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Friday, October 12, 2007 |
BoingBoing: "Interesting story about the Gulfstream II jet filled with 3.7 tons of cocaine that crashed in the Yucatan a couple of weeks ago. According to the Austin American Statesman, this plane has previously flown to Guantanamo Bay, which has a highly restricted airspace:
Some news reports have linked the plane to the transport of terrorist suspects to the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but those reports cite logs that indicate only that the plane flew twice between Washington and Guantánamo and once between Oxford, Conn., and Guantánamo.
The jet, with the tail number N987SA, changed hands twice in recent weeks. But how it ended up in the hands of suspected drug traffickers remains a mystery.
The Mexican attorney general's office said the blue and white Gulfstream II crashed Monday in a remote jungle area on the Yucatán Peninsula. Authorities seized 132 bags of cocaine weighing four tons."
Do read on here.
It looks like the US (CIA?) - as has been proven many times in the past - is involved in illegal drug trafficking, to finance and support their illegal activities abroad.
10:55:14 AM 
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CorpWatch: "'Nobody knows who's actually lobbying on behalf of whom,' says Caroline Lucas, a British Member of the European Parliament (MEP), who came out the official buildings to join the activist protest. 'There's a massive corporate lobby here, but it's secretive and it has access to the Commission in a way that we, as parliamentarians, frankly can only dream of. There is no kind of register - I think it is absolutely crucial. That's the only way to ensure that people have confidence in the system, in the decisions that are made here.'
The system now includes more than 15,000 lobbyists who work in Brussels to aggressively lobby the dozens of major European Union (EU) institutions that control tens of billions of Euros in funding as well decide the strict environmental, labor and financial rules that govern the 27 EU member countries. Some 90 percent of these lobbyists are believed to work on behalf of industry, with civil society groups such as environmentalists and trade unions making up less than ten percent. Together they spend an estimated 750 million Euros ($1 billion) a year to influence the European bureaucrats.
Large and influential as the EU lobbyist industry is, it is dwarfed by its U.S. counterpart. There are some 35,000 registered lobbyists in the United States, who recorded expenditures of $2.61 billion in 2006, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington, DC-based non-profit."
10:48:03 AM
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Colonialism is dead, long live our own national brand of colonialism.
CorpWatch: "More than 416,000 children under the age of 18, of whom almost 225,000 are younger than 14, are involved in child labour in India's cottonseed production. Most of them are girls.
They work in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, which account for nearly 92 per cent of the cottonseed production in the country.
A recent report titled 'Child bondage continues in Indian cotton supply chain' reveals that the total number of working children in cottonfields has risen over 2003-04.
According to the report, more than 13 Indian companies and two multinationals, Monsanto and Bayer, are involved in this modern form of child slavery.
The biggest among the Indian seed companies, Nuziveedu, Raasi, Ankur and Mahyco (a joint venture partner of Monsanto), make use of around 200,000 children who are employed by the farmers to whom they have sub-contracted the cultivation of Bt cotton seeds."
10:43:33 AM
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