Breitbart
December 19, 2018

Half of Sweden’s 300 Islamic State fighters have returned from the Middle East, but a survey has revealed several municipalities have little idea who among their residents are former fighters.

The survey found that out  of the municipalities believed to be the homes of the 150 returnees, the local authorities could only identify 16 adults and ten children, Swedish public broadcaster SVT reports.

The cities and municipalities of Malmö, Borås Gothenburg, Stockholm, and Örebro saw the most fighters leave to fight with the terror group.

Estimates state that in Gothenburg and Västra Götaland, the number of returnees is somewhere in the dozens, but Gothenburg could only name ten adults and eight minors that they were aware of.

Stockholm, which identified one individual who turned out to live in another municipality, is thought to have 35 to 40.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 7:34 am

An intriguing presentation about the possible link between age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and processed food consumption literally caught my eye. As presented in the featured video, ophthalmologist Dr. Chris Knobbe, founder and president of the Cure AMD Foundation, suggests the common assertion macular degeneration is caused by aging or genetics is a mistaken one.

Given the reality macular degeneration has gone from being an extremely rare disorder more than a century ago to one that is found at increasingly alarming rates in developed countries around the world, Knobbe points to higher intakes of processed food — not aging or genetics — as the root cause.

He presented his research findings at the 2018 Ancestral Health Symposium, held in Bozeman, Montana. Knobbe asserts the same people known to consume the most processed food not only develop AMD, but are also more likely to be affected by cancer, heart disease, hypertension, obesity, Type 2 diabetes and stroke.

What Is Macular Degeneration?

According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO),¹ macular degeneration results when the part of your retina called the macula becomes damaged, causing you to lose your central vision. If you have AMD, you cannot see fine details whether close or far, but your peripheral (side) vision remains normal.

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The BrightFocus Foundation defines AMD as “an irreversible destruction of the macula, which leads to loss of the sharp, fine-detail, ‘straight ahead’ vision required for activities like reading, driving, recognizing faces and seeing the world in color.”²

Knobbe notes your macula measures 6 millimeters (mm), or…

Australian union leader warns of eruption of working class struggle

By
Mike Head

20 December 2018

This week’s three-day Australian Labor Party national conference in Adelaide ended as it began, with anxious warnings that rising “anger and frustration” in the working class could erupt out of the control of the party and its trade union partners.

“The trade union movement in our country is sounding an alarm,” Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) secretary Sally McManus told the conference at the start of her speech on Tuesday. “Working people are crying out for action on insecure work and crying out for fair pay rises.”

Sally McManus

McManus invoked the spectre of a literal tsunami of social unrest. “The trade union movement is an early warning sign of the tremors before the waves meet the coast,” McManus pleaded. “We must take action now.”

The union bureaucrats are well aware that millions of workers are outraged by soaring social inequality, falling real wages and the destruction of full-time jobs, accompanied by rising rates of casualisation and the ripping up of previously hard-won working conditions.

Discontent is building up among young workers, who are suffering the worst exploitation in what the corporate media dubs the new “gig economy.” Only half of 25-year-old workers have full-time work, despite 60 percent having tertiary education qualifications.

McManus’s prominent role at the conference, and the content of her presentation, pointed to how closely the party and union leaders are working together to try to suppress working class discontent and channel it behind the return of yet another pro-business Labor government.

The ACTU leader was given pride of place on the speakers’ list, and received a standing ovation from the…

The US Senate has approved legislation to temporarily fund the government and avert a partial federal shutdown after President Donald Trump backed off his demand for money for a border wall with Mexico.

Senators in the upper chamber of Congress passed the measure on Wednesday, which would keep government running until February 8 and avoid a potential crisis.

The House of Representatives is also expected to pass a temporary funding bill before Friday’s deadline, when funding for a portion of the government expires.

Should the legislation become law, the border money fight would drag into the next Congress, which could prove even more difficult for Trump after Democrats take control of the House.

Trump appeared to retreat on his shutdown threats after promising a fight over funding the contraction of a wall on the US-Mexico border, which had been central to his presidential campaign.

Just last week Trump said he would be “proud” to shut…

Free Beacon
December 19, 2018

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested Tuesday the Trump administration wouldn’t force a partial government shutdown over funding for its long-promised border wall.

Speaking with Fox News, Sanders said there were other ways to attain the $5 billion it wants to build the wall, which President Donald Trump previously said Mexico would pay for and was a cornerstone of his successful 2016 campaign.

In a contentious meeting last week with Democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), Trump said he would be proud to have a government shutdown over border security if he didn’t get the funding he wanted. But Sanders sounded different on Fox News on Tuesday, after she was asked by host Bill Hemmer if the administration would accept $2.5 billion from Congress in a continuing resolution to keep the government funded.

“We have other ways that we can get to that $5 billion that we will work with Congress if they will make sure that we get a bill passed that provides not just the funding for the wall, but there is a piece of legislation that’s been pushed around that Democrats actually voted 26-5 out of committee that provides roughly $26 billion in border security, including $1.6 billion for the wall,” she said. “That’s something that we would be able to support as long as we can couple that with other funding resources to get to the $5 billion.”

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This article was posted: Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 7:44 am

Almost 700 clergymen in the US state of Illinois have been accused of sexually abusing children, a far greater number than the Catholic Church had previously disclosed, dealing a new blow to the credibility of the church.

The state’s six Catholic dioceses had publicly identified 185 priests accused of sexually abusing children and had not released the names of at least 500 others, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said Wednesday.

In a scathing statement, the attorney general’s office criticized the Church’s handling of the abuse allegations, saying in some cases the archdioceses did not investigate the allegations at all or did not notify law enforcement or child welfare agencies.

“The preliminary stages of this investigation have already demonstrated that the Catholic Church cannot police itself,” Madigan said.

The Illinois investigation was opened following the release of a probe by the attorney general of Pennsylvania that found…

We humans are an interesting species … instead of seeing eye-to-eye, we are inclined to see eye-to-nose.  We focus on the present and ourselves, particularly where our comfort is concerned, no matter how dire the predictions for the future.

Although these are now over, such has been evident at the climate change talks in Katowice, Poland.  An effort to mandate the Paris agreement, in light of the dire 1.5C report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has been stymied repeatedly by Saudi Arabia, the US, Russia and Kuwait.  Particularly disturbed are island countries like the Maldives that are literally disappearing with sea-level rise.  One of the last spats was on the word “welcoming” as in welcoming the IPCC 1.5C report.  It has been changed to “welcomes the timely completion of … ” in the final draft thereby not endorsing its conclusions, stark warnings or more ambitious goals.

The serious sticking point has been Article 6.  It deals with country plans and is of special concern to the poorer countries promised financial support.  But to obtain it Measuring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of carbon emissions reduction is sought by donor agencies and private sector groups.

Thus Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) is an international organization promoting balanced economic growth, that is without harming the environment.  It can help prepare a low emissions development strategy by assisting in developing viable MRV schemes.  …

Malcolm X reminded us that we had to be careful about the difference between the wolf and the fox. The wolf for black people was the hardcore, racist white folks with the hoods and clearly articulated stance in support of white supremacy. The fox, on the other hand, was the liberals who were supposed to be our friends. Their ultimate support for white supremacy was always just as deadly but sugarcoated in diversionary language like “humanitarian intervention” and the “responsibility to protect.” The game, according to Malcolm, was that black folks would recognize danger of the wolf and run from the wolf straight into the jaws of the fox with the consequence being just as fatal because both the fox and the wolf are members of the same canine family.

This captures in many ways not only the nature of the ongoing saga of U.S. politics in general where there is really no substantial difference in the class interests and fundamental priorities of the two capitalist parties, but specific policies like U.S. policy in Africa.

In a speech last week before an audience at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, John Bolton unveiled the Trump administration’s “new Africa Strategy.” In what could only be characterized as another example of the White supremacist racial blind-spot, Bolton revealed an understanding of Africa and the role played by the U.S. and Europe that was a compete departure from the reality of the systematic underdevelopment of that continent by…

The European Union on Wednesday adopted backup plans to protect air transport and financial markets in the event Britain leaves without a Brexit deal in 100 days.

The bloc has promised that British citizens living in Europe would continue to enjoy residents’ rights “provided that this approach is reciprocated by the UK”.

EU officials insist the measures would not mean Britain can quit the union painlessly, but that it is important for “time-limited” measures to “mitigate” the harm.

“The best, if you talk in terms of the economy and avoiding disruptions, is to stay within the EU,” European Commission vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis told reporters.

“Then, if the decision on Brexit is taken, of course, withdrawal or Brexit with a deal is better than withdrawal with no deal,” the former Latvian prime minister said.

“In case of no deal scenario, doing some preparation to minimize damage is better than no preparation at all.”

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The…

Whenever María Salguero, 40, has a moment to herself, she sifts through her Google Alerts and the local news in Mexico for reports of femicides.

This unusual pastime began in 2016 when Salguero, a human rights activist and geophysical engineer by training, decided to build a map tracking cases of femicide, and filling in the gaps left by official data, in her spare time.

Femicide (also referred to as feminicide) is the deliberate killing of a woman or girl because of their gender. UN Women, the United Nations’ gender equality organisation, notes that these gender-related murders may follow other violent acts including domestic abuse, describing the context in Latin America as one of “high tolerance” towards such “normalised” attacks.

In a café in central Mexico City earlier this year, Salguero told me that she “had already worked on a map of people who are disappeared [in Mexico]”, referring to the tens of thousands of missing women, men and children in the country, believed to have been abducted and likely tortured or killed. In 2018, the government’s own figures counted more than 37,000 ‘desaparecidos’.

While working on this map, Salguero said, she “noticed that there were more and more articles about women who were being murdered”. Around the same time, some of her friends, who are journalists, told her that they were having trouble quantifying and tracking the number of femicides.

“Building a database is not that hard, nor is georeferencing it, I told them… I started my own”, Salguero explained. Over the last two years, her work has had a significant impact. Mexico’s mainstream press has cited her data, for example. She has also been invited to the states of Quintana Roo, Michoacán and Zacatecas to present her findings to local governments.

Recently, El Universal, one of Mexico’s most important national papers, described Salguero’s project as “an important source to…

Daily Mail
December 19, 2018

Facebook has made it nearly impossible for users to avoid having their location tracked.

A new report has found that even if users turn off location tracking on Facebook, the firm will still use their IP address, as well as other information like their check-ins and the city listed on their profile to discern where they are and generated targeted ads, according to Gizmodo.

This experienced was recounted by Aleksandra Korolova, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, who examined how Facebook tracks a user’s location.

‘When it comes to one of the most privacy-sensitive types of data, location, Facebook does not provide meaningful controls and is misleading in its statements to users and advertisers,’ Korolova explained.

‘…Taken together, Facebook creates an illusion of control rather than gives actual control over location-related ad targeting, which can lead to real harms.’

Korolova turned off location tracking on Facebook, doesn’t check into places and doesn’t list a city on her profile, yet she continued to see location-specific ads on Facebook.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 7:46 am

American Mirror
December 19, 2018

Two top Democrats eyeing a 2020 presidential run topped the list for the most egregious ethics violations this year.

The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust released its list of Worst Ethics Violators of 2018, which includes Democratic Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Both Harris and Warren found themselves in hot water a few months ago for their opposition to Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court.

Shortly after the two top Democrats played up their resistance and used antics to fundraise and beg for money, FACT filed an ethics complaint against both senators.

In the complaint, FACT noted the following section of Senate Ethics rules:

Senate Ethics Rules prohibit Senators from soliciting campaign contributions based upon any action taken in their official capacity. By linking a promise of official action with campaign contributions, a Senator violates a ‘basic principle’ of Senate Ethics that guards against conflicts of interest. The Senate Ethics Manual is clear that a Senator “should never use the prestige or influence of a position in the Senate for personal gain. This provision was intended ‘as a broad prohibition against members, officers or employees deriving financial benefit, directly or indirectly, from the use of their official position.’” Moreover, Senators are to act based upon merit, not on partisan affiliation or for campaign contributions.

Warren and Harris topping the list for ethics violations won’t surprise many given the two Democrats have a long history of controversial actions and comments.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Last month, Harris compared the Immigration Customs and Enforcement agency to the Ku Klux Klan.

Before that, she came under fire for refusing on 10 separate occasions to say whether she believes a “convicted felon” should be…

Russia has slammed the “illegal” presence of US troops in Syria as “a dangerous obstacle” to finding a peace settlement.

“From being a factor in the fight against terrorism, the illegal American presence in Syria is becoming a dangerous obstacle to the path to a settlement,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a news briefing on Wednesday.

Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The Syrian government says the Israeli regime and its Western and regional allies are aiding Takfiri terrorist groups wreaking havoc in the country.

The US has long been accused of providing safe passage and logistical support to the Takfiri terrorists, who have been fighting to topple the Damascus government since early 2011.

Currently, American military forces maintain a significant presence in Syria’s north, where they openly support the anti-Damascus Kurdish militants.

The US and its allies have also…

It would be nice to think the president has final say on foreign policy, given the U.S. constitution. But the misleading troop withdrawal announcement, followed by Trump’s boastful tweet, suggests the exact opposite, says Patrick Lawrence.

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

The announcement on Wednesday that the U.S. will withdraw all remaining troops from Syria within the next month looked at first like a rare victory for Donald Trump in his admittedly erratic opposition to senseless wars of adventure. “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there,” the president tweeted with an unmistakable air of triumph.

Don’t get your hopes up. Just about everything in these initial reports is either wrong or misleading. One, the U.S. did not defeat the Islamic State: The Syrian Arab Army, aided by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah militias did. Two, hardly was ISIS the only reason the U.S. has maintained a presence in Syria. The intent for years was to support a coup against the Assad government in Damascus—in part by training and equipping jihadists often allied with ISIS. For at least the past six months, the U.S. military’s intent in Syria has been to counter Iranian influence.

Last and hardly least, the U.S. is not closing down its military presence in Syria. It is digging in for an indefinite period, making Raqqa the equivalent of the Green Zone in Baghdad. By the official count, there are 503 U.S. troops stationed in the Islamic State’s former capital. Unofficially, according to The Washington Post and other press reports, the figure is closer to 4,000—twice the number that is supposed to represent a “full withdrawal” from Syrian soil.

It would be nice to think Washington has at last accepted defeat in Syria, given it is preposterous to pretend otherwise any longer. Damascus is now well into its consolidation phase. Russia, Iran, and Turkey are currently working with Staffan de Mistura, the UN’s special envoy for Syria, to form a committee in January to begin drafting a new Syrian constitution.

U.S. forces conducted a precision airstrike near Sarmada in northwest Syria Nov. 18 that Pentagon says killed a…

Actor Geoffrey Rush denies new #MeToo-inspired claims of “inappropriate” behaviour

By
James Cogan

19 December 2018

Interviews given by actress Yael Stone to both the New York Times and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “7.30” TV program, are being used to once again attack the character of award-winning Australian actor Geoffrey Rush with unsubstantiated allegations of sexual impropriety.

Stone performed in 2010–2011 alongside Rush in a production of the play Diary of a Madman, directed by Neil Armfield. Nearly eight years later, she has gone public with allegations that the famous actor’s relationship with her involved conduct that was “reasonably inappropriate” and incidents that made her feel “uncomfortable.”

Stone’s claims have been made within a definite context.

In November 2017, as a raft of #MeToo allegations of sexual assault or impropriety were being made internationally against prominent men, particularly in the performing arts industry, Rush was accused, in an Australian tabloid newspaper, of having “inappropriately touched” a female co-star during a production of the play King Lear in January 2016.

On the basis of an anonymous and unsubstantiated allegation, Rush was pressured to resign as president of the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) and his distinguished career was threatened with destruction. He responded by filing a defamation law suit against the owner of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, Rupert Murdoch’s Nationwide News, and the author of the article, journalist Jonathon Moran.

The case was heard and concluded in a Sydney court last month. The actress who was allegedly “inappropriately touched,” was revealed to be Rush’s co-star in the play, Eryn Jean Norvill. Rush’s lawyers…

Mediaite
December 19, 2018

On top of all the legal problems that Donald Trump now faces, Don Lemon points out that the potential slowdown of the economy could be an even greater threat to the presidency when the Barack Obama effect wears off.

On Tuesday night’s edition of CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, the host led off his second hour by noting that Trump’s presidency has been “buoyed by an economy that’s been going gangbusters, an economy President Trump inherited from President Barack Obama and juiced with a big mostly corporate tax cut passed a year ago this week.”

Noting that “the economy is suddenly looking less rosie,” Lemon pointed out that “The markets under Trump are now doing much worse than they did in the same time period under Obama,” and showed a graph comparing the S&P 500 under the two administrations.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 7:48 am

Few days remain in 2018 to celebrate and recall all the events on the 50^th anniversary of 1968. Comparisons with the “gilets jaunes” in France have evoked some of the memories, but for those who lived through 1968 as students there are events permanently etched in our psyches that will not go away. For Millennials and the X Generation, 1968 is pre-history, ancient dinosaur time. For those who experienced 1968, it was a year of rupture and transformation.

A brief review of the major events: The Tet offensive began on January 31, leading to the first breach of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon by the Viet Cong. The February photo of the chief of the national police shooting a suspected Viet Cong officer on a Saigon street or the 1972 photo of the young girl screaming in pain from napalm consolidated in images all that was wrong with the U.S. presence in Vietnam.

The March New Hampshire primary was a turning point. Senator Eugene McCarthy came within 200 votes of defeating the sitting President Lyndon Johnson in the Clean for Gene campaign, initiating a political drive to oust the initiator of the Great Society but also the expander on the Vietnam conflict. Four days later, Senator Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy. For many, the choice between the philosopher/poet/politician McCarthy and the tough, politically opportunistic senator from New York was contentious.

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in early April in Memphis, highlighting the worst elements of…

The intense focus on the “ills” of Nicaragua completely misses the deep issues of continued US intervention – imperial neocolonialism – into the sovereign lives of other countries, as here with Nicaragua. Whether you love or hate Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, their personalities and personal lives are not the issue, whatsoever.

For US Americans to be so closely scrutinizing clearly the most progressive government in Central America, ignoring the new US friendly but unpopular president of Costa Rica, Carlos Alvarado Quesada; the systematic violence in the streets of El Salvador which is directly related to the US funded death squad governments of the 1980s; the repressive and illegal President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez; and the repressive and corrupt government of Guatemala under President Jimmy Morales, is very interesting, and disturbing.

The elaborate, well-planned conspiracy behind the April-July 2018 US-orchestrated coup attempt against Nicaragua, included most of the church hierarchy, many wealthy ex-Somocistas, many NGOs including the European-funded CENIDH, the NED (National Endowment for Democracy) and USAID, and a couple thousand young Nicaraguans trained over 4 years in the use of social media to blitzkrieg an agenda-loaded propaganda campaign when the right opportunity arose. It had been in the works since at least 2011 when Nicaraguan Felix Maradiaga teamed up with Colombian…

If you want to understand Murray Rothbard, you need to keep one principle in mind. If you remember this, you will have the key to grasping his thought.  And you should want to understand Murray Rothbard, because he was the greatest American defender of liberty in the twentieth century.

The principle in question is that Murray Rothbard had a consistent vision of the good society that he upheld throughout his long career. He described this vision in a vast number of books and articles, including Man, Economy, and State, Power and Market, The Ethics of Liberty, and Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature. That vision was always the same.

Some people, even among those who knew and admired Murray, fail to realize this because they view him through a political lens. They point to shifts in his political alliances, seeing him as shifting from Old Right to Left and finally to Paleolibertarian. They miss the essential point.

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Of course, Murray wanted to put his vision into practice. But for him the vision was primary. If you concentrate on Murray’s political tactics you will miss the real Murray.

What was this vision? As everybody knows, Murray believed in a complete free market. The State , which Nietzsche called “that coldest of all cold monsters” was the enemy.

In order to maintain a free society, people needed to hold certain values. Murray was a traditionalist who believed in natural law and the family. He deplored assaults on tradition such as the modern feminist movement. In cultural matters, Murray started out on the Right, and he always remained there.

Here are a few samples of what he said: “In our century, we have been inundated by a flood of evil,…

Newsbusters
December 19, 2018

During Sunday’s AM Joy, host Joy Reid and her panel took shots at White House adviser Stephen Miller, President Trump and the Trump base for their “radical” views on immigration. The panel ultimately concluded that “Trump and his base are in a closed universe” and that “his base is scared of anyone who is not visibly white.”

The segment began with host Joy Reid playing a clip of Miller promising to “do whatever is necessary to build the border wall to stop this ongoing crisis of illegal immigration,” including shutting down the government.

Guest Michelle Bernard then unloaded about the administration’s response to the death of a seven-year-old girl in border patrol custody: “They sanctioned cruelty and they have absolutely no empathy for…people who are going to leave their countries…because they are trying to get away from the most horrible situations anyone could ever imagine.” Bernard argued that “there is a continual decision to try to do things to…basically tear apart our democracy.”

According to faux conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, “these people are in the business of cruelty.” She also argued that it “did result in a tragic death of the girl.” Rubin added: The big takeaway from this year is that Trump and his base are in a closed universe. They are a significant segment, unfortunately, of the country.”

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This article was posted: Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 7:50 am

Deutsche Welle
December 19, 2018

Police raided a mosque and several other buildings in Berlin on Tuesday morning in an operation into suspected terrorism financing, prosecutors said.

State criminal police, intelligence officers as well as special police forces took part in the raids, which included the As-Sahaba mosque in the Berlin neighborhood of Wedding.

One of the main suspects was identified as Ahmad A., an imam at the mosque who preaches under the name of Abul Baraa.

The 45-year-old is suspected of sending money to an Islamist fighter in Syria “for purchasing military equipment to carry out terrorist criminal acts,” prosecutors said on Twitter.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 7:51 am

The FBI calls its report of a given interview a “302.” This Luddite insistence on a written summary in the age of easy voice recording opens the door to all manner of misinterpretation.

In the case of the 302 that recreated the initial interview with Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in January 2017, that misinterpretation may not be innocent. To have any value, a 302 must be prepared within five days of the actual interview. That is FBI protocol as well. Last week, when Judge Emmett Sullivan ordered the Robert Mueller legal team to turn over the 302 for the Flynn interview, however, Mueller produced a 302 prepared seven months after the interview.

As Sidney Powell observes in the Daily Caller, there is ample evidence in the infamous Lisa Page-Peter Strzok texts and in the most recent Mueller filing that the FBI had prepared a 302 in a timely fashion. Strzok, in fact, conducted the original interview. That original 302 apparently has been lost or destroyed.

This is not the first time that the FBI — or some entity with power over the FBI — has manufactured a 302 in a politically sensitive case. In the case of TWA Flight 800, the 747 destroyed off the coast of Long Island in July 1996, the FBI and/or CIA manufactured second interviews with the three most critical eyewitnesses.

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In fact, the CIA built its infamous “zoom climb” animation around a fully imaginary second interview with Mike Wire, “the man on the bridge.” In Wire’s case, no second 302 was put in his file, but someone did put counterfeit 302s in the files of other two key witnesses.

FBI Witness 32, Dwight Brumley, a U.S. Navy master chief, was looking out a…

A main charity group in the United Kingdom has called on the British government to stop fueling a conflict in Yemen by imposing a total ban on sales of weapons to Saudi Arabia.

The Christian Aid said in a report published on Wednesday that there was a need for an immediate review of UK sales of arms to states that are actively infringing international law and human rights by pursuing murderous campaigns against their own citizens or their close neighbors.

The British government is selling billions of pounds worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, fueling the kingdom’s three-year-old war on Yemen which has left 22 million people struggling to survive.

Thousands of civilians have been killed, while thousands more have been injured. Collapsed infrastructure coupled with a partial blockade has also deprived most of the population of clean water and proper healthcare, while unleashing the worst cholera outbreak in modern history.

Despite all this,…

Two years of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as a Middle East peacemaking team appear to be having a transformative effect – and in ways that will please neither of them.

The American public is now evenly split between those who want a two-state solution and those who prefer a single state, shared by Israelis and Palestinians, according to a survey published last week by the University of Maryland.

And if a Palestinian state is off the table – as a growing number of analysts of the region conclude, given Israel’s intransigence and the endless postponement of Mr Trump’s peace plan – then support for one state rises steeply, to nearly two-thirds of Americans.

But Mr Netanyahu cannot take comfort from the thought that ordinary Americans share his vision of a single state of Greater Israel. Respondents demand a one-state solution guaranteeing Israelis and Palestinians equal rights.

By contrast, only 17 per cent of Americans expressing a view – presumably Christian evangelicals and hardline Jewish advocates for Israel – prefer the approach of Israel’s governing parties: either to continue the occupation or annex Palestinian areas without offering the inhabitants citizenship.

All of this is occurring even though US politicians and the media express no support for a one-state solution. In fact, quite the reverse.

The movement to boycott Israel, known as BDS, is growing on US campuses, but vilified by Washington officials, who claim its goal is to end…

While decrying “gangster” violence in Sweden partly brought about by mass immigration

Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
December 19, 2018

Swedish Moderate Party leader Ulf Kristersson insists that it’s “crucial” for young Swedes to learn Arabic if they are to be successful in the future.

During a speech at Haymarket Hotel in Stockholm, Kristersson said that in order to assure Sweden’s “competitiveness in the increasingly globalised economy,” it’s crucial for the long term success of Swedish students “to master not only English, school-level French and school-level German, but also Arabic and Chinese.”

Some may take Kristersson’s remarks as another sign that Sweden, which has accepted large numbers of migrants from the Middle East in recent years, is becoming increasingly Islamic.

For hundreds of years, Finnish was the second most spoken language in the Scandinavian country but was recently overtaken by Arabic as Sweden’s largest minority language.

As Douglas Murray documents in his book The Strange Death of Europe, native Swedes will be an ethnic minority in their own country within the lifetimes of most people alive today if current immigration rates continue.

A 2017 Pew Research report put the number of Muslims living in Sweden at approximately 810,000, or 8.1 per cent of the population.

In cities like Malmö, which has suffered a surge in violent crime and gang-related disorder, non-natives already make up half of the population.

Prominent Muslims in Sweden are also demanding that the Islamic call to prayer be broadcast throughout the country after it was allowed in the city of Växjö.

Swedish men seeking voluntary vasectomies has risen by 70 per cent – from from 1,430 men in 2013 to 2,470 in 2017. In cities like Stockholm, the number of men sterilizing themselves has doubled over the last five years.

This has contributed to Swedes having a 1.78 birth…

Above: Boycott Racist Israel, protest in South Africa by the Iraq News Service.

In recent weeks, racism against Palestinian people and the expansion of apartheid-Jim Crow policies have escalated. The Israeli lobby and its supporters attacked freedom of speech in the United States, showing how far they will go to prevent the US public from being aware of their behavior.

If more people in the US become aware of the truth about Israel’s genocidal policies, the economic lifeline and political protection of the United States will disappear. Israel could be forced to make significant changes that recognize the human rights and self-determination of Palestinians.

Israel knows that without the support of the United States, it could not continue these crimes against the Palestinian people. The lesson for US activists: keep telling the truth about Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.

“The Israeli army has enough bullets for every Palestinian.”

That is what the Chair of the Defense Committee of the Israeli Parliament, Avi Dichter, threatened last week. He was commenting on the Great March of Return protests that took place along the eastern fence of the Gaza Strip. Saying Israel has enough bullets for every Palestinian is saying Israel could kill every Palestinian, the definition of ethnic cleansing.

Dichter is not a fringe backbencher but a senior member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party. This former director of the Shin Bet…

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has warned that a disorderly withdrawal from the European Union for Britain, in which the country would leave the bloc without a deal to define its exit terms and future ties, would create an “absolute catastrophe” on the two sides of the English Channel.

“The risks of a disorderly exit of Great Britain from the European Union are clear. It would be an absolute catastrophe,” Juncker said on Wednesday, adding that the EU was trying to a no-deal Brexit from happening on March 29, 2019, the day in which Britain is expected to leave the EU.

The comments come amid a deepening row in the British parliament over a draft Brexit agreement signed between the British government and the EU last month. Both London and Brussels have insisted that the deal is the best and only option available for Britain. However, a majority of British lawmakers are expected to vote the deal down in a…

Canada’s media foments anti-China campaign after Meng arrest

By
Roger Jordan

19 December 2018

Since Canada, acting at Washington’s behest, arrested senior Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, Canada’s major media outlets have gone into high gear to justify her seizure as “lawful” and to depict China as a menace to Canada and the world.

The criminal charges the US has brought against Meng are transparently trumped up and politically motivated. Yet this has not stopped the media from greeting China’s complaints over Meng’s arrest with hoots, and from portraying Canada as under attack from an overbearing and bellicose China.

The Globe and Mail gloated, in a December 14 editorial titled “The end of the Trudeau government’s China delusion,” that Meng’s Dec. 1 detention and the subsequent tit-for-tat arrest of two Canadian citizens in China have put paid to the Liberal government’s plans for a free trade deal with Beijing. “The case of Meng Wanzhou has torpedoed the Trudeau government’s China policy,” enthused the Globe, the traditional mouthpiece of the Bay Street financial elite. “At the same time, it has also sunk China’s Canada policy. Call it a win-win.”

The neoconservative National Post was equally jubilant. Writing in the wake of the arrest by Chinese authorities of former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, the Post declared their arrests could “prove useful,” because “they ought to make it impossible for our prime minister, or any future prime ministers, to keep turning a blind eye to the criminal and thuggish nature of Beijing’s rulers.”

This turns reality on its head. The Beijing regime is no doubt authoritarian, representing as it does the capitalist oligarchy that emerged from the Stalinist bureaucracy’s restoration…

The Senate passed the First Step Act on Tuesday night in an 87-12 vote after vigorous debate over legislative amendments that would have gutted much of the bill. The legislation now moves to the House for a vote later this week, where it is expected to pass.

The sentencing reform legislation, shaped in large part by Jared Kushner and Koch Industries attorney Mark Holden, expands job training and other rehabilitation-oriented programming designed to reduce recidivism rates among federal prisoners deemed “low-risk.” It also expands early-release programs and somewhat reins in sentencing laws, including mandatory minimums for drug offenses.

The legislation’s changes to sentencing laws include allowing judges more flexibility to pass sentences below mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenders and reducing mandatory minimums associated with the three-strikes law. The legislation also prohibits the shackling of pregnant prisoners and the use of solitary confinement for juveniles.

The latest version, which came to the Senate floor via another, unrelated bill, advanced Monday with stripped-down provisions and additional measures demanded by law enforcement groups, including the National Sheriff’s Association and “tough-on-crime” Republicans.

Senators voted against a set of amendments to the bill Tuesday that reform advocates deemed “poison pill” amendments ahead of the legislation’s passage. Republican Senators Tom Cotton and John Kennedy authored three amendments that advocates say would have unacceptably whittled down the already feeble legislation.

US President Donald Trump has declared victory against Daesh terrorists in Syria as reports suggest that he is planning to pull out American troops from the conflict-torn country.

“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” Trump tweeted Wednesday, using an acronym for the terrorist group.

The declaration comes after the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post reported that Trump is preparing to “immediately” withdraw the 2,000 American troops in the country.

When asked to comment on the reports, Pentagon spokesman Col. Rob Manning said on Wednesday only that “at this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region.”

The US has reportedly more than 2,000 troops stationed in eastern Syria, in…

‘We borrow more than a million-and-a-half dollars a minute’

Steve Watson
Prison Planet.com
December 19, 2018

Senator Rand Paul has said that while he opposes a government shutdown, spending is out of control and it should not be allowed to continue.

“People worry about the government shutting down, and I understand that, but they should also worry about keeping the government open,” Paul said during a Fox News appearance.

Citing $22 trillion in federal debt, Paul urged that “We shouldn’t willy-nilly shut the government down, but also shouldn’t just keep it open and keep spending money like there’s no tomorrow.”

“If you keep a government open that borrows a trillion dollars a year, are there problems to that?” Paul asked, adding “Is there an ultimate underpinning that is eroding away for the whole country, when we accumulate a $22 trillion debt, when we borrow more than a million-and-a-half dollars a minute?”

Paul added that a government shutdown is “more hype than reality” and that if it makes a difference it can be an effective tool.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

The Senator warned, however that there is still a lot of wastage in shutting down the government, and that a long term fix would be to make the government smaller.

“We always pay the people for not working. So they’ll declare 80 percent of the people up here ‘unessential,’ meaning they don’t have to show up for work, but we always pay them,” Paul said.

“I don’t understand that. They’re unessential, we keep paying them and we keep them employed. I’m for if you’re unessential, maybe that’s an argument for making government smaller.” The Senator argued.

This article was posted: Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 8:59 am

…

Generally seen as highly homogenous, Japan is changing fast. In Tokyo, Kawasaki and Osaka recently, I encountered quite a few non-Japanese working at convenience stores and restaurants, and saw many more on the streets. Japan’s largest immigrant groups are Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese and Brazilians. Though the last are mostly ethnic Japanese, they maintain a separate culture, so are perceived as Brazilians.

In Kawasaki, a city just across a river from Tokyo, I entered a Peruvian restaurant with two Japanese friends, Ryo Isabe and Samson Yee. Born in Hong Kong, Samson spent parts of his childhood in England, has traveled all over and is married to a Japanese, and his spoken Japanese is nearly perfect, I was told. Immediately, Samson identified the woman serving us as not Japanese, although she appeared native enough to me, and had barely said anything. The more she talked, the more her Japanese deficiency was exposed, however. She was Peruvian.

Ryo is a critic, mostly of rap and electronic music, and the author of a book on Kawasaki. On the ribbon over its cover is a question, “Is Kawasaki hell?” Crossing the Tama River from Tokyo, I did notice a row of shacks, erected by the homeless, but by the time the train rolled into the station, everything seemed sparklingly modern and sophisticated. Walking around, I ran into plenty of chic stores and restaurants, and a swanky shopping center, La Cittadella.

Postcards from the End…
Linh Dinh
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Ryo explained that although Kawasaki may appear perfectly normal, there are many underlying problems. In 2015, the city shocked Japan when a 13-year-old boy was tortured and killed, with his naked body tossed into the…

Free Beacon
December 19, 2018

The Department of Justice announced on Tuesday it will effectively ban the possession of all bump-fire stocks through a new regulatory rule.

Senior DOJ officials told reporters it would become a felony to own a bump-stock within 90 days of the new rule’s publication. They estimated March 21, 2019, would be the deadline for the public to turn in or destroy their bump stocks. The officials said they would prosecute those who do not comply with that deadline.

“We anticipate that the general public will be compliant with the law,” a senior official said. “To the extent someone chooses not to comply with the law, we will treat this as we do with all firearms offenses. We will prioritize our resources to maximize public safety, focusing on those that pose the greatest threat. We will enforce the statute based on the circumstances of the individual case as we do with all firearms law.”

The new rule rewrites current law prohibiting machineguns to incorporate bump stocks. The National Firearms Act of 1934 defines a machinegun as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” The operation of bump-stocks requires an individual trigger pull for each individual round fired. The DOJ nevertheless decided they “initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger.”

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This article was posted: Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 7:52 am

Could global warming pose the greatest threat to the future of life on the planet?  Quite possibly, if we believe the international (and scientific) consensus, despite a widening stratum of debunkers, deniers, and skeptics.  What about the prospects of thermonuclear war between the United States and Russia, two countries armed to the max and seemingly moving toward the brink of military conflict?  Where does that rate?   If the question is asked of most any Beltway denizen, the response might be something along lines of “sounds frightening, but right now we have other priorities, and we can’t lose sight of the Russian threat”.

As American political life continues to deteriorate, matters of war and peace rarely merit attention amidst the sound and fury of manufactured news, moral posturing, personal scandals, and tweeting exchanges.  Good for TV ratings and maybe partisan advantage, decidedly less so for addressing issues of political relevance.   Now we have two years of frenzied Russiagate and its attendant neo-McCarthyism.   That the intensifying hostility directed by one nuclear power toward another might bring the world closer to a war that could end all wars seems bizarrely remote to a political class obsessed with little beyond its own power and wealth, faintly camouflaged by identity politics; the “unthinkable” remains, well, unthinkable.

As anti-Russia hysteria spreads, speech taboos harden; any discourse at odds with tightening official…

It is hard to envisage sympathy for a person who made a name as a home secretary (prisons, detentions, security and such) taking the mast and banner of her country before hopeless odds, but inadequate opponents will do that to you.  Vicious, venal and underdone, the enemies from within Theresa May’s own Tory ranks resemble the lazily angry, the fumingly indulgent.  These are the same men, and a few women, who managed to derive enormous satisfaction from a Britain pampered and spoiled by EU largesse but questioning of its bureaucracy and demands.  Patriotism has an odd habit of making one jaundiced, but manic self-interest will also do that to you.

May remains British prime minister after a botched effort to overthrow her within conservative party ranks.  She faced the unenviable situation of being stonewalled in Europe and by Parliament itself.  President of the European Council Donald Tusk assured May that the deal for the UK leaving the EU is not up for renegotiation, “including the backstop”.

The border with Ireland – soft, hard, or middling – is proving to be a rattling affair.  Should it go “hard”, Britain will find itself trapped.  As The Irish Times noted, “It evokes genuine fear, not least in those who live near the Border or rely on trade for their livelihoods or count themselves among the silenced majority in Northern Ireland who voted Remain.”

As for Parliament, May has ducked and weaved in putting the deal to its irritable…

Cabinet of the Minister of Armed Forces says text of letter is “unworthy”

Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
December 19, 2018

French generals who signed an open letter accusing President Macron of “treason” for committing France to the UN migration pact are facing disciplinary action.

As we reported last week, a letter written by General Antoine Martinez and signed by ten other generals, an admiral and a colonel, as well as former French Minister of Defense Charles Millon, warned Macron that the signing of the pact strips France of more sovereignty and provides an additional reason for “an already battered people” to “revolt”.

The letter accuses Macron of being “guilty of a denial of democracy or treason against the nation” for signing the pact without putting it to the people.

According to a report by French news outlet l’Opinion, the cabinet of the Minister of Armed Forces responded to the letter by calling the content “inadmissible and unworthy”.

Asserting that military personnel are tasked with “setting an example,” the cabinet said that the signatories to the letter had abandoned their responsibilities and statutory obligations “and thus expose themselves to disciplinary sanctions,” which will occur within days.

One of the generals who signed the letter, Marc Bertucchi, has since distanced himself from the text, commenting, “It is out of the question for me to accuse our president of “treason” because he is going to sign a document which, after careful reading, obviously does not undermine the principles that are the honor of France and for which I have engaged for more than forty years.”

It is unclear what action will be taken against the generals, all of whom but one are still on reserve duty.

The UN migration pact is legally non-binding but some have asserted that courts in European countries will be obliged to take its mandates into…

Little by little, the partisans of the Cebrowski doctrine are advancing their pawns. If they must cease creating wars in the Greater Middle East, they’ll just turn around and inflame the Caribbean Basin. Above all, the Pentagon is planning to assassinate an elected head of state, ruin his country, and undermine the unity of Latin-America.

John Bolton, the new US National Security Advisor, has relaunched the Pentagon’s project for the destruction of the State structures in the Caribbean Basin.

We remember that in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Secretary for Defense at that time, Donald Rumsfeld, created the Office of Force Transformation and nominated Admiral Arthur Cebrowski as its Director. Its mission was to train the US army for its new role in the era of financial globalisation. It was designed to change military culture in order to destroy the State structures of the regions which were not connected to the global economy. The first chapter of this plan consisted of dislocating the « Greater Middle East ». The second stage was intended to perform the same task in the « Caribbean Basin ». The plan was designed to destroy some twenty coastal and insular States, with the exception of Colombia, Mexico and as far as possible, territories belonging to the United Kingdom, the United States, France and Holland.

Secret Empires: How th…
Peter Schweizer
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When he arrived at the White House, President Donald Trump opposed the Cebrowski plan. However, two years later, he has so far only been able to prevent the Pentagon and NATO from handing over States to the terrorist groups they employ (the « Caliphate »), but not to stop manipulating terrorism. Concerning…

The United States was a near global outlier Monday at the United Nations General Assembly in rejecting a framework to bolster international cooperation on refugees.

Only Hungary — headed by far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose administration has been accused of carrying out “a full-frontal assault on migrants and refugees” — joined the US in voting “no” on the Global Compact on Refugees (pdf). One hundred eighty-one nations voted to approve it, while three — the Dominican Republic, Eritrea, and Libya — abstained.

“The US said recently that it backed most of the refugee pact, but not the part aimed at limiting detentions of asylum seekers,” Agence France-Presse reported. The international agreement states: “The development of non-custodial and community-based alternatives to detention, particularly for children, will also be supported.”

As the Washington, DC-based advocacy organization Refugees International explains of the non-binding agreement:

The Compact was developed over the course of two years of consultations among governments, UN agencies, civil society organizations, the private sector, and refugees themselves. At present, around 85 percent of the world’s refugees are hosted by low- and middle-income countries, contributions from wealthy donor governments fall well-short of overall need, and opportunities for refugees to resettle to third countries have actually decreased. The overall goal of the Compact was to establish a more equitable, predictable, and inclusive refugee response framework based on international cooperation.

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Nancy Wilson (1937-2018), an extraordinary singer who will be missed

By
John Andrews

19 December 2018

Nancy Wilson, one of the most active and distinctive American jazz and pop singers during the late 20th century and the first few years of the 21st, passed away after a long bout with kidney cancer on December 13. She was 81.

Nancy Wilson

Ms. Wilson was a familiar and popular figure. She appeared regularly as an actor on television and in films, and for seven years her silky and mellifluous voice narrated the marvelous “Jazz Profiles” series for National Public Radio.

Raised by jazz-loving, working-class parents (her father an iron foundry worker, her mother a maid) in Chillicothe, Ohio, Ms. Wilson’s talent for singing emerged during childhood. By the age of 15 she was performing locally, including on television station WTVN, before completing high school and one year of college. Ms. Wilson then committed to a career in music and toured the Midwest and Canada with a minor dance band.

She recorded first for the uneven Dot label, which had started out with country western, but moved to New York City in 1959 and quickly hit the big time with Capitol Records, the home of Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and the Stan Kenton Orchestra.

Capitol issued five well-recorded, popular and aesthetically pleasing albums of hers during the next two years, along with a number of hit singles, including “Guess Who I Saw Today,” which remained the singer’s signature tune.

From the beginning, Ms. Wilson inhabited the nether world between jazz, pop and rhythm-and-blues, with one foot firmly planted in the commercial world, but without ever compromising her gifts. Like one of her primary influences, Anita O ’Day, Ms. Wilson considered herself a “song stylist” rather than a jazz…

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation
December 19, 2018

Fox News host Tucker Carlson is standing strong and doubling down in the face of establishment leftists targeting his advertisers because he dares to speak out against open borders globalism.

As the left has given up trying to win people over to open borders globalism with their terrible arguments, they’re now focused entirely on destroying people for thought crimes. While the left used to be skeptical of corporate power, these days they’ve teamed up with Big Tech and corporate America to censor their opposition. Most “journalists” now act as unpaid interns ratting out conservatives for wrong-think so their corporate masters can ban them from their platforms or force them out of their jobs.

Pacific Life Insurance Co., TD Ameritrade, Indeed, Smile Direct Club, Bowflex, NerdWallet, Ancestry, Jaguar Land Rover, Voya Financial, Minted, Zenni Optical, Just for Men, IHOP, and SCOTTeVEST have all either stopped advertising on Carlson’s show, paused their ads on his show, or said they won’t advertise on his top-rated show in the future.

Hollywood trash like Judd Apatow have also demanded he be deplatformed:

The Murdoch family is a family of immigrants. Everyone’s family is a family of immigrants. @TuckerCarlson is a an idiot who doesn’t understand who we all are. How can anyone advertise on a show which spouts hate? What would it take for people to care? https://t.co/cgpjdElZh2

— Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow) December 17, 2018

Tucker Carlson, who is the greatest voice for sanity on television, is refusing to back down:

Transcript via Fox News:

We’ve talked a lot on this show about the threat to free speech. It turns out it’s very real.

Here’s one example: Last week, we interviewed a man named Genaro Lopez. Lopez is an elected official in Tijuana, Mexico. He’s exactly the kind of person you’d think a lot of…

Some US lawmakers have called for a probe into the death of a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl at a US Border Patrol detention center in Lordsburg, New Mexico earlier this month.

Jakelin Caal Maquin, who had traveled with her father to the US from a rural area in Guatemala’s impoverished Alta Verapaz region, died of dehydration while in US custody.

The girl and her father had been detained by US immigration authorities on December 6 as part of a group of 163 people who approached US agents to turn themselves in.

Early on December 7, the girl started having seizures, and emergency responders measured her body temperature at 105.7 degrees Fahrenheit (40.9 degrees Celsius). She was then taken to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead the day after.

According to US government officials, Jakelin had not had anything to eat or drink for days, but lawyers for her family have disputed the claim.

A group of lawmakers visiting the same area on Tuesday…

The UK’s minor opposition parties have tabled a vote of no-confidence in the government of Prime Minister Theresa May as the country could be leaving the European Union without an agreement.

On Monday, May announced that a vote on her Brexit deal would not take place until after Christmas, more than a week after she had sparked a huge controversy by pulling a planned vote.

She told the House of Commons that parliament would be able to begin a week of debate on the Brexit deal on January 14.

The SNP, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens met on Tuesday and decided to table a vote of no-confidence, saying it was essential to debate the vote on May’ deal before the Christmas recess begins.

“By tabling our motion on Tuesday evening, we hope to be afforded time by the UK government to debate it before parliament closes for the Christmas recess,” said SNP Westminster Leader Ian Blackford MP after meeting with Liberal Democrat…

Breitbart
December 18, 2018

One of the two first Muslim women to be elected to Congress has announced she will be showcasing both her religion and her Palestinian roots when she is sworn in on January 3.

Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American who was unchallenged in her bid to represent Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, posted a photo on Instagram of the gown or “thobe” that she will wear.

“Sneak peek: This is what I am wearing when I am sworn into Congress,” Tlaib wrote, using the hashtags #PalestinianThobe and #ForMyYama.

“Yama” is an Arabic term for mother.

“A thobe or thawb is a traditional gown worn in Arab countries in the Middle East and in some African countries,” the Huffington Post reported. “A Palestinian thobe is known for its embroidered patterns and has its own unique style depending on where the person wearing it hails from.”

Tlaib’s post prompted other Muslim women to share photos of themselves wearing the traditional garb and using the hashtags  #TweetYourThrobe or #TweetYourThoub.

Read more

This article was posted: Tuesday, December 18, 2018 at 7:37 am

US President Donald Trump signed a letter of intent to proceed with negotiations to construct a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to a new document obtained by CNN.

The letter, dated October 28, 2015 and signed by Trump, outlined the intent to build Trump condominiums, a hotel and commercial property in the heart of Moscow, the network reported on Tuesday.

Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani told CNN on Sunday that the document was never signed by Trump.

“It was a real estate project. There was a letter of intent to go forward, but no one signed it,” Giuliani told the network’s Dana Bash.

The document is also signed by Andrey Rozov, owner of I.C. Expert Investment Co., the Russian company that would have been responsible for developing the project, the report said.

While running for president in 2016, Trump repeatedly told the public that he had “nothing to do with Russia.” He never said that his company explored the business deal with…

The United States’ envoy on North Korea is to start a four-day visit to South Korea in an apparent effort to kick-start stalled nuclear talks between Washington and Pyongyang.

Stephen Biegun, the US special representative for the North, is to arrive in the South’s capital, Seoul, on Wednesday afternoon, according to the US State Department.

The South Korean Foreign Ministry said Biegun would on Friday attend a meeting of the South Korea-US working group on North Korea, which was established last month to work toward the demilitarization of the South-North border.

“Close discussion over various pending issues related to the North Korean nuclear issue… including inter-Korean relations will (also) be held,” the ministry added.

The US envoy is scheduled to hold talks on Thursday with his South Korean counterpart, Lee Do-hoon. He will also meet Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon on Friday.

It is unclear if Biegun will be meeting with…

The left professes diversity as its vehicle and goal to expand power and bring more of the deserving into the system but, ironically, it’s one of the reasons why the Democrats fared so poorly in the 2016 election. Some, like Jay Haug, blame their intolerance. They force their issues of race, gender, and sexuality in the faces of their opponents with a politically correct inevitability that backfires (American Thinker, 1/20/17). Similarly, J. T. Young claims their diverse pitch is undercut by their homogenizing of substance and badgering methods (The Daily Caller, 11/30/17).

Could they have diversified and softened their pitch to those outside their orbit?

It’s difficult to imagine how believers in traditional marriage, for example, could have engaged in a productive conversation with the LGBT community. The left needed a more flexible frame to approach these outsiders—especially moderate, working class, and rural whites—and set aside their differences at least long enough to win elections, something the right has been very good at for some time now.

These differences were no minor obstacle. The success of the Sanders campaign challenged the Democratic Party’s established position on who should be included in its coalition. The Democrats have left the lower and working classes behind over the past forty-plus years as they’ve shifted to the right. In the mid-to-late 1970s the Democrats began to embrace identity politics, the special endorsement of racial,…

Do New Democrat MPs who belong to the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group (CIIG) have carte blanche to flout party policy?

Last week CIIG executive member Murray Rankin participated in a press conference calling for a new round of Canadian sanctions on Iran. The Victoria MP joined CIIG chair Michael Levitt, vice-chair David Sweet and executive member Anthony Housefather for an event led by former CIIG executive Irwin Cotler. Rankin’s role in this anti-Iranian effort runs counter to the NDP’s opposition to illegal sanctions on Iran, call for Canada to re-establish diplomatic relations with that country and support for the 2015 “p5+1 nuclear deal”. (Justin Trudeau has failed to maintain his election promise to restart diplomatic relations with Iran.)

Rankin’s departure from NDP policy takes place amidst the Donald Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and bid to force others to adhere to its illegal sanctions, threatening to sanction any country that buys Iranian oil.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently said the US would seek to starve Iranians until the country’s decision-makers accept their demands. Last month Pompeo told the BBC, “the [Iranian] leadership has to make a decision that they want their people to eat.”

Along with punishing its economy, the US and Israel are seeking to foment unrest in Iran. According to a July Axios story, “Israel and the United States formed a joint working group a few months ago…

Breitbart
December 18, 2018

Migration Watch UK has suggested “immigration-driven population growth” is to blame for London’s status as the second-most gridlocked city in Europe after Moscow.

The migration-sceptic think tank was commenting on a study by traffic data firm Inrix reported earlier in 2018, which suggested that not only was London runner-up to Russia’s troubled capital in the gridlock stakes, but that the United Kingdom as a whole was the world’s number ten most-congested country.

It is likely that, if taken singly, England would be even higher up the rankings, as the United Kingdom’s other Home Nations are much less densely packed — particularly Scotland, with the wide expanses of its iconic but sparsely populated Highlands.

‘The UK is the world’s 10th most congested country and London is Europe’s second most gridlocked city after Moscow.’ Could it have anything to do with immigration-driven population growth where the equivalent of a new city arrives each year from overseas? https://t.co/AbtKDuM0n1

— Migration Watch UK (@MigrationWatch) December 17, 2018

Quoting an observation from a BBC report on the Inrix study that “The UK is the world’s 10th most congested country and London is Europe’s second most gridlocked city after Moscow”, Migration Watch asked its Twitter followers: “Could it have anything to do with immigration-driven population growth where the equivalent of a new city arrives each year from overseas?”

Net annual immigration to the United Kingdom from the European Union, which is effectively unlimited and unvetted under the bloc’s Free Movement regime, was 74,000 in the year to June 2018 — a significant drop from previous years, due in part to the Brexit vote and in part to incomes in the poorer EU countries British employers had been sourcing low-paid workers from improving.

Read more

This article was…

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has said that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) must stop the “thuggish nature in which he has been acting,” in the wake of the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In an interview with The Washington Examiner on Tuesday, Haley praised the Saudi crown prince for having “a lot of good ideas,” but added that he has been “careless at times.”

She said that how bin Salman deals with the aftermath of the killing of Khashoggi will prove his ability to lead the Saudi kingdom moving forward.

“First and foremost, [the crown prince] owes us some accountability for what happened to Khashoggi. Without question,” Haley said.

Commenting on this international lawyer and political analyst Barry Grossman said that the real point that needs to be made is that after her token and hypocritical reference to thugishness, she also praised the crown prince for having “a lot of good ideas,”…

A Palestinian-American speech pathologist in Austin, Texas, has filed a federal lawsuit for losing her job after refusing to sign a pro-Israel oath. Bahia Amawi is an Arabic-speaking child language specialist who had worked for nine years in the Pflugerville Independent School District. But she lost her job last year after she declined to sign a pledge that she would “not boycott Israel during the term of the contract” and that she would not take any action that is “intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with Israel.” We speak with Bahia Amawi and Gadeir Abbas, senior litigation attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He is representing Amawi in her lawsuit against the Pflugerville Independent School District and the state of Texas.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A Palestinian-American teacher in Austin, Texas, has filed a federal lawsuit for losing her job as a speech pathologist after refusing to sign a pro-Israel oath. Bahia Amawi is an Arabic-speaking child language specialist who had worked for nine years in the Pflugerville Independent School District. But she lost her job last year after she declined to sign a pledge that she, quote, “will not boycott Israel during the term of the contract,” unquote, and that she will not take any action that is, quote, “intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with Israel.”

AMY GOODMAN: Before filing the lawsuit Monday, Bahia Amawi spoke to The Intercept about what happened to her.

BAHIA AMAWI: The point of boycotting any product that supports Israel is to put pressure on the Israeli government to change its treatment, the inhumane treatment, of the Palestinian people. Having grown up as a Palestinian, I know firsthand the oppression and the struggle that Palestinians face on a daily basis.

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You know, I have to set an example for…

The Daily Caller
December 18, 2018

Witches aren’t thrilled with President Donald Trump’s repeated use of the term “witch hunt” to describe special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

According to an article published Monday by The Daily Beast, a number of practicing witcheshave voiced concern over the president’s use of the term, saying essentially that he was trivializing the worst point in their history to score political points.

Actual witch hunts have left what witchcraft author Kitty Randall, who uses the name “Amber K.” in the witching world, calls a “traumatic emotional imprint” on modern-day witches.

“To have him compare his situation to the worst period in our history is just infuriating,” Randall said.

Trump has used the term dozens of times on Twitter and on live television — and most people probably assume that, rather than a literal hunt for practicing witches, he intends it to reflect Merriam-Webster’s secondary definition:

Witch hunt: the searching out and deliberate harassment of those (such as political opponents) with unpopular views

Regardless, according to David Salisbury of Washington’s Firefly House witch community, “Many are mad, and the rest are rolling their eyes.”

Read more

This article was posted: Tuesday, December 18, 2018 at 7:50 am

The Daily Caller
December 18, 2018

Witches aren’t thrilled with President Donald Trump’s repeated use of the term “witch hunt” to describe special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

According to an article published Monday by The Daily Beast, a number of practicing witcheshave voiced concern over the president’s use of the term, saying essentially that he was trivializing the worst point in their history to score political points.

Actual witch hunts have left what witchcraft author Kitty Randall, who uses the name “Amber K.” in the witching world, calls a “traumatic emotional imprint” on modern-day witches.

“To have him compare his situation to the worst period in our history is just infuriating,” Randall said.

Trump has used the term dozens of times on Twitter and on live television — and most people probably assume that, rather than a literal hunt for practicing witches, he intends it to reflect Merriam-Webster’s secondary definition:

Witch hunt: the searching out and deliberate harassment of those (such as political opponents) with unpopular views

Regardless, according to David Salisbury of Washington’s Firefly House witch community, “Many are mad, and the rest are rolling their eyes.”

Read more

This article was posted: Tuesday, December 18, 2018 at 7:50 am

US President Donald Trump has agreed to shut down his personal charity – Trump Foundation – following allegations that it misused funds for his political and business gains.

New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced on Tuesday that the foundation would be dissolved and its remaining assets distributed to other charities under judicial supervision as it had engaged in a “shocking pattern of illegality.”

Underwood filed a lawsuit against the foundation in June, claiming that Trump had been misusing the charity to promote his business interests and his candidacy during the US 2016 presidential elections.

Underwood argued that the charity “was little more than a checkbook for payments to not-for-profits from Mr. Trump or the Trump Organization.”

“This resulted in multiple violations of state and federal law because payments were made using Foundation money regardless of the purpose of the payment,” she said in the…

The advantages of a second citizenship and passport all boil down to one principle: freedom. Your passport is the property of the government that issued it. Your government can revoke it anytime, leaving you trapped in your own country.

Indeed, a second passport could literally save your life. During World War II, the Nazis invalidated German citizenship for millions of Jews. Most were shipped off to concentration camps where they died, but a few thousand Jews had a backup plan: a second passport they could use to escape to freedom.

Dual citizenship coupled with a second passport can offer numerous additional benefits, such as improved visa-free travel options; the right to reside in another country or countries; and the ability to cross international borders if your primary passport is lost, stolen, or revoked.

Clearly, almost everyone can benefit from a second citizenship and passport. Wouldn’t you feel safer with a second passport stashed away – just in case?

Unfortunately, legitimate second passports are difficult to obtain unless you qualify through ancestry, marriage, religion, or long-term residence in a foreign country. Without meeting one of these criteria, the only way for you to acquire one is through a citizenship-by-investment program (CIP).

The Lifeboat Strategy
Mark Nestmann
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Only a handful of countries offer a path to citizenship and passport with a clear legal basis through a contribution or investment. But that number is increasing rapidly. Today, 13 countries have CIPs. Three nations – Jordan, Moldova, and Montenegro – introduced them in 2018.

Here are the countries with legitimate CIPs in effect:

1. Antigua & Barbuda
2. Cambodia
3. Commonwealth of…

SEP meeting attendees speak out in defence of Julian Assange

By
our reporters

18 December 2018

Workers, students and young people responded with enthusiasm to announcements at a Socialist Equality Party meeting last Sunday that the SEP will hold rallies next March in defence of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Those in attendance expressed their hostility to the role of the Australian political establishment in the persecution of the publisher, and their admiration for WikiLeaks’ exposure of US-led war crimes and illegal diplomatic intrigues.

James

James, a mature-aged history student, said he attended the meeting, because he “felt a responsibility to support a hero who is under fire, someone who is a very important figure, a world-wide figure. Someone who is telling the truth and exposing corruption.

“The photo of Assange’s current condition outraged me. It made me realise how much he has been suffering especially in the last couple of years in the embassy. He has committed no crime, he has exposed the truth.

“Assange is being victimised because the American war machine has to go on. They can’t stop it. It’s their main source of income. They need wars. We’ve got business people dictating to governments. Assange is a very dangerous figure because he’s making these things transparent.

“We’re living through a stage of history with mass rumblings and opposition from below. We’ve had things like 40 million people go on general strike in Brazil last year and now the emergence of the Yellow Vest movement in France. Under these conditions, workers need people like Julian Assange exposing the truth more than ever.”

Gus

Gus, a construction worker, came to the meeting after attending a lecture by WSWS international editorial board chairman David North…

The US Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed legislation long in the making and backed by President Donald Trump to reduce sentences for certain prison inmates.

By a vote of 87-12, the Republican-led Senate passed and sent to the House of Representatives the “First Step Act,” which would ease the way for some prisoners to win early release to halfway houses or home confinement.

The legislation also aims to establish programs to head off repeat offenders and protect first-time non-violent offenders from harsh mandatory minimum sentences.

Earlier this year, the House passed a bipartisan bill focusing on prison reforms, which did not include sentencing reforms.

With little time as Congress tries to wrap up its session this month, Senate proponents are hoping their broader version is accepted by the Republican-controlled House.

The United States leads the world in prison population, with about 2.2 million people incarcerated at the end of…

Zero Hedge
December 18, 2018

As members of the FOMC gather at the Eccles building for the first day of the central bank’s December policy meeting, during which they’re widely expected to vote to raise the Fed funds rate for the fourth time this year, President Trump is once again urging the central bank to reconsider – this time urging Chairman Powell & Co. to read an editorial in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal calling for a pause in rate hikes (which in turn followed a similar piece from Fed “hawks” Stanley Druckenmiller and Kevin Warsh).

The tweet followed a similar message from Monday where Trump pointed out the incongruity in the Fed raising interest rates while “the world is blowing up.”

On the heels of Monday’s brutal selloff, which sent stocks to their lowest levels since October 2017, Trump warned “don’t let the market become any more illiquid than it already is. Stop with the 50 B’s.

Instead of blindly hiking, the Fed needs to “Feel the market, don’t just go by meaningless numbers. Good luck!”

His reference to “50 Bs” initially sparked some confusion on twitter:

We’re all scratching our heads at that one.#50Bs?

— ForexFlow (@forexflowlive) December 18, 2018

The 50 Bs? Didn’t they sing “Love Shack”? https://t.co/1KOkgXlnIO

— Gareth Baines (@DrGABaines) December 18, 2018

While the bizarre phrasing is most likely a reference to the central bank’s $50 billion a month balance sheet runoff, a quick Google search revealed that a 50B is a legal code for… a domestic violence protective order.

Of course, we can’t be sure that’s what Trump means (who knows what’s going on in his head?) Then again, only Trump would use domestic violence as an analogy for stock selling.

This article was posted: Tuesday, December 18, 2018 at 7:52 am

The sentencing of former US national security adviser Michael Flynn has been postponed for 90 days to allow the high-ranking military official to prolong his cooperation in the Russia probe after he admitted to lying to the FBI and was accused of betraying his country.

During an explosive hearing on Tuesday, US District Judge Emmet Sullivan severely criticized US President Donald Trump’s former adviser for committing a “serious offense” by lying to FBI agents in the investigation into the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and selling out the United States.

“This is very serious offense. A high-ranking senior official of the government making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while on the physical premises of the White House,” Sullivan said in federal court in Washington, DC. “Arguably, you sold your country out. I’m not hiding my disgust, my disdain for this criminal…

Photo Source Kurtis Garbutt | CC BY 2.0

The year 2018 is coming to an end with a deeply divided government and people. The Democrats won the House, promising to paralyze the remaining two years of the highly contested reign of Donald Trump. The government may shut down just before Christmas because Trump wants money for a wall to keep Mexicans and Latin Americans out of the USA.

The American schism

Trump, a hotel and gulf-course businessman, has been spearheading the schism in America. It’s as if he welcomes confrontation and controversy. His connections with Russia, China, the immigrants, the media, North Korea, and his staff at the White House and the government are generating enormous corruption and chaos.

Trump caters to interest groups like the Evangelicals, pistol-carrying NRA enthusiasts, impoverished and confused coal miners, and, of course, registered Republicans and the very wealthy.

In fact, the tax cut he engineered earlier this year bribed the largest corporations and the very rich, sealing the class war he is heading. In addition, he filled the Supreme Court and is stacking the lower courts with judges who share his oligarchic politics.

The fact Trump was elected president shows the precarious and hazardous nature of American political institutions. They resemble those of the Roman empire, which was governed by emperors with absolute power. Some of those emperors grabbed power through civil wars. Occasionally, monsters like Caligula, Nero, Commodus,…

Two hundred nations at Katowice COP24 Poland just wrapped up two-weeks of climate meetings. If history is a guide, CO2 emissions will continue to accelerate until COP25 next year in Chile. Still, the delegates did adopt a rule book to put Paris ’15 into action, Ahem!

But, hark! There’s a ray of sunshine peering out from behind the Katowice coal-clouded skyline because big money interests may be altering the landscape for combating global warming.

According to reports out of Katowice global investors managing $32T issued a “stark warning” that the world faces financial Armageddon worse than 2008 if carbon emissions are not cut, including a phase-out of coal. Wow!

That sets the stage for proving/disproving the old maxim “money talks.” If it does, there’s a glimmer of hope for Miami’s survival.

Accordingly, some of the world’s deepest pocket investors including pension funds, insurers, and asset fund managers exhibited their most impressive intervention ever by insisting that (1) fossil fuel subsidies must end and (2) substantial taxes must be slapped on carbon.

According to the IMF, current subsidies for fossil fuels amount to $5T per year, which makes fossil fuel subsidies alone equivalent to some of the largest economies in the world. Ipso facto, if $5 trillion/year pivots from fossil fuel subsidies to renewable investments, just imagine the impact. By way of comparison, in 2017 total investment in renewables reached $280B.

Of course, the big…

Sarah Cowgill
Liberty Nation
December 18, 2018

Transgender rights activists are celebrating with cosmopolitans, dark chocolate, and passing around palette loads of Midol, because the U.K.’s Brighton and Hove city council has declared that boys also menstruate. The East Sussex city’s local government brain trust issued guidelines earlier this month, under the heading “Taking a Period Positive Approach in Brighton & Hove Schools” and will be compulsory inside the classrooms of all primary school children.

The council, which is far beyond the label of extreme and lunatic left, issued the statement:

“Trans boys and men and non-binary people may have periods … and menstruation must be inclusive of all genders.”

Yes, these people are seemingly bat-dung nuts.

And although women worldwide would be ecstatic for men to have cramps, bloating, and irritability for several days a month, alas, this report is devoid of, well, science. In short, it’s completely whackadoodle.

Teach Your Children Well

Health class for school children is about to get a bit more interesting in the Green Party bonkers bastion by the sea as the guidelines require full compliance in or before 2020, and will be included in the curricula for children enrolled in grades one through eight.

The prospectus has come under fire from Member of Parliament for the Conservative Party, David Davies, who told reporters the plan was insane:

“Learning about periods is already a difficult subject for children that age, so to throw in the idea girls who believe they are boys also have periods will leave them completely confused.”

But the city council believes otherwise. Heck, in 2016, they sent letters to parents before class enrollments requesting that children, as young as age four, choose the gender “they most identify with.” They also make teachers use a Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit, one of the aims…

Last week something historic happened in the US Senate. For the first time in 45 years, a chamber of the US Congress voted to pull US forces from a military conflict under the 1973 War Powers Act.

While there is plenty to criticize in the War Powers Act, in this situation it was an important tool used by a broad Senate coalition to require President Trump to end US participation in the Saudi war against Yemen. And while the resolution was not perfect – there were huge loopholes – it has finally drawn wider attention to the US Administration’s dirty war in Yemen.

The four year Saudi war on neighboring Yemen has left some 50,000 dead, including many women and children. We’ve all seen the horrible photos of school buses blown up by the Saudis – using US-supplied bombs loaded into US-supplied aircraft. Millions more face starvation as the infrastructure is decimated and the ports have been blocked to keep out humanitarian aid.

Stopping US participation in this brutal war is by itself a wise and correct move, even if it comes years too late.

The Revolution: A Mani…
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The Senate vote is also about much more than just Yemen. It is about the decades of Presidential assaults on the Constitution in matters of war. President Trump is only the latest to ignore Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution, which grants war power exclusively to Congress. Yes, it was President Obama who initially dragged the US illegally into the Yemen war, but President Trump has only escalated it. And to this point Congress has been totally asleep.

Fortunately that all changed last week with the Senate vote. Unfortunately, Members of the House will not be allowed to vote on their…

A court in the UK has jailed a couple who promoted neo-Nazi ideas and even named their new-born baby after Germany’s Nazi-era dictator Adolf Hitler.

The jailed sentence issued on Tuesday in Birmingham Crown Court saw Adam Thomas, 22, and Claudia Patatas, 38, jailed for six years and six months for being a member of National Action, a banned far-right organization in the UK.

The judge said the two persons had “a long history of violent racist beliefs”.

“Its aims and objectives are the overthrow of democracy in this country by serious violence and murder, and the imposition of a Nazi-style state which would eradicate whole sections of society by such violence and mass murder,” said Melbourne Inman after handing down the sentences.

The court also said the couple had chosen Adolf as a middle name for their new-born son, with the father, Thomas, saying it was in admiration of Hitler. They had also cushions in their home with signs of…

Twenty-six states have laws preventing state agencies from contracting with companies or individuals aligned with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. BDS is an international campaign to pressure Israel to comply with international law and respect Palestinian rights. However, its opponents say BDS is a thinly disguised anti-Semitic attempt to debilitate or even destroy Israel. We speak with Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of the founding editors of The Intercept. His latest piece is headlined “A Texas Elementary School Speech Pathologist Refused to Sign a Pro-Israel Oath, Now Mandatory in Many States — So She Lost Her Job.”

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, one of the founding editors of The Intercept, his latest piece headlined “A Texas Elementary School Speech Pathologist Refused to Sign a Pro-Israel Oath, Now Mandatory in Many States — So She Lost Her Job.”

Glenn, why don’t you talk about, you know, exposing this story nationally? But we’re talking about the law in Texas. In fact, more than half the states in the United States have a contract like she was being forced to sign, if she wanted to keep her job as a speech pathologist.

GLENN GREENWALD: So, there are 26 states in the US that have some version of this Texas law. They’re not all as severe as the one in Texas, though many of them are. Others have various kinds of restrictions on people who boycott Israel, prohibiting the expenditure of any funds to invest in companies, for example, or in pension funds, that have companies that invest — that advocate a boycott of Israel. They all have one thing in common, which is that they impose limitations on the opportunities and abilities of private citizens or private companies that support or participate in the boycott of Israel.

The mainstream US media is woefully blind to reality, and only promote what their Wall Street handlers dictate, according to Myles Hoenig, an American political analyst and activist. 

Hoenig, a former Green Party candidate for Congress, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Tuesday while commenting on a new report prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The report, which was produced by researchers from the firm New Knowledge, said the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA) launched an online disinformation campaign in the lead up to the 2016 US election.

The campaign included messaging that supported 2016 Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein, the report claimed.  

American broadcaster CNN was the first to claim that the Russian campaign had messaging that included support for Stein’s third-party candidacy as well as support for Hillary Clinton’s Democratic primary opponent, Sen. Bernie…

Newsbusters
December 18, 2018

A new study has claimed Russia’s online interference tried to aid the conservative movement and Donald Trump. There’s a big problem with that assessment. It comes from a left-wing operation that previously classified more than 11 different conservative outlets as “junk news.” And two of those authors were also involved in this report.

The study was released by the Oxford University Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika. It argued that fake accounts, ads, and tweets “all clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party — and specifically Donald Trump”

The Oxford University Computational Propaganda Project had attacked several conservative outlets as “junk news” in previous studies. Those targeted outlets include Drudge Report, NewsBusters, CNSNews, MRCTV, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Free Beacon, LifeNews, National Review, the Federalist, and the Red State. (Three of those are operated by the Media Research Center, which runs NewsBusters.)

The study on “junk news” drew on “a list of sources that consistently publish political news and information that is extremist, sensationalist, conspiratorial, masked commentary, fake news, and other forms of junk news.”

That study was also produced by Oxford and Graphika. Two of the people behind that study, “Junk News Consumption,” were involved in this latest study, “The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States 2012-2018.” Philip N. Howard and John Kelly worked on  both projects. On Twitter, Howard has posted that he is against the Second Amendment, and repeatedly pushed that Trump supporters and the Trump campaign work primarily through “fake news.”

Another member of the group that produced the study, Camille Francois, was a former employee of Google, working at Jigsaw as a Principal Researcher.

Read more

This article was…

Britain’s upper house of parliament has recommended the government to emancipate itself from the United States’ influence, saying a White House under President Donald Trump is posing serious threats to UK interests in the world.

A committee of peers said Tuesday in a report that it was time for London to understand that Trump was actually trying to undermine Britain’s foreign policy and its efforts to remain as an influential player at the world stage.

“In future, the government will need to place less reliance on reaching a common US-UK approach to the main issues of the day than has often been the case in the past,” said the report which has been compiled using advice from key people in diplomacy, national security and foreign policy.

The report specifically mentioned Trump’s decision to withdraw from major international agreements, such as Iran’s nuclear deal, saying the way Trump was handling foreign policy was undermining…

The disinformation campaign behind the allegations of Russian “disinformation”

18 December 2018

Amid new exposures of Wall Street criminality, the White House’s mass imprisonment of immigrant children, and growing demands by US workers for decent wages, the US media was preoccupied Monday with the supposed efforts of Russian President Vladimir Putin to make people believe that life in America is not a paradise.

Throughout the day, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Google News all led with breathless stories about Russian efforts to “sway American opinion and divide the country” (in the words of the Times). The propaganda barrage was based on a set of reports submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee by organizations with close ties to the US state and intelligence apparatus.

Like countless other stories about alleged Russian “disinformation,” Monday’s media blast followed a script. Reports and testimony from nominally independent organizations, which are, in reality, mouthpieces for the intelligence agencies, are commissioned by Congress. They are “leaked” to the New York Times, which publishes a front-page article promoting them as “independent,” scientific and authoritative, without, however, presenting any serious analysis of the actual evidence or the social and political forces behind the studies. The reports in the Times (or the Washington Post) are then cited by countless media outlets and politicians as new and irrefutable “evidence” of Russian “meddling” and “fake news.”

Examples of what Facebook and New Knowledge call “Russian Propaganda”

The new “proof” of Russian subversion is then used to demand even more sweeping measures to censor the internet, in the name of securing “our democracy.” With each…

Cyber security expert warns employees are punishing sites that conflict with their politics

Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
December 18, 2018

Professor of cyber security Kevin Curran says that Google now has “God-like” power which has been weaponized for political purposes.

Responding to a story about how Google considered banning Breitbart from its lucrative ad network for vague, unspecified “hate speech,” Curran, professor of cyber security at the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Built Environment at Ulster University, warned that the Silicon Valley giant is out of control.

“The newly released leaked emails, which demonstrate Google employees plotting to ban Breitbart from Google AdSense, show again the God-like power companies like Google have in modern life,” said Curran.

“Here we have a company with employees who’d seen to remove the ads from a company, which relies on the dominant search engine of the Internet,” Curran told Sputnik. “Removal from the search ad market on Google would severely damage their business. It seems that Google employees were seeking to weaponize Google search for left-wing political purposes.”

Calling for greater transparency, Curran said that Google employees were abusing their power to “to punish sites which conflict with their politics” and that a “company culture” existed at Google which turns a blind eye to this abuse.

As we previously reported, following Donald Trump’s election win, Google employees discussed gaming their own search results to bury conservative media outlets.

“How many times did you see the Election now card with items from opinion blogs (Breitbart, Daily Caller) elevated next to legitimate news organizations?” asked Google engineer Scott Byer, adding, “That’s something that can and should be fixed.”

A video of a Google meeting shortly after the election which leaked in September…

The United States has turned into one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists.

The US ranked fifth, along with India, as one of the deadliest countries for journalists behind Afghanistan, Syria, Mexico, Yemen and India, respectively in the same order, The Hill on Tuesday cited a Paris-based media watchdog as saying.

International monitoring organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in its annual report for 2018 that it is the first time that the US has been listed among the most lethal countries for journalists.

“The world’s five deadliest countries for journalists include three – India, Mexico, and for the first time the United States where journalists were killed in cold blood although these countries were not at war or in conflict,” the report noted.

It said six journalists were killed in the US this year — four were killed in June after a shooting in Maryland’s Capital Gazette newspaper and two…

There are liberal pikers and there are conservative pikers.

Every few years, liberals and progressives in and out of Congress push for an increase in the federal minimum wage. During one such time back in the 1980s, economist Murray Rothbard, in the course of explaining how a “minimum wage law provides no jobs; it only outlaws them,” made this noteworthy statement:

The advocates of the minimum wage and its periodic boosting reply that all this is scare talk and that minimum wage rates do not and never have caused any unemployment. The proper riposte is to raise them one better; all right, if the minimum wage is such a wonderful anti-poverty measure, and can have no unemployment-raising effects, why are you such pikers? Why you are helping the working poor by such piddling amounts? Why stop at $4.55 an hour? Why not $10 an hour? $100? $1,000?

It is obvious that the minimum wage advocates do not pursue their own logic, because if they push it to such heights, virtually the entire labor force will be disemployed. In short, you can have as much unemployment as you want, simply by pushing the legally minimum wage high enough.

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This is still true today. Liberals who are calling for a $15 federal minimum wage are pikers. Why not do something to really help the working poor and demand that the minimum wage be raised to $150 an hour?

But conservatives can be pikers too. Not when it comes to the minimum wage, but on the subject of tariffs.

Some conservatives have always made veiled criticisms of free trade in their writings that, correctly, disparage government-managed trade agreements. But since the elevation of the protectionist, economic…

The British government has completed its contingency plans for dealing with a situation in which the country could be leaving the European Union without an agreement that could define divorce terms as well as how future relationship would work.

A spokesman of Prime Minister Theresa May said Tuesday that the cabinet had reached a conclusion on its discussions about the no-deal Brexit.

“Cabinet agreed… we have now reached the point where we need to ramp up these preparations. This means we will now set in motion the remaining elements of our no deal plans,” said the spokesman, adding, “Cabinet also agreed to recommend businesses now also ensure they are similarly prepared, enacting their own no-deal plans as they judge necessary. Citizens should also prepare.”

The official said among the plans were allocating enough space on ferries to ensure that Britain would be able to receive medical supplies in time if the country leaves the…

US President Donald Trump heads into the second half of his first term with uncertain footing.

Republicans increased their control of the US Senate but, in the House of Representatives, Democrats made significant gains and wrested control of the chamber.

In a divided Congress, the President will find it increasingly difficult to pass major domestic legislation, such as the signature Republican-led tax cut.

More pointedly, since the 2016 election, Democrats have been gnashing their teeth at a raft of actions taken by Trump and members of his administration but they have wielded little leverage to do much about it. Now, unleashed and in charge of the House, Democrats can be expected to launch myriad hearings and investigations.

As well, the Russia investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller carries on and the expectation among Washington observers is that he will present his findings, either in part or in whole, within the first six…

Two years of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as a Middle East peacemaking team appear to be having a transformative effect – and in ways that will please neither of them.

The American public is now evenly split between those who want a two-state solution and those who prefer a single state, shared by Israelis and Palestinians, according to a survey published last week by the University of Maryland.

And if a Palestinian state is off the table – as a growing number of analysts of the region conclude, given Israel’s intransigence and the endless postponement of Mr Trump’s peace plan – then support for one state rises steeply, to nearly two-thirds of Americans.

But Mr Netanyahu cannot take comfort from the thought that ordinary Americans share his vision of a single state of Greater Israel. Respondents demand a one-state solution guaranteeing Israelis and Palestinians equal rights.

By contrast, only 17 per cent of Americans expressing a view – presumably Christian evangelicals and hardline Jewish advocates for Israel – prefer the approach of Israel’s governing parties: either to continue the occupation or annex Palestinian areas without offering the inhabitants citizenship.

All of this is occurring even though US politicians and the media express no support for a one-state solution. In fact, quite the reverse.

The movement to boycott Israel, known as BDS, is growing on US campuses, but vilified by Washington officials, who claim its goal is to end…

Absurdly claims fans who retweet his videos could be sued

Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
December 18, 2018

A history teacher went on an unhinged rant about YouTuber PewDiePie, absurdly claiming that the Swedish entertainer is promoting “genocide,” anti-Semitism and that his fans could be sued for retweeting his videos.

PewDiePie is the online persona of Felix Kjellberg, YouTube’s most popular entertainer who spends most of his time laughing at memes and playing video games.

However, according to one colossal moron, who somehow managed to land a job as a teacher, this constitutes promoting “genocide” and anti-Semitism.

The clip was posted to Twitter by a user called Rissian. The teacher’s identity has not been revealed.

Our history teacher told us that by supporting @pewdiepie, we are supporting anti-Semitism, racism, ignorance, etc. He also said that @WSJ is a very reputable news source. How ignorant can you get? The political arguments are more and more ironic daily. @ChrisRayGun @benshapiro pic.twitter.com/qg6BtrOhek

— Rissian (@Rissian9) December 15, 2018

“And by every time you retweet one of these things, or every time you promote this idea, you are promoting ignorance, racism, genocide, anti-Semitism…..these are all things that you are putting forward when you are doing anything that promotes PewDiePie,” said the teacher.

“So be careful about this. If someone decided to, if something would happen and PewDiePie were to be sued for this, you could be complicit if you retweet it, they can make you pay a fine as well, because you have officially published anti-Semitic things, so if you are republishing this stuff, you could get in trouble for it, be very aware that that is a real thing,” he added.

The clown in the clip has obviously been indoctrinated by mainstream media hysteria campaigns about PewDiePie, the most recent of which claimed he was pushing…

A new report shows the British police are forcing people to have their faces scanned as part of a controversial surveillance scheme which is being rolled out in London.

A Tuesday report in the Evening Standard said police officers testing the Live Facial Recognition technology in central neighborhoods of London were treating shoppers in an invasive manner.

Officials in the Liberty human rights organization told the newspaper that anyone who declined to cooperate with police officers on the ground and avoided their cameras was treated as suspicious. 

This comes despite a previous statement by the Scotland Yard, the investigative police force in London, saying that the trial roll-out of the scheme would not affect ordinary people and only those on police’s watch list would become involved.

The Metropolitan Police also said last week that “anyone who declines to be scanned will not be viewed as suspicious by police officers”.

It…

The recent debates over the First Step Act and California’s SB-10 — two bills that attempt to address the overuse of incarceration in the US — have thrown the complexities of “criminal justice system reform” into the spotlight. Most attention has focused on sentencing reform and ending cash bail. But the struggles over these bills have brought another issue front and center that will be extremely critical in the long run: electronic monitoring. Both these laws, if enacted, (and many more to come) would precipitate a much wider use of e-carceration — the deprivation of liberty by means of technologies such as ankle monitors.

I have campaigned against the use of electronic monitors for many years, after spending a year on one myself. Fortunately, an increasing number of people are reaching the obvious conclusion: Electronic monitoring is not an alternative to incarceration but an alternative form of incarceration. With the monitor, our homes become our jails; our loved ones become our jailers. While this is an important realization, we need to dig deeper in responding to electronic monitors. As much as some of us may want them to go away, they are here and are going to be with us for a good while.

The United States has about 200,000 people on these devices right now with the numbers, especially among immigrants, steadily rising. Even the hinterlands are busting out e-shackles. Indianapolis seems to lead the nation’s cities in electronic monitoring with more than 4,000 people forced to wear ankle monitors. Those of us who oppose mass incarceration, especially if we adopt an abolitionist perspective, must respond to ankle monitors like we respond to prisons. Abolitionists oppose adding more prisons, push for people to be freed from them and try to close them down. When we can’t do any of that, we fight to reduce the harm by opposing torturous practices like solitary confinement, mandatory minimums and shackling mothers who are giving birth. To similarly oppose…

President Donald Trump on Tuesday urged the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, to not make “another mistake” by raising interest rates.

“I hope the people over at the Fed will read today’s Wall Street Journal Editorial before they make yet another mistake,” he tweeted. “Also, don’t let the market become any more illiquid than it already is. Stop with the 50 B’s. Feel the market, don’t just go by meaningless numbers. Good luck!”

The Journal editorial called for a pause in rising interest rates, as the Fed on Tuesday opens its final two-day policy meeting of 2018 at which it is widely expected to raise the key rate for the fourth time this year, working to get ahead of expected gains in inflation.

Trump has repeatedly broken with the norm respected by US presidents in recent decades to refrain from criticizing the Fed, hammering the central bank this year over its move away from the zero interest rate policy implemented during the global…

Video claims Trump has “achieved more during his time in office than any president in history”

Steve Watson
Prison Planet.com
December 18, 2018

It appears that President Trump’s first ad for a 2020 reelection campaign has been released, and it has caused deranged leftists to scream toward the sky.

The ad, which was reportedly run on CNN of all places, sees 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale asking Americans to call a hotline and “let President Trump know that we appreciate what he is doing for America.”

First 2020 ad? This Trump ad, featuring his campaign manager @parscale, just aired on CNN. It’s a minute long and asks viewers to call an 800 number to leave a thank you message for POTUS. I called the number and it leads to a fundraising appeal (not unusual for pres campaigns) pic.twitter.com/yB3Rb1pJKe

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) December 18, 2018

In the ad, Parscale, claims that Trump has “achieved more during his time in office than any president in history.”

“We have a booming economy, historic low unemployment, including the lowest unemployment rate for minorities in history,” Parscale states, accompanied by visuals of factory workers, campaign events and the US flag.

“We’re bringing jobs back to America through new trade deals and the world is a safer place,” the campaign manager adds.

The end of the ad shows Trump at a Christmas-themed rally, which happened in Florida last year, accompanied by footage of supporters saying “Thank you, President Trump!”

“President Trump needs to hear from his supporters,” the voice over states.

A call to the 800 number leads to a Parscale request for donations to Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, touting “lower regulations, massive tax cuts and renegotiated trade deals that put America first.”

Parscale adds that “enforcing our immigration laws are making Americans safer,” before turning to…

COMMENT: Dear Martin,
I would like to share any information on the subject “The Hunt for Taxes and the Abolition of Cash” that you comment on so often:
Citi closes accounts of customers who withdraw cash instead of using credit cards The Peruvian author and journalist Jaime Bayly, who lives in Florida, comments political and arts issues in his daily TV show. Recently, he mentioned that the Miami subsidiary of Citi bank closed all his accounts because he withdraws too much cash from his account instead of using his credit card to pay his expenditures. His objection that he prefers to use cash for personal reasons was countered by the bank that he is suspicious of money laundering!

Thank you so much for your work and for maintaining a blog that I review daily with great interest,
kind regards,
U. G.

The War Against Cash: …
Ross Clark
Check Amazon for Pricing.

REPLY: What people do not realize is that the regulations being imposed upon banks all to hunt for taxes are rarely ever discussed in mainstream media. Effectively, the government has put all banks in a position where THEY must be the judge, jury, and prosecutor whereas the government could NEVERimpose such restrictions upon individuals without a Constitutional violation of Due Process of law. They force banks to be the police because you are NOT entitled to Constitutional Due Process of law when it is not a LEGAL proceeding that could result in the confiscation of your property or imprisonment. Like FATCA, they imposed regulations upon foreign banks that they MUST report WHATEVER an American does overseas and if they own more than 5% of any company they must report them to the USA or their assets will be confiscated. This is outright unethical, but no…