Discussions are underway with new NATO ally Bulgaria to create a Black Sea Coordination Center in Varna. The United States is considering a ten-year roadmap for defense cooperation with Bulgaria and is eager to provide Sofia broader access to its high-end military technologies. The advanced technologies would include surveillance capabilities specifically targeting Russia.
There is also a fundamental second level of stupidity in basing such an effort in Bulgaria as the Turks, also frequently at odds with Washington, control the door to the Black Sea through the Bosporus and Dardanelles. If relations really do go sour and if demands to kick Turkey out of NATO ever do bear fruit, Ankara can make it very difficult for NATO warships transiting into the Black Sea.

The head of the Palestinian Commission of Detainees' Affairs, Qadri Abu Bakr, confirmed to The New Arab’s Arabic-language service that Abu Diyak died at dawn on Tuesday, in the hospital of Israel’s Ramla prison.

Abu Diyak had been diagnosed with intestinal cancer in 2015. His condition subsequently deteriorated, which Palestinian media say is in part due to medical mistakes at the hospital in southern Israel where he had surgery to remove part of his large intestine.

"The death of Abu Diyak comes after months of warning [the Israeli authorities] about the seriousness of his condition, that he could die at any moment because of the medical negligence he was subjected to," said Abu Bakr.

Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, issued a searing condemnation of Abu Diyak's death, calling on Israel to take responsibility for its actions.

An hour-long video featuring Sandeep Chakravorty, India's consul general in New York, has gone viral on social media, in which he is addressing a group of Kashmiri Hindus - known as Pandits - at a private event in the US city last week.

"I believe the security situation will improve, it will allow the refugees to go back, and in your lifetime, you will be able to go back … and you will be able to find security, because we already have a model in the world," said Chakravorty, referring to the exodus of tens of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus in 1989 after an armed rebellion against the Indian rule started in the Himalayan region.

"I don't know why we don't follow it. It has happened in the Middle East. If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it," he said, adding that the current Indian leadership is "determined" to do so.

'Chilling video'

Major protests in Iran about the increase in gas prices may be over, but Iranian officials are saying that they believe a US-orchestrated conspiracy was involved in violence seen during the rallies, which involved attacks on Iranian banks.

Hundreds of banks were attacked, and Iranian authorities say 7,000 protesters were arrested. Iranian intelligence officials say at least eight CIA assets were among those arrested in connection with the violence.

The eight people had been given CIA-funded training, nominally to become “citizen journalists.” Six were arrested at the rallies, while the other two were trying to send information abroad.

Syria has been the target of what may be the most sophisticated propaganda campaign in history, and Bellingcat has been consistently rallying behind even the most transparently ridiculous tools of this campaign. This includes the notorious Bana Alabed psyop which at its height saw CNN staging a fake, scripted interview featuring a seven year-old girl assigning blame to Bashar al-Assad for an alleged sarin gas attack in Khan Shaykhun. Bellingcat’s stellar investigative work (which has been praised in fawning puff pieces by mainstream outlets like The Guardian and The New Yorker) concluded that this obvious propaganda construct was in fact nothing other than a little girl and her mother independently composing viral tweets, giving interviews and authoring books about how the Syrian government must be toppled via western interventionism.

SOURCE: MINT PRESS
BY ALAN MACLEOD
Bolivian President Evo Morales was overthrown in a U.S.-backed military coup d’état earlier this month after Bolivian army generals appeared on television demanding his resignation. As Morales fled to Mexico, the army appointed right-wing Senator Jeanine Añez as his successor. Añez, a Christian conservative who has described Bolivia’s indigenous majority as “satanic”, arrived at the presidential palace holding an oversized Bible, declaring that Christianity was re-entering the government. She immediately announced she would “take all measures necessary” to “pacify” the indigenous resistance to her takeover.
This included pre-exonerating the country’s notorious security services of all future crimes in their “re-establishment of order,” leading to massacres of dozens of mostly indigenous people.

SOURCE: MIDDLE EAST MONITOR
The Israeli government is aiming to increase the volume of Israel’s defence exports, reported Globes, which has revealed the main points of the plan for the first time.

The project, being overseen by the Defence Ministry’s International Defence Cooperation Directorate (SIBAT) led by Brigadier General (Res.) Yair Kulas, will begin to be rolled out in early 2020.

According to Globes, the plan is based on “focused seminars for senior commanders in foreign armies”, Israeli military “assistance for promoting sales of Israeli weapons”, and “subsidising small and medium-sized defence companies seeking to sell arms around the world”.

Speaking this week, Kulas said that SIBAT favours a major expansion of agreements between countries, resulting in significant deals for the large defence companies, especially Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems.

SOURCE: CBS NEWS
Thousands of migrant children allegedly suffered sexual abuse while in U.S. government custody over the past four years, according to Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) documents released Tuesday by Florida Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch.

According to the documents, over a thousand allegations of sexual abuse against unaccompanied minors in HHS custody were reported to federal authorities each fiscal year since 2015. In total, between October 2014 and July 2018, 4,556 sexual abuse complaints were reported to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) — an agency within HHS in charge of caring for unaccompanied migrant minors.

An additional 1,303 complaints were received by the Justice Department between fiscal years 2015 and 2018, but it’s unclear whether these complaints overlap with those reported to ORR.

Jason Blum's "The Hunt" was canceled earlier this year over fears it could incite violence or a civil war but now Jordan Peele is coming out with a new series titled "Hunters" with nearly the exact same theme.

The trailer for Amazon Prime's "Hunters" shows what appear to be white Americans, several of whom are donning red hats, battling with and appearing to be killed by "a diverse band of Nazi Hunters."

It is worth noting that the last paragraph is largely in the present tense. It’s less a reference to the KKK and the lynchings rampant in the 1930s New York City inside Bouie’s brain, it is a reference to how a black vigilante “is justified” right now.

It’s almost as British as fish and chips and a pint, but what used to be embraced by the masses as a reliable source of information, the BBC, is now under increasing scrutiny for its overt political bias. With the growing popularity of social and alternative media, Brits are no longer taking as gospel what is pumped out by, this publicly funded service which is increasingly coming under fire for being nothing more than a propaganda machine for the sitting government. The hashtag #BBCbias has been trending for some time now on Twitter, and with more and more commentators questioning the integrity of this public service, it’s clear that the organisation needs to take a long hard look at itself.

Progressive journalist Michael Tracey claimed Tuesday that MSNBC is has dropped all pretenses for their “contempt” towards Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii).

The political news contributor said the left-leaning network has treated her fellow 2020 Democratic candidates, including businessman Andrew Yang and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) unfairly, but he argued that with Gabbard it, “crosses a certain threshold.”

“Fundamentally they’re beholden to whatever the market incentives are and right now it’s within their market interests to depict Tulsi as an infiltrator, as a Trojan horse in the Democratic Party and not deal on the substance with what she’s saying which is why over and over again they tar her as a Russian plant essentially,” Tracey told Hill.TV.

“There’s nobody who can really offer any kind countervailing view because it’s just not economically advantageous for them at this point,” he added.

Sirens went off in Gaza Strip and Sderot, Israeli Defence Forces reported on their twitter page on Tuesday.

Following the sirens, two launches from Gaza Strip at Israeli territory were identified, according to the IDF. The military added the Iron Dome air defence system managed to intercept one projectile.

"2 rockets were just fired from #Gaza at Israeli civilians. 1 rocket was intercepted by the Iron Dome Aerial Defense System," the IDF wrote on its Twitter page.

A former masseuse for Jeffrey Epstein who says he raped her on his private island, has provided photos of his secretive Caribbean compound to The Sun.

Chaunte Davies says she was raped by Epstein over the course of several years before finally parting ways with him in 2005. She told the Sun that the wealthy pedophile was arrested just five days after she gave the FBI and New Mexico Assistant Attorney General evidence against him.

Now 40, Chaunte says the ex-Wall Street banker performed a sex act on himself during their first massage session - and that she was "manipulated" into staying in their circle by Epstein's alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell. "Within weeks she was jetting round the world on his private jet and on to his island of Little Saint James," according to the report.

Authored by Christoph Gisiger via TheMarket.ch,

Tad Rivelle, Chief Investment Officer of the Californian bond house TCW, doubts that the Central Banks can prevent the impending economic downturn. He spots increasing signs of stress in the credit sector and recommends holding safe assets to be prepared for turmoil in the financial markets.

Mr. Rivelle, who rarely gives interviews, views the prospects on the financial markets with skepticism. In his opinion, it’s clear that the business cycle is in its final stages. He warns that the power of unconventional monetary policy is largely exhausted and nervousness in the credit sector is growing.

Against this background, he advises a defensive calibration of the portfolio and a careful approach when it comes to security selection – especially in the investment grade segment where many companies are more leveraged than their rating indicates.

We write this open letter, as medical doctors, to express our serious concerns about the physical and mental health of Julian Assange. Our professional concerns follow publication recently of the harrowing eyewitness accounts of Craig Murray and John Pilger of the case management hearing on Monday 21 October 2019 at Westminster Magistrates Court. The hearing related to the upcoming February 2020 hearing of the request by the US government for Mr Assange’s extradition to the US in relation to his work as a publisher of information, including information about alleged crimes of the US government.

Just as we warned would happen, the tech giants are now moving aggressively to ban all speech that contradicts whatever “official” position is decided to be “the truth” by the corrupt establishment. This week, Facebook announced it would block all content on Facebook that questions the official dogma on vaccines, which falsely insists that vaccines have never harmed anyone (a hilarious lie), that vaccines contain only safe ingredients (a blatant deception) and that vaccines always work on everyone (another laughable lie).

A Kurdish senior foreign affairs official, Aldar Xelil, reported that the US has assured Kurdish forces that US troops will remain in the oilfield area between Derik and Terbespiya, in eastern Syria.

This assurance doesn’t seem to be helping the Kurds feel a lot better, however. with Xelil pointing out that this really isn’t going to do anything to prevent the Turkish offensives into northeastern Syria.

The US announced a “pullout” from Syria but ended up just redeploying around the oil, with President Trump saying the oil is the priority. Xelil says the US has no intention of staying anywhere west of Qamilshli, and for the Kurds, that’s a problem.

The US is still in Syria, but there’s about 100 km gap between Syrian-held Syria and US-held oilfield where Turkey and its rebels are not only free to invade Kurdish-held territory, but to push potentially quite deep into Kurdish territory.

Looting and demonstrations took place in cities across the South American nation, and an agreement on a political roadmap that will see Chile draft a new constitution has halted neither the anger, nor the bloodshed. Furious Chileans have since October 18 been protesting social and economic inequality, and against an entrenched political elite that comes from a small number of the wealthiest families in the country, among other issues.

The crisis is the worst in three decades of Chilean democracy and has led to around 2,000 injuries, including some 280 people who suffered eye damage from shotgun pellets.

Style writer Vanessa Friedman had drooled over Hillary’s clothing back in 2016, calling her white pantsuit “presidential.”

However, when Gabbard, a fierce critic of Clinton, wore virtually the exact same outfit, Friedman said it made her look like a “cult leader” full of “combative righteousness” and that the white fabric has “connotations of the fringe, rather than the center” and even undermines “community building.”

SOURCE: COMMON DREAMS

"Their insidious control of our digital lives undermines the very essence of privacy and is one of the defining human rights challenges of our era."

A new report from Amnesty International accuses Facebook and Google of having a "surveillance-based business model" that threatens users' right to privacy and other human rights.

The tech giants, said Kumi Naidoo, secretary general of Amnesty International, have amassed "unparalleled power over the digital world by harvesting and monetizing the personal data of billions of people. Their insidious control of our digital lives undermines the very essence of privacy and is one of the defining human rights challenges of our era."

Facebook and Google, according to the report, deserve to be singled out of the so-called Big 5 for their outsize influence on internet users.

SOURCE: COLLECTIVE-EVOLUTION
The notion that citizens of the United States don’t actually live in a democracy has been picking up steam for decades, with scars from economic, social and political decay inflicting themselves ever more deeply into our psyches as the years move on.

You would think that, with the rise of science and technology, we would have been able to build a far more prosperous nation. Instead, we have seen a vast reduction in our standard of living, and are being forced to work longer and harder in increasingly menial and unfulfilling jobs across the board. We are ever more being subjected to the control-hungry vicissitudes of mega-corporations that are swallowing up American entrepreneurship and prosperous self-employment.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr was in Memphis last Wednesday to announce the launch of a new federal gun control program, Project Guardian. The AG promises to enforce federal gun regulations “with a vengeance.”

As President Trump is facing mostly manufactured charges of committing impeachable offenses, his attorney general is committing actual offenses against the Constitution, namely infringing on the right of the people to keep and bear arms, as protected by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“I have long believed that the first duty of government is to protect the safety of our citizens,” Barr told the press gathered to cover the kick-off of the gun buying crackdown.

Actually, Mr. Barr, the federal government was NOT given the power by the states to protect the citizens of those states.

The scope of federal authority was very succinctly explained by James Madison in Federalist 45:

A 16-year-old boy who opened fire at his Southern California high school, killing two classmates and wounding three others before shooting himself in the head, used a “ghost gun” built from parts, the local sheriff said on Thursday.

Nathaniel Tennosuke Berhow pulled the .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol from his backpack on Nov. 14, his birthday, and shot students at Saugus High School in the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Clarita seemingly at random before turning the gun on himself. He died of his wounds the next day.

“When we did a search of the house, we encountered what’s called a kit gun. The weapon used in the homicide was also a kit gun,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva told local KABC-TV in an interview.

“It was assembled from parts, had no serial number. So it becomes what’s known as a ‘ghost gun,’” Villanueva said.

The correctional officers haven’t yet been named. It’s very possible that New York prosecutors will seek to use them as patsies to deflect skepticism from the official narrative surrounding Epstein’s death.

The guards have apparently been offered a plea deal that they declined, setting the stage for legal proceedings that could shine light on Epstein’s death.

The authorities’ official story maintains the billionaire pedophile committed suicide in his own jail cell, hanging himself with bed sheets when jail guards weren’t looking. Epstein’s close personal connections to neoliberal political elites such as Bill Clinton and the UK’s Prince Andrew have lead to an abundance of alternative explanations, with a plurality of Americans doubting the jail’s version of events.

An investigation by the Wall Street Journal has confirmed many of the central allegations made by the World Socialist Web Site in 2017 regarding Google’s censorship of the internet.

In an extensive article published Friday, the Journal concludes that, contrary to Google’s repeated assertions, the company maintains blacklists of individual websites and intervenes directly to manipulate individual search results.

On July 27, 2017, the World Socialist Web Site reported that changes to Google’s search algorithm, internally dubbed “Project Owl,” had drastically reduced search traffic to left-wing, antiwar and progressive websites.

The WSWS based its assertions on Google’s public declarations that it was seeking to “surface more authoritative content” and demote “alternative viewpoint[s],” as well as detailed data from the WSWS’s analytics systems and data provided by other websites and publicly available web and search traffic estimators.

JOHN BERCOW will join Sky News for its general election night coverage on December 12, but raging voters have accused the broadcaster of Remainer bias and threatened to switch over to rivals.

Amazon is touting a new children’s book narrating the birth of Jesus Christ as its “#1 New Release in Children’s Christian Holiday Fiction.”

WhatsApp yesterday blocked access to hundreds of Palestinian journalists and activists who were providing live updates during the Israeli offensive on Gaza, Safa news agency reported.

This came less than 24 hours after the end of the two-day Israeli offensive which resulted in the death of 34 Palestinians and wounded 111 others.

Palestinian journalists and activists, who were active during the Israeli offensive, reported that their accounts were blocked and they were unable to use them.

The United States has called on Libyan renegade General Khalifa Haftar to stop a months-long offensive on Tripoli and said it would back the country’s internationally recognised government against "Russia’s attempts to exploit the conflict".

The statement was the most explicit call by Washington against the self-styled Libyan National Army of Haftar, who was earlier praised by President Donald Trump.

"The United States calls on the 'Libyan National Army’ to end its offensive on Tripoli," the US State Department said in a joint statement released on Thursday after talks with a delegation from Libya’s Tripoli-based Government of National Accord in Washington.

Libya has been split between rival camps based in Tripoli and the east since 2014, a result of the divisions that surfaced following the NATO-backed overthrow of long-time ruler Muammar Gaddafi three years earlier.

In keeping with the so-called “Christchurch Call to Action” which flowed from a meeting of government officials and internet giants on May 15, 2019 in Paris, Facebook issued an internal document entitled “Hate Agent Policy Review,” which, according to Breitbart, which received a copy from a source inside Facebook, “outlines a series of ‘signals’ that Facebook uses to determine if someone ought to be categorized as a ‘hate agent’ and banned from the platform.”[1]

The guidelines were simultaneously draconian and incoherent. You can be designated as a “hate agent” if “you praise the wrong individual, interview them, or appear at events alongside them.”

In the wake of an explosive revelation that ABC News allegedly knew the extent of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes years ago but chose not to report them, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has demanded answers from the network’s execs.

In his letter to ABC News president James Goldston, McCarthy demanded the names of those involved in the decision not to run the story, as well as their motives. In a video clip leaked earlier this month, ABC News anchor Amy Robach is caught on a “hot mic” speaking to colleagues about the alleged cover-up.

It’s an open secret. The deep state is working hand in hand with Silicon Valley social media giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google to control the flow of information. That includes suppressing, censoring and sometimes outright purging dissenting voices – all under the guise of fighting fake news and Russian propaganda.

SOURCE: RT
In the wake of explosive revelation that ABC News allegedly knew the extent of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes years ago but chose not to report them, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has demanded answers from the network’s execs.
In his letter to ABC News president James Goldston, McCarthy demanded the names of those involved in the decision not to run the story, as well as their motives. In a video clip leaked earlier this month, ABC News anchor Amy Robach is caught on a “hot mic” speaking to colleagues about the alleged cover-up.

“I’ve had this interview with Virginia Roberts...we would not put it on the air,” Robach says about the woman who now three years later publicly accuses Epstein of using her as a sex slave, and pimping her out to his powerful friends, including Britain’s Prince Andrew.

Questions remain about the circumstances that led to Morales’ ouster, and whether foreign governments played a role in it. But recent history provides reason to suspect that Bolivia’s rich natural resources are part of the answer.
In a near empty room, a Bolivian military official placed the presidential sash over Jeanine Anez Chavez, a senator from the Beni region who didn’t run the country’s recent election. The ardently Christian politician carried a Bible with her into the ceremony, which consolidated the coup d’etat in the Andean country.