May
30
2013
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Hollywood actor Danny Glover has made an appearance at a union protest in downtown Johannesburg.
Glover, also a labor rights activist, is in South Africa as part of a trade union delegation from the United States that seeks international support for auto workers in Canton, Mississippi. The workers want to form a union at an auto manufacturing plant operated by Japanese company Nissan in Canton.
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May
30
2013
Protesters rallied in St. Louis, MO on Wednesday over the death of 25-year-old Cary Ball Jr, who was shot 25 times by police officers last month. Police say Ball refused to pull over for a traffic stop, eventually crashed into a parked car, and started running. According to police, Ball pointed a semi-automatic handgun at the officers, prompting them to open fire.
Several witnesses who spoke to the family, however, say Ball threw his gun on …
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May
30
2013
Nine North Korean refugees have been forced to return home after escaping to Laos, drawing protests from human rights groups and concern from the US.
The defectors, the oldest aged 23 and the youngest just 15, were arrested in Laos three weeks ago. They were sent to China on Monday and flown to Pyongyang the following day, reportedly accompanied by at least one North Korean official.
Human Rights Watch accused the Lao and Chinese governments of showing …
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May
30
2013
Hackers from the Anonymous collective claimed to have infiltrated the website for the biotech giant Monsanto, which has been the subject of recent international protests.
The cyber-attack was carried out as part of #OpMonsanto, an attempt to demonstrate against Monsanto’s reach into every aspect of the food industry, from nature to farmers to consumers. The corporation’s main website, Monstanto.com, appeared to have been briefly disabled Wednesday night.
It comes days after over two million people took part …
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May
30
2013
A Florida man has been sentenced to prison after pleading guilty to threatening United States President Barack Obama over Twitter.
Donte Jamar Sims, 22, will serve six months in prison plus one year of supervised release for tweets he published last year. He pleaded guilty to threatening the president’s life last October and was sentenced in a Charlotte, North Carolina courtroom on Wednesday.
Authorities obtained a search warrant for user records pertaining to the Twitter account “DestroyLeague_D” …
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May
30
2013
The Internal Revenue Service, not the most popular government agency to begin with, has been in the midst of a scatological squall for the past 3 weeks over their treatment of tea party groups. According to an agency spokesperson, organizations garnered additional scrutiny of their applications for non-profit status for having “Tea Party, Patriot, or 9/12” in the application materials. Non-profit status is granted by the IRS for “social welfare organizations” and federal law puts …
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May
30
2013
Conservative arguments against immigration reform took another blow yesterday with the release of a new study about immigrant contributions to the federal safety net. According to a new study published in the journal Health Affairs, immigrant communities contribute billions more to the Medicare Trust Fund than they use. And since the opposite is true of the U.S. born, immigrants are paying for everyone’s grandmother’s healthcare. According to the data, this will remain true for …
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May
30
2013
A polio vaccination campaign worker was shot to death in Pakistan on Tuesday, which The New York Times wasted no time in reporting. What the Times article neglected to mention was that the killing followed a CIA operation in which agents orchestrated a fake vaccination program in order to gain entry to Osama Bin Laden’s home. (The plot was based on knowledge that health workers had previously managed to enter Bin Laden’s home to administer …
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May
30
2013
California’s Gold Rush may have ended well over a century and a half ago, but there are new prospectors in town and these suits aren’t toting tattered tents and rusty old pans. Instead the new Golden State pioneers employ geologists and lease expensive extraction equipment. Yet, in many ways it is still the Wild West out here in the land of sun and sea, and many are hoping to strike it rich.
Fracking, or the act …
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May
30
2013
A long-running hunger strike by detainees at Guantánamo has worsened since Barack Obama promised action to close the controversial prison camp in a landmark speech last Thursday.
On the eve of Obama’s address, there were 103 prisoners on hunger strike, with 31 being force-fed by military authorities and one in hospital. Since then, not a single prisoner has stopped their strike, and now 36 of the detainees are being force-fed to keep them alive, with five …
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