Society's ChildS


Stock Down

China warns investors to prepare for wave of bankruptcies

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© Feng Li/Getty ImagesChina's Premier, Li Keqiang, was speaking after the annual session of the national people's congress.
China is braced for a wave of industrial bankruptcies as its slowing economy forces companies with sky-high debts to the wall, the country's premier has said.

Premier Li Keqiang told lenders to China's private sector factories they should expect debt defaults as the world's second largest economy encounters "serious challenges" in the year ahead.

Speaking after the annual session of the national people's congress, Li Keqiang said: "We are going to confront serious challenges this year and some challenges may be even more complex." He told lenders to China's private sector factories they should expect debt defaults.

Airplane

Plane disappearances - a brief history

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© Mak Remissa/EPAA man writes a message for passengers of Malaysian Airline flight MH370 on a banner at Kuala Lumpur International airport.
Since 1948, 100 aircraft have gone missing in flight and never been recovered.

Should the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 never be found, its disappearance would be by far the biggest such unexplained disaster in aviation. Yet such disappearances are not that uncommon: according to records assembled by the Aviation Safety Network, 100 aircraft have gone missing in flight and never been recovered since 1948. Some of the most notable include:

Newspaper

'Operation Smear Nigel Farage' - politics of the lowest form

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© Matt Cardy/Getty ImagesUkip leader Nigel Farage gives a press conference at the party's 2014 spring conference.
There are still 382 days before the Queen dissolves parliament, but Operation Get Farage is revving into action. Splashing allegations that he had a "mistress" across the Daily Mail and BBC news bulletins are being justified in the public interest, of course. The former Ukip MEP Nikki Sinclaire exploited the European parliament's immunity from libel law to throw the revelations to a slavering media pack. Farage was fuelling unemployment, she cheekily suggested, by employing both his wife and "former mistress Annabelle Fuller", a suggestion passionately contested by Farage and Fuller.

You don't have to be a fan of Nigel Farage to object to this style of politics. It's personal, lowest common denominator, play-the-man-not-the-ball nonsense, beloved by the likes of Tory spin doctor Lynton Crosby. By all means attack the hypocrisy of a party that rails against the "EU gravy train" while milking its expenses: in 2012, for example, Ukip MEPs claimed nearly £800,000 EU expenses and allowances. Opponents of the state often have the least scruples about taking from it, and given generous donations to the party from Ukip MEPs, it could be justifiably claimed that this virulently Eurosceptic-party is partly EU-funded. But let's not pretend this is anything other than an excuse to discredit Farage via his private life, accompanied with nudge-nudge wink-wink stories about his "womanising" from former colleagues.

X

Say what? Police Dept. denies Freedom of Information Request for their own Freedom of Information Handbook

NYPD police officer
© Associated PressAn NYPD police officer in Times Square / AP
Transparency advocates decry 'ludicrous' ruling

The New York City Police Department has denied a public records request and subsequent appeal for its Freedom of Information handbook.

MuckRock journalist Shawn Musgrave filed a records request under New York's Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) for the police department's FOIL handbook, the guide officers use to apply public record law.

However, the NYPD told Musgrave its Freedom of Information handbook is not covered by FOIL, arguing it is protected under attorney-client privilege.

The NYPD said the information in the handbook reflects "confidential communications between members of the FOIL unit and their attorneys in the context of the providing of legal advice concerning the meaning and requirements of the Freedom of Information Law."

Journalists and transparency advocates who have long complained about the NYPD's culture of secrecy criticized the latest rejection.

"What's ludicrous here is that the NYPD is refusing to be open about its own transparency process itself," Musgrave told the Washington Free Beacon. "Even if attorney-client privilege applied here - and I don't believe that it does, not for the department's FOIL handbooks and manuals, at least - department lawyers can absolutely choose to release this basic information. Even the FBI and NSA have released similar documents with minimal redactions."

Robert Freeman, the executive director of the New York State Committee on Open Government, said that, while he has not seen the handbook, the NYPD's arguments are tenuous at best.

Dollars

Fox host: Overtime pay isn't fair to companies because it makes employees greedy‏

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© Unknown
Fox Business host Stuart Varney on Thursday asserted that paying overtime could stifle companies like Google, and that a proposed White House change to overtime rules was essentially "buying votes."

Bloomberg News reported this week that the Obama administration was considering directing the Labor Department to make more American workers eligible for overtime pay. The rule change was expected to target fast food and retail companies which often label workers as "supervisors" or "managers" so they do not have to be paid for more than 40 hours of work.

Cell Phone

Two teenage girls 'tortured mentally disabled boy, forced him to perform sex acts and recorded it all on their cell phones'

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Lauren Bush, 17, has been charged with assault, child pornography and false imprisonment.
Two teenage girls are behind bars following allegations that they carried out a campaign of harassment against a mentally-challenged boy including stabbing him, dragging him by the hair and forcing him to engage in sex acts with an animal.

The St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office said 17-year-old Lauren Bush and an unnaned 15-year-old girl - both students at Chopticon High School in Morganza, Maryland - recorded the assaults against the autistic 16-year-old victim on their cell phones.

Footage shows the suspects force the teen to walk on a partially frozen pond, which resulted in him falling through the ice several times.

Each time, police said, the suspects refused to help the boy out of the frigid water.

Sheriff Tim Cameron told ABC7 that the allegations leveled against the girls are among the most disturbing he has dealt with in his career.

He says that several times between December and February, the suspects preyed on the victim - assaulting him with a knife, kicking him in the groin, dragging him by the hair, coercing him to engage in a sex act with an animal, and forcing him to walk on the partially frozen pond.

Alarm Clock

Viewpoint: Is macho culture causing young men to take their own lives?

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Three times as many men as women kill themselves. Is a culture of masculinity where men struggle to communicate their feelings partly to blame, asks Jonny Benjamin.

I can vividly recall the moment I decided I was going to take my own life. It was early on the Sunday evening of 13 January 2008. Suicide had been something I had contemplated since my mid-teens, but it wasn't until now, just a couple of weeks from my 21st birthday, that I made a plan to actually end my life.

Light Sabers

Indian diplomat in US strip search saga: Indian diplomat wins indictment's dismissal in U.S. district court

Devyani Khobragade
© REUTERS/Stringer Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade (C) leaves with her father Uttam Khobragade (L) from the Maharashtra Sadan state guesthouse to meet India's Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid in New Delhi January 11, 2014.
An Indian diplomat charged in New York with visa fraud and making false statements about a domestic worker she employed has won dismissal of a federal indictment, ending a chapter in an dispute that frayed U.S.-Indian diplomatic relations.

Devyani Khobragade, who was India's deputy consul-general in New York, had diplomatic immunity when she sought on January 9 to dismiss the indictment, and thus could not be prosecuted, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan ruled on Wednesday.

Prosecutors accused Khobragade of making Sangeeta Richard, her housekeeper and nanny, work 100-hour weeks at a salary of just over $1 an hour, far below the legal minimum U.S. wage of $7.25 an hour.

Arrow Down

70-year-old South Carolina man shot for picking up cane during traffic stop

Bobby Canipe
© York County Sheriff’s DepartmentThe moment Bobby Canipe was shot.
Clover - A senior citizen was shot during a traffic stop when a police officer stopped him for expired tags and mistook his walking stick for a gun.

The incident occurred on the evening of February 25th, 2014. As 70-year-old Bobby Dean Canipe drove down Highway 321 with a female friend, he was pulled over by a young deputy for having an expired license plate. The two were driving through South Carolina on a return trip from Florida back to North Carolina. The pair had watched the Datona 500 together.

Mr. Canipe, a veteran of the Vietnam War, stopped his truck when signaled. Without being prompted, he then proceeded to step out of his pickup truck to see what the problem might be.

Lacking the strength to walk properly, Mr. Canipe then reached into his truck to pick up his walking stick, as he had done countless times before. But this time was different. Canipe was in the presence of a police officer.

"Sir... Sir... Woah, woah!!" the deputy yelped. He opened fire on the man, firing multiple rounds toward the truck.

Mr. Canipe slumped against the truck. "Drop the gun!" the deputy shrieked. When the septuagenarian doubled over, wobbling on his cane, the deputy realized what he had done. He rushes in to help.

"I'm disabled and I was trying to get my cane out," Canipe explained, as his female friend becomes frantic.

"That's all I ask I ask of you Lord, is please help him and take care of him Lord," the woman is heard saying on the video. "We were just innocent people going home. There wasn't a thing wrong with us."

Arrow Down

Dead Indian guru frozen by devotees

Indian Guru
© Divya Jyoti Jagrati SansthanAshutosh Maharaj's body has been kept in a freezer for nearly six weeks.
Ashutosh Maharaj was declared dead by authorities in Punjab on 29 January after a suspected heart attack.

But, confident that he was merely in a state of deep meditation, his followers froze his corpse.

He led the Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan (Divine Light Awakening Mission) which claims more than 30 million followers.

"He is not dead. Medical science does not understand things like yogic science. We will wait and watch.

We are confident that he will come back," his spokesman Swami Vishalanand told the BBC.

He said that although doctors had declared Maharaj "clinically dead", he was actually alive and in a state of samadhi, which is the highest plane of meditation.

The guru is thought to have been in his seventies.