The Taliban has killed at least 47 people in separate attacks in Afghanistan, despite the beginning of peace talks with Afghan officials in Moscow.

The armed group launched a pre-dawn attack on an army base in northern Kunduz on Tuesday, killing 26 members of the security forces, Mohammad Yusouf Ayubi, head of the provincial council said.

There were at least 23 soldiers and three members of the local police force among those slain.

According to Ayubi, 12 troops were wounded in the Taliban onslaught, which lasted for over two hours until reinforcements arrived at the besieged base and the attackers were repelled.

"Day by day, the security situation is getting worse in and around Kunduz city," said Ayubi, adding there are fears the city could again fall into the hands of the Taliban as it did briefly on two occasions in recent years - in September 2015 and in October 2016.

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s pesticide Round Up, is a perfect example, as science has been showing for decades how incredibly harmful it is for human health and the environment, yet it’s approved as ‘safe’ for use in the western world. It’s no mystery why glyphosate is illegal in the majority of countries around the world. The same goes for genetically modified foods, which is what Round Up was designed to be used on. Years ago, a lawsuit forced the FDA to divulge its files on genetically engineered foods.

“As part of the process, they portrayed the various concerns as merely the ignorant opinions of misinformed individuals – and derided them as not only unscientific, but anti-science. They then set to work to convince the public and government officials, through the dissemination of false information, that there was an overwhelming expert consensus, based on solid evidence, that GMOs were safe.” – Jane Goodall.

Not content with Real Time Crime Centers (RTCC) forcing businesses to spy on customers in real-time. Homeland Security has now decided to use RTCC's to spy on motorists in real-time.

Last month an article in the Baton Rogue Proud revealed that the Baton Rouge Police Department's RTCC will be using red light cameras to spy on motorists.

"Baton Rouge Chief Administrative Officer Darryl Gissel said the verbiage of the new contract with Verra Mobility, the traffic camera company, allows BRPD to access those live camera feeds."

Verra Mobility's slogan is, "A new kind of smart mobility company focused on safe cities, smart roadways and the connected systems that tie them seamlessly together." Roughly translated, Verra Mobility is using their Smart City surveillance cameras to help police spy on everyone.

in 2017 Caracas awarded licenses to Russian oil giant Rosneft for the development of two offshore gas fields, via Reuters.

In total Caracas owes Rosneft $3 billion, according to Gabuev, which could lead to "a new sort of proxy conflict in America’s backyard," which is at once economic, political, and could increasingly turn to proxy military intervention. Indeed the Kremlin has already accused the US of "meddling" in the affairs of a sovereign country in order to foster a "slow motion coup".

"Any solution to the internal political crisis in Venezuela is possible only by Venezuelans themselves," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday. "Imposing any solutions or efforts aimed at legitimizing the attempt of usurping power is, in our view, just direct and indirect meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs," Peskov said.

Just over a week after his televised arrest was carried exclusively by CNN, attorneys for the longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone have sent a letter to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees detailing how some reporters may have received an early draft copy of the indictment.

Documents obtained exclusively by The Gateway Pundit show a copy of the draft indictment without the PACER filing number or official stamps of the court, with metadata on the document identifying it as being authored by “AAW”, who is suspected to be lead Special Counsel prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.

CNN’s camera crew allegedly arrived at Stone’s residence a whole hour before the raid and CNN’s Sara Murray provided Stone’s attorney with a draft copy of the indictment in an early morning communique to confirm the FBI raid and arrest.

CNN was the only camera crew on the scene of the FBI raid on Roger Stone’s home.

Social media giants Facebook and Twitter announced Thursday that between them, they had taken down thousands of accounts they claimed were connected to “attempted influence campaigns” by Iran, Venezuela and Russia. However, their ability to prove those claims is questionable at best.

Facebook's Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher said in a blog post Thursday that the company had removed a total of 783 pages, groups and accounts for "engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior" tied to Iran: 262 pages, 356 accounts and three groups, as well as 162 accounts on Instagram. The pages together paid for about $30,000 worth of ads, hosted eight events and had a combined "reach" of about 2 million people who had liked at least one of the accounts, he said.

Israel’s Prime Minister said on Sunday that the General Election campaign would not stop his government from bombing the Gaza Strip or Iran, Anadolu has reported. The election is due to be held in April.

“If calm is not maintained in Gaza, Israel will not hesitate to move against it even during the election period,” Benjamin Netanyahu told his weekly Cabinet meeting. “I [also] have a message to the tyrants in Tehran: Israel will continue moving overtly to protect its future.”

The Israeli occupation authorities continue to fear any Palestinian retaliation for the Israel Defence Forces’ ongoing aggression and killing of unarmed demonstrators taking part in the Great March of Return protests along the nominal border between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

Are you a victim of panic propaganda promulgated by the Government?

The media is the fourth branch of government, dominated by the power of advertisers, such as the pharmaceutical industry. Media propagandizes people using words as weapons to disparage, demonize, and dehumanize. The propaganda machine, like the markets and the seasons, cycles and repeats. With each cycle, the machine attempts to generate greater panic and more victims.

By design, a repeat story of measles outbreak has morphed from a typical outbreak story of a few targeted individuals to a “geographic area” where no one is safe from coughing and sneezing. Washington state has declared a measles state of emergency and blame the unvaccinated! The World Health Organization reports measles as a leading cause of death worldwide of 450 cases each year, but do not show the evidence of who has been vaccinated. They ignore the 2011 measles outbreak in Quebec Canada of 750 cases where 95% were twice vaccinated.

The meetings in Beijing during January 30-31 between Washington, Russia, China, France and the UK apparently failed to preserve the commitment to prohibit intermediate range nuclear weapons. Washington stuck to its determination to withdraw from the historic agreement of Reagan and Gorbachev to destroy all land-based intermediate range nuclear missiles. This US withdrawal from a nuclear weapons reduction agreement follows the George W. Bush/Cheney regime’s withdrawal from the anti-ballistic missile treaty. Indeed, since the Clinton regime, every US president has produced worsening trust between the two major nuclear powers.

No good can come of this as Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said at the Beijing meeting.

A California cop gave a Marine veteran a concussion for nothing more than filming a traffic stop.

"That's fine," Burrell responds. The officer starts handcuffing Burrell, and tells him to "stop resisting."

"I'm not resisting you," Burrell says, as the officer threatens to take him down. "Stop fighting or you're going to go on the ground," the cop says.

It's hard to see what happens next, and the camera eventually goes dark. "He handcuffed me and threw me into this wall here," Burrell tells KGO. "Swung my body into that pole there, where I knocked my head. He took me to the car and detained me and told me I was going to jail." Burrell wrote on Facebook that he suffered a concussion as a result of the officer's actions.

Several seconds later in the video, the officer can indeed be heard saying: "That wasn't very smart, man. Now you get to go to jail."

The Internet once seemed poised to utterly destroy the establishment media. In an era where everyone with a phone and a social media account could reach an audience of millions, the need for professional journalists gatekeeping information seemed pointless.

Yet journalists have savagely fought back against the social media companies that once threatened to displace them. Today, one angry email from a left-wing journalist is enough to get a tech giant to frantically manipulate its algorithms — or even create manual blacklists — to appease them.

By now most everyone knows that the Covington Catholic High School boys didn't mob and harass a revered "tribal elder" at the Lincoln Memorial following the March for Life on January 18. The boys were actually targeted and harassed by two groups of protesters: the Black Hebrew Israelites (who hurled hateful, racial, homophobic slurs at them) and Native American activists from the American Indian Movement, led by "tribal elder" Nathan Phillips.

A nationwide media frenzy erupted after the Covington boys were falsely accused of mocking Phillips, spurring hundreds of threats against the school and the school's students from across the country by phone, email, and social media.

Not everyone who helped perpetuate the initial fake story has retracted their claims or apologized, and lawyers for the Covington families are working hard to make sure people are held accountable.

In a desperate attempt to cover its tracks, the propaganda network linked to Britain’s security services, the Integrity Initiative (II), has wiped its website and locked its Twitter account “pending an investigation into the theft of data.”

The decision was taken shortly after the Anonymous hacking group released new II documents targeting Russia as supposedly the greatest threat to world peace, based on claims that it is the country most likely to use nuclear weapons.

The documents reveal yet more of the disinformation campaign used to justify NATO preparations for war with Russia, including the use of nuclear weapons.

Minutes from a joint workshop of the Institute for Statecraft (IfS), which runs the II, and the US government-funded Center for Naval Analyses discuss what would happen if the “West” intervened to “push back” a Russian advance in the case of a localized conflict.

Over the past few days, the intensity of anti-government protests in Venezuela has declined despite attempts of the US-led bloc to warm them up through both public and clandestine measures. However, the conflict continues to develop amid the acute standoff in the media sphere between the Maduro government and its opponents backed by the US-led bloc.

A total of about $107 billion has been recovered as a result of the detention of scores of Saudi royals and businessmen in Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton hotel in 2017, according to the kingdom’s anti-corruption commission.

It said the assets collected from the 87 detainees came in a mix of cash, real estate, companies, and securities. The commission, which was headed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), referred more than 60 people to prosecution, saying that 56 of them had “other criminal cases against them.” Eight other people “refused to settle despite the existence of evidence against them, and they were referred to the public prosecutor.”

MBS, who called the anti-corruption campaign a “shock therapy,” has declared it a lucrative success. He told Bloomberg earlier that $35 billion had been collected from the prisoners.

NBC NEWS PUBLISHED a predictably viral story Friday, claiming that “experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.”

But the whole story was a sham: the only “experts” cited by NBC in support of its key claim was the firm, New Knowledge, that just got caught by the New York Times fabricating Russian troll accounts on behalf of the Democratic Party in the Alabama Senate race to manufacture false accusations that the Kremlin was interfering in that election.

On Saturday, RT aired the second part of a conversation between host Chris Hedges, journalist Max Blumenthal and me about the censored Al Jazeera film The Lobby – USA.

In part two – which you can watch above – we focus on how the film shows Israel lobby groups fabricating accusations of anti-Semitism on US college campuses in order to incite official crackdowns against Palestine solidarity activism.

I tell Hedges that “a lot of these fake anti-Semitism allegations are about trying to lay a factual basis to make federal civil rights complaints or lawsuits that can then be used to force university administrations to muzzle students and teachers.”

The Emergency Committee for Israel, an anti-Palestinian activist group, is also seen in the Al Jazeera film organizing a fake pro-Israel protest at the national conference of Students for Justice in Palestine, using paid fellows who are required to attend.

One of the participants describes it as “a chance to shout at Arabs.”

NBC NEWS PUBLISHED a predictably viral story Friday, claiming that “experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.”

But the whole story was a sham: the only “experts” cited by NBC in support of its key claim was the firm, New Knowledge, that just got caught by the New York Times fabricating Russian troll accounts on behalf of the Democratic Party in the Alabama Senate race to manufacture false accusations that the Kremlin was interfering in that election.

Several big-name Democratic politicians are calling on Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam to resign following a racist picture that appeared on a page set aside for him in his 1984 medical school yearbook.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand were some of the Democrats who called on Northam to step down. The picture showed one person wearing blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan costume in Northam’s section of the yearbook.

Facebook has deleted hundreds of fake accounts, groups and pages which it claims are linked to Iran.

The head of Facebook’s cyber-security department, Tanil Glitscher, said in a letter earlier this week that the accounts were “engaging in false and covert activity on Facebook and Instagram,” which is owned by the social media giant. These accounts specifically targeted people around the world, especially in the Middle East and South Asia, Glitscher added.

The company added that the content of these accounts and pages was related to issues such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, as well as the wars in Syria and Yemen. In some cases, the accounts’ content acted as “reorientation of the content of the Iranian government media”.

However, Facebook stressed that it had deleted the accounts because of their activities, rather than the content they were publishing.

Following the January 12 declaration of an official fuel price hike in Zimbabwe, civil unrest and political paranoia has rocked the nation.

President Emmerson Mnanagagwa announced that fuel prices at $1.30 USD per liter would go up by 150 percent, making Zimbabwe’s fuel among the most expensive in the world. The next day he left for a five-day tour of Russia and Eastern Europe, purportedly in search of investment deals. Chaos and anarchy broke out the following Monday.

The military was immediately deployed to quell protests after angry mobs looted and set ablaze several supermarkets and chain stores. Reports of state agents gunning down unarmed civilians circulated on social media before the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ) completely shut down the Internet and all forms of social media from January 14-January 20, 2019.

FBI agents had to officially reiterate their message: no drones near Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium where Sunday’s Super Bowl will take place.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) declared a “no drone zone” on Thursday, placing a three-day Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) within a 30-nautical-mile radius around the stadium and up to 18,000 feet in altitude — well below the typical altitude of commercial airliners.

The news comes in the aftermath of chaos erupting at London’s Gatwick and Heathrow airports in December. Over 100,000 passengers were stranded after unidentified drones showed up near the airports’ runways.

A Federal Communications Commission lawyer faced a skeptical panel of judges today as the FCC defended its repeal of net neutrality rules and deregulation of the broadband industry.

FCC General Counsel Thomas Johnson struggled to explain why broadband shouldn't be considered a telecommunications service, and struggled to explain the FCC's failure to protect public safety agencies from Internet providers blocking or slowing down content.

Oral arguments were held today in the case, which is being decided by a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. (Audio of the four-hour-plus oral arguments is available here.) Throttling of firefighters' data plans played a major role in today's oral arguments.

It’s an evident fact that neocolonial powers are ruled by behemoth corporations whose wealth is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, far more than the total GDP of many developing nations. The status of these multinational corporations as dominant players in international politics gets official imprimatur when the Western governments endorse the congressional lobbying practice of so-called "special interest" groups, which is a euphemism for corporate interests.

Since the Western governments are nothing but the mouthpiece of business interests on international political and economic forums, therefore any national or international entity which hinders or opposes the agenda of corporate interests is either coerced into accepting their demands or gets sidelined.

After Facebook purged thousands of independent media pages from its platform in October, one may be forgiven for thinking that Facebook couldn’t go any lower. But in the company’s second purge of 2019, the social media giant may have done just that.

The round of bans — doled out on Thursday to more than a thousand pages — was revealed in two blog posts: one focusing on pages that allegedly originated in Iran and another that took aim at activity in Indonesia. Not to be outdone, on Thursday Twitter also banned more than 2,500 accounts that it “believes may have origins in Iran.”

National Security Adviser John Bolton—the neoconservative who's played a key role in the Trump administration's effort to overthrow the Venezuelan government—suggested on Friday that President Nicolás Maduro could find himself locked away in the U.S. military prison at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba if he does not soon step aside.

Bolton—who has repeatedly threatened U.S. military action to force out Maduro—made the threat in a "crazy" radio interview (mp3) with right-wing commentator Hugh Hewitt about President Donald Trump's broader policy toward Venezuela, including the administration's endorsement of self-declared "Interim President" Juan Guaidó, and sanctions imposed via executive order against the state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PdVSA).

Last week, The New York Times continued its long, predictable tradition of backing U.S. coups in Latin America by publishing an editorial praising Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This will be the 10th such coup the paper has backed since the creation of the CIA over 70 years ago.

A survey of The New York Times archives shows the Times editorial board has supported 10 out of 12 American-backed coups in Latin America, with two editorials—those involving the 1983 Grenada invasion and the 2009 Honduras coup—ranging from ambiguous to reluctant opposition. The survey can be viewed here.

In this special episode of Media Roots Radio Robbie Martin interviews journalist and writer Whitney Webb about her recent ‘NewsGuard’ expose for MintPress News. NewsGuard is the most recent iteration of the neocon/neoliberal/corporate agenda to soft-censor alternative news and status-quo-challenging viewpoints on the internet. First, there was ‘Prop or Not’ then there was ‘Alliance for Securing Democracy’ now there is ‘NewsGuard’.

On January 25 2018 YouTube unleashed the latest salvo in the war on conspiracy theories, saying “we’ll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.”

At first glance that sounds reasonable. Nobody wants YouTube or anyone else to recommend bad information. And almost everyone agrees that phony miracle cures, flat earthism, and blatantly false claims about 9/11 and other historical events are undesirable.

But if we stop and seriously consider those words, we notice a couple of problems. First, the word “recommend” is not just misleading but mendacious. YouTube obviously doesn’t really recommend anything. When it says it does, it is lying.

France's public health agency has postponed the release of a report on an investigation into the abnormal numbers of babies being born without arms in rural regions — a medical mystery which has baffled experts.
Three infants were born with no arms between June and November 2016 within a 30km radius of Vitrolles in the Bouches-du-Rhône region. That followed another cluster of cases near the area of Ain, where eight babies were born with the defect within a 17 km radius. Similar cases have also been observed in other regions of rural France.

A nationwide investigation into the phenomenon began last October and the government had promised an update by January 31, but that date was suddenly pushed back — and the parents of affected children are becoming impatient and suspicious.

Update: As we previewed below, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has announced that the US will withdraw from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty immediately, prompting threats of a Russian "response" from Moscow.

According to RT, Pompeo said the US could return to compliance with the treaty if Moscow meets Washington's demands within the next 180 days. To convince the US to back down, Washington has insisted that Russia cease development of a new cruise missile. Moscow has repeatedly denied claims that it's in violation of the treaty.

On the evening before National Security Advisor John Bolton reiterated that "all options [including, presumably, military intervention] are on the table" regarding the situation in Venezuela, Twitter announced that it had joined the US-backed coup by taking down 2,000 accounts that it said were engaged in a "state-backed influence campaign", according to RT.

In a blog post, Twitter said it removed 1,196 accounts located in Venezuela which it deemed to "appear to be engaged in a state-backed influence campaign targeting domestic audiences." The company also removed another 764 accounts, but said "we are unable to definitively tie the accounts located in Venezuela to information operations of a foreign government against another country."

Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe called on the state Wednesday to immediately purge 11,198 noncitizen voters who were confirmed as registered to vote despite not being eligible, reports the Washington Times.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe called on the state Wednesday to immediately purge 11,198 noncitizen voters who were confirmed as registered to vote despite not being eligible, reports the Washington Times.

Photo: The Patriot Post
State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, a Republican and former chairman of a House government oversight panel, said the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, belatedly acknowledged the large number of noncitizens in communications over the past two months.

“I believe that we need to take action and have those people removed immediately from the rolls,” Mr. Metcalfe told The Washington Times. “They were never eligible to vote.” -Washington Times

There is a widespread concern in the world regarding China’s decelerating economic growth. The slowdown, if it continues, threatens economic activity almost everywhere. Growth in Germany, for example, has already cooled due to its exports of high-quality machinery to China dropping precipitously.

Those in the oil market also worry about China. The country’s economic growth has been a key driver of global crude oil consumption. Indeed, China accounts for one-third of the International Energy Agency’s projected 2019 increase in world oil use.

Before the big game there’s a coin toss and by the luck of the draw, decisions are made even before the teams take the field. It is the same for politics with, perhaps, the exception of luck having anything to do with the outcomes. Regardless, the games play on our screens and we passively watch; anxiously waiting to see what happens.

It’s an all-or-nothing blitz to score big and winners take all. In the interim, there are the commercial breaks revealing ads refined by the fires of focus groups and in boardrooms.

He’s a man of the moment; not the first, and he won’t be the last.

A Hong Kong-Based training company launched by Blackwater founder Erik Prince is reportedly building a training center in the controversial Western Chinese region of Xinjiang according to Reuters, citing a company statement from Prince's Frontier Services Group (FSG).

While the exact details of the $600,000 (4 million yuan) project weren't disclosed, a state media report said that the facility will be able to train 8,000 people a year.

Despite being the founder, Executive Director and Deputy Chairman of FSG, Prince says he had "no knowledge or involvement" in the preliminary memorandum for the base, according to Reuters.

A Hong Kong-based spokesman for FSG told Reuters on Friday that the statement was “published in error by a staff member in Beijing” and had been taken off FSG’s website.

The removed statement had said that FSG signed a deal with the Kashgar Caohu industrial park in Tumxuk city in southern Xinjiang to build a training center.

There is at present an undeclared and non-violent civil war being waged in this country. The underlying factor of any civil war is an elite ruling class desperate to maintain power at odds with a majority of a population seeking change. Also prevalent in most civil upheavals is the unleashing, by those determined to retain power, of the radicalized and ultimately uncontrollable dogs of war who more often than not devour their sponsors. Both elements are currently in play.

While the ruling class publicly obsesses over Donald Trump and denigrates the vast majority of the population, they have planted the seeds, by their actions, for a takeover of the country by a radical element that will turn on them as they are presently doing within the Democratic Party.

The world first got wind of Russia's massive, 20-ton stealth drone fighter last summer when Russian defense industry sources told TASS, a Russian state-owned media outlet:

According to the defense official, the sixth generation jet program “has not yet taken full shape, its main features are already known.”

“First of all, it should be unmanned and capable of performing any combat task in an autonomous regime. In this sense, the stealth drone will become the prototype of the sixth generation fighter jet,’ the source said, adding that the drone will be able to “take off, fulfill its objectives and return to the airfield.”

“However, it will not receive the function of decision-making regarding the use of weapons – this will be decided by a human,” he said.

Well, as LiveJournal now reports, new images of the first prototype of the unmanned recon-strike drone - nicknamed "Hunter" - have been taken at the airdrome of the Novosibirsk Aviation Plant.

Just one week ago, we warned that the government — helped by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), President Trump (who signed the Rapid DNA Act into law), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget) — was embarking on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

The Insurance Bureau of Canada’s decades-long campaign to raise alarms about the ravages of floods continued last week with an appearance by Blair Feltmate, a favourite star climate-change witness for the biggest insurers, at the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority’s annual meeting. Feltmate heads the industry-funded Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at Waterloo University, which claims climate change has triggered a surge in flood events in recent years. As Feltmate put it during his comments at the meeting: “The elephant in the room, from a climate-change perspective, is… too much water in the wrong places.”

Not quite. The real elephant sharing the room with Feltmate turned out to be a detailed report from Guy Gendron, a CBC/Radio Canada International ombudsman, outlining how such distorted flood claims led the news network to publish stories last fall that contained “inaccurate and irrelevant” information.

Thousands of U.S.-bound Central American migrants resumed their northern journey on Thursday, Mexico City officials said, part of a growing group of would-be asylum seekers who say they are fleeing violence and poverty back home.

Around 2,400 migrants left a city shelter to begin the journey from the Mexican capital early Thursday morning, the latest caravan to embark upon the risky path to the U.S.-Mexican border despite U.S. President Donald Trump's determination to prevent them from entering.

Since last October, thousands of mostly Central American migrants have sought to cross into the United States, many traveling in caravans in order to minimize the risks of kidnapping and attacks by members of criminal gangs while in Mexican territory.

ON DECEMBER 11, 1981 in El Salvador, a Salvadoran military unit created and trained by the U.S. Army began slaughtering everyone they could find in a remote village called El Mozote. Before murdering the women and girls, the soldiers raped them repeatedly, including some as young as 10 years old, and joked that their favorites were the 12-year-olds. One witness described a soldier tossing a 3-year-old child into the air and impaling him with his bayonet. The final death toll was over 800 people.

The next day, December 12, was the first day on the job for Elliott Abrams as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs in the Reagan administration. Abrams snapped into action, helping to lead a cover-up of the massacre. News reports of what had happened, Abrams told the Senate, were “not credible,” and the whole thing was being “significantly misused” as propaganda by anti-government guerillas.

On Friday, The New York Times continued its long, predictable tradition of backing U.S. coups in Latin America by publishing an editorial praising Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This will be the 10th such coup the paper has backed since the creation of the CIA over 70 years ago.

A survey of The New York Times archives shows the Times editorial board has supported 10 out of 12 American-backed coups in Latin America, with two editorials—those involving the 1983 Grenada invasion and the 2009 Honduras coup—ranging from ambiguous to reluctant opposition. The survey can be viewed here.

Closer inspection of the uniforms worn by two self-proclaimed Venezuelan army defectors interviewed on CNN earlier this week has revealed that they are not who they say they are, and probably should not be given guns.
“As Venezuelan soldiers, we are making a request to the US to support us, in logistical terms, with communication, with weapons, so we can realize Venezuelan freedom,” one of the alleged defectors told CNN.

Their conveniently timed appeal came alongside ramped up efforts by the US to institute regime change in the oil rich South American nation, installing pro-American opposition leader Juan Guaidó into power. The two claimed to be in contact with a network of disgruntled army units and defectors ready to “rise up in arms” against recently re-elected President Nicolas Maduro.

The fact that MSNBC host Rachel Maddow focuses excessively on Russia-gate is not new, and it’s not unique—clearly, there is some kind of ratings incentive for cable TV news hosts like her to chase the Kremlin dragon in lieu of topics that you or I might consider more concrete and more important. That’s life on the small screen, and while it’s easy to rue the melodrama and the superficiality, Russia has been the moneymaker since Trump was elected, and it’s not going to change.

That said, there’s a big difference between obsessively covering the Mueller investigation and…this.

This is something different, and bizarre, and frankly you just have to watch to understand:

A U.S. federal judge has ruled against a petition to unseal a criminal complaint against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, arguing that there is no proof that it exists.

Judge Leonie Brinkema of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia decided on Wednesday to turn down the request by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to make public details of the complaint, the existence of which was made known inadvertently last year.

“The Government opposes the Committee’s application on the ground that it has neither confirmed nor denied whether charges have been filed against Assange and cannot be required to disclose that information before an arrest is made,” Brinkema wrote in her 10-page ruling.

Last month the Government’s Bureau of Lies And Statistics served up an employment report purporting 312,000 new jobs in December. This despite massive seasonal retail lay-offs in the latter half of the month. The BLS happily counts those jobs when hired in October but forgets to remove them when are dismissed at the end of the holiday shopping season. As John Williams (Shadow Government Statistics), the 312,000 jobs were created by re-doing the spreadsheets for prior months’ jobs reports:

Surging December payrolls were a reporting fraud, a canard, no more than massive prior-period revisions “recalculation of seasonal factors” that shifted growth from past months into the October 2018 to December 2018 time-frame, without showing the headline downside revisions to the earlier months from which the growth was borrowed

The Trump administration’s attempt to force out the president of Venezuela marked the opening of a new strategy to exert greater U.S. influence over Latin America, according to administration officials.

In sight isn’t just Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, but also Cuba, an antagonist that has dominated American attention in the region for more than 50 years, as well as recent inroads made by Russia, China and Iran.

Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday greeted Carlos Alfredo Vecchio, right, who was named a diplomatic representative to the U.S. by Juan Guaidó, who has claimed Venezuela’s presidency.Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg News

While Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, have long drawn Washington’s condemnation, the Trump administration is stocked with officials who have long believed Cuba to be the more serious national-security threat. They cite Cuba’s intelligence operations in the U.S., and its efforts to spread anti-American views in other Latin American countries.

On 4 December, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave Russia two months to "return to compliance" with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty or Washington would leave the accord on February 2.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov stated Friday that Russia's military capabilities guarantee the country's security irrespective of the US moves on the INF Treaty.

"I think this [US withdrawing from the INF] is an inevitable prospect, and there will be no deviations from the path stated by President Trump and his national security assistant John Bolton when he was in Moscow. This game is played, the Americans will eventually reject the contract", he added.