Guy Faulconbridge, Michael Holden
ReutersMon, 05 Aug 2019 02:29 UTC
© Business Insider
Scottish voters would back independence and they want another referendum in the next two years, a poll published on Monday showed, indicating that
the United Kingdom could be wrenched apart shortly after it leaves the European Union.
Asked how they would vote in an independence referendum, 46% of the 1,019 surveyed Scottish voters said they would vote for independence and 43% said they would vote against, according to a poll by Michael Ashcroft. Excluding those who said they did not know or would not vote, this amounted to
52% to 48% for an independent Scotland.
"I found a small majority in favor of a new vote - and
the first lead for an independent Scotland for more than two years," Ashcroft, a Conservative who opposed Boris Johnson's successful bid to be prime minister, said.
Johnson, who took over from Theresa May last month and is unpopular in Scotland, was booed as he entered a meeting last week with Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon who is demanding London agree to another referendum.
© Warwickshire Police
Louise Warton
A depraved UK mom will spend the next three decades in prison for killing her two young daughters, who "got in the way" of her sex life, a court heard this week.
Louise Porton, who was a sex worker, was found guilty Thursday in Birmingham court for the murders of 3-year-old Lexi Draper and 17-month-old Scarlett Vaughan, The Sun reported.
The 23-year-old mom was ordered to serve 32 years to life in prison for the murders, which were within three weeks of each other.
Comment:
From the
The Sun:
Sick Louise Porton, 23, offered to perform sex acts on a client while one child lay dying in hospital and joked "I had two, now down to one" before the death of the second.
...
Porton told one customer how "they can have sex despite being in a shared room with both children present if they're quiet".
...
A second CCTV clip shows brazen Porton driving around and filling up her car as Scarlett lay dying in the back seat.
...
On the day before Lexi died, Porton messaged a man telling him: "Im just really havin a tuff time with my 3-year old being ill from that deadly flu doctors tellin me she gonna die x [sic]".
Porton had also carried out chilling internet searches on her phone two hours before little Lexi died - including how long it took a body to "go cold up to the shoulder".
Another read "Is it true you s*** yourself when you die?", while one asked: "For how long after drowning can someone be resuscitated?"
...
"She has lied repeatedly to friends, family and professionals to cover her tracks."
"At no point throughout the whole investigation has she ever shown any real signs of emotion."
Josie Appleton
SpikedMon, 05 Aug 2019 12:00 UTC
© Getty
The war on smoking has set the template for state meddling in our lives.
In this sequence, public health has shifted from a position of accepting people's right to personal choice - ie, to smoke or not to smoke, so long as you do not harm others - to an almost complete obliteration of this right in policy documents (the only question remaining is whether a measure can be successfully enforced or not).
In the 1970s, government was mainly concerned that the public should be adequately informed of the risks to their health. It introduced health warnings on cigarette packets, as well as restrictions on tobacco advertising, attempting to rein in the power and seduction of publicity that for decades had claimed that smoking was beneficial for
health.
© Sputnik/Iliya Pitalev
Syrian army Idlib Province
the Syrian Armed Forces said in a statement on Monday. A statement quoted by the Ikhbariya TV channel:
"Taking into account that the agreement on the ceasefire under conditions of implementation of the Sochi agreements by Ankara was not implemented despite Syria's efforts in this direction, the army and armed forces therefore resume the military operation against terrorist groups with different names and will respond to any aggression in accordance with its constitutional obligations to protect the Syrian people and ensure their security."
Idlib is reportedly controlled mainly by Hayat Tahrir Sham and remains the last opposition stronghold. Government forces are fighting to take back the territory with support from Russia as part of a counterterrorism operation.
Drago Bosnic
FRNMon, 05 Aug 2019 00:00 UTC
© SANA
August 4, 2019: Weapons, ammunition seized by Syrian government forces during clean-up operation in southern part of Syria.
The Syrian Army discovered a large volume of weapons and ammunition, including US-made missiles, from arms depot in formerly-held positions of the terrorists in the southern part of Syria.
The Syrian Army's engineering units found a large cache containing
different combat rifles, over 200,000 bullets, large amount of canons, mortar rounds and US TOW missiles together with launching-pads, anti-tank machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), bombs, hand-grenades, drones and night-vision cameras, also Israel-made military equipment and medicine.
In a relevant development in late June, the Syrian Army seized a large number of weapons and military equipment, including arms and ammunition made in the US and Israel, in areas and military bases formerly held by the terrorists in the surrounding areas of Damascus and Quneitra provinces, [including] southwestern Damascus and northwestern Quneitra.
It has been a tumultuous weekend for the country, which suffered two consecutive mass shootings over the last 48 hours in both
El Paso and
Dayton.
And while the media was eager to quickly expose the El Paso shooter as a right-wing extremist with the implication that he is merely following Trump's belligerent rhetoric, only few details had emerged about the Dayton, Ohio shooter although we certainly understand
why the mainstream media may not have rushed to make these alleged details public - because according to Heavy.com, the Dayton shooter was an Elizabeth Warren (and Bernie Sanders) supporter who advocated for socialism, communism and supported Antifa.
The shooter, Connor Betts, was 24 and from Bellbrook, Ohio. His alleged social media biography started to emerge late on Sunday night, with his Twitter page stating that he described himself as:
"he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i'm going to hell and i'm not coming back."
Comment: See also :
9 killed as gunman opens fire in Dayton bar district, hours after Texas massacre - UPDATE: 10 dead
More information is coming out about the Dayton shooter, Conner Betts. Those who profess to have known him in school describe him as a bully and a stalker. The
Dayton Daily News reports:
The shooting suspect has been identified as Connor Betts, 24, of Bellbrook, government sources confirmed.
Chris Baker, who just resigned this summer after 14 years as Bellbrook High School principal, was asked about Betts' time as a Bellbrook student.
Asked about reports that, while a Bellbrook student, Betts was suspended for causing a lockdown by writing a "hit-list" on a bathroom wall, Baker said, "I would not dispute that information, but I don't want to get involved any more than just making that comment."
A woman who went to high school with Betts recalled the hit-list.
"I know he made the list," she said. "I'm not sure who the names were on there...He had a plan to shoot up the school."
When she first heard about the shooting, she said Betts' name came to her mind.
"I guessed it might've been him just from that list," she said.
She added that Betts was bullied at the high school and that he seemed "pretty normal" after he "got some help from making list."
Demoy Howell was a year behind Connor Betts at Bellbrook High School, where they were in Junior ROTC together.
"He was always a little bit of an oddball," said Howell, who graduated in 2014. "He had a dark sense of humor - jokes about people dying. He would wear all black. I remember sensing a dark energy around him."
He never had a problem with Betts, but remembers friends saying he made them feel threatened or uncomfortable. The rigor of the military program seemed to have a calming influence, as Betts didn't seem to have many friends, he added.
"Even though we all knew he was kind of weird, I felt like the colonels kind of kept him together," Howell said. "There was a lockdown one year and it was because he wrote something in the bathroom. Then he kind of fell off the face of the earth. I don't remember him walking (at graduation)."
Later, Howell said, the two worked together at a fast-food restaurant.
"Generally there was no issue," he said. "He kind of kept it together."
Betts also worked at a gas station where Howell would sometimes stop in to grab a drink.
"He was normal there, too," he said. "He kept on a professional face."
The
Los Angeles Times adds:
High school classmates of the gunman who authorities say killed nine people early Sunday in Dayton say he was suspended for compiling a "hit list" of those he wanted to kill and a "rape list" of girls he wanted to sexually assault.
Both former classmates told the Associated Press that Betts was suspended during their junior year at suburban Bellbrook High School after a hit list was found scrawled in a school bathroom. That followed an earlier suspension after Betts came to school with a list of female students he wanted to sexually assault, according to the two classmates, a man and a woman who are both now 24 and spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern they might face harassment.
"There was a kill list and a rape list, and my name was on the rape list," the female classmate said.
The woman, a former cheerleader, said she didn't really know Betts and was surprised when a police officer called her cellphone during her freshman year to tell her that her name was included on a list of potential targets.
A Twitter user collected some posts purporting to be former classmates of Betts, disputing the "bullied at school" narrative. Shades of the Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz.
Some of the individual tweets are below:
© Ben Seitz/Twitter
And as seems usual, talk of a second shooter is
damped down, without accounting for the efficiency of the carnage.
"Shots fired! Shots fired!" an officer shouts in archived scanner audio, which you can listen to here. The dispatcher indicates the shooting occurred in the Oregon District. At one point, an officer said on the scanner that it looked like 9 to 10 people were shot.
"We got shots fired. We got multiple people down. We need multiple medics...We need to shut the whole street down....We think there's one shooter. He's down. We're looking for a second shooter," says an officer in the audio. (There are often incorrect reports of multiple shooters in the early moments of active shooter incidents, and it was clear that officers were trying to get a handle on a chaotic situation with possibly conflicting early information on that point. As noted, Dayton police later said they believe there is probably only one shooter.)
Language warning
Update (Aug. 6): In line with the statements as to Betts's character above, there's
this:
Betts was also in a "Pornogrind" Band that, according to Vice News, "released songs about raping and killing women." Vice called it the "extreme metal music scene." The bands he performed in sometimes were called Menstrual Munchies and Putrid Liquid, and the songs contained vile names like "6 Ways of Female Butchery" and "Preeteen Daughter Pu$$y Slaughter," Vice reported.
A woman he briefly dated, Caitlyn "Adelia" Johnson, told The Toledo Blade that he took her to gun ranges and showed her body camera video footage from a mass shooting, causing her to break off the relationship by text message. She also told the newspaper that Betts confided that he was bipolar and had Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
...
The woman he briefly dated also told The Toledo Blade that Betts had bragged that he knew a lot about mass shootings. She shared a text message exchange with the newspaper, in which she asked, "Do you know tragedies from every city?"
"A fair bit of them! :D [smiley face]," he responded. She told the newspaper he was charming and outgoing, but said he told her he had put a gun in his mouth before and he once called her drunk and said he wanted "to hurt a bunch of people."
Johnson published an account of her 'polyamorous' relationship (spring of 2019) with Betts on
Medium. He allegedly showed her a video of a synagogue shooting on their first date. She insists that despite the weirdness, he "was a perfect gentleman throughout our relationship." She says at one point he attempted to deliver a slightly threatening letter to an ex-girlfriend, about which she confronted him. She concludes her piece:
I have no idea what his motivation was. I will never know. But there are a few things that I'm certain that it wasn't. This wasn't a hate crime. He fought for equality. This wasn't a crime of passion. He didn't get passionate enough. This wasn't very premeditated. He wasn't a thorough planner.
I also know that his getting shot is exactly what he wanted. He would have been the first one to tell you that he hated himself. He told me that twice he held a gun in his mouth ready to pull the trigger. He knew that he shouldn't have been allowed to own a gun, even though he loved guns. He believed as I believe that people with mental illnesses shouldn't be allowed to own guns because of people like him, people that turn into monsters. You don't know which people with mental illnesses will be the rare few like him and who will be in the majority of the completely harmless. But putting a gun in their hand could spark thoughts that they would have otherwise never have thought of. It's not a risk that we should take, no matter how fun shooting one is.
As for Betts's sister, police still
not sure whether she was deliberately targeted. Some eyewitnesses said Betts had been denied entry to the bar outside of which the shooting took place, but their accounts haven't been confirmed. One survivor said he saw
bodies falling in the line to get into the bar, suggesting that Betts's targets were probably packed relatively closely together in front of the building.
"I turn around and you can just see bodies falling in the line," Anthony Reynolds told NBC News. "You hear about it, you see it on TV, but like they say, when it hits home, it hits different."
Reynolds said he was leaving the bar when the shooting happened and described the shooter as a heavy-set white man. He said he knew one of the people killed.
Betts was reportedly using a 100-round magazine, with "extra magazines" on him, but he was shot and killed by police after approximately 30 seconds of shooting. Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley told the media, "If the Dayton police had not gotten to the shooter in under a minute, hundreds of people in the Oregon District would be dead today." Here's Police Chief Beihl's press conference, with footage from scene:
According to Betts's Twitter account, he was apparently following the El Paso shootings, liking the posts of various leftists posting their thoughts on it. This included a tweet by leftist activist Jared Holt of Right Wing Watch replying to Mike Cernovich (Holt later deleted the tweet and blocked Betts's account):
Gallup recently announced
that forty percent of all Americans believe in creationism. A better storyline to its recent polling data might be that only one in five Americans believes in Darwinism, which was a wobbly theory when first proposed almost two centuries ago
and which has become an increasingly improbable explanation for the origin of life and species during the last two hundred years. That would be a better storyline, but it is not the storyline presented by Gallup.
Darwinists are invariably the product of an educational system that has as little to do with free thought as the educational systems of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Groupthink, instead, is what these institutions create and nurture. There are no longer "schools of thought," but simply "settled science" and its detractors (those with free and thinking minds).
It is Darwinism, not its alternative theories, that is an intolerant system of blind faith that brooks no reconsideration, no conflicting scientific opinion, and no independent thought. This shows up not only in the purging of academicians who hold politically incorrect views in life sciences, which Ben Stein exposed in his 2008 documentary
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but in
deliberate mischaracterization of the debates about the origin of life.
Comment: With any luck, that 20% will shrink smaller and smaller, driving Darwinists mad that they can't convert the masses to their odd religion of miracles of complexity produced by blind randomness.
For more on the subject, see:
Scott Palmer
NewshubTue, 06 Aug 2019 00:01 UTC
A vegan has been turned down from the Defence Force over his
"plant-based diet".
Jack Burns applied this month to join the Navy in the hope of helping people as a medic. Now, he's speaking out after his application was denied due to his veganism.
"I thought it was quite strange that they didn't look at my personality or my skills. They just looked at what I ate," he told Newshub.
© AP Photo / Cliff Owen
Yemeni forces carried out drone attacks on two airports and an airbase in Saudi Arabia in retaliation against the Kingdom's deadly aggression on their impoverished country. The spokesman for Yemeni Armed Forces, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, said in a statement on Monday that in the first drone attack, domestically-developed Qasef-2K (Striker-2K) targeted Najran Regional Airport in the Saudi southwest, Yemeni News reported.
The air traffic came to a halt after the attack, he added. The second attack targeted military and strategic positions at King Khalid Air Base near the city of Khamis Mushait in the southwestern province of Asir, Saree stated. Also in Asir, the Yemeni drones attacked Abha International Airport on Monday, suspending flights. Saree also noted that the attacks were in response to the crimes committed by the Saudi-led coalition,
referring to the 21 Saudi airstrikes that have hit Yemen over the past 48 hours.
In mid-May, Yemeni soldiers, backed by allied fighters from Popular Committees, launched a major operation against the strategic oil facility in Saudi Arabia in retaliation for the Riyadh regime's devastating military aggression and siege of the impoverished country.
Following the attack, Saudi Arabia stopped pumping crude oil on the major pipeline across the country. The retaliatory attack also led to the rise of oil prices and the fall of stock markets in Persian Gulf Arab countries.
Comment: This news is actually fairly significant - a sign of bigger dynamics at play in the region. For the details, see Elijah Magnier's latest:
RTTue, 06 Aug 2019 17:23 UTC
© Reuters / Pawel Sosnowski
The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has received a groundswell of support in Eastern Germany, leading in polls just weeks before regional elections in three states. Support for major parties is at a historic low.
In an outcome sure to unnerve Germany's more conventional politicians, a series of polls conducted in June and July has demonstrated that the anti-establishment force has moved to the fore in the former Eastern Bloc territory, where they enjoy steady public backing - all ahead of the crucial regional elections, two of which are scheduled in about a month's time.
By contrast, the heavyweights of German politics - Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) and their coalition partners in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) - are facing what might be called a near collapse of popular support in the same eastern regions. In the
latest poll conducted by the Emnid Institute, AfD picked up 23 percent of the vote in the five East German states, narrowly beating out the CDU, which received 22 percent.
Comment: See also: