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| Homeless good Samaritan left to die on NYC street |
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| This race for rent? > > > > |
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| Vets suffer financial woes |
| Carter says U.S. tortures |
| Jesus: Tales From The Crypt Posted by Tim McGirk |
| Poll: Most Americans see lingering racism-- in others |
| Soldiers 'warned' off the truth |
| Report: Change Iraq policy now |
| Deep from the muck, the truth rears its ugly head. |
| Dead-enders? Last throes? Think again. The monster lives; it's alive! |
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| A Synopsis of the Israel /Palestine Conflict ifamericansknew.org from spring, 2005 Archive |
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| "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." -- Steven Weinberg |
| Former Head, Star Wars Program: "Cheney Main 9/11 Suspect" |
| Totally Mucked-up > > > > |
| Democracy Be Damned - Republicans Need Another War |
| I was just hunting UFOs, says Pentagon's UK hacker |
| S.Korea charges stem cell scientist with fraud |
| The Story of Carl - On Workers Memorial Day |
| by Thom Hartmann (thru commondreams.org) mikeblackwood.net / May 17, 2006 |
| "AL CAPONE" OF ELECTRICITY Ken Lay Will Get Away with his Real Crimes |
| Timorese pray for peace as youth gangs rampage |
| 2004 Election Stolen- Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. |
| Stand Up for Democracy (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) by Thom Hartmann |
| History Of 'New Energy' Invention Suppression Cases By Gary Vesperman / rense.com |
| Doug Thompson / Founder & Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue Doug Thompson realized the value of capturing history 46 years ago as a 10-year-old schoolboy in Farmville, Virginia. |
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| Britain's nuclear warheads could be triggered by road crash: New Scientist |
| Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy? June Tikkun Magazine / AUGUST 2006 |
| Fool Me Twice--Will We Let Them Steal Another Election? By Tom Wright | bio Crunch Time. |
| Miracles Or Madness? By Danny Penman The Daily Mail |
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| Dear Bart,
October 11, 2006 The gitmo detainees ? held for over four years with out trial are not proven killers/terrorists. But a guy in the US is proven to have killed 73 people goes free? What will Bush do? And will the media pursue this as an issue of hypocrisy or let it slide? Link Jenny |
| Veterans scandal: Army chief quits |
| The Hammer! |
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| Why are we shooting at UFO's? |
| NASA Airbrushed UFOs, Lunar Base Towers |
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| PM disowns gay daughter |
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| Things That Go Boom In The Night |
| A danish scientist Niels Harrit, on nano-thermite in the WTC dust |
| DHS to make plane passengers wear taser bracelet |
| Will their next step be a 24-hr citizen safety collar? Or how about a "freedom collar"? |
| Cornered: |
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| "Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run 'amok' against society; but I preferred that society should run 'amok' against me, it being the desperate party." ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden |
| Some Famous Writer: |
| Australian mayor pleads for 'ugly women' |
| Security Threat from Within A letter from Dr. Gabriel Cousens |
| Uncovering the secrets of storytelling |
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| The U.S. writer Kurt Vonnegut put together a list of rules on how to write a short story. |
| Chinese companies 'rent' white foreigners |
| Sir Winston Churchill once said: |
| "A fanatic is one who cannot change his mind and, worse, refuses to change the subject." |
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| Should you fake your job references? |
| NEW YORK ? The homeless man lay face down, unmoving, on the sidewalk outside an apartment building, blood from knife wounds pooling underneath his body.
One person passed by in the early morning. Then another, and another. Video footage from a surveillance camera shows at least seven people going by, some turning their heads to look, others stopping to gawk. One even lifted the homeless man's body, exposing what appeared to be blood on the sidewalk underneath him, before walking away. It wasn't until after the 31-year-old Guatemalan immigrant had been lying there for nearly an hour that emergency workers arrived, and by then, it was too late. Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax ? who police said was stabbed while intervening to help a woman being attacked ? had died. "I think it's horrific," said Marla Cohan, who teaches at P.S. 82, a school across the street from where Tale-Yax died. "I think people are just afraid to step in; they don't want to get involved; who knows what their reasons are?" Tale-Yax was walking behind a man and a woman on 144th Street in the Jamaica section of Queens around 6 a.m. April 18 when the couple got into a fight that became physical, according to police, who pieced together what happened from surveillance footage and interviews with area residents. Tale-Yax was stabbed several times when he intervened to help the woman, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. She and the other man fled in different directions, and Tale-Yax pursued the man before collapsing. Authorities are searching for the man and woman. A 911 call of a woman screaming came in around 6 a.m., but when officers responded to the address that was given, no one was there, police said. Another call came in around 7 a.m., saying a man was lying on the street, but gave the wrong address. Finally, around 7:20 a.m., someone called 911 to report a man had possibly been stabbed at 144th Street and 88th Road. Police and firefighters arrived a few minutes later to find Tale-Yax dead. Officials say they're not sure whether the man was still alive when passers-by opted not to help him. Residents who regularly pass by the same stretch of sidewalk, in a working-class neighborhood of low-rise apartment buildings and fast food restaurants near a busy boulevard, were unnerved by the way Tale-Yax died. "Is anybody human anymore?" asked Raechelle Groce, visiting her grandmother at a nearby building on Monday. "What's wrong with humanity?" In the urban environment, it's not unusual to see people on the street, sleeping or under the influence of drugs or alcohol. But even assuming the person they've just passed is drunk, instead of injured, is no reason not to notify authorities, said Seth Herman, another teacher at the school. He remembered calling an ambulance when seeing a man who appeared to be homeless on the street, with a beer bottle near by. He called 911, he said, because "I felt it wasn't my job to figure out if the person was drunk or actually hurt." Groce agreed. "I just think that's horrible, whether you're homeless or not," she said. "He's a human being; he needs help." |
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| Beijing, China (CNN) -- In China, white people can be rented.
For a day, a weekend, a week, up to even a month or two, Chinese companies are willing to pay high prices for fair-faced foreigners to join them as fake employees or business partners. Some call it "White Guy Window Dressing." To others, it's known as the "White Guy in a Tie" events, "The Token White Guy Gig," or, simply, a "Face Job." And it is, essentially, all about the age-old Chinese concept of face. To have a few foreigners hanging around means a company has prestige, money and the increasingly crucial connections -- real or not -- to businesses abroad. "Face, we say in China, is more important than life itself," said Zhang Haihua, author of "Think Like Chinese." "Because Western countries are so developed, people think they are more well off, so people think that if a company can hire foreigners, it must have a lot of money and have very important connections overseas. So when they really want to impress someone, they may roll out a foreigner." Or rent one. Last year, Jonathan Zatkin, an American actor who lives in Beijing, posed as the vice president of an Italian jewelry company that had, allegedly, been in a partnership with a Chinese jewelry chain for a decade. When is being foreign a career advantage? Zatkin was paid 2,000 yuan (about $300) to fly, along with a couple of Russian models, to a small city in the central province of Henan where he delivered a speech for the grand opening ceremony of a jewelry store there. "I was up on stage with the mayor of the town, and I made a speech about how wonderful it was to work with the company for 10 years and how we were so proud of all of the work they had done for us in China," Zatkin said. "They put up a big bandstand and the whole town was there and some other local muckety-mucks." The requirements for these jobs are simple. 1. Be white. 2. Do not speak any Chinese, or really speak at all, unless asked. 3. Pretend like you just got off of an airplane yesterday. Those who go for such gigs tend to be unemployed actors or models, part-time English teachers or other expats looking to earn a few extra bucks. Often they are jobs at a second- or third-tier city, where the presence of pale-faced foreigners is needed to impress local officials, secure a contract or simply to fulfill a claim of being international. "Occasionally companies want a foreign face to go to meetings and conferences or to go to dinners and lunches and smile at the clients and shake people's hands," read an ad posted by a company called Rent A Laowai (Chinese for "foreigner") on the online classified site thebeijinger.com. It continued: "There are job opportunities for girls who are pretty and for men who can look good in a suit." Click here for in-depth news on China People like Brad Smith. When Smith -- the nom de plume of the Beijing-based American actor -- answered CNN's phone call on a recent morning, he was standing outside a meeting room at a Ramada Inn in Hangzhou, a city about 100 miles outside of Shanghai. Today's job: Pretend to be an architect from New York and give design plans for a new museum to local officials. "They have not told me what my name is today. I think it is Lawrence or something," said Smith -- unlike some jobs, no fake business cards were given to hand out. Earlier that morning he went over his script with his Chinese "business partners" at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. "It says, 'Good morning distinguished leaders. It is my privilege to participate in this program'," said Smith, who asked that his real name not be used for fear it could jeopardize future jobs. If Smith is asked a question, he is told to pretend to answer as his "translator" pretends to understand. Occasionally, these jobs can go awry. Smith said 18 months ago Beijing police showed up at his apartment after a financial company he worked at for a couple of months in Xi'an, a city in western China, allegedly swindled millions of yuan out of clients. "That company said I was the guy in charge," he said. "I didn't even remember the company's name. After that, I decided I was never going to use my passport again with these fake companies. The small gigs are much less dangerous." Sometimes companies will hire Caucasians simply to sit in the office a few hours a day near the window where clients and customers can see them. White women are also a hot commodity, sometimes to pose as phony foreign girlfriends, or, in the case of Vicky Mohieddeen, to pretend to be an oil tycoon. Mohieddeen, who is Scottish, took a job in 2008 to attend what she describes as some sort of "oil drilling conference" in Shandong province for 300 yuan ($44). Several busloads of foreigners, with nationalities ranging from Pakistani to Nigerian, were trucked to the event, she said. They were greeted by brass bands and feted with a sumptuous dinner. "I was like, 'Yeah, we have a lot of oil in Scotland.' I didn't know what to say. It was a bit nerve-racking. We were guests of honor of the vice mayor. We were put in a nice hotel. It was quite fancy." For Mohieddeen, who had just arrived in Beijing at the time, the experience, albeit bizarre, was an introduction to a side of China most foreigners will never see. "It is part of what China is all about, you know," Mohieddeen said. "There is quite an elaborate fantasy world going on here where if everyone buys into it, it does not matter if it is the truth. Those kinds of experiences give me a fuller understanding of the way the culture works." |
