Society's ChildS


Pirates

Counter-insurgency operation: Reject PKK 'splinter group' claims responsibility for Ankara attack


RT
Fri, 19 Feb 2016 17:22 UTC
ankara
© Umit Bektas / ReutersCars of emergency services arrive after an explosion in Ankara, Turkey February 17, 2016
The Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK), a Kurdish militant group, has claimed responsibility for the Ankara bombing that killed 28 people this week, according to its website. It said the attack was in retaliation for Ankara's military operation in Turkey's southeast.

The TAK, which is a splinter group of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), vowed to continue its attacks, Reuters reported, citing the group's statement published on Friday.

It identified the perpetrator of the Ankara bombing as a 26-year-old Turkish national born in the eastern city of Van.

The militant group operates in Turkey and northern Iraq and is regarded as a terrorist organization by Ankara and the US. It has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks since 2004. The latest one was the December mortar attack at Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen airport that killed one man and damaged five aircraft.

The TAK has said that it severed links with the PKK. The latter, in turn, has reportedly denied having any control over the TAK.

Comment: So much for Erdogan's hysterical "Those damn dirty Syrian Kurds done it!" ranting and raving. (Not that it was believable in the slightest.) As for TAK, they seemingly came out of nowhere in 2004. No one seems to know who started the group. Which is curious, to say the least. Who pulls their strings?

In all probability, 'splinter group' is here code for 'intelligence outfit pretending to be the opponent', or 'pseudo-gangs' as the British counter-insurgency operatives called them. Whether or not the Turkish government was directly involved, the Ankara bombing was very probably a NATO operation.

It is simply far too convenient that 'terrorist attacks' are happening in Turkey at a time when the 'Mad Mullah' in charge there is exterminating Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iraq - for which he badly needs Western public support - and his direct involvement in funding and arming ISIS has been exposed to all the world by Russia.

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Quenelle - Golden

Black Lives Matter forms alliance with Oregon occupier supporters to fight for police accountability

John Vibes
The Free Thought Project
Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00 UTC
Activist Unification
Portland, OR — On the surface, it would seem that Black Lives Matter and the militia groups that recently occupied a wildlife refuge in Oregon have very little in common. However, they are very much fighting the same struggle, and they have a common enemy.

The media and the political establishment would like to see these groups divided, because if they unify, they could make a strong and worthy opponent for the current control system.

The media coverage of the two anti-establishment groups has attempted to pit them against each other, using their difference in culture to hide the fact that they are facing the same oppressor. Luckily, it seems that many people within both of these groups are too smart to fall for such divisive tactics.

After police killed Oregon occupier Robert "LaVoy" Finicum earlier this month, there has been a push by his supporters for the department to release the name of the officer who was responsible. In response, legislators have proposed a bill that would shield the officer from having his identity released, which could have implications for other cases in the state.
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Piggy Bank

'I guess it's food stamps' then: 400,000 Americans in jeopardy as giant pension fund plans 50% benefit cuts

Tyler Durden
Zerohedge
Thu, 18 Feb 2016 14:38 UTC
Pension fund cartoon
Dale Dorsey isn't happy.

After working 33 years, he's facing a 55% cut to his pension benefits, a blow which he says will "cripple" his family and imperil the livelihood of his two children, one of whom is in the fourth grade and one of whom is just entering high school.

Dorsey attended a town hall meeting in Kansas City on Tuesday where retirees turned out for a discussion on "massive" pension cuts proposed by the Central States Pension Fund, which covers 400,000 participants, and which will almost certainly go broke within the next decade.

"A controversial 2014 law allowed the pension to propose [deep] cuts, many of them by half or more, as a way to perhaps save the fund," The Kansas City Star wrote earlier this week adding that "two much smaller pensions also have sought similar relief under the law, and still more pensions are significantly underfunded."

"What's happening to us is a microcosm of what's going to happen to the rest of the pensions in the United States," said Jay Perry, a longtime Teamsters member.

Jay is probably correct.
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Bizarro Earth

Lunatics have taken over Egypt's justice system: 4-year-old boy sentenced to life in prison for alleged crimes when he was 1

Andrew Emett
Free Thought Project
Fri, 19 Feb 2016 14:02 UTC
child prison epypt
Convicted of murder, inciting riots, destruction of government property and threatening cops, a four-year-old Egyptian boy was sentenced to life in prison this week. Although the boy was less than two years old during the civil unrest in 2014, he was convicted in absentia due to a clerical error and the court's incompetence.

Born in September 2012, Ahmed Mansour Karni was swept up in an indictment listing his name along with 115 other defendants accused of participating in riots and demonstrations on January 3, 2014. Despite that fact that Ahmed was only a year and a half old at the time, he was reportedly charged with four counts of murder, eight counts of attempted murder, vandalizing property belonging to the Egyptian Health Administration in his home province of el-Fayoum, threatening soldiers and police officers, and damaging vehicles belonging to security forces. Convicted in absentia, Ahmed was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday.


Comment: A one year old child charged with four counts of murder?! Another sign of the times. Insanity has spread across the globe, how could any so called system of law convicted a child that young?

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Eye 1

WFP Jordan: Iris scan payment system, refugees receive food assistance


RT
Thu, 18 Feb 2016 05:31 UTC
eye scan
© United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees / YouTubeIn a blink of an eye...(but don't).
An iris scan payment system has been launched by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in Jordanian supermarkets to help Syrian refugees staying in migrant camps to conduct purchases at local shops using their eye instead of credit cards, cash, or vouchers. "This is a milestone in the evolution of our food assistance programme, which has come so far from the first few months of the Syria crisis, when we distributed food parcels," said WFP Country Director in Jordan Mageed Yahia.

With a wink of an eye refugees at King Abdullah Park camp made their first purchases at a local supermarket on Tuesday, as part of the new program designed to simplify the redeeming of their monthly UN food aid. Developed by partners of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) the system is now being used by the WFP.

The project uses the EyeBank product created by iris specialist firm IrisGuard that uses the UN Refugee Agency's biometric registration to identify the recipient of virtual funds. Once the eye has been scanned the system pulls the data on a particular individual from UNHCR's registration database, before relaying the transaction to the Jordan Ahli Bank using the Middle East Payment System (MEPS). Once confirmed the funds are deducted from the refugee's monthly allowance before the purchase receipt is printed.


Comment: A vision of things to come. There are legitimate concerns as to the security of this data for storage and usage which implicates a potential endangerment and unintended consequences to those scanned. Interesting how technology is foisted upon the human populations with no recourse or the ability to object. Do we see eye-to-eye with this program? Can we just look away?

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Attention

Trust runs thin as black water flows in Crystal City, Texas

Garrett Brnger
KSAT News
Thu, 18 Feb 2016 18:49 UTC
+
crystal city black water
© KSAT News
Black water latest in string of Crystal City woes

Trust isn't running very deep in Crystal City at the moment, and now the water has been running black.

Residents in Crystal City took to social media Wednesday night to share pictures of dark-colored water running out of their taps. The city said it's sediment that was flushed into distribution lines when the tower was drained to be worked on.

The city is advising residents to boil their water and/or let it run before using it.


Comment: That is just nuts! Who would think and suggest that boiling the water would make black water okay to drink or use?

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Heart - Black

Sad state of society: Dolphin dies after beachgoers pass it around taking selfies


Sky News
Thu, 18 Feb 2016 21:06 UTC
dolphin dies selfies
A young dolphin has died after beachgoers took it from the sea to pose for photographs with it. Huge crowds gathered around the small animal on the beach resort at Santa Teresita in Argentina after one man picked it up. But it appears it quickly overheated and died while out of the water.

It was still being passed around by the beachgoers after its death and was later left discarded in the sand. The dolphin was left on the sand after it died.

The dolphin was from the La Plata - also known as the Franciscana - variety, found off the coasts of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. It is considered a "vulnerable" species because there are only about 30,000 left in the world.
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Red Flag

Ignorance of history: Despite genocide, slave-trading and concentration camps, most Britons are proud of British colonial legacy

Danielle Ryan
RT
Thu, 18 Feb 2016 20:44 UTC
uk city block
© Stringer / Reuters
A recent poll conducted in the UK found that 44 percent of British people are "proud" of the British Empire, while only 21 percent of respondents "regretted" that it existed.

The YouGov poll found 43 percent of respondents felt the empire had been a "good" thing while 19 percent said it was "bad".

At its peak in 1922, the British Empire governed one-fifth of the world's population and one-quarter of the world's land area. Slave-trading, famine, concentration camps, massacres; those all sound like a history that would evoke a sense of shame, not pride.

But this isn't about bashing Britons for being proud of their history and telling them to feel ashamed instead. It's about the fact that they — too many of them — don't actually know their history. The history of the empire is not widely taught in UK schools — and what is taught is a watered-down or varnished version of the truth.

As British-Nigerian historian and writer David Olusoga put it: "The empire has become reduced to the abolition of slavery, the building of the Indian railways and some vague talk about the rule of law, British values and the spread of the English language."
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Attention

MICE-IS on the loose: Brussels blames rodents for eating infrastructure plans


Sputnik
Thu, 18 Feb 2016 20:36 UTC
mouse
© Flickr/ Tara Swann
If you think the old "the dog ate my homework" excuse is bad, wait until you hear what happened to the master plans for roadways in Brussels.

Deteriorating tunnels in the Belgian capital have been in such bad shape that they have been causing roads to shut down, and yet rebuilding plans keep being delayed. Finally, the city announced that the reason behind this is that the major infrastructure plans were likely eaten by rodents.

"They may have been eaten by mice," the former head of the city's infrastructure agency, Christian Debuysscher, told the regional parliament on Wednesday.

Perhaps even stranger is where the plans were being stored. In 1989, when the Brussels region was founded, the transportation department was housed in a temporary office in a hotel. So naturally, the city stored the important tunnel plans inside bridge supports on the side of one of their main highways.

Comment: This is getting serious, folks! The rodents in Brussels are out of control (and so are the mice).

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Sun

Nevada just killed the solar industry with 40% tax hike, derailing the off-the-grid movement

Justin Gardner
Free Thought Project
Fri, 15 Jan 2016 20:18 UTC
Rooftop solar panels
Rooftop solar panels
While Nevadans were celebrating the holidays under solar-powered lights, the Nevada Public Utilities Commission (PUC) voted unanimously to increase a monthly fee on solar customers by 40% while reducing the amount they get paid for excess power sold to the grid. Adding insult to injury, they made the rate changes retroactive, sabotaging consumer investments in solar energy.

This single move by government regulators will effectively kill the solar industry in Nevada and put an end to the surge of people seeking to detach from the grid by harnessing their own energy from the sun. Just as importantly, it serves to protect the profits of Nevada's public utility company, NV Energy.

"It will destroy the rooftop solar industry in one of the states with the most sunshine... There is so much wrong with the decision," said SolarCity CEO Lydon Rive. "The one beneficiary of this decision would be NV Energy, whose monopoly will have been protected."
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