Society's Child

Chavez has respiratory infection, now 'controlled'

Vivian Sequera
My Fox DC
Tue, 18 Dec 2012 10:46 UTC

© Reuters/Miraflores Palace
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez takes part in a meeting with members of the political coalition "Great Patriotic Pole" at Miraflores Palace in Caracas October 8, 2011.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has a respiratory infection after undergoing cancer surgery in Cuba and must have "complete rest" for the next few days, the government said Tuesday.

The socialist leader is in stable condition after being diagnosed with the respiratory infection on Monday, Information Minister Ernesto Villegas said on television, reading a government statement.

"It has been controlled," Villegas said. "In the opinion of the doctors, this type of ailment is one of the consequences that appear with the greatest frequency in patients who have undergone complicated surgeries."

The infection appeared a week after a six-hour operation that the government has said involved complications.

"The medical team has said that President Chavez should have complete rest in the coming days and receive ... the prescribed medical treatment, with the purpose of maintaining the stability of his vital signs that he currently enjoys," Villegas said.

Concluding the statement, he said: "Long live Chavez!"

Tuesday's announcement came amid uncertainty and concern over the 58-year-old president's health.

Chavez hasn't spoken publicly since his Dec. 11 surgery for an undisclosed type of pelvic cancer. It was his fourth cancer-related operation since June 2011.

Four St. Louis area schools locked down after gunman seen stalking woods

Jim Hoft
The Gateway Pundit
Tue, 18 Dec 2012 20:44 UTC

Four St. Louis area schools were locked down on Monday after an unidentified gunman was seen in a nearby wooded area.
KSDK reported:

Police called in tactical SWAT units, police helicopters and canine units due to the threat.

A suicidal man forced four St. Louis area schools to go on lock down Monday afternoon.

KSDK reported:

A suicidal man that caused four Parkway School District schools to go on lock out has been captured.

Hanna Woods Elementary School, Southwest Middle School, Parkway South High School, and Wren Hollow Elementary School locked their doors shortly before 5 p.m. Monday and would not let anyone enter the schools as a precaution after a call was made to police about a suicidal man in a wooded area.

Students inside the schools for after-school activities were allowed to leave if a parent is present.

Chief Tim Fitch says a distraught 19-year-old male from Webster Groves was texting with this girlfriend and threatened to kill himself.

Another local school near St. Louis in Granite City, Illinois was locked down Monday after receiving threats.

Elementary school student brings handgun to school

David Wells and Meredith Forrest Kulwicki
Fox 13 News - Salt Lake City
Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:09 UTC

Kearns, Utah - A 6th grade student brought an unloaded handgun to West Kearns Elementary School Monday.

The 11-year-old boy allegedly told other students his parents encouraged him to bring a gun to school for protection following the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday.

The boy reportedly pulled the gun, a .22-caliber pistol, out of his backpack during recess Monday morning.

"At recess, he pointed a gun to my head and said he was going to kill me," said Isabel Rios, one of the boy's fellow 6th grade students.

Granite School District officials say students didn't notify teachers about the weapon until 3 p.m.

"Once the teacher knew there was a weapon in the classroom, the student was apprehended in 30 to 45 seconds and immediately brought down to the office and the police were on site within five to 10 minutes," said Granite School District Spokesman Ben Horsley.

Granite School District sent a pre-recorded message via telephone to the parents of West Kearns Elementary students at 5:30 p.m. By then, some of those parents had already heard about the incident from their children.

"There was no lockdown. No one was called. Nothing was done. And then we had to hear it from our kids," said John Klaus, the father of a student at West Kearns Elementary.

Head O'Meadow school, Newtown closed after threat

NBC Connecticut
Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:03 UTC

Head O'Meadow School, an elementary school in Newtown, is closed after the school received a threat on Tuesday, according to the superintendent.

Public schools in Newtown were scheduled to open two hours late, so no students were at school when the threat was received.

School officials said police had predicted that there might be some threats and there was one.

All staff members are safe, school officials said. Police were at the scene as a precaution before the threat was made.

The threat was made on the day that Newtown public schools returned to school after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday.

No additional information has been released on what the threat was.

Car backfire believed to have caused school lockdown

CBS DFW
Tue, 18 Dec 2012 10:55 UTC

Texas - The Birdville Elementary School in Haltom City and nearby Shannon Learning Center were both on lockdown for about an hour Tuesday morning.

Police said they initially received a report of a gun or gunfire near the school. A student had allegedly reported seeing a teenager fire a gun in the air. School administrators quickly confirmed that no shots were fired in the school and no one was injured.

It was as police continued their investigation, after the lockdown was cancelled, that a parent came forward and told police he may have caused the loud bang that was thought to be gunfire.

Birdville ISD spokesperson Mark Thomas quoted the man as saying, "My vehicle backfired at that time." Thomas said the possibility of the error makes sense. "The only thing that we can confirm at this point is we have a vehicle that backfired in the parking lot. There's no confirmation that there were any guns at all or any gunshots fired."

Comment: More evidence that everyone in the U.S. is on edge and fearful, which will probably result in them accepting more Police State mandates for "their protection".

For more information please read:

Sandy Hook psy-ops: Police State here we come
Sandy Hook massacre: Official story spins out of control
Don't Say a Word

Members of at Northern Illinois University fraternity have been charged with hazing following the death of a student after a night of drinking

New York Daily News
Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:32 UTC

David Bogenberger, 19, was found unresponsive at the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house early on Nov. 2. Alcohol intoxication was a cause of his death, the ME said.

© handout
David Bogenberger, 19, died during a Northern Illinois University Pi Kappa Alpha hazing ritual in early November. Investigators say he had been going room to room chugging alcohol.

DeKalb, Illinois - Nearly two dozen fraternity members at Northern Illinois University have been charged with hazing-related counts after a freshman was found dead at their fraternity house following a night of drinking.

DeKalb police and prosecutors issued arrest warrants Monday for 22 members of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity in DeKalb. Five members are charged with felony hazing, while the other 17 members are facing misdemeanor hazing charges.

Phone messages and emails sent to local and national fraternity officials were not immediately returned.

The warrants were filed after David Bogenberger, 19, was found unresponsive at the fraternity house early on Nov. 2. The DeKalb County Coroner's Office said toxicology results found his blood alcohol content was about five times the legal limit for driving.

The coroner ruled Bogenberger's cause of death was cardiac arrhythmia, with alcohol intoxication as a contributing cause.

Dreams in infrared: The woes of an American drone operator

Nicola Abé
Spiegel Online
Fri, 14 Dec 2012 09:10 UTC

© Gilles Mingasson
Drone operators: A drone pilot, left, and a drone sensor operator practice on a simulator at Holloman Air Force base in New Mexico

A soldier sets out to graduate at the top of his class. He succeeds, and he becomes a drone pilot working with a special unit of the United States Air Force in New Mexico. He kills dozens of people. But then, one day, he realizes that he can't do it anymore.

For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.

The container is filled with the humming of computers. It's the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren't flying through the air. They're just sitting at the controls.

Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.

French village pleads with Mayan apocalypse fanatics not to visit Bugarach

The Telegraph
Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:17 UTC

© Guillaume Horcajuelo/EPA
Believers see Bugarach as one of a few sacred mountains sheltered from the end of the world Photo:

French authorities have pleaded with New Age fanatics, sightseers and media crews not to converge on Bugarach, the tiny village some believe will be one of the few places spared when the world supposedly ends.

Jean-Pierre Delord, the mayor of Bugarach, said: "I am making an appeal to the world - do not come to Bugarach."

He added that police will from Wednesday block access to the southwestern village of 200 residents.

Scammers & spammers try to cash in on Sandy Hook shootings

Chris Morran
The Consumerist
Mon, 17 Dec 2012 23:51 UTC

It's no surprise that there are horrible people in this world who will try to take advantage of peoples' desire to do something, anything, positive in the wake of a tragic event. Sadly, the shooting deaths of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary is no exception to that rule.

As with many tragedies, scammers immediately come wriggling out of the muck. According to NotB4coffee.com, within hours of the police releasing the names of the Sandy Hook victims, fake Facebook pages were set up in the names of each child. Some of these are asking for people to make donations, though most are not legitimate.

There are also numerous pages that appear to be set up with the purpose of memorializing the victims through photos and "Like"-worthy quotes, but it's possible that the people running some of these pages are simply doing this to flip the pages for a profit.

Technorati's Shea Wong explains why all those "Likes," Re-Tweets, and shares could add up to cash for underhanded marketers:

Every time you like and share one of these images, the algorithm in the social media platform you are using assigns that image a level of importance - the more people who like and share, the higher importance that image has. That explains why sometimes you see the same image three or four times on your news feed.

When people 'like' the page that created the meme (usually a name like "All The Newtown Babies Are Now Angels"), that page also rises through the algorithm rankings. The creator of the page then sells the page wholesale to the highest bidder in online marketer forums. The name of the page is changed (usually to a cheap product page) and your Facebook feed gets flooded with sales spam.

Controversial UK law criminalises 'insulting words or behaviour'

Steve Doughty
Mail Online
Mon, 10 Dec 2012 19:40 UTC

Free speech: Keir Starmer QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, said there is no need for a law that makes it a crime to insult someone

There is no need for a law that makes it a crime to insult someone, the Director of Public Prosecutions has said.

In a boost to free-speech campaigners, Keir Starmer QC said it was safe to reform the controversial law that says it is a criminal offence to use 'insulting words or behaviour'.

The clause of the 26-year-old Public Order Act has spurred a campaign which has united gay and secular activists, celebrities and conservative Christian evangelicals in favour of a robust right for people to insult each other.

In October, comedian Rowan Atkinson said the law was having a 'chilling effect on free expression and free protest'.

He warned: 'The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.'

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Society's Child

Chavez has respiratory infection, now 'controlled'

Four St. Louis area schools locked down after gunman seen stalking woods

Elementary school student brings handgun to school

Head O'Meadow school, Newtown closed after threat

Car backfire believed to have caused school lockdown

Members of at Northern Illinois University fraternity have been charged with hazing following the death of a student after a night of drinking

Dreams in infrared: The woes of an American drone operator

French village pleads with Mayan apocalypse fanatics not to visit Bugarach

Scammers & spammers try to cash in on Sandy Hook shootings

Controversial UK law criminalises 'insulting words or behaviour'

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