Society's ChildS


Key

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

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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


Alarm Clock

New evidence Texas man was wrongly put to death in 2004

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.

Hearts

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

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)


Yoda

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

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"!


Footprints

Over 400 Ukrainian troops abandon Kiev's war to cross into Russia for refuge

Kiev troops
© RIA Novosti/Yulia Nasulina
More than 400 Ukrainian troops have been allowed to cross into Russia after requesting sanctuary. It's the largest, but not the first, case of desertion into Russia by Ukrainian soldiers involved in Kiev's military crackdown in the east of the country.

According to the Rostov Region's border guard spokesman Vasily Malaev, a total of 438 soldiers, including 164 Ukrainian border guards, have been allowed into Russia on Sunday night.

One of the Ukrainians was seriously injured on his arrival in Russia. He was taken to the hospital for surgery, the officials added.

The other Ukrainian soldiers have been housed in a tent camp deployed near the checkpoint via which they entered Russian territory. The Russian border guards are providing them with food and bedding.

Life Preserver

Ferry with 250 on board sinks in river in Bangladesh

Bangladesh ferry sinks
Bangladeshi rescue workers search for dead bodies inside a sunken ferry on the river Meghna in Munshiganj district, some 50 kilometers south of Dhaka, May 17, 2014.
A passenger ferry with about 250 passengers on board has capsized on a river in central Bangladesh, officials say.

The incident took place on Monday when the overloaded M.V. Pinak was crossing the River Padma in Munshiganj district around 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of the capital Dhaka, said Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority Chairman Samsuddoha Khondaker.

Officials say 12 bodies have been recovered so far. They added that 50 passengers had been rescued as well but many were feared trapped or drowned.

Pistol

"No baby deserves to die like that": Community mourns 3-year-old baby killed by stray bullet - What about Palestinian babies?

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3-year-old Tynirah Borum
A 22-year-old man has been arrested and charged with murder in the shooting death of a 3-year-old girl who was sitting on a front porch when an argument broke out, police said Saturday.

Douglas Woods, of Philadelphia, has been charged with murder, three counts of attempted murder, aggravated assault and other charges, according to Officer Tanya Little.

Three-year-old Tynirah Borum was shot in the chest by a stray bullet while getting her hair braided at about 9:40 p.m. Friday in the Grays Ferry section of the city, according to police. Officers put her in their patrol car and rushed her to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead less than an hour later.

Three adults were injured, one critically.

"She was everything to us," Renee Bradford, a friend of Tynirah's mother, told WCAU-TV. "She didn't deserve this. She was simply trying to get her hair done. For her to get shot in the chest? She's a baby. No baby deserves to die like that."

Comment: "She didn't deserve this. She was simply trying to get her hair done. For her to get shot in the chest? She's a baby. No baby deserves to die like that."

The same can be said about more than 300 Palestinian babies who died since the start of the latest genocide by Israel in Gaza. They were not just killed by stray bullets. They were wilfully murdered in cold blood and then completely forgotten by the mainstream media. What about them?


USA

Why does the U.S. government have an 'Office of Population Affairs'?

Population Control
© Public DomainPopulation Control.

Did you know that the federal government has an "Office of Population Affairs"? I didn't realize this either until someone sent me a link to their website. The Office of Population Affairs operates under the umbrella of the Department of Health & Human Services, and it might as well be called "The Office of Population Control" because almost everything on the website is about controlling or reducing the size of the population.

On the site you can find information and resources about abortion, female sterilization, male sterilization and a vast array of contraceptive choices. There is even a search engine where you can find a local "family planning clinic" where you can get rid of any "unintended pregnancy" that may be bothering you. Frankly, it sickens me to think that my tax dollars are being used to fund all of this.

But the Office of Population Affairs is not just pro-abortion and pro-sterilization. On the page describing their "purpose and mission", they actually admit that "population research" and studying "population growth" are part of their core work. The following is an excerpt from the official OPA website...

Title X is the only federal program dedicated solely to the provision of family planning and related preventive services. The Office of Population Affairs (OPA) administers the Title X program and serves as the focal point to advise the Secretary and the Assistant Secretary for Health on a wide range of reproductive health topics, including family planning, adolescent pregnancy, sterilization and other population issues.

Calculator

11,472,000 Americans have left the workforce since Obama was elected

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© APJob seekers wait in line at a job fair in South Los Angeles.
11.4 million Americans age 16 and over have left the workforce since President Obama took office in January 2009, according to data released today from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

In July 2014, there were 92,001,000 Americans, 16 and over, who were classified as "not in the labor force," meaning they not only did not have a job, but they didn't actively seek one in the last four weeks.

This number has increased by 11,472,000 since January 2009, when the number of Americans not in the labor force was 80,529,000.

The number of Americans not in the labor force dropped slightly in July, down 119,000 from the 92,120,000 Americans not in the labor force in June.

The participation rate, which measures the percentage of the civilian non-institutional population that participated in the labor force by either having a job or actively seeking one, increased from 62.8 percent in June to 62.9 percent in July.

Stop

Essential items you had no idea the world was running out of

In news that will chill you to your very core, the world is running out of antibiotics - meaning that going into hospital for a simple procedure could soon become deadly. England's chief medical officer Professor Dame Sally Davies has warned of the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections, noting there is only one drug left which effectively treats gonorrhea. "There is a broken market model for making new antibiotics, so it's an empty pipeline", she said. "There will not be new antibiotics to come."
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© Mercola
The world will run out of seafood by 2048 if we continue to fish at current rates, according to a 2006 study. Greenpeace estimates that 63 per cent of global fish stocks are currently over-fished and has called for "urgent action" to replenish our oceans.