Bombshell at ZeroHedge on Trump's "alleged" past misbehaviour. Will this derail him? If Cruz gets the nomination, take it for granted that either Clinton or Sanders will win big time against that weirdo.
Is This The Ultimate Act Of A Frantic Establishment Willing To Do Anything To Stop Trump?
Submitted by SM Gibson via TheAntiMedia.org,
As Donald Trump inches closer to the Republican nomination, GOP insiders scramble to put a halt to the billionaire’s run for the White House. A new lawsuit filed in the state of California could prove to be the ultimate act of desperation by a frantic establishment willing to go to any lengths to end Trump’s bid for the Oval Office. However, if the allegations contained within the court documents are found to be true, they would not only spell the end of Trump’s presidential aspirations, but most likely his brand as a whole.
On April 26, a woman residing in California named Katie Johnson filed a lawsuit against Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein – for the amount of $100 million – accusing the two billionaires of “forcing her to engage in various perverted and depraved acts by threatening physical harm.” The plaintiff, who describes herself as Trump and Epstein’s “sex slave” in the papers, also accuses the pair of having threatened to kill her family if she told anyone of their crime.
The incidents alleged to have taken place over a four-month span in 1994 in New York City, when Johnson was only 13-years-old....
Juan Cole at Informed Comment
The End of American Iraq: Poor Shiites invade Parliament over corrupt Spoils System
Baghdad is under a state of emergency on Sunday a day after members of the Sadr Trend stormed the Green Zone and invaded the parliament building, briefly imprisoning parliamentarians in the chamber (and some in a basement) before letting them go. Some apparently were beaten as they left. Most of the protesters, though, were relatively peaceful and had been ordered to avoid violence by their leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. As at Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011, of which the invasion of the Green Zone was a distant echo, they chanted “peacefully, peacefully” ( silmiyyah, silmiyyah).
When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 he established blast walls around central government offices, establishing a four square mile Green Zone (i.e. one that was safe and which the US controlled, with the rest of the country being a Red Zone; more or less, that situation never changed). The parliament building and Western embassies were in the Green Zone. I visited it in 2013. You enter through a narrow entranceway and can only really go in by foot (this measure stops car bombs from getting in). The security people who checked us in were international– Ghana and Peru or something. I doubt they would die for the cause. There were Iraqi troops on the outside of the blast walls. Apparently some of them sympathized with the Sadr Trend and let the crowd pull down a couple pylons of the blast wall, after which they streamed in.
Who were the protesters? The Sadr Movement is particularly popular in East Baghdad or Sadr City, a dense slum where a plurality of Baghdadis live. The father of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, was assassinated by Saddam Hussein’s secret police in 1998. Young Muqtada survived underground. He reemerged in 2003 to oppose the US military occupation of his country, forming the Mahdi Army, which more than once fought US troops. His was a movement of the poor and the street. After the US withdrew, al-Sadr adopted a lower profile. But now that President Obama has reestablished a US military command in the country, al-Sadr has come back out to protest the renewed US presence and the al-Abadi government, which the US props up.
What were they protesting?
The spoils system.....
.....The Bush administration in its years of military occupation of Iraq presided over the installation of an Iraqi spoils system more rowdy and rapacious than anything Andrew Jackson ever imagined. ....
Eric Zuesse at StrategicCulture
Seymour Hersh Says Hillary Approved Sending Libya’s Sarin to Syrian Rebels
In an interview with Alternet.org, the independent investigative reporter Seymour Hersh was asked about Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi Libya consulate’s operation to collect sarin from Libyan stockpiles and send it through Turkey into Syria for a set-up sarin-gas attack, to be blamed on Assad in order to ‘justify’ the US invading Syria, as it had invaded Libya.
He said: «That ambassador who was killed, he was known as a guy, from what I understand, as somebody, who would not get in the way of the CIA. As I wrote, on the day of the mission he was meeting with the CIA base chief and the shipping company. He was certainly involved, aware and witting of everything that was going on. And there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel».
This was, in fact, the Syrian part of the State Department’s Libyan operation, Obama’s operation to set up an excuse for the US doing in Syria what they had already done in Libya.
The interviewer then asked:....
From DemocracyNow
Sy Hersh's Book on Bin Laden Killing Rejects U.S. Story,
Says Saudis Financed Hiding of Qaeda Leader
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’re on a 100-city tour marking Democracy Now!'s 20th anniversary, today broadcasting from Santa Fe, from New Mexico's state Capitol building known as the Roundhouse. Our guest for the hour is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. Next week will mark the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Osama bin Laden. This is President Obama announcing the news of his death five years ago.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that was President Obama speaking in May 2011. Sy Hersh, your new book, titled The Killing of Osama bin Laden, you argue the official account of how bin Laden was found and killed was deceptive. Explain what you think really happened, and talk about the role of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and, of course, the United States.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, one of the myths that was created was that we discovered where he was living. Abbottabad is about 50 or 60 miles from the capital of Islamabad. It’s a hilly, higher elevation. And in the summer, it’s a resort place for many of the people who go—many of the people in the government and the military take their vacations there. It’s sort of a Pakistani Martha’s Vineyard, if you will. And anyway, he was there.
What I know, as in "know," is there was a walk-in, that in August of 2010, a Pakistani—I can say right now, he was a colonel in the regular army, not in the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, which is a very tough bunch, a separate group. He was an officer who had been passed over for general or whatever, and was—came into our embassy. We have a station chief there who’s quite—quite competent guy named Jonathan Bank. And he went in to him and said, "We’ve had bin Laden for four years." ISI got him. The Pakistani intelligence service picked him up probably in the Hindu Kush area, in the areas—the mountain area between Pakistan and Afghanistan—where we thought he was. He had been on the run for—let’s see, since late 2011, when we drove him out of Afghanistan into the mountain region. And we finally got him. We looked for him. We thought we had him in '02. There was a firefight that nobody knows about yet, with the SEALs. But anyway, we finally got him because of a walk-in. And you have to know, in the business of the CIA, protecting a walk-in is the most important thing. And so, a walk-in. And so, if you have a bunch of people somewhere in the basement, intelligence officers working on trying to track him through couriers, you may let them think that they did do it, because that's just the way it works in the CIA. You know, they don’t always tell the truth to their people that work for them, when it comes to protecting a source, somebody who walks in.
And where I was dumb—you know, this story, I initially wrote much of ....
From TheRealNewsNetwork (vid at link)
Judge Exonerates Mike Duffy, "Indicts" Stephen Harper and Senate
Author and journalist Rick Salutin tells the Real News that Duffy, "a phony, populist man of the people," has served the historical purpose of bringing Harper down
Snowden ... the movie, schedule to open in September.
Dan Sanchez at his blog
The Hell on Earth Paved by Samantha Power’s Good Intentions
The Scourge of Africa and Her Savior Complex
In Batman Vs. Superman, the intrepid reporter Lois Lane (played by Amy Adams), tries to expose a dastardly villain and gets herself into a deadly predicament from which Superman must save her. This has been the Lois Lane formula since 1938. But in this case, the rescue has blowback. The villain in question was an African warlord/terrorist. And the intervention of Superman (and the CIA) somehow precipitates a massacre of local civilians. Lois’s efforts end up leading to the very kind of atrocity she was crusading against.
This also aptly describes the Africa policy of Samantha Power, the most strident “humanitarian interventionist” in the Obama administration. Power’s career was encapsulated in a single awful moment last week. A New York Times story relates that:
“As the convoy barreled through a village in northern Cameroon on Monday, a 7-year-old boy darted to the road, excited to see the chain of white S.U.V.s carrying Samantha Power, the first cabinet-level American official to visit the country since 1991.
Distracted by a thundering noise, the boy glanced up at the helicopter providing security from above. Suddenly, he was struck dead — killed by the same convoy that had brought officials to showcase American efforts to help protect West Africa’s women and children.”
Running over one of those children with a car may seem a botched “showcase.” However it quite accurately, if tragically, exemplified the sort of “protection” that the U.S. government, and Ms. Power in particular, has provided the people of the African continent. The Times continues:
“…Ms. Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, had come to West Africa to help raise awareness and win people over. It was planned as part of an effort to convince residents who are terrorized by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram — but who are also disenchanted by the heavy-handed tactics of their governments — that their paths lie with the American-backed state, not with the militants.”
While stumping for the region’s brutal and predatory presidents-for-life, Power probably failed to mention that Boko Haram was boosted by her own policy. As The New Yorker recalled in late 2014:
“Power was ‘the first and most decisive advocate for aggressive actions in Libya, and she was a consistent voice before anybody else was,” a senior official involved in the Libya actions told me. “She really put on the agenda the use of military power to respond to what was happening there, at a time when the President wasn’t sure.’ Dennis Ross, then Obama’s top Middle East expert, said…”
Power, then a National Security Council....
Corey Schink at Sott (all relevant links at link below)
Back in 2015 the Journal of Evolutionary Psychological Science published a study that provided yet more evidence that "individuals with psychopathic traits may be able to express fraudulent emotions that appear genuine to the people around them." The authors added, "individuals involved in predatory behavior need to appear to be cooperative and 'normal' to successfully take advantage of others."
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the common emotional rhetoric of Israeli politicians. In the past week Netanyahu has claimed 'outrage' that the UN would dare support Syria's claim to its territory in the Golan Heights, and Israel's representative to the UN, Danny Danon, claimed in a heated debate that it is fine for Israel to abduct children because "'terrorists' deserved no other treatment."
But of course Israel's minister of defense would think otherwise. He opined just a few months back that the IDF and Sunni terrorists in Syria were on the 'same page'. Therefore, applying Israeli political logic, if they're 5 years old they're a target for illegal abduction. But if they're a group of drugged-out head-choppers selling Israel stolen oil, then they're 'just fine by us'.
So perhaps it's time to step in and issue a reminder of what is truly 'outrageous' in this situation. What is outrageous is a sadistic regime which steals the land of its neighbors, openly sides with terrorists to steal those neighbors' resources, and proceeds to torture and murder an entire ethnic group while claiming 'defense against terrorism'. All this while Netanyahu has the gall to say, with a straight face, "Israel, [is] the only true democracy in the Middle East."
What is outrageous is video after video after video showing terrified Palestinian children (as young as 5 years old) shaking and sobbing as they or their loved ones are being abducted by Israeli military. And no, they are not being arrested; they are being abducted. An arrest process involves some form of judicial process that leads to evidence being presented in court, but in Israel it is the military that decides what to do with the children, in secret, without oversight. .....
Greg Hunter at USAWatchdog
Very Big Correction for All Markets Coming-Alasdair Macleod
Financial expert Alasdair Macleod says the most important economic news concerns the U.S. dollar. Macleod explains, “I think the most important point is actually the dollar has turned. The panic move into the dollar by miners and producers of raw material . . . was driving the dollar up. That has now ceased. China has now started buying those raw materials, base metals, oil and so on and so forth. So, the result is the commodity crisis is over. That, actually, is the biggest driver of the dollar, which is pushing it down.”
On the U.S. economy having a huge recession, Macleod contends, “Actually, the underlying business conditions are not good. What we have seen for considerable time is U.S. corporations have increased their borrowing, to invest in production—no, to buy back shares to artificially inflate their earnings. There comes a point that if you don’t have the underlying cash flow, you can’t do that anymore. I think there is a concern in the markets we are getting near to that point.”
Macleod predicts when the market turns, it will crash big-time. Macleod contends, “Whenever markets get mispriced, the correction is always very sudden, unexpected and hurts a lot of people. Now, we don’t have it in just one market, we have it in all markets. So, I would expect on that basis alone, that when the thing starts sliding, it’s going to be very, very big and actually could be systemically big.”........
James DiEugenio at ConsortiumNews
How CBS News Aided the JFK Cover-up
In the mid-1960s, amid growing skepticism about the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman findings on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, there was a struggle inside CBS News about whether to allow the critics a fair public hearing at the then-dominant news network. Some CBS producers pushed for a debate between believers and doubters and one even submitted a proposal to put the Warren Report “on trial,” according to internal CBS documents.
But CBS executives, who were staunch supporters of the Warren findings and had personal ties to some commission members, spiked those plans and instead insisted on presenting a defense of the lone-gunman theory while dismissing doubts as baseless conspiracy theories, the documents show.
Though it may be hard to remember – amid today’s proliferation of cable channels and Internet sites – CBS, along with NBC and ABC, wielded powerful control over what the American people got to see, hear and take seriously in the 1960s. By slapping down any criticism of the Warren Commission, CBS executives effectively prevented the case surrounding the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy from ever receiving the full airing that it deserved.
Beyond that historical significance, the internal documents – compiled by onetime CBS News assistant producer Roger Feinman – show how a major mainstream news organization green-lights one approach to ........
Silvia Cattori at Arret sur Info article translated from French by Vanessa Beeley at 21CenturyWire
Exclusive: Aleppo Doctor Attacks Western Media for Bias, Censorship and Lies
When the US and NATO war of aggression was launched against Syria, Dr Nabil Antaki could have abandoned Aleppo to ensure his own safety. Instead he decided to remain and to serve the besieged people of his City, working with various local charities. Above all, he wanted to bear witness to the destruction caused by Western support for the foreign armed groups who have been systematically destroying Syria and terrorising its people for the last 5 years.
Yesterday Silvia Cattori recorded this report from Dr Antaki on the recent amplification of propaganda surrounding events in Aleppo. It has been translated from the French by Vanessa Beeley.
“With regards to recent events in Aleppo, I state very clearly that the mainstream media are lying by omission. Since the beginning of the war in Aleppo that began 4 years ago, they have consistently failed to report all the facts.
All of us here in Aleppo are disgusted by their lack of impartiality and objectivity. They only ever talk about the loss of life in the east of Aleppo which is entirely controlled by Al Nusra, a terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda. These are their “moderate rebels” a title that affords them an unmerited degree of respectability.
This same media remains silent on the daily losses and suffering endured in the Western areas of Aleppo living under the rain of mortar fire from these terrorist factions. This media never mentions the terrorist blockade upon our people or the electricity cuts and water shortages inflicted upon us by their “moderate rebels”....
Foreign Policy Diary from SouthFront
From MoonOfAlabama
Syria - Russia Rejects Kerry's New Attempts To Shield The Terrorists
The U.S. admits that the upcoming Aleppo offensive by the Syrian government and its allies is designed to hit al-Qaeda and associated terrorist forces and not primarily the "moderate" unicorns the U.S. propaganda blushes about. But the openly U.S. supported forces will also be hit as they are very much integrated with al-Qaeda. The U.S. has for long considered al-Qaeda a secret ally in its attempt to destroy the Syrian state. The French magazine L'Orient Le Jour sees the U.S. relation with al-Qaeda in Syria as part of the attrition strategy the U.S. is waging against Syria (and Russia).
Secretary of State Kerry tried to convince the Russian that al-Qaeda should not be attacked during the cessation of hostilities. But the Russian's did not agree. Al Qaeda is a UN recognized international terrorist organization which, under UNSC resolutions, must be fought. The U.S. only succeeded in downgrading the permanent ceasefire the Russians had preferred to into a temporary cessation hostilities. It thought to use the time to rearm and to regroup its proxy forces.
But then thing went wrong. An offensive along the Turkish border to push away the Islamic State and to seal the border between the Islamic State and Turkey failed. Al-Qaeda convinced other groups, including directly U.S. supported CIA assets, to prematurely attack Syrian government forces south of Aleppo on Tal el-Eis. The attack mad only little progress before it was stopped.
Now al-Qaeda and the U.S. proxies are heavily targeting the government held western arts of Aleppo city:...........
Felicity Arbuthnot at GlobalResearch
Death and Destruction in Iraq, Extensive US War Crimes: Apocalypse in Mosul in the Guise of Bombing ISIS
“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.” (Albert Camus 1913-1960.)
On 1st May 2003, George W. Bush stood in a dinky little flying suit on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and in a super stage managed appearance told the lie of the century: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.” (1)
The illegal occupation and decimation of Iraq continued until December 2011. In June 2014 they returned to bomb again in the guise of combating ISIS. As the thirteenth anniversary of Bush’s ridiculous appearance with a vast “Mission Accomplished” banner behind him, Iraq is largely in ruins, Iraqis have fled the murderous “liberation” and it’s aftermath in millions and there are over three million internally displaced.
The nation is pinned between a tyrannical, corrupt US puppet government, a homicidal, head chopping, raping, organ eating, history erasing, US-spawned ISIS – and a renewed, relentless US bombardment. So much for the 2008 US-Iraq State of Forces agreement, which stated that by 31st December 2011: “all United States forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory.”
On the USS Abraham Lincoln Bush stated: “In this battle, we have fought for....
Ron Donaghy at MiddleEastEye
Sacked workers in Saudi Arabia set fire to buses in protest over unpaid salaries - See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/sacked-workers-saudi-arabia-set-fire-buses-over-unpaid-salaries-372554115#sthash.KYd07TFd.dpuf
50,000 foreign labourers have been sacked by the Binladin Group and some have not been paid salaries in at least four months
Workers at one of Saudi Arabia’s largest employers set fire to buses on Saturday amid protests at being laid off and told to leave the kingdom without being paid for several months work.
Footage uploaded to YouTube showed employees of the Binladin Group protesting outside the construction company’s offices in Mecca province, and setting fire to several buses.
Saudi daily Okaz reported that fires on seven buses in Mecca had been extinguished without any fatalities, adding that local authorities had launched an investigation into the incident.
However, the newspaper did not mention the cause of the fire, which was by angry former Binladin employees.
The protesting workers are among 50,000 foreign labourers who have been sacked by the private company as the kingdom’s revenues have declined due to low oil prices, which have forced government spending cuts.
Saudi daily al-Watan reported on Friday that Binladin had given the sacked foreign workers a permanent exit visa to leave the country but many of them do not want to leave because they claim not to have been paid properly.....
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