Free Republic

All over the world 4.8 million people, mostly women and children, are stolen and sold as sex slaves to the highest bidder each year. In America, few regions have been hit by this scourge worse than Orange County, California. On the outside, the Southern California county appears to be a safe, wealthy, and even fairly conservative community, boasting a median income of over $86,000 and a healthy employment rate. According to The Epoch Times, however, the county has become a hot destination for human traffickers: "The official Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force (OCHTTF), set up to fight real time...

Full Title: A Dozen Calif. Church Leaders Indicted For Allegedly Holding People Captive & Forcing Them Into Labor El CENTRO – A dozen leaders of Imperial Valley Ministries, including the former pastor, are charged in an indictment unsealed today with subjecting dozens of mostly homeless people to forced labor, coercing them to surrender welfare benefits and compelling them to panhandle up to nine hours a day, six days a week, for the financial benefit of the church leaders. The defendants were arrested today in El Centro, San Diego and Brownsville, Texas and charged with conspiracy, forced labor, document servitude and...

Allison Mack has entered a guilty plea to charges stemming from her role in DOS, the sex slave cult that was an offshoot of Nxivm. Court records reveal that Mack appeared before Judge Nicholas Garaufis at 11:30am Monday to enter her plea to at least two of the charges she was facing in the case. Mack, who shot to fame in the CW series Smallville, had been charged with racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy forced labor conspiracy, sex trafficking conspiracy , sex trafficking and attempted sex trafficking. She was facing life in prison if convicted on those charges, but...

TUCSON, AZ (3TV/CBS 5) - A Sierra Vista woman says she believes she found a note from a Chinese "prisoner" pleading for help, claiming he or she was being forced to work under abusive conditions.

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has a plan to “guarantee food supply, social justice, and democracy.” As with most of Maduro’s plans, it will accomplish none of those things. Vice News reports: “A new decree establishing that any employee in Venezuela can be effectively made to work in the country’s fields as a way to fight the current food crisis is unlawful and effectively amounts to forced labor,” Amnesty International said in a statement released on Thursday. President Nicolás Maduro signed a decree at the end of last week that gives powers to the labor ministry to order “all workers from...

International human rights activists are complaining that new laws have introduced forced labour in Venezuela. "A new decree establishing that any employee in Venezuela can be effectively made to work in the country's fields as a way to fight the current food crisis is unlawful and effectively amounts to forced labor," Amnesty International said in a statement released on Thursday. President Nicolás Maduro signed a decree at the end of last week that gives powers to the labor ministry to order "all workers from the public and private sector with enough physical capabilities and technical know-how" to join a government...

Grappling with an intensification of global sanctions over its nuclear-weapons program, North Korea recently ordered its working population to toil nonstop for 70 days in a bid to boost production and demonstrate loyalty. Citizens of the authoritarian nation can, however, buy vacation days from the government during the 10-week period, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports. …

Amid a sustained human rights campaign to end the mass forced labor surrounding Uzbekistan's annual cotton harvest, farmers in the eastern province of Ferghana are saying that they were enlisted to reattach picked cotton onto the bolls of bushes to feign a picturesque snowy-white landscape ahead of an anticipated visit by the country's prime minister, Shavkat Mirzayev. The governor of Ferghana is said to have called for hundreds of men and women to undo the back-breaking work of picking cotton — the nation's main export — and glue the fiber back onto plants that would be seen along Mirzayev's expected...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Saying they felt a "deep sense of ethical responsibility for a past tragedy," executives from a major Japanese corporation gave an unprecedented apology Sunday to a 94-year-old U.S. prisoner of war for using American POWs for forced labor during World War II.At the solemn ceremony hosted by the Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, James Murphy of Santa Maria, California, accepted the apology he had sought for 70 years on behalf of U.S. POWs from executives of Mitsubishi Materials Corp.

It won’t be long before Americans all across the country are celebrating our great national birthday. And we won’t do so quietly. “It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty,” John Adams, our second president, wrote of July 4. “It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.” Indeed it should. I also frequently urge people to reread our founding charter, the Declaration of Independence, which...

The Cuban government conspired with a Curacao ship repair company to provide practically slave labor fixing up vessels, including Miami-based cruise ships, and kept workers under harsh conditions, a lawsuit filed in U.S. District court in Miami alleges. The civil suit filed before Judge James Lawrence King alleges that up to 100 Cuban shipyard workers are forced to work against their will at Curacao Drydock Co., a ship repair company with an agent in Delray Beach, Klattenberg Marine Associates. The suit, filed by three workers who escaped and now live in Florida, alleges they were ordered to work 16-hour shifts...

Empty communist rhetoric, indoctrination, social justice/equality promises by deceptive elitist governments

Copyright issues force me to just post the link: http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080221/OPINION12/802210310/1189/OPINION

The following draft of the blueprint attempting to address not only the current situation between the government of Union of Myanmar and International Labor Office but also the issue of forced labor in Myanmar: - 1. The ILO liaison officer ad. Interim continues to carry out his functions in Myanmar. ILO does not continue, in its Conventions and Conferences, receiving the reports of those who are neither delegates of a member state nor representatives of the member country concerned, the Union of Myanmar, effectively denying the due respect to Myanmar. 2. The Joint Plan of Action which originates from the...

Our area takes great pride in the role many organizations and residents here played in the Underground Railroad during the years leading up to the Civil War. Thousands of slaves were freed because of the courage of individuals who either housed fugitive slaves or went south to escort them to freedom here in the north. It is a heritage we can be proud of. Today, there is a similar effort underway. It is happening in a land divided along lines of north and south. Race is a component. Other nations are involved. And the bravery of conductors and engineers on...

Burma was on collision course in March with the one world organization that has the power to do real harm to Rangoon’s military regime. Days before the Governing Body of the International Labour Organization, or ILO, was slated to decide how to compel the regime to end its alleged widespread practice of forced labor, a senior government official in Rangoon told the organization in so many words: “Mind your own business.”

The local authorities of Burma’s military junta, State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) at Kawthaung in southern Burma have been forcing the victims of recent Asia tsunami to rebuild a bridge damaged by the tidal waves. The authorities of Tamaing Aung Thukkha Ward in Kawthaung ordered one person from each household to “volunteer” in the rebuilding of the damaged Paloketonetone Bridge and those who could not, have to pay 2,000 kyat each. When the people asked the authorities if they are not afraid to go to jail as local authorities from Kawmoo, Kalewa and Taungup areas have been sent to...

Thursday 27th January, 2005 Mexican textile rep lashes out at China-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Big News Network.com Wednesday 26th January, 2005 (UPI) A Mexican textile industry leader is accusing China of using unfair labor conditions to win over competitors, El Universal reported Wednesday. China is an unfair competitor because its workers labor in subhuman conditions, seven days a week, more than eight hours a day, said Rosendo Valles Costas, president of the Mexican Textile Industry Chamber. They sleep in the factories and have no medical services or pensions. Valles Costas requested Mexican President Vicente Fox reduce electricity rates 50 percent and crackdown on...

Thousands of members of an ethnic group in eastern Burma with a strong Christian population are hiding in the jungle after their villages were attacked by army battalions carrying out a government plan described by human-rights watchers as systematic genocide of minorities. Two recent reports sent to WorldNetDaily by an aide worker in Thailand, near the Burma border, indicate Rangoon's military regime is continuing to drive members of the Karen minority from their homes. While officially the government has agreed to a cease-fire with Karen resistance fighters seeking independence, the Burmese Army has maintained attacks on ethnic villages during the...

CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa — When Rodrico Harp was sentenced to seven years at hard labor for his part in the infamous abduction and rape of an Okinawa schoolgirl in 1995, he never thought he’d be assembling cell phones or making auto parts. That’s what he claims “hard labor” meant at Kurihama, the Japanese prison near Yokosuka where most American servicemen convicted in Japanese courts wind up. “I made parts for Mazdas and Nissans,” Harp said during a telephone interview from his home in Griffin, Ga. “You had no choice. If you refused to work, they put you in what we...