Inside Stories

SOUTHERN YEMEN — “They come to strip off our clothes not to liberate us. After taking your clothes off, they tie your hands to a steel pole from the right and the left so you are spread open in front of them. Then the sodomizing starts,” a released prisoner from a secret United Arab Emirates prison black-site, who only wanted to be identified as A.F.D. in fear of retaliation, told MintPress. “Please do not mention my name.”
He continued:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – (ANALYSIS) After over a year and a half of anticipation, the first formal meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin was certainly a momentous occasion, but hardly for the intended reasons.
It remains too early to definitively tell whether Helsinki will go down in history as the beginning of a new stage of rapprochement between Washington and Moscow or the trigger for a new downward plunge in bilateral relations between the two rivals. But the signs from the U.S., so far, are very, very grim.

JERUSALEM — After several days of rushing and intense debates, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had his wish come true. He urgently wanted to get the Nation State bill passed into law before the Knesset goes into summer recess on July 22, and for several days now the Knesset committee charged with ironing out the bill was delaying the process with long discussions.  Now the law passed 62 to 55 and 2 abstentions.

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA – Leaked reports from the Colombian Armed Forces have alleged that scattered groups of dissident former members of the dissolved Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) plan to hold a guerilla conference and formally unite as a large new guerilla force in the country’s lawless border regions and rural countryside.

CHICAGO — Hoisting placards that read “Stop Killing Black and Brown People” and chanting “Who Do You Protect? Who Do You Serve?” hundreds of demonstrators poured into the streets of this city’s South Shore neighborhood Monday for a third consecutive day to protest the latest fatal police shooting of a black man.

BRUSSELS — The still-popular yet polarizing ex-president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa Delgado, is garnering the support of regional figures and mass movements throughout Latin America, as he defies an order that would see him detained in his current country of residence, Belgium, and incarcerated in the Andean nation.

CHICAGO — “Shorty!”

DETROIT — The first signs that something was amiss surfaced in the weeks before the 2016 election, when public-health officials began to notice one patient after another walking into a clinic, or hospital emergency room in the Detroit metropolitan area complaining of the same symptoms: nausea and vomiting, pains in their stomach and joints, fatigue, fever, loss of appetite, yellowing of the skin and eyes, dark urine, and pale-colored feces.
It didn’t take long for the medical community to hone in on the culprit: hepatitis A.

In our previous report on the U.S. immigration enforcement regime, MintPress News looked at how the for-profit prison industry and anti-immigrant lobbyists have driven the U.S. government’s war on immigrants. In this report, we look at the factors that fueled the monstrous growth of the migrant incarceration system and concentration camp network sprawling across the United States.

HADAR, SYRIA — Situated in the northern part of Quneitra governorate, with the towering Jabal al-Sheikh (Mt. Hermon) overlooking it and the region, Hadar is in both a beautiful area of Syria and a dangerous one.
The roughly 10,000 defiant villagers of Hadar are isolated and under constant threat of attack. Until December 2017, Hadar was surrounded on three sides by terrorists and was attacked many times.