Newsbusters
April 1, 2018

Well that didn’t take long.

My prediction was made in this space on October 28, 2017. The headline: “Laura Ingraham: New Fox Star, New Left-Wing Target.”

In which I said the following of the Fox announcement that Laura Ingraham- she the radio talker, ex-Reagan staffer, Justice Clarence Thomas Supreme Court clerk and all-around conservative superstar – would be hosting a new Fox opinion show at 10 pm weekdays. I wrote:

“This is the strategy of the Left. Since they can’t make the arguments for their side, the answer is to take out the stars of conservative media. Ruin their careers. If possible destroy their lives. Beck and Dobbs and Rush yesterday, Hannity or Tucker today. And now that Laura arrives on the scene with her own prime time show following on the heels of Sean Hannity’s? Start sharpening the knives.

Laura Ingraham calls David Hogg whiny.

Apologizes. Still loses a ton of sponsors & maybe her job.

David Hogg: ‘Jokes’ about mosquitoes killing “billions” of people, calls it a “great” thing.

Doesn’t apologize. Doesn’t even address it. No one cares.https://t.co/Rba6jGPxUx

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) April 1, 2018

See how much @therealroseanne has pissed off the establishment just for daring to portray a Trump supporter as not a complete monster? Just watch, they’ll throw absolutely everything at her now. These people are relentlessly vicious.

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) April 1, 2018

….The last thing the leftist media wants to see is yet another conservative superstar with an hour of Fox time cutting Big Government down to size with support for the hated Trump and his populist craziness.

….But the ultimate, ultimate insult, of course, is that the star of the Ingraham Angle is…a woman. Worse still, this is a woman who never hesitates to wear a piece of jewelry around her neck that is — oh nooooooo! — a…

In the latest continuation of western media’s shameless promotion of a known war criminal, the Washington Post sat down with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) last Thursday for a 75-minute discussion (even the Post itself previously published an acknowledgment of his crimes).

While the Post’s write-up focuses mainly on the allegation that MBS has Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, “in his pocket,” the war in Yemen, and the rights of women in the Kingdom, most curious is the second-to-last paragraph of the report, which states the following:

“Asked about the Saudi-funded spread of Wahhabism, the austere faith that is dominant in the kingdom and that some have accused of being a source of global terrorism, Mohammed said that investments in mosques and madrassas overseas were rooted in the Cold War, when allies asked Saudi Arabia to use its resources to prevent inroads in Muslim countries by the Soviet Union.” [emphasis added]

What? Allies asked Saudi Arabia to use its resources — specifically, investments in mosques and madrassas overseas —to prevent countries from forming alliances with the former Soviet Union?

Of course, it was already known that Saudi Arabia was doing just that for decades, but this is the first time the blame has been openly shifted to Western allies in an interview with a major newspaper.

As the Week explained in 2015, Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars “investing heavily in building mosques, madrasas, schools, and Sunni cultural centers across the Muslim world. Indian intelligence says that in India alone, from 2011 to 2013, some 25,000 Saudi clerics arrived bearing more than $250 million to build mosques and universities and hold seminars.”

The…

Build rank-and-file committees to unite with teachers in Arizona and Kentucky!

Mobilize the working class behind striking Oklahoma educators!

By
Socialist Equality Party

31 March 2018

Tens of thousands of striking Oklahoma teachers and school employees are converging in the state capital Monday to demand higher wages and increased school funding. They have rejected the bipartisan bill passed Thursday night that includes an insulting $6,000 one-off pay increase and a small increase in school funding that will not make a dent in the billions of dollars that have been cut from education over the past decade.

The statewide strike in Oklahoma is part of an expanding wave of struggles by educators across the United States and internationally. On Friday, teachers in Kentucky rejected the union’s proposal that they do nothing in the face of severe cuts to pensions, organizing wildcat sickouts and closing schools in 29 counties. Thousands will demonstrate in Frankfort today, and demands are growing for a strike.

Educators in Arizona, where median pay is last in the nation, are calling for a statewide strike following a demonstration last Wednesday for wage and school funding increases. The movement of teachers, which erupted with the nine-day walkout in West Virginia last month, has also spread to Colorado, New Jersey and other states, plus the US territory of Puerto Rico.

The National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) are opposed to an extended strike in Oklahoma, which would galvanize opposition throughout the country. The unions are seeking to send teachers back to work after a one-day strike that will resolve nothing. They want to turn teachers’ energies toward the dead end of lobbying and pressuring the bought-and-paid-for…

Former US Veterans Affairs (VA) Secretary David Shulkin says he did not resign from his post despite allegations by the White House, suggesting that he was fired.

Shulkin told CNN on Sunday that he was “committed to making sure this job was seen through to the very end.”

The administrations of US President Donald Trump is no stranger to staff and cabinet shake-ups.

Some recent ones are former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and White House communications director Hope Hicks.

Shulkin said he “never had any issues” with Trump.

“I came to run the Department of Veterans Affairs because I’m committed to veterans,” Shulkin said, while a West Wing spokesperson maintained that he himself stepped down from his post. “I did not resign.”

On Saturday, White House deputy press secretary Lindsey Walters asserted that “Secretary Shulkin resigned from his position as Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

In a tweet last week,…

Daily Mail
April 1, 2018

Scientists have developed an astonishing mind-reading machine which can translate what you are thinking and instantly display it as text.

They claim that it has an accuracy rate of 90 per cent or more and say that it works by interpreting consonants and vowels in our brains.

The researchers believe that the machine could one day help patients who suffer from conditions that don’t allow them to speak or move.

The machine registers and analyses the combination of vowels and consonants that we use when constructing a sentence in our brains.

It interprets these sentences based on neural signals and can translate them into text in real time.

In fact, scientists claim that the machine can use words that it hasn’t even heard before.

Read more

This article was posted: Sunday, April 1, 2018 at 6:23 am

Boston — After back-to-back, eight-hour shifts at a chiropractor’s office and a rehab center, Nirva arrived outside an elderly woman’s house just in time to help her up the front steps.

Nirva took the woman’s arm as she hoisted herself up, one step at a time, taking breaks to ease the pain in her hip. At the top, they stopped for a hug.

“Hello, bella,” Nirva said, using the word for “beautiful” in Italian.

“Hi, baby,” replied Isolina Dicenso, the 96-year-old woman she has helped care for for seven years.

The women each bear accents from their homelands: Nirva, who asked that her full name be withheld, fled here from Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Dicenso moved here from Italy in 1949. Over the years, Nirva, 46, has helped her live independently, giving her showers, changing her clothes, washing her windows, taking her to her favorite parks and discount grocery stores.

Now Dicenso and other people living with disabilities, serious illness and the frailty of old age are bracing to lose caregivers like Nirva due to changes in federal immigration policy.

Nirva is one of about 59,000 Haitians living in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a humanitarian program that gave them permission to work and live here after the January 2010 earthquake devastated their country. Many work in health care, often in grueling, low-wage jobs as nursing assistants or home health aides.

Now these workers’ days are numbered: The Trump administration decided to end TPS for Haitians, giving them until July 22, 2019, to leave the country or face deportation.

In Boston, the city with the nation’s third-highest Haitian population, the decision has prompted panic from TPS holders and pleas from health care agencies that rely on their labor. The fallout offers a glimpse into how changes in immigration policy are affecting older Americans in communities around the country, especially in large cities.

Ending TPS for Haitians “will have a devastating impact on the ability of skilled nursing…

Photo by Paul Siarkowski | CC BY 2.0

“It seems like a bad dream,”

— The New York Times. March 28, 2018

Former President Jimmy Carter, recently interviewed on the PBS Newshour repeated what often seems to be our bottom line: “I think the future of the politics in America is dependent on what Mueller will have come forward to allege.”

But then again, there is no “our” now.

Whatever Mueller’s investigation comes up with will surely be countered by “alternative fact,” not simply by President Trump and the many toadies who surround him but by that same impenetrable coalition of supporters Trump has had from the start. This will leave any indictments or impeachment moves as nothing more than accelerants to civil war, rather like the Kansas-Nebraska Act and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, called the fuse that ignited the powder keg of secession.

Many — not enough to keep Trump out of the White House in 2016 — hope that the Congressional elections in November will topple or at least seriously damage the Republican hold on Congress. Maybe those elections will wake us up into some semblance of unity, or, rather more likely wake some up angry and others relieved. Or maybe the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, will decide that even his hero Ayn Rand would try to remove Trump from the presidency. However, Mr. Ryan seems to see great promise in fulfilling what Rand called “rational individualism” with the irrationalist Donald J. Trump.

Various rages…

Dear Mr Yakovenko,

I would just like to express my sincere dismay at the way my government reacted to the alleged recent poisoning of two people in Salisbury.

I recall very well the events that occurred fifteen years ago, when the British parliament was lied to about alleged weapons of mass destruction, supposedly held by Iraq, and which supposedly could strike at Britain within forty minutes. These allegations went almost completely unchallenged by the mainstream media, and our country was subsequently tricked into supporting an illegal war in Iraq. Although many people never believed the propaganda – as evidenced by the million or so protesters who marched through the streets of London at the time resisting the drive to war – the lie prevailed.

At this moment in time we have seen no verifiable evidence for the events that allegedly took place in Salisbury a couple of weeks ago. Until that evidence is forthcoming, and remembering well the deceit my own government has used in the past for its own very questionable ends, I refuse to believe that Russia had anything to do with it, and want to assure you that in this, as in many other areas of government policy, my government does not speak for me.

Neither am I impressed by the unbelievable actions of so many other countries in their expulsion of Russian diplomats from their embassies. Given the fact that there appears to be no verifiable evidence for the Salisbury incident, these actions by other countries defy…

Daily Mail
April 1, 2018

President Donald Trump hit out at Amazon again Saturday calling its business deal with the U.S. Postal Service to deliver packages a money-losing agreement that hurts U.S. taxpayers.

In tweets Saturday, Trump said ‘the U.S. Post Office will lose $1.50 on average for each package it delivers for Amazon. That amounts to Billions of Dollars.’

He added: ‘If the P.O. ‘increased its parcel rates, Amazon’s shipping costs would rise by $2.6 Billion.’ This Post Office scam must stop. Amazon must pay real costs (and taxes) now!’

Amazon has been a consistent recipient of Trump’s ire. He is sore in part because its founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post, which Trump has labeled ‘fake news’ after the newspaper reported unfavorable developments during his campaign and presidency.

Earlier this week, Trump took a similar aim at Amazon, again over Twitter.

While we are on the subject, it is reported that the U.S. Post Office will lose $1.50 on average for each package it delivers for Amazon. That amounts to Billions of Dollars. The Failing N.Y. Times reports that “the size of the company’s lobbying staff has ballooned,” and that…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 31, 2018

…does not include the Fake Washington Post, which is used as a “lobbyist” and should so REGISTER. If the P.O. “increased its parcel rates, Amazon’s shipping costs would rise by $2.6 Billion.” This Post Office scam must stop. Amazon must pay real costs (and taxes) now!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 31, 2018

Read more

This article was posted: Sunday, April 1, 2018 at 6:26 am

Time and time again, we’re told that there’s absolutely no reason to have an AR-15 except to take a human life. They’re “weapons of war,” they’re tools designed to kill and nothing else, some say.

However, an Illinois man is alive today because of an AR-15 in the hands of a private citizen.

Dave Thomas was getting ready for work Monday afternoon when he heard women screaming in his apartment building in Oswego.

Thomas, a gun instructor, peeked out the door and saw blood in the hallway. He went to his bedroom, where a handgun and an AR-15 assault-style rifle were lying on the bed. He picked up the rifle.

“I teach people how to defend themselves, and it was just a reaction to grab the AR-15,” he said.

Police said Thomas confronted a man who was stabbing another man in the apartment complex on the 100 block of Harbor Drive. The man with the knife ran off when Thomas threatened to shoot him.

“He was a half a breath away from getting his head blown off and he knew that,” Thomas, 41, said. “That’s why he put the knife down.”

…

A sheriff’s spokesman, Detective Bryan Harl, credited Thomas with preventing the situation from getting worse, and said the investigation showed he’d done nothing criminal. “He did in the moment what he thought was going to de-escalate this situation and stop any further violence or loss of life and for that he is to be praised,” Harl said.

I think part of why the AR-15 was so effective was because of the media hype. The news is filled with reports of them being instruments of war and murder, so when a man with a knife is faced with certain disintegration from a handheld, small-caliber bazooka, of course, he ran.

If that was the case, the media have finally made themselves useful.

Read…

US President Donald Trump has warned that he would scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) if Mexico doesn’t do more to curb drug and immigration flow to the north of the border, doubling down on the importance of separating the two countries with a wall.

“Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the US.” the American president wrote in tweet on Sunday. “They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!”

Trump has repeatedly called for renegotiation of the three way pact with Canada and Mexico, arguing that it harms American companies.

The Republican president’s plans to build a much-debated wall on the border with Mexico has been faced with great opposition in Congress but Trump has proven that he would do anything to make the wall…

The majority of Labour Party members in Britain say Israel is “a force for bad” and believe accusations of anti-Semitism within UK’s main opposition party are being exaggerated to damage Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and stifle legitimate criticism of Israel, according to a new poll.

The YouGov survey, which was commissioned by The Times newspaper, showed that 65 percent of the party’s members held a negative view of Israel.

The poll’s findings sent a clear message as Israeli military forces continued to brutally stifle a six-week protest by Palestinians near the border with Gaza.

Called the Great March for Return, the march has seen around 30,000 Palestinians pitch tents along the coastal enclave’s borders to mark the Land Day, the 42^nd anniversary of Israel’s murdering of several Palestinians who protested Israel’s land grab plans in 1976.

Israeli soldiers have so far killed 16 protesters and injured dozens more since Friday,…

African American workers are chronically underrepresented compared with whites in high-paying jobs across the United States, according to a new study.

White workers outnumber blacks by a large margin in high-salary jobs, including in the fields of technology, business, life sciences, architecture and engineering, an Associated Press analysis of government data has found.

Instead, many black workers find jobs in low-wage, less-prestigious fields where they’re overrepresented, such as the restaurant and retail industries, office work and building maintenance, the AP analysis found.

The study found that a white worker had a much better chance than a black one of being employed in the 11 categories with the highest median annual salaries, as listed by the US Department of Labor.

The ratio of white-to-black workers is about 10-to-1 in management, 8-to-1 in computers and mathematics, 12-to-1 in law, and 7-to-1 in education — compared with a ratio…

Daily Caller
April 1, 2018

An article from CNN.com published Friday bewilderingly claims that the biblical story of Easter is a #MeToo story from Mary Magdalene’s perspective.

“The men refused to listen to her story,” the article begins. “She was publicly smeared as a whore. And when she emerged as celebrated advocate, powerful men tried to silence her because she threatened their status. Nevertheless she persisted.”

“The woman we’re talking about, though, is not a leader in the #MeToo movement — the viral campaign raising awareness about sexual assault and harassment against women,” it continues.

“She is Mary Magdalene, the first person Jesus appeared to after his resurrection, according to the New Testament, and the first person to preach the good news that he had been raised from the dead.”

The post, which is not marked opinion, continued to make comparisons between the way women are allegedly mistreated in 21st Century America with the way Mary Magdalene, the biblical character, was marginalized.

The article’s author, CNN’s John Blake, draws another comparison between Christ’s crucifixion and #MeToo — the use of “sexual humiliation.”

Blake argues that Jesus being stripped naked on the cross is analogous to stories of sexual harassment exposed by the #MeToo movement.

Read more

This article was posted: Sunday, April 1, 2018 at 6:29 am

President Donald Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as his national security adviser is his most dangerous move yet, argues Marjorie Cohn.

By Marjorie Cohn

Nothing Donald Trump has done since his inauguration 14 months ago is more dangerous – to the United States, and indeed, to the world – than his selection of John Bolton for National Security Adviser. It is not surprising the president would feel most comfortable receiving advice from a fellow bully.

John Bolton

Trump bullies people on a nearly daily basis, directing his ire at immigrants, Muslims, women, LBGTQ people, the poor and the environment. He hurls Twitter attacks at those who disagree with him.

The president has encouraged police brutality, suggesting in a Long Island speech that law enforcement officers bang suspects’ heads against police car doors. “Please don’t be too nice” when arresting people, Trump advised. “Like when you guys put somebody in the car, and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put your hand over” their head, “I said, ‘You can take the hand away, OK?’”

After being told someone might throw tomatoes at him at a campaign rally, Trump urged his supporters to “knock the crap out of them … I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.” He stated on Fox News that a Black Lives Matter activist who was attacked at a Trump rally “should have been roughed up.”

Trump’s fellow bully Bolton also engages in abusive behavior. Melody Townsel, working on a USAID project in Kyrgyzstan, became the object of Bolton’s wrath in 1994. Townsel had complained about incompetence, poor contract performance and inadequate funding of the project by a contractor Bolton represented.

In a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Townsel wrote that Bolton “proceeded to chase me through the halls of a Russian hotel throwing things at me, shoving threatening letters under my door, and generally behaving like a madman.” Townsel claimed Bolton threatened employees and contractors who refused to cooperate with him. She maintained Bolton’s behavior “wasn’t just unforgivable, it was pathological.”

Carl W. Ford, former Assistant…

Daily Caller
April 1, 2018

Wounded warrior Derek Weida, who lost a leg while deployed in Iraq, posted a poignant rebuttal to Parkland survivor David Hogg’s gun control campaign on Friday.

As of Saturday afternoon, Weida’s post had over 35,000 reactions and over 14,000 shares.

The post was written from the perspective of Weida “listening to David Hogg speak,” and it began with a direct piece of advice for Hogg: “Watch what you say.”

“I got shot on a house raid in Iraq. My getting shot didn’t make me a professional on war, international relations, house raids (obviously!), or guns,” wrote Weida, adding that despite the “horrible thing” that happened to him — and the feelings he had against the war in Iraq — he “didn’t come home and protest the war.”

Acknowledging that he “signed up to be shot at” as opposed to Parkland students, Waida had a few words to say about gun control.

Read more

This article was posted: Sunday, April 1, 2018 at 6:32 am

Fourth suicide since June at Hudson County, New Jersey jail

By
Mark Ferretti

31 March 2018

Last week, 26-year-old Carlos Borroto was found dead in his cell at Hudson County Corrections and Rehabilitation Center in Kearny, New Jersey, a suburb of Newark. He had tied a laundry bag around his neck and hanged himself from his bed. His death marks the fourth suicide, and sixth death overall, at the jail since June 2017.

The act of desperation cannot have taken prison officials by surprise. When officers of the West New York police department arrested Borroto on Friday, March 23, on open warrants, he yelled, “I want to jump off a bridge!” The officers brought Borroto to Palisades Medical Center, where he was evaluated and released into police custody. He had been charged with domestic violence, aggravated assault, animal cruelty, and resisting arrest.

While he was being processed for incarceration, Borroto told correctional staff that he had mental health problems. If the staff had properly reviewed their records, they would have known that in May 2017 Borroto had told medical personnel at the jail that he had suicidal thoughts. But, overlooking his previous report of suicidal thoughts and his current complaint of mental health problems, the staff assigned him to the general population instead of to a mental health ward.

In response to Borroto’s death, Hudson County Executive Tom DeGise issued a hypocritical statement of outrage. After he met with staff at the jail on Monday, the county ended its $29.4-million contract with CFG Health Systems, which had provided medical care at the jail.

Borroto’s suicide is only the latest product of the criminal neglect and inadequate health care that has persisted for years at Hudson County jail.

While she was on mental health watch in…

“In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime — the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps …the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.” —Martin Luther King Jr.

Just as police states have arisen throughout history, there have also been individuals or groups of individuals who have risen up to challenge the injustices of their age.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer risked his life to undermine the tyranny at the heart of Nazi Germany.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn challenged the soul-destroying gulags of the Soviet Union.

Martin Luther King Jr. called America on the carpet for its color-coded system of racial segregation and warmongering.

And then there was Jesus Christ, an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day—namely, the Roman Empire—but provided a blueprint for standing up to tyranny that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him.

Battlefield America: T…
John W. Whitehead
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A radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn, Jesus was a far cry from the watered-down, corporatized, simplified, gentrified, sissified vision of a meek creature holding a lamb that most modern churches peddle. In fact, he spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire.

Those living through this present age of…

“All over the city we have huge needs. We need better public transport that works for all of us. We need affordable housing,” said Elizabeth Falcon, speaking into a megaphone in front of the downtown Washington, D.C. office building of the Carlyle Group private equity fund.

“But we can’t do those things while these guys are up here making $2 billion a year and paying less on the profits that they make than the folks who are picking up our trash and cleaning our streets and teaching our children.”

Falcon, Executive Director of DC Jobs with Justice, was among leaders of several activist groups, including SPACEs, the Take On Wall Street campaign, and the Patriotic Millionaires,  who spoke at a March 23 rally in front of Carlyle’s Pennsylvania Avenue office. Their aim was to hold up the top guys at this fund as prime examples of the need to close a tax loophole that has made obscenely wealthy financial executives even wealthier.

The three Carlyle Group founders — David Rubenstein, William Conway, and Daniel D’Aniello — are each worth $2.8 billion, according to Forbes. They owe a substantial share of their wealth to the “carried interest” loophole, which allows hedge fund and private equity managers to claim most of their income as capital gains rather than ordinary income.

The top tax rate on capital gains is currently 20 percent (plus a Medicare surtax of 3.8 percent), while the top marginal income tax rate has just dropped from 39.6 to 37 percent.

During his presidential campaign, President Donald Trump pledged to close the carried interest loophole. Instead, the new tax law merely lengthened the holding period for assets that qualify for the favorable capital gains rate from one to three years, and some tax experts fear funds structured as partnerships may be able to get around even this modest change.

“These guys here and around the country have gotten a break for too long because they have close ties to Congress, and Congress has cut them a deal,” said rally speaker David…

Photo by Rick McCharles | CC BY 2.0

Walt Whitman opens his now-classic poem, “I Sing the Body Electric,” chanting:

The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account,
That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.

Can we say the same things about our bodies a century-and-a-half later?

The U.S. is a land of contradictions, none more so than that pertaining to the human body, living nature.  Americans have never known how to relate to living nature, whether it be the natural world (e.g., land and animals) or their own physical bodies (e.g., sexuality).  Early European colonizers of the new nation conceived nature as, at best, a challenge that enveloped them, or, at worse, a threat that frightened them.  With equal fear, they felt challenged by the continent’s original inhabitants who they exterminated and seized their lands.

For the last four centuries, many Americans believed nature was to be conquered and the original inhabitants decimated.  And so too the human body, the physical self.  Many bodily functions were seen as shameful, private, something to be denied, hidden; they were denounced as sins of the flesh, whether involving pleasure, procreation or excretion.  Those who celebrated the body, especially those identified as witches or libertines, were shamed and often punished.

Americans today embrace a great contradiction with regard to their living body.  Popular culture is saturated within a highly…

Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet and professor of Creative Writing at Texas State.  Her father was Palestinian and a refugee journalist. In one of her poems after 9/11, entitled “Blood,” she writes:

I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?

I myself tried to write something for the 15 year “commemoration” of the US war against Iraq, but wasn’t able to complete it.  It was too much for me. A couple of months ago I was invited to go to the Northwest to speak about “Fifteen Years After the War.”  It was too much for me emotionally, and somewhat shamefully I had to decline.

As I write, I have the phone next to me.  I am texting a young Iraqi boy who is alone in Turkey. About ten months ago he was kidnapped in Iraq.   Through a chain of events, he ended up in Syria.  About two months ago his father was contacted and was able to get his son smuggled across the border into Turkey.  Last month his son turned 18 years of age and was eligible to register as a refugee with UNHCR.  But he will not get an interview for many months to come.

Traumatized, missing family and without friends, he tells his family he wants to come home.  But it is much too dangerous for him to return.  Trying to draw him out of his boredom, I ask him to tell me…

Buzzfeed
March 30, 2018

On June 18, 2016, one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s most trusted lieutenants circulated an extraordinary memo weighing the costs of the company’s relentless quest for growth.

“We connect people. Period. That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it,” VP Andrew “Boz” Bosworth wrote.

“So we connect more people,” he wrote in another section of the memo. “That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies.

“Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.”

The explosive internal memo is titled “The Ugly,” and has not been previously circulated outside the Silicon Valley social media giant.

Read more

This article was posted: Friday, March 30, 2018 at 3:40 am

Daily Mail
March 30, 2018

No sooner than President Trump had secured his first major trade deal, the U.S. leader said he could hold it up for awhile.

Trump told a crowd Thursday that he may wait to move ahead on a deal his administration inked with South Korea until planned nuclear talks with North Korea have concluded.

‘South Korea has been wonderful,’ he said, ‘but we’ll probably hold that deal up for a little while, see how that deal plays out.’

Trump said his thinking had shifted on the matter because the trade deal is a ‘very strong card’ and he wants to make sure that ‘everyone is treated fairly’ in the process.

It was a surprise development after the Trump administration said Tuesday that the United States and South Korea had agreed on revisions to their six-year-old trade pact.

Officials said the revised deal widened US access to South Korea’s car market while providing American manufacturers protection from South Korean imports.

Trump had previously called the original South Korea pact a job killer.

Read more

This article was posted: Friday, March 30, 2018 at 3:41 am

The Vatican is to hold a training course for priests in exorcism next month amid claims that demands for deliverance from demonic possession have greatly increased across the world.

The Vatican-backed International Association of Exorcists, which represents more than 200 Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox priests, said the increase represented a “pastoral emergency”.

According to a priest from Sicily, the number of people in Italy claiming to be possessed had tripled to 500,000 a year, and an Irish priest has said demand for exorcisms has “risen exponentially”.

Last year, the Christian thinktank Theos reported that exorcisms were a “booming industry” in the UK, particularly among Pentecostal churches.

But some warn that “deliverance ministry” can be a form of spiritual abuse. Critics also say LGBT people and those with mental health issues are targeted for deliverance in the belief that their sexuality or psychiatric problems are the result of demonic possession.

The Vatican training course, which will be held at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome between 16-21 April, will focus on exorcism and the prayer of liberation, a prayer commonly used for deliverance from possession.

“The fight against the evil one started at the origin of the world, and is destined to last until the end of the world,” Fr Cesare Truqui, one of the speakers, told Vatican News.

“But today we are at a stage crucial in history: many Christians no longer believe in [the devil’s] existence, few exorcists are appointed and there are no more young priests willing to learn the doctrine and practice of liberation of souls.”

Fr Benigno Palilla, an exorcist from Sicily who reported a tripling of demonic possession cases on the…

CNS News
March 30, 2018

* This story has been updated to include a statement from the Vatican (below).

In another interview with his longtime atheist friend, Eugenio Scalfari, Pope Francis claims that Hell does not exist and that condemned souls just “disappear.” This is a denial of the 2,000-year-old teaching of the Catholic Church about the reality of Hell and the eternal existence of the soul.

The interview between Scalfari and the Pope was published March 28, 2018 in La Repubblica. The relevant section on Hell was translated by the highly respected web log, Rorate Caeli.

The interview is headlined, “The Pope: It is an honor to be called revolutionary.” (Il Papa: “È un onore essere chiamato rivoluzionario.”)

Scalfari says to the Pope, “Your Holiness, in our previous meeting you told me that our species will disappear in a certain moment and that God, still out of his creative force, will create new species. You have never spoken to me about the souls who died in sin and will go to hell to suffer it for eternity. You have however spoken to me of good souls, admitted to the contemplation of God. But what about bad souls? Where are they punished?”

Pope Francis says,  “They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, ‘eternal fire.’ The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.” (1035)

Bloomberg
March 30, 2018

U.S. filings for unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell last week to the lowest level since January 1973, further evidence that the labor market remains tight, Labor Department figures showed Thursday.

Claims at the lowest level in 45 years underscore a persistent shortage of qualified workers that has made employers reluctant to fire staff. Applications for jobless benefits below the 300,000 tally are typically considered consistent with a healthy labor market.

Other aspects of the job market remain robust, with payrolls continuing to exceed expectations and an unemployment rate near the lowest since late 2000. Steady employment will help to sustain consumer spending, the biggest part of the economy.

The report reflects the annual revision to seasonal adjustment factors for initial and continuing claims from 2013 to present.

Read more

This article was posted: Friday, March 30, 2018 at 3:44 am

Newspapers and other publications keep what they call “stylebooks” to let the folks who write for them know what’s acceptable to the publication and what isn’t. Many factors determine the rules that are included in a stylebook, many, but not all of them, economic.

What these stylebooks reveal, however, is much more than just preferences and economics. What is a “terrorist” for example – – –

For the record, here’s the [Minnesota] Star Tribune style entry, word for word: “The Star Tribune permits the use of the word ‘terrorist’ to describe nongovernmental groups that carry out attacks on civilians. Other words –‘gunmen,’ ‘separatist,’ ‘rebel’ and ‘suicide bomber,’ for example –usually are more precise and therefore are generally preferred. In the case of Al-Qaida, the use of ‘terrorist network’ or similar terms is permitted. Also, referring to the Sept. 11 attacks as ‘terrorist attacks’ is permitted.” –from Minnesota startribune

So, “In the case of Al-Qaida, the use of ‘terrorist network’ or similar terms is permitted.” But, in the case of governments, apparently, the use of “terrorist,” etc. isn’t permitted.

It seems that if a “governmental group/network” does exactly what a non-governmental “terrorist group/network” does — “carrying out attacks on civilians,” etc. — it isn’t called “terrorist.”

Can you think of any “governmental group/network” currently carrying out attacks on civilians?

Thought so. Me too.

So, we know that governments attack civilians – – – regularly. And the results are predictable and the magnitude horrendous. Just to start with – – –

New York, NY – An early July column in the Wall Street Journal by R.J….

The American and South Korean militaries have launched annual joint war games after an initial postponement that had been meant not to upset North Korea.

The annual Foal Eagle drills began early on Sunday, South Korea’s Defense Ministry spokesman announced on the same day.

The drills had been postponed back in January to accommodate North Korea’s then-upcoming participation in Winter Olympics in South Korea. North Korean athletes participated in the Games in a rare show of unity staged by the two Koreas, and diplomats from the two sides met to defuse tensions.

The US and South Korea also halved the length of the Foal Eagle drills — which had historically run for two months — in what seemed to be a minor attempt at de-escalation with Pyongyang.

But the drills still risk endangering the nascent diplomatic efforts by the two Koreas to end long-running hostilities.

Silence in Pyongyang?

The joint military exercises involve a series of…

The US has blocked a UN Security Council statement on Israel’s use of deadly force against Palestinians commemorating Land Day in Gaza.

The statement was issued on Friday when at least 17 Palestinians lost their lives and more than 1,400 others sustained injuries when Israeli military forces opened fire on thousands of protesters who had flocked to a sit-in near the Gaza border.

On Saturday, the US objected the adoption of the statement, which was proposed by Kuwait that represents Arab countries on the council, a Security Council diplomat told AFP.

The draft council reaffirmed “the right to peaceful protest” and called for an “independent and transparent investigation” of the violence.

It also expressed “grave concern at the situation at the border” and shared the council’s “sorrow at the loss of innocent Palestinian lives.”

The statement also called “for respect for international human rights law and international humanitarian law,…

Breitbart
March 30, 2018

Thursday at Rutgers University, former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said she was concerned President Donald Trump had caused a “loss of leadership and leverage” in global politics.

The reason: She is concerned American’s word “is no longer trusted.”

When asked what her concerns about our “democratic stability” in the era of Trump were, Clinton replied, “I worry about the degradation of institutions, the dismissing of norms and values, because remember, a democracy is fundamentally held together by trust.”

She continued, “I would like to get back to where Republicans and Democrats argue about all the policies that separate us and try to figure out the best path forward. But right now I’m more worried about whether our Constitution is going to be honored, whether we will see the rule of law protected, whether we will have the predictably and stability we need in foreign affairs. As former secretary of state, I am deeply worried about the loss of leadership and leverage that the United States is currently experiencing. ”

She added, “We have some real problems that we need to be addressing and that requires us bringing our friends and allies together, not alienating them and walking away from them. I am worried that our word is no longer trusted and that the prospects for the kind of peace and prosperity and progress that we have spent decades building up since World War II are dimming, so there is a lot to be concerned about. And I understand that for enough Americans, the prospect of an unpredictable reality TV campaign was too good to turn off. But now we’ve seen it, and we have seen it for more than a year. And I think many Americans are beginning to ask questions about what to expect and how this is going to turn out.”

This article was posted: Friday, March 30, 2018 at 3:53 am

Exclusive to Consortium News: Twenty-seven writers, journalists, film-makers, artists, academics, former intelligence officers and democrats call on the government of Ecuador in this letter, written by John Pilger, to allow Julian Assange his right of freedom of speech.

THE ISOLATION OF JULIAN ASSANGE IS THE SILENCING OF US ALL

If it was ever clear that the case of Julian Assange was never just a legal case, but a struggle for the protection of basic human rights, it is now.

Citing his critical tweets about the recent detention of Catalan president Carles Puidgemont in Germany, and following pressure from the US, Spanish and UK governments, the Ecuadorian government has installed an electronic jammer to stop Assange communicating with the outside world via the internet and phone.

As if ensuring his total isolation, the Ecuadorian government is also refusing to allow him to receive visitors. Despite two UN rulings describing his detention as unlawful and mandating his immediate release, Assange has been effectively imprisoned since he was first placed in isolation in Wandsworth prison in London in December 2010. He has never been charged with a crime. The Swedish case against him collapsed and was withdrawn, while the United States has stepped up efforts to prosecute him. His only “crime” is that of a true journalist — telling the world the truths that people have a right to know.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

Under its previous president, the Ecuadorian government bravely stood against the bullying might of the United States and granted Assange political asylum as a political refugee. International law and the morality of human rights was on its side.

Today, under extreme pressure from Washington and its collaborators, another government in Ecuador justifies its gagging of Assange by stating that “Assange’s behavior, through his messages on social media, put at risk good relations which this country has with the UK, the rest of the EU and other nations.”

This censorious attack on free speech is not happening in Turkey, Saudi Arabia or China; it is right in the heart of London. If the Ecuadorian government does not cease its unworthy…

Sometimes we see him as other hotel guests would have seen him: as the tall gambler intent on the video poker machine across the casino floor, or as the customer standing in line in front of you at the gift shop, buying snacks, or as the guy you briefly glance at as he waits for you to get off the elevator — polite, unhurried, unmemorable.

Sometimes we see him as the employees would have seen him, as the casually dressed V.I.P. with the many suitcases who jokes with bellhops, chats with valets and gives out tips along with handshakes. And sometimes we see him as only the surveillance cameras saw him — riding the elevator alone.

Within a few days, he would use the arsenal he had moved upstairs in those suitcases to shoot and kill 58 people from his 32nd-floor suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.

These were Stephen Paddock’s final movements in the days before he opened fire from his hotel suite on Oct. 1: an apparently relaxed solo vacation that, as surveillance footage obtained by The New York Times from MGM Resorts makes clear, was actually the methodically planned prelude to a massacre.

Rarely are investigators or the public able to track the preparations of a mass gunman in such molecular detail. Yet for all the material the footage offers about the who, the what, the where, the when and the how, we are no closer to the why.

Watching the footage, nearly six months later, is a kind of compulsive ghost-hunting. In the antiseptic stare of…

Student activist’s concern for life not so apparent in online comments

Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
March 31, 2018

In a 2017 Reddit post, ‘March For Our Lives’ gun control activist David Hogg celebrates the fact that mosquitoes kill “billions” of people as being “great for the environment”.

Another user on the site asked the question, “What is a positive reason for mosquitoes to exist?” to which Hogg responded, “They kill humans, billions of them, which is great for the environment.” The post was made eight months ago.

Although the entry was posted under the pseudonym ‘davisgreen111’, the account almost certainly belongs to Hogg. The poster refers to himself as “David Hogg” in one post and another post links to a video from Hogg’s personal YouTube channel. Another post confirms that he lives in Parkland, Florida.

Another post also links to a story about Hogg’s father, former FBI agent Kevin Hogg. In another post, ‘davisgreen111’ makes reference to his dad being an FBI agent.

According to the World Health Organization, mosquito bites result in the deaths of more than one million people every year. There are 300-500 million cases of malaria every year and a child dies from malaria every 30 seconds.

The Reddit post conflicts with Hogg’s public image as somebody who cares about saving lives. Some would also construe the remark as racist given that mosquito-related deaths disproportionately affect non-white people living in poor third world countries.

#Malaria is a life-threatening disease caused by parasites that are transmitted to people through the bites of infected mosquitoes https://t.co/x6I15Ye9rE pic.twitter.com/Mq8Dv3MUXy

— WHO (@WHO) 29 November 2017

In other posts, Hogg repeatedly discusses his inability to get a girlfriend and in one instance refers to girls as bitches.

Infowars reached out to Hogg for a comment…

Teachers, school service workers and their supporters — including all the labor unions in West Virginia — rally at the capital on behalf of better wages for state workers, and demanding a fix for the states underfunded and broken PEIA health insurance programs. Teachers across Kentucky on March 30 became the latest educators to walk out of their classrooms, denouncing a bill that passed in the state Senate which proposes reduced pension benefits for state employees. (Photo: Rich McGervey / Flickr)

Teachers across Kentucky on Friday became the latest educators to walk out of their classrooms, denouncing a bill that passed in the state Senate on Thursday which proposes reduced pension benefits for state employees.

The strike, which closed schools in more than 20 counties, is the latest in a recent wave of impassioned protests that have been staged by teachers in red states, where lawmakers have placed little importance on funding schools and retaining qualified teachers in recent decades — instead wooing corporations with tax cuts. 

After years of state tax cuts for the 1% and big corporations, teachers are finally standing standing up and demanding higher wages. #StandWithTeachers #TrumpTaxScam https://t.co/Tiqiomq8zG

— For Tax Fairness (@4TaxFairness) March 30, 2018

How absurd is it that we live in a country where Congress and many states give huge tax breaks to billionaires and large corporations, but fail to provide adequate funding for education?

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 30, 2018

In Kentucky, educators and supporters have adopted the hashtag #120strong to encourage teachers in all 120 counties to join the fight to keep state workers’ pensions funded.

The bill that passed Thursday would limit the number of sick days teachers can put towards retirement; establish a plan in which new hires contribute a certain amount to their pensions, leading to fears of steep cuts to retirement plans; and would allow lawmakers to make other changes to…

“Pope Declares No Hell?”

So ran the riveting headline on the Drudge Report of Holy Thursday.

Drudge quoted this exchange, published in La Repubblica, between Pope Francis and his atheist friend, journalist Eugenio Scalfari.

Scalfari: “What about bad souls? Where are they punished?”

Bad souls “are not punished,” Pope Francis is quoted, “those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”

Nixonu2019s White Hous…
Patrick J. Buchanan
Buy New $15.00
(as of 04:25 EDT – Details)

On the first Holy Thursday, Judas betrayed Christ. And of Judas the Lord said, “Woe to that man by whom the Son of Man shall be betrayed; it were better for him if that man had never been born.”

Did the soul of Judas, and those of the monstrous evildoers of history, “just fade away,” as General MacArthur said of old soldiers? If there is no hell, is not the greatest deterrent to the worst of sins removed?

What did Christ die on the cross to save us from?

If Francis made such a statement, it would be rank heresy.

Had the pope been speaking ex cathedra, as the vicar of Christ on earth, he would be contradicting 2,000 years of Catholic doctrine, rooted in the teachings of Christ himself. He would be calling into question papal infallibility, as defined in 1870 by the Vatican Council of Pius IX.

Questions would arise as to whether Francis is a true pope.

The Vatican swiftly issued a statement saying the pope had had a private conversation, not a formal interview, with his friend Scalfari.

The Vatican added: “The textual words pronounced by the pope are not quoted. No quotation of the aforementioned article must therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the…

Israeli wall from the Palestinian side.

The West has long been enamored with the specter of passive resistance with tens of thousands of unarmed demonstrators facing off against a heavily armed and ruthless force in pursuit of justice.

Today hundreds of thousands of peaceful unarmed demonstrators marched towards the rim of the sealed off Gaza Strip. They got no closer than several hundred yards from Israeli snipers before shots rang out leaving hundreds of Palestinians injured and at least ten dead.

This is not a movie. It is Gaza. It is Palestine.

For more than seventy years Palestinians have tried by all means possible to obtain their rights as guaranteed under international and humanitarian law.

Over these decades dozens of resolutions have come from a wide range of international bodies, associations and NGO’s in support of our fundamental rights to freedom and self-determination and a return to our homes, from which we were forcibly expelled in 1948.

Despite a romantic rewrite, dozens of respected historians and journalists including Israelis such as IlanPappe and Gideon Levy have documented the coordinated Zionist attack on hundreds of age-old Palestinian villages in 1948 as the onset of a calculated project of ethnic cleansing that continues unabated today.

To suggest that almost a million Palestinians voluntarily left their homes, schools, mosques and churches in 1948 is little more than to proclaim the earth is flat. The hurried desperate mass flight of…

The murder of six worshippers in January 2017 reached a dramatic conclusion in March when Alexandre Bissonnette pleaded guilty, avoiding a lengthy trial.

I’d like to ask for your forgiveness for all the harm I caused you, even though I know what I did is unforgivable. In spite of everything that was said, I am not a terrorist, nor Islamophobic … [I am] more a person who was carried away by fear and a horrible form of despair.

‘Semites’ and imperialism

Quebec has a long history of racial and religious problems, going back to the British conquest in 1763. The French were forced suddenly to accept ‘les maudits anglais‘ as their masters. The British were not gentle imperialists, and the Catholic French soon became second class citizens, with English the business language, and the economy controlled by these occupiers. They brought with them their ‘semites’, a handful of Jewish merchants and bankers, who faced discrimination, but more because it was politically acceptable to criticize Jews but not the British. In any event, Jews and Brits were considered the same — rich interlopers — and were resented.

This only got worse with the flood of poor east European Jewish immigrants in the 1890s. Canada wanted farmer immigrants, but the Jews were only interested in living in the large cities, especially Montreal, where they faced friction with their strange customs and tribal identity, centred on commerce, from the rag trade through to garment workers and…

The Pentagon is gearing up to face friction with the White House following US President Donald Trump’s pick of John Bolton as his national security advisor.

Citing a source familiar with the situation at the Pentagon, The Hill reported on Saturday there is skepticism that US Defense Secretary James Mattis and Bolton will get along.

“I don’t think they will get along… I think they’ll be at odds,” said the source.

Bolton, an outspoken advocate of military intervention who served in the administration of former US president George W. Bush, has argued for attacking Iran and North Korea.

In a February op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Bolton made the “legal case for striking North Korea first” to stop what he described as an “imminent threat” from the nation’s nuclear program. He also argues that the “only diplomatic option left is to end the regime in North Korea.”

But Mattis, despite having warned North Korea that it faces…

Back in 2009, I wrote a few articles on torture during the Bush/Cheney administration. With Barack Obama elected on a vague platform of hope, change, and transparency, there was a sense torture would be outlawed and torturers would be called to account. Obama did sign an executive order to outlaw torture – which really meant nothing more than that the U.S. would abide by international treaties and follow international law with respect to torture – but torturers were never called to account. The failure to do so has left us with a new president, Donald Trump, who says he supports torture (though his Defense Secretary, James Mattis, does not), and a person nominated to head the CIA who enabled torture and helped to cover it up.

Here are a few points I made back in 2009. We should consider these as Congress debates whether to place the CIA in the hands of a torturer.

Recently [2009] in the New York Times, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti showed that the Bush administration, the CIA, and the Senate and House Intelligence Committees failed to ask for any historical context before approving so-called “harsh interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, in 2002. No one apparently knew, or wanted to know, that the US had defined waterboarding as torture and prosecuted it as a war crime after World War II. Did our leaders think the events of 9-11 constituted an entirely new reality, one in which historical precedent was rendered nugatory?

Perhaps so, but their failure to ask historically-based questions also highlights the narrowness of their intellectual training. Like the accused Nazi judges before the bar in the movie Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), they asked themselves only what the law is (or what it became under John Ashcroft and John Yoo), not whether it is just. If a legal brief authorized brutal methods such as waterboarding, who were they to question, let alone challenge, the (freshly minted) legal opinion?

Clearly, the leaders making and implementing decisions on torture constituted a single, self-referencing, self-identified Washington elite almost entirely divorced from thinking historically, let alone tragically. And because they could think neither historically nor tragically, they found false comfort in picturing themselves as stalwart defenders of the nation, not recognizing the mesmerizing power of vengeance and hate.

Our elected officials who find history books too onerous would do well to invest three hours of their time to watch Judgment at Nuremberg. They might learn that a compromised judiciary will uphold any action – discriminatory race laws, involuntary sterilization, even mass murder – all in the name of defending the people from supposedly apocalyptic threats.

Indeed, defending the country from apocalyptic threats is a popular line for those wishing to uphold the Bush Administration’s policy on torture. After the tragedy of 9/11, and…

The Hill
March 31, 2018

President Trump ordered the State Department to freeze $200 million in funds to help recovery efforts in Syria, a sign of the president’s growing skepticism over the United States’ involvement in the war-torn country.

Trump froze the funds after reading a news report that the U.S. had agreed to provide an additional $200 million to bolster recovery and stabilization efforts in Syria, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced the additional funding in Kuwait in February during a ministerial meeting of the coalition fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Trump has since fired Tillerson as head of the State Department.

Trump has appeared increasingly eager for an early U.S. exit from Syria. During a speech in Ohio on Thursday, he said that the U.S. would be “coming out of Syria, like, very soon,” and called on other countries to “take care of it now.”

Read more

This article was posted: Saturday, March 31, 2018 at 8:12 am

Yulia Skripal “improving rapidly”: The unravelling of the Russian Novichok narrative

By
Chris Marsden

31 March 2018

When placed in the context of the global anti-Russia propaganda campaign spearheaded by Britain’s Conservative government, Thursday saw the greatest Easter miracle since Christ rose from the dead.

For weeks, the world’s media has cited uncritically government claims that double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned March 4 with a “weapons grade” nerve agent, known as a Novichok.

The agent was described as so deadly that the comatose Skripals were unlikely to ever recover, and that if they did they would be brain damaged and physically compromised. On Wednesday there were even media headlines that their life support might have to be turned off.

Yet Thursday saw reports from Salisbury NHS foundation trust that 33-year-old Yulia is no longer in a critical condition and was “conscious and talking.”

Yulia’s apparent recovery blows a hole in an official narrative that, by rights, should sink it forever. Instead, as has happened on repeated occasions, the story will no doubt be modified as required. Nothing must be allowed to prevent the UK, in alliance with the United States, from continuing its push for further economic sanctions and the expulsion of diplomats to justify pre-existing plans for military aggression on Russia’s borders and in the Middle East.

There are innumerable inconsistencies, contradictions and flat out lies in the case made against Russia. Above all there has been no convincing political explanation advanced as to why Russia would target the Skripals.

Nor is there anything linking the attempted murder of the pair to anyone—least of all the Russian state and the government of President Vladimir…

Daily Caller
March 31, 2018

President Trump has directed the U.S. military to rain Hell on ISIS in Iraq and Syria. According to officials from Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, during the two-week period between March 16 and March 29, U.S. and coalition forces launched 25 separate strikes against ISIS.

Syria

The fighting in Syria remains centered around Abu Kamal, a small town near the Syrian-Iraqi border. Coalition forces working as part of Operation Inherent Resolve reported destroying several ISIS targets, including buildings, tunnel systems, tactical units, fighting positions and weapons caches. In the same area, U.S. forces also destroyed an ISIS Vehicle Bourne Improvised Explosive Device factory.

An ISIS-held building in Al-Shadaddi, which was the site of a brutal battle between the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces and ISIS in 2016, was also destroyed.

Iraq

The fighting in Iraq remains dispersed over several parts of the country. There were several strikes near Hawijah, Qayyarah and Ramadi over the two week period. U.S. and coalition forces reportedly destroyed ISIS boats, tactical units, vehicles, storage facilities and an ISIS-held cave complex.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

The U.S. Air Force may soon play less of a roll in the fight in Iraq. During a press briefing earlier this week, Air Force Brig. Gen. Andrew A. Croft gave details of the new training program being introduced to Iraqi Air Force pilots.

The program, known as CAATTS (Coalition Aviation Advisory and Training Team), is focused on teaching leadership skills to qualified Iraqi pilots, so that they may begin to lead their own missions in support of Iraqi Security Forces.

“Coalition air power in support of Iraqi Security Forces has been extremely successful in the destruction of ISIS in Iraq,” Croft said.

The program may one day see the Iraqi Air Forces sholdering the majority of the burden in…

With that their eyes were opened and they recognized Him,
but He vanished from their sight.

LittlemoreTracts classic, 4/30/17 — The great English writer G. K. Chesterton was asked once by a reporter what he would do if the Risen Christ were now standing right behind him. The questioner knew of Chesterton’s firm belief in the bodily resurrection of Christ, but he was not prepared for the answer he got from Mr. Chesterton, who simply replied “but He is.”

Unfortunately, not many Christians today have this clear insight and deep faith when it comes to the Resurrection of Christ. For too many Christians, His Resurrection is simply something they profess their faith in, that is, an astounding event that happened two thousand years ago.

But Mr. Chesterton, who was a recent convert to Catholicism when this brief interview took place, well understood that the Resurrection is in fact an event that touches the life of the true believer right here and now, and Jesus Christ not only lives, but He will continue to live with us until the end of the world, as he promised his astonished disciples. True, we do not physically see Him standing behind us, or in front of us, but He nonetheless is present with us just as He promised so long ago. Orthodox Christian faith believes this truth fully, and thus a deep faith will sense His presence with us, within us, and it will understand why He is so near to us. He remains here with us to bring us safely home to His Father’s Kingdom.

All too often we Christians act not like men or women reborn from an Easter faith, but rather like the two downcast disciples on the Road to Emmaus. These good men were clearly in a depressed state of mind traceable to the utterly depraved condition of the world that they had…

Washington Examiner
March 31, 2018

Fox News host Laura Ingraham capped a tumultuous week, during which a feud with a Parkland, Fla., shooting survivor led to an exodus of advertisers, by announcing at the end of her show Friday that she would be taking next week off for Easter.

“I’ll be off next week for Easter break with my kids, but fear not. We’ve got a great lineup of guest hosts to fill in for me,” Ingraham said in signing off. She made no mention of David Hogg, the senior from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with whom she had engaged in a war of words earlier in the week.

BREAKING: Laura Ingraham announced on tonight’s show that she would take next week off and be replaced by “a great lineup of guest hosts” pic.twitter.com/Ucoa4D45O2

— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) March 31, 2018

But Hogg did have a message for Ingraham. “Have some healthy reflections this Holy Week,” he said in response to a video of her sign-off on Twitter.

Have some healthy reflections this Holy Week. https://t.co/bjSLmj3gyH

— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) March 31, 2018

Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

More than a dozen advertisers have either pulled their support or have distanced themselves from Ingraham and her show over the past couple days, spurred on by Hogg, since the deadly shooting at his high school last month he has become a leading voice calling for more stringent gun restrictions.

He rallied support from his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers for a boycott of Ingraham’s advertisers after she mocked Hogg on Wednesday for getting rejected by multiple California universities.

Read more

This article was posted: Saturday, March 31, 2018 at 8:27 am

American Mirror
March 31, 2018

This is CNN.

Morning anchor Alisyn Camerota was floored on Friday that colleges are rejecting Parkland, Florida student-turned-anti-gun activist David Hogg.

“What kind of dumbass colleges don’t want you?” Alisyn Camerota asks Parkland survivor David Hogg, who says he was rejected from four universities pic.twitter.com/MUpCMOL8qD

— CNN (@CNN) March 30, 2018

“David, I am stunned that four colleges rejected you,” Camerota told the student, gushing that he’s “taken the country by storm.”

“What kind of dumbass colleges don’t want you!” she asked Hogg, who laughed.

She wanted to know if the schools turned him down before or after the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School.

“They rejected me about two weeks ago, most of them,” Hogg said.

He tweeted about his rejections at the time:

Just got rejected from another college but that’s ok we’re already changing the world. Goodnight everyone

— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) March 17, 2018

Update: I have one more muffin and just got rejected by another school. Oh god what will eat next to cope I might just have to breakout the emergency chocolate bar

— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) March 17, 2018

He told Camerota it’s competitive and hard to get into schools.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

“You can still change the world” whether you’re in college or not, he said.

On Wednesday, the New York Post reported the senior is having trouble being accepted.

Some state colleges in California are apparently not impressed by the Parkland high school shooting survivor who helped become a voice for a global gun control movement.

David Hogg, 17, has so far been rejected by four University of California campuses — UCLA, UCSD, UCSB and UC Irvine, he told TMZ.

According to the UC site, a minimum 3.4 GPA is required for non-California residents to get in. The Florida teen has a 4.2 GPA and an SAT score…

US President Donald Trump has appointed John Bolton his national security adviser in order to intimidate the North Koreans, says E. Michael Jones, a 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 Saturday.

Last week, Trump announced Gen. H.R. McMaster’s replacement, making Bolton — a former US ambassador to the United Nations — his third national security adviser, part of a shake-up that creates one of the most hawkish national security teams of any White House in recent history.

And earlier this month Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was forced to quit. CIA Director Mike Pompeo was named as Tillerson’s replacement.

“The appointment of John Bolton as the national security adviser is shocking because there is no greater war monger than among the American elite than John Bolton. Trump was…

Why has Ecuador silenced Julian Assange?

31 March 2018

The draconian measures taken by the government of Ecuador to cut off all access to the outside world by Julian Assange represent a reactionary attack on basic democratic rights that must be vigorously opposed by workers and youth in every country.

Ecuadorian authorities have blocked the WikiLeaks founder’s access to the Internet as well as all other means of communication from Quito’s embassy in London, where Assange has been confined for nearly six years. In addition, it is barring visitors from seeing him, leaving him with fewer rights than a prisoner behind bars.

Assange continues to face coordinated conspiracies by the British and US governments to have him arrested and extradited to face US charges of treason and espionage, which carry potential death penalties.

The attack on Assange is part of a global assault on democratic rights that increasingly recalls the darkest days of the 1930s, in the midst of the rise of fascism and the drive to world war. It is significant that he was subjected to his enforced isolation in part for making a telling comparison on Twitter between the German government’s recent arrest of Catalonian leader Carles Puigdemont at the behest of Spain and the 1940 arrest of the president of Catalonia, Lluís Companys, who was extradited by the Nazis to Franco’s fascist dictatorship, which tortured and executed him.

The placing of Assange under what amounts to incommunicado detention coincides with a drive by governments all over the world to impose censorship on the Internet. Assange has been in the forefront of the resistance to this antidemocratic campaign.

These actions are also bound up with a sharp turn to the right not only by the government of Ecuador, but by those of a number of Latin…

Trump’s new National Security Adviser John Bolton has been instrumental in launching wars and scrapping arms control treaties – just the man for the job as the U.S. embarks on a new arms race with Russia, Ray McGovern sardonically observes.

By Ray McGovern

John Bolton’s appointment as national security adviser to President Donald Trump is the latest blow to hopes for a less confrontational U.S.-Russia relationship that would include new talks on arms control. Mutual trust is now hanging by a very thin thread.

George W. Bush announces his appointment of John Bolton to UN ambassador post on August 1, 2005.

One wag suggested to me that the Bolton appointment should not really come as a surprise, since it fits the recent Washington pattern — if White House chaos can be considered a pattern. For Kremlin leaders, though, White House zig-zags are no laughing matter. Let’s try to put ourselves in their shoes and imagine how the unfolding of recent events may have looked to them.

On March 1 in his state-of-the-nation address, President Putin revealed several new strategic weapons systems that Russia developed after the Bush/Cheney/Bolton administration abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had been the cornerstone of strategic stability for the previous 30 years. (John Bolton is included in that august company because, as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, he was Vice President Dick Cheney’s enforcer to put the kibosh on the ABM Treaty.)

You would not know it from the “mainstream media,” but in that same speech Putin offered to “sit down at the negotiating table” and “work together … to ensure global security” — taking into account the strategic parity Moscow claims.

Referring to what he called “our duty to inform our partners” about Russia’s claimed ability to render ABM systems “useless,” Putin added: “When the time comes, foreign and defense ministry experts will have many opportunities to discuss all these matters with them, if of course our partners so desire.”

One “Partner” So Desires

On March 20, two days after Putin was re-elected President of Russia, President Trump decided to…

The Wrap
March 31, 2018

Ted Nugent, the sometime classic rocker and current NRA board member, is speaking out about the new generation of gun reform advocates: the “pathetic” teenage “liars” who survived the deadly massacre last month at a high school in Parkland, Florida.

“These poor children, I’m afraid to say this and it hurts me to say this, but the evidence is irrefutable, they have no soul,” he said Friday on Newsmax’s “The Joe Pags Show.”

“The dumbing down of America is manifested in the culture deprivation of our academia that have taught these kids the lies, media that have prodded and encouraged and provided these kids lies,” he said after watching clips Parkland mass-shooting survivors such as David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez who have become leading advocates of legislation to curb gun violence in the U.S.

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This article was posted: Saturday, March 31, 2018 at 8:18 am