Posts Tagged ‘families’
Interesting and positive tactics in community policing cut crime
Just part of cultural history – Kelpies – sculpture
A pioneering police division has cut serious violent crime by a record 20% by identifying and tackling specific “problem families” and helping to find jobs for young people in trouble.
Police in North Lanarkshire have identified the most prolific problem families in different council wards and used a combination of persuasion and compulsion to get young people into work, sport and training.
The new figures from the police division show there have been 90 fewer victims of serious assault in the past year – with estimated savings of £2 million for the police and NHS…
Divisional Commander Chief Superintendent Graham Cairns said: “We know that a small number of people are responsible for most of our crime.
“By mapping out diversionary activities and connecting kids into ongoing activities that interest them we have reduced youth disorder by 43% in the last two years and that is massive. We cut serious assaults by 20% last year and they are down a further 14% so far this financial year…overall violence has been cut by 22% and that includes murder and attempted murder.
“We ran a Pathfinder initiative for kids who are emerging on our radar and we work with them over consecutive months before going on an outward-bound weekend with them.
“They get to know the cops and we get to know them, but they also get to break down barriers with the other local kids whom they perhaps saw as a threat…As an extension of this we have now had meetings with employability agencies and are trying to connect those kids into training for employment.
“Some kids come from families with maybe three generations of worklessness and if we are to break that cycle then we have to be proactive in doing it.
Canada debating whether “honor killings” require special laws
Flowers by the canal where the bodies of the Shafia sisters and their mother were found
Few phrases in the popular discourse are as contentious as “honour killing,” but the Shafia trial, currently taking place in Kingston, Ont., is forcing Canadians to once again grapple with this controversial issue.
Mohammad Shafia, his wife, Tooba Yahya, and their son Hamed stand accused of killing four female family members.
In 2009, teen sisters Sahar, Zainab and Geeti Shafia, along with Mohammed Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, were found dead in a submerged car in the Rideau Canal. The Crown alleges the four women were killed because Sahar and Zainab Shafia were thought to have dishonoured the family by having boyfriends and living a modern lifestyle…
In a wiretapped conversation between Mohammed Shafia and his wife and son after the bodies were discovered, Shafia revealed his anger at seeing suggestive cellphone photos of his two eldest daughters: “Curse God on both of them. Is that what a daughter should be? Would a daughter be such a whore?”
Though often linked to sexual issues such as adultery and premarital sex, the perceived “offences” that have prompted honour killings have ccome to include a woman’s push for independence…There are documented cases of men being killed for ruining a family’s reputation, but the vast majority of the victims are female.
To some observers, honour killings confuse the issue of domestic abuse with religious connotations. For others, it’s an important designation of a cultural phenomenon distinct from domestic violence…
Obama must reverse policy on no condolence letters for suicides – UPDATED
Chancellor Keesling coming home from Iraq
A bipartisan group of senators is asking President Barack Obama to change the current “insensitive” policy of not sending condolence letters to families of service members who commit suicide.
A letter signed by 11 senators — 10 Democrats and one Republican — urges the president to “take immediate steps to reverse the long-standing policy of withholding presidential letters of condolence” to families of troops who killed themselves.
The policy, which goes back several presidents, has been the subject of protest by military families. CNN first reported in 2009 about the family of Spc. Chancellor Keesling, who killed himself while serving in Iraq.
The family set up a wall to pay tribute to Keesling in their Indiana home. Along with his uniform and the flag from his burial service, a space was left for the expected condolence letter from the commander in chief. It never arrived.
Upset when they learned a suicide did not merit a letter from the president, Keesling’s father, Gregg, wrote to the president and the Army chief of staff requesting the policy be changed.
At the time, a White House spokesman said the administration was reviewing the “inherited” policy.
Keesling has argued that his son’s suicide was a result of what he was exposed to during war and deserves to be considered caused by battle. The letter never arrived.
The letter to the president this week seeks again to reverse the policy. The senators note that the Pentagon has worked hard to try to eliminate the stigma of mental health injuries and to lower the suicide rate…
“Unfortunately, perpetuating a policy that denies condolence letters to families of service members who die by suicide only serves to reinforce this stigma by overshadowing the contributions of an individual’s life with the unfortunate nature of his or her death,” the letter says. “It is simply unacceptable for the United States to be sending the message to these families that somehow their loved ones’ sacrifices are less important.”
It doesn’t seem to matter if our leader in the White House is a compassionate conservative or a compassionate liberal – there hasn’t been anyone in that office with common sense or compassion enough to care about the families of someone whose death took place while toiling for this nation as a member of the American military.
Last time I experienced the death by suicide of someone I worked with it was defined by a construction job – and the dude who walked away from life was the foreman. We had in fact discussed the broader concept of suicide and when someone might feel it an appropriate alternative to carrying on. The point remains that – after his death – there wasn’t a worker on that job who didn’t participate in some manner of condolences to friends and family for their loss.
It takes some kind of barbaric reasoning to inflict further loss upon those who were close to someone who felt they needed to take their life.
UPDATE: We won that one. Obama changed administration policy, today – 6 July 2011.
Insurer faces criminal probe for unpaid death benefits for Iraqis
American soldier [L], Iraqi translator [R] = same risks
An administrative law judge has referred a U.S. insurance company for criminal investigation after the firm failed to pay benefits to survivors of nine Iraqi translators killed while working for the American government.
Under a federally funded program, Chicago-based CNA Financial Corp. provides insurance coverage to contractors killed or injured while working overseas for the U.S. The slain translators were helping to train Iraqi police recruits.
CNA withheld information from the federal government and avoided making payments to the families who lost relatives in a 2006 attack, according to court files and interviews. One widow was unable to keep up the payments and lost her home after her son and other translators were ambushed by insurgents in the southern city of Basra, one of her attorneys said.
In a ruling last week, administrative law Judge Daniel Solomon ordered CNA to begin making payments to the families. In an unusual move highlighting the government’s concern over potential fraud, the judge also told the Labor Department, which oversees the program, to investigate whether the insurance carrier should face criminal charges. A Labor Department spokesman said the agency would “fully investigate” the allegations to determine whether to ask the Justice Department to prosecute the case…
Attorneys for the families said they believed that CNA withheld documents to avoid making payments.
“These were people who helped the U.S. in Iraq,” said Agnieszka Fryszman, an attorney for the families. “Their families were kicked to the curb when they were most in need of help.”
It will take a decade or so to complete all the revelations of corruption and war profiteering by the corporations invited into Bush’s war.
Parents, don’t dress your girls like tramps!
I saw someone at the airport the other day who really caught my eye.
Her beautiful, long blond hair was braided back a la Bo Derek in the movie “10″ (or for the younger set, Christina Aguilera during her “Xtina” phase). Her lips were pink and shiny from the gloss, and her earrings dangled playfully from her lobes.
You can tell she had been vacationing somewhere warm, because you could see her deep tan around her midriff thanks to the halter top and the tight sweatpants that rested just a little low on her waist. The icing on the cake? The word “Juicy” was written on her backside.
Yeah, that 8-year-old girl was something to see alright. … I hope her parents are proud. Their daughter was the sexiest girl in the terminal, and she’s not even in middle school yet.
Abercrombie & Fitch came under fire this spring for introducing the “Ashley,” a push-up bra for girls who normally are too young to have anything to push up. Originally it was marketed for girls as young as 7, but after public outcry, it raised its intended audience to the wise old age of 12. I wonder how do people initiate a conversation in the office about the undeveloped chest of elementary school girls without someone nearby thinking they’re pedophiles?
What kind of PowerPoint presentation was shown to the Abercrombie executives that persuaded them to green light such a product?
That there was a demand to make little girls hot?
Gen. McChrystal to lead Obama program for military families
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who was relieved of command in Afghanistan after a magazine profile quoted his subordinates as disparaging senior civilian leaders, has been invited back to public service by the Obama administration to help oversee a high-profile initiative in support of military families, White House officials said Sunday.
General McChrystal will lead the three-member advisory board for the initiative, called Joining Forces, whose aim is to encourage companies, schools, philanthropic and religious groups and local communities to recognize the unusual stress that is endured by families of active-duty personnel, reservists and veterans, and to strive to meet their needs.
The appointment of General McChrystal, who commanded elite Special Operations units before taking over the mission in Afghanistan, can be seen as an effort to mend any perception of a civilian-military breach following his forced retirement.
Recognizing as well – perhaps – that a lot of folks here in the States felt the criticisms were legit.
More broadly, the new program is an acknowledgment by the administration that while the United States has been described as “a nation at war,” the burden of combat is carried by less than 1 percent of the population. The military has been fighting for almost a decade — since a month after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — the longest sustained era of conflict in the nation’s history. And unlike previous wars, these have been carried out by an all-volunteer force…
General McChrystal, in a telephone interview on Sunday, noted that a decade of combat carried out by a relatively small military force “has required a lot of sacrifice by families.”
“This program will be a chance to focus people’s attention on ways they can help, and on the importance of helping, and provide opportunities for people to find practical things to do to support military families,” he said…
Since leaving the military, he has been teaching at Yale University and making the rounds on the lecture circuit. He said Sunday that the Obama administration’s invitation to return to public service should be seen as proof to those in uniform, and to the American public, that there were no hard feelings on either side of the civilian-military divide.
Poisonally, I think one of the triggers that presaged this decision by the Obama White House was Stan McChrystal’s recent appearance at the TED conference. His talk about leadership certainly conveyed to me a growth in understanding about the separation of responsibilities between civilian and military divisions in our government.
Certainly sharper than any understanding among most in Congress.
Lancet study says secondhand smoke kills 600,000
Second-hand tobacco smoke kills upwards of 600,000 people every year, nearly a third of them children, according to a global assessment in The Lancet, a British medical journal.
The findings, released on Friday in the first ever global study, indicate that unlike “lifestyle” diseases, which stem largely from individual choice, the victims of passive smoking pay the ultimate price for the health-wrecking behaviour of others, especially family members.
Among non-smokers worldwide, 40 per cent of children, 35 per cent of women and 33 percent of men were exposed to second-hand smoke in 2004, the most recent year for which data was available across the 192 countries examined.
In addition to 5.1 million deaths caused by active smoking, the final death toll from tobacco for 2004 was more than 5.7 million people, the study concluded.
Nearly half of the passive-smoking deaths occurred in women, with the rest divided almost equally between children and men, according to the study.
RTFA.
Smokers could care less what happens to people around them. Callous, addictive behavior is the norm.
Even posting an article like this means I have to crank up the software that removes comment spam. The tobacco industry is only matched by the gun industry when it comes to trying to squash dissent and criticism.
Catholics weigh significance of Pope’s condom flip-flop
The Catholic Church is in a state of some confusion over reports that Pope Benedict XVI has overturned a long-standing church ban on condoms by saying that their use is acceptable in exceptional circumstances.
But it is not clear what those circumstances are. It was widely reported yesterday that the Pope has decreed condoms may be used against Aids, which would be a remarkable U-turn in the history of Catholicism. The church’s hardline stance on that has for years been heavily criticised. But some commentators suggest that the Pope seems only to be saying that the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV infections is only permissible under church teaching when they are being used by gay men…
In a series of interviews the Pope gave earlier this year he gives the example of the use of condoms by male prostitutes as “a first step towards moralisation”.
The problem is that the traditional Catholic disapproval of condoms is rooted in a long-standing teaching that contraception is not acceptable because it means that sexual acts are not “open to the transmission of life” – a law which most Western Catholics, of course, ignore. But since sex between men is not open to the production of children, the use of a condom there would clearly be only for the prevention of disease.
The key question is whether the Pope is also saying that for heterosexual couples the prevention of disease should now have primacy over the ban on contraception. That would indeed herald the start of a sea change in the church’s attitude. So far, the Pope is sending mixed messages…
The message wasn’t mixed when my family left the Catholic Church.
It was early days in WW2, most of the men in my father’s family were preparing to leave for war. The patriarch of our family, my grandfather, died suddenly of a heart attack. The sons and daughters and their spouses were gathered together at St. Charles Church in the East End of the factory town where we lived in the southern reach of industrial New England.
The priest walked down the line of eight brothers and sisters, all married but one. He questioned each about the number of children in each family and then cut loose, castigating all for not being the sort of True Catholic their father had been. They all had obviously been practicing some level of birth control. None had more than two children.
After the funeral, my father stepped forward to the priest and speaking on behalf of a united family he told him he could stick his church where the sun don’t shine. And they all walked out of a church that had not the least perception of human needs, the slightest concept of aiding progress in life for its parishioners.
Kids of lesbians have fewer behavioral problems
A nearly 25-year study concluded that children raised in lesbian households were psychologically well-adjusted and had fewer behavioral problems than their peers.
The study, published…in the journal Pediatrics, followed 78 lesbian couples who conceived through sperm donations and assessed their children’s well-being through a series of questionnaires and interviews…
The answers were coded into a computer and then analyzed. This data was compared with data from children of nonlesbian families. The results surprised Dr. Nanette Gartrell.
“I would have anticipated the kids would be doing as well as the normative sample,” she said. “I didn’t expect better.”
Children from lesbian families rated higher in social, academic and total competence. They also showed lower rates in social, rule-breaking, aggressive problem behavior.
The involvement of mothers may be a contributing factor, in addition to the fact that the pregnancies were planned, Gartrell said.
The children “didn’t arrive by accident,” she said. “The mothers were older… they were waiting for an opportunity to have children and age brings maturity and better parenting.”
This also could have occurred because “growing up in households with less power assertion and more parental involvement has been shown to be associated with healthier psychological adjustment,” Gartrell wrote in the study…
“This study shows that the 17-year-old adolescents who have been reared by lesbian families are psychologically happy and high functioning,” said Gartrell, a Williams distinguished scholar at the UCLA School of Law. Restrictions of child custody and reproductive technologies based on sexual orientation are not justified, she said.
CNN’s article covers its buns by dragging in bible-based moralists and a few others who have an axe to grind whenever science and reason provide positive information and analysis. That – to me – is part of the silliness that rules American politics.
One of the main antagonists says the results of this study…”just defies common sense and reality.”
The fact is that so-called common sense has nothing to do with verifiable, reproducible, scientific peer-reviewed evaluation. “Common sense” to the superstitious – means superstition rules — and science and reality is ignored. Ideological hogwash.
Now that spadework has turned up surprising results – bona fide scientists will lead the way to discovering why and how the differences exist.
Drop a computer on your head, lately?
Home computer-related injuries have increased more than sevenfold, with children hurt most often, data reveal.
Over 78,000 patients were treated for such injuries in US hospitals between 1994 and 2006, and 93% of the trips, bumps and falls occurred in the home.
Over the 13-year study period the injury rate increased by 732%, which is more than double the increase in household computer ownership.
Children under five had the highest injury rate, mainly due to falls after tripping over cables or head injuries from falling monitors.
Similarly, in the UK computer-related accidents in the home sharply increased from around 800 in 1995 to more than 1,800 in 1999 and 2,100 in 2002 – the latest figures available.
A third of the incidents in 2002 involved a child under the age of 15, according to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (Rospa).
Although most result in minor bumps and bruises, some injuries can be more serious. One case in 1998 involved a six-year-old boy who was burned by a fire caused by spilling a drink on a computer.
So, is the problem caused by these critters being purchased and set-up by consumers – who don’t have a clue about safety? Or are the children of the Western World simply becoming klutzier?
I think it’s the former. After all, we’re talking about people who try to pick up lawnmowers to trim the hedge.
