One of the longest “SELF” serving leaders in the World, has finally decided to step down. Fidel Castro RESIGNS…

FROM HAVANA, Cuba, the news that one of the longest serving leaders in the world was officially stepping down sent ripples around the globe, Fidel Castro’s resignation announcement barely registered in Cuba.

Fidel Castro, shown in an undated file photo, took power in Cuba in 1959 and reigned with an iron hand.

Castro, 81, revealed his plans in a letter published in the middle of the night in the online version of Cuba’s state run newspaper, Granma.
“I will not aspire to, nor will I accept the position of president of the council of state and commander in chief,” Castro wrote. “I wish only to fight as a soldier of ideas. … Perhaps my voice will be heard.”

President Bush said Castro’s decision ought to spark “a democratic transition” for Cuba.

“The international community should work with the Cuban people to begin to build institutions that are necessary for democracy and eventually this transition ought to lead to free and fair elections,” Bush said Tuesday in Rwanda. “The United States will help the people of Cuba realize the blessings of liberty.”

But the streets of Cuba’s capital, Havana, reflected the normal comings and goings of residents. No gatherings or rallies erupted at Castro’s news.

Despite the story later consuming the entire front page of the print version of Granma, complete with a banner headline, many Cubans said they hadn’t heard the news when asked by CNN.

Those who had were wary of offering their opinions.
“He’s leaving the position because his age and illness don’t let him work,” one man said. “Let’s see what comes.”

“He’s aware of his place in history, and he’s going to keep on occupying that place in one way or another,” a retiree said.

Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte said the U.S. embargo on Cuba will not be lifted in the near term.

Cuba’s leaders plan to elect a president within days. Castro’s brother Raúl, 76, the country’s defense minister, has been named publicly as his successor.

Fidel with his brother Raul.

“There’s a lot of difficulty in day to day living,” said CNN senior international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, who has visited Cuba several times.

“The question is: Will there be enough change?” she said. “If it is Raúl [as president], will he show there’s a progress towards the kind of thing that the Cuban people want, which is openness, freedom, the ability to have enough wherewithal [to find jobs], the same kind of bread and butter issues that everybody all around the world wants?”

Oswaldo Paya, a Cuban dissident, said that no matter who the next leader of the country will be, the Cuban people “have more hope.”

“Not because we trust his successor more than we trusted Fidel Castro but because there’s a buzz among the people, and we want everything to go smoothly, peacefully, but the government cannot keep denying the people their space,” Paya said.

Castro received treatment for intestinal problems two years ago and cited his “critical health condition” in the letter published Tuesday. He said “it would be a betrayal to my conscience to accept a responsibility requiring more mobility and dedication than I am physically able to offer.”

He also said he realized that he had a duty to prepare Cubans for his absence.

“My wishes have always been to discharge my duties to my last breath,” he said. “That’s all I can offer.”

At age 32, Castro led a band of guerrillas who overthrew a corrupt dictatorship in 1959. He went on to become a thorn in Washington’s side by embracing communism and cozying up to the Soviet Union.

Castro reigned in Havana with an iron hand, defying a U.S. economic embargo intended to dislodge him.

In Miami, Florida, the news came as no surprise to Janisset Rivero, the executive director of the Cuban Democratic Directorate, a group that works with dissidents in Cuba.

“I think there have been preparations taking place for quite a while to assure the crowning of Raúl Castro,” she said Tuesday morning. “It doesn’t mean any change to the system. It doesn’t mean there will be freedom for the Cubans. One big dictator is replacing the other.

“It will be a big deal when political prisoners are released, when political parties are allowed to organize, when the country stops being ruled by a single party.”

Polarizing figure
To leftist revolutionaries around the world, Castro, with his ubiquitous military fatigues and fiery oratory, became a hero and patron. But for hundreds of thousands of his countrymen who fled into exile, he became an object of intense hatred.

Castro clung to a socialist economic model and one-party Communist rule, even after the Soviet Union disintegrated and most of the rest of the world concluded that state socialism was a bankrupt idea whose time had come and gone.

“The most vulnerable part of his persona as a politician is precisely his continued defense of a totalitarian model that is the main cause of the hardships, the misery and the unhappiness of the Cuban people,” said Elizardo Sanchez, a human rights advocate and critic of the Castro regime.

And yet, his defenders in Cuba point to what they see as social progress made under Castro’s revolution, including racial integration and universal education and health care. They blame the U.S. embargo for the country’s economic woes.

“What Fidel achieved in the social order of this country has not been achieved by any poor nation, and even by many rich countries, despite being submitted to enormous pressures,” said Jose Ramon Fernandez, a Cuban vice president.

Castro’s staying power was a source of irritation to Cuban exiles.

The center of the exile community is Miami, where the Cuban American National Foundation became a powerful lobbying group courted by U.S. politicians.

Road to revolution

Castro was born August 13, 1926, in Oriente Province in eastern Cuba. His father, Angel, was a wealthy landowner originally from Spain; his mother, Lina, had been a maid to Angel’s first wife.

Educated in Jesuit schools, Castro earned a law degree and offered free legal services to the poor. In 1952, at the age of 25, he ran for the Cuban parliament. But just before the election, the government was overthrown by Fulgencio Batista, whose dictatorship put Castro on the road to revolution.

In 1953, Castro took part in an unsuccessful coup attempt that made him famous but sent him to prison.

He was released in 1955 and lived in exile in the United States and Mexico, where he organized a guerrilla group with Raúl Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentine doctor turned revolutionary.

The next year, 81 fighters landed in Cuba. Most were killed; the Castros, Guevara and other survivors fled into the Sierra Maestra Mountains along the southeastern coast, where they waged a guerrilla campaign against the Batista government that finally brought it down in 1959.

Although the United States quickly recognized the new Cuban government, tensions arose after Castro began nationalizing American owned factories and plantations. In January 1961, Washington broke off diplomatic ties.

Less than four months later, a group of CIA trained Cuban exiles, armed with U.S. weapons, landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in a disastrous attempt to overthrow Castro.

Two weeks after the Bay of Pigs, Castro formally declared Cuba a socialist state.

In October 1962, Cuba became the focus of a tense world crisis after the Soviet Union installed nuclear weapons in the country. President Kennedy demanded that the Soviets remove them and quarantined the island, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war.

The Soviet Union backed down and removed the weapons.

Castro is believed to have fathered eight children with four women. His longtime companion, Dalia Soto del Valle, is the mother of five of his sons.

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Thank you CNN News

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I hope that the Cubans finally get freedom..but I sincerely think that is possible with Fidel’s replacement.

But my biggest wish is that the U.S. stay out of it…let them take care U.S. citizens who are hungry and the senior citizens who are eating dog food and going to bed hungry, cold or dying from the heat in summer.

Let them give moneys to the schools and universities to educate, instead of making war with other countries.

Let them give money to a health program where “U.S.citzens” can get proper heath, dental and vision care.

Make education and heath a primary responsibility for it’s own citizens instead of making war and then having to rebuild what it has destroyed.

If that doesn’t get some of you going…nothing will!

Wake up AMERICA!

“I will not aspire to, nor will I accept the position of president of the council of state and commander in chief,” “I wish only to fight as a soldier of ideas. … Perhaps my voice will be heard.”

After talking it over with a friend of mine…I decided to nominate Britney Shears for the next Presidente, of Cuba…it will keep her out of trouble. The girl definately needs something constructive in her life.

~The Baby Boomer Queen~

SHOES…Shoes…the ability to accessorize is what separates us from the Primates!

Web site for women who love shoes…

From Somerville, Massachusetts, a Massachusetts company has fired up a Web site
dedicated to women who are obsessed with shoes called, naturally enough,
Shoetube.tv

The Web site, operated by Powderhouse Productions, based in Somerville, Mass.,
features instructional videos and fashion tips, The Washington Times reported.

Wear them this way annd you get an extra pair!

“Shoes are universal, women love them. They connect like nobody’s business,
” Powderhouse Productions Creative Director Bill Lattanzi said.

The Web site, with a reported core staff of four people and multiple freelancers, will
offer weekly videos, daily clips and blogs. The site also encourages users to post
videos, the newspaper said.

Don’t you just LOVE these!?!?

“Alternate your shoe choice and height from one day to the next, or from day to night.
Wear a pretty ballet flat one day and romp around in your beloved platforms the next,
” a blogger wrote on the site.

Powderhouse, which also produces for PBS and the Discovery Channel, was looking for
a fun project for the company when it got the concept from the Hello Stiletto Shoe club
in Boston, Lattanzi said.

Now THIS…is a shoe closet!!!

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Thank you United Press International
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I am afraid that I am a shoe lover, myself.

Can one ever have enough shoes…?

There are so many adorable, sexy shoes out there it makes my heart go weak.

“After all it is the ability to accessorize, that separates us from the primates”…and you can quote me on that!

I can think a bunch of shoe references! Here are just a few.
a. Dorthy in the Wizzard of OZ…her RED SLIPPERS
b. Cinderella…GLASS SLIPPERS
c. Drinking Champagne out of shoes…many movies
d. The old woman who lived in a SHOE…the fairy tale
e. Swan Lake
f. The Red Shoe Diary…HBO series
h. The Red Shoe…the movie

~The Baby Boomer Queen~

IMPRISONED in Mexico with out hope…for two years…what would you do?

It’s a good old Mexican Stand OFF…

Guadalajara. Mexico’s city of churches. A wonder of colonial architecture and a must see for tourists. But for Canadian Brenda Martin, it’s a personal hell. She’s spent two years in jail here without ever having been convicted of a crime. There’s little evidence to suggest she’s guilty. Yet her pleas have been virtually ignored by Canadian officials.

W~FIVE negotiated with Mexican authorities and was able to obtain an exclusive on-camera interview in the prison where Brenda is being held.

Moving to Puerto Vallarta in 1999, Brenda says she was very happy hanging out at the beach, picking up odd jobs to survive. Then she got her perfect job offer, a chance to cook for a fabulously wealthy Canadian by the name of Alyn Waage.

Brenda Martin sits down the W~FIVE for an exclusive interview from the Mexican jail.
Originally from Edmonton, Waage told Brenda that he had an investment business and needed Brenda to cook for the staff. For 10 months life was simple. But drinking too much and a fast temper, eventually led Brenda to be fired. She says she was given a severance package of $26,000, the equivalent of one year’s pay.

Then opening her own catering business, life in paradise was still on track. That is, until she heard a rumor that Waage had been arrested and was accused of running one of the biggest Internet pyramid schemes in history. Using a company called TriWest Investments, he bilked clients in the United States and Canada for more than $60 million. Waage was arrested in Mexico, tried in the U.S. and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Brenda thought nothing more of it until she was taken in by a sting operation in February of 2006 and brought to the prison in Guadalajara. The Mexican authorities thought the money Brenda had been given as a severance package was in fact money she’d been given to launder. With only a smattering of Spanish, Brenda had difficulty understanding the charges against her.

During the next 22 months, Brenda reports she has been living in a three metre by four metre cell with 11 other women, some of whom are convicted murderers and drug dealers. This is in direct contravention of international human rights treaties to which both Canada and Mexico have agreed to.

Despite numerous pleas to Foreign Affairs by Brenda, friends like Debra Tieleman and family members, there has only been the minimum of contact with Canadian officials.

The only glimmer of hope was a sworn affidavit by Alyn Waage saying that Brenda had nothing to do with TriWest. But even though this evidence was admitted into a Mexican court it has had little or no impact, because according to Brenda, she has had a series of ineffective or incompetent lawyers.

Desperately in need of some solid legal advice, Brenda’s childhood friend, Tieleman, did some research and found the name of Guillermo Cruz Rico. Cruz is a high powered Mexican lawyer living in Canada. Visiting Brenda in Guadalajara, Cruz realized there was only one shot left to get Brenda out of prison. He filed a constitutional challenge called an Amparo.

Guillermo Cruz Rico, a high-powered Mexican lawyer living in Canada, has filed a constitutional challenge called an Amparo.

The case was simple. Brenda’s rights to a timely trial and humane living conditions had been so violated that the charges should be dropped. In addition, without translators, Brenda never understood the case against her. The Amparo seemed to spark an interest in Canadian authorities. Out of the blue, the Canadian Consulate in Guadalajara called Brenda. But Brenda was outraged at the length of time they had taken to respond to her plight and told them so.

Surprisingly, a recent ally of Brenda’s is the Mexican Ambassador to Canada, Emilio Giococchea. Not only has he met with Tieleman, but he’s also visited Brenda in jail and intervened with Mexico’s Attorney General. Brenda feels this is more than Canadian officials have done for her.

W~FIVE wanted to ask the minister responsible for consular services, Helena Guergis, about Brenda’s case. But she repeatedly declined requests for an interview. So our producer tried to talk with her at a public appearance. Guergis did not want to talk prior to the announcement about a children’s sports program, so we tried to negotiate with her press secretary. But to no avail. The Minister didn’t speak with us and she didn’t even make her announcement.

Debra Tieleman, a childhood friend, sought help when she found out Brenda was imprisoned in a Mexican jail.
Guergis did rise in the House of Commons recently to insist she has been pressuring the Mexicans to act on Brenda’s behalf.

And just hours before our broadcast W~FIVE received a letter from the Minister. In it she states consular officials have been helping Brenda.

But when reached in jail, Brenda denied the claims made by Guergis that consular officials in Mexico had phoned her or visited her more than 75 times. Reacting to those claims, Brenda said, “I just can’t believe that…Helena Guergis has the gall to say what she’s said in that letter.”

Two years after her arrest, Brenda Martin remains in jail and still has not been convicted of any crime.
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Thank you W~five
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Baby Boomers…do you remember back in the 70’s when alot of now Baby Boomers were locked and Mexican jails and how bad they were??? I don’t think it has changed much!

I bet you still have to pay your way out of there.

NOT where I would want to be.

This article was sent to me via my dear friend, Marlena in Canada…hope it helps in some way! Preferably in a LARGE way…

~The Baby Boomer Queen~

How to order pizza in “2020″…watch out for BIG Brother…is it humor???

Watch out for BIG BROTHER…how to order a pizza in 2020…

http://aclu.org/pizza/images/screen.swf

Rmember that song “In the year 2222 if man is still alive…”

Heavy cell phone usage tied to poor SPERM count… …wierd science…

Heavy cell phone use tied to poorer sperm quality…

From NEW YORK… Heavy cell phone use tied to poorer sperm quality…Spending hours on a cell phone each day may affect the quality of a man’s sperm, preliminary research suggests.

In a study of 361 men seen at their infertility clinic, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic found an association between the patients’ cell phone use and their sperm quality.
On average, the more hours the men spent on their cell phones each day, the lower their sperm count and the greater their percentage of abnormal sperm.

The findings, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, add to questions about the potential health effects of cell phones and other wireless devices. Some studies, for example, have linked long term cell phone use to a higher risk of brain tumors, though many other studies have found no such connection.

The concern is that, over time, the electromagnetic energy emitted from mobile phones could theoretically harm body tissue, by damaging DNA, for example.

However, the new findings do not prove that cell phones somehow damage sperm, according to the researchers.

“Our results show a strong association of cell phone use with decreased semen quality. However, they do not prove a cause and effect relationship,” lead researcher Dr. Ashok Agarwal told Reuters Health.

He and his colleagues based their findings on semen samples from 361 men who came to their infertility clinic over one year. All of the men were questioned about their cell phone habits.

In general, the researchers found, sperm count and sperm quality tended to decline as daily cell phone hours increased. Men who said they used their phones for more than four hours each day had the lowest average sperm count and the fewest normal, viable sperm.

“We infer from our results that heavy cell phone use … is associated with a lower semen quality,” Agarwal said. But whether cell phones somehow directly affect men’s fertility is not clear.

Agarwal said he and his colleagues have two studies underway aiming to shed light on the issue. In one, they are exposing semen samples to electromagnetic radiation from cell phones to see what, if any, effects occur.

The second is a follow up to the current study that is assessing a larger group of men. Agarwal said this study is more rigorously designed and will account for certain other factors like lifestyle habits and occupational exposures that might affect sperm quality.

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Thank you Fertility and Sterility, Amy Norton and Reuters Health

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OH DEAR…do you think that cell phone usage is connected with BAD fashion sense as well???

~The Baby Boomer Queen~

HI~TECH competition…three ladies in a sauna…Baby Boomer WINS! …joke…humor…

THREE WOMEN, TWO YOUNGER, AND ONE BABY BOOMER WERE SITTING NAKED IN A
SAUNA.

SUDDENLY THERE WAS A BEEPING SOUND.

THE YOUNG WOMAN PRESSED HER FOREARM AND THE BEEP STOPPED. THE OTHERS
LOOKED AT HER QUESTIONINGLY .

“THAT WAS MY PAGER, SHE SAID. I HAVE A MICROCHIP UNDER THE SKIN OF MY ARM .”

A FEW MINUTES LATER, A PHONE RANG. THE SECOND YOUNG WOMAN LIFTED HER PALM TO HER EAR. WHEN SHE FINISHED,SHE EXPLAINED, “THAT WAS MY MOBILE PHONE, I HAVE A MICROCHIP IN MY HAND.”

THE BABY BOOMER FELT VERY LOW~TECH. NOT TO BE OUT DONE, SHE DECIDED SHE HAD TO DO SOMETHING JUST AS IMPRESSIVE. SHE STEPPED OUT OF THE SAUNA AND WENT TO THE BATHROOM. SHE RETURNED WITH A PIECE OF TOILET PAPER HANGING FROM HER REAR END.

THE OTHERS RAISED THEIR EYEBROWS AND STARED AT HER.

THE BABY BOOMER WOMAN FINALLY SAID……………….

” WELL, WILL YOU LOOK AT THAT…..I’M GETTING A FAX!!!”

From 0 to 200 in 6 seconds… …joke…humor…

0 to 200 in 6 seconds

Bob was in trouble as he’d forgot his wedding anniversary and his wife was extremely upset.

She told him “Tomorrow morning, I expect to find a gift in the driveway that goes from 0 to 200 in six seconds!”

The next morning he got up early and left for work. When his wife woke up she looked out the window and, sure enough, there was a box gift wrapped in the middle of the driveway.

Confused, the wife put on her robe, ran out to the driveway, and brought the box back in the house.

She opened it and found a brand new bathroom scale.

Bob has been missing since Friday.

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