Friday, April 11, 2008

Blood Phones

----- Original Message -----
From: Paul Doyon
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2008 1:04 PM
Subject: [SpamGuard:#] Add One More MAJOR REASON TO WHY One Should Never Own or Use a Cell Phone


The list of reasons why one should never own or use a cell phone is growing by the second. The following article lists a number of terrible major reasons why one should never own one of these Blood Phones

http://www.willthomasonline.net/willthomasonline/Blood_Phones.html

The next time your cell phone rings and you bring it up to your ear, listen closely. You may be able to hear the muted screams of women and girls being raped by greed-crazed, frightened men intent on obtaining a tiny piece of mineral used in your phone. It's called coltan. And the frenzied rush for its extraction in strip mines across the Congo is exploiting children, razing pristine forests, endangering rare mountain gorillas - and has already led to the rape and horrific mutilation of more than 250,000 women as old as 75 and girls as young as three. I could not bring myself to show the picture of a “soldiers' hacking off the severed stump of a raped, naked woman with his knife.
Abbreviated for columbine tantalite, coltan is in huge and growing demand by high tech industries rushing to meet the consumer frenzy for clever, brain numbing gadgets. Its high melting point and resistance to corrosion coupled with its unique ability to conduct heat and electricity make coltan particularly prized in cell phones, as well as wireless laptop computers, TVs and other consumer “bads” marketed and sold as “goods”.
Coltan is mainly extracted from chopped down Congo forests, where strip-mining is carried out by workers, many of them children. More than 10,000 people have abandoned their farms and urban centers and moved into the Kahuzi-Biega National Park to cut down the pristine forest, home of endangered gorillas, and mine coltan under the direction of rebels, who continue raping women as “needed”. [IUCN Apr 23/01; Global Witness 2004; World Rainforest Movement Nov 14/05; assets.panda.org; PRNewswire]

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