Video: Goal Click: Project that aims to show real Russia through football stories

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Video: Goal Click: Project that aims to show real Russia through football stories

Matthew Barrett is a co-founder of photography project Goal Click, which documents football culture around the world, including in Russia. Check out http://rt.com …

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The Dictatorship Over America: How It Functions

Eric Zuesse
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The Dictatorship Over America: How It Functions

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org

Democrats have won the national vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, which, with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, will have resulted in the appointment of eight of the Supreme Court’s nine justices. And yet four of those justices will have been appointed by presidents who took office despite having fewer votes than their opponent. Republicans will have increasingly solid control of the court’s majority, with the chance to replace the sometimes-wavering Kennedy with a never-wavering conservative movement stalwart.

Over the last generation, the Republican Party has moved rapidly rightward, while the center of public opinion has not. It is almost impossible to find a substantive basis in public opinion for Republican government. On health care, taxes, immigration, guns, the GOP has left America behind in its race to the far right. But the Supreme Court underscores its ability to counteract the undertow of its deepening, unpopular extremism by marshaling countermajoritiarian power.

This is the way that the neocon (Hillary Clinton wing) Democrat Jonathan Chait, writing at the Democratic Party propaganda-organ New York magazine, got something correct, for a change. That quotation opened Chait’s June 27th commentary, which was ominously titled “The Republican Court and the Era of Minority Rule”. However, the prospects for democracy in America are actually even worse than that. This problem is bipartisan, and Chait himself has been part of it. Neoconservatives (otherwise called “America’s imperialists” but they’re basically no different from imperialists in other countries) run both of America’s political Parties — not only the Republican Party — regardless of what voters might happen to think of the neoconservative philosophy. This disparity between the non-ideological public and the virtually 100% neoconservative rulers, is due to the fact that voters have no real power in America (something that Chait noted in that excerpt, but only within a partisan Democratic-Party-versus-Republican-Party context, not any broader or more encompassing context, one that questions the political and economic system itself — at a deeper level than merely “Democratic” versus “Republican”). By contrast against that powerless public, America’s aristocrats possess all of the real power, in both Parties, and they’re virtually 100% imperialists (“neocons”) because they want their private international corporate empires to dominate over the entire world — at the public’s expense, with a huge, globe-spanning, military.

This insightful (though too narrowly focused) opening from Chait shows that even neoconservatives (such as he) aren’t always wrong about everything. In fact, this opening, from a Democratic Party neoconservative, about America’s increasing conservative (Republican) dictatorship, was entirely truthful within its partisan narrow scope, and therefore (to that extent) it was more like an exemplification of the proverbial “infinite monkey theorem” — that “a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.” That opening was a random masterpiece.

However, Chait’s ‘Shakespearean’ string ended precisely there, when he immediately followed it by saying, “The story really begins in December 2000,” and he proceeded then to blame everything on Bush-v.-Gore, and on the way that the Republican operatives raped the American nation on 9 December 2000. But to allege that the problem started in 2000 is false ‘history’. This problem started much earlier (as will now be documented).

—

The only comprehensive and scientific study which has ever been done of whether the U.S. is a democracy or instead a dictatorship, was published in 2014. It studied the period during 1981 through 2002, and it found that, “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.”

Consequently, for example, prior to our invasion of Iraq in 2003, our opinions of “Saddam’s WMD” were simply being manipulated by the controlling owners of U.S.-based international corporations (including their ‘news’media, which they advertise in and/or also own), just as those same super-rich individuals (most of whom are Americans) have controlled whom the nine people will be who rule from the Supreme Court, about what the U.S. Constitution means, and doesn’t mean (and this judicial panel, of course, also decided Bush-v.-Gore, to which Chait blames America’s dictatorship).

So: the U.S. Constitution has become increasingly twisted (by such jurists) to ‘mean’ things (such as aristocratic dictatorship) that were actually loathed by America’s Founders, who even went to war against Britain’s aristocracy — this anti-aristocratic Constitution has become increasingly twisted by the aristocracy’s court-picks, to ‘mean’ things such as creating and expanding an international empire, and as allowing U.S. taxpayers to be forced to subsidize the political speech of some religions and not of other religions, nor of seculars (rejectors of all religions). Especially the Republican Party benefits enormously from empowering evangelical pastors to preach Republican propaganda to their congregations. Religion becomes a political football.

According to that scientific study, the United States, during the period that was studied, 1981 through to 2002, which was virtually the entire twenty years PRIOR to Bush-.v.-Gore — and this is quoting now directly from the study itself: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” So: it didn’t start in 2000.

A study published two years later (in 2016) reviewed the entire relevant literature and found “that responsiveness [to the American public’s preferences] seems to have declined during the late twentieth century” and might be getting worse yet than that: “The picture appears to be even more ominous — that is, opinion and policy are negatively related — on highly salient issues that attract media attention.” (Consequently: the more media-attention, the less that the Government’s policy will reflect the public’s preferences on the given issue.) This report states, in its “Conclusions,” that, “the trends seem to be moving in the wrong direction from the standpoint of democratic theory — that is, people seem less and less likely to get what they say they want from government.”

The basic problem in America, therefore, isn’t Democratic versus Republican; it is instead democracy versus dictatorship. And this problem exists within each Party: each Party is controlled by its billionaires, not by its voting-public.

So: how does this — the aristocracy’s dictatorial grip on America’s Government — actually function? Not only the 2000 U.S. Presidential ‘election’ was stolen from the American electorate, but so too are almost all U.S. national elections stolen, especially the crucial ones, such as the political primary elections to Congress and the Presidency, for candidates to become the selected nominees of each of the two political Parties and thus to become offered to the public as the final contestants who might actually win those offices in the U.S. national Government. Just as Bernie Sanders was the most-preferred of all candidates in 2016 to become the U.S. President but the nomination was stolen from him by the Democratic National Committee for Hillary Clinton, it’s the same in most ‘elections’ to American national offices. And this dictatorship by the super-rich didn’t start with Bush.-v.-Gore, such as Chait alleges.

—

Here’s a current example of how this dictatorship functions: Right now, the U.S. aristocracy, who control all of the large U.S. corporations — including all of the major news-media — are pushing very hard to impose a kind of lock-down against the few media that they don’t control: against the media whose only presence is online, because these small media lack the funding to have either a print-and-paper presence, or else network broadcast and telecast facilities or a cable network. The way that the ‘news’-giants propagandize for this lockdown against unwanted truths, is by calling those small media sites (especially the half-dozen or so which do publish the elsewhere prohibited truths) ‘fake news’ media, and by alleging that only the print-broadcast-cable ‘news’ media (the very same ‘news’media which had deceived the public in 2002 to fear “Saddam’s WMD,” and which subsequently also ‘justified’, in 2011, Obama’s destruction of Libya, and then his subsequent invasion of Syria) ought to be trusted by the American people. Obviously, trusting those media is crazy, but America’s aristocrats want the public to believe this false way — trusting the billionaire-controlled ‘news’media.

Thus, on June 27th, Gallup reported:

Gallup and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation conducted a web-based experiment to assess the effectiveness of a news source rating tool designed to help online news consumers discriminate between real news and misinformation. The tool identifies news organizations as reliable (using a green cue) or unreliable (using a red cue) based on evaluations of their work, funding and other factors by experienced journalists.

The Gallup news-report closed: “Gallup and Knight Foundation acknowledge support for this research provided by the Ford Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Open Society Foundations.” All of them are neoconservative organizations, which represent the interests of America’s billionaires — not of the public anywhere.

The technical report of this experiment concluded that mainstream news-media can increase the public’s prejudice against non-mainstream news-media, by having their own hired “experienced journalists” label those small competing news-media as providers of ‘misinformation’ instead of ‘news’:

This survey experiment evaluated the effect of a specific source rating tool — cues about news organization trustworthiness based on evaluations from experienced journalists. The findings suggest that using this approach may help combat online misinformation and restore confidence in obtaining quality news.

Of course, this finding is very good news for America’s billionaires, because further suppressing what the aristocrats are calling ‘misinformation’ (such as this, from one of the sites on the aristocracy’s banned list) will enable them to increase their dictatorship, even more. (Incidentally, both the bipartisan aristocratic control, and the truth-suppression, are similar in UK to what they are in U.S., and with similar results.)

As time goes by, the means of deceiving the public, become even cagier than they were before. The way that the dictatorship in America functions is by deceiving the public; and perhaps this Gallup-Knight-Ford-Gates-Soros study has helped them to develop a more effective “tool” to do that.

—

Maybe the next big invasion will be of Iran. American-and-allied media seem to be focusing increasingly on this particular target. Perhaps “experienced journalists” are being promoted right now, for that very purpose. With Donald Trump in power, Iran is systematically becoming the main next target. It was his top target even before he became elected; and one can even say that he was selected by the U.S. aristocracy, and by Israel’s aristocracy, and by the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, and by the leader of UAE’s royal families, mainly for this reason, to be installed to run the U.S. regime. But, of course, they would also have done very well if Hillary Clinton had been ‘elected’. That’s the way things are: politics in America, especially at the national level, is now merely a puppet-show. And, apparently, many if not most of the people who are pulling the strings in it don’t so much as live here — they are foreigners, though of the types that Trump (as now is obvious), relies upon, instead of persecutes (such as ‘wetbacks’). The American people are merely the audience. We didn’t even buy this puppet-show. Those billionaires did. (The American ones also buy the puppet-theater which presents Russia — not Israel or Saudi Arabia — as being the foreign power that controls the U.S. Government and that ‘endangers democracy’ everywhere. During the communist era, that story-line was believable by even intelligent people, but after 24 February 1990, it no longer is: the U.S.’s own aristocracy clearly is that “foreign power”.)

NOTE: The way that the present writer tries to facilitate readers’ checking-out the trustworthiness of the allegations in my own news-reports, isn’t based on sites (like the aristocracy want it to be, so that the news that they don’t want the public to know — and that their own ‘news’-sites won’t publish — won’t be able to have an impact) but instead is based on individual news-reports, by means of providing links to that specific source whenever a given allegation is of such nature that a significant percentage of readers might think it to be false. I am selective of each and every individual article or video that I cite (link to) as being evidence; I never select and link to sources on the basis of the news-medium that published them, because I sometimes find falsehoods published on even the best media, and sometimes find thoroughly accurate articles or videos to be published on even the worst media.

Selecting on the basis of media, instead of specific evidence, is for fools. Every news-consumer should know what the prejudices of any given ‘news’medium are — its main propagandistic orientations. But to evaluate any given allegation on that type of basis, is foolish. It is an ad-hominem, not ad-rem, evaluation regarding that given allegation. It welcomes prejudices, instead of facts — it repels truths. And that is why the aristocracy encourages and promotes it, as the Gallup-Knight-Ford-Gates-Soros study does. (In fact, I’ve seen evidence that the Washington Post uses software that automatically rejects any submission which links to a website that isn’t on the Post’s management-approved list of sites to link to. And, of course, this management-policy encourages the ‘news’paper to accept submissions that have no links in them at all — precisely the least-trustworthy type of submissions.)

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

FDA Repays Industry by Rushing Risky Drugs to Market

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Nuplazid, a drug for hallucinations and delusions associated with Parkinson’s disease, failed two clinical trials. In a third trial, under a revised standard for measuring its effect, it showed minimal benefit. Overall, more patients died or had serious side effects on Nuplazid than after receiving no treatment.

Patients on Uloric, a gout drug, suffered more heart attacks, strokes and heart failure in two out of three trials than did their counterparts on standard or no medication.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved both of these drugs — with a deadly aftermath. Uloric’s manufacturer reported last November that patients on the drug were 34 percent more likely to die from heart disease than people taking an alternative gout medication. And since the FDA fast-tracked approval of Nuplazid and it went on the market in 2016 at a price of $24,000 a year, there have been 6,800 reports of adverse events for patients on the drug, including 887 deaths as of this past March 31.

The FDA is increasingly green-lighting expensive drugs despite dangerous or little-known side effects and inconclusive evidence that they curb or cure disease. Once widely assailed for moving slowly, today the FDA reviews and approves drugs faster than any other regulatory agency in the world. Between 2011 and 2015, the FDA reviewed new drug applications more than 60 days faster on average than did the European Medicines Agency.

Europe has also rejected drugs for which the FDA accelerated approval, such as Folotyn, which treats a rare form of blood cancer. European authorities cited “insufficient” evidence of health gains from Folotyn, which shrinks some tumors but hasn’t been shown to extend lives. It costs more than $92,000 for a seven-week course of treatment, according to research firm SSR Health.

As patients (or their insurers) shell out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for unproven drugs, manufacturers reap a windfall. For them, expedited approval can mean not only…

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America’s Moral Angst

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Photo by Dave Hosford | CC BY 2.0

For all those who in 2016 closed their eyes, held their noses and took a leap into the unknown by voting for Donald Trump, it is time to pry open those eyelids, gaze upon what they have wrought, and smell the decay pervading the country’s public sphere. And indeed, it seems that growing numbers have, rather belatedly, noticed the signs of moral degeneracy coming from the Oval Office. What took them so long?

Actually, the time lapse is not really unusual. These Trump voters, having taken the leap sometimes for no other reason than they disliked Hillary Clinton (and her “politics as usual” ways), returned to their local lives and carried on as before. It was Mrs. Clinton’s defeat that satisfied them more than any concern with who had actually been elected. They had not paid attention to Trump’s malicious humbug.

These rather absent-minded balloters can be contrasted with another subset of voters, represented by the likes of former Klan leader David Duke, who went into their polling stations with eyes fully open. In February 2016 Duke had informed his white supremacist followers that “not voting for Trump was really treason to your heritage.” Later he would declare that “we are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.” The “we” here are those American whites who feel that social justice and civil rights for anyone but themselves would be an affront to their…

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“If You Shoot Me, You Better Shoot Straight”

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Zero Hedge
July 1, 2018

Rep Maxine Waters (D-CA) is blaming a series of death threats on comments made by President Trump over Twitter, following her call last weekend for the public to form into mobs and physically confront members of the Trump administration.

“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowdand you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” said Waters.

Addressing a crowd in Los Angeles on Saturday, Waters, 79, packaged the entirety of her detractors into the same category as would-be KKK assassins in the same breath, and then insinuated that if they don’t successfully take her out she would become “like a wounded animal.”

“I know that there are those who are talking about censuring me, talking about kicking me out of Congress, talking about shooting me, talking about hanging me,” Waters told the crowd in Los Angeles.

“All I have to say is this, if you shoot me you better shoot straight, there’s nothing like a wounded animal.”

In response to Waters call to action last weekend, President Trump tweeted on Monday that “Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!”

In response, Waters appeared on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes where she read a list of…

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Trans people won’t get legal access to public single-sex spaces, ministers pledge — RT UK News

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Trans people won’t get legal access to public single-sex spaces, ministers pledge — RT UK News

Trans people will not be legally entitled to access single-sex spaces, the government said. The Equalities Commission said the rights of those identifying as female should not override those of women who are biologically female.

Despite warnings from rights campaigners that single-sex facilities, such as toilets and changing rooms, discriminate against the transgender community, the government said it has “no intention” to make female- and male-only services accessible to transgender people.

“We are clear we have no intention of amending the Equality Act 2010, the legislation that allows for single-sex spaces,” a government statement said on Sunday.

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© Britta Pedersen/ Global Look Press

The announcement follows growing pressure from feminists to guarantee the protection of women as the government pushes through the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), which will allow for trans people to legally alter their gender.

It comes after woman complained about having a man self-identifying as a female carrying out her cervical smear test. Women also complained about trans swimming in female-only pools.

In response to a 12,000-strong petition calling for women to be consulted before any change to the Act is passed, the Government Equalities Office said: “We are clear that we have no intention of amending the Equality Act 2010, the legislation that allows for single-sex spaces.

“Any GRA reform will not change the protected characteristics in the Equality Act nor the exceptions under the Equality Act that allow provision for single and separate sex spaces.”

It added: “Providers of women-only services can continue to provide services in a different way, or even not provide services to trans individuals, provided it is objectively justified on a case-by-case basis.

“The same can be said about toilets, changing rooms or single-sex activities. Providers may exclude trans people from facilities of the sex they identify with, providing it is a proportionate means of meeting a legitimate aim.”

Gay and trans rights group Stonewall said: “Trans people are subject to appalling levels of abuse in daily life and dehumanised by the way the current debate questions their very right to exist.

“This is unacceptable in Britain in 2018 and it demonstrates just why the Gender Recognition Act needs urgent reform.”

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

At least 9 injured in knife rampage in Idaho, some ‘in critical’ condition – police — RT US News

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At least 9 injured in knife rampage in Idaho, some ‘in critical’ condition – police — RT US News

A knife rampage in the state of Idaho left at least nine people injured, police confirmed. The attack happened at an apartment complex which also houses refugees. A suspect has been detained by authorities.

The assault happened in Boise at 9pm on Saturday. It was described by Police Chief William Bones as involving the highest number of people injured on a single occasion in the city’s history.

The suspect, a 30-year-old man, was taken into custody immediately following the rampage. Police reported that he “came from out of state,” but it remains unclear how long he had been in Idaho.

READ MORE: #FamiliesBelongTogether: Nationwide protests over immigrant separations, detentions (PHOTOS, VIDEOS)

The victims, who include refugees, were immediately transported to a local hospital. They were found inside the apartment complex and in a nearby parking lot. According to a statement made by Boise police, four of the victims are being treated for life-threatening injuries.

“As you can imagine the witnesses in the apartment complex along with the rest of our community are reeling from this attack. This incident is not a representation of our community but a single evil individual who attacked people without provocation that we are aware of at this time,” Police Chief Bones said.

Local police are trying to find out the suspect’s motive and are also working with witnesses and victims. Authorities are unaware of any connection between the man and the victims so far.

Boise is known for being a refugee hotspot in Idaho and its refugee resettlement program has received international praise. Since 2012, more and more migrants from the Middle East have been resettled in Idaho. A large part of the refugees currently come from Congo, Burma, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia.

READ MORE: 4 injured in shooting & stabbing in Sweden’s Helsingborg (VIDEO)

This incident comes after a demonstration on Saturday outside the Idaho State Capitol, where thousands protested Trump’s zero-tolerance policy against immigrants illegally crossing the US border.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Video: World Cup brings carnival to Russia: Fans’ costumes from all over the world

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Video: World Cup brings carnival to Russia: Fans’ costumes from all over the world

What’s a carnival without costumes? Check fans’ costumes from all over the world. Check out http://rt.com RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air Subscribe to RT!

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Video: ‘We’re going to have to see’: Trump on recognition of Crimea

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Video: ‘We’re going to have to see’: Trump on recognition of Crimea

US President Donald Trump has said he does not rule out recognizing Crimea as Russian. The province rejoined Russia in 2014, but is still considered …

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Why Do Students Kill Their Class-Mates?

Dissidentvoice
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Detachment, Isolation, Dehumanization, and Emotional Estrangement from Human Relationships

A recently released phone video shot by 19-year-old Parkland, Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz, reveals a cold, callus young man who claims to “hate everyone and everything.”

Los Angeles Times reporter, Melissa Healy, compares Nikolas Cruz to Sandy Hook school shooter, Adam Lanza, and sees a commonality in isolation and “a profound sense of alienation from virtually all human relationships.”

The anonymous web on which we play and interact is clearly a double-edged sword. Healy notes:

Most adolescents and young adults come to recognize there’s a fundamental difference between going online and actually having a close personal relationship. But for kids who are not fitting in, that’s a very attractive alternative: You can hide or disguise who you are and what you’re thinking.

Many young shooters, however, have attributed motivation to wanting to be “known” indicating feelings of being unheard, invisible, insignificant.

The need to “belong” to be part of a “family” or something bigger than oneself has been reported to be at the root of adolescents joining gangs, cults, and being recruited by foreign terrorists.  While not joining, others feel in sync with terrorist’s ideologies, identifying with the intense anger but striking out as lone actors.

Another noted commonality of school shooters and mass murderers is fatherlessness by various…

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PressTV-Trump, Trudeau discuss trade after G7 row

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US President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have discussed trade and other economic issues over the phone, according to the White House.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders made the announcement on Saturday, a day after Canada struck back at the Trump administration over US steel and aluminum tariffs.  

The phone call between the two leaders was the first to be publicly disclosed since Trump described Trudeau as “very dishonest and weak” at the end of the Group of Seven (G7) leaders meeting in Canada early last month.

On June 9, Trump left the G7 industrial nations’ summit in Canada early in anticipation of the meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore.

Trudeau said after the G7 summit that it was “kind of insulting” that the United States implemented steel and aluminum tariffs against his country on the basis of national security. Trudeau also promised to slap retaliatory tariffs…

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It’s About Resisting Tyranny – LewRockwell

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Right now, the anti-gun zealots are preoccupied with so-called “assault rifles.” They’re doing everything they can to gin up support for a ban, hoping that a weak-spined majority in Congress will “bow to the will of the people” if they can just get enough support and hold onto it for a long enough period of time.

One of their favorite arguments, however, is that “no one needs an AR-15.” They usually then call it a “weapon of war.”

As gun folks, we tend to take issue with the whole “weapon of war” thing. After all, the AR-15 isn’t a weapon of war. No military on Earth has ever fielded the weapon and none has expressed any interest in doing so. While it’s similar to the M16/M4 platform, it lacks that select-fire capability that pretty much every military on the planet needs.

However, I don’t think that’s the part of the argument we should focus so much on. After all, we tend to want these guns in part to resist tyranny, right? If we ever have to do that, God forbid, they will then be weapons of war. It’s a quibble, but one anti-gunners will likely latch onto if any have the brainpower to see it.

Straight Talk on Armed…

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Instead, I think the “no one needs X” argument is the weaker argument and one we should be attacking.

First, let’s face facts. Our system of government isn’t predicated on people only meeting their needs. After all, our affluent society is known by our consumerism to some degree. We buy all kinds of things, which is what has spurred our economy on and helped make us such a powerful nation.

No one needs most of the stuff we have.

My family possesses multiple laptop computers and a desktop. We don’t need all that….

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Prison Planet.com » French nuclear reactor was main target of ISIS, not Brussels Airport, ex-jihadist says

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Voice Of Europe
June 29, 2018

Jonathan Geffroy is an ex-ISIS soldier and is now cooperating with French authorities. Newspaper L’express obtained and published some of the frightening transcripts of his conversations with them.

Jonathan G. spent two years in the Iraqi-Syrian zone before he was captured in the beginning of 2017 by the Free Syrian Army. He was then transferred to French authorities and is fully cooperating with them.

The 35-year-old ex-jihadist worked with the “Clain Brothers”, ISIS’s chief propagandists, who’ve claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks.

Jean-Michel Clain, who calls himself “Abu Othman”, “has an important position in Daesh”. “He was in the field of information transmission of the Islamic State and he was in contact with Ajna, the highest authorities of the Islamic State,” Jonathan says.

“The Clain family is aware of everything, they are close to scientists, media and officials,” Jonathan continues. He was one of the rare “privileged” who could go to Jean-Michel Clain, in Raqqa.

When asked about the Brussels airport bombing, he says that “they weren’t prepared” but “ triggered” by the arrest of Paris attacker Salah Abdeslam, who planned the attack on the Bataclan theatre.

“Othman said to me that in effort to avoid everybody’s arrest, they targeted Zaventem’s airport in Brussels, but the original target was a French nuclear power plant. They planned to drive to the plants and blow up their cars”, Jonathan adds.

This article was posted: Friday, June 29, 2018 at 6:52 am



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Dubai is ‘new Costa del Crime’ for fraudsters hiding cash from UK government — RT UK News

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Dubai is ‘new Costa del Crime’ for fraudsters hiding cash from UK government — RT UK News

Fraudsters that owe the UK Treasury more than £100 million have snapped up a string of luxury apartments in Dubai. The prevalence of UK criminals in the UAE city has led to it being dubbed the new ‘Cost del Crime’.

According to a leak of a secret property database, a group of men, who will be looked at closely by British investigators, stand accused of running a carousel fraud ring. The fraud network is estimated to have cost the UK £16.5bn in tax revenues over an 11 year period, spanning from between 2005 to 2016.

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(Reuters/Catherine Benson)

Rod Stone, former assistant director of HM Revenue and Customs organized crime national coordination unit, told the Guardian that fraudsters began consigning goods via Dubai back in 2005 to try and undermine the tax authorities’ ability to identify the circular movements of carousel fraud.

“Fraudsters used Dubai banks to avoid both the stringent anti-money laundering reporting requirements in the UK, and the authorities’ ability to freeze their ill-gotten gains,” Stone said. “Many law enforcement professionals now believe that Dubai has replaced the Costa del Crime in Spain as the place criminals conceal and invest the proceeds.”

Carousel fraud, also known as the far drier ‘missing trader intra-community value-added tax (VAT)’ fraud, is when a business imports goods VAT-free from overseas, then sell the goods on to domestic buyers, charging them VAT. The sellers then disappear into thin air, pocketing the VAT without paying the tax to the government.

International investigative organization, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, obtained a massive leak of Dubai property ownership records dating from 2014 to 2016. Finance Uncovered, another investigative journalism body, uncovered a paper trail of businessmen wanted by the UK tax authorities.

One such person is believed to be 47-year-old Mustafa Al Hassani, whose mobile phone wholesale business Abyss International operated out of Dubai and London. Al Hassani was part of a chain that owes huge sums to HMRC and bought eight previously unknown Dubai properties worth over £2.5m.

His younger brother, Haider, who the HMRC is also allegedly chasing, also bought property in Dubai. Other alleged fraudsters with Dubai properties exploited the “carbon credits” system, generated by the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. Europol estimated that carousel scams in carbon credits cost around €5bn between 2008 and 2009.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters cancels public appearances — RT US News

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Congresswoman Maxine Waters cancels public appearances — RT US News

Maxine Waters has canceled two speaking engagements after allegedly receiving a “very serious” death threat. The California congresswoman hinted that US President Donald Trump had incited his supporters to target her.

Waters made headlines earlier this week after she voiced her support for those harassing administration officials. In the latest chapter of her bizarre #Resistance saga, the congresswoman announced on Thursday that she had canceled two scheduled appearances in Texas and Alabama after receiving a torrent of threatening messages.

“As the president has continued to lie and falsely claim that I encouraged people to assault his supporters, while also offering a veiled threat that I should ‘be careful,’ even more individuals are leaving (threatening) messages and sending hostile mail to my office,” she said in a statement.

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President Donald Trump and Rep. Maxine Waters

Waters also claimed that “one very serious death threat” from “an individual in Texas” had forced her to cancel her weekend speaking engagements. She said that the US Capitol Police are investigating several individuals who have threatened to shoot, lynch or cause her serious bodily harm.

The Democratic congresswoman and zealous Russiagate crusader – who is world-famous for her creative utterances about Trump, Putin, and Russia’s sneaky ways – received widespread condemnation from both sides of the aisle after she encouraged Americans to publicly confront and harass members of Trump’s administration in public places such as restaurants, department stores and gas stations.

Her controversial comments came shortly after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was driven out of a Mexican restaurant in Washington, DC, by activists, and White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant in Virginia.

Other administration and government officials have been confronted recently in response to Trump’s deeply divisive “zero tolerance” policy regarding illegal immigration.

In response to her apparent endorsement of these incidents, Trump took aim at Waters on Twitter, mocking her “extraordinarily low IQ” and accusing her of being the “unhinged face” of the Democratic Party who wishes harm upon his supporters. “Be careful what you wish for Max!” he ended one of his tweets.

READ MORE: ‘Careful what you wish for!’ Trump slams Maxine Waters for urging harassment of officials

Waters has denied that her comments were an incitement to violence. “I have not called for the harm of anybody. This president has lied again when he’s saying that I’ve called for harm,” she said on Monday. “I don’t cry about protests,” she added. “People protest me all the time. People come to my district office. That’s their right. The only time I have anything to say about protests is when they threaten to kill me, then I turn that in. Otherwise, protests is the American way.”

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Video: World Cup Fans: Uruguay (Part 2)

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Video: World Cup Fans: Uruguay (Part 2)

Carnival and football are the two big passions of the people of Uruguay. WATCH PART 1 HERE: https://youtu.be/OjHUpP7r7sI Check out http://rt.com RT LIVE …

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The Berkeley Tribute to Robert Parry – Consortiumnews

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A tribute to Robert Parry, the founder and editor of Consortium News, was held in Berkeley last month. Here is the video of the event and excerpts from the speakers who celebrated Bob’s life.

By Rick Sterling

Event Photos by Bill Hackwell

A celebration and salute to the investigative journalist and publisher Robert Parry took place on Saturday, May 19 in Berkeley California.

You can watch a video shot by Raj Sahei of the entire event here.

Robert Parry was born in 1949 and died of pancreatic cancer in January 2018. From 1974 until the early 1990’s he worked as investigative journalist for Associated Press, Newsweek magazine and then PBS Frontline. During that time, he played a key role breaking stories on the illegal funding of the Nicaraguan Contras, CIA collusion with drug dealers, and Ronald Reagan election team negotiating with Iran to delaying the release of American hostages until after the 1980 election. Frustrated with the increasing difficulty of getting his research and findings published, Parry founded the investigative journal Consortium News, which continues to today.

Although Bob never became a household name, many readers will recall News stories he played a key role in bringing to public consciousness. He uncovered the “Iran-Contra scandal” where the US secretly sold weapons to Iran via Israel with profits supporting mercenary “Contras” attacking the Nicaraguan government. He uncovered Lt. Col. Oliver North secretly working at the Reagan White House to supervise support for the Contras. He exposed CIA collusion with criminals sending weapons to the Contras and receiving tons of cocaine on return flights from Colombia and Central America.

In 1988, Parry co-authored an article that documented CIA and State Department activities to misinform the public to promote the desired public policy.

Next, Parry worked with PBS Frontline to uncover the “October Surprise”. That story involved Ronald Reagan’s election team secretly delaying the release of American hostages held in Iran. These stories appeared in mainstream media but were ultimately swept under the carpet.

The CIA-Contra-Cocaine Connection

The story about CIA…

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Video: ‘Mbappe’s performance was magnificent’: Peter Schmeichel on France – Argentina match

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Video: ‘Mbappe’s performance was magnificent’: Peter Schmeichel on France – Argentina match

RT special World Cup host Peter Schmeichel analyzes France – Argentina game and its highlights. Check out http://rt.com RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air Subscribe …

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We Have to ‘Put Our Bodies on the Line’ to Stop Trump

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Daily Beast
June 29, 2018

In 2004, Michael Moore released his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 about the run-up to the Iraq War. This September, he will premiere his latest film: Fahrenheit 11/9.

As the liberal filmmaker told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show Thursday night, that date represents the night Donald Trump was elected president. “This is about how the hell we got in this situation and how we’re going to get out of it,” he said.

After playing a clip from the film in which he tries to infiltrate Mar-a-Lago, Colbert asked him if he was “civil” to the people there. “I was as civil as any Eagle Scout Catholic altar boy could be when confronted with the devil,” Moore answered.

Speaking to the great civility debate happening in America right now, Moore continued, saying that Democrats have traditionally been “so wimpy and weak” but now “a few people want to stand up and say, I’ve had enough, that’s it.”

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This article was posted: Friday, June 29, 2018 at 6:57 am



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Plumber turned Taliban-bomber guilty of planning Westminster terrorist attack faces life sentence — RT UK News

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Plumber turned Taliban-bomber guilty of planning Westminster terrorist attack faces life sentence — RT UK News

A British plumber turned Taliban bomb-maker has been found guilty of planning a knife attack on MPs and police officers outside Westminster. The prosecution described his intent as “chilling”.

Khalid Ali, 28, who spent five years in Afghanistan detonating over 300 bombs against coalition troops, was found with three knives hidden under his clothes when he was stopped by firearms officers on Parliament Street in April last year.

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© Toby Melville

Ali, who grew up in Edmonton in north London and trained as a gas engineer and plumber, had returned to the UK in November 2016. He came under MI5 surveillance a month later when the FBI linked his fingerprints to improvised explosive devices used in Afghanistan.

Scotland Yard’s head of counterterrorism, Dean Haydon, stated that “due process” led to the authorization to use evidence in the UK was only given a day after Ali planned the attack.

An Old Bailey jury convicted him of preparing an act of terrorism in the UK and two counts of possessing an explosive substance with intent. The defendant will be sentenced on July 20, and faces a lifetime jail term.

Brian Altman, QC, for the prosecution, told the Old Bailey: “If he hadn’t been stopped, who knows how many more people would be lying dead or mortally wounded on the streets of Westminster.”

Ali said he had come back to Britain, where he first moved with his parents in 1992, to deliver a “message” to the “decision-makers” of the country, but told officers the knives  were for self-defence. He admitted swearing allegiance to three successive heads of the Taliban and the leader of Al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Ali was watched by intelligence officers as he carried out reconnaissance on March 18 last year. He was spotted on CCTV using the Stand Up To Racism March as a cover to get through to Downing Street and the Cenotaph.

Just over a month later on April 27 his mother called the police to say she had seen knives in her son’s bedroom and feared he would attack their family. On that same day he bought an 8.5in chef’s knife and two 3.5in paring knives, before he travelled to Westminster.

After deliberately disposing of his phone in the Thames, officers swooped in to arrest him.

Altman told the jury that Ali planned a “deadly terror attack at the very heart of this country’s democracy by killing a police officer, a member of the military or even a Parliamentarian”.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Annapolis shooter ‘made threats against paper for years’ but no charges pressed — RT US News

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Annapolis shooter ‘made threats against paper for years’ but no charges pressed — RT US News

Jarrod Ramos, the suspect in a deadly shooting at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, allegedly made threats against the newspaper for years after it wrote about him in 2011. The newspaper refused to press criminal charges.

Ramos blasted through the glass entrance to the newsroom with a pump-action shotgun on Thursday, opening fire as staff crawled under desks to hide. Police were on the scene within minutes and Ramos was arrested and taken into custody – but not before he succeeded in killing five people.

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© Leah Millis

The shooter “was there to kill as many people as he wanted to” and “looked for his victims,” police said in a Friday press conference, adding that Ramos’ attack was most likely premeditated.

It appears that Ramos’ beef with the gazette was personal, despite the fact that several mainstream media outlets outright suggested that he might have been radicalized against the media by President Donald Trump’s rhetoric.

In 2012, Ramos filed a defamation lawsuit against the paper, after it covered his conviction in a criminal harassment case one year previously. Ramos was convicted of harassing a former high school classmate, the Baltimore Sun reported.

Thomas Marquardt, the newspaper’s former editor and publisher, was named in Ramos’ lawsuit. He told the Sun that after the article was published in 2011, Ramos began making increasingly serious online threats to the paper and its staff.

From a now-suspended Twitter account, Ramos threatened to “make corpses out of corrupt careers and corporate entities.” He also said that “it would be nicer” to see the Gazette’s staff “cease breathing,” and warned them that “journalist hell awaits.”

“I was seriously concerned he would threaten us with physical violence,” Marquardt told the Sun. “I even told my wife, ‘We have to be concerned. This guy could really hurt us.’”

Despite the alleged threats, Marquardt declined to file a restraining order against Ramos in 2013.

According to a local reporter, the woman allegedly stalked by Ramos said that the shooter became “fixated” on her, leading her to change her name and leave the state of Maryland. The woman said that she told police Ramos was a “F**king nut job,” and that “he will be your next mass shooter.”

Ramos is now facing five counts of first-degree murder for his newsroom rampage, and is being held without bail.

Still grieving, the Gazette put out a newspaper on Friday, with the five victims’ pictures below the masthead. The editorial page was left blank, save for a small note saying “Today, we are speechless.”

The attack was condemned by Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley, who said that Thursday was “probably the saddest day in Annapolis since I can remember.”  President Trump also tweeted his sympathies to the victims, and praised the response from law enforcement.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Expert witness on Grenfell Fire: Cladding on Grenfell Tower was “a major hazard”

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Expert witness on Grenfell Fire: Cladding on Grenfell Tower was “a major hazard”

By
Trevor Johnson

30 June 2018

The testimony of Dr. Barbara Lane, a fire safety specialist and expert witness to the inquiry on Grenfell Tower, presented a report on the tower’s construction in relation to the relevant fire safety requirements. Officially, 72 people died as a result of the inferno at the West London tower block on June 14, 2017, which was able to spread rapidly due to numerous safety failings.

Lane used photographs and videos from the night of the fire to show how quickly the fire spread around the outside of the building due to the combustible cladding that had been fitted to improve its appearance in a “refurbishment to prettify its outside appearance.” Lane also used photos her team had taken since the fire to show many examples of noncompliant materials and construction.

Lane identified a “culture of noncompliance” that resulted in the blaze and listed many failures to meet building regulations at Grenfell Tower, the majority of which were the result of changes made since it was originally designed and built between 1967 and 1974.

She began her presentation to the inquiry by describing Grenfell Tower as it was first built. While many of its features were not compliant with building regulations now in use, it was largely composed of materials that were non-combustible, such as concrete.

Building regulations required the use of materials and safety features in a way that ensured a fire in one flat would not spread to others, she said. This “compartmentation” is the basis of the “stay put” and “defend in place” policies employed by the London Fire Brigade during the fire. These regulatory measures have been in place since the 1960s, she explained,…

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Video: Japanese space rocket crashes & explodes seconds after launch

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Video: Japanese space rocket crashes & explodes seconds after launch

MANDATORY CREDIT: INTERSTELLAR TECHNOLOGIES A rocket developed by a Japanese startup company exploded seconds after liftoff on Saturday in …

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PressTV-US immigration laws ‘dumbest’ in world: Trump

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President Donald Trump has doubled down on his demand that illegal border crossers be deported immediately, protesting that immigration laws in the United States are “the dumbest anywhere in the world.”

“When people come into our Country illegally, we must IMMEDIATELY escort them back out without going through years of legal maneuvering,” the president said in a tweet Saturday while at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

The president’s demand also resembled his previous that immigrants caught crossing the southern border illegally be immediately deported without due process.

Trump also highlighted Republicans’…

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Video: ‘Resistance isn’t enough, revolt!’ New Yorkers denounce immigrant separations, detentions

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Video: ‘Resistance isn’t enough, revolt!’ New Yorkers denounce immigrant separations, detentions

Protesters were chanting ‘Resistance is not enough. Revolt, revolt, revolt!’ on Saturday during a New York City march denouncing the Donald Trump …

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Can Trump Turn Back the Clock on Inequality?

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“As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.” These were the words of candidate Donald Trump’s at the 2016 Republican National Convention, referencing the horrifying shooting massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the month before.

Leaving aside the blatant racism and Islamophobia of his statement, the past year has shown that Trump’s promise couldn’t be further from the truth.

Trump’s first year in office has been a political roller coaster, with a seemingly never-ending barrage of attacks against workers, the oppressed and the planet, punctuated by spontaneous explosions of protest and resistance.

And at a time when public opinion has largely shifted in solidarity with demands for LGBTQ equality, the Trump administration is carrying out policies that threaten to turn back the clock on the rights that have been won and whip up hatred and suspicion that has fueled his bigoted right-wing base of support.

Given the whirlwind of attack coming down from the Trump administration, it’s useful to take stock of the past year and evaluate the landscape of LGBTQ rights under Trump, the response from established LGBTQ political organizations and the possibilities for potential resistance.

* * *

From attacks against trans people to the defense of “religious liberties,” the Trump administration has made it a point to target the oppressed and vulnerable, and stand up for bigotry and discrimination.

Last summer, in a series of classic Trump tweets, the president announced that he would be reinstating the military’s ban on transgender people serving in the military, bogusly claiming the military couldn’t afford the high rate of health care costs.

Never mind, of course, the high costs of building the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and military juggernaut. The administration has continued to defend the ban as it has made its way through the…

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On Tipping Points and Authoritarian Peril

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Photo by Graham C99 | CC BY 2.0

The Tangerine Tosser’s triple trade tiff – with China, the European Union, and the United States’ NAFTA partners (Canada and Mexico) – has the potential to spark an American and global economic meltdown.  Classic signs of a coming collapse have been evident for some time: wage stagnation for the many alongside skyrocketing wealth for the ever more absurdly opulent few (three of whom now possessbetween them the same net worth as the poorest half of the U.S. populace); colossal accumulated corporate, government, student loan, and credit card debt; rampant surplus and “fictitious” capital devoted to speculative rather than productive investment; capitalist profits far beyond real economic growth; wildly unsustainable stock market values (artificially buoyed by debt and corporate buybacks); the deregulation of financial markets and institutions.

As the astute Goldman Sachs veteran and financial commentator Nomi Prins noted last January, “There will be a tipping point – when money coming in to furnish that debt, or available to borrow, simply won’t cover the interest payments. Then debt bubbles will pop, beginning with higher yielding bonds.  Leverage is a patient enemy.”

The next financial “correction” could cut deeper than the last one, “the Great Recession.”  That’s because, as Prins argues in her latest book Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, “there is no Plan B” this time. Interest rates…

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Suicide by Barbarian – LewRockwell

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Around the world, very few people are capable of wrapping their heads around the European reaction to the migrant crisis. On the side of the migrants, we have avid displays of barbarism, fanaticism and aggression; on the side of the Europeans, we have abject fear of appearing… intolerant. In an out-of-control situation where we would expect people to organize, protest, put up road blocks and vote en masse for nationalist parties, we are instead subjected to the ridiculous spectacle of meek, effeminate Europeans dressed up in unisex outfits chalking “No to terrorism!” on sidewalks. Most people around the world see in this an orchidaceous display of anthropological nullity. “Is Europe dead?” they wonder aloud.

Lest you think that this impression is politically incorrect or undiplomatic or somehow marginal rather than mainstream, Russia’s FM Sergei Lavrov, a senior Russian statesman and a diplomat’s diplomat, is on the record saying that the European Union is “committing suicide” by letting in the invading hordes from the Middle East and North Africa.

Here we have a flood of people coming in, the majority of them young adult males shirking military service back home, and relatively few of them are qualified to seek asylum. Most of them are unqualified to do any sort of work within the EU due to lack of literacy, education or work ethic. Many of them would not be trainable in any case, coming as they are from populations bred for physical stamina and disease tolerance rather than intelligence.

Quite a few are Islamic radicals who see themselves as actual colonizers; many more have no qualms about robbing Europeans and raping European women. A few thousand are actual terrorists being sent in to await orders. For most of them,…

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Migrant will NOT be deported for raping 92-year-old woman on Christmas Eve

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Voice Of Europe
June 29, 2018

The 28-year-old African, repeat sex offender will not face deportation for a spate of sex crimes in Sweden. As the man received a Swedish passport, according to current law, cannot be sent back, Fria Tider reports. 

The man, who moved from Kenya to Sweden in 1998 is a serial sex offender. In June 2014 he was sentenced to six years in prison by the court of appeal for two rapes.

One of the victims was a 92-year-old woman in Töreboda in Västergötland. The elderly woman was vaginally and anally raped by the migrant on Christmas Eve.

Simultaneous to that sentencing, he was also sentenced for having assaulted and raped another woman outdoors in the Bomhus district in Gävle.

After his conditional release from prison this year, he commit more sex crimes only three days after his release. He sexually assaulted a disabled woman and showed his genitals to two 13-year-old girls.

The man has now been sentenced to a mere three months in prison and according to Swedish legislation, he cannot be deported because he has a Swedish passport.

This article was posted: Friday, June 29, 2018 at 7:04 am



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Female offenders to be jailed only when guilty of violent crime – Ministry of Justice — RT UK News

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Female offenders to be jailed only when guilty of violent crime – Ministry of Justice — RT UK News

Female offenders will be put behind bars only in cases where they commit violent offences, the justice secretary has revealed. David Gauke said short custodial sentences have failed to halt the “cycle of reoffending.”

The Ministry of Justice published a strategy on its website Wednesday outlining plans to scrap short custodial sentences as they have failed to stop people from re-committing crime. The government will instead build five trial residential centers as part of a shift towards community care.

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© Paul Hackett

The new plans to “break the cycle” of sentencing female offenders to prison come after it emerged a great majority of them are behind bars for minor crimes such as shoplifting. Fewer than 40 women out of the almost 4,000 currently in jail in England and Wales have committed a violent offence.

Of all the women released from custody between April and June 2016 after a sentence shorter than 12 months, 70.7 percent of them went on to reoffend, Gauke said.

“Evidence clearly shows that putting women into prison can do more harm than goodfor society, failing to cut the cycle of reoffending and often exacerbating already difficult family circumstances,” said Gauke.

The government said 60 percent of female offenders have experienced domestic abuse, while an estimated 24 to 31 percent have children for whom to care. It also highlighted how those in jail or on probation are more than twice as likely to suffer mental health issues than men.

“We want to ensure that the public and judiciary have confidence in non-custodial sentences – such as effective community orders – which directly tackle the causes of reoffending, including alcohol or drug abuse,” said the Ministry of Justice.  

“We will be looking at what more we can do to emphasize that short custodial sentences should be viewed as a last resort.”

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Leaflets that cry ‘surrender now!’ as they rain down on enemy troops — RT US News

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Leaflets that cry ‘surrender now!’ as they rain down on enemy troops — RT US News

The US may soon add talking leaflets to their psychological warfare arsenal. The devices would play pre-recorded 30-second messages to whoever picks them up and may even soon listen back to the response they get.

A prototype of a weaponized version of a musical greeting card has been developed by the US Special Operations Forces Command, or US SOCOM, which unveiled it at an industry conference in Tampa, Florida, Defense One reported. The military now wants to find a partner, who would pick up the project and mass-produce the leaflets.

Dropping in sound messages rather than written ones could be quite useful when targeting illiterate people with whatever the US military want them to hear.

A letter screaming threats at you may be quite terrifying, as any Harry Potter fan can attest to after watching Ron Weasley receiving a ‘howler’ during his second year at Hogwarts.

But the leaflets will not only be used to intimidate enemy soldiers into defecting. The US military say they can, for example, be used to warn civilians about an incoming airstrike.

The final version that SOCOM envisions is a sheet about four times thicker than regular paper containing flexible micro-circuitry, including a speaker and a PV-battery. The publication speculates that the electronic part may be based on graphene, a conductive ultra-thin form of carbon that may revolutionize production of electronic devices in the future.

The US military is also thinking about including advanced features like an ability to serve as a communication device by listening back to what the recipient’s reaction is. They are also considering building in a biometric identifier to deliver individually tailored messages.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-Thousands protest NHS funding: Cuts leave scars

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PressTV-Thousands protest NHS funding: Cuts leave scars

Tens of thousands of people in London have taken to the streets to protest against the government’s funding cuts for the National Health Service (NHS) and privatization of its services. 

The protesters braved hot weather on Saturday and gathered in the capital’s West End district before walking to Westminster, the country’s political heart, ahead of NHS’s 70th anniversary next week.

They demanded more money for the health service and an end to cuts and privatization.

The protesters were bearing placards reading “Cuts leave scars”, “For people not profit,” and “Democracy or corporate power.”

The demonstrators stopped outside Downing Street and demanded Prime Minister Theresa May’s resignation.

Britain’s opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn speaks at a demonstration and celebration march to mark the 70th anniversary of the National Health Service (NHS), in central London on June 30, 2018. (Photo by…

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Video: Out of EU, out of mind: ‘Merkel-saving’ EU deal on migrants leaves many open questions

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Video: Out of EU, out of mind: ‘Merkel-saving’ EU deal on migrants leaves many open questions

Human-rights activists have voiced concern over the creation of migrant processing camps, a move decided upon by EU leaders on Friday. They fear such …

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Video: World Cup 2018: Fans Eye View (LIVE & TAPE)

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Video: World Cup 2018: Fans Eye View (LIVE & TAPE)

The next-best thing to being here. Russia 2018 has already exceeded everyone’s expectations. Ask any fan. Or better still, watch them live here. Check out our …

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A Fatal Incompatibilty: Big Business and Human Survival

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Dramatic as the title of the article is, it is becoming increasingly clear that this is not hyperbole or hysterics. It is the only logical conclusion one can arrive at if one analyses the facts of our current situation as a species.

Commerce has existed for thousands of years, with private and government-owned companies providing goods and services for sale, largely unregulated for most of that time. Of course, government has always had the capacity to intervene where business practices have been found to be unsafe or unethical, for the protection of society.

As economies have developed beyond a mostly agricultural foundation into a consumer-driven industrial system, corporations have gained increasing economic, social and political influence. Although there is now an enormous quantity of legal regulation in relation to the conducting of business (in the developed world particularly) corporations exert such a huge influence on countries (democratic or otherwise) that we could accurately be described as living in an age of corpocracy. The infiltration of governments by corporate interests is so severe that governments are almost powerless to prevent the wholesale destruction of our environment and huge damage to humanity without causing a worldwide economic collapse.

Most corporations are not owned by one or a few individuals any more. Generally a large number of unknown individuals (shareholders) own them, to whom the directors are solely answerable. In almost…

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PressTV-US father, son compete in RI election

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American father and son in the state of Rhode Island who disagree on President Donald Trump policies have entered an electoral race against each other for a state House seat.

Forty-seven-year-old David Quiroa Sr. is running as a Republican against his 22-year-old son, David Quiroa Jr., who is running as an independent for the local legislative in a bid to unseat the state’s Democratic lawmaker Marvin Abney, AP reported Saturday.

Both father and son filed for the House seat earlier in the week, using the same address in the city of Newport, the report added, noting that they also arrived at the City Hall together to file their candidacy documentations.

“What better way to argue with my father than on the political level?” said the younger Quiroa, adding: “He definitely is a very good motivator. Even if it’s to motivate to stop him.”

“We definitely had a lot of surprised faces,” he further underlined as quoted in the report….

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Trump’s top hawk John Bolton tells UK to up defense spending ahead of NATO summit — RT UK News

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Trump’s top hawk John Bolton tells UK to up defense spending ahead of NATO summit — RT UK News

The war over the UK Ministry of Defence’s budget took another turn on Wednesday after reports of a top Trump administration official demanding the UK spends more on its defense during a meeting of key NATO security chiefs.

John Bolton, who has been Donald Trump’s national security advisor since April, made the demands to his British counterpart Sir Mark Sedwill during a meeting on Monday which also included French and German security chiefs, ahead of a much-anticipated NATO summit in Brussels in July.

During the meeting, Bolton voiced concerns from the White House that Britain’s deterioration in defense spending was causing unknown damage to the British Armed Forces, with one UK official telling the Daily Telegraph that there were “some frank conversations about our spending on defense.”

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NATO military drills. © Xinhua/Sergei Stepanov

Another source quoted said Bolton made it “abundantly clear what the Trump administration expects from Britain in terms of defense spending and its future military capabilities.”

The comments will no doubt be music to the ears of Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson who, over the last number of weeks has been increasingly vocal about his displeasure at not acquiring more cash for his department.

Last week, it was reported that “shock waves” were sent through the MoD after a meeting between Williamson, Prime Minister Theresa May and Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond saw Williamson leave empty handed in his demands for more funding. Instead the government plans to pump extra funds into the NHS.

Facing a funding shortage of up to £20.5 billion, Williamson is in the midst of a defense spending review on the MoD’s future modernisation plans. Initially due in July, the plan’s publishing date has been pushed back until the early autumn. But May is expected to give a brief overview of the plan at next month’s summit.

Likely to take place on Thursday July 12 – ahead of Trump’s working visit to the UK – the summit is likely to see Trump reiterate demands that European allies spend more on defense after previously threatening to pull out of the alliance.

Washington is expecting that all 29 of NATO’s members move towards a spending requirement of at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense, many are reluctant to do so. But while UK ministers insist that they are hitting that 2 percent, there are fears that the figure stands at only about 1.7 percent, according to the Telegraph.

READ MORE: UK military ‘very weak’ and ‘diminished’: MPs back Williamson on defense spending

Yesterday, MPs from the Commons Defence Select Committee gave their backing for more defense spending after the release of a committee report recommending that the UK ups its budget to 3 percent of GDP to maintain its warfighting capabilities in the wake of perceived threats such as conflict with Russia.

These concerns were reiterated by the former Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) General Lord Houghton, who said a continued decline in military capabilities would only “encourage Russia to be more aggressive.”  

Houghton also warned against being dismissive of Russian concerns of the “strategic threat” posed by the rollout of NATO and EU memberships so close to its borders. Rather than telling Russia to “shut up and go away,” as Williamson said earlier this year, Houghton said the issue required a greater understanding of “Russia’s predicament” and that concerns should be dealt with diplomatically.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Rosenstein trolls Republican lawmaker amid Clinton email dispute — RT US News

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Rosenstein trolls Republican lawmaker amid Clinton email dispute — RT US News

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has snapped at Jim Jordan, snarkily lecturing the Republican representative, who had accused him of “hiding” information from Congress and of threatening government staff with legal action.

Jordan, a two-time champion wrestler, had badgered Rosenstein about the Justice Department’s failure to turn over documents related to the FBI’s probes into Hillary Clinton’s email server use and President Trump’s alleged ties with Russia.

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FILE PHOTO. © Jonathan Ernst

The Justice Department and the FBI have already turned over thousands of documents, but the Republican-controlled House Judiciary & Intelligence Committees are looking for additional material, including records on alleged surveillance of the Trump campaign. Jordan accused the Department of withholding this information to prolong its investigation, a charge Rosenstein said was “deeply wrong.”

“It’s not accurate, sir,” Rosenstein said, wagging his finger at the Congressman. “I am not hiding anything from you…If you are interested in the truth, [department staff] are working around the clock, doing their best [to provide information].”

Jordan then quoted a Fox News report which alleged that Rosenstein had threatened to subpoena the emails and phone records from staff on the House Intelligence Committee. He accused the deputy of trying to intimidate the committee staffers.

“Did you threaten to subpoena their calls and emails?” Jordan asked.

“No sir, and there’s no way to subpoena phone calls,” the smug deputy shot back, as laughter spread throughout the room. However, Rosenstein snared Jordan on a technicality. Phone records can, in fact, be subpoenaed, while phone calls themselves cannot.

“I’m reading what the press said,” replied Jordan, waving a printout of the report in question. Rosenstein was unshaken by the accusation, and responded: “I would suggest that you not rely on what the press said, sir!”

Thursday’s hearing was Rosenstein’s first time before Congress since the Justice Department Inspector General’s report was released. The report criticized the department and the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation and the inquiry into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties with Russia.

The inspector-general’s report found that Former FBI Director James Comey was “insubordinate” and “deviated” from standard FBI and Justice Department procedures in handling the Clinton probe. It did not, however, find that Comey was motivated by political bias, as President Trump has repeatedly asserted.

The report also found that, by exchanging anti-Trump text messages, several FBI employees, including lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, had “brought discredit to themselves, sowed doubt about the FBI’s handling of the Midyear [Clinton] investigation, and impacted the reputation of the FBI.”

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© Kevin Lamarque

In the wake of the report, Republican lawmakers have called on the Justice Department to end Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing ‘Russiagate’ investigation. Mueller was appointed by Rosenstein after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself. After two years and almost 20 million dollars spent, the investigation has still not found any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian actors.

At Thursday’s hearing, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R- South Carolina) slammed the investigation, and demanded Rosenstein turn over any incriminating evidence gathered.

“This country is being hurt by it. We are being divided,” Gowdy said, and later added: “Whatever you got, finish it the hell up because this country is being torn apart.”

The House passed a resolution on Thursday demanding that the Justice Department turn over thousands of documents pertaining to the investigation by July 6.

“When we get these documents, we believe that it will do away with this whole fiasco of what they call the Russian Trump collusion because there wasn’t any,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-North Carolina), a staunch critic of the Justice Department.

President Trump himself has described the Mueller investigation as “rigged” and a “witch hunt” lead by “13 angry Democrats,” referring to the fact that 13 of Mueller’s 17 investigators are Democrats.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Video: World Cup 2018: Fans Eye View (LIVE & TAPE)

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Video: World Cup 2018: Fans Eye View (LIVE & TAPE)

The next-best thing to being here. Russia 2018 has already exceeded everyone’s expectations. Ask any fan. Or better still, watch them live here. Check out our …

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PressTV-US businesses warn of job cuts due to tariffs

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US automakers and manufacturers have cautioned that President Donald Trump’s insistence on imposing major tariffs on imported automobiles may lead to rising unemployment and harm the nation’s economy.

Business groups from across the US forwarded comments in the past week to the Commerce Department, which is investigating whether Section 232 tariffs should apply to imports of cars and auto parts in the interest of national security, local news outlets reported Saturday.

The National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) declared that auto tariffs will increase costs for US automakers, which will eventually impact American customers.

NFTC President Rufus Yerxa further stated that the tariffs will make it almost impossible for US manufacturers to sell their vehicles overseas due to retaliatory tariffs from other nations, the Washington-based The Hill reported Saturday.

“Today, NFTC joined the US auto industry in opposing new tariff barriers on…

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Video: ‘Watch out for Cavani’: Peter Schmeichel on Uruguay – Portugal match

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Video: ‘Watch out for Cavani’: Peter Schmeichel on Uruguay – Portugal match

Denmark goalkeeping great Peter Schmeichel talks Uruguay win and Portugal’s crucial defeat. Find out more: https://www.rt.com/fifa2018 Check out http://rt.com …

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The Mighty Mischief at the DOJ

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The fabulous Coen Brothers of Hollywood couldn’t come up with a wackier Deep State than the one depicted on Cable News this week. Thursday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing had Congressman Jim Jordan (R- Ohio) in the role of “The Dude” from The Big Lebowski doing battle with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as “Osborne Cox” in Burn After Reading. Rosenstein was sure burning, or at least smoldering in his seat, as Jordan badgered him about threatening House staffers by subpoenaing their emails and phone calls…!

The gotcha moment: “You can’t subpoena a phone call,” Rosenstein answered, trying to suppress his mirthful smirk… as in, listen to me, you dim, Rotarian, Buckeye clod, with your worthless JD from the most obscure law school in the darkest corner of your meth-and vicodan-addled state… you can’t subpoena a phone call, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…!

Had Mr. Jordan been a little more nimble of mind in his Dude role, had he not, say, downed that Red Bull and Ayahuasca “pick-me-up” before the committee session, he might have come back smartly at Mr. Rosenstein with a simple, “…yes, but you can subpoena the records of phone calls, can’t you?” Schwing. Only the poor clod muffed it, and Rosenstein’s praetorian guard of attorneys in the seats behind him joined in the mirthful smirkery, grand fellows of the Deep State are we, we eat Buckeyes for breakfast!

The Law of the Jungle:…
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Now, Mr. Trey Gowdy (R – SC) is a different breed of porpoise among congressmen, kind of legal man-eating orca. In look and demeanor, he comes off as a cross between Atticus Finch and the young feller who played the banjo so well in the…

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PressTV-‘Saudi Arabia doesn’t like raising oil output’

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Riyadh does not “like” raising its oil production not at least beyond 11,000 barrels per day (bpd), says a Saudi official.

The anonymous official made the comment to The Wall Street Journal Saturday, not long after US President Donald Trump claimed that the monarchy has agreed to raising the oil output to take on Iran and Venezuela.

“Saudi Arabia does not really like going beyond 11 million barrels a day and has no intention of expanding its current production capacity. It is expensive,” a Saudi official told the paper.

Trump claimed in a tweet that Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud had agreed to his call to boost production by “maybe up to 2,000,000 barrels.”

“Just spoke to King Salman of Saudi Arabia and explained to him that, because of the turmoil & disfunction in Iran and Venezuela, I am asking that Saudi Arabia increase oil production, maybe up to 2,000,000 barrels, to make up the difference…Prices to high! He has agreed!”…

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Prison Planet.com » “Girl From The Bronx” Ocasio-Cortez Called Out In Fact Check; Actually Grew Up In Wealthy Enclave

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Zero Hedge
June 30, 2018

The Democratic Party’s rising socialist icon – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been on an intense media junket since her upset primary victory over establishment Democrat Joe Crowley this week – doing her darnedest to project her “girl from the Bronx” working-class image.

“Well, you know, the president is from Queens, and with all due respect — half of my district is from Queens — I don’t think he knows how to deal with a girl from the Bronx,” Ocasio-Cortez told Stephen Colbert during an appearance on The Late Show.

The socialist phenom also told the Washington Post “I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family — mother from Puerto Rico, dad from the South Bronx. I was born in a place where your Zip code determines your destiny.”

Except Ocasio-Cortez isn’t quite the blue-collar champion she’s branding herself as. Breitbart‘s Josh Caplan is out with a “fact check” on the Democratic Socialist’s background – only to find she grew up in one of the richest counties in the United States.

Around the age of five, Alexandria’s architect father Sergio Ocasio moved the family from the “planned community” of Parkchester in the Bronx to a home in Yorktown Heights, a wealthy suburb in Westchester County. The New York Times describes her childhood home as “a modest two-bedroom house on a quiet street.” In a 1999 profile of the area, when Ocasio-Cortez would have been ten years old, the Times lauded Yorktown Heights’ “diversity of housing in a scenic setting” – complete with two golf courses.

The paper quoted Linda Cooper, the town supervisor, describing Yorktown as ”a folksy area where people can come, kick off their shoes, wander around, sit in a cafe, listen to a concert in the park, or go to the theater.”

…

Westchester County – which the Washington Post, in a glowing profile on Ocasio-Cortez, describes…

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The final straw? Tory colleagues give Johnson the ‘cold shoulder’ after week of gaffes

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The final straw? Tory colleagues give Johnson the ‘cold shoulder’ after week of gaffes

Preview Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson was treated to many a “cold shoulder” and barely concealed contempt from cabinet colleagues, on his return from Afghanistan, after avoiding the contentious Heathrow expansion vote in parliament.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Man tries to bribe immigration officer with thousands of dollars to deport wife — RT US News

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Man tries to bribe immigration officer with thousands of dollars to deport wife — RT US News

A 48-year-old man from Portland has been charged with three counts of bribing a public official after attempting to pay a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer to deport his estranged wife and her daughter.

Antonio Oswaldo Burgos offered an immigration officer different sums on three occasions, local media reported, citing the indictment.

He offered $3,000 in May, the same amount on June 5, and increased the offer to $4,000 the next day, according to KATU News.

READ MORE: ‘Come legally or not at all’: VP Pence sends message to Latin America

Burgos’ wife, an El Salvador national, met him several years ago and the couple married in 2015. He’s a legal US citizen.

On Friday, Burgos pleaded not guilty to the three incidents of bribery when he appeared in federal court. He was released pending another trial that is set to start on August 28.

The man has been slammed on social media for his actions following a new spike in the US immigration debate after public outcry over Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance policy.

READ MORE: ‘Abolish ICE!’ 575 arrested after protesters occupy US Senate building (PHOTOS, VIDEOS)

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

The elections in Mexico and the political tasks of the working class

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The elections in Mexico and the political tasks of the working class

30 June 2018

The national elections taking place in Mexico on Sunday pose vital issues before the Mexican and international working class.

After six years of the corrupt and brutal rule of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico is mired in pandemic violence, unprecedented social inequality and staggering levels of unemployment as well as deepening poverty for the majority of the population.

The ruling PRI, which held undisputed power from 1929 to 2000, is so hated that it chose as its candidate a “technocrat”, José Antonio Meade, who is not even a member of the party. He is running third in the polls, and there is distinct possibility that the party will face a nationwide rout on the local, state and federal levels.

The candidate of the right-wing PAN (National Action Party), with which the PRI has alternated power since the dawn of the new millennium, Ricardo Anaya, is widely viewed as a representative of the corrupt system of bribes and kickbacks that he oversaw as the former president of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies.

With the massive popular repudiation of these two traditional ruling parties, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City and now three-time presidential candidate, running as leader of the MORENA (Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional) party, is projected by virtually every poll to win the July 1 election by an historically unprecedented margin.

The coming to power of López Obrador will yield not a way out of the current crisis, but its sharp intensification and new dangers for the Mexican working class. Sooner rather than later, a MORENA-led administration will betray the mass aspirations for an end to…

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Unions Have Been Down Before, History Shows How They Can Come Back

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Unions Have Been Down Before, History Shows How They Can Come Back

The Janus decision by the US Supreme Court on Wednesday was another blow to the labor movement. It creates a financial incentive for public sector union members to leave the union while continuing their job.

Ever since the beginning of the 1980s clamp-down on the US left, signaled by President Ronald Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers to end their strike, the labor movement has been besieged by what billionaire Warren Buffett described in the New York Times as a class war started by his class. It’s not the first time this has happened in U.S. history.

Labor organized strongly and successfully in the period before World War I, so much so that the 1 percent led a fierce push-back in the 1920s that substantially lowered union membership. While touring for my book “Viking Economics” last year, some people told me we can’t get the Nordic model in the United States because the labor movement has been in decline, not realizing that labor has a history of ups and downs in this country. The 1930s became a period of tremendous union growth, so much so that progressive movements were able to achieve victories almost impossible to imagine in the 1920s.

Two ways we can honor unions at this time of trial are to ask others to join union picket lines and to learn from their innovations and successes for whatever campaigns we are committed to today. According to labor historian Sidney Fine, the union breakthrough in Detroit and Flint, Michigan, was “the most significant American labor conflict in the twentieth century.”

In some ways the struggle was more strategically sophisticated than many campaigns are today, which is why it offers important lessons on tactics, racism, using the spectrum of allies and sequencing the focus of organizing.

Labor Matches Innovative Tactics to Target in Giant Victory

Americans fell in love with the automobile in the 1920s. Factories in Michigan needed to grow rapidly to meet the demand. At the same time, black people from the…

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Still Better Than Hitler … For the Most Part

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Shortly after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, George W. Bush told a Joint Session of Congress that “they” did it because “they hate our freedom.”  Everybody knew who “they” were.

Even so, in those halcyon days, when it was still not acceptable for an American president to level ethnic or religious slurs against Muslims except by indirection, that morsel of idiocy drew justifiable derision.

There were, of course, many outraged citizens who took Bush’s words seriously.  Before long, though, the level of hysteria diminished and their numbers declined.

From Day One, everybody whose head was screwed on right knew that blowback from Western, especially American, machinations in the historically Muslim world better explained why “they” did it.  As time went on, ever larger numbers of people came the same realization.

Even so, the hysteria never quite went away.  Thanks to the uses our political class and our media made of it, 9/11 marked a turning point.

Since then, “our freedom” has fared poorly.  For that, “they” don’t deserve all the blame; not by any means.  Most of the damage has been self-inflicted.

Whatever there is in patriotism that is admirable or even tolerable also took a hit after 9/11.  When Bush spoke his drivel and for some time thereafter, displays of the stars and stripes were ubiquitous from sea to shining sea.  The flag-waving had a chauvinistic component, but there were also whiffs of rational…

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Prison Planet.com » Prank Caller Patched Through To Trump For 3-Minute Conversation On Air Force One

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Zero Hedge
June 30, 2018

President Trump was prank called yesterday at 30,000 feet on Air Force One after “Stuttering John” Melendez pretended to be New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez.

Trump starts off the conversation by congratulating “Menendez” on his primary win against Lisa McCormick, telling him he “went through a very tough situation.”

The two then discussed immigration – with Trump “Bob, let me just tell you I want to be able to take care of the situation every bit as much as anybody else at the top level. I’d rather do the larger solution rather than the smaller solution.”

On the topic of a Supreme Court pick, “Menendez” tried to bait Trump into exchanging political favors for a less conservative pick:

“Bob Menendez”: “I promise you, you will have my vote. I will help you if you if you don’t go too conservative, you know what I’m saying?”

  • A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Trump: Ah… well, we will talk to you about it. We’re gonna probably make a decision Bob over the next two weeks. We have some great choices.

Melendez said on his podcast “This is how easy it is to infiltrate the administration.”

Meanwhile, the White House is scrambling to figure out how Melendez was so easily transferred from the White House switchboard to Air Force on, reports Axios.

Trump of course isn’t the first politician to be trolled in recent memory. Both John McCain and Maxine Waters fell victim to Russian pranksters Vladimir Krasnov and Aleksey Stolyarov, known online as Vovan and Lexus, in 2017. McCain took a call from who he thought was the Ukrainian Prime Minister, while Waters was tricked into talking about Russian hacking and other Kremlin concerns.

And while there’s no way to prove that the recordings are actually them, neither have denied their authenticity.

This article was posted: Saturday, June 30, 2018 at 7:53 am


…

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Man stabbed to death in north London, 81st murder to hit capital this year

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Man stabbed to death in north London, 81st murder to hit capital this year

Preview Scotland Yard has launched its 81st murder investigation this year after a 20-year-old man was stabbed to death in Edmonton, north London.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Shhh… Nasa’s supersonic silent aircraft gets name reflecting long QueSST to make it — RT US News

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Shhh… Nasa’s supersonic silent aircraft gets name reflecting long QueSST to make it — RT US News

After decades in the making, NASA’ s silent supersonic aircraft seems to have reached the stage it deserved a name. The plane is designed to travel over cities faster than the speed of sound and as quietly as a mouse.

The moniker X-59 QueSST was given to the experimental aircraft by the US Air Force, who informed NASA of their choice this week. The name reflects the decades-long journey it took for NASA aeronautics to get the green-light to construct the X-plane.

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© Simone Brandt

The X-59 is the product of a $247.5 million contract recently awarded to Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company by NASA, to build the X-plane that will demonstrate quiet supersonic technologies in straight and level flight over a large area.

The X-plane number designation is a tradition for all important experimental aircraft and rockets, which began in 1947 with the first X-1, a rocket-powered airplane flown by Chuck Yeager who became the first human to fly faster-than-sound.  

The ability to fly supersonic, while generating sonic booms that are almost completely silent, has been a plan in the works since the 1960s, when NASA and others modified the nose of fighter jets to prove the boom-reducing theory.

The X-59 is designed so that, when it’s flying supersonic, people on the ground below will hear nothing more than a sonic thump, if anything at all. The aircraft is expected to take to the sky over select towns and cities within National Airspace to test the air (and residents’ hearing) in 2023.

Current regulations, based on aircraft speed, ban supersonic flight over land. The results from these test flights will then be presented to US and international regulators who will be tasked with forming noise level rules to enable new commercial supersonic flights over land.

Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Trump Isn’t The Problem, He’s the Manifestation of America’s Id

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Paul Krugman, professor of international trade and economics at Princeton University

The speed of America’s moral descent under Donald Trump is breathtaking. In a matter of months we’ve gone from a nation that stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to a nation that tears children from their parents and puts them in cages.
— Paul Krugman, New York Times column, June 21, 2018

conomist Paul Krugman is a smart Princeton professor who won a Nobel Prize, and most of what he says in this column is heartfelt, decent, and humane. His argument is relatively simple: since there is no present immigration crisis, there is no basis – practical, moral – no decent basis whatsoever for the current government’s inhumane, illegal, brutal treatment of immigrants and their children. In an apparently deliberate exercise of hatred and bigotry, the Trump administration is committing crimes against humanity.

That’s all quite true, quite obvious, and millions of people already recognize the government’s mindless cruelty for what it is – mindless cruelty that stimulates the mindlessly cruel base of Trump supporters from the cabinet on down.

But the way Krugman opens his column is mind-bogglingly delusional at best, dishonestly partisan at worst. Yes, “America’s moral descent under Donald Trump is breathtaking,” but not because of its speed. America’s moral descent has been with us from the beginning. America’s beginning was a struggle to ascend…

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Erdogan Scores Another Triumph – LewRockwell

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Few phobias run deeper in Europe than the fear and hatred of Turks.  For at least six hundred years, Europe was locked in innumerable wars with first Seljuk, then Ottoman Turks.  My big St Bernard is a descendant of dogs bred to attack Arab and Turkish raiders coming over Switzerland’s St Bernard Pass.

Today, by contrast, there are some 10 million ethnic Turks in Europe, most of whom came in past decades as guest laborers, prized for their hard work, honesty and reliability.

Turkey joined NATO in 1952 at a time when the US dominated the continent and Mideast.  The Turkish armed forces were the second largest in NATO after the US.   Joined at the hip with the US military, the Turkish generals ran the government in Ankara behind a screen of squabbling politicians. The US gave Turkey its marching orders. Turkey’s small but powerful westernized elite was delighted to follow Washington and keep Islam in Turkey handcuffed or exiled to rural areas.

This all changed in 1994 when a young, 40-year old nationalist, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, became a reformist mayor of Istanbul and began cleaning up and modernizing the decrepit metropolis.   After a brief jail term for reading an ancient  Islamic poem, he was released and formed the Justice and Development Party (AK) which is an Islamist Lite party dedicated to democracy guided by Muslims principals of national pride, welfare for the poor and elderly, sharing wealth, supporting fellow Muslims and urging followers to lead lives of moderation.

American Raj: Liberati…
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There was no stopping the dynamic Erdogan, who was a semi-pro footballer before his full-time political career. By 2003, he was elected prime minister…

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PressTV-All immigrants strip-searched at some ICE jails

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All immigrants entering some detention facilities belonging to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are strip-searched, says the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General.

The watchdog released a report amid nationwide fury over indefinite detention of the “illegal” immigrants.

“Several facilities continue to strip-search all incoming detainees without establishing reasonable suspicion, as required by detention standards,” read the report.

Some also refuse to report sexual assault, taking place inside the detention centers.

“Other examples of repeat deficiencies include facilities failing to notify ICE about alleged or proven sexual assaults,” the watchdog noted. “We also found less egregious repeat deficiencies such as instances where officers open incoming general correspondence without the presence of the addressed detainee or do not allow detainees to participate in recreation for the…

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Prison Planet.com » How To Survive The Civil Unrest That’s Coming To America

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Daisy Luther
Organic Prepper blog
June 30, 2018

The rhetoric in the United States is heating up and we’re sounding anything but… well… united.

It seems to most media pundits like we are too far down the path to Civil War 2.0 to turn back now. Activists are laying siege to government offices. Threats toward people who disagree are growing in ferocity. It’s ugly and getting uglier. It’s a powder keg that is about to erupt. (Here are some thoughts on what a full-fledged Civil War might look like.)

It is only a matter of time before civil unrest begins to escalate and spread throughout the country. Many people are wondering, how do you keep your family safe during widespread unrest? It’s not about being fearful. It’s about being prepared.

My thoughts on this manipulated division are fodder for another article. (You can find it here.) This article is apolitical (to the best of my ability, anyway) and focuses strictly on what you need to know to survive should the unrest come to your neighborhood.

You need to understand how riots unfold.

First things first, you need to understand how this kind of unrest unfolds so that you can see the warning signs earlier. Never underestimate the power, rage, and motivation of a mob.

Here’s the pattern:

  • An outrage occurs.
  • Good people react and protest the outrage.
  • Those perpetrating the outrage try to quell the protest because they don’t think that the outrage was actually outrageous.  (And whether it was or not can fluctuate – in some cases, force is necessitated, but in more and more cases, it is flagrantly gratuitous.)
  • Others react to the quelling and join the protest.
  • A mob mentality erupts. Thugs say, “Hey, it’s a free for all. I’m gonna get some Doritos and while I’m at it, beat the crap out of some folks for fun.”
  • All hell breaks loose.
  • The military gets called in.
  • The city burns, and neighborhoods get destroyed, and…

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‘Girl from the Bronx’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Grew Up in One of Richest U.S. Counties

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party’s rising socialist star, describes herself as “a girl from the Bronx” to project a working-class image. However, this claim is only half true – to borrow a phrase from the left-wing website PolitiFact.

“Well, you know, the president is from Queens, and with all due respect — half of my district is from Queens — I don’t think he knows how to deal with a girl from the Bronx,” Ocasio-Cortez said this week on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

She similarly told the Washington Post: “I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family — mother from Puerto Rico, dad from the South Bronx. I was born in a place where your zip code determines your destiny.”

The congressional candidate, who pulled off an upset win against high-ranking establishment Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY), was indeed born in New York City’s Bronx borough. She currently lives there, too.

So what’s the issue? Ocasio-Cortez omits that for most of her formative years, she was actually raised in one of the United States’ wealthiest counties.

Around the age of five, Alexandria’s architect father Sergio Ocasio moved the family from the “planned community” of Parkchester in the Bronx to a home in Yorktown Heights, a wealthy suburb in Westchester County. The New York Times describes her childhood home as “a modest two-bedroom house on a quiet street.” In a 1999 profile of the area, when Ocasio-Cortez would have been ten years old, the…

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Man who said he wanted to ‘slit a Muslim’s throat’ jailed for inciting hatred — RT UK News

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Man who said he wanted to ‘slit a Muslim’s throat’ jailed for inciting hatred — RT UK News

A man has been jailed for almost two years after saying he wanted to “slit a Muslim’s throat” in a series of Islamophobic tweets following the Manchester Arena attack. The 31-year-old was found guilty of inciting racial hatred.

Rhodenne Chand, from Birmingham, posted 32 tweets following a terrorist attack on Ariana Grande’s concert on May 22 last year that killed 22 and left many more injured .

He was arrested on June 17 last year after a member of the public reported him to the police. West Midlands Police said the tweets encouraged violence against Muslim and Pakistani communities and attacks on mosques.

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© Paul Hackett

Superintendent Mat Shaer of West Midlands Police said the messages “left people fearing some of the threats could be carried out by him or his Twitter followers”.

He went on: “This case saw the sustained release of offensive, threatening material aimed at Muslim and Pakistani communities − it left people fearing some of the threats could be carried out by him or his Twitter followers.

“The law is careful to try and not penalise expression of opinion, even in strong and possibly offensive terms.

“But Chand’s tweets were a much baser expression of animosity towards a section of society and were totally unacceptable.”

Chand’s arrest came two days before the Finsbury Park terrorist attack, which saw Darren Osborne plow his van into a crowd of Muslim worshipers outside a mosque. One person was killed in the attack and another nine were injured. Osborne was said to have been radicalized by tweets and posts by far-right figures.

Chand admitted publishing threatening, abusive or insulting material intended to stir up racial hatred and was jailed for 20 months at Birmingham Crown Court on Monday.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Blunderful Giuliani says US wants to change regime in Iran — RT US News

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Blunderful Giuliani says US wants to change regime in Iran — RT US News

Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has once again risked the wrath of the US State Department, by suggesting that the president’s decision to reimpose sanctions on Iran is aimed at bringing about regime change.

Addressing an event organized by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a Paris-based exile group, the gaffe-prone former mayor of New York said that Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal and reintroduce sanctions was the beginning of the end for the regime.

READ MORE: That’s just Rudi: State Dept disowns Trump lawyer’s comment on regime change in Iran

“When the greatest economic power stops doing business with you then you collapse … and the sanctions will become greater, greater and greater,” he said on Saturday night, adding that the NCRI would be ruling Iran before 2019, according to Reuters.

Washington pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal in May, claiming, along with Israel, that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons. Other signatories to the hard-negotiated Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as well as the world nuclear watchdog IAEA, have said that Iran had followed all the requirements of the deal. While the US slapped Iran with sanctions and is now urging countries to stop buying its oil, the White House insists they are not involved in regime change.This is not the first time Giuliani has committed a diplomatic faux pas while speaking as a private citizen.

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Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. © Francois Lenoir

Trump’s old ally Rudy seems not to follow the agenda. In May, he was slapped down by State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert after telling a meeting of the Iran Freedom Convention for Democracy and Human Rights in Washington that Trump is “committed” to regime change.

“[Giuliani] speaks for himself and not on behalf of the administration on foreign policy,” Nauert told AP at the time.

Giuliani has been a source of much embarrassment for Trump as his loose lips on matters involving the Mueller investigation as well as Trump’s relationship with porn actress Stormy Daniels became more outlandish.

READ MORE: Mueller’s Trump obstruction probe to end by Sept 1 – Giuliani

In an appearance on Fox News, Giuliani appeared to destroy the administration’s case in the Daniels affair, telling the broadcaster that Trump had actually reimbursed his lawyer Michael Cohen for a $130,000 payment to the porn star, after an alleged affair in 2006. Trump was later forced to admit that he had paid the adult film actress, a claim he had denied. However, he continues to insist there was no affair between the two.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Video: The CIA’s New Torturer-in-Chief

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Video: The CIA’s New Torturer-in-Chief

Gina Haspel, President Trump’s new pick to head the CIA, has played a key role in the agency’s torture program — and in covering it up, says Marcy Wheeler …

Via Youtube

PressTV-‘US pullout from Germany highly unlikely’

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Recent reports that the US is examining options for a large-scale withdrawal or transportation of its forces stationed in Germany is another contradictory policy coming from the Donald Trump administration, a political commentator says.

James Petras, author and political commentator, told Press TV on Saturday that on one hand the US constantly condemns Europeans and Germany for not contributing enough to NATO, and on the other hand claims mulling lesser military presence in Europe, namely Germany.

He also reminded that Trump’s concern with military expenditures in Germany is in contradiction with major increases in US military spending in this year’s US budget. 

Petras said “there is no substantive basis for what Trump has recently said regarding the withdrawal of US troops. It’s also questionable whether Trump would be able to convince the US generals in the Pentagon that this is a good policy for the US. So one has to view this…

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FBI Refusing to Give Congress Material That Alleges Loretta Lynch Interfered in Clinton Inve

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Real Clear Investigations
June 30, 2018

Paul Sperry reports at RealClearInvestigations — the investigative reporting affiliate of trusted polling aggregator RealClearPolitics — that the FBI is refusing to allow members of Congress to review intelligence that alleges Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch interfered in the Hillary Clinton email investigation:

The FBI had little problem leaking “unverified” dirt from Russian sources on Donald Trump and his campaign aides – and even basing FISA wiretaps on it. But according to the Justice Department’s inspector general, the bureau is refusing to allow even members of Congress with top security clearance to see intercepted material alleging political interference by President Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch.

That material – which has been outlined in press reports – consists of unverified accounts intercepted from putative Russian sources in which the head of the Democratic National Committee allegedly implicates the Hillary Clinton campaign and Lynch in a secret deal to fix the Clinton email investigation.

“It is remarkable how this Justice Department is protecting the corruption of the Obama Justice Department,” said Tom Fitton, president of Washington-based watchdog Judicial Watch, which is suing for the material.

Read the rest of the story at RealClearInvestigations.

This article was posted: Saturday, June 30, 2018 at 8:03 am



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New figures show royals cost the public more than ever before — RT UK News

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New figures show royals cost the public more than ever before — RT UK News

The annual cost of the Queen is now 69p per person, as figures show that royal spending rose 13 percent in 2017/2018. Taxpayers’ funding has also increased by 40 percent for Prince William, Harry and Kate.

New data from the royal accounts reveal that the public funds used by the Queen for official spending and royal duties jumped from £41.9 million ($54.8 million) to £47.4 million ($62 million) last year.

The main reason for the 13-percent increase in costs borne by the taxpayer is understood to be the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace. Over £4 million ($5.2 million) was spent on the initial phase of improvements at the palace, which included the removal of old wiring.

The Queen’s official pay-packet is derived from public funds in exchange for revenue from the Crown Estate. The “core” of the sovereign grant is usually based on 15 percent of the net surplus of the Crown Estate, but this year the grant is based on 25 percent of the surplus in order to meet the costs of refurbishing the palace.

Overall, the total Sovereign Grant was £76.1 million ($99.6 million). Of this amount, £28.7 million ($37.6 million) was placed in reserves, intended to pay for the palace renovation.

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Prince William (L) sits down with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah © Shadi Hatem/Global Look Press

Royal travel has also cost the public an eyewatering sum – £4.7 million ($6.2 million) – with Prince Charles’s tour of India and the Far East in November 2017 coming in as the most expensive. The tour cost a staggering £362,149 ($473,987), and he has also used royal train twice as often as the Queen, at a cost of around £20,000 ($26,180) per trip.

Figures released by the Prince of Wales’ private office, Clarence House, show that spending has also increased for his children and their wives. In total, the bill footed by the taxpayer for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke of Sussex went from £3.5 million ($4.6 million) to £5 million ($6.5 million). A palace spokesman declined to comment on how much of the increase was attributable to Meghan Markle.

Separate figures show the Crown Estate provided £329.4 million ($431.2 million) to the Treasury, a like-for-like increase of around 4 percent compared with last year’s figures for England only.

Keeper of the Privy Purse Sir Michael Stevens, who oversees the royal family’s finances, told the BBC that “there are three generations of the royal family at work together in support of the Queen.”

“Each generation brings its own style and personality,” he said. “What everyone shares is a desire for the monarchy to reflect and serve all parts of our country and the wider Commonwealth.

“The [palace renovation] program addresses the urgent need to overhaul the palace’s essential services – some of which have not been updated since the 1950s. These important works will help avert the very real danger of a catastrophic building failure such as a flood or fire.”

Anti-royalist campaigners lashed out at the new data, saying that the Queen costs the taxpayer dearly.

READ MORE: Royal welcome? Trump to meet the Queen after all during his UK visit, ambassador says

“The big lie from royalists is the idea the monarchy is paid for by the Crown Estate – which is simply untrue,” Republic spokesman Graham Smith said.

“Or that the Queen personally owns the Crown Estate and sacrifices her own income, which is also nonsense. The reality is that the monarchy costs the British taxpayer dear, more than £345m a year. That’s a symptom of a secretive and unaccountable institution.”

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Nationwide protests over immigrant separations, detentions (PHOTOS, VIDEOS) — RT US News

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Nationwide protests over immigrant separations, detentions (PHOTOS, VIDEOS) — RT US News

Hundreds of thousands of people are hitting the streets of US cities to demand that President Donald Trump reunite families separated at the Mexico border, end family detentions and abolish his ‘zero-tolerance’ policy.

Protests were underway throughout the entire country on Saturday, with the main demonstration taking place in Washington DC’s Lafayette Square. More than 30,000 people had already turned up to that protest less than two hours after it began, according to organizers.

The Families Belong Together national day of action was organized by dozens of advocacy groups, including MoveOn and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Organizers have three demands for the Trump administration: For the government to reunite families separated at the border, to end family detentions and to end its zero-tolerance policy towards those crossing into the US illegally.

Protesters could be seen holding signs proclaiming “Families Belong Together” and “Immigrants are welcome here,” as well as “Love has no borders.”

Other signs called for the abolishment of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency that has been tasked with carrying out Trump’s zero tolerance policy.

Around 200 protesters also turned up along the route to Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, ahead of his arrival to the site on Saturday. 

Border officials separated nearly 2,000 children from their parents between April 19 and May 31 – a practice which many child care experts and the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics likened to child abuse. Although Trump later reversed his decision to take children away from their mothers and fathers, many remain separated.

Protests were scheduled for all 50 states, Anna Galland, executive director of Move On, told the Huffington Post. A total of 628 rallies were registered, including some in international locations such as Berlin and London.

The protests come comes as lawmakers are at loggerheads over immigration legislation after a bill designed as a “compromise” between conservative and moderate Republicans in the House failed this week. The bill would have stopped the practice of splitting up families, funded the president’s border wall, limited legal immigration and created a pathway to citizenship for some “Dreamers.” It failed by a 301-121 vote, losing the support of every single Democrat and 112 Republicans. House lawmakers are now on their July 4 recess, and are due to return on July 10.

The recent failure to pass any sort of immigration reform comes after similar foot-dragging under the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, with each failing to get legislation passed through both chambers of Congress during their presidencies.

Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-UK urged to raise military budget to counter Russia

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The British armed forces require a significant increase in funding to counter threats posed by Russia, a British parliamentary panel has warned.

In a report released Sunday, the Commons Defense Committee warned that the government of Prime Minister Theresa May needed to raise military spending from 2 percent of the total GDP to 3 percent if it wanted to prevent British forces from becoming “outgunned” by their Russian peers.

This means May needs to save around £20 billion ($26.5bn) a year in other sectors and increase military investment to levels that have only been seen immediately after the end of Cold War.

Dubbed Beyond 2 Percent, the report warned that failure to finance the military at these levels was going to make it “very difficult” to maintain the UK’s long-term strategy to address its military needs.

The committee warned that a lack of vehicle-mounted anti-tank weapons and “serious deficiencies in the quantities of…

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PressTV-US plot to topple Iran govt. won’t work: Scholar

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PressTV-US plot to topple Iran govt. won’t work: Scholar

The United States’ plot to exert economic pressure on the Iranian nation in order to trigger a government change in the country is a joke, according to American US scholar and political analyst Kevin Barrett.

Barrett, who is an author and political commentator in Madison, Wisconsin told Press TV on Saturday that the odds for the US to succeed in its plot for regime change in Iran were minuscule.

He said US President Donald Trump and top officials in his administration like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security adviser John Bolton were revealing the ugly face of American leaders to the Iranians.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (L) and US National Security adviser John Bolton. (Photo by AFP)

Barrett quoted the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei as saying that the US did a favor to the Iranian nation by showing the true face of the White House’s leaders.

The analyst said Washington is…

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Planned Parenthood’s Union Busting Could Have a Chilling Effect for Workers Everywhere

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When Ashley Brink accepted a job at Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM) in April 2016, she knew it would mean taking a $3 an hour pay cut. It also entailed relocating from Wichita, Kansas, among the cheapest U.S. cities to live in, to Denver, one of the most expensive. 

But Brink was passionate about Planned Parenthood’s mission. In 2013, she’d helped reopen Wichita’s sole abortion clinic, closed four years earlier following the murder of its doctor, George Tiller. After three years of working as the funding and patient coordinator for the small clinic—a job she says included everything from checking in patients to helping them secure funding to travel to Wichita for abortions—she was “ready for a new adventure” with an organization she admired.

As a traveling health center assistant for PPRM, Brink works at multiple clinics across three states. “I get to help so many different communities access healthcare,” she says. “Access is very important to me.”

So Brink was dismayed when, in May 2017, PPRM announced that it was closing six of its clinics, including one in Casper, Wyoming—Planned Parenthood’s only facility in the entire state.

That was the moment when Brink says she and many of her co-workers decided they needed a union. In December 2017, employees at 14 clinics in the metro Denver area voted to form one.

That made PPRM just the sixth local Planned Parenthood affiliate to unionize, out of more than 50 nationwide. In at least two of these cases, the local employer was accused of attempting to squelch worker organizing. But this year, PPRM went a step further when it appealed the union vote to the National Labor Relations Board, as previously reported by the Intercept. That’s left employees like Brink feeling “disheartened” as they wait for a decision that could also have broad implications for workers nationwide.

A small group of PPRM employees first began organizing in the fall of 2016. Their key issues included…

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Did Israel Inspire Trump’s Family Separation Policy?

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Photo by www.ice.gov | Public Domain

This past May, the United States Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, announced the government’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy at US border crossings. It was a matter of weeks before the new policy began yielding tragic outcomes. Those attempting to unlawfully cross into the US were subject to federal criminal prosecution, while their children were taken away by federal authorities, which placed them in cage-like facilities.

Expectedly, the policy caused outrage and was eventually reversed. However, many of those who have chastised the administration of President Donald Trump seem willfully ignorant of the fact that Israel has been carrying out far worse practices against Palestinians.

In fact, many within the American ruling classes, whether Republicans or Democrats, have been captivated with the Israeli model for decades. For years, US pundits have praised, not just Israel’s supposed democracy, but also its security apparatus as an example to be emulated. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, a renewed US love affair with Israel’s security tactics blossomed, where Tel Aviv raked billions of American taxpayers’ dollars in the name of helping secure US borders against perceived threats.

A new, even more appalling chapter in the ongoing cooperation was penned soon after newly-elected Trump declared his plan to build a ‘great’ wall at the US-Mexico border. Even before Israeli companies jumped on the chance to build…

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Did Israel Inspire Trump’s Family Separation Policy?

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Photo by www.ice.gov | Public Domain

This past May, the United States Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, announced the government’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy at US border crossings. It was a matter of weeks before the new policy began yielding tragic outcomes. Those attempting to unlawfully cross into the US were subject to federal criminal prosecution, while their children were taken away by federal authorities, which placed them in cage-like facilities.

Expectedly, the policy caused outrage and was eventually reversed. However, many of those who have chastised the administration of President Donald Trump seem willfully ignorant of the fact that Israel has been carrying out far worse practices against Palestinians.

In fact, many within the American ruling classes, whether Republicans or Democrats, have been captivated with the Israeli model for decades. For years, US pundits have praised, not just Israel’s supposed democracy, but also its security apparatus as an example to be emulated. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, a renewed US love affair with Israel’s security tactics blossomed, where Tel Aviv raked billions of American taxpayers’ dollars in the name of helping secure US borders against perceived threats.

A new, even more appalling chapter in the ongoing cooperation was penned soon after newly-elected Trump declared his plan to build a ‘great’ wall at the US-Mexico border. Even before Israeli companies jumped on the chance to build…

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The Civil War Is at Hand

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Even though Fox News gave him the boot, George Will’s signature trait — pretentiousness — is alive and well.  In a recent column in the Washington Post titled “Vote against the GOP this November,” Will outdid himself with a whole new level of pretentiousness.  One gets the distinct impression that his greatest thrill in life is coming up with words that most people have never heard of.

True, his pretentiousness is phony and obnoxious.  True, he has become a caricature of the infantile whiners who failed to get their way in the last election.  True, his irrelevance has reduced him to a pathetic figure.  But before dismissing Will’s childish behavior out of hand, I think it’s worth examining what his downfall and subsequent bitterness means in the grand scheme of things.

Will is an icon of the establishment that ruled Washington for decades, prior to the Trump Revolution — perhaps, one might argue, since the very inception of the nation.  Those in the establishment have had their way for so long they cannot bring themselves to believe they are no longer in control of things.

To them, the Trump-inspired political earthquake is nothing more than a sociological hiccup — an accident of history that occurs every 50 years or so.  Just bide one’s time, keep calm, hold the fort, and it will all melt away when people finally come to their senses.

The late, great Charles Krauthammer, one of George Will’s closest friends, was somewhat caught up in the same normalcy-bias trap, though he had a much better grasp of reality than Will.  When I interviewed Krauthammer back in 2009, I found him to be reasonable and thoughtful with his words, and, in an uneffusive and odd sort of way, rather pleasant.

The Politically Incorr…

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PressTV-Americans protest Trump’s immigration policy

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PressTV-Americans protest Trump’s immigration policy

Thousands of Americans have staged demonstrations across the country to protest against US President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration that separated children from migrant parents on the US-Mexico border.

Thousands of protesters gathered outside the White House on Saturday and chanted “shame, shame” and demanded that the detained children be reunited with their parents.

The protest in Washington, DC is part of a wave of nationwide demonstrations against the Trump administration which began seeking in May to prosecute all adults who cross the border without authorization.

Demonstrators hold placards in front of the White House as they march against the separation of immigrant families, on June 30, 2018 in Washington, DC. (AFP photo)

Thousands of protesters also gathered in the downtown of New York City. They were chanting “Shame!” and singing “Shut detention down!”

The demonstrators gathered under the…

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Stop the NHS sell-off: Build rank-and-file committees

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Stop the NHS sell-off: Build rank-and-file committees

Statement of the Socialist Equality Party (UK)

30 June 2018

On the 70th anniversary of its creation, the National Health Service (NHS) is in grave danger.

Its establishment in 1948 as a universal health provider, free at the point of use, is fiercely defended by working people as their fundamental social right. That right is now in jeopardy as the NHS is transformed into a skeleton, for-profit service, modelled on the US healthcare market.

This is the result of the privatisation policies of successive Labour, Liberal and Conservative governments. Whatever the acronyms used—Private Finance Initiative, Sustainability and Transformation Plans, Accountable Care Organisations, etc.—a two-tier system is being created in which not only the standard of healthcare but ready access to it is determined by the ability to pay.

An investigation last year by the Independent found the total amount of income NHS England made from private patients leapt by a third between 2011-12 and 2016-17. It cited the example of London’s best-known cancer-specialist hospital, Royal Marsden, whose income from private patients rose by 105 percent, from £44.7 million in 2010/11 to £91.9 million—some 31.4 percent of its total funds. While soaring waiting lists and bans on certain “elective” surgeries are forcing those who can to pay privately for care, companies such as Virgin Care, UnitedHealth, Health Care America and Circle are making vast profits.

Recent figures show that £9 billion of NHS services have been outsourced to private providers. Meanwhile, under the Naylor Review, a fire-sale of NHS land and property to private developers is underway. This is in addition to the transfer of whole sections of the NHS estate—buildings bought…

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May softens stance on Norway-style EU deal, at odds with cabinet Brexiteers — RT UK News

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May softens stance on Norway-style EU deal, at odds with cabinet Brexiteers — RT UK News

UK PM Theresa May is leaning towards a Norway-style EU withdrawal deal, which would see Britain accepting single-market membership – at least for goods – as Brexiteers press for a less-restrictive, Canada-style trade agreement.

May is set to embark on a trip to Brussels, where she will update EU leaders on her government’s progress – or lack thereof – on Brexit. The prime minister will be hoping to paper over the cracks of a cabinet at war over the shape of a future UK-EU trading relationship.

Whitehall sources have indicated that May is favoring a Norway-style arrangement, which would maintain single-market membership, but would exclude three of the four freedoms (people, services and capital). This would retain the free movement of goods across borders, reports The Guardian.

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© Simon Dawson

There is some doubt as to whether this type of “cherry-picking” from the UK on single-market membership would be an acceptable proposition for the 27 EU member states. The EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, has been adamant that the UK would have to abide by all four freedoms in order to retain single-market membership, describing this as “non-negotiable.”

The UK may point to the fact that EEA (European Economic Area) members, such as Norway, are allowed to opt out of the four freedoms if they are facing serious economic, societal or environmental strain under Article 112 of the EEA Agreement.

Furthermore, it’s thought that Britain’s senior negotiators have picked up positive signals from EU governments keen to avoid trade disruption.

Anand Menon, director of UK in a Changing Europe, said the two options that have surfaced, concerning Norway- and Canada-style trading arrangements, are both problematic for the prime minister, as both deals have their drawbacks.

“It’s politics versus economics,” he said. “The impact of [a Canada-style deal] on the economy is very bad; but the politics of selling the alternative, which is Norway-plus-a-customs-union, are terrible for May.” It’s distinctly possible that May’s approach would anger some Brexiteers and prompt resignations.

READ MORE: Blair blames populism for rise in fascism as Keir Starmer claims Brexit deadlock stoking far right

A Canada-style trade agreement being pushed by Brexiteers would create a much looser relationship with the EU. Under the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), there is no obligation for Canada to pay into the EU budget or – crucially – sign up to the EU’s four freedoms. In addition, they don’t have to abide by European Court of Justice (ECJ) rulings.

The drawbacks include the UK not having a say on EU standards and regulations governing exports to the bloc. CETA does not guarantee Canadian firms an EU financial services “passport.” This means that they will still face obstacles to trading freely with EU member states.

Furthermore, CETA does not remove non-tariff barriers such as EU rules of origin requirements, while products such as eggs or chicken are not covered by the agreement.

READ MORE: ‘Diverge’ from EU rules or risk US Trade deal: Paul Ryan warns the UK

May’s decision to assemble her whole cabinet at Chequers in recent days, rather than just her deadlocked Brexit subcommittee, is generating anxiety among Brexiteers. “They’re stacking the deck to make sure they’ve got the numbers in the room,” said one senior government Brexiteer.

The prime minister will meet a string of EU27 leaders over the next seven days, beginning on the sidelines of the European Council in Brussels, hoping to win them over.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Ted Cruz backs Democrat over Nazi GOP in Illinois — RT US News

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Ted Cruz backs Democrat over Nazi GOP in Illinois — RT US News

Ted Cruz may have urged voters to choose a Democratic candidate instead of a self-confessed Nazi running for a congressional seat in Illinois, but the internet is giving him very little credit for speaking out.

Cruz took to Twitter to condemn Arthur Jones, the Holocaust-denying Republican candidate for the third district of Illinois, ahead of the November midterm elections. Jones won his place on the ballot after Republicans failed to nominate a candidate to run against him in the primary election. The district is usually a safe seat for the Democrats.

He later won the primary by running unopposed. Jones told Politico that he was running to counter a “two-party, Jew-party, queer-party system.”

READ MORE: ‘Absurdity of gerrymandering’: US Nazi is the only GOP contender for congressional seat

Writing in a tweet, the Texas senator called Jones’ place in the congressional race as “horrific” and said: “This bigoted fool should receive zero votes.”

Twitter users were quick to highlight perceived hypocrisies in Cruz’s stance, pointing out that he had remained silent after his former presidential campaign co-chairman, Republican lawmaker Steve King, refused to apologize for retweeting a message from a well-known British neo-Nazi.

READ MORE: Ted Cruz: My Twitter account ‘liked’ porn video due to ‘staffing issue’

Others pointed to the Republican Party’s association with other right-wing candidates such as Paul Nehlen, the “pro-white Christian American” candidate for Paul Ryan’s soon-to-be vacated congressional seat in Wisconsin; and Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff found guilty of contempt for ignoring court orders to stop immigration roundups. Arpaio, who was pardoned by Donald Trump last year, is running for the Senate in his home state of Arizona.

Some felt Cruz’s words were merely a cynical attempt to placate supporters who may be thinking of transferring their vote to Democratic opponent Beto O’Rourke ahead of his own senatorial race in November.

READ MORE: #CNNBlackmail: Ted Cruz claims CNN may have broken law as meme war intensifies

A fair number of people took Cruz’s concern at its face, agreeing with the spirit of the remarks, and encouraging other politicians to join in the protest.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-Three killed in London after being hit by train

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Three people have died in south London after being hit by a train, according to police.

The police said on Monday that the men were in their 20s and the accident happened near Loughborough Junction in south London in the early hours of Monday.

Spray cans were found near where their bodies were found, according to rail industry sources.

“My team is now working hard to understand what happened and how these three people came to lose their life on the railway,” said detective Gary Richardson.

“At this time, we are treating their deaths as unexplained as we make a number of immediate inquiries.

“I would ask anyone who was near to Loughborough Junction this morning, and saw something which they think might be relevant, please contact us as soon as possible.”

British Transport Police (BTP) Supt Matthew Allingham said three men were declared dead at the scene.

“It is believed that they died earlier in the morning and that their injuries are…

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PressTV-US envoy to Estonia to retire over Trump’s jibes

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The US ambassador to Estonia, James Melville, will retire from the State Department next month, a move he said was prompted by Donald Trump’s jibes and treatment of European allies.

The announcement comes ahead of a summit in Brussels of NATO allies on July 11-12, which has been clouded by Trump’s angry claims that Europe is exploiting the United States by underspending on defense.

The US embassy in Tallinn said the career diplomat would retire after finishing his three-year assignment in Estonia in late July.

But in a private Facebook post first reported by Foreign Policy, Melville said frustration over Trump’s barbs had made him decide “it was time to go.”

Trump recently told fellow western leaders that the NATO alliance was “as bad as NAFTA” — a North American trade deal that he has threatened to tear up.

“A Foreign Service Officer’s DNA is programmed to support policy and we’re schooled right from the start, that if there ever comes a…

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GM Crops in India: Approval by Contamination?

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The regulatory system for GMOs (genetically modified organisms) in India is in tatters. So said the Coalition for a GMFree India (CGMFI) in 2017 after media reports about the illegal cultivation of GM soybean in the country.

In India, five high-level reports have already advised against the adoption of GM crops:

  1. The ‘Jairam Ramesh Report’, imposing an indefinite moratorium on Bt Brinjal [February 2010];
  2. The ‘Sopory Committee Report’ [August 2012];
  3. The ‘Parliamentary Standing Committee’ [PSC] Report on GM crops [August 2012];
  4. The ‘Technical Expert Committee [TEC] Final Report’ [June-July 2013]; and
  5. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science & Technology, Environment and Forests [August 2017].

Given the issues surrounding GM crops (including the now well-documented failure of Bt cotton in the country), little wonder these reports advise against their adoption. Little wonder too given that the story of GM ‘regulation’ in India has been a case of blatant violations of biosafety norms, hasty approvals, a lack of monitoring abilities, general apathy towards the hazards of contamination and a lack of institutional oversight.

Despite these reports, the drive to get GM mustard commercialised (which would be India’s first officially-approved GM food crop) has been relentless. The Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) has pushed ahead regardless by giving it the nod. However, the case of GM mustard remains in limbo and stuck…

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PressTV-Democrats want to abolish ‘all police’: Trump

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US President Donald Trump says Democrats want to see “all police” abolished as protests against his tough immigration policy gain momentum. 

In recent months, a US law enforcement agency known as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is involved in in processing the status of refugees crossing into America at the southern US border with Mexico, has been under fire for implementing Trump’s hardline immigration policy.

Democrats are campaigning to abolish ICE due to the agency’s aggressive approach to undocumented migrants and its separating of families at the border.

“The Democrats are making a strong push to abolish ICE,” Trump wrote in a tweet on Saturday morning.

Trump defended ICE in the tweet, declaring that the “brave” ICE personnel were doing a “fantastic job” and must keep their spirit up.

“To the great and brave men and women of ICE, do not worry or lose your spirit. You are doing a fantastic job of…

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Prison Planet.com » Hillary Refuses To Condemn The Left Becoming ‘Uncivil’ — Calls For ‘Strength’ To Resist Trump

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Daily Caller
June 30, 2018

Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton rejected calls of civility in a recent interview, calling for “strength and resolve” to resist President Trump.

The Guardian reports that when asked about some on the left becoming “uncivil” recently, she responded:

“‘Oh, give me a break,’ she erupts, eyes widening into indignation. ‘Give me a break! What is more uncivil and cruel than taking children away? It should be met with resolve and strength. And if some of that comes across as a little uncivil, well, children’s lives are at stake; their futures are at stake. That is that ridiculous concept of bothsideism.’”

Clinton also mocked people who call for civility in political discourse, imitating, “Well, you know, somebody made an insulting, profane remark about President Trump, and he separated 2,300 children from their families, that’s both sides, and we should stop being uncivil — oh, and, by the way, he should stop separating children.”

“‘Give me a break, really,’ she growls, rolling her eyes,” The Guardian article also reported her saying.

This article was posted: Saturday, June 30, 2018 at 8:13 am



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UN human rights chief to probe extreme poverty in the UK

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UN human rights chief to probe extreme poverty in the UK

Preview The UN will launch an investigation into extreme poverty in Britain this year. The move comes amid concern at the impact of the Tory government’s austerity policies.
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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Feminists under fire for defending scholar accused of sexual harassment — RT US News

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Feminists under fire for defending scholar accused of sexual harassment — RT US News

A group of prominent feminists is facing backlash over a letter they signed, defending an academic accused of sexual harassment because she is an “important figure” in feminist literary theory.

In what started off as humdrum ‘Me Too’ story with a twist –30-year-old male Ph.D. student accuses 66-year-old female New York University (NYU) professor of sexual harassment– has now reached peak internet gossip level, after 50 academics, including several influential feminists, defended the scholar.

Avital Ronell, a world-renowned professor of German and comparative literature at New York University, was accused by a student, known only as ‘M’, who filed a complaint last September in NYU’s Title IX office – the department named after the civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender in federally funded educational institutions.

READ MORE: Going too far? Trudeau’s overly liberal course might do him a disservice

In May, colleagues of Ronell sent a letter to the NYU administration signed by a list of character witnesses, including about 50 intellectuals and many leading feminist theoreticians, who lambasted the accusation as a “witch hunt” and emphasised Ronell’s academic achievements. The letter says she is “the real victim in the story.”

Judith Butler, the influential philosopher and gender theorist, and philosopher Slavoj Zizek are among those who have reportedly signed their name to the letter, which described Ronell as someone whose “influence is felt throughout the humanities,” and the most “important figure in literary studies at New York University.”

Zizek, a cultural philosopher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, responded to criticism and defended his signing of the letter by saying he knows the details of the “utterly ridiculous” accusations, which have so far been kept confidential.

READ MORE: State funded feminist porn could be future of German sex ed

The letter was made public by Brian Leiter, a professor of philosophy and law at the University of Chicago Law School, in a blog post he titled ‘Blaming the victim is apparently OK when the accused in a Title IX proceeding is a feminist literary theorist.’

In the letter, Ronell’s colleagues also warned the administration that if she were to be terminated or relieved of her duties “the injustice would be widely recognized and opposed.”

“The ensuing loss for the humanities, for New York University, and for intellectual life during these times would be no less than enormous and would rightly invite widespread and intense public scrutiny,” the letter warned.

The group also urged the university to approach the case “with a clear understanding of the long history of her thoughtful and successive mentorship, the singular brilliance of this intellectual [and] the international reputation she has rightly earned as a stellar scholar in her field.”

READ MORE: Slavoj Žižek: Britain’s royal wedding had an emancipatory subtext

Critics of the letter have dubbed this effort by the academic community, and feminists in particular, hypocritical for going against the ‘party line’, in which accusers should always be believed and the connections or achievements of the accused should be at least irrelevant, if not actually used as evidence of their power over the victim.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-British citizens rush to obtain EU citizenships

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An increasing number of British citizens are obtaining the nationality of other EU member states since the Brexit referendum, with German citizenship seeing the highest requests.

In 2017, a total of 12,994 British citizens received the citizenship of one of the 17 EU member states for which the BBC has data. In 2016, this figure was 5.025 and only 1,800 in 2015.

Germany has been the most popular member state for Britons seeking citizenship, with 7,493 people gaining nationality in 2017 compared with 2,702 in the previous year – a 177 per cent increase.

The BBC reports that the rise is presumed to be the result of Britons who can meet the criteria seeking to keep their legal rights attached to European Union membership. The 2017 figure is about seven times the 2015 level.

The dramatic increase is consistent across many countries. France was the second most popular nationality, jumping from 320 instances in 2015 to 1,518 last year, and then…

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Video: Motorsport 360: Russian Superbike Championship International Cup

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Video: Motorsport 360: Russian Superbike Championship International Cup

RT presents 360 video from Moscow Raceway, where you can feel like a participant at the Russian Superbike Championship International Cup along with …

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Ideas and Politics as Usual?

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  1. The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude – Étienne de La Boétie’s

  2. Everyday Saints and Other Stories – Archimandrite Tikhon

  3. The Old South: 50 Essential Books (Southern Reader’s Guide) – Dr. Clyde N Wilson

  4. Shooter’s Bible Guide to Home Defense: A Comprehensive Handbook on How to Protect Your Property from Intrusion and Invasion – Roger Eckstine

  5. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos – Jordan B. Peterson
  6. How To Be Your Own Bodyguard: Because the Will to Survive is Instinctive but the Ability is Learned – Nick Hughes

  7. Glow15: A Science-Based Plan to Lose Weight, Revitalize Your Skin, and Invigorate Your Life – Naomi Whittel

  8. Death By Regulation: How We Were Robbed of a Golden Age of Health and How We Can Reclaim It – Mary J. Ruwart PhD

  9. The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus  – Richard Preston

  10. The Illustrated Art of Manliness: The Essential How-To Guide: Survival, Chivalry, Self-Defense, Style, Car Repair, And More! – Brett McKay

  11. Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  12. The Legacy of the Civil War – Robert Penn Warren

  13. The Free Society – Laurence M. Vance

  14. The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor – Mark Schatzker

  15. The Road to Freedom and the Demise of Nation States – Author Peter B. Bos

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Most Americans Think U.S. Border Most Porous in the World

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Breitbart
June 30, 2018

President Donald Trump campaigned and likely won the presidency on his promise to build a wall between Mexico and the U.S, and a new Rasmussen poll shows that a majority of Americans think our border is more porous than in other countries.

“Despite President Trump’s efforts to toughen border enforcement, voters still think it’s easier for illegal immigrants to get into the United States and stay here than in much of the rest of the world,” Rasmussen said about its findings.

The telephone and online survey found just 22 percent of likely voters think it is harder to get into the United States illegally than in other countries, while 39 percent said it is easier. Twenty-six percent said getting into a country illegally is about the same around the globe.

To see the questions asked, click here.

Breitbart News reported in March that a Quinnipiac poll revealed Republican voters still think immigration is the most important issue in November’s midterm elections, along with the economy.

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‘Something wrong with the story’: Seymour Hersh questions media narrative on Salisbury poisoning

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‘Something wrong with the story’: Seymour Hersh questions media narrative on Salisbury poisoning

Preview Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh has questioned the UK government’s official line on the motives behind the Skripals’ poisoning, saying there is an “instinctive dislike” of Russia within the UK.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Rescue crews spend over 30 hours saving deaf puppy in Alabama (VIDEOS) — RT US News

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Rescue crews spend over 30 hours saving deaf puppy in Alabama (VIDEOS) — RT US News

A team of firefighters, cave rescuers and plumbers spent 31 hours struggling to save a seven-month-old deaf puppy in Huntsville, Alabama.

The puppy, named Toffee, fell down a 60-foot hole (18 meters) in South Huntsville while playing with her foster family. Following the incident, rescue crews of volunteers, firefighters and plumbers emerged, using nets, bags, ropes and crates in a bid to save the puppy.

READ MORE: Salty dog drama: Ship stranded at sea for days because port won’t accept puppies saved by crew

Huntsville television stations live-streamed the recovery op and the feed drew thousands of followers.

After more than 30 hours of rescue operations, the owner was finally reunited with her pet.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

For Many Immigrant Families, the Fight for Reunification Is Just the Beginning

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For Many Immigrant Families, the Fight for Reunification Is Just the Beginning

President Donald Trump signed an executive order June 20 purporting to end immigrant family separations at US border with Mexico. Four days later, the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services announced a plan to reunite approximately 2,000 children who were taken from their parents at the border between April and the time the executive order was signed.

Immigration advocates have noted many shortcomings with the executive order. They also emphasize the logistical difficulties parents are experiencing as they try to locate and contact their children.

Sadly, I believe these hurdles are only the tip of the iceberg. One thing few people currently realize – despite reassuring words from the administration – is many of these families will most likely never be reunited.

I’ve been writing about the impact of the US government’s immigration policies on undocumented families for years. The policies the Trump administration is enforcing, especially after the new executive order, are for the most part similar to those first enacted under President Obama. In 2014, during a surge in illegal border crossings, the Obama administration attempted to detain hundreds of families indefinitely – until the practice was legally challenged and stopped. This is essentially the same policy the Trump administration has adopted under the executive order.

Even before the 2014 surge, the Obama administration increased efforts to detain and deport undocumented immigrants within the US, resulting in numerous family separations. It is reasonable to expect that the eventual outcomes of today’s separations will mirror these earlier ones.

The Role of State Family Law

The biggest issue is how family law views detained undocumented parents. When immigrant children are separated from their parents, they enter two different legal tracks. The parents will likely remain in detention centers until their cases are heard by immigration judges. Most will face immediate…

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Video: CrossTalk on Russiagate: Poisonous Tree

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Video: CrossTalk on Russiagate: Poisonous Tree

The fruit of the poisonous tree – this is what critics are calling the ongoing investigation of alleged Trump world collusion with Russia during the 2016 election.

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Anthony Kennedy and the Court of Lost Resort

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Photo by White House Photographic Office | CC BY 2.0

These occasions don’t come round all that often, so we should pause for moment amid the daily traumas of Trumptime to celebrate the departure of Anthony Kennedy from the Supreme Court. With Kennedy’s exit, the high bench will finally be cleansed of the last remnant of Reaganism, a judicial contagion that has gnawed away at the legal foundations of the Republic for the past 37 years, since Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to replace Potter Stewart in the summer of 1981. Over eight years, Reagan remade the federal judiciary from top to bottom by appointing 383 judges, more than any other president.

O’Connor’s elevation to the bench was followed by Reagan’s decision to enthrone the austere William Rehnquist as Chief Justice in 1986, followed four days later by the nomination of fire-breathing Anton Scalia to the slot vacated by Warren Burger.

When center-right justice Lewis Powell, author of the notorious Powell Memoranda that charted a corporate counter-attack against the regulatory state, stepped down in the summer of 1987, Reagan nominated Robert Bork, the bearded conservative who served as Nixon’s executionor in the Saturday Night Massacre. But Bork’s nomination was, well, Borked, by an uppity senate which was, after six years, finally beginning to push back against Reagan with Teddy Kennedy leading the charge. Next Reagan turned to the wonkish Douglas Ginsburg. a former Harvard Law professor whom…

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Video: As Mike Pence Visits Guatemala, Jennifer Harbury Discusses the U.S. Role in the Refugee Crisis

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Video: As Mike Pence Visits Guatemala, Jennifer Harbury Discusses the U.S. Role in the Refugee Crisis

https://democracynow.org – Extended conversation with Jennifer Harbury, a human rights lawyer who has lived here in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas for over …

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Prison Planet.com » Capital Gazette Shooting Is The Largest Mass Shooting Of Journalists In America

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Daily Caller
June 29, 2018

The shooting at the Capital Gazette newsroom on Thursday marks the largest mass shooting with journalist fatalities in the United States.

The shooter killed five people and injured several more at the Annapolis, Maryland, news outlet.

Prior to this incident, 10 journalists have been shot to death in the U.S. since 1992 in separate, work-related instances, according Committee to Protect Journalists data.

The largest casualty incident involving journalists was the 1910 bombing at the Los Angeles Times. The explosion started a fire that killed 21 employees at the newspaper and injured 100 others. The newspaper regarded it two days later as an “awful pit of death.”

In 1992, Cuban-American journalist Manuel de Dios Unanue, former editor of El Diario/La Prensa was shot in the head in a New York City restaurant. Unanue wrote extensively about drug and money laundering operations in the city, and police believed that motivated dozens of drug-traffickers and businessmen to murder him.

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This article was posted: Friday, June 29, 2018 at 7:06 am



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Thatcher’s favorite think tank says legalizing cannabis could boost Britain by £1bn a year — RT UK News

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Thatcher’s favorite think tank says legalizing cannabis could boost Britain by £1bn a year — RT UK News

The Institute of Economic Affairs, a think tank favored by ex-prime minister Margaret Thatcher, has called for the legalization of cannabis, claiming it could raise £1 billion ($1.3 billion) in taxes every year.

The IEA has joined the growing number of voices, campaigners and business organizations calling for the class-B drug to be decriminalized, arguing that it would be a “win-win-win” situation as it takes “lucrative business” out of criminal hands while boosting revenue for the country.

The black market is estimated to generate some £2.6 billion ($3.4 billion) a year from the sale of 255 tons of cannabis to over three million users, according to the think tank. The IEA was once praised by Thatcher – popularly known as the ‘Iron Lady’ – for creating the “climate of opinion” that ultimately saw her assume office in Downing Street.

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The IEA also highlighted how additional profit would be generated by alleviating the burden of public health services coping with issues related to the ‘skunk’ strain of cannabis, which has been linked to psychotic disorders. A study by King’s College in February found that the high-potency strain makes up nearly all of the cannabis currently sold on Britain’s streets.

“The dominance of hazardous, high-strength ‘skunk’ cannabis in the black market should be a key reason for legalization,” says the IEA report. “Licensed sales would allow safer, regulated cannabis to displace the more dangerous strains and generate tax revenue that could be spent on mental health services.”

Costs relating to the seizing of cannabis and related prosecutions would also be slashed were the class-B drug to be legalized.

The IEA’s intervention comes as the height of a political debate over whether medical cannabis should be legalized, after the high-profile case of 12-year-old epileptic boy Billy Caldwell. He suffered from up to 100 seizures a day, though upon taking cannabis oil, his condition improved dramatically. Caldwell had no seizures for almost a year, but they returned when his supply of the drug was confiscated by the Home Office earlier this month.

Amid mounting pressure from campaign groups, MPs, and doctors, Home Secretary Sajid Javid said there would be a review of the scheduling of medical cannabis.

Chris Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the IEA, said: “It’s high time for reform of cannabis policy in the UK. Canada and the USA are showing the way. Done properly, the legalization of cannabis is a win-win-win: criminals lose a lucrative industry, consumers get a better, safer and cheaper product, and the burden on the general taxpayer is reduced.”

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Donald Trump answers prank call aboard Air Force One — RT US News

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Donald Trump answers prank call aboard Air Force One — RT US News

A US comedian claims he tricked President Donald Trump aboard Air Force One with a prank call in which he pretended to be a Democratic senator, discussing immigration, his Supreme Court nominee, and a public scandal.

Comedian John Melendez posed as Senator Bob Menendez for the joke and says he actually spoke to the president’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, while posing as an assistant, before receiving a call back from the president on Thursday.

Melendez, also known as Stuttering John, uploaded a recording of the four-minute conversation to his podcast, in which Trump can be heard revealing his plans to nominate a new Supreme Court judge in “10 to 14 days,” following Anthony Kennedy’s decision to step down next month.

In the recording, the man identified as Trump also congratulated Senator Menendez for his acquittal in a 2017 bribery case. Menendez was accused of accepting gifts from a Florida eye doctor in exchange for political clout.

Melendez said that he and a friend initially called the White House and were honest about their identity, but they were told the president was busy. When the comedian called back with an English accent pretending to be “Shawn Moore,” a fake assistant to Menendez, they were successful.

READ MORE: ‘Generally conservative’ candidates on Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist, nomination coming soon

CNN reported that the White House confirmed the gaffe on Saturday, admitting: “The president wants to be accessible to members and likes engaging them and wants them to have the opportunity to connect. The downside of that is sometimes the channels are open too widely and mistakes like this happen.”

The comedian said that if the administration had asked him about Senator Menendez’ party affiliation or even the state for which he is a senator, his cover would have been blown: “But they didn’t ask me any of this,” he told CNN.

“I just could not believe that it took us an hour and a half to get Jared Kushner and Donald Trump on the phone from Air Force One,” he added.

It appears that Kushner will be shouldering the blame for the embarrassing blunder. According to Politico, when Legislative Affairs got word of the call, they contacted Menendez’s chief of staff and learned that the senator was not trying to contact the president. However, the call was still put through by Kushner.

Democratic Senator Menendez is an avid campaigner for immigration reform. President Trump and his administration have been under intense scrutiny lately over the long-standing US policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the Mexican border.

Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-EU to cancel Brexit deal if UK quits European court

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The European Union is threatening to nullify any EU-UK security partnership following Britain’s exit from the bloc if the UK leaves the European Court of Human Rights.

Under plans suggested by Brussels, the EU will trigger a “guillotine clause” that will cancel any post-Brexit security partnership with London to fight crime and terrorism.

In its latest publication on a joint security partnership, the bloc has dismissed a number of the UK’s proposals in order to strike the “closest possible” security pact.

In April, the European Council announced its commitment to “establish a partnership in the field of fighting against terrorism and international crime.”

EU member states want to see the UK-EU security partnership to continue after Brexit, according to one EU diplomat. But, huge differences remain in both London and Brussels’ plans to strike such a partnership.

Both sides have stated that they are determined to find an…

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Video: Vegan danger? French butchers claim being harassed by animal rights activists

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Video: Vegan danger? French butchers claim being harassed by animal rights activists

A group of French butchers are demanding police protection, claiming they’ve become a terror target at the hands of vegan activists. READ MORE: …

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PressTV-US mulls withdrawing troops from Germany

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The United States is reportedly examining options for a large-scale withdrawal or transportation of its forces stationed in Germany.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that the US Department of Defense was analyzing the cost and consequences of shifting either some or all 35,000 US troops to the US or Poland.

Citing anonymous sources, the paper said President Donald Trump had showed interest in shifting US forces during a White House meeting earlier in the year after he had voiced shock at the number of American troops in Germany and complained that other countries had not been contributing fairly to joint security or paying enough to NATO.

Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon, however, dismissed any suggestion of a full or partial withdrawal from Germany and described such analysis of the US troop deployments as routine.

“The Pentagon regularly reviews force posture and performs cost-benefit analyses,” he said in a statement. “This is…

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Quebec construction unions shut down week-long wildcat strike by crane operators

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Quebec construction unions shut down week-long wildcat strike by crane operators

By
Laurent Lafrance

30 June 2018

After days of menacing government threats and frantic appeals from the trade union top brass for an immediate halt to their job action, Quebec’s striking crane operators returned to work last Tuesday, ending a six-day wildcat strike. 

The “illegal” strike began on June 14, when crane operators on the new Champlain Bridge project, which will link Montreal to the South Shore, walked off the job. By Monday, June 18, the strike had spread to building sites across Quebec, with some 1,500 crane operators participating. The workers were protesting against industry-backed changes to government labour regulations that slash the number of hours of training required to operate cranes, thereby threatening worker and public safety.

The crane operators’ days-long defiance of the government and the FTQ-Construction and Provincial Building Trades Council union bureaucrats is part of a growing movement of the working class in Canada and internationally. Workers are not only challenging the demands of employers and big business governments for austerity and concessions. They are increasingly doing so in open conflict with the rightwing, pro-employer union apparatuses.

The crane operators’ strike slowed and even paralyzed work at many of the province’s major construction projects, including the CHU mega-hospital in Québec and the Turcot Interchange project in Montreal. 

The Quebec Liberal Government intervened aggressively against the strike, which it denounced as “irresponsible and unacceptable.” It threatened to prosecute strikers and endorsed repressive actions taken by the Quebec Construction Commission (QCC), the state agency that regulates the…

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Trump Threatens Canada: “Defence” Community Remains Silent

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A volatile leader in charge of a military behemoth prone to aggression has repeatedly attacked Canada and its prime minister in recent weeks. But, this country’s “defence” community, which often hypes Russian, Jihadist and other threats, has barely made a peep.

Citing a concern for its “national security”, the US slapped tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum imports at the end of last month. Since then Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized Justin Trudeau and two of the US President’s top advisers called the prime minister “dishonest”, “weak” and “rogue” and said “there’s a special place in hell” for him.

The bombastic rhetoric targeting the Trudeau government is coming from a state that has substantial military capacity close to the Canadian border and has repeatedly invaded nearby nations. The US is currently dropping a bomb every 12 minutes on seven different countries and its troops are fighting/operating in dozens more. And its Commander-in-Chief is highly impulsive.

Despite this aggressive posture from Washington, Canada’s “defence” community hasn’t raised the alarm or sought to capitalize on the tension by asking for more weapons and troops. Contrast this with the academics and think tanks funded by arms companies and the Department of National Defence who regularly hype lesser threats in a bid to increase military spending.

Why the difference in treatment of “threat” assessments?

The “defence” sector ignores…

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Video: 50-meter-long penis captured by Google Earth at bottom of dry lake in Australia

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Video: 50-meter-long penis captured by Google Earth at bottom of dry lake in Australia

A penis so enormous it can be seen from space – that’s what’s been etched into the bed of a dry lake in Victoria, Australia. READ MORE: …

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Manufacturing Hate – LewRockwell

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Last Saturday I went on a quest to find the source of rising leftist hatred. I needed to get beyond the facades fronting websites and Facebook posts, as well as the provocative clickbait that covers the edges of browser pages. I needed to get inside the movement – the Petrograd Soviet, so to speak – to hear the Bolsheviki recite Marx, shout slogans, and call for worldwide revolution.

While I consider politics the genesis of coercion and compulsion, I am drawn, ala Murray Rothbard, to the machinations that make up the political process. Since I like to hear from all sources, I subscribe to emails from leftist organizations (and right ones as well), including ProgressOhio, whose website states it is the state’s leading progressive organization. A while back, they sent an email inviting subscribers to a We are Progress training summit hosted by Generation Progress, the youth outreach arm of the Center for American Progress (things get murky when you try to put all the organizations together). The summit included speakers from various other Ohio organizations (most small, flying well under the radar, so to speak). I decided to attend to find the source of hatred, expecting there would be calls for blood in the streets.

After I entered the meeting, sat down, and observed, I found the assumed agitators reserved and reasonable, with no revolution proposed. The hate was, for the most part, nonexistent. In fact, I empathized with many of the speakers. Sure their means were wrong, but their ends made some sense. Let me explain.

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The summit was small, close to 50 attendees, with at least half being speakers or other members of the…

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PressTV-General Motors warns Trump tariffs risk US jobs

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General Motors Company, America’s largest automobile manufacturer, has warned that higher tariffs on imported vehicles under consideration by the administration of President Donald Trump could cost US jobs while isolating American businesses from the global market.

In comments filed with the US Commerce Department on Friday, GM said that overly broad tariffs could “lead to a smaller GM, a reduced presence at home and abroad for this iconic American company, and risk less — not more — US jobs.”

Higher tariffs could also hike vehicle prices and reduce sales, GM said.

Its comments echoed those from two major US auto trade groups on Wednesday, when they warned that tariffs of up to 25 percent on imported vehicles would cost hundreds of thousands of auto jobs, dramatically raise prices on vehicles and threaten industry spending on self-driving cars.

GM operates 47 US manufacturing facilities and employs about 110,000 people in the…

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Spreads Hoax Stats on U.S. Mass Shootings

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Breitbart
June 29, 2018

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Candidate for U.S. Congress (D-NY), reacted to the lives lost in Annapolis by claiming the attack marked the 195th mass shooting this year.

She shocked the nation with a primary victory over Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY-14) on June 26, and is now spreading stats on mass shootings that are exponentially higher than actual shooting figures support.

Ocasio-Cortez tweeted:

So Ocasio-Cortez is claiming 195 mass shooting in the first six months of this year, and if the same kind of math applies to the next six months, that will mean a claim of 390 mass shootings for the year. The left made similar claims in 2015, suggesting 355 mass shootings for the year. The figure was so far removed from reality that Mother Jones editor Mark Follman stepped in to correct the record.

Writing in The New York Times, he said:

At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have complied an in-depth open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four “mass shootings” this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.

Follman showed the claim of 355 mass shootings was about 351 incidents too high. The actual number of mass shootings for 2015 was four.

CNN has taken the lead on presenting inflated numbers on school shootings. Following the February 14, 2018, Parkland school attack, they claimed one school shooting “on average” every week. They made the same claim following the May 18, 2018, shooting at Santa Fe High School, but their claim included BB gun incidents and accidental discharges.

The heinous attack on Capital Gazette headquarters in Annapolis was a mass shooting, but it was simply nowhere close to…

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The Legacy and Fallacies of Bernard Lewis – Consortiumnews

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Bernard Lewis, seen by some in the West as a giant of Arab and Muslim scholarship, left behind a legacy of falsehoods and politically-motivated distortions, as As’ad AbuKhalil explains.

By As`ad AbuKhalil
Special to Consortium News

There is no question that Bernard Lewis was one of the most politically—not academically—influential Orientalists in modern times.

Lewis’ career can be roughly divided into two phases: the British phase, when he was a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and the second phase, which began in 1974, when he moved to Princeton University and lasted until his death on May 19. His first phase was less overtly political, although the Israeli occupation army translated and published one of his books, and Gold Meir assigned articles by Lewis to her cabinet members.

Lewis knew where he stood politically but he only became a political activist in the second phase. His academic production in the first phase was rather historical (dealing with his own specialty and training) and his books were then thoroughly documented. The production of his second phase was political in nature and lacked solid documentation and citations. In the second phase, Lewis wrote about topics (such as the contemporary Arab world) on which he was rather ignorant. The writings of his second phase were motivated by his political advocacy, while the writings of the first phase was a combination of his political biases and his academic interests.

Shortly upon moving into the U.S., Lewis met with Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the dean of ardent Zionists in the U.S. Congress. He thus started his political career and his advocacy, which was often thinly hidden behind the title of superficial books on the modern Arab world. Lewis not only mentored various neoconservatives, but he also elevated the status of Middle East natives that he approved of. For instance, he was behind the promotion of Fouad Ajami (he dedicated one of this books to him), just as he was behind introducing Ahmad Chalabi to the political elite in DC.

Lewis: A questionable legacy.

Furthermore, Lewis was also behind the invitation of Sadiq Al-Azm to Princeton…

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‘Generally conservative’ candidates on Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist, nomination coming soon — RT US News

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‘Generally conservative’ candidates on Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist, nomination coming soon — RT US News

President Donald Trump is moving quickly to fill the vacancy on the US Supreme Court, telling reporters he plans to choose from among the five or so “generally conservative” finalists and announce the nominee by July 10.

“I’ve got it narrowed to about five,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, en route to his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club.

“It’s a great group of intellectual talent … they are generally conservative,” he said, without naming any names. Two of the finalists are women, Trump said, adding he may interview one or two of the candidates over the weekend.

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Justice Anthony Kennedy walks with President Donald Trump after the swearing-in of Justice Neil Gorsuch, April 2017 © Joshua Roberts

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said he hoped the confirmation process would be done “in time for the new justice to begin the fall term of the Supreme Court” by the first Monday in October.

Trump assured reporters he would not discuss abortion or gay rights with the candidates. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement on Wednesday, had sided with the court’s four liberal justices on both issues.

Kennedy’s decision to leave the court at the end of July was met with anger and dismay by many Democrats, who regarded the Reagan-appointed justice as the crucial “swing vote” in decisions such as Obergefell, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2015.

Trump has already appointed one Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, to fill the seat vacated for over a year by the February 2016 death of Justice Antonin Scalia. President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland was held up by McConnell, who cited the upcoming presidential election.  

After announcing the Supreme Court pick, Trump is scheduled to travel to Europe, where he will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 16. On Friday, Trump reassured reporters that he would discuss US interests in the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, and would certainly raise the issue of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-UK ‘complicit’ in Israeli crimes against Palestinians

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A London-based charity has said the British government is “complicit in the violence” perpetrated against Palestinians as it continues to provide arms to Israel.

British charity War on Want made the comment in an interview with The Independent on Monday, denouncing a recent move by the UK government to abstain from a United Nations vote on Israeli violence in the besieged Gaza Strip.

The vote condemned Israel’s “use of any excessive, disproportionate and indiscriminate force” against peaceful Palestinian protesters.

“In abstaining from this vote, the UK government has yet again refused to commit to the protection of Palestinians’ human rights as they are targeted with the brutal and unlawful use of force by the Israeli military,” Ryvka Barnard, senior campaigns officer for War on Want, told the British newspaper.

“But make no mistake, the UK is not sitting aside and remaining neutral. While the world calls for violent…

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GM Crops in India: Approval by Contamination?

Colin Todhunter
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GM Crops in India: Approval by Contamination?

GM Crops in India: Approval by Contamination?

The regulatory system for GMOs (genetically modified organisms) in India is in tatters. So said the Coalition for a GMFree India (CGMFI) in 2017 after media reports about the illegal cultivation of GM soybean in the country.

In India, five high-level reports have already advised against the adoption of GM crops:

  1. The ‘Jairam Ramesh Report’, imposing an indefinite moratorium on Bt Brinjal [February 2010];
  2. The ‘Sopory Committee Report’ [August 2012];
  3. The ‘Parliamentary Standing Committee’ [PSC] Report on GM crops [August 2012];
  4. The ‘Technical Expert Committee [TEC] Final Report’ [June-July 2013]; and
  5. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science & Technology, Environment and Forests [August 2017].

Given the issues surrounding GM crops (including the now well-documented failure of Bt cotton in the country), little wonder these reports advise against their adoption. Little wonder too given that the story of GM ‘regulation’ in India has been a case of blatant violations of biosafety norms, hasty approvals, a lack of monitoring abilities, general apathy towards the hazards of contamination and a lack of institutional oversight.

Despite these reports, the drive to get GM mustard commercialised (which would be India’s first officially-approved GM food crop) has been relentless. The Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) has pushed ahead regardless by giving it the nod. However, the case of GM mustard remains in limbo and stuck in the Supreme Court due to various pleas lodged by environmentalist Aruna Rodrigues.

Rodrigues argues that GM mustard is being undemocratically forced through with flawed tests (or no testing) and a lack of public scrutiny: in other words, unremitting scientific fraud and outright regulatory delinquency.

Moreover, this crop is also herbicide-tolerant (HT), which is wholly inappropriate for a country like India with its small biodiverse farms that could be affected by its application.

GM crops illegally growing

Despite the ban on GM cops, in 2005, biologist Pushpa Bhargava noted that unapproved varieties of several GM crops were being sold to farmers. In 2008, Arun Shrivasatava wrote that illegal GM okra had been planted in India and poor farmers had been offered lucrative deals to plant ‘special seed’ of all sorts of vegetables.

In 2013, a group of scientists and NGOs protested in Kolkata and elsewhere against the introduction of transgenic brinjal in Bangladesh – a centre for origin and diversity of the vegetable – as it would give rise to contamination of the crop in India. As predicted, in 2014, the West Bengal government said it had received information regarding “infiltration” of commercial seeds of GM Bt brinjal from Bangladesh.

In 2017, the illegal cultivation of a GM HT soybean was reported in Gujarat. Bhartiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), a national farmers organisation, claimed that Gujarat farmers had been cultivating HT crop illegally – there is no clearance from the government for any GM food crop.

There are also reports of HT cotton illegally growing in India. In a paper appearing in the Journal of Peasant studies last year, Glenn Stone and Andrew Flachs show how cotton farmers have been encouraged to change their ploughing practices, which has led to more weeds being left in their fields. The authors suggest the outcome in terms of yields (or farmer profit) is arguably no better than before. However, it coincides with the appearance of an increasing supply (and farmer demand) for HT cotton seeds.

It doesn’t take a dyed-in-the-wool cynic to appreciate that the likes of Bayer, which has now incorporated Monsanto, must be salivating at the prospect of India becoming the global leader in the demand for GM.

All of this is prompting calls for probes into the workings of the GEAC and other official bodies who seem to be asleep at the wheel or deliberately looking the other. The latter could be the case given that, as Stone indicates, senior figures in India regard GM seeds (and their associated chemical inputs) as key to modernising Indian agriculture.

CGMFI spokesperson Kavitha Kuruganti says that the regulators have been caught sleeping. It wouldn’t be the first time: India’s first GM crop cultivation – Bt cotton – was discovered in 2001 growing on thousands of hectares in Gujarat, spread surreptitiously and illegally by the biotech industry. Kuruganti said the GEAC was caught off-guard when news about large scale illegal cultivation of Bt cotton emerged, even as field trials that were to decide whether India would opt for this GM crops were still underway.

In March 2002, the GEAC ended up approving Bt cotton for commercial cultivation in India. To this day, no liability was fixed for the illegal spread.

The tactic of contaminate first then legalise has benefited industry players before. In 2006, for instance, the US Department of Agriculture granted marketing approval of GM Liberty Link 601 (Bayer CropScience) rice variety following its illegal contamination of the food supply and rice exports. The USDA effectively sanctioned an ‘approval-by-contamination’ policy.

Illegal GM imports

Despite reasoned argument and debate having thus far prevented the cultivation of GM crops or the consumption of GM food in India, it seems we are to be witnessing GM seeds and crops entering the food system regardless.

Kuruganti says that a complaint lodged with the GEAC and a Right to Information (RTI) application seeking information regarding the illegal GM soybean cultivation in the country has stirred the apex regulatory body to bring the issue to the notice of the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT), months after the issue became public.

In reply to the RTI application, the GEAC responded by saying it had received no complaint about such illegal  cultivation. Kurauganti says this is a blatant lie: the BKS had collected illegally cultivated soybean samples for lab testing and the report was sent to the GEAC along with a letter of complaint. GM HT soybean has not been granted permission for field trials, let alone large-scale cultivation.

It is also understood that apart from the BKS, the Government of Gujarat also alerted the GEAC to the illegal cultivation.

Kuruganti says:

The fact that the GEAC is writing now to the DGFT to take action (on preventing the illegal GM imports), makes it clear that it lacks any real intent to take serious action about the violations of its own regulations. It also indicates that it is putting up a show of having “done” something, before an upcoming Supreme Court hearing on PILs related to GMOs.

Her assertion is supported by Rohit Parakh of India for Safe Food:

Commerce Ministry’s own data on imports of live seeds clearly indicates that India continues to import genetically modified seeds including GM canola, GM sugar beet, GM papaya, GM squash and GM corn seeds (apart from soybean) from countries such as the USA… with no approval from the GEAC as is the requirement.

Kuruganti concludes that the regulatory system is a shambles and is not preventing GMOs from being illegally imported into the country or planted. Moreover, the ruling BJP has reneged on its election promise not to allow GM without proper protocols.

Offshoring Indian agriculture

It is not a good situation. We have bogus arguments about GM mustard being forwarded by developers at Delhi University and the government. We also have USAID pushing for GM in Punjab and twisting a problematic situation to further Monsanto’s interests by trying to get GM soybean planted in the state. And we have regulators (deliberately) asleep at the wheel.

The fact that India is importing so many agricultural commodities in the first place doesn’t help. Relying on imports and transnational agribusiness with its proprietary (GM) seeds and inputs is not a recipe for food security. In the 1960s, Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter. Today, courtesy of World Bank, IMF and WTO interventions, the continent imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer.

Is this what India wants? Based on its rising import bill, self-reliance and food security seems to be an anathema to policy makers. In response to the government’s decision to abolish import duty on wheat in 2017, Ajmer Singh Lakhowala, head of the Punjab unit of Bharatiya Kisan Union, said sarcastically:

The import of cheap wheat will bring the prices down. It appears the government wants the farmers to quit farming.

As previously outlined, at the behest of the World Bank and courtesy of compliant politicians in India, it certainly seems to be the case.

Self-sufficiency is not to the liking of the US and the World Bank. Washington has for many decades regarded its leverage over global agriculture as a tool to secure its geostrategic goals.

Whether it involves the import of subsidised edible oils, wheat, pulses or soybean – alongside the ongoing neglect of indigenous agriculture and farmers by successive administrations – livelihoods are being destroyed, food quality is being undermined and Indian agriculture is slowly being offshored.

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer Twitter

Video: World Cup fans: Mexico (Part 2)

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Video: World Cup fans: Mexico (Part 2)

It is Jaime’s first time in Moscow. What does he think so far? WATCH PART 1 HERE: https://youtu.be/eu8L2JW93w0 FOLLOW: https://www.rt.com/fifa2018 Check …

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PressTV-North Korea making more nuclear bomb fuel: US intel

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US intelligence sources claim North Korea has recently boosted its uranium enrichment at secret sites despite President Donald Trump’s insistence that Pyongyang was “no longer a nuclear threat,” a news report said.

Citing unnamed US officials, US-based NBC News reported Saturday that satellite images indicated implementation of rapid improvements at a North Korean nuclear research facility at Yongbyon, insisting that the development poses major challenge to Trump’s claim that his Singapore summit with North’s leader Kim Jong-un earlier this month was a success.

While the North Koreans have stopped missile and nuclear tests, “there’s no evidence that they are decreasing stockpiles, or that they have stopped their production,” the report underlined, quoting what it described as “one US official briefed on the latest intelligence.”

“There is absolutely unequivocal evidence that they are trying to deceive the US,” the official…

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Video: World Cup fans: Germany

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Video: World Cup fans: Germany

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Prison Planet.com » Bushie-turned-MSNBC host hopes for recession to take down Trump

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American Mirror
June 29, 2018

Trump haters are apparently okay with inflicting economic pain on average Americans as a way to get the president out of office.

Nicolle Wallace, a former George W. Bush communications director turned MSNBC host, was downright giddy at the prospect of Trump losing re-election due to a recession.

“If a recession hits…” panelist Jon Meacham said.

“You think that’s where the bottom falls out (for Trump)?” Wallace interjected.

“I think so,” he responded.

“Um,” Wallace said, flashing a smile, “Okay, good,” cackling.

  • A d v e r t i s e m e n t

The media elites joined in laughing at the prospect of inflicting pain on average Americans to satisfy their political objectives.

“You spoke to my better angels!” she added.

Earlier this month, limousine liberal Bill Maher also said he hopes for a recession so President Trump will lose re-election in 2020.

“Can I ask about the economy because this economy is going pretty well,” Maher said.

“It is going well, for now,” Shermichael Singleton interjected.

“I feel like the bottom has to fall out at some point, and by the way, I’m hoping for it,” Maher said.

“Because I think one way you get rid of Trump is a crashing economy, so please,” the atheist continued, clapping his hands together, “bring on the recession. Sorry if that hurts people,” as the audience applauded.

“It’s either root for a recession or losing your democracy,” Maher said.

This article was posted: Friday, June 29, 2018 at 7:29 am



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‘Racially motivated’ stabbing left man fighting for life in east London

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‘Racially motivated’ stabbing left man fighting for life in east London

A man was left fighting for life after being stabbed multiple times in a “vicious” and racially motivated attack. It comes as Scotland Yard launched its 81st murder investigation this year.

The man, understood to be in his 30s, was stabbed several times on June 19 after a brawl erupted in east London, Scotland Yard has reported. The victim remains in hospital but his condition is no longer critical.

The man had reportedly been in Poplar when a scuffle broke out with a group of people.

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© Gustavo Valiente/ Global Look Press

“However, the situation calmed and the victim and six males from the group went to an underpass. They sat chatting and drinking for a while before the victim was attacked and stabbed several times,” officers said.

The victim managed to stop a taxi driver, who called emergency services, the Met added. Officers are treating the incident as racially-motivated, according to the Met’s website.

“This was a vicious attack which left a man fighting for his life,” said Police Constable Simon Meade, of Tower Hamlets Criminal Investigation Department (CID).

“Our initial enquiries have made good progress and we continue to work to identify those who were involved in the attack.”

Anyone with information can call Tower Hamlets police on 101 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-UK ‘waging war on Russia’ to save itself

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The UK is waging a psychological war against Russia to keep its own existence as the European Union (EU) and the NATO military alliance fall apart, says a political analyst.

E. Michael Jones, an editor of Culture Wars Magazine, made the remarks following a British parliamentary report that warned the UK armed forces require a significant increase in funding to counter threats posed by Russia.

“If there’s ever a preposterous statement it is this statement,” Jones told Press TV on Monday. “England has been waging war… psychological warfare against Russia for months now.”

“The point here is the British are trying to save some type of failing enterprise,” Jones argued. “They have left the European union (EU), the EU is now falling apart. NATO has no meaning anymore and so the British are trying to come up with some type of way to save their own existence.”

The Commons Defense Committee warned that the government of Prime…

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Video: Japanese space probe could offer insight into solar system’s origin

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Video: Japanese space probe could offer insight into solar system’s origin

A Japanese space probe has completed its three-year journey to the Ryugu asteroid, hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth – on a mission to discover the …

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PressTV-‘Americans waking up to necessity of real resistance’

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Americans are increasingly “waking up to the necessity of real resistance” against the state that has historically resorted to violence to maintain its protected status, says a writer and political analyst.

“It’s a white supremacist experiment that has been based in blood and violence from the beginning,” Daniel Patrick Welch told Press TV in an interview.

“A lot of people are realizing that the white extinction anxiety- this idea that white people are very scared about losing their protected status and are lashing out more openly and more brazenly— is a true threat,” he noted.

Welch made the comments in response to a new survey that shows about a third of US voters believe another civil war is possible because of political violence and immigration issues.

The poll by Rasmussen Reports found 31 percent of those surveyed believe it is “likely” that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next…

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Another Mass Shooting Fueled by Toxic Masculinity

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As the nation mourned yet another senseless mass shooting — this time at a local newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland on Thursday in which five people were murdered — details of the alleged gunman expose yet another perpetrator with a history of misogynistic and threatening behavior towards women.

On Friday it was reported that the man arrested by police at the scene of the massacre inside The Capital Gazette’s offices, Jarrod Warren Ramos — who had a “bitter history” with the newspaper going back years — had been charged by local prosecutors with five counts of first degree murder.

According to the Associated Press:

Ramos filed a failed lawsuit against the paper in 2012, alleging the newspaper, a columnist and an editor defamed him in an article about his conviction in a criminal harassment case in 2011.

According to court documents, five days after Ramos pleaded guilty to criminal harassment, the newspaper published a story describing allegations by a woman who claimed Ramos harassed her online for months.

The article said Ramos had contacted the woman on Facebook and thanked her “for being the only person ever to say, ‘Hello,’ or be nice to him in school.”

The woman told the newspaper that Ramos appeared to be having some problems, so she wrote back and tried to help, suggesting a counseling center. She said that set off months of emails in which Ramos sometimes asked for help, but other times called her vulgar names and told her to kill herself. She told The Capital that she told him to stop, but the emails continued. She said she called police and the emails stopped for months, but then started up again “nastier than ever,” the article said.

After a court rejected his lawsuit claiming defamation by the paper, Ramos’ ire reportedly intensified and he increasingly targeted the newspaper and its staff with threats. As Christian Christensen, professor of journalism at Stockholm University in Sweden, pointed out Ramos’ profile fits a familiar…

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UNRWA Does not Perpetuate the Conflict, the Conflict Perpetuates UNRWA

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Photo by Jordi Bernabeu Farrús | CC BY 2.0

In January, without warning, Donald Trump declined to pay $305 million of his country’s $365 million commitment to UNRWA.  UNRWA, the UN agency serving Palestinian refugees, remains $200 million short of the funds it needs to provide humanitarian services  for five million people, including 2/3 of the population of the Gaza Strip.

This is not really a story about under-funding UNRWA.  This is about the people who strenuously seek to eliminate it.

I worked as the business and livelihoods consultant to the office of UNRWA’s Gaza director, 2013 – 2015.  I had been Mercy Corps’ Gaza Economic Director for the previous two years.  I am not natural UN material, and the director, Bob Turner, once had to ask me not to refer to career UN staff as ‘you people’.  However, the blockade of Gaza necessitates a purpose-built humanitarian channel to the human beings who live behind the wall.  The violent onslaught of 2014 showed (again) how Gazans are endangered. While their suffering continues, while they are denied any freedom of movement, there must be an UNRWA.

Gaza’s Great March of Return has reinvigorated a specious argument against UNRWA:  by upholding Palestinians’ rights as they are written into international human rights law and UN resolutions, UNRWA’s very existence is said to perpetuate the conflict.  This makes a virtue of weakening UNRWA.

Yossi Klein Halevi hums this tune in a liberal key, in Letters To…

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Faceprint – LewRockwell

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A creepy footnote to the shooting in Maryland yesterday. Apparently, the identity of the shooter – who had no ID on him, refused to give his name and had “obscured” his fingerprints – was determined via the use of facial recognition software.

An NBC news story about the incident mentions this fairly casually and without comment:

“Senior law enforcement sources briefed on the investigation told NBC News that Ramos had been identified through the use of facial recognition software. The sources said earlier that he had somehow obscured his fingerprints, making identification difficult. (Anne Arundel County Deputy Police Chief Bill) Krampf would not confirm those details, and said Thursday evening that he had no knowledge of any facial recognition or anything about fingerprints.”

Italics added.

If, in fact, the shooter was identified via his “faceprint” – so to speak – it shows just how powerful this “tool” is.



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It is also implies pretty strongly that our faceprints are also in the system and the implication of that is troubling. We are probably not only being watched but individually recorded – our comings and goings – whenever we’re out and about. The cameras which are ubiquitous in most areas probably work like those Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) which can scan and “process” the license plates of every vehicle that passes within range of the reader.

Some people may not object, of course. If you have nothing to hide . . .  .

In which case, why object to random spot checks of our homes by government goons? If you’ve got nothing to hide . . .  .

Is it exaggerating things to suggest that all of this keeping track of…

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Video: ‘Full of friends’: Jose Mourinho on England – Belgium match

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Video: ‘Full of friends’: Jose Mourinho on England – Belgium match

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PressTV-US says it will detain migrant children with parents

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The administration of US President Donald Trump says it has the right to detain children and parents caught crossing the US-Mexico border illegally for the duration of their immigration proceedings.

The US Justice Department said Friday that a ruling this week by a federal judge in San Diego, California, requiring the government to reunify families separated at the border means authorities can legally keep families detained until their cases are complete.

The interpretation means immigrant families could spend months or even years in detention – even those seeking asylum – because of a years-long backlog in immigration court.

The Justice Department has previously said that cases in which immigrants are kept in custody move through the system quicker than if they are released.

“The Trump Administration has been engaged – since January of 2017 -in restoring order to the lawlessness at the Southwest border and protecting our nation’s citizens,…

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Prison Planet.com » Merkel stays up all-night to save her job by clinching EU migration deal that promises to halt onward flow to Germany and set up ‘processing’ camps INSIDE the bloc

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Daily Mail
June 29, 2018

A bleary-eyed Angela Merkel stayed up all night to save her job by clinching an EU migration deal – after pizza was delivered during the marathon talks in Brussels.

The German Chancellor had been given an ultimatum from her hardline coalition partners to find a Europe-wide solution to the migrant crisis.

Merkel’s political allies, Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU), had called for borders to be closed to asylum seekers in a row that threatened to bring down her government.

But the 63-year-old emerged after nine hours of ‘toxic’ negotiations to reveal a ‘joint text’ which included moves to stop migrants registered in Italy and other EU countries from moving on to Germany.

Pizza was delivered at 2am as exhausted leaders thrashed out pledges to share out refugees arriving in the bloc on a voluntary basis, create ‘controlled centres’ inside the EU and to strengthen external borders.

Hours later – and as leaders reconvened for further talks this morning – reports emerged that up to 100 Europe-bound migrants were feared to have drowned off the Libyan coast.

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This article was posted: Friday, June 29, 2018 at 7:46 am



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Blanket ban on upskirting images regardless of motivation sought by MP cross-party group — RT UK News

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Blanket ban on upskirting images regardless of motivation sought by MP cross-party group — RT UK News

A group of cross-party MPs will seek to amend the government’s upskirting bill to ensure a blanket ban on taking voyeuristic images no matter the motivation to close a loophole that could have allowed offenders to escape justice.

Conservative MP Maria Miller, Labour’s Jess Phillips MP, and Wera Hobhouse MP of the Liberal Democrats want to prevent upskirting perpetrators from avoiding criminal prosecution, whether their motivation was financial gain or they if did it “for a laugh.”

A loophole in the bill as drafted means that it would only criminalize those taking upskirting photographs for sexual gratification or to cause distress – failing to cover pictures of celebrities or photos taken for their own amusement.

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Miller told The Guardian: “If someone was successful in arguing this, it would make a mockery of the law.

“Our amendment will remove the categories and make it unlawful for all upskirting images to be taken, but insert various defenses, including taking the image for the purposes of law enforcement, or where it is a genuine accident.”

It comes after Conservative MP Christopher Chope caused widespread consternation by blocking the private members bill on what he said were procedural grounds. The government subsequently agreed to sponsor the legislation. The bill is scheduled to have a second reading on July 3.

The cross-party group of MPs is also recommending another amendment to the bill that would outlaw the distribution of upskirt images.

Miller has said that she will call for a more extensive review of sexual offences in her speech when she addresses the House of Commons on Monday.

“I’ll be calling for an overhaul of the way it is decided how something is a sex crime – it is absurd that upskirting is a sex crime but posting images online for thousands to see is not a sex crime. It is treating online crime as second-class crime,” she said. “Unfortunately, it’s not something that can be changed in this bill.”

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

US ambassador to Estonia resigns over Trump’s EU & NATO statements — RT US News

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US ambassador to Estonia resigns over Trump’s EU & NATO statements — RT US News

Donald Trump’s careless statements and clumsy transatlantic policies have reportedly forced the US ambassador to Estonia to retire from his post, saying these values are no longer compatible with “his DNA.”

“The United States’ Ambassador to Estonia, Jim Melville, announced his intent to retire from the Foreign Service, effective July 29, after 33 years of public service,” a State Department spokesperson confirmed, after it was reported that the career diplomat had sent out a private Facebook message notifying his friends of his decision to quit.

Apparently, American values under the new administration are no longer compatible with his “Foreign Service Officer’s DNA,” Melville said, explaining that he disagrees with Trump’s view of NATO and transatlantic relations with the EU.

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The diplomat’s decision follows a series of statements by the US president at the G7 summit in Quebec, in which he complained that Washington has become a “piggy bank that everyone keeps robbing.” The US leader also wasn’t shy from thrashing NATO, claiming that the military alliance was “as bad as NAFTA,” the North American Free Trade Agreement that he has vowed to renegotiate.

“For the President to say the EU was ‘set up to take advantage of the United States, to attack our piggy bank,’ or that ‘NATO is as bad as NAFTA’ is not only factually wrong, but proves to me that it’s time to go,” Melville said, in a private message seen by Foreign Policy Magazine.

Melville’s retirement announcement comes less than two weeks before the NATO summit convenes on July 11 in Brussels. At the meeting, Trump is widely expected to once again demand greater contributions from other member states of the alliance. “Germany has to spend more money. Spain, France. It’s not fair what they’ve done to the United States,” Trump told reporters on Friday, aboard Air Force One, reiterating his demands for a two percent contribution of a nation’s overall GDP to NATO.

Melville is not the first member of the American diplomatic community to have quit his job over Trump’s administration policies. Acting Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Susan Thornton has also reportedly decided to leave her job on Friday, CNN reports, citing two State Department officials.

‘Not the language used’: Trump after reports of ‘s***hole’ countries remark about African nations

The US ambassador to Panama, John Feeley, was also forced to resign in January this year, after Trump described Haiti and African countries as a “sh*thole.”

Elizabeth Shackelford, a member of the diplomatic corps in Africa, was another senior member of the Foreign Service community to announce her departure in November, citing the administration’s failure to promote US interests overseas.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-‘May hopes lawmakers will back Brexit plan’

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British Prime Minister Theresa May hopes parliamentarians will support her proposal to offer them a say over a Brexit deal, according to her spokesman.

The prime minister cannot accept a competing proposal from Britain’s House of Lords because it would weaken the government’s authority to secure the best possible deal with the EU, the spokesman said on Tuesday, before a showdown in parliament over her plans to leave the European Union.

“We cannot accept the amendment on (a) meaningful vote agreed in the Lords. Agreeing to amendable motions would allow parliament to direct the government on its approach to exiting the EU, binding the prime minister’s hands and making it harder to secure a good deal for the UK,” he told reporters.

May has said that it is essential to ensure that parliament could not block Brexit.

On Sunday, May defended her way of passing the legislation that will pull Britain out of the European Union. On Tuesday,…

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Video: ‘Germany deserve nothing’: Peter Schmeichel on Germany – S. Korea match

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Video: ‘Germany deserve nothing’: Peter Schmeichel on Germany – S. Korea match

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Why do they flee? | Dissident Voice

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Why do they flee?

The current mass exodus of people from Central America to the United States, with the daily headline-grabbing stories of numerous children involuntarily separated from their parents, means it’s time to remind my readers once again of one of the primary causes of these periodic mass migrations.

Those in the US generally opposed to immigration make it a point to declare or imply that the United States does not have any legal or moral obligation to take in these Latinos. This is not true. The United States does indeed have the obligation because many of the immigrants, in addition to fleeing from drug violence, are escaping an economic situation in their homeland directly made hopeless by American interventionist policy.

It’s not that these people prefer to live in the United States. They’d much rather remain with their families and friends, be able to speak their native language at all times, and avoid the hardships imposed upon them by American police and other right-wingers. But whenever a progressive government comes to power in Latin America or threatens to do so, a government sincerely committed to fighting poverty, the United States helps to suppresses the movement and/or supports the country’s right-wing and military in staging a coup. This has been the case in Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua and Honduras.

The latest example is the June 2009 coup (championed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) ousting the moderately…

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Video: ‘Excellent performance’: Peter Schmeichel on Sweden’s win in match against Mexico

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Video: ‘Excellent performance’: Peter Schmeichel on Sweden’s win in match against Mexico

Peter Schmeichel discusses results of Sweden-Mexico match, he believes it was ‘mental toughness’ which helped Swedes to gain the victory. Check out …

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New York Times restates Washington’s anti-China agenda in Sri Lanka

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New York Times restates Washington’s anti-China agenda in Sri Lanka

By
Wasantha Rupasinghe

29 June 2018

On June 25, the New York Times published a lengthy front page article entitled “How China Got Sri Lanka to Cough Up a Port.” The more than 3,800-word piece repeats the usual allegations manufactured by the Times, and other media conduits for Washington’s foreign policy propaganda, about growing Chinese influence in Sri Lanka.

The tone and timing of the piece is aimed at sending a clear message to Colombo: ‘US imperialism is watching you closely, do not attempt to divert from our military-strategic preparations for war against China.’

The US and its international allies have long put pressure on Sri Lanka, which is strategically located close to major Indian Ocean sea lanes straddling Asia and Africa. As a result, the island-nation has been dragged into the maelstrom of global geo-political tensions, mainly between the US and China, and Washington’s concerted economic and military offensive to undermine Beijing’s influence throughout the Indo-Pacific region.

According to the Times, China is using loans and aid “to gain influence around the world” and is willing to “play hardball to collect.” To prove this claim, the newspaper comments on China securing a majority share of Sri Lanka’s southern port of Hambantota. The facility was built during former President Mahinda Rajapakse’s rule.

Last December, after almost two years of negotiations, the current government of President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe formally handed over Hambantota Port to China Merchant Port Holdings (CMPH).

Under this agreement, Sri Lanka sold a 70 percent stake in the port to CMPH via a 99-year lease, while retaining a 30 percent share…

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Prison Planet.com » Top Air Force General says US military must continue to use AI

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Daily Mail
June 29, 2018

The US military has to expand its use of AI to stay ahead of its enemies and deter war, a top Air Force general  has warned.

Gen. James Holmes, who leads Air Combat Command, pledged that despite a Silicon Valley backlash ‘AI is a big part of our future’.

Holmes told a a Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington he was concerned that the recent row with Google over Project Maven might prompt other tech firms to boycott military contracts, but said ‘this is part of being an American.’

‘Americans have expectations about what their government does and whether the government uses technology and tools to infringe upon their rights or not,’ he said, according to Defence One.

‘We have really high standards as a nation that that things that we being forward as military tools have to live up to.’

‘The benefit of this will be: it will free up people to focus on thinking about what they see and what it means in the intelligence field and on passing that information to decision makers more timelty because you’re able to do it faster,’ Holmes said.

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Hillsborough football match commander to face trial, accused of 95 counts of manslaughter — RT UK News

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Hillsborough football match commander to face trial, accused of 95 counts of manslaughter — RT UK News

The football match commander who oversaw the Hillsborough football tragedy that saw 96 Liverpool fans die as a result of a crush – will now face trial, accused of 95 counts of manslaughter by gross negligence.

Former South Yorkshire chief superintendent, David Duckenfield, 73, will face prosecution in September for his role in the disaster, alongside Graham Mackrell, Sheffield Wednesday Football Club’s secretary at the time, who is charged with two offences – one involving the stadium safety certificate, and the another relating to health and safety.

Judge Sir Peter Openshaw, sitting at Preston Crown Court, lifted the legal restriction on Duckenfield’s prosecution, called a ‘stay,’ and granted a voluntary bill of indictment to permit the case to proceed.

The judge said: “In respect of the defendant David Duckenfield, I lift the stay. I confirm that I grant the voluntary bill of indictment to allow prosecution for manslaughter to proceed. I decline to order a stay on that charge.”

READ MORE: ‘It was hell on Earth’: Hillsborough campaigner recalls tragedy that claimed her brother’s life

A total of 96 Liverpool fans died as a result of the Hillsborough tragedy, which unfolded at the FA Cup semi-final in 1989 between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.

Duckenfield could not be charged in relation to the death of Tony Bland, who became the 96th supporter to die when he passed away after four years in a coma, due to the length of time that elapsed between the incident and his death.

Under the law, there was a time limit of one year and one day within which manslaughter prosecutions could be initiated after the disaster.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Put your junk away! Professor halts penis-measurement study over ‘public reaction’ to pic request

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Put your junk away! Professor halts penis-measurement study over ‘public reaction’ to pic request

Preview A US academic who appealed to the public for penis pictures has canceled her research, which has been “compromised” by “public reaction.” She failed to elaborate on what was likely a barrage of lewd pictures sent to her inbox.
Read Full Article at RT.com

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PressTV-Corbyn raps Trump’s ‘tragic, shocking’ migrant policy

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UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has denounced as “tragic and shocking” US President Donald Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their families at US-Mexico border.

The opposition leader said in a tweet on Tuesday that Trump’s immigration policy of zero tolerance was “immoral” as the process meant border guards separating children from their parents.

“It’s tragic and shocking to see innocent children caged like animals at US migrant camps and to hear their cries of anguish after being forcibly separated from their parents,” Corbyn wrote.

“It’s immoral and goes against fundamental human rights we must always respect, no matter the situation,” he added.

The British Prime Minister Theresa May also distanced herself from Trump’s immigration policy, saying that the UK approach was more “humane.” 

The UN Human Rights Council blasted on Monday Trump’s new policy of separating migrant parents from…

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Video: ‘Be all-business & tone down confrontation’ – Ex-Pentagon officer on anticipated Putin-Trump summit

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Video: ‘Be all-business & tone down confrontation’ – Ex-Pentagon officer on anticipated Putin-Trump summit

The Kremlin and the White House have agreed on the first official summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. This was revealed during the visit of US …

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PressTV-Calls growing to abolish US immigration agency over ‘abuses’

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An emerging coalition of politicians, activists and pro-immigrant protesters are calling for the abolition of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over border abuses.

They have deployed posters and slogans in their calls for the dismantling of the ICE, which has treated would-be immigrants cruelly and unfairly.

“We will continue calling on Congress to de-finance the forces of deportation,” Maria Bilbao, a Florida organizer for the pro-immigrant group United We Dream, told AFP on Friday, referring to ICE.

“Now is the time to stop and take to the streets to fight for an end to these abuses.”

The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy towards illegal immigration has led to family separations at the US border with Mexico.

Broadcast pictures of young children held in enclosures behind chain-link fences have triggered angry protests across the US and elsewhere, with larger demonstrations expected on Saturday.

“Occupy ICE”…

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Little House on the Orwellian Prairie

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In the name of progressive politics, ‘social justice warriors’ have turned their self-righteous wrath on a celebrated early-to-mid 20th century US author whose only crime was honestly portraying the events of her turbulent age.

There are particular moments in history when no pleasure can be gained from being right. These are such times. Following last summer’s riot in Charlottesville, Virginia over the removal of a statue to Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general in the Civil War, I wrote on these pages that removing historical monuments is just one step away from “history books purged… for fear of offending somebody.” What I could not have predicted at the time, however, was that I would be writing on that very topic less than a year later.

This week, the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) dumped a literary award named after author Laura Ingalls Wilder, giving it instead the soulless title ‘Children’s Literature Legacy Award.’ The stated reason for dropping the ‘Laura Ingalls Wilder Award’ was due to the “anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments“ that purportedly peppered Wilder’s writing.



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Laura Ingalls Wilder
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Before diving into that mosh pit, who was Laura Ingalls Wilder? Born in 1867, Wilder was a Wisconsin school teacher whose first book, ‘The Little House in the Big Woods’ (1932), wasn’t published until she was 65-years old. It told the semi-autobiographical story of five-year-old Laura and her life growing up in the rugged American Midwest between 1870 and 1894. In other words – snowflakes brace yourselves – it was a subject strewn with life’s occasionally vicious vicissitudes. A dozen or…

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Video: ‘Nothing really happening for Neymar’: Peter Schmeichel discusses Brazil – Serbia match

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Video: ‘Nothing really happening for Neymar’: Peter Schmeichel discusses Brazil – Serbia match

Peter Schmeichel discusses the match between Brazil and Serbia. Check out http://rt.com RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air Subscribe to RT!

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‘I’ve Never Completely Understood the Term Deep State’

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Breitbart
June 29, 2018

Thursday while testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray said he never had “completely understood” the concept of a “deep state” in government.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) asked, “So I asked in another hearing, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, was there a deep state at the State Department. He laughed, and he basically said no, there was not. So, Director Wray, I’m going to ask you. Is there a deep state at the FBI?”

Wray answered, “Congressman, I’ve never completely understood the term ‘deep state.’ What I can tell you is that we have 37,000 men and women working in field offices all over the country and in offices all over the world. They are people of character, of courage, of principle, of selflessness and of patriotism. And that’s the FBI that I see.”

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‘I’ve Never Completely Understood the Term Deep State’

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Breitbart
June 29, 2018

Thursday while testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray said he never had “completely understood” the concept of a “deep state” in government.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) asked, “So I asked in another hearing, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, was there a deep state at the State Department. He laughed, and he basically said no, there was not. So, Director Wray, I’m going to ask you. Is there a deep state at the FBI?”

Wray answered, “Congressman, I’ve never completely understood the term ‘deep state.’ What I can tell you is that we have 37,000 men and women working in field offices all over the country and in offices all over the world. They are people of character, of courage, of principle, of selflessness and of patriotism. And that’s the FBI that I see.”

This article was posted: Friday, June 29, 2018 at 7:52 am



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‘I’ve Never Completely Understood the Term Deep State’

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Breitbart
June 29, 2018

Thursday while testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray said he never had “completely understood” the concept of a “deep state” in government.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) asked, “So I asked in another hearing, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, was there a deep state at the State Department. He laughed, and he basically said no, there was not. So, Director Wray, I’m going to ask you. Is there a deep state at the FBI?”

Wray answered, “Congressman, I’ve never completely understood the term ‘deep state.’ What I can tell you is that we have 37,000 men and women working in field offices all over the country and in offices all over the world. They are people of character, of courage, of principle, of selflessness and of patriotism. And that’s the FBI that I see.”

This article was posted: Friday, June 29, 2018 at 7:52 am



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Sex trafficker convicted in ‘horrendous’ case — RT UK News

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Sex trafficker convicted in ‘horrendous’ case — RT UK News

A nurse who forced women to take part in a voodoo ceremony before smuggling them to Europe to work as prostitutes, has become the first UK national to be convicted of human trafficking for crimes committed outside Britain.

A Birmingham Crown Court heard how Josephine Iyamu, 51 and originally from Liberia, subjected her victims to juju, a form of voodoo whose adherents claim can exercise a psychological control over those subject to it.

Iyamu, who became a British citizen in 2009, charged her victims, aged between 24 and 30, up to £33,000 to be smuggled into Europe. The route saw the women travel through the Sahara desert from Nigeria to the Libyan coast. The “horrendous” journey involved some women shot at and gang rapped, according to National Crime Agency (NCA) Senior Investigation Officer Kay Mellor. They would then travel across the Mediterranean to Italy, from where they would be sent to Germany and forced into prostitution to pay off their debts.

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© Nikolay Gyngazov/Global Look Press

Describing the witch-doctors, Mellor said: “They exert an insidious control which an expert witness has said is more powerful than chains. As part of the oath-swearing ceremony they were given blood containing worms to drink. A chicken was used to hit her naked body on the back and on the chest.

“She had to eat the heart of the chicken which had just been killed. And the priest would cut their skin and mouth with a razor blade,” Mellor said after the case’s conclusion.

The investigation – named Operation Redroot – was instigated when one of Iyamu’s victims was arrested by German police. The woman, from a poor family in Nigeria, had been promised great amounts of money for working as a prostitute in Europe.

The police started wiretapping the victims’ phones, leading to the identification of Iyamu and subsequently the involvement of the NCA.  The court heard how, Iyamu – also known as Madam Sandra – forced one of her victims to have sex while she was still bleeding from an abortion she had after being raped and impregnated on her way to Germany.

In messages found by the police, the victim wrote: “Have you forgotten that you sent me straight back to work right after my abortion, even though I was still bleeding?” In response, Iyamu wrote: “Time is dragging on. Pull your finger out!”

Iyamu and her husband Efe Ali-Imaghodor, 60, were arrested at Heathrow Airport on August 24 last year after travelling back from Nigeria. Iyamu was convicted on five charges of facilitating the travel of another person, she will be sentenced on July 4.

She was also found guilty of perverting the course of justice after paying Nigerian police to arrest one of the victims’ relatives in a bid to stop her from testifying against her.

Mellor explained how Iyamu had been the first British national to be convicted of trafficking crimes under the Modern Slavery Act 2015 which did not involve British victims and which occurred abroad.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

US woman attacks black teen at swimming pool, bites cop during arrest (VIDEO) — RT US News

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US woman attacks black teen at swimming pool, bites cop during arrest (VIDEO) — RT US News

For most people, going to the swimming pool is a relaxing way to pass a sunny afternoon, but things didn’t go that way for a South Carolina woman who ended up assaulting a teenager and biting a police officer.

Stephanie Sebby-Strempel reportedly told a 15-year-old black boy and his friends that “they did not belong” at the pool in Summerville, South Carolina, according to the Charlotte Observer.

READ MORE: Teen who died in jail after being tasered in groin – and other cases involving the infamous stun gun

The incident report said Sebby-Strempel labelled the teens “punks” and used racial slurs. One youth captured part of the highly charged exchange on video and a family member shared it on Facebook. The video shows Sebby-Strempel striking the teen. It quickly went viral, has now been viewed nearly 850,000 times and the woman has been dubbed “Pool Patrol Paula.”

“Sebby-Strempel is clearly the aggressor in the assault even going as far as to continue to assault the victim as he was walking away from her,” the police report said.

 A spokesperson for Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office told the Observer that Sebby-Strempel got into a fight with police officers when they attempted to serve her with an arrest warrant.

A second incident report says she pushed one detective into a wall, causing knee injuries, and then bit another detective’s arm, breaking the skin.

Her day at the pool ended with charges of third-degree assault related to the teenage boy, and with two counts of assaulting a police officer while resisting arrest.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-‘UK officials resisted inquiry into 833 hospital deaths’

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PressTV-‘UK officials resisted inquiry into 833 hospital deaths’

A former health minister has accused government officials of trying to evade a public inquiry into the suspicious deaths of 833 patients at one hospital in England in 2002.

Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb said he suspected a “conspiracy” among officials as they attempted to reject an inquiry into the deaths of mainly elderly patients allegedly linked to Dr. Jane Barton.

He said his intervention at the last moment allowed the subsequent launch of the probe into circumstances around the incidents at Gosport War Memorial Hospital, The Independent reported.

Many of the patients were prescribed high doses of morphine to “keep them quiet” on overstretched wards, the report said.

It also noted that the £13m inquiry focused on the death certificates signed by Barton (pictured below).

A number of other investigations, which predated the inquiry, were carried out by police, prosecutors, the National Health Service and the General…

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Video: ‘Everything went as planned’: Schmeichel on Switzerland – Costa Rica match

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Video: ‘Everything went as planned’: Schmeichel on Switzerland – Costa Rica match

RT special World Cup host Peter Schmeichel evaluates the results of Switzerland – Costa Rica match. According to Schmeichel ‘everything went as planned’ for …

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PressTV-‘Trump told Macron France should leave EU’

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US President Donald Trump has reportedly tried to persuade his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron to pull his country out of the European Union in return for better bilateral trade terms.

According to a report by the Washington Post, Trump made the suggestion during a private meeting at the White House in late April, while he and Macron were discussing trade.

At one point, he asked Macron, “Why don’t you leave the E.U.?” the Post cited two European officials as saying.

Trump also said that if France exited the union, Washington would offer Paris a better trade deal than the EU, the paper added.

Meanwhile, the White House did not dispute the officials’ account, but declined to comment.

Also, it is not clear whether Trump made the comment as a joke or as a serious attempt to undermine the bloc.

Trump has also praised Britain for its push to leave the EU and offered London a great transatlantic trade deal after Brexit.

The Trump…

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31% Think US Civil War Likely Soon

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Most voters fear that political violence is coming from opponents of the president’s policies, just as they did in the second year of Barack Obama’s presidency, and nearly one-in-three think a civil war is next.

Thirty-one percent (31%) of Likely U.S. Voters say it’s likely that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years, with 11% who say it’s Very Likely. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 59% consider a second civil war unlikely, but that includes only 29% who say it’s Not At All Likely.

Democrats (37%) are more fearful than Republicans (32%) and voters not affiliated with either major party (26%) that a second civil war is at hand.

But 59% of all voters are concerned that those opposed to President Trump’s policies will resort to violence, with 33% who are Very Concerned. This compares to 53% and 28% respectively in the spring of Obama’s second year in office. Thirty-seven percent (37%) don’t share that concern, including 16% who are Not At All Concerned.

Fifty-three percent (53%) are concerned that those critical of the media’s coverage of Trump will resort to violence, with 24% who are Very Concerned. Forty-two percent (42%) are not concerned about violence from media opponents, including 17% who are Not At All Concerned.

The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on June 21 and 24, 2018 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points…

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Over 600 Women Face Arrest for Protesting US Immigration Policy

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In Washington, DC, 630 women were arrested Thursday during a massive nonviolent civil disobedience action on Capitol Hill protesting the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Protesters, chanting “We care” and “Abolish ICE,” and wearing mylar emergency blankets like those given to immigrants imprisoned in US detention centers, flooded the Hart Senate Office Building for a sit-in protest demanding that immigrant children be released from US custody and reunited with their families. Protesters included the actress Susan Sarandon and Linda Sarsour, co-organizer of the Women’s March on Washington.

AMY GOODMAN: Now to Washington, DC, where nearly 600 people, mainly women, were arrested on Capitol Hill, among them, the actress and activist Susan Sarandon.

PROTESTERS: We must resist! Women all around, raise your fist!

SUSAN SARANDON: I’m a mother and an American and a patriot. So, we have to keep the dialogue going so this doesn’t become normal, separating children from their families. Our whole system of denying asylum seekers, treating them as if they—it is unlawful, is completely wrong and unconstitutional. And we’re here to put our bodies down and try to keep the discussion going and make it clear that we’re not stopping. We’re going to fix this, if it takes many arrests to do it. And this is just one of many marches where people can understand that this is a serious—we’re taking this seriously. And in this moment of history, we’re going to be on the right side of what needs to happen.

MARITZA SOLANO: Maritza Solano, I’m from Silver Spring, Maryland. I come from an immigrant family, a mixed-status family, and I’m here to represent them and to represent the community that I currently work with, to tell—this is the first time I’m ever getting arrested or participating in this form of civil disobedience, because I think it’s time to sort of take a stand on this racist, anti-immigrant administration. And I’m here representing…

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The Supreme Court’s Fatal Attack on Public-Sector Workers

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Photo by Supermac1961 | CC BY 2.0

The courts have always been an instrument of plutocratic power. But the war against American workers has intensified in Trump’s America. With its recent rulings, Harris v. Quinn (2014) and Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (2018), the Supreme Court has set American workers’ rights back decades. Through these cases, the court is hammering the final nails in the coffin of organized labor, threatening what little remains of unionization in America. While just 11 percent of Americans are members of a union – most of which are in the public sector – the Janus case threatens to destroy what little remains of the economic foundation of state and local unions. A full collapse of unions in America appears to be increasingly likely in its aftermath.

The Harris case was a prelude to Janus, with the Supreme Court ruling that home care workers could opt out of paying “fair share” union dues. Under state law (at least before the Janus case), all employees operating in a union workplace were required to contribute to these dues. The logic behind these forced payments was simple: since all workers (whether in the union or not) are protected by the union’s collective bargaining agreements (which secure pay raises and other benefits for employees), all should be compelled to pay their “fair share” in helping secure those benefits. With Janus, fair share union laws have been overturned for all…

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Video: Putin it in the back of the net: Russian president has kickabout in Red Square

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Video: Putin it in the back of the net: Russian president has kickabout in Red Square

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Gianni Infantino visit Football Park in Red Square and kick the ball around. Check out http://rt.com RT LIVE …

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A New Military Force Established In Europe

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Alex Gorka
The Strategic Culture Foundation
June 29, 2018

The predictions have come true about the emergence of a new defense group that will change the European security environment.

On June 25, the defense chiefs from nine EU countries signed off on the creation of a new force called the European Intervention Initiative (EII), which is spearheaded by French President Emmanuel Macron. The new organization will have a common budget and a doctrine establishing its guidelines for acting and joint planning for contingencies in which NATO may not get involved. The group includes the UK, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Estonia, Spain, and Portugal. Italy may join soon. The initiative is not tied to the EU’s Common European Defense, which includes the PESCO agreement as well as NATO. Great Britain has always opposed the idea of creating a European defense alliance, fearing it would undermine transatlantic unity. Now it has done an about-face, as the rifts within the US grow deeper.

The new force is to be much more efficient than anything else the EU has to offer, with a streamlined decision-making process that will permit a quick reaction time. Its relatively small number of members will give it more flexibility in comparison with the EU or NATO. For instance, the EU’s four multinational military battle groups that were created as far back as 2007 have never been deployed.

Its main mission is to offer a rapid response to crises that could threaten European security. The operations are to be conducted independently from US control. The UK will remain a member of this European defense entity even after it leaves the EU next year. Denmark, which retains a special opt-out status and has not joined PESCO, is a signatory to the EII. This is a step on the path to creating a real European armed force to unite non-EU participants with those who keep their distance from the…

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Britain’s Prince William ignores history, politics & reality in right royal Middle East tour — RT UK News

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Britain’s Prince William ignores history, politics & reality in right royal Middle East tour — RT UK News

Prince William has spent the week in the Middle East, a tour which included the first official trip for a senior British royal to Israel. He was keen to avoid politics, so visited the Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

It was always going to be a difficult trip for a British royal. William is the symbol of a country which was, in no small part, responsible for the hullabaloo which still blights the Middle East today – while at the same time he has absolutely no power to do anything about it.

ICYMI takes a closer look at William’s tour of the Middle East.

For more, follow #ICYMI on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Judge strikes down Medicaid work requirement in Kentucky — RT US News

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Judge strikes down Medicaid work requirement in Kentucky — RT US News

A federal judge has ruled against Kentucky’s policy that would impose a work requirement on Medicaid recipients, temporarily halting the efforts to roll back the program’s expansion under Obamacare.

When the Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary approved Kentucky’s request, he had not considered the effect it would have on medical coverage, US District Judge James Boasberg ruled on Friday.

The HHS had “entirely failed to consider” Kentucky’s estimate that 95,000 persons would be removed from Medicaid rolls over the five-year course of the project, Boasberg said, adding that this goes against the central objective of Medicaid, which is helping the state provide medical assistance to its citizens.

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FILE PHOTO U.S. President Donald Trump attends the Women in Healthcare panel hosted by Seema Verma, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services © Kevin Lamarque

“This signal omission renders his determination arbitrary and capricious,” he concluded.

The program, called Kentucky HEALTH, was scheduled to go into effect on July 1. Several other states had followed suit and applied for waivers from the HHS, in an effort to scale back the expansion of the program mandated under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

“Even if Kentucky were able to ‘unexpand’ Medicaid (far from a foregone conclusion), Plaintiffs would have, at minimum, momentary relief,” Boasberg wrote in the ruling.

Because many of the plaintiffs suffer from various chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and mental health issues, they fear that even a temporary implementation of the work requirement “could cause serious harm,” the judge said, explaining his decision to send the program back to HHS for further review.

While the push to repeal and replace Obamacare failed in the Senate last year, the Trump administration has sought to roll back many regulatory aspects of the law, from tax penalties to Medicaid expansion.

The decision notes that Kentucky applied for the program in July 2017, and received approval on January 12, 2018. It is unclear, though, who actually made the approval decision – Tom Price, who resigned in September 2017, or Acting Secretary Eric Hargan, who was running HHS on the date of the approval. The current HHS chief, Alex Azar, was sworn in on January 29. The case names him as the defendant.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-UK’s trade minister says ‘zero’ chance of stopping Brexit

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UK Trade Minister Liam Fox says a vote in Britain’s parliament on Wednesday closed the door for good on any chance of the country staying in the European Union.

“As many of you will know, we took the decisive step last night in legislation that will now pave the way irrevocably for Britain’s exit from the European Union,” Fox told a debate in Geneva on Thursday.

“So in case anyone is in any doubt, the chances of the UK not leaving the European Union are now zero,” he added.

Fox said Britain was keen to ensure continuity as it left the trading bloc.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May won a Brexit vote in parliament on Wednesday, keeping her divided government’s plans to end more than 40 years of British partnership with the EU on track.

In Britain’s 2016 referendum, 52 percent, or 17.4 million people, voted to leave the EU while 48 percent, or 16 million, voted to stay.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has called on the…

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Video: ‘Next World Cup in North Korea’: Kim Jong-un lookalike visits Moscow

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Video: ‘Next World Cup in North Korea’: Kim Jong-un lookalike visits Moscow

The ‘Supreme Leader’ Kim Jong-un appeared in Moscow accompanied by two bodyguards, cheered the crowd and danced along to a rendition of the Katyusha …

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Video: Top U.S. & World Headlines — June 29, 2018

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Video: Top U.S. & World Headlines — June 29, 2018

Visit https://democracynow.org to watch the full independent, global news hour, read the transcript, search our archive and to make a donation to support us.

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Borneo: Not Just Nature, But Also Great Ancient Culture Has Been Destroyed

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Would you ever think of the third largest island on Earth – Borneo (known as Kalimantan in Indonesia) – as one of the cradles of the world’s democracy? Perhaps you wouldn’t, but you should.

This is how Kalimantan used to be

While Europe was engaged in myriads of internal as well as expansionist wars, in the once lush, tropical Borneo, people who belonged to the ancient local cultures, used to decide things communally, by consensus, or should we use the Western term, “democratically”. Judged by today’s standards, they were also living the lives of determined ‘environmentalists’, showing great respect for the nature around them – for all living creatures, plants, deep forests, wide rivers as well as humble creeks.

True, local people – Dayaks – were often marked as “headhunters”, at least by the European Orientalists. But that was only one of many features of their culture. Dayaks spoke at least 170 languages and dialects, enjoying complex fabric of cultures, customs and laws.

The bottom line is: in many ways and for many centuries, traditional Dayaks were able to co-exist perfectly well with their island and with the surrounding environment.

If left alone, that is what they would still be doing now – living their own lives, in their own place, and most likely, living well.

Unfortunately, that was not meant to be.

Borneo was attacked, colonized and devastated by European invaders. For a short period, the Japanese occupied the island,…

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There’s Something ‘Fishy’

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Judge Brett Kavanaugh sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.  Several news articles, including those here, here, and here, mention him as a leading contender to be nominated by President Donald Trump to replace retiring justice Anthony Kennedy on the United States Supreme Court.

The nomination of Kavanaugh would be ironic, given candidate Trump’s disparaging comment about a death investigation in which Kavanaugh played a major role.  On July 20, 1993, Hillary Clinton’s former law partner, and then deputy White House counsel for President Bill Clinton, Vincent Foster, was found dead in Virginia’s Fort Marcy Park.  The official U.S. government conclusion is that Foster committed suicide in the park.  In May of 2016, candidate Trump stated that the circumstances of the death were “very fishy.”  At the 2004 confirmation hearing for Kavanaugh, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) stated: “Mr. Kavanaugh served in the Office of Independent Counsel under Judge Starr, where he conducted the office’s investigation into the death of former Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr.”  A 1998 New York Times article also states that Kavanaugh “led the investigation into the death of the deputy White House counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr.”

Before Trump makes his decision, he should speak with Miguel Rodriguez, who was an assistant United States attorney in Sacramento, California when he was selected to lead the Foster death investigation for Kenneth Starr’s Office of Independent Counsel for a time in the mid-1990s.  I wrote about Rodriguez in my AT article in May of 2016 discussing the Foster case and my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to force public disclosure of photographs of Foster’s deceased body taken at the park.

After my lawsuit ended,…

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Video: Keiser Report: Central Bank Engineered Growth in Billionaire Class (E1246)

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Video: Keiser Report: Central Bank Engineered Growth in Billionaire Class (E1246)

Check Keiser Report website for more: http://www.maxkeiser.com/ In this final episode of the Keiser Report from Paris, France, Max and Stacy discuss the central …

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Video: Actor Jay Ellis of HBO’s “Insecure” Condemns Separation of Families at Protest in Brownsville, Texas

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Video: Actor Jay Ellis of HBO’s “Insecure” Condemns Separation of Families at Protest in Brownsville, Texas

https://democracynow.org – More than a thousand people from across Texas came to protest outside the federal courthouse in Brownsville Thursday, demanding …

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PressTV-Trump reportedly suggested pulling US out of WTO

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President Donald Trump has reportedly suggested withdrawing the US from the World Trade Organization (WTO), a move that would throw global trade into wild disarray.

Trump, who is a fierce critic of the WTO, had repeatedly talked with his advisers about the issue, Axios reported on Friday, citing people involved in the talks.

“He’s [threatened to withdraw] 100 times. It would totally [screw] us as a country,” a source familiar with White House talks told Axios.

“We always get f***** by them [the WTO]. I don’t know why we’re in it. The WTO is designed by the rest of the world to screw the United States.”

Trump has been critical of the WTO since the campaign trail and once he told NBC that the WTO was a “disaster”.

Meanwhile, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin toned down the report, calling it ”an exaggeration.”

Mnuchin said the president “has concerns about the WTO. He thinks there’s aspects that aren’t…

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Capital Gazette Staff Warned Years Ago to Call 911 if They Saw Shooting Suspect

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Suspect in newspaper shooting, which left five staff dead and two injured, is charged with five counts of first-degree murder

Capital Gazette staff were shown a photo of Jarrod W. Ramos years ago, and warned that if they ever saw him to call 911, a former editor and publisher said.

Authorities on Friday charged Mr. Ramos with five counts of first-degree murder following Thursday’s deadly attack there.

Thomas Marquardt, who led the paper when Mr. Ramos’s grudge against the Annapolis, Md., newspaper started, described the suspect as the most threatening person he ever had to deal with as a journalist. He said he asked the newspaper’s lawyers to contact the Anne Arundel County sheriff’s office to investigate what he considered to be obvious threats.

“Some people have said the threats were veiled, but it was pretty clear to us working there at the time,” said Mr. Marquardt, who stepped down in 2012 but continued to write for the paper. “They weren’t vague to me at all. I felt threatened the whole time.”

Mr. Marquardt said the suspect had launched a Twitter account that he directed at the newspaper and its staff. At one point, Mr. Ramos tweeted implying he wished Mr. Marquardt was dead, he said.

“Everyone knew what he looked like,” said the 70-year-old former editor and publisher, now retired and living in Florida. “We took it very seriously.”

Mr. Ramos allegedly entered the office at around 2:30 p.m. Thursday, shooting out the doors and then…

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Prison Planet.com » Maxine Waters Cancels Events Following “Very Serious” Death Threats

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Zero Hedge
June 29, 2018

Congresswoman Maxine Waters – who earlier this week urged her supporters to accost members of the Trump administration at restaurants and other public venues – has been forced to cancel a pair of public events after receiving a “very serious death threat.” The Congresswoman told CNN on Thursday that she’s seen an increase in threats since she made the controversial comments.

Waters canceled appearances in Alabama and Texas this week after receiving “threatening messages” and “hostile mail” at her office, including “one very serious death threat” from an individual from Texas.

“As the President has continued to lie and falsely claim that I encouraged people to assault his supporters, while also offering a veiled threat that I should ‘be careful’, even more individuals are leaving (threatening) messages and sending hostile mail to my office,” Waters said in a statement.

“There was one very serious death threat made against me on Monday from an individual in Texas which is why my planned speaking engagements in Texas and Alabama were cancelled (sic) this weekend,” she continued. “This is just one in several very serious threats the United States Capitol Police are investigating in which individuals threatened to shoot, lynch, or cause me serious bodily harm.”

Waters has been roundly criticized by President Trump, who published several tweets criticizing the Congresswoman and her ill-advised comments this week.

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May implores EU leaders to share security info post Brexit — RT UK News

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May implores EU leaders to share security info post Brexit — RT UK News

UK Prime Minister Theresa May has warned EU leaders not to put their citizens’ lives at risk by allowing the European Commission (EC) in Brussels to restrict security co-operation with Britain post-Brexit.

May, who is in Brussels hoping to advance Brexit negotiations, delivered a striking message to EU heads of state, claiming the EC was preventing the opportunity to form a new coherent UK-EU security pact, the Times reports.

The PM called for leaders to overrule the commission and extend the negotiating mandate allowing the unrestricted sharing of police and security information that would be “in all our interests.”

Senior British officials are thought to be infuriated at what they see as inflexibility within the commission over granting them access to shared real-time databases on terrorism suspects.

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Calling Brexit a

May told leaders on Thursday: “Our collective ability to map terrorist networks across Europe and bring those responsible to justice would be reduced. That is not what I want and I do not believe it is what you want either.”

“So when you meet as 27 I would urge you to consider what is in the best interests of the safety your citizens and mine and give your negotiators a mandate that will allow us to achieve this crucial objective,” she added.

Britain is currently part of the Schengen information system, which allows EU countries to share data on criminals, individuals under surveillance and missing people.

The European Criminal Records Information System is also accessible to British police, allowing them to ascertain whether a suspect has committed a crime in another member state. Britain is also hoping to negotiate access to Prüm, the new EU-wide DNA database.

European negotiators have until now insisted that these arrangements must come to an end after Brexit because Britain will officially become a “third country” outside the bloc’s legal framework.

“The precondition for a security agreement has to be that the UK accepts the consequences of its own decisions,” a senior EU official said.

“We don’t want a security gap. If there is a security gap, that is caused by Brexit, not the EU. We get the impression that the UK wants to transfer responsibility for its own decisions to the EU rather than accept the inevitable consequences of leaving.”

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© Artur Widak/Global Look Press

It’s understood that Britain has given up on remaining in the European arrest warrant scheme. Several EU member states, including Germany, have constitutions that prevent the extradition of their own citizens to any country outside the bloc.

May left Brussels early on Friday morning, after conducting talks long into the night with EU leaders. On departing talks she told reporters: “The future security partnership with the EU will be very important. We currently enjoy a high level of co-operation with member states of the EU in a number of areas on security that are important for our citizens — this is what is at stake.”

“I want to see a strong and deep security partnership continuing with our EU partners. We’ll be setting that out in more detail in the white paper we will publish shortly and I want to show we can accelerate and intensify negotiations. I want to see that from the European Union and the European Commission as well.”

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

‘It’s very, very good for business if the president attacks you’ – MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell — RT US News

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‘It’s very, very good for business if the president attacks you’ – MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell — RT US News

A primetime MSNBC news host just revealed the secret to high ratings in modern America to a chat livestream: Poke fun at the president until he attacks.

TV news is just a show, and nobody knows this better than Lawrence O’Donnell, news anchor, pundit and also the producer and writer of NBC’s political drama ‘The West Wing’.

On Monday, O’Donnell told Cheddar, an online live streaming channel, that he wishes President Trump would publicly attack him. Because, in his own words: “It’s very, very good for business if the president attacks you.”

O’Donnell, MSNBC’s second-highest rated host behind Rachel Maddow, also told the livestream that he believes President Trump focuses his attacks on CNN instead, as CNN has lower ratings and, he claims, “pay people to defend Trump” on air.

But when it comes to chasing those all-important ratings, MSNBC has a trick up its sleeve.

O’Donnell’s fellow host, Rachel Maddow, often deploys crocodile tears in her quest for ratings, most recently ‘struggling’ to get through a report on the Trump administration’s isolation and detention of illegal immigrant children.

And to those in the news business, ratings often come before truth. Last year, conservative watchdog group Project Veritas filmed an undercover interview with CNN producer John Bonifield. On camera, Bonifield admitted that the ‘Trump colluded with Russia’ narrative was “mostly bulls**t,” with “no real proof.”

However, Bonifield noted that the “bulls**t” story is “good for business,” and said that, thanks to Trump, “our ratings are incredible right now.”

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-British children exposed to harmful pollution: UNICEF

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A third of all children living in Britain, around 4.5 million, live in areas with harmful air pollution, a report by the UN children’s agency UNICEF said on Thursday.

Britain’s government last month announced plans to curb air pollution after the European Commission said it would take Britain and five other European Union member states to the EU Court of Justice for failing to respect air quality limits.

UNICEF said the plans do not go far enough and called for more funding for measures to help reduce pollution in the worst affected areas.

“Under the government’s air quality plans, unsafe levels of air pollution in around 71 percent of UK towns and cities is likely to be the case for another 12 years,” the report said.

A separate report by Global Action Plan, also released on Thursday, found that children are 30 percent more exposed than adults to dangerous pollution coming from vehicles on busy roads due to their shorter height.

British…

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Video: UN Declared Humanitarian Crisis in the DRC, President Kabila Rejects Aid

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Video: UN Declared Humanitarian Crisis in the DRC, President Kabila Rejects Aid

President Joseph Kabila insists that there is no humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo, even as millions of children starve. Kabila “doesn’t …

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Video: Chinese man’s pilgrimage across Russian World Cup cities… on horse

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Video: Chinese man’s pilgrimage across Russian World Cup cities… on horse

Tsin Li, Chinese-born man travels across Russia to celebrate World Cup… on a horse Check out http://rt.com RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air Subscribe to RT!

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Video: Texas Protesters March to Federal Courthouse Where Migrants Are Being Prosecuted in Mass Trials

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Video: Texas Protesters March to Federal Courthouse Where Migrants Are Being Prosecuted in Mass Trials

https://democracynow.org – Thursday’s Families Belong Together rally at the federal courthouse in Brownsville, Texas, culminated with people marching across …

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Supreme Court vacancy exposes bankruptcy of the Democratic Party

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Supreme Court vacancy exposes bankruptcy of the Democratic Party

29 June 2018

The resignation of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, which will give Trump another pick for the court and an opportunity to determine its trajectory for many years to come, has exposed the impotence and bankruptcy of the Democratic Party.

Trump has said that his appointment will come from a list of 25 candidates compiled during the 2016 presidential campaign with the assistance of the arch-reactionary Federalist Society. Whoever is chosen, the selection will serve to consolidate the power of the far-right on the court, fulfilling Trump’s pledge to strengthen executive power and undermine or reverse previous decisions on basic democratic rights.

Trump clearly feels emboldened by recent court decisions, including one upholding his racist ban on refugees from predominantly-Muslim countries. Though the administration faces mass popular opposition, it is seizing the offensive. Trump is traveling around the country, threatening his opponents, and seeking to whip up his crowds with openly fascistic rhetoric.

The Democrats, on the other hand, appear cowardly and feckless. At the slightest sign of genuine popular anger against Trump, the Democrats collectively wag their fingers and deliver sermons against “incivility.” Nothing frightens them more than the emergence of a mass popular movement against the billionaire thug in the White House. After all, is there not a danger that such a movement might be directed not only against Trump, but against the entire political establishment and the economic interests it defends?

During the 2016 election campaign and in the year and a half since Trump’s inauguration, the Democrats’ opposition to Trump has been focused obsessively on the alleged…

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Video: Destroying evidence? UK may buy Skripal’s house using taxpayers’ money – report

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Video: Destroying evidence? UK may buy Skripal’s house using taxpayers’ money – report

Reports have emerged in the British media, claiming that the UK government is going to spend a million pounds to buy the house of former Russian …

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Video: Susan Sarandon & Linda Sarsour Speak Out as 630 Women Arrested Protesting U.S. Immigration Policy

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Video: Susan Sarandon & Linda Sarsour Speak Out as 630 Women Arrested Protesting U.S. Immigration Policy

https://democracynow.org – In Washington, D.C., 630 women were arrested Thursday during a massive nonviolent civil disobedience action on Capitol Hill …

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My call for shooting journalists was just a ‘troll’

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The Hill
June 29, 2018

Conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos on Thursday insisted that he “wasn’t being serious” when he recently told two reporters that he “can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists.”

Yiannopoulos’s comments Thursday came shortly after a gunman opened fire in the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Md., leaving at least five people dead and several others seriously injured. Authorities have taken a suspect into custody, but have not yet released an identity or motive.

“You’re about to see a raft of news stories claiming that I am responsible for inspiring the deaths of journalists,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a Facebook post. “The truth, as always, is the opposite of what the media tells you.”

“I sent a troll about ‘vigilante death squads’ as a *private* response to a few hostile journalists who were asking me for comment, basically as a way of saying, ‘F—k off.’ They then published it,” he continued. “Amazed they were pretending to take my joke as a ‘threat,’ I reposted these stories on Instagram to mock them – and to make it clear that I wasn’t being serious.”

Yiannopoulos reportedly sent Davis Richardson, a reporter for the Observer, a text message this week, saying: “I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.”

The right-wing provocateur also sent the message to Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer, according to the Observer.

This article was posted: Friday, June 29, 2018 at 8:01 am



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Huge fire breaks out in 12th-floor flat in London tower block (PICTURES) — RT UK News

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Huge fire breaks out in 12th-floor flat in London tower block (PICTURES) — RT UK News

A huge fire has broken out in a 22-storey residential building in east London. It’s the second blaze to rip through a London tower block in just two days.

Smoke can be seen billowing into the sky from the 12th-floor flat in a block on Wellington Way, Mile End. The Fire Brigade confirmed half of the flat was set alight, but said rescuers had managed to reach the floor and bring the blaze under control.

Another witness claimed she could see the fire all the way from Shoreditch, and described it as “really bad.”

It comes after another huge fire erupted at a luxurious sixth-floor apartment in a tower block in Battersea, south west London, on Wednesday.

Flames and smoke poured out onto a balcony in one of the properties where apartments are marketed at £1 million each. 

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-EU says ‘last call’ for Britain in Brexit talks

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European Union president Donald Tusk issued a “last call” Friday for Britain to explain what it wants from Brexit, as the bloc warned time was running out and stepped up preparations for the prospect of no deal.

EU leaders meeting in Brussels expressed their concern at the lack of progress in negotiations, exactly nine months before Britain leaves the bloc in March 2019.

“There’s a great deal of work ahead and the most difficult tasks are still unresolved,” Tusk told an end-of-summit press conference.

“This is the last call to lay the cards on the table.”

Britain is hoping to agree a withdrawal deal and the outline terms of a future trading and security partnership by October, but talks have become stalled on the issue of the Irish border.

The EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier said he hoped a policy paper from London, due within weeks, would “contain workable and realistic proposals”.

“But let me mention once again that time is very…

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Video: First ever extraterrestrial interview? SophieCo Show marks 5 years (PROMO)

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Video: First ever extraterrestrial interview? SophieCo Show marks 5 years (PROMO)

The SophieCo show is 5 years old now! Thank you everyone for coping with us for all this time. There’s a lot of exciting things ahead for us still! Perhaps, actually …

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Video: Don’t Put Children in Cages! Reunite Families Now! A Message from Youth Protesters in Texas

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Video: Don’t Put Children in Cages! Reunite Families Now! A Message from Youth Protesters in Texas

https://democracynow.org – At Thursday’s protest in Brownsville a group of children took the stage to condemn the Trump administration for separating other …

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DNC Chair Tom Perez on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Win and Obama’s Immigration Policies

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Attendees at Thursday’s protest in Brownsville included Tom Perez, the chair of the Democratic National Committee. Amy Goodman had a chance to interview Perez about Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, as well as President Obama’s record on immigration. They also talked about Tuesday’s New York primary, where 28-year-old Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated 10-term Congressmember Joe Crowley.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re on the road in Brownsville, Texas, broadcasting from the US-Mexico border wall. Just behind me, you can see this wall. You can see the International Bridge to Matamoros, Mexico. On this bridge, just behind where we’re broadcasting, people seeking asylum have been turned away, told there’s no room or to come back later. Many wait days or weeks, baking in the hot sun, sometimes with young children, fearing violence if they return to their home countries. In fact, we’re right in front of a section of the wall. This is the Rio Grande Valley area, where thousands of parents and children have been forcibly separated by the Trump administration after they crossed and were apprehended by Border Patrol agents.

On Thursday, more than a thousand people gathered here in Brownsville outside the federal courthouse to demand all the families be reunited. Today, we’re bringing you voices of protest. Among those at the protest was the Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez. I asked why he’d come to Brownsville.

TOM PEREZ: I’m here today because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. What has been happening at the border, where children, young children, some in diapers, are ripped apart from their parents, is not only illegal, it’s inhumane, so inconsistent with our values as a nation. This president, this Republican Party, has failed every test—legal test, moral test—of leadership. And I’m here to make sure that…

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: There’s Room For Democratic Socialists In The Democratic Party

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1yvfdUG5pQ]

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The United States Withdraws from the World

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The United States has decided to no longer participate in the United Nations 47-member Human Rights Council (UNHRC). The number one reason cited by U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley was that the council is unfairly critically focused on Israel. The United States had already left the U.N.’s cultural organization UNESCO last October, the last straw reportedly being when the organization named the city of Hebron on the West Bank a Palestinian World Heritage site, which Israel declared to be unacceptable. At that time, the number one reason cited by Haley for the withdrawal was that the organization was too critical of Israel.

Haley has also made a number of other comments relating to the United Nations and Israel. Immediately upon taking office she complained that “nowhere has the U.N.’s failure been more consistent and more outrageous than in its bias against our close ally Israel” and vowed that the “days of Israel bashing are over.” In February 2017, she blocked the appointment of former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to a diplomatic position at the United Nations because he is a Palestinian. In a congressional hearing she was asked about the decision: “Is it this administration’s position that support for Israel and support for the appointment of a well-qualified individual of Palestinian nationality to an appointment at the U.N. are mutually exclusive?” Haley responded yes, that the administration is “supporting Israel” by blocking every Palestinian.

There is clearly a disinclination on the part of the Trump Administration to support multinational bodies, evident in the rejection of climate, trade and non-proliferation agreements. Complete withdrawal from the United Nations is not unthinkable in the current…

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Video: ‘Violating rights since 2001’: AT&T allegedly provides data to NSA

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Video: ‘Violating rights since 2001’: AT&T allegedly provides data to NSA

At least eight AT&T facilities across the US provide the NSA with data essential to spy on internet and phone traffic across the globe, the Intercept has revealed.

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Video: Voices from Brownsville Protest: We Have a Moral Responsibility to Help Asylum Seekers

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Video: Voices from Brownsville Protest: We Have a Moral Responsibility to Help Asylum Seekers

https://democracynow.org – Protesters in Brownsville are calling on the Trump administration to uphold its obligations to protect asylum seekers under the …

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PressTV-Who wants to preserve confrontation with N Korea

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The US military-industrial complex has the vested interests in preserving the confrontation on the Korean peninsula, according to E. Michael Jones, an American political analyst in Indiana.

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

The US military in South Korea has opened its “biggest overseas base,” just weeks after President Donald Trump said he would love to get American military out of the Korean peninsula, following a historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un earlier this month.

North Korea has long demanded US troops be removed from the Korean peninsula as part of a nuclear deal, but the US has been at pains to stress the issue is not a bargaining chip. The US has about 28,500 service members stationed in South Korea.

Trump said at a press conference following the June 12 summit with the North…

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Tracy Rosenberg on ICE’s Corporate Collaborators, Patty Lovera on the Undercovered Farm Bill

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Microsoft facial recognition technologyThis week on CounterSpin: “As a company, Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border,” the global tech company declared in a statement. “Family unification has been a fundamental tenet of American policy and law since the end of World War II.”  The same Microsoft bragged a few months ago about ICE’s use of its Azure cloud computing services to “accelerate facial recognition and identification” of immigrants, though the post has since been altered to omit the phrase “we’re proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud.”

The spotlight on the White House’s inhumane agenda on immigration and immigrants is exposing more than the devastatingly cruel practices in force at the border, but also the numerous big corporate and institutional players that are—often invisibly—enabling that agenda. And just like the agenda, the impact of these collaborations extends well beyond immigrant communities. We’ll talk about all that with organizer/advocate Tracy Rosenberg, executive director of Media Alliance and co-coordinator of Oakland Privacy.

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Combine harvesterAlso on the show: The 2018 Farm Bill has been in the news mainly because of House Republicans’ vehement efforts to deny more people the roughly $1.40-per-meal subsidy provided by the SNAP program, whose participants are overwhelmingly children, the elderly and people with disabilities. Whether such punitive, evidence-free ideas make it through to the final legislation will certainly be a test of something. The undercovered Farm Bill affects a number of other things as well: crop subsidies, conservation and—big picture—our ability to move toward a food system that is thriving, sustainable and healthy. We’ll hear about that from Patty Lovera, assistant director at Food and Water Watch.

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Prison Planet.com » Michael Moore Admits He Cries “Every Day” Over Trump

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Liberal tears never tasted so good

Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
June 29, 2018

During an interview with Stephen Colbert, Michael Moore admitted that he cries every day over President Trump and his policies.

Yes, really.

After calling on Democrats to be less “wimpy” and get angrier in opposing Trump, whom referred to as “the devil,” Moore acknowledged that reading news about how Trump is implementing his agenda literally causes daily blubbering fits.

“When you read the paper every day, you watch the news, do you ever cry? Do you ever tear up? Does this ever happen to you?” Moore asked Colbert.

Colbert responded that he did, before Moore admitted, “It happens to me now every day.”

The fact that Michael Moore literally cries over President Trump every day is likely to be met by Trump supporters with a mixture of glee and hilarity.

Moore, who in January said that America needed to be “cleansed” of its “white privilege,” appears to be a bit less bullish than in previous TV appearances.

In March last year, the far-left blowhard called on Democrats to declare a “national emergency,” claiming that President Trump and his staff are guilty of “espionage”.

In December 2016, before Trump was inaugurated, Moore told Seth Myers that “something crazy, something we’re not expecting” could happen to prevent Trump becoming president or that Trump could “quit” because he was “bummed out” by the amount of work required.

Two months after that, Moore cited claims that Trump had colluded with Russia to call for the president to be arrested and for Hillary Clinton to be installed in his place.

Despite supporting Bernie…

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Prosecute Blair govt officials at ICC after torture report – ex-diplomat Craig Murray (VIDEO) — RT UK News

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Prosecute Blair govt officials at ICC after torture report – ex-diplomat Craig Murray (VIDEO) — RT UK News

Craig Murray, the only British civil servant to express written concerns over UK complicity in torture and rendition, has told RT that former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw should face the International Criminal Court.

Murray was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan when he noted that MI6 operatives were receiving intelligence from the “torture chambers of the Uzbek regime,” later expressing written concerns back to the Foreign Office and “to Jack Straw personally,” only to be told that “in the War on Terror, the decision was that we would accept intelligence from torture.”

“I subsequently became aware that in fact the Americans were also shipping people into Uzbekistan specifically in order for them to be tortured under the extraordinary rendition system,” said Murray.

The only senior British civil servant to raise objections to the post-9/11 security policy, Murray soon found himself “railroaded” out of the Foreign Office. Murray has since become a proficient and widely-read blogger, frequently criticising the British political and media establishment.

As part of their inquiry into the UK’s role in the rendition and torture program, Murray gave evidence to the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) and features in their reports on the matter which were published Thursday.

First commissioned in 2010, one report dealt with the mistreatment and rendition of detainees between 2001 and 2010, while the other considers current issues. They offer a damning insight into how UK intelligence services were linked to torture and rendition of terrorist suspects after 9/11, which were much more widespread than previously reported.

Murray was one of only four out of 23 requested witnesses to be allowed by the government to give evidence to the ISC inquiry, a point which the ex-ambassador highlighted to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers.

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Camp Delta prison located at US Naval Base Guantanamo Bay © Michelle Shephard/Global Look Press

According to Murray, while the ISC published his evidence that the Foreign Office policy of accepting intelligence gained via torture was “deliberately kept secret” and “deliberately not written down,” they did not publish evidence “specifically implicating Jack Straw.”

“In fact Jack Straw’s culpability for all of this is skated over by the report although of course it is plainly impossible that all of this could be happening and he didn’t know.”

Backing renewed calls for a “full public inquiry in the whole rotten system,” Murray also said he’d like to see Straw “face a criminal court.”

Accusations of a government cover-up were followed up by Murray in a blog post on Friday, where he accused Downing Street of doing “everything possible to handicap the work of the committee.”

Accusing Theresa May of “specifically and deliberately” preventing the ISC from “questioning any official who might be placed at risk of criminal proceedings,” “tells us much more about their [the government’s] future intentions than any fake apology.”

Straw, who headed the Foreign Office from 2001-2006, is facing questions as to the extent of his knowledge of the program and why he did not ask for a briefing on the policy when accusations that widespread rendition and torture were already circulating widely in the media at the time.

Upon the publication of the reports, Straw has said that “that where I was involved in decisions I consistently sought to ensure that the United Kingdom did act in accordance with its long-stated policies and international norms.”

READ MORE: Ex-justice minister calls for fresh torture inquiry into UK’s ‘disgraceful involvement’ in rendition

In May, the British government reached an out-of-court settlement worth £2.2 million with the Libyan national Abdul Hakim Belhaj, who along with his then-pregnant wife Fatima Boudchar, were kidnapped from Thailand by British operatives and sent back to Libya to be tortured by the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.

At the time of his kidnapping, Belhaj was emir of the defunct Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an anti-Gaddafi guerrilla group.

For Murray, the award of “large sums of taxpayers’ money” by the government to the Belhaj family was in order to “avoid the possibility of Jack Straw having to appear in the dock.”

Praising the ISC for their “honesty, integrity and above all persistence” during the investigation, he said the Blair and Brown governments were “immersed in torture, a practice that increased hatred of the UK in the Muslim world and thus increased the threat of terrorism.”

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-Airbus threatens to leave UK under ‘no-deal Brexit’

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Aviation giant Airbus has threatened that it could leave the United Kingdom if the country exits the European Union (EU) without a transition agreement.

In a risk assessment report published on Thursday, the European plane-maker warned that London’s departure from the EU’s single market and customs union immediately and without a transition deal would lead to “severe disruption and interruption of UK production,” saying that “this scenario would force Airbus to reconsider its investments in the UK, and its long-term footprint in the country.”

Airbus also warned that a no-deal Brexit could have “catastrophic consequences” for its production plans and put thousands of British jobs at risk.

“This is a dawning reality for Airbus…Put simply, a No Deal scenario directly threatens Airbus’ future in the UK. Therefore, immediate mitigation measures would need to be accelerated,” Tom Williams, chief operating officer of Airbus’s…

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Video: Russian Foreign Ministry news briefing (Streamed live)

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Video: Russian Foreign Ministry news briefing (Streamed live)

The Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, is giving her weekly news briefing. Check out http://rt.com RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air Subscribe …

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Video: DNC Chair Tom Perez on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Upset Win & Obama’s Immigration Policies

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Video: DNC Chair Tom Perez on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Upset Win & Obama’s Immigration Policies

https://democracynow.org – Attendees at Thursday’s protest in Brownsville included Tom Perez, the chair of the Democratic National Committee. Amy Goodman …

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PressTV-Rights groups slam US Supreme Court ruling

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American rights groups have harshly criticized the US Supreme Court’s decision to uphold President Donald Trump’s controversial travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a number of other partner organizations challenged the top court’s ruling on Tuesday, denouncing the decision as a historic mistake.

The ruling “will go down in history as one of the Supreme Court’s great failures,” Omar Jadwat, an attorney with the ACLU, said in a statement.

“The court failed today, and so the public is needed more than ever. We must make it crystal clear to our elected representatives: If you are not taking actions to rescind and dismantle Trump’s Muslim ban, you are not upholding this country’s most basic principles of freedom and equality,” he added.

Nihad Awad, the chief executive officer and founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, slammed the decision as extremely…

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Venezuela: Towards an Economy of Resistance

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The Government of Venezuela called an international Presidential Economic Advisory Commission, 14-16 June, 2018 to debate the current foreign injected economic disturbances and seeking solutions to overcome them. I was privileged and honored to be part of this commission. Venezuela is literally being strangled by economic sanctions, by infiltrated elements of unrest, foreign trained opposition leaders, trained to disrupt distribution of food, pharmaceutical and medical equipment. Much of the training and disturbance in the country is financed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an “NGO” that receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department to “spread democracy” and provoke “regime change” around the world, by boycotting and undermining the democratic processes of sovereign nations that refuse to bend under the yoke of the empire and its ‘allies’ — meaning vassals, afraid to stand up for inherent human values, and instead dance spinelessly to the tune of the murderous North American regime and its handlers.

Imagine, Venezuela has by far the world’s largest known reserves in hydrocarbon under her territory. more than 300 billion barrels of petrol, vs. 266 billion barrels, the second largest, of Saudi Arabia. Venezuela is a neighbor, just across the Caribbean, of the United States’ arsenal of refineries in Texas. It takes about 3 to 4 days shipping time from Venezuela to the Texan refineries, as compared to 40-45…

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Video: ‘People should assume the best’: British reporter responds to claims of racism in Russia

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Video: ‘People should assume the best’: British reporter responds to claims of racism in Russia

Due to scare-mongering in the media, fewer Brits have actually come to this World Cup than during previous ones. Other fans, however, seem thrilled to be in …

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PressTV-US opens ‘biggest overseas base’ in South Korea

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PressTV-US opens ‘biggest overseas base’ in South Korea

US forces in South Korea have opened their “biggest overseas base”, just weeks after President Donald Trump said he wanted to bring the troops home. 

Camp Humphreys straddles an area of over 14.5 million square meters. It’s in Pyeongtaek around 70 kilometers south of Seoul.

The two allies agreed as long ago as 1990 to relocate the previous headquarters to Camp Humphreys, but the project was delayed for years by resident protests.

The relocation project was revived following an agreement back in May 2003.

The commander of US Forces Korea, Vincent K. Brooks, said South Korea had shouldered nearly all the cost of building the military base

“This was a project that cost nearly $10.8 billion to build over 10 years and the Republic of Korea investment was over 90 percent of the cost,” Brooks said in a ceremony at the new base on Friday.

US soldiers stand guard during a joint medical evacuation exercise as part of the annual massive…

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Mob Of Reporters Angrily Yell At Trump About Maryland Shooting

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“WHY ARE YOU WALKING AWAY?”

Steve Watson
Prison Planet.com
June 29, 2018

This is, apparently, how journalism is conducted in 2018 – aggressively yelling at The President from across the White House lawn as he arrives back from other duties:

Angry reporters seem to have adopted the Jim Acosta method of journalism, making themselves the center of attention by yelling out agenda driven questions at incredibly inappropriate times.

Some believe that the main protagonist was CNN analyst Brian Karem:

Of course, by this point Trump had already released a statement, which was publicly available:

CNN and others were quick to blame Trump for the shooting at Maryland daily newspaper The Capital Gazette, claiming, without any evidence or having details, that the attack was driven by Trump’s anti-media rhetoric.

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Ex-Guantanamo Bay prisoner says British intel agencies the ‘only reason’ he was locked up (VIDEO) — RT UK News

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Ex-Guantanamo Bay prisoner says British intel agencies the ‘only reason’ he was locked up (VIDEO) — RT UK News

An ex-Guantanamo Bay inmate has said British intelligence agencies are the “only reason” he was locked up in the controversial facility. It follows revelations that the UK was more involved in US torture than previously known.

Moazzam Begg, who spent two years in Guantanamo, said that British interference was the only reason for his detention in the prison, which was established by former US president George W. Bush as part of the ‘War on Terror’ after the 9/11 attacks.

“The first instance in which an MI5 agent saw me was when my hands were tied behind my back, shackled to my legs, and a hood was placed over my head while Americans pointed guns towards me,” Begg said.

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Camp Delta prison located at US Naval Base Guantanamo Bay © Michelle Shephard/Global Look Press

His comments come after two long-overdue parliamentary reports found UK intelligence agencies colluded with the US practice of kidnapping and torturing suspected terrorists to a greater extent than previously thought.

The reports by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) found that the UK was responsible for “inexcusable actions” at the hands of US guards, while “tolerating” others.

Asked by RT’s Bill Dod what he makes of the report finding no proof that British agencies had tortured anybody, Begg said: “That doesn’t mean anything,” before adding “Britain did almost everything other than physically carry out the torture.

“In fact, a lot of the torture only happened because the British made sure these people ended up in Guantanamo because they furnished that information to Americans. In my case, the Americans came to me only because of what the British told them.”

Begg called on Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister at the time, to be tried at the International Court of Justice.

“I hope that people like Tony Blair and people who are involved with him like Jack Straw are taken to The Hague for war crimes because torture in the context of war is a war crime,” Begg told Dod on Thursday.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Radio geek may have intercepted order for B-52 bomber to drop nukes — RT US News

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Radio geek may have intercepted order for B-52 bomber to drop nukes — RT US News

A radio enthusiast has recorded what is said to be a coded message directing a B-52 strategic bomber to launch a nuclear attack off the US Pacific coast. The nightmare scenario was part of the drills simulating nuclear warfare.

The dialogue was intercepted on Tuesday by radio and Boeing aircraft enthusiast Matt Cawby. It appears to be one of the so-called Emergency Action Messages (EAMs) used to initiate nuclear attacks, Tyler Rogoway, editor of military aviation-themed blog The War Zone, writes.

The exchange between the B-52 pilot, codenamed ‘Doom 61’ in the drill, and an operator on the ground, was posted by Cawby on Twitter. The message itself is relayed via NATO phonetic alphabet. The bomber was flying off the coast of Washington and Oregon when it was intercepted by the aviation enthusiast, according to Rogoway.

The EAMs direct the nuclear forces to unleash pre-planned nuclear strikes. Rogoway explains that “in order for that deterrent to work, enemies need to know that the command and control infrastructure that controls the arsenal is totally reliable and can act with sudden efficiency. Hence the display of force and the radio transmissions from last evening.”

The B-52s, along with B-2 stealth bombers, comprise the ‘air leg’ of the US nuclear triad. The other two ‘legs’ are the ballistic missile submarines and silo-based ICBMs.

READ MORE: Need better tech & more infowars: NATO fears lack of air superiority against ‘peer adversary’

Last August, the Pentagon awarded Lockheed Martin Corporation and Raytheon Company a $900-million contract each for manufacturing nuclear-tipped cruise missiles for B-52s. “This weapon will modernize the air-based leg of the nuclear triad,” said Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said in a statement. The new missiles are expected to be fielded by 2030.

However, recent reports also indicated that the bombers may also be fitted with wing pylons able to support MOAB, the most powerful non-nuclear US bomb.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-Airbus in ‘great difficulty’ if transition deal fails

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Airbus will be in “great difficulty” if the plane-maker firm fails to get a transition agreement over the UK’s divorce from the European Union (EU), says an academic in London, after aviation giant threatened that it could leave the United Kingdom after the country exits the bloc.

“Airbus is in a situation where if it does not get a transition agreement, it will be in great difficulty,” Dr. Rodney Shakespeare, a university professor in London, said in an interview with Press TV on Friday.

“Airbus is already in some difficulty losing its trade with Iran as a result of America and it doesn’t want to lose its cooperation and indeed possibly its manufacturing connections with Europe,” he added.

Shakespeare also noted that as the transition agreement is an immediate period of two years, Airbus will have to be moving quickly to address a difficult and uncertain situation.

The firm called on the UK to extend the planned…

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Video: Civil War continues: Libyan National Army closing in on Derna

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Video: Civil War continues: Libyan National Army closing in on Derna

Libya is being torn apart by rival armed groups, seven years on from the fall of Gaddafi. And the city of Derna is on the front line of the civil war. Check out …

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PressTV-White man charged with murder in Maryland shooting

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An American white man in his late 30s has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder in the shooting death of employees at a newspaper office in the US state of Maryland.

The 38-year-old suspect on Thursday afternoon allegedly targeted The Capital Gazette building in Annapolis, Maryland, shooting his way into the newsroom and killing four journalists and a staffer before police arrested him.

The suspect has been named as Jarrod W. Ramos. In 2012, he filed a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper and a columnist over a July 2011 article that covered a criminal harassment charge against him.

The court case made staff concerned about the Ramos’ behavior, the newspaper’s former editor said. “He waged a one-person attack on anything he could muster in court against the Capital,” said Tom Marquardt. “I said during that time, ‘This guy is crazy enough to come in and blow us all away.’”

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The Incredibles – LewRockwell

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What proportion of the top creative artists in Hollywood, the heavyweight auteurs, are men of the right?

This old question has come up again with the box office triumph of the anti-egalitarian Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 and the comments about Donald Trump by David Lynch, director of Twin Peaks and Eraserhead.

Lynch’s work isn’t to everyone’s taste, but obviously he’s an American original who makes movies and television shows that nobody else could (or perhaps would). If you are as admired as David Lynch (his Mulholland Drive came in No. 1 in a recent poll of critics as the best film of the 21st century, although that could be an artifact of the survey methodology), you can, hopefully, continue to have a career after saying to The Guardian:

“[Trump] could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much. No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way.” While Trump may not be doing a good job himself, Lynch thinks, he is opening up a space where other outsiders might. “Our so-called leaders can’t take the country forward, can’t get anything done. Like children, they are. Trump has shown all this.”

Trump joked:

“There’s David Lynch. Enjoy it because his career in Hollywood is officially over.”

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The square-jawed Lynch, who identifies himself on Twitter as “Filmmaker. Born Missoula, MT. Eagle Scout,” has many obsessions, but few that overlap with those of the social justice jihadis. Fortunately for Lynch, much of the press can’t imagine that his assessment of Trump could be anything other than some complex aesthetic put-on. They assume: By definition, unique artists…

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Video: Putin-Trump summit confirmed: Russian and US presidents to meet in Helsinki

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Video: Putin-Trump summit confirmed: Russian and US presidents to meet in Helsinki

The much-anticipated talks between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are set for July 16 in Helsinki, Finland, the Kremlin and White House confirmed. This will …

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PressTV-17 states sue Trump admin. over family separations

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Seventeen US states led by Democratic attorneys general have sued the administration of President Donald Trump over separating immigrant parents from their children.

The states joined Washington DC on Tuesday in filing the lawsuit in US District Court in Seattle, the first legal challenge over the practice.

“The administration’s practice of separating families is cruel, plain and simple,” New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said in an emailed statement. “Every day, it seems like the administration is issuing new, contradictory policies and relying on new, contradictory justifications. But we can’t forget: the lives of real people hang in the balance.”

This comes after Trump, who blamed Democrats for the separations, issued an executive order last week, ending the practice under his “zero tolerance” policy.

The states, however, argue that Trump’s order is full of caveats and fails to reunite parents and children, insisting his…

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Anti-China “foreign interference” bills rammed through Australian parliament

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Anti-China “foreign interference” bills rammed through Australian parliament

By
Mike Head

29 June 2018

Working in lockstep with the Labor Party, the Liberal-National Coalition government last night pushed through the Australian parliament the most extensive, anti-democratic legislation in the country since World War II.

With the two parties using their combined numbers to cut off debate, two massive “foreign interference bills” were passed by both houses of parliament in near-record time—less than three days.

Totalling some 150 pages, the Espionage and Foreign Interference (EFI) and Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme (FITS) laws constitute a far-reaching assault on fundamental legal and democratic rights.

Drawn up entirely behind the backs of the Australian people, the bills are key parts of a sweeping package of draconian legislation. It has a twin purpose: to prepare for Australian involvement in a US-led war against China, and to create police-state conditions that criminalise opposition to the war drive and the accompanying deepening attack on working class living conditions.

The haste to bulldoze the laws through parliament is bound up with intensifying pressure from Washington, where the legislation is regarded as a precedent-setting model.

The legislation is also seen by the Trump administration and throughout US ruling circles as a test of the Australian political establishment’s commitment to the escalating US trade and military confrontation against China, Australia’s largest export market.

When he first introduced the bills last December, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull cited “disturbing reports about Chinese influence” as justification for the measures.

Those still-secret “reports” were delivered by the Australian intelligence…

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Prison Planet.com » CNN Blames Trump For Newspaper Shooting That Had Nothing to Do With Him

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Gunman’s vendetta against newspaper stretched back 7 years

Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
June 29, 2018

null

CNN’s Asha Rangappa blamed Donald Trump’s rhetoric for the shooting of journalists at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis yesterday despite the fact that the gunman’s vendetta against the newspaper stretched back seven years and had nothing to do with Trump.

Armed with smoke grenades and a shotgun, Jarrod W. Ramos opened fire on journalists working at the newspaper yesterday afternoon, killing five.

Almost as soon as the shooting was reported, and with zero knowledge of the gunman’s motive, mainstream press talking heads began blaming Trump’s anti-media rhetoric.

Prime amongst them was CNN legal and national security analyst Asha Rangappa, who suggested that Trump’s “dangerous rhetoric” could have been a motivating factor.

“Just to relate this back to kind of a bigger conversation that we’ve had this week about civility and rhetoric, you know, lone wolf actors are often alienated individuals who are looking to displace their anger and frustration onto some kind of outside entity or enemy, and I think it’s worth pointing out that we’ve had a constant rhetoric coming even from the President that the press is the enemy of the people, that’s been repeated constantly, and I think it’s worth noting if there is a link here that the publication was being targeted that that kind of rhetoric can be very dangerous in these times,” said Rangappa.

The insinuation that Trump’s rhetoric was somehow to blame for the shooting is completely inconsistent with the facts.

The gunman sent a tweet minutes before the attack making reference to the judge who dismissed his 2012 lawsuit against the Capital Gazette.

It quickly emerged that Ramos was pursuing a vendetta against the newspaper, having sued them for defamation over a 2011 article in which they reported on his…

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Congressman warns US heading towards civil war – 31% of Americans agree — RT US News

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Congressman warns US heading towards civil war – 31% of Americans agree — RT US News

The United States is heading towards civil war, Congressman Steve King has warned. His sentiments are mirrored by a troubling new poll which shows that 31% of Americans believe a second civil war is likely in the next five years.

The Republican congressman from Iowa made his eyebrow-raising comment in response to a report about protesters occupying an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in Portland, Oregon. He tweeted that “America is heading in the direction of another Harpers Ferry,” adding that “after that comes Ft. Sumter.”

King was referring to the siege of Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina in April 1861, which marked the start of the Civil War. Harper’s Ferry was a Virginia town where militant abolitionist John Brown led a raid against a federal armory in October 1859, in a failed attempt to spark a slave uprising.

Upheaval over US President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, as well as a child detention practice which was reversed last week via executive order, has left America deeply divided.

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© Jonathan Bachman

Amid conflicting accusations of creeping fascism and perilous open borders, the congressman’s startling belief appears to be shared by a surprisingly large percentage of Americans. A new Rasmussen national telephone and online survey found that 31 percent of likely US voters say it’s “likely” that the United States will descend into a second civil war in the next five years. Eleven percent of respondents said that civil war in the near future was “very likely,” while only 29 percent said it was “not at all likely.”

Democrats (37 percent) were more fearful than Republicans (32 percent) and voters not affiliated with either major party (26 percent) that a second civil war is at hand. The survey also found that 59 percent of all voters are concerned that those opposed to Trump’s policies will resort to violence.

And while many Americans appear to be bracing for some kind of violent internal conflict, others believe that the second civil war has already begun. Tennessee Law Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds argued in a recent USA Today column that a new civil war is “well underway,” while Bloomberg columnist Thomas Schaller declared that America was “at the beginning of a soft civil war.”

But pundits aren’t the only ones raising the alarm: Provocative statements about the rise of “fascism” and the need for “revolution” have become commonplace among American actors, musicians and activists.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

May not bluffing about no deal Brexit

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Liam Fox The British International Trade Secretary says UK Prime Minister Theresa May is not “bluffing” when she threatens to take Britain out of the European Union without a deal.

“Our negotiating partners would not be wise if they believed the Prime Minister was bluffing,” he said about May’s resolve to BBC.

He added the consequences of a situation where no deal is reached are actually detrimental to EU members too: “If we were to leave, the economic impact on a number of European countries would be severe. Countries like Ireland, countries like the Netherlands, countries like Belgium — would really feel the impact of that and that cannot be what the European Union 27 actually want to see.”

“The Prime Minister has always said that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed and that no deal would be better than a bad deal, and I think it’s essential as we enter the next phase of the negotiations that the European Union…

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Video: The Peter Schmeichel Show: Legendary goalkeeper talks to SUI Captain & frmr Couch of Costa Rica

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Video: The Peter Schmeichel Show: Legendary goalkeeper talks to SUI Captain & frmr Couch of Costa Rica

Peter Schmeichel talks to Stephan Lichtsteiner and Paulo Wanchope. Check out http://rt.com RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air Subscribe to RT!

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PressTV-Pentagon chief in Beijing amid US-China tensions

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US Defense Secretary James Mattis has met his Chinese counterpart in Beijing amid increasing tensions between Washington and Beijing over the South China Sea and President Donald Trump’s trade policy. 

Mattis arrived Wednesday on his first tour to the Asian country in what seems to be a bid to find areas of cooperation despite a mounting military rivalry between the two superpowers.

In opening remarks, Defense Minister Wei Fenghe described the visit as essential “to increase the strategic trust between our countries.”

He said Mattis’ remarks “carry weight in both the military and political circles back in the United States.”

Mattis said, in response, that military relations were critical to the deeper relationship between the two countries, expressing hope that the discussions would involve “very open and honest dialogue.”

His visit comes at the time when there is currently a bitter dispute over China’s placement of advanced weapons…

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An Interview With Noam Chomsky

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With its spate of right-wing rulings this week, the Supreme Court has paved the way for Donald Trump and the Republican-dominated Congress to intensify their attacks on human rights, workers and the country’s democratic institutions, dragging the US deeper into the abyss.

US political culture has long been dominated by oligarchical corporate and financial interests, militarism and jingoism, but the current Trumpocracy represents a new level of neoliberal cruelty. Indeed, the United States is turning into a pariah nation, a unique position among Western states in the second decade of the 21st century.

What factors and the forces produced this radical and dangerous shift? How did Trump manage to bring the Republican Party under his total control? Is Trumpocracy a temporary phenomenon, or the future of American politics? Is the Bernie Sanders phenomenon over? In the exclusive Truthout interview below, world-renowned scholar and public intellectual Noam Chomsky, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at MIT and currently Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, tackles these questions and offers his unique insights.

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, while many in the country and the world at large watch aghast as Donald Trump’s nightmare of white supremacy continues to unravel the United States, it still remains something of a puzzle as to what propelled Trumpism to political prominence. For starters, why did voters turn to Trump? Who are the people that make up his hard-core base, and how do we explain the fact that he has essentially taken over the Republican Party without any serious opposition?

Noam Chomsky: Part of the solution to the puzzle is Obama’s performance in office. Many were seduced by the rhetoric of “hope” and “change,” and deeply disillusioned by the very early discovery that the words had little substance. I don’t usually agree with Sarah Palin, but she had a point when she ridiculed this hopey-changey stuff. A fair number of Obama…

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The Peace Deal That is All Israel

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Photo by U.S. Embassy Jerusalem | CC BY 2.0

Honor, like integrity, is not a commodity,  like a gilded condominium in New York City for sale to the highest bidder. Nor does it license a messenger to whisper through a backdoor that which cannot be said through the front because it’s been closed for want of fairness and respect.

Yet, having been rebuked by Palestinian leadership due to the shameful move of the US Embassy to the capital of Palestine that is precisely what Jared Kushner has tried to do with his deceitful appeal to the Palestinian people in his recent interview with Al Quds.

It would be far too easy to dismiss Kushner as a mere partisan novice who, with his family, has spent a lifetime extolling the primacy of the Jewish state in the chase of personal greed, framed as religious principle. To them, like other Zionists, Palestine is but an impediment in a supremacist reach that began with the blessings of the United States well before the onset of the Nakba.

Jared Kushner, the Kushner family, and its Kushner Companies holdings are deeply tied to the financing of Israeli occupation in Palestine and the exploitation of Palestinians.

Jared Kushner has been a regular visitor to Israel since his childhood. As a 16-year-old, he and thousands of other Jewish teenagers were led on a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp by Benjamin Netanyahu, himself, waving Israeli flags along the way. At the end, they flew to Israel as part of their “Zionist rebirth.”

The…

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Video: Migration may put trust in EU in question – Merkel

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Video: Migration may put trust in EU in question – Merkel

EU leaders are gathering today in Brussels to discuss pressing issues. Leaders are saying it’s a crucial event for the future of the European Union, as one of the …

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PressTV-US charges Chinese university tied to army

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US prosecutors on Tuesday charged a Chinese university linked to China’s army with conspiring to violate US export laws in order to obtain items from the United States that could be used in anti-submarine warfare.

An indictment filed in federal court in Boston charged China-based Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU), along with Shuren Qin, a Chinese national living in Wellesley, Massachusetts, who was arrested last week.

The indictment also charged LinkOcean Technologies, a Chinese company headed by Qin, whose clients, according to prosecutors, include Chinese research institutes and the naval warfare branch of the People’s Liberation Army.

Lawyers for Qin did not respond to a request for comment. Neither the university nor LinkOcean responded to emails seeking comment.

Speaking in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said he had noted the reports.

“From a principled position, China always asks Chinese citizens to…

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Prison Planet.com » Dem congresswoman among anti-Trump protesters arrested inside Capitol office building

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Fox News
June 29, 2018

Washington Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal is among the more than 500 protesters who were arrested inside a Capitol office building on Thursday while demonstrating against President Trump’s policies on illegal immigration.

The protest, which included hundreds demonstrators, took place in the Hart Senate Office Building. The protesters were calling for the abolishment of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and were heard chanting “abolish ICE.” Most of the protesters were female.

Eva Malecki, a spokeswoman for the United States Capitol Police, said 575 individuals were charged with unlawfully demonstrating in the atrium of the building.

“I was just arrested with 500+ women and @WomensMarch to say @RealDonaldTrump’s cruel zero-tolerance policy will not continue. Not in our country. Not in our name. June 30 we’re putting ourselves in the street again,” Jayapal tweeted.

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This article was posted: Friday, June 29, 2018 at 6:08 am



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Danny Dyer breaks internet by talking Brexit — RT UK News

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Danny Dyer breaks internet by talking Brexit — RT UK News

A one-off special of ITV’s Good Evening Britain did not disappoint, when a Brexit rant from actor Danny Dyer saw him branding David Cameron a t**t, and demanding that the former prime minister is held accountable for Brexit.

The usual breakfast show duo of  Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid went on air at the later time 9.15pm, after England’s 1-0 loss to Belgium. Among the eclectic lineup of guests were former Baywatch lifeguard, model and animal rights activist Pamela Anderson and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

But it was Eastenders star Dyer who stole the show. His first move was to tell Morgan to “just stop talking” as Morgan attempted a stumbled apology about criticizing Love Island contestants – Dyer’s daughter, Dani, is on the show – but the gem that is Dyer truly shone when the topic of Brexit came up.

“Who knows about Brexit? No one’s got a effing clue what Brexit is, yeah? You watch Question Time, it’s a comedy!” opined Dyer, before describing the UK’s exit from the European Union as a “mad riddle, know one knows what it is.”

Getting down to who he deems as responsible for the current political upheaval in Britain since the June 2016 result, Dyer asked: “So, what’s happened to that t**t David Cameron who called it on?,” a reference to the former prime minister responsible for allowing the referendum to happen, only to resign and step away from politics entirely in its aftermath.

Through tense chuckles, a curious look from Corbyn and a wince from Susanna Reid, Dyer continued: “How come he’s just scuttled off?”

“Where is he? He’s in Europe, in Nice, with his trotters up. Where is the geezer? He should be held accountable for it!”

Sitting back in his chair arms folded, Dyer gave off a final call of “t**t”, cementing his status and a national treasure and as the best thing to happen to the Good Morning/Evening franchise since Richard Madeley embarrassed Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson on air.

Needless to say, the social media reaction has been top-notch.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Police slammed for tasing unarmed black man as VIDEO of him writhing in pain goes viral — RT US News

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Police slammed for tasing unarmed black man as VIDEO of him writhing in pain goes viral — RT US News

Disturbing footage of a police officer using a stun gun on an unarmed black man has gone viral. Concerned citizens took to Facebook to slam police for excessive use of force and giving “confusing” instructions to suspects.

Police in the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania say they received a call on Thursday morning, claiming there was “a male with a bat.” When they arrived at the scene they found Sean Williams, who officers claim “refused to comply” to their instructions. Later police admitted that no bat was found at the scene of the incident.

The footage captured by a bystander, shows a police officer telling an apparently-unarmed Williams to sit down on the curb and stretch his legs out in front of him and cross them at the ankle. He seems to misunderstand the instructions and stretches his legs out only partially and then moves them back under him. As he starts moving his legs towards the curb the officer uses a taser on him. Williams is seen writhing on the ground in pain.

Later in a statement released by Lancaster police, officers explained that Williams wanted to fight a group of three people and attempted to prevent the woman in the group from entering her apartment. The group said Williams “was known to them” and that he had been “exhibiting increasing erratic behavior” over the previous few days. Officers found that there was an outstanding warrant for Williams’ arrest, with charges of Possession of a Controlled Substance (PCP) and Public Drunkenness. He was later released on a $5,000 bail.

Originally posted on Facebook, the video quickly went viral, attracting more than 1.4 million views and 36,000 shares in less than 16 hours.

Shocked viewers harshly criticized police actions, saying that the man was “no threat to anyone” and calling police actions “a crime.”

A man who witnessed the whole incident told local media that Williams was confused by police orders. “He first put them straight and then she said cross your legs, so he tried to cross his legs, tased him in the back (sic),” Juan Almestica said.

People on social media echoed Almestica, saying that the instructions police gave to the man were truly “confusing” and “weird.”

Police officers claim the instructions were meant to make sure the suspect was not going to flee. But the scope of the media fuss has reached the Lancaster mayor, who took to Facebook to explain that a probe into the Thursday incident i underway. “Like you, when I saw the video I was upset by it and it is of great concern to me. We take the use of force very seriously,” Danene Sorace stressed in a statement.

READ MORE: Teen who died in jail after being tasered in groin – and other cases involving the infamous stun gun

A number of Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have expressed concerns in recent decades about the excessive use of tasers by police in the US and have urged greater restraint and stricter rules regarding their use.

According to a Reuters investigation conducted back in 2017, more than 1,000 people in the US have died after being shocked with police tasers. Nearly all deaths took place since the 2000s when tasers became popular among police officers. 

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-Tens of thousands rally for new vote on Brexit

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Two years on from Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union, and tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in London to call for a new vote on the fate of their country.

Marking the second anniversary of the Brexit vote, an estimated 50,000 protesters, including politicians and lawmakers, joined the People’s Vote march to the Parliament Square in London on Saturday, in the hope of stopping Brexit.

The organizer, People’ Vote campaign, says it wants to ensure a public ballot “so that we can decide if a decision that will affect our lives for generations makes the country better or worse off.”

“People have seen politicians making a cataclysmic mess of a really bad deal they didn’t vote for, or even a no deal they didn’t vote for,” said a spokesman for the campaign. “This is the people telling the political elite that they got it wrong.”

One of the rally organizers James McGrory said Brexit is “not a done deal”…

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Video: UK knew about US mistreatment of detainees after 9/11 – report

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Video: UK knew about US mistreatment of detainees after 9/11 – report

British officials knew about the ‘torture’ of US detainees after the 9/11 attacks,a UK govt report has revealed. Controversy remains over what Washington calls …

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PressTV-‘US relies on military–industrial complex for jobs’

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The United States relies on the country’s military–industrial complex for manufacturing and factory employment, an American analyst in Virginia says.

Maintaining the massive US arms industry is motivated not just by military purposes, but also for preserving American jobs and economic growth, said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

“The military–industrial complex…is a central component of the United States economic system,” Preston told Press TV on Thursday.

“Military production is a big part of the economy,” he said. “Essentially they’re not so much because they serve any military purpose as much as someone is getting paid for producing the weapons or they’re the source of preserving jobs and employment either within the military or within the civilian sector.”

US manufacturing, and in particular by the US arms industry, has always relied on government funding in one form or another.

Roughly 10…

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Is This the Real Culture War? Art Movements and the People’s Movement

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Introduction

Ever since the achievements of Renaissance humanism with the triumph of art over nature, with the development of new artistic techniques (the optics of perspective, the structure of anatomy, the mixing of pigments, and the development of movement) art was strengthened and, combined with the scientific explorations and achievements of the Enlightenment, led to the idea that Man could become stronger and better and hold an optimistic view of the future. He could improve his well-being and even take control of nature to create a better life for all.  This view continued through the decades and was associated with social revolutions and political activity which connected progressive ideas about society to artistic forms of expression which would illustrate and advance the hopes and desires of the masses for a better life and future. These artistic movements changed and developed from the Enlightenment to Realism to Social Realism and then to Socialist Realism as artists both inspired and reflected the people’s progressive movements the world over.

However, at every juncture, oppositional movements also stepped in and opposed progressive change and revolution by the people; from the Romantic movement in Revolutionary France to the Modernist movement to Postmodernism and now Metamodernism. These movements have derided every aspect of the progressive forces, from the quietist “l’art pour l’art” of Romanticism to the attack on artistic form by…

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For Want of a Natural Migraine Remedy

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Said to have suffered excruciating migraine headaches since childhood which eventually caused her to rely on problematic pain relievers like hydrocodone and fentanyl, and then and forced to be fed through a feeding tube for months and left in a state of severe mental depression, Bridgette Marshall, wife of Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, took her own life by a gunshot to her head this week.  In a telephone call to her husband she said she could not endure the pain any longer.  [Daily Mail, June 28, 2018]

For the want of natural pain relievers and overreliance of modern medicine upon synthetic drugs, this life could have been saved.

The dietary supplement coenzyme Q10 has been shown to be effective for migraines. [Nutritional Neuroscience 2018]

This has been shown in numerous studies. [Journal Headache Pain 2015; Acta Neurology Belgium 2017]

A combination of coenzyme Q10 with magnesium and an herbal extract has been shown to reduce mental depression and anxiety among migraine sufferers.

Magnificent Magnesium:…
Dennis Goodman MD
Best Price: $5.96
Buy New $7.99
(as of 10:00 EDT – Details)

[BMC Complementary Alternative Medicine 2017]

Indeed, a shortage of magnesium may explain childhood migraine attacks. [Pharmacological Reports 2013; Clinical Neuroscience 1998]

Magnesium is also a remedy for menstrual migraines. [Journal Reproductive Medicine 2007]

The failure to use magnesium in cases of unremitting migraine is unconscionable.

This has been said about magnesium:  “It is highly regrettable that the deficiency of such an inexpensive, low-toxicity nutrient result in diseases that cause incalculable suffering and expense throughout the world.”  [Medical Hypotheses 2001]

Attorney General Steve Marshall wonders if his depressed…

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Video: Anti-Macron rallies: Demonstrators decry social reforms

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Video: Anti-Macron rallies: Demonstrators decry social reforms

The steets of Paris are once again packed with protesters, denouncing French President Emmanuel Macron’s labour and tax reforms. It’s part of a mass …

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PressTV-‘You are causing suffering and division’

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Veteran American filmmaker David Lynch has issued a rebuke to Donald Trump after the president touted a quote from him saying Trump could be remembered as one of the greatest presidents in US history.

In a post on his Facebook page, Lynch told the president that his comment from an Breitbart article was taken out of context and needed some explaining.

Lynch told the president that his divisive policies that have disrupted political norms will ultimately prevent him from being remembered as a great president.

“Unfortunately, if you continue as you have been, you will not have a chance to go down in history as a great president,” Lynch wrote. “This would be very sad it seems for you — and for the country. You are causing suffering and division.”

On Monday, Trump tweeted a link to the Breitbart article that featured a comment Lynch made in a lengthy profile published by The Guardian.

The director had told the newspaper that Trump…

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Democratic Elite Scrambles to Respond to Ocasio-Cortez – Consortiumnews

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Stunned by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, the Democratic Party establishment is trying to contain the rebellion challenging its class interests and may try to stem the tide with a compromise on super-delegates, as Norman Solomon reports. 

By Norman Solomon

Conventional wisdom said that powerful Congressman Joseph Crowley couldn’t be beat. But his 20-year career in the House of Representatives will end in January, with the socialist organizer who beat him in the Democratic primary in the deep-blue district of the Bronx and Queens poised to become Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In a symbolic twist of fate, the stunning defeat of Crowley came a day before the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic Party voted on what to do about “superdelegates,” those unelected Democratic Party elite who’ve had an undemocratic and automatic vote in presidential nominations since 1984 to prevent just such a candidate as Ocasio-Cortez from stirring up people to challenge the interests of the party’s establishment.   

Crowley’s defeat shows how grass-roots movements can prevail against corporate power and its pile of cash. The Crowley campaign spent upward of $3 million in the Democratic Party primary. The Ocasio-Cortez campaign spent one-tenth of that. He wielded the money. She inspired the people. 

As the 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez was quick to say after her Tuesday night victory, her triumph belongs to everyone who wants social, economic and racial justice. She ran on a platform in harmony with her activism as a member of Democratic Socialists of America and an organizer for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.

Conventional wisdom said superdelegates—who exerted undemocratic power over the selection of the party’s presidential nominee in 2016—couldn’t be stopped from once again putting the establishment’s thumbs on the scale.

But on Wednesday afternoon, the party committee approved a proposal to prevent superdelegates from voting on the presidential nominee during the first ballot at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. (The last time the party’s convention went to a second ballot was 1952.)

As NPR reported,…

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Prison Planet.com » Italian Gun Ownership on the Rise as Populist Salvini Offers Stronger Self-Defence Laws

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Breitbart
June 28, 2018

Firearms licences in Italy have increased by 13.8 percent in a single year and the populist Interior Minister Matteo Salvini is looking to liberalise home self-defence laws to allow Italians to confront intruders.

New figures show that 4.5 million homes across the country have access to firearms as recently released studies show that Italians feel less secure in their homes, Il Giornalereports.

Anti-theft systems such as reinforced doors are now present in 33 million Italian homes while alarms, which often include video cameras, are in nearly 10 million residences across Italy.

The figures come as populist Interior Minister Matteo Salvini announced on Twitter that he would be looking at reforming the self-defence laws to allow homeowners to confront intruders and defend themselves with firearms if need be.

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 28, 2018 at 6:37 am



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Lightning strike narrowly misses Florida officer in CCTV footage (VIDEO) — RT US News

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Lightning strike narrowly misses Florida officer in CCTV footage (VIDEO) — RT US News

A Florida police officer narrowly escaped injury after a bolt of lightning struck very close to a local police station. CCTV cameras captured the moment.

The canine officer was exiting a patrol car in the Apopka Police Department parking lot on Tuesday evening, when an intense lightning bolt struck just meters away, prompting the startled man to jump back into the safety of his vehicle.

The lightning strike was so strong, it appeared to activate the emergency lights of another parked cruiser. It also caused significant electrical damage and cut power to the building.

READ MORE: Lightning strike caught on camera as biblical storms wreak havoc in Germany (VIDEO)

The Apopka Fire Department responded to the incident but there were no reported injuries, according to a police statement published by the Apopka Voice.

The National Weather Service in Melbourne, Florida warned the public of the dangers of lightning on Monday by reminding people that six people have already been killed by lightning this year.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-BBC raps presenter for comment on Israeli child killings

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BBC has found its presenter Andrew Marr guilty of breaching editorial guidelines for commenting during his flagship Sunday morning program that Israel has killed “lots of Palestinian kids.”

The broadcaster issued the unprecedented ruling against one of its most senior personalities after a complaint was filed against Marr over his comment during a discussion about a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria during the April 8 edition of The Andrew Marr Show.

“And the Middle East is aflame again. I mean there’s lots of Palestinian kids being killed further south as well by Israeli forces,” the veteran presenter said, referring to clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Irked by Marr’s remark, anti-Semitism campaigner Jonathan Sacerdoti complained that Marr’s remarks were “incorrect” and “unrelated” to the topic of Syria.

“He stated there’s a lot of Palestinian kids being killed further…

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Video: Multiple shooting victims as local paper attacked in Maryland – reports

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Video: Multiple shooting victims as local paper attacked in Maryland – reports

Breaking news coming in from the city of Annapolis in the US state of Maryland. Police have confirmed that there was an ‘active shooter’ at the Capital Gazette …

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PressTV-‘Liberal US judges under influence of big oil’

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Even the most liberal courts in the United States side with big oil companies, an author and geopolitical analyst says, pointing to a dismissed climate change lawsuit against five oil giants by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland.

In an interview with Press TV on Tuesday, Dean Henderson the author of various books including “Big oil & their bankers in the Persian Gulf” said the verdict is a “telling case” of the climate of US politics where a supposedly liberal judge appointed by Bill Clinton dismisses an obvious case of environmental damage by big oil companies.

 “The interesting thing is that all parties in the suite agreed to the science of it, so basically they are admitting they are causing global warming and yet they say we need a bigger venue, this not the appropriate place.”

Henderson said the case is not “surprising” since from the time of [former US President Ronald] Regan, the courts have been stacked with…

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Video: ‘They didn’t take the opportunity’: Peter Schmeichel on England – Belgium match

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Video: ‘They didn’t take the opportunity’: Peter Schmeichel on England – Belgium match

RT special World Cup host Peter Schmeichel talks about England – Belgium match outcome. Schmeichel believes young English team ‘didn’t take the …

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PressTV-US judge orders migrant families to be reunited

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A US judge has blocked the administration of President Donald Trump from separating immigrant parents and children at the US-Mexico border.

The nationwide injunction issued Tuesday by US District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego, California, also ordered that those who were separated be reunited within 30 days.

However, the ruling will not be the final word over the US immigration crisis. An appeal by the Trump administration is likely.

Sabraw, an appointee of former Republican President George W. Bush, rebuked the Trump administration.

“The facts set forth before the court, portray reactive governance responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the government’s own making,” he wrote. “They belie measured and ordered governance, which is central to the concept of due process enshrined in our Constitution.”

The judge’s preliminary injunction also requires the US government to reunite children under the age of five with their…

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72% Of Americans Say News Outlets Intentionally Run Fake News

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CNS News
June 28, 2018

A new survey shows 72% of Americans believe “traditional major news sources report news they know to be fake, false, or purposely misleading.”

In the survey by Axios/SurveyMonkey, respondents were asked “How often do you think traditional major news sources report news they know to be fake. False, or purposely misleading?”

The survey also showed on the political side that 92% of Republicans said that traditional news sources report news they know to be fake, along with 54% of Democrats. Additionally, the survey showed 79% of Independents said that traditional news sources report news they know to be fake.

While 69% of Republicans said news sources report news they know be fake “A lot,” another 23% said news sources “sometimes do.”

Among Democrats, 21% said that news sources report news they know to be fake “A lot,” while 32% of said they “sometimes do.” For Independents, 42% said news sources report news they know be fake “A lot,” while 37% of Independents said news sources “sometimes do.”

Among those who think traditional news outlets report false news, about two-thirds think they do so intentionally to advance “an agenda.”

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 28, 2018 at 6:39 am



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UK immigration ‘needs drastic reform’ as it’s revealed 850 people detained by mistake awarded £21m — RT UK News

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UK immigration ‘needs drastic reform’ as it’s revealed 850 people detained by mistake awarded £21m — RT UK News

The UK immigration system needs “roots and branch reform”, a Labour MP has said, as it emerged that 850 people were wrongfully detained between 2012 and 2017, leading to a £21 million payout from the government.

According to figures released by the Home Affairs Select Committee this week, 171 people were wrongfully detained between 2015-16 and the government was compelled to pay a total of £4.1 million in compensation fees.

There were 143 cases registered in 2016-17, triggering a further £3.3 million payout. While between 2012 and 2015, £13.8 million was paid out to over 550 people after they were unjustly detained in immigration removal centers (IRC).

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© Peter Marshall

It comes as Prime Minister Theresa May’s “hostile environment” came under the spotlight recently after it emerged Windrush migrants, who had been living in the UK legally for decades, were threatened with, or suffered from, deportation and/or the removal of other rights.

While the figures give no detail on who was detained, Windrush individuals could be among them. The government has already said that 63 were mistakenly deported but has yet to reveal how many Windrush immigrants were detained.

Philip Rutnam, the permanent secretary to the home office, attempted to downplay the figures, stating: “By way of scale comparison, to support enforcement of the UK’s immigration law over 27,000 people are detained each year under immigration powers, with up to 3,000 people detained in either the detention estate or prisons at any one time,” he wrote.

“Ninety-five per cent of people who are liable to removal are managed in the community, rather than in detention.”

In turn, Labour’s Stephen Doughty, who sits on the home affairs committee, said: “These figures expose what many of us have warned for months: that the government has been wrongfully locking up individuals as well as wrongfully deporting others.

“The immigration system needs root and branch reform. How are millions of EU nationals to have any confidence in a system that wrongly deports and locks up people?”

Rutnam said in a letter to the chair of the home affairs select committee, Yvette Cooper, that the maximum payout to a single individual was £120,000, while the smallest amounted to a mere £1. The average payout was around £20,000 or less.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Panic in anti-Trump establishment, as liberal Supreme Court judge set to retire — RT US News

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Panic in anti-Trump establishment, as liberal Supreme Court judge set to retire — RT US News

The retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy from the US Supreme Court sent shockwaves of hysteria rippling through progressive America, as liberals brace themselves for a conservative replacement.

As news of Kennedy’s retirement broke, former Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor summed up the liberal reaction in one word:

Splinter, an online magazine that ran a piece earlier this week calling for civil unrest and bombings against the Trump administration, sounded even more panicked, while HuffPost ran the news under the banner: “Code Red.”

Other media figures were equally distraught at the news. Former CNN anchor Dan Rather described the vacancy as “a fight for the future of democracy,” while Comedy Central called the whole situation “supremely f**ked.”EditDelete

Justice Anthony Kennedy was a swing voter, who authored the ruling in favor of nationwide gay marriage rights in 2015, but also voted conservatively under the Trump administration.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate would vote on Kennedy’s replacement “this fall,” presumably before the November midterm elections if not before the Supreme Court convenes for the next term in October.

President Trump will most likely nominate a conservative judge in the mold of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away in 2016. An originalist, Scalia believed that the constitution did not guarantee the right to same-sex marriage or abortion, and considered affirmative action policies unconstitutional.

If Trump succeeds in getting a conservative justice nominated, the Supreme Court will have a 5-4 conservative majority for the foreseeable future, regardless of whether or not a Democrat wins the presidency in 2020.

The weight of that implication was not lost on Reddit’s ‘politics’ forum, whose leftist user base went into full-blown panic mode.

“If a blue wave doesn’t happen in November, I’m cutting my losses and planning my way out of this f**king country,” read one comment from user cor_cordis. “This is too much.”

“Democrats need to shut it down. No more diplomatic bullshit. It’s time to take the gloves off,” read another comment from Rise_Above_13, echoing Rep. Maxine Waters’ calls for physical harassment of Trump aides last weekend.

On Twitter, the sentiment was similar. One panic-stricken commenter saw a future where a jackbooted Supreme Court comes after the press, free speech, and the right to assemble.

Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer (New York) pleaded for the Senate to hold off on confirming Kennedy’s replacement until after the midterm elections in November. Calling the vacancy “the most important Supreme Court vacancy for this country in at least a generation,” Schumer warned that abortion rights, defined by the Roe vs. Wade case of 1973, and gay rights could now potentially be rolled back.

As for Trump’s supporters, Kennedy’s retirement threw them into party mode, as they celebrated their chance to control the nation’s judiciary for a whole generation.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Panic in anti-Trump establishment, as liberal Supreme Court judge set to retire — RT US News

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Panic in anti-Trump establishment, as liberal Supreme Court judge set to retire — RT US News

The retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy from the US Supreme Court sent shockwaves of hysteria rippling through progressive America, as liberals brace themselves for a conservative replacement.

As news of Kennedy’s retirement broke, former Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor summed up the liberal reaction in one word:

Splinter, an online magazine that ran a piece earlier this week calling for civil unrest and bombings against the Trump administration, sounded even more panicked, while HuffPost ran the news under the banner: “Code Red.”

Other media figures were equally distraught at the news. Former CNN anchor Dan Rather described the vacancy as “a fight for the future of democracy,” while Comedy Central called the whole situation “supremely f**ked.”EditDelete

Justice Anthony Kennedy was a swing voter, who authored the ruling in favor of nationwide gay marriage rights in 2015, but also voted conservatively under the Trump administration.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate would vote on Kennedy’s replacement “this fall,” presumably before the November midterm elections if not before the Supreme Court convenes for the next term in October.

President Trump will most likely nominate a conservative judge in the mold of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away in 2016. An originalist, Scalia believed that the constitution did not guarantee the right to same-sex marriage or abortion, and considered affirmative action policies unconstitutional.

If Trump succeeds in getting a conservative justice nominated, the Supreme Court will have a 5-4 conservative majority for the foreseeable future, regardless of whether or not a Democrat wins the presidency in 2020.

The weight of that implication was not lost on Reddit’s ‘politics’ forum, whose leftist user base went into full-blown panic mode.

“If a blue wave doesn’t happen in November, I’m cutting my losses and planning my way out of this f**king country,” read one comment from user cor_cordis. “This is too much.”

“Democrats need to shut it down. No more diplomatic bullshit. It’s time to take the gloves off,” read another comment from Rise_Above_13, echoing Rep. Maxine Waters’ calls for physical harassment of Trump aides last weekend.

On Twitter, the sentiment was similar. One panic-stricken commenter saw a future where a jackbooted Supreme Court comes after the press, free speech, and the right to assemble.

Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer (New York) pleaded for the Senate to hold off on confirming Kennedy’s replacement until after the midterm elections in November. Calling the vacancy “the most important Supreme Court vacancy for this country in at least a generation,” Schumer warned that abortion rights, defined by the Roe vs. Wade case of 1973, and gay rights could now potentially be rolled back.

As for Trump’s supporters, Kennedy’s retirement threw them into party mode, as they celebrated their chance to control the nation’s judiciary for a whole generation.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-50 Tory MPs ready to stop May’s no-deal Brexit

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More than 50 Members of Parliament from the ruling Conservative Party are ready to rebel against Prime Minister Theresa May in case she decides to pull the UK out of the European Union (EU) without striking a deal.

A former cabinet minister told The Independent on Sunday that the Tories would thwart the PM if she decides to push ahead with of a “no deal” Brexit in case EU talks fail.

“There are at least 50 Conservative MPs who would be prepared to vote to stop it happening, which would be more than enough to force the government to take notice,” the unnamed ex-minister vowed.

The warning comes amid growing concerns that May would insist on leaving without any agreement despite warnings by her own government officials about potential food and medicine shortages and huge tailbacks at the UK’s borders.

Earlier this month, she was able to talk her way past a Tory revolt in the parliament that sought a “meaningful vote” to block…

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Video: ‘A lot of pride played for’: Peter Schmeichel on Tunisia – Panama game

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Video: ‘A lot of pride played for’: Peter Schmeichel on Tunisia – Panama game

RT special World Cup host Peter Schmeichel analyzes Panama – Tunisia game and its highlights. Check out http://rt.com RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air Subscribe …

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PressTV-1 in 3 Americans say US civil war likely soon: Poll

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About a third of US voters believe another civil war might be fought in the United States within a few years due to political violence and immigration issues, a new survey shows.

The poll by Rasmussen Reports found 31 percent of those surveyed believe it’s “likely” that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years, with 11 percent saying it’s “very likely.”

Some 28 percent of white respondents, 44 percent of African-Americans and 36 percent of other minorities were among those who expressed concern for civil war.

The poll also found that 59 percent of US voters are concerned opponents of President Donald Trump’s policies would resort to violence.

Some 53 percent said they are worried violence will occur from critics of Trump’s news media coverage. About half of those surveyed blame Trump for his bad relationship with the news media.

Voters are also more distrustful of the political news they…

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Pennsylvania judge breaks teachers’ strike

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“Teachers will be in the classroom…there will be no labor activity”

Pennsylvania judge breaks teachers’ strike

By
Adam Mclean

29 June 2018

Teachers in the northeastern Pennsylvania town of Dallas went on strike on June 19 to fight to secure a contract and oppose school authorities’ demands for cuts in wages and healthcare and pension benefits. The teachers who have been without a contract for three years struck for 22 days at the beginning of the school year in 2017.

Less than 24 hours after the strike began, a Luzerne County judge issued an injunction ordering the teachers back to work, citing a state law that mandates that students receive 180 days of instruction per year. Issuing his back-to-work order, Judge Williams Amesbury, a Democrat who previously ran under the ticket of both parties, was particularly vindictive.

“Teachers will teach, they will be in the classroom, there will be no labor activity,” the judge bellowed. “Do you understand?” He continued, “There are too many people involved; too many children who have the right to an education.”

Union officials from the Dallas Education Association immediately capitulated and submitted to court-supervised bargaining sessions.

The judge’s sudden concern for the right of students to a quality education was disingenuous to say the least. While throwing the book at the teachers—who are fighting not only for improved wages but better funding for their children—the judge has said nothing about those who are really stripping working-class youth of the right to public education.

Students have suffered years of savage budget and program cuts in Dallas and other towns and cities in the economically depressed area, a former coal mining and manufacturing center. In 2016, schools in Dallas and nearby…

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Meet an Immigration Lawyer Trying to Unite Migrant Families

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On Tuesday, Federal Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego ruled all children under the age of 5 must be reunited with their parents within 14 days, and all children 5 and older must be reunited with their parents within 30 days. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has claimed he could easily locate any of the children separated from their parents. But immigrant parents and their lawyers tell a different story. We speak to Rochelle Garza, an immigration lawyer based here in Brownsville, Texas, who is now representing immigrant families who have been separated by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, this is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’re broadcasting live from Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, the epicenter of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” crackdown against immigrants. Hours from now, more than a thousand people from across Texas are expected to converge right here, in front of the federal courthouse just behind us—in fact, right behind me, “Families Belong Together” rally is—the stage is being constructed—to demand the Trump administration comply with a federal judge’s ruling that all migrant children separated from their parents must be reunited within 30 days. Kids under 10 [sic], 14 days, must be reunited. On Tuesday, Federal Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego ruled all children under the age of 5, rather, must be reunited within 14 days, and all children 5 and older must be reunited with their parents within 30 days.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar testified in a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday that 2,047 migrant children remain separated from their parents. He also claimed he could easily locate any one of the kids.

HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES SECRETARY ALEX AZAR: There is no reason why any parent would not know where their child is located. I could, at the stroke of—at keystrokes—I’ve sat on the 

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Immigration and the Politics of Moral Corruption

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Photo by Jonathan McIntosh | CC BY 2.0

Genocides, drug trades, gang violence, famines, natural disasters, poverty, political upheaval, ecological degradation… All around the world, asylum seekers and migrants, displaced by forces larger than themselves, are crossing national borders in search of basic human rights. Authors of Up Against The Wall, psychologist Mary Watkins and philosopher Ed Casey argue that as the global refugee and immigrant crisis continues to grow, how America manages its relationship to the U.S.-Mexico border will set an example for the rest of the world.

If Watkins and Casey’s postulation is correct, and if America is setting an example, this is what the world is seeing: Tent cities. Chain-linked fences. Bare cement floors. Foil sheets for blankets. Kids, some in diapers, herded into cages, crying for their lost mothers and fathers. And President Trump attempting to justify the separation of families: “They could be murderers and thieves and so much else.”

The United States has a long past in racial, ethnic, and religious scapegoating. But criminalization of migrants is essential in particular to today’s detention and deportation industries. After all, the detention-industrial complex is an extension of the prison-industrial complex. Hired by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and assigned a yearly detention quota by Congress, private prison companies strongly benefit from the President’s rhetoric labeling undocumented…

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No Party for Old White Men

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For Nancy Pelosi, 78, Steny Hoyer, 79, and Joe Biden, 75, the primary results from New York’s 14th congressional district are a fire bell in the night.

All may be swept away in the coming revolution. That is the message of the crushing defeat of 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley, who had aspired to succeed Pelosi and become speaker of the House.

The No. 4 House Democrat, Crowley, 56, had not faced primary opposition since 2004. He outspent his opponent, 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was tending bar a year ago, by 10 to one.

The son of an Irish immigrant, Crowley was leader of the Queens Democratic Club. He had the unions’ support. So confident was he that he skipped a debate and sent a Latina politician to stand in for him.

First comes Hubris, the god of arrogance. Then comes Nemesis, the goddess of retribution.

Tossing Crowley’s credentials back in his face, Ocasio-Cortez ran as a Latina, a person of color, a millennial and militant socialist who lived in her district, and painted Crowley as a white male with lots of PAC money who had moved to D.C. and sent his kids to school in Virginia.

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“The Democratic Party takes working-class communities for granted; they take people of color for granted,” railed Ocasio-Cortez. The party assumes “that we’re going to turn out no matter how bland or half-stepping (their) proposals are.”

“Bland or half-stepping” are not words her agenda calls to mind.

A Democratic Socialist, endorsed by MoveOn, Black Lives Matter and People for Bernie, Ocasio-Cortez favors Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage, 100 percent renewable energy by 2035, free tuition at public colleges, federal…

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As Election Day Approached, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Removed Antiwar Foreign Policy Section From Her Website (Updated)

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Updated below

I was happy to see an antiwar Democrat beat the establishment Joe Crowley in New York. I had read the following on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s website 6 weeks ago:

Foreign Policy:
Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States has entangled itself in war and occupation throughout the Middle East and North Africa. As of 2018, we are currently involved in military action in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. According to the Constitution, the right to declare war belongs to the Legislative body, not the President. Yet, most of these acts of aggression have never once been voted on by Congress. Alex believes that we must end the forever war by bringing our troops home and ending the air strikes and bombings that perpetuate the cycle of terrorism and occupation throughout the world.
(You can still read this on the May 16 archived version of her site at Archive.org)

However, a month later, the foreign policy section has been deleted (see here), and is still gone today.

I assume that someone in the campaign thought that she needed to avoid such a “controversial” stance against war and standing up for the constitutional position that “the right to declare war belongs to the Legislative body, not the President.”

What a shame. I hope that she doesn’t shy away from the strong antiwar positions she first campaigned on when she takes office.

UPDATE:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted this last night:

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Video: World Cup 2018: Fans Eye View (LIVE & TAPE)

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Video: World Cup 2018: Fans Eye View (LIVE & TAPE)

The next-best thing to being here. Russia 2018 has already exceeded everyone’s expectations. Ask any fan. Or better still, watch them live here. Check out our …

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PressTV-Long-time US congressman loses to 28-year-old activist

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PressTV-Long-time US congressman loses to 28-year-old activist

The Democratic Party’s insurgent left wing and Republican US President Donald Trump each claimed big victories on Tuesday, as voters in seven states selected the parties’ candidates for November’s midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.

US Representative Joseph Crowley, a high-ranking Democrat seen as a possible future leader of the chamber, lost his re-election bid in a stunning upset that highlighted the ideological battles at play in this year’s midterm elections.

Crowley, a 10-term incumbent who was fourth in line in the House of Representatives’ Democratic leadership, was defeated by 28-year-old challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a safely Democratic district in New York City.

Political analysts cast Ocasio-Cortez’s win as the biggest upset since House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Republican, lost in 2014 to a little-known right-wing professor, Dave Brat.

Progressive challenger Alexandria…

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Soaring Cost of Clues Leaves Thomas Friedman Apparently Unable to Buy One

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NYT: Why Are So Many Political Parties Blowing Up?

Thomas Friedman’s understanding of economics seems stuck in the “off” position (New York Times, 6/26/18).

In a period of record-low productivity growth, Thomas Friedman (6/26/18) tells us the robots are taking all the jobs. Hey, no one ever said you had to have a clue to write for the New York Times. Here’s the punch line:

From 1960 to 2000, Quartz reported, US manufacturing employment stayed roughly steady at around 17.5 million jobs. But between 2000 and 2010, thanks largely to digitization and automation, “manufacturing employment plummeted by more than a third,” which was “worse than any decade in U.S. manufacturing history.”

The little secret that Friedman apparently has not heard about is the explosion of the trade deficit, which peaked at almost 6 percent of GDP ($1.2 trillion in today’s economy) in 2005 and 2006. This matters, because the reason millions of manufacturing workers lost their jobs in this period was decisions on trade policy by leaders of both political parties, not anything the robots did. That changes the story of the collapse of political parties (the theme of Friedman’s piece) a bit.

Friedman’s confusion continues in the next paragraph:

These climate changes are reshaping the ecosystem of work—wiping out huge numbers of middle-skilled jobs—and this is reshaping the ecosystem of learning, making lifelong learning the new baseline for advancement.

These three climate changes are also reshaping geopolitics. They are like a hurricane that is blowing apart weak nations that were OK in the Cold War—when superpowers would shower them with foreign aid and arms, when China could not compete with them for low-skilled work, and when climate change, deforestation and population explosions had not wiped out vast amounts of their small-scale agriculture.

The reason that highly skilled workers are benefiting at the expense of less-educated workers is because we have made patent and copyright protection longer and stronger. It is more than a little bizarre that ostensibly educated people have such a hard time understanding this.

We have these protections to provide incentives for people to innovate and do creative work. That is explicit policy. Then we are worried that people who innovate and do creative work are getting too much money at the expense of everyone else. Hmmm, any ideas here?

Remember, without patents and copyrights, Bill Gates would still be working for a living.

One more item: China competes with “low-skilled” work in the United States and not with doctors and dentists because our laws block the latter form of competition. There was nothing natural about this one, either. Yes, this is all in my (free) book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.

Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (6/27/18).

You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

Featured image: cc photo by Charles Haynes


This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.

Prison Planet.com » In Its Anti-Trump Hysteria, The Democratic Party Has Become The Party Of VIOLENCE

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Daily Caller
June 28, 2018

Violence against Republicans and conservatives is on the rise. And Democrats and their mainstream media allies are encouraging it.

The toxic rhetoric isn’t limited to crazed tweets and rambling columns. It’s resulting in real-world confrontations. A recent string of incidents should make every American pause and reflect on the direction that the Democratic Party is pushing this country.

Last week, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was chased out of a restaurant by an angry activist mob.

This weekend, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant by its owner — who then allegedly proceeded to stalk her dinner party as they went to another restaurant.

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi was accosted outside of a movie theater where she was harassed and spat on.

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 28, 2018 at 6:45 am



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‘Bodies are barely cold’: Yiannopoulos defends ‘gun journos down’ words after Annapolis shooting

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‘Bodies are barely cold’: Yiannopoulos defends ‘gun journos down’ words after Annapolis shooting

Preview Following the Capital Gazette shooting, right-wing pundit Milo Yiannopoulos said his ‘gun journos down’ statement was not a call for violence, and accused left-wing press of exploiting deaths while the bodies are ‘barely cold.’
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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-‘Zombie knives’ causing rise in stabbing deaths in UK

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Violence is spiraling out of control in the British capital as gun and knife-related attacks have reached record highs and the metropolitan police are dealing with a shortage of officers.

London’s murder rate is soaring because “feral” youths are stabbing people multiple times with so-called zombie knives, making it virtually impossible for paramedics to save them, one of Scotland Yard’s most senior officers suggested.

Martin Hewitt, assistant commissioner of Metropolitan Police, the territorial police force responsible for law enforcement in Greater London, said the level of violence had got significantly worse over the past five years with his officers now routinely administering “trauma medicine” on the streets of the capital.

“The violence is getting greater. If I was stood here five years ago, I would probably be talking about knife offences where there was generally a single puncture wound,” he said.

“We are now routinely seeing…

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PressTV-US Supreme Court shifting further to right

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US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has announced that he is retiring, giving President Donald Trump the chance to pick yet another justice for the court and shift its ideological balance even farther to the right for years to come.

“It has been the greatest honor and privilege to serve our nation in the federal judiciary for 43 years, 30 of those on the Supreme Court,” Kennedy said in a statement.

The announcement came shortly after Chief Justice John Roberts adjourned the court for the summer recess.

The justice delivered a letter to White House Wednesday afternoon, informing Trump of his decision, effective July 31.

Nominated by President Ronald Reagan and confirmed in 1988, Kennedy,82, is the court’s longest-serving member and second-oldest justice.

During his tenure, Kennedy has sided with liberals on several issues, including efforts to save ObamaCare and limit the death penalty.

His retirement is bad news for liberals, who…

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Democrats Against Assange: Influencing US-Ecuador Relations

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Such a historical twist, but one that deserves its iniquitous slot in the history books.  No secret has been made about US policy towards Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, which continues its trajectory to seek his apprehension and shutter the organisation.  Despite its cables being used for political effect by interested parties; despite the exposures of corruption within the ranks of US politics, Assange is to be thanked with punishment.

This is the sentiment expressed by Senator Robert Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with nine other Democratic senators, in a letter to US Vice President Mike Pence.  The senators had been losing sleep after getting wind of what was said, or rather not said, in a June 4 phone call between Pence and Ecuadorean President Lenín Moreno. One glaring omission troubled them: the absence of any discussion about Assange’s asylum status and stay in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Ahead of Pence’s meeting with Moreno this week, the senators wished to press the matter:

As the United States is still seeking clarity about the full extent of Russian intervention in our elections and Russian interference in elections across the world, it is imperative that you raise US concerns with President Moreno about Ecuador’s continued support for Mr. Assange at a time when WikiLeaks continues its efforts to undermine democratic processes globally.

This is a fine take, if dizzyingly inaccurate:…

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Video: Top U.S. & World Headlines — June 28, 2018

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Video: Top U.S. & World Headlines — June 28, 2018

Visit https://democracynow.org to watch the full independent, global news hour, read the transcript, search our archive and to make a donation to support us.

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PressTV-Trump to warn Putin over midterm interference

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PressTV-Trump to warn Putin over midterm interference

US President Donald Trump will warn his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin not to intervene in the upcoming midterm elections, according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Pompeo made the comment during a Senate subcommittee hearing, aimed at covering several foreign policy challenges for the United States.

“I’m confident that when the president meets with Vladimir Putin he will make clear that meddling in our elections is completely unacceptable,” said the former CIA director.

Meanwhile, the president’s national security adviser, John Bolton, was meeting with Russian officials in Moscow to prepare for an upcoming summit between the two leaders.

CaptionRussian President Vladimir Putin (L) shakes hands with US national security adviser John Bolton greet as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (C) looks at them during the meeting in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on June 27, 2018.

After the 2016 presidential election, which yielded…

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Prison Planet.com » Prominent Democrats Keep Destroying Norms To Go After Trump

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Daily Caller
June 28, 2018

Prominent Democrats have repeatedly abandoned political norms and customs in order to oppose President Donald Trump.

Trump’s presidency, and his candidacy before it, has been in large part defined by his willingness to abandon conventional political behavior when it suits him — a recurring feature in criticisms of the president. Many of his opponents, too, have trampled American political norms, even as they rush to “resist” Trump.

Democratic California Rep. Maxine Waters exemplified that tendency on Saturday when she called for liberal mobs to harass Trump administration officials who show their faces in public — a move that earned her a rare rebuke from Democratic leadership.

Waters isn’t alone in abandoning political norms to go after Trump.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nominee, slammed Trump during the campaign for refusing to promise to accept the results of the election. Clinton called Trump’s defiance “horrifying” and said he was “talking down our democracy.”

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 28, 2018 at 6:49 am



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Tony Blair calls for counter-terror cooperation with Russia — RT UK News

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Tony Blair calls for counter-terror cooperation with Russia — RT UK News

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has called on the UK to cooperate with Russia to tackle terrorism. Blair said that there will always be “strong disagreements” with the Kremlin, but the relationship is necessary.

While speaking at Chatham House in London on Wednesday, Blair said that while UK-Russia tension may continue, the need for a united front against terrorism is crucial.

“On the Middle East, on fighting terrorism, yes, we will have to ally with Russia, but that’s not to say we aren’t prepared to have powerful and strong disagreements with them when they’re doing things we don’t agree with and can’t agree with,” Blair said.

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© Michael Nigro

“This is why always with Russia we’ll be having disagreements, which will be very ugly and difficult from time to time, but we’ll always be wanting to deal with them at a certain point – which is why we need to be careful how we approach the relationship.”

The UK-Russian relationship has deteriorated in recent months following the attempted-murder of Russian ex-double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in March. The Kremlin has vehemently denied any involvement in the attempt on Skripal’s life, however the UK blamed Russia and expelled 23 of its diplomats in retaliation to the poisoning.  

The UK and its allies have opposed Russia in the Syrian conflict. Russia has been aiding its ally, Syrian President Bashar Assad, in fighting rebel groups. Both Russia and Assad claim the militant groups are terrorists.

Since 2011, Syria has seen the rise of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and other terrorist groups aligned to Al-Qaeda, sparking fears Syria could become a base for militant groups. Moscow intervened in the conflict in September 2015, and Russian air strikes have since been crucial in preventing the overthrow of Assad’s government.

The UN estimates that 400,000 have been killed since the Syrian Civil War began.

This isn’t the first time Blair has stressed the need for the West to work with Russia to stop terrorist groups. In April 2014 he said the threat of “radical Islam” was such that ”on this issue, whatever our other differences, we should be prepared to reach out and cooperate with the East, and in particular Russia and China.”

READ MORE: Blair pleads ignorance over man kidnapped and tortured by Gaddafi thanks to MI6 intel

Blair previously led the United Kingdom into conflicts in the Middle East to take part in the ‘War on Terror,’ joining the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 at the behest of US President George W. Bush  and ostensibly in response to the 9/11 terror attack. Blair has consistently defended his decision to invade Afghanistan, starting in 2015: “I think it always felt right and just that we were there in Afghanistan, in both fighting to remove the Taliban and stabilise the country…”

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

‘Abolish ICE!’ 575 arrested after protesters occupy US Senate building (PHOTOS, VIDEOS) — RT US News

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‘Abolish ICE!’ 575 arrested after protesters occupy US Senate building (PHOTOS, VIDEOS) — RT US News

Nearly 600 activists, protesting Donald Trump’s ‘zero-tolerance’ policy against illegal immigrants, have been arrested after staging an occupy sit-in at the Hart Senate Office building in the nation’s capital.

Hundreds of women, wrapped in metallic silver blankets, referencing the duvets given to migrant children in detention centers, occupied the Senate office building in Washington DC after marching down the streets of the city chanting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” and “This is what democracy looks like.”

Demanding the closure of the detention centers for illegal immigrants, the activists made a brief stop in front of the Department of Justice, urging the government to “abolish ICE,” the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

The crowd then marched down to the federal premises, where they occupied the atrium and several floors, chanting “we care” and “where are the children?” in reference to minors separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border.

READ MORE: Pentagon asked to accommodate ‘alien family population’ of 12,000

The crowd was joined by a number of US Senators who oppose Trump’s immigration policies, as well as other prominent people, among them as the actress Susan Sarandon.

After repeated calls from the police demanding that they leave the premises or face arrest, officers were forced to move in, detaining at least 575 activists for “unlawful demonstration,” AP reported. Rep. Pramila Jayapal was one of those who were detained on Thursday, before being released with a fine.

Protesters staged the sit-in “to fight for our families to be free, to fight for the ability of our kids to be with their parents — not in cages, not in prison, but able to live their lives free, safe and secure,” she tweeted in a video message.

After Donald Trump announced his zero-tolerance policy on illegal border crossing in April, around 2,300 children were separated from their families. Facing a massive public backlash, last week Trump issued an order allowing families to stay together after being detained at the border. On Monday, US Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services reported that 538 kids had been reunited with their parents. The next day, a judge in California granted a preliminary injunction giving the government 30 days to reunify minors with their families, 14 days if the child is younger than five.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-UK military needs more money to work with US, NATO

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British lawmakers have warned the Prime Minister Theresa May the country’s armed forces need more money to maintain “interoperability” with the US and other members of the NATO military alliance.

The House of Commons defense committee repeated its calls to raise military spending from the minimum NATO requirement of two percent to at least three percent of the GDP – around £60bn a year.

“Diminished capacity reduces the UK’s usefulness to the US and our influence within NATO. The government must not allow this to happen,” said the committee.

The MPs then referred to recent remarks by the US defense secretary James Mattis that the UK raked in £3 billion a year from its military ties with Washington and said London needed to spend more in order to save this profitable relationship.

That would be possible “only while the UK military retains both the capacity and capability to maintain interoperability with the US military and to…

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The War on Yemen and Pompeo’s Pathetic Propaganda

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Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

The Trump administration keeps desperately trying to shift the blame for the catastrophe in Yemen away from the Saudi coalition and the U.S.:

The administration has consistently focused on the small Iranian role in Yemen and exaggerated its importance while doing everything possible to cover for the Saudis and Emiratis at the same time that the U.S. has aided and abetted their bombing campaign and the many war crimes they have committed. Even now that the coalition is launching an offensive on the major port of Hodeidah that serves the vast majority of the population, the U.S. is not calling them out for their destabilizing and destructive activities. Instead of condemning the coalition for putting millions of Yemeni lives in jeopardy, the U.S. helps them to attack their impoverished neighbor. Instead of using its influence with these governments to rein in their abuses and alleviate the civilian population’s suffering, the U.S. gives them carte blanche, never criticizes them even when they massacre wedding-goers and refugees, and goes out of its way to fault one of the few governments in the region that isn’t attacking Yemen for the country’s miserable state.

The humanitarian crisis in Yemen is the worst in the world, and the coalition blockade and bombing campaign are principal causes of that crisis. If the administration were even slightly concerned with addressing the suffering of Yemen’s people, it would not be providing weapons, intelligence, and refueling to the coalition, and it would be holding them accountable for their numerous and egregious war crimes and crimes against humanity. They aren’t concerned, and so they continue to support the war on Yemen no matter what the coalition does. Support for this war is indefensible, so it is no wonder that top U.S. officials have to try to distract the world from what our government is enabling in Yemen. It is the Saudi and Emirati governments along with ours and the coalition’s other Western patrons that need to be called out and held accountable for creating the disaster engulfing the people of Yemen.

Daniel Larison is a senior editor at The American Conservative, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and is a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Dallas. Follow him on Twitter. This article is reprinted from The American Conservative with permission.

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Video: Justice Kennedy’s Resignation Opens Door for Far-Right Supreme Court & Overturning of Roe v. Wade

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Video: Justice Kennedy’s Resignation Opens Door for Far-Right Supreme Court & Overturning of Roe v. Wade

https://democracynow.org – In a move that could transform the Supreme Court for decades, Justice Anthony Kennedy has announced his retirement, giving …

Via Youtube

PressTV-‘US foreign policy goals don’t change with a president’

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It does not matter if a Republican or a Democrat is in the White House, the foreign policy goals of the US elite remain the same, according to Walt Peretto, a writer and researcher based in Washington, DC.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that President Donald Trump will warn his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin not to intervene in the upcoming midterm elections.

Pompeo made the comment during a Senate subcommittee hearing, aimed at covering several foreign policy challenges for the United States.

“I’m confident that when the president meets with Vladimir Putin he will make clear that meddling in our elections is completely unacceptable,” said the former CIA director.

A one-on-one summit between Trump and Vladimir Putin is now scheduled for July 16 in Helsinki. And, US National Security Adviser John Bolton is meeting with Russian officials in Moscow to prepare for the summit.

Peretto said, “Putin had clearly expressed…

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Mother Shoots Home Invader – LewRockwell

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By Chris Eger
Guns.com

June 28, 2018

Police in Goochland County, Virginia report that a woman shot a man twice as he was reaching through smashed glass to unlatch her door.

The man, identified by the Goochland Sheriffs Department as Troy George Skinner, 25, was arrested and treated for a gunshot wound to the neck. Officials paint a horrifying story of a determined individual who flew halfway around the world to make contact with the woman’s teenage daughter, who he met while playing video games online.

Although investigators stress the minor broke off contact with Skinner, he flew to Washington, D.C then traveled to Virginia via bus, where he acquired pepper spray and purchased a hunting knife and duct tape at an area Walmart just before the incident that left him wounded and the unidentified family shaken, Richmond.com reported.

Read the Whole Article 



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Video: In Janus Case, Court Issues Major Anti-Labor Ruling, Eviscerating Power of Public-Sector Unions

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Video: In Janus Case, Court Issues Major Anti-Labor Ruling, Eviscerating Power of Public-Sector Unions

https://democracynow.org – Justice Anthony Kennedy’s announcement came as the Supreme Court struck a major blow to organized labor Wednesday. In a 5-4 …

Via Youtube

PressTV-House Republicans reject Trump-backed immigration bill

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The US House of Representatives has turned down a Republican “compromise” bill on immigration despite an eleventh-hour endorsement by President Donald Trump.

The GOP-dominated House voted 301-121 against the far-ranging bill on Wednesday, a move that further revealed deep divisions between Republicans over Trump’s immigration policies.

All Democrats and 112 Republicans voted against the measure, which proposed providing long-term protections to Dreamers—thousands of immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children. The bill also sought to deal with an ongoing crisis over the separation of children of illegal immigrants and their families at the border.

The bill would have authorized $25 billion for Trump’s controversial wall along the US border with Mexico, which he insists would curb illegal immigration.

Another key aspect of the deal was that it would restrict family-based immigration into the US. Overall, the…

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Prison Planet.com » Leftists Already Blaming Trump For Annapolis Shooting Without Knowing Motive

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Update: NBC reported that the suspect was a 39-year-old from Maryland who was identified using facial recognition software.

Anti-Trumpers rush to place blame on shooting despite few known details

Kit Daniels
Prison Planet.com
June 28, 2018

Numerous leftists were already blaming President Trump for the Annapolis newspaper shooting, despite the fact that police had not yet revealed a motive.

Here’s what we do know so far, as of late Thursday afternoon:

– Shooter is possibly a male in his 20s
– He had ‘damaged’ his fingerprints to avoid identification, according to CBS
– He shot at least five people, then apparently stopped on his own volition, according to multiple outlets
– The newspaper, the Capital Gazette, covers local news
– The suspect was captured and is under interrogation

As of the time of this writing, there’s not much else to know about the shooting.

Additionally, from what’s known, it’s possible that the shooting was workplace violence. This scenario fits into the fact that the shooter apparently stopped after shooting several people out of the over 170 present. But, again, a true motive has not been revealed as of the time of this writing.

Yet despite all the ‘unknowns’ surrounding this shooting, numerous leftists on Twitter were already blaming President Trump within the first few hours of the news breaking.

Why the rush to politicize a shooting when, so far, few details have emerged?

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‘Break cosy club of British elite’ to end revolving door among politics, media & business say Labour

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‘Break cosy club of British elite’ to end revolving door among politics, media & business say Labour

Preview Labour has called for “a radical overhaul” of the parliamentary system “to break open the cosy club of the British elite” to halt the “revolving door” between politics, the media and business that is corroding public trust.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

#Resistance rushes to blame Trump for Annapolis attack — RT US News

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#Resistance rushes to blame Trump for Annapolis attack — RT US News

There is no love lost between President Donald Trump and mainstream US media, which he has repeatedly called “fake news.” His critics are now using those words to blame him for inciting a shooting at a local newspaper.

Five people were killed and three more injured after a gunman attacked the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland on Thursday. The local newspaper had no ideological bent and the gunman’s motives –or identity– are unknown as of yet.

That has not stopped the self-styled anti-Trump Resistance from accusing the US president of inspiring the attack, going so far as to claim he has “blood on his hands.”

READ MORE: ‘Bodies are barely cold’: Yiannopoulos defends ‘gun journos down’ words after Annapolis shooting

In a February 2017 tweet, Trump had called “fake news” media the “enemy of the American people” – singling out CNN, the New York Times, NBC News, ABC, and CBS. He repeated the phrase on Monday at a rally in South Carolina.

“The enemy of the people I call ’em,” he said, pointing to the media he dubbed “fake news.”

It wasn’t any of these outlets that got attacked, however, but a local newspaper in a Democratic-majority region of Maryland, for reasons that are so far shrouded in mystery.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-British Brexit bill officially becomes law

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The speaker of Britain’s House of Commons has announced that the government’s flagship Brexit legislation allowing the country to leave the European Union has become law.

Speaker John Bercow told MPs on Tuesday that the EU Withdrawal Bill received royal assent from Queen Elizabeth II, resulting in the bill becoming an Act of Parliament.

The EU Withdrawal Act, as it is now known, enables EU law to be transferred into British law in an attempt to ensure a smooth Brexit, and it enables EU law to be transferred into UK law in an attempt to ensure a smooth withdrawal from the EU, and it also repeals the 1972 European Communities Act, which made Britain a member of the union.

British Prime Minister Theresa May called the bill’s approval a “historic moment for our country, and a significant step towards delivering on the will of the British people.”

Members of parliament who are in favor of Brexit also hailed the development.

“The legal position…

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Video: Meet an Immigration Lawyer Trying to Unite Migrant Families While Battling the Trump Administration

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Video: Meet an Immigration Lawyer Trying to Unite Migrant Families While Battling the Trump Administration

https://democracynow.org – On Tuesday, Federal Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego ruled all children under the age of 5 must be reunited with their parents …

Via Youtube

PressTV-China ‘monitoring US legislation on inbound investments’

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China’s Commerce Ministry says it is carefully monitoring new US legislation that would restrict Chinese investment in America but that is meant to do so through a less confrontational attitude.

“China will closely monitor the legislation process and evaluate its potential impact on Chinese companies,” Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesman Gao Feng said at a regular press conference in the capital, Beijing, on Thursday.

He added that his country did not agree with Washington’s move in “tightening foreign investment conditions using national security as reasons.”

The ministry’s comments came just a day after US President Donald Trump said in a statement that he would initiate a strengthened national security review process to foil China’s alleged attempts to acquire sensitive American technologies, which is considered to be a softer approach than introducing China-specific investment restrictions.

The US Treasury Department…

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NYC Elects Socialist for Congress Whose Platform Catered to Non-Whites, Wants ICE Abolished

Red Ice
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The future of the Democratic Party is suddenly more clear.

On Tuesday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old first-time candidate for office and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, defeated the incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley, a powerful Queens Democrat and one of his party’s most senior members in Washington. Ocasio-Cortez didn’t just defeat Crowley – she stomped him. With 88 percent of the vote counted, she led by nearly 4,000 votes out of 26,000 cast.

Crowley’s defeat has already been called the Democratic version of then-House Majority leader Eric Cantor’s shock upset loss in 2014 to an obscure economics professor. It’s not a perfect comparison, but it’s useful all the same: Crowley and Cantor were both viewed as potential speakers of the House. Both had close ties to the corporate wings of their parties, especially the finance industry. But while Cantor was caught off-guard by his challenger, Crowley spent big money in the final weeks and months of his primary race knowing that he faced a serious threat.

Ocasio-Cortez represents in many ways the new face of progressive politics growing in strength on the left flank of the Democratic Party. She is a young…

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Today’s Refugee Crisis Is Blowback From US Dirty Wars in Central America

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In our special broadcast from the US-Mexico border, we speak to human rights lawyer Jennifer Harbury, who has lived here in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas for over 40 years and has been active in the response to the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. Her husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, was a Mayan comandante and guerrilla who was disappeared after he was captured by the Guatemalan army in the 1980s. After a long campaign, she found there was US involvement in the cover-up of her husband’s murder and torture. Now she continues to work with people fleeing violence in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Brownsville, Texas, ahead of a mass protest later today at the federal courthouse that’s right behind us, that’s calling on the Trump administration to end the “zero tolerance” policy, which has separated more than 2,000 children from their parents, who have been charged with a crime for crossing the border. In a minute, we’ll be joined by the person who helped draw attention to this crisis when she shared audio with ProPublica of some of the disappeared children in a CBP, a Customs and Border Protection, facility. The children are estimated to be between the ages of 4 and 10, and can be heard crying “Mami!” “Papi!” This is an excerpt. A warning: The audio is disturbing.

CHILD: [crying] Papá! Papá! Papá! Papá! Papá! Papá!

AMY GOODMAN: The person who made that recording asked not to be identified, for fear of retaliation. And they were able to share it with the help of our next guest, Jennifer Harbury, who is a human rights lawyer, well-known activist. She has lived here in the Rio Grande Valley for over 40 years, has been active in the response to the “zero tolerance” policy. Her husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, was a Mayan comandante guerrilla in the highlands of Guatemala. He was disappeared after he was captured by the army in the 1980s. After a long campaign, that she…

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Neo-Liberalism and the Retreat of Democracy

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Photo by Ronald Reagan Library | CC BY 2.0

Democracy across the world is under siege. This according to the latest Freedom House report documenting that for 2017, “democracy faced its most serous crisis in decades” as  seventy-one countries experienced declines in freedom or fair government, including the United States,  and only thirty-five an improvement.  This was the twelfth consecutive year of decline in democracy world-wide.

The question is why? Why has confidence in democracy retreated? Freedom House does not provide an answer, but there is a reason.   It is democracy’s marriage to neo-liberal capitalism has fostered the conditions leading to its own undoing, similar to the way Karl Marx once described in the Communist Manifesto the “gravedigger thesis” (What the Bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all,  are its own grave diggers”) where capitalism would produce the conditions that would undermine its own existence.

From the 1960s until the early 1990s democracy was in the upswing internationally.  African de-colonization produced initially popularly elected governments.  In South America the demise of strongmen led to a wave of democratic regimes.  And the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the break up of the USSR in 1991 produced the dismantling of communist authoritarian or totalitarian governments that made it possible for Francis Fukuyama to proclaim that democracy had won and emerged as the last grand global political…

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Ron Paul on the Oil Weapon: Trump Tightens Iran Stranglehold

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President Trump has informed Washington’s allies that they must cease purchasing Iranian oil by November. He is also trying to force/intimidate European countries into joining, de facto, a return to prior US sanctions on Iran. The goal seems clear: push regime change in Iran through economic strangulation. The Europeans may well go along, but will Russia and China? Turkey? Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

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Video: Jennifer Harbury: Today’s Refugee Crisis Is Blowback from U.S. Dirty Wars in Central America

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Video: Jennifer Harbury: Today’s Refugee Crisis Is Blowback from U.S. Dirty Wars in Central America

https://democracynow.org – In our special broadcast from the U.S.-Mexico border, we speak to human rights lawyer Jennifer Harbury, who has lived here in the …

Via Youtube

Papers Insist ‘We Need’ Secret Gang Databases—Just Like We ‘Needed’ Stop & Frisk

FAIR
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New York Post: Criticisms of NYPD's Gang Database Are Utterly Ridiculous

“Utterly ridiculous”: the New York Post‘s defense (6/16/18) of the gang database

When President Donald Trump rails against alleged immigrant gang members as “animals,” as he did last month, he’s reducing complex (and highly political) issues—like the presence of MS-13 in the United States—to a fearsome cartoon of snarling packs of subhuman marauders. Vintage Trump, right? But local media, nowadays lionized as a check on Trump, resort to the same strategy, playing fast and loose with the inflammatory term “gang” and deferring and time and time again to questionable police tactics.

As FAIR’s Adam Johnson wrote two years ago (“Media Convict Scores of ‘Gang Members’ on NYPD’s Say-So—No Trials Necessary,” 5/2/16), local dailies in New York City were instrumental in convicting alleged gang members in the court of public opinion before anyone had ever even seen a judge. Most other local media outlets took the same approach, never bothering to ask if the scores of people arrested and perp-walked by police as violent gang members could actually be innocent, or unfairly swept up by a police department (in)famous for its dragnet approach to public safety.

On the gang sweeps, the New York Daily News led the way with its  2015 “Gangs of New York—and How Close You Live to Them” special feature (12/13/15), which included a map purporting to show “where gangs and crews operate,” based on data provided by the NYPD. It’s little surprise, then, that after community legal advocates criticized large-scale gang raids, leading to public hearings questioning the tactics, the News‘ editorial board quickly sided with police on a key tool: so-called gang databases.

Daily News: Ganging Up on Police

The Daily News (6/13/18) asks critics to quit picking on the NYPD.

Editorializing in favor of a database kept by the NYPD that no one knows they’re on—and therefore cannot challenge their inclusion in—the News (6/13/18) shrugged off community concerns as “alarmism,” and called the collection of people on the database (some as young as 13 when added to it) “good police work.” The editorial headline “Ganging Up on Police: The NYPD’s Gang Database Is a Solid Investigative Tool” told readers it was the police who were under attack, and conferred legitimacy on a shadowy database that the News‘ own reporting (6/12/18) suggests can negatively impact people for years.

Local police gang databases can present serious legal implications for those marked as gang members, such as increased bail, harsher sentencing, erosion of presumption of innocence and even increased chances of deportation.

Lawyers and activists have suspected local gang database information is shared with federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), sometimes even putting people trying to avoid gangs on the deportation block (New Yorker, 1/1/18). In fact, a new report released on the same day that Trump made his “animals” comment says that gang designations have led to increased deportations of young immigrants in New York. The report also points to “media coverage in certain outlets” that have “exacerbated the view of MS-13 as a dangerous, invading army of foreigners,” thus “sowing fear around the country.” Are these concerns alarmist? Or, as the New York Post‘s editorial board headlined, “utterly ridiculous” (6/16/18)?

For News and Post readers, the editorial board positions must have sounded awfully familiar: They were almost indistinguishable from the police department’s position, which was published by the News (6/12/18) the day before key hearings by the New York City Council.

An editorial mistake (8/13/13) the Daily News doesn’t seem to have learned anything from.

Not just the editorials but the whole scenario should feel familiar, since we’ve been here before. Nearly five years ago, as the NYPD was being criticized by community and legal groups over its Stop and Frisk program, the News‘ editorial board (8/13/13) sided with the police department, predicting “the ravages of lawlessness and bloodshed” if police efforts were curtailed. That didn’t happen, and the News, three years later, apologized on its pages (“We Were Wrong: Ending Stop and Frisk Did Not End Stopping Crime,” 8/8/16).

You’d think after being so spectacularly wrong on Stop and Frisk, the News would take the lesson to be more skeptical and wary about police practices. Alas, no, the editorial instinct is the same: support the police department to the point of echoing its talking points.

The News and Post couldn’t even bring themselves to follow even the most basic journalistic practice of asking for more information. There are still essential questions around the database and the actual impact of gangs left unanswered. The NYPD and the News, for example, claim the database currently has only about 17,500 New Yorkers listed. However, a Freedom of Information request by CUNY Law School’s Babe Howell suggests over 42,000 names, based on information she received from the police department itself.

The NYPD and the News say that about half of all shootings in the city are “gang-related”—which would include suspected shooters and victims that the police allege to be gang members. However, seen in the broader context of New York City, which is experiencing record low crime, “gang-related” crime accounts for 1.7 percent of overall crime. The numbers get even lower for “gang-motivated” crime—crime done in the interests of a gang, according to police—which is at less than 0.1 percent (The Intercept, 6/11/18).

Then there is the key argument over whether the NYPD should have arbitrary power over designating who, in fact, is in a gang. The criteria police use is remarkably loose: simply “associating” with gang members, living in certain neighborhoods,  having certain tattoos and even wearing certain colors. With criteria like these, which scream guilt by association, it’s hardly surprising that 99 percent of people added to the list are non-white.

With remarkable disparities over how far-reaching the database really is, the extent to which gang violence actually affects the city, as well as the central question of who is actually in a gang, the editorial position of two of the city’s major newspapers would seem, at the very least, premature.

There is, of course, nothing to lose for members of the News‘ editorial board. As I wrote earlier this year in Injustice Today (now The Appeal), there are no measures of accountability for media when they support destructive police policies. While some media outlets may apologize years after the policies have upended people’s lives, they are free to continually support more potentially destructive policies in the future.

I have been one of many organizers pushing back against the database and the NYPD’s gang sweeps. And, in fairness, the News did publish my opinion piece (6/13/18) on the gang database. But that doesn’t amount to balance in their pages when both the reporting and editorial weight is thrown behind the police, time and time again.

For the New York Post (6/26/18), a murder that happened while the NYPD had a gang database proves the need for a gang database.

A recent, horrendous murder of a 15-year-old Bronx boy by alleged gang members could make media coverage worse. The Post (6/26/18) has already jumped on the story to make the point that his death “proves we need an NYPD gang database.” Three years ago, the Post  (5/31/15) similarly spotlighted shooting murder cases to make the case that New York City should bring back Stop and Frisk. What the Post wanted then, as they do now, is to unleash the police—who they say have been “handcuffed” by the advocacy of “radicals” and “cop-haters”—to do whatever they want.

While the murder has rightly stirred outrage on social media and in the community, is the answer to ramp up aggressive police enforcement? The Post presents the false choice that in order to prevent violence, the police must be enabled in a way that could lead to further injustices. In the 2007 report Gang Wars: The Failure of Enforcement Tactics and the Need for Effective Public Safety Strategies, Judith Greene and Kevin Pranis wrote about the failures of gang suppression efforts across the country to actually reduce gang violence.

The way media might further intensify police gang tactics could impact a growing national conversation and empower the most dangerous elements of the Trump administration. Last year, after a string of brutal murders in Long Island, reportedly by MS-13, it was Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions who arrived to declare war on gangs.

Much of this is happening as activists are making some headway in challenging anti-gang tactics. Activists in Chicago, where a Guatemalan immigrant was arrested by ICE last year after being incorrectly identified as a gang member, recently filed a class action lawsuit challenging the Chicago police department’s gang database for being inaccurate and discriminatory. In Los Angeles, where California’s gang database was found to have one-year old babies listed, activists and lawyers recently won a federal ruling barring police from imposing damaging gang injunctions, a civil court–ordered restraining order that restricts where certain residents can go, who they can be seen with and even what they can wear.

Locally, the Daily News and New York Post want their readers to simply trust law enforcement. History may be repeating itself, with many people’s lives likely to be impacted. Either way, New York City’s editorial boards are happy to go along for the ride.


This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.

Papers Insist ‘We Need’ Secret Gang Databases—Just Like We ‘Needed’ Stop & Frisk

FAIR
-
0
New York Post: Criticisms of NYPD's Gang Database Are Utterly Ridiculous

“Utterly ridiculous”: the New York Post‘s defense (6/16/18) of the gang database

When President Donald Trump rails against alleged immigrant gang members as “animals,” as he did last month, he’s reducing complex (and highly political) issues—like the presence of MS-13 in the United States—to a fearsome cartoon of snarling packs of subhuman marauders. Vintage Trump, right? But local media, nowadays lionized as a check on Trump, resort to the same strategy, playing fast and loose with the inflammatory term “gang” and deferring and time and time again to questionable police tactics.

As FAIR’s Adam Johnson wrote two years ago (“Media Convict Scores of ‘Gang Members’ on NYPD’s Say-So—No Trials Necessary,” 5/2/16), local dailies in New York City were instrumental in convicting alleged gang members in the court of public opinion before anyone had ever even seen a judge. Most other local media outlets took the same approach, never bothering to ask if the scores of people arrested and perp-walked by police as violent gang members could actually be innocent, or unfairly swept up by a police department (in)famous for its dragnet approach to public safety.

On the gang sweeps, the New York Daily News led the way with its  2015 “Gangs of New York—and How Close You Live to Them” special feature (12/13/15), which included a map purporting to show “where gangs and crews operate,” based on data provided by the NYPD. It’s little surprise, then, that after community legal advocates criticized large-scale gang raids, leading to public hearings questioning the tactics, the News‘ editorial board quickly sided with police on a key tool: so-called gang databases.

Daily News: Ganging Up on Police

The Daily News (6/13/18) asks critics to quit picking on the NYPD.

Editorializing in favor of a database kept by the NYPD that no one knows they’re on—and therefore cannot challenge their inclusion in—the News (6/13/18) shrugged off community concerns as “alarmism,” and called the collection of people on the database (some as young as 13 when added to it) “good police work.” The editorial headline “Ganging Up on Police: The NYPD’s Gang Database Is a Solid Investigative Tool” told readers it was the police who were under attack, and conferred legitimacy on a shadowy database that the News‘ own reporting (6/12/18) suggests can negatively impact people for years.

Local police gang databases can present serious legal implications for those marked as gang members, such as increased bail, harsher sentencing, erosion of presumption of innocence and even increased chances of deportation.

Lawyers and activists have suspected local gang database information is shared with federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), sometimes even putting people trying to avoid gangs on the deportation block (New Yorker, 1/1/18). In fact, a new report released on the same day that Trump made his “animals” comment says that gang designations have led to increased deportations of young immigrants in New York. The report also points to “media coverage in certain outlets” that have “exacerbated the view of MS-13 as a dangerous, invading army of foreigners,” thus “sowing fear around the country.” Are these concerns alarmist? Or, as the New York Post‘s editorial board headlined, “utterly ridiculous” (6/16/18)?

For News and Post readers, the editorial board positions must have sounded awfully familiar: They were almost indistinguishable from the police department’s position, which was published by the News (6/12/18) the day before key hearings by the New York City Council.

An editorial mistake (8/13/13) the Daily News doesn’t seem to have learned anything from.

Not just the editorials but the whole scenario should feel familiar, since we’ve been here before. Nearly five years ago, as the NYPD was being criticized by community and legal groups over its Stop and Frisk program, the News‘ editorial board (8/13/13) sided with the police department, predicting “the ravages of lawlessness and bloodshed” if police efforts were curtailed. That didn’t happen, and the News, three years later, apologized on its pages (“We Were Wrong: Ending Stop and Frisk Did Not End Stopping Crime,” 8/8/16).

You’d think after being so spectacularly wrong on Stop and Frisk, the News would take the lesson to be more skeptical and wary about police practices. Alas, no, the editorial instinct is the same: support the police department to the point of echoing its talking points.

The News and Post couldn’t even bring themselves to follow even the most basic journalistic practice of asking for more information. There are still essential questions around the database and the actual impact of gangs left unanswered. The NYPD and the News, for example, claim the database currently has only about 17,500 New Yorkers listed. However, a Freedom of Information request by CUNY Law School’s Babe Howell suggests over 42,000 names, based on information she received from the police department itself.

The NYPD and the News say that about half of all shootings in the city are “gang-related”—which would include suspected shooters and victims that the police allege to be gang members. However, seen in the broader context of New York City, which is experiencing record low crime, “gang-related” crime accounts for 1.7 percent of overall crime. The numbers get even lower for “gang-motivated” crime—crime done in the interests of a gang, according to police—which is at less than 0.1 percent (The Intercept, 6/11/18).

Then there is the key argument over whether the NYPD should have arbitrary power over designating who, in fact, is in a gang. The criteria police use is remarkably loose: simply “associating” with gang members, living in certain neighborhoods,  having certain tattoos and even wearing certain colors. With criteria like these, which scream guilt by association, it’s hardly surprising that 99 percent of people added to the list are non-white.

With remarkable disparities over how far-reaching the database really is, the extent to which gang violence actually affects the city, as well as the central question of who is actually in a gang, the editorial position of two of the city’s major newspapers would seem, at the very least, premature.

There is, of course, nothing to lose for members of the News‘ editorial board. As I wrote earlier this year in Injustice Today (now The Appeal), there are no measures of accountability for media when they support destructive police policies. While some media outlets may apologize years after the policies have upended people’s lives, they are free to continually support more potentially destructive policies in the future.

I have been one of many organizers pushing back against the database and the NYPD’s gang sweeps. And, in fairness, the News did publish my opinion piece (6/13/18) on the gang database. But that doesn’t amount to balance in their pages when both the reporting and editorial weight is thrown behind the police, time and time again.

For the New York Post (6/26/18), a murder that happened while the NYPD had a gang database proves the need for a gang database.

A recent, horrendous murder of a 15-year-old Bronx boy by alleged gang members could make media coverage worse. The Post (6/26/18) has already jumped on the story to make the point that his death “proves we need an NYPD gang database.” Three years ago, the Post  (5/31/15) similarly spotlighted shooting murder cases to make the case that New York City should bring back Stop and Frisk. What the Post wanted then, as they do now, is to unleash the police—who they say have been “handcuffed” by the advocacy of “radicals” and “cop-haters”—to do whatever they want.

While the murder has rightly stirred outrage on social media and in the community, is the answer to ramp up aggressive police enforcement? The Post presents the false choice that in order to prevent violence, the police must be enabled in a way that could lead to further injustices. In the 2007 report Gang Wars: The Failure of Enforcement Tactics and the Need for Effective Public Safety Strategies, Judith Greene and Kevin Pranis wrote about the failures of gang suppression efforts across the country to actually reduce gang violence.

The way media might further intensify police gang tactics could impact a growing national conversation and empower the most dangerous elements of the Trump administration. Last year, after a string of brutal murders in Long Island, reportedly by MS-13, it was Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions who arrived to declare war on gangs.

Much of this is happening as activists are making some headway in challenging anti-gang tactics. Activists in Chicago, where a Guatemalan immigrant was arrested by ICE last year after being incorrectly identified as a gang member, recently filed a class action lawsuit challenging the Chicago police department’s gang database for being inaccurate and discriminatory. In Los Angeles, where California’s gang database was found to have one-year old babies listed, activists and lawyers recently won a federal ruling barring police from imposing damaging gang injunctions, a civil court–ordered restraining order that restricts where certain residents can go, who they can be seen with and even what they can wear.

Locally, the Daily News and New York Post want their readers to simply trust law enforcement. History may be repeating itself, with many people’s lives likely to be impacted. Either way, New York City’s editorial boards are happy to go along for the ride.


This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.

PressTV-What China’s actions in South China Sea express

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China’s defensive installations in the South China Sea are an expression of its sovereignty, and no international body has jurisdiction over China’s sovereign territory, says Dennis Etler, an American political analyst who has a decades-long interest in international affairs.

Etler, a former professor of Anthropology at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Wednesday while commenting on US Defense Secretary James Mattis’ visit to China.

On Wednesday, Mattis met his Chinese counterpart in Beijing amid increasing tensions between Washington and Beijing over the South China Sea and President Donald Trump’s trade policy. 

China won’t give up ‘one inch’ of territory

Mattis also met with President Xi Jinping on Wednesday night following his talks with other senior officials as part of his trip to Asia that will include visits to regional allies Seoul and Tokyo.

China is committed to…

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Sri Lankan unions betray national postal strike

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Sri Lankan unions betray national postal strike

By
W.A. Sunil

28 June 2018

The Sri Lankan postal unions called off a 16-day national strike by more than 25,000 workers at midnight on Tuesday. None of the demands were met. Union officials ended the industrial action without calling mass meetings after accepting vague promises made during discussions with the Postal Services Minister M.H.A. Haleem and other government officials.

The unions’ demands included a revision of recruiting procedures, the re-establishment of 18 junior grades positions, permanency for officers who have been on probation for more than five years, and inclusion of deputy postmasters in the consolidated postal service.

The unions worked from the outset to limit and isolate the indefinite walkout, which began on June 11. Postal union members, however, made clear at every opportunity that they were determined to remain on strike until the government granted all of their claims.

Four thousand workers demonstrated in Colombo on June 20 and protests were held on June 25 in towns and cities across Sri Lanka, including Kandy, Matara, Galle, Ambalangoda, Hatton and Colombo.

Strikers defied threats by the government and the postal authorities. The postmaster general cancelled their leave, threatened to suspend those who failed to report for work and to stop salary payments during the walkout. The government deployed police in post offices to break the strike under the pretext of protecting employees who had returned to work.

Union of Postal and Telecommunication Officers (UPTO) secretary H.K. Kariyawasam told the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) that his union would receive a “written promise” from the National Salary and Cadre Commission (NSCC) within two to three months. He claimed that the postal…

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Prison Planet.com » U.S. oil prices settle at highest since 2014 as crude supplies notch biggest weekly drop of the year

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Market Watch
June 28, 2018

Oil prices rallied Wednesday, with the U.S. benchmark settling at its highest since 2014 as domestic crude supplies notched their biggest weekly drop of the year so far.

Traders also showed concerns over U.S. threats to sanction countries that don’t stop importing oil from Iran by Nov. 4.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, August West Texas Intermediate crude CLQ8, +0.01%  tacked on $2.23, or 3.2%, to settle at $72.76 a barrel. That was the highest finish since Nov. 26, 2014. August Brent crude LCOQ8, +0.66% the global benchmark, settled $1.31, or 1.7%, at $77.62 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe, for the highest finish since May.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported Wednesday that crude supplies declined by 9.9 million barrels for the week ended June 22—the largest weekly decline so far this year. Analysts surveyed by S&P Global Platts had forecast a fall of 2.3 million barrels, while the American Petroleum Institute on Tuesday reported a drop of 9.2 million barrels.

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 28, 2018 at 6:50 am



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Seymour Hersch questions media narrative on Salisbury poisoning — RT UK News

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Seymour Hersch questions media narrative on Salisbury poisoning — RT UK News

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersch has questioned the UK government’s official line on the motives behind the Skripals’ poisoning, saying there is an “instinctive dislike” of Russia within the UK.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show, Hersch was responding to a question about whether journalists often bring their own “baggage or views” to stories before they’ve found out about what’s going on, and if this shaped how stories were reported.

He said there is “bias all the time” in the media, and that the UK is “riddled with bias” fueled by an “instinctive dislike” of Russia.

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Police officers stand guard outside of the home Sergei Skripal on March 6, 2018. © Toby Melville / Reuters

“There’s bias all the time, this country’s riddled with bias, there’s a great dislike of Russia here, an instinctive dislike,” he said.

“You saw that mess you had in March, the two Russians that were allegedly killed by nerve gas, which is essentially impossible,” he continued in reference to the poisoning of ex-Soviet double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury three months ago.

“If you kill them, you kill half the city with nerve gas,” he added, before saying that interest in reporting on the story has “dwindled away.”

“There’s something wrong with the story,” he added.

After several months in hospital, both Skripals were released from hospital after becoming seriously ill when coming into contact with the nerve agent Novichok. Little has been heard from the Skripals since their subsequent discharge from hospital.

Although London and other Western nations were quick to point the finger at the Kremlin, no evidence has been provided that directly links Moscow to the attack.

Last week, it was reported that the British government would buy the residence of Sergei Skripal, along with the home of Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, the officer who became ill after finding the Skripals slumped on a bench.

The total bill to the taxpayer, which includes the two homes, cars, and various possessions, is estimated at a cool £1 million ($1.3 million).

READ MORE: UK plan to turn OPCW into politicized quasi-prosecutorial body will undermine intl security – Russia

Hersch, who shot to fame after exposing the cover up of the My Lai Massacre of civilians by US troops during the Vietnam War, has gone on to become one of the leading investigative reporters on national security issues, and a critic of US foreign and security policy.

Stories he has covered since the infamous My Lai investigation have included the torture and mistreatment of inmates by US Military Police in Abu Ghraib prison after the invasion of Iraq, and – more recently – he has called into question claims made that the Syrian government has used sarin gas against civilians. As a result, he has been labeled by critics as an apologist for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

When asked for his own take on who really was behind the Salisbury attack, Hersch said: “I’ve been told the real story had little to do with Russia per se, except that he was ratting out some of the Russian mobs.”

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

‘Nothing more terrifying than hearing shooter reload from under your desk’ – Maryland paper survivor — RT US News

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‘Nothing more terrifying than hearing shooter reload from under your desk’ – Maryland paper survivor — RT US News

A crime reporter who witnessed his colleagues being shot at an Annapolis, Maryland newspaper and then waited under his desk for the gunman to pick the next victim, posted a harrowing description of the attack on Twitter.

Five people were killed and several others gravely injured at the offices of Capital Gazette in Annapolis on Thursday. The gunman has been detained.

“A single shooter shot multiple people at my office, some of whom are dead,” reporter Phil Davis tweeted on Thursday afternoon. He added that the gunman “shot through the glass door” and then targeted several of his colleagues, adding “can’t say much more and don’t want to declare anyone dead, but it’s bad.”

Davis, who managed to take cover, recalled that there was “nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload.”

He then clarified for some of the confused Twitterati that he wasn’t tweeting from under his desk: “I was already safe when I started tweeting.”

In a later interview with the Baltimore Sun, the Gazette’s parent company, Davis described the shooting as “like a war zone”

“I’m a police reporter. I write about this stuff — not necessarily to this extent, but shootings and death — all the time,” he said. “But as much as I’m going to try to articulate how traumatizing it is to be hiding under your desk, you don’t know until you’re there and you feel helpless.”

Davis and other Gazette employees were still hiding when the shooting stopped: “I don’t know why. I don’t know why he stopped,” Davis said.

READ MORE: Five dead in Annapolis paper shooting, gunman in custody – police

Anne Arundel County Police reached the building within two minutes of receiving the active shooter call and arrested the suspect, officials said on Thursday. They could not confirm reports that the suspect used a shotgun in the attack.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-UK PM distances herself from attacks on companies

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PressTV-UK PM distances herself from attacks on companies

British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Tuesday companies should be listened to but stopped short of condemning her foreign minister who, according to accounts of remarks at a private event, used foul language to criticize business concerns over Brexit.

The government’s already strained relations with business further soured over the weekend after Boris Johnson was quoted by The Daily Telegraph newspaper brusquely dismissing business leaders’ concerns about the impact of Brexit.

“We want to make sure we are listening to the business voice,” May said at an event hosted by The Times newspaper when asked how she responded to the alleged comments, according to journalists who were present.

“Business is at the heart of how we are going to develop this country,” she added.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson

On Sunday, two cabinet ministers accused companies of issuing threats and undermining the prime minister by voicing…

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PressTV-Immigration protesters occupy US Senate building

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PressTV-Immigration protesters occupy US Senate building

Hundreds of protesters have occupied a US Senate office building and chanted slogans against President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration.

During the demonstration on Thursday, the activists, mostly women dressed in white,  refused police orders to leave and lined up to be arrested, Reuters reported.

The protesters occupied the Hart Senate Office Building’s marbled floors and wrapped themselves in metallic silver blankets, which appeared to be a reference to those given to children of undocumented migrants sleeping on thin mattresses on the floors of detention centers.

“Say it loud, say it clear, immigrants are welcome here,” the protesters chanted.

A demonstrator dressed as US President Donald Trump marches as immigration activists rally as part of a march calling for “an end to family detention” and in opposition to the immigration policies of the Trump administration, in Washington, June 28, 2018. (Reuters…

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What does Doug Ford’s Election as Premier of Ontario mean for the Palestinian Solidarity Movement?

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How will the election of Doug Ford as premier of Ontario effect the pro-Palestinian movement?

In one of his first post-election moves Ford announced that he would seek to ban an annual Palestinian solidarity event. After the recent Al Quds (Jerusalem) Day protest brought over 500 people out in Toronto, Ford tweeted, “our government will take action to ensure that events like Al Quds Day, which calls for the killing of an entire civilian population in Israel, are no longer part of the landscape in Ontario.” Ignoring how Israel has been killing large numbers of Palestinian civilians — 124 to 0 in the latest round in Gaza — the premier-elect added in a subsequent tweet: “Blatantly racist or anti-Semitic ideology should never be permitted on the grounds of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, or anywhere else in our province.”

Ford’s move isn’t surprising since he’s previously campaigned against Palestinian solidarity activism. During his stint on city council Ford sought to defund Toronto’s Pride Parade because Queers Against Israeli Apartheid was allowed to march alongside hundreds of other groups. “We don’t support hate groups, that’s our view. If they want to march in the parade, then we won’t fund them,” said the Councillor.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Jewish Defence League and B’nai B’rith immediately applauded or re-tweeted Ford’s call to ban Jerusalem Day protests (as did Canada’s leading Christian Zionist…

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Can Illegal Immigrants Be Deported

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Last weekend, President Donald Trump argued that those foreigners who enter the United States unlawfully should simply be taken to the border, escorted across it and let go. According to the president, this would save precious government resources, avoid the business of separating children from their parents and free up the Border Patrol and other federal assets to do their jobs.

He is undoubtedly correct on the beneficial consequences to the government of forced deportation without due process. Yet deportation without a trial is profoundly unconstitutional.

Here is the back story.

The nation has been torn apart by the images of immigrant children — some are babies — being forcibly separated from their parents by U.S. immigration authorities, who were getting orders from the Trump administration, which was misreading federal law so as to require the separation.

The government has essentially taken the position that those physically present in the U.S. illegally have few constitutional rights and thus family members who arrive together can be separated, no matter the psychological or physical consequences. This forced separation is not novel to the Trump administration, but its massive scale in the present toxic national political environment has painfully brought it to our collective conscience.

Suicide Pact: The Radi…
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The forced separation by the government of children from their parents without a trial when neither is a danger to the other is child abuse or kidnapping or both. When federal authorities engage in such morally repellant behavior — whether as a negotiating technique to bring the president’s political adversaries to the bargaining…

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PressTV-‘Several dead’ after newsroom shooting in US

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Several people are dead after a shooting at a newspaper office in the US state of Maryland, according to reports.

A senior federal law enforcement source told CBS News that at least four people were dead in the incident happened on Thursday afternoon.

The first reports of the shooting came at 2.40pm at the Capital Gazette building in Annapolis, after the shooter entered the building, which also houses other businesses. The Gazette is a local newspaper owned by The Baltimore Sun.

Employees were evacuated by police from the building with hands raised above their heads. Police were searching through the building and called the situation “active and ongoing.”

A spokeswoman for the city said the suspect had been arrested.

No motive has been known yet but a law enforcement official said the shooting was not being treated as an incident of terrorism, rather as a local incident.

Phil Davis, a Gazette reporter, tweeted that he was in the…

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Shooting Reported at Capital Gazette Newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland

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A shooting has occurred at the Capital Gazette in Anne Arundel County, a paper that is owned by The Baltimore Sun, according to reports from Gazette staff.

Anne Arundel County Police confirmed there was an “active shooter” at 888 Bestgate Road, where the newspaper’s offices are located. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confirmed it was responding to a “shooting incident” at the Gazette.

Phil Davis, a Gazette reporter, said that multiple people had been shot. Police did not immediately respond to requests for further information.

Police said the building was being evacuated as officers continue searching it.

Agents with the ATF were on the scene in Annapolis to provide support to local law enforcement, said Amanda Hils, a spokeswoman for the federal agency. ATF can help with tracing weapons, conducting interviews and other assistance.

Police were also at The Baltimore Sun newsroom in Baltimore. Police said there was no threat on the Sun, and that their presence was a precaution.

 

 

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‘He just wanted to show his skin colour’

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Voice Of Europe
June 28, 2018

The Swedish district court has released an African migrant after he showed his penis to a 6-year-old child, Fria Tider reports.

On 11 May 2017 a woman with her two children entered a café in Sollentuna. As she stood at the counter she saw the man who worked as a waiter, showing his penis to one of her children.

In the police interrogation, the affected child said that the African first pulled up his shirt and showed his stomach before clutching his trousers and exposing himself.

The man later defended himself saying he “only” showed parts of his penis to the child because the six-year-old “asked him” to do it by saying “pippi”.

“I thought the child was curious about my skin colour,” he explained. Attunda District Court released the African and based their judgement on his own story.

The man, who is a citizen of Gambia, has to pay a fine of 4,200 SEK (€404 euros) and an amount of 800 SEK (€77 euros) into the victim’s fund.

This article was posted: Thursday, June 28, 2018 at 6:53 am



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Video: Fake News and the Real Existential Threat, Paul Jay Takes Viewer Questions

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Video: Fake News and the Real Existential Threat, Paul Jay Takes Viewer Questions

Recorded live on June 14th, Dharna Noor hosts a wide ranging discussion with the TRNN Senior Editor Visit http://therealnews.com for more stories and help …

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Staunch anti-Russian MP wants special powers for Ofcom (VIDEO) — RT UK News

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Staunch anti-Russian MP wants special powers for Ofcom (VIDEO) — RT UK News

A Conservative MP with a history of stirring anti-Russian sentiment and fear-mongering has called on the UK’s communications regulator Ofcom to be given special, stronger powers to deal with Russian broadcasters.

Isle of Wight MP Bob Seely led a debate on Russian Federation activity in the UK and across the globe – yet another chance for the firmly anti-Russian MP to air his grievances against the Kremlin.

Seely said that “Russia Today, or RT, whatever they’re calling themselves this week” – referring to the not-so-hard-to-grasp 2009 name change of the international news network – accused the channel of running propaganda and said that such organisations should come with a “health warning.”

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Be on the look out for Putin, says Tory MP Bob Seely. © Sergei Karpukhin

“I am suggesting that TV stations that don’t have an independent editorial line should have to advertise that,” he said, before later stating that Ofcom should be given more power to deal with the Russian broadcaster.

“Investigations by Ofcom take up to a year and, against the West, RT and Sputnik churn out a regular diet of anti-Western nonsense,” Seely said. “I don’t believe we should ban RT or Sputnik… but we need to strengthen Ofcom’s powers. Fines, right of reply, and ensure that Ofcom investigates broadcasters of knowingly fake and propagandistic news more quickly.”

The Tory politician is no stranger to using his position in the public eye to attack the Russian state; on June 4, the MP released a ‘study’ – anti-Kremlin propaganda masquerading as a peer-reviewed paper – for neoconservtative think-tank the Henry Jackson Society.

Seely, who during the debate called for the strengthening of laws to restrict dirty money or finances from unknown sources in the UK, partnered with the think-tank accused of similar secretive behavior: pulling funding in 2014 for two parliamentary groups which focused on homeland and international security after refusing to disclose its donors to the Commons’ standards watchdog.

READ MORE: ‘RT should come with a health warning,’ says Tory MP, peddling anti-Moscow academic paper (VIDEO)

According to Seely’s June paper on Russia, the study was peer-reviewed by staunch anti-Russian academic Dr Andrew Foxall. Seely’s document does refer to two others who also reviewed the paper, but it fails to name them.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

Five dead in Annapolis paper shooting, gunman in custody – police

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Five dead in Annapolis paper shooting, gunman in custody – police

Preview Five people have been shot dead and several more injured by a gunman at the offices of Capital Gazette, a newspaper in the Maryland capital of Annapolis. The shooter is in custody, police said.
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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

PressTV-Two dead, 18 injured in UK bus crash

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PressTV-Two dead, 18 injured in UK bus crash

A crash between a double-decker bus and a lorry in Cambridgeshire, eastern England, has left two people dead and 18 others injured, police say.

The collision took place on the A47 Thorney Road in Guyhirn, a village near Wisbech, around 7:30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) on Tuesday.

Reports said the deceased were the bus driver, in his 50s, and a passenger, in his 70s.

“We are sorry to report that two men, traveling in the bus involved in the A47 collision, have sadly died. Our thoughts are with their families at this time,” said Cambridgeshire Constabulary’s official Twitter account. “Seven people have been seriously injured and 11 have minor injuries following the collision.”

Police noted that those who were seriously hurt had a combination of broken bones and head injuries, including brain injuries.

The scene of a crash on the A47 Thorney Road in Guyhirn, Wisbech. (Photo via social media)

Footage from the scene shows the bus, which had…

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PressTV-US Supreme Court sides with billionaires in Janus case

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The Supreme Court has sided with billionaires by ruling against public sector unions, prohibiting them from charging “agency fees” to the public employees for whom they negotiate pay increases and other benefits if those employees decline to join the union as full members.

Justice Samuel Alito’s 5-4 majority opinion on Wednesday’s 5-4 ruling but that dealt a blow to worker rights. The so-called “fair share” fees used to help unions represent all workers, including non-unionized ones.

The decision “marks a victory in the decades long Republican campaign to undermine the labor movement,” said Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires organization, which says its mission is to build a more stable, prosperous, and inclusive nation by promoting public policies based on the “first principles” of equal political representation, a guaranteed living wage for all working citizens, and a fair tax system.

“Unfortunately though, it…

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PressTV-US says has ‘ironclad’ commitment to South Korea security

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PressTV-US says has ‘ironclad’ commitment to South Korea security

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis says the United States has an “ironclad” commitment to South Korea’s security and will maintain its current number of troops on the Korean Peninsula, despite the suspension of some joint military drills with Seoul.

The Pentagon chief made the comment during a brief visit to Seoul on his way from China to Japan on Thursday.

“The US commitment to the Republic of Korea remains ironclad, and the US will continue to use the full range of diplomatic and military capabilities to uphold this commitment,” Mattis told his South Korean counterpart, Song Young-moo.

US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis (2nd-L) is greeted by South Korea’s Defense Minister Song Young-moo (3rd-L) on his arrival at the Defense Ministry in Seoul, South Korea, on June 28, 2018. (Photo by AFP)

Mattis also defended US President Donald Trump’s decision this month to suspend large-scale “war games” with South Korea.

“The recent…

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Napolitano Top Front-Runner For Trump’s Supreme Court Pick

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Napolitano was told he was a top pick in 2017 by the president face-to-face

Kit Daniels
Prison Planet.com
June 28, 2018

Andrew Napolitano is a top front-runner for President Trump’s next Supreme Court pick, multiple sources have told Infowars.

Napolitano was already told he was on the president’s short list in 2017, but Neil Gorsuch was selected based in part on a computer algorithm that suggested he was the top conservative judge based on federal court cases.

Napolitano, on the other hand, has experience as a state judge for New Jersey’s Superior Court.

It appears that for his first pick, President Trump decided to ‘play it safe’ with a known federal judge like Gorsuch, which gave him more maneuverability for his second choice.

Choosing Napolitano wouldn’t be far-fetched, given Trump’s penchant for thinking outside the box and for the “earned media” a Napolitano pick would generate.

Furthermore, Napolitano’s judicial philosophy is within the same realm as Gorsuch and the late Antonin Scalia, and while Napolitano doesn’t follows the latter’s strict originalism to the letter, he only deviates from it to protect the liberties of the individual through the application of Natural Law.

In 2017, Infowars had already reported that Napolitano was one of Trump’s personal favorites, with the president praising Napolitano’s ability to make federal law understandable to the common man.

Trump also quoted Napolitano in a tweet on Tuesday, and Napolitano was one of the first legal experts to shine a light on the controversial surveillance targeting the Trump campaign in 2016.