Repatriation

An illegal immigrant who once worked as a nanny for former Atty. Gen.-designate Zoe Baird has agreed to leave the country, an immigration official said Thursday. Richard Kenney, a spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, said Lillian Cordero, during a meeting with immigration officials in Hartford on Tuesday, agreed to return to her native Peru.

Nobody thought much about the locked metal cabinet in the medical school at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. It was another forgotten fixture in the anatomy department - until a researcher last year found seven skulls with yellowing labels indicating the remains were those of Native Americans from California's Central Coast. Earlier this month, the skulls and several bone fragments were boxed and gingerly placed aboard a jet to LAX at London's Heathrow Airport.

More than 2,214 Orange County residents have signed a petition protesting the forced repatriation of Vietnamese "boat people" by the Hong Kong government, Vietnamese-American community leaders said Monday. The petitions, which are addressed to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, were presented to a U.N. adviser at a March 6 meeting in Anaheim to discuss the Vietnamese refugee problem.

A huge, one-time tax break to lure back about half of the $1.4 trillion in earnings held abroad by U.S. companies would produce nearly 3 million jobs nationwide over two years, according to a study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. A so-called repatriation tax break, which would temporarily reduce the tax rate on foreign earnings to 5.25% from 35%, has been pushed by the chamber and major U.S. corporations, including Cisco Systems Inc. and Oracle Corp. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this online article said a repatriation break would lure $700 billion in foreign earnings back to the U.S., $500 million more than would come back over the next 10 years, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

A United Nations plan to repatriate Rwandan Hutu refugees, already delayed by logistics problems, disease and local opposition, was further postponed until at least May. Yagi Sitolo, governor of the eastern Upper Zaire province, said the repatriation should not start until May 5 because of a cholera epidemic. Sitolo intervened last week to delay a plan to start an airlift this weekend of up to 100,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees from two camps south of Kisangani in eastern Zaire.

The U.N. World Food Program began rescue flights Saturday to repatriate 2,800 Ugandan refugees stranded by fighting in the town of Juba in southern Sudan. The refugees fled civil strife in Uganda five years ago for Juba, scene of fighting between Sudanese government forces and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army.

Britain, Vietnam and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees have reached an agreement that could lead to the repatriation of thousands of Vietnamese "boat people" from overcrowded camps in Hong Kong, officials in Hanoi said Saturday. The joint statement, released in London, said that Vietnam had agreed after two days of talks to take back refugees who have not volunteered for repatriation but are not opposed to returning.

Unable to persuade Hong Kong, Thailand and other "first asylum" countries to change their policies on Vietnamese refugees, Southern California Vietnamese leaders said Saturday that they will focus new attention on establishing regional holding centers to prevent people from being sent back to Vietnam against their will. Returning from the International Conference on Indochinese Refugees in Geneva, the local delegates representing Orange County's estimated 100,000 Vietnamese said the fate of tens of thousands of refugees holed up in camps throughout Southeast Asia remains uncertain because most of the countries housing the refugees have refused to reject the policy of forced repatriation.

Cuban and Haitian refugees detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base do not have the same constitutional rights as U.S. citizens and may be returned home, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. A government spokesman said there are no immediate plans to repatriate any of the Cubans. A key issue in the appeals before a three-judge panel of the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals was whether the refugees have constitutional rights, such as access to lawyers.

Undocumented Mexican youths who commit minor crimes in Los Angeles County can be shipped back to their native country for punishment, the Board of Supervisors decided Tuesday. Under the Border Youth Project approved by the board, youngsters have a choice of facing prosecution in Los Angeles or being sent to Tijuana, where Mexican juvenile authorities will deal with them. Without comment, the supervisors unanimously authorized a $117,000 contract with Community Services Resource Corp.

The impromptu tributes began on a spring day in 2007 when church bell ringers stopped their weekly practice and tolled instead for two passing coffins carrying soldiers slain overseas. The rituals ended Wednesday with a sunset ceremony, as the town of Wootton Bassett said a solemn goodbye to its unique role in honoring Britain's war dead. The bodies of slain military personnel, which had been passing through the south England market town from nearby Lyneham air base, will now return to Brize Norton military airport close to the mortuary outside Oxford and Lyneham air base is to close this year.

The J. Paul Getty Museum's iconic statue of Aphrodite was quietly escorted back to Sicily by Italian police last week, ending a decades-long dispute over an object whose craftsmanship, importance and controversial origins have been likened to the Parthenon marbles in the British Museum. The 7-foot tall, 1,300-pound statue of limestone and marble was painstakingly taken off display at the Getty Villa and disassembled in December. Last week, it was locked in shipping crates with an Italian diplomatic seal and loaded aboard an Alitalia flight to Rome, where it arrived on Thursday.

One was a college student hauled off a public bus in the West Bank, blindfolded and deported to the Gaza Strip, two months shy of her graduation. Another was a beekeeper, left at the Gaza border after being seized in his West Bank home. He hasn't seen his wife and daughters, ages 8 months and 2 years, since December. The bees are dead and his business has collapsed. They are two of dozens of Palestinians ensnared by Israel's controversial practice of removing former Gaza residents from the lives and families they've led in the West Bank and sending them back to the restive Hamas-controlled seaside territory against their will.

In an attempt to ensure the flow of remittances to devastated Haiti, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Friday that the Obama administration would temporarily grant legal status to the tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants who were living in the United States illegally before this week's earthquake. But Napolitano emphasized that Haitians living in the island nation would not be eligible for temporary protected status, and would be repatriated if they attempted to enter the country, an implicit acknowledgment of the fear, thus far unrealized, that the earthquake could trigger a mass migration of Haitians to U.S. shores.

The release by Scotland of Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi, who was expected to spend his life in prison for the 1988 bombing of a Pan American jetliner, was merciful, certainly, but an outrage nonetheless. The "compassionate release" of the terminally ill Libyan terrorist showed no compassion for relatives of the 270 people killed when the jet exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Compounding their trauma was the muted protest of the Obama administration. Instead of viewing the special relationship between the United States and Britain as a cause for candor, the president, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Atty.

And the bronze goes to . . . no one. The identity of the bidder who promised to pay the estate of the late designer Yves Saint Laurent $40 million for bronze heads of a rabbit and a rat that had been looted from an imperial Chinese palace was revealed today: an advisor to a nonprofit group dedicated to repatriating missing relics. But the winning bidder, Cai Mingchao, said he had no intention of paying for the heads, which the Chinese government maintain should be returned as stolen property.

A Republican proposal to offer millions of dollars in new U.S. aid to Vietnamese asylum-seekers has been blamed for revolts in refugee camps across Asia, causing outbreaks of violence and the cancellation Tuesday of flights to return several hundred people to their homeland. Officials of the Office of the U.N.

Who, at the beginning of the Yugoslav wars, would have thought that Germany would become the refuge of choice for the shellshocked, homeless Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina? Just three years ago, Germany was being pilloried, with critics calling it an abject failure in protecting foreigners already in its midst. Racist skinheads and neo-Nazis were prowling its streets, roughing up Africans, laying siege to Vietnamese workers' hostels, chanting, "Foreigners out!"

It took 12 years for Ojwang Santino to feel safe enough to begin rebuilding his home. Each morning before the sun gets too hot, he makes the trek to his ancestral land to smooth new mud walls and work on the thatched roof. But now he doesn't know whether he'll have the courage to move in. He's afraid the Lord's Resistance Army will come back. Santino, a father and grandfather, is one of the 1.

As the only prisoner of war held on U.S. soil, inmate No. 38699-079 gets annual visits from the Red Cross and can wear his military uniform and insignia when he goes to court. Gen. Manuel A. Noriega frequently sees his wife and children, who make the trip to his private bungalow at a federal prison near Miami from their home in Panama. The onetime CIA operative is a dedicated news junkie, reads voraciously about history and politics and is working on a memoir. Whether the vanquished dictator's story ends in prison or freedom, at home or abroad, depends on how courts in three countries on two continents decide to punish him for his drug-running past.