The most immediate takeaway from last week’s Kavanaugh Confirmation Carnival was that the 1980s must have been one helluva of a time to be a student.

To hear their schoolmates tell it, both Brett and Christine were a beer vendor’s dream and knew a thing or two about the joys of getting blitzed long before they had reached the legal age. And both went on to earn at least a college minor in beer pong and bar-hopping and, apparently, those other extracurricular endeavors which frequently follow fast thereupon.

Then again, why is the Senate of the United States (and now the FBI, too) wasting its time investigating the antics of a handful of party kids from among the tens of millions of students – before, then and after – whose adventures in beer besotted bacchanalia were hardly dissimilar?

As the tale has unfolded, in fact, we haven’t actually heard a thing – proven, that is – that hasn’t long been par for the course among boozed-up and sex-awakened adolescents. Even the alleged very bad behavior that was the focus of Thursday’s deliberations, which ended in an “he said, she said” tie, surely isn’t some kind of shocking aberration.

Fifteen and Seventeen year olds simply don’t appreciate that the combo of demon rum and raging hormones can quickly descend into trouble owing to a confusion of intentions and behaviors; and so it, unfortunately, sometimes does lead to unwanted sexual pressure and even assault.

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That seems to be the case here. By her own admission, Mrs. Ford was boozing it up at age 15 at an un-chaperoned house party. So she may have been as innocent as she claims – or perhaps not so much.

We…

American Mirror
October 1, 2018

ESPN won’t broadcast the National Anthem during Monday Night Football, and now the Green Bay Packers are honoring a fake American flag.

Not sure what country today’s Packers-Bills game is being played in but that’s not my flag pic.twitter.com/XGsk75sPsM

— Rob Demovsky (@RobDemovsky) September 30, 2018

That was a bridge too far even for the social justice sports network.

“Not sure what country today’s Packers-Bills game is being played in, but that’s not my flag,” ESPN reporter Rob Demovsky tweeted.

The team unfurled a red, white and blue banner at one end of the field that resembles the American flag, but is clearly different.

Very unamerican flag at packers game no real surprise pic.twitter.com/1m7rmdVqFi

— Zane (@zaneomaxbaby) September 30, 2018

“Very unamerican flag at Packers game, no real surprise,” another fan tweeted.

Packers brought out the wrong flag for the Anthem at today’s game https://t.co/JdYpL5FPij pic.twitter.com/E5gP0s6DWl

— Viral Posts (@aolblog) September 30, 2018

“Packers brought out the wrong flag for the Anthem at today’s game,” wrote another.

Another attendee wondered if the Packers didn’t have permission to use Old Glory.

No offense to the Packers or, y’know, America, but did you not clear the rights for the actual flag, guys? pic.twitter.com/sVMhi1923p

— Kyle Nabilcy (@kylenabilcy) September 30, 2018

“No offense to the Packers or, y’know, America, but did you not clear the rights for the actual flag, guys?” Kyle Nabilcy wrote.

This article was posted: Monday, October 1, 2018 at 5:28 am

The Russians have an expression: words are deeds. Indeed, words contain a mesmeric power, and while this power can be used for good, it can also be used to harness dark and pernicious forces. For as Orwell understood all too well, words can be hijacked by a corrupt ruling class and used to indoctrinate, manipulate, and deceive.

In order to understand how the liberal class has come to be so beguiled by the forces of reaction, one must take note of the unprecedented liberal hysteria over racism, sexism, and homophobia. Indeed, the more liberals remain transfixed with this unholy trinity, the more indifferent they become to the terrible suffering inflicted by capitalism, as they are drawn further and further to the right, and pulled ever more deeply into a vortex of amorality.

This is not to suggest that racism, sexism, and homophobia do not exist, but rather, that these words have been co-opted by a ruling establishment which has succeeded in duping the faux-left into embracing policies that are deeply antithetical to the interests of American workers, patients, and students.

In politics either one believes in unions, single-payer, and public education or one doesn’t. Either one opposes imperialism, or one does not. The problem with anchoring a political discourse around who opposes racism, sexism, and homophobia and who (allegedly) doesn’t, is that these words are inherently ambiguous to the point where they can be manipulated to mean almost anything. All too…

Forbes
October 1, 2018

It finally happened. The feds forced an Apple iPhone X owner to unlock their device with their face.

A child abuse investigation unearthed by Forbes includes the first known case in which law enforcement used Apple Face ID facial recognition technology to open a suspect’s iPhone. That’s by any police agency anywhere in the world, not just in America.

It happened on August 10, when the FBI searched the house of 28-year-old Grant Michalski, a Columbus, Ohio, resident who would later that month be charged with receiving and possessing child pornography. With a search warrant in hand, a federal investigator told Michalski to put his face in front of the phone, which he duly did. That allowed the agent to pick through the suspect’s online chats, photos and whatever else he deemed worthy of investigation.

The case marks another significant moment in the ongoing battle between law enforcement and tech providers, with the former trying to break the myriad security protections put in place by the latter. Since the fight between the world’s most valuable company and the FBI in San Bernardino over access to an iPhone in 2016, Forbes has been tracking the various ways cops have been trying to break Apple’s protections.

Read more

This article was posted: Monday, October 1, 2018 at 5:29 am

With Hurricane Florence’s floodwaters receding and people returning home to deal with the damage left behind, the disaster recovery process is getting underway in the Carolinas.

Residents who suffered losses as a result of the storm are now able to register for assistance with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Department of Homeland Security division that coordinates responses to disasters that overwhelm local and state authorities. But if the FEMA response to recent disasters is any indication, storm victims could face barriers in securing federal aid — especially if they’re not white.

Consider what happened in Texas after Hurricane Harvey hit the Gulf Coast last August. A survey of more than 1,600 Texans in 24 counties conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Episcopal Health Foundation from Oct. 17 to Nov. 20 documented how the storm itself had disparate impacts on various demographic groups, with black and Hispanic residents and those with lower incomes more likely to be affected by property damage or income loss than white and wealthier residents, and with the racial disparities persisting even after controlling for income.

The inequality in who the disaster affected was then amplified in the recovery process, with black and Hispanic respondents more likely than their white counterparts to report being unable to access needed aid of any kind. Only 52 percent of the survey’s white respondents impacted by Harvey said they were able to get the help they needed; that number dropped to 46 percent for Hispanic and 32 percent for black respondents.

Among those who applied for post-Harvey disaster assistance from FEMA or the Small Business Administration (which provides low-interest loans for businesses, nonprofits, homeowners, and renters), those who reported incomes at least four times the federal poverty level were more likely to say their application was approved, at 45 percent. And while only 34 percent of all white residents who sought…

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says Iran will not sit for talks with the US as long as it sees no reliability and realism on the other side.

“I’m not ruling out the prospect of talks provided the necessary conditions for talks, and that is reliability,” Zarif said in response to a question about the possibility of bilateral talks between Tehran and Washington.

He made the remarks in an exclusive interview with The New Yorker, which was conducted in New York on Saturday and published on Monday.

“Reliability is different from trust. Reliability is that when you sign something you are bound by it,” the Iranian top diplomat noted. He then cited an old Latin idiom, Pacta sunt servanda, which means “treaties shall be complied with”, and described it as the basis of international relations.

“Otherwise everything will fall apart… We are waiting for some sense of realism,” Zarif added.

Zarif further noted that…

It’s what you didn’t hear in the Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings in the US Senate.

Did you hear that Christine Margaret Blasey Ford, an American professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, who claims she was sexually attacked in her high school years by Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh, has a conflict of interest?

According to the National Library of Medicine, Dr. Christine Blasey has authored or co-authored 21 scientific reports on a wide variety of topics including gender and depression.  Six of these reports address mifepristone, the abortion pill.

In the USA, 31% of abortions before nine weeks are by pill (not surgery).  For sure, Roe vs. Wade, the court case that legalized abortion may be up for legal reconsideration.  Judge Kavanaugh is likely to vote against abortion.

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Did you also hear, according to radio commentator Michael Savage, that Christine Blasey-Ford, besides being a “professor” at a major university she just so happens to head up the CIA undergraduate internship program at Stanford University.

Christine Blasey’s brother, Ralph the third, used to work for the international law firm of Baker, Hostetler.  That firm created Fusion GPS, the company who wrote the Russian “dossier” against President Trump.   Baker Hostetler is located in the same building where the CIA operates three companies operated by Ralph Blasey II.  He is the father of Christine and Ralph III.  Christine and Ralph III’s grandfather was Nicholas Deak.  Former CIA director William Casey acknowledged Deak’s…

One kept her television on 24 hours a day in the aftermath to try to gather every detail that could help her understand what happened. Another delved into the attacker’s family history.

Others have debated the case informally among colleagues and officially at professional conferences.

One year after Stephen Paddock killed 58 Las Vegas concertgoers, criminal psychologists and threat-assessment experts are still puzzling over why a wealthy, 64-year-old gambler committed the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Democrats, media press Kavanaugh sexual assault campaign

By
Patrick Martin

1 October 2018

An expanded FBI background check of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has begun under terms laid down by the Trump White House and the Senate Republican leadership, who agreed on Friday to a one-week probe in order to secure a party-line vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee to approve his nomination. The Republicans plan to bring the matter to the Senate floor for a vote some time next week.

After Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona threatened to block the nomination, a bipartisan deal was negotiated in which Senate Democrats agreed to support a limited FBI investigation into 36-year-old allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh, now an Appeals Court judge.

The Judiciary Committee then approved Kavanaugh’s nomination by an 11-10 vote, with Flake voting in favor. The FBI will report its findings to the White House, which will forward them to the Senate.

There were objections from the Democratic side to the limits set on the probe, apparently by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other leading Republicans. The FBI will interview Christine Blasey Ford, who testified before the Judiciary Committee Thursday during the all-day hearing on her claims that Kavanaugh assaulted her at a party in suburban Maryland when she was 15 years old and he was 17.

The FBI will also interview several others identified as possible witnesses to the assault or to the party, including Mark Judge, the friend of Kavanaugh whom Ford identified as an accomplice in the assault. The FBI will also interview Deborah Ramirez, who claimed Kavanaugh engaged in improper sexual conduct while a student at Yale University in the mid-1980s, but not Julie Swetnick, who made the most sweeping…

A source in the British government has revealed that Prime Minister Theresa May is preparing to offer the European Union some concessions on the thorny issue of the Irish border to finally win a much-needed deal on the country’s withdrawal from the bloc.

The senior government official told Bloomberg on Monday that May would accept EU demands for imposing some checks on goods moving between British mainland and Northern Ireland.

The source said the offer is meant to unblock the impasse in the ongoing negotiations between the United Kingdom and the EU.

The issue of border between the EU state of Ireland and the UK province of Northern Ireland remain a key stumbling block in talks on Brexit. May has resisted EU pressure for having the Northern Ireland treated differently than the rest of the United Kingdom once the country leaves the EU in March.

However, the EU insists that the only solution to avoid a hard border on the island, which could…

Free Beacon
October 1, 2018

Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) said on Sunday that Democrats have disgraced the United States Senate in their orchestrated smear campaign against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

“The Democrats have disgraced this process and the United States Senate in the orchestrated smear campaign of character assassination they’ve run against Judge Kavanaugh,” Cotton told “Face the Nation” host John Dickerson.

Kavanaugh has faced a series of sexual misconduct allegations that, according to the accusers, occurred decades ago. Ford told the Post that Kavanaugh, then a junior in high school, attacked her when they were at a party in Maryland in the early 1980s. A second allegation came from a woman named Deborah Ramirez who accused Kavanaugh of exposing himself at a dorm party during his freshmen year at Yale. Another allegation was brought forth from a woman named Julie Swetnick, who is represented by anti-Trump lawyer Michael Avenatti. Swetnick claimed Kavanaugh committed a series of “gang rapes” when he was in high school, but she offered no additional evidence or witnesses to support her allegations.

Kavanaugh has vehemently denied all accusations and there have been no corroborating witnesses to the assaults.

Read more

This article was posted: Monday, October 1, 2018 at 5:32 am

It is not only information that they need – in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it…What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves…what may be called the sociological imagination.

— C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959

‘Our own death is indeed, unimaginable,’ Freud said in 1915, ‘and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we can perceive that we really survive as spectators.’  It is thus the very habit of military situations that turn them theatrical.  And it is their utter unthinkableness: it is impossible for a participant to believe that he is taking part in such murderous proceedings in his own character.  The whole thing is too grossly farcical, perverse, cruel, and absurd to be credited as a form of ‘real life.’  Seeing warfare as theatre provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of theatre, he can perform his duties without implicating his ‘real’ self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place.  Just before the attack on Loos, Major Pilditch testifies to ‘a queer new feeling these last few days, intensified last night.  A sort of feeling of unreality as if I were…

A hospital patient, who was threatening to shoot anyone approaching him but was actually unarmed, has been shot dead by three US police forces.

Identified as Brian Baker, 35, the patient at Orlando Regional Medical Center was killed Monday morning.

He had claimed that he had a gun and would “shoot anyone who comes near him,” according to Orlando police.

Police Chief John Mina asserted that Baker “made movements consistent with pulling or reaching for a firearm.”

“It’s going to end today,” Mina quoted him as saying at some point, adding that police crisis negotiators were met with…

Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) has been ordered to pay a historic sum of £20 million to a young woman who has suffered for more than 18 years as a result of medical negligence which took place when she was a baby.

British media reported on Monday that the unidentified teenager would receive a lump sum of £2.1 million and annual payments of £203,000 for the rest of her life as a compensation for negligence in the University hospital of Wales in Cardiff in February 2000 when she was starved of oxygen.

The oxygen starvation resulted in catastrophic brain injuries in the baby while she also developed complications at five months old when doctors tried to correct a malformed esophagus in an operation.

A judge ruled last month that doctors at the NHS facility had failed to adequately ventilate the baby before and after her respiratory arrest.

Justice Robert Harrison of the high court in the Welsh capital announced the financial…

If you are reading this, that means that articles that speak against the activities of the Anti-Defamation League are not being automatically scrubbed from the internet.

Yet.

In a foreboding sign that the free expression of opinion on the internet is too much of a threat to the powerful elite of our society, the Anti-Defamation League is leading the charge in turning their own subjective opinions on ‘hate speech’ into the absolute rule of Internet law. As this Cnet article reports,

Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft, among others, are joining with the ADL to form a Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab, the companies and the civil rights group said Tuesday. They’ll exchange ideas and develop strategies to try to curb hate speech and abuse on the companies’ various platforms and across the internet.

“These companies have an added responsibility to do everything within their power to stop hate from flourishing on their watch,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “We look forward to tackling this pressing challenge together.”

Wow. A Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab. What heroes of selfless service to humanity.

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Like Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy, who said in a statement that “some of the best minds in engineering will work alongside the ADL to help us rise to the occasion.” What occasion? The threat of the power that the proliferation of free speech on the internet is giving to individual human beings fighting for truth and justice.

Who Died And Made Them King?

It is disconcerting to me that we are moving into a time where a once free and neutral internet has…

American Mirror
October 1, 2018

Nancy Pelosi told a Texas audience that Republicans are helping her to win the November elections so they can undercut President Trump.

Or President “Bush,” as she said for at least the sixth time since he was sworn into office in 2017.

“Some Republicans have come to us and said the party of Lincoln cannot survive as the party of Bush— excuse me, of Trump,” Pelosi said at the event hosted by the Texas Tribune.

“I love the Bushes, so…” she continued. “The party of Lincoln cannot survive as the party of Trump. And we’re going to help you win the election. We don’t want you to win 23,” she continued in the “Republicans’” voice, referring to the number of seats Democrats must flip to win the majority.

“We want you to win more than that,” she continued. “And then, we can’t beat these people in the primary, you beat them in the general, and then we’ll have our usual debate over the role of government, and respect for other people’s views,” she said.

“Whether they help us or not, we’ll see. But one thing is good: is that all of them are not working against us because they see what’s at stake in the election,” she said.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

RELATED: See Diamond and Silk skewer Nancy Pelosi in ‘Dummycrats’ on October 15!

She didn’t name the “Republicans” helping her to stop Trump from draining the swamp.

During an interview with KTVU last year, Pelosi also referred to Trump as “President Bush.”

“Everything we have seen so far with the president has been about tax cuts for the rich,” she told the news station.

“In fact, affecting California very directly, is the Affordable Care Act. President, uh, uh, Bush has come out against that as you know,” she said, not correcting herself.

During a weekly press conference in June 2017, the House Minority Leader referred to President Trump as…

When President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testified last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he called Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against him and the subsequent fallout a “circus” orchestrated by the Democrats. His language echoed Clarence Thomas, who nearly 30 years ago said of the Anita Hill trials, “This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. … It is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.” We speak with Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University who assisted Anita Hill’s legal team. She is the founder of the African American Policy Forum. Her piece for The New York Times last week was headlined “We Still Haven’t Learned from Anita Hill’s Testimony.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Our next guest argues when senators questioned Dr. Blasey Ford last week, they showed they had failed to learn from Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony against Clarence Thomas. But first I want to play some of the testimony from both confirmation hearings: President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testifying Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he did not sexually assault Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, then Clarence Thomas testifying he did not sexually harass Hill.

JUDGE BRETT KAVANAUGH: This whole 2-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, … revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups. This is a circus.

Don’t miss a beat

Get the latest news and thought-provoking analysis from Truthout.

JUDGE CLARENCE THOMAS: This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. … As far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves

Otis Rush performing in 2002. Photo: Masahiro Sumori.

In 1969, after nearly 14 years of constant gigging in small blues clubs and cutting scorching singles for obscure labels, songs that received limited radio play but were greedily snatched up by young white rockers desperate to learn the rudiments of the Chicago blues, it looked like Otis Rush was about to finally get his due. Rush had just been signed by the notorious Albert Grossman, then the manager of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Peter, Paul and Mary. Grossman told Rush that he had landed him a recording deal with Atlantic Records.

Rush headed down to Muscle Shoals, Alabama to record one of the first sessions at the soon-to-be-famous studio out on Jackson Highway. The album, Mourning in the Morning, was produced by two other musicians from Chicago who idolized Rush, Michael Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites. Bloomfield, one of the more authentic white blues guitar-players, and Gravenites were then heading the short-lived jam band Electric Flag. Bloomfield  had convinced Grossman to sign Rush, telling the portly manager that he was the Jimi Hendrix of the blues.  Like Hendrix, Rush was a lefty. Unlike Hendrix,  Rush usually played  a left-handed guitar with the order of the strings reversed, featuring the low E string on the bottom. The Rush sound was striking lyrical and, though many tried, nearly inimitable.

The new Muscle Shoals Studio had been founded by some of the best session players in the south: keyboardist…

Britain has warned the European Union that it could leave the bloc without a deal, saying the EU will go nowhere by trying to bully the United Kingdom in talks over Brexit.

“What is unthinkable is that this government, or any British government, could be bullied by the threat of some kind of economic embargo, into signing a one-sided deal against our country’s interests,” Brexit minister Dominic Raab said on Monday.

Raab, addressing a ruling Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, said the EU has shown no sign of pragmatism in responding to Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit proposals, adding that “respect” for Britain and its Brexit plan was ascent from a recent EU summit in Salzburg, Austria.

“Unfortunately, that wasn’t on display in Salzburg,” he said, adding, “Our prime minister has been constructive and respectful. In return we heard jibes from senior leaders and we saw a starkly one-sided approach to…

Daily Mail
October 1, 2018

U.S. investigators failed in a recent courtroom effort to force Facebook to wiretap voice calls over its Messenger app in a closely watched test case, according to two people briefed on the sealed ruling.

Members of a joint federal and state task force probing the international criminal gang MS-13 had tried in August to hold Facebook in contempt of court for failing to carry out a wiretap order, Reuters reported last month.

Arguments were heard in a sealed proceeding in a U.S. District Court in Fresno, California weeks before 16 suspected gang members were indicted there, but the judge ruled in Facebook’s favor, the sources said.

The details of his reasoning were not available.

The government’s request had alarmed technology executives and privacy advocates.

Read more

This article was posted: Monday, October 1, 2018 at 5:36 am

US President Donald Trump has touted a new trade agreement made with Canada and Mexico that replaces NAFTA as “truly historic news,” marking it as a victory in his push to reshape the lines of global commerce.

The new trilateral deal is “truly historic news for our nation and indeed for the world,” Trump said Monday during a press conference at the White House.

“We have successfully completed negotiations on a brand new deal to terminate and replace NAFTA and the NAFTA trade agreements with an incredible new US-Canada-Mexico agreement,” Trump said, pledging that “it will transform North America back into a manufacturing powerhouse.”

“These measures will support many – hundreds of thousands – American jobs,” Trump said. “It means far more American jobs, and these are high-quality jobs.”

US and Canadian negotiators worked frantically ahead of a US-imposed deadline on Sunday to settle differences, with both sides making…

British Finance Minister Philip Hammond has claimed that his country has the fiscal capacity to cope with the divorce from the European Union without any agreement.

Hammond also said that the doubts about the future had already hit the United Kingdom’s economy but believed the mood in Brussels was to reach a divorce deal with his country.

“The mood is undoubtedly that people want to do a deal with the UK. People want to minimize the disruption of the UK’s departure from the European Union, they want to continue having a relationship with us and smooth trading partnership in the future,” he said in an interview with BBC on Monday.

But he added, “Clearly there has been a hit to the economy through the uncertainty the Brexit process has caused. Many businesses are sitting on their hands frankly waiting to see what the outcome of this negotiation is before confirming their investment plans.”

“I believe when the prime minister lands…

There are reports that the Washington-initiated and militarily- supported Saudi Arabian war against Yemen have a starving Yemeni population eating leaves.

The Saudis, with Washington’s GPS support, continue to target school buses, massacring children as an element of the terror assault against the population, trying to break Yemeni resistance by murdering children on school buses. Washington continues to supply the Saudis with the weapons to target school buses and the diplomatic support to protect the criminal Saudi regime from war crimes charges. The European cowards turn their heads. Even Russia is silent.
Putin’s “partnership” with the criminal state of Saudi Arabia is more important.

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Isn’t this a far greater offense, an offense that most definitely does not lack evidence, than the accusation that Kavanaugh, a nominee to the US Supreme Court attempted to rape a women 30 or 40 years ago, for which there is no evidence, only accusation, an accusation that the female defense attorney who questioned for the Senate committee the woman claiming abuse found insufficient for an indictment.

Of course, this report could be fake news. As in America fake news has taken over from truthful news, we have no way of knowing. All we can conclude is that America has again made a world-wide fool of herself. Thanks to the Identity Politics of the Clinton-corrupt Democratic Party, in the eyes of the world America has assembled a Supreme Court of serial sexual abusers. Makes one wonder why it is so important to the Russian government that Russia joins the West.

If Kavanaugh attempted to rape someone, why didn’t it come up in…

Hundreds of thousands demand strike action in the US

1 October 2018

The American news media and political establishment are singularly obsessed with the degrading spectacle surrounding the Senate confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The issue is dominating every newspaper and broadcast channel and was the sole subject on the Sunday morning network news shows.

A fundamental aim of the Democrats’ focus on the sexual allegations against Kavanaugh, as the WSWS has explained, is to hijack popular opposition to the Trump administration and subordinate it to the Democrats’ own reactionary agenda of war, censorship and social inequality. This requires the endless promotion of the lie that race and gender, not class, are the central divisions in American society.

The goal is to somehow divert attention from and cover up social and political reality, which is characterized above all by the growth of class tensions and conflict, in the US and around the world. A decade after the crash of 2008, which was used by the ruling class in the US and internationally to carry out a historic transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich, workers are engaging in a series of strikes and mass protests over basic class issues.

Last week, major cities in Argentina were brought to a standstill as workers launched their fourth general strike against the right-wing government of Mauricio Macri and austerity measures demanded by the IMF. On Thursday and Friday, thousands of pilots and cabin crew in six European countries carried out a coordinated 24-hour strike against Ryanair. Over 30,000 workers in Finland are scheduled to strike Tuesday to oppose government plans to facilitate the layoff of workers.

Workers in Nigeria conducted a four-day strike ending Sunday, which shut…

Nicholas West
ActivistPost.com
October 1, 2018

As the march toward a cashless (and privacy-less) society accelerates forward, a new high watermark has been reached…

India first introduced its concept for a nationwide biometric ID database more than 7 years ago, which they touted as a necessary “social welfare” program to assist the millions of India’s unbanked, streamline welfare distribution and reduce corruption. At the time, Brandon Turbeville reported on the plan for Activist Post.

Yet, although the justification for the billion person database is the increased ability to accurately disperse social welfare benefits, it will not be just the Indian government’s social welfare programs that have access to and utilize the UIDAI. Indeed, even before the program has been completed, major banks, state/local governments, and other institutions are planning to use the UIDAI for identification verification purposes and, of course, payment and accessibility.

As Aaron Saenz of the Singularity Hub writes:

Yet the UID is going to be used for much more than social welfare programs. The UIDAI is in discussion with many institutions (banks, local/state governments, etc.) to allow them to use the UID as a means of identity verification. These institutions will pay the UIDAI some fee to cover costs and generate revenue. There seems to be little doubt that once it is established, the UID will become a preferred method (if not the preferred method) of identification in India.

Saenz also sees the eventuality of the UIDAI program becoming a means of payment and accessibility. He continues:

Ultimately, I wouldn’t be surprised if the UID, with its biometric data, could be used as a means of payment (when linked to a bank account), or as an access key to homes and cars. Purchase a meal with your fingerprint and unlock your door with the twinkle in your eye. Similar results could be expected in…

Situated on a coastal location on the outskirts of Tripoli, with golden sands and an expansive view of the Mediterranean Sea, the Palestinian Refugee Camp of Nahr al-Bared could be a beautiful environment in which to raise a child… It isn’t.

Nahr al-Bared Beach location

The sense of despair is as dark as I have known it during these past three years of visiting and listening to camp residents. The US Government, under the Trump administration, has cut all UNWRA funding to Palestinian Refugee Camps. Palestinian refugees living in refugee camps in Lebanon are not allowed to work, own property or have Lebanese citizenship. It is only from being recognized as refugees and the international law of ‘right of return’ (resolution-194) that prevents them from being stateless. Although UNWRA funding keeps them trapped in a state of dependancy, it is also what keeps them alive. UNWRA heavily supports the funding required for medical, educational and social care. Without the contribution of the US, the over strained resources in the camps will reach breaking point. (We are already witnessing a slow, calculated genocide taking place in Gaza.) Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States have offered to pick up the short fall left by the loss of the US contribution, but there are conditions…. conditions that are impossible for Palestinians to accept.

Youngsters in the Nahr al-Bared Refugee Camp in Lebanon

Netanyahu is claiming that there are no longer any Palestinian refugees….

British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson says UK forces stationed in Germany will continue to stay in the country after Britain’s pending exit from the European Union (EU).

“We are increasing our British points of presence across the world,” Williamson told the Telegraph on Sunday as he announced the UK’s new military strategy in the Arctic.  “We will not be closing our facilities in Germany, and instead use them to forward base the Army.”

There are 185 British Army personnel and 60 Ministry of Defense (MoD) staff currently based in the 45-square mile Sennelager Training Area in near the western city of Paderborn.

The UK and the US-led NATO military alliance have been using Sennelager as an expansive live firing training area over the past years.

The personnel would continue to occupy the adjacent Athlone Barracks for housing and schooling, the MoD said in a statement.

The British army would also keep control over the…

A security meeting between US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and his Chinese counterpart has been canceled, the latest sign of deteriorating ties between Beijing and Washington.

A senior US official said Sunday that China canceled the meeting that had been planned for October, days after a top Chinese official said there was no reason to panic over growing tensions between the countries.

The official, who is involved in China policy and spoke on condition of anonymity, said China could not make Mattis’s counterpart available for the planned meeting, souring the Pentagon on the idea.

“The tension is escalating, and that could prove to be dangerous to both sides,” the official said.

The US Defense Department had been working on the possibility of a meeting between the Pentagon chief and his counterpart, General Wei Fenghe, as part of the diplomatic and security dialogue, US officials said.

The US-China diplomatic and security dialogue was…

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation
October 1, 2018

Former FBI Director James Comey has officially come out as a pussy-hat wearing, Democrat hack.

Earlier this year, he said everyone “must vote for Democrats” in the midterms:

This Republican Congress has proven incapable of fulfilling the Founders’ design that “Ambition must … counteract ambition.” All who believe in this country’s values must vote for Democrats this fall. Policy differences don’t matter right now. History has its eyes on us.

— James Comey (@Comey) July 18, 2018

On Saturday, he attacked Brett Kavanaugh by suggesting he was a liar:

Small lies matter, even about yearbooks. From the standard jury instruction: “If a witness is shown knowingly to have testified falsely about any material matter, you have a right to distrust such witness’ other testimony and you may reject all the testimony of that witness …”

— James Comey (@Comey) September 28, 2018

On Sunday, he released an editorial in the New York Times seeking to interfere in the FBI’s investigation into the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh:

https://t.co/oaFOBiBtav

— James Comey (@Comey) September 30, 2018

From The New York Times:

President Trump’s decision to order a one-week investigation into sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, his Supreme Court nominee, comes in a time of almost indescribable pain and anger, lies and attacks.

We live in a world where the president routinely attacks the F.B.I. because he fears its work. He calls for his enemies to be prosecuted and his friends freed. We also live in a world where a sitting federal judge channels the president by shouting attacks at the Senate committee considering his nomination and demanding to know if a respected senator has ever passed out from drinking. We live in a world where the president is an accused serial abuser of women, who was caught on tape…

Psssttt! While you’re here we need your help.

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The result is that our articles are reaching fewer people at a time when we need genuinely independent news more than ever. 

Here’s how you can help: Since Truthout doesn’t run ads or take corporate or government money, we rely on our readers for support.

By making a monthly or one-time donation of any amount, you’ll help us publish and distribute stories that have a real impact on people’s lives.

French troops are transported by truck to the front, as shown on a bas-relief of the Monument of the Voie Sacrée near Verdun. Photo by J. Pauwels.

Virtually everybody knows that the First World War came to an end when Germany capitulated on November 11, 1918. But very few people are aware that, earlier in that same year, the Reich came tantalizingly close to winning the so-called Great War, but ultimately snatched defeat, so to speak, from the jaws of victory.

In the spring of 1918, the Germans launched a major offensive on the western front. This undertaking, orchestrated by General Ludendorff, actually amounted to a big gamble because, though still very strong militarily, Germany was in very bad shape. Blockaded by the Royal Navy, the country was plagued by shortages of all kinds of products, including crucially important raw materials and food. German civilians and soldiers were undernourished and hungry; they were so disgruntled that it was feared that they might follow the revolutionary example set by their Russian counterparts in 1917. Already in the beginning of the year, Berlin and other big cities were the scenes of demonstrations and riots, as well as strikes. Moreover, Germany’s Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Ottoman allies had started to display alarming signs of war weariness. And on the western front, the number of Germany’s enemies was mushrooming as more and more American troops were joining their French and British brothers in arms.  It was…

Zero Hedge
October 1, 2018

Out with the old, in with the new…

Just hours before the end-of-month deadline, US trade rep Robert Lighthizer and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland announced last night that Canada and the US had successfully agreed on a sweeping revision of the Nafta trade accord (an agreement that had been reached with Mexico’s outgoing PRI government weeks ago), maneuvering the final leg of the new trilateral deal, which will henceforth be known as the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, into place. The US heralded the deal by proclaiming that it would mean “freer markets, fairer trade and robust economic growth.” After both President Trump and Canadian Prime Minister reportedly approved the agreement, markets rejoiced, sparking rallies in the loonie, Mexican peso and US stock futures.

The preliminary terms reflected a resolution of the dairy-market problem, which had proved to be an intractable point of contention, with Canada offering access to roughly 3.5% of domestic dairy market to the US and will agree to a vehicle export quota of 2.6 million vehicles that could be exported to the US tariff free or near tariff free. Meanwhile, as reported previously, the Chapter 19 dispute resolution process – something that Canada demanded be preserved in the final accord – will remain unchanged.

Given that, in the Trump era, nothing is done until it’s done, Trump lauded the agreement on Twitter Monday morning, saying it would correct “deficiencies and mistakes in NAFTA, greatly opens markets to our Farmers and Manufacturers, reduces Trade Barriers to the U.S. and will bring all three Great Nations together in competition with the rest of the world.”

Late last night, our deadline, we reached a wonderful new Trade Deal with Canada, to be added into the deal already reached with Mexico. The new name will be The United States Mexico Canada…

The United States and Canada have reached a new free trade deal, along with Mexico, to replace the expiring North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Following over a year of negotiations aimed at revamping NAFTA, the US and Canada announced in a statement late Sunday that they finalized the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

The USMCA is an updated version of NAFTA and will replace the nearly 25-year-old agreement.

“Today, Canada and the United States reached an agreement, alongside Mexico, on a new, modernized trade agreement for the 21st Century: the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement,” US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said in a joint statement.

The agreement “will give our workers, farmers, ranchers and businesses a high-standard trade agreement that will result in freer markets, fairer trade and robust economic growth in our region,” the statement…

If there’s one thing that brings a tear to Caitlin Johnstone’s eye, it’s the inspiration she feels watching Republican-aligned neoconservatives and Democrat-aligned neoconservatives find a way to bridge their almost nonexistent differences. 

By Caitlin Johnstone
Special to Consortium News

If there’s one thing that brings a tear to my eye, it’s the inspiration I feel when watching Republican-aligned neoconservatives and Democrat-aligned neoconservatives find a way to bridge their almost nonexistent differences and come together to discuss the many, many, many, many, many, many many many things they have in common.

In a conference at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, “Resistance” leader and professional left-puncher Neera Tanden met with Iraq-raping neocon Bill Kristol to discuss bipartisanship and shared values. While leprechauns held hands and danced beneath candy rainbows and gumdrop Reaper drones, the duo engaged in a friendly, playful conversation with the event’s host in a debate format which was not unlike watching the Pillsbury Doughboy have a pillow fight with himself in a padded room after drinking a bottle of NyQuil.

To get the event started, the host whose name I refuse to learn asked the pair to discuss briefly what common ground such wildly different people could possibly share to make such a strange taboo-shattering dialogue possible.

“Issues around national security and believing in democratic principles as they relate to foreign policy,” replied Tanden. “And opposing authoritarianism, and opposing the kind of creeping populism that undermines democracy itself.”

Neera Tanden, in case you are unaware, is a longtime Clinton and Obama insider and CEO of the plutocrat-backed think tank Center for American Progress. Her emails featured prominently in the 2016 Podesta drops by WikiLeaks, which New Republic described as revealing “a pattern of freezing out those who don’t toe the line, a disturbing predilection for someone who is a kind of gatekeeper for what ideas are acceptable in Democratic politics.” Any quick glance at Tanden’s political activism and Twitter presence will render this…

Daily Mail
October 1, 2018

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has lost faith in autonomous cars for the time being.

Wozniak has flip-flopped in his opinions about the technology over the last few years.

In May 2017 he claimed driverless technology is the ‘biggest, most obvious moonshot,’ in current times, pointing to Tesla as the most promising company in that field.

But just months later he did a 180, and said he doesn’t ‘believe anything Elon Musk or Tesla says.’

Now, Wozniak has doubled down on his doubts surrounding autonomous technology, stating at a recent event that he has ‘given up’ on self-driving cars.

Read more

This article was posted: Monday, October 1, 2018 at 5:39 am

The moment long feared is fast approaching in Gaza, according to a new report by the World Bank. After a decade-long Israeli blockade and a series of large-scale military assaults, the economy of the tiny coastal enclave is in “freefall”.

At a meeting of international donors in New York on Thursday, coinciding with the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, the World Bank painted an alarming picture of Gaza’s crisis. Unemployment now stands at close to 70 per cent and the economy is contracting at an ever faster rate.

While the West Bank’s plight is not yet as severe, it is not far behind. Countries attending the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee were told. Gaza’s collapse could bring down the entire Palestinian banking sector.

In response, Europe hurriedly put together a €40 million aid package, but that will chiefly address Gaza’s separate humanitarian crisis – not the economic one – by improving supplies of electricity and potable water.

No one doubts the inevitable fallout from the economic and humanitarian crises gripping Gaza. The four parties to the Quartet charged with overseeing negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians – the United States, Russia, the European Union and the UN – issued a statement warning that it was vital to prevent what they termed “further escalation” in Gaza.

The Israeli military shares these concerns. It has reported growing unrest among the enclave’s two million inhabitants and believes Hamas will…

López Obrador promises Truth Commission in disappearance of Ayotzinapa students

By
Don Knowland

1 October 2018

Last week marked the fourth anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 teaching students (normalistas) from the Raúl Isidro Burgo Rural Normal School in the town of Ayotzinapa in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. Following a demonstration against cuts in education funding in the city of Iguala, local police herded the students into buses and likely turned them over to a local gang, the Guerreros Unidos. They have never been heard from since, and the remains have been recovered of only one of the students.

The incident itself, as well as its investigation by the Attorney General of Mexico (PGR) under what is now the outgoing government of President Enrique Peña Nieto and his Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI), were emblematic of the lawlessness of the Mexican state, its corruption and its ties to organized crime. At a more fundamental level, the case evinced the disdain of Mexico’s ruling oligarchy and government for the most basic rights of the Mexican population, who were outraged by this monstrous crime.

The PGR’s investigation concluded that the Guerreros Unidos gang killed the students and then incinerated their remains in a dump by a river in the neighboring town of Cocula. This is known in Mexico as the “historical explanation.”

Its deficiencies and inconsistencies were exposed by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) and the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, among others. They proved that the students’ remains could not have been incinerated at the Cocula dump site as the PGR had concluded.

The PGR arrested 170 people, including members of Guerreros…

Sputnik
October 1, 2018

For the second time this month, the U2 lead singer likened the Swedish Democrats to Nazis, this time also taking a jab at Denmark, as well as other European nations with a strong presence of right-wing parties.

During a much-anticipated and fully booked gig in the Danish capital of Copenhagen, U2 leader Bono, who proudly launched the recent world tour by waving the EU’s starred banner, has unleashed a tirade against European right-wingers, starting with the host nation itself.

“Denmark, I have forgotten about your splendid colonial ways, but I see you’re finding your own form. Forget Borgen [a popular Danish TV show]. You’re banning burqas and confiscating jewelry from those awful asylum seekers. Bravo!” Bono said, using the guise of a fictional devil character.

In recent years, Denmark’s center-right government comprised of the Liberals, the Liberal Alliance, the Conservatives and the right-wing Danish People’s Party introduced harsher immigration laws, tightening citizenship laws and launching a campaign toward better integration of newcomers, which seemingly irked the pro-diversity and multiculturalist-leaning celebrity. Denmark also had a brief stint as a colonial power in the 17th century, acquiring overseas possessions in America, Africa and Asia.

Bono then went on to call Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban a “lovely man,” whereupon he performed a Nazi salute shouting out the name of the Sweden Democrats’ leader Jimmie Åkesson, “next door in Sweden.” This move was first debuted during a Paris gig on September 9 following the Swedish general election, the Sweden Democrats‘ most successful so far, when Bono also ventured that “boring” Swedes had started to discover their “Aryan potential.”

Read more

This article was posted: Monday, October 1, 2018 at 5:01 am

…

Influential Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has said she will “take a hard look at” a prospective 2020 presidential run following midterm elections in November.

“After Nov. 6, I will take a hard look at running for president,” Warren said while talking to reporters at a town hall meeting in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

Warren, who served as an adviser to former President Barack Obama before she was elected to the Senate in 2012, has taken several steps in recent months to increase her national profile.

If Warren, a star of the party’s progressive wing, decides to run for the White House, she might have to compete against several fellow liberal senators planning to get the Democratic nomination.

Senators Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Chris Murphy all are reportedly weighing their own bids for the White House.

Warren, a staunch critic of President Donald Trump and his divisive polices, has…

Lawrenceville, Georgia — When Nikia Jackson needed to be screened for a sexually transmitted disease, she wanted a clinic that was reputable, quick and inexpensive.

After searching online, Jackson, 23, ended up at the Obria Medical Clinics’ sparkling new facility in an office park in suburban Atlanta. She was unaware that the clinic does not offer condoms or other kinds of birth control beyond so-called natural family planning methods.

Religious conservatives say these types of clinics are the future of women’s sexual health care in the United States.

“A woman needs choice, but you can’t have a choice if the only clinic that a woman can go to is Planned Parenthood,” said Kathleen Bravo, chief executive of the Obria Group and a devout Catholic.

Young women, she said, “don’t want to live every day having to take a carcinogen,” referring to hormonal contraception.

For decades, contraception drew widespread bipartisan support, but since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, religious conservatives trained their ire on the law’s contraception mandates, and the politics of abortion and birth control converged.

Bravo is positioning her company to become a nationwide alternative to Planned Parenthood and aims for it to qualify for millions of dollars in federal family planning funds next year. With 38 clinics and 22 more slated to open, Obria offers tests for pregnancy, STIs, HIV and cervical cancer and prenatal care.

But patients seeking to prevent pregnancy can receive only fertility planning methods that require women to track their periods and refrain from sex when most fertile. When followed exactly, the method is 76 percent effective, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That vision has found favor with the Trump administration, which has proposed sweeping changes to a $280 million federal program called Title X, the only source of federal funds for birth control for low-income women who lack health insurance.

Photo Source Jeanne Menjoulet | CC BY 2.0

I was sexually harassed by one of my professors in graduate school. He was the director of the graduate program and was known to host parties at his apartment for the graduate students. I assumed, when he invited me to his apartment for “dinner,” that the “dinner” in question was such an event.

I was wrong. I was the only guest for what had clearly been conceived as a romantic dinner. There was filet mignon wrapped in bacon and an excellent cabernet. I was surprised to find myself the object of such attentions, but I wasn’t frightened, not at first, anyway. The professor in question, let’s call him Professor H (H for “harasser”), was only a few years older than I was. We were both young and unattached. Unfortunately, though I was flattered by his interest, I didn’t reciprocate it. I tried to communicate this to him in a way that would minimize his hurt and embarrassment. He was a hard man to put off though. The evening ended, I kid you not, with his literally chasing me around the dining table. He kept moving uncomfortably close to me and I kept moving away, around and around the dining table until, finally, he seemed to get the point.

When he realized, or appeared to realize, anyway, that I was not simply playing hard-to-get, he told me that he appreciated my honesty and that what was most important to him was that we continued to have a positive professional relationship. And we did continue to have a positive…

British Foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt has likened the European Union to the Soviet Union amid London’s struggle to exit the bloc.

Hunt called on Brussels during a Conservative conference Sunday not to “turn the EU club into a prison.”

He further censured EU leaders for turning their backs on the “confidence and ideals of the European dream.”

“What happened to the confidence and ideals of the European dream?” he asked. “The EU was set up to protect freedom. It was the Soviet Union that stopped people leaving.”

The European Union has said that parts of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan to exit the EU are unacceptable as many Conservative lawmakers are threatening to vote down a deal based on it.

“The lesson from history is clear: if you turn the EU club into a prison, the desire to get out won’t diminish, it will grow – and we won’t be the only prisoner that will want to escape,” Hunt said, further…

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation
Sept 28, 2018

Judge Brett Kavanaugh has the needed votes in the Senate to be confirmed, a Senate insider reportedly told Townhall.

Townhall’s Matt Vespa reports:

With the Senate Judiciary Committee holding a vote at 9:30 A.M. tomorrow, a Senate insider has told Townhall that Kavanaugh has the votes to make it out of committee and the votes to be confirmed on the floor for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Sens. Flake (R-AZ), Collins (R-ME), Murkowski (R-AK), and Manchin (D-WV) are expected to vote in favor of Kavanaugh. All the Republicans are voting yes. Also, in the rumor mill, several Democrats may break ranks and back Kavanaugh. That’s the ball game, folks.

Let’s hope this is true.

There’s no question Judge Kavanaugh and Senator Lindsey Graham delivered in spades.

The reporters’ tweets who were quoted were not so sure.

Politico’s Burgess Everett:

Donnelly, Manchin, Murkowski and Collins are all expected to vote the same way, per senators and aides

— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) September 28, 2018

This doesn’t mean they are voting for or against…I legitimately don’t know. But these four aren’t expected to end up in opposite places

— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) September 28, 2018

The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott:

Interesting: A source close to Senator Manchin tells me now, “Short of claims that definitively prove Dr. Ford’s allegations or a realization that Kavanaugh will gut the healthcare law, Manchin will side with the overwhelming number of people in WV who want Kavanaugh confirmed.”

— Elaina Plott (@elainaplott) September 28, 2018

Manchin, of course, left his meeting with Collins, Murkowski, and Flake saying he was unsure. But thought source’s use of “definitively prove” was interesting.

— Elaina Plott (@elainaplott) September 28, 2018

Here’s what I’m wondering: if Collins and Murkowski vote yes, are there other…

By Dr. Mercola

To say that the HPV vaccine is controversial would be a serious understatement. A number of experts have spoken out against the vaccine since its release, and studies have revealed serious problems. Children and teenagers have died or been permanently disabled following HPV vaccination, yet it remains on the market.

The featured 2017 trilogy, “Sacrificial Virgins,” looks at the HPV vaccine from a variety of angles. Part 1,¹ “Not for the Greater Good,” questions the science behind the HPV vaccine and asks “Do we need it?”

Part 2,² “Pain and Suffering,” tells the story of two severely HPV-injured girls in the U.K., highlighting the possibility that the aluminum adjuvant added to Gardasil and Cervarix may be causing the devastating neurological damage seen in young girls and boys.

The third episode,³ “A Penny for Your Pain,” looks at legal cases worldwide (in particular Japan, Spain and Colombia), in which victims are seeking compensation for their injuries.

Clinical Trial Participant Speaks Out Against Gardasil

In December 2017, Slate magazine published an article dishing out yet another inconvenient truth about this medically unnecessary vaccine, revealing trials “weren’t designed to properly assess safety.”⁴ Slate recounts the story of Kesia Lyng, a 30-year-old Danish woman who, at the age of 19, made the fateful decision to participate in a clinical trial for Merck’s Gardasil vaccine.

Dissolving Illusions: …
Suzanne Humphries MD, …
Best Price: $13.79
Buy New $22.78
(as of 12:40 EDT – Details)

Gardasil is supposed to prevent human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, which in rare cases may cause cervical cancer if left untreated. “Lyng’s grandmother had died of cervical…

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation
Sept 28, 2018

Judge Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford has raised over $750,000 through multiple GoFundMe campaigns to cover “expenses” related to her testimony.

As of the early morning of September 28th, the “Help Christine Blasey Ford” campaign total stood at $473,622 of a $150,000 goal.

The “Cover Dr. Blasey’s security costs” campaign has raised $209,987 of a $175,000 goal.

A host of other similar campaigns for Ford raised around another $100,000.

Ford did manage to work a plug in for her GoFundMe campaigns during her testimony:

“Her lawyers have paid for her polygraph … as is routine,” Christine Blasey Ford’s lawyers tell prosecutor Rachel Mitchell, who is asking questions for GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. pic.twitter.com/R4jCPeX2fH

— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) September 27, 2018

Hopefully, she can use the funds to buy much-needed coffee!

VIDEO: Christine Blasey Ford gets her request for coffee personally delivered to her by @CoryBooker while she sat at the witness table in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. pic.twitter.com/HzuymqrDXU

— Detroit Free Press (@freep) September 27, 2018

This article was posted: Friday, September 28, 2018 at 4:47 am

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop

— Economist Herbert Stein

Those who live in the reaches of the Arctic Circle tend to convey the same humbling lesson: Mother Nature calls the shots and survival depends upon preparing for her mood swings. It’s an adage that will take on increasing relevance as history unfolds because disaster has been baked into our future. Decades ago a whole series of events was set into motion and it may be too late to break their momentum. Civilization will be tested as large swathes of the globe become uninhabitable. While it might be tempting to seek refuge in the form of denial or nihilism, doing so won’t prevent what’s coming down the pike.

It’s Much Worse than You Think   

The indicators are hard to miss. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached levels not seen for nearly a million years. Roughly half of India’s population (which tips the scales at over a billion) currently faces extreme water scarcity and within two decades India’s demand for water will likely rise to twice the available supply. Moreover, by the end of the century scientists assess that population centers across the Middle East will confront “temperature levels that are intolerable to humans.” Which is a polite way of describing a death trap. One that will probably snap shut even if emissions are somehow kept within internationally agreed upon levels.

At some point our system’s…

Polls predict Quebec elections likely to end in hung parliament

By
our reporters

29 September 2018

Opinion polls suggest no party will win a parliamentary majority in Monday’s Quebec provincial election.

At the campaign’s outset, the right-wing populist Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ-Coalition for Quebec’s Future) had a more than five-percentage point lead over the Quebec Liberal Party, which has governed Quebec for all but 18 months of the last 15 years. But the CAQ’s crude Quebec chauvinist appeals, including its plan to expel immigrants who fail French-language or “Quebec values” tests after three years’ residence, have repelled many voters.

At the last of three debates between the leaders of the four parties represented in the outgoing Quebec National Assembly—the Liberals; CAQ; the big business, pro-Quebec independence Parti Québécois (PQ); and the pseudo-left Québec Solidaire—CAQ head and one-time PQ cabinet minister François Legault soft-peddled his party’s anti-immigrant stance. The Liberal government, he demagogically declared, is the only one that the CAQ wants to expel.

However, Legault couldn’t help himself. When a CAQ supporter asked him Wednesday if he would “fight for us” against immigrants who are “effacing us,” Legault exclaimed, “Yes, of course that’s what we want … It is a question of protecting who we are as Quebeckers.”

The Liberals, headed by Premier Philippe Couillard, remain the preferred party of government of most of Canadian and Quebec big business. The press is full of commentary lamenting that whilst Quebec’s economy is the “best” it has been in decades, the Liberals are so widely despised they are in danger of garnering their smallest-ever share of the popular vote in a Quebec election.

In…

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation
Sept 28, 2018

Christine Blasey Ford admitted under oath Thursday before the Senate Judicial Committee that her supposed “fear of flying,” which she used an excuse to successfully delay Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, did not stop her from flying all over the place over the last two months and jet-setting to exotic locations all around the world to surf in the past.

This is what Ford had her friend tell the media last week, as ABC News reported:

[L]awyers for Ford are asking the Senate Judiciary Committee to schedule a hearing for her to be heard on Thursday, allowing time for Ford to make the drive from California to Washington D.C. Ford’s friend, Kate Devarney, told CNN this week that Ford’s fear of flying is directly related to her allegation of assault, and that an airplane is “the ultimate closed space where you cannot get away.”

Ford revealed Thursday under oath she’s been flying almost every week!

Despite Dr. Ford’s reported fear of flying (which was her excuse for not being able to testify in a timely manner before the Senate Judiciary) she admits she traveled to DC in a plane. pic.twitter.com/suaLy4yguD

— The Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) September 27, 2018

TRANSCRIPT:

Rachel Mitchell: May I ask, Dr. Ford, how did you get to Washington?

Ford: In an airplane.

Mitchell: I ask that because it’s been reported by the press that you would not submit to an interview with the committee because of your fear of flying. Is that true?

Ford: Well, I was willing—I was hoping they would come to me, but I realized that was an unrealistic request.

Mitchell: It would have been a quicker trip for me.

This is huge. The Republicans made it abundantly clear from the very start that they were eager to send a team out to speak with her at her home in Palo Alto. Chairman Chuck Grassley pointed this out shortly after Ford’s comments.

To…

Friends pay tribute to 11-year-old Xavier, nickname Wedos. Photo: Stan Hister.

We’d all be human if we could

– Bertolt Brecht

Children aren’t doing well in America these days. The most obvious example is the Trump administration’s brutal policy of separating immigrant parents from children at the US-Mexico border but there are many far less well publicized instances of neglect or worse.

When I was in Chicago last month there was a horrifying fire in a mostly Mexican neighborhood on the city’s west side. The first reports had it that 6 kids and two adults had died, and two other kids were in critical condition in hospital. Within days the two kids in hospital died.

And then it turned out that the two adults were actually teens, 15 and 16 years old. Because their bodies were covered in soot and because of their size relative to the other kids, they’d been mistaken for adults. No doubt there was also the assumption that there must have been some adults around. But there weren’t.

This was the worst fire fatality in Chicago in over a decade, and the most children to die in a fire since 1958.

No one lived on the main floor of the house, which was boarded up. One family lived in the back, in a two bedroom apartment in what’s known as a carriage house. All but one of the kids were related, as siblings or cousins. They were all together for a sleepover. The youngest was a three month old baby.

The building had a long string of safety code violations. Early reports…

The owner of British-based company EasyGroup is taking legal action against American video streaming firm Netflix over its comedy series named “Easy”, claiming its use of the name breaches the UK company’s European trademarks.

The easyGroup is led by Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, a British Cypriot billionaire businessman who also founded easyJet, an airline known to passengers for its “easy” and low-cost services.

Haji-Ioannou is specifically seeking a court injunction to prevent Netflix from airing Easy, a flagship series by Joe Swanberg, in Europe.

“This is a case of typically arrogant behavior by a very large American tech company who never bothered to check what legal rights other companies have outside the US,” he said.

A spokesman for easyGroup said its lawyers had launched a legal procedure against Netflix to prevent the tech company from streaming Easy, a comedy-drama anthology series, in Europe, where easyGroup enjoys…

American Mirror
Sept 28, 2018

The left came unglued today as Judge Brett Kavanaugh defended himself and Republicans senators supported him.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham was chased by a group of agitators through the Capitol as he attempted to give an interview to Fox News’ Peter Doocey.

LINDSEY GRAHAM moments ago on Fox (with protesters yelling behind him):

“These people can yell all they want to. Doesn’t matter. I believe him.” pic.twitter.com/xyOiaGZnOF

— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) September 27, 2018

And yet, he persisted.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

“I thought what they did to Kavanaugh was despicable,” Graham said over the shouts.

“I feel sorry for Dr. Ford,” he continued, unflinching amid the finger-waving and heckling.

One nasty woman was just inches from hitting Graham.

“These people can yell all they want to,” he said, pointing over his shoulder to the agitators continuing to aggressively follow him.

“Doesn’t matter. I believe him.”

He continued, “It’s all about power. It’s all about delaying the hearing to keep the seat open. It’s not about the truth,” he said.

Those comments were similar to the ones earlier in the day when he erupted at his Democrat colleagues.

“If you wanted an FBI investigation, you could have come to us. What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open, and hope you win in 2020,” Graham said, pointing his finger at the Democrats.

“This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics. And if you wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn’t have done what you’ve done to this guy.”

“Boy, you all want power. God, I hope you never get it. I hope the American people can see through this sham,” Graham said. “You had no intention of protecting Dr. Ford. None! She’s as much as a victim as you are.”

This article was posted: Friday, September 28, 2018 …