Society's ChildS


Ambulance

Queen Elizabeth II hospitalized

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Britain's Queen Elizabeth II was hospitalized Sunday after experiencing symptoms of gastroenteritis, a palace spokesman said.

The queen was taken to the hospital "as a precautionary measure," the spokesman said, and is expected to stay at London's King Edward VII's Hospital for two days.

Gastroenteritis is an inflammation of the lining of the stomach and intestines. It is commonly known as "stomach flu," but is not caused by the influenza virus, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Eye 2

Three sisters raped and murdered: the tragedy that engulfed an Indian village

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© Gethin Chamberlain for the ObserverTanuja, 11, Priya, 5, and Prachi, 9, the three sisters found in a well, raped and murdered.
As the nation still struggles to come to terms with the attack on a Delhi student, another disturbing sex abuse case has shaken a rural community. It has raised awkward questions about police efficiency, disputed evidence and local gossip

Priya was the vivacious one, a bright five- year-old who loved music and wanted to be a teacher. Prachi was quiet, nine years old and painfully shy; Tanuja more headstrong, an independent 11-year-old.

The three sisters were Madhuri Borkar's only children. On 14 February they left home for schools in the village of Murmadi as usual. When they failed to return on time the family went to the police to report the girls missing.

"Go away," the police told them. "Come back tomorrow if they don't turn up." No one knows if the girls were still alive at that point. But it was two more days before a farmer found their bodies floating in the dark water at the bottom of a deep well in a corner of a paddyfield one mile from their home.

Even then, police initially treated the deaths as an accident. It was not until villagers started blocking the highway in protest that they started to pay attention. Two days later, the results of the postmortem examination came through and the story exploded. The girls had been raped and murdered, the report said. In the febrile atmosphere that has gripped India since the gang rape of a 23-year-old Delhi medical student last December, the case was taken up as another indictment of the plight of India's females.

Bizarro Earth

Couple arrested for attacking each other with chips and dip

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© Shutterstock
A Canadian couple was arrested on Friday for allegedly getting into a food fight in an argument over the last beer.

The Canadian Press reported on Friday that when police arrived at the unidentified couple's home in Lindsay, Ontario shortly after 1 a.m., they found the residents, a 39-year-old man and a 41-year-old woman, covered in chips and dip.

Ambulance

Expectant parents die in New York car crash; infant survives

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© VosIzNeias.com, Eli WohlIn this photo provided by VosIzNeias.com, first responders work at the scene shortly after a car accident in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood took the lives of an expectant couple Sunday, March 3, 2013, in New York.
A young couple who had taken a car service to a hospital for the birth of their first child were killed en route in a hit and run early Sunday, but their baby boy survived, born prematurely, authorities and a neighbor said.

The driver of a BMW slammed into the car carrying Nathan and Raizy Glauber, both 21, at an intersection in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, said Isaac Abraham, a neighbor of Raizy Glauber's parents who lives two blocks from the scene of the crash. Both of the Glaubers were pronounced dead at hospitals, police said.

Their infant son was in serious condition at a hospital, said Abraham, and the driver of their car was in stable condition, police said.

Fireball 5

Exploding meteor changed perception of life for 26% of Chelyabinsk residents, biggest impact on religious people: Russian poll

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The meteor explosion above Chelyabinsk this month changed the "perceptions of life" for 26 percent of the Russian city's residents, a poll showed.

Forty percent of those who heard the explosion on Feb. 15 thought they witnessed a plane crash and 8 percent believed a missile had gone off, according to a Feb. 23-24 poll by the Moscow-based Public Opinion Foundation, or FOM. Ten percent said they correctly guessed that a meteorite had hit, while 1 percent each believed that it was a nuclear blast or the end of the world, the survey showed.

The meteor that exploded above Russia's Ural Mountains sent shock waves that broke thousands of windows and injured about 1,150 people in the Chelyabinsk region. The event had a bigger impact on religious people, according to Grigory Kertman, senior analyst at FOM.

They "reported some significant changes to their attitude toward life twice more often than non-believers," Kertman said by phone yesterday.

FOM polled 500 Chelyabinsk citizens by phone. The results have a margin of error of 5.5 percentage points.

Source: Bloomberg News

Family

Russian demonstrators rally in support of U.S. adoption ban

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© Reuters / Maxim ShemetovPeople march during a rally in support of a ban on U.S. adoptions in Moscow, March 2, 2013.
Moscow - Thousands of people marched through Moscow on Saturday in an orderly show of support for a ban on adoptions of Russian children by Americans, echoing President Vladimir Putin's demands for better care for Russian orphans in their homeland.

Carrying signs with slogans including "Children are our future" and "America - hands off our children", activists mixed bitter criticism of the United States with calls for improvements in Russia's own care system.

"These children are ours. We shouldn't give them away," said Natalya Bakhinova, 56, walking in one of two columns led by marching bands that converged in Moscow's Pushkin Square.

Police said 12,000 people joined the rally, and organizers denied allegations some were coerced or paid to attend.

Moscow has seized on the death of Russian-born three-year-old Max Shatto - who died in January in Texas, where his adoptive parents live - as justification for the ban that has increased tensions with the United States.

After improvements under a "reset" President Barack Obama initiated in 2009, ties have been strained by Syria and issues including Putin's charges of U.S. meddling and his treatment of opponents since he returned to Russia's presidency last May.

Activists on Saturday called for Max Shatto's younger brother Kris to be taken from the family and returned to Russia.

Sheriff

City in Maryland to place cameras on police officers' sunglasses

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Laurel, Maryland - Videotaping police encounters. It's a controversial issue when citizens record the cops. Now one Maryland police department is going to start recording citizens right back.

Monique Griego has more on the new wearable police cameras.

The cameras will be worn on sunglasses and other types of headgear. Many people believe they benefit both the police and the public.

Pistol

72-year-old Chicago man headed to medical appointment robbed, shot to death outside home


A 72-year-old man who was about to board a bus to go to a medical appointment was shot to death outside his Roseland neighborhood home early Saturday during an apparent robbery attempt, police said.

"He was 72 years old, his birthday was just Sunday, last weekend, Sunday, he just turned 72," said William Strickland's son-in-law.

And now just days after celebrating life, Strickland's family members are planning his funeral after he was fatally shot steps away from his front door.

Fox 32 News has learned the 72 year old was on his way to dialysis treatment early Saturday morning when he was ambushed and ultimately struck by multiple bullets in his back, stomach and head in an apparent robbery.

Che Guevara

Hundreds of thousands march against austerity in Portugal

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A woman protests during a demonstration in downtown Lisbon on March 2, 2013.
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Lisbon and other Portuguese cities Saturday to protest against the government's austerity measures aimed at rescuing the debt-hit eurozone nation.

The rallies were organised by a non-political movement which claimed 500,000 marched in the country's capital and another 400,000 in the main northern city of Porto. There have been no official estimates of the crowds.

But the mood of the crowd was clearly political, calling for new elections with banners declaring "Portugal to the polls!" and "If you fall asleep in a democracy, you wake up in a dictatorship".

Another banner showed a picture of centre-right Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho with the caption: "Today I am in the street, tomorrow it will be you."

Portugal was granted a financial rescue package worth 78 billion euros ($103 billion) in May 2011, in exchange for a pledge to straighten out its finances via austerity measures and economic reforms.

Nuke

'I am one of the Fukushima fifty': One of the men who risked their lives to prevent a catastrophe shares his story

They displayed a bravery few can comprehend, yet very little is known about the men who stayed behind to save Japan's stricken nuclear plant. In a rare interview, David McNeill meets Atsufumi Yoshizawa, who was at work on 11 March 2011 when disaster struck.

Fukushima
Workers amid the damage wrought by the tsunami and explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011
It was, recalls Atsufumi Yoshizawa, a suicide mission: volunteering to return to a dangerously radioactive nuclear power plant on the verge of tipping out of control.

As he said goodbye to his colleagues they saluted him, like soldiers in battle. The wartime analogies were hard to avoid: in the international media he was a kamikaze, a samurai or simply one of the heroic Fukushima 50. The descriptions still embarrass him. "I'm not a hero," he says. "I was just trying to do my job."

A stoic, soft-spoken man dressed in the blue utility suit of his embattled employer Tokyo Electric Power Co., (Tepco) Mr Yoshizawa still finds it hard to dredge up memories of fighting to stop catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Two years later, debate still rages about responsibility for the planet's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, and its impact. Fish caught near the plant this month contained over 5,000 times safe radiation limits, according to state broadcaster NHK.

A report this week by the World Health Organisation says female infants affected by the worst of the fallout have a 70 per cent higher risk of developing thyroid cancer over their lifetimes, but concluded that overall risks for the rest of the population are "low". Over 160,000 people have been displaced from their homes near the plant, perhaps permanently, and are fighting for proper compensation. Stress, divorce and suicides and plague the evacuees.