While other primates (such as baboons and red colobus, red tail, and blue monkeys) have managed to thrive in Gombe, chimpanzees have not. Their larger body size puts them at a disadvantage in a restricted habitat, because they must consume more calories (and thus more food) to grow and maintain their weight.
NO OTHER country puts as much emphasis on “freedom” as the United States. Patrick Henry demanded “liberty or death”. The national anthem calls America “the land of the free”. Great reformers from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King have urged America to live up to its ideal of “freedom”. When a group of French Americanophiles wanted to flatter the United States, they sent the Statue of Liberty.
And no other country boasts as much about its mission to give freedom to the rest of the world. Woodrow Wilson thought that he had a God-given duty to bring liberty to mankind. George Bush regards his foreign policy as a crusade for freedom—“the right and hope of all humanity”.
But how good is America at living up to its own ideals? A new study by Freedom House tries to answer this question. The fact that Freedom House has devoted so much attention to the United States is significant in its own right. Founded in 1941 by a group of Americans who were worried about the advance of fascism, Freedom House is now the world's leading watchdog of liberty. The fact that “Today's American: How Free?” is such a thorough piece of work makes it doubly significant.
The judicious tone of “How Free?” will undoubtedly disappoint leftists. Freedom House bends over backwards to give the authorities the benefit of the doubt. Other countries have recalibrated the balance between freedom and security in the face of terrorists who want to inflict mass casualties on civilians. America's recent sins, however, are minor compared with those of its past. Newspapers have published highly sensitive information without reprisals. Congress and the courts have repeatedly stepped in to restore a more desirable constitutional balance.
But the verdict on the Bush years is nevertheless sharp. “How Free?” not only details and condemns the administration's familiar sins, from Guantánamo to extraordinary rendition to warrantless wiretapping. It reminds readers of its aversion to open government. The number of documents classified as secret has jumped from 8.7m in 2001 to 14.2m in 2005—a 60% increase over three years. Decade-old information has been reclassified. Researchers report that it is much more difficult and time-consuming to obtain information under the Freedom of Information Act.
Government whistleblowers have repeatedly been punished or fired—even when they have been trying to expose threats to national security that their bosses preferred to overlook. Richard Levernier had his security clearance revoked for revealing that some of the country's nuclear facilities were not properly secured. Border security agents have been punished for pointing out that the border is inadequately monitored, and airport baggage-handlers and security people for pointing to weaknesses in the security system. The Office of Special Counsel, which was established to enforce laws designed to protect the rights of such people, is widely regarded as “inept and even hostile to whistleblowers”.
“How Free?” also has some hard things to say about America's criminal-justice system. The incarceration rate exploded from 1.39 per 1,000 in 1980 to 7.5 in 2006, driven, among other things, by the war on drugs. America now has one of the highest rates of imprisonment in the world: 5.6m Americans, or one in every 37 adults, has spent time behind bars. Even though prison-building is one of the country's great growth industries, overcrowding is endemic, with federal prisons operating at 131% of capacity. America is also one of the few countries to ban felons and, in some states, ex-felons from voting. At any one time 4m Americans—one in every 50 adults—is disenfranchised because of past criminal convictions. This includes 1.4m blacks, or 14% of the black male population.
Freedom House's strictures are, if anything, too soft. America insists on criminalising victimless crimes such as prostitution. Last week Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called DC Madam, committed suicide; the government had thrown the book at her, including racketeering and mail fraud, because it really wished to penalise the arranging of assignations between consenting adults. In her suicide note to her mother she wrote that she could not “live the next six-to-eight years behind bars for what you and I have both come to regard as this 'modern-day lynching'.”
America prosperity today and the extinction of native American cultures were due to European settlements. Europeans settlers like the spanish forced the native Americans into converting into Christianity which resulted in leaving today Americas' lost in native cultures. However the europeans brought about goods things to modern day Americas. The start of slaveries lead to civil rights and diverse in Americans cultures. Many people from around the world started migrating into Americas in search of freedom of religious and opportunities. The world most wide known language, English originated from the British settlements. Modern US government was brought through progresses of Europeans arrival from the Mayflower Compact to the Bill of Rights, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, etc.. Europeans also brought along advances in technology from their voyages around the world, such as the type writer and compass.
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The <em>redeemers</em> were a political coalition in the Southern states during the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War. During this time, the south was occupied by federal forces, and their governments dominated by Republicans, who tried to guarantee the new civil rights obtained by black people. This was very unpopular for Southerners, who refused to lose their power to black people. So they employed violent measures to prevent them from participating in politics, attacking them and other republicans. The most infamous example of these paramilitary organizations is the Ku Klux Klan, other less known are the White League in Louisiana and the Red Shirts in Mississippi and North Carolina.
So, the strategy they used is violence and threats to undermine the Republican vote. They finally succeeded with the Compromise of 1877, when Hayes became president with the votes of the south in exchange for favors to them, such as the removal of federal forces. This led to the end of the Reconstruction.
