Refugees

Four people were diagnosed with measles after an outbreak last summer that probably began with a 15-year-old Burmese refugee traveling from Malaysia to Los Angeles, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. The teenager arrived in Los Angeles on Aug. 24 and was taken to a hospital with a fever and a rash. He was diagnosed with measles a few days later. Health officials also diagnosed three other people with measles, including two young passengers on the refugee's plane and a customs officer who processed him after arrival.

TEL AVIV - The first Molotov cocktail ignited a backyard fence, just a couple of feet from where three Eritrean refugees were sleeping outdoors on makeshift beds of wood planks atop old TV sets. One man burned his arm trying to extinguish the flames with a blanket. Moments later, a second firebomb was tossed through an open air vent into the adjacent apartment, where another family of African asylum-seekers was sleeping. It exploded in the shower without causing injury. The post-midnight attacks last month by unknown assailants continued across Tel Aviv's dilapidated Shapira neighborhood, striking another refugee house and a kindergarten catering to African children.

Re "Payback for a tax refugee," Opinion, May 16 In calling for Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin to be exiled from the United States, Bruce Ackerman seems to argue that people should not be able to move freely around the world, even as our policies embrace free trade. Ackerman ignores that Saverin has always had two national loyalties and now lives in a third country. Such "third culture kids" are increasingly common today, and many are not super-rich. Rather, their statuses reflect a beneficial global market of talent moving across borders.

My Op-Ed on Wednesday put the spotlight on people like Eduardo Saverin, who enjoy the benefits of life in America but then renounce their citizenship. If they cut themselves off from from the United States, I think we should reciprocate -- and severely limit their right to return to the country they have repudiated. But as commenters "benewman" and "Scotsgirl151" point out, some U.S. citizens never do live here as adults because their parents move them abroad as children or because they were born abroad to U.S. citizens.

Is citizenship a commodity, to be bought and sold when the price is right? Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook, thinks so. After becoming an American 14 years ago, he has traded his citizenship in the country that helped make him rich for the low-cost Singapore product. According to the New York Times, he denies making the switch for pecuniary reasons, but it's hard to believe. He stands to gain $4 billion from Facebook's imminent public offering, which has to make Singapore tax laws enticing.

Prospects for a cease-fire in Syria further dimmed Monday when fighting spilled over the border into Turkey and Lebanon, leaving at least three people dead, opposition activists said. An additional 160 people were killed within Syria, activists said, as forces loyal to embattled President Bashar Assad continued to shell buildings and shoot at residents of rebellious cities on the eve of a proposed halt to the hostilities. Government troops and tanks were due to be withdrawn Tuesday from cities and towns, but that seemed increasingly unlikely as the violence has only escalated in the last week and on Sunday the Assad government demanded written guarantees from all opposition groups, a proposal that the rebel Free Syrian Army dismissed.

Um Eddine shudders as she describes the icy night she and her four children reached the barbed-wire fence that marks the border between her native Syria and Jordan. She pushed her two youngest children through and continued to run, hoping that the ordeal of leaving her troubled homeland, where her husband had been jailed for protesting against President Bashar Assad, was almost over. But she soon noticed that her eldest two children, ages 6 and 7, were no longer behind her. She suppressed a mother's urge to call out for them in the dark, remembering the family had been warned against making noise during their escape, lest they alert government snipers hiding in the hills who would open fire at any cracking branch.

During a pause in the shelling, Um Mahmood and her 9-year-old son ducked out of their house together in Baba Amr, the most contested neighborhood in the Syrian city of Homs. Their entire family of nine had been waiting for a chance to flee the government onslaught, and rebels had just sent word that they should use the lull to get out. But as Um Mahmood and her son hurried along a dirt road, several shells landed nearby, knocking them to the ground. Other family members scattered.

Even as it recovers from its recent civil war, Libya is fast becoming a place of sanctuary for thousands of refugees fleeing the bloodshed in Syria. Buses from Damascus, crammed with Syrian families, are arriving daily in the eastern city of Benghazi, the cradle of the effort to oust the late Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi. "Up to 4,000 Syrian families have sought refuge in Libya in the last weeks, and the numbers are increasing every day," said Mohammed Jammal, a Syrian community leader in the city.

Chu Sung-ha says he knows for sure that some of the people shown sobbing on television over the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il are faking it. Once, he was one of them. As a 20-year-old student at Pyongyang's prestigious Kim Il Sung University in 1994, when North Korea's founder and the school's namesake died, Chu and his fellow students were used to illustrate the nation's grief. Television cameras were rolling when the students were ushered into an auditorium to be told the news.