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Trump under arrest in New York - Justice Dept. reportedly pursuing separate obstruction case against him


RT
Tue, 04 Apr 2023 18:01 UTC
Donald Trump
© AP Photo/Corey SipkinFormer President Trump leaves Trump Tower in New York for Manhattan Criminal Court, where he will be booked and arraigned on charges stemming from a hush money payment to a porn actor during his 2016 campaign, Tuesday, April 4, 2023.
Former US President Donald Trump arrived at the Manhattan District Attorney's office on Tuesday afternoon, to be placed under arrest and face a series of charges his attorneys have denounced as a politically motivated "witch hunt" by the New York Democrat Alvin Bragg.

The existence of the charges was leaked to the press last Friday, and more details were leaked on Monday, indicating that Bragg is going after the 45th president for the "crime" of allegedly falsifying business records in regard to "hush money" reportedly paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Federal prosecutors declined to pursue the case, and multiple legal scholars have argued that the charges amount to a misdemeanor campaign violation at best. Hillary Clinton paid a fine for the same exact transgression in the matter of funding the notorious "Steele dossier," a series of fabrications accusing Trump of having ties to Russia.

Trump himself has denounced the indictment as purely political. Though Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he might not honor the politicized New York arrest warrant, Trump decided to fly in from his Mar-a-Lago home to New York on Monday, and turn himself in on Tuesday.

Comment: NewsReal: Trump Says 'US Dead' as Regime Indicts Him

Trump is charged with 34 felony counts, with a possible prison sentence of over 130 years. Though a prison sentence is unlikely - "No one gets jail time for that as a first offender," said a New York law enforcement official.
After this story was posted, a spokesman for Trump said the former president's legal team had not seen the indictment or been briefed on the details. Trump himself responded with a post on Truth Social.

"Wow! District Attorney Bragg just illegally LEAKED the various points, and complete information, on the pathetic Indictment against me," Trump wrote. "I know the reporter and so, unfortunately, does he. This means that he MUST BE IMMEDIATELY INDICTED. Now, if he wants to really clean up his reputation, he will do the honorable thing and, as District Attorney, INDICT HIMSELF. He will go down in Judicial history, and his Trump Hating wife will be, I am sure, very proud of him!"

A spokesperson for Bragg said in an email that the district attorney's office "declined to comment on a sealed indictment."
And it's not just the DA.
The Department of Justice is reportedly building a case around the issue of obstruction of justice, as it investigates Donald Trump for potentially mishandling classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago.

The Washington Post reported the development first on Sunday, citing multiple sources familiar with the ongoing investigation.

According to the Post, Mr Trump is under investigation for potentially obstructing authorities as they attempted to secure all the classified materials retained by Mr Trump without the permission of the National Archives from his days in the White House. Some of those retained documents had classified markings, prompting the review into whether any classified information was mishandled.


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USA

US argues for immunity from MK-ULTRA mind control experiments case before Quebec Court of Appeal


CBC.ca
Tue, 04 Apr 2023 22:29 UTC
Quebec's Court of Appeal
© Simon-Marc Charron/CBC/Radio-CanadaQuebec's Court of Appeal will rule on whether Quebec Superior Court was right in granting immunity to the U.S. government over its alleged involvement in the MK-ULTRA experiments.
A proposed class-action lawsuit over infamous brainwashing experiments at a Montreal psychiatric hospital was before Quebec's highest court Thursday, as victims attempted to remove immunity granted to the United States government.

The U.S. government successfully argued in Quebec Superior Court last August that the country couldn't be sued for the project known as MK-ULTRA, allegedly funded by the Canadian government and the CIA.

U.S. lawyers argued that foreign states had absolute immunity from lawsuits in Canada between the 1940s and 1960s, when the program took place.

Comment: See also:

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Bullseye

Europe can't afford to 'decouple' from China - former Italian official


Global Times
Mon, 03 Apr 2023 05:44 UTC
Michele Geraci
Michele Geraci
Leaders from European countries have recently announced trips to China. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez attended the Boao Forum for Asia in South China's Hainan Province which lasted from March 28 to 31. French President Emmanuel Macron and some EU leaders, including EU Commission President Urusla Von der Leyen, will also pay visits to China. What does this wave of visits signal about China-Europe relations?

How should Europe balance its ties with China and the US? Global Times (GT) reporter Wang Wenwen talked to Michele Geraci (Geraci), former undersecretary of state at the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, over these issues on the sidelines of the Boao Forum for Asia.

Comment:



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Bad Guys

A New Pandemic Treaty: The most dangerous International treaty ever proposed

Molly Kingsley
Brownstone Institute
Wed, 29 Mar 2023 00:00 UTC
WHO Flag
Human history is a story of forgotten lessons. Despite the catastrophic collapse of European democracy in the 1930s, it appears that the tale of the twentieth century - in which citizens, cowed by existential threats, acquiesced in the rejection of liberty and truth in favour of obedience and propaganda, whilst allowing despotic leaders to seize ever more absolutist powers - is perilously close to being forgotten.

Nowhere is this more evident than in relation to the apparent nonchalance which has greeted two international legal agreements currently working their way through the World Health Organisation: a new pandemic treaty, and amendments to the 2005 International Health Regulations, both due to be put before the governing body of the WHO, the World Health Assembly, in May next year.

As concerned scholars and jurists have detailed, these agreements threaten to fundamentally reshape the relationship between the WHO, national governments, and individuals.

Comment: See also:

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Arrow Down

Finland joins NATO, Russia warns of counter-measures

Anne Kauranen
Reuters
Tue, 04 Apr 2023 23:40 UTC
finland nato
Finland formally joined NATO on Tuesday, its flag unfurling outside the military bloc's Brussels headquarters, in a historic policy shift brought on by Russia's invasion of Ukraine that drew a threat from Moscow of "counter-measures."

Finland's accession, ending seven decades of military non-alignment, roughly doubles the length of the border the North Atlantic Treaty Organization shares with Russia and bolsters its eastern flank as the war in Ukraine grinds on with no resolution in sight.

Finland's flag - a blue cross on a white background - was hoisted alongside those of the alliance's 30 other members as a military band played in bright spring sunshine.

Comment: The people of Finland haven't benefited from siding with Western belligerence, and there's no reason to believe they'll be any better off now that they've joined NATO: See also:

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NPC

New Zealand's PM doesn't know what a 'woman' is: 'Um ... People define themselves' he says in flustered response to reporter

Antoinette Milienos
Daily Mail
Tue, 04 Apr 2023 06:26 UTC
Chris Hipkins
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins was caught off guard after a reporter asked him to 'define woman' during a press conference (pictured)
New Zealand's newly elected Prime Minister Chris Hipkins struggled to define the term 'woman' when a reporter's question about gender caught him off guard.

During his regular afternoon press conference on Monday, Mr Hipkins was asked by Sean Plunket, a broadcast reporter from The Platform, to 'define a woman' on behalf of himself and his government.

Mr Hipkins took a moment to gather his thoughts before responding.

'Um,' Hipkins began, before pausing.

'To be honest Sean, that question has come out of left field for me.'

Comment: Could the new PM really be worse than Ardern? Do New Zealanders really want to find out?

As noted above, the UK's Labour leader, tipped to be the next PM, also doesn't know what a woman is. Below are just 2 of his tragic responses:





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Attention

OPEC: Saudis aren't afraid of US anymore

MK Bhadrakumar
Indian Punchline
Tue, 04 Apr 2023 19:13 UTC
Saudi Oilfields
© Indian Punchline
The shock oil production cuts from May outlined by the OPEC+ on Sunday essentially means that eight key OPEC countries decided to join hands with Russia to reduce oil production, messaging that OPEC and OPEC+ are now back in control of the oil market.

No single oil producing country is acting as the Pied Piper here. The great beauty about it is that Saudi Arabia and seven other major OPEC countries have unexpectedly decided to support Russia's efforts and unilaterally reduce production.

While the 8 OPEC countries are talking about a reduction of one million b/d from May to the end of the year, Russia will extend for the same period its voluntary adjustment that already started in March, by 500,000 barrels.

Now, add to this the production adjustments already decided by the OPEC+ previously, and the total additional voluntary production adjustments touch a whopping 1.6 million b/d.

What has led to this? Fundamentally, as many analysts had forewarned, the Western sanctions against Russian oil created distortions and anomalies in the oil market and upset the delicate ecosystem of supply and demand, which were compounded by the incredibly risky decision by the G7, at the behest of the US Treasury, to impose a price cap on Russia's oil sales abroad.

On top of it, the Biden administration's provocative moves to release oil regularly from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve in attempts to micromanage the oil prices and keep them abnormally low in the interests of the American consumer as well as to keep the inflationary pressures under check turned out to be an affront to the oil-producing countries whose economies critically depend on income from oil exports.
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Clipboard

How's that war going?

James Howard Kunstler
Clusterfuck Nation
Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:01 UTC
newspaperpuppet
© AIPAC/The Ugly Truth/WordPress.com/M. Dyksrtra/Shutterstock/KJN
"The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives... Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise."
— Jacob Siegel
How's the war going? Huh? Do you mean the war over in Ukraine? Or the US government's war against its own people?

Well, the first one, the Ukraine War, is mostly destroying Europe — though, apparently, they haven't figured that out yet. Europe's industrial economy is toast without affordable Russian natgas. We turned off their pipeline for that in September and nobody in Europe objected. They just sucked it up and went back to smoking cigarettes at their café tables. A year or so from now, nobody in Europe will have enough money for a cappuccino (or cigarettes) and maybe then they'll start asking the mental mollusks who run things there some questions — if they don't just leapfrog all that politesse and burn the joint down.

The main thing about the Ukraine War is that the US doesn't want it to end. You understand, it is not about any airy-fairy principles such as freedom for Ukraine. It's about antagonizing Russia no matter how many dead Ukrainians it takes, because US officials developed a delusional psychosis about Russia after years of using it to mind-fuck American citizens, and we have to justify that antagonism by pretending we have vested interests in Ukraine, which we don't, by the way.
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Arrow Down

Sanna Marin suffers defeat in Finland election as SDP beaten into third place

Jon Henley
The Guardian
Sun, 02 Apr 2023 20:09 UTC
Marin
© tickernews.comFinnish PM Sanna Marin loses election
Marin says 'democracy is always a wonderful thing' as her Social Democrats come third behind rightwing NCP and nationalist Finns parties...

Finland's prime minister, Sanna Marin, has lost her battle to stay in power after her centre-left Social Democratic party (SDP) was narrowly beaten into third place in a cliffhanger election by its conservative and far-right rivals.

With all of the votes counted on Sunday, the right-wing National Coalition party (NCP) won 20.8% of the vote, with the populist, nation-first Finns party scoring 20.1%. Marin's SDP took 19.9% of the vote. Voter turnout was 71.9%.

Marin congratulated the election winners during her concession speech, but hailed an improvement in both her party's vote share and its projected number of MPs.
"It's a really good achievement, even though I didn't finish first today. Democracy has spoken, the Finnish people have cast their vote, and the celebration of democracy is always a wonderful thing. We have good reason to be happy about this result."
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Arrow Up

EU leader declares support for Trump


RT
Tue, 04 Apr 2023 15:30 UTC
orbantrump
© AP/Manuel Balce CenetaDonald Trump welcomes Viktor Orban to the White House in Washington, DC, May 13, 2019
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban urged the embattled ex-president to "keep on fighting" as he prepares to face trial in New York...

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban took to Twitter on Monday to show his support for former US President Donald Trump, who will appear in court in New York on Tuesday. "We are with you," the conservative PM told his political ally.

Trump departed his residence in Florida on Monday, bound for the city in which he built his fortune, New York. He is expected to turn himself in on Tuesday to face criminal charges relating to his alleged payment of hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Crowds of supporters cheered the ex-president's motorcade as it traveled to Palm Beach International Airport. Meanwhile, the Hungarian PM wished his former American counterpart well online.
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