CNN abandoned journalism and became a propaganda ministry for the Democratic National Committee and the corrupt upper echelons of the CIA and FBI. After three years of telling the most outrageous lies ever associated with an alleged news organization in an alleged democracy, CNN’s viewership collapsed. CNN turned propaganda ministry saw its primetime viewers shrink by 40%. Even insouciant Americans could see that CNN was nothing but a lie factory.

One would have thought CNN would have learned a lesson. But apparently not. The scum or fools, whichever it is, that runs CNN decided instead to tell even more lies. The propaganda ministry concocted an even less believable story than the ones that had driven away 40% of CNN viewers. The story “reported” by Alex Marquardt goes as follows:

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

SOURCE: ZEROHEDGE

Authored by William Hartung via TomDispatch.com,

When, in his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the “unwarranted influence” wielded by the “military-industrial complex,” he could never have dreamed of an arms-making corporation of the size and political clout of Lockheed Martin.

In a good year, it now receives up to $50 billion in government contracts, a sum larger than the operating budget of the State Department. And now it’s about to have company.

SOURCE: ARSTECHNICA.COM

Between 2006 and 2012, opioid drug makers and distributors flooded the country with 76 billion pills of oxycodone and hydrocodone—highly addictive opioid pain medications that sparked the epidemic of abuse and overdoses that killed nearly 100,000 people in that time period.

As the epidemic surged over the seven-year period, so did the supply. The companies increased distribution from 8.4 billion in 2006 to 12.6 billion in 2012, a jump of roughly 50%. In all, the deluge of pills was enough to supply every adult and child in the country with around 36 opioid pills per year. Just a 10-day supply can hook 1 in 5 people into being long-term users, researchers have determined.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has spoken out about the death of a Democratic National Committee staffer killed nearby his Washington D.C. home.

In the past, Assange hinted Seth Rich may have been a WikiLeaks informant, and in an exclusive interview with Fox News' Megyn Kelly, he revealed even more.

But once again, Assange skirted the question of whether Rich was an informant in the interview. He would only say he was concerned about any potential sources who would try to help WikiLeaks in its endeavors.

Kelly also questioned Assange about WikiLeaks' involvement with the Russians in American politics and his view of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, including what information he may have on Trump and if it will ever be released.

But the exchange with Kelly about the D.C. murder of the 27-year-old Democratic National Committee employee revealed some interesting information.

Five years ago, on 17 July 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down approximately 30 miles from the Ukrainian-Russian border, while fighting raged below between Western-supported groups and “Moscow-backed separatists”.

During late afternoon local time 298 people, including crew members, lost their lives when the scheduled passenger aircraft was blown out of the sky. In the following time, some of the dead were found scattered in the surrounding sunflower fields.

Many reports later emanated from Western media, without necessary supporting evidence, claiming that “Russian-sponsored militants” were responsible for firing a Buk surface-to-air missile at the plane. Buk missile systems are in fact under possession of both Moscow and Kiev.

Almost 200 of those killed were of Dutch nationality – with the aircraft itself, a 64 metre long Boeing 777-200ER, having intended to reach Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, after departing Amsterdam about three hours before.

No doubt that the plane was taken out by a missile, but the media changed that to an “unexplained” explosion of one of the fuel tanks.

Air traffic controllers saw it happen on their radar screens. Thousands of people saw it and over 100 eye witnesses – including pilots, former military people, fishermen – came forward.

The FBI started a legitimate investigation.

Then the CIA got involved…and the story changed radically.

The FBI fell in the line and the New York Times printed whatever the CIA told them to print.

The British public were subjected to an hour of anti-Palestine propaganda by the BBC last week when it aired a Panorama programme on the “anti-Semitism” row within the Labour Party. The public service broadcaster appeared to be doing very little public service when it unleased what was, by any reasonable assessment, a media broadside taken straight from the disinformation rule book.

Received by the mainstream media as though it were the final say on the anti-Semitism row that has rocked the Labour Party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015, the public have been duped into submitting to the dominant narrative. The political party that was born out of a desire to fight inequality and headed now by a leader whose record of fighting for social justice and equality is second to none is, we are led to believe, institutionally anti-Semitic.

On this date in 1996 TWA Flight 800 was shot down south of Long Island.

The government of the United States, despite the embarrassment of having been caught in court rigging lab tests and lying in its reports, still officially attributes the disaster to a spark in the center fuel tank, while government spokespeople insist that the witnesses who saw a missile hit the jumbo jet are all drunks.

Spanish newspaper EL PAÍS reported on July 9 that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was spied on by a Spanish private defense and security firm called Undercover Global S.L., when he lived in the Ecuador embassy in the United Kingdom.

The report was based on “documents, video, and audio material” that was “used in an extortion attempt against Assange by several individuals.” In May, Spanish police arrested journalist José Martín Santos, who had a record of fraud, and a computer programmer for their alleged involvement in an “attempt to make €3 million from the sale of private material.”

by Ray McGovern Posted on July 17, 2019

Friday’s surprising report that Robert Mueller had successfully sought an extra week to prepare for his House testimony on Russiagate (now set for July 24) must have come as scary news to those of his fans who can put two and two together. Over the past few weeks, it has become clearer that each of the two frayed findings of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has now come apart at the seams.

How to Avoid Eating Crow

As the truth seeps out, there will be plenty of crow to go around. To avoid eating it, the Democrats on the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, the stenographers who pass for journalists at the Times and Post, and the “Mueller team” will need all the time they can muster to come up with imaginative responses to two recent bombshell revelations from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

As the nominee for Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper is set to inherit just a whole slew of US wars around the world. His long hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee, however, didn’t spend a lot of time talking about wars.

Or indeed any time. Esper was faced with questions about his history as a lobbyist for a major arms maker, and how that was going to fit in to his potential new job. He was asked exactly zero questions about ongoing wars.

Esper assured Senators that he sees “the big picture,” and his focus was heavily on the need for the Senate to spend vastly more on weaponry for the US military, which would be his job as Defense Secretary, and largely just a scaled up version of his lobbying past.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has claimed that Iran has signaled a willingness to negotiate on the matter of ballistic missiles. Other US officials aren’t so sure, and Iranian officials are also telling conflicting stories on the matter.

“Iran’s missiles are absolutely and under no condition negotiable with anyone or any country,” insisted Alireza Miryousefi, the spokesman for Iran’s UN Mission. That is certainly the position Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has long taken.

Yet Pompeo’s belief that talks are possible didn’t come out of thin air. Rather, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif suggested in the US was willing to cut off arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Iran’s missiles might also be up for negotiation.

That’s probably a non-starter,with President Trump so obsessed with growing arms sales, but does point to a grand bargain potentially being on the table, if both sides want it. The problem is, neither side is being very clear if they want it or not.

New Delhi (Sputnik): India says it is working with Russia to overcome payment issues for its strategic imports from that country. Deputy National Security Advisor of India, Ambassador Pankaj Saran said both sides are working on rupee-rouble trade to overcome a crisis caused by US financial sanctions.

Addressing the Second India-Russia Strategic Economic Dialogue in New Delhi on Wednesday, Ambassador Saran said this would help overcome India’s adverse balance of trade with Russia.

“As part of the trading environment, there have been talks about trade in national currencies. This again is still a work in progress and we need to see how we can operationalise and move forward on this idea, because increasingly we see many countries in the world are taking recourse to trading in their own respective currencies", said Ambassador Saran.

ERIC ZUESSE, ORIGINALLY POSTED AT THE SAKER
The success of Turkey’s takeover of Syria’s most pro-jihadist province, Idlib, is making less and less likely that Syria will be able to continue maintaining Idlib as being a part of Syria. (This is something I had predicted, back on 14 September 2018, to be possible or even likely, and now it is actually happening.) On July 10th, Reuters headlined “Assad hits a wall in Syrian war as front lines harden”, and reported that, “More than two months of Russian-backed operations in and around Idlib province have yielded little or nothing for Assad’s side. It marks a rare case of a military campaign that has not gone his way since Russia intervened in 2015. While resisting government attacks, the insurgents have managed to carve out small advances of their own, drawing on ample stocks of guided anti-tank missiles that opposition and diplomatic sources say have been supplied by Turkey.” It continues:

Ehud Barak, who defeated Benjamin Netanyahu in a 1999 election to become Israel's prime minister, has been linked to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Less than three weeks after announcing that he will come out of political retirement to challenge Benjamin Netanyahu for prime minister in the upcoming Israeli elections, as YNet News reported, former prime minister Ehud Barak is facing allegations that he is financially tied to convicted sex offender and shadowy financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a sexual offense with a 14-year-old girl, and was arrested again on July 6 on new sex trafficking charges. Barak, a former lieutenant general in Israel’s army, served as Israel’s 10th prime minister from 1999 to 2001, after defeating Netanyahu, who was then serving his first term as Israeli PM.

Some in the news media have tried in recent days to rekindle their long-lost love affair with former MI6 agent Christopher Steele and his now infamous dossier.

But lest anyone be tempted to think Steele’s 2016 dossier is about to be mysteriously revived as credible, consider this: Over months of work, FBI agents painstakingly researched every claim Steele made about Trump’s possible collusion with Russia, and assembled their findings into a spreadsheet-like document.

The over-under isn’t flattering to Steele.

Multiple sources familiar with the FBI spreadsheet tell me the vast majority of Steele’s claims were deemed to be wrong, or could not be corroborated even with the most awesome tools available to the U.S. intelligence community. One source estimated the spreadsheet found upward of 90 percent of the dossier’s claims to be either wrong, nonverifiable or open-source intelligence found with a Google search.

In other words, it was mostly useless.

Donald Trump has said his administration will probe accusations that Google has been infiltrated after working with China’s military, days after billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel called for the tech giant to be investigated.

The US president tweeted on Tuesday that he would “take a look” at Thiel’s assertion that Google was in cahoots with Beijing and should face a federal investigation. During a speech on Sunday, the co-founder of PayPal urged the FBI and CIA to take action, suggesting that Google may be “thoroughly infiltrated” by Chinese intelligence. Thiel failed to provide evidence when pressed further about his incendiary claims, stressing that he was simply “raising questions” about Google’s relationship with Beijing.

SOURCE: MATT AGORIST @ THE FREE THOUGHT PROJECT
(Support Free Thought) - Tragically, in America, mass shootings — in which murdering psychopaths go on rampages in public spaces — have claimed the lives of 339 people since 2015. While this number is certainly shocking and far too high, during this same time frame, police in America have claimed the lives of 4,355 citizens.

While some of these citizens were armed and dangerous, others were innocent, unarmed, and include small children. Daniel Shaver was one of these people whose life was brought to a screeching halt as he begged on his knees for police not to shoot him. Despite being innocent and unarmed, this father of three was murdered in cold blood by Philip Brailsford who was never held accountable and allowed to retire from the police force with his pension.

SOURCE: RT
A major technical error has caused Europe’s satellite navigation system to be fully offline since Friday, with most satellites powering the Galileo system broken, the EU’s space agency has said.
Europe’s Galileo system was built to replace the US’ GPS system but, since the outage, users are automatically being switched back to the US positioning system. The Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency (GNSS) said in a statement on Sunday that “a technical incident related to its ground infrastructure” had caused the problem.

The incident led to the “temporary interruption” of the Galileo services since Friday, with the exception of the Search and Rescue (SAR) service, which locates people in distress situations at sea or on mountains, GNSS said.

The agency said its experts are working to restore operations “as soon as possible” and that an ‘Anomaly Review Board’ has been set up to analyze the “exact root cause and to implement recovery actions.”

A federal judge in San Francisco on Monday reduced an $80 million award levied against Monsanto Co. to $25 million for a Sonoma County man who claimed the company's Roundup weedkiller caused his non-Hodgkins' lymphoma.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria upheld a jury award of approximately $5 million in compensatory damages to Edwin Hardeman, 70, of Santa Rosa, but said that guidelines in a 2013 Supreme Court decision required him to reduce the jury's $75 million in punitive damages to $20 million.

The ruling leaves Hardeman's total award at $25,267,634. His case was the first to go to trial of more than 1,000 federal lawsuits against Monsanto nationwide.

A former Florida sheriff’s deputy was arrested Wednesday for planting drugs and falsely arresting at least 10 people, including one case where Reason obtained body camera footage showing him lying about the results of roadside field test.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) announced yesterday that, following a months-long investigation, former Jackson County sheriff’s deputy Zach Wester had been arrested and charged with 52 felony crimes, including racketeering, false imprisonment, fabricating evidence, and drug possession.

In a stunning 30-page affidavit, the FDLE laid out how Wester kept unmarked bags of marijuana and meth amphetamines in the trunk of his patrol car, manipulated his body cam footage, planted drugs in people’s cars, and falsified arrest reports to railroad innocent people under the color of law. His victims, many of whom had prior records or were working to stay sober, had their lives upended. One man lost custody of his daughter.

Last week, during a meeting of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, an Army Corps of Engineers official admitted that the agency has been dumping toxic water from Lake Okeechobee into local estuaries without any warning to the public.

For years, this has been an open secret among the area’s residents, who have seen the consequences of this policy on the region’s wildlife, but this is the first time the government has admitted that it is actually happening.

Republican Congressman Brian Mast questioned Maj. Gen. Scott Spellmon of the Army Corps during the meeting, asking him about the water that was being diverted from Lake Okeechobee into estuaries on the coasts of Florida. Mast asked if the water that was dumped into the estuaries contained cyanobacteria.

At Rhode Island Hospital, Phillips learned that his 46-year-old brother had stopped for lunch at a Subway sandwich shop, in Cranston, when he collapsed.

The cause of death was hypertensive cardiovascular disease, according to his death certificate.

In the months since his brother’s death, Phillips — a volunteer firefighter and licensed EMT — has been trying to piece together what happened the day Scott died.

“Being an EMT,” Troy Phillips said, “you just want to know, what happened?”

But he keeps hitting a wall.

Rhode Island is one of about a dozen states that prohibit the release of 911 recordings or transcripts without the written consent of the caller or by court order. The goal generally is to protect the privacy of callers in what may be one of the most stressful moments of their lives.

SOURCE: BALTIMORE SUN
In the wake of Freddie Gray’s death from injuries suffered in police custody and the subsequent protests and rioting in Baltimore in 2015, state lawmakers passed a law mandating police agencies across Maryland report when officers use excessive force or injure someone and cases of officers’ criminal misconduct, among other data.

However, dozens of agencies — including the Baltimore Police Department — never did so. That’s resulted in extreme undercounting of such encounters in annual reports mandated by the law and collated by the Maryland Police Training and Standards Commission.

In 2018, 42 of 148 agencies required to submit data did not, according to the commission.

“There was a misunderstanding here about which unit was responsible for submitting,” said Matt Jablow, a Baltimore Police spokesman, after The Baltimore Sun asked this week about the agency’s failure to comply with the law.

How Israeli-designed drones ended up supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a case study in the complicated relationship between Israel and Russia. Though Russia has been instrumental in protecting the Assad government, which appeared to be on the brink of collapse four years ago, it has also carefully cultivated a military relationship with Israel over the past decade.

After more than seven years of war, the skies over Syria are saturated with aircraft from multiple militaries and armed groups, each pursuing their own goals, including using the country as a weapons-testing ground. American airpower and Kurdish ground forces helped grind the Islamic State’s caliphate down to a tiny pocket before it dramatically collapsed this past spring. Meanwhile, Turkish occupation forces and their proxies are conducting a brutal campaign of repression in the Syrian-Kurdish canton of Afrin.

TOP FBI, DOJ OFFICIALS USE DRUG-CARTEL-STYLE BURNER PHONES TO DODGE FEDERAL INVESTIGATORS, LAWMAKERS.

Members of the FBI and Justice Department’s top brass at their Washington D.C.headquarters and other field offices are now using burner phones to stay under the radar of federal investigators and lawmakers, according to FBI insiders.

The shocking revelations come on the heels of news that the FBI deleted thousands of text messages between anti-Trump FBI agents before investigators could review their content.

While that is disturbing on one level, FBI and DOJ hierarchy employing the telecom habits of drug cartel bosses reaches a new low for the once-heralded federal law enforcement agency and the DOJ. And breaks federal laws as well.

SOURCE: ZEROHEDGE

Tens of millions of Americans in 43 states may have been exposed to toxic fluorinated compounds known as PFAS in their drinking water.

In a report from May, the non-profit Environmental Working Group (EWG) showed how PFAS had exposed upwards of 19 million Americans through contaminated groundwater. EWG found 610 contaminated locations ranging from public water systems, military bases, military and civilian airports, industrial plants, dumps, and firefighter training sites.

Now the environmental advocacy group has identified 58 more military sites where high levels of PFAS used in firefighting foam have been detected in groundwater or drinking water, from Elmendorf Air Force Base and Fort Richardson, Alaska to Fort Eustis, Virginia, reported the Military Times.

It keeps getting worse. The neocons have burrowed termite-deep inside the Trump administration and rumor has it the president will add yet another one to an important cabinet position.

If there is any substance to the latest rumors, DNI Dan Coats will be replaced by Fred Fleitz, former NSC executive secretary, CIA analyst, Trump Chief of Staff, Bolton enforcer, and CEO of the Center for Security Policy.

This last one should send up a huge red flag. CSP is a project launched by Frank Gaffney Jr., an Islamophobe way out on the neocon fringe. During the Trump presidential campaign, I wrote a short ebook (Donald Trump and the War on Islam) about Gaffney, among other neocons and rabid Israel-firsters exacting a corrosive influence on the Trump campaign.
I wrote:

SOURCE: BLOGSPOT.COM

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. Local governments and private corporations are using facial recognition to secretly blacklist people, despite having no valid reason to do so.

A recent article in the Idaho Statesman and in the video above, prove that local governments are using facial recognition to ban residents from accessing city-owned buildings.

The Boise city council claimed that they need facial recognition cameras to protect public employees from disgruntled or unwelcome residents.

Wow, there must be a lot of disgruntled or unhappy residents for the city council to justify putting facial recognition cameras in Boise City Hall and City Hall West, right?

Would you believe both city halls have banned just one single resident because he opposed using city funds to pay for an NBA developmental league team.

Now that the EU's anti-trust regulator is finished fining the bejeezus out of Alphabet, the European Commission is turning its attention to another American tech giant: Amazon.

The e-commerce giant is facing a formal EU anti-trust probe over its treatment of third-party merchants on its platform, a premise that doesn't sound all that different from the EU's investigation into Google's AdSense advertising business (the EU hit Google with three multi-billion anti-trust fines over the past few years). In addition to the Amazon probe, the EU is also juggling investigations into Facebook, Apple and Twitter over violations of the EU's new GDPR privacy laws.

According to WSJ, Amazon is suspected of "abusing its dual role as both the provider of a marketplace where independent sellers can offer products and a retailer of products in its own right." In particular, the probe will explore whether "Amazon is using sensitive data from independent merchants to compete against them."

Why does the global economy need rescuing after 10 years of non stop monetary stimulus?

I also have an answer and it’s an unpleasant one. Because by bailing out markets and economies at every sign of trouble over the past 10 years central banks have given politicians license to do nothing. And nothing is what you get as political discourse fragments and majority solutions are impossible to come by.

But not only are majority solution impossible to get nobody even wants to even talk about them. Why? Because they involve pain. Voters don’t want to hear pain. Hence all you hear is free money. Tax cuts in 2016. Now we hear free college, health care and debt forgiveness for 2020 and who knows maybe more tax cuts.

Nobody wants to campaign on pain. I get it. But does anyone really think solving the structural problems that are behind slowing growth after 10 years of monetary stimulus are easily solvable?

There is a reason James Simons' RenTec is the world's best performing hedge fund - it spots trends (even if they are glaringly obvious) well ahead of almost everyone else, and certainly long before the consensus.

That's what happened with Deutsche Bank, when as we reported two weeks ago, the quant fund pulled its cash from Deutsche Bank as a result of soaring counterparty risk, just days before the full - and to many, devastating - extent of the German lender's historic restructuring was disclosed, and would result in a bank that is radically different from what Deutsche Bank was previously (see "The Deutsche Bank As You Know It Is No More").

Yesterday, prosecutors revealed that Jeffrey Epstein kept a fake Saudi passport in his home’s safe along with diamonds and piles of cash. It also emerged last week that Epstein invested millions in a deal with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak acknowledged to the Daily Beast that he, like other world leaders, visited Epstein’s Island and that he was first introduced to Epstein by Shimon Peres, former Israeli prime minister and president.

Barak’s high-tech company financed by the arch sex trafficker is called Carbyne. The Israeli enterprise develops “call-handling and identification capabilities for emergency response services,” essentially it seeks total access to your phone, its GPS system and its camera. This shouldn’t take us by surprise. By now we know that Epstein was very excited by cameras.

In the wake of Freddie Gray’s death from injuries suffered in police custody and the subsequent protests and rioting in Baltimore in 2015, state lawmakers passed a law mandating police agencies across Maryland report when officers use excessive force or injure someone and cases of officers’ criminal misconduct, among other data.

However, dozens of agencies — including the Baltimore Police Department — never did so. That’s resulted in extreme undercounting of such encounters in annual reports mandated by the law and collated by the Maryland Police Training and Standards Commission.

In 2018, 42 of 148 agencies required to submit data did not, according to the commission.

“There was a misunderstanding here about which unit was responsible for submitting,” said Matt Jablow, a Baltimore Police spokesman, after The Baltimore Sun asked this week about the agency’s failure to comply with the law.

A friend of mine recently commented that if the current trend to reduce the study of history in schools to easily digestible politically correct soundbites that are being successfully pushed by social justice warriors continues, we will soon be limited to discussing how horrible slavery was, the Stonewall Inn riots and the so-called holocaust. Indeed, it seems that those who complain the loudest are the only ones listened to and no one complains more often or at greater volume than American Jewish groups intent on preserving the benefits that are derived from always being able to claim their perpetual victimhood.

World War II was by far the bloodiest and most destructive war in human history. Many people wondered whether all of the death and destruction caused by the war had been necessary.

The so-called Holocaust was used by the Allies to demonize Germany and prove that their war effort was necessary to defeat such an evil nation.

August 5, 2018 marks the one-year anniversary of Ernst Zündel’s passing. He was essentially kidnapped from the U.S. and forced to remain in Germany. His wife, Ingrid Rimland, was unable to leave the U.S. to be with him. She risked jail time in Germany despite having no previous criminal convictions.

His crime? Ernst Zündel was deemed a “security threat.” Not because he was ever violent or ever incited violence, but because he created a legal precedent in which:

For the first time ever, “Holocaust” survivors and “Holocaust” historians were closely and critically questioned under oath about their claims and views.

Few Canadians realize that Zündel did them “a favor by wiping off the books [the] disgraceful False News laws” strangling free-speech.