Society's ChildS


Footprints

Pakistan factory fires kill 105 workers


NBC News
Wed, 12 Sep 2012 02:40 UTC
A fire raced through a garment factory in the Pakistani city of Karachi overnight killing up to 80 people, while another fire in a shoe factory in Lahore killed at least 25 people, police and government officials said on Wednesday.

"People started screaming for their lives," said Mohammad Asif, 20, a worker at the Karachi factory. "Everyone came to the window. I jumped from the third floor."

The fires could raise fresh questions about Pakistan's industrial safety. Critics say the government is too corrupt and ineffective to tackle an array of problems, from struggling industries to suicide bombings in the South Asian nation.

Senior Superintendent of Police Amir Farooqi told Reuters that police were raiding parts of Karachi to search for the factory owners.

Farooqi said 35 people were injured in the garment factory fire and bodies were still being recovered from the facility which employed about 450 people.

The latest death toll was up to 80, according to Provincial Information Minister Sharjeel Inam Memon.

The cause of the garment factory fire was not clear.

"Within two minutes there was fire in the entire factory," said factory worker Liaqat Hussain, 29, from his hospital bed where he was being treated for full-body burns.

"The gate was closed. There was no access to get out we were trapped inside."

Comment: Update: As of 11:00 am EST, the death toll is 314.

Read More...
Phoenix

Mob sets fire to US consulate in Libya, staffer dies


ahram online
Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:00 UTC
An armed mob protesting over a film they said offended Islam, attacked the US consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi.
Image
© Mohamed Abd El Ghany / ReutersProtesters outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo demonstrate their outrage over a movie produced in the U.S. they say insults the Prophet Muhammad.
An American staff member of the U.S. consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi has died following fierce clashes at the compound, Libyan security sources said on Wednesday.

"One American staff member has died and a number have been injured in the clashes," Abdel-Monem Al-Hurr, spokesman for Libya's Supreme Security Committee, said, adding that he did not know the exact number of injured and could not say what the cause of death was.

An armed mob protesting over a film they said offended Islam, attacked the US consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi on Tuesday and set fire to the building, witnesses reported.

The attack happened on the same day as a similar group of hardliners waving black banners attacked the US embassy in Cairo and tore down the US flag, but it was not immediately clear if the two incidents were coordinated.
Read More...
USA

Cairo protesters scale U.S. Embassy wall, remove flag


USA Today- On Dead Line
Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© The Associated Press/Mohammed Abu ZaidDemonstrators destroy an American flag pulled down from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo today in protest of a film deemed offensive to Islam.
Egyptian demonstrators climbed the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo today and pulled down the American flag to protest a film they say is insulting to the prophet Mohammad.

Update at 2:07 p.m. ET: CNN reports that U.S. security guards fired a volley of warning shots as the crowd gathered outside the embassy walls.

CNN adds that the embassy had been expecting a demonstration and cleared all diplomatic personnel earlier from the facility.

Original post: The Associated Press reports that embassy officials say there was no staff inside at the time.

Reuters reports that protesters tried to raise a black flag carrying the slogan: "There is no god but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger."

The news agency says about 2,000 protesters have gathered outside the embassy and about 20 have scaled the walls.

The AP says the protesters were largely ultra-conservative Islamists.

Iran's FARS news agency says the film is the work of a group of "extremist" members of the Egyptian Coptic Church in the United States.
Read More...
Arrow Up

Spain Refuses Bailout Terms

Stephen Burgen
The Guardian
Tue, 11 Sep 2012 09:40 UTC
Image
© Diego Crespo/EPA Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy answers journalists questions during a rare TV interview.
Mariano Rajoy puts Spain on collision course with ECB after ruling out any bailout terms despite bank president's insistence

Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish prime minister, has said he is more determined than ever to avoid having to ask for a bailout - despite the insistence last week by ECB president, Mario Draghi, that it would be a condition of the central bank helping to keep down a country's borrowing costs.

"If there is one overriding priority for creating employment it's reducing the public deficit. That is far more important than what people like to call a bailout," Rajoy said in a televised interview on Monday night.

Draghi announced last week that the bank would buy unlimited quantities of sovereign debt to ensure eurozone governments retained access to funding, but he made it clear that there would be strings attached. However, Rajoy said he was not prepared to accept such conditions. "I couldn't accept anyone else telling us what our policies should be or where we have to make cuts," he said.
Read More...
Attention

Alps Shootings: How French Press Buried the Story

Kim Willsher
The Guardian
Sun, 09 Sep 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© Laurent Cipriani/AP Flowers on the crime scene four people were killed in the French Alps. The French press treated the story as small in comparison to front-page headlines on British pages.
Murder of British family and French cyclist seen by Gallic press as small story despite hitting front pages in UK newspapers

For the French press, the murder of a British family and a French cyclist on the edge of an Alpine forest was what is known as a "fait divers", a term mostly used to describe a trivial miscellaneous news item.

Reports of the multiple killing emerged well in time for newspaper deadlines on both sides of the Channel. However, it made front-page headlines on Thursday only in Britain.

Libération, the leading leftwing daily newspaper, carried a short report on page 14 under the headline: "Unexplained carnage in Haute-Savoie", while its rival, the right-of-centre Le Figaro relegated the story to page 8. Even on Friday, when one of the victims had been identified as a local Frenchman, father-of-three Sylvain Mollier, who happened to be cycling past when he was gunned down, only the local papers and the national tabloid Aujourd'hui put the story on the front page.
Read More...
Heart - Black

Pat Robertson Tells Man To Move To Saudi Arabia So He Can Beat His Wife (Legally, of Course)

Kate R. Bennert
Gawker
Tue, 11 Sep 2012 19:57 UTC

This morning on the 700 Club's regular segment "Bring It On," in which horrible people ask other horrible people how to continue being horrible people, a man asked Pat Robertson how to work things out with his wife who "has no respect for [him] as head of the house." Pat Robertson responded, unblinking:
Well you could become a muslim and you could beat her.
Whole seconds pass before Pat chuckles as if he were kidding (which, as it becomes clear, he is not) and continues to deep-throat his own foot:
Somebody's gotta stand up to her, and he can't let her get away with this stuff... I don't think we condone wife-beating these days, but something's gotta be done to make her -
Read More...
Pistol

Toronto slayings, shootings linked to battle for gang leadership


Yahoo! News - Canada
Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© Tony Smyth/CBC NewsOne of the victims of the shooting on Danzig Street in Toronto's east end is rushed to hospital.
A spate of killings and shootings in Toronto's east end are tied to a leadership vacuum inside one of the city's most notorious gangs, police say. And the worst mass shooting ever in Toronto's history is linked to that same gang.

On Tuesday morning, at a news conference in a parking lot where one of the killings happened, police said they have evidence that links three homicides and a series of shootings to the gang known as the Galloway Boys.

"We have some information that the shooters in these incidents are vying for the leadership within the Galloway Boys group," said Det.-Sgt. Brett Nicol, who is leading the investigation into one of the slayings.

"These guys are involved in all sorts of criminality from drug dealing, weapons trafficking and prostitution," he said.

Police also revealed that the shooting death of D'Mitre Barnaby was a tragic case of mistaken identity.

Barnaby was found shot to death outside an apartment building on Dec. 30, 2011, just a few blocks from where the street party took place.

No charges have been laid in that slaying.
Read More...
Light Saber

Idaho Abortion Ruling States Pregnant Women Can't Be Prosecuted For Having Abortions


Huffington Post
Tue, 11 Sep 2012 17:42 UTC
Jennie Linn McCormack
© Kim Murphy/Los Angeles Times/MCTJennie Linn McCormack's civil suit challenges an Idaho law that makes it illegal to obtain abortion pills from out-of-state doctors over the Internet. She is shown in Pocatello, Idaho.
An Idaho law that bans the use of medication to induce abortion cannot be used to prosecute a woman who took the pills to abort her pregnancy, a U.S. appeals court decided on Tuesday.

Bannock County prosecutors brought a case against Jennie Linn McCormack in 2011 after she used medication that she obtained online to induce her own abortion. McCormack, a single mother of three, claims that she could not find a licensed abortion provider in Southeastern Idaho, so she had to violate a state law that requires abortions to be performed at a hospital or medical clinic.

An Idaho federal judge dismissed the charges against McCormack in September 2011 on the grounds that the law cannot be enforced. McCormack then challenged the law itself, arguing that it imposes an undue burden on women's access to abortion in Idaho.
Read More...
Cult

Brainwashing Alert!: Louisiana Keeps Getting Busted for Teaching Creationism

AUSCS
Opposing Views
Tue, 11 Sep 2012 15:49 UTC
creationism
People have the right to believe what they want about human origins, but they have no right to use the public school system to propagate religion. Insanity, it has been said, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

In light of that, the state of Louisiana might want to get a mental health check-up. Legislators and some education officials there keep promoting creationism in public school science classes - and they keep getting busted on it.

Here's the latest round: In 2008, Louisiana lawmakers passed a law that allows the use of "supplemental" materials in science class so long as the materials "promote critical thinking skills, logical analysis and open and objective discussions of scientific theories being studied." The law lists three scientific theories that would fall under this: the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.

By "origins of life," the legislature clearly meant evolution. Cut through the rhetorical fog about "critical thinking" and "logical analysis," and what legislators really want is to teach religion in biology class.
Read More...
Attention

We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say

Brian Merchant
MotherBoard
Mon, 10 Sep 2012 13:52 UTC
Riots
© Mother Board
What's the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many - poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc - but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It's hunger, plain and simple. If there's a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it's food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.

In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.

The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI's model works: "The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause." Plot the data, and it looks like this:
Read More...