I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
In the wake of last week’s dismissal of all charges against five former Blackwater employees accused of opening fire in a public square in Baghdad and killing 17 unarmed civilians, the government of Iraq is preparing to take action against those guards on their own and warning other ex-Blackwater guards now working for other companies to leave the country immediately. CNN reports:
The Iraqi government is actively pursuing any former Blackwater personnel still working in the country, spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told CNN in an interview Sunday.
“I don’t think [the] Iraqi government is willing to have any Blackwater member, even if they are working in other companies, we don’t like to see them here working in any company,” al-Dabbagh said. “Instructions have been given to check if there is any Blackwater member [in the country]. I advise him to leave Iraq and not to stay in Iraq anymore.”
The Iraqi government also said that it would pursue its own charges against the former Blackwater guards who had the charges dismissed in an American court last week. That may be difficult to do since those guards are no longer in Iraq to be arrested and tried and due to a rule put in place by the Coalition Provisional Authority — the American-controlled occupying government initially set up after the invasion of Iraq — exempting American military contractors from Iraqi law.
Blackwater is the largest private military contractor in the United States. It was founded by Michigan native Erik Prince, heir to an auto parts fortune in the billions. The Prince family and the DeVos family, which are connected through the marriage of Erik’s sister Betsy to Dick DeVos, former gubernatorial candidate and heir to the Amway fortune, are probably the two largest backers of conservative causes in the state of Michigan.
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