With the Syrian government saying that any more failures to take back the country’s southwest diplomatically would lead them to launch an offensive, the US State Department is threatening “firm and appropriate measures” to punish Syria for any such attempt.

Syria has been expected to launch such an offensive for awhile. Russia negotiated with Israel to get them to agree to keep out of the fighting, in return for Russia urging Iran and Hezbollah to remain out of the border region. The assumption has been for some time this cleared room for the push.

US officials, however, say that Syria would be violating the previous de-escalation deal made between the US, Russia, and Turkey, as some of the offensive would take place in that area. Other de-escalation zones have effectively been erased by government gains, or the wiping out of certain rebels by others.

Three US senators have called on the Pentagon to immediately reveal the extent of US military support to the Saudi-led Arab coalition that launched an attack on Hodeidah, a key port city and last humanitarian lifeline in Yemen.
“We call on you to immediately disclose the full extent of the US military role in the Saudi-led war against Yemen’s Houthis, including the use of special operations forces; disclose any role that the Pentagon is currently performing, has been asked to perform, or is considering performing regarding an attack on the port of Hodeida,” says the letter sent to Defense Secretary James Mattis on Friday, and signed by Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut)

The United States’ demands regarding reforming the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) have failed to be met, and as such Washington is reportedly ready to pull out over what it calls anti-Israel bias and the inclusion of alleged rights abusers.

Diplomats told Reuters that it's merely a matter of time before the US exits the council, which will convene Monday for a three week convention that will last until July 6. One US source who spoke anonymously said that an announcement looks "imminent."

Another US official in Geneva, where the UNHRC will meet June 18, said, "we are still moving ahead with our engagement for the coming session."

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations NIkki Haley speaks to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference in Washington, U.S., March 27, 2017
© REUTERS / JOSHUA ROBERTS
"Blood Is on Your Hands": Nikki Haley Heckled During University Speech (VIDEOS)

Former FBI Director James Comey was blasted by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s office for his actions during the bureau’s ‘midyear’ investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct government business and the investigation found evidence that other members of the FBI deliberately took official action in an attempt to keep President Donald Trump from holding elected office.

Horowitz’s 500 page report, a summary of which was obtained by this reporter and other news outlets, also gave extensive and in-depth details of the dis-function within the bureau and Department of Justice from the beginning of the investigation in July, 2015 until Comey ended the probe into Clinton during the summer of 2016.

In the middle of directing the difficult task of transferring the historically important records of the Obama administration into the National Archives, the archivist in charge, David Ferriero, ran into a serious problem: A lot of key records are missing. A first-rate librarian, Ferriero has been driving a much-needed digital overhaul and expansion of the National Archives over the nine years of his appointment. This will greatly improve the ability of digital search locally and remotely, as well as accessing the files themselves. To support this effort, in 2014 President Obama signed the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments. For the first time electronic government records were placed under the 1950 Federal Records Act.

As Canada's controversial Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project faces ongoing opposition, the former governor of the Bank of Canada said that protesters may die but that the government should push the project through anyway.

Speaking at an event Wednesday, David Dodge said, "We're going to have some very unpleasant circumstances," the Edmonton Journal reported. "There are some people that are going to die in protesting construction of this pipeline. We have to understand that."

"Nevertheless, we have to be willing to enforce the law once it's there," Dodge said. "It's going to take some fortitude to stand up."

In an interview with the Journal, he elaborated by saying, "We have seen it other places, that equivalent of religious zeal leading to flouting of the law in a way that could lead to death."

Dodge's comments prompted outrage from climate activists.

Police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, have been ordered to “never suggest or demand” that paramedics use powerful horse tranquilizers on suspects, following a report that the practice had spiked in recent years.

The new policy order comes after a report by the city’s Office of Police Conduct Review found that paramedics had used ketamine on suspects during police calls 62 times in 2017, up from just three times in 2012. In some cases, emergency personnel injected the tranquilizer into suspects who were already restrained, causing heart and breathing failure and requiring the suspects to be medically revived, reported the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

“Our policy should be clear,” said Mayor Jacob Frey. “Cops shouldn’t direct medical professionals on health-related issues, and medical professionals shouldn’t listen to them.”

A barber was asleep on the couch in his apartment when a SWAT team blew the front door off of its hinges with such force that it flew across the room and landed on top of him. The officers stormed his apartment, arrested him, and then later informed him that he had been accused of selling $100 worth of cocaine to a confidential informant.

In an exclusive interview with The Free Thought Project, Roderick Talley said he has video evidence that the informant—who he claimed has a long arrest record—lied about the sale. The fake drug buy led to a very real search warrant, and when the SWAT team did not find cocaine in Talley’s apartment, they claimed to have found cannabis instead.

At a technology conference in Hannover, Germany, Marc Raibert, the founder of Boston Dynamics, outlined how his company may soon begin to turn its decades-long robotics research into an actual business.

Boston Dynamics was sold to SoftBank by Alphabet last year following concerns around its ability to generate revenue. Since the acquisition, it seems that the company has ramped up testing on its increasingly dexterous and nimble robots. Earlier this year, Raibert said the company planned to start selling its SpotMini robot dogs in 2019, and onstage this week, he said the company plans to produce about 100 of the robots by the end of this year. The goal is to begin mass production at the rate of about 1,000 robots per year in the middle of 2019.

The Texas Bullion Depository officially opened for business this week. The creation of the facility represents a power-shift away from the federal government, and sets the foundation to undermine the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on money.

In June 2015, Gov. Greg Abbot signed legislation creating the state gold bullion and precious metal depository. The facility will not only provide a secure place for individuals, business, cities, counties, government agencies and even other countries to store gold and other precious metals, the law also creates a mechanism to facilitate the everyday use of gold and silver in transactions. In short, a person will eventually be able to deposit gold or silver – and pay other people through electronic means or checks – in sound money.

The facility began accepting deposits of precious metals on Wednesday, June 6. Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar became the first depositor. He praised the depository as a secure place to store gold and silver.

Yves here. This isn’t the first telling of Purdue Pharma’s orchestrated campaign to ramp up sales of OxyContin, including misrepresenting the risks of addiction and identifying doctors who could be persuaded to prescribe the medication heavily, but it is a story that cannot be told too often.

By Fred Schulte, a four time Pulitzer Prize finalist who has worked at the Baltimore Sun, the South Florida Sun Sentinel and the Center for Public Integrity. Originally published at Kaiser Health News

Purdue Pharma left almost nothing to chance in its whirlwind marketing of its new painkiller OxyContin.

From 1996 to 2002, Purdue pursued nearly every avenue in the drug supply and prescription sales chain — a strategy now cast as reckless and illegal in more than 1,500 federal civil lawsuits from communities in Florida to Wisconsin to California that allege the drug has fueled a national epidemic of addiction.

At least 17 people were killed as an explosion rocked a meeting of Taliban and Afghan security forces, gathering during an unprecedented ceasefire for the Eid holiday, in the eastern province of Nangarhar, a local official said.
Casualties include Taliban, Afghan security forces, and civilians, Attaullah Khogyani, spokesman for the provincial governor of Nangarhar, said.

The timing of the bombing appears to be significant. On Saturday, Taliban members entered the Afghan capital, Kabul urging people to come forward and take selfies with them. The unusual move reportedly occurred elsewhere in the country, as photos and videos on social media showed Taliban fighters giving hugs to locals and Afghan forces across several provinces.

A Swedish call at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire in the Yemen port of Hodeidah was derailed during a closed session Friday. The US and Britain both expressed opposition to the measure, designed to prevent Saudi-led forces attacking a port responsible for feeding 8.4 million civilians.

Britain insisted on the meeting being a closed session, meaning specific comments during the hearing, and the reiteration from UN officials of the humanitarian crisis threatening to kill millions, would not be done for the public to see.

US officials did not publicly comment on why they’re opposed to the ceasefire, but likely is a reflection of the Saudis really wanting to attack the city. British Ambassador Karen Pierce said their opposition was made purely based on “the British national interest.”

It’s not clear exactly how preventing food being delivered to Yemeni civilians is in the British national interest.

With regard to any application that claims to provide privacy: “The simple fact is that the platforms on which it runs are compromised from the operating systems down to the silicon.”

I’m not saying to not encrypt. Encryption can prevent your data from falling into the hands of thieves, Google and maybe the local police. What I’m saying is that, “If you are specifically targeted by a state intelligence agency, you are going to have a very, very hard time defeating that.” (From the post linked above.)

Via: Reuters:

Federal prosecutors investigating U.S. President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen have extracted more than 700 pages of messages sent using encrypted programs like WhatsApp and Signal on phones seized from Cohen, according to a court filing on Friday.

You’re in search of your roots, on a quest to uncover your ancestors. You submit DNA to a public genealogy service and in exchange get information about your people. Success!

But from a constitutional perspective, in the U.S., you’re also abandoning evidence, which means criminal investigators can use your data. They don’t need a search warrant and you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but you should think carefully, according to a May 29 paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine by U.S. National Institutes of Health bioethicists Benjamin Berkman and Christine Grady, and lawyer Wynter Miller. They point out the ethical questions raised by use of public genetic databases in criminal investigations, and argue for more public discussion.

On the one hand, public genealogy databases have helped investigators crack difficult cases and track down killers that eluded them for decades. So that’s good.

American universities pride themselves on fostering free speech and protecting their communities’ academic freedom. But for Palestinian students, faculty, and their supporters, both freedoms have been sharply limited.

A small army of pro-Israeli watchdog organizations keeps a close eye on everything Palestinian academics do and say, every Tweet they post and group they join. Those who go too far in criticizing Israel or standing up for Palestine may pay with their jobs, their academic standing, their future admission and employment opportunities.

All these groups claim they are defending Jewish students from anti-Semitism. In reality, the watchdogs rarely address anti-Jewish incidents – there aren’t many to address — but they will be all over anyone who calls out Israeli crimes.

Israel’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation is expected to approve a draft bill on Sunday that aims to ban the documentation of Israeli soldiers’ treatment of Palestinians by human rights groups.

The legislation would prohibit the “documentation and distribution of any report about confrontations between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians with the intent either to harm national security or to ‘break the spirit of Israeli soldiers and inhabitants’”, reported Haaretz.

The law, proposed by MK Robert Ilatov of Yisrael Beitenu, enjoys support from faction head Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman and the Kulanu party, headed by Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon.

The radical Left — which now controls tech giants like Google and Facebook — can’t win any debate (or elections) based on facts or logic, so they resort to brazen censorship to silence all opposing views in the hopes of dominating the culture by cheating. “These activists want the playing field to be tilted in favor of their ‘politically correct’ worldview so that democratic outcomes like the 2016 presidential election can never happen again,” warns Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), a member of Congress. “Censorship like this undermines public discourse and trust in our institutions — and it is likely to get worse before it gets better.”

The Jewish Chronicle seems dismayed that the singer-songwriter Alison Chabloz has escaped jail time, at least for the time being. But the message conveyed by Ms. Chabloz’s conviction is devastating for Britain. This kingdom has, in just a short time, become a crude authoritarian state.

For posting so-called ‘grossly offensive songs’ on the internet, Chabloz was sentenced by District Judge John Zani to 20 weeks imprisonment suspended for two years. It seems that now music is deemed a major threat to Britain.

Chabloz was also banned from posting anything on social media for 12 months. I am perplexed. What kind of countries pre-vet social interaction and intellectual exchange? Israel imposes such prohibitions on its Palestinian citizens. Soviet Russia banned certain types of gatherings and publications and, of course, Nazi Germany saw itself qualified to decide what type of texts were healthy for the people and actively burned books. I guess that Britain is in good company.

Fears for the safety of Tommy Robinson are mounting after it was revealed that he has been moved to a heavily Muslim-populated prison in the United Kingdom and has already been on the receiving end of death threats.

Robinson was jailed last month for a “breach of the peace” while live streaming a trial involving a Muslim rape gang outside Leeds Crown Court.

He was initially held in a low security prison with a low Muslim population.

However, today it was revealed by Robinson’s manager Caolan Robertson that the activist has now been moved to another prison that has a large Muslim prison population.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has become embroiled in yet another scandal. The Likud leader was questioned yesterday by police in connection with an investigation into alleged corruption relating to Israel’s $2 billion purchase of submarines from Germany.

The Financial Times reported that Netanyahu was grilled for “several hours” at his official residence in Jerusalem. While Israel’s premier is not thought to be a suspect at the moment, the questioning by police over such long hours is bound to raise suspicions given that he is already under investigation over several cases of corruption.

Corruption scandals have followed the Netanyahus since he took office nine years ago. Though he has denounced the investigations as nothing but a “witch-hunt”, his critics maintain that there is no smoke without fire.

China, the world's most populous country, continues to devise new methods of keeping tabs on its 1.4 billion citizens. And after the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week about a powerful new spy camera devised by a team of researchers at Duke University who had, incidentally, received funding from the US government, America's business newspaper of record is back Wednesday with another stunning report, this time about how China is establishing a new system to track cars using electronic tags. Indeed, WSJ describes the plan to "improve public security", which will also purportedly help ease extreme congestion in the largest Chinese cities.

The plan, which is set to be rolled out by July 1, will rely on chips that can be identified thanks to their unique radio frequency signature. Compliance will be voluntary at first, but it will become mandatory for all new vehicles by Jan. 2019.

A resolution has passed in the UN General Assembly slamming Israel’s use of ‘excessive force’ against Palestinian protesters during their Great March of Return in Gaza, with more than 130 killed and thousands injured.

Many of the protesters were unarmed but encountered live ammunition from Israeli snipers. Victims included journalists and first aid responders, who were well marked but were targeted and slaughtered anyway.

Nikki Haley, the American UN envoy, was adamantly opposed to the resolution and submitted an amendment of her own in which Hamas was to be condemned as the aggressor, with no attention being paid to the death toll racked up by the Israelis who were not being attacked by civilian protesters, which failed to obtain the necessary support in the Assembly.

If you take Prilosec or Zantac for acid reflux, a beta blocker for high blood pressure, or Xanax for anxiety, you may be increasing your risk of depression.

More than 200 common medications sold in the U.S. include depression as a potential side effect. Sometimes, the risk stems from taking several drugs at the same time. Now, a new study finds people who take these medicines are, in fact, more likely to be depressed.

The list includes a wide range of commonly taken medications. Among them are certain types of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) (used to treat acid reflux), beta blockers, anxiety drugs, painkillers including ibuprofen, ACE inhibitors (used to treat high blood pressure), and anti-convulsant drugs.

"The more of these medications you're taking, the more likely you are to report depression," says study author Mark Olfson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University.

Yet another disturbing video of police officers assaulting patrons at a Waffle House has been released, leading to renewed calls for a boycott of the 24-hour restaurant. This time, the incident involved an innocent couple who were accused of theft who were subsequently handcuffed and arrested by police after they complained about being overcharged for their meal.

According to reports, the couple was complaining that they were overcharged $0.50 for a $1.00 orange juice on their to go order. Before they received their food, they complained and asked to speak to customer service.

Instead of customer service, however, Waffle House called the cops.

Body camera footage of the incident was recently released and shows police enter a Waffle House and tell the man, who was simply trying to dispute his bill before getting his food, to get out of the restaurant.

“Get out here,” the officer tells the man. “He needs to get out here and talk to me like a man.”

What’s the purpose of the Medicaid program? Is it to provide health care coverage to people who cannot access it on their own, so they can lead healthier lives? Is it to fill health care gaps during epidemics and disasters, while ensuring hospitals and emergency rooms are not left with unpaid bills? Or is it Medicaid’s role to encourage people to find employment, so eventually they “drain” fewer resources from the government?

If you ask the analysts at Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing group founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, the answer is the latter. They argue that the “goal” of any safety net program should be “helping people improve their own lives” and “reduce their dependency on government.” Of the nearly 68 million Medicaid recipients nationwide, 25 million are adults who do not receive a monthly check for living with a disability, so Americans for Prosperity concludes there is fat to trim — and people who should find a job.

PJ Media is reporting that the Kindle version of Juanita’s new book “You’d Better Put Some Ice On That: How I Survived Being Raped by Bill Clinton” has been removed from online retail giant Amazon. Jeff Reynolds writes:

Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who claims that Bill Clinton raped her in 1978, has written a book about the event. Published on Amazon, Kindle and print versions of the book have sold briskly. Now, however, Amazon has halted sales of the Kindle version of the book after five months of problem-free sales, and Broaddrick is sounding the alarm.

The USA, with the unbelievable good luck of having the world’s reserve currency, has been spending money like water which it never truly earned, running up trade deficits of 2018 valuation of up to $20 trillion worth, thereby exporting its jobs and ruining its Main Street economy.

The economic system, managed by the Rothschilds, was created to plunder the life force from the population. The public see money as currency, but the Rothschilds see it as energy, which it is – currency that circulates as a current which returns to them, the elites, at a much greater rate, expanded by interest. In so doing, the Rothschild family has now come to privately own more than half of Planet Earth.

President Donald Trump should pardon John Kiriakou as soon as possible. He should do so to reverse former president Barack Obama’s worst injustice: putting a man in prison for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation techniques, now widely considered to be torture and banned by Obama himself.

Kiriakou was highly decorated during his 14 years of CIA counterterrorism service. In 2007, he went public with what the CIA was doing to prisoners—which current CIA director Gina Haspel most recently disowned in a letter to Senator Mark Warner: “[T]he program ultimately did damage to our officers and our standing in the world. With both the benefit of hindsight and my experience as a senior Agency leader, the enhanced interrogation program is not one the CIA should have undertaken.” Kiriakou’s objections catalyzed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which strengthened and clarified existing interrogation prohibitions.

Commanders along the border between Syrian territory and the Israeli occupied Golan Heights say that the Syrian army has been deploying substantial reinforcements to the area to bolster air defenses.

Israel has been repeatedly attacking Syria in recent months with airstrikes from both Israeli airspace and Lebanon. Syria is said to want to get its reinforcements into the region for a deterrent factor.

This appears to be timed for an upcoming Syrian offensive against rebels in the southwest. Nominally, Israel made a deal with Russia promising not to interfere so long as Iranian forces didn’t take part. Clearly, Syria isn’t entirely sure that’s going to remain the case.

After a handful of statements last week suggesting the US was opposing the planned attack on the vital Yemeni aid port of Hodeidah, officials are now indicating that the US has reversed again, and will actually be participating in the attack.

Pentagon officials say they intend to provide growing amounts of military intelligence, including target lists, for the Saudi-led invasion force in Yemen. They argue that this is going to ultimately reduce the civilian death toll of the attack on the port.

Yet US targeting aid in the past has done little to keep the Saudi strikes on Yemen from regularly killing large numbers of civilians. Even beyond this, the fall of Hodeidah threatens to spark a famine that would kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of others.

In a surprise move, influential Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and militia leader Hadi Amiri have announced on Tuesday that their political blocs will ally. As the top two seat-getters in the May 12 election, this would go a long way toward forming a government.

This is a surprising move as Sadr had campaigned heavily on the idea of Iraq being more independent, and less aligned with either the US or Iran. Amiri, by contrast, is the head of the Badr Brigade, and is very close with the Iranian government.

The announcement of the deal said that the blocs would be carving out a “nationalist” alliance. This is more what Sadr has long advocated. It is not clear what positions within a coalition government are being offered to Amiri’s bloc

America has a dark secret that no one wants to admit. Talk of this secret will get you labelled as a conspiracy theorist, fake news, and outlets who report on it will have their organic reach throttled by social media and Google alike. Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many in the mainstream media and the government refuse to see this very real epidemic of child sex trafficking in the United States. What’s more, according to the government’s own data, the vast majority of a portion of these trafficked kids are coming from the country’s own foster care system.

Children are being needlessly ripped from homes at such an alarming rate that hundreds of parents in one state have gone so far as to create a counter-kidnapping organization to stop it.

A bad idea that continues to persist is a favorite of many government officials. The problem with the internet is anonymity, according to them. Wouldn't we all be better off if we were forced to identify ourselves before using social media platforms? The theory is people won't say mean, stupid, or regrettable things if their posts and comments are linked to their real names. Several years of Facebook-only commenting systems has proven this wrong.
And yet the idea continues to be pushed by European politicians and DHS officials. The latest to call for an internet drivers license is UK security minister Ben Wallace. His theory is the use of real names and verifiable info will inflict mass civility on the internet, which is currently home to roving bands of ruffians and Wild West content. [Paywall ahead.] [Alternate link to article provided by Alec Muffet, who has helpfully taken a screenshot of the print edition.]

Let’s start by talking about unemployment.

We are being told that the unemployment rate in the United States is currently “3.8 percent”, which would be the lowest that it has been “in nearly 50 years”.

To support this claim, the mainstream media endlessly runs articles declaring how wonderful everything is. For example, the following is from a recent New York Times article entitled “We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are”…

The real question in analyzing the May jobs numbers released Friday is whether there are enough synonyms for “good” in an online thesaurus to describe them adequately.

Doesn’t that sound great?

It would be great, if the numbers that they were using were honest.

The truth, of course, is that the percentage of the population that is employed has barely budged since the depths of the last recession. According to John Williams, if honest numbers were being used the unemployment rate would actually be 21.5 percent today.

So we've been noting how (thanks to FOIA requests) the FCC has been caught completely making up a DDOS attack in a bizarre, ham-fisted attempt to downplay public opposition to their net neutrality repeal. In short, agency e-mails confirm agency staffers routinely fed false claims to gullible reporters that the FCC website outages caused by John Oliver's coverage of the repeal were the result of a malicious attack, then used those false claims to further prop up the bogus narrative. The goal was apparently to try and downplay massive public backlash to what Americans overwhelmingly believe to be shitty, corruption-fueled policy.

After two months of legal wrangling following an April 9 FBI raid on his home, hotel room and office, sources close to Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen say that he's preparing to cooperate with prosecutors from the Southern District of New York who have been overseeing the criminal probe against him, ABC News reported Wednesday morning.

A military coalition formally led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and supported by the United States and Britain, bombed a newly constructed cholera treatment in Yemen on Monday, June 11.

This attack comes after Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, suffered through the worst cholera outbreak in recorded history, with more than 1 million cases reported in 2017 alone.

The cholera treatment center was operated by the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (known in French as Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF). It was located in Yemen’s northwestern Hajjah Governorate, an area that has been heavily bombarded by Saudi Arabia for more than 3 years.

MSF said in a statement that the cholera treatment center had markings on the roof that clearly identified it as a healthcare facility. It added that the center has been destroyed and is now completely non-functional.

The Saudi-led coalition is desperate to be able to occupy Hodiedah province, where the main port of Yemen is located, from which all the essentials of life enter Yemen. The blockade has been in force for more than three years, for weakening the Yemeni front.

Presently, 90 percent of food and medicines come to Yemen via Hodiedah, making the port vital lifeline to Sana’a with some other ports under control of occupying forces. Since Saudi Arabia waged a war against Yemen on 27 March 2017, Saudis have take actions to wrest the major port from Ansar Allah forces. Air raids on the area’s infrastructure and Ansarullah positions is common during the three years of war.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, according to Bloomberg.

Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order to sow discord among American voters.

The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.

Nowhere in the Western world is truth respected. Even universities are imposing censorship and speech control. Governments are shutting down, and will eventually criminalize, all explanations that differ from official ones. The Western world no longer has a print and TV media.

Whistleblowers are prosecuted and imprisoned despite their protection by federal statue. The US Department of Justice is a Department of Injustice. It has been a long time since any justice flowed from the DOJ.

The total corruption of the print and TV media led to the rise of Internet media such as Wikileaks, led by Julian Assange, a prisoner since 2012.

Assange is an Australian and Ecuadorian citizen. He is not an American citizen. Yet US politicians and media claim that he is guilty of treason because he published official documents leaked to Wikileaks that prove the duplicity and criminality of the US government.

Last night's Singaporean show was the prelude to the rest of the week's real action - central banks - and nothing drives The Fed more than inflation anxiety as exhibited by Core CPI this morning... and it printed hot.

For the 32nd consecutive month, the consensus estimate on the street was +0.2% MoM - and expectations were met - pushing the headline CPI to +2.8% YoY (as expected) - the highest since December 2011...

As was widely expected, a group of senators have successfully attached an amendment that would effectively kill the Trump administration's deal with Chinese telecoms firm ZTE to a "must-pass" defense authorization bill, according to Axios- the latest sign that the movement to kill the deal is gaining momentum, even among Republicans who rarely oppose the president. The measure has found support among a bipartisan group of Senators who claim that the ZTE deal poses potential national security problems, according to Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who introduced the amendment alongside Republican Sen. Tom Cotton. In addition, Van Hollen maintains that the ZTE deal is "genuinely a bad deal" that must be overturned.

In Singapore, Trump tweeted more about that piggy bank.

“Why should I, as President of the United States, allow countries to continue to make Massive Trade Surpluses, as they have for decades … (while) the U.S. pays close to the entire cost of NATO-protecting many of these same countries that rip us off on Trade?”

To understand what drives Trump, and explains his exasperation and anger, these remarks are a good place to begin.

Our elites see America as an “indispensable nation,” the premier world power whose ordained duty it is to defend democracy, stand up to dictators and aggressors, and uphold a liberal world order.

They see U.S. wealth and power as splendid tools that fate has given them to shape the future of the planet.

Trump sees America as a nation being milked by allies who free ride on our defense effort, as they engage in trade practices that prosper their own peoples at America’s expense.

So far, so good, but the problem is that the SDF militia that would prospectively continue to administer “Rojava’s” “layered decentralization” is nothing more than a thinly “diverse” front of Arab collaborators barely concealing the reality of a Kurdish-run “deep state” (or permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracy) protected by over 20 American bases and an undisclosed number of French ones. Ironically, the Kurds took up arms against the democratically elected and legitimate Syrian government on the supposed basis that the minority Alawites had hijacked the country’s “deep state” and were exploiting it for their own self-interested ends at everyone else’s expense, though the fact of the matter is that it’s now the Kurds – and never was the Alawites – who are actually doing this via the “federalization” of “Rojava” as enforced by the US-created SDF.

At the G7 meeting in Canada in recent days, we witnessed unprecedented clashes between Trump and G7 leaders over the imposition of tariffs on trade. We must now conclude that the event has been relegated to irrelevance, as the G7 has heretofore derived its clout from speaking as one voice. Trump even went further, refusing to sign the final draft of the organization’s joint statement after Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau lashed out at Trump’s trade decisions. Trump showed how little he cares for his allies, leaving the summit a day early to arrive early for the meeting with Kim Jong-un in Singapore to make preparations for the long-awaited encounter between the two leaders.

“I feel really great,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s gonna be a great discussion and I think tremendous success. I think it’s gonna be really successful and I think we will have a terrific relationship, I have no doubt.”

Mr. Kim said: “It was not easy to get here. There were obstacles but we overcame them to be here.”

Armed anti-riot police and pro-government paramilitary attacked barricades manned by anti-government protesters in eastern Managua, plunging city neighborhoods in violence and chaos in an attempt to stamp out a two-month-old uprising against the government of President Daniel Ortega.

Cracks of gun fire resounded through the streets of the Nicaraguan capital as television footage showed turbulent scenes of armed security forces on foot and in trucks chasing young men away from street barricades.

Activists attempted to push them back by throwing rocks and setting off homemade mortars.

Silvio Jose Baez, an auxiliary bishop of Managua, urged residents to stay inside their homes.

"It is very dangerous because of the presence of violent gangs," he wrote on Twitter. "Don't risk life in vain."

The Trump administration is working with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to create a rift between the Gulf states and the Palestinians, according to a wide-ranging report on Trump's Middle East policy that was published on Monday in The New Yorker.

The report says that the Trump administration's peace plan, which will likely be much closer to the Israeli government's positions than previous U.S. peace plans, could be used by Netanyahu to divide the Gulf monarchies and the Palestinians.

Netanyahu, according to the report, expects the Palestinians to reject Trump's plan, thus creating an opening for the Gulf states to support it and distance themselves from the Palestinian leadership while inching closer towards Israel, with whom they share a common view of Iran as the main threat in the region.

Palestinians took to the streets of Ramallah city Sunday night, demanding that the Palestinian Authority (PA) end its sanctions on the besieged Gaza Strip that have exacerbated a humanitarian crisis in the small Palestinian enclave.

At least 1,500 protesters marched downtown starting at the central Manara Square at 9:30 p.m., a time when the streets are bustling with people shopping, eating, or enjoying ice cream after breaking their fasts during the holy month of Ramadan.

The protest, led by an independent youth movement, was the largest show of support for Gaza in the occupied West Bank since the Great March of Return was launched in the besieged territory on March 30.

The crowd consisted of mostly young Palestinians, but older protesters and children also joined the demonstration. Palestinians traveled from across the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem and Haifa, among other places, to attend the protest.

As US and Kurdish forces carried out offensives against ISIS in the area, US warplanes carried out airstrikes against the town of Khoeberah, in the mostly Kurdish Hasakeh Province of northeast Syria, killing 18 civilians.

Details are still emerging on the incident, which the Syrian government has confirmed. The majority of the slain civilians are, by their accounts, Iraqi refugees who had fled into Syria during the fighting in western Iraq.

This is a common occurrence on both sides of the border, as ISIS controlled territory straddling the Iraq-Syria border, and offensives against each side tended to send civilians scattering to any place remotely safer than where they were at.

Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose political bloc won the May 12 election, is rejecting calls by other factions to hold a re-run of the vote, saying certain factions are trying to start a civil war with all the allegations around the elections.

Sadr warned it was “time to stand as one for building and reconstruction instead of burning ballot boxes or repeating election just for one seat or two.” Some of the re-vote advocates, like the parliament speaker, lost their seats in the election.

The election’s votes were initially counted electronically, and parliament has since called for a full recount. The fire in Baghdad, at one of the ballot warehouses, has fueled even more claims of a cover-up of the results.

Recounts, the firing of the commission, the burning of the warehouse, and the legal challenges by the commission all look to drag on post-election wrangling before a coalition negotiation can really begin in earnest.

The New York Times reports that the United Nations is pulling its staff from the besieged Yemeni port city of Al Hudaydah as a massive assault on the country's only major humanitarian lifeline appears imminent.

UN staff have played a key role in delivering foreign aid through what is now one of the besieged country's only humanitarian access points to the outside world, through which 80% of all humanitarian aid flows.

The NYT details that the UN evacuation comes after "member countries were told that an attack by forces led by the United Arab Emirates was imminent, according to two diplomats briefed on the matter."

Moscow will continue efforts to involve the radical Taliban movement (outlawed in Russia) in direct talks with Kabul, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said following the meeting of CSTO foreign ministers on Monday, adding though that those efforts have failed so far.

According to Russia’s top diplomat, "together with normalizing the military situation in Afghanistan" heads of ministries supported Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s call for a direct dialogue with the Taliban members.

"Russia has long advocated for this kind of dialogue, the Taliban members are part of the Afghanistan’s society. Provided that they abandon a military approach to defending their interests, they should be made direct participants of the political process," he said. "So far the Taliban members have not demonstrated readiness to this kind of dialogue, but we will continue our efforts, particularly on the back of today’s agreements between the CSTO foreign ministers," the minister added.

All hell broke loose at the G6+1, aka G7, while the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) aimed at global integration and a peaceful multipolar order...

All hell broke loose at the G6+1, otherwise known as G7, in La Malbaie, Canada, while all focused on divine Eurasian integration at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in China’s Qingdao in Shandong, the home province of Confucius.

US President Donald Trump was the predictable star of the show in Canada. He came late. He left early. He skipped a working breakfast. He disagreed with everybody. He issued a “free trade proclamation”, as in no barriers and tariffs whatsoever, everywhere, after imposing steel and aluminum tariffs on Europe and Canada.

Meanwhile, over in Qingdao, the stunning takeaway was offered predictably by Chinese President Xi Jinping; “President Putin and I both think that the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership is mature, firm and stable.”

This year’s Bilderberg summit is a council of war. On the agenda: Russia and Iran. In the conference room: the secretary general of Nato, the German defence minister, and the director of the French foreign intelligence service, DGSE.

They are joined in Turin, Italy, by a slew of academic strategists and military theorists, but for those countries in geopolitical hotspots there is nothing theoretical about these talks. Not when the prime ministers of Estonia and Serbia are discussing Russia, or Turkey’s deputy PM is talking about Iran.

The clearest indication that some sort of US-led conflict is on the cards is the presence of the Pentagon’s top war-gamer, James H Baker. He is an expert in military trends, and no trend is more trendy in the world of battle strategy than artificial intelligence. Bilderberg is devoting a whole session to AI this year – and has invited military theorist Michael C Horowitz, who has written extensively on its likely impact on the future of war.

United States Army Secretary Mark Esper recently revealed that the military has a strategic vision of utilizing autonomous and semi-autonomous unmanned vehicles on the battlefield by 2028.

“I think robotics has the potential of fundamentally changing the character of warfare. And I think whoever gets there first will have a unique advantage on the modern battlefield,” Esper said during a Brookings Institute event.

“My ambition is by 2028, to begin fielding autonomous and certainly semi-autonomous vehicles that can fight on the battlefield,” he added. “Fight, sustain us, provide those things we need and we’ll continue to evolve from there.”

In a preview of the U.S. Army’s strategic vision, released on June 6, Esper said the integration of these forces would become a critical strategic component, quoting from the document:

The violent gang MS-13 has infiltrated a predominantly Hispanic school in Maryland, bringing terror and the campaign to recruit young students, with teachers calling the situation a “ticking time bomb.”

William Wirt Middle School in Riverdale has reportedly become a battleground after the gang established its presence at the school.

Fighting, drug dealing, pro-MS-13 graffiti and attempts to recruit immigrant children from Central America have become an everyday occurrence, The Washington Post reported.

“We now have two to three fights per day,” one school employee told the paper, who didn’t reveal his name over fears to lose the job or be targeted by the gang. “At this point, it’s completely out of control.”

School teachers claimed at least a dozen of members of the gang are in the school. The violent activities prompted the school to call the police over 70 times in the 2017-2018 school year.

Johnny Edward Tallbear of Oklahoma City, who spent over 26 years behind bars on a first-degree murder conviction, has been released after a new test of the DNA evidence led to the dismissal of the case against him.
Tallbear, who is now 61, had shackles removed from his wrists and ankles in court and left the building on Monday a free man. It felt “great” to be out of chains, he told the journalists, adding that the first thing he wanted do after getting home was “eat some decent meal.”

“I’ve been saying for more than two decades that I didn’t have anything to do with this horrible crime. I’ve always known that I’m innocent and now the DNA has proved it,” said Tallbear, as cited by the Innocence Project, which facilitated the new testing.

Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater confirmed that the case was dismissed “based on the DNA evidence that wasn’t available at the time of trial,” which went against all the other evidence that led to Tallbear’s conviction in 1992.

Israel will pay 60 million shekels ($16.7 million) in compensation to illegal settler families whose houses are being demolished today.

Fifteen buildings in the illegal Israeli settlement of Netiv HaAvot, south of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, are due to be demolished by the Israeli government because they are built on private Palestinian land. The structures will be rebuilt nearby on land that is “not privately owned” but still within the occupied West Bank.

The move to demolish the houses has been widely protested by the settlers and right-wing Israeli ministers, including Israel’s Education Minister and leader of the orthodox Jewish Home party, Naftali Bennett.

Bennett labelled the demolitions “senseless” and vowed that “whoever wants to raze 15 homes will receive 350 on this hill. This is a difficult night. It is incomprehensible to the residents of the Netiv HaAvot neighbourhood and for everyone who has settled the precious land of Israel,” according to Haaretz.

A Libyan man who took photos of himself posing at various spots across Beghazi in 2000 has revisited the same locations 18 years later to photograph life under the new "NATO liberated" Libya.

The "before and after" pics showing the utter devastation of post-Gaddafi Libya have gone viral , garnering 50,000 retweets after they were posted to an account that features historical images of Libya under Gaddafi’s rule between 1969 and 2011.

It appears people do still care about Libya even if the political elites in Paris, London, and Washington who destroyed the country have moved on. Though we should recall that British foreign secretary Boris Johnson was caught on tape in a private meeting last year saying Libya was ripe for UK investment, but only after Libyans "clear the dead bodies away."

In what was perhaps the most surprising announcement to emerge from today's Trump-Kim summit, president Trump agreed to suspend military exercises with South Korea in return for a commitment to denuclearisation from North Korea.

As we reported earlier, Trump said the war games were expensive and “very provocative”, and yet stopping them has been called a "major concession", something the US has previously rejected as non-negotiable on the grounds that the exercises are a key element of its military alliance with Seoul, and maintaining a deterrent against North Korea. In return, Trump said Kim had agreed in a joint statement to reassert “his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”.

A few weeks ago, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) released a letter claiming that Amazon’s Rekognition technology was “patriotic and can benefit society”.

“Facial recognition technology has many beneficial uses for society, even when used by the government. Even the use-case that privacy advocates are crying wolf over, facial recognition systems integrated with police body cameras, can benefit society.

The ITIF went on to claim that police body cameras hold “law enforcement accountable and there is no reason to suggest the same cannot be true for facial recognition technology.”

Let’s discuss ITIF’s claim that body cameras hold police accountable.

A 2017 article in Ars Technica reveals that body camera footage is generally not available to the public.

A newly installed TransCanada natural gas pipeline exploded early Thursday in the remote Nixon Ridge area of Marshall County in West Virginia.

No injuries were reported but flames and smoke from the blast could be seen as far as 20 miles away, residents told local media. Area police told CBS News the fire was "very large—if you can see it from your house, evacuate."

"It sounded like a freight train coming through, or a tornado, and the sky lit up bright orange, and then I got up and looked out the window and flames were shooting I don't know how far into the sky," Tina Heath-Chaplin, of Moundsville, told WPXI.

TransCanada—the same company behind the Keystone pipeline—said the explosion has been contained and an investigation is underway.

"As soon as the issue was identified, emergency response procedures were enacted and the segment of impacted pipeline was isolated. The fire was fully extinguished by approximately 8:30 a.m," the company commented Thursday.

Officer doing the extra special security inspection upon my arrival in
Washington DC: so what is the purpose of your trip to the US?

Me: Doing lectures but the reason you are troubling me as a US citizen is
that you are obeying orders that come down to you from Tel Aviv

Officer (puzzled): What are you talking about

Me: I have gone through this many times and wrote to homeland security and
will likely sue them for continued harassment on behest of Israel. Here is
the letter I received from them with a redress number. Basically,
Washington is being forced by a Zionist lobby to do things on behest of
Israel and that is not good for the US or its taxpayers like you and I

Officer: So what do you lecture about?

Me: various topics from environmental conservation to environmental justice
to human rights and how the colonial apartheid state of Israel uses our US
tax money to ethically cleanse fellow Palestinians…..you can check my

As part of its “media monitoring,” the DHS seeks to track more than 290,000 global news sources as well as social media in over 100 languages, including Arabic, Chinese and Russian, for instant translation into English. The successful contracting company will have “24/7 access to a password protected, media influencer database, including journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc.” in order to “identify any and all media coverage related to the Department of Homeland Security or a particular event.”

“Any and all media coverage,” as you might imagine, is quite broad and includes “online, print, broadcast, cable, radio, trade and industry publications, local sources, national/international outlets, traditional news sources, and social media.”

Israeli authorities were caught on video excavating portions of the historic Bab al-Rahma cemetery next to Al-Aqsa mosque in occupied East Jerusalem. The cemetery is believed to contain the final resting places of two companions of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.

Video from June 5 shows about a dozen men, presumably members of Israel's Nature and Parks Authority, at a work site in the Bab al-Rahma cemetery, through which Israel is planning to build a national park trail.

The cemetery sits adjacent to Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. It is believed to hold the graves of Ubada ibn as-Samit and Shadad ibn Aus, two of the Prophet Muhammad's companions. The cemetery has remained in use for more than 1,000 years.

Zuckerberg is nothing if not an obedient lackey to Washington DC. He may be one of the richest people in the world but that just means he has more to lose should the regime turn against him. He better does exactly as they say and silence establishment critics, or else

A history teacher at an elite Riverdale private school is being investigated after some parents took issue with statements he made about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to administrators and reports.

Riverdale Country School instructor Shawn Redden’s job was in limbo after he engaged students in a history class following the killing of 60 Gazans by Israeli soldiers during protests in May. Redden went on a “diatribe” against Israel, one parent told the New York Post.

School administrators said Redden is being investigated.

“At Riverdale Country School we believe that there should always be robust dialogue and debate of different points of view. At the same time, all community members –- students, faculty, and staff — must be treated at all times with respect as outlined specifically in our Principles of School Life,” said Head of School Dominic Randolph in a statement.

The EU Copyright Directive, due to be put to vote soon, most naturally aims to protect the intellectual property of people who author material uploaded to the internet, but there are a number of potential repercussions that come with the move.

A new provision to the EU Copyright Law, titled Article 13, would lead to the banning of parody content on the world wide web, such as viral memes, campaigners are warning. They noted that the law would paralyze the internet "as we know it," adding it would allow IT giants to monopolize and monitor the online content, that is “control what we see and do.” Most importantly, memes, which fall under the article 13 provision, are also somebody’s original creative work, although derived from other people’s unique content, campaigners stated.