SunSeeker
SunSeeker's JournalFascism and Football: Death and Hatred in the Soccer Stadium
The fight that ensued was brutal, to say the least. Four Napoli fans suffered deep stab wounds and an Inter fan, who had been banned from entering the stadium because of disruptions at previous games, died in the hospital after an SUV allegedly driven by a Napoli fan ran over him before speeding off.
Then things got really bad, and nobody should have been surprised. The way “the beautiful game” has turned ugly reflects darker developments in a broader segment of the Italian and indeed the European body politic.
“They were radical fans who were, originally, apolitical and dedicated only to the colors of the team. In the mid 1990s however, the ultras became increasingly fascist in inspiration, introducing anti-Semitism, swastikas and overt racism into Italian grounds,” Jones told The Daily Beast. “The overt and increasing racism of the ultras is merely a reflection of the society from which they come, and which has repeatedly voted for neo-fascist political parties.”
Inside the stadium at the Napoli-Inter Milan match, the tension was high as word of the scuffle outside spread. Napoli's star defender Kalidou Koulibaly, a 27-year-old French-born man of Senegalese descent who has played for Napoli since 2014, was just warming up when thousands of Inter fans started making monkey sounds from the stands.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fascism-and-football-death-and-hatred-in-the-soccer-stadium?ref=home
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It is so depressing to see Pele's beautiful game descend to this. 
Iraqi Lawmakers Criticize Trump Visit As Blow To Iraqi Sovereignty
Source: HuffPost/Reuters
Iraqi political and militia leaders condemned U.S. President Donald Trump’s surprise visit to U.S. troops in Iraq on Wednesday as a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty, and lawmakers said a meeting between Trump and Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi was canceled due to a disagreement over venue.
Sabah al Saadi, the leader of the Islah parliamentary bloc, called for an emergency session of parliament “to discuss this blatant violation of Iraq’s sovereignty and to stop these aggressive actions by Trump who should know his limits: The U.S. occupation of Iraq is over.”
Iraqi lawmakers told Reuters that the pair had disagreed over where their planned meeting should take place: Trump had asked to meet at the Ain al-Asad military base, an offer which Abdul Mahdi declined.
Qais al-Khazali, the leader of the powerful Iran-backed Asaib Ahl al-Haq militia said on Twitter, “Iraqis will respond with a parliamentary decision to oust your (U.S.) military forces. And if they do not leave, we have the experience and the
ability to remove them by other means that your forces are familiar with.”
Read more: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5c242273e4b0407e907f9028
So because Trump was too chickenshit to leave the air base and meet the Iraqi Prime Minister during his visit, he insulted the Iraqis and potentially destabilized the Iraqi government.
Shitler is a human wrecking ball.
Arizona man fulfills Christmas wish list for Mexican girl who sent it by balloon
Earlier this month, Randy Heiss was hiking in Patagonia, Arizona, when he saw the ragged remains of a balloon with a note attached.
Heiss' wife translated the list and the pair identified its likely sender as a girl named Dayami.
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Heiss and his wife delivered the toys to Dayami and her sister younger sister, Ximena, during the meeting. It brought him "healing joy" to see the children's happy faces, Heiss told the "Today" show.
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“We lost our son nine years ago,” Heiss told KVOA. “So we don’t have grandchildren in our future and so really getting to share Christmas with kids was something that’s been missing in our lives.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/love-has-no-borders-arizona-man-fulfills-christmas-wish-list-n951581
It's Officially Time To Ban Gift-Wrapping Paper
According to an August report from Sundale Research, people in the U.S. spent a total of $12.7 billion on gift wrap, including wrapping paper, tissue paper and gift bags, in 2017. What a waste. This is stuff designed to be torn into shreds and tossed away in less than 60 seconds.
Do you like decorations and artistic flourishes on your presents? Well, be selective. “If it has glitter or tape, it’s not recyclable,” Celia Ristow of Litterless told HuffPost.
Glitter-encrusted paper is especially terrible for a couple of reasons. It can’t be recycled, for one. What’s more, glitter is made from teensy pieces of plastic that not only appear in your hair weeks later but also pollute the oceans, according to National Geographic. Marine animals often ingest these little specks, and over time, collect them in their stomachs, which can be fatal.
Kellogg agreed that brown paper can be made into a beautiful wrapping option, especially when spruced up with a sprig of evergreen, a dehydrated orange slice of a stick of cinnamon (and then you have the added bonus of scented gift wrap). With this option, “you still get the feeling of getting to rip through paper,” Kellogg said, with the ability to recycle when you’re done. https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5c1d5c12e4b0407e907af36c
Taliban greets Pentagon's withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan with cries of victory
Source: NBC News
“The 17-year-long struggle and sacrifices of thousands of our people finally yielded fruit," said a senior Taliban commander from Afghanistan’s Helmand province. "We proved it to the entire world that we defeated the self-proclaimed world’s lone super power."
“We are close to our destination," added the commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the group's leadership had prohibited members from talking to the media about current events. He added that all field commanders had also been told to intensify training efforts to capture four strategic provinces in the run up to the next round of talks between the U.S. and Taliban, which are expected in January.
The Pentagon declined to comment on the Taliban's claims.
The Taliban sheltered 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and was toppled soon after the 2001 attacks. Since then, the militants have been trying to unseat the U.S.-backed government in Kabul and reimpose their strict version of Shariah. Successes on the battlefield coupled with a recent intensifying efforts to reach a peace deal led by U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad have boosted the movement's confidence and power.
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/taliban-greets-pentagon-s-withdrawal-troops-afghanistan-cries-victory-n950811
Trump's sudden announcement (tweet) basically took away all of the Kabul government's bargaining power in the upcoming peace talks with the Taliban. Now, it will not be so much peace talks as negotiations on the terms of surrender/safe withdrawal.
Trump's incompetence and impulsiveness will continue to result in humiliation for the United States until he is out of office.
Founder of viral fundraiser for Trump's border wall has questionable news past
Source: NBC News
The Florida man behind the GoFundMe page, a triple-amputee Iraq War veteran named Brian Kolfage, spent a large portion of the fundraising campaign’s description outlining his past, including a bolded section titled “How do you know this is not a scam?”
He implored users to look up his history, pointing donors to his verified Facebook page, and saying “I'm credible and a real person.”
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The fundraising page doesn’t mention Kolfage’s most recent business venture, a Facebook page titled Right Wing News and a ring of affiliate sites that frequently trafficked in conspiracy theories. In October, Right Wing News was pulled down by Facebook in a sweep of more than 559 pages that the company said were “using fake accounts… to drive traffic to their websites” or “were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.”
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Kolfage also ran Right Wing News’ shuttered affiliate sites including VeteranAF and FreedomDaily, which pushed false conspiracy theories, like ones claiming Hillary Clinton was secretly hiding deadly illnesses and fake voter fraud stories days before the 2016 election.
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/founder-viral-fundraiser-trump-s-border-wall-has-fake-news-n950636
Senate Republicans are responsible for the most unethical and incompetent administration ever
Scott makes a key point that should go well beyond Farr or judicial nominees: “We should stop bringing candidates with questionable track records on race before the full Senate for a vote.”
That raises a broader question: Why is the Senate bringing and confirming candidates with questionable track records — on race or otherwise — to a vote on the floor?
Consider the people brought to the floor and confirmed: judges rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association; an oil executive, Rex Tillerson, with no government experience, as secretary of state; a lawyer, Alex Acosta, whose supervision of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division was roundly criticized and who participated in the atrociously lenient plea deal for serial child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein; Ben Carson, a man utterly lacking in government experience or housing expertise, as secretary of housing and urban development; former congressman Tom Price for Health and Human Services despite his record of trading “shares worth more than $300,000 in about 40 health-related companies” while he was sitting on the House Ways and Means Committee and “working on measures that could affect his investments”; Steven Mnuchin, who had no government experience and had failed to disclose $100 million in assets, as treasury secretary; Wilbur Ross, who also lacked government experience and had been “forced to pay fines to the government several times, including as recently as August of 2016 to the SEC for failing to disclose fees his firm was charging … [and had] sat on the board of a company that agreed to pay over $2 billion in a settlement over its handling of subprime loans,” as commerce secretary; Scott Pruitt, who had repeatedly sued the Environmental Protection Agency and collaborated secretly with private industry to defeat federal regulations, as EPA administrator; and a hodgepodge of unqualified cronies for ambassadorships (a sin other administrations are guilty of as well).
The GOP would do well to heed Scott’s advice not only with regard to judges and not only with respect to race. It shouldn’t be so hard to reject unqualified nominees and those whose records suggest they’ll be poster boys for corruption in government. Moreover, if Senate Republicans started dinging just a few of the lousy nominees, the White House would get the message and be compelled to find more-qualified people. Senate Republicans would do themselves a favor (diminishing the perception they are invertebrates) and Trump a favor as well if they started saying “no” once in a while.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/09/senate-republicans-are-responsible-most-unethical-incompetent-administration-ever/?utm_term=.74981455c45a
As autumn rain in California vanishes amid global warming, fires worsen
This is a wet place by California standards.
It averages about 55 inches of rain a year, thanks to its prime location in the verdant foothills of the Sierra Nevada, which wrings rain out of Pacific storms.
But when the Camp fire sparked last Thursday, Paradise was parched. The area usually gets about 15 storms during the summer and early fall, adding up to five inches of rain. But this year, it got a measly one-seventh of an inch. The vegetation around Paradise was explosively dry, resulting in the worst fire in modern California history that left 7,000 structures destroyed, at least 42 dead and scores still missing.
Across California, the lack of autumn rain is having dire consequences. Ventura County, where the Woolsey fire last week destroyed hundreds of homes, also got almost no rain through the summer and fall. Early storms were supposed to have ended the Northern California fire season by now, allowing more firefighters to head to Southern California to battle fires spread by Santa Ana winds.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-rain-fires-california-20181113-story.html
Typhus outbreak in Los Angeles County surpasses 100 patients
The latest figures for Long Beach and Pasadena obtained by NBC News, 15 and 20, respectively, bring L.A. county's total to at least 107 new typhus patients in 2018, more than half of what the entire nation usually observes in an entire year, according to the California Department of Public Health.
In the 2000s the number of patients diagnosed with typhus in Los Angeles county "did not exceed 20 cases per year," according to a county report. Observers say there's a correlation between the rise of typhus and the area's 47 percent increase in homelessness since 2012.
Nearly one in 10 area cases, according to the county's health department figures, was centered downtown, where squalid conditions in the skid row neighborhood, including piles of trash and conspicuous rats, have been blamed for exacerbating the outbreak.
A typhus infection can cause headache, high fever and, in rare cases, meningitis and death. According to the L.A. county health department website, it's contracted when "the feces from infected fleas are rubbed into cuts or scrapes in the skin or rubbed into the eyes."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/typhus-outbreak-los-angeles-county-surpasses-100-patients-n926496
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