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Oklahoma's 'family values' senator given 15 years for child trafficking and child pornography

Matt Agorist
The Free Thought Project
Tue, 18 Sep 2018 14:17 UTC
Senator Ralp Shortey
Over a year has passed since Oklahoma state senator, Ralph Shortey was busted for child sex trafficking and now, on Monday, he's finally been sentenced to prison.

U.S. District Judge Timothy DeGiusti handed down a 15 year sentence to Ralph Shortey, 36, who faced sentences of between 10 years and life in prison. DeGiusti also ordered Shortey to serve 10 years of supervised probation once he is released from prison and said he will impose a fine on the former two-term lawmaker at a later date. The fine could be up to $250,000, according to NBC.

In September of 2017, Shortey was accused in a federal indictment of multiple counts of child sex trafficking and child pornography offenses. In November, Shortey agreed to plead guilty to a single child sex trafficking charge in exchange for the three other charges to be dismissed.

The age of consent for sexual activity is 16 in Oklahoma. However, it is against both state and federal law for anyone under the age of 18 to be involved in the commercial sex industry.

As a result, anyone who prostitutes a minor under the age of 18, like Ralph Shortey, can be charged with either child prostitution or trafficking in minors - thus the charge of child sex trafficking.

Body Camera footage, released last year, showed the moment police raided the hotel room occupied by Shortey and his underage victim.
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Dollar Gold

EU regulators to drop legal action against Ireland after Apple pays €13.1 billion in back taxes


RT
Wed, 19 Sep 2018 10:46 UTC
Apple Ireland back taxes
© Dado Ruvic / Reuters
European Union antitrust regulators plan to drop legal action against Ireland after iPhone maker Apple paid the country €13.1 billion ($15.3 billion) in back taxes.

The lawsuit was initiated in 2017 by the EU which severely criticized Dublin for moving too slowly in recovering the money.

"In light of the full payment by Apple of the illegal state aid it had received from Ireland, commissioner Margrethe Vestager will be proposing to the college of commissioners the withdrawal of this court action," the European Commission's spokesman Ricardo Cardoso said.

Ireland's finance ministry began collecting the back taxes in a series of payments in May.

Comment: Previously:

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X

Police chief resigns over ties to neo-nazis, gets hired by neighboring police dept

Matt Agorist
The Free Thought Project
Tue, 18 Sep 2018 10:11 UTC
white supremacist
As the Free Thought Project reported last year, a newly-appointed police chief was forced to resign after he was directly linked to a website that promotes international racist skinhead gangs, the Klu Klux Klan, and media titled "Hitler was Right." Now, after the nation learned of his racist ties, this cop has been hired on with another department in Oklahoma.

Bart Alsbrook resigned as interim police chief of Colbert, Oklahoma late last August after a local news agency found he was likely a skinhead white supremacist. Now, however, after he was outed as a racist neo-nazi, he was hired in the neighboring town of Achille.

According to a report from KXII News, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a "hate map" last year, which claimed to track 917 hates groups across the United States. There was only one listed in the Texoma area: a website named ISD Records, which was created by Bart Alsbrook in 2004.

Comment: See also: 'Secret FBI rules' exposed in report revealing pattern of white supremacy infiltration of U.S. law enforcement

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Satellite

Space detectives: Russian cosmonauts prepare for spacewalk to inspect mysterious Soyuz module hole


RT
Tue, 18 Sep 2018 23:19 UTC
Soyuz MS-09
© NASA Johnson / FlickrSoyuz MS-09 spacecraft docked to the ISS.
The investigation of a mysterious hole in the Soyuz spacecraft has reached a whole new level, as Roscosmos announced that two Russian cosmonauts will inspect the holey module from the outside. While in space, naturally.

Two cosmonauts will cut through the anti-meteorite shielding of the spacecraft in an attempt to find metal shavings and traces of sealant compound on the spacecraft, the deputy Director General of Russian space corporation Roscosmos, Nikolay Sevastyanov, announced on Tuesday.

The space investigation is expected to shed light on the question of where exactly - in space or on earth - the drill-hole was made. The hole in the spacecraft was discovered late in August, when the International Space Station (ISS) started leaking oxygen. Various conspiracy theories blossomed after the incident, ranging from an impact of a micrometeorite to an alien job. It was determined, however, that the hole was actually made by a drill from the inside of the spacecraft.

Comment: See also:

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Arrow Up

Russian poll reveals overwhelming support for ban on mobile phones in schools


RT
Wed, 19 Sep 2018 09:26 UTC
Russian Beauty pageant final
© Vladimir Pesnya / SputnikA young contestant in the 2017 Young Russian Beauty pageant final
About three quarters of Russians say they support the idea of banning the use of cell phones and other tech gadgets in schools and believe that children would study better were such measures taken.

The data was revealed by the state-run public opinion research agency VTSIOM on Wednesday. A recent poll has shown that 83 percent of the Russian public think that smartphones and other gadgets distract children during their school studies and badly affect their education.

Some 73 percent of Russians say they support the idea of banning the use of cell phones in schools. The proportion was even higher - at 83 percent - among those who said that their children do not own cell phones and also among those who said that they don't have any children of school age (74 percent).

Comment: Mobile phones don't just pose a very real risk to children's psychological health, but the EMF they, and wifi, emit have been shown to have detrimental effects on their physiological health too: Also check out SOTT radio's: The Health & Wellness Show: EMF Exposure Part II

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Pirates

Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups reject Turkish-Russian agreement to establish demilitarized zone in Idlib


South Front
Wed, 19 Sep 2018 09:35 UTC
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham jihad terrorist
© Omar Haj Kadour / AFPHayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militants at a camp in Syria's province of Idlib on August 14, 2018.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and some other groups, including the Islamic Turkistan Party and Jaish al-Izza, have rejected a Turkish-Russian agreement to establish a demilitarized zone in the Syrian province of Idlib and the nearby areas, according to pro-militant sources.

On September 18, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu stated that work to establish a new security system in the Idlib de-escalation zone had started. He recalled that all heavy weapons have to be withdrawn from the demilitarized zone by October 10 and radical groups have to withdraw their forces by October 15.

So, Turkey and the Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance have to force the militants to obey the agreement if they seek to enforce the demilitarized zone in time.

Pro-militant media outlets have already started spreading speculations that Damascus will not act up to its part of the agreement thus creating a media environment to justify actions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies.


Comment: It's hard to reason with unreasonable people, which is what jihadi terrorists are by definition.

From FARS:
The Arabic-language al-Watan newspaper quoted Russian diplomatic sources as saying that the Russian-Turkish agreement on Idlib will be implemented in three stages, adding that the first stage will go into effect by mid October to create a 15 sq/km weapons-free zone near Idlib city.

Also, in the second stage monitored by Moscow and Ankara, the heavy weapons will be collected from the region until November 10 and the terrorists will leave the civilian areas, they said, adding that in the third stage which lasts to the end of this year, state bodies will resume operation in Idlib.

The sources said that if the terrorist groups do not accept this agreement, they will be considered as enemy of the Turkish army and will be fought.

Meantime, the Arabic-language al-Akhbar newspaper underlined that the Russian-Turkish agreement will create new challenges on Idlib, and said such an agreement is not possible practically because Turkey is now faced with a too difficult mission in which it has earlier failed.

The paper added that convincing the terrorist groups, including Tahrir al-Sham Hay'at (the Levant Liberation Board or the Al-Nusra Front), Turkistani, Horas al-Din and Ansar al-Islam, which have set up their important bases in the afore-mentioned 15-km zone to disarm and leave will not be easy.

Leaders of Russia and Turkey agreed to establish a de-militarized zone in Syria's Idlib province, in a move that ostensibly puts on hold a threatened all-out military operations by government forces on Syria's last terrorist bastion.

The announcement was made on Monday during a press conference in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, where Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Speaking alongside Erdogan, Putin said the 15-20km-wide zone would be established by October 15.

This would entail a "withdrawal of all radical fighters" from Idlib, including the al-Nusra Front, Putin said, referring to Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham.

Putin added that heavy weapons would be withdrawn from all opposition forces by October 10 - an approach supported by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
All three stages of the Turkey-Russia agreement require terrorist or 'rebel' groups playing along. Of course, it would have been surprising if they did accept - being who they are. But the fact is that Putin, by agreeing to Turkey's use of the diplomatic card in order to save its proxies, has put Erdogan in a position in which he will be forced to side with Russia, Syria and Iran against the militants who are refusing to take Turkey's lead. It seems that once again Putin's 'wise as serpent, gentle as dove' approach is solving a major problem, in this case the Turkish problem in Idlib.

As for the terrorists themselves, they are still counting on their old dirty tricks:

Russian UN envoy: White Helmets continue to prepare provocations in Idlib

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Palette

Hysteria on college campuses

Heather Mac Donald
Quillette
Wed, 19 Sep 2018 08:23 UTC
fuck the police
© Andy Ngo


Editor's note: The following text is excerpted with permission from The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, by Heather Mac Donald, published by St. Martin's Press. © 2018 Heather Mac Donald.

Where are the faculty? American college students are increasingly resorting to brute force, and sometimes criminal violence, to shut down ideas that they don't like. Yet when such travesties occur, the faculty are, with few exceptions, missing in action, though they have themselves been given the extraordinary privilege of tenure to protect their own liberties of thought and speech. It is time for them to take their heads out of the sand.

I was the target of such silencing tactics two days in a row in 2017, the more serious incident at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, and a less virulent one at UCLA.

The Rose Institute for State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna had invited me to meet with students and to give a talk in April about my book The War on Cops. Several calls went out on Facebook to "shut down" this "notorious white supremacist fascist Heather Mac Donald." A Facebook post from "we, students of color at the Claremont Colleges" announced grandiosely that "as a community, we CANNOT and WILL NOT allow fascism to have a platform. We stand against all forms of oppression and we refuse to have Mac Donald speak." A Facebook event titled "Shut Down Anti-Black Fascist Heather Mac Donald" and hosted by "Shut Down Anti-Black Fascists" encouraged students to protest the event because I allegedly "condemn [the] Black Lives Matter movement," "support racist police officers," and "support increasing fascist 'law and order.'" (My supposed fascism consists in trying to give voice to the millions of law-abiding minority residents of high-crime areas who support the police and are desperate for more law-enforcement protection.)

Comment: With the takeover of higher education by leftist ideology and policies, we can say good bye to freedom of speech, even thought. Anything that challenges their disconnected view from reality is to be stamped out and destroyed under the banner of "anti-fascism, fairness, equality, diversity or whatever else fits the virtue signalling mandate. What is particularly rich is the hypocrisy; as they behave in direct opposition to the so-called values they claim to be upholding to achieve their goals. See also:

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Attention

3 injured after car rams pedestrians outside NW London mosque


RT
Wed, 19 Sep 2018 08:22 UTC
car hits pedestrians outside mosque in NW London,
© @miqdaad / Twitter
Three people were injured after a car rammed into pedestrians outside a mosque in London, police said. Law enforcement has ruled out terrorism, but suspect it was a "hate crime."

It happened shortly after midnight on Wednesday in the Cricklewood area of northwest London. Cricklewood is home to a number of mosques and Islamic centers.

According to the Metropolitan Police, the occupants of the car - three men and a woman in their mid-20s - "were involved in a confrontation" with people visiting a Muslim community center. The group allegedly made "comments of an Islamophobic nature." Then the vehicle "proceeded to make off at speed" colliding with three pedestrians. They are currently being sought by police.

Comment: Below is a selection of car ramming attacks that have happened in the last few months:

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Flashlight

Twitter user dismantles Bellingcat's claims on Russian suspects of Skripal poisoning

Elena Evdokimova
Twitter / @elenaevdokimov7
Fri, 14 Sep 2018 08:34 UTC
Skripal suspects
© MET PoliceRussian suspects Alexander Petrov (L) and Ruslan Boshirov (R)

Comment: The following Twitter thread was posted in response to Bellingcat's article Skripal Poisoning Suspect's Passport Data Shows Link to Security Services, published on September 14, 2018.



Comment: See also:

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Cell Phone

Bank worker texted 'go signal' before 2 men tried robbing $75,000 from woman, according to officials

Katherine Lam
Fox News
Thu, 23 Aug 2018 08:16 UTC

An employee at a Texas bank allegedly texted a "go signal" to a duo of thieves in order to launch a plot to steal $75,000 from a woman on Friday - a violent attempted robbery captured in shocking surveillance footage.

Shelby Taylor Wyse appeared in court Wednesday, the third person arrested in connection with the violent robbery at Wallis State Bank in Harris County, KTRK reported. Wyse faces a charge of second-degree robbery. Travonn Johnson, who is dating Wyse, and David Dowell Mitchell were also arrested in the case.

Travonn Johnson robbery
© Harris County Constable Precinct 4Travonn Johnson, left, Shelby Wyse and David Dowell Mitchell were arrested in connection with a violent robbery.
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