Society's ChildS

Heart - Black

Best of the Web: 300,000 babies stolen from their parents - and sold for adoption: Haunting BBC documentary exposes 50-year scandal of baby trafficking by the Catholic church in Spain

Polly Dunbar
The Daily Mail
Sun, 16 Oct 2011 12:59 UTC
Identity crisis:
stolen spanish babies
© Rex/BBCRandy Ryder as a baby being cradled in a Malaga hospital in 1971 by the woman who bought him
Up to 300,000 Spanish babies were stolen from their parents and sold for adoption over a period of five decades, a new investigation reveals.

The children were trafficked by a secret network of doctors, nurses, priests and nuns in a widespread practice that began during General Franco's dictatorship and continued until the early Nineties.

Hundreds of families who had babies taken from Spanish hospitals are now battling for an official government investigation into the scandal.

Several mothers say they were told their first-born children had died during or soon after they gave birth.

But the women, often young and unmarried, were told they could not see the body of the infant or attend their burial.

In reality, the babies were sold to childless couples whose devout beliefs and financial security meant that they were seen as more appropriate parents.

Comment: Trafficking infants and protecting paedophiles. How can any sane person stay affiliated with such a corrupt organization as the Catholic church?

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Smiley

No Show? Preacher's Doomsday Prediction Echoes Past Failures

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Sat, 22 Oct 2011 07:35 UTC
Sunrise
© Vera Volkova, ShutterstockDespite Harold Camping's doomsday predictions, the sun has gone on rising.
California radio preacher Harold Camping was wrong when he predicted that the world would end Friday (Oct. 21). But his failed prediction puts him in good company.

Doomsday prophets have been around for thousands of years, according to sociologists, and failed doomsday predictions rarely stop them for long. Camping himself originally claimed the world would end in 1994, later asserting that he'd gotten his Biblical math wrong and the real date would be Oct. 21, 2011.

In fact, Camping had also predicted Judgment Day, complete with devastating earthquakes and a Rapture of the faithful, on May 21 of this year. After that prediction failed, Camping stuck to his guns, claiming that a spiritual, non-physical, rapture had indeed happened on that day.

This has all happened before, and it will all probably happen again. It's extremely rare for a doomsday predictor to recant his or her apocalyptic views after a failed prediction, said University of Alberta sociologist Stephen Kent. Some groups fall apart, while others cling more closely together against the scorn of the outside world.

"There's going to be a crisis within Camping himself, an existential crisis," Kent told LiveScience. "His remaining followers will have their own crises."
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Eye 1

Philadelphia, US: Suspect in Basement Torture Case Diagnosed as Schizophrenic


Raw Story
Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:00 UTC
schizophrenic
© istock
Linda Ann Weston, who allegedly locked mentally-challenged adults in a basement dungeon in Philadelphia, was once diagnosed as mentally retarded and schizophrenic, court records revealed on Friday.

The diagnosis of Weston, 51, appeared in documents tied to her 1983 third-degree murder conviction for starving to death a man held captive for three months in a closet of her apartment in North Philadelphia.

The circumstances of Bernardo Ramos' murder are eerily similar to the current case, in which four malnourished adults, each with the mental capacity of a 10-year-old child, were discovered in a locked and filthy furnace room of an apartment house in the Tacony neighborhood.
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Handcuffs

NYPD arrests OWS organizer


Poor Richard's Blog
Sat, 22 Oct 2011 13:27 UTC
Debra Sweet

Debra Sweet, an organizer of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, has been arrested by New York police, just minutes before her interview with Press TV news channel.

On Friday, about 30 anti-corporate protesters, including Debra Sweet, were arrested after they demonstrated in front of a local police precinct house.

The campaign's organizer Sweet was detained only minutes before her scheduled interview with Press TV.
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Vader

Biggest Challenge for Occupy Wall Street Will Be to Prevent Police Infiltrators From Provoking Violence

Mark Karlin
BuzzFlash
Thu, 20 Oct 2011 12:50 UTC
Occupy Wall Street
© Occupy Wall Street,police brutality

A recent article in the New York Observer highlights the ongoing challenge Occupy Wall Street faces in preventing the New York Police Department (NYPD) and perhaps FBI infiltrators from creating acts of violence that will turn the nation against the movement.

Mayor Bloomberg and the FBI know that nothing will change the mood of support for Occupy Wall Street faster than having them portrayed as a "violent mob." So, there have been ongoing incidents of what appear to be provocations by the police or infiltrators to create an image of an unruly group of lawbreakers. (Just remember the Brooklyn Bridge incident for one.)

BuzzFlash at Truthout warned of this likely ongoing effort in a commentary on October 4, "The NYPD and FBI Are Trying to Infiltrate Wall Street Protest to Discredit It: Of This You Can Be Sure."
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Stormtrooper

OWS ain't a war zone' - One marine vs 30 cops in NYC

RussiaToday
YouTube
Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:42 UTC
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Light Saber

Wall Street Tsunami: OWS grows in force

RussiaToday
YouTube
Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:39 UTC
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X

UK: Paedophile, 58, snared by teenage car thieves who handed his laptop to police after finding stash of child porn


The Daily Mail
Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:57 UTC
Image
© UnknownJailed: Keith Smith was convicted of child porn offences after thieves found his laptop in the back of a car they'd stolen
An unemployed social worker has been jailed after the teenage burglars who stole his car found child porn on his laptop and handed it in to police.

The sequence of events which led to the arrest of 58-year-old Keith Smith began when the burglars broke into a house where he was staying, took his car keys and driven off in his vehicle.

When the burglars looked at the computer left in the car, they were so 'spooked' by its contents that they passed it to an adult to give to the police, Manchester Crown Court heard.

The burglary remains unsolved and the youths have never been identified. The 'go-between' was not linked to the crime.

Raids were then carried out at a series of addresses linked to Smith which turned up 15,000 child porn images, as well as a photo of a dog being abused by a woman.

Smith, who is from Levenshulme, a suburb of Manchester, was arrested and later admitted 18 sample charges of downloading indecent and extreme images.

Kate Hammond, prosecuting, told the court that in September 2009 a man had walked into a police station and handed in an external hard drive, two pen drives and five memory cards, which he said had been stolen in a burglary.
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Heart - Black

Anwar al-Awlaki's family speaks out against his son's death in airstrike

Peter Finn and Greg Miller,
The Washington Post
Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© unknownAnwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was a so called radical cleric and one of the most influential al-Qaeda operatives wanted by the U.S., was killed in September in an airstrike in northern Yemen.
In the days before a CIA drone strike killed al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki last month, his 16-year-old son ran away from the family home in Yemen's capital of Sanaa to try to find him, relatives say. When he, too, was killed in a U.S. airstrike Friday, the Awlaki family decided to speak out for the first time since the attacks.

"To kill a teenager is just unbelievable, really, and they claim that he is an al-Qaeda militant. It's nonsense," said Nasser al-Awlaki, a former Yemeni agriculture minister who was Anwar al-Awlaki's father and the boy's grandfather, speaking in a phone interview from Sanaa on Monday. "They want to justify his killing, that's all."

The teenager, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver in 1995, and his 17-year-old Yemeni cousin were killed in a U.S. military strike that left nine people dead in southeastern Yemen.

The young Awlaki was the third American killed in Yemen in as many weeks. Samir Khan, an al-Qaeda propagandist from North Carolina, died alongside Anwar al-Awlaki.
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Stormtrooper

Soldiers May Be Leaving Iraq, But Contractors Will Remain

Ryan J. Reilly
TPM
Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:33 UTC
Iraq contractor
© Morten Hyaal Rapport Press Newscom

American troops may be leaving Iraq before the end of the year, but U.S. contractors aren't going anywhere soon.

ABC News reports that the State Department "is expected to have about 5,000 security contractors in Iraq as of January 2012 (they already have about 3,000 in country)." There will also be 4,500 "general life support" contractors to provide food and medical services.

Still, there'll be a pretty big reduction in the contracting fleet. The Defense Department currently has 9,500 security contractors in Iraq in addition to several thousand general life contractors, said ABC News. At one point, in June 2009, the DOD had 15,200 security contractors in the country.
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