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Deadly threats persist: Deaths from terrorist activity up 20%, says Janes


Janes
Tue, 09 Mar 2021 00:01 UTC
terrorists taliban
2020 full-year terrorism figures from Janes highlight 2,543 more deaths in 2020 from terrorist activity than in 2019 - despite operational activity slowing down.

Data from the 2020 Global Attack Index by Janes, spanning the entirety of 2020, demonstrates a total of 17,122 non-militant deaths in 2020 resulting from attacks by non-state armed groups (NSAG), a 17.4% increase from 2019. Despite this, information from the trusted global agency for open-source defence intelligence recorded a 3.7% decrease in attacks - with 13,310 attacks by NSAG recorded from open-sources.

"The overall downturn in attacks can be largely attributed to the July ceasefire in Ukraine's Donbass region, which resulted in attacks dropping by one-third in the high-tempo separatist conflict," said Matthew Henman, head of Terrorism and Insurgency at Janes. "This decrease masked major shifts in violence in Afghanistan and key conflict zones in sub-Saharan Africa, though, where attacks and resultant fatalities rose dramatically."

Comment: See also:

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Heart - Black

The Mauritanian: With a Second War on Terror looming, a new film explores the grave abuses of the first

Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald
Tue, 09 Mar 2021 12:48 UTC
Imprisoned without charges for fourteen years in Guantánamo, Mohamedou Slahi is a symbol of humans' impulse to abuse power and their capacity for redemption.
Glenn Greenwald - Mohamedou Slahi
Mohamedou Slahi is an extraordinary person with a harrowing past and a remarkable, still-unfolding story. The interview I conducted with him on Saturday, which can be viewed below, is one I sincerely hope you will watch. He has much to say that the world should hear, and, with a new War on Terror likely to be launched in the U.S., his story is particularly timely now.

Known as the author of the best-selling Guantánamo Diary — a memoir he wrote during his fourteen years in captivity in the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo — he is now the primary character of a new Hollywood feature film about his life, The Mauritanian. The first eight years of Slahi's imprisonment included multiple forms of abuse in four different countries and separation from everything he knew, but it afforded no charges, trials, or opportunities to refute or even learn of the accusations against him.

Comment: See also:

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Family

Swedish feminists seek donations to pay fines for slanderous #MeToo women


RT
Wed, 10 Mar 2021 10:50 UTC
Metoo protest sweden
© Deros Andres / ZumaPress via Global Look Press
A MeToo protest in Gothenburg, Sweden.
A Swedish feminist group, which says "no woman should pay damages to her rapist," is soliciting donations to cover fines that courts imposed as part of successful defamation prosecutions.

Called "Fortalskassan" or "Defamation Fund," the compensation mechanism is a response to an increase in lawsuits filed by men who were accused of sex crimes by women encouraged by the #MeToo movement. It was launched by a group of influential feminists, including journalist and author Maria Sveland and actress Lo Kauppi.

Sweden has strict laws in relation to sex crimes. In 2018, the country changed the definition of rape to include any acts conducted without consent, dropping a requirement for prosecutors to prove coercion or intimidation. The result was a 75 percent hike in conviction rates in the following two years, as reported by the National Council on Crime Prevention (Bra).

Comment: Believe all women. Women are biologically incapable of lying about sexual abuse. The #MeToo movement has relied almost exclusively on trying the accused in the court of public opinion (which has a rather large bias toward guilty verdicts, regardless of the evidence or, more often, lack thereof). God forbid these accusers actually go through the existing court system in order to receive justice. Accusational tweets so much easier.

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Chart Bar

50% of Americans say Biden not 'physically, mentally' fit for presidency

Natalie Winters
The National Pulse
Tue, 09 Mar 2021 00:01 UTC
joe biden
A new poll shows that 50 percent of Americans are not confident that "Joe Biden is physically and mentally up to the job of being president of the United States."

The findings come from a March 9th, 2021 Rasmussen report which links the astoundingly low confidence in President Biden to his lack of transparency with the media.

52 percent of likely voters are concerned that he hasn't held a press conference, including 32 percent who are "very concerned," the poll also finds.

Comment: In other words, half of Americans recognize the Emperor is naked, despite the propaganda.

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Bullseye

Tech giants "are private firms and can do whatever they want" is the stupidest thing I ever heard

Marko Marjanović
Anti-Empire
Sun, 28 Feb 2021 06:46 UTC
big tech and politics
It's Disingenuous

Ironically the argument that online censorship by private companies can not be argued against originates with the "bake the cake" brigade that does not accept this argument in any other case. Only when it comes to censoring their ideological and cultural enemies the property rights of companies suddenly become absolute.

But let's test that proposition. Is it really true that tech behemoths can do whatever they want? Can Facebook change its logo to the Confederate flag, deny NSA and FBI access to data of its users, move its servers to Russia, and flood its users with suggested articles explaining Assad fought US-boosted al-Qaeda in Syria? Yes, it can do that. If it is looking to get nationalized by Tuesday.

Your local car repair shop is a private company and can do whatever it pleases. A globe-spanning corporation is emphatically not at liberty to do the same. Especially a communications firm, with all its enormous potential power, has to read the tea leaves not to run afoul of governments formal and informal (such as the Red Guards of the mainstream press).

Comment: See also:

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Attention

Killer lockdown: 43,000 non-covid excess deaths at home since last march

Will Jones
Lockdown Skeptics
Tue, 09 Mar 2021 13:39 UTC
person in bed
The ONS mortality report this morning showed that in the week ending February 26th (week 8) deaths registered in England and Wales were 9.2% above the five-year average (1,066 deaths higher).

However, drilling down into the data it becomes clear that perhaps all of those excess deaths this week are deaths caused by the lockdown not by the virus, primarily denial of healthcare.

Deaths in care homes were down to 12.6% below the five-year average (334 deaths) (down from 1.1% above the previous week). Deaths in hospitals were slightly above the five-year average at 5% (275 deaths).

Deaths in private homes on the other hand were still a huge 44.2% above the five-year average (1,147 excess deaths). There were 238 deaths involving COVID-19, leaving 909 non-Covid excess deaths (if we make the generous assumptions that all Covid deaths are excess). That's nearly 80%.

Comment: See also:

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Snakes in Suits

'Huge middle finger': YouTube tells foreign creators they will soon be charged AMERICAN tax


RT
Tue, 09 Mar 2021 22:01 UTC
El algoritmo de YouTube que facilita videos de niños a posibles pedófilos
YouTube has told its content creators and partners that they need to prepare for paying US taxes on their earnings - even if they live and work elsewhere. The already beleaguered video creators are taking it poorly.

The video platform, owned by Google, actually updated its terms of service to tax US creators shortly after the 2020 election, but the change went largely unnoticed in the uproar about censorship. On Tuesday, however, YouTube announced that the taxes will soon be taken out of earnings by creators outside the US.

Taxes will be deducted from earnings derived from US viewers through "ad views, YouTube Premium, Super Chat, Super Stickers, and Channel Memberships," the platform said.

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Cult

Attack of the nihilists: Did Dostoevsky's novel 'Demons' predict wokeism, Antifa and the gender-benders?

Kevin Barrett
The Unz Review
Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00 UTC
demon picture
"'Are these the Nazis, Walter?' 'No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of.'" -The Big Lebowski

Since the so-called insurrection of January 6, big media, big government, and big corporations have been demanding the collective scalp of the Trumpian alt-right. If we don't somehow make those 70 million Trump voters disappear, the subtext goes, American democracy is doomed.

The alt-right agrees that American democracy faces an existential threat, but disagrees vociferously about the nature of the threat. Whereas Democrats and corporate media consider Trump's cult of personality a fascist regime in the making, and his followers deluded and none-too-bright storm troopers, the deplorables, for their part, view the corporate Democrats as TDS-addled censorship-loving election thieves bent on establishing a "woke" dictatorship.

What does all this sound and fury really signify? What we are witnessing is a clash of barely-coherent yet increasingly frenetic ideologies — something the previous generation never imagined when it famously proclaimed the end of ideology. Its seems that Francis Fukuyama never read his Dostoevsky. If he had, he would have understood that the collapse of the grand récit of modernity would not lead to universal satisfaction under neoliberalism, but instead to ideological extremism, chaos, and bloodshed.

Comment: See also: Suicide of the Liberals

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Arrow Down

New York tabloid launches ill-timed defense of Andrew Cuomo, as scandals pile up and both parties demand resignation


RT
Tue, 09 Mar 2021 16:38 UTC
Cuomo
© Reuters/Seth Wenig
Andrew Cuomo speaks at a Covid-19 vaccination site in New York City, March 8, 2021.
Once lauded as a pandemic hero, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is now beset by scandal and being hounded by Democrats and Republicans alike to resign. What better time for a newspaper to step in and defend the indefensible?

The past few weeks have been rough for Andrew Cuomo. He's been accused of sexual misconduct by five different women, and the FBI and New York prosecutors are investigating his March 2020 order which sent Covid-19 patients into nursing homes. Cuomo is accused of then attempting to hide the true scale of nursing home deaths, which came to more than 15,000.

Amid the twin scandals, Cuomo has been stripped of his emergency powers, thrown under the bus by previously supportive media outlets, and may soon be impeached by Republican lawmakers, if he refuses to heed the calls from his own party to resign.

Enter the New York Daily News. In a terribly-received article published on Monday, writer Linda Stasi argued that New Yorkers shouldn't let "scandals distract from pandemic competence."

Comment: Passed the point of no return? Cuomo is under increasing fire as critics join the fray:
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Stop

Entire staff of Nevada Democratic Party quits after Democratic Socialist slate won every seat

Akela Lacy, Ryan Grim
The Intercept
Mon, 08 Mar 2021 08:17 UTC
Judith Whitmer
© judithwhitmer.com/Mario Tama/Getty Images
New Chair of the Nevada Democratic Party Judith Whitmer • Sanders supporter
Not long after Judith Whitmer won her election on Saturday to become chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, she got an email from the party's executive director, Alana Mounce. The message from Mounce began with a note of congratulations, before getting to her main point.

She was quitting. So was every other employee. And so were all the consultants. And the staff would be taking severance checks with them, thank you very much.

On March 6, a coalition of progressive candidates backed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America took over the leadership of the Nevada Democratic Party, sweeping all five party leadership positions in a contested election that evening. Whitmer, who had been chair of the Clark County Democratic Party, was elected chair. The establishment had prepared for the loss, having recently moved $450,000 out of the party's coffers and into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee's account. The DSCC will put the money toward the 2022 reelection bid of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a vulnerable first-term Democrat.

While Whitmer's opponents say she was planning to fire them anyway, Whitmer denies that claim. "I've been putting in the work," Whitmer told The Intercept for the latest episode of Deconstructed. "What they just didn't expect is that we got better and better at organizing and out-organizing them at every turn."
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