Society's ChildS


Bomb

Baghdad: Shia mosque blast kills 5, wounds 16


Press TV
Wed, 09 Dec 2015 12:49 UTC
mosque bombing
© www.worldbulletin.netDeadly suicide bombing at Baghdad-area mosque.
At least five people have been killed and over a dozen others wounded in a bomb blast at a Shia mosque in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, security officials say. The bombing was carried out on Wednesday in the Obeidi area of the city when an assailant blew up his explosives in the entrance of the mosque as worshippers were exiting after midday prayers.

The Daesh Takfiri terror group, which captured parts of Iraq's west and north in 2014, claimed the bombing in a statement, saying an attacker identified as "Abu Salem" carried it out with an explosives-rigged belt.

Iraqi forces have succeeded in taking back significant territory [in the] north of the country, as the militants have been pushed back from some of their major bastions, including the cities of Tikrit and Baiji in Salahuddin Province, while the operation continues to retake positions in the Western province of Anbar and also in the northern province of Nineveh.

Daesh has also suffered setbacks in the north of Anbar as Kurdish forces, known as Peshmerga, purged the militants from the border city of Sinjar last month. The loss of Sinjar and other areas in Anbar would deprive militants from most of their communications with Daesh-controlled areas in neighboring Syria.

Comment: Thanks to US-rael, Iraq's trauma and devastation has no ending. The Middle East is out of control and neither relief nor repair is readily in sight. The unfettered slaughter-fest is a daily occurrence. What now, Mr. Obama? How do you account for, how do you justify what is gone and what remains?

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Eye 1

FBI admits using Stingrays, hacking computers and software


RT
Wed, 09 Dec 2015 04:15 UTC
Man on cell phone
© Edgard Garrido / Reuters
A top official in the FBI's Operational Technology Division admitted that in addition to using biometric databases and rapid DNA-matching machines, the agency hacks computers and software, and uses Stingrays to mimic cell phone towers.

The revelations came in a Washington Post profile of the executive assistant director for science and technology, Amy Hess, who oversees the Bureau's Operational Technology Division.

"All of the most interesting and troubling stuff that the FBI does happens under Amy Hess," Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Washington Post. "If it's high-tech and creepy, it's happening in the Operational Technology Division."
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Pistol

Another execution: Dashcam footage shows Chicago cop shooting man as he ran from police

Matt Agorist
The Free Thought Project
Mon, 07 Dec 2015 02:36 UTC
Shocking dashcam footage was just released confirming what the victim's mother has been saying all along -- her son was murder by police
Ronald Johnson shooting
© Screenshot via The Free Thought Project
In the wake of the recent dashcam footage showing Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke kill Laquan McDonald, the Chicago police department has quietly been hiding another dashcam as well.

On October 12, 2014, Ronald Johnson, 25, was involved in a highly disputed interaction with Chicago police. At the end of this interaction, Ronald 'Ronnieman' Johnson would be dead at the hands of Chicago's finest. According to Dorothy Holmes, Johnson's mother, the officer who fired the fatal rounds into her son was officer George Hernandez. This information was kept secret by the Chicago police until now, as officials have announced that no charges will be filed against this killer cop.

Holmes has refused to be bullied by the Chicago police since this horrific incident wrecked her world last year. Despite not getting the media spotlight as in the case of McDonald, Holmes continued to fight for justice. Because of her relentless drive to bring Hernandez to justice, the Chicago police have finally released the dashcam of that fateful night.


Comment: We are the government: Tactics for taking down the police state

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Arrow Down

Unpublicized and deadly: High levels of uranium contaminates water in US western farming regions

Ellen Knickmeyer And Scott Smith
Phys.org
Tue, 08 Dec 2015 00:00 UTC
uranium contamination
© AP Photo/John LocherIn this Sept. 15, 2015 photo, water is pumped from a well into an irrigation ditch near Fresno, Calif. Officials with the U.S. Geological Survey's Sacramento office and elsewhere believe the amount of uranium increased in Central Valley drinking-water supplies over the last 150 years with the spread of farming.
In a trailer park tucked among irrigated orchards that help make California's San Joaquin Valley the richest farm region in the world, 16-year-old Giselle Alvarez, one of the few English-speakers in the community of farmworkers, puzzles over the notices posted on front doors: There's a danger in their drinking water.

Uranium, the notices warn, tests at a level considered unsafe by federal and state standards. The law requires the park's owners to post the warnings. But they are awkwardly worded and in English, a language few of the park's dozens of Spanish-speaking families can read.

"It says you can drink the water—but if you drink the water over a period of time, you can get cancer," said Alvarez, whose working-class family has no choice but keep drinking and cooking with the tainted tap water daily, as they have since Alvarez was just learning to walk. "They really don't explain."

Uranium, the stuff of nuclear fuel for power plants and atom bombs, increasingly is showing in drinking water systems in major farming regions of the U.S. West—a naturally occurring but unexpected byproduct of irrigation, of drought, and of the overpumping of natural underground water reserves.

Comment: It is not only the US farming regions that are contaminated - uranium radiation pollution has effectively spread around the world from war zones where the Israeli and US militaries have frequently fired uranium-containing shells.

History of uranium pollution:
  • In December 1995 and January 1996, U.S. Marine Corps Harrier aircraft training near Okinawa, Japan fired about 1,520 DU - depleted uranium - rounds. The Japanese government was not notified for almost a year.
  • In February 1999, two U.S. Marine Corps Aircraft expended 263 DU rounds at the U.S. Navy firing range in Vieques, Puerto Rico, which is not licensed for DU munitions. This "accidental" release was only discovered through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Military Toxics Project.
  • In January 2003, the Navy admitted routinely firing DU from its Phalanx guns in prime fishing waters off the coast of Washington state since 1977.
The people of Iraq (1991), Bosnia (1994-1995), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001-2003), Libya (2011) and Syria (2013) experienced uranium exposure first-hand:

Immediate battlefield exposures of combat and cleanup personnel to "depleted" uranium are only the tip of the toxic and radioactive iceberg. Continuing environmental exposures present a much longer-term danger to civilians in post-conflict areas. The Royal Society (the British national academy of sciences) recently concluded that because DU may move into the environment - especially water sources - over many decades, "contaminated land might be a concern for hundreds of years" and "contamination of water supplies or other sensitive components of the environment... might only become apparent after a number of years or more likely decades."

Firing of DU munitions can immediately contaminate air, soil, and water with ingestible particles of toxic and radioactive "depleted" uranium. (Read more in the original publication: "The depleted uranium fact sheet".)

See also:

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Bizarro Earth

Horrible conditions for 12,000 Syrian refugees stranded on Jordan border


Sputnik News
Wed, 09 Dec 2015 02:23 UTC
syrian refugees jordan
© REUTERS/ Muhammad Hamed
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has called on King Abdullah II of Jordan to let the masses of displaced persons enter the country.

Jordanian officials have been urged to allow the refugees, who fled war-torn Syria, to enter, prioritizing as the most vulnerable babies under the age of six months, pregnant women and the elderly.

According to UNHCR, 11,000 refugees are stuck in Rukban, eight kilometers from the place where the Syrian, Iraqi and Jordanian borders meet. Another 1,000 displaced persons are in Hadalat on the Syrian-Jordanian border, 90 kilometers further west.

Comment: How much more do these people have to suffer before getting the help they need?

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Arrow Up

UK veterans of Middle East wars throw down medals in protest over Syrian airstrikes


RT
Tue, 08 Dec 2015 23:42 UTC
Libya veteran Daniel Lenham
© Rob Edwards / RT Libya veteran Daniel Lenham discards his medals at Downing Street
Royal Air Force veteran Daniel Lenham served in Iraq and later in Libya during the 2011 NATO intervention. Ahead of his full interview on RT's Going Underground, he explains why he threw his medals down on the pavement outside Downing Street.

Lenham said the act of casting aside his decorations left him feeling empowered. He found the experience "therapeutic."

"If I am honest, it was an emotional event and part of a process I am on," he said.

Lenham saw it as an opportunity to express his disgust at the government's "insane folly" of bombing Syria.

Lenham was among four ex-servicemen from Veterans for Peace UK to throw down their medals in protest. The group held a similar ceremony in July. Tuesday's act, however, was directed at parliament's decision last week to launch airstrikes on Syria.

Asked what he made of the Syria vote, Lenham blasted the MPs who brought the UK into another Middle East conflict.

Comment: More people are beginning to understand the true nature of the Western 'war on terror' and are unwilling to be cannon fodder for the hegemonic goals of empire.

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Cult

'Heil Donald Trump!' Neo-nazis celebrate their savior with memes

Patrick Howell O'Neill
The Daily Dot
Tue, 08 Dec 2015 19:11 UTC
trump and hitler
Here's one way Donald Trump's political math is working out, whether he meant it to or not.

Trump's new proposal to ban Muslim entry into the United States plus his longstanding promise to deport 11 million undocumented, mostly Latino workers equals intensifying support from white supremacists.

"At this point, if you still don't support Trump, I'm seriously questioning whether or not you're [a white nationalist]," one individual said Monday evening on Stormfront, the most popular white supremacist forum online.

Comment: Bear witness. We have entered a very frightening period in the US. If we get out alive, many will be shaking their heads and wondering how we let it come to pass.

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TV

PBS Newshour fails the public miserably on Syria, Russia and Turkey

Rick Sterling
Counterpunch
Tue, 08 Dec 2015 00:00 UTC
PBS Newshour

PBS Newshour is considered high quality journalism by many North Americans. But is it? A test case is their report on Nov 24 when a Russian jet was shot down and one pilot killed as he descended in parachute.

This was a significant international event and the situation is still dangerous. The conflict in Syria could get even worse. PBS Newshour presented a discussion/analysis of the event with two guests: Nicholas Burns and Angela Stent. The PBS Newshour host was Judy Woodruff.

This critique applies to the PBS Newshour broadcast on November 24 but the essential points apply to the present. The assumptions and bias regarding the Syrian conflict are pervasive and persistent. How can US foreign policy change if the public is continually fed biased and false information?

Here are specific points:

Comment: Until and unless one is open to getting the facts and news from objective - usually so-called 'alternative' sources - one remains utterly subject to the polished and shiny fraudsters who purport in all seriousness to be giving balanced analysis. These news outlets are, unwittingly or not, responsible for helping perpetuate high crimes and their dissembling is one of the main reasons that Sott.net exists: to respond to their lies.

See: Sott.net's Yearly State of the World Address

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Heart - Black

Londis shop in UK refuses to pay 15-year-old for 10 weeks of work

Lucy Sheriff
Huffington Post, UK
Tue, 08 Dec 2015 12:59 UTC
Londis
© Birmingham Post and Mail
A teenager who worked for 10 weeks in a local corner shop so he could save money to buy Christmas presents for his family was then told by the store's owners he was actually just a volunteer.

Jay El-leboudy, a 15-year-old from Canterbury, had been doing two shifts a week at a Londis store in Longport. According to his mother, Zoe Buckwell, an arrangement had been made with the store's owners that he would have a week-long trial to see how he did.

After 10 weeks, however, the teen became increasingly worried that he still had not received any pay, and was then reportedly told by the owners they had never agreed to pay him. Posting on the Canterbury Residents Facebook page, Buckwell asked for help from her neighbours as she was "not sure what to do about it".

"He was waiting to get paid in all this time, because the shop owner said she needed permission from the council and his school before she could pay him," she wrote. "She's now decided to say she never agreed to pay him, it was only volunteer work."

El-leboudy also chimed in, saying the shop owner owed him at least £100. "I'm 15 years old and had been working in the shop for a few months. On Monday night I had to leave as I was informed by kitty (the owner) that she never intended to pay me and that it was just 'voluntary work' even though I had been working till 9:30 pm on school nights.

"She has paid me once before and had numerous conversations with me and my mum regarding my next payment... I have recently found out that she has done this before to others my age. She [owes me] over £100 and wasted 45 hours of my working time."
Jay El-leboudy
© Huffington Post

Comment: Sounds like the shop owner has been doing this for some time and is covering his rear end. Working for food and coffee. Really!? How many others have they done this to?

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Bomb

Crimea back to full power - Russian energy ministry


RT
Tue, 08 Dec 2015 20:54 UTC
Crimea
© Vladimir Sergeev / SputnikCrimea
Electricity has been fully restored to Crimea, the Russian Energy Ministry announced on Tuesday. The region has been under a partial blackout after Ukrainian activists blew up power lines providing electricity to the peninsula on November 22.

"On December 8, a 220 KV line linking Kakhovsky-Titan-Krasnoperekopsk was switched on," the ministry said on its website, confirming reports from officials in Ukraine's Kherson region.
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