Giorgos Taktikos was just 5 years old when he and his family began their long journey to the Sinai Desert by boarding a small boat in the middle of the night and leaving behind their native Chios.

Today, at the age of 78, Taktikos is following history being written the other way round. As a former refugee, he is pained to observe the boatloads of people fleeing the Middle East and reaching Greek shores, while his mind races back to his own long and difficult journey into the unknown.

A native of the Chiot village of Kourounia, Taktikos was one of over 30,000 Greeks who left several eastern Aegean islands during the German wartime occupation, some seeking refuge in Syria, others reaching South Africa, in an effort to escape hunger and war.

Despite the ongoing propaganda reinforcing America's "cleanest sheets in a brothel" economic growth, the fact is, there is a reason why The Fed folded, why Draghi doubled-down, why China cut, and why Kuroda will likely unleash moar QQE this week. It appears the 'trap' that central planners have set for themselves - by enabling massive financial asset inflation in the face of what is now the longest streak of economic weakness and data disappointment on record - now looks set to prove their impotence and/or Enisteinian insanity.

As Ice Farm Capital notes,
Corporate profit margins have taken a sharp hit and corporate profits for the S&P are now down 3% year-over-year despite continued share buybacks.

Through this entire period, markets have continually expected happy days to be just around the corner.

Police are responding to reports of shots fired at a US Navy recruiting center in Davenport, Iowa, as well as at a second location in Bettendorf. The gunman shot himself near Miller-Meier Limb and Brace in Bettendorf, police told local news.

No one else was injured, and both scenes are safe, Davenport Police Captain Jane Imming told the Quad City Times.

Rating capitalist despicability is a daunting task with Big Pharma and High Finance in the running, but Higher Ed's betrayal of a century-old trust with young Americans vaults it toward the top of the list. Since 1862 public colleges had been expected to serve primarily as a means for the American people to achieve an inexpensive college education, and to benefit from academic research. The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act changed it all. It freed public universities from releasing new research discoveries to the public, allowing them instead to patent the results and make licensing deals with private companies.

The University of California, anticipating big agri-business subsidies, took full advantage in 2013, siding with Monsanto in a lawsuit against a farmer who was accused of stealing the company's seed. The farmer lost. And universities became more deeply entrenched in the capitalist world. There are other reasons for the continuing degradation of higher education.

Europe is scrambling for ideas on how to detain and process the hundreds of thousands of migrants winding through the continent, yet after months of effort officials are still struggling to make headway before the onset of winter.

Heads of government agreed to come up with 100,000 places in shelters along the so-called western Balkans route after European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker warned that refugee families could "perish miserably" during the journey from Greece through former Yugoslavia and into Austria and Germany without help.

At the moment, officials are suffering from a dearth of information on the ground as Greece and countries in former Yugoslavia — which often have strained diplomatic relations — either do not collect or fail to pass on information.

"I cannot tell you how many are on the move as we speak," said one EU official.

Berlin has heaped pressure on its neighbours to deal with incoming asylum seekers before they reach German borders, as chancellor Angela Merkel attempts to quell a domestic backlash — among both voters and her own party — against the influx of refugees.

EU leaders have various models to hold asylum seekers — from migrant camps and reception "hotspots" to Germany's ideas for transit zones — but have hit a wall of political objections, legal pitfalls and logistical shortcomings.

Five British nationals died when the whale-watching boat Leviathan II sank off the coast of Tofino, B.C., officials say.

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond confirmed the victims' nationalities in a statement released Monday.

Investigators are trying to determine what caused the vessel to capsize Sunday, killing five of the 27 passengers and crew who were tossed into the frigid water.

All four hospitalized passengers were listed in stable condition Monday.

Rescuers pulled 21 survivors out of the water and all were taken to hospital. Seventeen people were released, while three remain in different hospitals on Vancouver Island. One person was taken to Vancouver General Hospital.

B.C.'s Joint Rescue Coordination Centre said five bodies were also recovered and another person remains missing. The RCMP are continuing their search for the missing passenger, along with the Coast Guard.

The Leviathan II cruiser vessel made a mayday call shortly after 4 p.m. local time, prompting nearby residents and search-and-rescue workers to rush to the scene to help.

The JRCC in Victoria dispatched a Royal Canadian Air Force Cormorant helicopter and an RCAF Buffalo aircraft, while the Canadian Coast Guard sent out four fast-rescue craft.

Lt. Paul Trenholm of the Joint Rescue Co-Ordination Centre said the quick response from nearby boats saved lives.

A former prosecutor claims that confessed child rapist Aaron Michael Fisher of Jefferson City, Missouri was able to walk free last week after delaying his trial for years, then suing for dismissal of his case on the grounds that he could not get a speedy trial.

According to LakeExpo.com, Fisher was released on Oct. 23 after Cole County Circuit Judge Patricia Joyce sustained a motion to dismiss the case against him on the grounds that his constitutional right to a speedy trial had been abridged. Fisher was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy for the rape of his 5-month-old daughter in 2009.

Fisher confessed to the crime in 2014. Former Miller County Prosecutor Matt Howard told LakeExpo.com that Fisher's trial has in fact dragged on, but that Fisher and his legal team were the ones responsible for the delays.

Howard's office began building a case against Fisher in 2010. Witnesses proved hard to coordinate and Cole County only has two circuit court judges, making trials difficult to schedule.

When the prosecution was ready to go to trial in January of 2011, Fisher's team motioned for a continuance and had the trial postponed.

Fisher then began filing his own series of handwritten motions from behind bars. In February of 2011, he filed a motion in nearby Miller County requesting a speedy trial. That motion was granted, but then just before the trial was scheduled to begin, Fisher's lawyer filed for a continuance and the trial dates were canceled.

This cycle continued through July of 2014, when Fisher got a new lawyer. Facing two life sentences if found guilty, he inquired about an old offer from the prosecution involving a guilty plea to a lesser charge. There would still be two life sentences, but a judge could allow them to be served concurrently and offer the chance of parole.

The leftwing movement of criticism of Israel is getting more and more mainstream by the second. Everyone is walking the path; they're just getting there a little later. The Washington Post, a hotbed of neoconservative ideas for the last 15 years, has another article harshly critical of Israel today, written by an Israeli. And guess what: that article along with yesterday's article by the two prestige Jewish academics calling for boycott of Israel are the two "most-read" articles on the Post list this morning!

This one tops the list: novelist Assaf Gavron's article titled, "Confessions of an Israeli Traitor." It turns out that Max Blumenthal's portrait of a rightwing Israel was an accurate one:

The internal discussion in Israel is more militant, threatening and intolerant than it has ever been. Talk has trended toward fundamentalism ever since the Israeli operation in Gaza in late 2008, but it has recently gone from bad to worse. There seems to be only one acceptable voice, orchestrated by the government and its spokespeople, and beamed to all corners of the country by a clan of loyal media outlets drowning out all the others. Those few dissenters who attempt to contradict it — to ask questions, to protest, to represent a different color from this artificial consensus — are ridiculed and patronized at best, threatened, vilified and physically attacked at worst. Israelis not "supporting our troops" are seen as traitors, and newspapers asking questions about the government's policies and actions are seen as demoralizing...

Facebook pages calling for violence against left-wingers and Arabs appear frequently, and even when they're taken down, they pop up again in one guise or another. Any sentiment not aligned with the supposed consensus is met with a barrage of racist vitriol. One Facebook group calling itself the Shadow Lions discussed how to disrupt a wedding between an Arab and a Jew, posting the groom's phone number and urging people to call and harass him. On Twitter and Instagram, hashtags like #leftiesout and #traitorlefties abound. Film director Shira Geffen, who asked her movie audiences for a moment of silence to respect Palestinian children killed in an Israeli offensive, was flayed across Israeli social networks. "Shame," a new and brilliant play by actress Einat Weitzman, brings to the stage a selection of the hateful comments she received after wearing a T-shirt bearing the Palestinian flag. One example from the play: "If the baby that was murdered was yours I wonder which flag you would put on yourself. Now step on it and get your ugly head back to your tiny apartment and bury yourself from the shame until you die there alone and maybe in your funeral we will ask the Jihad to read verses from the Koran."

A creationist pastor mocked Hindus who were killed or injured when a religious idol fell on them as they worshiped.

One man was killed and three people were injured when a statue of the elephant god Ganesh collapsed during a worship service last month in India, and a video of the tragedy was circulated and widely reported last week.

Ray Comfort — who is probably best known for arguing that bananas disproved evolution, at least until he learned that they were the products of artificial selection by humans — posted a link to an article about the tragedy and urged his followers to donate to his Living Waters ministry.


"The Bible says that those who worship dumb idols, are just like them," Comfort posted on his Facebook page. "How India needs the gospel! But we don't have to go there to take it to them. We have the Internet."


Comfort's fans quickly picked up what he was laying down and praised God's wrathful judgment.

The number of U.S. police officers charged in fatal shootings has hit the highest level in a decade in 2015, new research shows, driven by greater scrutiny over use of deadly force. Public outrage over the deaths of black men at the hands of police in New York, Missouri and elsewhere have spurred prosecutions. Police body cameras and bystanders' videos also have helped bring cases, but even with the upturn, only a small percentage of police killings result in charges, lawyers and analysts say.

A dozen officers have been charged with murder or manslaughter this year resulting from shootings, up from an average of about five a year from 2005 to 2014, said Philip Stinson, an associate professor of criminology at Ohio's Bowling Green State University. He sifted court records and media reports as part of research for the Justice Department on police crimes and arrests.

The 2015 number does not include six Baltimore officers facing trial for the death of Freddie Gray. The 25-year-old black man died in April from a spinal injury after he was arrested and bundled in a transport van. Four of the officers face murder or manslaughter charges. None of the officers has been convicted, and over the previous decade just one in five officers charged was found guilty, said Stinson, a former police officer.

Stinson, attorneys and criminologists say it is too early to tell if the upturn indicates a permanent change or is a statistical fluke. "We can tell for one year, but is that just an anomaly or is it a trend?" said Stinson.

The prosecutions represent only a small fraction of the killings by U.S. police. A Washington Post database last week showed 796 fatal police shootings this year, and one maintained by the Guardian newspaper recorded 927 deaths from all causes.