© Unknown
Anybody who pays critical attention to outputs of corporate news media will be aware that the idea of a free press, while lauded in principle, is scarcely
actualised in practice. A further worrying development is that the very principles animating the idea are apparently being called into question by an organisation that purports to defend them.
Protecting press freedom is supposedly the purpose of
Reporters Without Borders (RSF). There has been concern for some time that RSF serves this mission in a selective and politicised fashion.[1] In line with its funding stream, it directs particularly critical attention to regimes that Washington disapproves of, while giving allies an easier ride.[2]
© Jonathan Ernst / ReutersU.S. Vice President Joe Biden (L) shakes hands with Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko before their bilateral meeting at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington March 31, 2016
Sometimes the obvious just has to be pointed out. Today we covered an
SVPressa story. Cutting to the chase, the gist of it was this:
"What we see is Russian special services are now going inside the country. Our opponents expect that power in Kiev can be changed from within by bribery, and such work is taking place in preparation for elections in 2019", - Kononenko stated. Bribery, we're pretty sure, is taking place all on its own without the requirement for "Russia's work."
© mundoaguaysaneamiento.net/SalonMichael Flynn and Robert Mueller
The mainstream narrative is that squeaky-clean special prosecutor Robert Mueller is going to indict Trump's one-time foreign policy advisor Michael Flynn because Flynn is in the pocket of the Russians and the Turks.
But the truth might be
totally different ...
After all, Flynn's meeting with Russian diplomats was
completely normal, according to a prominent U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union.
So why is Mueller
really going after Flynn?
When Flynn was head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and afterwards, he blew the whistle on the U.S. and its allies willfully allowing Islamic terrorists to flourish in Syria.That didn't ingratiate him with the Deep State ...
Comment: Further reading:
The news about the wars the U.S. is waging all over the world is unreliable. The same statements of progress are repeated year after year. The official numbers, be they of civilian casualties or deployed troops, are mere lies. Every news presentation should be engraved with a warning: "Assertions and numbers are not what they appear." Consider, for example, the various "turned corner" statements officials have made about Afghanistan.
On October 5 2017 the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani
confirmed to the BBC that Afghanistan has "turned the corner":
... when I ask whether he is saying Afghan forces have turned the corner in the fight against the Taliban, there is no hesitation: "Yes," he says.
On October 24 the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan General John Nicholson
agreed with President Ghani:
"With the mounting military, diplomatic, and social pressure that is building - that we all are collectively committed to sustaining over the coming years - the enemy will have no choice but to reconcile. I believe, as President Ghani says, 'we have turned the corner,'" he concluded.
Comment: What a
true turning of the corner in Afghanistan looks like:
RTTue, 28 Nov 2017 15:11 UTC
© US President Donald Trump Global Look Press
US President Donald Trump said he does not envision reaching a deal with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown, citing their stance on immigration and crime.
Taking to Twitter on Tuesday, Trump said that he would be meeting with Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) later in the day, but that he was not optimistic about a deal to avoid a government shutdown.
"Meeting with 'Chuck and Nancy' today about keeping government open and working. Problem is they want illegal immigrants flooding into our Country unchecked, are weak on Crime and want to substantially RAISE Taxes. I don't see a deal!" he wrote.
© Clodagh Kilcoyne/ReutersFrances Fitzgerald told the Irish cabinet she would leave office to avert a snap Christmas election.
Ireland's prime minister, Leo Varadkar, will go into next month's crucial European summit on Brexit without the fear of a general election at home after one of his key allies resigned from the cabinet hours before a parliamentary vote that would have led to the collapse of the government in Dublin.
Varadkar's deputy, Frances Fitzgerald, offered her resignation at lunchtime on Tuesday, thus averting a vote of no confidence that could have brought down the minority Fine Gael-led coalition.
Fitzgerald's decision to stand down
brought Ireland back from the brink of a pre-Christmas election and gives Varadkar a freer hand to enter critical negotiations on Brexit, the Irish border and the future relationship between the EU and the UK at the summit in December.
Comment: This is the key part in the above article:
The confidence and supply deal that props up Varadkar and the Fine Gael/Independent Alliance is similar to the one the Democratic Unionist party operates to keep Theresa May in Downing Street.
In fact, it's even stranger than that: the current government in the Republic of Ireland is held together by an alliance that is officially 'un-allied'. Fianna Fail are nominally 'in opposition', but are effectively co-governing with Fine Gael - as we see above, by calling the shots over who gets fired when.
These two parties have historically been 'the big two' in the Republic - they originate from the two sides in Ireland's civil war a century ago - so they absolutely cannot be seen to officially co-govern as such a stance would amount to tacit acknowledgement that the increasingly popular (in both Northern Ireland and the Republic) Sinn Fein party is now the real opposition party.
The Dublin establishment is constantly conspiring to keep the nationalist, all-Ireland Sinn Fein party out of power, even as a minority party in a coalition government. Sinn Fein is of course long used to dirty tricks with respect to its involvement in government in Northern Ireland, where the London and Belfast establishments constantly undermine its role.
It's interesting that, at a time when 'the center cannot hold' in both London and Dublin, the Irish populist cause for reunification of the country is stronger than ever.
The EU, of course, is cynically exploiting the Irish National Question to put pressure on London, but 'Brexit' for Ireland has really been, and really always will be, about 'Exiting from Britain'. Of course, few people explicitly say that in Ireland because "
we're all friends with the Brits now", but The National Question is what lies behind Ireland's current political crisis just as much as the UK's current political crisis (with respect to Scotland and, of course, Northern Ireland).
As is happening everywhere across the West these days, 'unresolved' or 'artificial' historical fault-lines are surfacing and forcing hitherto nominally 'democratic' regimes to confront the fact that they are - in substance - 'Athenian' democracies of liberal-metropolitan elites supporting a degenerate 'Western World Order', not regimes that actually reflect the will of (most) people in the nations they rule over.
© AFPSaida Ahmad Baghili, an 18-year-old Yemeni woman pictured in October, is a victim of malnutrition
Last month, Saudi Arabia expanded its repertoire of ludicrous antics by
bestowing citizenship upon a robot named Sophia - a move presumably meant to augment the veneer of modernity and progress the tyrannical Saudi authorities strive to maintain.
In a recent
interview with the
Khaleej Times, an Emirati newspaper, Sophia speculated that "it might be possible to make [robots] more ethical than humans" and that there are only two options for the future: "Either creativity will rain on us, inventing machines spiralling into transcendental super intelligence[,] or civilisation collapses."
RTTue, 28 Nov 2017 21:04 UTC
© Faisal Al Nasser / ReutersSaudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
The foreign minister of Qatar, who also serves as the country's deputy prime minister, has lashed out at Riyadh, saying the "big" neighbor is "bullying" smaller countries, such as Qatar and now Lebanon, and destabilizes the entire region.
"This is a big country bullying a small country - we have seen it in Qatar and now we are seeing it repeated in Lebanon," Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani said this week during a conference in London, as
quoted by the
Independent. Al-Thani made similar remarks in Washington earlier this month. Speaking to the media there, the Qatari official said Saudi Arabia is "bullying small countries into submission," Press TV
reported.
Saying that Riyadh has exercised aggressive scenarios on several states in the Middle East, with its latest target being Lebanon, al-Thani added that such a policy poses a threat to the entire region.
"There are enough crises on the table," he pointed out, particularly mentioning Yemen, Iraq and Syria. If those are not solved, "we are going to face a new generation of extremism," he warned.
Comment: This is the same kind of behavior exhibited by Israel in the Middle East. The US Empire employs it as well around the globe. Since Israel and Saudi Arabia are essentially US vassal states, it makes sense that they would behave as their master does.
RTTue, 28 Nov 2017 20:47 UTC
© Stephen Kalin / ReutersUS soldiers gather at a military base north of Mosul, Iraq
US deployments in some states are up to several times higher than numbers quoted by military officials, the latest report from the Defense Manpower Data Center shows, indicating that the Pentagon is failing in its promise to provide more transparent troop data.
According to the quarterly report produced by the DMDC, which is itself a part of the US Department of Defense, on September 30 there were a total of 25,910 US troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, compared to the 14,765 declared by the Pentagon.
In Iraq, there were 8,992 troops, not 5,262, in Afghanistan 15,298 troops, not 14,000, and in Syria the deployment appears to be three times bigger - 1,720 against the latest official level of 503.
The data forced the Pentagon to acknowledge on Monday something that is widely known by military and Washington media, but is barely understood by the American public - that the US overseas mission figures regularly quoted by US officials are "not meant to represent an accurate accounting of troops deployed to any particular region."
Comment: Middle East analyst Ali Rizk makes
a very good point when he says that the real reason that the Pentagon fudges the real number of troops stationed abroad is to avoid criticism from a war-weary American public. The Deep State clearly does not care if the opinion of the majority of Americans on how their government, which is funded by them, is operated.
© AFP / Justin Sullivan
Since its financial meltdown in 2008 and unprecedented bailout by the U.S. taxpayer, Citigroup (parent of Citibank) has been repeatedly charged by its Federal regulators with odious crimes against its pooled mortgage investors, credit card and banking customers, student loan borrowers, and for its foreclosure frauds. It has paid billions of dollars in fines for its past misdeeds while new charges pile up. In 2015, it became an admitted felon for participating in rigging foreign exchange markets.
In short, Citigroup is a lawbreaking recidivist. If it were a mere human, it would be serving a long prison term. Instead, its fines for charges of egregious acts are getting smaller, not larger.Last Tuesday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which typically has a good track record of holding the big Wall Street banks accountable for their misdeeds, imposed an unusually feeble fine against Citibank for a
litany of abuses against student loan borrowers. The CFPB ordered Citi to pay $3.75 million in restitution and to pay a $2.75 million fine. When combined with the fact that the CFPB did not make Citibank admit to the charges, this amounts to a slap on the wrist to a serial lawbreaker. (See Citigroup/Citibank's history of misconduct below.)
Comment: