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Wed, 27 Oct 2021
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Pistol

Thank God for guns: Witness prevents the kidnapping of an 11 y.o. girl

attempted kidnapping
Police need your help finding a man who they say tried to kidnap an 11-year-old girl while she was walking to school.

According to Sgt. Tommy Thompson with Phoenix police, the suspect approached the girl from behind, grabbed her arm and pulled it behind her back and put his arm over her face while she was walking to school near 19th Avenue and Bell Road on April 3.

When the suspect started talking to the girl, a witness knocked him down and told him to leave the girl alone.

The witness then pointed a handgun at the suspect and told him to leave.

The suspect ran westbound on Morningside Drive.

People

University prof promotes men's cuddle groups to help 'redefine masculinity'

cuddling men
A Pennsylvania university is promoting the concept of men cuddling as a way to help them deal with stress and "redefine masculinity."

Dr. Christopher Liang, a counseling psychology professor at Lehigh University's College of Education, recently came out in support of a Philadelphia area "Men's Therapeutic Cuddle Group," a function advertised by Lehigh University in a news release. The Meetup.com page for the group currently has 69 members and the group has held 46 events so far. The meetups are held once every other week.

Organizers have established quite an expansive set of guidelines for attendees. The men attending must be "hygienically sound" and "remain fully clothed at all times." The group's organizers state that all cuddling is "non-sexual." However, they do note that participants may become aroused during cuddling and that if that occurs, it should be treated as a normal thing.

Liang believes that "these types of groups can be healthy and helpful for men and women," according to the news release.

Comment: Strange that contemporary masculinity (as the left defines it) is starting to look more and more like homoeroticism.


Bullseye

Illinois attorney general sues Oxycontin maker for 'deceptive marketing practices'

Kwame Raoul
© Seth Perlman/AP, FILE
Kwame Raoul speaks during a news conference at the Capitol, in Springfield, Ill., Aug. 12, 2015.
He says Purdue Pharma's actions tripled its opioid prescriptions in the state.

Illinois has become the most recent state to sue the company that makes Oxycontin, an opioid prescription drug, joining a growing number of states and municipalities pursuing legal means to grapple with the opioid epidemic.

Attorney General Kwame Raoul filed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma on Monday, citing "its deceptive marketing practices designed to significantly increase prescriptions issued for opioids," his office announced in a press release.

"Purdue carried out an aggressive and misleading marketing effort to increase prescriptions of opioid painkillers even as communities throughout Illinois and across the country faced an opioid addiction epidemic," the statement read.

Comment: See also: Maker of OxyContin pays Oklahoma mere $270 million settlement for role in "worst public health crisis" the US has ever seen


Attention

Devonshire, UK: Shipyard evacuated after bomb scare

BAE Shipyard

Large scale emergency incident at Barrow's BAE Shipyard.
Staff at Barrow's shipyard have been evacuated after reports of a bomb on a submarine.

An employee said staff in the Devonshire Dock Hall complex had been told this morning there had been an anonymous tip of a bomb on one of the Astute class vessels at BAE.

It is thought around 1,700 employees were evacuated.

A BAE Systems spokesman: "We can confirm there is an ongoing incident at our Barrow site and we are liaising with Cumbria Police who are carrying out an investigation.

Cross

'Ideological delirium': Italian cemetery covers crosses so as not to offend people of other religions

crucifix
© Pixabay
The crosses on graves in an Italian cemetery in Pieve di Cento have been covered with black cloth so as not to offend those who may come from another religion.

The cemetery, which is located in Bologna in a town of around 7,000 people, has also installed motorised blackout curtains in a local chapel following renovations to hide Roman Catholic symbols during ceremonies involving other denominations, Il Giornale reports.

Following the reports of the coverings of the symbols, many have expressed criticism including Forza Italia (Forward Italy) deputy Galeazzo Bignami who denounced the move saying those looking not to offend were disrespecting Christian values and he added, "even more so the memory of our dead, hiding them behind 'motorised tents' in a cemetery to avoid offending other religions."

"If the administrators are ashamed of our tradition and our culture, they should go and hide themselves and not just behind a motorised tent. If they are not able to bring respect for the living at least they have the decency to leave the dead alone and not involve them in foolishness," he added.

Radar

Japanese fighter jet 'disappears from radar' over Pacific: Rescue operation underway - UPDATE


Comment: Japan's military has confirmed finding debris from the F-35A fighter jet that disappeared. This is the second F-35 crash in the fighter's short history, and the first one outside the US. This plane was less than a year old and was delivered to the JASDF last year...

Boeing is screwed in the civilian sector. Is Lockheed to follow suit in the military sector?


f-35 fighter jet f35
© Reuters/File
F-35 fighter jet
A Japanese stealth fighter jet has disappeared from radar over the Pacific Ocean during a training mission, according to local reports. Radio contact has also reportedly been lost with the plane.

The F35A stealth fighter disappeared at approximately 7.30pm local time Tuesday, reports the Asahi Shimbun. The jet took off with several other aircraft from the Misawa Air Base, roughly 135km northeast of Misawa City, for a regular night-time training exercise about half an hour before the disappearance.

The aircraft is believed to have one pilot on board. A search and rescue operation is already underway, and the Japanese Coast Guard has deployed two patrol ships to look for the aircraft and pilot.

Comment: Another F-35 casualty? Let us hope the pilot is rescued uninjured. How will the US sell such a costly lemon?


Bizarro Earth

UK Council forced to remove 1km of netting set up to prevent birds nesting in cliffs

Netting bird
© NorfolkBea/Twitter
Netting was placed over the cliffs to prevent erosion.
A local council will partially remove netting on cliffs set up with the intention of preventing migrating sand martins from nesting.

North Norfolk District Council placed the material over more than one kilometre of cliffs at Bacton, around 20 miles north of Great Yarmouth earlier this week.

The authority's intention was to prevent the birds from setting up homes in the sandy banks, in a bid to safeguard homes and a nearby gas terminal from coastal erosion. It says it took advice from Natural England and the RSPB before embarking on the project.

But the netting has caused outrage among conservationists, with video appearing online of birds becoming entangled in the nets.

Comment: The council will need a lot more than nets to prevent coastal erosion, because this problem is global and it's increasing at a serious pace, and so, in reality, it's highly unlikely there is anything they can do to stop it:


Pistol

Suicide rate among French police continues rising steeply - Deteriorating working conditions blamed

French police
© Reuters / Benoit Tessier
French police during a ceremony in Paris, December 20, 2018
Police unions in France have reacted with "great anger" to the news of two more suspected service suicides over the weekend in the country.

"It's a massacre," the UNSA-Police union's Thomas Toussaint told French media. He noted that it took until August last year for the number of suspected or proved officer suicides, currently 25, to reach 2019's level.

A female officer who worked for a suburban Paris station was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to Le Parisien. Local media in the town of Ales also reported the discovery of the body of a male officer who had disappeared one week previously.

A senate report released last summer looked at the problems facing law enforcement personnel, including grueling schedules, exhaustion, and heightened tensions caused by recent civil unrest, as well as terrorist incidents, and labelled the issue a "true crisis."

Comment: One wonders whether the police can see the contradiction in violently repressing the Yellow Vest protests on behalf of the corrupt government, which is also to blame for the deterioration in living conditions and this alarming rise in suicides: Also check out SOTT radio's: NewsReal #26: Globalization vs Nationalism - The Hidden Causes of The Yellow Vest Protests in France


Red Flag

Who is paying for Monsanto's crimes?

RounUp
© Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
And while Bayer may dole out a few billion dollars in damages, who is really being made to pay?’
The chickens are coming home to roost, as they say in farm country.

For the second time in less than eight months a US jury has found that decades of scientific evidence demonstrates a clear cancer connection to Monsanto's line of top-selling Roundup herbicides, which are used widely by consumers and farmers. Twice now jurors have additionally determined that the company's own internal records show Monsanto has intentionally manipulated the public record to hide the cancer risks. Both juries found punitive damages were warranted because the company's cover-up of cancer risks was so egregious.

The juries saw evidence that Monsanto has ghost-written scientific papers, tried to silence scientists, scuttled independent government testing and cozied up to regulators for favorable safety reviews of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.

Comment: Regulators Knew World's Best-Selling Herbicide Caused Problems, New Report Finds
Although the EPA has said it wants to evaluate more evidence of glyphosate's human health risk as part of a registration review program, the agency is not doing any studies of its own and is instead relying on outside data - much of which comes from the agricultural chemicals industry it seeks to regulate...

The EPA is hardly the only industry regulator that relies heavily on data supplied by the agrochemical industry itself.

"The regulation of pesticides has been significantly skewed towards the manufacturers interests where state-of-the-art testing is not done and adverse findings are typically distorted or denied," said Jeffrey Smith, of the Institute for Responsible Technology.
"The regulators tend to use the company data rather than independent sources, and the company data we have found to be inappropriately rigged to force the conclusion of safety."
"We have documented time and time again scientists who have been fired, stripped of responsibilities, denied funding, threatened, gagged and transferred as a result of the pressure put on them by the biotech industry," he added.



Propaganda

Venezuela sabotage and evil Russians: Several video games are now blatant US war propaganda

war video games
© Reuters / Mike Blake
It's long been known that Hollywood works hand-in-glove with the CIA to produce entertainment imbued with unsubtle pro-US messaging - but the use of video games as propaganda, while as common, is less talked about.

A producer for Venezuela-based news outlet Telesur tweeted a video on Monday showing clips from the 2013 game 'Call of Duty: Ghosts' which appear to foreshadow massive electricity blackouts which left Venezuela's capital city Caracas in almost total darkness in March.