The Supreme Court of California has ruled that a suspect's silence can be used as evidence of guilt during trial.

The 4-3 decision reversed an appellate court's ruling and reinstated a man's felony conviction for a 2007 vehicular manslaughter case. That case involved a motorist named Richard Tom, who broadsided another vehicle while speeding in Redwood City.

Following the collision, Mr. Tom chose to remain silent when confronted by police. While "the right to remain silent" is traced back to the Fifth Amendment and has received longstanding legal acceptance, courts have recently moved to curtail that right by claiming that a suspect must verbally invoke a condition of silence for the legal protection to apply, prior to the reading of the Miranda warning.

In other words, the burden rests on the suspect to indicate when he or she is exercising such a right. For example, a suspect must announce, "I'm going to remain silent now," or "I am hereby invoking the Fifth Amendment" during police questioning for legal protection of silence to apply. Without specifically stating an intention to remain silent, prosecutors may portray the defendant as guilty for simply saying nothing.

This is of course ridiculous. The yahoos are running roughshod on everything a normal healthy human being could or would hold sacred. The right to silence should be absolute.


That's what happened in Mr. Tom's manslaughter trial. Since he did not specifically invoke the Fifth Amendment, prosecutors exploited his silence by telling jurors that the defendant callously refused to ask about the injured parties; attempting to portray the behavior of a reckless and remorseless killer instead of a person exercising his rights (and standard legal advice).

At his 2008 trial, Mr. Tom was convicted of gross vehicular manslaughter. A San Mateo Superior Court judge said that Tom's apparent lack of concern was relevant to the issue of criminal recklessness.

Mr. Tom went on to appeal the decision and in March 2012, California's Third District Court of Appeal ruled that the testimony violated Mr. Tom's Fifth Amendment rights because "post-arrest, pre-Miranda silence" could not be used as substantive evidence of guilt in a trial.

However, the appeal was overturned in August 2014 when the California Supreme Court issued its decision in The People v. Tom.

Islamist forces are fighting their way into western Syria from bases further east, bringing forward the prospect of US military intervention to stop their advance. If Isis, which styles itself Islamic State, threatens to take all or part of Aleppo, establishing complete dominance over the anti-government rebels, the US may be compelled to act publicly or secretly in concert with President Bashar al-Assad, whom it has been trying to displace.

The US has already covertly assisted the Assad government by passing on intelligence about the exact location of jihadi leaders through the BND, the German intelligence service, a source has told The Independent. This may explain why Syrian aircraft and artillery have been able on occasion to target accurately rebel commanders and headquarters.

Syrian army troops are engaged in a fierce battle to hold Tabqa airbase in Raqqa province, the fall of which would open the way to Hama, Syria's fourth-largest city.

Further north, Isis has captured crucial territory that brings it close to cutting rebel supply lines between Aleppo and the Turkish border. The caliphate declared by Isis on 29 June already covers the eastern third of Syria in addition to a quarter of Iraq. It stretches from Jalawla, a town 20 miles from Iran, which the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga are trying to recapture, to towns 30 miles north of Aleppo.

The question of possible US military action in Syria, such as air strikes, jumped to the top of political agenda on Thursday when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, General Martin Dempsey, said: "Can they [Isis] be defeated without addressing that part of the organisation that resides in Syria? The answer is no."

Gilad Atzmon Interviewed by Alimuddin Usmani for Egalite Reconciliation

Alimuddin Usmani: As I write to you, the ceasefire has, once again, collapsed between Israel and Palestinian fighters in Gaza. In its attempt to kill Hamas armed wing leader, Mohammed Deif, the IDF failed, and instead killed his wife and infant son.

It is increasingly clear that Israel is stuck in this conflict and doesn't know how to end it. You were the first to say that Israel was "desperate for a break in the violence."


How were you able to predict this outcome when most analysts failed?

Gilad Atzmon: Unlike the Jewish 'progressive' commentators who have dominated the Palestinian solidarity discourse for about two decades, I am a reactionary essentialist. I believe that events in history and politics become meaningful only when analyzed within an rigorous essentialist context. Righteous progressive Jews suffocate the discourse with tons of anecdotal details in order to conceal the Jewish ideology at the core of the crimes committed by the Jewish State and the Lobby. I firmly believe that every Israeli and Jewish collective political activity from AIPAC to Mondoweiss can be understood within the framework of Jewish culture, ideology and heritage.

By now I am not a lone voice anymore. Many scholars and commentators detect the obvious spin at the heart of the Jewish progressive discourse. The Jewish State openly proclaims its commitment to Jewishness, Jewish values and heritage, making the Jewish progressive attempt to prevent an understanding of Israeli crime and Jewish lobbying within the context of Jewish culture, ideology and heritage almost amusing.

As an essentialist it is clear that Israeli barbarism, the Nakba, the Holodomor, the Zio-driven neocon movement and even the crimes committed by the Yiddish speaking International Brigade at the time of the Spanish Civil war must be examined in the light of Jewish goy hatred, Jewish supremacy and the unique sense of Jewish righteousness inextricably intertwined with Jewish self-love.

The horrific pictures of the beheading of American reporter James Foley, the images of executions of alleged collaborators in Gaza and the bullet-ridden bodies left behind in Iraq by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant are the end of a story, not the beginning. They are the result of years, at times decades, of the random violence, brutal repression and collective humiliation the United States has inflicted on others.

Our terror is delivered to the wretched of the earth with industrial weapons. It is, to us, invisible. We do not stand over the decapitated and eviscerated bodies left behind on city and village streets by our missiles, drones and fighter jets. We do not listen to the wails and shrieks of parents embracing the shattered bodies of their children. We do not see the survivors of air attacks bury their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters. We are not conscious of the long night of collective humiliation, repression and powerlessness that characterizes existence in Israel's occupied territories, Iraq and Afghanistan. We do not see the boiling anger that war and injustice turn into a caldron of hate over time. We are not aware of the very natural lust for revenge against those who carry out or symbolize this oppression. We see only the final pyrotechnics of terror, the shocking moment when the rage erupts into an inchoate fury and the murder of innocents. And, willfully ignorant, we do not understand our own complicity. We self-righteously condemn the killers as subhuman savages who deserve more of the violence that created them. This is a recipe for endless terror.

Chaim Engel, who took part in the uprising at the Nazis' Sobibor death camp in Poland, described what happened when he obtained a knife and confronted a German in an office. The act he carried out was no less brutal than the beheading of Foley or the executions in Gaza. Isolated from the reality he and the other inmates endured at the camp, his act was savage. Set against the backdrop of the extermination camp it was understandable.

The genocidal war that the apartheid Israeli state has waged on the Gaza Strip has generated an unprecedented wave of international public condemnation and international solidarity with the Palestinians. Graphic images of unimaginable destruction and heaps of dismembered and shattered bodies of innocent children flooded social media. Circulating in the context of the recent history of a series of Israeli military incursions into Gaza (first in 2008 and again in 2012), these images prompted hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets around the world to demand an end to the Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

The engineers of Zionist hasbara (the Hebrew word for "propaganda") pushed back, redoubling their efforts in well-orchestrated PR campaigns that tried to reframe their genocidal war with typically hackneyed talking points. Israeli PR pressure even forced some celebrities, who had posted on Twitter both against the senseless genocide in Gaza and for recognising the humanity of Palestinians, to retract their Twitter posts.

However, the hasbara apparatus of the Israeli apartheid state failed to concoct myths and rhetorical games creative enough to whitewash their disproportionate use of force and war crimes. Their psyops tactics were largely ineffective, even in Tel Aviv, pushing them to desperate measures, including censoring the media.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) shot down an Israeli spy drone over the Iranian sky before the unmanned Israeli aerial drone reached Iran's Natanz civilian nuclear energy facility.

Is Israel trying to ignite a regional war that could quickly escalate into a broader nuclear world war involving the US, the United Kingdom, Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, Georgia, France, Germany, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan, India and China as different conflicts converge?


What does the United Nations and international community have to say about this reckless and dangerous Israeli move that jeopardizes world peace and international security?

Guam, an Island nation of 160,000 people has been a victim of Imperialism dating back to the 16th century. More than 65,000 of the population are called the Chamorro people, an indigenous population originally from the Mariana Islands. Many of the Chamorro people also live in the Northern Mariana Islands, another U.S. territory. Guam's fate with imperial powers from the West began with Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, who represented the King of Spain, landed in Guam around 1521. Spanish General Miguel López de Legazpi claimed Guam for the Spanish throne in 1565. It eventually resulted in the Spanish-Chamorro War which lasted 25 years. Then it was followed by Japan's brutal occupation during World War II. U.S. won a decisive battle against Japanese forces known as the Battle of Guam in 1944. However, the U.S. still remains in Guam. They never left.

Over the years, the U.S. Military-Industrial complex has become the Island's main economic engine besides the tourism industry. With geopolitical developments in recent years, the U.S. is now in the stage of "rebalancing" its Pacific forces to prepare for a possible future war with China and North Korea.

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is being touted as the newest "threat" to the American homeland: hysterics have pointed to Chicago as the locus of their interest, and we are told by everyone from the President on down that if we don't attack them - i.e. go back into Iraq (and even venture into Syria) to root them out - they'll soon show up on American shores.

How is this supposed to work? Well, you see, that monster who beheaded James Foley had a British accent, and there are reports of more than a few Brits (and Americans) traveling to Syria to fight on behalf of ISIS. So these jihadi "internationalists" could always just fly back to either Britain or the US, where another 9/11 would shortly be in the works.

Let's put aside the FBI statement that, while Americans abroad may be in some unspecified degree of danger, ISIS represents "no credible threat" to the continental United States. If we take the ISIS-threatens-us-at-home war propaganda seriously we have to believe Western law enforcement agencies, with all the tools at their command - including near total surveillance of online and telephonic communications worldwide - have no idea what dubious characters have traveled to Syria via, say, New York or London, and would in any case be powerless to prevent their return.

In short, we have to invade yet another country (or two) because our own post-9/11 security arrangements are virtually nonexistent - in spite of having spent untold billions on building them up.

Can that really be true?

If we step back from the hysteria generated by the beheading of US journalist James Foley, what's clear is that this new bogeyman is the creation of the United States and its allies in the region.

ISIS didn't just arise out of the earth like some Islamist variation on the fabled Myrmidons: they needed money, weapons, logistics, propaganda facilities, and international connections to reach the relatively high level of organization and lethality they seem to have achieved in such a short period of time. Where did they get these assets?

At least 20 Palestinians wounded as Israeli rockets destroy much of one of Gaza's tallest buildings.

At least five Israeli air strikes have destroyed much of one of Gaza's tallest apartment and office buildings, setting off huge explosions and wounding 20 people, Palestinian health officials said.

Israel had no immediate comment on Tuesday's attack.

Seventy families lived in the building, which also housed offices and a shopping complex.

Al Jazeera's Jane Ferguson, reporting from Gaza, said Israel fired three non-explosive warning missiles before the air strikes.


"The 13-storey building, contained 11 floors of residential units and two floors of commercial offices and a coffee shop. those floors also host the offices of the Ministry of Public Works and offices belonging to the political wing of Hamas movement," Ferguson said.


Since a truce between Israel and armed factions in Gaza collapsed, the death toll in the Palestinian enclave has steadily risen, with 13 more Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes since Sunday night.

On Monday, a 17-year-old boy was killed and about 25 people were wounded in a strike on a Gaza City mosque.

The Gaza religious affairs ministry said Israeli fire during the day destroyed four more mosques, raising to 71 the number of mosques destroyed over the past seven weeks.

Abdullah Mortaja, 27, a freelance journalist who previously worked for Hamas's Al-Aqsa TV, was among the latest casualties. Medical officials said he was hit by tank fire in the war-battered Shejaiya area of eastern Gaza City.

Two people wounded previously died of their injuries on Monday, raising the Gaza death toll since the July 8 start of the campaign to 2,135 with 10,915 wounded, according to the emergency services.

On the Israeli side, 68 people have been killed, the vast majority were soldiers.

If Argentina were in a high-stakes chess match, the country's actions this week would be the equivalent of flipping over all the pieces on the board. - David Dayen, Fiscal Times, August 22, 2014

Argentina is playing hardball with the vulture funds, which have been trying to force it into an involuntary bankruptcy. The vultures are demanding what amounts to a 600% return on bonds bought for pennies on the dollar, defeating a 2005 settlement in which 92% of creditors agreed to accept a 70% haircut on their bonds. A US court has backed the vulture funds; but last week, Argentina sidestepped its jurisdiction by transferring the trustee for payment from Bank of New York Mellon to its own central bank. That play, if approved by the Argentine Congress, will allow the country to continue making payments under its 2005 settlement, avoiding default on the majority of its bonds.

Argentina is already foreclosed from international capital markets, so it doesn't have much to lose by thwarting the US court system. Similar bold moves by Ecuador and Iceland have left those countries in substantially better shape than Greece, which went along with the agendas of the international financiers.

The upside for Argentina was captured by President Fernandez in a nationwide speech on August 19th. Struggling to hold back tears, according to Bloomberg, she said:

When it comes to the sovereignty of our country and the conviction that we can no longer be extorted and that we can't become burdened with debt again, we are emerging as Argentines.

. . . If I signed what they're trying to make me sign, the bomb wouldn't explode now but rather there would surely be applause, marvelous headlines in the papers. But we would enter into the infernal cycle of debt which we've been subject to for so long.