Liam Neeson has described the wave of sexual misconduct allegations that have swept the entertainment industry as "a bit of a witch-hunt" and appeared to dismiss breast groping as "childhood stuff" in an interview on Irish television.

Speaking on The Late Late Show on RTE, the Hollywood A-lister said "there's some people, famous people, being suddenly accused of touching some girl's knee, or something, and suddenly they're being dropped from their program, or something".


The French actor Catherine Deneuve drew sharp criticism this week when she also used the term "witch-hunt" to describe the chain of events since allegations of serial sexual assault were made against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein last year.

Authorities in the central Kazakh city of Temirtau have launched an investigation after a mysterious dust turned the snow black. Local residents have blamed the metallurgical complex in the area for causing the strange pollution.

A winter wonderland was turned into a rather depressing view in early January, when a layer of soot-like dust covered the Kazakh city. Temirtau residents took to social media to share their pictures and footage of snow piles coated with black dust.

"How is it possible to live in a such city? Look at this dirty snow and dust settling on clothes. It's hard to breathe, I suffer from asthma," one local woman complained, as she signed a petition "against black snow." More than 5,000 people have put their names to the letter so far, calling on the authorities to take action against the pollution.

Former Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) officer Richard Scavone pleaded guilty last year in federal court to assaulting a handcuffed woman in his custody. After the plea, authorities released the body camera footage of the assault. It is nothing short of infuriating and shows the level of violence a woman-abusing cop was willing to take to assert his authority.

This week, in a rare move, the former bad cop was actually held accountable and was sentenced to a year in prison. As the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported, U.S. District Judge Richard Boulware also ordered Scavone to serve a year of supervised release, pay a $20,000 fine and complete 300 hours of community service after his imprisonment, according to the Justice Department.

The encounter happened in January of 2015 after this abusive cop thought he had nabbed himself a prostitute.

Voting continues in the Czech Republic in the presidential elections. Eight candidates are seeking to oust the pro-Russia and China, Milos Zeman.

The current president, Milos Zeman leads the first round of elections in the Czech Republic.

Eight candidates are seeking to oust the 73 year old, whose inclination towards far-right groups and warm relations with Russia and China has split public opinion.

In a recent interview, Moby said his friends at the CIA asked him to take advantage of a greater "social media following" to spread rumors about President Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign.

Multi-award winning recording artist and activist Moby gave an interview to WFPK on Thursday to promote his new album, "Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt," but somehow ended up spending the last half of the interview talking about Trump and Russia.

Employees were allowed to award those who spoke out against Damore's memo 'peer bonuses' monitored by the 'Google Recognition Team.'
This article quotes communications that contain obscene language.

The lawsuit James Damore filed against Google on Monday provides a fascinating glimpse into the way the company and many of its employees see the workplace in terms of a demographic hierarchy, and what happens to those who diverge from the consensus view.

Details from diversity training sessions, accounts of alleged reverse discrimination, and screenshots of internal communications on company forums and message boards in the lawsuit cast the company culture as extremely hostile to employees with unpopular opinions, especially heterosexuals, men, white people, and those who hold conservative views.

How soon before we start demanding dangerous solutions to our mass-driven anxieties?

Fear has always been a tool of the vested interests to retain power, make money, and keep the masses under control. But now things may be veering off the rails.

The old fears deployed by the nation's power centers during and after the Cold War-commies and terrorists-are reliably set, with the levers of power fueling and cooling down as needed. There's always been an element of manipulation at work, as evil and insidious as that is (think Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud"), but it's been one that's maintained a strategic balance. You want enough fear to make people compliant, but not so much that they end up chasing each other-or their leaders-with pitchforks or driving cars through crowds of protesters.

One of Putin's biggest fans and a prominent businessman in the agriculture industry, Stefan Dürr has built a farming empire in Russia. Dürr emigrated from Germany to Siberia when he was a student and now has his own empire in Russia. He owns at least 200,000 hectares of land and has 60,000 cows and 4,000 employees. Two years ago Vladimir Putin personally handed him the certificate of Russian citizenship.

Amnesty International has reiterated a call for an independent investigation into rights abuses in Myanmar's Rakhine state after the country's army admitted its soldiers were involved in the murder of 10 Rohingya.

The remains of the victims were found in December in a mass grave outside Inn Din, a village in the Maungdaw township.

In a Facebook post on Wednesday, Min Aung Hlaing, the military's commander in chief, said soldiers and villagers had confessed to killing 10 suspected Rohingya fighters on September 2.

James Gomez, Amnesty's regional director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, called the admission a positive development, but said it was "only the tip of the iceberg".

It "warrants serious independent investigation into what other atrocities were committed amid the ethnic cleansing campaign that has forced out more than 655,000 Rohingya from Rakhine State since last August," he said on Thursday.

Mother Jones thinks the Climategate email leak and the Democrat Podesta Email hack were all part of a grand Russian conspiracy to subvert the West.

7 Years Before Russia Hacked the Election, Someone Did the Same Thing to Climate Scientists

"Why does this story sound so darned familiar?"
REBECCA LEBER AND AJ VICENSJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 ISSUE

One Saturday morning in June, two days after the president had announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, Michael Mann was tweeting about Donald Trump.

Mann, a Penn State professor who is one of the world's most prominent climate scientists, was thinking about the daily barrage of revelations surrounding Russia's efforts to help Trump win the previous year's election. The hacked Democratic documents posted on WikiLeaks. The media craze over private emails that had been ripped out of context. Smear campaigns circulating on social media.

"#Russia #Wikileaks #HackedEmails #Sabotaged #ClimateAgreements," tweeted Mann. "Why does this story sound so darned familiar?"

Seven years earlier, Trump was riffing on a very different set of hacked emails. The real estate mogul had called into Fox News after a blizzard to declare that climate change was a hoax. Trump claimed that "one of the leaders of global warming" had recently admitted in a private email that years of scientific research were nothing but "a con."

...

In hindsight, the Climategate hack, clearly timed to disrupt the Copenhagen negotiations, looks like a precursor to the hack that helped shape the outcome of the 2016 election. That's how John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman whose stolen emails were posted on WikiLeaks in the final weeks of the campaign, sees it. The parallels go beyond the hacks themselves. "I think it was the intentionality of influencing the public debate," he says.

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