JTA
HaaretzSat, 16 Aug 2014 20:15 UTC
© AFPA Palestinian man carries boxes given to him as aid containing sanitation kits and soap at a UN school on August 15, 2014 in Gaza City.
, a British newspaper, has apologized for running an advertisement for a charity raising funds for the crisis in Gaza.
The weekly paper said running the ad for the Disasters Emergency Committee's Gaza Crisis Appeal was "meant as a purely humanitarian gesture,"
BBC reported.
In response to controversy over its decision to run the ad,
The Jewish Chronicle's editor, Stephen Pollard,
issued a statement Thursday explaining that the ad was not an expression of the newspaper's editorial view, which he said is separate from its commercial operations.
"The ad was approved by the chairman of the
JC, who has no involvement in editorial decisions, as an ad for humanitarian aid which nowhere makes political or partisan points," Pollard wrote.
Comment: What's worse? The Jewish Chronicle's supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza or apologizing for running an ad to support the victims of said genocide? It's completely heartless either way.
RTSun, 17 Aug 2014 19:56 UTC
© Reuters/Lucas Jackson
Protestors march and hold their fists aloft as they march during ongoing demonstrations in reaction to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri August 16, 2014.
One person is in critical condition and seven people have been arrested in the latest Ferguson protest, local police said in a news conference. They also confirmed the use of tear gas.
Earlier, conflicting reports suggested either
tear gas or smoke bombs were used.
#Ferguson cops say smoke, other media down it are reporting tear gas pic.twitter.com/JtWAWog40W
- David Carson (@PDPJ) August 17, 2014
Police officials are saying what they are firing is not tear gas, but smoke #ferguson
- Anastasia Churkina (@NastiaChurkina) August 17, 2014
I have been teargassed many times, the police definitely used it today in #Ferguson
- Tim Pool (@Timcast) August 17, 2014
Police radio said that a person has been shot, and it's not clear if rubber bullets were used. It's also reported that the man has been taken to hospital.
© APProtesters in Oakland marched over of the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
Two men were arrested and an officer was sent to a hospital during an anti-police march through downtown Oakland streets Friday night, police said.
The planned march was part of nationwide demonstrations in response to an officer-involved shooting in Ferguson, Missouri that happened one week ago. Most of the people in the march Friday night were protesting peacefully, however a small group of people became violent and pepper sprayed officers, police said. One officer was transported to a hospital after being assaulted by several people while trying to make an arrest, according to police.
A 45-year-old Oakland man was arrested in connection the assault at Third and Castro streets around 7:30 p.m., police said. About two hours later in the 5200 block of Telegraph Avenue, a 41-year-old Hayward man was arrested on suspicion of obstructing, delaying and resisting police officers, according to police.
The march started at 14th Street and Broadway near Frank H. Ogawa Plaza at 6 p.m. then moved down Telegraph Avenue towards Berkeley. The protestors also vandalized multiple businesses, wrote graffiti, broke windows and disrupted traffic, police said.
© Tommy Trenchard for The New York Times
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is so out of control that governments there have revived a disease-fighting tactic not used in nearly a century: the "
cordon sanitaire," in which a line is drawn around the infected area and no one is allowed out. Cordons, common in the medieval era of the Black Death, have not been seen since the border between Poland and Russia was closed in 1918 to stop typhus from spreading west.
They have the potential to become brutal and inhumane. Centuries ago, in their most extreme form, everyone within the boundaries was left to die or survive, until the outbreak ended. Plans for the new cordon were announced on Aug. 1 at an emergency meeting in Conakry, Guinea, of the Mano River Union, a regional association of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the three countries hardest hit by Ebola, according to Agence France-Presse. The plan was to isolate a triangular area where the three countries meet, separated only by porous borders, and where 70 percent of the cases known at that time had been found.
Troops began closing internal roads in Liberia and Sierra Leone last week. The epidemic began in southern Guinea in December, but new cases there have slowed to a trickle. In the other two countries, the number of new cases is still rapidly rising. As of Monday, the region had seen 1,848 cases and 1,013 deaths, according to the World Health Organization, although many experts think that the real count is much higher because families in remote villages are avoiding hospitals and hiding victims.
RTFri, 15 Aug 2014 16:29 UTC
© AFP/Getty Images/Spencer Platt
A white police officer in the United States killed a black person on average of twice per week from 2005 to 2012, according to homicide reports offered to the FBI. But this data is limited, as only about 4 percent of law enforcement agencies contributed.
There was an average of 96 such incidents out of at least 400 police killings each year that local police departments reported to the FBI, according to analysis conducted by
USA Today.The analysis comes in the wake of the
fatal police shooting by a white officer of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri that has set off national outrage over US law enforcement's aggressive use of deadly force, incongruent targeting of minorities, and a militarized posture that treats citizens as the enemy.
The FBI report shows that 18 percent of African-Americans killed during those seven years were under the age of 21. Whites killed that were under the age of 21 came out to 8.7 percent.
As
USA Today noted, only around 750 agencies - out of the 17,000 law enforcement entities across the United States - offered such data to the FBI.
On top of the limited participation, the self-reported contents of the database are considered incomplete. The data are not audited after submission to the FBI, and information on "justifiable" homicides has often been at odds with independent statistics gathered on police fatalities.
RT.comSun, 17 Aug 2014 13:16 UTC
© Reuters/Eddie Keogh
Your Android phone can be turned into a microphone without your permission or knowledge. All that's needed are the gyros in your phone that measure orientation. Stanford researchers have shown how to rewire them to pick up sound waves.
Together with the defense firm Rafael, they created an Android app called Gyrophone, which shows just how easy it is to get the vibrating pressure plates used by the gyroscope to pick up vibrations of sound at frequencies in the 80-250Hz range - the base frequencies of the human voice.
"We show that the MEMS gyroscopes found on modern smartphones are sufficiently sensitive to measure acoustic signals in the vicinity of the phone. The resulting signals contain only very low-frequency information (< 200 Hz). Nevertheless we show, using signal processing and machine learning, that this information is sufficient to identify speaker information and even parse speech. Since iOS and Android require no special permissions to access the gyro, our results show that apps and active web content that cannot access the microphone can nevertheless eavesdrop on speech in the vicinity of the phone," the scientists say on the Stanford Security Research
website, where they also offer the Android application as a free download.
Psychological Problems faced by disappointed alarmists
© Search-motive.com
The
Sydney Morning Herald has published an article describing the psychological problems alarmists are experiencing, in the wake of their Copenhagen 2009 disappointment.
Ask most alarmists and they will insist they are winning the debate - that the world is about to embrace green orthodoxy, that carbon trading schemes are rising, that "deniers" are more marginalised than ever before.
The article in the
SMH tells a very different story -
rising despair, despondency, disengagement, and in some cases delusional behaviour, in the wake of serial climate disappointments.
According to environmental scientist Nicole Thornton; "It's strange. Sometimes you just don't feel you're making headway in the time you've got, before it's too late for the planet," Thornton says. "All these little things weigh you down, and then the big stuff breaks you."
The article goes on to describe more serious cases - for example, "Six years ago, a dehydrated 17-year-old boy was brought into the Royal Children's Hospital, refusing to drink water. He believed having a drink would somehow contribute to the global shortage of potable water, and became the first diagnosed case of "climate change delusion".
© www.palestinechronicle.comOne ship in "Gaza's Ark."
Following Israel's latest military assault on Gaza, civil society groups from around the world say they are moving forward with plans to break the blockade on this besieged strip by sailing a "freedom flotilla" into Gaza Port.
At a meeting in Istanbul, Turkey this week, the international
Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) and numerous other groups came to the conclusion that "it is the responsibility of civil society worldwide to sail to Gaza," according to a press statement. They committed to making the voyage during 2014, which has been
coined by the United Nations as the
"International Year of Solidarity With the Palestinian People."
While the group did not publicly disclose a launch location or date, they announced that
they expect participation from civil society organizations across the globe - from Greece to South Africa to Jordan to Malaysia - as a counter to "the complicity of world governments" in the blockade on Gaza."Calls to end the blockade of Gaza need to move from words to actions," said Ann Ighe, chairperson of Ship to Gaza and member of the FFC. "We invite all interested citizens worldwide to participate in this initiative in any way you can."
Israel's month-long military assault on Gaza, currently stalled by a tenuous ceasefire, has left at least 1,939 Palestinians dead, 9,886 wounded, over 200,000 displaced, and more than 10,000 Palestinian housing units destroyed or severely damaged. United Nations officials estimate that at least three-fourths of Palestinians killed in Gaza are civilians and one third are children.
Comment: The peaceful challenges of the Israeli blockade of Gaza started in 2008 in the form of boats, financed by civilians and NGOs worldwide, that sailed from Cyprus, Greece and Turkey to Gaza. After the first few missions reached Gaza, Israel fiercely attacked the boats and the activists on board. The violence Israel was showing reached new criminal heights on May 31, 2010, when it killed nine (10, 1 was an American) activists on the Mavi Marmara in cold blood. It was a completely illegal act; Israel had no right to board the ship. The rest of the over 600 people on the flotilla boats were taken to Israel and deported home.
Israel stopped Freedom Flotilla 2, the Freedom Waves initiative and the Estelle which sailed at the end of 2012, continuing its long history of targeting peaceful, non-violent direct action with violence and sabotage. Gaza's Ark was/is again the evolution of the flotilla movement.
The Al Mezan Center for Human Rights notes that "it is common for the (Israeli) navy to open fire on fishermen, pursue them in Gazan waters, and destroy and confiscate their equipment, including their nets and boats. Such acts constitute flagrant violations of Israel's legal obligations as an occupying power under international law, and violate the fishermen's rights to life and work."
With the siege, Israel has also enforced no-go zones in Gaza's sea, to which Palestinians, under the Oslo accords, have the right to fish as far as 20 nautical miles from the coast. Fishermen and human rights groups report that the Israeli navy shoots on, harasses and abducts Palestinians as close at times as less than a mile from Gaza's coast, killing or injuring numerous fishermen while shooting at their boats. The act of the blockade is an act of collective punishment, which is outlawed under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
What is annoyingly dangerous to Israel is a peaceful project, supported by thousands of normal individuals, that will expose its lies and sidetrack its agenda. A flood of independent thinking and action won't float Israel's boat, thus it had to destroy Gaza's Ark.
© Unknown
San Francisco Bay Area Palestine activists have declared their first victory in attempting to prevent the offloading of an Israeli cargo vessel at the Oakland Port. Originally planning to show up at 5:00 am Saturday morning to block the ship, activists sent word out late last night that the meeting time had been moved up to 3:00pm, as the ship had delayed its arrival at Oakland in an apparent attempt to avoid the protest.
Activist Mohamed Shehk told The Electronic Intifada that the organizers have
been tracking the vessel
Zim Piraeus, and realized last night that it had stopped before reaching its Oakland destination, spending the night at sea.
"This delay is seen as a victory for us. It shows how much Zim is trying to avoid our protest, and it shows how effective we can be when we can organize these types of actions," Shehk said.
© Teo/Flickr
More than 350 members of a Texas high school's marching band were sent home and told to thoroughly shower and sanitize their instruments after a plane flying overhead doused them with pesticides. Reports indicate that the students, who attend Pearland High School near Houston, were outside practicing when a city plane flew by, dumping chemicals meant for mosquito extermination.
According to reports, the incident happened around 8 a.m. on August 7, when a plane from the Brazoria County Mosquito Control District (BCMCD) flew over a parking lot next to the school's football stadium. When administrators figured out what was going on, they told band members to go inside. But it was too late, as the toxins had already been released.
Comment: What's worse? The Jewish Chronicle's supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza or apologizing for running an ad to support the victims of said genocide? It's completely heartless either way.