Mexican troops cross U.S. border, hold Border Patrol agent at gunpoint

Reuters | Aug 6, 2008

PHOENIX (Reuters) – Mexican soldiers briefly held a U.S. Border Patrol agent at gunpoint in a remote stretch of the Arizona desert after they mistakenly strayed north across the border, authorities said on Wednesday.

Tucson sector Border Patrol spokesman Mike Scioli said four Mexican soldiers wearing desert camouflage and carrying weapons confronted the agent early on Sunday morning as he patrolled a border road in the Tohono O’Odham nation southwest of Tucson.

Scioli said the agent repeatedly identified himself in English and Spanish. After four minutes the soldiers lowered their weapons and crossed back in to Mexico on foot.

The stretch of desert is frequently crossed by human and drug smugglers from Mexico, and the border line in the area is not always clearly marked, Scioli said.

A spokesman for the U.S. State Department said the incursion had been brought to the attention of the Mexican government, and appeared to be accidental.

“Our understanding is that this encounter stemmed from a momentary misunderstanding as to the exact location of the U.S.-Mexican border,” Gonzalo Gallegos said.

“We recognize that occasional incidents such as this can and do occur. But we take the misunderstanding seriously, as does the Government of Mexico.”

Incursions by Mexican military personnel into the United States over the nearly 2,000-mile (3,200-km) southwest border are not uncommon. Scioli said 42 incidents had been reported since October 1 last year.

(Reporting by Tim Gaynor; editing by Alan Elsner)

Italy’s brutal crackdown on Gypsies echoes country’s fascist past

The bodies of Cristina, 12, and Viola, 11, were left on the sand after they drowned in rough seas as holidaymakers carry on sunbathing nearby. It was the week’s most shocking picture: gipsy girls dead on a beach ignored by sunbathers… Now there is more chilling evidence of how Italy’s brutal crackdown on the Roma has sick echoes of the country’s fascist past.

Thousands of migrants, many of them Roma gipsies from the old communist bloc and racially troubled Balkans, have poured into the country since the dismantling of border controls across a greatly expanded European Union in 2004.

Daily Mail | Jul 26, 2008

By Sue Reid

She looks like any teenager the world over. Wearing a denim skirt, pink designer T-shirt, and with long hair tied back from her face, Samantha is a child who would make any parent proud.

Yet just a few days ago, this bubbly 14-year-old found herself taking part in an excercise that would seem unthinkable in a modern, civilised European country.

She was ordered to line up at the local community hall near her home in Naples, Italy, and dab her right forefinger in black ink before placing it on a government census form.

Samantha was photographed and given an identity code – F43 – as officials asked for her full name, address, age, religion and where she was born.

Most controversially of all, she was told to state her ethnic background.

Every detail, including the fact that her parents are immigrant Roma gipsies from Serbia, was catalogued and put on a national computer system.

She was mortified. Her eyes bright with anger, Samantha said she felt like a villain in the only country she has ever known.

‘That same day, the Italian kids started calling me “gyppo” in the streets.

They pointed at me and laughed. I felt like shouting back and saying: ‘I am Italian just like you. I was born here too.

‘But I didn’t dare, in case I started a riot.’

Samantha was taking part in a compulsory new census of Italy’s 160,000 Roma people, promised by the inflammatory Right-wing premier Silvio Berlusconi in the run-up to his successful election this spring.

Anyone with a sense of the past would be forgiven for a strong feeling of foreboding about what is happening.

Thousands of migrants, many of them Roma gipsies from the old communist bloc and racially troubled Balkans, have poured into the country since the dismantling of border controls across a greatly expanded European Union in 2004.

The huge diaspora was political good fortune for 73-year-old Berlusconi.

In a country where fascism under dictator Benito Mussolini thrived until the end of World War II, Berlusconi warned of a ‘Roma emergency’ in big cities and produced a dossier of dubious figures alleging foreigners were involved in half of Italy’s attempted murders, muggings and robberies.

The interior minister went further. Roberto Maroni, a leader of the anti-immigrant Northern League aligned with Berlusconi’s nationalist Forza Italia party, claimed the controversial census and fingerprinting was essential to discover ‘who is entitled to be here and who is not’.

It would stop anonymous armies of Roma children being sent out begging or stealing by their families, 60 per cent of whom have no identity papers or passports, he claimed.

Gipsy people with the right to stay would be re-housed in ‘decent conditions rather than with rats’. The remainder, Maroni made clear, could expect deportation.

Many observers, including the Roman Catholic Church, the United Nations, Roma and Jewish leaders, condemned Berlusconi’s actions. Comparisons were made with the Nazi registration of Jews and gipsies introduced by Adolf Hitler with the support of Mussolini.

Only this week, the Italian parliament authorised six-year prison sentences for immigrants who lie about their identity, and instigated the deportation of foreigners who have been given any prison sentence of two years or more.

For the first time, simply living in Italy illegally is punishable by up to four years in prison.

But where will Berlusconi stop? Italy’s pledge to the EU that the census would not include a question about ethnicity has been blatantly breached, even for children such as Samantha.

While fingerprinting children under 14 has been abandoned (they are photographed instead) following international disquiet, there are now whisperings that gipsy camps not sanctioned by the authorities – and there are 50 of these in Rome alone – will be destroyed by the authorities.

Border controls are expected to be reintroduced to staunch the flow of migrants from Italy’s neighbours.

No wonder there is a growing sense of unease at the huge – and illegal – Rotunda gipsy camp in Naples, where Samantha Jevremovic underwent fingerprinting.

She lives there with her parents, two younger brothers and a toddler sister in a small white wooden hut.

The family share one bedroom and eat at a table outside, whatever the weather.

Samantha goes to school and hopes to train as a hairdresser. Her 32-year-old mother and itinerant metalworker father, 33, have no citizenship in Italy or anywhere else.

On the census form they declared themselves ‘Ethnic Serbs’, who slipped into the country illegally in 1993, just before their eldest daughter was born.

Her mother, Dani, says: ‘We didn’t want to co-operate. We are afraid.

‘But we hope by giving the information it will stop us being thrown out of Italy, which our children think of as home.’

The camp has 700 residents and was first established 25 years ago. It’s the size of a sprawling village under a four-lane expressway to the north of the city.

By any standards, it is a shabby place where potholes are filled with fetid water, toddlers run half-naked chased by cats around the alleys, and burnt-out cars outnumber brick houses.

Most of the residents live in corrugated shacks without either a tap or a lavatory, with only a towel or a duvet pinned up to serve as a front door.

Here, only two-thirds of the 300 children go to school, a pink-roofed building nearby. Their parents say they are afraid to send them because the appalling facilities in the camp mean they cannot wash the boys and girls each day.

‘They are scared that the Italian pupils will jeer at their dirty sons and daughters,’ explains 48-year-old Nihad Sajovic, one of the gipsy elders.

‘Would you send your child to class if that was going to happen?’

At a table in the community hall, where the census took place, he added: ‘No one can imagine our situation during the past few months.

‘There is a witch-hunt under way and people now believe that we are the only ones who commit crimes in Italy.

‘It is not easy for us. There have been incriminations and accusations against our community. We no longer know what the future holds.

‘We want to put down roots; we want to stop fleeing because our people have been doing that since the War began in 1939.

‘At the end, the Jews were given money and a new land. We still have nothing.’

Extraordinarily, the Red Cross of Italy has been persuaded by Berlusconi to help count gipsy heads and gather data on hundreds of families at 70 camps in Rome, an operation that will last until September.

Massimo Barra, the charity’s president, this week visited one pitiful group of gipsies who have been living under a dripping railway arch near international Leonardo Da Vinci airport for six years.

It can be reached only by a perilous walk along the main railway line between central Rome and the air terminus, then down a narrow gully.

On the brick walls hang a few pots and pans. Tents take up most of the floor space.

There is an acrid smell, and at night the rats come out. Surely this can’t be better than living in Romania, from where the 15 gipsies and their children had fled?

‘Yes it is,’ said Maria, mother of six. ‘There, we were accused and persecuted for being gipsies.

‘Up to now, we have lived in Italy in peace.’

The Red Cross’s Mr Barra said: ‘We know that people are pointing and saying that this is reminiscent of the Nazis. But that is collective paranoia.

‘We want to get these children vaccinated, give them health checks and medical cards.

‘That is all this census is about. We are building bridges and not walls.’

Whatever the truth of this, Italy’s history cannot be forgotten. It was as early as 1926 that Mussolini first expelled gipsies, calling them ’sub humans’.

It is thought that in the next 20 years, more than one million Roma people were killed in the extermination camps of Europe, alongside the Jews.

The current wave of Italian xenophobia was given new impetus last November when an Italian admiral’s wife, a religious education teacher, was beaten with a rock in a sex attack by a Romanian migrant.

Dreadfully injured, she was dumped in a ditch in a suburb of northern Rome. She died two days later and suspect Nicolae Mailat, 24, from Transylvania, was arrested in a nearby gipsy camp.

National outrage followed.

Soon afterwards came a story of baby-snatching when a teenage Roma girl was alleged to have tried to kidnap a baby from its mother in a local apartment in Ponticelli, near Naples.

The girl is now in custody awaiting trial. But the case sparked an extraordinary backlash.

In May, several hundred local residents besieged the nearby Roma camp, hurling missiles and abuse.

Eventually, the police evacuated the gipsy residents. Within a short time, the shanty town was in flames.

The response of the Berlusconi government? ‘This is what happens when gipsies steal babies,’ shrugged Maroni of the Northern League.

Sporadic vigilante attacks on gipsies have continued. Only this week there was another mysterious fire at an encampment on the outskirts of Rome.

At 10pm on Tuesday, a swathe of trees surrounding the officially sanctioned site, again near the airport, suddenly burst into flames.

As police investigated, the Roma residents said that they heard three loud bangs as if Molotov cocktails had been hurled into the undergrowth.

‘What do you expect us to think? We are scared and dispirited,’ said Lordache Cortizon, a 40-year-old who came to live in Italy from Romania six years ago.

‘We came to escape racism. Yet in the past few months since the government changed, we have lived in fear. On the streets we are given filthy looks.

‘The census is nothing short of racism. If they come here and ask that my four children are fingerprinted I will say no.’

Full Story

Mexicans urged to reclaim a piece of Texas

Telegraph | Jun 26, 2008

By Tom Leonard

Mexicans are being encouraged to reclaim a piece of Texas, more than 150 years after they lost the Lone Star state to the United States.

Texan estate agents are heading south of the border to drum up the interest in buying cut-price land and property in the foreclosure-hit state.

Thanks to a rising Mexican peso and an economy which is growing faster than that of the US, a country that has previously been looked on by America as a source of cheap labour is now seen as a potential source of rich investors.

A “Texas for Sale” sign and cowgirl-clad models greeted visitors to a recent property fair in Monterrey, Mexico, at which hundreds of Mexicans looked over lists of potential investment opportunities. Virgilio Garza, a Monterrey developer, said he and his partners were considering investing $8 million in buying up foreclosed homes in Texas.

He told Bloomberg: “Texas is like our home. We believe there can be some opportunities.”

Marco Ramirez, a Texas estate agent, said that residents of Monterrey, which is 150 miles from the Texas border, were his best hope of buying the 120 foreclosed properties on his books.

“Many of these people have children who are studying in the US. They’ve been renting or leasing and now it’s a great time to buy.”

America annexed Texas in 1845 after Texans gained independence from Mexico nine years earlier following the Battle of the Alamo.

A three-year war between the two countries resulted in Mexico losing about half its territory – including what is now Arizona, Nevada and California – to the United States.

Foreclosures in Texas have risen by 29 per cent in a year with one in every 274 households now going through the process.

The peso has risen by 5.9 per cent against the dollar since the beginning of the year.

Diseases Plaguing Poorer Nations Infect Growing Numbers in U.S.

Bloomberg | Jun 24, 2008

By John Lauerman and Rob Waters

June 24 (Bloomberg) — Preventable diseases commonly seen among impoverished people in Africa, Asia and Latin America are infecting millions of U.S. residents, mostly poor women and children, researchers found.

Chronic infections such as Chagas disease and dengue fever are a major cause of disability, impaired child development, and pregnancy complications in the U.S., said Peter Hotez, author of the study released by the Public Library of Science’s journal Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Parasitic conditions including roundworm and toxoplasmosis, along with tropical bacteria are widespread in many inner cities, the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia, and the Mexican borderlands, the study said. Improved recognition, screening and treatment of the diseases are needed to reduce the impact on patients, who are often poor and less educated, Hotez said.

“If these diseases were hitting wealthy people in the suburbs, we would never tolerate it,” said Hotez, chairman of microbiology at the George Washington University in Washington, yesterday in a telephone interview. “We need to make the names of these diseases household words.”

Even before Hurricane Katrina drove thousands from their homes in Louisiana in 2005, poverty and lack of access to health care contributed to high rates of roundworm and other parasites, the study said. Prolonged flooding has paved the way for increased rates of Chagas, a parasite that can cause lethal heart and intestinal complications, according to the researchers.

Red Cross Recommendation

An American Red Cross researcher called in October for screening of all donated blood for signs of the parasite that causes Chagas disease, which may be found in as many as one in 25,000 blood donors in the U.S., and kills as many as one third of patients. The disease can lurk undetected in infected people for as long as 20 years.

Hotez’s study is a wake-up call to state, local and U.S. health officials that more needs to be done about tropical diseases in the U.S., said Mary Wilson, a Harvard School of Public Health associate professor.

“Most people are completely unaware that many of these diseases still exist in the U.S.,” she said yesterday in a telephone interview. “Even for health professionals who work in major cities, this is below the radar screen.”

Infectious diseases can be difficult to track in poor populations, particularly when immigration is involved, said Elias Bermudez, chief executive officer of Immigrants Without Borders, an advocacy group in Phoenix.

Immigrants

“Communicable diseases are not reported by poor people,” especially undocumented immigrants, he said yesterday in a telephone interview. “With the anti-immigrant atmosphere that exists now in Arizona, people are afraid to go to medical clinics and hospitals, and that compounds the problem.”

Soil-dwelling microscopic worms, such as hookworms, penetrate the skin or gastrointestinal tract and infect billions of people throughout the tropical world, according to the World Health Organization in Geneva. The tiny parasites can cause diarrhea, abdominal pain, weakness, anemia, and may affect mental function and physical growth, the United Nations health branch said on its Web site.

Millions of people in the U.S., most of them in the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia, are likely to be infected with worms, Hotez said. In 2000, researchers estimated that 169,000 homes in Appalachia had no indoor plumbing, and in some of the region’s counties, 25 percent of homes lack complete plumbing, the study said. The report cited another 2000 study showing that about 36 percent of Mississippi Delta blacks then lived below the poverty line.

Study, Drugs Needed

More study is needed of which populations are most vulnerable, how worms are transmitted and how to diagnose them, Hotez said.

“We need to take a better look at which interventions are possible,” he said. “The approach to worms is more systematic in Honduras than it is in the U.S.”

New drugs also are needed to treat dengue fever, a mosquito- borne disease frequently found along the U.S.-Mexico border, he said. Better drugs and diagnostics also are needed for parasitic leishmaniaisis, a skin infection that can affect internal organs, he said.

The U.S. is spending billions to find treatments for anthrax, avian flu, and smallpox, diseases that affect few or no one, Hotez said. More resources should be spent on finding new treatments for tropical diseases that sicken millions annually, he said.

“Here we have real suffering, real diseases among the poorest people living in the U.S.,” he said.

Many tropical diseases could be alleviated just by addressing the poverty of people that suffer from them, said Harvard’s Wilson.

“For a lot of these diseases, basic biomedical research is not going to provide the answers,” she said. “We have to alleviate poverty and social inequities, and provide better education for people living in conditions that contribute to disease.”

Global warming to spur more terrorism and illegal immigration

Report: Climate change linked to national security

Associated Press | Jun 25, 2008

By PAMELA HESS

WASHINGTON – Global warming probably will mean more illegal immigration and humanitarian disasters, undermining shaky governments and possibly expanding the terrorism threat against the U.S., intelligence agencies say.

“Logic suggests the conditions exacerbated (by climate change) would increase the pool of potential recruits for terrorism,” said Tom Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis.

Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Central and Southeast Asia are most vulnerable to warming-related drought, flooding, extreme weather and hunger. The assessment warns of a global spillover from increased migration and water-related disputes, Fingar said in prepared remarks Wednesday to a joint hearing of a special House committee on global warming and a House Intelligence subcommittee.

Climate change alone would not topple governments, he said. But it could worsen problems such as poverty, disease, migration and hunger, creating conditions that could destabilize already vulnerable areas, Fingar said.

But he warned that efforts to reduce global warming by changing energy policies “may affect U.S. national security interests even more than the physical impacts of climate change itself.”

“The operative word there is ‘may,’ we don’t know,” Fingar said.

The assessment of global climate change through 2030 is one in a series of periodic intelligence reports that offer the consensus of top analysts at all 16 spy agencies on foreign policy, security and global economic issues. Congress requested the report last year. The assessment is classified as confidential.

It predicts that the United States and most of its allies will have the means to cope with climate change economically. Unspecified “regional partners” could face severe problems.

Fingar said the quality of the analysis is hampered by the fact that climate data tend not to focus on specific countries but on broad global changes. For that reason, the intelligence agencies have only low to moderate confidence in the assessment.

Africa is seen as among the most vulnerable regions. An expected increase in droughts there could cut agricultural yields of rain-dependent crops by up to half over the next 12 years.

Parts of Asia’s food crops are vulnerable to droughts and floods, with rice and grain crops potentially facing up to a 10 percent decline by 2025.

As many as 50 million additional people could face hunger by 2020. The water supply, while larger because of melting glaciers, will be under pressure from a growing population and increased consumption. Between 120 million and 1.2 billion people in Asia “will continue to experience some water stress.”

Latin America may experience increased precipitation, possibly cutting tens of millions of people from the ranks of those in need of water. But from 7 million to 77 million people could be short of water resources because of population growth.

Fingar’s statement strikes a considerably less ominous tone than a report issued a year ago by the Center for Naval Analyses.

Rep. Edward Markey, the chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, accused the White House of trying to “bury the future security realities of global warming” in Fingar’s prepared statement. Markey, D-Mass., received a briefing on the classified assessment, which he said is “first-class.”

Fingar said no one in the White House changed any of his public testimony.

The center’s report, by retired military leaders, drew a direct correlation between global warming and the conditions that lead failed states to become the breeding grounds for extremism and terrorism.

“Climate change will provide the conditions that will extend the war on terror,” said Adm. T. Joseph Lopez, who commanded U.S. and allied peacekeeping forces in Bosnia in 1996.

“Weakened and failing governments, with an already thin margin for survival, foster the conditions for internal conflicts, extremism and movement toward increased authoritarianism and radical ideologies,” the center’s report said. “The U.S. will be drawn more frequently into these situations,” according to the report, which drew on 11 retired generals and admirals.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said the request for the intelligence agencies’ report was “a dangerous diversion of intelligence assets.” He said the issue should be studied by climate scientists, not intelligence agencies.

Republicans used the hearing to argue for domestic oil drilling and nuclear power to reduce reliance on foreign energy.

Mass immigration to blame for British crime spikes and knife culture

Cambridgeshire Police Chief Constable Julie Spence complains the force can’t cope

Daily Mail | Jun 4, 2008

By  James Slack

A chief constable gave a stark public warning yesterday of ‘immense’ pressure placed on resources by the unprecedented influx of immigrants.

Julie Spence, who heads Cambridgeshire Police, took the highly unusual step of singling out Poles, Lithuanians and Iraqi Kurds who are carrying knives on the streets.

The comments of such a senior officer in an Parliamentary evidence session will spark widespread alarm at a time when the UK is struggling to control knife crime.

Mrs Spence said: ‘We have had the Iraqi Kurds who carry knives and the Poles and the Lithuanians who carry knives. If it is normal to carry them where you come from, you need to educate them pretty quickly. We have done a lot of work to tell them not to, and we have seen it go down.’

The chief constable  -  who first sparked a nationwide debate on migrant crime last year  -  also said there were problems related to violent debt recovery among Eastern Europeans.

‘There is an assaults pattern going on in relation to debt recovery. There is an issue of confidence in the police.’

Mrs Spence also described as ‘very worrying’ growing labour and sexual exploitation within former Communist communities whose nations have joined the EU since 2004. In the same evidence session, Local Government Association chairman Sir Simon Milton reported a series of ’spikes’ in crime as a result of mass immigration.

He told the Home Affairs Select Committee there had been an issue with largely Romanian pick-pocketing gangs in the Westminster area.

‘Nationally there has been no crime wave but there are instances where there have been spikes in certain types of criminal activity. Much of it is low-level  -  driving offences, and so on.’

Mrs Spence has given previous warnings of the link between migrants and certain types of crime. Last September she highlighted a surge in drinkdriving, for example, by migrants with ‘different’ cultures and standards.

But it is highly unusual for a police chief to single out certain nationalities as posing a specific crime problem.

Simply carrying a knife in public is a criminal offence, punishable by up to four years in jail.

Mrs Spence, however, is establishing a reputation as an officer prepared to confront uncomfortable truths.

Addressing the Police Federation Conference last month, she warned that the economic downturn could spark tensions among ethnic groups.

Violence has already erupted between immigrant populations in the past. And she warned that the looming financial crisis could trigger unrest as competition for jobs increases. She also claimed that the Government had greatly underestimated the soaring numbers of Eastern Europeans entering the UK.

Mrs Spence said as many as 1.4million had arrived since the borders were opened to them four years ago  -  half a million more than the official figure.

She called for a European-wide police database so officers can easily check whether immigrants they arrest have any previous convictions in their home country. Mrs Spence cited one example of a violent Polish man arrested by her officers who came up as clear on the police national computer. They contacted the Polish authorities and had to wait 24 hours to find out he was a convicted murderer.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said last night: ‘Under Labour, fatal stabbings are up by almost a third and the Government’s lax approach means people carry knives in the street with impunity. We need more effective action to tackle knife possession  -  regardless of who is carrying them.

‘This means taking a zero-tolerance approach  -  including action to confiscate such weapons and punish those carrying them. Only this will send a clear message that we are serious about tackling a problem, which one senior judge has labelled an epidemic.’

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘The vast majority of foreign nationals entering or living in the UK play by our rules. However, we will not accommodate those that abuse our hospitality by becoming involved in crime.

‘In 2007 we removed over one person every eight minutes, including the highest-ever number of foreign lawbreakers, up by a huge 80 per cent to 4,200.

‘The new UK Border Agency has put in place a national network of crime partnerships so that we stand shoulder to shoulder with police forces and systematically target foreign lawbreakers for expulsion from Britain.’

The Real Life Ministry Of Love Is Being Built

“I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what Congress has done to them over the last 49 years, they would move on Washington; they would not wait for an election. It adds up to a preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the United States.”

- George W. Malone, U.S. Senator (Nevada), speaking before Congress in 1957.

Rogue Governent | May 24, 2008

By Lee Rogers

The federal government is continuing the incremental agenda to build a Ministry of Love styled detention camp system for the American people. According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency or ICE is building three new detention camps in the United States. The detention facilities will be minimum-security residential facilities that the federal government says will be used to house illegal aliens. Considering that the majority of the American people are against illegal immigration and just want immigrants to come into the country legally, most people will believe that this is a reasonable step to solve the illegal immigration problem. Unfortunately, this is really nothing more than a phony solution to solve a problem that has been created by government policies that have been implemented to encourage the illegal alien problem.

The federal government is using the illegal immigration problem as an excuse to build the detention camp apparatus that is really meant for the American people. This is pretty obvious considering Rex 84, the Army’s Civilian Inmate Labor Program, the preservation of detention camps for Japanese Americans used during World War II and additional detention facilities built by KBR. Building a series of detention facilities is not going to resolve the illegal immigration problem with an administration that has supported policies to ensure as many illegal aliens enter the country as possible. As the economy unravels and as more and more people begin to protest against this criminal government, the establishment will need these detention facilities to lock up large numbers of Americans.

Recently in Waterloo Iowa, the federal government through ICE and FEMA built a temporary detention facility on the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds to round up a group of illegal aliens working in the area. Rounding up a few hundred illegal aliens does absolutely nothing to reverse the long standing policies that created the illegal immigration problem in the first place. In fact, all they are doing to the illegal aliens they round up is to process them through their temporary FEMA camp. This is clearly not an effective way to stop illegal immigration. Under the guise of solving the illegal immigration issue they are simply having their people go through the motions in order to practice the deployment of a FEMA camp and the processing of live test subjects through the FEMA camp.

According to a report from Radar Magazine, top secret continuity of government operations includes a database called Main Core which contains a list of 8 million Americans. During a national emergency, people in this database could be arrested and detained by government authorities. In 2007, George W. Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 51 which gives the president authority over all three branches of government during a catastrophic emergency. The Bush administration has also refused to reveal details on specific details of continuity of government operations to the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee. Perhaps the Main Core database and the plans to round up American citizens listed in this database during a national emergency is one of the reasons why they are keeping these details secret.

FEMA has also announced that they are expanding a program to transport a large number of American citizens using trains during an emergency. This is the same method that the Nazis used to transport large numbers of Jews and political dissidents to their death camps.

At the very least, the federal government is setting up some sort of Orwellian Ministry of Love system with these FEMA camps. In George Orwell’s book 1984, thought criminals were taken away to the Ministry of Love where they were re-educated to love Big Brother. These FEMA camps would serve as suitable places for the federal government to take away political dissidents and protesters. If Radar Magazine’s report on the Main Core database is accurate, this makes the possibility that these FEMA camps will be used for such a purpose quite real. Top this off with the fact that S 1959 the Homegrown Terrorism and Violent Radicalization Act of 2007 gives the federal government a blank check to establish various think tanks and commissions to study and target people who have certain belief systems under the guise of fighting terrorism and it becomes even scarier. The U.S. House of Representatives has already passed their version of the bill by a vote of 404-6. The U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee has come out with a report suggesting that new legislation should be passed to deal with homegrown terrorism and the adoption of so called radical ideology. What better way to deal with people who have certain belief systems than to put them in FEMA camps that will be used for the purposes of re-education?

It is no secret that the Bush administration has maintained a policy that endorses torture. The 81 page torture memo that was authored by former Deputy Attorney General John Yoo is proof that the administration sought to justify torture using the phony terror war as cover. There’s little doubt that they are attempting to socially engineer the general public to accept torture as an acceptable practice. If they are successful in doing this, they will undoubtedly utilize these practices in any sort of Ministry of Love styled re-education camp system.

At the very worst, the federal government is setting up these FEMA camps as a way to exterminate large numbers of people. The elites of the world are obsessed with population reduction and these FEMA camps could easily be used to kill a large number of people.

These actions by the federal government should be of the utmost concern to the American people. The executive branch is being incredibly secret about continuity of government operations, there is legislation pending that will give the government a blank check to label particular belief systems as homegrown terrorism, the administration has written memos justifying the use of torture, they are maintaining a database of people who they’d round up during a national emergency and they are increasing the number of government run detention centers. As the economy continues to unravel and as more and more people become unhappy with the criminals and tyrants that have taken over the government, there is a very good chance that the ever growing martial law apparatus could be used on the people. This apparatus that they are setting up could be as bad if not worse than the Ministry of Love as depicted in George Orwell’s book 1984.

Tibet could be ’swamped’ by mass re-settlement of Chinese people after Olympics, says Dalai Lama

Buddhist leader fears attempt to dilute identity

The Guardian | May 24, 2008

By Julian Borger

The Dalai Lama claimed yesterday that Beijing was planning the mass settlement of 1 million ethnic Chinese people in Tibet after the Olympics with the aim of diluting Tibetan culture and identity.

Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader also claimed that some of Asia’s most important rivers which flow from the Tibetan plateau are being polluted and diminished by careless industrialisation and unplanned irrigation.

The Dalai Lama made the claims in an interview with the Guardian after a meeting yesterday with Gordon Brown at Lambeth Palace. He said the talks had been detailed and the prime minister had been helpful “in spite of his difficulties”. The Dalai Lama said: “He met me and he showed genuine concern and he wants to help.”

Downing Street said the discussion focused on talks due next month on Tibet’s future between Tibetan representatives and Beijing officials. The prime minister is said to have stressed the importance of the Dalai Lama’s pledge to oppose violence, not seek Tibetan independence, nor support a boycott of the Beijing Olympics.

The Dalai Lama said he feared the Chinese authorities could take a tougher line on Tibet after the Olympics, and possibly flood it with Han Chinese, the world’s largest ethnic group.

The Dalai Lama said he had been informed by Tibetan residents that large areas of empty land had been marked out, as if for construction, in the past two years. “Then last year we received information – after the Olympics 1 million Chinese are going to settle in the autonomous region of Tibet,” he said, adding the information came from a “military source” in Tibet.

“There is every danger Tibet becomes a truly Han Chinese land and Tibetans become an insignificant minority. Then the very basis of the idea of autonomy becomes meaningless.”

There has been an increasing influx of Chinese settlers into Tibet in recent years as transport has improved, but the exact figures are a matter of dispute. According to an official census in 2000, there were 2.4 million Tibetans in the region and 159,000 Han Chinese. The government in exile says there are many more Chinese if migrant workers and soldiers are counted. The Dalai Lama has said there is a Han majority in Lhasa, the regional capital.

China has denied carrying out any deliberate settlement policy aimed at the dilution of Tibetan culture and points instead to the benefits brought to the region by economic development and investment.

The Dalai Lama claimed over-settlement and over-exploitation of Tibet was threatening the quality and flow of rivers flowing out of the Tibetan highlands, including the Yangtze, the Yellow River, the Indus, the Mekong and the Ganges.

“Due to carelessness these waters have been polluted and also reduced, and I think billions of people’s lives depend on these rivers,” the Dalai Lama said. “[There has been] mining without proper care, deforestation … irrigation without proper planning. In some valleys, new diseases have developed which some specialists believe is the result of water pollution.”

Lhasa is now relatively quiet since protests were put down by Chinese troops in March, and the Dalai Lama has threatened to resign if the unrest turns to violence. But he said the Tibetan commitment to non-violence might not outlast him.

“Now there are signs of frustration among Tibetans, not only young monks,” the 72-year-old Buddhist leader said. He said Tibetans were now telling themselves: “While the Dalai Lama remains, we have to follow his advice. That means non-violence. After him, we ourselves will take appropriate action.”

The next talks between representatives of the Dalai Lama and China are scheduled for Beijing on June 11. On Wednesday, envoys of the Tibetan leader visited the Chinese embassy in London to offer his condolences for the dead from this month’s earthquake in Sichuan.

Asked what he thought Gordon Brown should tell the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, when he attends the Olympic closing ceremony in August, the Dalai Lama said: “If within two months it gets more positive then the prime minister must give encouragement and appreciation. If things get worse, the prime minister will have to speak out.”

Ship unloads cargo of swarming “crazy” ants to invade Houston

Ants swarm over Houston area, fouling electronics

Associated Press | May 15, 2008

by LINDA STEWART BALL

DALLAS – In what sounds like a really low-budget horror film, voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers.

The hairy, reddish-brown creatures are known as “crazy rasberry ants” — crazy, because they wander erratically instead of marching in regimented lines, and “rasberry” after Tom Rasberry, an exterminator who did battle against them early on.

“They’re itty-bitty things about the size of fleas, and they’re just running everywhere,” said Patsy Morphew of Pearland, who is constantly sweeping them off her patio and scooping them out of her pool by the cupful. “There’s just thousands and thousands of them. If you’ve seen a car racing, that’s how they are. They’re going fast, fast, fast. They’re crazy.”

The ants — formally known as “paratrenicha species near pubens” — have spread to five Houston-area counties since they were first spotted in Texas in 2002.

The newly recognized species is believed to have arrived in a cargo shipment through the port of Houston. Scientists are not sure exactly where the ants came from, but their cousins, commonly called crazy ants, are found in the Southeast and the Caribbean.

“At this point, it would be nearly impossible to eradicate the ant because it is so widely dispersed,” said Roger Gold, a Texas A&M University entomologist.

The good news? They eat fire ants, the stinging red terrors of Texas summers.

But the ants also like to suck the sweet juices from plants, feed on such beneficial insects as ladybugs, and eat the hatchlings of a small, endangered type of grouse known as the Attwater prairie chicken.

They also bite humans, though not with a stinger like fire ants.

Worse, they, like some other species of ants, are attracted to electrical equipment, for reasons that are not well understood by scientists.

They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner’s gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven’t caused any major problems there yet.

Exterminators say calls from frustrated homeowners and businesses are increasing because the ants — which are starting to emerge by the billions with the onset of the warm, humid season — appear to be resistant to over-the-counter ant killers.

“The population built up so high that typical ant controls simply did no good,” said Jason Meyers, an A&M doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on the one-eighth-inch-long ant.

It’s not enough just to kill the queen. Experts say each colony has multiple queens that have to be taken out.

At the same time, the ants aren’t taking the bait usually left out in traps, according to exterminators, who want the Environmental Protection Agency to loosen restrictions on the use of more powerful pesticides.

And when you do kill these ants, the survivors turn it to their advantage: They pile up the dead, sometimes using them as a bridge to cross safely over surfaces treated with pesticide.

“It looked like someone had come along and poured coffee granules all around the perimeter of the rooms,” said Lisa Calhoun, who paid exterminators $1,200 to treat an infestation of her parents’ home in the Houston suburb of Pearland.

The Texas Department of Agriculture is working with A&M researchers and the EPA on how to stop the ants.

“This one seems to be like lava flowing and filling an entire area, getting bigger and bigger,” said Ron Harrison, director of training for the big pest-control company Orkin Inc.

CIA Chief Sees Unrest Rising With Population

Washington Post | May 1, 2008

By Joby Warrick

Swelling populations and a global tide of immigration will present new security challenges for the United States by straining resources and stoking extremism and civil unrest in distant corners of the globe, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in a speech yesterday.

The population surge could undermine the stability of some of the world’s most fragile states, especially in Africa, while in the West, governments will be forced to grapple with ever larger immigrant communities and deepening divisions over ethnicity and race, Hayden said.

Hayden, speaking at Kansas State University, described the projected 33 percent growth in global population over the next 40 years as one of three significant trends that will alter the security landscape in the current century. By 2050, the number of humans on Earth is expected to rise from 6.7 billion to more than 9 billion, he said.

“Most of that growth will occur in countries least able to sustain it, a situation that will likely fuel instability and extremism, both in those countries and beyond,” Hayden said.

With the population of countries such as Niger and Liberia projected to triple in size in 40 years, regional governments will be forced to rapidly find food, shelter and jobs for millions, or deal with restive populations that “could be easily attracted to violence, civil unrest, or extremism,” he said.

European countries, many of which already have large immigrant communities, will see particular growth in their Muslim populations while the number of non-Muslims will shrink as birthrates fall. “Social integration of immigrants will pose a significant challenge to many host nations — again boosting the potential for unrest and extremism,” Hayden said.

The CIA director also predicted a widening gulf between Europe and North America on how to deal with security threats, including terrorism. While U.S. and European officials agree on the urgency of the terrorism threat, there is a fundamental difference — a “transatlantic divide” — over the solution, he said.

While the United States sees the fight against terrorism as a global war, European nations perceive the terrorist threat as a law enforcement problem, he said.

“They tend not to view terrorism as we do, as an overwhelming international challenge. Or if they do, we often differ on what would be effective and appropriate to counter it,” Hayden said. He added that he could not predict “when or if” the two sides could forge a common approach to security.

A third security trend highlighted by Hayden was the emergence of China as a global economic and military powerhouse, pursuing its narrow strategic and political interests. But Hayden said China’s increasing prominence need not be perceived as a direct challenge to the United States.

“If Beijing begins to accept greater responsibility for the health of the international system, as all global powers should, we will remain on a constructive, even if competitive, path,” he said. “If not, the rise of China begins to look more adversarial.”

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