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Banned: Smear campaign against Brit-Israeli peace activist Gilad Atzmon

Richard Hugus
MintPress News
Thu, 27 Dec 2018 00:00 UTC
Gilad Atzmon
© Gilad.co.uk.jpg
British-Israeli Jazz saxophonist, writer and peace activist Gilad Atzmon rocks the sax.
Jazz saxophonist and writer Gilad Atzmon was recently banned from playing at an assembly hall in Islington, a borough of London, by order of the Islington Town Council. This came about as a result of an e-mail from one person - Martin Rankoff - saying nothing more than that if Atzmon was going to be at the venue on December 21 he would give a ticket that was given to him to someone else.

Rankoff wrote, "Mr Atzmon's news and beliefs I personally find repulsive and do not wish to be in the same place as him, let alone listen to his music." Rankoff included links to ADL and Israeli news outlets accusing Atzmon of antisemitism. Incredibly, on the basis of this letter alone, the Islington Council went way out of its way and contacted the show's promoter to get Atzmon banned - something Rankoff didn't even ask for.

Imagine the situation in reverse: Gilad Atzmon writes a letter to the Council saying he is uncomfortable with Martin Rankoff appearing in the audience at Islington assembly hall. He refers to Mr. Rankoff's pro-Israel Twitter page where Rankoff calls Jeremy Corbyn "A F***ing Antisemite and Racist" and where Corbyn is pictured on a bike with a comment suggesting Corbyn should be rammed by a car. Atzmon says that he doesn't feel safe with Rankoff in the audience. He finds Mr. Rankoff's support for Israel repulsive because Israel was founded on genocide against the people of Palestine. As proof he provides links to news reports on the slaughter of unarmed protestors in Gaza since March 30, 2018, and a story on the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948.
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Stop

Bank of Russia shuts down five foreign exchange dealers who specialized in moving funds offshore


RT
Fri, 28 Dec 2018 11:24 UTC
Forex, stock trader
© Reuters / Viktor Korotayev AS
The Bank of Russia has revoked licenses of five out on nine foreign exchange dealers operating in the country - Alpari Forex, Forex Club, Fix Trade, Trustforex, and Teletrade Group. The decision comes into force on January 27.

All the companies are subsidiaries of foreign firms that use aggressive advertising to lure Russian clients and focus on moving their money offshore, according to the regulator.

The forex platforms now have a month to cease operations in Russia's securities market and pay off their customers, the regulator said announcing the measure on Thursday. Liabilities of the five forex platforms deprived of licenses amount to 35 million rubles ($504,000) and have some 2,000 clients, only 470 of whom are active, according to department head of the Russian Central Bank Larisa Selyutina.

The official reasons behind the move were repeated violations of Russian law, namely on securities. The Central Bank says the five dealers failed to fulfill the regulator's requirements, had flaws in internal accounting and presented inaccurate information and false reports to the regulator among other violations.

Comment: Putin has been working to stabilize Russia's economy and end illegal capital flight for years; despite constant pressure from the West he has been largely successful.

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Fire

Surge at ConEd substation casts eerie blue glow over New York

Tom Bemis
The Street
Fri, 28 Dec 2018 12:02 UTC
Sky in NY
New York City firefighters responded to a reported explosion at a Consolidated Edison (ED - Get Report) facility in Queens Thursday night that shocked many on social media.

Posts on Twitter showed an eerie blue glow over large portions of the area and sustained flashing lights.

A post from New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson showed a surreal video of a major portion of the sky illuminated with a blue light that appeared from a science fiction movie.

"Hearing reports of ConEd explosion in Queens that lit up NYC skies a few minutes ago. Will provide more information here as it becomes available," Johnson posted.
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Christmas Tree

Racially charged 'ghost' Christmas trees invade St Petersburg, Russia


RT
Fri, 28 Dec 2018 12:35 UTC
Ghost trees
© Ruptly
A simple act of vandalism on dozens of Christmas trees made it appear as if a peculiar Ku Klux Klan chapter had sprung up in the Russian city of Saint Petersburg this week.

The wrapped trees had eyeholes daubed on their protective coverings giving the impression that a bizarre Klan gathering was taking place near the Primorskaya metro station on Vasilyevsky Island.
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Arrow Up

New Russian law bans killing & mistreating animals, restricts petting zoos & illegal circuses


RT
Fri, 28 Dec 2018 15:23 UTC
Tiger
© Sputnik / Evgeny Biyatov
A tiger roars during a circus performance.
We are responsible for those we tame. And it's now a law in Russia as Vladimir Putin put his signature under new legislation, which bans killing, pitting and other forms of mistreatment of animals.

The Law on Responsible Treatment of Animals prohibits the killing of animals "under any pretext." It also outlaws shooting or poisoning stray dogs and cats, which has been happening in many Russian cities in recent years. Homeless animals are to be captured, sterilized, vaccinated and released with a special microchip.

Organizing animal fights and hounding beasts at other animals or people has also been made illegal.

The law orders pets to be kept in proper conditions by their masters. It bans contact or petting zoos from being opened at the malls, which is a common thing across Russia, as well as hosting animals at bars and restaurants.
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NPC

Swedish state broadcaster 'blasted' for playing down horrific details of ISIS-inspired murders in Morocco


RT
Fri, 28 Dec 2018 13:48 UTC
Morocco Scandinavian murder vigil Maren Ueland

People from Maren Ueland's hometown walk in a torch-lit march to honor Maren Ueland from Norway and Louisa Vesterager Jespersen from Denmark
Swedish state broadcaster SVT has come under fire for what some viewers are calling an effort to downplay the horrendous details of the murders of two Scandinavian backpackers in Morocco last week.

Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, from Denmark, and Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway were killed while backpacking in Morocco's High Atlas mountains. While both girls were stabbed multiple times, one of them was also beheaded on camera, shown in a video that has spread like wildfire around social media.

Previously recorded footage, which was authenticated by investigators, also shows the suspects in the brutal double murder pledging allegiance to the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, further confirming that the murders were an act of terrorism.
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Broom

Double-decker bus crashes into garden of London home

James Dawson
Joe.co.uk
Wed, 26 Dec 2018 20:55 UTC
double decker bus crash london

The area was cordoned off by emergency services
Footage has shown the aftermath of a double-decker bus veering off the road and crashing into the front garden of a south London home on Boxing Day night.

Police and paramedics were called just before 9pm to the incident that saw the bus smash through a fence and into the garden of a house in Streatham Vale, Brixton.

The area was immediately cordoned off by emergency services with two people treated for minor injuries and another taken to hospital, the Met police confirmed.

An eye-witness on Twitter claimed the bus had narrowly missed a car but footage shows a number of other vehicles that appear to have been damaged.

Comment: See also:

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Cow Skull

Former Reddit CEO: Internet traffic metrics are b******t - 'everything is fake'

Tyler Durden
Zerohedge
Thu, 27 Dec 2018 17:44 UTC
Ellen Pao

Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao
"It's all true: Everything is fake," tweeted Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao regarding a Wednesday New York Magazine article which reveals that internet traffic metrics from some of the largest tech companies are overstated or fabricated. In other words; they're bullshit.

Pao was responding to a tweet by the Washington Post's Aram Zucker-Schariff, quoting the following segment of the article:
The metrics are fake.

Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world's greatest data-gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its "Instant Articles," the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook's mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what's the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there's something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook's claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day - though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn't need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes. - NYMag
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Document

Black Fla. lawmaker proposes bill to protect Confederate statues

Rob Shimshock
Campus Reform
Thu, 27 Dec 2018 21:09 UTC
confederate statue
A black lawmaker in Florida filed a bill that would bar the removal of Confederate monuments in the Sunshine State. Such statues and other memorials have come under attack on American college campuses during recent years.

Republican state Rep. Mike Hill proposed the "Soldiers' and Heroes' Monuments and Memorials Protection Act" to ensure the preservation of "remembrances" constructed on public property from Mar. 22, 1822 and onward, the Pensacola News Journal reported.

Such memorials "may only be relocated, removed, altered, renamed, rededicated or otherwise disturbed if necessary to accommodate construction, repair, or improvements to the remembrance or to the surrounding property," according to the bill. While governments have bypassed similar laws by selling land on which Confederate memorials are located and permitting the new owner to remove them, Hill's bill stipulates that sale of public property containing a memorial must result in the memorial occupying a position of "equal prominence."
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NPC

Today's campus crazy: Univ official claims a tall man asking out a short woman gives him 'power over her' & could constitute sexual misconduct

Ashe Schow
The Daily Wire
Thu, 27 Dec 2018 00:00 UTC
college dating Title IX
Author's note: It appears other outlets misrepresented this story, reporting John was found in violation simply for asking out a physically smaller woman. This is not true, nor is it what I reported. I reported that the comments from the Mizzou official were made during a deposition for a lawsuit brought by John. I then summarized the actions that led to his punishment and linked to a previous article with more information. Nowhere in that summary or the previous article do I mention physical size, because that's not what led to his punishment. That does not change the fact that a Mizzou official, during a deposition, compared a man asking out a physically smaller woman to a professor asking out a student.

Getting up the courage to ask someone out on a date can already be nerve-racking, but now that college campuses have completely gone off the deep end, that fear will be intensified.

Today's crazy comes from - unsurprisingly - the University of Missouri (Mizzou), best known for torpedoing its enrollment rates after campus protests led a professor to threaten a student journalist. An official at Mizzou indicated during a deposition that a male student who was physically larger than the female student he asked out may have violated the school's Title IX policy because his physical size gave him "power over her."

For years, we have been told that one must receive "affirmative consent" before anything of a dating or sexual nature takes place. Critics of such policies, such as this reporter, have often wondered what would happen if the mere ask is unwanted, does that also constitute sexual harassment or assault?

Now we appear to have our answer: Yes.

When a Mizzou official was questioned regarding a case where a black male Ph.D. candidate at the school asked out a white female fitness trainer, she bizarrely suggested that the fact that the male student was larger than the female student gave him "power over her" and violated school policy.

Comment: Apparently a new category, 'oppression by physical size' has just been added to the Oppression Olympics as well as a new conduit for inter-sectional warfare...get out the popcorn!!

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