Sorry -- We're CLOSED ... Internet Cafes Shut Down Again in Jackson County -- BIG DAWG -- "We seized computers, documentation records," said Jackson County Sheriff Lou Roberts. (Feb. 8, 2012) ...
Image by marsmet526
Marianna- The Big Dawg and Kindel Lanes Bowling Alley's internet cafes in Marianna remained closed Wednesday.
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.....item 1)... WJHG.com ... www.wjhg.com ... Posted: 6:29 PM Feb 8, 2012
Internet Cafes Shut Down Again in Jackson County
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img code photo ... BIG DAWG Calling Cards
media.graytvinc.com/images/2012-02-08_13-09-21_2081.jpg
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Marianna- The internet cafe debate is heating up again in Jackson County. The Jackson County Sheriff's Department shut down two of the operations this week that had re-opened.
Reporter: Bryan Anderson
Email Address: Bryan.Anderson@wjhg.com
www.wjhg.com/home/headlines/Internet_Cafes_Shut_Down_Agai...
Marianna- The Big Dawg and Kindel Lanes Bowling Alley's internet cafes in Marianna remained closed Wednesday.
"We seized computers, documentation records," said Jackson County Sheriff Lou Roberts.
Roberts said he and his deputies busted the two businesses for a second time Tuesday.
"What were the owners reactions when they saw you guys show up yesterday?," asked News Channel 7's Bryan Anderson.
"I think it was deja vu all over again, they're here again," said Roberts.
This comes as lawmakers continue to battle it out in Tallahassee over the legality of these businesses. The House is pushing a bill that would ban them outright, while the Senate calls instead for regulation.
But there's not been a final decision yet, and some fear legislators are farther from making one than when they first started.
"There are so many clouded issues as to which way it could go," said Roberts.
Despite the ongoing debate, Roberts and many other authorities around the state say they hope for a clear-cut answer sometime soon. Roberts said until then he'll continue to go off the opinions of Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and Jackson County's grand jury.
"Our stance is still that it doesn't pass the standard in the gambling statutes in Florida," said Roberts.
There's still an ongoing lawsuit between Specialized Games L.L.C., which ran Kindel Lanes' cafe, and Sheriff Roberts and the State. It's not clear how Tuesday's shut down could affect the case.
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What makes us visible / invisible or are we living just to enrich others? What is our soul, what is our life? Explore through imagination of beauty my friends! Do you see?
Image by || UggBoy♥UggGirl || PHOTO || WORLD || TRAVEL ||
View Invisible Souls, who live On lonely planets On Black
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The invisible workers
by Graham Bowley
Published 16 December 2002
People like Marianna, a doctor, clean our toilets, sweep our roads, care for our elderly. They shouldn't be here; perhaps that's why we don't see them. Graham Bowley reports
The frail 23-year-old woman with long brown hair took the stuffy overnight train to Kiev six times, sitting alone among the milling crowds in the stark waiting hall at the British embassy, before she grew frustrated and turned at last to the black market. She was desperate to leave Ukraine: she had recently finished her medical studies, but to secure an internship, she would have to pay a ,000 "gift" to the head doctor. This was a near-impossible sum when, as a family practitioner, she would make only a month. So Marianna had decided to travel to England to earn her fortune.
There she would join her husband. Eight months earlier, in October 2000, Oleh had closed his wine distribution business in Ivano-Frankivsk, a provincial town in western Ukraine: he couldn't afford the bribes sought by the tax police on top of the 95 per cent rates he already paid in official taxes. He had fled to London using illegal documents provided by "the firm", as Marianna called it. A few months later - and ,000 in debt to the firm - Marianna set off on a coach to England, feeling "calm but cold", clutching a student visa, and leaving Katrussia, her ten-month-old daughter, behind.
She is not alone. Of the 3,000 people in the village near Ivano-Frankivsk where Marianna grew up, half now labour abroad. The pattern is the same across the whole of eastern Europe - Ukrainians, Belorussians, Moldovans, Lithuanians, all the nations that emerged 11 years ago from the remains of the Soviet Union, are now pouring into Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany and Britain.
As a result of this burgeoning economic migration, there are now hundreds of thousands of people like Oleh and Marianna living among us. They are a secret, undocumented, even invisible population. But they are there, all the same. They stare back at us over our coffee-shop counters, they clean our hotel rooms, they toil in the dust of our building sites. And their numbers will swell as the new Europe opens its borders farther to the east.
"The amount of people who are working outside normal labour conditions is huge," says Nicola Rogers of Advice on Individual Rights in Europe (Aire). She adds: "From what I can see, there is a severe underreporting of illegal immigrants in this country. There is an increasing use of trafficking and smuggling. That is not surprising because people can't come here by legal routes."
At the small, bare terraced house in north London, the Ukrainian woman who lives across the landing from Marianna and Oleh has been slitting her wrists. She has also been shoplifting and using forged Tube tickets. Everyone in the illicit migrant community possesses some forged papers - a Lithuanian gang, nicknamed "the Manipulators", provides Marianna, Oleh and their friends with any false document they need, from passports (cost: £1,500 in cash) to a bank account (£100) to false National Insurance cards (£40) - but most use them sparingly, and carefully. Marianna, who has been showing me her daughter's creased photograph pinned to a wall in the tiny bedroom, is crazy with fear that her unpredictable, suicidal neighbour will bring the police to their door. If that happens, she says, then she and Oleh "will have to leave the house and run away quickly" and never return. Over the past two years since they came to England, they have moved house five times, always to one of the cheaper neighbourhoods that form a ring around central London: areas such as Stratford, Seven Sisters, Clapton and Leytonstone that most of the new migrants call home. Sitting there now, it seems a far cry from the majestic, dilapidated avenues of western Ukraine.
"We are trying not to develop close friends here," says Marianna, leaning forward at the kitchen table. A thin woman with wide cheekbones, a mole on her cheek and small glass earrings, she is very pale and visibly shaking. The tips of her faintly dyed hair curl on her shoulders. "Though we do have acquaintances, perhaps a hundred people we know, all Ukrainians. We all keep in touch by mobile phone."
After I have managed to coax Marianna to talk for a few minutes, Oleh, a lean, fair-haired man in his early thirties, wearing a fake designer blue T-shirt, tracksuit trousers and running shoes, bounds in to show me a well-thumbed photograph album. In one of the photos, a two-year-old girl wearing a yellow dress and with a cheeky grin stands in a flower-filled garden. The fair-haired girl gazes out from the picture at her parents, who sit in the kitchen 1,000 miles away. Together, Oleh and Marianna stare longingly at the image. "She looks a lot like me," Oleh says. He left when his daughter was six weeks old and hasn't seen her since.
When, two years earlier, he arrived in London on a dark October evening - the bus from the east rolls in twice a week, packed with economic migrants on "student" and "tourist" visas - Oleh was met "by the boys", three friends who had already made the journey west.
His friends set him up with a building firm. To get the job, he only had to produce a bank account number and (false) ID, both purchased from the Manipulators. Since then, he has worked all over the city. On a bright morning earlier this month, Oleh leant against a metal railing in front of his latest construction site, a 200-metre-wide hole in the ground beside one of central London's busy roads. Arms of yellow diggers twisted above lorries. From the grey earth, glistening steel pipes stuck out like a cage. In his gang, Oleh said, there were "four Ukrainians, two Poles, one Mongolian, some English and many Irish"; all the foreigners were employed at cheap rates to lift and carry, to do the dirty groundwork that the British and Irish workers refused to do.
"I work hard - shovel, jackhammer, everything." For these labours, he gets paid £6 an hour, less than half the amount the British and Irish workers receive. "Six pounds is considered very, very good money," he said. He works ten hours every day, half-days on Saturday, gets Sunday free. "We have to work hard all the time," he said, nodding at the blue wooden cabin high up near street level. "Our boss watches us from his office, and if anyone stands around, the boss will come out and point and say: 'Take off your jacket. Go home. Don't come back.' And that's that." He shrugs. "So we keep working."
"These people are being pushed to the margins of the British workforce," says Tauhid Pasha of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants. "They have no recourse to labour controls, which means they are open to exploitation."
When Marianna first arrived in England, she had no job for the first six months. "It was a catastrophe," she says. Then she found a job cleaning hotel rooms. She took home around £20 for an eight-hour day. For better money, she found work in south London, "washing shirts in a laundry with 200 other workers, and they were all illegal". She earned £130 for a five-day week, but because she was working unlawfully, she had no means of complaining when her boss cheated her out of £400 back pay, part of which he said was a "deposit".
She went back to cleaning hotel rooms, but it was hard. "There were never any white English people there, but there would be some black English people working with me," she says. "I was paid £4.20 an hour, the others got £6.20." With a monthly house rent of £400, she and Oleh manage to save around £1,000 each month, which they despatch to Ukraine in a minivan run by a private courier that ferries food, clothes and letters across Europe. They are saving to buy their own apartment back home, which will cost around £9,000.
But Marianna doesn't know how long they can continue: "I have finished medical school and here I am treated like lower-class help. When I come home, Oleh says I look like a grey old woman. I glance at my medical textbooks. I sleep. But when we go back, we must be able to provide a life for our daughter."
Despite the privations suffered at home and in work, migrants from eastern Europe like Oleh and Marianna continue to flock to Britain's shores. It is clear that these people are not asylum-seekers. They are not fleeing torture or death in their blasted homelands. But neither do they arrive in Britain intending to live easily on our state's handouts: they come genuinely seeking work. They are a people battered by cruel forces of history, by two world wars, by Stalin. Now, the collapse of communism and the efforts to build capitalism have left them free but impoverished.
They are here doing the work that Britons are not prepared to do: they are the ones cleaning our toilets, sweeping the roads, caring for our elderly.
"The fact that they then engage in work demonstrates that there is an economic need for them," says Nicola Rogers of Aire. "They are fulfilling a need in the labour market in the UK that people here are not willing to meet. So long as there is a market for them, then they will keep coming, either legally or illegally."
The exact size of this new workforce remains unclear. John Salt, director of the migration research unit at University College London, has estimated that there were roughly 1.1 million foreign nationals working legally in the UK in 2000. But "nobody has done the work yet that quantifies the illegal population", he says.
The government's policy response in the face of such numbers has so far been muted, to say the least. The Home Office has eased some rules to attract highly skilled professionals, as well as expanding schemes to draw lower-skilled farm labourers for seasonal work, though these schemes have been criticised for still leaving workers exposed to gangland exploitation. For countries about to join the EU, new pre-accession agreements exist to grant some entrepreneurial migrants official status. But the application has to be made from their home country, and the process is so lengthy that, according to Nick Rollason, a specialist immigration lawyer in London, "although there are lots and lots of people who are coming in under this route, some genuine, some arranged by gangmasters, there is still a lot of illegal immigration".
Meanwhile, UK officialdom ignores the rest of the great, desperate masses who continue to press through Britain's notionally locked gates. They are here, they pass us on the streets, they huddle in the shadows of subterranean bars singing songs of their Slavic homeland and in the small ornate churches dotted around London, taking the seats closest to the door for fear of police raids. Or they sit in shabby suburban flats, like Oleh and Marianna, studying photographs of a loved one left behind.
BY
www.newstatesman.com/200212160026
BE VISIBLE! IT SHALL NOT MATTER WHAT YOU DO, AS LONG, YOU HAVE THE SOUL OF SOMEONE WHO LOOKS TO UNDERSTAND PEOPLE, EDUCATES PEOPLE, APPRECIATES BELIEVE IN PEOPLE AND BELIEVES IN THE FREEDOM OF INDIVIDUALITY THROUGH THE POWER OF HELPING EACH OTHER OUT, IN TIMES OF CRISIS OR WHEN IT MATTERS MOST! THIS CONCEPT IS DIFFERENT FROM THE CONCEPT MOST PEOPLE BELIEVE IN AND GET EDUCATED IN OUR SCHOOLS! BELIEVE IS THE RECOGINTION OF EVERYONE! ISN'T IT TIME TO SIMPLY LET YOUR BARRIERS DOWN AND TRY A NEW WAY OF LIVING, AWAY FROM THE STANDARD BORING, MONOTONE WAY, OF NOT HEARING, SAYING, SEEING OR DOING? CELEBRATE DISHWASHER, LITTER / BIN / TRASH MEN, AND ALL OTHERS, WITHOUT THEM, WE COULD NOT LIVE OUR LIVES, AS WE DO NOW!
"All We Need is Love" - digital heart design Valentine card to make" by mimitalks, married w/children
Image by mimitalks, married w/children
As I believe God has given me the ability to design this,
I share my design and picture instructions with you
for personal use only (please).
It is under a Creative Common's license.
Happy Valentine's Day!
Picture tutorials
How to make it: www.flickr.com/photos/mimitalks/6870220427/in/photostream/
How to fill it with a treat: www.flickr.com/photos/mimitalks/6870224903/in/photostream/
Klondike Mike's
Image by Travis S.
I've learned a few things about the person who lost the memory card.
I know that he hit up this bar called Klondike Mike's in Palmer, but I can't figure out his relation to this girl.
**While surveying out in Denali Park, miles from the nearest road, I found a 1GB memory card that still works. It seems to have wintered somewhere around the Stampede Trail along the Teklanika River.
Here is a link to the story of how I found the card, and a link to the conclusion of how I found the memory card's owner.
mump-1201-how-to-install-a-high-tech-sound-system-001
Image by RETROSOUNDUSA
How To - Install A High-Tech Sound System
1 RetroSound’s contemporary sound system is engineered for all kinds of classic cars including,’65-’86 Mustangs, thanks to adjustable brackets and shaft controls. This brings modern technology right into your Mustang’s inner world with LCD display, front and rear auxiliary inputs, USB/SD card reader, and a remote control. Your Mustang’s original AM radio die-cast knobs will fit this unit, which makes it nearly invisible at first glance. Later model ’74-’86 knobs will also fit. View
Read more: www.mustangmonthly.com/howto/mump_1201_how_to_install_a_h...
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