Last night Maori TV showed The Central Park Five, the harrowing story of five African American teenagers who were wrongfully convicted of gang raping, battering and nearly murdering a white jogger in Central Park in 1989.
The most distressing part of the film is the beginning, which depicts how Central Precinct cops terrorized five innocent teenagers (age 14-16) – by depriving them food, water and sleep – into signing a a confession in which they incriminated each other of various aspects of the crime. Although they were all minors, no parents were present in the interrogation room, a violation of New York state law.
There was no consistency whatsoever between the five statements as to the exact location of the rape or exactly who was responsible for grabbing the woman, beating her, undressing her or having sex with her. None of the boys had traces of her blood on them, and there was no trace of their DNA on her body. Moreover the timeline constructed by the police establishes clearly they were in another area of the park when the woman was attacked.
In 2001, they were exonerated when a convicted serial rapist came forward and confessed to the crime. When the police investigated, not only did his DNA match the rape kit sample, but he related details of the crime that were never made public.
The eldest, who was sentenced as an adult, has served 13 years when he was released in 2002. The others had received conditional releases after 7 years, though one had be re-arrested on a drugs charge.
The case received massive publicity in 1989, in part due to Donald Trump taking out a full page ad calling for the boys’ execution. New York police and prosecutors have never acknowledged their wrongdoing.
This is in response to the blog post, “Over 4000 Migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean this Year”
It is a harsh response and I’m not apologizing for it because this point needs to be made.
Of course my heart goes out to these refugees, and I feel my own frustration, and anger. But deep down, as a student of history I’m reminded of those incredibly brave Russians who stuck it out in Stalingrad against the German onslaught and heroically held on against all odds, suffering unimaginable horrors throughout an unusually harsh winter. They didn’t run. So many didn’t run, they stood up to their would be conquerors and fought back by every means the human mind can conjure up. How many people remember these people were offered a chance to escape, to withdraw deep into the wilds of Siberia. They chose to stand and fight, men, women and children… mostly women and children!
It happened in Greece, in Italy, basically throughout Europe as it had happened in Spain during the Spanish civil war which the Fascists and Nazis won only because of overwhelming force garnered from arms and support received (as in the case of IS and other terror groups now in the Middle East) from the American military industrial complex.
My own parents in the French Resistance during WWII didn’t attempt to flee to England though they lived on the coast with a very narrow channel between them and freedom, and they were fisher folk with access to boats: they held their ground and fought back. That’s how people were “made” in those pre-boomer, entitlement years.
Isn’t that what you would do if groups of nut jobs invaded your country and began to systematically spread terror among your own people, perhaps even taking your daughters, lovers, wives as sex slaves, burning your homes, forcing your sons into their madness as suicide bombers, torturing and killing your neighbours? Tell me that you wouldn’t fight back, even if it meant using broken shards of glass, throwing rocks or ripping their faces off with your bare hands! I certainly know I would, tooth and nail, as there always comes that time when a certain kind of vile violence can only be countered with same because THERE IS NO LONGER A CHOICE. Either you oppose them, or you become like them. Is the word, “freedom” just another politically correct term now?
What’s wrong with these people that they can’t stand and fight for themselves but can only think of running to hopefully save their own skins? I don’t get this. Has the human race so quickly become dis-empowered, turned into cattle, as were the Jews in Nazi Germany, meekly and silently walking to their slavery and death in concentration camps without making any attempt to help themselves? When you know you are going to die regardless, why whimper into it? That’s just not normal, nor natural! What’s wrong with these people that they can only rely on power groups for their survival? Don’t they have a life, that innate rage to live free?
But it isn’t just Syrians. Look how few people are standing boldly against the DAPL predators and their government armed supporters when the entire nation of free individuals should be standing with them, either at Standing Rock or in front of every capitol, every corporate HQ’s and every bank that funds the “Damn All Pipe Lines” monstrosity.
There is a connection throughout these current events clearly showing that people in general have become mindless cowards, thralls on their way to abysmal slavery to State and Banksterism. There is no more stand and fight, only run for your life. Is that THE sign that humanity knows it’s doomed already and has no heart left, sees no point in fighting back against oppression and oppressors everywhere?
Perhaps T.S. Eliot said it best in his poem, The Hollow Men, “This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Dramatic CCTV footage has been released showing the moment a woman got out of her car at a Chinese wildlife park, only to be dragged away by a tiger.
The incident happened on Saturday afternoon at Beijing Badaling Safari World, which is located at one of the most popular sections of the Great Wall.
Visitors are allowed to drive through the Siberian tiger enclosure at the safari park to view the big cats up close, but are warned to stay inside the vehicle.
However, a group driving through the park Saturday apparently ignored this safety advice, leading to one woman being mauled to death and a second being seriously injured.
It’s understood the car was carrying a family of four when an argument broke out between two of the occupants. As can be seen in CCTV footage, when one of the women exits the vehicle, a tiger quickly pounces on her and drags her away.
It wasn’t this woman who was killed, however, although she was left with serious injuries, according to Shanghai Daily.
A second woman who stepped out of the car to help fend off the attack was targeted by another tiger. Although the park’s rescue staff rushed to the scene, this woman was killed.
The injured woman was taken to hospital and the park was shut down while an investigation into the incident was launched.
Видео опубликовано RT (@rt) Июл 24 2016 в 9:08 PDT
This isn’t the first such tiger attack at the park. Two years ago a Bengal tiger mauled a park ranger to death after he reportedly got out of his jeep to relieve himself.
Tragedy also struck in 2009 when a man climbed the three-meter-high fence into the enclosure, at which point he was killed by a Siberian tiger.
Warning: This article is not for the feint of heart. It gives a glimpse of the horrors that some unfortunate beings, through no fault of their own, face on a daily basis. Once again, thank you USA and the UK, and your pathetic minions.
Well, it didn’t take long for our prediction to come true. We warned back in September 2015 that sympathy for the Syrian/Arab/Muslim refugees would be transformed into hate to fuel geopolitical motives. Just four months separates the ‘refugee rape epidemic’ that, apparently, spontaneously broke out across Europe on New Year’s Eve, from the date when 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach. Like the ‘horde’ of Syrians fleeing their NATO-torn country, Aylan’s family tried crossing the Aegean Sea in a rubber dinghy, in dire weather conditions. Aylan, his 5-year-old brother Galib, and their mother Rehana, drowned.
Just to remind you of the chronology of events here. A photo-journalist happened to be at the beach Aylan washed up on; Western journalists suddenly noticed refugees were dying in droves; and the public expressed outrage for the ‘collateral damage’ pouring out of Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. Whether or not Aylan’s fate was deliberately used as political capital, public sympathy flowed for those fleeing the shadow of imminent and violent death. So many other events have transpired since that dark day in September. These days, you can barely register sadness for the loss of innocent lives before fresh atrocities make new headlines.
Death toll
But children drowning in the Aegean soon became yesterday’s news, to be replaced more recently by growing public anger at and hatred towards those same people. Does anyone feel like they’re being manipulated?
Over at the Greek edition of SOTT.net, however, we didn’t forget because we couldn’t. Reports of new drownings came in almost daily. We kept track of them as best we could. Since Aylan’s death, about 140 child refugees are known to have drowned in the Aegean Sea. In most cases of mass drownings, a majority of the fatalities are children who don’t know how to swim, and who are too small for their life-saving vests. For some of the refugees, even the parents, it was their first, and last, time seeing open waters. This list (with links to Greek reports) is long, unfortunately:
September 13: Boat containing about 120 refugees capsizes off Farmakonisi island – 34 people drowned, including 4 infants and 11 small children
September 15: 22 people lost their lives, including 4 children
December 8: 6 children from Afghanistan drown near Turkish coast
December 9: 12 people drown near Farmakonisi – 6 children among them
December 18: 3 Syrian children and 2 Iraqi children among 8 drowned refugees in the Aegean
December 19: 18 people drown off southwestern Turkey, including unknown number of children
December 23: 13 refugees drown near Farmakonisi, 7 of them children
December 24: 11 children among 20 drowned refugees near Turkish shores on Christmas Eve
January 3: Two-year-old boy drowns as inflatable boat carrying almost 40 people crashes against rocks
January 5: 38 refugees drown in the Aegean, 4 of them children
January 15: 3 children drown near the island of Agathonisi, while another infant is found dead after 2 shipwrecks off Farmakonisi
One of the children in the more recent January 5th event was a girl found on a beach on the Greek island of Ikaria. She was 4 feet 4 inches tall, about 7-10 years old, and had long black hair. She was fully dressed in pink; her little gloves, her boots, and her little winter coat were a darker pink color. Only her life jacket was blue – which, of course, failed to save her life. Nobody knows how many hours, or days, she struggled with all her strength in the angry winter seas of the Aegean before it became her tomb.
The beautiful Aegean Sea… I doubt there is a body of water anywhere in the world more celebrated in song, poetry and other works of art. Witness to eons of wars, mass migrations and the simple lives of those living on its shores, the Aegean Sea – like its big sister, the Mediterranean – has today become the final destination for thousands of people. In 2015, according to the International Organization for Migration, 1,004,356 people successfully crossed the Mediterranean to Europe, with some 400,000 of those landing on Greek shores from Turkey. 3,771 people drowned or are missing at sea – 805 in an attempt to cross the Aegean – up from 3,279 deaths in 2014.
An average of 5,000 refugees were arriving daily on the island of Lesvos until the winter set in. Most Greek islanders are doing the best they can to help out. Some of them were once refugees in older wars that savaged Greece, so they understand. Some volunteers take their own children with them: “We are educating them in humanity,” they say. Stratis, a volunteer in Mitillini, says: “Every child I take in my arms when they come out of the boat is my child.” And Vicky from Chios had this to say for the volunteers: “They are giving their souls to help the refugees. And their only reward is a big thank you, ‘shukraan’ in the language of many of the refugees. The volunteers, in their exhaustion, are able to sleep at night with a clear conscience. This is a great thing.”
The locals have been joined by volunteers from all over Greece, and from others all around the world. “We have volunteers from all different countries,” says Matina, a volunteer on Leros. “This happens for the first time. The tourists heard of the large numbers and saw the people, their grief, their pain. And they also saw how helpless Greece is in trying to help these people.”
Greece, currently suffering from the worst ‘austerity measures’ in Europe, is nevertheless being as hospitable as it can with what little it has. Meanwhile, the EU, instead of helping Greece help the refugees, is going behind its back to strike Faustian bargains with Turkey, the country that supports terrorism, ethnically cleanses its Kurdish population and actively traffics refugees from the Middle East to Europe. The EU has paid Turkey an initial 3 billion euros, and promised an ‘accelerated accession process’ for its entry into the Union in exchange for vague commitments by Ankara to reduce the flow of refugees to Europe, and – in the grand scheme of things – to keep supporting the Atlanticists irrational and psychopathic war against Russia.
Fake life-jackets
Just recently a Turkish trafficker spoke to Greek media and was very clear when he said, “If the Turkish government didn’t want us to bring refugees to the Greek Islands, we wouldn’t be able to bring in a fly.” That Ankara has agreed to stem the flow of refugees reaching Europe via Greece in exchange for political gain tells you all you need to know about the people responsible for this humanitarian crisis – the psychopaths in power.
The illegal manufacture and sale of cheap ‘life-jackets’ greatly contributed to the thousands of deaths in the Aegean. They are on display all over Turkish coastal cities from where the refugees begin their sea journeys. A recent police raid at a manufacturing facility in Smyrna uncovered 1,263 fake life-jackets made out of tent cloth and filled with sponges and rags, rather than the buoyancy material needed to keep potential victims afloat – all put together by underage Syrian girls.
Most of the ‘life-jackets’ discarded on Greek shores after the refugees land have messages on them. “My name is Amptirachman Ali Yusuf. If you find me, call this number. This is my mother. Mom, I want you to know that I love you,” reads one. Apostle Veizis, program manager of the Greek branch of Doctors Without Borders, says: “These messages are confirmation of the fact that refugees are aware of the dangers they are up against when they board the vessels that carry them to Europe.”
It was not the fake life-jackets but the kid’s pool toys used as life-jackets that moved journalist David Darg as he walked along beaches on Lesvos:
If anything can represent the true makeup of the refugee population, it should be these images [of life jackets and children’s pool toys together on the beach]. These toys weren’t used to protect terrorists from drowning; they were used to protect innocent children from a crossing they should never have to make.
I glanced at the back of one of the little life jackets. The instructions sent a shiver down my spine. “Warning: This is not a lifesaving device.”
On New Year’s day, dozens of Greenpeace, Doctors without Borders volunteers and locals created a huge peace sign on a hillside in Lesvos overlooking the small strait between Greece and Turkey “as a way to honor those who have made the journey and to urge peace in the new year.” The sign was made with over 3,000 Turkish ‘life-jackets’…
People are calling out for Peace, but where is she? There isn’t a single place on Earth not suffering from some kind of actual or economic war waged by psychopaths against humanity. They subjugate people and force them to accept psychopathy as a ‘way of life’, to be like them, to not care about each other, and to ignore the fact that there are children, and their parents, dying in the seas all around us.
Killing kids for profit
Not satisfied with plundering Syria’s energy resources, Turkey’s leadership is also apparently plundering its human resources – literally. In April 2014 Nizar Abboud, a reporter at the UN in New York City, cited Syrian doctors’ reports appearing in Middle Eastern media about tens of thousands of Syrian children’s organs being harvested – mainly in refugee camps in Turkey and in Turkish hospitals, where children injured in the fighting go for treatment, but instead end up dead. Watch as the UN Council representative casually dismissed Abboud’s question about the UN investigating these claims:
Were it not for the well-documented terrorism and atrocities that we know are being committed by Turkey’s Erdogan government in Syria, we might pass over as political fiction the hand-me-down news report about injured Syrians being robbed of their organs when taken to Turkey’s public hospitals for treatment.
But in the context of Turkey’s role in supporting and arming the terrorists to overthrow the Assad government in Syria and its history with trafficking human organs, there’s reason enough to take the report seriously.
The Turkish public health sector has a history of operating in international human organ smuggling for money. In 2010 The Guardian reported the theft of human organs by Yusuf Ercin Sonmez, a Turkish surgeon who was sought by Interpol in an international manhunt at the time. Sonmez has been indicted for illegally taking human organs for sale from patients in Kosovo, and has been accused of the same in Azerbaijian, and of being involved in an organ theft ring in Ecuador. In Kosovo, Sonmez was indicted for taking organs from Serb soldiers captured in the 1998-1999 US war on Serbia, and leaving them to die.
Sonmez’s partner-in-crime was Moshe Harel, a Turkish-Israeli. Together they harvested and trafficked human organs for a number of years as part of a global network “covering countries that ran through Kosovo, Turkey, Europe, Canada, the US and Israel.” Though both men were prosecuted and tried, their whereabouts are unknown since 2013. One wonders, with reports of on-going organ-trafficking in Turkey involving young refugees, whether these two are still around and protected by the authorities.
While those ultimately responsible for all this mass death and untold suffering – the powerful and wealthy making political maneuvers from their gilded halls – and while all too many people in Europe block out the refugees’ cries for help with walls of fear, hate-mongering and racism, those who voluntarily help the refugees are exercising conscience to weave a wide net of humanity, dignity and solidarity. Each of us should follow their example, wherever we might be.
Let’s open our hearts and offer help and hospitality, or at least show our support, for those who suffer or could use a helping hand. Compassion is contagious through our innate limbic resonance, and I am convinced that small acts of service to our fellow humans can change the world if done by many consistently. As tragedy upon tragedy piles up, the possibility of a new compassionate world is emerging amid the ruins of war and psychopathic politics… and the children of the refugees, our children, need not continue to drown in the seas.
May our children rest in peace, and may their deaths be not in vain. May it touch our hearts deeply so that we feel a sadness and pain for their loss so intense, that it turns into rage. A true and righteous rage against the policies, the governments, the institutions, the persons that allow the senseless and unjustified wars that produce the deaths of these children and millions of others globally, to continue. Rage against the psychopaths who rule over all life on this planet. Rage and be the voice for all the innocent victims dead and alive. Rage to defend whatever is left of beauty, justice, truth, solidarity, compassion and humanity in this world… For there is a worse kind of death than drowning in the Aegean Sea: drowning in a sea of ignorance and indifference to the plight of your fellow human beings, and losing your own humanity in the process.
Originally from Cyprus, Irini has a Master’s degree in Creative Arts Therapy and extensive clinical experience in the field of mental health. Her desire to understand global reality led to a position as editor on sott.net, where she became passionately interested in uncovering the truth hidden behind the lies mainstream media feed us daily. Irini is also a certified instructor of Éiriú Eolas, sharing the practice that keeps people sane in an insane world. She likes spending time around her loved ones and enjoys learning new crafts and skills.
A Pennsylvania state constable fatally shot a 12-year-old girl while serving an eviction notice to her father in Duncannon, Pennsylvania, on Monday. The constable, who was delivering the notice from a district court, shot the father in the arm, but the bullet passed through him, striking and killing the young girl.
According to police, Donald B. Meyer, 57, was behind on rent, and District Judge Daniel McGuire had issued an eviction order that Meyer reportedly failed to appeal. Pennsylvania State Constable Clarke Steele, a law enforcement officer tasked with carrying out orders from the judicial system, came to enforce the eviction order. Police allege Meyer first opened the front door, then shut it. He then reportedly re-opened the door armed with a rifle, pointing it at Steele.
In response, Steele fired his gun at Meyer, but the bullet exited through Meyer’s left arm, travelling to Ciara, Meyer’s 12-year-old daughter, who was standing behind him. Ciara was home sick from school on Monday. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
“Very kind, sweet kid,” a neighbor told local ABC27. “Here’s a little girl that doesn’t even have a chance to grow up and live her life, and all because of this senseless act. It’s horrible, absolutely heartbreaking.”
According to state police spokesperson, Trooper Rob Hicks, Meyer had been previously notified he had to leave the apartment by 10:00 am Monday, January 11. Hicks said, “It was absolutely no surprise he was coming at this date and time.” Hicks said Steele had been to Meyer’s residence “numerous times” to warn of the impending eviction. Police said that after the incident, they discovered Meyer’s gun had a round in the chamber, along with a magazine of 30 rounds.
Bil Stoeffler, a Dauphin County constable and spokesperson for the capital area constables’ association, stressed both that Steele is respected by fellow law enforcement and that Ciara’s death was accidental. “It was absolutely not intentional that the girl was shot,” he said. “The constable fired one round when he faced an immediate threat from which he could not retreat safely – he had no other force options.” While it’s possible this statement is true for Meyer’s situation, Stoeffler’s explanation is an oft-repeated justification for law enforcement shootings.
Nevertheless, Steele is reportedly devastated by the incident and has suspended work activities until an investigation into Monday’s incident is complete. A source close to him reportedly toldABC27 that Steele is “very distraught over the situation.”
Donald Meyer was taken to Penn State Hershey Medical Center on Monday morning due to injuries sustained from the bullet that passed through him to kill his daughter.
By Tuesday, he had been charged with a litany of offenses: aggravated assault, simple assault, terroristic threats, and reckless endangerment. Meyer will be held in prison without bail once he is released from the hospital.
He is due back in court for a preliminary hearing on January 15. Ciara’s body is scheduled for autopsy on Wednesday.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 