Society's ChildS


Ambulance

Boston, US: A Rising Hunger Among Children

Janell Goode, a single Lowell mother w/kids
© Globe Staff / Wendy MaedaJanell Goode, a single Lowell mother who is now unemployed, has struggled to feed her young sons a healthy diet.
Boston Medical Center sees more who are dangerously thin and facing lasting problems

Doctors at a major Boston hospital report they are seeing more hungry and dangerously thin young children in the emergency room than at any time in more than a decade of surveying families.

Many families are unable to afford enough healthy food to feed their children, say the Boston Medical Center doctors. The resulting chronic hunger threatens to leave scores of infants and toddlers with lasting learning and developmental problems.

Before the economy soured in 2007, 12 percent of youngsters age 3 and under whose families were randomly surveyed in the hospital's emergency department were significantly underweight. In 2010, that percentage jumped to 18 percent, and the tide does not appear to be abating, said Dr. Megan Sandel, an associate professor of pediatrics and public health at BMC.

Family

Rural US disappearing? Population share hits low

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© Associated Press/Ed Andrieski
Washington -- Rural America now accounts for just 16 percent of the nation's population, the lowest ever.

The latest 2010 census numbers hint at an emerging America where, by midcentury, city boundaries become indistinct and rural areas grow ever less relevant. Many communities could shrink to virtual ghost towns as they shutter businesses and close down schools, demographers say.

More metro areas are booming into sprawling megalopolises. Barring fresh investment that could bring jobs, however, large swaths of the Great Plains and Appalachia, along with parts of Arkansas, Mississippi and North Texas, could face significant population declines.

These places posted some of the biggest losses over the past decade as young adults left and the people who stayed got older, moving past childbearing years.

For instance in West Virginia, now with a median age of 41.3, the share of Americans 65 and older is now nearly double that of young adults 18-24 - 16 percent compared to 9 percent, according to census figures released Thursday. In 1970, the shares of the two groups were roughly equal at 12 percent.

Mr. Potato

Clueless GOP lawmaker advises poor to 'drop out of the country club'

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) may have won the contest for the worst analogy of the entire debt ceiling debate.

The tea party favorite told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Wednesday that he wanted to lower the debt ceiling because when you're broke, you have to cut back on certain luxuries.

"Well, Andrea, the thing is, when someone is overextended and broke, they don't continue paying for expensive automobiles; they sell the expensive automobiles and buy a cheaper one," Broun explained. "They don't continue paying for country club dues, they drop out of the country club."

Attention

The Horn of Africa: Skeletal, frail and hours from death: The haunting face of baby Mihag given 50% chance of survival after mother walks for a week to refugee camp

Cradled in his mother's arms, this is the face of a skeletal seven-month-old baby starving to death in the Horn of Africa.

Weighing just seven pounds - as much as a newborn - Mihag Gedi Farah stares wide-eyed, his skin pulled taut over his ribs and tiny arms.

Mihag is just one of 800,000 children who officials warn could die across the region in the worst drought for decades.

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© Associated PressDesperate: Seven-month-old Mihag Gedi Farah weighs just 7lbs and was hours from death after arriving at a field hospital in Dadaab, Kenya

Wolf

Ohio, US: 6-year-old Lorain County girl tries to drown puppies

Seven Beagle puppies are in foster care after being rescued, and some revived, by Lorain police last week.

Police found a 6-year-old child trying to drown the pups in a kiddie swimming pool on the city's east side after getting a call from a neighbor.

The 6-week-old pups were rushed to an animal emergency center, where they were stabilized before being passed into the custody of the Friendship Animal Protective League in Elyria.


Pistol

US, Virginia: Patient Kills Psychiatrist in Murder-Suicide


Dr. Mark Lawrence, a Virginia psychiatrist who was killed by a patient in a murder-suicide Friday, was remembered by his colleagues as a gifted psychiatrist and mentor to hundreds of therapists.

"He helped people focus on their own strengths. It was such a hopeful vision," said Dr. Cynthia Margolies, who worked with Lawrence at the Center for Healing and Imagery, a school Lawrence founded 27 years ago to provide continuing education to therapists.

Barbara Newman, 62, shot Lawrence, 71, when she showed up at his home office in McLean Friday afternoon for her appointment. Newman then turned the gun on herself.

Stormtrooper

US, Georgia: Police Beat Man That Just Learned His Son Committed Suicide

Fox news reports that Loganville police beat an emotionally distressed man who just learned his son had committed suicide.

In another blaring example of the transitioning of America into a complete Nazi style police state, police show no sympathy for an emotionally distressed man who just learned that his son committed suicide.

Instead the police just add another award to their trophy case of felony assaults on an Americans with no arrests being made against them.


The Fox news report in the video attached to this page is just the latest of several cases of police brutality and police beatings across the nation.

The man interviewed shows off extensive injuries beyond the extent of which should be tolerated as he tells Fox news about how the police brutality beat him.

Handcuffs

US, California: 117 arrested during 4-day crime sweep in Stockton

Authorities say 117 people were arrested during a four-day crime sweep in central Stockton.

The suspects were booked on various charges, including murder, attempted murder, robbery and kidnapping.

Stockton police spokesman, Officer Pete Smith, says the sweep began on July 20 and ended Sunday. It involved more than 60 law enforcement agencies including police, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Among those arrested were a man wanted in the July 11 killing of 41-year-old Dominique Jones and a man wanted in the June 18 killing of 33-year-old Brian Walker. Two 18-year-olds also were arrested in the Feb. 10 fatal shooting of 19-year-old Jarred Justiniani.

Authorities also seized 15 firearms and small amounts of methamphetamine and cocaine in the raids.

Source: The Associated Press

Handcuffs

Canada: Grandma jailed for 12 days in heroin mixup

Janet Goodin, 66
© FacebookJanet Goodin, 66, of Warroad, Minn., was arrested at the border as she tried to enter Manitoba for a bingo game in Apri

Janet Goodin had hoped to spend the weekend with her family, starting with a half-hour drive over the border from Minnesota to meet her daughters for a game of bingo in Manitoba.

But when a jar of motor oil stowed in the back of her van tested positive for heroin during a border check, those plans changed.

That weekend in April ended with the 66-year-old grandmother in jail facing charges of heroin possession and trafficking, and enduring what she calls "the most humiliating experience of my whole life."

Twelve days passed before an RCMP lab test showed the jar to contain nothing more than used motor oil and all charges were dropped.

Magnify

Best of the Web: Fundamentalism Kills

mourners attack Norway
© AP / Frank AugsteinPeople embrace and mourn at the massive flower field laid in memory of victims of Friday’s twin attacks in Norway.
The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik. This filth has poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages experienced by Norway. I worry more about the Anders Breiviks than the Mohammed Attas.

The battle under way in America is not between religion and science. It is not between those who embrace the rational and those who believe in biblical myth. It is not between Western civilization and Islam. The blustering televangelists and the New Atheists, the television pundits and our vaunted Middle East specialists and experts, are all part of our vast, simplistic culture of mindless entertainment. They are in show business. They cannot afford complexity. Religion and science, facts and lies, truth and fiction, are the least of their concerns. They trade insults and clichés like cartoon characters. They don masks. One wears the mask of religion. One wears the mask of science. One wears the mask of journalism. One wears the mask of the terrorism expert. They jab back and forth in predictable sound bites. It is a sterile and useless debate between bizarre subsets of American culture. Some use the scientific theory of evolution to explain the behavior and rules for complex social and political systems, and others insist that the six-day creation story in Genesis is a factual account. The danger we face is not in the quarrel between religion advocates and evolution advocates, but in the widespread mental habit of fundamentalism itself.

Comment: Mr. Hedge's analysis of the problem of fundamentalism (regardless of its particular form) is correct. However, he is evidently unaware of the role that psychopaths play in these situation. Once an ideology, no matter how benign and well-intentioned its beginnings, has been twisted from within by these parasites on society, there can only be one outcome: its use as a means of domination.

The seminal book, Political Ponerology, outlines the means and methods by which this is accomplished.