US President Donald Trump has announced that Venezuela has freed an American national from detention.

In a tweet on Saturday morning, Trump did not identify the American by name but said he would be welcomed at the White House with his family in the evening.

The person appeared to be Joshua Holt, who was arrested shortly after arriving in Venezuela about two years ago.

In July 2016, Venezuela said it had arrested Joshua Holt and his Venezuelan wife on charges of fomenting unrest against embattled President Nicolas Maduro.

Venezuelan Interior Minister Gustavo Gonzalez Lopez said that the country’s intelligence service had detained Holt in a public housing complex on the…

Before the Fall: German and Austrian Art of the 1930s on view in New York City

By
Fred Mazelis

26 May 2018

Before the Fall: German and Austrian Art of the 1930s is a riveting and thought-provoking exhibition on view through May 28 at New York City’s Neue Galerie, the small but important museum that is a fairly recent (2001) addition to New York’s “Museum Mile” on Fifth Avenue, home to the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim and numerous other world-renowned institutions.

The current show is the last in a trilogy that began at the Neue Galerie several years ago with two other, equally fascinating exhibitions, the first one entitled, Degenerate Art: the Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, which was followed by Berlin Metropolis: 1918-1933. All three shows have been curated by Olaf Peters, a professor at the Martin-Luther-Universität in Halle, Germany.

The current exhibition includes the work of some less well-known artists compared to its predecessors. It also features work from a somewhat later period than the earlier shows—paintings, prints and photographs from either just prior to or during the era of the Third Reich.

A few of these artists could perhaps be placed in a category similar to the “forgotten composers” who lost their lives or whose careers suffered because of the Holocaust. Most included in this exhibition, however, survived the war, and only a few were Jewish. In fact, there are a handful of artists here who were Nazis themselves, or at any rate joined the Nazi Party. Even among some who opposed fascism, however, their prospects for an international reputation suffered as a result of the upheavals of the 1930s and 1940s.

Max Beckmann, 1922

The timeliness of this work, produced as it was in the shadow of Hitler’s dictatorship, hardly needs…

Smartphone maker Apple Inc. has released a transparency report on the US government data requests, saying the US national security increased its demands to access user’s accounts in the second-half of last year.

In its yearly transparency report on government data requests that was issued on Friday, Apple said more than twice as many requests were filed in the second half in 2017 than the same period in the previous year.

From July 1 to December 31 last year, the company said, it received up to 16,249 US National Security Requests (NSR) that affected some 8,249 accounts.

The number of requests rose 20 percent compared with the first half of 2017, when Apple received 13,499 such requests.

The most recent figures, however, are more than two-and-a-half times higher than the comparable period a year earlier, when Apple received only 5,999 such requests.

The tech firm had received requests by orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance…

On December 21, 2017 the United Nations General Assembly rejected the Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by a 128-9 vote. The only countries to side with Israel and the U.S. were Guatemala, Honduras, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and for good balance, Togo. (The West African country’s President Gnassingbe benefiting from Israeli aid gushes about “Israel coming back to Africa, and Africa coming back to Israel.”)

Recall that the UNGA resolution that was passed in 1947, proposing the partition of Palestine, which (with a lot of terror) led to the establishment of the state of Israel, posited Jerusalem as a corpus separatum. Not just the status of East Jerusalem but that of the whole city remains in dispute. The city is the third holiest in the Islamic worldview, behind Mecca and Medina. The Prophet supposedly in a miraculous night visit on a sacred horse, alighted the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in what is now the occupied Old City. (I don’t believe that, any more than I believe the Old Testament myth about God causing the sun to remain stationary in the sky to give Joshua more time to conquer Jerusalem from the evil Canaanites–as depicted in Joshua 10:12. But myths are powerful.)

In any case, from the second century to the twentieth the city was overwhelming Christian or Muslim, a large percentage of its inhabitants probably descendants of pre-diaspora Judeans who over time converted to these…

Zero Hedge
May 24, 2018

Several FBI agents would like Congress to subpoena them so that they can step forward and reveal dirt on former FBI Director James Comey and his Deputy Andrew McCabe, reports the Daily Caller, citing three active field agents and former federal prosecutor Joe DiGenova. 

“There are agents all over this country who love the bureau and are sickened by [James] Comey’s behavior and [Andrew] McCabe and [Eric] Holder and [Loretta] Lynch and the thugs like [John] Brennan–who despise the fact that the bureau was used as a tool of political intelligence by the Obama administration thugs,” former federal prosecutor Joe DiGenova told The Daily Caller Tuesday.

“They are just waiting for a chance to come forward and testify.”

DiGenova – a veteran D.C. attorney who President Trump initially wanted to hire to represent him in the Mueller probe – only to have to step aside due to conflicts, has maintained contact with “rank and file” FBI agents as well as a counterintelligence consultant who interviewed an active special agent in the FBI’s Washington Field Office (WFO) – producing a transcript reviewed by The Caller.

These agents prefer to be subpoenaed to becoming an official government whistleblower, since they fear political and professional backlash, the former Trump administration official explained to TheDC.

The subpoena is preferred, said diGenova, “because when you are subpoenaed, Congress then pays…for your legal counsel and the subpoena protects [the agent] from any organizational retaliation…. they are on their own as whistleblowers, they get no legal protection and there will be organizational retaliation against them.”

DiGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing have long represented government whistleblowers. Most recently, Toensing became council for William D. Campbell, the former CIA and FBI operative that was deeply embedded…

The global economy is facing a threat of a spiraling protectionist measures that can lead to a devastating crisis, Vladimir Putin warned. Nations must find a way to prevent this and establish rules on how the economy should work.

The Russian president spoke out against the growing trend of using unilateral restrictions to achieve economic advantage, as he addressed guests of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) on Friday.

“The system of multilateral cooperation, which took years to build, is no longer allowed to evolve. It is being broken in a very crude way. Breaking the rules is becoming the new rule,” he said.

In addition to traditional forms of protectionism such as trade tariffs, technical standards and subsidies, nations are increasingly using new ways to undermine their competition, like unilateral economic sanctions. And nations which thought they would never be targeted by such measures for political reasons are now being proved wrong, Putin said.

“The ability to impose sanctions arbitrarily and with no control fosters a temptation to use such restrictive tools again and again, right and left, in every case, regardless of political loyalty, talks about solidarity, past agreements and long cooperation,” he said.

How an Economy Grows a…
Peter D. Schiff, Andre…
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Putin called for a change of course, for free trade to be defended, and for rules-based regulation of the global economy, which would alleviate the chaos resulting from the rapid technological transformations arising from the development of digital technology.

“The disregard for existing norms and a loss of trust may combine with the unpredictability and turbulence of the colossal…

The Daily Sheeple
May 24, 2018

Hasn’t Facebook gotten themselves into enough hot water? First was privacy concerns and then came Cambridge Analytica, and of course, the censorship of anyone who is not a leftist. Now the social media network is ramping up the creepiness and wants you to send them your nudes: it’s for your protection, of course.

Facebook can’t protect your data, but they want to be in charge of protecting your naked photos. The social media company suggests that sending it naked pictures is the best way to protect yourself from revenge porn, reported The Guardian.   Sorry, Facebook.  You’ve proven yourself untrustworthy.  But there are actually some considering sending their naked pictures to the social media giant.

But give it a chance. The company’s offering is a better idea than it sounds. Facebook has spent years working with other large technology firms to build software that can identify problem images the second they hit the net, and flag and remove them without the need for human intervention. The scheme, which has already been trialled in Australia, will be tested in the UK this week. –The Guardian

Facebook’s proposal is to send them the nudes first, though, before you’re a victim of revenge porn. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, to argue for trusting Facebook with the most sensitive data imaginable doesn’t just seem crazy, it is crazy.  Have you ever heard the term “screw me once, shame on you; screw me twice, shame on me?” Well, that’s pretty much how most people feel about Facebook having all of their naked photos on file…you, know…just in case.

The Guardian seems to think it’s just a fabulous idea, however.  “As for misusing the data,” The Guardian writes, “well, it may be evil, in the sort of banal, spreadsheety way a lot of major companies are, but it’s not stupid. Misusing these images would be a…

US President Donald Trump feels obligated to heed to Israeli leaders and the Zionist lobby which want another major military conflict in the Middle East to wipe out the Palestinian people, an American scholar says.

“The concern here is that Trump is beholden to people like [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, Sheldon Adelson and other gangsters allied with extremist fringe of the Zionist movement,” said Kevin Barrett, an author and 9/11 researcher in Madison, Wisconsin.

Sheldon is a billionaire US casino mogul and hard-line supporter of Israel. He had offered to fund the relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem al-Quds.

“These people would like a huge war in the Middle East that would allow them to finish the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by murdering and expelling the remaining Palestinians,” Barrett told Press TV on Friday.

The US House of Representatives unanimously passed an amendment on Wednesday that…

Campus Reform
May 24, 2018

Marygrove College, a Catholic graduate institution in Detroit, is now offering students a chance to earn a master’s degree in Social Justice.

According to the program’s webpage, the graduate program “is ideal for those interested in learning and promoting social justice/ change and becoming a scholar/activist.”

Through various courses offered by the program, students will get a chance to learn about concepts such as “corporate power,” “white privilege,” “psychology on social justice,” and more.

Among the courses that count towards a Master of Arts in Social Justice degree are “Justice [in] U.S. Economic Structures,” “Religion and Justice: Conflict and Congruence,” “Organizing for Social Change,” and more.

“Examination of race and racism will be presented from the lenses of Colonialism, Post-Traumatic Slavery Syndrome, and the dysfunctional side of white privilege,” one course description reads. “In addition, it will explore contemporary perspectives on spiritual and emotional intelligence related to social injustices.”

“This course is designed to introduce students to the law and policy of environmental justice,” explains the description of another course. “Environmental justice is at the confluence of the civil rights movement and the environmental movement. Students will develop an understanding of the scientific, economic, ethical, and legal underpinnings of environmental justice decision-making with a focus on Detroit.”

A course on human rights, meanwhile, offers students an opportunity to “examine how narratives (including films) enable or disable memory, truth telling, and justice in the aftermath of atrocity,” while a “special topics” Theology class helps pupils “develop their own theology of resistance.”

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

According to the main description of the degree plan, the…

Devin Nunes was far from being a national figure before President Donald Trump took office. Thanks to his work defending the president through his position as chair of the House Intelligence Committee, the California Republican has become notorious for his role in obstructing the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election — and has become a top target for Democrats hoping to flip the House in this fall’s midterm elections. But if newly leaked fundraising numbers are any indication, Nunes’ celebrity among Trump supporters has propelled him to a position where he’ll only feel more emboldened to shill on behalf of the president.

Nunes managed to raise roughly $2.5 million over the last six weeks for his re-election campaign this year, according to the Washington Examiner. Overall Nunes has raised $5 million, including $1.25 million raised in the first fiscal quarter of 2018, more than he raised in all of 2017. Most of the money is raised outside California’s 22nd congressional district — an unglamorous agricultural region in the state’s Central Valley — from Republicans around the country who have become aware of Nunes thanks to his high-profile role in defending Trump and attempting to discredit the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“If you’ve got the attention of the grassroots — particularly if you’re investigating the president or defending him — it’s a smart investment to make,” a Republican consultant told the Examiner about Nunes’ fundraising program.

Trump himself recently acknowledged his political debt to Nunes.

“A very courageous man — he’s courageous,” Trump said of Nunes as the two men attended a ceremony at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, recently. “Thank you very much, Devin, for being here, appreciate it.”

Nunes also attacked his hometown paper, the Fresno Bee, after a reporter asked the congressman whether he plans on hosting local forums or town hall meetings in his home district. (Republican…

Photo by Carl Glover | CC BY 2.0

The question is: has the Trump administration already made a decision to go to war with Iran, similar to the determination of the Bush administration to invade Iraq in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington?

Predictions are dicey things, and few human institutions are more uncertain than war. But several developments have come together to suggest that the rationale for using sanctions to force a re-negotiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is cover for an eventual military assault by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia aimed at regime change in Teheran.

As clueless as the Trump administration is on foreign policy, the people around the White House—in particular National Security Advisor John Bolton—know that sanctions rarely produce results, and unilateral ones almost always fail.

Sanctions aimed at Cuba, North Korea, Iraq and Libya did not dislodge any of those regimes and, in the case of North Korea, spurred Pyongyang into producing nuclear weapons. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi were eventually overthrown, but by American firepower, not sanctions.

The only case in which sanctions produced some results were those applied to Iran from 2010 to 2015. But that embargo was multi-lateral and included China, India, and one of Iran’s major customers, the European Union (EU). When the U.S. unilaterally applied sanctions to Cuba, Iran and Libya in 1996, the move was a

By Dr. Mercola

Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS),¹ a major U.S. medical insurer, suggests more than 4 percent of commercially insured Americans, or roughly 9 million people, suffer from clinical depression. Moreover, they report depression rates have jumped by 33 percent in the past five years, steadily increasing across all age and gender groups — with the rates of incidence for adolescents and millennials being of notable concern.

The implications of this data are far-reaching, especially given the reality that most people struggling with depression are also dealing with one or more other chronic health conditions, BCBS says. If you suffer from depression, you may also be affected by anxiety, diabetes, heart disease or another chronic illness. As the rates of depression continue to rise, you may be wondering what can be done to treat it. The good news is a number of natural treatments exist that will do more good for you than pharmaceutical drugs ever could.

Health Insurer BCBS Reports Depression Rates up 33 Percent in 5 Years

Based on insurance claims filed by 41 million of its privately insured members, BCBS reports diagnoses of clinical depression — also known as major depression — have risen by 33 percent during the past five years.² Given the reality most sufferers of depression also battle other health conditions, such as anxiety, chronic illness or substance abuse, BCBS says major depression ranks behind high blood pressure as “the second most impactful condition on the overall health of commercially insured Americans.” ³

According to the report,⁴ women of any age are more likely than men to be clinically depressed. Since 2013, depression diagnoses have increased across every demographic, with the most dramatic…

US border agents have neglected and physically and sexually abused more than 100 migrant children who were in their custody, according to a scathing new report.

The report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the University of Chicago Law School International Human Rights Clinic is based on thousands of pages of records detailing accusations from 116 unaccompanied migrant children in temporary US detention centers.

Some minors accused US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents of punching or kicking them and running them over with vehicles. Others said they were tased and verbally abused by officers.

Children also complained of being deprived of edible food and water, held in freezing cells, touched inappropriately by officers and threatened with rape or death.

“Migrant children long have reported varied mistreatment in CBP custody, including sexual, physical, and verbal abuse, and the deprivation of basic needs such as…

Israel and Saudi Arabia are making strange bedfellows but there are reasons for the emergence of their de facto alliance, as Lawrence Davidson explains.

By Lawrence Davidson

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during his grand tour of the United States last month publicly declared in an interview with the Atlantic magazine that the Israelis “have a right to live in their own land just like the Palestinians.” It is a problematic assumption, given that the Israelis’ “own land” is the land they took away from the Palestinians. This, and much else, has been either forgotten or ignored by the Saudi crown prince.

Seventy-three years ago Saudi Arabia’s first king, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, expressed a very different position in a series of letters to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For instance in a letter of November 1938 Ibn Saud had wrote “The [European] Jews have no right to Palestine and their claim is an act of injustice unprecedented in the history of the human race.” Sadly, there was in fact plenty of precedent when it came to colonial injustice, but Ibn Saud’s declaration certainly demonstrated the King’s depth of feeling. Other letters followed, predicting that Palestine was bound to become a “hotbed of disturbances and troubles” if the Zionists got their way.

The two leaders finally met face to face in 1945 on the U.S. Cruiser Quincy in the Suez Canal during FDR’s return trip from Yalta. In that meeting Roosevelt tried to convince the Saudi ruler to allow European Jewish occupation of Palestine. Ibn Saud countered that “Make the enemy and the oppressor pay; that is how we Arabs wage war.” He continued, “Amends should be made by the criminal, not by the innocent bystander. What injury have Arabs done to the Jews of Europe? It is the ‘Christian’ Germans who stole their homes and lives.” He finally added that “The Arabs would choose to die rather than yield their land to the Jews.” 

FDR: Couldn’t convince Saud.(US Army Photo)

What Changed?

Now Crown Prince bin Salman shows us that a lot has changed in the intervening years. Zionist Israel has become an established “fact on the ground” and thus…

Turkey’s petty-bourgeois left lines up behind bourgeois pro-NATO opposition

By
Halil Celik

26 May 2018

Following the decision of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to hold parliamentary and presidential snap elections on June 24, the Turkish pseudo-left parties and organisations are lining up behind the pro-NATO and pro-EU bourgeois opposition parties. While they are divided amongst themselves on the question of Kurdish nationalism, they are all in agreement on the rejection of an independent perspective for the working class—independent of all the discredited bourgeois camps.

Erdogan decided to call the election 17 months ahead of the scheduled date under the pressure of intensifying class tensions, an escalating fiscal and economic crisis, the ongoing war in Syria and US war preparations against Iran.

The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has formed an electoral alliance with the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Grand Unity Party (BBP)—the “People’s Alliance”. The main bourgeois opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), is heading the “Nation Alliance” that also includes the newly formed Good Party (IYI Parti—a Turkish nationalist party that split from the MHP) and the Felicity Party (SP—a smaller Islamist party, from which the AKP split in 2001).

Such electoral alliances between political parties, which have been legalised by a new electoral law, allow smaller parties, who join an alliance, to bypass the prohibitive 10 percent electoral threshold.

The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has not been allowed into the “Nation Alliance” due to opposition by Turkish nationalists. It is participating in the election with its own slate. While not having formed its own alliance, it has included…

In those seemingly interminable refugee debates being held in various countries, cruelty is pure theatre. It is directed, stage managed, the victims treated as mere marionettes in a play of putrid public policy and indifferent public officials.  Barriers have been set; barbed wire has been put in place. Open zones such as the European Union are being internally bordered up, the principle of mobility derided and assaulted.

In all of this, Australia has remained a paragon to be emulated. It first began with tentative steps: the establishment of onshore detention facilities at Villawood, Sydney and Port Headland, Western Australia, in 1991.  Then came that vile concept of mandatory detention, introduced in 1992.  The hobgoblin of offshore detention, financed afar by the Australian tax payer, would come with the Howard government.

The worded rationale since the Hawke years has tended to follow variants of the same, only differing in terms of shrillness and savagery. “Australia,” came the grave words of the Hawke government, “could be on the threshold of a major wave of unauthorised boat arrivals from south-east Asia, which will severely test both our resolve and our capacity to ensure that immigration in this country is conducted within a planned and controlled framework”.

The list of obituaries arising from such a policy is growing and should be chiselled into a wall of remembrance.  There is the Kurdish-Iranian refugee Fazel Chegeni, who perished on…

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation
May 24, 2018

BBC host Jo Coburn questioned future Prime Minister contender, conservative Jacob Rees-Mogg, whether his being Catholic should be a “barrier” to holding office in the United Kingdom.

Coburn attacked Rees-Mogg for opposing gay marriage and abortion in accordance with his Catholic faith and said, “Is it a barrier, do you think, to holding high office?”

From The Daily Express:

JACOB Rees-Mogg turned the questioning on the BBC Daily Politics host Jo Coburn and challenged her for “picking on the views of the Catholic church”.

Mr Rees-Mogg defended his views and asked why the ancient teachings of the church were not being tolerated in public life.

He said: “I make no criticism of any of my colleagues but do you believe in religious tolerance?

“So why do you pick on this view of the Catholic church?

“I am asking you, why do you pick on the views of the Catholic church?

BBC presenter Jo Coburn responded: “I am saying there are people who might have a problem with it.”

Mr Rees-Mogg did not let the matter drop and hit back: “You are saying that tolerance only goes so far and you should not be tolerant of the teaching of the Catholic church, so isn’t this stretching into religious bigotry?

Jo Coburn continued: “Is it a barrier, do you think, to holding high office?”

The arch-Brexiteer added: “Ah that is a different question and it is really important to get to the heart of this because this country believes in religious tolerance, we are a very tolerant nation.

“The act of tolerance is to tolerate things you do not agree with not just ones you do agree with and the problem with liberal tolerance is it has got to the point of only tolerating what it likes.

The BBC host responded angrily: “Do not assume what I think or that I am attacking I am raising an issue that your colleagues have also raised.”

Mr Rees-Mogg…

US President Donald Trump says his administration was having “productive talks” with Pyongyang about reinstating a planned June 12 summit with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, just a day after canceling the meeting.

“We are having very productive talks about reinstating the Summit which, if it does happen, will likely remain in Singapore on the same date, June 12th., and, if necessary, will be extended beyond that date,” Trump tweeted late on Friday.

Earlier in the day, Trump had indicated the summit could go ahead as planned after welcoming a conciliatory statement from Pyongyang, which said it remained open to talks.  

“It was a very nice statement…

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation
May 24, 2018

A liberal federal judge’s ruling against President Donald Trump in favor of liberal Twitter trolls could be a major win for right-wingers who’ve been censored and banned from social media.

From NY Daily News, “Trump can no longer block users on Twitter as judge declares his feed a public forum”:

President Trump can’t block Twitter users from viewing his prolific feed, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

Manhattan Federal Court Judge Naomi Buchwald ruled that Trump’s Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, is a “designated public forum” and protected by the First Amendment.

But the judge stopped short of ordering Trump to unblock his critics, saying she did not want to “enter that legal thicket.”

[…]The first-of-its-kind suit, filed last July by a group of Trump critics blocked from reading his tweets, claimed that the President was violating the First Amendment by taking such action because they expressed views he didn’t like.

“The @realDonaldTrump account is a kind of digital town hall in which the president and his aides use the tweet function to communicate news and information to the public, and members of the public use the reply function to respond to the president and his aides and exchange views with one another,” the lawsuit said.

Justice Department lawyers countered that Trump was within his rights to block certain people in the same way he can ignore certain people in a crowd.

But Buchwald rejected that argument, saying the President’s Twitter feed amounted to a public forum and he can’t cut off those with divergent views.

“The viewpoint-based exclusion of the individual plaintiffs from that designated public forum is proscribed by the First Amendment,” wrote Buchwald, who was appointed by President Clinton.

This is what right-wingers like Chuck Johnson and Jared Taylor who are suing Twitter for…

A mother and her 12-year-old daughter celebrating a birthday at a popular restaurant in Oklahoma City were shot Thursday night around 6:30 p.m. by a man in his late teens, when a bystander armed with a pistol confronted the shooter and fatally shot him as he tried to flee, according to Oklahoma City Police – who called the citizen “a blessing.”

Capt. Mathews says when the suspect exited the restaurant, he was confronted by a citizen who took out his own firearm, shooting and killing the suspect. –News9

Natalie and her daughter Niah Will were walking into Louie’s Grill & Bar to celebrate the woman’s eldest daughter Shayla’s 14th birthday when they were shot by a man said to be an 18 to 20-year-old white male wearing eye glasses and ear protection. Natalie was shot in the arm, while 12-year-old Niah was shot in her tailbone – the bullet traveling to her stomach. Shayla’s best friend, 14-year-old Alex, was also shot.

“To the good Samaritan that killed that monster I want to meet you and shake your hand and tell you face to face thank you for saving my daughter’s and everyone else in that restaurants life. You are my hero sir,” wrote Niah’s father, Jabari Giles, over Facebook.

Natalie’s sister Leslie said on Facebook both were in a stable condition, and Niah was taken into surgery, which ‘went well’.

The Law of Self Defens…
Andrew Branca
Check Amazon for Pricing.

‘Natalie was shot in the arm and is going to be fine. My niece suffered a more severe gunshot wound to her hip near the tail bone and bullet tracked into her stomach,’ she wrote.

‘She had surgery and it went well she is doing well. I just cant wrap my head around this evil in our world.

‘My sister is one of the best mothers and…

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation
May 24, 2018

The Southern Poverty Law Center responded with outrage to the Trump administration trolling the media last week with a press release titled, “What You Need To Know About The Violent Animals Of MS-13.”

While the press release detailed a host of heinous crimes committed by the El Salvadorian gang members on American streets, the SPLC was more angry over the White House’s tone.

“It is unacceptable for such racist, dehumanizing language to now be repeated 10 times on the White House website in a document that speaks for America,” the SPLC tweeted on Monday.

It is unacceptable for such racist, dehumanizing language to now be repeated 10 times on the White House website in a document that speaks for America. pic.twitter.com/U5yfT33BX6

— Southern Poverty Law Center (@splcenter) May 21, 2018

Incidentally, their tweet didn’t go over very well.

As one Twitter user responded: “The SPLC considers conservative Christians extremists, but will defend murderous gangs from being called what they are.”

On Tuesday, Fox News reported on how an MS-13 member known as “Animal” was sentenced to 40 years in prison for stabbing a 15-year-old boy to death in Massachusetts.

This article was posted: Thursday, May 24, 2018 at 6:29 am

Former CIA operative and Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles died Wednesday just outside of Miami. He was 90 years old. Posada Carriles is best known as the suspected mastermind of the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airline jet. For decades, the US refused to extradite Posada Carriles to face terrorism charges, despite demands by Cuba and Venezuela. Posada Carriles later publicly admitted ties to a series of hotel bombings in Cuba in 1997. In 2000, he was arrested in Panama City for plotting to blow up an auditorium where Fidel Castro would be speaking. Despite his record, Luis Posada Carriles died a free man in Florida. We get reaction from José Pertierra, a Cuban attorney based in Washington, DC. He represented the Venezuelan government in its efforts to extradite Luis Posada Carriles, and also represented Elián González in 2000-2001.

TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: Former CIA operative and Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles has died. He died on Wednesday just outside Miami. He was 90 years old. Posada Carriles is best known as the suspected mastermind of the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airline jet. For decades, the US refused to extradite Posada Carriles for terrorism charges, despite demands by Cuba and Venezuela. He later publicly admitted ties to a series of hotel bombings in Cuba in 1997. In 2000, he was arrested in Panama City for plotting to blow up an auditorium where Fidel Castro would be speaking. Despite his record, Luis Posada Carriles died a free man in Florida.

For more, we’re joined by José Pertierra, a Cuban attorney based in Washington, DC, represented the Venezuelan government in its efforts to extradite Luis Posada Carriles, and also represented Elián González in 2000, 2001, when Elián González was here in the United States, eventually sent back to Cuba to be with his dad.

José, if you could start out by talking just about the Cubana airlines bombing in 1976, how — and the Cubana airlines bombing? How many people died? And the significance of who this man is,…

Photo by Backbone Campaign | CC BY 2.0

When Facebook’s data practices began dominating the news last month, The Washington Post, like many other news organizations, was eager to share the story. Post reporters churned out at least 39 stories about Facebook in the week following the Congressional hearings with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The extensive coverage was justified, as the issues at play are not trivial. But the debate is not just about Facebook, it’s about how intimately big tech companies surveil users; a practice which is central to big tech’s continued growth.

One of the companies that profits most from closely tracking users is Amazon. The company’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, is far and away the richest man alive, worth an estimated $132 billion. And since 2013, Bezos has owned The Washington Post (which he bought for $250 million).

Bezos’s ownership of the Post has caught the ire of President Trump, who has falsely accused the newspaper of being Amazon’s “lobbyist.” Trump’s targeting of the “Amazon Washington Post” has led many to come to the newspaper’s defense, and rightfully so. But still, there’s a question as to whether the Post has been soft on Amazon, like in its coverage of the jurisdictional bidding war to land Amazon’s second headquarters.

Even so, at least the Post has regularly informed readers of Bezos’s ties to Amazon when reporting on the company. In the week following Zuckerberg’s testimony,…

President Donald Trump on Friday signed three executive orders designed to make it easier to fire federal government workers and to crack down on the unions that represent them, drawing immediate criticism from a group representing federal employees.

Administration officials said the orders would give government agencies greater ability to remove employees with “poor” performance, get “better deals” in union contracts and require federal employees with union responsibilities to spend less time on union work.

“Today the president is fulfilling his promise to promote more efficient government by reforming our civil service rules,” said Andrew Bremberg, director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, in a conference call with reporters.

“These executive orders will make it easier for agencies to remove poor-performing employees and ensure that taxpayer dollars are more efficiently used.”

The American Federation of…

Luis Posada Carriles, the most notorious and wanted terrorist in the Western Hemisphere – but one few Americans have ever heard of – has died a free man in Miami at age 90.

The Miami Heraldreports Posada Carriles died peacefully in his sleep in a Hollywood, Florida hospital early on May 23 following a lengthy battle with throat cancer.

At the time of his death, Posada Carriles, a staunchly militant anti-Castro Cuban exile and former longtime CIA agent, was wanted by authorities in Cuba and Venezuela for his leading role in masterminding the 1976 bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner over the Caribbean, an attack that killed 73 innocent people. He is also wanted for orchestrating a string of terror attacks on Cuban hotels and for repeatedly plotting to assassinate the late Cuban president Fidel Castro.

Posada Carriles and Castro were actually acquaintances during their pre-revolution college years at the University of Havana. Both equally despised the brutal US-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. However, after Castro’s revolution overthrew the Batista regime Posada Carriles was briefly jailed before fleeing his homeland for Argentina, then the United States.

When the John F. Kennedy administration decided to wage covert warfare against Castro’s Cuba, Posada Carriles was one of the young CIA-trained exiles who planned the ill-fated 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Following that colossal embarrassment, he received explosives and sabotage training at Ft. Benning, Georgia during a period of rising US support for anti-Castro terrorism, crimes which included a rocket attack on the United Nations in a failed bid to assassinate Che Guevara.

The CIA set up a station at University of Miami, where agents plotted to kill or overthrow Castro and where operatives planned and launched countless terror and sabotage missions. Militantly anti-communist exile groups trained and operated throughout South Florida, with secret camps popping up in the Everglades. In the 1970s, a wave of bombings, assassinations and other attacks on pro-Castro exiles in South Florida and far beyond earned Miami the FBI nickname of America’s “terrorist capital.”

Posada Carriles would later boast that “the CIA taught us everything… they taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb, trained us in sabotage.”

He would put all of those deadly skills to use while planning, along with fellow anti-Castro exile Orlando Bosch, the brazen broad daylight car bombing assassination of former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC on September 21, 1976. Letelier’s newlywed American aide, Ronni Moffit, was also killed in the attack.

The following month, Posada Carriles and Bosch planned the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455, which killed 73 civilians including Cuba’s junior Olympic fencing team. It was the worst act of airborne terrorism in the Western Hemisphere until the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The CIA, under its new director George H. W. Bush, knew…

Recent cases of personal information collecting for corporate interests highlight the urgency of revisiting the topic of higher education in its connection with the corporate sector and the government. We ought to reconsider at least some aspects of the complex web of the contemporary “education industry” and its social implications. Understanding how contemporary (Western) education works (or doesn’t work) can contribute to raising the awareness of the general population as to the scale of the problem, and making a change, no matter how small.

What’s the problem?

Why should one be concerned with the way the system of (higher) education works? Although the manifold issues related to the contemporary system of higher education in the West (primarily in the US) cannot be summarized in one word, one phrase does capture the most important problems: corporatization of universities.

This process is not new. It follows the more general tendency of applying “neo-liberal” policies, “business logic” and “market principles” to virtually all spheres of our private and public lives. Higher education—and, in particular, the humanities as the main focus of this essay—seem to be one of the latest victims of the all-penetrating (neo-liberal) capitalist ideology. The application of this ideology in academia has resulted in a couple of significant changes over the past decades, primarily in the US and the UK, but the rest of the world is catching up. These…

American Mirror
May 24, 2018

Hillary Clinton still needs help with the stairs.

The failed Democratic presidential candidate appeared in New York on Wednesday to speak to Democrats. After an impassioned speech full of yelling, Gov. Andrew Cuomo met Clinton on stage where he helped her conquer a single step way back up to the microphone.

Cuomo could be seen holding Hillary’s elbow as she bravely ascended the roughly 12 inch height.

Watch:

The feat wouldn’t have been complete without the famous Clinton cackle.

Hillary failed miserably earlier this year as she attempted to negotiate a staircase in India.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

While visiting Jahaz Mahal in Dhar’s Mandu in March, Clinton was attempting to descend about 15 stairs.

She was holding the arm of an aide.

With Huma Abedin following behind, Clinton slipped about halfway down the descent, nearly tumbling down.

A man walking in front of her jumped to grab her as she reached for him.

Despite both men helping her get to the bottom of the stairs, she slipped again, nearly doing the splits.

Huma stopped to watch as Clinton attempted to regain her balance.

Hillary kicked off her sandals to get to the bottom of the stairs.

No one seemed alarmed by the startling display.

This article was posted: Thursday, May 24, 2018 at 6:30 am

U.S. threats to crush Iran and North Korea may yet work, but as of now neither Tehran nor Pyongyang appears to be intimidated.

Repeated references by NSC adviser John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence to the “Libya model” for denuclearization of North Korea just helped sink the Singapore summit of President Trump and Kim Jong Un. To North Korea, the Libya model means the overthrow and murder of Libya strongman Col. Gadhafi, after he surrendered his WMD.

Wednesday, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui exploded at Pence’s invocation of Libya: “Vice-President Pence has made unbridled and impudent remarks that North Korea might end like Libya … I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks.

“Whether the U.S. will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behavior of the United States.”

Yesterday, Trump canceled the Singapore summit.

Earlier this week at the Heritage Foundation, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out our Plan B for Iran in a speech that called to mind Prussian Field Marshal Karl Von Moltke.

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Among Pompeo’s demands: Iran must end all support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, withdraw all forces under Iranian command in Syria, and disarm its Shiite militia in Iraq.

Iran must confess its past lies about a nuclear weapons program, and account publicly for all such activity back into the 20th century.

Iran must halt all enrichment of uranium, swear never to produce plutonium, shut down its heavy water reactor, open up its military bases to inspection to prove it…

Some details have finally been revealed around the discovery, in 2015, of the 62-gun, treasure-loaded Spanish galleon long known as the “holy grail of shipwrecks.”

The San José went down with hundreds of sailors and chests of gold, silver and emeralds mined in Peru and worth up to $17 billion in today’s dollars during a 1708 battle with British ships in the Caribbean Sea off the South American coast.

The legendary wreck was discovered off Cartagena, Colombia, on Nov. 27, 2015, launching questions about a potentially testy private-public resolution of who would collect on the glory, and, possibly, the bounty. As such, secrecy has shrouded the project for years before a few new details of that discovery were released this week.

To hunt for the San José, researchers used an unmanned underwater vehicle called REMUS 6000, owned by the Dalio Foundation, created by the head of the world’s largest hedge fund, Ray Dalio, and operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). It’s the same vessel that helped find the wreckage of Air France 447 in 2011 and helped map and photograph the Titanic wreck site in 2010.

To confirm the identity of the San José, REMUS, celebrated for its ability to conduct long-duration missions over wide areas, descended near the suspected wreck, found about 2,000 feet underwater, capturing photos of a key distinguishing feature of the San José: bronze cannons engraved with dolphins, the WHOI said in its release. WHOI said it…

US-China tensions expose rifts in Australian ruling circles

By
Mike Head

25 May 2018

Intensifying US economic, diplomatic and military pressure on China, and the Chinese regime’s counter-offensive, are fuelling rifts inside Australia’s government and the corporate and political establishment as a whole.

The Trump administration is threatening a trade war against China, while accusing Beijing of militarising the South China Sea and seeking to coerce North Korea into a deal that would endanger China’s strategic interests. Under these conditions, the US military-intelligence apparatus is reinforcing its insistence that there must be no wavering by Australia from lining up against China, its biggest export market.

Renewed accusations of “Chinese interference” in Australia are being promoted in the media, to try to poison public opinion against China. These are in preparation for potential military conflict and to hit back against voices of concern in ruling circles about the impact on the multi-billion dollar profits at stake for Australian capitalism.

Washington’s push produced extraordinary scenes in Australia’s parliament this week. First, on Tuesday, the chairman of the joint parliamentary intelligence and security committee, Andrew Hastie, a Liberal-National Coalition government backbencher, threw what the media called a “grenade” into recent government efforts to overcome a chill in relations with China.

Hastie, an ex-SAS military commander, used parliamentary privilege to accuse a prominent Chinese-Australian billionaire, Chau Chak Wing, of having “co-conspired” to bribe the president of the United Nations General Assembly, John Ashe, in 2013. Chau, whom Hastie declared had “extensive contacts in the Chinese Communist Party,” became an…

President Donald Trump is suggesting that Democrats had an informant spy on his presidential campaign amid a US Justice Department’s investigation into whether there was such an infiltration.

Trump said in a tweet Friday that the FBI had used a top-secret informant to surveil his team long before the bureau started investigating the alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

His tweet comes days after he demanded on Sunday that the Justice Department investigate whether the department or the FBI spied on his campaign at the behest of the administration of former President Barack Obama.

He said that…

Sputnik
May 24, 2018

Malaysian Airlines’ Boeing 777 crashed in eastern Ukraine in July 2014 during its flight to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam. All 298 passengers and crew members on board were killed.

Dutch investigators have claimed they’ve uncovered hard evidence that the missile system that had shot down MH17 over East Ukraine in 2014 was part of the Rusian military.

The missile, which downed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine in 2014, was launched by the Buk TELAR belonging to the Russian Armed Forces, head of the Dutch National Police’s Central Crime Investigation department Wilbert Paulissen said Thursday.

“The JIT has come to the conclusion that the Buk TELAR by which the MH17 was downed originated from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Bridage, or the 53rd Bridage, from Kursk in the Russian Federation,” Paulissen told a press conference organized by the Dutch-led JIT.

According to JIT, the missile system was allegedly delivered to territories in eastern Ukraine that were beyond Kiev’s control at the time of the incident and subsequently returned to Russia after the crash.

Dutch Chief Prosecutor Fred Westerbeke stated however that the investigation team will not disclose the evidence allegedly uncovered.

“We have more evidence and more information to back the conclusions made today, but we will not make them public at this time,” he announced.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Malaysian Airlines’ Boeing 777 crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 passengers and crew members on board.

In 2016 the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team presented the initial results of the criminal investigation into the crash, claiming that the airliner was downed by a Buk surface-to-air missile launcher which was delivered from the “territory of the Russian Federation to Ukraine.”

“We have determined that the weapon…

Police across Ontario are searching for two men who detonated an “improvised explosive device” in a Mississauga restaurant on Thursday night where patrons — including young children — had come for birthday parties.

The suspects immediately fled the Bombay Bhel restaurant, located in a plaza at Hurontario Street and Eglinton Avenue, after the explosion around 10:30 p.m.

It is too early in the investigation, police said, to know whether this may a hate crime or a terror-related incident.

Fifteen people were injured. Though three individuals were taken to the Toronto Trauma Centre in critical conditional, Chief Jennifer Evans of Peel Regional Police told reporters at an early morning press conference that they were now in stable condition. Evans did not name the victims but said the three in stable condition include a 35-year-old man from Brampton, and two Mississauga women, aged 62 and 48.

The remaining victims are between 23 to 69 years old. They were taken to local hospitals for the minor injuries and have since been released. Though Evans said children under the age of 10 were at one of the birthday parties, none of the children were hurt.

The explosion caused “considerable damage” to the restaurant, according to police. The men, who wore dark hoodies and had their faces covered with dark cloth, did not appear to stay long in the restaurant. When asked whether they had lingered in the restaurant before setting off the device, Evans said, “Not that I’m…

The administration of US President Donald Trump is responsible for the collapse of the negotiations for the summit with North Korea, not Democrats, 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, after Trump accused Democrats of “rooting against” the administration’s negotiations with North Korea.

“Democrats are so obviously rooting against us in our negotiations with North Korea,” Trump tweeted on Friday.

Jones said, “This is a completely preposterous claim. The reason that the negotiations for the summit collapsed is the Trump administration itself.”

“Trump made the mistake of appointing the biggest warmonger in America his national security adviser.  I’m talking about John Bolton who in the run-up for the summit with North…

Photo by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff | CC BY 2.0

President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to run away from a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un should not be a surprise to anyone. The White House is encouraging the notion that China’s Xi Jinping is to blame for souring the notion of a U.S.-North Korean summit and for toughening Kim Jong Un’s negotiating position, and the mainstream media is doing its predictable best to validate such a self-serving explanation.  In actual fact, the Trump administration was never prepared to discuss any issue that resembled arms control and disarmament, and national security adviser John Bolton, the formidable chairman of the new “war cabinet,” was never agreeable to the idea of U.S.-North Korean diplomacy.

Any exercise in arms control and disarmament involves two sets of negotiations: first is the internal set within the administration itself; second is the external set with foreign counterparts.  Typically, the internal negotiations within any administration is the tougher road. One of President John F. Kennedy’s greatest successes was disciplining the Pentagon in 1963 in order to negotiate the Partial Test Ban Treaty.  Over the past fifty years, there has never been an arms control and disarmament treaty that the Pentagon has welcomed.

President Richard Nixon and national security advisor Henry Kissinger were particularly skillful at disciplining the national security bureaucracy that found the…

(Photo: ERproductions Ltd / Getty Images)

Louisiana state officials warned earlier this year that thousands of elderly and disabled people would be evicted from nursing homes if lawmakers failed to reverse course on Medicaid cuts and solve the state’s ongoing budget crisis. (Lawmakers later moved to shield the elderly and disabled from spending cuts but have yet to pass a budget.) In Kentucky, Republican Gov. Matt Bevin proposed raiding $201 million from a health care fund for state workers to balance the state’s budget, a move that critics said would rob cost savings from Bevin’s employees.

For conservatives opposed to tax hikes, balancing budgets needed to keep schools open and hospitals running in cash-strapped states is not easy. By placing work requirements on adults in state Medicaid programs that provide health coverage for low-income people, Republicans in 11 states could make that job even harder.

Kentucky expects its work requirements to reduce Medicaid rolls by 15 percent, which means about 100,000 people would lose coverage in an average month.

By expanding coverage for millions of people, the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion reduced un-recouped costs at hospitals and in emergency rooms and funneled billions of dollars in new federal funding into state coffers. Kentucky alone was expected to realize a net fiscal benefit of $919 million from 2014 to 2021 as a result of Medicaid expansion, including nearly $100 million in savings, according to one state analysis commissioned before Bevin was elected.

Bevin and other Republicans have a different idea for saving money: Reduce the number of people covered by Medicaid. Unable to repeal the Affordable Care Act in Congress, the Trump administration and its allies in state government are chipping away at Medicaid expansion by applying for federal waivers to place work requirements and other conditions on enrollment. Kentucky expects its work requirements to reduce Medicaid rolls by 15 percent, which…

The Trump regime has sabotaged Putin’s peace efforts in Syria, Iran, Ukraine, and North Korea.

In the interest of peace Putin has avoided responding to US and Israeli provocations in Syria. Putin went so far as to invite the war criminal and genocidal maniac Netanyahu to Russia for the celebration of Russia’s victory over Germany in World War II. Netanyahu accepted, but showed Putin who is boss by ordering illegal Israeli military attacks on Syrian army positions just prior to his departure for Russia. Washington rewarded Putin’s peace efforts by occupying with US and French troops the part of Syria still held by Washington’s mercenaries sent to overthrow Assad and by re-supplying the Muslim extremists Washington is using against Assad’s secular government. With US and French troops present, Putin has halted the offensive to clear all of Syria of the foreign invaders. If Americans or French are killed, Putin knows that the demonization of Russia will reach a new high pitch and Washington will use it to counteract Europe’s dissatisfaction with Washington. The box into which Putin has been put by the Russian government’s misjudgment of US and Israeli intentions allows continuing US-led attacks on Syrian military positions. See here.

Previously Putin blocked the planned US invasion of Syria by arranging for all of Syria’s chemical weapons to be turned over to the West for destruction. The official chemical weapons inspection agency certified that Syria is devoid of chemical weapons. Putin’s reward is that US government officials, the entirety of the US media, and Washington’s British and French vassals have consistently blamed false flag chemical attacks, and in the case of Douma a fake news chemical attack that has been…

“At present, investors are trading our products in US dollars. We would definitely like to explore the possibility of launching products denominated in offshore renminbi,” Chamberlain said in an interview with the South China Morning Post.

The LME, which is owned by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX), currently allows traders to use the Chinese currency as collateral. Last July, the HKEX stock market also launched yuan-denominated gold futures.

LME’s chief executive didn’t specify when the new metals contracts would start changing hands in London. However, Chamberlain is reportedly confident that yuan-backed futures contracts are destined for success, as the Chinese currency is becoming more and more used in global finance.

“Chinese investors are definitely very active customers at the LME. They are trading through mainland brokers who are members of the LME or western firms,” he said, as quoted by the media.

“We believe with the increasing number of Chinese trading in our market, there would be more Chinese companies wishing to join the LME.”

The first steps towards internationalizing the Chinese renminbi were taken nearly a decade ago, when Beijing allowed the currency to be used in trade and investing. In 2016, yuan was included in the Special Drawing Right (SDR) basket alongside the US dollar, the Japanese yen, the euro, and the British pound. The move granted yuan the status of a reserve currency.

Earlier this year, China, the world’s biggest crude importer, rolled out a yuan-denominated oil contract that attracted nearly 27 billion yuan ($4 billion) during the first trading session. The contract saw interest from both domestic and foreign investors.