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It was billed as a chance to taste the “glitz and glamour” of Hollywood or enjoy VIP treatment in some of the most exclusive shopping areas in the world. But when a group of 2,000 elderly British cruise ship passengers docked at Los Angeles for a short stop-off during a five-star cruise around America it was, in the words of one of them, more like arriving at Guantanamo Bay.

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that California welfare money meant to help the needy pay for food, clothes and other essentials has been withdrawn on at least 14 cruise ships sailing out of Miami and other ports.

NORTH PORT - The used car was a blessing, a gift from her church to help Diane Pearson, a single mother with three children and a long commute to work. And after receiving the 1998 Mercury from her church, Pearson found her drive to Sarasota a bit less stressful.

North Port took Pearson to court this month over fines of more than $27,000 for keeping her old car in the driveway without a license plate. If the city wins its case, Pearson could be facing bankruptcy.

An 18-year-old Panamanian fisherman who survived 28 days adrift at sea is suing Princess Cruise Lines, arguing that the cruise ship whose crew members saw him stranded should have stopped and saved him. The behavior of crew members of the Star Princess was outrageous, shocking, atrocious and utterly intolerable in a civilized community. Even though crew members "had clear knowledge that people were stranded in an open boat hundreds of miles from shore in the Pacific Ocean and desperately calling for help," the lawsuit says, "they consciously ignored the emergency situation," R.

Your Stimulus Dollars at Work: $2 Million Per Job

Rockefeller and other critics of the industry say that cruise lines that are headquartered in the United States but have their ships registered elsewhere are getting a free ride on the backs of U.S. taxpayers, placing demands on federal agencies such as Immigration, Customs and the Coast Guard, which are charged with oversight when those ships enter and leave U.S. ports.
"They don't reimburse the Coast Guard, they don't pay taxes that will help with these 20 federal agencies that are watching over them in various ways and whose services they use, or might use," Rockefeller told CNN

A dire report prepared for President Medvedev by Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources is warning today that the British Petroleum (BP) oil and gas leak in the Gulf of Mexico is about to become the worst environmental catastrophe in all of human history threatening the entire eastern half of the North American continent with “total destruction”.

“Takei takes us to the house in East Los Angeles, where the Takei family first surrendered, then showing us the horse stalls at Santa Anita Racetrack near Los Angeles, where George's family was forced to live under armed guard for several weeks, before being shipped off to prison camps in Arkansas and Northern California. But it's how George Takei's family survived this unspeakable injustice, ultimately taking this American tragedy and turning into the American dream that makes George Takei's America.”

In "Why America Failed", left-wing historian and cultural critic Morris Berman’s postmortem of America, the author concludes that our inevitable end was literally woven into the American DNA, dooming the country from the start. It isn't just the American Dream that has failed claims Berman, but America itself, because the dream -- the individual accumulation of wealth -- was a mistake in the first place.