Society's Child
An average Ukrainian earns slightly more than $200 a month, according to the finance ministry's website. The research concluded an average Ukrainian could buy only 185.1 liters, or refill a tank three times each month. That's only half of what Bulgarians can afford; the country ranked second worst-performer in the rating.
Ukraine had the biggest surge in petroleum prices last year at 21.5 percent, which outpaced the country's inflation of 12.4 percent.
While gasoline prices are the highest in the Netherlands, its citizens can still buy 1,837 liters of premium gas a month. Countries with the cheapest petrol, income adjusted, are Luxembourg, Norway, and the UK.
Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Russia have the cheapest gasoline in Europe, but lower salaries compared to Western countries make it less affordable. While a Russian can buy 814 liters of petroleum a month, this is a better result than the EU's Portugal, Poland or the Baltic States, but smaller compared to the bloc's northern and western countries.
The research concludes Eastern and Southern Europe has the least affordable gasoline on the Continent.

Understated in size by the media, Antifa claims it is fighting fascism...by beating people and committing arson.
Comment: Characterizing Yiannopoulos as a "provocateur" is harsh. As he describes himself, he is an entertainer, first and foremost. He certainly provokes people to think, but there's no reason to suggest he's being nefarious by doing so.
Following the unrest, Yiannopoulos ascribed the violence to the general "Left" and President Donald Trump even called for taking away funds from the prestigious university. However, according to reports, the protests were peaceful until a group of several dozen black-face-mask-clad activists showed up. Soon, videos showed them shooting fireworks at the building and smashing windows.
Such a physically confrontational approach characterizes "Antifa" and separates it from the organic protests that have sprung up in the wake of Trump's inauguration as president. "We won't put up with the violent rhetoric of Milo, Trump or the fascistic alt-right," one Berkeley student who said he identified with the "Antifa" movement told The Guardian. "We are willing to resist by any means necessary."
Comment: If you pay enough, you can recruit almost anyone for anything. If you give them a purpose and ideology, they will take up the cause for free.
Additional information on Antifa:
The Alliance for Global Justice is funded by a Soros-backed charity called the Tides Foundation, who gave $50,000 to help fund a radical-left group called "Antifa," who used extreme violence to shut down the event at UC Berkeley featuring Milo Yiannopoulos."
"Refuse Fascism" bragged on its website about how they used "righteous" violence against "fascist" Yiannopoulos and how they set a shining example for others to follow. The full name of the group is "In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America"
The Alliance for Global Justice, based in Tucson, is listed as an organizer and fiscal sponsor for Refuse Fascism, a communist group that encouraged left-wingers to shut down the Yiannopoulos event.
The call to arms succeeded. Yiannopoulos' talk was cancelled after demonstrators lit fires, vandalized businesses, and assaulted Donald Trump and Yiannopoulos supporters.
Refuse Fascism, which includes Princeton professor Cornel West as one of its founding "initiators," defended the response, issuing a statement on its website that called the shut down "righteous."
And on its Facebook page, the group asserted that the vandalism and arson were not "violence." Instead, the group argued that Yiannopoulos and Trump perpetrate violence through the policies they support.
"Dismantling police fences is not violent. And to compare preventing someone like that from speaking to the real-world violence that they perpetuate everyday is ludicrous," reads one post on the group's Facebook page.
It's a Go Fund Me page set up to attempt to raise $35,000 to nullify the 2016 election results on the basis of Russian hacking.
It's authors claim that Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg has put their writ of mandamus on the docket for response this month:
US bankruptcy filings by consumers rose 5.4% in January, compared to January last year, to 52,421 according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. In December, they'd already risen 4.5% from a year earlier. This was the first time that consumer bankruptcies increased back-to-back since 2010.Of course consumer bankruptcies are still much lower than they were during the last financial crisis, but what this could mean is that we have reached a turning point.
However, business bankruptcies began to surge in November 2015 and continued surging on a year-over-year basis in 2016, to reach a full-year total of 37,823 filings, up 26% from the prior year and the highest since 2014.
For years, the Federal Reserve has been encouraging reckless borrowing and spending by pushing interest rates to ultra-low levels. Unfortunately, this created an absolutely enormous debt bubble, and now that debt bubble is beginning to burst. Here is more from Wolf Richter...
"I acknowledge that these false statements were very harmful and hurtful to Mrs. Trump and her family, and therefore I sincerely apologize to Mrs. Trump, her son, her husband and her parents for making these false statements," the blogger, Webster Tarpley, wrote in a statement released by Trump's lawyer.
A lawyer for Tarpley confirmed the accuracy of the statement in an email and said the case had been resolved. Neither side would divulge the amount of the settlement, though Trump's lawyer Charles Harder called it a "substantial sum."
Trump, who is married to U.S. President Donald Trump, filed the lawsuit last year against both Tarpley and the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, after the newspaper published an article that falsely alleged she had worked for an escort service.
Brizzi, 50, was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of PC Gordon Semple in December and told he would serve a minimum of 24 years. He is believed to have committed suicide on Sunday in Belmarsh prison, the Mirror reports. Brizzi strangled PC Gordon Semple after meeting him on the gay cruising app.
The crystal meth addict copied a storyline from US crime drama Breaking Bad to try to dispose of the corpse in acid. Brizzi also boiled and roasted parts of Gordon's body and attempted to eat them with chopsticks at his flat in Southwark, South London.
Police were called by neighbours reporting foul smells six days after Gordon, 59, from Inverness, vanished in April last year. Brizzi, dressed in sunglasses and pink underpants, opened the door to two female officers.
They found an acid-filled bath with flesh floating in it and a bucket with Gordon's head inside. Brizzi, a former Morgan Stanley merchant bank computer programmer, told the officers that Satan had ordered him to kill. He was brought up in a devout Italian Catholic family but thought being homosexual meant he had been spawned by the devil.
Vizio, one of the world's biggest makers of Smart TVs, is paying $2.2 million to settle charges that it collected viewing habits from 11 million devices without the knowledge or consent of the people watching them.
According to a complaint filed Monday by the US Federal Trade Commission, Internet-connected TVs from Vizio contained ACR—short for automated content recognition—software. Without asking for permission, the ACR code captured second-by-second information about the video the TVs displayed. The software collected other personal information and transmitted it, along with the viewing data, to servers controlled by the manufacturer. Vizio then sold the data to unnamed third-parties for purposes of audience measurement, analysis, and tracking.
Comment: Further reading: 1984 becomes reality as surveillance technologies are deployed without public consent
We are fast approaching an era when humanity will be subjugated by a technological tyranny managed by an untouchable organization of elites, bureaucrats and paid public minders hired to monitor our behaviors, emotions and thoughts. In an environment like this, law and justice will be meaningless, as the tools of a technocracy can used to enforce the policies and whims of whoever monitors us, whether it be corporate employees, criminals, or abusive state actors.
Thirty-eight-year-old Officer Danielle Alamrani describes years of horrendous verbal abuse — fellow cops called her a "Muslim bitch," regularly referred to her as "the Taliban" and "terrorist," and even refused to work with her, once she began wearing the headcovering on the job.
According to the lawsuit, as paraphrased by Gothamist, "In one particularly disturbing incident [on Christmas Day] December 2012, Alamrani claims that two officers in the precinct tried to rip off her hijab, referred to her as 'a Muslim bitch' and one told her 'I will punch you in the face.' Alamrani's suit says the officers who allegedly did this weren't disciplined and therefore felt empowered to continue harassing her. Two years later, in 2014, Alamrani's suit says she and her husband were arrested after a neighbor made a noise complaint about their children despite a responding officer finding the children asleep when they came to her home. The suit claims that the responding officer also detained Alamrani's children for eight hours 'just to harass her.'"
"During this incident, the responding officer," states the lawsuit, "made numerous comments about Plaintiff Alamrani's religion, including that Plaintiff Alamrani's family were 'Arabs' who 'slept on the floor like animals.'"
Springare is a senior investigator at the serious crimes division at the Örebro Police Department with 47 years under his belt. In the Saturday post he said what he was going to say would not be politically correct and that saying such things could harm an officer's position or pay grade, but he was about to retire and didn't care.
"Here we go; this is what I've handled from Monday-Friday this week: rape, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, rape-assault and rape, extortion, blackmail, assault, violence against police, threats to police, drug crime, drugs, crime, felony, attempted murder, rape again, extortion again and ill-treatment," he wrote.
"Suspected perpetrators; Ali Mohammed, Mahmod, Mohammed, Mohammed Ali, again, again, again. Christopher... what, is it true? Yes, a Swedish name snuck in on the edges of a drug crime. Mohammed, Mahmod Ali, again and again," he added.
Hersh Mahmood Khudhur, 36, now feels embarrassed to smile, and wears a scarf to hide part of his face. Three months ago, after he and other Kurdish fighters embarked on a mission to protect Kirkuk from Daesh terrorists, what is now covered with scars was hard to call a face.
"At around 4 am some hundred of Daesh suiciders penetrated the city. We advanced immediately. Gunfire started, and I caught three shots from a Daesh militant. The first one hit my gun. The second got in my shoulder. I tried to bend to save my head, and the third shot hit the cheek and the chin. It could easily be in the forehead if I did not move... I saw the man who was firing at me. I can still remember him," Khudhur said.














Comment: Gasperation! Another sign that the Ukraine alignment isn't working out that well for the Ukrainian people.