Society's ChildS


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Four face death for 'cold-blooded' murder in Delhi gang rape

Four men were convicted on Tuesday of the "cold-blooded" murder of a woman who was raped and tortured on a bus in New Delhi, a crime that shook India and forced the country to confront sexual violence in a society undergoing wrenching change.

The four - a bus cleaner, gym instructor, fruit seller and an unemployed man - face hanging, the maximum penalty for murder. The trial judge will hear prosecution and defense arguments on sentencing on Wednesday, when he could deliver his ruling.

The minimum sentence the men could get is life imprisonment, two defense lawyers said.

"She has got justice today. We are very happy," said the father of the 23-year-old trainee physiotherapist who was attacked on December 16. "We are very confident that all of them will be hanged."

Bizarro Earth

Symbolic? Train service in Norway disrupted by railway communication failure

Train service in Norway was disrupted by a failure in the railway communication system on Tuesday morning, the Norwegian railway authority said on its Twitter account.

Also known as NSB, the Norwegian State Railways said that a software error of the GSM-R system used for communication between trains and control centers, brought down the railway network in many parts of the country, including the speed train running in and out of the Oslo airport.

According to NSB, reports of the problem came in at about 9 a.m. local time (0700 GMT).

All affected trains have either stopped immediately or ran to the nearest stations for further notice, said NSB spokesman Arvid Baardstu.

Comment: Read the following forum thread to learn more about other recent cases of railway disruptions.


Syringe

Let them eat fake - 'Artificial egg' made from plants backed by Bill Gates set to revolutionize cooking goes on sale at Whole Foods

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A radical 'artificial egg' backed by Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel and Bill Gates goes on sale in US supermarkets for the first time today. Made from plants, it can replace eggs in everything from cakes to mayonnaise - without a chicken ever coming close to the production process.

The team today started selling their 'plant egg', called Beyond Eggs, in Whole Foods in California - and say it could soon be available in supermarkets worldwide.

'We want to take animals out of the equation,' said Josh Tetrick, the firm's founder. 'The food industry is begging for innovation, especially where animals are involved - it is a broken industry.'

Tetrick's idea was to find a mix of easy-to-grow plants that, when mixed together in the right way, replicate the taste, nutritional values and cooking properties of an egg.

This, he believes will allow the firm to produce its substitute for mass market foods - and to allow developing worlds to grow their own versions with added nutrients.

'Eggs are functionally incredible, they do everything from hold oil and water in mayo to making the muffin rise and holding scrambled eggs together,' he said 'I started to think what if we can find plants that can do this. We have about 12 plants pre-selected, including a pea already widely grown in Canada. There's also a bean in South Asia that is incredible in scrambled eggs.'

Arrow Down

Sir David Attenborough isn't optimistic about our future: 'Humans have stopped evolving'

David Attenborough
© FacebookSir David Attenborough
Birth control and abortion have ended natural selection, says the veteran broadcaster, but cultural evolution is accelerating

Sir David Attenborough has said that he is not optimistic about the future and that people should be persuaded against having large families.

The broadcaster and naturalist, who earlier this year described humans as "a plague on Earth", also said he believed humans have stopped evolving physically and genetically because of birth control and abortion, but that cultural evolution is proceeding "with extraordinary swiftness".

"We stopped natural selection as soon as we started being able to rear 90-95% of our babies that are born. We are the only species to have put a halt to natural selection, of its own free will, as it were," he tells this week's Radio Times.

Dollar Gold

Study finds U.S. 'Big Agriculture' subsidy over payments: $17 million; Food Stamps? $0

Big agriculture farm
© peacefulanarko.wordpress.comWhile congress is busy cutting food stamps for the hungry, the USDA finds big agriculture to be the real welfare cheats.
The GOP has been making political hay - or hash - out of so-called food stamp abuse, holding the food stamp provision in this year's farm bill hostage to their prejudices. The Democrat-controlled Senate passed their bipartisan version of the bill, including funding for SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps), in May. In July, the Republican-controlled House eliminated the program altogether before passing their version of the bill, leaving the two versions to be reconciled when Congress reconvenes.

Last week, however, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued a report for 2012 that puts a different light on the GOP insistence that SNAP is rife with abuse and fraud. The report found that the amount of major overpayments in five food assistance programs - SNAP, the School Lunch Program, the School Breakfast Program, the Child and Adult Care Food Program, and WIC (supplements for Women, Infants, and Children) - is $0. But the amount of major overpayments in farm subsidy programs adds up to over $17 million.

If you think these subsidies are going to small family farmers, think again. They are mainly going to large agribusinesses - corporations. Those who pocket the government checks are rarely those who ever step foot in a field.


Comment: If you ever want a psychopath's "interesting perspective" you really don't have to look far. Our government is chock-full of 'paths just like Steve Pincher. He is not unique, in fact, he is the norm among our rape and pillage oriented ruling class.


Bullseye

Millionaire Ohio Gov. John Kasich forces starving families to perform slave labor for food stamps

Gov. John Kasich's administration will limit food stamps for more than 130,000 adults in all but a few economically depressed areas starting Jan. 1.

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Gov. John Kasich is turning Food Stamp recipients into a source of slave labor for major corporations and the state.
To qualify for benefits, able-bodied adults without children will be required to spend at least 20 hours a week working, training for a job, volunteering or performing a similar type of activity unless they live in one of 16 counties exempt because of high unemployment. The requirements begin next month; however, those failing to meet them would not lose benefits until Jan. 1.

"It's important that we provide more than just a monetary benefit, that we provide job training, an additional level of support that helps put (food-stamp recipients) on a path toward a career and out of poverty," said Ben Johnson, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

For years, Ohio has taken advantage of a federal waiver exempting food-stamps recipients from the work requirements that Kasich championed while U.S. House Budget Committee chairman during the mid-1990s. Kasich and former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Heath, co-sponsored an amendment requiring able-bodied recipients without dependents to work that was included in sweeping welfare-reform legislation adopted in 1996.

Comment: Witness the latest phase in the Corporate takeover of America. After destroying the American Labor Unions and shipping most American jobs overseas to places where slave labor is legal, America's leaders are now reintroducing slave labor to a starving population here.

This is how it works. Wealthy scumbags like Kasich make it mandatory for hungry people to "spend at least 20 hours a week working, training for a job, volunteering or performing a similar type of activity" Then the major corporations create various "Programs" with which to exploit these people who are forced to work for about a dollar an hour in Food Stamps. In addition to getting dirt cheap labor, these morally deficient moguls rake in even more ridiculous Corporate tax breaks for doing so.

From a psychopath's perspective, it's brilliant. They loudly bang the "Must work for Food Stamps" drum to rally the small portion of taxpaying American workers who don't need Food Stamps (yet) behind them. The impoverished, overworked fools who actually fall for the "blame the poor for our economic woes" rhetoric don't even realize that it's their jobs which will eventually be replaced by starving American slaves who have no choice but to work for Food Stamps. By the time the portion of the working class that believes "Must work for Food Stamps" is a good idea realize what's going on, they'll be working for Food Stamps too.


Bullseye

Kansas will kick 20,000 people off of food stamps

Sam Brownback
© R-KSGov. Sam Brownback
Kansas plans to throw more than a fifth of its nearly 90,000 unemployed residents off of the food stamp rolls by reinstating federal work requirements for the program that are normally waived during times of unusually high unemployment. The state's Department for Children and Families announced the move Wednesday and projected that 20,000 unemployed Kansans currently on food assistance will be affected.

The federal rules for food assistance require that able-bodied recipients who do not have dependent children - a very small subset of the food stamp population - work at least 20 hours per week in order to receive the aid for longer than three months. But states can waive that requirement when jobs are especially scarce, and nearly every state has done so during the Great Recession and gradual recovery. Kansas will be the fifth state to reinstitute the work requirement, and Oklahoma and Wisconsin are reportedly poised to follow suit shortly.

Nationwide, there are more than 3 job seekers for every job opening. Critics of Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback's (R) decision to reinstate the work requirements, such as Annie McKay of the Kansas Center for Economic Growth, noted that the state can't change that scarcity of work through sheer willpower. "Taking someone off food stamp assistance isn't going to suddenly create jobs for them," McKay told the Kansas City Star. Chad Manspeaker, a city councilman in Topeka, told the Huffington Post that unemployment is a long-term problem and "we don't solve it by starving them."

Fish

Fisherman catches fish with knife in it

Knife in Fish
© Jackie Carmichael, Managing Editor of The Westerly News
Here's one for Ripley's. Fishing guide Gil DiCesare wasn't expecting to get into a knife fight when he began gutting a 16-pound Chinook in July, but amazingly that's what he got.

After a guest reeled the fish in off Meares Bluffs in Barkley Sound, DiCesare took the it to the fish cleaning station on the back of his boat and began cutting it open.

He said everyone on the boat was "totally flabbergasted" when the fish cut back.

"I put my knife back in there to cut and it was like metal on metal. I go 'What the hell is this?

"I went to gut it, opened it up and put my hand in to take the entrails out and I got cut right through my gloves on my forefinger," he said.

"I opened up the stomach and sure enough there was a full size fillet knife in it, razor sharp, as sharp as any knife I've got on my boat."

Handcuffs

Moscow gun rampage killer gets life sentence

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© RIA Novosti. Vladimir AstapkovicMoscow Gun Rampage Killer Gets Life Sentence
A Russian court sent to prison for life Monday a man who shot dead six of his colleagues last year.

The court found Dmitry Vinogradov guilty of six counts of murder.

Vinogradov, 30, went into the Moscow office of the pharmaceutical company where he worked as a lawyer on the morning of November 7 and opened fire on his colleagues with two hunting rifles, killing three men and two women and wounding a fourth man who later died in hospital.

Hours before the shooting, Vinogradov, dubbed the "Russian Breivik" by media, posted a rambling message on a social network about his hatred for the human race, stating that the only way to make the world better was to kill as many people as possible.

In his message, Vinogradov wrote: "Evolve! At last become aware of your real meaning and place in this world! Understand that you are aliens here, you are the genetic rubbish which should not be here, the rubbish which appeared by accident, as a result of a mistake in evolution, the rubbish which must be destroyed."

Psychiatric experts confirmed his sanity during the investigation.

Arrow Down

Nearly half of new Harvard students admit to cheating

Harvard
© The Independent, UK
Nearly half of new students starting at Harvard this year have admitted to cheating in their studies before starting at university.

A tenth of the incoming class have cheated on an exam, while 42 per cent admit to doing homework dishonestly, according to the results of a survey by the university's own newspaper The Harvard Crimson.

Athletic students were most likely to cheat, with 20 per cent confessing to chicanery in tests, compared to nine per cent of those who do not play a varsity sport. Men are twice as likely to have cheated.