This one’s an oldie but goodie: Geraldo Rivera and Bill O’Reilly have a shoutfest regarding the Alfredo Ramos drunk driving incident last year.
Archive for May, 2008
Uncontacted Indian tribe photographed in Amazon
RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – Amazon Indians from one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes have been photographed from the air, with striking images released on Thursday showing them painted bright red and brandishing bows and arrows.
The photographs of the tribe near the border between Brazil and Peru are rare evidence that such groups exist. A Brazilian official involved in the expedition said many of them are in increasing danger from illegal logging.
Man arrested for buying Mexican babies to sell to U.S. couples
via The Monitor (though the comments are rank with sexism and classism)
REYNOSA – Amado Torres Vega sees his work as a simple act of charity.
He rescues newborn children from a life of poverty in Mexico and helps place them with financially stable couples in the United States, he told Mexican police this week…Over the past year, they say, he bought at least 15 children from poor Mexican women and sold them to adoptive parents in the United States. Some of the women reportedly got pregnant over and over simply to collect a paycheck.
According to Mexican authorities, they include:
* a 39-year-old mother who told police she carried three children to term for Torres so she could pay medical bills for a 9-year-old daughter suffering from bone marrow cancer; she would also save the babies’ umbilical cords for Mexican stem cell treatments on her daughter before selling the newborns.
* and a 21-year-old suffering from AIDS who got pregnant and sold a child to pay for her own care.
Plan Mexico approved by Congress
It’s official: Congress has approved Plan Mexico. [...]
Plan Mexico will provide resources, equipment, and training to the Mexican government, police, and military. It will not give Mexico liquid funds. The US military, government agencies such as USAID, and US defense contractors such as mercenary firms and weapons manufacturers will receive funding to carry out Plan Mexico, Plan Mexico is yet another bill to line the pockets of the military industrial complex.
Burger King agrees to better wages/conditions for tomato workers
I don’t know how I managed to miss this one! If there’s one thing that rings true about me, it’s that I have no problem whatsoever boycotting fast food chains for the various crap they try to pull.
Florida farm workers who harvest tomatoes for the Burger King system will see improved wages and working conditions following an historic agreement announced yesterday between the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and the fast food giant. The agreement follows a more than year-long drive that mobilized union members, students, religious and community activists and lawmakers in marches, rallies, congressional hearings and petition drives demanding justice for the workers.
One step closer to arresting Karl Rove…
via American Freedom Campaign
Eleven days ago, I encouraged you to send an E-mail to your U.S. representative, urging him or her to support the use of inherent contempt against former Bush administration official Karl Rove, if it appeared as if it were necessary. A few days later, the House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena to Rove, seeking his testimony on July 10 about the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman.
270 Agriprocessors detainees sentenced to five months in federal prison
I did a double take when I saw this article. The May 12 Agriprocessors immigration raid, the largest single site raid in U.S. history, has certainly come under a lot of scrutiny in the past couple of weeks. Stories of abusive and dangerous working conditions at the plant continue to surface. And of course, there’s the symbolism of rounding the immigrants up and “processing” them at the National Cattle Congress grounds in Iowa.
But this really takes the cake. How can it be that 270 immigrants were raided, arrested, prosecuted in a makeshift federal court (on the Cattle grounds, naturally), and sentenced to five months in federal prison…all in a 12 day period?
Amanda Marcotte, please cease and desist.
Will someone please just direct Amanda Marcotte to a Cultural Sensitivity 101 class? After a couple of very recent fiascos on the WOC/feminist blogosphere, you’d think the woman would think twice before writing about anything having to do with people of color, no?
Earlier this week, Marcotte published an article titled Birth Control “Options:” Like Tex-Mex?
Sexual abuse at Agriprocessors
Following the biggest immigration raid in U.S. history, reports of sexual abuse and propositioning are starting to emerge from workers at the Agriprocessors plant.
If a worker wanted, say, a promotion or a shift change, “they’d be brought into a room with three or four men and it was like, ‘Which one do you want? Which one are you going to serve? ” McCauley said Monday in an interview with Des Moines Register editors and reporters.
“Unfortunately, they are grateful for some of their ESL classes, and they knew what some of those words meant,” she said. “If they had the courage, they could refuse it.”
I wish I could say otherwise, but is it really all that surprising that women in a precarious legal position were being manipulated by their superiors?
Orgasm mouths
I’m so sick of them.
I watched One Missed Call on dvd last night (even though I knew it would be unforgiveably wretched, and it was). On top of the horrible acting, lame plot, played out special effects, and awful script, I think the last straw for me was the orgasm mouth dvd cover:
