Society's ChildS


Eye 2

Judge accused of trading sex for reduced sentences resigns after investigators find photographs on his computer depicting nude defendants

judge
© AFP
An Arkansas judge accused of trading sex for reduced sentences with young male defendants for the past three decades has resigned after investigators said they found thousands of photographs depicting nude male defendants.

Cross County District Judge Joe Boeckmann announced his resignation on Monday in a letter to the state Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission. In it, he said he would never again seek a job as a local, county or state employee in the State of Arkansas.

Documents released by investigators found thousands of sexually explicit photographs depicting young men inside or outside his home, many of whom were identified as defendants.

Investigators also said the photos showed evidence that some of the men had been paddled, and the discipline commission told the former judge to turn over the paddle used in the photos.

Cell Phone

Parents' smartphone obsessions lead to children lacking in social skills, says new report

children playing
© Dave Thomopson/ PANearly 200,000 children will be unready for primary school when they go this September.
Parents' immersion in smartphones has left some neglected children starting primary school unable to hold conversations, new research warns.

Almost a third of children starting school are not ready for the classroom, with many lacking social skills, having speech problems or not toilet trained, the survey of senior primary school staff has found.

Teachers warned of children suffering from a lack of attention and interaction from parents obsessed with their smartphones.

Comment: Idiocracy is here.


Yoda

Green Party candidates share refreshing views on curing US problems in debate hosted by RT

green party debate
© Aliza Krichevsky / RT
In a debate hosted by RT America, Green Party candidates Jill Stein, Kent Mesplay and Sedinam Kinamo Christin Moyowasifza-Curry shared their views on everything from whistleblowers to foreign relations with Russia. Here are 15 of their best quotes.

#1: The threat of Islamic terrorism "was created by the CIA and the Saudis in order to fight the Russians in Afghanistan "before it spread to other parts in the Middle East, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said. "The war in Iraq, Syria, and Libya has fanned the flames of ISIS," she added, urging the US to "stop the arming and the funding."

#2: "Under a Stein administration, when we turn the White House into a 'Green House,' we will ensure that everyone has healthcare as a human right," Stein said, stressing that the government will have nothing to do with "dictating" the health of US citizens.

#3: Green Party presidential candidate Kent Mesplay said there is a need for a "cultural shift to not have a militarized police force" and stressed a need to "take the money out of the military."

Comment: If the US were truly a free, democratic country, these three candidates would be given the same amount of chance of winning as the presumptive Republican and Democratic candidates. Instead, we have a system where the idea of a true democracy is just a farce, an illusion foisted upon the American people by the rich and powerful and given credence through the lapdog mainstream media. George Carlin laid it all out for us some time ago:




Light Sabers

German court refuses to grant injunction requested by Erdogan against publisher who supported Bohmermann poem

erdogan
© Adem Altan / AFP
A Cologne court refused to grant an injunction against the chief executive of leading publishing house Axel Springer, Mathias Doepfner, at the behest of Tayyip Recep Erdogan. Doepfner penned an open letter in support of a satirist mocking the Turkish leader.

"The defendant has a right to free expression of opinion," said a statement from the court, following Tuesday's hearing.

Seeking a preliminary injunction, Erdogan requested that a lawsuit be filed against Doepfner, Reuters reported on Monday citing German media and Ralf Hoecker, the Turkish President's lawyer. In a letter published by Die Welt in April, Doepfner said that he "wholeheartedly"endorsed the critical poem over which the German comic Jan Bohmermann has been facing defamation charges from Erdogan.

"For me your poem worked. I laughed out loud," he wrote according to AFP. In his letter Doepfner said he stood on the comedian's side and took whole credit for the letter's content.

Take 2

Police evacuate train stations and public places in several Czech cities after police claim to receive bomb threats

police tape
© Radovan Stoklasa / Reuters
An anonymous tip-off about an impending bomb attack in the Czech Republic has prompted a mass response from the national police.

The tip-off mentioned 10 bombs, Czech media reported.

"An anonymous person informed us by telephone that there were bombs at the central railway station in Prague and other places across the Czech Republic," police chief Marketa Janovska told the local media.

Janovska did not disclose which other places were named by the caller, citing security concerns. Czech media reported that police had ordered the evacuation of public buildings in the cities of Pardubice and Plzen.

Eye 2

Indian woman tortured to death by Saudi employer

looking out window
© Reuters
A 25-year-old woman from India, working as a housemaid in Saudi Arabia, was tortured to death by her employer, the woman's family claims. However, The Saudi hospital where she had been treated says she died of "natural causes."

Asima Khatoon, from Hyderabad, had managed to sneak a call to her family two months before her death to blow the whistle on her ill treatment at the hands of her employer, Abdul Rahman Ali Mohammed, the ANI news agency reported, citing Asima's family members.

They said the young woman complained of being harassed both physically and mentally, and begged her parents to help her get back to India as soon as possible.

The Telangana state government sent a request to the Ministry of External Affairs asking for help in repatriating the woman, Indian media report.

It was a call from an unknown source that informed relatives in India she had died at the King Saud hospital for chest diseases.

Comment: It's completely hypocritical for the West and Saudi Arabia to condemn Syria for anything when they are the worst offenders of human rights across the globe. Fix your own house before you go around criticizing others' homes, or, as the case may be, destroying their homes.


Red Flag

German restaurant forced to close due to threats from selling "Erdogan burgers"

erdogan burger
© Urban Burgery / Facebook
A restaurant in Cologne that was selling "delicious and juicy" Erdogan burgers, apparently named after the Turkish president, was forced to close over "credible threats" it had received, the eatery said.

The burgers had only been on sale in the Urban Burgery restaurant since April.

"Delicious, juicy, and the next big thing, is Erdogan the burger," was the intriguing announcement on the restaurant's Facebook page, "It [the burger, definitely not the Turkish leader] weighs more than any kebab."

The "tasty and delicious" Erdogan burgers were served with goat cheese, the restaurant said, apparently referring to German TV satirist Jan Bohmermann's poem implicating Recep Tayyip Erdogan in alleged sex acts with goats and a proclivity for child pornography. Erdogan and later German Chancellor Angela Merkel found the poem insulting. Bohmermann now faces prosecution under a rarely-used law that punishes those who insult foreign dignitaries.

Attention

Man reportedly shouts 'Allah is great' and stabs people at train station near Munich killing one and injuring three

Munich stabbing
© Sammy Khamis/Twitter
At least one man has been killed and three injured after a knife-wielding German man reportedly shouting "Allahu Akbar" attacked people at Grafing train station near the city of Munich. The attack might have an Islamist motive, officials said.

Apart from "Allahu Akbar" the man was heard shouting "unbelievers," Das Bild newspaper reported, citing local witnesses.

The prosecutor has confirmed the death of a 50-year-old man. He added that "two people are badly wounded, one is in critical condition." The three injured are aged 58, 43 and 55.

The "assailant made remarks at the scene of the crime that indicate a political motive - apparently an Islamist one," Ken Heidenreich, spokesman for the prosecutor's office, told AFP. "We are still determining what the exact remarks were."

The 27-year-old German citizen stabbed a newspaper delivery man in the back, a firefighter told the Merkur paper.

Gem

What is 'Cultural Marxism'? A left-wing conspiracy to destroy Western civilization!

cultural marxism
Cultural Marxism: "It's never our fault; it's always their fault!"
The culture war that so defines current debates between the left and right sides of politics has its history in the barmy theory of 'cultural Marxism'

What do the Australian's columnist Nick Cater, video game hate group #Gamergate, Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivik and random blokes on YouTube have in common? Apart from anything else, they have all invoked the spectre of "cultural Marxism" to account for things they disapprove of - things like Islamic immigrant communities, feminism and, er, opposition leader Bill Shorten [Leader of the Australian Labor Party - Sott.net ed.].

What are they talking about? The tale varies in the telling, but the theory of cultural Marxism is integral to the fantasy life of the contemporary right. It depends on a crazy-mirror history, which glancingly reflects things that really happened, only to distort them in the most bizarre ways.

It begins in the 1910s and 1920s. When the socialist revolution failed to materialise beyond the Soviet Union, Marxist thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs tried to explain why. Their answer was that culture and religion blunted the proletariat's desire to revolt, and the solution was that Marxists should carry out a "long march through the institutions" - universities and schools, government bureaucracies and the media - so that cultural values could be progressively changed from above.

Comment: Indeed, it's seeing a conspiracy where there is none, and thus obfuscating the real, underlying, 'natural' conspiracy of demented 'elites' lording it over everyone else.

People are misplacing causal agency. It's not that someone 'over there' deliberately conceived a plan to make society rot; society is rotting because BOTH 'cultural Marxists in academia' and 'right-wing think-tanks' - right here, 'at home' - are spinning BS narratives in order to maintain their comfortable positions at your expense.


USA

'Everybody Sucks 2016': Joke campaign sign garners national attention

everybody sucks
© 16sucks,com
A Kansas City, Missouri couple may have tapped into America's latent resentment regarding this election season, receiving national attention for a joke campaign sign which they put in their front yard reading: "Everybody Sucks 2016. The US is doomed."

Debbie Butler told KSHB-TV last week that she and her husband, an Army veteran who fought in both Afghanistan and Iraq, first bought the sign as joke.

"It's just fun," Butler told the network. "We just thought it was funny when we saw it, so we bought it and put it in the front yard."

Although buying it may have just been a flight of fancy, it has since attracted attention from Kansas City residents, and images of it have gone viral on a national level.

"It gets a lot of car honks," Butler explained to KHSB. "It gets people stopping and saying, 'We love your sign.' People slow down and take pictures of our sign."