Society's Child
Hailing from Syria's port city of Latakia, the young boy has become something of a mini-celebrity for his seemingly strange ability to stick metal objects to his stomach. His grandparents are hoping his apparent condition can be studied abroad to get to the bottom of his mysterious "magnetism."
"We were concerned about this phenomenon. Speaking frankly, I don't want it to affect him," said Zulfikar Ibrahim's grandfather. "Since Russia is specialized in this subject, we want this phenomenon - or this biological energy - to be cultivated and studied in Russia."
In 2014, Russian schoolboy Nikolai Kryaglyachenko made headlines when he claimed an electrical accident left him with powers of human magnetism. Hence, the belief that Russian specialists may have some insight into Ibrahim's new found skills.

Christopher's mother is charged with injury to a child for allegedly faking his illness, resulting in 13 major surgeries.
Kaylene Bowen-Wright is charged with injury to a child and was jailed on $150,000 bond, reported CBS DFW. The child and his two siblings were removed from the home by child welfare officials last month.
An investigation by Child Protective Services (CPS) found Bowen-Wright took her son, Christopher, to hospitals in Dallas and Houston with a variety of complaints, resulting in 323 medical appointments and 13 "major" surgeries, CBS DFW reports. He's been on a feeding tube, confined to a wheelchair, developed a blood infection that landed him in the ICU, and has spent time in hospice care, Dr. Suzanne Dakil wrote in an affidavit provided to the CPS investigator.
The agency's report indicated it was likely a case of Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, where a caregiver fakes or creates a child's symptoms to receive attention, sympathy or other benefits. A CPS investigation also found Bowen-Wright cut her son's hair and posted a picture of him in a Make-A-Wish shirt claiming he had cancer in an effort to raise money.
Three-year-old Sofia Zaynukova from the southern Russian republic of Dagestan had been discovered in an Iraqi prison where wives and widows of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) fighters are held. The girl, whose parents traveled to the region to join the terrorist group years before, was looked after by a woman, who picked her up after a deadly airstrike in Mosul. The woman said the girl's mother was buried under the rubble.
Zaynukova's father left Dagestan in 2015, having deceived his own parents by saying he was traveling to a nearby city to get medical treatment accompanied by the girl and her mother. He ended up as an IS fighter in Iraq, just as his brother did. That man's daughters, Sofia's cousins, Khadija, 5, and Fatima, 3 were reunited with their grandparents earlier this year.
"I lost my two sons, but I was given my granddaughters back," their grandfather says. Daughters of his elder son were brought back home from a Baghdad orphanage after having been spotted in an RT video about children whose parents were killed fighting for IS. The family then started looking for the third missing child, Sofia. See video here.
Comment:
- Traumatized & unwilling to speak: RT searches for relatives of 2 new children in Baghdad orphanage
- Courtesy of US Empire: Charities tell RT 90% of Iraqi children have lost a relative while orphans suffer from trauma
- 7yo girl helps track down two missing sisters in Iraqi orphanage shown in RT coverage
- Bombing trauma torments children brought home to Russia from Iraq
Mohammad Ismail told Buffalo News that he knew the decrepit house was going to need a lot of work when he purchased it for $14,000-as it had not been lived in for years-but he had big plans to renovate it into a home for his wife and four children.
Ismail said that after his purchase of the home was finalized, and he obtained a building permit, he was working on the house on April 18 when he was approached by two Buffalo police officers. Officers Christopher Fields and Debra A. Strobele were both in uniform when they arrived in a patrol car.
Fields claimed he was the owner of the house, and he threatened that he would arrest Ismail and take him to jail if he did not leave. Ismail complied and said he left the house and went to City Hall to confirm that he owned the home.
The report from Buffalo News confirmed that Ismail is the owner, and noted that records from the city's Division of Housing and Inspection show that there were "numerous code violations at the property stretching back to 2013, the year Fields took ownership of the house."
The No. 2 story was Donald Trump's tumultuous first year as president. A year ago, Trump's unexpected victory over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election was a near-unanimous pick for the top news story of 2016.
The first AP top-stories poll was conducted in 1936, when editors chose the abdication of Britain's King Edward VIII as the top story.
Tablet Magazine reports:
A Tablet investigation using public sources to trace the evolution of the now-famous dossier suggests that central elements of the Russiagate scandal emerged not from the British ex-spy Christopher Steele's top-secret "sources" in the Russian government-which are unlikely to exist separate from Russian government control-but from a series of stories that Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and his wife Mary Jacoby co-wrote for The Wall Street Journal well before Fusion GPS existed, and Donald Trump was simply another loud-mouthed Manhattan real estate millionaire. Understanding the origins of the "Steele dossier" is especially important because of what it tells us about the nature and the workings of what its supporters would hopefully describe as an ongoing campaign to remove the elected president of the United States. [...]
In a Facebook post from June 24, 2017, that Tablet has seen in screenshots, Jacoby claimed that her husband deserves the lion's share of credit for Russiagate. (She has not replied to repeated requests for comment.) "It's come to my attention that some people still don't realize what Glenn's role was in exposing Putin's control of Donald Trump," Jacoby wrote. "Let's be clear. Glenn conducted the investigation. Glenn hired Chris Steele. Chris Steele worked for Glenn." This assertion is hardly a simple assertion of family pride; it goes directly to the nature of what became known as the "Steele dossier," on which the Russiagate narrative is founded.
"We now know that the official Churches, whether Evangelical [Protestant] or Catholic, are politicized through and through," Alice Weidel, Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) parliamentary group leader, told Focus magazine on Thursday.
"The separation of Church and State is no longer observed." Apart from a "few exceptions," the Church now has "the same inglorious role [it] played in the Third Reich," she said.
Weidel's harsh words came in response to comments by the Protestant Bishop Markus Droge, who questioned whether one "could credibly engage as a Christian in the AfD."

A bullet hole in a victim's vehicle window is shown in this photo in Fresno County, California, U.S., provided December 21, 2017.
Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims has warned the shooting attacks, which have occurred in her jurisdiction and neighboring Madera County, could turn deadly.
"If this keeps going, it's going to be a matter of time before we have a murder investigation," Mims said at a news conference. "That's what we're trying to avoid."
Witnesses described the suspect's vehicle as a dark colored pick-up truck with oversized tires, Mims said. The motive for the shootings is unknown, the Fresno County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

At $450 million, Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi is the most expensive painting sold at auction.
It turns out there is another-even two-out there. And at least one dealer thinks they could be worth as much as $200 million each.
Both are smaller-scale, devotional paintings depicting the same image: the Virgin Mary with the Christ child in her lap. The baby is holding a cross-shaped stick used to wind yarn, which has inspired the shared name, The Madonna of the Yarnwinder.
"They are both in private hands," said Martin Kemp, a da Vinci scholar and emeritus research professor of art history at Oxford University in the U.K. "I know both owners." (Christie's says they do not comment on works that are not consigned and stand behind their presentation of Salvator Mundi.)
Announcing the arrests at a news conference, Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson initially criticized Facebook as being unhelpful during a 10-month investigation by his department.
"Quite frankly, they haven't been very friendly to law enforcement to prevent these things," he told reporters.
However, police later said the department and the California-based company agreed to work collaboratively "to target any illegal activity on the platform."












Comment: Criminal behavior can take many forms but the following seems to underlie most: "...we can assume that the motives are to gain attention to have drama in one's life, excitement" - at the expense of others.