More graves discovered at Florida's Dozier School for boys; NATO apologizes for a case of 'mistaken identity that left two young boys dead; Sharing on Facebook comes at a cost and more.
March 4, 2013

Video report from February 1st tells of the discovery of new burial sites at the Dozier School for boys in Marianna, Florida.

The official stance on 98 dead boys from the Dozier School in Florida is that they were "accidents," or that the children died from "natural causes." Increasingly, it seems that may not have been the case.

From The Independent:

'A concentration camp for little boys': For years, almost no one at the Dozier School even knew about the burial ground in a clearing in the woods on the edge of campus. It was forbidden territory. The soil here, churned in places by tiny ants, holds more than the remains of little boys. Only now is it starting to give up its dark secrets: horror stories of state-sanctioned barbarism, including flogging, sexual assault and, possibly, murder.

That the Arthur G Dozier School – a borstal for delinquent boys founded in 1900 – was not a gentle place was well-established. Boys as young as six were chained to walls, lashings with a leather strap were frequent and, in the early decades, children endured enforced labour, making bricks and working printing presses. When it was closed in 2011, it had already been the subject of separate federal and state investigations.

But, as suspicions deepen about how the boys in the burial ground died, pressure is growing again on the state to shine new light into the darkest days of the school in Marianna, a Florida Panhandle town that once was a bastion of the KKK and the site of the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal. The pressure is coming from some of the school's survivors, from relatives of boys who died here, and from Florida's top US Senator, Bill Nelson."

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All Apologies: A NATO commander describes the shooting of children, both under 10, as case of "mistaken identity" during fight with Taliban.

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A report in the New York Times explains that sharing on Facebook now comes at a cost.

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing reports that our six-strikes copyright system is a nightmare:

A post on Slashdot by Dangerous_Minds links to a parade of horrors with the new "Copyright Alert System" -- the voluntary six-strikes-and-you're-out copyright enforcement system that America's major ISPs have chosen to enact on behalf of the MPAA and the RIAA. It's trivial to hijack, clobbers small business owners who let people use their Internet access.

Most immediately, it also requires its victims to complete an online copyright re-education camp designed by the major record labels and studios, and as EFF's Corynne McSherry points out, this is a total clusterpoop, a way of ramming inaccurate copyright information into the nation's eyeballs. Unsurprisingly, the gross errors in the mandatory copyright reeducation materials would all improve the profitability of the entertainment industry if they were taken to heart by the public.

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Holocaust Worse Than Previously Known: Researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum are documenting for the first time the scale of the horror that radiated from Germany in the 1940s, and have uncovered that there were far more slave labor camps and other detention centers than previously known. Researches have identified 42,500 camps, reaching from France to Russia, where Jews and other persecuted groups were held for slave labor to fuel the Nazi army and where pregnant women were forced to have abortions and have sex with German military personnel. But the sheer number of sites shocked Holocaust researchers, who at first didn’t believe their ears. “The numbers are just so much higher than we originally thought,” the institute’s director said.

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Olbermann Vies for ESPN Comeback: Everyone's favorite rabble-rouser is apparently hoping for a spot back at his old network stomping grounds, ESPN. President of the network John Skipper says Keith Olbermann reached out and the two had dinner in New York. “Clearly he was looking to see if there was an entry point to come back,” Skipper said. Olbermann worked at ESPN from 1992 to 1997, showing himself as a prodigal talent, albeit difficult to work with. “I had the privilege to spend some time with John Skipper,” he told The New York Times. “His vision and charm were readily apparent, and judging by his leadership, his family name was prophetic.” The journalist is currently in the midst of a $70 million lawsuit he filed against his latest employer, Current TV.

israel-buses

Following complaints by West Bank settlers that Palestinians posed a "security risk" to fellow bus riders, the Afikim bus company will begin running separate buses for settlers and Palestinians traveling into the State of Israel, beginning Monday morning.

Baby With HIV Cured: Doctors said that they had successfully cured a baby with HIV for the first time. The Mississippi baby was blasted with antiretroviral drugs 30 hours after birth—usually a newborn with the virus is given one or two drugs to fend off the disease. This time, instead of waiting to confirm infection, doctors essentially nuked the disease, lowering virus levels immediately and seemingly eradicating the illness. There are approximately 330,000 babies who were born with HIV in 2011. If confirmed, this is the second documented case of a cure, the first being the “Berlin patient” who was given a bone-marrow transplant. The only remaining question about this baby: whether the child was actually infected with HIV.

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