“We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”—Rod Serling

Have you noticed how much life increasingly feels like an episode of The Twilight Zone?

Only instead of Rod Serling’s imaginary “land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas,” we’re trapped in a topsy-turvy, all-too-real land of corruption, brutality and lies, where freedom, justice and integrity play second fiddle to political ambition, corporate greed, and bureaucratic tyranny.

It’s not merely that life in the American Police State is more brutal, or more unjust, or even more corrupt. It’s getting more idiotic, more perverse, and more outlandish by the day.

One DNA-matching company has decided it's going to corner an under-served market: US law enforcement. FamilyTreeDNA -- last seen here opening up its database to the FBI without informing its users first -- is actively pitching its services to law enforcement.

The television spot, to air in San Diego first, asks anyone who has had a direct-to-consumer DNA test from another company, like 23andMe or Ancestry.com, to upload a copy so that law enforcement can spot any connections to DNA found at crime scenes.

The advertisement features Ed Smart, father of Elizabeth Smart, a Salt Lake City teen who was abducted in 2002 but later found alive. “If you are one of the millions of people who have taken a DNA test, your help can provide the missing link,” he says in the spot.

Ecuador’s president is threatening to soon decide on Julian Assange’s refuge after his government falsely accused WikiLeaks of publishing files about a scandal that threatens to bring the president down, as Elizabeth Vos reports.

Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno said Tuesday he would decide “in the short term” the fate of Julian Assange after claiming that WikiLeaks had “repeatedly violated” the terms of Assange’s asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy by commenting on a scandal linking a Panamanian investment company with Moreno and his family.

Those conditions, or protocol, were imposed by Ecuador on Assange in March 2018 and bar him from commenting publicly on political matters in exchange for being allowed to remain a refugee in the embassy. Assange never agreed to the protocol, which contradicts international refugee law guaranteeing freedom of expression.

The cast of characters will be familiar to observers of secret intelligence operations.

The embassy burglars sought information, a la Watergate. Unlike Watergate, they came by day. They invaded the Embassy in a quiet residential neighborhood, assaulted the staff, tied people up, and demanded computers and files.

A BBC report says they were especially interested in former ambassador to Madrid, Kim Hyok-chol, a confidante of Kim Jong-un.

He was a natural target for those seeking intelligence about North Korea’s nuclear program. In February Thae Yong-ho, a former North Korean diplomat who defected to South Korea in 2016, described him as nuclear expert.

“At a very young age, Kim Hyok Chol was placed on the task force that wrote the drafts for North Korea’s nuclear strategy documents at its foreign ministry,” Thae told reporters at a news conference in Seoul.

El Pais on the possible motive for the brazen attack:

Joe Biden appears to have made a major tactical error last year when he bragged to an audience of foreign policy experts how he threatened to hurl Ukraine into bankruptcy if their top prosecutor, General Viktor Shokin, wasn't immediately fired, according to The Hill's John Solomon.

In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. -The Hill

"I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’" bragged Biden, recalling the conversation with Poroshenko.

Facebook users are being interrupted by an interstitial demanding they provide the password for the email account they gave to Facebook when signing up. “To continue using Facebook, you’ll need to confirm your email,” the message demands. “Since you signed up with [email address], you can do that automatically …”

A form below the message asked for the users’ “email password.”

“That’s beyond sketchy,” security consultant Jake Williams told the Daily Beast. “They should not be taking your password or handling your password in the background. If that’s what’s required to sign up with Facebook, you’re better off not being on Facebook.”

At this point, the most unsettling thing about Facebook is that it keeps churning out the apologies and promises as it descends to abuses that would have seems impossible to get away with even a few years ago. It's a wolf with a tiny, creepy sheep mask balanced on its snout that far too many journalists feel bound to respect.

The Trump administration’s recent recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the contested Golan Heights territory is part of a larger effort by the White House to open new fronts in efforts to combat Iranian militants and terror proxies in the region, according to U.S. officials familiar with the decision.

President Donald Trump won plaudits from the pro-Israel community and allies on Capitol Hill when he announced that America would officially recognize the Golan territory on Israel’s northern border as belonging to the Jewish state, which annexed the area following war with Syria several decades ago.

U.S. officials last week faced down critics of this decision at the United Nations, a forum unfriendly to the Jewish state, telling member countries that the Trump administration will take every step necessary to protect Israel’s right to self defense against Iranian militants and Hezbollah fighters who have used the Golan area to launch terrorist attacks on Israel.

Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Venezuela is home to the largest oil deposits in the world, which makes the political stakes involved much higher than they would be otherwise. Enter Juan Guaidó, Washington’s puppet leader in Caracas, who will be attempting to rally the country against legitimate (i.e., democratically elected by the people) President Nicolas Maduro next month.

Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó has announced that April 6 will kick off a nationwide "tactical actions" as part of the so-called Operation Freedom protests, which are designed to oust President Nicolas Maduro.

"On April 6 will be the first tactical actions of the # Operation Freedom across the country," Guaidó declared over Twitter this week.

"That day we must be ready, prepared and organized, with the Aid and Freedom Committees already formed. The rescue of Venezuela is in our hands!"

Is this the start of Maidan 2.0?

Multiple whistleblowers have come forward claiming that Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) safety inspectors were not properly trained and did not hold valid certifications on the Boeing 737 Max aircraft, according to a letter to FAA Acting Administrator Daniel Elwell from Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS).

"Allegations from these whistleblowers include information that numerous FAA employees, including those involved in the Aircraft Evaluation Group (AEG) for the Boeing 737 Max, had not received proper training and valid certifications," the letter reads.

"Some of these FAA employees were possibly involved as participants on the Flight Standardization Board (FSB)," a group formed to evaluate the 737 Max 8 to determine requirements to rate pilots, develop minimum training recommendations, and to ensure "initial flightcrew member competency."

Joe Biden appears to have made a major tactical error last year when he bragged to an audience of foreign policy experts how he threatened to hurl Ukraine into bankruptcy if their top prosecutor, General Viktor Shokin, wasn't immediately fired, according to The Hill's John Solomon.

In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. -The Hill

And why would Biden want the "son of a bitch" fired?

In what must be an amazing coincidence, the prosecutor was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into a natural gas firm - which Biden's son, Hunter, sat on the board of directors.

Show Me The Big Picture

A hefty case can be made that the Empire of Chaos currently has no allies; it’s essentially surrounded by an assortment of vassals, puppets and comprador 5th columnist elites professing varied degrees of – sometimes reluctant – obedience.

The Trump administration’s foreign policy may be easily deconstructed as a crossover between The Sopranos and late-night comedy – as in the whole episode of designating State Department/CIA regime change, lab experiment Random Dude as President of Venezuela. Legendary cultural critic Walter Benjamin would have called it “the aestheticization of politics,” (turning politics into art), as he did about the Nazis, but this time it’s the Looney Tunes version.

n a further blow to US-Saudi ties, reports emerged this weekend on the October murder of Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi kill team. The kill team’s leader, Maher Mutreb, and other members, had apparently been trained by the US government in the past.

It’s a familiar story, heard often enough when the US aligns itself with a country with a flimsy human rights record. The trainees were part of ongoing routine training operations meant to increase the ties of rank and file Saudi figures with the US security state.

During his training Mutreb, a colonel in the Saudi apy agency, apparently went so far as to try to befriend Khashoggi, likely gathering more intelligence on him, but likely also making his murder all the more uncomfortable.

Turkey’s ruling party, the AKP, lost in a big way in the weekend’s local elections, results that had many suggesting that President Erdogan’s attempt to make local voting a referendum on his rule a strategic error.

The AKP, however, is spinning the losses as simple “mistakes,” and with major losses in the big cities of Istanbul and Ankara, the results are being presented as temporary, with AKP fully expecting to appeal enough to get handed those cities in court

Appeals are expected in every distinct of the capital city, as well as in much of Istanbul, where the loss came down to an estimated 0.28 percentage points. Officials see any recounts or appeals as virtually certain to benefit the incumbent party.

With turnouts well above 80%, this was clearly a major election for Turkey, where Erdogan has increased his own powers while severely limiting the parliament, and local officials.

"The Christchurch „massacre" is our chance to destroy the power of mainstream media narratives. Although in most cases I usually reject the classification of terror attacks as hoaxes, this one seems to be such a false flag non-incident. And it threatens all of us truthers. The looming threat for us to be muzzled by increasingly rigid internet legislation is now spread by the mainstream media on a daily basis since 15th March.

We have to fight this shutdown. We do that best by eventually (!) once (!) clarifying/solving one - THIS- "terror" case completely."

Al Jazeera has obtained exclusive footage that proves the presence of child soldiers in the recruitment camps of the Saudi-UAE-led coalition fighting in Yemen.

The children, desperately poor, are being recruited to fight along the Saudi border to defend it from the Houthis, a rebel group that overran the capital, Sanaa, and large swaths of Yemen's northwest in 2014.

In 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) formed a coalition to overthrow the Houthis - plunging Yemen into a ruinous war - supported by forces loyal to the country's internationally recognised government.

The conflict has created the world's worst humanitarian crisis, pushing Yemen to the brink of famine and leaving about 80 percent of its population - 24 million people - in need of humanitarian assistance.

According to US Central Command, at least six airstrikes were carried out by US forces over the past week in Yemen. The strikes were intended to targeted the local al-Qaeda affiliate in al-Bayda Province.

As usual, Centcom offered no casualty data or any details of who was hit, or who was even the intended target. Bayda is known as a major haven for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) but strikes into the province aren’t necessarily productive to that US air war.

The reason Centcom discussed the matter at all seems to have been to clarify that this was part of an anti-al-Qaeda campaign, and not in any way related to the Saudi invasion of Yemen. Despite that, Centcom says that the operation was coordinated with the Saudi-backed government.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a progressive Democrat who is the co-chairman of the 2020 Democrat presidential campaign for Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview that he hopes a bipartisan coalition comes together to work with President Donald Trump to end a number of wars and U.S. military conflicts worldwide.
Ro Khanna argued that if the United States stops its backing of Saudi Arabia in Yemen’s civil war, finally ends the war in Afghanistan, withdraws troops from Syria once and for all, resists temptations by some to get militarily involved in Venezuela, and completes successful peace negotiations with North Korea, then the United States could better invest resources wasted abroad into rebuilding America’s infrastructure.

TN has repeatedly warned that the China model of Technocracy and Scientific Dictatorship was coming to America, and here it is. Detroit, New Orleans and San Diego are all bent on total surveillance of their citizens. ? TN Editor
The push to turn America’s cities into Chinese-style surveillance networks has found a new partner in Detroit, Michigan

The only difference between what is happening in San Diego and what is happening in Detroit is, they are not using the same smart street lights to spy on everyone. Detroit uses Intellistreets a company known to have strong ties to Homeland Security.

What started out as a ‘voluntary’ police-cam share program in Saginaw, Michigan has morphed into a massive 1000 surveillance camera network which includes 500 businesses in Detroit.

Detroit’s Project Green Light, spies on people in real-time at gas stations, retail stores and public housing.

Trump’s decision not only preserves the status quo and legitimises Israel’s occupation, but is also tantamount to declaring war on international norms, represented by the UN and international law. At a stroke he has imposed the law of the jungle on the Middle East and its people.

Whether the Golan Heights was sold for money or a guarantee of the presidency for Hafez Al-Assad, or both, is not really the issue. Either way, the betrayal is clear. The result was Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights and Hafez Al-Assad becoming president after his military coup against President Nureddin Al-Atassi in 1971.

The annual income gains of Petro Poroshenko, who is currently fighting for a second presidential term in Ukraine, saw a nearly hundredfold surge in 2018, the president’s tax documents reveal.
According to the Ukrainian unified register of asset and income declarations, Poroshenko’s fortune totaled 1.56 billion hryvnia (US$57 million) over 12 months through March 31, which is 95 times as much as he reported in the same period a year ago. In 2017, Poroshenko’s gains reportedly reached 16.3 million hryvnia ($600,000).

Most of Poroshenko’s income – around $40.4 million – reportedly comes from return on investment in Zurich-based Rothschild Trust Schweiz, a trust subsidiary of Rothschild Bank AG. The Ukrainian president also earned $14.7 million in profit from the Prime Assets Capital investment fund, while returns on domestic government loan bonds amounted to nearly a million dollars.

Facebook has deleted 712 accounts and 390 pages in India and Pakistan for “inauthentic behavior”, it said on Monday, many linked to India’s opposition Congress party days before a national election, and others related to Pakistan’s military.

Since the dawn of civilization, powerful individuals have controlled the stories people tell themselves about who they are, who’s in charge, how a good citizen behaves, what groups should be loved, what groups should be hated, and what’s really going on in the world. When you study what we call history, you’re mostly just reading the ancient proto-propaganda of whatever kingdom happened to win the last war during that period of time. When you study what we call religion, you’re mostly reading stories that were advanced by ancient governments explaining why the people should be meek, forgiving taxpayers instead of rising up and killing their wealthy exploiters.

Two weeks after a chemical storage complex near Houston erupted in flames and menaced tens of thousands of people with dangerous fumes, the site remains too hazardous for investigators to approach.

Intercontinental Terminal Co. is still trying to drain millions of gallons of volatile oil byproducts from tanks damaged in the four-day blaze that began on March 17. The ground around the tanks is also saturated in dangerous fluids, severely restricting access to the facility 20 miles (32 kilometers) east of downtown Houston. On Friday, the company said they may be able to allow some access early this week.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (“EPIC”), a civil liberties group based in Washington D.C., filed an amicus brief in the United States vs. Wilson case concerning Google scanning billions of users’ files for unlawful content and then sending that information to law enforcement agencies.

BYPASSING THE FOURTH AMENDMENT
EPIC alleges that law enforcement is using Google, a private entity, to bypass the Fourth Amendment, which requires due process and probable cause before “searching or seizing” someone’s property.

As a private entity, Google doesn’t have to abide by the Fourth Amendment as the government has to, so it can do those mass searches on its behalf and then give the government the results. The U.S. government has been increasingly using this strategy to bypass Fourth Amendment protections of U.S. citizens and to expand its warrantless surveillance operations further.

IMAGE HASHES VS. IMAGE MATCHES

Jussie Smollett isn't alone in trying to fake a hate crime for personal or selfish reasons. Hate crime hoaxes happen more often than many well-meaning Americans probably realize, and often they're orchestrated as part of a trend intended to provoke hysteria and panic. Sometimes, innocent conservatives guilty of nothing more than living in the area where the "crimes" allegedly occurred are falsely accused of carrying out the attacks, and subjected to a storm of online threats and abuse. The political subtext of these false reports is easy to spot. Just like the Smollett case, they're intended to portray Trump supporters and conservatives as violent bigots and homophobes willing to indiscriminately target members of the trans and gay communities.

...this latest effort is hamfisted in the extreme, and may have the effect of splintering the internet beyond what seemed possible even a few years ago. In the wake of GDPR’s passage, Europeans couldn’t visit the websites of some US publishers for months as new privacy frameworks were put into place. That sort of thing may be about to become a lot more common. The time has now come to speak of the internets, plural. And to get around, you might just need a passport.

Basically, as Newton notes, it just might not be worth it for many sites to serve EU visitors:

Leading Democratic senators are expected to introduce a constitutional amendment Tuesday to abolish the Electoral College, adding momentum to a long-shot idea that has been gaining steam among 2020 presidential candidates.

Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii plans to introduce the measure, along with Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2-ranking Democrat in the Senate, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Also signed on to the legislation is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, one of a growing number of presidential candidates who have called for electing presidents by popular vote, even though changing the Constitution is seen as virtually impossible today.

A constitutional amendment may be proposed by a two-thirds supermajority in both the House (about 290 votes) and Senate (67 votes) and requires ratification by 38 states.

A group of American hackers who once worked for United States intelligence agencies helped the United Arab Emirates spy on a BBC host, the chairman of Al Jazeera and other prominent Arab media figures during a tense 2017 confrontation pitting the UAE and its allies against Qatar, a Reuters investigation has found.

The American operatives worked for Project Raven, a secret Emirati intelligence programme that spied on dissidents, fighters and political opponents of the UAE monarchy. A Reuters investigation in January revealed Project Raven's existence and inner workings, including the fact that it surveilled a British activist and several unnamed US journalists.

Gone are the days when you could use a "slug" to purchase a can of soda, because today's vending machines will know who you are and your criminal record before you purchase an item.

American Green Vending Machine (AGM) uses finger vein readers to identify each customer.

"The American Green Smart System is an age verification system that allows the opportunity of merchandising and selling age restricted products. American Green’s technology interface is one of a kind and does some pretty cool things such as vein verification biometrics."

Customers must register their personal biometrics and information with AGM before they are allowed to purchase anything.

What makes this story so disturbing, is corporate America's rush to put biometric scanners everywhere.

Imagine in the not too distant future, your new car using a built-in TSA biometric scanner to identify you and your family before you even enter a sports stadium.

Ahead of parliamentary elections in Israel next week, a watchdog group claims to have exposed a network of fake accounts supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and slandering his opponents, including false rape accusations.

In a campaign already marred by pending corruption and bribery charges, Netanyahu's Likud party certainly does not need another scandal with eight days left before Israelis head to the polls. Nonetheless, a selectively released report by Noam Rotem and Yuval Adam of social-media watchdog group Big Bots Project claims that a nexus of hundreds of fake accounts has been disseminating messages of support for the ruling party, while maliciously attacking their opponents. While it is difficult to say exactly how many fake accounts were actually involved, the project identified at least 400.

An Israeli watchdog has said that it found a network of social media bots disseminating messages in support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of next week’s elections. Noam Rotem and Yuval Adam, two researchers operating the Big Bots Project, said in a report published on Monday that they uncovered hundreds of fake accounts spreading messages in support of Netanyahu’s Likud party and smearing his opponents. Israelis head to the polls in eight days, and Netanyahu is seeking a fifth term in office.

I met journalist and friend Rafiq Lutf and cameraman Abdul-Mun’aim Arnous in January 2018 and I was honoured when Rafiq asked me to work with him on his film project, The Veto.

As Dr Shaaban said to me in August 2016, “Western propaganda is paid for in Syrian blood”. This is true. The horrifying bloodshed and loss of life in Syria could never have happened without the colonial media manufacturing consent for another illegal war against a Sovereign nation.

The Veto tracks the evolution of the propaganda campaign waged by Western media against Syria. From Baba Amr in Homs 2011/2012 until the modern day “propaganda construct” – the NATO-member-state funded White Helmets. It honours Russia and China’s vetoes that have consistently defended Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the UN.

On March 25, a group of fringe neocons and alt-rightists surfaced in Washington to declare propaganda war against China. The group, led by Steve Bannon, Frank Gaffney, Fred Fleitz, General Jerry Boykin and a handful of others, announced the formation of the Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC). The original Committee on the Present Danger was launched in the mid-1950s to spread the call for a Cold War arms buildup, but was soon shut down when President Eisenhower, an opponent of the group, coopted several leading members into his administration and effectively ended it. A second iteration of CPD surfaced in 1976 and did play a role in electing Ronald Reagan as President. A mid-2000s version never got off the ground. Not much chance of the current version--CPD 4.0--faring any better.

The FBI, CIA and NSA claim that the DNC emails published by WIKILEAKS on July 22, 2016 were obtained via a Russian hack, but more than three years after the alleged “hack” no forensic evidence has been produced to support that claim. In fact, the available forensic evidence contradicts the official account that blames the leak of the DNC emails on a Russian internet “intrusion”. The existing evidence supports an alternative explanation--the files taken from the DNC between 23 and 25May 2016 and were copied onto a file storage device, such as a thumb drive.

Costco has reportedly decided to stop selling Roundup weedkiller after a federal jury in San Francisco awarded more than $80 million to 70-year-old California man, Edwin Hardeman, who was diagnosed with cancer after spraying the herbicide on his property for decades.

The country's media regulator accused the BBC of broadcasting content which "put national cohesion and reconciliation at stake" while charging VOA with employing an opposition figure wanted in connection with violence that preceded a May 2015 coup attempt.

The landlocked Central African country of Burundi has banned the BBC and indefinitely suspended the Voice of America*, accusing the international UK and US outlets of spreading "lies" and disinformation.

In a statement put out on Friday, Burundi's media regulator said it revoked the British Broadcasting Corporation's license over a lack of "proper measures" taken following the airing of a documentary which authorities said contained falsehoods, including allegations that members of the intelligence services engaged in the detention and torture of dissidents.

Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” host Jake Tapper told President Donald Trump’s Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney he was unaware of anything those on his network got wrong while reporting on the Mueller probe.

Mulvaney said, “We need to figure out what went wrong with the Mueller report, why, in all fairness to your network, why the media got it so wrong for so long.”

Tapper said, “I’m not sure what you’re saying the media got wrong. The media reported that the investigation was going on. Other than the people in the media on the left, not on this network, I don’t know anybody who got anything wrong. We didn’t say there was conspiracy. We said that Mueller was investigating conspiracy.”

Then suggests we don't know if the Mueller report exonerates Trump.

In a deposition last June for a lawsuit related to the dossier, former British spy Christopher Steele acknowledged that his infamous report could be the product of Russian disinformation. But Steele, a former MI6 officer who worked in Moscow, dismissed the possibility that he was hoodwinked by Russian operatives who planted anti-Trump dirt.

“All material contained this risk, but that any information that was actually provided would have been subject to scrutiny in respect of this risk,” Steele said in a June 18, 2018 deposition for a lawsuit against BuzzFeed, the original publisher of the dossier.

In other words, Steele believed that he had enough experience dealing with Russian sources that he could spot Kremlin attempts to provide him disinformation.

The first extraordinary action came on March 26, 2019, when Courthouse News published the article “FBI Accused of Omitting Evidence From 9/11 Report,” which — to the astonishment of many — offered fair coverage of the lawsuit filed one day earlier by the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and 9/11 family member Bob McIlvaine.

In this rare deviation from the media’s dogmatic denigration of any person who questions the government account of 9/11 (and who refuses to believe that miracles took place that day), Courthouse News reporter Jennifer Hijazi committed the cardinal sin of failing to refer to the plaintiffs as “truthers” or “conspiracy theorists.” She also neglected to question their mental state or to dismiss out-of-hand the validity of their case against the FBI. Practicing objective journalism, she accurately quoted from the complaint and from her interview with attorney Mick Harrison.

An Israeli watchdog group has found a network of hundreds of social media accounts, many of them fake, used to smear opponents of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in next week’s election and to amplify the messages of his Likud party, the New York Times reported citing an independent organisation known as the Big Bots Project.

The watchdog said that “the network operates through manipulations, slander, lies and spreading rumours” and that “on its busiest days, the network sends out thousands of tweets a day.”

The network’s activity is said to have intensified almost fivefold since the election was called in December, and “is mobilized at climactic moments for Netanyahu, such as the announcement of the indictment against him.”

It’s suspected that the network may have violated Israeli laws pertaining to elections, campaign finance, privacy and taxation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman has accused Palestinian women protesting in Gaza of being affiliated to Daesh, in a renewed bid to smear demonstrators participating in the Great March of Return.

Ofir Gendelman, the prime minister’s spokesman for Arab media, tweeted a picture of veiled women holding Palestinian flags this weekend, alleging they were members of Daesh, claiming this was evidence that Gaza Strip authority Hamas was also part of the terror group in Iraq and Syria.

Last weekend, I published a book chapter criticizing the Russiagate narrative, claiming it was a years-long press error on the scale of the WMD affair heading into the Iraq war.

Obviously (and I said this in detail), the WMD fiasco had a far greater real-world impact, with hundreds of thousands of lives lost and trillions in treasure wasted. Still, I thought Russiagate would do more to damage the reputation of the national news media in the end.

A day after publishing that excerpt, a Attorney General William Barr sent his summary of the report to Congress, containing a quote filed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

No one has ever seen anything like it.

A highly over-rated but high-profile Hollywood actor pays for and commits a repugnant hate crime in the dark of night, the cops nail him on every angle, and the perp(s) gets off scot-free.

You can hear the baseless justifications from LA to Chicago to NYC: They’ll say it was a victimless crime where the only one hurt was Jussie Smollett himself.

That’s exactly how the Left thinks … especially the Deep State liberals who populate the highest echelons of today’s “Criminal Injustice System”.

However, this Chicago-LA-DC crime spree is a LOT deeper and broader than anyone knows. Here’s the short story as well as hidden back story to SMOLLETTgate.

Democrats and the establishment media are floating conspiracy theories about special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation in order to discredit his finding of no collusion.

Mueller delivered his report to Attorney General Bill Barr last weekend, and Barr sent a letter to Congress summarizing the report’s principal findings: no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and no conclusion on obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump.

After President Donald Trump called Congressman Adam Schiff a “pencil neck,” MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch attacked the president, by saying he was “one of the most repulsive” looking human beings he has ever seen.

“When he started with the ‘pencil neck’ Adam Schiff, it reminds me, and it’s just — sometimes we laugh. And I’ve said this before on the show, he’s just disgusting to look at,” Deutsch said On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Friday.
“He’s obese. I wish we could put out that picture of him from behind, playing tennis or playing golf. He’s one of the [most] repulsive physically looking human I’ve ever seen.

Not since the witchcraft hysteria of the Middle Ages have we seen such a display of human idiocy, credulity and absurdist behavior. I refer, of course, to the two-year witch hunt directed against President Donald Trump which hopefully just concluded last week – provided that the Hillaryites, Democratic dopes and secret staters who fueled this mania don’t manage to keep the pot boiling.

This column has said from Day 1 that claims Trump was somehow a Russian agent were absurd in the extreme. So too charges that Moscow had somehow rigged US elections. Nonsense. We know it’s the US that helps rig elections around the globe, not those bumbling Russians who can’t afford the big bribes such nefarious activity requires.