Day: April 21, 2013

Nearly half of Gitmo prisoners are now on hunger strike

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Gallo/Getty

The number of detainees taking part in a hunger strike at the US-run Guantanamo Bay military prison has grown to 77, an increase of 25 in just the past few days, according to a US military spokesman.

Lieutenant Colonel Samuel House said in a statement that of the detainees refusing food, 17 are receiving “enteral feedings,” a process involving being force-fed via tubes.

Five of the inmates have been admitted to hospital, although none faces “life-threatening conditions,” House said…

The hunger strikers are protesting against their incarceration without charge or trial at Guantanamo over the past 11 years.

“They say they want their freedom,” Al Jazeera’s Rosiland Jordan, reporting from Washington, said. “Or they’ll die trying to get it…”

Al Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj, who spent six years at the Guantanamo Bay prison, said: “They used dogs on us, they beat me, sometimes they hung me from the ceiling and didn’t allow me to sleep for six days.”

Brandon Neely, a US Military Policeman and former Guantanamo guard, told Al Jazeera that detainees were “treated horribly”.

Neely said he regularly watched detainees being beaten and humiliated, as well as watching a medic beat an inmate.

Despite an order in 2011 by Barack Obama, the US president, to close Guantanamo down by the end of that year, there are no current plans to shut the prison.

American politicians all seem bound by a system of ethics which denies culpability, rejects responsibility for their actions – especially when they violate laws they otherwise praise. Passing the buck has become the number one sport inside the Beltway.

Pic of the Day

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marathon bomber
Click to enlarge – REUTERS/Massachusetts State Police/Handout

An aerial infrared image shows the outline of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in a boat during the manhunt in Watertown, Massachusetts, April 19, 2013, courtesy of the Massachusetts State Police. A telephone call from a resident led police to the boat where the suspect, identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was hiding and a police helicopter detected a heat signal that confirmed his presence there…

Florida battles slimy invasion by giant snails – the wrong way

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Slow-moving fast food

South Florida is fighting a growing infestation of one of the world’s most destructive invasive species: the giant African land snail, which can grow as big as a rat and gnaw through stucco and plaster.

More than 1,000 of the mollusks are being caught each week in Miami-Dade and 117,000 in total since the first snail was spotted by a homeowner in September 2011, said Denise Feiber, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

Residents will soon likely begin encountering them more often, crunching them underfoot as the snails emerge from underground hibernation at the start of the state’s rainy season in just seven weeks, Feiber said…

A typical snail can produce about 1,200 eggs a year and the creatures are a particular pest in homes because of their fondness for stucco, devoured for the calcium content they need for their shells…

The last known Florida invasion of the giant mollusks occurred in 1966, when a boy returning to Miami from a vacation in Hawaii brought back three of them, possibly in his jacket pockets. His grandmother eventually released the snails into her garden where the population grew in seven years to 17,000 snails. The state spent $1 million and 10 years eradicating them.

Feiber said many people unfamiliar with the danger viewed the snails as cute pets.

“They’re huge, they move around, they look like they’re looking at you … communicating with you, and people enjoy them for that,” Feiber said. “But they don’t realize the devastation they can create if they are released into the environment where they don’t have any natural enemies and they thrive.”

Though I prefer sea snails/scungilli and conch, many varieties of snails are a taste-tempting treat. Never had a chance to be told they were something not worth eating because – when I was a kid – our family shared a duplex home with our landlady who was French. She kept a terrarium of snails in her kitchen for special occasions.