News Round Up [June 20, 2017]

7 swim ashore after floatplane crashes on takeoff near Ketchikan

Alaska Dispatch News by Chris Klint

A floatplane carrying tourists crashed on takeoff Sunday from a lake in Misty Fjords National Monument near Ketchikan, but the seven people on board escaped serious injury.

Alaska State Troopers said the crash of the de Havilland Beaver on Big Goat Lake, about 46 miles northeast of Ketchikan, was reported just before 2:30 p.m.

"One of the passengers said the left wing struck the water," Johnson said. "The floats were torn off of the airplane, so they were floating separately and the rest of the plane sank."

Ketchikan resident Matthew B. Perron, 30, was the pilot, according to troopers. Two of his six passengers, Tim Friedrich, 40, and Catrin Fredrich, 36, were from Germany, and the other four – Robert S. Grover, 63, Debra A. Grover, 60, Nicole D. Grover, 30, and Jonathan M. James, 36 – were from California.

Chris John, an incident commander with the Ketchikan Volunteer Rescue Squad, said Big Goat Lake is a common stop for Ketchikan air tour companies. The squad was alerted by troopers and launched a fixed-wing plane and a helicopter at about 3 p.m., but the survivors were already on their way to Ketchikan.

"By the time we got out to the lake we found out that three air taxis had brought in the seven survivors," John said. "It was phenomenal that they got through that crash in as decent shape as they were." [Source]

Native Americans Call For Rethink of Bering Strait Theory

Cecily Hilleary

It’s one of the most contentious debates in anthropology today: Where did America’s first peoples come from — and when? The general scientific consensus is that a single wave of people crossed a long-vanished land bridge from Siberia into Alaska around 13,000 years ago. But some Native Americans are irked by the theory, which they say is simplistic and culturally biased.

Since “primitives” weren’t sophisticated enough to have sailed the oceans, early scientists concluded Indians had reached North America by some unknown land route. They found their answer in the Bering Strait.

Ewen says that theory cemented into dogma and persists to this day, even in the face of new discoveries and technology that suggests Indians arrived much earlier and by different routes.

“In the first place, it’s simplistic,” said Ewen. “The people in this hemisphere were — and are — extremely diverse, more than any other place in the world.”

In the 1930s, scientists examined a pile of mammoth bones in Clovis, N.M., where they found distinctive spear points. Since then, tens of thousands of “Clovis points” have been found across North America and as far south as Venezuela. Scientists decided the Clovis people must have been America’s first peoples, arriving 13,000 years ago.

Excavations in the 1970s pushed the date even further back, to as much as 16,000 years ago. Archaeologist James Adovasio dated artifacts found at Pennsylvania’s Meadowcroft Rockshelter to be up to 16,000 years old, to harsh criticism.

Other branches of science have weighed in: In 1998, University of California-Berkeley linguist Johanna Nichols argued that it would have taken up to 50,000 years for a single language to diversify into the many languages spoken by modern Native American groups. That meant ancient Indians would have to have arrived 19,000 years ago. [Read the Rest]

Swedish Brewery Names Beer 'F**k You I'm Millwall' In Tribute to Man Who Fought London Bridge Attackers

Larner fought off three terrorists earlier this month and has been lauded a hero.

“Like an idiot,” he told The Sun, “I shouted back at them. I thought, ‘I need to take the p*** out of these b******s’.”

“I took a few steps towards them and said, ‘F*** you, I’m Millwall’. So they started attacking me.”

Larner added: “I stood in front of them trying to fight them off. Everyone else ran to the back.

“I was on my own against all three of them, that’s why I got hurt so much.

“It was just me, trying to grab them with my bare hands and hold on. I was swinging.

“I got stabbed and sliced eight times. They got me in my head, chest and both hands. There was blood everywhere.

“They were saying, ‘Islam, Islam!’. I said again, ‘F*** you, I’m Millwall!’

The beer in his honour has now been distributed in the area around the brewery and has already become a talking point.

“A friend of mine who is a Millwall fan in London sent me a link to an article about Roy and I thought it was an amazing story of his bravery,” 45-year-old David Mortimer, co-owner of Frequency Beer Works, told the News. [Story]

Illinois State Official: "We Are In Massive Crisis Mode, This Is Not A False Alarm"

In a last ditch attempt to resolve the ongoing budget impasse and prevent a potential crisis, which may culminate with an eventual default by the distressed state, yesterday the WSJ reported that Illinois Gov. Rauner ordered lawmakers to return for a special session this week, but the two sides still seem far apart. Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner ordered the special session starting Monday, as the backlog of unpaid bills reaches $15.1 billion.

“Everyone needs to get serious and get to work,” he said in a video announcing the session that his office posted on Facebook.

As reported previously, the state Transportation Department said it would stop roadwork by July 1 if Illinois entered its third consecutive fiscal year without a budget - the longest such stretch of any US state - while the Powerball lottery said it may be forced to dump Illinois over its lack of budget. For now, state workers have continued to receive pay because of court orders, but school districts, colleges and medical and social service providers are under increasing strain.

And yet, despite the sharp selloff in Illinois GO bonds which some had expected could force the two sides to reach a bargin, neither the Democrat-led legislature, nor Republicans governor Bruce Rauner appear closer to a consensus. Which probably explains today's Associated Press "shock piece" exposing just how serious the situation could become in under two weeks absent a resolution. It focuses on state Comptroller Susana Mendoza - who has had the unenviable job of essentially sitting at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to pay the bills - who is warning that the previously discussed new court orders in lawsuits filed by state suppliers that are owed money mean her office is required to pay out more than Illinois receives in revenue each month. That means there would be no money left for so-called “discretionary” spending - a category that in Illinois includes school buses, domestic violence shelters and some ambulance services.

“I don’t know what part of ‘We are in massive crisis mode’ the General Assembly and the governor don’t understand. This is not a false alarm,” said Mendoza, a Chicago Democrat.

“The magic tricks run out after a while, and that’s where we’re at.” [Source]

Canada Criminalizes Use Of Wrong Gender Pronouns

Canada passed a law Thursday making it illegal to use the wrong gender pronouns. Critics say that Canadians who do not subscribe to progressive gender theory could be accused of hate crimes, jailed, fined, and made to take anti-bias training.

Canada’s Senate passed Bill C-16, which puts “gender identity” and “gender expression” into both the country’s Human Rights Code, as well as the hate crime category of its Criminal Code by a vote of 67-11, according to LifeSiteNews. The bill now only needs royal assent from the governor general.

Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto, and one of the bill’s fiercest critics, spoke to the Senate before the vote, insisting that it infringed upon citizens’ freedom of speech and institutes what he views as dubious gender ideology into law.

“Compelled speech has come to Canada,” stated Peterson. “We will seriously regret this.”
“[Ideologues are] using unsuspecting and sometimes complicit members of the so-called transgender community to push their ideological vanguard forward,” said the professor to the Senate in May. “The very idea that calling someone a term that they didn’t choose causes them such irreparable harm that legal remedies should be sought [is] an indication of just how deeply the culture of victimization has sunk into our society.” [Source]

This woman stole children from the poor to give to the rich

Babies were snatched off the streets by strangers in passing cars. Or taken from day-care centers or church basements where they played. Or stolen from hospitals, right after birth, passed from doctor to nurse to a uniformed “social worker” — before vanishing in an instant.

Some were dropped into dismal orphanages; others were sent to a new family, their identities wiped, no questions asked. Most would never see their birth parents again.

While it sounds like something out of Dickens or the Brothers Grimm, this happened in the United States in the 20th century. Thousands of times.

She was the mastermind behind a black market for white babies.It was the dark handiwork of the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, a supposedly charitable organization, led by a woman named Georgia Tann.
Tann was a pied piper without scruple; she was the mastermind behind a black market for white babies (especially blond, blue-eyed ones) that terrorized poor Southern families for almost three decades. It’s estimated that over 5,000 children were stolen by Tann and the society between 1924 and 1950 and that some 500 died at the society’s hands as a result of poor care, disease and, it is suspected, abuse. [Read the Rest]

Cartoon of the Week: