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'This is a period of insanity': Soviet grandmaster Anatoly Karpov on chess racism debate


RT
Mon, 29 Jun 2020 17:44 UTC
Anatoly Karpov
© REUTERS / David Mercado
Russian chess grandmaster and former world champion Anatoly Karpov
Soviet and Russian chess legend Anatoly Karpov has commented on the recent debate over racism in the game, which has caused outrage on social media, calling it 'a period of total insanity' which has nothing to do with chess.

"A period of total insanity has begun," the former world champion said. "What does it have in common with the centuries-old game?"

Last week, John Adams, an economist who represented the Australian Chess Federation in 2015, revealed he had been contacted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio station in Sydney to comment on the matter of racial controversy in chess, because white always moves first.


"I just received a phone call from an ABC Sydney based producer seeking a comment about the game of chess! The ABC have taken the view that chess is RACIST given that white always go first!" he wrote on Twitter after dismissing the request, sparking an online debate.
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Pistol

Utopia: Gunshots interrupt interview inside activist-run CHAZ enclave in Seattle amid reports of 'active shooter'


RT
Mon, 29 Jun 2020 17:34 UTC
CHAZ seattle shooting
© Twitter / Andy Ngô @MrAndyNgo
Several gunshots were heard during the taping of an interview inside the activist-held Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ/CHOP) in Seattle, Washington. The area has seen several shootings in recent weeks.

A video posted on social media shows an interview being conducted inside CHAZ. Suddenly, what appears to be gunfire is heard in the background. "That's not a firework," the person being interviewed says. Several people are then seen running down the street.

Reports indicated there is an "active shooter" in the area, and videos from the scene showed people hiding in panic. Some were even filmed arming themselves and going to search for the attacker.

Comment:

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Syringe

Fracking 'powerhouse' Chesapeake Energy files for bankruptcy protection, $9 billion in debt

Cathy Bussewitz
USA Today
Mon, 29 Jun 2020 08:27 UTC
Fracking
© AP Photo/Ralph Wilson, File
Chesapeake Energy, a shale drilling pioneer that helped to turn the United States into a global energy powerhouse, filed for bankruptcy protection June 28, 2020.
Chesapeake Energy, a shale drilling pioneer that helped to turn the United States into a global energy powerhouse, has filed for bankruptcy protection.

The Oklahoma City-based company said Sunday that it was a necessary decision given its debt. Its debt load is currently nearing $9 billion. It has entered a plan with lenders to cut $7 billion of its debt and said it will continue to operate as usual during the bankruptcy process.

The oil and gas company was a leader in the fracking boom, using unconventional techniques to extract oil and gas from the ground, a method that has come under scrutiny because of its environmental impact.

Other wildcatters followed in Chesapeake's path, racking up huge debts to find oil and gas in fields spanning New Mexico, Texas, the Dakotas and Pennsylvania. A reckoning is now coming due with those massive debts needing to be serviced by Chesapeake and those that followed its path.

Comment: RT reports:
A study released by the global accountancy firm Deloitte this month said that the US shale industry is entering a period of "great compression" and could face up to $300 billion in losses and a wave of bankruptcies due to the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 200 US oil producers have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past five years.


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TV

GOD TV is dead? Israel kicks US-based evangelical Christian channel off air


RT
Sun, 28 Jun 2020 16:56 UTC
Friends of Zion sign in Jerusalem
© AFP / Thomas Coex
FILE PHOTO. A woman walks past a poster on a street in downtown Jerusalem by the pro-Israel Christian evangelist group "Friends of Zion."
Israel has ordered US-based evangelical GOD TV off air, accusing the obviously religious broadcaster of concealing its missionary agenda which allegedly targeted the Jewish population of the country.

The seven-year broadcasting contract secured by GOD TV and Israel's main cable provider earlier this year proved to be very short-lived. The broadcaster's Israeli subsidiary, Shelanu TV, was taken off air after a review by the Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Council, the regulator's chairman Asher Biton announced. The channel must now stop broadcasting in Israel within seven days.

The channel's license agreement stated "explicitly that the channel is intended for the Christian population," Biton explained, yet Shelanu TV was also allowed to "integrate several programs with content designated for Israel." After the oversight, however, the council concluded that the channel was not appealing to the Christian population in Israel but rather specifically to Jews, and that thus "the characterization of the channel that was submitted does not reflect its broadcasts."

The decision to silence the evangelical channel was welcomed by some Israeli hard-liners. International spokesperson for the Jewish community of Hebron and NYT contributor Yishai Fleisher, for instance, hailed the regulator's move, proclaiming that "Israel is Jewish" altogether and apparently 'forgetting' about non-Jewish citizens of the country.

Comment: Evangelicals in the U.S. really need to give up the illusion of the "special relationship" they think they have with Israel. The hard-line Israeli's are tolerant of Evangelicals because this tolerance gets them military support and billions in U.S. government handouts. If it wasn't for these handouts the Israeli's would treat Evangelicals just like Palestinians, as worthless subhumans.

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USA

North Carolina Sheriffs: It's not our job to enforce the governor's 'mask orders' - they are 'not constitutional'


Law Enforcement Today
Sat, 27 Jun 2020 17:26 UTC
nc sheriffs
Do it yourself.

That's essentially the message that a group of sheriffs in North Carolina are sending to the governor over what they believe are unconstitutional mask orders.

Across the country, a number of governors have issued Executive Orders mandating the use of masks while in the public.

The majority of these orders specify that persons who cannot be a minimum of six feet apart and indoors must wear a mask or face a fine or imprisonment. No one disputes that the numbers of positive cases have grown recently, but there is dispute as to what those numbers really mean.

Some believe that the states and/or federal government is skewing the numbers.

One one side, some believe the numbers are worse than what we know of and we are not told the true amount for fear of sparking nationwide panic.

On the other side, some argue the actual number of infected persons is significantly lower than what is provided and that they are using antibody tests as positive cases. Those suggest that the numbers are inflated in order to keep the economy slowed or shut down in order for democrats to remain in power.

There is an old cop saying that pertains to these theories - in every story there are three sides, his side, her side, and the truth. This means that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle of the two arguments, but we may never know.
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Star of David

Paperless Palestinians held hostage in Gaza by Israeli bureaucracy

Ola Mousa
The Electronic Intifada
Mon, 29 Jun 2020 17:21 UTC
palestinian identification cards documents
© Mohammed Al-Hajjar
An estimated 5,000 Palestinians in Gaza hold only temporary ID cards.
Khadija al-Najjar flipped through pictures of her children and grandchildren, growing more and more agitated.

Some of her children now live in Europe or North America. But Khadija, 72, cannot visit them. She does not hold and cannot obtain a Palestinian ID even to attempt to go and visit. Without one, she has no papers to allow her passage.

She is not alone. There are an estimated 5,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Authority's ministry for civil affairs office there, who share her predicament. Israel stopped distributing ID cards meant for residents of the coastal strip after 2007, when Hamas took sole control of Gaza from Fatah after winning the previous year's parliamentary elections.

Khadija and her husband, Muhammad Issa al-Najjar, live in the al-Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City. Muhammad was born in 1945 in Masmiya al-Kabira, a Palestinian village in the then-Gaza district (now on the Israeli side of the boundary) that was forcibly depopulated and largely destroyed in the Nakba of 1948.
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Handcuffs

Two men caught with nearly $4,500 worth of illegal fireworks in New York City


CBS News
Mon, 29 Jun 2020 16:26 UTC
confiscated fireworks New York
Fire marshals arrested two men in Manhattan on Saturday as the crackdown on illegal fireworks continues, CBS New York reports.

Anthony Quezada, 28, and Hugo Figueroa, 30, were busted during a surveillance operation.

Investigators caught them with approximately $4,500 worth of illegal fireworks.

Comment: Two men were also arrested on June 23rd by FDNY Fire Marshals in Staten Island for having $6,000 worth of fireworks, two more men were arrested on the 25th for having $2,800 worth of fireworks, and 10 individuals were also arrested on the 25th for having a trove of fireworks and three alligator carcasses.

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Briefcase

DHS admits 600,000 foreign H-1B Workers employed in American jobs

Neil Munro
Breitbart
Mon, 29 Jun 2020 16:09 UTC
foreign workers US
© Associated Press/Altaf Qadri
U.S. employers keep roughly 600,000 foreign H-1B visa workers in jobs throughout the United States, according to an unprecedented report released by the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency.

The total number of resident H-1B workers has successfully been kept secret for decades, mainly because Fortune 500 companies do not want voters to recognize the massive outsourcing of jobs for themselves and their college graduate children.

But President Donald Trump has allowed his pro-reform deputies to release the data, likely to boost his June 22 reform plans.

The DHS agency studied the shifting number of H-1Bs working in 2018 and 2019. The resident population usually declines in September as the foreign workers go home or get green cards. For most of the year, the number of working H-1Bs was about 600,000, says the report, titled "H-1B Authorized-to-Work Population Estimate."

Comment: Nothing to see here but the greed of Big Business.



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Airplane

Bye-bye social distancing, done in by economics: American Airlines will book flights to full capacity

David Koenig
Star Tribune
Sat, 27 Jun 2020 16:00 UTC
American Airlines planes
© GENE J. PUSKAR – ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE
American Airlines planes are parked at Pittsburgh International Airport in Imperial, Pa. There will be no more attempt at social distancing on American Airlines flights. The airline said Friday, June 26, that it will start booking flights to full capacity next week.
American Airlines will start booking flights to full capacity next week, ending any effort to promote social distancing on its planes while the United States sets records for new reported cases of the coronavirus.

American's move matches the policy of United Airlines but contrasts sharply with rivals that limit bookings to create space between passengers to minimize the risk of contagion.

The pilots' union at American said it hopes that the airline reconsiders and instead decides to add more flights using idle planes and crews.

American said Friday that it will continue to notify customers if their flight is likely to be full, and let them change flights at no extra cost. The airline said it will also let passengers change seats on the plane if there is room and if they stay in the same cabin.

Comment: Spirit, United, and American Airlines aren't the only ones who are done with the quarantine measures:

'More idiotic rubbish': Ryanair trashes UK's 'air bridge' plan, calls for scrapping Covid-19 restrictions
Ryanair, Europe's biggest low-cost airline, has blasted the UK's plan to relax anti-coronavirus measures through establishing so-called air bridges with certain countries, calling quarantine altogether "useless."

The plan will exempt travelers from the mandatory two-week quarantine. A full list of countries is set to be unveiled by the British government next week, and it is expected to include France, Greece and Spain.

While the plan has been designed to help air carriers, hard-hit by the Covid-19 fallout and enduring travel restrictions, the industry has not been very pleased with that limited lifting of anti-coronavirus measures. Ryanair called for scrapping all the restrictions at once instead.

"The UK government's idea of "air bridges" is more idiotic rubbish from a government who can't operate a "form filling" quarantine or a track and trace system either," Ryanair told Bloomberg in a written statement.
Thousands of British families are ignoring this useless quarantine as bookings to Europe from the UK for July and August are flooding into Ryanair.
While the UK was among the last to introduce a mandatory quarantine for air travelers, the move caused a very angry reaction from airlines operating in the country. Early in June, British Airways joined forces with Ryanair and budget airline EasyJet to sue the British government. The air carriers arguing that the restrictions would have a "devastating" effect on the industry and would ultimately result in the decimation of "thousands of jobs."


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Sherlock

Lynching, stoning and burning: The 1919 'Red Summer' race riots that America and Britain want you to forget but which echo today

Andrew Dickens
RT
Mon, 29 Jun 2020 11:07 UTC
race riots USA 1919
© Getty Images/Bettmann
White children cheer outside an African-American residence that they have set on fire.
In 1919, hundreds of people were murdered in race riots across the US and UK. Men, women and children were butchered. So why is it a footnote in history? Because the media and governments don't want you to know how they reacted.

Warning: The following article contains images that may be disturbing to some readers

Comment: The suggestion in the final paragraph above that the struggle for equal rights in the early 20th century is continuing today in the form of the recent BLM protests is, perhaps, an exaggeration. Today, black Americans have achieved equal rights under the law. There are no mobs of white people hunting down blacks. If anything, there is a significant risk that the BLM protests could devolve into black or BLM mobs hunting down white people.

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