Society's ChildS


Attention

Riots in Uganda after top opposition leader kicked off Kenya Airways flight home

Uganda's top opposition leader was kicked off a flight from Kenya on Wednesday, prompting riots back home that police quelled with tear gas only a day before the country's president of 25 years was due to be sworn in for another term.

Kizza Besigye said he was waiting to board a flight when a Kenya Airways official informed him that the plane would not be allowed to land in Uganda with Besigye on it. A government spokesman in Uganda denied that authorities had interfered with his return.

Anti-government marches led by Besigye over the last month have been the most serious unrest in sub-Saharan Africa since protests swept out leaders in Egypt and Tunisia. Human Rights Watch says that Uganda security forces have killed nine people during the protests.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who first came to power in 1986, has said repeatedly that his government will not fall to protests. He was re-elected in February and his inauguration is set for Thursday.

Stop

The end of the world as we know it? 10 dates when the world failed to end

Italians are to leave Rome over fears a giant earthquake is coming following a seismologist's 1915 prediction that "the big one" would hit the capital on May 11, 2011. Here is a list of end of the world predictions:
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© Associated Press/Susan WeemsFlames engulf the Branch Davidian compound April 19, 1993 in Waco, Texas. Eighty-one Davidians, including leader David Koresh, perished as federal agents tried to drive them out of the compound.

Oct 3 1533 - Michael Stifel, a German associate of Martin Luther, urged his small band of followers to sell all their property after becoming convinced by his mathematical study of the Bible that the end of the world was approaching. On the appointed day he led his followers to the top of a hill so they could be delivered to heaven. A few hours later, with the world very much intact, he hurried down the hill and had to be locked in a local prison for his own protection.

Nuke

US: Officials Investigate Nuke Reactor Shutdown

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© Constellation Energy Group, Inc. 2008The Nine Mile Point nuclear station, with Nine Mile 1 on the left and Nine Mile 2 and its signature cooling tower on the right.
As of press time Tuesday, nuclear plant personnel are continuing to investigate Monday night's automatic shutdown of Constellation Energy Nuclear Group's (CENG) Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station Unit 1.

The shutdown at the Scriba-based facility reportedly occurred at 8:51 p.m.

"(Nuclear power plants) are designed to automatically shut down when there are certain indications that come into the control room, and that is one of the foundational safety measures built into the plant," said Jill Lyon, a spokeswoman for CENG. "So everything worked as it was designed to."

The shutdown occurred while the reactor was operating at 47 percent power, Lyon said. Unit 1 operators lowered reactor power on April 26 based on indications within the feedwater system. In addition, the plant had been operating at reduced levels while equipment repairs were in progress.

Star of David

Israel: Orthodox rabbi convicted of molesting female Israeli soldier on flight to New York

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© AlamyMolested: An orthodox rabbi was convicted yesterday of groping a woman on a Delta Airlines flight to JFK Airport in New York

An orthodox rabbi has been convicted of groping a female Israeli army officer on a transatlantic flight to New York.

Gavriel Bidany, a 47-year-old father of 11 children, reached out under a blanket and fondled the woman twice as she slept next to him on the Delta Airlines flight to JFK.

Bidany, who is also Israeli, tried to claim he accidentally touched her in his sleep, but a Brooklyn magistrate yesterday dismissed his testimony as 'not worthy of belief'.

Vader

Live by Treachery, Die by Treachery; A Historical Lesson About Selling Your Soul

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Sadist, bully Nikolai Yezhov: The system in a sense of ironic justice, cornered, tortured a false confession from, and executed the man who had so eagerly dealt out such a fate to so many others.

Bangkok, Thailand - Nikolai Yezhov served as a soldier in the Russian revolution, as a party member during Stalin's rise, then as a leading participant in Stalin's notorious purge. It is said that a policy paper penned by Yezhov served as the rhetorical justification for the arrest of 40 million Russians, 20 million of which would end up dead. He would lead the purging of not only the regime's opponents, but also the systematic purging of various military units and political supporters as well. For when the megalomaniacal tyrant looks across his dominion, all before him, both friend and foe, is but a sea of potential usurpers.

In the end, not even Nikolai Yezhov escaped the astronomical atrocity he had helped perpetuate. It is said he was dragged, weeping hysterically to the executioner's room. He then scurried about like a rat attempting to dodge the bullets he had once so eagerly dealt out. After his execution, Stalin would literally have his memory erased by having his image removed from photos taken together. Yezhov was not the only treacherous set of helping hands to be cut off by Stalin's regime. His predecessor and successor both met similar fates.

The moral of this story, beside the cost of allowing a degenerate elite to paralyze an entire nation of millions in fear for nearly a generation, is that those who help the elite do so, inevitably pay the price as well. They pay the price not at the hands of those they see as enemies, but at the very hands that feed them. While the story of the Russian people frozen in inaction is an instructive tale for most of us, the story of Nikolai Yezhov is for the pundits, the police, the military, the policy makers, and the bureaucrats who blindly serve a system, or worse yet, knowingly serve a system that preys on its own people. When the system is done consuming its enemies, it turns in upon itself. After it is done setting false pretenses to brutalize foreign and domestic enemies, it begins setting pretenses to brutalize its own allies. No one is safe at that point, and the system's brutes soon become the weeping, cowering victims themselves.

Newspaper

US: Baby receives pat-down at Kansas City airport

Photographer: 'I do not believe that an 8-month-old constitutes a security threat'

A photo posted on Twitter of a baby receiving a pat-down at Kansas City International Airport is the latest in a number of recent highly publicized incidents of airport security screenings involving young children.

The photo taken by Kansas City pastor Jacob Jester on Saturday and posted on Twitter has been viewed nearly 300,000 times.

"I really didn't stop to think about what would happen," Jester told msnbc.com. "I just snapped a picture."

Jester said he was traveling to Albuquerque on Saturday when he noticed the woman behind him was traveling with a baby about the same age as his son. He had just passed through security when he looked back and saw the baby receiving the pat-down.

"My thinking was, this is an extreme measure. I wouldn't want that to happen to my own son," Jester said.


Better Earth

Japan to Cancel Plan to Build More Nuclear Plants

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© Kyodo News, via Associated PressEvacuees cleaned their house during a brief visit that was their first time since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami located near Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on Tuesday.

Tokyo - Prime Minister Naoto Kan said Tuesday that Japan would abandon plans to build more nuclear reactors, saying his country needed to "start from scratch" in creating a new energy policy

Mr. Kan's announcement came as Japan allowed residents of evacuated areas around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to briefly revisit their homes for the first time since the devastating earthquake and tsunami in March caused the nuclear accident.

Tuesday's decision will mean the abandonment of a plan that the Kan government released last year to build 14 nuclear reactors by 2030 and increase the share of nuclear power in Japan's electricity supply to 50 percent. Japan currently has 54 reactors that before the earthquake produced 30 percent of its electricity.

Heart - Black

US: Father, woman charged with killing boy who relatives say was kept in dog cage

Prosecutors in northwestern Indiana have charged a man and a woman in the death of his 13-year-old son who relatives say was kept locked in a dog cage.

Lake County police say Riley Choate and Kimberly Kubina were charged Tuesday with murder, battery, neglect and criminal confinement. Court documents allege Riley Choate regularly beat Christian Choate and kept him caged for months on end without regular meals. Authorities say Kubina lived with the Choates at the time.

Earlier Tuesday, Riley Choate pleaded not guilty to charges that he moved his son's body and failed to notify authorities.

The boy's body was found last week in a shallow grave in a mobile home park in Gary

Defence attorney Randy Godshalk says there appear to be inconsistencies in some witnesses' stories.

Source: The Canadian Press

Bizarro Earth

Italians evacuate Rome over 'big one' fears

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© ALAMYMany people are leaving Rome in case Raffaele Bendani's predictions come true

Italians will on Wednesday flee Rome over fears a giant earthquake is coming following a seismologist's 1915 prediction that "the big one" will strike on May 11, 2011.

Businesses have reported requests from one in five people to have time off work and many are also keeping children away from school and heading to the beach or country for the day.

Romans are taking it so seriously that local newspapers have even been publishing survival guides with tips of what to do - if - the ground starts to tremble.

The panic has been fanned by Facebook, Twitter and text messages around a prediction by Raffaele Bendani, a seismologist who forecast in 1915 that a "big one" would hit Rome on Wednesday.

People

Democracy, Haitian Style

Except for Aristide's tenure, what passes for Haitian democracy would make a despot blush, thanks to America's imperial grip on the hemisphere's poorest, long-suffering people.

As a result, last November's presidential and legislative elections might best be called a cruel joke. The entire process was rigged to exclude 15 parties, including by far the most popular, Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas.

Moreover, the election was so tainted by brazen disenfranchisement and fraud, including ballot box stuffing and other irregularities, that legitimate independent observers would have demanded throwing out the results and starting over.

Most Haitians, however, weren't fooled. A scant 22%, in fact, voted, a hemispheric low since record keeping began over 60 years ago.