Nation roundup for June 24

Family-friendly work rules urged by Obama

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama said Monday that the United States should join the rest of the industrialized world and offer paid leave for mothers of newborns.

“Many women can’t even get a paid day off to give birth — now that’s a pretty low bar,” Obama said at the White House Summit on Working Families. “That, we should be able to take care of.”

The president is talking about paid maternity in the midst of a midterm election campaign focused on women voters, raising questions about how he would fund such a system. “If France can figure this out, we can figure this out,” Obama said.

While some companies offer paid family leave to attract workers, the 1993 Family Medical Leave Act only requires that employers provide unpaid leave for medical and family reasons.

Obama praised California, Rhode Island and New Jersey for creating a state benefit. But he has not endorsed legislation that would create a similar national system funded by a payroll tax, and he pledged in his 2008 presidential campaign not to raise taxes on families making under $250,000 a year.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., has introduced legislation that would provide up to 12 weeks of paid leave through a fund in the Social Security Administration, paid for by contributions from employees and employers of 0.2 percent of wages.

She said she has personally encouraged the president to back it and hopes he will, despite his tax pledge.

Iraqi receives 26 to life for fatally beating wife

EL CAJON, California (AP) — A California judge sentenced an Iraqi immigrant Monday to 26 years-to-life in prison for his wife’s fatal beating — an attack that initially drew international condemnation when authorities believed it was a hate crime.

Kassim Alhimidi, 50, entered the courtroom bound and surrounded by deputies because of his previous outbursts that repeatedly disrupted his emotional trial in San Diego County Superior Court.

On Monday, he yelled out in English “I swear I am not guilty!” and then shouted in Arabic to his son, before the judge ordered the defendant to be briefly removed from courtroom.

When Alhimidi returned minutes later, he blew kisses to his 17-year-old son, Mohammed, and then sobbed as the teen told the court: “I just basically lost both my parents.”

The couple’s oldest daughter, Fatima, found Shaima Alawadi, 32, in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor of their home in 2012 in El Cajon, a San Diego suburb that is home to the second-largest Iraqi population in the United States.

She died at a hospital two days later after suffering multiple fractures to her skull.

Investigators initially believed the killing was a hate crime because of a note found after the beating near the devout Muslim mother of five who wore a hijab. It read: “This is my country, go back to yours, you terrorist.”

The victim and her Shiite Muslim family left Iraq in the early 1990s after a failed Shiite uprising, living in Saudi Arabian refugee camps before coming to the United States.

The slaying was condemned by Muslim community leaders in the United States and Iraq before laboratory tests determined the note was a photocopy of one found earlier outside the home, indicating it was planted.

Prosecutors said Alhimidi lied to police about the state of his marriage and hid the fact that his wife was seeking a divorce and planned to move to Texas. His wife’s relative also overheard Alhimidi apologize to his wife as she lay dying in a hospital, according to the prosecution.

Alhimidi’s daughter, Fatima, did not attend the sentencing but sent a statement that was read in court in which she told her father: “What I saw scarred me for life.”

She added: “It disgusts me that you made this look like a hate crime.”

The 18-year-old is now taking care of her two younger sisters in El Cajon, while the two sons are living in Texas, her brother, Mohammed, said after the hearing.

After being sentenced, Alhimidi yelled out that he would prefer to be sentenced to death and donate his organs.

Alhimidi’s outbursts stopped the proceedings several times during his trial. He shook his head and wagged his finger as jurors delivered the guilty verdict in April.

His sons shouted in his defense, with one yelling obscenities before several deputies wrestled him out of the courtroom.

His son, Mohammed, who tattooed a drawing of a woman in a hijab on his arm in honor of his mother, told reporters Monday that he struggled at the time to believe his father had killed his mother.

Mohammed told the court he wakes up at night thinking of her and breaks down when he remembers “the man I looked up to all my life is the reason why she is gone.”

Defense lawyers said there was no forensic evidence against Alhimidi and that he loved his wife and was not a violent man. They say he also returned from Iraq after burying his wife there when he could have stayed in his homeland to avoid prosecution.

Alhimidi will have to serve 26 years actual time before he is eligible for a parole hearing, but he will get credit for time already served since his November 2012 arrest.

Massachusetts mayor: Stop sending my city refugees

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) — A Massachusetts mayor is calling for an end to refugee resettlement in his city, saying Somali families are putting pressure on already strained services in Springfield, a onetime industrial center where nearly a third of the population lives below the poverty line.

Mayor Domenic Sarno is the latest mayor to decry refugee resettlement, joining counterparts in New Hampshire in Maine in largely rare tensions with the State Department, which helps resettle refugees in communities across America.

The mayor is drawing criticism from those who say this country has a moral obligation to help the outcast and refugees who say they’re being scapegoated for problems the city faced long before their arrival.

“Why not talk about the problems in the city, why not talk about the houses that are unstable and in bad conditions, why only talk about the Somalis and Somali Bantus?” Mohammed Abdi, 72, said through an interpreter.

Sarno, leader of the state’s third-largest city, first demanded last summer that the U.S. government stop sending refugees. But after recent inspections found Somali families living in overcrowded, pest-infested apartments without electricity and sometimes heat, he stepped up complaints, saying resettlement agencies are bringing in “warm-weather” refugees and dumping them into cold climates only to leave them dependent on the city.

“I have enough urban issues to deal with. Enough is enough,” Sarno said in an interview. “You can’t keep concentrating poverty on top of poverty.”

Hard examples and evidence for the mayor’s stance are scant. The problems in the Somali housing have largely been attributed to neglectful landlords. The government does not track the number of refugees who rely on social services. The refugee population in Springfield of about 1,500 — around 380 of them Somali — represents about 1 percent of the city’s total of 153,000. And a 2014 report by the U.S. government found that Massachusetts ranked third in the nation for refugee employment, with 73 percent of refugees enrolled in state programs finding work.

Madino Idoor, a 35-year-old Somali with seven children, spent 12 years in a refugee camp before coming to the U.S. in 2004. She works two jobs — one at Goodwill at Springfield and another as a dishwasher at the Barnes Air National Guard Base in nearby Westfield.

“I can work hard and provide for my family,” Idoor said. “I do not need for the mayor to worry about me.”

She and others wonder why the mayor is targeting an already vulnerable population, an idea reiterated Friday in a Boston Globe editorial.

“While Sarno raises valid points about needing adequate resources to accommodate newcomers, his stance is far too rigid and ignores both the moral imperative to help refugees and the benefits those refugees can bring,” the editorial read.

About 67,000 Somalis have come to the United States in the past decade, seeking refuge from civil war. Most have settled in Minnesota, California, Georgia and Washington, D.C.

In 2004, more than 100 Somalis came to Springfield, placed there because it met criteria including a public transit and other urban infrastructure. The community has grown as others reunite with family members.

Sarno, a Democrat, said the State Department has not been receptive to his requests to stop sending refugees, echoing sentiments sometimes heard elsewhere.

Lewiston, Maine, Mayor Robert MacDonald, who in 2002 asked Somalis there to help “reduce the stress on our limited finances,” took heat a decade later for saying immigrants should “accept our culture and, and you leave your culture at the door.” MacDonald, a Republican, later clarified that he didn’t expect them to abandon their religion or language but said: “I’m not going to apologize for ‘leave your culture behind.’”

Manchester, New Hampshire, Mayor Ted Gatsas in 2011 asked the State Department to stop resettling refugees there. Last year, Gatsas, a Republican, told the AP he still believes the city could benefit from a break in arrivals to “get these people into working society.”

Such requests are rare, said Daniel Langenkamp, a department spokesman.

“We make every effort to work with local officials and other stakeholders to ensure the resettlement of refugees is acceptable,” he said.

The Department, he said, does not place refugees unless an area is equipped to handle them. The government’s work with refugees in Springfield is mostly about family reunification, and it cannot keep families from moving there if they are placed elsewhere, he said.

Federal funding of about $1,800 per person helps resettlement agencies assist refugees for as long as eight months, but Springfield argues that is not enough time for some refugees to adjust.

Robert Marmor, president of Jewish Family Services, a resettlement agency in Springfield, said that aid for additional services is available from other sources and that his door is always open.

“It is unfortunate that 5 percent of refugees who struggle are the focus and not the 95 percent who are really making it,” Marmor said.

Somali refugee Adan Abdi, 28, came to Springfield in 2004 with his parents and six siblings after years in refugee camps where security, food and water were scarce and a couple of pounds of corn per person had to stretch for two weeks.

“There is no comparing our new life in America to living in those camps,” said Abdi, who has a wife and three children. “Springfield is my home. It’s where I began my new life.”