Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

The world is now 188 trillion dollars in debt, and that number continues to grow rapidly each year.

It is a form of enslavement that is deeply insidious, because most of those living on the planet do not even understand how the system works, and even if they did most of them would have absolutely no hope of ever getting free from it. The borrower is the servant of the lender, and the global financial system is designed to funnel as much wealth to the top 0.1% as possible. Of course throughout human history there has always been slavery, and the primary motivation for having slaves is to extract an economic benefit from those that are enslaved. And even though most of us don’t like to think of ourselves as “slaves” today, the truth is that the global elite are extracting more wealth from all of us than ever before. So much of our labor is going to make them wealthy, and yet most people don’t even realize what is happening.

Here we go as predicted: the Lebanese central bank attempts to prevent a "panic mode" scramble on the part of the public to remove all deposits, and the recently imposed (unofficial) regulations geared toward staving off capital flight are predictably failing fast, per Reuters:

“Clients with guns have entered banks and security guards have been afraid to speak to them as when people are in a state like this you don’t know how people will act.”

Lebanon's private banks reopened a week ago on Friday following a two-week closure due to massive anti-government protests which created gridlock across the country's main cities, including closure of other public institutions such as schools.

The World Bank weighed in on Friday, urging leaders in Beirut to form new Cabinet within a week, citing risks to Lebanon's stability as "deeply concerning," according to the AP.

In what appears to be the first death of a protester stemming from the aggressive police tactics, a young student has died after sustaining a serious head injury during a fall from the third floor of a car park to the second while police carried out an aggressive dispersion operation to end a protest

According to the SCMP, Chow Tsz-lok, a second year computer science undergraduate student at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology fell from the car park in Tseung Kwan O as police fired off rounds of tear gas on Monday.

When historians look back on contemporary California, one thing they'll be bound to make note of is that the state's developers bet on the wrong model.

Endless, suburban sprawl is coming back to haunt California in ways both major and minor. In densely populated communities across the state, traffic is horrible thanks to underdeveloped public transportation (this is especially true in LA). Most residents have accepted that deadly, devastating wildfires are just part of the deal now - bound to recur endlessly until the state's population shrinks to the point that it no longer intermingles with the state's vast swaths of woodland.

Authored by US Army Major Danny Sjursen (ret.) via TheNation.com,

Patches, pins, medals, and badges are the visible signs of an exclusive military culture, a silent language by which soldiers and officers judge each other’s experiences, accomplishments, and general worth. In July 2001, when I first walked through the gate of the US Military Academy at West Point at the ripe young age of 17, the “combat patch” on one’s right shoulder - evidence of a deployment with a specific unit - had more resonance than colorful medals like Ranger badges reflecting specific skills. Back then, before the 9/11 attacks ushered in a series of revenge wars “on terror,” the vast majority of officers stationed at West Point didn’t boast a right shoulder patch. Those who did were mostly veterans of modest combat in the first Gulf War of 1990–91. Nonetheless, even those officers were regarded by the likes of me as gods. After all, they’d seen “the elephant.”

Facebook announced on Friday that it would be removing an posts which name alleged Trump-Ukraine whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.

"We are removing any and all mentions of the potential whistleblower’s name and will revisit this decision should their name be widely published in the media or used by public figures in the debate," Facebook said in a statement in which they claim it violates their "coordinating harm" policy which prohibits content 'outing of witness, informant, or activist.'

On Wednesday, the social media giant removed ads naming Ciaramella which had been viewed several hundred thousand times according to the Washington Post.

On Friday, Breitbart's Allum Bohkari reported that the news outlet's posts containing references to Ciaramella had been scrubbed from the site.

Somehow I’d ended up on a plastic mattress in a tiny prison cell wearing the infamous orange jump suit. I’d been arrested once before in Egypt during the revolution as a journalist, but now I was in Wisconsin, America, where freedom of speech is enshrined in the constitution. I’d considered myself safe there.

I had been arrested whilst filming a small, peaceful protest by mainly Indigenous Ojibwe people against the construction of a new oil pipeline. I was working on a documentary film on America’s struggle for clean water.

Controversial pipelines

Enbridge’s Line 3 will carry 760,000 barrels per day of tar sands oil from Canada, across the American border to a refinery on Lake Superior, Wisconsin. Almost as much oil as the controversial Keystone XL.

The media refuses to accept that those who have been vaccine damaged, or who have children who will suffer for the remainder of their lives from adverse vaccine events, have a legitimate right to speak their truth rather than being labeled as hysterical or crazy. All of these individuals and parents were pro-vaccine until they or their child became vaccine-injured. Similarly we saw the New York Times manufacturing consent for accepting falsehoods that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. And this was true across the mainstream outlets including the Washington Post, Fox, MSNBC, CNN and others. The Times fabricated that rationale to the public on behalf of the neocons in the Bush administration who were determined to have a war. None of the journalists publishing these lies have taken responsibility nor lost a night’s sleep because their fakery led to the death of millions.

The quality of American education, as we will see, is far lower than the world has been led to believe, and the quality in China is in many cases much superior to that in the US. Americans might care to ask why it is that Chinese elementary or high school students moving to the US are often promoted by one or two grades. The reason is that they know so much more than their American counterparts they would suffer terminal boredom if forced to remain at their prior grade level. If we refer to the PISA tests, Shanghai’s math scores were 119 above the OECD average, or the equivalent of nearly three years of schooling, with reading and science exceeding the OECD average by about 1.5 years of schooling. And in some cases, the American students were behind the OECD average by approximately the same number of years as the Chinese were ahead.

sraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed the head of a far-right political party as defence minister of his caretaker government, a spokesman for the premier’s right-wing Likud party said on Friday.

John Shipton, the father of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, told reporters on Friday that he needs to “face the bitter truth” that his son “may die in jail.” Shipton spoke with reporters in Geneva two days after he visited Assange in Belmarsh prison in London.

“This is not the bitter disappointment of a father, this is simply fact,” Shipton said. “Julian may die in jail over a nine-year persecution for revealing the truth of war crimes. It is beyond obscene.”

Shipton’s comments come a week after UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer said, “Unless the UK urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr. Assange’s continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life.” Melzer has previously warned that Assange had been subject to psychological torture.

Iraqi security forces continued to crack down on protests Friday, with security forces killing at least 10 people in Basra, where the protesters have been keeping the country’s main Gulf port closed for days.

Live gunfire and killing protesters hasn’t worked in the past, nor is there any sign it’s going to work here. The biggest issue is likely to be Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s sermon, which is now saying the government must immediately meet demands of protesters.

The top religious leader in Iraq, Sistani has long warned against using force against the protesters, and now says it is time to just meet the demands of the protesters immediately. His aide Sheikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbalaie, added that their position is that the Iraqi government can not “procrastinate on this issue because of the great risks facing the country.”

Whether to control the oil or flat out take the oil, US statements on the new military mission in Syria are heavily oil-themed. Other reports, however, suggest that the operation is a lot more complicated than that.

In reality, a lot of the goal is nation-building, with US forces meant to both keep the Syrian government out of this part of Syria, and try to “bring prosperity” to the region, propping up a potential territory of rebels.

This is again built around the assumption that the US can manufacture an autonomous, prosperous region, using the oilfields as the revenue source, and then steer that region toward hostility with the rest of Syria.

This will likely end up being a plan easier for the Trump Administration to sell than overt theft of oil, as it allows the US to retain its primary focus, military hostility toward Syria with an eye toward eventual regime change.

EXCLUSIVE: The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee has formally requested that the panel's chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., testify in a closed-door setting as part of the impeachment inquiry against President Trump.

Fox News has obtained a letter written by committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who demanded that Schiff appear for a deposition in private before lawmakers.

Even before Donald Trump Jr. appeared on The View yesterday, liberal celebrities were howling their fury.

Will and Grace actress Debra Messing, who hasn't stopped hysterically raging about all things Trump for the past four years, was incensed the President's son was even allowed to go on at all.

'Why would you bring him on?' she tweeted the ABC show's Twitter account. 'You trying to be 'balanced'?'

You could almost feel the bile laced all over her lips as she spat out the dreaded b-word.

Messing is an expert in disappointing and irresponsible decisions.

A few weeks ago, she demanded the Hollywood Reporter publish the names of everyone attending a Trump fundraiser in Beverly Hills. Her Will and Grace co-star Eric McCormack revealed the sinister motive behind this demand: 'Kindly report on everyone attending this event, so the rest of us can be clear about who we don't wanna work with. Thx.'

Las Vegas officials passed a law on Wednesday the first in the US that will make it illegal for homeless people to sleep on streets when beds are available at established shelters.

The measure will apply to the city's downtown urban core, not the tourist-heavy Las Vegas Strip, which is overseen by a different jurisdiction.

Las Vegas becomes the latest city in the US West - from San Francisco and Seattle to Honolulu and Salt Lake City - to try to deal with complaints about homelessness.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a similar law from Boise, Idaho, last year - calling it unconstitutional to prosecute people for sleeping in public places when there aren't enough shelter beds.

Contrary to our expectations, the slaying of nine members of a Mormon community living in Northern Mexico at the hands of Mexican cartel gunmen seems to have already dropped out of the news cycle, perhaps because it's already become clear that neither the US nor Mexico is planning to hold the attackers accountable.

Senior Mexican security officials who are obviously worried about more bad press insist that the attack was a case of mistaken identity. But keep in mind, these are the same people who initially told the world that federal police just happened to stumble upon the son of El Chapo in Culiacan (denying that his arrest had been the target of an organized operation).

Security Minister Alfonso Durazo, whose name has been in the press frequently in the aftermath of the attack, said earlier this week that the gunmen may have attacked the women because they suspected they were members of a rival gang during a period of intense turf wars.

Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman told reporters on Thursday that while the US continues to expand its presence in and around east Syria with an aim of protecting and controlling the oil fields, the US won’t be keeping the money.

“The revenue from this is not going to the US, this is going to the SDF,” Hoffman said, suggesting the US-backed Kurds will get all the money. That’s still entirely speculative, however, because no US company has expressed any willingness to extract the oil in the first place.

It’s also not what has been sold to the US by President Trump. Trump has insisted that the US would be keeping some of the oil for itself, telling crowds recently that it would amount to $45 million a month and that it was always his intention to “keep the oil.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s controversial 2014 decree that cleared the way for the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, which still draws international outrage, is going on the auction block.

The personally signed order tucked neatly into an ornate leather binder could bring as much as $8,000-$10,000, according to Alexander Historical Auctions, hosting the online auction Nov. 19-21.

Alexander Auctions President Bill Panagopulos described his unusual item this way:

An historic modern Russian document with repercussions still affecting the world today, Vladimir Putin's executive order creating the Ministry of Crimean Affairs and integrating the economic, financial, credit and legal systems of the Crimea with that of the Russian Federation. Putin essentially inextricably merges Crimea's economy and courts with those of Russia, making any future return of Crimea to Ukraine nearly impossible.

Former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova anticipates an "explosive" Justice Department inspector general report on alleged Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses.

After it was reported Wednesday that a public copy is expected to be released at about Thanksgiving or later, diGenova appeared with his wife and legal partner, Victoria Toensing, on Fox Business to talk about what they have heard.

Host Lou Dobbs asked diGenova to describe his expectations for the report's findings.

"I would say explosive," he replied. "And I would say for people at the highest levels of the FBI and at the highest levels of the Justice Department — more important the Justice Department — it's going to be devastating. It's going to ruin careers.

BOOM! Fired Anti-Trump Ambassador Yovanovitch LIED UNDER OATH During Impeachment Testimony About Contact with Dem Staffer (VIDEO)
Jim Hoft by Jim Hoft November 7, 2019 201 Comments
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Tucker Carlson broke an exclusive tonight on the ongoing Democrat Party impeachment inquisition.

According to Tucker Carlson a Democrat staffer contacted by email the fired Ukrainian ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and asked for some time to discuss a “delicate” issue days after “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella filed his complaint against President Trump.

The Tucker Carlson team acquired a copy of the email from that Democratic staffer to Yovanovitch. This was sent by private email to the former ambassador.

Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) asked Ambassador Yovanovitch about the email during her testimony before Adam Schiff’s impeachment committee.

A State Department official who served in the U.S. embassy in Kiev told Congress that the Obama administration tried in 2016 to partner with the Ukrainian gas firm that employed Hunter Biden but the project was blocked over corruption concerns.

George Kent, the former charge d’affair at the Kiev embassy, said in testimony released Thursday that the State Department’s main foreign aid agency, known as USAID, planned to co-sponsor a clean energy project with Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas firm that employed Hunter Biden as a board member.

At the time of the proposed project, Burisma was under investigation in Ukraine for alleged corruption. Those cases were settled in late 2016 and early 2017. Burisma contested allegations of corruption but paid a penalty for tax issues.

After a chorus of Democrats came down hard on Facebook after CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company would continue to distribute political ads without fact checking them, the company is now 'mulling' changes to how such ads are treated, according to CNN. That said, the company will continue to allow politicians to run unverified advertisements.

Notably, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - who still appears to be having issues accepting the results of the 2016 election decried a "war on truth" last week, and suggested that "Mark Zuckerberg should pay a price for what he is doing to our democracy."

"Part of our problem, those of us who are appalled by this war on truth and this fake news which is truly surrounding us these days, is we’re not very good at combating it. It’s hard because you’re up against algorithms, plus all these other powerful forces, it’s really hard," she added.

CBS has fired a female staffer believed to have had access to a candid tape of ABC host Amy Robach complaining that in 2016, the network shelved her scoop on Jeffrey Epstein's sex crimes, according to Page Six.

"I've had the story for three years... we would not put it on the air," Robach said on a hot mic moment leaked to Project Veritas. "It was unbelievable what we had, Clinton, we had everything."

It hasn't gone unnoticed that exposing Epstein would have hurt Hillary Clinton during the 2016 US election.

CBS News fires staffer who had access to leaked Amy Robach audio that was revealed by @Project_Veritas

The person who got fired in this situation was the one trying to protect the children who were being trafficked.

CBS sided with a Pedophile.

- Former US diplomat Dennis Ortblad has called on Washington to reconsider sanctions against Russia as well as its position on Crimea with the aim of improving relations with Russia.

"We need to deal with Russia as it is, not as we wish it to be. And our enemy is not Russia", Ortblad wrote in a Tuesday article for The National Interest magazine.
According to the ex-diplomat, Washington should first and foremost change its stance on Crimea's status so that it can review its sanction policy against Russia.

"To recalibrate our sanctions, we must recognise that Crimea will remain Russian. Its population was always heavily Russian ... Crimeans identify with the historic struggles of Russia against invasion from the West ... It was clear to us [during the recent visit to Sevastopol] that the people of Crimea would not relinquish their pride in their traditional Russian identity to accept a return to Ukraine", he said.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel released a new legal opinion stating that subpoenas from House Democrats in their impeachment investigation into President Trump will be considered “legally invalid” if Trump administration witnesses aren’t allowed to have an attorney with them while testifying.

The new legal stance by the Trump DOJ is detailed in a five-page legal memo dated Nov. 1, just one day after the House of Representatives voted to formalize the opening of its impeachment process stemming from a Ukraine whistleblower in a near-party-line vote. Republicans had previously complained about the closed-door nature of the impeachment proceedings as well as the lack of a launch vote, but the new legal justification by DOJ could escalate the battle over the Trump administration’s lack of cooperation with the House, as the Trump administration continues to slow-walk some information requests and stonewall some subpoenas.

SOURCE: FAIR.ORG
Chile’s anti-neoliberal rebellion is entering its third week, and the brutal crackdown continues. Hard-right President Sebastian Piñera and his generals have effectively decreed the country’s oligarch-dominated democracy out of existence by sending soldiers into the streets to kill, maim and torture their own people.

And, for the most part, the Western corporate media blackout persists unabated.

October 25’s historic 1.2 million–person march in Santiago—the largest since the end of the dictatorship—has forced some outlets to begin to acknowledge state violence. But corporate journalists continue to largely overlook the Piñera government’s mounting atrocities.

As I examined recently for FAIR (10/23/19), this behavior contrasts remarkably with the corporate media’s unanimous backing of regime change in Venezuela, endorsing insurrectionary protests and vilifying Nicolas Maduro as a “dictator” (FAIR.org, 4/11/19).

At one time, the elite at least attempted to conceal their boundless enthusiasm for population control from the general public, but now they aren’t even trying to hide it anymore.

On Tuesday, an alarming new study that advocates global population control as one of the solutions to the “climate emergency” that we are facing was published in the journal BioScience. This document has already been signed by 11,258 scientists from 153 different countries, and it openly calls for a reduction in the human population of our planet. This has always been the endgame for the climate change cult, but now a big push is being made to make the public believe that there is a “scientific consensus” that this is necessary.

You can find a summary of the report here, and I would very much encourage you to read it, because it is essentially a blueprint for where the elite intend to take humanity in the years ahead.

The award-winning writer and founder of the adversarial news site The Grayzone journalist and best-selling author Max Blumenthal, had his apartment swarmed by D.C police who pounded on his door and demanded that he open it, or it will be broken down. Max admitted to journalist and comedian Jimmy Dore that he was debating in his mind whether or not to open the door or let the officers destroy his property.

Max noticed police had his apartment surrounded, and instead of allowing the police to kick his door in, he opened his door, and armed officers swarmed into his livingroom and presented Max with a warrant for his arrest. DC police then arrested Max Blumenthal on a five-month-old warrant for simple assault stemming from an event in which Max Blumenthal attempted to smuggle food into the Venezuelan Embassy to activists of the Embassy Protection Collective.

SOURCE: REASON
An 83-year-old retired engineer in Michigan underpaid his property taxes by $8.41. In response, Oakland County seized his property, auctioned it off to settle the debt, and pocketed nearly $24,500 in excess revenue from the sale.

Under Michigan law, it was all legal. And hardly uncommon.

Uri Rafaeli, who lost his property and all the equity associated with it, is just one of thousands of people to be victimized by Michigan's uniquely aggressive property tax statute. The law, passed in 1999 in an attempt to accelerate the rehabilitation of abandoned properties, empowers county treasurers to act as debt collectors. In the process, it creates a perverse incentive by allowing treasurers' offices to retain excess revenue raised by seizing and selling properties with delinquent taxes—even when the amount owed is miniscule, and even when the homes aren't abandoned or blighted at all.

Legal questions. That’s hilarious.

I just want to remember the good old days, when they felt the need to dazzle us with yellow cake uranium fraud before they stole the oil.

Via: Military Times – AP:

President Donald Trump has approved an expanded military mission to secure an expanse of oil fields across eastern Syria, raising a number of difficult legal questions about whether U.S. troops can launch strikes against Syrian, Russian or other forces if they threaten the oil, U.S. officials said.

SOURCE: KRDO
The awkward camera angle is meant to hide the fact that the owner of the phone is filming, but there is no mistaking the outlines of the heavy cargo being deposited on the dock in the Yemeni port of Aden last week.

The distinctive shape of the US-made Oshkosh armored vehicle stands out in the early morning darkness, a piece of military hardware that is currently at the heart of a standoff between some American lawmakers and President Donald Trump’s administration.

Aden is controlled by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, whose main partners are continuing to ship American-made weapons into the country despite bipartisan outrage in Congress over the way the US is backing Riyadh in this bloody and bitter conflict.

SOURCE: TECH DIRT
Cops have discovered a new source of useful third-party records: DNA databases. Millions of people have voluntarily handed over personal information to a number of services in exchange for info on medical markers or distant family members.

Investigators are submitting DNA samples from cold cases in hopes of tracking down criminals who’ve managed to evade them for years. It has led to the closing of some cases, which is all agencies need to argue for continued access to DNA samples from millions of users.

Two Former Twitter Employees Charged With Spying For Saudi Arabia, May Be Involved In Khashoggi Murder
For all those still seeking details about Saudi Arabia’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi, it may be time to give Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey a call.

Two former Twitter employees were charged with spying for Saudi Arabia, the Justice Department unveiled on Wednesday in San Francisco, in a case which the WaPo said "raises concerns about the ability of Silicon Valley to protect the private information of dissidents and other users from repressive governments."

The complaint unsealed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco detailed a coordinated effort by Saudi officials to recruit employees at the social media giant to look up the private data of thousands of Twitter accounts. The accounts included those of a popular journalist with more than 1 million followers and other prominent government critics.

A convoy of buses carrying employees and contractors of a Canadian gold mining firm and its military escort fell victim to an armed ambush in eastern Burkina Faso, leaving upwards of 37 dead and 60 injured, some reports say.
The SEMAFO convoy was attacked by unidentified gunmen some 40km from one of its mines in the Est region despite an escort by local security forces. The total number of casualties is not yet known, and an official statement from the company only mentions “several fatalities and injuries.”

The majority of the country's oil fields are currently controlled by the US military, illegally stationed in the Arab Republic, and the Kurdish militia. Washington recently reaffirmed its intentions to "keep" the Syrian oil, despite objections from Moscow.

The Syrian Army started deploying its forces near the city of Qamishli in northeastern Syria, and specifically near the village of Mulla Abbas, claiming the Rumailan oilfield, which was lost to Damascus several years ago, during the civil war, SANA news agency reported. The area is located on the Turkish-Syrian border.

The entire “success” of Democrats depends on keeping the American people wildly ignorant of reality, facts, history, and even current events.

The few times in our history when Congress has either voted to impeach a president or considered returning articles of impeachment, the process was handled very publicly.

Hearings were not held in secret. Testimony was not taken behind closed doors. Witnesses and evidence were presented out in the open so the American people, through various media of the day, were well aware of what was happening.

The reasons for the openness should be obvious, but alas, they are not for far too many Americans.

First of all, allowing someone accused of criminal activity to face his or her accuser is a fundamental legal principle of our founding.

The audience of The View actually applauded when Joy Behar said that democrats “need to lie” in order to get elected. Basically, people don’t need any integrity or morality to join the ruling class, and people are content with that.

Behar actually admitted that democrats are going to need to lie in order to get elected. To Behar, O’Rourke’s problem was not his vow to confiscate weapons — that “hell, yes, we’re coming for your AR-15s” — it was that he was stupid enough to be honest with the American people about wanting to wipe out one of the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

The ACLU has sued the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other federal agencies, making claims that the government is improperly withholding information on how it uses a facial recognition database on millions of Americans. The civil rights organization also asks for a “federal court to intervene and order the FBI and related agencies to turn over all records concerning their use of face recognition technology,” according to a legal document.

“Because of the FBI’s secrecy, little is known about how the agency is supercharging its surveillance activities with face recognition technology,” Kade Crockford of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in a post on its website.

The public has a right to know when, where, and how law enforcement agencies are using face recognition technology, and what safeguards, if any, are in place to protect our rights.

Turkey's state-run media is reporting the United States is planning two new military bases in Syria's oil-rich Deir ez-Zor province, which are currently under construction, after US special forces convoys were seen patrolling the area in the past days.

Anadolu Agency, citing local sources, said the bases were under construction as evidenced by the influx of heavy equipment:

While the footage captured by Anadolu Agency showed that much construction equipment is being put into action, it was learnt the U.S. has sent 250 to 300 additional soldiers, armored vehicles, heavy weapons and ammunition to the region.

The reported added: “The military bases are being built in the 113th Brigade area and near al-Sur region,” according to the sources.

Syria's largest oil fields, which historically account for most of its domestic energy needs, are located in Deir Ezzor, including Al-Omar, Conoco, and Rumeilan.

In a Tuesday interview, Paul said that the whistleblower - reported to be CIA officer Eric Ciaramella - "is a material witness to the possible corruption of Hunter Biden and Joe Biden," and that Congress should investigate the whistleblower's ties to the Biden family and Burisma holdings, the Ukrainian gas company that paid Hunter Biden to sit on its board, according to BuzzFeed.

"[The whistleblower] might have traveled with Joe Biden to Ukraine for all we know. We should look at his writings. We should know all of this stuff to see whether or not he has any intersection with Burisma and with Hunter Biden," said Paul.

Less than a year after his finance ministry failed to broker a merger between Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank in a bid to rescue the flailing German lending giant (Deutsche) and create a new national champion (or so he hoped), German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz is embarking on a campaign to convince the European Union to finish work on a comprehensive banking union.

Many have argued that Europe's lack of a comprehensive banking regulatory framework make the system particularly vulnerable to chaos and infiltration by criminal groups (evidenced by the money laundering scandal that has embroiled several northern European banking giants).

And with Brexit finally nearing the end game, or so it appears, Scholz argues that Europe's global position would be at risk if it doesn't finish the integration of the eurozone's financial sector, seeing as the EU is losing one of its main financial centers in London.

US equity futures suddenly tumbled after Reuters reports that the signing of the US-China trade deal could be delayed until December as terms and the venue remain unclear.

Additionally, a senior official of the Trump administration told Reuters on Wednesday that it was still possible the "Phase One" agreement aimed at ending a damaging trade war would not be reached, but a deal was more likely than not.

Dozens of venues have been suggested for the meeting, which had originally been scheduled to take place on the sidelines of a now-canceled mid-November summit of Asia-Pacific leaders in Chile, the official said. They included sites in Europe and Asia, but the former was more likely, with Sweden and Switzerland among the possibilities.

Iowa, which Trump has suggested, appeared to have been ruled out, the official said. China's latest push for more tariff rollbacks would be discussed, but was not expected to derail progress toward an interim deal.

After weeks of secretive impeachment proceedings from which House Democrats have largely excluded Republican lawmakers, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) announced on Twitter Wednesday that his committee will hold its first public impeachment hearings next week.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

A video out of China shows a citizen being publicly shamed and having his photo and ID card flashed up on a big screen for crossing the road on a red light.

The Communist country’s vast network of facial recognition surveillance cameras are being linked to citizen ID cards, producing the kind of dystopia that would make even George Orwell roll in his grave.

Under its social credit score system, China punishes people who criticize the government, as well as numerous other behaviors, including;

– Bad driving.
– Smoking on trains.
– Buying too many video games.
– Buying too much junk food.
– Buying too much alcohol.
– Calling a friend who has a low credit score .
– Having a friend online who has a low credit score.
– Posting “fake news” online.
– Visiting unauthorized websites.
– Walking your dog without a leash.
– Letting your dog bark too much.

It looks as though the Securities and Exchange Commission isn't happy enough just allowing CEOs like Elon Musk to retain their C-suite position after committing egregious frauds like faking the largest buyout in history. The commission, under Jay Clayton, continues to make life easier for corporations while making protecting investors a second priority.

Since Jay Clayton took over as head of the SEC, 17 changes have been made and 9 more have been proposed, that are part of a broad push to help "reverse a 20-year decline in U.S. public company listings", according to Reuters. The changes include modernizing disclosures and cutting regulatory costs for companies - and just making life easier for public companies in general.

This, of course, is not without its down side: these new rules will weaken investor safeguards or diminish their rights.

The FBI must delete its memo documenting a journalist’s First Amendment activities, a federal appellate court ruled this week in a decision that vindicates the right to be free from government surveillance.

In Garris v. FBI, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ordered the FBI to expunge a 2004 memo it created that documented the political expression of news website www.antiwar.com and two journalists who founded and ran it. The Ninth Circuit required the FBI to destroy the record because it violated the Privacy Act of 1974, a federal law that includes a provision prohibiting federal agencies from maintaining records on individuals that document their First Amendment activity.

House Democrats have released the latest in the series of heavily-redacted transcripts of the secret hearings they had undertaken in recent weeks - that of Bill Taylor - the top US diplomat in Ukraine - ahead of his public testimony next week.

Drama ensued on Wednesday after Donald Trump Jr. tweeted a Breitbart News article which contained the name of the alleged Trump-Ukraine whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella.

Donald Trump Jr.
?
@DonaldJTrumpJr
Because of course he did!!!

Alleged ‘Whistleblower’ Eric Ciaramella Worked Closely with Anti-Trump Dossier Hoaxer https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/11/06/alleged-whistleblower-er... …

Oklahoma police have asked a federal court to support their claim that citizens who comply with police during an arrest do not have a clearly established right to be free from police brutality. The police’s justification of the use of excessive force, even in the absence of provocation, were made in a motion by City of Muskogee police seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by attorneys for The Rutherford Institute on behalf of Jeriel Edwards, an African-American man who, despite complying police orders during an arrest, was subjected to excessive force and brutality, including being thrown to the ground, tasered, and placed in a chokehold that rendered him unconscious and required his hospitalization for three days.

The UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, has expressed alarm at the continued deterioration of Julian Assange’s health since his arrest and detention earlier this year, saying his life was now at risk.

Mr. Assange was sent to a UK high-security prison on 11 April 2019 where he continues to be held in connection with a US extradition request on espionage charges for having exposed evidence for US war crimes and other misconduct in Iraq and Afghanistan. “While the US Government prosecutes Mr. Assange for publishing information about serious human rights violations, including torture and murder, the officials responsible for these crimes continue to enjoy impunity,” said Melzer.

The Special Rapporteur and his medical team visited the imprisoned Wikileaks founder in May and reported that he showed “all the symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture” and demanded immediate measures for the protection of his health and dignity.

Hunter Biden and his Ukrainian gas firm colleagues had multiple contacts with the Obama State Department during the 2016 election cycle, including one just a month before Vice President Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating his son’s company for corruption, newly released memos show.

During that February 2016 contact, a U.S. representative for Burisma Holdings sought a meeting with Undersecretary of State Catherine A. Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the Ukrainian firm where Hunter Biden worked as a board member, according to memos obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. (I filed that suit this summer with the help of the public interest law firm the Southeastern Legal Foundation.)

BY MICHAEL MAHARREY
We’ve become increasingly comfortable with facial recognition technology. We use it to unlock our phones and to skip the security line at the airport. But the convenience of facial recognition is blinding us to its dangers.

Georgetown University School of Law privacy expert Clare Garvie put together a video that explains why you should be concerned about the growing use of facial recognition technology, even if you think you have “nothing to hide.”

According to Garvie, police databases now contain images of nearly half of all Americans. She argues that without some restrictions on facial recognition, we’re rapidly hurtling toward a Chinese-style surveillance state.

As Garvie puts it, Americans are basically in a perpetual police lineup.

SOURCE: SUMMIT.NEWS

Police in Oklahoma City are investigating “It’s okay to be white” fliers that were posted at the Oklahoma City University School of Law as a potential hate crime.

Although authorities acknowledge that the fliers were “not believed to be a threat” and that posting them wasn’t a crime because no property was damaged, the individual responsible is under investigation anyway.

“Investigators are trying to determine his intent and whether the actions are a hate crime,” reports the Associated Press.

Law school Dean Jim Roth said the OCU is “intentional and relentless” in supporting diversity and the hatred and exclusion “will not be tolerated.”

Meanwhile in another incident, a sign that read “It’s OK to be white” was hung on a bridge over a highway in Massachusetts. A local ADL spokesman said the message “excludes people” and “targets people.”

Massachusetts: It’s Okay to be White pic.twitter.com/dKkdgIuavq

SOURCE: ARSTECHNICA.COM

Mozilla is urging Congress to reject the broadband industry's lobbying campaign against encrypted DNS in Firefox and Chrome.

The Internet providers' fight against this privacy feature raises questions about how they use broadband customers' Web-browsing data, Mozilla wrote in a letter sent today to the chairs and ranking members of three House of Representatives committees. Mozilla also said that Internet providers have been giving inaccurate information to lawmakers and urged Congress to "publicly probe current ISP data collection and use policies."

DNS over HTTPS helps keep eavesdroppers from seeing what DNS lookups your browser is making. This can make it more difficult for ISPs or other third parties to monitor what websites you visit.

Submitted by Nauman Sadiq, an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.

A car bomb exploded in northern Syria killing 13 and wounding 20. The blast on Saturday ripped through a crowded market in Tal Abyad, a town recently occupied by Turkish-backed militant proxies. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the blast targeted pro-Turkey fighters and civilians were also among the dead.

Even though the Turkish Defense Ministry promptly laid the finger of blame on Turkey’s arch-foe, the Kurdish YPG militia, without conducting an investigation, car bombing as a tactic for causing widespread fear is generally employed by jihadist groups and not by the Kurds.

Compare US pillaging with Russia-Iran-Turkey’s active involvement in a political solution to normalize Syria..

What happened in Geneva this Wednesday, in terms of finally bringing peace to Syria, could not be more significant: the first session of the Syrian Constitutional Committee.

The Syrian Constitutional Committee sprang out of a resolution passed in January 2018 in Sochi, Russia, by a body called the Syrian National Dialogue Congress.

The 150-strong committee breaks down as 50 members of the Syrian opposition, 50 representing the government in Damascus and 50 representatives of civil society. Each group named 15 experts for the meetings in Geneva, held behind closed doors.

This development is a direct consequence of the laborious Astana process – articulated by Russia, Iran and Turkey. Essential initial input came from former UN Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura. Now UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen is working as a sort of mediator.

Signaling what will be a major uptick in US drone activity across western Africa, US African Command (AFRICOM) announced Friday its airbase Agadez, Niger has gone operational, not just flying surveillance drones as was originally expected, but also armed combat drones.

Flights from the base, called Air Base 201, began last week and the patrols are to aid US-Nigerien military patrols in rooting out regional ISIS militants and other Islamist factions which have been threatening the area. Specifically US officials say the armed drone program is badly needed due to prior ISIS ambushes on US-Nigerien troops.

Hong Kong protesters have set fire to metro stations and vandalized buildings, including an office of China’s official news agency Xinhua, during a night of violent protests after Beijing vowed to tighten control over the restive city.

Police fired tear gas and water cannon Saturday as thousands of protesters defied authorities in another unsanctioned march.

Commercial districts on the main island turned into a battlefield as squads of black-clad protesters — many wearing face masks despite a recent ban on them — clashed for hours with riot police.

US troops are reportedly back in military bases in northeastern Syria which they had previously evacuated ahead of Turkey's military action against Kurdish forces in the area.

Turkey's Anadolu Agency has reported that American forces arrived in the west of Syria’s northern province of Raqqa on Saturday to rebuild their military base.

A US military convoy, including a personnel carrier armored vehicle, a mine flail and a utility vehicle, arrived in Jazira base located west of Raqqa via Syria's northeastern province of Hasakah.

On Friday, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said that a total of 10 rockets had been fired from Gaza, including eight projectiles that had been intercepted by the Iron Dome air defence system.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Hamas was responsible for all rocket attacks against Israel from Gaza.

“We are in a very sensitive security period, that is explosive in several spheres in the east, north, and south,” Netanyahu said.
“Immediately after the rocket fire on the Gaza envelope, I convened a top level security meeting in the military headquarters in Tel Aviv,” he stressed.

The Israeli military reported that the rockets were fired late on Friday. Eight of them were intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome air defence system. One of the rockets hit a residential building in southern Israel, damaging it.

Tensions near the Gaza Strip border heightened on Friday amid the 81st anti-Israeli protest, dubbed the Great March of Return.

Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

With the transformation of the rules of the “Great Game” in the Middle East emerging out of President Trump’s recent Syrian surprise pullout and Putin’s brilliant manoeuvres since 2015, a sweeping set of development/reconstruction programs led by China now have a chance to become hegemonic across the formerly hopeless, terrorist-infested region.

The fact that the Arab states of the Middle East were targeted for destruction by western geopoliticians over the last 40 years is not un-connected to the region’s historic role as “cross-roads of civilizations” which were once the bridge between East and West along the ancient Silk Road (c. 250 BC). Today’s New Silk Road has brought 150 countries into a multipolar model of cooperation and civilization-building which necessitates a stabilized Middle East in order to function.

Nearly a thousand protesters took to the streets of Brooklyn to demonstrate against the NYPD after a spate of violent arrests on the subway and over its plans to put more officers on the beat to catch anyone who skips paying the fare.

The protesters started gathering in Downtown Brooklyn near Barclays Center at about 7pm Friday, with their signs reflecting the dual nature of the march.

While flashier banners bore slogans such as 'Don't let these pigs touch us,' 'F**k the police,' 'Punch that cop' and 'NYPD out of MTA,' other signs read 'Free transit,' 'Poverty is not a crime' and 'Our subways need more $ for elevators, not for cops.'

Their grievances stem from two issues. One, alleged police brutality against New Yorkers including a group of teenagers who officers were seen fighting with in a recent viral video.

Yesterday, the Keystone pipeline leaked an estimated 383,000 gallons (9,120 barrels) of oil into wetlands in North Dakota. The leak is already the eighth-largest pipeline oil spill of the last decade. The tar sands oil transported through the Keystone pipeline is particularly hard to clean up because, unlike crude oil, it sinks in water.

Keystone operator TC Energy’s (formerly TransCanada) alarming spill and safety record has come under scrutiny as it attempts to build the controversial and much larger Keystone XL pipeline through the midwestern United States and Indigenous treaty lands.

In response, Greenpeace USA Senior Research Specialist Tim Donaghy said:

rom one or more illegally established airbases in Syria, as well as other other regional ones, Pentagon warplanes, attack helicopters, and drones continue terror-bombing Syrian sites at the discretion of its commanders.

US troops still occupy large parts of northern and southern Syrian territory indefinitely, including oil producing areas — looting them for private and CIA profiteering, as well as wanting Damascus denied revenues from its own resources. That’s what grand theft is all about.

All of the above are war crimes as defined under the UN Charter and other international law. The US and its imperial partners remain unaccountable for crimes of war and against humanity in all their war theaters.

The same goes for US economic terrorism against Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, and other countries — high crimes gone unpunished.

But the real irritant is that Russia will not bow down to Western dictates. The very fact that Western sanctions have not crippled and destroyed Russia makes Western leaders irate. In a surprising, though understandable way, the sanctions have helped the Russian home-grown production of goods to flourish. After all, Russia must make its own decisions for the survival of its people. It is the West’s growing irrelevance to Russia, which it itself caused, that enrages its governments.

MRAUK U, Myanmar—Here in the town of Mrauk U, in Myanmar’s troubled Rakhine state, there has been little to celebrate during this October’s Thadingyut, the second-most important annual festival of the Buddhist calendar. Normally, the auspicious full moon would be hailed with a floating armada of delicate candlelit paper lanterns and song, theater, and dance.

Yet this year, there are no celebrations.

Instead, at 9 p.m. sharp, a curfew falls as soldiers from the Myanmar Army, known as the Tatmadaw, emerge from their posts to pull barbed wire and steel barricades across roads. Shops and businesses shutter, the streets empty and lights flickering out.

An Israeli prison guard deployed to watch a hospitalized Palestinian prisoner reportedly fired tear gas into the intensive care unit room where the man was convalescing after treatment for injuries sustained during interrogation.

The Hebrew newspaper Maariv reported that an Israel Prison Service guard “accidentally” emitted tear gas in Samer Arbeed’s room at the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem earlier this month, requiring doctors to intervene.

Maariv said the incident was never reported to the prison service.

Arbeed was hospitalized on 27 September following his interrogation by Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet.

But being hospitalized has not stopped his ordeal and Israeli prison authorities have continued to question Arbeed even while in the ICU.

As governments in Iraq and Lebanon stagger and stumble under huge waves of popular protest, powerful factions loyal to Iran are pushing to quash political upheaval which challenges Tehran’s entrenched influence in both countries.

Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri has resigned and the government of Iraq’s Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi has been pushed to the brink of collapse.

Both governments have enjoyed backing from the West. But they have also relied on the support of political parties affiliated with powerful Iran-backed Shi’ite armed groups, keeping allies of Tehran in key posts.

That reflects the relentless rise of Iranian influence among Shi’ite communities across the Middle East, since Tehran formed the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1982 and after Saddam Hussein was toppled in Iraq in 2003.

Russia's foreign ministry spokesperson has accused the U.S. of "criminal activity" with regards to President Donald Trump's plan to deploy troops to guard oil fields in eastern Syria.

Maria Zakharova said Friday that the Trump administration was engaging in illegal smuggling, and estimated Washington stands to make tens of millions of dollars every month from the oil extracted in the region.

According to state news agency Tass, Zakharova said the U.S. was "bypassing its own sanctions" to take the oil—"worth over $30 million per month"—from Syria. She also suggested the U.S. forces deployed "are not going to leave these areas in the near future."

Palestine’s Christian population is dwindling at an alarming rate. The world’s most ancient Christian community is moving elsewhere. And the reason for this is Israel.

Christian leaders from Palestine and South Africa sounded the alarm at a conference in Johannesburg on October 15. Their gathering was titled: "The Holy Land: A Palestinian Christian Perspective".

One major issue that highlighted itself at the meetings is the rapidly declining number of Palestinian Christians in Palestine.

Increasingly beleaguered, Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem have been driven out from their historic city in large numbers. According to the city’s mayor, Vera Baboun, as of 2016, the Christian population of Bethlehem has dropped to 12 percent, merely 11,000 people.

The most optimistic estimates place the overall number of Palestinian Christians in the whole of Occupied Palestine at less than two percent.

AFRICOM says flights started this week, refuses to say which sort of drones are being used.

US African Command (AFRICOM) announced on Friday that the controversial Nigerien Air Base 201, meant to house US surveillance and combat drones, is now open and operational, and flights began earlier this week.

After an ambush by ISIS against a joint US-Nigerien military patrol, the US began pushing Niger for permission to fly not just surveillance drones, but also armed drones. In the panic after the attack, they got permission, starting the long road to constructing this large base.

And while AFRICOM is championing this as expanding US interests in the region, they are refusing to provide any indication what sort of US drones will be based out of the site, saying there are “security concerns” about that.

The original sin of Julian Assange was the same as that of Galileo Galilei. Galileo sinned by revealing to the people things the elite already knew or at least surmised, but wished to keep secret from the masses, in order not to shake the people’s faith in the official truth. Assange did the same thing with the formation of WikiLeaks The official version of reality was challenged. All lies should be exposed. By far the most sensitive targets of his wide-ranging reality revelations were the lies, the hypocrisy, the inhuman brutality of the United States in its wars of global hegemony. To Assange, these things were simply wrong.

At first, WikiLeaks attracted a great deal of popular attention and even acclaim. Julian Assange became famous. He was a geek, but he didn’t look like a geek. Tall, handsome, striking with his nearly white hair, Julian was something strange: a charismatic geek.

Assad's commentary on the latest White House policy to "secure the oil" in Syria, for which US troops have already been redeployed to some of the largest oil fields in the Deir Ezzor region, was the biggest pressing question. The Syrian president's response was unexpected and is now driving headlines, given what he said directly about Trump, calling him the "best American president" ever – because he’s the "most transparent."

“When it comes to Trump you may ask me a question and I’ll give you an answer which might seem strange. I tell you he’s the best American president,” Assad said, according to a translation provided by NBC.

“All American presidents commit crimes and end up taking the Nobel Prize and appear as a defender of human rights and the ‘unique’ and ‘brilliant’ American or Western principles. But all they are is a group of criminals who only represent the interests of the American lobbies of large corporations in weapons, oil and others,” he added.

In what looked like a scene from The Purge, six members of Antifa went to the Portland home of journalist Andy Ngo — while wearing paper masks of his face.
Unsettling footage of the hooded, gloved, and masked harassers was captured by Ngo’s security camera.

Ngo was violently attacked and robbed by Antifa while attempting to cover a protest in June. He was hospitalized with a cerebral hemorrhage.

I was beaten on the head & robbed on 29 June. Antifa then continued to hurl "milkshakes" at my bleeding face. I was hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage. There still hasn't been a single arrest by @PortlandPolice. Help me seek justice; join my legal fund: https://publiuslex.com/pf/justice-for-andy-ngo/ …

Since then, far-leftists have been sending him death threats and doxing him and his family.

Now, they are going to his home, according to the security footage that Ngo posted online.

Amid recent statements by both Iranian and Hezbollah leaders accusing the United States of hijacking the massive anti-corruption protests which have gridlocked Lebanon for over the past two weeks, the White House has made the dramatic and unexpected move of freezing US military aid to the Lebanese Army.

The money, part of a military aid package totaling $105 million, had been approved by Congress and the State Department, and requested by the Pentagon. Interestingly, proponents of the package argued that it would allow the Lebanese Army to grow more independent, making it less cooperative with Hezbollah.

According to Reuters the aid was frozen two days following Tuesday's resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, who in a parting speech admitted he'd "reached a dead end" amid the protests which have reportedly involved one million people, or up to 25% of Lebanon's total population, and further called on "all Lebanese to protect civil peace".

BY AARON KESEL
U.S. President Donald Trump is using his executive order signed in 2017 to expand the militarized police forces across the nation in preparation to launch a sweeping crackdown on crime that Trump referenced was “the surge” according to a press event at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Conference and Exposition.

“In the coming weeks, Attorney General Barr will announce a new crackdown on violent crime — which I think is so important — targeting gangs and drug traffickers in high crime cities and dangerous rural areas,” Trump said during the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Chicago. “Let’s call it the surge,” the White House press release reads.

The President didn’t provide any details on the plan but he stated that the actions would be “very dramatic.”

Trump further expressed his administration’s “achievements” like putting military equipment into the hands of U.S. police officers, as Activist Post reported.

“You can wake her up at 5AM, she won't complain.”

Slavery is one of many industries made more efficient by Silicon Valley, and specifically, Facebook-owned Instagram.

A new BBC investigation reveals the widespread online sale of human beings in the mideast for domestic labor. The buyers and sellers use services from Instagram, Facebook, Apple, and Google to facilitate slavery transactions.

Housekeepers and nannies are purchased and sold as slaves through Instagram, promoted using hashtags, and promoted on other apps in Google Play and Apple's App Store.

These workers live their lives in Kuwait mostly behind closed doors, invisible and with no rights to protest abuse by their employer/enslavers.

Excerpt:

After being alerted to the issue, Facebook said it had banned one of the hashtags involved.

Google and Apple said they were working with app developers to prevent illegal activity.

Here, let me try to dispel a myth peddled by the corporate media and foreign policy think tanks that the Islamic State originated from al-Qaeda in Iraq. Many biased political commentators of the mainstream media deliberately try to muddle the reality in order to link the emergence of the Islamic State to the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the Republican Bush administration.

Their motive behind this chicanery is to absolve the Obama administration’s policy of nurturing the Syrian opposition against the Syrian government since the beginning of Syria’s proxy war in 2011 until June 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul in Iraq and the Obama administration made a volte-face on its previous “regime change” policy of providing indiscriminate support to Syrian militants and declared a war against a faction of Syrian rebel groups, the Islamic State.

SOURCE: NAUMAN SADIQ, BLACKLISTED NEWS

Although Donald Trump claimed credit for expropriating Syria’s oil wealth, it bears mentioning that “scorched earth” policy is not a business strategy, it is the institutional logic of the deep state. President Trump is known to be a businessman and at least ostensibly follows a non-interventionist ideology; being a novice in the craft of international diplomacy, however, he has time and again been misled by the Pentagon and Washington’s national security establishment.

SOURCE: VICE
Every fall, the elite of the literary world and Hollywood convene at a highly secretive writer's retreat hosted by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and no one talks about it.

Not every Campfire attendee is a household name: Tech entrepreneurs and industry power brokers are also invited to rub shoulders with celebrities.

Now, Motherboard has learned that one of Campfire 2018's attendees was Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite who is alleged to have been instrumental in grooming young women into convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's sex-trafficking ring. Reporting on Maxwell’s alleged role, via victim statements and court records, goes back to 2011.

SOURCE: MINT PRESS

HODEIDA, YEMEN — The country of Yemen, known in the medieval period as “Green Yemen,” is one of the most extensively terraced areas of the world. There, Yemeni farmers transformed rugged mountain slopes into terraces and built dams like the Great Marib, a structure whose history spans long enough that it was mentioned in the Quran. During the medieval period, Yemen had one of the widest ranges of agricultural crops in all of the Middle East.

SOURCE: MOON OF ALABAMA
Ukrainegate is the new Russiagate. The 'whistleblower complain' is the new 'dirty dossier'. The 'former' MI6 spy Christopher Steele wrote the dossier. The current CIA spy Eric Ciaramella wrote the 'complain':

Federal documents reveal that the 33-year-old Ciaramella, a registered Democrat held over from the Obama White House, previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump who helped initiate the Russia “collusion” investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.
Further, Ciaramella (pronounced char-a-MEL-ah) left his National Security Council posting in the White House’s West Wing in mid-2017 amid concerns about negative leaks to the media. He has since returned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

“He was accused of working against Trump and leaking against Trump,” said a former NSC official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

U.S. meat markets had so far been shielded from the effects of a deadly pig disease wiping out Asian herds. That’s starting to change.

As pork supplies plummet in China, the world’s top consumer is desperate for meat and is ramping up imports. As a result, it’s becoming harder to set longer-term protein contracts amid concerns over market volatility and changing trade flows, according to Jayson Penn, chief executive officer of Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., the No. 2 U.S. chicken producer.

“The contracting season is moving somewhat slower this year” for chicken, Penn said on a conference call with analysts following the release of third-quarter earnings. While major fast food restaurant chains are looking for beef contracts, “there are not many sellers willing to forward price,” he said.