Health Impact News Editor Comments

In a brazen act of medical tyranny, California recently became the first state in the U.S. where lawmakers removed religious exemptions to those opposing vaccines for their children. The bill now signed into law, SB277, faces legal hurdles in court next.

Now, legislators in California want to pass the "first US adult vaccine mandate with NO personal exemptions and CRIMINAL penalties for failure to comply." SB 792, would eliminate an adult's right to exempt themselves from one, some, or all vaccines, a risk-laden medical procedure.

Will California soon become a medical police state?

This conversation took place before the deal

Harry Lambert: So how are you feeling?

Yanis Varoufakis: I'm feeling on top of the world - I no longer have to live through this hectic timetable, which was absolutely inhuman, just unbelievable. I was on 2 hours sleep every day for five months. ... I'm also relieved I don't have to sustain any longer this incredible pressure to negotiate for a position I find difficult to defend, even if I managed to force the other side to acquiesce, if you know what I mean.

HL:What was it like? Did you like any aspect of it?

YV: Oh well a lot of it. But the inside information one gets... to have your worst fears confirmed ... To have "the powers that be" speak to you directly, and it be as you feared - the situation was worse than you imagined! So that was fun, to have the front row seat.

HL:What are you referring to?

YV: The complete lack of any democratic scruples, on behalf of the supposed defenders of Europe's democracy. The quite clear understanding on the other side that we are on the same page analytically - of course it will never come out at present. [And yet] To have very powerful figures look at you in the eye and say "You're right in what you're saying, but we're going to crunch you anyway."

Barclay's bank froze a Rossiya Segodnya news agency account without explaining its reasons. The agency's head Dmitry Kiselyov has called it "censorship."

"To close the account of one of the world's leading news agencies is censorship, the direct obstruction of journalists' work," Dmitry Kiselyov said. "What kind of press freedom and democracy can Britain claim to have if it prevents one of the world's largest news agencies from working in the country?"

No formal notification of the move or justification for it was immediately provided. A source in the banking sector told the agency the Exchequer has put Dmitry Kiselyov on an anti-Russian sanctions list, which could have led to the news agency's account being frozen.

"This is illegal," Rossiya Segodnya's Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan tweeted. "The sanctions imply that Kiselyov cannot travel to Europe and have personal bank accounts there. No sanctions were imposed on Rossiya Segodnya news agency."

Kiselyov is one of the people subjected to financial and travel sanctions in the EU. These restrictions have been imposed on a number of Russian officials in connection with Moscow's stance over Ukraine crisis.

The sanctions list, which includes the head of Rossiya Segodnya news agency, was published on March 21. It characterizes Kiselyov as "central figure of the government propaganda supporting the deployment of Russian forces in Ukraine."

Russia's ambassador in the UK, Alexander Yakovenko, tweeted that the move is an example of using censorship against media that provides an alternative point of view.

It took the longest Eurosummit ever for the EU "institutions" to deliver a shattering humiliation of Greece cushioned in Eurocratese newspeak.

This coming from "institutions" that don't break a sweat when it comes to applying sanctions on "Russia aggression".

And those interminable hours were hardly enough. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble was thoroughly enjoying the torture rack - literally not giving a damn to break up Europe in two or three irreconcilable parts.

In the end it was up to France (President Hollande) vs. Germany (Chancellor Merkel) - two minions history placed at this fateful juncture — to decide the future of the EU deep into the night. Germany won - with France hardly sweetening the bitter pill for Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

In the process, Merkel/Hollande performed more like a NATO commando, delivering a (economic) European remix of Shock and Awe. An unidentified, invisible - yet appalled — eurocrat memorably described it as "extensive mental waterboarding". Dick Cheney and Donald "known unknowns" Rumsfeld should be eligible for royalties - in the spirit of Atlanticist friendship.

The result — this Eurosummit statement — adds a new twist to the Tacitus maxim, "they make a desert and call it peace." The Financial Times — who at least is familiar with the history of Rome — called it, "the most intrusive economic supervision program ever mounted in the EU."

Late last year, Germany's broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) investigated what turned out to be hundreds of trucks a day carrying billions of dollars in supplies, flowing across the Turkish border into Syria and directly into the hands of the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS).

The border crossing near the Turkish city of Oncupinar, approximately 100km west of the Syrian city of Kobani, is apparently only one of many such crossings where ISIS fighters, weapons, and materiel move directly under the watch and apparent assistance of NATO.

TIME in their recent article titled, "ISIS Fighters Kill 200 Civilians in Syrian Town," reported that:

The attacks also came after the group [ISIS] suffered a series of setbacks over the past two weeks, including the loss last week of the Syrian border town of Tal Abyad — one of the group's main points for bringing in foreign fighters and supplies.

Tal Abyad, a Turkish-Syrian border crossing east of Kobani, is now a second, confirmed point of entry into Syria used by ISIS to supply its ongoing campaign within the country.

"They crucified Tsipras in there," remarked a senior EU official who had attended yesterday's European Council emergency summit meeting. "Crucified."

Tsipras has certainly had it tough these last few days and weeks, but who is really being "crucified" by this series of intensive meetings that led to yesterday's "agreement" in the "Greek crisis"? Tsipras is the Greek PM and leader of the Syriza party elected in January this year - very much thanks to a middle- and lower-class populist vote. Their mandate, therefore, was to work in the best interests of the Greek people. Unusually for European governments that get elected on a populist ticket, the Syriza government tried to do exactly that.

Some allies say incident means Canada was an active participant in regime change
It was one of those events that simply appeared and disappeared during the bloody, swift-moving events of Ukraine in the winter revolution of 2014.

Canada's embassy in Kyiv was used as a haven for several days by anti-government protesters during the uprising that toppled the regime of former president Viktor Yanukovych.

The Harper government never fully acknowledged — during the upheaval or since — the depth and extent of the security breach, which has had far-reaching implications on how Canadians are perceived in the region.

The Canadian Press has spent months piecing together the events surrounding the extraordinary incident, which started on Feb. 18, 2014 and occurred at the height of the violent crackdown against pro-European protesters.

An historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last week's landslide "No" vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a "bailout" that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has pushed through parliament a proposal to cut at least 13 billion euros from the public purse - 4 billion euros more than the "austerity" figure rejected overwhelmingly by the majority of the Greek population in a referendum on 5 July.

These reportedly include a 50 per cent increase in the cost of healthcare for pensioners, almost 40 per cent of whom live in poverty; deep cuts in public sector wages; the complete privatization of public facilities such as airports and ports; a rise in value added tax to 23 per cent, now applied to the Greek islands where people struggle to eke out a living. There is more to come.

This week saw the failure of the UK-backed UNSC draft resolution calling to declare the 20-year-old mass murder of thousands of Muslims near the town of Srebrenica as genocide committed by the Serbian army; and while some Western countries strongly criticize the failure, a Russian expert explains what actually might be behind the proposed document.

Saturday, July 11, marked the 20th anniversary of the tragic events in the Muslim-majority town of the mainly Serb eastern part of Bosnia.

Back in 1995 thousands of Muslims, mainly men and boys, were murdered in and around the town of Srebrenica after it was occupied by the Bosnian Serb militia under the command of Gen. Ratko Mladic. The former general is now on trial for genocide in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, along with the former President of the Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina Radovan Karadžić.

The massacre in Srebrenica has previously been classified as an act of genocide by the UN International Court of Justice and ICTY, now the draft resolution pushed for the same classification, claiming that a failure to adopt it will hinder reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

However, one of Russia's most well-known scholars and an expert in the Balkans, Elena Guskova, who was there on the ground during the years of the Bosnian war, believes that despite the enormity of the crime, there are insufficient grounds to consider the killings an act of genocide.

"We can't talk about genocide here," she told Rossiya 1 TV show "Vesti on Saturday". "What is genocide by definition? It is the elimination of a particular nation on the territory of another country. It is a systematic, deliberate killing. There was nothing of the kind on the territory of Srebrenica. Those were military actions."

She also debated the actual number of those killed, saying that now it stands at 8,000, but it is absolutely unclear where this figure comes from and it has fluctuated all the time, dropping down to 5,000 and then rising up to 25,000.

"This does not reflect the truth in any way," she said. "This massacre has already become a myth, which can't be either reviewed or otherwise disputed."

Soldiers of the Ukrainian Army recorded a video message to President Petro Poroshenko in which they stated that they will no longer accept orders from Kiev.

The 2nd battalion of the 17th tank brigade has had enough, with soldiers refusing to take orders from their command as the video message clearly showed.

The battalion demanded Poroshenko to urgently deal with the widespread lawlessness in the Ukrainian Army.