Society's ChildS


Health

Sodomized Guantánamo prisoner recovers after surgery

Carol Rosenberg
Miami Herald
Sat, 15 Oct 2016 01:03 UTC
Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi
© www.welt.deMustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi
An alleged accomplice in the Sept. 11 terror attacks underwent reconstructive surgery for decade-old damage from his "sodomy" in CIA custody and was to be returned to his clandestine prison to recuperate, his attorney said Saturday. "All they said is there was minimal bleeding and he is recovering," attorney Walter Ruiz, a Navy Reserve commander, said Saturday morning. His client, Mustafa al Hawsawi, 48, was scheduled to begin surgery at 9 p.m. Friday and Ruiz said he was informed that it was over by 10:45 p.m.

Hawsawi, a Saudi, and four other men are awaiting a death-penalty trial for allegedly orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. He voluntarily missed Friday's hearing to rest up for the procedure.

An unclassified portion of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of the CIA's Black Site program showed allegations that Hawsawi was subjected to rectal exams with "excessive force" before his 2006 transfer to Guantánamo and that at one point he had a "medical emergency" that the agency considered having treated in a foreign hospital.

Comment: Torture: The government's 'terrorists' within are just as bad, maybe worse, than the terrorists in the field. For Hawsawi, it took more than 10 years to repair this ongoing, painful damage.

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Laptop

Memo to Clinton team: We noted you might need a few email security tips...

Micah Lee
The Intercept
Thu, 13 Oct 2016 02:34 UTC
hillary on phone face
© Ethan Miller/Getty Images
There is probably no one more acutely aware of the importance of good cybersecurity right now than Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta, whose emails have been laid bare by WikiLeaks, are being mined for news by journalists (including at The Intercept), and are available for anyone with internet access to read.

So as a public service to Podesta and everyone else on Clinton's staff, here are some email security tips that could have saved you from getting hacked, and might help you in the future.

Use a strong password

There's a method for coming up with passwords that are mathematically unfeasible for anyone to ever guess by brute force, but that are still possible for you to memorize. I've written about it before, in detail, including an explanation of the math behind it.

But in short: You start with a long list of words and then randomly select one (by rolling dice), then another, and so on, until you end up with something like: "slinging gusty bunny chill gift." Using this method, called Diceware, there is a one in 28 quintillion (that is, 28 with 18 zeros at the end) chance of guessing this exact password.

For online services that prevent attackers from making very many guesses — including Gmail — a five-word Diceware password is much stronger than you'll ever need. To make it super easy, use this wordlist from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Comment: Wise advice. Who's been reading YOUR email?

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Handcuffs

Ridiculous laws, awful cop behavior and the reason why people are angry: What walking around a blocked sidewalk looks like in a police state

Claire Bernish
Free Thought Project
Sat, 15 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC
blocked road
Edina, MN — Larnie B. Thomas didn't do anything 'wrong,' per se — but that, unsurprisingly, did not prevent a typically ugly interaction with police intent to enforce one of thousands of needless laws governing daily life.

Edina, Minnesota, police felt construction blocking the sidewalk did not constitute sufficient reason for Thomas to enter the roadway, even though he hugged the right shoulder's white line — so a plain-clothed officer paid with taxpayer dollars halted his forward progress to harass and then arrest the man for attempting forward progress.

Janet Rowles stopped her vehicle and watched the incident unfold along Xerxes Avenue and — as has become a necessity in the American police state — whipped out her cell phone to tape the unnecessary confrontation.

Lt. T.F. Olson, identified later, grabbed the back of Thomas' jacket and then escorted the man back toward his waiting, unmarked SUV.

"Come over here," the white officer in an oxford shirt and khakis tells the man whose elbow he grasped.

"For what?!" Thomas replies, understandably angry at having been accosted for essentially no reason.
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Cross

Mexican priest with HIV who raped 30 young girls absolved by church

Ariel Zilber
Daily Mail
Tue, 20 Sep 2016 16:46 UTC
catholic church
© Getty Images/EyeemThe priest, Jose Garcia Ataulfo, was absolved of any wrongdoing by the Archdiocese of Mexico.
The Catholic Church has acquitted an HIV-infected priest who has admitted to raping close to 30 young girls between the ages of five and 10 years old.

According to a bombshell report, which appeared in the Spanish-language news site Urgente24.com, the priest, Jose Garcia Ataulfo, was absolved of any wrongdoing by the Archdiocese of Mexico.

Comment:

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Dollar

Caught!: Millions found in Chicago police dept. from secret asset forfeiture fund

Ryan Bannister
Daily Sheeple
Sat, 15 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC
gun-money
A detailed report released in September 2016 by the Chicago Reader unveiled a secret civil asset forfeiture fund that amounted to nearly $50 million in seized cash which the Chicago Police Department was attempting to keep for themselves. The detailed analysis shows that CPD officials were attempting to pocket 65% of the cash and assets they brought in through civil asset forfeiture. This is policing for profit, and it is no different than highway robbery.

The Reader reports:
Since 2009, the year CPD began keeping electronic records of its forfeiture accounts, the department has brought in nearly $72 million in cash and assets through civil forfeiture, keeping nearly $47 million for itself and sending on almost $18 million to the Cook County state's attorney's office and almost $7.2 million to the Illinois State Police, according to our analysis of CPD records.

Comment: From this recent article we learn that police civil asset forfeiture is a widespread phenomenon:
Such pointless raids were the norm rather than the exception in about a half a dozen ride-alongs on which Atkinson and his crew went. But while the cops found almost no drugs, they did seize $876 through a controversial policing practice known as civil asset forfeiture.

"It gives you a reason to enter the home and almost always there's something you can seize within the home," Atkinson said in an interview with Truthdig. "We've created a for-profit policing system," said Atkinson, the son of a SWAT-team commander. "You're sending SWAT teams into homes, and if they find anything, they get to keep it."

According to Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Peter Kraska, there are 50,000 to 80,000 raids like this per year, up from 3,000 per year in the 1980s. The turning point came in the 1990s with the 1208 program, which authorized the Department of Defense (DOD) to transfer to federal and state police any weaponry and supplies "suitable for use by such agencies in counter-drug activities." The 1208 was expanded into the 1033 Program in 1997, and the new policy gave police the right to asset forfeiture.

Today, 80 percent of SWAT deployments are based on search warrants. Nearly all of those are drug raids, which, according to the movie, yield results about half of the time. The situation is so out of control that in 2014, police seized more private property from ordinary citizens than was stolen by criminals.


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V

Europeans Take To Streets To Protest TTIP, CETA Trade Agreements


RT
Sun, 16 Oct 2016 12:25 UTC
protesters
© Agencja Gazeta / Reuters
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Paris, Warsaw, and Madrid, urging their governments to reject the TTIP and CETA free-trade agreements with the US and Canada.

Some 7,000 people demonstrated in the Polish capital of Warsaw on Saturday, RIA Novosti reported.

Expressing disapproval of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the US and the strikingly similar Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) deal with Canada, protesters marched in central Warsaw near the country's Agriculture Ministry building and prime minister's offices.

People carried banners that called the deals "toxic," "threatening to local agriculture" and a "dictatorship of corporations." People opposing the deals also fear that genetically modified products might appear on local markets.

Organized by a non-governmental group, Akcja Democracja, the Warsaw protest was joined by trade unions and several opposition parties. The Polish parliament has recently adopted a plan towards the deal, having pronounced CETA economically "neutral," with no reasons not to join it.
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Stock Down

Big banks warn that the economy has gone suicidal

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com
Fri, 14 Oct 2016 12:00 UTC
money boat in storm
The economy has gone suicidal.

It is working against the very people who need its energy to survive. It is collapsing on its own weight, and the weight of literally incalculable levels of toxic debt. And it is going to create the greatest disaster of our time, if the warnings from the world's most powerful bankers are any indication.

While the general population is obsessed with the details of the world's most entertaining and bizarre election in American history, the big banks are gearing up for a deadly serious economic collapse.

Just during the past few weeks, there have been major discussions about stock markets dropping, the insolvency of Europe's biggest investment bank, the mounting debt crisis and a deeper, long-term decline for 'everyday Americans.'

Here's what you probably missed while the Hillary-Trump cage match has taken over the collective psyche:
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Biohazard

River turns blood red overnight alarming residents in Guatemala


Strange Sounds
Fri, 14 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC
Samalá river turns blood red overnight alarming residents in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala Friday 14th October 2016
© Stereo 100Samalá river in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala turns blood red overnight
The Samalá river in Quetzaltenango turned blood red overnight on October 14, 2016, alarming residents of nearby communities. The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (MARN) has launched an investigation to determine the source of this mysterious color.

Samalá river in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala turns blood red overnight
Local residents were alarmed
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Dollar

What economic recovery? 35% of Americans have debt that is in collections

Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse
Fri, 14 Oct 2016 11:40 UTC
drowning
More than a third of all Americans can't pay their debts. I don't know about you, but to me that is a shocking figure. As you will see below, 35 percent of the people living in this country have debt in collections. When a debt is in collections, it is at least 180 days past due. And this is happening during the "economic recovery" that the mainstream media keeps touting, although the truth is that Barack Obama is going to be the only president in United States history to never have a single year when the economy grew by at least 3 percent. But at least things are fairly stable for the moment, and if this many Americans are having trouble paying their bills right now, what are things going to look like when the economy becomes extremely unstable once again.

The 35 percent figure is a nugget that I discovered in a CNN article about Detroit that I was reading earlier today...
And the city's troubles have left a mark on the financial stability of its residents in a big way, according to a new report from the Urban Institute.

About 66% of residents have debt in collections — meaning more than 180 days past due — at a median amount of $1,847. Across the U.S., 35% of Americans have debt in collections.

Comment: Debt slaves: Most Americans believe that debt is a necessity

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Pumpkin 2

Hysteria: Killer clown craze hits tattoo parlors

Hannah Ferrett
The Sun, UK
Sat, 15 Oct 2016 09:44 UTC
Now people have started getting permanent tributes to creepy clowns etched on their bodies
Creepy clown tattoo
© Via Instagram@belfasttatoocollective
Clowns have barely been out of the news in recent weeks, with seemingly ever-more horrifying incidents involving people dressed as them each day.

In Sweden, a teenager was stabbed by a violent jester in the middle of the street, and Childline has reported a massive surge in calls from kids who've been left frightened by the phenomenon.

Not everyone is so scared though, as this new tattoo craze shows. People have been paying homage to the killer clown trend with spooky inkings etched on their skin. The trend seems to be for tattoos of creepy clowns, with black-and-white and just a hint of colour the most popular.
Creepy clown tattoo

Comment: See also:

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