MSNBC – On the streets of Antigua, Texas billionaire Allen Stanford is a controversial figure. Some embrace him while others deride him as a modern-day colonialist.

But nearly all say they fear a U.S. investigation into the tycoon’s financial empire and Antigua-based offshore bank could damage the Caribbean island where Stanford is a household name, its biggest private employer and powerful business force.

"He’s providing jobs. He’s good for the economy. If he’s in trouble, that’s bad for us all," said George Green, manager of Cool Down Cafe, a hole-in-the-wall restaurant on a narrow street in St. John, the island’s capital.

Green’s comment was echoed across the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda on Monday as news spread of a deepening probe into Stanford’s $50 billion Houston-based investment operation, Stanford Group Co, and its Antigua-based affiliate, Stanford International Bank.

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Bloomberg – Brazil’s main airports are filled with the country’s fastest-growing import: Brazilians returning home after losing their jobs in the U.S., Japan and Europe.

They left their homeland for jobs in more developed countries years ago, and sent some of their wages to the struggling families they left behind. Now they are out of work, evicted from employer-supplied housing and arriving back home to an economy ill-equipped to absorb or help them.

Most of them are called dekasseguis, a Japanese word meaning “to leave work.” Brazil has the largest Japanese population outside Japan and during Latin America’s economic crises in the 1980s and early 1990s many Brazilians with Japanese ancestry moved to the island nation in search of better jobs. About 322,000 Brazilians work in Japan, making them the third-largest community of foreign workers there, according to Japan’s Ministry of Justice.

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