Screenshot featuring Shona Banda from a video by MedicalMarijuana411.com.
As if spreading misinformation to children isn't despicable enough, it would appear that they are willing to ruin lives to protect their propaganda.
Society's Child
Screenshot featuring Shona Banda from a video by MedicalMarijuana411.com.
As if spreading misinformation to children isn't despicable enough, it would appear that they are willing to ruin lives to protect their propaganda.
© Reuters/Shannon Stapleton
After an overwhelming vote of 122-18, the proposal - House Bill 40 - advanced to the state Senate, where lawmakers have not taken up the bill just yet. The bill featured 70 co-sponsors and had the support of the oil and gas industry.
The House vote comes just a few months after voters in a small Texas town called Denton approved a measure that banned fracking in the area. Denton was the first Texas city or county to ban the practice, the oil industry has already filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse the prohibition.
On Friday, Rep. Drew Darby (R-San Angelo), who introduced the bill, said the ban on banning fracking was needed to ensure that cities didn't implement different regulations that harm the state's economy.
"In the absence of this bill, a statewide patchwork of oil and gas regulation is likely," Darby said to the Houston Chronicle.
© Reuters / Kacper Pempel
They also want compensation for the fact the SNCF billed the Nazis for third-class train tickets, while the Holocaust victims were taken to concentration camps in cattle cars.
"SNCF committed, conspired to commit and aided and abetted others who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Acting with full knowledge, SNCF was complicit in the commission of genocide," the suit launched on Thursday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, alleges.
Comment: Getting compensation is one thing but clearly not enough to stop the continuing abuses of human rights and crimes against humanity.
People see their own nation, and foreign nations, through the filter of the press that's available to them; so, if that filter is systematically distorting (distorting in ways that most of the others similarly do), then democracy cannot function, public opinion can be manipulated and warped; and wars might even start that shouldn't — something Americans have tragically been experiencing lots of, during recent decades, such as when we invaded Iraq in 2003 (just to cite the most famous of many examples).
A typical Reuters 'news' report will be examined here, in order to determine how high the journalistic standards of the Reuters 'news' organization actually are. Reuters is an internationally respected 'news' organization, as reliable as any major 'news' organization in the U.S. and Europe — thus, it's a good source to provide a case-example.
The particular report, dated Thursday, April 16th, is titled "Russia blames U.S. for security crises and turmoil in Ukraine."
Comment: One can just imagine the head honchos at Reuters, AP, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major western news outlets instructing their staff on their company's editorial line:
"... and above all else, just repeat the charge of 'Russian aggression' folks!! Doesn't matter what Putin or his folks are saying - doesn't matter what some journalist in Italy says - and it doesn't matter what the friggin' bloggers come up with - just keep repeating 'Russian aggression, Russian aggression'! Its gotta stick in people's minds: when people think of 'Russia,' that stupid country's name has to seem incomplete without the word 'aggression' coming right after it! Got it?!"
And the press whores respond in near unison:
"Yeah, boss."
© Reuters / Eric Vidal
Consumer rights activists hold banners and flags as they protest against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) during a demonstration in Brussels, April 18, 2015.
Consumer rights activists hold banners and flags as they protest against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) during a demonstration in Brussels, April 18, 2015.
Crowds have gathered in London, Munich, Brussels and other major European cities to march against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and similar secretive international trade deals.
Comment: This public outcry is good but will it be enough to stop the capitalists?
© RIA Novosti / Pavel Palamarchuk
The angry U-turn in attitudes towards the Ukrainian government was published on Friday in the Gazeta Prawna newspaper. Skrzypczak said he is outraged with a law that the Ukrainian parliament passed hours after Polish President Bronisław Komorowski spoke before the MPs to express support for Ukraine.
The law gave benefits to all people who fought for Ukraine's independence throughput history. Those include fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, which was responsible for mass killings of Polish citizens in 1943-44. The tragic events are known as Volhynian slaughter in Poland.
"I realized that Ukraine has no concern for Polish people. I am talking about what happened in Volhynia, the slaughter of 100,000 Poles by the UPA," the ex-general said.
Comment: At least he can see what Ukraine is devolving into but has yet to understand Russia.
A probe by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which examined World Bank's records in 14 countries, discovered that some 3.4 million of the "most vulnerable people" were forced off their land in the last decade.
The World Bank "has regularly failed to live up to its own policies for protecting people harmed by projects it finances," ICIJ states as one of its key findings.
The World Bank as well as the International Finance Corporation (IFC), which distributes the funds, have invested $455 billion in nearly 7,200 projects between 2004 and 2013 in the developing world, ICIJ says. More than 400 were confirmed to have caused the permanent displacement of local communities, while another 550 may have made locals homeless.
"An ICIJ analysis found that between 20 and 30 percent of all projects the bank funded from 2004 to 2013 were deemed likely to cause resettlement," report's summary reads.
Comment: The Worldbank and IMF seem to be in the business of inflicting untold misery on the residents of developing countries.
Food Emergency: How the World Bank and IMF Have Made African Famine Inevitable
Repeal, don't reform the IMF!
© AFP 2015/Atta Kenare
Three years ago, Reuters was kicked out of Iran after the news agency published a story, claiming that Tehran was preparing an all-female squad of professional killers trained in ninjutsu, a lethal martial art practiced by ninjas.
The original story caught the public's attention. Readers from around the world wanted to know more about the all-female squad of Iranian ninjas. Sputnik managed to get in touch with Tehran's "notorious" ninja-training club and spoke with head coach Akbar Faraji to reveal the secret that left many in awe after the original story was published in 2012.
Comment: Tehran was preparing an all-female squad of bloodthirsty terrorist-ninjas... really? This is just one of many unfounded claims that have been and continue to be made by Western media in order to show Iran - or any other country that is not to their liking - in a bad light.
© wikipedia / Scrumshus
Then Saturday happened.
On the kind of beautiful sunny day when hope springs eternal, an older gentleman wearing a backpack walked over by the fountain in front of the Capitol Building in Washington DC. And a sign. According to people who saw him, it said simply:
"Tax The 1%."The police captain on the scene who addressed the news cameras eerily avoided the question, mumbling that it was "something about social justice," as if he were annoyed to address any specifics. So we know nothing else. Not even a name was given. A dog run over by car might have gotten more respect and news coverage than this unknown man.
Comment: George Orwell, the author who invented the term "Memory Hole," was famous for saying "in times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." That police and media are deeply troubled by something as a simple as a protest sign shows just how tenuous the illusion of democracy and freedom is in the United States for the millions of people falling through the cracks every single day there.
Private prison companies are spending millions of dollars to lobby the U.S. government for harsher immigration laws that, in turn, spike corporate profits by driving up incarceration levels, a new report from the national social justice organization Grassroots Leadership reveals.
Entitled Payoff: How Congress Ensures Private Prison Profit with an Immigrant Detention Quota, the report's release on Wednesday coincided with a renewed hunger strike at a privately-run immigrant detention center in southern Texas, where asylum-seeking mothers incarcerated with their children report inhumane conditions, including sexual assaults by prison guards and staff.
According to the report, for-profit companies are capturing an ever-increasing share of this immigrant detention center "market." In 2009, 49 percent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention beds were run by for-profit companies. Today, that number stands at 62 percent.
Now 90 percent of the largest ICE detention centers in the U.S. are privately operated, the study finds.
Comment: The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and no nation in history has ever locked up more of its own citizens. This high incarceration rate is directly correlated with the advent of the private for-profit prison system. This highly profitable industry is rife with abuse, with the ACLU reporting numerous instances of poor medical care, lack of basic sanitation and a tendency to overuse extreme isolation of prisoners. The DHS recently gave Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison company with an above average risk of assault and abuse oversight of one of the largest detention centers for undocumented immigrants. No doubt we will be witnessing an ever increasing spiral of immigrants being detained as well as abused. Another grand example of American 'exceptionalism'.
- Immigrants For Sale: Lost, Abused and Neglected for a Profit
- Private Prisons: The more Americans they put behind bars the more money they make
- Private US prisons are getting rich by abusing illegal immigrants
- Jailing Americans for Profit: The Rise of the Prison Industrial Complex
Comment: If there was any question as to just how much influence the Oil & Gas industry wields, this should remove all doubts. Citizens concerned about the many dangers to their health and the environment will have even fewer abilities to protect themselves. And this is what we call democracy?