Thursday, December 25, 2014

Uproar in India over 'forced' conversions...

China's iPhone workers are pressured into working 65-hour weeks, made to sleep on plywood beds in bleak dormitories and harassed by the facility’s security force...

A U.S.-based labor watchdog group says it has uncovered disturbing working conditions inside a Chinese factory producing parts for our favorite electronic gadgets.

According to a new report from the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, workers at the Zhen Ding Technology Holding factory in Shenzhen, China, are pressured into working 65-hour weeks, made to sleep on plywood beds in bleak dormitories and harassed by the facility’s security force. The work is so exhausting that some of the estimated 15,000 workers choose to sleep through their lunch breaks instead of eating, the report states.

Zhen Ding supplies circuit boards for Apple iPhones and iPads, among other electronics.

“The production goal increases every day,” the report quotes one worker as saying. “Today we met the production goal, and then it goes up tomorrow. It goes up until we can’t finish the job.”

After viewing the report, an Apple spokesman told The Huffington Post that the company was already aware of problems at the factory due to previous annual audits. Apple put Zhen Ding on probation earlier this year after discovering it had doctored payroll records to hide excessive overtime. Such falsification is "a core violation of our Supplier Code of Conduct -- the most serious breach of compliance," the spokesman said. Though Zhen Ding may still be producing parts for Apple, the company won't be eligible for new orders until it proves its payroll records are legitimate. Full story...

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A Nepalese World Cup worker dies every other day in Qatar...

Nepalese migrants building the infrastructure to host the 2022 World Cup have died at a rate of one every two days in 2014 – despite Qatar’s promises to improve their working conditions, the Guardian has learned.

The figure excludes deaths of Indian, Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi workers, raising fears that if fatalities among all migrants were taken into account the toll would almost certainly be more than one a day.

Qatar had vowed to reform the industry after the Guardian exposed the desperate plight of many of its migrant workers last year. The government commissioned an investigation by the international law firm DLA Piper and promised to implement recommendations listed in a report published in May.

But human rights organisations have accused Qatar of dragging its feet on the modest reforms, saying not enough is being done to investigate the effect of working long hours in temperatures that regularly top 50C. Full story...

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Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Underwear thief is caught after ceiling collapses under the weight of the 2,000 sets of lingerie he had hidden in China!!!

China's most prolific underwear thief terrorised his neighbours in a one-man crime wave that was anything but brief ... it lasted more than a decade.

But the bra bandit of Yulin city, southeast China, has finally been snared after the ceiling of his apartment collapsed under the weight of his stash.

The bra bandit, named only as Tan, had hidden more than 2,000 pairs of pilfered pants and brassieres in the cavity above his bedroom in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region's second-largest metropolis.

He had amassed the vast - and colourful - trove of lingerie by creeping into his neighbours' homes and snatching their smalls when they were at work. Full story...

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Federal court gives “early Christmas present” to war criminals Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others, immunizing them from civil inquiry regarding Iraq war...

Late Friday, a federal judge dismissed a civil claim filed against George W. Bush and other high-ranking officials regarding their conduct in planning and waging the Iraq War, and immunized them from further proceedings.

“This is an early Christmas present to former Bush Administration officials from the federal court,” Inder Comar of Comar Law said. Comar brought the claim on behalf of an Iraqi refugee and single mother, Sundus Shaker Saleh. “This was a serious attempt to hold US leaders accountable under laws set down at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. I am very disappointed at the outcome.”

The tribunal at Nuremberg, established in large part by the United States after World War II, declared international aggression the “supreme international crime” and convicted German leaders of waging illegal wars.

The case alleged that George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz committed aggression in planning and waging the Iraq War. Specifically, the lawsuit claimed that high-ranking Bush officials used the fear of 9/11 to mislead the American public into supporting a war against Iraq, and that they issued knowingly false statements that Iraq was in league with Al-Qaeda and had weapons of mass destruction, when none of those things were true.

“The decision guts Nuremberg,” Comar said. “Nuremberg said that domestic immunity was no defense to a claim of international aggression. This Court has said the opposite.” Full story...

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VIP child abuse whistleblowers were 'murdered': MP says men were poised to lift lid on scandal...

A campaigning MP sensationally claimed yesterday that two whistleblowers who threatened to expose an alleged VIP paedophile ring may have been murdered.

John Mann has passed detectives information about the suspicious deaths of the men who were allegedly poised to lift the lid on child sex abuse at the heart of the Establishment.

The development comes as the Labour MP told the Daily Mail yesterday that a key witness has come forward providing the address of a Dolphin Square flat which was used for ‘abuse parties’ by a network of high-profile figures including politicians and leading members of the judiciary, military and security services.

The potential breakthrough, which could help detectives identify the alleged perpetrators, comes a day after it emerged that Mr Mann had handed detectives a dossier naming 22 politicians – including six serving MPs and members of the House of Lords – suspected of involvement in a Westminster paedophile ring.

The Bassetlaw MP has since spoken to a victim who has provided a specific location where it is claimed that boys from care homes in Lambeth, South London, were taken to be abused – the apartment in the luxury block of 1,250 flats at Dolphin Square in Pimlico. Full story...

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JOE COCKER -With A Little Help From My Friends- 1969 Woodstock...


Sex slavery 'pushes ISIL victims to suicide'

Women and girls from Iraq's Yazidi religious minority forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group have committed suicide or tried to, rights group Amnesty International said.

The London-based rights group said on Tuesday, women faced torture, rape, forced marriage and were "sold" or given as "gifts" to ISIL fighters or their supporters in Iraq and Syria.

"Hundreds of Yazidi women and girls have had their lives shattered by the horrors of sexual violence and sexual slavery in ISIL captivity," Amnesty's Senior Crisis Response Adviser, Donatella Rovera, said in a statement.

"Many of those held as sexual slaves are children, girls aged 14, 15 or even younger,'' Rovera added.

Based on interviews with over 40 former captives, the Amnesty report , Yezidi women and girls face harrowing sexual violence , said fearful of rape, some of the women had tried to kill themselves.

A 19-year-old named Jilan committed suicide out of fear she would be raped, Amnesty quoted her brother as saying. Full story...

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Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Forget 'evil' Putin - we are the bloodthirsty warmongers...

This is a time of year for memories, and the ones that keep bothering me are from my childhood, which seemed at the time to be wholly happy and untroubled.

Yet all the adults in my life still dwelt in the shadow of recent war. This was not the glamorous, exciting side of war, but the miserable, fearful and hungry aspect.

My mother, even in middle-class suburban prosperity, couldn’t throw away an eggshell without running her finger round it to get out the last of the white. No butcher dared twice to try to cheat her on the weights.

Haunted all her life by rationing, she would habitually break a chocolate bar into its smallest pieces. She had also been bombed from the air in Liverpool, and had developed a fatalism to cope with the nightly danger of being blown to pieces, shocking to me then and since.

I am now beset by these ingrained memories of shortage and danger because I seem surrounded by people who think that war might be fun. This seems to happen when wartime generations are pushed aside by their children, who need to learn the truth all over again. Full story...

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Monday, December 22, 2014

Argentine court extends human right to freedom to orangutan...

In an unprecedented decision, an Argentine court has ruled that the Sumatran orangutan 'Sandra', who has spent 20 years at the zoo in Argentina's capital Buenos Aires, should be recognized as a person with a right to freedom.

The ruling, signed by the judges unanimously, would see Sandra freed from captivity and transferred to a nature sanctuary in Brazil after a court recognized the primate as a "non-human person" which has some basic human rights. The Buenos Aires zoo has 10 working days to seek an appeal.

The "habeas corpus" ruling in favor of the orangutan was requested last November by the Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights (AFADA) alleging that Sandra suffered "unjustified confinement of an animal with proven cognitive ability."

 Lawyers argued that just as a person, the ape is capable of maintaining emotional ties and has the ability to reason, while feeling frustrated with her confinement. Furthermore, the legal team claimed that the 29-year old orangutan can make decisions, has self-awareness and perception of time. And therefore, all things considered, Sandra's presence at the Zoo constituted illegal deprivation of liberty. Full story...

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New York Times calls for Cheney, Bush officials to be investigated and prosecuted for torture...

In a blistering editorial published in the Monday edition of the New York Times, the editorial page editors are calling upon the Justice Department to open an investigation into the torture practices committed during the administration of President George W. Bush with an eye towards prosecuting those who “committed torture and other serious crimes,” along with former Vice President Dick Cheney and other major administration officials.

Under a headline reading, “Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses,” the board criticizes the administration of current President Barack Obama for failing “to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects,” during the period following the attack on 9/11.

The editorial notes that the American Civil Liberties Union will present a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. on Monday calling for appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate what appears to be “a vast criminal conspiracy, under color of law, to commit torture and other serious crimes.”

Saying it is hard to imagine the current administration “having the political courage” to order an investigation, the board calls for a full investigation that will include major figures in the Bush administration, including Cheney, and former CIA director George Tenet. Full story...

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How one indigenous woman took on a multinational mining corporation... and won!



For over three years, indigenous Peruvian farmworker Maxima Acuña de Chaupe has refused to allow a U.S.-based multinational corporation to turn her land into an open-pit gold mine, withstanding multiple violent eviction attempts by corporate and state agents.

On Wednesday, Acuña de Chaupe finally saw victory when a Peruvian appeals court struck down a lawsuit levied by the Yanacocha mine—which is 51 percent owned by Colorado's Newmont Mining Corporation—that had sought to expel and imprison the family for "invading" their own land.

The ruling is an important win in a case that has become a rallying point for local resistance to multinational plunder.

In 1994, Acuña de Chaupe and her family built their home in Tragadero Grande in the region of Cajamarca next to the Blue Lagoon of Celendin. This lake was sought after for the building of the open-pit Conga gold mining project—an extension of the one at Yanacocha.

This mine is widely opposed by peasant, worker, and indigenous peoples in the region, who have protested its resource extraction, exploitation, displacement, and environmental harm with with mass marches and general strikes.

When Yanacocha sought to buy Acuña de Chaupe's land in 2011, she refused, in a bid to protect the environment and her family's home. Full story...

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CCTV doesn't work, so we'll spend money on 'bobbies on the beat'

A police force is preparing to abandon round-the-clock monitoring of CCTV cameras and spend the money on 'bobbies on the beat'.

Dyfed-Powys Police discovered its network of security cameras was failing to cut crime and is poised to drop monitoring the CCTV feeds to save cash.

An independent report found the cameras had "little success in deterring violent crime or anti-social behaviour".

Christopher Salmon, the force's police and crime commissioner, said: "We must spend every pound where it delivers.

 "In the meantime, I'm giving the public what they ask me for - more bobbies on the beat." Full story...

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Scotland Yard is probing five VIP paedophile rings after Labour MP hands in dossier naming six serving politicians and Lords...

Police are investigating claims that at least five paedophile rings operating at the heart of Westminster were covered up.

Labour MP John Mann has submitted an explosive dossier to police naming 22 politicians – including three serving MPs and three serving members of the House of Lords – linked to historical child abuse.

Last night, he said the complexity of the criminality at the heart of the Establishment during the 1970s and 1980s had been underestimated.

The latest claims come after Mr Mann revealed in the Mail last week that he was aware of five investigations dropped by Scotland Yard into alleged VIP child abuse which took place over the last three decades.

Last night the Bassetlaw MP said: ‘There are at least five paedophile rings which involved MPs. Each of them involved at least one MP, some involved more, and these were groups of people who knew about the activities of one another. Full story...

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Painkillers kill more than heroin and cocaine combined...

Yes, prescription painkillers do in fact take more lives per year than two of the hardest illegal drugs in the nation — surpassing both heroin and cocaine in their total related deaths.

It all has to do with how these prescription pharmaceuticals work in the brain, and how many individuals around the country are easily acquiring them to feed their deadly habits. Because after all, who said legal drugs were all that different from illegal drugs in many cases?

Prescription painkillers are known to ‘numb’ the pain, which is achieved by their ability to bind to brain receptors and decrease your body’s ability to process pain signals.

As a result, it’s easy to enter into this ‘feel good’ state to the point of serious addiction and even physical dependence. Think similarly to a heroin user who needs to inject the drug multiple times a day in order to reach the ‘high’ that they have become accustomed to.

But let’s look beyond the basic science of how painkillers work and into the largest study on the issue of painkiller deaths, which was recently conducted by McGill University in Canada. An impressing topic that truly does deserve thorough research, researchers from the team tracked the total death stats from both heroin and cocaine, and then compared them to the painkiller death figures that they collected from numerous top sources.

Published in the American Journal of Public Health, some key findings include: Full story...

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Chinese 'surgical selfie' leads to mass sacking

A team of Chinese surgeons, doctors and nurses has been sacked after posting a 'selfie' photograph online following a successful seven-hour operation.

The series of 'selfies' taken at the private Fengcheng Hospital in Xian were described as an insult to both the patient and the medical profession.

The hospital's deputy director, Chen, was sacked and fined three months' salary along with the director, the head anaesthesiologist, the head nurse and all those who appeared in the photographs – who also had to pen self-criticisms, Xian's bureau of public health announced.

The severe punishment has prompted debate about the pressures on medical staff – and when to post 'selfies' online.

 According to the Shanghai Daily, the photographs, taken in August and depicting three doctors treating a wound while several nurses flash celebratory 'V' signs, were leaked from a private WeChat messaging account by a woman who claims she wanted to "make sure other doctors didn't behave in such a fashion". Full story...

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Sunday, December 21, 2014

BBC Panorama Apple's Broken Promises: Workers Life in china Making iphone 6...

‘The Interview’, A Sony false flag hack and Hollywood’s empire of mediocrity...

It’s official: Sony Pictures has pulled the plug on The Interview – across all media platforms.

The chain of events which led to this point may forever be marked by historians as a seminal, watershed moment in this troubling epoch, known simply as, ‘The Age of Stupidity’.

Without a doubt, the most exciting piece of foreign theater involving the US and North Korea since Dennis Rodman and The Fish That Saved Pyongyang…

It couldn’t be any more ridiculous; a twisting and turning, real-life cloak and dagger drama seemingly tailor-made for Hollywood’s ever-expanding child-like adult audience who tends to believe anything which comes from ‘official sources’ or Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.

THE PLOT: A mysterious group of hackers who go by the intriguing name ‘Guardians of Peace’ (not to be confused with ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’) are said to have breached the company’s firewalls and have stolen lots and lots of sensitive emails and data from Sony Pictures Entertainment in Hollywood. Full story...

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Russell Brand film on RBS bankers funded by City investors - including former RBS banker...

When Russell Brand wanted to film himself confronting bankers about their bonuses, he chose to storm RBS, regarding the bank as the very embodiment of the capitalist system he so despises.

But, not for the first time, Brand has left himself open to accusations of hypocrisy after it emerged the film company he set up is largely funded by City investors - including a former RBS banker.

Brand raised almost £1 million by issuing shares in Mayfair Film Partnership Ltd, the production company making his next film, a documentary called Brand which will explore his ideas on the redistribution of wealth.

At least 11 of the 21 main investors in the company are current or former employees of banks or other financial institutions, while a 12th is a pension fund.

They were all able to claim tax relief by offsetting the money they invested in the shares against their income tax, as part of a government scheme to attract investment in high risk start-up companies. Full story...

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Is this speck in the Indian Ocean Britain's Guantanamo?

Lost in the vastness of the Indian Ocean, midway between East Africa and the southern tip of Asia, there is a footprint-shaped coral atoll where orange and blue coconut crabs scuttle across pristine white beaches and turtles wallow in the powder-blue lagoon.

Though it is called Diego Garcia, after the 16th-century Portuguese mariner who supposedly discovered it, it was ceded to Britain following the Napoleonic Wars and has belonged to us ever since, proudly flying a palm tree-embossed Union flag and retaining its old-fashioned Post Office pillar-box.

By rights, I ought to be sending this report to you from this remote and beautiful island, but regrettably that isn’t possible.

For in 1966 it was leased by Britain to the United States, which has turned it into a vast military base — ‘the Guantanamo of the East’ — and in the 48 years since then, journalists have been banned from going there.

Such is the cloak of secrecy surrounding Diego Garcia that a Time magazine executive once offered ‘a crate of the finest Bordeaux’ to the writer who filed the first despatch carrying the island’s dateline.

Though one landed there very briefly, when the presidential plane on which he was travelling with George W. Bush made a refuelling stop, the wine has not been claimed. Full story...

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Chinese passenger opens plane door for fresh air...

A Chinese airline passenger pulled open an emergency exit as his plane was about to take off because he “just wanted fresh air”, Chinese media have reported.

The man had not realised that opening the door was dangerous, staff members said.

The safety scare on Sunday came days after a passenger on another domestic flight opened the emergency exit moments after his plane landed - deploying the shute - saying that he was in a hurry to get off.

There is growing concern in China that the behaviour of travellers, particularly those venturing overseas, is damaging the image of the country.

An AirAsia flight from Bangkok to Nanjing had to return to Thailand last week after an angry Chinese passenger threw scalding water at a flight attendant. Full story...

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Friday, December 19, 2014

Wealth gap in America widens to record level...

The wealth gap between middle- and upper-income households has widened to the highest level on record, says a new report.

Using the latest Federal Reserve data, the Pew Research Center said Wednesday that the median wealth for high-income families was $639,400 last year — up 7% from three years earlier on an inflation-adjusted basis.

For middle-income families, the median wealth — that is, assets minus debts — stood at $96,500 last year, unchanged from 2010.

The result is that the typical wealth of the nation's upper-income households last year was nearly seven times that of middle-class ones. By Pew's calculations, that is the biggest gap in the 30 years that the Fed has been collecting statistics from its Survey of Consumer Finances.

 "The latest data reinforces the larger story of America's middle-class household wealth stagnation over the past three decades," Pew said. "The Great Recession destroyed a significant amount of middle-income and lower-income families' wealth, and the economic 'recovery' has yet to be felt for them." Full story...

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Kill the banker...

A little violence can sometimes work to defend against predatory bankers. Consider the farmers of Le Mars, Iowa. The year was 1933, the height of the Great Depression.

A finance bubble on Wall Street had crashed the economy, the gears of industrial production had ground to a halt, and 13 million Americans had lost their jobs. Across the Corn Belt, farmers couldn't get fair prices for milk and crops, their incomes plummeted, and their mortgages went unpaid. Seeing opportunity, banks foreclosed on their properties in record numbers, leaving the farmers homeless and destitute.

So they organized. Under the leadership of a boozing, fist-fighting Iowa farmer named Milo Reno, who had a gift for oratory, several thousand farmers across the Midwest struck during 1933, refusing to sell their products. "We'll eat our wheat and ham and eggs" went the popular doggerel of the movement. "Let them"—the bankers—"eat their gold."

 They called it a farmers' holiday and named their group the Farmers' Holiday Association. In speeches across the Midwest, Reno inveighed against "the destructive program of the usurers"—by which he meant, of course, the ruinous policies of Wall Street and the banking industry. Farmers, he said, had been "robbed by a legalized system of racketeering." He said that the "forces of special privilege" were undermining "the very foundations of justice and freedom upon which this country was founded." He compared the farmers' fight to that of the Founders, who had taken up arms. He warned that the farmers might have to "join hands with those who favor the overthrow of government," a government that he considered a servant of corporations. "You have the power to take the great corporations," he said, and "shake them into submission." One of his deputies in Iowa, John Chalmers, ordered FHA men to use "every weapon at their command." "When I said weapons," Chalmers added, "I meant weapons." Full story...

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Senthil and Sok Hwee, an uncommon Singapore friendship...

Qatar hires ‘$8 fake fans’ to fill empty stadiums...

Migrant workers in Qatar get one dollar an hour for sitting in the stadiums and pretending to have fun, to applaud and to do the wave, AP reports. Sometimes they even were asked to dress like Qataris in white robes and head-scarves.

"Qatar has a true passion for sports. Everything in our country revolves around sport," Aphrodite Moschoudi, Qatar presenter in 2019 world championships host selection, said in November.

However, Qataris do not attend matches so often. A poll published this year by Ministry of Development, Planning and Statistics says two-thirds of Qataris surveyed did not attend any football matches during the previous season, while two-thirds of respondents said fake fans were one of the reasons to keep them away from a stadium.

That is why Qatari officials need someone to fill the empty places in stadiums, according to the Associated Press. 30 Qatari riyals, equivalent to eight American dollars for migrant workers, though, is good money and some of them even enjoy their “work.”

"Shaking my body all over ... being in the crowd and shouting and dancing," Adu, a worker from Ghana told the agency. "Being there and getting paid is a plus for me." Full story...

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Apple 'failing to protect Chinese factory workers'

Poor treatment of workers in Chinese factories which make Apple products has been discovered by an undercover BBC Panorama investigation.

Filming on an iPhone 6 production line showed Apple's promises to protect workers were routinely broken.

It found standards on workers' hours, ID cards, dormitories, work meetings and juvenile workers were being breached at the Pegatron factories.

Apple said it strongly disagreed with the programme's conclusions.

Exhausted workers were filmed falling asleep on their 12-hour shifts at the Pegatron factories on the outskirts of Shanghai.

One undercover reporter, working in a factory making parts for Apple computers, had to work 18 days in a row despite repeated requests for a day off. Full story...

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Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Selfie shame: People queue to pose for pictures of themselves at scene of Sydney terror...

Tourists have always taken selfies of themselves at Sydney's most iconic landmarks, but on a day that has horrified the city many people are taking macabre snapshots for old times' sake as well.

All day people were uploading selfies of themselves on Twitter from as close as possible to where the hostage siege was taking place.

Just to make the photos more authentic some even took them with television cameras in the background. Two onlookers even looked like they were taking a 'celebration selfie' than one at a hostage siege. Others smiled happily as if they were standing in front of Sydney Opera House instead of a chilling hostage crisis that could yet end in tragedy.

The hostage siege has been going since 10am on Monday with as many as 30 people believed to be held against their will by a gunman in a central Sydney cafe.

Not that it stopped people taking selfies in the area. However, the thoughtless actions have created a huge backlash on Twitter, with many users berating the people for putting up the tasteless selfies. Full story...

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Australian police say three dead, four hurt in Sydney siege...

Three people are dead after a hostage drama in a Sydney cafe ended in heavy gunfire as security forces stormed the building, Australian police said on Tuesday.

Local media reports said the hostage-taker was among those killed.

Heavy gunfire and blasts from stun grenades filled the air shortly after 2 a.m. local time (10.00 a.m. ET on Monday) at the Lindt cafe in central Sydney, bringing to an end a siege that had lasted more than 16 hours.

A 50-year-old man, a 38-year-old woman and a 34-year-old man had died, New South Wales police said. Two people were taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries, while a police officer was being treated after being hit in the face with gunshot pellets. A woman was being treated for a gunshot wound to the shoulder, police added. Source...

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Sunday, December 14, 2014

Desperate in crisis, Spaniards turn to fortune-tellers...

After years looking for a job in a country where one in four is unemployed, this 48-year-old mother of two has turned to alternative ways to try and improve her fortunes.

Around her neck hangs a necklace of shungite -- a shiny black mineral from Russia, said by occultists to bring emotional stability. In her bag she has a statue of a smiling Buddha and another of a three-legged frog -- Asian charms reputed to bring wealth.

They are her latest purchases at Magic International, a spirituality fair in crisis-hit Barcelona where crowds browse over magic stones and spiritual tomes and countless fortune-tellers seek new clients.

"Any kind of help is welcome," said Izquierdo, who has curly dark hair and bags under her eyes.

 "In our house, we've had enough. My husband can only find temporary, badly-paid jobs. My eldest son can't find anything and neither can I." Full story...

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Kung-Fu cabs: female-only taxi firm teaches drivers karate...

Corrupted and defeated by our own shameful cruelty...

There is nothing more dangerous in the world than a man who thinks he is doing good. Such men are capable of the most dreadful horrors.

And it was such men who allowed and carried out the shameful torture which we now know for certain was inflicted by ‘our’ side in the great unending battle against ‘Al Qaeda’ or ‘ISIS’ that we are constantly told we are fighting.

This is why – as a patriotic Christian conservative from a Service family – I strive so hard to puncture and mock the ridiculous rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’.

The truth remains that it is more likely that an eagle will drop a tortoise on your head from the sky than that you will be affected by terrorism in your entire life. And in any case Mrs Theresa May and MI5, MI6, the CIA and GCHQ can’t protect you from either of these remote dangers.

If we continue to believe this self-righteous anti-terror rubbish, we will in the end be destroyed by our own hypocrisy. Full story...

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The ‘selfie’ obsession: a chronic, narcissistic mental disorder...

(...)

Everyone is taking selfies now. Should we really be worried about this trend, or is it just a case of people being empowered on a microblogging platform like Twitter, or Instagram? Writer Donna Highfill explains, “I have run into at least 10 people recently who have stopped on fast-moving, heavily-populated sidewalks to take a #selfie. There is no historical building behind them, no beautiful landscape, no real reason to take a picture of themselves other than the fact that they can reverse the camera on the phone, gaze at their own visage, and then share it on social media so the rest of the world can gaze upon it as well.”

“If smartphones were ponds, a large portion of our population would have already drowned.”

No one is immune. Even celebrities who you’d think are already getting enough face time are still drawn to the cheap narcissistic released provided by the selfie.

Yesterday, the digital oligarchs at Twitter declared 2014 as the ‘Year of the Selfie‘. According to executives there, the most popular, the most retweeted, ‘tweet’ of the year was by comedian Ellen DeGeneres at the Oscar awards last March – with her celebrity ‘friends’, including Bradley Cooper, Meryl Streep, and Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt. Her Tweet was ‘favorited’ over 2 million times and retweeted 3.3 million times. Full story...

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American Inquisition...

Torture is a crime under both American and international law. The Bush administration repeatedly broke the law from 2002 to 2006 by unleashing a wave of torture, kidnapping, and murder, all under the banner of its faux “war on terror.”

“Terror” is a wonderfully useful propaganda term developed by the Israelis and adopted by the Bush administration to dehumanize and delegitimize America’s violent enemies who were opposing US presence in much of the Muslim world.

The US Central Intelligence Agency, created to gather and assess information, was turned into a ruthless paramilitary hunter of America’s real or imagined enemies. Of course, America had to be protected from another 9/11-type attack. But, just as much, the Bush administration was seeking revenge for the 9/11 attacks that caught the tough-talking president asleep on guard duty. CIA was given the dirty job and then chivvied without relent by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Muslims had to be taught a dire lesson. The Guantanamo gulag, the freezing rooms, beatings, contorted positions, waterboarding – all tortures favored by the old Soviet secret police – were to serve as a stark warning to disobedient miscreants in America’s Mideast Empire, which I call, the “American Raj.” Humiliation and degradation techniques developed by Israel to turn Arab prisoners into informers were applied full force by US military jailers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

Amazingly, some idiots at CIA actually paid two quack psychologists $81 million to develop tortures. Any self-respecting Moroccan or Serb policeman would have happily done job for $100 cash. Full story...

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'About to land, but selfie first': Instagram-addicted pilots defy cockpit rules...

The temptation of flying high in social media inspires dozens of cockpit crewmembers to shoot and post stunning aerial views and selfies, while on duty. They do so despite it being against the rules, and even at critical moments of takeoff and landing.

Instagram has been monitored for six months by Quartz reporters, who surfed the social network for pictures with hashtags like #pilotlife, #pilotsview or #cockpitview. They found hundreds of examples.

Some of the sky-high images have garnered hundreds of likes and followers.

Social media popularity, however, comes at a price of violating safety rules, adopted in the US and in Europe. These bar airline pilots from using electronic devices for personal reasons while on duty in the cockpit.

 There’s also an even stricter requirement of a so-called "sterile cockpit" – a ban on doing anything unrelated to operating the plane - while the aircraft is in the process of takeoff or landing at altitudes below 10,000 ft (3,000 m). Full story...

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Toilet or divorce: Maharashtra woman's ultimatum to husband...

Toilet or divorce - that's the choice Vandana Thorat has given her husband Santosh, a farmer in Maharashtra's Beed district. She has even slapped a legal notice making her demand amply clear: She wants a toilet built within one month.

"We feel ashamed to defecate in the open. For two years I have been telling him. My daughter said to leave him. We had to squat on the roads. So I sent him the notice," Vandana said.

Santosh recently built a new brick and mortar house in the Pangri village, but without any toilet. They have a daughter and the women have to resort to open defecation which compelled Vandana to push her 17-year-old marriage to the brink.

"I got the notice which says if I don't build a toilet within a month, she will divorce me," said Santosh.

In a similar incident in May, a woman in a Bihar village demanded a divorce from her husband for not constructing a toilet in their house. She was upset over being forced to make her way to an open field every day under the cover of darkness to defecate.

"Since 2009, my husband has been promising and assuring me to construct the toilet but it is yet to be built. Whenever I insisted for it, he thrashed me. Now I have decided not to live with him," the woman said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his Independence Day speech, had stressed on the needs for toilets as much as digital India. Mr Modi also urged all parliamentarians to invest their constituency funds into building toilets in every school. Source...

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Saturday, December 13, 2014

Kabul's Kung Fu kid fights for better future...

The CIA torturers started at the top...

(...)

The distinguisheRE American jurist, Robert Jackson, who would preside as prosecutor over the Nuremburg War Trials of Nazi leaders, said he was “dedicated to the principle that international law must apply equally to all nations. I am not willing to charge as a crime against a German official acts which would not be crimes if committed by officials of the United States,” he said. He added that “we must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.”

Messrs. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and many more including the head of the CIA and his top assistants apparently have forgotten, or in Bush’s case probably never knew, given his :”gentleman’s C” while serving as a cheerleader at Yale, Jackson’s statement that history will judge the US on the principles enunciated then.

Sadly, nothing is going to happen to them. George Bush is painting and cutting brush on the ranch. Cheney is traipsing around Washington characterizing the report as nonsense. Fox News, in a remarkable episode, excoriated the Senate Intelligence Committee and its head, Diane Feinstein, for releasing the report and characterized it as politics – as a report that would have been exposed as Democratic posturing by an incoming Republican Senate majority.

It has been argued on the pages of the New York Times that the perpetrators should at least be pardoned so that a record will stand that they were pardoned from the crimes they committed. One can argue vainly that they belong in the Hague, in the international court of justice formulated as a result of the Nazi atrocities and trials. They will never get there, But that isn’t any reason for saying they shouldn’t. .Just as the Stanford students needed someone to tell them to stop, so did the CIA. And there was nobody there to do it. Full story...

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Four Rajinikanth fans from Japan have landed in Chennai to watch their superstar's Lingaa from ground zero...

Four Rajinikanth fans from Japan have landed in Chennai to watch their superstar's Lingaa from ground zero.

Outside the Kasi theatre in the city which is showing Lingaa, Yasuda Hidetoshi and three other Japanese fans from Osaka drew a lot of attention, wearing Rajini t-shirts and holding Lingaa placards in the shape of hand fans. (Also Read: Rajinikanth's Lingaa Releases Today, Chennai is Beside Itself)

Yasuda, who even speaks Tamil, lists out more than 20 films of Rajinikanth that he has watched. He adds, "I love Rajnikanth's style, action and humility. I have come to Chennai just for Lingaa".

His three Japanese team members, including two women, sing the Tamil superhit number Cauvery Aarum Kaikuthal Arasiyum from Rajini's previous blockbuster Endhiran with so much of enthusiasm and excitement. One of them says, "I love Rajini's Chandramukhi film. Happy birthday, Thalaiva." Today is the actor's 64th birthday. (Also Read - Rajinikanth, Happy Birthday: 5 Things You Didn't Know About Him)

 Rajinikanth has a huge fan following in Japan with at least 20 halls screening Lingaa reportedly running houseful. Yasuda says, "I am going to Albert theatre, the ground zero for Rajini mania, to experience Lingaa there. Full story...

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Pope Francis refuses to meet with Dalai Lama, apparently to avoid upsetting China...

A gathering of Nobel Peace Prize laureates opened in Rome on Friday, overshadowed by a dispute with the Vatican over reports that Pope Francis had refused to grant an audience to the Dalai Lama, the 1989 laureate, for fear of offending China.

The pope’s action, reported by news agencies and by the Dalai Lama’s followers, seemed to represent a further success for China in its efforts to isolate the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, who is regarded as one of Beijing’s principal political nemeses.

The laureates’ gathering was initially set to take place in Cape Town in October, but the government of President Jacob G. Zuma, which has close economic ties with China, refused to grant the 79-year-old Dalai Lama a visa.

The action provoked a boycott by other Nobel laureates. Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, the South African winner of the 1984 prize for his battle against apartheid, responded to Mr. Zuma’s action by saying he was “ashamed to call this lickspittle bunch my government.”

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, was quoted in news reports on Thursday as saying that “Pope Francis obviously holds the Dalai Lama in very high regard, but he will not be meeting any of the Nobel laureates.” Full story...

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Wednesday, December 10, 2014

China accuses US of human rights ‘double-standards’

China has accused the United States of having double standards on human rights, ahead of the release of a controversial Senate report on the CIA’s use of torture in the years following the September 11 attacks.

The 480-page US Senate intelligence committee report is due to be released on Tuesday and is expected to lay bare how the CIA used “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding in an attempt to obtain intelligence from terror suspects.

Even before its release Xinhua, China’s official news agency, published a lengthy editorial detailing what it said were the United States' human rights failings.

The US' behaviour at home and abroad – including “attacks on foreign soil in its anti-terror campaigns” had "drawn international concern,” Xinhua noted.

 "America is neither a suitable role model nor a qualified judge on human rights issues in other countries, as it pertains to be,” the Beijing-run outlet added. “Yet, despite this, people rarely hear the US talking about its own problems, preferring to be vocal on the issues it sees in other countries, including China.” Full story...

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