Allegations that Russian hacking attacks aided the victory of Donald Trump are a myth, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Italian newspaper Corriere della sera. The interview also focused on sanctions against Moscow and NATO-Russia tensions.
In the immediate aftermath of the victory of Donald Trump at the US presidential elections, American and international media were quick to assume the alleged hacking of the camp of the Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by “Russian hackers” was to blame for the result.
Speaking to the Corriere della sera in an interview published late Wednesday, Lavrov stressed that the only ones who really “helped” Donald Trump to become the 45th US president were American citizens.
“It is symptomatic that the authors of such insinuations, who had inflated Russophobic hysteria in the United States on the eve of the vote, are now playing mum. No promised ‘evidence’ of interference in the electoral process has been presented neither to the American, nor to the international public,” Lavrov said.
In October, Washington officially accused Moscow of staging hacking assaults on US officials and institutions, though not delivering any facts or other information backing the serious statement. Kremlin rebuffed the accusations by the US as “nonsense.” The lack of proof has raised numerous questions as to what exact purposes the allegations might have actually served, Lavrov said.
“This confirms once again that the whole story is from the field of myth-making with a goal to solve the short-term political objectives,” the foreign minister added.
On November 29, German Chancellor Angela Merkel also weighed in, linking the recent hacking attacks on the country’s telecommunications group Deutsche Telecom to Moscow. However, the German leader admitted she did not know who exactly the attackers were.
‘Italy businesses dissatisfied with Russia sanctions’
When asked on how Russia is viewing relations with Italy, which is among the countries who imposed sanctions on Moscow over the Ukrainian crisis, Lavrov noted that both sides are suffering from the measures.
“Sanctions introduced by the EU against Russia, joined by Italy, and the Russian retaliatory steps had a negative impact on bilateral trade and economic cooperation,” Lavrov said. He also noted that Italy, which used to be the fourth-largest trading partner with Russia, now ranks sixth, while Washington has surpassed Rome and is now placed fifth.
“Thus, Washington, who became the initiator of a large part of the anti-Russian intentions, is not suffering any losses. Perhaps there is something our Italian and in general European partners have to think about,” Lavrov said. Russia, for its part, has already “adjusted” itself to the restrictions with the country’s economy solidly “standing on its feet.”
The Russian foreign minister also noted that “Italian political, business, public circles are increasingly expressing [their] dissatisfaction with the sanctions policies, advocate for the return” of the growing bilateral ties between the two states.
“A number of regions in Italy adopted a resolution calling for the removal of anti-Russian sanctions,” Lavrov said. He added Moscow hopes that Rome will build relations with Russia “based primarily on self-interest.”
“All the rich history of Russian-Italian relations, which are based on years of experience of fruitful cooperation, is an example that with joint efforts we managed to achieve significant results,” Lavrov said.
On Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016, after more than five years of fighting in Aleppo, Syrian government forces recaptured a major portion of the “rebel” enclave often called “east Aleppo”.
They recounted horror stories of how the “rebels”, under the leadership of the extremist al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (AKA Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), denied them food and water and shot at them when they tried to leave (after confiscating their mobile phones so that no one could hear their story). Nevertheless, hundreds of fighters decided to accept the government offer of amnesty, and laid down their arms, while the rest retreated into the shrinking enclave.
The main water pumping station for the entire city had been in this liberated section of the city, and government engineers promise that service will soon be restored for the first time in many years.
It is a major turning point in the Syrian war, signaling the beginning of the end for efforts by the US, NATO and the Arabian monarchies to create “regime change” and a failed state in place of the secular government supported by the vast majority of Syrian citizens.
But apparently none of this is of any importance. After following what I thought were exciting developments through Twitter, Facebook, RT, and various alternative media sites, I flipped through the evening news of the three major US television networks (ABC, NBC & CBS) to see what sort of coverage they might have. I was expecting denunciations, accusations of Russian and Syrian atrocities, and the usual lies and distortions.
Instead, I found nothing at all. There was no coverage of Syria. Apparently, nothing of any consequence had happened. Instead, there was a story about how a group of US workers had won the lottery and had all become millionaires.
Silly me! I had thought it was a historic turning point. I can only imagine that the lavishly funded Aleppo Media Center and White Helmets “impartial” “volunteer” organizations were too busy running for their lives, along with their head-chopping heroes, to concoct their stories and stage their imitation rescue and black flag operations, and distribute them to the western media. Without these sources, the corporate media were left with nothing to report except stories that contradicted everything they had been reporting for months and years.
Silence is golden.
Paul Larudee is one of the founders of the Free Gaza and Free Palestine Movements and an organizer in the International Solidarity Movement.
The United States, the United Kingdom, France and the United Nations have not yet offered humanitarian relief to 90,000 Aleppo citizens, liberated from militants two days ago, the Russian Defense Ministry’s spokesman said Wednesday.
“Two days after over 90,000 Aleppo residents were freed from terrorists, no offer of humanitarian assistance came from the office of UN envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura, the British and French Foreign Ministries or the US State Department,” the ministry’s spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said.
Konashenkov reminded about the previous US, UK, UN and French demands to provide humanitarian access to eastern Aleppo when it was held by the militants.
“Apparently, the [humanitarian] assistance was destined for certain other people living in the eastern parts of Aleppo,” Konashenkov said highlighting the absence of the above-mentioned sides’ interest in providing civilians with humanitarian aid after all the necessary conditions for the aid delivery had been created.
On Tuesday, the Russian Defense Ministry said that the Syrian government forces had cleared almost half of eastern Aleppo from militant strongholds, liberating tens of thousands local residents.
After Fidel Castro passed away Friday night at 90 years old, the obituaries written about him in the American press typified the U.S. government propaganda used for decades to demonize Castro and obscure the tremendous social and humanitarian advances that the Cuban Revolution was able to achieve in the face of unrelenting interference, subversion and destabilization. None were more over-the-top in their bias than the obituary in the New York Times.
A mere 54 words, the lede paragraph contains an astonishing amount of misinformation and innuendo:
“Fidel Castro, the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959”
It’s hard to imagine any Western leader being called a “fiery apostle.” The phrase suggests Castro was driven by an irrational, religious mission to undertake revolution, rather than having resorted to armed resistance as a last resort after the possibility of nonviolent opposition through political means was eliminated. In 1952, as Castro was favored to win a seat in the House of Representatives, Fulgencio Batista promptly cancelled the upcoming elections as it became clear he would not be able to hold power in a free and fair vote. Only after this did Castro and others start to organize a guerilla resistance in order to prevent rule by a military dictatorship. Calling him a “fiery apostle of revolution” is reductionist and Manichean.
The second part of the sentence is easily disprovable. The Cold War was well underway and active in the Western Hemisphere long before the Revolution came to power in 1959. Five years earlier, the CIA, at the behest of the United Fruit Company and working in conjunction with Congress and the White House, supported the overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected progressive President Jacobo Arbenz by the Guatemalan military. The reason was summed up by Senator George Smathers of Florida, who was quoted in an article in the CIA’s professional journal, Studies in Intelligence, saying: “In all candor, we must admit that the democratic nations of the Western Hemisphere could not permit the continued existence of a Communist base in Latin America, so close to home.”
Aside from misrepresenting the Cold War timeline, the idea that it was Castro who was responsible for Cold War tensions with the United States is laughable. Castro immediately reached out to the U.S. government after taking power in 1959, and even visited the country four months later. Upon arriving he was stood up by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who decided to play golf instead meeting with Castro. The next year, Eisenhower would cancel the sugar quota Cuba depended on for export revenue, provoking Cuba to exercise its sovereign right to nationalize U.S. properties. In return, the U.S. government prohibited delivery of oil to the island, which led to Cuba seeking oil from the Soviet Union.
“and then defied the United States for nearly half a century as Cuba’s maximum leader”
It is strange that Castro’s commitment not to compromise on the sovereignty of Cuba and its people would be seen as remarkable enough to draw attention to it so prominently. Imagine a Russian obituary to Ronald Reagan stating that he defied the Soviet Union. Such a statement presumes that the natural state of affairs would be subservience to the dictates of a foreign power. Americans would find this notion absurd.
“bedeviling 11 American presidents”
This is one way of stating that Castro survived more than 600 assassination attempts authorized by multiple U.S. executives and resisted their criminal economic war that sought “to bring about hunger, desperation” and “hardship” and to this day continues to deny food and medicine to children.
“and briefly pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war”
A year and a half prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the CIA directed a mercenary invasion of Cuba that failed spectacularly after it was quickly repelled. Understanding that another invasion was imminent, Castro sought nuclear missiles from the Soviet Union because he believed it would possibly be the only deterrent to another U.S. attack. Meanwhile, the United States had nuclear missiles positioned across Eastern Europe at the Soviet Union. When Kennedy protested to the Soviets, Khrushchev offered to withdraw the missiles before they reached Cuba if the U.S. would likewise withdraw its nuclear missiles from Turkey and promise not to invade Cuba. Kennedy said this would “look like a very fair trade” to any “rational man.” Yet, he was still not satisfied and instead of accepting it decided to engage in a game of chicken that could easily have resulted in a nuclear holocaust. To pin responsibility on Fidel Castro for the escalation of this situation is a gross distortion.
“died on Friday. He was 90.”
This I don’t take issue with.
The rest of the obituary is riddled with other inaccuracies and rhetorical flourishes that all predictably echo decades worth of U.S. government propaganda.
The Times claims Castro “ceded much of his power to his younger brother Raúl.” In reality, Fidel resigned his position as the President of State in 2006. He did not personally hand power to his brother in a dictatorial display of nepotism. Raúl was at the time Vice President, having been elected in the process stipulated by the Cuban Constitution. Likewise under the Constitution, as Vice President he assumed the role of the Presidency upon the resignation of the current President. No different than how succession would work in the United States.
The piece goes on to make unfounded claims of Castro’s self-aggrandizement (“he believed himself to be the messiah of his fatherland”) and launch evidence-free smears about his abuse of power (“he wielded power like a tyrant, controlling every aspect of the island’s existence”).
No one in recent history has been the subject of such vitriolic and politically biased propaganda emanating from the U.S. government as Fidel Castro. It is unsurprising that the self-declared paper of record in the U.S. would replicate the same disingenuous rhetoric rather than attempt to objectively assess the life of undoubtedly the most important individual of the 20th century based on documented facts placed in historical context.
Your crime, as it were, need not be substantiated with evidence; the mere fact you publicly revealed your anti-Establishment thought convicted you.
One of the most remarkable ironies of The Washington Post’s recent evidence-free fabrication of purported “Russian propaganda” websites (including this site) is how closely it mimics the worst excesses of the USSR’s Stalinist era.
One episode is especially relevant to the totalitarian tactics of The Washington Post’s evidence-free accusation. Solzhenitsyn tells the story of one poor fellow who made the mistake of recounting a dream he’d had the previous night to his co-workers.
In his dream, Stalin had come to some harm. In Solzhenitsyn’s account, the fellow was remorseful about the dream.
Alas, mere remorse couldn’t possibly save him. He was promptly arrested for “anti-Soviet thoughts” and given a tenner in the Gulag–a tenner being a ten-year sentence in a Siberian labor camp.
The Washington Post’s accusation is based on a “behavioral analysis”–in other words, publicly sharing “anti-Soviet thoughts”–in our era, the equivalent is sharing anti-Establishment thoughts.
Your crime, as it were, need not be substantiated with evidence; the mere fact you publicly revealed your anti-Establishment thought convicted you.
This is the Corporate Media’s Gulag of the Mind. We’ll tell you what’s “true” and what is correct to think and believe. Any deviation from the party line is a threat and must be discredited, marginalized or suppressed.
Where is the Post’s hard evidence of Russian ties or Russian influence? There isn’t any–but like Stalin’s henchmen, the Post has no need for evidence: merely going public with an anti-Establishment thought “proves” one’s guilt in the kangaroo court of America’s corporate media (a.k.a. mainstream media or MSM).
While The Washington Post is owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the vast majority of what we read, watch and hear is controlled by a handful of corporations loaded with cash and connections to the ruling elite.
This concentration of media control creates the illusion of choice— the same elite-propaganda spin is everywhere you look; our “choice” of “approved” (i.e. corporate) media is roughly the same as that offered the Soviet citizenry in the old USSR.
This is why the billionaire/corporate media is so desperate to discredit the non-corporate media: if an alternative to the corporate media’s elite-propaganda catches on, the corporate media will lose its audience, its advert revenues and a substantial measure of its influence.
The cornered elite-propaganda beast is lashing out, undermining its waning credibility with every attack on an independent free press. As I noted in a recent conversation with Max Keiser, democracy requires the citizenry to sort out who benefits from whatever narrative is being pushed.
That’s what terrifies the elite-propaganda mainstream media: the status quo narrative they’ve spewed for years doesn’t benefit the bottom 95% — rather, it actively impoverishes and disempowers the bottom 95%–and the citizenry is slowly awakening to this reality.
So for goodness sakes, if you have an anti-elitist dream, keep it to yourself or you’ll end up on the ruling elite’s “enemies list.”
The final irony in all this: the real enemy of democracy and freedom of the press is The Washington Post and the rest of the billionaire/corporate media. The only way to escape the Corporate Media’s Gulag of the Mind is to stop watching their TV channels, turn off their radio stations and stop reading their print/digital propaganda–except of course if you have a taste for dark humor.
No, weather is NOT climate… even when it’s warm outside. But in case there’s a climate cultist in your life that insists otherwise, here are some facts about global warming and vaguely-defined “extreme” weather that you can use to talk some sense into them.
Media ignore Clinton’s weaknesses and Trump’s strengths for 18 months to epically blow election predictions.
No calls for recounts.
Clinton concedes.
No calls for recounts.
Despite over 200 years of the electoral college system, and this being the fifth presidential election where the winner did not receive the majority of the popular vote, Clinton supporters begin bleating about her winning the popular vote so, whatever, she should become president. Many seem surprised to learn of this “electoral” system;
No calls for recounts.
Clinton supporters hold street protests.
No calls for recounts.
Effort made to talk electors out of voting for Trump fails to gain traction.
No calls for recounts.
Two weeks after the election in the midst of the Trump transition OMG the Russians hacked the election Putin is controlling America with RT.com thought waves and fake news so we gotta recount it but only so faith in American democracy is restored.
Jill Stein, who received zero electoral votes and has absolutely nothing to gain from a recount somehow raises more money in a few days than in her entire previous campaign.
We gotta have a recount!
Clinton campaign joins in demand for a recount.
(Standby for cries that the recount, which will show Clinton still losing, is itself crooked as it was done by the same local election officials under the same mind control of the Soviet Bear)
BONUS:
My point is nowadays (i.e., 1950) any criticism of the Clinton is taken as de facto “evidence” of Russian agency. The Catch-22 is that if it cannot be shown that you work directly for the Russians, it is said you are a “useful idiot” too dumb to realize you are secondarily under their influence. Everybody is thus part of the Soviet global threat.
“A closer look at what Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” is reporting on Syria shows that the purported critical broadcaster has become a purveyor of Western government propaganda. While the mainstream media’s propaganda function is obvious to the informed public, Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” plays a more subtle role. Camouflaged with the trappings of critical, independent journalism, “Democracy Now!” serves to sow powerful seeds of misinformation in a way that the “compromised” mainstream media cannot.” ~ Finian Cunningham 2012
“As the United Nations says nearly 1 million Syrians are living under siege and the last remaining hospitals in eastern Aleppo have been destroyed.” ~ Democracy Now! November 2016
Last night, Democracy Now!released a report that was breathtaking in the saturation of NATO aligned propaganda in this one segment out of their almost six year criminal, media campaign against Syria and the sovereign will of its people. In the first line alone, we have the ubiquitous and now hugely discredited description of the “last remaining hospitals in eastern Aleppo”.
The East Aleppo “last hospital” litany has become synonymous with corporate media lies. It’s duplicitous and misleading use is clearly demonstrated by this short video collection of the many mainstream media reports on the “last hospital” rendering these corporate media accounts questionable and far from credible.
A search on Twitter under the hashtag “last hospital” reveals the extent of the mockery of the mainstream media narrative that has risen to an unprecedented level of outright lies in line with the US coalition frustration at the Syrian Arab Army allied advances towards the full liberation of East Aleppo from the clutches of over 22 brigades of assorted US, UK, EU, Turkish, Gulf State-funded & armed militants and mercenary gangs under the leadership of Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda terrorist affiliate in Syria.
Collection of corporate media tweets amplifying the “last hospital” narrative in East Aleppo. (Collage created by @Navsteva)
“Nothing Short of a Slaughter“: 1 Million Syrians in Aleppo Under Siege with No Hospital, Food”
This is the already misleading headline of the Democracy Now! report. Interviewer, Nermeen Shaikh interviews guests, Bassam Haddad, director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies program at George Mason University, and Dr. Zaher Sahloul, founder of the American Relief Coalition for Syria and senior adviser and former president of the Syrian American Medical Society.
The following are the ten main points put forward by these two guests, points that are questionable, and yet go unchallenged by Shaikh:
1: East Aleppo contains 300,000 people, of which 100,000 are children
2: These people are under siege, starving & without medicine for the last four and half months, due to the Syrian “regime” and allies.
3: Every 17 hours right now in Aleppo, “health care facilities” are being targeted. In the last 144 days, there were 143 attacks on health care facilities across Syria. One third of these attacks were in the “city of Aleppo”, so 48 attacks in last four and a half months.
4: The daily massacre and maiming of Syrian civilians in West Aleppo by the militant factions in East Aleppo pales into “insignificance” when compared to the “brutal bombardment of eastern Aleppo and the almost total destruction of life”
5: The Syrian “regime” is “focused” upon re-conquering the whole of Syria in its entirety.
6: Al Nusra are not in East Aleppo except maybe a “few fighters”
7: The population of East Aleppo was 1.5 million before the crisis. Now it is 300,000 so majority have fled to Turkey, Europe or elsewhere inside Syria. Any other place in Syria is dangerous. If they go to government controlled areas they risk being “tortured or detained”. So, the civilians in East Aleppo cannot leave because there is nowhere safe for them.
8: The Syrian “regime” is conducting an ethnic cleansing operation by evacuating “rebels” from liberated areas such as East Aleppo, Homs, Daraya.
9: There is a rift between the US think tanks who support the Syrian “revolution” in order to ensure Israel’s security in the region and the true “revolution” supporters who are interested primarily in the well being of all Syrians. “A rift that should have existed from the very beginning for the sake of building a healthier, independent and democratic uprising in Syria against a dictatorial regime.” ~ Bassam Haddad
10: President Elect, Donald Trump’s stated support for Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, is the “final nail in the coffin of the aspiration of the Syrian people, the young people of Syria, who rose up in the beginning of this five years ago for freedoms and liberties that we enjoy and we all support.” ~ Dr Zaher Sahloul
Democracy Now!’s Fake Objectivity
Yet again, Democracy Now! give their guests a protected platform to present a very partisan and biased view of events in Syria. Not once does Shaikh proffer an alternative view to that which is being presented by the show’s guests. On the contrary, she positively reinforces their narrative with the use of her own rhetoric and terms such as “annihilation and war crimes” directed against the Syrian government and allies, in the opening statement of the interview.
“The second implication is that this neutral voice, without a discipline of verification, creates a veneer covering something hollow. Journalists who select sources to express what is really their own point of view, and then use the neutral voice to make it seem objective, are engaged in a form of deception. This damages the credibility of the craft by making it seem unprincipled, dishonest, and biased.” ~ The American Press Institute. (Emphasis added)
Shaikh even fails to question the contradiction of her own introduction by Sahloul. Sahloul states that Al Nusra barely exist in East Aleppo. In her introduction, Shaikh alludes to the UN suggestion that the Syrian government should permit autonomy for East Aleppo provided the “jihadist fighters linked to al-Qaeda (Al Nusra) withdrew and the fighting stopped.”
Shaikh fails in her assumed role as an independent and objective reporter. She fails to ask the most basic questions that would deconstruct the narrative being projected by her guests. She fails to debate. She succeeds only in giving credibility to an incredible account of the situation in East Aleppo, an account that is flatly denied by recent visitors to Aleppo such as independent journalists & researchers, Eva Bartlett, Tom Duggan and the author of this article, Vanessa Beeley.
We all know that people differ mentally in a great many ways: some are reflective, others impulsive; some are sympathetic, others are sociopathic; some are creative, others seem never to have a witty or imaginative thought; some are sensible, others are flighty, fanatical, or prone to panic; and some are smart, whereas others cannot do a simple arithmetical calculation in their head or solve an elementary logical puzzle.
So how do we measure the human intellect? Among educators and psychologists, the most common procedure is to conduct a test of reasoning ability that yields a result called an intelligence quotient, or IQ.
Some people think IQ’s are terrifically important and that people can be ranked from dumb to brilliant according to their IQ. Moreover, it is widely believed that one’s IQ is largely genetically determined at birth.
Thus to many, IQ is a mark of inherent social rank.
A problem with this idea is that IQ’s seem to vary according to experience and culture. Sub-Saharan Africans, for example, are widely said to have IQ’s averaging 20 to 30 points lower than the average of about 100, which is typical of most European populations. Trouble is, when Africans migrate to Europe, their IQ’s rise. Same with country folk versus city folk. The former seem to have lower IQ’s until they migrate to the city, then they, or their children, match the IQ’s of the city-born.
There’s also the effect known as test sophistication, which means that the more IQ tests you take the better you get at them. So IQ is not quite so firmly fixed by the genes as many people seem to believe. Moreover, there are generational differences in IQ, with IQ’s of most populations rising by five to as much as 30 points per generation since the beginning of the 20th Century, this phenomenon being known as the Flynn Effect.
But if people differ in intellect in ways other than reasoning capacity, what value is there in judging intellect by IQ?
For example, does IQ measure creativity, judgement, diligence, responsibility, or empathy?
Obviously not. Moreover, very little is knows about the effect of environment, diet, or culture on the many facets of human intelligence.
So why is so much attention given to the measurement of IQ?
Such a narrow view of human mentality seems not very intelligent, really.
Almost anyone with adequate schooling can learn to observe carefully, perform basic logical processes, make comparisons, draw more or less obvious logical inferences, and perform all the other operations that underlie appropriate responses to IQ test questions.
But not everyone is creative, sound in judgement, socially responsible, mentally vigorous, or possessed of the power of empathy.
And without those other qualities of mind, how useful is an abnormally high IQ?
In most circumstances, not very.
In fact, the idea of rating intellect on a single linear scale seems neither sensible nor useful, whereas it is almost certainly seriously misleading and, therefore, harmful.
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour has equated climate change skeptics with the purveyors of “ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia” and “unspeakable crimes.” She also declared that the media should not give voice to those who reject the alleged “consensus” of man-made climate fears. Amanpour warned of a “Tsunami of fake news.”
Amanpour was honored with the Burton Benjamin Memorial Award by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), for her extraordinary and sustained achievement in the cause of press freedom on November 22, 2016. (Email: press@cpj.org) She is the Chief International Correspondent for CNN and host of CNN International’s nightly interview program Amanpour.
Amanpour said the following about “global warming” and “press freedom” at 4:35 into the video: Note: The transcript at the Real Clear Politics link (slightly different from what she actually says in the video) includes the following:
Key Excerpt of Christiane Amanpour speech:
“It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth. We cannot continue the old paradigm–let’s say like over global warming, where 99.9 percent of the empirical scientific evidence is given equal play with the tiny minority of deniers.
I learned a long, long time ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence, because then if you do, particularly in situations like that, you are party and an accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes and consequences.
So I believe in being truthful, not neutral.”
End excerpt.
Wikipedia states that “The CPJ International Press Freedom Awards honor journalists or their publications around the world who show courage in defending press freedom despite facing attacks, threats, or imprisonment.”
As Climate Depot reader Tony Kondaks noted: Neither Amanpour or the CPJ “was aware of the irony that an award for ‘press freedom’ is going to an individual who feels that defending press freedom means that journalists must self-censor and RESTRICT their readers’ access to countering and opposing views.”
Amanpour also noted the oft repeated incorrect claim of a 97% consensus about “global warming” but she even juiced that number to 99.6%.
For the truth about the 97% “consensus” claims, see below.
97% Climate Consensus?
The claim that “97% of scientists agree” is in part based on 77 anonymous scientists who [participated] in a survey. The survey started by seeking opinions from 10,257 scientists. However, it was then whittled down to 77. So the 97% “consensus” claim is not based on thousands of scientists or even hundreds of scientists – but only on 77 scientists. Out of those 77 scientists, 75 answered the survey to form the mythical 97% ‘consensus.’
In 2013 and 2014, other claims of an alleged 97% climate ‘consensus’ emerged, prompting UN IPCC lead author Dr. Richard Tol to publish a critique and declare: “The 97% is essentially pulled from thin air, it is not based on any credible research whatsoever.” The new 97% claim by climate activist John Cook was so “so broad that it incorporates the views of most prominent climate skeptics.” Another researcher, Andrew Montford, commented: “The [97%] consensus as described by the survey is virtually meaningless and tells us nothing about the current state of scientific opinion beyond the trivial observation that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet to some unspecified extent.”
Lord Christopher Monckton’s analysis found that “only 41 papers – 0.3% of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0% of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1%” actually endorsed the claim that “more than half of recent global warming was anthropogenic.”
Bjorn Lomborg wrote: “Do you remember the ‘97% consensus,’ which even Obama tweeted? Turns out the authors don’t want to reveal their data. It has always been a dodgy paper. Virtually everyone I know in the debate would automatically be included in the 97%.”
UN IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Tol: The 97‰ ‘consensus’ is a ‘bogus number’ – Some of the mistakes in the study should be obvious to all. There are hundreds of papers on the causes of climate change, and thousands of papers on the impacts of climate change and climate policy. Cook focused on the latter. A paper on the impact of a carbon tax on emissions was taken as evidence that the world is warming. A paper on the impact of climate change on the Red Panda was taken as evidence that humans caused this warming. And even a paper on the television coverage of climate change was seen by Cook as proof that carbon dioxide is to blame.
Cook and Co. analysed somewhere between 11,944 and 12,876 papers – they can’t get their story straight on the sample size – but only 64 of these explicitly state that humans are the primary cause of recent global warming. A reexamination of their data brought that number down to 41. That is half a per cent or less of the total, rather than 97 percent.
MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen Mocks 97% Consensus: ‘It is propaganda’ – 97 Consensus? Dr. Lindzen: ‘They never really tell you what they agree on. It is propaganda. So all scientists agree it’s probably warmer now than it was at the end of the Little Ice Age. Almost all Scientists agree that if you add CO2 you will have some warming. Maybe very little warming. But it is propaganda to translate that into it is dangerous and we must reduce co2 etc. If you can make an ambiguous remark and you have people who will amplify it ‘they said it not me’ and he response of the political system is to increase your funding, what’s not to like?’
Journalist Ilanit Chernick’s feature piece celebrating Sukkot in Israel is not innocuous, and is redolent of White South Africa’s attempt to display scenic Cape Town, the glitter of Sun City or the enchanting Kruger Park game reserve to hide Apartheid’s ugly face and its crimes against humanity.
Photos of the ancient seaport city of occupied Majdal, now called Ashkelon, was one of the 540 Palestinian villages and towns ethnically cleansed by Zionist brutality in 1948. In 1918, it became part of the British Occupied Enemy Territory Administration and in 1920 became part of Mandatory Palestine.
Majdal had 10,000 Palestinian inhabitants and in October 1948, the city accommodated thousands more refugees from nearby villages. They are now part of the 7 million Palestinian refugees and displaced people in the Palestinian diaspora who have been denied their basic human rights.
The picture of the Al-Buraq Plaza, or what some Jews call the Western Wall, is an integral part of the western boundary wall of the Al-Aqsa Sanctuary. After a two-year study, a League of Nations Commission reported in 1931 that Muslims would have the sole ownership of, and the sole propriety right to, the Western Wall as it forms an integral part of the Al-Aqsa Sanctuary. The commission also specified the pavement in front of the Wall and of the adjacent Maghribi Quarter opposite the Wall to be under Muslim control.
This was recently confirmed by UNESCO’s Executive Board in Paris who adopted a resolution that called Israel “the occupying power” and demanded that Israel not restrict Muslim access to the Temple Mount, condemning Israel for “illegal measures against the freedom of worship” at the “Muslim holy site of worship.” It also accused Israel of installing fake Jewish graves in other spaces of the Muslim cemeteries located in the Al-Aqsa area.
The fate of Al-Quds, Jerusalem, and its holy sites cannot be understood separately from the fate of Palestine. The daily struggle of Palestinian Muslims and Christians in that city is a representation of the struggle of Palestinians everywhere. In 1980, Israel passed a law that explicitly annexed the illegally occupied city to become part of the State of Israel. Since then, Jerusalem has been a major point of strife, political conflict and controversy.
The Zionists have concentrated much of their efforts on the “Judaisation” of Jerusalem. They confiscated 86 per cent of the city and filled it with Jewish immigrants. In the area of East Jerusalem, where the Al-Aqsa Mosque is located, about 200,000 Jews were settled there after they had encircled it with a wall of settlements, isolating it from its Arab and Islamic surroundings.
Jerusalemite Palestinians feel the burden of Israeli discrimination on a daily basis. While they represent 37 per cent of the total population in the city, the poverty rate among them has reached 75 per cent, a third of their youth drops out before finishing high school and 39 per cent of their houses are built without permits. Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are not Israeli citizens, but rather possess permanent residency status that can be revoked at any time.
The ban on the Islamic call to prayer, the Athan, in a bid to silence the mosques, is but the latest in a succession of steps taken by all Israeli governments from the moment Israel occupied and annexed East Jerusalem, to Judaise the city in every respect.
Palestinian MK Haneen Zoabi stated: “The issue is not about noise in their ears but about the noise in their minds. What disturbs them so much is the noise of the Palestinians’ presence in their own homeland.”
The Athan has been sounding over the city five times a day for the past millennium and a half, and this is an attempt to change the multi-confessional complexion of the holy city characterised by the mingling sounds of the Athan and church bells ringing.
Chernick’s images are divorced from reality, with perhaps the exception of the poignant photo of the black Ethiopian beggar on the restaurant sidewalk. The pathetic plight of the Falashas languishing in slums on the outskirts of the cities; the grotesque wall that separates the Palestinians from their livelihood; the cages that choke non-Jews desperate for work or treatment at checkpoints; and the plight of the Africans confined in hovels awaiting expulsion are pictures waiting to be taken for Chernick’s next assignment that will depict Israel’s true reality.
The father of the Cuban Revolution remains unbeaten by his foes even in death. We look over the most dramatic assassination plots on El Comandante – from character-assassinations by way of LSD, to Italian mobsters, tuberculosis wetsuit, and exploding cigar.
“If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal,” Castro is famously quoted as saying. Cuba’s ex-intelligence chief Fabian Escalante – the person tasked with guarding Fidel’s life – puts the number of attempts at 638. The man also claimed to Reuters in a 2010 interview that the John F. Kennedy assassination could well have been an attempt to expedite the process of removing Castro from power: the American president, some said, was not doing enough. Of course, by the time of Kennedy’s 1963 shooting death in Dallas, Texas, there had already been numerous attempts on Castro’s life – intended to bolster Kennedy’s own reputation back home as a strong president, with his administration exerting great pressure on the CIA to take care of it. It is fitting then to start at the beginning.
1) Getting the Mafia to do it
When a sizable cache of classified CIA documents, amicably called ‘Family Jewels,’ was finally released in 2007, Cuban communists felt a sense of vindication, finally gaining the ability to publicly accuse the United States government of what they claimed was already common knowledge.
In the summer of 1960, the CIA recruited former FBI agent Robert Maheu. He became the go-between from the agency to two prominent Italian gangsters on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List – Santo Trafficante of the Miami Syndicate, and Salvatore Giancana – Al Capone’s successor in Chicago. They were gotten hold of by way of Las Vegas mobster Johnny Roselli. A payment of $150,000 was on the table. According to the declassified documents, Giancana suggested using poisoned pills – six of them. But despite gaining access to officials inside the Cuban government, the plan had been unsuccessful, and was later scrapped in the run-up to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. It is said the agency was able to retrieve all the poison pills.
The closest the Americans got to killing Castro was with a poisoned chocolate milkshake, Escalante claimed to Reuters. According to the 2007 documents, another batch of poison was delivered through the Mafia in 1963 in a bottle of Bayer aspirin pills. An opposition group, it was believed, had a good chance. But the plot failed when a disguised waiter did not manage to lace Castro’s milkshake in the cafeteria of the then-Hilton Hotel (now Havana Libre), as the pill got stuck in the freezer – where it was hidden – and broke apart when the assassin attempted to dislodge it from the wall.
2) Contaminating an entire broadcast studio with LSD with the intention of eroding public trust
This was not just about spiking drinks or cigars. The CIA went all-out. After a failed attempt to embarrass El Comandante by having his beard fall out due to boots spiked with chemicals, the agency had opted for a box of cigars spiked with LSD. The plan was to have Castro burst into laughter during a televised interview, thus subjecting him to ridicule in the public eye. But it was not just cigars. The CIA planned to lace the entire studio. This plot was not implemented, but was high in the running for ways to spark a national uprising against Castro.
3) Tuberculosis-laced scuba gear that followed the exploding sea shell
The CIA had back-paddled on another of its ingenious plans to kill Castro, leading to the poisoned scuba gear idea. The agency knew the revolutionary was an avid diver. The plan had been to attract El Comandante with a sea shell practically impossible to miss, having been painted in colors bright enough to attract him. Castro would swim closer to inspect it, whereupon a lethal amount of explosives would detonate. But the idea was aborted due to impracticality, the declassified documents claimed. So the spies went the more practical way: lacing Castro’s scuba gear with tuberculosis to trigger a deadly skin disease. The man who was supposed to give Castro the suit had opted to give him an ordinary one, it turned out.
4) Evolution of the poison cigar – the exploding cigar
According to a Saturday Evening Post report on November 4, 1967, a CIA agent had approached a New York cop with the idea of handing Castro an exploding cigar during a UN meeting. That was reportedly after the plan to poison the cigar had been abandoned. This was despite the poison having already been injected into the cigar, with the CIA dismissing the person tasked with carrying the plan out in the final stages.
However, the exploding-cigar plan also failed due to the double agent changing his mind at the last instant.
5) Femme fatale
One of Castro’s many lovers – CIA informant Marita Lorenz, was also tasked with poisoning Castro in a daring operation involving a secret unit tasked with the assassination – Operation 40. According to the FBI, Lorenz had become a “contract agent” for the CIA, and willingly accepted the task of assassinating him following a miscarriage or an abortion – a story she told in 1959. Castro’s reaction to her not having the child had reportedly enraged her so much, she had eagerly taken up the task. And so she met with CIA double agent Frank Sturgis in 1960, who had handed her a bottle of poison pills.
Lorenz was to drop one into her lover’s drink, containing enough poison to kill him within 30 seconds. But as with the countless other attempts, it did not succeed because Lorenz herself could not go through with it. The mission was wrought with pitfalls. According to Ann Louise Bardoch’s ‘Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana,’ Lorenz recalled that “They said, ‘we want you to take him out.’” But, “I knew the minute I saw the outline of Havana I couldn’t do it.”
Even then, she had made the mistake of stashing the pills in her pot of cold cream, in fear of being discovered by customs. The substance had stuck to the pills, and Lorenz couldn’t unmix the two. As she attempted to flush the pills down the toilet, Castro –who had got wind of the plot – walked in with a cigar. He removed his handgun from the holster, and handed it to Lorenz with the words: “Did you come to kill me?” According to Lorenz, he handed her the gun and puffed on his cigar with his eyes closed.
“He made himself vulnerable because he knew I couldn’t do it. He still loved me and I still loved him.”
She feared the CIA would kill her for being with Castro after the foiled assassination attempt. Upon her return to Miami, Lorenz never again met with Castro. Later, however, she had a daughter with another Latin American military leader, Venezuela’s Marcos Perez Jimenez.
According to Escalante, it was the Cuban revolutionary’s vigilance and the efforts of his security apparatus that kept him alive all those years. Numerous books have been written on the matter.
Former Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey was warned by loyalist paramilitaries that they were once tasked with murdering him in an assassination plot purportedly dreamt up by the British secret service.
The sensational disclosure was sent in a letter to the Irish government, newly released under the Public Records Act, which requires documents of historical value to be published by the National Archives within 30 years.
Written on Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) signature paper, the warning claims the terrorist organization was asked by an MI5 operative about the prospect of carrying out an attack on Republic of Ireland leader Haughey in 1985.
At the time, Haughey would have been in opposition as head of political party Fianna Fáil, but details of the solicitation did not become known to Irish authorities until 1987.
“In 1985 we were approached by a M15 officer attached to the Northern Ireland Office and based in Lisburn, Alex Jones was his supposed name,” the letter reads, according to the Irish Times. “He asked us to execute you.”… continue
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