Society's ChildS


Light Saber

Palestinians to challenge Israel's illegal settlement project by suing Airbnb in US court

Mairav Zonszein
The Nation
Mon, 18 Mar 2019 15:04 UTC
airbnb Israel settlements
Israeli settlement in the West Bank looms over two Palestinian villages; Airbnb; Gilad Erdan.
The challenge comes in response to a case filed by Israeli settlers against Airbnb.

Randa Wahbe is a United States citizen with West Bank residency who is studying for a PhD in anthropology at Harvard University. Over the years, the 31-year-old Palestinian-American has used Airbnb, the online vacation rental platform, to travel in Miami, Denver, Istanbul, and Tunisia. Despite the site's promise of "healthy travel that is local, authentic, diverse, inclusive and sustainable," however, Wahbe says she cannot utilize its services in large swaths of her family's own back yard: the West Bank occupied by Israeli settlers.

That's because Palestinian residents of the West Bank, even those with an American passport, are barred from living in or even visiting Israeli settlements unless they acquire a permit from Israeli authorities. Under Israel's system of military control and segregation, Wahbe does not have the ability to "live like a local" in parts of the very region she is from, or in the city of Jerusalem, where her father's family is from.
Read More...
Yoda

Twitter restricting account of Julian Assange's mother, Christine Assange: Unable to post - UPDATE

Joe Lauria
Consortium News
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 14:04 UTC
Christine Assange
© European Press AgencyChristine Assange
The social media giant has given no reason to Christine Assange who had turned to Twitter to campaign for the liberty of her son.

The Twitter account of Christine Assange, the mother of the arbitrarily detained founder of WikiLeaks, has been restricted, she told Consortium News on Tuesday.

"My Twitter account has been 'blocked due to 'unusual activity,'" Ms. Assange wrote in a text message. Twitter, however, has provided her no reason for its action.

Ms. Assange is a prolific user of Twitter in her campaign to free her son who has been a refugee in the Ecuador embassy in London since 2012.

Comment:

UPDATE 21/03/19: Mrs. Assange's access has been restored
The Twitter account of Julian Assange's mother was restored on Wednesday night after her supporters sent a flood of messages to Twitter.

Christine Assange, the mother of WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange, had her Twitter account restored more than 24 hours after it was abruptly restricted by the social media company.
twitter assange mother
Hundreds of tweets were sent to the San Francisco-based company by supporters demanding that she regain access to her account.

Ms. Assange tweeted at 10:33 p.m. U.S. Eastern time on Wednesday: "Back on deck! Many thanks to everyone contacting @Twitter on my behalf. Thanks to @Twitter for responding with a reconnect."

Ms. Assange told Consortium News she has had no contact with Twitter and still does not know why her account was restricted and why it was restored. She was unable to post new Tweets or read anyone else's while the restriction was in place.

Outrage at the restriction was expressed by many Assange supporters in tweets to Twitter and its CEO, Jack Dorsey.
twitter assange mother restored
twitter assange mother restored
Another supporter wrote: "The only unusual activity is not seeing a mother fight for her child. It's unnatural and cowardly to think that her tweets are unusual."
twitter assange mother restored


Read More...
Attention

Video shows Iran Air plane belly land then catch fire at Tehran airport, all passengers escape safely


RT
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 18:32 UTC
iran air
© Twitter / @IranAir_IRIFILE PHOTO
An Iran Air medium-sized Fokker jet has caught fire after crash-landing at Tehran's Mehrabad airport on Tuesday, but emergency services managed to put out the flames and evacuate all passengers without any injuries.

The aircraft was forced to land on its belly after its landing gear did not properly deploy, authorities said after the incident, praising the skills of the pilot who managed to land the plane in one piece.

A video presumed to be of the incident posted online showed the plane shooting sparks and flames at the moment of landing.

"Thanks to the pilot's skill, it landed," Pir Hossein Kolivand, Head of Iran's Emergency Medical Services told reporters, noting that all 33 passengers managed to escape the crash-landed plane safely.

Comment: There seems to be an ongoing spate of aircraft disasters and troubles these days, from passenger jets, small aircraft, and even helicopters. While some can be explained either by criminal negligence or freak weather events many remain unsolved:

Read More...
Health

Better keep an eye on your health... apps. They share your data almost everywhere

Samantha Cole
Motherboard
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 23:30 UTC
health app
I probably give health apps way too much of my personal data. Fitness trackers know what running routes I take, pharmacy apps know what ails me, diagnosis apps know how I'm feeling, and period trackers know what birth control methods I use.

And because these apps often leak user data to third parties and beyond, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, know these things, too. Health apps can't keep a secret.

A new study out of the University of Toronto, published in The BMJ on Wednesday, highlights privacy issues around health apps by examining how medicine management apps share personal user data. The researchers found that most of the apps they tested shared sensitive information like medical history and demographics with third parties.

The researchers examined 24 of the top-rated Android apps for health medicine management in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, including Ada, Lexicomp, Medscape, and Medicinewise. They found that 19 out of the 24 tested apps shared user data outside of the app, frequently to third-parties like Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Google, and AT&T. An app called "Pill Identifier and Drug List" shares data with the Department of Health and Human Services.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Pistol

Paul Joseph Watson on the New Zealand mosque attack

Paul Joseph Watson
Youtube
Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:01 UTC
Paul Joseph Watson
Paul Joseph Watson is on point in this video, calling out the regressive left for its shameless twisting of the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque attack for their own political ends. The hypocrisy is stunning .

Please donate to the victims' families here: https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/chris...

Twitter: https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PaulJosephWatson
Minds: https://www.minds.com/PaulJosephWatson

Comment: More from PJW:

Read More...
Pistol

Ethnicity, politics, land, religion and deadly clashes in Jos, Nigeria

Kingsley L. Madueke
Sciences Po
Mon, 30 Apr 2018 00:01 UTC
Nigeria map
Over the last two decades, Nigeria has experienced at least 2,500 violent events in the form of riots, protests, terrorist attacks, and other expressions of collective brutality. In addition to the insurgency led by the Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad [People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet's Teachings and Jihad], also known as Boko Haram, in the north east, the country's ethnically diverse landscape is marked by frequent indigene-settler conflicts and farmer-herder clashes in the central belt, separatist agitations in the south east and militancy in the Niger Delta. Over 40, 000 people have been killed.1 While most parts of the country have witnessed one form of violence or the other, incidents of large-scale violence are disproportionately concentrated in the central region also known as the "Middle Belt".

The media often describe these conflicts as "religious crises" and reconciliatory measures have focused on engaging Christian and Muslim leaders to broker peace. This article argues that labelling these clashes "religious" is a gross oversimplification and has motivated an intervention approach that focuses on interreligious reconciliation without paying attention to the underlying issues.

As episodes of riots in the city of Jos suggest, collective violence in the region is a culmination of several factors. In the towns and cities, violent riots stem from contestations between indigenes and settlers over rights, distributable resources and political power whereas struggles between farmers and pastoralists over land are at the heart of mass killings in the rural areas. Measures aimed at promoting peace have not yielded concrete results because they have sidestepped these factors. In addition to building links across religious divides, an effective peacebuilding strategy should address the long-running contestations over indigeneity, resource-based competition, power tussles and struggles related to land ownership and use.

Comment: After the Christchurch shooting, much of the rhetoric from the right has brought up the attacks on Christians that have been happening around the world that are not reported in the mainstream media. The situation in Nigeria is held as a particularly egregious example. While the lack of media coverage is a legitimate gripe, as we can see from the above article, the situation in Nigeria is much more complex and nuanced than the call of "they're killing Christians!" allows for. It's not a religious war, despite the fact that the lines of division between factions can be simplistically reduced to religious designations.

Read More...
Dollars

College Admission Scandal: Why Elites dislike standardized testing

Daniel Friedman
Quillette
Sun, 17 Mar 2019 21:39 UTC
Zoe Kazan
Zoe Kazan
On Tuesday, March 12 2019, federal prosecutors exposed a crooked college admissions consulting operation that bribed SAT administrators and college athletic coaches in order to get wealthy, under-qualified applicants into elite universities. Also charged were 33 wealthy parents who had paid for admissions bribes, including actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, Gordon Caplan, a co-chair of the international law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and Douglas Hodge, the former chief executive of Pimco.

As this story unfolds, there will be numerous takes and analyses about what the exposure of such widespread corruption in college admissions could mean. People are going to say that this scandal is proof that the meritocracy is broken and corrupt. And it's likely that many commentators will use this event as an opportunity to attack the SAT and the ACT. Progressives view test-based admissions as inequitable because some marginalized groups are significantly underrepresented among the pool of top-scoring college applicants. But millionaires and elites also hate standardized admissions tests, because their children's admission to top colleges is contingent upon test scores.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Brick Wall

'Inclusiveness' preaching Cambridge University rescinds Jordan Peterson invitation


The Guardian
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 22:17 UTC
Offer of visiting fellowship to controversial professor resulted in backlash from faculty and students
Jordan Peterson
© Mikko Stig/Rex/Shutterstock
Cambridge University has rescinded its offer of a visiting fellowship to Jordan Peterson, the self-styled "professor against political correctness", after a backlash from faculty and students.

Peterson, a psychology professor from Toronto who has courted controversy for his views on transgender rights, gender and race, announced on Monday via his YouTube channel that he was joining Cambridge for two months.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
NPC

Ignoramuses: Progressive professors suggest blacklisting Quillette writers

Terry Newman
The Post Millenial
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 00:00 UTC
witch hunt
Using social pressure to stigmatize is a hallmark of witch hunts throughout history, and this tactic hides in plain sight on social media
Dr. Katja Thieme, a professor of English at the University of British Columbia, took to Twitter recently to enact her own unique brand of McCarthyism. "YES. If you are an academic and you publish in Quillette, we see you. We fucking see you. And we are looking right at you."

This was in response to the following tweet by a Denison University History professor who stated, "And any member of our field who publishes with Quillette should lose all credibility."
Read More...
Heart - Black

Afghan refugee accused of repeatedly raping 11yo in Germany could avoid trial as he was underage


RT
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 18:38 UTC
german police
© Global Look Press / Karl-Josef Hildenbrand
An Afghan asylum seeker, who has been accused of repeatedly raping an 11-year-old girl in Germany, could be set free as his lawyer maintains the refugee was younger than 14 at the time of the incident and cannot be tried.

The Afghan teenager, identified only as Mansoor Q, is suspected of raping the German girl on several occasions in April and May 2018, together with other asylum seekers. According to the prosecution, Mansoor and an Iraqi, identified as Ali Bashar, who is also on trial over a separate rape and murder case, first assaulted the victim near a supermarket in Erbenheim, a borough of the west German city Wiesbaden.

It is alleged Mansoor Q. once again attacked and raped the same girl together with Bashar's underage brother in a wooded area in Wiesbaden soon after the first attack. According to the prosecution, the victim was also previously raped by Bashar, 22, in late April 2018, when he locked her in his room in an asylum shelter.

However the Afghan may avoid trial as his lawyer told the court he has evidence his client was under 14 - the age of criminal responsibility in Germany - at the time of the alleged attacks.
Read More...