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RT VIDEO: Kurdish militia battles Nusra on front line of Aleppo


RT
Sun, 28 Aug 2016 19:59 UTC
RT's video agency Ruptly has filmed Kurdish militia on the frontline in Aleppo, Syria. The forces were allegedly battling Al-Nusra militants, attempting to force the terrorist group out of the predominantly Kurdish Aleppo neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsood.

The footage, shot at night, shows two soldiers from the Kurdish militia firing rounds from automatic rifles from behind improvised barricades in the ruins of the deserted city on Saturday.

The video shows the crumbling remains of what was once a bustling district provide places for the fighters to seek refuge. Meanwhile, one soldier scrolls through images of dead enemies' bodies on a laptop.


"We are here in Sheikh Maqsood for the freedom of the people, for innocent children. ISIS and Al-Nusra are trying to capture Sheikh Maqsood and we are fighting against them," Shilayan Fia, a Kurdish fighter, told Ruptly.

Comment: According to Erdogan, all the Kurdish militias are terrorists. But al-Nusra isn't a terrorist group, according to Erdogan, because it fights Daesh. The Kurds fight Daesh, so... they must be terrorists?

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Sheriff

Bureaucrats with weapons: Are police really necessary?

Claire Bernish
The Free Thought Project
Sun, 28 Aug 2016 00:00 UTC
police
© Romeo Ranoco / Reuters
Are police necessary? Although this existential question often produces a knee-jerk 'of course they are, who would protect us?' a growing call for the abolition of police — and working examples to back it up — deserves more than scornful dismissal, particularly amid epidemic-level violence by agents of the state.

Police are under no obligation to protect the public they putatively serve — a series of state and Supreme Court decisions stretching back more than three decades indisputably establish this fact — so the lingering question, 'who will protect us?' is of no consequence to the case for dismantling every police department in the nation.

On the contrary, police kill, maim, intimidate, harass, and generally brutalize the citizenry with alarming frequency — and rarely face consequences beyond a paid vacation farcically termed 'administrative leave' for doing so.

Rather than fight and solve violent crimes, police act as little more than heavily militarized code-enforcers, or as David Graeber of the London School of Economics aptly terms, "bureaucrats with weapons" — protecting us from broken tail lights, missing front license plates, and imperfect lane changes more often than from robbery, homicide, and rape.

Give police the equipment and weapons of war under the premise of fighting terrorism, when terrorism is all but nonexistent, and predictably, they will go to war. As Abraham Maslow posited in 1966 in a concept known as the law of the instrument, "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

We, the citizenry, are not nails to be forcibly and violently coerced into submission over the tiniest of nonviolent and inconsequential infractions — but, whether or not we're inclined to admit as much, that summarizes our current situation in the eyes of an overbearing state and its criminalization of, in essence, daily life.

Comment: The American citizenry don't need police, rather it's the psychopaths ruling the USA who need them to facilitate total control over the populace and whose social engineering game has fueled the overt brutality directed against the population.

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Heart - Black

Oklahoma cops assault and pepper spray 84 y.o. grandma

Matt Agorist
The Free Thought Project
Sat, 27 Aug 2016 17:49 UTC
Geneva Smith pepperspray
© earhustle411.comGeneva Smith
Last week, an innocent 84-year-old grandma was attacked by police, pepper sprayed, arrested, and hospitalized after officers chased her son during a traffic stop. On Friday, the graphic body camera video of that attack was released showing the horrid and outright insane response to her son rolling a stop sign.

Police were after the victim's son, who they say refused to stop and ran into her home instead. When officers showed up, according to Smith and the body camera video, they kicked in her door and as she got up to see who was there — she was met with a face full of chemical agent.

"Turn around or I'll spray you!" screams the cop just before dousing this innocent elderly woman in the face with the painful spray. Smith then falls to the ground in agony.

The body cam footage then shows police shoot her son with a taser because they said he refused to come out. With his hands in the air and walking toward police, Smith's son was tased and fell to the ground.
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Family

Aleppo: A 'deadly place to call home'


RT
Sun, 28 Aug 2016 17:39 UTC
Child in Aleppo, Syria
© lizzie_phelan / Instagram
There's no safe place left in Aleppo, where heavy fighting between the Syrian army and rebels is shifting from neighborhood to neighborhood. RT's Lizzie Phelan went to Aleppo's most active frontline to talk to residents that still remain.

The southern part of the city became a battle front just weeks ago, quickly emerging as the most active in Aleppo. Some 1,070 apartment buildings controlled by government forces are located here, and just opposite them are those controlled by the opposition, mainly consisting of Jaish al-Fateh militants, previously known as Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda's branch in Syria.

"They used suicide bombers and they have so many weapons," a Syrian soldier fighting the rebels here told RT. "We will stop them in this battle."
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Sheriff

Rewarded for bad behavior: Paid leave for violent cops costs taxpayers over $1500 a day

Matt Agorist
The Free Thought Project
Sun, 28 Aug 2016 17:33 UTC
beer vacation
A sizeable chunk of the Free Thought Project archives is devoted solely to a single department in Florida. The Broward Sheriff's Office is notorious for its rapists, child molesting stalkers, sadistic dog siccing torturers, and woman battering deputies. Many of these cops are never fired, and, even if they are, they are likely all given paid vacations first — some of them for months, or longer.

Deputy Gerald "Gerry" Wengert, the sadistic cop who forced his K-9 to tear into a teenager for suspicion of spray painting a train car, is one of those cops who was given an extended paid vacation.

According to a report in the Broward New Times, for the past 440 days, Wengert has been on paid leave. Since his annual salary is $72,735.22 a year, he's cost taxpayers $87,680.81 so far for not showing up to work.

All too often, when cops beat, rape, kill, or otherwise commit atrocious crimes against others, they have a unique ability, not granted to anyone outside of government. They get paid for being bad.
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Post-It Note

'Longest living human' aged 145 says 'the recipe is just patience'


The Telegraph
Sat, 27 Aug 2016 17:27 UTC
Mbah Gotho, from Java, has been named as the world's longest lived human at 145 years old
© CENMbah Gotho, from Java, has been named as the world's longest lived human at 145 years old.
An Indonesian man who claims to be the longest living human in recorded history has described how he "just wants to die".

Mbah Gotho, from Sragen in central Java, was born on December 31, 1870, according to the date of birth on his identity card.

Now officials at the local record office say they have finally been able to confirm that remarkable date as genuine.

If independently confirmed, the findings would make Mr Gotho a staggering 145 years old - and the longest lived human in recorded history.
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Che Guevara

Media censorship: Why there's a blackout on the Native American oil pipeline blockade

Nick Bernabe
Anti Media
Thu, 25 Aug 2016 16:08 UTC
native american media blackout
As the Lakota Sioux continue their peaceful blockade of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline, the story's absence from the national media narrative is palpable. Considering the corporate media's chronic quest for controversial stories on government versus public standoffs, you'd think this situation would garner the typical media frenzy invoked during a right-wing militia occupation of a federal building, for example, or a tense standoff between the Black Lives Matter movement and police. But it's not.

As of late, the media has faced criticism for its selective coverage of certain events — like, say, focusing on single terror attacks in Western Europe that garner thousands of headlines while basically ignoring similar or worse attacks that occur on a constant basis in Muslim-majority countries.

But the confrontation unfolding in North Dakota, in particular, is strikingly similar to the recent standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, which involved a right-wing militia advocating land rights against the federal government. The militia was led by the controversial Bundy family, which previously drew sensationalized coverage during a similar standoff in Nevada in 2014. So why were these stories covered extensively while the other — also centered around land rights — has been mostly ignored?
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Airplane

Cracked windshield forces Boeing flight to make emergency landing in Okinawa


RT
Sun, 28 Aug 2016 10:00 UTC
ANA emergency landing okinawa
© @tmnr815/TwitterFILE: Tokyo Haneda airport
A Boeing 787 bound for Singapore made an emergency landing on the Japanese island of Okinawa, after originally taking off from Tokyo. The All Nippon Airlines plane had suffered a cracked windshield.

The Dreamliner aircraft safely touched down at Naha airport during the middle of the night. The windshield on the pilot's side of the plane had become cracked, according to internet portal Airlive.

Passengers from flight #NH843 from Tokyo to Singapore are waiting for a replacement aircraft to arrive to let them continue on with their journey.

In June, Engineers working on the Dreamliner project claimed they had been pressured by senior Boeing management to approve parts and designs for the plane, regardless of whether they met standards set by the Federal Aviation Administration.
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Ambulance

Wave of heroin overdoses hit the US; over 200 victims in one week

Terry DeMio
USA Today
Sat, 27 Aug 2016 19:48 UTC
overdose prevention
© Andrew Burton, Getty ImagesPolice officers responding to overdoses are administering naloxone, sometimes in more than one dose, to resuscitate heroin users.
An overdose crisis in the past week has left police and emergency responders here drained and without clues.

It has also underscored that this region does not have resources to treat all of people addicted to opioids, including heroin.

Police are asking for the public's help in identifying the source of heroin sold here that caused scores of overdoses, including at least three deaths. More than 200 people in four states have been victims of what law enforcement officials are calling a supercharged form of the sedative, and one additional person died in Indiana.

"We're working very closely to find the source dealer," said Police Chief Tom Synan of Newtown, Ohio, who heads the law enforcement task force for the Hamilton County Heroin Coalition. He said local, state and federal authorities are combining their forces to investigate the source or sources. "We don't have anything solid to go off of."

Comment: Ushering in a heroin nightmare: Big Pharma exposed for knowingly causing opioid epidemic

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Pistol

Russian online media journalist found shot dead in Kiev apartment


Sputnik
Sun, 28 Aug 2016 13:14 UTC
Alexander Shchetinin, Russian journalist
© Alexander Shchetinin facebook
Alexander Shchetinin, Russian journalist and a head of an online media outlet, was found shot dead in an apartment in the city of Kiev, Ukraine's capital, according to local police.

"Police are establishing the circumstances of the journalist's death... Police received information about it about midnight [21:00 GMT]. When an investigative team arrived at the crime scene, a man with a gunshot wound to the head was found on the balcony. According to the preliminary forensic data, the death occurred between 8 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. It transpired that the man, born in the Russian Federation in 1962, had been living in Kiev for several years and was a head of an online media outlet," the statement said.

The statement added that during the search, the investigators found a fired case, a rubber-bullet pistol and a suicide note. "Doors to the flat were closed, nothing suspicious inside," the police said, adding criminal proceedings had been opened.

Later in the day, Ukrainian media reported that the killed man was Alexander Shchetinin, who was the founder of the Novy Region (New Region) news agency.
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