SHAFAQNA

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Cancer is threatening to overwhelm Latin American countries, experts writing in Lancet Oncology warn.

There are far fewer cases of cancer in the region than in the US or Europe - but the proportion who die is far higher, they say.

Late diagnosis and poor access to treatment are the main reasons for the disparity, they add.

They said as life expectancy increased, cancer would become more common, and many countries would not cope.

The experts looked at cancer incidence and care in the Latin American and Caribbean region, including the following countries: Argentina, Bahamas, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, French Guiana, Guyana, Honduras, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, Paraguay and El Salvador.

Risk factors

Writing in a Lancet Oncology report that is being officially launched at a specialist conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil, they say as the economies of these countries grow, and standards of living increase, people are increasingly adopting the habits of more developed countries.

They are living more sedentary lifestyles, eating more unhealthily, smoking more and drinking more alcohol.

Sun exposure and indoor pollution from burning solid fuels are also risk factors.

The researchers say that in Latin America, there are around 163 cases of cancer per 100,000 people.

In the US, the comparable figure is 300 cases per 100,000, while in Europe it is 264 cases per 100,000.

But the death rate is much higher. In Latin America it stands at 13 deaths for every 22 cancer cases, while it is 13 deaths for every 37 cases of cancer the US, and approximately 13 deaths for every 30 cases in Europe.

Researchers estimate that in 2030, there will be 1.7 million cases of cancer diagnosed across Latin America and the Caribbean, and there will be more than 1 million deaths.

Paul Goss, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who led the research team, said: "More widespread adoption of lifestyles similar to those in developed countries will lead to a rapidly growing number of patients with cancer, a cost burden for which Latin American countries are not prepared.

"This burgeoning cancer problem threatens to cause widespread suffering and economic peril to the countries of Latin America.

"The region is poorly equipped to deal with the alarming rise in cancer incidence and disproportionately high mortality rates compared with other world regions, underscoring the magnitude of the cancer-control problem."-www.shafaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –A U.N. special investigator has linked the Boston marathon bombings to the United States’ superpower status and Washington’s policy on Israel, the Associated Press has reported.

Richard Falk, the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, wrote about the attacks in an April 21 commentary in Foreign Policy Journal that “the American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.”

Falk also said “as long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy.”

He said President Barack Obama hasn’t adopted a “more balanced approach to the Palestine/Israel impasse.” Instead, Falk accused Obama of “succumbing to the Beltway ethos of Israel first.”

U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said in response to reporters’ questions Wednesday that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon rejects Falk’s comments, which could undermine the U.N.’s credibility and work. “The secretary-general immediately condemned the Boston marathon bombing and he strongly believes that nothing can justify such an attack,” Nesirky said.

Israel has barred Falk, who reports to the 47-nation U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, from visiting the Palestinian territories because he has compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with the horrors of Nazi Germany. He also is an American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University.

FACTS & FIGURES

The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews. The Washington Post

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, do not appear to have been directed by a foreign terrorist organization. The Washington Post

Two bombs exploded in the crowded streets near the finish line of the Boston Marathon last week, killing at least three people. AP

The count of injured people of the Boston Marathon bombings who were treated in area hospitals has risen sharply to 282, according to the Boston Public Health Commission. That is far higher than the initial estimate of 170. Boston Globe. -www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:Press TV

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –Michael Moore, the gadfly documentarian who has made a career out of fighting against conservative issues, has called for U.S. citizens to stand up to President Barack Obama and back a court case he says is fighting a dangerous erosion of civil liberties.

The case has been brought against a little known piece of legislation called the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which critics say has been changed to grant Obama the power to indefinitely detain American citizens without charge.

A group of activists, including Daniel Ellsberg - the official who leaked the Pentagon papers about the Vietnam war - and former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges have gone to court to get the language of the NDAA changed. On Wednesday an appeals court in New York heard arguments in the case and is set to render a judgment in the coming months.

Now Moore has come out swinging against the NDAA, too, saying that the White House is embarking on a plan to scrap vital civil rights that should concern every American citizen - despite a relative lack of publicity about the case. "At the moment a lot of people think the NDAA does not look scary. But this sort of thing never looks scary at the start. But the American people will rue the day if they do not stop this," he told the Guardian in an interview.

Moore was speaking after a court in New York heard an appeal in the case against the NDAA. Lawyers seeking to overturn the NDAA argued that it erodes American rights and free speech, and grants huge and unconstitutional powers to the government to suppress dissent and indefinitely detain people without going through proper legal channels. Lawyers for the Obama administration insist that the NDAA represents nothing new and has never been used in the ways that its critics suggest.

Moore said he would be seeking to explain the case to his fans. "If the American people understood this, I do believe they would be very, very concerned about it," he said. The force behind such hard-hitting documentaries as Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine - which took on rightwing issues like President George W Bush's security policy and gun laws - said that liberals were giving Obama a free pass due to his popularity with Democrats. "[Obama] puts this face on it that makes it difficult. It was much easier when the face was Bush," Moore said "We have to work and speak out against the Obama administration and everything they are doing to destroy civil liberties." The Guardian

FACTS & FIGURES

The NDAA, an otherwise mundane annual bill that lays out the use of funds for the Department of Defense, has come under attack during the Obama administration for the introduction of a provision last year that allows the military to detain United States citizens indefinitely without charge or trial for mere suspicions of ties to terrorism. RT

On December 31, 2011, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), codifying indefinite military detention without charge or trial into law for the first time in American history. The NDAA's dangerous detention provisions would authorize the president - and all future presidents - to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any battlefield. ACLU

In its original form, the NDAA allows the military hold anyone accused of having "substantially supported" al-Qaeda, the Taliban or "associated forces" until "the end of hostilities” and indefinitely imprison anyone who commits a "belligerent act" against the United States, yet fails to explicitly define what is constituted as such. RT

Because there are no established rules allowing a citizen to exercise the right to a civilian trial, as guaranteed by the Constitution (specifically, the Sixth Amendment), detained citizens have no way to gain access to lawyers, family or a civilian court after they are detained by the military. Prison Planet

President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 on Jan. 2. The Huffington Post

Civil liberties advocates had roundly criticized the bill over Guantanamo and a separate section that could allow the military to indefinitely detain American citizens on suspicions of supporting terrorism. The Huffington Post

On Wednesday, Obama administration lawyers defended the military's indefinite detention powers in Manhattan federal court, claiming civil liberties advocates shouldn't worry about their rights being violated under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.The Huffington Post

www.shfaqna.com/English

source:Press TV

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- That big bulge up above? It’s moving up and to the left. America is well on the way towards having a small, highly skilled and/or highly fortunate elite, with lucrative jobs; a vast underclass with casual, occasional, minimum-wage service work, if they’re lucky; and very little in between.

But it won’t be 19th century capitalism redux, there’ll be no place for neo-Marxism. That underclass won’t control the means of production. They’ll simply be irrelevant.

Why? Technology. Especially robots. The Atlantic is already wringing its hands over “The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots.” These days robots are in factorieseverywhere–but soon enough they’ll be doing plenty of service jobs too. Meanwhile, software is eating white-collar jobs.

Well, at least the newly unemployed can still go flip burgers…oh, wait, robots are doing that, too. (And other machines can print the meat. No, really.) No wonder people with jobs increasingly feelthey have to work harder and longer.

Of course the robot manufacturers dispute this characterization. “While automation may transform the workforce and eliminate certain jobs, it also creates new kinds of jobs that are generally better paying and that require higher-skilled workers,” says the NYT.

That’s true, and the usual retort to this kind of Luddism. But what if, as I’ve been saying for more than a year, technology is now destroying jobs faster than it’s creating them? What if America has hit peak jobs?

Here’s your answer: that’s a good thing…in the long run. Job loss isn’t actually a problem in and of itself. Instead it’s a symptom of something much larger.

Step back a minute. Way back. What precisely is the purpose of technological innovation? Why do we want to make things faster, smarter, better, healthier, new? To get rich? OK: to generate wealth, and ultimately, eliminate scarcity. The endgame, where we’re going as a species if we don’t screw up badly and destroy ourselves or burn out all our resources before we get there, is some kind of post-scarcity society.

Will people have jobs in a post-scarcity society? No. That’s what post-scarcity means. They’ll have things to do, authorities, responsibilities, ambitions, callings, etc., but not jobs as we understand them. So if the endgame is a world without jobs, how will we get there? All at once? No: by a slow and inexorable decline of the total number of jobs. Today’s America is just at the edge, the very beginning, of that decline.

Trouble is, America, more than any other nation, is built around the notion that all able-bodied adults should have jobs. That’s going to be a big problem.

Paul Kedrosky recently wrote a terrific essay about what I call cultural technical debt, i.e. “organizations or technologies that persist, largely for historical reasons, not because they remain the best solution to the problem for which they were created. They are often obstacles to much better solutions.” Well, the notion that ‘jobs are how the rewards of our society are distributed, and every decent human being should have a job’ is becoming cultural technical debt.

If it’s not solved, then in the coming decades you can expect a self-perpetuating privileged elite to accrue more and more of the wealth generated by software and robots, telling themselves that they’re carrying the entire world on their backs, Ayn Rand heroes come to life, while all the lazy jobless “takers” live off the fruits of their labor. Meanwhile, as the unemployed masses grow ever more frustrated and resentful, the Occupy protests will be a mere candle flame next to the conflagrations to come. It’s hard to see how that turns into a post-scarcity society. Something big will need to change.

www.shafaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- An Arctic blast has gripped North America over the last few days. Bitter weather and icy winds have dragged the temperatures down over many eastern parts of both Canada and the USA.

Snow has added to the misery, with more than 250 mm falling in parts of Michigan this week. The snow is known as 'lake-effect snow' because the air picks up moisture as it passes over the Great Lakes and delivers it as snow to the opposite coast. This is a regular hazard of the winters in North America.

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SHAFAQNA(Shia International News Association)--In America tonight, tens of millions of men and women will struggle to get to sleep because they are stressed out about not making enough money even though they are working as hard as they possibly can.

They are called "the working poor", and their numbers are absolutely exploding. As a recent Gallup poll showed, Americans are more concerned about the economy than they are about anything else. But why are Americans so stressed out about our economic situation if things are supposedly getting better?

Well, the truth is that unemployment is not actually going down, and the real unemployment numbers are actually much worse than what is officially being reported by the government. But unemployment is only part of the story. Most American workers are still able to find jobs, but an increasing proportion of them are not able to make ends meet at the end of the month.

Our economy continues to bleed good paying middle class jobs, and to a large degree those jobs are being replaced by low income jobs. Approximately one-fourth of all American workers make 10 dollars an hour or less at this point, and we see them all around us every day. They flip our burgers, they cut our hair and they take our money at the supermarket.

In many homes, both parents are working multiple jobs, and yet when a child gets sick or a car breaks down they find that they don't have enough money to pay the bill. Many of these families have gone into tremendous amounts of debt in order to try to stay afloat, but once you get caught in a cycle of debt it can be incredibly difficult to break out of that.

So what is the solution? Well, the easy answer would be that we need the U.S. economy to start producing more good paying jobs, but that is easier said than done. Our big corporations continue to ship huge numbers of good paying manufacturing jobs out of the country, and millions of Americans have been forced to scramble to find whatever work is available. Today, there are so many very talented American workers that are trapped in low wage work. According to the Working Poor Families Project, "about one-fourth of adults in low-income working families were employed in just eight occupations, as cashiers, cooks, health aids, janitors, maids, retail salespersons, waiters and waitresses, or drivers." A lot of those people could do so much more for society, but they don't have the opportunity.

Sadly, the percentage of low paying jobs in our economy continues to increase with each passing year, so this is a problem that is only going to get worse. So don't look down on the working poor. The good paying job that you have right now could disappear at any time and you could end up joining their ranks very soon.

The following are 35 statistics about the working poor in America that will blow your mind...

#1 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either "poor" or "low income".

#2 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 57 percent of all American children live in a home that is either "poor" or "low income".

#3 Back in 2007, about 28 percent of all working families were considered to be among "the working poor". Today, that number is up to 32 percent even though our politicians tell us that the economy is supposedly recovering.

#4 Back in 2007, 21 million U.S. children lived in "working poor" homes. Today, that number is up to 23.5 million.

#5 In Arkansas, Mississippi and New Mexico, more than 40 percent of all working families are considered to be "low income".

#6 Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.

#7 Half of all American workers earn $505 or less per week.

#8 At this point, one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less.

#9 Today, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.

#10 Median household income in the United States has fallen for four consecutive years.

#11 Median household income for families with children dropped by a whopping $6,300 between 2001 and 2011.

#12 The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs. 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.

#13 Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.

#14 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before.

#15 There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing. That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.

#16 Low income families spend about 8.6 percent of their incomes on gasoline. Other families spend about 2.1 percent.

#17 In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance. Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based health insurance.

#18 According to one survey, 77 percent of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.

#19 Millions of working poor families in America end up taking on debt in a desperate attempt to stay afloat, but before too long they find themselves in a debt trap that they can never escape. According to a recent article in the New York Times, the average debt burden for U.S. households that earn $20,000 a year or less "more than doubled to $26,000 between 2001 and 2010".

#20 In 1989, the debt to income ratio of the average American family was about 58 percent. Today it is up to 154 percent.

#21 According to the Economic Policy Institute, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans households on average have 288 times the amount of wealth that the average middle class American family does.

#22 In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

#23 According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined.

#24 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans combined.

#25 Sadly, the bottom 60 percent of all Americans own just 2.3 percent of all the financial wealth in the United States.

#26 The average CEO now makes approximately 350 times as much as the average American worker makes.

#27 Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high. Meanwhile, wages as a percentage of GDP are near an all-time low.

#28 Today, 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings.

#29 The number of families in the United States living on 2 dollars a day or less more than doubled between 1996 and 2011.

#30 The number of Americans on food stamps has grown from 17 million in the year 2000 to more than 47 million today.

#31 Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.

#32 More than one out of every four children in the United States is enrolled in the food stamp program.

#33 Incredibly, a higher percentage of children is living in poverty in America today than was the case back in 1975.

#34 If you can believe it, the federal government hands out money to 128 million Americans every single month.

#35 Federal spending on welfare has reached nearly a trillion dollars a year, and it is being projected that it will increase by another 80 percent over the next decade.

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source:Press TV

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) --  Just how lucrative has Apple's iPad become? Let's put it this way: if the tablet were spun off into a standalone business, it would be the 11th largest U.S. tech company.

According to a recent report from Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi, the iPad line brought in $32 billion in sales last year -- accounting for just over 60% of all tablet sales -- and will grow 75% in 2013 to $46 billion. With numbers like those, Sacconaghi estimates that would make the iPad business, on its own, the 11th largest tech company.

Even more impressive, it would make the Fortune 500, slotting in at No. 98, above long-established companies like McDonald's (MCD) (No. 107, $27 billion), Macy's (M) (No. 110, $26.4 billion), and Nike (NKE) (No. 136, $20.9 billion). Put another way, the iPad business handily makes more money than Gap (GPS) (No. 185, $14.5 billion) and Toys "R" Us (No. 194, $13.9 billion) combined. Not too shabby for a device launched just shy of three years ago.

Looking ahead, although Sacconaghi projects healthy sales growth over the next two years, he sees adoption flattening out in 2015 due to a heavily saturated market. In other words? By then, many consumers -- even your mom -- will likely be tapping, swiping, and pinching around a tablet of their own.

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SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- The US capital is now preparing for Barack Obama's inauguration.

But it was before his inauguration four years ago that civil liberties groups had high hopes he would do away with laws put in place by his predecessor that violate US constitutional rights in the name of national security.

On Sunday, they were once again disappointed when Obama signed the re-authorisation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendment.

This law gives the government broad powers to eavesdrop on the private conversations of US citizens as long as one of the conversation participants is outside the country.

But at a time when the US Congress cannot seem to agree on anything in a timely manner - Republicans and Democrats came together and rejected all of the proposals, instead putting national security ahead of constitutional rights.

Earlier last week, several senators tried to amend the legislation to add some protection for Americans.

Senator Ron Wydens proposed an amendment that would mandate the release of information on searches that involved US citizens. It did not pass but garnered 43 votes.

Senator Jeff Merkley's amendment would have declassified the legal opinions of the FISA court - a secret court that certifies government privacy protections. Thirty-seven senators supported his proposal.

An amendment from Senator Patrick Leahy would have required congressional approval of FISA legislation every three years instead of five. His proposal received the backing of 38 senators.

Senator Rand Paul's amendment would have required individual search warrants for all electronic communications. It got a mere 12 votes.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency, explained what the extension to the FISA amendment means for US civil liberties.

"[The FISA Act] is one part, it's one element of a much larger series of activities that the US is engaged in in terms of surveillance … but it has gone far beyond its original mandate … the problem is everything else that the government is doing under that mantle, that rubric of national security …. Part of the problem is much of this is being done in secret and there's very little oversight or accountability …. It was just stunning when I found out that the White House had entered into a secret agreement with the National Security Agency to completely bypass the FISA, and by bypassing it they turned the USA into the equivalent of a foreign nation for the purposes of dragnet, blanket electronic surveillance … in secret, in secret."

So, does spying on Americans really protect the country?

Joining Inside Story Americas for the discussion with presenter Kimberley Halkett are guests: Sebastian Gorka, a national security analyst; Michelle Richardson, the legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union; and Shahid Buttar, the executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.

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SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- On the evening of December 27, an Indian immigrant to America named Sunando Sen was pushed by a stranger onto the subway tracks in New York City and struck and killed by an oncoming train. Sen had called New York home for years, and after years of hard work and struggle had recently managed to achieve his lifelong goal of opening a small business of his own, a copy shop in Upper Manhattan.

His roommate, MD Khan expressed shock at the death of his friend, a soft spoken man who liked to stay up late watching comedy shows and listening to music: "He was so nice, gentle and quiet… It's broken my heart."

The following day, the NYPD announced the arrest of Erika Menendez, a 31-year-old woman who had been spotted on security footage fleeing the scene after Sen had been pushed. Upon being detained and taken to a 112th Precinct police station for questioning, Menendez confessed to Sen's murder and revealed as her motivation a desire to commit violence against Muslims. As she told detectives:

"I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims… Ever since 2001 when they put down the Twin Towers, I've been beating them up."

Sunando Sen was not a Muslim, but as a brown-skinned foreigner living in the United States, he was targeted and killed in an act of hate which is the by-product of an ongoing campaign of bigotry and demonisation against Muslims living in America.

Muslim-Americans, as well as Hindus, Sikhs and others who purportedly "look Muslim" have beenhumiliated, assaulted and in many cases murdered by individuals often galvanised to violence by politicians and media figures who have enthusiastically engaged in public hatemongering against the Muslim community in the country.

Anti-Muslim violence increases

The 9/11 attacks precipitated a surge in hate crimes, but even as the events themselves recede further into history, the level of hatred and violence directed at Muslim communities is paradoxically increasing. Within the past month, in New York alone, police have suspected racial hatred as being the motive behind several crimes.

This includes a string of murders specifically targetingMiddle Eastern storekeepers in Brooklyn, the last of whom, a 78-year old Iranian immigrant named Rahmatollah Vahidipour, was shot to death while closing his boutique and whose lifeless body was then dragged to a backroom and covered over with merchandise from his store.

Within the same week as Vahidipour's murder another Muslim man was viciously beaten by two men who preceded their attack by asking him whether he was "a Hindu or a Muslim", while another man was stabbed several times outside of a mosque in a random attack by an assailant who screamed "I'm going to kill you Muslim", while repeatedly plunging a knife into his victims' body.

Far from being aberrations, these incidents are in line with national statistics which show anti-Muslim violence in America nearing record highs, a trend which comes in tandem with highly public campaigns against mosque construction as well as fear-mongering by politicians and media figures regarding alleged plots by Muslim-Americans to override the constitution and impose Islamic law on the country.

The US election cycle also saw Muslims used as convenient targets for politicians seeking office, with one example being incumbent Illinois House of Representatives Republican Joe Walsh who told a cheering crowd at a campaign rally that "Muslims are here trying to kill Americans everyday", before making a baseless and highly incendiary claim that radical Islam had "infiltrated" the Chicago suburbs and that Muslims there were planning an attack that would "make 9/11 look like child's play".

While working the crowd into hysterics was a convenient campaign strategy for Walsh, just days later the Muslim community experienced the consequences of his rhetoric. A man opened fire on an Illinois mosquewhile it was packed with hundreds of congregants for Ramadan. The next day, another mosque was hit with an acid bomb thrown at a window while worshippers had gathered for night services.

Despite these attacks against Illinois Muslims in the wake of his statements, Walsh steadfastly refused to apologise for his rhetoric demonising the Muslim-Americans and instead doubled-down on his blanket accusations against them, a reflection of the mainstream acceptability of anti-Muslim rhetoric by political figures in the US today.

Indeed the use of Muslims as a punching bag by opportunistic politicians seeking a minority group to scapegoat has become a regular feature of American political life which shows no signs of abating, despite the "trickle-down" effect by which this bigotry is now manifesting itself in real violence against innocent Muslim-Americans on a regular basis.

Behind this hatemongering lies a deep cynicism, as leading anti-Muslim politicians such as Newt Gingrich who have warned of "stealth jihad" and other nefarious plots by Muslims in America were within recent years helping facilitate Sharia-compliant finance programmes in the country and who maintained notably cordial relations with prominent Muslim leaders.

Political hatemongering

With Muslim-bashing becoming politically fashionable in recent years, politicians such as Gingrich have markedly changed their tune and it has been to the detriment of Muslim-Americans, as well as to the general level of social cohesion and tolerance in the country.

In addition to political hatemongering, the past several years have seen a highly organised and well-funded group of anti-Muslim activists who have been sponsoring campaigns targeting Muslims across the country.

Leading figures in this movement such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer have led a crusade to vilify Muslims throughout the country and to exclude them from public life through campaigns of smears and hate-mongering which have cast Muslim-Americans as an insidious fifth column within the country.

Their views have gotten considerable popular attention, and thanks to a documented network of funders and media associates they have managed to bring their message to people across the United States.

In the past few months, a major controversy erupted when Geller's anti-Muslim organisation sponsored the placement of Islamophobic advertisements at major subway stations in New York as well as in other cities across the country.

Some advertisements depicted pictures of the 9/11 attacks with verses from the Quran superimposed, while others called Muslims "savages" and implored people to "fight Jihad". While the campaign has been challenged by many liberal commentators, including one infamous incident in which Egyptian-American activist Mona Eltahawy was arrested for attempting to cover a sign with pink spray paint, they continue to run across the country and to spread a message of indiscriminate, vitriolic hatred towards Muslim-Americans in a manner unlikely to be tolerated were it to pertain to any other minority group.

While correlation does not necessarily imply causation, the question must be asked - what effect do advertisements such as these have on the psyches' of people such as Erika Menendez? Was Sunando Sen, a law-abiding, hardworking immigrant who had given his life to achieving the American dream and who was pushed to his death by a woman who "hated Muslims" a direct victim of this campaign of bigotry? That he lost his life on the same subway system which for months has played host to hateful, incendiary advertisements such as Geller's is a tragic irony but is in many ways the natural result of a national culture of anti-Muslim bigotry that has become mainstream in both politics and popular culture.

The sad, inescapable truth is that Sen will likely not be the last victim of the accelerating phenomena of violence against Muslims in the United States - the only question today is how far into the darkness America must travel before it decides to take a stand against it.

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SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- President Barack Obama has signed a law to counter Iran's alleged influence in Latin America, through a new diplomatic and political strategy to be designed by the State Department, the AFP news agency reported.

Enacted on Friday, the Countering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act, passed by lawmakers earlier this year, calls for the State Department to develop a plan within 180 days to "address Iran's growing hostile presence and activity".

Although the strategy is confidential and only accessible to lawmakers, it must contain a public summary.

The text also calls on the Department of Homeland Security to bolster surveillance at US borders with Canada and Mexico to "prevent operatives from Iran, the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps], its Quds Force, Hezbollah or any other terrorist organization from entering the Untied States."

And within Latin American countries, the text provides for a multi-agency action plan to provide security in those countries, along with a "counterterrorism and counter-radicalisation plan" to isolate Iran and its allies.

Washington has repeatedly stated it is closely monitoring Tehran's activities in Latin America, though senior State Department and intelligence officials have indicated there is no apparent indication of illicit activities by Iran.

Iran, placed under a series of international sanctions because of its suspected nuclear weapons programme, has opened six new embassies in the region since 2005 - bringing the total to 11 - and 17 cultural centres.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made regular visits to Latin America, though he only toured the region twice this year.

Tehran has particularly close ties with Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, where it has strengthened its presence through investments.

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