Society's Child
The plans follow the recommendation of a taskforce set up by the Transport Ministry, after a pilot sealed himself inside the cockpit of a plane and crashed it in the Alps, killing all 150 people on board.
Prosecutors have found evidence the co-pilot, who had suffered severe depression and may have feared losing his job, had researched ways to kill himself and hidden an illness from his employer, sparking a debate on supervision and medical secrecy.
German Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt told the paper Bild am Sonntag: "I think it's sensible that pilots are checked on a random basis for the consumption of alcohol, drugs and medicines."
He added: "Experts around the world see positive effects from this to boost operational safety in aviation."
A Polish market stall selling fireworks mysteriously burst into flames, injuring three people and sending knives from a nearby stall "flying through the air"
Three people were injured in the Polish city of Swinoujscie on Sunday when a street stall selling fireworks exploded, local media reported.
Firefighters tackled the blaze for more than an hour, with their job made even more difficult by further fireworks going off and knives from a neighbouring stall being thrown through the air, Polish broadcaster TVN reported.
Police are investigating the cause of the accident, which happened shortly after 2pm local time (1300 GMT).
The explosion is estimated to have caused around £43,000 worth of damage, as neighbouring stalls were also affected by the fire.
Comment: Other fireworks related explosions this year include:
- Five killed in fireworks truck explosion in Jordan
- At least 4 dead and 6 injured in explosion at fireworks factory, Zaragoza, Spain
- Huge fireworks factory explosion near Colombian capital
Christmas Day in America. A 73-year-old grandmother in Texas shoots her husband over "marital issues." The parents of a young boy are gunned down in an Ohio parking lot. A barber is shot three times, and left lying on the sidewalk by his shop.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, 27 people were killed in shooting incidents across the United States on Friday. Another 63 were injured, and neither of these figures include self-inflicted gunfire.
Comment: Also see:
America is literally violently ill. This society is feverish on the valorization of violence. Victims of violence - speaking out and demanding accountability for racism (such as in Charleston or Ferguson), or regarding violent sexism (as in Planned Parenthood) - are blamed as the cause. This 'blame culture' is a symptom of America's frankly sick relationship to violence.
No other way to put it: America is mentally ill
More than 450 civilians have been evacuated from the areas besieged by militants in Syria under a ceasefire deal reached with the government, the United Nations announced Monday.
"The United Nations (UN) in Syria, in partnership with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have successfully facilitated the evacuation of more than 450 people including the injured and their accompanying family members, following a local Agreement concerning the Syrian towns of Foua, Kafraya in Idleb and Zabadani and Madaya in Rif Damascus," a joint statement published on the UN's website read.
Comment: Since the West only calls for ceasefires when their mercenaries are losing, and they obviously want to salvage their 'assets' from the Russian coalition, one wonders exactly who was evacuated from these areas.
Also see:
"It is remarkable that Western leaders only remember the term ceasefire when their rebels on the ground are losing. Why haven't they remembered the need to settle peace before the Russian operation had started in Syria?" Khuder told Radio Sputnik.
"As a journalist working on the ground in Syria I know how it works. These rebels have a strategy which is to occupy and invade peaceful villages. They take village people as hostages. These civilians are literally used as human shields. The Syrian Army is too patient to make any operation in order to avoid losses and casualties. This is how they are using civilians," the analyst added.
Western countries only call for ceasefires when their mercenaries are losing
This is a leak that the Gas Company feels could go on at least into March. Methane freely polluting the air until at least March. Have we yet to grasp the severity of this? This is a man-made natural catastrophe that may well turn out to be larger in scale than the BP oil spill. According to Erin Brockovich, the side effects, which are deep and involved, take less than a week to start feeling.Workers were continuing to drill a relief well and had reached a depth of 3,800 feet about midnight Saturday when they discovered the site of the target well using a magnetic ranging tool, said Anne Silva, a spokeswoman for SoCal Gas. The well extends more than 8,000 feet below the surface.
The company is still "not sure of the exact location of the leak," Silva said, "but suspects it is within a shallow level — within the first several hundred feet of the 8,700-foot well."
We can't even begin to fathom what the serious longterm consequences over this matter will turn out to be. Making matters worse, SoCalGas has essentially REFUSED to release information on the surrounding air quality, so we have no way of really grasping how bad this really is. The leak is supposedly residing at over 8000 feet underneath the ground, making it a complicated, complex problem to solve. With the potential of liability and litigation, attorneys are filtering responses on both sides. In just one month, this leak will have accounted for 1/4 of the total estimated methane emissions in the entire state of California.After only a week of visiting families in Porter Ranch, I am already experiencing the headaches, nausea and congestion that have plagued this community living at the center of one of the most significant environmental disasters in recent history.
Vomiting, nosebleeds, trouble breathing, are just the beginning of what these people are experiencing on a daily basis. The community has begun the act of transferring school children out of the area. While SoCalGas has helped with some relocation efforts, it hasn't been nearly enough. Many people have been stuck waiting on a list to be assigned relocation, all the while, their respiratory systems being decimated by infectious gases.
Comment: Another gas/oil corporation causing an epic disaster that will cause untold harm for a very long time.
Poisoning young minds: IS training children in weapons use, beheading techniques and suicide bombing
Filmmaker and journalist, Najibullah Quraishi, said that he was shocked at what he saw at the jihadist school in Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar Province.
"Imagine children (boys) aged from three to nine or 12 years old. How they should know about Jihad? So, they're teaching them what's jihad; how should they do jihad; the jihadists should be against whom," he said.
The training has, apparently, been going on for months, with the young students making significant progress.
"All the children knew all the names of the weapons and they all knew how to use [them]... It means they were taking training a while ago," Quraishi said.
Comment: These are the monsters that the U.S and NATO have been surreptitiously supporting in their crazed attempts to subvert Russia at any cost.
St. Louis-based Monsanto notified the Iowa Economic Development Authority that it will not build a long-delayed seed corn production facility in Independence that would have created 47 full-time jobs and 800 seasonal positions. The IEDA board on Friday voted to allow the company to cancel a contract for $7.5 million in job creation tax credits.
Screams of agony can be heard echoing from the trees as the man's arm is twisted almost to the breaking point and his rectum is invaded by the gloved hand of a drug war enforcer.
The cops can be heard saying, "Stop resisting! Just relax!" as the victim continues to scream and kick in pain. Five officers are initially involved in subduing the man and searching his vehicle, and then another joins the fun by posing with gun in hand facing the onlookers.
Comment: Right, because relaxing is just what anyone would do when your rear end is being violated by a gang of armed thugs.

A campaign rally last week in Michigan. In the current presidential contest, a frustrated white working class has been receptive to anti-democracy messages.
A disenfranchised white working class vents its lust for fascism at Trump campaign rallies. Naive liberals, who think they can mount effective resistance within the embrace of the Democratic Party, rally around the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who knows that the military-industrial complex is sacrosanct. Both the working class and the liberals will be sold out. Our rights and opinions do not matter. We have surrendered to our own form of wehrwirtschaft. We do not count within the political process.
Comment: For more on climate change, see:
- The Fallacy of "Climate Change"
- Climate Change: Science Manipulated
- Climate change: The great Atlantic shutdown and the Coming Ice Age
- Global Cooling: Is an Ice Age coming?
What's important to understand is that this totalitarian system Hedges so aptly describe, is one created by psychopaths in power. It's further kept in place by authoritarian followers. Their pathological worldview infects, fractures and eventually destroys the rest of society.
- Ponerology: Why the Corrupt Few Wreak So Much Death, Destruction, and Suffering on the Rest of Us
- George Carlin and the Illusion of Freedom
- A freedom to live or a freedom to die?
- The American dream is an illusion with rates of social mobility that are no better than medieval England
- The concept and illusion of money
- The Illusion of Choice
- Does fear lead to fascism? A culture of fear and the epigenetics of terror














Comment: For a run down of the evidence that suggests that we are not being told the whole truth about Germanwings crash, see Joe Quinn's article: Germanwings crash: Not the full story?