5: All the Shit You Have to Deal with Walking Alone as a Woman
As a woman walking around the city alone at night, it often feels like there’s not much you can do if some creep decides to follow you around and harass you. But many women try to find a way to deal with feeling unsafe—to project an aura that will stop the harassment from happening. A brisk and confident step, eyes on the pavement, and a hand in the pocket of your coat, clutching your phone.
To see how women from different countries in Europe deal with street harassment, VICE offices across the continent asked women from 13 cities if and where they feel unsafe alone at night, and how they deal with that feeling.
Vice News
4:Did the DEA Nab an International Weapons Dealer, or a CIA Asset Hung Out to Dry?
IN THE LATE evening of December 15, 2014, agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration descended on a hotel in Podgorica, Montenegro, to take into custody a man arrested by local authorities for arms trafficking.
Flaviu Georgescu, an American citizen from Romania, had been in the DEA’s sights for years. A tall, heavyset man in his mid-40s with close-cropped hair, Flaviu worked as a private security contractor in Bucharest.
Over the past several months, Flaviu had been meeting with a Colombian man who claimed to be a member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. This man had sought Flaviu’s help setting up a multimillion-dollar arms deal to help rearm FARC in Colombia. Arrested with Flaviu in the hotel that night was another man, Cristian Vintila, then a high-ranking government minister in Romania and another participant in the alleged arms deal. It seemed like a high-profile nab for the DEA.
Robert J. Scott was among the DEA agents who came to the hotel room that night in Montenegro. Flaviu immediately motioned with his head that he wanted to talk to the DEA agent.
“I’m with the CIA,” he told Scott.
He was working undercover to provide more information, he told Scott that night. Scott wasn’t interested. He’d heard excuses before. A 17-year veteran of the DEA, he knew handcuffed criminals would say just about anything to escape punishment.
Over the next several hours, Flaviu told agents in detail about the proposed deal — how a Southern California man introduced him to the Colombians seeking weapons. He told the agents how he connected with Vintila, as well as with a flamboyant former member of the Italian parliament named Massimo Romagnoli, to piece together the supply chain for the arms deal.
That night, Flaviu helped DEA agents lure Massimo to Montenegro to be detained. As a former member of parliament facing unrelated charges in Italy, Massimo would have been cumbersome for the United States to extradite from that country. But Flaviu, in a DEA-controlled call, coaxed him into the trap.
Flaviu didn’t ask for a cooperating agreement or any other guarantee for his help, insisting to DEA agents that he was working for the CIA and had been gathering information all along. According to him, this was all part of the job.
Flaviu spent several weeks in detention at a local prison. In February 2015, the three men — Flaviu, Cristian, and Massimo — were extradited to the United States to face trial on charges of material support for terrorists. In a statement announcing their extradition, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara described them as “ready and willing merchants of death.”
The reality, it turned out, was far more complicated. Flaviu contends he had been running his own sting operation — using skills he developed a decade earlier while working undercover for the FBI. He never considered that another man involved in the transaction would be running a sting of his own. If this is true, Flaviu and his informant adversary were playing opposites sides of a mysterious spy game.
The Intercept
Former presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is continuing her efforts to force recounts in three states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. But on Tuesday the effort faced a setback as a Wisconsin judge refused to order a statewide hand recount. Instead, the judge ruled that each of the state’s 72 county clerks can decide on their own how to carry out the recount. Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin by less than 30,000 votes out of 2.8 million cast. The result was even closer in Michigan, where Trump won by just 12,000 votes. Stein is expected to file paperwork in Michigan by today’s deadline to request a recount there. More than 130,000 people have donated more than $6.5 million Stein’s efforts—that’s nearly double how much Stein raised during her presidential effort. We speak to Jill Stein.
Democracy Now
2: Oil price surges as Opec agrees first cut in output since 2008
The price of oil has surged by 8% after the 14-nation cartel Opec agreed to its first cut in production in eight years.
Confounding critics who said the club of oil-producing nations was too riven with political infighting to agree a deal, Opec announced it was trimming output by 1.2m barrels per day (bpd) from 1 January.
The Guardian
1: US hate incidents spike after Donald Trump elected
In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, the United States saw a “national outbreak of hate” with a spike in assaults, intimidation, and harrassments towards ethnic and racial minorities, including children, women, and the LGBT community, a US civil rights group says.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) said in a report released on Tuesday that it documented nearly 900 hate incidents within the 10 days following Trump’s election on November 8, but noted it was “almost certainly a small fraction of the actual number” because of underreporting.
Many of the perpetrators invoked the president-elect’s name during the incidents, indicating the surge was linked or motivated by his electoral win, the report said.
It also blamed Trump for running an election campaign “marked by incendiary racial statements and the stoking of white racial resentment” and “opening wounds of division” in the country.
Aljazeera
