Society's ChildS


Star of David

Razing Palestine: Palestinian forced to demolish his own shop in occupied East Jerusalem


Middle East Monitor
Fri, 17 Nov 2017 09:37 UTC
Israel demolishes palestinian homes
© Issam Rimawi/Anadolu AgencyPalestinians hang Palestinian flags after Israeli occupation forces demolished their home in the West Bank on 16 August 2017.
A Palestinian store owner was forced to demolish his own shop in occupied East Jerusalem on Tuesday, after Israel issued an order to demolition the property and threatened to charge the man for the demolition.

The Wadi Hilweh Information Centre, based in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan, reported that Amin Abbasi was told by Israel's Jerusalem Municipality two weeks ago that if he did not demolish his shop within 30 days, crews from the municipality would carry out the demolition and force him to pay the costs, which typically are extremely high.

Occupation authorities said this was because the property was built without the nearly impossible-to-obtain building permit.

The centre said that the shop was built two years ago.

Abbasi's demolition was the second recorded self-demolition to take place in Silwan in 48 hours, after another Palestinian destroyed his own home on Sunday for the same reasons, leaving his family of four homeless.

Comment: The Israeli government has been destroying the homes and livelihoods of Palestinians for decades with complete impunity - and those are the LEAST of their crimes.

Declassified Israeli transcripts discuss ethnic cleansing
Israeli-Zionist Genocide And Racism Unmasked Since The Nakbah in 1948

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Propaganda

Journalists create cyptocurrency to free themselves of publishers' vested interests


RT
Sun, 19 Nov 2017 17:06 UTC
reporters
© Global Look Press
The Californian investment fund, HigherOrderVC, and journalists from across the world have teamed up to create a new cryptocurrency to provide financing for investigative journalism.

The new virtual currency, named PressCoin, is aimed at empowering independent journalists with new tools to stand against fake news, as well as improving their objectiveness and financial independence. PressCoin is reportedly expected to wean journalism off the advertising revenue model, upending corporate media monopolies with collaborative content.

"Today journalists are bound to the vested interests of publishers. More and more publishers are chasing advertising dollars. To get views, they defer to social media platforms. And so does their content. This not only compromises the integrity of quality, independent journalism, it also pushes money onto social media platforms,"says Amit Rathore, PressCoin's President, as quoted by Payment Week, a New York-based magazine covering mobile payments.
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Santa

Catholic priest says Christmas has been "hijacked by Santa and reindeer"


RT
Sun, 19 Nov 2017 16:49 UTC
A Catholic priest has urged the church to abandon the word "Christmas" because it has been "hijacked by Santa and reindeer."

A hand-carved nativity scene.
© AFPA hand-carved nativity scene.
Dublin-based priest Father Desmond O'Donnell said believers should now use the word "Nativity" instead of "Christmas," because the latter has lost all its meaning to commercialization.

Comment: While the commercialization of Christmas is a valid point, members of the church might better serve the public if it would address the issue of child sex abuse in it's organization. See:

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Gear

Appropriate response to sexual misconduct vexes both parties in wake of Franken, Moore allegations

Laura Litvan and Arit John
Bloomberg
Fri, 17 Nov 2017 15:15 UTC
Al Franken
© Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg
Allegations about improper sexual conduct by a Democratic senator and a Republican senatorial candidate are forcing the Senate to confront a difficult dilemma: where to draw the line and how to mete out punishment.

How should Democrat Al Franken of Minnesota be dealt with after an allegation he forced his tongue in a woman's mouth and appeared to grope her while she slept? Should Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore be thrown out of the chamber if he wins election on Dec. 12 because of accusations he sexually assaulted or fondled teenage girls when he was in his 30s?

The questions have politicians across the country and in both parties, including President Donald Trump, grappling with how to calibrate their responses at a time when sexual harassment allegations are getting a heightened level of attention by the public.

"Obviously that's not acceptable and that's why we do the ethics investigation," Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio said a few hours after Franken said he would submit to a review by the Senate ethics committee. "I don't know where the line is."

Comment:
Roy Moore caught up in Hollywood Weinstein Hysteria
Los Angeles broadcaster accuses Senator Al Franken of sexual harassment

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Cardboard Box

Orange County: 1,000 bikes found in bunker underneath homeless encampment

Jordan Graham
OC Register
Thu, 16 Nov 2017 17:57 UTC
underground bikes
© OC Sheriff’s DeptOrange County Public Works discovered 1,000 bikes in a flood-control tunnel in Santa Ana, two miles northeast of the former Fountain Valley homeless encampment.
The makeshift bunker beneath a recently-displaced Fountain Valley homeless encampment was big enough for a grown person to stand inside, replete with wood-paneled walls and a support beam, and accessible only via a small hatch camouflaged to blend in with its dirt surroundings.

The half-loaded .357 Magnum found near the same camp, along the Santa Ana River, contained three empty shell casings - meaning it had been fired.

And the 1,000 bicycles discovered hidden away in the flood-control channel's dark tunnel system in Santa Ana, two miles north of the encampment, could suggest a large-scale theft ring.

Orange County sheriff's deputies and public employees said they uncovered unusual and dangerous conditions in the recently cleared homeless camps on the riverbed in Fountain Valley and in portions of the river to the north. The findings, they said, posed public safety risks and indicated that the area was rife with crime.
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Bullseye

Apple's diversity chief being replaced for saying white males can also be diverse

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Sat, 18 Nov 2017 17:31 UTC
Denise Young Smith
Denise Young Smith
Silicon Valley's disdain for its mostly white, mostly male tech workforce has reached absurd new heights.

The New York Post is reporting that, after just six months on the job, Apple Diversity Chief Denise Young Smith, who was named vice president of diversity and inclusion in May, has resigned her post after making a "controversial" comment last month during a summit in Bogota, Colombia.

What was Young's crime? She insinuated that "diversity" can still exist among a group of white men because of their different life experiences.

"There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they're going to be diverse too because they're going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation," the inaugural diversity chief said.


Comment: Diversity of thought and experience is much more valuable than outer appearance.


"Diversity is the human experience," she said, according to Quartz. "I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT."
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Stop

Yankees go home! US Marine kills elderly Japanese man while driving drunk in Okinawa


RT
Sun, 19 Nov 2017 17:08 UTC
Japan officer
© Reuters
A US military truck collided with a light vehicle in Okinawa, Japan, killing an elderly civilian, local media reports. The driver, a member of the US Marine Corps, was drunk at the moment of the crash and is being questioned.

On Sunday morning, the driver of a US military truck reportedly violated traffic regulations, running a red light and crashing into a light vehicle at an intersection in Naha, the capital of Okinawa Prefecture, according to NHK. The Japanese driver, 61, of the civilian truck was taken unconscious to a local hospital, where he died an hour and a half later.
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Sheriff

Cop loses control of patrol car and plows into mother and her two children

Matt Agorist
The Free Thought Project
Sat, 18 Nov 2017 17:23 UTC
police chase
Two children were killed and their mother severely injured Thursday night when a Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy plowed them down on the sidewalk after he lost control while responding to a call.

The three-car crash occurred about 7:30 p.m. in the 800 block of South Indiana Street in Boyle Heights. The impact thrust the sheriff's vehicle onto the sidewalk, where it ran into a mother and her two children, ages 7 and 9, said Los Angeles police Officer Drake Madison, an LAPD spokesman, according to the LA Times.

According to the report in the Times:
A security video obtained by The Times from Green Mill Liquor Store shows the moments after a sheriff's SUV drove onto the sidewalk and hit the pedestrians.

The clip shows the sheriff's SUV after it had already struck at least two people. The vehicle appears in the frame from the side of a building. The video shows the split second after the front of the SUV - with its emergency lights on - hit a trash can. A person rolls into the frame on the sidewalk. Because the video has no audio, it's unclear if the cruiser's sirens were on.

Just moments before, the video shows a man walking through a parking lot next to the building abruptly turning and running toward the street just as the SUV appears, apparently reacting to the sound of the crash.

The clip is about eight seconds long.

Images from the scene show the crumpled right front side of the SUV and the tire folded under its mangled frame.

One child died at the scene, and one died at a hospital, he said. The mother is in critical condition, Madison said.
The crash severely injured seven other people as well. According to Madison, in addition to two deputies and three pedestrians, someone from one of the other two cars was transported to a hospital.
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Pistol

Cracking under pressure? Paris cop goes on rampage - Shoots three people dead before committing suicide


RT
Sun, 19 Nov 2017 15:16 UTC
cops
© Thomas Samson / AFPPolice officers patrol next to red chemical dust left over blood stains from a crime scene on November 19, 2017 in Sarcelles.
A police officer shot dead three people and injured three others before committing suicide in the northern suburbs of Paris, according to local prosecutors. It all started as he and his girlfriend were "discussing their separation in a car."

The shooting began at around 8:45pm on Saturday night in the commune of Sarcelles, where an argument broke out between 31-year-old officer Arnaud Martin and his 25-year-old girlfriend as they sat in a car outside her parents' house, Eric Corbaux, the public prosecutor of Pontoise, told reporters.

Arnaud then shot her in the face before opening fire on two passers-by who, as a preliminary investigation has shown, tried to intervene. Both were fatally shot. The first, a 30-year-old listening to music in his car, had just stepped out to "see what was going on."

The second, who had gone out to buy cigarettes, was about to celebrate his 44th birthday with his children, his sister-in-law, Noria Madani, told AFP. "He told his children that he was coming back right away and police have come to say he will never come back," she said.

Comment: That makes 10(+3) in 10 days:

NINE French cops kill themselves in one week - 61 police suicides in France so far this year

Oy vey.

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Wreath

French court orders mayor to remove his nativity scene from city hall


Knights Templar International
Sat, 18 Nov 2017 17:14 UTC
nativity scene
A French appeals court has ordered the mayor of Béziers to permanently take down a nativity scene that was installed at the city hall in 2014.

The administrative court of appeal of Marseille has ruled that the nativity scene, installed by Robert Ménard after he had been elected mayor of the Béziers, had no place in the city hall.

Shortly after its installation in 2014, complaints were lodged against the religious scene, with some claiming that it breaches France's secularization laws.
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