Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis have taken their romance (and appetites) to the Eternal City.
Shielded by a large umbrella, on Sunday the couple was photographed leaving Antica Pesa restaurant in Rome. (Kunis is in town to shoot her new movie, The Third Person.)
At dinner, the pair ordered a number of the restaurant's specialties, including Parma ham crudo and mozzarella, eggplant parmigiana, mini beef sliders, pasta with chickpeas, a salad with marinated anchovies and much more. They also saved room for dessert: a thousand layer pastry with cream and fresh berries. And the couple washed down their meal with a bottle of red wine.
While in Rome, the two have also been spotted taking evening strolls and holding hands in the cobblestone streets in the center of Rome and sightseeing.
The Rome visit has been just another romantic rendezvous for the couple who have been spotted doing everything from spoon feeding each other to relaxing with foot massages all over the world.
Most recently, Kutcher, 34, and Kunis, 29, visited Sydney, Australia together.
Men with Southland ties sought to join Al Qaeda and harm Americans, FBI says.
Four men with ties to Southern California have been charged with plotting to join Al Qaeda and the Taliban to commit "violent jihad" and target Americans, the FBI said Monday night.
One of the men, Sohiel Omar Kabir, 34, allegedly traveled in July to Afghanistan, where he arranged for terrorist training to be conducted with Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, according to a complaint unsealed Monday in U.S. District Court in Riverside.
Kabir, who lived in Pomona, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan, federal authorities said.
In 2010, Kabir allegedly introduced Ontario resident Ralph Deleon, 23, and Upland resident Miguel Alejandro Santana, 21, to "radical and violent Islamic doctrine," according to the complaint.
"Kabir influenced Santana and Deleon to convert to Islam," the complaint said.
Kabir and Santana allegedly posted terrorist audio and video files on their Facebook pages and communicated via Skype when Kabir was overseas, according to federal authorities.
The complaint said the men studied Internet essays and lectures by Anwar Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric and U.S. citizen killed in Yemen in 2011 by missiles fired from a U.S. Predator drone aircraft. The death of Awlaki, a mid-level Al Qaeda operative, was considered a major coup because he had been effective in reaching disaffected Muslims in the U.S. and elsewhere with his online speeches and sermons.
Santana is accused of posting audio files of Awlaki on a social media site, the complaint alleges.
After arriving in Afghanistan, Kabir told the two men he had arranged for them to travel to that country for terrorist training, the complaint alleged.
Santana and Deleon are accused of telling a confidential source working for the FBI that they planned to go to Afghanistan to take part in "violent jihad," the complaint said. Santana is a permanent resident born in Mexico, authorities said, and Deleon is a permanent resident born in the Philippines.
The confidential source was paid more than $250,000 in October by the federal government and received unspecified "immigration benefits," according to a footnote in the criminal complaint. The source was previously convicted of trafficking in pseudoephedrine.
In September, Santana and Deleon recruited Arifeen David Gojali, 21, of Riverside to travel overseas with them and join Kabir for terrorist training, according to federal authorities. Gojali is a U.S. citizen.
Santana, Gojali and Deleon were apprehended Friday by authorities with the Joint Terrorism Task Force. They appeared before a magistrate Monday in federal court in Riverside.
Kabir was taken into custody in Afghanistan.
The investigation is ongoing. If convicted, the men each face up to 15 years in federal prison.
Smoke rose over Gaza City on Sunday, as Israel widened its range of targets to include buildings used by the news media.
CAIRO — Emboldened by the rising power of Islamists around the region, the Palestinian militant group Hamas demanded new Israeli concessions to its security and autonomy before it halts its rocket attacks on Israel, even as the conflict took an increasing toll on Sunday.
After five days of punishing Israeli airstrikes on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and no letup in the rocket fire in return, representatives of Israel and Hamas met separately with Egyptian officials in Cairo on Sunday for indirect talks about a truce.
The talks came as an Israeli bomb struck a house in Gaza on Sunday afternoon, killing 11 people, in the deadliest single strike since the conflict between Israel and Hamas escalated on Wednesday. The strike, along with several others that killed civilians across the Gaza Strip, signaled that Israel was broadening its range of targets on the fifth day of the campaign.
By the end of the day, Gaza health officials reported that 70 Palestinians had been killed in airstrikes since Wednesday, including 20 children, and that 600 had been wounded. Three Israelis have been killed and at least 79 wounded by unrelenting rocket fire out of Gaza into southern Israel and as far north as Tel Aviv.
Hamas, badly outgunned on the battlefield, appeared to be trying to exploit its increased political clout with its ideological allies in Egypt’s new Islamist-led government. The group’s leaders, rejecting Israel’s call for an immediate end to the rocket attacks, have instead laid down sweeping demands that would put Hamas in a stronger position than when the conflict began: an end to Israel’s five-year-old embargo of the Gaza Strip, a pledge by Israel not to attack again and multinational guarantees that Israel would abide by its commitments.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel stuck to his demand that all rocket fire cease before the air campaign lets up, and Israeli tanks and troops remained lined up outside Gaza on Sunday. Tens of thousands of reserve troops had been called up. “The army is prepared to significantly expand the operation,” Mr. Netanyahu said at the start of a cabinet meeting.
Reda Fahmy, a member of Egypt’s upper house of Parliament and of the nation’s dominant Islamist party, who is following the talks, said Hamas’s position was just as unequivocal. “Hamas has one clear and specific demand: for the siege to be completely lifted from Gaza,” he said. “It’s not reasonable that every now and then Israel decides to level Gaza to the ground, and then we decide to sit down and talk about it after it is done. On the Israeli part, they want to stop the missiles from one side. How is that?”
He added: “If they stop the aircraft from shooting, Hamas will then stop its missiles. But violence couldn’t be stopped from one side.”
Hamas’s aggressive stance in the cease-fire talks is the first test of the group’s belief that the Arab Spring and the rise in Islamist influence around the region have strengthened its political hand, both against Israel and against Hamas’s Palestinian rivals, who now control the West Bank with Western backing.
It also puts intense new pressure on President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who was known for his fiery speeches defending Hamas and denouncing Israel. Mr. Morsi must now balance the conflicting demands of an Egyptian public that is deeply sympathetic to Hamas and the Palestinian cause against Western pleadings to help broker a peace and Egypt’s need for regional stability to help revive its moribund economy.
Indeed, the Egyptian-led cease-fire talks illustrate the diverging paths of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, a Palestinian offshoot of the original Egyptian Islamist group. Hamas has evolved into a more militant insurgency and is labeled a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel, while the Brotherhood has effectively become Egypt’s ruling party. Mr. Fahmy said in an interview in March that the Brotherhood’s new responsibilities required a step back from its ideological cousins in Hamas, and even a new push to persuade the group to compromise.
Reporting was contributed by Ethan Bronner, Irit Pazner Garshowitz and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, and Peter Baker from Bangkok.
Peta Murgatroyd is a formerDancing with the Starschampion, winning the coveted mirror-ball trophy in season 14 – only her second season on the series – with Donald Driver. The Australia native blogged for PEOPLE.com about competing with Gilles Marini in the current all-star season. The pair was eliminated during Week 8. Murgatroyd has written her final post.
Elimination is always a little disappointing. Gilles [Marini] really wanted to win badly and he was a bit devastated that he got cut. But he's cool with it now. He's okay. I don't think he expected it. He worked really hard and he's the type of person who believes if you work hard, you get results. But it's not always the case with this TV show. Everyone works hard and everyone was amazing. It was such a tough competition, and I believe we were very lucky to have gotten that far.
It's just more heartbreaking because we had ideas for the next week. We were excited to get started on new things. It's just not going to happen, but we both have other things to look forward to now.
Gilles had the talent to make it to that final. He is an absolutely amazing dancer. But the show is about votes, and that's what really killed us in the end.
Gilles and I definitely bonded over this period. We've become very close friends and I'm become friendly with his wife Carole and his children. We're going to stay in touch and think about work ventures together. He's got great stuff ahead of him. He's an amazing person and I've definitely learned a few lessons from him. He's taught me a few things about life.
I love that we get different partners. You walk away from these relationships staying friends, but also learning about each other and about life. It's one of the best things about the show.
Right now I feel great. I'm a little tired from New York because I just flew in, but it was fun. I met up with a few friends when I got in, and then Gilles and I did the foxtrot together on The View. I stayed a few days extra to catch up with friends and Gilles went home. The View was fun.
I pigged out in New York. I had bagels with cream cheese, gelato and some pizza. I kind of hit all the food groups, which is something I usually don't allow myself to do. I have everything in moderation, but I really splurged over there and it felt good. I don't feel guilty about it at all. I'm going straight back to the gym.
SANTA CRUZ — The first slide professor Nirvikar Singh flashed on his PowerPoint showed the faces of six Sikh worshipers gunned down the previous month in Oak Creek, Wis., by a man with white supremacist ties.
As after other attacks since 9/11, the UC Santa Cruz professor explained to students in this fall introductory course, the Wisconsin shooting revealed an abiding ignorance over who Sikhs are — and aren't.
"Despite being in this country for more than 100 years, I think Sikhs are not well understood," said Singh, a 58-year-old economist, dressed in jeans and a midnight blue turban.
Singh holds the university's nascent chair in Sikh and Punjabi studies — the fourth of its kind in California and part of a broader movement to spread the word about the world's fifth-largest religion while promoting scholarship.
For students like David Villalobos, the course offered a chance "to get to know a culture I know nothing about." Guneet Kaur, who along with about a third of Singh's three dozen students is of Sikh heritage, craved the perspective of non-Sikhs and a "sounding board" on the Oak Creek temple massacre.
Like those at UC Santa Barbara, UC Riverside and Cal State East Bay, the program was launched with an endowment from a Sikh family honoring a relative. It comes at a time of promising developments in the community's struggle for exposure.
Efforts to include basics on Sikh history, religion and political struggle in California's K-12 curriculum are moving forward after years of delay. Embracing a legislative declaration of November as "California Sikh Awareness and Appreciation Month," Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson has recommended instructional materials and attended outreach events.
Meanwhile, California is enacting the nation's strongest workplace religious freedom law, barring employers from rejecting religious accommodation unless they can prove doing so would impose "significant difficulty or expense." Sponsored by the nonprofit Sikh Coalition, it is expected to loosen prohibitions on such Sikh articles of faith as unshorn hair and carrying a kirpan — a small sword that represents self-reliance and readiness to defend the oppressed.
The changes come as Stockton's gurdwara — the oldest and for decades only Sikh temple in the United States — celebrates its centennial and as statewide conferences on Sikh history, religion, art and music proliferate.
"The tide is turning," said Bruce La Brack, a professor emeritus in cultural anthropology at Stockton's University of the Pacific, who began studying California Sikhs in Yuba City nearly 40 years ago.
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Rooted in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent, Sikhism was founded by the 15th century Guru Nanak on tenets of monotheism, egalitarianism and community service.
The tenth and final guru, Gobind Singh, deemed the Sikh sacred scripture to be his eternal successor, and the voluminous text known as the Guru Granth Sahib became the focus of religious life.
In the late 19th century, Sikhs first migrated to British Columbia and then California, where men worked the railroads before turning to peach and almond farming. Discrimination and misconception were ever present.
Today there are an estimated 600,000 Sikhs in the United States, about 250,000 in California, said La Brack. The largest community is in the Bay Area, where Sikhs have thrived in Silicon Valley and built six gurdwaras — among them a $20-million facility in San Jose that accommodates 10,000 worshipers.
Although most Sikhs focused on faith and family, an entrepreneur known as the father of fiber optics launched the philanthropic Sikh Foundation in Palo Alto in 1967 to broadly promote Sikh culture. By 1999, Narinder Singh Kapany had dedicated a gallery of Sikh works at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and endowed the first university chair, at UC Santa Barbara.
"I felt that the Sikh culture needed to be understood in the U.S., and also by the Sikh youth," he said in a recent interview.
Kapany, 85, matched donors with three more California universities. The endowment for the Santa Cruz chair, launched last year, came from a San Antonio family in honor of their son, Sarabjit Singh Aurora, an engineer who had died of cancer.
"He was always very keen to educate kids in the schools about Sikhism," said his sister, Arvinder Kaur Aurora, 42.
The need for mainstream education, she and others note, became more pronounced after 9/11. Mistaken for Muslims because of their turbans, Sikhs were targeted. Among them was an Arizona gas station attendant killed by a self-proclaimed "patriot" who had vowed to shoot some "towel heads."
TEL AVIV — When Israel assassinated the top Hamas military commander in Gaza on Wednesday, setting off the current round of fierce fighting, it was aiming not just at a Palestinian leader but at a supply line of rockets from Iran that have for the first time given Hamas the ability to strike as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
The commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, had shifted Hamas’s low-grade militia into a disciplined force with sophisticated weapons like Fajr-5 rockets, which are named after the Persian word for dawn and have significantly increased the danger to Israel’s major cities. They have a range of about 45 miles and are fired by trained crews from underground launching pads.
Hamas had perhaps 100 of them until the Israeli attacks last week, which appear to have destroyed most of the stockpile. The rockets are assembled locally after being shipped from Iran to Sudan, trucked across the desert through Egypt, broken down into parts and moved through Sinai tunnels into Gaza, according to senior Israeli security officials.
The smuggling route involves salaried employees from Hamas along the way, Iranian technical experts traveling on forged passports and government approval in Sudan, Israeli officials said.
Mr. Jabari’s strategy has been so effective and alarming for Israel that it is preparing for a possible next stage in the four-day-old battle: a ground war in which its troops would seek to destroy remaining rocket launching bases and crews and munitions factories.
Under Mr. Jabari, Hamas also developed its own weapons industry in Gaza, building long-range rockets as well as drones that they hoped to fly over Israel just as Israeli drones roam the skies of Gaza, sowing fear in its population.
The current operation to eliminate the Hamas rocket launchers could serve to cripple the ability of Iran’s allies in Gaza from retaliating should Israel ever carry out its threat to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.
“Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad are building weapons with experts from Iran,” one top security official said Saturday, speaking on condition of anonymity. “What we took care of last night was their own production facility for U.A.V.’s,” he added, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. “This was all the work of Jabari, who was a very sophisticated and strategic thinker.”
A number of recent Israeli military attacks were aimed at cutting the supply chain into Gaza. In late October, a munitions factory in Sudan was hit from the air. Israel did not acknowledge carrying out the attack, but the winks and nods of officials here make clear that it did. Israel has carried out several other such attacks on Sudan, including on convoys, in the past few years.
In addition, Mossad agents killed a Hamas official in a Dubai hotel in early 2010 because he was thought to be crucial to the Hamas supply chain of weapons and rockets into Gaza.
One official here said that until Israel ended its military occupation of Gaza in 2005, there were only primitive weapons factories there. The Hamas rockets had a flight capacity of about a mile, they could not be aimed and they flew in a wild cylindrical pattern. Hamas then built better rockets that could fly up to 12 miles.
That changed little until 2007, when Hamas fighters pushed the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority out of Gaza into the West Bank and took over governing the coastal strip.
“At that point, Jabari turned his neighborhood defense operation into a real army,” said a retired Israeli general whose portfolio included Gaza and who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He organized what was a militia into companies, battalions and brigades. He sent commanders to Syria and to Iran to be trained by the Revolutionary Guards. And then he built up this whole new branch to develop military technology focusing on long-range missiles.”
The collapse of the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya last year created other supply options for Hamas as Libyan military storehouses were raided and the equipment sold off. Those weapons were driven across Egypt and into Gaza.
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Jabari’s death will truly cripple Hamas, or whether it will find someone equally adept to take his place, the officials said.
Either way, Hamas now has a range of rockets and weapons in its arsenal, said Jeffrey White, a former analyst with the United States Defense Intelligence Agency and now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In addition to the Fajr-5, Hamas has a few hundred of what are known as enhanced Grad rockets, which have a range of about 25 miles. The Grads are 122-millimeter rockets that have bigger warheads than the standard Grads, but their accuracy is relatively low. The Grads may also be coming from Iran, Mr. White said, but others are made in Gaza and imported from Libya.
In addition, Hamas has hundreds of standard Grads that have a range of about 12 miles, as well as thousands of homemade mortars and Qassam rockets with a range of about six miles.
Israeli officials said the movement of the Fajr-5 rockets through Egypt could not go unnoticed there, given their size. Each is 20 feet long and weighs more than 2,000 pounds — the warhead alone weighs 375 pounds — and the trucks carrying them across Egyptian bridges and through roadblocks into Sinai would be hard to miss.
In the current conflict, Israel’s antirocket system, known as Iron Dome, has been more effective than expected, but still dozens of rockets have landed.
Whether the military operation against Gaza is a dress rehearsal for any future attack on either Iran or Lebanon — where Hezbollah has thousands of rockets pointed at Israel — is a matter under debate here. Some see it as clearing away any possible trouble from Gaza. Others say that makes little sense, given the difference of scale in the conflict in Gaza and any war against Iran or Hezbollah. Hamas’s arsenal is tiny compared with what Hezbollah in Lebanon is thought to have: thousands of rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv.
Yonatan Touval, an analyst with Prime Source, a private Tel Aviv risk-assessment company, said, “The Iron Dome system is ineffective in intercepting longer-range projectiles, such as those that would be launched from Lebanon toward the Tel Aviv area. To address this threat, Israel is currently developing the Magic Wand system, but it is not expected to become operational before 2015.”
He added that the fighting now was therefore not really a test of a future conflict involving Iran and Lebanon. “If Israel’s political leadership is treating the current operation in Gaza as something of a rehearsal for a future war with Hezbollah and Iran, it is rehearsing the wrong play,” he said.
Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from Washington.
Janet Mayer/Splash News Online; Don Arnold/Wireimage
Taylor Swift appears to be taking her love life in a new direction.
The "Never Ever Getting Back Together" singer is seemingly taking her lyrics to heart as she moves on from recent ex, Conor Kennedy, and enjoys the company of One Direction hottie Harry Styles.
"I had to literally do a double-take," an onlooker tells PEOPLE of finding Styles, 18, with Swift, 22, on the set of The X Factor Thursday morning.
Styles was on hand to watch Swift rehearse the debut of "State of Grace," which she performed later that night on the Fox reality show.
"He was smiling at her while she rehearsed. When she was done he jumped up on stage, picked her up, put her over his shoulder and carried her off stage," the onlooker says. "The whole crew was really surprised."
The young singers were also spotted by X Factor host Mario Lopez, who says he was slapped on the back by Styles during Swift's rehearsal.
"I said, 'What are you doing here,' " Lopez said on his 104.3 MY FM radio show Friday. "And he sort of [pointed] toward Taylor."
Lopez went on to say he later saw the two "hand-in-hand."
A telling sign of the budding relationship may have been a look Styles shared with his bandmate Niall Horan a week earlier after Horan told PEOPLE his favorite song of 2012 was Swift's "Never Ever Getting Back Together."
When asked if he would ever date Swift, Horan gave a small laugh, looked at Styles and answered with a succinct, "no."
LONDON (AP) — Europe's top drug regulator has recommended approval for the first vaccine against meningitis B, made by Novartis AG.
There are five types of bacterial meningitis. While vaccines exist to protect against the other four, none has previously been licensed for type B meningitis. In Europe, type B is the most common, causing 3,000 to 5,000 cases every year.
Meningitis mainly affects infants and children. It kills about 8 percent of patients and leaves others with lifelong consequences such as brain damage.
In a statement on Friday, Andrin Oswald of Novartis said he is "proud of the major advance" the company has made in developing its vaccine Bexsero. It is aimed at children over two months of age, and Novartis is hoping countries will include the shot among the routine ones for childhood diseases such as measles.
Novartis said the immunization has had side effects such as fever and redness at the injection site.
Recommendations from the European Medicines Agency are usually adopted by the European Commission. Novartis also is seeking to test the vaccine in the U.S.
After the nightmares started, Davien Graham avoided his bicycle.
In his dreams, he pedaled his silver BMX bike through his neighborhood, heard gunfire and died.
If I stay off my bike, I'll be safe, he thought.
He placed it in a backyard shed, where it sat for months. But Jan. 12, 2008, dawned so spectacular that Davien decided to risk it.
He ate Cap'n Crunch Berries cereal, grabbed the bike and rode a half-mile west to Calvary Grace, a Southern Baptist church that was his haven.
Davien lived with an unemployed aunt and uncle, a former Crip, and five other kids in a cramped four-bedroom house in Monrovia, about 20 miles east of Los Angeles.
Yet as a 16-year-old junior at Monrovia High School, Davien earned A's and B's, played JV football and volunteered with the video club. He cleaned the church on Saturdays for minimum wage.
If I live right, God will protect me.
That afternoon, sweaty from cleaning, Davien reached for his wallet to buy a snack — only to realize he had forgotten it at home.
After returning to his house, he caught his reflection in the front window. He was 6 feet 2 and wiry. His skinny chest was beginning to broaden. He was trying to add weight to his 160-pound frame in time for varsity football tryouts.
He showered, told his aunt he would be right back and again jumped on his bike, size-14 Nike Jordans churning, heading for a convenience store near the church.
At the store, he bought Arizona fruit punch and lime chili Lay's potato chips. He recognized a kindergarten-age Latino boy and bought him Twinkies.
Davien pedaled down the empty sidewalk along Peck Road. He could hear kids playing basketball nearby. As he neared the church, a car passed, going in the opposite direction. He barely noticed.
He heard car tires crunching on asphalt behind him. He glanced back, expecting a friend.
An X marks the spot where Davien Graham was shot. (Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department)
Instead he heard: "Hey, fool."
The gun was gray. It had a slide. Davien recognized that much from watching the Military Channel.
Behind the barrel, he saw forearms braced to fire and the face of a Latino man, a former classmate.
The gunman shouted, "Dirt Rock!," cursing a local black gang, the Duroc Crips.
Davien's mind raced: Don't panic. Watch the barrel. Duck.
Suddenly, he was falling. Then he was on the ground, looking up at the church steeple and the cross.
He heard more shots, but stopped feeling them. A chill crept up his legs.
Davien watched the sedan disappear down the street. He saw the boy he had bought the Twinkies for and other children spilling out of a nearby apartment building.
He was having trouble breathing. He felt sleepy.
He tried to raise his eyelids to see if the shooter was returning. He knew gangsters don't like to leave witnesses.
Davien was raised not to snitch.
He grew up south of the Foothill Freeway and Monrovia's quaint downtown, in a frayed, unincorporated area neighbors call No Man's Land.
The oldest of six children, he learned as a small boy not to feel safe anywhere. He played under the towering pines and sweet gum trees of Pamela Park, where gangbangers stashed guns in bathrooms and addicts left crack pipes in sandboxes.
Davien in an undated school photo. (Courtesy of Davien Graham)
He witnessed his first drive-by when he was 4 years old. He came to recognize the sound, "like a loud drum, a thunderclap."
He grew leery of sedans with tinted windows, "drive-by cars," and gangsters who sprinted past his house and across "the wash," a drainage canal, with police in pursuit.
For Davien's safety, a relative had walked him to school — until he, too, was shot and his body dumped in the wash.
Davien had one goal in mind: to make it to his 21st birthday.
Drug dealers, bookies and hustlers called to him from the streets: "Hey, Day Day! You just like your dad."
The comparison made him cringe. Davien's father, Steven Graham, or Steve-O, was a Crip who pleaded guilty to cocaine possession weeks after Davien was born. Steve-O would spend several years in prison.
Afterward, on days Steve-O got high or drank too much, he would put on his sunglasses and take Davien out to the yard for lessons in manhood, often bringing a shotgun.
Davien's mother, Sharri McGhee, also struggled with drugs.
Even so, when times were good, Davien felt as though he belonged to a normal family. His mother would check them into an Embassy Suites hotel so they could swim in the pool. It felt like Disneyland.
Then he woke up one morning and all his videos and the TV and VCR were gone, and he saw his dad walking home because he had sold the car, too.
The best way to become a man is to look at those around me, and do the opposite.
By the time he started school, Davien had learned not to depend on adults for protection. He saw kids whisked away from their parents by the state, or sent to juvenile hall. He promised his younger brothers he would take care of them.
One day he found his pregnant mother lying on the back patio, convulsing. At the hospital, she delivered a premature baby girl with drugs in her system.
The state intervened. At age 9, Davien, two brothers and the baby were sent to live nearby with his aunt and uncle, Joni and Terry Alford, and their two children. Davien thought they acted more like big kids than parents.
The best way to become a man is to look at those around me, and do the opposite.
On Jan. 30, 2007, as Davien and his uncle walked in the neighborhood, they spotted a group of Latino men approaching, heads shaved gangbanger-style, arms covered in tattoos.
Suddenly, everyone was shouting in English and Spanish. Someone fired a gun.
His uncle stumbled off, shot in the calf.
Davien ran, hiding under a low brick garden wall. He could hear the strangers searching for him, their breath close. He wondered where his uncle had gone.
After they left, he bolted home, arriving to see paramedics lift his uncle into an ambulance. Sheriff's deputies followed.
His uncle answered some of their questions. But he never identified the shooter. He wasn't a snitch.
Deputies questioned Davien too. He knew he was supposed to tell the truth, as a Christian. But helping deputies would put his family at risk.
He didn't describe the suspects. No one was arrested.
Davien soon began having the nightmares about getting shot on the silver BMX his uncle had given him.
As Davien lay bleeding on the grass, he played dead.
Through droopy eyelids, he watched cars brake for a stop sign across the street, then zoom off. He recognized one driver, a neighbor who looked away.
She must think I'm a gangster.
A red Ford Explorer slowed, windows rolled down. Davien took a chance.
"Ma'am, I need help, I've been shot!" he yelled.
The car stopped and a white lady with long red hair and glasses jumped out. She grabbed Davien's hand and called 911.
A bullet recovered by a surgeon from Davien’s body was later introduced into evidence. (Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department)
It was 4:57 p.m.
"There is a young African American gentleman who has been shot," the woman told dispatch. "There's a lot of children out here as well, if you can kind of hurry."
Davien groped for the cellphone in his pocket just as it started to vibrate.
It was his aunt. She and his uncle had been out on the front stoop and thought they heard gunfire.
"They shot me," Davien said. He hung up so his aunt could call 911.
His uncle soon pulled up in the family's white SUV. He cradled Davien's body.
"I can't move my legs!" Davien cried, loud enough for the 911 operator to hear.
His uncle grabbed the church's water hose and held it to Davien's lips. Davien stared up at Calvary Grace.
I don't want to die.
He felt himself passing out, eyes rolling back into his head. He gripped the grass beneath him. His uncle was shouting his nickname.
"Day Day, come on!"
Paramedics arrived and loaded Davien into an ambulance. Just then his aunt rushed up. She was an imposing figure, heavyset, with tattoos and a deep voice. Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies stopped her.
Had Davien belonged to a gang, they asked?
His aunt pointed to the church. Go ask somebody in there, she said as she climbed into the ambulance. Church folks would set them straight, she figured.
A block away at the convenience store, a witness called 911. She told the operator she saw three or four people flee in a black Nissan.
“I heard the pop, pop, pop… I didn’t want them to see I saw them.”
—Witness
"I heard the pop, pop, pop. I turned, I didn't want to look at the vehicle, I didn't want them to see I saw them."
"Did you actually see them do it?" the operator said.
"Yes, I did."
"Are you going to talk to deputies?"
She paused.
"I'm a little concerned," she said, her voice quavering. "I'm a little bit worried, too, for my safety and for my kids…"
By the time detectives interviewed her, the woman insisted she had not seen the shooter.
That left Davien as the only witness.
Davien awoke in intensive care. He didn't know what day it was. He couldn't tell if the sun was rising or setting.
A thick zipper of a scar sealed his chest. A tube jutted from his stomach, another from his arm. A ventilator covered his mouth, making a Darth Vader sound. He had trouble staying awake.
Below his waist, he felt nothing.
Doctors told him he was at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, listed under a fake name as a precaution. He had been shot twice, in the left flank and right buttock. One bullet lodged in his ribs, another splintered.
Surgeons had labored for five hours to patch his left lung, remove his left kidney and his spleen. They could do nothing to repair his L1 vertebra. His legs were paralyzed.
A nurse brought pad and pen. Davien wanted to tell his family about the shooting. He had recognized the shooter, but he was too scared to write down a name.
Instead, he scribbled: "I forgive them."
Days later, Sheriff's Det. Scott Schulze showed up at Davien's bedside with a series of mug shots.
Davien spotted the shooter immediately. Jimmy Santana had taken gym classes with him in middle school and later joined a Latino gang, Monrovia Nuevo Varrio, or MNV.
The detective asked Davien if the shooter was among the photos.
Davien feared what could happen if he snitched. He also believed as a Christian that it was wrong to lie.
He circled Santana's photo. Beside it he wrote: "It's him."
He was scared. And not just for himself.
Davien's younger brothers looked a lot like him.
Seventeen days after the shooting, on Jan. 29, 2008, deputies arrested Santana at his mother's house in Duarte. He would stay in jail until a preliminary hearing to determine if he should stand trial.
Investigators believed Davien was the victim of a 17-month war between black and Latino gangs, dating to a night when Latino gang members went gunning for Vincent Minor, a black Duroc Crip associate.
About 10 p.m. on Aug. 9, 2006, suspected members of Duarte Eastside, a Latino gang, arrived at Minor's ranch house.
The gang sprayed the house with bullets from a 9mm handgun. One pierced a converted garage, killing Minor's father, 54-year-old Michael Minor, who volunteered as a youth football coach.
Payback came within hours.
Three outraged Duroc Crips spied a Duarte Eastside gang member, Marcus Maturino, sipping a beer outside a house on Shrode Avenue, less than a mile from the first shooting.
The Crips fired with a .45 and a TEC-9 handgun. They missed.
Standing nearby was Nicole Kaster, an aspiring gym teacher. A bullet struck her in the face, killing her. She was 22.
Tit-for-tat retaliation followed — with 71 gang-related shootings by the end of 2007. Investigators struggled to make arrests. Witnesses disappeared, changed their stories or clammed up.
In June 2007, members of Monrovia Nuevo Varrio strode up to a black crowd at a park and opened fire, wounding one person.
Police arrested Santana and charged him with four counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm. Later, a judge dismissed that case against him for lack of evidence.
Santana, 18, lived at home with his mother and older brother, a gang associate. Santana had been nicknamed Lil Tuffy by the gang and inducted into a clique called the Pee Wee Locos. On a bedroom wall, he had tacked an ode: "Enemies run from me, they're all cowards, because I'm the shot caller with lots of power."
On Dec. 12, a month before Davien was shot, two black men shot and killed 24-year-old Hector Acosta as he rode his motorcycle on Millbrae Avenue in Duarte. Acosta wasn't a gang member.
Everyone knew what would come next: MNV would retaliate. This time, they would send a gangster who knew how to hit a target and could be trusted not to talk if he got caught.
Davien was in the hospital for eight weeks, undergoing multiple surgeries. He tried to puzzle out why God let him get shot.
His faith wavered. He began to doubt the wisdom of testifying against Santana.
On March 14, 2008, two months after the shooting, Davien was discharged. He returned to his aunt and uncle's house in a wheelchair.
He was a wisp of his former self, 70 pounds lighter. Bones in his toes were brittle; doctors warned that if he ran into something in the chair, they could shatter.
In the weeks after he was shot, Davien was treated at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, where he underwent physical therapy as he adjusted to life in a wheelchair. (Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times)
Surgeons had removed the bullet from his ribs, but they could do nothing about the fragments near his spine. Hot fingers of pain yanked him awake at night, tugging the breath out of him.
God, give me just five minutes without it.
Davien was scheduled to testify at Santana's preliminary hearing four days after being released from the hospital.
He couldn't decide what to do. He worried that every approaching car might bring another drive-by. In a wheelchair, it would be hard to flee.
Relatives offered little help. Some were scared of being attacked; others were bent on revenge. Few trusted the police.
Davien returned to church looking for answers. On Palm Sunday, two days before Santana's hearing, he entered the sanctuary with his aunt and uncle.
He tried to listen to the sermon but he couldn't concentrate. His spine was throbbing again.
His uncle wheeled him out to the church parking lot.
You need to face your fear, his uncle said.
He started pushing Davien toward the front of the church, the site of the shooting.
His aunt joined them, followed by the pastor's wife.
They crept forward. When they reached the sidewalk, their pace turned glacial.
"OK to go further?" his uncle asked.
Davien’s uncle, Terry Alford, wheels him back to the scene of the shooting, urging him to confront his fears. (Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times)
Davien reluctantly nodded.
His aunt sobbed. The pastor's wife held her.
Staring down that barren road, walled off by backyard fences, Davien saw himself back on the grass, bleeding.
He knew three people who had been gunned down in the Monrovia area since he was shot: a 16-year-old girl killed next to the church, a 19-year-old former Duarte High School football player and a 64-year-old man. None was a gang member.
If Santana could shoot me here, he thought, he could shoot anyone anywhere.
Davien couldn't stand. But he could stand up.
"OK," he told his uncle. "I'm straight."
PART 2
Making peace
Making peace
A whirring mechanical lift raised Davien Graham’s wheelchair to the witness stand in Department Four on the third floor of the Los Angeles County courthouse in Alhambra.
Pain burned at the base of Davien’s spine. Then his eyes met Jimmy Santana’s for the first time since the shooting.
He thought Santana seemed much smaller sitting at the defense table than he with the gun in his hand. In his baggy blue jail uniform, he looked like a child, Davien thought.
Two months earlier, on Jan. 12, 2008, Davien had been gunned down as he rode his bike in front of his church, an innocent victim of a gang war that had raged in Monrovia for two years.
He recognized Santana as the shooter who fired from the car. They had gone to school together. Raised by a father and then an uncle who both were Crips, Davien learned that victims and witnesses don’t snitch—they don’t identify their attackers.
But he had shunned gang life for a Christian life, and he believed that Christians don’t lie. So when asked by detectives, he had circled Santana’s photo in a lineup of mug shots.
Now he was being asked to set aside fears of retaliation and testify in open court.
Staring at Santana, Davien said the first thing he remembered saying after the shooting was, “I forgive the person who did this to me.”
Santana stared back, appearing unmoved.
Sitting in his wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, Davien could see Santana’s mother in the gallery, a small woman with a strained face. A group of young people lounged behind her.
Maybe they were in the car with Jimmy that day.
The prosecutor asked a question, addressing Davien as John Doe, a well-meaning effort to protect his identity. It didn’t matter. Everyone in the room knew Davien.
“Do you see the man who shot you here in court today?”
“On the right side of the courtroom, and he’s wearing a blue uniform,” Davien said.
That was all the judge needed to hear. He ordered Santana to stand trial. Davien was free to go.
But he didn’t feel free.
They must think I’m a gangster and was shot as payback.
Sheriff’s investigators said he wasn’t at risk, and his family didn’t need protection. But he didn’t trust the sheriff’s department. The sheriff had sent a task force to Monrovia to stop the gang violence. They dropped warnings at gangsters’ homes.
His uncle got one. So did Davien.
That upset him. Unlike his uncle, Davien had never joined a gang.
They must think I’m a gangster and was shot as payback.
As Davien left court, the judge ordered two deputies to escort Davien to the parking lot, just in case.
Davien knew his biggest hurdle lay ahead, testifying at Santana’s trial.
As the case dragged on, Davien felt like he was doing time, waiting. He began to believe that his aunt and uncle, Joni and Terry Alford, resented him hanging around, especially when he bumped into their furniture or peed in his shabby wheelchair.
They didn’t seem to fear for his safety. Sometimes when they ran errands, they would leave him alone in the car, feeling trapped and exposed.
Davien wanted to put the trial behind him. He wanted out of Monrovia. He decided his way out was to finish high school and go to college.
It took months for Davien to regain strength. He returned to Monrovia High for his senior year. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)
In September, he returned to Monrovia High and, back among his friends, he thrived. He almost forgot about the trial. Then one day some guys drove by his house, shouting threats. It wasn’t clear if the message was meant for Davien or for his uncle.
Sometime later, Davien was called to the principal’s office. Sheriff’s deputies were waiting. They told him a message intercepted at the county jail, written in gang code, appeared to say he had been targeted.
We’re taking you home to grab some things, deputies said. You can stay in school, but not with your family. You’re being relocated.
Back at the house, his aunt watched him pack. Deputies could not say where he was going, or for how long.
“It’s messed up,” Davien said, trembling. “Not only did he take my legs away from me, now he’s trying to take my whole life.”
Deputies took Davien to stay with a teacher who the officers knew.
Davien felt safer. But he still worried, especially about his brothers at home. One of them had started working at Calvary Grace, the church where Davien had been shot.
Over the next three years, as the sheriff’s task force tamped down the gang war, Davien’s case passed to a new public defender, a new prosecutor and six different judges.
Davien graduated from high school and moved far from Monrovia to attend a four-year college. He learned to get around in his wheelchair, and had more surgeries than he could remember to deal with the bullet fragments left inside his body.
One day last fall, as he was preparing for mid-terms, Davien arrived at his apartment to find a sheriff’s detective and deputies waiting. The trial was starting Jan. 26, 2012. They handed him a subpoena, and it didn’t sit well.
He had agreed to testify. Why were they acting like they had to force him, surprising him at his apartment with his friends?
He called the new prosecutor on his case. He didn’t trust her, so he recorded the call. He asked why she hadn’t come to see him herself and why she sent deputies when she knew he had agreed to show up.
He hung up feeling like he was heading to court without anyone on his side.
Davien could feel jurors’ eyes crawling over his face. He stared ahead, focusing on the prosecutor, just as Schulze had recommended.
Davien, by then 20, shifted in his wheelchair on the stand, looking down at the gallery. He recognized Santana’s mother. She and another son testified that Santana was home with them at the time of the shooting. It was their word against Davien’s. No other witnesses were willing to testify.
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Det. Scott Schulze, whom Davien had come to trust, escorts him into court as he prepares to testify. (Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times)
No one from Davien’s family was there. He didn’t tell them about the trial because he didn’t want to put them at risk if gang members showed up.
He tried to clear his throat, his mouth was dry. In a court system handling more than 1800 attempted murder cases at the time, he felt lost.
He hoped the jurors could read him, the way parents read a child. Jurors needed to see that he was no gangster. He just happened to be young and black and in the wrong place.
Surely the lone black juror, a woman staring at him from the front row, would understand.
Santana, 23, sat 15 feet away, slouching into a baggy dress shirt.
The prosecutor asked him to demonstrate how his attacker pointed the gun.
Davien extended his willowy arms, clasping his hands in the shape of a pistol. He winced. His back ached every time he bent his 6-foot 4-inch frame to the microphone.
“Where was it being pointed?” the prosecutor asked.
“At my face.”
He could feel sweat spreading under his arms, wilting the new button-down shirt bought at Target for the trial.
“Did you see anyone in the car?” she asked.
“I saw a driver and a passenger,” Davien said, without looking at Santana.
“Did you know who said ‘Hey fool’?”
“The passenger,” he said.
“Did you get a look at the passenger?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Now Davien glanced at Santana. The accused was biting his shadow of a mustache.
“Did you see his face?” the prosecutor asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can you look around the court and see if the person is here?”
Davien did not hesitate.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Candace J. Beason looks at Jimmy Santana as Davien points at him and explains that Santana shot him. (Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times)
“Yes, ma’am,” Davien said, “He is sitting next to his lawyer in a collared shirt.”
“How confident were you that he was the person?”
“One hundred percent.”
Not long afterward, Santana’s public defender stood. Davien had once imagined himself looking just like that lawyer: a black man standing tall in an elegant suit.
What was the name of your uncle’s former gang, the lawyer asked.
Davien frowned. “I don’t recall.”
“You don’t recall what gang?”
The prosecutor objected. The judge overruled her. Davien had to answer the question.
“He was a Crip,” Davien said.
Jurors shifted in their seats. Davien feared they were souring on him. They didn’t know how hard he had tried to live right.
They think I got shot for a reason.
At 3:50 p.m. on Feb. 2, after six hours of deliberation, a buzzer sounded signaling a verdict.
The bailiff brought Santana into the courtroom. His mother bowed her head and grasped the hand of her other son, praying in a whisper of Spanish, “Let it be just.”
Four more bailiffs slipped into the courtroom for security.
As the clerk read the verdict, Santana shook his head.
Jimmy Santana reacts to the jury's verdict: guilty on all counts. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)
Guilty on all counts, including willful, deliberate and premeditated attempted murder.
Santana sobbed, curling into himself. He was soon joined by his weeping mother.
Jurors filed out, eyes darting, avoiding the Santanas and searching for the polite young man in the wheelchair who they would later say they believed from the moment he took the stand.
But Davien had gone back to school.
He would later send a statement for the prosecutor to be read to Santana at his sentencing in June.
The shooting broke him, Davien wrote. But he managed to recover and start a new life.
“I hope that you can become a better person during this whole experience,” he wrote to Santana. “Life does not end here for you. You can still do good to the world.”
Santana and his family declined to be interviewed for this article. He was sentenced to 40 years to life.
The next month, on March 17, 2012, Davien was surrounded by a crowd at his apartment. It was his birthday. He had fulfilled his childhood dream: survive to age 21.
Davien belted out a rap song he had composed.
“What do you see when you look in the mirror? Does it fade away or all get clearer?”
Davien’s father, Steven Graham, or Steve-O, was in the crowd. Steve-O had straightened out. Davien made peace with him and his mother—but as friends, not as parents. He had been his own parent for a long time.
He had accepted life in a wheelchair.
School can take me places that walking can’t.
He had fulfilled his childhood dream: Survive to age 21.
Davien, finishing his third year of college, plans to graduate with a degree in video production.
He has a five-year plan, which includes self-producing two rap albums from his mix tapes: “Musical Chair” and “Ramps and Elevators.”
He also plans a clothing line featuring a stylized handicapped logo, an after-school program for at-risk youth and a screenplay titled, “Where there’s wheels, there’s a way.”
At the party, his girlfriend presented a marble sheet decorated with his planned album cover: a photo of Davien in his wheelchair.
“It’s not every day a young man turns 21,” his father said. “You’re grown for the rest of your life—don’t turn back.”
He handed Davien a flute of pink champagne. Davien sipped slowly. Leaning forward to blow out his candles, he made a wish.
TEL AVIV — With rockets landing on the outskirts of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on Friday and the Egyptian prime minister making a solidarity visit to Gaza, the accelerating conflict between Israel and Hamas — reminiscent in many ways of so many previous battles — has the makings of a new kind of Israeli-Palestinian face-off.
The combination of longer-range and far deadlier rockets in the hands of more radicalized Palestinians, the arrival in Gaza and Sinai from North Africa of other militants pressuring Hamas to fight more, and the growing tide of anti-Israel fury in a region where authoritarian rulers have been replaced by Islamists means that Israel is engaging in this conflict with a different set of challenges.
The Middle East of 2012 is not what it was in late 2008, the last time Israel mounted a military invasion to reduce the rocket threat from Gaza. Many analysts and diplomats outside Israel say the country today needs a different approach to Hamas and the Palestinians based more on acknowledging historic grievances and shifting alliances.
“As long as the crime of dispossession and refugeehood that was committed against the Palestinian people in 1947-48 is not redressed through a peaceful and just negotiation that satisfies the legitimate rights of both sides, we will continue to see enhancements in both the determination and the capabilities of Palestinian fighters — as has been the case since the 1930s, in fact,” Rami G. Khouri, a professor at the American University of Beirut, wrote in an online column. “Only stupid or ideologically maniacal Zionists fail to come to terms with this fact.”
But the government in Israel and the vast majority of its people have drawn a very different conclusion. Their dangerous neighborhood is growing still more dangerous, they agree. That means not concessions, but being tougher in pursuit of deterrence, and abandoning illusions that a Jewish state will ever be broadly accepted here.
“There is a theory, which I believe, that Hamas doesn’t want a peaceful solution and only wants to keep the conflict going forever until somehow in their dream they will have all of Israel,” Eitan Ben Eliyahu, a former leader of the Israeli Air Force, said in a telephone briefing. “There is a good chance we will go into Gaza on the ground again.”
What is striking in listening to the Israelis discuss their predicament is how similar the debate sounds to so many previous ones, despite the changed geopolitical circumstances. In most minds here, the changes do not demand a new strategy, simply a redoubled old one.
The operative metaphor is often described as “cutting the grass,” meaning a task that must be performed regularly and has no end. There is no solution to security challenges, officials here say, only delays and deterrence. That is why the idea of one day attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, even though such an attack would set the nuclear program back only two years, is widely discussed as a reasonable option. That is why frequent raids in the West Bank and surveillance flights over Lebanon never stop.
And that is why this week’s operation in Gaza is widely viewed as having been inevitable, another painful but necessary maintenance operation that, officials here say, will doubtless not be the last.
There are also those who believe that the regional upheavals are improving Israel’s ability to carry out deterrence. One retired general who remains close to the military and who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that with Syria torn apart by civil war, Hezbollah in Lebanon discredited because of its support for the Syrian government, and Egypt so weakened economically, Israel should not worry about anything but protecting its civilians.
“Should we let our civilians be bombed because the Arab world is in trouble?” he asked.
So much was happening elsewhere in the region — the Egyptian and Libyan revolutions, the Syrian civil war, dramatic changes in Yemen and elections in Tunisia — that a few rockets a day that sent tens of thousands of Israeli civilians into bomb shelters drew little attention. But in the Israeli view, the necessity of a Gaza operation has been growing steadily throughout the Arab Spring turmoil.
In 2009, after the Israeli invasion pushed Hamas back and killed about 1,400 people in Gaza, 200 rockets hit Israel. The same was true in 2010. But last year the number rose to 600, and before this week the number this year was 700, according to the Israeli military. The problem went beyond rockets to mines planted near the border aimed at Israeli military jeeps and the digging of explosive-filled tunnels.
“In 2008 we managed to minimize rocket fire from Gaza significantly,” said Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, a military spokeswoman. “We started that year with 100 rockets a week and ended it with two a week. We were able to give people in our south two to three years. But the grass has grown, and other things have as well. Different jihadist ideologies have found their way into Gaza, including quite a few terrorist organizations. More weapons have come in, including the Fajr-5, which is Iranian made and can hit Tel Aviv. That puts nearly our entire population in range. So we reached a point where we cannot act with restraint any longer.”
Gazans see events in a very different light. The problem, they say, comes from Israel: Israeli drones fill the Gazan skies, Israeli gunboats strafe their waters, Palestinian militants are shot at from the air, and the Gaza border areas are declared off limits by Israel with the risk of death from Israeli gunfire.
But there is little dissent in Israel about the Gaza policy. This week leaders of the leftist opposition praised the assassination of Ahmed al-Jabari, the Hamas military commander, on Wednesday. He is viewed here as the equivalent of Osama bin Laden. The operation could go on for many days before there is any real dissent.
The question here, nonetheless, is whether the changed regional circumstances will make it harder to “cut the grass” in Gaza this time and get out. A former top official who was actively involved in the last Gaza war and who spoke on the condition of anonymity said it looked to him as if Hamas would not back down as easily this time.
“They will not stop until enough Israelis are killed or injured to create a sense of equality or balance,” he said. “If a rocket falls in the middle of Tel Aviv, that will be a major success. But this government will go back at them hard. I don’t see this ending in the next day or two.”
