Society's ChildS


Handcuffs

Man released after 15-year prison sentence robs same store

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© Toms River policeChristopher M. Miller
A day after being released following a 15-year stay in state prison for robbing a Toms River shoe store, a 40-year-old man allegedly committed the same crime at the same business, authorities said today.

When Christopher M. Miller woke up Friday morning, he was on the verge of being freed from South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton. A little more than 24 hours later, he returned to the scene of his crime - the Stride Rite shoe store on Hooper Avenue in Toms River - and demanded cash from the store's two employees, police said.

Miller took the cash register containing $389 but the workers refused his demand to turn over their car keys, authorities said. Instead, Miller took cellphones belonging to a 17-year-old boy and a 43-year-old woman before fleeing on foot.

"He was not armed but just made a verbal threat," police spokesman Ralph Stocco said. He said that Miller became agitated when the employees did not move as quickly as he liked.

Black Magic

Dogs bite master: Turkish sponsored Syrian terrorists injure 3 Turkish policemen in Istanbul

Turkish terrorists ISIL
© Unknown
Three policemen are injured in the Turkish city of Istanbul in a gun battle with suspected members of an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group fighting the Syrian government.

According to reports on Wednesday, the incident took place when Turkish police and special units raided the Umraniye district of the city to arrest armed members of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) on Tuesday night.

Two militants were reportedly injured and arrested in the raid.

The police operation was launched after it was announced that the terrorist group was behind a deadly attack on security forces in central Turkey last week.

On March 20, three people, including one police officer, were killed in a shooting attack in the province of Nigde. The incident, in the town of Ulukisla, occurred when gunmen armed with long-range shotguns opened fire on security forces from a truck.

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the attack and described the shooting as a "vile act of terror."

Turkey, a fierce opponent of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government, is seen as one of the major regional supporters of foreign-backed militants fighting government forces in Syria, along with Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Heart - Black

Police: Woman performs C-section on dog, uses glue to close incision

 police car
© Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesFile photo of a police car.

Tampa Florida - Police arrested a woman after she performed a cesarean section on a dog and used glue to close the incision.

Candace Patricia Hauser is facing one charge of aggravated cruelty to animals after removing two of the 14 puppies from the dog she cut open and then closing the incision with non-medical glue, the Brandenton Herald reported.

The pregnant Mastiff, Nadia, was brought to Hauser's home on March 4 by the owner Brenda Hines. Hauser told the woman she could help deliver puppies, investigators said.

The Mastiff began having trouble giving birth to the last two puppies, so the 31-year-old woman performed a C-section on the dog without anesthesia.

Hauser does not have a veterinarian license.

Roughly 12 hours after the C-section, Hines took her dog to Veterinary Healthcare Associates saying she believed that the dog was dying, but the veterinarian told her that the Mastiff was already dead.

Arrow Down

Foreign farm workers in Italy are 'treated like slaves'

Farm Workers
© Mario Laporta/AFPFarm workers in south-east Italy. Immigrant workers often earn less than €25 a day.

Farm workers in Italy face "disastrous" working conditions, with many living off two meals a day in abandoned buildings, the coordinator of a doctors' association said on Tuesday.

Alberto Barbieri, the general coordinator of Doctors for Human Rights (Medici per i diritti umani, MEDU), said the situation for workers "continues to be disastrous".

He was speaking during a press conference on Italy's seasonal in Rome on Tuesday morning.

Following a MEDU project in Italy's southern Calabria region, Barbieri said a third of agricultural labourers treated by doctors live on just two meals a day and work up to ten hours a day.

Farm workers, the majority being young men from West Africa, are housed together in abandoned buildings without running water or heating. They are often paid €25 a day or less, without contracts, Barbieri said.

"The working conditions and treatment of immigrants remains disastrous, incompatible with the principles of a country in which respect for fundamental rights should always be guaranteed," he said during a press conference on Tuesday morning at Italy's parliament.

While Barbieri focused on the Calabria project, he said similar conditions existed across Italy.

Cult

Virginia Christian school bans 8-year-old girl - tomboys aren't 'biblical'

girl not biblical
© WSET News
An 8-year-old girl in Virginia has been told that she can not return to her Christian school because she defied "biblical standards" by looking like a boy.

Doris Thompson told WSET that her granddaughter, Sunnie Kahle, was forced to enroll in public school and has been refused admission for the next school year until she can express the proper gender identity.

"You're probably aware that Timberlake Christian School is a religious, Bible believing institution providing education in a distinctly Christian environment," a letter from Timberlake Christian School's principal said.

According to WSET, the letter said that school rules said that students could be banned for "condoning sexual immorality, practicing a homosexual lifestyle or alternative gender identity."

"We believe that unless Sunnie as well as her family clearly understand that God has made her female and her dress and behavior need to follow suit with her God-ordained identity, that TCS is not the best place for her future education," the principal wrote.

Doris Thompson, who has adopted and raised her granddaughter, said that Sunnie is now in public school, and she "cries every morning to get on the bus, she cries when she comes home because she wants to go back to Timberlake Christian with her friends."

"How do you label a child, eight years old, or discriminate against an eight year old child?" grandfather Carroll Thompson asked. "It just don't happen."

Comment: The inmates are definitely running the asylum.


USA

Pathological USA: "Purity balls" where girls 'gift their virginity' to their fathers

Purity balls, in which a girl pledges to remain 'pure' until her wedding day, symbolically 'marries' God, and promises her father that she will remain a virgin until she's a wife, have become a phenomenon in America, now taking place in 48 out of the 50 states.

The balls resemble giant wedding ceremonies, with the girls - all around the age of 12 - wearing white gowns and dancing with their fathers who promise to 'protect' their daughter's chastity.

During the ceremony, fathers present their daughters with purity rings, which they wear to symbolise their commitment to virginity.


No Entry

Sick! Aborted and miscarried babies incinerated to heat UK hospitals

ultrasound
© AlamyMore than 15,000 aborted or miscarried babies were burned as 'clinical waste' an investigation has discovered
The bodies of thousands of aborted and miscarried babies were incinerated as clinical waste, with some even used to heat hospitals, an investigation has found.

Ten NHS trusts have admitted burning foetal remains alongside other rubbish while two others used the bodies in 'waste-to-energy' plants which generate power for heat.

Last night the Department of Health issued an instant ban on the practice which health minister Dr Dan Poulter branded 'totally unacceptable.'

At least 15,500 foetal remains were incinerated by 27 NHS trusts over the last two years alone, Channel 4's Dispatches discovered.

The programme, which will air tonight, found that parents who lose children in early pregnancy were often treated without compassion and were not consulted about what they wanted to happen to the remains.

Chalkboard

Professors in homeless shelters: It is time to talk seriously about wage-slave university adjuncts

adjunct professors tenure
© thelinke via iStock
Adjunct abuse is one of higher education's great sins. So why is a leading writing conference not discussing it?

Hi there, Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

We've known each other for awhile. We first met in 2009 in New York and it was love at first sight. You plied me with talks about writing craft, you offered table after table of literary magazines and small presses. I got the idea to start a lit mag review site and I met some amazing people. You have inspired me, AWP, in so many ways over the years.

But I want to talk to you about something. Because we're friends. Because I trust you and, I hope, you trust me. (You did, after all, help me fix the sign on my table when it kept falling down this year. That was awesome of you.) So I want to tell you: I think you're failing writers in some big and important ways.

Here's the thing, AWP. The percentage of teaching positions occupied by non-tenure-track faculty has more than tripled in the past four decades. According to the Adjunct Project, "Two-thirds of the faculty standing in front of college classrooms each day aren't full-time or permanent professors." The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that "the shadowy world of would-be academia is filled with people cobbling together five or six such teaching gigs at once. That's possible because some 70 percent of college courses offered are now taught by adjuncts - part-timers who are paid a pittance and have no job security."

Yet, at this year's conference in Seattle, the biggest AWP conference yet, you did not have a single panel dedicated to adjunct teaching. Nor were there any panels addressing this shift toward part-time faculty at colleges. Absent also were lectures, discussions or Q&A sessions addressing these changes in the academic climate.

Articles detailing the grueling working conditions of adjuncts abound. I've heard stories about professors with PhD's sleeping in homeless shelters, of adjuncts teaching in rooms filled with cockroaches, of professors without health insurance, unable to afford heat in their homes, living on food stamps.

No doubt, AWP, you have heard these stories too.

Arrow Down

Florida woman files suit alleging cops made her defecate on lawn during drug bust

drug dog
© unknown
A Florida woman is filing a claim against police officers for violating her civil rights when they forced her to defecate on her front lawn during a meth bust. A federal judge ruled that her claim won't stick.

Courthouse News Service reports that Dawn Brooks alleges that police in New Smyrna Beach handcuffed her and brought her outside when she asked to do her business in a private place as they searched her house for meth.

"They 'told her to 'just use the restroom right there' in the front yard, which plaintiff did," U.S. District Judge Roy Dalton Jr. summarized.

Brooks further claims that they looked on and laughed at her as they made her undress and change into a plastic jumpsuit instead of helping her do so.

Heart - Black

Innocent Mississippi woman slated to be executed on Thursday

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Mississippi Will Execute a Woman for a Crime Her Son Confessed To
A Mississippi woman is slated be executed on Thursday for a murder her son confessed to carrying out.

Michelle Byrom's conviction dates back to 1999, when a jury found her guilty of murdering her husband, Edward Byrom Sr. Byrom was convicted on grounds that she hired her son's friend Joey Gillis to kill her husband. Byrom, who was abused by her husband for years, pleaded not guilty to the crime. Her son, Edward Byrom Jr., wrote multiple confession letters in which he explicitly admitted to killing his father, but the jury was forbidden from reading them.

"As I sat on my bed, tears of rage flowing, remembering my childhood my anger kept building and building, and I went to my car, got the 9mm, and walked to his room, peeked in, and he was asleep," he wrote in one of the letters. "I walked about 2 steps in the door, and screamed, and shut my eyes, when I heard him move, I started firing."

Byrom Jr. was initially on trial for murdering his father. During the trial, prosecutors made a deal with Byrom in which they would reduce his sentence if he agreed to testify in court that his mother was involved in the murder plot. Byrom agreed to the deal, even though he has since confessed that the narrative he testified to was a lie.