Society's ChildS


Bizarro Earth

New Zealander starts campaign to eradicate pet cats

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© Getty ImagesNew Zealand is looking to ban cats in order to save a unique native bird species.
Gareth Morgan has a simple dream: a New Zealand free of cats. But the environmental advocate triggered a claws-out backlash Tuesday with his new anti-feline campaign.

Morgan called on his countrymen Tuesday to make their current cat their last in order to save the nation's unique native birds. He set up a website, called Cats To Go, depicting a tiny kitten with red devil's horns. The opening line: "That little ball of fluff you own is a natural born killer."

He doesn't recommended people euthanize their current cats - "Not necessarily but that is an option" are the site's exact words - but rather neuter them and not replace them when they die. Morgan, an economist and well-known businessman, also suggests people keep cats indoors and that local governments make registration mandatory.

But Morgan's campaign is not sitting well in a country that boasts one of the highest cat ownership rates in the world.

Heart

Michigan 'hero' teen hides rape victim from alleged attacker

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© Colleen Harrison | Mlive.com/The Saginaw NewsJames Persyn III, left, and Acelin Persyn, right, are seen in this Jan. 17, 2013 photo after an abducted Central Michigan University student who had been kidnapped and raped showed up at their home, seeking refuge.
A Michigan 14-year-old is being hailed as a hero by his community for helping to hide a rape victim in his house while her alleged attacker pounded on the doors, threatening to kill.

James Persyn III was at home in Shepherd, Mich., watching his siblings Acelin, 11, and Angus, 2, on Wednesday night while their father drove a few miles away to pick up his fiancee from work.

Suddenly, the children said they heard banging on the door and a woman screaming, "Let me in! Let me in!"

James opened the door and a panicked woman rushed into the kitchen. She shouted that someone had kidnapped her and was trying to kill her. She told the children they needed to hide.

Cell Phone

Montana family accused of $70M in bogus cell phone charges

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© Fotolia
A Montana family and their accountant are accused of tacking $70 million in bogus charges onto customer phone bills nationwide, then funneling some of that money through a religious organization to buy land and pay for the husband's legal bills.

Steven Sann, his wife Terry, son Nathan and accountant Robert Braach run a maze of nine companies engaged in "cramming, " or adding unauthorized charges to a customer's phone bill, according to a civil complaint filed this month by the Federal Trade Commission.

When customers complained or phone companies grew suspicious about one of the Sanns' companies charging phone bills, they would switch over to another company, the complaint says.

Gold Coins

Saudi's inflation driven by rent and food prices

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The Central Department for Statistics and Information (CDSI) has released CPI data for December showing inflation remained at the 3.9 per cent year-on-year level observed in the previous month.

"This puts the annual inflation for last year at 4.5 per cent-year-on-year in line with our forecasts. For 2013, we expected inflation to be mainly driven by rent and housing related services as well as food prices," said Jadwa Investments in a report.

"While the latter is expected to likely be less of a concern as international food prices are slowing down, we expect rent and housing related services to continue the current gradual downward trend," it continued. "Government housing initiative is likely to reduce pressure on such component, but we do not expect such effect to materialise before next year. As such, we expect inflation in 2013 to reach 4.3 per cent year-on-year down from 4.5 per cent last year.

Arrow Up

On the way up - food prices expected to rise

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© C. TODD SHERMAN | DAILY JOURNALDerice Lambert places freshly wrapped and priced packages of ground beef at Todd’s Big Star in Tupelo on Wednesday. Meat prices are expected to rise this year, along with other food prices.
If you thought you spent more at the grocery store last year, it wasn't your imagination.

And you'll be paying even more this year.

A study conducted by agricultural and food industry consulting group FarmEcon said the average family of four paid more than $2,000 above expectations last year.

That represented an additional $162 billion spent on food in 2012.

Attention

25 signs American women are being destroyed by the sexual revolution and our promiscuous culture

Lady Gaga
© T G Sengel
Has the sexual revolution been good for American women? Not at all. In fact, when you look at the facts it becomes clear that the sexual revolution has been an absolute disaster for American women.

In the United States today, men have been trained to primarily view women as sex objects, and our culture has become exceedingly promiscuous.

As a result, the United States leads the world in teen pregnancy, there are 19 million new STD infections every single year, more than half of all children born to women under the age of 30 are being born out of wedlock and we are witnessing the systematic breakdown of the family unit in America.

And yet anyone that tries to teach our young women that they should dress modestly and keep themselves pure for marriage is severely criticized. Well, if all Americans actually did keep themselves pure until marriage, we wouldn't have nearly the problems with STDs, teen pregnancy and abortion that we do today.

The consequences of teaching our young women that they should be "free" to run around and sleep with a whole bunch of different men have been dramatic.

The following are 25 signs that American women are being destroyed by the sexual revolution and our promiscuous culture...

Heart - Black

New charge filed against Suffolk man accused of child molestation

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One more charge was filed Thurday against a Suffolk man accused of child sex crimes.

66-year-old Larry Keith Baker allegedly inappropriately touched a family acquaintance more than a dozen times between March and August 2012.

Life Preserver

Obese people more likely to die in car accidents: report

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© AFP Photo
Obese people face a much higher risk - of up to 80 percent - of dying in a car collision compared with people of normal weight, researchers reported Monday in a specialist journal.

The cause could be that safety in cars is engineered for people of normal weight, not for the obese, they said.

Transport safety scientists Thomas Rice of the University of California at Berkeley and Motao Zhu of the University of West Virginia delved into a US databank on road accidents, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS).

They dug out data from 1996 to 2008, covering more than 57,000 collisions that involved two cars. This was whittled down to cases in which both parties involved in the collision had been driving vehicles of similar size and types.

Coffee

Man tries to rob Starbucks, settles for cup of coffee

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© Source: Madison County Jail)Phillip Sawdey
A robbery suspect is behind bars after police say he tried to steal from a Huntsville Starbucks.

Police said Phillip Sawdey walked into the Starbucks on Airport Road and demanded all the cash in the register. The cashier told him she couldn't open it and offered him a coffee instead,

Sawdey accepted the coffee and left the store.

He was located in the parking lot, arrested and charged with robbery.

Attention

Boulder rams into Utah woman's bedroom, breaks her jaw and sternum

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© Image credit: Scot DenhalterScot Denhalter stands beside the giant 12-foot-wide-by-9-foot-tall boulder that pummeled into his home on Jan. 21 in St. George, UT.
It was a nightmare for a Utah woman who awoke in the middle of the night to the rumble of a boulder that rammed through her bedroom.

The 12-foot-wide-by-9-foot-tall rock pummeled through Wanda Lee Denhalter's bedroom at 3 a.m. Jan. 19, breaking her jaw and sternum.

Her husband, Scot Denhalter, was not home during the incident.

"Just knowing a rock had pinned her in the bedroom frightened me," Denhalter was quoted as saying in The Spectrum. "I feel a bit guilty because I wasn't there. She stumbled around probably in shock. She found her phone and called 911."