Why America and Britain Are Self-Destructing (And What the World Can Learn From it)

It’s a striking fact of today’s world that the two rich societies in shocking, swift, sharp decline are America and Britain. Nowhere else in the world, for example, are real income, life expectancy, happiness, and trust all plummeting, apart from maybe Venezuela (No, “but at least we’re not Venezuela!” is not the bar to aim for, my friends.)

Their downfall is, of course, a self-inflicted catastrophe. But the interesting question is: why? And what does it tell us about what it takes to prosper and thrive in the 21st century, which is something that America and Britain clearly aren’t doing, and maybe aren’t capable of doing?

The former general counsel for President Obama made “false and misleading statements” to the Justice Department regarding work he did for the Ukrainian government that has come under scrutiny in the special counsel’s probe.

Greg Craig’s allegedly false statements were revealed in a settlement announced Thursday by the Justice Department. The agency announced it was settling with Craig’s former firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which worked with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on behalf of Ukraine beginning in 2012.

Skadden Arps agreed to register retroactively with the Justice Department as a foreign agent of Ukraine and to pay a $4.6 million fine, the same amount that the firm was paid for its consulting work.

Earlier this month in India, close to five million women literally joined hands in Kerala, a state in the southern part of the country, to form a 385-mile
human chain to demand gender equality. They were protesting right-wing Hindu hotheads who, in defiance of a recent ruling by the country's Supreme Court, were preventing two women from entering an ancient Hindu temple that banned menstruating-age, meaning sexual, women because, as per its lore, they are considered "impure."

Meanwhile, back here in the good old U.S. of A, the third annual Women's March planned for tomorrow is in serious trouble, thanks to irreconcilable political disagreements.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham ranted about “minority privilege” as she attacked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for criticizing her on Twitter.

Ocasio-Cortez wrote last week that Fox News had “crossed a line beyond conservatism and into outright bigotry” with its financing of Ingraham and fellow host Tucker Carlson.

Pakistani officials are reportedly intensifying their efforts to get together US and Taliban negotiators for a new round of peace talks in Afghanistan. They express confidence that they can get the two sides together, but say that any success or failure will depend on the negotiators themselves.

Talks between the two sides were going very well, with talk recently that there would be a deal to establish a new government in Afghanistan which would include Taliban representation. This was part of the reason the US wanted the existing Afghan government to delay their elections.

But in the last couple of weeks, things appear to have soured, as the US has apparently backed away from talk of a pullout, and are now trying to get the Taliban to grant them having “long-term bases” which has the Taliban threatening to withdraw from the talks entirely.

Our greatest of Founding Fathers and our third U.S. president had it right: “When the people fear the government there is tyranny, but when the government fears the people there is liberty!” Knowing that the government over time since our founding as a free nation would grow very corrupt and oppressive, Thomas Jefferson predicted and advocated revolution, even a violent one when necessary – in effect to clean out the swamp that would necessarily seek to gobble up liberty. While he saw some government as necessary evil, he thus had a huge fear about its ultimately enslaving the lives of American citizens, as it had in France, where he also was one of the architects of its bloody revolution.

The Trump administration is evaluating oil sanctions on Venezuela now. The sanctions that are already in place lead to many deaths and make an economic recovery practically impossible, says CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot

October 4th, 2018, was a busy news day. The fight over Brett Kavanuagh’s Supreme Court nomination dominated the cycle. The Trump White House received a supplemental FBI report it said cleared its would-be nominee of wrongdoing. Retired Justice John Paul Stevens meanwhile said Kavanaugh was compromised enough that he was “unable to sit as a judge.”

#NationalTacoDay trended on Twitter. Chris Evans told the world production wrapped on Avengers 4.

The only thing that did not make the news was an announcement by a little-known government body called the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board — FASAB — that essentially legalized secret national security spending. The new guidance, “SFFAS 56 – CLASSIFIED ACTIVITIES” permits government agencies to “modify” public financial statements and move expenditures from one line item to another. It also expressly allows federal agencies to refrain from telling taxpayers if and when public financial statements have been altered.

Some progressives back piling on even more debt to pay for social programs. That could be risky...

Discussions of big government spending programs often revolve around the question of how to pay for them. For example, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez touted her proposal for a 70 percent tax rate on income above $10 million by saying it would help pay for the Green New Deal, a broad package of environmental and economic initiatives.

The U.S. Navy has not ruled out sending an aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait, despite military technology advances by China that pose a greater threat to U.S. warships than ever before, the chief of U.S. naval operations said on Friday.

Washington sent ships through the strategic waterway three times last year as it makes more frequent transits of the strait that separates Taiwan from the Chinese mainland, but it has not dispatched a carrier in more than 10 years.

During that time, China has modernized its forces with missiles designed to strike enemy ships.

“We don’t really see any kind of limitation on whatever type of ship could pass through those waters,” Admiral John Richardson told reporters in the Japanese capital, when asked if more advanced Chinese weapons posed too big a risk.

“We see the Taiwan Strait as another (stretch of) international waters, so that’s why we do the transits.”

With President Trump reserving the possibility that he might pardon former aides indicted by Mueller, Barr’s handling of the Iran-Contra pardons of 1992 is revealing.

The CIA was in real danger. The trials of George and Clarridge promised to be a public relations nightmare or worse.. Sen. Pat Moynihan, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee had introduced a bill to abolish the clandestine service. The Cold War was coming to an end and the agency’s future was in doubt.

In his oral history, Barr urged Bush to pardon the CIA men on the grounds that they were victims of the “criminalization” of foreign policy. When it came to pardoning, Barr said he “favored the broadest” use of the power.

“There were some people arguing just for Weinberger, and I said, No, in for a penny, in for a pound,” Barr recalled.

Hillary Clinton is not on the campaign trail right now, but she still is using her influence to push legalized abortion up to birth.

On Sunday, she announced plans to help New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo push a radical pro-abortion bill in his state.

“I’ll be joining Gov. Cuomo as he lays out his plan to codify Roe v. Wade and pass the Reproductive Health Act,” Clinton wrote on Twitter. “There’s no time to wait.”

Cuomo made no secret of his plans to ram the pro-abortion bill through the state legislature. He said he wants to see it pass within 30 days.

Expressing disbelief at her romantic partner’s dramatic behavioral shift, local woman Emily Kittleson, 30, told reporters Friday that she had not expected her boyfriend’s attempts to recognize and curtail toxic masculinity would eventually turn him into a “weepy little pansy.”

“Christ, I know the dope is trying to be conscious of the effects of his words and actions and to be more open and honest with his emotions, but there’s got to be a limit,” said Kittleson of her boyfriend Shane Magnusen, 31, whose efforts to reject toxic masculinity have begun to irritate her as she claims he has evolved into “a fragile fucking flower about everything” in recent weeks.

President Donald Trump took to a Pentagon podium on Thursday to paint a picture of a gathering storm — a not-too-distant storm of long-range, defense-evading enemy missiles.

“All over, foreign adversaries, competitors, and rogue regimes are steadily enhancing their missile arsenals…Their arsenals are getting bigger and stronger,” Trump said. “They’re increasing their lethal strike capabilities, and they’re focused on developing long-range missiles that could reach targets within the United States.”

In what had otherwise been a strong day for US tech stocks, the Washington Post sent shares of Facebook reeling on Friday afternoon when it reported that the FTC is preparing to follow through with a "record-breaking" fine against the social media giant for violating an agreement with the regulator to safeguard the data privacy of its users.

The fine, which would be the first penalty Facebook has faced since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke nearly one year ago, won't be anywhere near the trillion-dollar penalty that some speculated Facebook could face at the hands of the FTC, but it will be more than the $22.5 million that the FTC hit Google with back in 2012.

The size of the fine was discussed during a recent meeting between the five FTC commissioners, though details aren't yet known. The agency is currently in shut down mode and it's unclear when more information will be known.

An ISIS suicide bombing in Syria’s Manbij killed four US troops. This caused a minor redesign in the narrative from hawkish US politicians and media pundits who were opposed to the US withdrawal from Syria. They’re exactly as opposed as before, only now Manbij is the excuse.

So after weeks of centering their talking points on saving the Kurds from Turkey, the focus now is on the idea that ISIS is emboldened by the announced US pullout, and that continuing the pullout will only make the withdrawing soldiers a target.

Their solution is to keep US troops in Syria, which ironically is also ISIS’ solution. Having lost their caliphate and become a desert-centric insurgency with little territory, the US pullout would be a big blow to ISIS’ already crumbling relevance as an international movement.

Why was Barr chosen, given his shocking and deeply criminal/cover-up kingpin background?

Was Trump duped by Deep State enemies, who have placed another predator into his administration with the power to destroy his presidency? Or has Trump co-opted and turned Barr, in the hopes that Barr will do Trump’s bidding? Why would Barr ever turn against his own Deep State cronies?

Does Trump have a plan? With Barr in place, is Trump signaling to his enemies that “I now own the Deep State”? Or is Barr the Deep State’s ultimate and final weapon against Trump, who remains surrounded by Bush/Clinton “swamp creatures” such as National Security Adviser John Bolton, who is one of Barr’s many fellow Iran-Contra co-conspirators, Vice President Mike Pence (who is in ideal position for a coup against Trump, and remains very cozy with the Clintons, dozens of Obama appointees that remain in place, and Republican “Never Trumpers”, all of whom continue to undermine Trump.

The level of absurdity in US politics has now reached such vertigo inducing levels as to render all manner of things permissible. Contact with the unwashed implies collaboration; discussion with the enemy implies assent. To go to a dinner party with a perceived hostile force in the context of business of diplomacy has become a child’s condemnation of misplaced loyalties. Yet everyday, thousands of engagements are made between powers and interests where nothing other than a hello is exchanged, or a pleasantry. Perhaps the more relevant question to ask here is that businessmen and women in power suggest the limits of the nation state and representation: to what extent can such figures claim to be legitimate as figure who think outside the logic of money and finance?

I am writing to request that both the 1) member states of the UN General Assembly and 2) member states of the Security Council hold hearings, debate and vote on an effective plan of action against various crimes that have been committed by people working for the government of the US that are of significance to the global community.

These crimes include:

The US government’s current (2018) attempts to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicaragua

US government interventionist policies and practices into the internal affairs of most of the member states of the UN (i.e. the US governments long history of being the #1 global bully on Earth)

The US government’s ascendancy to having become the #1 violator of human rights globally and

The Global Surveillance State program of the US secret police (e.g. NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA, DIA, etc.).

Another US regime change undertaking is about to begin. Meanwhile, the Syrian misadventure will, hopefully, end soon and Bashar Al Assad’s enduring presence in Damascus is Washington’s failure writ large.

But that is not stopping the neoconservatives. Washington is beating the war drums again, this time in Latin America.

Venezuela, and its Bolivarian socialist revolution has long irked the United States. And, when on 10th January the re-elected Nicolas Maduro was sworn-in for his second six-year term as President, US imperial vitriol was unleashed, unfettered. The pomp and ceremony was attended by 94 international delegations — among them Russia and China — and the presidents of Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba, and too the celebrating crowds of Venezuelans. Obviously, neither Maduro nor Venezuela is isolated.

A power struggle over the Black Sea between Russia and the US plus NATO has the potential to develop as a seminal plot of the 21st century New Great Game – alongside the current jostling for re-positioning in the Eastern Mediterranean.

By now it’s established the US and NATO are stepping up military pressure from Poland to Romania and Bulgaria all the way to Ukraine and east of the Black Sea, which seems, at least for the moment, relatively peaceful, just as Crimea’s return to Russia starts to be regarded, in realpolitik terms, as a fait accompli.

After a recent series of conversations with top analysts from Istanbul to Moscow, it’s possible to identify the main trends ahead.

US airstrike targeted a group of fleeing civilians outside of the village of Baghouz in eastern Syria on Friday. The attack killed at least 23 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The majority of those slain were civilians, though there are reports that some of the fleeing people were ISIS members. Activists said they believe the majority had been displaced from nearby areas, and were fleeing again.

This comes amid the latest offensive by US-backed Kurdish forces against the three ISIS towns in eastern Syria, and the adjoining villages. These areas have been repeatedly attacked, lost and regained, and every time it leads to a number of displaced civilians.

Militants are preparing a new chemical attack in the Ma’aret al-Nu’man area in the province of Idlib, the Interfax news agency reported on January 15 citing an informed source.

According to the source, militants store toxic chemicals in several warehouses across Idlib province and the far northern part of Lattakia province.

The source stressed that Ajnad al-Caucasus, Jaish al-Izza and the Turkistan Islamic Party, all of which are linked to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, are preparing for a series of synchronized chemical attacks in the provinces of Lattakia, Idlib, Aleppo and Hama. According to the report, militants will use use shells and mortar mines as well as drones loaded with toxic materials.

Turkey on Friday insisted Syrian regime forces should not be allowed in Manbij as US troops withdraw, as proposed by a US-backed Kurdish militia viewed as terrorists by Ankara.

The strategic northern city has been held by the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia since 2016 after they recaptured the territory from Islamic State jihadists.

But Ankara, who says the YPG is a "terrorist offshoot" of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), has repeatedly called for the militia to leave the city.

"The YPG's efforts to stick the regime in Manbij must absolutely not be allowed," Turkish Foreign Ministry Hami Aksoy said during a press conference in Ankara.

Backed by Washington, the militia has spearheaded the fight against IS but was taken aback when President Donald Trump made the shock decision to pull out 2,000 American ground forces from Syria.

Four Americans, including two US soldiers, were killed this week in Manbij in a suicide attack claimed by IS.

From having her vineyard taken over by a caravan of “illegals,” to getting her overseas trip canceled by President Trump, it’s safe to say that Nancy Pelosi is having a pretty bad week.

The Speaker of the House may have finally realized that she’s in for a rough two years.

Political strategist Roger Stone says that the deep state is planning to remove both President Trump and VP Mike Pence from office so that they can install Nancy Pelosi as President as part of a coup that will eventually see Hillary Clinton return as President.

After Randy Weaver, an outspoken separatist living on a mountaintop in northern Idaho, was entrapped by an undercover federal agent, U.S. marshals trespassed on Weaver’s land and killed his 14-year-old son, Sammy. The following day, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi killed his wife, Vicki, as she was standing in the cabin doorway. Horiuchi had previously shot Randy Weaver in the back after he stepped out of the cabin. The suspects were never given a warning or a chance to surrender and had taken no action against FBI agents. Weaver survived.

A court in the United States has confirmed the arrest of US-born Iranian Press TV news presenter Marzieh Hashemi as a material witness in an unspecified investigation.

Ms. Hashemi, 59, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on unspecified charges upon arrival at St. Louis Lambert International Airport in St. Louis, Missouri, on Sunday, her family and friends said.

At the request of the US Justice Department, Judge Beryl Alaine Howell, the chief district judge for the District of Columbia, issued a federal court order, approving the partial unsealing of the Press TV journalist’s case, Reuters reported.

According to the document, since her arrest, the journalist has appeared twice before a US district judge in Washington and has been appointed a lawyer.

Nearly two dozen civilians, mostly women and children, have been killed after the US-led coalition purportedly fighting the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group carried out a series of aerial assaults in Syria’s troubled eastern province of Dayr al-Zawr.

Local sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Syria’s official news agency SANA on Friday that 20 people were killed when US-led warplanes bombarded residential buildings in al-Baghuz al-Tahtani village.

The United States is seeking to put pressure on Iran through the arrest and imprisonment of Marzieh Hashemi, a journalist and anchor working for Iran’s English-language Press TV television news network, says an academic.

“I think they have motives, obviously we can only kind of guess at those, but clearly what is certainly happening is that this is an escalation, an escalation of harassment, an escalation in terms of trying to put pressure on Iran through Ms. Hashemi, through her treatment. They have purposely chosen this situation and escalated it so that it becomes the issue that it has become,” Kenneth Fero, lecturer at Coventry University, told Press TV in an interview on Friday.

“They have opened a new theater really and they are having their players running around and controlling everything. Later on today if it does goes to court we’ll be able to know whether she is being held as a material witness or whether she is actually going to be charged with anything,” he added.

A trade pact, if it happens, may soothe investors, and perhaps even juice economic growth—at least temporarily. But it won’t bring an end to China’s woes. While tariffs are a nuisance, the real problems run deeper, embedded in China’s financial structure.

What goes widely unnoticed is that China is already in crisis. No, it’s not the sort of hold-on-for-dear-life collapse the U.S. had in 2008 or the surprising, ferocious meltdowns the Asian Tiger economies experienced in 1997. Nonetheless, it’s a crisis, complete with gutted banks, bankrupt companies, and state bailouts. Since the Chinese distinguish their model of state capitalism as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” let’s call this a “financial crisis with Chinese attributes.”

The Secret Service was never contacted by Nancy Pelosi’s office or other Democratic congressional leadership regarding their ability to protect the president, members of the administration and Congress during the State of the Union, according to a senior law enforcement official at the Department of Homeland Security.

According to the official who spoke to the The Daily Caller, Pelosi made the decision unilaterally without contacting the Secret Service or DHS. “The Secret Service was never contacted by congressional leadership regarding our security plan or the Secret Service’s ability to carry it out,” the senior law enforcement official said.

CNN guest and radio host Ben Ferguson said Friday that BuzzFeed News “got their brains kicked in” by the Special Counsel’s office over their disputed report on President Donald Trump.

BuzzFeed News reported on Thursday night that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen told Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors that the president had directed him to lie about a potential Trump Tower deal in Moscow during the 2016 election. (RELATED: Mueller’s Office Disputes BuzzFeed’s Report)

Mueller’s office issued a rare statement disputing BuzzFeed’s reporting on Friday:

“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate.”

BuzzFeed’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day just got worse as the New York Times is reporting that the prosecutors in the special counsel’s office are saying that Michale Cohen “never implied that the president had pressured him to lie to Congress”:

n the 1960s, the sugar industry funded research that downplayed the risks of sugar and highlighted the hazards of fat, according to a newly published article in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The article draws on internal documents to show that an industry group called the Sugar Research Foundation wanted to “refute” concerns about sugar’s possible role in heart disease. The SRF then sponsored research by Harvard scientists that did just that. The result was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, with no disclosure of the sugar industry funding.

The sugar-funded project in question was a literature review, examining a variety of studies and experiments. It suggested there were major problems with all the studies that implicated sugar, and concluded that cutting fat out of American diets was the best way to address coronary heart disease.

Amid a growing national movement away from jailing people for low-level crimes — which critics say can trap defendants in a cycle of poverty and incarceration — Miami Beach has taken the opposite approach.

Last January, after learning that the Miami-Dade state attorney’s office was routinely dropping charges for “quality of life” offenses such as drinking in public and entering a park after hours, Miami Beach hired its own prosecutor to target people who violate city laws. The program, which is the only one of its kind in Miami-Dade County, was part of a broader effort to address nuisance crimes.

But despite residents’ complaints about rampant public drunkenness during spring break and other times that draw a lot of tourists, a review of the cases prosecuted by the new program shows that few tourists have been arrested and prosecuted for drinking in public or for other nuisance crimes.

Instead, public records show, the majority of the cases have involved homeless people.

Army recruiters are having a challenging time convincing Americans born between 1995 and 2005 to sign up and serve. The situation is so dire that Army Recruiting Command has turned to e-Sports video game tournaments.

“It is incredible, the amount of coverage that you get and the amount of the Z Gens that are watching these games,” Gen. Frank Muth, the head of Army Recruiting Command, told NPR.

Sponsoring video game tournaments is an effort to boost recruitment after the Army fell short of its 76,500 recruitment goal by 6,500 people last year.

The battle for new delivery business spurred by the significant rise in large products ordered online is officially on.

And as consumers get more comfortable buying larger items like appliances, grills, treadmills and even furniture online, trucking companies like JB Hunt Transport Services Inc. are knee-deep in the fray to secure the ensuing delivery business that comes with it.

JB Hunt, for instance, announced Wednesday that it has agreed to pay $100 million for a company in New Jersey that specializes in delivering large items to consumers. This is the second such purchase made by JB Hunt in the delivery space in less than two years.

A huge fire exploded at a pipeline leaking fuel in central Mexico on Friday, killing at least 21 people and badly burning 71 others.

The leak was caused by fuel thieves illegally tapping the pipeline in a small town in the state of Hidalgo, according to state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex.

Video footage showed dozens of residents near the town of Tlahuelilpan gathered to collect spilled fuel in buckets, garbage cans and other vessels.

'There was a report that residents were on the scene trying to obtain fuel,' according to a police report.

China invited representatives from 12 neighboring, mostly Muslim-majority countries to tour some of the internment camps built in Xinjiang province to indoctrinate, torture, and exploit the labor of Chinese Muslims, a report claimed Friday.

A report in the People’s Daily on Friday, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, claimed that the envoys were extremely impressed by the success of the “vocational centers,” as Beijing calls them, in helping incorporate members of the Uighur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz ethnic minorities into the Chinese economy.

The U.S. East Coast is bracing for freezing cold temperatures and heavy snowfall this weekend, likely bringing challenging travel conditions and power outages to thousands across the regions.

The winter storm is slated to hit large parts of the Northeast Sunday, dropping at least a foot of snow and ice in blizzard-like conditions. Residents of the inland tri-state area and mid-Atlantic will face subzero temperatures.

At least 100 million people across the country are under winter weather watches or warnings.

ou cannot have a discussion on the prison-industrial complex without discussing private prisons. As of 2018, private prisons housed 8.41 percent of incarcerated persons in the United States. While private prisons date back to the colonial days, the modern privatized prisons as we think of them only date back to the 1980s. This was initially due to the explosion of prison population and resulting prison overcrowding that some have tied to the War on Some Drugs.

This spike in incarceration, however, is far more closely tied with the rise of private prisons. Between the years 1925 and 1980, the prison population in the United States remained constant as a proportion of the overall population. In 1983, however, two things happened: First, the first private prisons came into operation. Second, the prison population as a proportion of the overall population began to explode.

This is the Rock Pi 4, the latest rival to the Raspberry Pi in the low-cost computing space.

Check out TechRepublic's full review to find out how the Rock Pi 4 measures up to the Raspberry Pi, and why the Rock Pi isn't a necessarily a better choice, despite its superior specs.

This is the 4GB of the Rock Pi 4 Model B, a board whose $75 price tag is more than twice that of the $35 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+.

One set of identical twins, two different ancestry profiles.

At least that's the suggestion from one of the world's largest ancestry DNA testing companies.

Last spring, Marketplace host Charlsie Agro and her twin sister, Carly, bought home kits from AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and Living DNA, and mailed samples of their DNA to each company for analysis.

Despite having virtually identical DNA, the twins did not receive matching results from any of the companies.

U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office issued a statement late on Friday taking issue with a report in Buzzfeed that President Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen said Trump told him to lie to Congress.

“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller office, said in the statement.

There is much weeping and gnashing of teeth in the media following the stunning implosion of a BuzzFeed story that was set up to provide the grounds for the upcoming impeachment of President Trump.

In the piece that was written by the already discredited Jason Leopold, it was claimed that the Democrats’ star witness against Trump in his former attorney turned rat Michael Cohen had been ordered to lie to Congress on the Trump Tower Moscow project.

The media picked up the ball and ran with it, hammering the impeachment angle repeatedly as Nancy Pelosi seethed over her foreign junket being canceled but on Friday evening, a rare statement out of chief inquisitor Robert Mueller’s office (likely approved Mueller himself) blew a smoking hole in the BuzzFeed piece and its inaccuracies.

It was as though all of the air was immediately sucked out of the balloon and the flummoxed media didn’t know what hit them.

WE EXPANDED OUR MISSION! We are no longer just funding the wall, we are now BUILDING the wall.

Eight days before Christmas I started this GoFundMe campaign because I was tired of watching the U.S. government’s inability to secure our southern border. Like most Americans, I see the porous southern border as a national security threat and I refuse to allow our broken political system to leave my family and my country vulnerable to attack.

Timothy Egan, a New York Times contributing opinion writer, has a column today defending the tradition of rich people having an outsize role in our politics, because that’s just reality. But he slipped in not one but two cracks at Sheldon Adelson.

An 85-year-old casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson, now has more influence on American foreign policy than even the secretary of state, the Koch [Brothers] tool Mike Pompeo.

But the Kochs pay for politicians in order to enrich themselves and to gut regulations affecting the polluting industries that made them billionaires. Adelson got a similar tax windfall for the millions he put into electing Republicans, with the added benefit of controlling the State Department’s view of Israel.

A slow-motion coup by right-wing opposition forces is underway in Venezuela. It has the support of President Donald Trump’s administration, and if successful, President Nicolas Maduro will be undemocratically removed from power though he was re-elected last May
.
Juan Guaido of the Popular Will Party in Venezuela was elected to lead the National Assembly, Venezuela’s congress. He said on January 11 that he was ready to replace Maduro.

“The constitution gives me the legitimacy to carry out the charge of the presidency over the country to call actions. But I need backing from the citizens to make it a reality,” Guaido stated.

On January 15, the National Assembly called Maduro’s presidency “illegitimate” and passed a resolution indicating the body no longer believes he has any legal authority.

President Donald Trump plans to meet face-to-face with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un next month for a second nuclear summit, the White House announced Friday.

"The President looks forward to meeting with Chairman Kim at a place to be announced at a later date," according to the White House readout of Trump's meeting with top Kim deputy Kim Yong Chul.

Trump and Kim Yong Chul had planned to discuss "relations between the two countries and continued progress on North Korea’s final, fully verified denuclearization," White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement before Friday's meeting.

Benny Morris, the Israeli historian who has documented Israeli-Palestinian history so meticulously, is again bemoaning that a full ethnic cleansing was not completed in 1948.

In a long interview with Ofer Aderet in Haaretz (published in English today), Morris says:

If the War of Independence had ended with an absolute separation of populations – the Palestinian Arabs on the east side of the Jordan River and the Jews on the west side – the Middle East would be less volatile and both peoples would have suffered less over the past 70 years. They would have been satisfied with a state of their own, not exactly what they wanted, and we would have received the whole Land of Israel.

The Jordanian foreign ministry yesterday condemned Israel’s actions near Al-Buraq (the Western Wall), stressing it is an inalienable part of Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Israel had reportedly set up steel and wooden structures near Al-Buraq, in contravention of the status quo agreement with Jordan over the administration of Al-Aqsa compound.

Foreign ministry spokesman, Sufian Al-Qudat, said that only the Palestinian Authority (PA) is responsible for dealing with issues related to Al-Aqsa Mosque, as stipulated by international law. Al-Qudat also stressed that Israel, as an occupying power, has to respect this agreement, Jordanian news agency Petra reported.

Al-Qudat also emphasised that Jerusalem’s Awqaf Department (which administers Al-Aqsa) is the only party with the power to carry out maintenance and renovation works in Al-Aqsa Mosque and the surrounding compound, an area which consists of 144 dunams (35 acres) of land.

Russia has reiterated its readiness to host a reconciliation conference between rival Palestinian factions.

In a phone call with the Head of Hamas’ Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, Russia’s special envoy to the Middle East and Africa Mikhail Bogdanov discussed the possibility of holding a comprehensive Palestinian reconciliation meeting in Russian capital Moscow.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Bogdanov had reiterated Russia’s “strong and firm intention to restore Palestinian national unity as soon as possible and find a solution to the Palestinian issue following international law”.

“Bogdanov stressed that Russia is ready to go on establishing intensive contacts with all the leading Palestinian political forces and organise a comprehensive Palestinian meeting in Moscow,” the statement added.

A Palestinian from Hebron has rejected a $100 million Israeli offer to buy his home.

An inhabitant of the West Bank city of Hebron, Abdul Raouf Al-Mohtaseb rejected an Israeli offer worth $100 million for his house and shop, located in the centre of the old neighbourhood of Al-Sahla, Hebron, Arabi 21 reported on Friday.

Al-Mohtaseb has rejected all previous Israeli offers made to him for his house and shop, which overlook Ibrahimi Mosque in the centre of the old city.

“I rejected $100 million,” Al-Mohtaseb said, adding: “I will reject all the money on earth. I will not betray my land or my people. Money is fine, but only when it is clean.”

Some Israelis insulted Jesus Christ recently in a museum in Haifa, making him into an offensive cartoon and insulting the anniversary of his blessed birth. It was as if they were reminiscing about chasing him across the mountains and valleys of Palestine. Today, they are insulting Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock Mosque in Jerusalem in an attempt to erase the traces of Prophet Muhammad’s footsteps in Palestine (peace be upon him).

For the residents of Issawiyeh, a Palestinian village of some 20,000, surveillance, military raids and building demolitions are a daily reality.

Nestled in the hills of East Jerusalem, the village is plagued by poor infrastructure, residents are constantly harassed by the Israeli Border Police and anyone, including children, run the risk of arbitrary arrest.

The village has seen its lands gradually disappear. Before Israel occupied the area in 1967, the village included some 12,500 dunams (1 dunam = 1,000 square meters) of land.

Since then, and due to a combination of Israeli settlements, illegal under international law, the nearby Hebrew University and, more recently, Israel’s West Bank wall, village land has been reduced to around 9,400 dunams, according to Muhammad Abu al-Hummus, a local council member.

An apparent suicide bombing in Manbij, northern Syria, has taken the life of four US servicemembers and several civilians. ISIS has taken credit for the attack. Neocons cite the attack as proof that we should stay. The rest of us cite the attack as more proof that we should leave. Where will Trump come down? On today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

White House officials have issued a statement on Friday rejecting Israeli Channel 13’s report on the Israeli peace deal, declaring the deal to be “inaccurate,” and saying that “very few people on the planet know what is in it.”

Channel 13’s report cited a “senior American official,” and presented a very broad-brush summary of the plan, including giving the Palestinians a state that included the majority of the occupied West Bank, and some of the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem as their capital city.

Though this fairly unspecific report is in keeping with what most plans could be expected to contain, US special envoy Jason Greenblatt not only rejected the idea, but added that any speculation about what the US plan actually is “is not helpful.”

Trump’s nominee to be attorney general has what Trump might call “deep state” credentials.

Barr came to Langley in 1973. He was a 23 year graduate of Columbia with a masters in Chinese studies His resume shows he toiled at the agency by day and attended George Washington University law school at night. The Watergate scandal was ravaging the agency’s reputation and bringing down president Richard Nixon.

Barr spent four formative years working in the Intelligence directorate and the Office of Legislative Counsel. He even made the acquaintance of CIA director George H.W. Bush. In 1977 Barr moved on to a prestigious clerkship for a federal judge and then a series of jobs in private practice and the Justice Department. In 1991, Bush, who had since been elected president, appointed Barr to be attorney general.

Will the Trump administration embrace the Bolton doctrine? John Bolton, whom Donald Trump appointed in April to replace the stolid H.R. McMaster, has been trying to tailor administration foreign policy to match his hawkish views. Among his initiatives, the Wall Street Journal reported, is to make a move to do what he has long wanted done, which is to wage war against the mullahs in Tehran. The result is a schism in the administration.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and one of the primary ways that the elite keep the rest of us subjugated is through the $244,000,000,000,000 mountain of global debt that has been accumulated.

Every single day, the benefits of our labor are going to enrich somebody else. A portion of the taxes that are deducted from your paycheck is used to pay interest on government debt. A portion of the profits that your company makes probably goes to servicing some form of business debt. And most Americans are continuously making payments on their mortgages, their auto loans, their credit card balances and their student loan debts. But most people never stop to think about who is becoming exceedingly wealthy on the other end of these transactions. Needless to say, it isn’t the 46 percent of the global population that is living on less than $5.50 a day.

A gas pipeline in the Mexican state of Hidalgo exploded on Friday night, killing at least 21 people in a blast the authorities said was caused by an illegal tap used to steal fuel.

Omar Fayad, the governor of Hidalgo, said on Twitter that more than 70 others were injured in the explosion in Tlahuelilpan, a town about 80 miles north of Mexico City.

The state-run energy company, Pemex, said that the explosion was caused by an illegal fuel tap at the Tuxpan-Tula pipeline.

“There’s one main issue that is central to the rest, and that is the issue of war and peace.” Those were the words of Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Democrat of Hawaii, appearing on CNN on January 12, as she threw her hat into the presidential ring.

Gabbard is one of the few Democrats in the 2020 mix who has experience as a combatant in war. Back in 2004, at the peak of fighting in Iraq, she volunteered for duty with the Hawaii National Guard as it was deployed to that country. So for her, as well as for all the other veterans of our recent wars of choice, America’s Middle East policy is more than an object for armchair strategizing.

Thus did Gabbard smile in agreement when CNN host Van Jones summarized her views as “hawk on terror, dove on regime change.” And most Americans would agree: that is, everybody wants an anti-terrorism policy, but few want more foreign wars and regime changes.

It took a solid week after her detention in St. Louis, but Marzieh Hashemi, an anchor for Iran’s PressTV and an American citizen, has finally gotten into a courtroom, and learned that she is neither being accused of any crimes nor is she facing any charges. That said, they’re not expecting to let her go any time soon.

Hashemi is being held as a witness for a grand jury. Federal law technically allows such detention if a judge is convinced the person might not testify willingly, though legal experts have noted this is a tactic that has faced little legal challenge in the past, and might not stand up to a serious case. Hashemi does not finally have an attorney.

The law that allows for these detentions is meant to be very limited in use, and very temporary, with the detainee supposed to be released immediately after they are deposed. It is unclear, however, when they actually intend to depose Ms. Hashemi, and the early impression is that the detention may take some time.

Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops on the Gaza-Israel border, east of Gaza City, on Jan. 18, 2019. At least 30 Palestinians were injured in clashes on Friday between hundreds of protesters and Israeli soldiers stationed at the borderline of eastern Gaza Strip, according to Gaza medics.

I spoke to The Real News about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s renewed attacks and smears against the BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – movement for Palestinians rights.

During a town hall meeting at Brock University in Ontario this week, one questioner asked Trudeau to retract his previous smears that the BDS movement is anti-Semitic.

Instead, the Liberal Party prime minister doubled down, claiming that the anti-racist BDS movement targets Jews.

Trudeau asserted “that anti-Semitism has also manifested itself not just as targeting of individuals but it is also targeting a new condemnation, or an anti-Semitism against the very state of Israel.”

Trudeau’s refusal to distinguish between Jews and Judaism on the one hand, and Israel and its state ideology Zionism, on the other, is, I told The Real News, itself an anti-Semitic move.

Crowdfund to ‘show public agencies they can’t make requesters go away’

Under scrutiny from lawmakers of both parties and academic groups, universities have been closing their Chinese government-run centers at a brisk pace.

The University of Kansas has not publicly moved to shutter its Confucius Institute, however, and a KU student wanted to know if administrators had discussed the possibility. He filed a public records request a month ago.

The taxpayer-funded university gave him an answer Thursday: $506.50.

Conner Mitchell set up a crowdfunding page to raise the money demanded by KU to hand over emails from top administrators that include the phrase “Confucius Institute.” He describes himself as a freelance journalist who has previously written for The Kansas City Star, Palm Beach Post and KU’s hometown newspaper, the Lawrence Journal-World.