Society's Child

The Sinai "crash" 1 year later: Russians continue to mourn

RT
Mon, 31 Oct 2016 18:53 UTC

© Sputnik
The wreckage of Kogalymavia's Airbus A321 passenger airliner. Flight 9268 was traveling to St. Petersburg from the city of Sharm El-Sheikh and crashed 100 km south of the North Sinai town of El-Arish.

One year on from the deadliest air crash in Russian history, in which a passenger plane en route to St. Petersburg was blown up over the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, relatives of the 224 victims still mourn their loved ones.

The Metrojet A321 charter flight 7K9268 with 224 people on board, including 25 children, was on its way to St. Petersburg, Russia, from the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. Twenty-three minutes into the flight, still above Egyptian territory, the plane disappeared from radar screens.

It was later discovered that a bomb had been placed aboard the Airbus, with a local branch of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) subsequently claiming responsibility for the attack.

After twelve months of grief, the victims' relatives say the hardest part is to accept this new heartbreaking reality that the people they loved more than life itself have gone.

Comment: There may be more to the Flight 7K9268 crash than meets the eye: Behind the Headlines: Did a 'Directed Energy' Weapon Bring Down the Russian Plane over Egypt?

Croatian MP tells truth about EU and NATO in parliament (VIDEO)

Sven Milekic
Balkan Insight
Thu, 27 Oct 2016 18:12 UTC

After a video in which he slated the US, NATO and the EU swept the social media in the region, Croatian anti-establishment MP Ivan Pernar claims 'people are hungry for the truth'.

With over a 1.5 million views of the video of his speech, newly elected Croatian MP Ivan Pernar has become a star for anti-establishment activists around the Balkan region.

Pernar, 31, a first-time MP from the opposition anti-establishment Living Wall - a party born out of a movement formed to stop seizures of homes - told BIRN that his appearance is not the primary cause for the popularity of the video, but "hunger among people for the truth".

The video was made by another young regional anti-establishment star, Boris Malagurski from Serbia, who is widely known for his film "Weight of Chains", in which he tackled the issues of NATO intervention in Yugoslavia and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

With no airstrikes on al-Qaeda to focus on, Amnesty Intl forced to condemn "unlawful" rebel attacks on western Aleppo

RT
Mon, 31 Oct 2016 17:09 UTC

The human rights NGO Amnesty International has raised the alarm of civilians being killed in Syria's western Aleppo by armed opposition groups. Having called the attacks on government-controlled areas "unlawful," the group said that weapons banned by international law had also been used.

"The goal of breaking the siege on eastern Aleppo does not give armed opposition groups a license to flout the rules of international humanitarian law by bombarding civilian neighborhoods in government-held areas without distinction," Deputy Director of Campaigns at Amnesty International's Beirut regional office, Samah Hadid, said.

In a statement published on Monday, the organization accused armed opposition groups of "a shocking disregard for civilian lives." The latest offensive on western Aleppo launched on October 28 saw "indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas," the group said, adding that dozens of innocent people, including children, were killed in the areas, controlled by the Syrian government.

Comment: As long as Syria and Russia were conducting airstrikes against the "rebels" attacking western Aleppo from the besieged eastern part of the city and from the rebel-held west, the media and human rights groups could focus solely on those airstrikes, denouncing them as war crimes, while ignoring the crimes of the rebels themselves. But now that the airstrikes have stopped, for now, it's a lot harder to ignore the nature of the attacks - which is the very reason Russia and Syria were carrying out airstrikes in the first place. RT's coverage of the "rebel" crimes has been exceptional:

And R&U Videos is a great resource for video updates of the fighting:

Rape culture: Whistle-blower cop fired after reporting supervisor's predatory sexual behavior

John Vibes
The Free Thought Project
Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC

Lt. Michael Masella, on right, is accused in a lawsuit of harassing former New Boston Police officer Alexandra Drake, second from right, and making lewd comments about women, including rating them on a “rapability” scale. On the far left is New Boston Police Chief James Brace. Second to the left is Officer Stephen Case. In the middle is Governor Maggie Hassan.

After she was fired for exposing the predatory behavior of one of her superior officers, a female cop has gone public with her case and filed a lawsuit against her former employer. According to the former officer, Alexandra Drake, her supervisor, Michael Masella, a lieutenant with the New Boston Police Department, was sexually threatening multiple female officers and would brag about he preyed on women at traffic stops.

Drake blew the whistle about her superior's behavior and filed a report along with another employee who witnessed his behavior. However, instead of looking into the allegations, the department fired Drake and accused her of lying.

According to a recent lawsuit, Drake noticed Masella's disturbing behavior while she was training under him at the New Boston Police department. The department alleges that she was fired for incorrectly filling out a police report, but she says she filed the report exactly as she was ordered to, by her superior, Masella.

According to the lawsuit, "After completing the stop, he told Drake that he wanted to just take them out and 'rape' them rather than issue a citation. Masella would routinely make comments about female drivers whom he thought found him attractive or good looking. He has apparently developed a 'rapability' scale about female drivers and would test Drake whether a particular driver was 'rapable.' "

Why DAPL protests matter: The far-reaching consequences for the environment and social justice

GreenMedInfo
Wed, 26 Oct 2016 13:45 UTC

"You can live without money. You can live without oil. But you can't live without water." - Standing Rock Youth [1]

In May of 2016, a multi-billion dollar corporation, Energy Transfer Partners, began construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) project, despite long standing opposition from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of North and South Dakota. The DAPL, also known as the Bakken Oil Pipeline, is designed to extend 1,168 miles across North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois, crossing through communities, farms, tribal lands, sensitive natural areas and wildlife habitat. It is intended to carry crude oil from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to Illinois where it will link with another pipeline that will transport the oil to terminals and refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. ^[2]

If construction is completed, the pipeline is expected to carry approximately 500,000 barrels of crude oil daily from North Dakota to Illinois, crossing underneath Lake Oahe and the Missouri River a half-mile upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's reservation. [3] The Missouri River is the main source of drinking and irrigation water for the 8,200 residents of the Standing Rock reservation. The pipeline would pump an estimated 17,000 gallons of oil per minute underneath this water source, which would be devastated by a spill or leak. ^[4] This project poses serious environmental threats and will disturb burial grounds and sacred sites on the Tribe's ancestral Treaty lands. ^[5] On July 26, 2016 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave its approval to run the DAPL underneath Lake Oahe, in violation of federal law. One day later, on July 27th, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed a complaint in federal courtseeking an injunction to halt construction. ^[6] The Tribe's legal action has been followed by a rapidly growing movement of peaceful support. A timeline and collection of articles chronicling events is available here.

US special forces 'impatient' with SAS 'double checking orders' over war crimes fears

RT
Mon, 31 Oct 2016 14:34 UTC

Special forces operations in Iraq and Syria are reportedly hamstrung by fears over war crimes prosecutions being brought against them retrospectively.

The elite soldiers are fearful of legal reprisals in what critics of full legal oversight are framing as a climate of litigation.

The UK is currently embroiled in a row over attempts to hold troops to account in relation to allegations of abuse and even murder from recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Indiana officials are trying to shut down almost 45,000 black citizens from voting

Kira Lerner
Think Progress
Wed, 26 Oct 2016 11:59 UTC

© AP Photo/Darron Cummings
Voters line-up to register and cast their early votes at the City-County Building Monday, Nov. 5, 2012, in Indianapolis.

Roughly 45,000 newly registered voters in Indiana — almost all of whom are black — may not be allowed to vote next month after state police targeted the state's largest voter registration drive, forcing it to shut down its operation.

Police raided the Indiana Voter Registration Project (IVRP) offices on October 4, seizing documents and equipment and forcing the group to cease its get-out-the-vote efforts one week before the end of the state's registration period. Bill Buck, a spokesperson for the liberal nonprofit Patriot Majority USA which runs the IVRP, told ThinkProgress that IVRP could have registered about 5,000 more voters in that additional week.

The IVRP is still unsure whether the 45,000 people it registered will be permitted to vote this year, or how the state will handle their applications while the police investigation is ongoing. Bill Bursten, chief public information officer for the Indiana State Police, told ThinkProgress that law enforcement is investigating whether IVRP is violating fraud and forgery laws.

"It will be up to each prosecutor to review the completed investigation and take whatever action they, as the local prosecuting authority, deem appropriate," Bursten said. "Investigations of this nature are complicated and can take an extended period of time to complete."

The secret forces that could lead to a Trump victory: apathy and revolt

Michael Walsh
New York Post
Sun, 30 Oct 2016 11:58 UTC

Driving across the country last week, it seemed hard to believe an American presidential election is happening a week from Tuesday. Few campaign signs sprout from urban lawns; partisan billboards along the highways are scarce. Away from the coasts, the talk on the radio is largely of football and Jesus, not politics. It takes a moment, hearing a spot in North Carolina for a US Senate candidate, to realize the voice belongs to President Obama, interrupting some country music.

Oh, there's plenty of chatter about it in the raging echo chambers of talk radio and TV cable news, and in the cocksure journalists' fun house known as Twitter, where in-the-tank reporters and dispossessed campaign consultants, smarting over their collective defeat in the primaries, smugly assure each other that Donald Trump will lose in a landslide.

But what if the widely swinging polls, turnout models and forecasting mechanisms are all wrong? What if the unique historical circumstances of this election — pitting the female half of a likely criminal family dynasty against a thin-skinned bull-in-a-china-shop businessman — have invalidated conventional wisdom? What if the ranks of shy voters storm the polls and, in the words of Michael Moore, deliver the biggest rebuke in history to the establishments of both parties?

Huge explosion at oil refinery in northeast Venezuela

RT
Sun, 30 Oct 2016 20:51 UTC

A hospital in the northeastern state of Anzoategui, Venezuela, has been evacuated following an explosion and a fire that engulfed an oil refinery located nearby, local media have reported.

The IVSS Hospital, located near the Guaraguao oil refinery, which is operated by PDVSA (Petroleum of Venezuela), suffered an explosion which led to a huge fire visible from miles around, the El Tiempo newspaper reported.

The patients were transferred to other healthcare institutions and an unspecified number of residents were evacuated to safe areas.

There has so far been no official version of what caused the explosion. An investigation into the incident has been ordered, a general manager of the refinery said, according to the Globovision news outlet.

Comment: Earlier this month a powerful blast ripped through an oil refinery in Nanjing, eastern China.

Explosion near Malta International Airport

RT
Sun, 30 Oct 2016 16:18 UTC

An explosion has left bystanders shaken near Malta International Airport and a nearby village.

The blast took place at about 4:20pm local time, just outside the airport and is thought to have come from a fireworks factory in the vicinity of Gudja, a nearby village. Gudja is currently celebrating the Feast of Our Lady of Consolation, or Tac-Cintura, which takes place on the last Sunday of October.

"It was a powerful explosion followed by a number of smaller ones, the big one felt like an earthquake," a local resident told the Times of Malta.

"We were passing by in my car with all the windows closed and the blast literally shook my car heavily," another local told the Times.

The investigation is still ongoing, but the blast appears to have come from a container full of fireworks.

Comment: Last week five French military officials were killed en-route to Libya in an aircraft crash outside Malta airport. Subsequent reports in the French media, confirmed that at least three of the five French passengers who perished in the crash were officers of the General Directorate for External Security, France's external intelligence agency, which goes by the initials DGSE.

Their were saints in Catholic history who most have heard about and others not so much. Now you have Saint Francis of Assisi, but you also have...

Buffalo_Ken

I have a different definition for the "global commons". It is in the definition of "the commons" definition in the link provided below. Here is a...

Buffalo_Ken

Biden the child-killer. Think of the children, vaxxers, think of the children.

hobnyeba

Thanks, all, for great comments and links. Lots to think about.

ReRan

I ran a search on "Archbishop Viganò" for the last week - just 22,500 results and obviously nothing MSM related Even this SOTT article makes it to...

HashAttack2

Society's Child

The Sinai "crash" 1 year later: Russians continue to mourn

Croatian MP tells truth about EU and NATO in parliament (VIDEO)

With no airstrikes on al-Qaeda to focus on, Amnesty Intl forced to condemn "unlawful" rebel attacks on western Aleppo

Rape culture: Whistle-blower cop fired after reporting supervisor's predatory sexual behavior

Why DAPL protests matter: The far-reaching consequences for the environment and social justice

US special forces 'impatient' with SAS 'double checking orders' over war crimes fears

Indiana officials are trying to shut down almost 45,000 black citizens from voting

The secret forces that could lead to a Trump victory: apathy and revolt

Huge explosion at oil refinery in northeast Venezuela

Explosion near Malta International Airport

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