Does This Mean We Can't Torture Mother Earth Anymore?

A draft treaty will soon be tabled at the United Nations that will grant "Mother Earth" the same rights as humans :

The bid aims to have the UN recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to "dominate and exploit" — to the point that the "well-being and existence of many beings" is now threatened.

(The treaty) also establishes a Ministry of Mother Earth, and provides the planet with an ombudsman whose job is to hear nature's complaints as voiced by activist and other groups...

..."Mother Earth has the right to exist, to persist and to continue the vital cycles, structures, functions and processes that sustain all human beings."

Canadian activist Maude Barlow is among global environmentalists backing the drive with a book the group will launch in New York during the UN debate: Nature Has Rights.

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Human Trafficking Along U.S./Mexican Border -- 'Startling Pattern of Torture, Rape and Murder'

Posted by The Blaze on March 6, 2011 at 5:49pm by  Meredith Jessup

Brutal crimes crossing over the U.S. southern border from Mexico is the latest dangerous import threatening America’s cities. Growing cases of human trafficking, drug smuggling and violent acts are overwhelming law enforcement officials from Texas to California in scenes reminiscent of the days of organized crime waves orchestrated by professional criminal syndicates.

Is there a “new mafia” in America today?

The Daily:

A brutal new crime wave from Mexico is hitting America’s suburbs. Drug cartels and their heavily armed henchmen are moving into the house next door, torturing and imprisoning victims for profit in middle-class neighborhoods. Law enforcement agencies from Texas to Northern California report being overwhelmed by the surge of violence.

“Mexican drug cartels are in well over 200 cities here in the United States,” Gil Kerlikowske, the White House drug czar, told The Daily. When his boss, President Obama, meets with President Felipe Calderón of Mexico today in Washington, violence from the drug war will be at the top of the agenda.

One of the most disturbing and least discussed aspects of this new crime wave is the “drop houses” — rented homes that function as makeshift prisons where criminal gangs and human smugglers hold large numbers of victims for ransom. The phenomenon is centered in the Southwest, often in foreclosure-devastated suburbs, but is spreading across America.

“What we’re talking about is nightmares, the stuff of nightmares,” said Los Angeles-based special agent Jorge Guzman of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  ”[It’s] playing out in suburban America — playing out all over America.”

 Hundreds of police reports and thousands of crime scene photographs obtained by The Daily expose a startling pattern of torture, rape and murder.

Read the rest of Part One here.

The Daily:

To judge by the tone of the White House news conference President Obama held with Mexico’s leader Felipe Calderon, better days are ahead in the war against cross-border violence.

“We are very mindful that the battle President Calderon is fighting inside of Mexico is not just his battle, it’s also ours,” Obama said. “I have nothing but admiration for President Calderon in his willingness to take this on.”

But missing from the discussion were many of the thorny new realities of the Mexican drug cartels’ expanding influence in the United States, including places like Vekol Valley.

Law enforcement sources describe the nearly 1,000-square-mile swath of desert along Interstate 8 between Arizona and California as one of the most dangerous places in America. It has been effectively ceded to Mexican drug cartels and human smugglers, they say.

Read the rest of Part Two here.

China Fires Back At US Over Human Rights : "The US Citizens' Freedom To Access & Distribute Information Is Under Strict Supervision"

China has compiled a detailed, well sourced report on human rights' violations in the United States, through 2008-2009. It makes for some very interesting reading, not only for the view China expresses of the United States, but for the vast number of human rights' violations listed, and the massive amount of general criminality it exposes.

Reading all this about the United States from inside China would make the US sound a quite scary, freedom-restricted, dangerous place. Much like the way China is portrayed by some or most of the commercial American media.

An excerpt :

Chaotic management of prisons in the United State also led to wide spread of diseases among the inmates.

A report by the Human Rights Watch released in March 2009 said although the New York State prison registered the highest number of prisoners living with HIV in the country, it did not provide the inmates with adequate access to treatment, and even locked the inmates up separately, refusing to provide them with treatment of any kind. (www.hrw.org, March 24, 2009).

While advocating "freedom of speech," "freedom of the press" and "Internet freedom," the U.S. government unscrupulously monitors and restricts the citizens' rights to freedom when it comes to its own interests and needs.

The U.S. citizens' freedom to access and distribute information is under strict supervision. According to media reports, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) started installing specialized eavesdropping equipment around the country to wiretap calls, faxes, and emails and collect domestic communications as early as 2001. The wiretapping programs was originally targeted at Arab-Americans, but soon grew to include other Americans. The NSA installed over 25 eavesdropping facilities in San Jose, San Diego, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago among other cities. The NSA also announced recently it was building a huge one million square feet data warehouse at a cost of 1.5 billion U.S. dollars at Camp Williams in Utah, as well as another massive data warehouse in San Antonio, as part of the NSA's new Cyber Command responsibilities. The report said a man named Nacchio was convicted on 19 counts of insider trading and sentenced to six years in prison after he refused to participate in NSA's surveillance program (http://www.onelinejournal.com, November 23, 2009).

After the September 11 attack, the U.S. government, in the name of anti-terrorism, authorized its intelligence authorities to hack into its citizens' mail communications, and to monitor and erase any information that might threaten the U.S. national interests on the Internet through technical means. The country's Patriot Act allowed law enforcement agencies to search telephone, email communications, medical, financial and other records, and broadened the discretion of law enforcement and immigration authorities in detaining and deporting foreign persons suspected of terrorism-related acts. The Act expanded the definition of terrorism, thus enlarging the number of activities to which law enforcement powers could be applied. On July 9, 2008, the U.S. Senate passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act of 2008, granting legal immunity to telecommunication companies that take part in wiretapping programs and authorizing the government to wiretap international communications between the United States and people overseas for anti-terrorism purposes without court approval (The New York Times, July 10, 2008). Statistic showed that from 2002 to 2006, the FBI collected thousands of phones records of U.S. citizens through mails, notes and phone calls. In September 2009, the country set up an Internet security supervision body, further worrying U.S. citizens that the U.S. government might use Internet security as an excuse to monitor and interfere with personal systems. A U.S. government official told the New York Times in an interview in April 2009 that NSA had intercepted private email messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by U.S. Congress the year before. In addition, the NSA was also eavesdropping on phones of foreign political figures, officials of international organizations and renowned journalists (The New York Times, April, 15, 2009). The U.S. military also participated in the eavesdropping programs. According to CNN reports, a Virginia-based U.S. military Internet risk evaluation organization was in charge of monitoring official and unofficial private blogs, official documents, personal contact information, photos of weapons, entrances of military camps, as well as other websites that "might threaten its national security."

The so-called "freedom of the press" of the United States was in fact completely subordinate to its national interests, and was manipulated by the U.S. government. According to media reports, the U.S. government and the Pentagon had recruited a number of former military officers to become TV and radio news commentators to give "positive comments" and analysis as "military experts" for the U.S. war in Iraq and Afghanistan, in order to guide public opinions, glorify the wars, and gain public support of its anti-terrorism ideology (The New York Times, April 20, 2009). At yearend 2009, the U.S. Congress passed a bill which imposed sanctions on several Arab satellite channels for broadcasting contents hostile to the U.S. and instigating violence (http://blogs.rnw.nl). In September 2009, protesters using the social-networking site Twitter and text messages to coordinate demonstrations clashed with the police several times in Pittsburgh, where the Group of 20 summit was held. Elliot Madison, 41, was later charged with hindering apprehension of the protesters through the Internet. The police also searched his home (http://www.nytimes.com, October 5, 2009). Vic Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said the same conduct in other countries would be called human rights violations whereas in the United States it was called necessary crime control.

The Full Report Is Here