Treaties

One of America's most wanted men, here in Britain anyway, is a slightly awkward computer geek who still drops by his mom's house on weekends to enjoy a home-cooked meal, the kind he doesn't get sharing an apartment with other college students. But Richard O'Dwyer will be eating prison grub soon if authorities in Washington have their way. O'Dwyer, 24, is due to be shipped across the Atlantic to face criminal charges in a country he's never set foot in. His offense: creating a website that featured links to pirated movies and TV shows.

A historic quill and lap desk used to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo will be auctioned Sept. 7 in Nebraska. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed Feb. 2, 1848, and brought an end to the Mexican-American war. California as we know it would not exist without it. The treaty handed over 525,000 square miles of land to the U.S. It encompassed all of what are now the states of California, Utah and Nevada and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming. It was America's second-largest land acquisition, after the Louisiana Purchase.

CAIRO - Egypt's foreign policy under its first Islamist president is likely to change in tenor but not substance, at least in the short term, as the new government can ill afford to strain relations with the U.S. or risk international furor by abandoning Egypt's 1979 peace treaty with Israel. President Mohamed Morsi faces domestic social and financial crises that are expected to eclipse foreign affairs in coming months. Rhetoric against Jerusalem and Washington may sharpen, but Morsi, who ran as the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate, is desperate for Western and regional investment to ease the economic turmoil that has overwhelmed the Arab world's most populous state.

The union representing Hollywood's actors hailed a landmark international treaty that officials said would provide important "economical and moral rights" for actors and other performers around the world. SAG-AFTRA, which has more than 160,000 members, said actors would benefit from a treaty signed by 46 countries Tuesday at a conference in Beijing held by the World Intellectual Property Organization, a United Nations agency in Geneva. If ratified, the treaty would require member countries to set up systems guaranteeing that actors and other performers would be compensated for the reuse of their work.

LONDON — Irish voters approved a European treaty to keep government spending in check, offering a small victory Friday to the region's leaders as they battle a worsening debt and banking crisis that has raised fear for the survival of the euro. A referendum to adopt the fiscal pact won by a strong margin, 60.3% to 39.7%, though only about half of Ireland's voters cast ballots Thursday. Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who campaigned hard for the "yes" side, hailed the result as a signal that his bailed-out nation "is serious about overcoming its economic challenges.

LONDON - Irish voters went to the polls Thursday to decide whether to ratify a treaty aimed at controlling the runaway deficits of European Union countries. The referendum, whose results are expected Friday night, comes as worry about Spain's economy continued to roil markets worldwide. Spanish stocks recovered some of their losses Thursday after slumping to nine-year lows a day earlier. The euro lost ground against the dollar, and oil prices fell, all on fear that Madrid will need international help to rescue its ailing banks.

PARIS - Exuberant supporters were still out celebrating Francois Hollande's election as president of France when the first fissures began opening up in the Franco-German motor that drives the rest of Europe. Although officials on both sides of the Rhine vowed to continue their close political cooperation, German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued a blunt rejection Monday of Hollande's pledge to renegotiate a Europe-wide fiscal treaty to rein in public debt. Nor would she countenance deficit spending to boost the economic growth that Europe so desperately needs, pouring cold water on another of Hollande's campaign promises.

CAIRO - The decorum of diplomacy has devolved into embarrassing headlines and testy one-liners in the increasingly strained relations between Egypt and Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that Egypt's Sinai peninsula had become a "kind of Wild West" overrun by militants, terrorists and arms smugglers. Over the weekend, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman had suggested massing more Israeli troops along the border with Egypt. That drew a bit of mafia parlance from Egypt's military ruler, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi: "Our borders, especially the northeast ones, are inflamed.

F. Sherwood Rowland, the UC Irvine chemistry professor who warned the world that man-made chemicals could erode the ozone layer, has died. He was 84. Rowland, known as Sherry, died Saturday at his home in Corona del Mar of complications from Parkinson's disease, the university announced. In 1995, Rowland was one of three people awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work explaining how chlorofluorocarbons, ubiquitous substances once used in an array of products from spray deodorant to industrial solvents, could destroy the ozone layer, the protective atmospheric blanket that screens out many of the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.