Jeffrey Epstein lost all sexual interest in his alleged victims as soon as they "lost their braces and their pubescent look," according to a former cop who's been investigating the convicted pedophile for more than a decade.

But Epstein still found a way for the "too old" teens to help satisfy his perverted appetite — by finding "younger girls" who were more his type, ex-detective Michael Fisten told CNN.

"Once these girls lost their braces and their pubescent look and started becoming 16-years old or 17-years old, they were too old for him, so then he started using them as recruiters to bring the younger girls," he said.

Fisten began investigating the multimillionaire financier in 2009 for lawyer Brad Edwards, who represents several women who claim Epstein abused them when they were underage.

"I started going out and interviewing witnesses that became victims," Fisten told CNN. "One after another, three girls turned into four girls, turned into five, six, seven and so on...I couldn't help but think that this could've been my daughter or your daughter or my next-door neighbor's daughter."

In the interview, Fisten alleged that Epstein hired "former Miami cops" to try to frighten his accusers into silence.

Four Chicago police officers have been fired over their alleged cover-up of the 2014 murder of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald, by former officer Jason Van Dyke.

The Chicago Police Board voted on Thursday to discharge Sgt. Stephen Franko and officers Janet Modragon, Daphne Sebastian and Ricardo Viramontes. They have the right to appeal the decision, which went into effect immediately.

The intellectual scene always used to have room for great minds from the Right. Today they would be denounced for thought crime by a Left that cannot tolerate dissent

British intellectual life has always made room for the conservative voice. From Burke and Hume to Maitland and Oakeshott, British philosophers have offered a continuous reflection on our social and cultural inheritance, with a view to understanding the fundamental idea on which conservatism has been founded - the idea of belonging.

They have insisted that the goal of our earthly life is not to remake the world but to belong to it, and that the true political virtues are patience, understanding and humility rather than indignation or revolutionary rage.

Italian police seized a new cache of weapons and Nazi materials during a raid on an underground far-right group linked with the conflict in Ukraine. The bust is tied to an earlier raid in which an air-to-air missile was found.

Last week, the General Investigations and Special Operations Division (DIGOS) found a cache of 20 firearms, an air-to-air missile, and Nazi memorabilia. Police arrested three suspects, including Fabio Del Bergiolo, a former customs officer and one-time failed Senate candidate from the neo-fascist Forza Nuova party.

On Friday, a Turin-based counter-terrorism unit raided Del Bergiolo's second residence in Massa Carrara province. Police found a rifle with two magazines and a tripod used for shooting, a handgun, a compound bow with 13 darts, a crossbow pistol, and a machete. Various ammunition was also discovered at the scene, as well as hand grenades and mortar bombs.

Tens of thousands of people once again took to the streets of Hong Kong to protest an unpopular extradition bill. A Chinese government office was targeted in the rallies, which ended in clashes with police.

About 400,000 people turned out for yet another protest in Hong Kong, according to the organizers' estimates, while police put the number at 138,000. The people continue to voice their anger over a controversial bill that envisages sending criminal suspects to mainland China, as well as the heavy-handed police response to the previous rallies.


Crowds of people marched through the city chanting slogans critical of the police and the local government. Thousands disregarded the designated march route and surrounded the Chinese government liaison office.

There, they spray-painted over the lenses of security cameras, wrote graffiti on the walls and defaced the lettering on the office gate. Some burned piles of garbage on the streets outside. Police pushed them back to the financial district, where clashes erupted.

The new event seeks to do a "raid" to the region of the Atlantic Ocean, north of Cuba, where a number of ships and airplanes are said to have disappeared. So far, it has less sign-ups than its Area 51 predecessor, but the dynamics are promising.

Looks like the notorious "Storm the Area 51" flashmob received a worthy successor. More than 19,000 people reportedly signed up for an event to storm the Bermuda Triangle, a mysterious part of the Atlantic northeast of Cuba, rumored to be swallowing ships and even airplanes. In addition, some 25,000 people are listed as "interested."

Mirroring the Area 51 event's sentiment that "the guards can't shoot all of us," the new event's organizer, Anthony Carnovale, says the mysterious place "can't swallow all of us."

Responding to news that journalist Andy Ngo had been beaten by antifa protestors in Portland last month, a woman named Charlotte Clymer tweeted that "Ngo intentionally provokes people on the left to drive his content. Being attacked today on video taken by an actual journalist (because Ngo is definitely not) is the greatest thing that could have happened to his career. You know it. I know it. He knows it. We all know it. Violence is completely wrong, and I find it sad and weak to allow a sniveling weasel like Andy Ngo to get under one's skin like this, but I'm also not going to pretend this wasn't Ngo's goal from the start. I mean, let's cut the shit here. This is what they do."

Who is Charlotte Clymer? She is an activist who works at the Human Rights Campaign, America's "largest LGBTQ civil rights organization," which supposedly "envision[s] a world where LGBTQ people are ensured equality at home, at work [and] in every community." Andy Ngo, who has written for Quillette, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and other publications, happens to be gay. So this is where we are right now: A staffer for a human-rights organization dedicated to helping gay people is publicly cheering the beating of a gay man. This should raise an eyebrow.

Palestinians built homes; years later Israel built a wall. Now the homes must be demolished because they are too close to the wall.

According to the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD):

Since 1967 when the Occupation began in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, nearly 50,000 Palestinian homes and structures have been demolished - displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and affecting the livelihoods of thousands of others. Combine this with the 600 Palestinian villages that were demolished when the state of Israel was established (www.zochrot.org) creating 750,000 Palestinian refugees (3/4 of the population), and its ongoing demolition policy within the state of Israel itself, the figure exceeds more than 100,000 Palestinian homes demolished since 1948. This is a conservative figure because multiple level homes and apartment blocks count as one unit and it does not include the number of self-demolitions which is a growing phenomenon done because Israel issues a bill for the demolitions which many Palestinians cannot afford to pay

Palestinian homes are demolished for various and sundry reasons: the land they own has been declared by Israel "agricultural land" or "open green space;" they have no building permit (which the Israeli authorities refuse to grant Palestinians); the slope of their land is adjudged as "too steep;" their houses are too near settlements or Israeli-only highways (although the houses were there first); out of collective punishment for some action the punished people had nothing to do with; the "clearing" of vast tracts of land for military/security purposes; destruction for the sake of expanding roads, settlements and the "Separation Barrier;" houses "cleared" to make passage safe for settlers or for other security purposes; homes representing "collateral damage;" and more.

reposted from IMEMC, July 1, 2019

In the Spring of 2011, the brothers Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels were the talk of Carteret County, on the central coast of North Carolina. Some people said that the brothers were righteous; others thought that they had lost their minds. That March, Melvin and Licurtis stood in court and refused to leave the land that they had lived on all their lives, a portion of which had, without their knowledge or consent, been sold to developers years before. The brothers were among dozens of Reels family members who considered the land theirs, but Melvin and Licurtis had a particular stake in it. Melvin, who was 64, with loose black curls combed into a ponytail, ran a club there and lived in an apartment above it. He'd established a career shrimping in the river that bordered the land, and his sense of self was tied to the water. Licurtis, who was 53, had spent years building a house near the river's edge, just steps from his mother's.

Their great-grandfather had bought the land a hundred years earlier, when he was a generation removed from slavery. The property — 65 marshy acres that ran along Silver Dollar Road, from the woods to the river's sandy shore — was racked by storms. Some called it the bottom, or the end of the world. Melvin and Licurtis' grandfather Mitchell Reels was a deacon; he farmed watermelons, beets and peas, and raised chickens and hogs. Churches held tent revivals on the waterfront, and kids played in the river, a prime spot for catching red-tailed shrimp and crabs bigger than shoes. During the later years of racial-segregation laws, the land was home to the only beach in the county that welcomed black families. "It's our own little black country club," Melvin and Licurtis' sister Mamie liked to say. In 1970, when Mitchell died, he had one final wish. "Whatever you do," he told his family on the night that he passed away, "don't let the white man have the land."

The Palestinian Prisoners' Society (PPS) has reported, Tuesday, that a Palestinian detainee from Beit Fajjar town, south of the West Bank city of Bethlehem, died in solitary confinement in Nitzan Israeli Prison.

The PPS said the detainee, Nasser Majed Taqatqa, 31, was taken prison by Israeli soldiers on June 19 2019, and has been under interrogation since then. This was his first arrest by the army. It also denied allegations by the Israel Prison Authority about his death and confirmed that the Palestinian did not have any preexisting health conditions.

The PPS held Israel fully responsible for his death, especially while under interrogation, as Palestinian detainees are frequently physically and psychologically tortured, in addition to the very bad living conditions they face, and the lack of medical treatment.