Friend of Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Savile given free rein to sexually abuse 60 people, report finds

Damning reports point finger at politicians, civil servants and senior NHS staff but stop short of holding anyone accountable

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Politicians, civil servants and NHS managers gave Jimmy Savile free rein to sexually abuse 60 people, including children as young as eight, over two decades at Stoke Mandeville hospital, two damning reports have concluded.

Savile’s celebrity status, his connections with the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and with royalty, and his role as a fundraiser allowed him unfettered access to patients, staff and visitors at the Buckinghamshire hospital. Over 20 years he brazenly used that power and access to rape, sexually abuse, harass, intimidate and silence his victims who ranged in age from eight and 40.

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Savile abused victims as soon as he started frequenting Stoke Mandeville in 1968, the report said. He became a porter at the hospital, having been invited in by a fellow porter who had worked with Savile at Leeds General Infirmary, where the DJ had also abused patients.

“He was a nightmare … he was vile,” a staff nurse told the inquiry. Others described how, when he turned up in a ward, a “Jimmy Savile alert would go out and we’d all disappear”.

Savile’s victims at Stoke Mandeville included an eight-year-old boy, and a girl, also eight, who was raped at least 10 times by Savile when she visited relatives there. One victim was systematically abused in the chapel by Savile, who was often accompanied by another, unnamed man. “Every time I went in that room I just knew he would touch me wherever he wanted to touch me,” she said.

A 12-year-old girl was raped by Savile in the television room. She returned to her ward and told a nurse that a porter, Savile, had “hurt me, down there”. She was told not to say anything, otherwise the nurse would get into trouble. Later that night Savile appeared at the girl’s bedside and sexually assaulted her again. Alone in her room afterwards, the child tore a page from a Bible in the room and wrote two notes asking for her father.

She posted them into a red post box in a corridor outside the ward, hoping someone would contact him; no one did.

more: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/26/jimmy-savile-given-free-rein-to-sexually-abuse-60-people-report-finds

Who Bankrolls the Islamic State? Private Donors in Gulf Oil States Cited as Key to ISIS Success...

Militants from the self-proclaimed Islamic State have reportedly abducted at least 220 people from Assyrian Christian villages in northeastern Syria during a three-day offensive. Meanwhile, the Islamic State militant nicknamed "Jihadi John," who has been featured in several beheading videos, has been identified as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born former resident of London. In other news, two U.S.-led coalition airstrikes have reportedly killed over three dozen people in Iraq, including at least 20 civilians. Also this week, UNESCO is has condemned the Islamic State for destroying the Mosul public library, which housed more than 8,000 rare books and manuscripts. UNESCO described the incident as "one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history." Earlier today, video was posted online that appears to show members of the Islamic State smashing ancient artifacts inside a Mosul museum. The video shows men toppling statues and using sledgehammers and drills to destroy the artifacts. The Guardian reports one of the statues destroyed was a winged-bull Assyrian protective deity that dates back to the 9th century B.C. Live from Iraq, we are joined by Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent. His latest book is "The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution."

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Why don’t we go right to the headline of that piece, Patrick? Talk about who is funding the self-proclaimed Islamic State?

PATRICK COCKBURN: It looks as though the Islamic State has much more money than it ought to have. It’s raised certainly 100,000, and getting on over 200,000, soldiers. They’re all being paid. It’s introduced conscription. It recently lowered the age of conscription below 18. If you join up, you don’t get much. You get $400 a month. If you’re a foreign fighter, you’ll get $800 a month and your keep. But this is a pretty large army they’re putting in the field, and they don’t have many sources of revenue. They have some oil. They have some taxes. So, there’s a great big gap there, which senior Kurdish officials and officials in Baghdad have told me they’re convinced come from private donors in the oil states of the Gulf. That’s the only real explanation for that.

more: http://www.democracynow.org/2015/2/26/who_is_bankrolling_the_islamic_state

Who Bankrolls the Islamic State? Private Donors in Gulf Oil States Cited as Key to ISIS Success...

Good question!

Militants from the self-proclaimed Islamic State have reportedly abducted at least 220 people from Assyrian Christian villages in northeastern Syria during a three-day offensive. Meanwhile, the Islamic State militant nicknamed "Jihadi John," who has been featured in several beheading videos, has been identified as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born former resident of London. In other news, two U.S.-led coalition airstrikes have reportedly killed over three dozen people in Iraq, including at least 20 civilians. Also this week, UNESCO is has condemned the Islamic State for destroying the Mosul public library, which housed more than 8,000 rare books and manuscripts. UNESCO described the incident as "one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history." Earlier today, video was posted online that appears to show members of the Islamic State smashing ancient artifacts inside a Mosul museum. The video shows men toppling statues and using sledgehammers and drills to destroy the artifacts. The Guardian reports one of the statues destroyed was a winged-bull Assyrian protective deity that dates back to the 9th century B.C. Live from Iraq, we are joined by Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent. His latest book is "The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution."

<snip>

Why don’t we go right to the headline of that piece, Patrick? Talk about who is funding the self-proclaimed Islamic State?

PATRICK COCKBURN: It looks as though the Islamic State has much more money than it ought to have. It’s raised certainly 100,000, and getting on over 200,000, soldiers. They’re all being paid. It’s introduced conscription. It recently lowered the age of conscription below 18. If you join up, you don’t get much. You get $400 a month. If you’re a foreign fighter, you’ll get $800 a month and your keep. But this is a pretty large army they’re putting in the field, and they don’t have many sources of revenue. They have some oil. They have some taxes. So, there’s a great big gap there, which senior Kurdish officials and officials in Baghdad have told me they’re convinced come from private donors in the oil states of the Gulf. That’s the only real explanation for that.

more: http://www.democracynow.org/2015/2/26/who_is_bankrolling_the_islamic_state

Growing Number Of Conservatives Seem Utterly Unaware That Obama Is Attacking ISIS...

While the U.S.-led coalition to defeat the so-called Islamic State has launched around 5,000 airstrikes against the extremist group, with Central Command posting daily updates on new airstrikes targeting the organization also known as ISIS or ISIL, several Republican politicians appear to believe that the U.S. is not at all engaging in a fight against group.

The same politicians will readily praise the leaders of Egypt and Jordan for launching airstrikes against the terrorist group, while then criticizing President Obama for not following in their footsteps, even though the U.S. is responsible for the vast majority of the airstrikes carried out by the anti-ISIS coalition. Of course, many Republicans and Democrats have expressed legitimate criticisms of the administration’s strategy to defeat ISIS, but some Republicans are acting as if the administration is not at all engaged in fighting the group, whose momentum has been blunted since the airstrikes began.

As Jon Stewart noted, Fox News pundits deny the facts about America’s anti-ISIS airstrikes “even when that fact is spelled out directly next to their face.”

- See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/growing-number-conservatives-seem-utterly-unaware-obama-attacking-isis#sthash.u7ce2cWG.dpuf


Just thought I'd throw this out there...

This Is What Poverty Looks Like

by Dawn Meehan



I recently read an article by Babble blogger Alice Gomstyn about Sonya Romero-Smith, a kindergarten teacher in Albuquerque who helps her students that are living in poverty. The first questions she asks them each morning are: “Did you eat?” and “Are you clean?” It shocked a lot of people — but not me.

I happen to be one of those educators, working in a title 1 middle school in a very high-poverty area. When I say “poverty” here, I’m not talking about a family whose dad has been laid off from his job or a family going through divorce or sickness. I’m not talking about a sudden, temporary, or even long-term shortage of money. I’m talking about families who have lived in poverty for generations. Families who don’t know anything but poverty. Generational poverty is very different from families experiencing hard times — mainly because they often view education as a stressor, and school a place they do not belong, making it extremely difficult to end the cycle.

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At the beginning of the year, I used to say things to my students like, “At least it’s Friday, right? You’ve got to love the weekend! Do you have any plans?” I said this until one too many students told me, “I’d rather be at school.” I was incredulous at first. What kid would rather be at school instead of at home on the weekend? And then I learned. A kid who doesn’t eat over the weekend. A kid whose dad is back in jail. A kid whose mom will spend the days off somewhere leaving that student to care for his four younger siblings with no food or diapers in the house. A kid whose mom’s drugged-up boyfriend will yell and hit. My students don’t look forward to days off school, they dread them.

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A couple of years ago, a student had to be transported from school to the hospital via an ambulance. His parents didn’t get to the hospital for seven hours because they had no transportation. For seven hours this student was sick and alone without his family there.

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When you read that more than half of U.S. Public School students are living in poverty, you think that these kids just don’t have a lot of money. But it goes so far beyond a lack of money. The effects are remarkably pervasive, creeping into every area of a student’s life. It’s hard to learn when basic needs aren’t being met. And it’s hard to care for a child who acts out, swears more than Eminem, disrupts your class, tells you off, and starts fights. The educators who take the time to talk to, listen to, sympathize with, and understand their students’ situations are the ones who make a difference. The ones who remember that the kids who need love the most will ask for it in the most unloving of ways, change lives.

more: http://www.babble.com/parenting/this-is-what-poverty-really-looks-like/?

An unrepentant whitewash of murder and occupation, American Sniper shouldn’t be up for any Oscars

Hollywood at War

An unrepentant whitewash of murder and occupation, American Sniper shouldn’t be up for any Oscars tonight.
by Stephen Maher

Great art is always ambiguous. Rather than giving us answers, it forces us to ask new questions; complexity is its hallmark. None of this applies to American Sniper, a truly abhorrent film that cannot be confused with art, much less great art.

Yet I suspect that the already deafening praise the film has received will only grow as Chris Kyle’s image as a national “war hero” is amplified both by Bradley Cooper’s Oscar nomination and the ongoing trial of Kyle’s murderer, Eddie Routh, a veteran struggling with severe mental health problems who Kyle had reached out to after returning home.

When not articulated within hawkish narratives emphasizing the glory or necessity of war, the very real suffering of so many returning soldiers is largely framed within the familiar dovish critique of American imperialism — repeated by American Sniper — which casts the war as a misguided expenditure of “our” lives and resources.

My antipathy for American Sniper isn’t an unthinking revulsion toward any film I perceive to be conservative. It is certainly possible for reactionary films to be so skillfully and intelligently constructed that they are great works, even if the way they deal with their subject matter and the conclusions they draw from it are revolting.

Consider, for example, many of Lars von Trier’s mind-bending but often misogynist films, such as Dogville; or Stanley Kubrick’s artful affirmation of the bourgeois family in Eyes Wide Shut; or John Ford’s Stagecoach, a film that glorifies the massacre of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, but which was so well technically executed that Orson Welles claimed to have seen it forty times while making Citizen Kane.

As in countless countries, and in countless wars, American Sniper attempts to construct a war hero for us to worship that is beyond politics. What we get instead is a hackneyed paean to brutish masculinity, and a film whose banality is lessened only by the shock of its whitewashing of the crimes of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq — even as it adopts a “dovish,” critical attitude toward the war.

more: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/02/american-sniper-war-violence-oscars/

“My first impulse is to call you a dumb Obama ass-licking c**t”: “American Sniper” fans tell me off

I dared criticize "American Sniper." You'd be horrified by the response from aggressive, deluded "patriots"
Sophia A. McClennen

We knew early on that critiquing the film was risky business since it would be followed with immediate and intense attacks. This was evident when Seth Rogen and Michael Moore experienced severe public backlash in response to less-than-favorable tweets about the movie. In a return of the “with us or against us” logic that framed the Bush administration’s response to 9/11, the film suddenly stood in for patriotism in general. If you critiqued the film, you hated the country, the military and your own freedom. And those that you had offended were going to make you pay for it.

It was just this sort of narrow thinking that I had in mind when I wrote a piece critical of the film for Salon. I suggested that the film suffered from two key flaws—delusion and aggression—and that both of those flaws had been present in public appearances by “American Sniper” director Clint Eastwood. Most important, I connected them to a hostile tendency common to a highly vocal sector of the GOP.

Little did I know that whatever my piece may have lacked in its assessment of the film, it would be the film’s defenders that would perfectly prove my point. Within minutes of the piece going live, my email inbox and Twitter feed began to light up with negative comments. Many of those early ones I deleted, but I soon realized that keeping them and analyzing them would be a useful exercise in understanding the hate speech that is threatening the health of our democracy. (You can access our full data analysis of the messages here.)

more: http://www.salon.com/2015/02/20/my_first_impulse_is_to_call_you_a_dumb_obama_ass_licking_ct_american_sniper_fans_tell_me_off/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Training Tea Party Activists In Guerilla Internet Tactics

Three Muslim College Students Slain in Shooting Near UNC Chapel Hill

Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, has been charged by Chapel Hill, NC police with three counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of three Muslim college students, who were all shot in the head at an apartment complex near the University of North Carolina campus. All three were pronounced dead at the scene.

According to WRAL, Hicks turned himself to police Tuesday night. He's accused of shooting and killing Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife, Yusor Mohammad, 21, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19.

Barakat, the Charlotte Observer reports, was a doctoral student at UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Dentistry; his wife and sister were students at North Carolina State University.


http://newsfeed.gawker.com/three-muslim-college-students-slain-in-shooting-near-un-1685160166?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow