Society's ChildS


War Whore

Israel declares another 72 hour ceasefire in order to reload

Amy Teibel and Saud Abu Ramadan
Bloodberg News
Mon, 04 Aug 2014 18:05 UTC
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© Said Khatib/AFP/Getty ImagesSmoke billows from buildings following an Israeli air strike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
Israel and the Palestinians have agreed to a 72-hour truce in the Gaza Strip to take effect today, the latest effort to end four weeks of fighting.

Under the Egyptian-brokered accord, hostilities will cease at 8 a.m. local time with no conditions attached, Israel's Channel 2 television station said. Hamas, the Islamist group that rules Gaza, has accepted the truce, spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in an e-mail.

While Israel hasn't sent a delegation to the Egyptian capital, it will consider going if militants abide by the cease-fire, an official said on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the matter. If quiet is maintained throughout the 72 hours, the Israeli military won't have to remain in Gaza, he said.

The Gaza offensive, which Israel says is intended to destroy the rockets that militants fire at the Jewish state and the tunnels they use to launch attacks, has been the deadliest in the territory since Israeli settlers and soldiers left in 2005. At least 1,868 Palestinians have been killed, many of them civilians, according to Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qedra. Sixty-seven people have been killed on the Israeli side, 64 of them soldiers.
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Evil Rays

Israel "will drown in the blood they shed" - Turkey's Prime Minister

Dasha Afanasieva and Humeyra Pamuk
Reuters
Sun, 03 Aug 2014 17:58 UTC
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© REUTERS/Murad SezerA supporter of Turkey's Prime Minister and presidential candidate Tayyip Erdogan waves flags during an election rally in Istanbul
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan accused Israel on Sunday of deliberately killing Palestinian mothers and warned it would "drown in the blood it sheds", pulling foreign policy to centre stage as a presidential race enters its final week.

Addressing hundreds of thousands of supporters at his biggest rally so far ahead of the Aug. 10 election, Erdogan again likened Israel's actions to those of Hitler, comments that have already led Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accuse him of anti-Semitism and drawn rebuke from Washington.

"Just like Hitler, who sought to establish a race free of all faults, Israel is chasing after the same target," Erdogan told the sea of cheering supporters at an Istanbul arena.

"They kill women so that they will not give birth to Palestinians; they kill babies so that they won't grow up; they kill men so they can't defend their country ... They will drown in the blood they shed," he said.

Erdogan's comments drew a sharp rebuke from a Jewish leader in the United States, who called the Turkish prime minister "the Joseph Goebbels of our time," referring to Hitler's chief propagandist.

"The time has come for world leaders to say that he has now crossed a line, and has crossed a line into the area of anti-Semitism and the world won't tolerate it," Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, told Reuters.
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Whistle

Whistleblowing will get you a dank basement office at the VA

David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post
Sun, 03 Aug 2014 17:05 UTC
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© Samantha SaisPaula Pedene, a former chief spokeswoman for the Phoenix Veterans Affairs hospital, works in the basement of the hospital, where her desk was relocated amid a misconduct investigation after she blew the whistle on the hospital’s director.
On her 71st workday in the basement, Paula Pedene had something fun to look forward to. She had an errand to run, up on the first floor.

"Today, I get to go get the papers. Exciting!" she said. "I get to go upstairs and, you know, see people."

The task itself was no thrill: Retrieve the morning's newspapers and bring them back to the library of the Phoenix Veterans Affairs hospital. The pleasure was in the journey. Down a long, sunlit hallway. Back again, seeing friends in the bustle of the hospital's main floor.

Then, Pedene got back in the elevator and hit "B." The day's big excitement was over. It was 7:40 a.m.

"I will not be able to do this forever," Pedene said later that day.

Pedene, 56, is the former chief spokeswoman for this VA hospital. Now, she is living in a bureaucrat's urban legend. After complaining to higher-ups about mismanagement at this hospital, she has been reassigned - indefinitely - to a desk in the basement.

In the Phoenix case, investigators are still trying to determine whether Pedene was punished because of her earlier complaints. If she is, that would make her part of a long, ugly tradition in the federal bureaucracy - workers sent to a cubicle in exile.

In the past, whistleblowers have had their desks moved to break rooms, broom closets and basements. It's a clever punishment, good-government activists say, that exploits a gray area in the law.
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Pistol

Family of 5, 3 children and 2 adults, found shot to death in Virginia home


newser
Mon, 04 Aug 2014 17:17 UTC
virginia family shooting
In this Aug. 4, 2014 photo released by the Culpeper County Sheriff's Office, police investigate the home where a family of five was found shot to death Sunday night, in Culpeper, Va
Police say a family of five, including three children, has been found shot to death at a home in Virginia. The other victims were two adults, both 35 years old; a family member discovered the bodies inside a house just outside Culpeper, a town of about 15,000 people 70 miles southwest of Washington, according to a detective with the Culpeper County Sheriff's Office. Deputies arrived at the scene around 10pm yesterday, after the relative found the bodies, and the shootings are being treated as homicide. Another family of five was found dead inside their Maine home last month.
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Alarm Clock

US cities' crackdown on homeless people is 'close to ethnic cleansing'

David Usbourne
Independent.co.uk
Sun, 03 Aug 2014 16:57 UTC
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David Usborne reports on an insidious campaign to drive out vagrants by a combination of police harassment and increasingly draconian new ordinances.
His face riven with lines forged by years on the streets, Gil reaches into the top pocket of his shirt and fishes out a wedge of grimy papers. These are the precious records of his life, documents the rest of us keep in a filing cabinet at home. Eventually he finds what he is looking for, a yellow slip that looks like a parking ticket

That, as it happens, is about right, although Gil is not a man of many possessions and certainly not a car. He does, however, have size 13 shoes. In his hands is a police citation written a few weeks ago when an officer found him sitting on the kerb with his feet touching the road. "Feet in Roadway Disturbing Traffic," it reads.
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Laptop

Culture of Intimidation: Hotel charges $500 from security deposit if guests write bad reviews on internet

Mara Siegler
NY Post
Mon, 04 Aug 2014 16:56 UTC
hotel
© Union St Guest HouseA room at the Union Street Guest House
A hotel in tony Hudson, NY, has found a novel way to keep negative reviews off Yelp and other sites - fine any grousing guests.

The Union Street Guest House, near Catskills estates built by the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, charges couples who book weddings at the venue $500 for every bad review posted online by their guests.

"Please know that despite the fact that wedding couples love Hudson and our inn, your friends and families may not," reads an online policy. "If you have booked the inn for a wedding or other type of event . . . and given us a deposit of any kind . . . there will be a $500 fine that will be deducted from your deposit for every negative review . . . placed on any internet site by anyone in your party."

If you take down the nasty review, you'll get your money back.
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Key

The U.S. power grid has more blackouts than any other country

Tara Dodrill
Govtslaves.info
Sat, 02 Aug 2014 00:54 UTC
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© Govtslaves.info
The United States power grid has more blackouts than any other country in the developed world, according to new data that spotlights the country's aging and unreliable electric system.

The data by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) shows that Americans face more power grid failures lasting at least an hour than residents of other developed nations.

And it's getting worse.

Going back three decades, the US grid loses power 285 percent more often than it did in 1984, when record keeping began, International Business Times reported. The power outages cost businesses in the United States as much as $150 billion per year, according to the Department of Energy.

Customers in Japan lose power for an average of 4 minutes per year, as compared to customers in the US upper Midwest (92 minutes) and upper Northwest (214), University of Minnesota Professor Massoud Amin told the Times. Amin is director of the Technological Leadership Institute at the school.

Comment: Homeland Security seeks student hackers to help counter cyberthreats

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Alarm Clock

New evidence Texas man was wrongly put to death in 2004

Maurice Possley, The Marshall Project
Washingtonpost.com
Sun, 03 Aug 2014 10:26 UTC
Willinghams
© Courtesy of the Cameron Todd Willingham familyCameron Todd Willingham with his wife, Stacy, and three daughters.
For more than 20 years, the prosecutor who convicted Cameron Todd Willingham of murdering his three young daughters has insisted that the authorities made no deals to secure the testimony of the jailhouse informer who told jurors that Willingham confessed the crime to him.

Since Willingham was executed in 2004, officials have continued to defend the account of the informer, Johnny E. Webb, even as a series of scientific experts have discredited the forensic evidence that Willingham might have deliberately set the house fire in which his toddlers were killed.

But now new evidence has revived questions about Willingham's guilt: In taped interviews, Webb, who has previously both recanted and affirmed his testimony, gives his first detailed account of how he lied on the witness stand in return for efforts by the former prosecutor, John H. Jackson, to reduce Webb's prison sentence for robbery and to arrange thousands of dollars in support from a wealthy Corsicana rancher. Newly uncovered letters and court files show that Jackson worked diligently to intercede for Webb after his testimony and to coordinate with the rancher, Charles S. Pearce Jr., to keep the mercurial informer in line.
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Hearts

Children of Gaza: The psychological toll of war trauma is too much to bear


Ma'an News Agency
Mon, 04 Aug 2014 10:13 UTC
children of Gaza
© Agence France-Presse/Mahmud HamsDisplaced Palestinian children take shelter at a United Nations school in the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, on Aug. 2, 2014
Ask any child in Gaza to do a drawing and the resulting picture is likely to be a house being bombed by a fighter plane.

In the strife-torn Palestinian enclave, thousands of children are suffering from the trauma of war but resources to help them are scarce.

At a school in the northern town of Jabaliya which has been converted into a refuge, specialist teachers hand out paper and colored crayons to a motley band of shaken up children, asking them to draw whatever is in their head.

Jamal Diab, a nine-year old with red flecks in his brown hair, draws his dead grandfather. Under the drawing, he writes in Arabic: "I am sad because of the martyrs."

"A few days ago, aircraft bombarded our house. We had to leave quickly and leave everything behind. It was dangerous," the lad breathes timidly as he shows his drawing.

Tiny seven-year old Bara Marouf shows a drawing of his grandfather without any legs. He was seriously wounded in an air strike.

Comment: Any child born in Gaza before 2009, and who has not been murdered by the Israhellish army, has lived through 3 wars by now. Just let this sink in for a while...

Gaza's children haunted by nightmare of war (video)

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Yoda

Hail also to Ken Loach who slams BBC's pro-Israel coverage of Gaza war


Press TV
Mon, 04 Aug 2014 09:40 UTC
Ken Loach
Internationally-renowned filmmaker Ken Loach
Internationally-renowned filmmaker, Ken Loach, has slammed the state-run BBC for its pro-Israel bias in the coverage of the ongoing war on the Gaza Strip.

Loach, who has participated in an ongoing occupation campaign in front of the BBC headquarters in the British southwestern city of Bristol, slammed BBC policies, saying, "We should note that many at the BBC, including senior staff, are embarrassed by the broadcaster's coverage that has an obvious pro-Israel bias."
"They don't put the views of Palestinians to the Israelis during interviews, while the use of language about Gazans is pejorative and the war crimes being committed against them ignored.... They're not 'militants' or 'terrorists,' they're 'resistance fighters,'" he said, adding, "It's the BBC, we own it, so it should be answerable."

Comment: It is past time we took the media back from the psychopathic enablers and apologists who call themselves "journalists"!

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