Jul 16

Today’s News 16th July 2019

  • "Combat Ready" Missile Seized During Police Raid On Italian Neo-Nazis

    Years ago both Gaddafi and Assad famously warned that as their nation’s borders were being flooded with NATO-backed arms and insurgents, the weapons and terrorist flow would soon go the other way into Europe.  And now more confirmation of this dark prediction come true in spectacular fashion with this unusual intro from the BBC: “Anti-terrorism police in northern Italy have seized an air-to-air missile and other sophisticated weapons during raids on far-right extremist groups.”

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    An actual “combat ready” missile was seized near Forli airport in Italy, via Sky News.

    If it sounds too bizarre or surreal to be true, the photographs alone from the breaking report are even more shocking, which show a five-foot long monster of a rocket with a large military shipping container. 

    What’s more is the interesting likely origin of what’s being described as a “combat ready” missile: it’s from the gulf country of Qatar, which has for years been a major weapons source fueling wars across the Middle East, from Syria to Yemen to North Africa. 

    “During the operation, an air-to-air missile in perfect working order and used by the Qatari army was seized,” Italian police said in a statement.

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    Via the BBC/EPA: “The missile is reported to be in good condition for combat use.”

    The missile was uncovered among a large cache of smaller arms during a major Italian police operation to break-up dangerous far-right militant groups:

    Three people were arrested – two of them near Forli airport. Neo-Nazi propaganda was also seized, in raids in several cities.

    Italian media say the raids were part of an investigation into Italian far-right help for Russian-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine.

    …The Turin special police force, called Digos, led the operations, assisted by police in Milan, Varese, Forli and Novara.

    Those among the arrested were alleged to have been active in fighting which has raged since 2014 in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

    Despite the BBC falsely reporting that those among the arrested had been supporting pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine, the Italian police press release states the opposite. 

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    Media reports suggest the missile was bound for the front lines in war-torn eastern Ukraine, or it may have also been up for sale on the black market. 

    Italy’s national police published images on social media showing weapons captured in multiple raids in different cities. 

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    Smaller arms and Nazi paraphernalia were also recovered during the Italian special police raids on known far right militant groups, via Sky News.

    The recovered rocket was only identified by Italian authorities as an “air-to-air” missile, suggesting it would need to be mounted on an aircraft, but few other details over its type were given, other than its Qatari origin prior to reaching Italy. 

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    Analysts online were quick to identify it as a likely Matra Super 530, which is a French-manufactured short to medium-range air-to-air missile.

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    Reports suggest the two men arrested specifically in relation to the missile, which was found at an airport hangar, may have been attempting to sell it. 

    Media outlets identified some among the more notable and politically active suspects as Fabio Del Bergiolo, 50, an Italian ex-customs officer and far-right Forza Nuova party activist; Alessandro Monti, 42, a Swiss national; and 51-year old Italian Fabio Bernardi.

    As the Middle East and again increasingly the Libya war 2.0, as well as Mediterranean migrant departure points become increasingly destabilized, we expect to hear about more such stories of heavy weaponry supplied by gulf states making their way to Europe’s shores. 

  • Mainstream Media Hide Skripal's Connections To Russiagate-Trump Case

    Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    First of all, everyone should read this:  “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story”. It is important background for understanding what follows, because the following helps to explain what is displayed in that brilliant prior article.

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    News has slowly been getting out that the British Government’s account of the poisoning of the Skripals is a fabrication which had been done in order to escalate hostilities against Russia, and that when information from Democratic Party and Clinton campaign computers subsequently became either leaked or hacked to Wikileaks, the Democratic National Committee hired, in order to investigate that, British contractors who were also involved in the Skripal fraud, and Skripal himself might have been a crucial part of the Russiagate-Trump operation. Russiagate — the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian Government — resulted from this DNC-UK team. There was collusion, but it was between the US Government (then under Obama) and the UK Government (under Cameron and then May), directed against Trump, and not actually between candidate Trump and the Russian Government, directed against Clinton. The present report summarizes the gradual making-public of this actual history.

    Developing that case about the real collusion has been and is a remarkably slow process, because the evidence in the real case requires extensive expertise in order to understand and interpret correctly the relationships between the people who were involved in it. So: the following summary encapsulates those relationships; and, at all points, it will link directly to the reports by the courageous investigative journalists who have participated in making public parts of what is, effectively, a key component of the history of the US Obama Administration’s collusion with the UK Government in order to cripple — and having the aim to overthrow — Trump’s US Government, in the event that Trump would win the 2016 US Presidential contest, as he did. (Perhaps the main reason for this manufactured case against Trump was that Trump had publicly criticised NATO, and that doing this, by any US Presidential candidate who has a real chance of winning his or her Party’s nomination, is prohibited by the Deep State — the rulers of both Parties, and of both US and UK.)

    Throughout this peeling-off (thus far) of the layers of this onion that’s behind both the Skripal fraud and the Russiagate fraud, the case became progressively stronger that the US and UK Governments were actually colluding together, in order to prevent any possibility that the Cold War would end on the US-and-allied side, as it had decades earlier ended only on Russia’s side in 1991. All of this has been done so to keep in place the myththat when Russia ended the Cold War on its side in 1991, the US and its allies likewise ended it on their side, instead of secretly proceeded forward on their side of the Cold War (as they have done), their ultimate aim being to gradually isolate and then take control of Russia’s Government, and thereby emerge with incontestable control over the entire planet, the first and only globally all-encompassing empire, a dictatorial government of the entire world — any imperialistic regime’s dream — an unchallengeable rule over everyone. Both the Skripal set-up and the Russiagate-Trump scam (and the cover-ups of both) were parts of that broader international operation.

    *  *  *

    PEELING THE ONION

    Layer 1:

    On 8 May 2018, David Allan Miller of the University of Bath in England headlined at Spinwatch, “Revealed: rebranded D-Notice committee issued two notices over Skripal affair”, and he posted, and then commented upon, a leaked email that the UK’s Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) office had distributed to all of UK’s major news-media, which started:

    From: DSMA Secretary <secretary@dsma.uk>

    Date: 7 March 2018

    Subject: URGENT FOR ALL EDITORS – DEFENCE AND SECURITY MEDIA ADVISORY (DSMA) NOTICE

    To: DSMA Secretary <secretary@dsma.uk>

    Private and Confidential: Not for Publication, Broadcast or for use on Social Media

    TO ALL EDITORS

    The issue surrounding the identity of a former MI6 informer, Sergei Skripal …

    You can see the full notice here. It instructs all of the major news-media to hide “the identifies [identities] of intelligence agency personnel associated with Sergei Skripal.” This, of course, would include the name of his MI6 handler, Skripal’s MI6 boss.

    David Miller then went on to summarize the evidence:

    On the evening of 6 March [2018] a Russian opposition news outlet Meduza, styling itself ‘Russia’s free press in exile’, published a long piece on Skripal in English. [Dr. Miller didn’t link to it, but it is dated “March 6, 2018” and opens “On March 4, a 66-year-old former colonel in Russia’s Military Intelligence Directorate was hospitalized in critical condition in Salisbury, England,” and that Meduza article can be seen here.] Citing a variety of online sources including in Russian, some from over a decade old, identifying Pablo Miller as the MI6 agent inside the Estonian embassy who had recruited Sergei Skripal. By the next afternoon, the notice [on 7 March] was issued to the mainstream media. The Telegraph was the first mainstream outlet to discuss – in discreet and decorous terminology – the connection between Skripal and a ‘security consultant’ who is ‘understood to have known him for some time’ and ‘is also based in Salisbury’. … The Telegraph reported that the ‘consultant’ worked at the same company (Orbis Business Intelligence) that compiled the controversial dossier on Donald Trump and Russia – paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Convention. The consultant was, as we now know, Pablo Miller, who had ‘known’ Skripal in the specific sense that he was his MI6 handler. Some, such as Guardian journalist Luke Harding, have suggested that Miller never worked for Orbis, but this seems to be false. …

    The notice helps to encourage the climate of anti-Russian hysteria implying that investigative reporting on this matter that might discuss British intelligence is in effect Russian propaganda. This is a nice illustration of David Leigh’s phrase from nearly 40 years ago: ‘the obverse of the secrecy coin is always propaganda’.

    It is a standing rebuke to the notion that journalism should question power, that 15 senior media people should agree to sit on this censorship committee. As well as the BBC, ITV, ITN and Murdoch’s Sky News, representing broadcasters, there are a variety of representatives from the broadsheet and tabloid press, regional and Scottish newspapers and magazines and publishing – including two News UK and Harper Collins, (both owned by Murdoch) as well as Trinity Mirror, the Daily Mail and the Guardian. On the government side of the committee are the chair from the MoD and four intelligence connected representatives from the MoD (Dominic Wilson, Director General Security Policy), Foreign Office (Lewis Neal, Director for National Security), Home Office (Graeme Biggar, unspecified post in the OSCT) and Cabinet Office (Paddy McGuinness, Deputy National Security Adviser for Security, Intelligence, and Resilience).

    The DSMA [Defence and Security Media Advisory] committee likes to cultivate the impression that it is a rather uninteresting committee that is, as a former vice chair of the committee (a journalist) put it, ‘is emphatically not censorship… but voluntary, responsible media restraint’. Then working at Sky News, that vice chair, Simon Bucks, is now CEO at the Services Sound and Vision Corporation, the broadcasting service which says it is ‘championing the Armed Forces’. Bucks also wrote [in the Guardian] that the DSMA committee is ‘the most mythologised and misunderstood institution in British media. … ‘Slapping a D-notice’ on something the establishment wanted suppressed has been the stuff of thrillers, spy stories and conspiracy theories for more than a century.”

    This is a typical deception used regularly by defenders of the British system of censorship.

    Layer 2:

    This comes from Ludwig De Braeckeleer: “Salisbury Incident — UK Media silenced by D-Notices Over Skripal Affair” Posted on May 10, 2018 [two days after David Miller’s article, and adding context to it]

    Quick Analysis

    In the aftermath of the Skripal incident, the UK government moved quickly to ‘protect’ the identity of Sergei Skripal as well as the identity of his former MI6 handler Pablo Miller who happens to live near Salisbury.

    On March 7, the first D-Notice was issued, but their names had already been revealed.

    At the same time, a few journalists planted false information regarding Pablo Miller and Orbis, the private Intel company that became famous because of the infamous dossier Chris Steele compiled on Trump’s Russiagate.

    On March 8, Gordon Corera tweeted that his sources were certain that no link exists between Skripal and Orbis or Chris Steele.

    On the same day, Luke Harding suggested that Miller never worked for Orbis, which is obviously untrue. Pablo Miller had listed his employment by Orbis Business Intelligence on his LinkedIn profile.

    So, this much is certain. The UK government has quickly moved to black out the identity of Pablo Miller and his connections to both Sergei Skripal and Orbis.

    In 2017, a D-Notice was already issued against British journalists revealing the identity of the Trump’s Dossier author (Chris Steele).

    Multiple British outlets ignored this advice and revealed his name anyway, including BBC News, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian.

    The use of a D-Notice is not a rare event. But it is not used very frequently either.

    I believe that a couple of such notices have been issued annually on average in the UK over the last ten years. And we KNOW that at least three of these notices were issued in connection with the Skripal and Orbis Affair(s?). Stay tuned!

    REFERENCES

    Revealed: rebranded D-Notice committee issued two notices over Skripal affair — SpinWatch

    The DSMA notices can be found here:

    DSMA notice 7 March 2018

    DSMA notice 14 March 2018

    Layer 3

    On 19 March 2018, the anonymous “Moon of Alabama” blogger headlined “No Patients Have Experienced Symptoms Of Nerve Agent Poisoning In Salisbury” and was perhaps the first person to put it all together:

    Is this third person the MI6 agent Pablo Miller who in 1995 recruited Skripal as British double agent. Miller who was also involved in handling the MI6 assets Boris Berezovski and Alexander Litvinenko. Pablo Miller who lives close to Sergej Skripal in Salisbury and is considered to be his friend? The same Pablo Miller who worked with former MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence which created the ‘dirty dossier’ about Donald Trump? How deep were the Skripals involved in making up the fake stories in the anti-Trump dossier for which the Clinton campaign paid more than $168,000. Did the Skripals threaten to talk about the issue? Is that why the incident [the poisoning] happened?

    Layer 4

    On 5 July 2019, Aaron Maté issued his enormous study, “CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims”, which points out that:

    There is also reason to question CrowdStrike’s impartiality. Its co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the preeminent Washington think tank [NATO’s PR agency, actually] that aggressively promotes a hawkish posture towards Russia. CrowdStrike executive Shawn Henry, who led the forensics team that ultimately blamed Russia for the DNC breach, previously served as assistant director at the FBI under Mueller.

    And CrowdStrike was hired to perform the analysis of the DNC servers by Perkins Coie – the law firm that also was responsible for contracting Fusion GPS, the Washington, D.C.-based opposition research firm that produced the now discredited Steele dossier alleging salacious misconduct by Trump in Russia and his susceptibility to blackmail.

    Layer 5

    On 31 August 2017, Scott Ritter issued his “DUMBSTRUCK: a HomeFront Intelligence Report on how America was conned about the DNC hack”, which described how

    the DNC prohibited the US Government from having access to the evidence, and instead went directly to the major ‘news’-media in order to (mis)inform the public what had happened:

    At first the DNC tried to get the FBI to make the attribution call, figuring that it would garner more attention coming from the US government. But when the FBI wanted full access to the DNC server so that it could conduct a full forensic investigation, the DNC balked. Instead, after meeting with Alperovitch and Henry, the DNC and CrowdStrike devised a strategy to take the case to the public themselves. Alperovitch prepared a formal technical report that singled out the Russians for attribution. When it was ready, the DNC invited in a reporter from the Washington Post named Ellen Nakashima, who was given exclusive access to senior DNC and CrowdStrike personnel for an above-the-fold, front-page article. … The Post article, published on the morning of June 14, 2016, went viral, with nearly every major media outlet.

    Layer 6

    On 11 June 2019, Matt Kennard posted a long string of tweets: https://twitter.com/DCKennard/status/1138493594728304640

    Matt Kennard [abbreviated here]

    @DCKennard

    Guardian’s deputy editor @paul__johnson joined state censorship D-Notice committee (run by MOD) after Snowden revelations in sop to British spooks. In board minutes, they thank him for being “instrumental in re-establishing links” between UK mil/intel and Guardian. Explains a lot

    10:09 AM – 11 Jun 2019

    Matt Kennard

    @DCKennard

    Who was @carolecadwalla’s “highly placed contact with links to US intelligence” who fed her clear disinformation? (Mueller report makes clear Podesta/DNC leaks transmitted digitally). Since Snowden, intel agencies have used Guardian/Obs to launder their disinformation operations.

    Matt Kennard

    @DCKennard

    Guardian dep ed @paul__johnson joins D-Notice comm for 1st meeting at MOD in 2014. Air Vice-Marshal Vallance reports relationship w/ Guardian has “continued to strengthen”. Alongside Air Commodore Adams and Brigadier Dodds he’s now in “regular dialogues” w/ “Guardian journalists”

    12 Jun 2019 …

    CONCLUSION

    So: not only was it “Pablo Miller as the MI6 agent inside the Estonian embassy who had recruited Sergei Skripal,” but “In the aftermath of the Skripal incident, the UK government moved quickly to ‘protect’ the identity of Sergei Skripal as well as the identity of his former MI6 handler Pablo Miller who happens to live near Salisbury.” MI6 was covering its tracks. And, “At the same time, a few journalists planted false information regarding Pablo Miller and Orbis, the private Intel company that became famous because of the infamous dossier Chris Steele compiled on Trump’s Russiagate.” And, “Pablo Miller had listed his employment by Orbis Business Intelligence.” And, “Orbis Business Intelligence … compiled the controversial [MI6 Christopher Steele] dossier on Donald Trump and Russia – paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Convention [Democratic National Committee]. The consultant was, as we now know, Pablo Miller, who had ‘known’ Skripal in the specific sense that he was his MI6 handler.” And, “CrowdStrike was hired to perform the analysis of the DNC servers by Perkins Coie – the law firm that also was responsible for contracting Fusion GPS, the Washington, D.C.-based opposition research firm that produced the now discredited Steele dossier alleging salacious misconduct by Trump in Russia and his susceptibility to blackmail.” And, “At first the DNC tried to get the FBI to make the attribution call, figuring that it would garner more attention coming from the US government. But when the FBI wanted full access to the DNC server so that it could conduct a full forensic investigation, the DNC balked. Instead, after meeting with Alperovitch and Henry, the DNC and CrowdStrike devised a strategy to take the case to the public themselves.” And, “Since Snowden, intel agencies have used Guardian/Obs to launder their disinformation operations.”

    Masterful. The Obama-Clinton DNC and MI6, and their hired private contractors, worked together to frame Russia for both the Skripal poisonings and the Trump victory.

    And yet, key questions remain unanswered: “How deep were the Skripals involved in making up the fake stories in the anti-Trump dossier for which the Clinton campaign paid more than $168,000. Did the Skripals threaten to talk about the issue? Is that why the incident [their poisoning] happened?” There is the possibility that the Skripals’ poisoning was an inside job, by a contractor, for the UK and/or US Governments.

    Not to mention other questions: Why are the Skripals still prohibited from speaking to the press and from answering questions in a court? After all, Boris Johnson, who is likely soon to be UK’s Prime Minister, lied, and repeatedly, in order to allege that UK’s Porton Down intelligence lab had identified Russia as the source of the poison: “Asked how the British government could be so sure Russia was behind the attack, Johnson deferred to ‘the people from Porton Down,’ who he said were ‘absolutely categorical.’” And here’s how corrupt he is.

    But the historical background of this entire matter — both Skripal and Trump-Russiagate — is obvious: MI6 is Britain’s equivalent to America’s CIA. That was Obama’s CIA. This was entirely a MI6-CIA disinformation campaign, which was an extension from Obama’s (and the UK Government’s) participation in US President G.H.W. Bush’s decision, on 24 February 1990, to continue the Cold War until Russia becomes swept up in, controlled by the USAnd Britain’s Guardian served the Deep State as the core conduit for disinformation to the public on this particular operation (Russiagate-Trump — Obama’s operation to make irreversible Obama’s public restoration (most obvious in Ukraine) of the Russia-is-America’s-top-enemy meme), for and on behalf of the Deep State, so as to continue G.H.W. Bush’s Cold War, inside the US — never to reverse it, until ‘victory’ is achieved.

    The “special relationship” between the US and UK (CIA and MI6) is obviously to assist each other in deceiving the other’s public. (Not only did MI6 participate in deceiving UK’s public to fear and despise Putin, but it was crucial in deceiving the US public that Trump was Putin’s stooge.)

    On 21 March 2016, the Washington Post had headlined “Trump questions need for NATO, outlines noninterventionist foreign policy” and reported:

    “I do think it’s a different world today, and I don’t think we should be nation-building anymore,” Trump said. “I think it’s proven not to work, and we have a different country than we did then. We have $19 trillion in debt. We’re sitting, probably, on a bubble. And it’s a bubble that if it breaks, it’s going to be very nasty. I just think we have to rebuild our country.”

    He added: “I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’re blown up. We build another one, we get blown up. We rebuild it three times and yet we can’t build a school in Brooklyn. We have no money for education because we can’t build in our own country. At what point do you say, ‘Hey, we have to take care of ourselves?’ So, I know the outer world exists and I’ll be very cognizant of that. But at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially the inner cities.”

    Five days later, the New York Times bannered “Transcript: Donald Trump Expounds on His Foreign Policy Views”and reported his saying, “NATO is obsolete” because it “was set up to talk about the Soviet Union. Now of course the Soviet Union doesn’t exist now.” How would the controlling owners of corporations such as Lockheed Martin — and extractive international US corporations such as ExxonMobil — feel about that? NATO has produced a significant portion of Lockheed’s sales, and of Exxon’s access to other nations’ natural resources. That sort of thing — enforcement and extension of empire — is NATO’s real purpose. And it didn’t end when the USSR’s communism, and Warsaw Pact, did in 1991.

    The Skripal poisonings had occurred earlier that same month, March 2016. And the DNC went to the very same UK operators that UK did in order to frame Russia for Skripal’s poisoning — but now to place that Russian frame around Trump’s face. All of this was part of the US empire’s decision, which had been made on 24 February 1990, to conquer Russia.

    In the timeline of events leading up to the DNC’s hiring of its investigators, we also have this, in 2016,

    29 April: The DNC discovers the penetration of its servers by unknown hackers. An emergency meeting is calledbetween Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (DNC Chief Executive), Amy Dacey (DNC Technology Director), Andrew Brown, and Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for Perkins Coie. Sussmann is a former federal prosecutor for the DOJ whose expertise is computer crime. …

    4 May: Five days after first discovering the server penetration at the DNC, Michael Sussmann – of Perkins Coie – finally calls CrowdStrike to arrange for analysis of the problem.

    In other words: Sussman wanted to privatize the ‘investigation’ instead of to hand to the FBI control over it, which would have given the FBI subpoena-power to require the DNC to provide to the FBI access to their computers — the actual evidence which was in their posession on their end of the case. Even the Special Counsel, Robwrt Miller, had no access to that crucial evidence.

    Furthermore, Aaron Maté’s painstakingly thorough analysis of the entire Mueller Report, on July 5th, showed “CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims”; and, so, even regarding the allegations that Mueller makes against Russia (not merely regarding whether Trump was colluding with Russia), Mueller’s Report was trash — extremely unreliable and untrustworthy. Mueller has a long history as being a Deep State agent.

    And through all of this has been the US and UK Governments’ imprisoning-without-trial Julian Assange — for many years including the part that was spent at the Ecuadorean Embassy — and never even negotiating with Assange for him to answer questions under oath such as “Did that information come to you physically via a thumb-drive or instead purely by electronic transmission?” “Did Craig Murray bring it to You?” They’d rather kill Assange or keep him incommunicado in prison for life, than to do that. Why? And Trump, himself, is part of this, no less than Obama was. Obviously, both Presidents serve the same Deep State (even though they serve different billionaires in it).

    This, at least, is a credible scenario. There is no evidence for the PR’d one, regarding either Skripal or Russiagate-Trump. There are accusations, but no case, for those.

    *  *  *

    NOTE: In the current hyper-partisan American political climate, when a vast majority of the supporters of each of the two Parties hates the opposite Party so much as to be closed-minded – blinded to the reality of their ownParty’s evilness, and to its incessant lying and cover-ups – I should make clear that there is nothing in this article that is, at all, supportive toward either Party. My personal view is that, ever since at least 1981, only Deep State controlled people have lived in the US White House and controlled Congress. As a group, they have perpetrated incalculable harm (such as this) to the entire world. Their only masters have been America’s billionaires. America certainly is a dictatorship, no democracy — it represents only its hundreds of billionaires and their millions of agents, no public at all. The two Parties represent the two factions into which America’s aristocracy have divided themselves. Neither represents the public. Each represents only a faction of America’s billionaires. A democracy cannot consist merely of contending factions of the aristocracy. That’s not a democracy. It’s like almost all other dictatorships throughout history. But the vast majority of Americans refuse even to consider this scientifically proven fact, that America is a dictatorship, not a democracy. For example: recently, a Democratic Party propaganda site, the Daily Beast, headlined “Mueller Missed the Crime: Trump’s Campaign Coordinated With Russia”, and the law-professor who wrote it ignored the much deeper criticisms that Maté’s article leveled against the Mueller Report. A prominent Democratic Party propaganda site continues, even now, “The Moscow Project” about “Trump’s collusion with Russia.” Closed-minded people are simply closed-minded — and that’s the vast majority. They’re open only to ‘information’ that confirms their prejudices. This widespread closed-mindedness is the Deep State’s biggest protector. The manufacture of consent is based upon it. Being open-minded doesn’t mean being gullible — a fool, manipulable. Being closed-minded does. Most people aren’t even aware of that basic epistemological-psychological fact. It’s the reason why both among Democrats and among Republicans, the vast majority still trust their Party, even after all of the blatant and consistent lying of the US Government at least since 9/11. Any Government with a track-record like this, warrants zero trust, and gets that from any intelligent citizen.

  • Ebola-Stricken Man Takes Bus To DRC Travel Hub With 2 Million Residents

    The Congolese health ministry announced that a pastor infected with Ebola took a bus to the city of Goma late Sunday, the first time the virus has spread to the major travel hub and home to more than two million people. 

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    The man, traveling from Butembo, was quickly identified and transported to an Ebola treatment center, while authorities say that they have tracked down the other 18 passengers aboard the bus and would vaccinate them on Monday, according to the Washington Post. 

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    “Because of the speed with which the patient was identified and isolated, and the identification of all the other bus passengers coming from Butembo, the risk of it spreading in the rest of the city of Goma is small,” the ministry said in a statement. 

    The official statement was echoed by WHO director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who said “Goma is a city of two million people, near the border with Rwanda, and is a gateway to the region and the world,” adding “We are confident in the measures we are put in place and hope that we will see no further transmission of Ebola in Goma.” 

    “Nevertheless, we cannot be too careful.” 

    The outbreak has killed 1,665 people as of Monday, while nearly 700 have survived the virus, which causes high fevers and internal bleeding. Days with dozens of new cases are common, despite a massive public health intervention across the affected area. 

    Health workers worry that some cases — if not whole transmission chains — are in places that are inaccessible because of poor infrastructure or insecurity, making the extent of the outbreak hard to fully measure.

    The area where the outbreak is taking place is also home to one of Congo’s most protracted and violent conflicts — a patchwork of ethnic militias, vigilantes and government-aligned forces.

    Fighting has at times targeted the Ebola response, hampering it and leading to spurts of new cases. Near the outbreak’s epicenter in the city of Beni on Monday, two health workers were killed by unknown assailants. Tedros Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, said there have been almost 200 attacks on health workers, killing seven, since January. –Washington Post

    As the Post points out, the virus is now present in two cities with populations exceeding one million people – Butembo being the other. The current outbreak is the second-worst on record, after the 2013-2016 epidemic which killed 11,300 in West Africa. 

  • A Sultan Shines In The Court Of The Dragon King

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,

    The graphic image of Turkey pivoting away from NATO towards the Russia-China strategic partnership was provided, in more ways than one, by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing right after the G20 in Osaka.

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    BEIJING, CHINA – JULY 02: President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (R) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (L) walk past the honor guards during an official welcoming ceremony at Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China on July 02, 2019. Volkan Furuncu / Anadolu Agency

    Turkey is a key hub in the emerging New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative. Erdogan is a master at selling Turkey as the ultimate East-West crossroads. He has also expressed much interest in joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), led by Russia-China, whose annual summit took place in Bishkek a few days before Osaka.

    In parallel, against hell and high water – from threats of sanctions by the US Congress to NATO warnings – Erdogan never budged from Ankara’s decision to buy Russian S-400 defense missile systems, a $2.5-billion contract according to Rostec’s Sergei Chemezov.

    The S-400s start to be shipped to Turkey as early as this week. According to Turkish Minister of Defense Hulusi Akar, their deployment should start by October. Much to Washington’s ire, Turkey is the first NATO member state to buy S-400s.

    Xi, as he welcomed Erdogan in Beijing, stressed the message he crafted together with Putin in their previous meetings in St Petersburg, Bishkek and Osaka: China and Turkey should “uphold a multilateral world order with the United Nations at its core, a system based on international law.”

    Erdogan, for his part, turned up the charm – from publishing an op-ed in the Global Times extolling a common vision of the future to laying it out in some detail. His target is to consolidate Chinese investment in multiple areas in Turkey, directly or indirectly related to Belt and Road.

    Addressing the extremely sensitive Uighur dossier head on, Erdogan deftly executed a pirouette. He eschewed accusations from his own Foreign Ministry that “torture and political brainwashing” were practiced in Uighur detention camps and would rather comment that Uighurs “live happily” in China. “It is a fact that the peoples of China’s Xinjiang region live happily in China’s development and prosperity. Turkey does not permit any person to incite disharmony in the Turkey-China relationship.”

    This is even more startling considering that Erdogan himself, in the past decade, had accused Beijing of genocide. And in a famous 2015 case, hundreds of Uighurs about to be deported from Thailand back to China ended up, after much fanfare, being resettled in Turkey.

    New geopolitical caravan

    Erdogan seems to have finally realized that the New Silk Roads are the 2.0 digital version of the Ancient Silk Roads whose caravans linked the Middle Kingdom, via trade, to multiple lands of Islam – from Indonesia to Turkey and from Iran to Pakistan.

    Before the 16th century, the main line of communication across Eurasia was not maritime, but the chain of steppes and deserts from Sahara to Mongolia, as Arnold Toynbee wonderfully observed. Walking the line we would find merchants, missionaries, travelers, scholars, all the way to Turko-Mongols from Central Asia migrating to the Middle East and the Mediterranean. They all formed the stuff of interconnection and cultural exchange between Europe and Asia – way beyond geographical discontinuity.

    Arguably Erdogan is now able to read the new tea leaves. The Russia-China strategic partnership – directly involved in linking Belt and Road with the Eurasia Economic Union and also the International North-South Transportation Corridor – considers Turkey and Iran as absolutely indispensable key hubs for the ongoing, multi-layered Eurasia integration process.

    A new Turkey-Iran-Qatar geopolitical and economic axis is slowly but surely evolving in Southwest Asia, ever more linked to Russia-China. The thrust is Eurasia integration, visible for instance via a frenzy of railroad building designed to link the New Silk Roads, and the Russia-Iran transportation corridor, to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea and, eastwards, the Iran-Pakistan corridor to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, one of Belt and Road’s highlights.

    This is all being supported by interlocking transportation cooperation agreements involving Turkey-Iran-Qatar and Iran-Iraq-Syria.

    The end result not only consolidates Iran as a key Belt and Road connectivity hub and China’s strategic partner, but also by contiguity Turkey – the bridge to Europe.

    As Xinjiang is the key hub in Western China connecting to multiple Belt and Road corridors, Erdogan had to find a middle ground – in the process minimizing, to a great extent, waves of disinformation and Western-peddled Sinophobia. Applying Xi Jinping thought, one would say Erdogan opted for privileging cultural understanding and people-to-people exchanges over an ideological battle.

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    The flags of China and Turkey flutter in Beijing during Erdogan’s visit to China on July 2. Photo: Wang Xin/ ImagineChina / AFP

    Ready to mediate

    In conjunction with his success at the court of the Dragon King, Erdogan now feels emboldened enough to offer his services as mediator between Tehran and the Trump administration – picking up on a suggestion he made to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the G20.

    Erdogan would not have made that offer if it had not been discussed previously with Russia and China – which, crucially, are member signatories of the Iran nuclear deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA).

    It’s easy to see how Russia and China should consider Turkey the perfect mediator: a neighbor of Iran, the proverbial bridge between East and West, and a NATO member. Turkey is certainly much more representative than the EU-3 (France, UK, Germany).

    Trump seems to want – or at least gives the impression of imposing – a JCPOA 2.0, without an Obama signature. The Russia-China partnership could easily call his bluff, after clearing it with Tehran, by offering a new negotiating table including Turkey. Even if the ineffective – in every sense – EU-3 remained, there would be real counterbalance in the form of Russia, China and Turkey.

    Out of all these important moves in the geopolitical chessboard, one motivation stands out among top players: Eurasian integration cannot significantly progress without challenging the Trumpian sanction obsession.

  • US Beekeepers Lost 40% Of Honeybee Colonies Last Year, UMD-Led Survey Finds

    Recent budget cuts by the Trump Administration slashed funding for the US Department of Agriculture’s annual Honey Bee Colonies report that has recently detailed a collapse in the bee population across the nation. Now researchers will be observing a new study, one that hasn’t been affected by spending cuts, shows beekeepers lost 40.7% of their bee colonies from April 2018 to April 2019.

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    The nationwide survey administered by the University of Maryland-led nonprofit Bee Informed Partnership warns of declining honey bee populations, could soon have an impact on food crops because these pollinating insects play a significant role in the pollination of plants.

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    Survey results reveal the annual loss of 40.7% honey bees, a marginal increase over the yearly average of 38.7%. The study noted that the winter losses were the highest since the survey began 13 years ago.

    “These results are very concerning, as high winter losses hit an industry already suffering from a decade of high winter losses,” said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, associate professor of entomology at the University of Maryland and president for the Bee Informed Partnership.

    The survey asked more than 4,700 beekeepers managing 320,000 colonies from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, represents about 12% of the nation’s estimated 2.69 million managed colonies.

    One of the most significant concerns respondents had about the winter colony losses is varroa mites, an external parasitic mite that attacks and feeds on the colony. “We are increasingly concerned about varroa mites and the viruses they spread, said vanEngelsdorp. “Last year, many beekeepers reported poor treatment efficacy, and limited field tests showed that products that once removed 90% of mites or more are now removing far fewer. Since these products are no longer working as well, the mite problem seems to be getting worse,” vanEngelsdorp said.

    “But mites are not the only problem,” continues vanEngelsdorp. “Land use changes have led to a lack of nutrition-rich pollen sources for bees, causing poor nutrition. Pesticide exposures, environmental factors, and beekeeping practices all play some role as well.”

    The ten-year trend of elevated losses have sent researchers scrambling to investigate what exactly is causing colonies to collapse, adds Geoffrey Williams, assistant professor of entomology at Auburn University and co-author of the survey. “We don’t seem to be making particularly great progress in reducing overall losses.”

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    State and federal agricultural agencies, university researchers, and the beekeeping industry have been working diligently to solve the bee crisis since they first discovered a dramatic loss in colonies about a decade ago.

    Along with defunding honey bee surveys, the Trump administration has also allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to expand the use of insecticides, once banned under the Obama administration.

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    The EPA reported last week that some of these toxic chemicals are “highly toxic” to honey bees, forcing the agency to require manufacturers of these chemicals to print new statements on the package that reads: 

    “This product is highly toxic to bees and other pollinating insects exposed to direct treatment or to residues in/on blooming crops or weeds. Protect pollinating insects by following label directions intended to minimize drift and reduce pesticide risk to these organisms.”

    While researchers aren’t exactly sure what is specifically collapsing bee colonies in large amounts, any more significant losses through the mid-2020s could transpire into widespread crop losses that could trigger food shortages across the US.

  • More Than A Precious Metal: How Platinum Improves Our World

    Authored by Nicholas LePan via VisualCapitalist.com,

    Within the hierarchy of precious metals, there is only one metal that could arguably stand above gold, and that is platinum.

    This is due in large part to the metal’s rarity throughout history. Its earliest known use was on the Casket of Thebes in Ancient Egypt. South American Indigenous populations also used platinum for jewelry.

    But platinum’s value goes beyond being a precious metal—its specific properties have made it indispensable to the modern economy, improving both the health and the wealth of the world.

    Platinum’s Industrial Applications

    Today’s infographic comes to us from the World Platinum Investment Council and outlines specifically how specific platinum’s properties are used in the modern economy.

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    There are four primary uses of platinum aside from investment demand.

    1. Manufacturing

    2. Healthcare

    3. Environmental

    4. Renewable Power

    Let’s look into all of these cases a little deeper.

    1. Manufacturing

    Platinum’s versatility in manufacturing has quadrupled its demand since 1980. Its catalytic properties are critical to the production of fertilizers, and more specifically, platinum’s efficiency in converting ammonia to nitric acid paved the way for large-scale fertilizer production.

    Around 90% of the nitrogen produced using platinum catalysts is used to make 190 million tonnes of fertilizers each year.

    2. Healthcare

    Platinum is a biologically compatible metal because it is both non-toxic and stable. It does not react negatively with or affect body tissues, which makes it an ideal material for medical tools. Platinum’s use in medicine dates back to 1874 for its use in arthroscopic tools. Its stability also makes it ideal for pacemakers and hearing assist devices today.

    While non-threatening to healthy cells, platinum compounds known as cisplatin can damage cancer cells and treat testicular, ovarian, lung, bladder, and other cancers. Given these crucial applications, the World Health Organization has put cisplatin on its List of Essential Medicines.

    3. Environmental

    Platinum is a critical material in the fight for cleaner air and in the construction of energy-efficient fiberglass. It is used in catalytic converters in exhaust systems of gas-powered vehicles, reducing the emission of harmful pollutants. In addition, platinum is used in the manufacturing process of high-end glass that improves the heating and cooling efficiency of homes and offices.

    4. Renewable Power

    Platinum’s catalytic properties make it critical to cleaning up air pollution, producing renewable hydrogen, and unleashing its power in fuel cells. Electrolysis, which can turn water into hydrogen and oxygen, works best when passing an electric current through platinum electrodes.

    Fuel cells are set to power a new generation of emission-free vehicles, and platinum membranes are used inside of them as well.

    More Than Precious

    More than a precious metal, platinum has many applications that make it a critical material for the modern economy in years to come.

  • CNN Recently Glorified ICE Facility Firebomb Attacker In Resurfaced Footage

    We highlighted previously how just months ago CNN ran a segment on the “Redneck Revolt” which promoted the Tacoma, Washington chapter of Antifa’s John Brown Gun Club, of which 69-year old Willem Van Spronsen was a member. The rifle-toting Van Spronsen attacked a Tacoma ICE detention facility with “incendiary devices” and was shot dead by police on Saturday morning as he tried to ignite a propane tank after first setting vehicles on fire.  

    Well, it gets worse: not only did CNN praise the John Brown Gun Club in its May 5th episode of “United Shades of America” with W. Kamau Bell, but the footage featured shots of Van Spronsen himself while commentary presented the group in a positive light. Even the promotional video for the CNN segment included a shot of the now confirmed domestic terrorist. CNN’s own commentary lionized the group as: 

    “white, liberal, progressive people, inclusive, friendly to the world.”

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    CNN has remained silent as controversy grows online, and as more people view the network’s past glowing segment following a Fox News report:

    A man appearing to be Van Spronsen can be seen four seconds into a promotional clip released by CNN for their segment.

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    Four seconds into the above official CNN promo video from May 2019, domestic terrorist Willem Van Spronsen is present while the commentator praises the group. 

    It has now been confirmed by multiple media organizations that not only was Van Spronsen part of the militant communist organization promoted by CNN, but was a regular at Antifa events and protests in the northwest, as also documented by Portland journalist Andy Ngo.

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    He had sent a written manifesto to friends ahead of the assault, saying “I am Antifa,” after which his colleagues are now reportedly calling him a “martyr”. 

    A Fox News report described the CNN video as follows:

    The heavily promoted CNN show featured Bell explaining the “Redneck Revolt,” which he identified as gun-toting liberals who defend the Second Amendment and seek to battle the “alt-right” and neo-Nazis.

    Bell called them “good guys,” going to a gun range with members and even questioning why “more white people” don’t share their viewpoints.

    One of the men featured on the CNN special appears to be Van Spronsen — who was armed with a rifle and incendiary devices when he launched his assault on the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma around 4 a.m. Saturday, according to the Tacoma Police Department.

    As Fox detailed further, it was Andy Ngo – himself recently subject of brutal beating by an Antifa mob in the center of Portland – who first noticed CNN’s glowing coverage of Van Spronsen in their May episode. 

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    Image of the attack aftermath which included an exploded vehicle via NTV Houston: “A man armed with a rifle attacked an immigration detention facility in Washington state on Saturday (July 13), throwing incendiary devices at the building and cars in the parking lot before dying after police opened fire, authorities said.”

    “CNN recently aired a documentary about the Antifa militia whose member was killed in an ICE firebombing attack yesterday. You can see Mr van Sprossen at the 4-second time stamp in this trailer,” Ngo wrote. 

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    CNN’s official Twitter account had heavily promoted the show  which clearly revealed Van Spronsen to have been an active member of the far-left gun toting group. 

    And still no comment from either CNN or the show host W. Kamau Bell who had also presented Van Spronsen’s militant group as one that “protects counter-protesters, feeds the hungry and provides gun safety courses.”

  • Zucked Again! Facebook's Founder Admits To Interfering In Political Speech

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    Censorship is alive and well! Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the social media giant actively interfered with political speech leading up to the Irish abortion referendum.  Facebook systematically deleted posts it didn’t like while promoting those it did.

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    During a recent talk, Zuckerberg admitted that the social media network banned a number of pro-life advertisements ahead of the Irish abortion referendum. According toPJ Media, during a recent interview at this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival, Zuckerberg began to explain how the social media firm is attempting to work with the governments of other countries to determine what political speech should be allowed on the site. Zuckerberg gave an example of Facebook’s interaction with the Irish government ahead of a 2018 referendum on the legalization of abortion in the country.

    Big Tech has officially taken sides, and they’ve sided with tyranny. According to Breitbart News, Zuckerberg explained that American pro-life groups wanted to run Facebook ads targeted towards Irish citizens. Not wanting to allow free speech and buckling like a slave to the government, Facebook reached out to the Irish “authorities” to determine whether or not the ads should be allowed at the time. Zuckerberg stated: “Their response at the time was, ‘we don’t currently have a law, so you need to make whatever decision you want to make.’”

    So Facebook’s CEO “Zucked” pro-lifers. “We ended up not allowing the ads,” Zuckerberg stated. Pro-life activist Lila Rose commented on how Silicon Valley tech executives have reacted towards the issue of abortion in a tweet which can be seen below:

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    The narrative has been chosen and the government and their accomplices in Big Tech and Big Pharma will decide what you hear, read, and see. Almost everything is now manipulated.  But it isn’t just Facebook that’s teamed up to control the narrative. Twitter, Google, and YouTube are also complicit.

    Violent Antifa Accounts Don’t Violate Twitter’s Rules: Conservatives Banned And Censored

    Google Manipulated YouTube Search Results To Program Users’ Behavior

    People are being fed their own slavery and attaching their own chains at this point. Regardless of what side of the abortion debate you come down on, squashing speech you don’t like from the other side certainly isn’t helping make you look like you’re “right.” It makes you look like you’re hiding information you don’t want anyone to think about because you’ve already made the decision for them. Just like the “Russian meddling” situation: who cares what others say? Are people really so afraid of information that disagrees with their already cemented bias that they can’t handle free speech?

    Whether Russia created ads to influence an election or not, and whether pro-life groups created ads to influence an election or not, it’s not Zuckerberg’s job to dictate what information people see. Free speech is the enemy to misinformation and that’s likely why authoritarians are actively trying to kill it.

  • Jon Corzine Accepts Regulatory Ban As Part Of His $600 Million Wall Street "Comeback"

    The SEC is making sure that the next time Jon Corzine takes to Wall Street, he will be restricted from wagering his own capital separately from his investor’s money, according to Bloomberg. This was the type of trading that sunk his prior firm, MF Global Holdings Limited, just eight years ago.

    Despite this, many are going to be asking an obvious question: why is he allowed to return to Wall Street to begin with?

    Corzine was banned from the futures industry when his firm MF Global went bankrupt and despite his new fund, JDC–JSC, not generating much buzz, it still launched early last year in New York.

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    Corzine was, of course, a US senator and governor of New Jersey and has pitched his new fund as a way to leverage his experience on Wall Street to anticipate how Donald Trump’s policies would affect markets. In other words, he’ll probably just be buying S&P futures and SPY ETFs.

    He set out with the goal of raising $100 million to $300 million during his first year of trading, but the fund had only taken about $53 million from US investors as of early February. This number jumped to over $600 million in late March, but could be a result of the firm taking on leverage – just what he needs.

    Since the firm’s assets exceeded $150 million, it was forced to register with the SEC. Even though most applications are approved automatically, some managers with a disciplinary record can face restrictions. One of Corzine’s lawyers worked with the SEC to develop these new restrictions to improve the likelihood that the fund’s registration would be granted.

    In a proposed agreement with the SEC, Corzine can contribute to his fund but is prohibited from trading outside of it. The firm must also adopt new procedures to protect customer cash and hire an independent compliance consultant.

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    Jason Scharfman of Corgentum Consulting said:

    “It’s more of a burden, but it’s not insurmountable for Corzine. There are going to be more eyes on him, but as a result, he will be more careful and more insulated.”

    Corzine famously crashed and burned at MF Global after making $6 billion in proprietary bets on European sovereign debt. The firm was then hit by a cash crunch tied to the trades and $1 billion in client funds went temporarily missing. The fund was then forced to file for bankruptcy and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission later filed a lawsuit against the fund and Corzine.

    Corzine settled allegations in 2017 by paying a paltry $5 million penalty and consenting to a lifetime ban from the futures industry.

    The CFTC didn’t block him from other parts of Wall Street, so he was able to start this new hedge fund. Now, he’s trying to win SEC approval approval to expand it.

    “If Corzine wants people to give him money, he will do what he has to do to make sure that happens,” Scharfman concluded.

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