the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

by Jonathan Cook   Part 4 - Journalism as espionage   Significantly, Judge Baraitser backed all the Trump administration’s main legal arguments for extradition, even though they were comprehensively demolished by Assange’s lawyers. Baraitser accepted the US government’s dangerous new definition of investigative journalism as “espionage”, and implied that Assange had also broken Britain’s draconian Official Secrets Act in exposing government war crimes. She agreed that the 2007 Extradition Treaty applies in Assange’s case, ignoring the treaty’s actual words that exempt political cases like his. She thereby opened the door for other journalists to be seized in their home countries and renditioned to the US. Baraitser accepted that protecting sources in the digital age – as Assange did for whistleblower Chelsea Manning, an essential obligation on journalists in a free society – now amounts to criminal “ hacking ”. She trashed free speech and press freedom rights, saying they did ...

globinfo freexchange   The short answer that comes immediately in mind is: competition.    Indeed, Huawei had been found frequently at the epicenter of Trump's "holly" trade war against China. Someone should expect this since Silicon Valley oligarchs see the Chinese high-tech giant rapidly penetrate into the global market, claiming bigger and bigger portion of the market pie.   As we reported previously, the US imperialist machine openly called Western allies (and particularly the UK), to sabotage China's economic and technological penetration in its Western sphere of influence, through a Foreign Policy article. According to the article, the UK appears to be the most suitable, among the US allies, to lead the race against China's 5G infrastructure deals with Western countries. In essence, it called the UK to play a leading role in sabotaging China's and Huawei's deals with the UK itself and other Western countries.   Also, according to MintPress , ...

The Grayzone   Red Lines host Anya Parampil speaks to Rune Agerhus, General Director of the Yemen Solidarity Council, about the Trump Administration's recent decision to classify the Houthi movement as a terrorist organization.    In response to the decision, the Yemen Solidarity Council announced it would cease operations in the United States, while other international aid groups have denounced the move as the deliberate criminalization of humanitarian work.    Agerhus explains why the designation makes it difficult for aid organizations to provide humanitarian relief to Yemen while providing historic context on the rise of the Houthi movement as well as Saudi Arabia's geopolitical interests in the country. 

The Grayzone   An independent United Nations expert is calling on the US to lift its crippling sanctions on Syria. Under the Caesar Act, US sanctions explicitly target Syria's reconstruction in the aftermath of a catastrophic 10-year war. Alena Douhan, the UN Special Rapporteur on the impact of sanctions, says that the US sanctions are illegal and depriving Syrian civilians of their basic needs.  " People shouldn't die, people shouldn't suffer, and people shouldn't fear whether they can survive after tomorrow, because they have neither medicine or food, because of the sanctions applied, " Douhan says.

April 1st 1957: the day Western mainstream media officially became masters of propaganda through a seemingly innocent April Fools' Day joke    Varoufakis claims that the innermost circle of the Greek PM owns shares of vulture funds connected with the non-performing loans of Greek banks   COVID-19 demonstrates that capitalism has outrun its historical tolerability      As Bernie drops nomination, progressives are left with only one political option: the Green Party    Biden's lame attempt to lure Bernie supporters fails miserably    How Bernie Sanders could still become president    We have come now to the point where an entire class of society has been designated "expendable"   Best evidence so far for the fact that Biden would start a war with Iran, just like Trump   

The Hill   Saagar Enjeti analyzes columnist, Ross Douthat's, article in The New York Times titled, "How the Republican Party Could Break".  

by Jonathan Cook   Part 2 - First, a dangerous ruling   So it was barely surprising, as I explained in my previous story, that, while denying the extradition claim, she supported all the arguments advanced by the US accruing to itself the right to prosecute Assange – and any other journalist – for the crime of doing journalism. She ignored the facts, the expert testimony presented in court and the legal arguments – all of which favoured Assange – and backed instead what amounted to a purely political case made by the US. She disregarded warnings from Assange’s legal team that acceptance of the political rationale for extradition amounted to an all-out attack on fundamental journalistic freedoms.    She established a terrifying legal precedent for the US to seize foreign journalists and prosecute them for “espionage” if they expose Washington’s crimes. Her ruling will inevitably have a profoundly chilling effect on any publication trying to dig out the truth about the...

UK judge Vanessa Baraitser justified CIA spying on Julian Assange by citing a falsehood-filled CNN report. Her judgment highlighted corporate media’s enthusiastic role in a state-sponsored assault on press freedom.   by Ben Norton   Part 2 - UK judge casts doubt on US spying on Assange while simultaneously justifying it   The Grayzone has published several investigations into the US government spying operation that targeted Julian Assange when he was trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy. The Spanish company hired by Ecuador to provide security, UC Global, was secretly working with the CIA, providing the US spy agency with 24/7 video and audio surveillance that covered almost every inch of the diplomatic building, including even the women’s bathroom. Max Blumenthal demonstrated that the CIA presided over this illegal spying ring with the help of a company owned by billionaire Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, a close ally of President Donald Trump and former CIA Directo...

by Jonathan Cook   Part 7 - Boy who cried wolf   The Haaretz article helps to contextualise Europe’s current antisemitism “witch-hunt”, which targets anyone who criticises Israel or stands in solidarity with oppressed Palestinians, or associates with such people. It is an expansion of the earlier campaign by the Jewish establishment against “the wrong kind of Jew”, as identified by Finkelstein in The Holocaust Industry . But this time Jewish organisations are playing a much higher-stakes, and more dangerous, political game. Haaretz rightly fears that the Jewish leadership in Europe is not only silencing ordinary Jews but degrading the meaning – the shock value – of antisemitism through the very act of politicising it.     Jewish organisations risk alienating the European left, which has historically stood with them against Jew hatred from the right. European anti-racists suddenly find themselves equated with, and smeared as, fledgling neo-Nazis. If those who suppor...

While the US and its allies glorify Leopoldo López as a new MLK, the US-backed Venezuelan opposition  collaborates with Colombia’s narco-affiliated, death squad-sponsoring former President Álvaro Uribe.   by Ben Norton   Part 5 - Leopoldo López meets with Colombia’s Álvaro Uribe, friend of drug cartels and death squads   But the photo op in Cúcuta was just the beginning of Leopoldo López’s PR campaign in Colombia. On December 15, López tweeted a photo of himself with far-right former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez. Uribe is the most powerful politician in Colombia, the beneficiary of extensive and well-documented links to the drug cartels and death squads that hold sway in the country. In 2018, the National Security Archive released declassified US State Department cables that showed Washington was aware its favorite ally in Bogotá had collaborated for decades with drug traffickers and paramilitaries, using cocaine money to fund his political campaigns. A 2018 New York...