Society's ChildS


Heart - Black

Fire in China poultry plant kills 120

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Smoke rises from the Jilin poultry farm where up to 120 people died
A fire at a poultry processing plant in China has killed at least 119 people, officials say.

The fire broke out at a slaughterhouse in Dehui in Jilin province early on Monday.

Accounts speak of explosions prior to the fire, which caused panic and a crush of workers trying to escape. Some exits were said to be locked.

The fire is now said to have been mostly put out and bodies are being recovered.

Sources including the provincial fire department suggest there may have been an ammonia leak which either caused the fire or made fighting the blaze more hazardous.

Other reports speak of an electrical fault.

An injured woman lies on a bed at a hospital in Changchun, after fire broke out at a poultry slaughterhouse in Dehui, Jilin province, on Monday Dozens of injured have been sent to hospital

It is China's deadliest fire since 2000, when 309 people died in a blaze in a dance hall in Luoyang, in Henan province. A labour activist told the BBC it was the worst factory fire in living memory.

About 100 workers had managed to escape from the Baoyuan plant, Xinhua said, adding that the "complicated interior structure" of the building and narrow exits had made rescue work more difficult.

It said the plant's front gate was locked when the blaze began.

Bad Guys

Punitive pricing! Samoa Air to charge passengers by body weight

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Samoa Air, a small island airline, has become the world's first airline to implement a "pay as you weigh" pricing model that calculates passengers' flight tickets based on their body weight, according to reports.

"This is the fairest way of traveling," Samoa Air chief executive Chris Langton told Australia's ABC Radio. "There are no extra fees in terms of excess baggage or anything - it is just a kilo is a kilo is a kilo."

The airline, which flies domestically and to American Samoa, the Cook Islands and Tonga, will charge rates ranging from $1 a kilogram on the airline's shortest domestic route to about $4.16 per kilogram for travel from Samoa to American Samoa, according to ABC Radio.

Under the new pricing system, passengers of Samoa Air, which operate N2A Islander and Cessna 172 aircraft, will need to enter their estimated weight during online booking and airfare will be calculated using their weight. "You travel happy, knowing full well that you are only paying for exactly what you weigh... nothing more," states the Samoa Air website.

Attention

Explosion of unknown origin in Brussels injures 7

"An explosion of unknown origin in a dwelling quarter has left at least seven people injured in Brussels, Belgian TV reports. The blast caused fire in an accommodation unit; firefighters are currently extinguishing the flames. The cause of the explosion is being investigated."

Alarm Clock

Kindergartener interrogated over cap gun until he pees his pants, then suspended 10 days

cap gun
© Unknown
In the latest incident of anti-gun hysteria to erupt in a school setting, a kindergarten boy has been suspended from school for 10 days because he showed a friend his cowboy-style cap gun on the way to school.

The incident happened on Wednesday morning at about 8:30 a.m. on a school bus in Calvert County, Maryland, reports The Washington Post.

The kindergartener had brought the toy gun because his friend had brought a water gun the previous day. He later told his mother than he "really, really" wanted his friend to see it.

The suspended boy had acquired the menacing, plastic, orange-tipped weapon at Frontier Town, a western-themed campground with a water park, mini golf and the like.

School officials at Dowell Elementary School in the town of Lusby proceeded to question the five-year-old for over two hours before finally calling his mother, whom The Post also does not name.

The principal eventually called the boy's mother at 10:50 a.m. By that time, the five-year-old had wet his pants (which the mother called highly unusual).

The principal told the boy's mother that the boy had simulated shooting someone on the bus with the offending novelty. However, both the boy and his older sister, a first-grader, say the principal is not telling the truth.

Che Guevara

Turkey police crack down on anti-government protests

Dozens injured as police use water cannon and tear gas at escalating anti-government rallies in Istanbul and Ankara.


Turkish riot police have used tear gas and water cannon during clashes with thousands of protesters in Istanbul, as more people joined the second day of the fiercest anti-government demonstrations for years.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday called for an immediate end to the protests, that were triggered by government redevelopment plans of a park in Istanbul's Taksim Square.

The protests have since widened into a broader show of defiance against Erdogan and his government and spread to Ankara and other cities.

Che Guevara

Best of the Web: Revolution underway in NATO protectorate Turkey? Istanbul Occupied

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Taken from Occupy Gezi’s Facebook page.
To my friends who live outside of Turkey:

I am writing to let you know what is going on in Istanbul for the last five days. I personally have to write this because most of the media sources are shut down by the government and word of mouth and the internet are the only ways left for us to explain ourselves and call for help and support.

Four days ago a group of people who did not belong to any specific organization or ideology got together in Istanbul's Gezi Park. Among them there were many of my friends and students. Their reason was simple: To prevent and protest the upcoming demolishing of the park for the sake of building yet another shopping mall at very center of the city. There are numerous shopping malls in Istanbul, at least one in every neighborhood! The tearing down of the trees was supposed to begin early Thursday morning. People went to the park with their blankets, books and children. They put their tents down and spent the night under the trees. Early in the morning when the bulldozers started to pull the hundred-year-old trees out of the ground, they stood up against them to stop the operation.

They did nothing other than standing in front of the machines.

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© Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty ImagesTaksim Square is now Occupied: Istanbul, on Sunday.

Heart - Black

Murder of April Jones proves porn link to sexual assaults

bridger
© PA
Bridger’s laptop computer contained a cache of images of children being raped and abused
As Mark Bridger was jailed for life for the abduction and murder of five-year-old April Jones, the NSPCC said there was a "worrying link" between his looking at indecent images online and the crime he went on to commit.

It called for "effective measures" to curb the ease with which extreme pornography and indecent images of children can be accessed.

Bridger's laptop computer contained a cache of images of children being raped and abused. Police found a horror film in his video recorder paused at a violent rape.

Earlier this month, Stuart Hazell was jailed for the murder of Tia Sharpe, his partner's 12-year-old-granddaughter. During his trial the Old Bailey heard that he had used his computer to search for terms including "violent forced rape" and "incest".

Bridger, like Hazell, had no previous convictions for sexual offences. Both went from viewing indecent images straight to the worst class of offending. With no gradual escalation in behaviour, there was nothing to suggested they were a threat to children and to alert police.

Ambulance

4 die when 2 small planes collide midair near Phoenix


Four adults died Friday morning after two single-engine planes collided above a remote desert area in north Phoenix, authorities said.

The identities were not released pending notification of family members.

"This is a tragic event," Phoenix police spokesman Steve Martos said at the scene. "It could have been much worse and be in a congested area where people reside."

Martos said planes frequently fly in the area because of the open airspace.

A pilot reported seeing the two small aircraft collide in midair about 15 miles northwest of Deer Valley Airport, spokesman Ian Gregor of the Federal Aviation Administration said.

Numerous 911 calls about the midair crash came in around 10 a.m., authorities said.

Fire crews went to the area and found the two planes. One plane, believed to be a Cessna, caught fire upon impact and was "unrecognizable," according to Capt. Dave Wilson of the Daisy Mountain Fire Department.

He said the plane contained two people, whose gender could not be determined at the scene, because the bodies were burnt.

Identification of these two victims will be made by the Medical Examiners Office, Martos said.

Martos said the identities of the two men in the other aircraft are known but the family has yet to be notified.

Wilson said the other aircraft, a Piper Archer III, appeared to have made a rough landing and was mostly intact. It was about 100 yards from the other plane with the two victims inside, he said.

"I thought possibly we might have survivors," said battalion Chief Gary Bernard of the Peoria Fire Department.

Dollar Gold

Wealth of most Americans down 55% since recession

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© iStockphoto
Increasing housing prices and the stock market''s posting all-time highs haven't helped the plight most Americans. The average U.S. household has recovered only 45 percent of the wealth they lost during the recession, according to a report released yesterday from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

This finding is a very different picture than one painted in a report earlier this year by the Fed that calculated Americans as a whole had regained 91 percent of their losses. The writers of the report released yesterday point out that the earlier number is based on aggregate household-net-worth data. However, this isn't adjusted for inflation, population growth or the nature of the wealth. Further, they say much of recovery in net worth is because of the stock market, which means most of the improvement has been a boon only to wealthy families.

"Clearly, the 91 percent recovery of wealth losses portrayed by the aggregate nominal measure paints a different picture than the 45 percent recovery of wealth losses indicated by the average inflation-adjusted household measure," the report said. "Considering the uneven recovery of wealth across households, a conclusion that the financial damage of the crisis and recession largely has been repaired is not justified," the researchers said.

Household wealth plunged $16 trillion from the top of the real estate bubble in the third quarter of 2007 to the bottom of the bust in the first quarter of 2009. By the last three months of 2012, American households as a group had regained $14.7 trillion.

The report says almost two-thirds of the increase in aggregate household wealth is due to rising stock prices. This has disproportionately benefited the richest households: About 80 percent of stocks are held by the wealthiest 10 percent of the population.

Pistol

Gun violence rocks Chicago as 8 are shot in one day

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The level of gun violence in Chicago, which has caused shock waves nationally, is continuing with eight people having been shot in the nation's third largest city in a 24-hour period that ended Friday morning, including one that ended with the death of a 15-year-old boy.

Chicago police said that the teenager, Patrick Sykes, was shot several times early Thursday afternoon. They said that witnesses offered conflicting versions of what occurred, with the shooters having been either on bicycles or on foot.

Two people were taken into custody for questioning, but they were released without any charges being filed, police said.

The 24-hour period of gun violence also included the shooting of an 18-year-old man, three women and several others.

The high level of violence in the month of May came shortly after the Chicago Police Department announced that crime in the city fell 8 percent in the first quarter of 2013, compared with the same period last year, and 15 percent from the same period of 2011.

Still, there are great concerns about violent crime in Chicago, where Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old honor student, who performed at President Obama's inauguration, was killed by a bullet while standing in a South Side playground.