Social Issues

On Friday, some 800 angry Greek farmers marched on the Agriculture Ministry in Athens and beat police with Shepherd’s crooks.

No, really:

The farmers are understandably upset with Alexis Tsipras and the government for a proposal to triple the social security burden and double income taxes in an effort to appease the powers that be in Brussels who claim Greece has not made enough progress towards fiscal consolidation since the country’s third bailout was agreed last August.

Spanish civil servant Joaquin Garcia failed to show for work for more than six years without anyone noticing his absence. The matter came to light when co-workers went to present him for a long-service award. Garcia was supposed to be supervising the construction of a water treatment plant in the ancient port city of Cadiz in southwest Spain. The Daily Mail reports: Joaquin Garcia had been employed by a water company run by the local authorities in Cadiz to supervise the construction of a water treatment plant.

People and pirates have been downloading content from the internet using file sharing for some time now. uTorrent, the popular peer to peer file sharing BitTorrent client is offering an ads-free version of their service to 150 million users for $5 per year. venturebeat reports: BitTorrent has unveiled a new annual subscription option that removes ads from the torrent-streaming service. The launch follows a short beta period, and the option — priced at a modest $4.95 per year — joins the existing $19.95 annual Pro tier, as well as the free ad-supported service.

Americans are fat. And they’re getting fatter all the time.

It was just last month when we showed you a series of graphics that demonstrated how it came to this. In short, average calories available to Americans jumped 25 percent to 2500, between 1970 and 2010. And it wasn’t because the US added a fourth meal to the day.

Two 15-year-old female high school students have been shot dead at a school in Glendale, Arizona on Friday. Police have put the Independence High School campus on lockdown while they investigate the school shooting. Glendale Police spokeperson Tracey Breeden said each of the two sophomoores sustained a single gunshot wound and were found dead next to eachother at the scene.