CAREY L. BIRON, - Inter Press Service
Stephan: When profit is the only priority this is what you get, and this is what adds to the growing virulent anti-Americanism.
WASHINGTON — A United Nations expert group is warning that too many gaps remain in implementing new safeguards among businesses based in the United States, both in terms of their domestic and international operations, to ensure the protection of human rights of workers and communities affected by those operations.
Two members of the U.N. Working Group on Business and Human Rights wrapped up a 10-day fact-finding mission to the United States this week, at the end of which they released initial observations. Ultimately, these will be expanded upon and finalised for presentation to the U.N. Human Rights Council in June 2014.
‘It’s a sad thought that our politicians are so crooked that we have to ask the United Nations for help, but no one else will listen.
No Comments
DAVID KEYS, - The Independent (UK)
Stephan: Another chapter of our past opens.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, weren’t in Babylon at all – but were instead located 300 miles to the north in Babylon’s greatest rival Nineveh, according to a leading Oxford-based historian.
After more than 20 years of research, Dr. Stephanie Dalley, of Oxford University’s Oriental Institute, has finally pieced together enough evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the famed gardens were built in Nineveh by the great Assyrian ruler Sennacherib – and not, as historians have always thought, by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.
Dr. Dalley first publicly proposed her idea that Nineveh, not Babylon, was the site of the gardens back in 1992, when her claim was reported in The Independent – but it’s taken a further two decades to find enough evidence to prove it.
Detective work by Dr. Dalley – due to be published as a book by Oxford University Press later this month – has yielded four key pieces of evidence.
First, after studying later historical descriptions of the Hanging Gardens, she realized that a bas-relief from Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh actually portrayed trees growing on a roofed colonnade exactly as described in classical accounts […]
No Comments
Stephan: The cost of 9/11 is only now being understood. Nineteen young terrorists didn't just kill several thousand people, they caused the citizens of the most powerful democracy on earth to voluntarily surrender their civil rights, and to subject themselves to a surveillance state that can only be described as Orwellian.
A former FBI counterterrorism agent acknowledged this week on CNN that every telephone conversation that takes place on American soil ‘is being captured as we speak.
No Comments
Stephan: It isn't hard to understand why this is happening. Consider this is the context of another fact. Eleven per cent of the American population takes anti-depressants. These social outcomes are telling us: We are not a happy people.
JUDY WOODRUFF: There’s been a stunning increase in the suicide rate among middle-aged Americans. The finding is part of a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that spells out how much suicide is a growing public health concern in the U.S.
Ray Suarez has more.
RAY SUAREZ: The analysis looked at data compiled over a little more than a decade, a period ending in 2010 that included the financial crisis and the great recession. In 2010, there were more suicides in the U.S., 38,000-plus, than there were fatal motor vehicle accidents.
Most disturbing, that spike among the middle-aged, a 28 percent rise overall, a 40 percent jump among white Americans, and among men in their 50s, suicides increased by more than 48 percent. Guns remained the leading method used in all suicides, followed by poisoning, overdoses and suffocation.
Some perspective on all this from Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC.
And, Dr. Frieden, the Morbidity and Mortality Report is a pretty technical document. But, from reading it, can you tease out what stressors might explain this tremendous spike in the number of people taking their own lives?
Chart: America’s Rising Suicide Problem
Chart: America’s Rising Suicide Problem
DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN, […]
No Comments
LOU COLAGIOVANNI, - Examiner (Houston)
Stephan: This is what prison privatization is leading to. This is not the first case like this of of Judicial corruption. Yet it is full steam ahead for corporate prisons. How can anyone think that corporate prisons was a good idea?
Disgraced Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella Jr has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for conspiring with private prisons to sentence juvenile offenders to maximum sentences for bribes and kickbacks which totaled millions of dollars. He was also ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution.
In the private prison industry the more time an inmate spends in a facility, the more of a profit is reaped from the state. Ciavearella was a figurehead in a conspiracy in the state of Pennsylvania which saw thousands of young men and women unjustly punished and penalized in the name of corporate profit.
According to allgov.com Ciavearella’s cases from 2003 – 2008 were reviewed by a special investigative panel and later by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and it was found that upwards of 5,000 young men and women were denied their constitutional rights, and therefore all of their convictions were dismissed and were summarily released.
During his sentencing Ciavarella was defiant, claiming he had broken no laws and claimed the money he received was a legitimate ‘finder’s fee.’ Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Zubrod said comments such as these were typical of Ciavarella, according to the local reporting of citizensvoice.com:
I think that’s his way […]
No Comments
