Society's ChildS


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Ronnie Biggs, notorious participant in Great Train Robbery, dies at 84

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© Washington Post‘Great Train Robber’ Ronnie Biggs dies at 84: Ronnie Biggs was a petty criminal who set out to transform his life with the daring heist of a mail train packed with money.
Ronnie Biggs, a British thief with a roguish streak who had a minor role in the 1963 Great Train Robbery, one of the more flamboyant crimes in modern history, and who became one of the world's most wanted and unrepentant fugitives, died Wednesday in London. He was 84.

The death was confirmed by his daughter-in-law, Veronica Biggs, who did not provide a cause.

He suffered from pneumonia and other ailments that led the government to grant him compassionate release from prison in August 2009. He had turned himself in to British authorities in 2001 after 36 years on the run.

Mr. Biggs, who fashioned himself as "the last of the gentleman crooks," spent much of his life brashly evading and taunting Scotland Yard, first from Australia and later from Brazil.

To his most devoted followers, he was a folk hero who symbolized rebellion against authority. He recorded with the British punk rock band the Sex Pistols on its single "No One is Innocent," sold T-shirts of himself and even made a TV commercial for a Brazilian instant coffee company. His pitch: "When you are on the run, like I am all the time, you really appreciate a good, satisfying cup of coffee."

Eye 1

New bill bars employers from requiring credit checks of potential hires

liz warren
© Reuters / Joshua RobertsSenator Elizabeth Warren
Employers would no longer have the right to attain a prospective employee's credit report, or to deny a job applicant based on credit status, under a bill introduced Tuesday in the US Senate.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and six other senators proposed the Equal Employment for All Act, which would aim to end the ability of employers to run credit checks on possible employees, currently a common practice.

Advocates of the measure says employer credit checks are a high, needless barrier of entry into the labor market for many with poor scores. Supporters add that the employer checks contribute to long-term unemployment and have disproportionately impacted women, minorities, students and seniors.

"There's little or no evidence of any correlation between job performance and a credit [report]," Warren said Tuesday, according to CNN. "[T]his is a point of basic fairness...people who get hit with hard economic blows end up getting squeezed out of the system. This is another way the game is rigged against hardworking middle-class families."

Stock Down

Kiss your IRA good-bye!

The recent volatility of the Dow Jones Industrial Average indicates savvy investors on Wall Street are worried.

Should the Federal Reserve, under Chairman Ben Bernanke's replacement, "taper" the current Fed policy of buying U.S. Treasury debt, investors anticipate a sharp downward market correction, possibly even a market crash.

Last week, the Dow fell below 16,000 only to rally back over the barrier as Federal Reserve officials attempted to calm nervous investors.

This week, the U.S. Senate is expected to confirm Janet Yellen to replace Bernanke as Fed chief, despite the continuing attempt by Republicans to slow the confirmation of Obama administration appointees after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid employed the "nuclear option," ending the requirement for a supermajority of 60 votes to force a vote.

Yellen, currently vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, is expected to begin ramping down Bernanke's policy known as "Quantitative Easing." Under the policy, the Federal Reserve has bought billions of dollars of U.S. Treasury debt to keep interest rates as close to zero as possible.

Arrow Down

A Hunger Games banner can get you locked up for terrorism

Hunger Games Banner
© MotherboardThe banner and atrium in question via Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance.
It's understandable that, as the location of one of the worst act of terrorism in American history, Oklahoma would have strict laws against even threatening a terrorist attack. It's just hard to understand how glitter falling from a Hunger Games-themed banner as it unfurls looks anything like terrorism.

Last Friday morning, a group of protestors from Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance and Cross Timbers Earth First! entered the 50-story Devon Tower in downtown Oklahoma City. They were there to protest the building's namesake, Devon, an energy company that is involved in fracking for oil and natural gas in both the United States and Canada, and their CEO sits on the board of directors at TransCanada.

Two protestors locked themselves in a revolving front door using a bike lock and two others went to the second floor and, from a balcony, unfurled two banners: one in support of indigenous activists protesting energy extraction from their land in Canada and another that had the Hunger Games Mockingjay emblem and the phrase "The odds are never in our favor."

As the banner unfurled, glitter - referred to by the police as a "black substance" - fell from it onto the ground. One of the activists, Eric Whalen, told KWTV 9 that the "black substance" in question was "simply glitter to make for good pictures and video and to make it pretty."

A spokesman for GPTSR said that a janitor came out and swept it up, while building security asked the protestors to leave, which they did, with the exception of the two who were locked in a revolving door. The fire department had to come to get them out. All in all, pretty normal sounding end of a protest, complete with some cuffing and trips to the police station.

Bizarro Earth

Hysteria alert! 5-year-old suspended for making gun gesture with hand while "playing army"

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© flickr
A 5-year-old boy was reportedly suspended from school after making a gun gesture with his hand on the playground.

His father, David Hendrix, was furious when he found out his son was issued a suspension for the gesture.

"He was playing army on the playground," Hendrix told WBTV. "I just felt like the punishment was way too severe."

The boy was issued a one day in-school suspension from his kindergarten class at Pinewood Elementary School.

Document

Family of Oakland girl on life support after tonsillectomy serves hospital cease and desist letter

The family of a girl who was declared brain dead at Children's Hospital Oakland last week has stepped up their fight to keep her on life support.

Relatives of 13-year-old Jahi Mcmath took their case to a lawyer who served the hospital a cease and desist letter that says the hospital does not have the family's consent to remove life support without permission.

McMath underwent surgery to remove her tonsils at the Oakland hospital on Monday, December 9th. It was said to have been a routine procedure that was intended to cure a sleep apnea problem. After the surgery, she coughed up blood and went into cardiac arrest.

She was declared brain dead last Thursday, but her mother Nailah Winkfield is not giving up.

Heart - Black

Disabled military retirees not exempt from pension cuts in budget deal

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© APKelly Ayotte, Lindsey Graham
A provision cutting the pensions of military retirees in the bipartisan budget deal that the Senate will vote on this week does not exempt disabled veterans, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

Disabled retirees were previously thought to be exempt from the changes to military retiree pay, which could cost servicemembers up to $124,000 over a 20-year period.

The Free Beacon previously reported that military retirees under the age of 62 would receive 1 percentage point less in their annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) in the plan crafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D., Wash.).

The section of the U.S. code that has been altered also applies to disabled servicemembers, many of whom have been wounded in combat.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, called the change "unthinkable."

"It has been asserted that the controversial change to military retirees' pensions affects those who are 'working-age' and 'still in their working years,' with the clear suggestion being that these individuals are able to work," Sessions said in a statement. "That's why I was deeply troubled when my staff and I discovered that even individuals who have been wounded and suffered a service-related disability could see their pensions reduced under this plan."

Alarm Clock

In the wealthiest area of the country, 7 homeless people have frozen to death this winter

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© KTVUJoe White, a homeless man who died during a Bay Area cold snap last weekend, in a photograph with his mother Mary Archuleta
Joe White was this close to making it.

A 50-year-old California man described by relatives as a "loving father and a doting grandfather," White had been living on the streets of Hayward for years. He wanted to work and was able to find odd jobs here and there, but it was never much or consistent enough to afford a place to live. Hayward has no emergency shelter with beds for single men, so White slept outside.

But things were looking up. Last Saturday, White was second on a long list to get permanent supportive housing in Hayward. He had been waiting in line for months and it seemed as though he might finally catch a break.

White died on Sunday.

Temperatures in the Bay Area plummeted to near-freezing on December 10, an uncommon occurrence in a region generally known for its lack of inclement weather. White's body was found in the old Hayward City Hall courtyard. He'd been beaten up and robbed by multiple men, who took the new winter coat White's sister had given him on Friday. He was wearing just a hoodie and shorts. His cause of death is still being determined, but police speculated that his death was weather-related.

Attention

Pedophile: the 'stomach churning' sexual assault accusations against R&B singer R. Kelly

R. Kelly in the news
© sun-times

It has been nearly 15 years since music journalist Jim DeRogatis caught the story that has since defined his career, one that he wishes didn't exist: R. Kelly's sexual predation on teenage girls. DeRogatis, at that time the pop-music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, was anonymously delivered the first of two videos he would receive depicting the pop star engaging in sexual acts with underage girls. Now the host of the syndicated public radio show Sound Opinions and a professor at Columbia College, DeRogatis, along with his former Sun-Times colleague Abdon Pallasch, didn't just break the story, they did the only significant reporting on the accusations against Kelly, interviewing hundreds of people over the years, including dozens of young women whose lives DeRogatis says were ruined by the singer.

This past summer, leading up to Kelly's headlining performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival, DeRogatis posted a series of discussions about Kelly's career, the charges made against him, and sexual assault. He published a live review of the singer's festival set that was an indictment of Pitchfork and its audience for essentially endorsing a man he calls "a monster." In the two weeks since Kelly released his latest studio album, Black Panties, the conversation about him and why he has gotten a pass from music publications (not to mention feminist sites such as Jezebel) has been rekindled, in part because of the explicit nature of the album and also because of online arguments around the Pitchfork performance.

I was one of those people who challenged DeRogatis and was even flip about his judgment -- something I quickly came to regret. DeRogatis and I have tangled -- even feuded on air -- over the years; yet, amid the Twitter barbs, he approached me offline and told me about how one of Kelly's victims called him in the middle of the night after his Pitchfork review came out, to thank him for caring when no one else did. He told me of mothers crying on his shoulder, seeing the scars of a suicide attempt on a girl's wrists, the fear in their eyes. He detailed an aftermath that the public has never had to bear witness to.

DeRogatis offered to give me access to every file and transcript he has collected in reporting this story -- as he has to other reporters and journalists, none of whom has ever looked into the matter, thus relegating it to one man's personal crusade.

I thought that last fact merited a public conversation about why.

Comment: Yet another example of monsters among us who are allowed to roam free.


Bullseye

Guess who's investing in America's future? Nobody, that's who.

Guess who's investing in America's future?

Nobody, that's who.

Just check out this excerpt from an article by Rex Nutting at Marketwatch and you'll see what I mean. The article is titled "No one is investing in tomorrow's economy":
The U.S. economy simply isn't investing enough to ensure that there will be enough good paying jobs for our children and our children's children. Net investment - the amount of capital added to our stock - remains at the lowest levels since the Great Depression. ...

Net investment...measures the additional stock of buildings, factories, houses, equipment, software, and research and development - above and beyond the replacement of worn-out capital. In 2012, net fixed investment totaled $485 billion, only about half of the $1.1 trillion invested in 2006...

If businesses, consumers and governments were investing for the future at usual rate, the economy would be at least 3% larger, employing millions more people. That's a huge hole in the economy that can't be filled by heavily indebted consumers, especially at a time when government is handcuffed by forces of austerity. ("No one is investing in tomorrow's economy", Rex Nutting, Marketwatch)