Society's ChildS


Briefcase

Courts repeatedly refused to consider Trump's election claims on the merits

Bob Anderson
The Federalist
Thu, 11 Mar 2021 00:01 UTC
trump biden
© Emma Kaden / Flickr
On Monday, without comment, the Supreme Court ended the last of the 2020 election cases, rejecting Trump v. Wisconsin Election Commission in a one-line order. It was a quiet ending to a tumultuous election season, but like a football game with a contentious call at the end, the debate over who really won will likely go on much longer.

The courts have always served as a pressure-relief valve on our internal disagreements. From the battle with an unscrupulous car dealer to a nasty divorce that requires discernment over how to split everything from the antique Corvette to the kids, wise judges can help to bring peace and healing. Surely, for a nation reeling after a tempestuous presidential election filled with strange occurrences, the courts were needed to bring us together.

We needed the steady hand of impartial jurists. Most of all, the losing side needed to know that a fair shake was given, and that justice prevailed, even if it wasn't the outcome they wanted. That did not happen after Nov. 3. Despite a stack of cases that worked their way through the legal system, we remain bitterly divided.

Comment: See also:

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Vader

Best of the Web: 'Kids passed from one abuser to another' - shocking allegations of child sex abuse at Irish Army base exposed

Sylvia Pownall
Irish Mirror
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 08:00 UTC
Defense-Forces-passing-out
© stock imageDefense Forces
A whistleblower has called for a Government inquiry to investigate allegations of systemic child sex abuse at the country's biggest Army base.

Anthony O'Brien, 64, who retired from the Defence Forces in 2003, says children living on the Curragh Camp in Co Kildare were subjected to "horrific" abuse.

He has contacted the Department of Defence and the Taoiseach's office having uncovered a litany of attacks by pedophiles on the military base dating back to the 1970s.

Dubliner Anthony, who was stationed at the Curragh for 22 years, has taken statements from more than 40 alleged victims which he sent to the Department of Defence.

These have now been passed to senior garda officers in Harcourt Street and are the subject of an investigation.

Comment: See also:

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Family

Sharp increase in reliance on food banks in Holland, particularly amongst children


NL Times
Wed, 10 Mar 2021 15:10 UTC
Food bank line in Clichy-sous-Bois, France
© Reuters/Charles PlatiauFILE PHOTO: Residents line up during a food distribution by volunteers from ACLEFEU association in Clichy-sous-Bois near Paris during a lockdown imposed to slow the rate of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in France, April 22, 2020.
In 2020, the number of people who turned to the food bank because they couldn't afford food rose sharply. Where in 2019, 151 thousand people made use of the food bank, last year that number rose to 160,500 people, the Dutch food bank reports.

The sharp increase was especially evident among children at 9.3 percent. The food bank reports that the need for assistance to supply daily meals has been on the rise for the past couple of years.

The demand for assistance differs between regions with Amsterdam and Rotterdam in the lead.

Comment: As noted above, food banks have been on the rise throughout the Western world for many years now, but even more so following nearly a year of lockdowns that continue to decimate economies:

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Sherlock

Millions of websites offline after massive fire at OVHcloud in France, Europe's largest cloud services provider

Mathieu Rosemain
Yahoo
Wed, 10 Mar 2021 08:41 UTC
OVHcloud
Fire destroys some servers at French data company OVHcloud
A fire at a French cloud services firm has disrupted millions of websites, knocking out government agencies' portals, banks, shops, news websites and taking out a chunk of the .FR web space, according to internet monitors.

The fire, which broke out on Wednesday shortly after midnight at OVHcloud, destroyed one of four data centres in Strasbourg, in eastern France, and damaged another, the company said.

There was no immediate explanation provided for the blaze, which erupted just two days after the French cloud computing firm kicked off plans for an initial public offering.

Comment: More details from the BBC:
Russia blames Google outage on data centre fire

Russian authorities have blamed problems accessing Google and YouTube on a fire at a data centre in Strasbourg.

The country's media watchdog Roskomnadzor tweeted that the disruption was due to the incident.

The data centre belongs to French cloud service provider OVH, which runs 32 such sites in Europe, America and Asia.

No-one was injured in the fire, which was declared a major incident.

It is not clear how the blaze started.


Two other data centres on the site remain closed.

OVH provides cloud services for 1.6 million customers across 140 countries.

The multiplayer video game Rust was also impacted - its developers tweeted that some players' progression data had been permanently lost.

The Google outages come the same day as Roskomnadzor announced that it had deliberately slowed down the speed of Twitter for failing to remove 3,000 posts relating to suicide, drugs and pornography.


Twitter had failed to remove posts that are illegal in Russia - and pretty much everywhere else, actually:
'On Wednesday, Russia began throttling Twitter as a way of pressuring the San Francisco-based company to remove over 3,100 posts found to be in violation of Russian law. Specifically, this includes 450 instances of child pornography and more than 2,500 incitements to underage suicide.'



President Vladimir Putin recently gave the watchdog the power to block social media platforms if they discriminated against Russian media.

Twitter is the widely used by opposition figures including Alexei Navalny, who was jailed in January.


"Just like in Ukraine and Belarus": TikTok condemned by Russian parents association over calls for youth to attend Navalny protests


Previously the authorities have experimented with ways to create a Russia-specific internet, separate from the rest of the world, something that it says would offer protection if the West cut off internet access - but which critics say would allow it to censor a range of content.
See also: Video game retailer GameStop stock doubles again with no let-up in amateur interest - UPDATES: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets outright, RobinHood bans buying more stock

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Attention

Gov. Cuomo reportedly reached under aide's blouse and groped her

Bernadette Hogan and Bruce Golding
New York Post
Wed, 10 Mar 2021 18:57 UTC
governor andrew cuomo
© AP Photo/Seth Wenig, PoolGov. Andrew Cuomo allegedly reached under a female aide’s blouse and groped her inside the Executive Mansion in Albany.
The sexual harassment scandal engulfing Gov. Andrew Cuomo escalated Wednesday with the emergence of allegations that he reached under a female aide's blouse and groped her while they were alone in a room inside the Executive Mansion in Albany.

The incident allegedly unfolded after the much younger woman was summoned to help the 63-year-old governor fix a problem with his cellphone, the Albany Times Union reported.

The woman told him to stop, the newspaper said.

Comment: It's actually quite stunning to see how thoroughly the bottom is falling out from under Cuomo right now. Two major scandals that both keep on getting worse by the day.

See also:

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TV

The German mainstream media is trying to smear RT for precisely what any news outlet should be doing: journalism


RT
Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:12 UTC
rt de
© www.de.rt.com
RT's increased presence in Germany has worried some of the establishment media enough that our competitors have launched a smear attack on us, based on hearsay and the claims of a disgruntled former employee.

RT DE has recently announced that it would expand its operation in Germany. Now we are seeing clear indications that this plan has scared a number of major outlets, and they have launched a smear campaign against RT, employing all means available. Here is RT's reaction to this attack.

Editorial response

In the grand scheme of things, one shouldn't really dignify one's critics by treating their speculative accusations too seriously. However, we owe it to our readers to figure out what really happened in recent days.

Comment: Aaaand RT is suing Bild:
RT in Germany is planning to take legal action against the tabloid Bild, after the Berlin newspaper ran a sensationalist tale that relied on leaked Telegram chats from a former employee, who claimed he had to spy for the channel.

In the article published on Tuesday, reporter Julian Roepcke, who has previously been aligned with the 'Disinformation Portal' of NATO's Atlantic Council adjunct, claims that, according to Bild's information, President Vladimir Putin ordered a spy op on his "public enemy number one." It allegedly targeted opposition figure Alexey Navalny and two of his close aides. The supposed snooping is said to have happened during the activist's treatment for alleged Novichok poisoning last year at Berlin's Charité clinic.

On top of that, writes Roepcke, "Russia's leadership used the Russian foreign broadcaster RT DE, which in turn relied on two German employees." To back up the claims, Bild also ran an interview with Daniel Lange, then an employee of RT DE, who claimed he had a feeling of having been used as a spy in the case. Lange also leaked to Bild what he says were internal chats with his bosses.

Calling out Roepcke's article, the head of RT in Germany Dinara Toktosunova said Lange had leaked Telegram chats in which he was merely being asked to do his job, after he'd failed to get any exclusive and newsworthy material about Navalny's stay in Germany.

"We remind our colleagues of the German legislation that (for now) protects the press by allowing it to collect information about matters of public interest," Toktosunova added.

The Bild article comes just days after Commerzbank told the parent company of RT DE and Ruptly that it would be ending their business relationship and closing their accounts at the end of May. Since Commerzbank changed its terms of service last November, RT DE had been trying to find an alternative bank, but 20 other financial institutions have either ignored its enquiries or flatly refused to open accounts on its behalf.
More from RT:
Leonid Volkov, a senior aide of the Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, has delivered an uncouth reaction to a baseless report by Berlin tabloid Bild alleging that RT's German service sent its employees to "spy" on his boss.

On Tuesday, Lithuania-based Volkov took the allegations published by red-top Bild at face value, launching a verbal attack on the head of RT in Germany (RT DE), Dinara Toktosunova, and Ruptly's chief content officer and executive adviser, Ekaterina Mavrenkova.

"It looks like [RT editor-in-chief Margarita] Simonyan's b****es are about to get into serious trouble," he wrote in his Telegram channel. Volkov, who describes himself as the "coordinator" of the "network of Alexey Navalny's regional offices" then enthusiastically suggested that RT was about to lose its journalistic license in Germany.


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Fire

'Militant-style group' still occupies George Floyd autonomous zone in Minneapolis

Jordan Davidson
The Federalist
Thu, 11 Mar 2021 00:01 UTC
george floyd autonomous zone
© Flickr/Photo
A "militant-style group" laid claim to the blocks surrounding a makeshift memorial to George Floyd in Minneapolis, refusing to budge from their self-proclaimed autonomous zone unless the city meets their list of 24 demands and preventing police officers and press from entering.

The group's demands include "recall the county prosecutor, fire the head of the state's criminal investigative agency, and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on programs to create jobs, combat racism and support affordable housing," but after law enforcement officers faced "protests, resistance, [and] opposition" from inside the autonomous region, the city plans to tear down the barriers and reopen the streets after the trial for Derek Chauvin, the officer charged in Floyd's death, in August at the earliest. Jury selection for the trial began this week.

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Newspaper

'It's all pretty amusing': Tucker Carlson fires back at New York Times over Taylor Lorenz dust up

Scott Morefield
Daily Caller
Wed, 10 Mar 2021 23:01 UTC
tucker carlson new york times
Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson fired back at The New York Times on Thursday night's edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight" after the media outlet criticized him for his Tuesday reference to reporter Taylor Lorenz.

Carlson criticized Lorenz for a tweet in which she claimed online harassment caused deep "trauma" and "destroyed" her life. "You'd think Taylor Lorenz would be grateful for the remarkable good luck that she's had, but no she's not," he said in the Tuesday segment.

Reacting Wednesday to Carlson's criticism of Lorentz, The New York Times released a statement calling the Fox News host's comments a "calculated and cruel tactic."

Comment: Remember Taylor Lorenz? See also:

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Arrow Down

The lockdowns weren't worth it

Philippe Lemoine
Wall Street Journal
Thu, 11 Mar 2021 16:56 UTC
empty street São Paulo
© miguel schincariol/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesAn empty street amid Covid-19 restrictions in São Paulo, March 6.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced last week that his state is ending its mask mandate and business capacity limits. While Democrats and many public-health officials denounced the move, ample data now exist to demonstrate that the benefits of stringent measures aren't worth the costs.

This wasn't always the case. A year ago I publicly advocated lockdowns because they seemed prudent given how little was known at the time about the virus and its effects. But locking society down has become the default option of governments all over the world, regardless of cost.

More than a year after the pandemic began, vaccination is under way in both Europe and the U.S. Yet stringent restrictions are still in place on both sides of the Atlantic. Germany, Ireland and the U.K. are still in lockdown, while France is two months into a 6 p.m. curfew that the French government says will last for at least four more weeks. In many U.S. states, in-person schooling is still rare.

This time last year we had no idea how difficult it would be to control the virus. Given how fast it had been spreading, people made the reasonable assumption that most of the population would be infected in a few weeks unless we somehow reduced transmission. Projections by the Imperial College Covid-19 Response Team in London projected that more than two million Americans could die in a few months. A lockdown would cut transmission, and while it couldn't prevent all infections, it would keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. It would "flatten the curve."

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Info

Black woman slams Ohio school board for critical race theory indoctrination of students

Libby Emmons
The Post Millennial
Thu, 11 Mar 2021 19:12 UTC
beachwood school board meeting


"You convince yourselves that blacks are oppressed and that it is your job to stop that oppression. How have you not looked at the results to realize that what you did was immoral and had the opposite effect?"

A black woman spoke up at a School Board meeting in Beachwood, Ohio, to take issue with the board's use of critical race and gender theory to divide families, pit students against their parents, and create a racist environment where none had existed before.

"If a lot more of the residents knew of the mess you've made of this school system via the curriculum as policy you would all probably lose your position in the district," she said.

Comment: See also:

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