Summer is in full swing, and Gainesville is burning. For all of you freshmen out there, welcome to UF! It’s tradition for the Alligator to hand out darts and laurels to the villains and heroes in the news every week. We present you with this week’s... Darts & Laurels
Inmates at Guantanamo have been on hunger strike for more than 150 days, with 45 of the inmates being force-fed to sustain their lives. Human rights and medical groups all over the globe have condemned the practice.
Recently, rapper Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, subjected himself to the same force-feeding techniques that the Gitmo inmates are subject to. Bey was chained to a chair as doctors prepared to insert more than a meter of rubber tubing through the nose down to the stomach. It wasn’t long before Bey pled for the doctors to stop.
For shedding the light of humanity onto this cruel and unusual custom, we give Bey a LAUREL.
Texas teen Justin Carter was arrested in February for comments he made on Facebook during an argument with someone about online video game “League of Legends.” During the course of the conversation, he said, “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still beating hearts,” followed by “lol” and “jk.”
The 19-year-old has since been jailed and charged with making terrorist threats. He has also been placed on suicide watch. In his father’s own words “...he’s had concussions, black eyes, [and has been] moved four times from base for his own protection.” On his current condition, “He’s been put in solitary confinement, nude, for days on end because he’s depressed. All of this is extremely traumatic to this kid. This is a horrible experience.”
His bail is set at $500,000.
We give the state of Texas a free-Justin DART, because that’s how you treat people when you actually want them to get “messed up in the head.”
Our last volley concerns international relations, and we’d better pay attention. When widespread surveillance of EU communications was discovered, it seemed that the world had united in its discontent against the National Security Agency’s widespread surveillance programs.
But then, the plane of President Evo Morales of Bolivia was forced to land in Austria after suspicion that he was harboring Edward Snowden, the notorious NSA leaker. This prompted the heads of state of South America to hold an emergency meeting of Union of South American Nations. The Cochabamba Declaration issued at the summit calls the forced halting of President Morales’ plane a “flagrant violation of international treaties.” Unasur is now calling for the governments of France, Portugal, Italy and Spain to apologize.
So, why would other countries be so willing to aid the U.S. in capturing Snowden, even at the expense of international treaties? Snowden may know why. Der Spiegel magazine recently quoted Snowden as saying “They [the NSA] are in bed with the Germans, just like with most other Western states.”
So, what’s really going on, and who should we trust? It’s tough to say for now, but we’re sending wake-up FLARTS to the people. There’s a big debate being waged right now, and we all need to be conscious of it and participate in it. What will be the future of the surveillance state?
