 Immigrant families, many with small children, are being kept in jail-like conditions in Texas and Pennsylvania, according to advocacy groups that say the Texas facility is inhumane and should be shut down.In a report being released Thursday, the groups seek the immediate closure of the T. Don Hutto Residential Center north of Austin, the Texas capital. The center, which opened in May, used to be a jail.The groups, Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, based their findings on their members' visits and interviews with detainees. At the Hutto site, a child secretly passed a visitor a note that read: "Help us and ask us questions," the report said. The groups reported that many of the detainees cried during interviews....
http://www.usatoday.com
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Editor - 08:02:00 02-22-07
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 Italian crisis talks as PM quits |
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano has begun crisis talks following the resignation of Prime Minister Romano Prodi after just 10 months in office. Mr Prodi quit after several of his centre-left coalition partners opposed troop deployments in Afghanistan and plans to expand a US airbase in Italy. Mr Napolitano may call new elections if agreement is not reached on forming a new coalition government. Mr Prodi will stay on as caretaker prime minister in the meantime. The talks are expected to last well into Friday, the president's office has said. The government was brought down by two communist senators who rebelled against their own parties. One of them, Franco Turigliatto, a Trotskyite, is facing expulsion procedures from the Communist Refoundation Party for not being "in line with the [party's] democratic will". The other rebel, Fernando Rossi, has already announced he will resign. ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6384953.stm
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Editor - 08:00:00 02-22-07
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| NATO expects hard fighting this spring, Taliban claims 6,000 fighters ready for offensive |
NATO said Wednesday it expects "hard fighting" this spring in Afghanistan's volatile south and west, while a top Taliban military commander claimed the Islamist militia has deployed more than 6,000 fighters for an imminent offensive. The comments came as two NATO soldiers died in violence in the south and west of the country, which over the past years has seen a Taliban resurgence and the bloodiest violence since the hardline regime's ouster in late 2001 for hosting al-Qaida. "The enemy is making preparations to ramp up their activities in the spring," Col. Tom Collins, spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force, told reporters in a snowy Kabul. Previous years have seen an increase in militant attacks in spring snows melt on mountain passes used by militants. "We know that there are concentrations of Taliban forces in some areas of the south," he said, listing Uruzgan, Kandahar and Helmand and the southwestern provinces of Farah and Ghor. ...
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/02/21/asia/AS-GEN-Afghan-Taliban.php
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Editor - 23:04:00 02-21-07
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| Italian Premier Quits After Narrow Defeat Over Foreign Policy |
After just nine months at the helm of a shaky government, Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi handed in his resignation Wednesday when he lost a critical parliamentary vote over the government's foreign policy. President Giorgio Napolitano asked Prodi to stay on as head of a caretaker government, and the day's frenetic events do not necessarily signal the end of Prodi's tenure as premier. Napolitano could ask him to try to form a new coalition after completing a round of consultations. But Wednesday's vote did confirm the delicate nature of Prodi's disparate band of political allies, a fragility evident since the coalition's narrow victory last April.The crisis in the center-left government opened up when a motion in the Senate to support a wide-ranging foreign policy address by Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema failed by two votes. In that speech, D'Alema called for continuation of the Italian role in NATO's Afghanistan mission and the expansion of a U.S. military base in ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/21/AR2007022101057_pf.html
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Editor - 22:07:00 02-21-07
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| More nations plan pull-out |
Denmark announced that it would withdraw its ground troops serving under British command in Basra, as other countries review their participation in the coalition force. Lithuania, which has 53 soldiers in Iraq serving alongside the Danish battalion, also said it was considering a pull-out. The Romanian Defence Minister said that Bucharest would take a decision on the presence of its 600 soldiers in Iraq, mostly serving under British command, in the next few days. But President Traian Basescu, who is also under pressure to announce a withdrawal timetable, warned that a hasty pull-out of the international coalition forces "would cause chaos and the division of Iraq". Poland has already announced that it will bring home its 900 troops by the end of the year, and Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Japan and New Zealand have already withdrawn their troops. South Korea, which has a contingent of 2,300 troops in the northern city of Arbil, intends to withdraw half by April, and its parliament is calling ...
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article2293479.ece
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Editor - 22:01:00 02-21-07
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| Rice denies US-led coalition in Iraq is crumbling |
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied on Wednesday that the US-led coalition in Iraq is crumbling after Britain announced it would reduce its troop mumbers by 1,600 in the coming months. "The coalition remains intact and in fact the British still have thousands of soldiers deployed in Iraq, in the south," Rice said after talks with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier ahead of a meeting of the Quartet for Middle East peace. Rice said the British pullout was occurring according to the coalition plan to gradually hand over responsibility for security to the Iraqis. "It is the plan that as it is possible to transfer responsibilities to the Iraqis, coalition forces would no longer be needed in those circumstances." Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that British troop numbers in southern Iraq would be reduced from 7,100 to 5,500 in the months ahead and said forces could be cut to below 5,000 later this year....
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070221/wl_afp/britainiraqwithdrawalusrice
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Editor - 21:55:00 02-21-07
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