Society's ChildS


Heart - Black

Best of the Web: Fury Rages Over Rape Case in Turkey


Hurriyet Daily News
Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:00 UTC
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© DHAMinister Şahin calls the reduction ruling in a rape case unacceptable.
Government ministers and deputies from opposition parties all joined an outcry regarding a court decision that lowers the sentence for 26 suspects who were tried for allegedly raping a 13 year old girl. Family and Social Policies Minister Fatma Şahin called the ruling 'unacceptable and worrying,' in a written statement.

Government ministers and opposition members have joined an outcry over a verdict by the Supreme Court of Appeals that ruled the 13-year-old victim in an alleged rape case had consented to sex with 26 suspects.

Family and Social Policies Minister Fatma Şahin called the ruling "unacceptable and worrying," in a written statement issued Tuesday after the Supreme Court of Appeals recently upheld the ruling of a local court in the southeastern province of Mardin to sentence the suspects to the minimum penalty.

"A child's consent is not looked after [when investigating a criminal] act committed against a minor who is categorized as being incapable of understanding the meaning and consequences of the deed [in question]," Şahin said.

The victim, identified only by her initials N.Ç., met the female suspects T. and E., also identified only by their initials, in 2002, after which time the two women facilitated the victim's having intercourse with 26 individuals in exchange for money.

"A judiciary that is incapable of upholding the rights of a 13-year-old child entertains no capacity whatsoever to uphold the Constitution," wrote Education Minister Ömer Çelik on Twitter on Tuesday.

Comment: If you are outraged by this case, please read and sign this petition and share it far and wide.

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USA

US, Chicago: Ron Paul declared winner of Illinois Republican straw poll

Andrew Stern
Reuters
Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© Reuters/Jim Young Republican presidential candidate and Congressman Ron Paul speaks at the annual Republican Party of Iowa Ronald Reagan Dinner in Des Moines, Iowa, November 4, 2011.
Ron Paul was declared the winner on Saturday of a weeklong Republican presidential straw poll in Democratic President Barack Obama's home state of Illinois.

Texas Congressman Paul won 52 percent of the combined 3,649 online and in-person votes cast between October 29 and Saturday evening. He won 66.5 percent of the votes cast over the Internet and 8 percent of those cast in person.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney earned 7 percent of the online votes cast and 35 percent of the in-person votes, winning the most in-person votes cast at 22 locations, the party said.

Businessman Herman Cain won 15 percent of the online vote and 29 percent of the in-person vote.
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Star of David

New York, US: Hate Crimes At Queens Libraries and Jewish Temple


My Fox: New York
Fri, 04 Nov 2011 18:11 UTC
Survey Finds Anti-Semitic Attitudes Rising

Swastikas were found painted on the facades of the Jackson Heights and East Elmhurst branches of the Queens Library and on the door of Congregation Tifereth Israel on Thursday.

The Anti-Defamation League today condemned the anti-Semitic graffiti. The ADL says there were 133 anti-Jewish incidents reported across New York City in 2010.

A nationwide ADL survey released just yesterday found that anti-Semitic attitudes have risen in America.

The ADL survey found that 15 percent of Americans - nearly 35 million adults - hold deeply anti-Semitic views. That's up three percent from 2009.
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Heart - Black

US: South Carolina Middle School Student Suffers Fatal Heart Attack After Tryouts


CBS Charlotte
Fri, 04 Nov 2011 09:53 UTC
basketball
© Jennifer Pottheiser/NBAE via Getty Images
A 13-year-old Sumter middle school student has died after suffering a heart attack following basketball tryouts.

Sumter School District spokeswoman Shelly Galloway told The Item of Sumter a staff member was with eighth-grader Tiffany Amber Cleckley on Tuesday when she collapsed in the office at Mayewood Middle School.

Galloway says an off-duty medical professional administered CPR and used an automated defibrillator until paramedics arrived.

Coroner Harvin Bullock said Cleckley was taken to a hospital, where she died. Bullock said an autopsy found a heart attack caused the death.

According to the American Heart Association if heart failure is caused by over circulation due to a congential heart defect, surgery is often necessary to repair the defect.
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Star of David

Ultra-Orthodox spitting attacks on Old City Christian clergymen becoming daily

Oz Rosenberg
Haaretz
Sat, 05 Nov 2011 14:27 UTC
Clergymen in the Armenian Church in Jerusalem say they are victims of harassment, from senior cardinals to priesthood students; when they do complain, the police don't usually find the perpetrators.

Ultra-Orthodox young men curse and spit at Christian clergymen in the streets of Jerusalem's Old City as a matter of routine. In most cases the clergymen ignore the attacks, but sometimes they strike back. Last week the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court quashed the indictment against an Armenian priesthood student who had punched the man who spat at him.

Johannes Martarsian was walking in the Old City in May 2008 when an young ultra-Orthodox Jew spat at him. Maratersian punched the spitter in the face, making him bleed, and was charged for assault. But Judge Dov Pollock, who unexpectedly annulled the indictment, wrote in his verdict that "putting the defendant on trial for a single blow at a man who spat at his face, after suffering the degradation of being spat on for years while walking around in his church robes is a fundamental contravention of the principles of justice and decency."

Comment: These racist ultra-Orthodox bigots increasingly are setting the tone in Israel. Imagine the outcry if Christians spit at rabbis anywhere in the world.

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Crusader

US: Antiabortion Movement Hoping for Electoral Victory in Mississippi

Sandhya Somashekhar
The Washington Post
Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:00 UTC
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© unknown
An antiabortion movement that is gaining momentum nationwide is hoping for its first electoral victory Tuesday, when Mississippi voters will decide whether to designate a fertilized egg as a person and potentially label its destruction an act of murder.

If approved, the nation's first "personhood" amendment could criminalize abortion and limit in-vitro fertilization and some forms of birth control. It also would give a jolt of energy to a national movement that views mainstream antiabortion activists as timid and complacent.

"They've just taken an incremental approach," said Les Riley, the founder of Personhood Mississippi and father of 10 who initiated the state's effort. "We're just going to the heart of the matter, which is: Is this a person or not? God says it is, and science has confirmed it."

"Life-at-conception" ballot initiatives in other parts of the country, including Colorado last year, have failed amid concerns about their far-reaching, and in some cases unforeseeable, implications.

But proponents of the amendment - who were inspired partly by the tea party movement - say they are more confident of victory in Mississippi, a Bible Belt state where antiabortion sentiment runs high and the laws governing the procedure are so strict that just one clinic provides abortions.
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Bomb

At least 67 people dead in bombings, shootings in northeast Nigeria claimed by sect

Jon Gambrell and Njadvara Musa
The Associated Press
Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:00 UTC
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© unknown
At least 67 people died in a wave of bombings and shootings carried out in northeast Nigeria overnight, officials said Saturday, as frightened mourners left their homes to begin burying their dead.

A radical Muslim sect known locally as Boko Haram claimed responsibility Saturday for the attacks, which represent the most co-ordinated and wide-ranging assault yet in their increasingly bloody sectarian fight with Nigeria's weak central government. The sect, which wants the strict implementation of Shariah law across the nation of more than 160 million people, promised to carry out more attacks.

The fighting centred around Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state, Nigerian Red Cross official Ibrahim Bulama said. The attack started Friday with a car bomb exploding outside a three-story building used as a military office and barracks in the city, with many uniformed security agents dying in the blast, Bulama said.

Gunmen then went through the town, blowing up a First Bank PLC branch and attacking at least three police stations and some churches, leaving them in rubble, he said. Gunfire continued through the night and gunmen raided the village of Potiskum near the capital as well, witnesses said, leaving at least two people dead there.

On Saturday morning, people began hesitantly leaving their homes, seeing the destruction left behind, including military and police vehicles burned by the gunmen, with the burned corpses of the drivers who died in their seats.
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Butterfly

US: Former CBS News Commentator Andy Rooney dies

Bill Trott
Raw Story
Sat, 05 Nov 2011 09:00 UTC
Andy Rooney
Andy Rooney, the curmudgeonly commentator who pondered everything from shoelaces to the existence of God on CBS's 60 Minutes news show for more than 30 years, died on Friday night at the age of 92, CBS said.

Rooney, a four-time Emmy winner, died one month after he had signed off from 60 Minutes in October, concluding a 33-year run. A statement on CBS News' website said he died in a New York hospital of complications following minor surgery.

Rooney was a fixture on Sunday night television, closing out the 60 Minutes broadcast with a short rant in his "A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney" segment. Sitting in his cluttered office at a desk he made himself, Rooney delivered more than 1,000 such essays, holding hold forth on a range of topics of varying degrees of relevance.
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Gear

100,000+ Occupy Oakland, Not 7,000 as Government Reports

Zennie Abraham
Poor Richard's Blog
Sat, 05 Nov 2011 11:02 UTC
Oakland's Interim Police Chief Howard Jordan (a capable and politically smart leader in a tough position) got the Occupy Oakland General Strike crowd count massively wrong: it's not 7,000, but 100,000.

This blogger has been in Oakland since 1974. The largest crowd at Frank Ogama Plaza was for a speech by then-Senator, now President Barack Obama in 2007, and for which was estimated at 18,000. Barack filled the space with people.

The Occupy Oakland General Strike had that many people in the plaza for most of the day, while two huge crowds were outside of it: one marching down Broadway, the other a set of people walking around various parts of downtown Oakland with protest signs.



You can't take a snapshot of an event like this, because of its time length; you have to think of it as a dynamic. In amy population there are births, deaths, in-migration, and out-migration. For the Occupy Oakland General Strike, there were no births, thankfully no deaths, but a lot of in-migration and out-migration.

What was so amazing about the size of the crowd both inside the plaza and just outside of it, then marching to the Port of Oakland, was that it did not decrease in size; it increased. And that was with some people leaving it, and others coming in from BART and from around Oakland via foot or other parts of the Bay by car.
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Attention

Scotland: Teachers Will Stage First Nationwide Strike in 25 years

Chris Marshall
Scotsman
Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:04 UTC
Image
© ScotsmanFlashback to 1986: teachers' last nationwide strike.
Teachers across Scotland will take part in a nationwide strike for the first time in 25 years, joining millions of public-sector workers across the UK in a protest against pension reform.

The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS), Scotland's biggest teaching union, said its members had voted overwhelmingly in favour of joining a UK-wide day of action on 30 November.

The vote means Scottish teachers will take part in a national walk-out for the first time since 1986 and the industrial unrest of the Thatcher government.

The EIS said its members' patience had been exhausted following a "wide-ranging attack" on pay, pensions and education budgets.
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