Chhabria has a pretty stellar background. Born and raised in California, he obtained his law degree in 1998 from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, graduating with honors. He served as law clerk for two federal judges and for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and worked as an associate for two law firms before joining the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office where he worked from 2005 to 2013. He was nominated by President Obama for the seat he holds now in the summer of 2013.

But interestingly, one of those law firms where Chhabria worked has raised eyebrows. Covington & Burling, LLP, is a well-known defender of a variety of corporate interests, including Monsanto Co. Covington was reportedly instrumental in helping Monsanto defend itself against dairy industry concerns over the company’s synthetic bovine growth hormone supplement, known as rBGH (for recombinant bovine growth hormone) or the brand name Posilac.

Weiner & Abedin Have Flipped! This will be the death knell for any future candidacy for Hillary Clinton! It also may bring down some very high officials. Huma was Hilary’s right hand person, and maybe (rumored) her lover. Anthony’s laptop had thousands of State Department emails he should never have had, plus lots of dirty sex stuff.

On July 17, the House Foreign Affairs Committee will begin to mark up a number of measures including a resolution that condemns the Global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS Movement). Despite concerns about the bill being constitutional, it’s currently supported by 70% of the Democratic Caucus.

As we reported, the young Jews of IfNotNow are doing what many activists have long called for: they are making Palestine an issue in the Democratic race by posting videos of young people asking candidates if they would bring pressure on Israel to end the occupation. The group has gotten evasive answers from Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke; a No from Cory Booker; a Yes from Pete Buttigieg; and nervous affirmation from Elizabeth Warren.

The big surprise of the IfNotNow campaign is how much rage it is provoking from the Israel lobby, which has long had a place inside the Democratic Party.

The group Democratic Majority for Israel has issued a “WARNING” to Democratic candidates that a “strongly anti-Israel organization” is having young people “run up to” candidates and ambush them with an occupation question, before “trumpet”-ing the politicians’ answer on-line. (Ah, democracy.)

It’s happening, but slowly. Surveying the special issue of the Palestine-Israel Journal devoted to the threat that the hallowed two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be in jeopardy – or, as the issue’s title has it, “at a dangerous crossroads” – one gets the feeling of half-hearted, almost desperate assertions that the two-state solution is the only plausible one.

President Trump’s racist comments regarding Congresswomen of color Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, saying that they should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”, are the news the world over.

They are so virulently racist, that the House passed a resolution yesterday condemning him. The Democrats were unanimous in the condemnation, and only four Republicans joined them.

Trump is not backing down – quite the contrary. He suggested that the condemnation is a conspiracy, tweeting:

Throughout history, students have been at the forefront of important movements advocating for fundamental changes in society.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the anti-apartheid movement gained traction on university campuses in the UK and the US, with various demonstrations taking place and calls to divest from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. At the University of California, Berkeley, students were successful in campaigning for divestment, and in 1986 the university voted to withdraw $3.1 billion worth of investments in the apartheid state.

An American-Israeli businessman has been granted permission to export oil extracted from Kurdish areas under the control of Syria’s pro-Washington Democratic Forces. Arab news sources have cited Moti Kahana as the person charged with facilitating the sale of crude oil produced in oil fields controlled by the Kurds in eastern Syria to Israel.

Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, which published the story said its claim was based on leaked documents. Kahana however has swiftly came out to reject the story but admitted to Israel Hayom that he has in fact tried to end Syrian oil sales to Iran. On his Facebook page, Kahana wrote that he opposes the Iranian presence in Syria, which he says belongs to the Syrian people.

US President Donald Trump’s racist attacks on Democratic members of Congress, which included allegations about their views on Israel, is a dangerous development for Israel, reported analysts.

“Trump’s use of Israel in his Monday morning attack will cause the country more damage than good”, declared Yaakov Katz, Editor-in-Chief of The Jerusalem Post.

It “will further undermine what Israel has long prided itself on having accomplished: keeping Israel an issue that receives bipartisan support in the halls of Congress”, Katz continued.

The British public were subjected to an hour of anti-Palestine propaganda by the BBC last week when it aired a Panorama programme on the “anti-Semitism” row within the Labour Party. The public service broadcaster appeared to be doing very little public service when it unleased what was, by any reasonable assessment, a media broadside taken straight from the disinformation rule book.

Received by the mainstream media as though it were the final say on the anti-Semitism row that has rocked the Labour Party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015, the public have been duped into submitting to the dominant narrative. The political party that was born out of a desire to fight inequality and headed now by a leader whose record of fighting for social justice and equality is second to none is, we are led to believe, institutionally anti-Semitic.

The Justice Department charged 22 alleged members of MS-13 in connection with seven murders in the Los Angeles area, including one in which a rival gang member was dismembered with a machete.

The indictment, which was unsealed Monday, focused on members of a Los Angeles-area subset of MS-13 known as the Fulton clique. Prosecutors called the San Fernando Valley-based gang a “particularly violent subset” of MS-13 that “has recently seen an influx of young immigrants from Central America.”

A church sign in Virginia is drawing both support and criticism on social media and beyond.

Those who travel down a stretch of Red House Road in Appomattox, Virginia drive right past this Friendship Baptist Church sign that reads, "America: Love it or Leave It."

Pastor E. W. Lucas and his wife shared how he has put up signs since he started Friendship Baptist Church in 1979.

"I thought I was going to make some remarks regarding the situation in Washington," said Pastor Lucas. "It just came to me... America, I love it. If you don't love it, leave it.'"

But not everyone loves the being told to "leave" part. Hundreds of people have expressed their support and opposition to it on social media, pointing to decisions made under President Donald Trump's administration.

We live in a time of very unpleasant realities. Truth has become such a valuable commodity that the government of the United States and the media have started (to put it politely) economizing it. Documented cases of media deception over the years have made it clear that the media lies to the public on important issues. As Richard Salent, Former President of CBS News has stated, media's job is to feed the public what media thinks the public ought to know. Clearly, anything that happens that the media doesn't think the public needs to know about will simply not be reported.

On this date in 1996 TWA Flight 800 was shot down south of Long Island.

The government of the United States, despite the embarrassment of having been caught in court rigging lab tests and lying in its reports, still officially attributes the disaster to a spark in the center fuel tank, while government spokespeople insist that the witnesses who saw a missile hit the jumbo jet are all drunks.

“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.”— Justice William O. Douglas

In a move designed to shock Israeli settlers in the West Bank into action, activists from the right-wing settler organization “Regavim” hung Palestinian flags along the main West Bank settler roads last week.

Regavim claims that there is a Palestinian take over of Area C and that the Israeli government is not doing enough to fight it. The organization’s PR stunt, shown in the video below, was in their own words “an in-your-face challenge to the ????? (Knesset) to enforce the law and halt the de facto creation of a terrorist state in the heart of Israel.”

Five years ago, Matteo Salvini stripped and posed half-naked for a series of “sexy” photos that were auctioned on eBay. At the time, he was a senior official of Italy’s separatist Lega Nord party. His bizarre photoshoot took place on the sidelines of a National Front conference in France. Beneficiaries of the auction included part of an Italian anti-abortion network that claims to be “inspired” by the “heritage of Christian culture” and responds to a “conspiracy against life.”

Today, Salvini’s party has transformed itself into one of the most prominent nationalist movements in Europe (now known only as Lega). Salvini himself has become Italy’s interior minister and the country’s most recognizable politician, emboldened by stunning results in the recent European Parliament elections, in which his party won a third of Italian votes (about five times more than the 6 percent it received in 2014).

Overall, President Donald Trump has disappointed patriots but he’s still set in motion a Republican transformation that can’t be stopped. The top concerns for GOP voters now: building the wall and limiting legal and illegal immigration. Serious Republican candidates for office now have to talk about immigration to maintain grassroots credibility—or else, like Justin Amash, quit before they are fired

Rather than being a revolutionary candidate, President Trump may have just been a transitional one, between the old conservative Republicans of the past and the New National Conservatism (nothing to do with the neutered version now frantically pedaled by Yoram Hazony et al) of the future. New leaders are emerging to take up the MAGA mantle—and old leaders are adapting.

President Donald Trump’s playground taunt Sunday that “the Squad” of four new radical liberal House Democrats, all women of color, should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came,” dominated Monday morning’s headlines.

Yet those headlines smothered the deeper story.

The Democrats are today using language to describe their own leaders that is similar to the language of the 1960s radicals who denounced Democratic segregationist governors like Ross Barnett and George Wallace.

Consider what the four women have been saying.

After several years of avoiding the subject — on Tuesday the Minneapolis Star-Tribune published a report on Ilhan Omar, her tax fraud crimes, her illegal use of campaign funds to cover travel costs and touched on her alleged marriage to her younger brother.

Investigative Journalist David Steinberg who has been covering the incredible story for years commented on the report today. Much of the information has already been reported… by David.

First they came for Betsy Ross and the flag she designed.

Now they come for the “Don’t Tread on Me” Flag as yet another reminder of white America’s irredeemable past that must be erased.

Enter Chris Pratt, one of the most bankable gentile white male action stars in Hollywood. He’s been attacked for saying “blue collar” American stories aren’t depicted in Hollywood films, and now he’s being attacked as a racist for wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” Flag shirt.

As Theresa May prepares to vacate Downing Street, Britain has never appeared so broken, fragmented and rudderless.

In London, long held up as one of the world’s major capital cities – a beacon of multiculturalism, dynamism, enterprise and opportunity – death stalks the streets and alleys of its vast sprawling housing estates. Gang warfare has grown to the point where the lives of its combatants, in the main teenage boys and youths, have been reduced to the deadly scenario of kill or be killed. Meanwhile, the conclusion that the Metropolitan Police has lost control of the streets is now impossible to avoid.

Georgetown University law professor Jonathan Turley notes that the University of California, once a bastion of free speech, now is opposed to it. The university now punishes people for opinions expressed outside the classroom and the university.

Not that long ago American universities emphasized tolerance of all views so that truth would not be obscured by dogmas. Little doubt this emphasis traced its heritage back to the Church’s interference in the scientific question whether the earth was the center of the solar system. In order to save their lives, astronomers were forced to renounce their findings and to assert the truth of dogmas that they knew to be wrong.

Today the same thing is happening in American universities, only the deadly controversies are over race and gender issues, not whether the sun revolves around the earth.

Speaking during a cabinet meeting, President Trump once again reiterated that the US is not in any way seeking regime change in Iran, but rather that his entire goal is “they can’t have a nuclear weapon.“

Trump further claimed a lot of progress, as well he might, since Iran wasn’t seeking a nuclear weapon int he first place, and has repeatedly said as much in recent days. If indeed that’s the only US goal, it effectively has already been achieved.

Of course, US officials are still pushing the need for talks with Iran, and Acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper urged the US to get “back on the diplomatic channel” with Iran. That’s a recurring refrain from officials, even if it’s not clear what they’ll accept from Iran after the repeated assurances not to get a nuclear weapon didn’t placate US hawks.

The New York Times videotaped 21 presidential candidates’ responses to the question: “Do you think Israel meets international standards of human rights?”

Here is a short montage of the candidates’ statements.

Palestinians lose about 60 million hours of work per year, due to check points and restrictions imposed, by the Israeli occupation, on Palestinian movement between the towns and villages of the West Bank, the Applied Research Institute (ARIJ) reported Monday, according to Al Ray.

ARIJ estimated the loss at about $ 270 million per year, according to the wage of workers per hour, in addition to extra fuel consumption at about 80 million liters per year, estimated at $ 135 million.

The consumption of the vehicle, which runs at a very low speed for long periods (1 – 10 km / h), according to certain calibrations, is about 0.049 liters / minute and 0.035 liters / minute for diesel engines and gasoline, according to the Institute.

The consumption of this amount of fuel leads to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions, by about 196 thousand tons per year.

The history of Zionism begins with contacts to the most violent ideologies, the most racist regimes and dictatorships and continues to this day as a thread through history. Rarely is it pointed out that Zionism is the official colonial settler colonial ideology of the “Jewish state”, which by definition is a thoroughly anti-Semitic ideology. Just the terms Israel as the “Jewish state” of the “Jewish people” or the audacity to speak out of this definition for all Jews worldwide. Not to mention the Zionist claim to call the illegal settlement policy and colonization of the state “Jewish value”. These “values” have always been based on the cooperation and support of fascist, right-wing and anti-Semitic, racist regimes and persons.

It keeps getting worse. The neocons have burrowed termite-deep inside the Trump administration and rumor has it the president will add yet another one to an important cabinet position.

If there is any substance to the latest rumors, DNI Dan Coats will be replaced by Fred Fleitz, former NSC executive secretary, CIA analyst, Trump Chief of Staff, Bolton enforcer, and CEO of the Center for Security Policy.

This last one should send up a huge red flag. CSP is a project launched by Frank Gaffney Jr., an Islamophobe way out on the neocon fringe. During the Trump presidential campaign, I wrote a short ebook (Donald Trump and the War on Islam) about Gaffney, among other neocons and rabid Israel-firsters exacting a corrosive influence on the Trump campaign.

Members of the FBI and Justice Department’s top brass at their Washington D.C.headquarters and other field offices are now using burner phones to stay under the radar of federal investigators and lawmakers, according to FBI insiders.

The shocking revelations come on the heels of news that the FBI deleted thousands of text messages between anti-Trump FBI agents before investigators could review their content.

While that is disturbing on one level, FBI and DOJ hierarchy employing the telecom habits of drug cartel bosses reaches a new low for the once-heralded federal law enforcement agency and the DOJ. And breaks federal laws as well.

One of the goofier members of Congress, Representative Al Green, just introduced Articles of Impeachment against President Donald Trump, hoping to force a floor vote later in the week.

This should make of of the crazier members of Congress and the media practically giddy with excitement.

You can expect to hear very soon from the likes of Maxine Waters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashid Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar.

Air University’s Officer Training School in Alabama is bracing for the largest influx of officer trainees in its history.

Class 19-07, comprising 800 officer trainees, is more than twice as large as the previous record-holding class at Officer Training School and has been nicknamed the “Godzilla” class by the folks down at Maxwell Air Force Base.

Last March, 340 officer trainees attended OTC, which was then the biggest class ever.

According to a recent news release from the Air Force, the colossal class size is needed to meet the Air Force’s demand for new officers.

Spanish newspaper EL PAÍS reported on July 9 that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was spied on by a Spanish private defense and security firm called Undercover Global S.L., when he lived in the Ecuador embassy in the United Kingdom.

The report was based on “documents, video, and audio material” that was “used in an extortion attempt against Assange by several individuals.” In May, Spanish police arrested journalist José Martín Santos, who had a record of fraud, and a computer programmer for their alleged involvement in an “attempt to make €3 million from the sale of private material.”

by Ray McGovern Posted on July 17, 2019

Friday’s surprising report that Robert Mueller had successfully sought an extra week to prepare for his House testimony on Russiagate (now set for July 24) must have come as scary news to those of his fans who can put two and two together. Over the past few weeks, it has become clearer that each of the two frayed findings of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has now come apart at the seams.

How to Avoid Eating Crow

As the truth seeps out, there will be plenty of crow to go around. To avoid eating it, the Democrats on the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, the stenographers who pass for journalists at the Times and Post, and the “Mueller team” will need all the time they can muster to come up with imaginative responses to two recent bombshell revelations from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

As the nominee for Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper is set to inherit just a whole slew of US wars around the world. His long hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee, however, didn’t spend a lot of time talking about wars.

Or indeed any time. Esper was faced with questions about his history as a lobbyist for a major arms maker, and how that was going to fit in to his potential new job. He was asked exactly zero questions about ongoing wars.

Esper assured Senators that he sees “the big picture,” and his focus was heavily on the need for the Senate to spend vastly more on weaponry for the US military, which would be his job as Defense Secretary, and largely just a scaled up version of his lobbying past.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has claimed that Iran has signaled a willingness to negotiate on the matter of ballistic missiles. Other US officials aren’t so sure, and Iranian officials are also telling conflicting stories on the matter.

“Iran’s missiles are absolutely and under no condition negotiable with anyone or any country,” insisted Alireza Miryousefi, the spokesman for Iran’s UN Mission. That is certainly the position Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has long taken.

Yet Pompeo’s belief that talks are possible didn’t come out of thin air. Rather, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif suggested in the US was willing to cut off arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Iran’s missiles might also be up for negotiation.

That’s probably a non-starter,with President Trump so obsessed with growing arms sales, but does point to a grand bargain potentially being on the table, if both sides want it. The problem is, neither side is being very clear if they want it or not.

New Delhi (Sputnik): India says it is working with Russia to overcome payment issues for its strategic imports from that country. Deputy National Security Advisor of India, Ambassador Pankaj Saran said both sides are working on rupee-rouble trade to overcome a crisis caused by US financial sanctions.

Addressing the Second India-Russia Strategic Economic Dialogue in New Delhi on Wednesday, Ambassador Saran said this would help overcome India’s adverse balance of trade with Russia.

“As part of the trading environment, there have been talks about trade in national currencies. This again is still a work in progress and we need to see how we can operationalise and move forward on this idea, because increasingly we see many countries in the world are taking recourse to trading in their own respective currencies", said Ambassador Saran.

ERIC ZUESSE, ORIGINALLY POSTED AT THE SAKER
The success of Turkey’s takeover of Syria’s most pro-jihadist province, Idlib, is making less and less likely that Syria will be able to continue maintaining Idlib as being a part of Syria. (This is something I had predicted, back on 14 September 2018, to be possible or even likely, and now it is actually happening.) On July 10th, Reuters headlined “Assad hits a wall in Syrian war as front lines harden”, and reported that, “More than two months of Russian-backed operations in and around Idlib province have yielded little or nothing for Assad’s side. It marks a rare case of a military campaign that has not gone his way since Russia intervened in 2015. While resisting government attacks, the insurgents have managed to carve out small advances of their own, drawing on ample stocks of guided anti-tank missiles that opposition and diplomatic sources say have been supplied by Turkey.” It continues:

Ehud Barak, who defeated Benjamin Netanyahu in a 1999 election to become Israel's prime minister, has been linked to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Less than three weeks after announcing that he will come out of political retirement to challenge Benjamin Netanyahu for prime minister in the upcoming Israeli elections, as YNet News reported, former prime minister Ehud Barak is facing allegations that he is financially tied to convicted sex offender and shadowy financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a sexual offense with a 14-year-old girl, and was arrested again on July 6 on new sex trafficking charges. Barak, a former lieutenant general in Israel’s army, served as Israel’s 10th prime minister from 1999 to 2001, after defeating Netanyahu, who was then serving his first term as Israeli PM.

Some in the news media have tried in recent days to rekindle their long-lost love affair with former MI6 agent Christopher Steele and his now infamous dossier.

But lest anyone be tempted to think Steele’s 2016 dossier is about to be mysteriously revived as credible, consider this: Over months of work, FBI agents painstakingly researched every claim Steele made about Trump’s possible collusion with Russia, and assembled their findings into a spreadsheet-like document.

The over-under isn’t flattering to Steele.

Multiple sources familiar with the FBI spreadsheet tell me the vast majority of Steele’s claims were deemed to be wrong, or could not be corroborated even with the most awesome tools available to the U.S. intelligence community. One source estimated the spreadsheet found upward of 90 percent of the dossier’s claims to be either wrong, nonverifiable or open-source intelligence found with a Google search.

In other words, it was mostly useless.

Donald Trump has said his administration will probe accusations that Google has been infiltrated after working with China’s military, days after billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel called for the tech giant to be investigated.

The US president tweeted on Tuesday that he would “take a look” at Thiel’s assertion that Google was in cahoots with Beijing and should face a federal investigation. During a speech on Sunday, the co-founder of PayPal urged the FBI and CIA to take action, suggesting that Google may be “thoroughly infiltrated” by Chinese intelligence. Thiel failed to provide evidence when pressed further about his incendiary claims, stressing that he was simply “raising questions” about Google’s relationship with Beijing.