Society's ChildS


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Hollywood gripped by child abuse scandal

Elijah Wood
© The Sunday TimesWood: sympathy with Savile victims.
Elijah Wood, the former child actor and star of the Lord of the Rings films, claims that Hollywood has been gripped by cases of sexual abuse similar to the Jimmy Savile scandal in Britain — and it may still be continuing.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Wood, 35, sympathised with British victims of Savile and said: "Jesus, it must have been devastating."

He said his mother had protected him from abuse when he arrived in Hollywood aged eight, but "I've been led down dark paths to realise that these things probably are still happening".

Wood, who played Frodo Baggins, the hobbit protagonist in the films of JRR Tolkien's books, said there were "a lot of vipers in this industry . . . there is darkness in the underbelly".

Allegations that powerful Hollywood figures have been protecting child abusers have circulated widely in recent years and Anne Henry, co-founder of Bizparentz, a group set up to help young actors, said: "Hollywood is currently sheltering about 100 active abusers."

Airplane

Azeri cargo plane crashes in Afghanistan, US B-52 bomber crashes on Guam

b-52 bomber
© AFP 2016/ Paul CROCK
An Azerbaijani cargo plane with nine crew members on board has crashed in Afghanistan, according to Azerbaijan state aviation authority.

Azerbaijani An-12 cargo plane with nine crew members on board crashed on Wednesday in Afghanistan, a source in Azerbaijan's Civil Aviation Authority reported.

"A cargo plane belonging to Azerbaijani Silk Way air carrier crashed in Afghanistan's Helmand Province," the source told RIA Novosti.

According to Azeri local media, the plane was on loan from Silk Way to carry out cargo missions in Afghanistan, and had an international crew comprising three Ukrainian, five Azeri and one Uzbek nationals.

Sheriff

"Blue Lives Matter": New law can make resisting arrest a 'hate crime'

Blue Lives Matter
Baton Rouge, LA — Last year, in an outburst of pure insanity, the National Fraternal Order of Police, a union representing over 300,000 officers, called for cops to be included under Congress's hate crimes statute. This demand has now materialized into actual legislation about to be signed into law in Louisiana.

Bill HB 953, which passed the legislature this week, is going to change the state's hate crime law to include law enforcement and firefighters.

A hate crime is defined by Congress as a "criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation."

The bill, which is based solely on appeal to emotion, and not in fact, changes the state's hate crime provision to say:
It shall be unlawful for any person to select the victim of the following offenses against person and property because of actual or perceived race, age, gender, religion, color, creed, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, or ancestry of that person or the owner or occupant of that property or because of actual or perceived membership or service in, or employment with, an organization, or because of actual or perceived employment as a law enforcement officer or firefighter ...

No Entry

Naked man jumps into lion enclosure in crazed suicide bid

man mauled by lions
A 20-year-old man took off his clothes and broke into a lion enclosure at Santiago zoo, where he was mauled by lions.
A naked man who jumped into the big cat enclosure at a Chilean zoo in a desperate 'suicide bid' survived - but only after the lions attacking him were shot dead.

Santiago authorities confirmed the two beasts were killed as they mauled the 20-year-old who had broken into their compound early on Saturday.

The man, who has not been named, was accidently hit with a tranquiliser as zookeepers frantically tried to put the lions to sleep.

He taken to a nearby hospital for treatment and was said to be in a "grave" condition.

Stormtrooper

Death in a shopping aisle: One man's fatal encounter with K-Mart

Jonathan Sorensen
At Carlisle and Indian School NE in Albuquerque, New Mexico, different worlds, borders and seemingly even dimensions collide, clash and literally intersect. On one side of Carlisle upscale shoppers peruse the selection of pricey delicacies at a Whole Foods store, while working-class families pulling in across the road still find meals for less than ten bucks at a Burger King.

A short jaunt up Carlisle the boulevard passes over Interstate 40 and its roaring, cement stomping big rigs, the modern mug of old Route 66 that linked the Midwestern heartland with the West Coast wonderland. Gas stations, restaurants, hotels and the Duke City offices of the New Mexico State Police sprinkle the zone. Here hungry passerby can find breakfast tacos alongside Southern-style barbeque or All-American hamburgers sprinkled with classic New Mexico green chile.

Darting in and out of traffic and stationing themselves on a median, homeless folk hold signs telling sad stories and begging for food and money. Perched on high ground, almost lording over the landscape, stands a branch of Kmart, an outpost of the once-thriving department store chain with an iconic USA logo that is now owned by Sears Holdings and experiencing hard times.

Handcuffs

Police state: Woman arrested, jailed and shackled for letting her 11 y.o. son drive a golf cart

Arrest of Julie Mall
Arrest of Julie Mall
A family's dream vacation would quickly morph into a nightmare after they crossed paths with police in North Carolina. For allowing her son to drive a golf cart, a woman was brutalized, arrested, shackled, and charged with child abuse. Part of the incident was caught on film.

Julie Mall and her family look forward every year to their vacation at the luxury resort on Bald Head Island. However, thanks to police in North Carolina, the Mall family has changed their annual destination.

The incident began last July as the family was returning from the beach to their $1,000 a night cottage and Mall's 11-year-old son asked to drive the golf cart. Seeing no harm in doing so, Julie and her husband Scott let their child have the wheel.

Cell Phone

Nanny State: New York cops will be allowed to search cell phones using a 'textalyzer'

texting and driving
© Christian Science Monitor/Getty
As government continues to expand, finding ever more ways to feed itself through taxation, it seeks to justify this burgeoning existence. Enter the Nanny State.

New York is a leader in developing laws and regulations to protect us from ourselves, perhaps most famously with the Big Apple's attempt to ban-large size sugary drinks. The Empire State has the highest cigarette taxes in the nation, which fuels a black market, and it places heavy restrictions on other "sins."

No one doubts that cigarettes and an excess of sugary drinks are bad for the health, but it is not the state's responsibility to manage this behavior. The issue becomes trickier when bad behavior puts other people's lives in danger.

Eye 1

Life in the surveillance state: Trading freedom for safety while becoming slaves

Surveillance against citizens
The nefarious brilliance of the surveillance state rests, at least in part, in the fact that it conveys omniscience without the necessity of omnipresence. Since even its verifiable actions are clandestine and shadowy, revealed not through admission but by whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Jeremy Hammond, its gaze can feel utterly infinite. To modify an old phrase, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not watching you—especially given that you now have proof. But if you never know precisely when they're watching or exactly what they're looking for, can you ever be paranoid enough?

This is, to some degree, the concern of many Americans, according to a new study from Oxford University. The Washington Post reports researcher Jonathon Penney found that Snowden's leaks about government surveillance had a "chilling effect" on American adults' internet habits. Penney looked at Wikipedia searches conducted after June 2013, when news of NSA spying programs so thoroughly dominated headlines that 87 percent of Americans became aware of them. In the wake of the story, he found "a 20 percent decline in page views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that mentioned 'al-Qaeda,' 'car bomb' or 'Taliban.'" The traffic for those pages dropped precipitously after the Snowden files came to light, and continued to slide over the next year, suggesting a "longer-term impact from the revelations."

"This is measuring regular people who are being spooked by the idea of government surveillance online," Penney told the Post. "You want to have informed citizens. If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat to proper democratic debate."

Comment: Further reading: Mission Accomplished? Snowden 'NSA Leak' had 'chilling effect' that scared people away from learning truth about terrorism


Attention

Illusion of choice - How technology hijacks people's minds

Performing Magic
© Medium.comThat’s me performing sleight of hand magic at my mother’s birthday party.
I'm an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That's why I spent the last three years as Google's Design Ethicist caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people's minds from getting hijacked.

When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want you to show you where it might do the opposite.

Where does technology exploit our minds' weaknesses?

I learned to think this way when I was a magician. Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it.

Once you know how to push people's buttons, you can play them like a piano.

And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention.

I want to show you how they do it.

Handcuffs

Police beat, tase and set a K-9 on a man for dancing in a freight yard

Tukwila officers
A Washington man was just granted $100,000 to settle a civil rights lawsuit after police were seen on dashcam, repeatedly punching him, repeatedly tasering him, and allowing their K9 to maul him continuously in spite of appearing unconscious.

On Aug. 22, 2014, the victim, Linson Tara was found dancing in a freight yard. Tara was not violent, and when police arrived, the dashcam shows him standing there with one hand on his hip and another in the air.

As police attempt to walk Tara over to the vehicle, they quickly become violent. At most, Tara had merely pulled his arm away from the officer before he was placed in a headlock, slammed to the hood of the patrol car and beaten.