If trust of important people who value their security is a measure, Adam Waters has had some success in the business of security alarm installation.

When he worked in North Carolina, Waters installed the home security system of then-Gov. Jim Hunt, according to Waters’ lawyer, Mark Correro. He also wired the home of the local mayor, as well as some buildings at an area air force base.

“He’s had a lot of high-level clearances,” Correro said.

But when Waters moved to Texas and applied for his state license to perform the same work here, he was rejected. The reason: An arrest a year earlier for speeding on his motorcycle and not pulling over quickly enough.

The obvious question — What does such a violation have to do with a person’s fitness to install security systems? — highlights the occasionally capricious way the state’s occupational licensing laws are applied. (For more on how seemingly unrelated crimes can scuttle a state-issued license to work, go here. For a story about how state regulators have tried to use a licensee’s off-duty behavior as a reason to take action against his or her license, go here.)

According to documents filed at the State Office for Administrative Hearings, which handles most occupational licensing disputes, Waters has worked in the alarm system installation business for about 25 years in several different states. After moving to Texas in 2011 and getting hired by a Houston-area company, he applied for permission to work in the field to the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Private Security Program, which oversees alarm-related professions.

On Aug. 30 of last year, however, the agency summarily denied his application, citing his criminal history. According to court papers, that involved a single case, in which Waters was pulled over in Lee County, east of Austin, while riding his motorcycle from San Antonio to College Station.

Waters concedes he was going “very fast.” And he says that he did not see police pursuing him “due to reduced vision in his rear-view mirrors,” a circumstance he calls “stupid.” But, he added, he’d never been in legal trouble before, and he sold his bike soon after the incident.

He pleaded guilty in September 2011 to evading arrest or detention with vehicle, a state jail felony. In exchange, he received deferred adjudication — a deal in which the charges will disappear from his record if he stays out of trouble for three years.

So far, that appears like a good bet. He was ordered to pay a $3,000 fine — which Correro says he has paid most of already — and to perform 150 hours of community service, which he has completed. He has also submitted to regular drug and alcohol tests, which he has passed.

None of that was good enough for state regulators, though. Two weeks ago, an administrative law judge ruled that the public safety department was justified in denying Waters’ license.

With the case decided (Waters can re-apply in 2014, when his court supervision ends), it’s worth asking how the decision to shut Waters out of his trade promotes Texans’ safety, or helps Texas. The connection between Waters’ criminal charge and his threat to citizens, for example, isn’t immediately obvious.

Court documents also show that Waters, who has seven children aged infant to 18, earned about $75,000 as an experienced security system installer. Deprived of his occupation of choice and training, he currently earns $8.75 cleaning trucks, a wage he says will make it extremely difficult to support his family.

The bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon this week give a chilling glimpse of just how much damage AWOL soldier Pfc. Naser Abdo could have caused had his attempted 2011 Fort Hood attack gone as he had planned.

Preliminary evidence from Boston shows that the bombs were made from pressure cookers, similar to those from a bomb-making recipe published by the Al Qaeda English-language magazine Inspire. That’s the same recipe investigators say Abdo was using to build a homemade bomb out of a pressure cooker in a Killeen budget hotel.

Abdo was sentenced to life in prison last year for plotting to plant his bomb in a Killeen buffet restaurant popular with Fort Hood soldiers. During his trial, prosecutors played video of a staged explosion of a bomb that forensic experts made following the Inspire instructions. But that re-enactment, using dummies to represent unsuspecting diners, gave just a hint of the destruction Abdo could have caused. In Boston, bombs killed 3 and wounded more than 170, leaving many with catastrophic limb injuries requiring amputations.

Police found pressure cookers, clocks and electrical wire in Abdo’s backpack and room, along with a bomb-building article from an al-Qaeda magazine.

During Abdo’s federal trial in Waco, prosecutor Gregg Sofer told jurors that Abdo was “only hours away from finishing construction” of a homemade bomb when he was arrested at a Killeen motel just outside Fort Hood.

Abdo also told an Austin-based FBI agent that he picked Killeen to “remind people” of Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused in the 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood. In an earlier court appearance, Abdo yelled out Hasan’s name.

Yet other trial testimony revealed Abdo may have originally sought to target Austin. Dallas-area taxi driver Husam Al-Qaysi, a native of Iraq, testified that he drove Abdo to Wal-Mart two times the night before he went to Killeen to buy items including pressure cookers and clocks. He said Abdo paid him about $400 to drive him to Killeen, but he said the Army town was not Abdo’s first choice. “At first he said he wanted to go to Austin,” Al-Qaysi testified. “Then he got a map and said, ‘Hold on; let me check.’”

Fed up with the silence surrounding the cartel activity that has engulfed their border city, a group of cyber-savvy “hacktivists” have launched an unprecedented attack against the Zeta crime syndicate in Ciudad Acuna.

The Free Acuna group, which is part of the online Anonymous movement, plans to release a trove of information identifying properties, ranches and businesses belonging to narcos in their city, information they promise will make also make life uncomfortable for the officials and politicians working with them.

Just across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Ciudad Acuna may be best known to Texans for its colorful bar district, which has inspired songs by ZZ Top, George Strait and Robert Earl Keen and served as locations for such movies as Desperado and Like Water for Chocolate. But in recent years, the city has increasingly fallen under the grip of the Zetas, perhaps the most violent and destructive of Mexico’s crime cartels. In addition to drug trafficking, the Zetas have expanded into more sinister money making endeavors such as kidnapping and extortion.

Along much of the Mexican side of the borderlands, cartel hitmen have largely frightened the local media into silence when it comes to their activities and many local newspapers have stopped printing news of cartel shootings. That’s left online blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to fill the void. And investigations into the cartel nexus with local officials and businesses, which go to the very heart of the cartels’ power, have become even more rare.

This week, Free Acuna began publishing photos of homes and businesses they say belong to cartel operatives (for now the blog post is only in Spanish).

In a previous communication with the Austin American-Statesman, a member of the group said the aim was to “rattle” cages with the postings. “The Zetas operate so independently and open in this town that there is no attempt on their part to hide,” the group member told us.

Needless to say, this is highly dangerous business. Mexicans have been killed for doing far less: In 2011, two people were tortured, killed and hung from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo as a warning to social media users in Mexico. A sign accompanying the bodies read in part, “This is going to happen to all those posting funny things on the internet.” And more recently, a cartel put out a $50,000 reward for personal information relating to the anonymous operator of a Tamaulipas Facebook page that chronicled in real time shootouts, cartel roadblocks and other activities that affect residents.

Located in the Mexican state of Coahuila, Ciudad Acuna was once part of what was called the “frontera blanca,” or peaceful border. The region, which includes neighboring Piedras Negras, earned the nickname for its relative tranquility even as Juarez to the west and Nuevo Laredo to the east exploded with cartel violence. That all changed about six years ago with a violent schism between the Gulf Cartel and its former enforcers and allies the Zetas. Today, Zetas and hitmen from the Sinaloa cartel, battle for control of the region.

The city has been home to some high profile cartel killings in recent months. In October, the son of former governor Jose Eduardo Moreira was killed in an ambush that authorities say was arranged by high ranking city police officials, who were providing protection to the Zetas.

We sent a number of questions to the Free Acuna group and got some interesting answers. Look out for the Q&A in an upcoming post.

The Boston Marathon bombing case isn’t the first time FBI agents had someone on their radar who later inflicted mass casualties, but didn’t take action.

In 2011, agents interviewed Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and concluded that he wasn’t involved in any domestic or foreign terrorism activity, according to the Associated Press. The FBI says it also checked U.S. government databases, telephone communications, possible use of radical online sites, as well as Tsarnaev’s personal associations, travel and education history.

That’s more than FBI agents did when they learned that accused Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan was corresponding with al Qaeda-linked cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in 2008. According to an extensive investigation sparked by the November 2009 shooting, agents concluded that Hasan was conducting research on behalf of the Army and worried that an interview would “harm Hasan’s career.” And pursuing Hasan, a Muslim Army officer, would be “politically sensitive,” according an unclassified report.

The failures in the Hasan case led to a lengthy investigation overseen by former FBI and CIA director William Webster, who detailed a series of missteps that ultimately led to the failure of anti-terrorism agents to contact Hasan. But the resulting report did not call for disciplinary action against any of the agents involved in the failed operation. Instead it took aim at the FBI’s lack of clear policies and procedures, which investigators say allowed the Hasan case to fall through the cracks.

Additional FBI soul searching will undoubtedly follow the Tsarnaev revelations, although second guessing is likely to bump up against civil liberty concerns. According to CBS News, which first reported the 2011 interview with Tsarnaev, federal authorities are prohibited from running open-ended investigations into American citizens, or those legally in the United States, “in the absence of a clear indicator of criminal activity or association with terrorism.”

Last week I was in West covering the explosion at West Fertilizer Co., talking to people who had been evacuated from their homes, watching donations stack up at the Best Western and trying to find people who knew the first responders who had lost their lives.

Thursday night, when my colleague Tony Plohetski asked the clerk at our hotel in Hillsboro for a dinner recommendation, she suggested we head to the Black-eyed Pea near the hotel. We did, and found a restaurant staff trying hard to smile when they were clearly upset about something. Then we saw the flyer near the front door announcing a fundraiser for the family of Jerry Chapman, a volunteer firefighter who was taking emergency medical technician classes in West. Chapman, who turned 26 on April 10, had been a server at the restaurant, and he had died in the explosion the day before while trying to battle the fire at the plant.

That led to a long interview with two of his best friends the next day, which led to this story that Tim Eaton and I wrote for Saturday’s paper about Chapman and another first responder who had lost their lives.

That led to a Saturday evening phone call from David Coleman, president of the College Board — the organization that creates the national SAT test and offers a host of other college readiness programs.He had read the article that day and said he was especially moved by Chapman’s story and wanted to create a scholarship to honor Chapman and other first responders (including those who rushed to save people injured in the Boston Marathon bombing last week).

Today, less than a week later, I got a press release announcing the scholarship. The College Board gave it some seed money (the release doesn’t say how much) and is reaching out to its members and the public for contributions. The final amount of the scholarship won’t be announced until fundraising is completed.

At the Black-eyed Pea that day, Chapman’s friends Sharon Matthews and Shelby McComas — wearing matching Batman shirts to honor their Batman-loving friend — couldn’t stop talking about Chapman, saying they wanted to tell the world what a great man he was. Their heartfelt stories about Chapman clearly connected with Coleman, and now some future student will get a scholarship inspired in part by Jerry Chapman’s sacrifice for his community.

The Black-eyed Pea held its fundraiser Saturday. Fatima Creamer, the restaurant’s general manager, said the restaurant was packed all day and a “substantial portion” of the day’s receipts will go to Chapman’s family, along with a donation from the corporate office and money raised by other Black-eyed Pea locations in Texas.

Creamer couldn’t give the exact amount because “money’s still rolling in,” she said. “I’m totally amazed at how people opened their hearts and their pocketbooks, especially with the economy the way it is now.”

Does an incident of prostitution mean a person is morally unfit to teach you how to ride a motorcycle?

Over the past couple of years, I’ve written plenty about some of the more questionable aspects of state vocational licensing, including stories about how state regulators regularly sanction licensees’ for their off-duty behavior that has nothing to do with their work; how simple paper snafus can grow into bureaucratic nightmares that threaten a licensee’s livelihood; and how prisoners can be trained at taxpayer expense to work in a state-licensed profession, only to be told after release that their criminal record precludes it.

But there’s no shortage of other examples demonstrating how the government’s unbending rules can test common sense. Norris Burns’ case is the latest I’ve run across.

Beginning in 2009, anyone seeking a Texas motorcycle license must take a safety course. Instructors need to be licensed by the Department of Public Safety, which administers a program of tests and apprenticeship programs. There are about 500 licensed instructors statewide.

Because the occupation is state licensed, that means the public safety department can also revoke its permission to work in the profession. Some — but not all — criminal convictions are disqualifying. Safety instructor licensees can’t have any felony convictions within the past ten years, for example. Nor can they have any DWIs within the past five.

Like many state-regulated professions,however, disqualifying crimes also include those of “moral turpitude” — one of which is prostitution.

On Jan. 25, 2007, Burns, of Carrollton, pleaded guilty in Dallas County court to a misdemeanor charge of prostitution. He received a deferred adjudication, a fine of $100, six months of community supervision and 24 hours of community service. He apparently continued working as a safety instructor. (Burns did not return calls for comment.)

But five years later, when the Department of Public Safety discovered the old crime as part of a new license renewal system, it moved to cancel his license. Burns appealed, but last May an administrative law judge sided with the agency and Burns lost his license to teach motorcycle safety.

The argument that those convicted of moral turpitude crimes don’t deserve a government-issued occupational license is that people who show poor judgment or control in some situations, even if only criminally minor, can’t be entrusted to act in the best interests of the profession. While that makes obvious sense in some cases — elementary school teaching, say — the reasoning is less clear in others.

Such as motorcycle safety.

Program director John Young said there are good reasons why a prostitution conviction should bar someone from the motorcycle safety profession. He said that the job is no different than any other teaching position, and all teachers must possess high moral character. That’s true with motorcycle safety, in particular, because riders as young as 15 are eligible for the class, he said.

“We have to really make sure everyone is qualified,” he said.

In Sunday’s paper we explored how the hotels and motels clustered along Interstate 35 near Rundberg Lane have over the years become the preferred crash pads for drug dealers, prostitutes and other criminals in the area — and what owners and managers are doing to try to keep the riff-raff out of their rooms.

(You can read the story here)

One common theme that I heard from the people who run these motels is that they need to work together and share information about people they don’t want on their property. Most of the motels maintain a “do not rent” list, but they don’t have any organized way to share that information. At most, a manager or desk clerk might phone nearby motels to warn them about someone they turned away, because that person is almost certain to walk to the next motel in search of a room.

Until now, the desire to present a united front against the area’s street criminals has been mostly talk. But on Wednesday, owners and managers from eight motels met at the Orangewood Inn and Suites (on the east side of I-35) at the invitation of Taber White, an Austin police district representative for the area.

“It was one of the most positive meetings I’ve been to in a while,” White said. “They had a lot of good ideas.”

Representatives of the Budget Lodge, Economy Inn, Austin Village Motor Inn, Budget Inn, Red Roof Inn, Austin Suites, Super 8 and Orangewood Inn and Suites came to the table, White said. The Holiday Inn Express and the Motel 6 at Rundberg and I-35 were invited but did not send a representative, he said.

Police have said they don’t get many calls to the Holiday Inn, which charges much higher rates than its neighbors. A Motel 6 spokesperson said their manager had a prior commitment and couldn’t make it, adding that “Motel 6 has a long history of cooperation with APD, including participation by the general manager in previous group meetings with APD.”

White said the motels agreed that they need to set up some sort of forum or network where they can discuss problems on the strip and share information about problem guests instantly (since some of the motels are literally next door to each other). They also talked about the need to match up their check-in policies (for example, many of them require a photo ID and won’t accepting cash so they know exactly who is staying in their rooms).

A persistent problem over the years, White said, is that while some motels have enforced strict policies to keep criminals out, nearby motels have rented rooms to anyone and everyone — and one or two weak links is all the criminals need to get entrenched.

The motels also agreed that they need to be united so they can have a stronger voice in talking to police and the city about cleaning up the area, which has been plagued with street crime for years.

“Nobody, as best I can tell, wants it to look like a slum,” White said.

The group agreed that they should have regular meetings to discuss common problems and possible solutions, such as a universal Do Not Rent list they all maintain and honor.

“This was a really good bunch and they really seem like they want to do something,” said White, who has spent months working to put together the meeting.

In early February, we wrote about a mounting backlog of samples awaiting testing at the Austin police crime lab that was causing unprecedented delays in both felony and misdemeanor criminal cases.

According to our report at the time, some cases couldn’t go forward for at least six months, stressing an already busy judicial system. The number of samples awaiting testing — such as blood and drugs — had nearly doubled in five years.

The county’s 13 criminal judges had complained; So had District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg and County Attorney David Escamilla.

With special funding from the Austin City Council, the department has now hired three new chemists to help ease the strain.

“We are absolutely ecstatic,” Ed Harris, the department’s chief of field support services, who oversees the lab, told me today. “We have three solid people we have brought on board who are going to be able to, once trained, help us with this.”

Soon after our Feb. 3 report, city council members approved spending $181,000 for three new hires and new equipment for the rest of the year — then promised to permanently include those positions in next year’s budget.

“I think the case is pretty compelling that this is something that needs to be done,” Mayor Lee Leffingwell said at the time. “I don’t think there is any question about that. The waiting time is not something that is tolerable as far as I’m concerned.”

Harris said today that the new employees will have to spend several weeks learning the lab’s specific protocols and policies.

He said he did not know how how quickly the lab’s backlog will be reduced, but that is hopeful for noticeable results in the next few months.

Last month we brought you the story of a group of “hacktevists” in Ciudad Acuna who are embarking on an audacious plan to publicly reveal addresses, photos and documents related to cartel activity in their city, which sits across the Rio Grande from Del Rio.

The group in Acuna - related to the online Anonymous movement, which has been involved in several high profile leaks including the dump of emails belonging to the Austin security consulting group Stratfor - says it began its work to fill in the gaps of local media, which has largely been frightened into silence by the cartels.

Such “zones of silence” have proliferated in recent years along the Texas-Mexico border, with news reporting on the cartels in places like Reynosa, Matamoros and Nuevo Laredo virtually non-existent. In the place of traditional reporting, bloggers, tweeters and other social media users have stepped up to provide basic information about shootouts, deaths and narco-roadblocks. It’s dangerous work, and Mexicans have been killed for doing far less than what the Free Acuna group is doing.

But the reality is that as of now, there are precious few alternatives when it comes to attempting to puncture those silent zones, which increasingly make law abiding residents in those areas feel like they have been abandoned by the rest of the world.

The zones of silence aren’t just problematic for Mexican journalists: U.S. journalists likewise struggle to find ways to safely and responsibly report from these troubled areas, where local officials can’t always be counted on for protection. At the same time, the number of American journalists covering border issues has dropped precipitously over the last decade.

Fortunately, recent years have seen a push for more creative ways to bridge the information gap. The Knight Center for the Americas at the University of Texas has held a series of conferences in which the journalists from both sides of the border have discussed ways to increase cooperation and collaboration.

In the meantime, below is an edited transcript of an email Q&A with the group.

An influential veterans lobbying group is trying to stop billions of dollars in potential cuts to the nation’s food stamp program, warning legislators that some 1.5 million veterans depended on such benefits in 2011. VoteVets also points out that over $100 million in food aid was used on military bases that year.

The House Agriculture Committee recently approved $2.5 billion in cuts to the food stamp program as part of a larger farm bill. The Senate version would make a smaller cut of $400 million.

The issue of military poverty is one that rarely makes headlines. Last year in a special report, we found that food stamp usage at Fort Hood commissaries had ballooned from $285,000 in 2001 to $1.4 million in 2011. Between 2008 and 2012, about 5,000 Fort Hood families had sought assistance from an on-post food pantry.

Military poverty is most acute for lower-rank enlisted soldiers with large families, which after a decade of war make up a growing percentage of the fighting force.

A Texas lawmaker has had an Austin police warrant out for his arrest for nearly a year for an unresolved speeding ticket, but paid his fine this afternoon within minutes of an American-Statesman inquiry.

“It was an oversight on my part,” said State Rep. James White, a Republican from Woodville. “I’ve just taken care of it.”

White paid $300 — his fine for speeding 40 miles per hour in a 30 mile per hour zone in the 1100 block of Winsted Lane near Mopac (Loop 1) and Enfield Road — plus court costs.

The newspaper received information about the warrant today and verified that White had not paid.

Austin Municipal Court Clerk Rebecca Stark said Austin police issued the ticket May 11, 2012 and that a judge signed an arrest warrant July 13, 2012 after White did not pay his fine or appear in court.

The newspaper then called White for comment.

White returned the call about 10 minutes later, saying the matter was resolved. He said the phone call “jarred my memory” and that he had forgotten to pay the ticket.

Six months after a grand jury investigation was promised into the South Texas shooting deaths of two Guatemalan immigrants in a pickup truck being pursued by a Texas Department of Public Safety helicopter, the case has yet to go forward.

How come? Officials say that fragmentary evidence recovered from the controversial incident near the Mexican border is still awaiting processing in crime labs in Texas and New Mexico.

DPS has completed some ballistics testing, but Rene Guerra, the district attorney of Hidalgo County, where the men were killed in October, also wanted an independent evaluation. In March, the New Mexico Department of Public Safety agreed to perform that task.

Asked for an update this week, Texas DPS spokesman Tom Vinger said in an email, “The trace evidence currently being processed at the DPS lab will be completed by week’s end, and we anticipate the independent ballistics test results to be available in the next two - three weeks.”

What’s taking New Mexico so long? It’s been speculated that since Texas isn’t paying for the forensics work — it’s termed a “professional courtesy” — New Mexico may not be highly motivated.

However, a spokesman for that state suggests the delay is not unusual. “I wish it were all like a CSI TV show, but yes, the tests take time and as with anything times vary,” said Tony Lynn with the New Mexico Department of Public Safety.

Back in January, DPS director Steve McCraw, a former FBI agent himself, asked the FBI and the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to backstop his agency’s investigation of the shootings. But the feds apparently didn’t want the ballistics job.

“I believe an effort was made for the FBI to do the test and they declined,” said Guerra.

From the beginning, DPS has released scant details on the shooting and denied most requests for more information under the state open records act. The incident began on a dirt road near the small town of La Joya on Oct. 26, when a DPS helicopter gave chase to a pickup truck that was mistakenly believed to be carrying drugs under a blanket in the bed of the vehicle. It was carrying nine Guatemalan immigrants instead.

A state trooper aboard the aircraft opened fire on the truck, aiming for the tires in an attempt to disable it. When it came to a halt, two men under the blanket were dead, and a third was wounded.

National headlines followed, and a torrent of public criticism directed at DPS. Law enforcement experts from around the country said that other police agencies don’t shoot from helicopters because it’s too risky. Three months later, McCraw announced a change in DPS policy to disallow the practice unless a “suspect has used or is about to use deadly force by use of a deadly weapon.”

Guerra had previously said he expected to take the case to a grand jury months ago. But it’s uncertain whether either of the grand juries now sitting in Hidalgo County will hear the case before their terms end in June.

The DPS trooper who fired the shots, Miguel Avila, was placed on leave after the incident but has since returned to duty. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed that seven other Guatemalan citizens who were in the pickup, including the wounded man, have been deported.

Over the last year, Maj. Nidal Hasan has tried several times to plead guilty to charges he killed 13 people and wounded 32 during a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in November 2009.

But despite saying he seeks to take responsibility for the massacre, Hasan has been rebuffed by a military judge who said she could not accept his plea. Judge Col. Tara Osborn cited military justice rules which prevent a judge from accepting guilty pleas on charges that could lead to the death penalty. Simply put, military defendants facing death must put on a defense of some kind. Several dramatic pre-trial hearings in the Hasan case have focused on this issue.

Yet earlier this week, another Army defendant, Sgt. Robert Bales, pleaded guilty to charges he killed 16 Afghan villagers during a shooting rampage in 2012, an incident that sparked massive protests in Afghanistan against the U.S. military and strained relations with Afghan armed forces. In pleading guilty, Bales avoided the death penalty and now faces life in prison.

Two mass shootings. One military criminal justice system. Two different legal results. Why the difference?

The short answer is that in the Bales case, commanders at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state agreed to a plea deal. Under military law, the Army commanders who make up the so-called convening authority have ultimate say over what charges are brought and what plea deals are made (in the civilian system, that call is made by prosecutors). In military capital cases, the convening authority is typically the commanding general of an installation.

In the Hasan case, where the evidence against Hasan is overwhelming, witnesses are plentiful, and outrage is high, the Fort Hood command has shown no appetite for a plea bargain.

Geoffrey Corn, military law expert at South Texas College of Law, said there are ample legal differences in the cases, including evidence of premeditation (Hasan began taking shooting lessons months before the rampage, according to testimony in an evidentiary hearing).

The Bales case is less clear cut, experts say. Prosecutors may have worried about obtaining a death sentence during the punishment phase, given Bales’ documented post traumatic stress disorder, the result of multiple tours to the war zone. PTSD is a defense that Hasan, who was never deployed, can’t claim, but it has played a role in other capital cases.

Last month, Sgt. John Russell was also allowed to plead guilty to killing five people, including soldiers, at a combat stress clinic in Iraq in 2009 after his lawyers argued that his PTSD made him not fully responsible for the shooting.

There is another obvious difference in the cases that goes beyond legalities: Hasan, an American-born Muslim, has said he killed fellow soldiers to protect the Afghan Taliban. Dozens of victims and family members have pushed the Department of Defense to label Hasan a foreign terrorist, which officials have not done for fear of hindering his prosecution. Were those same officials to agree to a plea deal that saves Hasan from the death penalty, one can only imagine the public outrage and political fallout. While there is also notable anger in Afghanistan over the Bales killings, a comparison of press coverage of the two cases shows how much more focused the American public is on the Fort Hood shootings.

Some experts think the discrepancy in plea deals could even play a role in Hasan’s sentencing. Military defense attorney James Rinckey told Stars and Stripes that Hasan could argue that he is being singled out because he killed Americans rather than Afghans.

“Is an American life valued more than an (Afghan) national?” Rinckey told the newspaper. “As a defense attorney, absolutely I’m going to make that argument.”

This weekend I wrote a profile of Howard Antelis, an IRS tax examiner who turned whistle-blower after trying for years to get his bosses at the tax agency to pay attention to what he said was wide-spread fraud at the Austin office.

Antelis worked processing Individual Tax Identification Numbers, or ITINs, which workers without social security numbers must use to file tax returns. But a combination of a system of generous dependant exemptions and loose identification requirements had resulted in massive fraud:

“Using obviously forged documents, thousands of applicants were claiming as many as 10 or 12 dependants each, often for multiple years, resulting in individual tax refunds of tens of thousands of dollars.”

After the article was published, several readers wrote in asking me if the federal government prosecuted such cases. The answer is: Not very often.

But for those interested in seeing what such a prosecution looks like, here is an indictment from a recent case filed in U.S. District Court in North Carolina.

In the criminal complaint filed last summer, the IRS accused Cathy Cisneros of orchestrating a tax fraud similar to what Antelis described to U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett’s office in 2010, and which the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which watch-dogs the IRS, confirmed in a 2012 audit.

According to the indictment, the scheme began unraveling when it attracted the attention of U.S. Post Office workers, who noticed that “an extraordinarily large number” Treasury tax refund checks were going to four apartments in Charlotte, with names of people on them who did not live at the residences.

Using the addresses, plus one more linked by Cisneros’s name to a fifth apartment, the IRS traced more than 800 1040 tax forms that had been sent to the apartments during the first six months of 2012. Together, the returns had refunds totaling $3.8 million.

A further check of a random sample of the names on the returns found that not only did the tax filers not live at the address, but that they didn’t actually exist, at least as U.S. residents.

In other words, a precise example of the sort of fraud scheme Antelis had been trying to get his managers to pay attention to for years.

The state of California is following Texas’s lead by establishing a “strike force” of state-employed claims counselors to help the federal Department of Veterans Affairs reduce a historic backlog of disability claims.

California announced its $3 million claims team in late June, about a year after Texas began pouring millions of dollars into its own groundbreaking program. Under the Texas model, state employees located in VA regional offices and medical centers work on the most complicated and severely backlogged cases.

Texas actually pioneered the program back in 2009, when it spent about $400,000 to hire temporary counselors. Last year Texas renewed the effort with $1.5 million to fund both strike force and “fully developed claims” teams in hopes of reducing the backlog. The Texas Legislature recently approved an additional $4 million for the effort through 2015.

Over the last year, pending claims at the Waco Regional Office, once the nation’s slowest, fell by almost 25 percent. But average wait times continue to grow for Central Texas veterans: it currently takes the Waco office an average of 444 days to complete a disability ratings claim, up from 403 days in July 2012.

As bad as those numbers are, however, the situation in California, which has the nation’s largest number of veterans (Texas is 2nd), is worse. The average waiting time at the Los Angeles Regional Office is a staggering 568 days; in Oakland it is 476 days.

While no other states have put together similar strike force teams, Sen. John Cornyn, R-TX, last year filed legislation to take the program nationwide. The bill passed the Senate, but hasn’t cleared the House of Representatives.

Conventional wisdom might be that a jury of high ranking Army officers wouldn’t hesitate before sending Maj. Nidal Hasan to death row for his role in killing 12 soldiers and a civilian during a 2009 rampage at Fort Hood.

And that may yet be the case. But at least two jurors accepted to hear the trial expressed some reservations about the death penalty this week during jury selection.

One officer, a male colonel who was working at the Pentagon when it was struck on 9/11, said he believes the death penalty is used too often in the civilian justice system and is not an effective deterrent. “In general my view is that capital punishment is a punishment from days gone by and that there are probably better ways to rehabilitate (offenders),” the officer told prosecutors.

But the man added that opinion is not “an absolute statement” and said his beliefs wouldn’t prevent him from considering the death penalty for Hasan.

The second officer, a female major and self-described “very religious” Christian, said she has become much more skeptical of the death penalty as better DNA testing has proven that a number of death row inmates were in fact innocent.

“There’s been plenty of cases where people were on death row and evidence has popped up to acquit them,” she said during questioning from prosecutors.

DNA would likely not be a factor in convicting Hasan, who has admitted to being the shooter, though he is barred from pleading guilty because military rules prevent defendants from doing so to charges that could bring the death penalty.

Both officers made the jury Wednesday after they were questioned by prosecutors and Hasan, who is acting as his own attorney. Four others were dismissed, bringing the current jury pool to 10. At least 13 jurors are required before the trial can start; jury selection will continue on Monday.

The death penalty views of the other eight jurors, who were not probed on the subject by the military’s lawyers or Hasan, are less clear. All potential jurors filled out a lengthy questionnaire last year that included questions about the death penalty, but those have not been made public.

As the Associated Press reports today, the newspapers of Nuevo Laredo have made no mention of the arrest of Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, better known as Z-40, the supreme leader of the murderous Zetas crime organization.

Without a doubt, Z-40’s arrest is huge news for Nuevo Laredo. Not only did the arrest occur in in Nuevo Laredo, but the leader’s downfall promises massive changes for the troubled border city. Some have theorized that it opens the door for the rival Sinaloa cartel to renew its claim to Nuevo Laredo, which would usher in a period of greater violence, at least in the short term. Nuevo Laredo, sitting across from the I-35 superhighway, is the crown jewel of border crossings for Mexican traffickers; it was a dispute over Nuevo Laredo back in 2005 that some believe kicked off the modern era of cartel ultraviolence.

As we have reported before, Nuevo Laredo’s newspapers have reason to be worried about what they print. The city’s largest and most respected daily, El Manana, has been the subject or repeated attacks, by both grenade and automatic rifle, and, in the absence of any meaningful protection from the Mexican government, made the understandable decision to stop reporting on the narco wars.

So what have Nuevo Laredo’s newspaper readers been learning about in the day’s since Monday’s arrest? El Manana’s headlines this morning include stories on dengue fever, a local Little League team heading to Williamsport, and construction of a new bus terminal. El Diario de Nuevo Laredo has stories on new businesses coming to town and illegal tire dumping.

Compare that to this morning’s El Universal, one of Mexico City’s largest dailies, whose stories on Z-40 include an analysis on what the arrest means for the Zeta leadership and a article questioning why the Zeta leader was allowed to walk into jail without handcuffs.

At Fort Hood, officials are understandably proud of their high prosecution rate when it comes to sexual assaults. Of the 200 sexual assault reports in the last two years, 49 have resulted in court-martials, the Statesman reported exclusively in May. While that might not sound overly impressive, the post’s 25 percent rate is more than double the military-wide average of just 10 percent. And depending on the outcome of another 22 cases currently in the system, Fort Hood’s rate could top 30 percent.

But for victims’ advocates, those relatively rosy numbers mask a deeper problem within the U.S. military: The vast number of service members who remain silent about being assaulted. According to recent Pentagon study, almost 90 percent of sexual assaults never result in a report. The reason, a growing number of voices in Washington D.C. say, is that unit commanders, and not independent prosecutors, make the decision on whether to file charges. If a perpetrator is a superior officer, or friend of the commander, even non-military folks can understand the reluctance of most service members to report an incident.

A Senate bill that would take sexual assault prosecutions out of the hands of the military chain of command may be getting new life. The bill appeared dead just last month when a Senate subcommittee voted it down after heavy lobbying from military brass. Pentagon leaders argued that taking that power away from commanders would weaken their authority and ability to make cultural changes within their subordinates.

But the bill, sponsored by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, got a boost after Tea Party favorites Sens. Ted Cruz, R-TX, and Rand Paul, R-KY, reached across the aisle to join forces with her. According to Politico, their support “inches the New York Democrat closer to the 51 votes she hopes is all she’ll need when her proposal comes up for debate as early as next week.”

Similar measures have proven successful in other countries, including Canada and England. In Israel, where a centralized, non-chain of command Military Advocate General makes all prosecution decisions, sexual harassment and assault complaints have increased 80 percent over the last five years.

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