Society's ChildS


Brick Wall

Hundreds of migrants board 'The Beast' train in Mexico for quick trip to the US border

migrants aboard train
© REUTERS/Jose de Jesus CortesCentral American migrants atop 'The Beast', Juchitan, Oaxaca
Hundreds of migrants boarded a train known as the "The Beast" in southern Mexico on Thursday, in a risky move aimed at transporting them to the U.S. border quicker.

The decision to board the train en masse comes after a breakout of migrants from a troubled immigration detention center in the southern border city of Tapachula on Thursday night.

Mexico's National Immigration Institute said the mass escape, which appears to be the largest in recent memory, involved around 1,300 Cuban migrants. Around 700 of them have since returned voluntarily, but hundreds remain on the run.

Migration authorities said nearly 400 migrants boarded the train, Reuters reported, with images showing men, women and children of various nationalities, most of them on the roofs of carriages.


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Clipboard

Democrats' objection to citizenship questions is a ploy to accrue more votes for themselves

voting ticket
As far as Democrats and their cheerleaders in the mainstream media are concerned, there's only one reason the Trump administration is trying to include a question about citizenship on the next census. The Department of Commerce is being widely depicted as solely interested in undercounting Hispanics and minorities, who, Trump critics say, will be discouraged from participating in the constitutionally mandated process by which the government counts the number of people in the United States.

In doing so, liberals accuse Republicans of trying to artificially depress the count to deprive urban areas of much-needed federal funds and wrongly skew the figures to lower the number of House of Representative seats in states where minorities predominate.

That was the conceit of the plaintiffs' arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court when the suit brought by several states against the government over the inclusion of a citizenship question was heard this week. While this fits in with the narrative seeking to depict the Trump administration as incorrigibly racist (and Republicans as cynically partisan), this approach to the question actually turns the truth on its head.

Far from being immoral, let alone illegal, by trying to prevent the government from finding out whether census respondents are citizens, it is Democrats who are seeking to exploit the process to advance their political agenda.

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Whistle

Boeing whistleblower reports new issue with 737 Max Jets - report

Airplane
© Reuters/Matt Mills McKnight/File Photo
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is reportedly considering an entirely new angle on its investigation into Boeing's 737 Max line of jets after a company insider called a hotline to report a new issue with the aircraft.

All 737 Max planes across the world were grounded by regulators after two of the aircraft crashed in separate incidents that claimed 346 lives.

At least four current or former Boeing employees called the FAA hotline to make complaints about the 737 Max line after Ethiopia's transport minister released a preliminary report on the March crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 that killed 157 people, CNN is reporting.

Handcuffs

German intel report warns of German far-right groups prepping for civil war, state collapse

defense germany
© REUTERS/Wolfgang RattayA far-right protester wears a sweater that reads, "If you can't protect us - then we protect ourselves"
German ultra-nationalists believe a civil war and an eventual demise of the state will come about, and are preparing for it by training to use firearms and explosives, a local security service has warned.

Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, sounded the alarm over the rise of the underground far-right, according to Die Welt. An intelligence report seen by the paper calls for increased surveillance of so-called "preppers" - a loose network of ultra-nationalists who prepare for apocalyptic scenarios.

Those people are collecting firearms and other supplies in preparation for "a civil war" or "a feared collapse of public order" in Germany, the BfV revealed. The preppers movement, which first emerged in the US, has long been rooted in survivalism - which sees far-right militias making stockpiles of food, ammunition and medicine that they would use in the event of a doomsday scenario.

Separately, there is an alarming number of extremists who could plot attacks involving improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and small arms. Notably, many of those on the far-right were indoctrinated "a few months or years" ago, but were not known to the agency before joining extremist groups.

German ultra-nationalists usually radicalize through social media and right-wing chats, where the perceived spread of Islam and inflow of immigrants dominate most discussions, the BfV report said. However, far-right terrorist acts - involving IEDs, knives or arson attacks - remain poorly organized, as there are "blatant gaps between planning and reality."

Gem

Russia's diamond titan Alrosa recovers giant gem-quality stone in Far North

Yellow diamond
© Getty Images
The world's largest diamond miner by volume, Russia's Alrosa, has revealed a huge light yellow rough diamond weighing almost 118.91 carats at its deposit in the northeastern region of Yakutia.

The precious stone, unearthed earlier this month, is the biggest discovery among the gemstone-quality diamonds at the company's 'International' mine over the past two years. A similar 109.61 carat gem was extracted at the same deposit in the summer of 2017.

The latest discovery is nearly a perfect example of a light yellow rough diamond, which has "salient edges, one of them with cleavage, and small inclusions in the central zone," according to Alrosa's press-release.

Boat

72yo Frenchman crosses Atlantic in a barrel-shaped capsule

Jean-Jacques Savin
© AFP / Georges GobetJean-Jacques Savin works on the counstruction of a barrel-shaped vessel at a shipyard in southwestern France in November 2018.
Transatlantic crossings have become somewhat mundane but this Frenchman turned his journey into a real tour de force, as he spent four months afloat on a small barrel-shaped capsule.

Jean-Jacques Savin's adventure was followed by more than 23,000 people as he posted updates on his Facebook page. On Saturday, around four months after casting off from the Canary Islands west of Africa on December 26, he finally announced that his mission is over.

"After 122 days and nine hours the meridian positions me in the Caribbean Sea. The crossing is over. Thank you all," the traveler wrote in an email cited by local media.

Savin said that he is currently drifting to Florida, US and is looking for a vessel that would take him to the nearest post.

Arrow Down

Hundreds die of exhaustion after counting millions of Indonesian election ballots

Counting ballots
© Antara Foto / Didik Suhartono / Handout via REUTERS
Counting millions of ballot papers by hand proved to be a life-threatening job for hundreds of election staff in Indonesia, as over 270 died and nearly 2,000 fell ill after working long hours, an official has said.

As many as 272 staff have died just 10 days after Indonesia held presidential and regional elections, mostly of fatigue-related illnesses, Arief Priyo Susanto, spokesman for the General Elections Commission (KPU), said on Sunday. Some 1,878 others had fallen ill after working long hours to count millions of ballots manually.

Eye 1

5 people found killed in 2 homes in Tennessee; suspect captured

Michael Cummins
Police in Sumner County, Tennessee, have taken a suspect into custody after five people were found killed in two separate homes on Saturday night.

Officials with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) reported to a home on Charles Brown Road where four people were found dead while a fifth victim was found in another residence on Luvy Daniels Road.

The victims have not been identified. A fifth person at the initial scene was injured and transported to the hospital.

Police said hours after a manhunt was launched that 25-year-old Michael Cummins had been taken into custody. He has yet to be charged with a crime, authorities said.

Attention

Pope Francis donates $500K to Mexican charities assisting migrants

Central American migrants US-Mexico border Ixtepec Mexico, April 2019
PHOTO:Central American migrants wait on the top of a parked train during their journey toward the US-Mexico border in Ixtepec, Oaxaca state, Mexico, April 23, 2019.
Pope Francis donated $500,000 to Mexico-based projects to help migrant communities as media attention has faded, the Vatican said Saturday.

The funds will be distributed between 27 projects associated with 16 Mexican dioceses and congregations, all of which asked for help to continue providing food, lodging, and basic necessities to those fleeing their home countries through Mexico.

"In recent months, thousands of migrants have arrived in Mexico, having travelled more than 4,000 kilometers on foot and with makeshift vehicles from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Men and women, often with young children, flee poverty and violence, hoping for a better future in the United States. However, the U.S. border remains closed to them," said a press release from Peter's Pence, the organization handling the funds.

Comment: The Vatican decries the dearth of media coverage of the border emergency. News agencies are reporting on the migrants, but perhaps The Vatican isn't happy that a more realistic assessment of the situation is now being presented:


Quenelle - Golden

Best of the Web: Yellow Vests reject Macron's 'rubbish' tax cuts, protest across France for 24th straight week

yellow vests Strasbourg April 27 2019
© AFP / Patrick HertzogProtesters take part in an anti-government demonstration called by the "Yellow Vest" (gilets jaunes) movement in Strasbourg, eastern France, on April 27, 2019.
Unrelenting Yellow Vest activists have marched in Paris and other French cities for the 24th straight weekend, just days after Emmanuel Macron tried to placate the protest movement with promises of lower taxes.

The demonstrators who assembled in Paris, Toulouse and Strasbourg on Saturday appear to signal that despite the French president's recent concessions to the group, the Yellow Vest movement is alive and well.



Oh Thursday, Macron held the first major press conference of his two-year presidency, in which he announced that he wanted to implement "significant" income tax cuts.


Comment: Just think about that; it's the first time in TWO YEARS he has deigned to have a press conference.


Comment: Interesting sidenote about this week's protest in Paris; the police, while still numbering in the thousands, did not violently suppress it (though they did in Strasbourg).

This is likely because the trade unions and Melenchon and his liberal-lefty friends decided to join the Yellow Vest Paris protest this week...

See also: Macron offers Yellow Vests €5bn in tax cuts, asks French to 'work more' in return