Society's ChildS


Bizarro Earth

Update: Helicopter crashed into Glasgow pub, leaving 8 dead, 14 injured - Tragic event marked black St Andrew's Day for Scotland

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© Andrew Milligan/PAPolice and Scottish Fire and Rescue services at the scene of the crash at the Clutha Bar in Glasgow
Planned national day celebrations were called off in Glasgow and elsewhere as the city and the country came to terms with the full horror of the tragedy, which has claimed at least eight lives.

First Minister Alex Salmond, ashen faced at a morning press conference, described it as a "black day" for Scotland, adding: "It's also St Andrew's Day and a day we can take pride and courage in how we respond to adversity."

The Archbishop of Glasgow, Philip Tartaglia, held a special Mass at St Andrew's Cathedral, which is just a few hundred yards away from The Clutha Bar. Priests from the parish were on hand throughout Friday night to help injured and concerned relatives.

The Archbishop said: "I was distressed by the news of last night's incident in central Glasgow near our cathedral when the helicopter crashed into the Clutha pub.

"Prayers will be offered for everyone, especially for those who have died, for the injured and for the bereaved."

Comment: No distress call was made from the helicopter, and it appears to fallen vertically into the building.


People

Bob Dylan sued in France for alleged racism

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© Unknown.Bob Dylan performs on-stage in June 2009 in California
Bob Dylan is being sued for alleged racism after he likened Croatians to Nazis and slave owners.

The legendary singer/songwriter is now facing a lawsuit filed by the Council of Croats in France (CRICCF) in relation to an interview he gave to French Rolling Stone in 2012.

Dylan, who was one of the public faces of the civil rights movement in the US during the 1960s, made the comments when asked how much he felt America had progressed since the Civil War in the 19th century.

"This country is just too f***** up about colour. It's a distraction. People at each others' throats just because they are of a different colour. It's the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back - or any neighbourhood back. Or any anything back," Dylan said.

"Blacks know that some whites didn't want to give up slavery - that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can't pretend they don't know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood."

Pyramid

Two German students have vandalised part of the Pyramid of Khufu to help 'prove' their Lost Civilisation theory

Ancient Cartouche
© News.com.auThe ancient cartouche, believed scrawled in the ceiling of Khufu's burial chamber by workers during its construction. The chamber has since become a magnet for vandals over the centuries.
Valid research or vandalism? Egyptian authorities are in uproar after two German students scraped away some ancient writing to "prove" the Great Pyramids are 20,000 years old.

Supporters of the popular story that the Pyramids are evidence of a lost civilisation from the dawn of time consider the reaction all part of an ancient conspiracy.

Internet forums, books and doccumentaries all rage against the "old guard" for hiding the "truth" and refusing to take their ideas seriously. Now, they have a pair of Indiana-Jones style heroes: Two German students who stole into the Great Pyramid to scrape away at an ancient cartouche.

The painted cartouche which named Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops) is scrawled in a small compartment above his burial chamber in one of the three Great Pyramids at Giza.

Their idea is a popular one: That the Great Pyramids were merely "refurbished" by the Old Kingdom Pharaoh credited with its construction in the 26th Century BC. They argue the official dating of the Pyramids is solely based on the presence of the ancient red cartouche.

The two students from Dresden University recently took matters into their own hands: With Egypt's political turmoil distracting security forces, the pair conspired to sample the red paint and smuggle the pigment out of Egypt.

They have since asserted the fragments support arguments that the construction of date of the Pyramids was much older than Khufu's reign.

Accredited archaeologists dismiss the claim as a fanciful conspiracy theory.

"This is totally false and nonsensical," said Ahmed Saeed, professor of ancient Egyptian civilisation at Cairo University.

Eye 1

Over 700,000 people on US watch list: and once you get on, there's no way off

TSA
© AFP Photo / Saul LoebA US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent checks the identification and boarding pass of a passenger as she passes through security in the terminal at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia

The names of nearly three-quarters of a million individuals have been secretly added to watch lists administered by the United States government, but federal officials are adamant about keeping information about these rosters under wraps.

A report by the New York Times' Susan Stellin published over the weekend attempted to shine much-deserved light on an otherwise largely unexposed program of federal watch lists, but details about these directories - including the names of individuals on them and what they did to get there - remain as elusive as ever.

More than 12 years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, federal agencies continue to keep lists on hand containing names of individuals of interest: people who often end up un-cleared to enter or exit the US due to an array of activity that could be considered suspicious or terrorist-related to government officials.

In 2008, the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that an Inspector General of the Department of Justice report found at least 700,000 individual names on the database maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sub-office tasked with overseeing the "single database of identifying information about those known or reasonably suspected of being involved in terrorist activity." Five years later, that number of suspicious persons is reportedly close to what it was at the time. Half-a-decade down the road, however, Americans and foreign nationals who end up on the government's radar are offered little chance to find out how they ended there, or even file an appeal.

According to some, that's just the start of what's wrong with these lists.

"If you've done the paperwork correctly, then you can effectively enter someone onto the watch list," SUNY Buffalo Law School associate professor Anya Bernstein told Stellin for this weekend's report. What's more, though, according to Bernstein, is that "There's no indication that agencies undertake any kind of regular retrospective review to assess how good they are at predicting the conduct they're targeting," suggesting that anyone can be targeted and added to such a list with little oversight to protect them.

"When you have a huge list of people who are likely to commit terrorist acts, it's easy to think that terrorism is a really big problem and we should be devoting a lot of resources to fighting it," Bernstein added. With almost no transparency and outrages aplenty, though, she argues that the government's watch lists are largely flawed and can erroneously ruin an innocent person's life.

Ambulance

'Fast and Furious' star Paul Walker killed in fiery car crash

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© AFP/File, Leon NealUS actor Paul Walker arrives at the world premiere of "Fast and Furious 6" at the Empire cinema in Leicester Square in central London on May 7, 2013
Actor Paul Walker, best known for starring in the "Fast and Furious" film franchise, was one of two people killed Saturday in a single-vehicle crash in Santa Clarita.

Walker was 40.

Walker was a passenger in the red 2005 Porsche Carrera GT that crashed into a tree and then a light pole before bursting into flames.

Authorities said the crash occurred around 3:30 p.m. in the 28300 block of Rye Canyon Loop in Valencia.

Officials said when deputies arrived at the scene, they found the vehicle fully engulfed in flames.

After the Los Angeles County Fire Department extinguished the blaze, two victims were found inside. Both Walker and the other passenger were declared dead at the scene.

Saturday evening, the actor's Twitter and Facebook accounts confirmed his death.

KCAL9′s Cristy Fajardo said that friends heard the crash and tried to put out the flames.

Bomb

Alleged 'Dissident IRA members' force innocent driver to park car-bomb in Belfast shopping center

Irish bomb squad
© BreakingNews.ieAn innocent driver was forced to drive a 130-pound bomb to the car park of the Victoria Shopping Center in the center of Belfast. The bomb failed to detonate.
Dissident IRA members forced an innocent driver to carry a loaded bomb in his car into the car park of a major Belfast shopping center on Sunday night.

The detonator on the 130-pound bomb, contained in a keg, exploded as bomb disposal experts approached in the car park of the Victoria Shopping Center, but it failed to trigger the main explosion which would have caused wide devastation and death said police.

The driver had been stopped at gunpoint in the nationalist Ardoyne area earlier by masked men in boiler suits who threatened him and told him to drive the car with the explosives to the center.

Comment: We find it VERY interesting that this happens right after BBC did an expose (of sorts, there's not actually anything new to learn for those who already know the score about what the British government has been doing in Ireland) on the British 'military reaction force' driving around pretending to be terrorists in the 70s and 80s. We suspect that if this bomb had gone off we'd be hearing that it was a 'suicide car bomb', precisely what UK and US military intelligence were doing in Iraq. Kitson's 'pseudo-gangs' are alive and well.

For a more accurate history of British involvement in the north of Ireland, read this.


Bullseye

How truth can fuel democracy

truth o'clock
© Can Stock Photo
The following is the text of the address I made to the Seek, Speak and Spread Truth Conference in London yesterday, 23 November. Its main thrust is about the need for citizens to become politically engaged to make democracy work (before it's as dead as the two-state solution for Israel-Palestine) in order for our children and grandchildren to have the real prospect of a future worth having.

I want to start with a promise. I won't be disturbed and you won't be disturbed by my mobile 'phone because I don't have one. I have thrown mine away because I am trying to stay human.

That said I'll give you my one-sentence overview of the state of affairs on our small, fragile, endangered planet. Modern life is a de-humanizing process which has reduced us, most of us, to units of consumption, digits in corporate computers, figures on accountants' balance sheets.

What this suggests to me is that the prime task for each and every one of us is to claim back our humanity. I'll be offering some thoughts on how we can do this, but first of all we have to address what I consider to be THE most important of all questions - the question of human nature.

What, really, is the quality of it?

Handcuffs

Gulag! America has more prisoners than high school teachers and engineers

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If sitting in a prison cell was a job, it would be one of the most common jobs in the United States. In 2012, there were some 1,570,000 inmates in state and federal prisons in the U.S., according to data from the Justice Department.

By contrast, there were about 1,530,000 engineers in America last year, 815,000 construction workers, and 1 million high school teachers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There were also 750,000 car technicians.

Bizarro Earth

Flashback Wal-Mart worker dies in rush; two killed at toy store

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A woman sits outside the Toys "R" Us after Friday morning's shooting.
Three violent deaths in two stores marred the opening of the Christmas shopping season Friday.

In the first, a temporary Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death in a rush of thousands of early morning shoppers as he and other employees attempted to unlock the doors of a Long Island, New York, store at 5 a.m., police said.

In the second, unrelated incident, two men were shot dead in a Toys "R" Us in Palm Desert, California, after they argued in the store, police said. The toy company and authorities said the California shootings had nothing to do with shopping on Black Friday, which is historically one of the year's busiest shopping days. The Wal-Mart worker, whom authorities did not identify, was 34 and lived in Queens, said Nassau County police Detective Lt. Michael Fleming.

"This was utter chaos as these men tried to open the door this morning," Fleming said.

Footprints

Exiled Tibetans start move to Canada under resettlement plan

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© Tom Hanson/Canadian PressPrime Minister Stephen Harper thanks the Dalai Lama after exchanging Katas in Ottawa on Oct. 29, 2007. The first group of exiled Tibetans to immigrate to Canada under a federal resettlement program will arrive in Ottawa and Toronto on Friday.
Up to 1,000 exiled Tibetans are moving to Canada as part of federal program

The first group of Tibetans to relocate to Canada under a new federal program arrived by plane in Ottawa and Toronto on Friday.

When they met in 2007, Tibet's spiritual leader in exile, the Dalai Lama, appealed to Prime Minister Stephen Harper for Canada to invite in more Tibetan exiles. That meeting prompted a rebuke from the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa.

Three years later, Jason Kenney, the immigration minister at the time, announced that Canada would take in as many as 1,000 Tibetans living in exile in the northern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.

There are 17 people in the initial group that was to arrive on Friday, said Nima Dorjee, president of the Project Tibet Society, which is managing the five-year project.

By mid-2014, about 200 Tibetans will have moved to Canada under the plan, Dorjee said. Most will settle in the Toronto area, Ottawa, Calgary, B.C's Lower Mainland or on Vancouver Island.