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Award-winning journalist Barrett Brown was re-arrested and taken into custody Thursday, the day before he was scheduled to be interviewed for a PBS documentary.
Brown quickly became a symbol of the attack on press freedom after he was arrested in 2012 for reporting he did on the hacked emails of intelligence-contracting firms. Brown wrote about hacked emails that showed the firm Stratfor spying on activists on behalf of corporations. Brown also helped uncover a proposal by intelligence contractors to hack and smear WikiLeaks defenders and progressive activists.
Faced with the possibility of 100 years in prison, Brown pleaded guilty in 2014 to two charges related to obstruction of justice and threatening an FBI agent, and was sentenced to five years and 3 months. In 2016, Brown won a National Magazine Award for his scathing and often hilarious columns in The Intercept, which focused on his life in prison. He was released in November.
Brown simply embarrassed the government with what he wrote, and for that embarrassment, he is paying the price in this trumped-up set of charges. I hope his attorney makes absolute mincemeat of his prosecutors in court, and that he walks out a free man.
US media reports this week blamed North Korea for having a dastardly role in an alleged chemical weapons massacre in Syria. As if the two countries could not be demonized enough. The latest spin of the "axis of evil" suggests Washington is hell-bent on war.
Demonize, dehumanize, destroy. That's the logic being throttled by the Trump administration toward both North Korea and Syria. This week war hawk US Senator Lyndsey Graham after a dinner with President Trump referred to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as a "nutjob," while Trump earlier labeled Syrian leader Bashar Assad an "animal."
Now the two "evil dictators" are bonded in US media reports for complicity in the alleged chemical weapons attack earlier this month in Syria's Idlib Province, where it is claimed Assad's armed forces dropped toxic munitions on civilians, killing up to 80.
The supplier of the alleged chemical weapons in Syria is the "Kim Jong-un regime" in North Korea, according to US reports.
The demonisation of Russia, North Korea, and Syria continues apace, in preparation for war.
The war against North Korea will have an incredibly horrific cost in blood and money.
The war against Syria will almost certainly lead to war against Russia, which is readying ground troops for Syria as I type this, and most probably the reinstatement of the US draft for both our young men and our young women.
But there is one factor the American Deep State is not considering; Americans have become war-weary, and war-skeptical, and may well not be willing to "buy into" war against either country, no matter how dramatic a next false flag the US creates to sell their wars may be.
Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on Thursday, US Pacific Commander Admiral Harry Harris Jr. refused to take an American invasion of North Korea off the table, as Pyongyang has already "provided provocation" to justify such an invasion, the District Sentinel reported.
In an exchange charitably describable as awkward, Harris was asked by South Carolina Republican and SASC member Lindsey Graham, "Is it fair to say, we do not have any intention of invading North Korea at all? Nobody has told you get ready to invade North Korea."
"That is not fair to say, sir," Harris answered, probably not the reply Graham was hoping for. "I believe the president has said that all options are on the table."
Harris: "I don't want to get into what we could or couldn't do."
"Well North Korea thinks we're going to invade at any moment. Do you think that's part of our national security strategy – without provocation to attack North Korea?" Graham asked.
The cost of such an invasion of North Korea, in blood and money, would be horrific; I would like to hope that the US government is not seriously thinking about doing this.
While investors insist the markets are currently NOT in a bubble, it would be wise to remember the same belief was held in 1999 and 2007. Throughout history, financial bubbles have only been recognized in hindsight when their existence becomes "apparently obvious" to everyone. Of course, by that point is was far too late to be of any use to investors and the subsequent destruction of invested capital. This time will not be different. Only the catalyst, magnitude, and duration will be.
For those who voted Trump into office, his complete indifference — as demonstrated by him playing golf all day while the neocons completely infiltrate his administration to make important decisions on his behalf — is nothing more than a giant slap in the face.
Award-winning journalist Barrett Brown was re-arrested and taken into custody Thursday, the day before he was scheduled to be interviewed for a PBS documentary. Brown quickly became a symbol of the attack on press freedom after he was arrested in 2012 for reporting he did on the hacked emails of intelligence-contracting firms. Brown wrote about hacked emails that showed the firm Stratfor spying on activists on behalf of corporations. Brown also helped uncover a proposal by intelligence contractors to hack and smear WikiLeaks defenders and progressive activists.
Journalist Barrett Brown quickly became a symbol of the attack on press freedom. Now he has been re-arrested.
Once again Republicans have managed to box themselves in. Just as the GOP has reportedly found enough votes among conservative Republicans to pass the latest iteration of the proposed Healthcare bill, with Freedom Caucus Mark Meadows saying "republicans will have the votes to pass" Obamacare repeal, Democrats realized that they once again have the leverage to bring this whole process to a grinding halt halt. And they are using it.
In the meantime, the Russians are beginning to redeploy ground troops to Syria. It appears that the U.S. is going to be pushed into a war in one theater or another by the progressives masquerading as conservatives. This brings to mind the ratiocination for the initiation of hostilities in either theater. For North Korea, it is simple: The North Koreans are one of the three nations not involved in the global banking cartel. In addition, a war will increase U.S. hegemony in the area regardless of what happens to South Korea or Japan in the aftermath.
Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel apparently wanted to move to the United States from Germany. (I say apparently because the decision on which I'm reporting, just posted on Westlaw but decided March 31 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Administrative Appeals Office, referred only to one E.C.Z., but both the initials and the facts described in the decision fit Zundel and likely no one else.) He would normally get an immigrant visa, because his wife of 16 years — who is about 80 years old — is a U.S. citizen. But he was classified as inadmissible because he has been convicted of foreign crimes for which the sentence was five years or more:
[I]n 2007 the Applicant was convicted in Germany of 14 counts of incitement to hatred and one count of violating the memory of the dead. The Applicant was sentenced to an aggregate of five years in prison.
We've seen a lot of riots and protests in recent years over police violence and the election of Donald Trump. While these events certainly don't bode well for the future, relative to the rest of American history they've been pretty tame (at least for now). They only look really serious to us, because many of us have forgotten about just how nasty a riot can get.
For instance, these events hardly compare to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which raged for days, caused over a billion dollars in damages, and weren't stopped until the military arrived. 55 people died and over 2,000 were injured. By comparison, the vast majority of the riots that have happened since then haven't resulted in any deaths at all.
This time around, I am concerned that it may just not be riots in Los Angeles, but in other major cities around this country, like perhaps, Detroit; Chicago; and Cleveland, where economic stresses are pushing people to the edge of both despair and survival.
Why do Western peoples believe the US government, a well proven liar, who blocks an investigation and asserts that everyone must believe Washington or else be put on a list of Russian agents?
The powers that be are intent on having a war, regardless of the consequences and effects on noncombatants. A war would also be a way to prop up the administration's flagging ratings. Domestically we have not emerged from the "soft" police state and liberal "legislative" powers of the Courts to remake Constitutional law and circumvent Congress and the President through selective interpretation of anything and everything: These things are the true "legacy" of Obama.
The United States government is the world leader in purveying false flags and propaganda stunts. Or, more generally, downright, systematic lies. To justify the outrageous violation of international law, wars and aggression.
Bowing to pressure from the H.R. McMaster, Dina Powell, Gary Cohn coalition, President Donald Trump's first overseas trip is scheduled to be in Saudi Arabia, multiple sources confirmed after Steve Holland of Reuters first reported rumors of the trip. This decision has split Trump's base, which views the Saudis as the largest state sponsor of Islamic terrorism.
During the visit Trump will discuss a proposed arms package for the Saudis, which would include a massive missile defense system as well as civilian nuclear technology. Behind the scenes McMaster will be seeking Saudi support for a ground war in Syria, which Mike Cernovich first reported in an article whose reporting was confirmed by Eli Lake of Bloomberg.
"Trump doesn't want to go," one person with knowledge of the trip said, "but Powell and Cohn are making him."
When asked how Powell and Cohn could force President Trump do to anything, the source replied,
Well, now we know who's calling the shots on American foreign policy, and that's the "unholy trinity" of McMaster, Powell, and Cohn.
The offensive weapons will be used to finish the Saudi genocide in Yemen, which is an appalling mass of war crimes, which just gets worse by the hour.
And the defensive weapons are designed to put Saudi Arabia on defense and nuclear parity with Iran.
But getting Saudi Arabi to sign off on a ground war in Syria?!? This most probably means two things; direct military confrontation with Russia here, and most probably the return of the draft.
The reuters article about it indicates that such a meeting will most probably happen in late May, when President Trump will be Europe for meetings, or perhaps early June:
Trump is already planning to attend a NATO summit in Brussels on May 25 and travel to Sicily for a Group of Seven leaders' summit scheduled for May 26-28.
Even if the US really backs off on its aggressive posture against North Korea, we are still then looking at yet another massive military intervention in the Middle East. And frankly, I am expecting that to go just as well.... as have the US military interventions in Afghanistan; Iraq; Libya; Somalia; and Syria.
Mike Pompeo, in his first speech as director of the CIA, chose to declare war on free speech rather than on the United States' actual adversaries. He went after WikiLeaks, where I serve as editor, as a "non-state hostile intelligence service." In Pompeo's worldview, telling the truth about the administration can be a crime — as Attorney General Jeff Sessions quickly underscored when he described my arrest as a "priority." News organizations reported that federal prosecutors are weighing whether to bring charges against members of WikiLeaks, possibly including conspiracy, theft of government property and violating the Espionage Act.
WikiLeaks has never, to my knowledge, in it's history, put out information which was subsequently and logically refuted as untrue.
So this is NOT about telling the truth, which the US government does only sporadically, and rarely, but about the reality that the information disclosed by WikiLeaks has been unfailingly embarrassing for the US government by exposing many of its foul-ups and blunders.
While the content of a high-profile White House meeting in which the entire US Senate was briefed about North Korea has not been totally made public, official attempts to emphasize the non-military efforts being made appear to be just one aspect of the story, as the consequences of a military conflict appear to also have been discussed.
Military officials emphasized the increased naval buildup around the Korean Peninsula, and preparations being made for a new Korean War, while also offering some frank warnings that North Korea would certainly retaliate against an American attack, and that such a retaliation would include major attacks against US forces in South Korea, and the South Korean capital of Seoul.
The cost, in blood and money, for such an attack would be monumental on both sides.
What the US government should be doing is working with Chinese President Xi Jinping to get North Korean leadership back to the negotiating table, as well as South Korea, and put together a true peace treaty, which would replace the existing armistice (which is simply the cessation of hostilities), with the quid pro quo that for the peace treaty, North Korea stops its nuclear weapons program.
Of course, this...would be logical.
Ongoing efforts by President Trump to delegate more and more of his war-making powers directly to the military leadership took a major new step on April 20, when he signed a classified memo delegating all decision-making on US troop levels in the global war against ISIS to Defense Secretary James Mattis.
Mattis has subsequently ordered a full audit of current troop levels in the ISIS war, along with the process by which the military will decide troop levels and the extent to which they will inform the American public when they send more ground troops abroad.
That could be a particularly important aspect of this delegation, as the Pentagon has long misreported troop levels in Iraq and Syria, and just a few weeks ago announced that they would no longer provide any troop numbers to the public at all, insisting that the American people didn't need to know that.
I fully expect this government to bring back the draft, under President Trump's watch.
Sec-Def Mattis has to understand, by this point, that we don't have anywhere near the troop strength to pursue all the wars which are already in play, let alone the future wars the Pentagon wants to see pursued.
The Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday warned that military options in resolving the North Korean issue are fraught with disaster in the region, reiterating Moscow's concerns with the deployment of the US missile system in South Korea.
"It is obvious that heavy-handed approaches that are beginning to be mentioned publicly are fraught with catastrophic consequences for the Korean Peninsula and the whole of Northeast Asia," Lavrov said.
Speaking at the VI Moscow Conference on International Security, he expressed concern about the degrading situation in the region with North Korea's continued development of its nuclear missile program.
Lavrov also voiced Moscow's disapproval "with the disproportionate build-up under the pretext of the North Korean threat of the US and its regional allies' military activity."
I have a great deal of respect for Lavrov, and his assessment of the situation is absolutely correct.
I am very concerned about the amount of hardware and personnel the US has packed on those warships off the Korean peninsula. One miscalculation, one stupid mis-judgement, and we are off and running into a shooting war - not just with North Korea, but with China as well.
I am hoping - and praying - that nothing goes "bang" in the region before the South Korean election on 9 May, and if the favored candidate does exercise the "sunshine policy" with regard to North Korea, which is a policy of engagement and rapprochement with the North, that tensions will ratchet down.
Unfortunately, however, there are those in the "deep American state" who believe that war is the only way to turn the fragile US economy around, and they are still cheer-leading for it to happen.
And also, unfortunately, the state of Hawaii may well be the "sacrificial lamb", as it was to get World War II going, to get a new war going against North Korea.
One has to wonder; was this simply a PR stunt, or, upon receiving the information on North Korea, was the general response of the Senate not to the White House's liking?!?
Donald Trump has decided not to pull the US out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, agreeing instead with his Canadian and Mexican counterparts to "proceed swiftly" with negotiations to update the deal, according to the White House.
According to the Financial Times, the move came in hastily arranged calls between the three leaders after news leaked that the White House was considering unveiling an executive order on Saturday that would have laid the groundwork for a US withdrawal.
In a statement, the White House said Trump had agreed with Mexico's Enrique Peña Nieto and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada in separate calls on Wednesday to pursue the "renegotiation of the Nafta deal to the benefit of all three countries".
"It is my privilege to bring Nafta up to date through renegotiation," the statement quoted the president as saying. "I believe that the end result will make all three countries stronger and better."
Another complete about face on trade makes me wonder; who is really in control of this government?!?
Because right now, from where I am sitting, it appears that President Trump is little more than a figurehead, and not at all in control of the government.
These flip-flops on campaign promises are giving me mental whiplash; please stop this, President Trump!!
Two leading U.S. news outlets reported on Wednesday on business ties totaling tens of millions of dollars between the family of Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, and the Steinmetz family, one of the richest families in Israel which made most of its fortune in the diamond industry in recent decades.
According to reports published in Bloomberg and in the New York Times, the ties between the two families include high-stake real estate deals in Manhattan worth more than $150 million. Bloomberg says at least 15 different buildings in downtown Manhattan are co-owned by Raz Steinmetz, nephew of diamond dealer Beny Steinmetz, and by Kushner family's Kushner Companies. The two also invested together in a project bearing President Trump's name in New Jersey, according to the report.
The business deals, in and of themselves, do not bother me; wealthy people collaborate all the time on business.
But what does bother me is that now, though Kushner, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has, if you will, "a seat at the table" from which to dictate American foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond.
And that bothers me greatly.
The land policies of the federal government, which commandeers about 640 million acres nationwide (28% of the 2.27 billion acres of the overall U.S.), do indeed call into question the very nature of such massive land control. The concentration of federal land ownership in the American West is especially staggering, with over 80% of Nevada falling under federal jurisdiction.
Behind the façade of the prosecution's rather tedious, misleading courtroom arguments, that's the real issue in the first trial of the landmark Cliven Bundy property-rights case—in which the jury deadlocked on April 24.
A federal agency won't release a study about the potential effects of a Dakota Access Pipeline oil spill because it claims information in the report could put lives at risk. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers made the claim while rejecting a Freedom of Information Act request from MuckRock, a journalism website that collects and publishes government documents.
Capitalism is the Banksters economic system they have imposed on the Planet.
America's Original economic system was free enterprise. When the Brits tried to impose an early form of capitalism on America known as Mercantilism they got a Revolution. The Banksters eventually got us back into their Satanic Economic System. PCR is 100% right. Capitalism and its handmaiden fractional reserve banking also known as Usury are nothing but a Gigantic Looting and Killing Machine!
The Looting Machine Called Capitalism
Paul Craig Roberts
I have come to the conclusion that capitalism is successful primarily because it can impose the majority of the costs associated with its economic activities on outside parties and on the environment. In other words, capitalists make profits because their costs are externalized and born by others. In the US, society and the environment have to pick up the tab produced by capitalist activity.
state auditor -- "I've never had a situation like that in my 17 years as state auditor
On Monday night, President Donald Trump had dinner with war weasels Senator Lindsey Graham and John McCain to talk about North Korea. McCain and Graham came away from the affair enthused, meaning the rest of us should be wary of things to come. Both McCain and Graham championed Trump's decision to bomb a Syrian airbase earlier this month despite the president's previous insistence that he had no intention of further involving the U.S. in that country's ongoing civil war. The hawkish duo continues to urge Trump to intensify U.S. action against the Assad regime—and, no doubt, it'll happen.
President Donald Trump has fought to ensure his own freedom from intrusion, acutely aware of what information could prove politically damaging, such as the release of his income tax returns. But under the rubric of rolling back regulations or enforcing immigration laws, Trump has taken actions that critics say will erode privacy for U.S. citizens, along the country's borders and in the privacy of their homes.
I'm not a huge fan of Ann Coulter, but for all the Left's breathless claims that President Donald J. Trump is a tyrant hell-bent on ruling with an iron fist -- it is THEY who continually behave as authoritarians, violently opposing and shutting down any political point of view they don't agree with. Free speech is dead in California. Brown and his Brown Shirt thugs killed it.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says the federal government's renewed interest in bringing charges against him for publishing leaked material is the latest development in a growing war on free speech in the U.S.
We've got serious problems in this country, and they won't be solved on the golf course, by wining and dining corporate CEOs, giving local police forces more military equipment, locking down the nation, or pretending that the only threats to our freedoms are posed by forces beyond our borders or by "anti-government" extremists hiding among us.
How could Comey justify the public revelation of a criminal investigation and a summary of evidence of guilt about one candidate for president and remain silent about the existence of a criminal investigation of the campaign of another? How could he deny knowledge of surveillance that was well-known in the intelligence community, even among his own agents? Why would the FBI director inject his agents, who have prided themselves on professional political neutrality, into a bitterly contested campaign having been warned it might affect the outcome? Why did he reject the law's just commands of silence in favor of putting his thumb on political scales? I don't know the answers to those questions. But the American public, and Hillary Clinton, is entitled to them.
"The best evidence yet that the new GOP repeal plan is a disaster for people's health care is that the GOP exempted members of Congress from living under it."
"Anyone should be allowed to talk about the traffic signals without being penalized," says Mats Järlström. He's suing the board.
What do you call it when someone takes 100% of your labor by force? Slavery.
Slavery is being forced to work against your will for the benefit of your master, your owner. The only reason they own the products of your labor is because they own you. If you had exclusive control over what is done to and with your body, the most basic right of self-ownership, you would not owe anybody your labor.
So then a lesser percentage of forced labor is also slavery, though to an obviously lesser degree.
Whether a cent or a million dollars is taken without consent, it is theft. And if someone forces you to work for them 1% of the time, or 100% of a time, that is still slavery.
After enduring shortages of food and medicine for years, as well as a total collapse of their currency, the people of Venezuela have had enough. Last week it was estimated that 2.5 million people marched against the Maduro regime, which had previously tried to strip away the powers of the opposition-led parliament. It's estimated that as many as 6 million people may have taken to the streets to protest throughout the country.
In the lead-up to the protest, which had been planned for weeks by opposition political parties, President Maduro issued an alarming proclamation that didn't receive nearly enough press. He promised to expand the nation's armed militia, and hand out firearms to as many as 400,000 loyalists.
04/26/2017 11:13 am
That is what happens when the government cannot meet its financial obligations. Two forms of default/bankruptcy are available: hard and soft. Hard means the government "stiffs" debt holders totally or partially—"sorry, we cannot repay any of your principal or interest" on your bonds and T-bills or "we can make only part payment." The "soft" default method is for the Federal Reserve to run its printing and digital presses red hot, paying off debt with zillions in money with new zeroes, ultimately making the money worthless. Economic chaos and disaster ensue. Irresponsible? Hyperinflation? Yes. Would the Fed do it? Don't ask me, ask the bailed-out masters of the universe on Wall Street what they want the Fed to do.
The NWO UN out of the USA! USA out of the NWO UN!
The United Nations warned the Trump administration earlier this year that repealing ObamaCare without providing an adequate replacement would be a violation of multiple international laws, according to a new report.
On Wednesday afternoon, Trump will hold a briefing for all 100 senators on North Korea. Reportedly a similar session is planned for House members – both meetings to be held in a "sensitive compartmented information facility" in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Secretary of Defense Mattis, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dunford, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates, and Secretary of State Tillerson will conduct the briefing.
On April 25, marking the anniversary of the founding of its army, North Korea held live-fire drills, involving hundreds of artillery pieces – instead of a sixth nuclear test some observers expected.
According to China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies Foreign Policy director Zhang Tuosheng, pressure from China, Washington, South Korea and Japan got Pyongyang to show restraint – whether short or longer-term remains to be seen.
This is why the US government and military will most probably not wait until the 9 May election to create some kind of false flag against North Korea, and we'll be off and running.
The fact that China has been sending some mixed messages on their potential range of responses to a US tactical strike against North Korea makes Mike and me more than a little nervous; Oahu is a critical military communications link to all of Asia, and would be a first-strike target in case China decides to go to war with the US over any such incident against North Korea.
The Pentagon's plan for seizing and occupying territory in east Syria is beginning to take shape. According to a Fox News exclusive: "The Islamic State has essentially moved its so-called capital in Syria… ISIS is now centered in Deir ez-Zur, roughly 90 miles southeast of Raqqa, the officials said." ("ISIS moves its capital in Syria", FOX News )
The move by ISIS corresponds to the secretive massing of US troops and military equipment on the Syria-Jordan border. It creates the perfect pretext for a ground invasion followed by a long-term military occupation in an area that Washington has sought to control for the last 18 months. Here's more on the topic from South Front:
Ah, but there is one reality the author of this article fails to mention; that is the (invited) Russian military presence in Syria.
And I think the question that Sec-Def Mattis must address is, how far will the Russians go to defend the Al-Assad government against this American invasion of sovereign Syria?!?
My thought would be, as far as it takes, even if it literally going to war with the US over Syria.
And this is a war which our American military may well lose; and I say that because at this point in its history, the American military doesn't have the troop strength; the weaponry; the money; or the manufacturing to insure a positive outcome to a conventional war against Russia.
Israeli-German relations took a turn for the worse on Tuesday, the day after Holocaust Remembrance Day, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a meeting with visiting German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel because he insisted on meeting with far-Left NGO Breaking the Silence.
"Our relations with Germany are strong and they are important and they will continue," Netanyahu said, explaining his decision to cancel the meeting with a senior representative of one of Israel's most important friends in Europe.
My policy is clear: not to meet with diplomats who visit Israel and meet with organizations that defame IDF soldiers and try to prosecute our soldiers as war criminals, which diplomats would never consider doing in the United States, Britain or anywhere else," he said. "Our soldiers are the basis of our existence. They are guarding us, and we will protect them."
Netanyahu is acting scared, because he understands that Breaking the Silence is a powerful witness to the brutal excesses of the IDF, including cold-blooded murder, against the Palestinians. Here's their website:
Breaking the Silence. Org
And German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, a word, please; whatever foreign aid your country is providing to Israel, I would suggest that it stops and immediately. People who tell the truth about their experience in the IDF should not be marginalised.
As I have noted in response to the latest U.S. government aggressions in the Middle East, Donald Trump's short-sighted military actions in Syria are not based on rational thought but on emotionalism, his feeling terrible about the children and other innocent victims of the chemical attack in Syria this week. But this is purely selective emotionalism, given that he doesn't seem so concerned about all the innocent victims of his own drone bombings that he has been authorizing since he was sworn in as President.
Trump is also not concerned for the probable long-term results of his warmongering now. History indicates that the situation will only get worse from here, as we have seen with Iraq.
What is most troubling to me, in Syria, is that it appears to be just a matter of time before Russia sends ground troops here, and Russia signalled its readiness to do so just yesterday:
Russia Ready To Send Ground Troops To Syria: FARS
US ground troops in combat with Russian ground troops in Syria?!?
I'm frankly not betting against this, at some near future point.
As the world focuses on the Middle Eastern and Korean flashpoints, the next war may not occur in either region, but rather in a replay of an old conflict that has been largely forgotten.
In an interview with Politico's European edition, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama threatened war if Kosovo is denied entry into the European Union:
"Albania's prime minister said a union between Albania and Kosovo cannot be ruled out if EU membership prospects for the Western Balkans fade.
"In an interview with Politico … Prime Minister Edi Rama said Europe would face 'a nightmare' if the Balkans 'go crazy' because EU accession is off the agenda, with the region becoming a 'gray zone in which other actors have more influence than the European Union.'"
It looks like this is about to get very ugly, and very quickly.
Turkey cannot fight the Kurdistan People's Party (PKK) at the expense of the regional fight to defeat the Islamic State, also known as Daesh (banned in Russia), acting US Department of State spokesperson Mark Toner said in a briefing on Tuesday.
"We're also cognizant of the threat that the PKK poses to Turkey but again the point we made to Turkey and I'm making now is that Turkey cannot pursue that fight at the expense of our common fight against the terrorists that threaten us all," Toner told reporters.
IF the PKK were legitimised in Turkey, and given the opportunity for true representation, this would not be an issue; unfortunately, the Kurds have been persecuted and marginalised in every possible way, and Turkey is paying the price for it.
U.N. Accuses Turkey of Killing Hundreds of Kurds
Gaithersburg, MD — Guns Loaded? Check… Extra Ammunition? Check… Bullet-proof protective vests? Check… Right home address? Uh oh! In yet another SWAT Team flub, a home has been raided, and its occupants beaten. However, once again, the police went to the wrong address.
The Carroll County Sheriff's Office in Gaithersburg admits they got it all wrong when they burst into Israel Orellana's home in Montgomery County. Orellana has the same name as the man police were searching for in a gun theft case. But still, incredibly, Carroll County got a warrant to search the wrong address. Worse yet, the group of people gathered in the home were church goers who were spending the night socializing and praying.
Orellana told reporters, "I thought it was my mom's friends because sometimes they pray and they start dancing." But that night, it wasn't dancing which was disturbing his peace, it was officers of the peace doing so.
To the people who live in this town; vote with your feet and move NOW, because even if you are the most law-abiding citizen ever, you are most probably next in line for this power-drunk, paranoiac, ham-fistedly, pig-headedly stupid treatment at the hands of your police.
A community is outraged after "the grandpa that everyone loves" suffered a shattered elbow and bloody nose at the hands of State Police, and is now facing a felony charge of resisting and obstructing police. Cops are telling a different story than the account given by 83-year-old Larry Sevenski, and the truth could easily be known – except that the police cruiser dashcam had a mysterious "malfunction" during Sevenski's arrest.
We do not always support our government in time of war, and in the most recent wars not for very many years. We do not obey its laws by habit but by force, and a great many of the most highly placed people both in government and business, including even our Presidents and our representatives and the executives of the largest firms, are regularly and increasingly seen to be disobeying these laws. It is the loss of citizenship, a malaise that is poisoning our society. I do not think that any nation has long survived under such conditions.
Be that as it may, we now, after only ninety days in office, have a neo-neocon foreign policy and the folks clustered around their water coolers in the Washington think tanks are again smiling.
The ultimate form of political and economic power is the power to commit crimes with impunity. – John Titus
U.S. District Judge William Orrick issued the temporary ruling
"I love Wikileaks," candidate Donald Trump said on October 10th on the campaign trail. He praised the organization for reporting on the darker side of the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was information likely leaked by a whistleblower from within the Clinton campaign to Wikileaks.
Back then he praised Wikileaks for promoting transparency, but candidate Trump looks less like President Trump every day. The candidate praised whistleblowers and Wikileaks often on the campaign trail. In fact, candidate Trump loved Wikileaks so much he mentioned the organization more than 140 times in the final month of the campaign alone! Now, as President, it seems Trump wants Wikileaks founder Julian Assange sent to prison.
In late March U.S. intelligence sources announced that terrorist organizations have found a novel and deadly way to smuggle explosives onto airplanes utilizing everyday laptops. Though officials declined to provide additional details, some believe that the intelligence highlighting the new threat was the result of President Trump's raid on an Al Queda compound in Yemen that left at least 14 Al Queda fighters. Navy SEAL Ryan Owens was also killed in the raid. The President called it a "winning mission," and officials said the mission's stated purpose, to gather information, had been accomplished.
If the information they deemed from the raid as revealed by U.S. intelligence sources to CNN is accurate, then travelling on airlines is about to get a lot more difficult for most modern-day passengers, who often carry electronic devices like phones, tablets and laptops when on the go.
When The Daily Coin was born, April 25, 2014, the goal was to help you in your quest for real news and information that would put you and your family in a better position for the coming economic collapse. As of 4:30pm April 12, 2015 it appears my views are about to change. Anyone who is awake and aware is familiar with the manipulation of markets, all markets, the criminality of the banking system and take over of governments, globally, by fascist means. Laws and regulations are now written by and for corporations and local police departments are in place to, specifically, protect the ruling and banking class. The local police also serve another very important function: to strip us of any loose change the banking and ruling class overlooked. As citizens we simply expect to be treated with dignity and a certain amount of respect.
Will the Kiwi police act upon this CLEAR violation of NZ law?
But unlike his predecessors, Trump's latest moves suggest he is prepared to commit U.S. forces to North Korea should the state fail to comply with demands to stifle their nuclear program, and according to a new report from Reuters, the President is doubling down on his efforts, hinting that he is indeed preparing military action.
Top Trump administration officials will hold a rare briefing on Wednesday at the White House for the entire U.S. Senate on the situation in North Korea.
All 100 senators have been asked to the White House for the briefing by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said White House spokesman Sean Spicer on Monday.
This definitely appears to be the direction in which President Trump is moving, and he seems (unlike his predecessor)to understand that only Congress can declare war; but is it the right move at the right time, and what will the repercussions be if this spins out of control?!?
As we reported on Friday, that's when Operation Gotham Shield, an exercise involving FEMA, Homeland Security and a myriad of law enforcement and military agencies and which simulates a nuclear bomb blast over Manhattan, is set to conclude.
Then, as we learned earlier, April 26 is also when the entire Senate will be briefed by Donald Trump and his four top defense and military officials on the situation in North Korea at the White House, an event which Reuters dubbed as "unusual."
April 26 is also when the USS Carl Vinson is expected to finally arrive off the coast of the Korean Peninsula.
Now, in a statement from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, the regional association reports that "law enforcement officials and other first responders will participate in a full-scale exercise on April 26 designed to prepare for the possibility of a complex coordinated terror attack in the National Capital Region."
What could possibly go wrong, right?!?
Please consider the following:
Terror Drills Gone Live
Another DHS "Exercise" Planned: The Risk of Terrorism Drills Becoming Reality
To the folks living at the epicenter of this drill, I hope and pray that all will be well for you. But it is an unfortunate reality that there are occasions which point to US government interventions which actually create the real terror, in these drills.
FULL PRESS CONFERENCE: Berkeley Young Republicans SUE School Over Ann Coulter Speech Controversy
The Ukrainian army continues to increase its activity in the east of the country in the combat zone between the Ukrainian armed forces and the Luhansk People's Republic's units. Thus, in the morning of April 23 a patrol vehicle of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) blew up on a mine in not controlled by Kiev Slavyanoserbsky district of the Lugansk region. As a result of the explosion, a US citizen working as a medical officer of the mission was killed and two mission employees were injured.
Being unable to conduct active armed actions, Kiev focused its efforts on asymmetric combat operations against the Donbass insurgents through sabotage actions.
So THIS is what Trump's White House, and Rex Tillerson are supporting by supporting the Ukraine?!? Assassinations and terroristic activities by Ukrainian troops?!?
These activities are a testament to the ultimate, inescapable reality that no matter who sits in the Oval Office, the American Deep State, and its paranoiac, warmongering nature, never changes.
This is why, when people from all areas of the political spectrum in this country believe that their votes will bring a change for more peaceful resolutions of geopolitical issues, what they get is ... more wars.
We are potentially looking at war against North Korea; more war in Yemen; war in Somalia; war against Iran; war in Syria; and ultimately, war against China and Russia, to prevent the rise of the yuan and the ruble against the American dollar.
Under President Trump's watch, I thoroughly expect to see the reinstitution of the draft; and this time, the government will not just be coming for our young men; they will be coming for our young women also.
FBI: Let's secretly run the biggest child porn site ever.
Judges: no
F: We're just OPERATING it, not using it!
J: still no
F: *runs CP site*
The current chair of the committee, Agustin Carstens, the governor of the Bank of Mexico, sought to cover over the significance of the decision by suggesting that the previous wording had been removed because "the use of the word protectionism is very ambiguous."
In reality, the omission of any disavowal of protectionism is an unmistakable expression of mounting trade tensions, fueled above all by the Trump administration.
These conflicts could not be completely suppressed at the meeting. In his statement to the IMFC, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said
Germany "commits to keep the global economy open, resist protectionism and keep global economic and financial cooperation on track."
This statement stood in stark contrast to the remarks of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. He said the US would
Secretary Mnuchin, a word, please.
The US manufacturing industry (or what hasn't been offshored/outsourced) needs to reimagine itself, and reposition itself toward making things people want to buy, and are durable.
Value engineering has to go the way of the dodo bird, and the dribble glass; it is just that simple.
And heaven help us, no sane, rational country on the face of this planet wants to buy our GMO agriculture. We see that consistently with China, which has a firm policy of not buying American, GMO-produced fruits and vegetables.
Blaming China and Germany for the failings of American manufacturing and monetary policies, are no substitute for fixing the problems American manufacturing and agriculture have to fix, to make US companies competitive again.
You're welcome!!
A day before opposition leaders convened more protests in Caracas calling for the ouster of Venezuela's government, the country's leader has accused the United States of working with right-wing leaders towards a coup.
"The U.S. government, the State Department has given the green light, the approval for a coup process to intervene in Venezuela," President Nicolas Maduro said, speaking from the Miraflores Palace.
Maduro said that security forces had arrested an "armed commando group sent by the opposition in order to attack the mobilization called by the right-wing for Wednesday to generate violence and deaths in the country." An investigation has been opened to determine who is behind the plan.
According to the Venezuelan leader, who also pointed to a U.S. State Department statement issued Tuesday evening warning of an "international response" should "peaceful protests" face repression, the U.S. government wrote up a coup scenario for opposition leader Julio Borges.
Given the US government's penchant for "regime change", it is totally illogical to dismiss, out of hand, a possible scenario where the US is planning to accomplish regime in Caracas.
Last week CNN reported, citing anonymous "intelligence community" sources, that the Trump Administration's Justice Department was seeking the arrest of Assange and had found a way to charge the WikiLeaks founder for publishing classified information without charging other media outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post for publishing the same information.
It might have been tempting to write off the CNN report as "fake news," as is much of their reporting, but for the fact President Trump said in an interview on Friday that issuing an arrest warrant for Julian Assange would be, "OK with me."
Trump's condemnation of WikiLeaks came just a day after his CIA Director, Michael Pompeo, attacked WikiLeaks as a "hostile intelligence service." Pompeo accused Assange of being "a fraud – a coward hiding behind a screen."
Julian Assange is no "coward" to me; he is someone who is paying an enormously high price for continuing telling the truth to the American people and the world; Mike and I understand more than a little bit about what that kind of price, for telling the truth, entails.
So, if moving ships and bombers around on a map were the full extent of U.S. plans to apply "maximum pressure" to North Korea, then U.S. policy might struggle to achieve its aims, but it would be no more dangerous than usual. In the context of this distorted formula, however, there are two interrelated differences that give reason to worry. First, the most direct reason that past crises with North Korea have not bubbled over into war was American restraint. The historical record of U.S.-North Korea relations reveals the surprising extent to which North Korea was poised to automatically retaliate and escalate in response to U.S. uses of force that never took place. Second, numerous administration sources have conveyed that the Trump administration is willing to launch preventive strikes in response to unspecified North Korean provocations, potentially even in response to non-violent actions like nuclear testing. This would be unprecedented.
Just yesterday, the US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, made the following statement:
The United States could strike North Korea if it attacks a U.S. military base or tests an intercontinental ballistic missile, President Donald Trump's U.N. ambassador said Monday. In several television interviews, Nikki Haley praised China's involvement in trying to pressure North Korea to cease missile testing and criticized Pyongyang's leader, Kim Jong Un, as unstable and paranoid. Asked about the threshold for U.S. action, Haley told NBC's "Today Show" that "if you see him attack a military base, if you see some sort of intercontinental ballistic missile, then obviously we're going to do that." Haley said the U.S. wasn't looking for a fight and wouldn't attack North Korea "unless he gives us reason to do something."
This time, look for a "reason" to be fabricated by the US as the "acceptable provocation" to justify military action against North Korea, in the form of a false flag to be blamed on North Korea, if not provided by Kim Jun Un personally.
America's renewed desire to escalate military tensions is a front for America's continual financial war, this time directed at North Korea, Syria and possibly Iran. This is likely to be the opinion of China's strategic advisors. We analyse the geopolitics and economics behind America's war strategy from China's perspective, concluding that it is entering its final phase. China's exit plan appears to be to tie the pricing of energy and then other major commodities to gold, returning to the pre-1971 status quo, when the dollar was just a settlement link between commodity prices and gold. Except this time, the dollar itself will be side-lined, so far as China is concerned, which will use the yuan instead for its empire, which will be far larger than that of the US in time, measured by GDP.
Julian Assange, along with the whistleblowers who reveal to us the evil that is being done in our name, are heroes. They deserve our respect and admiration, not a prison cell. If we allow this president to declare war on those who tell the truth, we have only ourselves to blame.
Hopes that the US sanctions against Russia would be quickly rolled back when President Trump was elected in November didn't pan out, and the latest comments from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson suggest that the administration has no intention of removing the sanctions at all.
Speaking with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko over the weekend, Tillerson reported told him that the US sanctions on Russia will remain wholly in place "until Russia returns control of the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine." Needless to say, Russia isn't going to do that.
Secretary of State Tillerson, a word, please.
The reason Crimea seceded from Ukraine, is that in 2014, the US/EU/IMF/Soros-backed putsch threw out the democratically elected Yanukovych as President, and - in an election more crooked than a dog's hind leg - replaced him with Poroshenko, a western-centric thug tasked with the agenda of moving Ukraine away from Russia's sphere of influence.
President Obama even admitted that the US government helped in this process.
Washington Was Behind Ukraine Coup: Obama admits that US "Brokered a Deal" in Support of "Regime Change"
And Victoria Nuland publicly confessed how much money the US had spent to destabilise Ukraine.
Victoria Nuland's Admits Washington Has Spent $5 Billion to "Subvert Ukraine"
Mr. Tillerson, one cannot unsee/unhear the above incontrovertible facts.
It was because Crimean officials understood that after the "anointing" of Poroshenko, there was no legitimate government in Kiev, that they did the referendum, and petitioned the Russian Federation to become a member; cause and effect, sir.
And your not accepting that Crimea had the right to peaceful self-determination, which is enshrined in the the UN Charter, kind of makes this country look like a horse's rear end, to the rest of the world; the hypocrisy is palpable.
When a country is a signatory to the UN, that country cannot pick and choose which elements of the charter it will observe, and which ones it will not honor.
And BTW, are you aware that the sanctions have done nothing but help to Russia stabilise, economically, and draw Russia into a closer financial and military relationship with China?!?
IF those are NOT the results you wanted these sanctions to have, I would strongly suggest that you reconsider these sanctions, as they seem to have had the polar opposite effects from those which were originally intended.
I have my doubts that any of these individuals—all of whom swore to uphold and defend the Constitution—have ever read any of the nation's founding documents. Had they actually read and understood the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, there would be no militarized police, no mass surveillance, no police shootings of unarmed individuals, no SWAT team raids, no tasering of children, no asset forfeiture schemes or any of the other government-sanctioned abuses that get passed off as law and order these days.
The Afghan War is going extremely poorly, 16 years in, and the US military needs someone to blame for its failures. The first choice among a lot of top military figures seems to be Russia, and while they offer no evidence to back up their claims, several have alleged that Russia might conceivably be arming the Taliban.
US commandeer Gen. John Nicholson appeared to be joining that camp today during comments in Kabul, complaining about the "malign influence" of Russia in the country, and insisting that he was "not refuting" allegations of Russia shipping weapons to the Taliban.
"Not refuting" is a very weak version of alleging, in this case, as US officials have offered no evidence that this is the case, nor any plausible reason why Russia would conceivably do this, as Russia fought materially the same insurgency during the 1970s and 1980s.
The reality here is that the war in Afghanistan was stupidly conceived, through a toxic combination of magical thinking, illogic, and a pathological inability to think a scenario through to its logical conclusion, and horribly executed, by the US and NATO, which still occupy the country today.
Blaming Russia for the US and NATO's failures in Afghanistan sound both like desperation on the cusp of madness, and a ramping up of the demonisation of Russia ahead of a potential attack against it, without any tangible evidence that these accusations are true.
What US and NATO leadership should do, from the most rational perspective, is to cut their losses; have all foreign troops leave Afghanistan, as quickly as it is safe to do so; then negotiate with whatever government is left standing in Kabul for pipeline rights, and access to Afghanistan's rich mineral deposits.
Of course, that....would be logical.
Weeks of speculation that the US is about to attack North Korea are again accelerating, with the White House announcing that they intend to play host to the entire Senate on Wednesday for an official briefing on the situation, with virtually the entire cabinet.
Such a briefing for the full Senate is extremely unusual, especially in the White House, which means this must be a very important meeting, which is once again adding fuel to the idea that the US is going to do something big, potentially a military attack.
This comes amid a new round of speculation that North Korea might be planning to carry out another nuclear test, with a holiday coming up this week and a round of intramural volleyball at the test facility having concluded, meaning they're no longer too busy to do the test.
So, we have the briefing of the Senate on North Korea tomorrow, and Tillerson will be addressing the UN about North Korea on Friday.
I would very strongly suggest that this is NOT sound and fury, signifying "nothing"; I think the attack is well and truly planned, and that South Korea, unfortunately, will suffer greatly from the repercussions of such an attack.
The complete and utter unwillingness of the US government to sit down with North Korea, South Korea, and China, and hammer out a peace deal with which to replace the armistice, creating a quid pro quo that accepting such a deal means the North Korean government stops its nuclear weapons program, is absolutely baffling to me.
This would be the most logical thing in the world for the US government to do, under these circumstances.
But unfortunately, logic, and the US government, have not had a good relationship in quite some time now, and with these threats to North Korea, you can see how that is playing out, in this grand geopolitical theatre, most likely leading to a war against it.
President Donald Trump has gone to great lengths to break from the policies and approaches of his predecessor. Yet, when it came to justifying a round of U.S. military missile strikes in Syria, the new commander in chief dusted off a legal rationale crafted by Barack Obama's administration.
A few hour ago the Turkish airforce hit Kurdish and Yezidi positons on both sides of the Singal mountains in east-Syria and west-Iraq. Near Derik in east-Syria more than 20 bombs destroyed a YPG headquarter, a radio station and a media center. At least nine YPK fighters were killed. The YPG is the Syrian sister organization of the Kurdish PKK in Turkey. The PKK is a designated terrorist organization. Within Syria U.S. special forces are embedded with the YPG and are coordinating YPG moves against the Islamic State in Raqqa. YPK and PKK follow the anarcho-marxist theories of their leader Abdullah Öcalan who is in isolation detention in Turkey.
The question is, what can the US offer Erdogan's Turkey, to make it comfortable with in an independent Kurdistan, when the Turkish government has made it clear that ethnic Kurds in their country are persona non grata, and done their best to suppress Kurdish political parties?!?
But until, and unless, the US has something to offer Turkey, in exchange for them accepting the reality of an independent Kurdistan, these attacks will continue, and most probably worsen.
Glazyev wagers that the U.S. is currently conducting "a hybrid war with the entire world to shift their debt burden on to other countries, to confine everyone to the dollar and weaken territories they cannot control." -- He added: "In this context, the anti-Russian hysteria and growing Russophobia can be seen as a long-term factor linked with the specific interests of the United States' ruling elite."
Act of War: Politicians Sell Russia Election Interference w NO Evidence
Montage video of politicians shilling Russian Election Interference, a claim that there has been NO objective/tangible evidence to verify. Beware ALL of those who shill propaganda to get us into either a cold or hot conflict with Russia
The events on September 11, 2001, changed the world. It was the excuse for the US government to launch military attacks on seven Middle Eastern countries, causing civilian casualties in the millions and sending waves of Muslim refugees into the Western world. The US government wasted trillions of dollars destroying countries and murdering women and children, while public infrastructure in the US deteriorated, Americans' homes were foreclosed, and American health needs went unattended. 9/11 was also the excuse for the destruction of the protection that the US Constitution provided to ensure the liberty of the American citizen. Today no American has the protection of the civil liberty that the Constitution guarantees.
The federal trial of a Kansas man for manufacturing and selling firearms and silencers without a federal license could very well turn out to be the pivotal case that not only challenges the constitutionality of the National Firearms Act of 1934, but also every federal firearms law ever passed in a battle that will determine whether it is the states or the federal government that has the constitutional right to pass gun laws. -- Put bluntly, this could be huge. We indeed live in interesting times, and I look forward to living in a world where the Supreme Court upholds the laws of the land, and not the whims of activists in robes.
Austerity is over, proclaimed the IMF this week. And no doubt attributed that to the 'successful' period of 'five years of belt tightening' a.k.a. 'gradual fiscal consolidation' it has, along with its econo-religious ilk, imposed on many of the world's people. Only, it's not true of course. Austerity is not over. You can ask many of those same people about that. It's certainly not true in Greece.
Finance Insider reveals a reality that is as shocking as can be (if no great surprise to increasing numbers of the waking public). This is the MOST convincing testimony I have ever come across.
Original is here: https://vimeo.com/212237317
The "fake news" pejorative has become commonplace in modern public discourse, so much so that social media outlets have taken it upon themselves to "police" so-called "fake news" stories and warn people about their dangers. This was largely due to the supposed impact "fake news" had on Trump supporters in 2016. To these self-appointed gatekeepers of truth, honesty, and the American way, nothing that contradicts their version of American history can be acceptable.
a 62-foot diameter airship called the Hover Hammer with an eavesdropping device, according to a classified document published Monday by The Intercept
On April 26, we'll go one step further and stage a very realistic emergency event involving multiple sites and actors posing as the casualties. However, there is no reason for residents to be alarmed because the exercise will occur in a controlled environment."
After the results of last year's election came in, the hacks in the mainstream media struggled to find an explanation for how Trump could have been elected. They simply couldn't fathom that voters would choose someone other than the establishment pick. In their angst, they threw up their hands and declared that the people had been bamboozled by "fake news," a vague and poorly defined term that just so happened to include every news source that disagreed with them.
Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is launching a new online publication which will aim to fight fake news by pairing professional journalists with an army of volunteer community contributors.
Wikitribune plans to pay for the reporters by raising money from a crowdfunding campaign.
Wales intends to cover general issues, such as US and UK politics, through to specialist science and technology.
Those who donate will become supporters, who in turn will have a say in which subjects and story threads the site focuses on. And Wales intends that the community of readers will fact-check and subedit published articles.
*hyperlinks live at source*
guest blog by "Captains America" (bio below)
The ongoing 5+ year war in Syria can be deescalated and ended by the troops in the U.S. military, and it matters not what Trump, Congress or Supreme Court do.
Many Americans, and military members, are worried about increasing military involvement and additional troop deployments in Syria, considering that one Pentagon plan calls for sending tens of thousands of troops into Syria.
Children feel violated, parents are furious, and a lawsuit is getting filed after the Worth County Sheriff's office conducted an illegal search of 900 students — in the name of the war on drugs. The rights-violating intrusive and aggressive patdowns and drug dog searches yielded absolutely nothing.
On April 14, when the students of Worth County High School returned from spring break, they arrived at school to find a police state had taken over. The sheriff and his deputies — with no probable cause — detained and illegally searched every single child in the school, all 900 of them.
When kids went home that day to tell their parents what happened, naturally, they were furious as it is a gross violation of the children's 4th Amendment rights.
"It's essentially a fourth amendment violation," said attorney Mark Begnaud. "It's 900 illegal searches, suspicion-less pat downs, suspicion-less searches."
"We're no longer fact-based. The founding fathers created a country based on fact. We don't have a fact base. If Breitbart News and the New York Times are regarded with equal credibility, you worry about this democracy." -- We won't even bother to highlight all of the instances in which the New York Times decided to push 'fake news' regarding the Trump administration's alleged ties to Russian hackers...
Translation: Trump's massive tax cut will be funded by debt, and as a result, will be at best temporary as it will be in breach of the revenue constraints in the reconciliation process; at worst it will never happen as it will now require Democrat votes.
Russia and China already have established systems to do global trade bypassing the US dollar. What Washington did to Iran — cutting their banks off SWIFT – is now unthinkable against Russia and China.
So we're already on our way, slowly but surely, towards a BRICS "gold marketplace." A "new financial architecture" is being built. That will imply the eventual inability of the US Fed to export inflation to other nations – especially those included in BRICS, EEU and SCO.
The Hollow Men
Retired U.S. Marine Corps General James Mattis testifies before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on his nomination to serve as defense secretary in Washington, U.S. January 12, 2017
US Defense Secretary Accuses Damascus of Retaining Chemical Weapons
I am hoping - and praying - that Escobar is correct in his assessment; however, there are too many people in the bowels of power in DC who want to see this war with North Korea happen, followed by regime change in Pyongyang.
erbian officials are warning that the Albanian ambitions to absorb Kosovo could easily lead to another war in the Balkans, and that NATO and the European Union need to publicly rule out that possibility in an effort to forestall another ethnic war spanning the region.
The status of Kosovo is a big sore spot in the region, after NATO's 1999 war imposed a separation of Kosovo from Serbia, which was supposed by the Kosovar Albanian majority but widely opposed by ethnic Serbs in Kosovo. Kosovo's independence is heavily contested, with a number of countries refusing to recognize it.
This could spiral out of control, and descend into another round of warfare in the Balkans very, very quickly.
Venezuela, a country with only $10 billion left in reserves to run on, is in trouble. As the currency hyperinflates to new record lows against the dollar...James Holbrooks points out that the people are starving. The government has gone full-on authoritarian, and now desperate human beings are dying in the streets.
This is a terrible situation, but one, I am quite certain, that the US government is quite gleeful about, because it looks like Maduros, who they detested even more than they did Chavez, is about to go down.
The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan labeled the paramilitary forces fighting the Islamic State in Iraq as "terrorists" and part of Iran's "Persian expansion policy".
"Who are al-Hashd al-Shaabi? Who is backing them? The Iraqi parliament supports al-Hashd al-Shaabi, but, honestly, they are a terrorist organization, and should be known who stands behind it," he said during an interview with the Qatari channel Al Jazeera on Wednesday.
Ahmed al-Assadi, a spokesperson of the Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU), also known as al-Hashd al-Shaabi, called Erdogan's remarks as "a violation against an Iraqi security institution" that is "recognized by the parliament and the state".
Hadi Al-Ameri, the former Iraqi minister of transportation and the head of the PMU Badr Organization, one of the biggest PMU forces in Iraq, in response called for a complete stop of trade with Turkey.
Just what the Middle East and Iraq need; more destabilisation, courtesy of Turkey!!
The International Monetary Fund had a sobering message for Greece this weekend: Even if the country secures debt relief from its European creditors -- a question that is by no means assured with bailout talks still deadlocked -- the nation still needs even more painful economic overhauls than currently planned.
Seven years into an economic crisis and another near-term financial emergency looming, that is a message no Greek wants to hear and a key reason why the IMF is also urging Germany and Athens' other European creditors to give the country hope in the form of real debt relief.
The country's "fiscal and structural reforms...pension reforms, tax reforms, are only a down payment," said Poul Thomsen, IMF's European department chief and Greece's original bailout architect, on the sidelines of the fund's semiannual meeting of finance ministers and central bankers.
Greece's government should "pull an Iceland", declare its debt odious, and throw the crooked politicians and bankers who got them into this mess into jail for what they have done to the Greek people, and the Greek economy.
The hypocrisy that is the DEA's refusal to acknowledge the medicinal benefits of cannabis cannot go unnoted; yet, more importantly, they have been caught red-handed, admitting tacitly during a House Judiciary Committee Hearing that the DEA sells drugs to people on the streets with the goal of catching "bigger fish."
The War on Drugs is perpetuated by the Drug Enforcement Agency who insists on locking people up for years at a time, for possession of what is still scheduled as a Class A substance, though now legal in many US states.
In the first week of April, the DEA was questioned over whether they allow shipments of drugs into the community for the sake of making a bigger bust down the track. The Washington Post reported on the transcript between Louisiana Democratic Rep. Cedric L. Richmond asking the DEA's appointed acting director Chuck Rosenberg on the issue:
Absoflippinglutely unbelievable, but from this government, perfectly predictable!!
Secretary of Defense James Mattis said last week that the U.S. would increase its involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, a war that has claimed the lives of 4,000 civilians in two years and drawn international criticism for war crimes committed by the Saudis.
As the Trump administration's foreign policy continues to push the U.S. closer to a new war, Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced last week that the U.S. is set to increase support for Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, a war that has drawn international condemnation for the Saudis' frequent bombings of civilian infrastructure like schools and hospitals.
Sec-Def Mattis, a word, please.
The level of Iranian assistance to the Houthi rebels has been a very hard bit to pin down.
And if you really want to identify the most destabilising culprit in the Middle East, who is the trouble maker par excellence, you have to look no further than the country of Israel, which was cheerleading for the war against Iraq, and is currently campaigning to ratchet up the war against Al-Assad in Syria, and to regime change Iran (and for Tel Aviv, these actions always should be purchased with American blood and money; never their own.)
In the meanwhile, there is a question I must ask you, even if others fear asking it: how morally comfortable are you, please, in the US government's being complicit in Saudi war crimes in Yemen?!?
The Saudis are killing and maiming innocent children with their bombing runs.
The US military is providing "guidance" for these strikes.
images: Yemeni children killed and maimed through Saudi bombing strikes
Yemeni children are being starved to death through malnutrition, because of US-Enabled, Saudi blockades of Yemeni ports:
Images: Yemeni children dying from malnutrition, due to Saudi port blockades in Yemen
The Saudi military is using depleted uranium weapons in Yemen:
Saudi coalition using depleted uranium weapons in Yemen
The result of this use of DU is causing massive rises in cancer rates; stillbirths, and horrific deformities of Yemeni children:
Images: Yemeni children born with horrific birth defects due to exposure to depleted uranium weapons
And yet, apparently, the Royal House of Saud; the Saudi government; and the US government, and you, sir, are perfectly comfortable with poisoning Yemeni children in the womb, and destroying not only their lives, but their families' lives as well. If there is a more cruel form of child abuse, I cannot imagine what that is.
I am profoundly reminded, in this obscenely callous disregard for human life as reflected in these Saudi military tactics, of the comment made by the Papal Legate at the siege of Montsegur against the Cathars, when he was informed that not only men were in the besieged castle, but women and children were also with them. He said, "Kill them all; God will find his own."
I just have to wonder when the massive air strikes, coupled with US boots on the ground, will accomplish this Saudi genocide in Yemen. And my sense of it is, relatively soon.
And by the way, Sec-Def Mattis: are you going to be informing our military who will comprise the "boots on the ground" element of the US military's plan to obliterate the Yemeni people in full, that if they are deployed to Yemen, they and their families also risk exposure to DU, and that their kids may well be born with precisely the same birth defects we are seeing in Yemeni children, and we did with the Iraqi children of Fallujah?!?
Thought not.
In what may have been the biggest trolling of the United Nations in recent history, Saudi Arabia was elected via secret ballot in the UN Economic and Social Council to the 45-member UN Commission on the Status of Women last week. According to Reuters, twelve other countries were also elected by the council in Geneva to serve for a four-year term, ending in 2022: Algeria, Comoros, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Iraq, Japan, South Korea, Turkmenistan, Ecuador, Haiti and Nicaragua.
The news promptly sparked mocking and ridicule. UN Watch, a human rights organization monitoring the performance of the United Nations, strongly condemned the appointment of Saudi Arabia to post,citing Riyadh's poor women's rights record and widespread gender inequality.
"Electing Saudi Arabia to protect women's rights is like making an arsonist into the town fire chief. It's absurd," Hillel Neuer, the UN Watch chief, said.
The Saudi most likely were able to buy the votes necessary to get them on the Commission.
As a country which still permits, and even encourages, the barbaric and brutal practice of female genital mutilation, Saudi Arabia was the LAST country on the planet that should have had a seat at this table; so they most likely bought it.
Yes, there are many that need a good kick in the pants to get them going in life, but there are also millions that are simply victims of our ongoing long-term economic collapse.
It was clear to me after the US election that Trump was never going to live up to all his promises to make America great again. He took over the country at the end of a 36-year era of continuous stock and bond market rally fuelled by the biggest credit expansion in US history. It would have been an impossible task for anyone to expand all the bubbles and it seems that Trump unsurprisingly has already failed at the first hurdle. After just under 100 days, he is already a lame duck president. This is why he has turned to war which is the last desperate attempt of a leader who fails on the home front in a bankrupt nation.
After getting its hands on leaked internal documents, including emails and presentations, The London Times recently revealed that one of the world's leading drug companies created artificial shortages and threatened to destroy supplies of life-saving cancer drugs to drive up prices in Europe.
There is much debate about where the U.S. economy is ultimately heading, but what everybody should be able to agree on is that economic conditions are significantly worse this year than they were last year. It is being projected that U.S. economic growth for the first quarter will be close to zero, thousands of retail stores are closing, factory output is falling, and restaurants and automakers have both fallen on very hard times. As economic activity has slowed down, commercial and consumer bankruptcies are both rising at rates that we have not seen since the last financial crisis. Everywhere you look there are echoes of 2008, and yet most people still seem to be in denial about what is happening. The following are 11 facts that prove that the U.S. economy in 2017 is in far worse shape than it was in 2016…
Machiavelli himself couldn't have designed a more devious and thorough plot to create social justice warriors, indoctrinated serfs and slaves who are indebted to the banksters.
Why should we not expect the FBI to bear down upon outspoken critics of U.S. foreign policy like Ron Paul?
After Berkeley Beat Down With "Combat Training, Better Equipment, Guns..."
It all began, of course, with the invasion of Iraq. Counter-terrorism specialists in the US government knew perfectly well that US regime change in Iraq through military force would give a powerful boost to Osama bin Laden's organisation and to anti-American terrorism generally
Apparently, New York 'Progressive' and Jewish activist, Bill Weinberg, thinks that I am "not welcome in NYC". Over the last ten days, Weinberg has worked tirelessly, trying to cancel a panel discussion on 30th of April at Theatre 80 NYC, related to my forthcoming book 'Being in Time'. Theatre 80's owner, Lorcan Otway, has made it very clear that he won't surrender to any calls for censorship, but still, Weinberg doesn't seem to give up. He believes that it is he who will decide who is, and who is not, "welcome in NYC."
Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar called on French Jews to leave their country if the far right politician Marine Le Pen is elected president next month.
Officials from some of the top international government spy agencies have flocked to New Zealand's Queenstown for a secretive meeting of the Five Eyes spying alliance between the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Click for larger image
Many Americans today would quite possibly consider Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" to be a utopia of sorts with its limitless drugs, guilt-free sex, perpetual entertainment and a genetically engineered society designed for maximum economic efficiency and social harmony. Conversely, most free people today would view Orwell's "1984" as a dystopian nightmare, and shudder to contemplate the terrifying existence under the iron fist of "Big Brother"; the ubiquitous figurehead of a perfectly totalitarian government.
FBI director James Comey has arrived in Queenstown for a 'top-secret' spy conference.
Comey, wearing sunglasses, a light blue shirt and chino pants, arrived on an FBI chartered Gulfstream Aerospace.
Comey was last in New Zealand in March 2016, when he met with Minister for the Government Communications and Security Bureau and Security Intelligence Service Chris Finlayson and Police Commissioner Mike Bush.
Before Comey's arrival, a CIA jet touched down on the tarmac at Queenstown Airport.
And, just like a scene out of an action flick, two security personnel stood guard as a number of men and women in suits exited the plane before being quickly ushered along the tarmac into waiting vehicles.
People are starting to stand up against the bullies!
A FLIGHT attendant was filmed challenging a passenger to a FIGHT after a sobbing mum was allegedly "whacked" on board.
The American Airlines steward shouts "hit me" when a passenger came to the defence of the distressed mother.
Passenger Surain Adyanthaya, who filmed the shocking footage, claimed the flight attendant "'violently took a stroller from a lady with her baby on my flight, hitting her and just missing the baby".
Adyanthaya added: "They just involuntarily escorted the mother and her kids off the flight and let the flight attendant back on, who tried to fight other passengers.
"The mom asked for an apology and the AA official declined."
US President Donald Trump may have branded a deal the Obama administration struck with Australia to resettle up to 1,250 refugees in America as "dumb," but his vice president has now assured the Aussies that Washington will honor it anyway.
Americans may have been led to believe through their education systems, their religious institutions, mainstream media and popular culture that their government's foreign policy is guided by the dictates of conscience, humanitarian considerations, and empathy for chemically mauled infants as well as a national vocation to bring "freedom and democracy" to the world.
A more honest and rigorous review of America's involvement in military conflicts, and its support for Israel, Saudi Arabia and other rogue states around the world reveal the shallowness of this understanding.
The structure of power in the U.S. as with other imperialist powers throughout history demands certain economic arrangements and military formations on the world stage.
The apparent and surprisingly abrupt demise in Steve Bannon's influence offers a major potential opening for neoconservatives, many of whom opposed Trump's election precisely because of his association with Bannon and the "America Firsters," to return to power after so many years of being relegated to the sidelines. Bannon's decline suggest that he no longer wields the kind of veto power that prevented the nomination of Elliott Abrams as deputy secretary of state. Moreover, the administration's ongoing failure to fill key posts at the undersecretary, assistant secretary, and deputy assistant secretary levels across the government's foreign-policy apparatus provides a veritable cornucopia of opportunities for aspiring neocons who didn't express their opposition to the Trump campaign too loudly.
I used to swallow the myth whole that voting, at the national level, meant Americans have, at least, some modicum of control over their lives; with the election of President Trump, I have realised, painfully clearly, the absolute and utter falseness of such a premise.
I have watched this man do so many flipflops on promised policy reforms, since his inauguration, that I am dealing with intense intellectual whiplash, and do not know if I will ever fully recover.
I have utterly zero control on the direction of domestic and foreign policy issues; it is the American deep state which is in control, no matter who is actually occupying the White House, so the consistent agendas of the Deep State never change.
And those agendas involve the following; the consistent destabilisation of both Russia and China, in order to prevent the ascent of the ruble and the yuan; the destabilisation of the Middle East, in order to expropriate resources to which the US has utterly no moral right, and to give more territory to Israel, whenever possible; to insure the governments of countries are western/US-centric, even to the point of regime change; and insuring that world resources are only sold in US dollars.
The American people, and their needs and concerns, are completely irrelevant to this process, except for paying taxes; creating soldiers with which to accomplish the American Deep State's geopolitical agenda; and believing the lies this government tells us, which get constantly regurgitated by corporate media presstitutes, to further its agenda.
I am disgusted and sickened by a thoroughly hypocritical President who uses murdered "beautiful dead babies" as an excuse for a military attack against Syria, while those dead and mutilated children of Yemen, killed by US-government enabled Saudi military strikes, who are dealing with starvation from malnutrition due to Yemeni port blockades, and exposure to DU, most probably sold to the Saudi Government by the US, are of no consequence, in his view.
Denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula can still be achieved peacefully because of Washington's new engagement with China, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said on Saturday, despite growing fears North Korea could soon conduct a new nuclear test.
South Korea is on heightened alert ahead of another important anniversary in the reclusive North that could be the trigger for a new nuclear test or launch of ballistic missiles, with a large concentration of military hardware massed on both sides of the border.
Tensions have risen sharply in recent months after Pyongyang conducted two nuclear weapons tests last year and carried out a steady stream of ballistic missile tests in defiance of United Nations resolutions and sanctions.
Would Vice-President Pence please elaborate on how he sees this happening, with South Korea, Russia, and China at a heightened state of alert due to North Korea's missile tests?!?
Attorney Troy Bouk was recently interviewed by Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins to discuss the shingles vaccine Zostavax, the issues related to its effectiveness and the problems that are associated with the product, including the fact that the drugmaker's vaccine seems to cause the very affliction that it seeks to prevent — and, according to a massive lawsuit, thousands of victims agree.
While we have everyone from attorneys to biologists, to political scientists who contribute to the Free Thought Project, none of us are doctors, so we do not make recommendations about what you and your family should do in regards to vaccination. That being said, the drug makers have an incentive for you not to see this information which means it will not be reported on in the mainstream media as their advertising dollars are tied directly to these companies. So, we find that it is our duty to spread this information and with your help sharing it, we can have a massive effect.
For the medical/industrial complex, "treatments/vaccines" are rarely about care, but always about profits.
The Obama administration isn't accused of gathering intelligence information to spy for political, and other, purposes just once. Or twice. Or even just three times.
A remarkable timeline assembled by ace investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson shows just how often the Obama administration apparently spied on friend and foe alike.
With all of this information gathered in one place, WND then compiled a list gleaned from Attkisson's timeline of all those whom the Obama administration is suspected of targeting either by spying, or investigating and/or prosecuting using intelligence information.
The death toll in three weeks of violence at anti-government protests in Venezuela jumped to 20 people after a night of clashes and pillaging left 12 people dead in Caracas, reports AFP.
Riot police and pro-government vigilantes fought running battles on the capital's east, west and south sides with protesters demanding the ouster of President Nicolas Maduro.
At nightfall on Friday, more protests and pockets of unrest were reported in eastern Caracas, and in Macuto in the neighboring state of Vargas.
Opposition leaders have called new protests for Saturday and Monday.
On Saturday, they plan to march in silence to the Catholic Church's episcopal seats nationwide. They plan to erect roadblocks on Monday to grind the country to a halt.
Protesters blame Maduro -- heir of the leftist "Bolivarian revolution" launched by the late Hugo Chavez in 1999 -- for an economic crisis marked by severe shortages of food, medicine and basic goods.
I am hoping this situation can be resolved without more bloodshed; however, realistically, I am not holding my breath that such a resolution can be achieved, or quickly.
Mike, you're getting a personal request from O'Connel to spread his story. He well knows this is right up your alley!
This is a very timely article, and should be read/shared by parents of small children, and those who love those small children, even if they are not their own.
Also, if you have not seen the documentary "Vaxxed", you should. Long story short, the CDC is not completely honest about the kind and amount of damage certain vaccines can cause.
And the vile and weird thing is, many times, that potential for harm is written on the package insert information parents never get to see.
Dtap vaccine can cause autism
A new report says the proposed US-UK trade deal promised by Trump will be "TTIP on steroids," bringing in "corporate courts," privatization of health services and a threat to climate change, Sputnik has been told.
The latest releases by WikiLeaks appear to include descriptions of CIA-developed malware that could turn Samsung TVs into recording devices.
Details about the British-made 'Extending' and the CIA's 'Weeping Angel,' both recently stolen from the CIA, were released by WikiLeaks on Friday.
The documents outline programs that can make certain Samsung TVs into recording devices via a USB drive placed in the televisions, The Hill reported.
The audio channels from the TVs would be rerouted from its microphone to the CIA.
Depending on the veracity of the documents, the initiative might have been developed jointly by Britain's MI5, which first developed the software, and the CIA.
Tens of thousands of farmers could be affected by a "knee-jerk" recommendation to further regulate semiautomatic firearms, Federated Farmers says.
Parliament's Law and Order Committee this month released its report after an inquiry into illegal firearms, with 20 recommendations.
Federated Farmers national board member Katie Milne said the lobby group strongly opposed the recommendation that semiautomatic firearms be further regulated, and that permits be required to lend firearms to other gun licence holders.
"This is a case in which the National Party needs to back up its election promise of less and better regulation," Milne said.
Semiautomatics were the best way of shooting pest species like rabbits, hares and Canada geese, she said.
This guy makes Obama look truthful!
Illegal aliens who crossed the border as children don't have to worry about being sent home, President Donald Trump told the Associated Press in a Friday interview.
Illegals enrolled in the President Barack Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals DACA program can rest easy, Trump said, because this is a case of heart.
There are signs that the mind-pyramids that technocrats have built to enforce their 21st-century global plantation slave system are crumbling as they press harder upon our cognitive ability to make sense of words and actions. The owners of the shoulders on which the structure of tyranny is supported are beginning to leave in droves. The pyramids are falling as slaves begin to recognize their unconscious effort, and consciously encourage others to find a different line of work.
Here are 10 ways that you can help collapse all of the pyramids of control.
The Donald Trump administration considers resuming sales of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia as part of additional military and intelligence assistance to the kingdom's bloody intervention in Yemen.
Officials said Washington, in return, wants new commitments from Riyadh to minimize civilian casualties in Yemen.
"We want the Saudis to show that they are committed to use these things properly," a US official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
A second official, however, suggested that the request for additional safeguards was just a formality. "This is an unconditional sale. There are no conditions attached. The decision has been made to let the sale go through."
The hypocrisy in DC just sickens me, and the degree to which the Trump administration is just happily on board to being complicit to Saudi war crimes in Yemen, does not bode well for peace in the Middle East at all.
These Saudi strikes have murdered women and children.
Images: dead and wounded Yemeni children from Saudi airstrikes
The Saudis have blockaded Yemeni ports, which means no food aid can get in, and children are literally dying from malnutrition:
Images: Yemeni children starving to death from malnutrition due to Saudi port blockades
And the Saudis are using depleted uranium weapons in Yemen, leading to a massive spike in cancers, birth defects, and still births.
Images showing Saudi Arabian troops using depleted uranium in Yemen
Severe birth defects in Yemen, due to Saudi troops using depleted uranium weapons
I will tell you right now, poisoning a child in the womb with depleted uranium weapons, is one of the most hideously cruel and insanely barbaric examples of outright, despicable child abuse I can imagine; and yet, obviously, the House of Saud; the Saudi Military, and the US military are perfectly comfortable doing this in Yemen.
US Defense Secretary General James Mattis has arrived in Israel for talks expected to focus on Iran and Syria as well the strategic relations between Tel Aviv and Washington.
Mattis arrived in Tel Aviv Thursday afternoon from Cairo on the third leg of a week-long tour of the US allies in the Middle East.
Marking the first time he has visited Israel as the Pentagon chief, Mattis was greeted by an official honor guard at army headquarters in Tel Aviv on Friday morning.
He then met the Israeli minister for military affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, and is scheduled to hold talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin.
Mattis hopes to hear directly from Israeli leaders their concerns about regional issues, with Iran's influence topping the list.
'No doubt Syria has chemical weapons'
With the corporate presstitutes demonising Iran this last week (for what specifically, I cannot tell you, because the IAEA has stated that they are still in compliance with the P5+1 deal), I'm not surprised by Sec-Def Mattis' trip to Israel.
What I know, just as certainly as I'm sitting here typing this, is that the Israeli government will make every effort to urge Mattis to "regime change" both Iran and Syria, and just as soon as humanly possible, and with the minimal Israeli military involvement.
Because from the Israeli government's perspective, it should always be American blood and money spent to achieve Israel's geopolitical objectives in the region.
But, as I mentioned in a previous article, there's a 6,000 lb gorilla, resting comfortably on the Bosendorfer; and that 6,000 lb gorilla is... Russia.
American meddling on the ground in Syria may well push al-Assad to invite Russian ground troops into the fray; and Russian political and military leaders have consistently stressed that should Iran be attacked, that Russia would come to its aid militarily.
Sec-Def Mattis, you know what kinds of arms and training the Russians have; would you bet the future existence of the United States against this?!?
Sir, I am hoping - and praying - that the short answer here is...no.
It is hardly surprising that the US and EU policymakers turn a deaf ear to Russia and Damascus's plea to conduct a scrupulous investigation into the suspected use of the chemical weapons in Khan Shaykhun, Russian political analyst Stanislav Tarasov told Radio Sputnik, explaining why the West is uninterested in carrying out such an inquiry.
While American and European politicians remain surprisingly reluctant to the idea to investigate the suspected chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun, political analyst, and head of the Middle East-Caucasus think-tank Stanislav Tarasov suggests that "the West" is by no means interested in conducting such an inquiry.
Speaking to Sputnik on Thursday Syrian President Bashar al-Assad emphasized that Western countries are deliberately blocking attempts to investigate the Idlib chemical incident.
Unfortunately, Al Assad is absolutely bang spot-on with his analysis.
Study: Police-Inflicted Injuries Send More Than 50,000 To Emergency Rooms EVERY YEAR
by Lily Dane
A new study published by JAMA Surgery found that from 2006 to 2012, there were approximately 51,000 emergency department visits per year for patients injured by law enforcement in the United States, with this number stable over this time period.
From the press release:
These statistics speak volumes; it appears that police violence happens to poorer people in urban neighborhoods more often than it does elsewhere.
What ever happened to the police technique of de-escalation?!? Is that even being taught to police cadets anymore?!?
If not, it should be.
The US government has paid at least £100m to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain's intelligence gathering programmes. The top secret payments are set out in documents which make clear that the Americans expect a return on the investment, and that GCHQ has to work hard to meet their demands. "GCHQ must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight," a GCHQ strategy briefing said.
Just when you thought it was over - after Trump 'Tomahawks' Putin's pal Assad, and Tillerson trounces Lavrov - and the media had stopped the constant "Russia did it" narrative, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (which seems like as big an oxymoron as can occur) has called numerous current (and former) officials to testify once again on Russia's "active measures during the 2016 election."
Trying to create a "there", which was never there, is absoflippinglutely unbelievable, and reeks of desperation on the cusp of madness.
A general alert is out for something major in the near or immediate future. Hopefully, it is just another false alarm, instead of another false flag. Either way, and danger is at hand.
Given all that is going on in the world, it is downright eerie to discover that the federal government is once again staging mock disasters that draw disturbing parallels with current world events.
In just a few days, during April 24-26th, Operation Gotham Shield will commence.
It is a tabletop, joint agency exercise involving FEMA, Homeland Security and a myriad of law enforcement and military agencies. WMD, chemical and biological units will all be on hand as a response is tested for a "simulated" nuclear detonation over the United States' foremost urban center, in the iconic and densely populated island of Manhattan and nearby shores of New Jersey.
This exercise will run from next Monday through Wednesday.
I don't know about you, but the hair on the back of my neck is very nervously break-dancing in a completely uncoordinated manner, upon hearing of this exercise.
If it turns out to be a real "false flag" event, who is the US government going to blame?!?
Russia?!? North Korea?!? Iran?!?
All of the above, with the accusation that they collectively, are in possession of a death star?!?
Color me very nervous for the start of this next week.
U.S. multinationals with plants in Venezuela are likely on edge Thursday, after American automaker General Motors (NYSE:GM) pulled the plug on its operations in the poverty-stricken country, following a government takeover of its plant amid large-scale violent protests.
"All foreign companies, and especially U.S. firms, should be concerned with the increasingly extreme and aggressive behavior of the Venezuelan regime," Ian Vasquez, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, told FOX Business.
American beverage company Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO), however, indicated to FOX Business Thursday it didn't have any plans to pull its operations from the distressed South American country.
"There is no indication that any of our facilities in Venezuela are currently at risk of being altered and we're working closely with Venezuelan authorities to assure a continuous operation in the country," the company said.
The choices here are very dicey for American companies doing business in Venezuela.
I just hope and pray that "regime change" here happens with a minimum amount of bloodshed; the Venezuelan people have suffered enough.
There are at least 25 factors that delegitimize the referendum and its results, and once implemented, the repercussions on Turkey's future will be dire and essentially seal the fate of the country's prospective democracy.
Finally, whether or not the West admits it, the referendum raises serious questions about Turkey's commitment to NATO and its importance as an ally. Erdogan has shown time and again that he is untrustworthy in the way he is dealing with Western powers.
His repeated threats to flood Europe with refugees unless he gets his way, and his challenge to the US to stop aiding its ally, the Syrian Kurds (the YPG)—whom he views as terrorists assisting the PKK in their battle against his government—must simply be rejected.
Ruby Ridge and Waco established the precedents that the US government could murder large numbers of Americans, and at Waco some foreigners, without consequence. The "representatives of the people" accepted the executive branch's lies in order to avoid having to hold the executive branch accountable for what were clearly without any doubt capital crimes against American citizens for which the federal perpetrators of these crimes should have been tried and executed.
These two instances established the precedent that the US government could murder US citizens at will.
The next step was to take away the constitutional and legal protections of citizens that are in the Bill of Rights, the amendments to the US Constitution, and are, or were, institutionalized in legal practices.
So the question remains, in the most peaceful, logical way possible, just what are the American people going to do about this?!?
If the short answer is "Nothing", then Americans truly deserve those invisible slave chains the removal our rights have caused us to wear since 9/11.
After launching the disastrous missile strikes against Syrian military forces that resulted in the killing of Syrian soldiers, civilians, and children as well as sending ships toward North Korea in a flagrant act of aggression and dropping the largest known non-nuclear bomb on Afghanistan, the Trump administration is now taking aim at Iran.
Sounding much like it did after its bizarre and unprovoked "putting Iran on notice" speech made by former Trump administration official Michael Flynn, the United States is now "reviewing its policy" on Iran and warning the world of the dangers of a nuclear Iran.
The Path to Persia
It appears that, ahead of another Iranian election cycle, the Israeli government is well and truly cheerleading for "regime change" in Iran, generated primarily by US military action.
However, there is one 6,000 lb gorilla, spread across, and snoozing, on the Bosendorfer in the living room which the US and Israeli government are ignoring at their peril; that is Russia.
Both Russian politicians and military officials have consistently gone on public record in saying that should Iran be attacked - by anyone - Russia will come to its aid militarily.
The US military doesn't have the troop strength; the weaponry; the manufacturing; or the money to go head to head with the Russian military in even a conventional military conflict.
And that is why this "magical thinking/siren song", urging the US government to go to war with a country which has never attacked it, but just had the temerity to throw out its US-backed puppet ruler, the Shaw in 1979, is so horrifically dangerous. As reported in this article by Juan Cole of 2013:
As Israelis Press Obama on Iran, Let's Remember they Urged Iraq War, Too
And we all understand.... just how brilliantly the war in Iraq has worked out, right?!?
With the rest of the administration continuing to play up US hostility toward Iran in the wake of the admission that Iran is fully complying with the P5+1 nuclear deal, President Trump today accused Iran of "violating the spirit of the deal."
President Trump offered no details on exactly what he was referring to, though the allegation is patently false at any rate, with Iran having no nuclear weapons program in the first place, and agreeing to drastically limit its civilian program in return for sanctions relief.
President Trump, what does this accusation this even mean, in light of the fact that the IAEA has consistently reported that Iran is in complete compliance with the terms and conditions of the P5 +1 Agreement?!?
South Korea said on Friday it was on heightened alert ahead of another important anniversary in North Korea, with a large concentration of military hardware amassed on both sides of the border amid concerns about a new nuclear test by Pyongyang.
North Korea said late on Friday the state of affairs on the Korean peninsula was "extremely perilous" because of "madcap American nuclear war manoeuvres aimed at trampling on our sovereignty and right to survival."
U.S. officials said there was a higher-than-usual level of activity by Chinese bombers, signalling a possible heightened state of readiness by reclusive North Korea's sole major ally, although the officials played down concern and left open a range of possible reasons. Beijing denied its aircraft were on an increased level of alert.
In Russia, the RIA news agency said a Kremlin spokesman declined to comment on media reports Russia was moving military hardware and troops towards the border with North Korea.
The sense I have is that US military action against North Korea is eminent.
We are just two and a half weeks away from the 9 May elections in South Korea, and the US military sees its window of opportunity for a military strike against North Korea as narrowing greatly, if the candidate who wins the South Korean election is a proponent of the "sunshine policy", which advocates engagement and trade with North Korea.
After that, the only US military option is a massive false flag, and I am quite certain that those scenarios have already been planned for, and signed off on, by President Trump.
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