LOS ANGELES — Two days after Mitt Romney vowed to honor the deportation reprieves granted by the Obama administration to many young illegal immigrants, his campaign clarified that he would halt the program if he wins the presidency.
Romney backpedals
on deportations
LOS ANGELES — Two days after Mitt Romney vowed to honor the deportation reprieves granted by the Obama administration to many young illegal immigrants, his campaign clarified that he would halt the program if he wins the presidency.
“He would honor any permits already issued through the president’s stopgap deferred action measure,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in response to a question by email. “But he will not continue the president’s temporary measure and intends to supersede it as soon as possible with the permanent reform of our broken immigration system that is so badly needed.”
President Barack Obama announced in June that his administration would stop the deportation of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who were brought to the United States as children by parents who lacked legal papers.
Despite his comment, Romney has not yet released a detailed immigration plan, a reflection of the sensitivity of an issue whose solution has eluded Democratic and Republican presidents.
Latinos strongly favor Obama’s re-election, polls show, and white conservatives only reluctantly embraced Romney after snubbing him in Republican primaries across the country.
2 Egyptian boys held in desecration of Quran
CAIRO — Two Christian boys have been arrested for allegedly urinating on the Quran, agitating tension across Egypt amid rising accusations of blasphemy after the furor last month over a film made in California that ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad.
Egyptian news reports said that brothers Nabil Nadi, 9, and Mina Nadi, 10, were placed in juvenile detention Tuesday in Beni Suef province. They were taken into custody after a cleric told authorities they had ripped up pages of the Quran and urinated on two holy books.
Authorities said the boys could be held for up to 15 days. One newspaper said the cleric “brought the kids to the local bishop and insisted someone else had incited them to desecrate the Qurans and throw them near the mosque.”
Past reports show pattern of lax security at U.S. missions
WASHINGTON — Past investigations into attacks on U.S. diplomatic missions have blamed both the administration and Congress for failing to spend enough money to ensure that the overseas facilities were safe despite a clear rise in terror threats to American interests abroad.
An Associated Press examination of two reports that are easily accessible to the public — those created after the devastating Aug. 7, 1998, bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania — may offer clues to the possible outcome of the current investigation begun by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton into last month’s attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
That attack by what is now believed to be al-Qaida-linked militants has become fraught with election-year politics as Republicans accuse administration officials of dissembling in the early aftermath on what they knew about the perpetrators and for lax security at the diplomatic mission in a lawless part of post-revolution Libya.
Two House Republican leaders this week accused the administration of denying repeated requests for extra security at the Benghazi consulate, where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.
A five-member accountability review board appointed by Clinton will begin this week looking at whether security at the consulate was adequate and whether proper procedures were followed before, during and immediately after the attack.
By wire sources