Society's ChildS


Camcorder

Ex-Reporter Sues After Alleged Police Brutality Deleted Off Camera

ABC News
Amanda Carey
Sat, 14 Apr 2012 17:35 UTC
Image
© New Mexico Corrections DeptFormer KOB anchor and reporter Cristina Rodda.
US - A former reporter is suing the city of Albuquerque, N. M., and a police officer for allegedly deleting evidence of police brutality and tampering with evidence during a story she was covering.

Cristina Rodda, a former anchor and reporter for the Albuquerque NBC affiliate station KOB, is suing Officer Stephanie Lopez of the Albuquerque Police Department. In her federal court filing this week she cited violation of the first, fourth and fourteenth amendments, intentionally spoiling evidence, violation of the New Mexico Tort Claims Act against Lopez. She also cited negligent hiring, training, supervision and retention against the city.

"We just filed this week so the city will have 20 days to answer the lawsuit," B.J. Crow, Cristina's attorney told ABC News.com.

On April 29, 2011 the reporter was sent by KOB to Tumbleweeds night club in Albuquerque, following a tip about a "rave" party where underage people were allegedly allowed, according to the lawsuit.

Rodda was filming the entrance of the club from the parking lot, when Officer Lopez allegedly pushed a young patron to the ground while working crowd control for the police department. Lopez has reportedly been disciplined for similar conduct in the past.

Rodda was soon asked to leave by a club employee and two officers, including Lopez, who demanded the camera tape, which Rodda refused and tried to leave.

Lopez frisked and searched Rodda's purse without consent, later admitting Rodda was compliant throughout the whole process, according to the suit. The officer took the camera.
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Pharoah

Formula One race to go ahead despite ongoing bloodshed in Bahrain


The Telegraph, UK
Sat, 14 Apr 2012 17:29 UTC
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© EPARelatives of late 22-year-old journalist Ahmed Ismail, with some of them wearing shirts with his picture react whille attending his funeral procession in the Salmabad village, south of the Bahraini capital Manama
A teenage mourner shot by police in Bahrain was in intensive care on Saturday as Formula One bosses said next week's Grand Prix will proceed as planned.

The 15-year-old youth was shot by anti-riot police while attending the funeral of a citizen journalist, who was killed at the end of March during a protest in the Gulf kingdom.

Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Aziz was among several people wounded during the funeral ceremony for Ahmed Ismail, 22.

Opposition activists said the young man was hit in the chest as police fired tear gas and live rounds at mourners.

Formula One's governing body the FIA (Federation Internationale de l'Automobile) and commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone both said in Shanghai, venue of Sunday's Chinese Grand Prix, that the April 22 Bahrain event would take place.

Human Rights Watch said the decision to go ahead with the race would be exploited by the ruling Sunni dynasty.

Comment: Apparently not all revolutions are created equal:

Formula One's fascism fetish should not surprise anyone

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Eye 2

Flashback Couple sentenced for involvement in French pedophile ring

Alexandra Fouché
BBC
Fri, 02 Jul 2004 17:14 UTC
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Thierry Delay Myriam Badaoui went to prison, but the 'large number' of names they named went free.
One of France's highest-profile sex abuse case in years has ended with guilty verdicts against 10 people, but with accusations of an even wider paedophile ring not proved.

Thierry and Myriam Delay (also known as Myriam Badaoui) have been found guilty of abusing their own four children and getting their relations and neighbours on a French housing estate involved, sometimes abusing their children.

A wide range of local people were implicated by the Delays, as well as by the other couple at the centre of the case, their next-door neighbour David Delplanque and his partner Aurelie Grenon, and the children involved.

The Delays, Delplanque and Grenon had confessed to raping the Delay couple's four children in Outreau, northern France from 1995 until 2000, when social services raised the alarm.

Comment: See also: Something rotten in France? Trial of 70 parents caught prostituting and raping their own children in Idyllic Angers

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House

Family Flees 'Haunted House,' Sues Landlord

Alyssa Newcomb
ABC News Blogs
Sat, 14 Apr 2012 11:52 UTC

A New Jersey couple is suing their landlord for a refund after they said paranormal activity caused them to flee their rental home.

Michele Callan and her fiance, Josue Chinchilla, moved into the home in Toms River, N.J., with Callan's two children on March 1 and were immediately spooked.

"Three taps on the TV, taps on the shoulder..." Chinchilla told ABC News.

At first they chalked it up to the adjustment period of moving into a new home.

But things only got spookier, they said.

Doors opened and closed. The family even claimed they recorded strange voices whispering, "Let it burn."
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Eye 2

100,000 children go missing every year in UK


Belfast Telegraph
Mon, 16 May 2011 16:53 UTC
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The face of Madeleine McCann was among more than 10,000 images held up at Wembley to raise awareness of the tens of thousands of children who go missing every year in the UK.

Members of the Rock Choir, a community singing phenomenon that is sweeping the country, filled the London stadium with posters of some of the 100,000 children who go missing each year.

The move comes after Prime Minister David Cameron told Kate and Gerry McCann their ordeal was "every parent's worst nightmare" as Scotland Yard pledged to lend its "particular expertise" to the search for their daughter.

Madeleine went missing aged three on holiday in Portugal in May 2007.

Caroline Redman Lusher, director of the Rock Choir, said: "If we can help just one missing child be brought home to safety, it will all have been worthwhile."

Martin Houghton-Brown, chief executive of Missing People, which helped organise the event, said: "By actively joining the search for missing children, and raising funds for the search to continue, Rock Choir has created a truly innovative partnership."
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Heart - Black

Man Tasered by Edmonton Police Dies


CBC News
Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
Taser
© Unknown
Canada - A man who was shocked by a Taser stun gun while in custody this week at Edmonton police headquarters has died.

Jeff Oatway, 34, had been in a coma on life support after he was taken to hospital on Wednesday.

Doctors declared him dead on Friday, said his father, Cliff.

The head of the Edmonton Police Association, Sgt. Tony Simioni, said Oatway "snapped" and became violent when officers were trying to get him ready for a bail hearing around 4 p.m. MT on Wednesday.

About a dozen officers were called to the scene as TV monitors were torn from the walls, computers were destroyed and desks overturned, Simioni said.

The Taser was used on Oatway after two officers were injured, Simioni said Thursday. He then suffered what police described as a "medical episode."

The Alberta Serious Incident Response Team has taken the lead in the investigation. ASIRT looks into incidents or complaints involving serious injury or death that may have resulted from the actions of a police officer.
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Laptop

Fate of Data Held by Megaupload Up in the Air

Matthew Barakat
Bloomberg Businessweek
Fri, 13 Apr 2012 04:01 UTC
police line tape @ megaupload
© n/a
US, Virginia - It's a cache of data roughly equivalent to half of the Library of Congress and nobody quite knows what to do with it.

Tens of millions of digital files kept on Megaupload.com went dark earlier this year. Megaupload was a cyberlocker of sorts, a service that offered individuals and businesses storage space for digital files. But in January, the federal government seized most of the company's assets and charged its founders with running a criminal enterprise designed to facilitate the illegal sharing of copyright-protected movies, music and TV shows.

A hearing Friday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. on what should be done with the data suggests just how intractable the problem is. Five different parties -- including the federal government and the Motion Picture Association of America -- weighed in with disparate views on what should happen. U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady ordered the parties to negotiate over the next two weeks and come up with a solution acceptable to all sides.

Currently the data -- 25 million gigabytes' worth -- sits on 1,100 powered-down servers stored in a climate-controlled warehouse in Harrisonburg, Va. The company that leased the servers to Megaupload, Dulles, Va.-based Carpathia Hosting, asked the court for guidance on what it should do. Megaupload had its assets seized and is no longer paying for the servers' upkeep, so Carpathia is paying thousands of dollars a day just to store the machines. They are also losing revenue that would be available if it erased the data and repurposed the servers for other uses. But Carpathia said it's reluctant to erase data that may serve as evidence in a criminal case.
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Display

Mysterious Internet outage in China fuels talk of a 'kill switch'

Hana Stewart-Smith
ZDNet
Fri, 13 Apr 2012 17:57 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Temporary blackouts leave China's Internet users unable to access many Chinese Web sites as well as other unblocked foreign sites. Chinese Telecoms deny any network issues.

At approximately 11am local time yesterday, Internet users around China reported significant Internet blackouts. Not only were they unable to access some Chinese sites, but also many foreign Web sites that had not previously been blocked.

The issue was not isolated to China. Web users in Hong Kong and Japan also reported issues with accessing Chinese sites. A number of explanations immediately came to light, with the most viable cause being the 8.7 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia on Wednesday, that might have damaged undersea cables.

However, reports from China's major telecommunication companies - China Telecom and Unicom - suggest that this was not the case. China Telecom confirmed that the earthquake had not interfered with the underwater cables in any way.

Comment: We may offer a hypothesis to the increasing cases of "internet temporary blackout". Read the following article to learn more about possible connections. Undersea Internet Cables Cut AGAIN!

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Cult

Flashback Something rotten in France? Trial of 70 parents caught prostituting and raping their own children in Idyllic Angers

Vivienne Walt
Time Magazine
Sun, 17 Apr 2005 15:49 UTC
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© Franck Prevel / APFrance was shocked by the involvement of mothers in the abuse
Angers embodies everything the world loves about France. Water gushes from stone cherubs on its Beaux Arts fountains as mothers sit in the sun, watching their small children spin gleefully on a painted carousel, to the sounds of My Boy Lollipop. Picture-perfect vineyards announce the town's current prosperity; a Gothic cathedral and 13th century chateau commemorate its noble past. Just 265 km from Paris, the gateway to the bucolic Loire Valley, Angers offers four museums, a feast of theater and music, and canoeing on nearby Maine Lake. "This isn't the overcrowded Paris suburbs," sniffs Angers' deputy prosecutor Hervé Lollic. "This is a place of fine wine and history; calm and quiet." The official town website boasts that this is an excellent place to raise a family, too.

Yet what occurred here between 1999 and 2002, years when surveys named Angers as one of the best places to live in France, has horrified the nation. In what could become the biggest French criminal proceeding ever, 39 men and 27 women went on trial last month for involvement in a massive prostitution trade of 45 children - many of them their own. At least 26 men and 13 women are accused of directly prostituting and raping girls and boys, some of whom were still in kindergarten. Prosecutors say that over three years, some 21 couples traded their children for cash, groceries and, in one case, a new car tire. According to prosecutors, Marine V., a pretty blond girl who's now 9, was just one of the victims. She was allegedly raped by about 30 men, including neighbors, uncles, her father and grandfather. Marine's mother acted as banker, allege prosecutors, collecting envelopes full of cash.
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Butterfly

Computer Legend and Gaming Pioneer Jack Tramiel Dies at Age 83

Dave Thier
Forbes
Mon, 09 Apr 2012 12:16 UTC
Tramiel
© WikipediaJack Tramiel founder of Commodore International, speaking at the C64 25th Anniversary.
Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore International and crucial figure in the early history of personal computing, passed away surrounded by his family on Sunday, his family confirms. He was 83 years old.

Tramiel was born in Poland to a Jewish family in 1928. During World War II, he and his family were sent to Auschwitz, after which he and his father were sent to a labor camp called Ahlem, near Hannover. Tramiel was rescued in April 1945 and emigrated to the United States in 1947.

In America, Tramiel started a typewriter repair business. Staying in the forefront of technology, his typewriters morphed into calculators, and later computers. In 1982, Commodore International launched the Commodore 64, which went on to the best-selling personal computer of all time. In 1984, after being forced to leave the company he founded, Jack bought the crumbling Atari Inc.'s Consumer Division and formed Atari Corporation.

Comment: History remembers Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steven Wozniak, Gordon Moore, and Steve Ballmer. History has forgotten Chuck Peddle, Jack Tramiel, and Irving Gould. And that's how the winners have written it for the last 25 years. Steve Jobs has been so brazen that he was claiming to be selling the #1 computer on the market when in fact the Apple II had less than 1/10th the market of the Commodore VIC-20. Hollywood has released revisionist tales such as Pirates of Silicon Valley which completely left out the world's largest computer maker during the time of the movie.

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