Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday criticized activists planning to challenge Israel’s sea blockade of the Gaza Strip, saying their efforts are neither “necessary or useful” in helping the Palestinian people of Gaza.
A day after the State Department warned Americans against participating in the planned flotilla, Clinton said the flotilla, which Israel has said it will thwart, is not helpful and will only increase tensions. She noted that Israeli authorities had this week approved new shipments of housing construction material to enter Gaza legally and that the aim of the organizers appeared to be to merely provoke Israel into using its right to defend itself.
More than seventy thousand “third-country nationals” work for the American military in war zones; many report being held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by subcontractors who operate outside the law. Photographs by Peter Van Agtmael. Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/06/110606fa_fact_stillman#ixzz1Q1MvrrLM
The Invisible Army
For foreign workers on U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, war can be hell.
It was lunchtime in Suva, Fiji, a slow day at the end of the tourist season in September of 2007, when four men appeared in the doorway of the Rever Beauty Salon, where Vinnie Tuivaga worked as a hair stylist. The men wore polished shoes and bright Hawaiian shirts, and they told Vinnie about a job that sounded, she recalls, like “the fruits of my submission to the Lord all these years.” How would she like to make five times her current salary at a luxury hotel in Dubai, a place known as the City of Gold? How would she like to have wealthy Arab customers, women who paid ridiculous fees for trendy cut-and-color jobs?
“I’ll talk it over with my husband,” she replied, coolly, but her pulse was racing. Vinnie, who was forty-five, had never worked abroad, but she often dreamed of it while hearing missionaries’ lectures at her local church. Nearly six feet tall and two hundred and thirty pounds, Vinnie moved with an arthritic gait. But she took care with her appearance. She wore shiny slacks, with a gold pageboy cap on her perfectly coiffed frosted black hair, and carried a bright-red faux-leather purse, stuffed with silver eyeshadow. She could see herself working in one of the great cosmopolitan capitals. The offer seemed like her big break, the chance to send her teen-age daughter to hospitality college and to pay her youngest son’s fees for secondary school.
Later that week, at a salon around the corner, Lydia Qeraniu, thirty-two, heard a similar offer. A quick-witted woman with a coquettish smile and a figure that prompted Fijian men to call out “uro, uro!”—slang for “yummy”—Lydia was thrilled by the prospect of a career in Dubai. So were many other women in beauty shops and beachside hotels across Fiji. A Korean Air flight to Dubai would be leaving from Nadi International Airport in a few days. The women just had to deliver their résumés, hand over their passports, submit to medical tests, and pay a commission of five hundred dollars to a local recruitment firm called Meridian Services Agency.
Soon, more than fifty women were lined up outside Meridian’s office to compete for positions that would pay as much as thirty-eight hundred dollars a month—more than ten times Fiji’s annual per-capita income. Ten women were chosen, Vinnie and Lydia among them. Vinnie lifted her arms in the air and sang her favorite gospel song: “We’re gonna make it, we’re gonna make it. With Jesus on our side, things will work out fine.” Lydia raced home to tell her husband and explain things to her five-year-old son. “Mommy’s going to be O.K.,” she recalls telling him. “Dubai, it’s a rich country. Only good things can happen.”
On the morning of October 10, 2007, the beauticians boarded their flight to the Emirates. They carried duffelbags full of cosmetics, family photographs, Bibles, floral sarongs, and chambas, traditional silky Fijian tops worn with patterned skirts. More than half of the women left husbands and children behind. In the rush to depart, none of them examined the fine print on their travel documents: their visas to the Emirates weren’t employment permits but thirty-day travel passes that forbade all work, “paid or unpaid”; their occupations were listed as “Sales Coördinator.” And Dubai was just a stopping-off point. They were bound for U.S. military bases in Iraq.
A coleague just resently recieved this in the mail from the future CEO of this company. We’re excited about moving forward on this and anticipate putting food on the table on a global basis. and as far as promotion goes, all options will be on the table.
When the times get tough, the Oregonians get tougher. This is a sure candidate for a small business loan because it will involve the defense industries that are already in place in the Middle East. They should be able to supply plenty of camel meat with Monsanto’s help. With the genes of rabbits, and a little genetic engineering, there should be plenty of Dromedaries to go around. Monsanto is probably already working on some drought and radiation resistant strains of wadi brush to feed them.
This is our call, fellow Oregonians. We can form cottage industries in all aspects of this unique food production, from the field to the final market. We will need experts in processing, packaging, advertizing, and delivery of the products. Shouldn’t take long to get this off the ground, with all the rain lately, we might still get in a crop of rice. There will be more on this after our first board meeting. We will also, no doubt, need some executives …G:
Supreme Court Sides With Wal-Mart In Sex Bias Case
Huffington Post
First Posted: 06/20/11 10:30 AM ET Updated: 06/20/11 02:16 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a massive sex discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart on behalf of female employees in a decision that makes it harder to mount large-scale bias claims against the nation’s biggest companies.
The justices all agreed that the lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. could not proceed as a class action in its current form, reversing a decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. By a 5-4 vote along ideological lines, the court said there were too many women in too many jobs at Wal-Mart to wrap into one lawsuit.
The lawsuit could have involved up to 1.6 million women, with Wal-Mart facing potentially billions of dollars in damages.
Now, the handful of women who brought the case may pursue their claims on their own, with much less money at stake and less pressure on Wal-Mart to settle. Two of the named plaintiffs, Christine Kwapnoski and Betty Dukes, attended the argument. Kwapnoski is an assistant manager at a Sam’s Club in Concord, Calif. Dukes is a greeter at the Walmart in Pittsburg, Calif.
In a statement, Wal-Mart said, “The court today unanimously rejected class certification and, as the majority made clear, the plaintiffs’ claims were worlds away from showing a companywide discriminatory pay and promotion policy.”
Dukes and Kwapnoski said they were disappointed in the ruling, but vowed to push ahead with their claims. Both women spoke on a conference call with reporters.
“We still are determined to go forward to present our case in court. We believe we will prevail there,” Dukes said.
A lot of wack rumors have sprung up around what is happening at the Bilderberg Summit every year. I don’t put a lot of stock in a lot of those rumors; I don’t think, for instance, that they meet to divide up the slaves, and I don’t think that they meet to form instruction sheets for the world’s politicians.
But I don’t know exactly what it is they do there, and nobody else who doesn’t get an invite does.
This year’s summit is supposed to be about “social networking and security,” but a lot of the names in attendance suggest that there are other things afoot. Kissinger, Rockefeller, CEOs of places like Goldman-Sachs. The Who’s-Who of the Plutocracy. I cannot imagine that these people are meeting to influence Governments, since they own quite a few of them. I’d guess that they are meeting to cement their hegemony over the riches of the world. While I don’t know what form that hegemony ultimately takes, I can safely assume that it is a form that would be unpalatable to the great mass of people. Otherwise, they’d release minutes of their meetings. They’d invite the press in. They’d let politicians in from countries that their policies will affect (as it is, any politician stupid enough to try to crash a Bilderberg Summit gets his ass beat by the local security forces. It’s happened more than once.)
In this world of ours, where right-wing scum constantly cry about SECURITY!!!, there is never a peep about these meetings. And that’s strange, because a bunch of disconnected, loaded people meeting in secret to formulate financial policy for the whole world are a hell of a lot more dangerous to us than any thousand Osamas will ever be. It seems to me that if we are ever going to weaken the Plutocracy, we must first give a damn about what they are up to. But we waste so much time on the Ten Commandments and birth certificates that these elites can go right on, doing what I suspect they’ve been doing for many years now-as in, dismantling the future for billions of people in the service of a few billionaires.
Do ya think we might get off “Jersey Shore” long enough to care?
This video is compliments of Ask Anthony Weiner on his Youtube channel. Unlike many Youtube sites, Anthony asks for your questions and allows open comments. I just commented there and, so far the comments are not moderated. Needless to mention there are some derogatory messages from Faux New$ types, but overall, a lot of the comments are from folks that understand what is going on.
So far there are only 4708 subscribers and 1494 channel comments, but, at least, this is not controlled by the corporate media…yet! I like Weiner, for many reasons, but especially for standing up to the Corporate Choir on healthcare issues. Worthy of mention is that “The Grinch” still has the unpremeditated gall to show his face in DC and is actually putting in a bid for POTUS. It will take a lot of scandal sauce for me to digest anything as ludicrous as this…
U.S. prosecutors in New York, the first to identify and charge Osama bin Laden three years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, were granted their request to dismiss the case against him, more than a month after he was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan.
U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in New York today ordered that the entire case be voided against bin Laden, a Saudi who was killed May 1 at his Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound by a team of U.S. Navy SEALs during a 40-minute raid.
Bin Laden was first charged secretly by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan in June 1998 for allegedly organizing a global conspiracy to attack U.S. facilities and citizens.
After the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were hit by near-simultaneous bombings on Aug. 7, 1998, the U.S. filed an updated indictment against him in November 1998, charging him with directing those attacks and with the murders of 224 people, including 12 U.S. citizens.
The indictment was first filed by prosecutors working for then-U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, who had established the nation’s first terrorist prosecution unit after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center that killed six people and injured more than 1,000
However, one year ago, on June 19, 2010, according to Jurist.org, a judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) dismissed 49 terrorism lawsuits, including five cases against relatives of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, citing lack of evidence. Judge George Daniels dismissed claims against four half-brothers and a nephew of bin Laden, holding that the prosecution lacked evidence to support the relatives’ involvement in al Qaeda operations surrounding the 9/11 attacks. The claims were brought seven years ago by the families of victims who died in the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.
“When any party to a lawsuit dies, the estate of the deceased party is substituted for the person. The estate executor or administrator then becomes the party in interest to handle the lawsuit. In most states, the executor/administrator will handle the lawsuit without having to consult with the ultimate beneficiaries before taking any action, such as settling. In practice though it is wise to get some feeling from the beneficiaries, since they might make some objections about a settlement and try to hold the executor/administrator liable for making a bad settlement. But once the executor/administrator does sign on the settlement, the beneficiaries cannot re-open the case just because they dislike the result.”
……………….
While it is said that it is standard procedure to dismiss the case of the deceased, Osama Bin Laden, I can’t help but wonder what options will be available to the 911 victims who believe that Bin Laden was responsible”, or for that matter, what options are available for the ones who believe the US Government is responsible?
Paul Ryan’s budget, which means austerity for most Americans, turns out to mean prosperity for Ryan and his family.
That budget, which the GOP-led House adopted as its blueprint, slashes funding for everyone from seniors to the disabled to students while preserving $45 billion in tax breaks and subsidies for Big Oil over the next 10 years, as has been widely reported.
But what we have only just learned from Ryan’s financial disclosure forms for Congress (here) that were made public this week is “he and his wife, Janna, own stakes in four family companies that lease land in Texas and Oklahoma to the very energy companies that benefit from the tax subsidies in Ryan’s budget plan,” as The Daily Beastreported today.
Ryan’s father-in-law, Daniel Little, who runs the companies, told Newsweek and The Daily Beast that the family companies are currently leasing the land for mining and drilling to energy giants such as Chesapeake Energy, Devon, and XTO Energy, a recently acquired subsidiary of ExxonMobil.
These energy giants stand to profit directly from the $45 billion in subsidies and tax breaks. How cozy!
Here is an exclusive video by James Corbett with the inaugural edition of the EyeOpener, a new weekly video series produced in conjunction with Boiling Frogs Post, on Obama’s Secret Transparency Award. This news clip is a prelude to our petition, ‘Rescind Obama’s “Transparency Award” Now!,’ co-written by Coleen Rowley and me, and signed by more than 25 high-profile government whistleblowers and over 20 organizations, which will be launched tomorrow morning. We are going to need every single one of you, your signatures, your support, and your voices to get these organizations to take back the undeserved and hypocritical award. Please watch this video. Maybe watch it again. Think about it. Get angry. Share this with everyone you know. Help up disseminate this and encourage others to watch think, get angry, and take action. We are counting on you; on us.
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