Society's ChildS


Snakes in Suits

Dodging responsibility: Michigan denies Flint right to sue state over lead contamination


RT
Tue, 20 Sep 2016 14:08 UTC
Flint Mayor Karen Weaver
© Alex Wong / Getty / AFPFlint, Michigan Mayor Karen Weaver
A sneaky move by Michigan removed Flint's ability to hold state officials accountable for actions resulting in the city's water supply being laced with lead. The new policy would require the state's permission to be sued, which is unlikely.

Mere days after receiving notice from Mayor Karen Weaver about her possible intention to sue Michigan on behalf of the city of Flint, Michigan changed the rules. While Weaver did not have plans to sue the state, she filed her intent to sue so that the door could be open.

However, the state-appointed Receivership Transition Advisory Board still controls part of the city's policies. With all of the five members on the board appointed by Michigan Governor Rick Synder (R), the board quickly slammed the door on the lawsuit by requiring their approval for any lawsuits, according to the Detroit Free Press.

Comment: Michigan state officials lied about lead in Flint's water - knowingly poisoning countless children

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Stock Down

Crude prices continue decline upon concerns of global oversupply


RT
Tue, 20 Sep 2016 09:19 UTC
oil prices falling graphic
Crude prices continued to fall on Tuesday as Venezuela announced global supply needs to be cut 10 percent to meet demand.

"Global production is at 94 million barrels per day (bpd), of which we need to go down 9 million barrels per day to sustain the level of consumption," Venezuela's Oil Minister Eulogio Del Pino said in an interview with state oil company PDVSA. Del Pino is also the company's president.

Oil prices fell half-a-percent on Tuesday on renewed concerns over global oversupply. The North Sea Brent benchmark crude slipped to $45.67 per barrel and US WTI slid to $43.07, as of 9:00am GMT.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia keeps upping production. The kingdom pumped 10.6 million barrels per day in July, up 120,000 bpd from the previous month. There's no official data on Saudi production in August, but Reuters reports it's expected to fall slightly.
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Pirates

Employees, customers warned of Wells Fargo fraudulent bank accounts years ago - Feds blew it off


RT
Tue, 20 Sep 2016 13:41 UTC
Wells Fargo bank fraud
© Shannon Stapleton / Reuters
Calling into question why Wells Fargo was only recently fined $185 million for fraudulently opening more than 2 million accounts, the US Senate is now hearing reports that employees and customers blew the whistle on the Wall Street bank's illegal activity several years ago.

After settling with regulators for $185 million over signing up its customers for more than 2 million accounts without their knowledge and subsequently charging them fees, Wells Fargo became the focus of a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

White-collar criminologist William Black told the Real News that the hard work exposing the bank's practices was "done by the customers, by the employees and by Los Angeles County, that bought the suit in 2015, building on these whistleblowers."

"You see almost no credit for that, in the coverage," said Black, associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. "Instead these federal agencies held absolutely not a single individual accountable, there were no admissions, there was absolutely no admissions in the settlement agreement. So this settlement agreement, principally negotiated by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) is disgustingly weak."

Comment: Notice that the FBI and the regulators were very happy to go after small community banks. The big fish like JP Morgan, Citibank, or Goldman Sachs get off with a wrist slap if they are prosecuted at all.

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Stop

Indian woman stabbed 22 times in middle of New Delhi street, no one helps


Sputnik
Tue, 20 Sep 2016 13:32 UTC
New Delhi skyline
© Flickr/ Ben Sutherland
The shocking incident occurred in broad daylight and was caught on security cameras.

A young woman was stabbed 22 times, resulting in her death in the streets by her older stalker. The shocking incident raises questions about the safety of women in Delhi and what steps the government is taking to protect them.

The suspected murderer, Surendar Singh, was reported to have been harassing the victim, Karuna, 21, for some time and was enraged after seeing a picture of the girl with another boy. "Karuna aged 21 years was stabbed by Surendar Singh, age 34. Deceased was a teacher at Novel Reaches School. He claims that he was in affair with this girl and today he saw some compromising pics sent by girl to another boy and that made him angry," reads a statement issued by the police.

The most appalling part of the crime is that no onlooker dared to come to the help of the victim, letting her die on the streets. Delhi is notorious for crimes against women and incidents of harassment and rape are not uncommon.
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Life Preserver

This 10-year-old girl wants you to know what the US Government is doing to Yemen

Carey Wedler
Anti Media
Mon, 19 Sep 2016 00:00 UTC
Yara from Yemen
Yara
Though Saudi Arabia often makes headlines for bombing hospitals and killing civilians in their ongoing war against rebels in Yemen, the Western role in these human rights violations is seldom discussed.

But a new video posted to Youtube from a ten-year-old girl living in the rebel capital of Sanaa, Yemen, hopes to challenge the perpetual attacks that have ravaged her country. Following the breakdown of peace talks last month, Saudi Arabia has repeatedly hit Sanaa with air strikes.

In a video she filmed in her bedroom on her mother's cell phone, the young girl, named Yara, recalls when the war started. In English, she explains how excited she was to attend a concert last March before her mother informed her a war against Yemen had begun, decimating schools, factories, and homes. Many people lost their jobs, she remembers, including her father.

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Info

Guess which terrorist group has killed more Americans than any other since 9/11?

Tom Cahill
U.S. Uncut
Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00 UTC
terror in us
While Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are using the Brussels attack to foment Islamophobia amongst their respective bases, it's important to note that white terrorists have killed more Americans on U.S. soil than Muslim terrorists since the 9/11 attacks.

The New America Foundation (NAF), a think tank funded by prominent universities and foundations, has been keeping track of all terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11, and found that not only have white terrorists killed more Americans than jihadists, but attacks by white terrorists are also twice as frequent, with 18 homegrown terror attacks between 2004 and 2015, and just 9 terror attacks rooted in Islamic extremist ideology.

To define what constitutes a terrorist, NAF has very specific criteria:

Comment: And when you consider how many of the so-called Jihadi-related terror attacks are manufactured by elements within the FBI (and other intelligence agencies) - what would the stats look like then??

See also: Non-Muslims responsible for 94% of terrorist attacks in America

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Syringe

Flashback More WADA leaks: British Olympic champion Mo Farah, Spanish tennis star Rafael were given 'exemptions' to take performance-enhancing drugs


RT
Mon, 19 Sep 2016 17:24 UTC
doping scandal
Cheats
The hacker group known as 'Fancy Bears' has released its latest list of WADA drug test results of well-known athletes, including those from Great Britain, Denmark, Australia, Spain and Germany.


The most high-profile names on the list are Great Britain's 'double-double' Olympic champion Mo Farah and Spanish tennis great Rafael Nadal. They appear on a 26-name list alongside athletes from Argentina, Belgium, Burundi, Canada, Denmark, France, Hungary and the USA.

The country that features the most athletes is Great Britain with eight, including Farah and Rio 2016 golf gold medalist Justin Rose.

Comment: Great Britain won just one gold medal at the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta (and a total of 15 medals).

Surely the only way that country could have - in the space of just 20 years - come second in the medal table at the 2016 Rio Olympic games is via a state-sponsored doping scheme?

See also:

Bombshell leak reveals Williams tennis sisters and Rio Olympics gymnast heroine have been doping for years, with WADA's approval

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Info

AfD boldly vows to become Germany's third largest force as Merkel admits refugee crisis was 'out of control'


RT
Mon, 19 Sep 2016 19:47 UTC
AfD party flag in Germany
© Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters
The deputy chief of the German anti-immigrant and Euroskeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has vowed it will become the third largest force in the 2017 federal parliamentary elections, following its latest breakthrough in the Berlin polls.

Celebrating the outcome, AfD deputy leader Beatrix von Storch published a post saying the result is a sign of "decline" for Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party.

"The CDU declines. The AfD rises. In 2017 we'll see Angela Merkel fighting for her political survival and the AfD will become the third-largest force in Germany - at least," Storch wrote.
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Pistol

Forensic report: 13-year-old killed by Columbus, Ohio police, shot while fleeing

Kim Palmer
Reuters
Mon, 19 Sep 2016 14:47 UTC
Tyre King
© NBC NewsTyre King
A forensic report released on Monday by attorneys representing the family of a 13-year old African American boy fatally shot by a white Columbus, Ohio, police officer last week said the teenager was shot three times while running away.

Francisco Diaz, a Michigan medical examiner hired by the family's attorneys, on Sunday examined the body of Tyre King. According to the Columbus Police Department, he was shot multiple times after he appeared to pull a handgun from his waistband during an encounter with police after a report of an armed robbery.

It was later determined the gun in question was an air pistol that fires BBs - small, metal pellets, not bullets. Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther previously said the BB gun looks "almost identical" to the 9-millimeter Glock semi-automatic handguns carried by city police.

"Based on the location and the direction of the wound paths, it is more likely than not that Tyre King was in the process of running away from the shooter or shooters when he suffered all three gunshot wounds," Diaz said, according to a statement from attorneys Sean Walton and Chanda Brown.
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Laptop

Teen hacker 'Fear' hits hundreds of government FTP data servers

Joe Uchill
The HIll
Mon, 19 Sep 2016 12:57 UTC
Computer keyboard
© Thinkstock
A hacker known as Fear appears to have hacked hundreds of government servers used to upload and download files from the internet.

Fear, who claims to be a teenager, said he took advantage of lax security at the company Neustar to gain access to a large number of FTP (File Transport Protocol) servers.

Servers for file transport are often used to upload data to a website, and run off of the same types of domain names as websites.

Neustar is in charge of the ".us" top-level domain, an alternative to ".com," ".edu" and ".org." By hacking Neustar, Fear gained access to the FTP accounts for every site with an address ending .us.

"I hacked into the Neustar FTP, and I dumped their files, and in the files there were a list of each and every FTP server on a .us, and it had their passwords, users, ftp ip, hostname, and domain," said Fear in an online chat.

Many of the servers that host .us accounts also host ".gov" accounts, leaving Fear with what he claimed was access to a wide variety of government information, including voter registrations for every county in all 50 states, prescription databases and the Department of Education.

"It only takes 13 hours and 23 minutes and 12 seconds for somebody to finish gathering data on every US citizen," Fear boasted.
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