Social Issues

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.

Officials from public schools in Los Angeles, where 50 percent of the students are Latino, are providing safeguards for their students and their families by restricting unauthorized access by immigration officials. There had been fears that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were about to raid schools in L.A. to crackdown on undocumented immigrants, mainly from central America, in lieu of recent policy changes and attitudes towards immigration into the United States.