Only In America

[masun]

Wow, even teenagers have become so violent in the US! No wonder more and more countries are saying No to the American model.


Students facing misdemeanor charges in hazing incident

Friday, May 16, 2003 Posted: 4:38 PM EDT (2038 GMT)

http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2003/LAW/05/16/school.hazing/story.football.wfld.jpg

Amateur video recorded the hazing incident between Chicago-area high schoolers.

SKOKIE, Illinois (CNN) -- Prosecutors said Friday they are pressing charges against 15 Chicago-area high school students who were involved in a videotaped hazing incident that turned violent earlier this month.

Twelve teen girls and three teen boys will be charged with misdemeanor battery, which is punishable by up to 364 days in jail, said Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine.

Other punishments could include probation, supervision and a $2,000 fine. A judge will determine the sentences upon conviction, according to Devine.

All 15 teenagers are expected to turn themselves in Skokie, beginning Friday afternoon, Devine said. They will be given the opportunity to post bond, which will be $1,000 each.

The suspects were notified of the charges Thursday night, according to Devine.

The students' next court date is scheduled for June 11.

"During the outburst, six junior girls were injured in a high school rite of passage gone bad," Devine said. "One victim had 10 stitches in her head. There are possible concussions. And it simply is the kind of behavior that any community cannot tolerate and will not tolerate."

The charges were based on a combination of information from witnesses and images captured on videotape, he said.

"There could be more charges if information comes forward that shows that other individuals were attacking victims," Devine said.

He said that officials have decided not to press hazing charges so far because the law defines hazing as something that occurs when individuals are trying to get into a group and that didn't appear to be the case here.

The "powder puff" football game before the event turned violent is traditionally an initiation of junior girls into the senior class, but it is not something students have to go through to gain entry.

"If we have further information in our investigation that supports it, we have no reservation about bringing that or any other charge supported by the evidence," he said.

Information sought about alcohol
Investigators are trying to determine who provided the beer that teens are seen drinking on the video.

Devine said that those adults who purchased and provided alcohol to the teens could face misdemeanor charges.

"It is also necessary that residents and citizens come forward to provide information about who is responsible for providing the alcohol in this case," Devine said.

"This is a very critical part of what happened, and it is up to the community to decide whether it is going to cooperate with law enforcement officials to resolve this most important issue," he said.

Officials at Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook this week suspended 32 students for their roles in the event and announced plans to expel them. Several students have filed lawsuits over the district's actions.

Videos of the May 4 incident show teens hitting younger classmates and showering them with mud, feces and garbage.

[Scarper]

what a hopeless article, i have no idea what happened. anyone?

[Handy Harry]

It was just some initiaition thing that went too far.

It was on the news here...presumably because someone with a home video was able to capture somebody getting hit by a garbage can.

[masun]

Apparently NBC broke the news first. Here's some more info from the site:

http://www.nbc5.com/news/2189200/detail.html

According to the article, five junior girls were treated at hospitals after the incident.

What's so disturbing about what happened is that those involved were not some underprivileged black kids who grew up in a ghetto, but rather white teenager girls from well to do families. Isn't it alarming that even these girls can exhibit such violent behaviour?

[cheesebeast]

$2 uncashed win ticket on Funny Cide in the Kentucky Dderby, worth $15 at the tote reaches $578 on ebay - insane!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2730717489&category=429

Current bid US $578.00 Starting bid US $0.01
Quantity 1 # of bids 25 Bid history
Time left Auction has ended.
Location Kentucky Derby UNCASHED $2 Win Ticket!!!
Country/Region United States /Chicago

[cheesebeast]

Not sure if this is for real or not?

http://www.rent-a-negro.com/negrofaqs.html

Why rent-a-negro?
Why not buy?
As we all know, the purchase of African Americans was outlawed many years ago. As times have changed the need for black people in your life has changed but not diminished. The presence of black people in your life can advance business and social reputation. These days those who claim black friends and colleagues are on the cutting edge of social and political trends. As our country strives to incorporate the faces of African Americans, you have to keep up. rent-a-negro offers you the chance to capitalize on your connection with a black person. At any gathering our service can bring a freshness and tension that will keep things lively. This adds currency to your image and events. We all go out for ethnic food every once in a while, why not bring some new flavor to your home or office...for all your friends and colleagues to enjoy!

[imaufo]

He was a heel, so she gave it to him

June 10 2003


A stormy relationship ended up on a Brooklyn street in the early hours of Saturday when a 100kg woman sat on her ex-boyfriend's chest and clubbed him to death with her size 12 high heeled shoe, police said today.

Anna Rhinehart, 40, told authorities she attacked Roosevelt Bonds, 51, in self-defence after he punched her in the mouth, knocking out her two front teeth.

The struggle began at 3am on Saturday when Bonds saw Rhinehart at a restaurant with another man, police said.

"There was a dispute between them and the man was struck in the head and body with a blunt instrument," police spokeswoman Carolyn Chew said.

Rhinehart was charged with manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon.


"It was her shoe," Chew said.

Reuters

http://www.italianheels.com/images/ventaglio2.jpg

[imaufo]

Spank my butt and call me Marie.


Ok, I like "Frog" bashing as much as anyone, I only do it for fun - I'm harmless.

Ok, they have REALLY hideous beer and ugly looking cheese. I mock their tiny portioned and perfectly arranged entrees and a fixation on phallic shaped vegetables. I'm a really weak French basher, see? I don't really HURT anyone. Even make my Quebec friends laugh.

But I'm fed up.

All this dumping French wine down the gutters, and renaming french fries (which aren't french to begin with, geniuses). Can I say all that and say not buying french products is just STUPID?

You are just making our country look like a bunch of freaking yokels. Which we are. A bunch of ignorant, redneck, retarded butt scratchers. Thanks A LOT!

Oh and BTW, your refusal to buy French goods is HURTING American business owners who BOUGHT it to sell over here before all this started. They likely paid months ago.

You are screwing Americans, numbnut, not the French. The French are mocking you right now, can you hear them?

Call them names, fine. Say they stink, (they probably do), go nuts. Ask your store keeper to not order more of their goods, super.

I don't care if you're for the war or not. I'm trying to stay off the issue here I'm not sure where I am anyway, but I will still eat Boursin cheese thank you, you'll not steal that from me.

In fact, thanks to all you pulling this I may be able to score a killer deal at Jungle Jim's on it again. 8 for a $1 (versus 1 for $8 ) here I come! Smack my butt and call me Marie, I like the stuff!

I'm gonna BUY French cheese to support AMERICAN business owners so they won't get stuck throwing thier money in the garbage. Good cheese is a horrible thing to waste. I'll take yours.

http://www.parkplace.com/resources/cmsimages/live/uf_7071_Main_C2BB0602-BB56-44B0-9804-0B73267748AC.jpg

[imaufo]

New York's finest are having a fine old time

By Caroline Overington
June 10 2003


Almost since it was founded, the city of New York has nurtured a reputation as the kind of place where the most extreme behaviour is tolerated. No more.

These days, you can be fined for doing just about anything, and many people suspect that the $US4 billion ($6 billion) hole in the city's budget is to blame.

In May, a boy was fined for riding his bike through New York's streets, without keeping his feet on the pedals. That was followed by the case of the 86-year-old man, who was fined (on his birthday) for feeding crumbs to pigeons.

Then came the pregnant woman, who was fined for sitting on the subway steps, and the shop owner, from Manhattan, who received a $US400 ticket for having too many letters on the awning above his store.

These stories made the news, prompting other people to come forward to complain about their tickets.


So, New Yorkers have learned of the woman who was fined for "talking too loudly" to her neighbour, who lives in the flat next door. She told police she shouted "hello" because she didn't want to leave a pot on the stove unattended.

Then there was the man fined for sitting on a milk crate. He was photographed, holding up a ticket that actually said: "Unauthorised Use of a Milk Crate". And, just this weekend, there was a woman who was fined for sitting on the grass in Central Park. Police told her the area was "restricted" for the Puerto Rican National Day Parade - but it wasn't Puerto Rican National Day when she was fined and there were no signs to say she couldn't sit there.

What could all this mean? Critics say that New York's mayor, the billionaire Michael Bloomberg, has ordered police to fine people for every conceivable thing, because New York is broke.

Mr Bloomberg denies this. He says it costs more to issue a ticket than it does to collect the money. But that didn't stop the Los Angeles Times from sending a journalist to New York to produce a story under the headline Start Spreading the News, New York's Ticketing Today.

The New York Times put a similar story on page one.

"But there is no ticketing blitz," an exasperated Mr Bloomberg said in a radio interview.

"Police don't have quotas to fill," he stressed. "They have productivity goals."

So, how does Mr Bloomberg explain why a man was fined for sitting on a milk crate, outside his place of work?

"That was a rookie cop who was just doing his job," Mr Bloomberg said. "There is a law that says you cannot sit on a milk carton, or something along those lines."


This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/09/1055010934860.html

[Handy Harry]

Seabiscuit the movie trailer (http://www.universalpictures.com/asx/seabiscuit/seabiscuit1_300k_wmv.asx)


http://www.seabiscuitmovie.com/images/Splash-Page-5_02.jpg

trailer 2 (http://www.universalpictures.com/asx/seabiscuit/seabiscuil_trlr3_300k_wmv.asx)

[imaufo]

Onward the new Christian soldier

January 17, 2005

Evangelists who hold the Bible as literal truth are reshaping the face of modern Christianity, writes Paul Sheehan.

Hundreds of millions of people believe the Bible is the literal truth. God created the world in six days, 6000 years ago. Evolution is wrong. Soon these beliefs will be exhibited in a state-of-the-art, multimillion-dollar museum that portrays and honours the beliefs of creationists. It is called the Creation Museum.

Only in America, you might think. Yes, the first stage of the museum is nearing completion in northern Kentucky. Yet the vision and drive for the museum has come largely from an Australian, Ken Ham, a former high school teacher from Brisbane. Ham is president of Answers in Genesis, one of the largest evangelical congregations in the United States.

He is also a warrior. "It's a war, it's a real battle between world views," he says of the battle against secularism and for the hearts and minds of Christians. He describes the Answers in Genesis ministry as "a Christian apologetics ministry that equips the church to uphold the authority of the Bible from the very first verse".

There will be plenty of "apologetics" when the Creation Museum opens this year. It will be dominated by life-size dinosaurs and large movie screens depicting epics from the Old Testament. A planetarium will demonstrate how God made the Earth in six days. Inside a re-creation of Noah's Ark visitors will hear water lapping outside, and perhaps even people screaming. (That touch is still under consideration.)

Animated figures will re-create Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with a Tyrannosaurus rex pursuing them after their fall from grace. Dinosaurs feature prominently in the museum, and will form the visual centrepiece and a marketing key for children.

Readers may ask how a modern museum could depict dinosaurs and humans cohabiting the Earth when the fossil and geological records show dinosaurs and humans missed each other by about 60 million years. In response to such yawning contradictions, Ham advises people (in one of the many video clips available on the Answers in Genesis website) to offer this omnibus retort: "Were you there?"

Creation Museum will provide the Biblical interpretation of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs in a display known as "The Fate of the Dinosaurs". The room will shake and rumble as a dinosaur walks by. Visitors may even feel the creature's warm breath on their necks. A display showing ancient Babylon will feature the Tower of Babel. Another exhibit will lay responsibility for AIDS on homosexuals. Disease and famine will be portrayed as the byproducts of mankind's fall from grace. The climax of the exhibitions will be the life of Christ with a three-dimensional depiction of the crucifixion. A "Bible Authority Room" will warn visitors: "Everyone who rejects His history - including six-day creation and Noah's flood - is 'wilfully ignorant.' "

All this will cost at least $US20 million ($26 million), with room for expansion. Answers in Genesis is seeking to raise the funds by selling 20,000 charter memberships of the museum at $US1000 apiece. The museum's site has been chosen for its strategic location. It is six kilometres from an airline hub, Greater Cincinnati International Airport, and near Florence, Kentucky, headquarters of the Answers in Genesis worldwide ministry. As Ham explains, "One of the main reasons we moved there was because we are within one hour's flight of 69 per cent of America's population."

Sixty-nine per cent of America is a very big market: 200 million of America's 290 million people, including the entire American south. The potential market for the Creation Museum is huge. In a Gallup poll in 2003, 46 per cent of Americans described themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians. Opinion polls have shown that more Americans believe in creationism than evolution. The President, George Bush, has been careful not to criticise creationism.

Even the huge evangelical population in the US is dwarfed by the numbers of evangelical, born-again, fundamentalist and conservative Christians in Latin America, which has almost 500 million Christians, Africa 360 million, and Asia more than 300 million. Evangelism is the boom area of global Christianity. In America, polls show two-thirds of Americans favour teaching both creationism and evolution in schools.

Not many people in Australia paid much attention to Ham before he moved to the US from Queensland in 1987, along with his wife, Mally. They have five children. After completing a bachelor's degree in applied science (biology) and a diploma of education, Ken Ham taught science in Queensland high schools before committing full-time to creationism. His ministry's website describes the journey: "Over 20 years ago, Dr Carl Wieland, Ken Ham and others saw that the church in their own country, Australia, was struggling and often compromising its biblical integrity in the face of the ever-increasing attacks from those hostile to Christianity. They realised that most Christians were not equipped to provide answers to a doubting world in a so-called age of science."

Ham's move to America has proved to be highly successful - he is one of the most influential creationists in the world - and in the American south and Midwest he is tilling some of the world's most fertile ground for adherence to the literal meaning of the Bible. The battle with secularism is ceaseless. Last Thursday, a US federal judge ordered schools in an Atlanta suburb to remove stickers placed in biology textbooks stating that "evolution is a theory, not a fact".

Judge Clarence Cooper concluded the stickers, although worded to avoid religious reference, amounted to an endorsement of "Christian fundamentalist or creationist" beliefs. The Cobb County School Board adopted the stickers in 2002 after parents protested against sections on evolution in a new biology textbook.

Creationism may be regarded as closed and dangerously regressive by secular liberals, who dominate the Western media, but it is the muscular intransigence of creationists and the zeal of evangelists who are reshaping Christianity at the beginning of the 21st century.

"The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning," Professor Philip Jenkins wrote in his book The Next Christendom (2002). "The face of change is undeniable ... So little did we notice this momentous change that it was barely mentioned in all the media hoopla surrounding the end of the second millennium."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/Paul-Sheehan/Onward-the-new-Christian-soldier/2005/01/16/1105810774805.html

http://www.thebricktestament.com/genesis/the_flood/gn06_17.jpg