June 20, 2010

Expecting children? Expect to cough up some big bucks.

The grand total for middle-income parents raising one child from birth to age 17 is $222,360, which doesn't include college tuition, according to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

That's 22% higher than the 1960 cost — adjusted for inflation — of $182,857.

"Annual child-rearing expense estimates ranged between $11,650 and $13,530 for a child in a two-child, married-couple family in the middle-income group," the report says.

The study, called "Expenditures on Children by Families," examined child-rearing expenses of 11,800 husband-wife households and 3,350 single-parent households.

The report called child-care and education costs "the most striking change in child-rearing expenses over time." Those expenses grew from 2% of total child-rearing expenses to 17%.

Healthcare expenses doubled as a percentage of total costs and also climbed in real terms.

Although food was among the largest expenses in both time periods, proportionally the overall costs have fallen. Changes in agriculture over the last 50 years have resulted in food taking up a lower percentage of household income, the report said.

The cost of housing has increased in real terms but was the most expensive expenditure in both time periods.

But having a lot of space isn't a priority for Meredith Rives of Evanston, Ill.

"We are looking to buy a bigger house but just haven't yet because it's cost-prohibitive," she said. "It's more important for me to stay home" to watch the kids.

Rives, a veterinarian putting her career on hold to care for two sets of young twins, looks on Amazon.com for diapers. She buys almost no new clothes for the children.

"I get hand-me-downs and shop at garage sales, mothers groups, rummage sales," she said. "If I buy retail, I never buy full price."

Partly because of globalization, children's clothing and miscellaneous expenses decreased both as a percentage and in real terms from 1960 to 2009, the report said.

The cost of raising a child, particularly in a shaky economy, has some people wondering whether they should put off plans to have more children.

Lindsay Murphy was eight months pregnant with her first child, now 11 months old, when her financial services employer in Skokie, Ill., laid her off in a round of downsizing.

She and her partner regularly discuss whether they should have another child before the economy gets on sounder footing.

"While we want another child and very much want our children to be close in age, we just can't get comfortable with the additional expense in light of the economy," she said. "We'd rather be sure to have the resources to fully provide for our daughter than risk not having enough to go around and potentially depriving both children of any advantages."

Tammi Toren, an assistant branch manager for Glenview State Bank in Illinois, has a 5-year-old daughter and is expecting a second child in October.

She said she and her husband, a service manager at a car dealership, didn't think about the economy's troubles before deciding to have another child. "You never really have enough money, if you think about it," she said.

They cut back on eating out, and her husband might give up his golf game during the week if their daughter wants to go skating.

They send their daughter to a Catholic school that costs $5,000 a year, but they save on child care.

"I have wonderful in-laws who watch our daughter," Toren said.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-children-2-20100621,0,3720641,print.story

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From Google News

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Report: 2 UN Inspectors Barred from Entering Iran

VOA News

June 21, 2010

The head of Iran's nuclear energy agency says two United Nations inspectors have been barred from entering Iran for presenting what he described as "false information" on Iran's nuclear work.

The Iranian Students News Agency quoted Ali Akbar Salehi Monday as saying the two International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors will not be allowed into Iran to visit its nuclear facilities.

Salehi accused the officials of disclosing information before it had been officially examined and filing a false report. He did not give details.

The move comes after the U.N. Security Council voted to impose a fourth round of sanctions on Iran for a nuclear program Western countries suspect is aimed at building weapons. Iran says its nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes.

The country's Supreme National Security Council issued a response Friday calling the new U.N. sanctions illegal.

The United States and the European Union have also expanded sanctions against Iran.

Russia's foreign ministry strongly criticized the European and U.S. actions, saying the extra sanctions would undermine the Security Council and efforts among its members to act cooperatively on Iran.

The EU's approved measures include a ban on new investment, technical assistance and transfers of technologies to Iran's key oil and natural gas sector. The U.S. on Wednesday blacklisted a state-controlled Iranian bank and 22 petroleum and petrochemical companies, a designation that makes them off-limits to U.S. businesses.

The U.S. also designated five front companies and more than 90 vessels that the Obama administration contends are used by Iran's national maritime carrier, Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, to evade sanctions.

http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/middle-east/Report-2-UN-Inspectors-Barred-from-Entering-Iran-96781124.html

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Local police struggle with immigration issues
Law enforcement officials say their job is complicated by the volatile immigration issue

June 20, 2010

By Antonio Olivo, Tribune reporter

As they rode through Lake County's immigrant neighborhoods serving arrest warrants, Sheriff's Deputy John Van Dien and three fellow officers were repeatedly confronted by a public relations problem nagging local law enforcement agencies nationwide.

They weren't hunting for illegal immigrants, but at nearly every stop, local residents seemed to think they were.

In Mundelein, neighbors watched the burly officers take a handcuffed Mexican immigrant away from his startled children in a scene that resembled thousands of family separations caused by immigration raids. But this was the case of a legal U.S. resident who had skipped court on drunken driving charges.

A few miles away, a Polish woman arrested for drug possession woefully admitted that her U.S. visa had expired, making her deportable and leaving the officers to wonder aloud about the fate of her three children.
And, near Diamond Lake, an elderly man tried to help the officers find a suspect sought for marijuana possession by noting, "There's a Mexican down at the end of the block."

A debate over how local law enforcement should deal with illegal immigration has heated up in the wake of a new Arizona law that allows police to check the status of people they stop if they suspect them of being illegal immigrants. In Lake County and other areas where immigrant communities have swelled, it is a question that street cops face every day.

"You've got to be so careful, because they'll accuse you, (saying) 'You're just picking on me because I'm Hispanic,'" said Van Dien, 43, during a recent sweep of court-ordered arrests in Lake County that the Tribune was permitted to observe.

"No," he objected, "we're picking on you because you came into our country and broke the (local) laws. There's a lot of people here illegally who we never see because they're just working and living honest lives."

Many local law enforcement officials complain that their work has been increasingly complicated by the volatile immigration issue, leading some of them to argue for offering legal status to the estimated 11 million people in the U.S. illegally.

In a vacuum created by Congress' inaction on immigration, the law enforcement officials say they're fighting crime amid a patchwork of sometimes counterproductive local solutions, ranging from get-tough state laws like Arizona's to "sanctuary" ordinances like Cook County's that instruct authorities not to participate in immigration enforcement.

Prodded by calls to help in an escalating federal crackdown against illegal immigrants, many local agencies, such as the Lake County sheriff's department, have begun routinely reporting the names of non-U.S. citizens who've been arrested for other crimes to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The extra effort adds to a web of local participation in immigration enforcement that includes federal authority for some police agencies to initiate deportation themselves.

At the same time, officials worry their involvement is getting in the way of other police work. The often time-consuming process of confirming whether a prisoner is an illegal immigrant eats into already strained local budgets and is complicated by the spread of fake IDs, which make it difficult to know who is who, law enforcement officials say. Meanwhile, they add, immigrant residents wary of being harassed or deported are unwilling to cooperate in investigations.

"We're in this federal holding pattern … and it undermines the credibility of local law enforcement," said Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran, whose jurisdiction includes Waukegan. "It makes us look like we … have no interest in upholding the Constitution."

In the past four years, Lake County has seen its foreign-born population jump by nearly 19 percent to about 13,000 residents. Curran estimates that 20 percent of his jail population is in the country illegally.

The former Democrat, who recently switched to Republican in his bid for re-election in November, has joined other law enforcement officials around the country in opposing laws like Arizona's. For Curran, it's part of a recent shift in his stance on immigration.

In 2007, he sought federal approval for his deputies to initiate deportation proceedings, but that was denied. Instead, Curran's department began holding suspects after reporting their names to ICE.

This year, Curran began arguing that granting legal status to undocumented immigrants in the country would be the most pragmatic solution, both in terms of finding the right people to arrest and not overloading the jails.

"From a law enforcement perspective, I need to know who's here," he said.

His Democratic opponent, Douglas Roberts, who also disagrees with the Arizona law, accuses Curran of pandering to Latino voters.

In the communities where Curran's deputies are working, winning over the immigrant community has been an uphill battle, made worse by a recent spate of incidents in the Chicago area in which three U.S. citizens say they were nearly deported by mistake.

In Lake County, a U.S. citizen born in Mexico was jailed for five days after U.S. marshal deputies mistakenly arrested him instead of an illegal immigrant with the same name, according to the man's attorney and family. One U.S. citizen born in Puerto Rico was jailed for nearly a week in Cook County, even after his mother showed U.S. officials his birth certificate, his lawyer says. A Mexican-born U.S. citizen in McHenry County claims in a federal lawsuit filed last month that he was wrongly jailed overnight after showing his proof of citizenship.

Officials in the first two cases acknowledged the mistakes and said they released the men as soon as the errors were discovered. A McHenry County sheriff's spokeswoman declined to comment.

In that climate, Van Dien and the other sheriff's deputies pound on doors in some of the same neighborhoods where ICE officials recently arrested 72 illegal immigrants.

Driving an anonymous-looking minivan and an SUV through leafy cul-de-sac communities and lakeside trailer parks, the officers said they were not concerned about immigration status. But sometimes the topic becomes an obstacle to doing their job.

"You'll have a (domestic violence) victim who refuses to press charges because they're worried about the husband being deported, even though she's got a black eye," Sheriff's Deputy Felix Pena said.

The officers worked from a stack of warrants that included immigrants and U.S. citizens from various ethnic backgrounds. The nearly 20 fugitives they sought had missed court appearances after being charged with crimes that included drunken driving, aggravated assault or marijuana possession.

Van Dien — who is 6 foot 4 and 370 pounds with a Bamm-Bamm tattoo on his forearm — cut an intimidating figure each time he got out of the van.

The native of North Chicago drove the van with a pouch of chewing tobacco in his cheek and an automatic rifle and sledgehammer within arm's reach. He said he sees his job through the eyes of his 6-year-old daughter and through how much the region has changed since his boyhood.

Outside the Mundelein home of Ernesto C. Manjarrez, whom the officers found hiding under a bed, Van Dien appeared emotional as he recounted how the man's crying preschool-age daughter had tugged on his arm in an effort to free her father.

"I looked at her and said: 'Honey. Please,'" Van Dien said. "That poor little girl was freaking out."

At the time, the officers believed that Manjarrez, who faced a felony drunken driving charge, was an illegal immigrant and that they had just split up a family.

But the Lake County sheriff's office checked his identity with ICE, discovering Manjarrez is in the country legally. Though he was released two days later on bail, a felony conviction could still result in eventual deportation for legal U.S. residents.

"I don't know what's going to happen," Manjarrez told the Tribune, acknowledging before going to jail that potential problems lay ahead.

The officers' hard-charging style sometimes puts off people in Lake County's immigrant community, making them unwilling to cooperate in investigations, local activists say.

"Sheriff Curran came in here once and said he's trying to do the best possible (to improve relations with Latino immigrants,)" noted Jose Luis Zavala, a Waukegan restaurant owner who heads a local immigrant civil rights group. "But, many times, they're helping to deport Hispanics."

That notion chilled nearly every conversation the officers had with the immigrant relatives or neighbors of the fugitives they sought, with some responding in terse one-word answers.

During one nighttime search inside a Diamond Lake area trailer-park village for an alleged drunken driver, a neighbor walking with his young daughter froze nervously as police flashlights sliced across his face.

When it seemed obvious the Spanish-speaking man knew nothing about his neighbor, some of the officers thanked him and left. Van Dien, seeing an opportunity, got out of his van and ordered the man, half his size, to follow him to the rear.

Opening the door, Van Dien dug into a plastic bag and pulled out a stuffed purple "Barney" dinosaur, handing it to the man's smiling daughter.

"Thank you," her beaming father said in English.

"You're welcome," Van Dien replied before driving off to search for another fugitive.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-06-20/news/ct-met-sheriff-immigrant-arrests-20100620_1_illegal-immigrants-immigration-enforcement-law-enforcement

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Al-Qaeda calls on Obama to stop interfering in Islamic world

CAIRO/DUBAI (DPA/ Ennaharonline) - Al-Qaeda asked U.S. President Barack Obama to “cease all interference in the religion, society, politics, economy and government of the Islamic world,” the network's spokesman said in a video message posted on Islamist websites Sunday.

U.S.-born Adam Yahiye Gadahn called on Obama to stop interfering in the region's educational curricula and end broadcasts targeting the Muslim World, “especially those designed to alter or destroy the faith, minds, morals and values of our Muslim people.”

Gadahn said that the network's conditions for peace with Washington include the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, ending support for Israel, and releasing Muslim prisoners.

“Legitimate Demands 2, Barack's Dilemma,” produced by al-Qaeda's media arm, al-Sahab production, shows Gadahn, wearing a white turban, as he speaks in English with Arabic subtitles.

Gadahn said that the Democrats' loss in January of a Senate -- or upper legislative house -- seat in the U.S. state in Massachusetts underlined Obama's falling popularity.

“You are no longer the popular man you once were, a year ago or so. Don't let the standing ovations you get wherever you go fool you. After all, didn't they keep applauding George W. Bush until the day he left office in disgrace?”

Gadahn, also known as Azzam al-Amriki, has appeared in a number of videos by al-Qaeda and has been wanted by the FBI since 2004.

In the 24-minute video entitled “legitimate demands” Gadahn asked the U.S. president to “withdraw all his soldiers, spies, security advisors, trainers, attaches, business, robots, drones and other U.S. personnel, ships and aircraft of all Muslim countries, from Afghanistan to Zanzibar.

He also asked Obama to end his support “both moral and material” to Israel, to boycott Israel and to stop supporting “detestable” regimes in the Muslim world to “stop interfering” in the affairs of Muslims and to release Muslim prisoners detained by the United States.

According to the SITE, this call looks like the one launched in 2007 by Azzam, converted to Islam and who presents himself as the American spokesman of al-Qaeda, former President George W. Bush.

http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=221725

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Al-Qaida warns of new attacks deadlier than before

By PAUL SCHEMM (AP)

CAIRO — Al-Qaida's U.S.-born spokesman warned President Barack Obama Sunday that the militant group may launch new attacks that would kill more Americans than previous ones.

In a taunting, 24 minute message that dwelled on Obama's setbacks, including the loss of Massachusetts Senate seat to the Republicans, Adam Gadahn set out al-Qaida's conditions for peace with the U.S., including cutting support for Israel and withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

Gadahn said that if you compared the number of dead Muslims "with the relatively small number of Americans we have killed so far, it becomes crystal-clear that we haven't even begun to even the score," he said, dressed in a white robe and turban.

"That's why next time, we might not show the restraint and self-control we have shown up until now," he said. Even if al-Qaida was defeated, "hundreds of millions of Muslims" would still fight the U.S., he added.

Al-Qaida offered the same conditions for an end to hostilities to then President George W. Bush in 2007, including the release of all Muslim prisoners and cutting off aid to Middle East governments.

Gadahn's statement was notable for its mocking tone, in which he described Obama as "a devious, evasive and serpentine American president with a Muslim name," and seemed to delight in his setbacks.

"You're no longer the popular man you once were, a year ago or so," he crowed, ascribing his drop in popularity to the escalation of the U.S. wars abroad.

At the time of Obama's election, many analysts said al-Qaida was worried that his race and Muslim family connections would make him more appealing to Muslims and Arabs angry at Bush's foreign policy.

In its statements since his election, al-Qaida has taken pains to show the continuity between Obama's foreign policy and that of his predecessor.

Gadahn is wanted by the FBI since 2004 with a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction. He is also known as Azzam al-Amriki, Arabic for the American.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g_JBe70QtSzgxcmZWYlmjV7luvsgD9GF4GT00

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Greater Restrictions on Sex Offenders Proposed by NY Sen. Schumer

By Helena Zhu

Epoch Times Staff

June 20, 2010

NEW YORK—Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) revealed that the current laws don't do enough in keeping sex offenders away from working with children.

The current law allows sex offenders to have close contacts with children through non-government-funded occupations, such as coaching, carnival ride operation, and karate, dance, and music teaching. The law also doesn't prevent them from working as magicians, clowns, private tutors, and employees in youth mentoring facilities, children’s museums, entertainment centers, video arcades, and child-themed party stores.

Schumer is introducing new legislation in the U.S. Senate that would limit sex offenders from getting jobs or volunteer positions that require interactions with children.

“Convicted sex offenders should not be able to hold any job or volunteer position where they have interaction with children in New York or across the country, period,” Schumer said. “The fact that these sex offenders are able to coach our children's teams, operate rides at fairs, and give dance and music lessons is beyond scary and we must take immediate action to stop it.”

The bill originally stemmed from news reports that a convicted child molester was running a karate school in Glendale, Queens, and two other convicted sex offenders were working as high school basketball referees in New York City.

“Dangerous loopholes exist in local and state laws which allow convicted sex offenders to work in positions of trust where they can have unlimited access to potential child victims,” said Laura Ahearn, executive director of Parents for Megan's Law and the Crime Victims Center.

At present, the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 leaves sex offender employment decisions up to the states. The new legislation would require the states to prevent sex offenders from accepting any paid or volunteer employment positions that interact with minors.

“This new legislation will close this huge loophole so no children are put into harm’s way,” Schumer said.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37723&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=1

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