A major German TV network has aired an interview with the UN rapporteur on torture that reveals the invention of the Swedish “rape” case against Julian Assange.
Truth has broken through for those confused about how a publisher ended up in a maximum security prison in London with a one-way extradition ticket to court in the U.S. and the rest of his life behind bars.
One of the main German TV channels (ZDF) ran two prime-time segments on Wednesday night exposing authorities in Sweden for having “made up” the story about …
Later this month, India’s Supreme Court will hold a lengthy hearing on the commercialisation of genetically modified (GM) mustard, which would be the country’s first GM food crop. The court has asked the chair of the Technical Expert Committee to be present and says that the decision on GM mustard cannot be kept pending. The TEC has come out against using genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in Indian agriculture.
As lead petitioner in a public interest litigation challenging the government-backed push to commercialise this crop, Aruna Rodrigues has over the past few years submitted much evidence to the court alleging the science …
There’s one reason why it’s a good thing that Wall Street billionaire Michael Bloomberg is trying to buy the Presidency: it could remove the issue of age for those concerned about candidates in their 70s. Bloomberg is 79, the same age as Bernie.
Bloomberg’s desperate move is happening following Biden’s persistent stumbles and weaknesses, and after Buttigieg’s 0% level of support from African Americans in a Quinnipiac poll. Zero percent!
As of now, from many different angles, Bernie is looking good, Buttigieg not so much, and Bloomberg is a big …
A passenger plane carrying 172 people from Tehran has been forced to make an emergency landing after almost being hit by Syrian air defenses in response to an Israeli airstrike over Damascus. Former UK MP George Galloway joins In Question to discuss.
The whole DNC and Chairman Perez should be shit-canned
by Dave Lindorff / February 7th, 2020
Bernie Sanders declares victory on Thursday in chaotic (and perhaps unsuccessfully DNC-hacked) Iowa Caucus
Hooray for Bernie Sanders!
He waited until he had the numbers and now he’s calling it. He won Iowa!
Maybe the same corporate media that have been touting Pete Buttigieg as the “presumptive winner” in the messy Iowa Caucus, now that their story is collapsing are unwilling to call it for Bernie.
Sanders, in a televised announcement Thursday from New Hampshire, finally took action, saying, “Even though the vote …
Early in the morning on Feb 6th, the RCMP launched their long anticipated raid on Wet’suwet’en land defenders. Six supporters have been arrested, at the 39 km marker of the Morice West Forest Service Road, and a large contingent of RCMP trucks and heavy equipment have moved onwards towards the Gidimt’en Access point at the 44 km marker. The time has come for supporters to rise up and #ShutDownCanada.
The State of the Union Speech was pretty much a theatre of the absurd, but it also showed the true colors of everyone involved. As a speech goes, regardless of the content, it was very good on rhetoric. With plenty of theatrics that only a reality game show host could muster, it very likely gave Trump a bump in the ratings, for now. Let’s just wait for his post-acquittal speech where he’s likely to claim himself St. Donald, martyred by the Radical Left Socialist Democrats.
There were of course moments that were bi-partisan, for good or bad. Highlighting the Tuskegee Airman …
What’s more likely to shape Canadian policy in the Hemisphere: human rights and democracy or bankers’ bottom-line?
Last week Venezuelan politician Juan Guaidó was fêted in Ottawa. The self-declared president met Canada’s Prime Minister, international development minister and foreign minister. Trudeau said, “I commend Interim President Guaidó for the courage and leadership he has shown in his efforts to return democracy to Venezuela, and I offer Canada’s continued support.”
Last month Guaidó was dethroned as leader of Venezuela’s national assembly. While the vote was contested, it represents a significant blow to Guaidó’s year-old claim to be Venezuela’s legitimate President. To shore up his position …
After the supposedly post-racial presidency of Barack Obama, what passes for the liberal punditry discovered racism had arisen in the homeland. They never felt so good feeling bad about racism, denouncing what they identified as its primal cause – Mr. Trump, who was sullying that “shining example” of the United States of America. Obscured were those historical antecedents of this “exceptional” republic, founded on the expropriation of indigenous land and extermination of its inhabitants and built in part by African slave labor.
Peculiar institution of US racism
Trump has been reprehensible in pandering to white racism. But the Republicans have …
After several postponements, US President, Donald Trump, has finally revealed the details of his Middle East plan, dubbed ‘Deal of the Century’, in a press conference in Washington on January 28.
Standing triumphantly beside Trump, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, must have surely understood that the timing of the announcement, only a few weeks before Israel’s third general elections in one year, was tailored especially to fit the embattled Israeli leader’s domestic agenda.
Consisting of 80 pages, 50 of which are entirely dedicated to the plan’s economic component, the document was a rehash of previous Israeli proposals that have been …
China has been hit by coronavirus as if by a brick over the head; heavily and mercilessly. Instead of help, Beijing has received criticism, even verbal attacks.
In spite of doing tremendous job fighting the epidemy, China is getting almost no tributes for its performance.
Now Bangkok, Jakarta and other regional capital are in panic. After trying to sweep the crises under the carpet in order not to rock their tourist industries which are heavily dependent on annual arrival of the millions of Chinese package tourists, they are trying to introduce coherent health measures. A bit too late, complain their own citizens. …
London — Parliament Square is the site, muddied by rain, trodden by hundreds who have made it their celebratory space. The Leave Means Leave official website had been busy for weeks, thrilled about January 31 and the fact that that Britain would finally be leaving that beastly collective they know as the European Union. Those who promised to be in attendance were the usual suspects of the Little England brigade who had been so successful in convincing citizens that leaving the European Union was tantamount to gaining one’s freedom from a stifling oppressor. Over time, the EU had become …
Israel needed a fresh pretext to justify seizing the last fragments of historic Palestine after the expiry of its Oslo alibi
by Jonathan Cook / February 5th, 2020
The Trump “Vision for Peace” will never be implemented – and not because the Palestinians reject it. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s enthusiastic public embrace of the plan belies the fact that the Israeli right detest it too.
The headlines are that, with US blessing, Israel’s dream is about to be realised: it will be able to annex its dozens of illegal settlements in the West Bank and the vast agricultural basin of the Jordan Valley. In return, the Palestinians can have a state on 15 per cent of their homeland.
But that is not the real aim of this obviously one-sided “peace” …
While waste, corruption, and failure have plagued the segregated and nontransparent charter school sector for decades, privately-operated-owned cyber charter schools, even by the admission of the most dogmatic supporters of charter schools, are the worst of the worst.
The academic performance of cyber charter schools is consistently abysmal; they have a very high failure rate. Most students enrolled in online charter schools receive a low-quality education. For this reason, many online charter schools often close, leaving many families high and dry. Along with this, many in the charter school sector …
I chose this title for two reasons: one simple, the other more complex. The basic facts state that 7 adults were killed during the Sandy Hook atrocity; that 6 of those adults were women, and 20 children, all between the ages of 6 and 7; and also the shooter himself, Adam Lanza, the only adult male on the Sandy Hook death list.
As far as the public record goes, there is no evidence that the killer was a professed misogynist, nor that he harbored a special hatred for children. Nevertheless, the gender of the adults that Lanza targeted for execution — …
I’m writing this letter to myself. I need to talk to someone, even it is only myself. I need to believe that what happened was real.
All that I know of the past was learned by word-of-mouth histories from those who came before me and those few historians who remain now. Some matters I know directly. We don’t talk much anymore to each other because it takes too much physical effort. It has been tiring to write this letter by the dim light available to me either in or outdoors, day or night. But it helps to distract me from the …
Afghanistan is a famous desert for empires, a burial ground which has consumed those in power who thought that extra fortification and trading most might benefit them. It remains a great, and somewhat savage reminder about those who suffer hubris, overconfidence and eagerness in pursuing their agendas. But the country has also served another purpose: a repository for the untruths of those who invaded it.
That said, the normative sense does not always keep pace with the actual; people might well insist that they loathe being lied to but that is no guarantee for altering conduct or votes. The US citizen …
Maybe something good will come out of the Trump plan, after all. By pushing the Middle East peace process to its logical conclusion, Donald Trump has made crystal clear something that was supposed to have been obscured: that no US administration has ever really seen peace as the objective of its “peacemaking”.
The current White House is no exception – it has just been far more incompetent at concealing its joint strategy with the Israelis. But that is what happens when a glorified used-car salesman, Donald Trump, and his sidekick son-in-law, the schoolboy-cum-businessman Jared Kushner, try selling us the “deal of …
As Canada prepares to violently invade our lands, we have no fear. We are peacefully living on our lands and upholding our laws, as we always have.
31 days after Coastal Gaslink was evicted from Wet’suwet’en territory, RCMP helicopters circle the Unist’ot’en healing center several times a day.
Busloads of police have taken over local community halls, airport hangers have become RCMP training grounds, while armored pickup trucks and police dogs have been spotted in the area. Canada is preparing to use militarized force to steal our lands and destroy them, with the world as witness.
Gene Weingarten, One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America, 2019.Denied entry to the US (who knows why, and welcome to the club), ((My fateful attempt to experience the underbelly of the beast firsthand was a bike trip along the south shore of Lake Erie to the legendary Chautauqua (of Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance fame) and on to the eastern Grand Canyon, Letchworth State Park. I recommend this bike trip to any Canadian (anyone) who doesn’t fear Homeland …
A radical call to action has never been more vital than today, as the abomination of capitalism known as neoliberalism tears apart society from stem to stern, continuing the grand experiment that originated under the watchful eyes and vision of aristocratic plantation-owners like Washington and Jefferson as wealthy patriots.
In honor of their hard fought war to avoid taxation as much as possible, Trump retroactively honored them with a gigantic tax cut for their distant namesakes, the wealthy.
Lo and behold, he has hardened the battle lines between them (1%) versus us (99%). Will the lines be crossed and how so?
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
— Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2005
While truth-tellers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning sit inside jail cells and Edward Snowden lives in exile …
In the preface to his last and perhaps most significant work, Andre Gunder-Frank cited what he called “Fairbank’s Rule No. 2”: “Never try to begin at the beginning. Historical research progresses backward not forward… Let the problems take you back.” ((Andre Gunder-Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, University of California Press, July 31, 1998.)) My mother was a forensic photographer. One of her less appetizing assignments was for the record of corpses returned from Jonestown, Guyana, after what has since been billed as a mass suicide by a bizarre religious sect led by an American …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / February 2nd, 2020
President Maduro speaks to a massive crowd at Miraflores Palace on the anniversary of a failed Guaido coup (From Orinoco Tribune)
Juan Guaidó proclaimed himself the president of Venezuela a year ago but despite multiple coup attempts, he never took power and his support there rapidly disappeared. Now, with his foreign tour concluding, Guaidó’s support is shrinking around the world as well. Rather than looking presidential, he appears clownish. Rather than developing new plans to try to topple President Maduro, he is left without any concrete promises from European governments, …
Continuously, discussions focusing on degraded ecosystems and tipping points forcing climate change to ramp up to chaos many times center around the “C” word.
Not “c” as in “cancer.”
“Capitalism is destroying the planet,” said Pat DeLaquil, an energy policy expert working with various governments, NGO’s and the private sector to “help achieve economic development and combating climate change.”
He was one speaker in a two-guest gig at the Newport Library on January 27 as part of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby and 350 Oregon Central Coast.
The other person presenting is director of a plastics to road …
January 30, RCMP attempted to enter the Gidimt’en supply and monitoring post, attempting to walk in to our camp which is outside of the injunction area. Police have undertaken a daily harassment and surveillance campaign against our supporters, and have even threatened to arrest those monitoring the road. While RCMP have publicly stated they will stand down for 7 days while our Chiefs speak with the Province of British Columbia, they continue to harass and threaten us daily.
In 2012 Barack Obama was reelected following the disastrous US-led war on Libya that he began without approval from Congress, and two years after the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, without trial, inside a sovereign nation. In 2011 Obama also came out with this progressive chestnut: “Unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices for territory or for resources. We do it because it’s right.” Violence helps gets you reelected.
Reflecting on this history, the hope of a renewed antiwar movement …
The global socio-economic context here is that the United Nations, influenced by global finance tied to large pharmaceutical interests, has installed …
Iran’s Islamic Revolution remains as bellwether, even though attempts to emulate it have not yet succeeded.
— Journalist Eric Walberg ((Eric Walberg, Islamic Resistance to Imperialism (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2015), 277.))
In number theory, 41 is a prime number meaning it is not divisible by any number except itself and one. Similarly, the Islamic Revolution in Iran so far has been unique in its success and indivisible unity of purpose, despite numerous attempts at sabotage by external and internal actors. At this prime age of 41, Iran is fully capable …
Tim Anderson’s Axis of Resistance: Towards an Independent Middle East takes on the leftist position of ‘a plague on all your houses’. Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, ‘the intellectual voice of the Syrian revolution’ (for westerners), presents a bleak portrait of “three monsters … treading on Syria’s corpse”: (1) the Assad regime and its allies, (2) DAESH/ISIS and the other jihadists, and (3) the West (the USA, UK, France, etc). This is the general view from outside the Syrian cauldron, but leads nowhere.
