Society's ChildS


Quenelle - Golden

Best of the Web: 'America was never great' hat sets off a firestorm of racism and death threats from Trump supporters

Krystal Lake hat controversy
© Chris Molla‎ / Facebook
American exceptionalists got riled up this week after a young Home Depot employee wearing an "America was never great" hat became the target of death threats and racist attacks by Trump supporters.

Krystal Lake, 22, wore her new custom-made cap to work in a Staten Island last Sunday when a customer violated her privacy and posted his photo of her online.

Those Trump supporters who are privileged enough to have Sunday off had plenty of time to send her death threats and rage on the internet.

Eye 1

Children's minister and volunteer pastor caught haggling for sex with underage girls

Knoxville police
© Knox County Sheriff's Office / Facebook
A trafficking ring in Tennessee was busted, leading to the arrest of nearly three dozen men, including the pastor of a children's ministry. He has since lost his job at Grace Baptist and is charged with human trafficking and patronizing prostitution.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation announced on Friday that 32 people have been arrested in connection with a Knoxville human trafficking ring. Among them were Jason Kennedy, a children's minister at the Grace Baptist Church in Karns, Tennessee, and Zubin Parakh, a volunteer creative pastor at the Lifehouse Church in Oak Ridge, WBIR reported.

Kennedy, 46, and Parakh, 32, were caught in a three-day operation in which undercover agents posted ads on Backpage.com, a common site for escorts. Kennedy and Parakh were both charged with trafficking after specifically seeking out sex with an underage girl, according to KGW.

Kennedy is facing a Class A trafficking charge and, if found guilty, could spend between 15 and 60 years behind bars and have to pay a $50,000 fine. He is currently in a county jail with bond set at $50,500.

According to WLTV, Kennedy responded via text to an ad placed by an undercover agent. He then received a text back in which he was made aware that two underage girls would be present. He haggled with the agents and finally agreed on a price of $100 for half an hour of sex with both of the girls.

Fire

Police investigate firebombing at Google Maps office

google office
Two incendiary devices ignited a fire late Thursday night at the offices of digital giant Google, damaging a Google Earth demo car and leaving a large singe mark on one of the buildings, authorities said.

Mountain View firefighters were called to the massive complex on Salado Drive at about 10:52 p.m.

The fire was set at one of the more well-known landmarks, the Google Street View car parked at 1501 Salado Drive in Mountain View, where the Google Maps team is based.

Books

Portland schools ban textbooks that question climate change

portland school meeting
© pps.netPortland Public Schools board member Mike Rosen (center) at the May 17 board meeting.
In a move spearheaded by environmentalists, the Portland Public Schools board unanimously approved a resolution aimed at eliminating doubt of climate change and its causes in schools.

"It is unacceptable that we have textbooks in our schools that spread doubt about the human causes and urgency of the crisis," said Lincoln High School student Gaby Lemieux in board testimony. "Climate education is not a niche or a specialization, it is the minimum requirement for my generation to be successful in our changing world."

The resolution passed Tuesday evening calls for the school district to get rid of textbooks or other materials that cast doubt on whether climate change is occurring and that the activity of human beings is responsible. The resolution also directs the superintendent and staff to develop an implementation plan for "curriculum and educational opportunities that address climate change and climate justice in all Portland Public Schools."

Comment: The "science" of man made global warming has been thoroughly exposed as fraudulent but it's not surprising that indoctrination centers schools would push such lies on their students. The global warming myth fits in quite well with all the lies taught about history, health, civics, etc.


Pistol

Breaking: White House on lockdown - gunshots fired in area

White house US government
© George Skidmore/Flicker
The White House is on lockdown after shots appear to have been fired in the area.

The suspect approached a Secret Service checkpoint at 17th and E Streets, brandished a weapon and the agents engaged with him. He was shot in the abdomen and taken into custody, a law enforcement source told CNN.

The press corps has been told to shelter in place, then were moved to the basement after reports of shots fired at the corner of West Executive and Pennsylvania avenues.


The location is inside the pedestrian area between the West Wing and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Handcuffs

Inmate dies in prison custody and is buried; no one tells his family

jail cell
© Jenevieve Robbins/Reuters
A family is now heartbroken after attempting to get in touch with their incarcerated son only to find out that he'd died months prior and had been buried without any word. To make matters worse, the prison never conducted an investigation into his death, and the family has still yet to receive a cause of death.

The family of the deceased, Lonnie Hamilton, received this horrible news earlier this month after unsuccessfully trying to call him, write him, and eventually going to the state's correctional website. When they logged into the website to see if he'd been transferred, Hamilton's family was shocked to find that he was listed as "deceased."

They thought it was a horrible joke; unfortunately, it was not.

Eye 2

Body cam video shows cops repeatedly tasering handcuffed man until he dies

police tasering
© NY Times
As Chase Sherman was returning home with his parents and fiancée from his brother's wedding in November, he began to hallucinate. Apparently reacting to synthetic marijuana he had taken days earlier, he bit his girlfriend and tried to jump out of the back seat of the car as the family drove through Georgia toward Florida.

About an hour outside Atlanta, at mile marker 55 on Interstate 85, his fiancée pulled over the car and his mother called the police, hoping they would help calm Mr. Sherman, 32. Less than a half-hour later, Mr. Sherman, who worked at a family-owned parasailing business on the Gulf Coast, was dead.

He was stunned numerous times with Taser guns carried by two sheriff's deputies, while handcuffed in the back seat of a rental car.

Like other recent episodes involving the police, this one was captured on video, in this case by body cameras worn by the sheriff's deputies as they tried to subdue Mr. Sherman.


Briefcase

Russian billionaire pledges to leave all his money to charity

russia billionaire charity
© Ramil Sitdikov / SputnikMikhail Fridman
Billionaire Mikhail Fridman, whose net worth is $13.3 billion according to Forbes, is to leave his children out of his will. The businessman said he wants his children to create something on their own.

"I'm not a big fan of such public statements, but I can say that I am going to transfer all my money to charity. I don't plan to transfer any money to my children," Fridman said, responding to a question from the audience at the Forbes club.

He says giving a young person large amounts of money risks ruining his life. He also doesn't want his children to participate in his Alfa Group business.

Fridman said he wants his children to follow his footsteps and create something of their own. Another reason for that is that he doesn't want his elder daughter Laura, who is now 22, to become a focus of people with bad intentions.

The tycoon added that the same decision was made by his business partners. Fridman has four children. The youngest is 10 years old, the eldest is 22.

In 2016, Forbes Russia estimated Fridman's wealth at $13.3 billion; he is ranked second among the richest Russians. He is the principal owner of Alfa Group, which includes Russia's largest private commercial bank Alfa Bank, X5 Retail Group that has a chain of supermarkets in Russia, A1 TV Channel and the LetterOne investment holding.

Megaphone

Actress Brigitte Bardot: Russia is lucky to have a president as remarkable as Putin

brigitte bardot
© AP Photo/ Jacques Brinon
Famous French actress Brigitte Bardot told Sputnik she thought Russia was lucky to have President Putin over his stance in environment an animal rights, yet more work on these issues remained to be done.

"You're really lucky to have a president as remarkable as Vladimir Putin. But even here work remains to be done in what concerns protection of animals. I am counting on the help of the Russian people to help me in this," Bardot said.

The actress said that even though she was French, she no longer recognized the country as it had changed so much.

Георгиевская ленточка

Russian judge: Obama's statements on US exceptionalism the same as what Nazis said about Germany

russian judge
© Vladimir Fedorenko / SputnikRussian Constitutional Court Chairman Valery Zorkin
The chairman of the Russian Constitutional Court has said that Barack Obama's statements about American exceptionalism were very similar to propaganda used by Nazi Germany and equally dangerous to world peace.

"The idea of specialness, exceptionality and unique rights of the American state and American people has been used in US internal political rhetoric for quite a while, but in the recent years it is being actively and persistently offered in US foreign policy documents and public speeches on international politics delivered by US officials," Judge Valery Zorkin said at the St Petersburg international legal forum on Thursday.

"Any unbiased and educated person would see that this statement by Obama is an almost exact copy of leading politicians and propaganda specialists of the Third Reich, including Adolph Hitler... In essence, Obama is using the exact same thing that Nazi bosses said about the German exceptionalism when they started the world war," he added.

The judge also said that in his view the exceptionalism concept had direct influence on the modern US concepts of military planning and these concepts see the main objective of all activities as reaching such degree of military might that the United States remains out of reach of other nations, on land, sea, in air and in space.