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Thu, 21 Oct 2021
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Rupert Murdoch is a "psychopath like Stalin" says former newspaper magnate Conrad Black

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Murdoch, psychopath?
Former newspaper tycoon Conrad Black attacked Rupert Murdoch on Tuesday, calling the News Corporation chairman a "psychopath" and comparing him to Joseph Stalin.

The former owner of the Daily Telegraph in Britain and the Chicago Sun-Times, who spent 37 months in a U.S. prison for fraud, said the media magnate - a longtime business adversary - was an "astonishingly cold man."

"He's a psychopath ... like Stalin, except that he doesn't kill people," Black told the Telegraph. "I'm not suggesting he's a homicidal psychopath - he just severs people out of his life like that. I have great admiration for what he's achieved but he's a terrible man."

Canadian-born Black, who served in the House of Lords and became a British national in 1999, was in the United Kingdom promoting his memoirs on the BBC satirical show, "Have I Got News For You."

That wasn't his first "psychopath" attack on Murdoch during his book tour.

War Whore

Israeli airstrikes kill 4, injure 8 in Gaza

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© Reuters/Suhaib Salem
The daughter of a Hamas gunman Ismail al-Tille sits near her crying mother (back, 2nd R) during al-Tille's funeral in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip October 24, 2012.
Gaza City - Multiple Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip have killed four people and injured eight since late Tuesday, medics said.

Israeli warplanes struck a target in Rafah early Wednesday, killing Muhammad al-Sheikh, 32, a member of the PRC's military wing the Nasser Saladin Brigades.

One other person was also injured in the attack.

Israel's army said it was targeting a launching squad which moments earlier had fired a rocket at southern Israel.

At midnight, an airstrike on Beit Lahiya in Gaza's north killed Ismail al-Tille, a member of Hamas' al-Qassam Brigades, and injured three others, Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra told Ma'an.

Another overnight strike in an area northwest of Beit Lahiya killed Loai Abed al-Hakeen Abu Jarad, 24, and Yousef Abu Jalhoum, al-Qidra said. One other person was seriously wounded.

Israel's army said it targeted a squad in the northern Gaza Strip "during its final preparations to fire rockets towards southern Israel."

Bad Guys

Starving people and targeting them with biological weapons is as American as cherry pie

street in Gaza
© Associated Press
Last week the Associated Press reported:
Israeli authorities blockading the Gaza Strip in 2008 went so far as to calculate how many calories would be needed to avert a humanitarian disaster in the impoverished Palestinian territory, according to a newly declassified military document... [Critics said] the document was new evidence that Israel used food as a pressure tactic to try to force Gaza's Hamas rulers from power...
What bothers me are the number of parallels to this right here, throughout US history. We've used chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare against our alleged enemies, have had concentration camps for far more people than the Japanese; starved our enemies with "sanctions" while denying them medical care at the same time; and much worse -back well into the First World War and the Civil War. But people don't like to remember these things, whether they're about Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, or Japan or against the enemies in our midst, like the Red Man - and god only knows how many others. Starving people through sanctions or sieges is, as Allen says, just a primitive form of biological warfare.

In its early years, our beloved, exceptional Republic, used germ warfare by deliberately giving small-pox infected blankets to groups of Native Americans, often wiping out entire tribes - and then grabbing their land. The concentration camps we devised for them still exist in places like the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota, the Tohono O'odham desert outside Ajo, Arizona, or the dustlands of Oklahoma. Go back to the Crusades for examples of enforced starvation and creative torture such as the art of burning living people at the stake in the name of religion.

Vader

"Terrorist" manufacturing business: Informant paid by NYPD to bait Muslims

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© AP Photo/Uncredited
A paid informant for the New York Police Department's intelligence unit was under orders to "bait" Muslims into saying inflammatory things as he lived a double life, snapping pictures inside mosques and collecting the names of innocent people attending study groups on Islam, he told The Associated Press.

Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bangladeshi descent who has now denounced his work as an informant, said police told him to embrace a strategy called "create and capture." He said it involved creating a conversation about jihad or terrorism, then capturing the response to send to the NYPD. For his work, he earned as much as $1,000 a month and goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests.

"We need you to pretend to be one of them," Rahman recalled the police telling him. "It's street theater."

Comment: When East Germany and Russia were eventually dismantled, Communism, ourtraditional enemy throughout the Cold War era, shed its adversarial face. This, of course, was bad news for the Military-Industrial-Complex, whose existence hinges on trillion-dollar profits derived from feeding and sustaining a perpetual war stance. A new 'enemy' was desperately needed to supplant the Russian bear. Voila! --- 9/11 was launched and the "Muslim terrorist" menace was born. The above article is an example of how this myth is kept alive, and how our masters have willingly managed to marginalize and vilify, en masse, a major world religion.


Star of David

Israeli poll finds majority in favour of 'apartheid' policies

More than two-thirds of Israeli Jews say that 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank should be denied the right to vote if the area was annexed by
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Israeli soldiers walk past a settlement in the West Bank. Almost six in 10 Israeli Jews said the country already practised apartheid
Israel, in effect endorsing an apartheid state, according to an opinion poll reported in Haaretz.

Three out of four are in favour of segregated roads for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, and 58% believe Israel already practises apartheid against Palestinians, the poll found.

A third want Arab citizens within Israel to be banned from voting in elections to the country's parliament. Almost six out of 10 say Jews should be given preference to Arabs in government jobs, 49% say Jewish citizens should be treated better than Arabs, 42% would not want to live in the same building as Arabs and the same number do not want their children going to school with Arabs.

A commentary by Gideon Levy, which accompanied the results of the poll, described the findings as disturbing. "Israelis themselves ... are openly, shamelessly and guiltlessly defining themselves as nationalistic racists," he wrote.

Eye 1

Joe Klein's psychopathic defense of drone killings of children

Drone protest Pakistan
© Mk Chaudhry/EPA
People burn a mock US flag during a protest against US drone attacks in Multan, Pakistan.
Reflecting the Obama legacy and US culture, the Time columnist says: "the bottom line is: 'whose 4-year-olds get killed?'"

On MSNBC's Morning Joe program this morning, which focused on Monday's night presidential debate, the former right-wing Congressman and current host Joe Scarborough voiced an eloquent and impassioned critique of President Obama's ongoing killing of innocent people in the Muslim world using drones. In response, Time Magazine's Joe Klein, a stalwart Obama supporter, offered one of the most nakedly sociopathic defenses yet heard of these killings. This exchange, which begins at roughly the 7:00 minute mark on the video embedded below, is quite revealing in several respects.

Stop

Not up for discussion: #StopNDAA - What Obama and Romney didn't touch on during the debates

Obama Romney
© AFP Photo / Saul Loeb
There’s so much to laugh about?
The defense bill that lets the government indefinitely detain any US citizen without charge or trial wasn't mentioned once during the three presidential debates, but that didn't stop activists from sounding off: #StopNDAA went worldwide Monday night.

A campaign aimed at drawing awareness to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 and a draconian provision that provides the government the power to lock-up any person on mere suspicion of terrorist ties succeeded during Monday's third and final presidential debate. "#StopNDAA" was among the most popular hashtags included in messages sent over Twitter Monday night, at one point entering the list of top worldwide trends.

USA

Two-party dictatorship: CIA officer John Kiriakou, prosecuted by Obama administration, sentenced to 30 months in prison for revealing CIA torture program during Bush administration

John Kiriakou
© YouTube / Healingitnow1
Former Central Intelligence Agency officer John Kiriakou.
Former CIA agent John Kiriakou pleaded guilty Tuesday morning to crimes related to blowing the whistle on the US government's torture of suspected terrorists and was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Kiriakou, 48, agreed to admit to one count of disclosing information identifying a covert agent early Tuesday, just hours after his attorney entered a change of plea in an Alexandria, Virginia courtroom outside of Washington, DC.

Kiriakou was originally charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 after he went public with the Central Intelligence Agency's use of waterboarding on captured insurgents in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. On Monday morning, though, legal counsel for the accused former CIA agent informed the court that Kiriakou was willing to plead guilty to a lesser crime.

Initially, Kiriakou pleaded not guilty to the charge that he had outted two intelligence agents directly tied to the drowning-simulation method by going to the press with their identities.

Comment: Rest assured that if the same thing were to happen in Russia, for example, and a former intelligence officer were jailed for revealing state torture under Putin, the White House would be up in arms, demanding their immediate release in the name of 'human rights'. Hypocrisy abounds.


War Whore

Supporting the Slaughter: U.S. blocks Russia's draft statement in UN on peaceful resolution of Bani Walid violence, Libya

UN Security Council
© AFP Photo / Emmanuel Dunand
The UN Security Council
The United States has blocked a draft statement, proposed by Russia, on the resolution of violence in the Libyan town of Bani Walid, which has been under siege for weeks. The statement called for a peaceful solution to the conflict.

Russia's envoy to the UN, Vitaly Churkin said the move "can't be serious," reminding the American delegation of the deadly attack in Benghazi that claimed the lives of four US diplomats in September.

"Blocking a draft statement that called to solve the country's political problems without violence is very strange," Churkin said. "This is a case when it is difficult to explain the US delegation's actions in rational terms."

Gold Bar

Gold price bounces off $1720 as Germany wants its gold back because it doesn't trust the NY Fed

Back in mid September when the gold price was trying to break above $1777 and hold there, something that it attempted several times but eventually failed, we cited the $1720 level as a place where any significant pull-back should be supported:
Should $1770 not hold decent support can be found at the $1720 level.
And that is exactly what has happened. On friday, and as usual just after the jobs report in the States, we got another smash in gold taking the price all the way down to $1720.

This morning there was initial selling but the gold price has turned around and is now holding around the $1727 area.
Gold price chart
© Unknown
As you can see on the chart above that $1720 area is also right at the 50 day moving average.