Society's Child

Indonesian VP not ruling out AirAsia plane crashed -- not confirming either

Sputnik
Sun, 28 Dec 2014 18:58 UTC

The missing AirAsia plane with 162 people on board might have crashed, according to Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla, Chinese news agency Xinhua reports Sunday.

"We haven't got any information that indicates where the plane crashed," Kalla said during a televised press conference Sunday evening, as quoted by Xinhua.

Previously, it was reported that Kalla was directly in charge of supervising the rescue operation of the missing plane at the headquarters of the National Search and Rescue Agency (Basarnas) in Kemayoran, North Jakarta, according to Jakarta Post.

However, rescue teams had to halt the search operation as the night settled in. Indonesia's Transport Ministry said the search operation would resume on Monday morning, as early as 7 a.m. local time (12 a.m. GMT).

Comment: Could this be another MH370, gone without a trace? If nothing is found, it will certainly be suspicious, especially given that the possible crash zone is probably much easier to identify and search than was the case with 370.

Herded like cattle: The plight of Palestinian workers

Gideon Levy
DesertPeace
Sun, 28 Dec 2014 06:27 UTC

Poverty and unemployment in the West Bank - a direct result of the occupation - drive Palestinian laborers to endure the pain and humiliation of working in Israel.

Israelis see them and they don't see them. They are on the scaffold of the building going up next to ours. We see them and we don't see them. We have no idea what they endure and we don't care. The people who build our homes and pave our roads left their own homes at around 2 A.M. last night. They will return in the evening, after a long, exhausting day of work, nearly 24 hours of hard labor, hard traveling and humiliation. Tonight they will again leave their homes for jobs in Israel. While some Israelis come to work bleary-eyed because their baby woke them up two or three times during the night, these people know no day or night.

Comment: Just another example of the psychopathic Israeli system. It's not enough that Palestinians are kept in the world's largest open-air prison, they must be subjected to daily humiliation and oppression that wears on their psyches and breaks them down.

Civil asset forfeiture: Only the rich can afford to keep their homes

Martin Armstrong
Armstrong Economics
Mon, 22 Dec 2014 17:49 UTC

© Steven M. Falk / Phiv.com Staff Photographer
Christos and Markela Sourovelis at their Somerton home, from which they were ousted because of a son's drug dealing.

Philadelphia prosecutors agreed Thursday to halt efforts to seize the homes of two of the lead plaintiffs in a widely publicized federal suit challenging the city's use of civil forfeiture laws in drug cases.

Philadelphia drops a Civil Asset Forfeiture case to prevent any court from ruling just seizing people's property is unconstitutional. Phily.COM has reported the case of Christos Sourovelis and Doila Welch, who were both caught up in having their homes seized to pay police pensions when the police arrested a relative they claimed was dealing drugs on their properties. Today, you basically have to shun relatives and never pick up a hick-hiker in trouble for if they have any drugs, even marijuana, there goes your assets.

The prosecutors, only after these people with money for lawyers and the press got involved, moved for dismissal in Common Pleas Court. The prosecutor agreed to drop the cases against properties as long as both owners took "reasonable measures" to ensure no further drug crimes occurred there.

Comment: How much more can people take before finally realizing the horror of the situation?

Ferry catches fire off Greek coast, 466 passengers and crew are being evacuated

RT
Sun, 28 Dec 2014 13:02 UTC

466 passengers and crew are being evacuated from an Italian car ferry that caught fire near a Greek island on Sunday morning. The evacuation is being complicated by strong winds and lack of places in lifeboats, according to the media.

Fire broke out on an Italian Norman Atlantic car ferry traveling from western Greece to eastern Italy at around 6.00 am local time (0400 GMT), coast guard officials said on Sunday.

"The captain has requested the evacuation of the ship, according to initial information," spokesman Nikos Lagkadianos said.

The international evacuation effort including Italian and Albanian forces is complicated by dangerous weather conditions with strong winds blowing in the area northwest of Corfu.

The ferry has 411 passengers and 55 crew on board, as well as 222 vehicles. An official told Sputnik news agency that within the framework of the rescue operation some 150 people had already been transferred from a lifeboat to a container ship that had been sailing nearby.

A Greek TV station got comments of some passengers, who dramatically described the evacuation.

"They tried to lower some boats, but not all of us could get in. There is no coordination," one said, as cited by Reuters. "It's dark, the bottom of the vessel is on fire. We are on the bridge, we can see a boat approaching... we opened some boxes and got some life vests, we are trying to save ourselves."

Problems with another Air Asia aircraft: Flight AK6242 makes emergency landing due to technical difficulties

Sputnik
Sun, 28 Dec 2014 12:41 UTC

AirAsia's flight AK6242 en route from Penang to Langkawi has made an emergency landing due to technical problems.

An AirAsia aircraft has reportedly made an emergency landing due to technical problems during its flight from Penang to Langkawi (Malaysia) hours after another of the company's planes went missing.

AirAsia's flight AK6242 en route from Penang to Langkawi has made an emergency landing due to technical problems, the Malaysian New Strait Times newspaper said on Twitter.

Earlier in the day, another AirAsia aircraft, flight QZ8501, en route from Surabaya, Indonesia to Singapore lost contact with air traffic control and went missing with 162 people on board.

Search and rescue operations are being conducted in the Java Sea by the Indonesian National Search and Rescue Agency (Basarnas), but no traces of the aircraft have been found so far.

AirAsia issued a statement confirming the crash of the aircraft due to bad weather conditions. Nevertheless, the Indonesian Ministry of Transportation said it was too early to confirm this information.

AirAsia Indonesia operates domestic flights within the Indonesian archipelago and international flights to Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and Thailand. The company is an affiliate of the Malaysian company AirAsia. In 2007, AirAsia Indonesia was banned from operating flights to the European Union (EU) due to safety concerns; however, the ban was lifted in July 2010, the BBC reports.

Comment: First a whole plane goes missing and then another one lands due to technical problems. Just what is going on?

Air Asia flight from Indonesia to Singapore 'missing'

Air Asia flight from Indonesia to Singapore 'missing'

RT
Sun, 28 Dec 2014 03:36 UTC

Air Asia flight number QZ8501, bound from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore, has reportedly lost control with air traffic control. The missing flight is an Airbus A320-200 with 155 people on board, Reuters reports.

The plane lost contact with Jakarta air traffic control on Sunday, Indonesian media said, citing Transport Ministry official Hadi Mustofa.

Mustofa said the contact was lost at 6:17 a.m. local time (23:17 GMT on Saturday), after the crew asked for an "unusual route."

According to an unnamed Indonesian transport official, there are 155 passengers and crew aboard the plane.

The flight was due to land in Singapore at 8:30 a.m. local time (00:30 GMT) and is currently listed as "delayed."

Police taser and arrest severely autistic man for walking down the street

Mike Sawyer
The Free Thought Project
Sat, 27 Dec 2014 00:00 UTC

Tario Anderson was simply walking down the street. Because of that he was assaulted, kidnapped, and charged with a crime and the Greenville police department doesn't see anything wrong with it.

An innocent 34-year-old autistic man was tasered and arrested by police on Christmas eve because he walking down the street at night.

Greenville City Police were in the area responding to reports of gunshots when they came across Tario Anderson and shined a spotlight in the innocent man's face. Anderson reacted by walking away from this stressful sensory overload.

"When they put their spotlight on him, he immediately put his head down, put his hands in his pockets and began to walk away from him," Officer Johnathan Bragg with Greenville Police said. "They then got out of the vehicle and approached him and ordered him to stop at which point he did flee from the officers and they pursued him."

Anderson had committed no crime but since he did not immediately bow down to the police, he was tasered and cops piled on top of him.

His mother, Carolyn Anderson, said he has severe autism, does not understand much and did not need to be arrested or shocked with a Taser.

"Tario can say yes or no, he might ask for a thing or two, but just verbal, no," Carolyn Anderson said.

Out in the cold: How one of the wealthiest cities in America treats its homeless

Evelyn Nieves
AlterNet
Thu, 25 Dec 2014 01:00 UTC

The city refuses to provide affordable housing, yet won't tolerate people living outdoors.

When San Jose dismantled the "Jungle," the nation's largest homeless encampment, many of its residents with nowhere to go scattered. They found hiding places in the scores of small, less visible encampments within the city, where more than 5,000 people sleep unsheltered on a given night.

But one group of about three dozen evictees gathered what they could salvage in backpacks and trash bags, and crossed a bridge to a spot about a mile away. They found a clean patch of grass near Coyote Creek, the same creek that the Jungle abutted. There, they pitched tents donated by some concerned citizens, assigned themselves chores and hoped for the best.

Instead, they got marching orders. After weathering the hardest rains to fall in these parts in a decade, the campers found 72-hour eviction notices on their tents. Once again, a little more than a week after their forced flight from the Jungle, they had no idea where they might live.

Comment: The rich don't want to help the down and out, they just want them to disappear. Of course not seeming to realize that they helped create the situation in the first place with their psychopathic greed.

Adolescence Interrupted: The unregulated, abusive war on troubled teens

Dawn Roberts
The Fix
Mon, 15 Dec 2014 23:29 UTC

Much has been written about the troubled teen industry by former clients, advocates and journalists. On a daily basis the "still-traumatized" post their experiences on social media platforms. They bear witness to friends who died during or after abuse at facilities that were supposed to help create lives of meaning and purpose. The community of survivors publish online to help make sense of their struggles. They also want to raise awareness about punitive and damaging treatments doled out by certain institutions.

The industry that has arisen around troubled teens is a profitable one, estimated at over two billion dollars a year. A wide range of behavioral and psychological issues affect adolescents who are remanded to residential facilities. They include substance abuse, ADHD, oppositional defiance, conduct disorder, and many other diagnoses. A common thread runs through family narratives; they can no longer manage the behavior of their children. Parents are fearful, bewildered, overwhelmed and often angry about their children's actions. Teens, on the other hand, may see their parents' responses as hand-wringing overkill. When these conflicts come to a head, an adolescent can find himself awoken in the middle of the night by strangers with restraints, and forcibly taken to a residential boarding school far from home.

Deterioration of society: Five people stabbed inside popular Washington DC restaurant

John Clarke
The Raw Story
Sat, 27 Dec 2014 19:14 UTC

© Stephanie Ramirez, WUSA9
The Northwest D.C. Restaurant and Saloon where five people were stabbed early Saturday morning.

Five people were stabbed early on Saturday in a restaurant in Washington, D.C., police said. The incident occurred around 12:30 a.m. at McFadden's, a popular restaurant and nightclub on Pennsylvania Avenue, eight blocks from the White House in the nation's capital.

All five victims were taken to hospital with knife wounds, a police spokesman said Saturday. Their identities have not been released.

Police said the stabbing happened inside the bar. Photos posted on Twitter Saturday show a blood-splattered sidewalk.

Comment: There have been multiple incidences of stabbings this year. Oddly, there was a rash of such incidents back in 2010, and hopefully this is not an indication of more to come.

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Winternights3

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Buffalo_Ken

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ReRan

Society's Child

Indonesian VP not ruling out AirAsia plane crashed -- not confirming either

Herded like cattle: The plight of Palestinian workers

Civil asset forfeiture: Only the rich can afford to keep their homes

Ferry catches fire off Greek coast, 466 passengers and crew are being evacuated

Problems with another Air Asia aircraft: Flight AK6242 makes emergency landing due to technical difficulties

Air Asia flight from Indonesia to Singapore 'missing'

Police taser and arrest severely autistic man for walking down the street

Out in the cold: How one of the wealthiest cities in America treats its homeless

Adolescence Interrupted: The unregulated, abusive war on troubled teens

Deterioration of society: Five people stabbed inside popular Washington DC restaurant

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