Society's ChildS


Camera

Authoritarians with guns: Mysterious military exercise leads to gruff encounter

Small-town military exercise cloaked in secrecy led to man being questioned for taking photos
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A man with a camera who stumbled on a military special forces exercise in a small Cape Breton town had his patriotism gruffly questioned by an undercover soldier, and was quizzed about whether he belonged to an anti-government movement.

Robert Westbrook said he was also threatened with arrest and he worried the undercover soldier would lash out and strike him.

"He takes a few steps back and clenches his fist and jaw angrily," Westbrook wrote in an account he posted online. " I truly think for a moment that he's going to take a swing at me."

Eye 1

Seattle police deactivate surveillance system after public outrage

seattle police
© Reuters / Matt Mills McKnight
Police in Seattle, Washington have responded to a major public outcry by disabling a recently discovered law enforcement tool that critics said could be used to conduct sweeping surveillance across the city.

Last week, Seattle's The Stranger published an in-depth look at a little known new initiative taking place within the city that involved the installation of dozens of devices that would create a digital mesh network for law enforcement officers. The devices - small white-boxes equipped with antennas and adorned on utility poles - would broadcast data wirelessly between nodes so police officers could have their own private network to more easily share large amounts of data. As The Stranger pointed out, however, those same contraptions were able to collect data on internet-ready devices of anyone within reach, essentially allowing the Seattle Police Department to see where cell phones, laptops and any other smart devices operating within reach were located.

The SPD said they had no bad intentions with installing the mesh network, but The Stranger article and the subsequent media coverage it spawned quickly caused the system to receive the type of attention that wasn't very welcomed. Now only days after citizens began calling for the dismantling of the mesh network, The Stranger has confirmed that the SPD are disabling the devices until a proper policy could be adopted by the city.

"The wireless mesh network will be deactivated until city council approves a draft policy and until there's an opportunity forvigorous public debate," Police Chief Jim Pugel told The Stranger for an article published late Tuesday.

"Our position is that the technology is the technology," Whitcomb said, "but we want to make sure that we have safeguards and policies in place so people with legitimate privacy concerns aren't worried about how it's being used."

The SPD told The Stranger previously that the system was not being used, but anyone with a smart phone who wandered through the jurisdiction covered by the digital nodes could still notice that their devices were being discovered by the internet-broadcasting boxes, just as a person's iPhone or Android might attempt to connect to any network within reach. In theory, law enforcement could take the personal information transmitted as the two devices talk to each other and use that intelligence to triangulate the location of a person, even within inches.

USA

Virginia police use taser on man for 42 seconds straight

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Fredericksburg police are conducting an internal investigation into a Saturday night incident in which a suspect appeared to be tasered for more than 40 consecutive seconds.

The incident occurred about 7:20 p.m. near the corner of Hanover and Caroline streets in downtown Fredericksburg, police spokeswoman Natatia Bledsoe said.

Several people had called 911 after a gray, four-door Buick struck and damaged five vehicles that were parked in the 200 block of Hanover.

The Buick driver had run from the scene when police arrived, but bystanders had attempted to detain the passenger, who was still in the area when the first officer arrived. The passenger is also the Buick owner, police said.

Police said the man was belligerent and threatened to hurt those who called police, but no one was injured.

Eye 2

Teen kills mom, cripples dad after being sent to anger management class

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© Facebook, MCSO
Marion County authorities are charging a 16-year-old boy as an adult in the murder and attempted murder of his mom and dad after they were found stabbed in their Haleyville home.

Travis Montgomery is being charged with the murder of his mother, Renae Montgomery, and attempted murder of his father, Wade Montgomery, according to Sheriff Kevin Williams.

Sheriff Williams says the stabbing happened at a mobile home on Slaughter Pen Road around 11:30 p.m. Sunday.

A relative heard screams nearly six hours later, around 5 a.m. Monday, and found Wade Montgomery suffering from stab wounds near the entrance of the trailer. Renae Montgomery's body was discovered in a hallway of the mobile home.

Sheriff

Crooked cop groped paraplegic's genitals inside adult diaper then planted drugs there, lawsuit claims

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© disara/Shutterstock.com
Intentional humiliation, combined with false charges and more abuse is alleged.

A crooked cop groped a paraplegic man's genitals under his diaper and falsely claimed to have found drugs there - and was sentenced to prison for such assaults, the man claims in court.

Carlando Mukes sued Milwaukee, its Police Chief Edward Flynn, and police Officers Jason Mucha, Michael Vagnini and Paul Martinez, in Federal Court. In 2008, Mukes, a 32-year-old paraplegic black man, was sitting in his wheelchair talking to a friend, when defendants Vagnini and Martinez drove up and searched him, according to the lawsuit.
"Plaintiff raised his arms in the air and told defendants Vagnini and Martinez that he did not have anything on him," Mukes says in the complaint.

"Defendant Vagnini patted down plaintiff's pants pockets without plaintiff's consent, found approximately $50, and said, 'This is drug money.'

"Defendants Vagnini and Martinez each grabbed one of plaintiff's arms and defendant Martinez said, 'Maybe it's in his adult diaper.'

"Defendant Martinez, who had no probable cause or reasonable suspicion that plaintiff possessed drugs or contraband on or about his person, reached his hand inside plaintiff's adult diaper, and groped plaintiff's genitals.

"Plaintiff did not have any drugs or contraband in his adult diaper or anywhere on his person.

"Defendant Martinez is not a health care professional, and he conducted the invasive and unreasonable search in an unsafe, unhygienic, and intentionally humiliating fashion, in a public thoroughfare, with no privacy."

Arrow Up

Power to the people! Occupy Wall Street activists buy $15 million of Americans' personal debt

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© Spencer Platt/Getty Images'Our primary purpose was to spread information about the workings of this secondary debt market,' said Andrew Ross.
Rolling Jubilee spends $400,000 to purchase cheap debt and free people from their bills.


- How could Brits do the same thing?
- Occupy Wall Street's debt buying strikes at the heart of capitalism

A group of Occupy Wall Street activists has bought almost $15m of Americans' personal debt over the last year as part of the Rolling Jubilee project to help people pay off their outstanding credit.

Rolling Jubilee, set up by Occupy's Strike Debt group following the street protests that swept the world in 2011, launched on 15 November 2012. The group purchases personal debt cheaply from banks before "abolishing" it, freeing individuals from their bills.

By purchasing the debt at knockdown prices the group has managed to free $14,734,569.87 of personal debt, mainly medical debt, spending only $400,000.

"We thought that the ratio would be about 20 to 1," said Andrew Ross, a member of Strike Debt and professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. He said the team initially envisaged raising $50,000, which would have enabled it to buy $1m in debt.

"In fact we've been able to buy debt a lot more cheaply than that."

The group is able to buy debt so cheaply due to the nature of the "secondary debt market". If individuals consistently fail to pay bills from credit cards, loans, or medical insurance the bank or lender that issued the funds will eventually cut its losses by selling that debt to a third party. These sales occur for a fraction of the debt's true values - typically for five cents on the dollar - and debt-buying companies then attempt to recoup the debt from the individual debtor and thus make a profit.

The Rolling Jubilee project was mostly conceived as a "public education project", Ross said.

Cult

10 Things traditional Christians got terribly wrong

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Although progressive Christians have been at the forefront of social justice, conservative Christians are often on the wrong side of history.

When Christians get political, they often do so because they believe that they have God on their side. This is true whether they are progressive or conservative, and throughout most of American history there have been both. (You'd think that the conflicting claims about what God wants would lead to more doubting, but here we are.) Looking over the long history of people claiming to be speaking for God's wishes, it quickly becomes evident that Christians are frequently on the wrong side of history. Here are 10 things that American Christians of the conservative stripe got completely wrong when they were so sure they were speaking on God's behalf.

1) Slavery. Both sides of the American slavery debate claimed to be speaking from profound Christian conviction. The Bible clearly has a positive view of slavery, something pro-slavery Christians routinely pointed out. Abolitionists took a broader, less literal view of the Bible. Unsurprising that this divide led to the South being, to this day, home of the most people who take a literalist, fundamentalist view of Christianity.

Of course, nowadays you can't find even the most literalist fan of the Bible who is willing to agree with their predecessors in the 19th century who believed the Bible endorsed slavery. Of the many things conservative Christians have gotten wrong over the years, the pro-slavery argument is probably the one that is least likely to be revived by modern fundamentalists.

Snakes in Suits

Kevin Trudeau found guilty of criminal contempt over diet book ads

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Author and infomercial pitchman Kevin Trudeau.
In the world of dieting, many promises are made and broken. But author Kevin Trudeau's is an extreme case: He had been warned by no less than the Federal Communications Commission not to make false claims about his diet book in advertisements.

Nevertheless, he appeared in a recent set of infomercials for his book "The Weight Loss Cure 'They' Don't Want You To Know About" saying that it revealed a miracle substance that would allow people following his diet plan to eat all they wanted and still lose weight. The infomercials aired 32,000 times.

A federal jury in Chicago found Trudeau guilty of criminal contempt Tuesday and he was taken into custody, Reuters reports. He faces potential federal prison time.

Trudeau has been in hot water with federal officials in the past for infomercials marketing remedies for AIDS, hair loss, memory loss and obesity. He paid $2 million in a 2004 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and agreed to stop advertising products with infomercials.

Publications about products, however, were still OK -- as long as he followed the rules.

Attention

Desperation grows among Philippine survivors of Typhoon Haiyan

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© Paula Bronstein/Getty ImagesTyphoon survivors wait to board a C130 aircraft during an evacuation from the Tacloban, Philippines
Filipinos in devastated Tacloban try to rush military planes to evacuate, and relief crews struggle to get aid through the debris.

Drenched by rain and increasingly desperate, typhoon-stricken Filipinos rushed fences and pleaded with guards Tuesday at the battered airport serving as a tenuous lifeline to an international aid effort confronted at every turn by transport and logistics bottlenecks.

The United Nations launched an appeal for $301 million to help victims. The chief of its humanitarian operations, Valerie Amos, arrived in Manila, the capital, to coordinate the relief effort and quickly acknowledged the difficulties it faced.

"We have not been able to get into the remote areas," Amos said. Even in Tacloban, she said, the main city in the typhoon's path and the site of the airport, "because of the debris and the difficulties with logistics and so on, we have not been able to get in the level of supply that we would want to."

In its appeal for funds, the U.N. estimated that more than 11 million people had been affected by Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest storms ever to hit land, with 660,000 left homeless. The official death toll was nearly 1,800, and that figure is expected to rise substantially. More than 2,500 were injured.

Philippine President Benigno Aquino III downplayed widespread estimates that 10,000 or more people might have died, telling CNN that the figure was more likely 2,000 to 2,500 people.

Ambulance

Train in Alabama oil spill was carrying 2.7 million gallons of crude

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© Bill Castle / Associated PressA tanker train that derailed and caught fire in western Alabama outside Aliceville was carrying 2.7 million gallons of crude oil.
A train that derailed and exploded in rural Alabama was hauling 2.7 million gallons of crude oil, according to officials.

The 90-car train was crossing a timber trestle above a wetland near Aliceville late Thursday night when approximately 25 rail cars and two locomotives derailed, spilling crude oil into the surrounding wetlands and igniting a fire that was still burning Saturday.

Each of the 90 cars was carrying 30,000 gallons of oil, said Bill Jasper, president of the rail company Genesee & Wyoming at a press briefing Friday night. It's unclear, though, how much oil was spilled because some of the cars have yet to be removed from the marsh.

"Most of the cars did not spill all of the product that was inside it," Don Hartley, a regional coordinator for the Alabama Emergency Management Agency, told the Los Angeles Times.

Emergency responders have to wait until the fire has burned out, Hartley said.

Hartley said that the marsh where the oil spilled is stagnant, so the oil hasn't spread to other water systems. Scott Hughes, spokesman for the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, told The Times that responders had set up booms to absorb some of the oil.