They had no weapons, said Tim Smith, an airline spokesman.

Port Authority police took the five men into custody immediately after the plane landed at 3:20 p.m., LaVorgna said.

LaVorgna did not have more details on why the men were considered suspicious. The five men remained in custody at the airport Saturday evening. The FBI had been notified and was expected to take over the investigation, LaVorgna said.

The plane was carrying 121 passengers and five crew members, Smith said. All other passengers had been released.

Marches in Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities, he said, "are an expression of frustration. People want to send a message to Washington that they're not happy with certain bills....

"I think that all of this comes down to one thing: The federal government has failed the people of America in a terrible way, in a disastrous way, when it comes to this immigration situation."

Schwarzenegger, who emigrated from Europe in 1968, called for better ways to police U.S. borders.

He chided federal policy-makers for letting the border problem "hang out there for 20 years and not do anything about it, when they knew this is a problem."

The governor voiced incredulity over what he described as porous borders that leave the U.S. exposed to terrorists.

Speaking at a middle school here, Schwarzenegger said that "to have a border that is not secure is to me staggering."

He scolded Congress for leaving Washington last month for spring recess, after a proposed deal to revamp the nation's immigration laws collapsed.

"For them to go home for spring break and not really take care of it when they know this was boiling here in this country is also irresponsible," he said.

Schwarzenegger called for "putting the pressure on the federal government [to] let them know they're responsible."

Dana Perino, a spokeswoman for the White House, said Friday that the Bush administration "has gone to great lengths to improve border security, both in terms of financial resources and technology.

"We do acknowledge that we need to do more, and the president has been very clear that he is for a comprehensive immigration bill that will improve border security, improve interior enforcement and include a guest worker program."

The findings support a huge U.S. federal study released last month, which found no link to cancer in a study of aspartame use among more than half a million Americans.

The European panel said its assessment should put the lid on years of debate over the sweetener found in thousands of products, including diet sodas, chewing gum, dairy products and even many medicines.

"There is no reason ... to undertake any further extensive review of the safety of aspartame," said Iona Pratt, a toxicologist who headed the panel.

The food safety scientists were also satisfied with the current European level set for the safe daily consumption of aspartame -- a maximum of 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight -- saying that the limit is well above what people consume normally.

"If you pick up little packets of it, you would have to take 80 of those packets into your coffee in one day in order to exceed this level," Pratt said at a presentation in Rome of the panel's findings.

The Italian researchers who conducted the rat study insisted that their initial findings were correct and pledged to continue studying the subject.

Dr. Morando Soffritti, who led the study for the Bologna-based European Ramazzini Foundation, also assailed the U.S. study, saying that it was an example of how "some researchers are ready to put themselves at the disposal of the industry" that produces sweeteners. He contended the U.S. research didn't distinguish between aspartame and other sweetener use and did not measure lifetime sweetener use.

History is full of examples where animal studies showed benefit or harm from a substance that later proved not true of people. But Soffritti insists that animal studies are better when it comes to aspartame because it's nearly impossible to find a comparison group of people who don't use the sweetener at all.

"How do you do a study on humans when aspartame is used in 6,000 products? How do you find a population that has never used it?" he asked.

Aspartame came on the market 25 years ago and is found in thousands of products -- sodas, chewing gum, dairy products and even many medicines. NutraSweet and Equal are popular brands.

Research in the 1970s linked a different sweetener, saccharin, to bladder cancer in lab rats. Although the mechanism by which this occurred does not apply to people and no human risk was ever documented, worries about sugar substitutes in general have persisted.

They worsened after Soffritti's research was reported. It involved 1,800 rats and was the largest ever done of aspartame in animals.

The rodents were divided into seven groups and fed different doses of the sweetener over their natural life span. Some of the rats, especially females, developed more lymphomas and leukemias than those not fed aspartame.

But the European food safety panel faulted the colony of rats used in the study, saying they had respiratory problems. These and other factors could have affected the observations, the panel said.

The U.S. findings on aspartame are based on lengthy food questionnaires sent in the 1990s to 340,045 men and 226,945 women, ages 50 to 69. They were participating in a research project by the National Institutes of Health and AARP, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons.

Based on those food surveys, filled out in 1995 and 1996, researchers with the National Cancer Institute calculated how much aspartame the participants consumed, especially from sodas or from adding the sweetener to coffee or tea. No connection was found between aspartame consumption and the type or number of tumors developed in later years.

For three examples of many to give the idea: RSF does not defend reporters in the Phillippines, which is the second deadliest nation for journalists after Iraq but is a strong ally of the US military. RSF completely ignores Mumia abu Jamal, a US reporter on death row and the object of support from "other" human rights organizations all over the globe. And in a recent interview, despite his very close ties with the Cuban-American community in Miami, RSF director Robert Menard claimed to be completely "unfamiliar" with the case of the Cuban Five. The Five, one of whom is a Cuban journalist, are serving life sentences in US prisons for infiltrating these Miami groups to prevent terrorist attacks on their homeland.1

This denial ties into the major activity (time, money and propaganda campaigns) of RSF, which is defaming the Cuban Revolution, trying to prevent European tourists from visiting the Island, and serving as a news agency and defender for "dissident reporters". The latter, according to Nestor Baguer -founder of the Independent Cuban Journalist Association, their reporter of longest duration, and the main Cuban representative of RSF, who later revealed himself as a Cuban security agent- were "neither journalists nor dissidents"2, but mercenaries paid to write as dictated by the RSF, the US Interest Section in Havana, and Florida-based hate groups.

RSF, in Menard's own words in an interview in 2000, has always considered Cuba the priority in Latin America, even giving the country a lower ranking on its press freedom index than countries where journalists routinely have been killed, such as Colombia, Peru and Mexico.3

Although incurious about the fate of journalists in Venezuela before President Hugo Chavez, RSF was very quick to support the coup d'etat against him, of course it had to be as the coup was very brief. Menard's group has since been outspoken against what it alleges to be anti-freedom of the press legislation in Venezuela, without evidently having read said legislation, and while incidently having a close relationship with Venezuelan multi-millionaire media giant Gustavo Cisneros.

Haiti is another example of the bias of this theoretically unbiased group. Menard denounced supposed "acts of repression" against local independent media under Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, while completely failing to notice aggressions by anti-government groups against journalists of Radio Solidarité and Radio Ginen.

Even in Iraq, where RSF does report deaths and kidnaping of journalists by insurgents, its "investigation" and subsequent whitewashing of the culpability of the US military in the death of the Spanish reporter-cameraman in the infamous Palestine Hotel attack outraged his family. The US tank operator admitted firing under orders from superiors, but RSF, whose interviewer was a personal friend of the officer giving the order, found the shots were fired by "persons unknown". The journalist's family asked RSF to withdraw from the case; a request it ignored.


Follow the money

While Robert Menard may be personally obsessed with Cuba and other countries that the US frowns upon, he is certainly paid well for this obsession. As Jean-Guy Allard has admirably researched in detail, RSF receives the preponderance of its funding from organizations corresponding with the CIA, filtered directly or indirectly, such as USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, the US Interest Section in Havana, and Cuban-American anti-Cuba groups in Miami.4

Menard has also finally admitted his bond with Nancy Pérez Crespo, operator of the rabid anti-Cuba Radio Mambí in Miami, who receives funds from said US establishments.

World journalists are in dire need of a true unbiased human rights organization that will protect them no matter where they are attacked or by whom, unfortunately Reporters Without Borders is not that organization.


Footnotes:

1 Excellent source of information on Cuban Five at www.freethefive.org
2 Elizalde, Rosa Miriam and Baez, Luis, Los Disidentes,Editora Politica, La Habana, 2003.
3 Barahona, Diana, "Cuba's Economy, Reporters Without Borders Unmasked", Counterpunch,www.counterpunch.org, 2005
4 Allard, Jean-Guy, Por Qu
é Reporteros sin Fronteras se ensaña con Cuba El dossier Robert Ménard, Lanctot, Quebec, 2005.

Hot spit, it was great. I was weeping with laughter while the portly millionaires of the American media sat there going whiter with shock (even as their younger female companions smirked) and the president looked as if he were about to have Colbert whacked.

Colbert loves Bush. Really. He told him so: "The greatest thing about this man is that he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will."

The finest moment was when Colbert told the media how it works: "The president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type.

"Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know, fiction!"

The former senior news analyst on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, America's No. 1 fake news channel, has his own show now, The Colbert Report, an elaborate parody of Bill O'Reilly's No-Spin Zone.

He calls his show a "no-fact zone" and he plays a blowhard anchor, what he calls a "high status idiot," an unread, grotesque bully who lives on "truthiness," a Colbert word for faith in what you believe to be true rather than what is true. He promises not to tell you the truth "but to feel the truth at you." It runs here on the Comedy Network; the two shows have more viewers in Canada than they do in the States, but Stewart and Colbert are U.S. cult hits.

The Colbert Report is the last word in anchor ego. Even the set is designed so that all lines converge on Colbert, and he is lit very much the way, say, Jesus would have been lit. Colbert sells his own sperm, Formula 401, to viewers, although he has now announced that this will be a seasonal product.

So someone - out of old-fashioned American cleverness worthy of H.L. Mencken or maybe not realizing that Colbert's humour is based on taking a fine sander to all that suckers hold true - said: Why don't we get Stephen Colbert this year?

They stuff 3,000 people into the ballroom at the Washington hotel where Ronald Reagan got shot. The press, armed with opera glasses and pink with proximity, compete over which famous person they can invite - this year it was George Clooney and former ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame, the reluctantly famous CIA agent - and pretend the president is their pal.

Colbert's monologue wasn't sarcastic or even ironic. It went far beyond that. Because he uses his own name to play a total bastard with an amazing resemblance to Fox's O'Reilly: He was doing a parody of a satire of the things Americans are told to repeat straight.

His words were seditious, yet he delivered them with a stern face. You get it or you don't. Bloggers have done a parallel transcript of Bush's thoughts during the monologue: "I love this guy. This guy loves me. I gotta hire him."

So that's a satire of a parody of a satire. If I can raise the tone here, Michael Scherer on Salon.com wrote that Colbert "reversed and flattened the meaning of the words he spoke."

And if I can go literary on you, Colbert had the wit and raw courage to do to Bush what Mark Antony did to Brutus, murderer of Caesar. As the American media has self-destructed, it takes Colbert to damn Bush with devastatingly ironic praise.

That day, viewers set up www.thankyoustephencolbert.org, which had 40,000 letters by last Thursday.

Some e-mailers worried that Colbert would be fired by Comedy Central, which is indirectly owned by CBS. Me, I offered to sponsor him and give him my house should Bush deport him. Let's not be smug. Canada needs a Colbert too.