Liberal Repercussion

http://villagevoice.com/issues/0411/cotts.php
Press Clips
by Cynthia Cotts
PBS Gets Picky
A Reporter Disses Halliburton, and Newshour Producers Decide His 15 Minutes of Airtime Are Up
March 17 - 23, 2004

posted by Rei Toei @ 8:23 p.m.

Halliburton carried on Iraq, business as usual, no big surprise. They seem to be blissfully unaware of pesky ethical considerations and unabashedly greedy. The bravado of it is sort of breathtaking, albeit folly.



http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/01/24/halliburton_says_employees_got_kickbacks_on_iraq_work/

Halliburton says employees got kickbacks on Iraq work

By Stephen J. Glain, Globe Staff, 1/24/2004

WASHINGTON -- Halliburton Co., hired to redevelop much of Iraq's oil sector, said yesterday it would compensate the federal government for $6.3 million in "improper payments" its former employees allegedly received in exchange for a subcontract awarded to a Kuwaiti firm.

posted by Rei Toei @ 10:50 a.m.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1068965.htm

Chinese blog sites shut down.

China is targeting personal Internet sites known as weblogs in its latest attempt to censor the World Wide Web.

The Paris-based media rights group Reporters Without Borders says the Chinese Government has shut down two sites hosting weblogs for thousands of people.

One of the sites, BlogBus.com, hosted more than 15,000 weblogs that have now been made inaccessible, the group said in a statement.

The site was shut down on March 11, for allowing a letter to be posted that was critical of the Government. The website could not be opened today.

"Due to the fact that the content in some blog user's blog violated regulations, the web server has been temporarily shut," a message on the website said.

"We will try to resolve the problem as quickly as possible."

The other blog hosting site, Blogcn.com, was shut down on March 14. It also remained inaccessible today.

The crackdown comes days after China approved an amendment to its constitution to for the first time say that the state respects and protects human rights.

posted by Rei Toei @ 10:41 a.m.

"Fat Tony" Scalia

http://nytimes.com/2004/03/15/opinion/15MON1.html



When the Sierra Club moved formally for Justice Scalia's recusal, the court properly referred the motion to him initially. The court has a practice of letting individual justices handle their own recusal issues and Chief Justice William Rehnquist and the other justices probably do not relish second-guessing Justice Scalia's personal contacts. But Justice Scalia has had time to do the proper thing, and his eight colleagues now need to render an institutional judgment on the widely expressed concern about his impartiality.

The swelling controversy has exposed other less egregious but still troubling outside activities by Justice Scalia. The Los Angeles Times recently reported that he delivered a speech to a $150-a-plate dinner of an anti-gay advocacy group in Philadelphia even as the Supreme Court was deliberating in the Texas sodomy case last year.

posted by Rei Toei @ 11:06 p.m.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-work14.html


Disposable' Mexicans die at U.S. jobs

March 14, 2004

BY JUSTIN PRITCHARD
Sun Times

The jobs that lure Mexican workers to the United States are killing them in a worsening epidemic that is claiming a victim a day, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Though Mexicans often take the most hazardous jobs, they are more likely than others to be killed even when doing similarly risky work.

The death rates are greatest in several Southern and Western states, where a Mexican worker is four times more likely to die than the average U.S.-born worker.

These accidental deaths are almost always preventable and often gruesome: Workers are impaled, shredded in machinery, buried alive. Some are 15 years old.

For the first such study of Mexican worker deaths in the United States, the AP talked with scores of workers, employers and government officials and analyzed years of federal safety and population statistics.

Among the findings:

*Mexican death rates are rising even as the U.S. workplace grows safer overall. In the mid-1990s, Mexicans were about 30 percent more likely to die than native-born workers; now they are about 80 percent more likely.

*Deaths among Mexicans in the United States increased faster than their population. As the number of Mexican workers grew by about half, from 4 million to 6 million, the number of deaths rose by about two-thirds, from 241 to 387. Deaths peaked at 420 in 2001.

*Though their odds of dying in the Southeast and parts of the West are far greater than the U.S. average, fatalities occur everywhere: Mexicans died cutting North Carolina tobacco and Nebraska beef, felling trees in Colorado and welding a balcony in Florida, trimming grass at a Las Vegas golf course and falling from scaffolding in Georgia.

*Even compared with other immigrants, what's happening to Mexicans is exceptional in scope and scale. Mexicans are nearly twice as likely as the rest of the immigrant population to die at work.

Why is all this happening?

Public safety officials and workers themselves say the answer comes down to this: Mexicans are hired to work cheap, the fewer questions the better.

They may be thrown into jobs without training or safety equipment. Their objections may be silent if they speak no English or are here illegally. And their work culture and Third World safety expectations don't discourage risk-taking.

posted by Rei Toei @ 10:46 p.m.