Muslim taxi drivers in Austria are refusing to transport blind people with guide dogs because dogs are seen as being unclean in Islamic culture.
Tiroler Tageszeitung reports on how a former board member of the Association for the Blind, who is totally blind herself, ordered a taxi to drop her off at Innsbruck airport.
However, when the taxi arrived, the driver refused to take her dog.
Taxi operators Anton Eberl and Harald Flecker apologized for the incident but stressed that they only mediate calls and do not own the taxis.
“We try to make it clear to the drivers again and again that this is not the case for us and that these trips have to be carried out exactly like any other job. Unfortunately, at the moment we are not in a position to solve this problem satisfactorily, ” said Flecker, adding that drivers had to be told “again and again” about the rules.
According to the Tiroler Tageszeitung newspaper, “80 percent of drivers now have a migrant background – and Muslims traditionally often regard dogs as “impure”.
Gabriele Jandrasits also tried to order a taxi to transport her and her Beagle-Jack Russell dog to the airport. Despite the fact that the dog was contained inside a transport cage, she was told that “most drivers would refuse to take dogs for reasons of faith.”
Local laws state the drivers must accept guide dogs for the blind, although many of them simply seem to be ignoring this mandate.
Slurs, sexual accusations, and assaults mire Fake News Network
AUGUST 14, 2019
Something’s happening at CNN.
No, we’re not talking about the network’s record low ratings.
CNNanchors can’t seem to stay out of trouble.
This week three different CNN anchors have been the focus of major controversies – and it’s only Wednesday.
Chris “Fredo” Cuomo
On Monday, a video went viral showing Cuomo Prime Time host Chris Cuomo threatening to kill someone after the guy called him “Fredo,” a term referring to the dumbest, most treacherous brother in the Godfather movies.
“Punk ass bitches from the right call me Fredo. My name is Chris Cuomo, I’m an anchor on CNN,” Cuomo told the man, before adding, “It’s like the N-word for us. Is that a cool fucking thing?”
Eventually the exchange escalates and Cuomo threatens to kill the guy.
“I’ll fucking ruin your shit. I’ll fucking throw you down these stairs like a fucking punk,” he says.
Watch the video:
CNN's Chris Cuomo Threatening Trump Supporter with Violence! "I'll throw your punk ass down the stairs!"pic.twitter.com/QOmdxwivWX
— THAT'S THE POINT with Brandon (@THEECONSTITUTI1) August 13, 2019
And see Infowars’ interview with the Twitter user who uploaded the encounter, “THAT’S THE POINT with Brandon”:
Don Lemon
Then, we learned about a salacious lawsuit against CNN Tonight host Don Lemon, accusing him of grotesque sexually-charged behavior at a New York bar.
A man named Dustin Hice is suing CNN anchor Don Lemon for assault, alleging that the anchor attacked him at a bar in the Hamptons last summer, according to Mediaite.
Hice noticed Lemon at Sag Harbor dive bar Murf’s in July 2018, where he allegedly approached Lemon, “tried to get Mr. Lemon’s attention and offered to buy Mr. Lemon a drink,” the suit claims. The CNN host declined the drink, saying he was “just trying to have a good time.”
The lawsuit then alleges that Lemon approached Hice later in the night, “put his hand down the front of his own shorts, and vigorously rubbed his genitalia, removed his hand and shoved his index and middle fingers in Plaintiff’s moustache and under Plaintiff’s nose.”
While shoving his fingers in Hice’s face, Lemon allegedly asked him “Do you like pussy or dick?”
Hice says in the lawsuit he left the bar “shocked and humiliated.”
Now that’s f**ked up…
April Ryan
Next, reports emerged that a security guard for CNN contributor April Ryan was seen assaulting a reporter who attended one of her events.
According to Mediaite, a reporter for a local paper called New Brunswick Today was accosted when he tried to go into an event where Ryan was set to make a speech.
“During the intro, this man came up to me, mentioned my video camera & asked me ‘Who are you with?’” Kratovil wrote on Twitter. “I gave him my card & explained that I followed the proper channels to cover the event. I asked if he had a card & he responded by saying he was ‘with the speaker.’”
Kratovil said the bodyguard then took down his camera and carried it out of the room. Surveillance video shows him getting violently dragged out of the event by the man. “Get off of me motherfucker!” Kratovil is heard shouting.
Watch the hotel surveillance footage:
Just what in the heck is going on over there?
Speaking to Fox News, one media critic said any normal organization would have implemented policy changes by now, but that doesn’t seem to be happening at CNN.
“This was not a good week to be CNN. In addition to its abysmal ratings, three of its top news personalities are embroiled in scandal and controversy,” Cornell University Law School professor and media critic William A. Jacobson told Fox News.
“In a rational world, CNN leadership would implement a dramatic course correction, but there is no sign that rationality prevails at CNN,” he said.
CNN political analyst April Ryan is under fire over a video purportedly showing a man identified as a security guard getting into a physical altercation with a local news editor who was covering an event that featured her as the keynote speaker.
Ryan reportedly told the crowd, “I don’t have news covering my speech.”
Local news editor Charlie Kratovil of New Brunswick Today attended the New Jersey Parent Summit at the Heldrich Hotel August 3 and says he covered it for hours without any issues:
Later in the day, Joel Morris – who Kratovil identifies as Ryan’s security guard – approached the reporter, demanded to know what organization he was with, and allegedly threatened to take Kratovil’s camera down.
“I declined to acquiesce to this threat from a stranger,” Kratovil wrote.
“Just as Rep. Payne was praising Ms. Ryan for her recent @rcfp ‘Freedom of the Press’ award, the public relations people started to gather around me at my table, pressuring me to stop recording,” he continued in a Twitter thread, detailing what led up to the altercation.
“As soon as things started going south, I began recording audio of our conversation,” he added:
He was warned by others to stop recording and told that Ryan would not take the stage as long as he had his camera rolling. Kratovil exited the room to discuss the matter further. Ryan’s security guard whispered something to Ryan as she spoke on stage, and he reportedly unplugged Kratovil’s camera:
At that point, Ryan reportedly told the crowd, “When I speak, I don’t have news covering my speech”:
Things quickly escalated, with Shennell McCloud, executive director of Project Ready, allegedly demanding Kratovil’s removal. At that point, Kratovil says Morris grabbed him and forced him out of the hotel lobby:
Surveillance video also captured the incident:
Kratovil said he intends to press charges:
Notably, Kratovil is a Trump critic who has stood with Ryan and her network’s supposed devotion to “freedom of the press,” but he now says Ryan is at a crossroads.
“I think that the President deserves much criticism for his administration’s lack of transparency, his own irresponsible rhetoric towards the media, and his childish attacks on individual reporters like Ms. Ryan,” Kratovil said, according to Fox News.
“Her reputation now depends on finally addressing this situation head-on and proclaiming that what happened that night in New Brunswick cannot be tolerated,” he added.
Ryan has yet to publicly address the incident.
This is just the latest episode in a drama-filled week for CNN. Primetime Chris Cuomo has been under fire over a video that surfaced Monday, showing the anchor raging and threatening violence against an individual who referred to him as “Fredo” and comparing the pop-culture nickname to the “N Word.” A CNN spokesman affirmed that the network believes the term is an “ethnic slur” despite several CNN contributors and guests using it on-air.
CNN’s Don Lemon is also in the hot seat after being accused of assault, according to a lawsuit filed over the weekend:
Here is the surveillance video from the hotel, provided to me by Charlie. It shows @AprilDRyan's bodyguard trying to snatch his camera and assaulting the local reporter. The video ends with the bodyguard dragging him out of the building. pic.twitter.com/rnAM0iVNEc
The FBI is investigating the shooting of two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) buildings in San Antonio, Texas.
The agency is describing the incidents as “targeted attacks” of federal agents, with bullets missing an employee by only two inches.
Despite the shooting taking place at 3 a.m., multiple federal employees were working in the offices at the time.
Acting Director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Ken Cuccinelli, tweeted out a photo of one of the bullet holes that went through a window.
A special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Antonio division, Christopher Combs, said, “These shootings were cowardly, brazen, violent acts, absolutely without justification and a threat to our entire community.”
“An attempt to attack federal employees is a federal crime with serious consequences. The FBI will relentlessly pursue every lead in this case to find the individuals who are responsible,” he continued.
During a Tuesday press conference, Combs made it clear he thinks the shooter or shooters “did some research” before targeting the building.
“I don’t think there is a question that they knew which floor the ICE office is on,” he said.
Combs also stressed the fact that other ICE buildings across the country are in danger of being attacked as political hostility against the agency continues to be fomented by the left.
“Political rhetoric and misinformation that various politicians, media outlets and activist groups recklessly disseminate to the American people regarding the ICE mission only serve to further encourage these violent acts,” ICE spokesperson Nina Pruneda stated.
Last month, an ANTIFA member was shot and killed by police as he threw Molotov cocktails at an ICE facility while armed with a semi-automatic rifle.
Alec Baldwin, you are a talented and likeable actor, but why do so many of your political pronouncements sound like you are trying to sabotage your own side?
I mean why in the world would you just tweet, “The Russians killed Epstein. They’re in charge of everything now.”
If so, perhaps you would like to elaborate. You’ve definitely got our attention.
Or is this satire?
I won’t list your numerous comedy credits, you give a funny interview, and do a mean Trump impression.
Maybe, you are inhabiting the role of a paranoid Democratic conspiracy theorist who blames even the most random of unfortunate coincidences on the dark hand of the Kremlin.
If so, this is very convincing.
However, if you wrote this in earnest, and you think that you know this stuff just because you KNOW IT, then I am not just bemused. I am a little disheartened.
Facebook says it has stopped feeding users’ audio chats to human reviewers for transcription, similar to what other Big Tech were recently caught doing. Facebook’s contractors were reportedly kept in the dark about their job.
The company “paused human review more than a week ago,” Facebook said in a statement on Tuesday, adding that the audio being reviewed was from Messenger users who opted in to having their voice chats transcribed to text by AI. The human transcribers were merely checking whether the AI transcriptions were correct, the company said.
Contractors often caught snippets of intimate or “vulgar” chats, though the messages were anonymized, and they were not told why they were transcribing the audio, where it came from or how it was obtained, contractors told Bloomberg. Some said the uncertainty and apparent duplicity – Facebook doesn’t tell users third parties may review their audio – troubled them.
While the company admits it collects “content, communications and other information you provide [when you] message or communicate with others,” there is no mention in its data use policy of humans processing the information. Instead, it’s Facebook’s “systems” that are supposed to “automatically process content and communications you and others provide to analyze context and what’s in them.” Even the list of third parties who might potentially receive users’ information doesn’t explicitly include human transcription teams, only “vendors and service providers who support our business” by “analyzing how our products are used.”
Further adding to contractors’ concerns about eavesdropping on users’ private messages is the fact that Facebook forbids at least one outsourcing firm from referring to them by name. Santa Monica, California-based TaskUs instead refers to one of its largest and most important clients only by the code-name “Prism”– which is, ironically, also the name of the NSA initiative exposed by Edward Snowden that installed backdoors in popular online platforms like Google, Skype, Twitter, and…Facebook.
TaskUs contractors also moderate content for policy violations, screen political ads, and work on “election preparation,” an ominous term Bloomberg opts not to define but which has previously coincided with mass deplatforming of political accounts in the months preceding elections. Facebook’s content-moderation contracting practices were exposed earlier this year after ex-contractors from outsourcing firm Cognizant complained that the work was giving them PTSD, leading them to drown their traumas in drug use and casual sex, and shaking their beliefs in the “official”versions of historical events like 9/11 and the Holocaust. Those employees, too, were forbidden from referring to Facebook by its given name.
Facebook added the AI transcription function to Messenger in 2015 and claims it is switched off by default. Its documentation, however, reveals that only one participant in a chat needs to opt in for the audio to be transcribed.
After similar practices were exposed by Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Siri, all three have promised to end the human eavesdropping – or at least give users the option of avoiding it. Apple has reportedly ended human “grading” of Siri recordings until a future software update gives users the option of participating, while Amazon has added an opt-out setting and Google has promised to suspend human review…in Europe, for at least three months.
Portland, Ore., is gearing up for a set of dueling rallies this weekend that is expected to bring an informal coalition of right-wing groups — some of which have been decried as white nationalists and white supremacists — and so-called anti-fascists, who have violently opposed these right-wing demonstrators.
Portland’s so-called “Antifa” members have issued an online call to followers to turn out to “defend Portland from a far-Right attack.”
Portland’s Rose City Antifa, the nation’s oldest active anti-fascist group, said violence against right-wing demonstrators is “exactly what should happen when the far-right attempts to invade our town.”
Portland leaders are planning a major law enforcement presence on the heels of similar rallies in June and last summer that turned violent, and the recent hate-driven shooting in El Paso, Texas. None of the city’s nearly 1,000 police officers will have the day off, and Portland will get help from the Oregon State Police and the FBI. Mayor Ted Wheeler has said he may ask Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, to call up the Oregon National Guard.
Experts who track right-wing militias and hate groups warn that the mix of people heading to Portland also came together for a Unite the Right rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, which ended when a participant rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring 19.
A 5K race scheduled for Saturday was moved to avoid any violence, and an Irish bar that’s a city institution canceled an amateur boxing event that expected 500 spectators. Other businesses plan to close on one of the last weekends of the city’s peak tourist season.
One rally is being organized by a member of the controversial Proud Boys. Others are expected to include members of the American Guard, the Three Percenters, the Oathkeepers and the Daily Stormers.
Video of the 30-second attack grabbed national attention and further turned the focus on Portland as a new battleground in a divisive America.
Joe Biggs, an organizer of Saturday’s rally, said the attack on Ngo made him decide to hold the event with the goal of getting Antifa declared a domestic terrorist organization. Biggs said those coming to Portland have been told not to bring weapons or start fights, but they will defend themselves if attacked.
Biggs toned down his online rhetoric after the El Paso shootings and urged followers coming to Portland to keep a cool head. He said he is not racist — he has a toddler daughter with his Guyanese wife — but wants to show the world the violent tactics of Antifa.
“That group of Antifa there in Portland needs to be exposed for who they are,” Biggs said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. “And guess what? They should be scared.”
Portland’s City Hall has been evacuated twice because of bomb threats after the June 29 skirmishes, and Wheeler, the mayor, has been pilloried by critics who incorrectly said he told police to stand down while anti-fascists went after right-wing demonstrators.
Police have noted the violence in June was limited to a small area of downtown Portland despite three different demonstrations that lasted more than five hours, with hundreds of people constantly on the move. They also made two arrests last week in a May Day assault on an Antifa member that became a rallying cry for the city’s far-left.
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