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Palestinian activists slam UK arms company over profiting from Israeli war crimes


Press TV
Sat, 09 Apr 2016 01:17 UTC
Palestinian child amidst rubble
© AFPA Palestinian child sits in front of the rubble of buildings which were destroyed during the 50-day war of Israel against Palestinians in the summer of 2014, in the village of Khuza'a, east of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on June 15, 2015.
Scores of pro-Palestinian activists in the UK have demonstrated outside the headquarters of an arms manufacturing company, accusing it of benefiting from Israel's deadly crackdown against Palestinians.

The protesters gathered in front of the UK headquarters of aerospace manufacturer Thales, in Crawley, on Friday and expressed their anger against the company's partnership with Israel's Elbit Systems to develop a surveillance drone, nicknamed Watchkeeper, used by the regime against Palestinians.

The rally was held by the Sussex Stop Arming Israel campaign and was supported by other human rights groups, including the Inminds. The main messages of the protest were "Stop Arming Israel" and "Thales profits from Israeli war crimes."
"Thales UK has a billion pound contract with Israel's largest arms company Elbit Systems to develop a fleet of drones. Human Rights Watch has documented [the drones] as being used by Israel to deliberately target Palestinian civilians in Gaza," said Inminds chair Abbas Ali.
"It's sickening that Elbit markets this killer drone as being extensively 'field tested' in 'real life' situations -- using the slaughter of Gaza's people as a marketing ploy to gain a competitive advantage," he added.

The Watchkeeper drone, which is produced through a joint venture dubbed UAV Tactical Systems, is modeled on Elbit's Hermes 450, a UAV that has been used in action by the Israeli military. According to the Sussex group, the drone is developed under a contract awarded by the UK Defense Ministry.


Thales UK is a subsidiary of the French company Thales, and is currently considered as the UK's second largest military company.
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Handcuffs

The secret epidemic of police domestic violence: Cops up to 15x more likely than general public to be domestic abusers

Kelly W. Patterson
Cop Block
Sat, 09 Apr 2016 00:00 UTC
domestic violence woman sign help
Could she be married to a cop?
This post was originally published at the "Ms. Magazine" blog in October of 2015 by Alex Roslinand Susanna Hope (who was married to a police officer for 20 years) under the original title "Police Wife: The Secret Epidemic of Police Domestic Violence." (See below for their full biographies.)
Domestic violence takes place in up to a staggering 40 percent of law enforcement families, but police departments mostly ignore the problem or let it slide, write ex-police wife Susanna Hope and award-winning investigative journalist Alex Roslin in their new book, Police Wife: The Secret Epidemic of Police Domestic Violence. The following excerpt is adapted from their book, available on Amazon or as an eBook from their website, and is being published as part of the Ms. Blog's Domestic Violence Awareness Month series.

According to Alex Roslin, Police Wife itself has more than 60 pages of appendices giving advice and resources to survivors, family and friends plus recommendations for advocates, police, governments, journalists and researchers.

In order to help survivors and others, they've made virtually all of the appendices available for free through their website. Here is the direct link to this extended free excerpt.

Comment: According to this research, statistically speaking, any cop you encounter is more likely to be a wife-beater than not. What an appalling state of society.

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Eye 2

An open air prison: Feds routinely making surveillance flights across US with planes owned by fake front companies

Asa J
Cop Block
Sat, 09 Apr 2016 00:00 UTC
drone domestic spying cartoon

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security have been running thousands of surveillance missions employing cellphone tracking and augmented reality technologies over US cities.

According to a new investigation by BuzzFeed News that collected flight data logged by planes registered with the two agencies from the public tracking service, FlightRadar24, over 3,500 surveillance flights took place between mid-August and December of 2015.

Augmented reality is a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are supplemented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.

Comment: Privacy and civil-liberties are dead in America and it's just a matter of time until some event happens that causes people to demand more of this, making it even more blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention that the US is an open-air prison.

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Arrow Down

Greenpeace gives "green" stamp of approval to corporations to destroy the planet

Sara Burrows
Return to Now
Mon, 28 Mar 2016 11:10 UTC
Greenpeace
Greenpeace and Sierra Club are doing more harm than good by co-opting grassroots environmental movements and giving destructive, polluting industries their "green" stamp of approval

"Greenwashing" is an attempt by corporations to cover up environmentally harmful practices by marketing products as "green" or "eco-friendly.' While saavy consumers are catching on that corporations still care more about the green in our pockets than the greenery of the earth, many of them would be surprised to learn that some of the world's most prominent environmentalist organizations have green "blood" on their hands too.
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Black Cat

Israel implies BDS movement are terrorists while cracking down on German banks and violating international law


RT
Sun, 10 Apr 2016 01:15 UTC
BDS protests against apartheid Israel
© Ruptly
Israel's Public Security Minister has linked the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement with terrorism and is threatening German banks using tactics previously employed against Al-Qaeda.

Netanyahu-appointee Gilad Erdan has threatened to coerce German banks to prohibit BDS activists from fundraising through their accounts, not through Israeli legislation, but the laws of other countries where Erdan has "increased awareness among decision-makers in Europe and North America of the anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, and discriminatory nature of the BDS movement, which seeks Israel's destruction and often has ties to terror-supporting organizations."

Comment: What's astonishing about this is that the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) people simply want to exercise their freedom of non-association and that freedom is being removed in their own countries due to Israel's influence. While clearly many people have missed the boat that Israel is in fact an illegal apartheid occupation, so the stance of the BDS is really a very reasonable response to the reality of the situation, one would think that they would at least respect the rights of others to not have anything to do with them if they don't want to.

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Cult

French elites declare open season on Muslim women

Sarah Lazare
AlterNet
Tue, 05 Apr 2016 00:00 UTC
French Elites

As billionaire Elisabeth Badinter calls for boycott of clothing lines that produce Islamic fashions, her PR firm promotes Saudi Arabia.

"We are tired and sick of always being targeted, of being the subject of stereotypes and racist fantasies," Sihame Assbague told AlterNet over the phone from her home in Villetaneuse, a suburb north of Paris. "Muslim women are talked about every day, but we are not given the right to speak. Other people speak for us."

An activist against state racism and organizer for the website Contre Attaques, aimed at countering Islamophobia, Assbague is not alone in her frustration. Muslim and Arab communities find themselves increasingly attacked by discriminatory house raids and warrantless arrests, over four months into a heavy-handed "state of emergency" imposed and then extended by the French government in the wake of the Paris attacks.

This state violence is abetted by those in France's intellectual and political classes who are calling for the intensified criminalization and public shaming of Muslim women in the name of "saving" them. Predictably, such figures have declared open season on the veil.

Comment: Watch it happen: The slow-motion horror show that moves step by step to marginalize, subjugate and ultimately destroy the lives of many millions of Muslim people around the world.

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Cardboard Box

Spain: Police find hidden cache of weapons and IS flag


Reuters
Sat, 09 Apr 2016 00:00 UTC
IS flag
© REUTERS/Dado RuvicA flag on the play.
Police said on Saturday they had discovered a hidden weapons cache and a home-made Islamic State flag in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, and are investigating a possible connection to Islamist militants.

The cache of four pistols, including an air gun modified to shoot live ammunition, two Scorpion sub-machine guns, ammunition and variety of knives, was found in perfect condition and buried on wasteland on Thursday, Spain's Interior Ministry said.

Spanish police have detained 15 people with suspected links to Islamic State militants so far this year and 102 people on the same charges last year after police stepped up security measures following attacks in Paris.

Ceuta and Melilla, Spain's other north African enclave, have been a focus of Spanish anti-militant investigations.
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TV

The high art of moral transgression in modern television

Maureen Callahan
New York Post
Sun, 10 Apr 2016 15:40 UTC
Scandal
© ABC“Scandal” protagonist Olivia Pope beats a man to death in a scene from the ABC show.
For nearly two decades, we've been told that this is the Golden Age of Television: the smartest, deepest storytelling, the most nuanced and morally complex characters, are found here.

Perhaps it's time for a reconsideration.

Thursday night, on ABC's "Scandal," Olivia Pope, the protagonist — long established in the show's vernacular as a "white hat," or good guy — beat a wheelchair-bound stroke victim to death by pulping his face with an aluminum chair.

It was a lengthy scene, and even for a Shonda Rhimes soap that bills itself weekly on "OMG twists" — gruesome scenes of torture and dismemberment, politically expedient murders and illegitimate war, rape, kidnapping, blackmail, and one interminable scene where an imprisoned terrorist chewed through her own wrist to escape — this one was morally and artistically bankrupt.
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Fire

Over 100 dead in temple fire in Southern India after firecrackers cause 'massive blast'


RT
Sun, 10 Apr 2016 09:10 UTC
Indian Fireworks
© Amit Dave / Reuters
At least 102 people have died and more than 200 were injured after celebratory firecrackers reportedly caused a massive blast and fire at a Hindu temple located in a coastal town near Kollam in the southern Indian state of Kerala.


Comment: An eyewitness reported feeling tremors from the massive explosion a kilometre away.

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Video

'Roadmap to Apartheid' film reveals Israel's fear of BDS

Jim Miles
The Palestine Chronicle
Thu, 07 Apr 2016 19:46 UTC
Roadmap to Apartheid

(Roadmap to Apartheid. Ind. documentary, Ana Noguiera and Eron Davidson. 2012.)

It is curious that the more Israel denies apartheid, and the more other states, such as Canada, "condemn" the BDS movement, the more awareness of the true situation of the Palestinians increases in the general population.

Fear of BDS

The Israelis know full well the impact that the label "apartheid" and its associated boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement had on South Africa. Their denials only reinforce the significance of these events and labels. One prime example derives from former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren in his book Ally (Random House, 2015), an account of his life leading up to but mostly concerning his role as ambassador.

At one point he is discussing all the difficult questions he receives concerning Israeli/Palestinian relations. He answers "All questions remained kosher but two." Kosher indicates that something is legitimate or admissible for Jewish concerns. One of the questions that is not kosher is "Isn't Israel an apartheid state just like South Africa?" His red-herring counter argument is that because the Knesset has Arab members as do the armed forces, then how does that "remotely resemble an apartheid state?" That line of argument is disingenuous and would be similar to saying there is no racism in the U.S. because their president is black and so are many of their military - it is simply an invalid argument.

Comment: In fact, BDS is such a concern for Israel that they are marshaling all their forces and influence in order to stem the tide of awareness that is now growing:

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