President Donald Trump says he may travel to Israel next month to open the new US embassy in the occupied city of Jerusalem al-Quds despite widespread Palestinian anger and global condemnation.

In December 2017, Trump officially declared the holy city as Israel’s capital and said his administration would begin the process of moving the American embassy in Tel Aviv to the disputed city, which is expected to take years.

On Friday, he said he had no regrets about the decision which was a major shift by Washington that overturned decades of US foreign policy.

“I may go. I’m very proud of it,” Trump told reporters at a joint press conference with German leader Angela Merkel.

None of previous US presidents, who had promised to move the embassy to Jerusalem al-Quds while running for election, could deliver on their promises.

“The embassy in Jerusalem has been promised for many, many years by presidents,” Trump said. “They all made…

Philip Bump
Washington Post
April 27, 2018

It’s faded into the background noise by now, as does anything in politics today that’s older than about 12 hours. But it’s worth occasionally remembering that the sitting president of the United States disparaged the media as “the enemy of the American people” within his first month in office.

“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!,” President Donald Trump posted via Twitter on Feb. 17. 2017.

There was a lot going on in that moment, more than we even realized at the time. (Three days before this, for example, Trump allegedly suggested to then-FBI director James Comey that he drop the agency’s investigation into just-fired national security adviser Michael Flynn.) So in short order, the comment was added to the lengthy column of “Things Trump did that most other presidents would never do,” and most of us moved on.

But Trump’s targeting of the media didn’t fade – and neither did the sentiment in that tweet.

Last month, Quinnipiac University’s pollsters asked Americans if they agreed with the sentiment Trump expressed in that tweet. Were certain news outlets – unnamed by Quinnipiac – enemies of the American people? Nearly 4-in-10 said yes – including more than 8-in-10 Republicans.

There are a lot of ways to read that, though. Without identifying the outlets, partisans might simply focus on the outlets they don’t like. Republicans might think of CNN; Democrats of Fox News. Either might think of partisan online outlets. It’s hard to say.

In a poll released on Thursday, Quinnipiac was more direct.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Less than a quarter of the public says that the news media broadly is better described as “enemy of the people” than an “important part of democracy.” But among Republicans, more than half preferred the…

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis says the future of American troops deployed to South Korea will be determined during negotiations with North Korea, as the leaders of the South and North made history after they attended a highly anticipated summit in a bid to put aside decades of enmity between the two peninsular countries.  

“I think for right now we just have to go along with the process, have the negotiations and not try to make preconditions or presumptions about how it is going to go. The diplomats are going to have to go to work now,” Mattis told journalists at a Friday press conference when asked about the future of US troops in South Korea.

Mattis’ comments came less than a day after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, following a highly choreographed summit, signed a joint declaration, dubbed, “the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification on the Korean Peninsula”,…

Photo by Commonwealth Club | CC BY 2.0

Madeleine Albright, without irony, has written a book on resisting Fascism. She has also published an op-ed in the New York Times pushing the same argument. Albright is alarmed and wants to warn the public to stop the fascism emerging under the Trump regime before it is too late.[1]  Unfortunately, moralism on the part of the infamous and notorious is often the enemy of both historical memory and the truth, in spite of their newly discovered opposition to tyranny.   It is hard to believe that a woman who defended the killing of 500,00 children as a result of the imposed US sanctions on Iraq can take up the cause of fighting Fascism while positioning herself (or being positioned by the mainstream media) as being on the forefront of resistance to US authoritarianism. Here is what David Rieff writing in the New York Times says about the sanctions Albright justified: “For many people, the sanctions on Iraq were one of the decade’s great crimes, as appalling as Bosnia or Rwanda. Anger at the United States and Britain, the two principal architects of the policy, often ran white hot. Denis J. Halliday, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Iraq for part of the sanctions era, expressed a widely held belief when he said in 1998: ‘We are in the process of destroying an entire society.’ It is as simple and terrifying as that.”[2]Is any policy worth the death of 500,000 children?  She is not alone.

Hilary Clinton, known…

In late September 2016, a few days after Nikolas Cruz turned 18 and became old enough to buy a gun, the Department of Children and Families sent one or more investigators to Cruz’s home. The Department had been alerted by posts on Snapchat where the young man talked crazily about cutting himself and asked for help in getting a gun.

Among the many missed opportunities widely discussed in the media, here is one on the local level where the Department of Children and Families actually went to his home to investigate. The department intended to evaluate Cruz for “possible detainment under the Baker Act, which allows authorities to hold individuals against their will for up to 72 hours.”

What did the investigator find? NBC News quotes the official report: “Mr. Cruz stated that he plans to go out and buy a gun… It is unknown what he is buying the gun for.”

Not only was Cruz planning to buy a gun while apparently refusing to say what he was planning to use it for, but his mother’s observations cast serious doubt on her son’s mental capacity to own a weapon. According to the New York Times, “She told the investigator that Mr. Cruz did not have a gun, though he did have an air gun she would take away from him when he did not follow rules about shooting only at backyard targets.”

Unbelievably, in full knowledge of Cruz’s intention to buy a gun, and his inability to take responsibility for the use of even an air gun, the department found Cruz to be a “low risk” and closed his case within two months.

Anatomy of an Epidemic…
Robert Whitaker
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Had Cruz been committed, under existing gun laws he would have become unable to legally buy a gun to carry out his…

Opposition mounting to Teamsters deal to cut pensions at ABF Freight

By
Steve Filips

27 April 2018

Workers’ anger is mounting against a sellout deal reached at the end of March between ABF Freight and the Teamsters union. ABF is a subsidiary of Arcbest based in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and is ranked as the overall 11th largest trucking concern handling less-than-truckload (LTL) general commodities from multiple customers within their own regional and national networks. The firm has 10,000 employees, and of that total 8,600 are Teamsters members.

A report from Wolfe Research, a Wall Street analyst, characterized the deal negotiated by the Teamsters as a bonanza for the management. “The details include low annual wage increases and a freeze in pension contributions… we’d view it as positive for ARCB(ABF),” it declared.

While the Teamsters tout the wage raises contained in the deal, they start at a sub-inflation rate of 1.2 percent the first year and a 1.6 percent average in the following years. Further, the contract mandates pension cuts of up to 60 percent for nearly 10 percent for future retirees. Workers will regain one-week vacation lost in the last contract. However, the utilization of lower paid part timers and subcontractors to reduce company costs did not appear to be seriously addressed.

The previous contract expired March 31, but was extended to allow for a vote by the membership. There was no mention of a strike, although workers voted earlier this year by a margin of 98 percent for strike authorization.

The latest sellout deal follows a concession agreement in 2013 where wages were slashed 7 percent. The cuts were declared necessary to stave off an ABF bankruptcy due to net business losses totaling $7.7 million in 2012. The 2013 concessions were projected…

If you force me to choose – and tragically, the mischievious confection of an “anti-semitism crisis” in the Labour party does require me to choose, because it turns racism into a competition between worthier “victims” – Marc Wadsworth, a black activist and the founder of the Anti-Racist Alliance, is a much bigger victim of racism than Jewish Labour MP Ruth Smeeth.

The proof is in the 50 Labour MPs who marched with her to an internal party hearing that they expect will expel Wadsworth. The MPs wanted to give the impression of serving as a bodyguard; in fact, they looked more like a lynch mob.

Wadsworth’s “crime” is his accusation at a meeting to unveil the Chakrabarti report nearly two years ago that Smeeth had been leaking stories to the right wing press to harm Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

We can argue the facts about whether Wadsworth’s claim is true: whether Smeeth did indeed connive with the anti-Corbyn press. But even if he is wrong, that would not make his allegations anti-semitic.

Furthermore, the accusation itself is hardly far-fetched. The Blairite wing of the parliamentary party, of which Smeeth is very much a part, barely bothers any more to conceal its desire to oust Corbyn from the leadership.

In fact, the Blairites now seem determined to terminally wound not just Corbyn but their own party, as they did at the instigation of the Conservative government last week in a debate on anti-semitism. The opportunistic pummelling of Corbyn,…

RT
April 27, 2018
Russia’s envoy to the OPCW said it was crucial to avoid new false-flag attacks in Syria and that Moscow “won’t allow” US military action there, as he described details of Russian findings on the site of the alleged Douma incident.

New false-flag operations against Damascus are “possible, since our American partners are once again threatening to take military action against Syria, but we will not allow that,” Russia’s permanent representative to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Aleksandr Shulgin, said during a press conference in The Hague on Thursday.

The meeting was called by Russia’s OPCW mission and featured witnesses of the April 7 alleged chemical incident in the city of Douma. It highlighted the findings of Russian military experts, who were among the first to reach the site of the purported attack and locate the “munitions” that supposedly hit the residential buildings.

“Russian experts performed a detailed analysis of the information on the ground,” Major-General Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection (RKhBZ) Troops, said. “Two gas cylinders, allegedly dropped by the government forces from helicopters, were found in two apartments.”

Read more

This article was posted: Friday, April 27, 2018 at 5:27 am

US President Donald Trump says Iran will not acquire nuclear weapons amid speculations that he will pull out of the nuclear deal reached between Tehran and the P5+1 group in 2015.

Trump made the remarks at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Washington on Friday.

The president said that the US will ensure Iran will not get close to nuclear weapons, a goal Tehran has always denied pursuing. However, he did not clarify whether he would use military force in Iran if necessary.

“I don’t talk about whether or not I would use military force…,but I can tell you this, they will not be doing nuclear weapons. That I can tell you. OK? They are not going to be doing nuclear weapons. You can bank on it.”

Meanwhile, Merkel called the deal “a first step that has contributed to slowing down their activities in this particular respect,” but added that she will continue to be in very close talks with the US over the…

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opens to the public in Montgomery, Ala., on Thursday, is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to enslaved black people, the victims of lynching, racial segregation and Jim Crow laws.

The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a Montgomery nonprofit that focuses on racial injustice and criminal justice reform and works to help marginalized communities, is responsible for bringing the memorial to fruition, The New York Times reports. EJI founder Bryan Stevenson told the paper that the idea for the memorial was inspired by the fact that nothing like it existed—despite the thousands of black people who died during decades of racial terror in America.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opens to the public in Montgomery, Ala., on Thursday, is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to enslaved black people, the victims of lynching, racial segregation and Jim Crow laws.

The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a Montgomery nonprofit that focuses on racial injustice and criminal justice reform and works to help marginalized communities, is responsible for bringing the memorial to fruition, The New York Times reports. EJI founder Bryan Stevenson told the paper that the idea for the memorial was inspired by the fact that nothing like it existed—despite the thousands of black people who died during decades of racial terror in America.

“Our nation’s history of racial injustice casts a shadow across the American…

The House Intelligence Committee has officially announced the end of its Russia investigation, revealing in a final report that there was “no evidence” regarding alleged collusion between Russia and US President Donald Trump’s campaign in the 2016 presidential election.

In the report released on Friday, the Republican-led panel rejected ties between Moscow and Washington in the US presidential vote, criticizing Trump’s campaign team and the campaign run by former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton for “poor judgment and ill-considered actions” in their dealings with Russian figures.

“While the Committee found no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded, coordinated, or conspired with the Russian government, the investigation did find poor judgment and ill-considered actions by the Trump and Clinton campaigns,” it said.

The report slammed the controversial June 2016 Trump Tower meeting in which Donald Trump Jr. and other top Trump…

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com
April 27, 2018

Peter Schiff has been saying that even though the stock market is on a slow downward slide, the biggest problem is actually in the bond market. Last week, Schiff warned us to be wary of the calm before the storm, and this week, he said most, including the Federal Reserve, are oblivious to the upcoming crash.

Yields have risen to levels not seen since before the 2008 crash. More significantly, the yield curve is flattening, according to Schiff. 

According to Seeking Alpha, Schiff pointed out, if you go back to the Second World War and look at average bond yields, these low rates are an aberration. They’ve been low for a long time, but they aren’t going to stay low forever. And yet the market seems to think it’s going to go on for another 30 years.

“Clearly, the market assumes that interest rates on 10-year government bonds are going to stay just barely over 3% for the next 20 or 30 years. I mean, that is crazy. Why would anybody think that?”

Just consider the deficits as well. The federal government is running $100 billion per month budget deficits – and this is during a supposed economic expansion. What’s going to happen when we hit a recession? And of course, rising interest rates just compound the problem. As Treasuries come due, the government has to replace them with higher interest rate bonds. This expands the deficit even further.

Also compounding the problem is the money printing scheme the Federal Reserve has taken to.  Why in the world would any rational person assume inflation will remain low?

We also have interest rates at around 3% and there is already some handwringing and nervousness. But as Peter said, they could easily blow through four or even 5%. The Fed keeps saying it plans to reduce its balance sheet, but it hasn’t sold very many bonds to date. What happens if they follow through with tightening plans and…

The newly-appointed US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, says President Donald Trump is “unlikely to stay” in the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six world countries as a deadline looms for the US to announce its stance.

“There’s been no decision, so the team is working and I am sure we will have lots of conversations to deliver what the president has made clear,” Pompeo told reporters during a press conference on Friday at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he said he had discussed the Iran deal with counterparts.

“The President has been clear — absent a substantial fix, absent overcoming the shortcomings, the flaws of the deal — he is unlikely to stay in that deal past this May,” Pompeo said.

Trump has been a vociferous critic of the Iran nuclear agreement, which was negotiated under his predecessor, Barack Obama. He has called the agreement the “worst deal ever” and even threatened to tear it up.

Back in January,…

“Together,” President Macron instructed President Trump, “we can resist the rise of aggressive nationalisms that deny our history and divide the world.”

Before Congress he denounced “extreme nationalism,” invoked the U.N., NATO, WTO, and Paris climate accord, and implored Trump’s America to come home to the New World Order.

“The United States is the one who invented this multilateralism,” Macron went on, “you are the one now who has to help preserve and reinvent it.”

His visit was hailed and his views cheered, but, on reflection, the ideas of Emmanuel Macron seem to be less about tomorrow than yesterday.

For the world he celebrates is receding into history.

The America of 2018 is coming to see NATO as having evolved into an endless U.S. commitment to go to war with Russia on behalf of a rich Europe that resolutely refuses to provide for its own defense.

Since the WTO was created in the mid-’90s, the U.S. has run $12 trillion in trade deficits; and among the biggest beneficiaries — the EU.

Nixonu2019s White Hous…
Patrick J. Buchanan
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Under the Paris climate accord, environmental restrictions are put upon the United States from which China is exempt.

As for the U.N., is that sinkhole of anti-Americanism, the General Assembly, really worth the scores of billions we have plunged into it?

“Aggressive nationalism” is a term that might well fit Napoleon Bonaparte whose Arc de Triomphe sits on the Champs-Elysees. But does it really fit the Hungarians, Poles, Brits, Scots, Catalans and other indigenous peoples of Europe who are now using democratic methods and means to preserve a national home for the unique peoples to whom they belong?

And the United…

If Israel persuades the United States to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement, Washington and Tel Aviv will be totally isolated, according to E. Michael Jones, an American political analyst in Indiana.

Jones, a writer, former professor, media commentator and the current editor of the Culture Wars magazine, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Thursday. 

On Tuesday, the US and French presidents called for major changes to Iran’s nuclear deal, despite Tehran’s repeated assertions that the agreement is non-negotiable.

“I can say that we have had very frank discussions on that, just the two of us,” French President Emmanuel Macron told a joint press conference with his US counterpart Donald Trump in Washington on Tuesday. “We, therefore, wish from now on to work on a new deal with Iran.”

When asked to clarify if he meant a new accord or an add-on agreement, Macron said, “I am not saying that we move from one…

If there’s any surprise that Senate Democrats, almost virtually indistinguishable from pro-war Republicans, are about to coalesce in support of the newest version of the AUMF , then you have seriously not been paying attention, says Renee Parsons.

By Renee Parsons

The proposed Authority for the Use of Military Force of 2018 (AUMF) of 2018 would replace AUMF 2001 and repeal AUMF 2002 while it will codify an “uninterrupted authority to use all necessary and appropriate force in armed conflict” against  the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS and as yet unidentified “designated associated forces” who might “pose a grave threat to the US” in whatever country they occupy.

Since its adoption in 2001 within days of the 911 attack, the AUMF has served to justify every expansion of the US military’s role in the Middle East with every relevant Congressional oversight committee acting as little more than a syncopation of bobbing heads.

The AUMF 2018 offers  no restriction on military ops and no expiration or sunshine date while it  abdicates all Congressional statutory war making authority as defined in the Constitution to the executive branch with no meaningful oversight or accountability.

In other words, the AUMF 2018 represents a complete capitulation  to the MIC in a permanent continuation of almost two decades of “forever war”ostensibly in the Middle East for future generations of American troops  as the country is driven deeper into an indisputable ditch of financial insolvency and a wicked, amoral quagmire at home.

It has been fifty years since Congressional Democrats were in the vanguard of the anti-Vietnam war movement. Since the 1960’s few elected Democrats have dared challenge the party leadership to speak for peace or challenge any administration’s military interventionist policy and yet it is the Democratic party which claims the moral high ground.

Daschle: The prime sponsor.

Still instructive is an analysis of the October, 2002 Congressional AUMF resolution approving GW Bush’s grotesque invasion of Iraq. The original AUMF was adopted by Congress three days after the 911 attacks with Senate Democratic Majority Leader Tom…

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation
April 27, 2018

Crime rates are skyrocketing across the board in multicultural Britain.

From The Daily Mail:

A knife crime epidemic in London and England’s big cities has seen the number of offences involving blades soar by more than a fifth in the last year.

Police in England and Wales recorded 39,598 offences involving blades in the year ending December 2017, a 22% increase compared with the previous year.

London saw a 44% increase in the number of killings, with more than 150 victims, while the number knife offences in the capital rose by more than 20 per cent to 14,680, separate stats showed.

The stats were released amid growing concern at the spiralling number of deadly attacks on the capital’s streets, with more than 60 people killed since the start of 2018.

I think we can all agree, as Labour MP Naz Shah retweeted last year, all these crime victims need to “shut their mouths for the good of diversity!”

Offences involving firearms were up, by 11% to 6,604 recorded crimes.

Knife and gun crimes tend to be disproportionately concentrated in London and other metropolitan areas, the Office for National Statistics said, but it added that the majority of police force areas saw rises in these types of violent crime.

The figures showed the number of homicides went up by 54, or 9%, to a total of 653, when cases linked to the Hillsborough disaster and last year’s terror attacks were excluded.

In the overall category of ‘violence against the person’, there were 1.3 million crimes logged, a rise of a fifth on the number in 2016.

Recorded burglary and robbery offences went up by 9% and 33% respectively, while the separate Crime Survey for England and Wales showed a 17% jump in vehicle thefts.

In total, police recorded 5.4 million offences, a 13% year-on-year rise.

While the outlook might seem bleak, it’s important to keep in mind, as leftist…

The leaders of North and South Korea agreed to pursue a peace agreement in historic talks on Friday, but steered clear of specifics on the question of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons, leaving uncertainties about the regime’s willingness to cede ground on its arsenal ahead of a meeting between Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump.

After an 8½-hour meeting in the demilitarized zone that was heavy on shows of amity between Mr. Kim and Moon Jae-in, his South Korean counterpart, both men agreed to take steps to dial down tensions and start talks with the U.S., and perhaps China, aimed at declaring within the year a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War. The conflict ended in an armistice that has held, despite some skirmishes, for 65 years.

The joint statement, called the Panmunjom Declaration, also calls for restarting reunions of families separated by the Korean War, and the establishment of an inter-Korean liaison office on the northern side. As part of the pact, Mr. Moon will travel to Pyongyang in the fall for a summit meeting.

In one surreal moment in a day replete with symbolism, Messrs. Kim and Moon abandoned their aides and strolled side by side to a park bench on a footbridge, where they conversed for more than half an hour—as cameras captured the moment for a rapt South Korean audience.

“We will work towards preventing another horrible war,” Mr. Kim said after signing the joint declaration. “With one language, one culture and one history, North and…

This week’s episode discusses the German workers who elect almost half of corporate boards of directors, major US corporations with negative tax rates, Kentucky governor maneuvers against black-lung victims, involuntary part-time employment, US evictions and dangerous long-term use of anti-depressants. Also included is a discussion of the economics of socialism and phony claims by state leaders that there’s “no money.”

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The RussiaGate conspiracy drama is a double-edged damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t trap for people on the portside. The perils of signing on to the storyline are clear as day to any self-respecting Leftist. Five come to mind off the top of my head:

1. Neo-McCarthyite distraction from numerous terrible things that the racist, nativist, sexist, white-nationalist, and eco-cidal, planet-cooking Trump administration and the Republican Party are doing with scant serious opposition from the dismal dollar Democrats. The media and the Democrats have the political culture mired in the Russia-Trump conspiracy while the in-power right-wing has worked all-too behind the scenes to: slash taxes for the already absurdly wealthy Few; reduce poor people’s access to health care; hand the federal bench over to religious and free-market fundamentalists; attack women’s reproductive and other rights; deport and harass immigrants; attack minority voting rights; criminalize protest and dissent; rollback labor and collective bargaining rights; rollback civil rights; increase the insanely gigantic Pentagon budget; make desperately poor people perform underpaid work in order to receive health insurance and public housing assistance; shred environmental protections; weaken financial regulations; decrease workplace safety; murder thousands of innocents across the Middle East; deepen Washington’s alliance with murderous regimes like Saudi Arabia and Israel;…

It may almost seem too obvious to mention, but I don’t think that’s why we so seldom mention it. I don’t mean being male, or being mentally disturbed, or having been cruel to women, or living in places like the United States where it’s easy to acquire weapons of war. These and many other factors are very significant and very often discussed, as they should be, when we consider mass killings.

There’s something else that ties a lot of mass killers together, and it’s also obvious, but seldom discussed. The man who killed with a van in Toronto had been briefly in the Canadian military and promoted his crime on Facebook beforehand as a military operation. The same day he killed in Toronto, the G7 countries were meeting at the University of Toronto and declaring their unified hostility toward Russia. The mass killing on Toronto’s streets sought to solve problems in the same way that the Canadian government and its allies seek to solve problems.

The recent mass-killing in a Florida High School was also promoted by the killer as a military operation, in the sense that he wore his JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) shirt and killed in the same school where the U.S. Army had trained him to shoot and instructed him in war-supporting views of the world and its history.

Why should anyone notice such points or generalize from them? Don’t members of militaries and veterans have it hard enough already without such gross bigotry?

There’s actually no…

Proposal mirrors that suggested by UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn

Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
April 27, 2018

The president of the Islam Party in Belgium, which sees as its ultimate goal the creation of a “100% Islamic state,” announced his plan to create gender segregated public transport under sharia law.

Abdelhay Bakkali Tahiri told RT that the party wants to create segregated zones for women on public transport in order to protect “vulnerable groups” like women and children.

In reality of course, the measure is a reflection of strict Muslim morality codes that treat women as second class citizens and require gender segregation. Some Islamic theologians have even issued fatwas (death warrants) against those who allow mixing of the sexes.

The party also wants to integrate Sharia law into the Belgian legislative system and mandate halal meat in all public schools in pursuit of a “100% Islamic state.” Some have called for the party to be banned.

As we reported yesterday, during a live television debate, the Islam Party’s founder Redouane Ahrouch refused to shake the hands of female participants or look them in the eye.

Following the debate, the women on the panel labeled Ahrouch’s behavior “shocking,” adding that they felt “humiliated” and “worthless.”

The Islam Party, which has its origins in Molenbeek, the notorious Brussels suburb that has been the home of numerous Islamic terrorists, already has two elected councilors and will participate in 28 municipalities in this year’s elections.

Illustrating how the far-left and Islamism are beginning to coalesce, UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has also called for gender segregation on public transport for virtually the same reasons.

Back in 2015, Corbyn said he would look at introducing women-only carriages on trains in order to “reduce harassment”.

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The Democratic Party and the confirmation of Mike Pompeo

27 April 2018

Former Congressman and CIA Director Mike Pompeo was confirmed Thursday afternoon by the US Senate to be secretary of state. The former Army tank commander, a supporter of torture and unlimited domestic spying, will now hold the top position in the Trump cabinet, as well as being fourth in line of succession to the presidency.

The installation of Pompeo as head of the State Department in place of Rex Tillerson follows President Trump’s replacement of Gen. H. R. McMaster with former Bush administration official and Iraq War conspirator John Bolton as national security adviser. Both Pompeo and Bolton have called for war against Iran and North Korea. They form a new foreign policy team that is even more reckless than the preceding one. Their installation signals an accelerated drive to a wider war in the Middle East and military conflict with Russia and China.

Pompeo embodies the link between imperialist war-mongering and political repression within the United States. He has defended waterboarding and the Bush administration’s CIA torture program. In a speech last year be called WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” He has called for the trial and execution of whistleblower Edward Snowden and advocates an expansion of the National Security Agency’s illegal mass surveillance program.

Pompeo was immediately sworn in by ultra-right Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. The new secretary of state boarded a plane to fly overnight to Brussels, where he will represent the US government at a NATO foreign ministers conference. This assemblage will discuss actions against Russia over the false charges of poisoning a former British double agent, Sergei Skripal, as well as Russian support for…

US President Donald Trump has lashed out at James Comey after he rejected accusations about illegally leaking classified information by sharing private memos, saying that the former FBI director was “either very sick or very dumb.” 

The rebuke came on Friday, a day after Comey appeared on a Fox News show, where he denied leaking memos inappropriately.

“Is everybody believing what is going on. James Comey can’t define what a leak is. He illegally leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION but doesn’t understand what he did or how serious it is. He lied all over the place to cover it up. He’s either very sick or very dumb. Remember sailor!” Trump said in a tweet.

The US president possibly referred to Kristian Saucier, a Navy sailor who pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2016 for taking and retaining unauthorized photos of classified areas and objects aboard a submarine. Trump pardoned Saucier in March.

On the Thursday night show, the former FBI…

No Attack, No Victims, No Chem Weapons: Douma Witnesses Speak at OPCW Briefing at the Hague

Witnesses of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, including 11-year-old Hassan Diab and hospital staff, told reporters at The Hague that the White Helmets video used as a pretext for a US-led strike on Syria was, in fact, staged.

“We were at the basement and we heard people shouting that we needed to go to a hospital. We went through a tunnel. At the hospital they started pouring cold water on me,” the boy told the press conference, gathered by Russia’s mission at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague.

Hassan was among the “victims” seen being washed by water hoses in a video released by the controversial White Helmets group on April 7. The boy and his family later spoke to the media and revealed that Hassan was hurried to the scene by men who claimed that a chemical attack had taken place. They started pouring cold water on the boy and others, filming the frightened children.

“There were people unknown to us who were filming the emergency care, they were filming the chaos taking place inside, and were filming people being doused with water. The instruments they used to douse them with water were originally used to clean the floors actually,” Ahmad Kashoi, an administrator of the emergency ward, recalled. “That happened for about an hour, we provided help to them and sent them home. No one has died. No one suffered from…

The three trillion-dollar income stream produced by the medical industrial complex is about to come demolished by a home remedy – baking soda.  Buy stock in Arm & Hammer. (Church & Dwight Co. Ltd.)

Now for the details:

Researchers at the Medical College of Georgia have discovered a nerve center in a cell layer in the spleen that controls the immune response and therefore inflammation throughout the body.  Given that virtually all chronic age-related disease involves inflammation (called inflammaging), this discovery is of monumental significance and has widespread application for virtually every organ and tissue in the body as the spleen is not only an abdominal organ that is involved in the recycling of old blood cells but is also a key part of the human immune system.

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The striking part of this discovery is that autoimmune reactions responsible for chronic inflammation throughout the body were quelled by consumption of two grams (~half a teaspoon) of baking soda in water for two weeks in healthy humans.  Researchers say baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) calms the immune response in the spleen and has a system-wide effect.

An over-active immune response defines autoimmune disorders experienced in physically remote parts of the body including the eyes, kidneys, brain, joints, arteries and lungs as well as in obesity.

As researchers explain, when sodium bicarbonate is consumed it becomes a trigger for the stomach to make more acid to digest the next meal and for the overlooked mesothelial cell lining in the spleen to signal there is no need to mount an overly protective immune response that can alter a delicate balance between M1 and M2 macrophages, white blood cells…

US President Donald Trump has hailed the “great help” that Chinese President Xi Jinping has offered in moving forward the peace process on the Korean peninsula.

“Please do not forget the great help that my good friend, President Xi of China, has given to the United States, particularly at the Border of North Korea. Without him it would have been a much longer, tougher, process!” Trump tweeted on Friday.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and the South’s President Moon Jae-in signed a joint declaration on Friday agreeing to work for the “complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula” following their historic summit.

During their first summit in more than a decade, the…

Police officers patrol the outer perimeter of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility April 12, 1993, after a prisoner uprising on April 11, 1993. (Photo: Eugene Garcia / AFP / Getty Images)

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the Lucasville Uprising, the longest prison revolt involving fatalities to occur in the history of the United States. Survivors of this 11-day prisoner takeover of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility (SOCF) have been active and inspiring participants in the present movement for prisoners’ rights, gaining attention that was unavailable to them in 1993. In light of the growing momentum in prisoner uprisings, including the recent South Carolina prison riot that was the deadliest in the past 25 years, the Lucasville Uprising offers timely lessons on the interplay between repressive state forces and prisoner-led movements.

The Lucasville Uprising often gets lost in the retelling of prison rebellions because it occurred during the prison boom, a period of accelerating mass incarceration during which the widespread use of “three strikes” policies began, long-term solitary confinement grew into Supermax prisons, and prison construction and expansion skyrocketed.

Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier describe these years, from 1980 to 1998, in their new book Rethinking the American Prison Movement as a “largely bleak period for the prison movement … splintering the elements that had made [it] a potent force,” while prison rebels “found it more difficult to sustain the broad coalition that had been a key part of earlier phases of the movement.” Unlike Attica and other uprisings occurring during the civil rights era, or the present wave of prison strikes, the state’s narrative about Lucasville as a “dangerous riot” dominated coverage, overshadowing the political nature of the uprising and the prisoner’s legitimate grievances. Lucasville survivors continue to struggle against this shadow today.

The Takeover at Lucasville

The first wave of prisoner-led…

Photo by Phil Roeder | CC BY 2.0

When Bernie Sanders took the stage in Washington Square Park in New York City on a cold April night in 2016, he faced a crowd of approximately 25,000 adoring fans, many of whom were young, progressive, and desperately seeking a political alternative to the seemingly ineluctable game of Russian roulette that was a Clinton-Trump crapshoot.

They waited for hours, listened to progressive celebrities like Spike Lee and Tim Robbins give rousing speeches, and were finally rewarded when the self-proclaimed democratic socialist from Vermont approached the podium with his characteristic lack of flair and precisely crafted economic populist stump speech which he had delivered a thousand times.

And yet, the energy coursing through the crowd told the story. They didn’t care they’d heard it all many times before, that Sanders was reading from the same cue cards as he had a hundred times in the weeks and months prior; they just wanted a glimpse of the man who, even if he wasn’t going to be president, had ignited a political revolution on the progressive left.

That night, Sanders’ voice carried to the 50,000 ears in the park, and the millions of eyeballs watching on the live feed and reading in the paper the next morning,

And when Sanders spoke, his words were like sustenance to young progressives who came of age in a time of political hopelessness, despite President Hope and Change sitting in the Oval Office. In The Bern, they saw a Moses-like…

By Dr. Mercola

Among all the factors contributing to poor health and early death, stress is perhaps the most pernicious yet commonly overlooked. While the stress response is a lifesaving biological function, enabling you to fight or flee an attacker, this “lifesaving” reaction ends up doing far more harm than good when triggered by financial worries, fear of public speaking, difficult bosses and traffic jams.

The sheer number of stress-inducing situations that face us on a daily basis can make it difficult to turn the stress response off. As a result, you may be marinating in corrosive stress hormones around the clock, and this can have serious consequences, from compounding a weight problem to elevating your blood pressure and raising your risk of a heart attack.^1,2

Emotional Resilience Helps Lessen the Impact of Stress

Clearly, stress is an inescapable part of life; it’s how you address it that will determine whether it will translate into health problems later on. The stress reaction should dissipate as quickly as possible after the perceived danger has passed. The scientific term for this is “resilience” — your ability to rapidly return to normal, physically and emotionally, after a stressful event.

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As explained by wellness coach Elizabeth Scott, diplomate at the American Institute of Stress and author of “8 Keys to Stress Management”:³

“More resilient people are able to ‘roll with the punches’ and adapt to adversity without lasting difficulties; less resilient people have a harder time with stress and life changes, both major and minor. It’s been found that those who deal with minor stresses more easily…

by The Real News Network (TRNN) / April 27th, 2018

The United States is going to “re-energize” a multi-lateral military campaign that it has been leading in Syria, says US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, contrasting his boss President Donald Trump’s pledge to pull out troops from Syria.

“We are not withdrawing,” Mattis said at a hearing session of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

“You’ll see a re-energized effort against the middle Euphrates River Valley in the days ahead and against the rest of the geographic caliphate,” the Pentagon chief told the panel, referring to Syrian territories that remain under terrorist control.

Since September 2014, the US and its allies have been pounding purported terrorist positions across Syria without coordination with Damascus or a mandate from the United Nations.

The airstrike has failed to yield any meaningful results and has on many occasions worked to the disadvantage of President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

However, Syria has been…

Weasel Zipers
April 26, 2018

Via Egypt Independent:

The Dar al-Iftaa-affiliated Observatory of Islamophobia denounced a call by former director of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Philippe Val, to delete verses from the Holy Quran, which in his view call for fighting the Jews and Christians. The Observatory described the call as “hateful racism”.

The Observatory said in a report on Tuesday that Val had claimed to have garnered 300 signatures in favor of the idea by well-known figures in France, most notably former President Nicolas Sarkozy, former Prime Minister Manuel Carlos Valls, and the famous singer Charles Aznavour.

The Observatory denounced “such dangerous calls launched by some from time to time, causing attacks and antagonism against Muslims there, and creating a conflict among the people [of France]”.

These calls also uphold views that say that “France is not a land that welcomes Islam”, the Observatory added.

This article was posted: Thursday, April 26, 2018 at 7:16 am