George Pell, the Vatican's CFO and often called the "3rd most powerful person in the Vatican" was convicted on all charges that he sexually molested choir boys in Australia in the 1990s. However, the press is barred from reporting on it based on one of those gag orders. The Herald Sun in Australia did post a brilliant, Streisand Effect-inducing front page display about how it was being censored from publishing an important story:

Front page of Thursday's edition of Australia's Herald Sun: "CENSORED"

"A statement to our readers...The world is reading a very important story that is relevant to Victorians. The Herald Sun is prevented from publishing details of this significant news." https://t.co/bzFOluucy9 pic.twitter.com/J0vSkBrB1g

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) December 12, 2018
Though, if you click on the link in that tweet it now shows an error message reading Error 400 and "Content is deleted, expired or legal killed." Legal killed.

The Government Accountability Office on Thursday released a report on recent purchases of firearms, ammunition and tactical equipment by federal law enforcement agencies.

The 86-page report focused on the weapons acquired by 20 diverse federal agencies ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General to the FBI. What it found were that the agencies reported spending at least $38.8 million on firearms, $325.9 million on ammunition, and $1.14 billion on tactical equipment in the past eight years.

When it came to firearms, GAO found that semi-auto handguns were king among the guns bought by 18 reporting agencies, accounting for 69 percent of the 44,551 weapons purchased. The biggest single buyer was ATF, which acquired at least 8,500 firearms — mostly in large buys in 2012 and 2017 — while the smallest purchases were made by the Social Security’s OIG, who have bought 311 new guns for their 270 agents since 2010.

The world order has already changed. China has a larger and more powerful industrial and manufacturing based economy than the US, and China’s potential domestic consumer market is four times larger than that of the US. As economies are consumer based, China’s potential is an economy four times larger than that of the US.

Russia has a far more capable military with weapon systems unmatched by the US. The US is drowning in debt, and the illegal and irresponsible sanctions that Washington tries to impose on others are driving the world’s largest countries away from the use of the US dollar as world reserve currency and away from Western clearance systems such as SWIFT. The United States already has one foot in the grave. Any country sufficiently stupid to ally with the US is allied with a dead man walking.

Serbia has threatened military action against neighbouring Kosovo after its parliament approved the creation of a new army.

Kosovar MPs voted on Friday to expand the existing Kosovo Security Force into a 5,000-troop army, plus 3,000 reservists.

Belgrade called the move a “direct threat to peace and stability” in the Balkans and lashed out at the United States for supporting the proposal.

Kosovo unilaterally declared independence in 2008, but Serbia does not recognise its former province as a state.

Belgrade insists the new army would violate a UN resolution that brought to an end its bloody crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in 1999.

Serbian prime minister Ana Brnabic said armed intervention was “one of the options on the table”.

A suppression order is made when a court prohibits the disclosure of information about a legal case.

These are ordered in Australia for a variety of reasons – in the interest of national security, to protect the safety of witnesses, or to guarantee a fair trial.

They can be wide-ranging, clamping down on nearly all – and at times all – information about a trial, or narrow, obscuring just one person’s name.

China moves forward with its global infrastructure program;and the trade war has had little impact in isolating Bejing from its principal markets. Moreover, the US policy has increased China’s role as a leading advocate of ‘open trade’ against President Trump’s protectionism.

Likewise, the tactics of encircling and sanctioning Russia has deepened ties between Moscow and Beijing. The US has increased its nominal ‘proxies’ in Latin America and Africa but they all depend on trade and investments from China. This is especially true of agro-mineral exports to China.

A bet on Donald Trump for president may have seemed risky two years ago. But for billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the payout has been spectacular.

The 85-year-old and his wife Miriam gave $82 million to Republicans and candidate Trump in 2016, and within two years watched their man execute two major Adelson asks: moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal.

THE VIDEO SHOWS A FAMILIAR WEST BANK SCENE. As a Palestinian flag in Nabi Saleh flutters in the wind on a spring day in 2017, two Palestinians with slingshots launch stones at Israeli soldiers. About a dozen others stand to the side, behind the ruins of a demolished house, calmly observing.

Then, a young man wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, alone, is seen heading up a slight slope toward the house. The camera jerks for a second, and the youth disappears from the frame. A single shot rings out. The observers duck. The young man, back in the frame, is running toward the others, holding his stomach. Then he falls. The screams for an ambulance begin.

Both sides agree to withdraw all troops from Hodeidah within 21 days.

The Yemeni peace talks in Sweden have ended on a high note on Thursday, with an agreement for more talks in January, and most importantly, a deal for a ceasefire in the vital aid port of Hodeidah.

Under the deal, both sides have agreed to withdraw all fighters from the area around Hodeidah within the next 21 days. The UN will oversee the withdrawal and is expected to play a role in monitoring the port.

The port deal appears to be broadly what was proposed by the UN and the Houthis in the first place. The Hadi government had previously rejected this plan, and demanding the Houthis disarm and surrender the city to them.

Both sides agree to withdraw all troops from Hodeidah within 21 days.

The Yemeni peace talks in Sweden have ended on a high note on Thursday, with an agreement for more talks in January, and most importantly, a deal for a ceasefire in the vital aid port of Hodeidah.

Under the deal, both sides have agreed to withdraw all fighters from the area around Hodeidah within the next 21 days. The UN will oversee the withdrawal and is expected to play a role in monitoring the port.

The port deal appears to be broadly what was proposed by the UN and the Houthis in the first place. The Hadi government had previously rejected this plan, and demanding the Houthis disarm and surrender the city to them.

TEN YEARS AGO TODAY.

On December 13, 2008, junk scientist Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap would be completely ice free in five years.
Gore made the prediction to a German audience on December 13, 2008. Al warned them that “the entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in 5 years.”

Up to 15,000 Syrian rebels are ready to join a Turkish military offensive against U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in northeast Syria, but no date has been set for the operation, a spokesman for the main Turkish-backed Syrian rebel group said on Thursday.

President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that Turkey would launch the offensive in a few days, targeting a border region east of the Euphrates river which is held by the YPG Kurdish militia.

The announcement prompted a sharp rebuke from the Pentagon, which said any unilateral military action into northeast Syria would be unacceptable.

The United States has been supporting the YPG in the fight against Islamic State insurgents since 2015. Following cross-border shelling from Turkey into Kurdish-controlled territory two months ago, U.S. forces have set up three military observation posts near the border.

British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who wrote the Democrat-financed anti-Trump dossier, said in a court case that he was hired by a Democratic law firm in preparation for Hillary Clinton challenging the results of the 2016 presidential election.

He said the law firm Perkins Coie wanted to be in a position to contest the results based on evidence he unearthed on the Trump campaign conspiring with Moscow on election interference.

His scenario is contained in a sealed Aug. 2 declaration in a defamation law suit brought by three Russian bankers in London. The trio’s American attorneys filed his answers Tuesday in a libel lawsuit in Washington against the investigative firm Fusion GPS, which handled the former British intelligence officer.

Ever wonder what it would be like for a website or platform to suddenly just pull the plug on an enormous swath of its users? Not just one or two thought criminals (such as, to pick at random, American Renaissance), or even a few dozen or hundred users, but a massive purge? Well, you are about to see such an act, arguably for the first time.

On December 3, the micro-blogging platform Tumblr announced that in one fortnight, on December 17, all “adult content” will be permanently removed from its site.

The U.S. Department of Education announced Thursday it would automatically cancel $150 million in student loans connected to for-profit colleges that closed in recent years.

The move was made under an Obama-era policy that a federal judge in October essentially forced U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to implement. The story was first reported by Politico.

The discharge of loans applies automatically to about 15,000 students who attended now-defunct colleges that closed between Nov. 1, 2013, and Dec. 4, 2018, according to the department's announcement.

The European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, has declared that no EU member-state is big enough to “pursue their own national interests” — a pointed warning the United Kingdom and any country thinking of following them out of the bloc.
“I think we all agree that no single European country can respond effectively to any of the challenges of our times, and I think we agree that we, the European Union, have a responsibility to embrace our role as a global power,” the Italy-born technocrat declared in a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

After being kept in the dark about New York's $3 billion deal with Amazon, allowing the trillion-dollar corporation to build its new headquarters—complete with helicopter landing pad for CEO Jeff Bezos—in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City, concerned New York City Council members and scores of angry New Yorkers on Wednesday angrily confronted company representatives over the plan.

At the first City Council meeting on Amazon's so-called "HQ2," about 150 protesters joined the mostly-Democratic lawmakers in slamming the closed-door process through which the city and state finalized the deal and the effect the corporation's arrival will likely have on affordable housing and community development in Queens and the entire city, as New York pours much-needed funds into the new one million square foot campus.

The US must have Kurdish militias withdraw from the Syrian town of Manbij, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday, otherwise he will order his troops to take the key settlement.

The threat, delivered during a speech in Istanbul, ramps up Erdogan’s rhetoric targeting the YPG militias. Earlier on Wednesday, he publicly complained that the US, which support the Kurds in northeastern Syria, is failing to deliver on its promise to clear Manbij of Kurdish fighters. Ankara considers Syrian Kurdish paramilitaries as an extension of the Turkey-based anti-government guerrillas and brands the YPG as terrorists.

“Manbij is a place where Arabs live, but they have surrendered the area to the terror organization,” the Turkish president told a judiciary conference. “Now we are saying that you should cleanse, remove them, or else we will enter Manbij. I am speaking very clearly.”

Three creepy Facebook patent applications describe using your historical location data — and others’ — to determine where users will go next or when they will be offline to feed FB content.

BuzzFeed reports that Facebook has filed several patents with the US Patent and Trademark Office for technology that is intended to predict your location.

The first application filed on May 30, 2017, titled “Offline Trajectories,” describes a process to predict where Facebook users will go next based on location data. The technology outlined in the patent would calculate a “transition probability based at least in part on previously logged location data associated with a plurality of users who were at the current location.”

The Clinton Foundation operated as a foreign agent ‘early in its life’ and ‘throughout it’s existence’ and did not operate as a 501 c3 charitable foundation as required, and is not entitled to its status as a nonprofit, alleged two highly qualified forensic investigators, accompanied by three other investigators, said in explosive testimony Thursday to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Recently, a patent application from Amazon became public that would pair face surveillance — like Rekognition, the product that the company is aggressively marketing to police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — with Ring, a doorbell camera company that Amazon bought earlier this year.

While the details are sketchy, the application describes a system that the police can use to match the faces of people walking by a doorbell camera with a photo database of persons they deem “suspicious.” Likewise, homeowners can also add photos of “suspicious” people into the system and then the doorbell’s facial recognition program will scan anyone passing their home. In either case, if a match occurs, the person’s face can be automatically sent to law enforcement, and the police could arrive in minutes.

Move over China, Russia and North Korea - Iran is now vying for the title of America's most threatening cyber nemesis. According to a report in the Associated Press, an Iranian hacking group known by the codename "Charming Kitten" has been caught by a private security firm trying to break into the email accounts of US nuclear scientists and policy makers, presumably to try and figure out what the US knows about Iran's clandestine enrichment program, and what, exactly, is happening in the minds of America's most senior policy setters.

After Trump reimposed sanctions against Iran last month (while offering a crucial backdoor in the form of oil -export waivers), the Iranian government rushed to try and infiltrate the accounts of people tasked with enforcing them.

On Monday, December 10, protestors gathered outside of the Albert Borschette Conference Centre in Brussels. They’d brought an unhappy refrigerator with them. Inside the building, European Union member states had gathered to vote on changes to the EU’s Eco Design and Energy Label Directives—a set of policies and laws governing the safe manufacture of various appliances.
Groups such as Schraube locker!? (Screw Loose in English) and the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) had been working towards this moment for months—agitating for EU politicians to take the opportunity to enshrine the right-to-repair in European law. It’s going to be a long fight. Monday was all about refrigerators.

Americans no longer have to worry about the TSA (DHS) using facial recognition to spy on you and your family. Because private corporations and sports stadiums are doing their dirty work for them.

Two days ago, Hertz Global Holdings Inc., revealed their plans to install facial recognition fast lane car rentals at every airport.

Which really should not surprise anyone, because last month I revealed the key to convincing Americans to accept facial recognition is to offer them consumer loyalty rewards and avoiding long lines.

"SensibleVision CEO George Brostoff sees customer loyalty rewards as a logical next step in the U.S. And Goode Intelligence Founder Alan Goode, sees a huge potential for biometric customer loyalty programs. Goode also thinks facial recognition should be used for age verification in self-check out systems."

chooling is adept at rooting out individuality and enforcing compliance. In his book, Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky writes:

In fact, the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on—because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.

This filtering process begins very early in a child’s schooling as conformity is rewarded and divergence is punished.

PUBLIC SCHOOLING BREEDS OBEDIENCE
Most of us played this game as schoolchildren. We know the rules. The kids who raise their hands, color in the lines, and obey succeed; the kids who challenge the rules struggle. The problem now is that the rules are extending beyond the classroom. Parents are increasingly required to obey, to conform to a school’s demands even if they believe such orders may not be appropriate for their child.

The types of sophisticated, intrusive spy gear available to law enforcement agencies continue to proliferate at a rapid rate. Here’s yet another example.

BriefCam’s “Transforming Video into Actionable Intelligence” allows law enforcement and retailers to secretly identify people by their gender, body size, color, direction, speed and more.

BriefCam’s Video Synopsis version V allows police and retail stores to use surveillance cameras to identify individuals and cars in real-time.

“BriefCam is the industry’s leading provider of Video Synopsis® solutions for rapid video review and search, real-time alerting and quantitative video insights. By transforming raw video into actionable intelligence.”

What is really disturbing about the video is no one knows where it is being used or by whom. BriefCam’s limited disclosures claim it is being used by top law enforcement agencies and governments but that’s it.

One person watching closely was Gabriel Weinberg, co-founder and CEO DuckDuckGo — a privacy-focused search engine company that competes with Google Search and last week, revealed a study of its own (not referenced by Rep. Smith).

The study, among other things, found that participants saw vast differences in search results when searching for the same keywords (like "gun control" or "immigration") from different locations across the country. The study controlled for other potential factors of personalization by having its participants log out of their Google accounts and search from an incognito state.

"What [our study] does reveal, or at least suggests, is that Google's collection and use of personal data, including location, which is then used to filter specific search results, is having an effect akin to the effects of a political bias," Weinberg told Business Insider on Tuesday. "That is an important nuance often missed in these discussions.?"

The Jewish Holocaust occupies a unique position in modern Western society, in that questioning the facts of the Holocaust is suppressed and vilified on a global scale as no other topic of human history. Why is research into the Holocaust so problematic? Why is it that serious research by scientists, historians and other academics is rejected out of hand as immoral? Why is the suppression of research into ANY aspect of history acceptable?

Despite criticism from fellow politicians, including Prime Minister Juha Sipilä, Ville Tavio's party, the Finns, has refused to disavow the statement about the "fascist" nature of European federalism.

Finnish MP Ville Tavio from the right-wing nationalistic Finns party has stirred a major uproar in his country by comparing the European Union with Nazi Germany during a parliamentary debate.

"Federalists are threatening the people of Europe and the nation state. They create a new kind of Soviet Union, they create a new Nazi Germany", Tavio said, as quoted by Finnish national broadcaster Yle. Tavio went on to suggest that the EU;s globalisation was a "new form of fascism", which the Finns were unaware of when they voted to join the EU in the 1990s.

Tavio's statement sparked a major debate, with politicians on both sides of the political spectrum reacting strongly.

If you want to understand the zeal with which social media platforms are now being censored, all you have to do is to look at what has been happening on our college campuses. There is a national movement to combat “offensive speech”, and this movement has been working very hard “to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense”. And these days, just about anything that you might say or think is probably going to deeply offend someone.

This morning CNN executives woke up to an ad chastising the network in the popular Sunday edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which reaches over 900,000 people.

In the paper of record, in CNN’s hometown, activists sent a powerful message in support of Professor Hill and in protest of his firing.

Marc Lamont Hill was fired by CNN after he spoke at the United Nations in defense of Palestinian rights as part of the UN-organized International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

The Jewish Voice for Peace advertisement is part of a larger support campaign for Marc Lamont Hill, and was paid for by over 1,000 individual donations, with an average gift of $28.

While Al Jazeera’s undercover investigation into Israeli influence in the United States, “The Lobby – USA,” was completed in October 2017, it never aired. Though the network’s director-general attributed the problem to outstanding legal issues, many, including journalists involved in the making of the documentary, suggested Qatari censorship of the film – likely resulting from US pressure and Qatar’s desire to curry favor with Washington. (Another Al Jazeera film on Israeli influence in the UK – “The Lobby” – aired in January 2017.)

Now, the US version is no longer under wraps: Last month, the Electronic Intifada, in tandem with France’s Orient XXI and Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar, which provided subtitles in French and Arabic, respectively, released the leaked film. (Click to access.)

Iran has been under severe US-imposed economic sanctions for 40 years. The US has been threatening Iran with war and “all options are on the table” for decades. The US has also instigated instability inside Iran and supported external attacks by terrorist groups such as Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or MEK. [*]

The US project to destroy Iran’s economy has had a devastating impact. The husky Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo said that it is up to Iranian’s leadership “if they want their people to eat”.[*] Because of the US, Iran lacks sufficient funds that it would like to invest in human resources and social programs. Iran’s constitution guarantees healthcare and free education for all, as well as protections of civil rights. As reflected in the drafting of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, the vision of the economic order was:

Dennis Nathan Cain, a former FBI contractor turned Clinton-Uranium One court-recognized whistleblower, says the FBI raid on his home despite this status reveals that the “deep state” is real. “So I blow the whistle on the FBI, get raided by the same FBI, and now they want to keep the FBI’s reasons secret? Do we now live in a secret police state? Feels a little like 1984,” Cain tweeted. Suspiciously, the raid happened just before former FBI Director James Comey, who oversaw this investigation, was slated to appear before closed-door meetings with Congress on this very topic. There’s still much more than meets the eye here, but we should assume precisely zero will be done about it in the new House of Representatives, which will be controlled by the Democrats.

Trafficking guns and explosives to the Irish Republican Army, running a massive criminal enterprise for years in Boston, extorting drug dealers so that they could do business on his turf, acting as an FBI informant and oh, so many murders: James “Whitey” Bulger's life was both colorful and poisonous, to say the least.

His long career as a professional criminal came to an end in 2011. After over a decade on the FBI's Most Wanted Fugitives list, Bulger was located and charged with murder, conspiracy to commit murder, extortion, narcotics distribution and money-laundering. He was convicted and thrown in the clink in 2012. This past October, Bugler, 89 years old and confined to a wheelchair, was stabbed and beaten to death by his fellow inmates at the United States Penitentiary, Hazelton, in West Virginia.

If Twitter hasn’t suspended or banned you yet, don’t feel relieved. You may be next.

When Twitter and other big tech companies started banning fringy rightwing characters over the past year or so, few people objected, because even most conservatives weren’t sympathetic to those purged. It’s hard to feel sympathy for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. But once the radicals were banned, it became far easier to ban others.

Now, people tend to talk about public issues mostly on the big tech platforms. Minority viewpoints can use them to get around the mainstream or legacy media. A biased article in The New York Times or The Washington Post is more likely to be challenged by a small website communicating with its readers through Facebook and Twitter, than by a conservative magazine.

Free speech and the ability to speak truth are being shut down. It is happening with the complicity of the print and TV media, the liberal/progressive/left, the US Department of Justice (sic), the law schools and bar associations, Congress, and the federal judiciary.

The attack on Julian Assange is the arrow aimed at the heart of the ability to publish the truth. If a journalist can be indicted for espionage for publishing leaked documents that a corrupt government has classified in order to conceal its crimes, the First Amendment is dead.

The Electronic Intifada was forced by Twitter to delete a tweet linking to a story that has been subject to Israeli military censorship.

In recent days, other publications and individuals have faced the same demand, indicating that the social media firm has agreed to become an enforcement arm for Israel’s efforts to control information about potential war crimes and abuses of Palestinian rights.

While Facebook has become notorious for enforcing censorship on behalf of Israel, this is a new turn by Twitter.

It is another ominous sign of how monopolistic Silicon Valley corporations – especially Facebook and Google – that control what are in effect the public commons are colluding with governments to reassert control of information previously lost due to the freedom provided by the internet.

US lawmakers could rush two bills into law that aim to silence and criminalize Palestine rights advocacy.

The legislation – the Israel Anti-Boycott Act and the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act – could be tacked on to a spending bill, evading debate on the House and Senate floors.

End-of-year spending bills are usually thousands of pages long and include legislation that could not pass earlier by regular means.

Both bills have been stalled in Congress amid First Amendment concerns, but sponsorship and support from Democratic and Republican representatives has been climbing.

If passed, the bills would have a chilling effect on students and scholars who criticize Israel and bolster efforts by Israel lobby groups to blacklist, surveil and harass supporters of Palestinian rights.

We are approaching critical mass, the point at which all hell breaks loose.

The government is pushing us ever closer to a constitutional crisis.

What makes the outlook so much bleaker is the utter ignorance of the American people—and those who represent them—about their freedoms, history, and how the government is supposed to operate.

As Morris Berman points out in his book Dark Ages America, “70 percent of American adults cannot name their senators or congressmen; more than half don't know the actual number of senators, and nearly a quarter cannot name a single right guaranteed by the First Amendment. Sixty-three percent cannot name the three branches of government. Other studies reveal that uninformed or undecided voters often vote for the candidate whose name and packaging (e.g., logo) are the most powerful; color is apparently a major factor in their decision.”

Australia‘s government signed a bill into law last week giving law enforcement agencies the right to force technology companies to reveal users’ encrypted messages. Another way of putting it: Australia‘s tech scene will soon be located on the Wayback Machine.

The law was introduced as the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018, but now it’s official. And there’s a lot to be concerned about, even if you don’t live or work in Australia.

Silicon Valley used to be technology companies. But it has become the "morality police," controlling free speech on its platforms.

The US will lead a new liberal world order, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared. Organizations and treaties not fitting this picture must be scrapped or reformed, so that non-compliers could not use them against America.
The vision of the bold new and prosperous (for the US and its supporters) world was delivered by Pompeo in a keynote speech to the German Marshall Fund on Tuesday.

The senior member of the Donald Trump administration said a multilateral approach is failing to produce a world of unrestricted capitalism, so the US should rule supreme – sorry, assume a leadership role – to ensure that countries like China didn’t try to offer an alternative way.