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Saudi Arabia beheads young migrant maid for killing infant


RT.com
Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:37 UTC
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© AFP Photo / Lakruwan Wanniarachi
Sri Lankan activists hold placards and shout as they march past a mosque to the Saudi Arabian embassy demanding the Sri Lankan government assist in the release of housemaid Rizana Nafeek in Colombo on July 8, 2011
Saudi Arabia has beheaded a young Sri Lankan housemaid despite years of appeals for clemency from her home country and widespread international condemnation. The woman was sentenced to death for the 2005 killing of an infant entrusted to her care.

Rizana Nafeek, 24, was executed on Wednesday morning in the town of Dawadmy, some 250 miles from the capital Riyadh, the Saudi Internior Ministry said in a statement.

Nafeek was sentenced to death in 2007 after her wealthy Saudi employer accused her of killing his 4-month-old daughter after the baby chocked while being bottle fed. The Saudi Interior Ministry issued a statement claiming the infant was strangled after a dispute between Nafeek and the baby's mother.

Sri Lanka appealed against the death penalty, but it was upheld by the Saudi Supreme Court in 2010.
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Pistol

U.S. suffers far more violent deaths than any other wealthy nation

Kevin Freking
Salon
Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:32 UTC
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© Credit: Flickr Creative Commons
It's not the frequency of the attacks that stands out -- it's the lethality.

The United States suffers far more violent deaths than any other wealthy nation, due in part to the widespread possession of firearms and the practice of storing them at home in a place that is often unlocked, according to a report released Wednesday by two of the nation's leading health research institutions.

Gun violence is just one of many factors contributing to lower U.S. life expectancy, but the finding took on urgency because the report comes less than a month after the shooting deaths of 26 people at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

The United States has about six violent deaths per 100,000 residents. None of the 16 other countries included in the review came anywhere close to that ratio. Finland was closest to the U.S. ranking with slightly more than two violent deaths per 100,000 residents.

For many years, Americans have been dying at younger ages that people in almost all other wealthy countries. In addition to the impact of gun violence, Americans consume the most calories among peer countries and get involved in more accidents that involve alcohol. The U.S. also suffers higher rates of drug-related deaths, infant mortality and AIDS.
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Heart - Black

Mass donor organ fraud shakes Germany

Kate Connolly
Guardian
Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:19 UTC
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© Photograph: Lester Lefkowitz/Getty
‘Too many transplant centres and too few donor organs’ are blamed for a scandal in Germany, where the medical council says some doctors manipulated health records to boost their patients’ position on waiting lists.
Criminal inquiry launched into transplant centres as senior doctors are accused of 'jumping' waiting lists.

German medical authorities are calling for an extensive overhaul of the country's organ transplant programme after transplant centres across Germany were placed under criminal investigation over allegations that they had systematically manipulated donor waiting lists.

Scores of patients are believed to have been given priority access to donor organs after doctors falsified the severity of their illnesses to ensure they received treatment ahead of other patients in Europe.

The revelations have led to accusations of widespread corruption and dishonesty in the system, and shattered public trust. Since the scandal emerged last year as a handful of cases that were initially believed to be isolated incidents, the number of Germans willing to donate organs has plummeted.

Post-death donations have dropped by between 20% and 40%, according to the German foundation for organ transplantation (DSO), which said the public's faith had been "massively shaken".
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Eye 2

Germany's Catholic Church severs ties with criminologists who research sex abuse


Raw Story
Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:14 UTC
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Germany's Roman Catholic Church said on Wednesday it had severed ties with criminologists commissioned to research sexual abuse by clergy in a row over the right to publish their findings.

The Church announced in July 2011 it would open its archives, which date back to the end of World War II, to shed light on abuse claims, tasking the northern Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony to analyse evidence.

But "mutual trust" between the Bishops' Conference and the head of the research centre has been "shattered", the bishops complained, adding they would now search for a new partner in the project.

Bishop Stephan Ackermann, appointed to handle issues surrounding claims of sexual abuse of minors, said they had been forced to terminate their contract with the institute "for an important reason with immediate effect".

"Trust is indispensable however for such an extensive and sensitive project," he said in the Bishops' Conference written statement.
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Health

South Carolina woman killed by dog while babysitting

David Ferguson
Raw Story
Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:11 UTC
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A 65-year-old woman in Greenwood, SC was attacked and killed by a family dog while she was babysitting. According to Abbeville/Greenwood's WYFF Channel 4, sheriff's deputies responded to a 911 call about an animal bite.

When they arrived, they were met at the door by an "aggressive pitbull" with blood on its chest, paws and muzzle.

Shortly after deputies arrived on the scene, the homeowners returned. They pacified the dog and closed it into a room of the house so police could enter. The babysitter, Betty Todd, was found dead in a pool of blood that had splattered up the wall, according to a police report. The report said that Todd appeared to have died of puncture wounds to the head, face and neck.
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Stormtrooper

Christian fundamentalists freak out over yoga in the military

Laura Gottesdiener
Salon
Wed, 09 Jan 2013 14:53 UTC
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© Credit: iStockphoto/STEEX
The exercise helps alleviate stress for traumatized soliders, but try telling that to the Family Research Council .

With a temporary ceasefire declared in the war over Christmas, fundamentalist Christian conservatives are looking for other places that religion may be under attack - and one radical thinks that that place may be the military.

Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, a right-wing Christian think tank that has been classified as a hate group, has flipped out over a "wacky" new initiative being tested in U.S. military training programs. No, it's not the end of "don't ask, don't tell" - it's yoga and meditation classes.

A new Mind Fitness Training program being tested in the U.S. military has integrated yoga, breathing classes and meditation alongside other more traditional training regimes to keep soldiers calm and mentally fit and to reduce depression and use of alcohol and drugs. To Perkins, however, this new initiative is a stand-in for one's personal relationship with God.
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Pistol

Jake England pleads not guilty in Tulsa shooting spree

Justin Juozapavicius
Huffington Post
Wed, 09 Jan 2013 14:50 UTC
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© AP
Jake England, 20, is charged with three counts of first-degree murder and two counts of shooting with intent to kill.
An Oklahoma man pleaded not guilty Wednesday to murder charges in an April shooting rampage that killed three black people and wounded two others in Tulsa.

Tulsa Judge James Caputo entered the plea on behalf of 20-year-old Jake England, who's charged with three counts of first-degree murder and two counts of shooting with intent to kill.

A second man charged in the deaths, Alvin Watts, 33, did not enter a plea, and his attorneys say they will enter one for him after filing several motions, including one seeking that their client be tried separately from England.
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Pills

Drug use is hiring hurdle for American employers

Kris Maher
Wall Street Journal
Tue, 08 Jan 2013 12:38 UTC
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© Jeff Swensen for The Wall Street Journal
A worker unloads drilling waste in Cecil, Pa. Federal law requires some types of workers in the industry be drug-tested to cut the risk of accidents.
Dawn Fuchs's trucking and environmental-cleanup business is thriving, thanks mostly to a boom in natural-gas drilling in western Pennsylvania. But she faces an unexpected hurdle to growth: More job applicants are failing drug tests.

"It's getting harder and harder to find clean applicants," said Ms. Fuchs, chief executive of Weavertown Environmental Group. About 7% of Weavertown's applicants have been turned away in the past two years after failing screenings, roughly four times the national average for such workers.

The high rejection rate makes it difficult to keep jobs filled in an expanding industry that has frequent employee turnover due to the heavy labor involved, such as cleaning spills and other hazards at gas wells and power plants. Ms. Fuchs figures the company, which now employs about 200 people, will need to add 100 more workers in 2013 and hire others to fill vacancies caused by turnover.

In the debate about whether American workers have the right skills to fill jobs in manufacturing and growing sectors such as oil and gas extraction, failed drug tests are often an overlooked problem. But in parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia - a region undergoing an industrial transformation driven by shale gas - employers and others say widespread drug use, particularly the abuse of prescription drugs, is affecting hiring.
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Question

Florida professor defends theory that Newtown shootings never happened

David Edwards
Raw Story
Wed, 09 Jan 2013 12:26 UTC
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A communications professor from Florida Atlantic University isn't backing down from his theory that the mass killing of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut may have never happened.

Writing on his Memory Hole blog last month, Professor James Tracy asserted that it was "not unreasonable to suggest the Obama administration [had] complicity or direct oversight of an incident that has in very short order sparked a national debate" on gun control.

"While it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place - at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation's news media have described," he declared, noting that no surveillance video of photos of bodies had been released by authorities.

"Moreover, to suggest that [President Barack] Obama is not capable of deploying such techniques to achieve political ends is to similarly place ones faith in image and interpretation above substance and established fact, the exact inclination that in sum has brought America to such an impasse."
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Eye 1

Daughter accuses German filmmaker Klaus Kinski of years of sex abuse


Raw Story
Wed, 09 Jan 2013 12:22 UTC
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The elder daughter of the late German film icon Klaus Kinski accused him Wednesday of sexually abusing her for several years from the time she was a small child.

Pola Kinski said the diminutive fair-haired actor who died in 1991 had molested her repeatedly from the age of five until she turned 19, in an interview with weekly magazine Stern ahead of the release of a tell-all book she has written.

The notoriously volatile but prolific star of "Fitzcarraldo" and "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and a frequent collaborator of German director Werner Herzog "ignored all protests" by his young daughter, Pola Kinski charged.

"He just took what he wanted," she said, adding that she lived in constant fear as a youngster of his angry outbursts.
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