Society's ChildS


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Imagine: Canadian dentist hopes to clone John Lennon using tooth DNA

John Lennon
© BBC/Brian Duffy/Crackit ProductionsGive teeth a chance: John Lennon.
A Canadian dentist is hoping to clone John Lennon using DNA from one of the singer's rotten teeth. Michael Zuk, who bought Lennon's molar at a 2011 auction, has begun sequencing the former Beatle's DNA - the first step in a process set out by scientists who propose to clone a woolly mammoth.

"Many Beatles fans remember where they were when they heard John Lennon was shot. I hope they also live to hear the day he was given another chance," Zuk said. The tooth has already been couriered to an unnamed US lab where scientists are "considering ways to extract [its] genetic code". "I am nervous and excited at the possibility that we will be able to fully sequence John Lennon's DNA," Zuk said. "With researchers working on ways to clone mammoths, the same technology certainly could make human cloning a reality."

Boat

Russian Navy Hovercraft Rams Into Crowded Beach


Moscow - A Russian Zubr ("Bison") hovercraft, the largest type of military hovercraft in the world, on Sunday ploughed into a Kaliningrad Region beach filled with dozens of sunbathers, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported.

The daily quoted the Russian Defense Ministry's press service as saying the landing was part of a routine exercise on ministry property and "what people were doing at the beach on the territory of a military base is unclear."

Zubr-class hovercraft can simultaneously carry several tanks and up to 500 troops. The landing, during which marines reportedly ran out and cordoned off the vehicle, occurred in the town of Mechnikovo, in Russia's western-most region.

Question

Utilities Plant explosion in Cedar Falls, Iowa


An explosion in Cedar Falls was reported Monday morning around 10 a.m. at a Cedar Falls Utilities electric generating station, destroying half of the building and sending shock waves throughout Cedar Falls.

The explosion happened at the generating station at 2602 West 27th Street in Cedar Falls at around 10 a.m.

Two CFU employees -- Steve Balthazor and Kevin DeSerano -- were inside at the time, according to Betty Zeman, CFU Marketing Manager. They were treated at the scene and declined further medical attention.

The workers were doing a routine test of the combustion turbine at the time, according to CFU officials.

"What was happening today is a routine test of one of the gas turbines that we do annually. So the employees who were working this morning were doing a routine start up of the turbine for testing," said Zeman.

CFU officials are still investigating the cause of the explosion.

Schilling said he was inside City Hall at the time and felt that building shake. Emergency crews got calls from all over Cedar Falls about buildings shaking, they said.

Officials say the explosion, which damaged about half of the station, will not affect CFU's ability to generate power to the city.

Pistol

Police taser 'suicidal' man as he hangs from the edge of a freeway overpass... as bystanders tell them to 'let him go'

  • Footage captured witnesses to the incident near Fresno, California
An amateur cameraman captured the moment that police tasered an apparently suicidal man as he hung from the edge of a freeway overpass, sending him plummeting towards the ground.

Footage of the incident shows the man falling about 15ft from the overpass near Fresno, California, into an air cushion set up to break his fall.

But even though the officers seem to have saved the man from killing himself, observers who are out of shot are heard saying: 'There is no denying it. This is becoming a police state.'

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Suicide attempt? Police and firefighters surround a man hanging from a freeway overpass near Fresno

People 2

8 Reasons young Americans don't fight back: How the U.S crushed youth resistance

Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.

Young Americans - even more so than older Americans - appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it.
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A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans "Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?" Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don't believe it will be around to benefit them.

How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

Pistol

SWAT team performs realistic hijacking drill on school bus filled with children

Rossford, Ohio Police staged a realistic hijacking of a school bus - with children on board - in order to allow a SWAT team to perform an explosion-packed rescue drill. The occupants of the bus were unaware of the details of the drill, for added terror and realism.


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© ABC 13A police officer dresses as a terrorist and wields a rifle in a realistic school bus hijacking drill


"I didn't know what was going on, because at the start he was just a normal person and then he pulled out a gun and a mask, and put it all on," said teen Justin Klocko to ABC 13 News. "Then he started tying everybody down and it just got really scary."

While the bus was in transit under the control of an armed, mask-wearing hijacker, a large crowd of school teachers and administrators sat in an audience observing the terror through a video feed. The bus ultimately pulled into the parking lot of Owens Center for Emergency Preparedness, where the crowd resided and the SWAT team was prepared to burst in with guns drawn to subdue the hijacker.

Bad Guys

Native Canadian women sold on U.S. ships, researcher says


Report says First Nations women from Thunder Bay, Ont., trafficked in sex trade in Minnesota

An American researcher says First Nations women from Thunder Bay, Ont., have been sold on ships in the harbour at Duluth, Minn.

Christine Stark said the port at Duluth is notorious among First Nations people as a site for trafficking women.

The masters student at the University of Minnesota Duluth said she has anecdotal reports of women, teenage girls and boys, as well as babies being sold on ships for sex.

"The women and children - and I've even had women talk about a couple of babies brought onto the ships and sold to the men on ships - are being sold or are exchanging sex for alcohol, a place to stay, drugs, money and so forth.," Stark said. "It's quite shocking."

Stark said the sex trade on ships has been going on for generations, and includes Indigenous women from Canada.
Strong link between Thunder Bay, Duluth

"I have spoken with a woman who was brought down from Thunder Bay on the ships and talks about an excessive amount of trafficking between Canada and the Duluth-Superior harbor," Stark said. "There is a very strong link between Thunder Bay and Duluth."

Her current research is an offshoot of a 2007 report on prostitution in Minnesota, in conjunction with the Minnesota Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition. That report included interviews with 105 indigenous women in Minnesota who have been trafficked in the sex trade.

Stark said the stories that "women get brought out onto the boats and never come back" that she heard as part of that study begged further exploration. She's currently conducting interviews with 15 people to learn more about what happens on the ships.

The Ontario Native Women's Association (ONWA) said it also has anecdotal reports of women being trafficked across borders,or provincial boundaries, into the sex trade.

"We know that it's happening between Winnipeg and Thunder Bay, and there have been reports of it happening in southern Ontario across the U.S. border," said Kezia Picard, the director of policy and research with ONWA.
Poverty, lack of housing make women vulnerable

But Picard said more funding is needed for more formal research into how women are being spirited away.

Sheriff

US suspends assistance to St Lucia Police Force

The United States has withdrawn all assistance to St. Lucia's police force over concerns about allegations of unlawful killings, the leader of the small Caribbean country announced.

St. Lucia Prime Minister Kenny Anthony said the matter focuses on 12 people fatally shot by police in 2010 and 2011 while another administration was in power. Relatives of the victims and other critics insist the men were murdered and police had a "hit list" of people deemed to be criminals.

The killings occurred during a security initiative called "Operation Restore Confidence" as the tourism-dependent island grappled with a worrying rise in violent crime. Five of the men were killed in a single police operation in the southern town of Vieux Fort.

Washington already had blocked St. Lucia officers from participating in U.S.-financed training programs and recently prevented the top commissioner from attending a law enforcement conference, Anthony said.

On Wednesday, a State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said St. Lucia was informed about the decision Aug. 16.

In an address to the country of some 162,000 people late Tuesday, Anthony said the action was based on a U.S. law that requires the State Department to stop assistance to a foreign security force if there is credible information that a gross violation of human rights has occurred.

In its recent annual report on the island, the State Department complained of the slow pace of investigations into the deadly police shootings.

Comment: The US is concerned with "unlawful killings" by police in Jamaica? Pot, meet kettle.


Star of David

How school privatization hawks Teach For America to promote Israel

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© sierraromeo/FlickrDozens of schools have been closed and approximately 850 teachers and staffers have lost their jobs in Chicago, a boon to Teach For America.
Teach For America (TFA) is best known for dispatching hundreds of idealistic college graduates to work in inner cities across the United States each year, but it also sends selected members on free, religious-themed tours of Israel.

Called The Reality Israel Experience, the TFA-sponsored trips bring idealistic young American teachers into contact with Israeli politicians and military personnel while "introducing [TFA] corps members to Israel's education and social justice systems."

According to testimonies featured on Reality Israel's official website, participants are at times led by a "military tour guide," visit with Israeli military educators at an army base "near Jerusalem" (in the occupied West Bank?), and enjoy "ATV off-roading all over the Golan Heights," an Israeli-occupied region of Syria.

The Reality Israel Experience is largely a project of Lynn Schusterman, the wealthy widow of the oil and gas tycoon Charles Schusterman. Since taking control of her husband's fortune, she has established a reputation as one of America's most aggressive backers of pro-Israel campus advocacy, funding campus-oriented ventures like Birthright Israel and The David Project.

As publicly-funded, privately-operated charter schools expand their reach and their wealthy advocates gain increasing influence over public education, boundaries between religion and state have blurred. This has opened avenues for ideologues like Schusterman to advance their political and religious agenda among a population of needy and impressionable children.

With an eye on promoting Israel advocacy in public schools, Schusterman has begun injecting millions into TFA, the advance guard of the education privatization movement.

Backed by billionaires

Since its birth in 1990, TFA has become a Wall Street-backed behemoth at the forefront of a movement that is rapidly placing large sectors of America's public education into private hands.

With at least $350 million in assets, including substantial support from billionaires like Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the heirs to the Walmart fortune, TFA has taken advantage of education reforms introduced under President George W. Bush and accelerated under the administration of Barack Obama. Thousands of its corps members are being moved into cities where certified, union-affiliated teachers are being laid off by the thousands.

Unlike certified teachers, TFA members must only complete a five-week summer training program before they enter the classroom. They work for lower salaries than certified teachers and must accept weaker health and pension benefits, a prime arrangement for libertarian-minded governors and mayors seeking to hollow out the public sector.

Heart - Black

Serial killer Naso guilty of 4 slayings

Naso was found guilty of first-degree murder
© Robert Tong, Associated PressAccused serial killer Joseph Naso rubs his eyes as the prosecution makes its opening statement in Marin Superior Court on Monday, June 17, 2013. On Tuesday, Naso was found guilty of first-degree murder in the slayings of four Northern California women in the 1970s and 1990s.
Former San Francisco resident Joseph Naso faces a possible death sentence after a Marin County jury on Tuesday found him guilty of murdering four Northern California women - prostitutes who were raped, strangled and dumped along rural roads in the late 1970s and early 1990s.

The verdict in a San Rafael courtroom followed two months of often lurid testimony in which prosecutors recounted how the discovery of a "rape journal" and other obsessive writings by Naso cracked the cold cases.

Naso, acting as his own lawyer, countered that he wasn't the "monster" authorities described.

The jury spent less than a day deliberating before finding Naso, 79, guilty of four counts of first-degree murder, along with the special circumstance of committing multiple killings. The same jury will convene for a death penalty hearing starting Sept. 4, after which they must decide whether Naso should be executed or sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Marin County prosecutors will be asking a jury to impose the death penalty for the first time since 1990. If executed, Naso would be the oldest person ever put to death in California.

Authorities believe Naso may have committed other killings, but they charged him with leaving four bodies along roads in Marin, Contra Costa and Yuba counties. The onetime photographer acknowledged that he hired prostitutes and photographed them in sexual positions, and admitted that he wrote in journals that he raped women. But he said he did not kill anyone.