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Greenwald accuses Brazil's Bolsonaro as a 'wannabe dictator' after threats of 'jail' for explosive leaks

Bolsonaro Greenwald brazil
© Reuters / Adriano Machado; Reuters / Adriano Machado.
(L) Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (R) Glenn Greenwald
The award-winning journalist has called Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro a 'wannabe dictator' after being threatened with jail time amid a scandal surrounding the nation's justice minister sparked by Intercept reports.

Amid rumors that Glenn Greenwald could face deportation under a new government decree, Bolsonaro stated that "he will not be kicked out" - but instead might "do jail time in Brazil." The decree, issued by Justice Minister Sergio Moro, allows summary expulsion of people accused of unconstitutional acts or deemed a danger to the "security of Brazil."

Bolsonaro said nothing about the charges that could land the reporter in prison. Instead, he attacked Greenwald's choice of life partner, claiming that the journalist might have engaged in a relationship with a Brazilian citizen only to avoid deportation.

Comment: Greenwald's definitely ruffled some feathers in Brazilian politics, and weakened the current ruling party's credibility. No wonder Bolsonaro is making threats.


Attention

LGB vs. T: How the trans issue is causing the left to devour itself

trans activists lesbians

Two factions of the Left square off.
The following is adapted from Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, a recently published book by former College Fix editor Robby Soave. Soave is currently an associate editor at Reason.

Today there are tensions between a second-wave feminism that is worried about people who were born men co-opting their movement and a younger feminism that embraces all people who self-identify as women. The new view has largely won that fight, and this victory has influenced how the broader public discusses trans issues.

Consider what happened to filmmaker Kimberly Peirce at Reed College in 2016. She had been invited to Reed College in the fall of 2016 for a screening of her landmark 1999 film Boys Don't Cry. The movie tells the true story of a transgender man who was murdered. Peirce herself has identified as a lesbian and genderqueer, and her movie contains a message of acceptance.

Comment: Human nature can be pushed only so far. The societal backlash against the gender extremists is likely to be severe.


Airplane Paper

I'm not that good: John McAfee denies posting drone footage of Epstein's 'orgy island' from jail

John McAfee
© REUTERS / Alexandre Meneghini
John McAfee at the Marina Hemingway in Havana, Cuba.
Eccentric billionaire John McAfee says he is not behind a YouTube channel that has been posting drone footage apparently shot on Jeffrey Epstein's island, saying that even he wouldn't be able to do it from a Dominican prison cell.

A YouTube channel has been posting videos apparently showing Little Saint James, a Caribbean island owned by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which was dubbed "Pedophile Island" and "Orgy Island" by the press due to the alleged abuse that has taken place there.

Some people believe the person responsible for the channel is none other than John McAfee, a veteran software engineer, cryptocurrency advocate, and US presidential candidate, who is also on the run from the Internal Revenue Service over his self-confessed eight years of not paying taxes.

The theory was popularized on the anonymous website 4chan after McAfee said the CIA attempted to "collect" him and his wife from their "freedom boat," the Daily Dot reported.

Comment: See also: Software magnate John McAfee will run for president 'in exile' using thousands of masked doppelgangers


Stock Up

Thriving nation: Little-known facts about India, one of the world's largest economies

New Delhi
© Getty Images / Sayan Chuenudomsavad
India’s economy has nearly sextupled in size in less than 20 years
A thriving nation with a population of around 1.37 billion people, India is one of the world's largest economies. It seeks to achieve an ambitious target of becoming a $5 trillion economy in the next five years.

Here are some interesting facts that you may not have known about the country.

India's economy has nearly sextupled in size in less than 20 years

At the turn of the millennium the country's gross domestic product was approximately $459 billion, according to the World Bank. Last year, it generated the equivalent of $2.726 trillion. That's an expansion of just short of six times in less than two decades.

Comment: It's understandable why the the US is strategizing to keep India within its sphere of influence and why India is becoming less inclined to appease Washington.


Bullseye

The Yaniv outrage has left Canada, rightly, the laughing stock of the world

Jessica Yaniv
© Jessica Yaniv
Jessica Yaniv, a transgender woman in B.C., has filed over a dozen human rights complaints against businesses she alleges discriminated against her on the basis of gender identity.
A friend of mine recently went to his local garage, claimed he was a re-conditioned '79 Chevy Nova and asked them to do a timing check on the carburetor and rotate his tires. They said they wouldn't because he didn't have a carburetor, or tires, and they only worked on "cars." He is off now to the local human rights tribunal (after a stop for spare parts at Canadian Tire).

The strange, ominous and creepy case before the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal is reverberating around the world. This is the case of the person, variously identified on the Internet as Jonathan or Jessica Yaniv, who has mounted a campaign to force unwilling cosmeticians to do a "Brazilian Wax" on their still very present testicles and penis. Yaniv has filed complaints against them all.

As I wrote last week, these are all women, some immigrants, and on the economic and cultural margins — 16 in total, according to most accounts. At least one, originally from Brazil, has had to close her small business. All have been under intense duress, and the vexatious complainant is notably hostile to immigrants (social media posts by Yaniv, then identifying as Jonathan, are remarkably insulting to newcomers to Canada). Some have paid Yaniv $2,500 dollars to lay off, while others equipped themselves with lawyers, at their own expense, had the complaints dropped.

Comment: See also:


Star of David

No shame: What Israelis do to Palestinians in the name of the Jewish state is pure evil

Destruction Palestinian homes Jerusalem

You can’t keep a military occupation of millions of people going on for years without becoming the essence of evil. That is what we have become and now we don’t even have shame in what we do.
As I watched the video of the Israeli soldiers and police blowing up one of the 13 residential buildings demolished this week in the Wadi al-Hummus neighborhood of Sur Bahir in east Jerusalem, I wanted to bury myself in shame. When the building imploded and the soldiers laughed as we heard the screams and cries from the Palestinians who became homeless, my shame turned to pure outrage and the urge to be violent. But I will not step down to that level. I will not be violent. But I will not hold back, I will not forget and I will not forgive. What we did, what the State of Israel did, what we do in the name of the Jewish state is becoming pure evil.

My first thoughts about what I see in the daily reality of east Jerusalem, and the West Bank and Gaza - things such as the Sur Bahir home demolitions; the removal of Palestinians from their homes in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah, and the moving in of Jewish settlers in their place; settlement expansion and building at a faster pace than I have seen in many years; unauthorized settlements being built, budgeted and hooked up to Israeli infrastructure; massive police presence all over the West Bank ticketing hundreds of Palestinian cars (not cars of settlers); and the ongoing strangling the Palestinian economy in full coordination with the US government - all of these actions and more are leading to a definite explosion. My thought: Maybe that is exactly what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants? This is the perfect backdrop for Election Day. Could even Netanyahu be so cynical? I thought to myself - this can't be.

Some of the right-wing politicians have been open and direct about their strategies - they will find ways of encouraging Palestinians to leave their homes and their country. This is what our transportation minister has been saying for years. This is what some of the Likud MKs say and believe. We don't need Meir Kahane's followers to force the Palestinians to leave against their will - that is what the government of Israel is carrying out. The policies being implemented on the ground, for years now, are working in that direction. But very few of the Palestinians are actually leaving. The majority of them are staying and they are suffering, and they will not forget or forgive.

Comment: Do Israeli's feel shame? Far from it: Israel's war criminals in their own words

See also:


Arrow Down

Parkland school gunman was considered such a threat he was searched every morning, yet parents weren't informed of the danger

Parkland nikolas Cruz
© The Free Thought Project
The former student who later shot up Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was such a threat in school that he was searched every morning for weapons, new testimony shows.

The extraordinary measure followed an earlier decision to bar Nikolas Cruz from taking a backpack to campus after he talked of suicide and wrote "kill" in a notebook.

The search procedure was revealed in a sworn deposition from Kelvin Greenleaf, the security guard who searched Cruz. The South Florida Sun Sentinel obtained a copy of the deposition this week.

"Never found a weapon on him," Greenleaf explained in the testimony July 11. "I think we got concerned when, I think, we found out he drank bleach, tried to hurt himself or something like that, the kid. That's when we started, like, having the kid come in every morning to be searched by me, but never found a weapon on the kid, never."

Administrators forced Cruz to withdraw from Stoneman Douglas within six months — in February 2017.

Comment:


Biohazard

River of radiation: Life in the area of the world's 3rd-worst nuclear disaster

Sign
© Sputnik / Aleksandr Kondratyuk
An old radiation warning sign next to the Techa River in Chelyabinsk region.
Before Fukushima and Chernobyl, the worst-ever nuclear disaster was a massive leak from a plant in the eastern Urals. RT went to see how people live in areas affected by the fallout from the USSR's risky rush to the nuclear bomb.

Chernobyl and Fukushima are the two names that are most likely to come to mind when one thinks about nuclear disaster, and rightfully so. People in the US will likely recall the Three Mile Island accident, while Britons may say the "Windscale fire."

The name "Kyshtym" will probably mean nothing to the wider public, despite it belonging to the third-worst nuclear accident in history. An RT Russian correspondent traveled to the area to speak with locals, some of whom personally witnessed the 1957 disaster, to find out what living in such a place feels like.

Bomb at any cost

Kyshtym is the name of a small town in what is now Chelyabinsk Region in Russia, located in an area dotted by dozens of small lakes. A 15-minute car ride east will bring you to another town called Ozyorsk. Six decades ago, you wouldn't find it on any publicly available map because it hosted a crucial element of the Soviet Union's nascent nuclear weapons program, the Mayak plant.

House

Review of 'Inside the Bruderhof' documentary: Is this a religious stirring I feel?

bruderhof community uk
I had always believed that if I were ever visited by religious feeling, it would be the blood-and-thunder Catholicism of my forebears. Folk memory or epigenetics would stir, and there I would be - calling fire down from heaven, searching for stigmatists and generally making a nuisance of myself, especially to Protestants. As I have grown older, I have realised this is unlikely for many reasons. First of all, God is dead - this was surely confirmed on Wednesday when Boris Johnson moved into 10 Downing Street. Second, my forebears must have been a much more extrovert lot than I am. I temperamentally incline to something quieter; less show, more focus. Something to which I can, since this documentary, call "more Bruderhoffy".

The Bruderhof is a radical Christian movement, founded 100 years ago, that comprises 3,000 members living in 23 settlements around the world. Inside the Bruderhof (BBC One) followed the lives of some of those ensconced in Darvell, their Sussex enclave. Bernard Hibbs, who has lived there for 30 years, explains that their purpose "is to follow Jesus as closely as possible, especially the Sermon on the Mount, and not wait for some future glorious kingdom to come". To this heaven-on-earthly end, the Bruderhof live as collectively and non-hierarchically as possible. Possessions are shared, clothes (many made on site) are issued from a central repository, food also comes from a central store and is cooked and eaten communally. There's a farm, a school, a laundry and no electricity, smartphones or other technology.

Comment: That sounds like a success story. Elsewhere, we read that:
The Bruderhof Christian movement is based around common ownership and was founded in Germany in 1920 by protestant theologian Eberhard Arnold.

The community was forced to flee in 1937 after refusing to join the Nazi Party, and many members moved to England.
There have actually been many like it for several centuries, also German-Protestant in origin, and generally flourishing in the US. What they're partially recreating is monastic life, a strong feature of the medieval period in Europe. In any event, it can work, even in the modern environment.

If we were to quibble about the above set-up though, there would ideally be no externally-mandated rules about dress, relationships, belongings, money and much that is personal. True colinearity towards a group aim ought to come from individually-realized principles or rules, and 'works' - creative and pecuniary - that are voluntarily given.

For example, people would just know, from their own basic rearing and miminal social feedback, what is or is not appropriate to wear in specific circumstances; there's no need for archaic uniforms.


Attention

Kidnapped Austrian triathlete sweet-talks captor into letting her go

Nathalie Birli
An Austrian triathlete said she was kidnapped and stripped naked by a van-driver earlier this week but managed to sweet-talk him into returning her home before he could do worse, according to report Friday.

Graz resident Nathalie Birli, 27, was riding her bike near her home when a van driver knocked her unconscious and took her back to his home, The Times reported.

When she regained consciousness, she was naked and tied to a chair "in an old house," Birli told the paper.