvi]

The lack of racist attacks carried out by white students against blacks or Hispanics has frustrated anti-white mainstream journalists. Associated Press reporter Erin Texeira dealt with this “problem” by perpetrating a soft hoax. In reporting on racial attacks on Asian students at Brooklyn, NY’s Lafayette High School, Texeira never said outright that the attacks had been carried out by whites, but strongly suggested that such was the case.

“In the Bensonhurst neighborhood, historically home to Italian and Jewish families, more than 20 percent of residents now are Asian. Those changes have escalated ethnic tension on campuses such as Lafayette High, according to Khin Mai Aung, staff attorney at the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which is advocating for Lafayette students.”

Texeira was spreading hateful nonsense. The anti-Asian attacks had been carried on mercilessly for over three years by black students who did not live in the neighborhood. There was no connection at all between changing neighborhood demographics and the attacks; whites were not attacking Asian students. And yet, nowhere in Texeira’s 1,253-word article about racial violence nationwide against Asian students – which, again, is a black pastime – did she breathe a word about black attackers.[xxvii]

 

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[i] Eric Hartley, “Court Master Blasts Meade Principal’s Handling of Fight,” The Capital, 17 June 2005.

[ii]Nicholas Stix, “Six Little Girls,” Middle American News, July 2005.

[iii]Marianna Hernandez, “Non-Bias Attack,” Brooklyn Skyline, 11 April 2005.

Black journalists at two major New York newspapers were angrier at Marianna Hernandez for reporting on the attack, than at the attackers. Leonard Greene of the allegedly conservative New York Post, called the reporting of the crime a “bias crime” on a par with the attack, and Aina Hunter of the radical leftist Village Voice, felt such racial loyalty to the attackers, that in addition to misrepresenting and condemning Marianna Hernandez for reporting the story, she thoroughly misrepresented the story and the neighborhood, depicting the attack as a “girl fight” between equally matched sides (she mentioned only “five or six” black girls, rather than the mob of approximately 30 black boys and girls); never mentioned the attackers’ three return trips to the basketball court, each time with additional reinforcements; insisted that the white victims had fabricated their charges of racial epithets sometime after police initially responded to the attack; and surreally presented the victims’ own neighborhood as being hostile towards them. Hunter went so far as to present outraged whites as the only “racists” in the story, to depict the attackers as fearing for their safety, and to deny that black New York teenagers would ever call a white a “cracker.” As her expert witness on the matter of racial epithets, Hunter cited none other than an “incredulous” Councilman Charles Barron. That would be the same Charles Barron whose ally Batin Ashante would later call Peekskill school officials “racist crackers.”

During a March 2006 interview, some of the victims’ parents told me that during Aina Hunter’s occasional visits to family court hearings, she would always go supportively straight to the attackers and their parents, as if they were the victims.) Leonard Greene, “VILE OUTBURSTS ARE FANNING FLAMES OF HATRED, New York Post, 25 April 2005.
Aina Hunter, “Girl Fight: Students say a Marine Park brawl was kid stuff. Prosecutors are calling it race rage,” Village Voice, 28 June 2005.

[iv] “Teen Killed In Baseball Bat Attack,” Associated Press, 13 April 2005. Jacqueline Kallas, “Victim ‘blamed’ in ball bat murder trial,” Antelope Valley Press, 8 July 2005.

A Web site, “Justice for Greg Harris,” was put together in defense of Jeremy Rourke's killer that is an unwitting self-parody of black racist rationalizations. The family and supporters of the murderer, Greg Harris, insist that he was an “honor student”; that he was the real victim, who had been “violated and assaulted” by the dead boy – “[Harris] was defending himself…”; and that the white victim had called his killer the “n” word just before the “tragedy.” (Witnesses refuted the last claim.)

“Justice for Greg Harris.” http://www.justiceforgregharrisjr.org/

On November 18, 2005, Oprah Winfrey had the murderer’s parents as guests on her TV show, where they were permitted to give the story their own spin, insisting that it was an “accident” that Harris, after hitting the nine-inch taller boy in the knee with a baseball bat, hit him full force in the jaw.

“Behind the Headlines: Tragedy at the Little League Park,” The Oprah Winfrey Show (Web site), 18 November 2005.http://www.oprah.com/tows/slide/200511/20051118/slide_20051118_284_101.jhtml

[v]David Andreatta, “School on Bias Alert,” New York Post, 25 April 2005.

[vi]“Latest Student Arrested At Sandalwood Charged With Hate Crime,”WJXT Jacksonville 22 September 2005 http://www.news4jax.com/news/5006757/detail.html

[vii]Angelina Cappiello and John Mazor, “Gal Battered in S.I. ‘Bias’ Assault,” New York Post, September 24, 2005.

[viii]Murray Weiss and John Doyle, “She-Wolf Pack,” New York Post, 24 September 2005.

[ix]Joe McGurk and Murray Weiss, “Kids in ‘hate’ attack on white student,” New York Post, 4 October 2005.

[x]Kathleen Lucadamo, “Ed Dept. eyes charge kids bullied, 1 beaten,” Daily News, 10 October 2005.

[xi]Rob McDonald, “Cops say student attacked because of color: Police say alleged attacker called himself a racist,” The Spokesman-Review, 19 November, 2005.

[xii]Dustin Lemmon, “Davenport police say they are keeping eyes on problem area,” Quad City Times, 2 March 2006.

[xiii]Rosalind Rossi, “Kids want cops in class,”, Chicago Sun-Times, 5 April 2006.

[xiv]Terry Bibo, “Family dismayed by public schools,” Peoria Journal Star, 16 April 2006.

[xv]Translated into English, the story means that the previous day a white and a non-white had fought one-on-one. Dissatisfied with that result, racist black and Hispanic students decided to commit a mob attack on white students. Note too Doyle’s use of the passive voice: “racial names were called.” Had a white student taken the initiative in calling a black or Hispanic student a racial epithet, Doyle would surely have said so. Based on common, politically correct newspaper etiquette, that she used the passive voice suggests that a non-white student called a white student a racial epithet; the white student may also have responded in kind. Doyle provided no evidence, not even by implication, that any whites had done anything justifying “retaliation.” Note however, that in anti-white racial strongholds, rules similar to those under Jim Crow operate, whereby anything can be used as a pretext for the most brutal “retaliation” against whites.

Sue Doyle, “Latinos, blacks fight whites at Hart High; 4 students arrested,” Los Angeles Daily News, 29 April 2006

[xvi]Howard Schwach, “Local High Schools Under Siege: BCHS Principal To Students: ‘I’m Disgusted With Your Behavior,’” The Wave, 26 December 2003

[xvii] Sara Rimer, “Unruly Students Facing Arrest, Not Detention,” New York Times, 4 January 2004.

[xviii] “‘No Obvious Motive,’” American Renaissance, January 2002.

[xix] Note that teacher Alicia Judd had left Dedrick Owens in a room with Kayla Rolland and two other children unsupervised.

Benjamin Dowling-Sendor, “When Child’s Play Turns Tragic: A troubling school shooting case raises ‘what if …’ questions about the need for adult supervision of young students,” American School Board Journal, June 2006.

[xx]Rebekah Denn, “White woman settles school reverse-bias suit: Apology, staff training, $40,000 won by Rainier Beach graduate,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 14 August 2001.

[xxi] Deborah Bach, “Seattle Public Schools’ first race relations chief hopes for ‘real change,’” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 19 October 2004

[xxii]Seattle Public Schools, Equity and Race Relations, “Definitions of Racism.” Downloaded on 16 May 2006.

http://www.seattleschools.org/area/equityandrace/definitionofrace.xml

[xxiii]Andrew J. Coulson, “Planning ahead is considered racist?,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1 June 2006.

[xxiv]Debera Carlton Harrell, “School district pulls Web site after examples of racism spark controversy,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2 June 2006.

[xxv]Ibid.

[xxvi] Ibid.

[xxvii]Erin Texeira, “Asian Youths Suffer Harassment in Schools: Asian Youth Say They’re Persistently Harassed in Schools; Data Suggests Problem Worsening, ABC News/Associated Press, 13 November 2005. http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1308263