Category Archives: Fail!

Germany planning to ′massively′ limit privacy rights | Germany | DW.COM | 25.11.2016

Perhaps most contentiously, the draft allows the government to deny people the basic right to know what personal data is being collected if “the release of the data endangers public safety and order, or disadvantages the well-being of the country, or the state in another way.”

Source: Germany planning to ′massively′ limit privacy rights | Germany | DW.COM | 25.11.2016

Cause of Severe Injury at Pipeline Protest Becomes New Point of Dispute – The New York Times

Sophia Wilansky, 21, who grew up in the Bronx, rested in a Minneapolis hospital bed, her father by her side, recovering from surgery to try to save her left hand and arm after an explosion at a pipeline protest in North Dakota this week.“From an inch below the elbow, to an inch above her wrist, the muscle is blown off,” her father, Wayne Wilansky, said from the hospital, Hennepin County Medical Center. “The radius bone, a significant amount of it, is blown away. The arteries inside her arm are blown away. The median nerve is mostly blown away.”As many as 20 operations lie ahead, Mr. Wilansky said, and it was unclear whether she would keep the arm.

Source: Cause of Severe Injury at Pipeline Protest Becomes New Point of Dispute – The New York Times

From Putin’s Hands: A Russian Passport for Steven Seagal – The New York Times

“I still love my country, I still love my family, and I am still an honorable man,” he says in a Southern drawl in a scene from the movie trailer. “If I am the bad guy, what does that make you?” {Not a turncoat or a traitor!”}

Source: From Putin’s Hands: A Russian Passport for Steven Seagal – The New York Times

A Long-Gone Parasite Returns to Florida, Leaving a Trail of Dead Deer – The New York Times – Nothing is ever “eradicated;” it evolves or is triggered by change in environment – duh!

What biologists discovered turned out to be even more frightening: the reappearance of a parasite known as the New World screwworm fly that had not been seen in the United States since the 1970s and had been considered eradicated.State and federal officials are hopeful that the infestation, which so far is restricted to Florida’s southernmost Monroe County, is being controlled. Symptoms were first reported in wild deer in July, and laboratory tests in late September confirmed the presence of the screwworm, which is the larva of the screwworm fly.The infestation has the potential to cause catastrophic damage to livestock and is being seen by some experts as a reminder of the challenges of controlling the spread of diseases and infestations in a world of limitless global travel and trade.

Source: A Long-Gone Parasite Returns to Florida, Leaving a Trail of Dead Deer – The New York Times

I Was Raped / I Was Battered – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

I passed signs boasting “98% of Our University is Nonviolent!” while on my way to a sexual assault survivors group to meet with twenty other women who were raped on campus in the last year.Hers: four men behind the science building, her face grating the asphalt, turns taken from behind. Two officers found her, they took no notes, they asked her to calm down, she was hysterical.Hers: a rapist with a name engraved on some campus building, a rape kit that showed her lacerations, a rape kit that showed his semen, a rape kit that was thrown out prematurely, a rapist that walked.Hers: a professor, but he was tenured.Hers: a long walk to the police, freshly raped, dress wadded between her legs, bloodied from all that tearing. The officer asked if she was sure it wasn’t her period. “Are you sure?” he pressed. “Are you sure? Are you sure?”Hers: a drug in a drink at a frat party, her body left between the cars in a gravel parking lot, a mandatory alcohol-education course courtesy of the Institution. The class met on Fridays; she heard the frat parties’ music through the cinder-block walls.Once, we counted all the other rape survivors we knew. There should have been two hundred of us there, not twenty.And at the end of the semester, the Institution reported zero assaults. They hung banners in the halls.

Source: I Was Raped / I Was Battered – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

Israel wildfire roaring through Haifa started by ‘politically motivated’ arsonists, authorities say – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Mostly political bullying and lying, I expect.

Many of the fires were also reported to be caused by extreme wind gusts and drought, with no rain reported in large parts of Israel for months.

Source: Israel wildfire roaring through Haifa started by ‘politically motivated’ arsonists, authorities say – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Germany supporting ethnic cleansing in Kurdish Iraq – www.german-foreign-policy.com

BERLIN/ERBIL/BAGHDAD (Own report) – In the wake of the war against IS (Daesh), the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq, which is supported by Berlin, is forcibly displacing the Arabic-speaking inhabitants, aimed at a consolidation of the Kurdish dominated territory, as was reported by Human Rights Watch (HRW). According to HRW’s investigation, the Kurdish Peshmerga has deliberately destroyed the homes of Arabic-speaking Sunnis in at least 21 villages and towns in northern Iraq, while leaving intact the Kurdish-owned houses. The Kurdistan Regional Government under President Masoud Barzani is striving to incorporate as many areas as possible – particularly the oil rich region Kirkuk – into the Kurdish autonomous region before seceding from Iraq. For decades, Barzani and his clan have been cooperating closely with politicians from the Federal Republic of Germany. Berlin was also promised access to the large oil reserves in the autonomous region. In return, Germany, above all, has been supporting the Peshmerga in its war against Daesh, while refusing similar aid to the Baghdad government. The German government is also ignoring the eviction of the Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the predominantly Kurdish region.

Source: www.german-foreign-policy.com

Lebanon builds wall around Palestinian refugee camp | Middle East | DW.COM | 22.11.2016

“The Lebanese authorities are building an apartheid wall surrounding the Ain al-Helweh camp in Sidon,” tweeted an account called Yarmouk News. Commentators on social media have used the term apartheid to describe the wall, claiming that it isolates and separates the Palestinians in the camp from the rest of Lebanese society.After the war of Arab-Israeli war of 1948, many displaced Palestinians were forced to flee to Lebanon. The majority of these Palestinians remain stateless refugees even today. The United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) provides food, medicine, education and other necessities to the Palestinian population in Lebanon. The Lebanese government bars Palestinians from taking white-collar jobs such as in the law and engineering fields. Palestinian refugees in Jordan, on the other hand, are eligible for Jordanian citizenship.

Source: Lebanon builds wall around Palestinian refugee camp | Middle East | DW.COM | 22.11.2016

The Arizona Tribe That Knows How to Stop a Trump Wall – Intercontinental Cry – Not Really but they hope so.

President-elect Donald Trump says that he will build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. It will stop undocumented immigrants from entering the country. It will stop drugs from entering the country. It will be 50 feet tall. It will be nearly a thousand miles long. And it will cut the traditional lands of the […]

Source: The Arizona Tribe That Knows How to Stop a Trump Wall – Intercontinental Cry

In the short term, when it comes to securing the border, there are no easy answers or solutions. But when it comes to working with tribal nations on the issue, in the eyes of the Tohono O’odham, Trump’s proposed wall represents either gross ignorance or blatant disregard for tribal sovereignty. And if construction begins, it could signal the winding back of clocks on U.S.-tribal relations on the border.

“I can’t even imagine how far it would set us back,” says Tatum. “More than a hundred years.”

{I cannot imagine that Mr. Trump could care a whit about tribal law, or the wishes of the Tohono O’odham – he cares about Trump and that is about as far as his caring goes.}

How Donald Trump Is Building a Fourth Reich | Dame Magazine

It’s been two weeks and already we’ve been inundated with debates and think pieces on how and why our nation’s voters elected a lying, unstable, unqualified, egomaniacal racist and misogynistic candidate as the 45th president of the United States of America. Donald Trump’s victory proves that in America, white men—even the most morally degraded—only have to be fractionally as good as everybody to be successful.Mainstream media outlets, which profited off Trump’s campaign and failed to uphold their basic responsibility of reporting the facts, educating the public and correcting lies, will not act like retrospect experts. Not only are they refusing to be held accountable for their incessant coverage that helped Trump’s winning the election, they are using any backlash that ensues in the streets to build their ratings.Many pundits are already professing their shock, asking how we got here. And the media are quickly normalizing a man who built—and indeed won—on a campaign driven by hate while pretending to push a narrative of “unity.” And they’re not just normalizing him, but his whole chaotic transition team and proposed cabinet filled with far-right henchmen who will enact the white-supremacist, anti-Muslim, misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, xenophobic messages Trump spouted off on the campaign trail.

Source: How Donald Trump Is Building a Fourth Reich | Dame Magazine