Australian Federal Police officers raided two separate news offices within 24 hours this week, in a chilling and blatant attack on the freedom of the press, aimed at intimidating journalists who report on government misconduct and war crimes.
Read more . . .Australian Federal Police (AFP) spent seven hours ransacking a News Corp political reporter’s home in Canberra, and eight hours poring over and seizing files at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Sydney headquarters.
In an extraordinary admission, the AFP’s acting commissioner Neil Gaughan blurted out that the real reason for the raids was to protect the information that the Australian police and intelligence agencies receive from their “Five Eyes” counterparts. Five Eyes is a top-level network of intelligence agencies dominated by the US that also includes Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Read more . . .“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” — Professor Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Read more . . .Dual nationals – those holding the citizenship of both an EU Member State and a non-EU state- will also be included in the database, despite protests from international legal experts who argue that doing so will create two ‘tiers’ of EU citizenship and thus discriminate against dual nationals.
Read more . . .An approach to economic sanctions based on the principle of solidarity with the victims and on norms of human rights may include humanitarian dimensions but should equally include elements of empowerment, such as asserting the rights of the victims. Among such rights figure particularly an entitlement to effective remedies for the unjustified harm they have suffered and which was caused by others.
Read more . . .David Martin lists 17 techniques used by governments and their willing executioners to suppress facts and cover-up official crime. Knowing these techniques helps to resist these psychological attacks and expose the deceivers.
Read more . . .Now comes forward an attorney, Mary Maxwell with a book. It is available online free. I read the first eight chapters, which was sufficient to comfirm me in my independent conclusion that there was no Boston Marathon bombing by terrorists. Irony is the style that she has chosen, and we must respect a person prepared to stand up to the murderous American establishment and to challenge one of the founding myths of the American Police State and Washington’s wars against the world.
Read more . . .In 2015, a number of journalists and journalism associations requested access from the Parliament to documents relating to the subsistence allowances, travel expenses and parliamentary assistance allowances of Members of the European Parliament (‘MEPs’). Those requests were all refused by the Parliament, as were the confirmatory applications which followed them. The General Court confirms the Parliament’s refusal to grant access to documents relating to MEPs’ subsistence allowances, travel expenses and parliamentary assistance allowances.
Read more . . .MI5 has refused to answer the claimants’ questions about the scope of the policy, including whether it could in principle authorise murder, torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, rape, kidnapping or false imprisonment. The security service’s lawyers said to answer such questions of law would reveal the facts of conduct they wish to keep secret.
Read more . . .This article briefly examines the medicines component of the right to health, While the article focuses upon the responsibilities of States, it also provides a brief introduction to the responsibilities of pharmaceutical companies. The article is offered as a preliminary contribution to far-reaching human rights issues of the first importance.
Read more . . .Facebook, Google, Twitter and other giant social media companies—working closely with intelligence agencies and governments—are seeking to leverage their role as mechanisms of communication to become instruments of censorship and repression. In the process, they are turning one of the most important and liberating technological advances of the 21st century, the growth and expansion of artificial intelligence, into a mechanism for police control and dictatorship.
Read more . . .A proposal in the Israeli parliament calls for a maximum five-year prison term for anyone photographing, recording or distributing Israel Defense Forces activity on social media with the aim of hurting the “soldiers’ spirit.” The maximum term increases to 10 years imprisonment for those convicted of seeking to harm national security
Read more . . .SANA, Yemen — I LEARNED that my 16-year-old grandson, Abdulrahman — a United States citizen — had been killed by an American drone strike from news reports the morning after he died.
The missile killed him, his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians on Oct. 14, 2011, while the boys were eating dinner at an open-air restaurant in southern Yemen.
Read more . . .Resolution 2397 will condemn the people of North Korea to excruciating deaths. Ironically, December 22 is the United Nations “Holocaust Remembrance Day.” It is shameful that on December 22 the United Nations Security Council voted to inflict the Twenty –First Century’s Holocaust upon the people of North Korea. With the passage of Resolution 2397, the United Nations Security Council has become an instrument of barbarism and terror.
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Read more . . .The triumph of political untruth has brought into being a vast system of political intimidation. Remember then that the intimidator does not really care what you believe or not, but impresses you with the fact that you have no choice. That is the essence of the exercise of brute power. With false flag events the circumstantial evidence sometimes appears quite transparently false and, indeed could be interpreted as having been purposeful.
Read more . . .A growing number of leading left-wing websites have confirmed that their search traffic from Google has plunged in recent months, adding to evidence that Google, under the cover of a fraudulent campaign against fake news, is implementing a program of systematic and widespread censorship.
Read more . . .On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the Center for Constitutional Rights described how the Constitution had been shredded based on assumptions about the 9/11 attacks. By then, it had also become clear that the government was actually giving aid and comfort to the enemy (violating Article 3) through arming and training terrorists. One might think it obvious that stopping such actions would be the goal of all Americans but to do so one Congress member has had to spell it out in legislation.
Read more . . .Five years of devastating civil war and strict economic sanctions have plunged over 80 percent of Syrians into poverty, up from 28 percent in 2010. Ferdinand Arslanian, a scholar at the Center for Syrian Studies at the University of St. Andrews, says that reduction in living standards and aid dependency is empowering the regime.
Read more . . .The intellectual’s provisional home is the domain of an exigent, resistant, intransigent art into which, alas, one can neither retreat nor search for solutions. But only in that precarious exilic realm can one first truly grasp the difficulty of what cannot be grasped, and then go forth to try anyway.
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