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World Cup scandal: French team spots drone spying during practice

Sam Colt
Business Insider
Thu, 12 Jun 2014 12:14 UTC
Image
© Screenshot/Evan Woodbery on Vine
Scandal has already taken hold of the World Cup on the tournament's first day of matches.

After spotting a drone hovering over its practice yesterday, France's team manager Didier Deschamps has called for an investigation into the possibility that the team was spied on, according to Yahoo Sports.

Deschamps told Football Italia the drone's operator was likely one of France's potential opponents, or a French news agency. France is in Group E with Switzerland, Honduras, and Ecuador.
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USA

Ponerized judge: Woman sentenced to prison for son's school absence dies in jail cell

John Vibes
The Free Thought Project
Thu, 12 Jun 2014 10:36 UTC
Image
Eileen DiNino, a 55 year old mother of 7 was sent to prison because she couldn't afford to pay for her children's truancy fines. Tragically, after serving half of her two day prison sentence, she was found dead in her cell.

District Judge Dean R. Patton of Reading, Pennsylvania sentenced Ms. DiNino to two days in prison to erase roughly $2,000 in fines.

Patton sent the woman away to prison against his better judgement, but as with most government jobs, Patton is required to ignore his own conscience to abide by federal and state laws.
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Frog

Monsanto nightmare: Thai military coup ushers in organic farming

Tony Cartalucci
Land Destroyer Report
Mon, 02 Jun 2014 05:19 UTC
Organic farming in Thailand
© Unknown
After the May 22 coup in Southeast Asia's Thailand, the new military-led government has revealed agricultural reforms based on sustainable, organic agriculture - an unprecedented and progressive departure from the unsustainable populist subsidies that proceeded it in Thailand, and that can be found in various degrees of failure around the world. The Royal Thai Army's General Prayuth Chan-ocha gave a basic summary of the reforms in a speech made before the nation late May, stating:
We are trying to find measures to fix the prices of agricultural products without bringing more problems like those that happened in the past. Some of these measures include cost reduction such as costs of fertilizers and seedlings, increase productivity while reducing areas being used, employ natural fertilizer and reduce chemical fertilizers, use of local raw materials, and increase product cost and quality in order to compete with other countries. At present, NCPO has giving priority to paying the rice farmers. The Bank of Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives owes the rice farmers a large sum of money. BAAC is now in the process of trying to solve this problem.
The plan seeks to immediately relieve farmers cheated by the ousted regime's failed subsidy program that left nearly a million farmers unpaid for rice they had long-ago turned in to government warehouses. To replace the subsidies, General Prayuth intends to implement a version of self-sufficient, localized agriculture that replaces big-agri with local and sustainable solutions.

Comment: See also:

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Chart Bar

Conspiracy theory? Half of Americans doubt official stories


RT
Thu, 05 Jun 2014 19:19 UTC
Image
© AFP
Astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., lunar module pilot of the first lunar landing mission, poses for a photograph beside the deployed United States flag during Apollo 11 Extravehicular Activity (EVA) on the lunar surface area called the Sea of Tranquility in this 20 July 1969 file photo.
If you've ever doubted any sort of official narrative, then you're far from alone: experts say that more than half of the people in the United States believe in at least one so-called conspiracy theory.

Recent studies suggest that around 50 percent of the American populations subscribes to at least one conspiracy theory, National Public Radio social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam told NPR's Morning Edition this week.

Whether it's concerns about the true nature of the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination or just about anything imaginable - experts say at least half of the US isn't so sure what to think about some of the most controversial topics of the last few generations.

Vedantam told NPR that researchers Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood at the University of Chicago have come up with the latest staggering statistic, which relies on data recorded by four nationally representative surveys conducted between 2006 and 2011.

Comment:
And they have good reason to. Updated, revised and extended:
33 'conspiracy theories' that turned out to be conspiracy facts

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Star of David

Really? Killing of Palestinian teens by Israeli forces 'might' be a war crime?


RT.com
Mon, 09 Jun 2014 21:22 UTC
palestinian teenagers
© AFP Photo / Mohammed Abed
The killing of two Palestinian teenagers by Israeli military forces on May 15 during a demonstration in the occupied West Bank might be a war crime, according to Human Rights Watch.

Muhammad Abu Thahr, 16, and Nadim Nuwara, 17, were both shot dead by Israeli troops as the pair protested the ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands. Video footage, photographs, witness statements, and medical records indicate that Israeli military forces used live ammunition against the boys and 15-year-old Mohammed Azza, who was seriously wounded in the incident, Human Rights Watch said in a report, entitled 'Killing of Children, Apparent War Crime,' released Monday.

The Israeli military said it "did not use live fire" during the demonstration, only rubber bullets and teargas, adding that it did not have an immediate reaction to the report.

Footage retrieved from security cameras on Palestinian properties near the scene of the alleged shootings shows the two teenagers hitting the ground at separate times, apparently shot despite posing no immediate threat to Israel troops.

Comment: The Israelis have been killing civilians for years and have consistently gotten away with murder, yet it seems the international community continues to turn a blind eye.
  • Gulag Gaza: 'No one responsible' for deaths of 21 Palestinian civilians says Israeli military
  • How the BBC whitewashed Israel's war crimes from the ceasefire in Gaza
  • Israel commits crimes without punishment

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Display

#Don't kill us: Refugees from Eastern Ukraine make a plea for peace (VIDEO)


RT
Tue, 10 Jun 2014 19:37 UTC
refugee

Refugee Maksim.
Refugees who fled the turmoil in Eastern Ukraine made a video plea, where they hold a poster with the hashtag #DontKillUs, urging the Kiev government to stop military assaults in the area.

Women and children that have been sheltered in a children's summer camp Dmitriadovsky in Russia's southern Rostov Oblast appear in the 5-minute video asking Ukraine's newly elected President Petro Poroshenko to stop the killing and withdraw Ukrainian troops.

Each of their messages asks the president to let them live and ends with a plea not to kill any more of their relatives.

The hashtag took the Twitter stratosphere by storm.

Overall about 20,000 women and children from Ukraine's southeast have crossed the border into Russia's Rostov Region in the last three days, according to regional authorities in Rostov. They added that at least 7,335 Ukrainian citizens have entered the Rostov Region in the last 24 hours.


Comment: The fact that we live in a world where it's even necessary to write such a 'hashtag' says volumes about us as a species. Humanity is a failed experiment.

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Question

'Gender nonconforming' summer camp for boys


Slate.com
Thu, 05 Jun 2014 12:30 UTC
Image
© Slate
Do you have a young male child who occasionally walks around in heels and plays with a barbie doll from time to time? According to some you need to send him to a specialized summer camp.

Over the past three years, photographer Lindsay Morris has been documenting a four-day camp for gender nonconforming boys and their parents.

The camp, "You Are You" (the name has been changed to protect the privacy of the children and is also the name of Morris' series), is for "Parents who don't have a gender-confirming 3-year-old who wants to wear high heels and prefers to go down the pink aisle in K-Mart and not that nasty dark boys' aisle," Morris said with a laugh.

It is also a place for both parents and children to feel protected in an environment that encourages free expression.

Comment: While 'transgenderism' is obviously a part, for some, of the human experience, we have doubts that such 'camps' are the appropriate way to deal with the issue, if, indeed, anything should be done, in any concerted way, or if 'transgenderism' is an 'issue' at all. It seems to us that such camps merely serve to make an issue of transgenderism in a way that is not appropriate for the children, their parents or society at large. As with so many other aspects of our modern society, almost everything is twisted and corrupted.

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Airplane

Glitches in the Matrix? 13 aircraft mysteriously disappear from radars in heart of Europe


RT.com
Thu, 12 Jun 2014 19:30 UTC
Disappearing Aircraft
© Reuters/Toby Melville
A total of 13 aircraft suddenly vanished off radars for about 25 minutes on two occasions over Austria and neighboring countries, Austria's flight safety monitor said, calling for an EU probe into the "unprecedented" incidents.

The flights vanished from air traffic controllers' screens in Austria on June 5 and June 10 for 25 minutes each time, Marcus Pohanka of Austro Control - Austria's flight safety organization - said Thursday.

Air traffic control in neighboring regions of Germany and the Czech Republic also reported similar problems.

Pohanka said the location, height, and identity of the 13 aircraft vanished over Austria both times, in what he called "unprecedented" incidents, AP reported.
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Chart Pie

7 million have left the workforce on Obama's watch

Daniel Halper
The Weekly Standard
Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:00 UTC
unemployed folk with signage
© themodernsocialist.org
Protesters gather as part of the long-term unemployed underclass.
Senator Jeff Sessions has released a statement that says, "7 Million People Have Left The Workforce Since The President Took Office." The statement is in response to today's jobs numbers.

"Today's jobs numbers are only enough to tread even with population growth, maintaining unemployment at 6.3 percent. When you include discouraged workers, the unemployment rate doubles to an alarming 12.2 percent. There are still 3.2 million fewer full-time employed persons than there were in 2007," says Sessions.

Comment: The fact that the 2014 Republican faction created this chart from polling (read hand-selecting) only 60,000 households, from 2009-2012 data, is just as, or more suspect than the current numbers coming out of the administration. And, our information from both sources is based on "definitions not-in-common" and "seasonally-adjusted data" from which to glean persuasive results. While "numbers don't lie," the interpretations may well be suspect. Regardless, one blatant fact remains: the economy is still not working.

(FYI: Sessions is the Alabama senator who thought the KKK was "OK until I found out they smoked pot," voted against prohibition of cruel and inhumane treatment of individuals in custody, has received a "zero" rating from the Human Rights Campaign and opposed the notion that the Ugandan Parliament consider rejecting "Kill-the Gays Bill"...yeah, that guy.)

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Heart - Black

Poor Brazilian children forced into prostitution to meet demand of fans of World Cup

Mark Williams-Thomas
The Mirror
Sat, 07 Jun 2014 07:45 UTC
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Tragic: Brazil's streets are filled with 'thousands' of desperate kids. Two pictured here with a missionary charity worker
A Sunday People investigation today reveals how kids living in shocking squalor and high on crack cocaine and glue, are exploited by drug dealers and pimps

Children as young as 10 are being forced to sell themselves for sex on the streets of Brazil to cash in on the waves of ­football fans heading to the World Cup.

A Sunday People investigation today reveals how kids living in shocking squalor and high on crack cocaine are exploited by drug dealers and pimps.

And as 600,000 foreign fans ­including Brits flood into Brazil this week, the youngsters' plight will get worse.

I flew out last week to host city Recife on the north-east coast to ­interview children caught up in the vicious cycle of prostitution.

Comment: See also:

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