Trump’s farm-state supporters have already been struggling with a dip in agriculture exports to China, which has exacerbated the low commodity prices that have pushed thousands of American farmers to the brink of bankruptcy. America’s farmers are extremely vulnerable right now, which is probably why Beijing has opted for this latest precision strike in the trade conflict: Bloomberg reports that China’s largest state-run grain buyers have been instructed to halt the ‘goodwill’ purchases of American soybeans as Beijing ratchets up the pressure on the White House, which could soon approve new tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese imports.
Thanks to February’s pledge to buy another 10 million tons of American soybeans, sales to Chinese grain buyers by American soybean farmers started to recover during the opening months of 2019. Since President Trump and Xi called the trade-war truce back in December, China has bought some 13 million tons of soybeans from American farmers. Data from the Department of Agriculture show that China’s grain buyers have yet to take delivery on about 7 million tons of US soybeans that it has committed to buying.
The timing of Beijing’s latest blow is notable: Friday marked the conclusion of a two-week tariff ‘grace period’ (since the higher rates didn’t apply to goods already in transit, analysts speculated that the two sides would have roughly two weeks to find a resolution before the new levies were actually imposed), which suggests that more retaliation from Beijing could be in the offing.
Last night, Washington imposed preliminary anti-dumping tariffs on Chinese mattresses and beer kegs (the keg tariffs will also impact Mexico and Germany), though a final decision isn’t expected until October.
As it ratchets up the pressure on the administration with one hand, Beijing is trying appeal to potentially sympathetic voices with the other by reportedly asking state media organizations to soften their criticism of the US in the hopes of keeping open the possibility that tensions with Washington could ease.
“We have been told not to use ‘the US side’ generally in our copy because there are many different voices within the US,” one unidentified official reportedly told the SCMP.
At the same time, Beijing is keeping up its threats about a possible rare earth export ban, much to the chagrin of the American defense and tech industries. Ministry of Commerce Spokesman Gao Feng said Thursday during a regular press briefing that China can’t accept its rare earth metals being used against itself, though it remains willing to meet other countries’ demands for the metals. Gao added that China will fight “until the end” if the US continues to escalate the trade fight, adding that China won’t tolerate US bullying.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2WxcmF5 Tyler Durden
Monty Python icon John Cleese has stoked controversy by reiterating his belief that London is no longer an English city due to mass immigration.
In a tweet to his 5.6 million followers, Cleese said:
“Some years ago I opined that London was not really an English city any more. Since then, virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation So there must be some truth in it.”
“I note also that London was the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU,” he added.
Some years ago I opined that London was not really an English city any more
Since then, virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation
So there must be some truth in it…
I note also that London was the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU
Cleese first made similar statements back in 2011 when he opined that London was handed the Olympic Games because of mass immigration.
“I’m not sure what’s going on in Britain. Or, let me say this – I don’t know what’s going on in London, because London is no longer an English city,” said Cleese.
The actor said that London was the most cosmopolitan city on earth but that it “doesn’t feel English”.
“I had a Californian friend come over two months ago, walk down the King’s Road and say, “Where are all the English people?”
“I mean, I love having different cultures around. But when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you’re left thinking, “Well, what’s going on?”‘ said Cleese.
The Monty Python star’s comments are just a reflection of reality. In London, white British people are a minority and have been for some years.
Over 41% of London’s population is foreign born. London also has the second highest foreign-born population of any city in the world.
* * *
There is a war on free speech. Without your support, Paul’s voice will be silenced. Please sign up for the free newsletter here. Donate to me on SubscribeStar here. Support Paul’s sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2W06GyY Tyler Durden
CNN President Jeff Zucker reportedly made the announcement at a company “town hall” meeting on Tuesday held at CNN’s office in central London.
CNN’s prime-time ratings dropped 26% in April – the worst month for total viewers since October 2015, according to Nielsen Media Research.
Staff were reportedly given zero advance warning of the layoffs, even those whose shows will be impacted. The cuts notably follow the unexpected announcement that CNN International boss Tony Maddox would be leaving.
The upshot: CNN International viewers will be exposed to less material produced in London, with the total to be cut by 90 minutes per day. London-based shows like CNN Talk will be cut completely as the UK office pivots to focusing on CNN’s website.
So, how will CNN fill the news hole left by these cuts? The Guardian says CNN International will accomplish this by – surprise, surprise – importing more content from its American mothership.
This means more international viewers will be subjected to antagonistic coverage of the Trump Administration and conspiracies about collusion and obstruction, all regular features of CNN’s coverage in the states.
CNN tried to spin the cuts as shifting jobs from London to Atlanta, though few of the impacted employees will likely be able to relocate to a different continent
A spokesperson for the channel said: “In the coming months, CNN International will be consolidating key parts of its production model centrally in Atlanta, in much the same way as we currently do with large parts of our programming for CNN US. This means that some jobs will shift from London to Atlanta, but overall headcount will be unchanged.”
Some of the gap will also be filled by “extra repeats of the flagship Christiane Amanpour programme,” the Guardian reports.
The cuts are the latest in a wave of staff reductions following the AT&T-Time Warner tie-up. And now that the Russia collusion narrative has been tentatively put to bed (though that could change depending on what Mueller says today), we imagine the channel’s ratings will only continue to slump.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2HIZ3t4 Tyler Durden
It’s a David vs Goliath story. A former local newspaper reporter, Robert Stuart, is taking on the British Broadcasting Corporation. Stuart believes that a sensational video story about an alleged atrocity in Syria “was largely, if not entirely, staged.” The BBC would like it all to just go away. But like David, Stuart will not back down or let it go. It has been proposed that the BBC could settle the issue by releasing the raw footage from the event, but they refuse to do this. Why?
The Controversial Video
The video report in controversy is ‘Saving Syria’s Children‘. Scenes from it were first broadcast as a BBC news report on August 29, 2013 and again as a BBC Panorama special in September. ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ was produced by BBC reporter Ian Pannell with Darren Conway as camera operator and director.
The news report footage was taken in a town north of Aleppo city in a region controlled by the armed opposition. It purports to show the aftermath of a Syrian aerial attack using incendiary weapons, perhaps napalm, killing and burning dozens of youth. The video shows the youth arriving and being treated at a nearby hospital where the BBC film team was coincidentally filming two British medical volunteers from a British medical relief organization.
Saving Syria’s Children documentary
The video had a strong impact. The incident was on August 26. The video was shown on the BBCthree days later as the British Parliament was debating whether to support military action by the US against Syria. As it turned out, British parliament voted against supporting military action. But the video was effective in demonizing the Syrian government. After all, what kind of government attacks school children with napalm-like bombs?
The Context
‘Saving Syria’s Children’ was produced at a critical moment in the Syrian conflict. Just days before, on August 21, there had been an alleged sarin gas attack against an opposition held area on the outskirts of Damascus. Western media was inundated with videos showing dead Syrian children amidst accusations the Syrian government had attacked civilians, killing up to 1400. The Syrian government was assumed to be responsible and the attack said to be a clear violation of President Obama’s “red line” against chemical weapons.
This incident had the effect of increasing pressure for Western states or NATO to attack Syria. It would be for humanitarian reasons, rationalized by the “responsibility to protect”.
The assumption that ‘the regime’ did it has been challenged. Highly regarded American journalists including the late Robert Parry and Seymour Hersh investigated and contradicted the mainstream media. They pointed to the crimes being committed by the armed opposition for political goals. A report by two experts including a UN weapons inspector and Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity also came to the conclusion that the Syrian government was not responsible and the attack was actually by an armed opposition group with the goal of forcing NATO intervention.
Why the Controversial Video is Suspicious
After seeing skeptical comments about ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ on an online discussion board, Robert Stuart looked at the video for himself. Like others, he thought the hospital sequences looked artificial, almost like scenes from a badly acted horror movie.
But unlike others, he decided to find out. Thus began his quest to ascertain the truth. Was the video real or was it staged? Was it authentic or contrived propaganda?
Over almost six years his research has revealed many curious elements about the video including:
* The incident happened in an area controlled by a terror group associated with ISIS.
* One of the British medics is a former UK soldier involved in simulated injury training.
* The other British medic is daughter of a prominent figure in the Syrian opposition.
* In 2016 a local rebel commander testified that the alleged attack never happened.
Support for Robert Stuart
Robert Stuart’s formal complaints to the BBC have been rebuffed. His challenges to those involved in the production have been ignored or stifled. Yet his quest has won support from some major journalistic and political figures.
Former Guardian columnist Jonathan Cook has written several articles on the story. He says, “Stuart’s sustained research and questioning of the BBC, and the state broadcaster’s increasing evasions, have given rise to ever greater concerns about the footage. It looks suspiciously like one scene in particular, of people with horrific burns, was staged.”
Former UK Ambassador Craig Murray has compared scenes in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ with his own harrowing experience with burn victims. He says, “The alleged footage of burn victims in hospital following a napalm attack bears no resemblance whatsoever to how victims, doctors and relatives actually behave in these circumstances.”
Fabrication in BBC Panorama ‘Saving Syria’s Children’
Film-maker Victor Lewis-Smith has done numerous projects for the BBC. When learning about Stuart’s research he asked for some explanations and suggested they could resolve the issue by releasing the raw video footage of the events. When they refused to do this, he publicly tore up his BBC contract.
Why it Matters
The BBC has a reputation for objectivity. If BBC management was deceived by the video, along with the public, they should have a strong interest in uncovering and correcting this. If there was an error, they should want to clarify, correct and ensure it is not repeated.
The BBC could go a long way toward resolving this issue by releasing raw footage of the scenes in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’. Why have they refused to do this? In addition, they have actively removedyoutube copies of ‘Saving Syria’s Children’. If they are proud of that production, why are they removing public copies of it?
Has the BBC produced and broadcast contrived or fake video reports in support of British government foreign policy of aggression against Syria? It is important that this question be answered to either restore public trust (if the videos are authentic) or to expose and correct misdeeds (if the videos are largely or entirely staged).
The issue at stake is not only the BBC; it is the manipulation of media to deceive the public into supporting elite-driven foreign policy. ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ is an important case study.
The Future
Robert Stuart is not quitting. He hopes the next step will be a documentary film dramatically showing what he has discovered and further investigating important yet unexplored angles.
The highly experienced film producer Victor Lewis-Smith, who tore up his BBC contract, has stepped forward to help make this happen.
But to produce a high quality documentary including some travel takes funding. After devoting almost six years to this effort, Robert Stuart’s resources are exhausted. The project needs support from concerned members of the public.
If you support Robert Stuart’s efforts, go to this crowdfunding website. There you can learn more and contribute to this important effort to reveal whether the BBC video ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ showed true or staged events. Was the alleged “napalm” attack real or was it staged propaganda? The project needs a large number of small donors and a few substantial ones to meet the June 7 deadline.
As actor and producer Keith Allen says,” Please help us to reach the target so that we can discover the facts, examine the evidence, and present the truth about ‘Saving Syria’s Children’. I think it’s really important.”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2JITygl Tyler Durden
Just hours after US National Security Advisor John Bolton formally accused Tehran of conducing the May 12 tanker “sabotage” attacks near the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s foreign ministry has responded that “we are ready for war” amid fears that Washington could still be on a war footing in the Persian Gulf.
“We hope that we can start a dialogue, but we are ready for war,” Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told RIA Novosti.
Bolton had told a press conference earlier in the day in Dubai, “The point is to make it very clear to Iran and its surrogates that these kinds of actions risk a very strong response from the United States.”
AP file photo of US troops in Saudi Arabia during 1990 Gulf War.
Bolton is in Abu Dhabi attending an emergency summit of gulf leaders to consider the implications of both the “sabotage” tanker attacks near Fujairah emiriate in the UAE and the drone strikes two days following on a Saudi Aramco pipeline and oil pumping station.
Meanwhile acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan told reporters while in Asia for a major policy speech on the region, “nobody wants war” with Iran. However, he added that the US is ready and willing to “defend ships in the Strait of Hormuz” if necessary.
Also of note is that Shanahan for the first time identified that 900 American troops newly deployed to the Middle East in response to the heightened Iran threat are headed to Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
JUST IN: Acting SecDef Shanahan says that the 900 troops being sent to the Mideast in response to what the administration calls an elevated Iran threat are going to Qatar and Saudi Arabia. (This is interesting since the place officials say American troops were at risk was Iraq.)
Riyadh hosting a new wave of American troops on Saudi soil is sure to be deeply controversial within the kingdom’s Wahhabi clerical establishment, given its strict form of Islam sees the region of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, as sacred ground which is off limits to US soldiers.
While there are already limited US Air Force units stationed across up to five Saudi air bases such as Riyadh Air Force Base and Eskan Village Air Base, the fact that the Saudis previously hosted American personnel for attacks on Iraq proved deeply controversial in the kingdom.
Meanwhile, Iran’s military leaders have slammed the latest announced US troop deployment — now made more interesting given at least some of those military personnel will be based out of Shia Iran’s foremost Sunni rival Saudi Arabia.
“If they commit the slightest stupidity, we will send these ships to the bottom of the sea along with their crew and planes using two missiles or two new secret weapons,” Gen. Morteza Qorbani, a top adviser to Iran’s military command, told the semiofficial news agency Mizan over the past weekend.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2W2TN7j Tyler Durden
The media are not a watchdog on power but the public relations arm of giant corporations pursuing their narrow interests in the Middle East…
By any reckoning, the claim made this week by al-Qaeda-linked fighters that they were targeted with chemical weapons by the Syrian government in Idlib province – their final holdout in Syria – should have been treated by the western media with a high degree of scepticism.
That the US and other western media enthusiastically picked up those claims should not have made them any more credible.
Scepticism was all the more warranted from the media given that no physical evidence has yet been produced to corroborate the jihadists’ claims. And the media should have been warier still given that the Syrian government was already poised to defeat these al-Qaeda groups without resort to chemical weapons — and without provoking the predictable ire (yet again) of the west.
But most of all scepticism was required because these latest claims arrive just as we have learnt that the last supposed major chemical attack — which took place in April 2018 and was, as ever, blamed by all western sources on Syria’s president, Bashar Assad — was very possibly staged, a false-flag operation by those very al-Qaeda groups now claiming the Syrian government has attacked them once again.
Addicted to incompetence
Most astounding in this week’s coverage of the claims made by al-Qaeda groups is the fact that the western media continues to refuse to learn any lessons, develop any critical distance from the sources it relies on, even as those sources are shown to have repeatedly deceived it.
This was true after the failure to find WMD in Iraq, and it has been confirmed after the the international community’s monitoring body on chemical weapons, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), was exposed this month as deeply dishonest.
It is bad enough that our governments and our expert institutions deceive and lie to us. But it is even worse that we have a corporate media addicted — at the most charitable interpretation — to its own incompetence. The evidence demonstrating that grows stronger by the day.
Unprovoked attack
In March the OPCW produced a report into a chemical weapons attack the Syrian government allegedly carried out in Douma in April last year. Several dozen civilians, many of them children, died apparently as a result of that attack.
The OPCW report concluded that there were “reasonable grounds” for believing a toxic form of chlorine had been used as a chemical weapon in Douma, and that the most likely method of delivery were two cylinders dropped from the air.
This as good as confirmed claims made by al-Qaeda groups, backed by western states, that the cylinders had been dropped by the Syrian military. Using dry technical language, the OPCW joined the US and Europe in pointing the finger squarely at Assad.
It was vitally important that the OPCW reached that conclusion — and not only because the west has an overarching ambition for regime change in Syria.
In response to the alleged Douma attack a year ago, the US fired a volley of Cruise missiles at Syrian army and government positions before there had been any investigation into who was responsible.
Those missiles were already a war crime — an unprovoked attack on another sovereign country. But without the OPCW’s implicit blessing, the US would have been deprived of even its flimsy, humanitarian pretext for launching the missiles.
Leaked document
Undoubtedly the OPCW was under huge political pressure to arrive at the “right” conclusion. But as a scientific body carrying out a forensic investigation surely it would not have dared to doctor the data.
Nonetheless, it seems that may well be precisely what it did. This month the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media — a group of academics who have grown increasingly sceptical of the western narratives told about Syria — published an internal, leaked OPCW document.
A few fays later the OPCW reluctantly confirmed that the document was genuine, and that it would identify and deal with those responsible for the leak.
The document was an assessment overseen by Ian Henderson, a senior OPCW expert, of the engineering data gathered by the OPCW’s fact-finding mission that attended the scene of the Douma attack. Its findings fly in the face of the OPCW’s published report.
Erased from the record
The leaked document is deeply troubling for two reasons.
First, the assessment, based on the available technical data, contradicts the conclusion of the final OPCW report that the two chemical cylinders were dropped from the air and crashed through building roofs. It argues instead that the cylinders were more likely placed at the locations they were found.
If that is right, the most probable explanation is that the cylinders were put there by al-Qaeda groups — presumably in a last desperate effort to persuade the west to intervene and to prevent the jihadists being driven out of Douma.
But, second, and even more shocking is the fact that the expert assessment based on the data collected by the OPCW team is entirely unaddressed in the OPCW’s final report.
It is not that the final report discounts or rebuts the findings of its own experts. It simply ignores those findings; it pretends they don’t exist. The report blacks them out, erases them from the official record. In short, it perpetrates a massive deception.
Experts ignored
All of this would be headline news if we had a responsible media that cared about the truth and about keeping its readers informed.
We now know both that the US attacked Syria on entirely bogus grounds, and that the OPCW — one of the international community’s most respected and authoritative bodies — has been caught redhanded in an outrageous deception with grave geopolitical implications. (In fact, it is not the first time the OPCW has been caught doing this, as I have previously explained here.)
The fact that the OPCW ignored its own expert and its own team’s technical findings when they proved politically indigestible casts a dark shadow over allthe OPCW’s work in Syria, and beyond. If it was prepared to perpetrate a deception on this occasion, why should we assume it did not do so on other occasions when it proved politically expedient?
Active combatants
The OPCW’s reports into other possible chemical attacks — assisting western efforts to implicate Assad — are now equally tainted. That is especially so given that in those other cases the OPCW violated its own procedures by drawing prejudicial conclusions without its experts being on the ground, at the site of the alleged attacks. Instead it received samples and photos via al-Qaeda groups, who could easily have tampered with the evidence.
And yet there has been not a peep from the corporate media about this exposure of the OPCW’s dishonesty, apart from commentary pieces from the only two maverick mainstream journalists in the UK — Peter Hitchens, a conservative but independent-minded columnist for the Mail on Sunday, and veteran war correspondent Robert Fisk, of the little-read Independent newspaper (more on his special involvement in Douma in a moment).
Just as the OPCW blanked the findings of its technical experts to avoid political discomfort, the media have chosen to stay silent on this new, politically sensitive information.
They have preferred to prop up the discredited narrative that our governments have been acting to protect the human rights of ordinary Syrians rather than the reality that they have been active combatants in the war, helping to destabilise a country in ways that have caused huge suffering and death in Syria.
Systematic failure
This isn’t a one-off failure. It’s part of a series of failures by the corporate media in its coverage of Douma.
They ignored very obvious grounds for caution at the time of the alleged attack. Award-winning reporter Robert Fisk was among the first journalists to enter Douma shortly after those events. He and a few independent reporters communicated eye-witness testimony that flatly contradicted the joint narrative promoted by al-Qaeda groups and western governments that Assad had bombed Douma with chemical weapons.
The corporate media also mocked a subsequent press conference at which many of the supposed victims of that alleged chemical attack made appearances to show that they were unharmed and spoke of how they had been coerced into play-acting their roles.
And now the western media has compounded that failure — revealing its systematic nature — by ignoring the leaked OPCW document too.
But it gets worse, far worse.
Al-Qaeda propaganda
This week the same al-Qaeda groups that were present in Douma — and may have staged that lethal attack — claimed that the Syrian government had again launched chemical weapons against them, this time on their final holdout in Idlib.
A responsible media, a media interested in the facts, in evidence, in truth-telling, in holding the powerful to account, would be dutybound to frame this latest, unsubstantiated claim in the context of the new doubts raised about the OPCW report into last year’s chemical attack blamed on Assad.
Given that the technical data suggest that al-Qaeda groups, and the White Helmets who work closely with them, were responsible for staging the attack — even possibly of murdering civilians to make the attack look more persuasive — the corporate media had a professional and moral obligation to raise the matter of the leaked document.
It is vital context as anyone tries to weigh up whether the latest al-Qaeda claims are likely to be true. To deprive readers of this information, this essential context would be to take a side, to propagandise on behalf not only of western governments but of al-Qaeda too.
And that is exactly what the corporate media have just done. All of them.
Media worthy of Stalin
It is clear how grave their dereliction of the most basic journalistic duty is if we consider the Guardian’s uncritical coverage of jihadist claims about the latest alleged chemical attack.
Like most other media, the Guardian article included two strange allusions — one by France, the other by the US — to the deception perpetrated by the OPCW in its recent Douma report. The Guardian reported these allusions even though it has never before uttered a word anywhere in its pages about that deception.
In other words, the corporate media are so committed to propagandising on behalf of the western powers that they have reported the denials of official wrongdoing even though they have never reported the actual wrongdoing. It is hard to imagine the Soviet media under Stalin behaving in such a craven and dishonest fashion.
The corporate media have given France and the US a platform to reject accusations against the OPCW that the media themselves have never publicly raised.
Doubts about OPCW
The following is a brief statement (unintelligible without the forgoing context) from France, reported by the Guardian in relation to the latest claim that Assad’s forces used chemical weapons this week: “We have full confidence in the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.”
But no one, except bloggers and academics ignored by the media and state authorities, has ever raised doubts about the OPCW. Why would the Guardian think these French comments worthy of reporting unless there were reasons to doubt the OPCW? And if there are such reasons for doubt, why has the Guardian not thought to make them public, to report them to its readers?
The US state department similarly came to the aid of the OPCW. In the same Guardian report, a US official was quoted saying that the OPCW was facing “a continuing disinformation campaign” from Syria and Russia, and that the campaign was designed “to create the false narrative that others [rather than Assad] are to blame for chemical weapons attacks”.
So Washington too was rejecting accusations against the OPCW that have never been reported by the state-corporate media.
Interestingly, in the case of US officials, they claim that Syria and Russia are behind the “disinformation campaign” against the OPCW, even though the OPCW has admitted that the leaked document discrediting its work is genuine and written by one of its experts.
The OPCW is discredited, of course, only because it sought to conceal evidence contained in the leaked document that might have exonerated Assad of last year’s chemical attack. It is hard to see how Syria or Russia can be blamed for this.
Colluding in deception
But more astounding still, while US and French officials have at least acknowledged that there are doubts about the OPCW’s role in Syria, even if they unjustifiably reject such doubts, the corporate media have simply ignored those doubts as though they don’t exist.
The continuing media blackout on the leaked OPCW document cannot be viewed as accidental. It has been systematic across the media.
That blackout has remained resolutely in place even after the OPCW admitted the leaked document discrediting it was genuine and even after western countries began alluding to the leaked document themselves.
The corporate media is actively colluding both in the original deception perpetrated by al-Qaeda groups and the western powers, and in the subsequent dishonesty of the OPCW. They have worked together to deceive western publics.
The question is, why are the media so obviously incompetent? Why are they so eager to keep themselves and their readers in the dark? Why are they so willing to advance credulous narratives on behalf of western governments that have been repeatedly shown to have lied to them?
Iran the real target
The reason is that the corporate media are not what they claim. They are not a watchdog on power, or a fourth estate.
The media are actually the public relations wing of a handful of giant corporations — and states — that are pursuing two key goals in the Middle East.
First, they want to control its oil. Helping al-Qaeda in Syria — including in its propaganda war — against the Assad government serves a broader western agenda. The US and NATO bloc are ultimately gunning for the leadership of Iran, the one major oil producer in the region not under the US imperial thumb.
Powerful Shia groups in the region — Assad in Syria, Hizbullah in Lebanon, and Iraqi leaders elevated by our invasion of that country in 2003 — are allies or potential allies of Iran. If they are in play, the US empire’s room for manoeuvre in taking on Iran is limited. Remove these smaller players and Iran stands isolated and vulnerable.
That is why Russia stepped in several years ago to save Assad, in a bid to stop the dominoes falling and the US engineering a third world war centred on the Middle East.
Second, with the Middle East awash with oil money, western corporations have a chance to sell more of the lucrative weapons that get used in overt and covert wars like the one raging in Syria for the past eight years.
What better profit-generator for these corporations than wasteful and pointless wars against manufactured bogeymen like Assad?
Like a death cult
From the outside, this looks and sounds like a conspiracy. But actually it is something worse — and far more difficult to overcome.
The corporations that run our media and our governments have simply conflated in their own minds — and ours — the idea that their narrow corporate interests are synonymous with “western interests”.
The false narratives they generate are there to serve a system of power, as I have explained in previous blogs. That system’s worldview and values are enforced by a charmed circle that includes politicians, military generals, scientists, journalists and others operating as if brainwashed by some kind of death cult. They see the world through a single prism: the system’s need to hold on to power. Everything else — truth, evidence, justice, human rights, love, compassion — must take a back seat.
It is this same system that paradoxically is determined to preserve itself even if it means destroying the planet, ravaging our economies, and starting and maintaining endlessly destructive wars. It is a system that will drag us all into the abyss, unless we stop it.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2XdYTiI Tyler Durden
Several weeks ago, we reported that U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres sounded the alarm over a large concrete dome constructed 40 years ago in the Marshall Islands to contain radioactive waste from Cold War-era nuclear tests.
According to Guterres, the dome – which houses approximately 73,000 cubic meters of nuclear debris on Runit Island, part of the Enewetak Atoll – may be leaking radioactive material into the Pacific Ocean, as the porous ground underneath the 18″ thick dome was never lined as initially planned.
Now, a new report from the Los Angeles Times shows that researchers have detected high levels of radiation in shellfish – confirming the worst case scenario: nuclear waste is devastating marine ecosystems near the dome.
The discovery is “raising concerns the contamination is spreading from the dump site’s tainted groundwater into the ocean and the food chain.”
The radiation “is either leaking from the waste site — which U.S. officials reject — or that authorities did not adequately clean up radiation left behind from past weapons testing, as some in the Marshall Islands claim.”
The U.S. tested 67 nuclear weapons tests from 1946 – 1958 at Bikini and Enewetak atolls. Despite U.S. efforts to move people to safety, thousands of islanders were exposed to radioactive fallout from above-ground tests conducted before a moratorium was enacted in 1958.
The tests included the 15 Megaton Castle Bravo on the Bikini Atoll, which was detonated on March 1, 1954. It was the most powerful ever detonated by the United States – and around 1,000 times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima just nine years before.
The effort to clean up the region in the 1970s included approximately 4,000 American members of the armed forces in what was known as the Enewetak Radiological Support Project.
In our report, we showed how cracks are visible in the dome’s surface, and the sea sometimes washes over its surface during storms.
“The United States Government has acknowledged that a major typhoon could break it apart and cause all of the radiation in it to disperse,” said Columbia University’s Michael Gerrard.
That said, a 2013 DoE report found that the soil outside of the dome is more contaminated than its contents– as the 1970s cleaning operation only removed an estimated 0.8% of the total nuclear waste in Enewetak Atoll.
It’s unclear whether the shellfish were poisoned by radioactive material from the dome, or the 67 previous tests in the surrounding area. However, one thing is obvious: the U.S. delayed the inevitable environmental disaster by burying nuclear waste inside a concrete dome some four decades ago.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2XiqQ92 Tyler Durden
“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’” ― Philip K. Dick
Red pill or blue pill? You decide.
Twenty years after the Wachowskis’ iconic 1999 film, The Matrix, introduced us to a futuristic world in which humans exist in a computer-simulated non-reality powered by authoritarian machines – a world where the choice between existing in a denial-ridden virtual dream-state or facing up to the harsh, difficult realities of life comes down to a red pill or a blue pill – we stand at the precipice of a technologically-dominated matrix of our own making.
We are living the prequel to The Matrix with each passing day, falling further under the spell of technologically-driven virtual communities, virtual realities and virtual conveniences managed by artificially intelligent machines that are on a fast track to replacing us and eventually dominating every aspect of our lives.
Science fiction has become fact.
In The Matrix, computer programmer Thomas Anderson a.k.a. hacker Neo is wakened from a virtual slumber by Morpheus, a freedom fighter seeking to liberate humanity from a lifelong hibernation state imposed by hyper-advanced artificial intelligence machines that rely on humans as an organic power source. With their minds plugged into a perfectly crafted virtual reality, few humans ever realize they are living in a dream world.
In our case, the red pill—a one-way ticket to a life sentence in an electronic concentration camp—has been honey-coated to hide the bitter aftertaste, sold to us in the name of expediency and delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets and cell phones.
Yet we are not merely in thrall with these technologies that were intended to make our lives easier. We have become enslaved by them.
Look around you. Everywhere you turn, people are so addicted to their internet-connected screen devices—smart phones, tablets, computers, televisions—that they can go for hours at a time submerged in a virtual world where human interaction is filtered through the medium of technology.
This is not freedom.
This is not even progress.
This is technological tyranny and iron-fisted control delivered by way of the surveillance state, corporate giants such as Google and Facebook, and government spy agencies such as the National Security Agency.
We are living in a virtual world carefully crafted to resemble a representative government, while in reality we are little more than slaves in thrall to an authoritarian regime, with its constant surveillance, manufactured media spectacles, secret courts, inverted justice, and violent repression of dissent.
So consumed are we with availing ourselves of all the latest technologies that we have spared barely a thought for the ramifications of our heedless, headlong stumble towards a world in which our abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos is grooming us for a future in which freedom is an illusion.
It’s not just freedom that hangs in the balance. Humanity itself is on the line.
Indeed, while most people are busily taking selfies, Google has been busily partnering with the NSA, the Pentagon, and other governmental agencies to develop a new “human” species.
But here’s the catch: the NSA and all other government agencies will also know you better than yourself. As William Binney, one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA said, “The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”
Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things, in which internet-connected “things” will monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.
This “connected” industry—estimated to add more than $14 trillion to the economy by 2020—is about to be the next big thing in terms of societal transformations, right up there with the Industrial Revolution, a watershed moment in technology and culture.
Between driverless cars that completely lacking a steering wheel, accelerator, or brake pedal and smart pills embedded with computer chips, sensors, cameras and robots, we are poised to outpace the imaginations of science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. (By the way, there is no such thing as a driverless car. Someone or something will be driving, but it won’t be you.)
The aim of these internet-connected devices, as Nest proclaims, is to make “your house a more thoughtful and conscious home.” For example, your car can signal ahead that you’re on your way home, while Hue lights can flash on and off to get your attention if Nest Protect senses something’s wrong. Your coffeemaker, relying on data from fitness and sleep sensors, will brew a stronger pot of coffee for you if you’ve had a restless night.
Internet-connected techno gadgets as smart light bulbs can discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats will regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells will let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.
Nest, Google’s $3 billion acquisition, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.
It’s not just our homes that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government and our very bodies that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.
Moreover, given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices are operating entirely independent of their human creators, which poses a whole new set of worries.
As technology expert Nicholas Carr notes, “As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they’re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can’t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it’s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers.”
For instance, just as the robotic vacuum, Roomba, “makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an insect,” weaponized drones will be incapable of distinguishing between a fleeing criminal and someone merely jogging down a street.
Unfortunately, in our race to the future, we have failed to consider what such dependence on technology might mean for our humanity, not to mention our freedoms.
Ingestible or implantable chips are a good example of how unprepared we are, morally and otherwise, to navigate this uncharted terrain. Hailed as revolutionary for their ability to access, analyze and manipulate your body from the inside, these smart pills can remind you to take your medication, search for cancer, and even send an alert to your doctor warning of an impending heart attack.
If you were shocked by Edward Snowden’s revelations about how NSA agents have used surveillance to spy on Americans’ phone calls, emails and text messages, can you imagine what unscrupulous government agents could do with access to your internet-connected car, home and medications?
Imagine what a SWAT team could do with the ability to access, monitor and control your internet-connected home: locking you in, turning off the lights, activating alarms, etc.
After all, who cares if the government can track your whereabouts on your GPS-enabled device so long as it helps you find the fastest route from Point A to Point B? Who cares if the NSA is listening in on your phone calls and downloading your emails so long as you can get your phone calls and emails on the go and get lightning fast Internet on the fly? Who cares if the government can monitor your activities in your home by tapping into your internet-connected devices—thermostat, water, lights—so long as you can control those things with the flick of a finger, whether you’re across the house or across the country?
It’s hard to truly appreciate the intangible menace of technology-enabled government surveillance in the face of the all-too-tangible menace of police shootings of unarmed citizens, SWAT team raids, and government violence and corruption.
However, both dangers are just as lethal to our freedoms if left unchecked.
Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business is monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in virtually every way by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
Whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, will be listening in and tracking your behavior.
This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.
In other words, there is no form of digital communication that the government cannot and does not monitor: phone calls, emails, text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, internet video chats, etc., are all accessible, trackable and downloadable by federal agents.
The government and its corporate partners-in-crime have been bypassing the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions for so long that this constitutional bulwark against warrantless searches and seizures has largely been rendered antiquated and irrelevant.
We are now in the final stage of the transition from a police state to a surveillance state.
Having already transformed local police into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are in the process of turning the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone Stingray devices and so much more.
Add in the fusion centers and real-time crime centers, city-wide surveillance networks, data clouds conveniently hosted overseas by Amazon and Microsoft, drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras, and biometric databases, and you’ve got the makings of a world in which “privacy” is reserved exclusively for government agencies.
In other words, the surveillance state that came into being with the 9/11 attacks is alive and well and kicking privacy to shreds in America. Having been persuaded to trade freedom for a phantom promise of security, Americans now find themselves imprisoned in a virtual cage of cameras, wiretaps, sensors and watchful government eyes.
Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people.
And of course that doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine. Indeed, Facebook, Amazon and Google are among the government’s closest competitors when it comes to carrying out surveillance on Americans, monitoring the content of your emails, tracking your purchases and exploiting your social media posts.
“Few consumers understand what data are being shared, with whom, or how the information is being used,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “Most Americans emit a stream of personal digital exhaust — what they search for, what they buy, who they communicate with, where they are — that is captured and exploited in a largely unregulated fashion.”
It’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.
We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, even our gait—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.
For instance, imagine what the NSA could do (and is likely already doing) with voiceprint technology, which has been likened to a fingerprint. Described as “the next frontline in the battle against overweening public surveillance,” the collection of voiceprints is a booming industry for governments and businesses alike. As The Guardian reports, “voice biometrics could be used to pinpoint the location of individuals. There is already discussion about placing voice sensors in public spaces, and … multiple sensors could be triangulated to identify individuals and specify their location within very small areas.”
Total control over every aspect of our lives, right down to our inner thoughts, is the objective of any totalitarian regime.
George Orwell understood this. His masterpiece, 1984, portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”
Make no mistake: the Internet of Things is just Big Brother in a more appealing disguise.
Now there are still those who insist that they have nothing to hide from the surveillance state and nothing to fear from the police state because they have done nothing wrong. To those sanctimonious few, secure in their delusions, let this be a warning: the danger posed by the American police state applies equally to all of us, lawbreaker and law-abider alike.
In an age of too many laws, too many prisons, too many government spies, and too many corporations eager to make a fast buck at the expense of the American taxpayer, there is no safe place and no watertight alibi.
We might call it the war for Libya 2.0, given that following the Arab North African country turning to chaos and ruin following the 2011 US-NATO regime change war against Gaddafi, a new war for Tripoli is fast becoming internationalized in what threatens to be a full-blown proxy war.
New reports this week have uncovered what appear to be covert arms shipments pouring into the war-torn country on “mysterious planes” in support of General Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA), which has since early April laid siege to the capital city. At the same time, there’s new evidence that external countries like Turkey as well as foreign mercenaries are bolstering the ranks of the UN-backed Government of National Accord which Haftar is trying to unseat.
Via Al Jazeera investigation: Two Ilyushin 76 aircraft made several trips between Egypt, Israel, and Jordan before landing at air bases controlled by Haftar
A new Al-Jazeera investigation caught what’s presumed to be weapons-laden cargo planes making repeat trips to makeshift battlefront air bases. What’s more is that they are attempting to go “covert” during the deliveries by flipping their tracking transponders off.
Cargo planes were discovered flying clandestinely into bases controlled by renegade Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar and dropping off unidentifed payloads at the time his forces attacked Tripoli last month, an Al Jazeera Arabic TV investigation found.
Satellite images and flight data show two Russian-made Ilyushin 76 aircraft registered to a joint Emirati-Kazakh company called Reem Travel made several trips between Egypt, Israel, and Jordan before landing at military bases controlled by Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) in early April, just as it attempted to seize the capital.
Haftar has long been described by many analysts as “the CIA’s man in Libya”— given he spent a couple decades living in exile a mere few minutes from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia during Gaddafi’s rule.
In late April the White House had shocked UN and western allies by reversing policy which had up until then recognized the GNA’s authority, and bestowed legitimacy of Gen. Haftar’s forces. President Trump went so far as to thank Haftar for “securing Libya’s oil resources” in a phone call.
This week Al Jazeera published photos and video footage of the illegal (under a recent UN arms embargo) arms shipments, as well as satellite and tracking data from the planes:
Flight transponders appear to have been turned off while flying into the war-torn North African country. Libya is currently under an arms embargo imposed by the United Nations after years of fighting.
Video published by Haftar’s forces shows one of the cargo planes – with the registration number UP-I7645 – after landing at LNA’s Tamanhant military base in southern Libya. It had taken off from Benghazi in the east, Haftar’s stronghold.
The report cites a gulf affairs analyst named Bill Law, who said the war for Libya is now expanding into a full proxy war. “What we’re seeing are lots of players coming into Libya. It’s a recipe that’s almost heading to a Yemen scenario. We’re beginning to see a proxy war emerging. We’re looking at a pretty bleak situation. In this situation of a vacuum, you see players emerge and we’re seeing this now,” he told Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera published screengrabs of a video published to Gen. Haftar’s media site, showing cargo unloaded from aircraft at a LNA military base.
Aircraft have been observed flying into Libya with their trackers off, in what appears violation of a UN arms embargo on the country.
Recent UN numbers and humanitarian monitors have put the number of displaced due to Haftar’s offensive on the capital at more than 40,000 civiliansand a rising death toll of multiple hundreds, and thousands wounded.
Among Haftar’s main backers include the UAE, Egypt, France, Russia, and recently the United States. Foreign mercenaries have been observed backing both sides, with Turkish as well as European military trainers reported to have recently assisted the Tripoli-based GNA.
Interestingly, in a reversal of the well-known “weapons rat line” which in 2011 to 2012 ran from Libya into Syria, Damascus has this week condemned what it says is a covert program to transfer Syrian jihadists to Libya.
Syria’s Ambassador to the UN Bashar Al-Ja’afari told the UNSC on Tuesday: “How can the fighters be transferred from Syria to Libya unless the support of governments benefiting from it?” as cited by The Libyan Address. “We have warned against the transfer of fighters to neighboring countries,” Jaafari added.
According to a summary of the intensifying influx of foreign fighters into Libya, the Middle East news site Al-Masdar noted:
Members of both the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh) and Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham have somehow made their way from Syria to Libya over the last year, prompting the governments in Damascus and Benghazi to question who is aiding their transfer.
Damascus and Benghazi have accused Turkey in recent months of helping to facilitate this transfer, despite Ankara’s rejection of accusations.
Turkey is considered a close ally to the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA); they are currently fighting the Libyan National Army (LNA), which is led by Field Marshal General Khalifa Haftar.
The twisted irony is that whereas Libya less than a decade ago was a main departure point for foreign jihadists entering the Levant region via Turkey to fight Assad, it now appears the same jihadists are headed the other way, and again in support of a NATO country (Turkey and the GNA’s UN allies).
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Wa4JoR Tyler Durden
A student-athlete at Franklin Pierce University on Saturday became the first in the school’s history to collect an individual national title. That student-athlete is also transgender.
“A transgender woman who competed as a man as recently as last year won an NCAA women’s track national championship on Saturday. Franklin Pierce University senior Cece Telfer beat the eight-woman field in the Division II women’s 400-meter hurdles by more than a second, with a personal collegiate-best time of 57.53,” the Tribune-Reviewreports.
“As recently as January 2018, Telfer had been competing as an athlete for Franklin Pierce men’s team as Craig. Telfer finished eighth in a field of nine in the Men’s 400 meters at the Middlebury Winter Classic in Vermont,” the Trib reported. “The NCAA allows male athletes to compete as women if they suppress their testosterone levels for a full calendar year. Before that, they compete on mixed teams — with men and women — in the men’s division but not the women’s.”
In just its 7th year of existence, the @FPURavensXCTF has its first national champion. Senior CeCe Telfer took control of the 400-meter hurdles on Sat. PM and went on to post victory w/ a personal best time of 57.53. Read more here; https://t.co/vCukMSb7vSpic.twitter.com/gE3v7HQ3Ml
A news release published by the small, private New Hampshire-based university celebrated the win:
In just its seventh year of existence, the Franklin Pierce University women’s track & field team has its first national champion. Senior CeCe Telfer (Lebanon, N.H.) took control of the 400-meter hurdles down the back stretch on Saturday night and went on to post victory by more than a second, in a personal collegiate-best time of 57.53 seconds. Telfer also added All-America First Team accolades in the 100-meter hurdles earlier in the day, on the third and final day of the NCAA Championships, hosted by Texas A&M-Kingsville, at Javelina Stadium.
Telfer is the first student-athlete in Franklin Pierce history to collect an individual national title. It marks the seventh NCAA national championship overall in the history of the University, with all the previous crowns coming on the soccer field. …
Earlier in the day, Telfer also earned All-America First Team honors in the 100-meter hurdles, with a fifth-place finish. Running out of lane 7, she crossed the line at 13.56 seconds, just one half-second behind the winner. Pittsburg State senior Courtney Nelson, who had been the top qualifier out of Friday’s preliminary heats, took home the national title in 13.06 seconds. San Francisco State junior Monisha Lewis followed in second (13.29), while Minnesota-Duluth senior Danielle Kohlwey took third (13.31). Lindenwood senior Erin Hodge narrowly edged Telfer at the line for fourth place, with a time of 13.47 seconds.
