Eideard

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…

Read the rest of this entry »

Three U.S. citizens traveling to spend the holidays with their relatives in Mexico were among those killed in a spree of shooting attacks on buses in northern Mexico…A group of five gunmen attacked three buses in Mexico’s Gulf coast state of Veracruz on Thursday, killing a total of seven passengers in what authorities said appeared to be a violent robbery spree.

The Americans killed were a mother and her two daughters who were returning to visit relatives in the region, known as the Huasteca, said an official in the neighboring state of Hidalgo, where the mother was born.

Hidalgo state regional assistant secretary Jorge Rocha identified the dead U.S. mother as Maria Sanchez Hernandez, 39, of Fort Worth, Texas, and the daughters as Karla, 19, and Cristina, 13. Rocha said all three held dual U.S.-Mexican citizenship. A 14-year-old Mexican nephew traveling with the three was also killed…

While funeral plans were unclear, Rocha said Sanchez Hernandez’s mother wants her daughter to be buried in Mexico.

Three other Mexican citizens were killed in the Thursday attacks on the three buses. The five gunmen who allegedly carried out the attacks were later killed by soldiers.

Earlier in their spree, the gunmen shot to death three people and killed a fourth with grenade in the nearby town of El Higo, Veracruz…

The US consulate urged Americans to “exercise caution” when traveling in Veracruz, and “avoid intercity road travel at night.”

As I have advised my friends and relatives – stay the heck out of Mexico!

A Port St. Lucie woman remained in the St. Lucie County jail Sunday after sheriff’s deputies say she placed drugs and used syringes under her baby’s daughter’s dress to avoid being searched by a female St. Lucie County Sheriff’s deputy.

Deanna Marie Angelico, 31, of the 800 block of Southeast Sweetbay Avenue, was charged with felony child neglect without great harm, felony drug possession and misdemeanor possession of drug equipment.

According to arrest reports, she and Michael G. Angelico, 23, were in a vehicle stopped by deputies in the 800 block of Prima Vista Boulevard after witnesses reported seeing two people shooting up drugs.

Michael Angelico…was charged with felony drug possession and misdemeanor possession of drug equipment. He was released Sunday on $5,500 bond; Deanna Angelico was held in lieu of $8,000 bond.

There probably was a word like “scumbag” used even in pre-biblical times for the behavior of people who enrolled in the addict’s lifestyle.

An 18-month-old Cambodian boy who has suckled milk directly from a cow daily for more than a month is in fine health, the child’s grandfather said.

The boy, Tha Sophat, made international headlines after his grandfather revealed he had been feeding himself directly from a cow since July when a storm destroyed his home and his parents left for Thailand to find work.

After he stopped breast-feeding from his mother, the boy became ill, said the 46-year-old grandfather.

The boy watched a calf nurse from its mother, and began to do the same thing, feeding directly from the cow each day, Um Oeung added. When the grandfather pulled him away, the boy cried, so he let him continue, Um Oeung told Reuters.

Neighbors and local officials in the village of Pheas in Siem Reap province, about 315 km from the capital Phnom Penh, say they are not happy about the nursing.

“They blame me and have told me not to allow him to suckle from the cow anymore. They say the boy will be ashamed when he grows up and that he will be naughty,” he said on Sunday…

“His health is fine, he is strong and he doesn’t have diarrhea,” said Um Oeung.

He’s ahead of life for so many wee’uns in Southeast Asia. Surely looks like the cow doesn’t mind.

It was the deathbed request from the mother of a longtime fugitive that finally led the FBI to William Walter Asher III.

For 36 years, Asher had been on the run — ever since he escaped from a prison camp in 1975 rather than serve time for a deadly robbery.

But last week, federal agents caught up to him. He had changed his name, worked for a trucking company and lived with a woman who had no idea about his criminal past…

For years, it seemed that the FBI would never nab Asher.
In 1966, he and three accomplices robbed a San Francisco bar, shooting and then beating the bartender to death, authorities said.

Asher was 20 at the time…He was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The file would have closed there. But eight years into his sentence, Asher escaped from a prison in El Dorado County, California — aided by a female accomplice…

In 2005, shortly before she died, Asher’s mother asked relatives to get in touch with her son. “She asked various family members to assist her in using the ‘secret’ number to call ‘Billy,’” the FBI said. Agents had been tipped off about the conversation by a source.

Armed with that information, agents scoured phone records of people who they believed may have helped fulfill the mother’s request.

They found two phone calls made to a home in Salida, California, to a man named Garry Donald Webb. The calls had been made two days before the mother died…

Authorities placed the home under surveillance. They also kept a watch on a trucking business where he was said to work.

On Friday, agents saw Asher leaving the home and confronted him.

“After some initial discussion Asher admitted his true identity,” the FBI said.

Which illustrates more than anything else is that “unidentified sources” – someone who expected payment and got it – is still one of the most important constituents of modern police work.

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.

Security officers at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport confiscated a jar of baby food and a juice box when they tested positive for trace amounts of explosives, officials said.

“It just didn’t clear,” said Transportation Security Administration spokesman Luis Casanova. “We tried to clear it because we wanted to give the baby food back to the mom, but it wouldn’t clear. The only alternative was to hold it…”

“She was understandably upset,” Casanova said.

He said the food and drink were pre-packaged and did not appear to be tampered with, so it appeared the alert was a false positive…

The woman and her baby went on to their flight, he said. The TSA threw away the food and juice.

Apparently, TSA has the authority to toss materials into the trash that test as dangerous – but, not return them to the mother and infant transporting the terrorist commodities. Am I the only one who sees a bit of a contradiction here?

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.

Safe Haven logo

A 27-year-old mother surrendered her baby girl to firefighters in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve…

She told firefighters at Fire Station 46 that the newborn was just 6 hours old. The firefighters accepted the girl, wrapping her in a blanket. She was healthy and did not appear to have been neglected or abused.

Firefighters named the newborn Noel, in honor of the Christmas holiday, said Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Erik Scott.

“We are happy to state that our last report was that the infant was very healthy, and we are moved that this potentially tragic incident had a pleasant outcome,” he said. “There was a sense of relief…”

The infant was taken to an area hospital, Scott said, and would be placed in protective custody.

In California, a parent or legal guardian can surrender a newborn at fire stations and hospital emergency rooms with no fear of arrest. The law is meant to protect infants from being hurt, neglected or killed.

Common sense prevails. Once in a while.