Author: Steven Sahiounie

A 16-year-old high school girl was arrested and her entire school locked down, all over her refusal to wear a face mask. Her arrest caused outrage on the right, and conservatives have started chipping in to her legal defense. Video footage captured on Thursday showed 16-year-old Grace Smith met with school officials and a police officer when she turned up at the doors of Laramie High School in Wyoming. Smith had already served two consecutive suspensions for refusing to wear a face mask in class – per school board requirements – and again attempted to enter the building unmasked. She…

Czech center-right opposition group Together is set to beat Prime Minister Andrej Babis’ ANO party in national elections. Babis was beset by corruption allegations after being named in the Pandora Papers ahead of the vote. Voting in the Czech Republic took place on Friday through to midday on Saturday, and with 99% of ballots counted that evening, the center-right Together coalition is taking 27.69% of the vote – a hair above the 27.23% taken by Babis’ ANO party. The liberal Pirates/Mayors coalition are coming in third, with 15.5%. Earlier results showed the ANO in the lead, but even before Together…

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and his accompanying delegation arrived in the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Saturday morning. The Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, Faisal Mekdad, who received Amirabdollahian at Damascus airport, said that “Syria supports efforts undertaken by the Iranian leadership regarding the nuclear file.” Mekdad strongly condemned all “American actions that seek to manipulate the nuclear issue and other matters in the region.” For his part, the Iranian Foreign Minister expressed his country’s interest in its strategic relations with Syria, stressing that “Iran will remain firmly on the side of Syria, just as it stood by it…

The United States is supporting Syrian terrorist groups to divide it, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said. “Washington is insincere about the reason behind its presence in Syria to combat ISIS,” he told reporters in a joint press conference with his Venezuelan counterpart, Felix Plasencia. “The United States transported ISIS militants from Syria to Afghanistan,” Mevlut asserted. The Turkish foreign minister underscored that Washington is making unilateral policies that have affected Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, calling on the US to change its policies instead of blaming Turkey. Cavusoglu had condemned the US military presence in Syria, saying it has to…

Militant groups in northern Mali’s Kidal region have been trained by French officers, Prime Minister Choguel Kokalla Maiga claimed in an interview with RIA Novosti, saying two-thirds of his country is “occupied by terrorists.” Mali has evidence that French forces present in its territory with a mission to counter terrorist groups have been instead “training” militants, the transitional government’s prime minister told Russia’s RIA news agency on Friday. According to the Malian official, France now controls an enclave in Kidal, with Mali having no access there. “They have militant groups there, who have been trained by French officers. We have evidence of…

By Manlio Dinucci . “The Facebook outage was a planetary-scale demonstration of how essential the company’s services have become to daily life” headlines the New York Times, pointing out that Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger are fundamental to the economy, politics, education, and health care. Worldwide, about 2.8 billion people, on average, use at least one Facebook product per day. Facebook collects billions of pieces of information every day from all over the world in its data centers, 13 of which are located in the United States, 3 in Europe and 1 in Singapore. In a similar way Google works, with its…

By Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin . In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character. We must begin to ask: Why are there forty million poor people in a nation overflowing with such unbelievable affluence? – Martin Luther King Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? [p141] The usage of the term ‘woke’ has spread rapidly in the last ten years from meaning awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination to describing the identity politics of various ethnic groups in the USA. The term has a long history reaching back to the 1930s when Black American…

Germany needed a late winner from Thomas Mueller to beat Romania 2-1 while the Netherlands eked out a 1-0 win in Latvia to stay on course for the World Cup finals on Friday. Four-time world champions Germany now have a six-point lead in Group J after their win in Hamburg. However, it was another rollercoaster evening for the European giants. Romania took a shock ninth minute lead when Rangers winger Ianis Hagi ghosted through the defence and fired past Germany goalkeeper Marc-Andre ter Stegen, a late replacement for injured Manuel Neuer. Serge Gnabry equalised with his 20th goal in 30…

At about 9.33 pm today, the Israeli enemy carried out an air aggression from the direction of the Al-Tanf area with rockets towards the T-4 military airport in the central region, and Syrian air defense media confronted the aggression’s missiles and brought down most of them.source : sana.sy

The International Criminal Court (ICC) asked UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday to decide who will be representing Afghanistan at the UN. “Today, 8 October 2021, Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court decided to request the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties of the Court to submit information on the identification of the authorities currently representing the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan,” the ICC said in a statement. The Chamber requested that Guterres and the ICC legislative body select an Afghan representative so that the Court could continue its inquiry into…