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INTERNATIONAL EDITION
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2012
109TH YEAR I ©2012 THE MIAMI HERALD
Five more bodies found on stricken liner in Italy BY GAIA PIANIGIANI AND ALAN COWELL New York Times Service
official, who spoke in return for anonymity, said all five bodies were located below the waterline. “We are currently trying to retrieve them,” Marini said. Their nationality was not immediately known. Italian officials have said the missing include 2 U.S. citizens. The discovery brought the number of known dead from the shipwreck to 11 and left as many as 24 people unaccounted for. The mounting tally of the dead — and growing concern over the fate of those still missing — cranked up pressure on judicial authorities to
GIGLIO, Italy — Rescuers found five more bodies still wearing life jackets from the stricken cruise liner Costa Concordia on Tuesday after having blasted holes into its hull, marooned on rocks just off this wintry Italian island, to open up new access and escape routes. Filippo Marini, a Coast guard spokesman, said the five — a woman and four men apparently aged between 50 and 60 — were all in the stern of the vessel as it lay canted at a crazy angle, its funnel almost parallel to the waters in which it had foundered late Friday. Another • TURN TO RESCUE, 2A
PHOTOS BY JIM WILSON/NEW YORK TIMES SERVICE
Martha, a U.S. citizen living in Mexico, holds her passport while waiting to cross the U.S. border in Tijuana, Mexico. Below, high school students walk toward the border.
CROSSING THE LINE
Rescue boats surround the stricken Costa Concordia off Giglio, Italy.
Young U.S. citizens in Mexico brave risks for U.S. schools BY PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN New York Times Service
TIJUANA, Mexico — Weekday mornings at 5, when the lights on distant hillsides across the border still twinkle in the blackness, Martha, a high school senior, begins her arduous three-hour commute to school. She groggily unlocks the security gate guarded by the family Doberman and waits in the glare of the Pemex filling station for the bus to the border. Her fellow passengers, grown men with their arms folded, jostle her in their sleep. Martha’s destination, along with dozens of young friends — U.S. citizens all living in “TJ,” as they affectionately call their city — is a public high school eight miles away in Chula Vista, Calif., where they were born and where they still claim to live. California teenagers start their mornings with crossing guards and school buses. Martha and her friends stand for hours in a human chain of 16,000 at the world’s busiest international land border. Cellphones in one hand and notebooks in the other, they wait again to cross on foot, fearing delays
that could force them to miss a social studies final, oblivious to hawkers selling breakfast burritos or weary parents holding toddlers in pajamas. In San Ysidro, the port of entry, they board a red trolley to another bus that takes them to school. They are sweating the clock — the bell rings at 8 a.m. sharp. “Most of the time I am really, really tired,” said Martha, whose parents moved back to Tijuana
because the cost of living was cheaper here than in southern California. “I try to do my best,” she added. “But sometimes, I just can’t.” In the raging debate over immigration, almost all sides have come to agree on tougher enforcement at the border. But nearly unnoticed, frustration is focusing locally on bordercrossers who are not illegal
Washington Post Service
ated a secret drone airstrip, and the number of U.S. military trainers in the country has been cut to a fraction of previous levels. Marc Grossman, the administration’s top diplomat in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan, asked to visit Islamabad during a current trip to the region, but Pakistani officials responded that it was not convenient. The “fundamentals” of mutual interest in destroying al Qaeda and safely managing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal haven’t changed, said a senior administration U.S. official, who, like several sources in this article, discussed sensitive diplomatic matters on the condition of anonymity. But the two countries are groping their way toward what he called “a new normal,” somewhere between the strategic alliance that U.S. President Barack Obama once proffered in exchange for Pakistan severing its ties with militants, and a more businesslike arrangement with few illusions. “It’ll be much more realpolitik,” another U.S. official said. “It’s getting away from the grandiose
In a call to her Pakistani counterpart this month, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reiterated the Obama administration’s counterterrorism “red line”: The United States reserved the right to attack anyone who it determined posed a direct threat to U.S. national security, anywhere in the world. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar responded in kind, telling Clinton that Pakistan’s red line was the violation of its sovereignty. Any unauthorized flight into its airspace, Khar bluntly told Clinton, risked being shot down. The conversation, recounted by U.S. officials, was one of the few high-level exchanges between the two governments in recent months, and it illustrated the depths to which U.S.-Pakistan relations have fallen after an inadvertent November border clash in which a U.S. air assault killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. Since then, Pakistan’s border crossings have remained closed to U.S. and NATO supplies in transit to the Afghan War. At Pakistan’s demand, U.S. personnel have evacu- • TURN TO PAKISTAN, 2A
RIVALS ATTACK ROMNEY IN GOP DEBATE, 3A
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Iran face-off complicates Obama’s reelection bid BY MARK LANDLER
• TURN TO U.S. SCHOOLS, 4A
As ties fray, U.S., Pakistan grapple to find ‘new normal’ BY KAREN DEYOUNG AND KARIN BRULLIARD
MCT
New York Times Service
been its main tool in pressuring Tehran, Congress agreed to modify the legislation to give Obama leeway to delay action if he concludes the clampdown would disrupt the oil market. He may also invoke a waiver to exempt any country from sanctions based on national security considerations. But using either of those escape hatches could open the president to charges that he is weak on Iran, which is viewed by Western powers as determined to achieve a nuclear weapons capability and which has drawn a tough response from Europe as well. Republican candidates, led by Mitt Romney, have threatened to use military action to prevent Tehran from building a bomb, and have criticized Obama for not
WASHINGTON — The escalating confrontation with Iran poses a major new political threat to U.S. President Barack Obama as he heads into his campaign for reelection, presenting him with choices that could harm either the economic recovery or his image as a firm leader. Sanctions against Iran’s oil exports that the president signed into law on New Year’s Eve started a fateful clock ticking. In late June, when the campaign is in full swing, Obama will have to decide whether to take action against countries, including some staunch allies, if they continue to buy oil from Iran through its central bank. After fierce lobbying by the White House, which opposed this hardening in the sanctions that have • TURN TO OBAMA, 2A
For intrigue, malaria drug gets the prize BY DONALD G. MCNEIL JR. New York Times Service
The Chinese drug artemisinin has been hailed as one of the greatest advances in fighting malaria, the scourge of the tropics, since the discovery of quinine centuries ago. Artemisinin’s discovery is being talked about as a candidate for a Nobel Prize in Medicine. Millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are spent on it for Africa every year. But few people realize that, in one of the paradoxes of history, the drug was discovered thanks to Mao Zedong, who was acting to help the North Vietnamese in their jungle war against the United States. Or that it languished for 30 years thanks to China’s isolation and the indifference of Western donors, health agencies and drug companies. Now that story is coming out. But as happens so often in science, versions vary, and multiple contributors are fighting over the laurels. That became particularly clear in September, when one of the Lasker Awards
— sometimes called the “American Nobels” — went to a single one of the hundreds of Chinese scientists once engaged in the development of the drug.
Mao’s role was simple. In the 1960s, he got an appeal from North Vietnam: Its fighters were dying because local malaria had become resistant to all known drugs. He ordered his top scientists to help. But it wasn’t easy. The Cultural Revolution was reeling out of control, and intellectuals, including scientists, were being publicly humiliated, forced to labor on collective farms or even driven to suicide. However, because the order came from Mao himself and he put the army in charge, the project was sheltered. Over the next 14 years, 500 scientists from 60 military and civilian institutes flocked to it. Meanwhile, thousands of U.S. • TURN TO MALARIA DRUG, 2A
SWEET WORMWORD
For centuries, Qinghao, or sweet wormwood, has been revered in China for its anti-malarial effects. NEW YORK TIMES SERVICE
OBAMA HOPES TO STRIKE BALANCE IN STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS, 5A
FRENCH DOWNGRADE PUTS ONUS ON GERMANY, BUSINESS FRONT
DJOKOVIC, WILLIAMS INTO AUSTRALIAN OPEN 2ND ROUND, SPORTS FRONT
INDEX THE AMERICAS ...........4A WORLD NEWS ...........6A OPINION........................7A COMICS & PUZZLES ..6B
1/18/2012 5:30:49 AM
BY DEKE CASTLEMAN DEKE@ACCESSECUADOR.COM
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