The CEO of SodaStream has accused Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu of being responsible for the sacking of hundreds of Palestinian employees at his company, blaming him for dismantling the "island of peace" the firm had created for both Jews and Palestinians. Speaking during an exclusive interview with the Times of Israel, SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum accused Netanyahu of being personally involved in a bureaucratic process which forced the company to fire its Palestinian employees.

According to Birnbaum, it all began when SodaStream decided it needed more space, and opted to close its West Bank factory. The move did, however, follow a boycott campaign against the company, in which critics accused it of making money on land "stolen" by Israel. Though Birnbaum insists the move was made voluntarily, he says the Israeli government is arguing that SodaStream was forced to move due to the pressure from the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, as well as fire the 500 Palestinians working there.

But the company insists that despite claims from the Netanyahu government, it wanted to retain 350 of its 500 Palestinian employees to work at its new plant in the Negev. However, according to Birnbaum keeping such a high number of employees was impossible because the company was initially only granted permits for 120 of the Palestinian workers - a number which new conditions later reduced to 74.

Since February, those remaining 74 employees have been barred from Israel, their permits retroactively canceled. "Apparently our 74 Palestinians represent a threat to [Netanyahu's] agenda," Birnbaum said. The CEO says Netanyahu - who he refers to as the "prime minister of conflict" - is responsible for the outcome, adding that his office "intervened to stop the employment of our Palestinians so that Bibi [Netanyahu] can then point a finger at the BDS."

Birnbaum did not mince his words when speaking about the prime minister, accusing him of "systematically spreading hate within Israel between Jews and Arabs and between Orthodox and secular..." "It pains me to say that I believe this administration is nurturing the conflict in all its evil manifestations. They nurture the hate and the boycott and they nurture separatism," he said.

Unsurprisingly, the story coming from Netanyahu's office is starkly different.

A Pakistani man, expelled from Italy for allegedly plotting an attack in the name of the Islamic State (IS) group, at one time captained the Italian youth cricket team, media reports say.

Aftab Farook was caught on a wire-tap talking about using a Kalashnikov or bomb to attack targets such as a wine shop in Milan or the airport of Bergamo in northern Italy in an attempt to "scare Europeans," Italian newspapers reported.

Italian authorities charged that Farook, 26, who had lived in Italy for 13 years, was planning to go to Syria to join the militants, and expelled him from the country on August 2.

Sportweek photos from 2009 show him as the captain of the under-19s national cricket team, wearing the Italian colors in international competitions. Farook worked for the sporting-goods retailer Decathlon and was well-liked by his cricket teammates and neighbors.

But police charged that he had changed over the past year, and had begun beating his wife and forcing her to wear a burqa.

A schoolgirl carrying on her body a heart monitoring device was asked off a bus in Russia's Yekaterinburg, after a passenger claimed she was a terrorist. The stressful incident apparently affected the girl's health.

The girl, a ninth-grader identified as Tanya N. by local media, is undergoing treatment at the local cardio center. She had a CardioDayHolter device fixed on her body at a local clinic to monitor cardio activity throughout the day, Tanya's relatives say. "She stepped out of the hospital, took a bus and there, a woman called her a terrorist and the bus conductor asked [my granddaughter] to get off," Irina Charova told RT.

The girl herself told local media outlet Nasha Gazeta that "an old lady" was sitting in front of her. When she saw the wires of the device, she started screaming "You're a terrorist! You're gonna blow all of us up! I'm not going any further with her [the girl]." The bus conductor suggested that one side of the conflict should leave the bus. The "old lady" flatly refused to leave, so Tanya had to get off.


She took the next bus and made it home, raising no suspicion this time, Charova said, adding that the outcome of the incident was that Tanya was upset, presenting a bad electrocardiogram and her blood pressure had spiked. The incident happened July 29, but the local media only learnt of it August 3, after the girl's relatives decided to make the story public.

Authorities are deciding whether any action should be taken against the bus company or other parties. "The Prosecutor's Office [will look into] the driver of the public transport vehicle [and] the owner company to verify whether the security rules... were violated," the Sverdlovsk Region Prosecutor's Office said in a statement.

Translated by Inessa Sinchougova

Western neoliberal ideology attempts to destroy all that is of conservative or traditional values. Where there is no consensus and no national interests - it is easier to pass almost any legislation at all. While Europeans have already, for the most part, been robbed and guilt-tripped out of their unique identities - the same template tends to backfire when applied to Russia.

In 2012- 2013, the punk band "Pussy Riot" took on the role of a marionette of Western propaganda against the Russian state. Its mandate was to attack the "human rights record" of the Russian government and as such, help paint Vladimir Putin as a "dictator" - by now, a fully absorbed aspect of CIA vernacular, espoused onto the American public.

In 2012, the members of Pussy Riot stormed into a Moscow cathedral, defaming the government, while mocking the beliefs of churchgoers with vulgarity and disruptive behaviour. They received a 2 year sentence in the process, but were released early in 2013 - only to cause a scene at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Having completed their task, they went on to CNN to interview about their ordeal. Any person with at least a half a brain understands, that if they were free to do this (the CNN interview took place in their home, in Russia) - then their allegations of not living in a free country, are contrary to logic.

In a gross display of wasted taxpayer dollars, dozens of Massachusetts National Guard personnel, operating under a grant from the DEA, alongside Massachusetts State Police, descended into the backyard of an 81-year-old cancer patient in a raid last week — to protect society from the dangers of his four marijuana plants.

Paul Jackson, 81, of Martha's Vineyard, grows cannabis to make medicine. His plants, along with several other plants, became the target of law enforcement last week in a crackdown on hardened criminals who'd dare to grow a plant that helps them.

Jackson was in his backyard last Tuesday when plainclothes men and a helicopter descended on his property. With no warrant, and without showing identification, these heroes ripped Jackson's plants from the ground.

"They just come charging through and start cutting it down," Jackson said in an interview with the MV Times.

According to the MV Times, Mr. Jackson, a lifelong Islander and renowned organic gardener with over 300 ribbons from the Martha's Vineyard Agricultural Fair, expressed both bewilderment and disgust when he spoke to The Times on Friday.

"I told them they don't know what they're doing, they're destroying it and it could be used for good purposes," he said. "I know because I went through it before. You wrote about it in The Times. I had the article framed, took it out to show them; I said, 'This is proof of what it does,' but they didn't want to hear it."

A Russian woman was seriously injured when a huge explosion rocked her relatives' house in Aleppo, Syria. Irina Barakyat heard a terrible roar outside and rushed to cover her daughter and son from the bomb. Saving their lives cost her a leg and a hand.

Barakyat is married to a Syrian man and has been living in Aleppo for the past 13 years. She was asked by her mother-in-law to come by to give an injection to her husband, who recently had a stroke. Barakyat agreed, taking her three children with her with a plan to stay overnight.

"When we woke up in the morning, I heard a terrible roar. I've never heard anything like that before. I realized I had to act without losing any time. My elder son and daughter stood nearby. I jumped on them, stretching my arm and leg, covering my kids. I heard a rumble, then saw my father-in-law lying on the floor. He was not breathing. My mother-in-law was injured. My children stayed alive because I had covered them. My son only broke a limb, and my daughter didn't sustain any injuries. My middle son had been sleeping in his room when the bomb went off."

Farmers in Arkansas, Tennessee and southern Missouri are angry at their neighbors - and agrochemical giant Monsanto - over a new weed-killer that has ravaged 200,000 acres of soybean fields. The herbicide is used to treat Monsanto's new strand of soy.

As controversies mount over its glyphosate-based herbicide, also known as Roundup, the Missouri-based Monsanto has rolled out a new soybean seed intended to be resistant to another weed-killer, known as dicamba. While the "Roundup Ready 2 Xtend" soy has been approved for planting in 2016, US federal regulators have yet to approve the use of dicamba.

Farmers who bought Monsanto's seeds have taken to spraying their crops with dicamba obtained from other vendors - which is prone to drifting into neighboring fields, severely damaging the non-Xtend crops. Officials across the three states cite a "rough figure" of 200,000 acres affected by the drift, Delta Farm Press reported.

"Dicamba is a chemical that really blows easily in the wind. And it is really toxic to regular old soybeans," according to Dan Charles of National Public Radio. "A lot of people are quite angry, mostly at their neighbors but also at Monsanto for putting this seed out there on the market."

The Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has become infamous due to the increasing incidents of rape but what is more disturbing is that many of these rapes are recorded and sold as 'rape videos' brazenly in the market at throw away prices.

'Rape videos' have become a new trend in the state of Uttar Pradesh and they can be found all over the state. These rape videos are in high demand and they are being sold with a price tag from 75 US cents to $3, depending upon the exclusivity of the clips.

Real life rape videos have become a craze among the youth, surpassing the demand for regular porn clips. Shopkeepers sell the videos by directly downloading them into smartphones or put them in a thumb drive.

It has been observed that in several cases, culprits involved in rapes take video of the crime and post them online.

During a five-hour standoff that ended in the death of a Maryland mother, police asked Facebook to suspend her social media accounts. Korryn Gaines had been streaming the confrontation and previously posted recorded encounters on Instagram.

Gaines, 23, was killed and her five-year-old son wounded, when police opened fire around 3:00pm on Monday. They arrived at her apartment in Randallstown, northwest of Baltimore, that morning, attempting to arrest Gaines for not appearing in court over a traffic stop in March.

The police request, which may be without precedent, is particularly interesting in light of the fact that Gaines had been a prolific Instagram and Facebook user, posting many videos of her encounters with the law on social media.

"We did in fact reach out to social media authorities to deactivate her account," Baltimore County Police Chief James Johnson told reporters Tuesday. "Why? In order to preserve the integrity of the negotiation process with her and for the safety of our personnel [and] her child. Ms. Gaines was posting video of the operation as it unfolded. Followers were encouraging her not to comply with negotiators' request that she surrender peacefully."

The Obama administration's six-year effort to completely eradicate veteran homelessness has met half of its goal, reducing it by 47 percent. However, despite coordinated federal, state and local efforts, 40,000 veterans are still homeless.

"[We've] got to keep fighting for the dignity of every veteran. And that includes ending the tragedy, the travesty of veterans' homelessness," said commander in chief, Barack Obama, before an audience at the Disabled American Veterans annual convention in Atlanta, Georgia on Monday. "Two states, Virginia and Connecticut, as well as 27 cities and towns across the country have effectively ended veteran homelessness."


The White House goal was to eradicate veteran homelessness over five years under an initiative known as Opening Doors, launched in 2010 and involving federal and state actors and nonprofit organizations and institutions. The administration spent $16 billion the program, and increase the overall Veterans Affairs budget by 85 percent, according to the Washington Times.