Night of horror at Ben Gurion airport for two French music students

We are two students, both studying musicology at the Université Paris 8 and in the CRR 93 at Aubervilliers and the CRD at Gennevilliers [translator's note : all located in the suburbs north of Paris]. After taking our baccalauréat exams at the end of high school, we left in September 2013 to spend a year living in Palestine. We gave and attended music classes (violin and flute) at the Edward Said National Conservatory in Ramallah and helped to create a music school in Jericho. This year we had decided to go back during our recent Easter break to see our friends again and to return to the places where we had spent time the previous year.

On Sunday April 19, we arrived at 2:30 AM at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. At the customs desk we stated the purpose of our visit ; but when the officer heard the word "Ramallah" we were sent straight to a small room where other people were waiting for us. We were immediately asked to write our telephone numbers and e-mail addresses.

After an hour's wait, a security officer came to pick up Philomène, telling her to take her luggage. In this first interrogation, the security officer asked her the reason for her visit, whether or not she had previously been to Israel, and why. After a few minutes, he began to get angry and called her a "liar" because it seemed to him impossible that a 20-year old would come to Palestine for a year for the sole purpose of playing and studying music. He asked her whether or not she had a Palestinian cell phone. She said no because she was afraid of placing her contacts in a bad position. The man stood up and pounded the desk with his fists, saying "You're a liar, I don't believe you!" He then brought Philomène back to the waiting room and asked Bastien to follow him. The same script ; he warned him that his friend is a liar and that he had better not tell any lies. Bastien told him the truth but the officer didn't believe him, and a dialogue of the deaf ensued. Then he ordered him to bring our Palestinian SIM cards and our camera. Having made Bastien translate all the messages on the cell phone and watch him look at our Paris photos to be sure we weren't activists, he told him to return to the waiting room.

Why did the Baltimore riots seem like they were perfectly staged to be a television event? Images of police vehicles burning made for great television all over the planet, but why were there abandoned police vehicles sitting right in the middle of the riot zones without any police officers around them in the first place? Why was the decision made ahead of time to set a curfew for Tuesday night and not for Monday night? And why are Baltimore police officers claiming that they were ordered to "stand down" and not intervene as dozens of shops, businesses and homes went up in flames? Yes, the anger over the death of Freddie Gray is very real. Police brutality has been a major problem in Baltimore and much of the rest of the nation for many years. But could it be possible that the anger that the people of Baltimore are feeling is being channeled and manipulated for other purposes? The following are 12 unanswered questions about the Baltimore riots that they don't want us to ask...

#1 Why are dozens of social media accounts that were linked to violence in Ferguson now trying to stir up violence in Baltimore?...

While we already observed that in Q1, US GDP rose by an appalling 0.2%, far, far below the consensus Wall Street estimate (in case you missed it, here again is the one thing every Wall Street economist desperately needs) and precisely in line with the Atlanta Fed forecast which we brought attention to in early March, confirming yet again that US stocks no longer reflect any fundamentals but merely Fed and global liquidity injections, there is something far more disturbing under the surface of today's GDP report.

Inventories.

Specifically, the $121.9 billion increase in private, mostly nonfarm, inventories in the first quarter.

Cutting to the punchline, this was the biggest inventory build in history.

I'm sure many of you remember when armed "nuisance abatement teams" from Los Angeles County, descended upon the independent minded folks who were living in the desert outskirts of the city. For the "crime" of living off the grid and growing their own food, they were harassed with fines, and forced to leave their homes at the barrel of a gun. It was probably the most dreadful moment for the prepper community in recent memory. Many of us would love to leave the city and live free of the system, but stories like that remind us that no matter where we go, the long arm of the government may be waiting to drag us back into the fold.

We have to ask ourselves, why does the government hate, nay fear, the self-reliant? On the surface it doesn't make sense. It's outrageous and has no practical value. Every person who is self-reliant is one less person the government has to provide for; and when disaster strikes, it takes some weight off of their disaster relief efforts.

Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was done in by his uncontrollable lust for human flesh, the man who whacked him in prison 20 years ago told The Post, revealing for the first time why the cannibal had to die.

Christopher Scarver — who fatally beat the serial killer and another inmate in 1994 — said he grew to despise Dahmer because he would fashion severed limbs out of prison food to taunt the other inmates.

He'd drizzle on packets of ketchup as blood.

It was very unnerving.

"He would put them in places where people would be," Scarver, 45, recalled in a low, gravelly voice.

"He crossed the line with some people — prisoners, prison staff. Some people who are in prison are repentant — but he was not one of them."

There's an international awakening afoot about a radical expansion of corporate power — one that sits at the center of two historic global trade deals nearing completion.

One focuses the United States toward Europe — that's the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) — and the other toward Asia, in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Both would establish broad new rights for foreign corporations to sue governments for vast sums whenever nations change their public policies in ways that could potentially impact corporate profits.

These cases would not be handled by domestic courts, with their relative transparency, but in special, secretive international tribunals.

An Israeli Boeing-747 returned from Nepal to Israel's Ben Gurion International Airport on Tuesday afternoon, and among its 229 passengers were 15 Israeli babies, all born within the past six weeks to surrogate mothers in Nepal.

Some of the babies were with their Israeli parents and others were cared for by Israeli passengers. None of the surrogate mothers were allowed to travel.

The infants' arrival completed the evacuation of 26 surrogate Israeli babies from Nepal, where a devastating earthquake on Saturday killed more than 4,000. The rescue process, coupled with widely published photos of the newborns being cradled by Israeli medics on the Tel Aviv tarmac, has thrust Israel's reliance on Nepalese surrogates into the spotlight, revealing a little known link between Nepal and Israel and starting a debate here about the ethics of international surrogacy.

In an exclusive jailhouse interview Monday, 18-year-old William Shultz calmly confessed to stabbing to death his best friend's 9-year-old brother while the boy slept, saying he wanted to learn what it was like to kill a human being before the coming end of the world.

In measured tones, Shultz smiled as he described his family's increasing concern over his odd behavior and mental health in the past month, culminating with a brief hospitalization at the county hospital Saturday, before he said a doctor discharged him and sent him in a cab to his mother's Discovery Bay home. An argument with his mother led him to the Almgren residence, where he spent Saturday night before stabbing Jordon Almgren early Sunday morning, the teen said. Jordon's older brother had been his best friend since sixth grade, he said.

"I wanted to see what it was like to take a life before someone tried to take mine," said Shultz, wearing his yellow, jail-issued jumpsuit and a buzz cut.

Shultz was arrested Sunday on suspicion of Jordon's murder, and is being held on $1 million bail in the County Jail in Martinez.

Sheriff's deputies received the stabbing report at about 10 a.m. Sunday at Jordon's house on the 1900 block of Frost Way, but when they arrived, family members had already brought the boy to a medical center. Shultz, who had spent the night at Jordon's home, was identified as the suspect, and a sheriff's spokesman said he attacked the boy overnight for "unknown reasons."

Smoke from burning forests in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is capable of spreading contaminants across great distances, even after the fire has been stopped, ecology experts told RT.

The forest fire near the crippled Chernobyl nuclear power plant started on Tuesday and triggered an emergency alert, with police and National Guard mobilized to bring the flames under control.

By Wednesday, the country's Emergency Ministry, as well as the prime minister, who went to the affected area, said the spread of the fire had been stopped and firefighters were containing the remaining flames. Later on Wednesday, Ukrainian TV reported the flames in areas containing radioactive waste have been put out. New hot spots were discovered, but they are outside the exclusion zone.

The fire occurred within 30 kilometers of the Chernobyl power plant, inside the exclusion zone which was abandoned and cordoned off almost 30 years ago. In 1986, an explosion and fire in Chernobyl's Reactor 4 caused a release of radioactive particles into the air, which contaminated the surrounding area and caused an increase in radiation levels in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and across Europe. It was the worst ever nuclear disaster in terms of casualties and clean-up costs. The crippled reactor itself was sealed under a sarcophagus of reinforced concrete.

Although the sarcophagus remains untouched by the fire, decades-old contaminants could still be released and travel far and wide, borne aloft by the smoke, nuclear safety expert John H. Large told RT:

Successive US governments have tried to refashion the world in America's image. Meanwhile, they've ignored the domestic race issue, which has now exploded again.

I know what the anti-RT brigade in the corporate media are expecting here. They imagine I'll take great satisfaction from current events in Baltimore. No, I don't. There's nothing good about watching a nation or city fragment along ethnic or racial lines.

Just as there's no joy in Ukraine's current predicament, where the State Department stoked festering ethnic tensions and destroyed a country. Nor was there anything positive about the civil war that raged in Ireland's north-east corner when I was growing up a couple of hundred miles south.

Throughout history, countries and empires have waged war. Sadly, it continues today, both overtly and covertly. However, no international conflict ever leaves behind the bitterness that lingers after a Civil War or matches the ferocity of contemporaneous feeling when a tribe splits. In America and Europe, there are still exiled White Russian families who won't talk to those they consider 'Reds' and Irish Catholics in Boston who wouldn't date a Protestant. Of course, it's boneheaded, but it happens.