Israel is fearful of the effect social media use is having on its armed forces: incidence of sex crime allegations in the military has doubled since 2012, involving everything from privacy and battlefield security breaches to full-on sexual assault.

"This is a very troublesome phenomenon, and soldiers don't understand how grave it is," chief military prosecutor, Colonel Udi Ben-Eliezer, told the official military journal Bamahane, as cited by Reuters. "The telephone is easily available, and therefore the crime becomes very easy to do."

The vast majority of cases center around instant messaging apps. They go a long way toward facilitating privacy infringement - the unwarranted sharing of incriminating photographs alone comprising 35 percent of the transgressions, according to the journal.

More seriously, a soldier photoshopped a female comrade's face onto a nude body, and threatened to disseminate it unless she had sex with him. Another example involved a soldier, phone at the ready, snapping away at female soldiers taking showers.


Not that female soldiers aren't up for a bit of fun as well: they've been posting semi-nude pictures of themselves, complete with combat gear.

Racism has also been an issue.

WhatsApp, one of the most popular messaging services, is also a big hit with the Israeli armed forces. Brigadier-General Sima Valnin-Gil said this had been a huge topic of discussion during last summer's Protective Edge operation in Gaza: soldiers texting was described as a grave security risk.

Saying almost nothing when first arrested, Yassin Salhi, suspected of beheading his boss at a French gas factory, has confessed to his crime, sources close to the investigation said. He will now be transferred to a Paris facility.

The main suspect told detectives he had killed Herve Cornara in a parking area before arriving at the plant in Saint Quentin-Fallavier, before he attempted to cause an explosion, a source told Reuters.


Salhi, 35, will now be transferred to Paris to be questioned further, AFP reports. His detention there could last up to 96 hours before further action is taken.

It transpired earlier that the suspect also took a selfie with his victim's severed head, before it was found dangling from a fence at the factory grounds. Additionally, the MMS was sent to a Canadian number whose owner the investigation is currently trying to determine, with help from the Canadians. The sender could also have reportedly been in Syria, which is being investigated at present.

Salhi's wife, sister and four others were earlier detained, but one of the group has since been released.

A small plane carrying 3 people on board has crashed into a house in Plainville, Massachusetts, setting it on fire and forcing owners flee the blaze, local fire and aviation officials confirmed.

Several firefighting crews responded to reports that the plane had crashed into the house at around 6:00pm local time, fire officials told Boston TV channel, WCVB.

BREAKING: Plane into house in Plainville. #wcvb pic.twitter.com/vJRaQKUOZh

— Sera Congi (@seracongi) June 28, 2015

Photos posted on social media by witnesses showed a house on fire, as well as what looked like debris from the tail part of a small plane.

The plane's pilot and passengers did not survive the crash, state police spokesman David Procopio said, according to the Boston Globe.

At least five black churches burned overnight this week, and three have been attributed to arson.

Last week's shooting at Charleston's Emanuel AME was perhaps the deadliest attack on a black church since the 1963 church bombing by the Klan in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four children. Since then, another specter from America's violent racist history is again rearing its head - setting black churches ablaze.

At least three have been intentionally set on fire in recent days, according to a survey of news reports compiled by the Daily Kos.

On Monday, someone set fire to College Hills Seventh Day Adventist Church in Tennessee, according to local WATE. The arsonist placed bales of hay outside the church doors and lit them ablaze, fire officials told the station. They also burned the church van.

On Tuesday, God's Power Church of Christ in Georgia was intentionally set on fire, authorities told ABC News. Electronics and other equipment were also stolen in the early morning fire. Authorities told reporters there is "no evidence" of a hate crime.

On Wednesday, Briar Creek Baptist Church in North Carolina burned in the middle of the night, causing $250,000 in damage, NBC News reports. Authorities are investigating whether the intentional blaze was a hate crime. It took 75 firefighters to bring it under control.

On Friday, Glover Grove Missionary Baptist Church in South Carolina, was virtually destroyed in an overnight blaze, the Aiken Standard reports. While the cause of the fire is still under investigation, the FBI has been called in.

To be "poor" in America isn't an identifying characteristic or a defining trait, like being forgetful or creative or tall.

Being a low-income American comes from being paid a low income.

It seems like a basic point, but it's one Andy Puzder needs to review. Puzder is CEO of CKE Restaurants, Inc., which employs more than 20,000 people and worldwide owns, operates and franchises more than 3,300 fast food restaurants, including Hardee's and Carl's Jr.

In a recent op-ed, Puzder made the specious claim that the social safety net "can lock [people] into poverty."

He argues that "these programs have the unintended consequence of discouraging work rather than encouraging independence, self-reliance and pride," and that, because of government assistance, his low-wage employees across the U.S. are refusing promotions and additional hours "for fear of losing public assistance."

What Puzder forgets to point out is that it is poverty wages—poverty wages paid by institutions like Hardee's and Carl's Jr. to many of their 20,000-plus employees— that force families to turn to nutrition and housing assistance, and other government-supplemented work supports, just to get by.

The consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen just issued a study that analyzes the efforts of billionaire families to - once again - try to repeal the estate tax. According to a June 25 news release by the organization,

Just nine families could dodge $25.7 billion in taxes, and perhaps as much as $54.7 billion, if the estate tax were repealed. Half of these families have spent more than a million dollars apiece lobbying Congress to repeal the tax between 2012 and the first quarter of 2015....

The families behind the eight companies pushing to repeal the tax include the Mars, Wegman, Cox, Taylor, Van Andel, DeVos, Bass, Schwab and Hall families. The Mars and Wegman families alone, who have a combined net worth of more than $63 billion, spent more than $3.5 million to lobby solely for the repeal of the estate tax during the time period studied.

The avaricious effort is being undertaken even though the minimum tax exemption for the estate tax has risen over the years. It is now over $5 million for an individual. For a couple, the estate tax does not kick in for an inheritance of less than $10.5 million. Most of the wealthiest people in the US do not pay a tax when their wealth is distributed to heirs. According to the Public Citizen study, "Only an estimated 0.2 percent of American estates are subject to the federal estate tax."

Public Citizen refutes in detail the myth that the estate tax hurts small farmers, a public relations rallying cry used by those who want to repeal the levy. Small farms are not being destroyed by the estate tax. They are being decimated by the juggernaut of large corporate agriculture. As Public Citizen notes in the introduction to its report,

In 2001, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston set out to investigate the popular claim and was unable to find one example of a family farm being lost due to the estate tax. Johnston stuck by his 2001 finding in a recent article for Aljazeera America.

Did you know that back in 1990, the Environmental Protection Agency was all set to release a report that admitted electromagnetic fields (EMFs) are dangerous to our health, including that EMFs have been linked with "the development of various cancers" but stopped short of straight up admitting they are "probable carcinogens"?

Isn't it ironic the newspaper thought to tack a Radio Shack add onto the end of this article? [see below] The clipping, published in the October 4, 1990 edition of The Indiana Gazette, reported:

"Now the Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of publishing a report suggesting that EMF is linked with the development of various cancers. And at one point, someone within the agency had considered an even more drastic step — classifying low-frequency electromagnetic fields as probable cancer-causing agents in the same rank as dioxin or PCBs."

More than 500 people were injured in northern Taiwan on Saturday, after fire broke out in a recreational park. The flames are suspected to have stemmed from an unknown flammable colored powder, which created an explosion after being sprayed onto a crowd.

People were attending a themed 'color party' at Formosa Water Park in New Taipei City, when they got caught up in the inferno, news agencies reported citing local media.

People were being sprayed with clouds of colored powder, when one of the substances exploded, officials said. Nearly a thousand people were near the stage when the fire broke out.


"At the beginning I thought it was part of the special effects of the party but then I realized there was something wrong and people started screaming and running," a male witness told local news channel CTI, as cited by AFP.

Footage from local media showed the park being ablaze, with people running to escape.

"Our initial understanding is this explosion and fire... was caused by the powder spray. It could have been due to the heat of the lights on the stage," AFP reported a spokesman for the New Taipei City fire department as saying.

California is in the midst of one of the worst droughts in the state's history, prompting Governor Jerry Brown to declare a water "state of emergency."

Ordinary Californians are bearing the brunt of this disaster. While the governor has imposed restrictions to reduce residential water consumption, businesses in the fields of agriculture and hydraulic fracturing have been largely exempt. Brown's unwillingness to take on these gargantuan corporate water-wasters lends a sharp political element to an otherwise natural disaster.

There's another region in the world, however, where access to water isn't just decided on the whims of politicians dealing with natural disasters. In fact, the very existence of water crises is official state policy for one country: Israel.

Dying of Thirst

Despite its location in a region thought to be perennially dry, the Holy Land actually has ample natural freshwater resources — namely in the form of underwater aquifers and the Jordan River. Palestinians in the West Bank and Israeli settlers live in roughly equal proximity to these resources, which theoretically would allow for equal consumption.

Israeli water policy, however, has made this prospect virtually impossible. In fact, there's a shocking disparity.

A Ramsey county sheriff's deputy is on paid vacation this week after he was captured on video in a downright evil beating of his K-9 partner.

Ramsey County Deputy, Brett Arthur Berry is charged with assaulting a public safety dog and animal cruelty for severely beating his dog at a K-9 training seminar over the weekend.

The surveillance footage from the Black Bear Casino in Carlton captured this sadistic officer as he beat, strangled, and hurled his K-9 partner to the ground.

According to Eyewitness News 5,

Black Bear security told deputies they had been called into the Cobalt Lounge to ask a man to leave. Security followed him with video and saw him return to his hotel room and exit five minutes later with his canine partner. Berry and other K-9 handlers were at the casino and hotel for training.

The sheriff's office says Berry walked with his dog to the casino parking lot, where he was seen scolding the dog and becoming upset. Video shows him picking up his dog by the collar and throwing it to the ground. The dog ran from him back to the casino and through the first set of doors but got trapped by a vestibule.

Berry then caught up to the dog and hit it repeatedly, the sheriff's office said.