Society's Child
'The resurgence of state-based threats, intensifying wider state competition and the erosion of the rules-based international order, making it harder to build consensus and tackle global threats', the report says. 'The erosion of the rules-based international order'? Excuse me? Didn't that happen when the UK and its NATO allies bombed Yugoslavia- without UNSC approval in 1999- and when the UK and its allies illegally invaded Iraq - again without UNSC approval- in 2003?
According to the report, those events just didn't happen. Instead 'Russian State Aggression' is the thing we should all be worried about. The long litany of alleged Russian crimes include 'supporting the Assad regime' and the 'illegal annexation of Crimea'. Never mind that the so-called 'Assad regime' requested Russian assistance in fighting ISIS [Daesh]*/al-Qaeda* linked jihadists whose co-ideologists have brought terror to the streets of Britain.

Driving towards Wafedin camp in Eastern Ghouta that has been receiving civilian evacuees from Eastern Ghouta.
The UN held a press briefing yesterday in Damascus. We arrived late but in time to hear UN figures of 75,000 civilians who have escaped Eastern Ghouta for the safety of the Syrian government centres set up to receive these traumatised civilians as they flee the terrorist occupation of their towns and villages via the Syrian/Russian established and negotiated humanitarian corridors.
According to a UN official, 25,000 of those civilians have been reunited with their families by the Syrian government, the remaining 50,000 are in the IDP centres and are being taken care of by Syrian civil society organisations.
These UN figures are lower than the Syrian Government and Russian negotiator numbers but it is not unusual for the UN to be out of alignment in this respect. Syrian Arab News Agency recently reported numbers closer to 135,000. However these UN figures still expose western media reporting of much lower numbers as deeply flawed at best, deliberately misleading at worst.
Just six out of every 1,000 individual taxpayers faced an audit last year, the government said in the latest IRS Data Book released last week, marking the lowest rate since 2002.
Analysts said that is unlikely to change this year, as the April 17 deadline for this year's filing season nears and as the IRS grapples with endemic budget cuts and the strain of having to administer the new tax law.
Some taxpayer advocates cheered the news, saying it's time the IRS was brought to heel after years of excesses, including targeting tea party groups for illegal scrutiny and making tax-filing season tougher than it had to be as a protest against budget cuts.
The notice, initiated by the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC) - the advocacy arm of the Reform Movement in Israel - hoped to inform passengers at Ben-Gurion Airport of their rights during the Passover travel season.
Comment: What is a social justice warrior to do? You don't want to support patriarchal oppression, but you don't want to be antisemitic either! So it's better to ignore that contradictory issues such as these - and much worse - exist in Israel.

Central American migrants board a bus before they continue their journey to the US
Over the past two days, Trump has been bombarding his Twitter followers with messages urging Congress to use the 'nuclear option' if necessary, in order to pass a law that would curb the flight of illegal immigration to the United States. The messages blaming Latin American countries for taking advantage of US immigration laws intensified on Monday.

In this Feb. 5, 2016 file photo provided by the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department, Ethan Couch, 18, appears in a booking photo, in Fort Worth, Texas
Tarrant County sheriff's spokesman David McClelland says Ethan Couch was released Monday from the county jail near Dallas after serving nearly two years for a revoked probation.
Couch was 16 in June 2013 when he struck and killed four pedestrians. A psychologist at his manslaughter trial blamed his irresponsibility on family wealth, dubbing it "affluenza." A juvenile court sentenced him to 10 years of probation.

The US just passed a $1.3 trillion budget with $700bn for the military and the projected deficit of $800bn
US Congress passed a $1.3 trillion budget for the fiscal 2018 last week that allocates $700 billion to Pentagon. For fiscal 2019 the military has been promised $716 billion.
According to an event description, students in a 90-minute training session will learn about ways American Christians receive things they don't deserve and are not worthy of getting: "How do we...acknowledge that Christians receive unmerited perks from institutions and systems all across our country?"
The Multicultural Student Services Center (MSSC) at GWU is hosting "Christian Privilege: But Our Founding Fathers Were All Christian, Right?!" Thursday as part of its "Excellence in Leadership Seminar," as first reported by The Christian Post.
According to the website, MSSC Associate Director and LGBTQ Resources Director Timothy Kane will discuss how American Christians have "easier" lives and get "built-in advantages over non-Christians" as well as making "room for all religious and secular identities on an equal playing field."
But the Christian privilege seminar doesn't just focus on one religion, it also singles out a race: white people.
Students will learn about "white privilege specifically" and the "role of denial when it comes to white privilege," the event description says, adding they will be able to list examples of Christian privilege and learn three ways to be an ally with non-Christians.
Other seminars offered by GWU's MSSC include: heterosexual privilege, cisgender privilege, abled-body privilege, socio-economic privilege, LGBTQIA diversity and inclusion, unconscious bias, and transgender diversity and inclusion.
Each of the privilege seminars states that they focus more specifically on white privilege.
The gender binary refers to the traditional classification of human gender into two distinct categories, masculine and feminine. Some professors at Temple University are looking to erase this "outdated" classification altogether.
Heath Fogg Davis, a professor of political science at Temple, argues in his new book that he wants to live in a world in which everyone uses a "gender-neutral pronoun."
"My argument in the book is not that we try to live beyond gender, but [to minimize] the formal use of gender and gender policies because of the ways it infringes on people's individual autonomy," Davis said. "In an ideal world, I wish that we all used a gender-neutral pronoun."
Comment: Watch Dr. Debra Soh break down the scientific realities behind gender:

Ted Hernandez, Chairman of the Wiyot Tribe, supports removing the McKinley statue.
No other city has taken down a monument to a president for his misdeeds. But Arcata is poised to do just that. The target is an 8½-foot bronze likeness of William McKinley, who was president at the turn of the last century and stands accused of directing the slaughter of Native peoples in the U.S. and abroad.
"Put a rope around its neck and pull it down," Chris Peters shouted at a recent rally held at the statue, which has adorned the central square for more than a century. Peters, who heads the Arcata-based Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous People, called McKinley a proponent of "settler colonialism" that "savaged, raped and killed."
A presidential statue would be the most significant casualty in an emerging movement to remove monuments honoring people who helped lead what Native groups describe as a centuries-long war against their very existence.











Comment: See also: Russia: Lavrov warns against sponsoring terrorists to achieve short-term goals, like overthrowing countries