Society's ChildS


Chess

The key word to focus on in the Trump-Kim show

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
Wed, 13 Jun 2018 16:25 UTC
US Air Force F-16 fighter jet
© Agence France-Presse/ Kim Hong-jiUS Air Force F-16 fighter jets take part in a joint drills at Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea last December. The war games are set to end, but will the US fully withdraw from the peninsula?
By reaffirming the Panmunjom Declaration, the US President has committed to bringing its military back from South Korea and thus a complete denuclearization of the South as well as the North

The Trump-Kim geopolitical reality-TV show - surreal for some - offered unparalleled entries to the annals of international diplomacy. It will be tough to upstage the US President pulling an iPad and showing Kim Jong-un the cheesy trailer of a straight-to-video 1980s B-grade action movie - complete with a Sylvester Stallone cameo - casting the two leaders as heroes destined to save the world's 7 billion people.

Away from the TV, the former "Rocket Man", now respectfully recast in Trump terminology as "Chairman Kim", did strike a formidable coup by completely erasing the dreaded acronym CVID - or "complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization" - from the final text of the Singapore joint statement.
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Cut

Plan to split California into three states gains momentum as initiative qualifies for November ballot


Liberty Headlines
Tue, 12 Jun 2018 00:00 UTC
California split
California's 168-year run as a single entity, hugging the continent's edge for hundreds of miles and sprawling east across mountains and desert, could come to an end next year - as a controversial plan to split the Golden State into three new jurisdictions qualified Tuesday for the Nov. 6 ballot.

If a majority of voters who cast ballots agree, a long and contentious process would begin for three separate states to take the place of California, with one primarily centered around Los Angeles and the other two divvying up the counties to the north and south. Completion of the radical plan - far from certain, given its many hurdles at judicial, state and federal levels - would make history.

It would be the first division of an existing U.S. state since the creation of West Virginia in 1863.


Comment:

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Handcuffs

Child sex offender sting nets in arrest of 2,300 suspects including Secret Service employee


RT
Thu, 14 Jun 2018 16:29 UTC
handcuffed man
© Boris Roessler / Global Look Press
A three-month operation has resulted in the arrest of more than 2,300 suspected child sex offenders, including a Secret Service employee, the Justice Department has announced. The investigation also identified 383 abused children.

The nationwide operation, dubbed "Broken Heart," ended in May. Conducted by Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) taskforces working in all 50 states, the operation was carried out by more than 4,500 law enforcement agencies at federal, state, local and tribal levels.

The operation targeted individuals suspected of producing or possessing child pornography, engaging in online enticement of children for sexual purposes, sex trafficking of children, and traveling across state lines or to foreign countries to sexually abuse children.
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Book 2

Postmodernism run amok: Author wins €100k literary award for writing one sentence, 270 page novel

Sian Cain
The Guardian
Wed, 13 Jun 2018 16:06 UTC
Mike McCormack
Author Mike McCormack
It's not often that an author described on his own Wikipedia page as "disgracefully neglected" is awarded a €100,000 literary prize. But this is where the Irish author Mike McCormack finds himself, with Wednesday's announcement that he has won the International Dublin literary award for his novel, Solar Bones. As someone who has hovered close to mainstream success without ever shaking off the slightly damning label of "writer's writer", he is unsurprisingly delighted.

"I don't feel neglected today. I don't know who put that Wiki page up, but I think whoever did will have to rethink that," he laughs. "I was shocked. I had completely given up hope that I was going to win it. But I'm over the shock now and enjoying myself - very much."

The International Dublin literary award, previously known as the Impac, operates with a slight air of mystery: a ridiculously long longlist (150 books this year) is picked by librarians around the world, from Barbados to Estonia, who hand their selection over to a panel of authors to bestow the grand boon on one unsuspecting writer.
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Magnify

Obama Admin. stenographer writes memoir detailing rampant drug use on Air Force One with plenty of cheating husbands and wives

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Thu, 14 Jun 2018 15:55 UTC
Beck Dorey-Stein
Beck Dorey-Stein, who admits she had a fling with a White House staffer Jason Wolf, who broke her heart
While we're way beyond debating whether or not Obama had a "scandal-free" administration as he claimed last January, the former President's stenographer, Beck Dorey-Stein, has come out of the woodwork with a new memoir, From the Corner of the Oval, which contains several shocking claims from her copious notes taken during her travel to over 60 countries over five years aboard Air Force One, reports the Daily Mail.

After answering an Obama administration's Craigslist ad for a stenographer, the then-25-year-old Dorey-Stein quit her five part-time jobs after she was hired to work in the White House in 2012 - joining a pool of 13 reporters from the White House press corps to travel with the president, recording everything he said and then transcribing it for the press office and presidential archive.

'Traveling with the president is like summer camp on steroids - a week on the road is like a year at home', Dorey-Stein writes.
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Airplane

Qantas Los Angeles to Melbourne flight sent into 10-second nosedive due to vortex caused by another aircraft


New York Post
Wed, 13 Jun 2018 20:18 UTC
Qantas airline
© David Gray / Reuters
Passengers have described the terrifying moment a vortex sent their Qantas flight into a 10-second "nosedive."

Hundreds of horrified travelers held hands ­believing they were about to die as the aircraft suddenly dropped over the Pacific Ocean on Sunday.

The dramatic ordeal afflicting passengers on the QF94 from Los Angeles to Melbourne is understood to have been caused by the vortex, or "wake turbulence" caused by another aircraft which took off just two minutes earlier.

QF94 passenger Janelle Wilson told The Australian the "three-quarters-full" plane suddenly entered a "free fall nosedive ... a direct decline towards the ocean" for about 10 seconds.

"It was between 1½ and two hours after we left LA and all of a sudden the plane went through a violent turbulence and then completely up-ended and we were nose­diving," Wilson told the newspaper yesterday.
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Star of David

Human Rights Watch calls to 'rip up old playbook' & investigate IDF actions in Gaza for war crimes


RT
Thu, 14 Jun 2018 15:50 UTC
gaza border protest march of return
© Ibraheem Abu Mustafa / Reuters
Human Rights Watch believes injuries and deaths of Palestinian protesters in the Gaza Strip, caused by Israeli soldiers' use of lethal force, may amount to war crimes and the officials responsible should face trial and sanctions.

The IDF's actions "highlight the need for the International Criminal Court to open a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine," the New-York-based global human rights watchdog said in a statement on Wednesday.

HRW's call came shortly before the UN General Assembly adopted a nonbinding resolution that condemns Israel's use of excessive force and calls for measures to protect Palestinians in Gaza.

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No Entry

Russian MP warns against sex with foreigners during World Cup, senior MP says don't worry about it - the more babies the better

Alec Luhn
Yahoo
Wed, 13 Jun 2018 15:25 UTC
russian girls
© Sputnik
A member of parliament has said Russian women should not have "intimate relations" with foreigners during the World Cup and warned against biracial babies.

Tamara Pletnyova, head of the family, women and children's affairs committee, argued that even if these relationships led to marriage, women or their children would inevitably be taken abroad by the man.

"Even if they get married, they'll take them away, then she doesn't know how to get back," Ms Pletnyova said on radio station Govorit Moskva. "Then they come to me in the committee, girls crying that their baby was taken away, was taken, and so on.

"I'd like people in our country to marry for love, no matter what nationality as long as they are Russian citizens who will build a family, live peacefully, have children and raise them."

She said women who had babies with foreigners around the time of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow often "suffered" as single mothers.

"It's good if it's one race, but if it's another race, then they really did. We should have our own babies," Ms Pletnyova said.

Comment: The Chairman of the State Duma Committee for Sports, Tourism and Youth, Mikhail Degtyarev, contradicted Pletnyova:
"The more World Cup love stories we have, the more people from different countries will fall in love with that game," Degtyarev said, according to Moskva Agency.

"The more children will be born [from that love], the better. Because many years from now, those children will remember that their parents' love story started here in Russia during the 2018 World Cup. Let's hope that the World Cup will give us many love stories, interracial couples and children."


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Pistol

Thefts rise after California reduces criminal penalties but violence is down

Don Thomson
The Sacramento Bee
Wed, 13 Jun 2018 15:41 UTC
Criminal cash
California voters' decision to reduce penalties for drug and property crimes in 2014 contributed to a jump in car burglaries, shoplifting and other theft, researchers reported.

Larcenies increased about 9 percent by 2016, or about 135 more thefts per 100,000 residents than if tougher penalties had remained, according to results of a study by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California released Tuesday.

Thefts from motor vehicles accounted for about three-quarters of the increase. San Francisco alone recorded more than 30,000 auto burglaries last year, which authorities largely blamed on gangs. Shoplifting may be leveling off, researchers found, but there is no sign of a decline in thefts from vehicles.
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Evil Rays

WhatsApp video of fake kidnapping sparks hysteria in India, mob beats men to death

Siobhan Heanue
ABC News
Tue, 12 Jun 2018 15:04 UTC
Nilotpal Das
© Facebook: Nilotpal DasNilotpal Das's father describes the musician as broad-minded and amicable.
Two men have been beaten to death by an angry mob in the Indian state of Assam because of false rumours spread on social media about child kidnapping gangs.

The pair had stopped to ask for directions when they were killed; their deaths filmed by attackers who then shared the gory videos online.

One of the victims, 29-year-old musician Nilotpal Das, can be seen covered in blood and pleading for his life.

Mr Das had travelled extensively through India and was described by his grieving father in Indian media as "broad-minded and amicable".

His friend, 30-year-old Abhijeet Nath, was also killed.
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