All posts tagged: mass

Suspected Trump Gunman Was Once Charged With Possession of a Weapon of Mass Destruction

Suspected Trump Gunman Was Once Charged With Possession of a Weapon of Mass Destruction

Published by skeptic

Ryan Wesley Routh, the suspected gunman involved in an apparent assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump at the Trump International Golf Club in Florida on Sunday, was charged with possession of a weapon of mass destruction over 20 years ago. “I figured he was either dead or in prison by now,” Tracy Fulk, the charging officer in the case, tells WIRED. “I had no clue that he had moved on and was continuing his escapades.” According to court records from the Guilford District Court in North Carolina obtained by WIRED, Routh was arrested by the Greensboro Police Department on December 16, 2002. Local reporting from Greensboro News and Record in 2002 states that Routh was pulled over by police during a traffic stop. Routh then drove to the business United Roofing, where he proceeded to barricade himself for three hours, the police said at the time. Fulk says he was well known in the area, and that police would get alerts about him allegedly related to, as she remembers, weapons and explosives. “One night …

Mexico: Anatomy of a Mass Murder | Claudio Lomnitz

Mexico: Anatomy of a Mass Murder | Claudio Lomnitz

Published by skeptic

In April 2011 Mexican soldiers discovered mass graves in San Fernando, a city of some 30,000 people in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas. One hundred and ninety-three corpses were exhumed and moved to the border city of Matamoros. Soon the local morgue was swamped with people trying to discover whether their disappeared family members were among the bodies. To cover the story, the news magazine Proceso sent a journalist named Marcela Turati. She was shaken not only by the crowd of families seeking information about their relatives but also by the behavior of the local, state, and federal governments, all scrambling to avoid any bad publicity that might dissuade tourists from visiting Matamoros over the approaching Easter vacation. To reduce media attention, forensic services moved the bodies again, this time to faraway Mexico City, permanently dispersing the mobs of desperate family members, most of whom could not afford an extended stay in the capital. No government body conducted a serious criminological investigation or made an effective attempt to bring the mass murderers to justice. Turati, …

Extreme heat poses ‘real risk’ to Spain’s mass tourism industry | Spain

Extreme heat poses ‘real risk’ to Spain’s mass tourism industry | Spain

Published by skeptic

The climate emergency poses a “real risk” to Spain’s traditional mass tourist model as rising temperatures and more frequent heatwaves hit the country’s most popular coastal destinations, a senior public health adviser has warned. Héctor Tejero, the head of health and climate change at Spain’s health ministry, said the increasingly apparent physical impacts of the climate emergency had already led the ministry to begin talks with the British embassy on how best to educate “vulnerable” tourists about coping with the heat. Asked whether the climate emergency could lead to tourism disappearing from parts of Spain in the future, Tejero said: “It’s a real risk because the big Spanish sol y playa tourist areas – the areas that are most dependent on tourism – are places where the impact of climate change is going to be greatest in Spain; places such as the south and the east of the peninsula – basically the Mediterranean coast. There’s a definite risk that the zones where there’s most tourism will become less habitable because of more heatwaves and much …

Ukraine in mass drone attack on targets in Russia as Putin’s forces launch intense assaults in east

Ukraine in mass drone attack on targets in Russia as Putin’s forces launch intense assaults in east

Published by Sam

Ukraine has launched dozens of drones in a mass strike across targets in Russia and around the Black Sea, including a major oil refinery. It comes as the country’s top commander said that Russian forces were staging relentless assaults to try to advance towards the town of Pokrovsk, a logistics hub in eastern Ukraine, and that there was active fighting taking place along the entire front line. “The enemy pays no attention to their fairly high level of losses and continues to push through towards Pokrovsk,” Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi said in a statement from the eastern front. The oil refinery in Tuapse was damaged in an overnight assault, officials from the Krasnodar region confirmed on Monday. Debris from a drone that was shot down by Russia sparked a fire at the refinery, which is located in the Black Sea and owned by Kremlin-controlled oil company Rosneft. The blaze has since been contained and there were no deaths following the attack, the regional administration said on the Telegram messaging app. It was not immediately clear …

I employed huge numbers of migrants – and I now realise the damage terrible mass migration has done

I employed huge numbers of migrants – and I now realise the damage terrible mass migration has done

Published by Sam

Growth in living standards – as any South American junta could tell you – comes one of two ways: real or artificially. The real thing is the product of getting more people into work, embracing technology, and reducing inefficiencies. But all manner of sleights of hand can conjure its illusion. Printing money will convince people – at least in the short term – that there’s more to go around. The graveyard of economic history shows how severe that drug’s comedown is. Yet, looking back at our own recent economic picture, despite the technological developments that could have turbocharged prosperity, it is hard to conclude that our own economic growth has been any less artificial. Today, “printing money” is rebadged (and it amounts to little more) as quantitative easing. Some £875 billion of newly minted money has been used to buy assets, flooding cash into the economy at an enormous cost. The Treasury now faces a vast bill, potentially ranging to £100 billion, to cover the losses. But as the Telegraph has reported, there have been winners: …

Mass immigration is about to tear apart British society

Mass immigration is about to tear apart British society

Published by Sam

For the first time in my life, sectarian politics has become a part of English political life. The rigid adherence to a narrow set of beliefs – whether religious or ethnic – is beginning to cause serious problems. This intolerance seems to be growing in tandem with votes being cast en masse along certain lines. Evidence is not hard to find. Just this month after a local election in Leeds a Green Party councillor called Mothin Ali shouted “Allahu Akbar!” after being elected to a city council. This shocked many people and outraged others. On Wednesday, a pro-Palestinian protest near Downing Street turned violent after thousands of people staged an “emergency rally”. A policewoman suffered facial injuries from a glass bottle. In the summer of 2022, there were ugly clashes in Birmingham between Hindus and Muslims. Political disagreements from other parts of the world have been imported into this country, principally from the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent. Those of us who live here are being forced to deal with the consequences. The major …

UN denounces ‘onslaught of violence against women’ by Israel, notes mass graves in Gaza – POLITICO

UN denounces ‘onslaught of violence against women’ by Israel, notes mass graves in Gaza – POLITICO

Published by skeptic

The statement notes that of the 34,488 Palestinians killed since the start of the war seven months ago, 14,500 have been children and 9,500 women. Israel disputes the number of dead as it is compiled by local health authorities run by Gaza’s Hamas-controlled government. The statement says reports continue of sexual assault and violence against women and girls detained by Israeli forces, but provides no further details. It cites U.N. reports that “a number of” women and girls have been “forcefully disappeared” since the start of the war. The authors also say miscarriages have increased; that 17,000 children have been orphaned since the start of the war; and that Israeli forces have destroyed Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, which is reported to have been storing 3,000 embryos. “Israel must cease all hostilities and States must end the export of all weapons immediately. These States can no longer ignore the fact that the weapons are being used to kill and maim innocent women and children. There can be no more excuses,” the statement concludes. Israel’s foreign press …

Mass deportations, detention camps, troops on the street: Trump spells out migrant plan | Donald Trump

Mass deportations, detention camps, troops on the street: Trump spells out migrant plan | Donald Trump

Published by skeptic

Donald Trump is planning to unleash the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history should he win re-election in November, involving legally questionable deployments of military and police units and the creation of vast detention camps along the southern border. Trump has laid out his vision for a “record-setting deportation operation” in a series of rally speeches, newspaper articles and social media posts. He intends to move swiftly after inauguration day next January to stage mass roundups of immigrants across the country, conducting raids inside big cities where he would face certain Democratic opposition. “On day one, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Freeland, Michigan, on Wednesday. He told his adoring supporters that immigrants were coming in by the millions from foreign prisons and “insane asylums” leading to the “plunder, rape, slaughter and destruction of the American suburbs, cities and towns”. Immigration experts say that the deportation plans for a Trump White House 2.0 dwarf anything previously seen – both in …