Society's ChildS


Pocket Knife

Best of the Web: Parents furious after new campaign suggests co-sleeping is as dangerous as babies sleeping with knives

Baby knives ad 1
© Milwaukee Health DepartmentControversial: The public service ads by Milwaukee's Health Department are intended to capture attention, but some deem the images 'over the top'
A sweetly sleeping baby lies amongst soft bedding, a chubby finger brushing against a giant meat cleaver.

One of two images, the photo is part of an ad campaign that has outraged parents and experts, who see its shock tactics as 'over the top.'

The public service ads by Milwaukee's Health Department are the latest weapon in a fight to alert parents to the dangers of sharing a bed with babies.

While many deem the message as timely and necessary, the way in which authorities have gone about the visual imagery is seen as offensive.

The images are run alongside the slogan: 'Your baby sleeping with you can be just as dangerous.'

People

Some 30,000 Greek protestors march on U.S. Embassy in Athens, clashes ensue

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© Yiorgos Karahalis, ReutersRiot police secure the U.S Embassy in Athens, November 17, 2011, during a rally marking the anniversary of a 1973 students uprising against the dictatorship then ruling Greece and to protest against the U.S. for having supported the 1967-1974 military junta.
Some 30,000 people took to the streets in Athens in commemoration of the 38th anniversary of the ultra-right junta of the "Black Colonels" on Thursday, police said.

Several demonstrations in Athens poured together and joined one mass peaceful demonstration against Greece's government decisions on austerity measures to receive loans from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

The protestors were marching toward the U.S. Embassy because the ultra-left organization blames the United States for supporting the "Black Colonels" in their suppressing a university students' uprising on November 17, 1973. During the uprising in 1973, several youth were killed and thousands were injured.

USA

US: House GOP Classifies Pizza As A Vegetable To 'Prevent Overly Burdensome' School Lunch Regulations

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© UnknownThis meal is chock full of vegetables, according to the House GOP.
Earlier this year, the USDA made an attempt to bolster the nutrition guidelines for the federal school lunch program. Under the new guidelines, for instance, school lunches would be limited to one cup of starchy vegetables a week and the ability of schools to count tomato sauce on pizza towards their fruit and vegetables requirement would be scaled back. But House Republicans, in a new spending plan unveiled yesterday, have done away with those changes:
The spending bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. The department's proposed guidelines would have attempted to prevent that.

The changes had been requested by food companies that produce frozen pizzas, the salt industry and potato growers. Some conservatives in Congress have called the push for healthier foods an overreach, saying the government shouldn't be telling children what to eat.

Alarm Clock

10-year-old Mexican girl gives birth to baby boy after 31-week pregnancy

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© Unknown

Country's laws prohibit abortion procedures for children under 12

A 10-year-old Mexican girl has given birth to a baby boy after a 31-week pregnancy, according to reports.

The premature infant, which weighed 3.3 pounds, was born by Caesarian section at the Women's Hospital in the city of Puebla and is in the intensive care unit recovering from pneumonia.

The young mother, who is from the nearby San Francisco Totimehuacan community, has returned home after the procedure but visits the baby every day to breastfeed, officials said.

Attention

US school board sells ad space on report cards

Faced with stinging budget cuts, a county school board in the Rocky Mountain state of Colorado is selling advertising space on report cards to help make ends meet.

Jefferson County Public Schools expects to make $90,000 over three years from Collegeinvest, a college savings plan, for the two-inch (five-centimeter) ads on report cards issued by its 91 elementary schools.

That seems like a drop in the bucket for the school board, which last year slashed its spending by $40 million in the face of reduced state and federal government support and a slump in revenue from school property taxes.

But school board spokeswoman Melissa Reeves told AFP by telephone on Monday: "We're obviously looking for revenue generators and taking them where we can find them."

Che Guevara

Seattle City Council Unanimously Supports Occupy Movement and Votes to Stand Up to Big Banks

Seattle Joins Los Angeles, San Francisco and Buffalo In Supporting Occupy Protests

The Seattle Times reports today:
The Seattle City Council on Monday unanimously adopted a resolution in support of Occupy Seattle that calls on the city to examine its banking and investment practices, home-foreclosure patterns and the financing of local elections.

The resolution was a grab bag of proposals meant to provide a local response to the concentration of wealth and abuses in the financial sector that the Occupy Wall Street protest and its regional offspring have called attention to in encampments and rallies around the country this fall.

"Working together, we can fix our broken economy and fix our broken social contract," said Councilmember Nick Licata, who sponsored the legislation. He said that, at the very least, the city can make sure public funds are reinvested in the community.

Other cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Buffalo, have passed resolutions in support of the Occupy protests.

The Seattle resolution ....called on Congress to support job creation by investing in the country's infrastructure, tightening banking regulations and allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire.

It's not clear how much practical effect the resolution will have. The city's finance director said very little of the city's money is in commercial banks. The city does do business with Wells Fargo, but the bank is essentially a pass-through as the city moves money into long-term assets or pays bills, said Glen Lee, finance director.

The city does give tax breaks to a range of businesses, from church-sponsored day-care centers and nonprofit adult family homes to banks with international facilities that pay about one-third less than other businesses, Lee said.

"I look forward to examining these issues with the council," he said.

Heart - Black

US: Missouri mother charged with murdering toddler son

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© The Associated Press//St. Louis Post Dispatch/Christian Gooden Mourners who did not want to give names show emotion Wednesday Nov. 16, 2011, after leaving a memorial for Tyler Dasher near St. Marcus Cemetery in St. Louis, Mo. where the one-year-olds body was found Tuesday.
Prosecutors charged a 20-year-old suburban St. Louis woman on Wednesday with murdering her 13-month old son, saying she admitted she beat the boy because he was crying and "wouldn't lay down, wouldn't go back to sleep."

Shelby Dasher is charged with second-degree murder in the death of her son, Tyler, whose body was found discarded near a cemetery about a mile from home on Tuesday, hours after she reported him missing.

Dasher was arrested early Wednesday and was being held on $500,000 cash bond.

St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch said Wednesday that Dasher told police she repeatedly struck her son because he was crying and "wouldn't lay down, wouldn't go back to sleep." He said she also admitted she disposed of his body.

"Raising children can be frustrating. There are a myriad of ways to handle that," McCulloch said. "This isn't one of them."

McCulloch revealed little else about the boy's death, except to say it appeared the mother used no objects or weapons to strike her son.

Dollar

US: Millionaires on Capitol Hill: Please tax me more!

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© The Associated Press/Carolyn KasterHouse Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Md., right, answers questions after a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2011. Huddling behind him, from left are, Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn., Sen. Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D, and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.
Lobbyists for a day, a band of millionaires stormed Capitol Hill on Wednesday to urge Congress to tax them more.

They had a little trouble getting in. It turns out there are procedures, even for the really rich.

But once inside, their message was embraced by liberals and tolerated by some conservatives - including the ideological leader of anti-tax lawmakers, who had some advice for them, too.

"If you think the federal government can spend your money better than you can, then by all means" pay more in taxes than you owe, said Grover Norquist, the head of a group that has gotten almost all congressional Republicans to pledge to vote against tax hikes. The IRS should have a little line on the form where people can donate money to the government, he suggested, "just like the tip line on a restaurant receipt."

One of the millionaires suggested that if Norquist wanted low taxes and less government, "Renounce your American citizenship and move to Somalia where they don't collect any tax."

In the silence left by the private efforts of the "supercommittee" to find $1.2 trillion or more in deficit cuts by Thanksgiving, free advice flowed in public.

Stormtrooper

US, Washington: Occupy Seattle: Pregnant Teen, Elderly Woman Among Pepper Sprayed

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© The Associated Press/seattlepi.com/Joshua Trujillo Seattle activist Dorli Rainey, 84, reacts after being hit with pepper spray during an Occupy Seattle protest on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011 at Westlake Park in Seattle.
A downtown march and rally in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement turned briefly chaotic as police scattered a crowd of rowdy protesters - including a pregnant 19-year-old and an 84-year-old activist - with blasts of pepper spray.

Protest organizers denounced the use of force, saying that police indiscriminately sprayed the chemical irritant at peaceful protesters.

The Occupy Seattle movement released a written statement late Tuesday expressing support for "a 4-foot 10-inch, 84-year-old woman, a priest and a pregnant woman who as of this writing is still in the hospital."

Dorli Rainey is an activist who has supported liberal causes in the Seattle area for decades. A photo showing Rainey being cared for by fellow activists in the immediate aftermath of the police incident appeared on news websites around the world.

Seattle police spokesman Jeff Kappel said he didn't have specifics on the Rainey incident, but he said pepper spray is "is not age specific. No more dangerous to someone who is 10 or someone who is 80."

Che Guevara

US, New York: Evicted Wall Street protesters seek rebound with rally

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© unknown
Occupy Wall Street protesters hope to rebound on Thursday with a rally at the New York Stock Exchange to show their battle against economic inequality has life after they were evicted from a downtown park.

Rallies by the two-month-old movement have numbered in the hundreds of people in New York but the protesters and city officials said they expect thousands of people to pour into the Wall Street area from 7 a.m.

It will be a test of whether Occupy Wall Street and the loosely knit global alliance it inspired will flag or get a boost after the police cleared a camp of several hundred protesters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan on Tuesday.

"This movement is really not about tents as much as it is about an idea and we're keeping the idea through a number of direct action things planned" for Thursday, said spokesman Ed Needham. "There's also going to be events in 100 countries around the world tomorrow."

Occupy Wall Street plans to shut down the home of the New York Stock Exchange and the heart of American capitalism with a street carnival that kicks off a day of protests.