An internal report revealing a disturbing racial prejudice at human rights organisation Amnesty has been leaked six months after it was written. While groups like it and Oxfam hold governments to account, who do they answer to? Truth hides in the darkness, if we go by the latest revelations surrounding Amnesty International.

The human rights organisation, whose stated aim is "campaigning for a world where human rights are enjoyed by all," decided not to release a damning internal report to the press. It somehow found its way to the back of the filing cabinet to gather dust.

But now it's been released to the wider world, aided by a group of whistleblowers. It's beyond hypocrisy that an organisation which continually pumps out diktats calling for change decided to keep its own failings in-house.

As an example, in the past week alone, Amnesty has produced reports about where the death penalty is used, Japan's refusal to pay damages to South Korean women forced into sexual slavery during World War II, an alleged alarming crackdown on human rights defenders in Republic of Congo, and a call for the Russian government to immediately stop the deportation of Tajikistani nationals detained during a peaceful protest.

There may be merit in these claims, depending on the information and veracity of whatever investigations were conducted. But how can such a pious organisation deflect away from its own serious failings?

The House on Wednesday passed legislation restricting arms sales to Saudi Arabia over the gruesome killing of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

The legislation, called the "Protection of Saudi Dissidents Act of 2021", passed the House with a bipartisan majority, 350 to 71 vote. It is unclear if the Senate will take up the measure.

The bill passed the House with a two-thirds majority, required under a fast-track process for bills that receive widespread support. It was authored by Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who represents the district where Khashoggi lived while in the U.S.

The bill halts the sale and export of certain defensive materials to Saudi Arabia unless the president can certify that the Kingdom is not engaged in repression and torture of dissidents and arbitrary detention of U.S. or international citizens.

Putin's address to the Russian Federal Assembly - a de facto State of the Nation - was a judo move that left Atlanticist sphere hawks particularly stunned.

The "West" was not even mentioned by name. Only indirectly, or via a delightful metaphor, Kipling's Jungle Book. Foreign policy was addressed only at the end, almost as an afterthought.

For the best part of an hour and a half, Putin concentrated on domestic issues, detailing a series of policies that amount to the Russian state helping those in need - low income families, children, single mothers, young professionals, the underprivileged - with, for instance, free health checks all the way to the possibility of an universal income in the near future.

Of course he would also need to address the current, highly volatile state of international relations. The concise manner he chose to do it, counter-acting the prevailing Russophobia in the Atlanticist sphere, was quite striking.

First, the essentials. Russia's policy "is to ensure peace and security for the well-being of our citizens and for the stable development of our country."

Yet if "someone does not want to...engage in dialogue, but chooses an egoistic and arrogant tone, Russia will always find a way to stand up for its position."

He singled out "the practice of politically motivated, illegal economic sanctions" to connect it to "something much more dangerous", and actually rendered invisible in the Western narrative: "the recent attempt to organize a coup d'etat in Belarus and the assassination of that country's president." Putin made sure to stress, "all boundaries have been crossed".

The plot to kill Lukashenko was unveiled by Russian and Belarusian intel - which detained several actors backed, who else, US intel. The US State Department predictably denied any involvement.

Putin: "It is worth pointing to the confessions of the detained participants in the conspiracy that a blockade of Minsk was being prepared, including its city infrastructure and communications, the complete shutdown of the entire power grid of the Belarusian capital. This, incidentally means preparations for a massive cyber-attack."

And that leads to a very uncomfortable truth: "Apparently, it's not for no reason that our Western colleagues have stubbornly rejected numerous proposals by the Russian side to establish an international dialogue in the field of information and cyber-security."

Perhaps the most pressing matter today for advocates of freedom is the prospect of the Left completing the institution of a totalitarian state. There is no other way to read the multiprong approach and the political maneuverings that political operatives are taking to rule under "Biden." I put "Biden" in quotation marks here because the current president of the United States is not a singular person named Joe Biden. It is a central executive committee consisting of party rulers and advisers, plus corporate-state apparatuses. Make no mistake, the power grab that the Left is undertaking poses the most grievous threat to liberty in recent history, regardless of its effects on the Republican Party.

The signals could not be any clearer. In addition to the swath of executive orders, clearly composed by executive committee members and aimed at either ingratiating and expanding the Democratic Party's base or extending federal power, the Democrats have initiated a growing body of laws which would, if passed, ensure uniparty rule for the foreseeable future.

These include especially H.R. 1, or the For the People's Act, passed by the House. Should it pass the Senate (with the eradication of the filibuster), H.R.-1 would grossly favor Democratic candidates in federal elections. Notwithstanding the expansion of the Democratic base through various means, including overriding existing voter ID laws in many states and mandating that all states allow mail-in ballots without IDs, it would further centralize federal election oversight and, according to the Institute for Free Speech, "[e]xpand the universe of regulated online political speech (by Americans) beyond paid advertising to include, apparently, communications on groups' or individuals' own websites and e-mail messages."

The legislative maneuverings include the ''Judiciary Act of 2021,'' which would simply expand the Supreme Court to twelve members plus the chief justice. This move, which would amount to adding four Democrat-approved justices, would essentially effect a legislative takeover of the Supreme Court, as the Democratic-controlled Supreme Court would increasingly "legislate from the bench" and likewise expand the power of the Democratic-controlled legislative and executive branches beyond official perimeters. The odds of its passage, as is, are slim, but the overture is indicative of an attempted power grab not seen since FDR.

But the most conspicuous sign of the nearing consolidation of totalitarian government is the effective merger of corporate and state functionaries, with corporations and other organizations acting as appendages of the government and enforcing corporate-state desiderata. The indications of this merger are so many and sundry that any exhaustive recounting of them would entail a book-length treatment.

Over 300 US lawmakers have urged Washington to uphold its commitment to provide "full" and "unconditional" security assistance to Israel.

In defense of the US-Israel relationship, some 330 members of the House of Representatives - roughly three-quarters of its membership - signed a letter sent on Thursday to the chair and ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, which regulates public spending.

The letter - whose signatories are split fairly evenly between Democrats and Republicans - comes less than a week after Representative Betty McCollum (D-Minnesota) and 15 Democrat co-sponsors proposed a bill that looks to place conditions on US aid in an effort to seek accountability for Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has warned that relations between Moscow and Washington have plummeted to levels last seen during the Cold War. He believes threats and sanctions will result in "permanent instability."

"In recent years, relations between Russia and the United States have actually shifted from rivalry to confrontation, essentially returning to the Cold War era," Medvedev, who now serves as the deputy chairman of the country's Security Council, wrote in an article for news agency RIA Novosti on Friday.

"Sanctions pressure, threats, confrontation, defense of one's selfish interests - all of this is plunging the world into a state of permanent instability," he added.

In particular, Medvedev noted what he called an "organized campaign of harassment against Russia," such as Washington's opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and the US attitude towards Ukraine.

Europe can't soft-pedal a sanitary techno-dictatorship while claiming to protect people from abuse by AI. Pick a lane, hypocrites.

The EU is proposing to regulate AI and facial recognition in the interest of privacy, while pushing ahead with an intrusive scheme that would strongarm citizens into disclosing private medical data through digital certificates.

This week, when logging into the French government's TousAntiCovid smartphone application - a one-stop shop for everything Covid-19 related, including the latest statistics, news and self-certification forms to be out and about after the 7pm curfew - French citizens discovered a new feature had been quietly added: "My wallet: Your test certificates will be available here," it reads.

The addition is detailed in the app as an "experiment in progress, only on some flights to Corsica" via Air France and Air Corsica - both of which are controlled in part by the French government through a 29% stake in Air France-KLM, making the state the company's single largest shareholder.

Description:

Senior Lebanese political analyst and editor-in-chief of the Al-Binaa newspaper, Nasser Qandil, says the entire Axis of Resistance is now on war alert and prepared to respond by 'openly' targeting deep inside Israel amid rising tensions between Tel Aviv and Tehran.

In a recent interview on Al Mayadeen, Qandil, who has close relations with Hezbollah, declared that the US now has to choose between either committing to an agreement over Iran's nuclear program and reining in Tel Aviv or a war scenario in which the Axis of Resistance will openly target Israel.

The 'Axis of Resistance' broadly refers to a strategic anti-Israel/anti-US imperialist alliance composed of, but not limited to, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Iraq's Hashed al-Shaabi, Yemen's Ansarullah, and various Palestinian armed factions.

Source: Al Mayadeen (YouTube)

Date: April 14, 2021

Backed by President Biden, the House has passed a bill that would make Washington, DC, a state, and with it lock down the Democratic Party's control of Congress. However, the bill faces an uphill battle in the Senate.

The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives voted on Thursday to pass HR. 51, a bill that would see the State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, become the 51st US State and the newest state admitted to the union since Hawaii in 1959. The bill passed on a party-lines vote of 216-208.

Some activists in the District of Columbia have pushed for statehood for a long time, but their cause was generally regarded as a fringe one, especially as the US Constitution requires that the nation's capital be located in a federal district, under the direct control of Congress and separate from any other state. To get around this, HR. 51 proposes shrinking the federal district to a tiny sliver of land encompassing the White House, Supreme Court and Capitol.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday laid out the department's plans to mobilize the U.S. economy against climate change, defying growing criticism from Republicans over the pace and scope of President Biden's environmental agenda.

In a speech to the International Institute of Finance, Yellen insisted that the U.S. must take an ambitious approach to fighting climate change through the economy despite the challenges of measuring and curbing the economic and financial risks it poses.

Republicans and advocates for the oil and gas industry have ripped Yellen and several other financial regulators for laying out plans to account for the financial and economic risks of climate change. Critics argue that holding banks and companies to strict climate-related standards is unfair given the uncertainty surrounding climate risk and a threat to fossil fuel producers.