Society's ChildS


Arrow Up

UK food prices jumped 33% in 5 years

Dave Beasley
Exmouth Journal
Mon, 02 Dec 2013 07:47 UTC
Image
And once gain this year the Salvation Army is urging people to donate gifts to give children a Merry Christmas.

This week the larder celebrated their first birthday, and shocking figures reveal that as food prices have increased by a third (33 per cent) in just five years, it is ordinary families as well as the vulnerable who a returning to the food bank for help.

Anthony Bernard of the Community Larder said: "We see people from all situations, all ages...

"There are many reasons why people come to us.

"Out of work from a good job with no severance pay; failing to make ends meet from a low paid job with a long commute with fuel and other costs rising; unable to understand benefits changes through learning disabilities; partner went off with all the money leaving kids and debts; huge debts after spending on credit in a good job that was lost; went away briefly and squatters moved into house and stole identity."

And as Christmas looms, with cold weather starting to bite and rocketing heating bills, the people who perhaps could cope a year or so ago are now struggling.
Read More...
Brick Wall

Billionaire bunkers: Elites prepare for the apocalypse in style

Morgan Brennan
Forbes
Wed, 27 Nov 2013 00:00 UTC
Al Corbi's residence in the Hollywood Hills has the requisite white walls covered in artwork and picture windows offering breathtaking views of downtown Los Angeles, but it has more in common with NSA headquarters than with the other contemporary homes on the block. The Corbi family doesn't need keys (thanks to biometric recognition software), doesn't fear earthquakes (thanks to steel-reinforced concrete caissons that burrow 30 feet into the private hilltop) and sleeps easily inside a 2,500-square-foot home within a home: a ballistics-proof panic suite that Corbi refers to as a "safe core."

Paranoid? Perhaps. But also increasingly commonplace. Futuristic security technologies - many developed for the military but sounding as though they came straight from James Bond's Q - have made their way into the home, available to deep-pocketed owners whose peace of mind comes from knowing that their sensors can detect and adjust for, say, a person lurking in the bushes a half-mile away.
House with bunker
© Edit InternationalA computer generated drawing showing an underground bunker that is secretly built under a family house. If the structure is destroyed by any threat event the family will survive in the bunker buried deep underground.

Comment: Why is it that when ordinary folks do it, they're "paranoid, doomsday, anarchist, conspiracy cult survivalist preppers"... but when the rich do it they're "enhancing home security" and "carving out safe rooms"?

Read More...
House

Woman shoots and kills daughter who she thinks is boyfriend

Allison Geller
Opposing Views
Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:00 UTC
Winter Haven, Florida, woman Adele Bing shot and killed her daughter in a deadly mistake. Bing thought the person at the door was her boyfriend, with whom she had just had a serious fight.

"How could I look my grandkids in their face and say I killed their mother?" Bing told police when they arrived at the scene. "Y'all can lock me away for good."
Adele Bing
© Unknown
Bing's 25-year-old daughter, Ruby Bing, was coming to visit with her 4-month-old baby the night of Nov. 26, CNN reported. Adele Bing, 52, had just had a "heated argument" with her boyfriend, James Lane.

Police said she came to the door with "a baseball bat in her left hand and a .22-caliber pistol in her right hand," intending to kill Lane, 39, who reportedly told her he planned to kill her. Police were actually interviewing Lane at the time, who was in the emergency room with a head injury caused by Bing, who had hit him with a gun.

Bing shot her daughter in the chest. She died at the scene. The baby was unharmed.
Read More...
Eye 1

Outraged mother says her daughter's school crossed the line with privacy infringement

Liz Klimas
The Blaze
Tue, 26 Nov 2013 21:49 UTC
Image
© KATU-TVAn Oregon middle school student’s video was deleted but she found administrators went through other applications on the device as well. Her mother views this as a privacy violation.
Khloey Summers, a student at a Hillsboro, Ore., middle school, like many of her peers, whipped out her cellphone to take footage of an incident occurring in the gym last week. School officials confiscated all the students' cellphones though, and when Summers' device was returned, the video was deleted.

Now, Summers' mother said she feels her daughter's rights were violated.

According to KATU-TV, R.A. Brown Middle School administrators took Summers' phone, on which she had filmed a confrontation between a student and staff member Friday. When she got her phone back the video was gone. She also reviewed her recently opened apps and found they had gone through her messages and photos as well, presumably to see if information about the confrontation had been sent elsewhere.
Read More...
Nuke

Anti-Monsanto activists assaulted in Argentina


RT.com
Fri, 29 Nov 2013 12:28 UTC

At least 20 people have been injured in clashes in Argentina between union members and environmental activists, who were protesting the construction of a plant by the biotech giant Monsanto. The clashes happened outside of the construction site in Cordoba province on Thursday.

Some 60 workers from the Argentine Construction Union attacked the protester camp, beating the activists and stealing from them, Environmentalist Vanina Barboza charged in comments to local TV. The union denied any involvement in the scuffles while Adrian Vilalba a Monsanto executive, blamed the environmentalist of damaging workers' cars.

Construction of the corn-processing plant was disrupted in October, when the activists started to block roads to the site, which eventually put the project on hold. The activists are concerned that once finished, the plant would process Monsanto-made genetically modified corn, with the products ending up in the local market.

Comment: See also:
Monsanto continues expansion in Argentina
Monsanto Lies, Again (and Again and Again)
Monsanto's Roundup is Causing DNA and Cellular Damage

Read More...
Stop

Victims' helpline in France never responds


The Connexion
Mon, 25 Nov 2013 00:00 UTC
An association of victims of domestic abuse has called on a minister to try out an emergency helpline that is supposed to help women, but which never answers

In an internet video uploaded for today's International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, the association Paroles de Femmes demonstrated how difficult it was for mothers to find a shelter with their children.

It also showed that the 115 emergency helpline was never actually answered and called on the Minister for womens' rights Najat Vallaud-Belkacem to test the number herself.

Read More...
Cow Skull

Global food crisis: Nutrient-rich food consumption down 40% in India, mostly affecting lower classes


IANS
Sun, 01 Dec 2013 16:36 UTC
Image
Malnutrition, a daily reality for most children on the planet's second most populous country
The spiralling inflation has forced homemakers to tweak their budgets, slashing consumption of nutrient-rich food by almost 40 percent, a survey by an industry chamber said here Sunday.

The survey, which was conducted in October-November, revealed that the maximum impact was felt in major cities led by Delhi-NCR and followed by Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and Chandigarh.

The Assocham survey claimed that nearly 72 percent of lower middle-class families covered by the survey said they have been forced to squeeze their budgets for fruits, vegetables and milk because of consistently high retail prices. The survey was conducted on 2,000 housewives and 1,000 working people.

"The price rise of essential commodities and expenses on other necessities like education, transport and health have stayed higher than the pace at which earnings have increased, making life difficult for the poor, lower income and even middle class families," Assocham secretary general D.S. Rawat said.

Comment: The root problem of high inflation and food scarcity is of course the greedy elites who blame their victims for the problems they create:

India's Minister for Justice, Law & Order and Communications Kapil Sibal blames food price hikes on poor people eating more than one choice of vegetable

Read More...
Bizarro Earth

Child taken from womb by social services

Colin Freeman
The Telegraph
Sun, 01 Dec 2013 14:41 UTC
Image
© ALAMYThe case has developed into an international legal row, with lawyers for the woman describing it as “unprecedented”
A pregnant woman has had her baby forcibly removed by caesarean section by social workers.

Essex social services obtained a High Court order against the woman that allowed her to be forcibly sedated and her child to be taken from her womb.

The council said it was acting in the best interests of the woman, an Italian who was in Britain on a work trip, because she had suffered a mental breakdown.

The baby girl, now 15 months old, is still in the care of social services, who are refusing to give her back to the mother, even though she claims to have made a full recovery.

The case has developed into an international legal row, with lawyers for the woman describing it as "unprecedented".
Read More...
Arrow Down

Racism eating away at Britain fabric: Analyst


Press TV
Sun, 01 Dec 2013 13:40 UTC
Racism
© PressTV
A prominent analyst says Britain is becoming submerged in racism, noting that this sinister phenomenon is eating away at the very fabric of the United Kingdom.

"In fact, a tragic sense of racism and hatred is permeating through the very fabric of the British society, eating it away like a kind of canker," Ismail Salami wrote in a column for Press TV on Sunday.
"With racism being institutionalized across the country, there is little hope for the burgeoning of multiculturalism, hybridity and the possibility of a reliable future for immigrants and alike," he added.
Salami outlined the depth of racism in Britain where a disabled Iranian man, Bijan Ebrahimi, was brutally murdered in July by his neighbor Lee James. Ebrahimi had contacted the police a number of times complaining that he was a victim of anti-social behavior, but police officers had ignored the calls.
"The Bijans of our time are the victims of blind prejudice and loathsome ignorance of those who consciously choose to relegate some people to the category of subhumans and put themselves instead on a pedestal of supremacy," wrote Salami.
The analyst noted that Ebrahimi's death is "just the tip of the iceberg."
Read More...
Arrow Down

UK parents skip meals to feed their families: Study


Press TV
Sun, 01 Dec 2013 13:36 UTC
Meals
© PressTVA new study has found that British parents skip meals so their families don’t go hungry.

A new study has revealed that more than one in four people in the United Kingdom have skipped thier meals and gone hungry over the past year to feed their families.

The research carried out by the UK's biggest provider of food bank the Trussell Trust, food distribution organization FareShare and supermarket giant Tesco, found that 40 per cent of households across Britain have seen their financial situation deteriorate over the last year as they can barely make ends meet amid rising costs of living and stagnant wages.

The report further noted that only over a quarter of the respondents said they have managed to purchase the same amount of healthy and nutritious food as they did a year ago, while almost two thirds stated that they will be cutting back on heating in order to be able to provide food for their families.

Moreover, the study showed that 33 per cent of lower-income consumers are concerned about their job security, 33 per cent are worried about mortgage or rental payments and 53 per cent are concerned about household bills.
Read More...