What's in the News?

          I woke up at 2:00 am this morning, perhaps to the call of yesterday's newspaper.  I read "Foreign students say program uses them as cheap labor" (Julia Preston, NYT) about students from China, Nigeria, Romania, and Ukraine who were protesting because what they thought would be a cultural exchange--a chance to work and travel in the U.S. while learning English--turned out to keep the 400 of them "Lifting heavy boxes and packing Reese's candies, Kit-kats and Almond Joys on a fast-moving production line, many of them on a night shift." The money they were making wasn't enough to cover the expenses of their getting to the point of exploitation in the first place! But, hey, we need our chocolate bars!  And we weren't outsourcing the bars.  They were right here in the USA--in Pennsylvania.  I liked the flavor of the protest, too.  They were "shouting defiantly in many languages."  This was, according to the article, a program sponsored by the State Department.

           I was also interested to read that there's an Iraqi drug ring working with the Mexican cartels in San Diego!  These Iraqis are Chaldeans--Christians who fled Iraq to escape extremists. Now they have their own company, the Chaldean Organized Crime Syndicate.  (Is that how they advertise in the yellow pages?)  Their headquarters are in Detroit, but the arrest was in El Cajon, near San Diego, where 60 people were arrested after a six-month investigation by the DEA and local police.  Apparently, neighbors and even the spouses of some of the club members had been complaining for years about the criminal activity--murder attempts, sales of meth and marijuana, gambling and illegal firearms.

           "The 'Bad Hair Bandit," the bank robber who used wigs when she robbed banks, turns out to be a former nurse for the Correctional Medical Services. Her younger husband, someone she met when he was in prison for forgery, drove the getaway car.

          When I saw the headline "Letterman threat on jihadist website," I wondered why the jihadist website was letting him put the threat there.

For years I've kept a log of the day's headlines, but these quirky little pieces of news are also fascinating, aren't they!