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Quenelle - Golden

Right-wing street artist hijacks Hollywood billboards to shame Epstein, Allen and Polanski: 'Once Upon a Time in Pedowood'

pedophiles epstein polanski billboard hollywood
A giant billboard for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has been hijacked by right-wing street artist Sabo to take aim at pedophiles Roman Polanski and Jeffrey Epstein.

The billboard on Pico and La Cienega in Hollywood now reads "Once Upon a Time in Pedowood." Sabo also replaced the faces of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio with the infamous predators.

Arrow Up

American citizen held in Syria by Assad forces freed, family says

Sam Goodwin
© Courtesy Goodwin Family
Sam Goodwin, 30, is pictured in an undated photo released by his family.
The family of an American citizen who was held in Syria says he has been freed after months in captivity of President Bashar al Assad's regime.

"We are grateful to be reunited with our son Sam. Sam is healthy and with his family," Thomas and Ann Goodwin said in a statement of their 30-year-old son.

Goodwin was taken off the street in May in Qamishli, as he was visiting Syria in a bid to visit every country in the world, a source close to the family and a U.S. official told ABC News.

A self-described expat, entrepreneur and world traveler, Goodwin has been to over 180 countries and had hoped to visit all 193 by the end of 2019, according to his blog. He had already visited other dangerous hot spots like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea.

Star of David

1 in 15 Israeli soldiers jailed for going AWOL - servicemen cite harsh conditions

IDF israel soldiers
© Associated Press/Ariel Schalit
A new report out of Israel has revealed that Israeli soldiers are being imprisoned for leaving their posts in broad daylight, and sometimes at night too.

The Israeli regime has revealed that over 10,000 Israeli soldiers-- that's one in every 15 service members-- spent time in a military prison in 2018.

This episode is all about why military members in Israel run away.


Comment: Breaking the Silence has helped many ex-soldiers cope with the reality of what service in the Israeli forces meant - giving up their humanity..


Arrow Down

Elizabeth Warren's fellowship applicants describe entry process as deceptive and exploitative

Elizabeth Warren
© Doug Christian
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has built much of her political career as a champion of workers and consumers against the deceptive and exploitative practices of corporations and employers.

But as she navigates the latest chapter of that career arc — a run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency — the Massachusetts Democrat faces criticism from several of her own supporters who said the lowest tier of her campaign structure doesn't match the image she projects.

Two early converts to Warren described the process for entry into her campaign's volunteer fellowship program as deceptive and at times exploitative in interviews with The Daily Beast. They said they were pushed toward unpaid positions over paid ones, misled over the availability of financial assistance, and asked to sign highly restrictive nondisclosure agreements that worker advocacy groups concede are irregular. Both applicants verified their accounts with emails and text messages from the Warren campaign.

The complaints from those offered unpaid fellowships could raise new questions for Warren as she seeks to put her lengthy history of advocating for consumer and worker rights at the center of her rising campaign.

"What was sold to me was very different than it actually was," said Jonathan Nendze, a rising senior at Seton Hall University who was offered a volunteer fellowship position on Warren's campaign. "It was kind of a great scam of getting people to show up and work in the capacity of volunteer, but to function as a paid intern in the amount of work they're doing," he said.

Heart - Black

Man apparently dies in hill of polluted soap suds in Mexico when he stopped to take a selfie

Car crash
A towering hill of soap suds floating atop a heavily polluted stream in Mexico has apparently killed a man who stopped to take a selfie, fell into the quivering mass and disappeared.

Authorities in the central state of Puebla are still looking for the man who fell into a mound of suds 20 feet (6 meters) high.

Heart - Black

Macron regime pretending to be deaf to whistleblowers over French police suicide epidemic

Ollie Richardson  yellow vests
© Ollie Richardson
Ollie Richardson: Photo taken by me at the June 29, 2019 Yellow Vest demonstration in Paris
I think by now most people who are interested in geopolitics are familiar with the "Yellow Vests" movement and the social unrest in France, but one topic that receives almost no mainstream media coverage (neither in the Anglophone nor French press), and which the French government deliberately ignores, is police suicide. At the time of writing - July 25th - there have been 66 police suicides in France so far in 2019. According to the President of the association "Uniformes en danger" Christelle Teixeira, 88 police officers killed themselves in 2018. At the current rate in 2019 it means that every four days a police officer kills themselves. This epidemic of suicides in the ranks of law enforcement is becoming an endemic problem that some people sometimes like to compare to the suicidal tendencies of French farmers, who have also been hit hard by socio-economic distress and drought.

Thus, according to a Senate report from June 2018, the rate of suicide in the French police is 36% higher than what is seen in the general population. Concerning farmers, the same rate was 20% to 30% higher than the average for the French population, according to a study published by the "Public Health of France" agency in 2016. It is a similar trend, but with a big difference concerning police officers and gendarmes: they all have the same employer - the state; and the same boss, the Interior Minister Christophe Castaner. The plans that were launched in the past to try to solve the problem, especially in May 2018 under the leadership of Gerard Collomb, are considered to be too weak by some police officers, who cite the daily grind and the "social context that is currently tense in many socio-professional categories", as Jean-Pierre Colombies explains.

Comment: How long before the French police wake up and realize the Yellow Vests are fighting the same fight? 'Jupiter' Macron seems oblivious to the possibility.


Bomb

2 North Carolina bomb squad agents injured in explosion while conducting investigation

Barn
© WTVD
Two North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation agents were injured in an explosion in Sampson County, North Carolina.
Two agents with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations bomb squad were injured in an explosion while conducting an investigation.

The agents, Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) Timothy Luper and Special Agent Brian Joy, were assisting the Sampson County Sheriff's Office with an investigation on July 26 and were attempting to melt down bomb-making materials found at the scene when the explosion happened, the North Carolina SBI said in a news release.

The investigation began the day before when the Sampson County Sheriff Office's Criminal Interdiction Team pulled a vehicle over for speeding, according to the sheriff's office.

Deputies conducted a probable cause search on the vehicle after a canine detected an odor of narcotics and found "what appeared to be an explosive device" in the passenger area of the vehicle, the sheriff's office said. After deputies closed down the scene and called in the SBI and Sampson County Emergency Services, the device was confirmed to be an explosive device and was disposed of by the SBI Bomb Squad, according to the sheriff's office.

NPC

Tour de France 'sexist' podiums and F1 grid girls - is no sport safe from radical feminism?

tour de france podium girl
© AFP / Marco Bertorello
As if on a seek and destroy mission to rid the sporting world of anything remotely offensive or unjust, radical feminists have taken their latest politically correct swing at the 'sexist tradition' of Tour de France podium girls.

Over 30,0000 disgruntled women's rights campaigners have signed a petition to do away with the "sexist tradition" of two glamorously but modestly dressed women handing bouquets and jerseys to the winners of one of sports most iconic races, capped off with a polite peck on the cheek.

Moroccan protest leader Fatima-Ezzahra Benomar ranted this week in a video recorded in front of the office of Tour organizers ASO: "Women are not prizes, rewards or sexual objects. They are athletes and their place is on the podium as sportspeople and not as rewards."

Eye 1

Australian federal police admit they unlawfully accessed metadata more than 3,000 times

Peter Dutton
© Mick Tsikas/AAP
Peter Dutton has said there are ‘consequences’ for unlawfully accessing metadata. ACT police have admitted they did so on more than 3,000 occasions
ACT Policing has admitted it unlawfully accessed citizens' metadata a total of 3,365 times, not 116 as previously disclosed in an explosive commonwealth ombudsman's report on Monday.

The new disclosures include a total of 240 cases that resulted in information valuable to criminal investigations and two that "may have been used in a prosecution".

In a statement on Friday, ACT Policing revealed the 116 unlawful metadata requests detailed in the report tabled in parliament on Monday are the tip of the iceberg, with a further 3,249 requests made from 11 March to 13 October 2015 under an invalid authorisation.

Bulb

Australian watchdog calls for regulatory controls on Facebook, Google

Josh Frydenberg
© AFP/File / SAEED KHAN
Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg
Australia's competition watchdog on Friday recommended tighter controls on the use of personal data and measures to ease Facebook and Google's dominance of online advertising among a slew of measures to better police the internet giants.

Intensifying the global drumbeat of calls to regulate some of the 21st century's biggest corporate titans, Australia's government said it would take the watchdog's 23 recommendations and propose regulation by the end of the year.

Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg welcomed the report from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, although it was unclear which of the recommendations the government may implement.