Society's ChildS


Heart

Girl writes letter to Putin asking for a dog - Putin delivers

putin girl chihuahua
© Крыминформ ИА / YouTube
An 11-year-old in the city of Sevastopol in Crimea has sent a letter to Vladimir Putin, telling the president she wanted a dog. Now she has become the happy owner of a chihuahua.

"I wrote: 'Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin! Please give me a chihuahua as a present,'" Alina Zykova told local media. The girl had watched the president giving presents to other children on TV, and decided to ask him to make her wish come true too, her mother added.

The family who moved to Sevastopol from the Donetsk region in Ukraine because of the girl's health (doctors recommended her to stay away from coal mines), received a phone call from the local government.
putin girl chihuahua
© Ruptly

Comment: When was the last time one of our Western leaders actually read a letter from a citizen? Hint: the answer is less than 1.


Eye 1

Never again? Anti-immigrant 'Alternative for Germany' scores huge gains in local German elections

Alternative for Germany
© Hannibal Hanschke / ReutersSupporters of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) demonstrate against the German government's new policy for migrants in Berlin, Germany, November 7, 2015
The anti-immigrant right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD) scored huge gains in local elections in the German central state of Hessen over the weekend, becoming the third strongest political force in the region amid the ongoing refugee crisis.

The anti-immigrant party garnered on average of 13.2 percent of vote throughout the region, coming in behind only Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), which received 28.2 percent, and the Social Democrats (SPD) with 28 percent, according to preliminary election results, as reported by the German media.

AfD also scored significant gains in Hessen's several major cities, winning 10.3 percent in Frankfurt, 12.2 percent both in Kassel and Darmstadt, as well as enjoying particular success in the regional capital of Wiesbaden, attracting 15.3 percent of the vote.

Comment: Further reading: Anti-refugee rallies in Germany, Netherlands, Swedish mosque arson attack


Hearts

Co-founder of "Dog Tales Rescue and Sanctuary" can't decide which dogs to save- buys entire shelter instead

Dog shelter
© Dog Tales
Danielle Eden is no stranger to hell.

She usually brings a few dogs back from there.

As cofounder of Dog Tales Rescue and Sanctuary, she has visited countless animal shelters throughout the world. And often she would bring dogs in the most dire circumstances back to the rescue's own rolling 50-acre property in King, Ontario.

But she wasn't prepared for what awaited her at a shelter she visited in Israel last January.

Every last dog was in desperate straits.

"This is the worst shelter she had ever seen," Clare Forndran, media director for Dog Tales Rescue and Sanctuary, tells The Dodo.

Comment: Kudos to Dog Tales Rescue and Sanctuary in their mission to save the lives of so many dogs and give them a new lease on life.


Eye 1

Clamp down on cash helps serve the ultimate surveillance state

Cashless society
'Come to us! Yesss, you know you want to!'
The war on cash is more than just a currency war to clamp everyone down on the electric grid. It is also a war on your privacy, and the nail in the coffin for the free market of low level transactions.

Soon, restrictions on cash will become so severe that even spending $100 will arouse suspicion, despite the constant inflation on the value of such a denomination. One day, physical currency may become obsolete.

When that day comes, they will know everything you do.

Conducting transactions in anything but digital creds will be not only increasingly difficult, but seen as outright criminal behavior. It might even make you a terrorist.

Don Quijones argues on Wolf Street:

Stock Up

Willful ignorance: Nestle admits 'possibility' of slave labor in its coffee supply chain

coffee slavery
© Nacho Doce / Reuters A worker walks after picking coffee beans from coffee plants during a harvest at a farm in Esprito Santo do Pinhal, 200 km (124 miles) east of Sao Paulo.
Two of the world's largest coffee companies Nestle and Jacobs Douwe Egberts say beans bought from Brazilian plantations may have been grown using slave labor because they do not know the names of all the plantations that supply them.

This followed an investigation from the Danwatch media and research centre which confronted the two companies with the possible infraction.

"Two coffee giants [together account for 39 percent of the global coffee market - Ed.] admit that coffee from plantations, where working conditions resembled slavery according to the Brazilian authorities, may have ended up in their supply chains," the Denmark-based group said, adding the companies often bought beans from middlemen and exporters in a muddled supply chain.

Comment: For a company which makes billions in profits to acknowledge that "forced labor is an endemic problem" and yet do nothing to actively track and maintain responsible levels of vigilance over its supply chain is sickening. As the track record would suggest, the duty of care is weighted towards share holders not the poor unfortunates they readily make profit from.


Ambulance

Terminal austerity: Ukrainians Dying by the Thousands Due to Lack of Meds, Protesters Blame Yatsenyuk

Ukraine protest
© n/a“I have AIDS, I was written-off by the Cabinet”, say these terminally ill people to PM Yatsenyuk
Terminally ill patients suffering from cancer, AIDS, hepatitis, and tuberculosis protested at the Ukrainian Government Building

They claim that the reduction of the country's medical budget dooms them to untimely death. Their posters say:
"I have cancer, I was written-off by the Cabinet"

"I have AIDS, I was written-off by the Cabinet"
Stumbling upon this video, I remembered that in 2010, the current Prime Minister of the Ukraine, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who is now implementing this austerity policy, ran for the presidency with these pledges:
"The quality of Soviet medicine and education exceeded standards of the most developed countries".

"If we are not able to revive our state medical system, people will be deprived of their future".

"That [Soviet] system had many disadvantages but still it was effective..."

"They [the West] have good educational systems. But it's not for everyone... Not many can afford to send their children to university..."

"The issue of Ukraine entering NATO is irrelevant".

"It's much more important for people to have good relations with Russia than with NATO. People want to improve these relations, including those in Western Ukraine. It's true - I've checked that".
This is not a joke - I kept Yatsenyuk's leaflets.

Comment: So as Ukraine is pillaged via the U.S. backed coup, IMF loans and enforced austerity, as ever it's the most vulnerable who suffer the most. Business as usual for the parasitic financial system and their puppets.


SOTT Logo Radio

Behind the Headlines: Postimperialism: A Template for a New Society and Why It's Necessary

Us troops
© tonyseed.wordpress.comUS troups are present in 156 countries
The evidence is all around that our current global society has reached its nadir. Today, the rampant corruption and psychopathy that define state and global 'leadership' has filtered down to sully all levels of society. From the new phony religion of myopic and obtuse 'science' and the old phony religion of made-up gods and saviors promising eternal bliss in 'heaven' or eternal damnation in 'hell', to sweat shops for the poor and dead-end mind-numbing jobs for the 'rich'.

Our chronically polluted environment is ignored in favor of endless wars on brown-skinned people that provides the rationale for police state measures in the affluent 'West'. Meanwhile, large numbers of the (otherwise) normal human population have responded to such chaos and disconnection with apathy and dissociation into increasingly toxic and pathological 'past times'. Yes indeed, things certainly could be better on our planet. But what can we do to help set things straight?

This week on Behind the Headlines, Joe Quinn and Pierre Lescaudron will be discussing some ideas about how a postimperial global society might be structured and why it is a very good idea that we all begin to seriously consider a future where building society from the 'ground up' is necessary.

Running Time: 01:51:02

Download: MP3


Quenelle - Golden

Israeli-American journalist compares Jewish Iranians to animals in a petting zoo

candle lighting
© AP Photo/Ebrahim NorooziIn this Thursday, Nov. 20, 2014 photo, an Iranian Jewish man lights candles at the at the tomb of Harav Oursharga, one of the holiest Jewish sites in Iran, in the city of Yazd 420 miles (676 kilometers) south of capital Tehran. More than a thousand people trekked across Iran this past week to visit a shrine in this ancient Persian city, a pilgrimages like many others in the Islamic Republic until you notice men there wearing yarmulkes.
Millions of Iranians, including many from the nation's Jewish minority, went to the polls on Feb. 26 to decide their next government.

After the Israeli news agency Haaretz published a photo essay of election day in a Tehran synagogue that doubled as a polling place, one conservative Israeli-American journalist used it as an opportunity to compare Jewish Iranians to animals in a petting zoo.

"Totally spontaneous scenes from a Tehran petting zoo," Goldberg tweeted on Feb. 28, with a link to the Haaretz article.

Goldberg is a neoconservative staff journalist at The Atlantic, and a well-known Zionist once referred to by the New York Review of Books as "the most influential journalist/blogger on matters related to Israel." In an April 2015 report for The Atlantic, he echoed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in arguing that Jews should leave Europe and emigrate en masse to Israel.

Arrow Up

Russia offers assistance to international organizations bringing humanitarian aid to Syria

syrian migrants
© Rodi Said / Reuters
Russian military facilities are offering assistance to humanitarian organizations offering aid to people in Syria, saying their facilities and logistics specialists may be able to resolve the problems they face.

The offer was made on Monday when the Russian Defense Ministry confirmed that the internationally sponsored truce between rebel groups and the Syrian government in Syria is mostly holding.

"In the current conditions the issues of safe return of civilians to their homes and delivery of humanitarian aid take a higher priority," the ministry said in a statement. "It's known that international organizations face difficulties when organizing humanitarian deliveries to Syria, primarily in logistics: storage, packaging, delivery and local distribution."

Comment: The humanitarian crisis in Syria was created by the US and its allies, and without Russia's intervention there would be no ceasefire or possibility of return for all those displaced in the conflict. Russia continues to show her decency and goodwill with the many humanitarian aid deliveries made throughout the world.


Cowboy Hat

Military report: Blundering disregard and 'daredeviltry' at UK nuclear submarine base caused radiation exposures

UK nuclear submarine
© David Moir / Reuters
Blundering 'daredevilry' at Britain's nuclear submarine base exposed up to 20 workers to radiation, according to a Ministry of Defence (MoD) report.

The incidents, which were investigated by the Ferret website, took place aboard nuclear submarines docked at the Faslane naval port in Scotland.

The MoD's report covered four incidents between 2012 and 2013. It took the military two years to release the heavily redacted documents following Freedom of Information (FoI) requests.

Comment: The Trident trap: Replacing UK's nuclear subs 'to cost £167 billion, exceeding all expectations'