Society's ChildS


Star of David

Striking diplomats force Israel to close embassies all over the world

Israel embassy Caracas
© AFP Photo / Juan BarretThe entrance gate to the commercial building where the Israeli embassy in Caracas is located
Employees of Israel's Foreign Ministry went on an all-out strike Sunday for the first time in the country's history over a dispute surrounding workers' salaries and conditions.

The dispute has been going on for nearly two years. Seven months of negotiations ended on March 4, when workers rejected a proposal by the Finance Ministry.

Israeli ambassadors abroad will not go to work, no consular services will be available, and Israel will not be represented at any international gatherings during the strike. Even the Foreign Ministry's political leadership and management will be locked out.

The strike is indefinite and will affect everyone, including employers bringing foreign workers to Israel for work, immigrants, and anyone who wants to travel to Israel - including foreign dignitaries.

"Today, for the first time in Israel's history, the foreign ministry will be closed and no work will be done in any sphere under the ministry's authority," a statement by the ministry's workers' committee reads.

It added that the strike would be "open ended" because of the "employment conditions for Israeli diplomats and because of the draconian decision by the Treasury to cut workers' salaries."

Family

Russia: New Family Code amendments to protect traditional family, religious values

Image
© RIA Novosti/Maksim Blinov
The head of the lower house committee for family issues has described a new set of legislative amendments protecting the values shared by basic religions, and inspiring young people to choose marriage over cohabitation.

MP Yelena Mizulina of the center-left Fair Russia party said that she opposed the complete rewriting of family laws, but urged changes in the existing ones so that a new Family Code matched modern reality.

The amendments will include a law protecting children against unwanted information. Mizulina said that when the current Family Code was adopted in 1995 lawmakers could not foresee shifts in information, in particular the development of the internet. Nevertheless, she said, the virtual world must live by the law, just like the real world.

Other possible changes could include outlining priorities in favor of traditional families and traditional family values. These include the concepts that have been supporting the Russian nation for over a thousand years - the union between a man and a woman, several children in a family, families uniting several generations and the deep connection between these generations.

Bell

Online poll gives victory to Venice residents who want to cut ties with Italy

venice
© Agence France-Presse/Olivier MorinSt Mark's square in Venice is pictured on May 18, 2012
Italians in Venice and its surrounding region have voted in an online poll in favour of breaking away from the rest of the country and forming their own state.

Over two million residents of the Veneto region took part in the week-long survey, with 89 percent voting in favour of independence from Italy.

The online vote, organised by local independence parties, is not legally binding but aims to galvanise support for a bill calling for a referendum.

Twitter lit up with excited separatists sparring with disparaging Italians from other regions who described the poll as "total madness".

Supporters say the new Republic of Veneto would be inspired by the ancient Venetian republic -- a rich economic, cultural and trading power which existed from the seventh century until its fall to Napoleon in 1797.

The result was announced in Padua to a couple of hundred pro-independence campaigners who cheered and waved Venetian republic flags.

The Indipendenza Veneta party behind the bill says the separatist movement is fuelled by the government's apparent inability to stamp out corruption, protect its citizens from a damaging recession and plug waste in the poorer south.

The poll on plebiscito.eu asked inhabitants of historic cities such as Treviso, Vicenza and Verona whether -- if the new republic was created -- they would want to keep the euro and belong to the European Union and NATO.

But the region's president Luca Zaia told foreign journalists this week that the referendum bill -- which must be approved by the regional council before it goes before the parliament in Rome -- "still has some way to go".

Critics protest that an attempt to split from Italy could be unconstitutional.

Via Agence France-Presse

Life Preserver

'Covered' through Obamacare: Las Vegas man owes $407,000 in doctor bills

Image
© Mark Damon/Las Vegas Review-JournalLas Vegan Larry Basich paid the premium on his Nevada Health Link insurance plan in November, but as of Feb. 25, it wasn't clear who was covering Basich. The retired civil engineer had a triple bypass on Jan. 3 and now has $407,000 in medical bills.
The hospital bills are hitting Larry Basich's mailbox.

That would be OK if Basich had health insurance. But he doesn't.

Thing is, he should be covered. Basich, 62, bought a plan through the state's Nevada Health Link insurance exchange in the fall. He's been paying monthly premiums since November.

Yet the Las Vegan is stranded in a no-man's-land where no carrier claims him, and his tab is mounting: Basich owes $407,000 for care received in January and February, when his policy was supposed to be in effect. Instead, he's covered only for March and beyond.

Basich has begged for weeks for help from the exchange and its contractor, Xerox. But Basich's insurance broker said Xerox seems more interested in lawyering up and covering its hide than in working out Basich's problems. Nor is Basich the only client facing plan-selection errors through the exchange, she added.

Xerox, meanwhile, said it's working every day to fix Basich's problem, and its legal counsel is routine.

Rose

News helicopter crashed near Seattle Space Needle: Casualties

Image
© KIRO-TV/APSmoke rises at the scene of a news helicopter crash outside the KOMO-TV studios near the space needle in Seattle on Tuesday, March 18, 2014.
A news helicopter crashed into a street and burst into flames Tuesday near Seattle's Space Needle, killing both people on board, badly injuring a man in a car and sending plumes of black smoke over the city during the morning commute.

The chopper was taking off from a helipad on KOMO-TV's roof when it went down at a downtown intersection and hit three vehicles, starting them on fire and spewing burning fuel down the street.

Kristopher Reynolds, a contractor working nearby, said he saw the helicopter lift about 5 feet off the low-rise building before it started to tilt. The chopper looked like it was trying to correct itself when it took a dive.

"Next thing I know, it went into a ball of flames," Reynolds said.

Witnesses also reported hearing unusual noises coming from the helicopter as it took off after refueling, said Dennis Hogenson, deputy regional chief with the National Transportation Safety Board in Seattle. They said the aircraft then rotated before it crashed near the Seattle Center campus, which is home to the Space Needle, restaurants and performing arts centers.

Mayor Ed Murray noted the normally bustling Seattle Center was relatively quiet at the time. Had it been a busier day, "this would have been a much larger tragedy," he said.

Heart - Black

California women arrested in heinous child abuse case

child abuse suspects
© Fox News
Three starving children - including one who was chained to the floor to prevent her from getting food - were found last month in the squalid home of a Northern California couple, authorities said.

All three - two boys and a girl - were taken into protective custody, and one was hospitalized, Monterey County Sheriff Scott Miller said Friday.

Authorities discovered them in the Salinas, Calif., home on March 14 after two of the young people missed appointments, according to several published reports.

"It was a particularly heinous case," Miller told the Monterey Herald. The children had "hardly eaten for months."

The boys are 3 and 5 years old, and the girl is 8, authorities said, and they all exhibited bruises and signs of other physical as well as emotional abuse.

The girl, who appeared to have suffered the most extreme abuse, was chained to the floor to prevent her from getting any food, they said.

"It seems that the little girl was the major target of this abuse," Miller continued, adding that she looked "like a concentration camp victim."

The girl was in the hospital for about five days, he said, and seemed "traumatized."

Powertool

Southern Baptists on unborn persons: The words 'zygote' and 'embryo' are tools of oppression

Image
© SWBTS.edu
Words commonly used to refer to the developmental stages of an embryo - and even the word embryo itself - are used as a tool of oppression, according to the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

Dr. Russell Moore made the comments last week during a prayer at the Susan B. Anthony List 2014 Campaign for Life Gala.

"Father God, as we see the tables cleared away tonight we know that tomorrow morning a young woman will probably be looking at two lines on a pregnancy test wondering what to do," Moore said.

"We know that tomorrow morning legislators in this city will be deciding whether or not to oppress the most vulnerable around us, not only with laws but also even before that with words, referring to persons you have created in your image as simply zygotes or embryoes or fetuses or crisis pregnancies rather than persons, neighbors, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters."

Roses

Mick Jagger's partner found hanged in Manhattan, NY apartment - suicide

Image
© Enfremenino.com
L'Wren Scott, the designer, former model and partner of Sir Mick Jagger, was found dead at her home in New York on Monday morning in an apparent suicide.

A spokesman for Jagger told the Guardian in an email that the singer, who had just arrived in Australia on tour with the Rolling Stones, was "completely shocked and devastated by the news".

New York police sources said that Scott, 49, was discovered by her assistant at her apartment on 11th Avenue in Manhattan's Chelsea neighbourhood at about 10am. She is believed to have been found hanged.

Scott created acclaimed womenswear collections, and styled some of Hollywood's biggest names. She also worked as a designer and consultant for costumes on several major films. The most recent show for her eponymous collection was scheduled to take place in London during fashion week last month. However, it was abruptly cancelled, apparently because of "production delays".

Chalkboard

Malaysia backtracks on when jet's communications were disabled

Image
© US Navy/ReutersSailors inspect the flight deck of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Kidd in this U.S. Navy handout picture taken March 16, 2014. The Kidd will end its search for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in a few days, according to the U.S. Defense Department.
The investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 took another confusing turn on Monday, as authorities here reversed themselves and offered yet another version of the sequence of events in the crucial minutes before ground controllers lost contact with the jet early on March 8.

As the search for the missing Boeing 777 jet stretched into a 10th day, two of the nations helping in the hunt, Australia and Indonesia, agreed to divide between them a vast area of the southeastern Indian Ocean, with Indonesia focusing on equatorial waters and Australia beginning to search farther south for traces of the aircraft. To the north, China and Kazakhstan checked their radar records and tried to figure out whether the jet could have landed somewhere on their soil.

Reuters also reported that Chinese authorities have begun searching Chinese territory, focusing on a northern corridor through which the aircraft could have flown.

Malaysian authorities said Monday that the plane's first officer - the co-pilot - was the last person in the cockpit to speak to ground control. But the government added to the confusion about what had happened on the plane by that time, withdrawing its assertion that a crucial communications system had already been disabled when the co-pilot spoke.

Airplane Paper

Plane crash near Montrose, Colorado: No survivors expected

Colorado plane crash
© EPA
A small plane believed to be carrying five people crashed into a reservoir in southwestern Colorado and authorities say they don't think anyone survived.

The single-engine Socata TBM700 was flying from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to Montrose, about 180 miles southwest of Denver, when it went down Saturday, Ouray County spokeswoman Marti Whitmore said.

Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said the crash occurred just before 2 pm, but the cause was unknown. The aircraft went down in Ridgway Reservoir, about 25 miles south of Montrose.

Rescue efforts started in the afternoon and were suspected shortly after sundown until Sunday morning, Whitmore said. She said no one is believed to have survived, but no victims have been recovered.

The identities of the occupants were being withheld until relatives could be notified. The plane is registered to an Alabama corporation. Messages left for the company Saturday evening weren't immediately returned.