Society's ChildS


Cloud Grey

Do we really want to be French? The French 'beauty' myth

french women
As a nation, we appear to be endlessly fascinated with how they live across the Channel. But it is particularly the female population that seems to be dazzled by our feisty, Chanel-wearing, red-wine swilling counterparts. Your local library could probably dedicate an entire corner to French lifestyle guides and there still wouldn't be enough room to house every book that advises on how to achieve the Parisian woman's je ne sais quoi. The subject practically deserves its own Dewey Decimal classification.

And now we are awaiting yet another addition to the genre. Mireille Guiliano's French Women Don't Get Facelifts: The Secrets of Ageing with Style and Attitude, published next week, is a sort-of sequel to her best-selling 2006 book, French Women Don't Get Fat.

X

Amtrak police force American homeless out into polar cold

New York homeless at Penn Station say officers threaten them with expulsion into deadly weather

homeless NYC
© Wilson Dizard/Al Jazeera AmericaAsa Lowe, 41, and Ray Cosby, 69, keep warm in Penn Station in New York City
As Rachel lay napping in New York City's Penn Station on Tuesday, an Amtrak police officer approached and banged on the wall next to her with his baton, startling her from sleep.

The officer told Rachel to get up from the floor or risk being removed from the station. She stood up and said, "Arrest me. I don't care."

Moving along the wall, the officer woke a homeless man by giving him a prodding kick to his feet, then roused several others.

Ambulance

Norfolk UK helicopter crash: 4 US dead

Norfolk crash
© USAF/APAn undated image made available by the US air force shows a HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter of the same type as the one that crashed in north Norfolk
Investigation begins after chopper from US base at RAF Lakenheath crashes on low-level training over marshes in east of England

An investigation has begun after four crew members were killed when a US military helicopter crashed on the east coast of England during a training exercise.

A 400m area was cordoned off by police following the incident, which happened at about 6pm on Tuesday near the Norfolk village of Cley-next-the-Sea. Local people were told to stay clear.

Fish

Japanese fleet slaughters whales inside Southern Ocean sanctuary

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© NRDC
Militant anti-whaling activists Sea Shepherd said they had zeroed in on a Japanese fleet Monday and captured evidence that four whales had been slaughtered, alleging the ships were found inside a Southern Ocean sanctuary.

Sea Shepherd said it had located all five Japanese vessels and was now in pursuit, forcing the harpooners to cut short their operation and retreat.

The group released footage and photographs showing three minke whales dead on the deck of the factory ship Nisshin Maru and said a fourth, also believed to be a minke, was being slaughtered when Sea Shepherd's helicopter flew overhead.

"There's three carcasses on the ship, a fourth carcass has been cut up. There's blood all over the place, meat being carted around on this factory ship deck, offal and innards being dumped in the ocean," said Sea Shepherd Australia chairman Bob Brown.

"That's just a gruesome, bloody, medieval scene which has no place in this modern world."

When the Nisshin Maru was first spotted from the air, Brown said it was in Antarctica's Ross Dependency, within New Zealand's territorial waters and the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, which he described as a "gross breach of international law".

The commercial hunting of whales is prohibited in the sanctuary, which was designated by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1994, but Japan catches the animals there under a "scientific research" loophole in the moratorium on whaling.

Document

"Guccifer Files" - Online outlaw's "archive" identifies scores of new high-profile victims

guccifer
The hacking spree by "Guccifer," the online outlaw who has bedeviled Colin Powell, members of the Bush and Rockefeller families, Obama administration officials, and assorted other public figures, has been far more extensive than previously known, The Smoking Gun has learned.

A large cache of documents reveals that the illegal "Guccifer" incursions have victimized scores of other high-profile victims both in the U.S. and overseas during the past year. The hacker has accessed e-mail correspondence, contact lists, phone records, personal photos, online storage sites, and a wide range of confidential financial documents, including credit card, banking, and investment statements.

Comment:

Hacker begins distributing confidential memos sent to Hillary Clinton on Libya, Benghazi attack
Audacious hack exposes Bush family pictures, e-mail


Arrow Down

Blood bricks: how India's urban boom is built on slave labour

Slave Labour_1
© Narendra Shrestha/EPABlood bricks … Migrant labourers are forced to work in squalid conditions to fuel India's building boom.

Across India, once small trading towns are transforming into bustling centres, as global companies flood in to set up call centres, factories and software development branches, eager to capitalise on high skill-sets at low labour prices. India's cities are expanding ever outwards to accommodate an expected 600 million people by 2030, when over 40% of the country's population will live in urban areas - compared to just 10% a century ago. But this miraculous metropolitan boom comes at a price.

On the outskirts of Hyderabad, the sprawling capital of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, thick clouds of smoke hang above a primal scene of bare-footed workers clambering atop kilns, hacking at mounds of clay and hauling heavy loads.

This is just one of over 150,000 brick production units in the country, which together employ an estimated 10 million workers, churning out the building blocks of the new offices and apartments, factories and shopping malls. All told, India's brick industry - the second largest in the world after China - contributes around £3bn to the country's economy every year. Not that the workers see much of that.

"It's modern-day slavery," says Andrew Brady, of Union Solidarity International (USI), a UK-based NGO that has been campaigning to improve the brick labourers' conditions over the last two years. "Entire families of men, women and children are working for a pittance, up to 16 hours a day, in terrible conditions. There are horrific abuses of minimum wage rates and health and safety regulations, and it's often bonded labour, so they can't escape."

Yoda

Jazz musician and author Gilad Atzmon speaks out in support of Dieudonne

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Speaking from London, jazz musician and author Gilad Atzmon speaks out in support of French comedian Dieudonne, accused by the French regime of 'anti-semitism'...


Bad Guys

Former Miss Venezuela Monica Spear and British ex-husband shot dead in robbery

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© Chaiwat Subprasom/ReutersFormer Miss Venezuela Mónica Spear in the 2005 beauty pageant. Police said her car was forced to stop before she was shot dead. Five suspects have been held.
A Venezuelan beauty queen and her British ex-husband were shot and killed after their car broke down on a roadside near Puerto Cabello on Monday night.

Mónica Spear, who won the Miss Venezuela crown in 2004, and Thomas Berry, a travel company boss from London, according to his Facebook page, are believed to be the victims of an attempted robbery or kidnapping in one of the world's most dangerous countries.

Their bodies - along with their injured five-year-old daughter Maya, who is now receiving hospital treatment - were found in a Toyota Corolla that had apparently broken down on the way from Puerto Cabello to Valencia.

Reflecting the high profile of Spear, President Nicolás Maduro made a statement on the killing, saying it reflected wider problems. "It is very sad to hear of the loss of this young woman ... It is a problem of social violence," he said.

People

U.S. Army Col. Harry G. Riley calls for millions to march on D.C.

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© WND
Truckers rallied in Washington to restore America to its constitutional republic foundations. So did veterans. And bikers. They all assembled and then departed, leaving the Beltway insiders to continue running the nation into the ground, according to one man who says an event he hopes to hold this spring will be different.

U.S. Army Col. Harry G. Riley, retired, who runs the Patriots for America website, told WND his event planned for May 16 doesn't really have an organized sponsor - it will be just be individual Americans assembling to demand a restoration of their nation.

One of the primary catalysts for the event he said, was the establishment of a prayer group.

Also, he vows that they won't leave Washington until they see change.

"One million or more of the assembled 10 million must be prepared to stay in D.C. as long as it takes to see Obama, Biden, Reid, McConnell, Boehner, Pelosi, and Attorney General Holder removed from office," Riley explains in a promotional email about his plan.

"The senior Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives will become Speaker of the House and the U.S. House of Representatives will elect a temporary president and vice president of the United States. The U.S. Senate will take action to elect a new majority and minority leader," he declared.

USA

The developing new American caste system

Caste System
© SMU Central University LibrariesOwditch (or Water) Brahmin-- part of the caste system.

America is believed by the rest of the world to be the land of opportunity and unimpeded upward mobility. It is where people from all walks of life, backgrounds, races and color can make the best of their opportunities and talents. America attracted people from all over the world to achieve, discover, innovate and improve their lives, and this helped create the greatest society ever built by man. It used to be that in America you could make a future for yourself no matter who your parents were, what your religion or race is. Can you imagine a black president with a Moslem father becoming the elected leader in France, England or Germany?

Unfortunately this is becoming less and less so. Life in America is slowly falling into a type of a new caste system, where your origins, and particularly your family's fortunes can in large part determine your future. If you were born rich you are likely to remain that way. But, if you were born poor, you and your progeny are likely to remain that way as well. The opportunity to change your caste is becoming less available nowadays.

We are slowly turning into a system similar to the landed gentry feudal system in England or to the more structured caste system in India. In a caste system, you are born in a pre-defined caste with no way out. In America the newly developing caste system appears to encompass more than just income inequality, it encompasses inequality in opportunity, in health, in life expectancy, in happiness and in all other aspects of life itself. Robert Reich related the Caste system to the decreasing social mobility in the United States.

Wealth inequality is dividing our one United States into two Americas: one that is rich and in control and one that is poor and helpless. The two Americas exist in increasingly separate spheres and barely know each other. The rich don't use the same schools, don't frequent the same restaurants, don't attend the same social functions, don't support similar causes, and don't use the same modes of transportation or shop at the same stores. They live on a higher plane and have an easier and more enjoyable life, different in many ways from the more demanding and stressful lives of most Americans. The rich populate the Congress and other government hierarchies. They write the laws and establish the rules for the rest of us to follow while largely unfamiliar with our lives and the challenges we face. Now, the wealth gap in the United States is the forth highest in the world; only Russia, the Ukraine and Lebanon are worse.