Ecuador's National Court of Justice has turned down an appeal filed by former president Rafael Correa in an "aggravated bribery" case, upholding the eight-year sentence that Correa has called politically motivated.

Correa and 17 other Ecuadorian officials were charged and convicted in absentia back in April, on charges of accepting bribes and spending them on political campaigning. The former president's appeal was dismissed on Monday and he was sentenced to eight year in prison.

Reacting to the verdict on Twitter, Correa said such a decision "was expected" while branding the whole case against him "ridiculous." He also denounced the court decision as "one of the darkest pages" in Ecuador's history.

Facebook has removed one of the largest anti-mask groups on its platform for violating its policies against spreading misinformation about COVID-19.

The About section of the public group Unmasking America! — which had more than 9,600 members — described it as "here to spread the TRUTH about masks!" It made several claims which have been widely debunked about masks obstructing oxygen flow and having a negative psychological impact. "It is a psychological anchor for suppression, enslavement and cognitive obedience. When you wear a mask you are complicit in declaring all humans as dangerous, infectious and threats," the post stated.


It is one of dozens of such groups easily found in a search for "unmasking" on Facebook. Some of the groups are private, meaning a group admin has to approve new members before they can join. But the theme is the same: the groups oppose the public health intervention championed by medical experts. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends people wear masks in all public areas, which should limit the spread of the virus. These Facebook groups are for people who don't want to wear masks, and there are a lot of them.

For several weeks, just as most states across the United States began to reopen, following three months of lockdown to "flatten the curve", several states including Texas and Florida began reporting record new numbers who tested positive for the coronavirus. At least that is what the world is being told. More careful investigation suggests what is unfolding as a huge manipulation of coronavirus tests that includes collusion by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the same CDC who badly bungled initial rollout of the virus tests in March by distributing tests that were found to contain traces of the virus and other serious defects. The present scandal bears the earmarks of more than mismanagement. It looks like political collusion to influence the November election and far more.

It seems that today something is very, very rotten in the State of Texas. The same for Florida, California, Arizona and many other states who just after reopening, now have again imposed lockdown and the foolish and ineffective mask-wearing and social distancing. Yet if we look at the actual data for deaths attributed to the coronavirus, since around the middle of April, the daily deaths designated of COVID-19, whether "with" or "of", has steadily dropped to a level some 90% below the peak.

In the latest twist in the 'Russiagate' saga, internet sleuths say they have figured out the identity of the source Christopher Steele used to embellish and fabricate what would become the notorious Trump-Russia dossier.

The identity of Steele's "primary sub-source" (PSS) has long been the subject of speculation, as the former British spy had no actual sources in Russia himself. The 59-page transcript of the FBI interview with the PSS, conducted in February 2017 and published on Friday, was heavily redacted. Several sources online now say they figured it out, and point to former Brookings Institution researcher Igor Danchenko as the match.


An anonymous blog that seems to have been created for the purpose lays out the case for Danchenko, saying his resume posted online "matches every detail in the summary to a degree that it is almost certain that this is the primary sub source."

In addition to the resume, Danchenko's name and the name of his hometown, Perm, match the length of the redactions in the document. So does the timing of his trips to Europe and Russia, and the unredacted job title - facilitator - at the Open World program run by the US Library of Congress, whose name was redacted.

A picture that emerges is of a Russian-born Danchenko who was recruited by the US program, and came to the US to get a master's in Kentucky. He appears to have been introduced to Steele in the mid-aughts, by his professor from Louisville Paul Weber, and paid several hundred dollars for small tasks while he had no income.

The so-called US "Civilian Protection Act" does everything except "protect" the people of Syria. If anything, it aims, what a draconian law would normally do, to further destroy and strangulate the Syrian economy to make the country's post-war economic reconstruction and development even more difficult. As the act's "statement of policy" states in explicit terms, the US continues to seek a "regime change" in Syria. Indeed, the cardinal US purpose behind igniting a "civil war" in Syria was always to "send Assad home", but the combined military strategy of Syria, Iran and Russia turned out to be the key to defeating the CIA-sponsored militant groups. The US, as it stands, continues to pursue the same objective, although its military defeat in Syria has forced it to shift its focus from direct military intervention and support for militant groups to economic sanctions.

While this is not for the first-time that sanctions have been imposed on Syria, the fact that this "protection act" expands the US reach to even non-Syrians i.e., Syrian's "foreign friends" (Russia, China, Iran) makes it an even worst attack on Syrian economy. This is in turn part of an officially declared US strategy to make Syria a "quagmire for Russia."

The alleged gunmen who killed the son of Esther Salas, the judge recently assigned to the Epstein-Deutsche Bank case, worked for a company of corporate spies and mercenaries with ties to intelligence and also to Deutsche Bank.
The news of the shooting of the husband and son of Esther Salas, the judge recently assigned to oversee the Jeffrey Epstein - Deutsche Bank case, caused shock and confusion while also bringing renewed scrutiny to the Epstein scandal just a week after Epstein's main co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, was denied bail in a separate case.

The case Salas is set to oversee is a class action lawsuit brought by Deutsche Bank investors who allege that Deutsche Bank "failed to properly monitor customers that the Bank itself deemed to be high risk, including, among others, the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein." The case came after the New York state Department of Financial Services had settled with Deutsche Bank over the bank's failure to cut ties with Epstein-linked accounts, resulting in Deutsche Bank paying a $150 million fine. Deutsche Bank, unlike other financial institutions, failed to close all of its accounts linked to Epstein until less than a month prior to his arrest last year, even though the bank had identified him as "high risk" years before.

Beyond the tragedy of Sunday's shooting, which claimed the life of Salas' only child, the quick discovery of the death of the main suspect, Roy Den Hollander, of a "self-inflicted" gunshot to the head before he could be arrested or questioned by authorities has led to speculation that there is more to the official narrative of the crime than meets the eye.

So, how are you enjoying the "New Normal" so far? Is it paranoid and totalitarian enough for you? If not ... well, hold on, because it's just getting started. There is plenty more totalitarianism and paranoia still to come.

I know, it feels like forever already, but, in fact, it has only been a few months since GloboCap started rolling out the new official narrative. We're still in the early stages of it. The phase we're in now is kind of like where we were back in February of 2002, a few months after the 9/11 attacks, when everyone was still in shock, the Patriot Act was just a few months old, and the Department of Homeland Security hadn't even been created yet.

You remember how it was back then, when GloboCap was introducing the official "War on Terror" narrative, don't you?

OK, maybe you do and maybe you don't. Maybe you're too young to remember, or you were caught up in the excitement of the moment and weren't paying attention to the details. But some of us remember it clearly. We remember watching (and futilely protesting) as GloboCap prepared to invade, destabilize, and restructure the entire Middle East, as countries throughout the global capitalist empire implemented "emergency security measures" (which, 18 years later, are still in effect), as the corporate media bombarded us with official propaganda, jacked up The Fear, and otherwise prepared us for the previous "New Normal" ... some of us remember all that clearly.

Personally, I remember listening to a liberal academic on NPR calmly speculating that, just hypothetically, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we might need to sacrifice our principles a bit, and torture some people, to "keep America safe." I recounted this to other Americans at the time, among my many other concerns about where the post-9/11 mass hysteria was heading. Most of them told me I was just being paranoid, or that they didn't really care, because we needed to do whatever was "necessary" to protect Americans, and, in any event, "the terrorists deserved it." Shortly thereafter, I started making plans to get the hell out of the country.

US President Donald Trump has vowed not to order Americans to wear masks to contain the spread of coronavirus.

His comments came after the country's top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, urged state and local leaders to be "as forceful as possible" in getting people to wear masks.

Wearing face coverings, Dr Fauci added, is "really important" and "we should be using them, everyone".

The wearing of face coverings has become highly politicised in the US.

The majority of state governors have now ordered that the wearing of masks outdoors be mandatory, rather than a personal choice. Among them are Republican governors, including Kay Ivey of Alabama, who have reversed their initial opposition to the mandates.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said Sunday that he expects criminal charges to come out of U.S. Attorney John Durham's investigation into the origins of the FBI's counterintelligence Russia probe.

Meadows, who replaced Mick Mulvaney as President Donald Trump's chief of staff in March, said during an appearance on Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures," that based on what he'd seen, he expects federal prosecutor Durham will file criminal charges against people involved in the investigation into supposed Trump-Russia collusion that was said to have swayed the 2016 election.

The former House representative sat on the House Oversight Committee throughout former special counsel and former FBI head Robert Mueller's probe into the alleged collusion. Mueller ultimately didn't establish any such collusion.

"I think the American people expect indictments," Meadows told host Maria Bartiromo. "I know I expect indictments based on the evidence I've seen. [Senate Judiciary chairman] Lindsey Graham did a good job in getting that out. We know that they not only knew that there wasn't a case, but they continued to investigate and spy — and yes, I use the word 'spy' — on Trump campaign officials, and actually even doing things when this president was sworn in and after that, and doing it in an inappropriate manner."

On July 15, Luis Fernando Camacho, leader of the violent coup against Bolivian president Evo Morales and current candidate for the Bolivian presidency, issued a desperate appeal to the Organization of American States.

According to a poll done by Centro Estratégico Latinoamericano de Geopolítica, which was released on July 7, Camacho is polling at nine per cent. Meanwhile MAS (Movement for Socialism) candidate Luis Arce, Bolivia's finance minister from 2006 until the coup, is polling at 42 per cent. To surpass Arce's lead in the polls, Carlos Mesa, the unelected coup president Jeanine Anez, and Camacho would have to consolidate their votes, while two would need to drop out of the race.