Do you think we have time! (Praying For Time)

 

Trust Act Signed In California To Limit Deportation Program

Maria del Carmen Sánchez, 45, knows the fear of getting slapped with an ICE hold.

Police arrested her last year after a minor traffic accident. Sánchez, who speaks limited English, says she was driving her neighbor to jury duty. But based on statements from English-speaking witnesses, police suspected that a man had been driving the car instead. When her son tried to bail her out of jail, he found that ICE had requested local authorities to keep her detained because she is undocumented.

“It was a really bad experience,” Sánchez told HuffPost in Spanish. “My kids suffered. I suffered. That was my fear, that they would separate me from my children. I kept thinking, ‘What’s going to happen?’ They need me. I need them.”

The City of Torrance, in California, dropped the criminal charges against Sánchez in September. But she remains in deportation proceedings.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/05/trust-act-signed_n_4050168.html

 

NYPD DESIGNATES MOSQUES AS TERRORISM ORGANIZATIONS

Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.

The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorist organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/nypd-designates-mosques-terrorism-organizations

 

A Vandalized Valley

A couple now in their early 90s lives about three miles away from me on their small farm. I have known them for 50 years; he went to high school with my mother, and she was my Cub Scout leader. They now live alone and have recently been robbed nine, yes, nine, times. He told me he is thinking of putting a sign out at the entrance to his driveway: “Go away! Nothing left! You’ve already taken everything we have.” Would their robbers appreciate someone else doing that to their own grandparents? Do the vandals have locks on their own doors against other vandals?

via The Project To Restore America.

 

FEMA Seeking Subcontractors to Provide “Temporary Camp Services”

For the better part of two decades FEMA detention camps were believed to be a figment of tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists. As more information over the years has been made available through alternative news researchers like Alex Jones in his full length documentary Police State 4 and former governor Jesse Venutra’s FEMA camp exposé, it is becoming increasingly clear that the government has been taking steps for quite some time to ensure a rapid and effective response in the event of a national disaster or U.S. military deployment on American soil.

As many of our readers know, the U.S. Senate recently passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which, it has been argued, authorizes the establishment of domestic war zones and the subsequent detention of those who are suspected of engaging in terrorist-related activity – including, arguably, U.S. citizens. What you may not know, however, is that just days after the passage of the act reports are surfacing that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security, is requisitioning private contractors to provide services for government, defense & infrastructure pertaining specifically to FEMA activities with respect to emergency services.

via FEMA Seeking Subcontractors to Provide “Temporary Camp Services”.

 

Mercedes Targeted as Luxury Cars Burned in Germany

Berlin resident Renate Langanke woke up shortly after midnight to a loud explosion. When the pensioner peeked out her window, she saw flames billowing from two Mercedes-Benz brand cars parked across the street.

“Fire and smoke were everywhere, you could smell burned rubber, it was awful,” said Langanke, who lives in a sleepy area with tree-lined alleys in white-collar western Berlin. “I’ve always felt safe here, now I’m scared.”

Arsonists have set fire to 26 cars in the German capital in the last two days, mainly from Daimler AG (DAI)’s Mercedes, Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW) and Volkswagen AG (VOW)’s Audi, police said today. That brings the total number torched this year in Berlin to at least 138, more than double the figure for all of 2010.

via Mercedes Targeted as Luxury Cars Burned in German Globalization Protests – Bloomberg.

 

Population Bomb.

World population will reach 7 billion this year, prompting new concerns about whether the world will soon face a major population crisis.

pakistani family celebrating world population day July 10, 2011

“In spite of 50 years of the fastest population growth on record, the world did remarkably well in producing enough food and reducing poverty,” said University of Michigan economist David Lam, in his presidential address at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America.

Lam is a professor of economics and a research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research. The talk is titled “How the World Survived the Population Bomb: Lessons from 50 Years of Exceptional Demographic History.”

In 1968, when Paul Ehrlich’s book, “The Population Bomb,” triggered alarm about the impact of a rapidly growing world population, growth rates were about 2 percent and world population doubled in the 39 years between 1960 and 1999.

According to Lam, that is something that never happened before and will never happen again.

“There is virtually no question that world population growth rates will continue to decline,” said Lam. “The rate is only as high as it is because of population momentum, with many women of childbearing ages in developing countries because of rapid population growth in earlier decades.”

Lam discussed a variety of factors that have worked together to reduce the impact of population increases. Among the economic forces, he cited the green revolution, started by Nobel prize-winner Norman Borlaug, that increased per capita world food production by 41 percent between 1960 and 2009.

“We’ve been through periods of absolutely unprecedented growth rates, and yet food production increased even faster than population and poverty rates fell substantially,” he said.

The capacity of cities to absorb the growth in world population is another major reason that the world was able to double its population in the last 40 years without triggering mass starvation or increased poverty, Lam told the group. Along with urbanization, Lam pointed to the impact of continued declines in fertility and rising investments in the education and well-being of children.

Work Lam did in Brazil with ISR social demographer Leticia Marteleto shows a mean increase of 4.3 years of schooling among 16-17-year-olds from 1960 to 2000.

“This increase clearly involves more than just reductions in family size,” Lam said. “For example, children with 10 siblings in 2000 have more schooling than children with one sibling in 1960.

“There is no Norman Borlaug of education to explain how schooling improved so much in developing countries during a period in which the school-age population was often growing at 3 percent or 4 percent a year. This is one of the accomplishments of the last 50 years that deserves to be noted and marveled about.”

In conclusion, Lam told the group, “The challenges we face are staggering. But they’re really nothing compared to the challenges we faced in the 1960s.”

 

Olivia Lum Of Hyflux Named World Entrepreneur Of The Year 2011

Last week, a woman who grew up without running water at home beat forty-nine other finalists to become the first female winner of the Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur Of The Year 2011 award. The woman was Olivia Lum, who won recognition for her Singapore-based water-treatment company, Hyflux.

“Hunger is the handmaid of genius,” wrote a near-bankrupt Mark Twain more than 100 years ago. Olivia Lum, the 49-year-old founder of Singapore filtration firm Hyflux knows all about that.

Now worth $330m (according to Forbes), Lum grew up in a palm-leaf hut with no running water in a Malaysian village near Singapore. Abandoned at birth, she was one of five orphans raised by an impoverished elderly woman called ‘grandmother’.

via Olivia Lum Of Hyflux Named World Entrepreneur Of The Year 2011.

 

iKidney

A 17-year-old student in Anhui Province sold one of his kidneys for 20,000 yuan only to buy an iPad 2. Now, with his health getting worse, the boy is feeling regret but it is too late, the Global Times reported today.

“I wanted to buy an iPad 2 but could not afford it,” said the boy surnamed Zheng in Huaishan City. “A broker contacted me on the Internet and said he could help me sell one kidney for 20,000 yuan.”

via iKidney… | zero hedge.

 

Is Three Cups of Tea Writer Greg Mortenson a Fraud

A bombshell 60 Minutes report has left the writer’s Three Cups of Tea memoir—which earned him millions and made him a humanitarian folk hero—in tatters. 

When 60 Minutes was finished with superstar philanthropist and U.S. military adviser Greg Mortenson on Sunday night, the author of Three Cups of Tea—a 2006 bestselling memoir of adventures and good works in Afghanistan and Pakistan—was in a million little pieces.

Notably false, Kroft reported, were Mortenson’s heartwarming tale of how the simple mountain villagers in Korphe, Pakistan, saved his life after he got lost during a perilous descent of K2, the world’s second highest peak; how he repaid their kindness by returning to build them a school; and how he was subsequently kidnapped for eight days by the Taliban.

“It’s a beautiful story, and it’s a lie,” best-selling author Jon Krakauer, a former friend and financial supporter of Mortenson’s, told 60 Minutes, which offered strong evidence that Mortenson was never lost or separated from fellow mountain climbers during his 1993 descent, that he never visited or even heard of Korphe until a year afterward, and that the men he identified as Taliban kidnappers were actually his tour guides.

via Is Three Cups of Tea Writer Greg Mortenson a Fraud? – Yahoo! News.