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 - As President Bush and Congress battle on the budget, homeland security and the war in Iraq, Americans blame both Republicans and Democrats for the impasse. By more than 2-to-1 margins, they give the president, congressional Democrats and congressional Republicans unfavorable ratings in a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll released Monday. While Bush’s ratings have been poor for most of the past two years, the two parties in Congress hit new lows in the poll. ‘The American people just decided that Washington is either incompetent or irrelevant,’ said Frank Luntz, who has conducted polls for Republicans. ‘Republicans made promises they didn’t keep, and Democrats made promises they couldn’t keep. And now it’s a pox on all their houses.’ The president’s 65% disapproval rating is his lowest since July, despite a decline in violence in Iraq, a Middle East peace conference and victories over congressional Democrats on the 2008 budget. ‘Just as the news from Iraq got slightly better, people were focused on the economy,’ Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Bush remains focused on his policy agenda. ‘Leadership isn’t found in chasing polls,’ she said. ‘It comes from standing on principle […]
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 […]
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 […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
