Society's Child

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

Rachel Shabi
The Guardian
Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:47 UTC

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.

Kremlin nervous as protesters return to streets of Russia

Miriam Elder
The Guardian
Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:23 UTC

© 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.

US: Occupy Albany Camp Dismantled As Police Pepper Spray Protesters

Alana Horowitz
Huffington Post
Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:16 UTC

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.

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

Ian MacKinnon
The Telegraph, UK
Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:02 UTC

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.

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

Phoebe Greenwood
The Guardian, UK
Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:43 UTC

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.

Breaking: WSRP wants your Presidential Preference NOW

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

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.

US: The Ongoing Republican Plan to Shame the Poor

Jamelle Bouie
The Nation
Tue, 20 Dec 2011 04:20 UTC

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.

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

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.

US Marine: I am sorry for the role I played in Fallujah

Ross Caputi
Guardian
Thu, 22 Dec 2011 05:00 UTC

US soldiers return to their barracks at a military base outside Fallujah

As a US marine who lost close friends in the siege of Fallujah in Iraq seven years ago, I understand that we were the aggressors

It has been seven years since the end of the second siege of Fallujah - the US assault that left the city in ruins, killed thousands of civilians, and displaced hundreds of thousands more; the assault that poisoned a generation, plaguing the people who live there with cancers and their children with birth defects.

It has been seven years and the lies that justified the assault still perpetuate false beliefs about what we did.

The US veterans who fought there still do not understand who they fought against, or what they were fighting for.

Cellphone towers fade into landscape

Roger Vincent
Physorg
Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:04 UTC

Faced with providing service for ever more data-hungry cellphones, telecommunications carriers are in a nonstop race costing billions of dollars to boost the capacities of their networks.

To handle the heavy volume of video, music and Web pages that smartphone users are downloading, office buildings, strip malls, condominiums, schools, churches and just about every other type of structure - including water towers and freeway overpasses - are being pressed into service as cell signal relay stations, industry lingo for cell towers.

The number of cell stations is growing rapidly but stealthily. Few new cell sites are the imposing triangle-topped metal poles that are widely regarded as eyesores.

"People think cell sites look like oil derricks," said Andy Shibley, AT&T Inc.'s general manager for the Greater Los Angeles region. "Some still exist, but by and large that is not the case anymore."

Comment: The towers may be missing, but the radiation dangers are still there.

Massive snowfall makes headlines and is taken in good measure but soon the amount of snow that will fall we stop folk in their tracks both...

Winternights3

Oh, and I thought he was f**king rhesus monkeys ... :O

codis

But now she is almost safe from Ze Virus ... Soon to be totally safe

codis

Every person I know fully supports the False-Flag narrative. Like everything else about our federal government deep state, they lie. It is all...

L. Wood

Wonder who created those vaccines and funded the research.

Searcher109

Society's Child

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

Kremlin nervous as protesters return to streets of Russia

US: Occupy Albany Camp Dismantled As Police Pepper Spray Protesters

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

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

Breaking: WSRP wants your Presidential Preference NOW

US: The Ongoing Republican Plan to Shame the Poor

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

US Marine: I am sorry for the role I played in Fallujah

Cellphone towers fade into landscape

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