Welcome to Sott.net
Mon, 25 Oct 2021
The World for People who Think

Society's Child
Map

Stormtrooper

Welcome Home! US Soldiers just back from Iraq get new orders: Afghanistan

Chelsea J. Carter
CNN
Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:00 UTC
Soldiers arrive at their home base in Fort Hood, Texas, last week after being one of the last U.S. combat units in Iraq.
© CNN

Soldiers arrive at their home base in Fort Hood, Texas, last week after being one of the last U.S. combat units in Iraq.

Atlanta, Georgia -- Soldiers who just returned from Iraq are among several thousand being ordered to Afghanistan in six months as part of a mission designed to beef up Afghan forces ahead of a planned 2014 U.S. military withdrawal, officials said.

News of the pending Afghanistan deployments came as families at bases across the country were celebrating the return in recent days of troops who turned off the lights at a number of U.S. bases ahead of an end-of-the-year deadline to leave Iraq.

"We are glad that we have brought all soldiers back home in time for Christmas to spend with loved ones. We do have to put information out about an upcoming mission, though," the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, said Tuesday on its Facebook Page.
      Read More...
Heart - Black

US: Police torture and kill man with pepper spray

Doug Smith
Fox 13
Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:59 UTC
Tampa, Florida- No doubt you've heard the adage: a picture is worth a thousand words. A picture of 62-year-old Nick Christie could be worth thousands of dollars when a jury sees it.


The photo shows the Ohio man restrained inside the Lee County Jail with his body covered in pepper spray.

"This photo is a picture of a man who is strapped to a chair naked inside a jail for hours with a hood over his face. That evokes thoughts of being tortured," says Cleveland-based lawyer Nick DiCello who represents the Christie family.
      Read More...
Cult

Israel's treatment of women is hardly that of a democracy

Rachel Shabi
The Guardian
Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:47 UTC
Israel bus
© David Silverman/Getty
A woman on a bus looks out at an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man in Jerusalem, Israel.
A 'dignified' dress code and gender segregation show Israel is fast becoming bigoted about dissent and difference

While we've been distracted by alarmism over newly elected Islamist leaders enforcing hijabs and bikini bans in the Arab world, Israel is already embroiled in attempts to rein in this unruly matter of female "immodesty".

Last week, Israel's Haaretz newspaper reported on businesses in the southern town of Sderot signing up to a "dignified" dress code - whereby female employees must be "modestly" clothed. So far 20 stores have adopted this long-sleeves directive, initiated by a religious group which says it did not actively threaten to boycott non-signatory shops - but which, nonetheless, has considerable buying power. Not surprisingly, the women subjected to this new code have described it as religious coercion.
      Read More...
Family

Kremlin nervous as protesters return to streets of Russia

Miriam Elder
The Guardian
Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:23 UTC
Anti Putin protest
© Mikhial Metzel/AP
A demonstrator holds a poster showing a photo of Vladimir Putin and the words "No! 2050" during a mass rally in Moscow, Russia.
Tens of thousands of Russians expected to demonstrate against election results that saw Putin's party take majority in Duma

Tens of thousands of Russians are expected to take to the streets on Saturday despite Kremlin efforts to ease tensions over disputed elections and Vladimir Putin's expected return to the presidency.

More than 50,000 people have indicated their intention to attend a protest on Moscow's Sakharov Prospect, named after the late leading Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. Thousands more have signed up via social networking sites for protests in more than 80 Russian cities.

The protesters are hoping to capitalise on the momentum launched earlier this month, when up to 50,000 people turned out in Moscow alone demanding the Kremlin overturn parliamentary election results that saw Putin's United Russia take a majority in the Duma despite widespread accusations of fraud.
      Read More...
Stormtrooper

US: Occupy Albany Camp Dismantled As Police Pepper Spray Protesters

Alana Horowitz
Huffington Post
Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:16 UTC
Occupy Albany
So much for the holiday spirit.

Police pepper sprayed Occupy Albany protesters in front of a man dressed as Santa Claus on Thursday night. The incident occurred as police dismantled the protester's camp, the AP reported.

After a judge issued a court order allowing the city to remove the camp's tents, a large group of city workers and police officers entered the camp. As the last tent was being removed, protesters began to fight back, holding on to it and engaging the cops in a tug-of-war. The AP reports that at least 5 protesters were pepper sprayed, 4 were arrested and 1 was taken away by an ambulance.

Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings defended the police action and insisted there was "no legal ambush" or "planned force."

Watch police clash with protesters in the video below.

      Read More...
People

Indonesian Tsunami Girl 'Turns up After Seven Years Presumed Dead'

Ian MacKinnon
The Telegraph, UK
Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:02 UTC
Aceh was one of the worst hit places
© REX
Aceh was one of the worst hit places in the Indonesian tsunami
An Indonesian girl swept out to sea in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and long feared drowned has apparently turned up in her village and been reunited with her parents seven years later.

The girl named Wati, 15, who uses just one name, was ripped from her mother's grasp in the province of Aceh by the raging waters and has not been seen since.

But on Wednesday a friend of the girl's grandfather, Ibrahim, brought a teenaged girl in a headscarf to his house in the city of Meulaboh.

She had been discovered sitting in silence in a coffee bar, but when questioned she said that she had come by bus from Banda Aceh and was trying to find her way home and did not know how.
      Read More...
Candle

'If Jesus Were to Come This Year, Bethlehem Would be Closed'

Phoebe Greenwood
The Guardian, UK
Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:43 UTC
A Palestinian shepherd
© Abir Sultan/EPA
A Palestinian shepherd watches his flock near the Israeli settlement of Har Homa, near Bethlehem.
If Joseph and Mary were making their way to Bethlehem today, the Christmas story would be a little different, says Father Ibrahim Shomali, a parish priest in the town. The couple would struggle to get into the city, let alone find a hotel room.

"If Jesus were to come this year, Bethlehem would be closed," says the priest of Bethlehem's Beit Jala parish. "He would either have to be born at a checkpoint or at the separation wall. Mary and Joseph would have needed Israeli permission - or to have been tourists.

"This really is the big problem for Palestinians in Bethlehem: what will happen when they close us off completely?"

Bethlehem is the heart of Christian Palestine and it swells with pride every Christmas. Manger Square is transformed into a grotto of lights and stalls crowned by a towering Christmas tree. Strings of illuminated angels, stars and bells festoon the streets. But just a few minutes' drive to the north, the festive atmosphere stops abruptly.
      Read More...
MIB

Breaking: WSRP wants your Presidential Preference NOW


The Reagan Wing
Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:08 UTC
Image

In an interesting move, the Washington State Republican Party is asking for your personal contact information and presidential preference (read "straw poll") through an online form, but also wants to know how you identify yourself. Republican? Progressive? Conservative? Liberal? Libertarian? Democrat?

The results of the presidential straw poll, according to Kirby Wilbur, will be released the day before the Iowa Caucus.

Will Rob McKenna, Slade Gorton or Sam Reed correctly identify themselves as "liberal"? We don't think so.
      Read More...
Heart - Black

US: The Ongoing Republican Plan to Shame the Poor

Jamelle Bouie
The Nation
Tue, 20 Dec 2011 04:20 UTC
food stamp card
© Unknown
That House Republicans are opposed to anything that could assist regular Americans is par for the course. After all, this is a class of lawmakers who voted for two budgets that would slash social spending and gut the welfare state. What's remarkable, as seen in the current fight over extending payroll tax relief, is the extent to which House Republicans are eager to heap scorn and disdain on the poor and disadvantaged. In addition to forcing drug tests on those who receive unemployment insurance - as if recipients are prone to drug abuse and thus undeserving - House Republicans want to require GED training for anyone who receives UI and does not possess a high school diploma. The New Republic's Timothy Noah explains the problem with this egregious provision:
Requiring a drug test establishes that if you are collecting unemployment you are probably a disreputable character. It's morally repellant, but not particularly novel, since companies now routinely require lower-tier workers to piss into a jar as a condition of unemployment. [...]

The GED requirement, on the other hand, is a new way to communicate that if you lack a job you must be deficient.... If you don't have a high school diploma, or a GED, you're going to have a very difficult time getting a job. But if someone is collecting unemployment who lacks either of these things we know that person managed to get a job in spite of this educational deficit - otherwise he or she wouldn't be on unemployment. To require this person to enroll in a GED program as a condition of collecting benefits is in essence to say that you had no business being in the labor force to begin with.
If this sounds like an overread of the situation - or comically evil - I challenge you to reconsider. Over the last year, conservatives have doubled-down on their view that the unemployed are responsible for their fate, and that the mass of Americans are "mooching" from the "makers" of society. "Reasonable" Republican presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman endorsed Representative Paul Ryan's draconian budget for the United States, while more conservative candidates like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain pushed for budget plans that would wipe out the income of poor and working-class Americans with massive tax increases.
      Read More...
Star of David

Will Tanya Rosenblit's stand lead to the desegregation of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem?

Josh Mintz
Haaretz
Mon, 19 Dec 2011 03:02 UTC
Tanya Rosenblit
© Ilan Assayag
Tanya Rosenblit
Rosenblit reminds me of Rosa Parks, who - together with Clifford Durr, Edgar Nixon and Jackie Robinson - led to the eventual racial desegregation of the United States.

There is a bar in Tel Aviv called Rosa Parks. It's a nice place, one renowned for its clientele of intellectually engaging young women. I went there not long ago with a friend of mine who was visiting Tel Aviv from London, who happens to be black. When he saw the name of the bar he jokingly asked the barman,

"So, do I have to sit at the back of the room then?"

He got nothing but a blank look in response, the barman had no idea who the bar was named after, nor did he know her story.

That's changed now. The sex segregation of busses has become one of the hottest topics in Israeli domestic politics, coming to a head last week with the story of Tanya Rosenblit who refused to move to the back of a bus on the order of a religious Jewish man. Now she's being called 'The Israeli Rosa Parks.' She's not though, not yet anyway.

Rosa Parks was not the first African-American to take a stand against segregation, nor was she the best known, nor was the story of her protest the most unique. Nine months before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat for a white person, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was dragged off a bus in handcuffs for the crime of "seated while black." Earlier still, in 1944 (three years before he would become the first black Major League Baseball player) Jackie Robinson was court-martialed for refusing to give up his seat on a bus to a white army officer.
      Read More...
Amazon Smile
Revolt! T-shirts