Europe and the UK have been much more proactive in trying to hold tech giants accountable than the US, which probably has something to do with the fact that most of these companies are American firms. So it's hardly a surprise that an editorial written by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, Mark Zuckerberg's former college roommate, resonated more on the other side of the pond.

In an editorial published by the FT, perhaps Europe's most venerable financial news publication, the paper argued that European capitals must lead the charge, but that ultimately, the US must wake up and start regulating.

BY CATHERINE J. FROMPOVICH
Attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Children’s Health Defense’s Chairman and Chief Legal Counsel, finally has “put on the gloves” and is ready to fight Big Pharma’s Merck & Co., Inc. regarding the falsified and fraudulent research they undertook and presented to the CDC/FDA for the licensure of the HPV vaccine Gardasil®.

After reading the transcript of Mr. Kennedy’s video, I could not help but spotlight some of the more apparently shocking facts he and his team uncovered in their exposé of the fraud that apparently took place during Merck’s testing of the Gardasil® vaccine.

Much of the information below is taken from various parts of the video/transcript, which I request readers refer to here. This may read out of context, but it falls together to tell a long story as briefly as possible.

SOURCE: ALJAZEERA

Blood-soaked body of Francisco Romero, fifth journalist to be killed this year, was found on a pavement in his hometown.

A Mexican journalist enrolled in a federal protection programme has been shot dead, the fifth reporter to be killed this year in one of the most dangerous countries for the press.

The blood-soaked body of crime reporter Francisco Romero was found on a pavement outside a nightclub in his hometown of Playa del Carmen along Mexico's Caribbean coast on Thursday, authorities said.

Romero ran a Facebook-based news site called "Ocurrio Aqui" (It Happened Here) that covers local politics and crime and had more than 17,000 followers. He also worked for one of the state's leading newspapers, Quintana Roo Hoy.

The state prosecutor's office opened a homicide investigation, saying Romero had filed a complaint on April 12 over threats he had received. The source of those threats was not specified.

It’s not enough to want untold thousands to die and the country destroyed, now neocons in Congress want to steal more than a billion and a half dollars from Iran as compensation for something somebody else did or didn’t do.

From the Daily Caller:

A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation Thursday to make $1.68 billion worth of Iranian funds available to the families of 241 American servicemen killed in the 1983 suicide bombing on a Marine base in Beirut, Lebanon.

In Trump Bizarro World, as in the Obama and Bush versions of the same, reality and facts are only applicable when they serve the agenda.

In his first pair of interviews since being sworn in, Attorney General Barr told Fox News and WSJ that he was pursuing the investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe – an investigation he has tasked

John Durham, the US Attorney from Connecticut, with leading – because Americans need to know whether the government “put a thumb on the scale” to try and undermine President Trump both during the campaign and during the first two years of his term, just like “we need to ensure that foreign actors don’t influence the outcome of our elections.”

Separately, he told WSJ that “government power was used to spy on American citizens…I can’t imagine any world where we wouldn’t take a look and make sure that was done properly.”

Barr has doubled-down on using the term ‘spying’, which has angered Democrats, after first using it during Senate committee testimony from April 10, where he uttered the now-infamous phrase “I think spying did occur.”

Davos elitist Maurice Levy is happy that new “hateful content” rules for the Internet will see “discussions” being “quickly erased from social networks”.

Levy is Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Publicis Groupe, the world’s third largest advertising and communications group and a regular attendee of the World Economic Forum.

He has joined with global leaders like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron to promote the “Christchurch Call,” which demands countries and social media giants “clamp down on hate content” in response to the New Zealand mosque shooting.

FOR 40 years, the good ladies of the Women’s Institute have been washing their hands and putting on their pinnies to bake cakes and biscuits for the terminally ill patients at the Loros hospice in Leicestershire.

They have now been told, however, that their confectionery gifts are no longer welcome. Loros (Leicestershire and Rutland Organisation for the Relief Of Suffering) is not allowed to accept them because members’ kitchens have not been visited and approved for cleanliness by health inspectors.

Glenice Wignall, 75, said she had never encountered problems with health and safety in three decades with the WI. And Loros manager Helen Williams said: ‘We have loved receiving donations from so many generous supporters but unfortunately this is a decision made by the local authority, not by our organisation.’

Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning has been sent to jail - again - for refusing to testify to a grand jury.

A judge on Thursday ordered Manning back to the Alexandria Detention Center until she agrees to testify to a grand jury investigating Wikileaks or until the grand jury term expires in 18 months.

Manning, 31, has already served two months in jail but was released last week when that grand jury term expired.

Judge Anthony Trenga was not impressed with her rationale and said that jail time may cause her to reflect differently on the issue.

Manning told the judge that she would 'rather starve to death' than change her opinion.

This article was originally published by Kurt Nimmo on Activist Post.

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Saudi Arabia on Thursday blamed Iran for ordering an attack early this week on two Aramco pipeline booster stations, a strike that was intended as part of a broader sabotage campaign to disrupt world oil supplies, according to Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih.

The drone attacks came one day after a string of attacks on two Saudi oil tankers and two other vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and caused the temporary closure of a vital east-west pipeline traversing the kingdom, since reopened.

Prince Khalid Bin Salman, the vice minister for defense and brother of the crown prince MbS, described Yemen's Houthis - which were believed to have launched the drone attack - of being used as an "Iranian" tool advancing Tehran's aggression and hegemony in the region.

In a tweet, he said the Houthi militias “are merely a tool that Iran’s regime uses to implement its expansionist agenda in the region, and not to protect the people of Yemen as the Houthis falsely claim”.

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Journalist Whitney Webb recently tweeted a 2010 video clip I’d never seen before featuring US National Security Advisor John Bolton defending the use of deception in advancing military agendas, which highlights something we should all be paying attention to as Trump administration foreign policy becomes increasingly "Boltonized".

On a December 2010 episode of Fox News’ Freedom Watch, Bolton and the show’s host Andrew Napolitano were debating about recent WikiLeaks publications, and naturally the subject of government secrecy came up.

“Now I want to make the case for secrecy in government when it comes to the conduct of national security affairs, and possibly for deception where that’s appropriate,” Bolton said. “You know Winston Churchill said during World War Two that in wartime truth is so important it should be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.”

“Do you really believe that?” asked an incredulous Napolitano.

Nellie Ohr - a CIA-linked operative who gave extensive anti-Trump research to her DOJ official husband Bruce while she was working for Fusion GPS' anti-Trump efforts, deleted emails from Bruce's account during an April, 2016 exchange about Russian influence in Europe.

Contained in over 339 pages of heavily redacted DOJ records obtained by Judicial Watch via FOIA lawsuit, the email chain between Nellie Ohr, Bruce Ohr, his top aide Lisa Holtyn and Stefan Bress - a first secretary at the German Embassy, discussed among other things the "Impact of Russian influence operations in Europe."

Authored by Dave Lindorff via Counterpunch.org,

American media still refer to Juan Guaidó, America’s hand-picked “legitimate leader” or “legitimate president” of Venezuela, as having an “administration.”

The truth is that his “administration” - consisting of advisors and other opposition leaders - are all either arrested and being held by the government, hiding, seeking asylum in various foreign embassies (Spanish, Italian, Brazilian and Argentinian) in the capital of Caracas, or have fled to other countries like Brazil and Colombia.

Guaidó, apparently a government of one, has so far avoided arrest probably because the elected Venezuelan President Maduro doesn’t want to give the US an excuse to try and rescue him, or to launch military actions of some kind against Venezuela as the White House keeps threatening to do.

A dispute has erupted over whether former FBI Director James Comey or his CIA counterpart, John Brennan, promoted the unverified Steele dossier as the Obama-era intelligence community targeted the Trump campaign.

The scare mongering about an attack on Iran continues. Bolton must be laughing his ass off how easy he can play the issue based on nothing. He simply counters any debunking of the alleged 'thread from Iran' by upping the ante. Yesterday a British general denied that any such threat exists in the area of his responsibility:

“No – there’s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria,” Maj. Gen. Christopher Ghika, deputy commander of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), the coalition responsible for counter-terrorist operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, said in a video briefing, according to the Guardian.

Today Bolton countered that by again raising the noise level around the imaginary threat:

The U.S. Embassy in Iraq says the State Department has ordered all non-essential, non-emergency government staff to leave the country right away amid escalating tensions with Iran.

Helicopters ferried US staff from the American embassy in Baghdad on Wednesday out of apparent concern about perceived threats from Iran, which US sources believe encouraged Sunday’s attacks on four oil tankers in the Gulf, Reuters reports.

The sabotage of the tankers, for which no one has claimed responsibility, and Saudi Arabia’s announcement on Tuesday that armed drones hit two of its oil pumping stations have raised concerns Washington and Tehran may be inching toward conflict.

A US government source said American security experts believe Iran gave its “blessing” to tanker attacks, which hit two Saudi crude oil tankers, a UAE-flagged fuel bunker barge and a Norwegian-registered oil products tanker off Fujeirah near the Strait of Hormuz.

The source said the United States believes Iran’s role was one of actively encouraging militants but indicated the United States does not now have evidence that Iranian personnel played any direct operational role.

Saudi Arabia submitted on Wednesday a letter to the United Nations Security Council, in which it held Iran and the Yemeni Houthi group responsible for targeting their oil facilities on Tuesday.

The letter was handed over by the Permanent Representative of Saudi Arabia to the United Nations, Abdallah Al-Mouallimi, according to Saudi TV channel Al Arabiya.

The letter included “Saudi Arabia’s holding of Iran and the Houthi militias it supports fully responsible for Tuesday’s attack on the kingdom’s oil facilities.”

According to the same source, a joint message was sent from Saudi Arabia and the UAE to the UN Security Council and UN Secretary-General António Guterres, on the attack and sabotage operation that occurred last Sunday against four ships in the international sea off the UAE’s territorial sea and coasts.

The group calling itself the Islamic State has announced the establishment of a new overseas province in Pakistan, just days after proclaiming another new overseas province in northern India. Until recently, the Islamic State’s operations in Asia were conducted under the banner of the Islamic State – Khorasan Province, or IS-KP. The shadowy group was founded in early 2015 and was led by former Taliban warlords who pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the spiritual leader and self-proclaimed emir of the Islamic State. Since that time, at least two of IS-KP’s leaders have been killed by United States forces, while the group has been engaged in a war against rival militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, notably the Taliban.

Washington, D.C. plans to join a growing list of cash-strapped cities that turn citizens into ticket vigilantes.

According to a Fox5 News article, Bill B23-0288 would allow 80 citizens, ten in each of D.C.'s eight wards to print out parking tickets and citations.

These government shills will be tasked with spying on motorists and ticketing them if they park too long or violate parking rules.

Reason.com warns, "these new citizen parking enforcers would be accountable to no one."

If you think you had problems with your neighbor(s) before, just wait until they have the power to ticket anyone.

I thought this was America, but whatever. Secrecy in all things government, despite the (often misheld) presumption that our public servants will be open and honest about issues that affect us.

It's no secret voting systems and databases are not secure. These are problems that date back 15 years, but have shown little improvement since. Election interference is just another tool in the nation-state hacking kit, and the US is far from immune from these attacks.

Federal agencies investigating election interference are at least speaking to officials in states affected by these efforts. But those officials are apparently not allowed to pass on this information to those affected the most: voters.

Gov. Ron DeSantis met with the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security last Friday to discuss the revelation in Robert Mueller’s report that “at least one” Florida county had its election information accessed by Russian hackers in 2016.

SOURCE: UC SAN DIEGO HEALTH
By Debra Kamin

Glyphosate, the primary ingredient in Monsanto’s popular weed killer Roundup, has been linked to liver disease in animal models. In a new study, the first of its kind, researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine report an association between the herbicide and negative effects upon the human liver.

Facing the possibility of being imprisoned yet again in the coming days for refusing to testify before a secretive grand jury, U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning on Sunday warned of the grave threat the Trump administration poses to press freedoms.

“I think that ultimately what they really want is, they want to go after journalists,” Manning said during an interview on CNN when asked whether the Trump administration’s effort to extradite WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange to the U.S. is a danger to the free press.

“This administration clearly wants to go after journalists,” Manning said. “I think that if the administration gets its way… we’re probably gonna see indictments and charges.”

“Whenever a journalist makes a misstep,” she added, “I think that they’re put on notice now that the FBI and the Department of Justice are going to go after them, on the administration’s behalf.”

Source: Common Dreams

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday came out forcefully against the Trump administration angling the United States into another costly and unnecessary war of choice in the Middle East—this time against Iran—delivering an online address in which he warned that any military action without approval from Congress would be an "unconstitutional and illegal" breach of office.

"Let me be as clear as I can be: a war with Iran would be an absolute disaster," said Sanders in the roughly six-minute speech. "Sixteen years ago, the United States committed one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the history of our country by attacking Iraq. That war was sold to the American people based on a series of lies about weapons of mass destruction. We should remember that one of the leading advocates for that war was John Bolton."

The US State Department has issued a security alert and ordered staff to evacuate Iraq amid escalating tensions with neighbouring Iran. The alert posted on the US embassy in Iraq today read: “The U.S. State Department has ordered the departure of non-emergency U.S. Government employees from Iraq, both at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and the U.S. Consulate in Erbil. Normal visa services at both posts will be temporarily suspended. The U.S. government has limited ability to provide emergency services to US citizens in Iraq.”

A US embassy spokesperson is reported by the Financial Times saying that US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, had taken the decision to withdraw because of “the increased threat stream we are seeing in Iraq”. The spokesperson declined to say how, when, or how many staff were leaving, citing security reasons.

Facebook has banned 23 major Italian pro-populist pages with a combined 2.5 million followers two weeks before the European elections, according to Italy's La Stampa.

The majority of the bans were for supporters of the current coalition government; La Lega (The League), headed by Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, and the 5-star movement, M5S, led by Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio. Among them, the most popular Facebook page for La Lega was taken down, right as polls reveal massive support for the party.

Facebook claims that the sites were spreading fake news, "hate speech," and "divisive content" about immigrants, vaccines and Jews, after left-wing "human rights" and environmentalist non-government organization (NGO) Avaaz issued a report on "inauthentic behavior" over Italian Facebook networks.

WhatsApp has asked users to update their systems after a malicious attack. The cyber attack is complete with all the hallmarks of a “government-sponsored surveillance” attempt.

The messaging and audio app owned by Facebook said Monday that malicious hackers were able to install spyware on Android smartphones and Apple iPhones and is asking users to make sure their security is up to date. But more alarming, is that this looks like the government wants to spy on its own people who use the WhatsApp app. “The attack has all the hallmarks of a private company reportedly that works with governments to deliver spyware that takes over the functions of mobile phone operating systems,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told MarketWatch.

Media-savvy U.S. government officials, political operatives, and lawmakers and their staffs from all political parties and ideological persuasions have no doubt, throughout the history of our great country, duped a fair-minded but unwitting reporter into writing a juicy story in order to get a piece of information into the public bloodstream without their fingerprints on it.

This is, in large part, how the Bush administration sold the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the American people: Feeding knowingly bogus or unsubstantiated intelligence on Iraq’s (nonexistent) WMD programs to reporters, who then published it as fact, without much in the way of critical scrutiny.

Despite the lessons we’ve learned from that debacle, it’s happening again with regard to the Trump administration’s march toward war with Iran.

An American military team assessing blasts that damaged four commercial ships off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Sunday has blamed Iran or Iranian-backed proxies using explosive charges, a source told Fox News on Monday evening.

Each ship had a 5-to-10-foot hole in it, near or just below the water line, a U.S. official told The Associated Press. A Norwegian-flagged vessel, two Saudi oil tankers and a bunkering tanker flagged in Shariah, one of the UAE's seven emirates, all suffered similar damage Sunday.

The UAE asked the U.S. to help investigate the damage, which Gulf officials have characterized as sabotage. UAE's state media said Sunday there had been "no injuries or fatalities on board the vessels" and "no spillage of harmful chemicals or fuel."

The U.S. has warned ships that "Iran or its proxies" could be targeting maritime traffic in the region, and America has moved additional ships and aircraft into the region.

Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels carried out drone attacks on two Aramco pipeline booster stations, a strike that was intended to disrupt world oil supplies, according to Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih.

Al-Falih told Saudi-funded news agency Al-Arabiya that the attacks targeted two pipeline booster stations between the Eastern province and the city of Yanbu.

Despite a flurry of meandering hot-then-cold trade war tweets from President Trump, US futures have been powering higher all morning. But then along came Axios to pour cold water all over the growing trade-deal optimism after the stock market's worst one-day selloff since January.

According to Axios, senior administration officials told senior White House reporter Jonathan Swan that a trade deal with China "isn't close" and that the US "could be in for a long trade war."

Swans' sources said the differences between the two sides "are so profound taut, based on his read of the situation, he can't see the fight getting resolved before the end of the year."

That's a much longer timeline than the three-four weeks Trump touted Monday night, who touted the possibility that the a meeting with President Xi at the G-20 in Japan next month could yield an agreement.

Soybean futures fell 25% in 50 weeks since the inception of President Trump's trade war early last summer.

CBOT Soybeans futures plunged to their lowest level in a decade as China on Monday said it would raise tariffs on $60 billion in US goods in retaliation for Trump's decision on Friday to raise duties on $200 billion in Chinese products to 25% from 10%. The deepening trade war has pushed American farmers onto the verge of disaster.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The economic and financial stresses will exceed the workforce's carrying capacity in the next recession.

A number of recent surveys reflect a widespread sense of financial stress and symptoms of poor health in America's workers, particularly the younger generations. There's no real mystery as to the cause of this economic anxiety:

-- competition for secure, well-paid jobs that were once considered the birthright of the middle class is increasingly fierce;

-- the pay and predictability of the jobs that are available are low;

-- high-paying jobs are extraordinarily demanding, forcing workers to sacrifice everything else to keep the big-bucks position;

-- the much-lauded gig economy is tracking the Pareto Distribution, as 80% of the income accrues to the top 20%, and those trying to earn a lower-middle class income in the gig economy are working long hours to do so;

A tariff may be described as a sales or consumption tax the consumer pays, but tariffs are also a discretionary and an optional tax.

If you choose not to purchase Chinese goods and instead buy comparable goods made in other nations or the USA, then you do not pay the tariff.

China loses the sale. This is why Beijing, which runs $350 billion to $400 billion in annual trade surpluses at our expense is howling loudest. Should Donald Trump impose that 25% tariff on all $500 billion in Chinese exports to the USA, it would cripple China’s economy. Factories seeking assured access to the U.S. market would flee in panic from the Middle Kingdom.

One of the companies that has been hit the hardest following the latest escalation in trade war between the US and China, and which not only is reliant on Chinese consumers to purchase its products and services on the mainland, but also produces iPhones in China and is thus subject to a double whammy of anti-American sentiment and higher export tariffs, is Apple, with its shares sliding -11% since the start of last week and 5% on Monday, on fresh worries relating to escalating trade war and the imposition of tariffs on imports from China, as well as on concerns over the consequences of the recent Supreme Court decision allowing a lawsuit against Apple practices in the App store.

In a note published this morning, JPMorgan writes that while it is difficult to precisely attribute the magnitude of the share price decline between tariffs and the lawsuits, "it is fair to say that the majority of the share price decline is driven by tariff
concerns."

Authored by Ron Paul via The Unz Review,

Last week the New York Times published some of President Trump’s 1980s and 1990s tax returns information. The information detailed President Trump’s financial difficulties during that time. While you would not know it from reading some media reports, this is old news. In fact, President Trump openly discussed his financial difficulties on his popular reality television show.

What should be of great concern is the possibility that the person who leaked the returns - who the paper says has legal access to President Trump’s tax records - is an IRS employee seeking to undermine the president. This would hardly be the first time an IRS employee has leaked confidential information because he disagreed with the taxpayer’s politics. In 2014 the agency had to pay the National Organization for Marriage 50,000 dollars after an IRS employee gave names of the group’s donors to the group’s opponents.

Last year, a coalition of privacy advocates and child psychologists warned against putting an Amazon Alexa speaker anywhere near your child on the fairly reasonable grounds that developing minds shouldn’t befriend always-on surveillance devices, no matter how cute the packaging. Now, a group of privacy researchers, attorneys, and U.S. senators are calling on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Amazon’s alleged violations of COPPA, a law protecting the littlest users of all.

The US-backed, neoliberal Ecuadorian leader is persecuting Swedish software developer Ola Bini for his political sympathies, censoring critical media, and jailing progressive leadership in a sweeping crackdown.
By Denis Rogatyuk

The arrest, sentencing and the plans for the extradition of Julian Assange from the United Kingdom to the United States continue to provoke waves of condemnation from all around the world, along with disgust at the government of Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno and its increasing subordination to the US.

This was the first time in living memory of many that a government allowed a foreign law enforcement agency to enter its sovereign territory – the Ecuadorian embassy in London – and take into its custody a publisher of journalism, whose status as a refugee had been recognized internationally by the United Nations, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International and other international organizations.

Source: Moon of Alabama

On April 7 2018 Syrian 'rebels' claimed that the Syrian government used chlorine gas and Sarin in an attack on the besieged Douma suburb near the Syrian capital Damascus. They published a series of videos which showed dead bodies of mainly women and children.

The claim of the 'chemical attack' was made shortly after U.S. President Trump had announced that he wanted U.S. troops to leave Syria. It was designed to "pull him back in" which it indeed did. In an illegal 'retaliation' the U.S., Britain and France launched a number of cruise missiles against Syria. Most of them failed to reach their targets.

Moon of Alabama published a number of pieces on the issue which are listed below.

Researchers from The University of Utah‘s (UoU) DIGIT Lab have reportedly developed a new smartphone app for snowflake Leftists that will allow liberals to report anyone who says or does something that personally “offends” them to law enforcement, under the pretext that these “offenders” have committed a “hate crime.”

Known as the Hate Incident Reporting System, the app has been branded as a tool to help fill the alleged “gap” in hate crimes reporting, which is apparently tracked by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). But in reality, the app is actually a weapon for the Left to use against people they don’t like who merely exercise their free speech rights in accordance with the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In his Fourth of July address to Congress in 1821, U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams stated that if America were ever to abandon its founding foreign policy of non-interventionism, she would inevitably become the world’s “dictatress” and begin behaving accordingly.

No can can deny that Adams’ prediction has come true. America has truly become the world’s dictatress — an arrogant, ruthless, brutal dictatress that brooks no dissent from anyone in the world.

Now, I use the term “America” because that’s the term Adams used. In actuality, however, it’s not America that has become the world’s dictatress. It is the U.S. government that has become the world’s dictatress.

The French prosecutor on Friday said it had opened a preliminary investigation into a suspected file assembled by Bayer’s seed maker Monsanto to influence various personalities in France.

The probe was opened after a complaint was filed by daily newspaper Le Monde.

According to Le Monde and other French media, Monsanto built up a file of some 200 names that includes journalists and law makers in the hope of influencing their positions on pesticides.

The file, Le Monde reports, dates from 2016 and was leaked by U.S public relations and marketing agency FleishmanHillard.

Officials at Bayer were not immediately available for comment.

By banning discussion of me (unless it’s to denounce me) Mark Zuckerberg is literally mimicking the tactics used against Samizdat dissidents during the Soviet dictatorship.

The Communist Chinese-style social credit system is right around the corner.

A cashless society where your grocery purchase gets declined because some soy boy in Silicon Valley got offended by your tweets.

France has formulated draft legislation scheduled to hit Parliament's agenda in the coming months to compel platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter to remove hateful content within 24 hours or face heavy fines.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Friday for talks amid increasing pressure on the social media giant to honour pledges to tackle hate speech and misinformation online.

The visit comes against the backdrop of regulators worldwide urging social media platforms to shoulder more responsibility for what their users post.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) would like to follow in Barack Obama’s footsteps by winning the White House in 2020 and she seems to be taking a cue from the former president’s now infamous “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that” speech in 2012.

Like Obama, Warren believes it is not American ingenuity and hard work but the federal government that makes the people and the country great.

On April 23rd, the great independent investigative journalist, Craig Murray — a former British diplomat — headlined at his blog, “Condemned By Their Own Words”, and he posted there the translated-to-English transcript (excerpted below) to this Israeli radio Hebrew broadcast on April 21st, in which an Israeli Brigadier-General, named Fogel, explained why Israel’s troops are doing the right thing to shoot and even to kill Gazans who come (an unspecified) too close to the wall which separates Israel from Gaza:

Detroit police purchased surveillance technology that allows police to actively track people’s locations through their cell phones, according to documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

In October 2017, the Detroit Police Department (DPD) obtained a cell-site simulator, which is a type of surveillance technology that locates and tracks phones by mimicking cell phone towers. Also known as IMSI catchers and Stingrays (a specific model of cell-site simulator made by Harris Corporation), cell-site simulators are increasingly used by law enforcement to locate suspects in investigations across the country.

The technology was purchased for $622,000 from KeyW Corporation in 2016, but DPD did not take possession of the equipment until the fall of 2017.

DPD’s cell-site simulator was deployed at least 66 times between January 1, 2018, and October 31, 2018.

Facebook has recently banned a number of prominent right-wing figures as "dangerous individuals", with the recent restrictions applying on Instagram as well. Speaking to Sputnik, a cyber security analyst and former US congressional candidate shed light on what appears to be political bias on the part of the Silicon Valley giants.

On 3 May, US President Donald Trump directed criticism at tech giants in Silicon Valley for banning right-wing users and media pundits.

Twitter has suddenly suspended a slew of pro-Trump accounts including the ‘Magaphobia’ account, which was set up by conservative commentator Jack Posobiec to “track violence against Trump supporters.”

The @Magaphobia account had defined the word as “an irrational, unfounded fear of Donald Trump or his supporters” or bigotry towards those who voted for him.

Twitter suspended David Horowitz from the Freedom Center on Tuesday.
The purge continues.

We are witnessing the elimination of conservatism from the public square.

And Republicans do NOTHING!

There are many partisan responses to this question. Of course, internationally, the United States is regarded by many people to be the gold standard of what constitutes a democracy (perhaps because the U.S. was the first nation that was born out of a successful revolution against an existing dictatorship and that quickly produced a written Constitution, which endorses many democratic principles and which lasts proudly till the present day). However, that reputation is not a substantive answer to the question as to whether the United States is today a democracy. There are dictatorships that have democratic written constitutions. Furthermore, the way that a constitution is enforced or not enforced can determine whether or not the nation’s constitution is real or whether it’s instead more of a mere formality than a reality.

President Donald Trump seems to be making Americans hate the empire again, by embracing war – or maybe only pretending to do so – against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and who knows where else.

One thing to keep in mind about Trump is that his critics tend to instinctively oppose anything he is for, regardless of what they may have thought in the past.

Take this video, for example, comparing the eerily similar rhetoric behind George W. Bush’s push for war against Iraq and the Trump administration’s current drumbeat for war with Iran, featuring Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

The latest incident in the campaign to eliminate the First Amendment in America took place oddly enough on the pages of the New York Times, which, in its international edition, ran a cartoon by a Portuguese cartoonist showing a dog with the face of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a leash leading a caricature of Donald Trump wearing a yarmulke and a blind man’s glasses. The Netanyahu-dog had a tag on its collar featuring a Star of David.

When social media platforms simultaneously banned Alex Jones last summer, I wrote that the decision was merely a “warning shot against dissent.” The latest Facebook bans against more conservative figures proves that point.
Facebook, citing company policies on “hate organizations,” has now banned Infowars, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Louis Farrakhan, among others. If that was not bad enough, now even merely posting a link to Infowars content could get you in trouble, too.

When social media platforms simultaneously banned Alex Jones last summer, I wrote that the decision was merely a “warning shot against dissent.” The latest Facebook bans against more conservative figures proves that point.

Facebook, citing company policies on “hate organizations,” has now banned Infowars, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Louis Farrakhan, among others. If that was not bad enough, now even merely posting a link to Infowars content could get you in trouble, too.

When I criticized the earlier bans against Jones, I prefaced it by saying that I was not a fan, lest anyone assume my words were tantamount to an endorsement of his content or opinions. But there should be no need for such a semi-apologetic disclaimer. This is straight-up censorship and it should be condemned, regardless of anyone’s personal feelings toward the targets.

Why is Alex Jones permitted to have a telephone?

It’s a serious question.

Facebook on Thursday announced that a small assortment of kooks — Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, Paul Nehlen, Louis Farrakhan — will be permanently banned from Facebook, Instagram and other platforms it controls. Jones’ publication, Infowars, also will be banned. Praise of these figures, and expressions of support for them, also are to be prohibited.

Facebook is a private company and is under no legal obligation to provide accounts to figures whose views its executives find objectionable.

But how far do we want to extend that line of thinking?

The first rule of Facebook is don’t talk about anyone Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t like, or you’ll be banned by Facebook.

That isn’t a joke. It’s literally their new policy.

Mr. President, we need action.

Searches of personal phones and laptops at airports are rising, according to a legal motion filed by the ACLU and the Electronic Frontiers Foundation. Investigative journalist Ben Swann joins In Question to discuss with RT America’s Manila Chan.

An Israeli man, 58, became the first citizen to be killed in the Middle East hostilities since the 2014 war.

Seven Palestinians, including a pregnant mother and her baby daughter, were also reportedly killed.

Israeli PM Netanyahu said Hamas is paying a 'heavy price' and has ordered ground troops up to Gaza's border.

Three Israelis, including an 80-year-old woman, were also wounded by rocket fire in the weekend of combat.

SOURCE: KURT NIMMO
While doing research for a Newsbud video, I came across the Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) website. This is one of a growing number of “fact checking” websites designed to discredit news websites not following official narratives closely enough.

Here’s what the site has to say about Newsbud and my participation:

Newsbud (NB) is a right wing, conspiracy and anti-government site founded by, among others, Kurt Nimmo, the former lead editor and writer for Infowars. What sets NB apart from other sites of this type is that the stories are, for the most part, well written and contain numerous sources. The bias of the writing is also more subtle than sites such as Infowars, but just as prevalent. Both as an overtone to all the stories as well as the sometimes questionable sources and / or the conclusions drawn from the source material. Additionally, many of their sources are other NB stories, or work the author and editors have done elsewhere.

Avner Cohen and Bill Burr are two of the best historians on the secret Israeli nuclear program of the 1960s, which made Israel the Middle East’s first nuclear power.

Seal of Mossad – Israeli Foreign Intelligence
It almost didn’t happen. In a brief for the non-profit National Security Archives and an article for Haaretz.com,Cohen and Burr explain that the program was almost shut down. President John F. Kennedy confronted Israeli leaders in the summer of 1963 demanding stringent inspections.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1963, the leaders of the United States and Israel – President John F. Kennedy and Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol – were engaged in a high-stakes battle of wills over Israel’s nuclear program.

SOURCE: ZERO HEDGE
Analysts have studied a report from North Korea's Korean Central News Agency, which was accompanied by a few images, and determined that the "projectile" fired by North Korea Saturday morning, was, in fact, a short-range ballistic missile.

In addition to images released by KCNA, independent analysts managed to capture images of the launch.

Our friends at @planetlabs got a shot of a North Korean short-range ballistic missile just after launch at 10:54 am local time. @DaveSchmerler found it. pic.twitter.com/aIZ0Dcc1u1

— Jeffrey Lewis (@ArmsControlWonk) May 5, 2019
Lucky shot! Captured by @planetlabs Planetscope satellite at 0154 UTC (1054 local) on Saturday as it overflew Wonsan, North Korea. pic.twitter.com/g5QgVI8hJf

— Martyn Williams (@martyn_williams) May 5, 2019

On May 4, 1970, at Ohio's Kent State University, four American citizens were murdered by their own government. A line of 29 men of the Ohio National Guard marched up before a group of unarmed protesters and opened fire, killing four and wounding nine others. It's an episode now burned into history as the Kent State Massacre.

The students were calling for peace. They were protesters demonstrating against the Vietnam War and against America’s intention to move into Cambodia. Too many soldiers had died — the protesters thought — many of them students whose names had come up in the draft lottery. The students wanted the killings to stop.

We do not remove lies or content that is inaccurate," wrote Joel Kaplan, Facebook's vice president of global public policy.

(JTA) — Facebook will still allow users to deny the Holocaust even though it removed prominent bigots and anti-Semites from its platform.

The social media giant deleted the personal, professional and fan accounts of some leading extremists and conspiracy theorists, like David Duke, Louis Farrakhan and Alex Jones, on Thursday. But in a letter from April 9, Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy, said the site would still allow users to “say things on Facebook that are wrong or inaccurate, even when they are offensive.”

George Orwell would have been in stitches Wednesday watching Attorney General William Barr and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee spar on Russia-gate. The hearing had the hallmarks of the intentionally or naively blind leading the blind with political shamelessness.

From time to time the discussion turned to the absence of a legal “predicate” to investigate President Donald Trump for colluding with Russia. That is, of course, important; and we can expect to hear a lot more about that in coming months.

More important: what remains unacknowledged is the absence of an evidence-based major premise that should have been in place to anchor the rhetoric and accusations about Russia-gate over the past three years. With a lack of evidence sufficient to support a major premise, any syllogism falls of its own weight.

George Orwell would have been in stitches Wednesday watching Attorney General William Barr and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee spar on Russia-gate. The hearing had the hallmarks of the intentionally or naively blind leading the blind with political shamelessness.

From time to time the discussion turned to the absence of a legal “predicate” to investigate President Donald Trump for colluding with Russia. That is, of course, important; and we can expect to hear a lot more about that in coming months.

More important: what remains unacknowledged is the absence of an evidence-based major premise that should have been in place to anchor the rhetoric and accusations about Russia-gate over the past three years. With a lack of evidence sufficient to support a major premise, any syllogism falls of its own weight.

One day after the Pentagon issued a new report dramatically hyping China as a grave threat to the United States, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is said to be planning a major anti-China speech during his visit to Finland on Monday.

Monday’s speech is expected to be a major US policy speech on the Arctic, and territorial claims therein. Pompeo is expected to spin China as threatening the entire Arctic, and will reject Chinese claims to be a “near-Arctic state” because of its interest in using the area as a shipping route.

The focus of Pompeo’s attack on China, however, is likely to be totally distinct from the Arctic, and just a continuation of the flurry of vague allegations that the Pentagon started with in its own report, part of a broader US policy to portray China as a major enemy and threat to American dominance worldwide.

Having cancelled his Europe trip because of ongoing planning on Venezuela, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan held closed-door meetings at the Pentagon on Friday with John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Exact details of the meeting are not being made public, and the State Department didn’t even list the meeting as having taken place. Administration officials, however, said the focus was on discussing various military options for a US invasion of Venezuela.

Perennial hawk John Bolton seems to be salivating at the possibility of the US invading the major South American country, while Pompeo has been telling the press at every opportunity that if the US decides an attack is required “that’s what the United States will do.”

Shanahan continues to brag about the good intelligence the US has on the situation in Venezuela, a claim which must be questioned after this week’s failed coup.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.

"Impeachment is too good for him,” Nancy Pelosi declared of the president on Thursday after “his lapdog” - as she styled Attorney General William Barr - refused to be whipped by grandstanding Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. What did Madam Speaker have in mind then? Dragging Mr. Trump behind a Chevy Tahoe over four miles of broken light bulbs? Staking him onto a nest of fire ants? How about a beheading at the capable hands of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)?

Mr. Barr’s stolid demeanor during the Wednesday session was a refreshing reminder of what it means to be not insane in the long-running lunatic degeneration of national politics.

Human Rights Watch got their hands on an app used by Chinese authorities in the western Xinjiang region to surveil, track and categorize the entire local population - particularly the 13 million or so Turkic Muslims subject to heightened scrutiny, of which around one million are thought to live in cultural 'reeducation' camps.

By "reverse engineering" the code in the "Integrated Joint Operations Platform" (IJOP) app, HRW was able to identify the exact criteria authorities rely on to 'maintain social order.' Of note, IJOP is "central to a larger ecosystem of social monitoring and control in the region," and similar to systems being deployed throughout the entire country.

The platform targets 36 types of people for data collection, from those who have "collected money or materials for mosques with enthusiasm," to people who stop using smartphones.

It looks like President Trump was right yet again when he put Joe Biden on blast for being "very naive" about China after the 2020 Democratic frontrunner said the world's second-largest economy "is not competition for us."

"If Biden actually said that, that’s a very dumb statement," Trump said in a Thursday interview with Fox News.

Considering the brewing tit-for-tat antagonisms between the American Navy and People's Liberation Army-Navy in the Strait of Taiwan and the South China Sea, it's hard to believe that any American politician - much less one vying to be the commander-in-chief of the American military - would write China off so easily.

A former DNC operative steeped in Trump-Russia research approached the Ukrainian government looking for 'dirt' on then-candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 US election, according to The Hill's John Solomon - citing written answers to questions submitted to Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office.

Chaly confirmed that DNC contractor of Ukrainian heritage, Alexandra Chalupa, approached Ukraine seeking information on Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's dealings inside the country, in the hopes of exposing them to Congress.

Chaly says that, at the time of the contacts in 2016, the embassy knew Chalupa primarily as a Ukrainian-American activist and learned only later of her ties to the DNC. He says the embassy considered her requests an inappropriate solicitation of interference in the U.S. election.

Authored by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner via Wirepoints.org,

Many of Chicagoland’s elite know exactly how to pass the property-tax buck onto other residents. For decades they’ve used their powerful connections to cut their own property tax bills and push the costs onto other unsuspecting residents. And that’s left many lower-income homeowners footing ever-larger tax bills.

The latest, most blatant example is Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s removal of toilets from one of his two Chicago mansions. Pritzker ripped out the toilets and convinced then-Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios the home was “uninhabitable.”

That move tanked the assessed value of the home and reduced Pritzker’s property tax bill by nearly $100,000. His tax savings became tax hikes for other homeowners.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

The healthcare system in the United States is deeply broken, and it is causing massive financial pain for millions of American families.

And now a brand new study that was conducted by researchers from the American Cancer Society has discovered that 137.1 million Americans suffered “medical financial hardship in the past year”. The following comes directly from the study…

Authored by Sharyl Attkisson via The Epoch Times,

The day that I told CBS News I wished to leave my job as investigative correspondent ahead of my contract, I didn’t give a reason. I didn’t see the point because the problem wasn’t fixable.

Nor was it isolated to CBS News.

My own take is that - as our industry has changed in ways that have become undeniable to most - I was a bit of the canary in the coal mine. By that, I mean I believe I was among the first to really pay attention to the increasingly effective operations to shape and censor news—the movements to establish narratives rather than follow facts—and to see the growing influence of smear operations, political interests, and corporate interests on the news.

A new Pentagon report released late this week has voiced deep concern over increased Chinese military presence in the Arctic region, including nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, which Beijing plans to produce at least five more of by 2020.

The Pentagon assessment explores and analyzes China's potential to erect a “Polar Silk Road” as an extension of President Xi Jinping’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. This would include likely deployment of security assets, such as submarines acting as nuclear deterrents and military bases in far-flung locations, found the report.

Beijing itself hasn't been secretive about this scenario, given it published an Arctic policy white paper last June, which outlined long term strategic expansion into the globe's northernmost climes, despite China's geography as a non-Arctic state.

Some of the highlights of the Pentagon report are as follows...

* * *

Military expansion under the guise of civilian research

Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

Cyber Wars And All That...

Behind the Huawei story, we must not forget there is a wider financial war being waged by America against China and Russia.

Stories about China’s banks being short of dollars are incorrect: the shortage is of inward capital flows to support the US Government’s budget deficit. By attracting those global portfolio flows instead, China’s Belt and Road Initiative threatens US Government finances, so the financial war and associated disinformation can be expected to escalate. Hong Kong is likely to be in the firing line, due to its role in providing China with access to international finance.

Authored by Jennie Taer via SaraCarter.com,

At their talks in Budapest on Thursday, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini agreed on the importance of strong nation states, on the need to give priority in Europe to European culture based on Christian values, and on border defence.

At a joint press conference held with Mr. Salvini – who is also head of the Italian government party Lega – Mr. Orbán said they both believe the following:

that there will be no strong Europe without strong and successful nation states;

that on the continent priority must be given to European culture based on Christian values;

and that “Europe’s borders must be defended against the migrant invasion”.

Authored by The Saker,

The Empire has suffered painful defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, but one has to admit that these are “tough” countries to crack. The Empire also appears to have lost control of Libya, but that is another complex country which is very hard to control. We also saw all the pathetic huffing and puffing with the DPRK. But, let’s be honest, the USA never stood a chance to bully the DPRK into submission, nevermind invading or regime-changing it. Syria was much weaker, but here Russia, Iran and Hezbollah did a world class job of repelling all the AngloZionist attacks, political and military. Besides, I for one will never blame Trump for not listening to Bolton and not triggering WWIII over Syria (yet?)

But Venezuela?!

Blocking payments to individuals or groups by financial service firms impedes freedom of speech in a free society, journalist Ben Swann has told RT, following reports that MasterCard is allegedly on course to censor the far-right.

The New York-based firm is reportedly being forced by left-leaning liberal activists to set up an internal “human rights committee” that would monitor payments to “white supremacist groups and anti-Islam activists.”

“The problem is that everyone has their own views and, in a free society, the idea of a free society is that you are free to have your belief systems, as long as you’re not harming anyone else physically,” Swann told RT America. “But your belief system belongs to you and you have the right be wrong. White supremacists have the right to be wrong.”