The Joseph Biden administration has named Richard Nephew as its deputy Iran envoy. Richard Nephew has taken personal credit for depriving Iranians of food and driving up their unemployment rates, celebrating the economic destruction he caused as “a tremendous success.” Under Biden, he will help direct policy on Iran.
Read more . . .There are considerable rhetorical parallels between Joseph Goebbels’ “Sports Palace Speech” and the hold-out slogans of today’s Corona hardliners. Are we equating the speeches of our “lockdown” presidents in the federal and state governments with the speech of the fascist Goebbels? No. Comparing does not mean equating. To compare means to compare – to identify similarities and differences. And the comparison is justified.
Read more . . .India’s President Modi surprised the entire country on 24 March 2020. At 8 pm, he announced on a government owned news channel that a nationwide lockdown would be enforced from midnight. All workplaces, schools, shops and hotels were shut down. Flights, trains, buses, private vehicles and other transport systems were halted. People were only allowed to leave their homes to pick up essentials and faced a year in jail if they did not have a valid excuse for being outside. India had one of the harshest lockdowns in the world in March, according to Oxford University’s Stringency Index.
Read more . . .We are on the threshold of a world in which a triumvirate of a few digital and financial groups and the most important central banks will dominate the global monetary system and thus finally and irrevocably take over world power. In his lecture at the WEFF [alternative forum] in Davos, Ernst Wolff illuminated the economic background that even critics of the Corona measures are not necessarily aware of.
Read more . . .To protect humanity, we would have to launch a battle for freedom from science. Saying that one has purely scientific thinking is tantamount to saying that one is a religious fanatic. Today, when science is turning into a religion, we would have to skeptical of its claims of building a better world.We all need to reflect that when debates and discussions were being barred in the name of COVID; when crores of people were being pushed into hunger, unemployment and misery in the name of expert advice and science; at that time, what was our duty? Did we do our duty? There is still time. Do we intend to fulfil our responsibility; do we want to discharge our duty?
Read more . . .Iran’s parliament speaker on international affairs, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said on Friday that severe consequences await the US military’s act of provocation. “The harassment of an Iranian passenger plane by American fighter jets once again proved that the presence of foreigners in the region is a serious threat to peace and security,” he said in a post on his Twitter account. “US illegally occupies territory of another State and then harasses a scheduled civil airliner—endangering innocent civilian passengers ostensibly to protect its occupation forces,” the Iranian foreign minister said.
Read more . . .The European Union already wanted to monitor our vaccination records and tie those to our passport, introduce mandatory vaccinations and clampdown on “misinformation”. They just didn’t have a reason yet. This was a situation which required a crisis and, fortuitously, it got one.
Read more . . .Among other ideas, the EU diplomats discussed the option of creating a certificate of security in the sphere of tourism under the provisional name “COVID-19 passport”, which would refer to the health status of the owner of the document, and enable him/her to travel to the EU and Schengen States.
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 . . .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 . . .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 . . .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 . . .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.
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Read more . . .The corporate state has made it very hard to make a living if you hold fast to this radical critique. You will never get tenure. You probably won’t get academic appointments. You won’t win prizes. You won’t get grants. The New York Times, if they review your book, will turn it over to a dutiful mandarin like George Packer to trash it—as he did with my last book. The elite schools, and I have taught as a visiting professor at a few of them, such as Princeton and Columbia, replicate the structure and goals of corporations. If you want to even get through a doctoral committee, much less a tenure committee, you must play it really, really safe. You must not challenge the corporate-friendly stance that permeates the institution and is imposed through corporate donations and the dictates of wealthy alumni. Half of the members of most of these trustee boards should be in prison!
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 . . .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 . . .All the evidence we present in this report shows that Greece not only does not have the ability to pay this debt, but also should not pay this debt first and foremost because the debt emerging from the Troika’s arrangements is a direct infringement on the fundamental human rights of the residents of Greece. Hence, we came to the conclusion that Greece should not pay this debt because it is illegal, illegitimate, and odious.
Read more . . .What raises particular concern are the attempts to artificially ratchet up the Sunni-Shiite disagreements and use religious differences to achieve political goals, among other things, by imposing schemes on the UN Security Council to approve outside interference.
Read more . . .During the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2014, U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) deployed to 133 countries — roughly 70% of the nations on the planet — according to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bockholt, a public affairs officer with U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
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