Society's ChildS


Eye 2

Parents in 'house of horrors' case in California had reality TV aspirations


CBS Los Angeles
Mon, 22 Jan 2018 13:27 UTC
David Louise Turpin
© Riverside County Sheriff's DepartmentDavid and Louise Turpin
As support continues for the Perris children of one of the country's worst child abuse cases ever, reports of the parents' interest in reality TV show has surfaced.

A sign taped to the front door, apparently illustrated by neighborhood kids reads: We stand united with the Turpin children.

A source close to the investigation tells CBS News all 13 sons and daughters of David and Louise Turpin were astounded that people wanted to help them, after they received clothes and shoes. The children asked to stay together and the source said they did not ask about their parents.

Comment: The case:

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Alarm Clock

Marc Benoiff: Regulators must 'wake up to threat from tech giants'

Ben Marlow
The Telegraph
Tue, 23 Jan 2018 11:38 UTC
Mr Benioff
Mr Benioff, founder and boss of cloud computing firm Salesforce, believes the tech giants need more regulation
Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Benioff has compared the current crisis of trust facing the tech giants to the financial crisis of a decade ago, urging regulators to wake up to the threat from Google, Facebook, and the other dominant firms.

The outspoken entrepreneur accused some of the industry's most influential bosses of "abdicating responsibility" and being ignorant to how powerful and sophisticated they had become. Regulators now had "have no choice" but to intervene, he said.

"We are in a new world. A decade ago, you had the banks talking about collaterised debt obligations and credit default swaps, saying they were great for the economy but regulators weren't paying attention. The government needs to come in and point 'True North'," Mr Benioff said at a panel session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
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Heart - Black

Mom of the year: Swedish feminist hushes up refugee sexual assault against own daughter


Sputnik
Wed, 24 Jan 2018 13:18 UTC
women with hands over eyes
A #Metoo feminist and a mother allegedly engaged in a relationship with an Afghan refugee has refused to report his sexual assault on her preteen daughter on the grounds that it would lead to his expulsion from Sweden.

The middle-aged woman, who works at a migrant home, reportedly started a relationship with one of the "refugee children" and allowed him to move into her place. The cohabitation ended with her fosterling sexually attacking her 12-year-old daughter. However, the woman refused to report the assault and allowed the culprit to stay, the news outlet Fria Tider reported.
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Clock

Doomsday panic in Hawaii: Threat of nuclear holocaust more looming than believed

Carl Boggs
CounterPunch
Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:01 UTC
Hawaii
© LASZLO ILYES | CC BY 2.0
When Daniel Ellsberg visited Los Angeles in mid-December, promoting his important new book The Doomsday Machine, his central message was that the threat of nuclear holocaust was more looming than generally believed. The American people have been lulled to sleep, distracted by endless media and political spectacles, while busy warmakers keep refining their insane nuclear blueprints that, once actualized, could incinerate several hundred million people in a matter of hours, if not minutes. More than 70 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pentagon elites still theorize and fantasize about the unthinkable, their demented plans far removed from the realm of political debate or even public awareness.

Could it be that President Trump's nuclear brinkmanship over North Korea - his bellicose promise to annihilate an entire country - not to mention his escalating threats against Iran, has pushed the U.S. (and the world) closer to something like a Doomsday moment? Have we reached the point where living on the edge of nuclear catastrophe has become thoroughly normalized? Could Ellsberg's warnings be more prescient than even he might be prepared to believe?

Exactly one month after Ellsberg's talk, on a quiet Saturday morning, the state of Hawaii awoke to the most startling text message: "Ballistic Missile Threat Inbound to Hawaii. Seek Immediate Shelter. This is Not a Drill." At that moment, I happened to be in Honolulu for a film conference with my girlfriend, when tranquil life on the islands instantly turned chaotic. People scattered frenetically, mostly without logic or purpose or hope. Where to go? If this turned out to be one of Kim Jong Un's powerful ICBMs, it could be over in 20 minutes. Repair to a shelter? None exist. Go to the basement? Sure suicide. Find a car or taxi and head for the hills? No time.

Comment: For more on the recent false missile threat in Hawaii, see:

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Light Sabers

Scientists go ape after Indian minister dubs Darwin theory 'wrong'


RT
Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
Chimpanzee
© Jon Nazca / Reuters
Three Indian science academies have rebuked the country's human resource development minister after he questioned Darwin theory, saying that no one ever saw "a man turning into an ape."

Satyapal Singh caused quite a stir last week after challenging Charles Darwin's evolution theory as "scientifically wrong."

"Since man is seen on Earth, he has always been a man," claimed the minister, who has a PhD in chemistry. Given that "nobody saw a man turning into an ape," Singh suggested a change in the curriculum.

Comment: On his 200th Birthday, Darwin's Theory Still in Controversy

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Pirates

Illegal immigrant activists 'outraged' at Democrats after amnesty-or-shutdown fail

John Binder
Breitbart
Wed, 24 Jan 2018 11:59 UTC
DACA illegal immigrant protest
Illegal alien activists say they are "outraged" after Senate Democrats did not leave the federal government shut down in order to force a deal whereby millions of illegal aliens are given amnesty at the expense of American citizens.

In a protest outside of the U.S Capitol, open borders advocates and illegal alien activists slammed Democrats after they originally shut down the federal government to push amnesty for illegal aliens, but then caved to President Trump and voted to reopen the government without an amnesty attached to the funding bill.

Illegal aliens shielded from deportation by the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program with the open borders group "United We Dream," which is funded by globalist billionaire George Soros, said they were entitled to an immediate amnesty before the federal government was reopened.

Comment: Further reading:

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Pistol

Sweden sees 'massive' increase in deadly shootings over recent years


Sputnik
Wed, 24 Jan 2018 11:59 UTC
Sweden police cops
© REUTERS/ Johan Nilsson/TT News Agency
Despite its traditional reputation as a safe haven, Sweden has seen a dramatic increase in deadly shootings in recent years. Swedish authorities have decided this is due to the proliferation of guns, and are preparing a new arms amnesty, the fourth in just two decades; it held the last one in 2013.

The number of deadly shootings in Sweden has surged in recent years. In 2006, only eight of them occurred throughout the country, as opposed to 43 in 2017, indicating a more than five-fold increase; there were twice as many shootings last year as there were in 2016.

Police officers themselves testify to a "tougher climate" in criminal circles, where members are described as being more "easily offended" than they used to be. The effect of the shootings is comparable to a spiral effect, in which criminals constantly resort to increasingly tougher violence in order not to appear as weaklings.

Comment: Further reading: Sweden: Crimes on record high years after refugee crisis

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House

Russian regional authorities buy apartment for man who rescued occupants of collapsed house


TASS
Wed, 24 Jan 2018 11:55 UTC
A wall of a multi-storey brick house in the town of Yurevets collapsed on the morning of December 22
Russian apartment collapse
© Vladimir Smirnov/TASS
Authorities in the Ivanovo Region have purchased a new flat for Vladimir Galochkin who rescued the residents of a building that had caved in on December 22 in the town of Yurevets, in the Ivanovo Region, the regional administration's press service reported on Wednesday.

A wall of a multi-storey brick house in Yurevets collapsed on the morning of December 22. No injuries were reported, because Galochkin noticed a crack in the wall, woke up the neighbors, and got them to leave the building. The man himself told TASS that he managed to take the last house dweller, an elderly woman, out of the building seconds before it was reduced to rubble. The local authorities also awarded him a Medal of Merit for the Ivanovo Region.
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Attention

Social media bosses don't use social media to avoid getting 'high on their own supply'

Alex Hern
The Guardian
Tue, 23 Jan 2018 12:27 UTC
Developers of platforms such as Facebook have admitted that they were designed to be addictive. Should we be following the executives' example and going cold turkey - and is it even possible for mere mortals?

social media1
Mark Zuckerberg doesn't use Facebook like you or me. The 33-year-old chief executive has a team of 12 moderators dedicated to deleting comments and spam from his page, according to Bloomberg. He has a "handful" of employees who help him write his posts and speeches and a number of professional photographers who take perfectly stage-managed pictures of him meeting veterans in Kentucky, small-business owners in Missouri or cheesesteak vendors in Philadelphia.

Facebook's locked-down nature means mere mortals can't see the private posts on Zuckerberg's timeline, but it is hard to imagine him getting into arguments about a racist relative's post of an anti-immigration meme. And it is not just Zuckerberg. None of the company's key executives has a "normal" Facebook presence. You can't add them as friends, they rarely post publicly and they keep private some information that the platform suggests be made public by default, such as the number of friends they have.

Comment: Designed to exploit people's susceptibility to addictive behaviors, it's no wonder they avoid using social media. See also:

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Syringe

Philadelphia approves 'supervised injection' of heroin, other drugs amid opioid crisis


RT
Wed, 24 Jan 2018 11:36 UTC
opiods
© Andy Clark / Reuters
Officials in Philadelphia are moving to open safe-injection sites for drugs like fentanyl and heroin as the opioid crisis persists. But the state attorney general insists there's "no safe way to inject" the highly addictive drugs.

Officials in Philadelphia announced on Tuesday that they would encourage the creation of addiction engagement sites that would oversee medically-supervised consumption of drugs, WCAU reports.

Such a center is called a safe-injection site, and they are staffed with medical professionals who can immediately respond in the event of an overdose. The sites also provide critical access to clean medical supplies, such as needles, along with addiction rehabilitation services, according to WCAU.
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