Society's ChildS


Red Flag

Woman defaces man's Trump sign, tries to run him over with her car


CBS Boston
Sat, 06 Aug 2016 15:52 UTC
Trump sign vandalism
© WBZSurveillance footage of a Trump sign being defaced.
A woman was arrested after she allegedly vandalized a resident's Donald Trump campaign sign and nearly ran over the homeowner as she tried to speed away.

Andover Police said Susan Bryant of North Reading spray painted the Trump sign on Jenkins Road early Saturday morning.

One side of the sign was painted with "Putin's (expletive)," a reference to Trump's purported relationship with Russia's Vladimir Putin. On the other side, Bryant allegedly painted "Gold Star Fail!"

When homeowner Art Gonsalves confronted Bryant, she allegedly drove off erratically, forcing the victim to run out of the way of her car.

Comment: Anti-Trumpers can be quite rabid. Man holds up Hillary sign at RNC, Trump sign at DNC - see what happens

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Attention

Score for Oxitec! FDA approves release of GM mosquitos to combat Zika in Florida

Kristen V. Brown
Fusion
Fri, 05 Aug 2016 15:26 UTC
zika
© afp.com/Marvin RECINOS
Our sci-fi future just got a whole lot closer to becoming a reality, after the Food and Drug Administration gave the okay to a field trial that would release genetically modified Zika-killing mosquitoes in the Florida Keys.

On Friday, the FDA released a final environmental assessment of the trial, finding that it "will not have significant impacts on the environment." The project, led by Oxitec, a biotech company that focuses on insect control, calls for the release of thousands of genetically engineered male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. The lab insects are bred so that over time they could kill off much of the local mosquito population by passing on a gene fatal to any offspring they have with wild females.

This is not the last hurdle Oxitec faces in turning its dream of disease-obliterating mosquitoes into reality. The company will have to win the approval of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, which plans to vote on the proposal after issuing a survey testing local sentiment of Keys residents this fall. While past surveys have shown the project to have a majority of support, it has also had vocal naysayers. Some fear the environmental impacts that removing the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, a non-native species, might have. Others have more imaginative objections, such as conspiracy theories about the project.

Comment: For more on the abomination of GM mosquitoes see:

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Heart - Black

Sadistic cops chase down a woodchuck and run it over with their golf cart

Claire Bernish
The Free Thought Project
Sat, 06 Aug 2016 13:31 UTC
groudhog
Two Rensselaer police officers have been suspended following reports they chased down and ran over a groundhog during a police union golf tournament in Troy, New York.

Chief Rick Fusco promised both officers would be fired if an investigation finds them guilty.

"If in fact this alleged situation happened, I will be recommending they be terminated," Fusco said. "There is no room in any police agency for a person like this to be carrying a badge and a gun."

Three-year veteran of the force, Tyler Sammon, drove the golf cart, and Matt Spath rode as passenger when the two reportedly chased the animal until it was exhausted, and then cruelly crushed it beneath the cart's tires — possibly more than once — in what the Albany Times-Union deemed an act of "woodchuck homicide."

Comment: Nothing and no one is safe around cops.

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Radar

Belgium officials reports machete-wielding man caused evacuation in Liege


RT
Sun, 07 Aug 2016 13:03 UTC
Belgian police
© Yves Herman / Reuters
A neighborhood in the Belgian city of Liege was evacuated after a machete-wielding man was spotted in the area, local media reported citing the authorities. Police detained the suspect, who is said to be of Turkish origin.

The Liege police received a phone call on Sunday morning at around 06:20 local time, stating that a man armed with a machete was walking around the Carre neighborhood, the Belgian broadcaster RTBF TV reported.

The area was immediately cordoned off by police.

A man in his 20s and believed to be of Turkish origin, was promptly arrested. He was reportedly not planning an attack.
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Attention

Russian Olympic team fans house was robbed during the Rio 2016 opening ceremony


RT
Sat, 06 Aug 2016 12:19 UTC
Russian Olympic Team Fans House Rio
© Ramil Sitdikov / Sputnik Raising the Russian flag at the opening of the Russian Olympic Team Fans House in Rio de Janeiro.
The Russian Olympic Team's fan house has been robbed during the Rio Games opening ceremony, Russian media reports, citing officials. No one was hurt in the incident but the burglars who stole expensive electronic equipment are still at large.

"The Russian Olympic Team Fans House has been robbed during the Olympic Games opening ceremony, Three laptops and a camera have been stolen," Anastasia Grigoryeva, the head of the facility's press service, told TASS, adding that police already launched an investigation into the incident. Her words were confirmed by the head of the Fans House, Oleg Rumyantsev, who told Ria Novosti that "some equipment was stolen from a technical zone during the changing of the guard."

"None of the fans were harmed and the fans' belongings also remained intact," he added, stressing that officials toughened security after the incident and set up additional guarding posts and place some additional CCTV cameras on the facility's territory.
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Stop

Crime study shows 6 million UK adults suffered abuse as children


RT
Fri, 05 Aug 2016 16:50 UTC
Child walking alone
© Darren Staples / Reuters
Up to six million adults in the UK say they suffered emotional, physical or sexual abuse as children, a new study has found.

The crime survey study of England and Wales carried out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that up to half a million adult women and 100,000 adult males had been raped.

Of those individuals 33,000 had been victims of rape or attempted rape before the age of nine, the figures indicate. It was the first time a question on abuse had been included in the survey.

Comment: And this isn't helping to tackle the problem: Institutional child sex abuse inquiry loses third head and it hasn't even started yet

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Vader

Israel's commitment to peace: More Palestinian homes demolished by Israel in first half of 2016 than in all of 2015

Allison Deger
Mondoweiss
Fri, 05 Aug 2016 00:00 UTC
demolition
More Palestinian homes were demolished in the occupied territories in the first half of 2016 than in all of 2015, according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.

According to B'Tselem, the group presented a report to lawmakers in July during a parliamentary conference on Israeli "efforts to expel" Palestinian villagers, including the use of "repeated demolition of the homes of the same families." The increased demolitions and displacement have also been accompanied by a rising number of new settler homes under construction. This past week Israel announced hundreds more settlements planned for East Jerusalem, prompting the U.S. State Department to issue an atypical condemnation of the Jewish state.

Record year of home demolitions

The B'Tselem report found from January to the end of June of 2016, Israeli forces razed 168 Palestinian units in the West Bank and Jerusalem, which left 740 homeless, nearly 250 more than the previous year when 125 houses were bulldozed.

The United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov said in February, demolitions this year are "three times the weekly average for 2015. These actions run directly counter to the idea of peace."

Comment: Because the economies in Gaza and the West Bank have been so decimated by Israeli aggression, many Palestinians are forced to go to work in Israel where they must pass through checkpoints; herded like cattle.
Of some 100,000 Palestinians who work in Israel daily, 63,000 have permits and enter Israel via one of 11 checkpoints. In June, during the fast of Ramadan, B'Tselem again documented the rough conditions at two of the checkpoints: 300 and Qalandia. While the latter has 5 lanes only one is operational at the busiest times. Crowding is particularly bad on Sundays, the first day of the workweek. These conditions mean workers are forced to leave for work in the dead of night, wait in long lines, and often sleep where they work, seeing their families only on weekends. This is not a necessary evil but a deliberate choice by the Israeli authorities. Whatever the reasons for the choice, it is an unconscionable and unacceptable one.


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Question

Edward Snowden tweets cryptic code: Was it a dead man's switch?


Sputnik
Sun, 07 Aug 2016 03:01 UTC
Snowden
© Screenshot: Council of Europe
After posting a 64 character hex code that is believed to be an encryption key, the internet worries that the famed whistleblower may have been killed or captured resulting in the triggering of a dead man's switch and potentially the release of many more US national secrets.

On Friday night, famed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted out a 64 character code before quickly deleting the message along with a mysterious warning earlier this week that "It's Time" which had called on colleagues of the former contractor to contact him leaving the internet to speculate that the characters could be an encryption key for a major document leak, it may be a "dead man's switch" set to go in effect if the whistleblower were killed or captured, or potentially both.

A dead man's switch is a message set up to be automatically sent if the holder of an account does not perform a regular check-in. The whistleblower has acknowledged that he has distributed encrypted files to journalists and associates that have not yet been released so in Snowden's case, the dead man's switch could be an encryption key for those files.

As of this time, Edward Snowden's Twitter account has gone silent for over 24 hours which is far from unprecedented for the whistleblower but is curious at a time when public concern has been raised over his well-being. The 64 hex characters in the code do appear to rule out the initial theory that Edward Snowden, like so many of us, simply butt dialed his phone, but instead is a clearly a secure hash algorithm that can serve as a signature for a data file or as a password.
snowden_twitter
© Twitter
The timing shortly after the "It's Time" tweet also have caused concern for some Reddit theorists such as a user named stordoff who believes that the nascent Twitter post "was intended to set something in motion." The user postulates that it is an encrypted message, a signal, or a password.
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Family

Russian boy kidnapped by gypsies found 16 years later, can't read, write or tell time


RT
Sat, 06 Aug 2016 19:21 UTC
Vasily missing boy
© Interior MinistryVasily at age 6, now 16 years later.
A boy long-thought dead was found in southern Russia, after escaping the Romani settlement which he was kidnapped in when he was a six-year-old back in 2000. The man has no formal education. His biological parents are dead, and his future remains uncertain.

In late July, a policeman found an apparently homeless man illegally sleeping in someone else's parked van in the city of Volgograd. When the man, possessing a sheaf of blonde hair, was taken to the station and asked to provide ID, he said he had no documents, and that he was a gypsy by the name of Dmitry Mikhay.

"Are you sure? Have you seen yourself in the mirror? Your complexion is way too light," said the on-duty policeman, according to daily Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, whose journalist interviewed the officers dealing with the case. The detainee immediately confessed that it wasn't his real name, and that he remembers only that he was called Vasily, when he was snatched by gypsies on his way home from an outdoor market where his mother was a trader.

Police began to scan missing persons records. As well as a name, officers had another distinctive detail to work with - a large birthmark on Vasily's chest.
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Coffee

New Jersey hopes to cash in by fining people who eat and drink while driving

Claire Bernish
The Free Thought Project
Sat, 06 Aug 2016 18:27 UTC
coffee while driving
© Getty
Drinking coffee while driving could land you in hot water if a new piece of legislation passes.

A bill in New Jersey targeting distracted drivers would levy hefty fines and a possible license suspension against those who eat, drink, groom, read, or use electronic devices while behind the wheel. In other words, drive and only drive, or else!

Although the bill's sponsors — Assemblyman John Wisniewski and Nicholas Chiaravalloti, both Democrats — claim the legislation is intended to educate, not punish, drivers, its penalties speak volumes.

"Violators could face a $200 to $400 fine for the first offense and a $400 to $600 fine for a second offense. A third or subsequent offense could mean a fine of $600 to $800 and up to a 90 day license suspension, as well as motor vehicle points," according to nj.com.
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