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Sunday, April 7, 2013

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Reference and Education: Why Teach Abstinence-Only Education?

As a society, we're slowly progressing. We're molting, leaving the Age of Capricorn and entering the Age of Aquarius.

We are in a new age. And now that we've entered it, we need to rid ourselves of antiquated healthcare practices perpetuated by atavistic superstition and dogma.

We need to base our healthcare practices off of science, statistics, and common sense, not ideology.

In short, we need to eradicate abstinence-only education.

I'm wearing my cerebral Kevlar, locked and loaded, and ready for battle.

My commentary isn't meant to inspire ire or jubilance, but rather provide a logical argument against abstinence-only education.

It's time that we, healthcare professionals, hash this out.

Our job is to prevent disease, save lives, and 'do no harm.'

And statistics show, overwhelmingly, that abstinence-only education is positively correlated with teen-age pregnancies and the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases.

Yep, teens exposed to abstinence-only education are more likely to have sex than kids who don't!

Yet, for whatever reason, many high school nurses keep on teaching abstinence-only education, some because they want to, and others because they must.

However, as nurses, we must advocate for our children, as their lives depend on it.

I, personally, couldn't teach abstinence-only education, just like I couldn't teach that the world is flat or that the sun revolves around the Earth. I'm not trying to be an ass, but come on.

Okay, now I'll give you two good reasons why abstinence-only education doesn't work.

Firstly, we're human. We're sexual creatures, and we begin experimenting sexually sometime after puberty -some of us earlier than others.

Secondly, sex is fun. Yep, I said it, we enjoy having sex. And the more we tell teens they shouldn't have sex, the more likely they will.

Why? Well, because they're teenagers and teenagers rebel.

Alright, alright, some of you're probably thinking: "It's against the Bible, my child needs to wait till marriage, and if you teach them comprehensive sexual education they'll be more promiscuous." Well, that argument is absurd. It just isn't true.

Once again, we're human, and we're all sinners.

Go ahead, just ask St. Augustine.

If you would like to read more of my articles like this, please visit http://www.mightynurse.com.

Source: http://13pisos.blogspot.com/2013/04/why-teach-abstinence-only-education.html

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One dead, dozens injured in Illinois school bus crash

(Reuters) - A school bus taking children to an elementary school in northeastern Illinois overturned in a crash at an intersection on Friday, killing an adult and injuring three dozen people, most of them young students, authorities said.

The bus was headed to Newport Elementary School in Wadsworth when witnesses say it ran a red light and hit a Jeep Wrangler, Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran said.

"The bus windows all crashed out. It's a bad scene," Curran told a news conference.

Wadsworth is about 45 miles north of Chicago near the Illinois-Wisconsin border in Lake County.

Twelve students were taken by ambulance to area hospitals and 23 others considered to be in at least good condition were taken on another bus to a hospital, John Kavanaugh, deputy chief of the Gurnee Fire Department, told reporters.

Two people from an SUV also involved in the crash were taken to a hospital, said Kavanaugh.

A helicopter video on the WGN-TV website showed the school bus resting on its side near an intersection, partly on the road and partly on the shoulder. An SUV with heavy front-end damage was next to the bus and the Jeep, extensively damaged, was nearby.

The bus did not have seat belts but high seat backs provided some protection for the students, officials said.

(Reporting by David Bailey; Editing by Tom Brown, Gary Hill)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/one-dead-illinois-crash-involving-school-bus-two-150948205.html

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Friday, April 5, 2013

Soldier charged with murder in Fort Knox shooting

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) ? A soldier apprehended Thursday in Tennessee was charged with murder in the shooting death of a civilian employee at Kentucky's Fort Knox a day earlier.

The FBI said in a court filing that Marquinta E. Jacobs fired a .45-caliber handgun at the victim, "striking him several times." Jacobs is charged with murder, according to the criminal complaint.

Jacobs is the soldier whom Army investigators said was apprehended Thursday in Portland, Tenn., FBI spokeswoman Mary Trotman said.

Army investigators had said a soldier wanted for questioning in the killing was apprehended in Portland, where Jacobs' mother lives. But the Army declined to identify the soldier, except to say he is a member of Fort Knox's 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division.

The shooting occurred around 5:40 p.m. Wednesday in the parking lot at the Army Human Resources Command building, prompting a brief lockdown at the Army post in central Kentucky, about an hour southwest of Louisville.

The victim was an employee of the command, which handles personnel actions for soldiers.

A witness saw the Wednesday shooting after Jacobs and the victim had a verbal exchange in the parking lot, according to the federal criminal complaint, which gave the following account:

The witness reported seeing Jacobs shoot the victim, identified as "L.G.," several times and then flee in a Dodge pickup truck. Investigators found eight shell casings at the scene.

Investigators interviewed Jacobs' wife, who said he owned a .45-caliber Glock pistol, and they found ammunition at the home that matches the kind used at the crime scene. Jacobs' wife told police that Jacobs had left the home on a black motorcycle.

The motorcycle was found at the home of Jacobs' mother in Portland. His mother told police he had left around 9 p.m. Wednesday driving a Kia Rondo.

Police in Portland referred questions to the Army Criminal Investigation Command on Thursday. A message left for a spokesman at Army CID was not immediately returned Thursday night. Fort Knox has said in a statement that the soldier was a man believed to be traveling on a motorcycle.

After the shooting, the victim was transported to the Ireland Army Community Hospital, where he was pronounced dead Wednesday.

Chris Grey, a spokesman for the Army Criminal Investigation Command, said the shooting was a personal incident.

"Special Agents from the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command are continuing the investigation and as previously released the shooting appears to be a domestic issue and not a random act of violence," Grey said in a statement.

The identity of the victim was being withheld pending notification of family.

___

AP writer Beth Campbell contributed to this report from Louisville

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/soldier-charged-murder-fort-knox-shooting-010403099.html

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Mozilla Moves Ahead With Its Plans For A Common Web API For Payments

Mozilla is working with payment vendors and the W3C standards body to create a common API to make online payments, both on desktop and mobile, easier and more secure. To get this process going, Mozilla has implemented a new and experimental JavaScript API into its new Firefox OS for smartphones that will eventually allow web apps to accept payments. Mozilla argues that having a common API for handling payments that can be integrated with multiple payment vendors will open up new business models for developers and publishers. This new API, navigator.mozPay(), Mozilla says, was inspired by Google’s Wallet for Digital Goods API and will ship in Firefox OS first and then be added to Firefox for Android and desktop Firefox later. While it’s currently a very experimental API (and still incomplete), Mozilla expects that it will be usable enough to “process live payments on the first Firefox OS phones and evolve quickly from real world usage.” The question to ask here, of course, is why bother, given that online payments don’t seem to be a major issue for users and developers, thanks to services like PayPal and Stripe. Mozilla, however, argues that users should have more choice when it comes to how they want to pay for goods online (be they virtual or physical). Users, the organization also notes, still have to type in their credit card numbers, which “is like giving someone the keys to your expensive car, letting them drive it around the block in a potentially dangerous neighborhood (the web) and saying please don?t get carjacked!” With navigator.mozPay(), developers will be able to grant permission to each payment provider they want to work with and use a very straightforward process for handling these payments that’s more about exchanging tokens than exchanging credit card information. You can find more details about how to implement and test the current version of this API here.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/B-Aoh4h0Dnw/

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Thursday, April 4, 2013

Study: Record Number Of People Are Cohabitating

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Please keep your community civil. All comments must follow the NPR.org Community rules and terms of use, and will be moderated prior to posting. NPR reserves the right to use the comments we receive, in whole or in part, and to use the commenter's name and location, in any medium. See also the Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and Community FAQ.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/04/04/176203263/study-record-number-of-people-are-cohabitating?ft=1&f=1007

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Looking for day when Mexico's underworld is violence-free? Try looking back.

Since the 1980s Mexico's criminal organizations have become increasingly globalized and sophisticated, but almost a century ago they were largely family organizations shipping bootleg liquor to the US.

By Patrick Corcoran,?InSight Crime / April 3, 2013

? InSight Crime researches, analyzes, and investigates organized crime in the Americas. Find all of Patrick Corcoran's research here.

Skip to next paragraph

Premodern groups

Mexico?s smuggling networks have emerged as an unfortunate emblem of the nation only relatively recently, but they have existed for more than a century. Initially, they were not dedicated to methamphetamine and cocaine, two of the drugs that currently offer the highest profit margins, but rather opium, and later marijuana. These groups, which first began to emerge toward the end of the 19th century, were initially not seen as a major public security threat. Indeed, newspaper reports at the time detail the concern for opium users, not bloodshed attached to feeding the market.

These groups were largely family-based. In the case of the opium traffickers, these groups were originally concentrated among the Chinese immigrants populated across Mexico?s northern region, especially northwestern states like Sinaloa. Reports from the era indicate that the marijuana production, on the other hand, was not especially associated with Chinese immigrants, and marijuana traffickers remained largely small-time operations that continued to be built around local family ties. One example of such an organization was that of Maria Dolores Estevez, or Lola la Chata, as she was more commonly known. Lola and her clan trafficked in vice (especially marijuana) in Juarez for some 30 years in the middle of the 20th century, though without ever achieving the wealth or international notoriety of today?s groups.

But if the early groups had a lesser impact on the state of the nation than today?s do, they were still instrumental in setting the stage for the future development of Mexico?s trafficking organizations. The groups that emerged in that period, while far different from their future iteration, spawned certain characteristics that would be vital to their coming growth.

First, they created smuggling networks in and out of the remote Sierra Madre Occidental, which lies along the convergence of drug-producing states Chihuahua, Durango, and Sinaloa. These states have remained home to the most powerful organizations ever since, and have birthed the nation?s most notorious traffickers. The tendency toward familial link in drug trafficking also remains very common today -- see, for instance, the Beltran Leyva Organization -- although the complexity of trafficking today requires any criminal group to branch out beyond blood ties.

The early groups also developed a capacity to slip past the US border, feeding the market for bootleg alcohol (during prohibition), marijuana, and opium. Since the US market for illegal drugs was later to become the most lucrative in the world, this gave Mexican traffickers the most sought-after job skills in the industry.

Furthermore, these early 20th century groups began to develop links to the political system, especially under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which emerged from the embers of the Mexican Revolution and dominated the nation?s governance until 2000. For instance, a major Chinese-Mexican trafficker in the 1930s was Antonio Wong Yin, a close friend of the mayor of Torreon (where he was based), the governor of Coahuila (which houses Torreon), and the army general charged with controlling the region. Such political support for traffickers, which are eerily similar to the stories of corruption that periodically emerge in the Mexican media today, was not uncommon.

Because Mexican groups thrive in large part with the support or tolerance of government agents, these early inroads from the forerunners of the political system were priceless, both at the time and as the industry grew.

The internationalization of Mexican crime

The introduction of cocaine to the US drug market in the 1970s and 1980s changed the circumstances dramatically for Mexico?s drug traffickers. Most important, the profit margins exploded; a recent report from the International Crisis Group referred to a 50-fold price discrepancy for a kilo of cocaine in Colombia compared with the same kilo in the US, from $2,400 to $120,000. Today?s substantial divergences were presumably even more yawning four decades ago, as US prices for cocaine have spent most of the meantime in decline.

Nothing like those profits was available from marijuana trafficking. As a consequence, successful Mexican cocaine smugglers were able to accumulate far more wealth than their criminal ancestors. The tendency was furthered as Mexican gangs, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, began to insist on payment not in cash but in product from their South American partners; at that point they were no longer subcontractors but rather wholesalers, with exploding revenues to match. This shift upended the power equilibrium between the traffickers and their government sponsors; the political system had an increasingly difficult time administering unruly gangsters.

The government, however, remained intimately involved, even as it lost some degree of control. Traffickers had deep relations with the political and security apparatus in Mexico; many of the most notorious capos, such as Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, and Juan Jose Esparragoza, alias "El Azul," were former police officers. A parade of high-ranking government officials, from former Federal Police Commander Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni, who was reportedly a favorite of President Carlos Salinas in the 1980s and 1990s, to General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, the new drug czar who was found to be on the Juarez Cartel payroll in 1997 (and made famous in the movie "Traffic"), have been discovered working for the groups that they are meant to attack. Such arrests, to say nothing of the rumors surrounding officials who are never formally accused, continue to the present day.

Another important shift was toward a more international system. With cocaine the most important substance in the industry, the Mexicans could no longer rely only on their connections within their country and at the border to do business. Ties to cocaine producers in South American nations like Peru, Bolivia, and especially Colombia became essential. This added another several steps to the supply chain, and made feeding the US market a more complex endeavor. A globalized approach became a necessity.

Largely in response to this new environment, Mexican groups themselves grew more sophisticated and more complex, pioneering new methods of airborne and maritime smuggling. They also shifted toward a more hegemonic operational model; the model of a small family firm directing their operation from a marginal Mexico City suburb or barrio in Juarez was no longer viable. Such smaller groups were absorbed or pushed out by new hegemons, which controlled entire regions and coopted public officials on a growing scale. Thus, control of the proverbial "plaza," or trafficking corridor, became a requisite.?

The best example of the new hegemonic model was the Guadalajara Cartel of the aforementioned Felix Gallardo. Originally a police officer and governor?s bodyguard from Sinaloa, Felix Gallardo and his crew moved south to Guadalajara in the 1970s in response to Operation Condor, in which the Mexican army launched a ferocious eradication campaign in the Sierra Madre mountain range. From Guadalajara, he was partnered with Colombian traffickers like Pablo Escobar, and became Escobar's most important Mexico associate. He also came to dominate the underworld in much of his country; Felix Gallardo and his subordinates controlled contraband within most of Mexico?s Pacific Coast and its US border.

The groups of today

The Mexican criminal organizations of today differ from those of Felix Gallardo?s era, and even more so from their predecessors a century ago. The most important factor is that the trend toward consolidation ended with Felix Gallardo. Following his arrest in 1989, the boss reportedly divided up most of Mexico and handed out parcels to his underlings, so as to prevent a breakup of the organization he had built. However, the gambit ? which may be apocryphal; Felix Gallardo has told reporters that he had nothing to do with it ? essentially failed. What had been the Guadalajara Cartel devolved, broadly speaking, into the Tijuana and Juarez Cartels, which were mortal enemies through the 1990s, despite their shared roots. These groups in turn, spawned a handful of further competing organizations, such as the Sinaloa Cartel, the Beltran Leyva Organization, and, in recent years, the Jalisco Cartel - New Generation.

That is, the splinter groups have given birth to splinter groups. The weakness of the remaining groups have encouraged other upstarts to rise up and challenge the existing bosses, turning the process of atomization, as it is often called, into a vicious cycle. Consequently, no recent group has ever matched Felix Gallardo?s territorial control, nor does it appear likely that any one ever will.

This cycle has been a significant driver of violence. The rivalries between the new gangs are in and of themselves violent contests. Tens of thousands have died thanks to disputes between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas, for example, and between the Juarez Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel. The problem is worsened because the fallen capos are often replaced not by businessmen but rather hit men, whose natural inclination is toward violence. Today?s groups also suffer from a greater degree of internal instability; as InSight Crime has reported about the Zetas in recent years, amid a context of constant criminal warfare and uneven cash flows, violent subordinates are often tempted to ignore or challenge their bosses.

Today?s gangs are far more reliant on alternative sources of income, beyond drug trafficking. These include oil theft, extortion, kidnapping, human smuggling, robbery, and pirate merchandising. In all likelihood, the revenues of these crimes collectively amount to no more than a few billion dollars a year, but they impose a greater cost on the society as a whole. A successful international drug deal imposes no direct cost on the community at large, but a kidnapper nearly always targets the most vulnerable. This is also true for extortion, which, if common enough, amounts to a disincentive against success for entrepreneurs.

Finally, the groups today no longer unquestionably subordinate the state. For all his power, Felix Gallardo ultimately answered to the political system. When the federal government decided to bring him down, it had no problem in finding him and incarcerating him for life. (According to accounts of his arrest, when he saw the Police Commander Gonzalez Calderoni just before his arrest, Felix Gallardo greeted him as a friend coming to visit.)

Today, this is no longer the case. The increased revenues from cocaine trafficking, discussed above, has contributed to this, and is an important part of the story, but developments within Mexico?s political system are just as important. Mexico?s criminal organizations are weaker in certain respects, but so is the state. The PRI, the political party that dominated from the 1930s onward, lost power for the first time in 2000, and the federal government has never recovered the near-omnipotence it once enjoyed.

As a consequence, the traffickers no longer exist within a system administered by the federal government. Rather, both the state and organized crime are in a constant power struggle. Given that the PRI was an authoritarian entity, this loss of power is, on balance, a good thing, but one of the unfortunate side effects was the state?s growing incapacity to impose itself on organized crime.

? Insight Crime?researches, analyzes, and investigates organized crime in the Americas. Find all of Patrick Corcoran's research?here.

The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of Latin America bloggers. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/Y2YnC4Z11Es/Looking-for-day-when-Mexico-s-underworld-is-violence-free-Try-looking-back

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Sunday, April 7, 2013

Lindsay Lohan and Avi Snow: It's Over!

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Reference and Education: Why Teach Abstinence-Only Education?

One dead, dozens injured in Illinois school bus crash

Friday, April 5, 2013

Soldier charged with murder in Fort Knox shooting

Mozilla Moves Ahead With Its Plans For A Common Web API For Payments

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Study: Record Number Of People Are Cohabitating

Looking for day when Mexico's underworld is violence-free? Try looking back.

Recent posts

Premodern groups

The internationalization of Mexican crime

The groups of today

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Friday, April 5, 2013

Thursday, April 4, 2013

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Recent posts

Premodern groups

The internationalization of Mexican crime

The groups of today