RTWed, 20 Feb 2019 19:09 UTC
© AFP / PREFECTURE DE POLICE; REUTERS / Alaa al-Faqir
Twitter users have expressed disbelief after Sky News published a video purporting to show members of the controversial White Helmets "rescuing puppies" in jihadist-controlled Idlib, Syria.
"A team from the Syrian Civil Defence, or White Helmets, were able to rescue two puppies from the rubble following rocket strikes," Sky News wrote in a tweet promoting the 31-second clip.
The video shows a group of men from the polarizing, foreign-funded "civil defense" group removing rocks lying on top of a puppy, which, even after surviving a rocket attack and being buried under the rubble,
shows no visible signs of injury.
RTWed, 20 Feb 2019 18:41 UTC
© Global Look Press / Server AmzayevCommercial port in Odessa, Ukraine
Despite years of mutual trade restrictions, Russia remained Ukraine's biggest trade partner in 2018, according to data published by the State Statistics Service of Ukraine.
Sales of Russian produce to Ukraine saw 12.3-percent year-on-year growth to US$8.1 billion. That makes Russia the biggest Ukrainian supplier, leaving China, Germany, Belarus, and Poland far behind. At the same time, the Russian market remained a major destination for Ukrainian exports. Ukraine sold $3.7 billion worth of goods to Russia, marking a 7.1 percent increase compared to the previous year.
Moscow suspended the free trade zone deal with Kiev shortly after the Ukrainian government signed an association agreement with the EU. Ukraine was automatically included on Russia's counter-sanctions list against the EU, introduced by Moscow in 2014 in retaliation to European penalties over re-unification with Crimea and Russia's alleged military involvement in Ukraine's eastern regions.
Comment: Who else would be willing to sell so much to a bankrupt country, knowing it will likely be stiffed? Russia has tempered its response to the Ukrainian government's hostilities with compassion for its citizens.
Brian Stelter
CNNWed, 20 Feb 2019 18:04 UTC
© CNNCNN says it is hiring Sarah Isgur Flores to be a political editor in the Washington bureau.
CNN says it is hiring Sarah Isgur Flores, who most recently served in the Justice Department as Jeff Sessions' spokesman, to be a political editor in the Washington bureau. Flores is a longtime Republican political operative who previously worked for Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz and Mitt Romney.
The reaction has been strong. CNN employees are concerned, according to numerous people who reached out to me on Tuesday. They are asking what Isgur's role will be and questioning whether her sudden leap from the Trump administration to the CNN newsroom is an ethical breach.
The Daily Beast's Maxwell Tani is hearing the same questions.
He reported that CNN staffers are "demoralized" by the news.
Comment: Something to keep an eye on. Will CNN's tone and direction change with Isgur Flores having a hand in shaping the emphasis of CNN's reporting?
© Alvin Benn/Special to the AdvertiserIn this photo from Advertiser archives, Democrat-Reporter Publisher Goodloe Sutton reviews an article in 2015 about the paper moving to a new location.
The editor of a small-town Alabama newspaper published an editorial calling for "the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again" against "Democrats in the Republican Party and Democrats (who) are plotting to raise taxes in Alabama."
Goodloe Sutton, who is the publisher of the Democrat-Reporter newspaper in Linden, confirmed to the Montgomery Advertiser on Monday that he authored the Feb. 14 editorial calling for the return of a white supremacist hate group.
"If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out D.C., we'd all been better off," Sutton said.
Nicholas Wolfinger
QuilletteWed, 20 Feb 2019 17:27 UTC
Having gestated in academia,
Intersectionality has escaped into the broader world. It's a foundational doctrine of third-wave feminism. It's long had its own
study group-the section on race, gender, and class-within the American Sociological Association, with an intellectual heritage in works by Patricia Hill Collins and Evelyn Nakano Glenn that preceded Kimberlé Crenshaw's 1989 coinage of the i-word. Intersectionality has garnered increasing attention in the past few years, but its big coming out party occurred in December of last year when Senator Kristin Gillibrand (D-NY)
tweeted that "our future is ... intersectional."
So it was timely that Anne Sisson Runyan published a
primer in the November-December 2018 issue of
Academe entitled "What Is Intersectionality and Why Is It Important?" Runyan does a good enough job of defining Intersectionality, but I honestly wish it were a little less important:
as it's typically practiced, Intersectionality is an intellectual straitjacket and an albatross for activism.
Comment:
A note from Wikipedia's entry on
Intersectionality:
Some right-libertarians have described the manifestation of intersectionality as being similar to the way religious faith manifests itself. Notably, for example, conservative political commentator Andrew Sullivan argues that the practice of intersectionality manifests itself "almost as a religion. It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained - and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., 'check your privilege,' and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay."[61][62] David A. French, writer for the National Review, states that proponents of intersectionality are "zealots of a new religious faith" intending to fill a "religion-shaped hole in the human heart". Additionally, he describes "extremist intersectionality" as justifying "intolerance in the name of tolerance".[63]
Sounds about right.
Matthew Brown
APWed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00 UTC
Every day many millions of gallons of water loaded with arsenic, lead and other toxic metals flow from some of the most contaminated mining sites in the U.S. and into surrounding streams and ponds without being treated, The Associated Press has found.
That torrent is poisoning aquatic life and tainting drinking water sources in Montana, California, Colorado, Oklahoma and at least five other states.
The pollution is a legacy of how the mining industry was allowed to operate in the U.S. for more than a century. Companies that built mines for silver, lead, gold and other "hardrock" minerals could move on once they were no longer profitable,
leaving behind tainted water that still leaks out of the mines or is cleaned up at taxpayer expense.Using data from public records requests and independent researchers, the AP examined 43 mining sites under federal oversight, some containing dozens or even hundreds of individual mines.
Richard Branson in his propaganda video
Isn't it amazing how the billionaires of the world seem to think they can meddle in anything and everything? "We Are the World!" they appear to assume, picking up on that "humanitarian" song from thirty years ago. I guess all that champagne consumed at Davos and elsewhere goes directly to their egos, inspiring new heights of arrogance and intrigue.
On February 15th Sir Richard Branson (whose net worth is estimated at about $4 billion) announced plans for a "Venezuela Aid Live" concert to be held on February 22 in the Colombian city of Cucuta and also live-streamed on the Internet, to raise $100 million for food aid.
Founder of the Virgin Group (400+ companies), Sir Branson is setting up the concert
"at the request of" Juan Guaido (who declared himself interim president on Jan. 23) "and jailed opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez to draw attention to the crisis in Venezuela. 'Our goal is to raise $100 million dollars in 60 days and reopen Venezuela's border so humanitarian aid can finally reach those millions who need it the most,' said Branson." [1]
There's a lot to unpack in that one paragraph, so let's start there and save the list of performers for later.
Comment: Watch Branson's video, if you can stomach it:
RTWed, 20 Feb 2019 17:03 UTC
© Global Look Press / ZUMAPRESS.com / PanoramicMartina Navratilova
American-based pro LGBT group Ally Athlete has broken off its partnership with the tennis star Martina Navratilova after she said that allowing transgender athletes to compete against female counterparts was "insane and cheating."
Ally Athlete, which describes its mission as a battle against "rampant homophobia and transphobia in sport," removed Navratilova from its advisory board and called her recent comments "transphobic" and "discriminatory."
"Martina Navratilova's recent comments on trans athletes are transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people through discriminatory laws, hateful stereotypes and disproportionate violence," the organization
said in a statement.
Comment: Some on Twitter recognized the truth:
© AFP/Frederick FLORINMacron visits a Jewish cemetery in Strasbourg, desecrated just that morning, before attending the Paris Holocaust memorial in the afternoon, then joining the 'anti-anti-semitism' demo in Paris that evening
Swastikas and anti-Semitic tags were found daubed over 80 gravestones at a Jewish cemetery in eastern France on Tuesday on the day of nationwide marches against a rise in anti-Semitic attacks.
The damage was discovered on Tuesday morning at a cemetery in the village of Quatzenheim, close to the border with Germany in the Alsace region, a statement from the regional security office said.
It's just the latest shocking incident of anti-Semitism in France.
According to authorities around 80 graves in total were vandalised with anti-Semitic graffiti and swastika symbols.
Photos show the Nazi symbols in blue spray-painted on the damaged graves, one of which bears the words "Elsassisches Schwarzen Wolfe" ("Black Alsacian Wolves), a separatist group with links to neo-Nazis
in the 1970s.
Comment: A fine line of BS.
The French media has been pumping out - day in, day out, in both regional and national outlets - the message that the Yellow Vest movement 'hates Jews' for over two solid months now. The French establishment - both its Franco-Français and Dual-Israeli branches - have gone full 'literally Hitler' on everyone.
Rounding off the theatrics yesterday was a demonstration in Paris called by France's main left-wing party (effectively a state-sponsored event, in other words), at which former presidents Sarkozy and Hollande joined Macron and other establishment figures to 'defend Jews' (but really to attack the Yellow Vests by implying that they are vile Jew-haters).
Today, Wednesday, Macron, the 'legitimate and democratically-elected' president of France, spoke at the above-mentioned CRIF, announcing that
he will decree legislation to
expand the definition of anti-Semitism to include criticism of Israel and Zionism...In Hitler's Germany, it was illegal to criticize Nazism. In the USSR, it was illegal to criticize Communism. That's one of the hallmarks of totalitarianism. Today we are witnessing a bizarre variation of this in the West: it is soon going to be illegal to criticize Jews
and the definition of what that means includes serious criticism of government, as in the Yellow Vest movement.
In Judaism, a scapegoat was a goat sent out of the city walls into the wilderness after the chief priest had symbolically laid the sins of the people upon it. The French government wishfully thinks that it can symbolically cast out the 'sins of the people' (their insurrection) by conflating criticism of the government with contravention of 'The Law'.
They're completely unaware, of course, what the real effect of all this political choreography is on the 75-85% of the population that wants regime change: behind the words, what they're actually communicating to the non-elite classes is that "
the conspiracy theory is factual - powerful Jews are your overlords."
What they're essentially doing then, inadvertently, is making a scapegoat of the Jews. The results are horrifyingly predictable.
Brad Edwards, Suzanne LeMignot and Charlie DeMar
CBS ChicagoTue, 19 Feb 2019 13:57 UTC
The two brothers involved in the Jussie Smollett attack told police that Smollett was behind creating a racist letter that was sent to the actor on the set of his show, "Empire," according to two sources with first-hand knowledge of the investigation.
And when that letter did not get a "bigger reaction," Smollett
orchestrated the attack a week later with the two men-Ola and Abel Osundairo, sources said. Also Tuesday, sources said the
two brothers were seen on a ride share video camera before being dropped off near the location of the attack.Smollett received a letter containing a white powder Jan. 22. The letter was mailed to Chicago's Cinespace Studios, where the show "Empire" is filmed.
The letter prompted a HAZMAT response. CPD says the "white substance" was later determined to be aspirin.
Comment: Who else would be willing to sell so much to a bankrupt country, knowing it will likely be stiffed? Russia has tempered its response to the Ukrainian government's hostilities with compassion for its citizens.