Argentine mom rescues hundreds of sex slaves in search for daughter

LA PLATA, Argentina (AP) — Susana Trimarco was a housewife who fussed over her family and paid scant attention to the news until her daughter left for a doctor's appointment and never came back.

After getting little help from police, Trimarco launched her own investigation into a tip that the 23-year-old was abducted and forced into sex slavery. Soon, Trimarco was visiting brothels seeking clues about her daughter and the search took an additional goal: rescuing sex slaves and helping them start new lives.

What began as a one-woman campaign a decade ago developed into a movement and Trimarco today is a hero to hundreds of women she's rescued from Argentine prostitution rings. She's been honored with the "Women of Courage" award by the U.S. State Department and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize on Nov. 28. Sunday night, President Cristina Fernandez gave her a human rights award before hundreds of thousands of people in the Plaza de Mayo.

But years of exploring the decadent criminal underground haven't led Trimarco to her daughter, Maria de los Angeles "Marita" Veron, who was 23 in 2002 when she disappeared from their hometown in provincial Tucuman, leaving behind her own 3-year-old daughter Micaela.

"I live for this," the 58-year-old Trimarco told The Associated Press of her ongoing quest. "I have no other life, and the truth is, it is a very sad, very grim life that I wouldn't wish on anyone."

Her painful journey has now reached a milestone.

Publicity over Trimarco's efforts prompted Argentine authorities to make a high-profile example of her daughter's case by putting 13 people on trial for allegedly kidnapping Veron and holding her as a sex slave in a family-run operation of illegal brothels. Prostitution is not illegal in Argentina, but the exploitation of women for sex is.

A verdict is expected Tuesday after a nearly yearlong trial.

The seven men and six women have pleaded innocent and their lawyers have said there's no physical proof supporting the charges against them. The alleged ringleaders denied knowing Veron and said that women who work in their brothels do so willingly. Prosecutors have asked for up to 25 years imprisonment for those convicted.

Trimarco was the primary witness during the trial, testifying for six straight days about her search for her daughter.

The road to trial was a long one.

Frustrated by seeming indifference to her daughter's disappearance, Trimarco began her own probe and found a taxi driver who told of delivering Veron to a brothel where she was beaten and forced into prostitution. The driver is among the defendants.

With her husband and granddaughter in tow, Trimarco disguised herself as a recruiter of prostitutes and entered brothel after brothel searching for clues. She soon found herself immersed in the dangerous and grim world of organized crime, gathering evidence against police, politicians and gangsters.

"For the first time, I really understood what was happening to my daughter," she said. "I was with my husband and with Micaela, asleep in the backseat of the car because she was still very small and I had no one to leave her with."

The very first woman Trimarco rescued taught her to be strong, she said.

"It stuck with me forever: She told me not to let them see me cry, because these shameless people who had my daughter would laugh at me, and at my pain," Trimarco said. "Since then I don't cry anymore. I've made myself strong, and when I feel that a tear might drop, I remember these words and I keep my composure."

Micaela, now 13, has been by her grandmother's side throughout, contributing to publicity campaigns against human trafficking and keeping her mother's memory alive.

More than 150 witnesses testified in the trial, including a dozen former sex slaves who described brutal conditions in the brothels.

Veron may have been kidnapped twice, with the complicity of the very authorities who should have protected her, according to Julio Fernandez, who now runs a Tucuman police department devoted to investigating human trafficking. He testified that witnesses reported seeing Veron at a bus station three days after she initially disappeared, and that a police officer from La Rioja, Domingo Pascual Andrada, delivered her to a brothel there. Andrada, now among the defendants, denied knowing any of the other defendants, let alone Veron.

Other Tucuman police testified that when they sought permission in 2002 to search La Rioja brothels, a judge made them wait for hours, enabling Veron's captors to move her. That version was supported by a woman who had been a prostitute at the brothel: She testified that Veron was moved just before police arrived. The judge, Daniel Moreno, is not on trial. He denied delaying the raid or having anything to do with the defendants.

Some of the former prostitutes said they had seen Veron drugged and haggard. One testified Veron felt trapped and missed her daughter. Another said she spotted Veron with dyed-blonde hair and an infant boy she was forced to conceive in a rape by a ringleader. A third thought Veron had been sold to a brothel in Spain — a lead reported to Interpol.

Trimarco's campaign to find her daughter led the State Department to provide seed money for a foundation in Veron's name. To date, it has rescued more than 900 women and girls from sex trafficking. The foundation also provides housing, medical and psychological aid, and it helps victims sue former captors.

Argentina outlawed human trafficking in 2008, thanks in large part to the foundation's work. A new force dedicated to combating human trafficking has liberated nearly 3,000 more victims in two years, said Security Minister Nilda Garre, who wrote a newspaper commentary saying the trial's verdict should set an example.

Whatever the verdict, Trimarco's lawyer, Carlos Garmendia, says the case has already made a difference.

"Human trafficking was an invisible problem until the Marita (Veron) case," Garmendia said. "The case has put it on the national agenda."

But Trimarco wants more. "I had hoped they would break down and say what they'd done with Marita," she said.

"I feel here in my breast that she is alive and I'm not going to stop until I find her," Trimarco said. "If she's no longer in this world, I want her body."

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EU leaders in Norway to pick up Nobel Peace Prize

OSLO, Norway (AP) — European Union leaders on Sunday hailed the achievements of the 27-nation bloc, but acknowledged they need more integration and authority to solve problems, including its worst financial crisis, as they arrived in Norway to pick up this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Conceding that the EU lacked sufficient powers to stop the devastating 1992-95 Bosnia war, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said that the absence of such authority at the time is “one of the most powerful arguments for a stronger European Union.”

Barroso spoke to reporters with EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy and the president of the EU Parliament, Martin Schulz, in Oslo, where the three leaders were to receive this year’s award, granted to the European Union for fostering peace on a continent ravaged by war.

Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland will present the prize, worth $ 1.2 million, at a ceremony in Oslo City Hall, followed by a banquet at the Grand Hotel, against a backdrop of demonstrations in this EU-skeptic country that has twice rejected joining the union.

About 20 European government leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, will be joining the ceremonies. They will be celebrating far away from the EU’s financial woes in a prosperous, oil-rich nation of 5 million on the outskirts of Europe that voted in 1972 and 1994 in referendums to stay out of the union.

The decision to award the prize to the EU has sparked harsh criticism, including from three peace laureates — South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland and Adolfo Perez Esquivel from Argentina — who have demanded the prize money not be paid out this year. They say the bloc contradicts the values associated with the prize because it relies on military force to ensure security.

The leader of Britain’s Independence Party, Nigel Farage, in a statement described rewarding the EU as “a ridiculous act which blows the reputation of the Nobel prize committee to smithereens.”

Hundreds of people demonstrated against this year’s prize winners in a peaceful torch-lit protest that meandered through the dark city streets to Parliament, including Tomas Magnusson from the International Peace Bureau, the 1910 prize winner.

“This is totally against the idea of Alfred Nobel who wanted disarmament,” he said, accusing the Nobel committee of being “too close to the power” elite.

Dimitris Kodelas, a Greek lawmaker from the main opposition Radical Left party, or Syriza, said a humanitarian crisis in his country and EU policies could cause major rifts in Europe. He thought it was a joke when he heard the peace prize was awarded to the EU. “It challenges even our logic and it is also insulting,” he said.

The EU is being granted the prize as it grapples with a debt crisis that has stirred deep tensions between north and south, caused soaring unemployment and sent hundreds of thousands into the streets to protest austerity measures.

It is also threatening the euro — the common currency used by 17 of its members — and even the structure of the union itself, and is fuelling extremist movements such as Golden Dawn in Greece, which opponents brand as neo-Nazi.

Barroso acknowledged that the current crisis showed the union was “not fully equipped to deal with a crisis of this magnitude.”

“We do not have all the instruments for a true and genuine economic union … so we need to complete our economic and monetary union,” he said, adding that the new measures, including on a banking and fiscal union, would be agreed on in coming weeks.

He stressed that despite the crisis all steps taken had been toward “more, not less integration.”

Van Rompuy was optimistic saying that EU would come out of the crisis stronger than before. “We want Europe to become again a symbol of hope,” he said.

The EU says it will donate the prize money to projects that help children in conflict zones and will double it with EU funds.

The European Union grew from the conviction that ever-closer economic ties would ensure century-old enemies like Germany and France never turned on each other again, starting with the creation in 1951 of the European Coal and Steel Community, declared as “a first step in the federation of Europe.”

In 60 years it has grown into a 27-nation bloc with a population of 500 million, with other nations eagerly waiting to join, even as its unity is being threatened by the financial woes.

While there have never been wars inside EU territory, the confederation has not been able to prevent European wars outside its borders. When the deadly Balkans wars erupted in the 1990s, the EU was unable by itself to stop them. It was only with the help of the United States and after over 100,000 lives were lost in Bosnia was peace eventually restored there, and several years later, to Kosovo.

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Obama met with Boehner on Sunday over fiscal cliff: aides

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama met with Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner on Sunday at the White House to negotiate ways to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” according to White House officials and a congressional aide.

The two sides declined to provide further details about the unannounced meeting. Obama and Boehner aides used the same language to describe it.

“This afternoon, the president and Speaker Boehner met at the White House to discuss efforts to resolve the fiscal cliff,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

“We’re not reading out details of the conversation, but the lines of communication remain open,” he said.

An aide to Boehner emailed an identical quote.

The two sides are trying to reach an agreement that would stop automatic spending cuts and tax increases from going into effect at the beginning of the year. Analysts say if that so-called “fiscal cliff” occurs, the U.S. economy could swing back into a recession.

Obama has made clear he will not accept a deal unless tax rates for the wealthiest Americans rise. Boehner and many of his fellow Republicans say any tax increases would hurt a still fragile economy.

Last week Boehner and Obama spoke by phone, a conversation that the Republican leader described as pleasant but unproductive.

The common language used by both men’s aides suggests an agreement to keep details about their discussions private, which could help both of them sell less politically palatable aspects of an eventual deal to lawmakers in their respective parties.

(additional reporting by Rachelle Younglai; editing by Stacey Joyce)

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U.S.-Mexican singer Jenni Rivera dies in plane crash

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexican-American singer Jenni Rivera died in a plane crash after the small jet she was travelling in went down in northern Mexico, her father said on Sunday.

A spokesman for the state government of Nuevo Leon said investigators had found the remains of Rivera’s Learjet, which disappeared from the radar 62 miles from the northern city of Monterrey at about 3:30 a.m. local time/4.30 a.m. EST.

Speaking after the wreckage was discovered, the singer’s father, Pedro Rivera, told Telemundo television all seven of the people on board the plane, including two pilots, had died.

“Everyone was lost,” Rivera said, flanked by two sons.

Investigators are still searching the crash site in the municipality of Iturbide, south of Monterrey. The transportation and communications ministry said the wreckage was strewn so far and wide that it was hard to recognize anything.

It was not clear what caused the crash.

Rivera, 43, was heading for the city of Toluca in central Mexico after a concert in Monterrey on Saturday night.

Born in Long Beach, California, to Mexican immigrants, Rivera sold some 15 million records in her career, won several awards and received Grammy nominations, her website said.

A mother of five, Rivera was a renowned performer of the Nortena and Banda musical styles.

(Writing by Dave Graham; Editing by Philip Barbara and Stacey Joyce)

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Obama, Boehner meet face-to-face on 'fiscal cliff'

For the first time in more than three weeks, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner met face-to-face today at the White House to talk about avoiding the fiscal cliff.

White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest would offer no details saying only, "The lines of communication remain open."

Erskine Bowles, the co-creator of a debt reducing plan, who was pessimistic a couple weeks ago, said he likes what he's hearing.

"Any time you have two guys in there tangoing, you have a chance to get it done," Bowles said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

The White House afternoon talks, conducted without cameras or any announcement until they were over, came as some Republicans were showing more flexibility about approving higher tax rates for the wealthy, one of the president's demands to keep the country from the so-called fiscal cliff -- a mixture of across-the-board tax increases and spending cuts that many economists say would send the country back into recession.

"Let's face it. He does have the upper hand on taxes. You have to pass something to keep it from happening," Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee said on "FOX News Sunday."

This comes after the White House moderated one of its demands about tax rate increases for the wealthy.

The administration was demanding the rate return to its former level of 39.6 percent on income above $250,000. The so-called Bush tax cut set that rate at 35 percent. But Friday, Vice President Joe Biden signaled that rate could be negotiable, somewhere between the two.

"So will I accept a tax increase as a part of a deal to actually solve our problems? Yes," said Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn on ABC's "This Week."

The problems the senator was referring to are the country's entitlement programs. And there was some progress on that front, too.

A leading Democrat said means testing for Medicare recipients could be a way to cut costs to the government health insurance program. Those who make more money would be required to pay more for Medicare.

"I do believe there should be means testing, and those of us with higher income and retirement should pay more. That could be part of the solution," Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

But Durbin said he would not favor raising the eligibility age from 65 years old to 67 years old, as many Republicans have suggested.

The White House and the speaker's office released the exact same statement about the negotiating session. Some will see that as a sign of progress, that neither side is talking about what was said behind closed doors.

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Anger at Australian radio station over royal hoax

LONDON (AP) — It started out as a joke, but ended in tragedy.

The sudden death of a nurse who unwittingly accepted a prank call to a London hospital about Prince William‘s pregnant wife Kate has shocked Britain and Australia, and sparked an angry backlash Saturday from some who argue the DJs who carried out the hoax should be held responsible.

At first, the call by two irreverent Australian DJs posing as royals was picked up by news outlets around the world as an amusing anecdote about the royal pregnancy. Some complained about the invasion of privacy, the hospital was embarrassed, and the radio presenters sheepishly apologized.

But the prank took a dark twist Friday with the death of nurse Jacintha Saldanha, a 46-year-old mother of two, three days after she took the hoax call. Police have not yet determined Saldanha‘s cause of death, but people from London to Sydney have been making the assumption that she died because of stress from the call.

King Edward VII’s Hospital, where the former Kate Middleton was being treated for acute morning sickness this week, wrote a strongly-worded letter to the 2DayFM radio station’s parent company Southern Cross Austereo, condemning the “truly appalling” hoax and urging it to take steps to ensure such an incident would never happen again.

“The immediate consequence of these premeditated and ill-considered actions was the humiliation of two dedicated and caring nurses who were simply doing their job tending to their patients,” the letter read. “The longer term consequence has been reported around the world and is, frankly, tragic beyond words.”

The hospital did not comment when asked whether it believed the prank call had directly caused Saldanha’s death, only saying that the protest letter spoke for itself.

DJs Mel Grieg and Michael Christian, who apologized for the prank on Tuesday, took down their Twitter accounts after they were bombarded by thousands of abusive comments. Rhys Holleran, CEO of Southern Cross Austereo, said the pair have been offered counseling and were taken off the air indefinitely.

No one could have foreseen the tragic consequences of the prank, he stressed.

“I spoke to both presenters early this morning and it’s fair to say they’re completely shattered,” Holleran told reporters on Saturday.

“These people aren’t machines, they’re human beings,” he said. “We’re all affected by this.”

Details about Saldanha have been trickling out since the duty nurse’s body was found at apartments provided by the private hospital, which has treated a line of royals before, including Prince Philip, who was hospitalized there for a bladder infection in June.

The nurse, who was originally from India, had lived with her partner Benedict Barboza and a teenage son and daughter in Bristol, in southwestern England, for the past nine years. The hospital praised her as a “first-class nurse” who was well-respected and popular among colleagues during her four years working there.

Just before dawn on Tuesday, Saldanha was looking after her patients when the phone rang. A woman pretending to be Queen Elizabeth II asked to speak to the duchess, and, believing the caller, Saldanha transferred the call to a fellow nurse caring for the duchess, who spoke to the two DJs about Kate’s condition live on air.

During the call — which was put online and later broadcast on news channels worldwide — Grieg mimicked the Britain’s monarch’s voice and asked about the duchess’ health. She was told Kate “hasn’t had any retching with me and she’s been sleeping on and off.” Grieg and Christian, who pretended to be Prince Charles, also discussed with the nurse when they could travel to the hospital to check in on Kate.

Three days later, officers responding to reports that a woman was found unconscious discovered Saldanha, who was pronounced dead at the scene. Police didn’t release a cause of death, but said they didn’t find anything suspicious. A coroner will make a determination on the cause.

In the aftermath of Saldanha’s death, some speculated about whether the nurse was subject to pressure to resign or about to be punished for the mistake. Royal officials said Prince William and Kate were “deeply saddened,” but insisted that the palace had not complained about the hoax. King Edward VII’s Hospital also maintained that it did not reprimand Saldanha.

“We did not discipline the nurse in question. There were no plans to discipline her,” a hospital spokesman said. He declined to provide further details, and did not respond to questions about the second nurse’s condition.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority, which regulates radio broadcasting, said it has received complaints about the prank and is discussing the matter with the Sydney-based station, which yanked its Facebook page after it received thousands of angry comments.

Holleran, the radio executive, would not say who came up with the idea for the call. He only said that “these things are often done collaboratively.” He said 2DayFM would work with authorities, but was confident the station hadn’t broken any laws, noting that prank calls in radio have been happening “for decades.”

The station has a history of controversy, including a series of “Heartless Hotline” shows in which disadvantage people were offered a prize that could be taken away from them by listeners.

Saldanha’s family asked for privacy in a brief statement issued through London police.

Flowers were left outside the hospital’s nurse’s apartments, with one note reading: “Dear Jacintha, our thoughts are with you and your family. From all your fellow nurses, we bless your soul. God bless.”

Officials from St. James’s Palace have said the duchess is not yet 12 weeks pregnant. The child would be the first for her and William.

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7 Apps You Don’t Want To Miss

Twitterific

Twitter client Twitterific released version 5 of its iOS app this week. Overhauled and redesigned, the updated app has a new customizable user interface, gesture support, and the ability to sync timeline positions between several different devices.

Click here to view this gallery.

[More from Mashable: Google Now Updated With Boarding Passes, Improved Voice Search]

It can be tough to keep up with all the new apps released every week. But you’re in luck — we take care of that for you, creating a roundup each weekend of our favorite new and updated apps.

This week a popular mobile photo editing app for iOS finally made its way to Android, and a hot email app for iOS saw a huge update.

[More from Mashable: Chihuly App Brings Glassblowing To The iPhone]

We found an app that lets you create virtual glass art projects with your iPhone, and an app for Android that lets you find and purchase art projects that others have created.

Check out the gallery above for a look at this week’s app highlights.

If you’re still looking for more, check out last week’s Apps You Don’t Want To Miss.

Think we left a great new app off the list? Let us know in the comments below.

Photo courtesy iStockphoto, scanrail

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Orlando Bloom’s Legolas returns to Middle Earth in 2014′s “There and Back Again”

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Legolas was a fan favorite in Peter Jackson‘s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, but J.R.R. Tolkien enthusiasts won’t see the warrior Elf return to Middle Earth until 2014 when “The Hobbit: There and Back Again” hits theaters.

Entertainment Weekly published the first image of Orlando Bloom reprising his role and he looks pretty much the same, with the exception of his very blue eyes (weren’t they brown before?).

It’s true that the character is not featured in the book this trilogy is being adapted from, but luckily for Bloom’s bank account, his father is.

“He’s Thranduil’s son, and Thranduil is one of the characters in ‘The Hobbit,’” Jackson explained. “And because elves are immortal it makes sense Legolas would be part of the sequence in the Woodland Realm.”

If you don’t recognize the man standing next to Legolas, it’s because he’s a new face in the franchise. Bard the Bowman – played by Luke Evans – is a heroic human Laketown warrior who (if you couldn’t tell by his name) is also quite the marksman. He’ll come into the picture when “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” lands in theaters on December 13, 2013.

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On the edge of the “cliff,” U.S. cities like Charleston

CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters) – For 37 years straight, Joseph P. Riley Jr. has sat behind the mayor’s desk here, shaping this city and its budget.

On a recent afternoon, Riley, 69, reached for a draft copy of next year’s spending plan and wondered aloud about what might get cut should politicians in Washington fail to find an agreement this month, unleashing $ 600 billion worth of spending reductions and tax hikes next year.

Hiring new police officers for the city of 123,000 could be put on hold, Riley said. A new piece of equipment for the fire department would have to wait. Sanitation workers might be in trouble, too.

“The thought that they would allow the economic harm that would ensue if we went over the fiscal cliff is mind-boggling,” said Riley, a Democrat who was elected to his 10th term last year.

Charleston, a beautiful city steeped in history and awash in tourist dollars, would seem at first glance a world apart from the harm that could be caused by the combination of spending cuts and higher taxes. Economists predict its arrival could send the United States hurtling back into a recession.

At its edges, however, Charleston harbors the people who are most vulnerable to Washington’s intransigence, making the city an emblem of a country’s worry and of the powerlessness people feel in the face of Washington’s indecision.

The sting of automatic cuts would be felt acutely by those who work in the defense sector and the poor. They form two prominent groups in Charleston County who may share little but the knowledge that federal belt-tightening is less a nuisance than an existential threat.

In South Carolina, defense spending accounts for $ 15.7 billion in annual economic activity – more than one in 10 dollars spent in the state – and nearly 140,000 jobs.

The Charleston area alone, which includes a large Air Force base and a Navy facility, holds more than 66,000 defense jobs and nearly half of the state’s military economic activity, according to a report released last month by the South Carolina Department of Commerce.

While Charleston, like the rest of the state, has seen a boom in military spending over the last decade, the area has the state’s second-highest concentration of people living in poverty, according to 2010 U.S. census data. More than one in four children live in poverty in the surrounding county.

From the anticipated cuts to the military to the shrinking of the safety net, Charleston shows what’s at stake should the United States fall off the fiscal cliff.

‘DEVASTATION’

A fast-talking engineer originally from Detroit, Michigan, Rebecca Ufkes founded UEC Electronics with her husband in neighboring Hanahan 17 years ago. Walking past employees in blue lab coats assembling components for military vehicles and commercial products last week, Ufkes described the chilling effect the possibility of cuts have had on Charleston’s defense industry.

In September, Ufkes traveled to Washington as a part of a lobbying effort organized by the Aerospace Industry Association, hoping to impress politicians with the dangers facing her 200-person company and its competitors should the anticipated $ 500 billion in defense cuts, over 10 years, come to pass.

She came away encouraged by her state’s largely Republican representation in Washington but frustrated by other lawmakers.

“South Carolina is a very pro-business state,” she said. “They are very keen on economics. It’s just that we are only one of 50 states.”

Ufkes, 48, said she worries not only about the uncertainty that has left defense contractors unsure where to invest but the impending tax increases, which she said will put her company, active in the commercial marketplace as well, at a disadvantage against foreign rivals.

“Probably the solution is not going to be perfect for UEC,” she said, “but I don’t want it to be devastating. Compromise and devastation are not the same thing.”

With a mug declaring, “Failure is not an option,” sitting on her desk, Ufkes predicted that her company would make it, no matter how devastating the cuts are.

“If we don’t survive,” she said. “I don’t know who will.”

NO ‘GIFTS’

Five miles (eight km) from Ufkes’ cutting-edge electronics manufacturer is the struggling North Charleston neighborhood of Chicora-Cherokee, where Bill Stanfield and his wife, Evelyn Oliveira, arrived fresh out of Princeton Theological Seminary 10 years ago.

They founded Metanoia, a development organization focusing on bettering the community by securing housing loans, planting a garden, and running after-school and summer programs.

Through government services like AmeriCorps, the national volunteer group, and funds from sources like the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Stanfield said his group received nearly a fifth of its funding from the federal government last year.

With politicians facing immense pressure over limiting cuts to entitlements like the Medicare health insurance program for seniors and the Social Security retirement program, advocates for the poor say they expect painful reductions in spending on education and housing.

“I don’t know if our housing program would survive,” Stanfield, 39, said.

Cuts to education will hit South Carolina hard, where the schools have bled money over the last five years.

According to the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, South Carolina’s cuts to education have been the fifth largest in the country, slicing 18 percent off of per-student spending during that period.

The Obama administration, which Republicans consider a profligate spender, has felt like lean times in neighborhoods like Chicora-Cherokee, Stanfield said.

“You know Mitt Romney said that people voted for Obama because of gifts?” Stanfield said. “There’s this misconception that President Obama has been a gravy train of funding. There was more funding under President Bush of these organizations than under Obama.”

‘GAME OF CHICKEN’

Last month, Riley, the Charleston mayor, went to Washington with a group of fellow city leaders, Democrats and Republicans, to lobby the White House and Congress to save cities from drastic cuts.

Vice President Joseph Biden and Democratic leaders from the House of Representatives and Senate met with the mayors. House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders in Congress declined their invitation, Riley said.

While Riley supports Obama’s proposal to increase taxes on income earned over $ 250,000, a sticking point in the negotiations, he and other mayors cautioned that ending the tax-free status of municipal bonds would strangle cities’ access to needed capital.

Riley returned to Charleston feeling like a deal, which could prevent the harshest blows from hitting his city, its residents and jobs, was in the offing. Now, he said, he is not so sure.

“It looks like it’s a game of chicken,” he said, “and there are signals that they are going to go through with it.”

(Reporting By Samuel P. Jacobs Editing by Fred Barbash and Eric Beech)

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North Korea considers delaying controversial rocket launch

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea may postpone the controversial launch of a long-range rocket that had been slated for liftoff as early as this week, state media said Sunday, as international pressure on Pyongyang to cancel the provocative move intensified.

Scientists have been pushing forward with final preparations for the launch from a west coast site, slated to take place as early as Monday, but are considering "readjusting" the timing, an unidentified spokesman for the Korean Committee for Space Technology told North Korea's state-run Korean Central News Agency.

It was unclear whether diplomatic intervention or technical glitches were behind the delay. A brief KCNA dispatch said scientists and technicians were discussing whether to set new launch dates but did not elaborate.

Word of a possible delay comes just days after satellite photos indicated that snow may have slowed launch preparations, and as officials in Washington, Seoul, Tokyo, Moscow and elsewhere urged North Korea to cancel a liftoff widely seen as a violation of bans against missile activity.

Commercial satellite imagery taken by GeoEye on Dec. 4 and shared Friday with The Associated Press by the 38 North and North Korea Tech websites showed the Sohae site northwest of Pyongyang covered with snow. The road from the main assembly building to the launch pad showed no fresh tracks, indicating that the snowfall may have stalled the preparations.

However, analysts believed rocket preparations would have been completed on time for liftoff as early as Monday.

North Korea announced earlier this month that it would launch a three-stage rocket mounted with a satellite from its Sohae station southeast of Sinuiju sometime between Dec. 10 and Dec. 22. Pyongyang calls it a peaceful bid to send an observational satellite into space, its second attempt this year.

The launch announcement captured global headlines because of its timing: South Korea and Japan hold key elections this month, President Barack Obama begins his second term next month and China has just formed a new leadership. North Koreans also have begun a mourning period for late leader Kim Jong Il, who died on Dec. 17, 2011.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Washington was "deeply concerned" about the launch, and urged foreign ministers from NATO and Russia to demand that Pyongyang cancel its plans.

U.S. and others said the launch would violate U.N. Security Council resolutions banning North Korea from nuclear and missile activity because the rocket shares the same technology used for firing a long-range missile.

North Korea has unveiled missiles designed to target U.S. soil and has tested two atomic bombs in recent years, but has not shown yet that it has mastered the technology for mounting a nuclear warhead to a long-range missile. Six-nation negotiations to offer North Korea much-needed aid in exchange for nuclear disarmament have been stalled since 2009.

China, the North's main ally and aid provider, noted its "concern" after North Korea declared its plans. It acknowledged North Korea's right to develop its space program but said that had to be harmonized with restrictions including those set by the U.N. Security Council.

In Seoul, officials at the Defense Ministry, Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Foreign Ministry said Sunday they couldn't immediately find what might be behind the possible delay.

North Korea may hold off if Washington actively engages Pyongyang in dialogue and promises to ship stalled food assistance to the country, said Koh Yu-hwan, a professor of North Korean studies at Seoul's Dongguk University.

In February, the U.S. agreed to provide 240,000 metric tons of food aid to North Korea in exchange for a freeze in nuclear and missile activities. The deal collapsed after North Korea attempted to launch a long-range rocket in April. That rocket broke up seconds after liftoff.

Analyst Baek Seung-joo of the South Korean state-run Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul said China must have sent a "very strong" message calling for the North to cancel the launch plans.

"North Korea won't say it would delay the launch due to foreign pressure so that's why they say scientists and technicians are considering delaying it," he said.

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