Bonjour Planet Earth

Saturday, May 05, 2012

The designer baby factory: Eggs from beautiful Eastern Europeans, sperm from wealthy Westerners and embryos implanted in desperate women...

Much as one feels for the desperate couples who beat a path to his Delhi office, it is a deeply depressing thought. And the sale of cheap, designer babies, made from Ukrainian eggs and British sperm, concocted in an American lab, and spawned in a factory in the backstreets of India, should send chills down the spine.

Above a cheap mobile phone shop in a chaotic street in north Delhi, there is a grimy apartment whose peeling walls are decorated with photographs of adoring mothers nursing their babies.

The woman cooing at her child in the biggest portrait is beautiful, white and affluent-looking — in stark contrast to the flat’s five residents, four of whom are pregnant, while the other is being pumped full of hormones in the hope she will soon conceive.

They are all uneducated, bare-footed, dirt-poor Indian women from outlying villages — and given the emotional turmoil that awaits them, one would have thought the very last thing they would wish to do is spend their enforced nine months of confinement here gazing upon images of maternal bliss. Full story...

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World's first test-tube baby, Louise Brown...

Malaysia and Singapore get low marks for press freedom...

Malaysia is ranked 29th among 40 countries in the Asia-Pacific region in the Freedom of the Press 2012 report.

The report was released by US-based think tank Freedom House in conjunction with World Press Freedom Day on Thursday.

The ranking puts Malaysia below neighbouring countries like the Philippines (ranked 21), Indonesia (22), and Thailand (28), but above Singapore (32), Brunei (35) and Laos (36).

Malaysia has climbed two places in the ranking but the press here is still categorised as “not safe”.

The Freedom of the Press index assesses the degree of press freedom in countries worldwide through the examination of the legal, political and economical influences on their press. Full story...

See the rankings here...

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The Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaida cock and bull story...

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Today, what’s left of al-Qaida numbers no more than 25 men in Afghanistan, according to US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Yet President Barack Obama cites the alleged al-Qaida "threat" as the reason for keeping US forces in Afghanistan and keeping Pakistan under semi-occupation. That was the real purpose for releasing these letters. Al-Qaida has become an integral part of US politics.

Al-Qaida is being used as a bogeyman by America’s Republicans to defend bloated US military spending and defend torture as having led to finding bin Laden. My sources tell me a huge bribe led the US to bin Laden, not torture.

The Pentagon has been leaking so-called information claiming bin Laden was planning a wave of terror attacks just before he died. In fact, bin Laden had become an isolated, powerless jihadi living in retirement when he was killed.

Why was he not brought back to the US for trial? Full story...

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Photos show three dead men but none look like bin Laden...

Media scrambles as bin Laden story crumbles...

The True Story of Lon, a Thai prostitute's depressing biography...

For anybody who has ever been in a Bangkok girlie bar, what the smiling and giggling women in their spangles and bare skin have given up to get there remains hidden and out of sight. But these women, many of them no more than children, have faced lives almost before puberty that has annealed them into hardened and calculating individuals whose life is dedicated not to the befuddled westerners asking them to lap dance but to survival and finding money. It is kept well hidden, under the surface, beneath the smiles.

It is a story of exploitation on a savage and depressing scale. It has been told before, but is told again by a young woman whose name at birth was Bountah, born in the impoverished northeastern region of the country, called Isaan. Only 13: The true story of Lon, is told by authors Julia Manzanares and Derek Kent as autobiography.

Beaten repeatedly as a child, Bountah was forbidden from going to school because the family only had enough money to send the boys. She ran away from home at age 11 because her grandmother refused to let her go to school even though she had earned the money herself to go by cleaning houses in a nearby town. A troubled, rebellious child, she set out for Bangkok 500 miles away, only to be returned home. She ran away twice more before she fled to Bangkok to take a job as a waitress – at the age of 12, working from 5 am to 7 pm for Bt1,500 (US$48.50) a month. Full story...

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Never give up believing in yourself...

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Greeks leaving cities, returning to barter economy...

Sitting in the shade of a mulberry tree in a market square of Volos, Eleni Boubouli is selling dried wild herbs.

She picks them herself from the Mount Olympus and other peaks of Thessaly.

The simple stall is her way of piecing together a living during Greece's ongoing crisis that includes teaching the odd English lesson, a bit of yoga and some financial support from her retired parents.

"You really need to think about survival now, really think," she says. "Our situation is so bad I don't know how to describe it." Like many Greeks, she feels that the economic maelstrom that has engulfed the country for the past two years will only get worse. A parliamentary election on Sunday, the first since the full onset of the crisis, inspires no confidence that the storm will be calmed. Full story...

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Journalists being killed at 'astonishing pace'

On World Press Freedom Day, Reporters Without Borders condemned the "astonishing pace" at which journalists are being attacked and murdered — 67 killed in 2011 and 22 more deaths since the beginning of the year.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the attacks "outrageous" and urged all countries to prevent and prosecute violence against the media and take action to ensure the safety of journalists and freedom of the press.

At Thursday's U.N. commemoration of Press Freedom Day, Ban asked the assembled diplomats, members of the media and civil society representatives to observe a minute of silence "in honor of the journalists who were killed in the line of duty last year."

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, 179 journalists were detained in 2011, a 20 percent increase over 2010 and the highest level since 1990, Ban said. Full story...

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Friday, May 04, 2012

Fears for Tamil detainees in Sri Lanka...

A key Tamil opposition politician in Sri Lanka says he fears for the safety of dozens of people arrested in a fresh round-up of Tamil Tiger suspects.

The government has acknowledged holding them and says most will be put through a process it calls "rehabilitation".

It says the families have been informed, but this is disputed by the biggest Tamil party in Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lankan army defeated separatist Tamil Tiger rebels after 26 years of bloody civil war in 2009.

After at first denying reports that it had detained a new batch of people it suspects of past links to the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan government now acknowledges it is holding them. Full story...

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Marijuana found to kill cancer cells...

Thanks to the available findings of a 2006 study showing that cannabis actually reduces the number of cancer cells, medical marijuana users can now feel even better about the widely abolished pain relief ingredient found in the plant.

The relationship between marijuana and cancer has always been up for debate, but with the use of a specially crafted oil made from the buds of the Cannabis Sativa plant, scientists confirmed that the plant’s primary psychoactive chemical tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) destroys any and all malignant cancer cell growths in several patients.

Details on the marijuana and cancer prevention connection aren’t exactly known, but further, more extensive testing will reveal exactly what may be causing this seemingly miracle cure.

(...)

The real irony in the situation here? The combined governments of the world are the primary authority behind more than 30 studies like these completed throughout the years – and they have kept them secret from the general public. It wouldn’t be very conducive for our government if word got out that a schedule 1 narcotic could actually help people. Full story...

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Marijuana cures cancer, Alzheimer's disease and improves memory...

A marijuana history lesson...

Where things come from...

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Villagers in Kenya dump food aid and grow their own crops...

In the remote east Kenyan village of Makutano, Jane Mutinda Maingi is feeding maize to her Friesian dairy cow, bought just a week ago with proceeds from selling produce grown on her one-hectare plot.

Despite frequent droughts in the semi-arid Yatta region, the 60-year-old mother of six has healthy maize crops on her farm, as well as vegetables such as chilli peppers and cucumbers, some destined for the export market.

“Since my childhood, this area has never been known for agricultural production,” she says. “In fact, until two years ago, the government and other humanitarian organisations always had a default programme of bringing us food aid every year.”

Tired of this dependency, several households in Yatta came together in 2009 under a church-led initiative aimed at stamping out hunger and ending the need for food aid. They called their project “Operation Mwolyo Out” (OMO), “Mwolyo” meaning food aid in the local Kamba language. Full story...

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What is Google doing with the contents of your hard drive?

When you hear the phrase "property rights," you probably think of farmers fighting environmental regulators and homeowners arguing with oil drillers. But in the Information Age, you should also be thinking about your computer - and asking, how much of you is really yours?

Last week's big technology announcement spotlighted the thorny question. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Google's announcement of its Google Drive came with the promise that users will "retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content." But when you save files to Google's hard-drive folder in the cloud, the terms of service you must agree to gives Google "a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute (your) content" as the company sees fit.

When asked about this, Google argued that its provisions merely "enable us to give you the services you want - so if you decide to share a document with someone, or open it on a different device, you can."

As reassuring as that seems, though, it's not that simple. Full story...

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Tunisian TV mogul fined over 'blasphemous' film...

A Tunisian court on Thursday fined a television mogul for airing an animated film construed as blasphemous by hardline Islamists, denting the country's religiously tolerant image.

Nabil Karoui was found guilty of "disturbing public order" and "violating sacred values" after his television station Nessma aired the Iranian coming-of-age film Persepolis, which includes a brief scene depicting God.

The controversial case has polarised Tunisia, exposing a deep rift between the country's secular and religious populations, and ripples from the verdict are likely to be felt across the region.

By fining Karoui nearly £1,000 rather than imposing the maximum sentence of three years in prison as demanded by some religious leaders, the court struck an uneasy compromise seemingly designed to assuage both sides. Full story...

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Big Brother not that scary after all?

Surveillance cameras seem to be springing up everywhere in Switzerland. But who and what exactly are the electronic eyes watching?

Following the first study on the impact of public video surveillance in 12 European countries, security and police experts say people should not overestimate the technology, and dispel “big brother” fears.

The scene is familiar from television police dramas: A camera homing in on an individual in an anonymous crowd of people, the close-up of a face fills the screen. Police officers compare it with the computer profile of a wanted person and - bingo, they match!

In reality the technology has not quite reached this level of sophistication and lags behind the world of fiction. Full story...

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'I will never be cut': Kenyan girls fight genital mutilation...

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Labiaplasty, deforming the vagina... (Graphic)

Female genital mutilation (FGM) in Africa (graphic)

Breast ironing in Cameroon. WTF!

Why are American doctors mutilating girls?

Bouncers in Britain doing Facebook identity checks...

Some bouncers have been demanding people hand over their smartphones so they can check Facebook accounts, Newsbeat has been told.

It's claimed that it is to make sure the person is who they say they are and isn't using fake identification.

It happened to Charlotte Neal, 20, who said there had been a few times where bouncers had asked to see her phone.

Charlotte said bouncers had checked that her Facebook name matched her driving licence. Full story...

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Teenagers and sex in India...

A controversial bill seeks to criminalize sex between consenting minors...

The Indian government is under growing fire from children’s rights activists for new legislation pushed through the Cabinet to define sex under the age of 18, even if consensual, as statutory rape.

As matters stand now, two persons over the age of 16 can consent to have sex without legal repercussions. Indians vote at 18 while the legal age for marriage for girls is 18 and for boys 21. However, the Protection of Children against Sexual Offenses Bill, as it is called would make sex under the age of 18 an offense that would be tried under the Juvenile Justice Act, carrying a maximum punishment of three years imprisonment.

There are plenty of problems for children in India. According to a 2007 report by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, an astonishing. 53.22 percent of all children surveyed reported having faced one or more forms of sexual abuse, with 21.90 percent of the children who responded reporting severe forms of sexual abuse and 50.76 percent reporting other forms. Of the child respondents, 5.69 percent reported being sexually assaulted. Full story...

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Thursday, May 03, 2012

Shareholders vent anger at UBS annual meeting against executive pay and bonuses...

After a year in which it suffered a loss of SFr1.8 billion ($1.97 billion) through the actions of a rogue trader, leading Swiss bank UBS on Thursday faced down angry shareholders over executive pay and bonuses at its annual general meeting.

Board members and senior management were told they “should be ashamed of themselves”, and when the vote was taken almost 40 per cent of the 3,400 shareholders present voted to reject the company’s remuneration plan.

In his address to the meeting, outgoing chairman Kaspar Villiger said the bank had revised its remuneration policy following strong opposition from shareholders last year.

(...)

But shareholders were not to be mollified. Dominique Biedermann of Geneva-based sustainable development foundation Ethos, which owns shares in UBS, recommended shareholders reject the bank's remuneration plan.

“I believe that the board is simply playing around with the trust of shareholders […] compensation is simply too high compared to performance,” he said.

Loud applause greeted Biedermann’s comments, as it did comments from several other shareholders who attacked high salary packages for UBS executives given what some described as an 85 per cent drop in the bank’s share price since the start of the financial crisis. Full story...

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Nick Leeson of Baring Banks infamy talks about the current crisis...

Lehman Bros head took home $300m!!!

Bankers and CEOs raping and pillaging the nation...

Wall Street bankers to pocket record-breaking $144 BILLION in pay and bonuses...

How to become a billionaire in a few easy steps...

While they come for our pensions – bank bonuses are back with a bang...

Goldman Sachs pay out $111million in bonuses despite taking billions in bailout money..

Pentagon admits it has no photo evidence of Bin Laden's death...

Pentagon officials recently disclosed to the Associated Press (AP) that they could not find any photo or video evidence to confirm that Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was killed in the Navy Seal raid in Pakistan a year ago.

AP has submitted more than 20 requests for information surrounding the raid on Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound to the U.S. Government under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

In response to the request for visual evidence of Bin Laden’s death, the Pentagon stated that it could not find any pictures or video footage of the raid itself or of Bin Laden’s dead body. It also told AP it could not locate any images of Bin Laden’s body that were taken on the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, the Navy aircraft carrier that reportedly lowered him into the sea after his death.

In addition, the Pentagon admitted that it could not find an autopsy report, death certificate or results of a DNA identification test for Bin Laden, in spite of claims made by President Obama and reported by CBC News that a DNA test was performed. Full story...

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Photos show three dead men but none look like bin Laden...

Media scrambles as bin Laden story crumbles...

Swiss "Jetman" Yves Rossy wings over the Rio de Janeiro skyline...

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Experience zero gravity. Who said men can't fly?

"Flying squirrel" Jeb Corliss in wingsuit demo...

War, debt, drunkenness, a broken nation: the real legacy of Tony Blair...

Fifteen years ago, the carefully stage-managed crowds cheered as their hero arrived in Downing Street to take office on a wave of hopes for a better Britain. What was his legacy? What did Tony Blair achieve? Debt, war, ignorance, welfare dependency, social division.

The crushing burden of debt has held back our wealth creating industries, left us with higher taxes, lower pensions, higher prices, and fewer jobs

Blair's wars – the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq and the consequential war in Afghanistan – have left thousands of our servicemen dead or injured, tens of thousands civilians dead or injured, a prosperous secular Iraqi middle class destroyed, Islamic extremism gaining in strength, and our historical friendly relationship with Pakistan soured.

Blairite education policies have brought about an upsurge in illiteracy and innumeracy, and left a generation of near-unemployable young people. Full story...

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School principal in India rapes under-age student with wife's help. WTF!

The director of a school and his wife who is a principal in the same school were arrested by the police in Betul town, 160 km from here, on Wednesday after a minor student was diagnosed "pregnant'' by doctors. The victim girl, a student of class 7, complained of abdominal pain and was taken to a local hospital where doctors found that she was pregnant.

When quizzed by her parents, the girl broke down and said that the director of the school Yashwant Kharpate had allegedly raped her with the assistance of his wife. The rape was committed in the end of December last year.

Police said that Yashwant Kharpate (45) and his wife Vandana (40) were arrested and a case registered against them under sections 376 (rape), 506 (criminal intimidation) and 34 (common intention) of the IPC.

According to the police, the victim girl a student of Apex English School, had repeatedly warned her mother that the school director Yashwant Kharpate often stopped her and said how beautiful she was. Her mother took the comments as the fatherly appreciation of a middle-aged man for a young girl. Full story...

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Indian teacher forced girl students to watch porn!!!

Female lecturer in India gang-raped by three teachers...

Who are the real fascists: Marine Le Pen - or the United States?

AMERICAN discussions of Europe swivel between rationality and hysteria. A discussion of Europe's awful unemployment figures and swelling mutiny against austerity suddenly mutates into tremulous wails about the menace of fascism in France, rancid racism in the Netherlands, the anti-Semitic beast unchained in Germany (in the terrifying form of Günter Grass's new poem).

A lot of this has to do with Marine Le Pen, leader of France's National Front. Now and again I'll mention her in something I've written without the obligatory insults about her family heritage and presumed totalitarian agenda. Furious letters pour in, particularly since she made a strong showing in the first round of the French presidential elections.

Marine Le Pen is a nationalist politician, quite reasonably exploiting the intense social discontent in France amid the imposition of the bankers' austerity programs. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard put it in The Daily Telegraph recently, she "presents herself as a latterday Jeanne d'Arc, openly comparing France's pro-EU camp with the Burgundians who plotted 'English Annexation' in the 1430s - or indeed 'Les Collabos' who bought peace after 1940. 'Let us break the chains of the French people. Bring on the French Spring,' she tells Front National rallies." Full story...

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Malaysia mosque a source of hope for heroin addicts...

For 30 years, Feisal Fakharudin lived a heroin addict's life, sleeping on streets, getting into trouble with police and rotating in and out of drug treatment centres.

In Malaysia, a Muslim-majority country where drug addiction is still taboo, his habit made him a social outcast until he found support from an unlikely source -- the Ar Rahman mosque nestled in the bustling capital city of Kuala Lumpur.

After performing his prayers, Feisal slips upstairs away from his fellow worshippers to receive a dose of methadone from a drug-treatment clinic - the world's first to operate in a mosque, according the World Health Organisation.

"In the past, there was no one to help me," said Feisal, who said he used to feel like the "scum of society."

Feisal attributes the success of his treatment to the spiritual guidance he gets from mosque clerics, as well as the methadone syrup dispensed twice a week by medical staff. Full story...

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BHOPALI, the story of the Bhopal tradegy and Union Carbide...

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Young and old abandonning traditional political parties...

Ron Paul is getting a hearing from young voters and old ones. Both age groups think the two major parties are corrupt.

This is not limited to the United States. Across Europe, the established parties are facing revolts.

This is a prelude to real political change. The voters did not care until it hit their wallets. Now they care. Too late. The politicians ran up the debts. These debts are coming due. No one has a solution.

There is only one solution: the Great Default. It’s coming.

In the meantime, the political parties face defections. Voters have lost faith. They see the politicians as liars, which in fact they are. Full story...

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Our neo-totalitarians are wearing out their democratic mask...

Call our state totalitarian, and there will be millions of hands indignantly thrown up in the air. After all, Britain manifestly lacks the outer attributes we associate with totalitarianism: barbed wire, watch towers, skeletal prisoners.

Yet if we delve under the surface, we’ll find that, though so far eschewing all those ghastly things, our state has laid the same groundwork that made them possible elsewhere. For, like Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, it has effectively replaced traditional morality with a self-serving kind. The method used to achieve this terrifying end is also similar: systematic brainwashing, ably boosted by an educational system whose purpose seems to be to benumb people’s minds.

Anything that advances the cause of communism is moral, explained Lenin, anything that doesn’t isn’t. Replace communism with the Aryan race, and Hitler’s dicta were identical. But such pronouncements mostly served PR purposes. Their underlying meaning was that for the Bolsheviks and the Nazis morality was coextensive with the good of the Bolshevik or Nazi state. Full story...

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Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Migrant workers from India face a hard reality in Singapore...

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Foreign workers constitute more than 85 per cent of Singapore's construction workforce from India, Bangladesh and China. There are approximately 1.05 million foreign workers in Singapore, of which 2,45,000 are in the construction sector alone. The relatively low wages, long hours and harsh working conditions make the industry an unattractive sector for most Singaporeans. “The most important reason for exploitation of foreign workers is the employer-sponsored work visa policy prevalent in Singapore, which gives employers excessive power and control over their workers,” said Debbie Fordyce, coordinator at Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), a non-profit advocacy group working for fair treatment of foreign workers in Singapore.

It starts with having to pay high agency fees to secure a job in Singapore. Once here, the workers are made to sign contracts limiting their civil liberties and agreeing to receive lower wages than promised. Additionally, the prevalence of unpaid salaries, long working hours with no offs, forced dangerous work leading to injuries, employers refusing to bear the cost of medical treatment, poor accommodations, passports routinely withheld, and above all, forced repatriation to their home countries without the employer settling their claims, make migrant workers one of the most vulnerable section of Singapore society. Full story...

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Black teens attack white couple, media bury incident...

There’s outrage in Norfolk, Va., today after a white couple was attacked by dozens of black teenagers, and the local newspaper did not report on the incident for two weeks, despite the victims being reporters for the paper.

Even today, the Virginian-Pilot did not cover the crime as news, but rather as an opinion piece by columnist Michelle Washington.

“Wave after wave of young men surged forward to take turns punching and kicking their victim,” Washington wrote, describing the onslaught that began when Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami stopped at a traffic light while driving home from a show on a Saturday night. A crowd of at least 100 black young people was on the sidewalk at the time.

“Rostami locked her car door. Someone threw a rock at her window. Forster got out to confront the rock-thrower, and that’s when the beating began. Full story...

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Serious allegations of violent racism against Asians at Philadephia high school...

Kate Upton does the Cat Daddy...

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37-year-old teacher in India elopes with teen student!!!

A petition for bail filed by school teacher Kumud, accused of running away with a class XI student, has been turned down by principal sessions judge P Kalaiyarasan.

A case was registered against the 37-year-old woman. While the 17-year-old student's father Saravana Kumar had lodged a complaint when he went missing on February 4, 2012, this was later altered to a case of kidnapping. After a habeas corpus petition was filed in the Madras high court, the police traced the teacher and the student to Gurgaon, New Delhi. They were brought back to the city on March 15. While she was sent to prison, the boy was reunited with his parents.

The judge said the teacher, "forgetting her noble profession, had exploited her lust." The act made for a prime facie case which fell well within the ambit of offence under Section 365 IPC as she, "by deceitful means, induced the adolescent boy, and took him from Chennai to Delhi, and kept him secretly." Full story...

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Indian teacher forced girl students to watch porn!!!

Female lecturer in India gang-raped by three teachers...

A Gold Medal for getting us to hate the Olympics...

The Campaign to Make Us All Hate The Olympics moves up a gear this week with the ludicrous, you-couldn’t-make-it-up news that the Army is to install surface-to-air missiles on a block of flats in the East End in, of course, ‘the interests of security’.

Someone needs to have a quiet lie-down here then have themselves fired. This is sport, for heaven’s sake. It is fit people running around and throwing things and hitting each other with sticks and having a swim. It is entertainment. It doesn’t matter. It is not important. It is supposed to be fun. Otherwise there is no point. If, at any time surface-to-air missiles are involved, you know it cannot be fun.

The Olympics really are starting to become surreal, as this brilliant piece explains. The official ‘restaurant’ is McDonald’s (how on earth does McD’s get away with calling itself a restaurant?). The official ‘drink’ is Coca Cola. So a British celebration of health and svelte is represented by American firms offering overpriced grease and sugary, tooth-rotting waist-expanding pop. Full story...

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Apple to crush carriers and offer direct mobile service?

Apple’s next huge move isn’t into the television or banking industries according to one expert. Instead, Apple will take on carriers like AT&T and Verizon Wireless by becoming a direct mobile service provider. Veteran wireless industry strategist Whitey Bluestein, who has managed strategic deals for the likes of AT&T, Intel, T-Mobile, Verizon, Microsoft, Nokia and Best Buy, says Apple will soon begin to offer wireless service directly to iPhone and iPad users. Apple has the distribution channels, digital content portfolio and customer base to make the move, Bluestein says, and it also has more than 250 million credit cards on file for iTunes users who could be billed directly for wireless service.

“The battleground is set, but Apple will be the first mover,” Bluestein said while speaking at the Informa MVNO Industry Summit in Barcelona. “Google will have to scramble because it lacks retail distribution, experience with subscriber services and the iTunes ecosystem of content. iTunes and the iTunes Store provide Apple with one-click buying and customer care. Google can acquire most of these capabilities, as it has before, but it is not a core competency of the company.” Full story...

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More Swedes surfing the net anonymously...

Swedes have become more inclined to surf the internet anonymously, in order to protect themselves from online surveillance, a new study shows.

Some 700,000 Swedes currently actively seek to hide their identity online by making use of anonymizer services, according to the survey by the Cybernorms project at Lund University.

The survey shows that around 200,000 Swedes aged 15-25-years-old habitually surf anonymously, making use of proxy services such as Relakks, Ipredator and Mullvad - this equates to 15 percent of the age group.

The researchers conclude that as internet usage and file-sharing is most common among younger Swedes, then the proportion of older users surfing anonymously is likely to be lower. Full story...

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Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Women in Kashmir...

Women in Kashmir are the worst sufferers in the past two decades of conflict, to suffer silently. They have been raped,tortured and killed, which is still ongoing. Yet, there are many who are not ready to suffer silently and have come out of the cocoon to make their presence felt in different shades of life.They are defying all odds in their own unique way to raise their voice against the occupation and become a voice to let the world know about her suffering and journey of survival by defying all odds.
As an assignment for Voices of our future, World Pulse, I couldn't think of anything else beyond her perseverance in this long pending dispute between the India and Pakistan . The reason is that being a Kashmiri women, I had also experienced the same which almost every women in Kashmir went through both directly as well as indirectly in the most pressing times.
This movie is in solidarity with the women who have suffered in the conflict, yet they are hopeful to get justice and an end to this conflict for a new dawn of sustainable peace and development. Thus, 'She' is a women of the revolution... Source...

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State threatens to jail blogger who cured himself of diabetes and gives advice on diets...

The North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition is threatening to send a blogger to jail for recounting publicly his battle against diabetes and encouraging others to follow his lifestyle.

Chapter 90, Article 25 of the North Carolina General Statutes makes it a misdemeanor to “practice dietetics or nutrition” without a license. According to the law, “practicing” nutrition includes “assessing the nutritional needs of individuals and groups” and “providing nutrition counseling.”

Steve Cooksey has learned that the definition, at least in the eyes of the state board, is expansive.

When he was hospitalized with diabetes in February 2009, he decided to avoid the fate of his grandmother, who eventually died of the disease. He embraced the low-carb, high-protein Paleo diet, also known as the “caveman” or “hunter-gatherer” diet. The diet, he said, made him drug- and insulin-free within 30 days. By May of that year, he had lost 45 pounds and decided to start a blog about his success. Full story...

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Priest sex scandal shocks Poland...

A priest in Poland, found guilty of having sex with a disabled 19-year-old girl who was entrusted in his care, has been sentenced to four years in prison.

This is the first time a priest has been caught and sentenced in Poland, though there have been few incidents in the past where priests were asked to resign.

Bialystok's District Court found that between July 2010 and February 2011 the priest had sexual intercourse with her as many as eight times, a media report said. Full story...

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Italian businessman becomes country's 25th 'austerity suicide' of the year...

An Italian businessman who was depressed over the failure of his construction company has taken his own life, in the country's 25th such "austerity suicide" this year.

Dismayed at the collapse of his business, which also employed his two sons, the 55-year-old Sardinian man shot himself in the chest with a pistol.

His death was a grim reminder of the country's worsening economic prospects, with official statistics showing on Monday that unemployment has reached nearly 10 per cent – the highest rate since 2001.

Sardinia has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country – one in two young people are out of work. Full story...

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Saxe-Coburg-Gotha: Syphilitic sociopaths behind the "green" deception...

History reveals it is mostly by blood that the genealogy of power is secured throughout the ages. And all those unrelated to the head snakes, have been royally approved to do evil in their name. A cast of sociopaths commanding a tribe of psychopaths. It is no coincidence that all the usual suspects appear prominently on the membership list of Bilderberg. Needless to say they rarely miss a meeting.

Products of centuries of intermarrying between families, the questionable art of breeding human livestock has been cultivated to its extreme by different royal houses of (mostly) German descent festering over the European continent for many a century. As a result, this unholy, age-old cesspool of interbreeding gave birth to the most malicious type of human imaginable: the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha chieftain.

Drawing from such a disturbingly limited gene pool, this ancient tree produced a peculiar ruthless sort of individual- first draft of the clinical sociopath. Combine this ruthlessness with some repulsive physiological features in outward appearance, and what you get is the European blue-blood par excellence. Full story...

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CISPA: why we should take notice...

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The USA has plenty of oil and natural gas...

The United States is not running out of oil. In fact, nobody on the entire globe has more energy resources than the United States does. The truth is that we are absolutely swimming in oil and natural gas and we have so much coal that we have no idea what to do with it all. At current consumption rates, America has enough energy resources to completely satisfy all of its needs well into the 22nd century. If we would just access those resources, we would not have to import a single drop of foreign oil. But most Americans don't realize that we have plenty of oil. In fact, our education system has brainwashed most Americans into believing that our energy resources are rapidly being depleted and that we will soon enter a great energy crisis. We are all constantly told that we must transition to "green energy" before it is too late. But the reality is that America is an energy rich nation and new discoveries of oil and natural gas deposits are being made all the time. Shouldn't someone tell the American people the truth about these things?

Sadly, Barack Obama keeps running around the country declaring that there is no way that the United States can supply itself with enough oil. During one speech a while back, Obama made the following statement....

"With only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices" Full story...

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Cars to be powered by ... whiskey?

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Ron Paul: the real cost of America's wars...

This month Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki announced the addition of some 1,900 mental health nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers to its existing workforce of 20,590 mental health staff in attempt to get a handle on the epidemic of suicides among combat veterans. Unfortunately, when presidents misuse our military on an unprecedented scale – and Congress lets them get away with it – the resulting stress causes military suicides to increase dramatically, both among active duty and retired service members. In fact, military deaths from suicide far outnumber combat deaths. According to an article in the Air Force Times this month, suicides among airmen are up 40 percent over last year.

Considering the multiple deployments service members are forced to endure as the war in Afghanistan stretches into its second decade, these figures are sadly unsurprising.

Ironically, the same VA Secretary Eric Shinseki was forced to retire from the Army by President Bush for daring to suggest that an invasion and occupation of Iraq would not be the cakewalk that neoconservatives promised. Then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who is not a military veteran, claimed that General Shinseki was "wildly off the mark" for suggesting that several hundred thousand soldiers would be required to secure post-invasion Iraq. Now we see who was right on the costs of war. Full story...

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