Society's ChildS


Pistol

Medicated to death: The link between SSRIs and mass killings


In May 1998, 15 year old Kip Kinkel murdered his parents and two classmates, as well as injuring 25 others, after engaging in a shooting spree that ended up in his school's cafeteria. In the investigation it emerged that he had been taking popular antidepressant medication Prozac since the summer of the previous year.

In December 2000, Michael McDermott went on a shooting rampage at his workplace, Edgewater Technologies, killing seven of his co-workers. During his trial, the court heard testimony that in the weeks before the shooting, McDermott had tripled the dosage of his antidepressant medication, Prozac, from 70 milligrams per day to 210 milligrams.

In March 2005, 16 year old Jeff Weise shot and killed nine people, including five students at Red Lake Senior High School in Minnesota, before turning the gun on himself. It was later revealed he had been undergoing treatment for depression and had been on Prozac at the time.

In September 2008, Finnish post-secondary student Matti Saari shot and killed ten other students on campus before killing himself. The official Finnish government report on the incident revealed that he had been taking an SSRI medication at the time of the shooting.

SSRI stands for Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitor, and it is a class of drugs that is often used to treat depression and anxiety. It includes Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Paxil and a host of other commonly prescribed antidepressants. And the perpetrators of a raft of school shootings, mass murders and other violent incidents in recent years have been taking them.

Shoe

Duck, duck, shoe! Clinton, Bush, Blair learn about flying footwear

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© Politico screen grabHillary Clinton — ducked a shoe.
Want to protest a politician? Throwing a shoe is a time-honored way of showing offense.

Hillary Rodham Clinton's brush with an orange and black shoe in Las Vegas on Thursday wasn't her first with flying footwear.

In 2012, then-secretary of State Clinton's motorcade was pelted with shoes and tomatoes during a visit to Egypt after Mohamed Mursi was elected president. Shoes and a water bottle landed near the Clinton delegation's cars in Alexandria. Clinton's vehicle wasn't struck. Protesters were chanting "Monica, Monica," in a reference to former president Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. Others chanted, "Leave, Clinton," according to Reuters.

Mr. Potato

Stupid French Farmers protest ban on GM corn (a rare wise decision by a government)

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French farmers and seed firms have vowed to fight a ban on genetically modified corn at the country's top administrative court.

They said they will take their case to the country's highest administrative court.

The move comes after the National Assembly yesterday adopted a bill banning the cultivation of all GM corn in France - including MON810, the only variety currently authorised in the European Union - while the government works on changes to domestic and European laws on a longer-term ban.

"The sale, use and cultivation of varieties of maize seed from the line of genetically modified maize MON 810 (...) is banned in the country until the adoption, on the one hand, of a final decision, and secondly, of (EU) community action," said a decree published on Saturday and adopted by the National Assembly yesterday.

Comment: French parliament bans genetically modified maize


Arrow Down

Vice-principal of South Korea school in ferry disaster commits suicide

The vice-principal of a South Korean high school who accompanied hundreds of pupils on a ferry that capsized has committed suicide, police said on Friday, as hopes faded of finding any of the 274 missing alive.
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© REUTERS/Kim Hong-JiRescued passengers cry at a gym where rescued passengers gather in Jindo April 16, 2014.
The Sewol, carrying 476 passengers and crew, capsized on Wednesday on a journey from the port of Incheon to the southern holiday island of Jeju.

Kang Min-gyu, 52, had been missing since Thursday. He appeared to have hanged himself with his belt from a tree outside a gym in the port city of Jindo where relatives of the people missing on the ship, mostly children from the school, were gathered.

Police said Kang did not leave a suicide note and that they had started looking for him after he was reported missing by a fellow teacher. He was rescued from the ferry after it capsized.

Twenty-eight people had been officially declared dead before Kang's suicide. One hundred and seventy-four were rescued. Most of the missing are students from the Danwon High School on the outskirts of Seoul, who were on a holiday trip.


Compass

Climate change not a top worry in US - economy is

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U.S. concerns with the quality of the environment dropped in 2014
This article is the first in a series that will analyze Gallup's latest March update on Americans' views on climate change and examine how these views have changed over time. The series will explore public opinion on the severity and importance of climate change, its causes and effects, the extent of Americans' understanding of the issue, and much more.

Twenty-eight U.S. senators held an all-night "talkathon" Monday to call attention to climate change, an issue that only 24% of Americans say they worry about a great deal. This puts climate change, along with the quality of the environment, near the bottom of a list of 15 issues Americans rated in Gallup's March 6-9 survey. The economy, federal spending, and healthcare dominate Americans' worries.

Comment: Our money-dependent society was created by greedy, power-hungry psychopaths for psychopaths. Considering how greed has destroyed America, it is no surprise that money is the top concern of most Americans.

Being concerned about climate change, on the other hand, implies a personal responsibility to the environment around you and the world at large. Living well with nature and our environment is an age-old principle the psychopaths have driven out of us.

Mere Thought of Money Makes People Selfish


Newspaper

Safe nowhere - Jakarta International School child rape shocks expat community in Indonesia

The rape of a five-year old boy in the toilets of the prestigious Jakarta International School has shocked the expatriate community and prompted a discussion in Indonesia about the prevalence of child sex abuse.
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Police have urged parents of other students at the school to check the behaviour of their children and report anything suspicious, after the shocking child rape claim at Jakarta International School.
The boy, who turned six last week, has contracted herpes and a bacterial infection allegedly as a result of two anal rapes by members of the school's outsourced cleaning staff in February and March.

Two men - employees of the international contract cleaners ISS - are in police custody. They are alleged to have attacked the boy during school hours when he went to the toilet near his classroom. Jakarta police say two more men and one woman are also under investigation.

The boy is the son of a Dutch father and an Indonesian mother. He attended the school's early childhood program. After initially requesting privacy, his mother went public with graphic details on Monday, motivated, according to lawyer Andi Asrun, by disappointment that the school had not acted more quickly to address problems. They say his teachers should have been aware of the boy's long absences and should have noticed that he was upset when he returned to class.

Mr Andi said during one of the attacks, the boy had been locked inside one of a number of janitors' closets inside the toilet, so that he "couldn't be heard screaming".

Map

Best of the Web: Lies and realities about the state of Ukraine

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Kiev

Two beautiful Slavic sisters, Ukraine and Russia, pitched against each other: long hair flying in the wind, gray-blue eyes staring forward accusatively, but in the same time with anticipation and love.

One single moment, one wrong move, one word, and two countries, two allies, two almost identical cultures, can easily dash at each other's throats... Different words, different gestures, and they can also fall into each other's arms, instantly.

Is there going to be a war, a battle or an embrace? Is there going to be an insult or reconciliatory words?

Ironically, there is no 'self-grown dispute' between two nations. The seeds of mistrust, and possible tragedy, are sown by the outsiders, and nurtured by their malignant propaganda.

As Sergei Kirichuk, leader of progressive movement 'Borotba', explained:

Snakes in Suits

Walmart gets $7.8 billion a year in tax breaks and subsidies from the US tax system - Employees forced to depend on social programs to get by‏

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© Reuters / Eric Thayer
Protesting Walmart's tax privileges as it pays its workers notoriously low wages, the store's employees and others have delivered a $7.8 billion "tax bill" to the Arizona home of the retail giant's chairman, Rob Walton.

A report released this week showed Walmart is the beneficiary of $7.8 billion a year in tax breaks and subsidies from the US tax system. Employees of the retail giant and others used the opportunity to remind Walmart heir Walton how many of the company's workers are forced to depend on social programs to get by, while Walmart reaps billions in profits.

The action is the latest in a string of demonstrations organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers and associated union-supported groups that aim to highlight Walmart employees' low wages and paltry benefits.

Book 2

Judge strikes down restrictive North Dakota abortion law as "unconstitutional"

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© Eric Wagner/cc/flickr
A federal judge on Wednesday struck down North Dakota's "fetal heartbeat" law, seen as the most restrictive abortion ban in the country.

The law, House Bill 1456, essentially banned abortions at six weeks. Barring a medical emergency, the law said that an abortion could not be performed if a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can happen as early as six weeks - a point at which a woman may not even know she is pregnant.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Daniel L. Hovland writes that "there is no question that North Dakota House Bill 1456 is in direct contradiction of United States Supreme Court case law addressing restraints on abortion. H.B. 1456 is an invalid and unconstitutional law based on the United States Supreme Court precedent in Roe v. Wade from 1973, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey from 1992, and the litany of cases that have followed."

Arrow Down

Louisville officers fired/demoted for exposing a wrongful conviction

Detective Baron Morgan
© WLKYDetective Baron Morgan discovered an innocent woman behind bars.

Kentucky - When an esteemed police detective discovered that an innocent woman had spent years in prison for a murder she didn't commit, he notified his supervisors and tried to make the tragic error known. Instead of seeing that the new evidence came to light, police brass demoted the whistleblower and kicked out of his unit. Another veteran officer stood up for the whistleblower, earning him termination from the department after decades of service. The Louisville Metropolitan Police Department has taken nefarious steps to hide a dark secret.

Wrongfully Convicted

Detective Baron Morgan of the LMPD stumbled upon the wrongful conviction during a routine interview with a suspect in 2012. During that interview, the suspect confessed to a shooting a man and dumping his body into the Kentucky River in 1998. This posed a big problem, since the person sitting in prison for that murder was a woman named Susan Jean King.

Susan King had been arrested for the crime in 2007, after the murder case had gone unsolved for 8 years. The victim, Kyle Breedon, was King's ex-boyfriend. When prosecutors threatened her with life in prison due to circumstantial evidence, she entered an "Alford Plea" on a lesser charge. A defendant who gives this type of plea does not admit guilt of the crime, but accepts the consequences, since battling the prosecution would likely lead to worse results. As such, King accepted a 10-year sentence for manslaughter to avoid the prosecutors' threats of life in prison. But all along, they had been threatening the wrong person.

The King conviction had already been under scrutiny by the Innocence Project when they learned that King was only 97-lbs and had only one leg. It would have been physically impossible for her to have launched Kyle Breedon's body over the bridge into the river.