A new Mercy For Animals undercover investigation reveals shocking abuse at New England's largest egg factory farm - Quality Egg of New England (QENE) in Turner, Maine. The hidden camera video shot in early 2009 gives a startling glimpse behind the closed doors of one of the nation's leading egg producers, exposing the rotten truth behind battery cage egg production - heinous cruelty to animals.

State officials responded to the findings of the investigation this morning by executing a raid on the farm.

MFA's investigation reveals: • Rotting carcasses in cages with live hens still laying eggs for human consumption.
• Workers and managers killing birds by grabbing their necks and swinging them around in circles - an attempt to break their necks which often resulted in prolonged, torturous deaths for the hens.
• Supervisors and workers throwing live birds into trash cans, leaving them to be slowly crushed under the weight of other birds' corpses and unable to access food or water.
• Birds suffering from broken bones, bloody open wounds, and untreated infections.

On March 30, Senator Patrick Leahy gave five Vermonters a half hour of his time. We were: Martha Hennessy, a peace activist from Weathersfield, John Nirenberg, a Brattleboro man who walked from Boston to Washington D.C. in 2007 to call for impeachment, Charlotte Dennett from Cambridge, who ran for Attorney General in Vermont in 2008 on a pledge to prosecute Bush, Kurt Daims, the author of the Brattleboro indictment resolution passed in 2008 and Dan DeWalt of Newfane, who has been active promoting impeachment and accountability. We were there to discuss the Senator's idea for a “truth commission” to investigate criminality by the Bush/Cheney administration, and our ideas about why only prosecutions of the culpable will give us a chance to prevent a recurrence of these crimes and abuses of the Constitution.

America, due to Bush/Cheney policy, has added torture to our standard operating procedure, even if it is now held in abeyance by the Obama administration. That morally reprehensible act, while now out of favor, is essentially legal and Constitutional because no Congressional objection has been made and no one has been held accountable.

Chernobyl exploded and Three Mile Island missed by a whisker. They both killed people.

But thirty years after the Pennsylvania melt-down, a Soviet-style Iron Curtain has formed between the corporate media and the alternatives, with nuclear power at its center.

The Soviets denied for days that the Chernobyl accident had happened at all. America's parallel corporate media says "no one died at TMI."

Take National Public Radio's Scott Simon. On March 28, Simon smirked on air that "no one was killed or injured" at Three Mile Island, "not so much as a sprained ankle."

Except when people are fleeing them, as they did 30 years ago, radiation releases have never been linked directly to joint sprains.

But cancer, leukemia, birth defects, stillbirths, malformations, spontaneous abortions, skin lesions, hair loss, respiratory problems, sterility, nausea, cataracts, a metallic taste, premature aging, general loss of bodily function and more can be caused by radioactive emissions of the type that poured out of TMI. And all such ailments have been documented there OUTside the corporate media.

While it’s a commonly held belief that “everyone has a nonbiological twin somewhere in the world,” I wonder if we all have an antithetical “anti-twin” as well. Because I recently met someone who could easily be mine. Ironically enough, it was at the public library, one of my favorite haunts.

It’d been a particularly cold winter and the mercury had finally inched up to where it was light jacket weather, so I decided to spend a day prowling around an area called The Country Club Plaza, a Kansas City “landmark.”

Picture the Plaza as a physical incarnation of the spiritual realm where all the souls of the “good” members of the bourgeoisie will transcend once they’ve run themselves to death in the race to acquire the most toys.

Ohio friends,
I’m writing to enlist your help. We are closing in on an initial goal in getting cosponsors for S 428, the Cuba “travel for all” bill in the Senate. The authors of the bill (Senator Dorgan, D-ND and Senator Enzi, R-WY) are looking to “go public” with the bill shortly.
As we approach the public announcement, we’d like to get a few more key senators on board. We’ve identified Senator Sherrod Brown as key to this effort. Senator Brown is a new senator, so he doesn’t have a record on Cuba votes in the Senate; but he does have a record from his years in the House of Representatives. And it is a good record, so it should not be a stretch for him to cosponsor this bill. We just haven’t been able to get his attention to sign onto this bill. We need to get the bill, S 428, on his radar screen (or his staff’s radar screens) so that he will sign on before the big public roll-out happens before the April recess. Can you help?