Eideard

 
Kid video of the year. Tea Party/GOP Presidential candidate and national-class bigot Michele Bachmann doing her money-making book tour in South Caroline falls into an exchange – and a reminder from this8-year-old child, that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being gay.

Rock on, Elijah!

An Australian woman is suing the nation’s top four banks for their alleged role in laundering money from her teenage son’s $200,000 eBay scam that afforded him a $6,000-a-day playboy lifestyle.

Australian media reported that in 2007, the then 14 year old boy was making so much money selling non-existent laptops, mobile phones and watches on eBay he could afford to book a $4300-a-night penthouses overlooking Sydney Harbour, fly friends interstate for lavish parties and hire limousines to take him to the beach…

Reports said she was seeking an apology from the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, Westpac and NAB for ”unconscionable conduct” after allegedly allowing her son to open numerous bank accounts with debit cards “without reasonable scrutiny”.

She claims the banks ignored her or refused to discuss the matter for privacy reasons when she warned them they had issued accounts that were being used by a minor to bank illegal funds, reports said.

”He was an intelligent boy who worked out how to cheat the system and play it for all it was worth,” she told Australia’s Sun Herald newspaper. ”As his parent and legal guardian, I begged the banks to stop giving him accounts and debit cards but each time I got nowhere because of the Privacy Act…”

Police eventually arrested the boy at school after many of the frauds were linked to an IP address attached to a classroom computer.

Reports said that during the past four years, she had reluctantly handed her son to the police 15 times.

Sounds like banks in Oz would have been happy to help out Bernie Madoff given half a chance.

Go for it, Mom. Make them own up for their scandalous lack of standards.

Infant moose, born on the front lawn, in downtown Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada

Thanks, Cinaedh

An East Naples man is accused of knocking his mother unconscious after she became angry with him for practicing martial arts in the house.

Cory William Morrel, 27, of the 7800 block of Regal Heron Circle, was arrested Friday by Collier County sheriff’s deputies at home.

According to a Sheriff’s Office report, deputies were dispatched to Morrel’s home in reference to a woman who was kicked in the head…

Morrel told deputies that while practicing martial arts in the living room, he accidentally kicked a wall causing a scuff mark. He said his mother became angry with him and began yelling profanity at him.

It is unclear what happened next due to redacted information regarding Morrel kicking his mother in the head. However, Morrel said he then called 911 when she became unconscious.

She was transported to an NCH hospital for further medical treatment.

Morrel faces a charge of domestic battery.

Another story of a loving son.

An Australian woman has been accused of child cruelty after she forced her young son to sit in public wearing a sign that read: “Do not trust me. I will steal from you as I am a thief.”

The boy, believed to be aged 10, was forced to wear the sign and a pair of Shrek ears in a busy park in the northern Queensland town of Townsville while his family ate lunch nearby.

The treatment of the child prompted outrage among other families in the park, who accused the woman of publicly humiliating him.

Diane Mayers was so disturbed that she called the child safety hotline. “The boy just kept his head down and was staring at the ground,” she told the Townsville Bulletin. “The parents had gone to all the trouble of printing two copies of the sign – one for the back and one for the front – and laminating them. A lot of work had gone in to it.

“A lot of people walked past and were laughing at him, including boys who would have been his age…”

However, the boy’s mother, who has not been named, has defended her actions, saying they were a last resort intended to shame him into giving up stealing. “We’ve had a process over the last three years of him shoplifting and stealing whatever he can get his hands on,” she said.

“I have taken him to the police station, had the police officers take him around, shown him a paddy wagon [police van], shown him all the cells, shown him the process of being charged.”

Nothing had so far worked, she said..

I don’t know what to say. Not a lot of detail and I wonder if this sort of public embarrassment achieves anything this side of gratification for the parents.

Sooner after, she took him out of public school and sent him to the nearest Catholic school where he could be “properly” disciplined. I always wondered how he ended up.

With the next organized search for a 6-year-old Aurora boy not planned until after the holiday weekend, officials from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children are encouraging the public to stay vigilant.

The Virginia-based group has partnered with letter carriers and Wal-Mart stores to hang posters with photos of the boy, Timmothy Pitzen, especially around Aurora, Wisconsin Dells and Sterling, where police have determined he stopped with his mother, Amy Fry-Pitzen, before his disappearance.

Fry-Pitzen of Aurora committed suicide in a Rockford hotel sometime after checking in on May 13 and left a note saying her son was in the care of unnamed people, police said.

During a search on May 19, dozens of officers unsuccessfully checked out more than 25 sites in the Dixon area, about 100 miles west of Chicago. The next search will focus on an area around a cell phone tower near the small northwest Illinois town of Sterling, the last place to get a cell phone signal from Fry-Pitzen, Aurora police said…

“We’re trying to send a message that there is hope,” Ernie Allen said. “Our firm belief is that somebody out there knows something … and they’ll come forward.”

Timmothy is about 4 feet 2 inches tall, weighs about 70 pounds and has brown hair and brown eyes. Any one with information is asked to call 630-256-5500 or 911.

Afghanistan is the worst place in the world to be a mother and Norway is the best…

“Afghanistan has the highest lifetime risk of maternal mortality and the lowest female life expectancy in the world,” putting it at the bottom of the the Mothers’ Index, which has been compiled for the past 12 years by the nonprofit group Save the Children.

In Afghanistan and the nine other countries at the bottom of the index, an average of one in six kids dies before age five and one in three suffers from malnutrition, the report says.

Nearly half the population in the worst countries to raise kids lacks access to clean water, and only four girls for every five boys are enrolled in primary school.

Five Nordic nations and two in the southern hemisphere made up the top seven countries for mothers.

They were, in order, Norway, Australia, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand and Finland.

Three European nations — Belgium, the Netherlands and France — rounded out the top 10…

A gulf of differences, especially in health, separates top-ranked Norway from bottom-of-the-heap Afghanistan.
In Norway “skilled health personnel are present at virtually every birth,” greatly reducing the likelihood of the mother or baby dying, while in Afghanistan, only 14 percent of births are attended, the report says.

The average life expectancy for a Norwegian woman is 83 years; in Afghanistan, it is 45.

More than eight in 10 Norwegian women use a modern form of contraception, and only one in 175 lose a child before his or her fifth birthday.

In Afghanistan, meanwhile, less than one in six women use modern contraception, and one child in five dies before reaching the age of five.

“At this rate, every mother in Afghanistan is likely to suffer the loss of a child,” the report says.

RTFA to expand your understanding of what it means to be a mother – and where. To clarify for my American readers – an American child is twice as likely as a child in Finland, Greece, Iceland, Japan, Luxembourg, Norway, Slovenia, Singapore or Sweden to die before reaching age five.

You can get the whole report over here [.pdf].

Police found a woman fatally shot in her Miramar apartment Wednesday evening, after receiving a 911 call in which someone said the woman’s toddler son somehow pulled the trigger.

Officers were interviewing a man who may know what happened, said Tania Rues, Miramar police spokeswoman.

Police would not identify the shooting victim until family members were notified. They also would not say what type of gun was fired.

Neighbors said at about 7 p.m. they heard one gunshot in an apartment in the Ashlar complex in the 8200 block of Sherman Circle North. Several Miramar police officers were already in the apartment complex when the shot rang out, searching for a missing 6-year-old who was quickly found unharmed, witnesses said. When the shot was fired, officers ran to the victim’s apartment and kicked in the door, said Abel Hernandez, 19, who lives in an adjacent building in the complex.

“The police brought out a small boy wearing a striped shirt and shorts,” Hernandez said.

Rues said the child, who was not injured, did not appear to understand what had happened. Police were trying to locate family members who could take custody of the child.

Yup. Let’s keep all our guns handy for whenever someone needs one.

A tug boat lookout was on a cellphone call to his mother’s house when the barge it was ferrying collided with an anchored tour boat in the Delaware River last summer…

Two tourists died and 26 other passengers were injured in the July 7 collision between the barge and the tour boat near Philadelphia…

The accident occurred shortly after the tour boat, the DUKW 34, had dropped anchor to deal with a mechanical problem that caused smoked to pour out of the engine. Around 2:37 p.m., a barge propelled by the tug boat, the Caribbean Sea, collided with the tour boat, causing it to sink in 55 feet of water.

According to the report, the Caribbean Sea’s master was off duty and below deck. The mate was on navigation watch. The report states that, according to telephone records, the mate made a call to his mother’s house at 2:32 p.m. The call, according to the report, lasted until 2:38, one minute after the accident occurred.

The report also states that that between noon and the accident, when the mate was on navigation watch, he made 13 phone calls and answered six.

There should be some conclusion made about priorities and safety, I would think. eh?

Who says teenagers don’t listen to their parents?

Public health researchers recently published an intriguing report about the indoor tanning habits of college students, based on a survey of more than 200 female students at East Tennessee State University…

The researchers, Mary Kate Baker, a doctoral student, along with Joel James Hillhouse and Xuefeng Liu, wanted to find out two basic pieces of information. First, how old were the students when they had started indoor tanning? And second, who did they go with on their first visit to a tanning parlor?

Often, it turns out, it was their mothers.

Indoor tanning, it seems, has become in many families a mother-daughter bonding ritual, like shopping or going to the hairdresser…

What was interesting is that for the girls who were introduced to tanning by their mothers, the habit really took hold. College students whose mothers introduced them to indoor tanning were almost five times as likely as the others to be heavy tanners once they were in college. The heavy tanners used indoor tanning at least twice a month or more.

The ones who went with their mothers first also started around age 14, on average, two years earlier than the others, who started around age 16.

Skin doctors are worried about the link between indoor tanning and skin cancer. The World Health Organization has labeled indoor tanning a Class 1 carcinogen, the same class as tobacco. And some research suggests that indoor tanning may even be addictive.

Alas, information – in this instance – doesn’t stand up well against a culture that presumes white people darkening their skin makes them more attractive.