Society's ChildS


Bell

TV is the Best Pet Sitter

Davis MacMillan
Minyanville
Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:16 UTC
Pet TV
© MinyanvilleMewtube!
In a move that has already spawned hundreds of uses of the phrase "going to the dogs," cable channel DogTV plans to go national in the next several months. In case the name wasn't self-explanatory, DogTV is TV designed for dogs.

According to an AP story reported yesterday, DogTV comes in eight-hour blocks specifically designed to keep dogs relaxed and entertained. Filmmakers got down on their knees to shoot from a dog's perspective and producers muted colors, changed the sound (for example, high frequency noises, which irritate dogs, have been removed) and added music written for man's best friend.

The channel already has a million subscribers in the San Diego area, and its owners expect it to do well nationally. The service will run for about $5 a month.

As far as products for dogs go, that's pretty cheap. Marvel Comics-themed dog clothes sell for between $10 and $20 apiece on PetSmart. This doggy tuxedo retails in the same range. For big spenders there's the much touted "Collection de Bijoux" line of dog collars, whose pieces run for between $150,000 and $3.2 million.
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Briefcase

Circumcision Damages: Dean Cochrun Sues Hospital For Circumcising Him As Newborn


The Huffington Post
Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:36 UTC
Image
© Alamy
A South Dakota prison inmate is suing the hospital where he was circumcised as a newborn, saying he only recently became aware that he'd undergone the procedure and that it robbed him of his sexual prowess.

Dean Cochrun, 28, is asking for $1,000 in compensatory and punitive damages. He also asks in the lawsuit that his foreskin be restored "in the hopes I could feel whole again," though he acknowledged that he didn't expect such a restoration to be anything more than aesthetic.

Cochrun, who is imprisoned in Sioux Falls on a kidnapping conviction, filed the federal lawsuit Friday against Sanford Hospital. Cochrun claims that an "unknown doctor" at the then-named Sioux Valley Hospital misled his mother to believe that the procedure was medically necessary. Cochrun argues that the procedure was unnecessary, unethical and without medical benefit.
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Target

Female soldier missing from Fort Bragg


MSNBC
Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:45 UTC
Image
© NBC NewsKelli Bordeaux, a soldier who recently joined the army, has been missing since Saturday from Fort Bragg, NC. She was last seen leaving a local bar.
Authorities are searching for a 23-year-old Army soldier who was last seen early Saturday morning leaving a bar in North Carolina.

PFC Kelli Bordeaux didn't turn up to her post at Fort Bragg on Monday, prompting Army officials to report her missing, NBC News reported.

Bordeaux was last spotted leaving a bar, Froggy Bottoms, in nearby Fayetteville about 1:30 am on Saturday. A bar employee gave her a ride home, but he is not considered a suspect, a military official told NBC.

Bordeaux, a health services specialist originally from St. Cloud in Central Florida, has been married for two years but is estranged from her husband, Mike, the official said.

Image
© NBC News
"Supposedly when the guy that was giving her a ride home, was taking her to her apartment, he got to her apartment and something spooked her so ... she said, 'No, no, no just let me out here,' instead of taking her like around the corner to her apartment," her mother, Johnna Henson, told wptv.com. "I don't understand that."

An Army investigator told wptv.com that, at some point, two text messages were sent from Bordeaux's phone, including one that said she got home safely.

"Being a soldier to Kelli is something she wouldn't jeopardize for anything. Missing work is something that is not in character for Kelli," her sister, Olivia Cox, told reporters. Asked how Mike Bordeaux was doing, she said:"Mike is holding up the best he can with his wife missing."
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Mr. Potato

Norway's Mass Killer Complains He Being Ridiculed

Alistair Scrutton and Victoria Klesty
Reuters
Wed, 18 Apr 2012 05:59 UTC
Anders Behring Breivik
© Reuters/Fabrizio BenschAnders Behring Breivik
Norwegian anti-Islamic fanatic Anders Behring Breivik complained on Wednesday he was being subjected to personal ridicule in court and demanded his killing of 77 people last summer be judged as a battle against immigration.

"I hope you will focus on the issue, not the person," the 33-year-old Breivik told the court, visibly irritated and swiveling a pen in his hand.

Breivik, who killed eight people with a car bomb in Oslo on July 22 and then shot 69 at a Labour Party summer camp, went on trial on Monday.

Asked how he had changed from a teenage vandal on Oslo's prosperous west side to a methodical killer, he said he helped found a militant group called the "Knights Templar" in 2001 and chafed at prosecution suggestions that it was largely imaginary.

"Your intention is to sow doubt whether this network existed," he said at one point, after repeatedly objecting to the way prosecutors phrased their queries.

The original Knights Templar were a medieval brotherhood of knights that prosecuted and financed anti-Islamic crusades.

Breivik has pleaded not guilty to terrorism and murder charges on grounds of "necessity". He called his victims "traitors" with immigrant-friendly ideas.
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Heart - Black

Shocking Rape Video Goes Viral in South Africa

Nkepile Mabuse
CNN
Wed, 18 Apr 2012 07:00 UTC
Johannesburg - South Africans woke up on Wednesday morning to the claim that a group of Soweto youths had filmed themselves raping a 17-year-old girl believed to be mentally ill.

The cellphone video is said to have gone viral among school kids in the township south of Johannesburg, and the term #rapevideo was trending on Twitter in South Africa on Wednesday.

The Daily Sun, a local tabloid, reports that it alerted the police after a concerned mother whose daughter was watching the video handed it over to the paper on Tuesday.

"The mother of a teenage girl saw the horrifying pictures and confiscated her daughter's phone. A work colleague of the woman said they recognized some of the boys and advised her to take the video to Daily Sun," the newspaper reported.

The suspects, aged between 14 and 20, were arrested Tuesday morning and charged with kidnapping and rape, police spokesperson Warrant Officer Kay Makhubela said.

"The video is very bad. The men can be clearly identified as they take turns raping and filming her," she told CNN.

The girl's mother reported her missing on March 21, Makhubela said.

Media reports suggest the police initially failed to open a missing persons case but that they have since done so.
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Handcuffs

Police in US Handcuff 6-Year-Old for Tantrum; Schools Wrestle with When to Call Cops

Jeff Martin and Jeri Clausing
The Associated Press and The Canadian Press
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© The Associated Press/WMAZ-13 TVSalecia Johnson
Atlanta - A 6-year-old who threw a tantrum at her U.S. school was taken away in handcuffs, firing up a debate over whether teachers and police are overreacting with disruptive students.

Salecia Johnson's family lashed out Tuesday over her treatment and said she was badly shaken, while the school system and the police defended their handling of the incident.

Civil rights advocates and criminal justice experts say frustrated teachers and principals across the country are calling in the police to deal with even relatively minor disruptions.

Some juvenile authorities say they believe it is happening more often, driven in part by an increased police presence at schools over the past two decades because of tragedies like the Columbine school massacre. But numbers are hard to come by.

"Kids are being arrested for being kids," said Shannon Kennedy, a civil rights attorney who is suing the Albuquerque, New Mexico, school district, where hundreds of kids have been arrested in the past few years for minor offences. Those include having cellphones in class, burping, refusing to switch seats and destroying a history book. In 2010, a 14-year-old boy was arrested for inflating a condom in class.

Salecia was accused of tearing items off the walls and throwing books and toys in an outburst Friday at her school in Georgia. Police said she also threw a small shelf that struck the principal in the leg, jumped on a paper shredder and tried to break a glass frame.

Police refused to say what set off the tantrum. The school called police, and when an officer tried to calm the child in the principal's office, she resisted, authorities said. She was handcuffed and taken away in a patrol car.
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MIB

Secret Service Looking into Ted Nugent's Violent Anti-Obama Rant

Lee-Anne Goodman
The Canadian Press
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
Ted Nugent
© Randy Snyder/ Getty ImagesTed Nugent
Washington - The U.S. Secret Service is investigating faded '70s rock star Ted Nugent for his recent insistence he'll be "dead or in jail" in a year's time if President Barack Obama is re-elected in November.

At a convention of the National Rifle Association over the weekend, the longtime gun advocate compared Obama and the Democrats to a coyote who should be shot.

"It isn't the enemy that ruined America," he said as he reaffirmed his endorsement of Republican front-runner Mitt Romney.

"It's good people who bent over and let the enemy in. If the coyote's in your living room pissing on your couch, it's not the coyote's fault. It's your fault for not shooting him."

He accused the Obama administration of being "evil" and "America-hating."

"If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year," he said angrily. "We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November."

He then told his audience of proud gun-owners that if they failed to "clean house in this vile, evil, America-hating administration, I don't even know what you're made out of."

The Secret Service says it's aware of the weekend remarks and is looking into them. It's illegal in the United States to threaten the commander-in-chief.
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Eye 2

Breivik Defends Massacre of 77 People: 'I Would Have Done it Again'


The Associated Press and The Canadian Press
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
Anders Breivik
© The Associated Press/Heiko Junge/Scanpix Norway/PoolAnders Behring Breivik sits in the courtroom, in Oslo, Norway, Tuesday April 17, 2012.
Oslo - In a scene unimaginable in many countries, Norway's worst mass killer got the chance to explain his fanatical views to the court and the world, unrepentant and dressed in a business suit. Prosecutors and lawyers for the families of his 77 victims even shook his hand.

Two days into Anders Behring Breivik's terror trial, the way Norway's legal system deals with a confessed killer who rejects its authority is baffling - even to some Norwegians.

The 33-year-old far-right militant gave a rambling hour-long address to the court on Tuesday, reading from a statement that essentially summarized the 1,500-page anti-Islamic manifesto he posted online before his bomb-and-shooting rampage nine months ago.

"The attacks on July 22 were a preventive strike. I acted in self-defence on behalf of my people, my city, my country," Breivik declared, demanding to be found innocent of terror and murder charges. "I would have done it again."

Breivik has five days to explain why he detonated a bomb outside government headquarters in Oslo, killing eight people, then drove to a nearby resort island, where he massacred 69 others, mostly teens, at a summer youth camp run by the governing Labor Party.

Breivik, who has admitted carrying out the grisly acts, boasted they were the most "spectacular" by a nationalist militant since World War II.

His victims were part of a conspiracy to "deconstruct" Norway's cultural identity, he said. Comparing the Labor Party youth wing to the Hitler Youth, he called their annual summer gathering an "indoctrination" camp.
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Passport

Getting Out:Taxes Prompt More Americans to Renounce Citizenship


Reuters
Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:23 UTC
passport taxes
© C. Sherburne | Photodisc | Getty Images
A year ago, in Action Comics, Superman declared plans to renounce his U.S. citizenship.

"'Truth, justice, and the American way' - it's not enough anymore," the comic book superhero said, after both the Iranian and American governments criticized him for joining a peaceful anti-government protest in Tehran.

Last year, almost 1,800 people followed Superman's lead, renouncing their U.S. citizenship or handing in their Green Cards. That's a record number since the Internal Revenue Service began publishing a list of those who renounced in 1998. It's also almost eight times more than the number of citizens who renounced in 2008, and more than the total for 2007, 2008 and 2009 combined.

But not everyone's motivations are as lofty as Superman's. Many say they parted ways with America for tax reasons.

The United States is one of the only countries to tax its citizens on income earned while they're living abroad. And just as Americans stateside must file tax returns each April - this year, the deadline is Tuesday - an estimated 6.3 million U.S. citizens living abroad brace for what they describe as an even tougher process of reporting their income and foreign accounts to the IRS. For them, the deadline is June.
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Calculator

Common Sense! What a Fair Tax System Looks Like

Jared Bernstein
Rolling Stone Magazone
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:36 UTC
This being tax day, "What's fair?" seems like an excellent question, especially given how often the concept of "fairness" has been thrown around in discussions of Obama's proposed "Buffett rule." (The president says it's unfair that some millionaires pay a lower effective tax rate than middle-class Americans, as they currently do; Republicans, that it's unfair to burden the rich with higher taxes.)

tax form
© Getty Images
I've got five answers. A fair tax system is:
  1. Progressive: those with more income pay a larger share of it in taxes;
  2. One that doesn't worsen inequality by giving preferential treatment to the wealthy (e.g., by favoring capital over labor income);
  3. One that doesn't disproportionately benefit those who are already doing the best at the expense of the rest;
  4. One that raises enough revenue from those with lots of resources to provide a leg up for those at a disadvantage;
  5. One that does not rearrange the pretax income distribution, as in a confiscatory, highly redistributive system that turns the poor into the rich and visa versa;
Conservatives invariably counter that it's not fair that almost half of American households, because their income is too low, pay zero federal income tax. (And not just conservatives--I got a pretty moving note from a guy who said he didn't think it was fair that, because he didn't make enough money, he didn't get to pay federal taxes. He wanted to contribute!)
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