Federal Charges for Ex-C.E.O. at Meatpacker

*Lock him up and throw away the key.*

Federal immigration agents on Thursday arrested the former chief executive of Agriprocessors Inc., the nation’s biggest kosher meatpacking company, accusing him of harboring illegal immigrants at a plant in Postville, Iowa, where about 400 immigrant workers were arrested in a raid in May.

With the arrest of the former chief executive, Sholom Rubashkin, federal authorities extended their criminal prosecution to the highest level of management at the plant. Some 300 workers, mainly immigrants from Guatemala, were convicted of felony document fraud charges after the raid, and Iowa prosecutors had faced mounting criticism for punishing those workers but not Agriprocessors’s executives and owners.

Mr. Rubashkin is the highest-ranking executive to face arrest in stepped-up immigration raids at packinghouses nationwide since late 2006.

The son of Aaron Rubashkin, the owner of the family-held company, Sholom Rubashkin had been the top manager of the kosher plant since 1987. He was forced by his father to step down as chief executive shortly after the raid.

Mr. Rubashkin was arrested Thursday by immigration agents at his home in Postville, prosecutors said, and was released on $1 million bail after a hearing.

He is also accused, in a criminal complaint unsealed Thursday, of abetting aggravated identity theft, which carries a mandatory two-year minimum sentence. Many of the immigrant workers were charged with that crime.

Mr. Rubashkin and his father, both Lubavitch Hasidic Jews, built Agriprocessors into a kosher giant. Kosher consumers faced meat shortages since the raid, and the scandal fueled a debate about kosher ethics.

According to the complaint, Mr. Rubashkin participated directly in efforts in the days before the raid to obtain fraudulent documents that could pass immigration agents’ scrutiny for dozens of illegal immigrants working in Postville.

The complaint suggests that plant managers had heard a raid was coming and had initially informed many workers they would have to present valid identity documents or be fired. But two floor supervisors told investigators that they met with Mr. Rubashkin at the plant to request a $4,500 loan to “help the employees who were to be terminated.” On May 9, Mr. Rubashkin agreed to give them the cash loan.

One supervisor said he had lent $200 each to about a dozen workers, who paid a line foreman to buy fake documents, the complaint says.

On May 11, the complaint charges, human resources managers worked all day under Mr. Rubashkin’s supervision to fill out job applications for workers with new fake documents.

One human resources manager told investigators that she had protested to Mr. Rubashkin that employees who had been scheduled for termination were applying under new names. Mr. Rubashkin said “the IDs looked good to him” and told her to accept them, the complaint says.

While the complaint names no employees, two supervisors, Juan Carlos Guerrero Espinoza and Martin de la Rosa, have pleaded guilty to harboring charges. A human resources manager, Laura Althouse, pleaded guilty on Wednesday.

Mr. Rubashkin and his father also face state charges for child labor violations. And Iowa labor authorities on Wednesday levied $10 million in fines against the company for wage violations.

Mr. Rubashkin faces a maximum of 22 years in prison if convicted on the federal charges.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/us/31immig.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Magnetic Portals Connect Sun and Earth

Oct. 30, 2008: During the time it takes you to read this article, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn’t believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page.

“It’s called a flux transfer event or ‘FTE,’” says space physicist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn’t exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible.”

Indeed, today Sibeck is telling an international assembly of space physicists at the 2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Alabama, that FTEs are not just common, but possibly twice as common as anyone had ever imagined.

Right: An artist’s concept of Earth’s magnetic field connecting to the sun’s–a.k.a. a “flux transfer event”–with a spacecraft on hand to measure particles and fields. [Larger image]

Researchers have long known that the Earth and sun must be connected. Earth’s magnetosphere (the magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet) is filled with particles from the sun that arrive via the solar wind and penetrate the planet’s magnetic defenses. They enter by following magnetic field lines that can be traced from terra firma all the way back to the sun’s atmosphere.

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“We used to think the connection was permanent and that solar wind could trickle into the near-Earth environment anytime the wind was active,” says Sibeck. “We were wrong. The connections are not steady at all. They are often brief, bursty and very dynamic.”

Several speakers at the Workshop have outlined how FTEs form: On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth’s magnetic field presses against the sun’s magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or “reconnect,” forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth. The European Space Agency’s fleet of four Cluster spacecraft and NASA’s five THEMIS probes have flown through and surrounded these cylinders, measuring their dimensions and sensing the particles that shoot through. “They’re real,” says Sibeck.

Now that Cluster and THEMIS have directly sampled FTEs, theorists can use those measurements to simulate FTEs in their computers and predict how they might behave. Space physicist Jimmy Raeder of the University of New Hampshire presented one such simulation at the Workshop. He told his colleagues that the cylindrical portals tend to form above Earth’s equator and then roll over Earth’s winter pole. In December, FTEs roll over the north pole; in July they roll over the south pole.

Right: A “magnetic portal” or FTE mapped in cross-section by NASA’s fleet of THEMIS spacecraft. [Larger image]

Sibeck believes this is happening twice as often as previously thought. “I think there are two varieties of FTEs: active and passive.” Active FTEs are magnetic cylinders that allow particles to flow through rather easily; they are important conduits of energy for Earth’s magnetosphere. Passive FTEs are magnetic cylinders that offer more resistance; their internal structure does not admit such an easy flow of particles and fields. (For experts: Active FTEs form at equatorial latitudes when the IMF tips south; passive FTEs form at higher latitudes when the IMF tips north.) Sibeck has calculated the properties of passive FTEs and he is encouraging his colleagues to hunt for signs of them in data from THEMIS and Cluster. “Passive FTEs may not be very important, but until we know more about them we can’t be sure.”

There are many unanswered questions: Why do the portals form every 8 minutes? How do magnetic fields inside the cylinder twist and coil? “We’re doing some heavy thinking about this at the Workshop,” says Sibeck.

Meanwhile, high above your head, a new portal is opening, connecting your planet to the sun.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/30oct_ftes.htm?list889783

Mississauga high school on lockdown

Mississauga’s Lincoln Alexander Secondary School is in lockdown today after a staff member spotted a youth inside the school carrying a handgun.

Peel police said two youths who fled the school were arrested at a nearby shopping centre.

“A weapon has not yet been recovered,” said Const. J. P. Valade.

A police tactical team and other officers were searching classrooms and areas outside the school for the handgun, police said.

Students were being walked across the street to the Malton Community Centre, one class at a time, as the search continues.

Valade said nobody was injured and that the school, on Morning Star Dr. northeast of Pearson airport, would remain in lockdown until further notice.

Brian Woodland of the Peel District School Board said as a precautionary measure, three elementary schools in the area have also been “secured.”

He said the doors of those schools remain locked, but students were free to move around within the buildings.

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/527369

Bee brains show just how smart they can be

HONEY bees can be trained to count up to four, Queensland researchers have found.

They say their research has shown that bees, which live for a month, can learn colours and smells and be trained to fly through complicated mazes.

One experiment showed the bees can be trained to differentiate between up to four separate landmarks before becoming confused.

“Beyond four they searched equally at all the landmarks, as if they couldn’t tell which one it was,” Professor Mandyam Srinivasan, of the University of Queensland’s Brain Research Institute, said yesterday.

Previous analogous studies had shown bees could store details of three separate locations of pollen-laden flowers in a “diary”.

“However, we were looking purely at sequential counting, whereas they were looking more at how many different items a bee could remember,” he said.

The research probed the capacity of a creature with a tiny brain, Professor Srinivasan said. The bee brain is about the size of a sesame seed, but research has shown it has many of the traits of the human brain, including complex behaviour such as advanced memory and learning.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/bee-brains-show-just-how-smart-they-can-be-20081026-5934.html

Prehistoric child is discovered buried with ‘toy hedgehog’ at Stonehenge

This toy hedgehog, found in a child’s grave at Stonehenge, is proof of what we have always known – children have always loved to play.

The chalk figurine was probably a favourite possession of the three year old, and placed next to the child when they died in the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age, around 3,000 years ago.

Archaeologists who discovered the grave, where the child was laying on his or her side, believe the toy – perhaps placed there by a doting father – is the earliest known depiction of a hedgehog in British history.

The diggers were working to the west of Stonehenge in what is known as the Palisade Ditch when they made the remarkable discovery last month in the top of the pit in which the child was buried.

Archaeologist Dennis Price said: ‘It is not difficult to envisage the raw emotion and harrowing grief that would have accompanied the death of this child.

‘Amid the aura of gloom that surrounds Stonehenge, it comes as a beam of light to find a child’s toy lovingly placed with the tiny corpse to keep him or her company through eternity.

‘I’m not aware of hedgehogs having any significance in pagan tradition so the discovery must rank as yet another unique and baffling aspect of one of the most famous and instantly recognisable prehistoric monuments on Earth. To my mind, the hedgehog possesses a real charm and an innocent beauty. ‘

Dr Joshua Pollard, of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, said: ‘Representational art from this period is very rare and so far as I’m aware, if the identification is correct, it’s the only known prehistoric depiction of a hedgehog from Britain.’

Fay Vass, of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, said: ‘We are very excited to hear about this find. It shows humans have taken hedgehogs to their hearts for a very long time.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1073210/Prehistoric-child-discovered-buried-toy-hedgehog-Stonehenge.html

Red Storm Rising: China’s Grip on the U.S.

*From email.*

Lou Dobbs Tonight
Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Television
*Tonight, the Federal Reserve has cut the key interest
rate by half a point to 1%. Will this help Americans escape
from our financial crisis? And we’ll have all the latest from
the campaign trail less than a week until Election Day.

* Plus, there are new security concerns tonight over a
recent move by the Port of Los Angeles. The port has decided to
use taxpayer money to purchase sensitive X-ray scanning
equipment from a Chinese company with links to the communist
government. We’ll have all the details in our special report.

Radio
Lou’s nationally-syndicated talk radio show, The Lou Dobbs
Show, debuted this spring. Join us weekdays for news and
politics aimed at independent thinkers. Visit LouDobbsRadio.com
to check your local listings or listen live online.

Wednesday’s guests include Dick Polman, a political columnist
and blogger for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He’ll discuss the
electoral dynamics of the Keystone State, a state McCain’s
desperately trying to win.

Howard Wilkinson, a political writer and columnist for the
Cincinnati Enquirer, will break down the situation in another
huge swing state, Ohio.

Peter Morici, professor of international business at the
University of Maryland, will also join Lou. Morici will offer
his insights on the legacy of the federal government’s Wall
Street bailout.

And Mike Malone, the “Silicon Insider” columnist for
ABCNews.com, will talk about media bias and the industry’s
decline.

As always, Lou will be taking your calls to discuss the issues
that matter most-and to get your thoughts on the direction
America is heading. Call him toll free on the Independent
Hotline at 877-55 DOBBS.

Books
Lou’s book, “INDEPENDENTS DAY” is now on sale in bookstores and
on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. In “Independents Day,”
Lou issues a rallying cry to American citizens eager for a
change, focusing particularly on the critical issues and
challenges of the 2008 election.

Web
Check out the completely re-designed
http://www.loudobbs.com, featuring the latest
updates on Lou’s TV and radio shows, audio and video clips,
written commentary and more.

Second Niagara restaurant closes over E. coli concerns

A second restaurant in the Niagara region closed Tuesday over fears of E. coli contamination, the restaurant’s owner confirmed Wednesday.

John Clark said he shut down his popular eatery, M. T. Bellies in Welland, Ont., on Tuesday after three people who had eaten there were reported to have E. coli.

A notice on the M. T. Bellies website said they had closed the kitchen portion of the 15-year-old restaurant as part of “a food safety investigation that may involve several Niagara restaurants.”

The bar remains open.

The closure in Welland follows a Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. restaurant that closed Friday due to an outbreak of the infectious food-borne bacteria.

The health agency is investigating 21 cases of E. coli, six of which have been confirmed to have been confirmed to be E. coli 0157: H7, a harmful strain of bacteria that can lead to bloody diarrhea, vomiting, stomach cramps and fever.

In severe cases, E. coli infection can lead to Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome, commonly referred to as hamburger disease.

The illness, which mostly affects children younger than five years old, can lead to kidney failure and death.

Clark said there is usually about one case of E. coli infection a year in the Niagara region, home to more than 420,000 people in cities such as Niagara Falls and St. Catharines.

“This year, it’s an anomaly, a very unusual situation,” said Clark from his restaurant, which he said had never closed due to food safety issues before. He said food inspectors were taking “scores of samples” to try to confirm the source of the contamination.

Clark would not comment on whether or not he thought the outbreak stemmed from a food distributor.

Niagara-on-the-lake is about 40 kilometres north of Welland. Both southern Ontario cities are within 20 kms. of the American border, raising concerns that the outbreaks could cross into the U.S.

The two closures are the second and third this month in Ontario. A Harvey’s fast food restaurant in North Bay, Ont. closed on Oct. 12 due to E. coli contamination.

More than 220 cases are being investigated in the central Ontario city, and 44 cases have been linked to the burger joint.

Dr. Catherine Whiting, North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit’s medical officer, said Tuesday that one child with E. coli had developed HUS. Another child was admitted to Sick Children’s Hospital in Toronto in critical condition over the weekend as a result of the outbreak.

E. coli cases originating at the Harvey’s have been confirmed in Quebec, British Columbia, and nine other regions in Ontario.

A $50-million class-action lawsuit was filed Friday against the owners of Harvey’s, Cara Operations Ltd.

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=eb1e3d3f-26d3-4248-86ed-fef2a5ff2feb

Joe the Plumber: A vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel

“Joe the Plumber,” the small business aspirant and overnight media sensation who has endorsed John McCain’s presidential campaign, said on Tuesday that he believed a Barack Obama presidency would spell “the death of Israel.”

The Ohio plumber, whose real name is Samuel Wurzelbacher, agreed with a McCain supporter who asked him if he believed “a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel.”

“I’ll go ahead and agree with you on that,” Wurzelbacher told the man, retired Florida lawyer Stan Chapman who was visiting Ohio.

Wurzelbacher, who also said he believed Obama would make America a socialist nation, was joined at the rally by Rob Portman, a former Ohio congressman and budget director under President Bush, who said he disagreed with Chapman’s assessment of Obama’s foreign policy.

Wurzelbacher became famous after he was referred to constantly in the final presidential debate. McCain has been portraying the plumber as emblematic of people with concerns about Obama’s tax plans.

Wurzelbacher himself has undercut the Republican message about him by revealing he makes far less than $250,000 a year. He actually stands to fare better under Obama’s tax plan, but says Obama’s plan would hurt him if he were able to buy the plumbing business from his current employer.

Portman said an Obama administration would mean increased taxes on Social Security, dividends and small businesses.

“In the tough economic times that we’re in, we shouldn’t be raising taxes on anybody,” said Portman, a McCain adviser.

Wurzelbacher’s first trip to the podium was without notes. He often apologized to reporters gathered in a flag store for talking from his gut.

“I’m honestly scared for America,” Wurzelbacher said.

He later said Obama would end the democracy that the U.S. military had defended during wars.

“I love America. I hope it remains a democracy, not a socialist society. … If you look at spreading the wealth, that’s honestly right out of Karl Marx’s mouth,” Wurzelbacher said.

“No one can debate that. That’s not my opinion. That’s fact.”

Wurzelbacher also said he had spoken with a lawyer about news reports that his state records had been accessed, perhaps illegally. The Ohio inspector general is investigating who or why accounts assigned to Attorney General Nancy Rogers’ office, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and the Toledo Police Department were used.

Wurzelbacher was scheduled to make stops in Dayton, Middletown, Milford and Cincinnati. The bus tour included guests billed as Mary the Flag Lady, Mike the Painter and Linda the Fitness Trainer

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1032257.html

Pakistani quake leaves 150 dead, 15,000 homeless

QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) — A strong earthquake struck before dawn Wednesday in impoverished southwestern Pakistan, killing at least 150 people, and turning thousands of homes of mud and timber homes into rubble.

With some roads blocked by landslides, officials said army helicopters were ferrying hundreds of troops and medical teams to villages in the quake zone and had set up a field hospital in Quetta, the Baluchistan provincial capital, 50 miles from the epicenter.

Officials said they were distributing thousands of tents, blankets and food packages and sending in earth-moving equipment to dig mass graves for those killed in the magnitude 6.4 quake. Many of those who survived were left with little more than the clothes they had slept in, and with winter approaching, temperatures were expected to drop to around freezing in coming nights in the region bordering Afghanistan.

A magnitude 6.2 quake struck Wednesday evening, but appeared to cause little damage.

The worst-hit area from the first quake appeared to be Ziarat, where hundreds of mostly mud and timber houses were destroyed in five villages, Mayor Dilawar Kakar said. Some homes were buried in a landslide triggered by the quake, he said.

“Not a single house is intact,” Kakar told Express News television.

Maulana Abdul Samad, the minister for forests in Baluchistan, said at least 150 people were confirmed to have died. Kakar said hundreds of people have been injured and some 15,000 were homeless.

“I would like to appeal to the whole world for help. We need food, we need medicine. People need warm clothes, blankets because it is cold here,” Kakar said.

In the village of Sohi, a reporter for AP Television News saw the bodies of 17 people killed in one collapsed house and 12 from another. Distraught residents were digging a mass grave.

“We can’t dig separate graves for each of them, as the number of deaths is high and still people are searching in the rubble” of many other homes, said Shamsullah Khan, a village elder.

Other survivors sat stunned in the open.

Hospitals in the nearby town of Kawas and Quetta were flooded with the dead and injured.

One patient in Quetta Civil Hospital, Raz Mohammed, said he was awoken by the sound of his children crying before he felt a jolt.

“I rushed toward them but the roof of my own room collapsed and the main iron support hit me,” he said. “That thing broke my back and I am in severe pain but thank God my children and relatives are safe.”

The quake struck two hours before dawn and had a magnitude of 6.4, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. It was a shallow 10 miles below the surface and was centered about 400 miles southwest of the capital, Islamabad.

Pakistan is prone to violent seismic upheavals. Wednesday’s quake was the deadliest since a magnitude-7.6 quake devastated Kashmir and northern Pakistan in October 2005, killing about 80,000 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.

Officials said the area hit on Wednesday was much less densely populated.

Baluchistan is home to a long-running separatist movement, but is not considered a major battleground in the fight against Taliban insurgents that plague other border regions.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jQ1xhRo256Itkv8iKFTl8uUTXpAwD9445KS80

Defence of free speech must be absolute: advocate

EDMONTON – There’s not much that seems to faze Alan Borovoy when it comes to his infallible belief in a person’s right to free speech in Canada.

Groups that bash gays, women or religious organizations may be repugnant, but democracies must allow them to speak freely, insists Borovoy, the general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association who will give a speech in Edmonton on Wednesday.

But even for a 40-year veteran of the civil liberties movement, the ideals of free speech can occasionally clash with the realities of one’s heart. For Borovoy, such a clash occurred when the CCLA defended Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel’s right not to be muzzled.

“I was bothered by the number of Holocaust survivors I knew who would be hurt by what I was saying,” says Borovoy, 75.

“To know the things I was saying were so hurtful to people who had suffered so much already — that bothered me.”

But that’s still no reason not to support Zundel’s rights, he says, immediately afterwards.

As the longtime public voice of the CCLA, Borovoy speaks persuasively and passionately about contemporary attacks on civil liberties in Canada. He has written a handful of books on the topic and lectures widely across the country. And he is funny.

“Do you know why cold weather makes for political stability?” he quips. “Because it’s too cold to demonstrate.”

In the 1960s, Borovoy started working for the Jewish Labour Committee to fight racism against minority groups in Toronto. In the four decades since, critics of his work have shifted along with the country’s political winds.

“At one time, I got it from the right because my stance might have been seen as helping the communists and Trotskyists,” he says.

“If you live long enough, you have the opportunity to experience (criticism) every which way.”

These days, he is likely to be eyed with suspicion by some members of the left who condemn his support for the rights of right-wing political commentators to express their views.

Borovoy has been particularly vocal in denouncing what he views as misuse of the country’s human rights commissions.

He notes two Alberta cases that have attracted media attention — that of Ezra Levant, who is appearing this month before the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission for publishing the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, and that of Rev. Stephen Boissoin, who wrote to a Red Deer newspaper claiming that gays, among other things, are “just as immoral” as pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps.

Levant and Boissoin are accused of promoting hatred towards Muslims and gays, respectively.

Borovoy believes neither case belongs in front of a human rights commission. He speaks from a position of intimacy on the issue, since he helped establish the commissions in the 1960s to stop discrimination against minority groups in the employment and housing sectors.

“Nobody ever thought the commissions would have anything to do with expressions of opinion or the dissemination of news reports. That wasn’t on the table,” he says.

“I think it’s awful that a law could be used to muzzle that kind of expression. That’s the stuff of what democratic polemics are about.”

In his 40 years at the helm of the country’s civil liberties movement, Borovoy has seen other changes, too, in how the Canadian public perceives civil rights issues. During the FLQ crisis, the CCLA spoke out against the invocation of the War Measures Act, and Borovoy recalls a stream of angry phone calls slamming the organization’s stance.

Fast-forward 31 years to government actions taken after 9/11, and reactions were very different, says Borovoy. Most calls to the CCLA supported their position against heavy-handed government intrusion on Canadians’ liberties.

“I can only speculate, but I suspect that it’s probably increased urbanization, increased immigration and communities that have become more heterogeneous (that) has brought with it a greater willingness to question government,” he says.

“And yes, it is positive. It’s important in a democracy.”

http://www.canada.com/topics/technology/story.html?id=449e1994-5d1d-4808-abca-aa7b1f096f66