Society's ChildS


Megaphone

50 years after 'I have a dream' the struggle continues


It's been 50 years since iconic civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream Speech." Although a lot of progress has been made, the struggle continues. Linda So reports.

Comment: To watch recordings of Martin Luther King's speeches and understand who killed him and why, watch the unique historical documentary Evidence of Revision.


Heart - Black

Bamboozled! Life-saving transplant denied, health insurance cancelled over 26-cent shortfall

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© Alex Remnick/The Star-LedgerSandy Marujo's cousin Sergio Branco has leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant. The family waged a battle to have Branco's COBRA insurance reinstated. It was cancelled because of a 26-cent shortfall on an insurance payment.
Twenty-six cents almost cost Sergio Branco his life.

Twenty-six cents.

Most of us could scrape that up from under our couch cushions or on the floor of a car.

Sergio Branco has 26 cents, too. The question was whether or not he would be permitted to pay it.

Branco, a 33-year-old father of three, was a truck driver for Russell Reid, a Keasbey-based waste-management company.

"In his spare time, he would play with his children, liked having barbecues and people over for gatherings," his cousin Sandy Marujo said. "He is a big kid at heart."

In January, Branco wasn't himself. He didn't feel right.

"He complained about bone pains and being extremely fatigued," Marujo said. "He decided to go to the emergency room."

The Edison man underwent several tests, which indicated he had a very weak immune system. It could be leukemia, the doctors said.

A few days later, a bone marrow test confirmed the diagnosis: acute myeloid leukemia. The disease, left untreated, travels fast and can kill within months, or even weeks, of diagnosis.

Branco started a series of treatments including chemotherapy and transfusions, and he took three months off from work under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).

Doctors soon said he'd need a bone marrow transplant to prolong his life. They found a 10-point match - the best possible match. The transplant and related care for the disease would cost more than $500,000.

Good thing the family had health insurance through Branco's job, they thought.

But when his three-month leave under FMLA ended, Russell Reid fired him, Branco's family said.

Comment: There was no "change of heart" on the part of Russell Reid, just the fear of a lawsuit and a lot of bad publicity! Psychopaths have no feelings.


X

New Brunswick python pet shop owner had blood on his hands

barthe brothers
Noah Barthe, left, and Connor Barthe pose in this undated photo posted on the Facebook page of their mother, Mandy Trecartin. (Facebook)
A reptile store owner under investigation for criminal negligence in the deaths of two boys after a large python escaped its enclosure had blood on his hands and shorts when police arrived at the scene in Campbellton, N.B., according to newly released court documents.

Jean-Claude Savoie was distressed and pacing outside Reptile Ocean on Aug. 5, when he said four-year-old Noah Barthe and his six-year-old brother Connor were dead, police state in the documents.

Inside, police found the boys' bodies on a mattress in an apartment above the store, where they had been sleeping.

An African rock python kept in the apartment escaped its enclosure, slithered through the ventilation system and asphyxiated the boys, according to autospy reports.

Ambulance

Tour bus sideswipes car and then overturns along California freeway

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© Leo Jarzomb / APEmergency personnel respond to the scene where a tour bus overturned on the eastbound Interstate 210 in Irwindale, Calif. about 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, on Thursday morning, Aug. 22, 2013. The California Highway Patrol says the driver of the bus carrying gamblers to an Indian casino east of Los Angeles made an unsafe lane change, causing the crash that injured more than 50 people on board
A tour bus carrying gamblers to an Indian casino overturned along a Southern California freeway after sideswiping a car, injuring more than 50 people on board Thursday, authorities said.

The driver made an "unsafe lane change" to the left, struck the car "and then overcorrected to the right," California Highway Patrol Officer Elizabeth Van Valkenburgh said. The skidding bus careened through a chain-link fence and down a dirt embankment, where it came to rest on its right side between the freeway and railroad tracks.

Ambulances and helicopters converged on Interstate 210 in Irwindale, about 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, where firefighters laid out red, yellow and green tarps to evaluate the injured.

Fifty-two people, mostly elderly, suffered minor injuries, according to doctors and fire officials. At least one passenger reported wearing a seatbelt, Van Valkenburgh said.

Some of the passengers were able to get out on their own, while others needed to be rescued by firefighters or drivers who stopped to help, said Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Brian Jordan.

Comment: This is eerily similar to another casino bound tour bus crash that occured earlier this year:

Two killed, dozens injured in bus rollover on Bush Turnpike in Texas


Black Cat

Creepy preacher wanders around Walmart with assault rifle to protest Texas concealed gun law

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If you go shopping in Huntsville, Texas, you're likely to run into a local preacher with an assault rifle slung across his back. Beginning last week, Pastor Terry Holcomb started posting videos of himself wandering into local businesses with an AR-15 Bushmaster rifle - the same weapon used to kill 20 children and six adults in the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting.

In one video, Holcomb wanders about a Walmart for several minutes before he is approached by two store employees and asked to leave. He argues briefly with those two employees until a manager approaches and threatens to call the police if he does not exit the store. Although Holcomb then agrees to leave the store, he refuses a request to stop videoing the engagement - at one point, his camera man claims the recording is for Holcomb's "safety."

Arrow Down

Imagine: Canadian dentist hopes to clone John Lennon using tooth DNA

John Lennon
© BBC/Brian Duffy/Crackit ProductionsGive teeth a chance: John Lennon.
A Canadian dentist is hoping to clone John Lennon using DNA from one of the singer's rotten teeth. Michael Zuk, who bought Lennon's molar at a 2011 auction, has begun sequencing the former Beatle's DNA - the first step in a process set out by scientists who propose to clone a woolly mammoth.

"Many Beatles fans remember where they were when they heard John Lennon was shot. I hope they also live to hear the day he was given another chance," Zuk said. The tooth has already been couriered to an unnamed US lab where scientists are "considering ways to extract [its] genetic code". "I am nervous and excited at the possibility that we will be able to fully sequence John Lennon's DNA," Zuk said. "With researchers working on ways to clone mammoths, the same technology certainly could make human cloning a reality."

Boat

Russian Navy Hovercraft Rams Into Crowded Beach


Moscow - A Russian Zubr ("Bison") hovercraft, the largest type of military hovercraft in the world, on Sunday ploughed into a Kaliningrad Region beach filled with dozens of sunbathers, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported.

The daily quoted the Russian Defense Ministry's press service as saying the landing was part of a routine exercise on ministry property and "what people were doing at the beach on the territory of a military base is unclear."

Zubr-class hovercraft can simultaneously carry several tanks and up to 500 troops. The landing, during which marines reportedly ran out and cordoned off the vehicle, occurred in the town of Mechnikovo, in Russia's western-most region.

Question

Utilities Plant explosion in Cedar Falls, Iowa


An explosion in Cedar Falls was reported Monday morning around 10 a.m. at a Cedar Falls Utilities electric generating station, destroying half of the building and sending shock waves throughout Cedar Falls.

The explosion happened at the generating station at 2602 West 27th Street in Cedar Falls at around 10 a.m.

Two CFU employees -- Steve Balthazor and Kevin DeSerano -- were inside at the time, according to Betty Zeman, CFU Marketing Manager. They were treated at the scene and declined further medical attention.

The workers were doing a routine test of the combustion turbine at the time, according to CFU officials.

"What was happening today is a routine test of one of the gas turbines that we do annually. So the employees who were working this morning were doing a routine start up of the turbine for testing," said Zeman.

CFU officials are still investigating the cause of the explosion.

Schilling said he was inside City Hall at the time and felt that building shake. Emergency crews got calls from all over Cedar Falls about buildings shaking, they said.

Officials say the explosion, which damaged about half of the station, will not affect CFU's ability to generate power to the city.

Pistol

Police taser 'suicidal' man as he hangs from the edge of a freeway overpass... as bystanders tell them to 'let him go'

  • Footage captured witnesses to the incident near Fresno, California
An amateur cameraman captured the moment that police tasered an apparently suicidal man as he hung from the edge of a freeway overpass, sending him plummeting towards the ground.

Footage of the incident shows the man falling about 15ft from the overpass near Fresno, California, into an air cushion set up to break his fall.

But even though the officers seem to have saved the man from killing himself, observers who are out of shot are heard saying: 'There is no denying it. This is becoming a police state.'

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Suicide attempt? Police and firefighters surround a man hanging from a freeway overpass near Fresno

People 2

8 Reasons young Americans don't fight back: How the U.S crushed youth resistance

Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.

Young Americans - even more so than older Americans - appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it.
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A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans "Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?" Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don't believe it will be around to benefit them.

How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?