6 News Stories to Connect to Orwell’s 1984 | pedablogical. Big brother really is watching you. Today we accept a certain amount of oversight by government and business as a part of daily life. Students know about all the surveillance cameras that follow them as they move about in the world. They realize the U.S. government tracks details on their income and health. They know that online vendors know what they buy and everything they looked at before they decide. Still, they can bring a skepticism to class when they read George Orwell’s 1984. Several recent news stories may make the answer to that question less certain. Someone’s watching Granny cook her eggs. Student discussion of the articles can be guided with these questions: What freedoms or privacy rights does the system affect? If students read and discuss several of the articles, additional questions can ask them to compare and synthesize the pieces: Notice that the targets of these programs are either students or senior citizens.
[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by anarchosyn] Smokers Need Not Apply « CBS Boston – News, Sports, Weather, Traffic and Boston's Best. CBS Boston (con't) Affordable Care Act Updates: CBSBoston.com/ACA Health News & Information: CBSBoston.com/Health Get Breaking News First Receive News, Politics, and Entertainment Headlines Each Morning. Sign Up NEWBURYPORT (CBS) — If you smoke, don’t bother applying for a job at Anna Jaques Hospital in Newburyport.
The hospital is requiring job applicants to take nicotine tests. WBZ-TV’s Christina Hager reports. “How far do we want our private employers to intrude in our private lives?” Hospital spokesperson Deb Chiaravalloti says, “We believe as a health care organization we need to make sure we have a healthy environment for our employees and our patients. Last year, the hospital prohibited employees from smoking in the designated fenced-off area outside the building. Next year, the hospital plans to ban smoking on the campus all together, even for patients and visitors. While Anna Jaques is the first hospital in Massachusetts to require nicotine testing, it is not the first employer. Shape Up or Pay Up: Emanuel. Who would want to bug Charlotte's Town Offices? | The Burlington Free Press | Burlington, Vermont. CHARLOTTE — Two wireless listening devices hidden in Charlotte Town Hall allowed eavesdropping on town clerk business and private selectboard sessions, town officials said Tuesday.
Neither device was functioning when workers found the bugs in October, nor have authorities determined when, why or by whom they were installed, Town Planner and Selectboard Assistant Dean Bloch said. The bugs were discovered during an energy retrofit of a dropped ceiling. Selectboard members were briefed on the matter, but did not discuss it during regular meetings, Bloch said. “Everyone around here was scratching their heads. Some of us were amused; some of us were disturbed,” Bloch said. “There was no way to track it down. The Shelburne Police Department, which serves Charlotte, confirmed it has a cold case on its hands. “Whoever did this is probably never going to own up to it,” he continued. Workers didn’t recognize the first bug they found and disposed of it along with other construction debris, he added. China bars English words in all publications. New Laws Govern Guns, Web, Banks. 'Mother,' 'Father' Changing to 'Parent One,' 'Parent Two' on Passport Applications - FoxNews.com.
Section of current passport application asking for "father" and "mother" information. The words “mother” and “father” will be removed from U.S. passport applications and replaced with gender neutral terminology, the State Department says. “The words in the old form were ‘mother’ and ‘father,’” said Brenda Sprague, deputy assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services. "They are now ‘parent one’ and ‘parent two.’ " A statement on the State Department website noted: “These improvements are being made to provide a gender neutral description of a child’s parents and in recognition of different types of families.” The statement didn't note if it was for child applications only. The State Department said the new passport applications, not yet available to the public, will be available online soon. Sprague said the decision to remove the traditional parenting names was not an act of political correctness.
Gay rights groups are applauding the decision. Click here for more on Fox News Radio. Video - NPR's Nina Totenberg Apologizes For Saying "Christmas" Metro randomly inspects passengers' bags - wtop.com. Metro conducts an inspection at the Braddock Road Metro station. (WTOP Photo/Adam Tuss) Gallery: (1 images) WASHINGTON - Metro Police started randomly inspecting bags at the Braddock Road and College Park Metro stations Tuesday. The searches, which are designed to be non-intrusive, came in the wake of recent terror plots and the same morning that an explosive device was found under a subway car seat in Rome.
The searches started at 7:30 a.m. and lasted about an hour at the Braddock Metro station. During the searches, police randomly selected bags or packages and checked for hazardous materials using special technology. Screeners swabbed some bags and inspected them in a process that look less than a minute each. Some common items, such as household chemicals, can prompt a positive test. One Metro transit officer tells WTOP's Adam Tuss that "homemade bombs often come from household chemicals. " Another woman, who did not object to the bag screening, was stopped for 45 seconds. Why the Feds Banned Four Loko (And is your favorite drink next?) On December 21, Ramiro Diaz was arrested for selling eight cans of Four Loko to an undercover agent from the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Diaz faces up to a year in jail for the offense, but just a few months ago Four Loko was perfectly legal.
What happened? The drink had been the subject of many media reports which suggested that Four Loko's mixture of alcohol and caffeine causes young people to engage in risky behavior. The drink was even dubbed "Blackout in a Can," and the story soon moved from newsrooms to Congress, where officials like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) demanded that it be pulled from shelves. "We must protect children from the severe and deadly consequences of drinks like Four Loko," declared Schumer.
So do drinks like Four Loko pose a unique danger to America's youth or is this episode more proof that that mixing media and politics can be hazardous to your freedom? “Why the Feds Banned Four Loko” is written and produced by Paul Detrick. Kiss your 100-watt lightbulb goodbye. Posted: 05/02/2012 10:35:42 PM PDT0 Comments|Updated: about a year ago Congratulations! You found a link we goofed up on, and as a result you're here, on the article-not-found page. That said, if you happened to be looking for our daily celebrity photo gallery, you're in luck: Also, if you happened to be looking for our photo gallery of our best reader-submitted images, you're in luck: So, yeah, sorry, we could not find the Mercury News article you're looking for.
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Parents fume over Black's 'birth control' quip about overcrowding - m.NYPOST.com. Now that’s Black humor. Less than two weeks into her new gig, Schools Chancellor Cathie Black has riled parents and public officials by jokingly suggesting that “birth control” was the solution to school overcrowding. The off-color quip came in response to concerns by public-school dad Eric Greenleaf, who said at a meeting of parents and officials at state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s downtown office that there will be “huge shortages” of classroom space in lower Manhattan in coming years.
“Could we just have some birth control for a while?” Black cracked. “It could really help us all out a lot.” The public-service novice, who has spent her entire career in media and publishing, also dropped jaws at the meeting by likening her task of satisfying space-crunch concerns in every neighborhood to making “many Sophie’s Choices” — a reference to the book in which a mother in the Auschwitz death camp is forced to decide which of her two children will live. “Everybody’s face fell. Govt 'creating vast domestic snooping machine'
Police: Man On Facebook Is Not The ‘Kensington Strangler’ « CBS Philly – News, Sports, Weather, Traffic and the Best of Philadelphia. FCC Gives Government Power to Regulate Web Traffic. No Congress Since 1960s Makes Most Laws for Americans as 111th - Bloomberg.com. 6 News Stories to Connect to Orwell’s 1984 | pedablogical. News Headlines. Terrorist watch list: One tip now enough to put name in database, officials say. A year after a Nigerian man allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, officials say they have made it easier to add individuals' names to a terrorist watch list and improved the government's ability to thwart an attack in the United States. The failure to put Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the watch list last year renewed concerns that the government's system to screen out potential terrorists was flawed. Even though Abdulmutallab's father had told U.S. officials of his son's radicalization in Yemen, government rules dictated that a single-source tip was insufficient to include a person's name on the watch list.
Since then, senior counterterrorism officials say they have altered their criteria so that a single-source tip, as long as it is deemed credible, can lead to a name being placed on the watch list. The government's master watch list is one of roughly a dozen lists, or databases, used by counterterrorism officials. 440,000 on list. Airport Security: Loaded Gun Slips Past TSA Screeners. <br/><a href=" US News</a> | <a href=" Business News</a> Copy Last fall, as he had done hundreds of times, Iranian-American businessman Farid Seif passed through security at a Houston airport and boarded an international flight. He didn't realize he had forgotten to remove the loaded snub nose "baby" Glock pistol from his computer bag. But TSA officers never noticed as his bag glided along the belt and was x-rayed.
When he got to his hotel after the three-hour flight, he was shocked to discover the gun traveled unnoticed from Houston. "It's just impossible to miss it, you know. I mean, this is not a small gun," Seif told ABC News. But the TSA did miss it, and despite what most people believe about the painstaking effort to screen airline passengers and their luggage before they enter the terminal, it was not that unusual. CLICK HERE to follow ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross on Twitter. With Air Force's new drone, 'we can see everything'
In ancient times, Gorgon was a mythical Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them. In modern times, Gorgon may be one of the military's most valuable new tools. This winter, the Air Force is set to deploy to Afghanistan what it says is a revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town. The system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements.
It can send up to 65 different images to different users; by contrast, Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a "soda straw" area the size of a building or two. With the new tool, analysts will no longer have to guess where to point the camera, said Maj. Gen. The Air Force is exponentially increasing surveillance across Afghanistan. The app that can read your mind: iPhone brainwave detector was only a matter of time. By Matt Blake Updated: 03:56 GMT, 15 January 2011 It's a device that would be more at home on the set of a Star Wars movie than the streets of Britain.
But an iPhone application has been developed that can read minds. The XWave allows users to control on-screen objects with their minds as well as train their brains to control attention spans and relaxation levels. Scroll down for video No-brainer: The XWave allows users to control on-screen objects with their minds as well as train their brains to control attention spans and relaxation levels The device - that could confuse Luke Skywalker himself - is the latest in the field of emerging mind-controlled games and devices and works via a headset strapped around the user's forehead, plugging into the iPhone jack. A state-of-the-art sensor within the device can then read the user's brainwaves through the skull, converting them into digital signals before displaying them in various colours on the iPhone screen.