U.S. law enforcement will train local and state police officers from Mexico as part of the next phase of the two countries’ joint fight against transnational drug cartels, a U.S. State Department official said Wednesday.

U.S. agencies have been training Mexican federal police on both sides of the border for several years. However, William Brownfield, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, said it is clear that local forces face the most concentrated violence, especially in northern Mexico, and are in the most need of training.

“If we do not address these problems cooperatively today, we will be addressing them on our own front doorsteps in five years,” Brownfield said.

Brownfield was in the Texas border town of Laredo on Wednesday, signing an agreement outlining how deputies from the Webb County Sheriff’s Office could spend periods of three months, six months or more training their counterparts in Mexico.

It was the first such agreement the State Department has signed with a local law enforcement agency anywhere on the U.S.-Mexico border. Brownfield said more trainers are needed and the high rate of bilingual deputies with border experience made Webb County an attractive place to start such a program.

Police training has been a significant part of the Merida Initiative, which outlined the U.S. partnership with Mexico and Central America in the drug war and has committed $1.4 billion since 2008. However, the focus now shifts to historically out-gunned and ill-prepared local forces ducking bullets and facing ominous threats on a daily basis.

Mexico received $327 million for police training in fiscal 2009 from the U.S. State Department through Merida, placing it behind only Afghanistan and Iraq in total funds received for police training from the departments of State or Defense, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office in April.

Details of the proposed training programs have not been worked out, but Brownfield envisions three or four training centers in Mexico. He is holding complementary meetings with Mexican officials on this trip to begin working out the program’s shape. He said he spoke with officials in Juarez on Monday and will hold similar meetings in Monterrey Thursday.

Chihuahua and Nuevo Leon states, respectively, have been two of Mexico’s hardest hit by drug gang violence.

According to official figures, at least 35,000 people have been killed in drug violence in Mexico since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched his crackdown on organized crime. Other sources, including local media, say the number is closer to 40,000. The federal government has not released an update of its numbers since December.

U.S. involvement in Mexico has drawn attention there recently after Mexico’s government confirmed that U.S. intelligence agents operate there, analyzing and exchanging information. The New York Times had reported that CIA agents and former U.S. military personnel are working at a Mexican military base in the fight against drug gangs.

Brownfield stressed that involvement of U.S. trainers will come only with Mexican approval and that the training centers would be under Mexican authority. He also said a longer-term vision could include pairing trainers from an agency such as the Webb County Sheriff’s Office with a National Guard deployment from Texas. The National Guard has been active in the drug war on the U.S. side of the border in intelligence analysis.

The agreement signed Wednesday “sets guidelines for the Webb County Sherriff’s Office to train, advise and mentor international law enforcement agencies and officers.” The sheriff’s office will pay the upfront costs and receive reimbursement from the State Department. Its trainers, which it will release on a voluntary basis, will not carry weapons in other countries and will have to be approved in advance by the State Department. The State Department will be responsible for screening any trainees and will give pre-deployment training to trainers.

The agreement leaves open the possibility of training on U.S. soil, but Brownfield said from a cost standpoint it made more sense to send a few trainers to Mexico than bring hundreds of trainees to the U.S.

Brownfield said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo was very active in pushing the venture. Cuellar’s brother, Martin Cuellar, is Webb County sheriff.

The congressman said the benefits worked both ways. “When the teacher goes down there, the teacher will learn from the students.”

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AT&T is now suing the law firms that have been seeking to block the $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile. Back in July, New York-based law firm Bursor & Fisher began a “Fight the Merger” campaign in which they encouraged AT&T customers to file arbitration cases against the carrier to challenge the merger. So far, the firm has already filed 26 arbitration demands and over 900 notices of dispute on behalf of AT&T customers.

Arbitration cases are being filed instead of class-action lawsuits due to the result of the AT&T vs. Concepcion case last November, in which the Supreme Court sided with AT&T allowing their phone contracts to contain a mandatory arbitration clause that waived customers’ rights to class-action lawsuits against the company. Hence, Bursor & Fisher began encouraging customers opposing the merger to individually file arbitration complaints, hoping to file thousands of such complaints.

AT&T has already said that the claims are without merit and that an arbitrator does not have the authority to block a merger or affect the process and now it’s suing the law firm for its abusive actions. The carrier says that these individual claims are an attempt to act as a class and that their arbitration agreement prohibits any form of class-wide relief.

However, Bursor & Fisher partner Scott Bursor insists that the American Arbitration Association has already overruled AT&T’s objections and moved forward with the arbitration process.

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In spirit, No Child Left Behind, was always a good idea. It was an imperative from Washington that, rich or poor, our nation would strive to ensure that every child gets a proper education and not be left to fall through the many cracks in our educational system.

No Child Left Behind was President George W. Bush’s first major legislative accomplishment and it garnered strong support from both political parties. (Remember when that occasionally happened?)

But a decade after its passage, it appears that while No Child Left Behind has had some positive impact, it hasn’t done all it intended and has even had some negative consequences. Among them — school districts and states subtly or not-so-subtly lowering standards to make sure No Child Left Behind benchmarks are met and teachers rigidly “teaching to the test” to the exclusion of other important lessons.

No Child Left Behind needs some changes. It needs to be a vehicle for raising the bar for those kids and those schools that perpetually struggle and not a mechanism that, unintended or not, exacerbates problems and leaves those educators who truly are doing their best in tough circumstances throwing up their hands in disgust.

The U.S. Department of Education is working on making the law less burdensome for states that are trying to overhaul their school systems and improve student performance, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday at a press conference. Next month, federal education officials plan to issue rules to states that want a waiver from some of No Child Left Behind’s most punitive provisions, Duncan said.

At least 13 states have contacted the Obama administration about getting a waiver or have announced plans to seek a waiver. New Jersey, which has many chronically failing schools in its former Abbott districts scattered around the state, is “actively considering” requesting an exemption, the state’s acting education commissioner, Chris Cerf, said in a statement.

By seeking a waiver, what we don’t want to see, and what parents whose kids are stuck in forever failing schools shouldn’t want to see, is a retreat from demanding more of schools stuck in the mud. Those schools aren’t hard to identify. In New Jersey, many of them are the Abbotts — the places where we pump a lot of state tax dollars only to see consistently low scores, low grades and high dropouts rates.

Changes to No Child Left Behind should reasonably balance the use of the carrot and the stick while making sure that kids across states are judged the same way on their mastery of the same basic skills. Here are some things that ought to be revised:

Ease the reliance on testing.

Across the nation, kids in every grade from 3 to 8 are given standardized multiple choice tests every year for math and reading skills. With federal funding for districts riding on the results of these tests, there’s far too much emphasis on tests in many schools. In some place, there’s also widespread cheating, often not by students but by educators, to make the grade.

Figure out why reading performance hasn’t improved at the same rate as math scores.

A comprehensive study released in November 2009 by researchers Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob of the University of Virginia found that student improvement under No Child Left Behind has been concentrated in the earlier grades, most notably in Grade 4 math scores and mostly among Hispanic and low-income students.

Where No Child Left Behind hasn’t resulted among specific groups or in specific subjects, clearly either the instruction hasn’t improved or the assessment isn’t being done correctly.

Require more uniform testing and measurement from state to state.

Yes, we’re arguing to allow for less teaching to the test. But that doesn’t mean we want to see all standardized testing go away — not at all. If we’re going to have national standards for basic skills kids should possess by certain ages, there needs to be uniform testing standards. What good is it to punish so-called “failing” districts in one state while rewarding “successful” districts in other states where the bar is being set too low.

No Child Left Behind has always attempted to address this. But states still have their own assessments of kids and those assessments differ, sometimes greatly, from state to state in form and content.

We shouldn’t scrap the concept of demanding greater accountability for student performance in our schools. The United States, after all, still ranks far below where it should when its students’ skills are compared with kids being educated in other industrialized nations — particularly in math and science.

But a decade in, there’s evidence that shows where No Child Left Behind is ready for improvement.

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Gaping holes in Michigan’s medical marijuana law have allowed dangerous people to hijack the system, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said Wednesday.

Schuette, along with several other Michigan legislators and law enforcement officials, unveiled a list of legislative proposals that would close what they say are gaps in the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act passed by Michigan voters in 2008.

Among these is a provision that would make it a felony for patients to lie about a medical condition to get a marijuana prescription and for a doctor to knowingly certify fake information.

“The situation we have now is literally like the wild, wild west,” said Sen. Rick Jones, R-Grand Ledge, who was among the group of representatives that unveiled the proposals with Schuette.

David Clark, an Okemos attorney who specializes in medical marijuana law, said false information by patients and doctors to attain medical marijuana is a widespread problem across the state.

“I have a sinking feeling that a lot of physicians will just take the word of the patient,” Clark said, adding the Legislature could pass laws in place requiring documentation of a medical condition for a marijuana prescription.

But Clark also said many of the proposed laws are being brought to the table by Republicans who were against the act to begin with.

“It’s certainly a political motive,” Clark said. “No one is surprised Mr. Schuette is taking this position; I’m sure he didn’t vote for (the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act).”

Schuette also is seeking to clarify contradicting Michigan laws that make it unclear whether medical marijuana patients can drive with any amount of the drug in their system.

“Driving with marijuana in your system is unsafe and jeopardizes the safety of our roadways,” Schuette said Wednesday in a statement. “If you take drugs, don’t take the wheel.”

Clark said the current law can make it illegal for medical marijuana patients to drive even several days after using marijuana as small doses of the active ingredients can linger in a person’s system.

Jones also has sponsored legislation aimed to help communities locally regulate medical marijuana, including one bill that ensures communities cannot be sued for regulating where dispensaries can open — an issue East Lansing as faced extensively in recent months.

City officials have felt scrutiny from all sides this year after passing a medical marijuana ordinance that restricts dispensaries to medical office districts of the outskirts of town.

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A group of 10 corporate law professors asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to require corporations to disclose to shareholders most political spending.

In a petition filed Thursday with the SEC, the professors asked the agency to establish rules to deal with new campaign finance laws that allow companies to donate to outside political groups directly from their corporate treasuries, rather than through political action committees funded by employee contributions.

The law professors, led by Lucian Bebchuk, of Harvard Law School, and Robert Jackson, of Columbia Law School, argue that while the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional any restrictions on corporate speech during elections, the high court’s ruling in the case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, assumed shareholders would be able to monitor the use of corporate resources on political activities.

“For this mechanism to work, however, shareholders must have information about the company’s political speech,” the professors said in the 11 page petitition. “Because the Commission’s current rules do not require public companies to give shareholders detailed information on corporate spending on politics, shareholders cannot play the role the Court described.”

They also said: “Shareholders need to receive such information for markets and the procedures of corporate democracy to ensure that such spending is in shareholders’ interest. Such spending is likely to become even more important to public investors in the future.”

SEC spokesman Kevin Callahan declined to comment on the petition.

Donations to federal candidates and political action committees are already disclosed to the Federal Election Commission, but the new rules would affect the numerous political nonprofits, operating under a special section of the tax code, that do not have to disclose their donors. Companies donating to those entities – such as Crossroads GPS, which advocates for conservative causes, and Priorities USA, a progressive group started by two former White House aides – would be required make their contributions public.

The petition is part of a push by good government groups and some in the business world to disclose the names of all corporate donors. Proponents of anonymous donations say it is protected by federal case law and free speech rights.

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US President Barack Obama has signed a emergency austerity bill that averted a devastating debt default, but warns the contentious plan was ‘just the first step’ on a long road to economic recovery.

‘It’s an important first step to ensuring that, as a nation, we live within our means,’ Obama said in the White House Rose Garden after polarised lawmakers sent him the legislation. ‘This is, however, just the first step.’

The measure lifts cash-strapped Washington’s $US14.3 trillion debt limit by up to $US2.4 trillion while cutting at least $US2.1 trillion in government spending over 10 years, a step forecast to drag down already sluggish US growth.

‘Slowing down the big-government freight train from its current trajectory will give us the time we need to work toward a real solution,’ said Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Obama spoke on Tuesday after the US Senate voted 74-26 to pass the measure — which cleared the House of Representatives by an overwhelming 269-161 margin on Monday — with just hours to spare before a midnight deadline that could have triggered a first-ever US default on its debt payments.

Congressional approval paid immediate dividends as the Fitch ratings agency said the hard-fought 11th-hour compromise would spare Washington from losing from its sterling Triple-A debt rating.

A downgrade would have likely led to a spike in US interest rates, making debt payments more pricey and hurting Americans holding flexible-rate loans — anyone carrying credit-card debt, or seeking a car loan.

But Fitch said it would keep a close eye on the country’s long-term finances and pressed for ‘a credible multi-year deficit reduction plan’ if Washington is to stay in the elite club of healthy, low-risk debtor economies.

Obama’s 2012 reelection bid will turn on voters’ perceptions of his handling of the US economy, which has laboured under historically high unemployment above nine per cent as it struggles to recover from the global meltdown of 2008.

The president promised that the deficit-cutting would not starve education and research nor happen ‘too abruptly while the economy is still fragile’ and railed against the ‘manufactured crisis’ over the debt limit.

Republicans have promised that the spending cuts will create jobs, but top Wall Street economists have warned the austerity measures will actually be a drag on already sluggish US growth even as government stimulus measures run out.

The overall shift from priming the US economy to government belt-tightening is expected to reduce US growth next year by about 1.5 percentage points, according to JPMorgan Chase economists.

The vote came as the US Commerce Department reported that US consumer spending, the economy’s key driver, fell 0.2 per cent in June relative to May, while personal income was basically stagnant, with just a 0.1 per cent increase.

Both figures fell short of analyst’s expectations and offered the latest discouraging omen about the US economy, which grew at a feeble feeble 1.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2011, much worse than economists had expected.

Despite such wrenching worries, major US companies like 3M, Caterpillar, Goodyear, Microsoft, and Apple have been packing away record profits.

Moreover, if the current trend keeps up, the SP 500 companies are poised to have their most profitable quarter ever, according to Standard Poor’s analyst Howard Silverblatt, who marvelled at the ‘amazing numbers.’

Obama signalled that he would campaign for raising tax revenue on the rich and wealthy corporations, a proposal that has already generated lockstep opposition from Republicans who contend it would smother job creation.

‘I’ve said it before, I will say it again: We can’t balance the budget on the backs of the very people who have borne the biggest brunt of this recession,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s going to have to chip in. That’s only fair.’

Democrats, especially on the party’s left flank, have expressed outrage that the bargain Obama struck with his Republican foes omitted any tax increase on the wealthy.

‘It is my hope that we have reached the high tide of an ideological movement that has sought to hold tax cuts for the wealthy sacred, while imposing increasingly draconian cuts on American families,’ said Democratic Senator Carl Levin, who voted for the bill.

In a veiled slap at Obama, Levin also stressed that ‘success also is going to require presidential leadership and stronger use of his bully pulpit.’

The new law calls for more than $900 billion in cuts over the next 10 years — $US350 billion of it in defence — and creates a special congressional committee tasked with coming up with another $US1.5 trillion in cuts to report by November 23, with Congress voting by December 23.

A failure by the committee would trigger painful, automatic cuts to key priorities of both parties.

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The Senate Intelligence Committee has voted to extend a wide-ranging surveillance law targeting foreigners overseas, but Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden says he will block the measure unless the public is told more about the law’s impact on people living in the United States.

In a closed-door session, the committee turned aside an amendment by Wyden and Democratic Sen. Mark Udall that would have directed the Justice Department’s inspector general to estimate how many people inside the U.S. have had their telephone calls and emails monitored by government agents under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008.

The law, due to expire at the end of next year, would be extended to June 2015 if the committee action becomes law.

The 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which were bitterly disputed in Congress, allow the government to obtain from a secret court broad, yearlong intercept orders that target foreign groups and people overseas, raising the prospect that phone calls and emails between those foreign targets and innocent Americans in this country also will be collected and reviewed.

The 2008 amendments also shielded telecommunications companies from lawsuits that complained that the companies helped the government spy on Americans without court warrants during the Bush administration.

The proposed 2 1/2-year extension was inserted without any public notice into the Intelligence Authorization Act for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The move was unusual because it took place a full year and a half before the law’s expiration date. Ordinarily, a proposed extension isn’t brought up until closer to the expiration date of the law.

The committee approved the intelligence authorization bill, including the extension, at a closed-door meeting last week, at which it also rejected the Wyden-Udall amendment. Details of the meeting emerged Tuesday after the authorization act and an accompanying report were printed and made public.

Recently, the expiration dates for some other intelligence laws were set at June 2015. The accompanying report that surfaced Tuesday said that aligning the dates would enable Congress to review the laws comprehensively rather than in piecemeal fashion. Addressing the FISA amendments act now instead of waiting until next year will help assure stability of the foreign intelligence collection system during the “critical times immediately ahead,” the accompanying report added.

In a letter Tuesday to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Wyden said he stands ready to place a “hold” on the measure, which would force a Senate debate on it if there is an effort to pass the legislation by unanimous consent. Wyden said his goal is to amend the bill to meet his concerns. A hold by Wyden would mean it would take 60 votes to end debate and vote on the bill.

“One of the central questions that Congress needs to ask is, are these procedures working as intended?” Wyden said in a statement. “Are they keeping the communications of law-abiding Americans from being swept up under this authority that was designed to apply to foreigners?”

Wyden pointed out that the purpose of the existing expiration date of Dec. 31, 2012, was to force members of Congress “to come back in a few years and examine whether these new authorities had been interpreted and implemented as intended.”

Separately, the committee, on a voice vote, rejected another amendment by Wyden and Udall to require Attorney General Eric Holder and the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, to submit a report to the congressional intelligence committees on what Wyden has said are secret interpretations of domestic surveillance law. Such a report would assess the problems that occur when executive branch agencies and departments rely on interpretations that are inconsistent with the public’s understanding of the law.

The proposal was aimed at provisions in the USA Patriot Act that allow government agents to conduct broad searches for records in national security investigations without court warrants.

On the Senate floor in May, Wyden said “there are two Patriot Acts in America. The first is the text of the law itself and the second is the government’s secret interpretation of what they believe the law means. The American people will be extremely surprised when they learn how the Patriot Act is secretly being interpreted.”

Wyden has said official secrecy prevents him from disclosing the interpretations that trouble him.

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When NBA owners and players convene Monday for their first full-scale bargaining session since the lockout was imposed on July 1, the real news will be unfolding far from midtown Manhattan. The environment necessary for compromise won’t be present in the Omni Berkshire Place hotel conference room that has thus far produced nothing of the sort.

Nearly one month into the lockout, this high-stakes, $4 billion strategy game could soon be shifting gears from negotiations that have been fruitless for two years to what one attorney described as a potentially “nuclear” legal war between the two sides.

If the threat of losing games — or possibly, the entire season — isn’t enough to compel both sides to hammer out a deal, the 2011-12 season will be in the hands of lawyers, judges and a labyrinth of legality. The outcome would be difficult to predict, and the timeframe possibly lengthy, depending on which legal strategies each side pursued.

Although the National Basketball Players Association has never decertified and sought antitrust relief from the federal courts in past labor disputes, the leverage — or threat of leverage — that comes with legal action has helped solve lengthy lockouts and strikes in other sports.

In 1995, Major League Baseball and its players’ union were forced back to the bargaining table, where they ended a 7½ month strike, as the direct result of an injunction issued by then federal district judge Sonia Sotomayor, who is now an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Most recently, the prospect of a lengthy and ugly antitrust battle persuaded NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith to hammer out a new labor agreement that ended that sport’s 4½ month lockout this week.

Labor attorneys say the NBA’s labor impasse differs greatly from both of those cases, and thus, so have the NBPA’s legal strategies — which are coming under fire from high-profile agents. “In the NBA, you are seeing the owners take a position where they want to radically change the way they do business,” said Gregg Clifton, a former baseball agent and now an attorney with Jackson Lewis, high-profile firm representing management in labor disputes. “If somebody wants to radically change the way they do business with you, you better have a really good reason and you’re going to get pushback. … Both sides can be polarized and be strong because neither side has anything happening yet that’s going to affect their bottom lines.”

As with the baseball and NFL work stoppages, this one will have to be solved at the bargaining table. But the leverage forcing each side to give in and negotiate seriously could come from the courts.

For now, the NBPA has decided to pursue its grievances against the NBA through the National Labor Relations Board, where it has filed a complaint alleging, among other things, that the owners have not bargained in good faith. In a meeting last Friday in New York, prominent agents blasted union officials for adopting this strategy as opposed to disbanding the union and filing an antitrust lawsuit, as the NFL players did. But according to labor law experts, the agents are off base.

First off, the injunction issued by Sotomayor that forced the two sides back to the bargaining table in ’95 came as the result of the MLBPA pursuing its case through the NLRB. At the time, given baseball’s long-standing exemption from federal anti-trust law, this was the baseball players’ only legal avenue.

The NFL players could have gone either route during the recent lockout, but chose to decertify and make their case under anti-trust law — partly because they faced a collectively bargained deadline beyond which such action would have been off limits.

The NBPA has both options available to it, and no deadlines or restrictions on when to use them. This is an advantage, labor lawyers say, but deciding between the two paths carries great risk.

“That’s a tough call,” Clifton said. “Do you feel you have a better cause of action through NLRB legally and from the standpoint of timing and chances of success vs. the courts, where it becomes an anti-trust action?”

The distinction is important. When they went the antitrust route, NFL players were tripped up by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which applied the Norris-LaGuardia Act in striking down a district judge’s injunction that temporarily ended the lockout. In federal antitrust cases, Norris-LaGuardia is the federal statute that forbids federal courts from issuing injunctions in labor disputes.

The law does not apply in labor disputes brought before the NLRB, meaning the NBPA’s current strategy could be its quickest route to an injunction lifting the lockout. If the NBPA is successful in getting the NLRB to issue a complaint against the NBA, the board could follow up by asking a federal judge to reinstate terms of the previous agreement — thus forcing the two sides to engage in serious bargaining. This is how the baseball strike ended in 1995.

To this extent, the NLRB also provides the players with as close to a home-court advantage as they could hope for, given that the 8th Circuit precedent stands in the way of having the lockout lifted through an antitrust action. The NLRB also is decidedly labor-friendly, especially in its current makeup of four Democrat appointees and one Republican.

“If you go with the antitrust action, you’re going to be doing a lot of shopping for interpretation of the Norris-LaGuardia Act before you jump into that circuit,” Clifton said.

The key to the NBPA’s current strategy will be how the NLRB rules on the union’s request for further financial information from the NBA to prove its stated $300 million in annual losses, said Jon Axelrod of Beins, Axelrod, P.C., in Washington, D.C., who has represented unions in labor disputes for 37 years. Larry Katz, the union’s outside counsel, has requested additional financial documents from the owners, including those detailing third-party transactions — where the money goes when a single entity owns the NBA team, the arena and an NHL team — and franchise valuations.

“In my experience as a union lawyer, that stuff would be very valuable to the union in preparing its negotiating position,” Axelrod said.

The NBA has furnished voluminous financial data to the union, including audited financial statements and tax returns. But Katz said the owners have not turned over accounting of third-party transactions or franchise valuations, for which the NLRB could cite the league for bad-faith bargaining.

Third-party details would assist the union in determining how much of certain teams’ losses resulted from internal transactions, as opposed to money going out the door. Franchise valuations would speak to the players’ contention that interest and depreciation costs they are being asked to bear in the form of pay cuts benefited the owners through rising franchise values — which the players do not share in when teams are sold.

“You can use interest to hide profit,” Axelrod said. “You can use certain other expenses to hide profit.”

Over time, through the cycle of various presidential appointees, the NLRB has taken different views on whether such detailed financial information is “reasonable and necessary,” Axelrod said. “It’s difficult to say what the current board would do.”

Problems with the NBPA’s strategy include the possibility that a request for an injunction may not necessarily follow swiftly after the NLRB issues a complaint, and that the board’s investigative pace is notoriously slow. The NFL filed an unfair labor practices charge against the NFLPA in February, and the NLRB never finished investigating it. Katz estimates, and the other labor attorneys agree, that the NLRB is 30-60 days away from deciding whether to issue the complaint against the NBA that could lead to the coveted injunction, though both sides are cautious about trying to predict the NLRB’s timetable.

If the NBPA decided to decertify, the pot of gold at the end of an antitrust case is the possibility of the players receiving treble damages — compensation totaling three times their salaries for being harmed by the lockout — if they eventually won the case, which could go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. But that process could take as long as 2-3 years, labor lawyers say, and would constitute “nuclear war” between the owners and players, according to Katz.

“It’s a Pandora box,” Katz said. “I’m scared as heck when I open up a big litigation box, because I don’t know what’s going to come out of it.”

It’s important to note that from the NBPA’s standpoint, decertification may not be a do-you or don’t-you issue, but rather one of timing. Neither side is willing to get bogged down in the federal courts for several years, so the threat of leverage and uncertainty could be more valuable than the outcome itself.

If they do not get a favorable ruling — or any ruling — from the NLRB by mid-September, the players may choose to go forward with decertification at that point. They would likely choose a court outside the 8th Circuit and hope for a more labor-friendly judge and appeals panel. There would be no chance of a decision in time to avoid canceling a portion of the season, but the threat of losing games and losing in court could compel the owners to be more flexible at the bargaining table.

“Timing is everything in life,” Clifton said. “The timing was reached in the NFL because people said, ‘Wait a minute. We’re going to miss games, and this is a $9 billion industry that will be an $18 billion industry by the end of the decade. What are we doing?’”

Glenn Grindlinger, a partner at Fox Rothschild, LLP, who represents management, said the most effective form of leverage for both sides remains “the fact that the season’s coming up.”

“The closer you get to the start of the season,” Grindlinger said, “the more incentive there is going to be for both sides to hash out a deal.”

But both sides also have legal weapons they have not yet deployed that could shake up the negotiations and add to the leverage necessary for a deal.

If the players decertified, lawyers from both sides essentially would be racing to court in an attempt to sue the other side first in a venue they believe will be favorable to them. This “circuit race,” as Axelrod described it, would be a contest of whether the players could file their antitrust suit before the owners sought declaratory judgment in a management-friendly circuit. Whichever side got its lawsuit filed first would set the venue for the case.

The players also have an obscure but potentially useful legal trick up their sleeves. In the 8th Circuit’s NFL ruling, the assenting judges used language that suggested players without contracts — free agents and drafted rookies — should be required to market their services and sign contracts. From a practical standpoint, the loophole is moot; the court said once those players signed contracts, they’d be locked out like everybody else.

But this could provide the NBPA with a narrow anti-trust avenue to pursue on behalf of players who were not under contract as of July 1. Instead of a Tom Brady v. NFL, imagine an NBA anti-trust case with the most prominent free agents (David West, Tyson Chandler, Grant Hill and Shane Battier) — plus the top picks in the 2011 draft (Kyrie Irving and Derrick Williams).

“You’d still have to decertify, but you might have a more focused action,” Clifton said. “… You might be able to challenge the draft that allowed them to be drafted and the antitrust ramifications of it.”

Timing is, indeed, everything. If LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh had not become free agents last summer, a potential antitrust suit by the NBPA this summer would’ve read like a who’s who of the biggest stars in the league. But the way this lockout is going, consider this grim possibility: Instead of becoming free agents next summer, Dwight Howard, Chris Paul, Deron Williams and Kevin Garnett might very well be antitrust plaintiffs, instead.

That would only happen if the entire 2011-12 season were lost, a catastrophic possibility for which both sides are privately preparing.

“It could happen,” Clifton said. “I hope not, but it’s possible. … When I talked about the NFL, I thought it would end by mid-July and they’d miss one preseason game, at most. Unfortunately, I’m equally pessimistic about the NBA.”

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A year after a federal law gave American Indian tribes more authority to combat crime on reservations, few have taken the steps to enact one of its main provisions — a measure allowing tribes to triple the amount of time tribal members can spend in jail.

The increase in sentencing authority from one year to three years for a single crime under the Tribal Law and Order Act marked one of the most substantial changes for tribal criminal justice systems. But sending people to jail for longer periods means that tribes first must provide public defenders, establish or update criminal codes, and have law-trained judges.

Some have determined they can’t afford it or are content with their current systems that don’t always determine a winner and loser and focus on restorative justice, while others are reserving the authority for only the most serious crimes.

“Tribes are cautiously proceeding, and rightly so,” said Troy Eid, chairman of the Indian Law and Order Commission born out of the act. “If they get it wrong, that’s a violation of the defendant’s constitutional rights, and that would potentially invalidate the whole program.”

President Barack Obama signed the measure into law last July, saying it was an important step in addressing the unique public safety challenges that confront reservations. The measure resulted in the appointment of special U.S. attorneys to ensure violent crimes are prosecuted. It also revamped training for reservation police and aims to improve the collection of reporting of Indian crime data.

U.S. Department of Justice officials highlighted the efforts they’ve made in Indian Country in a call with reporters Tuesday. They said they’ve traveled to sometimes remote areas to hear from tribal leaders on how they can better collaborate to combat crime. U.S. attorneys in South Dakota, Arizona and New Mexico spoke about how their offices have trained tribal police as federal agents, recruited tribal prosecutors to assist in federal cases, helped improve technology in tribal court systems and are working to make sure that major crimes on reservations don’t go unpunished.

According to the federal government, violent crime rates on Indian reservations are more than twice the national rate, and there is an epidemic of domestic and sexual violence in Indian Country, along with high instances of child abuse, teen suicide and substance abuse. Federal officials have also said there is a proliferation of gang activity on reservations, and yet law enforcement recruitment and retention across Indian Country lag far behind the rest of the nation.

“We know that the issues of public safety in Indian Country are daunting and sobering,” said Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke. “We know we’ve had a lot of successes, and we have a ways to go.”

On the Tulalip Reservation in Washington, tribal officials are preparing to present a proposal to the legislative body next month that would create a new class of 15 felony crimes that include rape and sexual assault of a minor, and are punishable by up to three years in jail, said Chief Judge Theresa Pouley. In the last six months, three sexual assault cases have been filed in tribal court, she said.

“Tulalip wants to maintain that restorative justice code at the same time balance the extended jurisdiction to address really serious crimes,” she said.

Pouley, who also trains tribes on the provisions of the Tribal Law and Order Act, said extending sentences could stretch already scarce financial and personnel resources for some tribal governments, which must then figure out how to house the inmates. The Tulalip Tribes contract with a neighboring county to house anyone sentenced through the tribal court system.

On the Navajo Nation — the country’s largest Indian reservation, extending into New Mexico, Utah and Arizona — officials have not actively talking about lengthening sentences. Any discussion would delve into exactly what Congress intended with the language in the Tribal Law and Order Act, whether the federal government’s idea of due process, fairness and law-trained judges fits the definition that Navajo officials might have, and, foremost, tribal sovereignty, said Chief Justice Herb Yazzie.

“Navajo people, because they are a sovereign nation, will not simply accept wholesale the demands of another government,” he said. “Because reality is that we want to institute and offer a system that administers Dine justice, not some other government’s sense of justice. When you do that, you also have to realize that we still need these systems of the federal government and financing (for) some of these improvements. So it’s a delicate arrangement that we will have to reach.”

The Navajo court system is guided by restorative, rather than punitive justice. It includes peacemaking courts and uses a set of centuries-old traditional tribal laws that all tribal judges must know in deciding cases.

John Dossett, general counsel for the National Congress of American Indians, said tribes have relayed stories to the organization that an enhanced sentence is a good tool for plea bargains and sometimes serves to deter people from committing crimes. But for tribes that are served by outside law enforcement and have no justice system of their own, creating them might be the biggest hurdle.

“There are so many aspects to this, that’s why it takes more time to implement,” he said. “The problem isn’t solved yet, but there is forward motion. Tribes are very interested in continuing to work with the administration and Congress, partly because they’re seeing some successes.

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Saudi Arabia denied allegations by Amnesty International that an anti-terrorism law under consideration will be used to suppress dissent in the kingdom, the official Saudi Press Agency reported.

The proposed law will pose “a serious threat to freedom of expression in the kingdom,” Amnesty International said in a statement on its website after reviewing a copy of the draft.

Saudi Arabia “would like to point out that Amnesty’s concerns about this law are baseless,” the news service said today, citing a statement from the kingdom’s U.K. embassy. An anti-terrorism draft law is under review at the Saudi Shoura Council, an appointed advisory body, SPA added.

In Egypt, clashes that erupted in central Cairo between supporters and opponents of the Egyptian military ruling council left more than 150 people injured, Al Arabiya reported today, citing state-run television.

Protesters used knives and swords in the clashes and the army blocked the road leading to the defense ministry, Al Jazeera reported.

Meanwhile in Syria, a train derailed in Homs today while it was on its way to Damascus from Aleppo with more than 480 passengers, most of whom were patients traveling to undergo surgeries, Syrian news agency SANA said. The driver of the train was killed, SANA reported.

“For sure, it is a subversive act,” George Essa, director of the railways authority in Homs, told the private website Syria News, according to Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Syria Protests

The incident took place hours after mass anti-government protests across the country, in which at least nine people were killed, according to the opposition Local Coordination Committees of Syria, DPA reported.

Syria’s Army War College in Homs was struck by explosions in what may indicate divisions within the country’s military, Al Jazeera reported, citing an eyewitness. Thirty soldiers and security personal were injured by “terrorist groups,” the official Syrian Arab News Agency said. The government denied reports that the military was divided.

In Yemen, two girls were killed and a boy was injured when gunmen targeted their house in the province of Taiz, SABA said, citing a military source.

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