Deal may let Russia to push into Georgia
TBILISI, Georgia, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- The agreement aimed at restoring calm in Georgia may have given Russia an opening to occupy Georgia under the guise of peacekeeping, European officials say.
Moscow demanded the cease-fire agreement brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy include language allowing Russian troops to act in a peacekeeping role until an international monitoring system was in place, The New York Times reported.
Russian military personnel, citing this point, moved into Gori, Georgia, saying they had identified a threat to the local population. Gori is outside of South Ossetia, the separatist region where the war began.
The Russia-driven accord led Georgian officials to bemoan the lack of Western leverage.
"I'm talking about the impotence and inability of both Europe and the United States to be unified and to exert leverage, and to comprehend the level of the threat," the senior Georgian official who attended the talks between Sarkozy and Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, said to the Times.
He said Russian negotiators rebuffed efforts to include a time line for withdrawal.
A senior U.S. official familiar with the talks confirmed Russians' insistence on the point regarding security measures.
"I think it was presented (to Georgian officials) as, 'You need to sign on to this,'" the official told the Times. "My guess is it was presented as, 'This is the best I can get.'"
International acceptance of Russians as peacekeepers in Georgia, the official said, "is absurd at this point."
Whites to be U.S. minority by 2042
WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 (UPI) -- Whites will become a minority in the United States as early as 2042, a Census Bureau report to be released Thursday projects.
Census Bureau demographer Grayson Vincent told the Detroit Free Press that's about a decade earlier than previously forecast as the point at which all Americans will be minorities.
The report will show that by 2050, non-Hispanic whites, who now represent two-thirds of the U.S. population, will number 203 million out of the nation's estimated 439 million people, the newspaper said.
In addition, the number of Hispanics will likely triple by 2050 to 133 million, while the black population is projected to reach 66 million and the Asian segment of the population will be about 41 million, the report said. The American Indian and Alaska Natives population will reach about 9 million.
Hair at post office not anthrax suspect's
WASHINGTON, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- Hair recovered from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., doesn't match the lead suspect in the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, federal investigators said.
FBI agents and U.S. Postal Service inspectors analyzed the data to try to place Fort Detrick, Md., scientist Bruce Ivins at the location where the anthrax-laced letters were sent to U.S. Senate offices and media outlets, sources told The Washington Post
The hair sample was among the evidence that still mystify investigators in the case, which apparently ended after Ivins committed suicide July 29 as federal prosecutors were preparing to indict him. Friends and former colleagues say they want to know about the DNA advances authorities say pointed to a flask in Ivins's lab, the Post said.
Defense lawyer Paul F. Kemp said he wonders "where Ivins could have possibly stored this anthrax without any employees seeing it, or if he took it home, why there was no trace" of the spores, despite repeated FBI searches.
The Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday said it will call FBI Director Robert Mueller to testify at a Sept. 17 hearing and the House Judiciary panel is seeking to conduct a separate oversight hearing in September, the Post said. The hearings could be the first public forum in which the FBI's handling of the case and the strength of the evidence against Ivins is examined.
The anthrax mailings killed five people and forced thousands to receive vaccines.
42 workers detained at Dulles
WASHINGTON, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- Federal agents said they rounded up 42 suspected undocumented workers at Washington's Dulles International Airport Wednesday.
Immigration authorities said the men, detained during checks at an employee entrance gate, were Latin Americans working on construction projects at the airport in Dulles, Va., The Washington Post reported.
"There's no indication that any of the aliens were involved in any terrorist activity at all," the newspaper quoted Mark McGraw, deputy special agent in charge with the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, as saying.
McGraw said the operation began about 5 a.m., when ICE agents working in conjunction with airport and transportation authorities set up a checkpoint at one of the southern drive-through entrances.
A similar enforcement effort in June 2006 resulted in 55 arrests.
McGraw said while unusual, such inspections are important to safeguard U.S. airports.
"This is a critical, sensitive facility so ... of course we pay particular attention to it," he said. "It's one of the highest priorities of the Department of Homeland Security."
The workers were being held administratively on immigration violations while authorities determined whether criminal charges were warranted against them or their employers, McGraw said.
Filipino forces say they've freed villages
MANILA, Philippines, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- Security forces in the Philippines retook control of 15 villages in southern Mindanao a week after Muslim rebels had occupied them, the military said.
The forces expelled hundreds of rebels from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front from the villages across North Cotabato, the Los Angeles Times reported, quoting military officials.
"We have totally reclaimed the villages occupied by rebels. But troops are still clearing the areas of land mines left behind by the MILF forces," said a spokesman.
The rebels, however, claimed the largely Christian villages are part of a Muslim homeland the government of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has agreed to set up under mediation by Malaysia.
The country's Supreme Court has, however, halted the signing of the accord because of opposition from village leaders. North Cotabato officials say they weren't consulted in the drafting of the agreement with MILF.
The fighting left more than two dozen rebels and government forces dead and forced some 160,000 people to flee their homes.
