From pat_wobbly at hotmail.com Sun Dec 1 18:02:23 2002 From: pat_wobbly at hotmail.com (Pat S) Date: Sun, 01 Dec 2002 18:02:23 -0800 Subject: [news] Officer refuses to arrest homeless man, suspended Message-ID: Police officer refuses to arrest homeless man, and is suspended http://www.sunspot.net/news/nationworld/bal-te.cop30nov30,0,1022281.story?coll=bal%2Dnationworld%2Dheadlines NEW YORK - Amid growing complaints that the New York Police Department is singling out homeless people in anti-crime sweeps, police officials have suspended an officer who refused orders to lock up a homeless man sleeping in a private Manhattan garage. Officer Eduardo Delacruz was taken off the force for 30 days after telling superiors he would not participate in the arrest of Stephen Neil, 44. The man had refused a request to immediately move or report to a shelter. Delacruz, who was part of the department's Homeless Outreach Unit, had reportedly told other officers earlier that he would not take homeless people into custody. According to a police report, he reiterated that position when other officers began to arrest Neil during the Nov. 22 incident, saying: "I told you before, I'm not going to do it. I won't arrest an undomiciled person." The suspended police officer stood by his actions yesterday, telling the New York Post that his refusal was a matter of principle that "means a lot to a lot of people." He refused to comment further about his suspension. The controversy underscored a growing debate over the way the NYPD monitors homeless people. Although precise figures are not available, police officials say that the number of homeless arrests for a variety of infractions is increasing, mainly because there have been more encounters between officers and street people. Advocacy groups called the suspension heartless, and Patrick Markee, spokesman for the Coalition for the Homeless, said Delacruz should be applauded for his sensitivity. Other groups are trying to end what they call a deliberate practice of arresting more homeless people. Josh Getlin is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper. _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail From bella_donna_36 at yahoo.com Sun Dec 1 11:55:39 2002 From: bella_donna_36 at yahoo.com (Bella) Date: Sun, 1 Dec 2002 11:55:39 -0800 (PST) Subject: [news] PRESS RELEASE: Class Action Lawsuit against Bid Corp & ICBC Message-ID: <20021201195539.65029.qmail@web80311.mail.yahoo.com> For those of you with IndyMedia contacts, spread the word. No Gamers with the IOC email contact list, please distribute! Nov. 30th, 2002 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Class Action Lawsuit launched against the 2010 Vancouver-Whistler Olympic Bid Corporation (Bid Corp.) and Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) for illegal financial transaction. Writ of Summons and Statement of Claim will be filed at 9am, Mon., Dec. 2nd, 2002 at the Supreme Court of British Columbia, in Vancouver. PRESS CONFERENCE WITH THE PLAINTIFFS: 9am, Mon., Dec. 2nd in the lobby of CKNW AM Radio Station, #2000-700 West Georgia St., Vancouver. THE CLAIMS OF THE LAWSUIT INCLUDE: - ICBC paid to the 2010 Bid Corporation the sum of $1.8 million, on or about Jan. 1, 2001. - The payment by ICBC to the Bid Corp. is outside the powers granted to ICBC by the Insurance Corporation Act and is thus an illegal transaction. - The directors of the Bid Corp. knew or ought to have known that the transaction was illegal and that they were participating in an illegal activity. THE PLAINTIFFS? DEMAND: - That ICBC take steps to recover the $1.8 million plus interest on behalf of its rate-payers/shareholders, the citizens of BC. - That the Bid Corp. repay this sum to ICBC immediately. BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND FUTURE ACTIONS: These financial dealings follow previous revelations of back room negotiations with various First Nations and municipal organizations for land, resource and financial considerations in return for support for the Bid. Crown Corporations including BC Hydro, BC Lotteries, Canada Post and any others that have made similar contributions to the Bid Corp. may be the subjects of additional class action lawsuits brought on behalf of the people of BC. FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT: Lawrence Pierce, Pierce Law Group (604) 681-4434 Plaintiffs: Charles Gould (604) 329-8378 (cell) Christopher Shaw (604) 924-1467 (h) (604) 875-4111 x 68373 (w) ===== talk-action=nothing __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo! http://sbc.yahoo.com From ron at resist.ca Tue Dec 10 17:40:16 2002 From: ron at resist.ca (ron) Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 17:40:16 -0800 (PST) Subject: [news] G8 death sparked bomb protest Message-ID: G8 death sparked bomb protest GENOA, Italy --A little-known group calling itself "July 20th" has claimed responsibility for two bombs that detonated in Genoa saying it was in response to the death of a protester during an anti-globalisation demonstration. The group made its claim on Tuesday in a series of letters to police and local newspapers. Monday's attack was "a first response against the material executioners of Carlo Giuliani's assassination," the letter said, The Associated Press reported. AP added that "July 20th" were also protesting against "the torture and systematic violence perpetuated in the streets and police barracks in a vain attempt to repress the people's response against the G-8 summit." Giuliani was shot on July 20, 2001 while demonstrating against the G8 summit which was being held in Genoa. Italian news agencies quoted Genoa's police chief, Oscar Fioriolli, as saying the group's claim appeared credible. The homemade devices exploded outside Genoa police headquarters in the early hours of Monday morning. The blasts smashed shutters and windows up to the fifth floor of the building, but caused no injuries, police said. One device exploded shortly before 4 a.m. (0300 GMT) in a public garden near the headquarters. The other bomb went off nearby 10 minutes later, just as police were arriving to investigate the first explosion, police said. It is believed the group derives its name from the date in 2001 when Giuliani was shot dead by police. As well as Giuliani's death, tensions during the summit were aggravated when police raided a school where many of the demonstrators were sleeping. Last week, prosecutors investigating the killing of Giuliani, 23, ruled that the officer who fired the fatal bullet had acted in self-defence and should not be charged. The controversial decision coincided with a magistrate ordering nine anti-globalisation activists be held in jail while investigations continue into their alleged role in the riots. In July this year, on the first anniversary of his death, tens of thousands of people gathered in the city in honour of Giuliani. (Full story) Copies of the "July 20th" letter were sent from postboxes close to Genoa's main Brignole station, said Antonio Di Rosa, the editor-in-chief of local daily Il Secolo XIX. The letters described what the group said were the contents of the explosive devices -- dynamite in a metal container, ball bearings, bolts, black powder. From ron at resist.ca Mon Dec 16 16:17:28 2002 From: ron at resist.ca (ron) Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002 16:17:28 -0800 (PST) Subject: [news] Canadians to lead weapons inspection team into USA Message-ID: Toronto November 21, 2002 Canadians to lead weapons inspection team into USA A coalition of Canadian peace groups today announced their intention to send an international team of volunteer weapons inspectors into the United States later this winter. The coalition, Rooting Out Evil, are recruitinginspectors through their newly launched website, www.rootingoutevil.org."Our action has been inspired by none other than George W. Bush," said Christy Ferguson, a spokesperson for the group. "The Bush administration has repeatedly declared that themost dangerous rogue nations are those that: 1) have massive stockpiles of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons; 2) ignore due process at the United Nations; 3) refuse to sign and honour international treaties; and 4) have come to power through illegitimate means. "On the basis of President Bush's guidelines, it is clear that the current U.S. administration poses a great threat to global security," said Ferguson. "We're following Bush's lead and demanding that the U.S. grant our inspectors immediate and unfettered access to any site in the country - including all presidential compounds - so that we canidentify the weapons of mass destruction in this rogue state," added David Langille. Visitors to Rooting Out Evil's website are invited to sign on as honorary members of the weapons inspection team. Honorary inspectors can participate in the action, or they can simply lend the support of their name as they would on a petition. The actual inspection team that crosses the border will be comprised of prominent individuals from Canada and other countries. The Rooting Out Evil coalition includes Greenpeace Canada, the Centre for Social Justice, and the Toronto Committee Against War and Sanctions on Iraq, and is supported by American groups such as the National Network to End the War Against Iraq, Global Exchange and the US section of theWomen's International League for Peace and Freedom. They oppose the development, storage, and use of weapons of mass destruction by any state. -30- For information: David Langille or Christy Ferguson info at rootingoutevil.org Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada Phone (306) 664-6071 From pat_wobbly at hotmail.com Thu Dec 19 12:30:03 2002 From: pat_wobbly at hotmail.com (Pat S) Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 12:30:03 -0800 Subject: [news] Mass arrest of Muslims in LA Message-ID: Mass arrests of Muslims in LA http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2589317.stm US immigration officials in Southern California have detained hundreds of Iranians and other Muslim men who turned up to register under residence laws brought in as part of the anti-terror drive. Reports say between 500 and 700 men were arrested in and around Los Angeles after they complied with an order to register by 16 December. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is refusing to say how many people were arrested but said detainees were being held for suspected visa violations and other offences. The arrests sparked angry protests in Los Angeles by thousands of Iranian-Americans waving banners which read "What's next? Concentration camps?" and "Free our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons". Official radio in Iran also reported the arrests and the protests, which it said were mounted by families of the detainees who converged on Los Angeles. Deadline Under the new US immigration rules, all male immigrants aged 16 and over from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria had to register with authorities by Monday unless they had been naturalised as citizens. Immigrants from other mainly Muslim states have been set later deadlines for registration. Community groups said men had been arrested in Los Angeles and nearby Orange County as well as San Diego. California is home to about 600,000 Iranians who have been living in exile since the 1979 Islamic revolution. One of the Iranian-American demonstrators in Los Angeles, Ali Bozorgmehr, told the French news agency AFP that his community was being targeted unjustly. "All Iranians that live in America are hard-working people... They love this country and all... are against terrorism," he said. 'Shocking' Ramona Ripston, executive director of the Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the arrests were reminiscent of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. "I think it is shocking what is happening," she said. "We are getting a lot of telephone calls from people. We are hearing that people went down wanting to co-operate and then they were detained." Islamic community leaders said many detainees had been living, working and paying taxes in the US for up to a decade and had families there. "Terrorists most likely wouldn't come to the INS to register," said Sabiha Khan of the Southern California chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations. She said the detainees were "being treated as criminals, and that really goes against American ideals of fairness, and justice and democracy". _________________________________________________________________ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail From pat_wobbly at hotmail.com Thu Dec 19 12:24:51 2002 From: pat_wobbly at hotmail.com (Pat S) Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 12:24:51 -0800 Subject: [news] Nestle Corp seeks $6m in compensation from famine-stricken Ethiopia Message-ID: Nestle insists on Ethiopia refund http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2589745.stm The Swiss-based food giant, Nestle, has defended its demand for $6m in compensation from famine-stricken Ethiopia. The dispute with the Ethiopian Government centres on a livestock firm that was owned by Germany's Schweisfurth Group, a Nestle subsidiary, before being nationalised by the former communist regime in 1975. "I think it goes way beyond the legal case," a Nestle spokesman told the BBC. "I think it is in the interest of the developing countries in general to have a continued flow of foreign direct investment." He said it was "very important for a country like Ethiopia that people do not fear to invest in that country". More than 40 governments and individuals are making claims against the Ethiopian Government for money lost during the communist regime. According to poverty relief organisation Oxfam, the Ethiopian Government has offered to pay Nestle about $1.5m (?930,000) - a figure based on the current exchange rate between the dollar and the Ethiopian birr. But the food giant is pushing for a payment of $6m, a sum based on the exchange rate in force at the time of the nationalisation. Claim condemned Oxfam has condemned Nestle's stance, saying there is no justification for diverting Ethiopian Government money to a multinational which made profits of about $3.9bn (?2.4bn) in the first six months of this year. "This is a company that has said publicly that one of the things it wants to do in the world is to help make poor people better off. This is a company that is trying to squeeze out of one of the poorest countries in the world $6m," said Oxfam's director of policy in the UK, Justin Forsyth. Famine fear Ethiopia, with average gross domestic product per person of just $100 a year, faces the prospect of its most serious famine since 1984 after drought caused widespread crop failures earlier this year. "The disaster we had in 1984 to1995 - the number of people involved was roughly a third to one half of the number of people involved now. So if that was a nightmare this will be too ghastly to contemplate," the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi recently told the BBC. Government revenues have been seriously depleted by a slump in the world price of coffee, the country's principal export. The World Bank's investment arm is taking part in negotiations between Nestle and the Ethiopian officials. "This $1m in our opinion is justifiable. But this is not the point of view of Nestle. They are trying to get as much as they can," said a World Bank spokesman. Nestle - Good Food Good Life (The World's Food Company) http://www.nestle.com/ _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail From ron at resist.ca Fri Dec 20 16:20:33 2002 From: ron at resist.ca (ron) Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 16:20:33 -0800 (PST) Subject: [news] U.S. Corporations, Gov't Agencies and Nuclear Labs Helped Illegally Arm Iraq Message-ID: http://www.democracynow.org/Zumach.htm Top-secret Iraq Report Reveals U.S. Corporations, Gov't Agencies and Nuclear Labs Helped Illegally Arm Iraq Hewlett Packard, Dupont, Honeywell and other major U.S. corporations, as well as governmental agencies including the Department of Defense and thenation?s nuclear labs, all illegally helped Iraq to build its biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs. On Wednesday, December 18, Geneva-based reporter Andreas Zumach broke the story on the US national listener-sponsored radio and television show ?Democracy Now!? Zumach?s Berlin-based paper Die Tageszeitung plans to soon publish a full list of companies and nations who have aided Iraq. The paper first reported on Tuesday that German and U.S. companies had extensive ties to Iraq but didn?t list names. Zumach obtained top-secret portions of Iraq?s 12,000-page weapons declaration that the US had redacted from the version made available to the non-permanent members of the UN Security Council. ?We have 24 major U.S. companies listed in the report who gave very substantial support especially to the biological weapons program but also to the missile and nuclear weapons program,? Zumach said. ?Pretty much everything was illegal in the case of nuclear and biological weapons. Every form of cooperation and supplies was outlawed in the 1970s.? The list of U.S. corporations listed in Iraq's report include Hewlett Packard, DuPont, Honeywell, Rockwell, Tectronics, Bechtel, International Computer Systems, Unisys, Sperry and TI Coating. Zumach also said the U.S. Departments of Energy, Defense, Commerce, and Agriculture quietly helped arm Iraq. U.S. government nuclear weapons laboratories Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia trained traveling Iraqi nuclear scientists and gave non-fissile material for construction of a nuclear bomb. ?There has never been this kind of comprehensive layout and listing like we have now in the Iraqi report to the Security Council so this is quite new and this is especially new for the U.S. involvement, which has been even more suppressed in the public domain and the U.S. population,? Zumach said. The names of companies were supposed to be top secret. Two weeks ago Iraq provided two copies of its full 12,000-page report, one to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Geneva, and one to the United Nations in New York. Zumach said the U.S. broke an agreement of the Security Council and blackmailed Colombia, which at the time was presiding over the Council, to take possession of the UN?s only copy. The U.S. then proceeded to make copies of the report for the other four permanent Security Council nations, Britain, France, Russia and China. Only yesterday did the remaining members of the Security Council receive their copies. By then, all references to foreign companies had been removed. According to Zumach, only Germany had more business ties to Iraq than the U.S. As many as 80 German companies are also listed in Iraq?s report. The paper reported that some German companies continued to do business with Iraq until last year. http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20021219.html TOP SECRET IRAQ WEAPONS REPORT SAYS THE U.S. GOVERNMENT & CORPORATIONS HELPED TO ILLEGALLY ARM IRAQ, PART TWO Hewlett-Packard, Dupont, Eastman Kodak, Honeywell, Bechtel, American Type Culture Collection, Spectra Physics, Semetex, TI Coating, Unisys, Sperry Corp., Tektronix, Rockwell, Leybold Vacuum Systems, Finnigan-MAT-US, Alcolac International, Consarc, Carl Zeiss - U.S., Cerberus, Electronic Associates, International Computer Systems, , EZ Logic Data Systems, Inc., Canberra Industries Inc., Axel Electronics Inc. These 24 U.S. corporations all illegally helped Iraq, according to the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung, which published the list today. The report is based on top-secret portions of the Iraq weapons document received by the paper's Geneva correspondent Andreas Zumach. Iraq's report also implicates the U.S. Departments of Energy, Defense, Commerce, and Agriculture and U.S. government nuclear weapons laboratories Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia. Zumach also revealed today that Iraq's report indicates two permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Russia and China, continue to this day to arm Iraq. The names of the companies were supposed to be top secret. Two weeks ago Iraq provided two copies of its full 12,000-page report, one to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Geneva, and one to the United Nations in New York. Zumach said the U.S. broke an agreement of the Security Council and blackmailed Colombia, which at the time was presiding over the Council, to take possession of the UN's only copy. The U.S. then proceeded to make copies of the report for the other four permanent Security Council nations, Britain, France, Russia and China. Only Tuesday did the remaining members of the Security Council receive their copies. By then, all references to foreign companies had been removed. Guest: Andreas Zumach, Geneva-based UN correspondent with the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung who obtained an unedited copy of Iraq's 12,000 page report to the United Nations. The report reveals how German and U.S. corporations helped build Iraq's weapons program. From pat_wobbly at hotmail.com Wed Dec 25 16:10:41 2002 From: pat_wobbly at hotmail.com (Pat S) Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2002 16:10:41 -0800 Subject: [news] The Fellowship of the Ring of Free Trade Message-ID: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring of Free Trade http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/12/1553281.php Now, for the first time ever, the hidden prophecies of J.R.R. Tolkien's classic epic, The Lord of the Rings, are decoded in this accurate re-edit of Peter Jackson's blockbuster motion picture. Unknownst to many readers, The Lord of the Rings - once thought to be merely a story of archetypal struggle between good and evil - has been found to contain astute prophetic messages about the impending crisis of capitalist modernity. Numerous scholars and linguists have already deciphered the main theme of The Lord of the Rings as being the freedom of ordinary people to be left alone from the ruling elites. However, Tolkien's hidden messages about the disasters of capitalism and the insightful predictions about the current political climate have not been made public until now. The Fellowship of the Ring of Free Trade includes subtitles of the decoded dialogues in painstaking detail and the true identities that the story's characters represent within the prophecy. Hado i philinn! "Mordor is in our midst." - J.R.R. Tolkien _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. 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