Society's ChildS


Pistol

School Safe Despite Gun Found in 12-Year-Old's Backpack, Toronto Principal Says

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© CTV NewsCraig Crone, principal of Oakdale Park Middle School, speaks to reporters about a 12-year-old being charged with bringing a gun to school, Wednesday, April 25, 2012.
Canada, Toronto - A Toronto principal says security is adequate at his school despite his "shock" at finding a gun in a student's backpack.

Craig Crone says he and another teacher found the weapon while checking the bag after a fight at Oakdale Park Middle School and called 911 immediately.

Toronto police have confirmed a 12-year-old boy, who cannot be identified because of his age, is facing several charges in Friday's incident.

Const. Wendy Drummond says the weapon was a loaded Colt 38 Detective Special and police are looking into whether the boy may have found it and put it in his backpack.

The principal says while security can always be improved he believes it is "adequate" and the school, located in the city's northwest end, is safe.

Bomb

Family Misses Flight After TSA Gives Pat-Down To 7-Year Old Girl With Cerebral Palsy

Photo of Dina Frank.
© CBS 2Photo of Dina Frank.
Washington - The Transportation Security Administration is once again the subject of national scrutiny, this time after aggressively screening a 7-year-old female passenger with cerebral palsy which caused her family to miss their flight.

The girl, identified as Dina Frank in a report by The Daily, was waiting with her family on Monday to board a flight departing from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York headed to Florida.

Since Dina walks with the aid of leg braces and crutches, she cannot pass through airport metal detectors, and must instead submit to a pat-down by TSA agents.

Dina, who is also reportedly developmentally disabled, is usually frightened by the procedure. Her family reportedly requests that agents on hand take the time to introduce themselves to her.

However, the agents on duty at the time began to handle her aggressively instead.

Stop

Unimaginable Horror as Helicopter-Borne Poachers Massacre 22 Elephants

In a scene of inconceivable horror, these slaughtered elephant carcasses show the barbaric lengths poachers will go to in their hunt for nature's grim booty.

The bodies were among a herd of 22 animals massacred in a helicopter-borne attack by professionals who swooped over their quarry.

The scene beneath the rotor blades would have been chilling - panicked mothers shielding their young, hair-raising screeches and a mad scramble through the blood-stained bush as bullets rained down from the sky.

Elephant Massacre
© ReutersBarbaric: In a scene too graphic to show in full, the carcasses of some of the 22 massacred elephants lay strewn across Garamba National Park in the Congo after being gunned down by helicopter-borne poachers.
When the shooting was over, all of the herd lay dead, one of the worst such killings in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo in living memory.

'It's been a long time since we've seen something like this,' said Dr Tshibasu Muamba, head of international cooperation for the Congolese state conservation agency, ICCN, as he surveyed the macarbre scene at Garamba National Park.

Eye 2

Shocking figures on the sexual assault against humans in the US

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1.3 women are raped in every minute, 2.8 million men are raped once in their lifetime, 422 thousand men are raped in prisons... These are just a few examples of a culture that the American government has caused by its cultural policies.

While the governments who oppose the U.S. government are condemned for spreading violence against the women, a closer examination of the matter shows that this issue is much more prevalent in the U.S. itself. Its existing cultural policies are pouring fuel on the fire.

One of the worst cases of the violation against women is sexual assault and attacking women's or even men's rights in the field of sexual relations is caused by the moral decay ruling these relations in the United States of America. Considering this point, some American private institutes and NGO's are motivated to do research in this field followed by their attempt to help the presumed victims of this story.

The report that you have in front of you is based on a number of statistical reports from some of the most credited institutes and tries to clear out, to some extent, this immorality and violation by relying on NGO's reports. It is crystal clear that we can notice some differences in statistics, coming from different institutes, which are due to the different statistical populations and research methodologies being implemented. Nevertheless, all of the reports are describing the formation of a catastrophic event in American society that has unfortunately become part of the American culture.

Hourglass

Manning gets Sept. 21 court date in WikiLeaks case

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© Mark Wilson/Getty Images fileArmy Pvt. Bradley Manning is escorted away from a hearing in February at Fort Meade, Md.
A military judge has rejected Pfc. Bradley Manning's attempt to have all charges against him dismissed and has ruled that he must face a court martial on charges that he leaked thousands of classified U.S. government cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

The court martial will start Sept. 21, military judge Col. Denise Lind said Wednesday.

Manning is accused of downloading more than 700,000 classified or confidential files from the military while serving in Iraq, the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history.

Lind said that military prosecutors and Manning's defense team had decided on a tentative trial schedule beginning Sept. 21 and lasting through Oct. 12. The trial will start more than two years after Manning was arrested.

Comment: Bradley Manning's treatment was cruel and inhuman, UN torture chief rules
Bradley Manning Nobel Peace Prize Nomination 2012

Hasn't Manning already served a life sentence, hasn't some part of him already been killed? Perhaps a photo will give us a clue.
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Need we say more?



Bizarro Earth

Department of Labor to Ban Children from Doing Work on Family Farms

Cole Hatfield tends to his show steers
© Rick Gershon/Getty ImagesCole Hatfield tends to his show steers on the 6666 Ranch October 24, 2007 in Guthrie, Texas on October 24, 2007.
A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores has drawn plenty of criticism from rural-district members of Congress. But now it's attracting barbs from farm kids themselves.

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families' land.

Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work "in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials."

"Prohibited places of employment," a Department press release read, "would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions."

The new regulations, first proposed August 31 by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, would also revoke the government's approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA, replacing them instead with a 90-hour federal government training course.

Rossie Blinson, a 21-year-old college student from Buis Creek, N.C., told The Daily Caller that the federal government's plan will do far more harm than good.

"The main concern I have is that it would prevent kids from doing 4-H and FFA projects if they're not at their parents' house," said Blinson.

"I started showing sheep when I was four years old. I started with cattle around 8. It's been very important. I learned a lot of responsibility being a farm kid."

Bizarro Earth

The Children of Fallujah - Sayef's Story

maother & child Fallujah
© Getty Images
The phosphorus shells that devastated this city were fired in 2004. But are the victims of America's dirty war still being born?


For little Sayef, there will be no Arab Spring. He lies, just 14 months old, on a small red blanket cushioned by a cheap mattress on the floor, occasionally crying, his head twice the size it should be, blind and paralysed. Sayeffedin Abdulaziz Mohamed - his full name - has a kind face in his outsized head and they say he smiles when other children visit and when Iraqi families and neighbours come into the room.

But he will never know the history of the world around him, never enjoy the freedoms of a new Middle East. He can move only his hands and take only bottled milk because he cannot swallow. He is already almost too heavy for his father to carry. He lives in a prison whose doors will remain forever closed.

It's as difficult to write this kind of report as it is to understand the courage of his family. Many of the Fallujah families whose children have been born with what doctors call "congenital birth anomalies" prefer to keep their doors closed to strangers, regarding their children as a mark of personal shame rather than possible proof that something terrible took place here after the two great American battles against insurgents in the city in 2004, and another conflict in 2007.

After at first denying the use of phosphorous shells during the second battle of Fallujah, US forces later admitted that they had fired the munitions against buildings in the city. Independent reports have spoken of a birth-defect rate in Fallujah far higher than other areas of Iraq, let alone other Arab countries. No one, of course, can produce cast-iron evidence that American munitions have caused the tragedy of Fallujah's children.

Stop

Armenian genocide: Armenians at home and around world mark genocide anniversary

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© Agence France-PresseFlowers, candles during a ceremony to commemorate the 97th anniversary of the 1915 mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire on Taksim Square in Istanbul, on April 24, 2012.
Armenians around the world Tuesday marked the 97th anniversary of the World War I massacre of their ancestors by Ottoman Turks, rekindling anger at Turkey for denying the deaths were genocide.

Thousands took part in an annual procession to a hilltop memorial in the Armenian capital Yerevan, carrying candles and flowers to lay at the eternal flame at the centre of the monument commemorating the mass killings in what was then the Ottoman Empire.

"Today we, just as many, many others all over the world, bow to the memory of the innocent victims of the Armenian genocide," President Serzh Sarkisian, who led officials laying wreaths at the monument, said in a statement.

"This day is one of those moments when the entire nation rallies around the unification of our homeland," he said.

Armenians say up to 1.5 million people were killed during World War I as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart, a claim supported by many historians and several other countries.

Stop

Hacked Tahiti airport website claims Sarkozy death

The website of the international airport in Tahiti in French Polynesia has been hacked, displaying a message that the French President Nicolas Sarkozy died in a plane crash.

The airport director says the website manager is trying to trace the hackers, adding that they are seeking advice on whether to lodge a formal complaint.

For several hours, the site carried a message that a private jet with the President aboard had vanished from the radar screen after sending a distress signal near Bora Bora.

Bizarro Earth

Hand Sanitizer Replaces Cough Syrup

Gel has 62% ethyl alcohol; it's akin to hard liquor and can sicken with a few shots.

Doctors are seriously worried about a sick trend - teens drinking hand sanitizer.

Six young people recently landed in a Southern California emergency room with alcohol poisoning after chugging the antimicrobial gel.

Hand sanitizer contains a whopping 62% ethyl alcohol - making the foul liquid akin to a shot of hard liquor.

YouTube has seen an influx of videos of teens chugging the foul germ-killing goo.

Dr. Young-jin Sue, a pediatric toxicologist at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, said that she hasn't seen any cases of teens coming into the ER after overdosing on the alcohol-rich gel.

"Teens don't have access to ethyl alcohol so they resort to crazy things," she said. "It's very concentrated, just a few ounces can make someone sick."

Teens have a long tradition of looking in the medicine cabinet in order get a cheap buzz.