Society's ChildS


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Number of reported rapes nearly doubles at Harvard


Cambridge - A troubling new statistic has Ivy League women concerned. "It's very frightening," says Harvard sophomore Emily Jones. She's talking about the number of reported rapes in Harvard's latest crime report, which has nearly doubled in the last year.

In 2011, there were 12 confidentially reported rapes. In 2012, the number jumped to 23, and they all occurred on campus. "That's a very serious statistic," says Jones.

But rape victim advocates are surprisingly positive about the news. "I don't think increased reporting numbers tell us necessarily about a spike in incidents," explains Meg Bossong of the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. "I think it tells us about a spike in work and comfort about making sure students know how to access resources."

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Police take 40 children out of sect in Germany after abuse fears

Child Abuse
© The Independent, UK
German police have raided the properties of a little-known Christian fundamentalist sect in the state of Bavaria and removed 40 children amid mounting allegations of persistent child abuse.

State prosecutors today launched a detailed investigation into the activities of the secretive religious community.

Twenty-eight children were taken away from a property belonging to the "Twelve Tribes" sect in the village of Deiningen in a dawn raid early on Thursday.

A further 12 children were removed from another of the sect's community homes in a nearby village.

Bavarian state prosecutors said they had ordered the raids because they had received reports from former sect members alleging cases of persistent child abuse within the sect's communities.

"There were clear signs of physical punishment and psychological abuse," said Helmut Beyschlag, the Bavarian court spokesman who is also leading the investigation.

He said the evidence included reports that sect members used "willow rods" to beat children and that young people were forcibly isolated for "weeks and months" as a form of punishment .

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Former California cop arrested for raping prostitutes while in uniform

Police Officer
© Shutterstock
A former police officer in Southern California was arrested Thursday for allegedly raping two prostitutes while he was in uniform or carrying his service gun, according to the Los Angeles Times.

"The charges in this case describe disgraceful abuses of police authority that simply cannot be tolerated in our society," United States Attorney André Birotte Jr. said in a statement.

Forty-six-year-old Jose Jesus Perez of Menifee, California was arrested without incident in Denton, Texas. A federal grand jury indicted Perez on four civil rights offenses, claiming the officer forced two women to have sex with him "while acting under the color of law."

Perez was hired as a Los Angeles Police Department officer in 1997. Eleven years later, he left the LAPD and joined the San Bernardino Police Department. Perez was "released from employment" in December, according to prosecutors.

Telephone

Rep. Alan Grayson: U.S. public is overwhelmingly against war in Syria - it's not that Americans are 'weary' of war; they're DISGUSTED by it

Congressman Alan Grayson is leading efforts within Congress to prevent an attack on Syria. He explains why, points to huge popular agreement, says the votes are lining up, and that President Obama will not attack Syria if the House votes against it. Congressman Grayson has a petition set up here.


Total run time: 29:00

Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

Download or get embed code from Archive or AudioPort or LetsTryDemocracy.

Syndicated by Pacifica Network.

Black Magic

Maldives vote-rigging row after 'black magic coconut' is found near polling booth

Voodoo Coconut
© The Independent, UK
As political dark arts go they don't come any darker than this.

A vote-rigging row has erupted in the Maldives ahead of Saturday's presidential election amid suspicions that one party is using cursed coconuts imbued with black magic spells to sway voters' political allegiances.

The claims came after a coconut, described as "young", was placed near a polling booth in an alleged bid to disrupt the upcoming elections.

The fruit had been inscribed with verse from the Koran and placed near the booth at a school on the remote Kaafu atoll - Guraidhoo, one of the islands that make up the Indian Ocean archipelago state.

Black magic is often used to prevent people from voting or influence them on the islands.

Following the discovery of the 'cursed' coconut police brought in a ruqyah practitioner (white magician) to examine the coconut.

Bizarro Earth

Man finds snake in Starbucks bathroom

Snake in Toilet
© WTVR.comSnakes in unexpected places can startle anyone. For Bruce Ahlswede the unexpected place was a San Antonio Starbucks bathroom, where he had stopped on Tuesday, September 3, 2013, after a business presentation.
Call it a "Grande" surprise.

Snakes in unexpected places can startle anyone.

For Bruce Ahlswede the unexpected place was a San Antonio Starbucks bathroom, where he had stopped on Tuesday after a business presentation.

He froze for a moment thinking the snake, lying across the toilet, was a toy left by a prankster.

Then it started to move. He backed out of the room and found a store employee.

"I said 'Hey you've got a snake in your bathroom and she's kind of freaking out,' " Ahlswede told CNN affiliate KSAT. Bruce, his wife and store employees all crowded into the bathroom and watched as the snake, perhaps just as surprised as the rest, slithered around the toilet bowl and disappeared, the station reported. Ahlswede's wife, Michele, managed to snap a photo.

She promptly posted it to Facebook.

"It had to have crawled up the pipes," Michele wrote on her page. "I have heard of it happening but have never seen it in person. Its a python guess he like coffee also."

Cardboard Box

Europe's scariest chart shows 1 in 4 young people unemployed

While near record low sovereign bond spreads and near record high equity prices have been taken as vindication by the European elites that all is well and 'we just need a little less fauxsterity' to be done with this crisis; the data, as it so often does, says the exact opposite. European unemployment just broke above 12% for the first time ever and European youth unemployment remains miserably above 24%. And while 1-in-4 under-25s unemployed is a bad enough statistic in terms of likely emergence of social unrest, the individual countries are in general deteriorating once again at a faster rate. French youth unemployment has risen for 13 months in a row to a record 26.5%; Spain (at 57.2% of under-25s unemployed) is catching up fast to Greece's stunning 59.1%; but perhaps the most concerning for the broader economies is the fact that Italy's youth unemployment has now topped that of Portugal at 38.4%. The only nation to see a drop in its youth unemployment was Ireland - which fell back modestly to January levels. Not a rosy picture, but then again, it doesn't matter...

eurozone unemployment

Cult

White Dallas man shoots 8-year-old black boy in the face for no reason at all

boy shot by white man texas
An 8-year-old African-American boy in Texas is struggling to recover after being shot in the face by a 46-year-old white man, but authorities have not been able to determine a motive.

Dallas police said that Donald Maiden Jr., who had just celebrated his 8th birthday on Sunday, was playing tag outside his apartment complex on Tuesday. According to his grandmother, Maiden ran inside to get some toys and was shot as came back outside.

Witnesses told police that 46-year-old Brian Cloninger had been seen waiving a handgun at people prior to the shooting, The Dallas Morning News reported.

Police reports said that Cloninger was seen standing beside his pickup truck as the boy was bleeding, and a witness asked him if he shot the boy.

Stormtrooper

More police brutality: Long Beach CA cops caught on tape beating and tasing helpless suspect


Police in Long Beach, California have opened an internal investigation about an incident involving a suspect who was tasered and brutally beaten by police even after he had been successfully subdued. According to the Los Angeles Times, 46-year-old Porfirio Santos-Lopez' teeth were knocked out, his right arm was broken, his left lung collapsed and both of his legs had gashes requiring stitches.

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-115,000: Number of Americans With Jobs Dropped in August

Jobless man
© Dreamtime.com
Although the national unemployment rate dropped from 7.4 percent to 7.3 percent in August, the number of Americans who actually held jobs during August dropped 115,000 from July.

The simultaneous decline in both the unemployment rate and the number of people with jobs was possible because the "labor force participation rate" dropped to 63.2 percent in August. That is the lowest it has been since August 1978.

The labor force participation rate is the percentage of adults 16 years or older who either had a job or actively sought one in the last four weeks.

The unemployment rate is the number of adults in the labor force (n.b. they had a job or were actively seeking one) who could not find a job.