Society's ChildS


Light Saber

Iceland seeks internet pornography ban

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Country to examine ways to prevent citizens accessing violent or degrading content but critics are uneasy about censorship

In the age of the internet and globe-spanning viral videos, can a thoroughly wired country become a porn-free zone? Authorities in Iceland want to find out.

The government is drafting plans to ban pornography, in print and online, in an attempt to protect children from a tide of violent sexual imagery.

The proposal by the interior minister, Ogmundur Jonasson, has caused uproar. Opponents say the move will censor the web, encourage authoritarian regimes and undermine Iceland's reputation as a Scandinavian bastion of free speech.

Advocates say it is a sensible measure that will shelter children from serious harm.

Snowflake

Lowell snow plow driver fired for posting a video of himself burying parked cars and bragging about it

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A screenshot of the video before it was taken off YouTube.
A snow plow driver in Lowell was fired Friday for posting a video of himself burying parked cars and bragging about it during the blizzard earlier this month.

The driver, who would only identify himself as Dogg, told WBZ-TV he lost his job plowing for a contractor for the city after the YouTube video was broadcast on local television.

The clip was taken down from the site late Friday morning.

He shot the video through his windshield while he was driving his plow in the Lowell area during the February 8-9 blizzard.

"At the end of the storm, I was already up for about 22 hours plowing and I decided to make a video of my favorite part of the day, which is when you push the snow banks back to the curbs," he told the Karlson & McKenzie show on WZLX Friday morning, before he was fired.

Info

California girl, 13, accused of stabbing peer for bag of chips

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Fresno, California - A California middle-school student in Armona has been charged in the stabbing of another student.

A 13-year-old girl from Armona, located in the South Valley, has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon.

The Kings County District Attorney's Office says she also faces another charge for using a knife. Kings County Sheriff's deputies say the girl stabbed a 13-year-old boy after he stole a bag of chips from her lunch.

She claims she only meant to "poke" him and was joking around.

The girl is expected to be arraigned on the charges Monday morning in Kings County Juvenile Hall.

Source: KFSN-TV

Heart - Black

9-year-old boy commits suicide after racial bullying

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© CatersAaron Dugmore
The devastated family of a nine-year-old boy who hanged himself say he took his life after racist taunts by Asian bullies.

Aaron Dugmore - thought to be one of Britain's youngest suicides after bullying - was found in his bedroom after months of jibes at school, they claim.

His family say that Aaron was threatened with a plastic knife by one Asian pupil - who warned him: "Next time it will be a real one."

But despite complaints to the school, where 75 per cent of pupils come from ethnic backgrounds, they claim nothing was done to stop the bullying.

Heartbroken mum Kelly-Marie Dugmore is convinced the taunts led to her son killing himself two weeks ago. She sobbed: "We are not racist people. Aaron got on with all the children at his last school, and for him to have been bullied because of the colour of his skin makes me feel sick to my stomach."

Aaron joined Erdington Hall primary in Birmingham last September after the family moved nearby. But Kelly-Marie, 30, and stepdad Paul Jones, 43, noticed a change in him from his first day.

Bizarro Earth

Homeless New Yorker sues parents for making him feel 'unloved and beaten by the world'

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A homeless New York man is suing his parents for $200,000 for allegedly not loving him enough.

"They aren't supportive, they're emotionally abusive, verbally abusive," 32-year-old Bernard Bey told WINS-FM. "We don't have a family bond that a family should have."

Bey's suit calls for his stepfather and mother, Bernard and Vickie Manley, to mortgage their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant in order to open a Domino's Pizza franchise.

According to WNBC-TV, Bey's lawsuit, filed on Thursday in Kings County in Brooklyn, accuses his parents of subjecting him to mental anguish and making him feel "unloved and beaten by the world."

Arrow Down

Violence against women an epidemic

Oscar Pistorius
© Themba Hadebe/APOlympic athlete Oscar Pistorius stands in the dock during his bail hearing in Pretoria, South Africa, on Friday. Pistorius was granted bail but still faces a murder charge in the shooting death of his girlfriend.
The headlines this past week made us want to scream in outrage.

The Oscar Pistorius murder case in South Africa; rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; gang rapes in India; Pakistan acid attacks, and missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada. Each news item was served up by reporters and anchors as a separate, isolated story. In fact they are all different versions of the same story, told over and over again, night after night, from one country to the next.

Why do we treat all these disparate threads around the world as unrelated events? According to UNIFEM, one in three women - one billion members of our human population - will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. It's time to wake up, connect the dots, and realize that violence against women is a global problem on the scale of climate change or world food shortages.

It is for the courts to decide Pistorius' guilt or innocence in the murder of his girlfriend, but the case highlights the broader problem of violence against women in South Africa. We spend two to three months of every year working in Africa, including numerous visits to South Africa, and we hear from our friends there the story behind the story. Last year, almost 65,000 sexual offences were reported to South African police, who estimate a woman is raped there every 36 seconds.

Bizarro Earth

''I can't forgive myself'': U.S. veterans suffering alone in guilt over wartime events

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© AP PHOTO/JOHN MINCHILLOIn this Oct. 16, 2011, photo, former Marine Capt. Timothy Kudo sits outside his apartment in the Brooklyn borough of New York.
A veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, former U.S. Marine Capt. Timothy Kudo thinks of himself as a killer - and he carries the guilt every day.

"I can't forgive myself," he says. "And the people who can forgive me are dead."

With American troops at war for more than a decade, there's been an unprecedented number of studies into war zone psychology and an evolving understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder. Clinicians suspect some troops are suffering from what they call "moral injuries" - wounds from having done something, or failed to stop something, that violates their moral code.

Though there may be some overlap in symptoms, moral injuries aren't what most people think of as PTSD, the nightmares and flashbacks of terrifying, life-threatening combat events. A moral injury tortures the conscience; symptoms include deep shame, guilt and rage. It's not a medical problem, and it's unclear how to treat it, says retired Col. Elspeth Ritchie, former psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general.

"The concept ... is more an existentialist one," she says.

Heart - Black

'No black nurses' lawsuit: 2nd nurse says she was asked not to touch infant

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© Lauren Justice / The Flint Journal'No black nurses' lawsuit: a second nurse in Flint, Mich. claimed she saw a note in the Hurley Medical Center's neonatal care unit that said African American nurses were not to assist a particular patient's baby. Here, Rev. Charles E. William II speaks to the press outside Hurley Feb. 19.
Where there is one, there is more.

Just days after news spread of a nurse at a Flint, Mich. hospital who had filed a lawsuit claiming her employer granted a patient's request not to have African-American nurses treat his baby, a second nurse has corroborated the claim in another lawsuit.

The nurse, Carlotta Anderson, claims in her lawsuit that a notice was posted on the assignment clipboard in the neonatal unit of the Hurley Medical Center on Oct. 31 that said, "No African American nurse to take care of baby."

Anderson's lawyer, Tom Pabst, tells The Christian Science Monitor that the notice is unambiguous discrimination.

"There's no misunderstanding. They gave an instruction. No black hand touches a white baby," he says.

News of the first lawsuit, filed by Tonya Battle, spread, and Al Sharpton's National Action Network held a press conference Feb. 19 in front of Hurley Medical Center to protest the notice and demand accountability.

Bizarro Earth

Police: Bloods gang member from New York hid 100 bags of heroin in his anus

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© Palisades Interstate Parkway Police
A routine traffic stop led to the rather unusual discovery of a large quantity of heroin on Thursday, according to Palisades Interstate Parkway police.

In a statement, Lt. Michael Coppola said that Sgt. Kley Peralta and Officer Mark Torsiello were patrolling the northbound side of the parkway near Exit 4 in Alpine when they stopped a 2005 Mitsubishi Lancer for having unclear license plates and an obstructed view.

As they approached the vehicle, they smelled burnt marijuana, and asked for consent to search the vehicle.

The driver, 32-year-old Rasoul Speight, of Port Jervis, N.Y., agreed, and the officers found nothing of value during the search, Coppola said.

Arrow Down

Best of the Web: Is the U.S. Republic ending? 8 striking parallels between the Fall of Rome and the U.S.

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Lawrence Lessig's Republic Lost documents the corrosive effect of money on our political process. Lessig persuasively makes the case that we are witnessing the loss of our republican form of government, as politicians increasingly represent those who fund their campaigns, rather than our citizens.

Anthony Everitt's Rise of Rome is fascinating history and a great read. It tells the story of ancient Rome, from its founding (circa 750 BCE) to the fall of the Roman Republic (circa 45 BCE).

When read together, striking parallels emerge -- between our failings and the failings that destroyed the Roman Republic. As with Rome just before the Republic's fall, America has seen:

1 -- Staggering Increase in the Cost of Elections, with Dubious Campaign Funding Sources: Our 2012 election reportedly cost $3 billion. All of it was raised from private sources - often creating the appearance, or the reality, that our leaders are beholden to special interest groups. During the late Roman Republic, elections became staggeringly expensive, with equally deplorable results. Caesar reportedly borrowed so heavily for one political campaign, he feared he would be ruined, if not elected.

Comment: Indeed, the similarities are so striking that this brief but succinct summation barely even scratches the surface. Stay tuned for the next volume of the 'Secret History of the World' series, in which Laura Knight-Jadczyk will be taking a close look at the Fall of Rome.