Quantcast
Channel: International – Reverb Press 📈

Obama Weighs How Slowly To Throw Afghanistan To The Wolves

0
0

The Taliban operate with near impunity in Kabul, a point they reinforce with almost daily attacks and bombings. On the morning of November 27th, they attacked a British embassy car and a foreign compound, killing 5 and wounding more than 30.

The Taliban gain a great deal of their power from extorting opium production (just as FARC thrived on the extortion of cocaine in Columbia for years). The UN reports that this year, opium production is up by 7%. Efforts to tamp it down have either failed or backfired. Thirteen years since the US invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban, strong as ever, is a salivating wolf at the door, waiting for the US to leave it open.

President Obama announced in January of 2013 that combat troops would be withdrawn by the end of 2014. Bloomberg reports that Obama seems to have been convinced by the military to keep 1,000 more troops, about 10 percent, more than initially promised, for a few months.

“Some U.S. military and intelligence officials have said that Afghan security forces, plagued by corruption and dependent on some U.S. assistance, can’t gain the upper hand over the Taliban and their allies, who maintain safe havens in neighboring Pakistan and increasingly in parts of Afghanistan.”

The recent Defense spending bill included $63.7 billion for “overseas contingency operations” in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as $2.9 billion available to the Afghan Ministry of Defense, half as much as was allocated last year. All this indicates that the US will be simultaneously drawing down while lingering, and possibly beefing up special operations, to defend the new government in Afghanistan. The US is telling the new Afghan government: the training wheels need to come off, but we’ll hold you  up if they don’t, and we’ll be almost completely out of here in two years, so, good luck!

[contentblock id=2 img=gcb.png]

The President was saddled with this war from the beginning of the Bush Administration, and may have little choice but to continue to fight it or risk ‘losing Afghanistan’ on his watch, even while he remains determined to withdraw all but 1,000 troops by the end of his term.

This is almost certainly not going to end well for the US or for Afghanistan. The end result for American foreign policy, possibly early in the next administration, is likely to be somewhere between Somalia and Saigon. In 1993, Clinton had inherited Bush Sr.’s peacekeeping mission in Somalia. The US began drawing down regular forces while beefing up special forces operations. This led to mission creep in the form of snatch and grab raids, which resulted in the tragic Black Hawk Down incident, souring the American public on the intervention. In 1975, the iconic image of CIA station personnel being evacuated from a rooftop as the People’s Army of Vietnam captured Saigon. Or, the military, under Obama, may decide to drag out the withdrawal as long as possible. The next president may decide that we’re not leaving until the Afghan government is ‘ready,’ which could take decades.

[contentblock id=2 img=gcb.png]

If the US leaves, the Taliban is almost certain to take over Afghanistan again. It will exact horrific retribution and roll back social gains, such as the education of girls. It will return the country to an Old Testament theocracy, a narco-state with scant human rights, and a safe haven for terrorists. Yet, if the US stays, it will continue to play whack-a-mole for eternity in the unforgiving badlands of the Hindu Kush, rightly known as the Graveyard of Empires since the locals repelled Alexander the Great’s legions of hoplites in Antiquity. It will continue to pursue an occupation of a land that has, for decades, rebuffed every foreigner and any domestic semblance of a nation-state for no conceivable strategic purpose. The US has failed in its adventure in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history, as so many great powers have before, and the President is now weighing how long we will stay there to avoid the political fallout when the Taliban inevitably makes it official.


Australia Ends Hostage Standoff, Fox News Claims Australians Are Jealous of America’s Guns

0
0

Following a dramatic hostage standoff which ended in the middle of the night Monday, Fox News reported, ‘Yippee for guns!’, Muslims are evil and Australians now want all the guns like Americans.

Fox News called on Australian correspondent Nick Adams to give his ‘analysis.’ Adams is the author of American Boomerang, a book apparently full of smooches to the American right wing’s backside. Chuck Norris calls it a ‘great work.’ In his article on Fox, Adams argues:

Interestingly, Monday’s events have also prompted Australians to revisit their gun laws.

Adams gives no evidence of this whatsoever. No statistics, no interviews, no anonymous officials, not even a quote from his senile grandmother. This is sheer blathering conjecture.

When a conservative government in Australia passed sweeping gun control in 1996, it did so with 90-95% public support. Gun deaths have steadily declined since. Today, Australian politicians warn the public to be careful about traveling to America because they are “15 times” more likely to get shot and killed, as a result of the NRA’s headlock over America’s gun policies. After the Newtown massacre in 2012, many Australians urged America to consider emulating their gun control. Australia is clearly a society that appreciates its government’s efforts to ensure public safety by regulating guns, and Adams is out on the limb of a right wing fringe, flirting with America’s right wing fringe. Adams moves right along from specious argument to offensive argument:

With Islamic supremacism a mainstream interpretation of Islam, deeply rooted in Islamic scripture and endorsed by many of Islam’s most influential scholars, Australians are beginning to understand the nature of the Islamic threat, and studying their own weaknesses in its wake.

This is a gross simplification of ISIS and its goals. He provides no evidence that its views are mainstream. This is not Bill Maher providing controversial statistics and drawing sweeping generalizations as a call for wariness and reform based on actual information. This is merely a slur against a large group of people, and a sloppy one at that. It is also a xenophobic effort to scapegoat a significant minority within Australian society. Adams continues,

The United Kingdom has had two beheadings of members of the public in the last two years, with neither police nor civilians able to prevent it. It also has prohibitive gun laws.

A man beheaded a woman in Oklahoma this year and no one was able to prevent that either, even though there are 89 guns for every 100 people in the United States. There were also 32,000 gun deaths a year in the US as of 2011, and neither police nor civilians stopped that.

Australians are looking to America, and not the UK for guidance.

The US has one of the highest rates of gun death per capita in the world and Australia and the UK have some of the lowest. In the US there were 10.30 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2011, while in Australia, there were 0.86, and in the United Kingdom, there were 0.25 in 2010. Both Australia and the UK have a pretty good thing going. Both have a participatory democracy more beholden to the people than the biggest banks and the military, and both have an economy more invested in the middle class than America does. They also have comprehensive gun regulation as a function of public safety, which didn’t lead to fascism, somehow. So why would Australians suddenly want to overthrow one of the world’s most effective gun policies just because of one hostage situation? Without any evidence to back that claim up, it’s safe to assume that they don’t. Adams continues fibbing,

With this sort of threat, the normal calculus of a civilized society with a small, armed (or unarmed) police force upon which the citizens are forced to rely, no longer adds up.

Here, Adams is assuming, as the American right he so admires assumes, that guns are banned in Australia. About 5.2% of Australians own and use guns. That devices designed only to kill should be regulated is common sense in every society with a functioning government except America. Adams is lazily relying on his misinformed conservative American audience to fail to understand that regulating guns is not the same as taking them away.

It is unsurprising that home-grown terrorism is most rampant in nations with strict gun control.

The US has a great deal of homegrown terrorism, and it does not have strict gun control. Since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the Southern Poverty Law Center has endeavored to keep a tally of planned, attempted or executed attacks by right wing domestic terrorists in the US. There have been dozens, and there are at least one or two every year. The most recent domestic terrorist attack was just a couple weeks ago, on November 28th, when a man angry about Mexican immigration shot more than 100 rounds at government buildings and set fire to a Mexican consulate in Austin. These terrorist attacks don’t even include hate crimes such as a recent suspected lynching of a black boy in North Carolina. The idea that Australia has more homegrown terrorism because it has strict gun control is absurd. Adams adds:

It is a reality that Australia’s powerful anti-gun lobby seems to wish to ignore.

It’s hard to imagine that Australia’s anti-gun lobby is anywhere near as powerful as the NRA is in America. And what power it has certainly derives more from the public opinion that almost universally supported sweeping reform than from the raw profit of manufacturers bent on squelching public safety, as the NRA’s power does.

It is times like these that Americans should be thankful for their Second Amendment, and crush any effort or force seeking to weaken or remove it.

Right now, they are the envy of a growing number of Australians that wish they were armed.

The same conservative Supreme Court that ruled that money is speech and corporations can have religious rights, also distorted the intended language of the Second Amendment, simply by interpreting a comma in a way that made no sense grammatically. If anything threatens the Second Amendment, it’s the conservatives who think they’re defending it. Even as recently as Reagan, gun control and conservatism went hand-in-hand. Today’s conservatives think the Second Amendment means, “as many guns in as many hands as possible, regardless of the consequences.”

Following the massacre of two dozen elementary school students two years ago, public support for curbing military grade weapons and magazines and closing gun show loopholes was at an all-time high. Through legalized corruption in Congress and a mendacious PR campaign that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun, the NRA managed to crush the effort to institute some semblance of sanity into America’s gun policies. They continue to protect an epic public policy failure that begets a culture of murder to rival countries with an ongoing civil war, purely for their private profit. Adams’s insinuation that any group of the American people have the democratic power to curtail this private interest is absurd revisionism. And the idea that Australians are, or should be jealous, should give the Australian people a taste of what Americans already know: there is no “News” on Fox.

Now We Know ISIL Are Evil Morons, Not Brilliant Masterminds

0
0

ISIS swept across northern Iraq like a sand devil last summer, scattering the terrified Iraqi army nearly as fast as the American coalition had 11 years earlier. They left mass graves and looted banks in their wake. Their modern weapons, diversified income of millions of dollars, slick propaganda, ability to understand and attract Westerners by the hundreds, and meticulous blitzkrieg made them seem less like a schism from al Qaeda, and more of a super mutation of al Qaeda. They were Spiderman to al Qaeda’s Peter Parker. In American media and rhetoric, swept up in election year hysteria, they were elevated to a status of evil masterminds. This week is likely to be the beginning of a rapid decline in their mystique and power, because their recent moves reveal that their decision makers are not evil geniuses, but vile idiots.

It is better to be feared than loved, as Machiavelli argued. But, if ISIS wants to be considered a valid political entity in the international arena it has to evolve beyond simply being the boogie man. Its leaders have to cultivate levers of influence over other political actors. By seeking to negotiate for hostages, it appeared to be cultivating influence in the mode of North Korea. But its psychosis and nihilism are apparently far deeper than Pyongyang’s. Consider the leverage that ISIS squandered by executing its two Japanese and one Jordanian hostage. The two Japanese men were incredible potential bargaining chips. ISIS was asking for $200 million for them. Simply by having them in their possession, ISIS embarrassed Japan, making the Japanese people question its first sustained expansion of military presence in the world since WWII. The Japanese government considered the situation a crisis, and was committed to trying to free them.

But rather than free them and gain a significant windfall for little effort, ISIS began playing games it couldn’t possibly win. ISIS beheaded one of the Japanese men, possibly in the hopes that a ticking clock would force the Japanese government to hand over money on blind faith. But no government is going to be hustled into a rash decision like that. The surviving Japanese prisoner was then used to instruct Jordan to release a failed suicide bomber with a connection to ISIS people who splintered from al Qaeda, in exchange for the Jordanian pilot. Jordan demanded proof that the pilot was still alive. ISIS could not possibly provide this, because they had already killed the pilot weeks earlier. ISIS then killed the second Japanese man, and revealed its horrific Dark Ages murder of the pilot while Jordan’s King Abdullah was in the US. This demonstrates that ISIS is not only evil in an ever-accelerating way, but its planning is irrational. ISIS held two major US-allied governments by the throat, but its commitment to cruelty trumped tactical decision-making. If they had compromised on the brutality, they could have come out hundreds of millions of dollars richer, and if Jordan had sprung the terrorist, with a PR coup to boot. The triumphant homecoming of a “jihadist sister” after two major governments prostrated themselves before ISIS would have attracted recruits. They could have used the money to supply more fighters, expand their influence, and entrench more deeply into their conquered territory.

If ISIS is to survive as a political entity, it needs to divide and conquer. It needs to be a beacon to extremists and secretly capture the imagination of moderates. It needs to drive a wedge between Arabs and the West, between Sunni and Shia, and between Muslims and their governments. Its propaganda had accomplished many of these things. But its psychotic video of the murder of the Jordanian pilot may undo a great deal of its messaging success. It is so depraved that no human with a thought beyond nihilistic savagery could possibly identify with it. The New York Times reports a virtually unprecedented wave of universal revulsion across the Middle East. The killing was condemned by clerics of virtually all stripes, not known for their agreement.

Many of ISIS’s latent opponents are teaming up and hardening their resolve. Iraqi Christians are forming anti-ISIS militias. The Kudish peshmerga have formed an operational alliance with the Free Syrian Army, to attack ISIS on two fronts. But most importantly, enraging Jordan may prove to be a grievous strategic blunder. Perhaps they sought to knock Jordan out of the war. But the Jordanian people seem to enthusiastically support a campaign of vengeance. Jordan has already begun retaliatory bombing of ISIS positions, but its airstrikes may be the least of ISIS’s worries.

Jordan has one of the best intelligence networks in the Arab world, and had the most success infiltrating al Qaeda before and after 9/11. In the summer of 2001, Jordanian intelligence warned the US that al Qaeda was preparing a big attack in the US, and that it would involve planes. Jordan’s king was so concerned about the size of the attack, that he offered to send Jordanian special forces to Afghanistan to preemptively attack al Qaeda on America’s behalf. The Bush Administration declined the offer. When al Qaeda in Iraq commander Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a US airstrike in 2006, it was the end result of a tenacious Jordanian intelligence infiltration operation. Arguably, there is no intelligence service on earth more skilled at infiltrating, understanding, predicting and destroying Islamic extremist organizations than Jordan’s. And in one fell, stupid swoop, ISIS just fused the people, King and military of Jordan into one white-hot seething rage.

This is the Middle East. The airstrikes are the appetizer. The main course will be personal.

Kayla Mueller Is Already The Target Of Right-Wing Lies

0
0

That didn’t take long — only a day after the death of peace activist and aid worker Kayla Mueller was officially confirmed, we are already seeing the beginnings of a vicious smear campaign coming from the fringes of the right. We are being told that Kayla Mueller was a supporter of terrorism and that her death was thus deserved. Conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel had the following blast of bile to contribute:

No tears for the newly-departed Kayla Mueller, the ISIS hostage whose parents confirmed today that she is dead. Mueller was a Jew-hating, anti-Israel piece of crap who worked with HAMAS and helped Palestinians harass Israeli soldiers and block them from doing their job of keeping Islamic terrorists out of Israel.

The cause of all this frothing and foaming? Kayla Mueller had worked with the International Solidarity Movement, a group devoted to non-violent advocacy of the Palestinian cause in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is also a frequent target of attacks from the right, both in the United States and in Israel. It has been tarred with supporting terrorism and been accused of anti-semitism, despite the fact that Neta Golan, one of its  three co-founders, is a third-generation Israeli. But this association with ISM is enough to smearKayla Mueller as a supporter of terrorism and as an anti-semite:

Kayla Mueller was a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) who spent at least two years working with that terrorist support group. She was involved in demonstrations against the Jews in Sheikh Jarrah (part of East Jerusalem) after a 20 year long court decision recognized the Jews’ legal rights to homes they were chased from in earlier wars launched by the Arabs. She also participated in demonstrations to interfere with the IDF demolishing the homes of terrorists and suicide bombers after the courts okayed the demolitions.

Others declare Kayla Mueller a supporter of “worldwide jihad,” and a disseminator of terrorist propaganda:

…she was working to support the goals of Palestinian irredentist/terrorists and to interfere with the IDF on behalf of terrorist groups. As an ISM activist she was a tool for the worldwide jihad.

Most telling though, was the tweet of Joel Pollak, editor-in-chief for Breitbart.com:

Sad that Kayla Mueller was anti-Israel activist. If she understood both sides she might have avoided idealizing the enemy that killed her

— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) February 11, 2015

While Pollak’s statement lacks the raw vitriol of some of the more unhinged commentators from the right wing, and while it would certainly be a bit of a mistake to expect an awareness of regional geopolitics and history, or even basic logic, from Beitbart.com, the conflation of Palestinian activism and the continued atrocities of ISIS under the broad label of “the enemy” is both profoundly ignorant and profoundly useless. More to the point, it displays a fundamentally monolithic understanding of the Middle East and its population. This is the same sort of muddled thinking that leads to attacks on President Obama for refusing to declare a war on Islamic extremism. By Pollak’s shaky logic — if one wishes to dignify his apparently random chain of thoughts with that term — associating with a peace activist group that supports the Palestinian cause is somehow equivalent to idealizing ISIS. And this is followed by the unstated implication that said idealization resulted in a lamentable, but somehow deserved, fate.

Since Pollak alleges to be the editor of what might loosely be referred to as a media outlet, and ostensibly deals with matters of international news on occasion, I feel like I shouldn’t have to tell him this, but ISIS and Palestine aren’t exactly good buddies. This should be obvious to anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of the two. ISIS’s goal of an Islamic state engulfing the whole of the Middle East is sharply at odds with the Palestinian goal of an autonomous state for the Palestinian peoples.

This isn’t complicated. The single point of commonality betwixt the Palestinians and ISIS is that they share a common religion. (There are Palestinian Christians, but let’s not confuse Pollak any further). Pollak cannot seem to wrap his mind about the fact that two groups, with nothing more than the Islamic faith in common, might have entirely different goals and ideologies. I won’t call Pollak’s conflation of Palestine and ISIS racism, or even bigotry, for those terms have been thrown around so often in this discussion that they have become void of meaning. I will call him deeply ignorant of the topic upon which he attempts to speak.

But beyond the muddled conservative logic that cannot distinguish between ISIS and ISM, Hezbollah and Hamas, the Wahhabist extremism of Saudi Arabia and the Shiite extremism of Iran, there is a more fundamental issue. That the right-wing would so gleefully and viciously attack Kayla Mueller, not 24 hours after her announced death, exposes a fundamental callousness and inhumanity. I would argue that their actions display a cruelty far worse than anything they have accused Kayla Mueller of. Should Pollak and his ilk wish to charge people with spreading terror and hatred, I might suggest they begin by looking in the mirror.

GOP Senators Try To Undermine Peace, Send Threatening Letter To Iran

0
0

Conservative Republicans have made no secret of their desire to derail President Obama’s peace negotiations with Iran. Their efforts are becoming desperate and dangerous.

One of the GOP’s most aggressive hawks, Tom Cotton — freshman Tea Party senator from Arkansas — has initiated ‘an open letter’ to Iran that blatantly interferes with the President’s right to conduct foreign policy. Signed by a total of 47 Republican senators, the letter purports to ‘educate’ Iran on American democracy. It begins:

“It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system.”

This insult to the intelligence of Iranian officials is followed by a veiled threat. First, it states that any treaty not ratified by Congress is “a mere executive agreement” that can be dispensed with as soon as a new president takes office. It says:

“President Obama will leave office in January 2017 while most of us will remain in office well beyond then — perhaps decades …

“The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”

In other words: we’re rolling up our sleeves, so get ready for a fight.

The effrontery of this attempt to intervene in foreign policy is shocking. During the previous GOP assault on the President, when its leaders invited Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to warmonger before Congress on the subject of Iran, Max Fisher of Vox wrote about the destructiveness of their breach of conduct:

“The Supreme Court has codified into law the idea that only the president is allowed to make foreign policy, and not Congress, because if there are two branches of government setting foreign policy then America effectively has two foreign policies.

“The idea is that the US government needs to be a single unified entity on the world stage in order to conduct effective foreign policy. Letting the president and Congress independently set their own foreign policies would lead to chaos.”

Republicans don’t care about unity, or about how America appears on the world stage. Chaos is apparently their aim. They have repeatedly shown that they are willing to endanger the entire country in an insane pursuit of their vendetta against President Obama. Over and over again, they’ve brought the federal government to the brink of disaster as the GOP has shut it down, refused to fund it, and nearly defunded what used to be their own sacred cow, Homeland Security.

It’s chilling that the entire Republican leadership in the Senate signed the letter, making obvious the fact that there is no adult at the helm. Not surprisingly, potential presidential candidates all signed as well — Marco Rubio (Fla.), Ted Cruz (Texas), Rand Paul (Ky.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.).

The short list of Republicans who didn’t sign is instructive — Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Dan Coats (Ind.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), Susan Collins (Maine), Bob Corker (Tenn.), Jeff Flake (Ariz.), and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — all old hands who, in spite of ideology, at least have some commitment to the stability of the country. The fact that it’s not the experienced, mature politicians who are in charge of the Republican Party should give all Americans pause.

Reaction from Democratic leaders has been swift and emphatic. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said on the Senate floor:

“Republicans need to find a way to get over their animosity of President Obama. It’s unprecedented for one political party to directly intervene in an international negotiations with a sole goal of embarrassing the president of the United States.”

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) bluntly described the consequence of GOP determination to undermine the President’s position:

“Understand that if these negotiations fail, a military response to Iran developing their nuclear capability becomes more likely. [Senate Republicans] should think twice about whether their political stunt is worth the threat of another war in the Middle East.”

The ‘open letter’ was intended as a warning to Iran. Instead, it’s a dark foreboding of what’s in store for America if Republicans have their way.

Pay-For-Play Hunter Grins In Photo Of Giraffe She Killed, Gets Destroyed By Internet (IMAGE)

0
0

Karma is currently beating the hell out of a pay-for-play hunter from Utah after she posted an image of herself smiling next to a dead giraffe she had just killed.

Rebecca Francis fancies herself a big game hunter and she brags about the many animals she has paid a lot of money to hunt down and slaughter with her bow and arrow. We’re not just talking about plentiful animals like deer or elk. Francis has killed many exotic animals, including some that are threatened or endangered species.

According to Francis on her own website,

“We hunt elk and deer every year without fail, even through pregnancy, and nursing babies. Our hunting trips are self-guided. I prefer bowhunting,” she said, “and the animals I have taken with a bow include: a 10 1/2 ft. brown bear, black bear, shiras moose, alaskan moose, dall sheep, stone sheep, desert bighorn ram, rocky mountain bighorn ram, mule deer, whitetail deer, elk, mountain goat, antelope, arapawa ram, kudu, zebra, black wildebeest, giraffe, springbuck, blesbuck, lynx, badger, and squirrel. I have also taken many of the same species and more with a rifle.”

Of the animals on her own list, the lynx is an endangered species, the desert bighorn ram population is extremely low, only a small percentage of blesbuck remain in the wild, and many subspecies of giraffes are endangered as well.

But it’s the giraffe that has created a firestorm of criticism after comedian Ricky Gervais posted a photo of Francis lying next to a dead giraffe she killed and smiling about it on his Twitter account.

“What must’ve happened to you in your life to make you want to kill a beautiful animal & then lie next to it smiling?” Gervais wrote.

Here’s the post via Twitter.

What must’ve happened to you in your life to make you want to kill a beautiful animal & then lie next to it smiling? pic.twitter.com/DyYw1T5ck2

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) April 13, 2015

The image has since gone viral, and Francis has become the hunted as she has been inundated with death threats and heavy criticism, which forced her to explain her action.

In a statement to HuntingLife.com, Francis claimed that she only killed the giraffe because the locals asked her to do so because it was already near death.

“When I was in Africa five years ago I was of the mindset that I would never shoot a giraffe. I was approached toward the end of my hunt with a unique circumstance. They showed me this beautiful old bull giraffe that was wandering all alone. He had been kicked out of the herd by a younger and stronger bull. He was past his breeding years and very close to death. They asked me if I would preserve this giraffe by providing all the locals with food and other means of survival. He was inevitably going to die soon and he could either be wasted or utilized by the local people. I chose to honor his life by providing others with his uses and I do not regret it for one second. Once he was down there were people waiting to take his meat. They also took his tail to make jewelry, his bones to make other things, and did not waste a single part of him. I am grateful to be a part of something so good.”

That may be so, but she didn’t have to take a photo and she certainly didn’t have to look happy about it. For someone who claims they didn’t want to kill a giraffe, Francis certainly looks gleeful about it. She also looks happy as can be in this photograph in which she poses with a dead lion she killed while pulling on the poor creature’s face to reveal the teeth. As Ricky Gervais sarcastically remarked when he posted it on Twitter, “she probably killed this one to feed the poor locals too.”

“@AndyBee_26: she’s so proud of herself! pic.twitter.com/esnGDpnFTn” < yeah, she probably killed this one to feed the poor locals too 😉

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) April 15, 2015

Just so everyone is aware, lions are listed as a ‘vulnerable’ species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and their numbers are rapidly decreasing. In other words, Francis paid to make lions an even more threatened and vulnerable species than it already is, just so she could add another trophy to her hunting bucket list.

In short, she definitely deserves all the Internet scorn coming her way.

How UK Journalism Explains Baltimore Riots Better Than American Media

0
0

Two of America’s most dominant mainstream news sources, the New York Times and CNN, can’t seem to get Baltimore right. CNN has been dinged for covering the Baltimore unrest much like it covered Ebola and the disappeared Malaysian airliner last year, with vapid sensationalism. CNN variously wondered why there weren’t more police where CNN happened to be filming, and lingered on long shots of buildings on fire, with barely concealed pyromania. The New York Times’ initial coverage focused almost exclusively on reporting officials’ and police’s version of events. This seems particularly daft in context, since the inexplicable death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore police custody was the spark that lit this powder keg. The police are not neutral observers in this case, and treating them that way is poor journalism.

United Kingdom media to the rescue! If the American media can’t or won’t figure out what the heck is happening in the United States, maybe it’s a lot clearer to some British journalists. Americans are lucky that English is such a ubiquitous language throughout the world. It makes it relatively easy to find out what other countries are saying about us. When cops whoopsie-kill an unarmed black man handcuffed in the back of a van, and the streets rise up, a foreign analyst’s point of view can be a painful but necessary reflection. British media are often great sources of information for events in America. They arguably understand our culture better than anyone except Canada, but they’re culturally distinct from us enough to have a detached take. Their serious publications have some of the most insightful journalism in the English-speaking world.

The Economist, a British business and politics news magazine has great in-depth analysis and opinion on a broad range of topics. Its writing is terrific and its politics are centrist. The magazine endorsed Barack Obama twice, and conservative David Cameron in the UK. An Economist article titled “It’s chaos,” written by D.K., with a dateline in Baltimore, described the scene,

WHAT is happening tonight in Baltimore is perhaps best described not as a riot but as anarchy. Though there are police lines, there are few protesters or people fighting the police or hurling stones. Indeed, where the police are lined up, the people standing around are mostly taking photos on their phones. Drive a few blocks in any direction, though, and suddenly it feels lawless. Groups of young men, boys really, wearing bandanas and hoodies, stand on street corners next to derelict buildings, staring at anyone passing, and occasionally throwing projectiles at cars. Young women hurry home carrying bags of stolen loot: food, clothes, and bottles of beer and liquor. On the occasional street here and there cars burn freely. Shops, of which there are not many in this abandoned corner of the inner city, are ravaged, their windows smashed, their shelves picked over. Cars hurtle through red lights at high speed, music blaring, boys leaning out of the windows. And everywhere the intense smell of smoke and the buzz of helicopters overhead.

The article invokes the ravage of the Great Recession and the dramatic social and economic inequality in the city. The writer describes a sense that the city was already tense, focusing on the sense of lawlessness that pervades the riots. D.K. concludes by pointing out that the police are at least partly responsible for that anarchy,

The bigger problem for Baltimore is that lawnessness is not limited to nights like tonight. As one young woman standing taking photos said to me, West Baltimore is “always like this. Well not like this, but you know, shootings”. This is a city where a young black man is killed almost every day—not by police officers, but by other young black men. The failure of the police in this city is that they cannot enforce the law even at the best of times. At their worst, as the death of Mr Gray seems to suggest, Baltimore’s police are simply another source of the lawlessness.

The Guardian, a progressive UK newspaper that has grown rapidly online in the US in recent years, published a detailed report on the situation. The report seamlessly integrated the particulars in Baltimore with the larger national movement. It strongly implied that this could be a watershed moment. The police in Baltimore told the Guardian they were “outnumbered” and “outflanked” by protesters, as “embattled” Baltimore officials were unable to explain how Gray suffered his injuries, and struggled to respond to the growing protests,

As heavily armed soldiers continued rolling into the city in armoured vehicles on Tuesday, embattled authorities in Baltimore were struggling to control a growing crisis in their city, long notorious for urban blight and accusations of police brutality.

The article emphasizes that “troops” were “rolling in” to Baltimore, and quotes the Maryland National Guard commander splitting hairs about the meaning of martial law. It quotes President Obama making some of his ardent comments to date about police abuse and civil rights protests. The article emphasizes apparent poor decision-making by police which exacerbated the situation, including stranding school kids after closing down public transportation, and then leaving 80,000 students with nothing to do after closing schools.

Finally, The Telegraph, one of the more conservative mainstream British news sources, treats the protesters with a healthy dose of skepticism. An article written by Raf Sanchez, hews close to the American right’s depiction of how the riots started,

The violence began on Monday afternoon after a widely-circulated social media post called for “a purge” by young people against police. The post was a reference to the 2013 horror movie The Purge, which portrays the complete collapse of society.

By the early evening looting and disorder had spread across the western half of Baltimore and authorities declared a state of emergency in the city.

Gangs of youths in hoods and masks raced through the streets in the back of pick up trucks while at least one rioter used a knife to slash through a fire hose as the fire brigade struggled to contain a burning pharmacy.

Mother Jones has disputed the “purge” story with a number of eye-witness accounts. But there is video of a masked rioter slashing a fire hose with a long knife.

Sanchez also prominently featured a man who stood outside a bar where he worked holding a machete to deter looters,

“Forget the law when the law can’t protect civilians. This is kind of all-out war,” he told The Telegraph.

The article also pointed out that, while some locals didn’t support the violence, they also didn’t condemn it,

“No one has ever listened to peaceful protests so maybe this will get their attention.”

Sanchez concluded by highlighting volunteers cleaning up their neighborhoods in the morning following the riots.

It’s clear that the range of British media has biases like American media. The Guardian takes a decidedly liberal approach, underlining the protesters’ grievances, the president’s growing support for them, and the failings of local officials. The Telegraph is more conservative, placing blame on “gangs of youths” for sowing chaos and resorting to violence. The Economist is more holistic, and looks at how systemic pressures affect individuals and the situation. Their biases generally seem less pronounced than their American counterparts, and their analyses of the situation a bit more clear-eyed and pertinent than some mainstream American media. When the American mainstream media falls short, British journalism is often the best source for understanding what is really happening in the United States.

G7 Leaders Commit To Phase Out Fossil Fuels By End Of Century (Video)

0
0

German chancellor Angela Merkel, host of the Group of Seven (G7) summit, announced today at a wrap-up news conference that the G7 leading industrial nations have made an agreement to phase out the use of fossil fuels by the end of the century, resulting in cutting greenhouse gasses that are attributed to global climate change.  The summit, held in the Barvarian Alps, was attended by seven leaders representing Britain,  Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States.

Merkel said the Group of Seven leaders had committed themselves to the need to “decarbonize the global economy in the course of this century”.

Environmental lobbyists described the announcement as a hopeful sign that plans for complete decarbonization could be ruled on in Paris climate talks later this year. World leaders backed taking action to limit global temperature rises to 2 degrees centigrade or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.  These rises in temperature threaten to melt ice caps and glaciers, raise sea levels and bring more violent storms and floods.

Merkel also said that the leading industrialized countries were committed to raising $100 billion in annual climate financing by 2020 from public and private sources.  This commitment should enable developing countries to combat climate change while promoting fair and sustainable development.

Reacting to the summit’s final announcement, the European Climate Foundation described the G7 leaders’ announcement as historic, saying it signaled “the end of the fossil fuel age” and was an “important milestone on the road to a new climate deal in Paris”.

In December, 2015, Paris will be hosting the UN Climate Change Conference (or COP21),  one of the largest climate conferences ever organized. Their website describes COP21 as follows:

In 2015, France will be hosting and presiding the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11), otherwise known as “Paris 2015” from November 30th to December 11th. COP21 will be a crucial conference, as it needs to achieve a new international agreement on the climate, applicable to all countries, with the aim of keeping global warming below 2°C. France will therefore be playing a leading international role to ensure points of view converge and to facilitate the search for consensus by the United Nations, as well as within the European Union, which has a major role in climate negotiations.

Other issues addressed during the summit included the crisis in Ukraine and global security threats

The leaders warned Russia it would face stepped-up sanctions for its “aggression” in Ukraine. We … stand ready to take further restrictive measures in order to increase cost on Russia should its actions so require,” … “We recall that the duration of sanctions should be clearly linked to Russia’s complete implementation of the Minsk agreements and respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

The leaders also addressed other threats to global security.  Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was invited to discuss the US-led campaign to help his country fight the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group who launched a lightning offensive a year ago and have invaded and overtaken over a third of the country’s territory.  “We reaffirm our commitment to defeating this terrorist group and combating the spread of its hateful ideology,” said the leaders, in reference to ISIL.


ISIS Terrorist Posts Selfie, Gets What He Has Coming (VIDEO)

0
0

An unnamed ISIS terrorist gave a whole new meaning to the word “photobomb” when he posted a selfie online, accidentally revealing his location. The U.S. Airforce was there within less than 24 hours with, shall we say, an explosive reply.

Heads will roll…

DefenseTech reports that although ISIS’ highly effective social media strategy helps them spread fear, bring in recruits, and publicize their horrific acts, the U.S. Airforce can also use it against them. Much to their delight, ISIS’s posts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media often produces useful intelligence. Mwahaha.

This is not the first time people from ISIS have screwed up online (check out our top 10 ISIS fails and bloopers). But this takes the prize. In this particular case, a post from an ISIS militant helped U.S. Airforce intelligence pinpoint and destroy what they obliquely refer to as an “ISIS headquarters building.”

Air Force Gen. Hawk Carlisle, head of Air Combat Command, described Monday [June 1] how airmen at Hurlburt Field, Florida, with the 361st Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group, recognized a comment on social media and turned that into an airstrike that resulted in three Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs destroying an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) headquarters building.

SFGate and other news outlets later discovered, and reported, that the ISIS social media culprit turned out to be some “moron” posting a selfie. At an Airforce Association breakfast meeting, the awesomely-named U.S. Airforce Gen. Hawk Carlisle revealed:

“The guys that were working down out of Hurlburt [Fla.], they’re combing through social media and they see some moron standing at this command. And in some social media, open forum, bragging about the command and control capabilities for Daesh, ISIL.”

Then, Gen. Carlisle declares, his airmen went to “take that entire [ISIS] building out.”

“And these guys go: ‘We got an in.’ So they do some work, long story short, about 22 hours later through that very building, three JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) take that entire building out.”

We’re dying to see the ISIS terrorist’s last selfie, and to find out where the building was, but of course that’s probably classified information.  I feel uneasy about these “targeted airstrikes” that make war seem more palatable to folks like me, and hope no civilians were killed. Alas, ISIS has no redeeming qualities that I know of, and I can’t help but feel glad we’ve got fewer of them.

THANKS, ISIS.

Here’s the video with CNN’s news report on how an ISIS selfie helped the U.S. Airforce take down one of their main offices. Let’s just hope the GOP doesn’t spin this in a way that makes President Barack Obama look bad.

https://youtu.be/eqwk8C2CFhA

This Guy Figured Out How To Fix Greece AND Tell Big Banks To Go F*ck Themselves

0
0

Meet Thom Feeney, a young man who’s figured out a brilliant way to save Greece and give the Greek people a way to tell the Big Banks to take their “austerity” bullsh*t and shove it. The 29-year-old from London crunched some numbers and figured that if everyone in the European Union chipped in roughly what they spend each day on coffee (€3 or $3.35) or on lunch (€6 or $6.69), we could save Greece.

And that was the start of Feeney’s Greek Bailout Fund page on IndieGogo.

Decided to solve the Greek Debt Crisis via crowdfund. All I need is for everyone in EU to buy a Feta and Olive salad https://t.co/vOXKyBOJhZ

— Thom Feeney (@ThomFeeney) June 28, 2015

Before you laugh, think: Our small donations to Feeney’s Greek Bailout Fund could save the Greek people from immense suffering caused by brutal austerity measures forced upon them by the big banks. Plus, our donations will send a strong message out to the world that we’re fed up with bailouts for the rich and austerity for the poor. The fact is, Greece’s financial problems — like many of the issues we face here in the U.S. — were not caused by ordinary people, but by their nation’s greedy and corrupt one-percenters (as explained here at ReverbPress by Eric W. Severson). Yet the Big Banks and the European Union are trying to force Greece’s senior citizens, working people and children to pay the price for the excesses of their elites. Mark Belisle from ReverbPress also points out that “the Greek people are given an impossible choice.” In a July 5 referendum, they can “Vote No and face exile from the Eurozone; [or] vote Yes and accept the poison of crushing austerity.”

Greece and its creditors, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank, largely funded by German and French banks, have reached a point of no-return. Europe seems to be trying to break not only Greece’s economy, but its political will.

But really, the people of Greece already made their choice when they voted in the populist Alexis Tsipras as their prime minister and swept his left-wing Syriza party into power back in January: Like many here in the U.S., they’re tired of socialized risk, privatized profits and bailouts for banks but not for ordinary people. As a scathing article from The Guardian points out, less than 10 percent of all the so-called Greek bailout money in 2010 and 2012 actually went to alleviate people’s dire poverty and economic losses: The other 90 percent went straight to the banks.

Only a small fraction of the €240bn [$267 billion] total bailout money Greece received in 2010 and 2012 found its way into the government’s coffers to soften the blow of the 2008 financial crash and fund reform programmes. Most of the money went to the banks that lent Greece funds before the crash.

The people of Greece have spoken: But can they withstand the latest round of miseries inflicted on them as Tsipras shuts down the banks to keep what little money they’ve got left in the country until the July 5th referendum? And will people’s fear of what might happen next force them to cave into another round of horrific austerity measures in exchange for another fake bailout that does little or nothing to help them?

Feeney’s Greek Bailout Fund Could Set Greece Free.

Feeney’s Greek bailout fund sounds crazy, but it could set the Greek people free from the crushing yoke of debt and austerity measures forced upon them by the big international banks. Our small donations could give them — and their new leaders — the breathing space they need to figure out a   The former marketing manager — who left his job and now works in a shoe store — told the Huffington Post via email:

“I truly do believe it can be effective, remember it’s a very small amount per person we’re looking for, It also makes a statement, if a man who works in a London shoe shop can get closer to solving the Greek financial crisis than [U.K. Prime Minister] David Cameron and [Germany’s Chancellor] Angela Merkel, maybe we all need to take a good hard look at the world.”

Feeney also wrote on the Greek Bailout Fund page:

“I was fed up of the Greek crisis going round in circles, while politicians are dithering, this is affecting real people. While all the posturing is going on, then it’s easy for the politicians to forget that. I just thought, sod it, I’ll have a crack.”

There are just two small problems with Feeney’s Greek bailout plan: (1) So far, neither the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the Greek government have contacted Feeney about how to transfer the money; and (2) Feeney’s Greek Bailout Fund page on IndieGoGo is getting such a huge response the site keeps crashing. At the time of this writing, I couldn’t get on the site: But at the time of this writing, Twitter user Asteris Masouras tweeted that 16,190 people had chipped in €249,830 ($278,415) in just two days.

Crowdfunding raised €249,830 by 16,190 people in 2 days for a Greek bailout https://t.co/GsjkAlqSSG symbolic, perhaps, but astonishing — Asteris Masouras 正义 (@asteris) June 30, 2015

That’s still well under the Feeney’s goal of the entire €1.6 billion (about $1.8 billion) required to pay off Greece’s debts, but the party’s just gotten started. And sure, giving to the banks doesn’t make sense at first, but StrikeDebt and Rolling Jubilee have both proven on a smaller scale that buying out debts can set people free and limit the banks’ ability to prey on us. So why not try and see what happens?

Fall Of The ¥uan Dynasty? China’s Communist Party May Pay Dearly For Its Panic

0
0

China’s Yuan Dynasty collapsed in 1368, of course, following a century of Mongolian conquest. But the Yuan, China’s currency, is tottering in the stock market. The Chinese Communist Party, which rules the world’s most populous nation without rival, may be lucky that its stock market is comparatively small. China’s overall economy is at least as big as America’s now. Before the ongoing crash, the combined value of China’s biggest stock markets was $10 trillion, while America’s is around $27 trillion. Despite being relatively contained, China’s markets have been growing at an absurd pace in an orgy of irrational exuberance, and are now cratering to rival 1929. The markets have dived over 30% in a few weeks, so far claiming an estimated $3.35 trillion, and we don’t know where it will bottom out.

The immediate pain will be felt near the top of the economic ladder. The farmers, laborers and venders who make up the broad base of China’s economy have virtually nothing invested in the stock market. As the crisis deepens, the damage will trickle down, and China could experience symptoms such as a housing crunch that could crush the already poor. But in the near-term, an avalanche is barreling toward China’s narrow slice of middle and upper class. China has a burgeoning bourgeoisie increasingly invested in the stock market. Among them are people who, insanely, were given loans to buy stocks. It is these nouveau riche that the Communist government most needs to spend money, and not ask too many questions.

Much as China was able in the 14th Century to absorb foreign invaders into their culture, the Communist Party survived a near-death experience at the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations by absorbing a restless generation into an implicit promise of constant economic growth in exchange for political apathy. Back in February, as China’s growth slowed, The Diplomat warned,

“Many Westerners forget that the massive protests that rocked Beijing and other Chinese cities in 1989 coincided with the biggest economic crisis of the post-Mao era, with annual inflation of 30 percent leading to panic buying throughout the country.

“Since 1990, China has been governed by a social contract in which the material lives of ordinary citizens improve dramatically while the Party keeps a monopoly on political power. Rising wages and standards of living helped ensure political stability. Historically most revolutions, including the recent upheavals in the Middle East, only reached critical mass when a majority of a country’s people lost hope in the economic capabilities of the governing political structure.”

The question that will soon face China is: As trillions in wealth are wiped out, is the post-Tiananmen political arrangement also being wiped out? In the calculus of growth-for-stability, when growth is replaced by crash, what replaces stability?

The pendulum of American politics swings most drastically when the economy stalls. The Great Depression enabled FDR’s historic presidency and the Great Recession boosted Obama’s electoral chances in 2008, and in 2012, as voters still blamed the economy on Bush. It has also led to polarization, as Republicans have taken over more local and state level positions. While the resulting gridlock may deepen frustration, it also creates a paradoxical stability. What happens in a one-party state, when the economy crashes, and there’s no other party to run to?

The Communist Party is already reacting with what, from the outside, looks a lot like full-blown panic. China’s response has been to cajole banks into agreeing to buying falling stocks, threatening shareholders not to sell, printing money, and now, it is beginning to close down exchanges. None of this will change the fact of an epic bubble burst, brought on by failure of confidence that is rotting China’s stock market. It calls to mind the legend of King Canute, who stood at the edge of the sea and commanded the tide not to rise on his land.

The biggest problem China may face is allowing free markets, but then bullying investors as it attempts to assert control over market forces. It makes the Communist Party look like a matador trying to control the direction of a charging bull. If China can’t figure out how to contain this financial rout, or at least undergird the fundamentals of its economy to mitigate the pain, the economic devastation could be historic for modern China, and could eventually be felt across the globe. But we could also see a revolt of the nouveau riche and the people of the People’s Republic slouching toward Tiananmen Square.

How The Hell Does ISIS Get All Those Tanks, Weapons And Shiny New Toyota Trucks?

0
0

U.S. Treasury Dept. Wonders: Where Did ISIS Get All Those Shiny, New Toyota Trucks?

Yikes! Those evil, marauding terrorists from ISIS are still at large, but fear not: ISIS can’t escape from the U.S. and our allies for long. And when we get ’em, we’re going to kick their cartoonist/woman/gay/Christian-hating Jihadi butts from here until Sunday.

There’s just one problem. If we’re at war with ISIS, why do we keep supplying them with tanks, weapons, Humvees and shiny new Toyota trucks?  CNN reports:

“They’re hard to miss. Packed with ISIS fighters and heavy weapons, Toyota pickup trucks and SUV’s are featured prominently in ISIS propaganda videos.”

According to ABC, the U.S. Treasury Dept.’s Terror Financing unit has finally taken notice of the endless parades of shiny, new Toyota trucks starring in ISIS’s propaganda videos, and they’ve launched an investigation. Toyota’s U.S. spokesman Ed Lewis told reporters this is part of a larger inquiry into supply chains and capital flows in the Middle East. Lewis promised Toyota’s full cooperation, and assures us that they’d never sell to terrorists.

“Toyota has a strict policy to not sell vehicles to potential purchasers who may use or modify them for paramilitary or terrorist activities, and we have procedures and contractual commitments in place to help prevent our products from being diverted for unauthorized military use.”

Whew. What a relief.

Toyota Trucks: The Jihadists’ Truck Of Choice.

CNN tracked down Jonathan Schanzer — who used to track terrorist finances for the U.S. Treasury Dept. and who’s now with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — to find out more. Schanzer explained that rugged outdoorsmen and off-roaders aren’t the only ones who love their Toyota trucks:

“Toyotas is the truck that Jihadists choose for when they want to go to war. It’s the same thing with Kalashnikovs [Russian automatic rifles more commonly known in the U.S. as AK-47s].”

And how to these ISIS terrorists get their hands on these bad boys? Schanzer suspects they just boldly walk into the car dealerships and pay cash!

“I think they’re buying them, probably, through formal channels. They’re probably going right into the dealerships and purchasing them, and not identifying as ISIS. Who would?”

Oh, and although Toyotas are the Jihadist’s truck of choice, they won’t object to a Ford or two. We’d love to see the look on this U.S. plumber’s face after seeing what Schanzer suspects ISIS picked up at an auction. As if to thumb their noses at us, they didn’t even bother to remove the former owner’s information from the front passenger side’s door.

Photo: Video screen grab/CNN.

Schanzer adds ISIS’s avid Toyota truck acquisition is just one example of how ISIS operates like “a combination of a mafia gang and a major corporation.” In other words, like a major corporation.

Here’s the video with CNN’s report.

ISIS Also Has Tons Of U.S. Weapons, Vehicles And Other Military Gear.

Toyota trucks aren’t all ISIS has managed to buy, capture or scavenge from us. In June, CNBC reported that so far we’ve accidentally furnished the Islamic State with at least $219.7 million worth of weapons, vehicles and other military supplies and gear — and that’s just the stuff we know about.

Based on various reports, CNBC came up with the following laundry list of supplies the U.S. has so kindly provided to ISIS so far.

  • 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles at $70,000 each: $16 million
  • 40 M1A1 Abram tanks at $4.3 million each: $172 million
  • 52 M198 Howitzer mobile gun systems at $527,337 each: $2.7 million
  • 74,000 Army machine guns at $4,000 each: $29 million

TOTAL: $219.7 MILLION in military weapons, vehicles, and other supplies and gear for ISIS.

How does the Islamic State get hold of all these U.S. weapons? We deliver them, either directly or through the tattered remnants of Iraq’s military. Jeremy Salt, a political analyst in Ankara, Turkey, gives RT.Com quite the scathing earful:

“Do you think the Islamic State’s advance would have been so successful without access to this U.S. military hardware by mistake, by default? Let me just briefly revise the history of American blunder over the past couple of years with regard to weapons ending up in the hands of Islamic State.”

Salt then reminded us of our nation’s major blunders for supplying weapons to ISIS for the past couple of years.

  • Accidental air-dropping of weapons and supplies intended for the Syrian Kurds into Islamic State territory.
  • This didn’t just happen once, it happened several times.
  • Weapons and supplies seized by ISIS during the falls of Mosul (Iraq), Ramadi (Iraq), AND Palmyra (Syria).

Salt doesn’t even bother explaining how the George W. Bush administration created ISIS by invading Iraq on false pretenses and chasing off all those heavily armed and well-trained Baathist soldiers. But he does ask how it’s even possible that U.S. intelligence and the military — both of which are among the most sophisticated in the world — could have possibly NOT seen what was coming.

What Salt says here about ISIS’s routing of Palmyra also applies to the sack of Mosul and Ramadi.

“Are we seriously to believe the United States couldn’t see them coming? Didn’t see those pickup trucks racing across the Syrian Desert? When they create massive plumes of dust, for one thing? Then they get to Palmyra, and they take over the city.”

Salt has a point. How could we have possibly missed miles of vehicles chock-full of masked ISIS militants waving guns and black flags while churning up choking clouds of desert dust visible from miles around? It’s almost as though we’ve ignored all this on purpose.

As for President Barack Obama, he’s made some smart moves. But how can he slam the brakes on a runaway crazy train that’s been lurching headlong for decades? After all, Reagan’s the one who armed and trained Al Qaeda back when they fought the former USSR as the Mujahideen resistance fighters. Also, we helped Saddam Hussein take power in Iraq in 1963, and Hussein was on the CIA’s payroll since at least 1959. And then we overthrew him and allowed the region to devolve into chaos because George W. Bush isn’t into “nation building.”

Here’s the video with the news report from RT on ISIS’s acquisition of U.S. military supplies, weapons, gear and vehicles.

Why The EU Is Right To Support Asylum For Edward Snowden (VIDEO)

0
0

On Thursday, the parliament of the European Union (EU) took a bold step regarding whistleblower Edward Snowden. The step was taken at the risk of angering the United States.

According to a press release from the parliament, a resolution was passed asking member nations to grant Snowden asylum as a defender of civil rights. The statement said:

“By 285 votes to 281, MEPs decided to call on EU member states to ‘drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistle-blower and international human rights defender’.”

The members of parliament are representatives from 28 member countries, each elected in their own countries. They have a mission of unity; the resolution fits with this part of the organization’s stated goals:

“The Parliament has sought to promote democracy and human rights – not only in Europe, but also throughout the world.”

The U.S. Has Provided Asylum To People From Other Countries

A sustaining principle of the United States democracy is the protection and defense of those who stand up for human rights, including granting asylum to citizens of other countries. The idea of giving Snowden some sort of reprieve from his current ‘official’ status as a criminal fugitive has been steadily gathering steam, ever since he fled the country in 2013.

But since the U.S. often falls short of its principles, the administration has repeatedly discouraged moves like the EU just made. Ned Price, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said:

“Our position has not changed. Mr. Snowden is accused of leaking classified information and faces felony charges here in the United States. As such, he should be returned to the U.S. as soon as possible, where he will be accorded full due process.”

But the position of many others has changed. Both President Obama and candidate Hillary Clinton have reiterated the lie that there were other avenues for Snowden to pursue, if he wanted to make dangerous information known — and that he would have had protection.

In August of 2013, Obama said at a news conference:

“If the concern was that somehow this was the only way to get this information out to the public, I signed an executive order well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information that provided whistle-blower protection to the intelligence community for the first time. So there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.”

But the President was fudging the truth, and he knew it. The order he signed protected only employees, not contractors like Edward Snowden. In addition, as the New York Times notes, Snowden did report the information to two superiors who didn’t act on it. Such is the culture of the intelligence community.

The Reasons For Offering Asylum Are Clear

In fact, both the NYT and Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantichave clearly laid out the reasons that Snowden should be granted clemency — or, at the very least, asylum. Among those reasons are:

  • The National Security Agency (NSA), for which Snowden worked, broke federal privacy laws thousands and thousands of times.
  • Federal judges have ruled that the NSA’s behavior was unconstitutional.
  • The leaks showed that James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, lied to Congress about the agency’s activities.
  • Congress was caught flat-footed by revelations of information that was withheld from them.
  • The leaks inspired legislation to reform the NSA.

Unfortunately, European countries are probably too intimidated by American clout to offer asylum. The EU resolution is a request, not a recommendation. The governing body has no authority to enforce such a solution. However, the statement is a powerful one from a group that is examining the abuse of surveillance within its own territory.

Jan Philipp Albrecht, a member from Germany, thinks the resolution will increase pressure on member countries to reconsider their positions:

“It’s the first time a Parliament votes to ask for this to be done — and it’s the European Parliament. So this has an impact surely on the debate in the member states.”

Snowden himself weighed in, via Twitter. He tweeted that the parliament’s decision is a “game-changer,” also noting:

“This is not a blow against the US government, but an open hand extended by friends. It is a chance to move forward.”

That chance may come for Snowden in Europe, if one of the EU countries has the courage to stand up to the U.S. and offer asylum. However, clemency isn’t going to come under Obama’s watch.

Only one of the presidential candidates has offered Snowden hope of leniency. Although Jim Webb said, during the Democratic debate, that he would bring Snowden home as a hero, he dropped out of the race. Bernie Sanders, however, also gave a compassionate response:

“I think Snowden played a very important role in educating the American public… I think there should be a penalty to [breaking the law]. But I think that education should be taken into consideration before the sentencing.”

If America hasn’t quite gotten there, maybe Europe will ultimately accord Snowden the respect that his accomplishments deserve. An international poll released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last spring showed that millennials around the world have an overwhelmingly positive view of the former contractor. The support is strongest in continental Europe, where it ranges from 78 to 86 percent.

At the time, Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU, said:

“The broad support for Edward Snowden among millennials around the world should be a message to democratic countries that change is coming. They are a generation of digital natives who don’t want government agencies tracking them online or collecting data about their phone calls.

“Old folks just don’t get it. The new generation will fix it if we don’t.”

Edward Snowden is a young man. There is hope that he will have a better future.

Nice French Flag Overlay, Facebook: Now How Do We Show Solidarity With Beirut?

0
0

Terrorist Suicide Bombing In Beirut, Lebanon Leaves 43 Dead…Where’s The Outrage? Where’s The Love?

“When my people died, no country bothered to light up its landmarks in the colors of their flag,” Elie Fares, seethes on his blog, A Separate State of Mind. The physician from Beirut, Lebanon was referring to Thursday’s deadly terrorist double-suicide bombing attacks, which left 43 dead and at least 239 wounded in his city. Buried deep within the recesses of their website, CNN reports:

The explosions detonated within 150 meters (490 feet) and five minutes of each other, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said, shaking an open-air market and other parts of the Bourj al-Barajneh district in southern Beirut. […] “There’s a lot of shattered glass on the street, a lot of blood, and it’s really just a scene of chaos and carnage,” journalist Tamara Qiblawi told CNN shortly after the blasts.

Since that report, ISIS announced that they were responsible for the attacks. The damage would have been far worse had it not been for a quick-thinking hero who died while stopping a third suicide bomber. Adel Termos was out and about with his young daughter when he spotted him. Elie Fares reports:

“He [Adel Termos] tackled him to the ground, causing the second suicide bomber to detonate. There are many many families, hundreds of families probably, who owe their completeness to his sacrifice.”

So where’s the mass news coverage? Where are the tears and outrage? Where are the Facebook “Safety Check” and Lebanese flag overlay features? Maybe we just assume these kinds of things are supposed to happen in places like Beirut, Lebanon. Or we just don’t care as much about the mostly-brown people who live there as we do about our long-time allies in Paris, France. As tech journalist K T Bradford snipes in a pointed Tweet:

Dear Facebook: Nice French flag overlay. But how do I change my profile picture to show solidarity with the people of Beirut?

— K T Bradford (@ktbradford) November 14, 2015

An outraged Elie Fares continues, in vain hope of being heard over the media’s deafening silence on the Beirut, Lebanon terrorist attacks.

“When my people died, they did not send the world into mourning. Their death was but an irrelevant fleck along the international news cycle, something that happens in THOSE parts of the world.”

We still think of Beirut, Lebanon as a war zone where Islamic terrorists run amok. But although Lebanon’s government is corrupt and ineffective, and despite the continued popularity of the Shiite militia group Hezbollah, this isn’t true. ISIS has very little presence in Lebanon, both Muslims and Christians hold positions of power, and — as pointed out by the New York Times — they haven’t had a bombing this deadly since their civil war ended back in 1990:

Some blamed news coverage for the perception that Beirut was still an active war zone. They cited headlines — including, briefly, a Times one that was soon changed to be more precise — that refer to the predominantly Shiite neighborhood where the bombing took place as a “stronghold” of the militia and political party Hezbollah.

Terrorism In Paris And Beirut? We Built That.

Nour Kabbach, a Syrian refugee and humanitarian aid worker in Beirut, also calls B.S. on the hypocrisy of the U.S. and other Western nations in an impassioned Facebook post:

We and our European allies bear a lot of the blame for the unrest, instability and terrorism that plagues the Middle East as a result of our own foreign policy. Our long history of colonialism, exploitation, destruction and regime change have created too many desperate people who’ve got nothing left to lose. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, riots and terrorism are the “language of the unheard.” And now, these latest acts of terror in Paris may make matters worse for the people we continue to victimize, by causing us to close our borders to the endless waves of terrified refugees.

If we truly want to fight terrorism, then we need to give all the non-terrorists who live in — or are fleeing — these unstable countries all the love, support, humanitarian aid and economic assistance we possibly can provide.

Here’s the report on the terrorist attack in Beirut, Lebanon from CNN.

Everything You Need To Know About The Panama Papers Data Leak

0
0

At 11.5 million files, the Panama Papers are the biggest data leak in history. They’re a road-map to a world that exists only in the shadows, populated by a network of the world’s powerful and wealthy elite.

If you’re feeling a bit lost, don’t worry. The sheer volume of information we’re going to see come from this is, to say the least, overwhelming. So let’s start with the basics: what exactly are the Panama Papers, and what do they reveal?

Tax-Dodging On An Unprecedented Scale

Let’s say a company has $10 billion dollars. They can avoid taxes by investing some of that money. For our purposes, let’s say they invest $5 billion. Now, they can legally claim $5 billion in profit and be taxed accordingly.

To get around the inherent risk involved in real investment, some large businesses, organizations, and wealthy individuals have “invested” in shell companies that make nothing and do nothing. The biggest facilitator of this practice is a Panama-based firm called Mossack Fonseca, who have created a vast network of shell companies to funnel dark money to and from businesses and individuals around the world.

Also Read: Leaked Documents Show Massive Hidden Offshore Accounts Of 143 Politicians (VIDEO)

Not only is this money safe from taxation, the network hides assets and paper trails the public might find unsavory.

Fusion provides a succinct explanation of Mossack Fonseca’s role in the affair:

As a ‘registered agent,’ Mossack Fonseca provides the paperwork, signatures, and mailing addresses that breathe life into shell companies established in tax havens around the world — holding companies that often create nothing and sell nothing, but shelter assets with maximum concealment and a minimum of fuss.

The leak revealed Mossack Fonseca‘s involvement in over 200,000 shell companies that helped companies avoid trillions of dollars in taxes.

The Biggest Data Leak In History

At 2.6 terabytes of data, the Panama Papers are the biggest leak ever received by a team of journalists. In late 2015, an anonymous source contacted the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, who in turn sought the help of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) to decrypt and decipher the information.

The graph below demonstrates just how large the leak was, contrasted with other notable data leaks from Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks.

A Chilling Exchange

When the editors of Süddeutsche Zeitung were contacted by the anonymous source, he/she told them their “life is in danger” and made the journalists agree to communicate only through secure, encrypted means. The exchange went like this, according to Süddeutsche Zeitung:

Source: Hello. This is John Doe. Interested in data?

Süddeutsche Zeitung: We’re very interested.

Source: There are a couple of conditions. My life is in danger. We will only chat over encrypted files. No meeting, ever. The choice of stories is obviously up to you.

Süddeutsche Zeitung: Why are you doing this?

Source: I want to make these crimes public.

More Than Just Tax Evasion

Not only are there severe social and political implications of widespread global tax evasion, the leak itself revealed how shady off-the-record businesses dealings have been the source of war crimes, poverty, sex trafficking, and more.

My Reverb Press colleague Carolina Chávez explains dark money’s deadly role in the ongoing Syrian Civil War conflict:

“It is known how barrel bombs and missiles have been dropped on civilian neighborhoods killing thousands of innocent lives in Syria. However, while the war crimes have been documented, the offshore finance behind these crimes has not. According to the Panama Papers, offshore companies have been accused of supplying fuel for jets slaughtering civilians in the Syrian civil war. And although many countries like the United Stated or the United Kingdom have called for bans on these companies, it is now known that Mossack Fonseca aided these companies and other clients to continue operating in alleged tax evasion, fraud, bribery, arms deals, and drug trafficking.”

You can read the rest of her article, Hidden Victims Of War And Trafficking Revealed By Panama Papers, here.

Connections to organized crime are also a prominent feature of the leak, according to Süddeutsche Zeitung:

“Among others, Mossack Fonsecas’ clients include criminals and members of various Mafia groups. The documents also expose bribery scandals and corrupt heads of state and government. The alleged offshore companies of twelve current and former heads of state make up one of the most spectacular parts of the leak, as do the links to other leaders, and to their families, closest advisors, and friends. The Panamanian law firm also counts almost 200 other politicians from around the globe among its clients, including a number of ministers.”

Who Is Involved

Süddeutsche Zeitung and major media outlets cooperating with them are releasing information systematically. It will be months or years before we have enough information to compile a full list, but if the names released thus far are any indication of the enormity of things to come—prepare for your view of major brands, media personalities, politicians, celebrities, and heads-of-state to change forever.

The Prime Minister of Iceland, for example, became visibly flustered and walked out of an interview with The Guardian after interviewers questioned him on an illegal tax dodge revealed by the leak. “What are you trying to make up here?” he asked. “This is totally inappropriate.”

There is a fascinating paper trail linking Vladimir Putin and a concert cellist to $2 billion in dark money. Even popular martial-arts star Jackie Chan “has at least six companies managed through the law firm,” according to USA Today.

Reverb Press will report on individuals and companies named by the leak as more information becomes available.


Mass Media Woefully Silent On Worst Climate Change Report To Date

0
0

An exhaustive scientific study has just been released, courtesy of the Obama administration, pointing a firm finger at the effects climate change bears on human health. The study offers an amazing opportunity for major media outlets to broadcast a vital issue that seldom receives the serious attention it deserves, but will they jump on the opportunity? Unlikely, if media’s track record for discussing climate change over the last year lends any indication.

The study known as the “Climate and Health Assessment” is the end result of roughly 100 experts in the fields of both health and science from eight different federal agencies putting their shoulders to the wheel for three years. It takes the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s National Climate Assessment and both builds and refines the data from there. As expected by many experts, the study shows a spike in “scientific confidence in the link between climate change and a broad range of threats to public health.”

Health threats the public faces as a result of climate change are increasingly poorer air quality and extreme heat waves leading to a rise in heat-related deaths. Other impacts that seem smaller but could have drastic impacts on the global population include weakened, struggling crops bearing less nutrition, as well as the mental, psychological and financial strain an increase in extreme weather-related activities can have on the population, not to mention government. The infrastructure budget could take a serious pummeling, and it’s struggling already to keep up with the nation’s roads, bridges and national parks, just to name a few examples.

That’s not all, either. The study also shows how climate change can potentially complicate and amplify different maladies, such as Lyme disease, Salmonella, water-borne illnesses, and West Nile virus, for starters. With all the talk about the Zika virus lately, and its relation to mosquitoes, that may amplify, as well. Of course, there is a high likelihood that an increase in climate change could bring about countless critical issues entirely unforeseen at this point, too.

As readers can see, the study gifts a virtual treasure trove of sensationalist opportunities for mainstream media to promote and further their fear-mongering agenda while simultaneously ignoring the rational, sensible implications and consequent plans of action that might otherwise come forth from a world running on sanity and harmony, rather than fear and domination.

To their credit, both “NBC Nightly News” and “CBS Evening News” ran stories last year detailing reports linking climate change to a rise in allergy and asthma complications. However, this most recent report offers further opportunities to go even more in-depth on those issues. Hopefully, NBC and CBS will make time the latest data, as well.

The Shared Responsibility Of Climate Change

The study also bumps up against environmental racism and environmental justice. The assessment concludes that minorities “bear a disproportionate burden associated with asthma as measured by emergency department visits, lost work and school days, and overall poorer health status.” It pinpoints several groups, specifically, that are “disproportionately vulnerable” when it comes to the effects of climate change. How much coverage do you think that will get from the major media?

Before readers go blaming corporate media alone, however, one must recognize that corporate media, largely, is beholden to the almighty dollar. If corporate media believes the public will not be drawn to reports of such important information, then they won’t broadcast it. The public needs to care about environmental racism enough for the corporate media to feel it can profit from broadcasting about it, but the public, sadly, does not, so the corporate media remains largely silent on such issues.

Meanwhile, the report states:

“[C]limate change exacerbates some existing health threats and creates new public health challenges. While all Americans are at risk, some populations are disproportionately vulnerable, including those with low income, some communities of color, immigrant groups (including those with limited English proficiency), Indigenous peoples, children and pregnant women, older adults, vulnerable occupational groups, persons with disabilities, and persons with preexisting or chronic medical conditions.”

The very people a civilized nation should be protecting are the same people suffering the most as the nations such as the United States avoid confronting their racism and social justice problems.

The “Climate and Health Assessment” isn’t the only alarming news out there lately, either, which means it is not the only opportunity for major media to cover such important environmental issues. A troubling study on rising sea levels has come out that foresees heavy coastal impacts as a result, especially in major cities, where millions could be affected directly by the rising water.

Conversely, all the dire news could serve the means for actually running a positive story regarding the perks to public health the Clean Power Plan could bring about, which Media Matters describes as “the most significant U.S. climate police in U.S. history.” That plan only received sparse coverage last year because it’s common knowledge that positive stories don’t sell, by and large. Since then, the fossil fuel industry has been teaming up with its toady attorneys general to beat down the plan in court—how lovely.

Many print publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have begun covering the “Climate and Health Assessment.” It’s high time for the major media networks to talk about these issues on the air, regularly, and with substance reaching beyond the three-second skeptic’s sound bite. In order to help make that happen, though, a greater percentage of the public has to start giving a damn about climate change, too.

REVEALED: Ivanka Trump’s Chinese Sweat Shops SCREWING OVER Workers With Slave Labor Wages, Hours

0
0

Her Father’s Daughter

When it comes to downright unethical business practices, Ivanka Trump is proof that the apple does not fall far from the tree. It seems as though one of the many subcontractors that Ivanka Trump uses to produce her shoes require those employees to work almost inhuman hours. On top of that, overtime pay was paid at an illegally low limit, and payments of wages were often delayed. Employees of Xuankai Footwear Ltd. in China have made more than 130,000 pounds of shoes for the Ivanka Trump brand, and employees are speaking out about the treatment they received.

Yahoo! reports:

“Workers at one Chinese footwear factory that, according to US customs data available on the ImportGenius database, has made more than 130,000 pounds of Ivanka Trump-brand shoes, describe being subjected to an array of workplace indignities, some that would potentially qualify as violations of local labor law. Workers say that the factory, Xuankai Footwear Ltd., located in the Houjie area of Dongguan in China’s Pearl River Delta, required them to work lengthy shifts stretching up to 16 hours that tested and exceeded the limits of human endurance. Some workers also allege that the factory paid illegally low overtime rates and systematically delayed wage payments.

“’I couldn’t do it,’ said one 26-year-old worker, who had been previously employed in several other Houjie shoe factories but said he quit after mere hours at Xuankai. ‘I was too scared.’”

Ivanka Trump’s Chinese Sweatshop

No wonder Ivanka’s daddy seems to be so petrified of China.

As recently as 2014, Ivanka Trump had shoes produced at the factory, which also manufactures for Guess and Tommy Hilfiger, as well. None of the companies responded for requests for comments in regards to the factory conditions.

According to investigations, Xuankai Footwear Ltd. subjected its employees to a brutal regime.

“Xuankai was different. Workers there told me that they were generally given only two days of rest per month and commonly worked 12-hour shifts, from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., with two one-hour meal breaks. A former employee surnamed Tian — who had quit the factory just days before, but still carried his Xuankai badge — said that in his months at the factory, he would sometimes have to work from 8 a.m. until 1 or 2 the following morning, with two hours of breaks during the long shifts. ‘We got to sleep for six hours,’ said Tian. ‘If we worked until after three in the morning, we could start the next day at 9:15.’”

But please, Ivanka Trump, tell us more about how your dad is going to make life for workers better. And while you’re at it, maybe you should start in your own backyard.

We’re all waiting.

Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images

trump shoes, how trump treats workers, unions, organized labor, ivanka trump shoes, ivanka, trump, donald trump, outsourcing

Communist/Socialist Coalition Topples Portuguese Government After Only 11 Days

0
0

Less than two weeks after forming, Portugal’s center-right government is overthrown

It was only 12 days ago in which Pedro Passos Coelho was sworn in as the Prime Minister of the new Portuguese government after the October 4th elections. He came into office uncertain of his future, with his party no longer in the majority after an election day rout that gave enormous gains to Socialist and Communist parties. His future was set however when it was announced that the far-left parties had united against him.

The new Communist/Socialist government has already garnered substantial opposition from business leaders, with an open letter expressing their fears over no longer being able to ride the austerity gravy train. After all, without austerity, how else can big businesses force government concessions? The rise of the Communist block within Portuguese politics should warn these businesspeople that it may not be wise to continue trying to push their weight around, for now the government regulation awaiting them has no fear of shutting them down completely.

Socialist and Communist Coalition Takes Form

The new coalition is formed by the Socialist, Portuguese Communist, Left Bloc, and Green parties, giving them 122 out of 230 parliament seats, a solid majority. When the Green Party is the most conservative of the entire coalition, the field has changed not only in Portugal but across Europe. In many ways, Portugal is the canary in the coal mine for those who continue to pursue an Austerity program. While Portugal has stabilized its economy, the European Union still is pushing for severe austerity cuts from Lisbon.

With the new government in place, one that is not only unbeholden to big business but adamantly against it, the stage is set for the real test of the Eurozone. The leader of this coalition, Antonio Costa, campaigned on reducing austerity, and the other members of this coalition have made calls for positions such as nationalizing the nation’s banks and energy firms to address the continuing Eurozone financial crisis.

This political upset is now the second major Communist victory this month after Nepal elected its first female President. With the 98th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution this weekend, it looks as if the Hammer and Sickle, rather than being buried and forgotten, are reasserting themselves. With the oppression of the business elites and the failure of liberal democracy in the face of wealthy oligarchs, the resolve of the Communist Party worldwide appears to be making itself known.

With Communist ideology in the halls of power in Europe for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we just do not know what will happen. What we do know is that, in those famed words that began a revolution, “Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa – das Gespenst des Kommunismus.”

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.

BREAKING: U.S. Officials Confirm Putin Personally Involved In U.S. Election Hacking

0
0

Breaking reports fromCIA officials Wednesday evening claim, with a high degree ofconfidence, that Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally involved in the e-mail hacking scandal that directly interfered with the recent presidential election campaign in the United States. Reports suggest that officials with direct access to the pertinent information indicates that Putin’s involvement is all over this attack and the CIA sources claim that the Russian President even went so far as to determine how the leaked information was used to be used.

The report goes onto reveal that Putin’s motives were multifaceted but that they were primarily concerned with ensuring that Hillary Clinton would not become the 45th President of the United States. The reason for Putin’s vendetta goes back to 2011 and comments that the former Secretary of State made about the parliamentary elections in the country that year. While the FBI and a number of other intelligence agencies do not share every facet of this assertion, there appears to be a general consensus emerging that Russian involvement in the hacking came from the most elite level at the Kremlin.

The assertion carries further weight following comments made by former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. Speaking on the matter, Mr. McFaul also believed that Putin actively wanted Trump to be the next President of the United States, stating that:

He has had a vendetta against Hillary Clinton, that has been known for a long time because of what she said about his elections back in the parliamentary elections of 2011. He wants to discredit American democracy and make us weaker in terms of leading the liberal democratic order. And most certainly he likes President-elect Trump’s views on Russia

This shocking revelation comes on the back of comments from the White House press secretary  Josh Earnest this Wednesday which indicate that president-elect Donald Trump could very feasibly have been aware that Russia was involved in the hacking of Democratic Party email accounts during the presidential campaign. The hacking which blighted the Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton through the election process included targeted attacks on a range of Democratic Party institutions including; the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta’s personal account.

Speaking on the matter, Earnest stated that:

There’s ample evidence that was known long before the election and in most cases long before October about the Trump campaign and Russia — everything from the Republican nominee himself calling on Russia to hack his opponent.

Wednesday’s revelations that Putin was actively involved in the email hacking of Democratic Party are bad but the reports that Trump was aware of Russia’s involvement is something else completely. The fact of the matter is that this level of deliberate interference by Russia in the U.S is unprecedented and needs to be treated as such.

REPORT: Paper Trail Suggests Trump Was Paid Off To Do 180 Degree Pivot On China Policy

0
0

The Time Line In The Trump-China Relationship Raises Serious Constitutional Questions

Could the national media have missed a major storyline with potentially devastating ramifications for the Trump administration while it’s focussed on Russia? Have a series of developments put President Trump in danger of violating the Constitution? According to Think Progress Editor Judd Legum, that’s exactly what transpired following the reversal of a Chinese decision that significantly benefits Trump’s financial holdings. Following the announcement that China has awarded the president a “valuable new trademark“, Legum put the pieces together in a series of tweets:

2. Since 2006, Trump has sought to trademark his brand in China. It wasn’t going well. He kept losing in court.

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 16, 2017

 

Trump has, in fact, lost continually in court. Fox News recounted his failures in the Chinese legal system dating back over a decade ago:

Trump applied for rights to the Trump mark for construction services on Dec. 7, 2006, but a man named Dong Wei had filed a similar application about two weeks earlier. China works on a first-come-first-served basis for trademarks, and the Trademark Office rejected Trump’s application.

Trump appealed to the Trademark Review and Adjudication Board, then to the Beijing Intermediate People’s Court, and finally to the Beijing High People’s Court. He lost, lost and lost again.

3. After winning the presidency, Trump caused a stir by rejecting the “One China” policy, angering the Chinese gov’t pic.twitter.com/1xJ6ZxncPZ

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 16, 2017

 

As President-Elect, he created major international headlines by simply communicating with Taiwanese President Tsai Ying-wen. As Mediate reported at the time:

This represents a complete reversal of United States policy as it stands with Taiwan and China. There have been no diplomatic relations made with the island since 1979 after Jimmy Carter recognized Beijing as the only government of China. This is part of the ‘One China’ policy in which Taiwan’s sovereignty isn’t recognized by the U.S.

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 16, 2017

The quick reversal, as reported by The Economist, set the table for a telephone conversation between the President And Chinese President Xi Jinping:

During an “extremely cordial” phone call with Xi Jinping, his opposite number, on February 9th, Donald Trump agreed to honour his country’s long-standing “one-China policy”, according to the White House. It said Mr Trump made this commitment “at the request of President Xi”. China regards the policy—which it interprets as confirming its sovereign claim to Taiwan—as the basis for its relationship with the United States. Mr Xi had refused to talk to Mr Trump until the American president committed himself to it.

5. Yesterday, IN A COMPLETE COINCIDENCE, China reversed course and awarded Trump a trademark pic.twitter.com/jlC0MAvll0

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 16, 2017

And according to ABC News, there are more grants to be expected:The government of China awarded U.S. President Donald Trump valuable rights to his own name this week, in the form of a 10-year trademark for construction services.

The registration became official on Feb. 14 and was published in a trademark registration announcement on the website of China’s Trademark Office on Wednesday.

This may well be the first foreign trademark to be handed to Trump during his presidency, but is unlikely to be the last. In China alone he has 49 pending trademark applications and 77 marks already registered in his own name, most of which will come up for renewal during his term.

Is A Profitable China Deal Illegal?

Legum continues:

6. This fits squarely into the definition of an emolument. Trump is getting something of value from a foreign gov’t

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 16, 2017

7. He couldn’t get it when he wasn’t president but he can get it now.

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 16, 2017

Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution states:

“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Put into common parlance of the 21st Century, no elected official shall receive a salary, fee or profit from a foreign state. Private citizen Trump was unable to obtain the trademark protection of his brand by the Chinese Government. President Trump did. And while it’s not known what the exact dollar figure on each trademark is, what is known is approximately how much money the president has spent seeking it:The precise value of the trademarks is uncertain, but in a 2011 letter to then-U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Trump wrote that he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend his brand in China.

It appears that a clear violation of the so-called “Emoluments Clause” would be grounds for impeachment. Yet with an administration in chaos, it’s flown under the mainstream radar. Could we be suffering from analysis paralysis of this presidency already?

Count Legum among the amazed…8. Kind of amazing that, amid all the chaos, this story — which should be a major scandal — barely gets notice

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 16, 2017

Declassified CIA 9/11 Reports Hide A Few Eyebrow-Raising Facts

0
0

On Friday, the CIA declassified five documents from the period before during and after 9/11, totaling over 600 pages. The documents are heavily redacted, with entire pages missing, and many areas looking more like a game of Mad Libs than a document.

Despite the fact that the CIA performed a document dump on a Friday afternoon, clearly calculated to minimize reporting on it, there doesn’t seem to be any major revelations. There could very well be bombshell information within the documents. If so, it is whited out and the public is likely to never see it.

However, there are a few facts should raise some eyebrows, either at the information not shared, or at the bureaucratic ineptitude involved. The documents paint a picture of bureaucratic strain in 2000 and 2001. The earliest document, from August 2001, shows that prior to 9/11, the Counterterrorist Center (CTC) was a relatively small shop within the CIA that was understaffed, overworked, overloaded with information and suffering from an extremely high turnover rate. While management was sensitive to these issues, they were primarily tasked with tracking bin Laden, and were overwhelmed.

The longest document, the “Office of Inspector General Report on Central Intelligence Agency Accountability Regarding Findings,” shares a couple curious tidbits of information. In the section on covert action, it says that US government officials wanted Osama bin Laden to be killed, wanted the CIA to kill him, thought that the CIA knew that, but didn’t want to have to spell it out for them, because of statutes barring assassination. Those statutes are now a quaint relic of America before the attacks.

It’s a bit preposterous to think that Osama bin Laden lived until Navy SEALS whacked him in 2011, despite the fact that he was wanted dead or alive as early as 1998, because government officials wanted the CIA to take a hint. Operational communication was as awkward as a teenage girl playing with her hair for a clueless boy across the row in her algebra class. If this is to be believed, it demonstrates that the CIA is actually rather cautious. It doesn’t go do something crazy like murder a foreign figure, unless a high elected official orders them to do so. It also indicates that the CIA is loath to become the scapegoat of a policy that no one above them wants to take credit for. Institutional self-preservation is its guiding principle, while preserving adherence to international law, and an unwillingness to assassinate an individual guided elected officials prior to 9/11.

Another eyebrow raising piece of information in the same document concerns the Saudi role in 9/11. The section entitled “Issues Related to Saudi Arabia” is about 15 pages. Almost all of it is entirely redacted except for a couple of paragraphs. These paragraphs say that the CIA doesn’t have access to the FBI’s information, which seems awfully convenient. Nonetheless, it insists that top CIA analysts saw “no evidence that the Saudi government knowingly and willingly support al-Qa’ida terrorists.” Yet, “‘limited’ reporting” on bin Laden’s finances indicated that “‘a few Saudi Government officials’” may have been supporting him.

It’s no surprise that some Saudi officials were supporting bin Laden. The question has always been whether that was the work of a few rogue individuals, or if it was a powerful bloc within the government, or even a central policy. The CIA’s document attempts to clear the Saudi Government’s name. But it raises an important question: why are 14 pages about the Saudi relation to 9/11 redacted? The US and Saudi Arabia share an extremely important mutual relationship, based on economics and security, or to be more blunt, based on oil and weapons. But the US is a democratic country, while Saudi Arabia is a theocracy with stupendously wealthy religious extremists in powerful positions. That creates uncomfortable situations. Papering over it by hiding the vast majority of the facts about what transpired between the US and Saudi Arabia around the time of 9/11 can only create more suspicion, not less.

Muslim Hero Hugs ISIS Suicide Bomber Right Before Explosion, Saves Countless Lives (VIDEO)

0
0

If It Wasn’t For The Quick Actions By An Iraqi Muslim Man, Scores MORE Could Have Been Killed

In a reminder that Muslims are the main target of Islamic extremist groups and their brutality, an Iraqi Muslim man is credited with saving lives of possibly hundreds of his fellow citizens through sheer bravery and self-sacrifice, just one day after the deadly blast in Baghdad that killed over 300.

According to India Times, when an Islamic State suicide bomber aimed to hit the Sayyed Mohammad Shrine in his city of Balad city, Najih Shaker Al-Baldawi threw himself on the bomber. The blast killed at least 37 and injured up to 70, but the casualties and damage would have been far worse if Al-Baldawi hadn’t have acted.

The Sayyed Mohammad Shrine was busy at the time of the blast with Shia Muslims, including women and children, celebrating the end of Ramadan, India.com reports.

The goal of the five ISIS fighters who were dressed in local militia uniforms and strapped with bombs was to kill police and worshippers and destroy the shrine which is considered to be one of Iraq’s most important Shia holy sites, thus further stoking the sectarian tensions which have been tearing the country apart.

When the Sayyed Mohammad Shrine had been hit in the past in a similar attack, it sparked a civil war in Iraq. Najih Shaker Al-Baldawi’s heroic actions not only saved hundreds of lives but prevented the shrine from being obliterated. Although the shrine itself was saved, the gates were destroyed as well as the market outside of the walls of the shrine.

[contentblock id=7 img=gcb.png]

The Shia militant group Hezbollah released a statement condemning the attack by ISIS on the holy site.

“[The attack at] a sacred place where Holy God is worshipped reflects the contempt of those criminals for the sanctities…this new crime confirms that the terrorists’ murder crimes target in an undistinguishing way the Muslims and the Christians as well as the Sunnites and the Shiites without minding the sanctity of blood, time and place.”


Canadians Reject Fox News Clone – Sun News Shuts Down (VIDEO)

0
0

The right-wing propaganda machine suffered defeat this week in the great white north when Sun News Network, the Fox News clone in Canada went off the air Friday. The network, which many dubbed the “Fox News North,” had been in operation since 2011, but it never caught on with the public. Their dismal ratings stand in stark contrast to their American equivalent, Fox News, which loves to crow about being the biggest fish in the little pond of American Cable News.

The network was meant to be the echo chamber for Canada’s emerging Conservative Party which began to rise in 2003 from the cattle farms and tar sands oil fields of Alberta. Touting deregulation, tax cuts and a hardline foreign policy, they were to Prime Minister Stephen Harper the same kind of cheerleader that Fox News is for America’s GOP.

Despite high hopes that the news outlet’s success would mirror that of the rising party, their ratings were terrible from the outset and never did get much better. At the end of their first year, the top show, Ezra Levant’s The Source, was drawing about 35,000 viewers nightly. Among the 18-34 demographic prized by advertisers, the show did not raise a pulse.

John Doyle, TV columnist for the Globe and Mail put it this way:

“Sun News’ reactionary message and crude style speaks to a tiny older audience, but the contrast between its swaggering self-important voice and its actual impact is comical. Much of what they do, which is pundits busting blood vessels over irrelevant issues, is genuinely laughable. At times the ratings suggest the number of viewers under 50 is literally zero.”

Like any good conservative, of course, they blame government rather than their own ineptitude. CNBCNews reported –

“Its supporters blamed the CRTC for not giving it the same access enjoyed by news channels operated by CBC and CTV.”

They say their ratings troubles are the result of Sun’s secondary status on Canadian cable, meaning they were not part of the basic cable package, and that this put them at a disadvantage to other news stations. Essentially this is the same sort of disadvantage suffered here in the US by MSNBC for many years.

As it turns out, though, they were denied from the basic package because they weren’t attracting viewers from the millions of homes that they were already in when they applied for inclusion in the package in 2013. As Daily Kos reported:

“Data released as part of that application showed that while the network was available to 5.1 million households, it was only attracting, on average, 8,000 viewers at any given time.”

At that rate, if they had been available on every TV set in the country, they might have averaged as many as 30,000 viewers, or roughly the population of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Now the experiment is over, a dismal failure. Canadians rejected Sun News. The right wing will have to find another way to brainwash our neighbors to the north.

Here’s The Last Few Minutes Of Sun News

The last few minutes of Sun News didn’t give any hints of what was to come, so the 23 people actually watching were likely very surprised. If you jump to three minutes, you can watch a show sign off, a few ads telling people about upcoming shows, followed by blackness and then a simple graphic. Farewell.

Greece Tells Big Banks To Stuff It With ‘No’ Vote On Austerity (VIDEO)

0
0

On Sunday, Greece voted ‘NO’ to the big banks’ austerity measures and their rigged system of socialized risk and privatized profit. Why? Because so many in Greece are now so desperately poor, they’ve got nothing to lose.

Reuters reports a whopping 61 percent of Greek voters soundly rejected the demands of the creditors hovering like vultures over the not-quite-financially-dead-yet carcass of their nation:

Greeks overwhelmingly rejected conditions of a rescue package from creditors on Sunday, throwing the future of the country’s euro zone membership into further doubt and deepening a standoff with lenders.

As Reuters’ newscaster explains (in the video below), people in Greece are fed up with years of misery, sacrifice and belt-tightening to pay off the excesses of a bubble the banks — with the backing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and their nation’s greedy elite — helped create.

“For millions of Greeks, Sunday’s outcome was an angry message to creditors: ‘We’ll no longer accept repeated rounds of austerity measures that in five years have left one in four jobless.’”

Of course the dry phrase “austerity measures” lacks emotional resonance. But a woman expresses her amazement that pollsters ever could have thought the vote would be close, and explains the hardships facing the people of Greece to Reuters in a far more succinct way:

“How can we expect ‘YES’ to win, when we’ve had 10,000 suicides, three million people living under the poverty line, and 1.5 million on food handouts?”

The folks running the big banks have forgotten what any smart business person should know: When people have nothing left to lose, they’re free to say, do and vote however the heck they want.

Yahoo News adds that Greece voting “no” on the referendum in such high numbers is a huge victory for Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his far-left party, Syriza. On national TV, Tsipras triumphantly announced the yes/no referendum he put up for vote a scant few days ago:

“Today we celebrate the victory of democracy, a bright day in the history of Europe. We proved even in the most difficult circumstances that democracy won’t be blackmailed.”

Yet — although Tsipras still hopes to leverage his strong support from the people of Greece to negotiate a better deal with the EU, the IMF and the big banks that’s more fair and which involves less suffering for his people — Greece is still in danger of getting cut off from the EU and becoming an economic pariah.

Alas, you can vote for an FDR-like “New Deal” and demand economic expansion from your government until you’re blue in the face, but that won’t give your government the funds or the financial backing (which comes, alas, from the very banks the people of Greece are rejecting) required to get the job done.

Here’s the video with the news report on Greece’s “no” vote on Tsipras’ yes/no referendum from Reuters.

https://youtu.be/hpaEJKgzdD0

Why The People Of Greece Voted “No,” And Why It Matters.

The thing is, the “no” vote is not just about the people of Greece feeling the pinch of a never-ending recession. If that were the case, American workers would have revolted in a similar fashion years ago. Greece’s massive “no” vote at the polls on July 5th also has a lot to do with national pride and the desire for self-rule.

As Matthew Yglesias explains on Vox, both right- and left-leaning economists (most notably, Milton Friedman and Paul Krugman) thought cramming all of Europe into the European Union and melding all their currencies was a doomed — or at least highly challenging — endeavor. Ygelsias also points out that one of the main sticking points is that Greece’s economy isn’t nearly as well-developed as richer countries like Germany, the UK and the Netherlands. Because of that, Greece has been under immense pressure to reform, increase their productivity, and boost their economic growth since joining the EU.

But is that fair, or even feasible?

Here in the U.S., Yglesias elaborates, we also have drastic regional differences in terms of culture, wealth, worker productivity, and economic output that vary from state to state. Yet things work most of the time because wealthy states with high levels of productivity and growth like New York, Massachusetts and California are mostly fine with subsidizing poorer states like Kentucky, Alabama, and South Carolina, even though some states pay way less in federal taxes than they receive in benefits.

Alas, richer EU nations like Germany and the Netherlands aren’t willing to subsidize poorer nations like Greece. When Greece first joined the EU, its economy got caught up in a euphoric bubble, and now it’s time to pay the piper. Alas, two stubborn facts remain:

  1. Greece can never repay what they’ve borrowed, at least not in a way that lets the banks make a profit; and
  2. The people of Greece — as individuals — did not create Greece’s financial crisis and should not be forced to suffer the brunt of economic “reform” or “progress” alone.

If the banks and leaders of the richer nations let Greece off the hook, other poorer nations like Spain and Italy might get some ideas. But guess what? If we don’t help Greece and other financially distressed nations victimized by the untrammeled power we’ve given to big banks and big corporations, they’ll have nowhere to turn than to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and any other world leaders who scare the Hell out of us and are all-too-happy to help them, in exchange for some influence

Thom Feeney’s awesome, long-shot Greek Bailout Fund via Indiegogo’s gone viral and could put a dent in Greece’s debt, but independent donors like us haven’t got a patch on the likes of Putin.

Pope Francis Condemns Capitalism As ‘The Dung Of The Devil’

0
0

Pope Francis is agitating among the poor in the south. No, not the United States’ South. Further south.

The pope’s current tour of South America is sending him back into the arms of the people he came from — the poor, the disadvantaged, the masses that he hopes are creating a grassroots movement for change. In coming to the aid of those on the wrong end of income inequality, Francis called the pursuit of wealth “the dung of the devil.” During a speech in Boliviahe took capitalists severely to task for exploiting poor countries for their raw materials and cheap labor.

By giving an apology, Francis went straight to the origin of the problem. He told his audience:

“Some may rightly say, ‘When the pope speaks of colonialism, he overlooks certain actions of the church. I say this to you with regret: Many grave sins were committed against the native people of America in the name of God. 

“I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offense of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.”

Then he launched a critique of the “new colonialism”:

“The new colonialism takes on different faces. At times it appears as the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain ‘free trade’ treaties, and the imposition of measures of ‘austerity’ which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor.”

The solution might be elusive, but there’s no doubt about in whose hands it lies. Francis called for a global social movement to break the hold of the colonialism that continues to take advantage of the poor around the world for the benefit of developed countries — chief among them being the United States. He gave people who may consider themselves powerless some validation by acknowledging that they have learned useful lessons. As an example, he praised local initiatives, like cooperatives, that have been created to help the poor.

With the following words, Francis supported the activism of the people and reinforced their rights:

“I would even say that the future of humanity is in great measure in your own hands, through your ability to organize and carry out creative alternatives, through your daily efforts to ensure the three Ls — labor, lodging, land.”

Many proponents of capitalism are squirming under the glare of this uncomfortable spotlight, no one more than Americans of the United States variety. Francis will visit our country — the beating heart of capitalism — in September. The looming tour and the Catholic leader’s most recent words raise questions about what kind of papal scolding this country might be in for.

Francis could already have been talking to the Republican Party on Saturday, during a speech in Paraguay. He pointedly linked money and idolatry by asking political and business leaders “not to yield to an economic model which is idolatrous, which needs to sacrifice human lives on the altar of money and profit.” And again, when he said that “the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy” lacks a human purpose and a human face.

Squirming defenders of capitalism are represented by the likes of the Rev. Robert A. Sirico. Sirocco is the president of an organization that promotes free-market economics, the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. He responded to the pope’s words with:

“I wish Francis would focus on positives, on how a free-market economy guided by an ethical framework, and the rule of law, can be a part of the solution for the poor — rather than just jumping from the reality of people’s misery to the analysis that a market economy is the problem.”

However, the pope is all too aware of economic reality to emphasize those elusive ‘positives’ — namely that ‘an ethical framework’ and ‘the rule of law’ are often either absent or skillfully evaded in the capitalist system. By contrast, he told Bolivians:

 “[The system] has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature.

“This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, labourers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself – our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say – also finds it intolerable.”

The most strident of the pope’s critics think it’s him, rather than their favored economic system, that is ‘intolerable’. They are quick to label Francis a Marxist — a label with which he might be comfortable.

It’s undeniable that Francis is calling for the redistribution of wealth, but so is much of the population of the world. More realistic appraisals include that of Robert A. Johnson, director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Johnson said:

“I think the pope is singing to the music that’s already in the air. And that’s a good thing. That’s what artists do, and I think the pope is sensitive to the lack of legitimacy of the system.”

The illegitimacy has become increasingly, painfully obvious. In the United States, that recognition is embodied in the swelling support for grassroots heroes like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. In Greece, it’s represented by the resounding ‘no’ vote against austerity, an attitude embraced by the Greek people, if not fully by its leaders.

Unrest is growing because, even where the economy seems to be rebounding, as in the United States, the benefits still flow mainly to the wealthy. The GOP continues to fight against a living wage for workers and against taxation of the wealthy that could distribute some of those benefits downward to the people whose labor makes excessive profits possible for the ‘leisure’ class.

The ‘future of humanity’ is in workers’ hands, much as it was during the Great Depression when union workers risked their lives to win rights for average Americans. The support of the pope may not be crucial to the movement that is currently underway, however it can only add to the urgency of the gathering momentum.

American Tourist Throws N*zi Salutes in Germany, Promptly Gets A** Kicked

0
0

Are we tired of winning yet? One American tourist wasn’t, but he might be now.

American Tourist Throws Nazi Salutes In Germany, Promptly Got Punched

As the world watches on in horror and the horrible White Supremacist chaos continue to unfold live in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Associated Press reports Sunday morning that at least one ugly American is now taking the disgusting show abroad.

The AP reports that a drunken 41 year-old American male threw up the stiff-armed “Sieg Heil” Nazi salute several times Saturday morning in Dresden, Germany. The American was punched by a passer-by who quickly “fled the scene.”

Fueled by a long, contentious presidential campaign led by Republican President Donald Trump, hate crimes jumped 20% in 2016, and show no signs of slowing down in 2017. That hate turned deadly on Saturday in Charlottesville, when 32-year old counter-protester Heather Heyer was mowed over and killed by a car driven by James Alex Fields, who plowed into the crowd and then fled. Fields has been arrested and is being charged with one count of second degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding and one count of failure to prevent hit-and-run.

On Saturday, President Trump made a less-than-strong statement condemning the heinous Virginia violence, but refused to use the term “White Supremacy.” He also refused to label the incident as “domestic terrorism.” Trump is being widely condemned by both Democratic and Republican politicians for his lack of leadership as White Nationalism is exploding across the United States.

Democratic Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe has been one of the most outspoken critics, telling the White Supremacists to “go home, and never come back.” He also told the press on Saturday that he spoke with Trump and implored him to,

“Stop the hate speech, stop the rhetoric in this country, we have got to bring people together.”

The American who was beaten in Dresden is being investigated for violating Germany’s laws against displaying Nazi symbolism or slogans. The attacker is still being sought.

In Japan, Robots May Take Up Slack For Dwindling Workforce (VIDEO)

0
0

The future is now. Robots are popping up all over the place in Japan these days, or so it might seem.  They can be found everywhere from department store to banks, and in the future, in just about every profession you can think of.  Believe it or not, this may be a necessity for Japan’s population sooner than later.

The woman you see in the video (below) is not an actual customer service representative.  Her name is Aiko Chihira, the store’s new temporary greeter. She is beautiful and friendly.  She will never have a beef with the store management or with a difficult customer. That is because she is a humanoid robot.

The store’s regular greeter claims she’s not worried about Aiko, who was built to look like a perpetually 32-year old woman, taking her job.

“Communication is important,said Ayako Seiryu of Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi.”My strength is I can actually talk to people.”

Aiko, manufactured by Toshiba, can use sign language and sing, but isn’t programmed to carry on a conversation — yet.

The technology is quickly evolving, however.  A bank in Tokyo is giving “nao” a try as a customer service robot.  This little guy is programmed to speak 19 different languages and answer basic questions.  This “polyglot” technology could be very useful during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, when the city will be hosting thousands of foreign visitors.  By the time 2020 rolls around, the bank expects to have many more robots on staff to handle the escalated workload.

A robot named “Pepper,” who  “chats” with customers, first began appearing in Tokyo stores last year. Softbank, Pepper’s manufacturer, hopes the machine will eventually be a “family robot,” like a more attractive version of Rosieon “The Jetsons” or the cute little jewel thief in “Robot and Frank“. At least we hope. (2001: A Space Odyssey, anyone?)

This summer in Nagasaki, a new hotel is scheduled to open.  The hotel plans to have 10 robot staff members and they eventually plan to have more than 90 percent of their hotel operations run by robots.

What seems like fun and games today will most likely become a reality, if not a necessity in Japan during the coming years.  Japan has an aging population and an ever-shrinking work force.  There is serious talk about how to incorporate robots into that workforce.

The country’s senior citizens seem to be more than willing to embrace robots as caretakers. In a survey conducted by nursing home operator Orix Living, the poll found that more seniors would feel comfortable being cared for by a robot than by a foreign nurse.

As one senior citizen comments:

“Some day I will be living alone.  I would like to have a robot stay with me.”

With Japan’s dwindling population, shrinking workforce, and deep resistance to immigration, it looks like robots will be playing an ever-expanding roll as co-worker and caretaker.

So go ahead, department store customers. Photograph away at the beautiful woman in the kimono.  Some day she could be cooking your meals and changing your Depends.   But remember, for everyIron Giant and WALL_E, there could be an equal number of HALsorStepfordwives.

Be careful what you wish for.

Top 10 ISIS Fails and Blunders of All Time (VIDEOS)

0
0

Over the past few years, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, better known as ISIS, has managed to keep themselves in the news.  From situations as serious as suicide bombings to something as humorous as a college student informing Jeb Bush of how his brother created ISIS, the fact is that they’re always there.  So today, we’re going to take away a little bit of their power by showing you what idiots these guys really are.

10.  Idiot ISIS Member Geotags Himself

In 2012, Abu Abdul-Rahman — formerly known by Mark Taylor — left New Zealand so that he could join ISIS in its fight against… whoever the hell they were fighting that week… it literally could have been anyone.  Unfortunately for Taylor, he has an addiction we understand all too well:  social media.  The struggle is real, people.

To assuage this addiction, he made sure to keep sending out Tweets about his adventures in ISIS.  What he didn’t realize, however, is the fact that his Tweets were geotagged.  He eventually took notice and deleted 45 of these Tweets.  It’s a shame bin Laden’s capture story didn’t start out like this. It would have made for a way better movie.

9.  ISIS Members Chastised By Elderly Woman

In early 2015, a video went viral of an elderly woman, assumed to be in Syria, confronting two members of ISIS while they were in a vehicle.  I’m not sure how often the word “epic” is used in the same sentence as ISIS, but this woman’s rant definitely deserves the adjective.  She shot off this classic gem:

“Do not slaughter anyone and nobody will slaughter you. It’s all forbidden. I swear nothing you have done was in the way of God”

She’d go on to tell the men that their perversion of the Koran would prevent them from entering into Heaven.  The video ends before we get to see the conclusion, but we can only assume she dragged both men out by their ears and threw them to the ground.  Okay… we can only hope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYRMBy9J2jY

8.  Not Quite Understanding Hostage Negotiation

Unfortunately, ISIS is a dangerous organization, and this dictates that this list will not only be composed of awesome old women and stupid Twitter updates.  We all remember, for instance, the video being released of ISIS burning the Jordanian pilot to death.  That’s not where the story began, though.  In fact, ISIS said that they would not harm the pilot, Moaz al-Kasasbeh, if Jordan released one of their prisoners.

The prisoner in question was Sajida al-Rishawi, a female ISIS militant who had been sentenced to death.  The woman was completely safe, and then ISIS decided to execute the pilot.  How did Jordanian king Abdullah II respond?  He went ahead and killed al-Rishawi.  Oh, along with Ziad Karbuli, an Iraqi al-Qaeda operative, and several other militants.

Dear ISIS:  Learn how hostage negotiation works… or at least don’t screw with the Jordanian king.

7.  Destroying Fake Statues

2015 hasn’t been the best year for ISIS.  Take when they destroyed a bunch of 3,000 year old statues.  Oh wait… they didn’t.  They filmed themselves destroying statues, and they even let us think they were ancient relics.  Unfortunately for the group, they haven’t really ever perfected their bluff game.

As it turns out, the statues they pretended to destroy were actually housed safely in an Iraqi museum.  And while this information was good to hear, we all sort of knew something was up when “3,000 year old statues” crumbled apart easily and appeared to be held together by metal bars.

Come on, ISIS.  You can do better.

6.  ISIS Trusts The Wrong People

ISIS undoubtedly has some trustworthy people in their rankings.  Come on… most are willing to die for what they believe in.  Luckily, not all of them will make this sacrifice.  In fact, sometimes all it takes for an ISIS commander to turn on his boys is the offer of a few jailhouse perks.

Abu Shakr joined al Qaeda when he became angry of how Sunnis in Iraq were being treated.  The group he was in evolved into ISIS, and Shakr became a trusted commander in the organization.  Then he was captured.  Then he was offered perks for snitching.

Then he snitched.

Shakr’s work as an informant has led to the capture and interrogation of numerous suspected militants.  Heck, his information helped take back the key town of Beiji, where the largest oil refinery in Iraq was located.  So ISIS and McCain have a bit in common:  they need to learn to better vet those they choose to put in top positions.

Looking at you, Sarah.

5.  ISIS Just Being Stupid

We would love to load every video of an ISIS militant doing something stupid that results in his untimely demise or serious injury.  Unfortunately, it’s not likely that our server would handle a “Top 7,532 ISIS Blooper Videos” article.  Just so you have a little something to take home with you, though, here you go.  Please overlook the fact that it’s set up like an infomercial. No idea what that’s about.

 4.  ISIS Girls Want To Come Home

Okay, in reality, this one is kind of depressing.  15-year-old Sabina Selimovic and 17-year-old Samra Kesinovic, two Austrian teen girls, decided that they wanted to fight for ISIS.  So in reality, their biggest blooper was in making this decision.  They left a note for their parents that said this:

“Don’t look for us. We will serve Allah – and we will die for him.”

It only took about half a year for them to recognize their “epic fail,” and a little longer for their note’s prediction to come true.  They were quickly married off to ISIS militants, impregnated and used as the poster girls to attract more female youth to ISIS.

Eventually, the girls were in contact with the families they left behind, and they told them that they no longer wanted to be part of the ISIS life.  Unfortunately, it’s not always quite that easy.  In Dec. 2014, it was reported that one of the girls was missing and the other was dead.  Sadly, this hasn’t deterred other young teenage girls from trying to follow in their footsteps.

3.  ISIS Suicide-Bomber Trainer Blows Up Classroom

Early 2014 resulted in one of the most inspiring stories to come out of the news in a while.  A member of ISIS, who was training several other members on how to become the best they could be as suicide bombers, accidentally set off a belt of explosives during class.  The explosion killed the teacher and 21 of his ISIS “students.”

Don’t worry… it’s okay to giggle at this.  In fact, a liquor store owner, Raad Hashim, who just so happens to work near a previous ISIS suicide bombing attack site, had this to say:

“This is so funny.  It shows how stupid they are, those dogs and sons of dogs.”

While his insults could use a little work, we couldn’t agree more.

2.  “Moron” Posts ISIS Selfie, Gives Away Location

We all know by now that ISIS are a bunch of social media junkies.  This is likely what led one of them to post a selfie from one of their command bases.  Air Force Gen. Hawk Carlisle said this about the post:

“[We’re] combing through social media and they see some moron standing at this command… And in some social media, open forum, bragging about the command and control capabilities for Daesh, ISIL.”

Using whatever specialized technology the military has, they were able to pinpoint the location in the background of the selfie.  Unlike the idiot mentioned in No. 10 of this list, though, this ISIS militant couldn’t have benefited from removing this post.

This is because, within 22 hours, the U.S. military had pinpointed and used three joint direct attack munitions to destroy the building and everyone in it.  Remember kids:  selfies can kill.  Especially if you’re a moron.

1.  ISIS Decapitates… ISIS

Everything on this list had the potential to be No. 1, but the feeling you get upon hearing this story pretty much cemented it’s place.  Are you sick of hearing about new videos being released of innocent people being beheaded by the violent organization?  Want to know what video you won’t see them bragging about?

The one where they accidentally decapitated one of their own fighters. In Nov. 2013, a spokesman for ISIS released this statement:

“We call on God to accept Mohammed Fares into his Kingdom and to forgive his brothers that sought to rid us of the enemies of God and our enemies.”

So who is Mohammed Fares?  Only an ISIS fighter who was injured while fighting for the organization.  As he was brought to a makeshift hospital, he happened to shout the names of two Shiite Muslims, and this led the Sunnis in the area to assume he wasn’t on the side of ISIS.

These things happen, I suppose.  ISIS posted a video of two young fighters displaying the head of Fares for all to see.  Can you imagine how sheepish they felt later?  Imagine being a fly on the wall at that HR meeting.

“Guys, we appreciate your enthusiasm, but these kind of mistakes just can’t happen anymore.  This is your one verbal warning.  After this, a write-up will go into your personnel file, and after that, even one slip up will result in you being sent to suicide bomber school.”

I know which teacher I hope they got…

Honorable Mention

Okay, this isn’t an actual ISIS blooper reel, but you can imagine it is. If you don’t have a slightly dark sense of humor, skip this one.

All Terrorists? Kenyan Muslims Shield Christians From Death During Al-Shabaab Attack (VIDEO)

0
0

On Dec. 21, a group of extremists in Kenya who identified with the al-Shabaab militant group of Somalia stormed a bus that was carrying both Kenyan Muslims and Christians through the Somali-Kenyan border town of Mandera in an attempt to segregate the Muslims from the Christians. The intent was clear – whomever was a Christian was a target for al-Shabaab – and the Muslim riders would give them up.

The CNN coverage can be seem summed up in this video:

Unfortunately for them the majority of the group -– who were Kenyan Muslims – armed their Christian counterparts with religious clothing and a vow of secrecy should they be interrogated by the al-Shabaab militants. Not to mention the group acted as a collective whole offering their opinion on religious segregation. An article published by Quartz Africa quoted one Muslim rider named Abdi Mohamud Abdi saying:

“The militants threatened to shoot us but we still refused and protected our brothers and sisters…we even gave some non-Muslims our religious attire to wear in the bus so that they would not be identified easily. We stuck together tightly.”

The Somalian extremist group al-Shabaab has been involved in some pretty significant religiously driven attacks in the last year. They were responsible for the mass murder of 147 college students at Garissa University in Kenya along with 28 more victims on a bus passing through Mandera.

They weren’t so effective this time in separating the riders by religion but they did manage to kill a traffic officer and conductor who were caught up in the attempted attack.

Despite Al-Shabaab’s Intimidation Religious Liberty Prevails In Kenyan Muslims.

If you turned on a news network these days it might seem like there is this massive war of divine beliefs, one that would pin people of Islamic beliefs against those of Christianity. The only problem is that events like the attempted Mandera attack on the 21st of December prove otherwise.  After the event Joseph Ole Nkaissery told CNN this:

“We are all Kenyans, we are not separated by religion…We are one people as a nation. And this is a very good message from my brothers and sisters from the Muslim community”

Although some American culture might be hinting a different direction the fact that there is still unity in areas of the world where this animosity is happening firsthand is a positive. And in a time where the Third Reich-esque Donald Trump has activated a sleeping giant-population of bigotry filled American voters, understanding what it means to work together is more important than ever.

In a recent article published by The Washington Post the Evangelical theologian Russell Moore said – among other things – this:

“Christians ought to stand up for religious liberty not just when our rights are violated but on behalf of others, too.”

As tensions between religions groups throughout the world seem to tighten there is a growing necessity for realizing the powerful nature of unity between all religions in a joint effort of religious liberty.






Latest Images