Technology, declining fertility and ancient prejudice are combining to unbalance societies
XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder-and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’
“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’
“‘But that’s…murder…and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’”
In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women-a figure unprecedented in a country at peace. Continue reading »
Inhaled or ingested DU particles are highly toxic, and DU has been classified as an illegal weapon of mass destruction by the United Nations.
“More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric testing [of nuclear bombs] has been released from DU weaponry since 1991,” said Leuren Moret, a U.S. nuclear scientist. “The genetic future of the Iraqi people, for the most part, is destroyed. The environment now is completely radioactive.”
“Because DU has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, the Middle East will, for all practical purposes, be radioactive forever.”
Beyond Treason investigates causes of Gulf War Illness and continuing deaths of gulf war veterans. Beyond Treason outlines: - exposure to depleted uranium munitions used on the battlefield. - chemical and biological exposures. - experimental vaccines given.
The US have destroyed Iraq forever. Even Hitler, Stalin and Mao begin to pale against such a crime against humanity.
Fallujah doctors report rise in birth defects
John Simpson talks about the children with birth defects he saw in Fallujah
Doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the US after the Iraq invasion.
The city witnessed fierce fighting in 2004 as US forces carried out a major offensive against insurgents.
Now, the level of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than in Europe.
The US military says it is not aware of any official reports showing an increase in birth defects in the area.
BBC world affairs editor John Simpson visited a new, US-funded hospital in Fallujah where paediatrician Samira al-Ani told him that she was seeing as many as two or three cases a day, mainly cardiac defects.
- 40 miles (64km) west of the capital Baghdad
- Major city in the predominantly Sunni province of Anbar, a hotbed of insurgency following US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003
- Burned corpses of four ambushed US contractors dragged through the streets of the city in March 2004
- Scene of major US-led offensive against insurgents in November 2004, when thousands of marines stormed the city
- US military’s use of white phosphorus munitions in that offensive widely condemned
- Situation in Anbar as a whole calmer since 2006, when tribal “Awakening Councils” turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq Disturbing tale of birth defects
Our correspondent also saw children in the city who were suffering from paralysis or brain damage - and a photograph of one baby who was born with three heads.
He adds that he heard many times that officials in Fallujah had warned women that they should not have children.
Doctors and parents believe the problem is the highly sophisticated weapons the US troops used in Fallujah six years ago.
British-based Iraqi researcher Malik Hamdan told the BBC’s World Today programme that doctors in Fallujah were witnessing a “massive unprecedented number” of heart defects, and an increase in the number of nervous system defects.
She said that one doctor in the city had compared data about birth defects from before 2003 - when she saw about one case every two months - with the situation now, when, she saw cases every day.
Ms Hamdan said that based on data from January this year, the rate of congenital heart defects was 95 per 1,000 births - 13 times the rate found in Europe.
“I’ve seen footage of babies born with an eye in the middle of the forehead, the nose on the forehead,” she added.Continue reading »
William Potter and his mum Lynn Potter
PACKMOORE, England, Feb. 17 (UPI) — A 3-year-old British boy has become one of the youngest-ever members of the world’s largest organization for people with high IQs.
David Potter and Lynn Goldstraw of Packmoore, England, said their son, William Potter, was accepted to Mensa after scoring an IQ of 140 on the organization’s tests, placing him in the 99.6 percentile among Britons, the Daily Mail reported Wednesday.
“He could count to 20 before he was 2 and knew his alphabet and colors and shapes,” Goldstraw said. “When in his pushchair, he’d read car number plates. Now when we go in the car, he’s in the back with a map on his knee.”
“He reads the signs and tells you when to turn,” she said. “He’s like a sponge. You only have to tell him something once and he remembers it. I think a lot of it is about spending time with him.” Continue reading »
According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families.
The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.
If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come. I don’t know about you, but I often have the laptop in the room while I’m getting dressed, having private discussions with my family, and so on. The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students’ clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.
Schools are in an absolute panic about kids divulging too much online, worried about pedos and marketers and embarrassing photos that will haunt you when you run for office or apply for a job in 10 years. They tell kids to treat their personal details as though they were precious.
But when schools take that personal information, indiscriminately invading privacy (and, of course, punishing students who use proxies and other privacy tools to avoid official surveillance), they send a much more powerful message: your privacy is worthless and you shouldn’t try to protect it.
France yesterday put in its bid for an unlikely prize, becoming the first western country to make even Australia look liberal when it comes to state powers of internet censorship.
In the teeth of fierce opposition both inside and outside parliament, the National Assembly approved, by 312 votes to 214 against, a first reading of a bill on Internal Security - the quaintly titled “LOPPSI 2″.
LOPPSI - otherwise known as Loi d’Orientation et de Programmation pour la SÈcuritÈ IntÈrieure (pdf)- is a ragbag of measures designed to make France a safer place. Like similar UK legislation - most notably the various Criminal Justice acts brought in over the last decade - LOPPSI brings together a number of apparently unrelated proposals which would severely restrict individual rights in all walks of life.
Last week, for instance, the Assembly agreed to include within the new law a measure that would allow Prefects to sign off on a curfew for children aged under 13, out unaccompanied between the hours of 11 pm and 6 am.
The bill also includes measures that would increase police spend on “security”, create additional penalties for counterfeiting and ID theft, increase CCTV surveillance, and widen access to the Police DNA database.
However, it is in the online area that some of the most radical proposals are to be found, with the criminalisation of online ID theft, provision for the police to tap online connections in the course of investigations, and most controversially of all, allowing the state to order ISPs to block (filter) specific internet URLs according to ministerial diktat.
It has also been suggested that the state should have the right to plant covert trojans to monitor individual PC usage.
Whilst the latter measures are put forward on the grounds of child protection, critics have been quick to point out that, in the absence of any judicial oversight mechanism, this is a power just waiting to be abused. Continue reading »
Human rights activists demonstrate waterboarding in front of the Justice Department. A soldier father stands accused of waterboarding his daughter because she couldn’t recite the alphabet
A U.S. soldier has been accused of ‘waterboarding’ his four-year-old daughter because she couldn’t recite the alphabet.
Joshua Tabor admitted to police that he used the CIA torture technique because he was so angry.
As his daughter ’squirmed’ to get away, Tabor said he submerged her face - upwards - three or four times until the water was lapping around her forehead and jawline.
Tabor, 27, admitted to investigators that his daughter was terrified of water and he had deliberately chosen the punishment. Continue reading »
WARSAW (Reuters) - A Polish priest has installed an electronic reader in his church for schoolchildren to leave their fingerprints in order to monitor their attendance at mass, the Gazeta Wyborcza daily said on Friday.
Oddly Enough
The pupils will mark their fingerprints every time they go to church over three years and if they attend 200 masses they will be freed from the obligation of having to pass an exam prior to their confirmation, the paper said.
The pupils in the southern town of Gryfow Slaski told the daily they liked the idea and also the priest, Grzegorz Sowa, who invented it.
“This is comfortable. We don’t have to stand in a line to get the priest’s signature (confirming our presence at the mass) in our confirmation notebooks,” said one pupil, who gave her name as Karolina. Continue reading »
NEW YORK, N.Y.-A New York City junior high student has been arrested for doodling on her desk.
Alexa Gonzalez, 12, scribbled “Lex was here 2/1/10” on her desk Monday. She also wrote “I love my friends Abby and Faith.”
Moraima Tamacho says her daughter was released several hours after she was taken in handcuffs to a police station, according to the Daily News.
Education department spokesman David Cantor said the incident shouldn’t have happened, and that common sense should prevail.
Last month, the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit alleging more than 20 instances of wrongful arrests and assaults by school safety officers. Continue reading »
(AFP) — Kariana, aged three, has a lonely existence in the New York homeless shelter her parents moved into last year. Lonely, but not alone — there are nearly 16,000 children just like her.
Homelessness in New York has soared as a result of the damaged US economy and children make up almost half of that growing population.
Shivering outside the forbidding gates to a Brooklyn shelter, Kariana’s petite mother, Karen Diaz, said she’d been homeless since arriving three months ago from Puerto Rico with her husband Pedro, Kariana, and a second daughter, aged six.
“We thought we would be here just for 10 days and get some place better, but time flew by,” said Diaz, 24.
Guards would not allow a reporter inside the building, a former hospital now named the Auburn Family Shelter.
Diaz described a rough life of tasteless food, “disgusting, dirty” communal toilets, bunk beds in their family room, and “scary” fellow residents.
“There are no friends for the girls. There are a lot of sick people,” Diaz said, as Kariana fidgeted in the bitter cold. “We keep to ourselves.”
With unemployment running over 10 percent in New York, sky high house prices, and icy winter temperatures, the family is lucky to have a roof while Diaz’s husband searches for a security guard job. Continue reading »
