2 December 2013– Voltaire Network
[Now here’s a weird report and who knows how accurate it is. WB]
The news agency Agence France Presse has revealed that secret high-level contacts between the European powers and Syria have taken place since May 2013 (that is to say, before the outbreak of the chemical weapons crisis at the end of August).
2 December 2013 — Wikileaks Press
On October 9th, 2009 Wikileaks published the UK MoD Manual of Security Volumes 1, 2 and 3 – Issue 2, a 2389-page UK military protocol for all security and counter-intelligence operations, classified “RESTRICTED.” The document outlines instructions on how to deal with leaks, investigative journalists, Parliamentarians, foreign agents, terrorists & criminals, sexual entrapments in Russia and China, diplomatic pouches, allies, classified documents & codewords, compromising radio and audio emissions, computer hackers—and many other intelligence-related issues.
2 December 2013 — Greanville Post
What most struck me last week about Boris Johnson’s speech canonising Margaret Thatcher and thereby, paving the way for his own beatification, was how deeply and intimately familiar it all sounded. Let me explain. I was born in Doncaster in 1955 and from 1960, raised and educated on the Isle of Lewis, the son of a Scottish (doctor) father and English (nurse) mother. Continue reading
2 December 2013 — Democracy Now!
With hundreds of thousands of people now on the government’s terrorist watch lists, a closely watched trial begins today in San Francisco. Stanford University Ph.D student Rahinah Ibrahim is suing the U.S. government after she was barred from flying from Malaysia back to the United States in 2005 to complete her studies at Stanford after her name was placed on the list. The New York Times reports that the federal government’s terrorist watch list, officially called the “Terrorist Screening Database,” has grown to at least 700,000 people and those on the list are often subjected to extra scrutiny, prohibited from flying, and interrogated while attempting to cross borders. (inc. transcript) Continue reading
2 December 2013 — Global Research
“The Tribunal is satisfied, beyond reasonable doubt, that the first defendant, (General) Amos Yaron, is guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide, and the second defendant, the State of Israel, is guilty of genocide.”
2 December 2013 — Coldtype
The December issue of ColdType is now on line
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2 December 2013 — IPS
MALVINAS ARGENTINAS, Córdoba, Argentina , Dec 2 2013 (IPS) – The people of this working-class suburb of Córdoba in Argentina’s central farming belt stoically put up with the spraying of the week-killer glyphosate on the fields surrounding their neighbourhood. But the last straw was when U.S. biotech giant Monsanto showed up to build a seed plant. Continue reading
2 December 2013 — IPS
MALVINAS ARGENTINAS, Córdoba, Argentina , Dec 2 2013 (IPS) – The people of this working-class suburb of Córdoba in Argentina’s central farming belt stoically put up with the spraying of the week-killer glyphosate on the fields surrounding their neighbourhood. But the last straw was when U.S. biotech giant Monsanto showed up to build a seed plant. Continue reading
2 December 2013 — Our NHS
It’s the competitive market in social care that has hammered down standards. The NHS must not follow care homes down the route of privatised provision.
2 December 2013 — RT
The Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology has apparently decided to violate those procedures, announcing it is retracting a long-term study on the toxic effects of Monsanto Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)—GMO Maize it published a year ago. Rigid criteria exist for a serious scientific journal to accept a peer-reviewed paper and to publish it. As well there exist strict criteria by which such an article can be withdrawn after publication.
2 DEcember 2013 — New Left Project
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. – Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Fans of Victorian melodrama will no doubt be familiar with this famous extended metaphor, used by Dickens to capture how public affairs could be conducted without humanity, insight or clarity. There are few better examples of obfuscated politics than the debate currently being staged on the subject of EU immigration.
2 December 2013 — Open Democracy
Steve Hewlett knows more than most about the BBC which is why I was taken aback recently to read in his Guardian column that the BBC’s Charter ‘by convention cannot be changed without the BBC’s full agreement’
1 December 2013 — VTJP
News
International Middle East Media Center
13 Palestinians Killed, 374 Kidnapped, In November
IMEMC – [Sunday December 1, 2013] The Ahrar Center for Detainees Studies and Human Rights issued its monthly report revealing that Israel soldiers shot and killed 13 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in November, while more than 374 Palestinians, including eight women, have been kidnapped. …
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1 December 2013 — Information Clearing House
Dollar Survival Behind US-China Tensions
By Finian Cunningham
In the imperialist, megalomaniac mindset of Washington, the “threat” to the US economy and indebted way of life is perceived as a tacit act of war.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37025.htm
2 December 2013 — WSWS
As a result of the Conservative/Liberal government’s elimination of the Council Tax Benefit scheme in April of this year, thousands of British citizens are being summonsed to court for failure to pay council tax bills they cannot afford.
The New Dark Age 