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Hamas used children to help them dig numerous tunnels into Israel and Egypt, a 2012 paper written for the Journal of Palestine Studies reported. […] In December 2011, the paper’s author, Nicolas Pelham, accompanied a police patrol in Gaza and reported that “nothing was done to impede the use of children in the tunnels, where, much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies.” He continued and said that “at least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials.” …

An international rights group is pushing the federal government and the tobacco industry to take further steps to protect children working on U.S. tobacco farms. A report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch claims that children as young as 7 are sometimes working long hours in fields harvesting nicotine- and pesticide-laced tobacco leaves under sometimes hazardous conditions. Most of what the group documented is legal, but it wants cigarette makers to push for safety on farms from which they buy tobacco. Human Rights Watch details findings from interviews with more than 140 children working on farms in North Carolina, Kentucky,...

Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) said Tuesday that state regulations governing child labor are hurting the state’s economy, according to the Portland Press Herald. “We don’t allow children to work until they’re 16, but two years later, when they’re 18, they can go to war and fight for us,” LePage said at an agricultural trade show, according to the paper. “That’s causing damage to our economy. I started working far earlier than that, and it didn’t hurt me at all. There is nothing wrong with being a paperboy at 12 years old, or at a store sorting bottles at 12...

It was time for our beach trip, the one I take with my wife and daughter every summer. On a beautiful early morning a month ago, we packed the family car (okay, my wife packed it) and headed from our home in Oxford, Miss., to Florida’s Gulf Coast for a week of fun and sun. Some call it the Redneck Riviera. This Jersey transplant and his Mississippi girls call it paradise. It’s the same Gulf Coast, by the way, that the media predicted — even seemed to hope — would be flooded with crude oil and destroyed as a result...

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Department of Labor today issued the following statement regarding the withdrawal of a proposed rule dealing with children who work in agricultural vocations: "The Obama administration is firmly committed to promoting family farmers and respecting the rural way of life, especially the role that parents and other family members play in passing those traditions down through the generations. The Obama administration is also deeply committed to listening and responding to what Americans across the country have to say about proposed rules and regulations. "As a result, the Department of Labor is announcing today the withdrawal of...

Barack Obama is attacking the family farm – an American tradition. The administration’s Department of Labor implemented new regulations to restrict children from working on the family farm. This is despite the fact that farm accidents and injuries have decreased over the past several years. For generations children and adults have worked together on the family farm. Those days are over. Senators John Thune (R-S.D.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) introduced the Preserving America’s Family Farm Act, to prevent the Department of Labor (DOL) from enacting its controversial proposed restrictions that would ban children from working on family farms. Recently, Senator...

Marlene Stasinos believes the best food is local food. “It’s more healthy. It’s less processed,” she says as she walks from her farm stand toward her home in Haverhill, Mass. “It’s just better for you when you eat it.” Stasinos’ family has been farming in and around Haverhill for three generations, but she says backyard farming is under attack.

Regulation: For centuries, children have played an indispensable role in family farms. Their efforts have been and still are often essential to survival. But the nanny state wants to outlaw their contributions. What do the Labor Department bureaucrats in urban, elitist Washington who are writing the rule that would prohibit children under 18 from working on farms know about farm culture? How familiar are they with agricultural society and its age-old traditions and its timeless demands? Who are they to interfere with a way of life that has been the backbone of America? None of that matters to the busybodies...

The U.S. Department of Labor is withdrawing a rule that would have limited the sorts of work that children can do on farms.

Under pressure from farming advocates in rural communities, and following a report by The Daily Caller, the Obama administration withdrew a proposed rule Thursday that would have applied child labor laws to family farms. Critics complained that the regulation would have drastically changed the extent to which children could work on farms owned by family members. The U.S. Department of Labor cited public outcry as the reason for withdrawing the rule. “The decision to withdraw this rule — including provisions to define the ‘parental exemption’ — was made in response to thousands of comments expressing concerns about the effect of...

Rosie O'Donnell, possibly one of the most uninformed people to ever be given a television program, actually ridiculed the intellectual capacity of Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich Thursday. Appearing with fellow brainiac Joy Behar on the HLN program thankfully in its final shows, O'Donnell called the former Speaker of the House a "joke" saying, "Perhaps he should read a history book" JOY BEHAR, HOST: Yes, but I mean, what about Newt's plan to drop the child labor laws and put kids to work as janitors? ROSIE O'DONNELL: Yes. BEHAR: I mean, where does he come up with this crap? O'DONNELL:...

LANSING, Mich. — Sparking outrage across the country’s rural heartland, the Obama administration is proposing rules to curb the ability of children on farms to engage in “corn sex” for pay. Farmers call it corn detasseling, a time-honored but physically demanding chore designed to promote cross-pollination in the field. For decades it has been a way for teens to earn extra spending money — and forge some good-natured field hand camaraderie — for a few weeks each summer. The Obama administration is considering revisions to federal agricultural work rules that effectively would bar teens younger than 16 from engaging in...

The Labor Department is sharply increasing the penalties against employers who illegally use child workers. Anyone illegally employing 12-and 13-year-olds will now face a penalty of $6,000 for each violation. The maximum fine previously was $900.

Scotland Yard and Romanian police have busted 30 suspected mobsters who allegedly ran a child trafficking ring which kidnapped children from poor Gypsy communities and forced them into a life of crime in Britain as reported by the Daily Mail: Police estimate that more then 170 youngsters as young as seven have been trafficked to the UK by the gang. * * * Police say the modern-day Fagins forced their young victims - snatched from poor gypsy communities - to beg in Britain and go on pick-pocketing and shoplifting sprees. Mob bosses set them up with bogus documents and homes...

"You will become frontrunners of your generation. You are the future, and I hope that you will remember Copenhagen as the beginning when you look back 10-20 years from now,” said Else Sommer from City of Copenhagen’s Department of Children and Family Care as she opened the Children’s Climate Forum on November 28. The symbolism could not be stronger when the delegates, 165 children from 44 countries, plastered handprints in all the colours of the rainbow on a large globe and lifted it up, declaring the forum open. “Children have a great ability to communicate, because we can hold hands...

As many as 150,000 poor British children were shipped off to the colonies over three and a half centuries, often taken from struggling families under programs intended to provide them with a new start - and the Empire with a supply of sturdy white workers. Forty years after the program stopped, Britain and Australia are saying sorry to the child migrants, who were promised a better life only to suffer abuse and neglect thousands of miles from home. The British government said Sunday that Prime Minister Gordon Brown would apologize for child migrant programs that sent boys and girls as...

We have to guard against a kind of moral obtuseness where if we don’t see the harm, that means it doesn’t exist. These poor people can’t afford to send their children off to day camp in the summer so they can do archery and go swimming. They can’t afford an academic program so the children’s achievements won’t dissipate over the summer. They can’t afford to have Mom quit work and stay home to watch them, so they bring their children to work. It is not in any way obvious that the children would be better off if their parents made...

SNIPPET: "For all his public activity, Bray has rarely, if ever, discussed his life story in detail. His own MAS biography offers vague descriptions of his work as "a long time civil and human rights advocate." A charismatic African-American convert to Islam, Bray spent this entire decade working for Islamist organizations. Prior to joining MAS, Bray was political director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Those jobs have helped him build a growing public profile and given him access to politicians and policy makers. And that may explain his reluctance to discuss his life before political activism. The Investigative...

… The trafficking of children for domestic labor in the U.S. is an extension of an illegal but common practice in Africa. Families in remote villages send their daughters to work in cities for extra money and the opportunity to escape a dead-end life. Some girls work for free on the understanding that they will at least be better fed in the home of their employer. The custom has led to the spread of trafficking, as well-to-do Africans accustomed to employing children immigrate to the U.S. Around one-third of the estimated 10,000 forced laborers in the United States are servants...

Late at night, the neighbors saw a little girl at the kitchen sink of the house next door... Shyima was 10 when a wealthy Egyptian couple brought her from a poor village in northern Egypt to work in their California home. She awoke before dawn and often worked past midnight to iron their clothes, mop the marble floors and dust the family's crystal. She earned $45 a month working up to 20 hours a day. She had no breaks during the day and no days off...