Another FL Tasering Results In Death

WEST PARK, Fla. (AP) -- A Fort Lauderdale man died after Broward sheriff's deputies shocked him with a Taser. Officers had been responding to a call about a home invasion in West Park.

The homeowner says 48-year-old Horace Owens broke in while he was watching television. He says the intruder ran from room to room yelling, in these words, "Please don't let them kill me."

Deputies got Owens outside, but he struggled with them. He was hit with the electrical shock outside the house. Officers tried to resuscitate Owens, but he was pronounced dead later at the hospital.

Owens is the seventh person to die in South Florida after being shocked by a Taser since 2002. AFP via rense

Eminent domain expanded

Court rules cities can seize homes for economic development

By Jan Crawford Greenburg - Washington Bureau June 24, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Rejecting pleas by homeowners fighting to keep their properties, the Supreme Court on Thursday said local governments could condemn a person's home or business so the sites could be redeveloped for more lucrative uses.

In a 5-4 decision written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the court said the Constitution permits governments to condemn a person's property, paying them a fair price for it, as part of a broader economic redevelopment plan to revitalize a distressed community.

The decision, one of the most anxiously awaited of the term, emphasized that governments have long relied on powers of eminent domain to condemn property for public uses, such as railways and utilities. The court has historically taken a "deferential approach to legislative judgments in this field," the majority said.

The court recognized the "hardship" such condemnations may bring to property owners uprooted from homes and businesses in the name of economic development. But local governments should be given "broad latitude" to determine whether their citizens would be best served by condemning private property, especially where it is part of a broader scheme for redevelopment, the court said. - chicago tribune

compare to: President Mugabe Bulldozes Homes Of 200,000 Across Zimbabwe

What is Bush getting ready for?

Equilibrium is set in the year 2072, in the dystopian city-state of Libria. The film explains how, in the early years of the twenty-first century, a devastating Third World War breaks out, the impact of which brings civilisations across the planet to their knees. After the war ends, world leaders fear that the human race cannot possibly survive a Fourth World War, and so set about building a new society which is free of conflict. Believing that human emotion is responsible for man's inhumanity to man, the new leaders ban all materials deemed likely to stimulate strong emotions, including art, music, and literature (these materials are rated "EC-10" for "emotional content" and typically destroyed by immediate incineration). Furthermore, all citizens of Libria are required to take regular injections - "intervals" - of a liquid drug called Prozium, collected at the distribution centres known as "Equilibrium". Prozium suppresses strong emotions, creating a sedate and conformist society. The loss of emotions is a heavy price, but it is considered to be one paid gladly in exchange for the elimination of war and crime. - wikipedia

	
 		
The Crime of "Unauthorized Reproduction"
New law will require marriage as a legal condition of motherhood

[webmasters note; this legislation is concerned with 'assisted reproduction therapy' 
but could still open the door to yet more christian fundamentalist fascism]
 
		 
By Laura McPhee

 Republican lawmakers are drafting new legislation that will make marriage a requirement for motherhood in the state of Indiana,
 including specific criminal penalties for unmarried women who do become pregnant "by means other than sexual intercourse."

 According to a draft of the recommended change in state law, every woman in Indiana seeking to become a mother through assisted
 reproduction therapy such as in vitro fertilization, sperm donation, and egg donation, must first file for a "petition for parentage" in
 their local county probate court.

 Only women who are married will be considered for the "gestational certificate" that must be presented to any doctor who facilitates the
 pregnancy. Further, the "gestational certificate" will only be given to married couples that successfully complete the same screening
 process currently required by law of adoptive parents.

 As it the draft of the new law reads now, an intended parent "who knowingly or willingly participates in an artificial reproduction
 procedure" without court approval, "commits unauthorized reproduction, a Class B misdemeanor." The criminal charges will be
 the same for physicians who commit "unauthorized practice of artificial reproduction."

 The change in Indiana law to require marriage as a condition for motherhood and criminalizing "unauthorized reproduction" was
 introduced at a summer meeting of the Indiana General Assembly's Health Finance Commission on September 29 and a final version of the
 bill will come up for a vote at the next meeting at the end of this month.

 Republican Senator Patricia Miller is both the Health Finance Commission Chair and the sponsor of the bill. She believes the new
 law will protect children in the state of Indiana and make parenting laws more explicit.

 According to Sen. Miller, the laws prohibiting surrogacy in the state of Indiana are currently too vague and unenforceable, and that
 is the purpose of the new legislation.

 "But it's not just surrogacy," Miller told NUVO. " The law is vague on all types of extraordinary types of infertility treatment, and we
 wanted to address that as well."

 "Ordinary treatment would be the mother's egg and the father's sperm. But now there are a lot of extraordinary thing s that raise
 issues of who has legal rights as parents," she explained when asked what she considers "extraordinary" infertility treatment.

 Sen. Miller believes the requirement of marriage for parenting is for the benefit of the children that result from infertility treatments.

 "We did want to address the issue of whether or not the law should allow single people to be parents. Studies have shown that a child
 raised by both parents - a mother and a father - do better. So, we do want to have laws that protect the children," she explained.

 When asked specifically if she believes marriage should be a requirement for motherhood, and if that is part of the bill's intention, 
 Sen. Miller responded, "Yes. Yes, I do."

 A draft of the legislation is available on the Health Finance Commission website
http://www.in.gov/legislative/interim/committee/prelim/HFCO04.pdf

boomantribune.com
		

BATON ROUGE (AFP) Sep 02, 2005 - A squad of 300 National Guard troops landed in anarchic New Orleans fresh from Iraq on Thursday, with authorization to shoot and kill "hoodlums", Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said. - MORE

New York subway alert ends, plot appears unfounded

10 Oct 2005 21:19:11 GMT By Christine Kearney NEW YORK, Oct 10 (Reuters) - New York called off a high alert for the city's subways on Monday after detainees in Iraq thought to be plotting to bomb the nation's biggest transit system indicated the threat lacked credibility.

The scaling back of security came as the attack date cited in a federal warning -- Sunday, Oct. 9 -- passed without incident.

"Since the period of the threat now seems to be passing, I think over the immediate future we'll slowly be winding down the enhanced security," Mayor Michael Bloomberg told a news conference.

The enhanced security had included more bag searches plus an increase in uniformed and undercover officers patrolling the largest mass transit system in the United States.

Bloomberg, expected to win re-election to a second term on Nov. 8, ordered the special police deployment on Thursday after federal authorities warned that "terrorist operatives" may be planning to attack the subway with remote-controlled bombs hidden in briefcases or baby strollers.

That same bulletin from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security also said experts "have doubts on the credibility of the threat."

NO CORROBORATION

Federal and local law enforcement officials said the alert was based on information from a normally reliable source whose warning led to the arrests of three suspects in Iraq.

"In the course of the debriefing they (the individuals captured) did not corroborate the threat information," said a law enforcement official who declined to be identified because the information was classified. "At least two of the three were found to be truthful in saying they were unaware of the New York City subway plot," the source added.

Bloomberg, facing questions from reporters about whether he had overreacted, defended his decision. "We're going to take seriously every single threat that has any chance of being credible," he said.

Bloomberg's Democratic challenger for City Hall, former Bronx Borough president Fernando Ferrer, called upon the mayor to disclose why he opted to warn the public. "I believe that we need to take every threat seriously. And now that we are no longer on high alert, it is appropriate for the mayor to tell us what he knew about the threat, when, and why he chose to act in the way he did," Ferrer's campaign said in a statement.

The mayor said the city remained on orange alert -- the second highest such level, just below red. The city has been on orange alert since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center. - alertnet.org

Punished for saving lives: US courts force anti-war group to disband

After 10 years of non-violent protest and direct aid to the suffering people of Iraq, Chicago-based group Voices in the Wilderness (VitW) has been forced to cease operating following an order by a US federal judge that the group pay a civil penalty ' effectively a fine ' of $20,000 for delivering medical supplies to Iraq without a permit.

Founded in 1995, VitW was always upfront about its deliberate violations of the genocidal embargo on the Iraqi people, organising more than seventy delegations to the country, each of which took vital medicines and medical equipment. Their banning follows repeated warnings from the US Treasury Department' s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), part of whose job is to ensure that Iraqi children die unnecessarily from diseases which would barely keep the child of a rich western family home from school.

The judge's decision concluded an eight year battle over charges of sanction violations. When they were at last fined $20,000, they responded by sending 20,000 Iraqi dinar, then valued at under $14, with telling the media that they were attempting to draw attention to the way in which the embargo had destroyed the currency' s purchasing power. The group defended itself by arguing that as they were involved in humanitarian acts, they were exempt from the embargo. Criticised for not applying for the necessary permit, they explained that this would have caused unacceptable delays in a situation of increasing urgency.

During court hearings, VitW repeatedly asked why humanitarian organizations were prosecuted while companies that broke sanctions for profit were not fined or penalized. "It's incredible that OFAC has pursued fining a relatively small number of people, but companies are untouched," said Jeff Guntzel, one of many group activists who has travelled to Iraq on numerous occasions.

The group has decided against accepting donations, despite the fact that the money could easily be raised from sympathisers. VitW bank accounts are frozen, and cheques are being returned uncashed. This action is designed to ensure that all such available cash goes to where it is most needed, to humanitarian aid in Iraq and educational work within the United States. The latter has increasingly become the group' s focus since it took the decision in March that conditions in Iraq had become too dangerous for activists' lives to be put at risk.

Although delegations have ceased pending an improvement in the security situation ' one which currently seems a long way off - VitW will continue to work with the Iraqi people under its new name, Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

Despite the risk of up to 12 years in prison, founding member Kathy Kelly says that VitW will not pay "one penny or dime" of the ' civil penalty' in a "conscientious objection to the utterly ruthless policies of war criminals in power." - spectrezine.org

U.S. wants to push ocean boundaries to limit terror threat

12 Oct 2005 21:23:58 GMT Source: Reuters By Stefano Ambrogi

The United States wants to search foreign ships far outside its territorial waters to stop a possible terrorist attack on the country coming from the sea, a U.S. coastguard leader said on Wednesday.

"If the threat is significant enough we will board that ship as far from our coast as we can," said Vice Admiral Harvey Johnson who is Pacific Area commander of the U.S. coastguard.

Johnson, who oversees key trade routes with Asia, told a maritime security conference in Copenhagen the policy of the United States was to "push back" its sea borders for searches as much as possible -- perhaps by as much as 2,000 nautical miles.

In August Washington said it planned to put sensors on oil rigs and weather buoys to spot security threats at sea and said it might use satellites to track suspect vessels.

Johnson said that, from an intelligence perspective, there was ample justification to worry about a terrorist threat. "And I believe the maritime sphere will be the avenue for that threat," he said. He said if the threat level from an incoming foreign-flagged ship was deemed to be low the United States might choose to board and search it closer to home, perhaps within its own territorial waters at 12 miles. But he said he would like to be able to carry out forced searches much further from shore.

Governments require permission from the flag-state to board a ship in international waters, where it is seen as sovereign territory, or risk a diplomatic row.

Nations would have to agree a new legal framework to allow countries to inspect or board ships outside their own territorial waters.

"I don't intend any sabre-rattling here. I'm talking from an operations perspective," he told Reuters. "I'm not trying to bring any undue international pressure to get permission to board without flag-state approval. What I do want though is enough time to interdict the vessel," he said. "Even if I did decide to board a vessel at sea, even as a three star admiral I couldn't make that decision, it goes back to Washington and it doesn't all happen in 15 seconds."

Johnson said the exact parameters would be worked out with partners at a global level and within the framework of international laws of the sea. - alertnet.org

Top Bush ally subpoenaed over stock sale

ISN SECURITY WATCH (Thursday, 13 October: 22:15 CET) - US Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Republican from Tennessee who is a close ally of US President George Bush, has been subpoenaed over the sale of stocks and allegations of insider trading, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

The subpoena was issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) during the past two weeks, the Post said, after allegations that Frist, who had been considering a presidential bid in 2008, sold stock in HCA Inc. in July. News reports have said the SEC and the Justice Department are investigating Frist for possible violations of insider-trading laws.

Frist allegedly sold shares of HCA, a hospital operator that was co-founded by his brother and father, just before its stock price fell due to a lower-than-expected profit outlook.

The senator has denied any wrongdoing and has said the sale was necessary to eliminate a possible conflict of interests during the 2008 race. - isn.ethz.ch

'Bush's Brain' makes 4th grand jury testimony

ISN SECURITY WATCH (Friday, 14 October: 15:49 CET) - US President Bush's top aide, Karl Rove, testified on Friday before a grand jury for the fourth time over the case of the leaked identity of a CIA agent.

The testimony is likely to be Rove's final opportunity to persuade the jurors he did nothing illegal in leaking the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame to two journalists, Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time magazine.

There is no guarantee that the man who has been described as "Bush's Brain" will not be indicted by the grand jury, whose term expires on 28 October.

The White House has refused to comment on the case. It had earlier denied that Rove or I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, had done anything wrong.

Friday's testimony comes after the release and subsequent grand jury testimony by Miller, who spent time in jail for refusing to reveal the source of her information. She was later released after testifying to the investigation about her information on Plame's identity, after saying her source had released her from the confidentiality agreement.

US law prohibits the intentional unmasking of a covert CIA officer. Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, was a critic of the Bush administration.- isn.ethz.ch

FBI, Pentagon pay for access to trove of public records

By Shane Harris, National Journal

To help the government track suspected terrorists and spies who may be visiting or residing in this country, the FBI and the Defense Department for the past three years have been paying a Georgia-based company for access to its vast databases that contain billions of personal records about nearly every person -- citizens and noncitizens alike -- in the United States.

According to federal documents obtained by National Journal and Government Executive, among the services that ChoicePoint provides to the government is access to a previously undisclosed, and vaguely described, "exclusive" data-searching system. This system in effect gives law enforcement and intelligence agents the ability to use the private data broker to do something that they legally can't -- keep tabs on nearly every American citizen and foreigner in the United States.

ChoicePoint is famous for being the largest and most sophisticated aggregator of public records on U.S. citizens and residents. The company has built an enormous electronic cache of more than 19 billion records -- all of which are legally obtained -- that it mines to locate criminals and suspects, their family members and known associates, and their hidden financial assets.

Most of ChoicePoint's customers are other companies -- insurance providers trying to spot potential scam artists applying for policies, for instance. But the company's work for the government is significant and growing. Using its DNA analysis lab, ChoicePoint helped identify victims of the September 11 attacks. And the following year, the company helped locate the Washington-area snipers by leading investigators to the blue Chevrolet Caprice that the two killers used in their spree. (ChoicePoint compiles hundreds of millions of motor vehicle registrations.)

Although it has generally been known that the FBI and intelligence agencies use ChoicePoint's people-tracking skills, federal and company officials have refused to discuss the particulars of their arrangements. ChoicePoint declined a request for an interview about its work for the FBI and the Defense Department. But a set of contract documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and which the government sought to withhold for almost two years, reveals details not previously reported about ChoicePoint's work for the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, called FTTTF or "F tre F." This task force was set up soon after the 9/11 attacks to assist law enforcement and intelligence agencies in locating foreign terrorists and their supporters in the United States. Because the task force can't maintain records on U.S. persons without opening an official investigation, it relies on ChoicePoint to augment the intelligence that the government collects through legal channels.

The documents show that ChoicePoint has provided an arsenal of data and analysis to the task force and its partner group, the Defense Department's Assessments and Technology Directorate, which in turn is part of a counterintelligence unit that identifies covert threats -- namely spies and terrorists -- to Defense Department personnel and property. The FBI task force and the Defense directorate share an office and have helped to identify more than 200 terrorist suspects in the United States, FBI officials say. The partnership has also helped track suspected suicide bombers; the FBI component, among other things, vets all foreigners attending U.S. flight schools.

According to the contract documents, which have been heavily redacted, in 2002 the FBI task force had an "urgent need to acquire high-volume public record data" to help locate and track "foreign terrorists and related activities." At that point, the task force purchased some of the company's most popular services.

In the beginning, ChoicePoint performed search work at its own facilities, taking "input criteria" -- a name or other identifying data supplied by the government -- and returning useful information, such as a subject's address or any disparity between his name and Social Security number (a signal that the person may have purchased a stolen number to shield his true identity).

A year later, the government's appetite for data apparently became more sophisticated. In early 2003, the agencies ordered a set of Internet-based services from ChoicePoint. These services, the documents show, effectively put the power of the company's databases at government agents' fingertips on their desktop computers. The agencies also bought the company's AutoTrack product, which creates "easy-to-read reports" and gives users the "ability to locate people and assets faster ... and solve more crimes," according to marketing materials on ChoicePoint's Web site. And the agencies purchased ChoicePoint's "national comprehensive reports with associates," a service that lists the names, Social Security numbers, addresses, properties, and even pilot licenses to which someone is connected, directly or through known associates and relatives. FBI officials have said that such services are an invaluable complement to traditional criminal investigations.

But the documents indicate that ChoicePoint may have gone beyond simply offering its commercially available products to the government. In 2003, ChoicePoint agreed to provide access to an "exclusive" system used to help identify terrorism suspects. Although much of the description of the system has been redacted from the documents -- on the grounds that it would reveal law enforcement tactics and operations -- the portions that were released indicate that ChoicePoint's work involves continuously tracking a "subject of interest" and notifying the government when new information has surfaced on that person.

After a string of redacted text about this exclusive service, the document states, "When this new information is added and identified as relevant new data for a subject of interest, the FTTTF will receive electronic notification.... Additional information beyond the identity and address data can be provided to the FTTTF with a subpoena." In releasing the contract documents, the government said it could not elaborate on the system, because doing so "could certainly assist ... terrorists in circumventing detection." The government also redacted the dollar amount of the contracts, making it harder to assess costs and scope.

According to an outside expert on ChoicePoint who reviewed the documents for National Journal, the exclusive service looks like something ChoicePoint built specifically for federal agencies, and the arrangement raises questions about whether the company is effectively becoming an arm of the federal government.

"The language [of the contract], and ChoicePoint making their full system available to the government and [performing] custom-tailored searches for the government, show a high degree of cooperation," says Chris Hoofnagle, a researcher with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who has obtained ChoicePoint contracts and corporate documents through other legal filings.

FBI officials have stated publicly that they don't use ChoicePoint for "fishing expeditions," that they tap its services only in the course of an official investigation. But the threshold for what constitutes a "subject of interest" is unclear. So are the restrictions, if any, that the government faces when it searches private databases for information on U.S. citizens. And it's unclear whether these restrictions differ from the rules for investigating foreigners.

Even though existing laws strictly limit the government's ability to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens, those limitations don't apply to corporations. And so, the more ChoicePoint takes on exclusive work for the government that the government is prohibited from doing on its own, "the more it looks like a government actor," Hoofnagle says.

ChoicePoint collects a dizzying variety of newly filed public records from sources as varied as courthouses and motor vehicle departments, any of which could be a key data point in building a profile about a person being investigated. Standard ChoicePoint fare includes concealed-weapons permits; marriage and death certificates; registrations for boats, aircraft, and automobiles; eviction notices; credit card information; hazardous-materials-handling permits; and employment histories.

Without question, ChoicePoint provides services that the government feels it can't live without. "The enormous number of visitors to the U.S. and avenues of entry and exit makes it inordinately difficult, if not impossible, to accurately account for each entrant," the FBI task force director, Mark Tanner, told House lawmakers in 2003. He was describing how agents use private data brokers' information to help find people who've overstayed their visas, a class the government deems a security risk. FBI agents privately also sing the company's praises and say that if they couldn't get public records from ChoicePoint, they'd have to dispatch investigators to courthouses and clerks' offices across the country, greatly slowing the pace of their work.

But as ChoicePoint's databases grow, Hoofnagle asks, "at what point do [the company's] records become the equivalent of a 'system of records,' " an official collection that is subject to government regulation and oversight and that must be publicly announced? Writing in the George Washington Law Review last November, two members of the Center for Democracy and Technology wondered whether government's use of private databases renders useless the federal Privacy Act, which is supposed to protect private information. "If the government is simply accessing databases created by commercial entities for their own reasons, there may be no system of records subject to Privacy Act requirements," the members wrote.

U.S. citizens have few avenues to monitor how the government is using their personal data when it resides outside government hands. "We have the legal authority to collect certain types of information," says Ed Cogswell, an FBI spokesman. ChoicePoint is "a commercial database, and we purchase a lot of different commercial databases.... They have collated information that we legitimately have the authority to obtain."

But because the FBI is so reluctant to discuss how it uses the data, and what its own guidelines are for monitoring agents' access to it, a cloak is cast over the government's work. "From the perspective of an American citizen, this is another example where a company that's built a massive personal-information database is being used regularly by the government to track citizens," says Hoofnagle, who supports using ChoicePoint for terrorism investigations but wants more public assurances that the information isn't being misused.

Congress wants similar assurances. In the wake of several security breaches this year, at ChoicePoint and other firms, in which identity thieves accessed people's financial records, lawmakers have proposed several bills that would rein in the private data brokers and monitor more closely how the government uses them. One bill, the Personal Data Privacy and Security Act, introduced by Sens. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., would require the government to establish rules protecting privacy and security when it hires data brokers, and to conduct regular audits of those contracts.

Privacy advocates following the bills say that they're weaker than legislation being pushed through in state legislatures, and that no single congressional bill fully addresses all their concerns. But the legislation has data brokers' attention. Hoofnagle says that lobbying expenditures by private data collectors are up across the industry. And this year, ChoicePoint has hired a number of lobby shops specializing in the executive branch. One hired last month is none other than the Ashcroft Group, founded by former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who oversaw the establishment of the FBI task force in 2002.

Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, says, however, that it is always hard to monitor what private contractors do in the intelligence field.

"Using contractors to perform sensitive intelligence or counterintelligence work, whether it's prisoner interrogation in Iraq or data mining in D.C., is always problematic, because their activities are much harder to oversee," Aftergood says. "Unlike government agencies, contractors are not answerable to Congress. And the secrecy of most intelligence work makes them all but impervious to independent oversight. If they broke or bent the law, we might never find out." - govexec.com

The Endgame

Where in the past the US Immigration authorities have detained their prisoners in various holding facilities, to include County Jails, Municipal Jails, Federal Prisons, they have embarked upon this 'ENDGAME' plan which will make them the largest jailer of human beings in all of history. The Department of Homeland Security and its bureau, ICE, are planning to build temporary cities that will hold millions of undocumented aliens. The ramifications of these plans are mind numbing, especially if the best of intentions get waylaid. We urge you to download the PDF document titled "Endgame." It's worth the time and effort. It's 1257 kb. click here

The American ...organization tasked with the building and maintaining of these camps goes by the most chilling of names, ICE, and which stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Even more frightening is ICE's 'blueprint' for their citizens, and that they do not even hide, and which they have titled "ENDGAME: Office of Detention and Removal Strategic Plan, 2003-2012" Sorcha Faal

US in move that may bar foreign researchers

By Edward Alden and Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington - November 24 2005

The US government is poised to propose rules that could restrict the ability of Chinese and other foreign nationals to engage in high-level research in the country, a plan that is generating fierce opposition from companies and universities. The move comes amid growing fears in the US that its relatively open rules allowing foreign nationals to work with sensitive technologies leave the country open to espionage.

Law enforcement and intelligence officials fear China in particular could be using some of its more than 150,000 students in the US to spy on behalf of Beijing.

In a few weeks, the commerce department is expected to respond to a report by its inspector-general, which warned of the espionage risks last year. The inspector-general’s proposal called for an expansion of the rules that restrict the sharing of advanced technologies with foreign nationals. Under existing law, companies or universities are required to seek a government export licence if they allow citizens from controlled countries, most prominently China, to engage in research involving technologies with potential military uses. But licences are not required if a Chinese national becomes a citizen or a permanent resident in another country – such as Canada or the UK – which is not subject to stringent US export controls. There are particular concerns about the tens of thousands of Chinese who have taken out citizenship in countries that exchange technology freely with the US.

The proposal under consideration would expand the so-called “deemed export” requirement to cover anyone born in China or other controlled countries such as Iran and North Korea, even if they had taken out citizenship in another country. The idea has particularly angered US universities, which have seen the enrolment of foreign students drop sharply owing to the stricter visa requirements imposed after the September 11 2001 terror attacks. International student enrolment at US colleges and universities has fallen by 1.3 per cent in the last academic year, following a 2.4 per cent fall the year before.

“The most alarming outcome of this proposed rule will be the substantial negative impact on attracting the best and brightest people from round the world to participate in the conduct of basic and applied research, which is of extraordinary social and economic value to the nation,” wrote Robert Goldston, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics laboratory, in one of hundreds of comments sent to the commerce department in the past six months.

Lawyers and lobbyists following the debate in the US government say the administration might opt for a less restrictive rule than that proposed in the inspector-general’s report. A senior commerce department official said that whatever rule was adopted would “strive to protect national security while meeting the needs of industry and academia”.

“Controls on the release of technology to foreign nationals in the US must – and can – protect national security while allowing business and the academic research community to employ the world’s best minds, no matter their nationality.” - ft.com

AA Flight 924 at Miami International Airport

so what happened? was he on, near, or running away from the plane? was he mental, retarded, black, one legged, eye patch, arabic, foreign looking, mongolian eyed, running or wearing an unsuitable coat...carrying a chair leg...????

you'd have to be f**kin' mental to want to be in the USA right now that's 4 sure sheesh! seriously though...it just sounds like he was trying to get some attention now...dont it...? if you're travelling... don't forget to take your medication so you don't bother those armed guards everywhere

by the way - No bomb was found in the bag