How does the purported shooter exit his Uber ride, put on full body dress, helmet, assemble his rifle, load it and start firing at targets within two minutes?

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School teacher Stacy Lippel was grazed by a hot bullet which left the chamber of the shooter's gun as she closed the door to her classroom after letting a number of students file into what would presumably be safety. However, nothing could have prepared the teacher for what she was to witness next.

"I suddenly saw the shooter about twenty feet in front of me standing at the end of the hallway actively shooting down the hallway, just a barrage of bullets, and I'm staring at him thinking 'why are the police here? this is strange', because he's in full metal garb, helmet, face mask, bulletproof armor, shooting this rifle that I've never seen before," Lippel told Good Morning America last Wednesday.

The brave teacher said she told fellow Stoneman Douglas H.S. teacher Scott Beigel, 35, to get back in his room just before the shooter fired a number of rounds into his room killing him and other students.

An article published by the Guardian stated that eastern Ghouta is turning into Syria's Srebrenica. The report says that the population there is not being protected following the failure of negotiations for peaceful resolution in late 2017. Radio Sputnik spoke with activist and independent investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley in an interview.

Sputnik: Mass media reports that the US and its allies are attempting to protect the civilians in Eastern Ghouta- is this really the case?

Vanessa Beeley: What needs to be made very clear and I think perhaps needs clarifying for your audience because we are hearing as usual the sensationalist journalism from NATO aligned corporate media in the West describing the Syrian Arab Army's legitimate military campaign against terrorist factions led, again, by Al Qaeda-affiliated factions that have occupied the areas, the eastern suburbs of Damascus, since 2013.

Basically, the atrocities that those media outlets are denying are the almost daily rain down of mortars and projectiles, missiles, explosive bullets, the suicide car bomb attacks against Syrian civilians in densely-populated residential areas of Damascus city, which also, by the way, is home now to a number of refugees, particularly from eastern Ghouta but other areas from of the east such as [Dourbar and Durmur] and have been for many years because many of the civilians in those areas fled the terrorist occupation and invasion in 2013. Those same terrorist factions were raining mortars down upon predominantly school children, civilians and residents of Damascus city are also known to be abusing, starving, imprisoning, putting Syrian civilians into cages as human shields and holding them hostage.

Now that the gun control advocates have had their fifteen minutes of fame, let's start focusing on the real issues impacting the rise in school shootings since that infamous day in Columbine in 1999. Issue number one that no one in the mainstream media or government wants to acknowledge: fatherlessness. Specifically, the impact of fatherlessness on the boys who grew up to become school shooters.

Dr. Warren Farrell, author of the new book The Boy Crisis, explains:

Minimal or no father involvement, whether due to divorce, death, or imprisonment, is common to Adam Lanza, Elliott Rodgers, Dylan Roof and Stephen Paddock.

In the case of 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, he was adopted at birth. His adoptive dad died when Nikolas was much younger, and doubtless the challenges of this fatherlessness was compounded by the death of his adoptive mom three and a half months ago.

The rate of mass shootings has tripled since 2011. We blame guns, violence in the media, violence in video games, and poor family values. Each is a plausible player. But our daughters live in the same homes, with the same access to the same guns, video games, and media, and are raised with the same family values. Our daughters are not killing. Our sons are.

But boys with significant father involvement are not doing these shootings. Without dads as role models, boys' testosterone is not well channeled. The boy experiences a sense of purposelessness, a lack of boundary enforcement, rudderlessness, and often withdraws into video games and video porn. At worst, when boys' testosterone is not well-channeled by an involved dad, boys become among the world's most destructive forces. When boys' testosterone is well channeled by an involved dad, boys become among the world's most constructive forces.

The dominant view of the US-led coalition against the Islamic State (ISIS), Operation Inherent Resolve, is that its fundamental goal is the defeat of ISIS.

And so, in the wake of the routing of ISIS from Iraq and Syria, the core justification for an ongoing US military presence in Syria is ensuring that no post-mortem ISIS insurgency arises.

That the US is unequivocally opposed to ISIS is simply taken for granted.

Yet a closer look at the history of US involvement shows that counterterrorism has been a lesser concern relative to geopolitical and strategic goals. Whenever the goals of expanding territorial control or weakening rivals conflicts with the goal of opposing ISIS, the entity was either ignored or even empowered in pursuit of these more paramount concerns.

In some ways, by providing a pretext for extended military operations on foreign soil, and by helping to diminish the military might of the Syrian regime and its allies, some coalition officials have seen the Islamic State as a potentially beneficial phenomenon to the wider ends of weakening the Syrian state and opposing Iranian influence in the Levant.

As the days since Mueller's latest indictment have passed, the failure of his investigation to make any claim of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia has begun to sink in, even amongst some of Donald Trump's most bitter enemies.

Even the Guardian - arguably the most fervid of Donald Trump's British media critics, and the most vocal supporter of the Russiagate conspiracy theory - has grudgingly admitted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has "once again failed to nail Donald Trump"

There will be understandable disappointment in many quarters that the latest indictments delivered by Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, once again failed to nail Donald Trump. Although the charges levelled against 13 Russians and three Russian entities are extraordinarily serious, they do not directly support the central claim that Trump and senior campaign aides colluded with Moscow to rig the vote.

The Times of London meanwhile has admitted that the latest indictment contains "no smoking gun"

The Department of Justice, however, offered no confirmation to those still smarting from the election in Nov­em­ber 2016, who believe that, in the absence of Russian interference, Hillary Clinton would be in the White House today. Friday's allegations offered no evidence that the outcome had been affected. Sir John Sawers, former head of MI6, said yesterday that Donald Trump's victories in the key swing states were his own.

There was further comfort for Mr Trump, which he was quick to celebrate with a tweet. The investigation uncovered no evidence "that any American was a knowing participant in the alleged unlawful activity". That includes, so far, anybody involved in the Trump campaign. If there is a smoking gun it has yet to emerge, though Robert Mueller's investigation will grind on. Presi­dent Vladimir Putin is a malign and dangerous mischief maker. It has not been proved that he is an evil genius with the ability to swing a US election.

In fact the latest indictment when considered properly is a further huge nail in the coffin of the Russiagate conspiracy theory and in the already disintegrating credibility of the Trump Dossier, which is the foundation document for that theory.

Picture this: A tribal leader from a distant country visits the US. He's brought to a large apartment building in New York City. When he gets out of the car, he looks up at the great building and is quite impressed. A uniformed doorman exits the foyer and comes out on the sidewalk. The tribesman sees the gold braiding and brass buttons of his coat and immediately decides that this is a very important person. Again he looks up at the building and says to the doorman, "This is a very great home you have. You must be very important indeed."

Of course, if we were present, we might chuckle at the tribesman's naiveté. The owners of such a great building would never greet people at the entrance. They leave such trivial tasks to hired servants, whilst they run the real business without ever needing any direct contact with visitors as they enter the building. And, in addition, doormen come and go - they are, after all, disposable. The owners - those who control what happens in the building - retain their positions over the long term... and may remain anonymous, if they so choose.

We find this simple concept easy enough to understand, and yet we chronically have difficulty in understanding that, in most countries, the president, or prime minister, is not by any means the man who makes the big decisions in the running of the country.

We assume that, because we were allowed to vote for our leader, he must actually be our leader. But, as Mark Twain has at times been credited as saying, "If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it."

Joe Rogan and Jimmy Dore talk about the shady history of Hilary Clinton, and how Set Rich's murder may very well be attributed to Hillary and the DNC.

From the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast...


Rogan and Dore discuss Obama's corruption and how Hillary Clinton was not the lesser of two evils, just pure evil.

Jimmy Dore later explains how the gas attacks in Syria were a complete, BS false flag.

The US and some Western media eagerly claimed that Iranians who took to the streets in December 2017 were 'fed up' with their 'oppressive' government - but a new poll suggests that their theory may be half-baked.

In a recent survey conducted by the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland and IranPoll, only 0.3 percent of Iranians selected "lack of civil liberties" as the most important problem or challenge currently facing Iran. "Injustice" was also at the bottom of the list of grievances, at just 1.4 percent.

Respondents overwhelmingly selected unemployment (40.1 percent) as the largest problem facing the country, followed by inflation and high costs of living (12.5 percent), youth unemployment (9.4 percent), low incomes (6.9 percent) and financial corruption/embezzlement (6 percent).

Mainstream media outlets and social media are full of reports that on February 7th hundreds of Russian private military contractors (PMCs) died in US-led coalition airstrikes on pro-government forces in the province of Deir Ezzor. Various sources provide different numbers, but one of the most popular versions is that between 100 and 600 PMCs were killed.

So, what is going on?

On February 8, the US-led coalition released a statement saying that on February 7th it had struck "pro-regime forces" attacking "Syrian Democratic Forces headquarters" in the Euphrates Valley. According to local sources, the US strikes hit the positions of pro-government forces near the village of Khasham. The CONICO gas facility and the nearby Jafar oil field were reportedly the targets of the alleged attack.

The Taliban has published a letter slamming the US president's new Afghan strategy. It urges Americans and their elected representatives to lobby Donald Trump to choose negotiations, not escalation, in war-torn Afghanistan.

The 10-page letter released by Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid makes use of statistics and figures in an attempt to sway the "American people" and "peace-loving congressmen" to pressure the White House into peace talks with the group - a move which Trump has publicly opposed.

Citing the "3,546 American and foreign soldiers" killed and the "87 percent rise" in heroin production in 2017, the letter argues that "if the policy of using force is continued for another one hundred years, the outcome will be the same ... as you have observed over the last six months since the initiation of Trump's new strategy."