Society's ChildS


Red Flag

Sexualized children: School superintendent proposes giving middle school students condoms without parents' permission

condoms
© David Gray / Reuters
A proposal introduced by San Francisco Superintendent Richard Carranza would allow public school nurses and social workers to give condoms to middle school students without parents' permission.

As it currently stands, condoms have been distributed in city high schools since 1991, with a 1996 amendment allowing parents to opt their children out of the program, according to KTXL. However, the new proposal would prevent parents from having their children excluded, as well as expand the program to reach pre-teens.

SF Gate reports that according to a student survey, at least 5 percent of the students in sixth until eighth grade had had sexual intercourse, while more than 25 percent of high school students had had sex.

Comment: In today's Western world, children are surrounded by sexual imagery, from television to movies to the Internet. It seems almost intentional that our society is introducing sex to children at younger and younger ages. Does anyone think that a 12-year-old should have access to a condom? Something is seriously wrong with our society.


Padlock

Coventry, UK: Cops break into homes to highlight burglary risk

UK cop
Coventry police have come under fire on Twitter for an unconventional social media campaign in which patrolling officers tweeted pictures of themselves inside homes that had been left unlocked.

The force's #stoleninseconds campaign has seen Coventry police officers patrolling streets searching for open windows and unlocked doors to highlight the risk of burglary to residents.

Two photos, which have since been taken down, show a police officer standing inside a person's hallway, while another shows an officer entering a home through a side or back door. Other photos, which are still on the force's Twitter feed, show them standing by unlocked gates to communal areas and pointing out easily accessible open windows.

Comment: It seems the Coventry cops are taking a page from the playbook of their American counterparts.

It's for your own good: New Haven cops steal residents' belongings to protect them from being stolen


Megaphone

Queues from hell! Over 100,000 stranded outside China's Guangzhou station, delays caused from heavy snow

China Guangzhou station
© www.talkglobalnews.com
Guangzhou railway station in southern China has been swamped by over 100,000 people desperate to get home to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Heavy snow in northern and central provinces caused delays to dozens of trains, leaving passengers stranded.

People had a nightmare start to the Lunar New festival, which gets underway later in February. They were unable to board trains because of inclement weather, leading to massive queues developing outside Guangzhou railway station.

Some people were standing for more than 10 hours in the pouring rain, as 32 trains were delayed.

Comment: See also: Snow causes chaos in China as millions head home for Lunar New Year


Bandaid

Spate of random slashings in New York City sows fear

Tony-Award winning playwright David Henry
© AP/Jim CooperIn this 2007 file photo, Tony-Award winning playwright David Henry Hwang is shown at The Public Theater in New York. Wang was a victim of a random attach while carrying groceries to his home in Brooklyn, N.Y

Tony-award winning playwright David Henry Hwang was carrying groceries down a Brooklyn street when he felt like he got hit in the back of the head. He suddenly couldn't walk straight.

"I kept veering into a wall, then a parked car. And that's when I realized I was bleeding," Hwang, the author of "M. Butterfly," said this week.

Hwang had been slashed with a blade by someone who came out of nowhere. The wound was so deep it severed an artery leading to his brain.

He isn't the only victim of such an unusual crime. Since December, about a dozen such random, unprovoked slashings have been reported across the city, including three this week on subway trains. All were committed by strangers, police said. They used knives, razors and, in one instance, possibly a machete.

Light Saber

Surfing icon Kelly Slater: Vote nobody 2016, Stop Monsanto and Investigate 9-11

Kelly Slater
© Inertia Kelly Slater
Surfing legend Kelly Slater is interviewed by Luke Rudkowski from We Are Change, just days after being in the news for saving a woman and her baby from a huge wave in Hawaii that swept them away.

In this interview the surfing icon opens up about his views on various issues including politics, 9/11, the wars in the middle east, ISIS, Monsanto and GMOs.

Slater is now part of a growing number of celebrities speaking out about import issues facing our time.

Like many people, the 11-time world surfing champion began questioning things after 9/11 and is now someone actively seeking the truth. He stopped watching the mainstream media to follow the alternative media instead, to find out what is going on in the world.

His concerns on topics such as Monsanto and GMOs are close to home for the surfer who lives in Hawaii, a well known testing ground for Monsanto.

Comment: Great interview, it's awesome to see celebrities using their platforms to increase awareness of the issues that matter.


Hourglass

Delaware halts all capital punishment cases as Supreme Courts weighs legality

Death penalty
© Fred Thornhill / Reuters
Delaware has put all of its nearly 40 pending death penalties on hold as the state's Supreme Court weighs the constitutionality of its capital punishment system. The move comes on the heels of a Florida case, during which the death penalty was ruled unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court has until April 14 to review and answer five questions from Superior Court judge regarding the roles of judges and juries in Delaware death penalty cases.

On Monday, Judge Jan Jurden ruled a temporary stay of the pending trials, penalty hearings, and applications related to the capital first-degree murder cases.

Comment: See also: Psychopathic Maine Governor wants to 'bring the guillotine back' and hold 'public executions' for drug offenders


Arrow Down

Snakes in suits: NGO aid-money laundering and embezzlement of disaster relief funds

haiti
It took the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti to expose the rot in the world's charities. Well-meaning people and their governments donated about $12 billion dollars of emergency aid, virtually none of which reached individual Haitians. The funds that were delivered went mostly to enrich the donor countries' government agencies, aid agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGO), and the vast majority of the pledged funds were never delivered at all. Some of this disappeared money was embezzled. Two criminal cases in 2015 give a glimpse into the use of NGOs by criminal networks to launder embezzled aid money.

Aid, Mediterranean style

Rafael Blasco, one of Spain's longest-lived and most indestructible politicians, became the first person to serve time for stealing Haitian reconstruction funds when he began a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence on June 15, 2015 for committing embezzlement of public funds, administrative prevarication, and forgery while he was the Director of the Aid Ministry in Valencia's regional government. Although the English-language press ignored this news, in Spain, the "Aid Case" was a major scandal that the media followed for three years, until the Spanish Supreme Court denied Blasco's final appeal for clemency in May 2015.

According to a Valencia High Court and the Spanish Supreme Court, Blasco received his sentence for running a criminal ring that had syphoned off all but 3 percent of a $2 million aid package that should have brought water and sustainable food to two poor rural areas of Nicaragua. This was only one part of the three-part Aid Case, which involved a total of $10 million and irregularities in 30 humanitarian projects in Central America and the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Another important part of the Aid Case was the planned construction of a hospital in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake for $5.1 million, but it turned out that there was sufficient evidence in the Nicaragua part to convict Blasco.

Comment:



Mail

The Right to Self Determination: Alaska & Hawaii ask the United Nations to Recognize the U.S. as occupiers

UN assembly
The indigenous peoples of Alaska and Hawaii appealed to the international community through the United Nations with a request to ensure their right to self-determination. The letter was circulated in Geneva.

In the address, the representatives of the peoples of Alaska and Hawaii urged UN members to raise the issue on May 11th in the framework of the consideration of the UN Council on Human Rights of the periodic review of the human rights and freedoms in the United States, according to TASS.

The appeal emphasizes that the sale of Russian Alaska to the United States in 1867 did "not mean the transfer of sovereignty over Alaska to the United States" and the "US invasion of Hawaii in 1893 was a violation of bilateral treaties and international law."

Binoculars

Human Rights Watch reports on US human rights violations

woman prisoner
© www.liberationnews.orgHRW report decries widespread abuse of mentally disabled prisoners in the US.
Human Rights Watch has published a scathing report criticizing the United States for violating human rights in a variety of areas. According to the report, US laws and practices violate internationally recognized human rights in incarceration, racial disparities, criminal justice, police killing of African Americans and foreign policy to name a few.

"The United States locks up 2.37 million people, the largest reported incarcerated population in the world," the report says, adding "about 12 million people annually cycle through county jails." It says that thirty-one US states still "impose the death penalty" with seven of them carrying out executions in 2014. Also, 27 people had been executed by lethal injection in the US in 2015, the report revealed.

On racial disparities in criminal justice, the report shows that "while whites and African Americans engage in drug offenses at comparable rates, African Americans are arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated for drug offenses at much higher rates." Even though African Americans account for "only 13 percent of the US population, they constitute "29 percent of all drug arrests," says the report, adding "black men are incarcerated at six times the rate of white men."

Comment: A reality check. Unfortunately, the US is far down the road to a fascist military-police state accountable to no one. It is gearing to implode and it appears there's very little that can stop it.


Heart - Black

Australian driver 'deliberately' mows down 17 kangaroos near Brisbane

Kangaroo killed by car
© EPAThe carcasses were found along a 330-foot stretch of road on the outskirts of Brisbane.
Authorities in Australia are searching for a driver who ran down and killed 17 kangaroos along a stretch of road where the creatures are known to feed at night.

The carcasses were found along a 330-foot stretch of road on the outskirts of Brisbane. Sixteen were dead but one was still alive and had to be killed.

"They've definitely been deliberately run over," said Michael Beatty, a spokesman for the RSPCA. "You can quite clearly see the tyre tracks where they've gone off the road to hit them."

The RSPCA, which has the power to investigate and to initiate prosecutions, is investigating the slaughter and is appealing for any witnesses to come forward.

The driver is believed to have had a bull bar, or front grill, and is likely to have been in a four-wheel drive. "They would have had a bull bar - otherwise they would not have any car left," Mr Beatty told The Telegraph.

"You can clearly see the tyre marks where the person has driven from the left side of the road to the embankment on the road and killed five or six [kangaroos] and then done the same thing 30 yards later."

Comment: More signs and symptoms of pathology in a society without a sense of conscience or respect for Mother Nature.