Puppet Masters
WikiLeaks is ready to sue Britain's Guardian newspaper for a "fabricated Manafort story" that accused Julian Assange of secretly meeting Donald Trump's former election campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Manafort agreed to take part in the Mueller probe over Russia's alleged meddling into the 2016 US election but he denies co-operating with Russia or ever meeting Assange.
The author of the report, Luke Harding, based his claim on "sources" and a document "written by Ecuador's Senain intelligence agency and seen by the Guardian," which the newspaper didn't publish.
"As part of the plea bargain, Purdue agreed to pay the federal government $600 million and 27 states $20 million. The three executives agreed to $34.5 million in fines but avoided jail-time. By contrast, Purdue has earned an estimated $31 billion in total revenues from extended-release oxycodone since its launch. Rather than deterring fraudulent marketing, the penalties simply became a cost of doing business."A cost of doing business. The preceding is an excerpt from a Harvard study published last year titled "The Opioid Epidemic: Fixing a Broken Pharmaceutical Market". It describes the illicit marketing practices advanced by Purdue's executives for its wildly profitable opioid Oxycontin, and how the criminal and civil cases brought against the company for those practices weren't consequential enough to prevent those practices from remaining highly profitable.
Big pharma has the highest profit margins of any industry in the United States and is also the number one lobbying industry in the United States, a correlation which won't surprise anyone who knows anything worth knowing about politics in capitalist societies. One of the many, many ways that the US government has collaborated with these massive pharmaceutical corporations to increase their profit margins has been to put into place laws which make them obscenely difficult to sue, therefore rendering the cost of the few lawsuit settlements which get through a mere drop in the bucket of profits made by unethical marketing practices. Even fines for downright illegal practices can be chalked up to mere overhead, with the largest fine ever levied against a drug company being $3 billion against GlaxoSmithKline, which sounds like a lot if you don't know that Glaxo raked in $27.5 billion just that year.
On November 21st, the Atlantic Council "an American think tank in the field of international affairs," which can also be described as NATO and the US's public relations office published a report called "Beyond Borderlands Ensuring the Sovereignty of All Nations of Eastern Europe."
As expected, the report primarily focuses on Russian influence, since other influence from the EU and the US cannot be considered any sort of influence, especially not bad. It also primarily focuses on Ukraine.
In the section dubbed "Security Assistance in the Short and Medium Terms," the situation in the Sea of Azov is highlighted.
"Russia is currently occupying and militarizing Ukrainian Crimea, conducting a simmering, hybrid war in the Donbas, and obstructing Ukrainian shipping in the Sea of Azov."Furthermore, the section looked at the conflict between Russia and Georgia in 2008, claiming that Russian "peacekeeper in South Ossetia periodically move the line of demarcation farther into Georgia."
Comment: See also:
- Where is The Logic in Ukraine Provoking Russia?
- While Kiev whips up confusion and panic, Ukraine citizens try to figure what martial law will mean for them
- UK to supply extra military forces to Ukraine: An irresponsible policy with dangerous repercussions
Facebook has publicly denied being a media publisher every time there is an issue with content on its site. The company has long claimed to simply be a platform for their users to utilize and as a result, the social media firm cannot be held accountable for the content posted there. But in a recent lawsuit, the company has claimed the exact opposite.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has denied that Facebook is a publisher publicly before the Senate. From Breitbart's article at the time:

Brazilian congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, and White House senior advisor Jared Kushner, son-in-law of President Donald Trump, meet at the White House on Nov. 27, 2018.
"The question should not be whether we will do it, but when we will do it," Brazilian congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro told Jared Kushner during a meeting in Washington on Tuesday.
Jair Bolsonaro's 34-year-old son was re-elected in October to a second term and became the Brazilian federal lawmaker to garner the most votes in history with over 1.8 million votes.

U.S. President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn after returning to the White House in the early morning hours from a trip to Mississippi November 27, 2018 in Washington, DC.
He doesn't like that General Motors is closing five plants across North America and laying off 14,700 workers. He doesn't like that economists are predicting an imminent recession.
And he hates the Federal Reserve Bank. In fact, most of these economic problems, says Trump, stem from the Fed. He is "not even a little bit happy" with his choice for Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell.
"I'm doing deals, and I'm not being accommodated by the Fed," Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post Tuesday. "They're making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else's brain can ever tell me."
Comment: The behavior of the Federal Reserve point to their agenda for countering everything Trump is trying to accomplish. It's no wonder he's not happy with them.
See also:
- Century of Enslavement: The Long Sordid History of the US Federal Reserve
- World stock markets plunge as Trump lambasts Federal Reserve's 'crazy' US rate hikes
- Is the Federal Reserve engineering the next crash in order to topple Trump?
- After a decade of reduced pay, US Federal Reserve worsens problem by stopping 'wage inflation'
- The Federal Reserve is the committee to destroy the financial world
While addressing a half-empty crowd at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto, Canada, on Tuesday night, the former secretary of state devolved into hacking.
During the first stop of "An Evening With The Clintons," Hillary was asked a question about Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
Before she could begin her usual spiel about how Russia cost her the election, Clinton was completely overtaken by an uncontrollable cough.
Remember the plane full of documents in Little Rock? Everyone was speculating as to who/what it could be about, and hoping it had to do with the Clinton Foundation investigations. Is it possibly connected to this ongoing investigation into legislator fraud? In August 2018, Deputy Attorney General Lloyd Warford, said that investigators have at least 4 million documents in a vault and another 200 gigabytes of information they have collected from the Department of Human Services. Warford also confirmed that more lawmakers are under investigation by the state, in cooperation with the federal investigation. They have already convicted over a dozen individuals in one case alone, several of which are former or current legislators, one former senator has already begun his 18-year prison sentence, and there are a slew of other individuals listed in indictments. It is quite an extensive list below.
But crucially there are already calls from top British commanders to send a much more powerful and capable Type 45 destroyer, or guided missile warship, into the Black Sea amid escalating tensions and after the UK condemned Russia for seizing Ukrainian ships and their crew off the coast of Crimea, which the Russian Navy said were "maneuvering dangerously".
Comment: The Brits have been poking their nose into Ukraine ever since the 2014 western-backed neo-nazi coup.
- Perfidious, warmongering Albion: British troops start training Ukraine's ramshackle army, US confirms own mission
- British instructors train Ukrainian military to slaughter more Eastern Ukrainians
- Belligerent Britain to send more troops to Ukraine claiming 'Russia threat'

A supporter of Salome Zurabishvili reacts during the announcement of the first exit polls
The first official data to be released showed that the former foreign minister and ambassador to France had secured 57.37 percent of the votes, with her opponent Grigol Vashadze landing 42.6 percent.
Earlier, an exit poll conducted by Gallup International for Imedi television showed Zurabishvili with 58 percent of the ballots. The 66-year-old is supported by the ruling Georgian Dream party.
A separate exit poll by Edison Research for Rustavi-2 television put Zurabishvili at gaining 55 percent of the votes, with opposition candidate Vashadze taking home 45 percent.












Comment: See also: Just like big pharma, there is no penalty for malpractice when the MSM lies