All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Irony in French? N-I-Q-A-B (Veil) Ban

President Sarkozy was at the forefront of beating the war drums for backing Libyan rebels. Fast forward to May. If a conservative but rebel Libyan woman visits France and goes out wearing a full-face veil – niqab, she could be arrested.

Sarkozy also was at forefront in expelling EU citizens from France because they did not have jobs and were Roma (gypsies).

Now it is rumored that if he loses the next election, he plans to deport himself to Arizona and run for office on a ban niqab wearing and being Roma in Arizona platform.

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

Full-face veils outlawed as France spells out controversial niqab ban

Veils that cover the face to be illegal from next month, with President Sarkozy accused of trying to win far-right votes

A woman in a niqab
A woman in a niqab walks with a child in the Tuileries, in Paris, France. Photograph: Horacio Villalobos/EPA

From Saudi tourists window-shopping on the Champs-Élysées to Muslim women in a departure lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport or the few young French converts on suburban estates, any woman who steps outside in France wearing a veil that covers her face will be breaking the law from next month.

Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

 

Drugs in Pigs = Sick People!

Banned drugs for pigs and human found in 4 million pounds of pork in China. How much did they miss – not known. How did it pass into system – smile (money, money, money).

US importing more and more food from all over the world – who’s checking the checkers – Is food safety up for cutting in Congress. Why are we importing green beans from Guatemala, Strawberries from Chile, Pork and chicken from China. Is this how Wal-Mart has become leader in grocery sales buying cheap and questionably safe food, while helping to drive US farmers out of business?

Oh well – who cares – price is the only thing and I “hope” that I and my kids don’t get too sick?

Amplify’d from www.wired.com

China pig crisis: Drug residues in pork

In China, more than 2,000 tons of fresh pork and pork products
have been recalled because the meat has tested positive for clenbuterol, a stimulant that is illegal in food-producing animals not only in China but in Europe and the United States.
Clenbuterol
It revs up the heart and gives you the shakes, and can be especially dangerous for pregnant women
This isn’t the first time clenbuterol has been found in pork in China.

Read more at www.wired.com

 

Bob Herbert: USA Slide – reversible?

When the dream becomes self-delusion, people believe each/all can overcome the odds that have been stacked against them. Read this three times and then think about its implications and what will you do with it” The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. 1. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent. 2. The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent. 3. The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com
Losing Our Way

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

Read more at www.nytimes.com

 

Woman is…

I do not have the words but this Afghan poet does.

Amplify’d from www.awwproject.org
For International Women’s Day

SHE struggles, hungers, cares, and loves.
SHE is the one for whom we never care.
Purity, honesty, then promises and sacrifices.
SHE is the one about whom we never wonder.
Hard work, talent, then intelligence and power.
SHE is the one about whom we never bother.
SHE helps, supports, gives tenderness. HER role.
SHE is the one for whom we never trouble.
SHE is the one who carries us while we are children,
the hands we have when we want to walk,
the guide for how to grow,
the only shoulder we have to cry on.
SHE is the mother,
the daughter,
the wife,
the sister.
Today is the day to speak of her.
SHE is the ONE we call a woman.

By Pakiza

Read more at www.awwproject.org

 

Tuberculosis Just Will Not Leave Us

My grandmother died of complications of TB and my mother had to be annually checked with x-rays all her life since she was just 4 when her mother had died and had been exposed and always tested positive.

TB may well have been the real source of the first beatitude of Jesus’: Blessed are the Poor in Spirit could be read blessed are those poor in breath (spirit). Crowded and unsanitary living conditions have and still are associated with the spread of TB. As long as TB is thought to be a disease of the past or a disease of poor countries, we risk ignoring it and facilitating its becoming an even bigger problem than it already is. The real problem is that drug-resistant TB variants continue to grow and in this air age TB easily passed on – as it has been – to people who would never think they had been exposed by a student, or health worker just returning from a vacation overseas.

Amplify’d from www.wired.com

Tuberculosis: Forgotten but not gone

It’s World TB Day
tuberculosis is stubbornly persisting, and the twin problems of multidrug-resistant and extensively drug resistant TB — MDR and XDR — are growing worse.
TB epidemic: 9.4 million just in 2009 and  1.7 million deaths.
It’s hard to know what to say in the face of an epidemic so huge, old and stubborn.

Read more at www.wired.com

 

Oil Inc motto: Lie until caught!

Remember that the people hired to oversee oil leaks in the Gulf over the past 30 or more years were encouraged, told to accept whatever the oil companies said? It takes a while to root that kind of behavior out. So, naturally, oil companies have continued to “lie” – oops we meant 4,000 gallons, our bad – won’t (grin) happen again (lol).

Out of front page and 5/7/11 PM news does not mean that oil companies have all of a sudden got clean.

Amplify’d from blog.skytruth.org

Gulf Spill – Source?

the source of the oil spill last weekend that came ashore in Louisiana. Located in West Delta Block 117, and operated by Anglo-Suisse, the spill reportedly occurred for a few hours last Saturday afternoon during operations to permanently plug and abandon the well.
NRC database
reports show amounts spilled of 1.89 gallons, 1.33 gallons, and 0.5 gallons – a whopping total of 3.72 gallons spilled.
Can a 4-gallon spill of oil travel across 20 miles of the Gulf, come ashore across a 30-mile stretch of coast, and oil 1300 to 2700 feet of beach? Call us skeptical, but we don’t think so.

Read more at blog.skytruth.org

 

Bethlehem Important to Palin? Nope!

Hard at work on the say/do anything tour – will have new Powerpoint show when she returns – purchased virtual tour of Bethlehem? Expects tour will boost her speaking price in US?

Anyone got a “get your tongue out of cheek” ap?

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

Sarah Palin pulls out of Bethlehem visit

Sarah Palin in Jerusalem
The former governor of Alaska pulled up to the checkpoint
They then turned around and drove away.

Palin wore a Star of David, the symbol of Judaism, around her neck, prayed close to the wall and lodged a written prayer in a crevice, according to tradition.

Palin told reporters: ” It’s overwhelming to be able to see and touch the cornerstone of our faith. I’m so thankful to be able to be here and I’m thankful to know the Israel-American connection will grow and strengthen as the peace negotiations continue.”

Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

 

The Midwest takes a dump in the Gulf!

All the pesticides, fertilizer, oil and industrial gunk that sits in the river during winter – gets “flushed” by Spring melt. As a consequence of treating the Gulf of Mexico as out “out house” there is a 70-150 mile dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi Delta.

Visible proof of how foul and irresponsible we are to ourselves and the planet!

Amplify’d from blog.skytruth.org

Mystery Oil Slick off Grand Isle, LA

This sediment plume looks pretty ugly up close: it’s brown, nasty, and carries a lot of stuff in it that is very bad for the Gulf: pesticide and fertilizer runoff, sewage overflows, and oily runoff from all our paved roads and parking lots that’s been building up over the winter. This is what causes one of the Gulf’s worst, chronic environmental problems: the giant “dead zone” that forms every year.

Read more at blog.skytruth.org

 

Sarkozy’s Place in Sun – #1, Not Libya?

Thanks to France for pitching in to help save Libyan’s effort to found a new government. Did France’s President suddenly discover how wonderful was the cause of Libyan freedom after his deporting Roma and disrespecting Muslims and immigrants in general did not raise his standings in polls?

Don’t know – what do you think? I am still wondering why the slaughter of women in Ivory Coast does not cause a Security Council meeting and why on Darfur continued killings and politically motivated rapes in Congo – we hear……..?

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

Libya crisis may save Nicolas Sarkozy from electoral humiliation

The French president certainly needs something to prevent him coming third in next year’s election

Nicolas Sarkozy

It would surely be poor taste to accuse Nicolas Sarkozy of leading France into combat for purely selfish political reasons – but that won’t stop some in the president’s inner circle wondering if Operation Odyssey Dawn might just save the skin of a man who, a matter of days ago, seemed destined for electoral humiliation. Ever so discreetly, they will be hoping Libya can do for Sarkozy what the Falklands did for Margaret Thatcher – anoint a successful war leader deserving of re-election.

Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

 

Afghan Follies Redux – Trust Us

Vietnam. Cambodia, Afghanistan, SWAT, ????, Iraq: trust us, we will help you if you come in to be reconciled, to give up fighting us. Those saying it always mean it at first. If the government is not real and just the machine set up by the occupier, it is a promise almost always swallowed up by corruption fed by the occupier’s agenda changing.

Why don’t we learn, why do we believe this kind of “war” can be clean and good, why do we repeat past mistakes?

How does Captain Cat continue to do good work, in the face of such dispiriting truth? I wish her well. You should read what she has to say and think about it – then take action.

Amplify’d from captaincat.typepad.com

Despatch from the moon

Aerial view of Khost
Last month I flew to Khost for a week, where the day after I arrived a young man blew himself up along with thirteen other people whilst he was waiting for the provincial governor to drive by.  I climbed up onto a roof and watched people fleeing the scene – faceless figures draped in blue shuffled hurriedly along a path through dun fields of sleeping maize, boys on bicycles, a man on a motorbike, patu flapping wildly behind him in dust kicked up by his wheels.
Almost two years ago to the day, I met a Maulawi and reconciled Talib, cousin of Southeastern insurgent commander Jalaluddin Haqqani (see interview here). I want to see him again, to ask how things have been going.
“We need 30-35 reconciled commanders,” they told me; I said it takes time to talk to people, to convince them. “So bring us shopkeepers with beards” was their response.
“I regret joining this process; all of my brothers regret it as well. We have received no assistance from the government, nothing that they promised. We gave up everything in Miram Shah and now we have nothing. Our six families share a single room.

Read more at captaincat.typepad.com