Worldwide Hippies News Briefs Friday
Andrew Breitbart dead: Outspoken conservative was 43
Andrew Breitbart, the outspoken conservative writer, activist and website operator, has died unexpectedly in Los Angeles, where he lived with a wife and four young children. He was 43.
Breitbart, who may have been best known as the conservative who brought down ACORN, was pronounced dead at the UCLA Medical Center shortly after midnight on Thursday, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office told Yahoo News. The cause of death was not immediately known, a spokesman at the coroner’s office said. More…
How Syrian Activists Saved Trapped Foreign Journalists
The Bab Amr district of Homs had already been descending into hell when the Syrian army apparently homed in on satellite phones being used by foreign journalists there and sent mortars their way, killing the American reporter Marie Colvin and the French photographer Rémi Ochlik on Feb. 22. It would take eight days before all their surviving colleagues were finally able to escape, even as Bab Amr lay shattered and grieving, its remaining residents — 4,000 people or so — exhausted by the weeks of bombardment, suffering from hunger and the gnawing cold. As of Thursday, Bab Amr was abandoned too by the elements of the Free Syrian Army who were using it to launch attacks on the regime of President Bashir Assad. The rebels had run out of ammunition. Syrian activists said on Thursday they had been forced to bury Colvin and Ochlik, after struggling for days to keep their bodies refrigerated with dwindling fuel supplies. More…
Mansion servant enslaved by uber-rich New York family for nearly six yearsA wealthy New York woman is facing criminal charges after being accused of keeping an illegal immigrant as an indentured servant and forcing her to live in a closet for nearly six years.
Documents posted on the Smoking Gun allege that Annie George, 39, and her now-deceased husband, Mathai Kolath George, hired an illegal immigrant from the Indian state of Kerala. The immigrant, identified only as “V.M.,” was promised about $1,000 a month in wages to live in the family’s 34-room, 30,000-square-foot home, known as Llenroc mansion, which houses a helicopter pad, 15 fireplaces, marble flooring, 24-karat gold gilded ceilings and a glass elevator. V.M. was tasked with taking care of the Georges’ four young children, along with performing household duties in the mansion located about 20 miles north of Albany.
New York’s minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Even if V.M. had been allowed to leave the residence at the end of a regular 40-hour workweek, she would have been entitled to a minimum, pretax income of $290 per week, or $1,160 per month.
Instead, the “forced labor situation” (as described in the court papers) was even worse than the already-below minimum wage offer of $1,000 month. V.M. received 85 cents an hour, working 17-hour days, seven days a week, over the 67 months she was kept inside the George residence. More…
