The former foreign minister of Ecuador will be placed on Interpol’s Red Notice list, after fleeing the country for fear of prosecution, as the government of Lenin Moreno continues to crack down on Julian Assange’s supporters.
“The attorney general’s office began a criminal process against Ricardo Patino for the alleged crime of instigation,” the office said in a statement on Thursday. “[Patino] had given a speech in which he instigated people to take over public institutions and close roads.”

Besides his alleged anti-government activities, Patino is also being sought for his supposed links to Swedish software developer Ola Bini, who was arrested last week on suspicions of ‘hacking’ for WikiLeaks.

Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation

But even given all of the horrific decisions being made in the White House, there is one organization that is far crazier and possibly even more dangerous. That is the United States Congress, which is, not surprisingly, a legislative body that is viewed positively by only 18 per cent of the American people.

A current bill originally entitled the “Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act (DASKA) of 2019,” is numbered S-1189.

It has been introduced in the Senate which will “…require the Secretary of State to determine whether the Russian Federation should be designated as a state sponsor of terrorism and whether Russian-sponsored armed entities in Ukraine should be designated as foreign terrorist organizations.” The bill is sponsored by Republican Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado and is co-sponsored by Democrat Robert Menendez of New Jersey.

Attorney General William Barr held a press conference this morning to address the contents of the Mueller report, just as he promised to do. Not long after, Barr delivered the full Mueller report to the public with necessary redactions, also as promised. And yet the mainstream media, which demanded all of these things and has now received them, still isn’t happy.

In fact, most fake news media pundits are now foaming at the mouth, questioning Barr’s loyalties and accusing him of colluding with President Donald Trump to convey the "spun" message that he’s innocent – which it would seem as though no amount of evidence will ever convince those with Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is actually true.

Soon, this blog will be illegal.

No, I’m not selling drugs or peddling child pornography. I write about America’s wars and the primary objective of those illegal and immoral wars—to make Israel the hegemon of the Middle East along with Saudi Arabia. All US foreign policy in that region centers on those two nations.

The following may soon be classified as hate speech and antisemitism (as increasingly criticism of the Jewish state and its Zionist political ideology are considered crimes).

Trump took the baton from Obama after he told us he wasn’t into “nation-building” and was a populist “America First” noninterventionist. The American people were lied to again, but then this is now normal behavior.

Such criticism of Israel will soon be illegal. Democrats and Republicans are working together to make criticism of Israel a criminal offense. .

SOURCE: BUSINESSINSIDER.COM
Facebook harvested the email contacts of 1.5 million users without their knowledge or consent when they opened their accounts.

Since May 2016, the social-networking company has collected the contact lists of 1.5 million users new to the social network, Business Insider can reveal. The Silicon Valley company said the contact data was "unintentionally uploaded to Facebook," and it is now deleting them.

The revelation comes after pseudononymous security researcher e-sushi noticed that Facebook was asking some users to enter their email passwords when they signed up for new accounts to verify their identities, a move widely condemned by security experts. Business Insider then discovered that if you entered your email password, a message popped up saying it was "importing" your contacts without asking for permission first.

Hours after the ejection of Julian Assange from the London Ecuadorean embassy last week, police officers in Ecuador detained the Swedish citizen and open source developer Ola Bini. They seized him as he prepared to travel from his home in Quito to Japan, claiming that he was attempting to flee the country in the wake of Assange’s arrest. Bini had, in fact, booked the vacation long ago, and had publicly mentioned it on his Twitter account before Assange was arrested.

Ola’s detention was full of irregularities, as documented by his lawyers. His warrant was for a “Russian hacker” (Bini is neither); he was not read his rights, allowed to contact his lawyer nor offered a translator.

North Korea is flexing its muscles. On Thursday, the nation announced that it had test-launched a new “tactical guided weapon” — but kept the details vague.

The weapon is unlikely to be a long-range ballistic missile that could jeopardize peace talks, according to the Associated Press. Rather, given the fact that the announcement came with new demands for ongoing negotiations with the U.S., the tests were likely intended as a display of military strength.

Guessing Game
South Korean experts suspect that the new weapon was some sort of cruise missile, per the AP‘s attempt to learn more. Had the weapon been a longer-range missile that could pose a threat to the U.S. or other nations, then North Korea may have put at risk its ongoing effort to lift sanctions that other countries have imposed on it.

The NXIVM sex cult is facing allegations that it illegally bundled campaign donations to gain political favor with an unnamed US presidential election candidate and reports suggest that the politician is Hillary Clinton.
United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Richard Donoghue asked a federal judge to introduce evidence showing that the defendants in the sex cult case had an “illegal scheme to exceed contribution limits to a presidential primary campaign.”

The court documents claim that witness testimony and documentary evidence will show that at least 14 NXIVM members, including five defendants, made the maximum campaign donation to a candidate, with the “understanding that they would be reimbursed by [Claire] Bronfman or Nancy Salzman,” who were involved in the cult. Salzman is the co-founder along with Keith Raniere.

Sears Holdings Corp sued longtime Chairman Eddie Lampert, his hedge fund ESL Investments, and former directors including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, accusing them of allowing the retailer to be looted of billions of dollars before its October 2018 bankruptcy.

The lawsuit, made public on Thursday, was filed by the restructuring team winding down what remains of the pre-bankruptcy Sears following Lampert’s $5.2 billion purchase in February of most of its assets.

Sears accused Lampert of ordering the creation of bogus financial plans showing the retailer would turn itself around even as it racked up huge losses, enabling the transfer of five major assets including Land’s End and Sears Hometown Outlet for his benefit.

Americans are increasingly living in fear of the opposing political party. While the elites laugh and continue to enslave the populace even further because of this fear, Americans increasingly embrace their chains while asking them to be shortened, and all while dehumanizing those on a different plantation.

The fact is, none of us are free. We are all slaves to the same master – the political elites. The only way to be free is to accept it and attempt to free others in the process. So far, the government has not had to put literal chains on anyone because most Americans are mental slaves. If you own the mind, you won’t need to enslave the body. This is causing problems in problems in our society, however, as many fear those who think differently than they do while giving a pass to the ones actually at fault for their dissatisfaction.

THE US MILITARY AND CIA LAUNDER COUP PROPAGANDA THROUGH POPULAR FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER VIDEO GAMES LIKE CALL OF DUTY, SIMULATING ASSASSINATIONS OF VENEZUELA’S SOCIALIST LEADER AND SABOTAGE OF ITS ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE.
BY MAX BLUMENTHAL AND BEN NORTON

We often think of video games as fiction, but the US government has weaponized them to advance its agenda around the globe.

SIMULATING VENEZUELA INVASION IN “CALL OF DUTY”
Venezuelan citizen journalists Orlenys Ortiz and Sancocho Power have drawn attention to the similarity between the plot of a 2013 first person shooter game, Call of Duty: Ghosts, and alleged acts of US sabotage against the country this March.

Call of Duty: Ghosts is set in a dystopian future after the Middle East is nuked. A Venezuelan general comes into power, establishing a socialist style federation that spreads across Latin America like a disease, uniting all oil producing nations and expelling US citizens.

It’s no secret that health experts and nutritionists have been wary of high fructose corn syrup for years. But now they have one more reason to advocate against it: a new study published in the journal Science says that the sugary substance boosts the growth of cancerous tumors in mice.

The study, conducted by researchers at Cornell University and Baylor University, found that consuming a modest amount of high-fructose corn syrup every day—about the equivalent of drinking one can of soda—can accelerate the growth of cancerous tumors in mice’s intestines.

it’s clear that the US desires to dismantle Iran and Venezuela’s supposedly interconnected influence networks in Latin America as the next step in fortifying “Fortress America“, and while “deep state” wars such as this one have been going on for decades, it’s hitherto unprecedented for any country to make such a crusade public since the end of the Old Cold War when the US used to make similar claims about the USSR and its communist proxies.

For years, law enforcement has been claiming that drones will only be used for natural disasters, crime scene investigations, car accidents and rescue operations.

That is the bill of goods, being sold to the public but it is all a lie.

A perfect example of how law enforcement promises the public one thing and after time passes, uses it for something else is taking place in Texas at the Memorial Villages Police Department (MVPD).

Two years ago, Click2Houston reported how the MVPD claimed that they would only use drones for "better emergency response during disasters." They also used police officer and UAV pilot, Larry Boggus to solidify their claim that drones would only be used for natural disasters saying, "drones are a huge asset for us because very quickly we were able to see the amount of houses that were damaged" during a 2018 storm.

I love it when police department's provide comic relief to prove my point.

On Monday a federal judge in Virginia unsealed the original 2017 affidavit and criminal complaint on which Assange's extradition request to the US is based, offering new details including chat logs between Assange and former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, which attempt to support a single count of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” which may or may not have succeeded.

The US alleges Assange actively sought for and encouraged Manning to crack a password to access classified information on a Defense Department network; the affidavit claims details related to this charge, for instance chat log discussions between the pair over how to crack a password, though the affidavit notes that "it remains unknown whether Manning and Assange were successful in cracking the password," related to the conspiracy charge.

The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.

That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.

But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.

For the last 25 years, the only reliable source of news has been the Internet.

Without it, we wouldn’t know even 1% of what we know.

We’ve seen all kinds of attacks on content on social medias platforms like Facebook and YouTube.

Now they’re coming after people who run their own INDEPENDENT web servers

“They’re making it up the rules as they go along”

White House staff has stonewalled for more than a week a group of lawmakers asking for a meeting with President Trump in a bid to convince him to sign legislation ending the U.S. role in Yemen's civil war.

Despite an official veto recommendation from White House staff, Trump has continued to appear open-minded, saying Wednesday that the matter was "very serious" and that he would have more to say later.

Sponsors of the legislation believe Trump is willing to sign the bill, but is being told by his staff, led by national security adviser John Bolton, that he should not.

"I feel from some of his statements that he's genuinely conflicted," said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who signed a bipartisan letter seeking a meeting. "I think his advisers are at odds with where he is ... advisers in the administration have their own interests and may not be giving him the full picture."

WASHINGTON – It has the makings of a new Cold War, or worse.

The deep chill in U.S.-Russian relations is stirring concern in some quarters that Washington and Moscow are in danger of stumbling into an armed confrontation that, by mistake or miscalculation, could lead to nuclear war.

American and European analysts and current and former U.S. military officers say the nuclear superpowers need to talk more. A foundational arms control agreement is being abandoned and the last major limitation on strategic nuclear weapons could go away in less than two years. Unlike during the Cold War, when generations lived under threat of a nuclear Armageddon, the two militaries are barely on speaking terms.

"During the Cold War, we understood each other's signals. We talked," says the top NATO commander in Europe, U.S. Army Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, who is about to retire. "I'm concerned that we don't know them as well today."

A new batch of displaced Syrians on Saturday left al-Rukban Camp in al-Tanf area near the Syrian-Jordanian borders and arrived in Jleigem corridor so as to be transferred to makeshift centers in Homs.

The process comes within the framework of the Syrian State's efforts to end the tragedy of tens of thousands of displaced citizens who have been trapped for years in the Rukban camp by US occupation forces and their affiliated terrorists positioned in al-Tanf.

SANA reporter said that tens of displaced families, most of them children, women and elderly, arrived Saturday noon at Jleigem corridor on board of trucks and tractors.

So in the past few days, editorials like this one from free press avatar Peter Greste have popped up all over the place with their own definitions of what journalism is in order to argue why that label can’t possibly apply to Assange. All of these definitions ultimately boil down to the argument that because Assange doesn’t publish leaks in a way that they feel journalism ought to be practiced, it isn’t journalism and therefore sets no legal precedent for journalists around the world. As though the US government is going to be consulting their feelings about what specifically constitutes journalism the next time they decide to imprison a journalist for doing what Assange did.

SOURCE: THE INTERCEPT
SINCE THE BRUTAL murder of Saudi dissident and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi last October, Congress has increasingly pressured the Trump administration to stop backing the Saudi Arabia-led coalition fighting in Yemen and halt U.S. arms sales to Riyadh. In response, President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that if the U.S. does not sell weapons to the Saudis, they will turn to U.S. adversaries to supply their arsenals.

“I don’t like the concept of stopping an investment of $110 billion into the United States,” Trump told reporters in October, referring to a collection of intent letters signed with the Saudis in the early months of his presidency. “You know what they are going to do? They’re going to take that money and spend it in Russia or China or someplace else.”

The Ecuadoran president has defended his decision to withdraw Julian Assange's asylum status, saying that the WikiLeaks founder had tried to set up a "spying centre" from the diplomatic mission in London.

"It is unfortunate that, from our territory and with the permission of authorities of the previous government, facilities have been provided within the Ecuadorian embassy in London to interfere in processes of other states," Lenin Moreno told The Guardian newspaper on Sunday.

"We cannot allow our house, the house that opened its door to become a centre for spying. Our decision is not arbitrary but is based on international law."

On Thursday, UK police announced the arrest of Assange following the Ecuadoran government's "withdrawal of asylum".

The operator of Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant has begun removing nuclear fuel from a building housing one of the reactors that melted down after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Remotely controlled equipment is lifting fuel rods from a storage pool near reactor number three.

The delicate work at the contaminated site is expected to take two years.

The next phase of the huge clean-up at reactor three will be to remove molten nuclear fuel that remains deep inside.

A spokeswoman for the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) said the operation to remove the fuel had been delayed by earthquake debris inside the building as well as other technical issues.

Reactor buildings at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant were damaged by hydrogen explosions caused by the earthquake and tsunami. Three reactors melted down.

EXCLUSIVE: AWAY FROM THE PUBLIC EYE, THE CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (CSIS) THINK TANK HOSTED A TOP-LEVEL, OFF-THE-RECORD MEETING TO EXPLORE US MILITARY OPTIONS AGAINST VENEZUELA.
BY MAX BLUMENTHAL

The Washington, DC-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) hosted a private roundtable on April 10 called “Assessing the Use of Military Force in Venezuela.” A list of attendees was provided to The Grayzone and two participants confirmed the meeting took place. They refused to offer any further detail, however.

A WHO’S WHO OF TRUMP ADMINISTRATION COUP ADVISERS

The CSIS check-in list not only confirms that the Trump administration and its outside advisors are mulling options for a military assault on Venezuela; it also outlines the cast of characters involved in crafting the regime change operation against the country.

The indictment, and some of the commentary it engendered, also makes much of the fact that Assange offered to try to crack a computer password for Manning. The Department of Justice claims that this action amounted to Assange engaging in a “hacking” conspiracy. Even some independent commentators have suggested that it went beyond the bounds of legitimate journalism—and the protections of the First Amendment.

But did it? On Thursday, my colleague Raffi Khachaturian, who has written extensively about Assange, pointed out that, as of now, it looks like Assange didn’t do much, if anything, to crack the password once Manning sent the encrypted version. Khachaturian also pointed out that federal prosecutors have known about this text exchange for many years, and yet the Obama Administration didn’t bring any charges. “As evidence of a conspiracy,” Khachaturian writes, “the exchange is thin gruel.”

Workers preparing to cleanup a fuel storage site near the infamous Dozier reform school—Florida’s first juvenile justice institution—discovered something far worse then pollution. Evidence of more than two dozen “clandestine” child graves was discovered as workers tested the ground.

Shockingly enough, this is the second time secret graves for tortured and raped children have been found nearby the school.

A report out of the Miami Herald detailed the horrific discovery this week:

A company hired to evaluate underground storage tanks adjacent to the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna performed a series of ground-penetrating radar tests on a parcel a little less than 500 feet from what is called the Boot Hill Cemetery at Dozier, an infamous youth prison linked to more than a century of chilling abuse.

echnology companies have for years responded to court orders for specific users’ information. The new warrants go further, suggesting possible suspects and witnesses in the absence of other clues. Often, Google employees said, the company responds to a single warrant with location information on dozens or hundreds of devices.

Law enforcement officials described the method as exciting, but cautioned that it was just one tool.

“It doesn’t pop out the answer like a ticker tape, saying this guy’s guilty,” said Gary Ernsdorff, a senior prosecutor in Washington State who has worked on several cases involving these warrants. Potential suspects must still be fully investigated, he added. “We’re not going to charge anybody just because Google said they were there.”

The ICC judge claimed a lack of evidence and a poor outlook for state cooperation — the latter reason essentially meaning the US and UK have already condemned the prospect of opening such an investigation.

The ICC had previously vowed to continue to operate "undeterred" by any US threat of punitive action against the ICC when it first considered examining allegations that US personnel committed war crimes, including instances of unlawful detention and torture of Afghans, as well as killing of civilians. The window of time ICC prosecutors considered for their investigation ran from May 2003, within the opening years of the US occupation, to 2017.

“The chamber hereby decides that an investigation into the situation in Afghanistan at this stage would not serve the interests of justice and accordingly rejects the request,” the judges said in their decision, as cited by Reuters. But the obvious first question is: whose interests are being served here?

Both Google and Mozilla have banned Gab’s Dissenter.com extension from their browsers’ extension stores. Dissenter’s mission is to bring a free speech comment system to every site on the Internet.

The developers at Gab recently launched a new platform called Dissenter, which acts as a comment system for every website on the internet. Dissenter has a web interface, but also created an extension for popular web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Now both companies, which together hold a large majority of the PC browser market, have blacklisted the Dissenter extension from their browser extension galleries.

This charge is premised on a fraudulent and manipulative distortion of reality, and you may be one hundred percent certain of it. Let me explain.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel – who, for all intents and purposes, looks suspiciously like a transgender – has decided to launch a full-scale crusade against the First Amendment.

According to reports, Nessel is planning to create a “hate crime unit” as part of Michigan’s government, the purpose of which won’t necessarily be to prosecute “hate crimes” – which aren’t a real thing anyway, by the way – but to actually police the speech and thoughts of Michigan residents to make sure they align with official government ideology.

By creating a database of people who think for themselves, Nessel is on record as stating that she plans to keep an all-seeing-eye on people who commit “thought violations” – which aren’t real crimes, according to the United States Constitution.

Once upon a time, U.S. politicians used to brag about how America was the only place in the world that permitted genuine freedom of speech.

Of course, like everything else they say, that turned out to be a lie. Perhaps it is the greatest lie we have ever heard in our lifetimes.

In fact, America has traded its Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech for laws protecting the very people aiming to destroy our country.

SOURCE: JOHN WHITEHEAD VIA THE RUTHERFORD INSTITUTE
If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.

Don’t ask me what I want it for
If you don’t want to pay some more
‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman…
And you’re working for no one but me.
— George Harrison, “Taxman

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

We get taxed on how much we earn, taxed on what we eat, taxed on what we buy, taxed on where we go, taxed on what we drive, and taxed on how much is left of our assets when we die, and yet we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used.

Case in point: Lawmakers across the country have been acting as fronts for corporations, sponsoring more than 10,000 model laws written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks such as the American Legislative Exchange Council.

It is generally believed that America is more polarized than ever. After all, one need only look at the fallout from the last election to test this theory: both liberals and conservatives are convinced that their ideas and principles are the best and should be followed.

But a recent survey by Reuters casts a bit of doubt on how well people really know their own minds and understand the political principles they say they adhere to. It appears that many Americans base their views on whether a particular authority figure holds them.

Dissenter, the extension which allows users to create a comments section for any page on the internet, has been banned from the Firefox extensions gallery for supposedly violating Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy.

Mozilla is the company behind the Firefox browser and sent an email to Dissenter informing them that the extension had been disabled and will no longer appear in the Firefox extensions gallery.

Facebook said Wednesday it is rolling out a wide range of updates aimed at combatting the spread of false and harmful information on the social media site — stepping up the company’s fight against misinformation and hate speech as it faces growing outside pressure.

"The most hated sort [of moneymaking], and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural use of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term usury which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money, because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of making money this is the most unnatural." -- Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

Leaked internal documents reveal that Google maintains a blacklist preventing certain news outlets from appearing in search results for news or other specific sections, according to the Daily Caller's J. Arthur Bloom.

What this means is that while search results from blacklisted outlets will still appear in the generic "ten blue links" portion of search results - targeted sites will not be allowed in sections such as "top news" or "videos," according to the report.

"The purpose of the blacklist will be to bar the sites from surfacing in any Search feature or news product. It will not cause a demotion in the organic search results or de-index them altogether," reads the policy document.

Of note, Zero Hedge was removed from Google's News category after the 2016 US election.

WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson has alleged that an extensive spying operation was conducted against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during his time in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

During an explosive press conference, which is still underway, Hrafnsson alleges that the operation was designed to get Assange extradited. WikiLeaks claims that it was told that Assange’s extradition was imminent.

“We know that there was a request to hand over visitor's logs from the embassy and video recordings from within the security cameras in the embassy,” Hrafnsson said, adding that he believes the information had been handed over to the administration of US President Donald Trump.

Cameras used within the embassy in the last year have the capacity to record audio meaning that every single meeting held by Julian Assange with his doctors and lawyers have been recorded, according to former Consul of Ecuador to London, Fidel Narvaez.

A doctor who led the charge for mass prescribing of opioids in the US, and was then paid by Purdue Pharma to help drive sales of OxyContin, is to testify against the drugmaker and other companies facing a raft of lawsuits over America’s opioid epidemic.

Dr Russell Portenoy, who many experts believe did more than any other specialist to erode longstanding caution within the medical profession over prescribing opioids because of addiction fears, has agreed to cooperate with lawyers for cities and counties suing drug makers, distributors and pharmacies in return for dropping legal actions against him.

Fake news laws aren't harmless. They don't protect the public. They're useless. And they lend themselves to censorship. Given these factors, it's tough to believe any of the proponents of fake news laws are proceeding in good faith but blinded by good intentions and fuzzy logic.

Anywhere they've been put in place, they've lead directly to governments taking action against political opponents, dissidents, and activists. Excuses are made about national security and protecting the public, but in the end, it's the public that ends up short on protection.

Singapore's new fake news bill is no exception. Legislators began pushing this bill last year, using their own fake news to claim the proposal had widespread support from the country's residents. The committee behind the legislation heavily editorialized the feedback it received at a public hearing, presenting a vocal opponent's comments as being supportive of instituting a fake news law.

Except for a few brief moments of sanity, the whole hearing was a farce—but it revealed our political Establishment’s mounting and ominous obsession with censorship.

Offering yet another lesson in how raising the minimum wage can destroy jobs, particularly for the most poorly compensated workers whom activists had intended to help, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that Wal-Mart is deploying robots to carry out mundane tasks like mopping its floors and tracking inventory as it seeks to cut down on labor costs after raising wages last year, while also expanding into new services like grocery delivery.

Wal-Mart, which is the largest employer in the US, said at least 300 stores will introduce machines that scan shelves for out-of-stock products. Meanwhile, so-called "autonomous floor scrubbers" will be deployed in 1,500 stores, and conveyor belts that automatically scan and sort products as they are loaded off of trucks will more than double to 1,200. Another 900 stores will install 16-foot-high towers that will allow customers to pick up their online grocery orders without interacting with humans.

As most are surely aware, the last year or two has seen a growing crackdown on free speech and free thought across the Internet, with our constitutionally-protected First Amendment rights being circumvented through the agency of monopolistic private sector corporations such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Although as yet our government has not gained the power to ban discordant views nor punish their advocates, anonymous tech company censors regularly take these steps, seemingly based upon entirely opaque and arbitrary standards which lack any power of appeal. No one really knows why some individuals are banned or “de-platformed” and others are not, and surely this looming uncertainty has imposed self-censorship upon hundreds of individuals for every publicized victim who receives an exemplary punishment.

I was in the New York Public Library recently doing research in the archives when I stumbled on a 1944 pamphlet from Western Electric, the old American techno-telephone monopolist. It’s called “Circuits for Victory” and its 40 glossy, slickly produced pages are dedicated to one thing: celebrating all the ways that the company’s telecommunication technology helps the United States government fight and win wars.

The pamphlet is a historical document, but if you squint at it right and replace “Western Electric” with, say, “Facebook” or “Google” or “Amazon,” you actually get an accurate sense of what Silicon Valley monopolies are today: privatized extensions of American Empire.

Iran has strongly condemned the latest deadly airstrikes by Saudi warplanes in Yemen that killed more than a dozen civilians, most of them schoolchildren, saying countries that are arming the aggressors are complicit in the crimes.

"Countries that have caused the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen by providing arms to the aggressors are accomplices in these crimes and must be held accountable for their support," Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi said on Monday.

He criticized the international community for remaining silent and indifferent to the atrocities committed by the Saudi-led coalition in its military campaign against Yemen and expressed sympathy with the families of victims.

The Iranian spokesperson called on the United Nations and countries involved in the Yemeni crisis to ramp up their efforts in order to put an immediate end to the attacks and adopt necessary measures to protect civilians, particularly women and children.

Last week Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced he was appointing Amal Clooney as the UK’s envoy on media freedom. Today Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright has put out a government White Paper on ‘Online Harms’ which includes proposals for a regulator which will have the power to ban the websites of non-compliant companies from being accessed in the UK at all. Someone tell Amal quick!

You would think that the likes of Facebook and Twitter would be up in arms – they are not because as Dom Hallas, Executive Director of The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec), says

Libya is back in the headlines after one of its two competing governments sent troops towards Tripoli. If another bloodbath happens there, it will be the inevitable result of the 2011 NATO bombing campaign, an expert told RT.
The Northern African country was once stable and quite prosperous thanks to large revenues from oil trade. But since 2011, when NATO supported a militant uprising and helped topple, then kill, longtime strongman leader Muammar Gaddafi, it remains a fractured failed state. Last week, the unending feuds between rival factions escalated, with Khalifa Haftar, a powerful military commander, launching an offensive against his rivals from the UN-recognized government in Tripoli.

The general is unlikely to immediately heed calls for a political settlement, believes US political commentator and historian Gerald Horne. This may escalate into a major battle in the capital.

Uneasy Hangs the Head That Wears a Crown: The Lessons Donald Trump Needs to Learn from William Shakespeare.

Now that President Donald Trump has finally been exonerated from the always farcical Big Lie of Collusion with Russia in the 2016 election, the US leader had better watch out: The Deep State will really go after him now that it's supposed Soft Coup plot has failed.

Who can never afford to rest.

The forces opposed to Trump and his decent, sensible 2016 campaign vision of defusing tensions with Russia worked viciously, relentlessly and long to discredit the 45th President of the United States before he could even get going. The idea that they are now going to sit back like good losers because their entire pyramid of lies on Collusion with Russia has been exposed is ludicrous.

Authored by Renee Parsons via Off-Guardian.org,

With Russiagate, the Democrats created some powerful karma to answer for; especially for the likes of Rep. Adam Schiff and Rep. Eric Swalwell, (D-Calif.), both of whom persist in the mindless search for the Holy Grail.

After cheating Bernie out of the nomination in 2016, the Dems had not yet learned their karmic lesson when they lost the Presidential election. The Mueller Report is but the latest of that karmic reckoning.

There is no pride in being one of those who “got it right” that there was no evidence, not a scintilla of material fact to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and the dastardly Russians. As the country has been torn asunder by a two year politically tainted investigation begun with no evidentiary standard and no probable cause, there is little satisfaction to be gained.

Authored by Mike Whitney via The Unz Review,

Turkish troops and armored units are massed along Turkey’s southern border awaiting orders to invade northern Syria. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to clear a ten mile-deep swath of land east of the Euphrates River in order to remove terrorist-linked militants (YPG) currently occupying the territory. The proposed offensive would put US Special Forces in the line of fire which significantly increases the likelihood of US casualties. If American troops are killed or wounded by the Turkish operation, Washington will respond in force leading to a potentially catastrophic face-off between the two NATO allies. The possibility of a violent clash between Turkey and the United States has never been greater than it is today.

A warning: If Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still in office in late 2020 or 2024, when President Donald Trump’s time in office is coming to a close, there is a good chance the two leaders will declare American recognition of Israeli annexation of all or most of the occupied West Bank.

The precedent for such a move was put in place Monday as two significant anti-Arab events took place in Washington.

First, at the annual AIPAC conference, Democratic and Republican speakers alike ignored the Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Arab territory, choosing instead to rail against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who has been vilified for openly criticizing the powerful Israel lobby group’s outsize influence.

A bipartisan consensus pretended that AIPAC was being silenced, turning on its head the reality that the organization is supporting legislation seeking to silence supporters of Palestinian rights.

Perhaps the one positive thing that’s come out of RussiaGate is that no one believes Silicon Valley’s global utopianism anymore.
BY YASHA LEVINE
Originally published at Yasha Levine’s Influence Ops

I was in the New York Public Library recently doing research in the archives when I stumbled on a 1944 pamphlet from Western Electric, the old American techno-telephone monopolist. It’s called “Circuits for Victory” and its 40 glossy, slickly produced pages are dedicated to one thing: celebrating all the ways that the company’s telecommunication technology helps the United States government fight and win wars.

The pamphlet is a historical document, but if you squint at it right and replace “Western Electric” with, say, “Facebook” or “Google” or “Amazon,” you actually get an accurate sense of what Silicon Valley monopolies are today: privatized extensions of American Empire.

The cat and mouse game between the world's largest media company and global governments continues.
Just days after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for more government regulation in an attempt to mollify the company's growing critics, while seeking to squash smaller competitors as well as give governments a legitimate reason to enforce censorship and chip away at freedom of speech in order to comply with Facebook's mysterious "community standards", the company and its tech peers are facing a new UK law that will impose "substantial" fines, or even ban companies if they don’t act swiftly enough to remove content that encourages terrorism and child sexual exploitation and abuse.

SOURCE: THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

The medical community knew that a day of reckoning was coming. For years, they were repeatedly warned that the rampant overuse of certain types of medications would result in the development of “super diseases” that we would not be able to stop, and now that day has arrived. Just like many types of bacteria, fungi have also been developing defenses against our most effective modern medicines. One in particular, a fungus known as Candida auris, is now a massive public health threat. An expert quoted by the New York Times has admitted that it is “pretty much unbeatable”, it spreads very easily, and it kills close to 50 percent of the people that it infects. In other words, we are in the early chapters of a medical horror show of our own making, and there is no way out.

Candida auris (or C. auris for short) spreads most easily among those with weakened immune systems. Infants, seniors, smokers and diabetics are among the most vulnerable.

Authored by Alexander Rubinstein via MintPress News

The Syrian American Council and a collection of pro-war lobbyists have led an intimidation campaign aimed at bullying a major Washington-based bookstore, Politics and Prose, into canceling award-winning journalist and author Max Blumenthal’s launch event for his new book The Management of Savagery.

And it appears to have worked. Politics and Prose announced that it would “postpone” the event, citing “concerns” over the event’s “format, substance, … [and] security” in a tweet. In a testament to the ferocity of the harassment campaign against the small chain, the company has pinned the statement to the top of its Twitter page so that anyone visiting it sees immediately that they caved.

(Haaretz) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israel’s Channel 12 News on Saturday evening that he will start extending Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank if re-elected prime minister in the election on April 9.

It remains unclear at this point whether Netanyahu was referring to all of the West Bank, or only parts of it.

“A Palestinian state will endanger our existence and I withstood huge pressure over the past eight years, no prime minister has withstood such pressure. We must control our destiny,” the premier said.

Germany has started repatriating the children of jailed "Islamic State" fighters from conflict zones the Middle East. European countries are grappling with how to handle returning foreign fighters and their families.

My original title for this article was going to be 30 Blocks of Potholes, Shitholes, and Assholes, but I didn’t want to offend the sensibilities of my highbrow readership. The trigger for that title was my morning commute on 34th Street in West Philly near the Philadelphia Zoo. This extremely well-traveled four lane highway resembles a moonscape of craters capable of blowing a tire (which I did a few years ago while turning onto Girard Avenue).

As I swerved through this obstacle course of government incompetence, I reflected upon how Philadelphia was a real shithole city run by Democrat asshole politicians (those not in prison yet). I’ve written dozens of articles about the 30 Blocks of Squalor over the last decade and one thing remains constant – West Philly is still a shithole, occupied by low income, low IQ, low morality, welfare state slaves who continue to vote for the same assholes who have enslaved them in squalor.

The Trump administration, which made promises to rein in Washington’s unnecessary wars, has not only expanded the US’ covert and lethal drone program, but has taken the covering up of its civilian death toll to a whole new level.
Like most of the battlefields opened more widely under the Obama administration, Donald Trump ramped up airstrikes against the infamous Al-Shabaab terrorist group in Somalia approximately two years ago. And, like most drone wars expanded under Obama and dramatically widened under Trump, the details of this covert assault are continuously swept under the rug, particularly when it comes to civilian casualties.

The Pentagon has openly said that its airstrikes in Somalia have killed zero civilians.

This comes a day after Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan slammed India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for purportedly trying to use false claims of Pakistan using an F-16 in the February dogfight between the two countries to promote “war hysteria”.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has claimed that he has “reliable intelligence that India is planning a new attack on Pakistan” which may take place between 16 and 20 April.

“I am saying it with responsibility and I have a responsible position, I know each word I say would make headlines in the international press”, Qureshi said.

READ MORE: India Warns Pakistan of Escalatory Retaliation in Direct Phone Call — Source

He added that New Delhi’s planned attack aims to “increase diplomatic pressure against Pakistan." India’s Foreign Ministry is yet to comment on the matter.

US Africa Command (AFRICOM) commander Thomas D. Waldhauser said that the decision to redeploy US forces was made "due to increased unrest". According to him, the situation in Libya has deteriorated and American troops are no longer safe there.

Libyan media released footage showing the temporary redeployment of the US Africa Command's military personnel.

READ MORE: US Evacuates Personnel From Libya Due To Increased Unrest — Report

US Africa Command (AFRICOM) commander Thomas D. Waldhauser said that the decision to redeploy US forces was made "due to increased unrest". According to him, the situation in Libya has deteriorated and American troops are no longer safe there.

Libyan media released footage showing the temporary redeployment of the US Africa Command's military personnel.

READ MORE: US Evacuates Personnel From Libya Due To Increased Unrest — Report

The report from Zerohedge via Reuters that Saudi Arabia is angry with the U.S. for considering a bill exposing OPEC to U.S. antitrust law is a trial balloon.

The chances of the U.S. bill known as NOPEC coming into force are slim and Saudi Arabia would be unlikely to follow through, but the fact Riyadh is considering such a drastic step is a sign of the kingdom’s annoyance about potential U.S. legal challenges to OPEC.

If these things are so unlikely then why make the threat public? There are a number of reasons.

First, one must remember that the Saudis are hemorrhaging money. Their primary budget deficit in 2018 was around 7% of GDP. Since the 2014 crash in oil prices it has gone from almost zero sovereign debt to $180 billion in debt to finance its spending, or around 22% of GDP.

Letter says Trump has opportunity to restore cooperation with Congress.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers from both the Senate and the House have issued a letter to President Trump urging him not to veto the SJ Res 7 War Powers Act challenge to the Yemen War. The resolution passed the Senate last month, and the House on Thursday.

The War Powers Act requires the president to get the approval of Congress for any overseas military conflicts, and allows Congress to demand a withdrawal form those nations if the operation is unauthorized. The Yemen War was never authorized by Congress.

President Trump has threatened to veto the resolution, and the letter urges him not to, arguing that he has an historic opportunity to set a precedent for cooperation with Congress by complying with the law and ending an unconstitutional war that was launched under President Obama.