Society's ChildS


Green Light

First train from China arrives in Russia as part of the New Silk Road

station
© sputniknews.comNew Silk Road open for business.
The very first freight train arrived to Russia's Kaluga Region from China as part of the Beijing-led New Silk Road infrastructural project, according to the official website of the Kaluga Region. The Chinese-led $900-billion New Silk Road infrastructural project is supposed to connect East Asia, the Middle East, Europe and even Africa.

Russia would also play a major part in the construction of the future major project. The train that arrived from China to the Kaluga Region is a test drive of a large scale trade volume of between the two countries. "On February 5, the first freight train arrived to the Kaluga Region under the framework of the international project New Silk Road," the official statement said. The cargo train was mostly fit with components for the Samsung company, based in the city of Kaluga.

Russian Deputy Transport Minister Alexei Tsydenov, Kaluga Region Governor Anatoly Artamonov and two top Chinese Samsung representatives were present during the official meeting ceremony.

Last year, China and Russia signed the "Joint Declaration on the Silk Road Economic Belt construction and the Eurasian Economic Union docking cooperation". The declaration confirmed that Russia supports the Silk Road Economic Belt project construction and is willing to cooperate closely with China to push the declaration.

Comment: Russian and Chinese partnering for infrastructure and commerce offers a way forward in the midst of dismal Western economic prospects. These two countries are not strangled by the dollar, nor are their economies dependent upon the US and its corrupt, self-serving financial hegemony. Worst case, they have created a means to cooperate and thrive while the rest of the world financially implodes.


Attention

Fatal head-on collision of two passenger trains in Germany; casualties reported

Train wreck collision Germany
© via Twitter @TimesNowRescue ops underway in Germany as 2 trains collide near Bad Aibling, killing 2 persons & injuring about 100 others
A head-on collision of two passenger trains occurred in southeastern Germany on Tuesday, with several people killed and at least 150 sustaining injuries, local police said.

The collision, which involved two Meridian passenger trains, occurred in Bavaria, the town of Bad Aibling, about 25 miles southeast of Munich, according to police spokesman Juergen Thal Meier, cited by the rosenheim24 news portal.

While the death toll is still unknown, local media report at least 150 people have been injured in the crash.

Handcuffs

Both Sanders and Clinton say they would end private prison contracts

jailbirds
© www.businessinsider.comStates pay private prisons per inmate and, by contract, have to pay for empty beds.
Senator Bernie Sanders has pledged if elected president, he'd end the practice of contracting with private corrections companies to operate federal prisons set aside for non-citizens, a campaign spokesperson told The Nation. The statement came in response to an investigation by Seth Freed Wessler, published in the Feb. 15 edition of The Nation magazine. Wessler uncovered negligent medical care that likely contributed to the deaths of dozens of immigrants inside a little-known sector of the federal prison system. Hillary Clinton's campaign did not respond to a request for comment, but has previously said more she'd end private contracting for immigrant detention broadly.

In September, Sanders introduced a bill called the Justice Is Not for Sale Act to ban government contracts with private prison companies at the federal, state, and local level within three years. "[Sanders] talked about how we need to stop those contracts period, and not just for immigrant detention centers, but for prisons overall," Erika Andiola, a campaign strategist for the Sanders campaign, told The Nation. "He's just not okay having contracts with private prisons at all."

"And he's not afraid to say this, because he's never gotten money from private prisons in the past," Andiola said, in a jab at Hillary Clinton, who pledged to stop accepting money from private prison companies last October only after protests and criticism from immigration activists.

Comment: Private prison...a place in which one of these candidates could become intimately acquainted? (Pssst...Hillary...they have your boot size!) Give the money back.


Attention

Refugee children increasingly vulnerable at the Greece-Macedonia border

Child refugees

More and more children are traveling alone on the Balkan route for refugees. It is feared that thousands could fall prey to criminals. DW's Nemanja Rujevic reports from Gevgelija.


Authorities are automatically suspicious when they encounter refugee children traveling through Europe alone. According to Europol, the EU law enforcement agency, 10,000 unaccompanied minors have apparently disappeared after entering the bloc, though many of those have likely fallen through the cracks of sloppy national bureaucracies. Aid workers in Gevgelija, a Macedonian town on the border with Greece, say the number of women and children on the run has been rising. According to statistics from the government of Macedonia, 75 percent of refugees who arrived in the country last summer were men, but now women and children make up two-thirds of the people seeking to transit the country en route to the European Union.

"At first, people wanted to test the system," said Jesper Frovin Jensen, who works for UNICEF in Gevgelija. "Young men broke the ice." But as the situation in war zones has deteriorated, Jensen said, waiting at home is no longer an option for many people. "Besides, the smugglers cannot fill their ships in these weather conditions and are thus lowering prices," the Danish aid worker said. "That is the green light for those who previously could not afford the journey."

Comment: See: German gov't: Around 5,000 refugee kids missing in Germany, police say some could be victims of crime


Eye 1

Neocons taking over US academic institutions, promote Islamophobia

Larycia
© www.patheos.com
Neoconservative Zionists have taken over US academic institutions and are promoting Islamophobia while pushing out professors who are sympathetic towards Islam and Muslims, an American scholar says.

"Unfortunately today, these neoconservatives whose philosophy is that intellectuals should be in the service of tyrants who rule using big lies and mass murder," said Kevin Barrett, who has a Ph.D in Arab and Islamic studies and is one of America's best-known critics of the so-called war on terror. "They have taken over the academy and they don't belong in the academy," Barrett told Press TV on Monday. "Transparency and freedom are the ideals of the academy; because the neoconservatives reject these ideals, they have no business in the academy."

On Saturday, an American female professor at a Christian university who got in trouble after wearing the hijab and saying Muslims and Christians worship the same God has agreed to leave the school.

Wheaton College, located near Chicago, Illinois, and political science professor Larycia Hawkins have reached a confidential agreement in which they will "part ways," the college said in a statement. "This seems to be a very strange kind of phenomenon that a professor should not be allowed to teach at a university," said Barret, who himself was fired from the University of Wisconsin for accusing the US government of being involved in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

"The whole idea is ludicrous but apparently not in Wheaton College, where Islamophobia appears to be mandatory," he added. "Anyone who doesn't hate Muslims with all their heart and soul apparently is not welcome to teach at Wheaton College. It's a disgrace and an outrage and travesty and anybody who cares about freedom in America should head straight to Chicago to protest, to go and occupy the offices of the administration [of Wheaton College] there."

Comment: What happened to the brotherhood of man, united we stand--divided we fall, all together now, our similarities far outweigh our differences...and so on? The need for the West to be thoroughly Islamophobic must be so important it is penetrating even the bastions of higher academia in order to ensure this mindset becomes a full-range societal paranoia.


Attention

Milestone study shows sleep deprivation easily leads to false confessions

Damon Thibodeaux false confession
© William Edwards/AFP/Getty ImagesDamon Thibodeaux faced 15 years in prison on the basis of a false confession he gave while sleep deprived.
The body of 14-year-old Crystal Champagne was found underneath a bridge in Louisiana in 1996, an electrical cord wrapped around her neck and her clothes in disarray. It didn't take long to find the man who did it: within a couple of days, her cousin Damon Thibodeaux confessed to police on tape that he had raped and murdered her.

In fact, Thibodeaux had nothing to do with the crime, as DNA evidence would later confirm. But he paid a heavy price for his false statement, spending 15 years in solitary confinement on death row before being released.

Although hard to fathom, false confessions happen surprisingly often; they are thought to play a role in up to a quarter of wrongful convictions in the US, according to the campaign group the Innocence Project. In many cases, as in Thibodeaux's, the suspect was profoundly sleep deprived during their police interviews.

Now a study has shed more light on how easily severe exhaustion can lead to this type of false confession. Legal experts are predicting it will be cited in future court cases. "It's a milestone," says Lawrence Sherman, head of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge.

Comment: Make no mistake, sleep deprivation is a form of torture: Ex-CIA officer: Torture great way to get false confessions


Snakes in Suits

Former New York Mayor Bloomberg contemplates 2016 presidential bid

Michael Bloomberg
© REUTERS/ Stephane MaheMichael Bloomberg
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he is looking at the possibility of running for the White House amid the current low quality presidential debate that offends US voters.

"I find the level of discourse and discussion distressingly banal and an outrage and an insult to the voters," Bloomberg said on Monday in an interview with the Financial Times. The mayor added that he is "looking at all the options," when it comes to running for office.

Comment: And the farce that marks this presidential race just keeps getting stranger:

Desperation: Rupert Murdoch floats Kerry as last-minute Democratic 2016 candidate
For heaven's sake, please do not poison my mind with the US elections!


Arrow Up

Indigenous native inhabitants seek apology from Pope Francis for genocide during his visit to Mexico

Indigenous ritual
© Flickr/Gabriel SaldanaIndigenous ritual.
Ahead of a February 12 visit by Pope Francis to Mexico, around 30 indigenous communities in Michoacan, Mexico, have released a statement demanding that he apologize for killings of some 24 million aboriginal inhabitants, committed with the complicity of the Catholic Church during the colonization of the Americas.

The Supreme Indigenous Council of Michoacan, Mexico, accused the Catholic Church of being involved in mass genocide, which started with the Spaniards' arrival to the Central American region in the 16th century.

The statement noted that, by the beginning of the 17th century, there were less than 700,000 native inhabitants left alive, from an original population of about 25.2 million, which makes the Spanish intervention and invasion of the Americas one of the largest acts of genocide in history.

"For over 500 years, the original people of the Americas have been ransacked, robbed, murdered, exploited, discriminated and persecuted," the statement reads. "Within this framework, the Catholic Church has historically been complicit and allies of those who invaded our land."

Stock Down

Ukrainian bonds plunge after Econ Minister resigns due to rampant corruption

Aivaras Abromavicius Economy minister Ukraine
© Ukrainian government press centreAivaras Abromavicius was one of the faces of Ukrainian reform
While the rest of the world's bond yields are collapsing and prices soaring (as NIRP sweeps the globe), Ukraine's 'young' implicitly-US-taxpayer-backed bonds have plunged to record lows. The reason - aside from simply disturbing economics...

Ukraine GDP Growth
© Thomson Reuters Datastream
...is, as The FT reports, the dramatic resignation of the economy minister accusing a senior presidential ally of blocking his attempts to root out graft and stymieing his plans for reform. Abromavicius exclaimed, of the Washington-installed elite at Kiev's heart, "I realised there is an intention to unwind the process of making all of this transparent."

Comment: Further reading:
[T]he reason for his departure casts a cloud over the whole governing coalition. The failure to launch reforms was a conscious decision and not dictated by war, as the authorities have been claiming. The government and the president who had promised a war against corruption, who gained power from the Euromaidan protests with the promise to change the system and stop corruption, in the end decided to benefit from corruption mechanisms, not to fight them. What was only discussed and suspected before, has now been confirmed by a top official.

Ukraine economic minister's resignation 'could herald the collapse' of Kiev regime



Heart

Ignored by Western Media: Heroic refugee saves drowning man celebrating German Carnival

Rhine river Krefeld
© Ina FassbenderThe Rhine river in the western German town of Krefeld.
Don't expect this story to be shared on the anti-migrant hate sites popping up around Europe, but people who aren't xenophobic are celebrating one refugee's Sunday heroics in Germany.

A 21-year-old Pakistani walking with a friend in the city of Krefeld spotted a man fall into the Rhine river while urinating, the Local reported, citing a German police report.

After telling his friend to contact emergency services, the migrant jumped into the chilly waters and bravely rescued the 20-year-old "Krefelder" who had been one of the 80,000 people at the local Karneval celebration.

Police described the rescue as a "selfless" act.

The unnamed migrant currently lives in a communal refugee home in the city.

Both men emerged from the water uninjured.

The only arrest made during Krefeld's Karneval was of a local man, police say.

Comment: Do you get the impression that the Western press has a definite agenda in hyping the hysteria over refugees to the exclusion of the more nuanced truth? If you do, then your perceptive abilities are working fine.