Society's ChildS

Black Cat

Ebola health team of eight brutally killed in Guinea as suspicion reigns among locals

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© Reuters / 2Tango
The bodies of eight people - including three journalists - were found in Guinea after an Ebola health team came under attack two days ago, officials said. Meanwhile, the UN plans to deploy a special mission to fight the virus in the worst-hit countries.

The group, which included three doctors and three journalists, is said to have been attacked near Nzerekore, a city near Guinea's southern tip. With the Ebola death toll now topping 2,600, the team was sent to the area to help raise awareness about the virus. They had been missing since Tuesday.

The six were found dead on Thursday. The identities of the other two bodies are currently unknown.

Government spokesman Damantang Albert Camara told Reuters that the workers and journalists were brutally beaten to death.

Arrow Down

Scots reject independence in historic vote

Scottish Vote
© Associated Press
Edinburgh - Scottish voters have rejected independence, deciding to remain part of the United Kingdom after a historic referendum that shook the country to its core.

The decision prevented a rupture of a 307-year union with England, bringing a huge sigh of relief to the British political establishment. Scots voted 55 percent to 45 percent Thursday against independence in a vote that saw an unprecedented turnout.

A majority of voters did not embrace Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond's impassioned plea to launch a new state, choosing instead the security offered by remaining in the United Kingdom.

"We have chosen unity over division," Alistair Darling, head of the No campaign, said early Friday in Glasgow. "Today is a momentous day for Scotland and the United Kingdom as a whole."

Salmond conceded defeat, saying "we know it is a majority for the No campaign," and called on Scots to accept the results of the vote.

Arrow Down

Florida cops storm barber shop to inspect licenses and sanitation

Barbershop
© Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando SentinelThe Strictly Skillz barbershop in Orlando.
Orlando - Deputies and state regulators aggressively raided Orlando-area barbershops, roughing up innocent staff and handcuffing them on the floor in an effort to check if the barbers had acquired government permission to legally cut hair.

A series of these raids has recently come to light, one of which is making its way through the litigation process in the federal court system. This was the raid of the Strictly Skills barbershop in Pine Hills, Florida, in which government agents warrantlessly stormed in the establishment with as many as 25 customers and 6 staff members present.

Radar

Hackers target RT.com with massive DDoS attack

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© Reuters / David McNew
RT.com has been hit with the most powerful DDoS attack in the website's history, which reached 10 Gbps in strength. No group has claimed responsibility. RT has experienced cyber assaults in the past, prompted by its reporting on Manning and WikiLeaks.

The Wednesday attack was successfully deflected, but resulted in a temporary slowdown of the site.

"Thanks to the website's reliable technical protection, RT.com was unavailable just for a few minutes, even though the DDoS attack has continued," RT's press service said in a statement.

The attack was identified as a UDP-flood type, and reached 10 gigabits per second.

Hackers have previously targeted RT with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, to prevent it from reporting on various controversial issues, such as the Chelsea Manning trial and WikiLeaks.

DDoS attacks bring websites down by fabricating internet traffic and overwhelming a site's hosting service.

One of the most powerful attacks on RT was recorded on February 18, 2013, when the website was unavailable for about 6 hours.

RT was also temporarily disabled for just under five hours in June 2013. Hacker group AntiLeaks, which opposes Julian Assange's WikiLeaks project, claimed responsibility for the attack.

The cyber assault coincided with RT's reporting on the trial of Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and massive anti-government protests in Turkey. Uninterrupted coverage continued on RT's Twitter page.

In August 2012, the same group claimed responsibility for a massive DDoS attack which knocked out RT's English and Spanish websites for hours worldwide.

Pistol

Grandfather shoots and kills daughter, 6 grandchildren in Florida murder-suicide

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© WFTV
A grandfather shot his daughter and her six children in Bell, Florida on Thursday. The local Sheriff's Office said the incident was an apparent murder-suicide. The children ranged from three months to 10 years in age.

The shooter was identified as Don Charles Spirit, grandfather, who shot his daughter and six of his grandchildren before taking his won life, Gilchrist County Sheriff's Office confirmed during a press-conference.

The incident took place at the Spirit's home in a small town of Bell.

The children's age varied from 3 months to 10 years of age. The mother of the kids was identified as Sarah Spirit, according to Action News.
Children ages 3mo to about 10 years old. Grandfather shot his daughter and her 6 children. #BellShooting pic.twitter.com/zvgb0YHD5g

- Hailey Holloway (@HHollowayNews) September 19, 2014
Police received a call about the shooting around 4 p.m. local time, Gilchrist County Sheriff's Office said on its Facebook page.

Eye 2

Psychopath: Doctor sentenced to life in prison after admitting to intentionally misdiagnosing cancer and ordering unneeded chemotherapy

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© WXYZDr. Farid Fata
A Michigan doctor faces life in prison after he admitted to intentionally misdiagnosing patients with cancer and recommending unnecessary chemotherapy to dying patients.

Dr. Farid Fata pleaded guilty Tuesday to 13 counts of health care fraud, two counts of money laundering and one count of conspiracy to pay and receive kickbacks, reported the Detroit Free Press.

The crimes were part of a moneymaking scheme, he said.

"It is my choice," Fata told the court. "I knew that it was medically unnecessary."

Prosecutors plan to seek life in prison for the 49-year-old married father of three, saying the case was "the most egregious" health care fraud their office had ever seen.

"In this case, we had Dr. Fata administering chemotherapy to people who didn't need it, essentially putting poison into their bodies and telling them that they had cancer when they didn't have cancer," said U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade. "The idea that a doctor would lie to a patient just to make money is shocking."

Fata made about $35 million as part of a Medicare fraud scheme through his practices in suburban Detroit.

Megaphone

America's natural politics: Populism - what it is & what it isn't

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My father, W.F. "High" Hightower, was a populist. Only, he didn't know it. Didn't know the word, much less the history or anything about populism's democratic ethos. My father was not philosophical, but he had a phrase that he used to express the gist of his political beliefs: "Everybody does better when everybody does better."

Before the populists of the late 1800s gave its instinctive rebelliousness a name, it had long been established as a defining trait of our national character: The 1776 rebellion was not only against King George III's government but against the corporate tyranny of such British monopolists as the East India Trading Company.

The establishment certainly doesn't celebrate the populist spirit, and our educational system avoids bothering students with our vibrant, human story of constant battles, big and small, mounted by "little people" against ... well, against the establishment. The Keepers of the Corporate Order take care to avoid even a suggestion that there is an important political pattern - a historic continuum - that connects Thomas Paine's radical democracy writings in the late 1700s to Shays' Rebellion in 1786, to strikes by mill women and carpenters in the early 1800s, to Jefferson's 1825 warning about the rising aristocracy of banks and corporations "riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman," to the launching of the women's suffrage movement at Seneca Falls in 1848, to the maverick Texans who outlawed banks in their 1845 state constitution, to the bloody and ultimately successful grassroots struggle for the abolition of slavery, and to the populist movement itself, plus the myriad rebellions that followed right into our present day.

Comment: Principles of the New Populism (the Oligarchy's Nightmare):


Bandaid

VA band-aids: Congress approves legislation to increase disability payments, give extra sick leave for veterans

disabled veteran
© Maria Sestito / The Daily News Disabled American Veterans Onslow County Chapter veteran service officer Mac Moody helps veteran Rich Zahn file a claim at the DAV office in Jacksonville.
Congress has been working on some important legislation recently that will benefit the country's service-disabled veterans.

The 2014 Veterans' Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act (S. 2258) now heads to President Obama for his signature, after the House passed the bill on Tuesday. The legislation increases the COLA for vets' disability benefits starting Dec. 1, 2014. The rate of the increase will be the same as the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security recipients. The annual COLA legislation, which the Senate approved last week, also affects the disability payments and compensation for vets' surviving spouses and children.

And on Wednesday afternoon, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved bipartisan legislation that would give disabled vets hired as federal employees access to their full year's sick leave immediately upon starting their jobs.

Comment: Anything that improves living conditions for US veterans is helpful, but it's obviously a huge band-aid covering a problem of epic proportions. The VA is busy recruiting new doctors while trying to overhaul the corrupt VA system. Considering the complete lack of empathy the psychopaths in charge have for those humans they consider 'cannon-fodder' these feeble attempts will come to naught.


Stock Down

David Stockman on the evidence of a looming market crash

david stockman financial crash
David Stockman
The Federal Reserve Wednesday reassured investors that it will hold interest rates near zero for a "considerable time" after it ends the bond-buying program known as quantitative easing in October. In response, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) closed at a new record high.

Former Director of the Office of Management and Budget and author of the book, The Great Deformation, David Stockman, has significant concerns about that very policy.

"I'm worried... that we've got the greatest bubble created by a central bank in human history," he told Yahoo Finance.

In a recent blog post, Stockman offered a handful of high-flying stocks as evidence of what he sees as "madness."
"...Twitter, is all that is required to remind us that once again markets are trading in the nosebleed section of history, rivaling even the madness of March 2000."
Behind the madness

In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Stockman blamed Fed policy for creating that madness.
"We have been shoving zero-cost money into the financial markets for 6-years running," he said. "That's the kerosene that drives speculative trading - the carry trades. That's what the gamblers use to fund their position as they move from one momentum play and trade to another."
And that, he says, is not sustainable. While Stockman believes tech stocks are especially overvalued, he warns that it's not just tech valuations that are inflated. "Everything's massively overvalued, and it's predicated on zero-cost overnight money that continues these carry trades; It can't continue."

And he still believes, as he has for some time - so far, incorrectly - that there will be a day of reckoning.
"When the trades begin to unwind because the carry cost has to normalize, you're going to have a dramatic re-pricing dislocation in these financial markets."
As Yahoo Finance's Lauren Lyster points out in the associated video, investors who heeded Stockman's advice last year would have missed out on a 28% run-up in stocks. But Stockman remains steadfast in his belief that the current Fed policy and the resultant market behavior can not continue. "I think what the Fed is doing is so unprecedented, what is happening in the markets is so unnatural," he said. "This is dangerous, combustible stuff, and I don't know when the explosion occurs - when the collapse suddenly is upon us - but when it happens, people will be happy that they got out of the way if they did."

Bandaid

Veteran's Admin recruiting new doctors by increasing pay scales

VA hospital
© Samantha SaisThe Veterans Affairs medical center in Phoenix. An acute shortage of doctors is at the heart of the falsified data here and possibly many other veterans hospitals.
The Veterans Affairs Department wants to increase the annual salaries of new physicians and dentists by up to $35,000 as part of a nationwide recruitment effort to hire more doctors and improve veterans' access to care.

The change, which the department announced Wednesday, would update existing pay tables for several categories of physicians in the Veterans Health Administration, enabling newly hired doctors to potentially earn between $20,000 and $35,000 more than the current salary ranges. The pay ranges for physicians who serve in leadership roles, including department undersecretaries and VA medical center directors, would not change. The notice outlining the new policy will be published Thursday in the Federal Register and will take effect on Nov. 30.

"We are committed to hiring more medical professionals across the country to better serve veterans and expand their access to timely, high-quality care," said VA Secretary Bob McDonald, in a statement.

Comment: If this recruitment effort does anything to improve the abysmal level of 'care' that our veterans have been receiving, then it will be worthwhile. However, that is questionable. The government seems to be good at throwing money around, while generally achieving little to improve the lives of those who have given all in support of the US psychopathic wars of terror.