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20 children die after school dinner in India


Press Association
Wed, 17 Jul 2013 03:09 UTC
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© Associated PressSchoolchildren receive treatment at a hospital after falling ill soon after eating a free meal in India
At least 20 children have died and many others are sick after eating a free school lunch which was tainted by a heavy dose of insecticide, Indian officials said.

It was not immediately clear how chemicals ended up in the food in the school in the eastern state of Bihar, though one official said the food may not have been properly washed before it was cooked.

The children, aged between eight and 11, fell ill soon after eating their school lunch in Masrakh, a village 50 miles north of the state capital of Patna.

School authorities immediately stopped serving the meal of rice, lentils, soya and potatoes as the children started vomiting. The lunch, part of a popular country-wide campaign to give at least one hot meal to children from poor families, was cooked in the school kitchen.

The children were quickly rushed to a local hospital and later to Patna for treatment, said state official Abhijit Sinha. In addition to the 20 children who died, another 27 children as well as the school cook were admitted to hospital, he said. Ten of them were in a serious condition.
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Heart - Black

Indian nun gang-raped for a week

Santosh Digal
AsiaNews
Mon, 15 Jul 2013 00:00 UTC
A nun, 28, was abducted and raped for a week. One of her cousins is among the attackers. For the archbishop of Cuttack-Bhubaneshwar, "The perpetrators must be brought to justice [. . .]. What happened is a disgrace".
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Bhubaneshwar - A 28-year-old nun was kidnapped and raped for a week by a group of men in Bamunigam, Kandhamal District (Orissa). She was held between 5 and 11 July, but the case was made public only today. "The perpetrators must be brought to justice without delay and the law must take its course. What happened is a disgrace," said Mgr John Barwa SVD, archbishop of Cuttack-Bhubaneshwar, who condemned the attack.

The nun, a Kandhamal native, lives in Chennai (Tamil Nadu), where she is studying in college. According to her testimony to police, she received a phone call from a woman about two weeks ago, who reported that her mother was very sick.

On 5 July, she took a train to Bamunigam, where two cousins ​​and some friends were waiting to take her home. However, rather than take her to the village of Minapanka, the men led her to a still unidentified place. Here the sister was gang raped for a week.
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Sheriff

Toronto officer disciplined for posing as flooded train passenger


Yahoo! Canada News
Tue, 16 Jul 2013 00:00 UTC
Philip Cheung For The Globe and Mail
A GO Train full of passengers is stuck on the flooded tracks during a major rainstorm in downtown Toronto on July 8, 2013.
Toronto police Chief Bill Blair says an officer has been disciplined for posing as a stranded passenger on a waterlogged commuter train during major flooding last week.

Blair told radio station Newstalk 1010 the officer was "shameful" to pretend he was one of the 1,400 riders on the GO train when it became trapped by flood waters during the evening rush hour.

CBC said the officer was Const. Nickolas Dorazio. The network said he was working to help rescue the passengers, but told their TV crew he was stuck on the stranded train and even draped an orange towel around his shoulders for effect.

Blair says the force has disciplined the officer for his "stupid behaviour" that Monday night.

The police chief says the officer's conduct was an "eyebrow raiser" that undermined public confidence in the force.

Police and firefighters used small inflatable boats to ferry the trapped passengers a short distance to higher ground, with the evacuation taking some seven hours.
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Arrow Down

"Hundreds" of poisoned meatballs discovered in SFO dog zones


The San Francisco Appeal
Wed, 10 Jul 2013 09:16 UTC
Poisoned Meatballs
© The San Francisco Appeal
San Francisco police are continuing to investigate a case involving numerous poisonous meatballs found on city streets recently.

Police warned dog owners in the city's Twin Peaks and Diamond Heights neighborhoods about the meatballs last week, and now say hundreds have been recovered.

The meatballs, which investigators said contained rodent poison, had been deliberately placed in spots where dogs defecate in the area of Crestline, Burnett and Parkridge drives, according to police.

One dog gobbled up a meatball last Wednesday evening while being walked by its owner, then became sick and had to be taken to a veterinarian, police said.

Anyone who sees anything resembling the meatballs should call the Police Department's non-emergency number at (415) 553-0123. Anyone who witnesses suspicious activity is asked to call 911.

Police also advised residents in those neighborhoods who have been involved in disputes over pets to call the Park Station investigations team at (415) 242-3000 and ask to speak with Lt. Pengel or Inspector Nannery.
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Pistol

'Juror B37′ sheds light on not guilty verdict in Zimmerman murder trial

Jason Howerton
The Blaze
Mon, 15 Jul 2013 20:40 UTC
A juror in the George Zimmerman trial said Monday that the actions of the neighborhood watch volunteer and Trayvon Martin both led to the teenager's fatal shooting last year, but that Zimmerman didn't actually break the law.

She also revealed that during initial deliberations, half of the jurors wanted to convict Zimmerman.

The woman known as Juror B37 told CNN's Anderson Cooper that Zimmerman made some poor decisions leading up to the shooting, but that Martin wasn't innocent either.

"I think both were responsible for the situation they had gotten themselves into," said the juror, who is planning to write a book about the trial. "I think they both could have walked away."
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Arrow Down

Nutritional tests conducted on hungry Canadian aboriginals: documents

Bob Weber
The Canadian Press
Tue, 16 Jul 2013 20:44 UTC
Nutritional Tests
© The Canadian Press/Library and Archive Canada/HandoutA nurse takes a blood sample from a boy at the Indian School, Port Alberni, B.C., in 1948, during the time when nutritional experiments were being conducted on students there and five other residential schools.
Recently published historical research says hungry aboriginal children and adults were once used as unwitting subjects in nutritional experiments by Canadian government bureaucrats.

"This was the hardest thing I've ever written," said Ian Mosby, who has revealed new details about one of the least-known but perhaps most disturbing aspects of government policy toward aboriginals immediately after the Second World War.

Mosby - whose work at the University of Guelph focuses on the history of food in Canada - was researching the development of health policy when he ran across something strange.

"I started to find vague references to studies conducted on 'Indians' that piqued my interest and seemed potentially problematic, to say the least," he said. "I went on a search to find out what was going on."

Government documents eventually revealed a long-standing, government-run experiment that came to span the entire country and involved at least 1,300 aboriginals, most of them children.

It began with a 1942 visit by government researchers to a number of remote reserve communities in northern Manitoba, including places such as The Pas and Norway House.

They found people who were hungry, beggared by a combination of the collapsing fur trade and declining government support. They also found a demoralized population marked by, in the words of the researchers, "shiftlessness, indolence, improvidence and inertia."

The researchers suggested those problems - "so long regarded as inherent or hereditary traits in the Indian race" - were in fact the results of malnutrition.
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Crusader

Amnesia victim in California was member of Swedish medieval society

Peter Vinthagen Simpson
The Local
Tue, 16 Jul 2013 19:50 UTC
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A man found unconscious in a California motel room who left US authorities baffled when he woke up only speaking Swedish, has been identified by a member of a Swedish medieval society as one of their kin

"I first met him when we were both members of a Middle Ages association called the Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA) in the 1980s. He went by the name of Strongbow," Johan Cassel of the SCA told The Local on Monday.

Cassel explained that the man identified in US and Swedish media reports as Michael Boatwright spent several periods living in Sweden before they lost contact in the late 1990s, adding that Boatwright learnt to speak Swedish fairly well.

"He could speak pretty good Swedish, although you could hear that he came from an English-speaking country. He had an accent," Cassel said.

The SCA is an international association that brings together people with an interest in the Middle Ages and members typically engage in range of activities, such as jousting. According to fellow member Olle Sahlin, Boatwright was active in the SCA's European chapter and was an early member of the Swedish Jousting Team.

"He organized a jousting exhibition for Saab and Scania's anniversary in 1985. I was one of the extras clad in a costume from the Middle Ages," Sahlin told The Local.

Sahlin explained that the SCA was launched in Sweden in the early 1980s and joined up with a Europe-wide movement that was dominated by servicemen and women of the US armed forces based in Europe.

"The SCA is divided up in districts, principalities and kingdoms. We are in the principality of Nordmark, in the Kingdom of Drachenwald," Sahlin told The Local.

Johan Cassel also recalled having met Boatwright while competing in jousting events and reports that the American, who originates from Florida, was a pretty accomplished performer.

Comment: Man found in California motel awakens with amnesia

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Attention

Food prices in Indonesia soar during Ramadan

Vento Saudale, Novi Lumanauw & Fana F.S. Putra
Jakarta Globe
Mon, 15 Jul 2013 00:00 UTC
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© JG Photo/Rezza EstilyBeef prices have skyrocketed throughout the month of Ramadan, peeking on Sunday at Rp 120,000 per kilogram.
Prices for certain kinds of food have doubled five days into the Ramadan fasting month, prompting the president to scold his ministers for their failure in preventing the inflation.

One of the more significant increases has been the price of beef, which jumped from between Rp 50,000 and Rp 60,000 ($5 and $6) to Rp 110,000 and 120,000 per kilogram on Sunday.

Meanwhile, some traders have been selling chicken meat at Rp 45,000, up from Rp 25,000, and the price of chilli has risen to Rp 100,000 from Rp 50,000 per kilogram.

In several Bogor markets for instance, traders have complained that sales of beef have dropped by half because it has become difficult to make sales at such a high price.

"Rp 110,000 is the highest price I have ever sold since I started selling beef 10 years ago," said Syahroni, a beef seller at the city's Jambu Dua market on Sunday.

The Indonesian Merchants Association (Ikappi) also confirmed that in general the price of beef had increased by almost 40 percent to Rp 120,000 per kilogram, while chicken meat surged to Rp 42,000 from Rp 27,000 per kilogram per kilogram.
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X

San Francisco plane crash victim may have been run over by ambulance


Daily Telegraph
Tue, 09 Jul 2013 16:08 UTC
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© ReutersUS National Transportation Safety Board investigators work at the scene of the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash site at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, California.
An investigation into how the teenager died began as it emerged that the plane's pilot Lee Kang-kuk, 46, was training and in the process of getting a licence for the Boeing 777, which he was landing at that airport for the first time.

One of two Chinese schoolgirls who died in a plane crash in San Francisco may have survived the disaster only to be run over by a fire engine or ambulance.

An investigation into how the teenager died began as it emerged that the plane's pilot Lee Kang-kuk, 46, was training and in the process of getting a licence for the Boeing 777, which he was landing at that airport for the first time.

He had logged only 43 hours at the controls on nine flights in that aircraft. More than 180 people were injured, 49 of them seriously, when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 hit a sea wall at the start of the runway, ripping off its tail, on Saturday.
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Family

Greece grinds to a halt as thousands join strike against further public sector staff cuts


RT
Tue, 16 Jul 2013 15:47 UTC
Thessaloniki protest
© AFP Photo / Sakis MitrolidisProtest against fresh austerity measures the government is imposing in order to keep receiving EU-IMF loans in Thessaloniki on July 16, 2013.
Tens of thousands of Greeks have abandoned their workplaces on Tuesday and rallied in front of parliament in the capital Athens against government plans to satisfy foreign lenders by firing public sector employees.

It is the third and the largest general strike the crisis-hit country has experienced since the start of the year.

The 24-hour walkout came a day before the Greek MPs vote on a series of unpopular reforms, which the European Union and International Monetary Fund say are obligatory if Greece want more financial aid.

"The public sector still composes a major part of the Greek economy. These jobs are protected by the constitution since the end of the 19th century," RT's correspondent, Egor Piskunov, reports from Athens.
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