Society's ChildS


Eye 1

Trump administration sued by Center for Biological Diversity for allowing 'unlimited' dumping of fracking waste into Gulf of Mexico

Oil rig
© Henry Romero / ReutersA general view of the Centenario deep-water oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Veracruz, Mexico.
The Trump administration is being sued by an activist organization for allegedly allowing oil companies to dump waste from fracking and drilling into the Gulf of Mexico, without considering the detrimental effect it will have on marine life.

The Center for Biological Diversity filed a formal notice of intent Thursday, after the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a Clean Water Act permit in September for new and existing offshore oil and gas platforms operating in federal waters off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

The Center allege that the Trump administration approved the permit - which allows unlimited amounts of waste fluid and chemicals to be dumped into the Gulf of Mexico - without evaluating the effect it will have on sea turtles, whales and other marine life.

Comment: See also:


Newspaper

IBU strips rights of Russian Biathlon Union to vote

IBU President Anders Besseberg
© EPA/MARTIN SCHUTT, archiveIBU President Anders Besseberg
The Executive Board of the International Biathlon Union (IBU) has decided to abridge the rights of the Russian Biathlon Union over doping abuses, IBU President Anders Besseberg said on Sunday.


Comment: Where is the evidence? Also, if a member of the Russian Biathlon Union has been found to be doping, why is the RBU being punished for it? Does every union get punished this way when one of their members inevitably gets caught doping? No they don't. This is just more politicized nonsense emanating from the West to demonize Russia.


According to Besseberg, the Russian Biathlon Union has been stripped of the right to vote at congresses and nominate its candidates.

The IBU Executive Board met on Sunday to discuss the situation following the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) decision of December 5 to suspend the Russian Olympic Committee's membership over multiple doping abuse allegations, thus banning the Russian national team from taking part in the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in South Korea's PyeongChang under the national flag.

The IOC accused Russia of systematic abuse of anti-doping rules at various sporting events, including the 2014 Sochi Olympics. The IOC vowed however to observe the rights of clean athletes. Those who match the proposed criteria may be invited to the 2018 Games as "Olympic athletes from Russia," under a flag with five rings, it said.

Fire

Sweden: Masked youths pelt Jewish synagogue with Molotov cocktails during pro-Palestinian demonstration

Swedish police
In Gothenburg, Sweden, group of masked youths have attacked a synagogue with Molotov cocktails, amid a global backlash against the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Three people were arrested following the incident, prosecutors say.

"A burning object has been thrown" just outside the synagogue building, Lars Tunefjord, commanding officer at the police regional management center told Sveriges Radio. The officer added that police are currently at the scene conducting a "technical investigation and searching for the perpetrators."

Three people were arrested early on Sunday, a spokeswoman for the Swedish Prosecution Authority said, according to Reuters. The official did not report any motive for the attack. It was also unclear whether the attack was linked to Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

According to witness accounts, a fire started in the yard of the synagogue shortly after 10:00pm local time, after pro-Palestinian protesters, demonstrating against President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, pelted the building with burning projectiles. One of the firebombs landed just outside the synagogue compound where local Jewish students were holding an event.

Comment: Palestine, Turkey and Jordan outraged at Trump's decision for US to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital (VIDEOS)


Heart - Black

Diabetic amputee honks at unmarked police car; cop takes his car and leaves him stranded on the street

police road rage victim
© NJ.com/Reena Rose Sibayan
Road rage is a very real and very dangerous issue in America today. All too often a simple honk of the horn can end in a wreck, violence, or worse. However, when the person who rages carries a badge and a gun, they can claim legal authority to ticket, kidnap, cage, or kill you. Kieran Walsh, a 59-year-old Marine veteran, and partial amputee learned the hard way what a cop's road rage looks like when he was left stranded on the side of the road last month.

Walsh, who suffers from diabetes was on his way to pick up medication on November 27 when he noticed a car barrelling dangerously toward him. Walsh then briefly honked his horn as the car came "flying down" the street. It was an unmarked police car, occupied by Officer Stephen Salot.

Because Salot claims the authority to detain people for victimless crimes, he moved to pull the person over who would dare to honk at him. "Evidently he didn't like that," Walsh said of the brief horn beeping.

Since he can't exactly tell Walsh that he pulled him over in a fit of road rage, Salot told Walsh that he pulled him over because his handicap placard was hanging from his rearview mirror while he was driving and this allegedly obstructed his view.

After Salot had him pulled over for the non-crime of a hanging handicap tag, he then noticed that the sticker on Walsh's license plate had expired-music to the ears of this would-be tyrant.

Sheriff

Chief pathologist exposes Sheriff's falsification of autopsy reports to protect killer cops

homicide accident
The resignation of a chief autopsy doctor has raised questions as he is now claiming that he chose to resign because he no longer wanted to stand by and watch the sheriff override his findings from death investigations, in order to protect law enforcement.

Former Chief Forensic Pathologist, Dr. Bennet Omalu, claimed that when he was conducting autopsies on individuals who were killed by police officers, Sheriff-Coroner Steve Moore attempted to influence his medical findings, according to a report from KQED News.

Based on a series of documents that include memos from Omalu, the report claims the doctor said some of the most alarming death investigations Moore tried to override were those of people who "died in the custody of law enforcement officers who used Tasers or other types of force."
"The sheriff was using his political office as the coroner to protect police officers whenever someone died while in custody or during arrest. I had thought that this was initially an anomaly, but now, especially beginning in 2016, it has become routine practice."

X

7 times CNN caught faking news in 2017 and there's still 21 days to go

CNN blue bg
CNN has had a rough 2017 and it's not even over yet. The news network has repeatedly made key errors when breaking big stories, only to get embarrassed when the facts come to light.

Here are seven times CNN botched the news in 2017.

Comey Testimony

CNN ran a story on June 6 that claimed former FBI Director James Comey would use his testimony the next day to refute President Donald Trump's claim that Comey had assured him three separate times that he was not under FBI investigation. That story was debunked the same day when Comey's prepared remarks were released to the public, showing that Comey would actually confirm, rather than refute, Trump's assertion.

The botched story had four bylines, including those of three veteran journalists: anchor Jake Tapper, chief political analyst Gloria Borger and executive editor Eric Lichtblau, who had recently joined CNN from The New York Times. CNN was forced to rewrite the piece with a correction noting the error.

CNN Smears Scaramucci

Later that month, CNN.com published, deleted, and then retracted and apologized for an article that claimed Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci was the subject of a Senate investigation for his ties to Russian bankers. After an intense public backlash, three key members of CNN's investigative team resigned over their role in the retracted story. The network pulled its investigative team off the Russia story shortly afterwards.


Comment: For more on their "bombshell" of a botch see: Fake News! CNN Launches Bombshell Dud Over False Trump-Wikileaks Story


Airplane

Small plane crashes into San Diego house killing two

small plane crashed into a home in San Diego
© denisescatena / Instagram
Two people have been killed and two others injured after a small plane crashed into a home in San Diego's Clairemont neighborhood. The two survivors were taken to a nearby hospital with burn injuries.

All four victims of the incident were on board the plane, local authorities said as cited by the local TV channel KABC. The house the aircraft plunged into was apparently empty at the time, officials said. The crash started a fire, which caused further damage to the building. It took firefighters some 30 minutes to deal with it.

Attention

Puerto Rico's hurricane mortality rate probably in the thousands, far higher than the official count of 64

Puerto Rico Hurricane Maria
© Mario Tama / GettyIn the ten days following Hurricane Maria's landfall, Puerto Rico's Demographic Registry recorded an average of 118 deaths per day, up from the usual average of 82 per day.
Trump critics drew attention to a New York Times report on Saturday regarding the estimated death toll in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria, which left the island devastated after making landfall in September. While the official count of fatalities stands at 64, the Times' analysis found that a more realistic estimate would be in the thousands.

The newspaper reported that since Maria hit 42 days ago, 1,052 more deaths than usual have happened in the U.S. territory. The mortality rate has grown as half of Puerto Rico is still without power. A month after the storm, about one million residents did not have access to safe drinking water, and many were desperately using water from a Superfund site to bathe and drink.

The dire conditions Puerto Ricans were faced with following the storm have led researchers to believe that Maria was responsible for far more deaths than the government has admitted.

Comment: Almost forgotten: The devastation that is Puerto Rico


Fire

Asia's tallest wooden tower razed to ground at a Buddhist monastery (VIDEO)

Burning tower
© Xinhua / Global Look Press
A huge blaze has engulfed and destroyed a 16-story wooden tower, known as the tallest of its kind in Asia, after a fire raged through a monastery in Sichuan Province, southwest China.

Heart - Black

Afghan 'teen refugee', who raped and murdered German girl, is actually 33-years-old

Hussein Khavari,Maria Ladenburger
Hussein Khavari raped and murdered Maria, the daughter of a top EU official
The Afghan refugee, who is now on trial for the rape and murder of the medical student Maria Ladenburger in October 2016, is older than previously thought.

Hussein Khavari entered Germany in November 2015 without identity papers. He told authorities that he was born in 1999 in Afghanistan and that his father was killed during the war.

But it now appears that his father is still alive. According to German media his father said his son was born in 1984 and that he is 33-years-old.