CORNWALL, Ont. — Akwesasne residents plan to demonstrate again at a Canada-US border crossing in eastern Ontario Monday.
They’re going to protest against the guards who will start carrying handguns this week.
About 200 Akwesasne Mohawks marched on the Canada Border Service Agency Offices in Cornwall Island on Saturday shouting out “no guns.”
Tribal spokesman Tim Thompson read a band council resolution asking officials to stop the initiative.
Monsanto dominates the global market for GMO seeds like Microsoft dominates the operating-system software market.
You don’t skirt around antitrust enforcement like that without having good friends in Washinton. And to make friends, you’ve got have guys in suits working the Hill and the agencies. La Vida Locavore’s ever-enterprising Jill Richardson got her hands on Monsanto’s first-quarter lobbying disclosure form (PDF). Turns out, the GMO-seed giant spent $2 million pushing its agenda in Washington the first three months of the year.
Conspiracy theorists fixated on a food safety bill called HR 875—insisting that Monsanto is planning to seize the globe’s farmland (why would a highly profitable transnational want to move into a low margin business like farming?) and ban organic agriculture—will be disappointed. The form makes no mention of food-safety bills.
Monsanto does, however, mention lobbying on Senate Bill 384—the so-called Global Food Security Act—which would gear U.S. foreign aid policy to promote GMO seeds in developing countries.
In a move to set the stage for another offensive on the Gaza Strip, Israel has warned that the current ceasefire between Tel Aviv and Hamas could be easily broken.
“The ceasefire is not complete and is very fragile,” a senior official quoted Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as telling a cabinet meeting on Sunday.
The premier also ruled out the possibility of lifting the crippling blockade on the Gaza Strip, saying there are other issues that should be dealt with in the costal sliver.
“We are being asked to ease the living conditions of the population and allow goods and equipment in, but we have other priorities in the Gaza Strip,” he added.
“We do not want to strengthen Hamas, not by allowing them to rebuild their defenses,” Netanyahu said.
He made the remarks on the same day that the Israeli military launched a large-scale maneuver which hints that another war in the region is imminent.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is supporting efforts by the Saudi royal family to defeat a long-running lawsuit seeking to hold it liable for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The Justice Department, in a brief filed Friday before the Supreme Court, said it did not believe the Saudis could be sued in American court over accusations brought by families of the Sept. 11 victims that the royal family had helped finance Al Qaeda. The department said it saw no need for the court to review lower court rulings that found in the Saudis’ favor in throwing out the lawsuit.
June 1 (Bloomberg) — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner arrived in Beijing with a pledge that the Obama administration will control its borrowing as he sought to reassure China its holdings of U.S. government debt are safe.
“No one is going to be more concerned about future deficits than we are,” Geithner told reporters on the way to two days of meetings that start today in China’s capital.
Geithner will meet with Premier Wen Jiabao, who in March called for the U.S. to “guarantee the safety of China’s assets.” China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. government debt, which so far this year has handed investors the worst loss since at least 1977 on forecasts for ballooning federal budget deficits.
“I hope Geithner’s visit can soothe our nerves,” said Yu Yongding, a senior researcher at the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a former central bank adviser. “The Chinese public is worried about the safety of its foreign- exchange reserves,” Yu said in an e-mail.
Investor concern about a record American budget deficit helped send yields on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note to 3.74 percent on May 27, the highest level since mid-November. The 10-year note yield ended last week at 3.46 percent, little changed from a week earlier.
China held about $768 billion of Treasuries as of March, according to U.S. government data.
Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and parts of the Caribbean by land or sea will face stiffer documentation requirements.
(USA Today) — On June 1, U.S. citizens returning from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and parts of the Caribbean by land or sea will face stiffer documentation requirements.
Passports, passport cards, Enhanced Driver’s Licenses or “trusted traveler” cards will have to be shown, unless voyagers are youngsters or on certain exempt cruises.
(U.S. citizens already need a passport to return via air from Mexico, Canada, Bermuda and Caribbean islands except Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.)
The stepped-up requirements are the final phase of a Department of Homeland Security/State Department anti-terrorism policy called the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which took effect in January 2007 with passports required to fly back from neighboring countries.
“The mission is to strengthen border security while facilitating legitimate travel,” says Joanne Ferreira, a spokeswoman for U.S Customs and Border Protection.
The United States Department of Homeland Security has just announced that it has launched two airports with the capability of collecting biometric data when travellers leave the country.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport are the two airports now collecting digital fingerprints off non-US citizen travellers when they depart the country, as part of the US-VISIT program.
“Collecting biometrics allows us to determine faster and more accurately whether non-U.S. citizens have departed the United States on time or remained in the country illegally,” said Janet Napolitano, Department of Homeland Security Secretary.
Wikipedia has banned the Church of Scientology from editing any articles. It’s a punishment for repeated and deceptive editing of articles related to the controversial religion. The landmark ruling comes from the inner circle of a site that prides itself on being open and inclusive.
In a 10-1 ruling Thursday, the site’s arbitration council voted to ban users coming from all IP addresses owned by the Church of Scientology and its associates, and further banned a number of editors by name. The story was first reported by The Register.
Self-serving Wikipedia edits are hardly new. Wired.com readers pulled in an award for discovering the most egregious Wikipedia whitewashes by corporation and government agencies, but this is the first time the site has taken such drastic actions to block those edits.
Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker has said all along he wants to know what people think of his “preferred” plan to put a police complex on Library Square.
And on Saturday, in the first of two public workshops on his proposal, scores of residents told him: They don’t like it.
“Library Square is the heart of the community,” Suzy Dailey said. “It is very important to the citizens what happens here.”
About 150 people attended the workshop at the city’s storied Main Library, not far from where city officials hope to erect a five-story police headquarters and a three-story emergency-operations center.
The meeting was split into two sessions, one in which residents could speak their minds about the idea and another in which they could work with building blocks and brainstorm with area architects about design and technical aspects of the so-called civic campus.
Resident responses were mainly the same from both sessions. Most want the city to keep the public-safety buildings off Library Square. They worry about losing open space, increasing traffic and harming the square’s symbolic value as a free-speech haven.
Nearly a century after she was rescued from the decks of the sinking Titanic, the last remaining survivor of the disaster has died, aged 97.
Elizabeth Gladys Dean, known as Millvina, died yesterday at the nursing home near Southampton where her care had been subsidised by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet — stars of the Titanic film — who were moved by her story.
Millvina, the youngest passenger on the ship, was 9 weeks old in April 1912 when she set sail for a new life in America with her mother, father and brother. The family, from London, were supposed to have emigrated on a different ship, but because of a coal strike were transferred to the Titanic, travelling third class.
On April 14, four days into the voyage, the ship struck an iceberg and Millvina’s father told his wife, Georgette, to wrap up Millvina and her one-year-old brother, Bertram, and take them up on deck. Here, among scenes of chaos and panic, the infant Millvina was placed with her mother and brother aboard Lifeboat 10 and lowered into the icy waters of the North Atlantic, leaving her father behind on the dying liner.
The launch was the seventh since Monday, when the rogue communist state also detonated a nuclear blast underground, triggering international condemnation.
With members of the United Nations Security Council considering economic or diplomatic sanctions, the foreign ministry issued a new threat.
The US Department of Homeland Security is set to kickstart a controversial new pilot to scan the fingerprints of travellers departing the United States.
From June, US Customs and Border Patrol will take a fingerprint scan of travellers exiting the United States from Detroit, while the US Transport Security Administration will take fingerprint scans of international travellers exiting the United States from Atlanta.
Biometric technology such as fingerprint scans has been used by US Customs and Border Patrol for several years to gain a biometric record of travellers entering the United States.
But under the Bush Administration, a plan was formulated to also scan outgoing passengers – including US citizens.
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The Most Frightening Monster Ever
2009 Leave a Comment
As an author of horror novels, I have a fascination with evil creatures that force their ways into the lives of innocents for nefarious purposes. I think classical monsters are the best. They can all fall into certain categories. Dracula, or vampire type monsters, lull and mesmerize their victims into thinking they’re dealing with some nice, charming type of being and then become parasites, sucking the life essence from their victim. Frankenstein, or zombie type monsters are mindless, usually wondering aimlessly about killing and committing violence for no apparent reason (other than occasionally feasting on brains). Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type fiends are particularly interesting and dangerous because you never know which one you’ll encounter when meeting this bipolar psychopath. Wolfman type monstrosities are kind of a combination of zombie and Dr. Jekyll types, only with the killing and mayhem taking place because of the feral side of human nature rather than because of pure mindlessness. Lastly we have perhaps the most heinous of all, the demon type creature. This would include Satan. These intelligent and thoughtful tricksters will make you believe they are your friends and helping you when in fact they are concerned only with their own evil schemes, their power and acquiring the souls that make them powerful. READ MORE »