Society's ChildS


Laptop

Twitter trolls jailed for sending abusive tweets

Image
© SkynewsNimmo and Sorley arrive separately at Westminster Magistrates Court.
A man and a woman are jailed for abusing high-profile feminist Caroline Criado-Perez and MP Stella Creasy on Twitter

Two people who sent abusive and menacing tweets to banknote campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez and Labour MP Stella Creasy have been jailed.

Isabella Sorley, 23, and John Nimmo, 25, posted dozens of abusive tweets against both women before they were arrested.

Senior district judge Howard Riddle jailed Sorley for 12 weeks and Nimmo for eight weeks as well as ordering them to pay £400 compensation to each victim.

Earlier this month the pair pleaded guilty to sending the menacing tweets, admitting they were among the users of 86 separate Twitter accounts from which Ms Criado-Perez had received abusive messages.

Passing sentence at Westminster Magistrates Court, Judge Riddle said that both victims had suffered substantially as a result of the abuse.

He said Ms Criado-Perez had faced "panic, fear and horror" adding that she feared the "abusers would find her and carry out the threats. She felt hunted."

Arrow Down

State crime labs are incentivized to get false convictions

Crime Lab
© HealthDay
To understand why the United States is the most incarcerated nation in the world, all aspects of the legal system must be scrutinized. One of the least considered points of corruption is the crime lab.

A recent study found that crime labs across the country are literally being incentivized to turn out results that will be favorable to prosecutors in getting criminal convictions. Some say that this introduces a point of compromise in a process that is supposed to be free of bias and partiality.

Its not hard to imagine why. Biased reward schedules are how animals are trained. When a performance is rewarded, a subject will produce more of it. When a performance is not rewarded, a subject will produce less of it.

Like a puppy being rewarded for performing a trick, the government rewards crime labs for "verifying" that unknown substances are illegal narcotics; for finding a driver's blood alcohol content to be over a certain arbitrary number; for determining that a package of drugs is over a certain arbitrary weight so a more draconian charge can be imposed.

Impossible? Consider the recent corruption scandal in Massachusetts, in which a biased crime lab chemist used her position to intentionally forge test results, casting doubt over the validity of tens of thousands of cases.

Sheriff

Flashback Sex trafficking of Americans: Business in the slave trade has never been better

The names of all victims and their relatives have been changed. Quotes from Dennis Paris, Gwen, and Alicia are taken from court testimony.
"He called me a stupid bitch ... a worthless piece of shit.... I had to tell people I fell off stage because I had so many bruises on my ribs face and legs.... I have a permanent twitch in my eye from him hitting me in my face so much. I have none of my irreplaceable things from my youth." - From the victim-impact statement of Felicia, minor prostitute-stripper enslaved by trafficker Corey Davis.

"Prostitution is renting an organ for ten minutes." - A john, interviewed by research psychologist Melissa Farley.

"Would you please write down the type of person you think I am, given all that you've heard and read?... I've been called the worst of the worst by the government and it's going to be hard for you to top that." - Letter postmarked June 27, 2008, to Amy Fine Collins, from Dennis Paris, a.k.a. "Rahmyti," then inmate at the Wyatt Detention Facility, in Central Falls, Rhode Island, now at a high-security federal penitentiary in Arizona.
Image
© Larry FinkA photographer's representation of a typical scene at one of the motels in Central Connecticut used for sex trafficking.
The little Barbies

In the Sex Crimes Bureau of the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, in the pediatric division of Fort Bragg's Womack Army Medical Center, in the back alleys of Waterbury, Connecticut, and in the hallways of Hartford's Community Court, Assistant D.A. Rhonnie Jaus, forensic pediatrician Dr. Sharon Cooper, ex-streetwalker Louise, and Judge Curtissa Cofield have all simultaneously and independently noted the same disturbing phenomenon. There are more young American girls entering the commercial sex industry - an estimated 300,000 at this moment - and their ages have been dropping drastically. "The average starting age for prostitution is now 13," says Rachel Lloyd, executive director of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (gems), a Harlem-based organization that rescues young women from "the life." Says Judge Cofield, who formerly presided over Hartford's Prostitution Protocol, a court-ordered rehabilitation program, "I call them the Little Barbies."

Comment: Despite the "happy ending" of this article, keep in mind that the federal government has estimated that at least 100,000 minors every year are sold for sex in the U.S. The men who purchase and pimp them are rarely punished. Run-away shelters, safe housing and services for these children are perennially underfunded. Instead, the most common reaction is to punish these victims.

Most children in the commercial sex industry qualify as victims under statutory rape laws. Yet Cynthia Godsoe, assistant professor of family law at Brooklyn Law School, could find not a single case of a customer of a trafficked child being prosecuted for statutory rape.

For more information see:

Give restitution to victims of child pornography, but also recognize all child victims of sexual exploitation


Pistol

Elderly Nevada man shoots paralyzed wife to death in hospital bed‏

Image
© Uknown
A man who shot his wife of 63 years to death last week in a Nevada hospital said he felt he had no other choice.

"She was paralyzed from the neck down and very uncomfortable without much of a future, so I just helped her along," the 88-year-old William Dresser told the Reno Gazette-Journal.

Dresser was released on $225,000 bond Friday, was charged with open murder in the Jan 19 fatal shooting of his wife, 86-year-old Frances Dresser, who suffered from a fall earlier this month and struck her chin.

Heart - Black

Woman sues employer for firing her hours after cancer diagnosis

The day Elisa Madonia learned she had cancer, she thought things couldn't get any worse, but they did.

She says just a few hours after her doctors told her employer she would need some time off for cancer treatments and surgery, they fired her.

CBS 2′s Dana Kozlov tells us why she's fighting back.

"I've been fighting for my life," said Madonia.

One thing Elisa Madonia didn't think she'd have to fight for after her cancer diagnosis was her four year job at property management company S37. She was wrong.

"Not only I'm being hit with a disease, that I have cancer, now you take my job too away from me?" said Madonia.

Madonia's ordeal began last October, right after doctors told her she had stage three esophageal cancer.

Doctors sent her employers letters about her illness and her possible need for some significant time off for chemo, radiation and surgery. Less than two hours after getting that letter, Madonia says her boss called her in to the office, suggested she resign and offered to pay six months of COBRA if she signed a separation letter. Then they terminated her. Video here.

Cell Phone

Mysterious phone calls scamming cell phone users in Florida

Cellphone
© ActionNewsJax
Jacksonville -- A new con is targeting cell phone users who do nothing but use their phones the way they're intended.

The Better Business Bureau issued an alert Thursday to users of any kind of cell phone under any carrier.

The scam starts when users receive a call from a number they don't recognize.

"There was no static, no fuzz, no anything, so I just hung up," said Carla Aldridge of the call from Antigua / Barbuda that she answered Thursday morning.

Aldridge owns CPR Cell Phone Repair in Jacksonville, and is always cautious of scams in the industry, but even this one got by her. Now, she owes her cell phone company $9.

"Nine dollars just for answering my phone?"

Aldridge is one of dozens of cell phone users Action News easily located, who were also targets over the past two days. Each received calls from somewhere in the Caribbean like Antigua, Grenada, Jamaica or the British Virgin Islands, where a computer calls random numbers and quickly hangs up if you don't answer.

"A certain percentage of people are going to automatically call back that number," says Tom Stephens, President of the Better Business Bureau of Northeast Florida and the Southeast Atlantic.

Ice Cube

If 3 inches of snow can cause this much chaos in Atlanta, what will an economic collapse look like?

Image
This week, three inches of snow "paralyzed" the ninth-largest city in the United States, and the highways of Atlanta "resembled a scene in a post-apocalyptic world" according to national news reports. Hundreds of cars were abandoned on the side of the road, people were spending the night in churches and grocery stores, and many walked for hours in a desperate attempt to get home or find needed provisions. So if three inches of snow can cause this much chaos in one of our major cities, what will a full-blown economic collapse look like? Most Americans have no idea how fragile our way of life is. In the event of a major natural disaster, a massive EMP blast or a complete economic meltdown, our lives would change very rapidly, and most people are totally unprepared for that.

In Atlanta, a relatively minor snowfall has resulted in the deaths of 5 people, more than 100 injuries, and some commuters reported being stuck in traffic for up to 18 hours. According to USA Today, highways around Atlanta resembled "a post-apocalyptic world" at the height of the storm...

Bullseye

Best of the Web: Why the rich are freaking out

money
© AP PhotoThe nation’s wealthiest 1 percent appear to be having a collective meltdown
The co-founder of one the nation's oldest venture capital firms fears a possible genocide against the wealthy. Residents of Manhattan's tony Upper East Side say the progressive mayor didn't plow their streets as a form of frosty revenge. And the co-founder of Home Depot recently warned the Pope to pipe down about economic inequality.

The nation's wealthiest, denizens of the loftiest slice of the 1 percent, appear to be having a collective meltdown.

Economists, advisers to the wealthy and the wealthy themselves describe a deep-seated anxiety that the national - and even global - mood is turning against the super-rich in ways that ultimately could prove dangerous and hard to control.

President Barack Obama and the Democrats have pivoted to income inequality ahead of the midterm elections. Pope Francis has strongly warned against the dangers of wealth concentration. And all of this follows the rise of the Occupy movement in 2011 and a bout of bank-bashing populism in the tea party.

The collective result, according to one member of the 1 percent, is a fear that the rich are in deep, deep trouble. Maybe not today but soon.

Comment: The elite should feel nervous. In times of catastrophe and societal collapse the population turns against its leaders.


Megaphone

It's about time: India's supreme court orders inquiry into gang rape

Image
© UnknownSupreme Court Building, New Delhi, India.
India's supreme court yesterday ordered an investigation into the gang rape of a 20-year-old woman in eastern Bengal state, allegedly at the behest of her village council as "punishment" for falling in love with a Muslim boy.

The court called the case "disturbing" and asked the district judge at Birbhum, 240km west of the state capital Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) where the sexual assault took place on Monday night, to investigate and file his report within a week.

The tribal woman, who is admitted to a local hospital, told the police that she was raped the entire night on the directions of her village council for falling in love with a man from a different community and religion.

She said her lover visited her on Monday to propose marriage, but was caught by the villagers who were enraged by his motives.

The two of them were then tied to a tree while the village council conferred to decide their fate.

It ordered each of them to pay a fine of Rs25,000 (€296) and when the woman's family, too poor to pay, demurred the council ordered her gang rape, police said.

TV

Me, Myself, and Biebs

Image
© Slate/Getty ImagesMissing the similarities between Corey Haim and Justin Bieber? Just watch Me, Myself, and I.
The blond, slight, hockey-obsessed Canadian teenager flirts outrageously with the camera, knowing full well that it is his greatest friend and professional asset. The young man is not just handsome, he's downright pretty, with a delicate, androgynous beauty that drives the teenyboppers crazy but also, uncomfortably, makes him an object of erotic desire for adults as well. He's still several years away from being able to drink legally in his adopted country of the United States but he looks much, much younger, less like a late teenager on the cusp of manhood than a boyishly handsome middle-aged lesbian.

He is so popular with teenyboppers that his name has become synonymous with a subset of perpetually screaming teen, tween, or preteen girls. This is a gift and a curse: It gives him a massive, loyal, and devoted fan base but it also makes it difficult, if not prohibitively impossible, for him to be taken seriously. He is a popular subject of worship and derision, lusty adulation and glib mockery. Child stardom of this nature and ferocity and intensity is not something to be experienced or enjoyed: It is something to be survived and endured, and sometimes even that is asking too much.

The young man in question is not Justin Bieber. It's the late Corey Haim. The video is Me, Myself, and I, a notorious, 40-minute long 1989 "video diary" the iconic former child star made following one of many stints in rehab to prove to the world that he was clean, sober, and ready for work. Instead the video helped finish the job Haim had already started of destroying a once promising career.