The rule of law has given way to law as a weapon in the hands of government

Everyone who is aware of the US government's extraordinary criminal actions at home and abroad bears a heavy weight. The millions of peoples murdered, maimed, orphaned, widowed, and displaced by gratuitous American military aggression comprise a Holocaust of deaths based entirely on lies and false accusations in order to advance secret American and Israeli agendas. I suspect that the heavy burden of responsibility for mass murder and destruction committed in our name is the reason most Americans prefer the fake news fed to them about how good and wonderful and exceptional we are and how hard our government works to protect us from the nasty folks elsewhere. This storyline converts the illegal brutal war crimes of the US government against women, children, defenseless citizens, schools, wedding parties, funerals, and farmers in their fields into glorious and brave defenses of our liberty and virtue. If you want the truth watch the video leaked by Manning of US troops enjoying themselves while from the air they machine-gun reporters and innocent civilians walking along a street and follow up by machine-gunning a father and his two young children, babies, who stopped to help the wounded bleeding in the street. The leak of the video that showed the true picture of Washington's wars is the reason Manning was tortured and imprisoned. It is the person who told the truth, not the criminals who committed the murders, who was punished.

I agree that the fake story of America's moral worthiness is much easier to live with than it is to bear the shame of the true story. But in the end the fake story destroys our liberty even more completely than would conquest by a foreign opponent. People are more suspicious of an occupying power than they are of their own government and are less likely to believe foreign occupiers when they lie to them. In contrast, a people's own government can trap them in a false consciousness and keep them there with fake news.

Wherever one looks at the behavior of Americans today, from airline flight attendants to police to national security advisors and secretaries of state, one sees people devoid of moral conscience, integrity, compassion, empathy, and self-control. For unreasonable and petty spite alone, a female airline attendant on a long-delayed Southwest Airline flight called police and had a man to whom she took a dislike arrested and taken off the airplane. All of the passengers protested to the police that the arrested person had done nothing, but the cops didn't listen. They had another victim to abuse. Was the victimization of this person the result of Identity Politics teaching women to hate men?

"The fact that we are handing over the keys of American democracy to the military-industrial complex - it's like giving the keys to the henhouse to a fox and saying, 'here come in and take whatever you want.' It's obviously dangerous." - Investigative journalist Yasha Levine

Earlier this month, tech giant Microsoft announced its solution to "protect" American elections from interference, which it has named "ElectionGuard." The election technology is already set to be adopted by half of voting machine manufacturers and some state governments for the 2020 general election. Though it has been heavily promoted by the mainstream media in recent weeks, none of those reports have disclosed that ElectionGuard has several glaring conflicts of interest that greatly undermine its claim aimed at protecting U.S. democracy.

In this investigation, MintPress will reveal how ElectionGuard was developed by companies with deep ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities and Israeli military intelligence, as well as the fact that it is far from clear that the technology would prevent foreign or domestic interference with, or the manipulation of, vote totals or other aspects of American election systems.

Election forensics analyst and author Jonathan Simon as well as investigative journalist Yasha Levine, who has written extensively on how the military has long sought to weaponize public technologies including the internet, were consulted for their views on ElectionGuard, its connections to the military-industrial complex and the implication of those connections for American democracy as part of this investigation.

In January, MintPress published an exposé that later went viral on a news-rating company known as Newsguard. Officially aimed at fighting "fake news," the company's many connections to U.S. intelligence, a top neoconservative think tank, and self-admitted government propagandists revealed its real intention was to promote corporate media over independent alternatives.

Newsguard was among the first initiatives that comprise Microsoft's "Defending Democracy" program, a program that the tech giant created under the auspices of protecting American "democratic processes from cyber-enabled interference [which] have become a critical concern." Through its partnership with Microsoft, Newsguard has been installed in public libraries and universities throughout the country, even while private-sector companies have continued to avoid adopting the problematic browser plug-in.

Now, Microsoft is promoting a new "Defending Democracy" initiative - one equally ridden with glaring conflicts of interest - that threatens American democracy in ways Newsguard never could. ElectionGuard is touted by Microsoft as a system that aims to "make voting secure, more accessible, and more efficient anywhere it's used in the United States or in democratic nations around the world." It has since been heavily promoted by mainstream and U.S. government-funded media outlets in preparation for its use in the 2020 general election.

It is not just Trump, but the media, Obama, Bush, mainstream "human rights" organizations, Republicans and Democrats alike that put the noose around the neck of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange - threatening all journalists.

WikiLeaks publisher and political prisoner Julian Assange is facing 17 charges under the United States Espionage Act - a draconian law that was written during World War I to imprison leftists who spoke out against the mass slaughter.

How fitting, then, that 100 years later, this same ruthless statute is being used to muzzle the man who has done more than any other person alive to expose the misdeeds of the US national security state.

In its relentless assault on civil liberties, the Donald Trump administration has the dubious distinction of breaking two records at once: Indicting a journalist under the Espionage Act for the first time, and indicting a non-US citizen.

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) will come into force on Thursday. It will be the largest free trade agreement by population that the world has seen since the 1995 creation of the World Trade Organization.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry said over the weekend that the required 22 ratifications have been received. The latest two ratifications, Sierra Leone and the Sahrawi Republic, were received by the African Union (AU) on April 29. All but three (Benin, Eritrea and Nigeria) of Africa's 55 countries have signed up to the deal. The UN said if Nigeria joins the AfCFTA then intra-African trade could grow by more than 50 percent in the next five years.

According to statistics, cited by the ministry, when the agreement enters into force it will affect more than 1.2 billion people, with a total domestic product of about $3.4 trillion. It will cut duties on 90 percent of goods on the continent. The deal could boost intra-African trade by 52.3 percent, the UN said.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame hailed it as a "new chapter in African unity."

Export of Swiss goods to Russia surged over 10 percent last year, reaching nearly 80 percent of the pre-crisis levels, according to Tobias Privitelli, the deputy head of the Swiss diplomatic mission in Russia.

The deputy ambassador added that Switzerland has been exporting vast volumes of pharmaceutical products, equipment and electronics. Mutual trade between the countries had been declining by about 13 percent from 2017 through 2018, according to Privitelli.

"However, exports from Switzerland to Russia grew by 12 percent, which is highly significant. That's 80 percent of exports volumes we had in 2013, before the crisis," he said.

Iraqi President Barham Salih has received an invitation from his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, to visit Iran, during his meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, the presidential office said.

"The Iranian Minister presented an invitation from President Rouhani to President Barham Salih to visit Tehran to follow up the common dossiers," the presidential office said in a statement, published on its official website late on Saturday.

According to the statement, the Iranian foreign minister said during the meeting that Tehran was interested in expanding cooperation between the two countries, and conveyed Iran's support for Iraq.

The permanent representative to the UN said Iran acknowledges US interest in engaging in dialogue, but added that there are three major obstacles that make a diplomatic resolution to the on-going crisis impossible at this moment.

Iranian permanent representative to the UN Majid Takht-e-Ravanchi published an opinion piece in the Washington Post, in which he detailed the hardships Tehran faces when dealing with the US.

According to Takht-e-Ravanchi, Trump is being driven to a confrontation with Iran by a number of people, both inside the US Government and in the Middle East. The representative argues that "contrary to the views of his close associates," President Trump doesn't seem to genuinely want a war with Iran. However, US policy towards Iran is inconsistent and controversial, he pointed out, adding that the US can't decide between threats and calls for dialogue.

US President Donald Trump has reaffirmed his "confidence" in North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, tweeting an approving snicker at his recent insult of Joe Biden and brushing off concerns over Pyongyang's short-range missile tests.

Donald Trump took to Twitter on Saturday to rekindle his somewhat stale bromance with Kim, hanging in the balance after their summit in Vietnam in February faltered and was further threatened by the recent seizure of a North Korean cargo ship by the US.

Trump, on a state visit to Japan, which eyes hosting its own summit with North Korea, defied hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton, tweeting dismissively about "some small weapons" fired by Pyongyang "which disturbed some of my people, and others, but not me."

The U.S. military on Friday accused Iran's Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) of being directly responsible for attacks on tankers off the United Arab Emirates earlier this month, describing it as part of a "campaign" by Tehran driving new U.S. deployments.

"The attack against the shipping in Fujairah we attribute it to the IRGC," said Rear Admiral Michael Gilday, the director of the Joint Staff, adding the Pentagon attributed limpet mines used in the attack to the IRGC. He declined to describe "the means of delivery" of the mines.

The remarks were made at a Pentagon news briefing to explain U.S. plans to send 900 more forces, including engineers, to the Middle East to bolster U.S. defense and extend the deployment of some 600 personnel manning Patriot missiles.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) blasted Politico for using anti-Semitic tropes in its scathing profile of Bernie Sanders. In a piece focused on his 'wealth', the presidential hopeful is shown next to a 'money tree'.

The Friday cover of Politico Magazine is graced by the image of Bernie Sanders, the only Jewish candidate in the packed Democratic presidential race, standing against the backdrop of a tree with dollar bills instead of leaves and a luxury mansion. The article, titled 'The Secret of Bernie's Millions', contrasts Sanders' socialist inclinations with being "a three-home-owning millionaire with a net worth approaching at least $2 million."

Politico's Michael Kruse does not pull any punches in his review of Sanders' political career, with colorful passages like: "The champion of the underclass and castigator of 'the 1 percent' has found himself in the socioeconomic penthouse of his rhetorical bogeymen." He describes Sanders' 2016 presidential run, effectively hijacked by the Clinton camp and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), as "the most lucrative thing he's ever done."