WASHINGTON The number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. has dropped for the first time in 20 years as substantially fewer undocumented workers from Mexico, Latin America and elsewhere are crossing the border in search of jobs, an independent research group says.The analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center suggests the nation’s economic downturn and increased [...]

Pro-Palestinian groups in Ireland launched a fundraising drive Monday to buy a ship for a second attempt to breach Israel’s sea blockade of Gaza.The Irish Ship to Gaza campaign aims to send between 30 and 50 Irish people, including public figures, journalists and activists, to join a flotilla taking aid to people in the Hamas-controlled [...]

SACRAMENTO, Calif. The temperature was nearly 100 degrees as 17-year-old Maria Vasquez Jimenez pruned grapes for nine hours at a vineyard near Stockton in California’s Central Valley.By the end of the day, the pregnant teen was dead from heat stroke, and her death set off renewed calls among union advocates for greater protections for farmworkers. [...]

WASHINGTON The Obama administration has told the United Nations that America’s human rights record is less than perfect but stressed that the U.S. political system has built-in safeguards that promote improvements.In its first-ever report to the U.N. Human Rights Council on conditions in the United States, the State Department said Monday that some Americans, notably [...]

The word tolerance comes from the Latin “tolerare” – to bear. In our dictionaries, we define it as, among other things, the “freedom from bigotry or prejudice.”Its meanings are almost as numerous as the people who express them, as recent entries in the visitor comment book at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in [...]

China still not escape the bad weather disasters that befall their region lately. Mud landslides that occurred in Sichuan Province is reported to have killed five people and trapping 500 others.This disaster is preceded by heavy rain that lashed since Thursday, August 12th at midnight local time in Mianzhu. This region is known as an [...]

WASHINGTON Companies using criminal records or bad credit reports to screen out job applicants might run afoul of anti-discrimination laws as the government steps up scrutiny of hiring policies that can hurt blacks and Hispanics.A blanket refusal to hire workers based on criminal records or credit problems can be illegal if it has a disparate [...]

WARSAW, Poland  The death toll in flooding in central Europe rises to 11 as Poland’s interior minister said Sunday that two more people had died in the southwestern region of the country.The flooding has struck an area near the borders of Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic.Heavy rains in Poland caused flooding in the southwestern town [...]

CONCORD, N.H. Beatrice Munyenyezi brought her three daughters to the United States from war-ravaged Rwanda in 1998 and focused on the American Dream: private schooling for her girls, a home with a swimming pool, a sport utility vehicle.Before long, she had a $13-an-hour job at Manchester’s Housing Authority in New Hampshire, her children were enrolled [...]

Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo has a second lymphoma nodule in his chest, doctors said on Saturday, a day after revealing he had cancer.Lugo, a former Roman Catholic bishop, took office as president of the poor, soy-exporting nation two years ago.His doctors said on Friday a biopsy carried out in a gland in his groin had [...]