Americas

President Barack Obama plans to make his first visit to Israel as a US leader in the coming months, the White House said Tuesday.

Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed the prospect of a visit in a telephone call late last month, but the White House said that it was not ready yet to name a date or offer further details.

"When the president spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu on January 28, they discussed a visit by the president to Israel in the spring," said National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor.

"The start of the president's second term and the formation of a new Israeli government offer the opportunity to reaffirm the deep and enduring bonds between the United States and Israel and to discuss the way forward on a broad range of issues of mutual concern, including Iran and Syria.

"Additional details about the trip -- including the dates of travel -- will be released at a later time." Israeli media earlier reported that the visit would begin in March 20.

West Bank visit also on the agenda
Obama will also stop in the West Bank and Jordan on his trip to the Middle East, the White House said.
Officials who had earlier disclosed Obama would visit Israel this Spring have later confirmed that the trip would also involve travel to Jordan and the Palestinian territories.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About 60 students forced to withdraw from elite college after cheating on last year's final exam, university says.

About 60 students have been forced to withdraw from Harvard University after cheating on a final exam last year in an "unprecedented" academic scandal at the prestigious school.

Harvard University said on Friday that the students were forced to withdraw from school for a period of time for cheating in a final exam in a class on Congress.

Roughly 125 undergraduates were involved in the scandal, which came to light at the end of the spring semester after a professor noticed similarities on a take-home exam that showed students worked together, even though they were instructed to work alone.

In a campus-wide email on Friday, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D Smith said the school's academic integrity board had resolved all the cases related to the cheating probe.

He said "somewhat more than half" of the cases involved students who had to withdraw from the college for a period of time.

Athletes implicated

Harvard said the length of a student's withdrawal period is usually from two to four terms.

Of the cases left, about half of the students got disciplinary probation. The rest were not disciplined.

Some athletes at the Ivy League school became ensnared, including two basketball team co-captains whom the school scratched from its team roster in the wake of the cheating investigation.

Past reports in The Harvard Crimson also linked football, baseball and hockey players to the scandal.

Smith's said in Friday's email that the school would not discuss specific student cases. A school spokesman, citing student privacy, also would not say if any athletes had withdrawn or say which teams might have been affected.

The dean called the scale of the cheating incident "unprecedented" and said reforms were being drawn up to "promote academic integrity and a deeper understanding of it within our community.

"This is a time for communal reflection and action," he wrote. "We are responsible for creating the community in which our students study and we all thrive as scholars."

Harvard, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the most exclusive universities in the world, with students paying about $63,000 a year to attend after winning a place in a highly competitive admissions process.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The White House has released a photo of US President Barack Obama firing a shotgun, looking to put to rest scepticism over his recent comments to a US magazine that he went skeet shooting “all the time".

The photo, which was published on the White House’s official Flickr account on Friday, shows the president skeet shooting at a range at his Camp David residence.

In an interview with the New Republic magazine last month, Obama showed sympathy for hunters as he pushed for tighter gun controls after 26 people were killed at a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut last December.

Obama's aides were in the awkward position of standing by his comments while resisting reporters' demands for proof that he was indeed a regular on the shooting range at the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains.

The White House finally weighed in with a photo of Obama skeet shooting on August 4, 2012.  

"For all the 'skeeters'," Obama senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said in a Twitter message linked to the photo, which showed the president - wearing sunglasses, jeans and noise mufflers on his ears - firing a shotgun with smoke spraying from the barrel.

‘Profound respect’

When the New Republic asked Obama last month if he has ever fired a weapon, Obama responded, "Yes, in fact, up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time," Obama said.

"The whole family?" he was asked.

"Not the girls, but oftentimes guests of mine go up there... and I have a profound respect for the traditions of hunting that trace back in this country for generations. And I think those who dismiss that out of hand make a big mistake."

Obama's comment was widely seen as an attempt to reach out to gun owners to ease their concerns about his legislative proposals, the biggest gun control push in decades. He will travel to Minnesota on Monday to speak on gun control.

The National Rifle Association, which has rejected Obama's gun control proposals, scoffed at the photo.

“One picture does not erase a lifetime of supporting every gun ban and every gun-control scheme imaginable,'' said Andrew Arulanandam, the influential gun rights lobbying group's spokesman.

The NRA opposes Obama's call for Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines and says requiring background checks for all gun purchases would be ineffective because the administration is not doing enough to enforce existing gun laws.
 

Considering numerous documents there can be no doubt that an individual known as Joseph Ametrano is clearly a suspicious person of interest, or a suspect if you will, and a willing accomplice to, the very strange Sandy Hook massacre.

Outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Thursday that the United States remains very concerned about the future of women in Afghanistan as US troops prepare to leave the country, AFP reports.

The American chain restaurant Applebee’s has fired a waitress who posted a note on the Internet from a pastor that refused to tip her, which said “I give God 10%, why do you get 18?”

The waitress posted the receipt on the social news and entertainment website Reddit, where it quickly went viral in the atheist section of the site.

“My mistake sir, I’m sure Jesus will pay for my rent and groceries,” the waitress, Chelsea Welch, wrote in the headline of her post. The Applebee’s receipt indicated that an 18 percent gratuity had been added to the check, since the dinner party included eight or more people.

But the angry customer scratched out the $6.29 top and wrote “0” instead, arguing that she should not tip the waitress more than she pays God.

“I originally posted the note as a lighthearted joke,” Welch told The Consumerist. “I thought the note was insulting, but it was also comical. I posted it to Reddit because I thought other users would find it entertaining.”

Welch said she did her best to conceal any identifying information and even gave an inaccurate description of the pastor. The picture she posted did not include the pastor’s name or the restaurant’s information and the signature at the bottom of the receipt did not appear to be legible. But due to the popularity of the post on Reddit, which acquired more than 4,000 comments in just three days, Internet users quickly worked to determine the identity of the pastor.

By the time Welch posted a version of the receipt that did not contain a signature, it was too late to stop the flurry of attempts.

“I had already started receiving messages containing Facebook profile links and blogs and websites, asking me to confirm the identity of the customer,” she said. “I refused to confirm any of them, and all of them were incorrect. I worked with the website moderators to remove any personal information. I wanted to protect the identity of both my fellow server and the customer. I had no intention of starting a witch hunt or hurting anyone – I just wanted to share a picture I found interesting.”

But once the pastor, 37-year-old Alois Bell, caught wind of the viral receipt, she called Applebee’s and demanded that everyone – including the waitress and the managers – be fired. Shortly thereafter, Welch lost her job – despite allegedly being one of their most beloved waitresses.

“When I posted this, I didn’t represent Applebee’s in a bad light. In fact, I didn’t represent them at all. I did my best to protect the identity of all parties involved. I didn’t break any specific guidelines in the company handbook – I checked,” Welch said. “But because this person got embarrassed that their selfishness was made public, Applebee’s has made it clear that they would rather lose a dedicated employee than lose an angry customer. That’s a policy I can’t understand.”

When questioned by the New York Daily News, Applebee’s spokesman Dan Smith confirmed that an employee had been terminated, but declined to specify which one.

The Smoking Gun also tracked down the pastor, who said her note was a “lapse in my character and judgment” and that it “has been blown out of proportion.”

“My heart is really broken,” she said. “I’ve brought embarrassment to my church and ministry.”
 

US president says "now is the time" for action on reform that will put illegal immigrants on path to citizenship.

"I can guarantee that I will put everything I have behind it," Obama said in an interview with Telemundo, one of two he conducted on Wednesday with Spanish-language television networks.

Obama said a deal should be attainable this year, but he wanted one even sooner. He said that politics, not technical issues, were standing in the way.

A group of Senators, both Democrats and Republicans, has agreed on a framework for comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants already in the country.

In the Republican-controlled House, another group of legislators was working on its own proposal.

Obama is promoting his own set of principles similar to those included in the Senate plan, but he has not been directly involved in the Senate's negotiations.

If Congress delays, he said, "I've got a bill drafted, we've got language" ready to offer Capitol Hill.

Obama offered his own principles on immigration at an appearance in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

He pushed for a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants that is faster than the one the Senate group proposed.

Path to citizenship

Rather than emphasise border security first as the Senators want, he would let undocumented immigrants get on a path to citizenship if they undergo national security and criminal background checks, pay penalties, learn English and get behind those foreigners seeking to immigrate legally.

Asked by the Univision network about Republican criticism of his proposals, particularly from a Hispanic senator, Marco Rubio, Obama argued his administration had already done much work on securing the US border with Mexico.

"Look, we put border security ahead of a pathway to citizenship. We have done more on border security in the last four years than we have done in the previous 20," Obama said.

"We've actually done almost everything that Republicans asked to be done several years ago as a precondition to move forward on comprehensive immigration reform."

Obama offered to meet publicly or privately with Rubio and other Senators to try to move the process forward.

The border security issue may be the toughest the two sides will have to overcome to reach the type of comprehensive overhaul that Washington has talked about for years, but has been unable to execute.

After years on the back burner, immigration reform has suddenly looked possible as Republicans, chastened by Latino voters who rejected them in the November election, appear more willing to accept an overhaul.

Congress is not grappling with two major issues - immigration and Obama's efforts to tighten gun regulations.

The president told Univision he believed Congress could handle both at the same time.
 

Wielding machetes and rusty shotguns, a motley crew in face masks escorts dozens of captives onto a basketball court to face a public "trial" for suspected ties to criminal gangs.

This is Wild West justice, Mexican-style.

Outraged at relentless extortion, kidnapping and theft as a wave of drug-related violence washes over Mexico, farmers, shopkeepers and other residents in the mountainous southern state of Guerrero are taking the law into their own hands as "community police."

Both state and federal police as well as the military leave them to their own devices, manning checkpoints at entries to towns, but venturing no farther.

T-shirts pulled over their faces with holes cut for the eyes and nose, dozens of gunmen on Thursday flanked the tiny square in the hamlet of El Mezon, where more than 50 prisoners were paraded in public and accused of crimes from murder to rape to theft. No real evidence against them was presented.

The vigilante justice underscores a serious challenge facing new President Enrique Pena Nieto, who has vowed to shift the focus away from a head-to-head fight with drug-smuggling cartels that has killed up to 70,000 people in the past six years and to a more effective campaign against extortion and violence.

He plans to create a civilian-led police force made up of former military personnel that will replace the armed forces in the field, although until then, the government will keep troops out on patrol to deter violence.

Many Mexicans have little faith in police forces or the justice system. In this corner of the country, they are taking on the job themselves.

One of the gunmen watching over the alleged criminals on Thursday wore a Mexican "lucha libre" wrestler's mask, another a Spider-Man hood and a shotgun slung over his back. Some curled their fingers nervously over triggers.

They paraded the accused in groups of five in front of hundreds of onlookers. A collective gasp rose when one man was accused of murder by dismembering, a common trademark of gruesome gangland killings. He stared back at the crowd with an impassive smile.

Some local leaders gave testimony about how they themselves had been kidnapped by the accused. Sentencing will come later, organizers say.

"Many people saw it when they grabbed me. They stroked my shoulder and said they would kill me," one community police leader told the assembly.

"In my mind, I am dead, I haven't been able to get over it."

EXTORTION, KIDNAPPINGS

Communities in the folds of rugged mountains east of the once-thriving and now gang-infested beach resort of Acapulco say police are often in cahoots with criminals, do nothing when crimes are reported and ask for bribes themselves.

Extortion has flared in and around Acapulco over the past five years after two cartels clashed and one fragmented, creating a series of mini-cartels and kidnap gangs.

"We are victims of extortion, of injustice. We have been abused," said Bruno Placido Valerio, who coordinates community police groups in 20 towns and villages - a total of about 240 gunmen.

"The people are indignant at so much abuse. But we are not seeking anarchy or aiming to take justice into our own hands, but rather find a way out from the problem we are living with."

While community self-protection is a tradition in some parts of Mexico, these more radical community policing groups are an offshoot that started to form in early January.

His eyes peering out from behind a black ski-mask and clutching an aging .22-caliber rifle, a man who goes by the nickname "El Ciclon" or "The Cyclone," kept watch over residents of nearby communities attending the start of Thursday's "trial."

He and others covered their faces to remain anonymous and avoid reprisals from friends of the captives, or from government authorities.

"The people are fed up," the 45-year-old farmhand said. "Our government doesn't back us, so we decided to try to clear away all the bad people. We have to get rid of these animals."

On the eve of the trial, Guerrero state officials staged a last-ditch push to defuse the situation, but to no avail. The communities must now debate whether to impose their own punishments, or opt to turn them over to the real courts.

Some are demanding an eye for an eye.

RAPISTS 'SHOULD BE RAPED'

"They must be punished in line with the crime," said Odila Gonzalez Rios, who oversees community policing in the settlement of Copala, near the Pacific coast. "If they have raped, then they should be raped to see how it feels."

"If they have killed? The same. ... They must die, because otherwise this will never end," she said. "Do to them what they have done to others."

Acapulco last year earned the dubious distinction of being the murder capital of Mexico.

Police pickup trucks patrol Guerrero state, bristling with semi-automatic weapons. Sandwiched between supermarket advertisements on the radio, advice is broadcast on how to anonymously denounce organized crime.

The community policing "people power" approach comes at a cost. With so many guns openly held against the law, school absenteeism has soared.

"Closing schools is no way to combat the social cancer of insecurity," said Silvia Romero Suarez, Guerrero state's education minister. "It impacts our schools because teachers are afraid and parents fear sending their children to class."

The flourishing of community police groups in Colombia was a major factor in a deep spiral of violence that country grappled with as drug gangs co-opted them in the fight against Marxist guerrillas.

Mexico's government now faces a careful balancing act in handling the issue to avoid stoking demands for self-determination elsewhere, like in the southern state of Chiapas.

In the meantime, it is allowing gunmen to operate outside the law.

"This is a violation of human rights. They are violating people's right to freedom," said Oscar Ortiz, a law professor based in Acapulco. "The Mexican state, and that of Guerrero in particular, should get into gear because you cannot permit the law to be broken like this."

But some local officials insist the push for justice is forcing criminals to think again and making the area safer.

"They have filled us, the authorities, with courage, I can't hide or deny that," said Severo Castro Godinez, mayor in the town of Ayutla.

"Fortunately today, thanks to this movement, Ayutla is at peace. ... The community police are good people. They are responsible citizens. They are not looking to kill, they are looking to correct social behavior."


(Reuters)

By Associated Press
Washington

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton issued a parting warning Thursday about Syria’s civil war, accusing Iran of playing an increasingly prominent role in directing the violence, which she said heightened the danger of a larger regional conflict that draws in Israel or other neighbors.

“I’ve done what was possible to do,” Clinton told reporters on the eve of her last day as secretary of state.

But she painted a harrowing picture of a war that could still get worse.

“The worst kind of predictions about what could happen internally and spilling over the borders of Syria are certainly within the realm of the possible now,” she said.

The conflict “is distressing on all fronts,” Clinton told a roundtable of journalists Thursday, a day before John Kerry is sworn in as her successor. She pointed the finger primarily at Iran, accusing it of dispatching more personnel and better military materiel to President Bashar Assad’s regime to help him defeat rebel forces. Its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, is also playing a bigger role in the conflict.

“The Iranians are all in for Assad, and there is very little room for any kind of dialogue with them,” Clinton said.

She spoke after Syria threatened Thursday to retaliate for an Israeli airstrike, and its ally Iran warned ominously that the Jewish state would regret the attack.

In a letter to the U.N. secretary-general, Assad’s regime stressed its “right to defend itself, its territory and sovereignty” and holding Israel and its supporters accountable. And Ali Abdul-Karim Ali, Assad’s ambassador in Lebanon, said his government maintained “the option and the capacity to surprise in retaliation.”

Clinton declined to talk specifically about Israel’s strike, which U.S. officials described as targeting trucks containing sophisticated Russian-made SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles. The trucks were next to a military research facility, and the strike hit both the trucks and the facility, U.S. officials said.

If the SA-17s were to have reached Hezbollah, they would have greatly inhibited the Israeli air force’s ability to operate in Lebanon, where Israel has flown frequent sorties in recent years. The attack has inflamed regional tensions already running high over Syria’s 22-month-old civil war, and which has already led to deaths in neighboring Turkey and Lebanon.

In her strikingly candid assessment, Clinton spread the criticism to Russia, which has stymied U.S.-led efforts to set global sanctions against the Syrian regime at the U.N. Security Council. Washington and Moscow have remained in a three-way dialogue with the U.N. special envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, since late last year, but Clinton said the Russians were simultaneously providing financial assistance and military equipment to Assad.

“The Russians are not passive bystanders in their support for Assad. They have been much more active,” she told reporters. “But maybe they will change. And maybe they will be more open to an international solution because they can’t look at what’s happening and not believe it could be incredibly dangerous to everyone’s interests, including theirs.”

Despite the dismal outlook of the war, Clinton stressed she in no way has softened her opposition to the United States providing weapons to Syrian rebels or intervening militarily to halt the conflict. Asked about America’s Gulf allies who have sent arms to the Syrian opposition, Clinton said the Obama administration continues to urge caution on the types of materiel being supplied and vetting recipients.

The U.S. fears that if extremist groups get dangerous weapons, they could then use them against American interests or Israel.

“Sitting here today, I can’t tell you that we’ve been entirely successful in that,” Clinton said. “There are those who are supplying weapons and money for weapons, who really don’t care who gets it as long as they are against Assad - and who have the view that once Assad is gone, then we’ll deal with the consequences of these other groups who are now armed and funded. That’s not our view.”

She stressed that a political solution was necessary, and defended Syria’s top opposition leader for suggesting earlier this week that he’d be willing to negotiate with members of Assad’s regime. The call provoked an outcry from rebels who insist that Assad must step down first.

And she urged Kerry to press on with efforts at the United Nations and elsewhere to “create more credibility for the opposition” and create the possibility for more forceful international action to end the war.

“I think I’ve done what was possible to do over the last two years in trying to create or help stand up an opposition that was credible and could be an interlocutor in any kind of political negotiation,” Clinton said. “We’ve engaged in a steady drumbeat of activities and trying to put together a coalition and trying to find a way to get something through the Security Council that would serve as the international legal basis for further action to be taken by many countries.”

 

With two decades to go before it can reprocess spent nuclear fuel, the US will have to bury nearly 70,000 tons of it, a research lab reports. It comes after Congress and the Obama administration defunded a planned nuclear waste repository in 2011.

­The Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a facility that does research for the Department of Energy (DOE), said that "about 68,450 [metric tons] or about 98 percent of the total current inventory by mass, can proceed to permanent disposal without the need to ensure retrievability for reuse or research purposes" in its report, published near the end of 2012. The rest of the waste, the report said, could be kept available for research on fuel reprocessing and storage.

The report was fairly obscure until being cited in a DOE document that showed plans to find a new permanent waste dump after Congress and the Obama administration cut funding for the Yucca Mountain repository in 2011.

Reprocessing has little support in Washington due to concerns that spent fuel could fall into the wrong hands. Nevertheless the DOE started looking into reprocessing methods in 2005.

But following the March 2011 disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, US officials became wary of recycling radioactive waste.

The Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, co-chaired by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, said that “no currently available or reasonably foreseeable reactor and fuel cycle technology developments — including advances in reprocessing and recycling technologies — have the potential to fundamentally alter the waste management challenges the nation confronts over at least the next several decades, if not longer” in a report.

Reprocessing was not taken off the table following the report, though, with American officials saying it was “premature for the United States to commit, as a matter of policy, to ‘closing’ the nuclear fuel cycle given the large uncertainties that exist about the merits and commercial viability of different fuel cycle and technology options."

The method is seen as a dangerous cash grab by anti-nuclear activists.

“Recycling is a euphemism for reprocessing which is one of the worst polluters of the atmosphere and the ocean, and is a direct conduit to proliferation,” Mali Martha Lightfoot, executive director of the Helen Caldicott Foundation, told Forbes.

“It is not really a solution to anything except how can the industry get more of our money. It also ups the ante for reactor accident danger, as in the case of Fukushima, because MOX fuel has plutonium in it.”

So-called MOX fuel, short for mixed-oxide, is used in nuclear warheads usually consists of a mix of plutonium and uranium.

The stock of used nuclear fuel currently held at 79 temporary locations in 34 US states “is massive, diverse, dispersed, and increasing,” according to the Oak Ridge report.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

US President Barack Obama’s Kenyan uncle has been living in the US illegally since arriving as a teenager and is now facing the prospect of deportation.

After being arrested and charged for drunk driving in Framingham, Mass., police discovered that 68-year-old Onyango Obama, the half-brother of the president’s father, was in the country illegally – and had been living in the US undetected for years.

After his arrest, an incapacitated and slurring Obama threatened to “call the White House”. He was charged with driving under the influence and was held without bail after the incident while immigration officials investigated the details surrounding his deportation warrant.

The president’s uncle had already been ordered for deportation in 1986 and 1989 and again in 1992 after failing to renew an application to stay in the US. But it wasn’t until the drunk driving incident that he was found and taken to court for violating the law.

The president said he did not know his uncle was here illegally and that he would not intervene in the trial. A hearing has been set for Dec. 3.

“Everybody wants to stay in America,” said the man’s lawyer, Scott Bratton. “Hopefully, on Dec. 3, the case will be over.”

Although the president said he will not intervene, it appears as if his uncle has been getting special treatment due to his relation. After his arrest, he was quickly released from the detention center and quickly secured a federal work permit and a state hardship driver’s license, since his own was revoked. He quickly returned to his job at a liquor store in Framingham.

Obama attended a boys’ school in Cambridge nearly 50 years ago and has lived in the US ever since. He is married to Zeituni Onyango, who was also ordered for deportation and was granted asylum in 2010, partially because of the media exposure her case received.
 

An Armenian presidential candidate from the Union for National Self-Determination party has been shot and wounded in the center of Yerevan, the country's capital. The attempt on Paruyr Hayrikyan’s life may delay the election.

­Following the incident, the 64 year-old Hayrikyan was rushed to the Saint Gregory the Illuminator medical center with two gunshot wounds, in the shoulder and in the chest. The chest wound is considered serious, but not immediately life-threatening, medics said.

Hayrikyan is conscious but has not yet been operated on. A number of high-profile figures visited the politician in his ward, including Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan, Yerevan Police Chief Vladimir Gasparyan and Speaker of Parliament Hovik Abrahamyan.

Abrahamyan told the press that the presidential elections may be delayed because of the attempted assassination.

“I do not rule out this possibility,” Abrahamyan said. “Moreover, our law has such a provision.”

“An attempt on Hayrikyan is a blow to our nationhood,” Abrahamyan added. “We explicitly condemn the incident and hope the police will solve the crime quickly.”

The candidate was shot as he left his car near his parent’s house on Tpagrichneri Street in the southeast section of central Yerevan.

Two shells have reportedly been found at the crime scene. Police are still investigating, but are not commenting on the incident.

Hayrikyan is one of eight candidates running for president in the February 18 election. Campaigning in the Caucasus state started on January 21.