[MrBill]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ferretlover', 'M')any years ago, when we lived in Manhattan, KS (Go Wildcats!), there was a rash of burglaries. It seems the criminals took metal detectors with them and were able to find things that had been hidden quite easily.

[Ferretlover]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MrBill', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ferretlover', 'M')any years ago, when we lived in Manhattan, KS (Go Wildcats!), there was a rash of burglaries. It seems the criminals took metal detectors with them and were able to find things that had been hidden quite easily.

[MrBill]

Your property. Sometimes more. The some 40 million functionally illiterate (never mind those with math anxiety) do not have a lot of upward mobility. Mostly down when the economy sours.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')ndre Giddings didn't have a gun but sold cocaine and marijuana and was in and out of juvenile detention because of truancy and drug dealing.

Like 42 percent of Philadelphia's public school students, he did not finish high school. He was unemployed when he died.

With a job, he might have survived because it would have given him an income outside the drug trade and sense of direction, said Giddings, a medical technician who said she always had enough money to give her son what he needed.

"If these young men had good-paying jobs, it would make a significant difference," she said. "Most of these young boys just want to be part of something. They just want to belong."

[MrBill]

BIC Syndrome[sup]TM[/sup] - bureaucracy ] incompetence ] corruption > economic underdevelopment > violence/conflict > feedback loop > etc.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')exico's federal government says it is doing everything it can to restore security to Tijuana and other cities in Baja California, one of Mexico's most violent states.

Since January last year, thousands of troops patrol Tijuana's streets and highways, and are engaged in a daily battle to destroy the Arellano Felix and Sinaloa drug cartels and clean up the corrupt police forces that ally with them.

But winning the fight will not be easy. As the Arellano Felix cartel weakens, the gang is increasingly relying on kidnapping and extortion.

A bid to introduce closed-circuit televisions in the city has meanwhile failed, as gangs sabotaged cameras and corrupt police switched them off to allow crimes to be committed.

[cube]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MrBill', 'N')eedless to say relying on the police was an exercise in hope over experience.

[Twilight]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('cube', 'I') wonder how many police patrols there will be in a post PO world where gasoline is $10/gallon?

[kublikhan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MrBill', 'W')hen we lived in the Ukraine many years ago, and we were being targeted by organized criminals, the first thing they stole was the surveillance camera! Needless to say relying on the police was an exercise in hope over experience. The same when our apartment in Moscow was robbed during the day. Despite a high security door they got in quite easily. They found everything. They looked in places I would not even think to hide stuff? A cautionary lesson for anyone considering storing precious metals at home to think about. We filed a report with the police for insurance reasons, but with about 11.000 burglaries per year on average it was clear that the underpaid and understaffed police simply did not have the resources to deal with the crime problem.

[setag]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MrBill', 'O')nly if you are a slave to GDP figures. I am not. Improving standards of living as per the UNs Human Development Index and investing in sustainable development and a clean environment are more important measures of economic prosperity than another 0.5% added to GDP figures.

You can create the same amount of GDP by fixing your crumbling infrastructure as you can by building something new, but less useful. It is not very sexy, but a mechanic fixing your old, but reliable car, generates the same GDP as the salesman who takes his commission on a new car. In turn that money not spent on a new car can be spent on something that improves your quality of life, like solar panels or insulation for your house, or invested, so someone else can use that money to create something of value.

The problem is that the uneducated and uninformed equate wealth creation with conspicuous consumption and not with raising living standards. That can entail doing more with less or switching from unsustainable to sustainable practices. Like diverting public funding away from highway construction and into railways.

It comes down to public policy, informed consumer choices and pressure from voters on politicians. Wealth is not bad. Without wealth creation you would have no social spending. Whereas conspicuous consumption and waste of scarce resources cannot be defended on any level except that they add nominally to GDP, but only a real cost to our environment and future standards of living.

[MrBill]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kublikhan', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A') cautionary lesson for anyone considering storing precious metals at home to think about. We filed a report with the police for insurance reasons, but with about 11.000 burglaries per year on average it was clear that the underpaid and understaffed police simply did not have the resources to deal with the crime problem.

[MrBill]

Apartheid, unacceptable. Inter-African ethnic cleansing, acceptable.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')his nation is undergoing a spasm of xenophobia, with poor South Africans taking out their rage on the poor foreigners living in their midst. At least 22 people had been killed by Monday in the unrelenting mayhem, the police said.

But the death toll only hints at the consequences. Thousands of immigrants have been scattered from their tumbledown homes. They now crowd the police stations and community centers of Johannesburg, some with the few possessions they could carry before mobs ransacked their hovels, most with nothing but the clothes they wore as they escaped.

"They came at night, trying to kill us, with people pointing out, 'this one is a foreigner and this one is not,' " said Charles Mannyike, 28, an immigrant from Mozambique. "It was a very cruel and ugly hatred."

(continued)

Since the end of apartheid, a small percentage of the nation's black population — the highly skilled and the politically connected — has thrived. But the gap between the rich and poor has widened. The official rate of unemployment is 23 percent. Housing remains a deplorable problem.

[MrBill]

If thieves keep electrocuting themselves and otherwise dying while trying to steal copper then we may (soon) face Peak Criminals (hopefully). But I will not hold my breath (just in case).
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')t took three hours for ENMAX to shut down power to the electrical shaft and for crews to check the air quality before firefighters could recover the body safely.

Officials said they don't know what the man was doing in the manhole, how long he'd been there or how he died. An autopsy has been scheduled for Thursday.

However, there's evidence he may have been trying to steal copper wire in the shaft. Cut copper wire was visible around the manhole, and some tools were found at the scene.

The underground shaft, full of electrical cables, is about three metres deep and recently supplied power to a nearby linen factory that was torn down.

[MrBill]

[align=center]No Peak yet in Arsons[/align]

``Home arsons follow foreclosure trends, with a lag,'' Quiggle said, pointing to an increase after the last housing slump when the number of blazes reached 116,600 in 1992 from 111,900 in 1990. ``We're facing a potential spike in arson like we've never seen before.''
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')t 10:40 p.m. on April 27, a blaze at the beige Victorian house at 19 Nye St. lit up a neighborhood littered with boarded-up homes on the north side of New Bedford, Massachusetts. It left charred wood and melted vinyl siding on the three-story structure.

The house had been abandoned after the owner defaulted on a $240,000 home loan from GreenPoint Mortgage Funding, a Novato, California lender that shut down in August, 2007. The fire was one of four suspicious blazes in foreclosed properties that month in the southern Massachusetts city. All are under investigation.

The biggest surge of mortgage defaults in seven decades coincides with an increase in blazes in foreclosed properties led by states with the most repossessed homes, according to fire safety officials in Nevada, Massachusetts and Ohio.

``The more empty houses we have, the more fires we are going to see,'' said James Wright, chief of the Nevada State Fire Marshal Division in Carson City, the state's capital. ``It's particularly dangerous for firefighters, because they don't know what condition these buildings are in or what they might find in them.''

[MrBill]

[align=center]Peak Stupidity[/align]

About nine metres of wire was stolen from the substation in North Tetagouche
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'C')opper thefts at five NB Power substations caused service interruptions for about 10,000 customers this week, including at a hospital.

The thieves have caused about 10,000 NB Power customers to lose power this week, including at the Chaleur Regional Hospital in Bathurst, which was hit by an outage on Tuesday night.

"It makes me a bit nervous," said Frances Pitre, emergency measures co-ordinator at the hospital.

The hospital has an emergency generator in place but if it failed there could be serious consequences, Pitre said.

"We don't want people … putting other people's lives in jeopardy, possibly in our health-care setting," Pitre said.

The substations were vandalized by people looking for copper wiring, the RCMP confirmed.

[MrBill]

A tea worker is trained to only pluck the top two leaves and a bud as the best way of ensuring a steady supply of fresh leaves. The thieves are not so restrained.


$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')hieves are breaking into tea gardens in India's northeast and plucking leaves, damaging tea bushes and hurting the industry, planters said.

The thieves are believed to be villagers in the tea-growing regions of Assam, famed for its strong malty brew, some of whom struggle to produce saleable tea in their small backyard tea gardens created as part of an employment scheme a decade ago.

"These thieves are now so desperate, they come with bows and arrows, and homemade firearms," said Rupesh Gowala, who leads a tea workers association.

"They clash with our workers whenever they are stopped from stealing. Two of our workers were also killed by them recently."

In Assam's Tinsukia district alone, police say around 500 tea garden burglaries have been reported this year. About 50 were reported in 2007.

[MrBill]

"We got an automatic green light to go through Mexican customs and then we were blindfolded and taken to a house in Tijuana. They held a pistol to my stomach all the time we were in the car,"
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'P')olice suspect the Arellano Felix clan is conducting cross-border abductions because so many wealthy Mexicans have left Tijuana and those who remain have heavy security.

Most of the abductions are done in daylight, with the kidnappers using the victim's car and threatening the victim with a hidden pistol, Mexican police and Esperanza say.

A spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection in San Diego said the agency does not have the resources to carry out southbound checks, although agents do make periodic, surprise revisions.

Mexican customs officials only check about 5 percent of vehicles entering by road into Tijuana and blame a lack of funds for the lightly-manned border posts, said a Baja California state official, who declined to be named.

[MrBill]

"It's like an ongoing nightmare and no one is sure when we're going to wake up."- Stuart Thomson, Resolution Investment Management Ltd., Glasgow
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'O')ver the weekend, I read where in Kentucky unemployment has crossed the 6.7% threshold on its way to 7%. Seven's the magic number for unemployment. Anything above 7 for any length of time is the kind of full-on crisis that results in wholesale regime change for anyone with the misfortune to be involved in state government at the behest of voters.

My mother lives about 60 miles south of Lexington, where the last large Kentucky city on Interstate 75 gives way to the foot of the Appalachian mountains of the east and the hill country that rolls up further south into Tennessee. Her city, London, is the last line of defense between decent law abiding citizens and the Crystal Meth crime wars, high unemployment and poverty that have been raging in the southeastern part of the state, under the radar of national news media, for the better part of the past decade.

I asked her for a report from Kentucky and the news was grim. "Churches and cash advance places are huge targets, and people are being robbed on the streets," she said. "Gas stations were considering closing at night, but they are being hit during the day as well and the biggest news story was a young man who
climbed on the roof during broad daylight, disabled the cameras, filled up and drove off. It's crazy!," she added, in case I had somehow become too jaded by New York City to recognize economic desperation.

She had a point. Manhattan today, far from being at the epicenter of degenerating economics, is actually the last bastion of The Dream in America. Manhattan, with rents for a one-bedroom approaching $3,000 a month, is for all intents and purposes the largest gated community in the country... for now.

[letitburn84]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('cube', '[')url=http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN2527885420080401]Some homes worth less than their copper pipes[/url]
The first 2 paragraphs says enough.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')ROCKTON, Massachusetts (Reuters) - Shards of broken glass outside the basement window of 31 Vine Street hint at the destruction inside the three-story home.

Thieves smashed the window to break in and then gutted the property for its copper pipes -- a crime that has spread across the United States as the economy slows and foreclosed homes stand empty and vulnerable.

"They cut it here and then pulled it right out of the wall," real estate broker Marc Charney said,...

[TheDude]

Man killed while trying to steal copper cable carrying 11,000 volts

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')imes Online

A man was killed trying to steal a copper cable which was carrying 11,000 volts, an inquest heard today.

Kirk John Thompson was electrocuted at the derelict Panteg steelworks, in Pontypool, South Wales, when his bolt croppers pierced the plastic coating of a cable still connected to the National Grid.

Britain has been hit by a plague of of metal thefts in recent years as the Asian construction and manufacturing boom has pushed up the prices of raw materials.

Thieves routinely rip long sections of copper cable from the side of railway lines or steal lead flashing from church roofs - ignoring health and safety warnings from the police and quickly melting down their loot.

[MrBill]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')t least 15 Indian train robbers looking to steal diesel from a freight carriage died Saturday after inhaling poison gas stored in another tank they accidentally broke open, police said.

A police patrol party said they found 30 other people lying unconscious on both sides of a forested train track in India's Assam state.

"We found many empty drums which they must have brought with them to fill with oil," a local police officer said by phone.

The train was earlier stopped by dozens of armed people who police believe were members of a gang which frequently steals crude oil from trains and pipelines carrying oil to refineries in the oil-rich state.