On a warm Tuesday morning earlier this month in Llano Verde, an eastern suburb of the city of Cali, five Afro-Colombian children decided to leave their homes to take advantage of the fine weather to spend some time outside. They would never return. Only a few hours later, they were found dead; their bodies burned, cut to pieces with machetes and riddled with bullets, dumped in public for all to see.
IDLIB PROVINCE, SYRIA (Report) — In recently liberated Qalaat Al Madiq — 500 meters from As Suqaylabiyah, a predominantly Christian town near Syria’s embattled Idlib province — the White Helmets, a controversial rescue group financed primarily by the U.K. Foreign Office, was found to have an established presence in a network of tunnels.
After the failure of Newsguard — the news rating system backed by a cadre of prominent neoconservative personalities — to gain traction among American tech and social media companies, another organization has quietly stepped in to direct the news algorithms of tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
SAN FRANCISCO – The “new year” was barely 24 hours old when President Donald Trump did what President Donald Trump does: he tweeted something as inane and stupid as it was gratuitously provocative. This time, it was in response to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s declaration that he was now in possession of nuclear capabilities that could strike at the whole of the United States, symbolized by a button on his desk.
NABI SALEH, PALESTINE (Op-ed) — One can barely go for half a day on social media without seeing new iconic images of Ahed Tamimi. Everyone who ever posed with her for a photo is posting, and some very creative art is being made of her almost by the minute.
TEHRAN, IRAN (Analysis) – Using the recent protests as cover, the governments of the United States and Israel are advancing a much larger plan for covert regime change against the Iranian government, one born out of the “secret deal” negotiated and signed between the two countries right before the widely covered but relatively small protests in Iran began in late December.
ATHENS, GREECE – For years, throughout the severe economic crisis that has plagued Greece over much of the past decade, the international media and financial press have held Greece up as a striking example of financial folly and mismanagement. Greece’s debt, we have been told, is the product of fiscal irresponsibility, of “lazy” and “unproductive” Greeks living beyond their means and spending recklessly.
MINNEAPOLIS — It just wouldn’t be Christmas without a story of hope and forgiveness. We can thank former Fox News figure Megyn Kelly, now an NBC News personality, for this one. The day after Christmas Kelly brought together for her feel-good show a wrongfully imprisoned man and the cop who framed him.
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA — From his post at the edge of the bus-shelter bench, James Anderson spotted the two police patrol cars heading slowly towards him and snapped briskly to attention, or at least as briskly as humanly possible for a 53-year-old man with a bad back. He reached for his cane and struggled unsteadily to his feet, shielding his eyes from the vehicle’s blinding head beams.
