Society's ChildS


Syringe

NYC is now one of the largest distribution hubs in the heroin trade: Drug trafficking at two-decade high


RT.com
Tue, 20 May 2014 17:37 UTC
heroin
© AFP Photo / Spencer Platt
As increased heroin use within the United States comes into sharper view, New York City has emerged as one of the country's largest distribution hubs, with more of the drug passing through it than at any time in the last 23 years.

According to a report by the New York Times, law enforcement has already confiscated 217 pounds of heroin throughout New York City in 2014, up sharply from 139 pounds over the same time frame last year.

Considering the fact that 786 pounds total were seized in 2013 - the largest number in about five years - police are already on track to blow past last year's figures. Since October, 35 percent of all the heroin collected by the Drug Enforcement Administration across the US has been in New York state.

On Staten Island, where the city's overdose rates are the highest, the amount of heroin removed off the street has jumped 61 percent compared to last year.

"It's cheap, it's potent and there's a user demand here right now and they're flooding the market," the DEA's James J. Hunt said to the Times. "In my time, we've never seen the amount of large heroin seizures like this."

Comment: The increase is heroin use appears to coincide with the increasing prescription drug addiction. Overdoses from prescription drugs have reached "epidemic" proportions, especially painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin. Users often switch from painkillers to heroin because it's cheaper and more readily available. But don't expect the government to do anything about either prescription drug usage or heroin - the drug trade is too lucrative for the CIA, the DEA as well as BigPharma.
Heroin's coming back in a big way - in affluent suburbs, small cities and rural towns
Doctors, not drug dealers, are responsible for heroin boom
The Silent Epidemic - Legal Prescription Drug Abuse
War On Drugs Is A Hoax - US military Admits to Guarding, Assisting Lucrative Opium Trade in Afghanistan
Largest cocaine smuggler in the U.S. revealed: The DEA

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USA

Pennsylvania man arrested for hanging flag upside down


Police State USA
Tue, 20 May 2014 18:21 UTC
Upside down flag
© WJACTVJoshuaa Brubaker’s flag.

Allegheny Township - Police arrested and charged a man with a crime because he hung an American flag upside down on his own property.

Joshuaa Brubaker, of Duncansville, says he is passionate about his Native American heritage and the American Indian Movement (AIM). He grew upset when the site of one of the most infamous massacres in U.S. history has been put up for commercial sale.

"I found that Wounded Knee is up for sale, not only privately but commercially," Brubaker said to WJACTV. He made his displeasure known by flipping over his American flag and painting "AIM" on it.

In 1890, during the height of the American Indian "relocation" effort, U.S. troops disarmed the Lakota people en masse "for their own safety and protection" as they were corralled into their new home. When a deaf Lakota man refused to surrender his rifle to the federal soldiers, most of the tribe was slaughtered. The event is known as the Wounded Knee Massacre, and is still memorialized today.

Brubaker's protest was peaceful and did not infringe on the property rights of anyone else. However, the same could not be said about those who reacted to his protest - offended that he was not waving his flag in a manner deemed proper by the state.

The Allegheny Township Police Department intruded on Brubaker's property and forcibly took down the flag. Mr. Brubaker was charged with 'defiling' an American flag.
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Hearts

Win-win approach: Russia and China to construct first rail bridge across Amur River


RT
Tue, 20 May 2014 11:24 UTC
Google map of Amur river
Google Map
Russia and China have agreed to build the first cross-border rail bridge over the Amur River by 2016, following President Putin's visit to Shanghai. The bridge will cut transportation times and increase trade.

Construction of the bridge is scheduled to start within the next few months.

"It is the first ever bridge between Russia and China. Now generally there are no bridges between our countries: neither automobile, nor railway," Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund told journalists on Tuesday.

"RCIF [Russia-China Investment Fund] not only builds financial bridges between Russia and China, but also invests in the infrastructure to benefit both countries," Dmitriev said in a press release on Tuesday.

The bridge will be a project of the Russian-Chinese Investment Fund and will be able to handle 21 million tons of traffic a year. It will connect the Jewish Autonomous Region with the Chinese province of Heilongjiang.
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Health

Train accident in Moscow: At least 6 killed, 45 injured


RT
Tue, 20 May 2014 10:47 UTC
Train crash in Russia
© Semyon Gutsul
A freight train crashed into a passenger train in the Moscow Region. Dozens of people are injured and at least six confirmed dead. Injured passengers were being carried out of the carriages by hand. Rescuers are working at the scene.

"Today at 12:38pm (08:38 GMT) a freight and a commuter train collided on the Bekasovo-Nara railroad near the regional center of Naro-Fominsk," reported the transport police press service.

According to preliminary reports, six people were killed in the incident, one of them dying in hospital. Five out of six dead were the citizens of Moldova.

Up to 45 passengers have been injured, 28 have been taken to hospitals, 15 of them are in a serious condition. Three of the injured are children.

"We now know about five dead," confirmed the head of Naro-Fominsk Region Vadim Andronov. "It is possible that the number of dead and injured passengers will grow as one overturned passenger carriage has been blocked by a container from the freighter train, which now remains on top of it. Rescuers are entering the second damaged passenger carriage right now.."

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Quenelle

They can't outlaw the revolution

Chris Hedges
Truth Dig
Sun, 18 May 2014 06:53 UTC
Image
© Photo by Lucy Parks CC-BY Cecily McMillan

Update: On May 19 Cecily McMillan was sentenced to three months in jail and five years of probation, plus community service. Click on the word Guardian and the words Huffington Post to see articles on the sentencing.

Cecily McMillan, the Occupy activist who on Monday morning will appear before a criminal court in New York City to be sentenced to up to seven years on a charge of assaulting a police officer, sat in a plastic chair wearing a baggy, oversized gray jumpsuit, cheap brown plastic sandals and horn-rim glasses. Other women, also dressed in prison-issued gray jumpsuits, sat nearby in the narrow, concrete-walled visitation room clutching their children, tears streaming down their faces. The children, bewildered, had their arms wrapped tightly around their mothers' necks. It looked like the disaster scene it was.

"It's all out in the open here," said the 25-year-old student, who was to have graduated May 22 with a master's degree from The New School of Social Research in New York City. "The cruelty of power can't hide like it does on the outside. You get America, everything America has become, especially for poor people of color in prison. My lawyers think I will get two years. But two years is nothing compared to what these women, who never went to trial, never had the possibility of a trial with adequate legal representation, face. There are women in my dorm who, because they have such a poor command of English, do not even understand their charges. I spent a lot of time trying to explain the charges to them."

Comment: Once again police can can use brutality to subdue nonviolent peaceful protesters and walk away scot-free, while peaceful protesters are thrown in prison and denied rights to defend themselves by corrupt judges...welcome to America home of the free!

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Robot

The world's first Artificial intelligent company director

Jordyn Taylor
BetaBeat
Tue, 13 May 2014 07:00 UTC
Image
© Wikimedia Commons
In case you needed more proof that all our jobs will one day be occupied by robots, a Hong Kong V.C. firm has just named an artificial intelligence tool to its board of directors. The company's also insisting the tool will be treated as an "equal" to the other board members.

Sure, it's all probably a bid for press - but it's still pretty funny.

A press release from Aging Analytics UK, a company that conducts research on biotechnology and regenerative medicine, made two announcements this morning: first, that they've launched an new A.I. tool called VITAL (Validating Investment Tool for Advancing Life Sciences); and second, that they've licensed VITAL to Hong Kong V.C. firm Deep Knowledge Ventures, where the tool will become an "equal member of its Board of Directors."

Yes, that means it'll have exactly the same power as a living, breathing, presumably college-educated human being.

Comment: Judging by the lack of conscience in boardrooms, this addition of an artificial intelligence in charge of overview seems a perfect extension of our core problem in human looking outfits; the psychopath. It's the next logical step in human devolution.
First, machines will consolidate their gains in already-automated industries. After robots finish replacing assembly line workers, they will replace the workers in warehouses. Speedy bots able to lift 150 pounds all day long will retrieve boxes, sort them, and load them onto trucks. Fruit and vegetable picking will continue to be robotized until no humans pick outside of specialty farms. Pharmacies will feature a single pill-dispensing robot in the back while the pharmacists focus on patient consulting. Next, the more dexterous chores of cleaning in offices and schools will be taken over by late-night robots, starting with easy-to-do floors and windows and eventually getting to toilets. The highway legs of long-haul trucking routes will be driven by robots embedded in truck cabs.

All the while, robots will continue their migration into white-collar work. We already have artificial intelligence in many of our machines; we just don't call it that. Witness one piece of software by Narrative Science (profiled in issue 20.05) that can write newspaper stories about sports games directly from the games' stats or generate a synopsis of a company's stock performance each day from bits of text around the web. Any job dealing with reams of paperwork will be taken over by bots, including much of medicine. Even those areas of medicine not defined by paperwork, such as surgery, are becoming increasingly robotic. The rote tasks of any information-intensive job can be automated. It doesn't matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, architect, reporter, or even programmer: The robot takeover will be epic. 

Rise of the droids: Will robots eventually steal all of our jobs?


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Telephone

"Your call is important to us": How it becomes harder than ever to talk to a real person at big corporations

James Howard Kunstler
Kunstler.com
Mon, 19 May 2014 00:05 UTC
Image
Funny how, in the current national rapture of techno-narcissism, it is harder than ever to do something that for generations used to be as simple as pie: to get somebody on the telephone. It's especially funny in a time when phones have become a prosthetic extension of every human hand and pretty much the be-all and end-all of human culture. I hold a phone, therefore I am!

It's not so funny that the places where it is most difficult to connect to a live human being are among the most critical activities, most particularly every branch of health care. Hospitals now operate under the entirely false and obviously dishonest premise that a robotic phone routing system is the best way to handle communications. Notice that, in the logic of this system, no distinction is made between mundane business and medical emergencies. Everybody who calls get's the same perky robot - always a woman, by the way, in a dishonest attempt to provide false reassurance that a "caring" presence (Big Sister) is at the other end of the line. Whether you call about a billing error or having just shredded your foot in a rototiller, the message at the other end will always be democratically the same: "Your call is important to us." (Not.)
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Bulb

David Letterman regrets his role in humiliating Monica Lewinsky


CBS DC
Fri, 16 May 2014 19:05 UTC
Image
© Getty Images/HandoutA photograph showing former White House intern Monica Lewinsky meeting President Bill Clinton at a White House function submitted as evidence in documents by the Starr investigation and released by the House Judicary Committee on Sept. 21, 1998.
David Letterman regrets the way he treated Monica Lewinsky throughout the years over her affair with then President Bill Clinton while she was a White House intern.

With retiring ABC News' Barbara Walters as his guest on his CBS show Wednesday night, "The Late Show" host said he started to feel bad about the role he played taking shots at Lewinsky after she penned a story for Vanity Fair opening up about the affair and the troubles she had finding a job.

"Now I started to feel bad because myself and other people with shows like this made relentless jokes about the poor woman and she was a kid. She was 21, 22," Letterman said, adding that it was a "sad human situation."

Letterman continued: "I feel bad about my role in helping push the humiliation to the point of suffocation."

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Eye 2

Dad gets restraining order against 5-year-old accused of bullying daughter - boy said, "I want to slit your throat and watch you bleed."


CBS Chicago
Fri, 16 May 2014 18:58 UTC
Image
A Wisconsin father has taken out a restraining order against a 5-year old boy who he claims has been bullying his 6-year-old daughter.

WBBM Newsradio's Dave Berner reports Brian Metzger said his daughter was threatened and attacked by one of her classmates at Prairie Lane Elementary School in Pleasant Prairie. He said his daughter used to love kindergarten, but doesn't want to go to school anymore.

He told WISN-TV his daughter told him the boy said, "I want to slit your throat and watch you bleed."

Metzger said his daughter has been harassed by the boy for the whole school year, but the school failed to protect his daughter.
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Eye 2

Family of mentally ill homeless veteran who died in hot NYC cell files $25M lawsuit against city


Star News Online
Fri, 16 May 2014 18:49 UTC
Image
© AP Photo/Bebeto MatthewsAttorney Derek Sells, left, listens as Alma Murdough speaks during a press conference on Friday May 16, 2014 in New York. Sells plans to file a $25 million wrongful death lawsuit against the city on behalf of Alma Murdough for the death of her son, Marine Jerome Murdough, who was found dead in a 100 degree cell on Rikers Island.
The mother of a mentally ill, homeless veteran and inmate who was found dead in a one-hundred-degree New York City jail cell that overheated due to an equipment malfunction in February plans to file a $25 million wrongful death lawsuit against the city, her lawyer plans to announce.

Alma Murdough's attorney, Derek Sells, also will ask the city to preserve all communications and 911 recordings regarding former Marine Jerome Murdough's death on Rikers Island at a press conference on Friday, he said.

Sells filed a notice of claim, the first procedural step necessary for a civil suit against the city, with the comptroller's office on April 30 on behalf of the inmate's 75-year-old mother. In it, he writes that 56-year-old Murdough's death was caused by carelessness and negligence by Department of Correction employees.

Prosecutors in the Bronx are investigating the death.

Comment: See: Riker's Island inmate found 'baked to death' in his cell

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