Society's ChildS


Dollars

Britain's bank bosses to be awarded £millions in 'extra bonuses' as nearly a million ordinary people rely on food banks to survive

Jill Traenor
The Guardian
Fri, 21 Feb 2014 20:00 UTC
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© Kirsty Wigglesworth/APBarclays' Antony Jenkins is likely to receive parcels of shares alongside his salary in the coming months, as are the chief executives of Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC and Royal Bank of Scotland

The bosses of Britain's biggest banks are on course to be awarded millions of pounds in share payments to circumvent a Brussels-imposed bonus cap - a move that risks inflaming the toxic row over City pay deals.

The new payments would be in addition to bank leaders' basic pay because the EU is limiting bonuses to 100% of salaries - or 200% if shareholders approve larger payments.

The big-four high street banks are consulting shareholders about bonuses for chief executives that hit the 200% limit, alongside discussions on additional share payments so that none of the elite boardroom-level bankers would be worse off as a result of the cap.

The initiative threatens to bring further political and public scorn on an industry that suffered yet another reputational blow this month when Barclays increased its bonuses to staff by 10% to £2.4bn, despite reporting a 32% fall in profits.

The attempt to outflank pay limits comes as thousands of bank employees face the threat of redundancy.
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Gear

In plundering the Earth with rash excess, the Oligarchy has dug the World's largest mass grave

Mark Karlin
Truth Out
Thu, 20 Feb 2014 08:15 UTC
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© tbone samdwichIs the human species next on the list?
There was a popular bumper sticker you'd see on luxury cars awhile back, "The person who dies with the most toys wins."

Sometimes, when I saw an automobile with such a message, my first thought was how tacky to put such a cheap plastic boast of wealth on a vehicle that cost tens of thousands of dollars. But then I realized that, to paraphrase Marshall McCluhan, "the medium is the message." This is what this person is all about; "my greed makes me who I am, and I'm better and more valuable than you are in your cheap Ford."

This destructive confusion of one's worth as a human being with one's financial worth arose in my mind again yesterday when writing a commentary, "Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease." After discussing a recent news kerfuffle over multi-millionaire Tom Perkins' assertion that the wealthiest are the most deserving -- in essence an Ayn Randian perspective on human value -- I noted:
There's a theory that the wealthy do believe that they are anointed. This speculation about their world view is not that different from the monarchies that democracies revolted against. It presupposes that the people of the world are set in sort of a pre-determined caste system. In this world view, those who inherit wealth (which is a high percentage of the super rich -- just look at the Walton and Koch heirs) are inherently more deserving of their billions. Those persons who ruthlessly claw their way to the top -- with money appearing to be their ultimate criteria for the value of their lives -- have been chosen to acquire fortunes because of their basic worthiness, this theory argues.

Comment: Psychopaths in Power and the Imminent Collapse of Global Society (It's all your fault!)

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Chalkboard

Rampant hysteria! UK EasyJet flight grounded for two hours 'because schoolboy reported another passenger was writing something in Arabic'

Lizzie Parry
Daily Mail
Thu, 20 Feb 2014 17:15 UTC
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© PAHysteria: An easyJet flight from Amsterdam to Newcastle was delayed for two hours after a group of school children reported seeing another passenger writing in what appeared to be Arabic script
An easyJet flight was grounded for two hours after a security alert was sparked when schoolchildren reported seeing a man writing Arabic in a notebook.

The students, who were aged 15 and 16, alerted cabin crew after spotting the man writing in what appeared to be Arabic script, while waiting for take off.

The flight from Amsterdam to Newcastle was delayed to allow for 16 of the 45-strong group of students, believed to be from a school in Northumberland, to get off the aircraft.

Technical support worker Adam Robson, 21, who was sat next to the man, said he first became aware of the issue when he felt kicking and banging on the back of his seat as one of the student's suffered a panic attack.

He said: 'The guy had a notebook and people were looking over at it as it had both Arabic writing and English words.

'One of the students called a flight attendant over and pointed it out,' said Mr Robson, from Newcastle's West End, who had been on a romantic weekend away with his girlfriend Lauren.
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Compass

Flashback Putin shows how it's done - Defeats terrorism by investing billions in Chechnya

Jonathan Steele
The Guardian
Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00 UTC
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© AFPKadyrov (left) with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Grozny in October 2008
Chechnya is being rebuilt with Russian oil cash and its leader obeys Moscow. Separatist ideas are on ice

No corkscrew. That's the first surprise about Chechnya. Unlike in Baghdad today or Kabul during the Soviet occupation, planes don't arrive high above the airfield and then dip one wing in a steep and terrifying spiral so as to reduce the risk of ground fire as they land. In Grozny they glide in over woods and villages, apparently confident there are no resistance fighters lurking in wait.

Surprise number two is the amount of reconstruction in the Chechen capital. Five years ago when I last visited Grozny it still looked like the ruins of Dresden or Hiroshima, street after devastated street. Now new nine-storey blocks of flats, shops, and cafes flank the main streets. In the central square workers are laying the last paving stones outside what is described as Europe's largest mosque, a concrete replica of Istanbul's Blue Mosque, financed and largely built with Turkish aid and Turkish engineers.
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Pills

Teenager's face melts after she suffers acute reaction to deadly Big Pharma 'heartburn pills'

Richard Hartley-Parkinson
Mirror
Thu, 20 Feb 2014 12:24 UTC
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© HotSpot Media

A teenager's face MELTED when she suffered an extreme reaction to a heartburn pill.

Leanne Howes, 17, has survived despite doctors saying there was a low likelihood that she would pull through.

She took over-the-counter Zantac tablets but within days she had a one-in-a-million allergic reaction and her skin started to fall off her entire body.

The trainee hairdresser from Hoveton, Norwich, was in hospital for several weeks after what started out as an itchy rash in September 2013 quickly developed into blisters the size of tennis balls.

She said: "I thought I was going to die. I couldn't move and my face was so swollen that my eyes had fused shut.

"Everywhere was itching and my skin was weeping a thick yellow pus."
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Stormtrooper

Young female woman jogger with headphones knocked to the floor, arrested by Austin police thugs because she didn't hear when they tried to ticket her for jaywalking

Snejana Farberov
Daily Mail, UK
Fri, 21 Feb 2014 18:29 UTC
Amanda Jo Stephen
© Chris Quintero
Busted: Amanda Jo Stephen, 24, is seen handcuffed and in tears following Thursday's arrest for a traffic violation in Austin
  • Amanda Jo Stephen, 24, charged with failure to identify and traffic signal violation in Austin, Texas
  • Eyewitness said Stephen was jogging with headphones on and didn't hear police officer tell her to stop
  • Police were in the area giving tickets to pedestrians for crossing street on red light
A female jogger out for a run in Austin, Texas, Thursday was arrested, handcuffed and hauled into a police cruiser screaming and in tears for allegedly failing to identify herself.

The entire incident was caught on video recorded by Chris Quintero, a student at University of Texas who was sitting in a cafe across the street and witnessed the woman being taken into custody.

The arrest took place just before 11am outside a fast-food eatery near the intersection of 24th Street and San Antonio Street in Austin.

Caught on camera: Chris Quintero took pictures and video of the jogger's arrest; the college student said the 24-year-old crossed the street without waiting to the light to switch and was ordered to stop by police

Sporting a black crop top, shorts and toe sneakers, 24-year-old Amanda Jo Stephen was running across the street when an officer yelled for her to stop.

According to Quintero, who saw the arrest play out from a nearby Starbucks, the jogger got caught in a police operation targeting jaywalkers, University of Texas' student newspaper The Daily Texan reported.

Since Stephen had her headphones on, she allegedly didn't hear the officer and continued on her way.
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Star of David

Do Only Some Massacres Matter? Remembering the Munich Olympics

Alison Alison Weir
Counterpunch
Tue, 11 Feb 2014 21:47 UTC
The Washington Post has published a moving article, "Russian Jews remember Israeli athletes murdered at 1972 Munich Olympic Games." Unfortunately, it gets a few things wrong and provides a one-sided context for the tragedy.

Allow me to correct the report and fill in a few of the missing facts.

Just 23 years before the Olympic incident, Israel had been created through ethnically cleansing much of the indigenous Palestinian population.

This had been accomplished through at least 33 massacres and was maintained in the years following by still more acts of ethnic cleansing and additional massacres. (These included areas from which the Munich kidnappers came).

Five years before the Munich incident, Israel violently conquered even more Palestinian land (illegal under international law), pushing out another 325,000+ Palestinian men, women, and children, and killing at least 13,000 Arabs in all. About 800 Israelis died.
israel ethnic cleansing
The violence continued, and beginning in 1968 Israeli forces repeatedly savaged 150 or more towns and villages in south Lebanon alone. By the time of the Munich Olympics, Israel held hundreds of prisoners in its notorious prison system.
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Sheriff

California's gun confiscation program - apparent civil rights violations


Ammo Land News
Mon, 10 Feb 2014 00:00 UTC
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California’s Gun Confiscation Program Hits Firearm Owners Hard
Efforts by the California Department of Justice to disarm gun owners have led to apparent civil rights violations, gun group says

Following numerous reports of improper arrests and firearm seizures throughout California, Roseville-based gun rights group The Calguns Foundation has issued a new warning to gun owners in the Golden State.
"Gun confiscation efforts pushed by Attorney General Kamala Harris have apparently led to unconstitutional arrests of regular, non-prohibited gun owners as well as the seizure of their firearms and ammunition," said Brandon Combs, the group's executive director and creator of the Foundation's DOJ Watch project.
California's Armed Prohibited Persons System, or 'APPS', firearms confiscation program was funded in 2013 through Senate Bill 140, authored by state legislators including San Diego-based senator Joel Anderson (R-Alpine). SB 140 re-appropriated money paid by gun buyers for background checks to APPS law enforcement actions, including the one which took firearms from Bakersfield, California resident Michael Merritt.
"These frightening raids, often carried out by heavily armed DOJ agents and local law enforcement agencies, aren't just hitting violent criminals," noted Combs. "What a sad day it is when even elderly law-abiding people need to be on the lookout for Ms. Harris' gun-grabbing goons."
Should you be contacted by law enforcement, be polite but prepared to exercise your rights. For instance, should a warrant be served upon you, do not physically resist the officers but do remain silent and contact your attorney as soon as possible. Do not consent to any search and remember that you are not required to volunteer information or open locked containers.
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Arrow Down

Did Discovery Channel fake the image in its giant shark documentary?

George Monbiot
The Guardian
Fri, 21 Feb 2014 16:33 UTC
Image showing Megalodon swimming past U-boats off Cape Town was doctored. Come clean, or prove me wrong.
Doctored Image
© Sharkzilla/Discovery ChannelImage purporting to show a giant shark swimming past German submarines.
The suspicion that the Discovery Channel had abandoned its professed editorial standards was a powerful one. As I mentioned in my earlier blog, its documentary claiming that the giant shark Carchardon megalodon still exists contained images which gave a strong impression of being faked; reports of incidents which don't appear to have happened; and interviews with "marine biologists" no one has been able to trace.

But allegations of fakery are very hard to prove. As you know, absence of evidence doesn't mean evidence of absence. Just because no one has been able to find the news reports the Megalodon show claims to have found, or any record of the deaths of four people in an attack by a giant shark off South Africa last year, or any trace of the suspiciously handsome experts it used to confirm its thesis doesn't prove definitively that all of them are inventions, even though it's hard to see how they could not be.

And pointing out that a photograph the "documentary" used to make its case looks like a really bad CGI cobblers in which just about everything is wrong isn't quite the same as being able to state categorically that it's a fraud.
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Handcuffs

Japanese-Americans warn interment for 'undesirables' still possible, Muslim-Americans take heed

Massoud Hayoun
Aljazeera America
Tue, 18 Feb 2014 13:16 UTC
internment poster muslim arab americans
© David Monkawa/NCRR A poster for Day of Remembrance 2002, months after the 9/11 attacks, focused on the detention of Muslim and Arab Americans.
As they mark Day of Remembrance, former detainees say talk of national security can still trump Americans' basic rights

Japanese-Americans are holding a Day of Remembrance this week for community elders who were unlawfully locked in internment camps during World War II. But for many people - including U.S. judicial authorities - the specter of the camps is hardly a thing of the past.

"You are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again," U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told University of Hawaii law students earlier this month. "In times of war, the laws fall silent."

For many former detainees who will tell their stories during remembrance events Wednesday, Scalia's words are a sobering reminder that national security at times trumps constitutional rights. They think of the National Security Agency's mass surveillance of private communications or the indefinite detentions of alleged terrorism suspects - mostly Arab and Muslim men - under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The Day of Remembrance marks not only the day in 1942 when President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order allowing the internment of 120,000 people of Japanese origin after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; it also serves as "a reminder to our communities - our civil rights are still not protected," said Karen Korematsu, whose father, Fred Korematsu, famously challenged his detention in the landmark Supreme Court case Korematsu v. United States in 1944.

Karen Korematsu cited the NDAA's indefinite detentions as one attack on civil rights now faced primarily by American Muslims. Among the other issues they say they face are the mass infiltration of mosque communities by law enforcement and harassment by Transportation Security Administration staff at U.S. borders.

"Even (Scalia) said this could happen again. That's why education (on Japanese-American internment and civil rights) is so important," Korematsu said.
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