From the Rochester, Minnesota Post-Bulletin:

EYOTA -- Criminal charges are expected to be filed against an Eyota man accused of assaulting a girl and choking a boy Saturday.

Olmsted County sheriff's deputy Mike Bromberg said authorities went to the house about 10 p.m. Saturday after the children and their mother ran to a nearby business and called 911.

Bromberg said the 28-year-old man is accused of physically assaulting the 8-year-old girl and choking the 10-year-old boy. He told officers he "lost it" when he opened a bedroom door and saw the children engaged in what he thought was inappropriate behavior.

OK - they don't need to spell it out for us. This "inappropriate conduct" must have had SOMETHING to do with sex.

These were two siblings. Two siblings under the age of 11. Perhaps they -- or at least the boy -- have started to go through puberty. They may have begun to have the desire to experiment with one another.

And of course, the way to react to said desire is to choke the ever-living sh*t out of the kid. That's how we teach children "appropriate behavior", right?

I don't think he should receive a lesser sentence because of any "temporary insanity" defense. This is just no way to react. Scream at the kids. Grab them and take them to different rooms. If the boy was forcing himself upon the girl, then why physically assault her? If the mother had to "run to a nearby business" that means he posed a danger to these children.

For that, he can't just get off with probation. Perhaps dealing with criminal charges will teach this man what appropriate and inappropriate conduct is.

There are just no words.

From BET.com:

Fla. Mother, Son Beaten and Sodomized by 10 Teens

July 12, 2007 – Two teenagers have been arrested and police are on the hunt for up to eight others who tortured and forced a Haitian-born woman to perform oral sex on her 12-year-old son.

For a full three hours – the assault took place, the victims told police, but no one answered their screams for help in the crime-ridden Dunbar housing project on the outskirts of downtown West Palm Beach.

"So a lady was raped. Big deal," resident Paticiea Matlock said with disgust. "There's too much other crime happening here."

The mother and her son fled the poverty and violence of Port-au-Prince, Haiti about seven years ago and ended up in the Dunbar housing projects, but nothing could prepare her for the torture she encountered on June 18.

According to police, 10 masked teenagers broke into the woman's apartment flashing their guns and demanding cash. When the 35-year-old woman told them that she was broke, the unimaginable happened. The woman says the teens gang-raped, beat her up and force her to perform oral sex on her son, The Associated Press reports.

"They just told me give us the money. I said I don't have money. They told me open the door, get inside. If you yell, we will kill you and your son," she said. "Some of them have sex with me twice, some have sex with me three times, they beating me up and make me do those things over and over. The one who has the big gun, he put the gun inside of me."

After the brutal abuse, the bandits poured household cleaners over the victims, which burned the boy's eyes, before racing off with hundreds in cash, jewelry and cell phones, AP reports. He has since regained his sight, but he and his mother are undergoing psychological counseling.

The mother, in an interview with WPTV, said that she and her son, were frozen with fear in the bathroom and sobbed a while before making the mile-long trek to a hospital in the dark of night. She couldn't call anyone because her cell phone had been stolen....

In the year leading up to the rape, AP reports that police were called to Dunbar Village 717 times, or almost twice a day.

Big deal? I think this woman's sentiment must have been rampant in the project.

I think the cops should have been called 717 times that day. Are we a nation so heartless that a woman can be sodomized with a gun and can, along with her son, scream for three straight hours and no one even calls 911 on a GoPhone? What is this? Granted, while we may not see ourselves as "our brothers' keepers" (regardless of what G-d says), THREE CONSECUTIVE HOURS?

As BET notes, often African-American women have a harder time getting people to believe they've been raped. There is a pervasive belief in American society "shaped by hundreds of years of stereotypes that portrayed African-American women as promiscuous, even sexually insatiable." In fact, Diane Miller Sommerville, a visiting professor of history at Binghamton University in New York suggests that "most Whites in America find it hard to believe that a Black woman could even be raped".

While I don't know how true THAT statement is (the word "most" throws me off and raises my eyebrows at Prof. Sommerville), the fact remains, many black women have an additional burden of proof that non-black women don't have. Prof. Sommerville suggests that this is rooted in the 19th century (I'd say "the times of slavery", but as we know, slavery is still alive and well in the world):

"The 'convenient rationalization for...slaveowners, that 'I didn't really want to have sex with her but she threw herself at me,'' carries over into modern society, she said.

The two victims in the Palm Beach case had to walk a mile to the hospital for help. A third teen has since been arrested. The oldest perpetrator so far is 16.

They will all be tried as adults.

The victim's name has not been released and the woman and her son are now living in hiding.

More information is available here. As you will see, the additional security measures instituted by police aren't doing as much as was expected.

As a nation we can never let things like this happen. Regardless of where we live, we are part of communities, and we should at least pick up a phone when a woman screams for hours on end.

It IS a big deal.

Anyone wishing to donate to the victim and her son are urged to call (561) 832-3757.

Oops! Don't you just hate those pesky computer glitches?

From the Houstonist:

City jail accidentally lets prostitution suspect go

Remember Pedro Espinoza-Escama, the man who police charged with helping his girlfriend sell her two teenage daughters into prostitution? Well, if you happen to run into him on the street, you really should call HPD: It seems someone accidentally released Espinoza-Escama from a city jail early Friday morning.

Oops!

According to police, 21-year-old Espinoza-Escama and his girlfriend, 35-year-old Nelsi Yolanda Latuda, forced Latuda's 14- and 16-year-old daughters into prostitution, and Latuda even passed out business cards advertising the daughters for sex.

Espinoza-Escama had been arrested on unrelated Class C misdemeanor charges on June 10 and was booked into the city jail; on Tuesday police questioned him and Latuda and charged them both with two counts each of compelling prostitution of a minor. But somehow, Espinoza-Escama was "inadvertently" released from the Southeast Division jail on Mykawa Road around 3:15 a.m. Friday, HPD spokesman Nate McDuell said.

It's not clear yet exactly how it happened — or it wasn't clear earlier in the weekend, at least. "Obviously, this shouldn't have happened," McDuell said in the Chronicle's Saturday editions. "We are trying to determine if it is a human error, a processing error or a computer error."

The girlfriend, Nelsi Latuda, is still being held on $10,000 bail in Harris County Jail.


Anyone who has seen this man is urged to call the HPD Juvenile Sex Crimes Division at 713-731-5335 or Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS.

In other news, child slavery in China (news broadcast is in Japanese, I think):


Get the full story on that -- and how it also turned into a child prostitution ring -- on thisisbabylon.net.

Can't get enough of that globalization and cheap labor.

This is Babylon.

Which group of people do you think represents the greatest threat to America? Radical religious fundamentalists? Illegal immigrants? Insert-name-of-ethnic-group-here?

Apparently, it's atheists. Atheists are now the "most distrusted minority" in America.

From The Collegiate Times:

A survey conducted by the University of Minnesota suggests otherwise. In telephone interviews with 2,000 households, interviewees were asked whom they thought most threatened the American way of life. Out of several heavily debated minority groups, including Muslims, immigrants, and homosexuals, atheists were considered the most harmful group to the American dream.

Atheists are also the group parents are least likely to "allow" their children to marry. More people said "I would not elect an Atheist president" in 1999 than said "I would not elect a Jewish president" in 1937. 19% of people in an AOL poll agreed with the statement "it sucks to be atheist".

What is making me furious is that all of these questions are spun in such a way (with the possible exception of the AOL poll) that they become a question of people vs. people as opposed to idea vs. idea. Do I eschew atheism? Of course, as would any monotheistic religious individual.

But were I to extend that to atheist people, I'd be rightfully called a rabid bigot and prejudiced. I would be wrong. We unfortunately have been trained by our media to use terms for ideologies and terms for people interchangeably.

Muslim guy blows up something? Blame Islam! Fed up with secularism? Blame atheists! As a result, innocent people get put on the receiving ends of the worst insults, and we have anti-atheist discrimination. This is no better than racism.

Fighting an idea changes minds and could change the world. Fighting a person only leads to negative outcomes.

If I had to point my finger at one group of people who I think represent the biggest threat to America, it would take no thought at all: it's prejudiced bigots.

"News and Politics" just doesn't do this justice.

The Iraq War could end up costing us upwards of TWO TRILLION DOLLARS by 2016. And this isn't a figure brought up by some peace-loving activists. It was said on FOX News by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation.

One op-ed piece decries the war as a "travesty" and says:

Donald Rumsfeld's estimate for the cost of the Iraq war was $50 billion. The actual cost to date is about $450 billion, climbing at the rate of about $275 million a day.

These are only the operating costs. They do not reflect the billions more that will be needed after the war ends--billions to re-equip and retrain the military to get readiness back to the pre-war level, higher recruiting costs because large bonuses are necessary to get people to enlist or re-enlist, or interest on the war debt.

Long-term medical costs alone could be $400 billion or more--and that amount does not include lifetime disability payments of another $150 billion or more.

Total long-term costs of the Iraq war are now estimated at $1 trillion to $2 trillion.

This incomprehensible figure does not reflect the sacrifice borne solely by the million or so families whose children and grandchildren risk becoming the dead and maimed while the rest of us are asked for nothing.

It does not reflect the death and misery we have unleashed on the Iraqis, that faceless irrelevance deprived by our government of even the simple dignity of being counted.

It does not reflect the loss of American prestige or the instability, chaos, and needless creation of additional enemies.

War apologists would have us believe that Saddam was so evil that removing him was worth any cost. That is simply nonsense. It is moral and political cowardice to allow this travesty to continue and its architects to go unpunished.

One previously skeptical columnist in Denver writes:

I cannot fathom that we are spending an average of $275 million a day on the war in Iraq. According to the costofwar.com, a website that tracks spending per second, the cost of this war thus far is about $450 billion, and it doesn't look like we are coming home anytime soon....

It has been estimated that the total cost of the war is anywhere between $1 to $2 trillion. What! $1 to $2 trillion? I thought to myself there is no way it will end up costing that much, but, you are going to be surprised, as was I...

(I'm omitting her itemizing of each cost, but it is very worth looking into.)

Let's take a look at this in another way called 'opportunity cost.' This is what America could have done with this same amount of money.

According to Greg Speeter (The National Priorities Project's), there could have been 3.7 million new housing units built since the war began, the nation's schools could have been rebuilt - each one of them, Social Security could have been fixed for the next 75 years, and lastly, $1 to $2 trillion could have been spent on homeland security...wow, what else could we have done with that money?

The architects of this unjust, unnecessary, and unjustifiable war will not only have to answer to their Creator for the havoc they have wreaked on the innocent masses of people they have put in American crosshairs, but they should have to answer to every single homeless person for why their shelters can not be built, every public school child, and every elderly person unable to pay for a prescription.

Perhaps the most disgusting fiscal action of modern American history, one can only wonder what type of legacy these warmongers will leave to their flat-broke great-grandchildren.

For an alternative point of view, a word from our vice president.



This is Babylon.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recently released a series of ads decrying the call for a boycott of Israel sent out by a British trade unions. The University and College Union (UCU), Britain's largest teachers union, "voted to consider" a boycott of Israeli universities on May 30. The UCU, representing 120,000 members, was followed soon after by UNISON, Britain's largest trade union, representing 1.6 million of Britain's civil servants.

Indeed, as the JTA notes, both decisions follow a resolution in April by Britain's National Union of Journalists condemning Israel's "savage" attack last summer on Lebanon and calling for sanctions against Israel.

This is the fourth such motion in British organized labor since 2002.



Is Britain's organized labor anti-Semitic? Alan Dershowitz thinks so. The ADL is running advertisements like the above, and like this one:



Is the ADL right or wrong?

It's all over the news in Georgia.

Northwest Hospital in Tucson, Arizona pleaded with people via KVOA to throw out their "potentially toxic" toothpaste.

In Florida, wholesalers are combing their shelves to find the tainted products.

The Associated Press brought us the news originally on Friday:

WASHINGTON — The government warned consumers on Friday to avoid using toothpaste made in China because it may contain a poisonous chemical used in antifreeze.

Out of caution, the Food and Drug Administration said, people should throw away toothpaste with labeling that it was made in China. FDA is concerned that these products may contain diethylene glycol.

The agency is not aware of any reports in the United States of poisoning from toothpaste, but it did find the antifreeze ingredient in a shipment at the U.S. border and at two retail stores: a Dollar Plus store in Miami and a Todo A Peso store in Puerto Rico.

Again from the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The United States is the seventh country to find tainted Chinese toothpaste within its borders in recent weeks.

Agency officials said they found toothpaste containing a small amount of diethylene glycol, a sweet, syrupy poison, at a Dollar Plus retail store in Miami, sold under the brand name ShiR Fresh Mint Fluoride Paste. The FDA also identified nine other brands of Chinese toothpaste that contain diethylene glycol, some with concentrations of 3 percent to 4 percent.

Previously, only a few brands had been identified by health officials around the world as containing diethylene glycol and all of them listed the chemical on the label.

But diethylene glycol was not listed on the label of the toothpaste found in the Miami store. Its presence was detected only because the FDA began testing imported Chinese toothpaste last month. That precaution was prompted by the discovery in Latin America of tens of thousands of tubes of tainted toothpaste made in China.

As Yahoo!Answers tells us, these poisonings, both in Panama and in the United States affect the poor almost exclusively. Like The Miami Herald reported, these products were found at "Dollar Plus" stores in Miami and a "Just Dollar" store in Hollywood, FL. "Todo A Peso" in Puerto Rico.

Places where poor people go when they can't afford advertised name brands.

Those who can't pay for Aquafresh buy Everfresh and hope that "all you're paying for is the name", and that they'll get "the same thing".

Only here, these bargain brands weren't the same thing.

Yangzhou Lierkang Daily Used Chemicals Co., Ltd is one distributor of Everfresh Toothpaste -- perhaps related to Yangzhou-Kingsley, implicated by the Miami Herald story.

From Consumer Affairs.com:

As ConsumerAffairs.Com reported on May 22, tubes of toothpaste from foreign lands are routinely sold in dollar-discount stores and neighborhood bodegas, even though the importation and sale of such products is illegal...

The tubes are illegal because they do not follow the FDA's over-the-counter drug labeling requirements. Two tubes didn't even list all the ingredients while many of the others are in foreign languages.

After almost three weeks of ignoring many of our questions, the FDA told ConsumerAffairs.Com that companies who manufacture, market and distribute the toothpastes could all face prosecution for selling the illegal products.

American toothpaste brands (like Crest and Colgate) were quick to note that their product is safe worldwide, but that is not the point. These are being almost exclusively sold to the poor, in their own neighborhoods, at the stores they are most likely to patronize.

FDA said that various brands such as Cooldent, Clean Rite and Oralmax have been found to be contaminated; some of them have the concentration of DEG as high as 3 to 4 percent.

According to the FDA, the companies manufacturing products containing DEG are Goldcredit International Enterprises Ltd., Goldcredit International Trading Co. Ltd., and Suzhou City Jinmao Daily Chemicals Co. Ltd.

The US health agency is concerned about the fact that DEG can pose a low but significant risk of toxicity and injury to children and people suffering from kidney or liver diseases, on chronic exposure to the chemical.

However, calling the FDA's warning "unscientific, irresponsible and contradictory", China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) in a statement posted on its Web site late Saturday said that low levels of diethylene glycol have been deemed safe for consumption.

In response to the FDA notice, AQSIQ said, "Our research shows that toothpaste containing up to 15.6 percent diethylene glycol, the chemical that the US side is concerned about, is safe, even after prolonged use."

The US health agency is concerned about the fact that DEG can pose a low but significant risk of toxicity and injury to children and people suffering from kidney or liver diseases, on chronic exposure to the chemical.

However, experts from the Chinese Health Ministry deemed the chemical a "low-level" poison that does not accumulate in the human body. They also said that there is no evidence that the chemical in question can cause cancer or deformities.

I GUARANTEE THAT, WERE WE TALKING ABOUT HIGHER-CLASS NEIGHBORHOODS, THIS WOULD NOT BE AN ISSUE UP FOR DEBATE. Goldcredit isn't distributing this stuff in the ritzy areas of South Beach, marking it up as "imported Asian dentifrice" in silver-capped bottles for $5.99 to the rich and famous. Paris Hilton will never taste Cooldent ICE.

If they did, there would be no squabbling over percentages of antifreeze. It would be corrected tout de suite.

While I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I can't help but think -- maybe Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, urban gentrification, environmental terrorism, lack of universal health care, and this are all parts of one macabre puzzle.

Class-based eugenics. The creation of the (perhaps Aryan) master class. Killing off the (largely minority) poor, little by little.

Like one columnist said, for these deaths, greed -- of which this classist population control is only a symptom -- is to blame, not China.

On the controversial (largely ex-Orthodox) blog SevenFatCow, I reposted a beautiful condemnation of racism in the Jewish community from ASimpleJew.blogspot.com.

A Simple Jew (ASJ) has taken it upon himself to blow up the problem of "heimishe" (i.e., "traditional" in Yiddish) racism.

I've been singing this guy's praises on thisisbabylon.net, for his first post, and this second one from ASJ is no exception, concluding with:

"You ask, 'Who cares about all the families of the earth?' Nevertheless, that's what the Torah says…The People of Israel will be a blessing for all the families of the earth. That means the Albanians, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Indonesians, the African Americans - all the families of the earth. That's what it says in my Torah!"

Thou Shalt Not Be Prejudiced - required reading for any Anti-Racist, but most significantly pointed at the Jewish community.

Just a reminder that the (to quote ASJ) "old-fashioned, peasant-like, uncivilized and coarse commonly accepted hatred" known as racism is not G-d's Will, has no place in any religious community, and has no place in the mind or heart of anything which considers itself to be a human being.

Unity is mandatory.

The New York Times reports that NY Governor Eliot Spitzer is proposing a major expansion of New York's database of DNA samples to include people convicted of most crimes, while "making it easier for prisoners to use DNA to try to establish their innocence."

The governor's proposal would order DNA taken from those found guilty of any misdemeanor, including minor drug offenses, harassment or unauthorized use of a credit card, according to a draft of his bill. It would not cover offenses considered violations, like disorderly conduct.

In expanding its database to include all felonies and misdemeanors, New York would be nearly alone, although a handful of states collect DNA from some defendants upon arrest, even before conviction.

Mr. Spitzer is also seeking mandatory sampling of all prisoners in the state, as well as all of those on parole, on probation or registered as sex offenders.

That expansion alone would add about 50,000 samples to the database, at a cost of about $1.75 million, his office said. It did not provide an estimate of the cost of taking DNA samples in all future convictions.

"This legislation will help us bring the guilty to justice and exonerate those who have been wrongly accused," Mr. Spitzer said in a statement. He plans to introduce his bill this week.

The bill would make it easier for prisoners and defendants to obtain court orders to have their DNA tested against evidence collected in their cases and to have that evidence tested against the entire database of DNA, aides to the governor said.

(For my conspiracy theorists: We already know that DNA can be copyrighted, to the point that one company, the BBC noted, was encouraging people to copyright their own DNA. Now we have a situation were potentially hundreds of thousands' of people's DNA will all be in one central data repository.)

The NY Civil Liberties Union called this a "potential threat to privacy."

"All felonies and misdemeanors." -- does this mean that a state -- without even so much as a conviction in some states -- holds the person's DNA data potentially forever? GovTech.net says Gov. Spitzer's proposal "will result in more perpetrators being identified, prosecuted, and convicted -- greatly increasing public safety, particularly in high-crime areas."

Somehow I don't think that an increase in public safety will be the only outcome if this legislation passes.

DNA privacy has got to mean something.

Or perhaps this is "News and Politics"?

It is a deeply held Jewish belief that the arrival of the Messiah will, as it says in 1 Kings 8:60, usher in an era where all nations of the world -- all humanity -- call out in the name of One G-d.

The 7 Laws of Noah, as derived from Genesis:
1. Believe in one G-d.

2. Don't curse G-d.

3. Not to murder.

4. Don't commit adultery, incest, etc.

5. Don't steal.

6. Don't eat a limb torn from a living animal.

7. Set up courts to ensure obedience to the other six laws.

(Keep in mind that adhering to any one of the majority of the world's religions would involve one keeping the 7 Laws. Islam and Christianity are certainly no exceptions to this -- and perhaps these people strengthened their faith as a result of these chassidim. Judaism teaches that any non-Jew who keeps these 7 laws will go to the Next World.)

Conversely, spreading the news about the 7 Laws of Noah is believed by many to be a very big aid in bringing the Messiah (he should come quickly). One group of Jews, the Chassidic sect of Chabad-Lubavitch, is taking this message to heart.

They're spreading the news of the 7 Laws of Noah.

In Arabic. To Israeli "Arabs" and Palestinians.



One love to those who build bridges and break down walls in the name of spreading peace and unity.

It's one thing to say, "We want Moshiach now!" It's another thing to get out there in the marketplace and bring him. I have nothing but love for these people's actions.

Imagine a Middle East where no one killed, no one raped, and no one stole.

These people did, and now they're doing something about it. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, the previous head of the sect, did, and that's why he told them to go there.

Today's USA Today blogs give a bit of a chilling statement on American society.

Currently "more than 1,000 high schools and middle schools conduct random drug testing", according to US "drug czar" John Walters and this number is expanding.

On average, by about one school per week.



Should this continue?

My gut reaction to this is that I literally can not believe that it has come to this. Not only can parents not tell if their children are high, teachers can't tell if their students are high, adminstrators can't tell if their students are high -- it feels as if there is no accountability being placed on anyone here.

It is apparently no one's responsibility to keep teens away from drugs (and it's not just pot here, we're talking coke and crystal meth) and alcohol, and we must test everyone.

While drug testing is, in one principal's eyes at a minimum, stopping kids from using on their own time, I just find it kind of sad that we are seeing such a vast application of mandatory drug testing (something which may be an invasion of privacy if there is no reasonable suspicion) for people under 18.

So maybe you have to be 18 to have your bodily fluids remain a private affair.

Perhaps there just is no other way to keep high schoolers from getting high. Or perhaps this is just a predecessor to a society we should all just prepare ourselves for?

No, seriously.

Tell me about how you think the candidates care about you.

Even the Democrats.

Tell me how you think they connect with you and how you think they have your interests in mind.

Then do yourself and the country a favor.

Wake up.

PresidentialBrands2008.com is a website designed to gauge the "brand equity" of the various presidential candidates.

They want to make sure that, to quote their report, that "the attributes candidates are marketing make a difference when it comes to the voters' purchasing decisions".

The candidates market "attributes" (like honesty, mother/fatherliness, personality) designed to make you vote.

Your vote is a purchasing decision, and they are adjusting the marketing accordingly. The election, like everything else in America, is a consumer-based decision, and therefore, inately run by money.

But don't take my word for it. Download the release of the report from the market research company directly yourself.

It's ultimately about making you buy. Except what's at stake here isn't an extra "$.99 off", it's your future, or at least the next four years of it.

Ultimately, for self-preservation, a person MUST vote for what they think the candidate will DO -- because anything you see on the screen ("oh he's so honest", "oh he's so real") has been designed and put there to make you have precisely that reaction.