Makhlouf was killed near the city of Shahba in a shooting and explosion of his car on Damascus-Sweida road on Wednesday, the Arabic-language media outlets announced.

Alaa Makhlouf was from the village of Marj Moirban in al-Qardaheh region in Lattakia. He was an activist of Asma al-Assad humanitarian group.

Since the start of the Syrian crisis in March 2011, the western countries, including the US, have delivered state-of-the-art weapons to the terrorists in Syria.

"Why don't you share good things about Israel?"

A few days ago, a very good Palestinian friend of mine shared a post on Facebook, about Israeli Skinheads. It referred to activists of the fascist Kahane Hai movement. Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was convicted in 1971 for a terrorist bomb-plot of the Jewish Defense League, became a member of Knesset in 1984, until his party was banned from Knesset in 1988. He inspired some of the most radical religious-nationalism in Israeli history.

A Jewish-Israeli kibbutznik contact responded with the comment: "Why don't you share good things about Israel, we are many more than these few idiots?"

It is worth noting here, that my friend is actually involved in quite serious and close debate with prominent Zionist Israelis, including leading editors.

The response intrigued me because I was just planning to write this article, circling exactly around this question, which I had been asked in various forms over the past few years. This comes in various forms, but the nerve is similar - it is the suggestion that this is not representative of Israel as a whole.

Whilst I cannot reveal the sources of the following quotes, I would like to provide a few examples to demonstrate what I mean:

Matthew Desmond's book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, is a heartbreaking snapshot of the rapacious exploitation and misery we inflict on the most vulnerable, especially children. It is a picture of a world where industries have been created to fleece the poor, and destroy neighborhoods and ultimately lives. It portrays a judicial system that has broken down, a dysfunctional social service system and the license in neoliberal America to carry out unchecked greed, no matter what the cost.

"Her face had that look," Desmond wrote. "The movers and the deputies knew it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be homeless in a matter of hours. It was something like denial giving way to the surrealism of the scene: the speed and the violence of it all; sheriffs leaning against your wall, hands resting on holsters; all these strangers, these sweating men, piling your things outside, drinking water from your sink poured into your cups, using your bathroom. It was the look of being undone by a wave of questions. What do I need for tonight, for this week? Who should I call? Where is the medication? Where will we go? It was the face of a mother who climbs out of the cellar to find the tornado has leveled the house."

Being poor in America is one long emergency. You teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, homelessness and hunger. You endure cataclysmic levels of stress, harassment and anxiety and long bouts of depression. Rent strips you of half your income—one in four families spend 70 percent of their income on rent—until you and your children are evicted, often into homeless shelters or abandoned buildings, when you fall behind on payments. A financial crisis—a medical emergency, a reduction in hours at work or the loss of a job, funeral expenses or car repairs—can lead inexorably to an eviction. Creditors, payday lenders and collection agencies hound you. You are often forced to declare bankruptcy. You cope with endemic violence, gangs, drugs and a judicial system that permits brutal police abuse and ships you to jail, or slaps you with huge fines, for minor offenses. You live for weeks or months with no heat, water or electricity because you cannot pay the utility bills, especially since fuel and utility rates have risen by more than 50 percent since 2000. Single mothers and their children usually endure this hell alone, because the men in these communities are locked up. Millions of families are tossed into the street every year.

The UK government should do more to promote a "pro-whistleblower" culture across all departments, the Public Accounts Committee said, as new data reveals the vast majority of whistleblowers choose to come forward anonymously. A report by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) warned that "shoddy treatment" experienced by staff who have come forward with allegations of wrongdoing may deter other employees from speaking out.

"Whistleblowers are on the frontline of defense against wrongdoing and bad practice," PAC chair Meg Hillier said. "They have a vital role to play in the day-to-day accountability of public spending and public service. This should be recognized by and enshrined in the culture of every government department. Where it isn't, senior officials in those departments should be held properly to account."

In response to the PAC report, the Cabinet Office has started collecting data on whistleblowing cases across departments. The first batch of data showed more than half of the 68 reported cases between April and September of 2015 were made anonymously. "At this stage, a common theme emerging is that the majority of complaints were made anonymously," the Cabinet Office said. Fourteen of the government's 32 departments, including the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), reported cases of whistleblowing over the period.

The Cabinet Office said the findings indicate most officials do not "have the confidence in their departments to deal with their case appropriately." In light of the findings, the Cabinet Office urged departments to "provide assurance to employees to enable them to raise their concerns openly."

'Business leaders who refuse to look into the realities of their own supply chains are misguided and irresponsible.'

Close to 46 million men, women, and children are enslaved across the world, according to a harrowing new report from the Australia-based Walk Free Foundation.

Many of them, the analysis notes, are in fact ensnared providing "the low-cost labor that produces consumer goods for markets in Western Europe, Japan, North America, and Australia."

The organization's 2016 Global Slavery Index—based on 42,000 interviews conducted in 53 languages, covering 44 percent of global population—found there to be 28 percent more "modern slaves" than previously estimated.

A new shocking twist in the Euro 2016 saga has emerged just days after stark warnings ISIS would make the event a target. It turns out 82 of the people hired for security posts on the football cup are on French terror watch lists.

The Directorate General of Internal Security (ISB) has screened a total of 3,500 individuals already hired for the job of ensuring the safety of visitors, according to Le Point. Those among the 82 found on the watch list could by definition either belong to a terrorist group, such as Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), or have a history of questionable behavior or extreme beliefs on either the left or right.

According to French authorities, some 90,000 personnel in total will be on duty during Euro 2016, including the stadiums, fan zones and on the streets. Of those, 77,000 are police and gendarmerie, while the rest comprise security and military personnel, as well as 1,000 or so volunteers.

"Such a unique event in exceptional circumstances requires extra security measures," Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told journalists.

Multiple videos have surfaced this week highlighting the sheer corrupt nature of police and their ability to lie in order to deprive innocent people of their freedom.

The video of the arrest of 32-year-old Clinton N. Walker, a Hillsborough County firefighter, and emergency medical technician shows just how much a police officer's word means — even when it is entirely false.

According to the official police report, officers said Walker was being combative and assaulted an officer, so they were forced to taser him and kick him. However, surveillance video and cellphone video shows that never happened.

Figures from most recent census available in Qatar showed that almost 60 percent of Qatar's 2.4 million population live in what the government calls "labor camps," , highlighting the issue of the emirate's huge migrant workforce.

The figures from the Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics (MDPS) revealed that 1.4 million people live in what the department officially designates as "labor camps", Daily Star reported.

At the time of the survey, the official population was 2.4 million and the statistics found the overwhelming majority, 1.34 million, were male. However, since the census, Qatar's population has grown further to just over 2.5 million.

The accommodation of migrant laborers working on Qatar's numerous infrastructure projects has long been a contentious issue.

Qatar, which will host the football World Cup in 2022, has been condemned by human rights groups, including Amnesty International, for providing "squalid and cramped accommodation" for its large migrant workforce.

Sometimes to get to the beginning you have to start at the end.

Thursday afternoon in a Santa Clara courthouse, Judge Aaron Persky sentenced 23-year-old former Stanford student Brock Turner for sexually assaulting an unconscious female student behind a dumpster on the Stanford campus over a year and a half ago.

Turner — an All-American swimmer with Olympic aspirations — could have been sentenced to a maximum of 14 years in a state prison. Prosecutors asked Persky to give Turner six years. Instead, acting upon the advice of probation officers, Turner received six months in a county jail from the judge — with the possibility of only serving three months with good behavior.

Citing Turner's age and lack of criminal history, Persky explained the sentence thusly: "A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him...I think he will not be a danger to others."


And that is the latest dispatch from the toxic American rape culture that continues to thrive in America where victims of sexual assault might as well be bagged and tagged afterward along with all the other evidence and filed away with their testimony and impact statements.

There is no question about what happened that January evening; this wasn't something that happened behind closed dormitory doors. Brock was spotted on top of his victim by two passing students, he bolted and they they tackled him and held him until campus security showed up. The victim woke up the next morning in a hospital with no recollection of what happened.

An Ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbi has introduced a new decree in one of Jerusalem's neighborhoods that forbids all girls over the age of five from riding bicycles, claiming the activity is "provocative" and could "cause serious damage to their modesty."

The rabbi is from Jerusalem's Nahloat district and part of the ultra-Orthodox Haredi branch of Judaism that rejects modern secular culture. His ruling was distributed to a number of synagogues.

"We inform parents that they are obligated to forbid their daughters from age five and up from acting in this illegitimate way," Ynet reported, citing the ban.

The rabbi said that bike seats "cause serious damage to their modesty" and the sight of girls sitting on them can be "provocative" to men.