- Mayor takes Chicago police leaders to task amid questions on response to latest violent gathering of youths downtown Chicago Tribune
- Disturbing video shows terrified woman attacked by mob during ‘Teen Takeover’ of downtown Chicago Yahoo News
- Millennium Park Teen Curfew Will Be Enforced After Youth Gatherings Downtown Turned Violent, Police Say Block Club Chicago
- Concerns about next time downtown Chicago crowds become violent after weekend chaos in Loop from hundreds of teens WLS-TV
- Next Chicago mayor excuses rioters: Expect more victims of violence New York Post
Tag Archives: youths
McDonald’s franchisee accused of overworking more than 100 youths
The McDonald’s locations, Labor investigators said, broke the law by permitting 14- and 15-year-olds to work more than three hours a day, and after 7 p.m. on school days, as well as later than 9 p.m. during the summer. The agency also accused the company of illegally employing youths for more than eight hours a day on weekends and more than 18 hours a week during school weeks.
“Permitting young workers to work excessive hours can jeopardize their safety, well-being and education,” Labor Department official John DuMont said. “Employers who hire young workers must understand and comply with federal child labor laws or face costly consequences.”
Santonastasso was fined $57,000 for the child labor violations, according to the Labor Department.
In a Facebook video posted in 2021, franchisee owners John and Kathleen Santonastasso said they ran a “people first” company that offered a “fun” environment, flexibility and the opportunity to earn money for college. On Friday they said the company now has new procedures to prevent problems with schedules.
“We take our role as a local employer very seriously and we regret any scheduling issues that may have occurred at our restaurants,” John and Kathleen Santonastasso said in a statement.
The McDonald’s corporation did not respond to a request for comment.
The investigation follows a series of reports of the illegal use of child workers this year in other industries, including meatpacking and auto-parts manufacturing, amid a nationwide labor shortage. Across the country, employers across the country have been increasingly hiring younger workers. The trend has been particularly noticeable in sectors that lost many workers during the pandemic, such as restaurants.
Earlier this year, the Labor Department accused Alabama plants that manufacture auto parts for Hyundai and Kia of illegally using child labor after Reuters reported that a Hyundai subsidiary near Montgomery employed migrant youths as young as 12.
Another federal investigation found in November that one of the country’s largest providers of food safety sanitation illegally employed dozens of youths at several JBS-owned meatpacking plants in the Midwest. Investigators found that 13- and 14-year-olds suffered severe chemical burns while working with cleaning products on graveyard shifts.
The Fair Labor Standards Act includes a series of child labor laws enacted to protect minors’ well-being and educational opportunities, and to prevent them from working under dangerous conditions.
Between 2017 and 2021, investigators found child labor law violations in more than 4,000 cases, involving more than 13,000 minors, the Labor Department said Friday.
Rampaging youths ransack Philadelphia Wawa, twerk on counter
Dozens of rampaging youths trashed a Wawa convenience store in northeast Philadelphia Saturday night — hurling food and drinks at one another as one belligerent young woman twerked on a counter, video of the chaos shows.
The rowdy group of about 100 young people were captured on video — shot inside the chain location at 7001 Roosevelt Blvd. — as they ransacked the shop at about 8:20 p.m. and recorded the pandemonium on their phones.
An employee filming the wild scene from behind a sandwich counter in the store can be heard scolding the vandals.
“You’re all stupid,” he said in the video. “For real. You’re all stupid, ugly, broke.”
A video of the aftermath shows the store completely torn apart. The floor is covered with items pulled off shelves, spilled drinks and trash.
The unruly crowd also broke several shelves at the shop, according to the footage.
The lawlessness apparently continued into the store parking lot where the vandals were caught yelling, cursing and fighting one another, the video shows.
Philadelphia police said they responded to the scene and found approximately 100 juveniles inside the Wawa, stealing and damaging store merchandise. The officers dispersed the crowd, but made no arrests.
There were no reported injuries, cops said.
The youths unleashed anarchy inside the convenience store as crime surges across the City of Brotherly Love.
As of Sept. 18, property crimes surged a whopping 32% from the same period last year and violent crimes were up nearly 7%.
Saturday’s vandalism mirrors a similar incident at a local business in the Germantown section of Philly last month.
In early August, a wild mob of teens trashed a Jamaican restaurant, Zion Cuisine, and attempted to harm its employees. The group flipped tables, threw chairs and other objects at workers and shattered a security glass inside the eatery, video shows.
Intimate portraits of LGBTQ youths living deep in the Amazon rainforest
While eating dinner at a restaurant in Careiro, a small town deep in the Amazon rainforest, Daniel Jack Lyons was unexpectedly approached by a local drag performer, Wendell.
Two days earlier, the American photographer had met with young community leaders in the hope that some might participate in a new project exploring the lives of marginalized youths in the remote Brazilian region. Word had quickly spread.
“He came up to me and said: ‘You’re the photographer, I’m a drag queen and you’re photographing me on Thursday,'” Lyons recalled in a phone interview.
The pair met up, and the resulting portrait — Wendell staring defiantly at the camera with a lit matchstick in his mouth — went on to become the standout image in Lyons’ dreamy new coming-of-age series, “Like a River.” But as both a photographer and a trained anthropologist, Lyons appears more interested in the human stories behind his pictures.
“Wendell does drag performances, but he’s also caring for his mother’s small business selling churrasco (grilled meat) at night in the market,” he said. “She’s quite ill, and he’s taken over. So, it’s a very sensitive thing: He doesn’t want to do drag and (have any resulting discrimination) negatively affect the business, which is what they’re surviving on.
“So as a way of overcompensating, he has become this ‘mother’ to all the non-binary, trans and queer kids in the town,” Lyons added, recounting how Wendell opened his home to struggling teens and has helped transgender youths access hormone therapy in the nearest city, Manaus.
About half of the subjects in Lyons’ new book identify as trans, non-binary or “queer in some way,” said the photographer. Credit: Like a River 2022/Loose Joints
Basing himself in Careiro and the nearby Tupana River for up to eight weeks at a time, Lyons went on to photograph dozens more young people for the series, which is currently on display at the Rencontres d’Arles photo festival in France. About half of the subjects in his accompanying book are trans, non-binary or “queer in some way,” said the photographer, who himself identifies as queer.
Their stories contain tales of turbulent gender transitions and family friction. One person Lyons spoke to for the project had been disowned by their wife and parents, and separated from their son, after coming out as trans. The photos were also taken against the backdrop of social stigmas in a country where homophobic hate crimes are on the rise and LGBTQ rights appear increasingly under threat (Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who once told Playboy magazine that he would be “incapable of loving a homosexual son,” has voiced disapproval of the country’s same-sex marriage laws).
Yet, the overriding spirit of Lyons’ images is one of resilience.
“There was a struggle among everybody I worked with, for sure,” he said. “But it’s almost like discrimination is just understood in a tacit way. It’s the undercurrent, it’s there, but as I was becoming friends with people, there was a lot of positive discussion.
“There was a (sense of) perseverance — celebrating the fact that they can walk around this town and not care what people think.”
Intersectional identities
Borrowing its title from a Brazilian poem of the same name, “Like A River” depicts not only the region’s LGBTQ communities, but other groups “living on the margins,” as Lyons puts it. His intimate images capture teens involved in arts and music subcultures, as well as indigenous youths with complex “intersectional identities.”
The photographer also turned his lens on young land activists, with environmental threats serving as a recurring concern among his subjects. He said that fear of illegal mining and deforestation has noticeably grown in Careiro since he began the project in 2019.
Lyons also turned his lens on the region’s environment, which he says is increasingly under threat. Credit: Like a River 2022/Loose Joints
“There’s obviously a lot of discrimination based on being queer, but I think the bigger threat for people is that Bolsonaro has created this wild west in the Amazon. There is a lot of fear that loggers and illegal miners can come into a community,” he added, referring to recent reports of miners attacking indigenous villages in the hunt for gold and other resources.
Lyons, who has previously produced series on marginalized youths in Mozambique and Ukraine, treats portraiture as an act of collaboration — and his subjects as friends.
The photographer focuses on building relationships before picking up his camera. He usually won’t capture people the day he meets them — and he gives collaborators power over where and how the shoots take place, including what they wear and how they pose.
“It’s not traditional photojournalism where you swoop in, take pictures and swoop out,” explained Lyons, who said he is still in touch with many of the people featured in “Like a River.”
“It was much more than that. I wanted to focus on engaging with people and really cherishing those intimate moments they shared with me.”
“Like a River” is on show at the Rencontres d’Arles photo festival until Aug. 28, 2022. A book of the series, published by Loose Joints, is available now.
Climate protests led by youths spread across the world: Live Updates
Protesters gathered outside the Reichstag, which houses the lower chamber of Germany’s parliament, in central Berlin complained that young people were being squeezed out of politics ahead of the weekend election.
Others who were old enough to vote said their voices were being drowned out by the country’s aging population.
Amadeus Truman, a 27-year-old German literature student living in Berlin, has worked with Fridays for Future for more than two years, describing climate action and justice as his passion.
“The parties fighting now for the German parliament on Sunday have let us down. They are so many parties who are telling us they want to cut emissions and it’s on their top agenda, but they don’t have the measures in place, and have not told us how they are going about doing this,” he told CNN.
“I think young people in Germany are highly underrepresented in politics, in the party and voting system – there are so many elderly people that vote and our voices all young people under 40 do not count as much as for those who are, for example, 60 years and older because we have so many elderly people.”
Wolfgang Wolman, a 27-year-old film editor from Berlin, said he didn’t hold much hope the country’s next government would bring about the climate action needed.
“I blame the older generation for messing things up for us – not personally but in the total of society. They did not take a chance to do anything for us,” he said.
“Politicians had the chance to do something about climate change but they have failed us.”
Katharina Hetzel, a 22-year-old interning with Greenpeace and studying social sciences, said that politicians were “doing nothing or way too little.”
“So that’s why we have to be here. We want a good life – we want to protect our lives and that of our children and future generations to come. And of course, we have to protect Mother Earth,” she said.
“Politicians have not seen climate change as a big problem of our times and they thought it wouldn’t get worse. They simply did not think about us. They thought about their own lives and wellbeing. I really do feel they have forgotten us. I do think that our entire young generations thinks the same – that’s why we are here.”
She said that she wanted to see more young people in politics, including in parliament.
“If we look at the government there are a lot more older people than younger people and I believe the average age for members of parliament in the Bundestag is over 40 years old, so all the young people, their voices, their thoughts are not being respected or heard.”
Hotez to MSNBC: Youths infected with coronavirus could experience ‘brain degeneration,’ ‘cognitive declines’
Media top headlines July 14
Fauci getting criticized for saying ‘no doubt’ children 3 years and older should wear masks, a CNN anchor dismissing critical race theory as a creation of Republicans, and a Texas State Democrat getting mocked for calling himself a ‘fugitive’ after fleeing the state to block voting bills round out today’s top media headlines
Baylor Medical School’s Dr. Peter Hotez predicted Wednesday that “waves of young people” would become infected with the Delta variant of the coronavirus within the next few weeks and could experience severe long-term side effects.
Speaking to MSNBC’s Craig Melvin, Hotez claimed the transmission of the Delta strain would continue to accelerate unless all adults and adolescents were vaccinated. He added young people who did contract the virus could experience “grey matter brain degeneration leading to cognitive declines” and “memory loss” due to potential long-haul Covid-19.
“People who are advocating for vaccines, especially in conservative stronghold areas, are being told that they can’t, and this is part of the reason why we’ve had this … awful rate of vaccination among young people in places like Tennessee, where only now 20% of the adolescents are vaccinated,” Hotez said.
PANDEMIC SAW WORSENING MENTAL HEALTH AMONG TEENS, YOUNG ADULTS, STUDY FINDS
“What’s going to happen is we’re going to see waves of young people and adolescents become infected with this Delta variant in the next few weeks and all of it is preventable,” he added.
Melvin said only a third of eligible adolescents across the U.S. had actually received the vaccine and asked Hotez what the risks were for those in areas with low vaccination rates, considering schools were going to begin opening in a matter of weeks.
“Well the risks are, unless you’ve got all of the adults and adolescents vaccinated, transmission will continue to accelerate because this Delta variant is twice as contagious as the original lineage. So we can expect a lot of them to get Covid,” Hotez said. “Now what the conservative lobby says is the death rates among young people is quite low, and that’s true. But what they omit telling you is that long-haul Covid is quite common, 10 to 30 percent.”
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“And now we have data from Oxford University showing a number of them will have grey matter brain degeneration, leading to cognitive declines, leading to memory loss,” he added. “And these are young people who should be doing things like taking SATs and applying to colleges, or their graduating colleges, applying for their first job. It should be among the most productive time in their lives and it’s now going to be squashed.”
Angry youths rattle Spain in support of jailed rap artist
BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — The imprisonment of a rap artist for his music and tweets praising terrorist violence and insulting the Spanish monarchy has set off a powder keg of pent-up rage this week in the southern European country.
The arrest of Pablo Hasél has brought thousands to the streets for different reasons.
Under the banner of freedom of expression, many Spaniards strongly object to putting an artist behind bars for his lyrics and social media remarks. They are clamoring for Spain’s left-wing government to fulfill its promise and roll back the Public Security Law passed by the previous conservative administration that was used to prosecute Hasél and other artists.
Hasél’s imprisonment to serve a nine-month sentence on Tuesday has also tapped into a well of frustration among Spain’s youths, who have the highest unemployment rate in the European Union. Four in every 10 eligible workers under 25 years old are without a job.
“I think that what we are experiencing now with the cases of Pablo Hasél (…) and other rappers politically detained by this regime is a brutal attack against the freedom of speech,” 26-year-old student Pablo Castilla said during a protest in Barcelona. “The protests are being brutally repressed by the allegedly progressive national government and the Catalan government.
“They are attacking us youngsters because we are showing our anger.”
For many, including older peaceful protesters, Hasél’s case also represents what they perceive as a heavy-handed reaction by a state whose very structure is in need of deep reform. That’s even when some of his public remarks, especially in messages sent out on Twitter, Hasél expressed radical ideas, talked about attacking politicians and defended the now-defunct Grapo and ETA, two armed organizations that killed over 1,000 people in Spain.
Hasél’s lyrics that strike at King Felipe VI and his father, King Emeritus Juan Carlos I, have connected with a growing public debate on the future of Spain’s parliamentary monarchy. Unquestioned outside fringe circles of the Left until the past decade, the royal house has been plagued by financial scandal that has reached Juan Carlos himself. Many Spaniards were aghast when the former monarch left Spain for the United Arab Emirates amid a court investigation into his alleged fiscal improprieties.
As well as shouting its support for Hasél, a crowd that gathered in Madrid on Saturday chanted “Where is the change? Where is the progress?” and “Juan Carlos de Borbón, womanizer and thief.”
The debate has caused tensions inside Spain’s left-wing coalition government. While Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his Socialist Party back the parliamentary monarchy Spain has had since the end of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in the 1970s, their minor partner, the upstart United We Can party, wants to get rid of the monarchy and has supported this week’s protests for Hasél despite their violent turn.
In the rapper’s home region of Catalonia, the unrest also comes after years of separatist politicians urging citizens to ignore or disobey court rulings unfavorable to their cause. Although this week’s protests are missing widespread calls for Catalonia’s independence or flags supporting secession of the industrial region, the head of public safety for Barcelona’s town hall said that many of the most violent offenders were also heavily involved in the 2019 riots that followed the imprisonment of several separatist leaders.
“It is a varied, violent profile that we already are familiar with because it is very similar to those who played a large role in the incidents of October 2019, so we know the type,” Barcelona town council member Albert Batlle told Cadena SER radio.
Some leading pro-secessionist politicians have heavily criticized the handling of the protests by Catalan police, who made more than 35 arrests on Saturday night alone.
What started out as peaceful, if angry, protests by thousands in Barcelona and other nearby towns, degenerated into ugly incidents come nightfall caused by a violent minority bent on destroying property and battling with police.
“I think we must differentiate between those who come here in support of Pablo Hasél’s freedom and those who do not,” 19-year-old Joana Junca said. “Street barricades to defend themselves are okay. But those who go out there just to riot don’t have my support.”
The Mossos d’Esquadra police said Monday that 61 of the 75 people arrested in the Catalan capital since protests erupted on Feb. 16 were 25 or younger, including 24 minors. Three out of four had Spanish nationality and 26 of them had previous run-ins with authorities for public disorders or theft.
Within that splinter group of troublemakers, some are out to do some timely looting, Catalonia’s regional interior minister, Miquel Sàmper, on Sunday told the regional TV3 broadcaster that what was “a protest over freedom of expression” had evolved to “acts of pure vandalism.”
Police point to small groups who bash their way into sporting goods stores and other shops while law enforcement officers are engaged by the clashes and the clearing barricades of burning trash containers and metal barriers strewn across streets. Police described what they called “pillaging” by “some people who take advantage of the disorder and cover provided by the large number of people.”
Then there are those, mostly teenage rioters, who appear to be motivated by an anarchist, anti-police bent and seek to disrupt public order by any means possible. They work in fast-moving packs, smashing store windows and trashing bank offices. They pick their moments to stop running and target police with coordinated hurling of stones and other objects. Police swing batons and fire foam bullets after pouring out of riot vans to disperse them — and the chase continues.
Eleven police officers were injured on Tuesday night when a mob attacked a police station in the Catalan town of Vic.
“The attack on the station in Vic was a turning point,” Imma Viudes, spokeswoman of the SAP-Fepol union for the Catalan police told Spanish National Radio. “We don’t have the means to control this mass violence. (…) Someone is going to have to put their fist down.”
On Monday, a few hundred marched along a central Barcelona boulevard passed the headquarters of the National Police but the group dissolved without much noise after a failed attempt to built new barricades.
That was a far cry from only 24 hours earlier. On their way to hurl bottles and firecrackers at a police station in Barcelona, a group of mostly black-clad youths marched behind a banner that they defiantly planted in front of a line of police vans.
It read: “You have taught us that being peaceful is useless.”
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AP journalists Aritz Parra in Madrid, and Renata Brito in Barcelona, contributed to this report.