Tag: InternationalNews

{{Police say they are interrogating four suspected Irish Republican Army members over the discovery of a bomb in a car in the Northern Ireland city of Londonderry.}}

Police intercepted an apparent bomb in transit hours ahead of Friday’s planned visit of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Belfast, 80 miles (130 kilometers) away.

Clinton was expected to meet the Protestant and Catholic leaders of Northern Ireland’s five-year-old unity government, the central achievement of the U.S.-brokered Good Friday peace accord of 1998.

Witnesses said a police vehicle rammed the IRA suspects’ car, disabling it. Police said they arrested three men in the car and a fourth nearby. They declined to specify the bomb’s size.

Most IRA members renounced violence and disarmed in 2005, but several splinter groups remain active.

Architect Oscar Niemeyer, who recreated Brazil’s sensuous curves in reinforced concrete and built the capital of Brasilia on the empty central plains as a symbol of the nation’s future, died on Wednesday. He was 104.

Elisa Barboux, a spokeswoman for the Hospital Samaritano in Rio de Janeiro, confirmed Niemeyer’s death and said the cause was a respiratory infection.

He had been hospitalized for several weeks and also on separate occasions earlier this year, suffering from kidney problems, pneumonia and dehydration.

Dr. Fernando Gjorup, Niemeyer’s physician, said the architect worked on pending projects in the days before his death, taking visits from engineers and other professionals.

“The most impressive thing is that his body suffered but his mind was lucid,” Gjorup said at a press conference.

“He didn’t talk about death, never talked about death. He talked about life.”

In works from Brasilia’s crown-shaped cathedral to the undulating French Communist Party building in Paris, Niemeyer shunned the steel-box structures of many modernist architects, finding inspiration in nature’s crescents and spirals.

His hallmarks include much of the United Nations complex in New York and the Museum of Modern Art in Niteroi, which is perched like a flying saucer across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro.

“Right angles don’t attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man,” he wrote in his 1998 memoir “The Curves of Time.” ”What attracts me are free and sensual curves.

The curves we find in mountains, in the waves of the sea, in the body of the woman we love.”

{{Rescuers are digging through mud and debris to retrieve more bodies strewn across a farming valley in the southern Philippines by a powerful typhoon.}}

The death toll from the storm has surpassed 500, with more than 400 people missing.

More than 310,000 people have lost their homes since Typhoon Bopha struck Tuesday and are crowded inside evacuation centers or staying with their families, relying on food and emergency supplies being rushed in by government agencies and aid groups.

President Benigno Aquino III on Friday visited New Bataan town, ground zero of the disaster, saying “I want to know how this tragedy happened and how to prevent a repeat.”

Aquino told residents that he’s bent on seeking answers in order to improve their conditions and minimize casualties when natural disasters occur.

{Wirestory}

{{Diplomatic efforts to end Syria’s civil war moved forward Thursday with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton joining Russia’s foreign minister and the U.N. peace envoy to the Arab country for extraordinary three-way talks that suggested Washington and Moscow might finally unite behind a strategy as the Assad regime weakens.}}

In Washington, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said intelligence reports raise fears that an increasingly desperate Syrian President Bashar Assad is considering using his chemical weapons arsenal — which the U.S. and Russia agree is unacceptable.

“I think there is no question that we remain very concerned, very concerned,” Panetta said, “that, as the opposition advances, in particular in Damascus, that regime might very well consider the use of chemical weapons.”

It was unclear whether Assad might target rebels within Syria or bordering countries, but growing concern over such a scenario was clearly adding urgency to discussions in Ireland’s capital.

On the sidelines of a human rights conference, Clinton gathered with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and mediator Lakhdar Brahimi for about 40 minutes to look for a strategy the international community could rally around to end Syria’s 21-month civil war.

“We have talked a little bit about how we can work out hopefully a process that will get Syria back from the brink,” Brahimi said after the meeting ended.

The experienced Algerian diplomat, representing the global body and the Arab League, said he would put together a peace process based on a political transition strategy the U.S. and Russia agreed on in Geneva in June.

Then, the process quickly became bogged down over how the international community might enforce its conditions.

“We haven’t taken any sensational decisions,” Brahimi said. “But I think we have agreed that the situation is bad and we have agreed that we must continue to work together to see how we can find creative ways of bringing this problem under control and hopefully starting to solve it.”

The former Cold War foes have fought bitterly over how to address the conflict, but Clinton stressed before the meeting that they shared a common goal.

“We have been trying hard to work with Russia to try to stop the bloodshed in Syria and start a political transition for a post-Assad Syrian future,” Clinton told reporters in Dublin.

{{The number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. dropped to an estimated 11.1 million last year from a peak of 12 million in 2007, part of an overall waning of Hispanic immigration. For the first time since 1910, Hispanic immigration last year was topped by immigrants from Asia.}}

Demographers say illegal Hispanic immigration — 80 percent of all illegal immigration comes from Mexico and Latin America — isn’t likely to approach its mid-2000 peak again, due in part to a weakened U.S. economy and stronger enforcement but also a graying of the Mexican population.

The finding suggests an uphill battle for the Republicans, who passed legislation in the House last week that would extend citizenship to a limited pool of foreign students with advanced degrees but who are sharply divided on whether to pursue broader immigration measures.

In all, the biggest surge of immigration in modern U.S. history ultimately may be recorded as occurring in the mid-1990s to early 2000s, yielding illegal residents who now have been settled in the U.S. for 10 years or more.

They include migrants who arrived here as teens and are increasingly at risk of “aging out” of congressional proposals such as the DREAM Act that offer a pathway to citizenship for younger adults.

“The priority now is to push a vigorous debate about the undocumented people already here,” said Jose Antonio Vargas, 31, a journalist from the Philippines.

“We want to become citizens and not face the threat of deportation or be treated as second class,” said Vargas, whose campaign, Define American, along with the young immigrant group United We Dream, have been pushing for citizenship for the entire illegal population in the U.S.

The groups point to a strong Latino and Asian-American turnout for President Barack Obama in last month’s election as evidence of public support for a broad overhaul of U.S. immigration laws.

Earlier this year, Obama extended to many younger immigrants temporary reprieves from deportation. But Vargas, who has lived in the U.S. since 1993 and appeared this year on the cover of Time magazine with other immigrants who lacked legal status, has become too old to qualify.

“This conversation is a question about how we as a nation define who is an American,” Vargas said, noting that if politicians don’t embrace immigration overhaul now, a rapidly growing bloc of minority voters may soon do it for them.

“If you want us to pay a fine to become a citizen, OK. If you want us to pay back taxes, absolutely. If you want us to speak English, I speak English. But we can’t tread water on this issue anymore.”

Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at the Pew Research Center and a former Census Bureau official, said U.S. immigration policies will have a significant impact in shaping a future U.S. labor force, which is projected to shrink by 2030.

Aging white baby boomers, many in specialized or management roles, are beginning to retire.

Mexican immigration, which has helped fill needs in farming, home health care and other low-wage U.S. jobs, has leveled off.

“Immigration is one way to boost the number of workers in the population,” he said, but the next wave of needed immigrants is likely to come from somewhere other than Mexico.

“We are not going to see a return to the levels of Mexican unauthorized immigration of a decade ago.”

The numbers are largely based on the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey through March 2011. Because the Census Bureau does not ask people about their immigration status, Passel derived estimates on illegal immigrants largely by subtracting the estimated legal immigrant population from the total foreign-born population.

The numbers are also supplemented with material from William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution and Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau, who reviewed data released Thursday from the Census’ American Community Survey.

The data showed that 11.1 million, or 28 percent, of the foreign-born population in the U.S. consists of illegal immigrants, virtually unchanged since 2009 and roughly equal to the level of 2005.

An additional 12.2 million foreign-born people, 31 percent, are legal permanent residents with green cards. And 15.1 million, or 37 percent, are naturalized U.S. citizens.

Fewer Mexican workers are entering the U.S., while many of those immigrants already here are opting to return to their homeland, resulting in zero net migration from Mexico.

In 2007, legal and illegal immigrants made up equally large shares of the foreign-born population, at 31 percent, due to ballooning numbers of new unauthorized migrants seeking U.S. construction and related jobs during the mid-2000s housing boom. Naturalized U.S. citizens then represented 35 percent.

Broken down by geography and race, roughly half of all states last year posted declines or no change in their numbers of foreign-born Hispanics, including big immigrant states such as California and New York as well as economically hard hit areas in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, which previously had seen gains.

Foreign-born Asians were a bigger source of population gain than Hispanic immigrants in California, New York, Virginia, Illinois and New Jersey.

Newly moving into suburban communities, the Asian population spread out more across the southeastern U.S. and Texas, increasing their share in 93 percent of the nation’s metropolitan areas.

As a whole, foreign-born residents are slowly graying, with 44 percent now age 45 or older. They are more likely than in 2007 to be enrolled in college or graduate school (39 percent, up from 32 percent) and to be single (17 percent married, down from 22 percent).

Births to immigrant mothers also are on the decline, driving the overall U.S. birth rate last year to the lowest in records dating back to 1920.

“At least temporarily, the face of immigration to the U.S. is changing in terms of cultural background, education and skills,” Frey said.

“The fertility bump provided by past Hispanic immigrants may not be replicated in the future, especially if Asians take over a greater share of U.S. immigrants.”

House Republicans, seeking to show they are serious about addressing the immigration issue after being largely rejected by Hispanics in the election, voted last week to make green cards accessible to foreign students graduating with advanced science and math degrees from U.S. universities.

The measure, strongly backed by the high-tech industry and touted as a boost to the U.S. economy, would have a net effect of extending more visas and eventual citizenship to students from India and China.

It is opposed by most Democrats, the Obama administration and immigrant rights groups such as the Asian American Justice Center which want to see it packaged with broader legislation that extends legal status for illegal immigrants.

These groups also oppose the proposed new 55,000 visas for foreign students because they would be offset by eliminating a lottery program that provides green cards to people with lower rates of immigration, mainly those from Africa.

Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked Republicans from bringing up the bill.

A bill introduced by Sens. Jon Kyl of Arizona and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, who are retiring at the end of this session, seeks to offer some legal status to young immigrants.

Critics say it falls short because it does not provide a path to citizenship, an issue that Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., describes as “non-negotiable.”

About 77 percent of Hispanic voters in the November election said they thought people working in the U.S. illegally should be offered a chance to apply for legal status, according to exit polling conducted for the television networks and The Associated Press.

That is compared with 71 percent of Asian-Americans and 65 percent of voters overall.
The political implications are great.

Hispanics and Asian-Americans are the nation’s two fastest-growing population groups, each increasing by more than 40 percent since 2000. A higher birth rate and years of steadily high immigration have boosted Hispanics to 17 percent of the U.S. population, compared with blacks at 12 percent and 5 percent for Asians.

Even if the nation’s estimated 11 million illegal residents do not attain citizenship, the nation’s Hispanics, who made up roughly 10 percent of voters in November, are expected to nearly double their share of eligible voters by 2030. Asian-Americans, who now are 3 percent of voters, will also continue to increase.

About 73 percent of Asian-Americans voted for Obama, second only to African-Americans at 93 percent and slightly higher than Latinos at 71 percent, according to exit polling.

Asian-Americans don’t strongly identify with either party, but they tend to cite jobs, education and health care as issues most important to them and generally prefer a big government that provides more services.

Relatively new to the U.S. and religiously diverse, Asian-Americans also may have been repelled by Republican Mitt Romney’s forceful stance during the primaries seeking “self-deportation” of immigrants as well as the GOP’s sometimes narrow appeal to evangelical Christians, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political science professor at the University of California-Riverside who helps conduct a broad National Asian American Survey.

While Mexicans make up about 55 percent of illegal immigrants and other Latin Americans represent another 25 percent, Asians make up a 10 percent share, many of whom overstay temporary visas.

{{Eccentric software tycoon John McAfee, wanted in Belize for questioning in the shooting death of his neighbor, has been arrested in Guatemala for entering the country illegally, his Guatemala attorney told media.}}

Before McAfee’s arrest, he told journalists he would be seeking asylum in Guatemala.

McAfee was arrested by the Central American country’s immigration police and not the national police, said his attorney, who was confident his client would be released within hours.

“Thank God I am in a place where there is some sanity,” said McAfee, 67, before his arrest. “I chose Guatemala carefully.”

McAfee said that in Guatemala, the locals aren’t surprised when he says the Belizean government is out to kill him.

“Instead of going, ‘You’re crazy,’ they go, ‘Yeah, of course they are,’” he said. “It’s like, finally, I understand people who understand the system here.”

But McAfee added he has not ruled out moving back to the United States, where he made his fortune as the inventor of anti-virus software, and that despite losing much of his fortune he still has more money than he could ever spend.

In his interview with Press, a jittery, animated but candid McAfee called the media’s representation of him a “nightmare that is about to explode,” and said he’s prepared to prove his sanity.

McAfee has been on the run from police in Belize since the Nov. 10 murder of his neighbor, fellow American expatriate Greg Faull.

During his three-week journey, said McAfee, he disguised himself as handicapped, dyed his hair seven times and hid in many different places during his three-week journey.

He dismissed accounts of erratic behavior and reports that he had been using the synthetic drug bath salts. He said he had never used the drug, and said statements that he had were part of an elaborate prank.

Investigators said that McAfee was not a suspect in the death of the former developer, who was found shot in the head in his house on the resort island of San Pedro, but that they wanted to question him.

McAfee told ABC News that the poisoning death of his dogs and the murder just hours later of Faull, who had complained about his dogs, was a coincidence.

McAfee has been hiding from police ever since Faull’s death — but Telesforo Guerra, McAfee’s lawyer in Guatemala, said the tactic was born out of necessity, not guilt.

“You don’t have to believe what the police say,” Guerra told ABC News. “Even though they say he is not a suspect they were trying to capture him.”

Guerra, who is a former attorney general of Guatemala, said it would take two to three weeks to secure asylum for his client.

According to McAfee, Guerra is also the uncle of McAfee’s 20-year-old girlfriend, Samantha. McAfee said the government raided his beachfront home and threatened Samantha’s family.

“Fifteen armed soldiers come in and personally kidnap my housekeeper, threaten Sam’s father with torture and haul away half a million dollars of my s***,” claimed McAfee. “If they’re not after me, then why all these raids? There’ve been eight raids!”

Before his arrest, McAfee said he would hold a press conference on Thursday in Guatemala City to announce his asylum bid. He has offered to answer questions from Belizean law enforcement over the phone, and denied any involvement in Faull’s death.

False Report of McAfee Arrest on Mexico Border

Over the weekend, a post on McAfee’s blog claimed that he had been detained on the Belizean/Mexico border.

On Monday, a follow-up post said that the “John McAfee” taken into custody was actually a “double” who was carrying a North Korean passport with McAfee’s name.

That post claimed that McAfee had already escaped Belize and was on the run with Samantha and two reporters from Vice Magazine.

McAfee did not reveal his location in that post, and a spokesman for Belize’s National Security Ministry, Raphael Martinez, said on Monday that no one by McAfee’s name was ever detained at the border and that Belizean security officials believed McAfee was still in their country.

However, a photo posted by Vice magazine on Monday with their article, “We Are With John McAfee Right Now, Suckers,” apparently had been taken on an iPhone 4S and had location information embedded in it that revealed the exact coordinates where the photo was taken — in the Rio Dulce National Park in Guatemala

{{Germany’s Cabinet on Thursday approved sending German Patriot air defense missiles to Turkey to defend the NATO member against possible attacks from Syria, in a major step toward Western military involvement in the Syrian conflict.}}

Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters that two batteries with a total of 400 soldiers would be sent to the border area for one year, although the deployment could be shortened.

The decision must be endorsed by the German Parliament, but approval is assured.

The Dutch Cabinet is expected to announce approval Friday contingent on parliamentary approval.

The Western alliance decided this week to approve sending the weapons to prevent cross-border attacks against Turkey after mortar rounds and shells from Syria killed five Turks.

But the announcement also appeared to be a message to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime at a time when Washington and other governments fear Syria may be readying its chemical weapons stockpiles for possible use.

Syria has denounced the NATO plan but German officials stressed that the missiles will only be used to defend Turkish territory and would not be a part of any “no fly zone” over Syrian territory.

“Nobody knows what such a regime is capable of and that is why we are acting protectively here,” Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said.

Officials said the Patriots will be programmed so that they can intercept only Syrian weapons that cross into Turkish airspace. They aren’t allowed to penetrate Syrian territory pre-emptively. That means they would have no immediate effect on any Syrian government offensives — chemical or conventional — that remain strictly inside the country’s national borders.

Due to the complexity and size of the Patriot batteries — including their radars, command-and-control centers, communications and support facilities — they will probably have to travel by sea, NATO officials said.

They probably won’t arrive in Turkey for another month, officials predicted.