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Rate of sexual abuse of kids is highest among religious Zionist sector

Students in religious public schools in Israel are at a higher risk of sexual harassment and assault than any other of the Jewish education streams, a new study examining cases of sexual abuse from the religious Zionist sector by the Ne’emanei Torah Va’avodah movement has found.

“[These results] are a first step in the necessary in-depth discussions that oblige us to fight this phenomenon, recognize it, and to wake up from the illusion that a separated society [of men and women] is a guarantee of preventing harm.” Ne’emanei Torah Va’avodah’s Shmuel Shatach

Researcher Ariel Finkelstein analyzed the scope and profile of sexual abuse victims in Israeli local authorities’ social services departments in 2020, by sector or stream.

In Israel, there are a number of educational streams: Secular public school (Mamlachti), religious public school (Mamlachti Dati) and ultra-Orthodox schools, which are either private or semi-private.

The distribution of the data on sexual abuse was filtered by sector, according to the type of educational stream where the victims are currently or were educated in their childhood.

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Former Iowa City schools counselor awarded $12 million after being wrongfully imprisoned for 6 years

Donald Clark won $12 million in a lawsuit he filed against the state of Iowa on Thursday, years after being exonerated and released from prison on false charges that he sexually abused a student while working as an Iowa City elementary school counselor.

A jury awarded Clark $8 million in past emotional distress damages and $4 million for future damages after he spent six years in prison starting in 2010. He was released in 2016 when his conviction was vacated. That year, the court found that his public defender, John Robertson, was ineffective and declared Clark not guilty, but also “actually innocent,” a legally important finding, according to a news release from Clark’s lawyers at The Spence Law Firm LLC.

The jury found that Robertson, who died in 2013, failed to investigate the prosecution’s case against Clark, and a “substandard trial performance led to his conviction and wrongful imprisonment.”

Mel Orchard III of Jackson, Wyoming, one of Clark’s lawyers, told the Press-Citizen on Friday that Clark was joyous when the decision was rendered. Clark and his lawyers spent five years suing the state since his original 25-year prison sentence was vacated.

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D.C. police officers under investigation for confiscating guns without arresting suspects

Several police officers in Washington, D.C., are under investigation for reportedly confiscating illegal guns from criminal suspects while allowing the criminals themselves to go free.

City Police Chief Robert Contee confirmed the investigation on Friday, saying it covered seven officers and supervisors within the city’s law enforcement apparatus. 

“In these cases, the suspect was not arrested, and the suspect should’ve been arrested,” Contee said during a press conference late on Friday. 

“The firearm was taken and placed into evidence, however, the suspect was allowed to go free, and that’s just not the way that we conduct business in the Metropolitan Police Department,” he said. 

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Snowden Didn’t “Flee to Russia”: Obama Trapped Him There

When Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden “fled to Russia.”

The disinformation-trafficking wasn’t limited to random people on social media. Among others, The New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, Christian Science Monitor and Canada’s CBC all asserted in the past week that Snowden “fled to Russia” in 2013 after revealing that the United States government had created a mass surveillance regime targeting its own citizens, in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

What many people don’t realize — and what some people both inside the government and out of it purposefully ignore — is that Snowden wasn’t traveling to Russia, but merely through it.

When he left Hong Kong after meeting with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and turning over hundreds of thousands of stolen files, Snowden’s ultimate destination was Quito, Ecuador.

It’s important to note that Snowden says that, before leaving, he destroyed his cryptographic keys that provided him access to the files, and didn’t bring any copies of the files with him.

At the time, the Ecuadoran government was providing political asylum to Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange at the country’s London consulate, and Snowden hoped Ecuador would provide him asylum as well.

Snowden’s itinerary was arranged such that he wouldn’t land in countries that would extradite him to the United States. Nor would he cross U.S. airspace along the way. He was to make four flights in all, taking him from Hong Kong to Moscow, then Havana, Cuba; Caracas, Venezuela and finally Quito.

However, upon arriving in Moscow, Snowden was escorted by Russian security officials to an airport conference room, where they informed him that, while he was flying to Moscow, the Obama administration had invalidated his passport.

He’d spend the next 40 days at the Sheremetyevo airport, during which he applied to 27 countries for political asylum. “Not a single one of them was willing to stand up to American pressure,” Snowden wrote in his memoir, Permanent Record, “with some countries refusing outright, and others declaring they were unable to even consider my request until I arrived in their territory — a feat that was impossible.”

Seemingly tired of the spectacle, Putin granted Snowden asylum, and he’s been in Russia ever since. The essential point, however, is that Snowden is in Russia because the Obama administration deliberately trapped him there.

In 2013 and ever since, rabid Snowden detractors have failed to acknowledge how that move by the Obama White House belied its own assertions that Snowden was a traitor who traveled to Moscow with highly valuable intelligence information and was at high risk of turning it over to the Russian government.

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Man says he was paid $21,000 for trading in 3D-printed guns at government buyback event, New York attorney general responds

A New York man claimed that he was paid $21,000 for trading in 3D-printed guns at a government buyback event.

A man who identified himself as “Kem” noticed that the New York attorney general’s office was holding a gun buyback event at the Utica Police Department on Aug. 27. Kem allegedly 3D-printed dozens of guns on a $200 3D printer he got for Christmas.

Kem told WKTV, “I 3D-printed a bunch of lower receivers and frames for different kinds of firearms.”

The man reportedly drove six hours to the Utica Police Department to trade in the firearms.

Kem said, “And he sees the tote and says, ‘how many firearms do you have?’ And I said, ‘110.’”

He said that he negotiated all day with the staff of the attorney general’s office.

“And it ended with the guy and a lady from the budget office finally coming around with the 42 gift cards and counting them in front of me,” Kem explained. “$21,000 in $500 gift cards.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that “296 firearms, including 177 ghost guns, were turned in to law enforcement at a gun buyback event hosted by her office and the Utica Police Department.”

“Since 2013, OAG has hosted gun buyback events throughout New York state and has successfully collected more than 5,300 firearms,” the statement read. “To date, Attorney General James has helped remove more than 3,300 guns out of communities since 2019.”

Kem mocked James, “I’m sure handing over $21,000 in gift cards to some punk kid after getting a bunch of plastic junk was a rousing success.”

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UN tells WEF how it partners with tech platforms to promote narratives

The World Economic Forum (WEF) held the Sustainable Development Impact Meetings, where unelected groups held a “Tackling Disinformation” panel, with participants including the UN, Brown University, and even CNN.

The panel discussed how best to control narratives on issues like climate change and COVID-19.

The UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, Melissa Fleming, noted that the UN had partnered with Big Tech companies, including Google and TikTok, to control narratives surrounding COVID and climate change.

“We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do,” she said.

The UN said it partnered with Google to influence search results on climate change so that narratives from “authoritative” sources would appear at the top of search results.

“We partnered with Google,” said Fleming. “For example, if you Google ‘climate change,’ you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources.

“We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top.”

The UN also says it partnered with TikTok on a project dubbed “Team Halo,” to control the narratives surrounding COVID-19.

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Aretha Franklin and the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO)

“Queen of Soul” cited in 270 pages of documents declassified by the FBI as they pursued Black revolutionary and communist influences in political and cultural life during the 1960s and 1970s

On August 16, 2018, Aretha Franklin, popularly known as the “Queen of Soul”, passed away at her home in Detroit, Michigan at the age of 76.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 25, 1942, Aretha came to Detroit in 1946 with her parents, vocalist Mrs. Barbara Siggers Franklin and Rev. Clarence L. Franklin, a well-known minister who originated in the Delta region of Mississippi. Franklin became a minister while he was a teenager in Mississippi.

Rev. Franklin was recruited to come to Detroit from Buffalo, New York in late 1945 and in subsequent years built the New Bethel Baptist Church into an internationally recognized religious institution located on Hasting Street on the eastside of Detroit. The community surrounding the church was later targeted in the late 1950s and early 1960s for demolition in a so-called “urban renewal” project fostered by the then City of Detroit government and the Federal Highway Administration based in Washington, D.C.

By the early 1960s, Detroit was seething with discontent over the massive displacement of more than 100,000 people from the lower east side communities known as Paradise Valley and Black Bottom. Many small businesses, social clubs, churches and as well as thousands of homes were destroyed by the racist white city administration.

New Bethel relocated on Linwood Avenue in the Virginia Park District on the west side in the Spring of 1963. This was the same year of the massive “Walk to Freedom” down Woodward Avenue on June 23. The demonstration was the largest civil rights manifestation in the United States and would set the stage for the “March on Washington” just two months later. The Detroit Walk to Freedom was led by Rev. C. L. Franklin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Rev. Albert Cleage of the Central Congregational Church, also located in the Virginia Park District on Linwood Avenue, among other community and labor leaders.

Rev. Franklin was heavily involved with the SCLC as a board member and fundraiser. Dr. King and his organization, in which he served as president, were subjected to intense spying and disruption efforts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) along with segregationist southern state governments bolstered by law-enforcement agencies and business interests.

Aretha Franklin often traveled with her father during the 1950s in his highly popular gospel tours throughout the South and other regions of the U.S. By 1960, Aretha had signed a recording contract with Columbia Records in New York City. Later in 1967, she switched to Atlantic Records where her first album catapulted the soul artist to the top of the charts.

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The 70 Seconds that Shook the World

On March 16, 2020, following a long weekend of negotiations and deals about the coronavirus, Donald Trump, Deborah Birx, and Anthony Fauci spoke at a White House press conference for the first time about nationwide lockdowns. 

They handed out a sheet of paper – it mostly consisted of conventional health advice – that said in tiny print: “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

Shut it all down. Everything. Everyone. As if the whole economy were a nightclub closing early. 

This amounted to a full repudiation of not only the Constitution but also freedom itself. At the very least, it was a fundamental attack on the First Amendment guarantees of the freedom of religion because it attacked the rights of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and everyone. 

All evidence suggests that Trump did not know that the tiny text was in there. 

The reading of the text was left to the question and answer session. 

Even when it was read by Fauci from the podium, Trump seemed distracted by something else, almost as if he did not hear or did not want to hear it. Later he bragged that the whole thing was his doing, but looking back at the history of that day, it is not so clear. 

Let’s take this apart frame by frame to understand what happened in these 70 seconds as part of the Q&A session. A reporter starts by asking whether the federal government is telling people to “avoid restaurants and bars” or if the government is saying that “bars and restaurants should shut down over the next 15 days.”

Both Fauci and Birx knew for sure that the guidelines were calling for them to shut down. 

After a long and tedious press conference about not much, following a very precise question, Trump turns to Fauci to have him answer. This might be because he wasn’t listening carefully and did not know how to respond. Fauci then motions to Birx, who rises to the podium. Fauci probably believed that she would be the one to do the dirty work of announcing the lockdowns. Fauci is clearly egging her on: now is your time. 

Birx begins her answer with a strategic deflection, speaking tendentiously about how long the virus lives on surfaces. It was nothing but smokescreen, and there is every reason to believe that she knew it. She pointedly was not answering the question. She chickened out at the last moment.  

A possibly frustrated Fauci interrupts here with a hand signal from the side. Birx immediately realizes what he was going to do: he was going to read the order that Trump did not know was there. So she decides to pass the buck. She gets giddy and silly with excitement, adrenaline flowing. She starts stumbling around with her words, and says in a faux-girlish way that she will let Fauci speak because he is her mentor. 

This was her way of saying that she would gladly pass this hot potato onto him. 

She likely knew that this was the great moment they had all been waiting for. She was mad with excitement. Oddly, Trump was smiling too but possibly because of her antics, not because of what was about to happen.

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