Society's ChildS


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French workers blockade oil refineries and depots in protest of unpopular labor reform


France24
Mon, 23 May 2016 13:13 UTC
France gas blockade
© PHILIPPE HUGUEN / AFP
Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Sunday France had enough fuel reserves to tackle shortages at hundreds of gas stations caused by workers blocking oil refineries and depots in protest at an unpopular labour reform.

About 820 stations out of a total of 11,500 petrol stations in France were out of all fuel on Sunday and another 800 were lacking at least one type of fuel, Transport Minister Alain Vidalies told Europe 1 radio.

France has been hit by strikes after President Francois Hollande's Socialist government forced labour reforms through the lower house of parliament on May 10 without a vote. Unions consider the bill unfavourable to workers and want it withdrawn.

"We have the situation fully under control. I think that some of the refineries and depots that were blocked are unblocked or will be in the coming hours and days," Prime Minister Valls told reporters during a visit in Israel.

"In any case, we have the reserves to deal with these blockades."
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Laptop

Best of the Web: Edward Snowden's slow data dump: Where's the beef?

Cynthia McKinney
RT
Sun, 22 May 2016 22:38 UTC
Former US intelligence contractor and whistle blower Edward Snowden
© Lotta Hardelin / AFP
After a big announcement on May 16, 2016, The Intercept made 166 documents available to the public. At this rate, it will take an estimated 600 years to read all of the documents! I would like to ask The Intercept, 'Where's the beef?'

Last updated on May 16, 2016, Pierre Omidyar's The Intercept released its first data dump of the Snowden NSA files. For a long time, I wondered why the Snowden files weren't available to us like the WikiLeaks files were. After all, the information could further research on US "asymmetric warfare." I wanted to search them just as I had done with WikiLeaks. And then, perhaps it was fate that gave me a partial answer: I used Wikileaks documents for my dissertation and was forced to scrub every WikiLeaks reference in order to get my dissertation published and receive my Ph.D.

You see, in its zeal to crack the whip on whistle blowers revealing the government's multitudinous dirty dealings and to deter even more acts of conscience from potential whistle blowers, the Obama Administration chose to prosecute and imprison journalist Barrett Brown who had merely republished via hyperlinks some of the same WikiLeaks sources found in my dissertation.
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Snakes in Suits

Trump's bullying a reflection of a bully nation

Charles Derber and Yale Magrass
Truthout
Tue, 17 May 2016 00:00 UTC
Trump bully
Donald Trump's flagrant bullying -- much denounced even by the Republican Party establishment, with both President Bushes refusing to endorse him -- is no sign that he will lose the presidential nomination or election. The dirty secret is that GOP leaders secretly admire and envy his power as a bully. Worse, Trump's bullying resonates not only with his hardcore supporters, but also to many in the elite classes and much of the population.

There has been endless elite and media bemoaning of Trump as a bully. Much of this misses the key point and is hypocritical, for Trump's bullying is largely a reflection of the establishment's own bullying and the centrality of bullying in our culture and society.

The mainstream media and party establishments say, "Isn't it terrible that Trump is such a bully?" Many ordinary people say the same thing. But the truth is that Trump's bullying is a deep part of US culture. If we look honestly in the mirror, we will likely see some reflection of Trump. This is especially true of the political and media establishments, who present themselves as being civil and anything but bullies.

The inconvenient truth is that bullying is embedded in our culture, our governing elites and our most powerful institutions: the military, the corporation and the state. Whatever our personal values, we all live in a bullying society -- militarized capitalism -- and must learn to play by its rules.

Comment: The thing about bully culture is that - especially in the US - it exists in a hierarchy. And though Killary may know it already (and not mind the arrangement), the Donald may be in for a rude surprise if he should actually gain the Presidency. There will be people telling him exactly what to do, and what not to do - right down to which days he can wear his pink ties.

Unless and until that happens though, let us take note of Trump in an earlier stage of his bullyness progression and lament that he did not follow this line of work more diligently:



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Arrow Down

Hollywood gripped by child abuse scandal

Oliver Thring
The Sunday Times
Sun, 22 May 2016 01:01 UTC
Elijah Wood
© The Sunday TimesWood: sympathy with Savile victims.
Elijah Wood, the former child actor and star of the Lord of the Rings films, claims that Hollywood has been gripped by cases of sexual abuse similar to the Jimmy Savile scandal in Britain — and it may still be continuing.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Wood, 35, sympathised with British victims of Savile and said: "Jesus, it must have been devastating."

He said his mother had protected him from abuse when he arrived in Hollywood aged eight, but "I've been led down dark paths to realise that these things probably are still happening".

Wood, who played Frodo Baggins, the hobbit protagonist in the films of JRR Tolkien's books, said there were "a lot of vipers in this industry . . . there is darkness in the underbelly".

Allegations that powerful Hollywood figures have been protecting child abusers have circulated widely in recent years and Anne Henry, co-founder of Bizparentz, a group set up to help young actors, said: "Hollywood is currently sheltering about 100 active abusers."
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Airplane

Azeri cargo plane crashes in Afghanistan, US B-52 bomber crashes on Guam


Sputnik
Thu, 19 May 2016 19:35 UTC
b-52 bomber
© AFP 2016/ Paul CROCK
An Azerbaijani cargo plane with nine crew members on board has crashed in Afghanistan, according to Azerbaijan state aviation authority.

Azerbaijani An-12 cargo plane with nine crew members on board crashed on Wednesday in Afghanistan, a source in Azerbaijan's Civil Aviation Authority reported.

"A cargo plane belonging to Azerbaijani Silk Way air carrier crashed in Afghanistan's Helmand Province," the source told RIA Novosti.

According to Azeri local media, the plane was on loan from Silk Way to carry out cargo missions in Afghanistan, and had an international crew comprising three Ukrainian, five Azeri and one Uzbek nationals.
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Sheriff

"Blue Lives Matter": New law can make resisting arrest a 'hate crime'

Matt Agorist
Free Thought Project
Sun, 22 May 2016 00:00 UTC
Blue Lives Matter
Baton Rouge, LA — Last year, in an outburst of pure insanity, the National Fraternal Order of Police, a union representing over 300,000 officers, called for cops to be included under Congress's hate crimes statute. This demand has now materialized into actual legislation about to be signed into law in Louisiana.

Bill HB 953, which passed the legislature this week, is going to change the state's hate crime law to include law enforcement and firefighters.

A hate crime is defined by Congress as a "criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation."

The bill, which is based solely on appeal to emotion, and not in fact, changes the state's hate crime provision to say:
It shall be unlawful for any person to select the victim of the following offenses against person and property because of actual or perceived race, age, gender, religion, color, creed, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, or ancestry of that person or the owner or occupant of that property or because of actual or perceived membership or service in, or employment with, an organization, or because of actual or perceived employment as a law enforcement officer or firefighter ...
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No Entry

Naked man jumps into lion enclosure in crazed suicide bid

Jon Lockett and Amanda Devlin
The Sun
Sun, 22 May 2016 17:35 UTC
man mauled by lions
A 20-year-old man took off his clothes and broke into a lion enclosure at Santiago zoo, where he was mauled by lions.
A naked man who jumped into the big cat enclosure at a Chilean zoo in a desperate 'suicide bid' survived - but only after the lions attacking him were shot dead.

Santiago authorities confirmed the two beasts were killed as they mauled the 20-year-old who had broken into their compound early on Saturday.

The man, who has not been named, was accidently hit with a tranquiliser as zookeepers frantically tried to put the lions to sleep.

He taken to a nearby hospital for treatment and was said to be in a "grave" condition.
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Stormtrooper

Death in a shopping aisle: One man's fatal encounter with K-Mart

Kent Paterson
Counterpunch
Fri, 20 May 2016 00:00 UTC
Jonathan Sorensen
At Carlisle and Indian School NE in Albuquerque, New Mexico, different worlds, borders and seemingly even dimensions collide, clash and literally intersect. On one side of Carlisle upscale shoppers peruse the selection of pricey delicacies at a Whole Foods store, while working-class families pulling in across the road still find meals for less than ten bucks at a Burger King.

A short jaunt up Carlisle the boulevard passes over Interstate 40 and its roaring, cement stomping big rigs, the modern mug of old Route 66 that linked the Midwestern heartland with the West Coast wonderland. Gas stations, restaurants, hotels and the Duke City offices of the New Mexico State Police sprinkle the zone. Here hungry passerby can find breakfast tacos alongside Southern-style barbeque or All-American hamburgers sprinkled with classic New Mexico green chile.

Darting in and out of traffic and stationing themselves on a median, homeless folk hold signs telling sad stories and begging for food and money. Perched on high ground, almost lording over the landscape, stands a branch of Kmart, an outpost of the once-thriving department store chain with an iconic USA logo that is now owned by Sears Holdings and experiencing hard times.
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Handcuffs

Police state: Woman arrested, jailed and shackled for letting her 11 y.o. son drive a golf cart

Matt Agorist
The Free Thought Project
Sun, 22 May 2016 16:18 UTC
Arrest of Julie Mall
Arrest of Julie Mall
A family's dream vacation would quickly morph into a nightmare after they crossed paths with police in North Carolina. For allowing her son to drive a golf cart, a woman was brutalized, arrested, shackled, and charged with child abuse. Part of the incident was caught on film.

Julie Mall and her family look forward every year to their vacation at the luxury resort on Bald Head Island. However, thanks to police in North Carolina, the Mall family has changed their annual destination.

The incident began last July as the family was returning from the beach to their $1,000 a night cottage and Mall's 11-year-old son asked to drive the golf cart. Seeing no harm in doing so, Julie and her husband Scott let their child have the wheel.
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Cell Phone

Nanny State: New York cops will be allowed to search cell phones using a 'textalyzer'

Justin Gardner
The Free Thought Project
Sun, 22 May 2016 14:32 UTC
texting and driving
© Christian Science Monitor/Getty
As government continues to expand, finding ever more ways to feed itself through taxation, it seeks to justify this burgeoning existence. Enter the Nanny State.

New York is a leader in developing laws and regulations to protect us from ourselves, perhaps most famously with the Big Apple's attempt to ban-large size sugary drinks. The Empire State has the highest cigarette taxes in the nation, which fuels a black market, and it places heavy restrictions on other "sins."

No one doubts that cigarettes and an excess of sugary drinks are bad for the health, but it is not the state's responsibility to manage this behavior. The issue becomes trickier when bad behavior puts other people's lives in danger.
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