Society's ChildS


Megaphone

Iranian newscaster speaks out about sexual harassment, emboldens others to break silence

Sheena Shirani/Facebook
© Sheena Shirani/FacebookShirani said there was nobody she could seek help from.
Allegations of sexual harassment at an Iranian TV station are emboldening Iranian women to break their silence and share their experiences of a problem traditionally not acknowledged inside the country.

Sheena Shirani, a news reader at Press TV, the state broadcaster's English language news channel, broke the taboo by speaking out about sexual harassment she says she endured from two of her managers over a prolonged period of time.

Her allegations went public in spectacular fashion when she posted online a recording of a phone conversation in which a man believed to be her boss, Hamid Reza Emadi, repeatedly asks her for sexual favours.

Following the incident Shirani quit her job and left the country and later published the audio file, which has been listened to more than 120,000 times on her Facebook page and an Iranian news site based outside the country. She also shared what appeared to be a screengrab from a text exchange in which Emadi asked her to take the audio down.

Comment: This same sexist and women-denigrating culture can, unfortunately, be seen throughout the world. And in this respect, Iran is certainly not unique - and some other countries most probably far worse:

Ex-Air Force lawyer: Victims of rape in the military face revenge, backlash from superiors for coming forward


Book

Flashback Texas mother teaches textbook company lesson on accuracy

The page in a McGraw-Hill Education geography textbook that refers to Africans brought to American plantations as “workers,” rather than slaves.
© Coby BurrenThe page in a McGraw-Hill Education geography textbook that refers to Africans brought to American plantations as “workers,” rather than slaves.
Coby Burren, 15, a freshman at a suburban high school south of here, was reading the textbook in his geography class last week when a map of the United States caught his attention. On Page 126, a caption in a section about immigration referred to Africans brought to American plantations between the 1500s and 1800s as "workers" rather than slaves.

He reached for his cellphone and sent a photograph of the caption to his mother, Roni Dean-Burren, along with a text message: "we was real hard workers, wasn't we."

Their outrage over the textbook's handling of the nation's history of African-American slavery — another page referred to Europeans coming to America as "indentured servants" but did not describe Africans the same way — touched off a social-media storm that led the book's publisher, McGraw-Hill Education, to vow to change the wording and the school's teachers to use other materials in the class.

Gold Bar

Lines around the block to buy gold in London while banks placing 'unusually large orders'

This is the best quarterly performance for Gold in 30 years...
Gold price chart
And as Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog details, physical demand is soaring...
First, let's look at the improved fundamentals. Gold bugs will exasperatingly proclaim that fundamentals have been great for the past four years yet the price plunged anyway, so who cares about fundamentals? To this I would respond with two observations. First, large institutional investors and sovereign wealth funds have been anticipating a rate hike cycle for a very long time now. They didn't know when, but they expected it. The fact that the gold bugs never believed this is irrelevant; what matters is that big money believed it, and it was perceived to be very gold negative. In their minds, this anticipated rate hike cycle would confirm that things were getting back to normal, and if things are normal you don't need to own gold, right?

The problem is that this assumption is quickly being called into question. Sure the Fed hiked rates once, but it is starting to look more and more like a policy error. Meanwhile, other major central banks around the world are going in the opposite direction, toward negative rates. I am a huge believer in market psychology, and the psychology dominating the minds of most institutional investors over the past few years has been that things were slowly getting back to normal. This has weighed on institutional demand for gold in a big way, and been a meaningful factor in the bear market (manipulation aside). If this psychology shifts, the shift back into gold could be very meaningful.

While that backdrop is interesting in its own right, what may make the move into gold that much more explosive is the lack of alternative investments...
- From the February 3, 2016 post: GOLD - It's Time to Pay Attention

Heart - Black

The inhuman factor: Greek maritime police arrest and charge volunteers on the island of Lesbos for providing assistance to refugees

Refugee assistance
The refugee crisis in Europe seems endless, the arrival of people mainly from Syria, Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan to the Greek islands of Lesbos and Kos did not cease despite the strict controls applied by the European Union to prevent the exodus refugees.

The European bloc approved the construction of walls and electric fences to reinforce security in the countries of the alliance in order to prevent the arrival and passage of refugees.

In recent days, the European security (Frontex) was given the task to criminalize the work of volunteers who assist in rescuing refugees by preventing them go out to the people unless there is a shipwreck.

Comment: The EU has put its inhuman screws to Greece (yet again) and now Greece feels compelled to comply...

See how this came about:


Fire

New Jersey train depot engulfed in massive blaze

train depot fire NJ
© Northeast Bravest / Periscope
Massive plumes of black smoke rose from a Hillsborough, New Jersey train depot. Firefighters are on the scene.

Around 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, users on social media reported the blaze. Multiple fire trucks and dozens of firefighters from the Hillsborough Township Volunteer Fire Company could arrived at the scene. Strong winds pushed the thick black smoke miles eastward far from the scene of the fire.

Brick Wall

Netanyahu to entirely fence in Israel, protect it from 'predators'

Net and fence
© www.jpost.comd'Net & d'Fence
Israeli Prime Minister has announced that he wants to surround the whole of Israel with a fence to protect the Jewish state from Palestinians and citizens from neighboring Arab states, whom he called "predators."

Netanyahu announced his plan during a tour of a newly-completed security fence along the border with Jordan near the Red Sea port of Eilat in southern Israel. The project was described by the Israeli PM as a "multi-year plan to surround Israel with security fences to protect ourselves in the current and projected Middle East," which will cost billions of shekels, The Times of Israel reports.


Comment: "projected Middle East" and what would that be exactly?


"In our neighborhood, we need to protect ourselves from predators," Netanyahu said. "At the end of the day, in the State of Israel, as I see it, there will be a fence like this one surrounding its entirety...We will surround the entire State of Israel with a fence, a barrier."

Comment: Interesting that Netanyahu wants this total-surround fence defense, most likely paid for with US tax dollars. Looks reminiscent of a WWII containment camp. A purposeful constant reminder for Israelis? for everyone else? Not too subtle.


Eye 2

Psychopath: Notorious German cannibal gives interview describing how he killed and ate his lover

Notorious German cannibal Armin Meiwes
Killer: Notorious German cannibal Armin Meiwes (pictured) has described how he killed and ate his gay lover 'with his permission' in 2001, in a shocking interview for a new documentary
A notorious German cannibal has described in shockingly graphic detail how he killed and ate his gay lover 'with his permission'.

Armin Meiwes became one of the most infamous cannibals in history after killing and consuming 43-year-old computer technician Bernd Brandes in 2001. The pair met after Brandes posted an advert online entitled 'Dinner - or your dinner' and offering 'the chance to eat me alive'. Meiwes, 42, from Rotenburg, has given horrific insight into the killing which stunned the country.

'I decorated the table with nice candles,' he said. 'I took out my best dinner service, and fried a piece of rump steak - a piece from his back - made what I call princess potatoes, and sprouts,' he said, in an unprecedented interview for new documentary 'Docs: Interview with a Cannibal'.

'After I prepared my meal, I ate it. 'The first bite was, of course, very strange. It was a feeling I can't really describe. I'd spent over 40 years longing for it, dreaming about it. 'And now I was getting the feeling that I was actually achieving this perfect inner connection through his flesh. The flesh tastes like pork but stronger.'

Meiwes became the first person in Germany to be charged with murder for sexual satisfaction, or 'love cannibalism'.

Comment: See also: Europe's hypocritical history of cannibalism


Red Flag

New York's finest hotels are suffering from bed bug infestations

bed bugs
Tourists visiting some of New York's most prestigious hotels have reported being bitten by bed bugs despite their five star surroundings.

Guests at the Waldorf Astoria and Marriott Marquis hotel are among those to have been affected by the infestation. Reports of bed bugs in the city's hotels have jumped by 44 per cent over the past year.

According to the Bed Bug Registry, which lists reports of alleged incidents, there are almost 6,000 incidents in their databases relating to New York. The registry said that reports of infestations had increased by more than 44 per cent between 2014 and 2015.

According to the reports, it is not only cheap motels who rent rooms by the hour who are affected by the uninvited guests.

One couple who were staying at the Astor on the Park hotel overlooking Central Park posted a video on YouTube of the mattress of their $400-a-night room.


Ambulance

Cop speeding down road with no siren or lights activated hits and kills woman

speeding cop hit woman
© MLive.com Staff / YouTube
The prosecutor's office in Berrien County, Michigan, has released a highly dramatic dashcam video from a police cruiser that hit a female pedestrian crossing the street. The police car was speeding, and had neither lights nor siren activated, witnesses said.

"I need an emergency unit to my location. I think I hit a person," Benton Township patrol officer Eugene Anderson informs radio dispatchers on the video just moments after the sound of smashing glass and a loud bang is heard as his police cruiser hits a woman.

Based on a squad car video, witness reports and a physical investigation of the scene, Anderson, who was responding to a domestic violence call, was traveling at 64 mph in a 35 mph zone when his car struck the woman, the Herald Palladium reported.

Kimberly Bedford, 48, who was crossing the road at 9 p.m. Sunday, died at the scene. The incident took place in September.


Alarm Clock

America it's time to confront our toxic legacy

Toxic legacy
© Wikimedia Commons / ArchiveU.S. Army Huey helicopter spraying Agent Orange over Vietnamese agricultural land.
Maybe if we declared "war" on poison water, we'd find a way to invest money in its "defeat."

David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, writing at Tom Dispatch this week about what they called "The United States of Flint," make this point:
"The price tag for replacing the lead pipes that contaminated its drinking water, thanks to the corrosive toxins found in the Flint River, is now estimated at up to $1.5 billion. No one knows where that money will come from or when it will arrive. In the meantime, the cost to the children of Flint has been and will be incalculable."
I sit with these words: "No one knows where the money will come from."

In the president's latest budget proposal, $7.5 billion is earmarked to "fight ISIS," an absurd non-threat to the nation's survival, but no matter. We're engaged in endless war with whoever the latest enemy happens to be and this war is endlessly funded, no questions asked. Mostly we're engaged in war preparation, of course (and the containment of the consequences of past wars — at least the ones that can't be ignored). As usual, the Pentagon and other war-engaged institutions will consume well over half the nation's discretionary spending, including a $59 billion "slush fund that permits the Pentagon to break through Congress' legislated budget caps," according to the National Priorities Project.