Society's ChildS


Cell Phone

Shop is evacuated and fire brigade are called after brand new iPad Air explodes and fills mobile phone store with smoke

  • Sparks and smoke flew from device released on November 1
  • Vodaphone store had to be evacuated following incident
  • Fire fighters put out the blaze started by demonstration model
A brand new iPad Air exploded in flames in an Australian mobile phone store.

The explosion and fire were so severe that the fire brigade had to be called in to fight the smoke and sparks that were continuing to burst out from the device.

The incident occurred in a Vodafone store in Canberra and the shop had to be evacuated.

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The burned iPad Air, which caused an Australian store to be evacuated when it burst into flames

USA

Psychiatrist said dad 'unfit' for refusing to take son to McDonald's

A defamation lawsuit in New York alleges a court-appointed psychiatrist told a judge a man who refused to take his son to McDonald's was an unfit parent.
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David Schorr, 43, a Manhattan attorney, filed a lawsuit in city Supreme Court alleging court-appointed psychiatrist Marilyn Schiller filed a report in his custody battle saying he was "wholly incapable of taking care of his son" and should be denied weekend visitation rights for refusing to take his 4-year-old son to the fast-food restaurant, the New York Post reported Friday.

Schorr said the incident in question involved his son throwing a temper tantrum during a Tuesday night visitation last week when he refused to take him to McDonald's.

Schorr said he told the boy they could go to any restaurant other than McDonald's, but if his son would not consent to another restaurant, there would be no dinner.

"The child, stubborn as a mule, chose the 'no dinner' option," Schorr said in the lawsuit. "It was just a standoff. I'm kicking myself mightily.

Books

Amazon sending independent bookshops a trojan horse?

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One bookshop owner said the scheme would be like "inviting hungry foxes into the henhouse"
Bookshop owners have hit back at an initiative by Amazon to sell its Kindle e-book reader in independent shops.

The Amazon Source programme, launching first in the US, would let bookshops sell the devices and receive a small cut of e-book sales thereafter.

But reaction has been hostile - one US bookseller described it as "inviting hungry foxes into the henhouse".

Amazon said bookshops "should be striving to offer customers what they want".

Announcing the initiative earlier this week the company said: "With Amazon Source, customers don't have to choose between e-books and their favourite neighbourhood bookstore - they can have both."

No Entry

French court orders Google to censor previously published images taken at disgraced ex-Formula 1 boss Max Mosley's five-hooker S&M orgy

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Max Mosley didn't seem to realise that reawakened interest in his case would boost rankings of said images!
Now everyone will view it AGAIN


Max, old bean - have you ever heard of the Streisand Effect?

A French judge has told Google to devise a way to take down all links to nine images of former F1 boss Max Mosley at a sadomasochistic orgy.

Mosley raised a case at the Paris superior court after claiming Google had not done enough to remove links to nine images of him cavorting with prostitutes - even though he successfully sued the News of the World, which published a video of the orgy, for breaching his privacy.

At a 2008 court hearing in Britain the F1 supremo confessed he had taken part in a sado-masochistic sex party.

Mr Justice Eady ruled the NoTW's allegations that the naughty knees-up had a Nazi theme were false. The judge admitted the orgy involved "bondage, beating and domination" and was "unconventional", but ordered the red-top to pay Mosley £60,000 nonetheless.

Now Google has been told to pay Mosley a token €1 (£0.89) in damages and €5,000 in costs, prompting the advertising giant to protest against the order to build a "censorship machine".

Comment: The plaintiff is obviously shooting himself in the foot, but note that this first for internet censorship comes to us courtesy of France, a country with an extraordinary fear of the Internet.


Health

Dengue cases reach 5,757 in Philippines' Davao City; floods, poor sanitation blamed

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© Unknown
Davao City - Floods and dirty surroundings were among the causes for the surge in dengue cases here during the first 10 months of the year, a Department of Health official in Southern Mindanao said Monday.Mary Divine Hilario, chief of the DOH's health education and information division, said the number of cases in this city was staggering.

Out of the 9,593 dengue cases posted region-wide as of October 30, Davao City accounted for 5,757 cases, Hilario said. Compostela Valley registered 971 dengue cases; Davao del Norte, 731; Davao Oriental, 1,113; and Davao del Sur, 1,004, she added. Thirty of the 60 deaths in Southern Mindanao were also from this city."These are mainly from the Buhangin District," Hilario said.

Cult

Businessman arrested in Australian yeshiva child sex abuse case

Daniel
Daniel "Gug" Hayman
Police in Sydney, Australia have arrested and charged a 49-year-old businessman, Daniel "Gug" Hayman, with charges related to child sexual abuse allegedly carried out at a camp affiliated with Chabad's Yeshiva Centre in Bondi.

Police in Sydney, Australia have arrested and charged a 49-year-old businessman, Daniel "Gug" Hayman, with charges related to child sexual abuse allegedly carried out at a camp affiliated with Chabad's Yeshiva Centre in Bondi, The Age reported.

The alleged abuse took place in 1985 and 1986. The two alleged male victims were 14- and 16-years-old at the time of the alleged abuse, which allegedly took place while Hayman was working as a senior counselor at a Chabad camp run by the Yeshiva Centre.

Hayman, who was approximately 21- to 22-years old at the time the alleged abuse took place, was charged with two counts of gross indecency and was refused bail.

The Age reports that Hayman's arrest and charging is "likely to put some of Australia's most senior rabbinical figures under scrutiny over their failures to act on complaints from victims. Despite complaints, Hayman was never reported to police and left Australia to live in Los Angles Jewish community, where leaders again acted to shield him."

Hayman was reportedly a director of a major Jewish educational organization in Australia "for several years after his alleged sexual abuse of boys" was reported to Chabad Yeshiva officials.

Heart - Black

First do no harm? UK nursing home staff tried for abuse of residents

Hillcroft nursing home
There are five privately-owned Hillcroft nursing homes in north Lancashire
Three carers mocked, bullied and assaulted elderly residents of a care home, a court has heard.

The three female staff members deny abusing eight people with advanced dementia at Hillcroft nursing home in Slyne-with-Hest near Lancaster.

One resident was slapped and others were mocked "for entertainment" between May 2010 and September 2011, Preston Crown Court was told.

A fourth carer has pleaded guilty to ill-treating residents, the jury heard.

Darren Smith, 34, of Howgill Avenue, Lancaster, was seen in bed with a distressed resident and has admitted abusing eight people at the home, the court heard.

Arrow Down

'Anti-drug cartel mayor found dead in West Mexico'

Ygnacio Lopez Mendoza
© Press TVYgnacio Lopez Mendoza
Mexican officials say a crusading mayor, who was allegedly threatened by drug cartels, has been found dead on a roadside in the western state of Michoacan.

The officials said on Friday local police found the body of Ygnacio Lopez Mendoza in his car on Thursday.

Mendoza was the mayor of Santa Ana Maya in Michoacan state, an agricultural town with about 12,000 residents. He was also a qualified doctor.

"The mayor ... was on hunger strike in front of the Senate complaining of complicity between local police and criminals. Today he's dead. How did it happen?" former President Felipe Calderon said on his Twitter account.

The mayor, who went on an 18-day hunger strike to raise more funds for his crusade against organized crimes, was publicly speaking against the Knights Templar drug cartel.

Mr. Potato

Obamacare's website: Recipe for disaster with 500 million lines of code, a shoestring budget and political pressure on deadlines

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© REUTERS There are big incentives for states to participate in the Medicaid extension. (Pictured) President Barack Obama meeting with health care professionals.

Healthcare.gov's problematic launch earlier this month has seen technical glitches for enrollees, flawed data for health insurers and increased scrutiny of private health care technology contractors.

Criticism from lawmakers and media coverage led President Barack Obama to hold a press conference on healthcare.gov on Monday, where he said there was "no excuse" for the problems so far with the website.

But online health insurance marketplaces have launched successfully in the past. Specifically, Massachusetts launched a widely applauded state health exchange in late 2006, known as the Massachusetts Health Connector.

Jon Kingsdale, a health exchanges and health care reform expert with Boston's Wakely Consulting Group, told International Business Times in a phone interview why federal and state health exchanges fared differently.

Gold Coins

Billionaires received U.S. farm subsidies (welfare), report finds

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The federal government paid $11.3 million in taxpayer-funded farm subsidies from 1995 to 2012 to 50 billionaires or businesses in which they have some form of ownership, according to a report released Thursday by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based research organization.

The billionaires who received the subsidies or owned companies that did include the Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen; the investment titan Charles Schwab; and S. Truett Cathy, owner of Chick-fil-A. The billionaires who got the subsidies have a collective net worth of $316 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

The Working Group said its findings were likely to underestimate the total farm subsidies that went to the billionaires on the Forbes 400 list because many of them also received crop insurance subsidies. Federal law prohibits the disclosure of the names of individuals who get crop insurance subsidies, the group said.

The report is being issued as members of the House and Senate are meeting to come up with a new five-year farm bill. The authors of the report said it is timely, given that lawmakers are debating a House proposal that would cut nearly $40 billion over 10 years from the food stamp program, which helps provide food for nearly 47 million people. A Senate provision would cut $4.5 billion over the same period.

A report released Wednesday by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning research group, found that food stamps kept about five million people above the poverty line last year. The food stamp program was cut by about $5 billion on Nov. 1 when a provision in the 2009 stimulus bill that added funding for the program expired.

Comment: Business as usual in one of the richest nations in the world - welfare for the rich while adding to the suffering of the poor.
Eat this: U.S. Farm Bill passes in House - without funding for food stamps
Food insecurity soars: Food stamp program in U.S is largest it has ever been
Food stamps to get cut by $5bn this week