Society's ChildS


Chart Pie

UK election poll that got 2017 result right predicts clear victory for Johnson's Conservatives


Comment: We usually avoid pre-election polls like the plague, but this one seems worth highlighting.


uk election poll 2019
A major new poll has predicted Boris Johnson's Conservative Party will win up to 366 seats at the general election.

The MRP poll, commissioned by the Best for Britain pro-EU campaign group, shows the Tories could end up with a majority of 82 on December 12.

It comes ahead of a YouGov MRP poll to be released tonight - the same poll that predicted Theresa May would lose her majority in 2017 when every other poll suggested the Conservatives would secure a big win.

Best for Britain's research surveyed nearly 40,000 people between October 15 and November 24 and shows Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party could finish with just 199 seats.

Cowboy Hat

Sheriffs group urges Supreme Court to strike down New York City gun rules

Sheriffs
© Mark Wilson/Getty Images
The National Sheriffs' Association is leading a coalition of law enforcement and gun rights groups urging the Supreme Court to strike down New York City's gun transportation regulations.

The coalition filed an amicus (or "friend of the court") brief arguing that the city lacks a legitimate public safety rationale for the rule, which prohibits "premise license" holders from carrying their firearms beyond city lines or to any location besides an authorized gun club. The high court will hear a challenge to New York's regulations on Dec. 2.

"The public safety interest alleged to support the rule is non-existent and unproven," the brief reads. "There is no proof that premises licensees have ever posed a threat to public safety when transporting their handguns."

"It is also highly implausible that premises licensees would engage in violence when transporting their handguns out of the city," the brief adds. "Licensees undergo exceedingly searching inquiries during the application process, and licenses can be refused for even trivial reasons."

Attention

How Westpac's LitePay service inadvertently helped Australian paedophiles abuse Filipino children

westpac
© ABC News / Alistair Kroie
Probably the single most damaging revelation in AUSTRAC's case against Westpac is that its LitePay service allowed paedophiles to send money to the Philippines to pay for child exploitation without raising any red flags.

The revelations have already cost the bank one high-profile customer, child protection advocacy group Bravehearts.

"Child sexual assault and exploitation happens in the darkest of corners and Westpac had an opportunity to shine a light on it. Instead they showed an unbelievable and inhumane disinterest," said the group's founder Hetty Johnston.

"There are rules and regulations in place so this doesn't happen but it seems Westpac has opted to ignore them. Every organisation has to take responsibility for protecting our children and if Westpac hasn't been doing that, we simply can't keep banking with them."

In its statement of claim, anti-money laundering watchdog AUSTRAC outlined 12 customer cases where repeated suspicious payments were made to the Philippines in a pattern that should have raised red flags about potential child abuse.

It also said that while LitePay has now taken steps to improve its monitoring, other Westpac services still present opportunities for high-risk transactions to be made to the Philippines and South-East Asia without alerting the bank or regulator.

So how were paedophiles exploiting Westpac's banking services and why was this allowed to continue for so long?

Comment: Apparently Westpac was also facilitating tax evasion:
"That's what this case is all about — it's the facilitation of massive, high-level, cross-border tax evasion," says Nathan Lynch, Thomson Reuters' Asia-Pacific bureau chief, financial crime and risk.
"Westpac established a cloak of invisibility for cross-border payments — tax authorities, financial regulators and agencies couldn't see anything.
...
"Westpac considered that the SWIFT payment network was costly and not an efficient means of sending low-value, large-volume payments for clients of global banks that need to make and receive payments around the world," was AUSTRAC's damning assessment.

To get around the "inconvenience" of SWIFT, Westpac set up two of its own products: LitePay for small transfers of up to $3,000 — the favoured platform of those sending money to Filipino sex traffickers — and the heavy-duty Australasian Cash Management (ACM) platform, capable of facilitating payments of up to $100 million.

Under the SWIFT rules, all of these payments need to be accompanied by sender and recipient data, regardless of the size. Without this data the global anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) framework is boxing in a blindfold.
...
As AUSTRAC pointed out, Westpac provided "nesting arrangements" for other banks and financial institutions to shift money around the world without anyone knowing what was really happening, and who was shifting money to whom.
...
"Westpac had limited or no visibility over the sources of funds ... there were no caps or limits on the volume and/or value of cross-border transactions through these arrangements," AUSTRAC alleges.
...
"$11 billion may have been moved through these channels, but Westpac can't show the regulator where it all went. Even after a multi-year remediation project, there is still missing information," Thomson Reuters' Mr Lynch said.



Car Black

Bear blamed for car damages in Alaska airport parking lot

Bear tears apart car
A bear has been blamed for a pair of vehicle break-ins at an Alaska airport parking lot that resulted in thousands of dollars in damage to one car, officials said.

The vandalism occurred at the Island Air terminal parking lot adjacent to the Kodiak Benny Benson State Airport, The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported Wednesday.

Vehicle owners Doreen Phillips and Alyssa Brenteson are both residents of Akhiok, a village about 90 miles (145 kilometers) from Kodiak.

Brenteson parked her car for two days at the lot and returned to find a caved-in roof, broken window, ripped seats, and muddy bear prints and fur covering her car, she said.

Eye 1

Man's body found in elderly woman's freezer could have been there for 11 years

Crime scene
The body of a man found in a freezer in a dead woman's home may have been there for as long as 11 years.

The grisly discovery happened last week when police were doing a routine welfare check on a 75-year-old woman named Jeanne Souron-Mathers that had not been seen for about two weeks. When police gained access to her home they discovered her deceased on her bed.

"That is kind of what started all this," said Tooele City Police sergeant Jeremy Hansen to ABC News' affiliate station KTVX.

Officers began processing the scene of the woman's death but when they looked into a deep freezer they found an adult male deceased inside the freezer.

Snakes in Suits

Hunter Biden's alleged baby mama worked at DC strip club under stage name 'Dallas': Report

Hunter Joe Biden
© REUTERS/Carlos BarriaHunter and Joe Biden
Former Vice President Joe Biden's son allegedly frequented a Washington, D.C., strip club where his "baby mama" worked around the time he was in a relationship with his dead brother's wife.

Hunter Biden, 49, allegedly frequented Mpire Club, located in the heart of D.C. in Dupont Circle, where Lunden Alexis Roberts worked, who went under the stage name "Dallas," sources told The Post, Page Six reported Wednesday. The sources told the publication that Roberts worked at the club around the time she became pregnant.

Several Mpire workers reportedly said they recognized 28-year-old Roberts.

Mpire is located blocks away from the strip joint Archibald's Gentlemen's Club, where employees told the New York Post they suspect Hunter Biden used the VIP room to smoke crack.
Hunter Biden
© Moses Robinson/Getty Images for Usher's New Look FoundationHunter Biden attends Usher's New Look Foundation — World Leadership Conference & Awards 2011 — Day 3 at Cobb Energy Center on July 22, 2011 in Atlanta, Georgia.
DNA test results confirmed Hunter Biden is the father of former basketball player Roberts's baby, a motion filed Nov. 20 in Independence County, Arkansas, on behalf of Roberts said. Roberts filed a petition for paternity and support for her 1-year-old baby in May, the Daily Mail reported. Hunter Biden denied the allegations in August and requested the court dismiss the allegations altogether.

Hunter Biden reportedly fathered Roberts's child while in a relationship with his late brother's wife, Hallie Biden. Hunter Biden and Hallie Biden's relationship ended in April, and Hunter Biden would go on to marry Melissa Cohen in a surprise wedding in May, Business Insider reported.

The November motion stated that "DNA testing has established with scientific certainty" that the defendant is the father of the plaintiff's child and that Hunter Biden "is not expected to challenge the results of the DNA test or the testing process."

Roberts said the baby's "paternal grandfather, Joe Biden, is seeking the nomination of the Democratic Party for President of the United States of America" and is considered "by some to be the person most likely to win his party's nomination and challenge President [Donald] Trump on the ballot in 2020."

The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Laptop

Sacha Baron Cohen is wrong about social media

sacha baron cohen
© Getty
Actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen launched a scathing attack on the social-media giants last week for enabling the proliferation of 'hate, conspiracies and lies'. In his keynote address to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Baron Cohen denounced Facebook as 'the greatest propaganda machine in history'. The Who is America star called for greater regulation of social media to remove hate speech, even if it meant banning elected politicians. And because Facebook doesn't fact-check political adverts, he claimed that if the platform were around in the 1930s, 'it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his "solution" to the "Jewish problem"'.

There are two major problems with Baron Cohen's broadside against social media. First, it is simply untrue that social-media platforms are unregulated and unmoderated havens for free speech. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and PayPal have all banned users who they consider to be spreading 'hate speech' - a definition which extends from conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and EDL founder Tommy Robinson to left-wing feminists like Meghan Murphy and some Antifa organisations.

Comment: So much for Cohen 'just being a comedian'. With this speech (to the ADL, no less!), he joins the globalists' call for mass censorship - precisely the kind of thing Hitler would have approved of. The 'funnyman' recently played a Mossad officer in a 'serious' biopic. It all puts his past 'performances' in a new light. Was he 'just making fun of' 'whoever' when singing ditties about 'throwing the Jews down the well', or was there a particular political slant to his characters?

As for social media being 'the largest mass propaganda machine in history'... whew, just don't mention the globalist MSM - largely controlled by his 'tribe'.

See also:


Attention

NYC pays 'rubber room' teacher $1.7M over 20 years after sex abuse claims

Aryeh Eller
© J.C. RiceAryeh Eller
It's his 20th anniversary in the rubber room.

Aryeh Eller taught orchestral music at Hillcrest High School in Queens for just two full years before being suspended in November 1999 for allegedly harassing female students with sexual comments and touching.

He asked girls to lift their shirts to show him their butts, lewdly remarked on their breasts, hugged and kissed them and claimed that he "had a hard time teaching" with the way they dressed, investigators found. He even admitted having a "crush" on a teen.

Comment: That so many teachers guilty of clearly exploitive and degrading behavior with students are quarantined, with pay(!), rather than fired is a true miscarriage of justice. That these pedophiles are kept on the payroll is abhorrent.

See also:


Stop

Council to sell original Magna Carta for £20,000,000 to fund office refurb

magna carta
© GettyThere are only seven copies of the Magna Carta – A charter of rights drawn up in 1215 – in existence.
Locals are fuming over their town council's plans to sell a medieval copy of the Magna Carta.

The charter of rights is just one of seven in existence and was presented to the Kent town of Faversham in 1300.

After caring for the document for more than 700 years, Faversham Town Council have revealed plans to sell the manuscript, which was signed and sealed by King Edward I.

Attention

Twitter's new terms of service explicitly allows pedophiles to discuss 'attraction towards minors' on their platform

twitter allows pedophilia
Social media giant Twitter has quietly amended their terms of service to allow for "discussions related to... attraction towards minors" to be allowed on their platform.

"Discussions related to child sexual exploitation as a phenomenon or attraction towards minors are permitted, provided they don't promote or glorify child sexual exploitation in any way," reads Twitter's terms of service.

Twitter noted that they would allow for nude depictions of children on their platform in certain instances.

Comment: See also: