World in brief: Migrants send $66 billion home

Latin American and Caribbean migrants sent relatives at home a record $66 billion last year, but the remittances grew by the lowest rate ever, with Mexico and Brazil showing significant slowdowns, a study released Tuesday shows.

Remittances, considered a crucial part of many Latin American and Caribbean economies, rose 7 percent in 2007, the first year that the growth rate has been in single digits.

The region’s top recipients, Mexico and Brazil, are weighing down the averages, said Don Terry, the president of the Multilateral Investment Fund, the unit of the Inter-American Development Bank that has tracked remittance trends since 2001.

Terry said a combination of factors was behind the overall slowdown in growth, from a weak U.S. economy and dollar to a stronger euro and healthy growth rates among many Latin American nations.

Brazil is the only country that saw its remittances decline, receiving $7.1 billion last year, down from $7.4 billion in 2006.

Once the engine of remittance growth, Mexico got $24 billion last year compared with $23 billion in 2006, a modest 4 percent increase.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

10-foot anaconda finds new habitat

Snakes – including a 10-foot anaconda – are increasingly invading the eastern Amazon’s largest city, driven from the rain forest by destruction of their natural habitat, the government’s environmental protection agency said Tuesday.

The agency, known as Ibama, has been called out to capture 21 snakes this year in Belem, a sprawling metropolis of 1.5 million people at the mouth of the Amazon River, said Ibama press officer Luciana Almeida.

In normal years, Ibama gets no more than one or two calls a month, she said.

No poisonous snakes were reported, she said. But the captured snakes included a 10-foot anaconda, usually a jungle recluse.

“People are scared,” she said. “Imagine finding a 3-meter snake in your plumbing.”

London

Task force probes forced marriages

Britain investigated 400 cases of forced marriages last year and is also looking into whether some girls who have vanished from school registers were taken out of schools to be married against their will, officials said Tuesday.

It is not against British law to force someone into marriage, but the practice often involves criminal offenses including abuse, assault, rape, kidnapping and murder.

The Forced Marriage Unit, comprising six officers from the Foreign and Home offices, dealt with 400 reported cases last year. Of those, 168 occurred abroad. The majority of the cases overseas were in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, the Foreign Office said.

The Commons Home Affairs Select Committee also said it has been investigating areas in Britain such as Bradford, where 33 youths – most of them girls – remain unaccounted for.

A new act takes effect this year that will allow judges more power to remove victims of abuses connected with forced marriage from households and issue protection orders. Family members who break the protection orders could be arrested.