A disturbing new video was recently uploaded that shows a New York police officer holding a number of teenage kids at gunpoint for nothing other that throwing snowballs at each other.

New Rochelle's Talk of the Sound uploaded the video that shows the teens scared out of their minds, as an officer points his weapon at the kids who can bee seen kneeling on the ground.

The cowardly officer can be heard telling them "Don't f*cking move, guys!"

The officer the frisks with one hand and aims the gun with the other.

"They were having a snowball fight," the eye-witness who filmed the encounter explained.

"This group of guys was having a snowball fight and now a cop has a gun on them."

In the week we have been commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz I have been trying to understand why I am so weary and wary of the Holocaust. Despite the undoubted emotional pull of the survivors' testimonies, is there any lasting meaning be found in the ashes at Auschwitz? Should it even be looked for?

I didn't always feel this way.

We recently moved house and a few weeks ago my older son and I were unpacking boxes of books and finding new homes for them. I noticed just how much reading I had done on the subject of the Holocaust, mostly more than twenty years ago.

I had straight histories like The War Against the Jews by Lucy Dawidowicz and Holocaust by Martin Gilbert. I'd read Last Waltz in Vienna by George Clare, Elie Wiesel's Night, Europa, Europa by Solomon Perel and Primo Levi's If This is a Man, and The Drowned and the Saved. There were Art Spiegelman's graphic novels Maus, where Nazis and Jews become cats and mice. Ghetto accounts such as A Cup of Tears by Abraham Lewin and Marek Edelman's The Ghetto Fights. I remembered being completely absorbed by Theo Richmond's detailed account of the destruction of one tiny shtetl village Konin. I had the complete transcript of Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary Shoah. Hannah Arendt's account of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in the 1950s. And of course, Anne Frank's diary, the fully annotated critical edition.

The center of Dublin has reportedly shut down as demonstrators, joining a chorus of nation-wide protests on Saturday, came out in droves to fight government efforts to tax citizens' right to water.

An estimated 30,000 marched in Dublin while other protests were held in cities and towns across the country including Limerick, Waterford and Donegal. According to The Irish Times, the rallies have caused major traffic disruption and road closures in Dublin, with groups marching from separate train stations and converging outside the General Post Office where speakers addressed the massive crowd.

Racism may be over according to the GOP and the Supreme Court, but outside those particular delusional conservative bubbles the rest of America realizes that outright race-based bigotry is still a... thing.

As is often the case, we need look no further than the state of Missouri to see that racism is alive and well. Tommy Dean Gaa, 65, of Maryville, was charged with felony assault motivated by discrimination after he accosted an African-American waitress whose only crime was serving him breakfast.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a federal lawsuit against officials in DeKalb County, Georgia after a judge imprisoned a black teenager who was too poor to pay $838 in fines. It all started with a traffic ticket near his home.

ACLU attorneys are now asking for an end to a process which, according to the group, allows indignant and impoverished Americans to be wrongly imprisoned for not being able to afford fees.

"Being poor is not a crime. Yet across the county, the freedom of too many people unfairly rests on their ability to pay traffic fines and fees they cannot afford," Nusrat Choudhury, an attorney with the group's Racial Justice Program, said in a statement this week. "We seek to dismantle this two-tiered system of justice that punishes the poorest among us, disproportionately people of color, more harshly than those with means."

Russia's Emergencies Ministry has assessed as successful another stage of providing humanitarian aid to war-torn Donbass.

"A regular stage of humanitarian aid supplies to the Donetsk and Lugansk regions went on like clock-work as all the cargoes were delivered and the task was accomplished," the ministry's press service told TASS on Saturday.

The twelfth convoy of the Russian Emergencies Ministry comprised over 170 trucks that all returned empty to the Russian southern Rostov region.

The trucks were inspected by customs and border officers at the checkpoints of Donetsk (in the Rostov region) and Matveyev Kurgan.

Ukraine's customs officers and border guards were overseeing the procedures earlier in the day when the convoy was heading for Donbass, a TASS correspondent said in an eyewitness's report adding the reporters who were admitted to the border checkpoints could make sure the trucks had come back empty.

A 3-year-old boy shot and wounded his father and pregnant mother with a 9 mm handgun that he pulled out of the woman's purse while searching for an iPad, police in New Mexico said on Sunday.

Both parents needed hospital treatment for non-life threatening injuries after the bullet went through his father's buttocks and into his mother's shoulder, Albuquerque Police Department Officer Simon Drobik said.

Islamic State fighters have admitted that Kurdish forces managed to retake Kobani after the intensified US-led air campaign forced the jihadists to abandon position in the strategic city near the Syrian-Turkish border.

In a recently released ISIS video, two militant fighters say that continued aerial bombardment by fighter jets from the US and some of its Arab allies forced them to retreat, although ferocious and heroic resistance from Kurdish forces defending the town was another key reason why they were forced into retreat.

"The warplanes were bombarding us night and day. They bombarded everything, even motorcycles," said one of the fighters.

The warplanes "destroyed everything, so we had to withdraw and the rats advanced," said another.

Earlier this week, Kurdish officials said the town was almost cleared of ISIS fighters.

Joan Peters, the author of the book From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict over Palestine, died on January 5th, at 78. As David Samel wrote following her death,"The bizarre chapter of Joan Peters's contribution to the Middle East debate does not end with her death. Her arguments, both those she adopted from others and those she formulated herself, still constitute a huge portion of the go-to hasbara repertoire." I interviewed Norman Finkelstein and asked him to reflect on her work and legacy, as he played a central role in debunking much of her work as described in his book Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

Adam Horowitz: Could you start by saying a bit about how From Time Immemorial was received?

Norman Finkelstein: First of all the important primary factor is the context. Israel in 1982 took its first major public relations hit since the 1967 war. It was a public relations disaster for Israel. One of the reasons being I think, as Robert Fisk pointed out in Pity the Nation he said unlike all other Arab states Lebanon did not control the press and so mainstream reporters were able at that time to roam freely throughout Lebanon. Mainstream reporters, I should say who had credibility, were able to roam freely through Lebanon during the Israeli attack, and what they were reporting was quiet horrifying. It's forgotten now but even against the Israeli attacks in recent years on Lebanon, on Gaza, they all pale in comparison to what Israel did in Lebanon in 1982. The usual figures are between sixteen and twenty thousand Lebanese and Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, were killed during the Israeli attack. All the Lebanese killed in 2006 plus the three massacres in Gaza that doesn't even come to half of the figure that happened in Lebanon.

So now you had credible reportage of what Israel was doing and it was a major public relations setback for Israel. You could say the first layer of Jewish support for Israel, the first layer, peeled away and that was the layer of what you would call the Old Left, mainly those were identified with the Soviet Union and therefore identified with Israel because the Soviets supported the creation of the state of Israel in '48 and also because a lot of the signature institutions of Israel in that era were of a socialist leftist orientation, most famously the kibbutzim.

And so before 1982 the pro-Soviet, pro-Communist Old Left even those who were disaffected from the Soviet Union which still fell within the umbrella of the Old Left, they were still pretty much pro-Israel, there were just really a tiny handful of exceptions. The best known being of course Professor Chomsky. There was also Maxime Robinson in France, but in general the support was totally for Israel, overwhelmingly for Israel.

Four out of every ten Italians no longer want the euro, according to a survey released on Friday by the Institute of Political, Economic and Social Studies, Eurispes.

The percent of Italians who want Italy to leave the Eurozone has risen from 26% at the start of 2014 to 40.1% now, the polling agency says.

More than half of the Euroskeptics think the single currency is the chief cause of Italy's economic woes, as it has deprived the country of the possibility of devaluating its currency at will.