Puppet MastersS

Pirates

France next on the economic hit list? 'Austerity looms large for France'

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The 'world economy' in a nutshell
Despite the French president's campaign pledge to avoid implementing harsh austerity measures, a report says his government is in dire need of cutting jobs and implementing economic reforms to achieve a European deficit target.

According to a report by France's national audit office on Monday, Paris needs to come up with EUR 33 billion (USD 42 billi
on) in savings next year to meet its European deficit goal of three percent of gross domestic product.

This comes as auditors have already noted in an in-depth review that the state requires EUR 6-10 billion (USD 7.6-12.6 billion) in budget savings in 2012 to reach the deficit target of 4.4 percent of the GDP.

Officials have warned that "2013 is a crucial year" as France "is in the danger zone in terms of its economy and public finances."

Star of David

Flashback to Jewish Ghettos in Poland under the Nazis: Hebron border police officer kicks a Palestinian child

A B'Tselem video volunteer documented an Israeli Border Police officer kicking a Palestinian child while another officer held the boy. The incident took place on the 29th of June 2012 near the Tomb of the Patriarchs, in Hebron's H2 area. The child, Abd a-Rahman Burqan, who is nine years old, lives with his family near the parking lot used by Israeli vehicles outside of the Tomb. The video shows a Border Police officer ambushing a child from around the corner. As the child walks past, the officer grabs him by the arm and says: "why are you making trouble?" The officer then drags the child, who is screaming, on the ground for a few seconds. A second Border Police officer then appears and kicks the boy. The officer then lets the child go. He runs away, and the two Border Police officers leave the scene as well. The incident was filmed by a volunteer in B'Tselem's camera distribution project, from inside his home. The volunteer told B'Tselem that he began to film when he noticed the officer hiding behind the wall. B'Tselem will refer the case to the Justice Ministry's Department for the Investigation of Police.


Comment: A snapshot of daily life for Palestinians under Israeli rule. The state of Israel treats Palestinians like the Nazis treated minorities and the whole world pretends it is normal and acceptable. But it should be obvious to any rational human being that what is acceptable in the Jewish state is not substantially different than what was acceptable in the Third Reich.

This Palestinian boy should count himself lucky though, he could just have easily been shot through the head by an Israeli soldier, who would have then been found innocent. In the totalitarian world he lives in, the world Zionists and psychopaths in power everywhere envisage for all humanity in the very near future, he will have to become very street-smart if he is to survive into adulthood.


USA

US Muffling Opposition Voice by Secretly Liquidating Dissidents: Analyst

9/11 truth
A US political analyst says despite Washington's claims to being a pioneer in promoting freedom of speech and human rights, the American government is actually disabling and even killing dissidents by inconspicuous means.

"The post-9/11 USA is no longer a beacon of human rights. As former President Jimmy Carter recently wrote in the New York Times, the United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights," Kevin Barrett wrote in an article published on the Press TV website.

Referring to recent remarks of President Barak Obama administration's information czar Cass Sunstein, who openly noted that the US government should "disable the purveyors of conspiracy theories," the analyst said one way to disable the purveyors of conspiracy theories is to terrorize them with death threats.

Laptop

Researches in Texas Use Spoofing to 'Hack' into a US Drone

drones
© unknownA US assassination drone.
American researchers at the University of Texas have successfully taken control of a flying drone by "hacking" into its GPS system, showing its weaknesses to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

During the experiment at the University of Texas at Austin's Radio navigation Laboratory, Professor Todd Humphreys and his team successfully hijacked a drone by "spoofing" its GPS receiver.

Humphreys says that Iran's success in bringing down a US spy drone last December gave him the idea of doing the experiment.

"So we decided to conduct the experiment, which showed us that it's possible to take control of a flying drone," Humphrey said.

Humphreys says that unlike military UAVs, which use an encrypted GPS system, most drones that will fly over the US will rely on civilian GPS, which is not encrypted and wide open to infiltration.

Stormtrooper

Video Shows Israeli Police Roughing Up Palestinian Child

Human rights group B'Tselem has uploaded a video showing Israeli police officers brutally attacking a Palestinian child, providing more evidence of Israeli violence against Palestinian children.


A volunteer shot the video near the Ibrahimi Mosque in the city of al-Khalil (Hebron) in the south of the occupied West Bank on June 29 for the B'Tselem human rights organization and the group uploaded the video on YouTube on Monday.

The video shows one border policeman apprehending a nine-year-old boy, identified as Abd al-Rahman Burkan, and knocking him to the ground while the child shouts.

Eagle

Allegations: Iranians Planned to Attack US, Israeli Targets in Kenya

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© ABC NewsThe frightening faces of Evil: Iranians who allegedly planned to attack US and Israeli targets in Kenya.
Two Iranian men who led officials to a 33 pound stash of explosives have now allegedly admitted they were plotting to attack, U.S., Israel, Saudi or British targets in Kenya, according to the Associated Press.

Ahmad Abolfathi Mohammad and Sayed Mansour Mousavi, who appeared in a Nairobi court last week, were arrested on June 19 in Nairobi and then led Kenyan authorities to 15 kilograms of explosives in Mombasa. They are believed to be members of the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force, say Kenyan officials.

Last fall, the U.S. disrupted an alleged plot by the Quds Force to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in Washington. Earlier this year, the Azerbaijani government arrested nearly two dozen Iranians who were allegedly plotting attacks on Western targets, and Thai police arrested a group of Iranian nationals after they allegedly attempted to flee a rented residence where bombs had detonated by flinging explosives at a taxi driver and police. Indian police have identified, but not apprehended, three Iranian suspects in the February bombing of an Israeli diplomatic vehicle. Israeli officials say a similar bomb was found on an Israeli vehicle in Tbilisi, Georgia but was defused.

Comment: US officials peddle false intel about Saudi Ambassador 'Plot'

Iran accuses Israel and US of assassinating scientist - "..security experts have suggested that they bore the hallmarks of operations carried out by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad."

There you have it folks, more smoke and mirrors to blame the Victim (Iran) of doing exactly what the West themselves are doing.


Cards

Corporate Media is Snookering You on Syria

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The hijacking of the Arab Spring has been aided by a media that airs propaganda on Syria.

For those versed in the black arts of propaganda, the hijacking of Arab Spring must be a beauteous thing to behold.

First came evidently spontaneous uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Then some up-and-comer in Washington or London or Paris had a brainstorm, a new twist on a very old idea: if you can't beat em, join em. Or even better, co-opt them, and use them for your own purposes.

The old way of getting rid of "inconvenient" leaders was so 20th-century - in the case of Saddam Hussein, a monstrous lie followed by a massive bloodletting on both sides. Tahrir Square suggested how to bring down a regime in a manner far less costly and far more palatable to the public: lots of medium-sized and little lies, war through Twitter, war through expendable proxies. Provide financial incentives to key figures to publicly renounce the old leadership, create a steady stream of heart-rending moments and photos and allegations, generate endless "human rights violations" by baiting the government into a military response, then very publicly petition international bodies for redress of humanitarian concerns.

Muammar Qaddafi, a fiercely independent, quasi-socialistic African transnationalist, was the guinea pig. A brilliant disinformation campaign isolated him, authentic domestic grievances were encouraged, and a whole war was conducted on behalf of the West with nary a Western soldier putting boots to ground.

Newspaper

Julian Assange's private life helped to conceal the real triumph of WikiLeaks

World View: Without the access to the US secret cables, the world would have no insight into how their governments behave

Assange
© UnknownGagged: A poster of Julian Assange at a demonstration outside London's Ecuadorian embassy on Friday
As Julian Assange evades arrest by taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge to escape extradition to Sweden, and possibly the US, British commentators have targeted him with shrill abuse. They almost froth with rage as they cite petty examples of his supposed gaucheness, egotism and appearance, as if these were criminal faults.

These criticisms tell one more about the conventionality and herd instinct of British opinion-makers than they do about Assange. Ignored, in all this, is his achievement as founder of WikiLeaks in publishing US government cables giving people across the world insight into how their governments really behave. Such public knowledge is the core of democracy because voters must be accurately informed if they are to be able to chose representatives to carry out their wishes.

Thanks to WikiLeaks, more information has become available about what the US and allied states are doing and thinking than ever before. The only competing revelations that come to mind were the publication by the victorious Bolsheviks in 1917 of secret treaties, including plans to carve up the Middle East by Britain and France. A more obvious parallel was the publication of the Pentagon Papers thanks to Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, revealing systematic lying by the Johnson administration about Vietnam. In similar fashion to Assange, Ellsberg was reviled by the US government and threatened with the severest punishment.

An extraordinary aspect of the campaign against Assange is that op-ed writers feel free to pump out thousands of words about his alleged faults, with never a mention of far more serious state crimes revealed by WikiLeaks. All these critics, and readers who agree them, should first switch on YouTube and watch a 17-minute video film taken by the crew of an Apache helicopter over east Baghdad on 12 July 2007. It shows the helicopter crew machine-gunning to death people on the ground in the belief that they are all armed insurgents. In fact, I cannot see any arms and what in one case was identified as a gun turned out to be the camera of a young Reuters' photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, who was killed along with his driver, Saeed Chmagh. The video shows the helicopter coming in for a second attack on a van that had stopped to pick up the dead and wounded. The driver was killed and two children wounded. "Ha! Ha! I hit 'em," shouts one of the US crewmen triumphantly. "Look at those dead bastards."

Attention

If One Storm Can Turn D.C. Dark For Several Days, What Would A Massive EMP Burst Do?

EMP
© Nuclear Enviroment Survivabilty, US Army
Sometimes we all get a little reminder of just how completely and totally dependent we are on the power grid. Massive thunderstorms that ripped through Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, Washington D.C. and Virginia left millions without power over the weekend. At this point it is being projected that some people may not get power back until the end of the week.

The "super derecho" storm that pounded the Washington D.C. area on Friday night with hurricane-force winds is being called unprecedented. But the truth is that there are other events that could happen that would be far more damaging to our power grid. For example, a substantial EMP burst over a major U.S. city would fry virtually all of the electronics in the city and take the power grid in the area down indefinitely. A gigantic EMP burst over the entire country (caused by a massive solar storm or a very large nuclear explosion high in the atmosphere) could theoretically take down the entire national power grid.

Just try to imagine a world where nobody has any electricity, nobody can pump gas, nobody can use their credit cards or get any more money, where most vehicles won't start, where nobody has the Internet, where all cell phones are dead and where nobody can heat or cool their homes. That is how serious an EMP burst could potentially be.

We are talking about an event that could be millions of times worse than 9/11.

Hopefully this latest storm has reminded Americans about how vulnerable our power grid really is and about how close we really are to being knocked back to the late 1800s.

Let's review some of the damage that this "super derecho" storm caused to the D.C. area....

-Thousands of businesses have been forced to close temporarily because they cannot operate without electricity

-Many federal agencies were closed on Monday because there was no power

-Many 911 call centers throughout Northern Virginia were down over the weekend and could not respond to emergencies

-Without electricity, many families have not been able to cook warm meals

-Without warm water, many families have not been able to take hot showers

-A "boil water advisory" was put into effect for several areas of northern Virginia

-Many families that still do not have power are in danger of losing much of the food in their refrigerators and freezers

-Many gas stations were not able to operate because of a lack of electricity and so this has made filling up the gas tank a major hassle for many families

-Hundreds of traffic lights are still out and this is making commuting a major problem in some areas

-Without air conditioning many families are absolutely sweltering as high temperatures remain well above 90 degrees

-During the power outage some people have been without cell phone service because many cell phone towers were inoperable

-Without electricity, thousands upon thousands of people have not been able to use their computers for several days and this is causing a lot of frustration

-Several major websites were totally knocked offline by the storms as Robert McMillan of Wired Magazine explained....
Hurricane-like storms knocked an Amazon data center in Ashburn, Virginia, offline last night, and a chunk of the internet felt it. The six-hour incident temporarily cut off a number of popular internet services, including Netflix, Pinterest, Heroku, and Instagram.
But to be honest this was not a major disaster.

Dollar

Five biggest U.S. banks craft 'living wills' in case they go out of business

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© Unknown
Five of the biggest banks in the United States are putting finishing touches on plans for going out of business as part of government-mandated contingency planning that could push them to untangle their complex operations.

The plans, known as living wills, are due to regulators no later than July 1 under provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law designed to end too-big-to-fail bailouts by the government. The living wills could be as long as 4,000 pages.

Since the law allows regulators to go so far as to order a bank to divest subsidiaries if it cannot plan an orderly resolution in bankruptcy, the deadline is pushing even healthy institutions to start a multi-year process to untangle their complex global operations, according to industry consultants.

"The resolution process is now going to be part of the cost-benefit analysis on where banks will do business," said Dan Ryan, leader of the financial services regulatory practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers in New York. "The complexity of the organizations will shrink."

JPMorgan Chase & Co, Bank of America Corp , Citigroup Inc , Goldman Sachs & Co and Morgan Stanley are among those submitting the first liquidation scenarios to regulators at the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, according to people familiar with the matter.