Foreign Students in U.S. Forced to Sleep on Floors, Strip for Cash

More than 100,000 foreign exchange students come to the U.S. every year as part of a State Department-run cultural exchange program, but while they’re promised work and the chance to travel, many encounter the seedier side of their host country, an Associated Press investigation finds. The J-1 Summer Work and Travel program—which actually runs year-round—is intended to give foreign college students a taste of the United States, but with little government oversight, the AP reports, J-1 students are routinely targeted by corrupt employers and landlords. Some participants reported being forced into working at strip clubs or begging to pay rent, while others say that their pay was docked so heavily that they ended up earning less than $1 an hour. J-1 students are often charged exorbitant rents, and “some live in apartments so crowded that they sleep in shifts because there aren’t enough beds. Others have to eat on floors.” The State Department “consistently” uses outside businesses to police the program, which “generates millions for the sponsor companies and third-party labor recruiters” who don’t have to pay taxes on foreign workers. Because workers typically leave after a few months, abuses usually go unnoticed. When approached by the AP about complaints stemming from the program, it took the State Department more than a year to respond. “It turns out that until this year, we did NOT keep a record of complaints. Now, we do,” said Marthena Cowart, a senior adviser for the department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, in a November 2010 e-mail.

via The most important news and commentary to read right now. – The Slatest – Slate Magazine.

Ho-Ho-Ho!: 100-Year-Old Walmart Greeter Lois Speelman Shoved by Customer

MILWAUKEE (Nov. 29) — A 100-year-old greeter at a Milwaukee Walmart was shoved by a customer after the centenarian tried to stop the woman to determine if she’d paid for items that were in the lower part of her shopping cart, police said Monday.

Greeter Lois Speelman fell down and went to a hospital after she was shoved on Sunday.

“I’m bruised a little, but I’m able to go back to work Thursday,” Speelman told The Associated Press from her home on Monday.

Speelman declined to answer further questions, saying she didn’t want to lose her job and the investigation wasn’t over. A Wal-Mart Stores Inc. spokeswoman didn’t have more details but said that Speelman’s health was the company’s primary concern.

“Most importantly, our associate is doing OK and we’re grateful for that. The actions of this individual are appalling and we appreciate the work of police in this case,” spokeswoman Ashley Hardie said.

Milwaukee police spokeswoman Anne E. Schwartz said the case has been referred to prosecutors for a potential aggravated battery charge.

Speelman became a local celebrity briefly when she was profiled by several news outlets after she celebrated her 100th birthday at the store in August.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Speelman has been twice widowed and started greeting at the store when she was 90. She retired at 95, but came back at 97 after her only living son died and continues to work an average of 34 hours a week.

100-Year-Old Walmart Greeter Lois Speelman Shoved by Customer.

Leslie Nielsen dies at 84; serious actor became a comic star – latimes.com

The Canada native, who seemed perfectly cast as a handsome leading man when he came to Hollywood in the 1950s, had career-changing roles in the ‘Airplane!‘ and ‘Naked Gun‘ comedies.

Leslie Nielsen, who starred in multiple spoof movies including “Wrongfully Accused,” has died. He was 84. (Doug Curran / The Associated Press)

Leslie Nielsen, a serious actor who became a comic star with his career-changing roles in “Airplane!” and the “Naked Gun” comedies, died Sunday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 84.

Nielson died of complications from pneumonia at a hospital near his home, surrounded by his wife, Barbaree, and friends, his agent, John S. Kelly, said in a statement.

In “Airplane!,” the 1980 send-up of just about every disaster movie plot imaginable, Nielsen as Dr. Rumack was “an essentially serious actor taking essentially preposterous material very straight,” wrote Times Arts Editor Charles Champlin in his review.

Just how preposterous was it?

As the crew and passengers became ill, Nielsen said they needed to get the sick to a hospital.

“A hospital? What is it?” a flight attendant asked.

Nielsen: “It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.”

And when Nielsen was told, “Surely you can’t be serious,” he answered: “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.”

Nielsen followed up “Airplane!” with another goofy role delivered with deadpan conviction as Frank Drebin in the “Police Squad!” television show and “Naked Gun” movies.

It was quite a career shift for an actor who seemed perfectly cast as a handsome leading man when he came to Hollywood in the 1950s, already a veteran of live television appearances.

A typically serious early role was as the spaceship commander in “Forbidden Planet, ” the 1956 science-fiction classic. “It’s the reason I was never asked to do ‘Star Trek’ or ‘Twilight Zone’ for TV,” he told the Toronto Star in 2002. “I carried too much baggage with me from that movie.”

Nielsen played Debbie Reynolds‘ sweetheart in the 1957 film “Tammy and the Bachelor,” was the Revolutionary War fighter Francis Marion in the Disney TV adventure series “The Swamp Fox” and had roles in such TV series as “The New Breed” and “Bracken’s World.”

“I just always worked,” he said. “I played a lot of leaders, autocratic sorts. Perhaps it was my Canadian accent.”

Nielsen also was captain of the doomed ocean liner in the 1972 disaster movie “The Poseidon Adventure.”

All the while he “was a closet comedian,” he told The Times in 1991.

Then “Airplane!” changed his career.

Producers-directors-writers Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker hired Nielsen and other veteran actors Robert Stack, Peter Graves and Lloyd Bridges, all perfectly cast to spoof their own heroic and very serious images.

“I will be forever grateful to them,” Nielsen told The Times in 1991. “It is just an amazing roll of the dice. I am so lucky to be a representative of their humor.”

Nielsen then was cast in “Police Squad!,” which aimed to do to cop shows what “Airplane!” did to disaster movies.

It lasted all of six episodes on ABC, but Nielsen moved on as Drebin to the 1988 movie “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!,” with George Kennedy, O.J. Simpson and Priscilla Presley among his co-stars. Its success led to two sequels.

“Leslie has the idea to play it maybe not straight but deadly serious,” David Zucker told the L.A. Daily News in 1994. “You can take any one performance and just transfer it from a comedy to a drama. There’s just no difference — that’s what he can do.”

Nielsen was born Feb. 11, 1926, in Regina, Saskatchewan. His father was a Royal Canadian mounted police officer and one of his brothers became a deputy prime minister of Canada.

He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force after graduating from high school and after the service studied at a Toronto radio school operated by Lorne Greene — who would become a TV star with the series “Bonanza”— before moving to New York to start working in television.

Nielsen’s later movies included “All I Want for Christmas” in 1991, “Dracula: Dead and Loving It” in 1995, “Spy Hard” in 1996 and “Mr. Magoo” in 1997.

He also toured with his one-man show on the life of defense lawyer Clarence Darrow.

Nielsen had two daughters and was married three times previously, according to the Associated Press. A complete list of survivors was not available.

Leslie Nielsen dies at 84; serious actor became a comic star – latimes.com.

Saddam Hussein’s Yacht Takes the Long Way Home

Saddam Hussein‘s 269-foot yacht, Basra Breeze, which has been on the lam since the 1980s, is back in Iraq. Now the country’s transportation minister, who enjoys using Saddam’s toilet and sleeping in his bed, wants to make it a museum.

Speaking to NPR, Transportation Minister Amer Abdul Jabar Ismail said he had a brush with another one of Saddam’s yachts in the 80’s when he was working as an engineer on an oil tanker: “The captain of this Saddam yacht told me, ‘Please, I need some assist, we need repair.’ I speak, ‘Yes,’ because I can’t refuse.” One of Saddam’s guards then detained and interrogated Ismail, before letting him go with a warning: “If I see you again, I kill you.”

Decades later, after the Basra Breeze was loaned out to the royal families of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman and then renovated in Greece, Ismail is getting the last laugh:

But now, I stay here – in Saddam’s position. You see? Now I receive Saddam’s salon, Saddam’s bedroom,” he says. “I read in the Koran. I sleep in the bed. I use bathroom. I use everything here.”

As one would expect from Saddam, the Basra Breeze boasts a minisubmarine, a helipad and gold-plated everything. And now Ismail, once threatened by the dictator’s men, is shitting in Saddam’s toilet and sleeping in his bed.

[Images via AP]

 

Saddam Hussein’s Yacht Takes the Long Way Home.

Hundreds Die in Stampede in Cambodia – NYTimes.com

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Thousands of people stampeded during a festival in the Cambodian capital Monday night, leaving more than 330 dead and hundreds injured in what the prime minister called the country’s biggest tragedy since the 1970s reign of terror by the Khmer Rouge.

Some in the panicky crowd — who were celebrating the end of the rainy season on a sliver of land in a river — tried to flee over a bridge and were crushed underfoot or fell over its sides into the water. A witness who arrived shortly after the stampede described “bodies stacked on bodies” on the bridge as rescuers swarmed the area.

Ambulances raced back and forth between the river and the hospitals for several hours after the stampede. Calmette Hospital, the capital’s main medical facility, was filled to capacity with bodies as well as patients, some of whom had to be treated in hallways. Many of the injured appeared to be badly hurt, raising the prospect that the death toll could rise as local hospitals became overwhelmed.

Hours after the chaos, the dead and injured were still being taken away from the scene, while searchers looked for bodies of anyone who might have drowned. An Associated Press reporter saw one body floating in the river, and hundreds of shoes left behind on and around the bridge.

Prime Minister Hun Sen, in his third post-midnight live television broadcast, said that 339 people had been killed and 329 injured. He described the chaos as the biggest tragedy to strike his country since the communist rule of the Khmer Rouge, whose radical policies are blamed for the deaths of 1.7 million people during the 1970s.

He ordered an investigation into the cause of the stampede and declared Thursday would be a national day of mourning. Government ministries were ordered to fly the flag at half-staff.

Authorities had estimated that upward of 2 million people would descend on Phnom Penh for the three-day water festival, which marks the end of the rainy season and whose main attraction is traditional boat races along the river.

The last race ended early Monday evening, the last night of the holiday, and the panic started later on Koh Pich — Diamond Island — a long spit of land wedged in a fork in the river where a concert was being held. It was unclear how many people were on the island to celebrate the holiday, though the area appeared to be packed with people, as were the banks.

Soft drink vendor So Cheata said the trouble began when about 10 people fell unconscious in the press of the crowd. She said that set off a panic, which then turned into a stampede, with many people caught underfoot.

Information Minister Khieu Kanharith gave a similar account of the cause.

Seeking to escape the island, part of the crowd pushed onto a bridge, which also jammed up, with people falling under others and into the water. So Cheata said hundreds of hurt people lay on the ground afterward. Many appeared to be unconscious.

Philip Heijmans, a 27-year-old photographer from Brooklyn, N.Y., who arrived at the scene half-an-hour after the stampede, walked up the bridge to see hundreds of shoes and pieces of clothing, then a body, then more “bodies stacked on bodies.”

He counted about 40 in all, with about 200 rescuers in the area. Some Australian firefighters were on the scene— it wasn’t clear why they were in town — who were checking pulses before loading bodies into vans.

Cambodia is one of the region’s poorer countries, and has an underdeveloped health system, with hospitals barely able to cope with daily medical demands.

Koh Pich used to host a slum community, but in recent years the poor have been evicted to make way for high-rise and commercial development, most yet to be realized.

Hundreds Die in Stampede in Cambodia – NYTimes.com.

Woman Considered World’s Oldest Person Dies At 114

Eugenie Blanchard

GUSTAVIA, St. Barts — Eugenie Blanchard, a nun who was considered the world’s oldest person, died in the French Caribbean island of St. Barts on Thursday. She was 114.

Blanchard, who friends called “Sweets” because of her kindness, died at Bruyn Hospital, where she had lived in the geriatric ward since 1980, said hospital director Pierre Nuty.

Her death leaves Eunice G. Sanborn of Jacksonville, Texas, as the world’s oldest person, according to two organizations that monitor that status.

Blanchard’s cousin Armelle Blanchard told The Associated Press that while her relative could no longer talk, she had seemed to be in relatively good health.

“When you talked to her, she would smile,” the cousin said. “We don’t know if she understood us.”

Blanchard was born on St. Barts on Feb. 16, 1896, and lived much of her life in a convent in the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao before returning home in the 1950s. She was the last survivor of a family of 13 brothers and sisters.

Blanchard worked hard from an early age, her cousin recalled.

“At that time, life was very hard in St. Barts,” she said. “She tended the garden and took care of the animals.”

Blanchard arrived at Curacao’s Congregation of Franciscan Sisters of Roosendaal in May 1923 and stayed until August 1955, said Sister Marietta, a nun in Curacao who met Blanchard just before she returned to St. Barts.

Blanchard, who was known as Sister Cyria, likely worked in the kitchen, she told the AP.

“I always saw her there. She was a very affectionate person,” Sister Marietta said.

After returning from Curacao, Blanchard lived in a quaint house in the Merlette district with a cat as her only companion, her cousin said.

France’s Junior Minister for Senior Citizens, Nora Berra, said Blanchard devoted her life to God and to others.

“Eugenie Blanchard, who dedicated herself to help those who are most fragile, was a lovely and generous example of France,” Berra said in a statement.

Blanchard became the world’s oldest person after Kama Chinen of Japan died a week before her 115th birthday, according to the Gerontology Research Group, which tracks people of extremely old age. Guinness Records also recognized Blanchard as the world’s oldest person.

Both the Los Angeles-based Gerontology Research Group and London-based Guinness Records say Sanborn is now believed to be the oldest living person. She was born July 20, 1896, in Louisiana. Blanchard’s birth date was Feb. 16, 1896.

Dr. L. Stephen Coles of Gerontology Research told the AP he spoke to Sanborn’s family Thursday and “she’s doing well.”

Sanborn told the Tyler Morning Telegraph in an April interview that she loves everything about her life and has “no complaints.”

Woman Considered World’s Oldest Person Dies At 114.

Related Articles

• Oldest person dies aged 114 (thesun.co.uk)