Society's ChildS

Stormtrooper

Police 'accidentally' raid and destroy 90-year old Florida woman's home

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© CBS
A 90-year old's home was destroyed by police conducting a raid but it appears they got the wrong house.

The elderly woman shared her story of terror and what police are doing to clean up the mess.

She's called Riviera Beach home for 25 years, but back on December 18th around 1 p.m., the 90-year-old woman, who asked not to be identified, had some uninvited guests.

"I don't know how the cops got in here. The noise woke me up when something said boom! Like a bomb or something," said the 90-year old.

There was shattered glass, a busted door, and traces of a flash bang device.

Riviera Beach Police said after evidence of criminal activity, they got a search warrant.

"Cops standing over here talking about where's the drugs? I said what? What drugs? Ain't no drugs in here," she said.

Police searched the home with drug sniffing dogs but came up empty-handed.

"I've never been arrested, never been in jail," said the 90-year old.

Riviera Beach Police said the search warrant was executed at the correct address and while the resident may not have had any knowledge of drugs being sold from her home, it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

The department has since put up temporary repairs and has decided to pay for new windows and doors.

The resident is supposed to get a new door later this week - and new windows by February 28th.

People

Germany sends police to stop Kosovo refugees seeking asylum in EU

kosovo refugees
© ReutersA Kosovo woman covers her baby after crossing illegally the Hungarian-Serbian border near the village of Asotthalom Feb. 6, 2015.
Germany will assign 20 of its police officers to the Hungary-Serbia border to stem the flow of asylum-seekers who are fleeing Kosovo in droves to find economic sanctuary in the European Union, the German Interior Ministry said Thursday. Thousands of Kosovars have left their homeland's unemployment and poverty and attempted to smuggle their way into EU, primarily to Germany and its vibrant economy.

A recent change to travel rules allowed citizens of Kosovo easier access to the EU by way of Serbia, according to Reuters. Approximately 10,000 refugees sought asylum in Hungary in January, with many moving on to Germany to apply for welfare benefits.

"To ensure the long-term stability of Kosovo and the whole region and to guarantee ... protection and acceptance among the population for those who are politically persecuted..., we have taken a range of measures," Germany's Interior Ministry said in a statement.

Comment: Abject poverty is what you get when your independence is sponsored by EU and NATO. Citizens of Kosovo were first 'liberated' and now isolated by the same group. Ukranian people should pay close attention to this, because today they are being given the same false promises as were once given to the Kosovars.

As for Germany, you made your bed when you helped destroy Yugoslavia, now you must sleep in it.


Attention

Anti-Muslim hate speech scrawled on Rhode Island Muslim school

rhode island hate crime
© courtesy Islamic School of Rhode Island
Federal authorities in the United States being asked to investigate an incident in Rhode Island over the weekend in which a Muslim school was vandalized with anti-Islamic graffiti.

"Now this is a hate crime" was among the slogans that were spray-painted on the back and front entrances of the nonprofit Islamic School of Rhode Island in the town of West Warwick late Saturday.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, is now calling on authorities to investigate the incident after what the group calls a "recent spike in anti-Muslim hate rhetoric and bias-motivated attacks on American Muslims and their institutions."

"This apparently bias-motivated incident should be investigated as a hate crime, with the strongest possible charges brought against the perpetrators once they are apprehended," CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper said in a statement on Sunday.

Comment: Muslims across the United States are afraid, and with good reason. The provocations to racial hatred have only intensified since 9/11, and innocent Muslims are the primary victims. History is repeating...


Bad Guys

Who would have believed it? The SNAP program capital of the U.S. is white and Republican

food stamps white republican
Owsley County, Kentucky
In spite of the prevailing stereotypes and assumptions about who uses SNAP Food Stamp benefits the most in the United States, the highest usage is not in Compton, Queens, nor the South Side of Chicago. Instead, a city that is 99.22% white and 95% Republican comes in the lead. Owsley County, Kentucky is a community of about 5,000, residents earning the lowest median household income in the country outside of Puerto Rico, according to the U.S. Census.

The decline in the profits from coal, tobacco and lumber industries led to a harsh toll being taken on the community.

Cale Turner, county executive of Owsley County told ABC back in 2010 that economic hardships have led to a high incidence of drug addiction.
"Those with drug addictions end up in prison without effective treatment. And it happens over and over in this community. The drug problem continues to get worse every year."

Comment: The brainwashing of the masses couldn't be more apparent than this. Huxley was right, we have been taught to love our servitude, and to defend those who impose it.


Bacon n Eggs

Neediest Americans left out of federal aid despite 74 percent increase over two decades

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© Reuters/Tim Shaffer
Over a period of two decades, 2.5 million single parent families experienced a 35 percent decline in federal assistance while those earning slightly more saw aid rise 74 percent, the New York Times reported.

The findings come from research that covers the 15 largest social safety net programs of the period between 1983 and 2004. They demonstrated that aid spending had dramatically increased. Despite this news, those earning as little as 50 percent below the federal poverty level, or $11,925 a year, were getting less support even though those earning 200 percent above the poverty level, or $47,700 were experiencing an increase in support.

Additionally, the review found that the elderly and disabled were benefiting more than younger individuals and the non-disabled, though families with married parents saw more support than single-parent families. In 2004, single-parent families received 20 percent less support than they did in 1983.

The period of study hints at the possible consequences of welfare reform legislation enacted during the presidency of Bill Clinton with the help of a Republican Congress, after which the amount of aid delivered to single-parent families decreased.

"You would think the government would offer the most support to those who have the lowest incomes and provide less help to those with higher incomes," Johns Hopkins University Economics Professor Robert A. Moffitt said in a statement. "But this is not the case."

The findings come from a new study, called "The Deserving Poor, the Family, and the US Welfare System by Moffitt," which is set to be published in the journal Demography.

The New York Times reported "that working families across the US account for nearly three quarters of the people enrolled in major public benefits program and 63 percent of the costs."

Comment: So, if you need help and you don't have a job, according to the government, you are not deserving of support. What a country!


Evil Rays

4 teens face life in prison after terrorizing grocery store

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Four juveniles who allegedly rampaged through a Marysville supermarket face up to life in prison after they were charged as adults in Yuba County Superior Court.

Yuba County prosecutors charged the teens on Friday with seven felonies and one misdemeanor.

Superior Court Judge Julia Scrogin set bail at $1 million each for Shateemah Harrison, Alexandria Petrondla Evans and Elias Esquivel, all 15, and Sarah Murphy, 14.

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The teens, who pleaded not guilty, wore Juvenile Hall jumpsuits and were chained at the waist as they appeared in Scrogin's courtroom.

They were charged with felony counts of second-degree robbery, dissuading a witness, criminal threats, assault with a deadly weapon, second-degree burglary and vandalism. Esquivel also faces a felony charge of resisting an executive officer.

They also face a misdemeanor count of resisting arrest.

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Revenge: Investigators say they believe the teens were trying to get revenge on the store, where three of them had been arrested for shoplifting on Monday

USA

Man jailed for 3 months freed when "drugs" police discovered on him turn out to be vitamins

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© Shutterstock
A Minnesota man who was arrested in November on drug charges has been released after the "most expensive and most accurate test" available found that the drugs in his possession were over the counter vitamins, the Mankato Free Press's Dan Nienaber reports.

Joseph Burrell was arrested on two felony counts of drug possession on November 14, 2014. According to police, Burrell was initially stopped for driving out of a grocery store parking lot without his lights on. When police searched his vehicle, they found a bag containing powder that a field test determined could be an amphetamine.

Burrell โ€” who acknowledged that he had used drugs in the past, but that he had also just finished in-patient treatment at the New Beginnings drug treatment center in nearby Waverly โ€” insisted that the substance was not illegal, and that he had purchased it to deal with a chronically sore shoulder.

Prosecutors pressured him to plead guilty, but Burrell told the Free Press that he "couldn't plead guilty [to possessing] something I knew wasn't a drug. They set my bail at $250,000 for vitamins."

The charges were dropped after prosecutors used a more sophisticated means of analyzing the powder and discovered that it did, in fact, consist of legally available vitamins.

"I had been sitting in the jail since November with my bail set at $250,000," Burrell told the Free Press. "Then, two days before trial, they dropped the charges and let me go."

TV

Symbolic? Television station apologizes for depicting Obama as rape suspect

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Two nights after briefly portraying President Obama as a sex-assault suspect on its 10 o'clock news, Fox 5 San Diego apologized to viewers.

At 10:04 p.m. Friday the 13th, viewers heard anchor Kathleen Bade say: "The only suspect in a sex assault at SDSU will not be charged." At the same time, a picture of Obama appeared with the legend "NO CHARGES."

The Obama shot lasted about 5 seconds, but it was noticed immediately in the newsroom, said Mike Wille, an assignment editor.

"Yeah, there was an accident when they had an over-the-shoulder" display, Wille told Times of San Diego. "It wasn't on purpose."

Asked why there was no immediate on-air acknowledgment or apology for the error, Wille said: "They really don't do that when it's a small thing like that."

But at 10:31 p.m. Sunday, Fox 5 anchor Misha DiBono read this statement:

"And we have an apology now. Friday night at 10 o'clock, we inadvertently used a photo of President Obama while reporting on a story about charges being dropped in a local case. We regret the error."

Compass

The disaster of human rights in America

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© NBCAntonio Zombrano-Montes shot by police for 'throwing rocks".
Antonio Zambrano-Montes, a 35-year-old Mexican national, was shot to death by police in Pasco, Washington last Tuesday as he was backing away from officers with his hands up. A video of the shooting clearly corroborates claims by Zambrano-Montes's family that he was killed "execution style."

Police claimed that Zambrano-Montes, who had lived in the city for ten years and worked as an orchard picker, may have been "armed with a rock" before he was shot multiple times. Protests erupted over the weekend, with more than a thousand demonstrating in Washington state on Saturday against the killing.

The United States has invaded, bombed and destabilized dozens of countries on the grounds that their regimes perpetrated human rights abuses. In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Obama declared that America leads the world "with the example of our values." He added, "That's what makes us exceptional."

Not only is this sanctimonious drivel completely at odds with the reality of American imperialist foreign policy, which employs mass murder, support for extreme right forces, subversion and provocation as its stock-in-trade, it is belied by the reality of life within the United States itself.

The wave of police violence in the US is one aspect of an escalating assault on the democratic rights of the working class that makes a mockery of the official human rights rhetoric. Were these events occurring in a country targeted for conquest or regime change by the CIA and the Pentagon, that country would be declared a human rights disaster area.

According to a web site that keeps track of police shootings, Zambrano-Montes was the 122nd person to be killed by police in the United States since the start of the year. In the five days since the shooting, another ten people have been killed by police: two black, two white, one Latino. The names and identities of five others have not been released.

In virtually all of these fatal police shootings, the victims have been blasted by a fusillade of bullets, their bodies riddled by ten, fifteen, twenty or more rounds fired off by the killer cops.

The recent incidents of wanton police violence include:

The beating of an elderly Indian man in Alabama as he walked in the street, leaving him partially paralyzed.

Comment: The War on Terror has turned our police force into a profitable militarized extension of the U.S. government. Historically, whenever the people try to rise up, they have to be smashed down by brute force. Police are essentially occupying armies and the enemy is you. It is a system designed to impose fear and curtail dissent, while lining the pockets of corporations.

See also: Oligarchic, corporate elites have created a society of captives


2 + 2 = 4

Award winning Ohio teacher resigns due to Common Core 'drill 'em and kill 'em atmosphere'

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© Mourning JournalStacie Starr
The veteran Elyria Schools educator said Monday she plans to resign at the end of the school year.

Gasps of disbelief followed the announcement made during an education forum aimed at unraveling for parents the intricacies of the standardized testing system. Starr was at the podium, delivering a talk on how special education students are suffering under the new system based on Common Core standards and more rigorous assessments. She said as a veteran intervention specialist at Elyria High School, she could no longer watch silently from within the confines of a structured school day.

Instead, she is leaving education in the traditional sense.

"I am going to teach in a different way," she proclaimed.

Starr wants to start an after-school mentoring program for at-risk students in hopes of saving them from the school-to-prison pipeline.

Starr garnered a reputation of being a rock star teacher long before "Live with Kelly and Michael" picked her as the winner of the 2014 Top Teacher Search. She has mentored middle school boys, putting books in the hands of at-risk youth and ties on their necks to foster a sense of pride. Handing out high school diplomas to those same students was a highlight of her career, a testament that getting a child to graduation sometimes requires more than just lesson plans and homework.

She has coached football, taken students on field trips to meet authors and adopted a "failure is not an option" approach to some of the hardest-to-reach students. Yet with a stellar 16-year career under her belt, Starr said the new testing culture is killing education.

"I can't do it anymore, not in this 'drill 'em and kill 'em' atmosphere," she said. "I don't think anyone understands that in this environment if your child cannot quickly grasp material, study like a robot and pass all of these tests, they will not survive."

Comment: The U.S. education system is not designed to teach children to think or foster creativity. It's main purpose is to create a compliant population that are human capital; unquestioning slaves of corporations and governments.

The Untold History of Modern U.S. Education

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