Society's ChildS


Attention

Spain's unemployment rate among the highest in the 'developed' world

protests in Spain
© AFP Photo / Javier SorianoA thousand people gather in front of fences blocking the street leading to Spain's parliament (Las Cortes) during an anti-government demonstration in Madrid
Spain's unemployment rate rose to 23.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014, up from 23.67 percent in the third quarter, National Statistics Institute (NSI) data showed Thursday, Reuters reported.

The Madrid-based Institute's figures showed that the number of jobless rose 30,100 from October to the end of December 2014, bringing the total number of unemployed to 5.46 million people. An earlier forecast by the NSI projected the unemployment rate to fall to 23.53 percent, due to increased hiring in manufacturing, agriculture and construction. Total hires in these three sectors amounted to 82,300, with the service sector suffering a loss of 17,200, but the growth wasn't enough to compensate for the growing labor force.

An earlier report published Tuesday by the International Labor Organization (ILO) expects unemployment to fall to 23.6 percent by the end of 2015, and projects that by 2019 it may fall to 21.49 percent, The Guardian explained.

Comment: Also see:


Books

The suppression of knowledge by establishment academia

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© The Schøyen Collection
One of the reasons I criticize academics has been my experience in their suppression of knowledge. I use to fund important archaeological excavations that could further our knowledge of history. The First Gulf War bombing uncovered a ancient city nobody had known about in the desert of Iraq. Ancient cities contained libraries where everything was stored including court cases and disputes. Over the years, I was a known collector of ancient economic texts. Thousands of these clay tablets appeared on the black market. I was naturally contacted. I bid on the find. I then learned that my only competitor was Martin Schøyen, a Norwegian collector of manuscripts. This find was a collection containing over 13,000 documents. Martin's collection was the finest in the world among which was an original Magna Carta.

Academics hated people like the two of us for they think only they should have such finds to play with. Of course they have no money and go begging hat-in-hand to governments for taxpayer's to buy their toys. Because of their academic greed, they have done far more harm to the advancement of knowledge than anyone.

Comment: More information on the Legal Code of Ur-Nammu:

Ancient Texts Tell Tales of War, Bar Tabs


Star of David

Gilad Atzmon: A personal note on Jewish statistics

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The British political establishment is in a state of panic. A poll revealed last week that "a quarter of Jews in Britain have considered leaving the country in the last two years and well over half (58%) feel they have no long term future in Europe." This could be a potential disaster for British political parties. Eighty per cent of the Tories are members of the pro Israeli lobby, The Conservative Friends Of Israel (CFI), and a similar percentage of Labour and Libdem MPs have vowed their allegiance to Israel through their respective Jewish Lobby groups. The Jews are clearly a vital source of funding for British politicians. In fact, it has become hard to imagine what British politics would look like without Jewish Lobby's money. Though the vast majority of British MPs are friends of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, it has not been established how many of our MPs are friendly with Manchester and Hartlepool.

Apparently a recent poll found that anti-Semitic beliefs are widely prevalent among the British public with 45 percent of Britons agreeing with at least one of these 'anti-Semitic' sentiments: a quarter of Britons believed "Jews chase money more than other British people," one in six agreed that "Jews think they are better than other people" and "Jews have too much power in the media."

Bad Guys

Palestinian children face psychological pressure to escape 'life' under Israel's genocidal occupation of their homeland

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© Dan CohenA Palestinian boy climbs through a blast hole from an Israeli tank shell into a Shujaiya recreation center.
"We are all under unbelievable amounts of psychological pressure. If anyone breaks down and goes crazy in the street, no one will blame them," Belal El-Shafi, 24, from Nuseirat refugee camp told me. Married with one child, El-Shafi works as a dishwasher in the Lightroom restaurant in Gaza City though he has advanced training as a nurse. He earns a meager living that affords a single room and food for his family. "I want to leave Gaza but I would go with my own dignity," El-Shafi remarked. "We're not living - this is not a life."

As a foreign journalist, the process of exiting the Gaza Strip is a jarring one - not for the difficulty, but for the ease. Palestinian friends and colleagues of mine who live in Gaza are unable to leave the bombed-out ghetto - they are effectively sentenced to live and die in Israel's open-air-prison. In stark contrast, I seamlessly pass from the dense, rubble-covered cityscape of the Gaza Strip to unobstructed views of abundance in southern Israel - where many of my friends' relatives were expelled from several decades ago.

Since the conclusion of the summer's devastating war in Gaza, the pressure on residents to leave the rubble-covered ghetto has become unbearable. Between the slash-and-burn Israeli assaults - another of which appears to be inevitable - and the Israeli-Egyptian siege that suffocates the economy and severely restricts the entry of basic necessities, there is little hope among the 1.8 million Palestinians living inside Gaza.

Most of those who wish to escape the Gaza Strip will run up against the iron wall of Israel's siege. The Middle East's most well-armed navy maintains a blockade on Gaza's Mediterranean coast and the southern border is controlled by Egypt, which destroys the once-thriving tunnel economy that sustained life in Gaza. The northern and eastern borders are controlled by a system of concrete walls and fences that are lined with intermittent pillboxes mounted with remote control machine guns, surveilled by high-tech cameras and patrolled by trigger-happy soldiers.

"If I walk to close to the border, Israeli soldiers will shoot me," 18-year-old Ezzeldeen Awad Obaid said with a nervous laugh.

Indeed, Israel carries out what it has euphemistically termed a "distancing procedure," in which soldiers open fire on any Palestinian who walks within 300 meters of the fence. In practice, soldiers have frequently shot at Palestinians beyond that distance.

Comment: See also:


Sheriff

Audit finds police who work on campus where they live rent-free ignoring over 90 percent of emergency calls

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© WPLG
The Resident on Campus Security (ROCS) program - which allows police officers to live rent- and utility-free in trailers on Broward County Public Schools campuses - is coming under fire after an internal audit determined that the program is "not adequately supervised," "operating with an expired lease agreement," and that almost 91 percent of the emergency calls from ROCS campuses are answered by local police departments instead of ROCS officers.

The ROCS program was founded in the 1980s to address theft, vandalism, and trespassing on school campuses, but according to the school board's chief auditor, Patrick Reilly, even if it were adequately overseen, it would still be unnecessary.

"The existing technology of alarm systems and fire alarm systems, along with the implementation of single point of entry, surveillance cameras, [Broward District Schools Police Department] staff on call and an Alarm Monitoring Unit that monitors security alarms at all school sites 24 hours a day, 7 days per week," makes the ROCS officers an expensive luxury.

According to WPLG, the program is "in shambles."

Sheriff

Dashboard cam shows cops shooting unarmed man with hands raised

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© Screen Shot (NJ.com)
Dashboard footage from a fatal police shooting in Bridgeton, New Jersey confirm eyewitness accounts that the victim was stepping out of the car with his arms raised when officers shot and killed him, the Press of Atlantic City reports.

Police in Bridgeton pulled over the car in which Jerame Reid was a passenger on December 30th. Prosecutors said that "during the course of the stop a handgun was revealed and later recovered," but witnesses said that Officers Braheme Days and Roger Worley opened fire and killed Reid as he was peacefully exiting the vehicle.

Tahli Dawkins told the Press of Atlantic City that he watched the officers approaching the car yelling, "Don't effing move!" and that they opened fire without provocation.

Denzel Mosley told KYW-TV that Reid's hands were "in plain sight," and that the officers "were telling him, 'Get out [of] the car,'" then yelling "'Stop!' and they started shooting."

Ben Mosley - a retired sheriff's deputy - said that Reid may have attempted to get back into the car when the officers yelled the contradictory order to "Stop!" but that he did not believe that justified firing upon him.

Comment: Will these police be held responsible for what is cold-blooded murder? Unlikely, based on the recent events surrounding cops killing unarmed citizens. This is the reality of living in a police state - the authorities have the right to kill at will with no repercussions. This is the U.S.A. right now, we are no longer protected by police, we are the enemy.


Stormtrooper

9 Fox News segments they would have been sued for if the U.S. had laws like France

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© YouTubeBill O'Reilly
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said on Tuesday that she planned to sue Fox News after the network repeatedly reported that there were so-called "no-go zones" in the city where Muslims had taken control.

Although French law makes a successful prosecution more likely, here are a few of the times Fox News might have been taken to court in the United States over the years if the U.S had laws like France.

1. Bill O'Reilly demonized abortion Dr. George Tiller before he was killed in 2009

Salon wrote in 2009 that there was "no other person who bears as much responsibility for the characterization of Tiller as a savage on the loose, killing babies willy-nilly" than Fox News Bill O'Reilly. After years of being attack on air by O'Reilly, Tiller was killed by an anti-abortion activist in 2009.


Eye 2

Burmese woman publicly beheaded in Saudi Arabia following murder conviction

Saudi Arabia
© Pablo Martinez Monsivias / AP Photo
A Burmese woman was publicly beheaded in the Saudi city of Mecca on Monday, January 12, triggering a heated debate regarding the cruelty of the punishment.

"Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim, a Burmese woman who resided in Saudi Arabia, was executed by sword on Monday after being dragged through the street and held down by four police officers," the Independent reported.

The woman was convicted of the physical abuse and murder of her seven-year-old step-daughter.

Hardhat

Cincinnati bridge collapse another example of US' crumbling infrastructure

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Cincinnati Bridge Collapse Kills Construction Worker
"Deteriorating infrastructure does not magically get better by ignoring it," says senator

In an op-ed published Tuesday, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) pointed to Monday's Cincinnati bridge collapse, which killed one person, as further evidence that the U.S. desperately needs to upgrade its infrastructure - from bridges and roads to railways and levees.

"Our infrastructure is collapsing, and the American people know it," wrote Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "The Interstate 75 bridge collapse in Cincinnati on Monday is only the latest example."

The Cincinnati overpass, which was undergoing demolition, collapsed late Monday and killed a construction worker.

While the overpass did not appear to have any structural issues, one of nine bridges in the U.S. is in fact structurally deficient and nearly a quarter are functionally obsolete, Sanders said - illustrating his point: "For many years we have underfunded the maintenance of our nation's physical infrastructure. That has to change. It is time to rebuild America."

Comment: In addition to the deterioration of bridges, highways and dams, the US is littered with aging nuclear reactors, and it has been reported that all of them have irreparable safety issues. Poverty and homelessness are at record levels, yet the elites spend billions on a manufactured war of terror to convince us that we need them to keep us safe. So much for American exceptionalism!


House

Another face of the tyrannical police state: Your home is your prison

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© Flickr.com/photos/65047661@N00
If they were moved all at once, they could almost replace the population of Jamaica (2.7 million) and they would leave Qatar, Namibia, Macedonia, or Latvia swimming in extra people. I'm talking about the incarcerated in America -- an estimated 2.4 million people at any moment in "1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,259 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories." That's just about one of every 100 Americans, more than 60% of whom are people of color. Add in another almost five million on probation or in some way under the supervision of the criminal justice system and you've reached about seven million, the equivalent of the population of Serbia or Paraguay. In other words, a reasonably sized nation of prisoners.

Not surprisingly, that's also the largest prison population on Earth. No other country comes close. Put another way, on any day of your choice, the United States, with 5% of the world's population, has close to 25% of the people imprisoned on this planet. That population, by the way, has risen by 700% since 1970, a tidal movement for incarceration that only in recent years has shown small signs of finally ebbing. In short, state by state or as a country, the U.S. leaves the rest of the world in the dust. (USA! USA!)

And that's just to scratch the surface of what, if we were being honest, would have to be called the American Gulag, a vast carceral archipelago that no other country can match and into which millions of human beings are simply deep-sixed. The urge to reform such a system should be applauded, but as with so many "reforms" in our era, the latest "alternative" forms of confinement may, in the end, only be extending and expanding the prison system into other parts of American life. It may, suggests Maya Schenwar, editor-in-chief of Truthout and author of the new book Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better, ensure that new concepts of how to lock down America are coming to a neighborhood near you. Tom

Your Home Is Your Prison
How to Lock Down Your Neighborhood, Your Country, and You
By Maya Schenwar

On January 27th, domestic violence survivor Marissa Alexander will walk out of Florida's Duval County jail -- but she won't be free.

Alexander, whose case has gained some notoriety, endured three years of jail time and a year of house arrest while fighting off a prison sentence that would have seen her incarcerated for the rest of her life -- all for firing a warning shot that injured no one to fend off her abusive husband. Like many black women before her, Alexander was framed as a perpetrator in a clear case of self-defense. In November, as her trial date drew close, Alexander accepted a plea deal that will likely give her credit for time served, requiring her to spend "just" 65 more days in jail. Media coverage of the development suggested that Alexander would soon have her "freedom," that she would be "coming home."

Comment: See also:'Neo-slavery' in America's for-profit prison system