Society's ChildS


Quenelle

'The people are livid': 100,000 march against 'pick-pocket' austerity in Brussels

Nadia Prupis
Common Dreams
Wed, 07 Oct 2015 17:24 UTC
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© Reuterssters march in Brussels on October 7, 2015.
Anti-austerity demonstrations in Belgium on Wednesday drew tens of thousands of people—some of whom clashed with police and were sprayed by water cannons as they marched through Brussels demanding an end to new measures which they say unfairly target workers and favor corporations.

Organized by Belgium's three largest unions, the protests came in response to new rules pushed through by the country's center-right coalition government, led by Prime Minister Charles Michel, in its first month in office, including wage freezes amid rising inflation, an increase in the retirement age, cuts to social services, and punitive taxes on lower-wage earners.

"The signal is clear. People are angry, livid. This government's policies are totally unbalanced," Confederation of Christian Trade Unions (ACV-CSC) chief Marc Leemans told Reuters.
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Book 2

The right idea! Lawmakers seek to throw the book at executives who hide deadly defects from the public


RT
Wed, 07 Oct 2015 01:37 UTC
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© Rebecca Cook / ReutersGeneral Motors Executive Vice President Global Product Development Mark Reuss (L), GM CEO Mary Barra and GM President Dan Ammann were not prosecuted for the deadly ignition switch scandal.
Two Democratic lawmakers think that corporate executives who conceal deadly defects in their companies' products should be jailed. They have introduced the Hide No Harm Act in the wake of a General Motors scandal that killed over 120 people.

Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) and Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania) introduced the bill on Tuesday. If passed, it would make failing to inform federal regulators about faulty and dangerous products a crime punishable by five years in prison. It would also safeguard whistleblowers who reveal that information from criminal liability.

The bill is a reaction to a "deferred prosecution agreement" reached between GM and the Department of Justice in September that found no officers criminally liable for knowingly concealing information about a lethal safety defect in the car manufacturer's ignition switches. The auto maker eventually recalled about 2 million cars. The faulty part, which caused cars to shut off abruptly or disable airbags, caused 124 deaths - 10 times more than GM originally believed - and 275 injuries, 17 of them serious.

Comment: Well its about time! For decades, many corporations based their informing the public of defects on pathological reasoning: Using a cost-benefit analysis they quite often determined that they would save more money by allowing injury and death to occur - and being sued for it - than they would by recalling their products and losing out on the bottom line. At a time where when fascist ideals are the norm, the proposed legislation is certainly a positive thing to see.

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Phoenix

US religious leaders say the end of the world is coming, again


RT
Tue, 06 Oct 2015 23:40 UTC
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© NASA / Reuters
Like a bad sequel, it's once again time for the "end of the world" as we know it (so well). Biblical calculations made by Chris McCann, head of the eBible Fellowship, predict that October 7 is the day of "annihilation."

Maybe.

"There's a strong likelihood that this will happen. Which means there's an unlikely possibility that it will not," McCann says, according to the Guardian.

That qualified statement comes after his Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based group spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on billboards and other mass media alerting the world that May 21, 2011 was Judgment Day. Since then, McCann's following has dwindled.

Comment: Actually, given all the various signs and events all around us, it does appear as though profound macrocosmic change is on its way to occurring. However, since the devil is so often in the details, and though some or many of the world's religious leaders may in fact be picking up on something true and objective, they most often mis-read these signals and even more often use them to serve themselves and their own ends.

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Camcorder

ISIS jumps the shark, features a kid terrorist in latest video


The Daily Sheeple
Wed, 07 Oct 2015 14:40 UTC
ISIS child
Just as with the introduction of Cousin Arthur on The Brady Bunch, does the addition of this child to Team ISIS signal it's demise?
Last year, Lady Gaga performed in Austin, Texas at the SXSW festival. She reportedly paid someone to throw up on her on stage as part of the act. They called the person "a professional vomit painter," as if that's a real thing. Guess she's running out of new and shocking ways to raise the bar.

So, obviously, is ISIS.

ISIS is like the Lady Gaga of terrorists. Because they started out as the social media terrorists, with these staged, ridiculous Wag The Dog-like "terror" videos, they have to continue upping the game, getting more and more ridiculous each time a new one comes out.

Last time it was drowning people in James Bond-villainesque cages with sophisticated, Hollywood studio-level underwater camera rigs and blowing people's heads up with explosive necklaces.

Comment: From Wikipedia:
Jumping the shark is an idiom popularized by Jon Hein that was used to describe the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality, signaled by a particular scene, episode, or aspect of a show in which the writers use some type of gimmick in an attempt to keep viewers' interest, which is taken as a sign of desperation, and is seen by viewers to be the point at which the show strayed irretrievably from its original premise. The phrase is based on a scene from a fifth-season episode of the sitcom Happy Days when the character Fonzie jumps over a shark while on water-skis.

The usage of "jump the shark" has subsequently broadened beyond television, indicating the moment when a brand, design, franchise or creative effort's evolution declines.
Thanks to Russia, ISIS is now on the decline: BREAKING: Russia launches 26 missiles against ISIS from 4 warships ... in the Caspian Sea

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2 + 2 = 4

Killers win academic contest of wit?


Russian Times
Wed, 07 Oct 2015 14:42 UTC
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© www.mapio.czEastern New York correctional Napanoch
Last year's world champions, the prestigious Harvard debate team, got a surprise stinger. They fell to a group of New York maximum-security prison inmates educated at a college located near the prison in Napanoch.

The Harvard team holds a number of titles, as well as being reigning US champions. But they were no match for the inmates, who also took down the prestigious US Military Academy at West Point and the University of Vermont. In fact, the feud with West Point is now for real. But the team at the Eastern New York Correctional Facility has only been competing for slightly more than a year.
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Heart - Black

Rabid cop suspended, not fired, after violent assaults

Andrew Emett
The Free Thought Project
Tue, 06 Oct 2015 18:42 UTC
maggie bruises
Arrested and charged with felony assault, a Niagara Falls police officer has recently been suspended without pay after witnesses reported seeing him kicking and beating a man unconscious with his motorcycle helmet. On Monday, reporters interviewed a previous victim who settled out of court after the same cop arrested and beat her unconscious when she reported her wallet stolen.

On the afternoon of September 5, off-duty officer James Conte was riding his motorcycle when he reportedly pulled up alongside a couple of cars and gave the drivers the middle finger. After following one of the vehicles, Conte waited until the 46-year-old driver pulled into a parking lot before attacking him.

"There was a verbal dispute following the incident on the road," stated Niagara County undersheriff Michael Filicetti. "Following the verbal dispute, our suspect took his helmet and struck the victim in the head and knocked him to the ground."
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Roses

'Russian giant' beaten to death in Ireland - due to height and nationality?


RT
Wed, 07 Oct 2015 00:04 UTC
russian giant_ireland
© Suzanne Plunkett / Reuters
The third tallest person in Ireland, a young man of Russian origin, was found lying in a garden in an Irish town with severe head injuries, which he later died from. He had been attacked at a party, allegedly due to his 2.32 meter height and nationality.

Dmitry Hrynkevich, 24, died in the hospital on Friday two days after he was found unconscious on the front lawn of a house in the Irish town of Tralee. Local police launched a murder investigation into the "very serious" case. The preliminary explanation is that Hrynkevich was beaten up by two drunken men because of his outstanding height and nationality.


A life-support machine couldn't help Hrynkevich regain consciousness, and he died surrounded by his family, who had emigrated from Russia to the southwest Irish county Kerry. Some reports say he was born in the Belarussian capital of Minsk. Still, it is not uncommon for Russian speakers to be referred to as "Russians," though Belarus proclaimed its independence from the USSR in 1991.

The young man grew up in Kerry, where he suffered from being bullied at school. However, he is remembered for being really gentle and even shy with other people.

"The awful thing is that you could guess something like this was going to happen. It was terrible the way he was treated by some people and most of the problems he had in life were because of how he tried to cope with that," a family's neighbor told the Irish Independent newspaper.

Comment: R.I.P. Dmitry Hrynkevich

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Pharoah

Meet the candidate for US Senate who killed a goat, drank its blood, and wants to start a civil war


Sputnik
Wed, 07 Oct 2015 03:41 UTC
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Thought you'd heard it all when it comes to the peculiar things US politicians do in their free time? Thought nothing else could shock you? You might be wrong.

Augustus Sol Invictus, a candidate from Florida running for the US Senate, has everyone beat.

Two years ago, the 23-year-old lawyer, who changed his given name to his current Latin one meaning "majestic unconquered sun," walked from Florida to Southern California, where he spent a week in the Mojave Desert, praying and asking for forgiveness. There were times he thought he would die, the Orlando Sentinel reported. Upon returning home, he killed a goat and drank its blood, as a pagan ritual expression of thanks.

It's a story that, perhaps predictably, has come back to haunt him as a campaigns for a US Senate seat on the Libertarian ticket.

The goat story prompted the chairman of Florida's Libertarian Party, Adrian Wyllie, to resign from his post to call attention to Invictus' candidacy. He says, in addition to the goat ordeal, Invictus wants to lead a new Civil War, and seeks to recruit white supremacists to the party.

Comment: This guy certainly doesn't seem much worse than many other world leaders:

#PigGate: British PM Cameron once inserted his 'private part' into a dead pig's mouth, claims scorned billionaire Tory supporter

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Gold Seal

10-year Florida cop fired after repeatedly Tasering unarmed black man


RT
Tue, 06 Oct 2015 18:03 UTC
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© Cop Block Fresno, CA/You Tube
A police officer from a Tampa suburb has been fired after footage from a bodycam emerged showing him using a Taser on a shoplifting suspect who had his hands up.

The officer, 36-year-old Tim Claussen, went to the house of Lester Brown, on September 9 to investigate a theft that had occurred at a local retailer earlier that day. The white officer asked Brown, who is black, to leave his house, but Brown didn't comply.

"Come outside now," Claussen said, "or you're about to get tased. This is the last time." The video then shows Brown being suddenly Tasered. He falls to the ground and the officer tells him that he had just "made it a lot worse" for himself. "Why," Brown asked, lying on his stomach, "'cause I'm in my house?"

Police authorities in Zephyrhills, Florida announced the firing of 10-year veteran Claussen on Friday. An internal investigation determined that "the deployment of the Taser was unjustified," city attorney Joseph Poblick said at a news conference. Brown, 42, was later arrested on shoplifting charges, but they were later dropped by prosecutors at the request of the police department.

This firing comes at a time of increased scrutiny of police conduct, particularly against unarmed black men and women. But Captain Derek Brewer of the Zephyrhills Police Department told the Tampa Bay Times that there was no evidence the incident had been "racially motivated."

"We recognized that there was an issue and that's why we acted quickly," Brewer said. "Given the circumstances of this incident, I feel like it was the right decision."


Comment: Firing police is not enough for the brutality innocent people have to endure. How about a few years of jail time for the offending officer? How about huge fines paid to the injured by the City? If you hit them where it hurts, in the pocketbook, you might see a reduction in violence local police and courts are condoning and encouraging. What thugs.

Seven reasons US police brutality is systemic, not anecdotal

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Heart - Black

Ohio man dies when cop hits pedestrian - witnesses say he 'checks out his car instead of doing CPR'

David Edwards
Raw Story
Mon, 05 Oct 2015 18:42 UTC

Witnesses said over the weekend that a man died after an East Cleveland officer hit him with a police cruiser and then refused to perform CPR.

According to officials, the officer was responding to an emergency call shortly before 10 p.m. on Saturday when he hit a 21-year-old man who was trying to cross the street. The man was taken to University Hospitals, where he later died.

A preliminary investigation by the Ohio State Highway Patrol found that the officer had his emergency lights on at the time of the accident, but WEWS reporter Kristin Volk spoke to witnesses who disputed that claim.

"Witnesses and others at the scene tell me the officer who hit the man checked out his car instead of doing CPR," Volk explained

"The officer, when the officer got out of the car, the officer went around the man, the young man on the ground, and checked his windshield out," the witness told Volk. "Then he put his hands on his hips. And everybody was like, 'What the f*ck are you doing? The guy you hit is on the ground. He's dying. He's dying.'"

Eventually a second officer arrived on the scene and performed CPR, but he was unable to save the victim.

The Highway Patrol, which is handling the investigation, had not released the name of the officer or victim, but officials said that the victim's family had been notified.
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