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Pastimes : Giving Up on the regular media, Where do you get your NEWS? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (40)	3/3/2002 4:03:14 PM
From: Tadsamillionaire	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 150

Rumble from the Jungle This is a great link counterpunch.org "Imagine that scene for a moment--you are an Ecuadorian farmer, and suddenly, without notice or warning, a large helicopter approaches, and the frightening noise of the chopper blades invades the quiet. The helicopter comes closer, and sprays a toxic poison on you, your children, your livestock and your food crops. You see your children get sick, your crops die." These are the words of Bishop Jesse de Witt, president of the International Labor Rights Fund, in a letter to Paul V. Lombardi, CEO of DynCorp. DeWitt's organization has filed suit in US federal court on behalf of 10,000 Ecuadorian peasant farmers and Amazonian Indians charging Lombardi's company with torture, infanticide and wrongful death for its role in the aerial spraying of highly toxic pesticides in the Amazonian jungle, along the border of Ecuador and Colombia. DynCorp's chances of squirming out the suit were dealt a crushing blow in January when federal judge Richard Roberts denied the company's motion to dismiss the case on grounds that their work in Colombia involved matters of national security

To: Ilaine who wrote (40)	8/13/2002 7:20:37 PM
From: Tadsamillionaire	Respond to of 150

Before we begin today's lesson on how to keep from being sued by criminals, I want you to put down the newspaper and rush outside to your automobile. Insert the keys in the ignition, make sure the doors are unlocked and the windows are open. Then leave it. As you may have heard by now, the families of Mexican migrants who died in the Arizona desert while illegally entering the United States have filed a $41.25 million wrongful-death claim against the government. Attorneys argue that American taxpayers are liable for allegedly not allowing do-gooders to set up water drops for border crossers. If sharp lawyers can put the government on the hook for not adequately protecting someone who's breaking the law, how long will it take them to get the rest of us? At least now you're protected from lawsuits filed by car thieves. Or is your automobile still locked? Imagine the size of the legal obligation you could face if a sliver of glass lodges in the eye of a crook because he is forced to smash the driver's side window of your car in order to gain entry. Or what if he receives a mild electric shock while trying to hot-wire the vehicle because you cruelly and intentionally brought the car keys into the house with you? And what about the potential liabilities in your home? Unlock the doors and unlatch the windows immediately. And be sure to switch on all the lights when you go to bed tonight. The last thing you need is to have a burglar stubbing his toe on a piece of furniture or slipping on a toy car left carelessly on the floor by one of your children. In order to protect yourself against legal action by miscreants, you should also leave in plain view a heavy-duty dolly with carpeted end rails to assist thieves in removing your TV and stereo without wrenching their backs or scratching the merchandise. Business owners will be forced to make changes as well. I'd guess that convenience stores, banks and retail outlets will remove their surveillance systems after Winona Ryder's lawyers file a whopping lawsuit against the Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. The claim will not be aimed at the store's accusation of shoplifting, but instead will rebuke Saks for secretly taking pictures of a movie star on a bad hair day, thus violating her privacy, interfering with her ability to earn a living and intentionally inflicting emotional distress. Ordinary citizens might also shave a few feet from the walls surrounding their homes in order to prevent prowlers from spraining ankles while leaping over. They also should keep guard dogs out of yards in order to thwart claims of vision damage by Peeping Toms forced to gaze through windows from a distance. Perhaps the families of hijackers will choose to sue the government and the airlines for not providing their loved ones with parachutes. Or maybe the family of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was sentenced Friday to life in prison without parole for spying for the Soviet Union and Russia, will sue the government for creating a hostile work environment when members of Hanssen's own agency arrested him for peddling top-secret information to a foreign country. We at the newspaper aren't immune to any of this, of course. If the border-crosser lawsuit succeeds, we'll most likely start handing out a free pair of gloves with each copy of The Republic, even those illegally lifted from coin-operated dispensing machines. The last thing needed by an operation this size is the daily potential of 500,000 lawsuits involving paper cuts. arizonarepublic.com

To: Ilaine who wrote (40)	4/12/2003 1:48:19 PM
From: Tadsamillionaire	Respond to of 150

Alarming facts about secret police, abductions, beatings, dismemberment and assassinations under the Iraqi dictator were not reported to the public, Mr. Jordan wrote, "because doing so would have jeopardized Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff." "I felt awful having those stories bottled up inside me," Mr. Jordan wrote in an editorial titled "The News We Kept to Ourselves" published yesterday in The New York Times. "At last these stories can be told freely." In an interview with The Washington Times, Mr. Jordan stood by his decision yesterday, saying he felt "relieved" and was "absolutely sure I did the right thing holding these stories." CNN coverage, he said, had already offered evidence of "the brutality in Iraq," and the move was not intended to "preserve CNN's presence in Iraq." "We've already been thrown out of Iraq several times. And we are proud we've been thrown out," he said. CNN correspondents were expelled from Baghdad last month. Some are baffled by it all. "I was stunned by that op-ed," Fox News Channel and ABC radio host Sean Hannity told The Times yesterday. "Doesn't CNN have a journalistic obligation to report these kind of details, or to make their reporters aware of them? You can bet if CNN made discoveries about, say, a conservative administration, they would share them." The editorial "sounds like a confession more than anything," Mr. Hannity said. "And I found it hypocritical." Rich Noyes, director of research at the conservative Media Research Center, said that "Jordan now admits that CNN kept many of Saddam's secrets. "Have other networks also censored their own tales of Saddam's evil?" he asked. "If accurate reporting from Iraq was impossible, why was access to this dictatorship so important in the first place? And what truths about the thugs who run other totalitarian states — like North Korea, Cuba and Syria — are fearful and/or access-hungry reporters hiding from the American public?" Mr. Noyes said. But Mr. Jordan had more dramatic revelations to justify his decision. In companion pieces telecast on CNN yesterday, he said: "There were people in Iraq who believed that CNN was effectively the CIA." Saddam's regime had accused CNN reporters of working for the CIA and Israel, Mr. Jordan said, and planned to attack them in northern Iraq last month. The plot was discovered by Kurdish police, who arrested two Iraqi intelligence agents. CNN obtained their videotaped confessions. Meanwhile, an Iraqi official told Mr. Jordan that "the severest possible consequences" awaited CNN correspondents and that the network's presence in the region "was a violation of Iraqi sovereignty." According to Mr. Jordan, officials warned other news organizations that anyone caught helping CNN cover the war in Iraq would be jailed. Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism supports Mr. Jordan's decision, and described him as "obviously tortured" yesterday. "He wrote an extraordinary and sensible essay," Mr. Rosenstiel said. "He was weighing out his journalistic responsibility and his human responsibility. It's a difficult task, but it comes with the territory of an editor who is responsible for his people — and the news." Fox News media analyst Eric Burns said he "commended" Mr. Jordan, if he had indeed protected innocent people from harm. "But why reveal all this now? Maybe CNN wants to cash in on the current pro-liberation sentiment," Mr. Burns said. "If he had knowledge he couldn't reveal, then I hope that it would at least be reflected in CNN's coverage." Barbara Cochran of the Radio and TV News Directors Association said Mr. Jordan was right not to reveal information that could endanger lives, citing the association's code of ethics, "which addresses balancing the harm you do with the news you present." washtimes.com