Society's ChildS


Health

Woman who was climbing Everest in bid to prove 'vegans can do anything' dies

Matt Hunter
Mail Online
Mon, 23 May 2016 13:27 UTC
A 34-year-old Australian woman who attempted to climb Mount Everest to prove that vegans are not 'malnourished and weak' has died.
vegana muere everest
© AgenciasMaria Strydom and her husband.
University lecturer Maria Strydom perished from a lack of oxygen in Nepal on Saturday afternoon after having to turn back from the final leg of her expedition because she felt unwell.

She, along with her husband Robert Gropel, challenged themselves to overcome Everest to show that 'vegans can do anything'.

Dr Strydom had said that climbing Everest while adhering to a strict vegan diet was their 'own personal Everest.'

According to The Washington Post, on an university blog she said: 'It seems that people have this warped idea of vegans being malnourished and weak.' 'By climbing the seven summits we want to prove that vegans can do anything and more.'

Comment: The vegetarian diet is completely anti-physiological. Knowledge protects, ignorance endangers:

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Laptop

Hacker Guccifer expected to plead guilty for Clinton email hack


RT
Tue, 24 May 2016 12:51 UTC
guccifer
© Mediafax / Silviu Matei / ReutersMarcel Lazar Lehel
The Romanian computer hacker known as Guccifer, who allegedly accessed the email account of an adviser to Hillary Clinton, is expected to plead guilty to charges related to breaking into the computers of top US political personalities.

Computer hacker Marcel Lazar Lehel is expected to appear in federal court on Wednesday for a change-of-plea deal, according to court records obtained by the Associated Press. The 44-year-old Romanian was extradited to the US in March to face charges including unauthorized access to computers, cyberstalking, and obstruction of justice.

Lehel had originally pleaded not guilty to the charges last month, and it's not clear what charges he will plead guilty to.

Lehel was indicted in 2014 on nine felony charges of him hacking into the email accounts of top US politicians. Emails between former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Corina Cretu, a Romanian member of the European Parliament, were released, prompting Powell to deny that the two had had an affair. A set of former Hillary Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal's emails were published online in 2013, which exposed a private email address that Clinton used when serving as Secretary of State.

Comment: The authorities should be charging Clinton and throwing her in jail. Guccifer was only doing a public service by shedding light on Clinton's illegal behavior and giving the world a chance to see Clinton indicted and jailed.

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Star of David

VIDEO: Off-duty Israeli cops brutally beat Arabic teen for not showing ID despite not identifying themselves as police


RT
Tue, 24 May 2016 12:38 UTC
shopworker beat idf
© איריס אלנר / YouTube
Controversial CCTV footage allegedly shows plainclothes Israeli police officers pouncing on an "Arab-Israeli" next to a Tel Aviv supermarket. Eyewitnesses say the man ended up brutally beaten and arrested after he refused to show ID to an off-duty cop.

The incident, which was captured by a security camera and first published by local Israeli media including Walla news, reportedly occurred outside an Arab supermarket on Ibn Gvirol Street in central Tel Aviv on Sunday afternoon.

An employee of Arab appearance walked out of the shop and was about to throw garbage into the bin when he was approached by an off-duty policeman clad in shorts, who asked to see his ID card. The shop worker refused to comply with the request.

The plainclothes officer, later confirmed to be a member of the border police, then reportedly began to beat the unarmed man with the help of a companion without any further pretext, eyewitness Erez Krispin wrote in a Facebook post, which has since gone viral. The Arab employee is said to have been unable to comply, as his ID was inside the shop. He also had no way of knowing that the man asking for his ID was an officer.

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Handcuffs

Guantanamo prisoner released after 14 years despite never standing trial


RT
Tue, 24 May 2016 12:20 UTC
guantanamo
© Marc Serota / Reuters
An Afghan man who was charged with war crimes but never stood trial - and who eventually had the charges dropped - has been cleared for release by US authorities after 14 years behind bars at the prison complex in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The decision to clear the detainee, known only by the name Obaidullah, was made by the Periodic Review Board, which holds hearings for detainees in order to determine whether they qualify for release. In this case, the board stated that continued detention "does not remain necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States."


Comment: Since the prisoner was never actually charged with a crime, it's rather ludicrous to determine that he's a threat to the security of the United States. They would have to actually provide evidence of that.


"The risk the detainee presents can be adequately mitigated," the board added.

Believed to be about 36 years old now, Obaidullah was captured back in July 2002 in Afghanistan, where US forces found unactivated land mines buried near his home in the eastern city of Khost. According to Defense Department documents, Obaidullah was allegedly part of an Al-Qaeda cell in Khost, involved in the planning and carrying out of attacks against US and Coalition forces. The Defense Department alleged he had links to a high-ranking Al-Qaeda and considered him a high-risk target.
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Quenelle

Gorbachev on Soviet collapse: US was elated over Russia's decade of chaos, wasn't remotely interested in helping build stable democracy

Alex Christoforou
The Duran
Tue, 24 May 2016 12:07 UTC
Gorbachev
© Ramil Sitdikov / SputnikFormer Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev
In an interview with Mark Franchetti from Britain's Sunday Times, the Soviet Unions's last leader Mikhail Gorbachev was as honest as we have seen him, as he reflected on the end of the Cold War, and the reasons for new US-Russian tensions.

In remembering the the US reaction to the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991, Gorbachev admitted that...
"Under the table, the Americans were rubbing their hands with glee."

"They thought, 'Now we're the boss of the world.' They weren't genuinely interested in helping Russia develop into a stable and strong democracy. They thought they'd cut Russia down to size. In the process, they've squandered the trust we'd built."
American elation, for what the US perceived as a Cold War victory, was in Gorbachev's opinion juxtaposed with a feeling of sorrow from the Russian side. Gorbachev said that Russians still feel sorry about the collapse, though few, including himself, would support the idea of bringing the Soviet Union back.

Comment: Of course the US wasn't interested in helping Russia develop a strong democracy. At no time in the past 100 years has the US promoted legitimate forms of democracy around the world - rather they topple elected governments, impose fascist dictators, and otherwise spread terror in the name of freedom.

Further reading: The New York Times has totally lost the plot on Russia

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Sherlock

Egypt's head of forensics denies reports of explosion and human remains retrieved from missing EgyptAir Flight 804


RT
Tue, 24 May 2016 12:10 UTC
egyptair debris
© AFPDebris that the search teams found in the sea after the EgyptAir Airbus A320 crashed in the Mediterranean, released by the Egyptian military spokesperson on May 21, 2016
Egypt's head of forensics has denied reports that human remains retrieved from the Mediterranean Sea and examined by a team of experts point to an explosion taking place on board flight 804, which crashed on Thursday.

"Everything published about this matter is completely false, and mere assumptions that did not come from the Forensics Authority," state news agency MENA quoted forensics head Hesham Abdelhamid as saying.

Earlier on Tuesday, an official who had personally examined the remains at a Cairo morgue told AP on condition of anonymity that "the logical explanation is that it was an explosion."

The source went on to state that the experts had been given around 80 small body parts to investigate. "There isn't even a whole body part, like an arm or a head," the official said.
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Attention

US and UK schools plagued with wave of bomb threats


RT
Tue, 24 May 2016 11:51 UTC
Police line tape
© Eduardo Munoz / Reuters
Bomb threats prompted lockdowns and evacuations in dozens of elementary and high schools across the US and UK, leaving classes to be resumed only after police failed to find any explosives or other dangerous items.

The threats led to the evacuations of schools in Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Utah and Wisconsin.

Media outlets in the United Kingdom also reported evacuations at dozens of schools up and down in that nation.
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Compass

Elites 'southern charm' of church and state, spreading through US?

David Underhill
CounterPunch
Fri, 22 Apr 2016 00:00 UTC
church state separation
"He was his slave." The man was casually describing the connection between a relative and "an old black man" who worked on an extended-family tract outside the city. They rode around together in the relative's truck doing chores, he said, and the "slave" was allowed to live in a house on the property.

That wasn't a recitation of family lore from some olden time. It referred to this century.

Drive the highways and notice the convict gangs bagging trash along the shoulders. Pass prison fields where mounted guards with shotguns herd inmates hoeing crops. You wouldn't know slavery ended a century and a half ago because it didn't, except legally.

See the columned mansions behind mossy oaks along city streets and realize that within them live the direct descendants of slave plantation masters, timber barons, and shipping magnates who scooped up the region's resources and sold them to the world. The crafty heirs of this inheritance didn't squander it. They magnified and diversified it into investment portfolios conferring the quiet authority that accompanies wealth.

In this ghostly form slavery survives, more pervasive and powerful than the embodied form of a single old handyman "slave" puttering around in a pickup on a small family acreage in the countryside.
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Dollar

'I'm not independently wealthy': Bundy lawyer wanted Koch brothers to pay client's fees


Rt
Mon, 23 May 2016 21:06 UTC
Rancher Cliven Bundy. Mike Blake / Reuters
© Mike Blake / ReutersRancher Cliven Bundy.
The defense attorney for Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy tried to get in touch the billionaire Koch brothers to help them fund his client's defense, according to an email obtained through a public records request.

Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) obtained an email that shows Joel Hansen, the defense lawyer for Cliven Bundy, contacting Utah state Representative Ken Ivory, hoping that the legislator could help him get in touch with the billionaire Koch brothers, who are known for donating to conservative causes.

Ivory is an advocate for transferring control of land owned by the federal government in Utah back to the state, having sponsored successful state legislation in 2012 that did just that.

Such legislation has goals, though likely not methods, that might align with those of Bundy, who made headlines in 2014 for his armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada over cattle grazing rights. Bundy and 18 of his supporters were subsequently indicted on federal felony charges.

Comment: See also: Agents provocateur: Is the Oregon occupation being stage-managed?

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Footprints

Parallels between 1930s Germany and Israel today

Uri Avnery
AntiWar.com
Sat, 21 May 2016 00:00 UTC
General Ya’ir Golan, the deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli army
General Ya’ir Golan, the deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli army
"Please don't write about Ya'ir Golan!" a friend begged me, "Anything a leftist like you writes will only harm him!"

So I abstained for some weeks. But I can't keep quiet any longer.

General Ya'ir Golan, the deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli army, made a speech on Holocaust Memorial Day. Wearing his uniform, he read a prepared, well-considered text that triggered an uproar which has not yet died down.

Dozens of articles have been published in its wake, some condemning him, some lauding him. Seems that nobody could stay indifferent.

The main sentence was: "If there is something that frightens me about the memories of the Holocaust, it is the knowledge of the awful processes which happened in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, 70, 80, 90 years ago, and finding traces of them here in our midst, today, in 2016."

All hell broke loose. What!!! Traces of Nazism in Israel? A resemblance between what the Nazis did to us with what we are doing to the Palestinians?

Comment: Israel is on the precipice of self-destruction with its oppression of Palestinians, covert and overt aggression towards other countries in the Middle East, and the death of whatever soul it has left to it as a nation. Individuals like General Ya'ir Golan, and the author of the article, and others understand that the situation is untenable and may be giving the last gasps of warning, conscience and rationality that Israel may ever see.

Further reading:

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