Monday, June 17, 2013

ENNISKILLEN, Northern Ireland (AP) — British Prime Minister David Cameron says leaders gathering Monday for the G-8 summit in Northern Ireland should reach speedy agreement on trade and tax reforms, and draw inspiration from the host country’s ability to resolve its own stubborn conflict.

Speaking hours ahead of the summit’s official opening at a lakeside golf resort, Cameron said he expects formal agreement to launch negotiations on a European-American free trade agreement. He said a pact to slash tariffs on exports would boost employment and growth on both sides of the Atlantic.

“This will be a summit that will drive growth and prosperity all over the world,” Cameron declared as he arrived at the summit venue ahead of leaders from the United States, Canada, Russia, Germany, France, Italy and Japan as well as the 27-nation European Union.

Referring to Northern Ireland’s ability to leave behind a four-decade conflict that claimed 3,700 lives, he said leaders of the Group of Eight wealthy nations should be inspired by the setting — the lush lakelands of County Fermanagh — to deliver their own economic breakthrough.

“Ten or 20 years ago, a G-8 in Fermanagh would have been unimaginable. But today Northern Ireland is a very different place … a symbol of hope to the world,” Cameron said.

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Obama says Northern Ireland peace is blueprint for world conflicts, but will be tested

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) — President Barack Obama declared peace in Northern Ireland a “blueprint” for those living amid conflict around the world, while acknowledging that the calm between Catholics and Protestants will face further tests. Summoning young people to take responsibility for their country’s future, Obama warned there is “more to lose now than there’s ever been.”

“The terms of peace may be negotiated by political leaders, but the fate of peace is up to each of us,” Obama said Monday during remarks at Belfast’s Waterfront Hall. The glass-fronted building would never have been built during the city’s long era of car bombs.

Obama arrived in Northern Ireland Monday morning after an overnight flight from Washington. Following his remarks in Belfast, he was bound for a lakeside golf resort in Enneskillen for meetings with other leaders of the Group of 8 industrial nations on Syria, trade and counterterrorism. Later Monday, Obama was meeting one-on-one with Russian President Vladimir Putin, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta.

Cameron selected Enniskillen as the site of this year’s meeting as a way to highlight Northern Ireland’s ability to leave behind a four-decade conflict that claimed 3,700 lives.

Significant progress has been made in the 15 years since the U.S.-brokered Good Friday Accords, including a Catholic-Protestant government and the disarmament of the IRA and outlawed Protestant groups responsible for most of the 3,700 death toll. But tearing down Belfast’s nearly 100 “peace lines” — barricades of brick, steel and barbed wire that divide neighborhoods, roads and even one Belfast playground — is still seen by many as too dangerous. Obama cited that playground in his speech, lauding an activist whose work led to the opening of a pedestrian gate in the fence.

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Labor unions plan strikes, protest after police crackdown empties Istanbul park of activists

ISTANBUL (AP) — Turkish trade unions urged their members to walk out of work Monday and join demonstrations in response to a widespread police crackdown against activists following weeks of street protests.

However, the interior minister issued a stark warning to organizers of the one-day labor walkout that is aimed at maintaining pressure on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.

“I am calling on public workers and laborers to not participate in unlawful demonstrations — otherwise they will bear the legal consequences,” Muammer Guler said. “Our police will be on duty as usual.”

A day earlier, riot police cordoned off streets, set up roadblocks and fired tear gas and water cannons to prevent anti-government protesters from converging on Istanbul’s central Taksim Square, while a few kilometers (miles) away Erdogan addressed hundreds of thousands of government supporters.

Police on Monday maintained a lockdown on Taksim, the epicenter of more than two weeks of protests, by barring vehicles. However, as the work week began, authorities re-opened a subway station at the square that had been shuttered Sunday when protesters tried to regroup.

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As more patients get lab-grown body parts, scientists face challenge of making complex organs

NEW YORK (AP) — By the time 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan finally got a lung transplant last week, she’d been waiting for months, and her parents had sued to give her a better shot at surgery.

Her cystic fibrosis was threatening her life, and her case spurred a debate on how to allocate donor organs. Lungs and other organs for transplant are scarce.

But what if there were another way? What if you could grow a custom-made organ in a lab?

It sounds incredible. But just a three-hour drive from the Philadelphia hospital where Sarah got her transplant, another little girl is benefiting from just that sort of technology. Two years ago, Angela Irizarry of Lewisburg, Pa., needed a crucial blood vessel. Researchers built her one in a laboratory, using cells from her own bone marrow. Today the 5-year-old sings, dances and dreams of becoming a firefighter — and a doctor.

Growing lungs and other organs for transplant is still in the future, but scientists are working toward that goal. In North Carolina, a 3-D printer builds prototype kidneys. In several labs, scientists study how to build on the internal scaffolding of hearts, lungs, livers and kidneys of people and pigs to make custom-made implants.

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Guardian: UK spies hacked foreign diplomats’ phones, emails at conferences

LONDON (AP) — The Guardian newspaper says the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ repeatedly hacked into foreign diplomats’ phones and emails when the U.K. hosted international conferences, even going so far as to set up a bugged Internet café in an effort to get an edge in high-stakes negotiations.

The report — the latest in a series of revelations which have ignited a worldwide debate over the scope of Western intelligence gathering — came just hours before Britain was due to open the G-8 summit Monday, a meeting of world’s leading economies that include Russia, in Northern Ireland. The allegation that the United Kingdom has previously used its position as host to spy on its allies and other attendees could make for awkward conversation as the delegates arrive for talks.

“The diplomatic fallout from this could be considerable,” said British academic Richard J. Aldrich, whose book “GCHQ” charts the agency’s history.

Speaking at the G-8 summit, Prime Minister David Cameron declined to address the issue.

“We never comment on security or intelligence issues and I am not about to start now,” he said. “I don’t make comments on security or intelligence issues. That would be breaking something that no government has previously done.”

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China activist says NYU is forcing him to leave under Beijing’s pressure; school denies that

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who was allowed to travel to the U.S. after escaping from house arrest, said Monday that New York University is forcing him and his family to leave at the end of this month because of pressure from the Chinese government. The university denied Chen’s allegations.

Chen said in a statement that China’s Communist Party had been applying “great, unrelenting pressure” on NYU to ask him to leave, though he did not provide details or evidence to back his claim. Chen said Beijing’s authoritarian government has more influence on the American academic community than is perceived.

“The work of the Chinese Communists within academic circles in the United States is far greater than what people imagine, and some scholars have no option but to hold themselves back,” he said. “Academic independence and academic freedom in the United States are being greatly threatened by a totalitarian regime.”

NYU officials called Chen’s account puzzling, saying that his fellowship was meant to be a one-year position and had simply concluded as planned, and that school officials have been talking with him for months about what his next step might be.

Chen sparked a diplomatic crisis between China and the U.S. last year when he fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from house arrest. Since last May, he’d been a special student at NYU’s U.S.-Asia Law institute. He has been working on a book due out later this year.

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Senator warns Republicans’ 2016 hopes could hinge on fate of immigration overhaul

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans’ hopes to reclaim the White House in the 2016 elections hinge on whether they support — or sabotage — the immigration overhaul being debated in the Senate, two lawmakers who helped write the proposal warn.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on Sunday told conservatives who are trying to block the measure that they will doom the party and all but guarantee a Democrat will remain in the White House after 2016’s election. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., went a step further and predicted “there’ll never be a road to the White House for the Republican Party” if immigration overhaul fails to pass.

The Senate is moving forward with an overhaul and appears to be on track to have a vote from the full Senate by July 4. A timeline for a House proposal is less certain, although leaders say they are working on plans that more closely follow conservatives’ wish list.

The Senate last week overcame a procedural hurdle in moving forward on the first immigration overhaul in a generation. Lawmakers from both parties voted to begin formal debate on a proposal that would give an estimated 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally a long and difficult path to citizenship.

The Senate legislation also creates a low-skilled guest-worker program, expands the number of visas available for high-tech workers and de-emphasizes family ties in the system for legal immigration that has been in place for decades. It also sets border security goals that the government must meet before immigrants living in the U.S. illegally are granted any change in status.

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Small-town Ohio police chief gives quick repercussion for criminals through Facebook floggings

KENT, Ohio (AP) — If you’re up to no good in this pocket of northeast Ohio, especially in a witless way, you’re risking not only jail time or a fine but a swifter repercussion with a much larger audience: You’re in for a social media scolding from police Chief David Oliver and some of his small department’s 49,000 Facebook fans.

And Oliver does not mince words.

In postings interspersed with community messages and rants, the Brimfield Township chief takes to task criminals and other ne’er-do-wells — his preferred term is “mopes,” appropriated from police TV shows and an old colleague who used it, for the stupid, the lazy and the outright unlawful. Even an ill-considered parking choice can spur a Facebook flogging.

“If you use a handicapped space and you jump out of the vehicle, all healthy-like, as if someone is dangling free cheeseburgers on a stick, expect people to stare at you and get angry,” Oliver wrote last year. “You are milking the system and it aggravates those of us who play by the rules. Ignoring us does not make you invisible. We see you, loser.”

His humor, sarcasm and blunt opinion fueled a tenfold increase in the Facebook page’s likes in the past year, bringing the total to more than four times the 10,300 residents the department serves. It’s among the most-liked local law enforcement pages in the country, trailing only New York, Boston and Philadelphia police, according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police Center for Social Media.

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Miss USA crown goes to 25-year-old Connecticut contestant during Las Vegas pageant

LAS VEGAS (AP) — The country’s newest Miss USA is leaving a white collar job behind for the glamour and excitement that goes with her new role — and she can’t wait.

Moments after she was crowned at the Planet Hollywood hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip Sunday, Connecticut accountant Erin Brady said all she could think about was letting her bosses know she won’t be coming in tomorrow. Or ever again.

As her family and fiancee looked on, Brady beat out other beauties from every U.S. state and Washington D.C. to take the title, accepting the crown from outgoing queen Miss Maryland Nana Meriwether.

She wore an orange bikini with a matching halter-top as she strutted to the Jonas Brother’s “Pom Poms.” Later, she donned a strapless gown with a spangled golden corset and long white train.

In the pageant’s final minutes, she answered without hesitation a question about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold widespread DNA tests.

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Manu Ginobili scores 24 points in surprise start, Spurs beat Heat 114-104 to take series lead

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Manu Ginobili ran onto the floor as fans stood and screamed.

He went to the bench, and they chanted his name.

The sights and sounds of so many San Antonio spring nights were back Sunday — and the real party might be just a few days away.

Ginobili broke out of a slump in a big way with 24 points and 10 assists in his first start of the season, and the Spurs beat the Miami Heat 114-104 to take a 3-2 lead in the NBA Finals.

Tony Parker scored 26 points, Tim Duncan had 17 points and 12 rebounds, and Ginobili had his highest-scoring game of the season as the Spurs became the first team to shoot 60 percent in a finals game in four years.