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Father/Son Prostitution Ring Busted

Janon Fisher
The New York Daily News
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:13 UTC
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© Jefferson Siegel/for New York Daily News
Six livery car drivers wait for their arraignment in Manhattan Supreme Court on Monday. They are charged with participating in a sex trafficking ring.
Shuttled women around in livery cabs: prosecutors.

A father-and-son pimp team were busted for running a multimillion-a-year sex ring - branding women with degrading tattoos and employing livery car drivers to shuttle them around, according to an indictment from the Manhattan district attorney's office.

"This as not your typical father-and-son business," said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, whose department partnered with prosecutors to crush the ring.

Vincent George Sr. ("Vee), 55, of Queens taught his son Vincent George Jr. ("King Koby"), 33, of Allentown, Pa., the ways of the flesh trade over the last 10 years, prosecutors charge.

The pimp daddy and his pimp son set up a phony business, Grip Entertainment, to launder their illicit money.
      Read More...
Bizarro Earth

Hollaback App Outs Catcalling Men

Simon E.W.
The New York Daily News
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:02 UTC
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© Bryan Pace for New York Daily News
Emily May, founder of ihollaback.org.
Skirt-chasers may face city's wrath via new app.

Looking to fight back against catcalling men hollering out "hey sexy" and other obnoxious come-ons? The city is working on an app for that.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn and City Councilman Julissa Ferreras (D-Jackson Heights) have greenlighted $20,000 worth of research hoping to develop an easy way for folks to report forceful flirtation and other forms of street harassment, the Daily News has learned.

The cash went to Hollaback!, a Boreum Hill based nonprofit, that already uses a hot pink iPhone and Android app. collecting complaints mainly from peeved women detailing sidewalk encounters with creepy Casanovas.
      Read More...
Pistol

Saudi Boy, 4, 'Kills Father Over PlayStation'


Agence France-Presse
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
An angry four-year-old Saudi boy shot and killed his father for refusing to buy him a PlayStation, Saudi media reported on Monday.

The Asharq daily, citing police in the southern Jizan area, said the child, aged four years and seven months, grabbed his father's pistol and shot him in the head.

According to the newspaper, the child had asked his father to buy him a PlayStation and the shooting took place after the man returned home without the desired object.

As he was undressing, the man put the weapon down, which the child then grabbed and fired at him from close range.
      Read More...
Che Guevara

People Power! Families Re-Occupy Vacant Homes

Rebecca Burns
In These Times
Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
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© Liberate the Southside
Tene Smith prays at a press conference outside her re-occupied home on January 19.
Growing movements on both sides of the Atlantic try to turn bank-owned houses into homes.

In the U.S. today, a new wave of squatters is moving into vacant foreclosed properties in cities like Chicago, New York and Minneapolis.

After three years of staying in her sister's living room, Tene Smith decided to move her family into a home that had sat vacant on Chicago's South Side for more than two years.

With the help of Liberate the South Side, a Chicago-based organization that targets vacant homes for re-occupation and spent months renovating the house, Smith and her three children moved in during a public ceremony attended by community members and the media in January 2012. "I was fearful when I first made this commitment," she told In These Times, "but as the days passed I had a sense of independence that had eluded me for a long time."

The term "squatter" conjures images of the predominantly young, urban hipsters who in decades past claimed vacant property in areas such as New York City's Lower East Side. But with five times as many vacant homes as homeless people in the U.S. today, a new wave of squatters - just as likely to be hard-hit families like Smith's as young activists making a political statement - is moving into vacant foreclosed properties in cities like Chicago, New York and Minneapolis.
      Read More...
Chart Pie

Foodstamp Spending Expected to Increase Through 2014

Damian Paletta
The Wall Street Journal
Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:58 UTC
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The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that 45 million people in 2011 received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, a 70% increase from 2007. It said the number of people receiving the benefits, commonly known as food stamps, would continue growing until 2014.

Spending for the program, not including administrative costs, rose to $72 billion in 2011, up from $30 billion four years earlier. The CBO projected that one in seven U.S. residents received food stamps last year.
      Read More...
Arrow Up

Banned: Swedish Airport Refuses to Allow Israeli Security Inspections


Ma'an News Agency
Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:07 UTC
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© Reuters
Stockholm's international airport has refused to allow Israeli security inspections to take place, forcing an Israeli airline to stop its service, daily Haaretz reported Thursday.

Israeli security procedures, which often involve ethnic and personal profiling, were prohibited from taking place at Denmark's Copenhagen airport last summer.

The measures, which are formulated by Shin Bet security services, are now also prohibited at Sweden's Malmo and Stockholm airports, Haaretz said.

Israeli airline Arkia has stopped flying to Stockholm's airport in light of the restrictions.

"We are talking with security authorities in Sweden and other countries where problems have surfaced, to understand the meaning of the new restrictions imposed on Israeli flights," Haaretz quoted Israel's Transport Ministry as saying.
      Read More...
Cowboy Hat

Hypocrisy of the Elites: Santorum Says Affordable Education Snobbish

David Sirota
In These Times
Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:00 UTC
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© Scott Olson/Getty Images
Rick Santorum speaks at a campaign rally in Lansing, Mich., on February 27.
Rick Santorum thinks making college affordable for all is elitist. How else are Americans going to find good-paying jobs?

Say what you will about this era's Republican presidential candidates, they at least have chutzpah.

Millionaire blue-blood George W. Bush pretended to be a down-home cowboy. Two-time divorcee and longtime Washington influence peddler Newt Gingrich struts around preaching about traditional family values and insisting he's a D.C. outsider. Now, topping them all is Rick Santorum, who last week declared that only "snobs" support efforts to make a college education more accessible to all Americans.

Santorum, of course, has not one, not two, but a whopping three separate degrees, two of which come from public universities - that is, two that were taxpayer-subsidized, courtesy of the "Big Government" Santorum now claims to loathe.

Hypocritical - and dare I say, snobbish - as it is for someone with such a pedigree to attack President Obama's college affordability initiatives, Santorum did inadvertently stumble into a significant question: Is higher education for everyone? The answer today is not necessarily, but that's precisely because of the affordability problem Obama aims to solve.
      Read More...
Crusader

Bishop Compares Obama's Health Care Policies to Hitler's Actions


The Guardian
Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
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© 2012.talkingpointsmemo.com
An Illinois Roman Catholic diocese whose bishop compared President Barack Obama's health care policies to actions taken by Adolf Hitler said Thursday that the comments, which prompted outside demands for an apology and investigation, were "historical context" in an ongoing debate over religious liberty.

Peoria Bishop Daniel Jenky said during a Sunday homily at St. Mary's Cathedral in Peoria that Obama is following previous governments that "tried to force Christians to huddle and hide only within the confines of their churches."

"Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services and health care," the (Peoria) Journal Star and Chicago Tribune quoted Jenky as saying during the homily. "In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama - with his radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda - now seems intent on following a similar path."
      Read More...
Chart Pie

'Shrink Ray' at the Supermarket: Shoppers are Paying the Same for Ever Smaller Products

Emily Allen
Mail Online
Thu, 19 Apr 2012 03:44 UTC
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Shoppers are paying more for their goods without realising - as manufacturers shrink the pack sizes
  • Two ice cream brands and detergent join the 'shopping list of shame'
  • Manufacturers say they're responding to rising commodity prices
    • Supermarket shoppers are increasingly getting less for their money as big brands continue to reduce the size of their products, a consumer watchdog has revealed.

    The smaller groceries still cost the same at the checkout, leaving customers with already squeezed household budgets due to the rising cost of living - out of pocket.

    This week Which? identified more everyday products subjected to the 'grocery shrink-ray' - a practice first highlighted by the Mail in 2001.
          Read More...
    Bulb

    Rationality and the Ability to Properly Weigh Evidence


    Increasebrainpower.com
    Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
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    © sumanthkapoor.blogspot.com
    Among the signs of rationality in one's thinking, the ability to properly weigh evidence is perhaps one of the most important. But how good are we at deciding what constitutes evidence and how do we determine how convincing each piece of it should be? We may not be as rational as we like to think we are at assessing evidence.

    To begin with, there are those who are too easily led to believe what they want and who take almost anything as valid evidence for that belief. On the other hand, some research shows that most people are too conservative in assigning weight to a piece of evidence. In general it is found that we remain less convinced than the evidence warrants. Or, to put it another way, humans may be more skeptical than they should be.
          Read More...
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