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Free to do as they please: UK to exempt military forces from Human Rights law


FARS News Agency
Wed, 05 Oct 2016 02:34 UTC
uk_military
© FNA
Britain on Tuesday announced plans to allow its soldiers to opt out of European human rights law, in a move the British Prime Minister Theresa May said would end "legal claims" against troops.

Under the new proposal the British government said it would allow soldiers to sidestep the European Convention on Human Rights during times of conflict, protecting them from prosecution, depending on an assessment of the circumstances, Alaraby reported.

"My government will ensure that our troops are recognized for the incredible job they do. Those who serve on the frontline will have our support when they come home."

"We will repay them with gratitude and put an end to the industry of vexatious claims that has pursued those who served in previous conflicts," May said in a statement.

The plan, announced during the ruling Conservative Party's annual conference, is intended to prevent legal claims against members of the armed forces which Defense Minister Michael Fallon said amounted to "false charges".

Comment: There is no justification for allowing these soldiers to do as they please with no possibility of being brought to justice.

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Heart - Black

Hillary addresses assassinating Wikileaks founder and embarrasses herself


RedStateWatcher
Wed, 05 Oct 2016 02:09 UTC
Surprised looking Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton, eyes downcast, stammering: If I talked about droning Julian Assange, "it would have been a joke."


Comment: If it was a joke....how would that be funny? Psychopath humor?

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Black Cat

Making Al-Qaeda propaganda for Pentagon: Ex-PR worker describes secret campaign to RT


RT
Wed, 05 Oct 2016 01:52 UTC

A former employee of the UK PR firm that was hired by the Pentagon to create fake terrorist videos in Iraq told RT that he arrived thinking he would be working with media agencies, but ended up creating materials for a secret propaganda campaign instead.

Bell Pottinger's staff was stationed inside a highly secured US military and intelligence HQ at Camp Victory in Baghdad.

"The arrival there [in Camp Victory in Iraq] was quite a shock... very very, I guess, distressing, really... You just felt you as if you didn't know what was going to happen," Martin Wells, a former employee of Bell Pottinger who worked for the US military in Iraq from 2006 to 2008, told RT.

The news that the Pentagon had paid Bell Pottinger over half a billion dollars to create fake terrorist videos in Iraq hit the headlines on Sunday when it was divulged by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which had received the information from Wells.

Wells says that he was initially told that he would be working on news.
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Bulb

Nearly a year without a national government and the people of Spain are getting along just fine

Raphael Minder and David Zucchino
NYT
Sun, 02 Oct 2016 01:06 UTC
Pedro Sánchez
© Susana Vera/Reuters
A supporter holding a poster of Pedro Sánchez, who stepped down as the leader of the Socialist Party, outside a party meeting in Madrid on Saturday.
For the past 288 days, Spain has plodded along without an elected national government. For some Spaniards, this is a wonderful thing.

"No government, no thieves," said Félix Pastor, a language teacher who, like many voters, is fed up with the corruption and scandals that tarnished the two previous governing parties.

Mr. Pastor, a wiry, animated 59-year-old, said Spain could last without a government "until hell freezes over" because politicians were in no position to do more harm.

After two grueling national elections in six months, and with a third vote possible in December, no party has won enough seats or forged the coalition needed to form a government. For the first time in Spain's four decades as a modern democracy, this country of 47 million people has a caretaker government.

That has produced an unprecedented public spectacle: Politicians scheme and plot but reject the difficult compromises needed to form a government. Voters watch ruefully with a mix of fascination and contempt.

On Saturday, the Socialists' leader, Pedro Sánchez, stepped down in a move that could open the way for his party to agree to the re-election of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and a government led by his conservative Popular Party.
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Vader

On the warpath: US Defence Secretary Carter announces "third phase" of military bullying towards China

Peter Symonds
World Socialist Web Site
Tue, 04 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC
Ashton Carter

Ashton 'let's bully the world into heaping pile of ash' Carter aboard the USS Carl Vinson in San Diego.
US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced last Thursday a further dramatic expansion of the Pentagon's "rebalance" or "pivot" to the Asia Pacific that will only heighten the already tense military confrontation with China in the region. He insisted that the Asia Pacific was "the single most consequential region for America's future."

Speaking on board the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson in San Diego, Carter outlined what he called the "third phase" of the US military build-up and the strengthening of a "principled and inclusive security network" in Asia. While claiming that Beijing was not excluded from the "network," every aspect of the "third phase" is aimed at preparing for a war with China.

The importance that Carter attached to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to "bind the United States more closely together with 11 other countries" underlines the real purpose of the "pivot:" to maintain American dominance and subordinate China to the interests of the United States. The very terms of the TPP ensure that Beijing will be excluded unless it accepts the rules set by Washington.

The defence secretary made clear US economic hegemony had to be underpinned by military might. In outlining the "third phase," he declared that "the United States will continue to sharpen our military edge so we remain the most powerful military in the region and the security partner of choice."


Comment: "The security partner of choice"? Choice has nothing to do with it. It's more like: "we'll make them an offer they can't refuse" geopolitical mafia style.


Comment: Boy oh boy, Ashton Carter has been a busy little war-monger hasn't he. Just last week he was giving a pep talk riling up the troops against Russia at Air Force Global Strike Command base in Minot, North Dakota - and now this. But that's what good little US War Secretaries do right? They pound the ungodly drums of mass gore and carnage - or the threat of mass gore and carnage - if sovereign countries don't want to follow the Empire's dictates.

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Piggy Bank

It's official: US government ends fiscal year 2016 with $1.4 trillion debt increase

Simon Black
Sovereign Man
Mon, 03 Oct 2016 23:19 UTC
US dollar cartoon
It's official.

The United States government closed out the 2016 fiscal year that ended a few days ago on Friday September 30th with a debt level of $19,573,444,713,936.79.

That's an increase of $1,422,827,047,452.46 over last year's fiscal year close.

Incredible. By the way, that debt growth amounts to roughly 7.5% of the entire US economy.

By comparison, the Marshall Plan, which completely rebuilt Western Europe after World World II, cost $12 billion back in 1948, or roughly 4.3% of US GDP at the time.

The initial appropriation for the WPA, perhaps the largest of Roosevelt's New Deal "make work" programs that employed millions of people, cost 6.7% of US GDP.

And, more recently, the US $700 billion bank bailout at the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis was the equivalent of 4.8% of GDP.

So basically these people managed to increase the national debt by a bigger percentage than the cost of the New Deal, Marshall Plan, and 2008 bank bailout.

What exactly did you get for that money?

Comment: What about the "black budget"? The black budget: What does it mean to US Federal budget, the economy and you?

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Snakes in Suits

Hillary Clinton's forgotten Honduras government overthrow in 2009

Vladimir Rodzianko
The Duran
Tue, 04 Oct 2016 21:49 UTC
Hillary Clinton and Manuel Zelaya
Hillary Clinton's stance on intervention and regime change in Libya, Iraq, and Syria is well known - but what is often forgotten is her role in the 2009 Honduran coup d'etat that ousted the democratically elected President of Honduras, leading him to call her "weak" and "bowing to pressure from the hawks in Washington."

On June 28th 2009, the elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped in his pajamas and flown to Costa Rica.

On August 7, 2009, 15 members of the U.S. Congress sent a letter to President Barack Obama requesting that he make a public statement. They asked Obama to announce that there was in fact a coup against the democratically elected president of Honduras.

State Department cables released by WikiLeaks shows that Hillary Clinton and her department had no intention of restoring the democratically elected president of Honduras.

Hillary admits her role in the deteriorating situation in the Latin American country, stating she needed to "manage a very difficult situation [in Honduras]."

Comment: More on Clinton and Latin America: Killary's bloody footprints in Latin America

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USA

U.S. "military aid" to Al Qaeda and ISIS-Daesh: Pentagon's use of illicit arms trafficking to channel shipments of weapons into Syria

Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research
Sun, 02 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC
light weapons isis
According to Jane's Defence Weekly, quoting documents released by the U.S. Government's Federal Business Opportunities (FBO), the US - as part of its "counterterrorism campaign" - has provided Syrian rebels [aka moderate Al Qaeda] with large amounts of weapons and ammunition.

The US and its allies (including Turkey and Saudi Arabia) have relied on the illicit trade in light weaponry produced in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, China, etc. for delivery to rebel groups inside Syria, including ISIS-Daesh and Al Nusra. In turn, operating out of the occupied Golan Heights, Israel's IDF has provided weapons, ammunition, logistical support to Al Qaeda rebels operating in Southern Syria.

While Washington's Middle East allies undertake shady transactions in a buoyant market for light weapons, a significant part of these illicit weapons shipments is nonetheless directly commissioned by the US government.

These shipments of weapons are not conducted through internationally approved weapons transfers. While they are the result of a Pentagon (or US government) procurement, they are not recorded as "official" military aid. They use private traders and shipping companies within the realm of a thriving illicit trade in light weapons.

Comment: Piece by hideous piece the god-awful truth about the US's manufactured terror in Syria is becoming known to the world.

See also: U.S. Special Forces officer: How the CIA armed and trained jihadists for war in Syria

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Chess

China's One Belt, One Road: The dawn of a New Eurasian Century

F. William Engdahl
New Eastern Outlook
Tue, 04 Oct 2016 21:49 UTC
china high-speed rail
I recently returned from a fascinating two week speaking tour in China. The occasion was the international premier of my newest book, One Belt, One Road - China and the New Eurasian Century. In the course of my visit I was invited by China's Northwest University in Xi'an to give a lecture and seminar on the present global political and economic situation in the context of China's New Economic Silk Road as the One Belt, One Road project is often called. What I've seen in my many visits to China, and have studied about the entirety of this enormously impressive international infrastructure project convinces me that a Eurasian Century at this point is unstoppable.

The idiotic wars of the Washington war-hawks and their military industry - in Syria, in Ukraine, Libya, Iraq and now the South China Sea provocations against China - are not going to stop what is now clearly the most impressive and economically altering project in more than a century.

The term "American Century" was triumphantly proclaimed in a famous editorial in Life magazine in 1941 in the early phase of World War II, before the United States had even entered the war, to describe the system publisher Henry Luce saw dominating the postwar world after the fall of the rival British Empire.

The American Century has lasted a mere seven decades if we date from the end of the war. Its record has been one of dismal failure on balance. The industrial base of the United States, the predominant leading industrial nation and leading scientific innovator, today is a hollowed, rotted shell with once-booming cities like Detroit or Philadelphia or Los Angeles now burned-out ghettos of unemployed and homeless.

Comment: And Washington sees the writing on the wall:

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Bad Guys

Green Party VP candidate: 'Clinton disconnected from youth issue of joblessness'


RT
Sun, 02 Oct 2016 21:24 UTC
sanders clinton
© Brian Snyder / Reuters
U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders react to the crowd during a campaign event about college affordability the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire, United States September 28, 2016.
"Clinton seems to imply there is a moral deficiency with these young people, some of whom are still living with their parents, as opposed to the inability of the system to provide them viable employment" - Ajamu Baraka, Green Party nominee for Vice President.

The conservative website, Washington Free Beacon, posted on Friday Hillary Clinton's candid statements on Bernie Sanders' supporters made during a private meeting with fundraisers.

In leaked audio, the Democratic presidential nominee said that his supporters were lured by "false promise" and, moreover, called them people who "are living in their parents' basement."

RT: What's your take on Clinton's recent comments?

Ajamu Baraka: I think her comments represent a real disconnection from the reality that many young people in this country are living - young people and people who supported Bernie Sanders, who were concerned and are concerned about the plight of the economy and what kind of solutions we need to put in place to address the issue of joblessness and the lack of opportunities for people who are coming out of college. She seems to imply that there is more of a moral deficiency with these young people as opposed to the inability of the system to provide them viable employment. So her attitude seems not only dismissive, but reflects her ideological connection, ideological commitment to solutions that are not going to objectively address the issues that these young people face.

Comment: Killary's comments encapsulate the attitude of the 1% she serves. No thought for the future welfare of anyone but themselves.

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