Society's ChildS


Whistle

Banking whistleblower tells committee he is relying on friends for food

Jonathan Sugarman
Jonathan Sugarman
A former high-flying bank executive who exposed alleged law-breaking in the industry a year before the crash is relying on friends for food, he has told a parliamentary watchdog.

Jonathan Sugarman said his life had been "utterly destroyed" because he did "the right thing" in trying to uphold the law in his role as a risk manager for Unicredit Ireland, the Irish arm of Italy's biggest lender.

Quenelle

Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai: Pakistan to blame for its own 'bad name'

Malala Yousafzai
© Darren Ornitz / ReutersYousafzai made the comments in a Facebook video.
Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai hit out at Pakistan following the lynching of a university student accused of blasphemy. Mashal Khan was stripped naked and beaten to death with planks on a campus in the city of Mardin after a reported religious debate.

"No one is maligning the name of your country or religion...we ourselves are bringing a bad name to our country and religion," Yousafzai said in a video posted to Facebook following a conversation with Khan's father.


Stop

Arkansas judge halts eight state executions after drug supplier protests use of lethal drug for executions

Arizona Department of Corrections
© ReutersArizona Department of Corrections
As many as eight state executions scheduled to begin next week in rapid succession may not go ahead as planned, as Arkansas has been blocked from using a drug obtained from McKesson Corporation for lethal use.

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen issued a temporary restraining order Friday preventing Arkansas from using the drug vecuronium bromide "until ordered otherwise by this Court,"according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, after the supplier told the court it was not sold to the state for executions.

The retail pharmaceutical distributor McKesson said in a statement Thursday night that it complained to the state about the plans to lethally inject the drug, and that Arkansas said it would return the drug. McKesson claims it issued a refund but never received its drug back, the Democrat-Gazette reported.

Syringe

America's deadly drug abuse epidemic rages on

drug abuse
The fact that the United States is losing its desperate battle against such deadly drugs as heroin and fentanyl has already been reported by various media sources, including prominent publications like Economist.

Last February, in his address to members of the US Congress, US President Donald Trump promised to put an end to America's "terrible drug epidemic." However, the goal of pulling the plug on the scourge of opioid abuse in America is looking more challenging by the day. To some extent, this challenge is being aggravated by the fact that drug abuse has been transformed into a form of business that has already become the fastest booming sector of the US economy. As for the government itself, they've been reluctant to take any decisive actions so far.

The fact that drug money are not just poisoning US business circles, but political ones as well, has recently manifested itself in the forced resignation of six US diplomats employed by the US Embassy in Afghanistan on grounds of possession of illegal drugs, Associated Press reports. Without a doubt, this will casts a dark shadow on every US official operating in Afghanistan, since there's ever increasing number of reports that America's "war on drugs" is only making the problem much, much worse.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the year 2015 alone more than 52,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, which translates into one death every ten minutes. Approximately 33,000 of these fatal overdoses—nearly two-thirds of them—were from opioids, including prescription painkillers, and heroin.

Comment: For more on the scope of this epidemic see:


Eye 1

Woman sentenced to three life terms after torturing granddaughter while dressed as a witch

witch
© Ints Kalnins / ReutersFILE PHOTO
An Oklahoma City woman has been sentenced to three consecutive life terms behind bars for physically abusing and scaring her seven-year-old granddaughter while dressed as a witch.

Fifty-one-year-old Geneva Robinson pleaded guilty to five counts of felony child abuse. She admitted to scratching the girl's neck, hitting her hand with a rolling pin, striking her in the face, and cutting her hair while she slept, the Oklahoman reports.

The girl was kicked, hit, whipped, burned and "repeatedly tortured," Assistant District Attorney Merydith Easter told the judge. The victim was also told that witches and creatures lived in the attic.

Boat

7 die in boat mishap, 136 missing

bodies being evacuated
Dead bodies being evacuated after a boat mishap
No fewer than seven people have died and seven hospitalized in Ngaski Local Government Area of Kebbi when a boat carrying 150 passengers returning from Malali Market capsized along River Niger.

The Coordinator of National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), in-charge of Sokoto, Kebbi and Zamfara States, Alhaji Sulaiman Muhammad, confirmed this in Ngaski on Saturday.

Family

Homeschooled children in Buffalo, NY taken by government, returned to mother after two months

Child protection services
Back in early February, two elementary school aged children in New York were snatched by the government because their mother dared to opt to homeschool them.

Last November, Kiarre Harris withdrew her children from school because she felt they deserved a better education than the system could provide.

"I felt that the district was failing my children and that's when I made the decision to homeschool," she told WKBW.

Newspaper

8-limbed baby undergoes successful 3-stage surgery in India

Gufran Ali
© Money SHARMA / AFP Iraqi mother Gufran Ali(L) gestures as she holds her eight month old son Karam during a press conference at a hospital in Noida on April 14, 2017.
An Iraqi baby boy born with eight limbs has successfully undergone surgery to bring him back to normal. Doctors removed his extra arms and legs, including those protruding from his stomach.

Surgeons at the Jaypee Hospital in the city of Noida completed a three-stage operation to remove the seven-month-old boy's extra limbs. The infant, named Karam, suffered from an extremely rare condition called polymelia, which affects one in a million infants.

Attention

Jeruselum: British woman stabbed to death by Palestinian on Good Friday

stretcher
© Magen David Adom / Twitter
Hannah Bladon, a 21-year-old British exchange student was fatally stabbed in Jerusalem on Friday afternoon, reportedly by a Palestinian man with a history of mental illness and sexual abuse, who had recently been released from a psychiatric facility. The suspect has been apprehended.

"Radical Islamic terrorism is striking world capitals. Regretfully, terrorism struck today in Israel's capital - Jerusalem," said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a statement. "A Palestinian terrorist murdered in cold blood... a British citizen. In the name of all the People of Israel, I send my condolences to the family of the victim."

The incident took place on the city's light rail network. The attacker reportedly stood up from his seat, pulled out a knife and stabbed Bladon without warning.

The woman received wounds to her upper body and was initially in critical condition, Magen David Adom, an Israeli emergency services company, wrote on Twitter.

Bug

Scorpions on a plane!: Man is stung on United Airlines flight

Richard and Linda Bell
Richard and Linda Bell
It's been a rough week for United Airlines.

The same day a passenger was infamously dragged off a United plane in Chicago, a man on a United flight from Houston to Calgary was allegedly stung by a scorpion.


The venomous creature fell from an overhead bin and landed on Richard Bell's hair as he was eating lunch Sunday in his business class seat, according to his wife Linda.

"My husband felt something in his hair. He grabbed it out of his hair and it fell onto his dinner table. As he was grabbing it by the tail it stung him," she told CNN. She said her husband shooed the scorpion off his tray and it landed in the aisle, catching the attention of a nearby passenger who cried, "Oh my god, that's a scorpion."

It's not clear how the scorpion got on the plane. The airplane had flown to Houston earlier in the day from Costa Costa Rica, according to FlightAware, a flight-tracking platform.