In 1971, Gary Allen published his book, None Dare Call it Conspiracy. It quickly became an unofficial best seller.

Over the years, several million copies have been sold.

Allen’s thesis was stark: super-rich American capitalists were financing socialism. This bizarre paradox was resolved when socialism was properly understood—not as “power to the people”—but as elite power over the people. In other words, as a hoax.

These days, the socialist hoax is still unknown to most of the population.

Cloak a global power grab as progress for all of humanity.

Here, from chapter six of None Dare Call it Conspiracy, “The Rockefellers and the Reds,” is a devastating passage commenting on the period just after the Russian Revolution of 1917:

“The Rockefellers assigned their public relations agent, Ivy Lee, to sell the American public the idea that the Bolsheviks were merely misunderstood idealists who were actually kind benefactors of mankind.”

Facebook wants to "deepen user engagement" with Messenger, and to that end, it's been pitching America's giant banks on joint enterprises where Facebook will get to see all your financial info (especially info on where you're shopping and what you're buying) to help it suck you into using Messenger for longer.

In return, Facebook offered to let the banks do business through its platform, allowing Facebook users to transact business and manage their finance through Facebook Messenger.

However, it promised the banks that the financial data they turned over wouldn't be shared with third parties.

The news that Facebook might be able to access all this financial data resulted in a massive share-price surge, with shares up 3.5%, recovering much of the ground lost during Facebook's share-price bloodbath last month.

In May 2015 David Cameron made a speech that was a warning shot of what was to come. “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. It’s often meant we have stood neutral between different values. And that’s helped foster a narrative of extremism and grievance. This Government will conclusively turn the page on this failed approach.” The Independent noted at the time that as far as the government was concerned, Britain should not leave people to lead their own lives.

Officially called the “No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act”, NOPEC is the definition of so-called “lawfare” because it enables the US to extra-territorially impose its domestic legislation on others by giving the government the right to sue OPEC and OPEC+ countries like Russia because of their coordinated efforts to control oil prices.

Lawsuits, however, are unenforceable, which is why the targeted states’ refusal to abide by the US courts’ likely predetermined judgement against them will probably be used to trigger sanctions under the worst-case scenario, with this chain of events being catalyzed in order to achieve several strategic objectives.

The first is that the US wants to break up the Russian-Saudi axis that forms the core of OPEC+, which leads to the second goal of then unravelling the entire OPEC structure and heralding in the free market liberalization of the global energy industry.

What to call someone who claims to oppose racism, except for that directed against Palestinians?

Judge someone by what they have done and continue to do. Consider the source. These thoughts ran through my mind as I struggled to write about Bernie Farber’s standing among some Left/liberals.

After Israel recently solidified its apartheid regime, a Facebook friend posted an opinion by illustrious pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim titled “Today, I Am Ashamed to Be an Israeli.” While expressing opposition to its recent entrenchment of Jewish supremacism, the story effectively denied the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by claiming,

“the founding fathers of the State of Israel who signed the Declaration [of independence] considered the principle of equality as the bedrock of the society they were building.”

In 2015, the UK Government’s Air Quality Expert Group (AQEG) wrote a report citing the increase of national pollution emissions that would be caused by proposed shale development in Britain.

Before the report was finally published this week, Public Health England, UK’s official body for the improvement of the nation’s health and wellbeing, always concluded that “the risks to public health from exposure to emissions from shale gas extraction are low if operations are properly run and regulated.”

Now, the AQEG report warns that

“Impacts on local and regional air quality have the potential to be substantially higher than the national level impacts, as extraction activities are likely to be highly clustered. Studies in the US have shown significant impacts on both local air quality and regional ozone formation, but similar studies have not yet been undertaken for the UK.“

A video was revealed on Sunday showing former Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe, telling a group of listeners that Venezuelan soldiers need to “remove” President Nicolas Maduro from office.

The recording was released just 24 hours after two air drones carrying explosives were detonated above President Maduro and several members of his administration on Saturday as the head of state addressed a large crowd at the 81st anniversary of the Bolivarian National Guard in Caracas. Maduro and other Venezuelan officials are saying that right-wing factions in the United States, Venezuelan and Colombia are behind the drone bombs.

In the video the former president and current Congress member says in English:

“I have said this in public, I have said that the Venezuelan soldiers need to remove that government (of Nicolas Maduro), not to establish a military government, but to call for a rapid transition, with democratic and transparent elections.

At a recent Pentagon press briefing, Task & Purpose’s Jeff Schogol asked General Joseph Votel, former SOCOM commander and the current chief of U.S. forces in the Greater Middle East, if “a new generation of children will grow up to have to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Votel largely punted on the issue of how generational the war on terror might prove to be, but his answer was still a telling one. “I do recognize we’ve certainly been in Afghanistan for a long time – and of course, we’re back in Iraq for a second/third time addressing some of these problems,” he replied. “I think this is a reminder that these things often take time.”

Time indeed.

With US sanctions against Iran officially going back into place on August 6, the Iranian government is scrambling to take some last minute measures to shore up their economy, and particularly their currency, before the sanctions start to hit.

Trying to protect the rial is a high priority, with a former central bank deputy governor and a number of foreign exchange dealers arrested amid the rial plummeting to all-time lows. On Monday, a rash of strict new measures are to be imposed on foreign currency access to try to limit any further falls.

Iran wants to make sure that what foreign currency does flow overseas is strictly allocated to a handful of important industries. The fall of prices for the rial has been heavy related to the surge in the price of gold, as economic uncertainty has many Iranians running to precious metals, and gold imports surged in recent weeks.

US sanctions aim to limit, if not totally eliminate, Iran’s access to foreign markets.

Having resumed their offensive last week, Saudi-led forces pushed into the Yemeni port city oh Hodeidah over the weekend. They faced heavy resistance, and the whole weekend saw fighting raging across the area.

At least 80 people were killed, with heavy casualties reported on both sides. Among the killed, 30 fighters who were part of a UAE-led force pushing into the city from the south. They were ambushed just south of the Hodeidah airport.

Hodeidah is the last rebel-held port in Yemen, and subsequently the lone source of aid for the entire northern half of the country. It is estimated the port imports food for 8.4 million people, and this has led to repeated warnings that the conquest of the city could lead to a more or less immediate, major famine.

Blood flows in the streets of Ferrara, Italy, as Nigerian migrants wage war with machetes, axes and knives, local media reports.

A slew of gruesome attacks have taken place in the last week in shop squares, parks, and bars as gang members and drug dealers settle disputes with lethal weapons in the once-peaceful bastion of high culture and gastronomy.

Police and emergency services have been responding to scenes of frequent clashes where butchered combatants are found lying in pools of gore.

"A nightmare... We are at the fourth fight on the street in two days. Here it is normal now," said a local official.

77 people were shot last week in Chicago, 9 fatally, but the rate of shootings has accelerated aggressively today as 'HeyJackass' reports "30 shot in 3 hours is the most shot in the least amount of time we’ve recorded in 5+ years. The previous record was July 4-5, 2016 w/ 29 shot in 6 hours."

Amid this carnage, ABC7Chicago reports that, police said there was a "trauma lockdown" at Stroger Hospital with only immediate family members of victims are being allowed in the emergency room. A spokeswoman for Stroger Hospital disputes the police account.

But, judging by the protests this week - that will shock the mainstream media narrative out of much of America - Chicagoans (particularly black inner city citizens) are furious at Mayor Rahm Emanuel's impotence and are asking President Trump for help.

Thanks to Judicial Watch, the Carter Page FISA docs were released a couple weeks ago after the watchdog filed a FOIA lawsuit.

Although the documents were dishonestly and heavily redacted, they confirm the FBI and DOJ misled the FISA courts.

GOP lawmakers such as Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-NC) and Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) called for the FISA docs to be declassified.

President Trump tweeted about the Carter Page FISA docs shortly after they were released to the public, slamming Crooked Hillary and called for the discredited Mueller witch hunt to be shut down.

Fabricated, unwarranted lawsuits are being used in an effort to shut down Alex Jones who raises too many issues that those who rule us do not want raised. At times Alex can be over the top, but overall he has spread a lot of awareness of events that otherwise would have received no notice.

There is no doubt whatsoever of William Binney’s expertise and integrity. This hour long interview with him is posted on Info Wars, not on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, NPR, or Fox News. It is not printed in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times or the Washington Post.

Hundreds of people had their homes foreclosed on after software used by Wells Fargo incorrectly denied them mortgage modifications.

The embattled bank revealed the issue in a regulatory filing this week and said it has set aside $8 million to compensate customers affected by the glitch.

The same filing also disclosed that Wells Fargo (WFC) is facing "formal or informal inquiries or investigations" from unnamed government agencies over how the company purchased federal low-income housing tax credits. The document states the probes are linked to "the financing of low income housing developments," but does not offer further details.

Reuters first reported news of investigations and mishandled mortgage modifications on Friday.

The toll from US-backed Saudi coalition air strikes on a fish market and hospital in the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah Thursday has risen to at least 60 people dead and 130 others wounded. The bombardment, which has been all but ignored by the establishment press, comes amid a weeks-long siege of the western city and coalition efforts to destroy vital civilian infrastructure, threatening to sharply escalate the world’s most dire humanitarian crisis.

Saudi coalition warplanes struck a crowded Hodeidah fish market as throngs of residents packed in to purchase one of Yemen’s only abundant domestic sources of food. Witnesses report a chaotic scene as a warplane overhead fired upon the packed market, then continued to linger above the city. As people rushed the dead and injured to the al-Thawra hospital just 20 meters (60 feet) away, the warplane began bombing the entrance to the hospital, apparently to prevent the injured from receiving treatment.

Today more than 40 million adults in the United States suffer from anxiety, and it is the most common mental illness in the United States.
Overdose deaths involving benzodiazepines — such as Xanax, Librium, Valium and Ativan, drugs commonly used to treat anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, seizures and insomnia — have quadrupled between 2002 and 2015, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The trend is being fueled by a 67 percent rise in prescriptions.
The market for benzos, as they are called, is expected to reach $3.8 billion in the U.S. by 2020, reports Zion Market Research.

According to the United States, the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) is violating United Nations Security Council (UNSC) restrictions concerning their nuclear testing and missile development programs. These accusations come from a six-month report released last week by the UN which claims Pyongyang is violating restrictions on both of these programs according to new intelligence gathered.

Besides the alleged violations of the UNSC restrictions on the DPRK’s arms development, Korea has also been accused of violating economic sanctions “through a massive increase in illicit ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum products, as well as through transfers of coal at sea during 2018.” The UNSC also claimed that the DPRK was assisting the governments of Syria with weapons as well as attempting to sell arms to the Ansarullah movement (Houthis) in Yemen.

Did the US try to assassinate Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro?
John Bolton, Trump’s veteran neocon national security adviser, told Fox News the US had nothing to do with the explosive drone attack during an appearance in Caracas that injured several people but left Maduro and his entourage untouched.

“I can say unequivocally there was no U.S. government involvement in this at all. If the government of Venezuela has hard information that they want to present to us that would show a potential violation of U.S. criminal law, we’ll take a serious look at it, but in the meantime I think what we really should focus on is the corruption and oppression in the Maduro regime in Venezuela,” said Bolton during an interview with Chris Wallace.

The Masters of the Universe at Facebook and Apple have censored InfoWars pages and podcasts on their platforms, both claiming Alex Jones and company engage in “hate speech.”

Following the recent suspension of Alex Jones’ Facebook page and the removal of InfoWars podcasts from Spotify, Facebook has permanently removed multiple InfoWars pages from its site while Apple has taken steps to remove InfoWars podcasts from its podcast directory.

Facebook has removed the following InfoWars pages from their platform: the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Page, the Infowars Page and the Infowars Nightly News Page.

The only way to pay all these future obligations is by creating new money.

Here's the uncomfortable reality: the means to pay all these future obligations-- the real-world economy, and the wealth and income of the vast majority of the populace-- are far too modest to fund the fast-expanding obligations,which include interest due on the ever-increasing mountain of public and private debt.

The current "everything" asset bubbles have temporarily boosted the wealth and income of corporations and the wealthy, but all bubbles eventually pop as the marginal elements that are propping up the expansion weaken and implode.

Once the asset bubbles pop, the illusion that "taxing the rich" will pay for all the obligations pops along with the bubble. And as I've noted many times, those at the top of the wealth-power pyramid wield political power, so they have the means and the motive to limit their tax burden to roughly 20% or less--(sometimes much less, as in zero.)

One of Syria’s leading pro-government newspapers has said that Israel was behind a bomb blast in Hama province that killed a senior scientist working for the country’s missile program. Aziz Azbar was reportedly a senior research director at the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, known as CERS. The Damascus-based agency is thought to be at the center of the Syrian government’s formidable chemical weapons program. Last year, the United States Department of the Treasury imposed economic sanctions on nearly 300 CERS employees, after Washington accused them of being directly responsible for the Syrian government’s repeated use of chemical weapons against rebels and civilians. The European Union, as well as the French and British governments, also imposed sanctions on CERS and its staff.

The state's lawmakers have embarked on a novel experiment to address a local news crisis: putting up millions of dollars in the state's most recent budget to pay for community journalism. While public television and radio stations have long received government funds, new media experts like Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute say they have not heard of any other efforts on this scale, with a state helping to pay for reporting projects among a range of news media, including for-profit outlets.

[...]Journalists and public officials described New Jersey's undertaking as once unthinkable, raising ethical concerns and stirring fears of government intrusion. Yet there has been little outcry, underscoring for many local journalism's precarious position and a growing willingness to experiment.

The legislation sets aside $5 million from the sale of old public television licenses, creating a nonprofit consortium that would fund reporting projects and bolster civic engagement.

Imagine this….You are listening to an interview with a Communist Chinese government critic. All of sudden, he’s no longer there. Nobody has heard from him. How did the communists get to him so quickly? You can thank Google’s police state technology.. Here is the story.

Meeting with his Turkish counterpart on Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that “the clock had run out” on Turkey to meet US demands to release an American pastor detained since 2016. He says Turkey is now “on notice.”

Brunson, like a lot of people, was arrested after the failed coup d’etat in Turkey, and the government has accused him of having ties to banned cleric Fethullah Gulen. The US insists the claim is false, and insists Turkey must release him, and every other American currently held.

While Turkish FM Mevlut Cavusoglu had agreed to resolve the situation in a meeting with Pompeo, he also says that the threatening language and sanctions from the US won’t get them anywhere.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’s effort to negotiate a ceasefire with the country’s last rebel group before stepping aside next week has failed, the two parties said on Wednesday.

The government, in a joint statement with the National Liberation Army (ELN), said advances were made in a sixth round of talks in Havana towards a ceasefire but “others needed to make more effective its implementation and verification were left pending.”

The statement said progress had been made since the talks began in 2017 and dialogue was the best option to settle their differences.

Santos, who signed an historic peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016, sent Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin to Cuba over the weekend in a last-ditch attempt to reach a temporary halt to hostilities before right-wing President-elect Ivan Duque takes office on Aug. 7.

The Trump administration has revoked Obama-era regulations limiting the use of pesticides in the National Wildlife Refuge System (NRWS), Fish and Wildlife Service Deputy Director Greg Sheehan said in a memorandum.

Meanwhile, US Environmentalists said Friday that lifting the restriction poses a grave threat to pollinating insects and other sensitive creatures relying on toxic-free habitats afforded by wildlife refuges, Reuters reported.

"Industrial agriculture has no place on refuges dedicated to wildlife conservation and protection of some of the most vital and vulnerable species," Jenny Keating, federal lands policy analyst for the group Defenders of Wildlife was quoted as saying by Reuters.

Right-wing Patriot Prayer marchers are holding a lawful protest in Portland today and antifa goons are openly mobilizing for violence.

CNN has been busy demonizing the group as racist neo-nazis and praising antifa to help justify antifa carrying out offensive violence to shut down the march.

Both sides are armed, but only anfita is trying to stop the Patriot Prayer group from holding a legal and lawful march.

'The Facebook page for Resist Patriot Prayer: Violent Alt-Right Bigots Off Our Streets," the group said it is willing to use physical force if necessary' i.e. it's openly conspiring to violate #patriotprayer 's civil rights. Why no Federal charges? https://t.co/6syBt0HJLl

— Peter Brimelow (@peterbrimelow) August 4, 2018

Antifa attacked police with rocks and alleged threw urine and feces at Patriot Prayer marchers.

Black-clad antifa goons were filmed stealing a man's American flag and hitting him in the head with a stick when he resisted:

After NYPD Sgt. Richard Blake shot Thavone Santana in the face during a confrontation, we were told a terrifying story of being threatened and mugged early Thursday on the mean streets of Brooklyn. Unfortunately for Blake, a nearby video camera captured him drawing his gun, shooting someone who was trying to move away from him, then dropping a knife near his unconscious body.

Blake paces back and forth, then appears to pat down Santana’s pockets. He then appears to take a sheathed knife from his own back pocket, the New York Times reported, slides it from its sheath and drops it next to Santana’s crumpled body. He then pauses for a moment and retrieves the knife, the video shows.

The New York Police Department said Thursday that Santana was in stable condition.

“The video captures actions that raise serious questions and require further investigation,” Detective Sophia Mason, a department spokeswoman, told The Washington Post in a statement.

The head of a Syrian research facility that Western countries say was part of a chemical weapons programme was killed when his car was blown up, the pro-Syrian government newspaper al-Watan said on Sunday.

Aziz Asber was the director of the Syrian Scientific Research Centre in Masyaf, near the city of Hama, which Western governments say was a covert Syrian government installation.

“(Asber) died after an explosion targeted his car in the Hama countryside,” al-Watan said in an online report.

The explosion occurred on Saturday night, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitoring group said. Who or what caused it is not known.

The Masyaf facility has previously been hit by what the Syrian government said were Israeli strikes in July and last year in September.

In April, missile strikes by the United States, Britain and France destroyed a Syrian Scientific Research Centre facility in Damascus, in response to a suspected poison gas attack.

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has survived an apparent attack on his life during a military parade celebrating the 81st anniversary of the Bolivarian National Guard in the capital, Caracas.

In a televised national address late Saturday, Maduro said he was fine and laid blame for the attack firmly at the feet of “right-wing imperial forces” who he said had hired the would-be assassins.

“They have tried to assassinate me today, and everything points to the Venezuelan ultra-right and the Colombian ultra-right, and the name of Juan Manuel Santos is behind this attack,” he said.

“I must inform that they have been captured – those who attempted to take my life – and they are being processed. I won’t say more, but the investigation is very advanced.

“I tell the Venezuelan opposition that I guarantee you can live in this country peacefully. If something happens to me, you will have to face millions of Campesinos and humble people making justice with their own hands.

On Friday, the FBI released a tranche of documents on Hillary Clinton’s email investigation thanks to a FOIA lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch.
The documents reveal the FBI logged a cyber intrusion analysis request to Hillary’s email investigation one day after the 2016 election–the FBI had already closed the investigation.

In mid-2016, according to Rep. Louie Gohmert, a government watchdog told Peter Strzok that 30,000 of Hillary Clinton’s emails went to a foreign entity–UNRELATED TO RUSSIA.

Now we find out the FBI logged a cyber intrusion analysis request to Hillary Clinton’s email investigation.

As TGP previously reported:
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, revealed in the hearing with Peter Strzok a couple weeks ago that the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) found that nearly all of Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 emails were sent to a foreign entity and the FBI did nothing about it.

Sleep deprivation is an increasing problem in many developed countries, which can result in impaired cognition and a number of serious individual and societal consequences. Lack of sleep has been linked to billions of dollars in lost revenue, up to one sixth of all traffic accidents in the US, and increased risk of chronic disease. The reason for this chronic sleep shortage is due to a combination of factors. Longer work hours, stress, and interpersonal relationships have all been blamed for the widespread insomnia. Now a new study claims that high speed internet access is at least partly at fault.

The study, published Friday in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and funded by the European Research Council, suggests that high speed internet access is causing people to lose up to 25 minutes of sleep per night compared to those without high speed internet. It’s the first study to causally link broadband access to sleep deprivation.

It’s a battle to serve either ’the public’ or else ’the people’, and each political brand will be struggling to keep Europe as an ally in American billionaires’ war against Russia (which all American billionaires want to defeat), but each team does this from a different ideological perspective, one being ‘liberal’, and the other being ‘conservative’.

Amid the economic, political, and social collapse, Brazil has been described by many as being in the midst of a “zombie apocalypse” as years of corruption and violence spectacularly implodes all at once.

Horrified by the out of control violence and pessimistic about the nation’s political and economic outlook, thousands of wealthy Brazilians are now fleeing the country.

Thiago Lacerda, a high-profile actor, is one of the thousands of celebrities, bankers, lawyers and affluent Brazilians considering emigration before the next round of turmoil.

“I’m totally freaked out by what’s been happening, especially here in Rio [Rio de Janeiro],” Mr. Lacerda told The Wall Street Journal.

The 40-year-old actor said he has considered moving his family to Europe for the safety of his three children. “In several years, they’re going to want to go out, to start dating, without worrying about getting shot.”

In the last 48 hours, the FBI has released two caches of documents through their "FBI Vault" website related to the 2016 US election. One sheds light on the agency's relationship with Christopher Steele, while the other reveals that disgraced agent Peter Strzok waited until after the 2016 election to have Anthony Weiner's laptop analyzed for hacking.

The 71-page release of heavily redacted records concerning former MI6 spy Christopher Steele reveals that he was paid by the agency over an unknown period of time - at least 11 times during 2016, and that Steele was admonished by the agency for unknown reasons in February, 2016.

A 20-year-old man with Down syndrome was shot and killed by police this week as he walked down the street with a toy gun. Police claimed the young man — who, according to his mother, had the mentality of a 3-year-old — created a threat that needed to be dealt with with deadly force.

According to the victim’s father, Richard Torell, his son Eric grabbed a toy gun from his toy pile and disappeared overnight.

“I woke up because Eric was gone,” Richard Torell told Expressen. “I went out and looked for him. I saw police cars on the street.

“Three police officers shot him in his stomach.”

As the Independent reports:

Police had been called after Eric reportedly showed the small toy gun to neighbours, who contacted authorities believing it was real.

Local media reports stated three police officers had shot him in the stomach after attending the incident. He was taken to hospital, but later died from his injuries.

Notice that at a Human Rights Day rally in Mpumalanga, “human rights” is associated with “cutting the throat of whiteness.” This legitimizes the murder and dispossession of South African whites, who have been in the country longer than most blacks, as an exercise in human rights. The leader of the new black party that is challenging the one to which the former white government handed over power even has a song about shooting whites.

How many years before it happens in “diversity multi-cultural” Europe and America?

What is wrong with the Russians that they want to be associated with a West that is actively pursuing self-destruction? How long before it is not only white South Africans who are fleeing to Russia to save their lives?

The United States government has never allowed independent governments in Latin America. Every time people elect a government that represents them instead of US economic interests, Washington overthrows the elected government. Marine General Smedley Butler told us this as have many others. There is no doubt about it.

Currently Washington is trying to overthrow the governments of Venezuela and Nicaragua and has bought off the Ecuadorian government with oil purchases and the usual personal bribes. Evo Morales government in Bolivia is also targeted by Washington. The Obama regime succeeded in removing the reform governments in Honduras, Argentina, and Brazil.

Germany's highest court has thrown out a notorious elderly neo-Nazi's case against her conviction for Holocaust denial, ruling that her activities are not covered by a constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression.

Haverbeck has repeatedly said the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland was just a work camp. She has been convicted several times but long avoided prison due to lengthy appeals.

Yemen’s Houthis (Ansar Allah) have submitted an initiative they hope will bring an end to conflict in Yemen and have unilaterally suspended retaliatory attacks against Saudi-led coalition forces in the Red Sea in order to support this effort.

A source in the Supreme Political Council, the highest political authority in Sana’a, told MintPress that the halt in retaliatory attacks in the Red Sea is aimed at preserving the Yemeni people and comes in response to regional and international efforts to bring peace to Yemen.

The initiative comes less than one week after Saudi Arabia temporarily suspended all oil shipments through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The coalition has thus far not commented on the initiative.

New reports from a host of mainstream sources are asserting that the U.S. government — in its long-standing efforts to arrest and prosecute WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange — may have changed its strategy in pursuing the journalist. While past efforts at targeting Assange focused on his role as a publisher, this new strategy would see Assange targeted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as an asset of Russian military intelligence.

As several recent reports at MintPress and other independent outlets have noted, the fate of WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange and the legal charges he is likely to face if extradited to the United States are likely to set several key precedents that could upend freedom of the press, citizen rights, and other cornerstones of modern democracy — that is, if he is prosecuted as a publisher of classified information.

Afghanistan, long acknowledged to be America's "forgotten war", has finally returned to the news of late. But this time, in a shocking twist on the now 17-year long conflict, the US is negotiating with the Taliban.

Perhaps this is why the mainstream media has by and large not given this bombshell story the coverage it deserves? Or do the major networks feel the American public has long ago stopped paying attention and will therefore yawn at any headlines containing the words 'US Troops/Afghanistan'?

As Daniel McAdams explains, last week US State Department officials met with Taliban leaders in Qatar. At the request of the Taliban, the US-backed Afghan government was not invited. The officials discussed ceasefires and an end to the war.

Meanwhile, the US inspector general charged with monitoring US spending on Afghanistan reconstruction has reported that since 2008, the US has completely wasted at the least $15.5 billion. He believes that's just the tip of the iceberg, though.

In a 2-1 vote, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia said Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners are shielded by government sovereign immunity from liability under the Federal Tort Claims Act because they do not function as “investigative or law enforcement officers.”

The majority said it was “sympathetic” to concerns that its decision would leave fliers with “very limited legal redress” for alleged mistreatment by aggressive or overzealous screeners, which add to the ordinary stresses of air travel.

“For most people, TSA screenings are an unavoidable feature of flying,” but it is “squarely in the realm” of Congress to expand liability for abuses, Circuit Judge Cheryl Ann Krause wrote.

This means that incidents like this are legal.

Iran is working on a plan to create a floating mechanism for pricing the US Dollar to help prevent further depreciation of its national currency which lost its value by above 14 percent within only hours this past Sunday.

The plan would be meant to take the pricing of the hard currency out of the hands of street dealers into a newly established “secondary foreign currency market”.

To the same effect, it would ban the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) from dictating its own rates for the Dollar and would instead peg the value of the hard currency to the actual trading rates as obtained from current transactions between currency suppliers and buyers in a newly established “secondary foreign currency market”.

This would be part of a package of CBI policies which would be unveiled soon for controlling the rates of foreign currencies, Iran’s media reported.

This is the second time Israel has shut the valve on Gaza in the span of a month.

Israel banned the entry of gas and fuel into the Gaza Strip Wednesday, as a response to a new surge of fire balloon and kite attacks originating from Palestinian soil, reports The Jerusalem Post.

"A short time ago Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman ordered that gas and fuel be banned from entering Gaza through Kerem Shalom [a border crossing], starting on Thursday and until such time as there is a new announcement," the minister's spokesperson said.

"The decision was taken in light of the continued terror balloons and continued friction along the [border] fence," the spokesperson added.

This is the second time Israel has resorted to such a measure in the past several weeks. Liberman ordered gas and fuel shut down earlier in July, but reversed the decision after the Palestinian attacks died down.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) appears to be preparing for a major display of force in the Strait of Hormuz, the only outlet from the Persian Gulf to the open sea, demonstrating its ability to shut down the strategically important waterway.

US Central Command tweeted Wednesday that American forces are closely watching the developing situation, with the Iranian exercise expected to begin in the next 48 hours.

President Hassan Rouhani listens to explanations on new nuclear achievements at a ceremony to mark National Nuclear Day, in Tehran, Iran, Monday, April 9, 2018

With the advent of the internet and social media, participation in political discussion has become more open to the common citizen than ever before. This is apparently an intolerable side effect that corporate elites would like to do away with.

It is a slightly complex problem, so I’ll try to break it down point by point:

So then, what is the solution?

I would first advocate for the end of the legal protections afforded under “corporate personhood.” When a company like Facebook is sued or prosecuted for its trespasses and criminality, the company itself is treated as if it is a legal person. Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk are not punished: the company is punished. This usually ends in fines which amount to nothing more than pocket change.

For years, some more skeptical analysts had been stumped by the relentless US consumer demand US for new cars, despite rising household debt levels, stagnant real wages, and concerns about record subprime exposure. Today, we may have found the dynamo that drove purchases to a plateau of between 17 and 18 million units over the past three years: pervasive dealer discounts and incentives.

Almost all major manufacturers reported a sharp drop in U.S. deliveries for July, led by a 15% plunge at Nissan Motor. The reason: for the first time in 55 months, the auto industry - perhaps due to concerns about the impact of auto tariffs - cut back spending on incentives, snapping a streak of monthly consecutive increases that began 4 1/2 years ago, according to J.D. Power.

Within Google, knowledge about Dragonfly has been restricted to just a few hundred members of the internet giant’s 88,000-strong workforce, said a source with knowledge of the project. The source spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to contact the media. The source said that they had moral and ethical concerns about Google’s role in the censorship, which is being planned by a handful of top executives and managers at the company with no public scrutiny.

“I’m against large companies and governments collaborating in the oppression of their people, and feel like transparency around what’s being done is in the public interest,” the source said, adding that they feared “what is done in China will become a template for many other nations.”

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

If the U.S. economy is really doing so well, then why is homelessness rising so rapidly?

why the number of homeless is surging. For example, the number of people living on the street in L.A. has shot up 75 percent over the last 6 years. But of course L.A. is far from alone. Other major cities on the west coast are facing similar problems, and that includes Seattle. It turns out that the Emerald City has seen a 46 percent rise in the number of people sleeping in their vehicles in just the past year…

The number of people who live in their vehicles because they can’t find affordable housing is on the rise, even though the practice is illegal in many U.S. cities.

The past two years have seen a rather aggressive change in corporate policies toward the very customers they used to covet. Not long ago, CEOs tended to keep their political views mostly in the closet. Companies remained publicly neutral because their goal was first and foremost to make money. When they wanted to influence politics or social norms, they bought politicians — you know, the good old-fashioned way. The big banks still do this by funneling cash to both Republicans and Democrats alike

However, in the wake of the social justice cult frenzy some companies have decided that ideology is more important than profit, and most of these companies are deeply involved in various forms of media.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 on Wednesday that a San Francisco Judge went too far last April with a nationwide injunction against President Trump's January Executive Order, which would withhold funding from "sanctuary" cities and counties. The panel, however, agreed that Trump may not withhold funding from San Francisco or Santa Clara County for limiting their cooperation with immigration enforcement officials.

A disturbing trend in the water sector is accelerating worldwide. The new “water barons” — the Wall Street banks and elitist multibillionaires — are buying up water all over the world at unprecedented pace.

world.

The second disturbing trend is that while the new water barons are buying up water all over the world, governments are moving fast to limit citizens’ ability to become water self-sufficient (as evidenced by the well-publicized Gary Harrington’s case in Oregon, in which the state criminalized the collection of rainwater in three ponds located on his private land, by convicting him on nine counts and sentencing him for 30 days in jail). Let’s put this criminalization in perspective:

What some people don’t know about Mueller is that he has a long history of leading government investigations that were diversions or cover-ups. These include the investigation into the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, the investigation into the terrorist financing Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the FBI investigations into the crimes of September 11th, 2001. Today the public is beginning to realize that Mueller’s investigation into Russian alleged collusion with the Trump campaign is a similar diversion.

Mueller’s talents were noticed early in his career at the Justice Department. As a U.S. Attorney in Boston during the mid-80s, he helped falsely convict four men for murders they didn’t commit in order to protect a powerful FBI informant—mobster James “Whitey” Bulger.” According to the Boston Globe,

Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot’s statements following the Druze community’s response to the nation-state law, referenced a few vital matters, albeit a few days late.

Eisenkot is not allowed at present to relate directly to the law; perhaps we’ll hear his opinion in another five months when his term as chief of staff ends. But he had to relate to the pain of the community, which has gone from criticism voiced by senior retired officers to announcements of resignations by two young professional Druze officers.

An Israeli district court sentenced Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, 36, to five months in prison and a six-month suspended sentence on Tuesday for posting a poem she wrote to social media in 2015.

Tatour, a Palestinian citizen of Israel from the Galilee, was convicted of three counts of incitement and supporting a terrorist organization last May after a lengthy trial. Prior to sentencing, Tatour had spent nearly three years under house arrest, during which she was banned from publishing and accessing the internet.

During the hearing prosecutors focused on a video posted to social media of Tatour reciting an original poem titled “Resist, my people resist them,” against backdrop images of violent confrontations between Palestinian and Israeli armed forces.

Iran said on Tuesday U.S. President Donald Trump was mistaken to expect Saudi Arabia and other oil producers to compensate for supply losses caused by U.S. sanctions on Iran, after OPEC production rose only modestly in July.

The comments, from Iran’s OPEC governor, came a day after a Reuters survey showed OPEC production rose by 70,000 barrels per day in July. Saudi production increased but was offset by a decline in Iranian supply due to the restart of U.S. sanctions, the survey found. [OPEC/O]

“It seems President Trump has been taken hostage by Saudi Arabia and a few producers when they claimed they can replace 2.5 million barrels per day of Iranian exports, encouraging him to take action against Iran,” Hossein Kazempour Ardebili told Reuters.

“Now they and Russia sell more oil and more expensively. Not even from their incremental production but their stocks.”

We are by now used to blood and thunder rhetoric between Washington and Tehran. But this time White House policy is clearly being directed by pro-Israel American neocons who want the US military to crush Iran as it did Iraq.

Crushing Iran will leave Israel with unfettered control of the Mideast and its oil – unless Russia or Turkey intervene against Israel, which is most unlikely. Some think Russia and Israel – and the US – have already made a deal to divvy up the central Mideast.

The Pentagon has planned a high-intensity air war against Iran that Israel and the Saudis might very well join. The plan calls for over 2,300 air strikes against Iranian strategic targets: airfields and naval bases, arms and petroleum, oil and lubricant depots, telecommunication nodes, radar, factories, military headquarters, ports, water works, airports, missile bases and units of the Revolutionary Guards.

Ahed’s story drew rare attention to the plight of Palestinian children held in Israeli military prisons — an overwhelming majority of them over stone-throwing incidents or for participation in protests — and the sham court proceedings, abuse and threat-filled interrogations, and extracted confessions to which they are subject. In the weeks before Ahed’s release, The Intercept spoke with more than a dozen formerly imprisoned children, parents of children currently in prison, attorneys and advocates, as well as several members of the Tamimi family. They shared similar stories of predawn raids during which soldiers separated children from their families, physically and verbally assaulted them, blindfolded and handcuffed them, and drove them to interrogation centers where — almost always without an attorney or parent present — they were subjected to further abuse and forced to confess, before being summarily sentenced to months in prison.

I am officially a prisoner of war, though the only battle I ever fought back home, as a taxi driver in Karachi, was the rush hour traffic. I was mistaken for an extremist, captured by Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s government and sold to the CIA for a bounty in 2002. I’ve now been detained at Guantánamo, without trial, for nearly 14 years.

President Trump’s lawyers argued in court this month that I and other Guantánamo prisoners who have filed habeas corpus petitions could be held by the U.S. government for a hundred years, if that is how long the “conflict” lasts.

All your base are belong to us. A leaked memo circulating among Senate Democrats contains a host of bonkers authoritarian proposals for regulating digital platforms, purportedly as a way to get tough on Russian bots and fake news. To save American trust in "our institutions, democracy, free press, and markets," it suggests, we need unprecedented and undemocratic government intervention into online press and markets, including "comprehensive (GDPR-like) data protection legislation" of the sort enacted in the E.U.

Titled "Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms," the draft policy paper—penned by Sen. Mark Warner and leaked by an unknown source to Axios—the paper starts out by noting that Russians have long spread disinformation, including when "the Soviets tried to spread 'fake news' denigrating Martin Luther King" (here he fails to mention that the Americans in charge at the time did the same). But NOW IT'S DIFFERENT, because technology.

Trump's vow of 'no preconditions' lasts less than 24 hours.

President Trump surprised many on Monday when he announced his willingness to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani “without preconditions.” Within less than a day, the administration had already started attaching substantial preconditions to the offer.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, early on Tuesday, began establishing preconditions, saying that Iran needed to commit to “fundamental changes to how they treat their own people, reduce their malign behavior, agree that it’s worthwhile to enter into a nuclear agreement that actually prevents proliferation.”

These preconditions almost certainly make the offer impossible, as the US treats Iranian foreign policy as necessarily “malign behavior,” and Iran is neither going to agree to deeper isolation, nor to the need for another nuclear deal while still trying to preserve the one the already signed, and which the US dishonored earlier this year.

Spain is the new center of Europe's migrant crisis – and the conservative Popular Party leader Pablo Casado has blamed the socialist government after they accepted migrant rescue boat 'Aquarius,' which Italy had turned away.
The rescue boat, which carried 630 migrants, has been operated since February 2016 by SOS Mediterranee and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). Italy and Malta rejected the rescue boat in June, sparking a bitter row within the European Union, with the two countries demanding another member of the bloc take in the migrants on board. The ship ended up docking in Valencia; a move that Casado warned may be seen as a welcome sign for more arrivals.

A German cleaning lady received a fine of 1,650 euros for criticising refugees and the country’s asylum policy, news outlet Wochenblick reports.

The woman committed her ‘Orwellian thought crime’ on Facebook, as she said this about refugees:

“Sh*t on the state, steal from people, rape, swirling the eggs, demand money from us and sue the state. That’s what they can. They’re more valuable than gold, our super-skilled people.”

The cleaning lady’s plea for help to the German judiciary was not heard. On the contrary, the district court of Dachau fined the cleaning woman because of “sedition” (§ 130 StGB).

She was given a 1,650 euro fine, as the court’s opinion was that her comment against refugees “scared people”.

Germany’s ‘thought police’ uncovered the case after receiving a message from the State Criminal Police Office (LKA) of North Rhine-Westphalia.

At a mid-July news conference at the Pentagon, AP reporter Lolita Baldor asked Gen. Mark Milley, the Army chief of staff, about an attack in Afghanistan that had led to the death of an American soldier. But before he could reply, a Defense Department press officer cut in to say that Milley and the three officials flanking him would be answering questions only about the intended topic for the news conference: the announcement of the location of a new command.

The next question went to Jennifer Griffin from Fox News. Over the previous two days, President Donald Trump had roiled the NATO summit in Brussels with verbal shots at the alliance’s members, so Griffin, after opening with a question about the new command, added, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to agree with Lita, we don’t have an opportunity to see you enough. Gen. Milley, have you reached out to your counterparts in Europe after the NATO summit to reassure them that the U.S. forces are staying?”

Trump calls on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to end Robert Mueller's Russia probe immediately, escalating his attacks on the inquiry.
"Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now," the president tweets. "Bob Mueller is totally conflicted, and his 17 Angry Democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace to USA!"
The president's attacks on the special counsel have escalated in recent weeks. Trump's attorney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, made headlines on Monday saying that "collusion is not a crime."

Machine-learning techniques promise to make biometric data far more useful for intelligence gathering.

Researchers have used artificial intelligence to show that very subtle eye movements, of the sort you might pick up with a camera, can divine aspects of personality much better than random guessing.

It’s another good example of how the wealth of biometric data that humans produce, once digitized and examined at large scale, can reveal hidden aspects of identity in ways that could be a boon to intelligence gathering.

The German and Australian researchers fitted 42 volunteers with eye-tracking headgear, and had them fill out the NEO Five-Factor Inventory, a personality test that measures traits such as neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

They then had the subjects go about a normal routine while they quietly collected eye movement data and then used machine learning to categorize the data.

Stephen Cohen schooled prominent 'Never Trump' neocon and Council on Foreign Relations member Max Boot on CNN's Anderson Cooper this week on the Trump-Putin Helsinki summit and general charges related to 'Russiagate'.

It's worth watching especially as it underscores why recognized academic experts are rarely given airtime on the mainstream networks if their perspective lies outside the accepted media group-think on Russia.

“I‘ve been studying Russia for 45 years,” Professor Stephen Cohen said as the debate got heated. “I‘ve lived in Russia, and I’ve lived here.”

But predictably Boot cut him off, leveling the standard ad hominem that's become the standard fallback retort to any 'contrarian' analysis, saying Cohen has been “consistently an apologist for Russia those 45 years.”

GOOGLE IS PLANNING to launch a censored version of its search engine in China that will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, The Intercept can reveal.

The project – code-named Dragonfly – has been underway since spring of last year, and accelerated following a December 2017 meeting between Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official, according to internal Google documents and people familiar with the plans.

Teams of programmers and engineers at Google have created a custom Android app, different versions of which have been named “Maotai” and “Longfei.” The app has already been demonstrated to the Chinese government; the finalized version could be launched in the next six to nine months, pending approval from Chinese officials.

Last week, the ACLU of Northern California revealed that Amazon’s Rekognition face surveillance software identified 28 members of Congress as people who have been previously arrested for a crime. The only problem? They were false matches. Unsurprisingly, the 28 members of Congress falsely matched to the mugshot database were disproportionately people of color. While Congress is only 20 percent people of color, they were 40 percent of those falsely matched by Rekognition.

Lawmakers reacted swiftly to the report. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Ed Markey (D-MA) fired off a letter to 39 federal law enforcement agencies, among them ICE and the FBI, demanding information about how they use face surveillance technologies. Senator Markey and Representatives Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL) and Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA) also sent a letterto Jeff Bezos himself, asking the billionaire for more details about Rekognition and a list of its government users.

In a campaign to improve its image abroad, the Israeli government plans to provide scholarships to hundreds of students at its seven universities in exchange for their making pro-Israel Facebook posts and tweets to foreign audiences.

The students making the posts will not reveal online that they are funded by the Israeli government, according to correspondence about the plan revealed in the Haaretz newspaper.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, which will oversee the programme, confirmed its launch and wrote that its aim was to “strengthen Israeli public diplomacy and make it fit the changes in the means of information consumption”.

With all the media focus on President Trump’s recent meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, a major event took place last week in the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait, which received little notice. The Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have acknowledged that they fired a missile supplied by Iran from the vicinity of the port city of Hodeida that hit a Saudi Aramco tanker. In response, even though there was little damage, Saudi Arabia has suspended all its shipping from transiting the Bab al-Mandab Strait.

Clearly, the Houthi rebels have seriously challenged the internationally-recognized “Freedom of Navigation” doctrine. The concept is that the internationally-recognized open waters of the world, including all strategic straits, should remain open and free for all commercial shipping. By extension, this includes the peaceful transit of naval forces as well.

According to The Economist, polygamy is a key factor in civil wars and conflict. How convenient to blame it all on ‘the natives’ and their ‘backward’ customs, obscuring the role of the US and its allies in destabilizing regions.
In the 1930 Marx Brothers comedy ‘Animal Crackers’ Groucho Marx proposes to two women at the same time. One protests: “But that's bigamy!” Groucho replies: “Yes and that's big-a-me, too. It's big of all of us. Let's be big for a change. I'm sick of these conventional marriages!”

We know the Economist isn’t a great fan of Karl Marx, and it’s doubtful it would approve of Groucho much either – or at least the idea of him taking two wives. You see, it would probably lead to armed conflict.

US special counsel Robert Mueller indicted former Trump campaign official Paul Manafort during the course of the investigation into alleged collusion between the campaign and the Russian government, but doesn’t plan on bringing any evidence to court regarding that charge in the trial starting July 31.

"The government does not intend to present at trial evidence or argument concerning collusion with the Russian government," Assistant US Attorney Uzo Asonye wrote in a document filed with the court earlier this month.

Instead, the most serious charge Manafort faces is bank fraud (and a lot of it). US District Judge T.S. Ellis III is overseeing the trial hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, in the Washington metro area.

Specifically, Asonye said prosecutors planned to furnish evidence showing that Manafort obtained $16 million in loans in a quid pro quo deal with banker Stephen Calk, who wanted to work in the Trump administration and saw Manafort as a path to achieve that goal.

Workplace safety incidents have been a major topic of discussion at certain high-flying companies over the last couple of months, but one of the names that hasn’t recently been mentioned has been Amazon. With the release of a new report by The Guardian early this week, that may very well change.

Amazon employees who suffer workplace safety incidents may be forgotten and left behind - with one report of a woman who was literally left "homeless", living in her car in a fulfillment warehouse parking lot and going "days without eating". Other employees claim that Amazon has failed to accept their workman's compensation filings and that the company has tried to "settle" with them for a pittance in a manner that absolves Amazon of all liability.

The new expose published over the weekend came just days after it was widely reported that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' net worth had eclipsed $150 billion after Amazon stock rallied to all time highs after its most recent earnings report.

This year’s BRICS Summit was a big show. No question. The main event was provided by Turkish President cum Dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Erdogan wants to a a “T” to the acronym, making them the BRICTS.

Erdogan also made it very clear Turkey’s shift away from the West will proceed faster if the bullying and marginalization continue. For months now, Turkey has struggled with a crashing Lira and sovereign bond market.

The poster child for the unfolding sovereign debt crisis.

The Trump Administration knows that Turkey is slipping from its grasp. Do you ever wonder why certain countries’ currencies get trashed when others with worse balance sheets or balance of trade don’t?

You should. Because asking that simple question will lead you to asking “Why X? Why Now?”

And in Turkey’s case it is for many reasons.

Countries of the NATO military alliance have been ordered by President Trump to increase their spending on weapons, and the reasons for his insistence they do so are becoming clearer.

It’s got nothing to do with any defence rationale, because, after all, the Secretary General of the US-NATO military alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, has admitted that “we don’t see any imminent threat against any NATO ally” and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute recorded in its 2018 World Report that “at $66.3 billion, Russia’s military spending in 2017 was 20 per cent lower than in 2016.”

Even Radio Free Europe, the US government's anti-Russia broadcaster, records that Russia has reduced its defence spending.

There is demonstrably no threat whatever to any NATO country by Russia, but this is considered irrelevant in the context of US arms’ sales, which are flourishing and being encouraged to increase and multiply.

Authored by Burak Bekdil via The Gatestone Institute,

Where would you like your daughter to be when she is 13? In school, or in bed with a grown man? The answer to this question is largely beyond argument in much of the world. In Islamic societies, however -- including non-Arab and theoretically secular Turkey -- the answer is anyone's guess. Usually in such states, the police power of the government does not fight the patriarchal tradition; instead, it supports it.

Turkey's president from 2007 to 2014, was a 30-year-old man when he married his wife Hayrünnisa (right) when she was 15 years old. (Photo by NATO press office via Getty Images)

Authored by Jonathan Turley via The Hill

Paul Manafort gambles against all odds at trial

Hunter Thompson once decried the fleeting fortunes of gamblers as “tomorrow's blinking toads, dumb beasts with no hope.” Paul Manafort is about to discover if he is one of those “blinking toads.” The trial of the former Trump presidential campaign chairman in Virginia, on more than a dozen criminal counts of tax fraud, bank fraud and reporting violations, is about to begin. Rather than take a plea, Manafort has taken the gamble of a trial and the lingering chance of a pardon.

So, desperate for revenue, the local government has been relying on an old tactic to get their hands on every spare penny they can.

The city of Philadelphia owns the local gas company - Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW). It’s essentially a local government monopoly.

And over the last few years, PGW developed an automated system to comb its billing records, find delinquent accounts, and file a lien on those properties.

If you’re not familiar with real estate law, a ‘lien’ is a formally-registered security interest in which your property serves as collateral for a debt.

When you borrow money from the bank to buy a home, for example, the bank registers a lien over your home for the value of the mortgage.

The lien prevents you from selling the home until you satisfy the debt. It also means that if you don’t pay the debt, the lienholder (the bank, or the gas company) can seize the property.

Iran's currency traded at a fresh record-low of 119,000 to the dollar on Tuesday, a loss of nearly two-thirds of its value since the start of the year as US sanctions loom.

The Iranian rial has been crashing in recent days as the country anxiously awaits the reimposition of full US sanctions, starting on August 6.

It hit 100,000 to the dollar for the first time on Sunday and continued its decline, losing 18 percent of its value in less than two days.

On January 1, the dollar was worth 42,900 rials.

The government has been in crisis mode, replacing its central bank chief last week.

The central bank issued a statement on Monday, blaming the currency volatility on the "enemies' conspiracy" and vowing fresh counter-measures "in the coming days".