Society's ChildS


Light Sabers

Transgender cop vs. disabled teenager: A courtroom drama for our time

lgbt police
© Flickr / Adrian SnoodA police officer pictured at London's LGBT Community Pride parade in 2015
A transgender police officer and a teenager with Asperger syndrome walk into a courtroom. It's not a joke, and it ends with the disabled teen under house arrest for a hate crime. Welcome to intersectional Britain.

PCSO Connor Freel was born a woman, but now identifies as a man. A transgender activist and police officer, Freel was on foot patrol in the northern Welsh town of Mold last October when he was heckled by 19-year-old Declan Armstrong, who shouted "Is it a boy or is it a girl?" at him.

Insulting? Yes. Insensitive? Yes. A hate crime? Yes, Mold Magistrates' Court decided this week.

The court heard how Freel was left "vulnerable, distressed and embarrassed" by the incident. Armstrong was found guilty of violating the Welsh Public Order Act 1986 by "using abusive or insulting words with intent to cause harassment." The teen was ordered to pay £590, including £200 in compensation to PCSO Freel, and was slapped with a curfew order for 12 weeks.

According to the judge, the "transphobic" nature of Armstrong's comments was an aggravating factor, and elevated his punishment from a low-level one to a medium.

Pistol

Shooting after Florida funeral leaves 2 dead, including teen boy

police church shooting florida
© WPTVPolice in Riviera Beach, FL respond to church shooting
One of those killed at Victory City Church in Riviera Beach was 15 years old.

Three people were shot, two of them fatally, following a funeral Saturday afternoon at a church in Riviera Beach, Florida, police said.

The shooting was reported just after 2:30 p.m. outside Victory City Church.

A 15-year-old boy and a man were pronounced dead at the scene. A woman was treated for a non-life threatening injuries, Riviera Beach police said in a press release. The dead man was later identified as 47-year-old Royce Freeman. Police said they were not identifying the other victims.

Star of David

Journalist injured as press BARRAGED by Israeli tear gas canisters while covering Ramallah protests

journalist tear gas ramallah israel
© RT/screencapture
A group of journalists reporting from the scene of clashes between Palestinian protests and Israeli soldiers came under fire from the Israeli side, which apparently targeted them with a barrage of tear gas canisters.

The incident happened amid the so-called 'days of rage' — a series of protests against Donald Trump's proposal to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. One of the demonstrations against the plan was held on Saturday outside of Ramallah, near the city of Al-Bireh in the West Bank.

The confrontation between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers was quite intensive. The demonstrators pelted the Israeli side with stones and burned tires, as the soldiers fired tear gas grenades. At one moment, a barrage of gas canisters landed right next to where a group of journalists covering the event stood, sending them fleeing and scurrying for gas masks.

Comment:


Binoculars

Irish election 2020: Shock poll shows Sinn Féin are poised for power

sinn fein varadkar macdonald
Make no mistake, this poll is seismic. And if replicated on this day next week, it would represent Sinn Féin's greatest breakthrough in over a century.

Mary Lou McDonald and her party are heading for government, and soon, if not this time around.

It was on December 14, 1918, that old Sinn Féin swept the board across Ireland and consigned the Irish Parliamentary Party to oblivion. That was, ironically, the last time a general election was held on a Saturday in Ireland.

The poll, carried out by Panelbase for The Times, puts Sinn Féin in second place on 21 per cent support; the very stuff of Republican dreams. It emulates a previous 21 per cent rating found by an Irish Times poll last month.

But sweeter still is consigning their bitter enemies in Fine Gael to an embarrassing third place, meaning that the Sinn Féin day — always coming, according to their Irish-language slogan — has more or less arrived.

Bomb

Kashmir: Grenade attack in Srinagar's Lal Chowk; 2 CRPF troopers, 4 civilians hurt

Terrorists hurled the grenade on the CRPF personnel near Pratap Park area of the city, a police official said.
CRPF personnel at Lal Chowk in Srinagar
© Hindustan TimesGrenade attack on CRPF personnel at Pratap Park, Lal Chowk in Srinagar
Two security force personnel and four civilians were injured when terrorists lobbed a grenade on a patrolling party of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) in Srinagar's busy Lal Chowk area on Sunday, police said.

Terrorists hurled the grenade on the CRPF personnel near Pratap Park area of the city, a police official said.

A CRPF spokesperson, Pankaj Singh, confirmed to HT that two troopers of Charlie 121 company have received minor injuries.

Gift 3

A pivot to China, a stronger economy or total collapse? What's next for the UK post-Brexit

brexit pins
© Reuters / Toby MelvillePro-Brexit pins are seen on a supporter's jacket at Parliament Square, on Brexit day in London
A pivot to China, a stronger economy or total collapse?

With Brexit done, where is Britain headed next? Will London allign with Washington, Beijing, or both? Will the departure usher in a new era of prosperity, or the collapse of the UK itself? RT spoke to experts and politicians. Business as usual, but pivoting to China

John Laughland, academic and author:
Boris Johnson is, you know, very close to Donald Trump. Trump may well be reelected, and that means that for four years Johnson will have in Trump a strong political ally, and he will seek to capitalize on that.

I think it's pretty unlikely that relations with Russia will improve. Johnson was foreign secretary during the Skripal affair, and he at that time spoke in very strong terms against Russia. Shortly after he became foreign secretary, he went to Moscow in an attempt to improve relations, and as he sees it, Moscow's response was to poison people in Salisbury, so he took it as a personal affront. He even said, after he'd left office as foreign secretary, "I hate that regime," referring to Russia.

For some years now, including under David Cameron, Britain has been operating a pivot towards China. There's a nuclear plant station built in Britain, which will be owned by China, the mobile telephone network is going to be built by Huawei, in spite of US protests. So there's a long-term pivot towards China, and when you think about it, this is possibly the economic logic behind Brexit. If Brexit is to be summed up in one simple slogan it's that Britain is leaving the low-growth zone of the European Union, and is pivoting towards the high-growth economies of America and China.

Gift 2

Leave or Remain: Who won the Brexit break-up? The UK's tortured relationship with the EU in numbers

brexit socks
© Reuters / Francois Lenoir
With Britain finally saying goodbye to the European Union after an agonizingly long and complicated Brexit negotiation saga, it's a good time to cast an eye back over the history of this doomed relationship.

Who benefited most? Were Brexiteers' fears always justified? How has decades as a member of this European club changed the face of Britain? Ultimately, who won in this Brexit break-up drama?

Let's look at some of the numbers.

Membership fee controversy

One of the issues that has always frustrated British Eurosceptics is the so-called 'membership fee' and what exactly that entails. Plenty of misinformation surrounding Britain's net contribution to Brussels has floated around over the years and the criticism has always been: 'We contribute more than we get back in return.'

Vinyl

Best of the Web: British Groundhog Day: Muslim dupe on police watch-list randomly stabs multiple people in London, UK govt sez 'Islamic terrorism'


Comment: Y'all know the script by now. Rinse and repeat, ad nauseum...


london stabbing terror attack
© Simon Dawson / ReutersA police forensics officer gestures near the site where a man was shot by armed officers in Streatham, south London, Britain, February 2, 2020.
London police have shot a man dead in the city's Streatham area in a "terrorist-related" incident. Several people have been stabbed, and video footage shared on social media shows armed police and ambulances on the street.

Armed police officers descended on the London suburb of Streatham on Sunday afternoon, and shot a knife-wielding criminal dead.

The Metropolitan Police said on Twitter that a "number of people have been stabbed," and that the incident has been declared "terrorist-related."

Video footage shared on social media shows a man lying on the ground outside a shuttered pharmacy, as armed police officers train their weapons on his unmoving body.


Comment: Question: given that stabbings in London are so common these days, including incidents where multiple people are stabbed, what prompted the authorities to respond within minutes to this particular stabbing with a veritable army of special armed police, helicopters, and ambulances?

Maybe it's nothing; maybe they're just super-organized and ready-to-go on a Sunday afternoon to any and all potential terror attacks...

In any event, it's all getting a bit old, no?

This stabby-jihadi too was on a 'watch-list', by the way.

Weirdly, or not, just like the London stabber-jihadi incident two months ago, an 'echo' stabbing incident occurred almost simultaneously across the English channel (this time in Ghent, Belgium, rather than The Hague, Holland)...
Police in the Belgian city of Ghent have shot and injured a knife-wielding woman, after she stabbed two people. The incident took place around an hour after a "terrorist" knifeman was shot dead by police in London.

According to Belgian news site HLN, a dark-skinned woman attacked two passers-by with a knife on the Bevrijdingslaan street in central Ghent. The woman reportedly stabbed one of her victims in the stomach.

Armed police officers neutralized the woman with a gunshot to the hand, and she was taken into custody.


Notice that the Belgian cops just shot the knife out of her hand, rather than riddle her body with bullets, a practice UK police seem to have picked up from the Americans. Why not just subdue the attacker then interrogate him/her?

Oh yeah, those 'suicide vests'...

Update 23:00 CET

Imagine our shock to learn that he was released from prison just a few days ago...


Update 3 February

'ISIS' has 'claimed responsibility' for the 'terror attack'...


That's according to the media anyway, which are citing 'ISIS News Agency, Amaq', if such really even exists. It has no surviving websites or social media accounts because they've either long since been taken down or tracked, located and droned.

As with ALL 'ISIS terror attacks' therefore, tracking the source of these claims-on-behalf-of-ISIS-by-Amaq... leads to a dead-end at SITE Intelligence 'terrorist watch group' subscriber-only website, an Israeli-owned corporation registered in Bethesda, Maryland, which is of course home to the NSA...

SITE Intelligence ISIS Mossad
Update 3 February 22:15 CET


No Entry

Russia suspends visa-free tourist travel to and from China over coronavirus

chinese tourist moscow
© Sputnik / Kirill KallinikovTourists wearing medical masks in the Red Square in Moscow.
Russia said on Saturday it was suspending visa-free travel for tourists to and from China to help contain the outbreak of a new coronavirus that emerged in China.

A bilateral visa-free regime for tourist groups agreed on in 2000 will suspended from Feb. 2, a government decree said.

Russia will also temporarily stop accepting and issuing documents for work visas to Chinese nationals.

Russia reported its first two cases of coronavirus on Friday and restricted direct flights to China, its biggest trade partner.

The Russian military is to start evacuating Russian citizens from China due to the outbreak.

Comment: See also: Coronavirus' deadliest day in China, WHO declares international health emergency, countries close borders - UPDATES


Cross

'He's in our anthem, why not in constitution?' Russian Patriarch wants GOD mentioned in state charter

Edessa
© Sputnik / Evgeny EpanchintsevAn icon of the 'Image of Edessa' of Jesus at a Russian church.
Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, says believers should pray for a constitutional amendment that would add a reference to God. He thinks the mention would be appreciated by all faiths alike.

"Most Russian citizens believe in God. Not just the Orthodox Christians — I speak about Muslims and many-many others," the patriarch said as cited by the Church spokesman. "If the anthem can have the words 'Our homeland protected by God', why can't the constitution say the same thing?"

Russia is currently preparing for a number of amendments to the basic law, which would somewhat redistribute powers among its branches and enshrine in it the State Council, an already existing consultative body. In theory, Patriarch's proposal could also be thrown in with the list of suggested changes.

Comment: See also: