SOTT
SIGNS
OF THE
TIMES
OF THE
TIMES
Welcome to Sott.net
The World for People who Think
Society's ChildS
Mount Rainer National Park, Wash. - A group of six climbers missing on Mount Rainier are all believed to be dead after plunging more than 3,000 feet down a steep rockfall at the peak's upper elevations.
A helicopter search was launched for the missing climbers Saturday morning after they failed to return on time from a scheduled five-day ascent of the mountain.
Officials said searchers found climbing gear and detected pings from the climbers' emergency beacons at the 9,500-foot level of the mountain. Their last known location before that was at 12,800 feet on Liberty Ridge.
"All indications point toward a fall of 3,300 feet from near the party's last known location," said Mount Rainier National Park spokeswoman Patti Wold. "There is no viable chance of survival from such a fall."
The area where they fell is at the base of a steep rockfall, and it's possible that their bodies will never be recovered due to the dangerous, unstable terrain in the area, Wold said.
© Stockphoto.com
Kilauea - A father was arrested when he gave his son the "old school" punishment of walking one-mile home from school to think about what he had done.
Robert De Mond, 36, said that when he picked up his 8-year-old son from school, he refused to tell say what had earned him a punishment from teachers. The Star Adviser reported what happened next:
In many people's lives, walking to get places isn't a punishment, it is a daily reality; the norm; how one gets places. However in Police State USA, a parent who allows their son to walk somewhere is arrested."I asked him, 'Why were you in time-out at A-Plus?'" De Mond said. "He told me, 'I don't know.' I asked him again and he said, 'I don't know.'"
He told his son: "I don't know is not an answer. You need to take responsibility for your actions. There has to be a reason that you were placed in time-out."
A mile from their house, he dropped his son off and asked him to "please walk home. When you walk home, you will have an answer better than 'I don't know.' And when you do come home you'll have an answer," he said.
De Mond said the stretch of the two-lane roadway - Kuhio Highway - is in a safe, rural area with acre-size agricultural lots, and a wide shoulder, 10 to 25 feet wide, where it's not uncommon to see people walking or riding their bikes.
The Verkhovna Rada appointed Prime Minister of Ukraine, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, was booed at in Germany, where he arrived to participate in the Charlemagne Prize award ceremony to President of the European Council, Herman van Rompuy, Deutschlandfunk.de reports.
In Aachen, local residents gathered near the building, which hosts the award ceremony. They were holding posters and chanted slogans calling to put an end to the American influence in Ukraine.
Heber City - A group of female students at a Utah high school are upset and demanding an answer as to why the school chose to alter their yearbook photos without telling them and also why this rule wasn't applied to everyone.
In a bid to make the photos "show less skin," authorities at Wasatch High School in Heber City doctored a selection of the girl's photos, adding sleeves and raising necklines. However, they didn't apply this policy to all the girl's photos and this has made the students even more angry.
In the video some of the doctored photos can be seen where sleeves have been added, or a tank top painted in under the open neck of a shirt. According to students, their outfits did follow the public school's dress code and they say they have worn them on campus many times.
For the first time official statisticians are measuring the value to the UK economy of sex work and drug dealing - and they have discovered these unsavoury hidden-economy trades make roughly the same contribution as farming - and only slightly less than book and newspaper publishers added together.
Illegal drugs and prostitution boosted the economy by £9.7bn - equal to 0.7% of gross domestic product - in 2009, according to the ONS's first official estimate.
A breakdown of the data shows sex work generated £5.3bn for the economy that year, with another £4.4bn lift from a combination of cannabis, heroin, powder cocaine, crack cocaine, ecstasy and amphetamines.
According to the estimates there were 60,879 prostitutes in the UK in 2009, who had an average of 25 clients per week - each paying on average £67.16 per visit.
© Unknown
It would, of course, be inaccurate to say, as speakers like me once did, that after four years of effort and experience you are now about to leave the hallowed halls of this campus and graduate into a new and adult world. The odds are that you aren't. You were graduated into that world long ago. I'm not sure that it qualifies as adult at all, but a new world it surely is, and one I grasp so little that I feel I should be in the audience and you up here doing what graduation speakers normally do: offering an upbeat, even inspirational, explanation of our world and your place in it.
Honestly, I'm like one of those old codgers I used to watch in the military parades of my 1950s childhood. You know, white-haired guys in open vehicles, probably veterans of the Spanish-American War (a conflict you've undoubtedly never heard of amid the ongoing wars of your own lifetime). To me, they always looked like they had been disinterred from some museum of ancient history, some unimaginable American Pompeii.
And yet those men and I probably had more in common than you and I do now. After all, I don't have a smartphone or an iPad. I'm a book editor, but lack a Kindle or a Nook. I don't tweet or Skype. I can't photograph anyone or shoot video of anything. I don't know how to text or read my email while walking in the street or sitting in a restaurant. And when something goes wrong on my computer or with the Internet, I collapse in a heap, believe myself a doomed man on an alien planet, mourn the passing of the typewriter, and call my daughter and throw myself on her mercy.
© Unknown
2. A half battery of Grad missile launchers, BM-21, is in position within range of Mariupol. As of this morning that unit has not fired. Range of Grad missile is up to 35 kilometers.
3. A half battery of Grad missile launchers is in position within range of Slavyansk.
4. I have no positive verification of a Grad missile attack on Slavyansk. This does not mean an attack did not occur. Something very large and multiple did hit the outskirts of an outlying village but I have no source at the impact spots to verify what the impacts were.
5. Sources report that the Donbas Army action at Donetsk Airport was a trap involving proposed negotiations with certain Ukraine Army units under the auspices of a western organization in Donetsk at that time. Sources report that shortly after the negotiations started the Ukraine Army sent in by air strong reinforcements to their unit in airport as the Ukraine Army units in airport attacked the Donbas Army unit.
Comment: The Saker has written this about "Juan", who is the author of the above:
I have recently come into contact with "Juan" who currently resides near the conflict area in the Ukraine. I don't personally know Juan but I am confident that he/she is a person with a military background and a first-hand knowledge of the Russian military, including elite units. In our email exchanges we soon established that while I was "one of 'them' who was buried under 15 kilometers of concrete, rock and steel" "Juan" was one of the "poor ground pounders had to slog through the mud and slime, rain and snow'. This gave me the idea to ask "Juan" to provide the readers of this blog with an analysis of the conflict in the Ukraine written from the point of view of somebody whose career was on the front lines and not, like me, in air-conditioned rooms with fancy computers and communication gear. I sincerely think that this latter perspective is something this blog sorely needed and I am delighted to be able to share it with you today.
A big thank you to "Juan" for agreeing to share his views with all of us!
The Saker
© AP Photo/The Daily News, Don BryanSandra Amritt, a cook for the Onslow County Jail, prepares a tray for the days lunch Oct. 22, 2007, in Onslow County, Jacksonville, N.C.
When she arrived at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Framingham, Hazen left behind a job as a records manager for a fiber-optics company. Her $14-an-hour salary had covered food, utilities, and rent on the modest apartment she shared with her boyfriend and her teenage son. She would have been putting some money away, too, if her paycheck hadn't also been covering the couple's drug habit. As it was, like many inmates, she went to prison with no savings and, because her boyfriend was locked up too, had no one on the outside to send her money. Her son went to live with his dad.
© Unknown'Tories are inhumane bigots' - Not just Tories, but the entire political and ruling class
"The really scary thing is if in the next 30 years house prices rise as much as they have done in the last 30 years, then the average house in Britain will cost £1.2 million (US$2 million)," said David Boyle, a British author and a government advisor who is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation.
According to Boyle, who spoke at the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts, most representatives from the traditional middle class won't be able to afford a house because wages will fail to keep up with huge price increases.
Comment: 30 more years is a very optimistic prediction for this highly unstable system run by insane parasites. A steady stream of austerity, job losses and privatization is hitting the UK hard, and it seems the "good times" are well and truly over for the common people of the Western empire.
© WSBTV
In a multijurisdictional raid in Habersham County police barged into the home of Wanis Thometheva at 3:00 am.
During the raid one of the uniformed men, tasked with caging people for possession of substances the state deems illegal, threw a stun grenade into the crib of a 19 month old baby.
Alecia Phonesavanh, the mother of the 19-month old, was staying at her sister-in-law's home when cops smashed in.
"It's my baby. He's only a baby. He didn't deserve any of this," Phonesavanh said. "It landed in his playpen and exploded on his pillow right in his face."
Phonesavanh's son is in the burn unit of a local hospital. The grenade blew a large laceration in his chest and ripped his face wide open.
There were many pictures taken but they were so graphic that the local news station chose not to share them.
According to WSBTV,
Cornelia Police Chief Rick Darby confirmed that the raid took place at the home just before 3 a.m.
Deputies said they bought drugs from the house and came back with a no-knock warrant to arrest a man known to have drugs and weapons.
"Everyone's sleeping. There's a loud bang and a bright light," Phonesavanh said. "The cops threw that grenade in the door without looking first and it landed right in the playpen and exploded on his pillow right in his face."
They arrested Wanis Thometheva, 30, during the raid.
Comment: See also...