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Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett blasts mainstream media coverage of Syria: "Lies are their agenda"


RT
Wed, 14 Dec 2016 17:48 UTC
aleppo destruction
© Omar Sanadiki / ReutersBoys stand amid the damage in the government-held al-Shaar neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria December 13, 2016
Western mainstream media's coverage of the Syrian war is "compromised" as their local sources are "not credible" and, in the case of Aleppo, not even there, a Canadian journalist said in an emotional speech at the UN.

"I've been many times to Homs, to Maaloula, to Latakia and Tartus [in Syria] and again, Aleppo, four times. And people's support of their government is absolutely true. Whatever you hear in the corporate media is completely opposite," Eva Bartlett, a Canadian journalist and rights activist, told a press conference arranged by the Syrian mission to the UN.

"And, on that note, what you hear in the corporate media, and I will name them - BBC, Guardian, the New York Times etc. - on Aleppo is also the opposite of reality," she added. The mainstream media narrative, she argued, is meant to mislead the public about what is really happening in Syria by demonizing President Bashar Assad's government and altering the facts on Russia's support for Damascus.

Bartlett's statements did not seemingly play well with everyone in the room. A reporter from Aftenposten, Norway's largest print newspaper, challenged her and demanded Bartlett explain what she thought was the "agenda" of Western mainstream media. "Why should we lie, why the international organizations on the ground should lie? How can you justify calling all of us liars?" he said.

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Arrow Down

Ukraine 'discovers' vast gas deposit that was already found in the 1980s


RT
Wed, 14 Dec 2016 18:00 UTC
Geology and Mineral Resources of Ukraine
© State Service of Geology and Mineral Resources of Ukraine
A Ukrainian exploration vessel has 'discovered' a huge gas field in the Black Sea. However, it turns out the field was already found by the Soviet Union 30 years ago.

"The fact that Ukraine once again began to search for oil and gas on the shelf of the Black Sea indicates a titanic shift in exploration work by the country. According to our estimates, gas reserves amounting to at least 40 billion cubic meters in an area of 7,000 square meters," said Ukrainian Minister for Mineral Resources Nikolay Boyarkin.

According to Boyarkin, Ukraine has enough resources to satisfy its gas needs and can produce it on its own.

Comment: Kiev desperate to find anything to help spread propaganda that everything is going well for Ukraine.

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Sheriff

99 Dallas officers quit or retired in last 10 weeks

Mark David Smith
Star-Telegram
Tue, 13 Dec 2016 17:45 UTC
dallas police
Police recruiters are trying to bring in hundreds of new police officers in Dallas.

Nearly 100 officers in the Dallas Police Department have quit or retired since October, according to multiple reports, worsening the department's deficit of personnel.

Interim Police Chief David Pughes told City Council members Monday night that the department wanted to fill the next academy class with 60 officers but has only hired 30 for the February class, the Dallas Morning News reported. The department is down to 3,252 officers and wold like to have at least 3,500.

CBS 11 reported that most of the 99 who left since Oct. 1 were some of Dallas' most experienced officers, according to the incoming president of the Dallas Police Association.

The recruitment/departure rate problems stem from the last fiscal year, which ended in September, in which 294 officers left and 142 were hired.

Comment: Meanwhile in Indiana, the entire police force in Bunker Hill (pop. 888) quit, because the town council repeatedly asked them to "do illegal, unethical, and immoral things." Whether it's the risk of being targeted with violence, the tarnished image because of excessive use of force and murder, the rising crime rate, or low salaries and poor planning, police forces in the U.S. are not what they could be, or should be.

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Bizarro Earth

Angry residents abduct drug kingpin's mother in retaliation for community kidnappings; demand prisoner exchange

Mark Stevenson
Star Telegram
Tue, 13 Dec 2016 17:40 UTC
kidnapping
© FBI
In one of the stranger chapters of Mexico's drug war, angry people in a southern town kidnapped the mother of a gang leader to demand the release of their loved ones.

The government of Guerrero state said Tuesday that it was sending about 220 soldiers and police to try to defuse the situation in Totolapan.

The town has been controlled for years by a drug gang boss whose proper name is Raybel Jacobo de Almonte, but who is better known as "El Tequilero."

De Alamonte has lived up to his nickname, which translates roughly as "The Tequila Drinker." In his only known public appearance, he was captured on video drinking with the town's mayor-elect. De Alamonte mumbles inaudibly and has to be held up in a sitting position by one of his henchmen.

In recent months, his gang - also known as the Tequileros -has been fighting turf battles with other gangs in the area. Last week, the Tequileros allegedly kidnapped several inhabitants of Totolapan who they wanted to extort or whom they suspected of supporting a rival.

In response, a few dozen men appeared this week in the streets of Totolapan waving shotguns and hunting rifles. In a video, the men carry banners calling for action against El Tequilero and identify themselves as a "self-defense" force, as vigilantes are known in the region.
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Magnify

Skewed perceptions: Poll shows British and French greatly overestimate their countries' Muslim population


RT
Wed, 14 Dec 2016 13:35 UTC
Ramadan East London
© Chris Helgren / Reuters Muslims attend Friday prayers on a rainy first day of Ramadan, at the courtyard of a housing estate next to a small BBC community centre and mosque in east London.
Members of the British public greatly overestimate the country's Muslim population and think the number is growing at a far greater rate than it really is, a new "Index of Ignorance" study has found.

The Ipsos Mori survey, The Perils of Perception, measured the gap between public perception and reality in 40 countries in 2016 for a wide range of topics. It aims to highlight how wrong people are about key global and national issues.

For the UK, the results found respondents believed one in six civilians is Muslim, when the real proportion is less than one in 20.

The poll also showed that members of the public think 22 percent of Britain's population will be Muslim by 2020, when researchers have put the figure closer to six percent.

Comment: Five facts about the size and makeup of Europe's Muslim population

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Pistol

13 y.o. girl arrested in school shooting plot


News 9
Wed, 14 Dec 2016 17:32 UTC
empty classroom
Police have arrested a 13-year-old girl suspected of plotting a mass shooting at her northern Oklahoma high school.

Acting on a tip, police in Tonkawa executed a search warrant Sunday at the girl's home and seized handguns and rifles, ammunition, and the girl's personal writings. Police Chief John Whitham said Wednesday that it's unclear how she got the weapons.

Police say the girl, who lives with her parents and grandmother, also made threats about specific students at the school, and that their families had been notified. She was charged as a juvenile with making threats to perform acts of violence and is being held in a youth detention center.
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Arrow Up

Precedent set as Texas man found not guilty for shooting 3 cops during no-knock raid

Jack Burns
The Free Thought Project
Wed, 14 Dec 2016 16:58 UTC
officers shot in no-knock raid
Ray Rosas is a free man tonight after a jury of his peers found him not guilty of shooting three Corpus Christi police officers on February 19, 2015. On that day, early in the morning, CCPD executed a no-knock search warrant, forcing entry into the home without first knocking and announcing they were the police.

A flash bang grenade was fired into Rosas' bedroom, reportedly stunning the 47-year-old, who then opened fire on the intruders. Three officers were wounded; officers Steven Ruebelmann, Steven Brown, and Andrew Jordan. Police were looking for drugs and Rosas' nephew, who they suspected to be a dealer. However, the unnamed nephew was not home at the time of the raid.

Rosas spent nearly 2 years in jail awaiting trial, which concluded Tuesday with a Nueces County jury finding him not guilty. Rosas' defense maintained, based on statements he made immediately following the shooting and later in jail that he did not know the men breaking into his home were police officers and there was no way he could've known, having been disoriented by the flash-bang stun grenade. "The case is so easy, this is a self-defense case," said Rosas' lawyer in closing arguments.

Rosas originally faced three counts of attempted capital murder, but the prosecution dropped those charges just before the trial began, opting instead to try him for three counts of aggravated assault on the police officers. The jury sided with his defense attorney's argument he had a right to defend his home and found him not guilty on all charges.
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Heart - Black

A child dies every 10 minutes: Malnutrition at all time high in Yemen


RT
Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:32 UTC
starvation malnutrition yemen
© Abduljabbar Zeyad / Reuters Salem Abdullah Musabih, 6, is held by his mother as she sits on a bed at a malnutrition intensive care unit at a hospital in the Red Sea port city of Hodaida, Yemen.
Nearly 2.2 million Yemeni children are in need of urgent aid, as malnutrition is at an "all-time high," a UNICEF report claims. The figures represent a 200 percent increase from 2014, with severe acute malnutrition affecting 462,000 children.

Physically severe acute malnutrition (SAM) is manifested in grotesquely slim bodies and stunted growth, as is the case in Sa'ada governorate in the northwest, which has the world's highest stunting rates, according to Monday's document - eight out of 10 children.

It is joined by four other governorates, all experiencing alarming rates of SAM.

Another 1.7 million children suffer from moderate acute malnutrition.

The report estimates that one child dies every 10 minutes from preventable diseases ranging from diarrhea to respiratory tract infections, as well as malnutrition itself.

Comment: The humanitarian disaster in Yemen is horrific beyond imagining, courtesy of Saudi Arabia, aided and abetted by the US, UK and Israel.

'Yemen on brink of abyss': 19 months of hell, 7,000+ killed, 37K injured, 2.1M displaced

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Snakes in Suits

Carnival Cruise Line outsourcing forces fired employees to train foreign replacements


RT
Wed, 14 Dec 2016 16:44 UTC
Carnival cruise ship
© Carnival Cruise Lines / Reuters
Carnival Cruise Line's slogan is 'Fun for all, all for fun', but its employees aren't having a good time after reportedly being told their positions will be replaced by foreign workers - and that they will be responsible for training them.

Although the holidays are a time when many workers expect a few perks from their employer, that wasn't the case for between 200 and 300 IT workers who were told they soon wouldn't have a job with Carnival.

"It was a hard blow to take," employee Matthew Culver, who has worked for Carnival's IT department for two years, told CBS Miami.

"There are people that have been there over 20 years that were just in disbelief; watching the people crying and wondering what was going to happen. I mean it was really sad to see. It was very hard," he added.

Comment: Will we see a Trump reaction to this news?

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Pirates

How ISIS managed to retake Palmyra


Sputnik
Wed, 14 Dec 2016 16:36 UTC
palmyra
© REUTERS/ Omar Sanadiki
Daesh terrorists have managed to enter the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra because they used so-called "cloud tactic" to secretly move in small groups, said Alexander Perendzhiev, a political and military analyst and lecturer at the Plekhanov Russia University of Economics.

Earlier, a source told RIA Novosti that Palmyra residents were evacuated and the Syrian Army was engaged in fierce clashes with Daesh militants at the outskirts of the city.

According to the Russia reconciliation center in Syria, over 4,000 militants have been engaged in an attempt to take control over Palmyra.

"Syrian terrorists use a very sophisticated tactic of moving in small groups, so-called 'cloud tactic.' Disguised as Bedouins, locals or even personnel of the Syrian Army, they arrive from different directions and concentrate in one unremarkable location. As a result, a powerful militant force suddenly forms in one place," Perendzhiev told RIA Novosti.

Comment: See also: Today, Assad told Rossiya-24:
"The issue of Palmyra should not be linked only to Mosul, because the IS [Daesh] is also present on Syria's territory, in Raqqa in the north of the country, where its positions have been allegedly bombed by the US-led coalition for two years... There are also IS militants in Deir ez-Zor, where the US forces and the coalition's aircraft attacked the positions of the government forces instead of bombing IS," Assad told Rossiya-24 television broadcaster.

He added that the recent Daesh attack on Palmyra had been carried out with the use of advanced equipment the insurgents had not had before and that could not be transported from Mosul.

"The truth is that the majority of these terrorists has arrived from Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. They were either directly supported by the Americans, or in the best case scenario, with the consent of Americans, who have turned a blind eye on it and allowed Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to complete this mission via support and funding of the IS. This is what really happened in Palmyra. The issue is not linked to Mosul only," Assad said.


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