Society's ChildS


Passport

ISIS passport forgers busted in Moscow

passports
© www.inquisitr.comHave passport, will travel...
Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) has arrested 14 suspects from an international criminal group involved in forging passports and other documents for Islamic extremists preparing to go to Syria, and those coming to Russia for terror missions. A joint special FSB and Interior Ministry operation in the Moscow region has exposed an international organized crime network, which was providing forged papers for extremists from Russia and CIS countries.

The gang was busy forging documents for those "illegally heading to Syria to take part in military actions on the side of Islamic State, and also for the militants sent on a mission to Russia by ISIS leaders to conduct terrorist and extremist activities, as well as illegal migrants." The members of the group were arrested after sufficient evidence had been gathered, the FSB reported. Search operations revealed a vast stockpile of forged documents, forms, stamps, special equipment for fake papers' production, as well as extremist literature.

The FSB believes that all members of the criminal ring are now in custody. Secret printing presses and laboratories have been found and sales and distribution channels shut down. The members of the criminal group have been taking extreme precautionary measures. They constantly changed their place of residence and used undercover communications' tools, including software enabling them to hide personal data while surfing the web, the FSB reported.

Comment: Good catch by Russia. Wonder if this savvy ISIS forgery group is operating independently or does it tie back to the 'Leaders of the Pack' (US/Israel, CIA/Mossad)? Given the 'governmentality' of surveillance mechanisms embedded in today's passports, the group would have to have some connections to insider knowledge and know-how...yes? And, if they can do it in one location...where else might they be?


Gift

UN, ICRC supervise Syrian aid to several towns under siege

syria aid
© Omar Sanadiki / ReutersA convoy carrying humanitarian goods wait to enter the besieged area of Moudamiya Al Sham in the suburbs of Damascus, Syria February 17, 2016.
Humanitarian relief convoys have entered crisis-stricken Damascus suburbs under the supervision of the Red Crescent and the UN, becoming the first international aid deliveries since world powers agreed on a ceasefire plan starting Friday.

A 35-lorry convoy carrying food and medicine entered Muadamiyat al-Sham, a town 10 kilometers southwest of Damascus, on Wednesday. According to the NGO and an RT Arabic crew on the ground, the lorries are loaded with produce, medical supplies and milk. From Damascus some 100 trucks left to other parts of Syria carrying food, non-food items, medical equipment and medicine.

The UN humanitarian coordinator for Syria, Yacoub El Hillo said that supplies were also sent to Madaya and Zabadani. Ahmad al-Najem, coordinator of field operations at Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) told the state-run Syrian news agency SANA that 59 trucks loaded with 15,600 flour bags and about 4,100 food rations in addition to medicines are on their way there. Muhannad al-Asadi of SARC also told the Syrian agency that that a mobile clinic entered Madaya on Wednesday.


Ambulance

Explosion in Sweden damages Turkish cultural center

stockholm explosion
© Ruptly / RT
An explosion has severely damaged a Turkish cultural center in Sweden, blowing out all of the windows of its headquarters, located in a Stockholm suburb, according to local media. Police said that no one was injured in the incident.

While all the facility's windows seem to be blown out, there were no immediate reports of any injuries from the incident, Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reports.

"No one was inside. No one was injured. It had been locked since earlier in the evening," a police spokesman said, according to Reuters.

The incident happened around 9:30pm GMT, in the basement of a building in Fittja, in southwest Stockholm, where the headquarters of a Turkish cultural association is located. Police, as well as a fire brigade and an ambulance were sent to the scene.

Authorities are investigating the incident, admitting that no one has been arrested and there are currently no suspects.

Earlier in the day a deadly blast rocked the Turkish capital of Ankara, killing at least 28 people and wounding dozens, when a car bomb apparently targeting military personnel detonated near government buildings, including the country's parliament and the armed forces' headquarters.


Comment: Is this blow-back against Turkey's assault against the Kurds and its support of ISIS, or is this a false flag by Turkey and/or others? Turkish officials predictably blamed the Kurds for the blast in Ankara, while other analysts blamed ISIS.


Attention

Corrupt medicine: Scandal widens in Sweden over surgeon's use of patients as guinea pigs and falsified research

royal swedish academy sciences
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says the credibility of medical research needs to be repaired.
In the wake of an ever-widening scandal surrounding surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, the vice-chancellor of the Karolinska Institute (KI) in Stockholm has resigned. Anders Hamsten was in charge of an investigation last year into Macchiarini's work at KI. Although an independent investigator commissioned by the university found evidence of misconduct, Hamsten decided in August that Macchiarini had made mistakes but was not guilty of misconduct. KI announced yesterday that it will reopen the investigation.

Macchiarini, a visiting professor at KI from 2010 until October 2015, led surgeries to implant artificial tracheae into several patients between 2011 and 2014. At the time, the operations were hailed as breakthroughs in regenerative medicine, but six of the eight recipients have since died. In 2014, several of Macchiarini's colleagues at KI raised questions about the published descriptions of the technique's success. That eventually led to the misconduct investigation, which concluded in August with Hamsten clearing Macchiarini of the charges. In November, the university gave Macchiarini a new 1-year contract as a senior researcher.

A television documentary, The Experiments, aired on the Swedish public television channel SVT, has brought renewed attention to the case, however. In an opinion piece published early this morning in Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, Hamsten admits that he and others at KI made serious mistakes in their dealings with Macchiarini and that he "completely misjudged" the surgeon. "[I]t seems very likely that my decision in this case was wrong," he writes. "I realise it will be difficult for me to continue working as Vice Chancellor of Sweden's most successful university with credibility and effectiveness."

Comment:

Medical insider: "science has taken a turn towards darkness"

According to Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and former longtime Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ): "It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine."

Dr. Richard Horton, Editor-in-chief of the Lancet recently published a statement declaring that a shocking amount of published research is unreliable at best, if not completely false, as in, fraudulent. Horton declared, "Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness."


Dollars

Ransomware: L.A. hospital pays 17K to computer hackers

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center
© Mario Azuoni/ReutersThe Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, California
A Los Angeles hospital paid a ransom of about $17,000 to hackers who infiltrated and disabled its computer network because paying was in the best interest of the hospital and the most efficient way to solve the problem, the medical center's chief executive said Wednesday.

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center paid the demanded ransom of 40 bitcoins — currently worth $16,664 dollars — after the network infiltration that began Feb. 5, CEO Allen Stefanek said in a statement.

The FBI is investigating the attack, often called "ransomware," where hackers encrypt a computer network's data to hold it "hostage," providing a digital decryption key to unlock it for a price.

"The quickest and most efficient way to restore our systems and administrative functions was to pay the ransom and obtain the decryption key," Stefanek said. "In the best interest of restoring normal operations, we did this."

Red Flag

Spreading Islamophobia: Polish magazine cover depicts woman being attacked by faceless dark-skinned men with headline: "The Islamic rape of Europe"

polish magazine migrant rape
© deidryalvarez / Instagram
A Polish magazine cover has sparked a fresh debate about the reporting of Europe's migrant crisis by featuring a woman, draped in the European flag, being attacked by a group of faceless dark-skinned men while the headline screams: "The Islamic rape of Europe".


Far-right weekly magazine wSieci sent Twitter into a tailspin with the controversial cover.

Pistol

Epidemic: Cops killed nearly 4 people a day in January - more deaths a day than most countries kill per year

police killings
In January 2016, police killed 113 people — at least one person was fatally gunned down by a cop every day that month. One particularly deadly day, January 27, saw ten people meet their fate, thanks to the police. On average, that is almost 4 people a day.

And there is no indication this tragic epidemic will end soon.

That daily average is higher than the annual average of other countries. For example, in all of 2011, British police killed 2 people. In 2012, 1 person. In 2013, a total of 3 bullets left the barrels of British police guns, and no one was killed. In the last two years, a total of 4 people have lost their lives because of British cops, bringing the total number of citizens killed in the UK to 7 in the last 5 years.

Nonprofit Fatal Encounters — which compiled the January statistics — tracks, verifies, maps, and charts the data for deadly police incidents, which admittedly isn't complete due to a continuing lack of mandatory national reporting requirement. That lack also creates gaps in available information — such as race or age, or even deaths, themselves — which might otherwise aid those seeking to curb, and ultimately end, police brutality. Though the numbers include killings by police which might be legally justified, many of the incidents' circumstances aren't entirely known.

Comment: Why are so many killed by police in the US? Obviously there's something terribly wrong with the way police are trained.


People 2

Silicon Valley's mysterious teen 'suicide clusters' brings community and federal action

teen suicide
© Counselling / pixabay.com
Palo Alto, California is home to high-tech companies, Stanford University, and upscale living, but the success-oriented culture has a dark side. Recent "suicide clusters" of teens and young adults are stirring the community and federal agents into action.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines a "suicide cluster" as three or more suicides that occur closer in time and space than what would be considered normal for the community.

That is what happened in Palo Alto during 2009 and 2010, when five students or recent graduates from Henry M. Gunn High School took their own lives, and it is what happened again across 2014 and 2015 when four more students, three from Gunn and one from Palo Alto High School, did the same, according to the Palo Alto Unified School District and other local reports.

This week, at the invitation of the city council, the CDC will begin investigating what it calls the "suicide contagion," what is behind the tragedies, through one of its epidemiological assistance teams. Since 2011, the federal agency has conducted similar suicide cluster inquiries in Fairfax County, Virginia and two Denver counties.

The CDC lists suicide as the second most common cause of death for Americans 15-24 years of age.

Comment: Given the emptiness of Western culture, and its lack of support for its youth, it's not hard to imagine some teens feel they have no other option


Laptop

British 15-year-old arrested charged with hacking attempt on FBI computers

british school boy hacks fbi
© Ints Kalnins / Reuters
A 15-year-old British schoolboy has been arrested in Glasgow for allegedly trying to hack into the US Federal Investigation Bureau's (FBI) computer system.

He could face extradition and imprisonment after being accused of attempting to access the high-security computer network. US officials from the security service reportedly flew to Scotland, where the boy lives, to oversee his arrest.

The officials also sat in on local police interviews with the boy.

Police confirmed the arrest, questioning and release, saying he was arrested under the Computer Misuse Act, which covers attempted hacking of secure networks.

A Police Scotland spokesman said: "Following a search of a property in the Glasgow area on Tuesday, February 16, a 15-year-old male was arrested in connection with alleged offences under the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

Heart - Black

Secretly filmed footage shows teacher verbally abusing 1st grade student for answering question incorrectly

classroom
© Stefanie Loos / Reuters
Disturbing footage of a teacher at a Success Academy charter school in New York chastising a young child for answering a math question incorrectly has raised further questions concerning such educational institutes.

In the video, Charlotte Dial, a teacher at the organization's charter school in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, can be heard venting her frustration at a first grade child who is made to sit away from the other students for getting confused over how she had solved a math puzzle.

Angrily ripping up the young pupil's paper, Dial can be heard telling the child to "go to the calm-down chair and sit." "There's nothing that infuriates me more than when you don't do what's on your paper," Dial says angrily.

"You're confusing everybody," she says to child, who is sitting away from the circle of students, before adding that she is "very upset and very disappointed."

The video was secretly filmed in 2014 by an assistant teacher who wanted to lift the lid on the atmosphere that can be found in such schools and the harsh treatment that children endure in them on a daily basis. The New York Times published the video on Friday.