Society's ChildS


Red Flag

Israel's growing gang violence leads to calls for anti-terror tactics

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© Alon Ron/HaaretzShalom Domrani, the reputed head of the prominent Israeli crime family the Domrani organisation, in court.
City of Ashkelon is rocked by car bombs targeting crime family as businesses associated with mobsters are bulldozed

Simon was standing in his shop in sight of Ashkelon's football stadium when he heard the bomb go off.

At first, said Simon - who declined to give his surname - he thought it was a Palestinian missile from Gaza, a short distance along the coast. "I shut the shop and smoked a cigarette to calm myself," he said. After a few minutes, puzzled he had not heard the air-raid siren, he stuck his head out of his door to see the flaming shell of a car. Its passenger, and the target of the blast, was a member of prominent Israeli crime organisation the Domrani family.

The car bomb on Ort Street, close to a school, was not a solitary incident. In the space of a fortnight spanning the final week of October and the beginning of this month, two car bombs detonated in the southern port city, both targeting Domrani family members.

Ashkelon is not the only Israeli town to be rocked by mob violence this year. On 7 November, a device attached to the car of a prominent state prosecutor, well-known for pursuing Israel's crime families, detonated in Tel Aviv.

This rise in incidents has inspired a fierce debate that reached a climax last week with a call from Israel's hawkish public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, for the use of anti-terror tactics usually reserved for Palestinian militants - including administrative detention - against Jewish Israeli crime families. As he made his call, several high-profile arrests took place and a number of businesses associated with mobsters were bulldozed in Ashkelon.

Radar

Watchful eye in nursing homes

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© Jonathon Rosen
A pretty nightie, a new lipstick, a fresh toothbrush: Doris Racher noticed that small things she had bought for her 96-year-old mother, Eryetha Mayberry, a dementia patient at a nursing home in Oklahoma City, had been disappearing. Ms. Racher assumed the culprit was another resident who sometimes wandered into her mother's room and fell asleep in her bed.So in 2012, Ms. Racher placed a motion-activated camera in her mother's room. It looked like an alarm clock, and Ms. Racher nearly forgot about it.

About two months later, the family decided to pore through the recordings.

The camera had not caught the petty thief. But it captured something else:
Nursing aide
© 2013 Doris RacherA video still of a nursing home aide stuffing latex gloves into Eryetha Mayberry's mouth.

An aide stuffed latex gloves into Mrs. Mayberry's mouth, while another taunted her, tapping her on the head, laughing. Hoisting her from her wheelchair, they flung her on a bed. One performed a few heavy-handed chest compressions.
On Nov. 1, propelled by the outcry over the Mayberry case, Oklahoma became the third state - along with New Mexico and Texas - to explicitly permit residents in long-term care facilities to maintain surveillance cameras in their rooms.In the last two years, at least five states have considered similar legislation.

Comment: This whole privacy issue seems to be a bit of a red herring. The psychopathic insurance companies would be the most damaged by allowing cameras in nursing homes. Their tort liability would increase exponentially. Funny how that is NOT mentioned. Cui bono.


Eye 1

The new normal: Google's chief internet evangelist says 'privacy may actually be an anomaly'

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Google's chief internet evangelist, Vint Cerf, suggests that privacy is a fairly new development that may not be sustainable. "Privacy may actually be an anomaly," Cerf said at an FTC event yesterday while taking questions. Elaborating, he explained that privacy wasn't even guaranteed a few decades ago: he used to live in a small town without home phones where the postmaster saw who everyone was getting mail from. "In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing."

Rather than privacy being an inherent part of society that's been stripped away by new technology, Cerf says that technology actually created it in the first place. "It's the industrial revolution and the growth of urban concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity," Cerf said. Cerf warned that he was simplifying his views - "I don't want you to go away thinking I am that shallow about it" - but overall, he believes "it will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve privacy."

Sheriff

Store videos capture a year of police racism

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© Miami HeraldStore owner Alex Saleh, left, with employee Earl Sampson
Earl Sampson has been stopped and questioned by Miami Gardens police 258 times in four years.

He's been searched more than 100 times. And arrested and jailed 56 times.

Despite his long rap sheet, Sampson, 28, has never been convicted of anything more serious than possession of marijuana.

Miami Gardens police have arrested Sampson 62 times for one offense: trespassing.

Almost every citation was issued at the same place: the 207 Quickstop, a convenience store on 207th Street in Miami Gardens.

But Sampson isn't loitering. He works as a clerk at the Quickstop.

So how can he be trespassing when he works there?

It's a question the store's owner, Alex Saleh, 36, has been asking for more than a year as he watched Sampson, his other employees and his customers, day after day, being stopped and frisked by Miami Gardens police. Most of them, like Sampson, are poor and black.


Question

Did JFK predict his own death?

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© Corbis"God, I hate to go to Texas," Kennedy told a friend, saying he had "a terrible feeling about going."
He was certainly preoccupied with the possibility of assassination

As utterly shocking and traumatic as the assassination of John F. Kennedy was, the one person who might not have been surprised that it happened was JFK himself.

It's worth remembering, as the 50th anniversary of JFK's death approaches, that the young president had a morbid fascination with sudden death - and sometimes speculated that he would die at the hands of an assassin.

"Thank God nobody wanted to kill me today," he said to a friend half a century ago tonight while flying from Florida to Washington. How would it happen? By someone firing at his motorcade from a high window, he thought.

Kennedy also confided in the friend, Dave Powers, that he really didn't want to go to Texas later that week.

"God, I hate to go to Texas," JFK said, adding that he had "a terrible feeling about going."

And on the morning of his murder, Friday, November 22, that terrible feeling was still with him.

Alarm Clock

Hospital holds girl for 9 months after parents argue diagnosis

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Justina Pelletier with her parents
It's a medical "mystery" that has left a Connecticut family baffled and heartbroken.

After a long history of medical problems, a West Hartford teenager is now "trapped" inside a hospital with seemingly no way out.

Fox CT spent the past few months investigating the emotional case.

It has been a bitter custody battle, and nine months after it started, it's still going on.

In December 2012, Justina Pelletier was an active 15-year-old girl who would go ice skating, laughed and spent time with her family.

But just two months later, her family says their nightmare began.

"[Exhales] It's beyond any wildest nightmare that you could think of," says Justina's father, Lou Pelletier.

Her longtime West Hartford psychologist has also been following the case.

"It's the most bizarre situation ... I've ever been involved with," says Dean Hokanson, the clinical psychologist who has worked with Justina the past five years.

Megaphone

Best of the Web: President John F. Kennedy's 1961 Inaugural Address

President Kennedy delivered his inaugural address on January 20, 1961. The public was not fully aware of what had happened when, on that day, a new administration (that was really a new regime) took over in Washington. Largely inspired by George Pope Morris, the Civil War poet, and by Abraham Lincoln, the new President's Inaugural Address was one of the finest pieces in the history of American literature. This long sermon in blank verse with key words that rhymed was the thunderclap announcing the birth of a new state. It was the advent, not of a dynasty, but of the intellect.

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In the enemy camp people listened, people read, people were moved and sometimes shaken, but they preferred to voice their amazement that President Kennedy had invited mostly writers, artists and scientists to the inauguration -- Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, William Inge, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, John Hersey, Robert Frost, Saint John Perse, Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Ludwigmies Van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein, Fritz Reiner, Eugene Ormandy, and one lone journalist, Walter Lippman. "There's nobody left at Harvard" became a popular wisecrack when the composition of the Presidential team was announced. But some only half-laughed. In the months that followed, America, anaesthetized by eight years under Eisenhower, awakened to discover that she had a President with both a brain and a heart.


Bulb

Best of the Web: Matt Damon on the need for Disobedience to the State

Matt Damon reads from Howard Zinn's 1970 speech "The Problem is Civil Obedience'. The extract of the text is just 5 minutes, but it packs in a lot of truth, truth that is even more relevant today than it was in 1970; truth that so many people around the world, and especially in the 'Western world' need to hear, take to heart and act upon.


Ambulance

Latvia store collapse: Deaths rise as Riga rescue continues

At least 45 people have been killed when the roof of a supermarket collapsed in the Latvian capital Riga. Rescue efforts are continuing and police have launched a criminal investigation. Three of those killed were emergency workers who were helping people trapped when more of the roof came down. The number of deaths makes this the former Soviet republic's worst disaster since the country became independent in 1991.

Police say they expect the number to rise further. It is unclear how many more people could still be inside.The cause of the collapse is unclear although reports say a garden was being constructed on the roof at the time.

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A view from a nearby building revealed the extent of the damage
Additional images

Bizarro Earth

22 veterans kill themselves every day: more US soldiers dying from suicide than combat

In the United States, America's commander in chief has paid tribute to his nation's veterans. Since 2001 official figures show more US soldiers have died from suicide than in combat - a horrific toll of . A new documentary called Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 highlights the attempt to save former soldiers from self-harm.

Listen here: