Society's ChildS


Heart

First Lady Valerie Trierweiler 'to be kicked out of Elysee Palace over partner "Ho-Ho" Hollande's sex scandal

Peter Allen
Daily Mail
Sun, 12 Jan 2014 19:34 UTC
Image
© ReutersVulnerable: Politicians claim Hollande's partner Valerie Trierweiler should not receive taxpayer-funded perks
France's First Lady Valerie Trierweiler was yesterday facing the prospect of becoming the first in history to be kicked out of the Elysee Palace.

It follows humiliating revelations that her partner, President Francois Hollande, has 'fallen in love' with a woman almost 20 years his junior.

Mr Hollande's relationship with actress Julie Gayet, 41, was exposed by a series of pictures in French Closer magazine which show him travelling to see her on a moped.

But beyond a new romance, opponents claim the scandal exposes publicly funded deceit, security lapses, and the huge cost of a first lady who no longer has any legitimacy.

Mr Hollande, who turns 60 this year, was poised to make a statement to 'clarify' the position of 48-year-old divorcee Miss Trierweiler.
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People

Most (and least) stressful jobs for 2014

Chad Brooks
Business News Daily
Fri, 10 Jan 2014 11:20 UTC
Woman holding temples
© Shutterstock.comNot all jobs are created equal when it comes to stress.
While all jobs come with their own level of stress, new research shows some have it more than others.

A study from job search site CareerCast revealed that jobs where employees are putting their lives on the line, such as military personnel and firefighters, are among the most stressful, while those that don't pose imminent danger, such as audiologists and hair stylists, are the least stressful.

However, not all workplace stress emanates from danger. Researchers said jobs such as public relations executive, newspaper reporter and event coordinator are among the most stressful because of tight deadlines and scrutiny in the public eye.

Determining the amount of stress a worker experiences can be predicted, in part, by looking at the typical demands and crises inherent in the job.

CareerCast's ranking system for stress considered 11 different job demands that can be expected to evoke stress, including amount of travel, growth potential, deadlines, working in the public eye, competitiveness, physical demands, environmental conditions, hazards encountered, own life risk, life of another at risk and meeting the public.
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Cookie

Huskeroos

Eric Peter
EricPeter's Auto
Sun, 12 Jan 2014 12:13 UTC
Huskeroos_1
© EricPetersAuto
Ah, the people of Wal-Mart.

The kids, too.

According to an article in the peer-reviewed journal, Pediatrics, about one out of every six children ages 1 to 6 is too beefy to fit into a standard-sized child safety seat - and needs oversized models designed to accommodate proto-Elvii.

One of the study's authors, Lara Trifiletti, decided to look into the matter after she discovered researchers evaluating the functionality of child safety seats were encountering problems finding seats to fit/properly restrain "husky" children.

This isn't baby fat wer'e talking here. These are three-year-olds who weigh in at 40 plus. Kiddies on a fast food track to being 200 pounders by their tweens.

Those gummi bears and juice boxes really add up, apparently.

So, what to do?


The obvious answer - feed them less and especially, less high fructose corn syrup and wheat products - isn't the right answer, apparently. Instead, the call is for accommodation, for super-sized car safety seats - units titanic enough to hold Baby Fatima so that she's not injured in the event of a car wreck. That she'll end up a teen diabetic - or in the cardiac care ICU by 40 - doesn't matter much, I guess.
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Heart - Black

Pimp sues Nike for $100 million since shoes he stomped victims with didn't have a warning label

Paul Szoldra
Business Insider
Sat, 11 Jan 2014 09:37 UTC
pimp
© Multnomah Co. Sheriff's Office
A 26-year-old pimp convicted and sentenced to 100 years in the brutal beating of a prostitute and another man is now suing Nike, claiming the shoe company is partially responsible since the Jordans he used to stomp the victims did not come with a warning label, The Oregonian reports.

From NBC:
[Sirgiorgio Sanford] Clardy wrote a three-page complaint against Nike from the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution where he is incarcerated, reported The Oregonian. In the claim he said Nike "failed to warn of risk or to provide an adequate warning or instruction," by not cautioning that their shoes are "potentially dangerous."
In June, Clardy repeatedly stomped on the head of a man with his Nike Air Jordan shoes for refusing to pay his prostitute, who Clardy also injured, USA Today reports. The man - who required stitches and plastic surgery on his nose - was then robbed of all his money, according to The Oregonian.

After a two-week trial in which Clardy threatened people and often shouted expletives at the judge, he was declared a dangerous offender unlikely of being rehabilitated, The Oregonian reported.

This latest conviction is another addition to Clardy's extensive rap sheet of felonies and misdemeanors, according to Multnomah County Sherriff's Office.
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Magnet

Second Canadian train derailment within a week


CBC News
Sat, 11 Jan 2014 02:27 UTC
Image
© Deborah Goble/CBC
No one was injured when three CP Rail cars carrying coal tipped over and went off the CN railway tracks near Burnaby Lake in B.C.'s Lower Mainland Saturday morning.

Burnaby RCMP Staff Sgt. Wayne Baier said police got a call about the derailment just before 11 a.m. PT and arrived at the intersection of Cariboo Road and Government Street to find three out of 152 rail cars tipped over, with the contents spilling out.

"The only contents of the car was coal," he said. "There's been some of the contents have fallen in a nearby stream. We've got a hold of the Ministry of Environment that oversees that issue, and I believe they are responding."

Baier said there was obvious damage to the rail tracks, cars and the immediate surroundings but that no one was hurt and the derailment posed no further risk.

"There is no safety concern to the general public," he said.

Comment: It's must have become increasingly more difficult to blame only local factors with a straight face, as it has become apparent that the phenomena of train derailments has skyrocketed all over, these last years.

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Laptop

Cyberbullying: Why women aren't welcome on the Internet

Amanda Hess
Pacific Standard
Mon, 06 Jan 2014 18:26 UTC
Image
© Pacific Standard
I was 12 hours into a summer vacation in Palm Springs when my phone hummed to life, buzzing twice next to me in the dark of my hotel room. I squinted at the screen. It was 5:30 a.m., and a friend was texting me from the opposite coast. "Amanda, this twitter account. Freaking out over here," she wrote. "There is a twitter account that seems to have been set up for the purpose of making death threats to you."

I dragged myself out of bed and opened my laptop. A few hours earlier, someone going by the username "headlessfemalepig" had sent me seven tweets. "I see you are physically not very attractive. Figured," the first said. Then: "You suck a lot of drunk and drug f****** guys c****." As a female journalist who writes about sex (among other things), none of this feedback was particularly out of the ordinary. But this guy took it to another level: "I am 36 years old, I did 12 years for 'manslaughter', I killed a woman, like you, who decided to make fun of guys c****." And then: "Happy to say we live in the same state. Im looking you up, and when I find you, im going to rape you and remove your head." There was more, but the final tweet summed it up: "You are going to die and I am the one who is going to kill you. I promise you this."

My fingers paused over the keyboard. I felt disoriented and terrified. Then embarrassed for being scared, and, finally, pissed. On the one hand, it seemed unlikely that I'd soon be defiled and decapitated at the hands of a serial rapist-murderer. On the other hand, headlessfemalepig was clearly a deranged individual with a bizarre fixation on me. I picked up my phone and dialed 911.
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Arrow Down

MSNBC: December Jobs Report Is 'Awful,' 'Very Bad,' And 'Ugly'


Washington Free Beacon
Fri, 10 Jan 2014 17:32 UTC

MSNBC admitted that the December jobs report was dismal Friday.

CNBC's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera announced the newly released report number. Only 74,000 jobs were created in December, a number that fell significantly short of the 200,000 anticipated created jobs.

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough commented "That's a horrific number" and said that the newly added jobs number is the lowest seen in years.

Caruso-Cabrera confirmed Scarborough's statement, saying that the newly added jobs number is in fact the lowest since January of 2011 and the number was "very, very bad."
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Book 2

Best of the Web: Amiri Baraka, poet, playwright, activist and author of 9/11 poem, dies at 79

Margalit Fox
New York Times
Thu, 09 Jan 2014 16:50 UTC


Amiri Baraka, a poet and playwright of pulsating rage, whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others, died on Thursday in Newark. He was 79.

His death, at Beth Israel Medical Center, was confirmed by his son Ras Baraka, a member of the Newark Municipal Council. He did not specify a cause but said that Mr. Baraka had been hospitalized since Dec. 21.

Mr. Baraka was famous as one of the major forces in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and '70s, which sought to duplicate in fiction, poetry, drama and other mediums the aims of the black power movement in the political arena.

Among his best-known works are the poetry collections The Dead Lecturer and Transbluesency: The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961-1995; the play Dutchman; and Blues People: Negro Music in White America, a highly regarded historical survey.

Mr. Baraka, whose work was widely anthologized and who was heard often on the lecture circuit, was also long famous as a political firebrand. Here, too, critical opinion was divided: He was described variously as an indomitable champion of the disenfranchised, particularly in the racially charged political landscape of Newark, where he lived most of his life, or as a gadfly whose finest hour had come and gone by the end of the 1960s.

Comment: He seemed like a soul searching for truth, no matter where it led. May he continue. Here is a link to the full text of his 9/11 masterpiece, "Somebody Blew up America."

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Yoda

Best of the Web: The George Carlin Experiment: how did you react?

Clint Richardson
Reality Blog
Sat, 11 Jan 2014 16:30 UTC
George Carlin
© Unknown

You could say I grew up watching George Carlin.

He was always my favorite rhetoric-ist. The most logical. The most reasonable. He was in effect my only access to what I now know as the Trivium.

In my first 25 years of life, George Carlin's material truly made me laugh at what could only be defined as Carlin's hyper-realistic perspective stand-up routine. It was the most harsh and abusive form of truth intervention for the entire human species - and yet it was masked brilliantly as comedy.

At around age 25, I attended an event in Las Vegas that was the beginning of my own transformation and incremental arrival into the over-exposure of hyper-reality Carlin spewed. This event was George Carlin, live at the Bally's Casino resort. How wondrously excited I was to see up close and personal one of my few Idols in life. And the show went on...

But something was different.

Something just didn't feel right.

George wasn't the problem, for he was delivering his material just as rehearsed-ly as he always had, mentally re-ciphering eerily associative memory poems with endless lists of material and anecdotal stories with an almost autistic flair.

No, the problem laid elsewhere... It was the crowd. And it was myself.
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Pills

U.K.: High on mephedrone, student cut his own penis and stabbed his mother

Adam Withnall
The Independent
Thu, 09 Jan 2014 13:10 UTC
methedrone
Police described both as stable after they were rushed to hospital with life-threatening – and in the teenager’s case, apparently self-inflicted – wounds
A 19-year-old student has cut off his own penis and stabbed his mother while high on the party drug mephedrone, it was claimed yesterday.

Emergency services rushed to a house in Haywards Heath, West Sussex and apparently found the man hanging from a bedroom window with blood pouring from wounds to his groin.

Police confirmed they entered the house in the early hours of Sunday 29 December and found the 46-year-old mother, who had phoned 999. Both were rushed to hospital with what were described as life-threatening - and in the man's case, self-inflicted - wounds.
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