An NYPD SUV carrying Mayor Bill de Blasio to an event in Harlem was going the wrong way and had its lights and siren on when it crashed into boiler truck. Cops determined the SUV’s driver was at fault in the 2015 incident, but texts obtained by a local newspaper found that the head of the mayor’s protection detail tried to cover the up the crash. State law requires any collision causing more than $1,000 in damage has to be reported to the Department of Motor Vehicles. But the newspaper found that no report has been filed for this crash.
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An NYPD SUV carrying Mayor Bill de Blasio to an event in Harlem was going the wrong way and had its lights and siren on when it crashed into boiler truck. Cops determined the SUV’s driver was at fault in the 2015 incident, but texts obtained by a local newspaper found that the head of the mayor’s protection detail tried to cover the up the crash. State law requires any collision causing more than $1,000 in damage has to be reported to the Department of Motor Vehicles. But the newspaper found that no report has been filed for this crash.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2QiAyFF
via IFTTT
France has threatened three French journalists with potential jail time for using secret documents to reveal the country’s involvement in the Yemen civil war.
In a series of reports published in April, investigative journalists from Disclose and Radio France revealed the number of French arms sold to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The documents, authored by France’s Directorate of Military Intelligence (DSGI), showed that senior French officials had lied about the role of French weapons in the Yemen War.
Following the publication of the reports in April, Disclose’s co-founders Geoffrey Livolsi and Mathias Destal and Radio France journalist Benoît Collombat were asked to attend a hearing at the DSGI headquarters in Paris.
The three journalists refused to reveal their sources after being questioned by the DSGI on the origin of the document, their work and posts on Facebook and Twitter.
The journalists used the hearing to defend press freedom and how it was in the public interest to publish details from the leaked DSGI document.
Press Freedom has been protected for more than 130 years under the Press Law of 1881, which gives journalists the right to keep sources confidential.
But the law, however, does not cover national security and the journalists could be sentenced under a 2009 French law that considers as an offence the handling of a classified document without clearance or proper authorisation.
If convicted, the journalists could face five years in prison and a $83,000 fine. The case could be closed by the DSGI or be handed to a judge who could take the case to trial.
Paul Coppin, the head of Reporters Without Border’s (RSF) legal unit, criticised the DSGI for attempting to prosecute the French journalists.
In a statement published on the RSF website, Coppin described the case as a “matter of legitimate public interest”.
“We are concerned that the sole aim of this hearing is to use the threat of prosecution to put pressure on these journalists to reveal their source,” said Paul Coppin.
“As it is legally unable to force them to disclose the identity of their source, the prosecutor’s office is using the possibility of a charge of compromising national defence secrecy, a charge punishable by five years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros [$83,750].
“The mere fact of threatening such a prosecution for publishing information in the public interest would in itself constitute a serious violation of the public’s right to be informed.”
Yemen’s civil war has killed or injured more than 17,900 civilians and triggered a famine that has taken the lives of an estimated 85,000 children.
Campaigners have argued that arms supplied by other Western countries, including the United States and Britain, have been used by the Saudi-led coalition to commit human rights abuses as they fight against Iran-backed Houthi rebels.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Wlf3cP Tyler Durden
A 31-year-old social worker in the UK is set to inherit a £50m ($64 million US) estate in Cornwall, UK, after a DNA test revealed he was the son of its deceased owner, reports The Guardian.
Penrose estate in Cornwall
Jordan Adlard Rogers discovered that his father was Charles Rogers following the aristocrat’s 2018 demise. The elder Rogers was found dead in his car last August of a methadone overdose at the age of 62, after spending 40 years living as a “drug-addled recluse.”
Estate manager Mr Care was the last person to speak to Charles, around three days before his body was discovered.
Mr Care said that in the months leading up to his death, Charles was malnourished and neglecting his personal hygiene, rarely changing his clothes.
Instead of living in his lavish home, Charles was sleeping in his car. –CornwallLive
Jordan, meanwhile, has moved his girlfriend and newborn son out of government housing onto the 1,536-acre Penrose estate, which his family has lived in since 1771. He will receive an annual stipend of £52,000 ($66,000 US) from the Rogers family trust. Of note, the average salary of a community support worker is £20,536 ($26,000 US) per year.
Jordan Adlard Rogers in front of portraits of members of the Rogers family (via CornwallLive)
Jordan, formerly a family support worker, had suspected that Charles Rogers was his father since the age of eight.
“He offered to do a DNA test when I was younger but it didn’t happen and then when I was 18 I knocked on his door and asked if I could have the test and he told me to do it through the solicitors. I was 18 so had other priorities at the time,” said Jordan.
“I wrote more letters in my twenties but never got a reply, then three years ago I got in contact with power of attorney Philip Care. Philip said Charles didn’t want to do the test so I wrote one final letter with a DNA test kit enclosed and that was when Philip rang and told me Charles was dead.”
“I’m not going to forget where I’ve come from,” he told CornwallLive. “I’ve been at the point of worrying about the next bill and have had a tough start in life but now I’m here I want to help people.”
“I’m now starting to get my feet under the table here. People say I’m lucky but I would trade anything to be able to go back and for Charles to know I was his son. Maybe then he might have taken a different path,” Jordan added.
“I don’t need to work anymore so want to set up a charity and help the Porthleven and Helston communities.”
The estate generates income from investments in stocks, as well as the rental of a number of parcels of land to local farmers.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Jzd0vE Tyler Durden
The French president is gathering unlikely allies to challenge the populists. But he’s so unpopular, it might not even matter.
It’s rare that the likes of Emmanuel Macron is compared to Roger Stone. But Stone’s cardinal rule, “In order to win, you must do everything,” very much applies to the French president. And the latest political alliance he’s struck ahead of the upcoming European elections only reinforces that.
Macron’s La République En Marche (“the Republic on the move”) party presented its European election manifesto in Paris two weeks ago, then traveled to Berlin and other European capitals to rally French expat voters. It also promoted its ally parties from other countries, namely the German Free Democratic Party (FDP), the Spanish center-right Ciudadanos, the Dutch D66, the Hungarian Momentum, the Belgian liberal MR, the Austrian liberal NEOS, and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s VVD. Through this group—which is humbly called “Renaissance”—Macron is trying to win 100 seats in the European Parliament (out of 778). But getting there will be tough, because even the aforementioned parties that actively wield power haven’t won significant shares of the vote.
This is where the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), a transnational political grouping, comes in.
Macron’s plan is to adopt the platform of the ALDE, drop the word “liberal” (which in Europe still refers to economic liberalism), and use its resources to argue for a stronger EU. But the ALDE itself has struggled to establish a power base and forged some shady alliances in trying to do so. For instance, it currently includes the Czech party ANO, whose leader, Andrej Babiš, is being investigated for allegedly misallocating €2 million ($2.24 million) for an infrastructure project he himself owned, in what is currently one of his country’s biggest corruption scandals. Babiš was a member of the communist party in the 1980s. He is on the European Court of Human Rights’ list of the former Czechoslovak dictatorship’s secret agents. He created a business empire in the post-Soviet 1990s, and now owns a very significant part of the Czech Republic’s media landscape.
And he isn’t the only media mogul on the list of Macron’s likely allies. Delyan Peevski from the ALDE affiliate Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) was identified by Reporters Without Borders as one of the main reasons for the poor state of the media in Bulgaria. RWB points out that the “New Bulgarian Media Group” controls nearly 80 percent of print media distribution in that country, and that it covers up corruption scandals by intimidating those trying to investigate shady business deals.
In Estonia, ALDE-affiliated Prime Minister Jüri Ratas didn’t mind forming a government coalition with the far-right EKRE party. Estonian Minister of Finance Martin Helme, a member of the EKRE, has been quoted saying “If you’re black, go back,” and calling for a “white Estonia.” His father, Mart Helme, who is now minister of interior, complained that the “number of negroes in Tallinn [Estonia’s capital] has grown explosively” and said of LGBT events that he does not see why “the police should guard a parade of perverts.”
To warn of a “wave of dangerous populists in Europe” while simultaneously getting in bed with them to stay in power shows quite a level of political opportunism. Not that being called a populist worries this group too much. In 2017, ALDE leader and former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt held talks with the populist Italian Five Star Movement, which is currently part of the Italian government. Verhofstadt was hoping to bring them onboard, which would have made the ALDE the third biggest group in the Parliament—even though he himself had said two years earlier that “it is impossible for any responsible, pro-European group to take the M5S [the Five Star Movement] on board” in a post that he has since deleted. Call it a European flip-flop.
Now that the Italian nationalists have opted out of a “centrist” alliance, Macron’s Renaissance is attempting to recruit the Italian Social Democrats. The ALDE says it’s looking for a “green, left, and centrist” coalition. I think they’re running the risk of repeating themselves.
What does Macron actually want?
Renaissance’s manifesto makes mention of much of what he’s already argued for in his European reform plans. But that was back when he was still giving off an exciting vibe in the distant year of 2017. People don’t get fired up by a European minimum wage and a European army anymore. Particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, centralized minimum wage laws can be seen as a way to crush emerging industries in favor of Western European production. And Macron’s proposed “agency to protect European democracies” would likely be viewed as taking aim at the governments of Poland, Hungary, and Romania.
But Macron’s struggles ultimately start at home. His pick for lead candidate in the European elections, Nathalie Loiseau, is a diplomat and academic administrator. Utterly devoid of excitement, she used a recent speech to give voice to the standard “dangers” of Donald Trump’s politics and liken her political project to the spirit of Gutenberg and Picasso. The address was probably supposed to fit with the “Renaissance” theme. That a considerable part of the country was still putting on yellow traffic vests and screaming their lungs out against the government in Paris doesn’t seem to bother her. They’re probably all populists anyway.
Marine Le Pen doesn’t need to do much ahead of the elections. She leads Macron’s movement by half a point, which would have been considered unfathomable just a year ago. And the more Le Pen gathers steam, the more Macron will lose ground.
Not that we should have expected more from one of the most unpopular presidents in French history.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/30C3cpV Tyler Durden
Justin Amash thinks Donald Trump is guilty of “impeachable conduct,” and he is absolutely right. Impeachable conduct is whatever the House of Representatives decides it is, a point the president’s defenders and some of his critics seem determined to obscure.
The House impeached Bill Clinton for lying under oath about oral sex, and the conduct described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report is more troubling and consequential, even if it does not amount to a crime that could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. When Amash, a five-term Michigan congressman, became the first Republican legislator to make that point, the reaction revealed how determined his colleagues are to evade their responsibilities.
Mitt Romney, the Utah senator and former Republican presidential nominee who a month ago said he was “sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection” detailed by Mueller, this week praised Amash’s “courageous statement” but added that he disagreed with his conclusion. Romney argued that “you just don’t have the elements” to “make a case for obstruction of justice.”
The Mueller report actually makes a strong case that at least some of Trump’s attempts to interfere with the investigation of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election involved the three elements of obstruction: an obstructive act, a nexus to an official proceeding, and a corrupt intent. When Trump tried to stop the FBI investigation of his former national security adviser, repeatedly demanded Mueller’s removal, pressed White House Counsel Donald McGahn to deny that Trump had tried to fire Mueller, urged his attorney general to take control of the Russia investigation and limit its scope, and discouraged witnesses from cooperating with it, he arguably met all three criteria.
Mueller unambiguously rejected the view, advocated by Trump’s lawyers and Attorney General William Barr, that the president cannot obstruct justice by exercising his otherwise lawful constitutional powers, which include control of the Justice Department. But even if you accept that theory, it does not cover Trump’s public and private attempts to influence the testimony of witnesses such as McGahn, his former lawyer Michael Cohen, and his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
The fact that Trump’s frequently clumsy efforts to impede federal investigations were mostly unsuccessful (mainly because of resistance by his underlings) does not get him off the hook, since attempted obstruction is also a crime. Nor does it matter that Mueller ultimately found no evidence that anyone in the Trump campaign illegally conspired with Russian agents. Trump himself did not know the answer to that question in advance, and in any case he may have been motivated by a desire to prevent revelations that could prove embarrassing and politically damaging.
More to the point, as Amash noted, the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that justify impeachment extend beyond provable statutory violations to abuses of power that betray the public trust. Trump’s own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, last year conceded that it “would just be unthinkable” for Trump to pardon himself, which “would lead to probably an immediate impeachment,” even though the Constitution imposes no limits on that power.
Congress might reasonably conclude that a president who uses his powers to protect himself in a less dramatic way—say, by repeatedly interfering with an investigation of his own actions—is unfit for office. Perhaps the norm of avoiding even the appearance of such interference is worth preserving, whether or not it is legally required.
Romney argues that impeachment would be unwise in terms of “practicality and politics,” since “the American people just aren’t there” and the Republican-controlled Senate, which would conduct the trial that follows impeachment by the House, “is certainly not there either.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is discouraging her fellow Democrats from pursuing impeachment, seems to have reached a similar conclusion.
It is hard to argue with that political calculation. But members of both parties may come to regret the signal they are sending about the sort of presidential behavior Congress is willing to tolerate.
Justin Amash thinks Donald Trump is guilty of “impeachable conduct,” and he is absolutely right. Impeachable conduct is whatever the House of Representatives decides it is, a point the president’s defenders and some of his critics seem determined to obscure.
The House impeached Bill Clinton for lying under oath about oral sex, and the conduct described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report is more troubling and consequential, even if it does not amount to a crime that could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. When Amash, a five-term Michigan congressman, became the first Republican legislator to make that point, the reaction revealed how determined his colleagues are to evade their responsibilities.
Mitt Romney, the Utah senator and former Republican presidential nominee who a month ago said he was “sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection” detailed by Mueller, this week praised Amash’s “courageous statement” but added that he disagreed with his conclusion. Romney argued that “you just don’t have the elements” to “make a case for obstruction of justice.”
The Mueller report actually makes a strong case that at least some of Trump’s attempts to interfere with the investigation of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election involved the three elements of obstruction: an obstructive act, a nexus to an official proceeding, and a corrupt intent. When Trump tried to stop the FBI investigation of his former national security adviser, repeatedly demanded Mueller’s removal, pressed White House Counsel Donald McGahn to deny that Trump had tried to fire Mueller, urged his attorney general to take control of the Russia investigation and limit its scope, and discouraged witnesses from cooperating with it, he arguably met all three criteria.
Mueller unambiguously rejected the view, advocated by Trump’s lawyers and Attorney General William Barr, that the president cannot obstruct justice by exercising his otherwise lawful constitutional powers, which include control of the Justice Department. But even if you accept that theory, it does not cover Trump’s public and private attempts to influence the testimony of witnesses such as McGahn, his former lawyer Michael Cohen, and his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
The fact that Trump’s frequently clumsy efforts to impede federal investigations were mostly unsuccessful (mainly because of resistance by his underlings) does not get him off the hook, since attempted obstruction is also a crime. Nor does it matter that Mueller ultimately found no evidence that anyone in the Trump campaign illegally conspired with Russian agents. Trump himself did not know the answer to that question in advance, and in any case he may have been motivated by a desire to prevent revelations that could prove embarrassing and politically damaging.
More to the point, as Amash noted, the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that justify impeachment extend beyond provable statutory violations to abuses of power that betray the public trust. Trump’s own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, last year conceded that it “would just be unthinkable” for Trump to pardon himself, which “would lead to probably an immediate impeachment,” even though the Constitution imposes no limits on that power.
Congress might reasonably conclude that a president who uses his powers to protect himself in a less dramatic way—say, by repeatedly interfering with an investigation of his own actions—is unfit for office. Perhaps the norm of avoiding even the appearance of such interference is worth preserving, whether or not it is legally required.
Romney argues that impeachment would be unwise in terms of “practicality and politics,” since “the American people just aren’t there” and the Republican-controlled Senate, which would conduct the trial that follows impeachment by the House, “is certainly not there either.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is discouraging her fellow Democrats from pursuing impeachment, seems to have reached a similar conclusion.
It is hard to argue with that political calculation. But members of both parties may come to regret the signal they are sending about the sort of presidential behavior Congress is willing to tolerate.
The rule of law has given way to law as a weapon in the hands of government…
Everyone who is aware of the US government’s extraordinary criminal actions at home and abroad bears a heavy weight. The millions of peoples murdered, maimed, orphaned, widowed, and displaced by gratuitous American military aggression comprise a Holocaust of deaths based entirely on lies and false accusations in order to advance secret American and Israeli agendas. I suspect that the heavy burden of responsibility for mass murder and destruction committed in our name is the reason most Americans prefer the fake news fed to them about how good and wonderful and exceptional we are and how hard our government works to protect us from the nasty folks elsewhere.
This storyline converts the illegal brutal war crimes of the US government against women, children, defenseless citizens, schools, wedding parties, funerals, and farmers in their fields into glorious and brave defenses of our liberty and virtue. If you want the truth watch the video leaked by Manning of US troops enjoying themselves while from the air they machine-gun reporters and innocent civilians walking along a street and follow up by machine-gunning a father and his two young children, babies, who stopped to help the wounded bleeding in the street. The leak of the video that showed the true picture of Washington’s wars is the reason Manning was tortured and imprisoned. It is the person who told the truth, not the criminals who committed the murders, who was punished.
I agree that the fake story of America’s moral worthiness is much easier to live with than it is to bear the shame of the true story. But in the end the fake story destroys our liberty even more completely than would conquest by a foreign opponent. People are more suspicious of an occupying power than they are of their own government and are less likely to believe foreign occupiers when they lie to them. In contrast, a people’s own government can trap them in a false consciousness and keep them there with fake news.
Wherever one looks at the behavior of Americans today, from airline flight attendants to police to national security advisors and secretaries of state, one sees people devoid of moral conscience, integrity, compassion, empathy, and self-control. For unreasonable and petty spite alone, a female airline attendant on a long-delayed Southwest Airline flight called police and had a man to whom she took a dislike arrested and taken off the airplane. All of the passengers protested to the police that the arrested person had done nothing, but the cops didn’t listen. They had another victim to abuse. Was the victimization of this person the result of Identity Politics teaching women to hate men?
Trump’s crazed war criminal national security adviser, John Bolton, and the idiot secretary of state, Pompeo, want to cause massive civilian deaths in Iran and Venezuela. Iran is to be overthrown for Israel, and Venezuela for US oil companies. The motives are blatant and obvious, but Bolton and Pompeo are not denounced and forced to resign for their shameful murderous intentions. Yet, if they used the n-word or sexually harassed a woman, they would have to resign. This demonstrates the twisted and sick state of American morality today. Bombing people is acceptable, but words might really hurt them.
Washington’s case against Julian Assange is so contrived and so weak, that the corrupt US attorney assigned to frame-up Assange has resorted to persecution of Manning in an effort to coerce false testimony against Assange from Manning. After being tortured and serving seven years in prison for revealing a US war crime, as Manning was required to do under the US military code, Manning was pardoned by President Obama. Now Manning is back in prison for a second time after being pardoned, because Manning will not cooperate in the frame-up of Assange by giving false testimony to a grand jury. Without false testimony, the corrupt US attorney hasn’t a case that could get a conviction from even the typical insouciant American jury, normally a collection of gullible people easily manipulated by the prosecutor.
When Manning was imprisoned for 63 days for refusing to tell lies about Assange, Manning spent 28 of those days in solitary confinement. Why?
A week after Manning was released, the corrupt US attorney called Manning again before the grand jury that the corrupt US attorney is using to contrive a case against Assange. Again Manning refused to cooperate in the frame-up, and was again held in contempt and again remanded into federal prison. This time a corrupt US federal district judge, Anthony Trenga, added to Manning’s jail time a daily fine of $500 rising to $1,000 daily after 60 days. In other words, the corrupt judge is helping the corrupt US attorney to coerce Manning into cooperating in a frameup of Assange. Americans need to understand that their judges are not judges. They are operatives of the American police state.
When I characterize the US attorney and judge as corrupt, I don’t mean that they are taking money, although that cannot be ruled out. I mean that they are corrupt in the sense that they have abandoned the rule of law and do not see their function as serving justice. The US Constitution and its amendments establish law as a shield of the people against coercive and arbitrary actions of government, but the US attorney and judge are using law as a weapon against individuals against whom authorities want revenge. For years we have been witnessing the rule of law being attacked from every level, from the president to the local police. See Roberts and Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
No one has protested the open and highly visible effort to force Manning to commit perjury that can be used to build a case against Assange or otherwise be imprisoned for “contempt” and fined into penury. The despicable liberal-progressive-left whores that comprise the US print and TV media and NPR will not protest the injustice. They hate Manning and Assange for having more integrity than all of them together. The conservative talk radio hosts won’t protest the attempt to coerce Manning, because they love Trump, Washington’s wars, and hate “anti-Americans,” which is everyone who dares tell the truth about the US. On conservative talk radio on May 17, I heard one popular host say “I am happy Manning is in prison.”
No US senators or representatives and neither the Senate or House judiciary committee sees anything untoward in forcing an American citizen to produce the needed lies for framing up the world’s best journalist. Law schools and bar associations are not demanding the corrupt US attorney to be disbarred for violating every precept laid down by US Attorney General, Surpreme Court Justice, and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson. Nor are they demanding the impeachment of the corrupt federal district judge, who perhaps has his eye on appointment to the appeals court for his cooperation in finishing off the First Amendment.
The American people are too insouciant and brainwashed to know what is happening. Regardless, they are as powerless as third world peasants who have a dictator’s boot on their necks.
The “Western democracies”—what a joke—have not raised a voice at the US government’s public display of intimidation of a witness, at the US government’s use of imprisonment and coercive fines in a public display of forcing a person to lie in order that the US government can get revenge on a journalist who published leaked materials that show conclusively that the US government is a deranged war criminal, a liar and deceiver of its dumbshit allies and population, and the greatest threat to peace and stability in the world.
Assange might be saved by prosecutors with a guilty conscience in Sweden, the country in which Assange’s troubles began. Assange’s troubles began in Sweden where two women enthralled with his celebrity separately invited him into their beds. One of them became alarmed when he did not use a condom. To reassure herself that he did not have a sexually transmitted disease, she asked him to take a test. He foolishly refused. She went to the police, not to report a rape but to inquire if Assange could be forced to submit to testing. The other woman found out about the other woman, and was angry that she was not the only woman in his sexual life.
It was the police and a feminist prosecutor taught to hate men who made it into a rape investigation. But as the women said it was consensual sex, the charges were dropped. Assange was released and free to leave Sweden.
His second mistake was to go to England, an American puppet state. Once Assange was in Britain, he was as good as in Washington’s hands. Washington encouraged a second Swedish feminist prosecutor to reopen the case. As there were no charges against Assange, all the feminist prosecutor could do was to try to extradite Assange for more questioning. Once Sweden had him, the expectation was that Washington would pay the bribe for his extradition to the US. Normally, extradition requires formal charges, but Sweden had none. Normally, there is no extradition for questioning. But a corrupt British court, perhaps well paid by Washington, agreed to the extradition for questioning and placed Assange under house arrest under a large bond paid, if memory serves, by Sir James Goldsmith’s daughter.
Whether or not Sir James’ daughter understood it, Assange and his lawyers understood that he was in line to be delivered to Sweden and from there to the Washington torturers. Therefore, asylum was arranged for Assange in the Ecuadoran Embassy where he lived seven years until a Washington-compliant and corrupt Ecuadoran president, well paid with an IMF loan, gained power and revoked Assange’s asylum. The British police then did Washington’s bidding and dragged Assange out of the embassy and placed him in a maximum security prison as if he were some sort of dangerous criminal.
The second Swedish prosecutor had eventually consented to interviewing Assange in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London and afterward dropped her extradition request, and the case was closed for the second time. But the corrupt British legal system, which is almost as corrupt as the American one, put Assange in jail for 50 weeks based on “bail jumping” despite the fact that the extradition request from Sweden on which the bail was based was withdrawn.
Now Washington’s British vassal is considering the request from Britain’s Washington master to hand over Assange for torture, confession, and death or long-term imprisonment. But suddenly Sweden has found that there is “still probable cause” that not using a condom could be a sexual offense and have again requested Britain to hand Assange over to Sweden.
Is this a rescue attempt on Sweden’s part to make up for having ruined the life of the world’s best journalist? Or is it Washington’s insurance polcy against the British coming to their senses and, on the basis of justice, refusing Washington’s extradition order?
In England the decision is up to the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, who is not of British ethnicity. Hopefully, he is an immigrant from one of the abused colonies and will stick his finger in the UK/US eye and turn Assange over to Sweden where he is unlikely to be convicted for engaging in unprotected sex. Hopefully, Assange will not be so stupid as to then travel to another Washington puppet state. If he does, he will experience his tribulation again.
But Washington pays so well I doubt Assange can escape. The corrupt Western media is against him because Assange shows them up as devoid of an ounce of integrity and devoid of the practice of journalism. The American presstitutes don’t care about the First Amendment. As they never tell the truth, they don’t need First Amendment protection.
Washington, which claims to represent the American people, is for war and more war. Bolton intends that the US will, for Israel, attack Iran and create chaos there as was created in Iraq and Libya, and also in Syria prior to the Russian intervention.
Under neoconserative and Israeli leadership, America has become a deranged country, distrusted by other governments and considered the primary threat to peace and life on earth.
Every American should be ashamed. But they are not. At some point, the Russians, Chinese, Europeans, Iranians, and everyone else will finally realize, hopefully before it is too late, that Washington is overwhelmed by evil, capable only of destruction, and a dangerous threat to life on earth.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2YHqfOE Tyler Durden
China reported weaker growth in retail sales for April last week, implying that consumers are now beginning to dial back their spending habits on everyday products. Clothing sales declined for the first time since 2009, also shows how consumers are pulling back on luxury clothing brands amid a deepening trade war and a slowing economy.
Bloomberg says consumers from Shanghai to Beijing have been on a Gucci binge since the trade disputes began last summer. The Chinese account for a little more than a third of all global luxury goods consumption.
The elevated level of luxury goods consumption in China has been a 15-year impulse, is expected to slow in the near term, due to a structural decline in the economy.
Even as the trade war sparked a further slowdown, Chinese demand for luxury clothing surged early this year. That was supported by government intervention through reductions in import tariffs on big-name luxury brands, which made them more affordable to consumers.
But over the last month, several factors have emerged that could slow demand for luxury clothing.
Although luxury goods weren’t included in the latest trade war escalation by the US, the risk of uncertainties surrounding trade can be enough to damage consumer confidence and lead to slower sales.
The recent drop in the yuan against the euro and dollar is more bad news for consumers’ purchasing power of Europen luxury goods.
Bloomberg shows that Swatch and Burberry have the most significant percentage of revenues exposed to the Chinese consumer, 47% and 40%, respectively.
The Bloomberg Intelligence index of top luxury companies in China shows a modest rebound from January, but the price has not made a new high since April. Since the deepening of the trade war in early May, the index has declined 4%, risks a complete reversal if tensions continue to increase through the summer.
Mario Ortelli, a managing partner of luxury adviser Ortelli & Co, told Bloomberg that Chinese consumers buying expensive handbags in Paris, or even taking a trip to Europe in the first place, is only when they feel wealthier and not plagued by global uncertainties surrounding trade.
What’s clear is that demand for top luxury brands could find one of its largest buyers [the Chinese] pulling back in consumption as soon as this summer, another ominous sign that a 2H19 rebound in China is more of a myth.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Eq8U4O Tyler Durden
The first to suffer was Syria and since then the gruesome effects have been spreading to Africans and Europeans…
Eight years on from NATO’s war in Libya in 2011, as the country enters a new phase in its conflict, I have taken stock of the number of countries to which terrorism has spread as a direct product of that war. The number is at least 14. The legacy of the overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi – pursued by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.S. President Barack Obama – has been gruesomely felt by Europeans and Africans. Yet holding these leaders accountable for their decision to go to war is as distant as ever.
Portrait of Gaddafi in Ghadames, Libya, 2009. (Wikimedia Commons)
The 2011 conflict, in which NATO worked alongside Islamist forces on the ground to remove Gaddafi, produced an ungoverned space in Libya and a country awash with weapons, ideal for terrorist groups to thrive. But it was Syria that suffered first.
After civil war broke out there in early 2011, at the same time as in Libya, the latter became a facilitation and training hub for around 3,000 fighters on their way to Syria, many of whom joined Al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State-affiliated Katibat al-Battar al-Libi (KBL), which was founded by militants from Libya.
In Libya itself, a rebranding of existing Al-Qaeda-linked groups in the north-eastern area of Derna produced Islamic State’s first official branch in the country in mid-2014, incorporating members of the KBL. During 2015, IS Libya conducted car bombings and beheadings and established territorial control and governance over parts of Derna and Benghazi in the east and Sabratha in the west. It also became the sole governing body in the north-central city of Sirte, with as many as 5,000 fighters occupying the city.
By late 2016, IS in Libya was forced out of these areas, largely due to U.S. air strikes, but withdrew to the desert areas south of Sirte, continuing low-level attacks. In the last two years, the group has re-emerged as a formidable insurgent force and is again waging high-profile attacks on state institutions and conducting regular hit-and-run operations in the southwestern desert. Last September, UN Special Representative to Libya Ghassan Salame told the UN Security Council that the IS “presence and operations in Libya are only spreading.”
Terror in Europe
After the fall of Gaddafi, IS Libya established training camps near Sabratha, which are linked to a series of terrorist attacks and plots. “Most of the blood spilled in Europe in the more spectacular attacks, using guns and bombs, really all began at the time when Katibat al-Battar went back to Libya,” Cameron Colquhoun, a former counterterrorism analyst for Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, told The New York Times. “That is where the threat trajectory to Europe began – when these men returned to Libya and had breathing space.”
Floral tributes to the victims of the attack in St Ann’s Square in Manchester city center. (Tomasz “odder” Kozlowski via Wikimedia Commons)
Salman Abedi, who blew up 22 people at a pop concert in Manchester in 2017, met with members of the Katibat al-Battar al-Libi, a faction of IS, several times in Sabratha, where he was probably trained. Other members of the KBL were Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the ringleader of the 2015 Paris attacks on the Bataclan nightclub and sports stadium, which killed 130 people, and the militants involved in the Verviers plot to attack Belgium in 2015. The perpetrator of the 2016 Berlin truck attack, which left 12 people dead, also had contacts with Libyans linked to IS. So too in Italy, where terrorist activity has been linked to IS Libya, with several individuals based in Italy involved in the attack on the Bardo museum in Tunis in 2015, which killed 22 people.
Memorial to victims of the attack on Bardo National Museum in Tunisia. (Yamen via Wikimedia Commons)
Libya’s Neighbors
Tunisia suffered its deadliest terrorist attack in 2015 when a 23-year-old Tunisian armed with a machine gun mowed down 38 tourists, mainly Britons, at a beach hotel in the resort of Port El Kantaoui. The perpetrator was reportedly an adherent of IS and, like Salman Abedi, had been trained in the camp complex at Sabratha from where the attack was staged.
Libya’s eastern neighbor, Egypt, has also been struck by terrorism emanating from the country. IS officials in Libya have been linked to, and may have directed, the activities of Wilayat Sinai, the terrorist group formerly known as Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, which has carried out several deadly attacks in Egypt. After the fall of Gaddafi, the Western Desert became a corridor for the smuggling of weapons and operatives on their way to the Sinai. Egypt conducted air strikes against militant camps in Libya in 2015, 2016 and again in 2017, the latter following the killing of 29 Coptic Christians near Cairo
Into the Sahel
But Libya has also become a hub for jihadist networks stretching south into the Sahel, the geographical transition zone in Africa between the Sahara desertto the north and the Sudanian Savanna to the south.
Libya’s 2011 uprising opened a flow of weapons into northern Mali, which helped revive an ethno-tribal conflict that had been brewing since the 1960s. By 2012, local allies of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) had taken control of day-to-day governance in the northern Mali towns of Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu. After France intervened in Mali, the ongoing lack of governance in Libya precipitated several groups to relocate their operational centers to Libya, including both AQIM and its offshoot, Al-Mourabitoun, from where these groups could acquire weapons more easily.
With Libya as its rear base, Al-Mourabitoun under its leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar was behind the attack on the Amenas hydrocarbon complex in eastern Algeria in January 2013, which left 40 foreign workers dead; the gun attack on the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali in November 2015, which killed 22 people; and for the attack on Hotel Splendid in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, which killed 20 people in January 2016. Al-Mourabitoun has also attacked a military academy and French-owned uranium mine in Niger.
Disastrous Foreign Policy
The fall-out from Libya spreads even wider, however. By 2016, U.S. officials reported signs that Nigeria’s Boko Haram jihadists, responsible for numerous gruesome attacks and kidnappings, were sending fighters to join IS in Libya, and that there was increased cooperation between the two groups. The International Crisis Group notes that it was the arrival of weapons and expertise from Libya and the Sahel that enabled Boko Haram to fashion the insurgency that plagues north-western Nigeria today. There have even been claims that Boko Haram answers to IS commanders in Libya.
After months of captivity by suspected Boko Haram militants, ex-hostages arrive at Cameroon’s Yaounde Nsimalen International Airport. (VOA via Wikimedia Commons)
In addition to these 14 countries, fighters from several other states have joined IS militants in Libya in recent years. Indeed, it is estimated that almost 80 percent of IS membership in Libya is non-Libyan, including from countries such as Kenya, Chad, Senegal and Sudan. These foreign fighters are potentially available to return to their own countries after receiving training.
The true extent of the fall-out from the Libya war is remarkable: it has spurred terrorism in Europe, Syria, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Islamic State, although now nearly defeated in Syria and Iraq, is far from dead. Indeed, while Western leaders seek to defeat terrorism militarily in some places, their disastrous foreign policy choices have stimulated it in others.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2VZQpPP Tyler Durden
