Haftom Zarhum shot by security guard then attacked by mob in Beersheba after another man attacked bus in latest outbreak of violence

Israeli police are hunting members of a group of Israelis who killed an Eritrean migrant after mistakenly identifying him as a terrorist involved in an attack at a bus station.


Haftom Zarhum was shot repeatedly by a security guard then kicked and spat at by a mob after going to the southern Israeli city of Beersheba to pick up his renewed work visa. He was walking past the central bus station with a group of friends when an Israeli Bedouin armed with a gun and knife attacked a bus,killing an Israeli soldier and injuring 10 others.

In the panic surrounding the attack, Zarhum was identified as a suspected accomplice, apparently based on his appearance. The Israeli daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth was among several media organisations that left no ambiguity as to why it believed he had been shot. Monday's headline read: "Just because of his skin colour."

In events that some Israeli media called a lynching, Zarhum was shot and wounded before being shot several more times by a security guard at the bus station as he crawled along the floor. Still alive, he was then surrounded by people who cursed and spat at him, kicked him in the head and tried to hit him with a chair.

As paramedics tried to rescue him, the crowd chanted "Death to Arabs", "Arabs out!" and "Am Israel Hai" ("The people of Israel still live") and tried to stop them. "It's terrible," said a foreign ministry spokesman, Emmanuel Nahshon, one of a number of officials to comment on the killing. "It shows you what a terrible situation we are in."

When the global economy is doing well, the amount of stuff that is imported and exported around the world goes up, and when the global economy is in recession, the amount of stuff that is imported and exported around the world goes down. It is just basic economics. Governments around the world have become very adept at manipulating other measures of economic activity such as GDP, but the trade numbers are more difficult to fudge. Today, China accounts for more global trade than anyone else on the entire planet, and we have just learned that Chinese exports and Chinese imports are both collapsing right now. But this is just part of a larger trend. As I discussed the other day, British banking giant HSBC has reported that total global trade is down 8.4 percent so far in 2015, and global GDP expressed in U.S. dollars is down 3.4 percent. The only other times global trade has plummeted this much has been during other global recessions, and it appears that this new downturn is only just beginning.

For many years, China has been leading the revolution in global trade. But now we are witnessing something that is almost unprecedented. Chinese exports are falling, and Chinese imports are absolutely imploding...

Growth of exports from China has been dropping relentlessly, for years. Now this "growth" has actually turned negative. In September, exports were down 3.7% from a year earlier, the "inevitable fallout from China's unsustainable and poorly executed credit splurge," as Thomson Reuters' Alpha Now puts it. Most of these exports are manufactured goods that are shipped by container to the rest of the world.

And imports into China - a mix of bulk and containerized freight - have been plunging: down 20.4% in September from a year earlier, after at a 13.8% drop in August.

This week it was announced that Chinese GDP growth had fallen to the lowest level since the last recession, and that makes sense. Global economic activity is really slowing down, and this is deeply affecting China.

There is growing discontent in Germany over the fact that the country's government policy is dictated by the US. Germans oppose the biased attitude towards Russia and want Germany to pursue a more balanced and independent policy, German writer Christoph Herstel said.

Long-term US strategy in Europe is aimed at creating conditions for provoking conflict with Russia. In this regard, Washington is doing everything to embroil Berlin and Moscow, according to a German writer and government consultant Christoph Herstel.

However, many Germans view this course as harmful and think that it may damage German and European interests. Forty thousand German citizens have signed a petition to the federal government against the deployment of British and American bases in Germany.

"The fear among Germans is increasing every day because people are closely watching the US policy. And what do they see? Support for ISIL and the desire to start a conflict with Russia. But no one here wants this conflict, everyone wants friendly relations. This is why I developed this petition and call for the withdrawal of US and British troops from Germany on my Facebook page," Christophe Herstel told Radio Sputnik.

Alcohol destroys more lives than all other drugs combined. Why aren't policy makers wringing their hands over that?
While our current political conversations often involve concerned discussions about marijuana's imagined dangers or potential benefits (recall that the most recent Republican and Democratic debates both dedicated time to the question of pot legalization), our most problematic relationship actually seems to be with alcohol. America, it seems, has a drinking problem—and studies indicate it is only getting worse. There are real reasons, in addition to the pressing issue of mass incarceration and the failure of the drug war, for us to start thinking seriously about the cost of our increasing reliance on alcohol when we consider the ravages of drug use. Particularly since the toll of alcohol, though often left out of that conversation, actually outpaces those of every other legal and illicit drug combined.

Drinking is on the rise in the U.S. Precipitously. A study released this year from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation finds that heavy drinking among Americans rose 17.2 percent between 2005 and 2012. Not only are Americans drinking more, but in an increasing number of cases, they're consuming those drinks in rapid succession. The same study found that binge drinking increased 8.9 percent nationally during the same time frame. In 2012, 8.2 percent of Americans were heavy drinkers, meaning they had one drink per day on average over the course of a month. An additional 18.3 percent of Americans that year fit the description of binge drinkers, defined by the CDC as men who have five or more drinks and women who have four or more drinks in a single drinking session.

It's women, by the way, who have largely driven these increases. In the years between 2005 and 2012, binge drinking increased just 4.9 percent among men, but jumped 17.5 percent among women. The reason for such a significant rise is likely due to changing social mores, according to Tom Greenfield, scientific director at the Alcohol Research Group, who spoke withKaiser Health News. Men still drink more than women do, but women have narrowed the gap in recent years.

Binge drinking, always a favorite sport on college campuses, has also become more prevalent. A 2013 study from the Center for Addiction Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital found that women in college binge-drink more often than male students. "It's not that the percentage of young people is increasing alcohol use," George Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol, told NBC News. "It's that bingeing is more intense."

Seven percent of slaves live in North America or the EU, but the problem is global. We must invest in protocols that work to fight trafficking and exploitation.

As a child growing up in one of Brazil's poorest regions, I was used to seeing well-off families take in girls from poorer ones to come live in their homes and be brought up as one of their own. This was seen as an act of kindness. It was only much later that I came to see it for what it really was: these young girls, who would do all the domestic chores all day long in return only for food and a roof over their heads, were in fact modern slaves.

Two black young men assaulted a down-and-out white woman - and videotaped the attack. She was knocked out in broad daylight and in a public place with people around her, minding their own business and apparently unaffected by the brutal attack.

The assault took place on October 17, in Browns Park in Atlantic City, NJ. Two young black men, one apparently in his 20s and the other looking to be around 14 or 15 years old, launch an unprovoked attack on a white homeless woman in her 40s, sitting on a bench.

The older man incites the teen to bully the woman, which the teen carries out enthusiastically. After abusing the victim, the teen suddenly inflicts a powerful blow to the woman's temple, rendering her unconscious.

The pair made no attempt to escape, continuing to pose by the victim and taking close-ups of her face, laughing and boasting to each other about what they had just done.

Shockingly, not one of the numerous bystanders witnessing the ugly scene attempted to intervene and stop the offenders, let alone punish them. Nobody called the police and the two men left the scene unhampered - and later uploaded the sickening video to the web.

The woman, 45, was taken to an Atlantic City hospital, where she remains with a brain trauma in serious condition.

With the online video as proof, police managed to detain 25-year-old Ibn Hunter, who apparently filmed the attack. He has been charged with aggravated assault.

St Louis police have confirmed that six fires at churches in predominately black neighborhoods near Ferguson occurring over just 10 days have been classified as arson. There have been no injuries and officials don't yet have a suspect.

"It is arson," St. Louis Fire Captain Garon Mosby told media outlets, according to the Associated Press. "These [fires] are being intentionally set."

Mosby said the possibility of a hate crime for religious or racial reasons "is part of the dynamic" in an ongoing joint investigation currently being conducted by the St. Louis Regional Bomb Unit and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The ATF has jurisdiction over fires at all houses of worship.

All the fires took place in predominately black neighborhoods within a three-mile radius of Ferguson, and all were lit at the front doors of the churches.

The first hit the Bethel Non-Denominational Church in Jennings on October 8. Two days later, the New Northside Missionary Baptist, also in Jennings, suffered from fire.

Ohio on Monday delayed all scheduled executions until 2017 at the earliest because of difficulty obtaining the drugs necessary to carry out lethal injections, the state's corrections department said.

The department said in a statement that "over the past few years it has become exceedingly difficult to secure those drugs because of severe supply and distribution restrictions."

Ohio, one of 31 U.S. states with the death penalty, has not executed an inmate since January 2014 and had planned 11 executions in 2016.

A new global network of Jewish organizations in 16 different countries are banding together to speak up against Israel and stand with the people of Palestine.

The coalition, which is yet to be named, is made up of 15 organizations that are based all across the world from Brazil, Australia, Switzerland to South Africa.

Over the weekend, the group released a statement and a petition against the violence, while calling for an end to Israel's illegal occupation.

"As a group of Jews from around the world we believe that immediate change needs to come from the Israeli government and Israeli people. It is incumbent on all Jews around the world to pressure the Israeli government — and those who follow and support its words and deeds — to change its approach."

They went on to demand that the people of Palestine be granted their freedom, and called on other Jewish people to stand with them to obligate their countries to cease economic and military support of Israel's occupation.

A teacher at Betty Fairfax High School in Laveen, Arizona, is on leave after parents called to complain about a personality quiz she had handed out to roughly 100 of her ninth- through 12th-grade students

The quiz had questions about sex, wife-swapping, pornography and other highly personal topics, and officials from the Phoenix Union High School District said the self-scoring personality survey contained more than 200 questions, ABC 15 reports.

Questions ranged from the ordinary, like, "Are you irritable sometimes?" to the outlandish, such as, "Would you attend a wife-swapping party?"

Other questions on the survey that raised red flags for families included questions about the type of sex the students prefer, whether they watch pornographic videos and whether they'd had the urge to kill someone.

Karina Vegas, whose son took the quiz, told ABC 15, "I think it was very, very, very inappropriate for my 15-year-old son to get those questions." Vegas also told ABC 15 her son refused to tell her what some of the other questions were out of fear that he would get in trouble.

School district officials in Arizona were notified after a number of parents called to complain about the quiz. The principal of Betty Fairfax High School sent a letter to parents, calling the quiz "inappropriate, highly personal and even offensive," ABC 15 reports.