tonyviner
Man Accused Of Incest Fathered Children With Two Daughters
From CNN:
Pinheiros, Brazil — Law enforcement agents in Brazil’s northeastern town of Pinheiros trekked and canoed for nearly two hours through rugged terrain to arrest a 54-year-old man accused of fathering eight children with his two eldest daughters, a top regional investigator said.
Pinheiros Regional Police Chief Laura Amelia Barbosa told CNN that Jose Agostinho Bispo Pereira — who was arrested Thursday after complaints that he sexually abused his 29-year-old daughter, whom he held captive — fathered yet another child with his eldest daughter.
“He fathered seven children with his 29-year-old daughter and one with his 31-year-old,” Barbosa said.
The seven children born from his 29-year-old daughter range in age from 2 months old to 12 years, she said.
“We just learned that he fathered a child with his 31-year-old daughter. … The 14-year-old is right here beside me,” Barbosa said in a phone interview with CNN.
“We also confirmed that two other of his children/grandchildren…
Revisiting Orwell’s 1984
By Richard Mynick for the World Socialist Web Site:
Since first appearing in the popular lexicon, the term “Orwellian” has conjured up a vision of the prototypical “totalitarian state”: a one-party dictatorship that swarmed with secret police, spied on its own people, quashed dissent, made arbitrary arrests, tortured prisoners, waged perpetual war, rewrote history for mere expedience, impoverished its own working population, and rooted its political discourse in doublethink—a thought system defined as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
Many Americans would easily recognize this description of “Oceania,” the futuristic dystopia immortalized by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the most influential English-language novels of the mid-twentieth century.
Whether many Americans recognize that this description applies to their own society as well is another matter. But since the theft of the 2000 election—a period marked by such events as the 9/11 attacks, the…
French Establishment Promotes IMF Director As Presidential Candidate
By Kumaran Ira for the World Socialist Web Site:
The decision by French media and political circles to promote the International Monetary Fund managing director and leading Parti Socialiste(PS) member Dominique Strauss-Kahn as a potential presidential candidate is a stark warning to the working class. Though presented as a “left” party to the public, the PS supports the IMF’s anti-working class policies, such as the cuts carried out by Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou.
Strauss-Kahn is seen as a major potential contender against the incumbent, conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential election. He has given prominent interviews on television and in the print media. An Ipsos-Le Point poll published on May 25 found that 76 percent of right-wing voters and 66 percent of Socialist Party voters back Strauss-Kahn for the presidency. The nomination of the PS candidate for the presidential elections will be decided at a PS-organized primary election to be…
What Would You Do with the Massive Datasets from Persistent Surveillance?
From Technoccult:
Marshall Kirkpatrick outlines the rapidly accumulating data from persistent surveillance, geospatial tracking, and massive sensor webs and poses the question: what would you do with it? Skipping to the end of his piece:
Let’s assume that real-time persistent airborne surveillance data becomes another cloud service you can pull down to leverage for your application development, just like storage, computing and some other data APIs are today. Let’s assume that in time this data becomes a commodity, even!
What on earth will people do with that? The possibilities seem nearly endless.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around – a sure sign that it’s a powerful vision of the future. I asked ReadWriteWeb research intern and resident GIS guy Justin Houk what he would do with such a service and his first answer was, “Become invisible and king of the world.” Then he got serious and settled on a dream app tracking food…
Bill O’Reilly Compares Gays To Al-Qaeda
From The New Civil Rights Movement:
Fair and balanced? You be the judge.
Burger Diet Boosts Kids’ Asthma Risk
From Physorg.com:
Eating three or more burgers a week may boost a child’s risk of asthma and wheeze – at least in developed nations – reveals a large international study, published in Thorax today.
Conversely, a Mediterranean diet, rich in fruit, vegetables, and fish seems to stave off the risk, the research shows.
The research team base their findings on data collected between 1995 and 2005 on 50,000 children between the ages of 8 and 12 from 20 rich and poor countries around the world.
Their parents were asked about their children’s normal diet and whether they had ever been diagnosed with asthma and/or have had wheeze.
Just under 30,000 of the children were tested for allergic reactions, to see if diet also influenced their chances of developing allergies.
Diet did not seem to be associated with becoming sensitised to common allergens, such as grass and tree pollen. But it did seem to influence the prevalence of…
Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once
Photo: Stevertigo (CC)
From the Onion. Yeah, that Onion, so progressives please try to remember where you left your sense of humor:
LEXINGTON, MA — Describing himself as “terribly exhausted,” famed linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky said Monday that he was taking a break from combating the hegemony of the American imperialist machine to try and take it easy for once.
“I just want to lie in a hammock and have a nice relaxing morning,” said the outspoken anarcho-syndicalist academic, who first came to public attention with his breakthrough 1957 book Syntactic Structures. “The systems of control designed to manufacture consent among a largely ignorant public will still be there for me to worry about tomorrow. Today, I’m just going to kick back and enjoy some much-needed Noam Time.”
“No fighting against institutional racism, no exposing the legacies of colonialist ideologies still persistent today, no standing up to the widespread dissemination of misinformation and…
Scientist Says Obama Administration Policy Contributed To Gulf Coast Spill
Rick Steiner, a former professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Alaska, told the World Socialist Web Site that lack of regulation was responsible for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He sharply criticized the response of the Obama administration, saying that its energy policy was identical to that of the Bush administration.
The BP Oil Spill and American Capitalism
Tom Eley writes on the World Socialist Web Site:
The explosion on the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon on April 20 off Louisiana’s coast, which took the lives of 11 workers and has resulted in a massive oil slick that threatens economic and environmental ruin for the Gulf Coast, stands as a powerful exposure of American capitalism.
Each day brings new revelations that federal regulators under both the Bush and Obama administrations aided and abetted BP and the oil industry as they disregarded safety and environmental precautions that might have prevented the disaster.
Some of the most recent revelations include:
• In 2000 the Minerals Management Service (MMS) requested industry advice on problems related to the cementing used around deep sea well caps to stop blowouts. The oil industry never produced recommendations, and no regulation was put in place.
• A 2002 study conducted by the MMS revealed that vital equipment on oil rig blowout…
Greek Protesters Urged to Retreat from ‘Abyss’ (Video)
BBC News reports:
Greece is “on the brink of the abyss”, President Karolos Papoulias has warned, after three people died during protests over planned austerity measures. “We are all responsible so that it does not take the step into the void,” the president said in a statement.
It followed a day of violence during which protesters set fire to a bank, killing three employees. Greece’s government has vowed to pursue the spending cuts — a condition of its 110bn euro ($142bn; £95bn) bail-out.
“We are prepared to pay the heavy political cost,” Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou told parliament during Wednesday’s debate on the bill. “We will not take a single step backwards.”
The euro hit a fresh 13-month low against the dollar and European stock markets were also hit, amid concerns over Greek bail-out plans. There are also fears Greece’s debt crisis could spread to other countries.
The Gulf Coast Oil Spill: An American Chernobyl?
The World Socialist Web Site writes:
With each passing day, the scale of the disaster unleashed by the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico increases. Somewhere between 5,000 (the official estimate) and 25,000 (the estimate of some scientists) barrels of oil is surging into the Gulf every day.
Before it is over, millions, if not tens of millions of gallons of oil will be washed up on America’s wetlands and shorelines.Eleven workers are already dead in the latest industrial disaster in the American energy industry. Now, the fishing and seafood industry along the Gulf coast may be shut down for years, perhaps even a generation. The destruction of the fragile ecosystems of the region will likely be irreparable.
The disaster implicates one of the world’s largest corporations, British Petroleum, together with partners and subcontractors like Transocean Ltd., operator of the drill rig, and Halliburton, which carried out major operations on the wellhead…
The Boondocks Addresses Our Black President
Just a friendly reminder that the new season of the Boondocks airs tonight on adult swim. 11:30 e/p.
Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black
Tim Wise (photo: timwise.org)
This is by a guy named Tim Wise:
Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure – the ones who are driving the action – we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.
So let’s begin.
Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with…
Serial Killer Won On ‘The Dating Game’
Rodney Alcala, 66, is representing himself in the penalty phase of his trial.
By Gabriel Falcon for CNN:
“Oh yeah, I remember it quite clearly,” said Jed Mills, the game-show contestant who sat next to Alcala in 1978. “He was creepy. Definitely creepy.”
Found guilty in February of murdering four women and a child, Alcala, 66, is acting as his own attorney in the penalty phase of the trial. He is hoping to persuade the jury in Santa Ana, California, to spare his life.
The crimes Alcala committed date to the late 1970s. Nobody at the time knew the man with the wavy long hair and toothy grin was a psychopath — an unstable, antisocial personality.
That includes Mills, a veteran television and film actor, whose only encounter with Alcala was when both of them appeared on “The Dating Game.”
“That’s when I became part of a nightmare, and I didn’t realize it was a nightmare…
Ahmadinejad: 9/11 Was A ‘Big Lie’
From CNN:
Two days before his official trip to Afghanistan, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a “big lie” intended to pave the way for the invasion of a war-torn nation, according to Iranian state media.
Ahmadinejad, known for his harsh rhetoric toward the West and Israel, said the attack on U.S. soil was a “scenario and a sophisticated intelligence measure,” Iran’s state-run Press TV reported Saturday.
The assault was a “big lie intended to serve as a pretext for fighting terrorism and setting the grounds for sending troops to Afghanistan,” Press TV reported Ahmadinejad as saying.
It’s not the first time Ahmadinejad has denied a historical tragedy. In the past, he has denied the existence of the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of some 6 million Jews during World War II, and suggested Israel should be “wiped off the map.”
“Today,” he said Saturday, “with blessings from the…
Birth Defects on the Rise in Fallujah
Via the Daily Mail:
A Fallujah mother holds her little girl, who was born without a left forearm and hand.
A high number of children are being born with birth defects in an Iraqi city where U.S. forces may have used chemical weapons during a fierce battle in 2004.
Children in Fallujah are being born with limb, head, heart and nervous system defects.
There is even a claim that a baby was born with three heads. The number of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than the rate in Europe.
The city, 40 miles west of Baghdad, was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the Iraq war in late 2004. U.S. Marines led Operation Phantom Fury to recapture it from insurgents.
British troops were involved in manning checkpoints on the outskirts of the city as the Americans went in. The U.S. has admitted that it used white…
Republicans Playing on People’s Fears (Officially)?
Ben Smith writes on the Politico:
The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to “save the country from trending toward socialism.”
The strategy was detailed in a confidential party fundraising presentation, obtained by POLITICO, which also outlines how “ego-driven” wealthy donors can be tapped with offers of access and “tchochkes.”
The presentation was delivered by RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart to top donors and fundraisers at a party retreat in Boca Grande, Florida on February 18, a source at the gathering said.
In neat PowerPoint pages, it lifts the curtain on the often-cynical terms of political marketing, displaying an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives.
The presentation explains the Republican fundraising in simple terms.
Senator Bayh Calls Senate “Broken and Dysfunctional”
By Dan Balz for the Washington Post:
Sen. Evan Bayh’s surprise decision not to seek reelection touched off a debate Tuesday among strategists and scholars about whether the Indiana senator’s depiction of the “brain dead” politics and hyper-partisanship of Congress is accurate or overblown — and, if accurate, whether walking away was the right decision.
Bayh dealt a triple blow to his Democratic Party and to President Obama with his announcement Monday that he is sick of the partisanship in Washington and will not seek a third term…
