More Guantanamo Bay detainees protesting their indefinite confinement joined a hunger strike, raising the number of inmates refusing food to 89 from 75, the U.S. military said Thursday.
Six of the hunger strikers at the isolated U.S. naval base in southeast Cuba were being force-fed, said Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand.
breitbart.com
Scott Silverman, Chairman of the Board of VeriChip Corporation, has proposed implanting the company’s RFID tracking tags in immigrant and guest workers. He made the statement on national television earlier this week.
Silverman was being interviewed on “Fox & Friends.” Responding to the Bush administration’s call to know “who is in our country and why they are here,” he proposed using VeriChip RFID implants to register workers at the border, and then verify their identities in the workplace. He added, “We have talked to many people in Washington about using it….”
The VeriChip is a very small Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag about the size of a large grain of rice. It can be injected directly into the body; a special coating on the casing helps the VeriChip bond with living tissue and stay in place.
livescience.com
Congressman Charles Rangel, a Democrat (NY), introduced on 14 February 2006 a bill in the US Congress which requires:
“all persons in the United States, including women, between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform a [two year] period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.”
The bill applies to both US citizens and non-citizens, to men and women. There does not appear to be a provision which would exempt women who are pregnant and/or caring for infants/children in a young age.
While there was some media coverage of Rangel’s initiative prior to the formal introduction of the bill, the matter has not been mentioned by the US media since it was introduced in February. There has been a deafening silence: since February 2006, not a single article or editorial has appeared in print on the Universal National Service Act of 2006.
globalresearch.ca
“In the past, if an individual came across the border their IDs would be checked. But there wouldn’t be a cross-referencing of 100 percent of those people into our databases,” said Woo, whose Boston office oversees about 40 border checkpoints in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire.
“We’re trying to increase border security,”
reuters.com
…There is no stronger or more persistent strain in the American character than the belief that the United States is a nation uniquely endowed with virtueÉ..This view is driven by a profound conviction that the American form of government, based on capitalism and individual political choice, is, as President Bush asserted, Òright and true for every person in every society.Ó
axisoflogic.com
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
rollingstone.com
SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia (Reuters) – She is young, attractive, upper middle class and U.S.-educated. Until recently, she was close to Bolivian President Evo Morales. Now, Adriana Gil leads a rival party and her career goal is clear: “I want to be my country’s first woman president.”
Her principal role model, she says, is the late Eva Peron. But she also admires the late Margaret Thatcher, not for her politics but for her no-nonsense leadership style.
To get to the political top, Gil launched her own left-leaning party on May 22, her 24th birthday, less than three weeks after she was abruptly expelled from Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) for lack of party discipline.
“This is the first time in the history of Bolivia that a woman heads a political party,” she told the founding meeting of her Social Democratic Force. “This is the birth of hope. We need to counter the dictatorial tendencies of the present (Morales) government.”
Virtually unknown outside Bolivia, Gil is fast becoming a household name in Santa Cruz province, Bolivia’s economic powerhouse and a bastion of opposition to Morales, who rode to victory in a presidential election in December on support from the country’s indigenous, poverty-stricken majority.
More than half of Bolivia’s 9 million people eke out a living on $2 a day or less.
How Gil came to join MAS, and was expelled from it, highlights some of the difficulties facing a country where the 60 percent of citizens who belong to indigenous ethnic groups have little in common with the traditional white elite of European descent.
Gil, then a law student at the university here, joined MAS two years ago because its message of social justice appealed to her. “I was severely criticized by people of my own background,” she said in an interview on the day she launched her party. “They called me a traitor, they called me naive, they treated me as if I had AIDS and leprosy at the same time.”
Criticism ranged from her taste for designer clothes to having “gringo” friends, the result of having gone to high school in Bay Minette, Alabama, where she lived with an aunt married to the sheriff.
news.yahoo.com
Well thank goodness she’s come to her senses and returned to the fold.
A US official handling Somalia has been transferred from his job after criticising payments to local commanders that are said to be fuelling some of Mogadishu’s worst fighting.
Diplomats said on Tuesday that the US State Department transferred Michael Zorick, formerly Somali political affairs officer at the US embassy in Kenya, to the Chad embassy after he spoke out.
aljazeera.net
KABUL – Taleban fighters killed at least a dozen Afghan police and abducted up to 40 in two separate attacks in southern Afghanistan, while US-led forces launched an offensive in a nearby province, officials said on Wednesday.
In the southern province of Zabul, a senior police official, Mohammad Rasoul, was killed and four other people, including two senior provincial officials, were wounded after the Taleban hit their car with a rocket on Tuesday night.
‘They were part of a reinforcement sent to help a group of highway police who had come under Taleban attack on a road of Zabul,’ said Yousuf Stanizai, the Interior Ministry spokesman.
An official in Zabul, who declined to be identified, said more than 10 policemen were killed in the Taleban assault.
The raid in Zabul came hours after the Taleban attacked a police base in Chora district of neighbouring Uruzgan province and abducted up to 40 policemen, an official in Kabul said on condition of anonymity.
A Reuters reporter received a phone call from an unknown person who described himself as Mullah Ahmad, a Taleban commander, and said the militants had taken the police hostage and the Taleban’s leadership would decide their fate.
He said militants had killed 12 police in the attack before kidnapping the others.
khaleejtimes.com
Of Faustian Bargains and Disposable Human Beings
…Thanks to the pathological greed unleashed and rewarded by Capitalism, America has forged a Faustian Pact. It is inevitable that Mephistopheles will come to collect his due. Or perhaps he already has.
uruknet.info