IMMOKALEE, Florida — Three Florida fruit-pickers, held captive and brutalised by their employer for more than a year, finally broke free of their bonds by punching their way through the ventilator hatch of the van in which they were imprisoned. Once outside, they dashed for freedom. When they found sanctuary one recent Sunday morning, all bore the marks of heavy beatings to the head and body. One of the pickers had a nasty, untreated knife wound on his arm. Police would learn later that another man had his hands chained behind his back every night to prevent him escaping, leaving his wrists swollen. The migrants were not only forced to work in sub-human conditions but mistreated and forced into debt. They were locked up at night and had to pay for sub-standard food. If they took a shower with a garden hose or bucket, it cost them $5. Their story of slavery and abuse in the fruit fields of sub-tropical Florida threatens to lift the lid on some appalling human rights abuses in America today. Between December and May, Florida produces virtually the entire US crop of field-grown fresh tomatoes. Fruit picked here in the winter […]
WASHINGTON – A former GOP political operative who ran an illegal election-day scheme to jam the phone lines of New Hampshire Democrats during the state’s tight 2002 U.S. Senate election said in a new book and an interview that he believes the scandal reaches higher into the Republican Party. Allen Raymond of Bethesda, Md., whose book Simon & Schuster will publish next month, also accused the Republican Party of trying to hang all the blame for a scandal on him as part of an ‘old-school cover-up.’ Raymond’s book, ‘How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative,’ offers a raw, inside glimpse of the phone scandal as it unraveled and of a ruthless world in which political operatives seek to win at all costs. McClatchy obtained an advance copy of the book. The 2002 New Hampshire Senate race, in which GOP Rep. John Sununu edged Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen by 19,000 votes, was among several targeted by Republicans seeking to win control of the U.S. Senate. Raymond said those who’ve tried to make him the fall guy for the New Hampshire scheme failed to recognize that e-mails, phone records and other evidence documented the […]
WASHINGTON — The size of China’s economy is overestimated by some 40 percent based on most current measures, but is the world’s second largest, the World Bank said Monday. In a report ranking the world’s economies, the World Bank said a more reliable method of estimation using ‘purchasing power parity’ (PPP) shows a much smaller value than the traditional market value estimates which the Bank called ‘less reliable.’ The study carried out by the World Bank and other partners was ‘the most extensive and thorough effort’ to measure the relative size of 146 economies using the PPP method which strips out the effect of exchange rates, a Bank statement said. China participated in the survey for the first time and India for the first time since 1985. ‘These results are more statistically reliable estimates of the size and price levels of both economies,’ the Bank said. ‘The previous, less reliable, methods led to estimates of their GDPs (gross domestic product) that were 40 percent larger than the results of the new, improved methods and benchmark.’ China still ranks as the world’s second largest economy with over nine percent of world production, but that compared […]
WASHINGTON — The government is promising $45 trillion more than it can deliver on Social Security, Medicare and other benefit programs. That is the gap between the promises the government has made in benefits and the projected revenue stream for these programs over the next 75 years, the Bush administration estimated Monday. The $45.1 trillion shortfall has increased by nearly $1 trillion in just one year, according to the administration’s ‘Financial Report of the United States Government’ for 2006. And, it’s up 67.8 percent in just the past four years. In 2003, the shortfall between promised benefits and revenue sources over a 75-year period was put at $26.9 trillion. The shortfall includes Social Security and Medicare in addition to Railroad Retirement and the Black Lung program. When the gap in funding social insurance programs is added to other government commitments, the total shortfall as of Sept. 30 represented $53 trillion, up more than $2 trillion in just a year, the report said. ‘Our government has made a whole lot of promises in the long-term that it cannot possibly keep,’ Comptroller General David M. Walker, the head of the Government Accountability Office, said Monday. Members […]
It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life’s most extraordinary molecule. Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA — an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for example, to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought. Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA. Scientists in Maryland have already built the world’s first entirely handcrafted chromosome — a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce. In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to ‘boot itself up,’ like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction. The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
