Society's Child

'I was going to do her!' The grubby comments by TSA agents that infuriated one female passenger

Mail Online
Sun, 13 Feb 2011 18:50 UTC

It seems some airport security staff are more interested in looking at what lies underneath women's clothes rather than respecting passengers.

Amy Sullivan, senior editor of Time magazine, was at a security checkpoint in Miami Airport on Tuesday when she opted out of passing through a backscatter scanning device - described by experts as a 'virtual strip search'.

When she went through a metal detector instead and was searched by a woman, a male Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official is alleged to have said: 'Hey, I thought she was mine - I was going to do her!'

© thepartyfaithfulbook.com
Upset: Time senior editor Amy Sullivan said she was unhappy with a male security officer's comment of: 'I thought she was mine' at Miami Airport.

Ms Sullivan was annoyed by the incident, in the context of a 'one-woman protest against the machines' that she said she is trying to make.

Controversial backscatter devices have been used in selected airports since last autumn, and have provoked fury from thousands of Americans pushing for a boycott.

Gaddafi Tells Palestinians: Revolt Against Israel

Ali Shuaib & Salah Sarrar
Reuters
Sun, 13 Feb 2011 18:59 UTC

* Libyan leader says refugees should mass on Israel's shores

* 'This is a time of popular revolutions': Gaddafi

* Accuses Western powers of being enemies of Islam

Palestinian refugees should capitalise on the wave of popular revolts in the Middle East by massing peacefully on the borders of Israel until it gives in to their demands, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said on Sunday.

Gaddafi is respected in many parts of the Arab world for his uncompromising criticism of Israel and Arab leaders who have dealings with the Jewish state, though some people in the region dismiss his initiatives as unrealistic.

He was giving his first major speech since a popular uprising in neighbouring Egypt forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign, an event which electrified the Arab world and prompted speculation that other Arab governments could also be toppled.

"Fleets of boats should take Palestinians ... and wait by the Palestinian shores until the problem is resolved," Gaddafi was shown saying on state television. "This is a time of popular revolutions."

"We need to create a problem for the world. This is not a declaration of war. This is a call for peace," he said in a speech given to mark the birthday of the Prophet Mohamed, a holy day in the Islamic calendar.

Tehran Beats Back New Protests

Farnaz Fassihi
Wall Street Journal
Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:49 UTC

© European Pressphoto Agency
Iranian demonstrators clash with Iranian riot-police during a demonstration in Tehran. The opposition reported that tear gas had been fired near Tehran's University and Azadi Square.

In Year's Biggest Rally, Iranians Seek Spiritual Head's Ouster

Iranian police used tear gas and electric prods to crack down on the country's biggest antigovernment protests in at least a year, as demonstrators buoyed by activism across the Middle East returned to the country's streets by the tens of thousands Monday.

The day of planned antigovernment rallies began largely peacefully, according to witnesses, with protesters marching silently or sitting and chanting. But as demonstrators' ranks swelled, police and antiriot forces lined the streets, ordered shops to shut down and responded at times with force, according to witnesses and opposition websites, in a repeat of the official crackdown that helped snuff out months of spirited opposition rallies a year ago.

By day's end, online videos showed garbage bins on fire, protesters throwing rocks at the police and crowds clashing with motorcycle-mounted members of the pro-regime Basij militia.

Monday's protests come as calls for regime change have led to the popular ousters of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. They mark a broadening from Iranian rallies that drew hundreds of thousands through 2009 and early 2010.

Gulf of Mexico residents: "We're Poisoned. We're Sick."

Dahr Jamail and Erika Blumenfeld
Truthout
Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:02 UTC

Residents who live along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, all the way from Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, to well into western Florida, continue to tell me of acute symptoms they attribute to ongoing exposure to toxic chemicals being released from BP's crude oil and the toxic Corexit dispersants used to sink it.

Shirley Tillman from Pass Christian, Mississippi, and former BP Vessels of Opportunity oil cleanup worker wrote me recently:

"You can't even go to the store without seeing sick people! You can hear them talking to people and they think they have the flu or a virus. I saw a girl that works at a local store yesterday that had to leave work because she was so sick! Others, throughout the entire store were hacking & coughing. It's crazy that this has been allowed to happen to all of us!"

Oil continues to wash ashore. That which was already there, usually in the form of tar balls or mats of tar, is being uncovered by the weather.

Four of the fragile barrier islands of Mississippi have had four million pounds of oil removed, thus far. The embattled coastline never gets a break. However, BP cleanup crews, who returned to work the first week of January after an 11-day break, removed another 11,000 pounds of oil from Petit Bois Island Thursday, January 6, and another 3,800 pounds from Horn Island.

"The northerly wind seems to do the uncovering [of the oil]," a cleanup supervisor said. "Southerly winds appear to be covering it up."

South Dakota Moves To Legalize Killing Abortion Providers

Kate Sheppard
Mother Jones
Tue, 15 Feb 2011 03:00 UTC

© Flickr/brunosan (Creative Commons)
— A new bill under consideration in South Dakota is an "invitation to murder abortion providers," critics say.

A bill under consideration in the Mount Rushmore State would make preventing harm to a fetus a "justifiable homicide" in many cases.

A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus - a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state's GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.

The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Phil Jensen, a committed foe of abortion rights, alters the state's legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person "while resisting an attempt to harm" that person's unborn child or the unborn child of that person's spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman's father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion - even if she wanted one.

UK: Hungry, thirsty, unwashed: NHS treatment of the elderly condemned

Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
The Independent
Tue, 15 Feb 2011 10:26 UTC

Elderly people treated by the NHS were denied even the most basic standards of care, according to a scathing report that reveals a health service rife with ageism.

Patients were left hungry and thirsty, unwashed, in soiled clothes, without adequate pain relief or an emergency call button in reach. Relatives were ignored or forgotten.

Investigations of 10 cases in which patients suffered unnecessary pain, indignity and distress while being looked after in hospital or by GPs, exposed a fundamental lack of humanity and compassion. The patients were selected from among 9,000 complaints to the Health Service Ombudsman. Nine of the 10 patients cited in the report died.

The shocking catalogue exposes the gulf between the principles and values laid out in the NHS constitution and the reality of being an older person in the care of the health service today, said the Health Service Ombudsman, Ann Abraham. Her report comes after a decade of investigations that have revealed an NHS riddled with ageist attitudes, in which elderly patients are neglected, poorly treated and marginalised.

King Tut Statues Stolen from Egypt Museum

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News
Tue, 15 Feb 2011 10:59 UTC

Sad news was announced about some of the treasures kept at the Egyptian National Museum just after Hosni Mubarak stepped down as Egypt's president.

According to Zahi Hawass, who under Mubarak was recently named minister of antiquities, some 18 objects went missing following a break-in at the museum on Jan. 28, 2011.

"The staff of the database department at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, have given me their report on the inventory of objects at the museum following the break in. Sadly, they have discovered objects are missing from the museum," Hawass wrote in his blog.

The artifacts include a limestone statue of Akhenaten holding an offering table (previously announced to have been under restoration), and two gilded wood statues of King Tutankhamun, one of the boy king being carried by a goddess, the other of the pharaoh harpooning.

"Only the torso and upper limbs of the king are missing from this object," Hawass said, referring to the harpooning statue.

The other artifacts are a statue of Queen Nefertiti making an offering, the sandstone head of an Amarna princess, a stone statuette of a scribe from Amarna, and 11 wooden statuettes plus a heart scarab (a protective amulet for the heart) belonging to Yuya, King Tut's great-grandfather.

Comment: Let us not forget that it was Mubarak's undercover police who were caught stealing and desecrating ancient artifacts belonging to the Egyptian people.

Looters included undercover Egyptian police, hospitals tell Human Rights Watch

Egypt's undercover police behind museum looting, group claims

Egypt's Military Eyes Constitutional Referendum

Marwa Awad and Tom Perry
Reuters
Mon, 14 Feb 2011 10:52 UTC

Egypt's new military rulers have signalled their intention to share power with civilians and amend the constitution rapidly by popular referendum, opposition activists and a British minister said on Monday.

Wael Ghonim, a Google executive detained then released for his part in the uprising that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak, said members of the military council had told him a plebiscite would be held on constitutional amendments in two months.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik had told him that he would reshuffle his cabinet in the coming week to bring opposition figures into the line-up appointed by Mubarak last month.

Earlier, the ruling Higher Military Council urged workers to return to their jobs and help restart an economy damaged by the uprising which ended Mubarak's 30-year rule but also sparked a growing wave of strikes.

In a televised address three days after Mubarak was forced to step down and hand power to the armed forces, a military spokesman appealed for national unity.

In "Communique No. 5" read out on state television, the spokesman said: "Noble Egyptians see that these strikes, at this delicate time, lead to negative results." It added that work stoppages were harming security and economic production.

Housing Crash Is Hitting Cities Once Thought to Be Stable

David Streitfeld
New York Times / CNBC
Mon, 14 Feb 2011 10:43 UTC

Few believed the housing market here would ever collapse. Now they wonder if it will ever stop slumping.

The rolling real estate crash that ravaged Florida and the Southwest is delivering a new wave of distress to communities once thought to be immune - economically diversified cities where the boom was relatively restrained.

In the last year, home prices in Seattle had a bigger decline than in Las Vegas. Minneapolis dropped more than Miami, and Atlanta fared worse than Phoenix.

The bubble markets, where builders, buyers and banks ran wild, began falling first, economists say, so they are close to the end of the cycle and in some cases on their way back up. Nearly everyone else still has another season of pain.

"When I go out and talk to people around town, they say, 'Wow, I thought we were going to have a 12 percent correction and call it a day,' " said Stan Humphries, chief economist for the housing site Zillow, which is based in Seattle. "But this thing just keeps on going."

Seattle is down about 31 percent from its mid-2007 peak and, according to Zillow's calculations, still has as much as 10 percent to fall.

Mr. Humphries estimates the rest of the country will drop a further 5 and 7 percent as last year's tax credits for home buyers continue to wear off.

Honduras: Small commercial plane crash kills 14

USA Today
Mon, 14 Feb 2011 06:56 UTC

© Fernando Antonio / The Associated Press
Rescue workers remove bodies Monday from a commercial airplane that crashed in Las Mesitas, Honduras. All 14 passengers were killed.

A small Honduran commercial airliner crashed Monday near the capital, killing all 14 people aboard, including a senior government official and a top union leader, authorities said.

The Central American Airlines plane was flying to the Toncontin international airport in Tegucigalpa when it crashed Monday morning in the town of Las Mesitas, about three miles (five kilometers) south of the airport.

The cause of the crash is being investigated, but there was fog in the area at the time. Tincontin airport is considered dangerous because of its short runway and surrounding hills.

The Let L-410 Turbolet was carrying two pilots and 12 passengers, including Assistant Secretary for Public Works Rodolfo Rovelo, United Workers Federation of Honduras leader Jose Israel Salinas and former Economy Secretary Carlos Chain, said airline manager Felix Pacheco.

"I'm destroyed, in shock, because of what happened," Pacheco said, adding that it was a regularly scheduled daily flight.

The government declared three days of national mourning in honor of the government officials killed.

A pilot survived the crash but died on the way to a hospital, firefighters spokesman Jaime Silva said.

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Society's Child

'I was going to do her!' The grubby comments by TSA agents that infuriated one female passenger

Gaddafi Tells Palestinians: Revolt Against Israel

Tehran Beats Back New Protests

Gulf of Mexico residents: "We're Poisoned. We're Sick."

South Dakota Moves To Legalize Killing Abortion Providers

UK: Hungry, thirsty, unwashed: NHS treatment of the elderly condemned

King Tut Statues Stolen from Egypt Museum

Egypt's Military Eyes Constitutional Referendum

Housing Crash Is Hitting Cities Once Thought to Be Stable

Honduras: Small commercial plane crash kills 14

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