Society's ChildS


Handcuffs

China's crackdown prompts outrage over boy's arrest

Andrew Jacobs
CNBC
Mon, 23 Sep 2013 12:41 UTC
Tablet
© Mark Ralston | AFP | Getty ImagesThe Chinese social media website Weibo.
In their widening campaign against online "rumormongers" and other putative purveyors of social disorder, Chinese authorities have netted influential rights activists, freelance anticorruption sleuths and even a billionaire entrepreneur who championed the rights of poor migrants. Many of those detained in recent weeks remain in police custody.

But the enforcers of Internet propriety, it seems, were not prepared for the online outrage stirred up by the arrest last week of a 16-year-old boy who had publicly questioned investigators over the mysterious death of a karaoke club manager in China's northwest Gansu Province.

On Monday, the police in Zhangjiachuan Hui Autonomous County apparently bowed to public pressure and released Yang Zhong, a middle school student who was among the first people to be charged under new regulations that criminalize the spreading of online rumors with up to three years in jail. The authorities contend the boy had simply confessed to his crimes and served his punishment. Hours after his release, he posted online a photograph of himself flashing a victory sign. His shirt read, "Make the Change."
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Clipboard

Record level of Americans believe that Gov't is too powerful

Joy Wilke
Gallup.com
Tue, 24 Sep 2013 12:13 UTC
Record number of Republicans say the federal government has too much power

Six in 10 Americans (60%) believe the federal government has too much power, one percentage point above the previous high recorded in September 2010. At least half of Americans since 2005 have said the government has too much power. Thirty-two percent now say the government has the right amount of power. Few say it has too little power.
Gov power
© gallup
These most recent data come from Gallup's Governance survey, conducted Sept. 5-8. The 7% who feel the government has too little power has been mostly steady since Gallup started tracking the measure regularly in 2002.
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People

Poland and Germany should unite, says Lech Walesa

Matthew Day
The Telegraph
Tue, 24 Sep 2013 12:08 UTC
Lech Walesa
© AFP/Getty ImagesLech Walesa
Lech Walesa has called for Poland to unite with Germany to form one European state, despite the bloody history between the two countries.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Polish president, whose Solidarity trade union played a key role in bringing an end to the Cold War, said the world had changed and needed new ways of organising itself.

"We need to expand economic and defence co-operation and other structures to create one state from Poland and Germany in Europe," he said.

Speaking to Russia's Itar-Tass news agency, Mr Walesa, 69, said national boundaries were not as relevant as they once were.
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Gear

Canada: Train derailment in Saskatchewan causes fire and oil leak


CBC News
Wed, 25 Sep 2013 11:47 UTC
train derailment map
© google mapsThe derailment happened close the town of Landis, Sask., about 130 kilometres west of Saskatoon
No reports of injuries

A CN Rail train has derailed just west of Landis, Sask., resulting in a grassfire and an oil leak.

There are no injuries.

RCMP said crews were on the scene Wednesday morning fighting the blaze and dealing with the derailment.

None of the 16 derailed cars had caught fire, the RCMP said. The fire, which was in a ditch, was extinguished.

The Saskatchewan government said the cars were loaded with ethanol, crude oil, car carriers and grain.
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Heart - Black

'Strip to prove you were raped,' Indian police tell teen girl


RT
Wed, 25 Sep 2013 10:42 UTC
India teen
© AFP / Roberto Schmidt
A 14-year-old girl turned to police in India to file a rape complaint, but instead she was allegedly forced to strip in front of a senior police officer to convince him that her allegation of rape was genuine.

Earlier this week the teenager had gone to a police station in Kushinagar, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, with her parents to file a report about her alleged rape by a local resident. But the girl's father was allegedly asked to pay 50,000 rupees ($800) to the police - to register the complaint and arrest the accused.

After the man refused to pay, the senior officer asked the man's daughter to accompany him into a room where he locked the door from inside and demanded that she strip for him to make sure she was raped, The Times of India reported.

"He took me into a room and closed the door and asked me to remove my clothes," the girl stated in her complaint. The police officer also allegedly verbally abused the girl and her parents and sent them away without filing a report.
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Handcuffs

Reefer madness continues: Half ounce of pot gets Louisiana man twenty years in prison

Bill Quigley
Common Dreams
Mon, 23 Sep 2013 18:33 UTC
While Colorado and Washington have de-criminalized recreational use of marijuanaand twenty states allow use for medical purposes, a Louisiana man was sentenced to twenty years in prison in New Orleans criminal court for possessing 15 grams, .529 of an ounce, of marijuana.
Image
Corey Ladd, 27, had prior drug convictions and was sentenced September 4, 2013 as a "multiple offender to 20 years hard labor at the Department of Corrections."

Marijuana use still remains a ticket to jail in most of the country and prohibition is enforced in a highly racially discriminatory manner. A recent report of the ACLU, "The War on Marijuana in Black and White," documents millions of arrests for marijuana and shows the "staggeringly disproportionate impact on African Americans."
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No Entry

Egyptian court bans ousted president Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, seizes assets

Stephanie McCrummen
The Washington Post
Mon, 23 Sep 2013 16:22 UTC
Muslim Brotherhood
© Khalil Hamra/APMuslim Brotherhood
An Egyptian court on Monday banned the Muslim Brotherhood and its vast social services network in what could be a devastating blow to the Islamist organization, which swept Mohamed Morsi to the presidency just last year and has fiercely resisted the military coup that ousted him in July.

The far-reaching ruling appears to apply to any group remotely associated with the world's oldest Islamist movement, granting temporary legal cover to the military-backed government of Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi to broaden a crackdown that has already left the Brotherhood battered.

Hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters have been killed and thousands have been arrested, including Morsi and other top leaders. Authorities have lately reached inside mosques to bar thousands of Islamist-leaning preachers.

The ban covers "all the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood organization, the groups emerging from it, its associations, and any institution that branches from it or follows the group or receives financial support from it," according to Egypt's state media outlet, MENA, which offered the only account of a ruling that has not been made public.
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Heart - Black

Hate Crime: Anti-Muslim Mob Attacks Sikh Ivy League Professor Dr. Prabjot Singh in Manhattan

Sarah Rae Fruchtnicht
Opposing views
Tue, 24 Sep 2013 06:39 UTC
Prof. Prabjot singh
© Unknown
Columbia University professor and physician Dr. Prabjot Singh was attacked by a mob of 20 young men Saturday in the middle of a New York City street in what the NYPD believes was a hate crime.

The mob harrassed and beat Dr. Singh, who wears a beard and a turban, because they though the Sikh professor was Muslim. Singh, 31, was just blocks from his home, when the attack occurred.

"It's incredibly sad," Singh told the New York Daily News. "It's not the neighborhood I know. I work in this community. It's just not American."

At 8:15 p.m. on Saturday, he was walking down 110th Street on the north side of Central Park, when he was verbally harassed by a group of men on bikes.

"There was a group of 25 to 30 young men. One of them said, 'Get him, Osama,'" Dr. Singh told the New York Daily News. "I got punched directly in the face about three times."

Singh was saved when a passerby came to his aid.

"I'm grateful to them," he said of the passerby, "It could have been a lot worse."
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Books

College students: Psychiatry targets them for final destruction

Jon Rappoport
Activist Post
Mon, 23 Sep 2013 19:22 UTC
Image
© mediamonarchy.blogspot.com
Send your child to college, and watch him earn a mental-disorder diagnosis.

What better target-rich environment for pharma/psychiatry to exploit than colleges?

Constantly renewing enrollments of the young and vulnerable, under pressure to perform academically, away from home for the first time, becoming aware that a degree may earn them zero security in the shrinking job market.

Through on-campus counseling services, feeder lines channel students into psychiatrists' office. Some colleges even have "crisis response teams" to guide students with problems into the heart of psychiatric-drug darkness.

The JED Foundation is an example of a group that networks with colleges to set up comprehensive systems for mental-health services. It boasts two past presidents of the American Psychiatric Association on its boards. JED's medical director, Dr. Victor Schwartz, writes:
In the past year, 21.2 percent of college students received a psychiatric diagnosis or were treated for mental health issues such as depression or eating disorders, and an estimated 6.6 percent of students reported having serious thoughts of suicide...

Comment: Listen to a lively discussion about the use and abuse of psychiatry and psychology: Good Science, Bad Science - Psychology and Psychiatry
In this second in our series of shows on the topic of science and its benefits and negative consequences for mankind, we'll be taking a look at the use and abuse of psychiatry and psychology.

From the psychotherapist's chair to anti-depressant drugs and diverse therapeutic modalities, psychiatry and psychology have come up with as many solutions for mental health issues as there are theories of what makes people tick.

While many individuals have benefited from some form of intervention or another, the application of psychological knowledge for propaganda purposes, mind control experiments and pure corporate greed has apparently left most people's psychological health more fragile than ever.

This week, we will attempt to sort the good from the bad and the ugly by 'psychoanalyzing' some of the questionable practices and theories of the mind, and untangle the confusion produced by psychological terminology that frequently overlaps the same basic underlying problems people encounter in our stressful modern world.


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Stock Up

Rising food prices causing stress in 41% of UK consumers


Belfast Telegraph
Sun, 22 Sep 2013 00:00 UTC
Image
Almost a third say they struggle to feed themselves or their family because of the cost

Rising food prices are causing stress for four in 10 consumers, while a third say they are struggling to feed themselves or their family.

Almost eight in 10 shoppers (78%) are concerned about the increasing cost of food, with almost half (45%) spending a larger proportion of their available income at the supermarket compared to a year ago, the survey for Which? found.

Food prices have risen over and above general inflation by 12.6% over the past six years, according to the Office of National Statistics, while incomes have stagnated.
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