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YPG rep confirms Syrian forces join Kurdish fighters in Afrin after confusing reports


Sputnik
Wed, 21 Feb 2018 10:04 UTC
Convoy
© AFP 2018/ George OURFALIAN
Convoy of pro Syrian government fighters arrive in Syria's northern region of Afrin
YPG representative in Afrin, Brusk Haseke, has confirmed to Sputnik that Syrian forces have arrived to Afrin despite Turkish Air Forces' shelling on February 20, adding that a new group of Syrian military entered the city today.
"The information that the Syrian army has retreated and could not enter Afrin under attack from the Turkish Armed Forces is not true. Yesterday, a large group of soldiers from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), linked to the Syrian army, arrived in Afrin to, jointly with the Kurdish self-defense units of the YPG, confront the Turkish military and the [Free Syrian Army] FSA," Haseke told Sputnik.
However, the YPG representative stated that at least two servicemen were killed during Turkey's shelling.
"While approaching Afrin, they were attacked by Turkish artillery, which resulted in the death of two fighters and three wounded. Despite this, they arrived in Afrin and joined detachments of the YPG. At present, the fighting is ongoing at the front in Afrin. The fighters arrived in the city with heavy weapons and armored vehicles and, together with YPG squads, confronted the aggressors. Today there were no dead or wounded among the militiamen," he specified.
The Syrian people's forces arrived in Afrin to voluntarily defend their land. Afrin is part of the Syrian territory. Our doors are open to anyone who intends to fight against Turkey and the groups it supports," he said.

Comment: This time Turkey is the invader and with that role comes serious fallout. As for the number of confusing reports, nothing about this war on this land with this cast of players has been straight forward, up front or uncomplicated. And, it is still unfolding.

See also: In-depth analysis: US protecting ISIS to weaken rivals, justify and expand indefinite US occupation of Syria

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Star of David

Norman Finkelstein: Gaza on the brink of collapse, residents 'caged in'


RT
Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:43 UTC
Palestinian Woman
© Mohammed Salem / Reuters
Palestinian woman, Southern Gaza Strip awaiting travel permit.
The "open-air prison" of Gaza is "on the brink of collapse," with Palestinians verging now on an unlivable situation, author Norman Finkelstein told RT's Going Underground.

Finkelstein, author of the book Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom, believes the "point of no return" has been reached when it comes to Gaza. "Seventy percent of the people of Gaza are refugees. More than half are children. They're trapped, there's no way out," he told the host, Afshin Rattansi.

"Ninety-five percent of the water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption. Each day, when a child drinks water, the child is poisoning him- or herself but they can't leave. They're caged in. As your former [Prime Minister David Cameron] put it, Gaza is an 'open-air prison.'"

The difference between Gaza and the rest of the world, according to Finkelstein, is that the rest of the world "has an option to flee" any bad situation.

Comment: See also: More genocide? As Gaza dries up, Israel turns off fresh water source

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Sheriff

Texas suburb to build police substation on affluent school campus

Sara Sarder
The Dallas Morning News
Thu, 22 Feb 2018 19:39 UTC
Westlake Academy
© Dallas Morning News
Keller police are collaborating with the town of Westlake to build a police substation on the Westlake Academy campus

The academy's board of trustees approved the plan in early February, before a school shooting killed 17 people in Parkland, Fla.

Keller Police Chief Michael Wilson said the plan for a substation addresses policing complexities created by the state charter school's corporate-style layout.

"[The layout] offers a ton of advantages for students and staff but poses challenges to safety," Wilson said. "[The substation] is a nontraditional approach to a nontraditional learning environment."

The plan comes after a series of mass shootings that have motivated schools to look for better methods and enforcement to prevent such tragedies in schools.
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Pistol

Hundreds of Maryland students walk out of class to protest gun violence

Rebecca Savransky
The Hill
Wed, 21 Feb 2018 18:38 UTC
Maryland school walkout
© Reuters
Hundreds of students in Maryland on Wednesday walked out of class and began marching toward the U.S. Capitol to demand action on gun control.

Students at Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County planned a walkout through social media, according to a reporter from ABC 7.

According to Fox 5, students at Richard Montgomery and Bethesda-Chevy Chase high schools are also taking part in a walkout.

The students will finish the rally at the Capitol.

Comment: Students are being used by anti-gun activists to pursue a particular political agenda. It is one which paints conservatives as responsible for violence and decline in the US. Not only is this agenda lacking in perspective, it wrongly assigns criminal thinking broadly to the right, when it more closely resembles that of the rising extreme left. See: Florida School Shooting: A Culture of Narcissistic Entitlement and Resentment

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Megaphone

Outrage in Florida as state legislature passes porn bill hours after rejecting gun control


RT
Thu, 22 Feb 2018 17:33 UTC
Students Florida congress
© Colin Hackley / Reuters
Students at the Florida congress house gallery begin to grieve as legislators strike down legislation on gun reform.
A week after 17 people were killed in a shooting at a Parkland, Florida school, the state legislature is facing backlash over dropping a gun control bill yet finding time to debate the ills of pornography.

In Tuesday's session, the Florida House of Representatives voted 36-71 against passing House Bill 219 in a matter of three minutes. The bill would have prohibited the sale of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines and required "certificates of possession" for lawfully-possessed firearms, among other measures.

The bill had not been heard in the House committees since representative Kionne McGhee, [D-Miami] submitted it last October. A January 10 senate bill was likewise ignored.

An hour later, Rep. Ross Spano turned the lawmakers' attention to more pressing matters: pornography. The bill (HR 157) argued that it was "creating a public health risk" and was "contributing to the hypersexualization of children and teens."

Comment: Simply banning AR-15s will not stop people like Cruz from finding some other way to hurt people in order to gain notoriety. If people want something to be done that might actually lower the number of school shootings in America, then calling for the media to stop publishing the names and pictures of shooters, and thus removing the notoriety, may be one way to go. As far as pornography is concerned, it most certainly is a public health crisis of epidemic proportions and should be recognized as such.

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Heart - Black

Finland turns away Iraqi human rights and anti-corruption researcher seeking asylum - he's killed on his return

Johanna Väänänen
Euro News
Mon, 19 Feb 2018 12:00 UTC
migrant refugee
© REUTERS/Khalid al Mousily
Ali's daughter, Noor, is adamant her father was killed by the same people who had made him seek refuge in Finland in 2015.

A man who was denied asylum by Finland's immigration service has been shot dead just weeks after his return to Iraq, according to Finnish public broadcaster YLE.

Ali had said he sought refuge in Finland for being an "incorruptible" researcher on human rights and corruption. In a YLE documentary aired at the start of 2017, Ali said that this made him a danger to many implicated in corruption.

Comment: Had Western governments not supported the illegal wars in the Middle East or backed 'open door' immigration policy in the first place, granting genuine asylum to those who need it wouldn't be so problematic: Check out SOTT radio's: The Truth Perspective: Weapons of Mass Migration: Interview with Michael Springmann on Europe's Migrant Crisis

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Ambulance

Connecticut man crashes car into hospital, sets himself on fire

Christine Dempsey, Shawn R. Beals and Nicolas Rondinone
Hartford Courant
Thu, 22 Feb 2018 13:35 UTC
Man crashes into CT hospital
© John Woike/Hartford Courant
Middletown firefighhters, FBI, State Police and local police are investigating an accident after a car drove into the entrance of Middlesex Hospital Thursday.
A man in his 20s crashed his car through the emergency room entrance at Middlesex Hospital Thursday morning and apparently set himself on fire, Mayor Daniel Drew said.

Drew said the act was intentional, but he would not speculate on the motive. The FBI, state police and Hartford bomb squads responded to the hospital, located at 28 Crescent St., and went to the man's home at 66 Milardo Lane on Thursday afternoon, officials said. When asked whether the incident is being investigating as a possible act of terrorism, Drew said officials are not speculating what the man's motives may have been.

Officials said the car crashed through the hospital doors at about 10 a.m. A number of gas cans were found in the vehicle, prompting evacuations of the hospital and nearby homes.
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Attention

Fmr. Bolivian president Lozada to face trial in Florida over human rights abuses


Daily Mail
Wed, 21 Feb 2018 12:26 UTC
Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada

Former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, seen here in a September 30 2003 picture, is to go on trial in Florida for alleged human rights abuses during 2003 protests against his government.
Former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada goes on trial in Florida next month in a civil suit over his role in the killing of more than 50 civilians during disturbances in 2003, court documents showed Wednesday.

It would be the first time a former head of state will face trial in the US for human rights abuses, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is among a team of lawyers representing relatives of eight of the victims.

The suit alleges that Sanchez de Lozada and his defense minister, Carlos Sanchez Berzain, planned the extra-judicial killings by Bolivian security forces.

A federal judge ruled that the two will face trial in Fort Lauderdale, Florida starting March 5 under a law that permits civil suits in US courts for extrajudicial killings.

Comment: The relatives of those killed may have their day in court, but whether justice will be served is questionable:
Obama administration refuses extradition Bolivia's ex-president on genocide charges

In October 2003, the intensely pro-US president of Bolivia, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, sent his security forces to suppress growing popular protests against the government's energy and globalization policies. Using high-powered rifles and machine guns, his military forces killed 67 men, women and children, and injured 400 more, almost all of whom were poor and from the nation's indigenous Aymara communities. Dozens of protesters had been killed by government forces in the prior months when troops were sent to suppress them.

The resulting outrage over what became known as "the Gas Wars" drove Sanchez de Lozada from office and then into exile in the United States, where he was welcomed by his close allies in the Bush administration. He has lived under a shield of asylum in the US ever since.
[..]
The former leader - a multimillionaire mining executive who, having been educated in the US, spoke Spanish with a heavy American accent - was a loyal partner in America's drug war in the region. More importantly, the former leader himself was a vehement proponent and relentless crusader for free trade and free market policies favored by the US: policies that the nation's indigenous poor long believed (with substantial basis) resulted in their impoverishment while enriching Bolivia's small Europeanized elite.

It was Sánchez de Lozada's forced exile that ultimately led to the 2006 election and 2009 landslide re-election of Morales, a figure the New York Times in October 2003 described as one "regarded by Washington as its main enemy". Morales has been as vehement an opponent of globalization and free trade as Sánchez de Lozada was a proponent, and has constantly opposed US interference in his region and elsewhere (in 2011, Morales called for the revocation of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize as a result of the intervention in Libya).
See also: Bolivian 'Day of Dignity' commemorates 'Black October' massacre

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Cow Skull

DACA amnesty could hurt American millennials most

Spencer P Morrison
The National Economics Editorial
Tue, 20 Feb 2018 18:35 UTC
DACA protestors
Although millennials are the first to virtuously signal their support for granting amnesty to DACA recipients, they are also the demographic cohort most hurt by DACA.

This is an bizarre paradox - why would anyone favor a policy that harms them? Misinformation? Perhaps. Or maybe millennials think - feel, rather - that they have more to gain (socially) from supporting DACA than they do to lose (economically). This is probably closer to the truth. Some doubtlessly do, but as a group millennials will be the losers in any DACA amnesty deal.

DACA is the acronym for President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive order, which granted temporary legal status to any illegal immigrant to arrived in America before the age of 16. Roughly 800,000 people enrolled in the program, although the total number of potential DACA recipients is nearly 2 million. This is how many people would likely receive amnesty in an amnesty deal.

Comment: Immigration, like any other large problem, is not black and white. No doubt there are among the Dreamers fine, intelligent young people who will be a credit to their community. The issue is to weed out those who have taken up a criminal lifestyle (e.g. M-13 gang members) or who otherwise are a drain on the country. The Democrats loudly oppose any sort of vetting, as every immigrant is a potential future vote.

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Extinguisher

Biblical sex 101: Michigan church faces state investigation, death threats for holding sexuality workshop

Penny Starr
Breitbart
Wed, 21 Feb 2018 18:39 UTC
bible
© Pixabay
From the moment Metro City Church announced a workshop for teenage girls struggling from peer pressure and questions about sexual identity, Jeremy Schossau, the lead pastor for the church with campuses in Riverview and Taylor, Michigan, said he and the congregation had faced "unbridled" hate and vitriol.

"Every kind of threat imaginable, from killing my family to burning down our church, has been leveled against us," Schossau said at a press conference at the state capitol last week with other pastors and supporters.


Comment: Tolerance in action.


The latest threat came from a man who was arrested after threatening that Antifa would show up at the church. Brian Carl Begin II was arraigned Feb. 15 on misdemeanor charges.

"In the middle of the voicemail the male states if the church goes through with the gay conversion therapy class in the state of Michigan, I promise every member of the Antifa will show up 'armed and ready. This is not a joke,'" the police told the News-Herald.

Protesters gathered at the church on the occasions of the six-week workshop - which has since been canceled - and the church has received a continuous stream of emails and voicemail claiming the aim of the course was "conversion therapy."


Comment: We can see what direction this is going. Anyone who questions transgender "identity" issues can now be accused of advocating "conversion" therapy.


The complaints and protest led two state legislators to speak out against the church, introduce a bill to make conversation therapy illegal in the state, and called on the attorney general's office to investigate the congregation.
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