Knowing they will face climate legislation sometime in the future, a number of U.S. corporations have already begun to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. The utility giant American Electric and Power is buying forest projects in Brazil and the disposal company Waste Management is recovering methane from landfills to use in its trash trucks in California.

But a preliminary report commissioned by the United Nations has found that the cost of environmental damages could erase at least one third of the profits major corporations make around the world, if they had to pay for these damages. The study looked at 3,000 of the world's top publicly traded companies, and calculated that their environmental impact amounted to at least $2.2 trillion in 2008. More than half of the damage was caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

The full report, due out this summer and first reported by the Guardian in February, was conducted by the British consultancy firm Trucost, and commissioned by the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment. Trucost's CEO, Richard Mattison, told the Guardian that industries are facing a completely new paradigm: "Externalities of this scale and nature pose a major risk to the global economy and markets are not fully aware of these risks, nor do they know how to deal with them," he said.

What economists call externalities, are industry byproducts such as air pollution, soil erosion, and water pollution. These costs to the environment (and the surrounding communities) are not included in the price of producing energy, timber or food, for example, but are "paid for" by those who suffer from the effects.

The Guardian reported that the $2.2 trillion figure could be much higher, since the study only included the impact from major corporations, and not the business and consumer practices of governments or the general population.

The authors of the study hope it will be used by growing numbers of institutional investors who want to back companies with a good track record in environmental, social and corporate governance, and drive home to business leaders and policy makers that environmental costs will increasingly be part of a corporation's bottom line.

The Securities and Exchange Commission delivered a similar message in January, when it released guidelines on what public companies should disclose as potential material risks from climate change.

The four main areas included the economic costs of meeting international emissions treaties and other pending regulations, staying competitive as consumer and business trends shift to adapt to climate change, and mitigating the potential physical challenges of a changing climate, such as water scarcity and soil degradation.

Whether these risks are caused by "increased competition or severe weather," said SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro, companies must disclose to their shareholders "the significant risks they face."

James Salo, the head of research and strategy at Trucost's U.S. office, told Carbon Watch that the guidelines "put the onus on companies to understand those risks in those four key areas and manage them."

In a recent editorial, Pavan Sukhdev, a former Deutsche Bank executive, who is now working with the U.N. to develop new economic models to protect biodiversity, argued that a value has to be placed on nature for businesses to change the way they produce goods and services.

"We cannot manage what we do not measure and we are not measuring either the value of nature's benefits or the costs of their loss," he said.

Here is Sukhdev describing the role "natural capital" can play in the global economy.

Under Sukhdev's leadership, the U.N. is expected to release another influential report later this year that will lay the economic foundations for putting a price on environmental impact and offer a broad set of solutions to reduce it.

We have iPod Touches just lying around in unopened boxes.

When we equipped our staff with new Macs, Apple threw in a bunch of free iPods. We’ve been talking about how we could put them to good use. And we think we have an answer.

California Watch is announcing a debate championship and you could win a free iPod Touch.

Over each of the next six months, our staff will select the best comments entered on our site during the previous calendar month in response to stories, blog posts, data and other content we publish.

The selected comments will be entered into a drawing – and one lucky winner will be chosen each month. Comments posted in the month of March will be eligible for a drawing held the first week in April. Same goes for April, May, June and so on.

You don’t have to agree with our content to be eligible. You just have to be thoughtful, focused and articulate in making your argument. Comments will be judged also on clarity of thinking and persuasiveness. And we could be swayed by clever humor. The judging is totally subjective. But we all know a good comment when we see one. Oh, and you can’t be related to any of us to win – or have worked or interned here during the past five years.

Once your e-mail address gets entered into our shoebox, fishbowl or whatever we end up using, we’ll draw out a single winner. Since we no longer allow any anonymous commenting, we’ll notify the winner based on the e-mail address given to us when they registered. If it bounces back, or we don’t hear from the winner within 72 hours, we’ll draw another name.

The more terrific comments you post during a month, the more chances you’ll have of being nominated for the drawing.

Good luck.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

By Andrew Becker

Many of the thousands of new border agents hired in recent years as part of a push to block drug traffickers and other safety threats from entering the country might actually pose security risks themselves, a Homeland Security official testified today.

Speaking at a Senate Homeland Security subcommittee hearing on corruption of federal law enforcement officers, James Tomsheck, the assistant commissioner for internal affairs at Customs and Border Protection, testified that drug-trafficking organizations have infiltrated the nation's largest federal law enforcement agency.

"There is a concerted effort on the part of transnational criminal organizations to infiltrate through hiring initiatives and to compromise our existing agents and officers," he said.

Despite efforts to combat corruption, which include lie-detector tests for applicants and background checks for new hires and veteran employees, Tomsheck said he worries that the problem may be too big for his agency and others to wipe out even when they work together harmoniously.

Since 2004, more than 100 CBP agents and officers have been arrested or indicted, officials said. Tomsheck said when he took over the internal affairs office in 2006 the vast majority of corrupted employees had worked with the agency for 10 years or more, but now an increasing number of younger agents and officers have become corrupted.

CBP has expanded rapidly in recent years, nearly doubling the number of Border Patrol agents to 20,000, which has pushed its ranks to about 58,000 employees.

Tomsheck, who appeared with top officials from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, said that his agency has a backlog of 10,000 regularly scheduled background investigations, which could almost double by the end of the year. Nearly 100 contractors, among them retired FBI, DEA and other federal agents who conduct the checks, were recently laid off because of budget woes.

Funding shortfalls have also limited polygraph examiners to administer lie-detector tests to 10 to 15 percent of applicants, Tomsheck said, although the goal is to test all potential hires. But 60 percent of those who take the test are deemed "unsuitable" to work as Border Patrol agents or customs inspectors, Tomsheck said.

When asked if the 60 percent failure rate could apply to the other 85-90 percent of possible hires who are not tested, Tomsheck said officials had reached that conclusion. They suspect that many of those hired during the hiring push would be found not suitable to work for CBP if subjected to the test, Tomsheck said.

Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., who called the hearing and is the chair of the subcommittee, said the percentage is "alarming."

"We're on very dangerous ground here with corruption inside federal law enforcement," Pryor said.

Kevin Perkins, the assistant director of the FBI's criminal investigative division, did not give a specific number on how pervasive the problem is, but offered the case of customs inspector Margarita Crispin as an example of how valuable a corrupt official is to traffickers.

Agents suspect that Crispin joined CBP in 2003 with the intent of working with drug smugglers. She was sentenced in 2008 to 20 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $5 million in bribes she was paid to allow thousands of pounds of marijuana to be smuggled through her inspection lane in El Paso.

Based on the amount of bribe money Perkins said he seems the problem of corruption is "significantly pervasive." The FBI has expanded the number of its anti-corruption units, which draw from other state and federal agencies, to attack corruption, he said.

But corruption in the Homeland Security Department isn't limited to Border Patrol agents and customs inspectors. Agents and officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which both runs immigration detention and is Homeland Security's investigative arm, and employees of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that issues green cards and other immigration benefits, have also been corrupted.

Tom Frost, the assistant inspector general for investigations at DHS, said his office has even greater concern about the risk of corruption within CIS.

"Immigration benefits are such a valuable commodity to drug-trafficking organizations or other persons that would do us harm," he said. "Immigration benefits are even more lasting and profound" because they allow drug traffickers to operate within the United States.

Pryor said that changes in the law might address the problem.

“These cartels in Mexico are very powerful,” he said. “We should not underestimate their ability to corrupt law enforcement authorities.”

On the heels of several reports documenting U.S. citizens who have been detained or even deported by federal immigration officers, a top Homeland Security Department official in November issued a memo that aims to guide his agency on what to do when a person suspected of being illegally in the country claims to be a citizen.

(The memo can be seen here.)

John Morton, Homeland Security's assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sent the memo, which instructs ICE employees that "In all cases, any uncertainty about whether the evidence is probative of U.S. Citizenship should weigh against detention."

(The memo supersedes a memo from November 2008, which superseded another memo from July 2008, which superseded a memo from May 2008.)

Aside from going deeper into the issue than previous guidance, the other differences are who issued the memo and to whom it's addressed.

The memos from November and July 2008 were issued by James T. Hayes Jr., the then-director of ICE's Office of Detention and Removal Operations, and sent to DRO's field office directors.

Morton's note didn't just go to the deportation officers and enforcement agents assigned to DRO. The recipients include special agents (through the 26 special agents in charge) and ICE attorneys (through the 26 chief counsels' offices). With it comes a sense of urgency and prioritization of such citizenship claims.

Morton's directive also instructs agents and officers to work with the local U.S. attorney's office to prosecute a person who lies about their citizenship claim.

(The government has shown its serious about prosecuting false claims, including asylum seekers.)

That the memo comes from Morton gives extra heft, and follows various media reports highlighting the issue.

CIR, in separate collaborations with the Los Angeles Times and Mother Jones, reported that numerous detainees with valid or possible claims to U.S. citizenship have been detained and even deported in recent years. (Other reporting on the issue can be found here, here and here.)

ICE's new "Secure Communities" program that targets criminal aliens for deportation has also mistakenly identified thousands of U.S. citizens initially believed to be potentially subject to deportation.

More details on how ICE determines citizenship could become public through a lawsuit filed by one such U.S. citizen detained for seven months.

Vern Castillo, a native of Belize, became a naturalized U.S. citizen while he was in the U.S. Army. A few years after Castillo was honorably discharged from the military he ended up serving a short jail sentence following a domestic dispute with a girlfriend.

Instead of being released once his jail time was up, Castillo was detained by immigration officials who thought he was in the country illegally. An immigration judge didn't believe Castillo's protests that he was a citizen, and ordered the man deported. It was only after an appeals panel reviewed the case that immigration officials realized a mistake had been made in his file, and he was released.

Castillo filed suit in November 2008 against the agents. A federal judge in Tacoma recently ruled the case could move forward in part. The U.S. government has appealed that ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Settlement discussions are ongoing.

According to court records, Castillo (or his legal team) wants a lesson in how ICE agents and officers go about their business of determining whether someone in their custody is a U.S. citizen or not. They want to videotape a qualified operator showing them how database searches are conducted.

Among the things that could come to light are the policies, procedures and practices in determining, documenting and investigating citizenship and claims of citizenship. Castillo also wants to see the agency's logs, training materials and manuals on the topic, court records show.

Following up an in-depth March 8 story examining federal homeland security grants, the nonprofit Texas Tribune has posted a searchable database online that allows visitors to see how cities and counties in the Lone Star State have used anti-terrorism and preparedness grants since 2003.

The Center for Investigative Reporting made the records available to the Austin-based news organization after obtaining them from the Texas Department of Public Safety using open-government laws. Tribune data guru Matt Stiles built the easy-to-use application that enables visitors to compare grant spending per capita, from tiny Loving County ($1,144 for every resident) to the county surrounding the Texas capital (about $1 for each resident).

The database can also be used to search by community for a detailed list in each of actual purchases totaling more than 25,000 expenditures statewide. In Bexar County where San Antonio is located, for example, authorities spent $350,000 on an armored-response vehicle. In the sample box here you can see a $68,000 "WMD kit," i.e. weapons of mass destruction.

Reporter Brandi Grissom's main story pointed out that big cities weren't the only ones to indulge in such high-priced items. A small county southeast of Dallas with fewer than 8,000 people also scooped up a fortified military-style truck. Grissom's reporting showed that the city of Houston paid professional filmmakers $194,000 for a 22-minute movie on disaster preparedness. Read the story for much more.

An ongoing drug trial in U.S. District Court in El Paso, Texas, provides an uncommon glimpse into the violent battle for Juarez, just across the U.S.-Mexico border. The trial has had as many twists and turns as the Rio Grande, which splits these New Wild West towns into something like Heaven and Hell.

For more than a week in El Paso, witnesses have taken the stand and testified about the world of Mexican drug traffickers. The El Paso Times has reported that their testimony has flashed light on the players and strategies in a vicious turf fight between rival traffickers vying for control of the lucrative smuggling corridor.

The testimony has also skimmed the murkiness of drug enforcement on both sides of the border. At least one witness and even the main defendant have been outed as sources for Immigration and Customs Enforcement who were later arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration for running drugs.

The testimony comes in the trial of two accused drug smugglers, Fernando Ontiveros-Arámbula, whom an ICE agent today said was an informant for the agency, and Manuel Chávez-Betancourt, who refused to cooperate with the government out of fear for his family's safety, according to court records. (For safety concerns, the federal judge, David Briones, ordered that jurors have lunch brought in to them each day.) Witnesses have testified that Ontiveros-Aråmbula worked directly under Mexico's most wanted drug trafficker, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera, who leads the Sinaloa drug syndicate, the El Paso Times reports.

The trial has a motley array of characters, from a rooster breeder who stored caches of marijuana in his New Mexico barn to a female trafficker who allegedly survived being shot 15 times to a former Juarez police captain who said all law enforcement in the city and elsewhere in the Mexican state of Chihuahua are on the take, including himself. Among them are several witnesses who have also been indicted or convicted of drug smuggling charges in El Paso and elsewhere and were flipped by the U.S. government to testify against the smugglers.

Among the more intriguing witnesses so far is the former Juarez police captain. Jesus Fierro-Mendez was a 10-year police veteran who ran a counter-narcotics unit, the EPT reports. He left the police department in April 2007 under suspicious circumstances, sources say. Federal agents arrested him at his El Paso home in Oct. 2008. He was sentenced in January to 27 years in prison by a federal judge in Indianapolis.

A quick aside: this former police captain got 324 months for smuggling cocaine into the United States. Most U.S. law enforcement busted for corruption typically get far less prison time. A Pennsylvania Congressman, however, introduced last month a bill that includes stiffer penalties for agents who accept bribes. By comparison, Osiel Cardenas, the notorious former head of the Gulf Cartel, was recently sentenced to 25 years after pleading guilty to drug dealing, money laundering and the attempted murder and assault of federal agents, according to news reports.

The counter-narcotics unit, known as Puma, consisted of young officers fresh out of the police academy who were supposed to be incorruptible, sources say. Little did the rookie cops apparently know that their boss was himself involved in the drug trade.

But Fierro-Mendez's testimony comes with a twist — he was also an ICE informant who, he said, was authorized by the infamous "El Chapo" of the Sinaloa gang to give U.S. law enforcement information about the rival Juarez cartel.

ICE agents in El Paso have walked down this path before, and not just with today's news that the defendant was passing information to the U.S. at the same time he was trying to pass loads of drugs. A law enforcement source said it is not uncommon for traffickers to offer information about competitors.

Another ICE informant was implicated in at least a dozen murders in Juarez around 2003. That informant, Guillermo Ramirez-Peyro, known as Lalo, awaits his fate in an immigration detention center in New York.

Last May, a high-ranking member of the Juarez cartel, who was also an ICE informant, was gunned down outside of his El Paso home. Among the hitmen was another member of the Juarez cartel who was also, allegedly, an ICE informant.

After federal prosecutors rested their case today, defense attorney began their questioning. Explosions expected to follow.

"The City of Corpus Christi hasn't used the $188,000 video screen it bought with homeland security funding in 2008," begins Texas Tribune reporter Brandi Grissom in a March 8 story about federal preparedness and anti-terrorism grants. "But when a hurricane strikes, city officials will be ready to watch footage from surveillance cameras around the area -- if the storm doesn't knock them out, of course."

The Tribune examined thousands of transactions made with federal homeland security grants that were contained in a database turned over by the Texas Department of Public Safety. The Center for Investigative Reporting made the data available to the Tribune after obtaining the records through an open-government request.

Doing so is part of the center's ongoing effort to collaborate with other investigative journalism organizations focused on the public interest. It's also an essential component of our more than year-long push to report on post-Sept. 11 security spending in the United States. You can see the nationwide map we recently unveiled using similar records from around the country here. The Center for Public Integrity partnered with us in constructing the map.

The Texas Tribune and Grissom found among other things that the city of Houston purchased a $1.3 million five-man helicopter and paid $194,000 to a professional filmmaking company for a 22-minute movie on disaster preparedness. A small county 80 miles southwest of Dallas with fewer than 8,000 people acquired a $180,000 military-style armored truck.

Image: Texas Tribune

Over the past 20 years, every unsolved civil rights murder case that has been reopened and successfully prosecuted in the South was the direct result of an investigation initiated by a journalist.

So the FBI’s decision to close, without prosecution or further disclosure, all but a few of the 108 unsolved murder cases it began re-examining three years ago, only highlights the vital need for investigative reporting that can find the truth, tell the stories and fill in the gaps in our nation’s history.

The Civil Rights Cold Case Project (www.coldcases.org), a team of investigative reporters, documentary filmmakers and interactive media producers, is digging into unsolved civil rights murders in the South. Led by the Center for Investigative Reporting and Paperny Films, the project -- which includes Clarion Ledger reporter and recent MacArthur Genius award winner Jerry Mitchell, and Pulitzer Prize winner Hank Klibanoff -- has been focused for more than two years on race murders and crimes primarily in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.

“These cases are not cold when it comes to the relatives and friends of the victims,” said Robert J. Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting. “Our reporting has found that these cases resonate powerfully today. Too many Americans are unaware of the terror of that era and how it has affected our country in terms of race and reconciliation.”

In a Washington Post story, the FBI said that it was discontinuing its pursuit of all but a handful of the cases it believed had great potential for prosecution when the initiative was announced in 2007. Cynthia Deitle, head of the FBI’s civil rights unit, told the Post that agents and prosecutors concluded that almost a fifth of the cases were not racially motivated. In other cases, agents hit dead ends or dead perpetrators. It continues to investigate a few cases.

“While we welcomed FBI involvement in these cases,” said Hank Klibanoff, managing editor of the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, “we always felt that our goals – deep reporting, story-telling and racial healing – had significance and value regardless of whether federal agents and prosecutors felt they could win a conviction. So while the FBI might pass on cases because the killers have died, we remain intensely interested because these stories are compelling and worth telling. There are family members of victims and perpetrators who deserve to know what happened, and there are history books and classrooms that are incomplete without this information.”

The Civil Rights Cold Case Project also urged the FBI to make all the files of the closed cases available to the public without redactions and without the long and difficult processes demanded by the federal Freedom of Information Act.

“There’s no reason now for this history to remain hidden,” Klibanoff said. “And there are compelling reasons for the records to be opened. A perpetrator of a racial murder should not be given special protection from disclosure and scrutiny simply because he had the misfortune of dying before he could be prosecuted.”

The Project also urged Congress to pass legislation that would ease public access to government-held records from the modern civil rights era. Working with Northeastern University Law Professor Margaret Burnham and her Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, Klibanoff has helped develop ideas for legislation that would create an independent review board to examine all those government-held civil rights records and release as many as possible, as soon as possible. The Civil Rights Cold Case Project supports this effort.

Congress acted in a similar manner twice before, both in the 1990s, when it created independent review boards to examine the John F. Kennedy Assassination Papers and the Nazi/Japanese War Crimes Papers; in both cases, Congress declared that the federal Freedom of Information Act had fallen short of its purpose – a situation the Civil Rights Cold Case Project believe exists today with civil rights records.

Sen. John Kerry recently introduced legislation that would create such a board to examine and release papers related to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Kerry’s office has said the senator would favor broadening the bill to include records of all civil rights murders.

The Project’s aim is to secure adequate funding to bring on additional reporters to join the existing team and produce ongoing reporting for newspapers and websites; a series of short and long-form documentaries for public television, in partnership with WNET.org in New York; reporting for National Public Radio; and a groundbreaking website and educational outreach effort that would engage victims’ families and communities in the investigative process.

Klibanoff noted that at least two of the handful of cases the FBI is still pursuing were prompted by Civil Rights Cold Case Project reporters.

Reporting by John Fleming of The Anniston Star led to federal criminal charges against a former Alabama state trooper for the 1965 shooting death of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion, Alabama, an act that helped trigger the historic Selma to Montgomery March. The trooper awaits trial.

In Ferriday, Louisiana, weekly newspaper editor Stanley Nelson’s extraordinary reporting on the 1964 murder of black shopkeeper Frank Morris led to a current FBI and local investigation, the posting of a reward and the possibility a grand jury will be empanelled. Nelson, working with thousands of pages of government documents that took nearly two years to obtain and aided by the children of former Klansmen, also has revealed important new information about a violent Klan offshoot, the Silver Dollar group, and its involvement in two other murders: Wharlest Jackson in 1967 and Joe Ed Edwards in 1964. Significant work has been done on those cases by two allies of the cold case project, law professors Paula C. Johnson and Janis L. McDonald, who run the Cold Case Justice Initiative at Syracuse University.

Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi has been responsible since the late 1980s for prosecutions and convictions in some of the nation’s highest profile civil rights cases, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham church bombing, and the “Mississippi Burning” murders of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman in Philadelphia, MS. Mitchell continues to find stories in the 40,000 pages of “Mississippi Burning” documents.

Two other team members, Canadian filmmaker David Ridgen and Thomas Moore, the brother of a young black man abducted and murdered in Meadville, Mississippi, produced documentary reporting that led to the federal prosecution and conviction of a Klansman for the murder – and a public apology by another Klansman.

Project reporter Ben Greenberg continues to break new ground on the 1964 murder of Clifton Walker, who was driving home from work in Woodville, Mississippi, when he was shot multiple times on a lonely road. Greenberg has found witnesses who were long ago believed to have died or disappeared.

“Investigative reporting takes enormous time and resources, and it’s even more challenging at a time when reporters are being called on to help their newsrooms by covering an ever-changing array of topics and stories,” Klibanoff said. “It is our hope that we can attract the resources to free up those reporters and many others who want to join us as we dig out and tell these hidden stories from our difficult past.”

Almost immediately after launching our California Watch Web site in early January, we went to work on changes for our “Phase 2.”

The first results of that work relate to our commenting. And the changes just went live.

It is now dramatically easier to register on our site. That means instead of filling out a longer form, we now are requiring only a few simple steps before registered users can comment on our stories, blog posts and databases.

The flipside is that we have eliminated anonymous commenting. We believe this change adds greater credibility and accountability to the online discussion surrounding our work. We recognize that we might lose some comments. But we think the tradeoff is worth it.

It’s also going to be a lot easier to respond to other comments by simply hitting “reply.” Your comment will appear underneath the comment you're responding to.

Expect other refinements on our commenting area in the near future. We really want to add a rating system, allowing readers to weigh in on other comments. It’s another step we can take to encourage responsible commenting.

In the next few days we are going to announce a special contest/promotion on our site that we hope will be fun and will help elevate the debate. It will work like this: At the end of every month through this summer, our staff will choose the most reasoned, incisive comments that appear on our site. There will be no limit to the number we select. It could be one. It could be 100. It could be any number in between. Comments will be judged on clarity of thinking and persuasiveness. The authors will then be entered into a drawing to win a free iPod Touch. You don’t have to agree with our content to be entered into the drawing. You just have to be thoughtful, focused and articulate in making your argument. We think it’s a fun way to encourage a healthy debate and discussion. Watch for more details soon.

In the meantime, I hope you try out our new commenting system. What do you think about our story this weekend that detailed how state workers are walking away from their government jobs with massive vacation payouts? Or how about our story about DUI checkpoints where police are more likely to seize cars from sober, unlicensed drivers? Our staff is also generating several blog items a day on our California Watchblog,  And now a better forum for discussion awaits.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

Almost a half-million people have sought refuge from the drug violence racking the Mexican border metropolis of Juarez, according to a newspaper estimate.

The El Paso Times reported this week that the city of Juarez's planning department have found that 110,000 houses have been abandoned from 2005 to the beginning of 2009.

The paper extrapolates that "based on average family size, about 420,000 people, or 30 percent of the city's residents, have moved out of Juárez, either to other parts of Mexico or to the United States."

Although numbers may be squishy, the paper said local police, real estate agents and demographers "detect an increase in refugees from Mexico living in El Paso."

Some of the "refugees" could be tied to the economy as about 75,000 people have lost their jobs since Dec. 2007, the paper reports. The maquiladora industry, which manufactures or assembles products for international distribution, shed most of those positions.

But another extraordinary statistic the paper reports is that more than 10,000 businesses — about 40 percent of the city's total — have closed out of fear of extortion and assault, according to the Mexican chamber of commerce.

CIR, reporting for The Nation, wrote last year that "Officials on both sides of the border acknowledge these new immigrants but decline to make estimates of how many have fled."

What's interesting about the El Paso Times story is the effort to go beyond the local body count — more than 4,600 killed since 2008 — to quantify the economic and social damage that the violence has had in Juarez.

While the U.S. has pledged $1.4 billion in aid to Mexico and Central American countries to combat the drug trade, there has been little public discussion between the U.S. and Mexico about the social fallout from the related violence, and possible refugees from the drug war.

Elsewhere in Texas, the former head of the infamous Gulf cartel was sentenced behind closed doors in Houston to 25 years in federal prison and ordered to forfeit $50 million, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Here is the press release from the U.S. attorney's office.