In the early morning of December 15th, Denver police forced dozens of homeless community members of Resurrection Village into blizzard conditions
In the early morning of December 15th, Denver police forced dozens of homeless community members of Resurrection Village into blizzard conditions. Since their tiny homes action on Oct. 24th, Resurrection Village members have been sleeping near various unused empty lots owned by the Denver Housing Authority and had set up tents the night before to provide temporary shelter from the impending snowstorm.
Unicorn Riot was at the scene of the newly fashioned tent city and documented Denver Police threatening everyone with arrest if they did not dismantle their camp.

Police arrived around 6 am in the midst of hard snowfall and brutal winds while everyone was warm, dry and sleeping.DPD then ordered the community to dismantle their tents and disperse. We were able to live stream the encounter:

The smell came from the canyons and drifted over their neighborhoods in late October, but most residents who live in the gated communities of Porter Ranch thought the northerly gusts of wind common to their area would sweep the stench of rotten eggs away.

Instead, the odor persisted.

It became a phantom that haunted them during their twilight jogs and on their morning walks on dusty horse trails. It was there in their dens where they watched TV and in bedrooms where their children slept. It was even there on the playgrounds of nearby elementary schools.

"It was smelling really bad," said Susan Gorman-Chang, who along with her husband, George, has lived in Porter Ranch for more than 20 years. Now, the couple has chosen to leave the area. "Our neighbor called the fire department. It was that bad."

The Southern California Gas Co. knew what was happening a day before the fire department was called. They knew methane was leaking from a 40-year-old well in Aliso Canyon above the Santa Susana Mountains, that it was spewing tons of gas into the air. Several days later, they informed residents through letters that the agency would plug the leak as fast as possible.

Eight weeks after that call was made, the leak continues. It has caused massive disruption in the northwestern San Fernando Valley community of Porter Ranch, an affluent community of nearly 31,000 residents about 28 miles from downtown Los Angeles. More than 1,800 families have been relocated by the gas company and more than 1,000 remain on a waiting list. Some say they can't remember a displacement of residents this large since the Northridge earthquake in 1994, when 20,000 people were left homeless. Two local elementary schools have been impacted, with nearly 2,000 schoolchildren and staff slated to be moved to other schools in January.

Enough methane gas is being released to fill the Empire State building each day, state officials have said, and the concern has even reached the Federal Aviation Administration, which issued temporary flight restrictions over the area for small aircraft and helicopters.

The gas company has apologized but has said the leak may take four months to plug and to create a relief well.

"It's like the BP spill on land," said environmental activist Erin Brockovich, who was made famous by successfully battling Pacific Gas and Electric Co. over groundwater contamination in the community of Hinkley in the Inland Empire in 1996. "I've really never seen anything like this. I think the magnitude is enormous. Its like a volcano, and the gas is like the lava that can't be shut off."

A disturbing video emerged Friday showing two Los Angeles sheriff's deputies killing a man after they had chased him for riding a bicycle while wearing headphones.

The incident took place more than a year ago with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department initially telling the media that they shot and killed 23-year-old Noel Aguilar, a "known gang member," after he pulled out a gun and shot a deputy.

But now a video shows the two deputies struggling to arrest Aguilar when one deputy pulls out his gun and shoots the second deputy before placing his gun back into its holster, then placing the blame on Aguilar.

Power circulates differently in the digital age. It's all about controlling the digital traces — collecting, mining, sharing, exposing, delaying, or erasing the data. Inevitably, some handling will occur in ordinary politics. But when the data are manipulated in order to obstruct criminal justice or steal an election, then it's no longer ordinary politics; it becomes a cover-up.

With each new day, there is growing evidence of a cover-up in Chicago.

First, late on Friday night, December 4, 2015, Chicago's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, released hundreds of pages of police reports from the October 2014 Laquan McDonald murder — including false statements by police officers who were at the scene of the crime. The data dump came at such a late hour that the Chicago Tribune was not able to report on the massive discrepancies between those statements and the dashcam video of McDonald's death until an article posted early Saturday morning, at 1:25 a.m., while most of the city was asleep.

The three Tennessee teens spared from a barrage of bullets by a heroic high school football star's death dive never had a chance to say thank you.

Zaevion Dobson, 15, was dead barely an instant after jumping atop the girls, acting as a human shield after running off a Knoxville porch to surrender his young life for theirs.

Survivor Faith Gordon recounted how Dobson appeared from nowhere Thursday night, and how his body laid lifelessly on top of her when the shooting stopped.

"I kinda like pulled on him and I was like 'You can get up now' ... He didn't get up, so I just went upstairs, and I came back to make sure everything was real and I looked at him and he was shot in the head," Gordon told WVLT-TV.

She later sent a Twitter tribute to Dobson: "You're my hero, I'll never forget you."

Her pal Kiara Rucker, speaking to WVLT, echoed Gordon's praise of the heroic 10th-grade student.

"If it wasn't for Zaevion, if he would have just ran off the porch, we would have probably been shot," Rucker said.

This is not a revolution that can be undone with one election, nor can it be simply legislated out of existence.

Much has been written about the outcome of Venezuela's Dec. 6 legislative elections, with many of the analyses justifiably focusing on the shortcomings of the Socialist Party (PSUV) and the difficulty of the current state of affairs in the country. Indeed, even before the political body was cold, post-mortem examinations abounded in the corporate and alternative media, with dissections of seemingly every aspect of the Bolivarian Republic's political, economic, and social life.

But what these journalists and political analysts often overlook is the determination of the core of the Bolivarian Revolution, the radical base that is committed to preserving what Hugo Chavez began building more than 17 years ago. This is not a revolution that can be undone with one election, nor can it be simply legislated out of existence. This Revolution will not, as some cynics have argued, be brought down by the weight of its own contradictions, or by internal rot and corruption, or by external forces such as assassinations and economic destabilization.

The little island of Ireland occasionally gets angry when their neighbors in Britain forget about their tense history and call them British. No lesson has yet been learned - the London Film Awards has just inadvertently deemed several Irish actors Brits.

Irish talents Colin Farrell, Michael Fassbender and Saoirse Ronan had been nominated by the London Film Critics' Circle in the "British Actor" and "British Actress" categories. The categories were hastily renamed to "British/Irish" on Tuesday following several complaints.

British media have previously made numerous attempts to steal/mistake Irish high-achievers for Brits before. Dublin-born UFC champion Conor McGregor, who spends most of his time draped in an Irish flag and wearing green shorts, was identified by the BBC as "the first UFC champion from the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland". Irish Olympic gold-medal winning boxer Katie Taylor was also listed as British by The Daily Telegraph.

Irish musician Hozier has also been called British by the BBC and Huffington Post. Oscar-winning Irish actress Brenda Fricker once famously said, "when you are lying drunk at the airport, you're Irish. When you win an Oscar, you're British."

To clarify, the Republic of Ireland is not part of Britain, it has been a self-governing state since 1922. Northern Ireland, consisting of six counties in the north of the island of Ireland, remains under British rule, but the remaining 26 counties (also known as the Republic of Ireland) are not.

All the celebrities mentioned are from the Republic of Ireland, making them exclusively non-British. Northern Irish examples of celebrities who blur the line include golfer Rory McIlroy who is from Northern Ireland and can compete for either Ireland or Britain in the upcoming Olympics - something sure to cause many a heated debate over a pint of Guinness in the pubs of Ireland.

According to German political magazine Cicero, European countries should take Russian President Vladimir Putin into consideration, because without him it is impossible to resolve current international crises.

In one of its publications, German political magazine Cicero called Russian President Vladimir Putin a "Man of the Year".

"It is impossible not to admit that Putin has managed to become a key figure in world politics", Editor-in-Chief Christoph Schwennicke wrote in the publication.

"There is nothing happening without Russia. This was proved by the negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program; it is now evident in the case of the Syrian war and at the Vienna talks aimed at finding a political solution to the Syrian conflict," the article said.

Thousands of people have joined demonstrations in cities across Poland to protest against the new government's attempts to take control of the country's Constitutional Court in a lingering political row.

The rallies against the actions of the month-old government formed by the ruling Law and Justice party were staged in more than 20 cities in different regions of Poland as well as in several cities abroad, including London, Brussels, Berlin and Tokyo, according to rally organizers.

A protest in front of the parliament building in the Polish capital of Warsaw was attended by about 20,000 Poles, Reuters reported citing city officials. The protesters were waving Polish and EU flags and chanting "Stop destroying democracy!" and, "We will defend democracy, constitution and Constitutional Court!"

The demonstrators were also carrying banners and placards that read "no to the dictatorship!" and "hands off Constitutional Court!"


The rally was organized by the Committee for the Defense of Democracy movement (KOD) via social networks and was supported by all major opposition parties with some politicians, including a former Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski,who attended the demonstration. Many activists from Poland's Solidarity movement, which opposed the country's Soviet regime in the 1980s also joined the protest.

"We have our freedoms and we will fight in order to protect them," the founder of the KOD movement, Mateusz Kijowski, said as quoted by Germany's Tagesspiegel newspaper.

The number of people who have been forced to flee their homes has reached a staggering level, with 2015 on track to break previous records, according to a United Nations report released Friday.

People who have been forcibly displaced — including those who fled domestically as well as international refugees and asylum-seekers — has likely "far surpassed 60 million" for the first time, reads the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees report. Last year, 59.5 million had been displaced.

"In a global context, that means that one person in every 122 has been forced to flee their home," the agency said in a statement.