Nation and World briefs for November 24

Stuck waiting: ground delays at US airports on the rise

NEW YORK (AP) — On a recent morning, Delta Air Lines Flight 435 pushed back early from the gate at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. Passengers watched the safety video and settled in for a six-hour trip.

Then they waited. And waited.

Still within sight of the gate, their jet sat motionless due to airport congestion. It wasn’t until 30 minutes after passengers buckled in that they were finally in the sky.

It’s a scene playing out across the country. According to an Associated Press analysis, airplanes spent 23 minutes and 32 seconds, on average, taxiing between gates and runways during the first nine months of the year. That’s the longest it has been since the Bureau of Transportation Statistics started tracking taxi times in 1995 and a 50-second increase over last year’s average.

For passengers, the rising delays add to the frustrations of travel. A plane might land early but then sit waiting for a gate to open up. Flights are still arriving “on time” but only because airlines have increased scheduled flying times to account for the added taxi times. The Delta flight made it to the gate in San Francisco 10 minutes ahead of schedule despite the takeoff delays.

Mali releases photos of slain gunmen in hotel attack

BAMAKO, Mali (AP) — State media broadcast photos Monday of the two slain attackers of a luxury hotel in Mali’s capital, appealing for anyone who knew them to come forward with information about the gunmen.

The photos of the two young men were taken after Friday’s rampage at the Radisson Blu hotel in which 19 people were killed, said Capt. Baba Cisse at the Interior Ministry.

The gunmen, who shouted “God is great!” in Arabic as they attacked, were shot to death by security forces following a more than seven-hour siege in the capital of the West African country.

Officials also put out phone numbers, urging people who might have known them to call with information.

The decision to release the photos came a day after the Islamic extremist group that first claimed responsibility for the attack purported to identify the gunmen in an audio recording, according to Al-Akhbar, a Mauritanian news site that often receives messages from Malian extremists.

$160B deal to combine Pfizer and Allergan raises outcry

A $160 billion deal announced Monday to merge Pfizer and Allergan and create the world’s biggest drug company renewed the outcry in Washington over “inversions,” in which U.S. corporations combine with companies overseas to lower their tax bill.

The combination — the second-largest merger in history — could have ramifications around the globe, pushing up drug prices and spurring more such deals in the fast-consolidating health care sector and other fields.

It is also increasing the election-year backlash from U.S. politicians who have been blasting drugmakers recently over medicine prices that can exceed $100,000 a year.

In what would be the biggest inversion ever, New York-based Pfizer could save hundreds of millions in U.S. taxes annually because it would move its tax headquarters to Ireland, where Allergan is based. That would enable Pfizer to slash its tax rate from around 25 percent this year to about 18 percent.

Inversions have long been attacked by some politicians as a tax dodge, and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the leading Democratic presidential contenders, criticized the deal.

Paris tourism slumps in wake of attacks

PARIS (AP) — The attacks in Paris are having a major impact on tourism, initial figures show, pushing the French prime minister to meet industry officials to come up with a plan to limit the damage and keep visitors coming to the City of Light.

Ten days after the carnage, the deadliest since WWII, museum ticket sales have plummeted. There are none of the usual lines of people waiting to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Though Parisians have put on a brave face since the attacks, which targeted entertainment spots like cafes and a concert hall, tourists are shying away. Those that do come notice a strange, oppressive mood.

“You can really feel how nervous and scared people are,” said 40-year-old South African Shaun Bruwer. He was at a train station when the sound of a pigeon getting electrocuted on the tracks “sent people running in all directions.”

The Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay museums, two of the most popular spots on the Paris tourist circuit flanking the Seine river, told The Associated Press they’ve both recorded a 30 percent drop in visitors compared with the week before the Nov. 13 attacks. The Pompidou, the main museum of modern art, says ticket sales have halved.

Social media helps drive historic Cuban exodus to US

PENAS BLANCAS, Costa Rica (AP) — As summer began to bake the central Cuban city of Sancti Spiritus, Elio Alvarez and Lideisy Hernandez sold their tiny apartment and everything in it for $5,000 and joined the largest migration from their homeland in decades.

Buying two smartphones for $160 apiece on a layover on their way to Ecuador, they plugged themselves into a highly organized, well-funded and increasingly successful homebrewed effort to make human traffickers obsolete by using smartphones and messaging apps on much of the 3,400-mile (5,500-kilometer) overland journey that’s become Cubans’ main route to the U.S.

Some 45,000 Cubans are expected to move by bus, boat, taxi and on foot from Ecuador and other South and Central American countries to the Texas and California borders this year, afraid that the normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba will mean an imminent end to special immigration privileges that date to the opening of the Cold War. With thousands more taking rafts across the Florida Straits, 2015 may witness the biggest outflow of Cubans since the 1980 Mariel boatlift that hauled 125,000 people across the Florida Straits.

The overland exodus has caused a border crisis in Central America, set off tensions in the newly friendly U.S.-Cuban relationship and sparked rising calls in the U.S. to end Cubans’ automatic right to legal residency once they touch U.S. soil.

At the heart of it all is Cubans’ ability to cross some of the world’s most dangerous territory relatively unscathed by the corrupt border guards, criminal gangs and human traffickers known as coyotes who make life hell for so many other Latin American migrants. Key to that ability is the constant flow of information between migrants starting the journey and those who have just completed it.

Nestle confirms labor abuse among its Thai seafood suppliers

WASHINGTON (AP) — Impoverished migrant workers in Thailand are sold or lured by false promises and forced to catch and process fish that ends up in global food giant Nestle SA’s supply chains.

The unusual disclosure comes from Geneva-based Nestle SA itself, which in an act of self-policing planned to announce the conclusions of its yearlong internal investigation on Monday. The study found virtually all U.S. and European companies buying seafood from Thailand are exposed to the same risks of abuse in their supply chains.

Nestle SA, among the biggest food companies in the world, launched the investigation in December 2014, after reports from news outlets and nongovernmental organizations tied brutal and largely unregulated working conditions to their shrimp, prawns and Purina brand pet foods. Its findings echo those of The Associated Press in reports this year on slavery in the seafood industry that have resulted in the rescue of more than 2,000 fishermen.

The laborers come from Thailand’s much poorer neighbors Myanmar and Cambodia. Brokers illegally charge them fees to get jobs, trapping them into working on fishing vessels and at ports, mills and seafood farms in Thailand to pay back more money than they can ever earn.

“Sometimes, the net is too heavy and workers get pulled into the water and just disappear. When someone dies, he gets thrown into the water,” one Burmese worker told the nonprofit organization Verite commissioned by Nestle.