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Five residents of a drug rehab center in this western Mexican city died and 26 others were sickened after eating donated food that apparently contained cyanide, the Red Cross said Monday.

Thirty-one residents of the Jara Creador de Vida facility in Guadalajara became ill Sunday night after a meal of sausage, rice and vegetables.

Besides the five who died, three people are listed in serious condition at a Guadalajara hospital, while 18 others were treated and released.

Doctors suspect the donated food was laced with cyanide, but it will be up to the Jalisco state medical examiner’s office to make the final determination, Red Cross spokesman Daniel Nuñez told reporters.

The state Attorney General’s Office ordered the rehab closed and detained center director Adrian Garcia Rojas and two cooks for questioning.

Drug-cartel gunmen have staged a number of attacks in recent years on addiction treatment centers in Mexico, apparently targeting individuals who are using the facilities to sell drugs on rivals’ turf, officials say.

More than 60 people have died in such assaults over the past three years.

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Mexican actor Pedro Armendariz Jr. died Monday in a New York hospital after a battle with cancer, Milenio television reported, citing a statement from the family of the deceased. He was 71.

The family did not specify in which hospital the actor passed away and asked the media to respect their privacy.

According to Mexican television personality Joaquin Lopez Doriga, Armendariz died at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Efe contacted Sloan-Kettering, but a spokesperson there said that for reasons of confidentiality they could say nothing.

According to the online edition of the Mexico City daily El Universal, Armendariz had a cancerous tumor in one eye that spread to his brain.

The Mexican actor had flown to New York two weeks ago for treatment, according to Lopez Doriga.

Armendariz, son of actors Pedro Armendariz and Carmelita Pardo, was one of the leading figures of Mexican films, with more than 100 movies to his credit. From 2006 to 2010 he was president of the Mexican Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

His first film was “Fuera de la Ley” (Outside the Law) in 1965, and his last appearance on the big screen was in the short subject “Despertar” (Waking Up), which premiered in March of this year and in which Cristina Obregon was his co-star.

Armendariz, born April 6, 1940 in the Mexican capital, was awarded the Luis Buñuel Prize at the 2006 International Film Festival in Huesca, Spain.

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A recent Ipsos-Telemundo Poll indicates that just over half of U.S Hispanic adults (56%) approve the way Barack Obama is handling his job as President while 35 percent disapprove of it.

While still a majority, the proportion of Hispanics who approve of how President Obama is handling his job keeps shrinking. An Ipsos-Telemundo Poll released in June 2011, found that Obama’s approval was at 62% at the time, already considerably lower than the 86% who approved back in April of 2009 – when the President marked his first 100 days in office. Overall, the President’s approval rating among Hispanics has dropped 30 points since April, 2009.

While President Obama’s approval ratings among Hispanics continue to be higher than among the U.S public at large (56% vs. 47%), the gap between both audiences narrowed by three percentage points since June 2011 (62% vs. 50%, respectively), and by 14 percentage points when compared to April 2009 (86% vs. 63%). The gap between Hispanics who approve of President Obama, and adults from the general public who do so, has reduced from 23 points in April 2009, to 12 points in June 2011, to just nine points in December, 2011.

These results suggest that while President Obama’s approval has been dropping since he took office, the disillusion among Hispanics is more pronounced than among the general public.

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Parents of overweight Hispanic children are willing to make food and lifestyle changes that will benefits their kids’ health, a new study suggests.

The findings may help improve efforts to combat the childhood obesity epidemic among Hispanic Americans, the largest and fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States, said the researchers at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

“Almost half of all Latino kids are either overweight or obese,” senior study author Dr. Glenn Flores, a professor of pediatrics and clinical sciences, said in a medical center news release. “It’s an important issue in terms of our future generations. If we intervene early enough, we won’t have obese adults.”

In the study, the researchers asked 19 Hispanic parents about their children’s dietary and exercise habits and roadblocks to making healthier choices.

“Themes regarding the most important things parents can do to help overweight children lose weight included encouragement, not making the child feel left out, the whole family eating healthy and the parent setting a good example,” said Flores, who is also head of general pediatrics at UT Southwestern and chief of general pediatrics at Children’s Medical Center Dallas.

The parents and children also tasted Hispanic foods prepared with healthy alternatives, such as tortillas made with vegetable oil instead of lard, beans made without lard, healthy-grain enchiladas with low-fat cheese, baked fish, skinless chicken breasts and brown rice.

The participants had favorable responses to all of the foods, with the exception of brown rice instead of white rice.

In addition to healthier foods, the parents said other actions that would help their children lose weight included cutting down on portion sizes and second helpings, drinking more water, being more physically active, making exercise a family activity, and limiting time in front of the television or computer.

Read more at Health Finder →

Starting in January, the Cuban government will expand its policy of shifting certain state workers who provide services, such a carpenters and shoemakers, to the private sector after implementing the measure this month for barber shops and beauty salons, Communist Party daily Granma said Monday.

The regulation states that workers who previously belonged to the staff of the state-run Technical, Personal and Household Services corporation will now become contractors.

The new system will apply to carpenters, photographers, locksmiths, upholsterers, watchmakers, cobblers, and repairmen for jewelry and electrical equipment, among other specialties.

Granma said the measure will be implemented “gradually” starting January in six of the nation’s 15 provinces, and will be extended progressively to the remaining regions.

While the premises and equipment included in the lease will continue to be state property, the workers will set their own schedule of working hours and the prices they charge for their services.

The daily said that the new measures will continue to advance the plan of economic adjustments promoted by the Raul Castro government in terms of “introducing non-state enterprises” in the services and retail sectors.

In 2009 the Cuban government launched its first experiment with this policy in some state-run barber shops and beauty salons that were leased to their workers and whose definitive transition to the private sector was implemented on Dec. 1.

The government’s economic reforms were approved in April by the 6th Communist Party Congress and signify a small, controlled opening to private enterprise, the “slimming down” of the inflated work forces of the state sector and the progressive elimination of subsidies and “unnecessary paternalism.”

Official figures show there are currently 358,000 Cubans working in the incipient private sector, twice as many as two years ago before the government began expanding self-employment in October 2010.

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Chile’s Supreme Court upheld on Monday a verdict ordering a newspaper to pay damages to 13 people hurt in explosions that resulted from preparing fritters according to a recipe they found in the daily.

La Tercera, published by Copesa, must pay a total of 85 million pesos ($163,460) a the 13 victims.

The claims of two other plaintiffs’ were rejected.

The case dates back to July 25, 2004, when La Tercera published in its women’s supplement a recipe for caramel-filled fritters that called for frying a mass of dough at a temperature of 250 C (482 F).

The procedure set down in the recipe produced “explosions so violent that the splatters reached the ceiling and bathed the person preparing it,” investigating magistrate Ximena Diaz concluded in 2008 after a four-year investigation.

“Faithfully following the recipe published in the daily, it would be impossible to have avoided this damage,” the judge wrote, noting that La Tercera’s instructions were wrong on the quantities of ingredients to be used.

People who used the recipe suffered burns to the arms, face and chest.

The individual plaintiffs will receive damages ranging from 1 million to 25 million pesos ($1,923 to $48,076).

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Slightly more than half a ton of marijuana was seized aboard a speedboat some 224 kilometers (139 miles) west of the Coronado Islands, located off the coast of Baja California and near the border with the United States, and three suspects were arrested, the Mexican Navy Secretariat said Sunday.

The seizure was made on Friday after the U.S. Coast Guard and the Mexican navy spotted the suspicious speedboat, the secretariat said.

The navy moved in after “an air unit saw packages being tossed in a suspicious manner into the sea in international waters approximately 140 nautical miles east-northeast of Ensenada, Baja California,” the secretariat said.

The 2nd Naval Region, which is based in Ensenada, sent three units - an ocean patrol boat, an interceptor patrol boat and a fast vessel - to intercept the speedboat.

“After an intense chase, a coast guard vessel stopped the smaller boat and guarded it until the Mexican navy boats arrived,” the secretariat said.

One of the navy boats recovered 42 bales of marijuana weighing a total of 591 kilos.

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Watch Demi Lovato’s new lyric video ‘Give Your Heart a Break’.  Sounds great. 

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The U.S. Mission to Brazil processed a record number of visa applications – 820,000 – in fiscal year 2011, a 42 percent year-over-year increase.

To meet the surging demand for U.S. visas in Brazil, the Department of State is deploying waves of temporary employees to the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia and U.S. Consulates in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Recife. These employees are helping to process extraordinary numbers of visa applications until permanent staff members arrive. The Department will double consular staffing in Brazil over the course of 2012, adding 50 new officer positions.

With the help of additional personnel, U.S. Mission Brazil has reduced the average wait time for visa interview appointments in Brazil to less than 50 days. While the Department always puts security first, visitors to the United States make critical contributions to economic growth and job creation. That is why shortening visa interview wait times is also a priority – to encourage even greater numbers of Brazilians to visit the United States, a premier destination for travelers from around the world.

The United States and Brazil, the two largest economies and the two largest democracies in the Western Hemisphere, share one of the most important trade and economic relationships in the world. According to the Department of Commerce, more than 1.2 million Brazilians visited the United States in 2010, contributing nearly $6 billion to the U.S. economy. By 2016, the United States could host a record 2.8 million Brazilian visitors.

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The U.S. government is currently reviewing orders to deport thousands of illegal immigrants in two cities, at a time of great division on the issue at federal and local levels. In the past fiscal year, a record 396,000 undocumented immigrants were deported from the United States, with more than 300,000 cases still pending.

The port city of Baltimore, Maryland, also known by its nickname “Charm City,” is one of the cities where U.S. federal immigration authorities are trying out new ways in dealing with a large caseload of deportation orders.

The other city is high-altitude Denver, Colorado.

Divergent views
In both places, illegal immigrants without violent criminal records may be allowed to stay, while cases against illegal immigrants deemed to have serious criminal records may be expedited.

One politician not happy at all with the experiment, which runs until the middle of January, is Maryland House of Delegates Republican Pat McDonough.

He recently wrote a newspaper opinion piece saying Baltimore was being turned into what he calls an “amnesty city.”

“What this does is it creates a magnet and incentive for people who are in this country without lawful presence to flock to Baltimore. And there are consequences to that,” said McDonough.

Economic issues cited

McDonough says consequences include added costs to provide bilingual services, added pressures on emergency rooms to deal with uninsured illegal immigrants, higher unemployment among legal residents, and threats to public safety.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said it was not conducting interviews on the immigration case review.

In an email statement, it said the U.S. government is trying to focus immigration enforcement resources on those convicted of crimes, recent border crossers and what it called egregious immigration law violators.

Pro-immigrant activists have complained too many non-violent illegal immigrants are being deported, in a rush by the agency to boost statistics and receive more funding.

Review and considerations

Mary Giovagnoli, the Washington-based Immigration Policy Center director, calls the current two-city review a small step in the right direction. 

“Truly moving on is really messy, and like any major social issue you do not resolve it right away. In that sense, it is not unlike the civil rights movement or the voting rights movement or any other number of issues that took years and years to really resolve and get right because you are both changing the laws, and you are changing hearts and minds,” said Giovagnoli.

The review comes at a time when lawmakers in more and more U.S. states are passing tough anti-immigration laws.

But the federal government is pushing back on that front as well, using challenges in the court system and saying it has exclusive authority to regulate immigration.

There also have been protests by those favoring fewer deportations. In some states like Alabama, civil rights leaders recently marched for families to be kept together, as in recent months, detained or deported illegal immigrant parents were separated from their U.S.-born citizen children.

Activists in other cities, like Iowa City, are going even further, seeking to make the college town Iowa’s first so-called sanctuary city to protect illegal immigrants from federal immigration law.

More than 30 cities in the United States have gone this route, with some even banning officials from asking people about their immigration status. Activists say it saves the city money while also creating a stronger sense of community - claims staunch opponents to illegal immigration find outrageous.

Read more at voice of america →