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Saturday, March 11, 2006 |
USNewswire: "In a historic and strongly worded decision by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) the United States was urged to 'freeze', 'desist' and 'stop' actions being taken or threatened to be taken against the Western Shoshone Peoples of the Western Shoshone Nation.
This monumental action challenges the US government's assertion of federal ownership of nearly 90 percent of Western Shoshone lands. The land base covers approximately 60 million acres, stretching across what is now referred to as the states of Nevada, Idaho, Utah and California.
Western Shoshone rights to the land - which they continue to use, care for, and occupy today - were recognized by the United States in 1863 by the Treaty of Ruby Valley. The U.S. now claims these same lands as 'public' or federal lands through an agency process and has denied Western Shoshone fair access to U.S. courts through that same process. The land base has been and continues to be used by the United States for military testing, open pit cyanide heap leach gold mining and nuclear waste disposal planning. The U.S. has engaged in military style seizures of Shoshone livestock, trespass fines in the millions of dollars and ongoing armed surveillance of Western Shoshone who continue to assert their original and treaty rights."
SFGate: "The House approved a bill Wednesday night that would wipe out state laws on safety labeling of food, overriding tough rules passed by California voters two decades ago that require food producers to warn consumers about cancer-causing ingredients."
CommonDreams: "Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich, Ranking Member of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, today, introduced a rarely used Congressional procedure called a Resolution of Inquiry to demand documents from the Administration about the security review of the port deal that would have allowed a United Arab Emirates (UAE) company to take control of six US ports.
'The port deal is not dead,' stated Kucinich. 'Much as they would like to, Congress must not allow this Administration to sweep this under the rug. Congress must fulfill its Constitutional duty and provide aggressive oversight of this ill-advised and misguided deal. Congress must continue to investigate this deal to ensure similar deals, which put the security of our nation at grave risk, can not happen again.'"
"Through the power of information and boycott, Consumers For Peace offers you a non-violent way, every day, to act on behalf of justice and peace. Our focus is the Iraq War.
ExxonMobil has been selected for boycott because of its apparent active involvement in U.S. policy in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular, and its power to help change these policies.
Campbell Soup, Carlson Companies (Radisson Hotels, TGI Friday's), Corning Inc., Metlife, Novartis, Pfizer, Verizon, Wells Fargo and Wyeth are also selected for boycott because these firms can influence ExxonMobil through board members they share in common with ExxonMobil."
VHeadline: "A Pomona College professor who is an outspoken critic of US policy in Venezuela has been questioned by two agents from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in what he calls an act of intimidation."
Why data-mining won't stop terror: "All data-mining systems fail in two different ways: false positives and false negatives. A false positive is when the system identifies a terrorist plot that really isn't one. A false negative is when the system misses an actual terrorist plot. Depending on how you 'tune' your detection algorithms, you can err on one side or the other: you can increase the number of false positives to ensure you are less likely to miss an actual terrorist plot, or you can reduce the number of false positives at the expense of missing terrorist plots.
Assume 1 trillion possible indicators to sift through: that's about 10 events - e-mails, phone calls, purchases, web destinations, whatever - per person in the United States per day. Also assume that 10 of them are actually terrorists plotting.
This unrealistically accurate system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month."
Sunshine week: March 12-18 - for an open government.
1:25:56 PM 
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Guardian: "NHS hospitals are having to repair the damage done during botched operations on people who have been sent to private centres for hip and knee replacements to cut waiting lists, it is revealed today.
Independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs) have been set up around the country using mainly surgeons from overseas to take the pressure off major NHS hospitals by fast-tracking the easiest cases."
12:55:03 PM
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