Society's ChildS


USA

New York man discovers it is illegal to wash his car in his own driveway


Police State USA
Wed, 18 Dec 2013 20:53 UTC
Washing Car
© Police State USA
Garden City - A couple of friends cleaning up a car they had just purchased were threatened by the police for car washing in their own driveway. The reach of the nanny state truly has no bounds when it comes to dictating what people must do on their own private property.

Johnathan Schmidt and Eric Jeer were minding their own business and about to wash a used Volkswagen Golf they purchased together. They were standing in their own private driveway, when a police officer walked onto the property.

"Is there a problem?" said Schmidt.

"The problem... is that your neighbor doesn't like you," said the officer.

"That's not my fault," said Schmidt.

"It is, when he starts calling about things being done against the village ordinance," said Officer Buonaiuto. "Such as doing any kind of work here, or any kind of detailing, like washing the car; things like that you're not allowed to do."

The officer attempted to smile for the camera and be cordial while he enforced the unjust laws. He pulled out a copy of the law and read it to the men, who stood in disbelief. The officer explained that the men were not allowed to do any work so long as they were in "public view."
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Arrow Up

Italy's president fears violent insurrection in 2014 but offers no remedy

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The Telegraph, UK
Tue, 17 Dec 2013 20:26 UTC
Student Protest
© EPAHundreds of students wrap themselves in an Italian tricolour during a Pitchforks Movement protest in Turin on Wednesday.
Events in Italy are turning serious. President Giorgio Napolitano has warned of "widespread social tension and unrest" in 2014 as the Long Slump drags on.

Those living on the margins are being drawn into "indiscriminate and violent protest, a sterile lurch towards total opposition".

His latest speech is a veritable Jeremiad. Thousands of companies are on the "brink of collapse". Great masses of the working people are on the dole or at risk of losing their jobs. Very high rates of youth unemployment (41pc) are leading to dangerous alienation.

"The recession is still biting hard, and there is a pervasive sense that it will be difficult to escape, to find a way back to full growth," he said.

Now why might that be? Might it not have something to do with the central overriding fact that Italy has a currency overvalued by 20pc or more within EMU: that it is trapped in a 1930s fixed-exchange system run a 1930s central bank that is standing idly by (for political reasons) as M3 growth stalls, credit contracts, and deflation looms?
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Camera

Ronnie Biggs, notorious participant in Great Train Robbery, dies at 84

Adam Bernstein
The Washington Post
Wed, 18 Dec 2013 12:12 UTC
Image
© Washington Post‘Great Train Robber’ Ronnie Biggs dies at 84: Ronnie Biggs was a petty criminal who set out to transform his life with the daring heist of a mail train packed with money.
Ronnie Biggs, a British thief with a roguish streak who had a minor role in the 1963 Great Train Robbery, one of the more flamboyant crimes in modern history, and who became one of the world's most wanted and unrepentant fugitives, died Wednesday in London. He was 84.

The death was confirmed by his daughter-in-law, Veronica Biggs, who did not provide a cause.

He suffered from pneumonia and other ailments that led the government to grant him compassionate release from prison in August 2009. He had turned himself in to British authorities in 2001 after 36 years on the run.

Mr. Biggs, who fashioned himself as "the last of the gentleman crooks," spent much of his life brashly evading and taunting Scotland Yard, first from Australia and later from Brazil.

To his most devoted followers, he was a folk hero who symbolized rebellion against authority. He recorded with the British punk rock band the Sex Pistols on its single "No One is Innocent," sold T-shirts of himself and even made a TV commercial for a Brazilian instant coffee company. His pitch: "When you are on the run, like I am all the time, you really appreciate a good, satisfying cup of coffee."
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Eye 1

New bill bars employers from requiring credit checks of potential hires


RT
Wed, 18 Dec 2013 23:12 UTC
liz warren
© Reuters / Joshua RobertsSenator Elizabeth Warren
Employers would no longer have the right to attain a prospective employee's credit report, or to deny a job applicant based on credit status, under a bill introduced Tuesday in the US Senate.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and six other senators proposed the Equal Employment for All Act, which would aim to end the ability of employers to run credit checks on possible employees, currently a common practice.

Advocates of the measure says employer credit checks are a high, needless barrier of entry into the labor market for many with poor scores. Supporters add that the employer checks contribute to long-term unemployment and have disproportionately impacted women, minorities, students and seniors.

"There's little or no evidence of any correlation between job performance and a credit [report]," Warren said Tuesday, according to CNN. "[T]his is a point of basic fairness...people who get hit with hard economic blows end up getting squeezed out of the system. This is another way the game is rigged against hardworking middle-class families."
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Stock Down

Kiss your IRA good-bye!

Jerome R. Corsi
Wealthy Debates
Tue, 17 Dec 2013 00:00 UTC
The recent volatility of the Dow Jones Industrial Average indicates savvy investors on Wall Street are worried.

Should the Federal Reserve, under Chairman Ben Bernanke's replacement, "taper" the current Fed policy of buying U.S. Treasury debt, investors anticipate a sharp downward market correction, possibly even a market crash.

Last week, the Dow fell below 16,000 only to rally back over the barrier as Federal Reserve officials attempted to calm nervous investors.

This week, the U.S. Senate is expected to confirm Janet Yellen to replace Bernanke as Fed chief, despite the continuing attempt by Republicans to slow the confirmation of Obama administration appointees after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid employed the "nuclear option," ending the requirement for a supermajority of 60 votes to force a vote.

Yellen, currently vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, is expected to begin ramping down Bernanke's policy known as "Quantitative Easing." Under the policy, the Federal Reserve has bought billions of dollars of U.S. Treasury debt to keep interest rates as close to zero as possible.
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Arrow Down

A Hunger Games banner can get you locked up for terrorism

Ben Richmond
Motherboard
Wed, 18 Dec 2013 17:03 UTC
Hunger Games Banner
© MotherboardThe banner and atrium in question via Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance.
It's understandable that, as the location of one of the worst act of terrorism in American history, Oklahoma would have strict laws against even threatening a terrorist attack. It's just hard to understand how glitter falling from a Hunger Games-themed banner as it unfurls looks anything like terrorism.

Last Friday morning, a group of protestors from Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance and Cross Timbers Earth First! entered the 50-story Devon Tower in downtown Oklahoma City. They were there to protest the building's namesake, Devon, an energy company that is involved in fracking for oil and natural gas in both the United States and Canada, and their CEO sits on the board of directors at TransCanada.

Two protestors locked themselves in a revolving front door using a bike lock and two others went to the second floor and, from a balcony, unfurled two banners: one in support of indigenous activists protesting energy extraction from their land in Canada and another that had the Hunger Games Mockingjay emblem and the phrase "The odds are never in our favor."

As the banner unfurled, glitter - referred to by the police as a "black substance" - fell from it onto the ground. One of the activists, Eric Whalen, told KWTV 9 that the "black substance" in question was "simply glitter to make for good pictures and video and to make it pretty."

A spokesman for GPTSR said that a janitor came out and swept it up, while building security asked the protestors to leave, which they did, with the exception of the two who were locked in a revolving door. The fire department had to come to get them out. All in all, pretty normal sounding end of a protest, complete with some cuffing and trips to the police station.
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Bizarro Earth

Hysteria alert! 5-year-old suspended for making gun gesture with hand while "playing army"


CBS Charlotte
Tue, 17 Dec 2013 18:39 UTC
Image
© flickr
A 5-year-old boy was reportedly suspended from school after making a gun gesture with his hand on the playground.

His father, David Hendrix, was furious when he found out his son was issued a suspension for the gesture.

"He was playing army on the playground," Hendrix told WBTV. "I just felt like the punishment was way too severe."

The boy was issued a one day in-school suspension from his kindergarten class at Pinewood Elementary School.
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Document

Family of Oakland girl on life support after tonsillectomy serves hospital cease and desist letter


CBS San Francisco
Tue, 17 Dec 2013 23:33 UTC
The family of a girl who was declared brain dead at Children's Hospital Oakland last week has stepped up their fight to keep her on life support.

Relatives of 13-year-old Jahi Mcmath took their case to a lawyer who served the hospital a cease and desist letter that says the hospital does not have the family's consent to remove life support without permission.

McMath underwent surgery to remove her tonsils at the Oakland hospital on Monday, December 9th. It was said to have been a routine procedure that was intended to cure a sleep apnea problem. After the surgery, she coughed up blood and went into cardiac arrest.

She was declared brain dead last Thursday, but her mother Nailah Winkfield is not giving up.
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Heart - Black

Disabled military retirees not exempt from pension cuts in budget deal

Elizabeth Harrington
Washington Free Beacon
Tue, 17 Dec 2013 17:59 UTC
Image
© APKelly Ayotte, Lindsey Graham
A provision cutting the pensions of military retirees in the bipartisan budget deal that the Senate will vote on this week does not exempt disabled veterans, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

Disabled retirees were previously thought to be exempt from the changes to military retiree pay, which could cost servicemembers up to $124,000 over a 20-year period.

The Free Beacon previously reported that military retirees under the age of 62 would receive 1 percentage point less in their annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) in the plan crafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D., Wash.).

The section of the U.S. code that has been altered also applies to disabled servicemembers, many of whom have been wounded in combat.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, called the change "unthinkable."

"It has been asserted that the controversial change to military retirees' pensions affects those who are 'working-age' and 'still in their working years,' with the clear suggestion being that these individuals are able to work," Sessions said in a statement. "That's why I was deeply troubled when my staff and I discovered that even individuals who have been wounded and suffered a service-related disability could see their pensions reduced under this plan."
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Alarm Clock

In the wealthiest area of the country, 7 homeless people have frozen to death this winter

Scott Keyes
Think Progress
Wed, 18 Dec 2013 17:21 UTC
Image
© KTVUJoe White, a homeless man who died during a Bay Area cold snap last weekend, in a photograph with his mother Mary Archuleta
Joe White was this close to making it.

A 50-year-old California man described by relatives as a "loving father and a doting grandfather," White had been living on the streets of Hayward for years. He wanted to work and was able to find odd jobs here and there, but it was never much or consistent enough to afford a place to live. Hayward has no emergency shelter with beds for single men, so White slept outside.

But things were looking up. Last Saturday, White was second on a long list to get permanent supportive housing in Hayward. He had been waiting in line for months and it seemed as though he might finally catch a break.

White died on Sunday.

Temperatures in the Bay Area plummeted to near-freezing on December 10, an uncommon occurrence in a region generally known for its lack of inclement weather. White's body was found in the old Hayward City Hall courtyard. He'd been beaten up and robbed by multiple men, who took the new winter coat White's sister had given him on Friday. He was wearing just a hoodie and shorts. His cause of death is still being determined, but police speculated that his death was weather-related.
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