SYRIA UPDATE

Mosaic painting dating back to Roman era uncovered in Homs northern countryside

The decorations on the painting indicate that it belongs to the classical period of the Roman era with an area of 8 square meters (2 wide and 4 long) of it unearthed so far, he added, indicating that work is continuing to reveal the entire painting.

https://sana.sy/en/?p=151102

Syria strongly condemns Israeli aggression on Gaza, affirms standing by Palestinian people

Syria calls on the international community to immediately halt the aggression and expose the criminal nature of Israel and its policy, particularly that its continued occupation of Arab territories is the main reason behind tensions and bloodshed, not to mention the unlimited support provided to Israel by US and it tools.

https://sana.sy/en/?p=151094

Militants Exploit Ceasefire To Launch More Attacks On Syrian Army

On November 14, radical militants attempted to launch a new attack against the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) from their positions within the demilitarized zone in the northern Hama countryside, according to the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA).

“A unit of the army detected a terrorist group that attempted to take advantage of the heavy rain to sneak from the town of al-Lataminah, 35km north of the city of Hama, towards military positions in the al-Zilaqiat, southwest of the town,” the SANA’s reporter in Hama said.

Few hours later, another group of militants gathered in the area of Tell al-Sakhr, near al-Lataminah, in order to carry out an attack on the SAA. However, the army’s artillery shelled the militants’ gathering forcing them to flee.

The demilitarized zone, which covers the opposition-held part of northern Hama, was established under the Russian-Turkish deconfliction agreement on the governorate of Idlib. However, the militants in Idlib are yet to respect the agreement.

https://southfront.org/militants-exploit-ceasefire-to-launch-more-attacks-on-syrian-army/

US-led coalition uses banned cluster bombs in Deir Ezzor

Local sources in Deir Ezzor told SANA reporter that the warplanes of the US-led coalition on Wednesday evening shelled the residential neighborhoods in Hajin city and al-Shafaa town in the eastern countryside of Deir Ezzor with cluster bombs, claiming the lives of a number of the civilians and injuring others, in addition to causing material damage to the civilians’ houses and their properties.

The sources added that hundreds of civilians have been displaced due to the coalition’s continuous strikes which destroyed their houses.

https://sana.sy/en/?p=151110

Video: Syrian Army Shells ISIS Militants In al-Safa With Rocket Launchers And Artillery

This video shows the ongoing operation of the Syrian Arab Army against ISIS in the al-Safa area in southern Syria. MORE HERE

https://southfront.org/video-syrian-army-shells-isis-militants-in-al-safa-with-rocket-launchers-and-artillery/

Syrian Security Forces Dismantle Several IEDs In Lattakia City

On November 14, Syrian security forces dismantled several heavy improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which had been planted near a railway in the southern part of the coastal city of Lattakia, according to several Syrian pro-government sources. The Syrian authorities have not accused any group of planning the failed attack yet. However, local observers believe that the IEDs were planted by cells of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the former branch of al-Qaeda in Syria, which controls a large part of the nearby governorate of Idlib.

https://southfront.org/syrian-security-forces-dismantle-several-ieds-in-lattakia-city/

Syrian War Report – November 14, 2018: Turkish-PKK Conflict Escalates Amid Fresh PKK Attacks

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https://southfront.org/syrian-war-report-november-14-2018-turkish-pkk-conflict-escalates-amid-fresh-pkk-attacks/Syrian War Report –

Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson’s Long Record of Justifying Police Misconduct and Shootings

Chicago detective Dante Servin shot Rekia Boyd in the back of the head late on a warm night in March 2012. Servin was an off-duty detective, a 20-year Chicago police veteran who lived on the block of the shooting, just off Douglas Park on the city’s West Side. Boyd was a 22-year-old African-American woman hanging out in the park with some friends. She was unarmed.

As police converged on the scene, Servin told his fellow officers that he had asked Boyd and her friends to quiet down as he drove out of the alley next to his house. According to Servin, a man in the group, Antonio Cross, responded by pointing a gun at him. Servin then fired five shots over his shoulder from inside his car. One hit Cross’s hand. Another hit Boyd, who fell to the ground.

Ambulances rushed both victims to the hospital while detectives prepared charges against Cross. Officers, including a canine team, spread out to look for the gun Servin claimed he had seen. Meanwhile, Servin freely wandered the scene, talking with a succession of detectives and police supervisors.

Soon, a deputy chief named Eddie Johnson took command of the crowd of officers outside Servin’s house. As the designated on-call incident commander, Johnson assumed responsibility for the department’s initial investigation of the shooting. The OCIC is a central part of the department’s response to police shootings, operating at the scene “with the authority of the superintendent of police,” according to Chicago Police Department regulations.

Johnson faced a difficult task. The first hours after the shooting were marked by conflicting accounts from Servin and multiple civilian witnesses. The undisputed facts of the case were also disturbing: An off-duty officer had shot an unarmed woman in the head. And he had fired into a group of civilians, typically a violation of department rules.

Yet Johnson and the officers under his direct command proceeded to make a number of troubling decisions. In the days after the shooting, witnesses told investigators that Servin appeared to have been drinking. When asked several months after the shooting if he had been drinking that night, Servin told a film crew, “That’s my damn business.” Police investigators waited six hours to administer a blood alcohol test.

Detectives also discovered cameras mounted on Servin’s house that looked directly over the scene of the shooting. When Servin said the cameras didn’t work, instead of insisting on inspecting them or obtaining a search warrant, detectives dropped the matter, eventually asking him to sign an affidavit swearing that the cameras were inoperable.

Detectives also quickly uncovered evidence that Cross had been unarmed. Civilian witnesses denied that Cross had a weapon, and although there was a trail of blood and dashcam footage clearly showing Cross’s path after the shooting, police were unable to find a gun. Despite these findings, police asked prosecutors to charge Cross with felony assault and issued a press release falsely claiming that Servin had fired only after Cross began to “approach him with a handgun” and “pointed the weapon in the direction of the detective.”

At 10:40 a.m., about nine hours after the shooting, Johnson concluded his initial investigation into Servin’s use of force and endorsed the detective’s account in his official use of force report. “Based on the facts available at this time, Officer Servin acted in compliance with department policy,” he wrote, approving Servin’s decision to open fire. “Officer Servin fired his weapon at the offender after the offender pointed a firearm at Officer Servin.” Johnson did not check the box in his report that would have recommended the case for further investigation. The official use of force report Johnson signed never mentioned Rekia Boyd.

https://theintercept.com/2018/11/14/chicago-police-department-superintendent-eddie-johnson/

Part 1

>>3901740

Many officers and residents respected Evans’s dedication to police work — he was known to sleep in his office and patrolled the streets alongside his officers — but he also racked up dozens of complaints and several lawsuits as he rose through the ranks. A formal investigation into a 2005 complaint by Evans’s ex-girlfriend found that he called her a “whore” and damaged her car. The city also paid a nearly $100,000 settlement after a partially paralyzed city worker accused Evans of beating him up. Those cases were not outliers. A report on 1,500 CPD officers compiled by a former epidemiologist and obtained by WBEZ showed that Evans garnered more excessive force complaints than any other officer between 1988 and 2008.

In a sworn deposition taken in 2015, Evans displayed a cavalier attitude toward CPD procedures, declaring that “department orders are a guideline and nothing more.”

Johnson knew Evans long before he moved him to the tactical team. Early in their careers, the two served together as patrolmen in the 6th District. Both were also among the small number of black officers in the CPD’s upper ranks. Johnson explained his support for Evans in a 2017 deposition: “He had a reputation as being a good aggressive officer.”

Evans’s approach to policing soon triggered a backlash, and allegations of excessive force began to swirl around his tactical team as a cadre of younger officers with lengthy complaint records joined the squad. Among the new additions was Jason Landrum, who had shot three people in five years, including a man he shot in the stomach after his partner handcuffed him to a fence.

The new officers appear to have had a major impact on the squad. By mid-2011, toward the end of Johnson’s tenure as commander, officers serving on his tactical team had received an average of seven complaints each over the previous three years, a 70 percent increase from when he took over the district and four times that of the average CPD officer.

Part 2

>>3901765

Proano killed Husband outside a South Side dance hall in July 2011. Officers claimed that the teenager was holding a young woman hostage and brandishing a gun. The same woman testified in court that she was a childhood friend of Husband’s and that the two had been hugging when the officers approached. She also denied that her friend had a gun. A jury awarded Husband’s family $3.5 million after a trial in which the family’s lawyer alleged that Proano and two other officers had planted a gun on Husband’s body after killing him. Under Johnson, Proano was not punished. The CPD instead awarded him a medal for valor for the shooting.

In November 2017, a federal jury convicted Proano on charges of using excessive force for firing multiple shots into a car full of unarmed black teenagers, injuring two, while on patrol in the 6th District in 2013, after Johnson had left his role as commander. Charges against Proano came after a retiring judge in a criminal case involving one of the teenagers leaked video of him shooting into the car to the Chicago Reporter, calling Proano’s actions one of the worst things he’d seen in over 30 years as a judge and public defender. He told the Reporter that “I’ve seen lots of gruesome, grisly crimes, but this is disturbing on a whole different level.”

Proano’s shooting of Husband was one of four controversial shootings by non-tactical officers working in the 6th District under Johnson. These cases included two other fatal shootings in which either the autopsy or eyewitnesses raised questions about the police account. The city also paid a man $100,000 after he claimed that two 6th District officers shot him and then planted a gun on him.

Abuses by 6th District officers outside the tactical team during Johnson’s time as commander also led to major misconduct payments and criminal cases. A jury awarded $750,000 to a woman beaten by a 6th District officer who accused the 20-year-old of violating curfew. An Internal Affairs investigation also found that 6th District officers, including a lieutenant, covered for a drunk officer named Richard Bolling — the son of a retired CPD commander — after he struck and killed a 13-year-old out riding his bike. One unidentified officer promised Bolling that “I’m gonna try to help you out as much as possible.” Sixth District officers on the scene waited over two hours to administer a sobriety test. Bolling was eventually sentenced to three years in prison.

The shootings and other misconduct allegations cost taxpayers millions. The Invisible Institute analyzed unit assignment data and a Chicago Reporter database that tracks all police misconduct payments from 2011 through 2016. Johnson’s 6th District was just one of 25 police districts but accounted for roughly $8 million, fully one-sixth of the entire CPD’s misconduct payments during his time as commander. Since the end of 2016, Chicago has paid at least another $3.7 million related to misconduct by 6th District officers during Johnson’s time as commander.

Over Johnson’s tenure, dozens of officers serving on the tactical team were involved in lawsuits that led to settlements totaling $6 million. That total accounted for a huge share of overall CPD misconduct payments, costing the city about $130,000 for each of the team’s roughly 45 officers — nearly 40 times the average for all other CPD officers.

Walker, the University of Nebraska police accountability expert, argues that Johnson’s handling of misconduct as a commander has a strong bearing on his role as superintendent. “It’s another reason why he’s probably not qualified for his current job,” he said. “He just doesn’t think in terms of these kind of problems or see them as problems and take corrective action. … He’s just not qualified to be the chief executive of a police department, especially one as large and complex as Chicago.”

Part 3

Attention on Caravans Is Shackling Mexican Cartels, Says Expert

The intense media focus on the caravans has hamstrung the Mexican cartels, which usually demand payment from migrants traveling north to the U.S. border.

“With such an intense media spotlight, it is extremely toxic for the major cartels or the gangs to be involved with it—from a kidnapping of some of its members or extortion perspective,” said Dr. Robert J. Bunker, adjunct research professor, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College.

“Still, the weaker members of the various caravans and their stragglers are going to be shaken down or picked off as targets of opportunity from time-to-time.”

Cartels control the trafficking routes throughout Mexico and the entry points, or plazas, into the United States, according to Sheriff Andy Louderback of Jackson County, Texas.

“Every day, every minute, some penetration of the Texas border, California border, New Mexico border, Arizona border—every minute, someone is preparing to send a load in, or traffick humans in, or some type of criminal activity is going on,” Louderback said in a previous interview. “Every minute of every day. That’s their job, that’s what they’re committed to do, that’s how they get paid. And that’s what we’re up against.”

Different cartels control different areas along the southwest border. For example, the Sinaloa Cartel is dominant in California and Arizona, whereas the Gulf Cartel reigns supreme in southeast Texas.

“[Cartels also] maintain drug distribution cells in designated cities across the United States that either report directly to TCO leaders in Mexico or indirectly through intermediaries,” according to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) 2017 national drug threat assessment.

Bunker said on top of the media focus, the caravans are being monitored closely by various humanitarian non-governmental groups and “we can assume” both Mexican governmental and security, and some foreign state, agencies.

“If and when the caravan makes it to the U.S. border with Mexico, I don’t view the cartel plaza bosses as likely to directly confront it or impede its progress. This is a highly politicized international spectacle that is now playing out,” Bunker said.

“I think you may see ad hoc and disorganized or opportunistic criminality directed at some of its members, however, by low level criminals or gang cliques but still this will only take place on the margins.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/attention-on-caravans-is-shackling-mexican-cartels-says-expert_2715735.html

>>3901884

>>3901827

Why no footage or pictures of these tanks???

>>3901908

kek

Full Court Press: Nancy Pelosi Launches Complete Campaign to Lock in House Speakership While Divisions Rankle Democrats

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is engaged in a full-on campaign for the House Speakership and is taking nothing for granted. Her move comes as more Democrats come out against her nascent bid to regain the Speaker’s gavel she lost when Republicans took the majority in the 2010 midterm elections.

While Democrats retook the House majority in the 2018 midterms, a new Democrat majority that will be seated in January 2019, Pelosi’s bid for another term as Speaker is anything but certain. While she remains the favorite, and has no intra-Democrat Party challenger, Pelosi’s struggle to get to 218 votes–the majority necessary to win the Speakership on the floor of the House of Representatives–could not be clearer.

On Monday, two senior Democrats–Reps. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) and Kurt Schrader (D-OR)–made clear in comments to Politico that they would not be supporting Pelosi. Now, late Tuesday in comments to CNN, two more Democrats–Reps. Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Filemon Vela (D-TX)–joined the public opposition to Pelosi’s speakership candidacy with warnings that she will not have the votes necessary to retake the gavel.

“I am 100% confident we can forge new leadership,” Vela said, with Moulton adding that he believes anti-Pelosi Democrats’ chances are also at “100%.”

“We are trying to do the right thing for the party by solving this ahead of time,” Moulton said.

Pelosi, meanwhile, fired back at Moulton on Wednesday, dismissing his certainty that she would fail with certainty she would succeed.

“I’m a busy person, but I will be the speaker of the House no matter what he said,” Pelosi said in response to Moulton on Wednesday.

Pelosi will almost certainly win the nomination of the Democrat conference later in November, as she only needs a majority of the majority to vote for her to be the Democrats’ nominee for Speaker in the early January House floor election. But it is on the House floor where she may have trouble locking down the Speakership, as any candidate running must win a majority of those members present and voting for a person to win the Speakership–voting present is a throwaway vote because it does not count toward the total and lowers the number that Pelosi would need to win. In other words, assuming all 435 voting members of the House vote for a person, Pelosi would need 218 votes to retake the Speaker’s gavel. And she has little margin for error.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/14/full-court-press-nancy-pelosi-launches-complete-campaign-to-lock-in-house-speakership-while-divisions-rankle-democrats/

“I am not voting for her — no if, ands or buts, under any circumstances,” Rose said on Fox News, per Politico.

Three South Korean Companies Agree to Plead Guilty and to Enter Into Civil Settlements for Rigging Bids on United States Department of Defense Fuel Supply Contracts

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-south-korean-companies-agree-plead-guilty-and-enter-civil-settlements-rigging-bids

NEVER LET A CRISIS GO TO WASTE

School shootings have fueled a $2.7 billion school safety industry

Elsewhere at the July conference, vendors peddled tourniquets and pepper-ball guns, facial-recognition software and a security proposal that would turn former Special Operations officers into undercover teachers. Threaded into every pitch, just five months after a Parkland, Fla., massacre, was the implication that their product or service would make students safer — that, if purchased, it might save a life.

What few of the salespeople could offer, however, was proof.

Although school security has grown into a $2.7 billion market — an estimate that does not account for the billions more spent on armed campus police officers — little research has been done on which safety measures do and do not protect students from gun violence. Earlier this fall, The Washington Post sent surveys to every school in its database that had endured a shooting of some kind since the 2012 killings of 20 first-graders in Newtown, Conn., which prompted a surge of security spending by districts across the country.

https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/69250/school-shootings-have-fueled-a-27-billion-school-safety.html

CONFIRMED: Aspartame linked to blood cancers according to 22-year study conducted by researchers at Women’s Hospital at Harvard University

Monsanto, the most evil corporation on Earth, may be responsible for more chronic deterioration of human health than any other manufacturer of food and agricultural chemicals. From genetically modifying crops to spraying them with the known carcinogen glyphosate (main ingredient in Roundup weed killer), from nuclear weapons to terminator seeds (they die after one year), and from petroleum-based fertilizers to cancer-causing Agent Orange in Vietnam, you’ve heard enough horrific Monsanto stories to last you a lifetime, even if that lifespan is shortened from consuming their chemicals.

Now, a 22-year study done on humans by researchers at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital at Harvard proves that aspartame, another Monsanto “Frankenfood” creation, is responsible for health “monsters” (deadly chronic conditions) that most medical doctors blame on anything and everything but the real root cause. It’s time to know all the facts and learn about the research conducted.

https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-11-14-aspartame-linked-to-blood-cancers.html