Society's ChildS


Padlock

Hashem Abedi: Brother of Manchester Arena bomber jailed for life with 55-year minimum term over murder of 22 victims

Lizzi Dearden
Independent
Thu, 20 Aug 2020 00:00 UTC
Abedi
© Greater Manchester PoliceMugshot: Hashem Abedi found guilty of 22 counts of murder.
The Manchester Arena bomber's brother has been jailed for life for his part in the terror attack.

Hashem Abedi was convicted of murdering the 22 victims after prosecutors said he was "just as responsible" as his suicide bomber brother. The 23-year-old dropped out of his trial and fired his legal team, then refused to attend his sentencing hearing at London's Old Bailey.

Mr Justice Jeremy Baker gave Abedi a minimum term of 55 years because the law did not allow him to pass a rare, whole-life order, because of Abedi's age at the time of the attack. He will not be released unless the Parole Board decides it is safe to do so, meaning he may spend the rest of his life in prison.

The judge said the brothers chose to target an Ariana Grande concert together, and "it was their intention to specifically target" young fans, including children. Justice Baker said:
"The stark reality is that these were atrocious crimes: large in their scale, deadly in their intent and appalling in their consequences. Those consequences have been graphically described in the many victim impact statements which I have had to consider concerning the diverse, talented and extraordinary individuals whose lives have either been extinguished or forever blighted by the physical and psychological effects of the explosion."
He said that the "despair and desolation" of bereaved families was palpable during the hearing, and that injured victims had been left feeling "guilt and shame" for surviving. "The only individual who should have any such feelings is the defendant," he added.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Light Saber

Ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger says it is 'surprising more can't see Assange case is worrying for all journalists'

Freddy Mayhew
Press Gazette
Fri, 21 Aug 2020 18:10 UTC
assange arrest
Julian Assange was dragged from the Ecuadoran embassy in London on April 11, 2019. Though he has completed all prison time sentenced, he remains in solitary confinement at Britain's supermax Belmarsh Prison

Comment: Has Rusbrigder had his 'come to Jesus' moment about press freedom? True journalism will share Julian Assange's fate.


Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has said the ongoing US extradition case against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is "disturbing" and "has worrying implications for all journalists".

And he has said it is "surprising" that more don't share his concerns.

While Assange has garnered support from a range of campaigning groups for his plight, the response from journalists and the news industry in the UK has been relatively muted.

Rusbridger was editor of the Guardian for 20 years, leaving in 2015. Under his editorship the paper worked with Wikileaks on the 2010 Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and, a few years later, the Snowden Files.

Comment:

Read More...
Chart Pie

Nearly one third of New Delhi's population have had Covid-19 according to government antibody survey


RT
Thu, 20 Aug 2020 15:58 UTC
New Delhi
© Reuters/Anushree FadnavisNew Delhi
New Delhi's mass antibody testing has found that almost 30 percent of those living in the Indian capital may have been infected with the coronavirus. The number eclipses that of the country's overall Covid-19 tally.

"We found that 29.1 percent of the population of Delhi had antibodies, which means that they were infected and have been cured," the capital city's Health Minister Satyendar Jain told reporters on Thursday.

The serological survey studied as many as 15,000 people residing in New Delhi area and was conducted in the first week of August.

If confirmed by further testing, the number would eclipse the 155,000 cases officially recorded in the capital territory as of now. New Delhi's estimated population currently stands at over 30 million, meaning that almost 10 million people could have been infected if the projection is correct.

India is in the top three of countries most affected by the coronavirus epidemic. The South Asian nation has reported 2.8 million active cases and 53,866 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University figures.
Read More...
Microscope 2

Best of the Web: International scholars must resist the American campaign to inject racial tribalism into science

Andreas Bikfalvi and Marcel Kuntz
Quillette
Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:01 UTC
shutdown stem academia
"Schœlcher n'est pas notre sauveur," declared protestors who toppled statues on the French territory of Martinique earlier this year — "Schœlcher is not our savior." The reference is to Victor Schœlcher, the 19th-century politician who's long been lauded for his role in abolishing slavery in France and its colonial holdings. French President Emmanuel Macron rightly condemned the act, as did cabinet minister Annick Giradin, who denounced the destruction of monuments that embody the nation's "collective memory." And the mayor of Martinique's capital warned against la tentation de réécrire l'histoire — the temptation to rewrite history.


Comment: See also:

Read More...
Propaganda

As Democrats deliver 4-point poll boost to Trump, media spin says convention bounce 'not the point'


RT
Fri, 21 Aug 2020 17:15 UTC
trump thumbs up
© REUTERS/Tom BrennerUS President Donald Trump speaks at the 2020 Council for National Policy meeting in Arlington, Virginia, August 21, 2020.
While the mainstream media have sought to downplay the impact of 2020 party conventions, polls showing President Donald Trump surging ahead as the Democrats held their virtual rally have them both stumped and spinning.

"Don't be surprised if Biden doesn't get a convention bounce in the polls. That's not the point," declared an early Friday headline in the Washington Post. Post-convention surges are hard when the country is polarized and the parties "stage theirs back to back, as they will this year," argued opinion writer Karen Tumulty.
trump biden poll
© Twitter/screenshot
Except both things were just as true in 2016, which didn't stop the media from treating the "convention bounce" as a thing of conventional wisdom. Either way, the problem was not that the virtual Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin didn't move the needle for the Democrats and their ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris - it's that it somehow managed to jolt the public opinion in favor of Trump!

The president's approval rating among likely US voters stood at 47 percent on Wednesday, with 51 percent disapproving. By Friday morning, those numbers had flipped completely, to 51 approval and 47 percent disapproval.
Read More...
Megaphone

Portland rioter Marquise Love viciously assaulted another white man before brutal attack on driver

Cassandra Fairbanks
Gateway Pundit
Fri, 21 Aug 2020 09:20 UTC
marquise love video stills
Portland rioter Marquise "Keese" Love, who is currently on the run from police for attacking a driver who had attempted to help stop a mob from attacking a trans person, was involved in a sickening gang assault on another white man prior to the viral incident.

In a shocking video of Love's previous attack, a large group is seen running up to a man and brutally beating him before dragging him down the street and continuing the attack. Love is clearly visible in the surveillance footage of the violence released by police in June.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Fire

Ghislaine Maxwell's deposition material could spread like 'wildfire,' threaten fair trial, lawyers say

Jonathan Stempel
Reuters
Fri, 21 Aug 2020 02:29 UTC
ghislaine maxwell artist's conception
© REUTERS/Jane Rosenberg/File PhotoJuly 14, 2020 in this courtroom sketch.
Ghislaine Maxwell's chance of a fair trial on criminal charges she aided Jeffrey Epstein's sexual abuse of girls could be destroyed by substantial negative publicity if a deposition she gave four years ago were publicly released, her lawyers said.

The lawyers made the argument in a Thursday night filing asking the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan to reverse a lower court judge's order to unseal the deposition and other documents.

Maxwell's deposition had been taken in April 2016 for a now-settled civil defamation lawsuit against the British socialite by Virginia Giuffre, who said Epstein kept her as a "sex slave" with Maxwell's assistance.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Propaganda

Messaging the vaccine - How to manipulate the American public

A Political Junkie
Viable Opposition
Wed, 19 Aug 2020 05:47 UTC
Vaccine
© GeekWire
With it looking increasingly likely that governments will force vaccinate us for the SARS-CoV-2 virus should a vaccine actually be created and manufactured as a means of returning society to whatever passes for "normal" in the post-COVID-19 reality, it is interesting to see how the United States federal government is working to persuade us to accept the vaccine.

Washington, in collaboration with Yale University, are researching the best methods that will make us think that it is a good idea to be vaccinated as protection against the current novel coronavirus. The official title of the trial is "Persuasive Messages for COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake: a Randomized Controlled Trial, Part 1" as shown here on the National Institutes of Health, U.S National Library of Medicine website:

library of medicine
The brief summary of the study reads as follows:
"This study tests different messages about vaccinating against COVID-19 once the vaccine becomes available. Participants are randomized to 1 of 12 arms, with one control arm and one baseline arm. We will compare the reported willingness to get a COVID-19 vaccine at 3 and 6 months of it becoming available between the 10 intervention arms to the 2 control arms."
Read More...
Attention

Are you ready for the "no one could have known" routine?

Thomas Harrington
OffGuardian
Sat, 22 Aug 2020 04:57 UTC
coronavirus
Ready for another rendition of the "no one could have known" routine made famous by all the self-proclaimed liberals who shamelessly went along with the Neo-Cons planned and lie-supported destruction of the Middle East nearly two decades ago?

As in "no one could have known" that by shutting down life as we know it to focus obsessively on a virus mostly affecting what is still a relatively small number of people at the end of their lives (yes, oh squeamish ones we must summon the courage to talk about Quality Adjusted Life Years when making public policy) we probably would:

1. Cause economic devastation and hence excess deaths, suicides, divorces depressions in much larger numbers than those killed by the virus.

2. Provide an already monopolistic and predatory online retailing establishment with competitive advantages in terms of capital reserves and market share that will make it virtually impossible at any time in the near or medium future for the country's and the world's small and even medium-sized businesses to ever catch up to them. And that this will plunge huge sectors of the world-wide economy into serf-like ruin, with all that this portends in terms of additional death and human suffering.

3. Cause greatly increased misery and countless additional deaths in the so-called Global South where many people, rightly or wrongly, depend on the consumption patterns of us relatively fortunate sit-at-homers to make it through the week.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Black Magic

Best of the Web: The Fatal Attractions of Techno-Fascism

Mark Petrakis
Dissident Voice
Mon, 17 Aug 2020 00:00 UTC
technocracy
The enduring appeal of fascism is that it requires so little from us... so little independent thought; just our basic belief and adherence to a limited set of popularly-shared directives and narratives that once fully accepted, relieve us of the need to address stubborn questions or to fret over subtle differences of opinion and feeling. Continual propaganda is there to reassure us that we are complete, that we know all that is important to know — that we are rational, pragmatic and moral... that the science has been settled and that we are all a part of something historic.

Such a surrender to constricted narratives cuts across all classes and income brackets. Neither the most educated nor the least uneducated retain any special advantage in the face of powerful consensus-shaping propaganda.

PROPAGANDA is, of course, the life-blood of authoritarian control. Maintaining the economic, governmental and scientific frameworks of a modern technocratic "operating system" would be impossible without propaganda's divisive assault. When truth is seen as a liability to power, it must always be disallowed, with all instances of it effectively penalized.

Radio, television, the Internet and their constant enabler, popular "science" — operate today as their own religions, reliant for their success upon the unquestioning devotion of the masses. The currency that we use to pay for admission to the electronic spectacle is our attention, and in such hyper-mediated times as these, those charges mount up exponentially, until we generally find ourselves at some point, broke and spiritually exhausted by soul-crushing denial and disconnection.
Read More...