nickpagliari.com

World  |  Barack Obama  |  Mexico

An American woman working at the consulate in Ciudad Juarez, just over the border from El Paso, Texas, and her U.S. husband were shot dead by suspected drug gang hitmen in broad daylight on Saturday as they left a consulate social event, U.S. and Mexican officials told Reuters.

A Mexican man married to another consulate employee was killed around the same time in another part of the city after he and his wife left the same event, a U.S. official said.

The official, who asked not to be identified, said it was not clear if the victims had been specifically targeted, and the motive for the attacks was unknown.

Bloodshed has exploded in recent months in Ciudad Juarez as the head of the Juarez cartel, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, fights off a bloody offensive by Mexico’s No. 1 fugitive drug lord, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, at the worst hotspot of Mexico’s three-year-old drug war.

“The president is deeply saddened and outraged by the news,” said White House National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer. He said Obama “shares in the outrage of the Mexican people at the murders of thousands in Ciudad Juarez and elsewhere in Mexico.”

The State Department updated its warning on travel to Mexico to say it had authorized the departure of dependents of U.S. government personnel from consulates in Ciudad Juarez and five other northern border cities.

“The safety and security of our personnel and their families in Mexico and at posts around the world is always our highest priority,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in statement. “These appalling assaults on members of our own State Department family are, sadly, part of a growing tragedy besetting many communities in Mexico.”

Nearly 19,000 people have been killed since President Felipe Calderon came to power in Mexico in late 2006 and launched a military assault on the country’s powerful drug cartels, sparking a surge in violence that has alarmed Washington, foreign investors and tourists.

Most victims are rival traffickers and police, and to a lesser extent soldiers, local officials and bystanders. It is rare for drug gang hitmen to target foreigners.

Saturday’s murders may be have been carried out by gangs related to the Juarez cartel, which has controlled cocaine trafficking in the region, the Chihuahua state government said in a statement.

“The Mexican authorities are determined to clarify what happened and bring those responsible to justice,” the Mexican Foreign Ministry said of the killings.

CHILDREN SURVIVE SHOOTING

The attack on the U.S. couple began with a car chase and ended in front of the main border crossing into El Paso, an area heavily patrolled by soldiers, local newspaper El Diario reported. The couple’s baby girl survived the attack.

The Mexican spouse was murdered in an upscale neighborhood of the city when gunmen boxed in his car with other vehicles and shot him, according to a local newspaper photographer who soon arrived at the scene.

The dead man’s wife, who was following in a second car, was unhurt, but their two children were wounded.

Calderon was already scheduled to visit Ciudad Juarez on Tuesday, his third trip there in a month, as he scrambles to find a way to deal with a surge in killings that 8,000 troops and federal police on the ground have failed to curb.

The drug war has killed more than 4,600 people in the manufacturing city in two years, and constant scenes of bullet-ridden vehicles and bodies lying in pools of blood have prompted many middle-class residents to flee.

Across Mexico, drug violence is at its worst level ever, and many U.S. students have heeded warnings not to cross the border this year for their annual “spring break” vacation.

A burst of drug gang clashes killed at least 27 people, including four who were beheaded, this weekend around the Pacific resort of Acapulco.

At least 13 were killed on Saturday and at least 14 on Sunday, police said. They included nine men killed in a shootout and a young woman shot as she drove by in a taxi.

Obama voiced his support for Calderon’s drug war during a visit to Mexico last year, but the rising violence along the border with Mexico has become a big concern for Washington.

(Additional reporting by Caren Bohan; writing by Noel Randewich; editing by Catherine Bremer and Chris Wilson)

World

The red-shirted supporters of former premier Thaksin Shinawatra have given the government an ultimatum: call elections by midday on Monday or face crippling mass demonstrations.

The protests which began on Friday and involved more than 150,000 people by Sunday have been peaceful, and the “red shirts” say they will remain that way. But Monday’s march could stoke anger by paralyzing already-congested streets in Bangkok.

“We will march over there, brothers and sisters. We will go to the infantry to get an answer from Abhisit himself,” said Nattawut Saikua, a leader of the protest group, the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD).

“With this many people on the streets, I don’t see how he still thinks he has any legitimacy,” he added.

Foreign investors worry any violence will derail a nascent recovery in Southeast Asia’s second-biggest economy but they have expressed confidence in Thailand’s financial markets by snapping up local stocks in recent weeks.

That view is based on three factors: Thai assets are already trading at a substantial risk discount, the economy has rebounded well from theglobal downturn despite bouts of unrest, and Abhisit is widely expected to survive the showdown.

Protest leaders hope a powerful display of popular support will force Abhisit to dissolve parliament and call an election that Thaksin allies would be well-placed to win. They also want to convince wavering partners in his coalition to break away.

Abhisit and his coalition are unlikely to bow to the pressure, the latest in a seemingly intractable political crisis pitting the military, urban elite and royalists — who wear yellow shirts at protests and back Abhisit — against mainly rural Thaksin supporters who wear red and say they are disenfranchised.

Most of the protesters traveled from Thailand’s poor, rural provinces, piling into pick-up trucks, cars and even river boats, and illustrating Thaksin’s influence even after his ouster in a 2006 coup, graft conviction and self-imposed exile. Take a Look on the political crisis in Thailand.

RISKS TO COME

Abhisit must go to the polls by the end of next year.

Thaksin’s allies are likely to win those elections just as they have won every poll held since 2001. The military and urban elite are likely to seek to overturn that result, possibly with a coup, as in 2006, or a judicial intervention, as in 2008.

In his weekly television address on Sunday, Abhisit indicated immediate elections were unlikely, citing the tense political climate and his government’s parliamentary majority.

Several main roads near government offices were blocked off either by protesters’ pick-up trucks and motorcycles or cordoned off by police and soldiers. Authorities deployed 50,000 police, soldiers and other security personnel across the city.

Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thuagsuban said protesters risk arrest if they disrupt life for Bangkok residents.

Last April, protests by Thaksin supporters triggered Thailand’s worst street violence in 17 years. In recent months, they have emphasized non-violence — and Thaksin’s rhetoric has softened since last year when he spoke of a “revolution.”

But without causing a big disruption, they may have trouble forcing elections, said Charnvit Kasetsiri, a political historian at Thammasart University. “It’s hard to pressure the government if the crowd is under control,” he said.

The protesters say the British-born, Oxford-educated Abhisit came to power illegitimately, heading a coalition the military cobbled together after courts dissolved a pro-Thaksin party that led the previous coalition government.

Adding to their anger, Thailand’s top court seized $1.4 billion of Thaksin’s assets last month, saying it was accrued through abuse of power.

Thailand was plagued by political upheaval in 2008 when yellow-shirted protesters who opposed Thaksin’s allies in the previous government occupied the prime minister’s office for three months and then blockaded Bangkok’s international airport until a court ousted the government.

(Writing by Jason Szep; Additional reporting by Ambika Ahuja; Editing by Louise Ireland)

U.S.  |  Health

The special U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled that vaccines could not have caused the autism of an Oregon boy, William Mead, ending his family’s quest for reimbursement.

“The Meads believe that thimerosal-containing vaccines caused William’s regressive autism. As explained below, the undersigned finds that the Meads have not presented a scientifically sound theory,” Special Master George Hastings, a former tax claims expert at the Department of Justice, wrote in his ruling.

In February 2009, the court ruled against three families who claimed vaccines caused their children’s autism, saying they had been “misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross medical misjudgment”.

The families sought payment under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a no-fault system that has a $2.5 billion fund built up from a 75-cent-per-dose tax on vaccines.

Instead of judges, three “special masters” heard the three test cases representing thousands of other petitioners.

They asked whether a combination vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, plus a mercury-containing preservative called thimerosal, caused the children’s symptoms.

MYSTERIOUS CONDITION

More than 5,300 cases were filed by parents who believed vaccines may have caused autism in their children. The no-fault payout system is meant to protect vaccine makers from costly lawsuits that drove many out of the vaccine-making business.

Autism is a mysterious condition that affects as many as one in 110 U.S. children. The so-called spectrum ranges from mild Asperger’s Syndrome to severe mental retardation and social disability, and there is no cure or good treatment.

The U.S. Institute of Medicine has reported several times that no link can be found between vaccines and autism.

Supporters of the scientific community welcomed the ruling.

“It’s time to move forward and look for the real causes of autism,” said Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation. “There is not a bottomless pit of money with which to fund autism science. We have to use our scarce resources wisely.”

But advocates for the idea that vaccines are dangerous said they would not give up. “We hope that Congress will intervene in what is clearly a miscarriage of justice to vaccine-injured children,” said Jim Moody of the Coalition for Vaccine Safety.

Autism Speaks, another advocacy group, said it would also not completely abandon the theory that vaccines might cause autism.

The organization said it would invest “in research to determine whether subsets of individuals might be at increased risk for developing autism symptoms following vaccination.”

But the group also said it was clear that if such a link did exist, it would be rare.

“While we have great empathy for all parents of children with autism, it is important to keep in mind that, given the present state of the science, the proven benefits of vaccinating a child to protect them against serious diseases far outweigh the hypothesized risk that vaccinations might cause autism,” Autism Speaks said in a statement.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)

U.S.

According to the Journal’s online report, a 31-year-old mother from Colorado named Jamie Paulin-Ramirez was one of seven people detained in Ireland on Tuesday.

Irish police said they were arrested in connection with a plot to kill cartoonist Lars Vilk because of his 2007 drawing depicting the Prophet Mohammed with the body of a dog.

The U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday it had charged a Pennsylvania woman, Colleen LaRose, who went by the pseudonyms “Fatima LaRose” and “JihadJane,” with plotting to kill a Swedish man.

Officials at the Justice Department were not immediately available for comment on The Wall Street Journal report.

The Journal said one of the people detained in Ireland was an Algerian man who was the main contact for LaRose. That man “has a relationship with Ms. Paulin-Ramirez according to a person close to the matter,” the newspaper reported.

The arrests in Ireland included two more Algerians, a Croatian, a Palestinian and a Libyan, according to the story.

Paulin-Ramirez announced nearly a year ago she had embraced Islam and last September 11 left her home in a small Rocky Mountain town to marry a Muslim man in New York she had made contact with via an Internet website, the newspaper said.

The Journal interviewed Paulin-Ramirez’s mother, Christine Holcomb, in Colorado. “I’m angry with her right now,” she was quoted saying. “I’d like to just choke her. But I’m worried about her, too. I love my daughter.”

The newspaper said Paulin-Ramirez gave her mother an address in Waterford, Ireland.

The Justice Department also has accused LaRose of trying to recruit fighters to commit violent attacks overseas.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Anthony Boadle)