Society's ChildS


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People are the losers in wars: Drone video shows devastated Damascus neighborhood


RT
Thu, 14 Jan 2016 01:32 UTC
RT footage from a drone flying over a Damascus neighborhood shows the scale of destruction inflicted upon it by years of warfare. The once-thriving area has been turned into a desolate, gray concrete wasteland.

The video was shot in the Dukhania neighborhood in eastern Damascus, which has changed hands several times during the civil war and at one point served as a staging ground for terror group the Al Nusra Front planning attacks on downtown in the capital.

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Heart

Above and Beyond: Breastfeeding Police Officer saves abandoned newborn's life

Rachel Grumman Bender
Yahoo! Parenting
Thu, 14 Jan 2016 00:00 UTC
Breastfeeding Police
© Unknown
A police officer went above and beyond the call of duty to save a baby's life.

Officer Luisa Fernanda Urrea, who recently became a mom herself, was called to a scene in a remote forest in Colombia after an abandoned infant was found. A local woman, Edinora Jimenez, discovered the crying baby in the undergrowth of the forest. "I was collecting some oranges when I heard something crying," Jimenez told a local news source, as reported by the Huffington Post Thursday.
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Attention

Shadow of fascism spreads: 'Soldiers of Odin' begin patrolling streets of Finland


RT
Thu, 14 Jan 2016 18:14 UTC
Soldiers of Odin
© Reuters
Far-right militia groups are assuming police functions by patrolling the streets in Finnish towns housing asylum seekers. The "Soldiers of Odin," who always dressed in black jackets, claim they are protecting native Finns from immigrants, Reuters reports.

Finland's authorities have become increasingly concerned with the group's activity, as its numbers have grown to hundreds. While it is claimed that the group is not supported by the majority of Finns, the anti-migrant, anti-Muslim group reflects the discontent of many Europeans with the continent's unprecedented refugee crisis.

The group has around 500 members across the country, according to Finnish paper Karjalan Heili.

"We woke up to a situation where many different cultures met. It caused fear and concern in the community. We started to gather a bunch of people," one of the organizers, Mika Ranta, told Finnish daily Aamulehti. "The biggest issue was when we learned from Facebook that new asylum seekers were peering through the gates of primary schools, looking at young girls."

Comment: How long before these far-right groups start violently "protecting themselves" en masse, and the already downtrodden refugees are fully oppressed by the European Holocaust 2.0?

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Document

The US Constitution - It is "Just a piece of **** paper"

Eric Peters
Eric Peters Autos
Thu, 14 Jan 2016 18:31 UTC
Piece of Paper_1
© Eric Peters Autos
We're supposed to revere - and follow - the Constitution. But if they don't, why should we?

By they, I mean the people who lord it over us. Our rulers. I choose the word deliberately, in the interests of editorial accuracy. We're certainly not ruled by the Constitution.

And neither are they.

Consider, for instance, this business of judicial review. The power claimed by the Supreme Court to "interpret" the Constitution. It is a power you will find nowhere in the Constitution itself, or even hinted at. It was simply asserted by the first chief justice, John Marshall (who was a cousin of but also - unsurprisingly - a great enemy of Thomas Jefferson's) in a kind of lawyerly Beer Hall Putsch. The court, under Marshall, defined and decreed its own power. It has been the final arbiter of what the Constitution "really" means ever since.

Even when the court's interpretation is obviously at odds with the plain meaning of what is actually written in the Constitution.

This is the mechanism by which we are halted and searched randomly - the very definition of unreasonable, which is the language you will find in the Constitution. But the Court has repeatedly asserted its own fluid definition, Humpty Dumpty-style, contrary to what is written and simply because it can. The Fourth (and other amendments) mean whatever the Court says they mean, which means they mean nothing at all.
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Laptop

Standard operating procedure 303: Will this secret protocol to shut down cell phones and internet ever see the light of day?

Derrick Broze
Activist Post
Thu, 14 Jan 2016 18:03 UTC
internet cables
On Monday the Supreme Court declined to hear a petition from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) that sought to force the Department of Homeland Security to release details of a secret "killswitch" protocol to shut down cellphone and Internet service during emergencies.

EPIC has been fighting since 2011 to release the details of the program, which is known as Standard Operating Procedure 303. EPIC writes, "On March 9, 2006, the National Communications System ('NCS') approved SOP 303, however it was never released to the public. This secret document codifies a 'shutdown and restoration process for use by commercial and private wireless networks during national crisis.'"

EPIC continues, "In a 2006-2007 Report, the President's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee ('NSTAC') indicated that SOP 303 would be implemented under the coordination of the National Coordinating Center ('NCC') of the NSTAC, while the decision to shut down service would be made by state Homeland Security Advisors or individuals at DHS. The report indicates that NCC will determine if a shutdown is necessary based on a 'series of questions.'"

Comment: Not only do the Feds have the ability to snoop on our phone calls and internet activity they can also shut down their use during what they deem to be a state of emergency. Hmm. You'd think that someone doesn't want the general public communicating with one another.

DHS cell phone kill switch plan to remain secret; Supreme Court refuses petition

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Fire

Deadly blast rocks Turkish police HQ in Kurdish region, string of other attacks also reported


RT
Thu, 14 Jan 2016 17:48 UTC
Turkish ambulance
© HABER Ci / YouTube
Photos showing the aftermath of a massive blast that destroyed the entire face of a multi-story police HQ in Turkey's Diyarbakir province has appeared online. Reports describe multiple casualties in Cinar, blaming the Kurdish PKK militant group for the attack.

At least five people, including an infant, were killed as a result of the attack, which took place early on Thursday in Diyarbakir province, local channel Haber3 reported, adding that 8 terrorists had been killed in clashes with police following the bombing.

In addition, 36 people, including civilians, were injured in the blast, many of which were trapped under the rubble of damaged buildings, according local media cited by BBC Turk.
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Water

Flint, Michigan: Outbreak of legionnaire's disease and water contamination; National Guard called in to assist


RT
Thu, 14 Jan 2016 17:24 UTC
flint water tower
As Flint, Michigan residents continue to deal with a state of emergency declared over their contaminated water supply, a sharp increase in cases of an atypical pneumonia known as Legionnaires' disease has hit the community.

On Wednesday, state officials hosted a press conference acknowledging the uptick in the cases of Legionnaires' disease, but gave no new advice to the public regarding water usage, saying they have yet to determine the cause of the disease. Dr. Eden Wells, chief medical executive of the state's Department of Health and Human Services, said a more thorough analysis was still to come.

Between June 2014 and November 2015, there were 87 cases of Legionnaires' disease in Flint, with 10 ending in death, according to Wells. The fatality rate for the disease ranges from 5 to 30 percent depending on access to antibiotics and other factors, according to the US National Library of Medicine.
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Cardboard Box

American nightmare: The death of the middle class and the rise in poverty

Vladimir Platov
New Eastern Outlook
Tue, 12 Jan 2016 00:00 UTC
unemployment, middle class
Over the past month, many US media publications have been sounding the alarm: death of the middle class of America and the end of the "American Dream".

According to the independent American portal - "End Of American Dream", one of the main reasons for this is that the rate of the cost of living increase in the United States is higher than the growth of wages. In particular, the cost increase for food, rent, health insurance, and therefore the number of the "working poor" in the country is increasing exponentially every year. However, the current US authorities do not care about the decline of the middle class, which once supported the country.

For example, health insurance premiums have been increasing 3 times faster than the federal officials say, and in 2016, across the whole country, an increase of 20.3% in these payments is expected, which would affect millions of families. Since July 2012, the food price index rose from 73 to 162 kinds of products. Today, 47 million Americans live in poverty, every fifth child in America is issued food stamps, 1.5 American families live on less than $US 2 a day, and each year 46 million Americans use the services of food banks.

In these circumstances, the future does not look very bright for the "ordinary hard-working Americans", since a large number of Americans, previously considered as a part of the middle class, are losing their jobs and homes. Homelessness and complete impoverishment have become a real prospect in the life of the middle-class, and with its disappearance - the death of the "American dream".

Comment: Yet, Obama had the temerity to say in his recent State of the Union address that "The United States of America right now has the strongest, most durable economy in the world." Nothing could be farther from the truth, yet that statement is only one in a long list of his lies and misleading statements.

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Pills

Replace our sick narcotics policies

Eric Zuesse
Sott.net
Thu, 14 Jan 2016 17:07 UTC
Drugs and money
Existing narcotics policies lock-up addicts, punish them, instead of deal with the problem, which is the explosion of burglaries and robberies that are produced by addicts. Those thefts are resulting actually from the inflated, black-market, price that addicts must pay gangsters to feed their addiction. If the drugs were instead sold by the government, at the free-market prices that would exist if these drugs were legally sold over-the-counter as regular non-prescription and unpatented medications (and if the product is grown and manufactured by a government-owned corporation which is the only legal supplier of the product, and which wholesales the product at the price that would prevail if it were produced and marketed as a regular free-market product), then this would immediately put all of the illicit dealers out of business, and it would also immediately end the thefts, which are resulting from the need that addicts have to possess enough money to pay gangsters for their drugs at the current sky-high (artificially high) black-market price.

Addicts already suffer more than enough from their addiction, which does nobody but the gangsters they pay any good. What our government's existing policies are doing is to force addicts to steal and pay that money to gangsters in order to be able to slake the addict's need. A person who before addiction might have had no criminal record at all, becomes now a veritable theft-machine, in order to feed his addiction.
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Stock Down

The world's bond bubble is about to burst

Graham Summers
ZeroHedge
Thu, 14 Jan 2016 13:49 UTC
Wall Street
© Unknown
The bursting of the bond bubble has begun.

As I've outlined previously the primary concern for Central Banks is the bond bubble. CNBC and other financial media focus on stocks because the asset class is more volatile and so makes for better content, but the foundation of the financial system is bonds. And bonds are THE focus for Central Banks.

In the simplest of terms, the world is awash in too much debt. The bond bubble was close to $80 trillion in size going into 2008. The Central Banks had a choice to either let the defaults hit and clear out the garbage debt from the financial system or attempt to inflate the debts away.

Comment: Also see: Financial analyst: For 2016 "...have a healthy storage of food, precious metals and supplies"

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