XIAM007 - Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World: 08/10/11

Wednesday, 10 August 2011

Dolce & Gabbana 'killer jeans' - calls for fashion houses to stop using sandblasting, for artificially worn look -

Three of Italy's best-known fashion houses are being accused of refusing to stop selling "killer jeans" that threaten the lives of workers in the poor countries where they are produced.

The Clean Clothes Campaign began pressing in February for leading fashion manufacturers and retailers to ban sandblasting, a technique for producing denim garments with an artificially worn look. The large amounts of silica dust produced can lead to silicosis, a potentially lethal pulmonary disease.

The process was banned in Turkey in 2009 after evidence was produced to show that 46 former sandblasting operators had contracted silicosis.

Almost 34,000 people have put their names to a petition drafted by the Clean Clothes Campaign and made available for endorsement on the website Change.org. The campaign's Italian spokeswoman, Deborah Lucchetti, said a number of well-known designers, manufacturers and retailers had already eliminated sandblasted denim clothing from their collections. They included including Levi's, H&M and C&A.

In Italy both Gucci and Versace had responded favourably. Gucci in particular was "responsible and advanced ... mature."

But Giorgio Armani, Roberto Cavalli and Dolce & Gabbana had not budged, Lucchetti said. "In these seven months, they are the only companies that have remained totally indifferent."

The campaign has singled out Dolce & Gabbana for special attention. Lucchetti said the Clean Clothes Campaign made a practice of notifying companies before they were targeted.

"Dolce & Gabbana telephoned me to say thanks for the information and that it did not interest them. I was pretty surprised. This is a serious issue. People have died because of sandblasting," she said.

Man Arrested for Squeezing Pimples in McDONALDS... -

Definitely not lovin’ it.

A man accused of disgusting McDonald’s patrons by popping his pimples was under arrest after customer complaints led to a brief chase by officers.

It started Monday when customers of the McDonald’s located at 2404 Santa Barbara Blvd. alerted authorities to a man standing outside the restaurant for about 10 minutes squeezing away at the acne on his back. Events that followed with police ended in a brief chase and the arrest of the man, who allegedly gave a false name when confronted about the complaints.

Rainbow Connection? Online Push Under Way for Bert and Ernie to Get Married on 'Sesame Street' -

An online push is under way to pressure the producers of "Sesame Street" into having Bert and Ernie get married.
More than 900 people have signed a petition about the pair of platonic puppets on Change.org as of early Wednesday.
"We are not asking that Sesame Street do anything crude or disrespectful," the petition reads. "It can be done in a tasteful way. Let us teach tolerance of those that are different."
The sexuality of Bert and Ernie -- perhaps the kid show's most popular characters -- has long been debated since the roommates sleep in the same room and constantly bicker.
The petition also asks that "Sesame Street" producers consider adding a transgender character to the show, which premiered in 1969 on Public Broadcasting Service.
The online campaign also has a companion Facebook page that has attracted as least 350 supporters as of Wednesday.
"Part of me is laughing and the other is crying," one posting read.
Another read: "Is Elton John going to play at the wedding?"
In a statement to FoxNews.com, the non-profit Sesame Workshop said the pair are simply "best friends."
"They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves," the statement read.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/08/10/petition-underway-for-bert-and-ernie-to-get-married-on-sesame-street/?test=latestnews

Most Americans say U.S. on wrong track - and nearly half believing the worst is yet to come -

Economic fears are weighing heavily on Americans, with a large majority saying the United States is on the wrong track and nearly half believing the worst is yet to come, a Reuters/Ipsos poll said on Wednesday.

The poll reflected growing anxiety about the economy and frustration with Washington after a narrowly averted government default last week, a credit rating downgrade by Standard & Poor's, a stock market dive and a stubbornly high 9.1 percent jobless rate.

President Barack Obama came out bruised but relatively intact from the brutal, weeks-long debt debate. His approval rating dropped to 45 percent from 49 percent from a month ago, according to the poll conducted from Thursday to Monday.

But negative views on the economy are worrisome signs as he looks ahead to his 2012 re-election bid.

The poll found 73 percent of Americans believe the United States is "off on the wrong track," and just one in five, 21 percent, think the country is headed in the right direction.

The level of discontent is the highest since Reuters/Ipsos began polling American public opinion in February 2009.

To review the poll results, go to here

Bat Terrorizes Passengers on Airplane - Hero passenger trapped it in restroom -

A bat got loose on an Atlanta-bound flight, forcing horrified passengers to duck for cover.

The flying mammal appeared about 15 minutes after Delta flight 5121, operated by Atlantic Southeast Airlines, took off from Madison, Wis., on Friday, and cruised around the cabin above passengers' heads.

“The captain called the control tower to say the plane was returning to the airport to remove a winged animal,” said Brent McHenry, spokesperson for the Dane County Regional Airport in Madison.

A passenger near the rear of the plane shooed the bat into the restroom and shut the door, to the cheers of fellow riders, according to the Wisconsin State Journal. But McHenry said that by the time the plane landed and all passengers got off, it seemed to have vanished. As airport maintenance staff searched the plane, however, a bat flew out and into the terminal, he said. From there, workers coaxed it out to freedom.

“Our terminal has high ceilings, and it’s not unusual to have a bird flying around inside,” said McHenry. “But the bat created a bit of entertainment for our early morning passengers as maintenance crew members with a large net ushered it outside.”

After a delay of a few hours, passengers were able to re-board continue on to Atlanta.

Jarek Beem, spokesperson for Atlantic Southeast Airlines, said the airline was “confident in the maintenance search and that the animal was no longer on the aircraft at the time of the next departure.”

Korean Stock Broker Leaps to Death Amid Market Plunge -

A South Korean stock broker jumped to his death from a high-rise office amid worldwide market turmoil.

The 48-year-old broker, identified only as "Seo," sent text messages to colleagues expressing regret over severe losses, just minutes before leaping to his death Wednesday in the city of Daegu, according to Chief investigator Lee Kang-ho.

Lee said Seo's text messages included an apology to his clients. The messages said prices of the stocks owned by his clients nosedived and he felt sorry, a Daegu police spokesman told AFP. No separate suicide note was found.

Police said CCTV footage showed the man coming out of an elevator alone on the 18th floor of the building before he was found dead on the ground.

South Korean stocks have been especially volatile amid global financial turmoil sparked by fears the U.S. and European economies could be headed for recession.

Officers in California scour online dating ads looking for possible human trafficking victims, and then arrange a date -

Londoners defend themselves from rioters - the police did not do anything so we chased them off ourselves -

The London lockdown seems to have worked. After three nights of escalating rioting across the city, last night was quiet. Instead, the looting and arson swept across England's provincial cities from Nottingham to Gloucester with Manchester seeing the worst of the violence.

It is unclear whether London was quiet because of the massive deployment of police — British Prime Minister David Cameron said yesterday there would be 16,000 on the streets — or because across the city stores shut early, windows were boarded up, and staff were sent home.

Maybe the rumor that the biggest selling items at hardware stores and online mail-order shops were crow bars and other hand-held heavy metal objects deterred looters. Shopkeepers were clearly preparing to defend their property.

It appears that's what saved the shops in my neighborhood, Stoke Newington, on Monday night. After the rioting started in Hackney central, it moved half a mile west to the shopping district of Dalston. The mob then swung north along Kingsland Road toward Stoke Newington High Street. It's a neighborhood of Turkish Kurdish exiles and almost all the restaurants and shops — including several gold and jewelry stores — are owned by members of this community. More than a few of the Kurds have had to deal with the Turkish Army so a couple of hundred rioters weren't going to deter them. Crow bars and kebab skewers in hand they faced down the mob.

One Kurdish shopkeeper, Yilmaz Karagoz, told the Guardian newspaper, "We came out of our shops but the police asked us to do nothing. But the police did not do anything so, as more came, we chased them off ourselves."

Police inaction, or ineffectual action, has been a big talking point in London the last 26 hours. Big questions hover over the Metropolitan Police's handling of these unprecedented events. People accept the logistics are hard enough. Police were faced with spontaneously combusting situations organized in the time it takes for kids with criminal mischief on their minds to text each other locations where the police seem not to be present.

“Naturist” challenges law banning public nudity - after he allegedly drove nude to an A&W fast-food outlet -

A breezy trip to the local drive-through has become a test of Canada’s 80-year-old law that makes it a crime to be naked in public.

Brian Coldin is charged in connection with a series of incidents dating back to 2008 and 2009, including one in which he allegedly drove nude to an A&W fast-food outlet near his rural Ontario hometown and reached into a non-existent back pocket for his wallet.

That incident and a similar encounter at a Tim Hortons coffee shop left staff “upset, embarrassed, shocked, shaken and uncomfortable," according to prosecutors.

Yes, but were they harmed? And was the impact of Coldin’s nakedness on members of the public more important than his freedom to express his “naturist” beliefs? Those are key among the questions raised by Coldin’s defense team, which includes Clayton Ruby, one of Canada’s foremost criminal and constitutional litigators.

Ruby and his team argue that section 174 of the Criminal Code banning public displays of nudity is an “historical oddity” that should be struck down in its entirety.

The law originates from a unique moment in Canadian history. It was adopted by Parliament in 1932, not as a response to the sexual mores of the time but as a direct attempt to control the strange and often violent antics of a religious sect known as the Sons of Freedom.

A radical offshoot of the Doukobours — Russian Christians who emigrated to western Canada to escape tsarist persecution — the Sons of Freedom objected to government regulation and, in particular, compulsory education for their children.

In protest, entire communities would parade in the nude, events often accompanied by acts of arson and violent confrontations with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Surprise! Underwater volcano has erupted - off the coast of Oregon spewing forth layer of lava more than 12 feet thick -

An undersea volcano has erupted off the coast of Oregon, spewing forth a layer of lava more than 12 feet thick in some places, and opening up deep vents that belch forth a cloudy stew of hot water and microbes from deep inside the Earth.
Scientists uncovered evidence of the early April eruption on a routine expedition in late July to the Axial Seamount, an underwater volcano that stands 250 miles off the coast of Oregon.
The discovery came as a surprise, as researchers attempted to recover instruments they'd left behind to monitor the peak a year earlier. When the researchers hefted a seafaring robotic vehicle overboard to fetch the instruments, the feed from the onboard camera sent back images of an alien seafloor landscape.
"At first we were really confused, and thought we were in the wrong place," said Bill Chadwick, a geologist with Oregon State University. "Finally we figured out we were in the right place but the whole seafloor had changed, and that's why we couldn't recognize anything. All of a sudden it hit us that, wow, there had been an eruption. So it was very exciting."

In addition to producing hardened lakes of blobby lava, in places more than a mile across, the eruption changed the architecture of the region's seafloor hot springs.
"There are more vents, they're higher temperature, and there are microbes living in them that are usually deep in the crust that come up to the surface in these events," Chadwick told OurAmazingPlanet.

Read more -
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44080264/ns/technology_and_science-science/

New York City Will Mandate Sex Education - will be required to take lessons on topics like how to use a condom -

For the first time in nearly two decades, students in New York City’s public middle and high schools will be required to take sex-education classes beginning this school year, using a curriculum that includes lessons on how to use a condom and the appropriate age for sexual activity.

The new mandate is part of a broader strategy the Bloomberg administration announced last week to improve the lives of black and Latino teenagers. According to city statistics, those teenagers are far more likely than their white counterparts to have unplanned pregnancies and contract sexually transmitted diseases.

“It’s obviously something that applies to all boys and all girls,” said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services. “But when we look at the biggest disadvantages that kids in our city face, it is blacks and Latinos that are most affected by the consequences of early sexual behavior and unprotected sex.”

The change will bring a measure of cohesion to a patchwork system of programs largely chosen by school principals.

It will also bring to New York the roiling national debate about what, exactly, schools should teach students about sex.

Nationwide, one in four teenagers between 2006 and 2008 learned about abstinence without receiving any instruction in schools about contraceptive methods, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive health. As of January, 20 states and the District of Columbia mandated sex and H.I.V. education in schools. An additional 12 states, New York included, required H.I.V. education only, according to a policy paper published by the institute.