http://www.freep.com/…

Drivers age 15 to 20 are the deadliest age group on the roads, and now a safety organization is trying to drum up support for bumping up the driving age in U.S. states to 17 or 18, to reduce the carnage on America’s roadways.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety today is releasing a report encouraging higher driving ages at a conference of the Governors Highway Safety Association in Scottsdale, Ariz. The institute notes that most of Europe as well as China, Japan, Russia and Brazil allow people to start driving at age 18. The agency, funded by the insurance industry, says several U.S. states have tried but failed to boost the age to 17 or 18.

More individuals looking to treat young adults as children and further removing their personal responsibility. They raise the smoking age to 19, fight to keep drinking at 21, make SCHIP cover those upto the age 25. The childification of these young adults will only cause greater problems.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/…

In late 2007, Richard Stengel wrote a cover story for Time magazine calling for a massive national service program to be imposed on American young people. If you’d like to read it, knock yourself out. Someone probably needs to smash it, but the avalanche of propaganda and nationalism you’ll find there was too demoralizing for me to attempt it. The very idea that helping someone in your neighborhood should be called “service to the nation” should be spooky and Orwellian enough, but for many people I guess it isn’t.

One thing I couldn’t get out of my head, even though it’s not by any means the weirdest aspect of the program, is Stengel’s proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of National Service. I think it was this piece of advice that struck me the most: “And don’t appoint a gray bureaucrat to this job; make it someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mike Bloomberg, who would capture the imagination of the public.”

Translation: the American people, too stupid to engage in government-approved service projects without being prodded by their betters, need a crowd-pleasing Hollywood actor to rouse them to action. Bloomberg, possibly the dullest human being in public life, would be a better choice than Schwarzenegger from my point of view: the American people would barely be able to keep awake through one of his droning appeals.

Read More…

http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/91536

Even in an age when cynical sleuths can hyper-analyze stories for truth and accuracy, the occasional hoax still slips through the cracks. Such was the case with a so-called “lost Amazon tribe.”

A few months ago, mainstream news outlets (including, ahem, Yahoo!) reported that a photographer had found a lost tribe of warriors near the Brazilian-Peruvian border. Photos of the tribe backed up his claim.

As it turns out, the story is only half true. The men in the photo are members of a tribe, but it certainly ain’t “lost.” In fact, as the photographer, José Carlos Meirelles, recently explained, authorities have known about this particular tribe since 1910. The photographer and the agency that released the pictures wanted to make it seem like they were members of a lost tribe in order to call attention to the dangers the logging industry may have on the group.

The photographer recently came clean, and news outlets, perhaps embarrassed at having been taken for a ride, have been slow to pick up the story. Now, the word is starting to spread and articles in the Buzz are picking up steam. Expect a lot more brutal truth in the coming days.

How totally not surprising that they will lie in order to drum up attention.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/…

Brazil’s government has expressed its “unhappiness” that no senior police officers involved in Jean Charles de Menezes’s shooting will be disciplined.

The Brazilian electrician was shot dead in 2005 by police who mistook him for a terrorist after the London bombings.

The independent police watchdog had cleared 11 of the 15 officers involved, and has now ruled the other four senior officers will face no further action.

They included commanding officer Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick.

A Brazilian government statement said: “The foreign ministry expresses its unhappiness with the decision of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) which absolves four senior officers involved in the death of the Brazilian citizen Jean Charles de Menezes.”

A Met Police spokesman said the shooting was “a matter of deep regret”, but added: “We are pleased by this move forward and for these officers and their families who have faced much uncertainty.”

Last I had heard and posted on this was that the Metropolitan Police force was fined for putting people in danger but nothing was being done to those that took Mr. Menezes’ life. It looks like that will stay. I’ve not seen anything in this new article but I’m betting his family is not getting any sort of restitution. Hopefully the Brazilian government will continue to complain. Someone needs to take some responsibility for this.