Society's ChildS


Stock Up

Ethereum beats bitcoin this year with 8,000% surge


RT
Wed, 13 Dec 2017 19:03 UTC
ethereum coin
© Jaap Arriens / Global Look Press
Despite all the hype surrounding bitcoin, there are virtual currencies that have seen an even more astounding rise in value. Rival cryptocurrency ethereum has just reached an all-time high, and is now up 8,000 percent this year.

The second-most valuable digital currency broke through the $500 and $600 price milestones before setting a new record of $707 at 17:20 GMT on Wednesday. It has been an amazing ride for ethereum, which began the year trading at $8.34.

Launched in 2015 by Canadian computer programmer Vitalik Buterin, ethereum's market value is currently above $68 billion, according to Coinmarketcap.com.

The rise in value was reportedly triggered by the news that Swiss financial giant UBS is going to lead an ethereum-based blockchain platform, along with such companies as Credit Suisse, Barclays, KBC, Swiss stock exchange SIX and Thomson Reuters. The network is aimed to help the firms to comply with the European Union's Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II - an overhaul of EU rules to improve financial-market transparency.
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Water

90% of plastic polluting our oceans comes from just 10 rivers

Verity Burns
The Sun
Tue, 12 Dec 2017 11:40 UTC
Turtle plastic ocean pollution
© AlamyPlastic pollution in the sea is having a devastating effect on wildlife and their habitats
The report, conducted by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany, was based on dozens of reports, as well as the debris collected at 79 sampling sites along 57 rivers.

The worst offenders are some of the longest and largest waterways in the world, and are in countries with poor waste management, when it comes to collection, dumping and recycling.

They're also the rivers with the largest population of people living alongside them, with rivers from inland areas particularly affected.
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Bulb

New pedophile law in Australia leads to man being detained at Sydney airport attempting to leave country


RT
Wed, 13 Dec 2017 18:21 UTC
australian police
A convicted child molester has been detained at Sydney Airport while attempting to leave the country. The man was stopped under new laws aimed at preventing pedophiles convicted in Australia from traveling overseas, namely to Southeast Asia, for sex tourism.

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told reporters at Sydney Airport that the man was being questioned by the Federal Police. It is not clear where the registered child offender was attempting to fly to.

Up to 800 Australian child sex offenders traveled overseas last year. About 40 percent of them did so without informing the authorities of their travel plans, Bishop told reporters on Wednesday. "This will now stop," she promised.
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Russian Flag

Alternate universe Israel: A visit to the Jewish autonomous region of Birobidzhan... in Russia's Far East

Yakov Rabkin
+972
Mon, 15 Dec 2014 17:37 UTC
Last summer, after three months of teaching in Japan, I decided to return home to Montreal via Birobidzhan, in Russia's Far East. The Jewish Autonomous Region was getting ready to celebrate its 80th anniversary, and I easily found people to host me.

Built by Jewish enthusiasts from a dozen countries including Argentina, Canada, France, the United States and British Palestine, Birobidzhan is conceptually akin to Israel, which also considers Jews as a nationality rather than a confession. But unlike the State of Israel, Birobidzhan was built on a true "land without a people" and did not have to displace anyone to make the Communist Jewish dream come true. This is one of the reasons an earlier plan to create a Jewish autonomous region in the Crimea, populated for thousands of years, was abandoned in favor of the Far East. Of course, most settlers came from within the Soviet Union, particularly from the Ukraine and Belorussia, where millions of Jews had been living for centuries. They wanted to contribute to the edification of socialism explicitly as Jews.

Two local Jews, cousins Sasha and Igor, met me at the Khabarovsk airport, the closest to Birobidzhan. Igor had recently returned from Israel after 17 years, two of which he spent in the military.

jewish oblast russia
© Yakov RabkinA sign marks the entrance to Birobidzhan.

Comment: Also by the author:

Jews in Iran: A travelogue

"Is it anti-Semitic to criticize and boycott Israel?" asks Yakov Rabkin

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Bad Guys

America needs new consensus on what is of vital interest to its people, and what isn't

Patrick Buchanan
Information Clearing House
Tue, 12 Dec 2017 15:54 UTC
United States flag lady liberty
© David Holt, Flickr
"We will never accept Russia's occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea," declaimed Rex Tillerson last week in Vienna.

"Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns full control of the peninsula to Ukraine."

Tillerson's principled rejection of the seizure of land by military force - "never accept" - came just one day after President Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and pledged to move our embassy there.

How did Israel gain title to East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Golan Heights? Invasion, occupation, colonization, annexation.

Those lands are the spoils of victory from Israel's 1967 Six-Day War.

Is Israel being severely sanctioned like Russia? Not quite.
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Dollars

French business paid $15.2 million to ISIS and terrorist groups in Syria, say human rights lawyers


Middle East Eye
Wed, 13 Dec 2017 17:40 UTC
LafargeHolcim CEO Eric Olsen
© AFPFile photo of former CEO of the construction materials giant LafargeHolcim Eric Olsen who resigned in April
French cement group Lafarge paid close to $15.2m to armed organisations, including the Islamic State (IS) group, to keep operating in Syria from 2011 to 2015, human rights lawyers said on Tuesday.

The lawyers were speaking at a news conference on the course of a preliminary inquiry launched in June by French prosecutors into Lafarge's operations on suspicion of "financing of a terrorist enterprise".

The lawyers for rights group Sherpa said a large part of the money went directly or indirectly into the pockets of IS and that payments lasted until well after the closure of Lafarge's Jalabiya plant in September 2014.

They were citing a figure pinpointed by prosecutors examining Lafarge's activities in Syria, in the throes of civil war since 2011, and drawn from an internal report by US law firm Baker and McKenzie for Lafarge.
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Dig

Human remains dug up adjacent to old Jewish cemetery in Poland, rabbi sees it as a scandal


RT
Thu, 07 Dec 2017 18:27 UTC
Cemetery
© Kacper Pempel / Reuters
Human remains have been dug up near an old Jewish cemetery in Poland, in what the country's chief rabbi has described as a "scandal." The incident, which occurred during construction work, is being investigated by the local prosecutor's office.

The remains were found in the city of Siemiatycze Tuesday, on grounds adjacent to the fence of a Jewish cemetery. The bones were found during construction work for a new supermarket, parking lot, and electrical transformer station, according to AP.

Although reports state the remains were dug up in an area adjacent to the cemetery, beyond its fence, and that the land belongs to the Polish Motor Association (PZMot), Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich said the area is still part of the cemetery, Gazeta Prawna reported. The rabbi said the Jewish community should have been informed that construction work was being planned at the site.

Schudrich called the incident a "full-out scandal" and "the worst deserialization of the Jewish cemetery" that he has seen since assuming his role as chief rabbi 17 years ago. Under Jewish law, human remains are not to be disturbed.
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Sherlock

Caterpillar, Porsche among corporations that paid spy firms to collect intelligence on activists


RT
Wed, 13 Dec 2017 15:36 UTC
Spies
© Global Look Press
Big, brand-name companies hired private intelligence firms to monitor political groups considered to be threats to their businesses, leaked documents reveal. The papers shine light on the shadowy world of corporate intelligence gathering.

British Airways, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Porsche and Caterpillar are among the companies that have been identified as having enlisted the services of corporate intelligence firms to spy on - and sometimes infiltrate - activist groups.

Hundreds of pages of leaked documents from two corporate intelligence firms, C2i International and Inkerman Group, reveal widespread use of spies-for-hire among the large companies over several years in the 2000s.

The corporate intelligence firms obtained emails, meeting minutes and other internal documents from the groups they spied on, according to The Guardian, which obtained the leaked documents in partnership with the Bureau for Investigative Journalism. Infiltration was also a common tactic used by the private spy firms. In one notable instance, a private spook "dressed up as a pirate with a cutlass and eyepatch as part of a protest."

Comment: See also:

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Target

Famed NYC restaurateur accused of sexual misconduct by 10 women

Kate Sheehy
New York Post
Tue, 12 Dec 2017 16:57 UTC
Ken Friedman
© StarpixKen Friedman
The owner of one of the city's most famous celeb hangouts, the Spotted Pig, has been accused of routinely groping female employees and demanding sex and nude photos from them - while allowing his buddies to molest them too, a new report says.

An after-hours space on the third floor of restaurateur Ken Friedman's tony Village hot spot is even known among workers and industry insiders as "the rape room" - where public sex is on display, according to the New York Times, quoting 10 women who are accusing the powerful businessman of unwanted sexual advances.

Former longtime server Trish Nelson said Friedman once grabbed her head as she was kneeling down behind the bar to get some glasses, told her "while you're down there," and pulled it toward his crotch - all in front of actress Amy Poehler - in 2007, according to the Times.

Comment: Piggish behavior, yes, but hardly worthy of losing his career over. What happened to the days when certain men were known to be pigs and women acted accordingly?

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Vader

Politicization of sport continues as IOC sanctions Russian women's hockey team


RT
Wed, 13 Dec 2017 16:28 UTC
russian women's hockey players
© Vladimir Fedorenko / SputnikFrom left: Ekaterina Lebedeva, Anna Vinogradova and Alexandra Vafina
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has extended its sanctions against Russia by adding six members of the national women's ice hockey team to the long list of athletes who are now prohibited from participating in any future Olympics.

The results of the Russian women's ice hockey squad from the 2014 Sochi Games, where they finished sixth, were also annulled by the IOC on Tuesday.

"Today the International Olympic Committee has published new decisions from the Oswald Commission hearings, which are being conducted in the context of the Sochi 2014 forensic and analytic doping investigations," the IOC official statement read.

"As a result, six Russian ice-hockey players, Inna Dyubanok, Ekaterina Lebedeva, Ekaterina Pashkevich, Anna Shibanova, Ekaterina Smolentseva and Galina Skiba, have been sanctioned. The case opened against a seventh athlete has been closed without a sanction."

Comment: Previously:

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