Society's Child

Sleepless no more in Seattle: Later school start times result in more sleep and better grades for students

Patti Neighmond
NPR
Wed, 12 Dec 2018 21:15 UTC

© Jasper Cole/Getty Images
Teens' biological clock drives them to stay up late and sleep in. Most school start times don't accommodate that drive

Many American teenagers try to put in a full day of school, homework, after-school activities, sports and college prep on too little sleep. As evidence grows that chronic sleep deprivation puts teens at risk for physical and mental health problems, there is increasing pressure on school districts around the country to consider a later start time.

In Seattle, school and city officials recently made the shift. Beginning with the 2016-2017 school year, the district moved the official start times for middle and high schools nearly an hour later, from 7:50 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. This was no easy feat; it meant rescheduling extracurricular activities and bus routes. But the bottom line goal was met: Teenagers used the extra time to sleep in.

Researchers at the University of Washington studied the high school students both before and after the start-time change. Their findings appear in a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. They found students got 34 minutes more sleep on average with the later school start time. This boosted their total nightly sleep from 6 hours and 50 minutes to 7 hours and 24 minutes.

Activist detained by police and deported over RT sex-trafficking documentary about Cambodia, now faces jail

RT
Thu, 13 Dec 2018 15:24 UTC

Rath Rott Mony (R) with his wife, Long Kimheang

A Cambodian activist has been deported from Thailand and is now facing jail for helping RT make a documentary about the sex-trafficking of children. Cambodian authorities insist it included fake accounts to "defame" the country.

Rath Rott Mony, 47, helped shoot RT's viral documentary "My Mother Sold Me," which includes harrowing accounts of young women whose own parents forced them into prostitution to help feed the family.

Mony was detained in Bangkok, Thailand on Friday as he was preparing for a trip to the Netherlands, his wife, Long Kimheang told RT. He was about to retrieve his passport from the Dutch embassy that day, she said, and the police refused to let her film the arrest.

The labor activist, who is the president of the Cambodian construction workers union CCTUF, was first held in a Thai police station before eventually being deported to his home country on Wednesday. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has confirmed Mony's deportation to RT, but could not comment on the charges brought against him. Cambodian police spokesperson Chhay Kim Khoeun told Reuters that they "will send him to court," which will determine the charges.

Mony worked as a fixer for RT Documentary crew shooting "My Mother Sold Me" in October. The documentary includes an account of a poor Cambodian girl who was sold into sex work by her mother.

Bloodthirsty illegal Israeli settlers hang posters calling for assassination of Palestinian president

If Americans Knew
Thu, 13 Dec 2018 20:11 UTC

Posters in the occupied West Bank proclaim "Sponsor of murder is equal to murderer" and call for the assassination of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas

Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority's capital, has been subject to raids allegedly in search of the perpetrator of a drive-by shooting of Israeli settlers yesterday. Now some settlers are calling for the PA president's assassination - and Israeli soldiers are staying silent.

Israeli extreme Jewish groups hung posters of the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Huwwara crossroads in southern Nablus, in the northern occupied West Bank, on Tuesday, calling for his assassination.

Comment: IDF surrounds Ramallah after deadly West Bank shooting

Good Samaritan comes to aid of car crash victims, cops detain him shortly after and impound his car

Matt Agorist
The Free Thought Project
Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00 UTC

For stopping on the side of the road to help the occupants of a deadly car crash, a good Samaritan was detained and his car stolen by police.

Benjamin Davis III was driving to work this week when he watched a car in front of him lose control and begin flipping off the road. Being the good Samaritan that he is, Davis stopped to help and could very well be the reason the passenger of the vehicle survived.

"The guy is hanging out of the passenger side door. Unfortunately, his friend was crushed," Davis said.

Davis was able to get one person out of the car and very well could've been responsible for saving his life. The other occupant of the vehicle, 21-year-old Kyree Payne of Northeast D.C., was crushed and died before Davis even got to him.

After Davis saved the only person he could, he waited at the scene for police to show up. When the D.C. police arrived on the scene, Davis told them everything that he witnessed and what he did. He was then allowed to leave.

As Davis pulled away from the scene, however, a D.C. police officer pulled him over less than a block away. This would be the beginning of a nightmare, according to Davis.

Robot impales factory worker with 10 foot-long steel spikes after horrific malfunction (Warning: Graphic Images)

Tariq Tahir
The Sun
Thu, 13 Dec 2018 12:08 UTC

The ten skewers that were removed

A Chinese factory worker has survived being skewered with TEN metal spikes when a robot malfunctioned.

The 49-year-old, named as Mr Zhou, was working on the night shift at a porcelain factory in Hunan province when he was struck by a falling robotic arm.

The accident resulted in him being impaled with foot long, half-inch thick metal rods, the People's Daily reported.

He was first taken to a local hospital before he was transferred to the Xiangya Hospital of Central South University due to the severity of his injuries.

Six steel rods fixed on a steel plate pierced his right shoulder and chest, and four penetrated elsewhere in his body.

CBC puts Baby It's Cold Outside back on air after 'overwhelming' response from listeners

Nick Faris
The Vancouver Sun
Wed, 12 Dec 2018 17:50 UTC

"Baby, It's Cold Outside" is an Academy Award-winning popular song written by Frank Loesser in 1944, which gained wide recognition in 1949 when it was performed in the film Neptune's Daughter.

'The audience spoke, and we listened,' CBC said. Rogers is sticking by its decision not to play the 1944 Christmas classic this year

The "overwhelming" desire of CBC Music listeners to be able to hear Baby It's Cold Outside has prompted the public broadcaster to resume playing the song after a week's hiatus.

CBC had followed the lead of a number of Canadian and U.S. broadcasters by deciding last week to remove the 1944 Christmas classic from two playlists its programmers curated for the holiday season. At the time, a spokesperson said CBC had "no plans" to play Baby It's Cold Outside in the future in light of public condemnation of its lyrics.

Comment:

'Spying & threats': Assange complains of 'more subtle' silencing than Khashoggi

RT
Thu, 13 Dec 2018 17:47 UTC

Julian Assange has accused his Ecuadorean hosts of spying and feeding information to US authorities, and slammed attempts to block his journalistic work as a more subtle way of silencing than the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

Suggesting there were "facts of espionage" inside the embassy, the WikiLeaks co-founder expressed concern during a hearing in Quito on Wednesday that Ecuadorean intelligence is not only spying on him, but sharing the data it has harvested with the FBI. Ecuadorean intelligence clearly spent a sizable amount of money equipping the embassy for surveillance, Assange added.

He accused Ecuadorean authorities of "comments of a threatening nature" relating to his journalistic work and compared attempts to silence him to the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was tortured and cut up in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in October, but "more subtle." The comparison elicited a harsh reaction from Ecuadorean Prosecutor General Inigo Salvador, who accused Assange of biting the hand that feeds him.

The feminist life script has made many women miserable. Time to opt out

Joy Pullmann
The Federalist
Tue, 11 Dec 2018 17:18 UTC

Our culture is so saturated with feminism that even conservatives and devoutly religious people like me think inside its wheel ruts. This wouldn't be a problem, except that feminism is antithetical to human flourishing, both individually and corporately, because it has a false view of human nature.

No matter how the evidence piles up in heartbreak after heartbreak, many women continue to give themselves cognitive dissonance. We all want to believe that we're exceptional, that patterns of human behavior don't apply to us. That while bad things happened to other people who did the same things we are or want to, those bad things won't happen to us, too. We're special. We're different.

Refusing to learn from history and experience only hardens people against the feedback from reality they need to make their lives better through smarter decisions. Thinking that the experience and wisdom of humans across time has a claim on our present behavior allows a form of troubleshooting and decisionmaking using billions of accumulated datapoints. Yes, it requires humility to consider whether your presuppositions and behavior are wrong, but what you may lose in feminist scorekeeping you reap a hundredfold in a richly happy life. How do I know? It's happened to me.

FSB arrests 7 suspected supports of ISIS and al-Qaeda in Russia

RFE/RL
Thu, 13 Dec 2018 17:20 UTC

Russian authorities say they have detained seven people suspected of financially supporting two extremist organizations in the Middle East.

Russia's Investigative Committee said on December 13 that the suspects had been apprehended in and around the Moscow region and the three North Caucasus regions of Chechnya, Daghestan, and Ingushetia.

They were suspected of sending at least 38 million rubles ($570,000) to militants of the Islamic State (IS) group and the Al-Nusra Front - Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate until 2016 -- since 2010.

The Federal Security Service (FSB) said the seven suspects were detained following a joint operation by the FSB, the Investigative Committee, and the National Guard.

Also on December 13, authorities in Ingushetia said that two suspected terrorists were killed overnight after one of them threw a grenade at police in the city of Nazran.

Two officers were wounded in the attack, officials said.

Comment: This is how Russia deals with her Islamist threat. France, by contrast, simply lets them walk the streets:

9 dead and 46 wounded as high speed train collides with locomotive in Ankara, Turkey

Sputnik
Thu, 13 Dec 2018 17:05 UTC

According to the Ankara administration, a crash, in which two railcars derailed, had been caused by the high-speed train's collision with a suburban passenger train.

Two railcars derailed in the Turkish capital of Ankara on Thursday leading to multiple casualties, local media reported.

The death toll in the high-speed train crash in the Turkish capital of Ankara has increased to nine, while 46 people were injured, Turkish Minister of Transport Mehmet Cahit Turhan told reporters.

"A total of seven people died as a result of the crash, including the driver. A total of 46 people were injured, and the condition of three of them has been assessed as grave", the Ankara administration said in a statement earlier.

Comment: Train crashes, derailments and bridges collapsing seem to be in the news more and more often these days. Here are just a few from this year alone:

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Society's Child

Sleepless no more in Seattle: Later school start times result in more sleep and better grades for students

Activist detained by police and deported over RT sex-trafficking documentary about Cambodia, now faces jail

Bloodthirsty illegal Israeli settlers hang posters calling for assassination of Palestinian president

Good Samaritan comes to aid of car crash victims, cops detain him shortly after and impound his car

Robot impales factory worker with 10 foot-long steel spikes after horrific malfunction (Warning: Graphic Images)

CBC puts Baby It's Cold Outside back on air after 'overwhelming' response from listeners

'Spying & threats': Assange complains of 'more subtle' silencing than Khashoggi

The feminist life script has made many women miserable. Time to opt out

FSB arrests 7 suspected supports of ISIS and al-Qaeda in Russia

9 dead and 46 wounded as high speed train collides with locomotive in Ankara, Turkey

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