2 January 2021 — The Grayzone
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No comments on US govt-sponsored website Bellingcat disrupts MH17 trial in Netherlands
US govt-sponsored website Bellingcat disrupts MH17 trial in Netherlands
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British Judge Keeps Julian Assange In Prison, Despite Denying Extradition Two Days Ago
6 January 2021 — The Dissenter
“As far as Mr. Assange is concerned, this case has not been won,” Judge Vanessa Baraitser declared. She said the United States government “must be allowed to challenge [her] decision.”
A British district judge denied bail for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after a hearing in which the prosecution argued he had helped NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden “flee justice” and would abscond if released from the Belmarsh high-security prison.
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German Government Uses Lockdown to Sneak Deadly Pesticide
4 January 2021 — New Eastern Outlook
Using the conditions of the most recent coronavirus lockdown, the German government’s agriculture minister has made a stealth decision, without open debate, to re-instate a banned class of systemic insecticides known as neonicotinoids. The German move follows a similar move by the French Macron government and puts the entire food security of the EU in serious danger. Ironically, or maybe not, the move comes at a time when food security worldwide is in grave stress owing to consequences of the global COVID lockdowns that have disrupted huge parts of the global food chains.
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UK: Will they misuse these powers?
4 January 2021 — Good Law Project
Under cover of Christmas, with less than a day for scrutiny, and with No Deal as the only alternative, Parliament passed the European Union (Future Relationship) Act 2020. The process was described by the venerable Hansard Society as “an abdication of Parliament’s constitutional responsibilities to deliver proper scrutiny of the executive and the law” and a “farce”.
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Power Grab: COVID-19 reinfection risk is virtually nonexistent, but ‘experts’ pretend otherwise
5 January 2021 — The Dossier
The ruling class is leveraging a massively overstated reinfection risk to continue sweeping up rights.

You’re not supposed to know that the chances of being infected with COVID-19 twice are so astronomically low that it’s only worth discussing if you also believe it’s important to warn the world about the dangers of falling into a sinkhole the moment you step outside your front door.
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The Assange Verdict: What Happens Now
5 January 2021 — Craig Murray
I fully expect that Julian will be released on bail this week, pending a possible US appeal against the blocking of his extradition.
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Chris Hedges: The Empire is Not Done with Julian Assange
4 January 2021 — Mint Press
By Chris Hedges
Princeton, New Jersey (Scheerpost) —As is clear from the memoir of one of his attorneys, Michael Ratner, the ends have always justified the means for those demanding his global persecution.
Shortly after WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs in October 2010, which documented numerous US war crimes — including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the Collateral Murder video, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to US checkpoints — the towering civil rights attorneys Michael Ratner and Len Weinglass, who had defended Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case, met Julian Assange in a studio apartment in Central London, according to Ratner’s newly released memoir “Moving the Bar”.
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UK: New Bill Threatens Future of Free Expression and Civil Liberty
5th January 2021 — True Publica – Big Brother Watch
TruePublica Editor: Big Brother Watch has warned that the recently proposed Online Harms Bill is yet another piece of legislation designed to deceive us into thinking the government is protecting us all when something more sinister is likely. Free expression and civil liberty are at stake. The result is a piece of proposed legislation which is as BBW says is “blunt in its force and will have severe unintended consequences”. Think back to the Regulatory Investigations Powers Act 2000, designed to catch terrorists and high level wanted criminals – eventually used by the BBC to catch licence fee dodgers and local authorities to catch underage sunbed use. There are many laws that the government have brought in since the late 1990s now being used against civil liberty and basic human rights.
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Black Agenda Radio for Week of January 4, 2021
5 January 2021 — Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Pandemic Reveals Crisis of US Imperialism / Only a “Transformational” Electoral Politics is Useful / AFRICOM Causes Humanitarian Crises on Two ContinentsPandemic Reveals Crisis of US Imperialism
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
“I think what we are looking at is a severely wounded, crippled US imperialism as the chief hegemon of world capitalism,” said Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations. The coronavirus epidemic “brought the crisis of this economy into bold relief,” said Yeshitela, while China continued its rise “as a major contending force that was rapidly overtaking the US economy – and most of Europe,” as well.
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Julian Assange News Links 4-5 January 2021
5 January 2021 — The New Dark Age
Chris Hedges: The Empire Is Not Done With Julian Assange
https://popularresistance.org/chris-hedges-the-empire-is-not-done-with-julian-assange/Assange Wins. The Cost: Press Freedom Is Crushed
https://popularresistance.org/assange-wins-the-cost-press-freedom-is-crushed/
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Julian Assange: Imminent Freedom
5 January 2021 — Craig Murray
It has been a long and tiring day, with the startlingly unexpected decision to block Julian’s extradition. The judgement is in fact very concerning, in that it accepted all of the prosecution’s case on the right of the US Government to prosecute publishers worldwide of US official secrets under the Espionage Act. The judge also stated specifically that the UK Extradition Act of 2003 deliberately permits extradition for political offences. These points need to be addressed. But for now we are all delighted at the ultimate decision that extradition should be blocked.
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The Assange Extradition Ruling Is A Relief, But It Isn’t Justice
4 January 2021 — Caitlin Johnson
British Judge Vanessa Baraitser has ruled against US extradition for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but not for the reasons she should have.
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Julian Assange News Links 4 January 2021
4 January 2021 — The New Dark Age
Julian Assange: Wikileaks founder extradition to US blocked by UK judge
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55528241In Assange Case, British Judge Rejects US Government’s Extradition Request
https://williambowles.info/2021/01/04/in-assange-case-british-judge-rejects-us-governments-extradition-request/
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In Assange Case, British Judge Rejects US Government’s Extradition Request
4 January 2021 — The Dissenter
“It would be oppressive to extradite [Assange] to the United States of America,” Judge Vanessa Baraitser stated
Old Bailey Courthouse (Photo: It’s No Game)Citing harsh federal prison conditions in the United States, a British district court judge rejected the United States government’s extradition request against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
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Why did the world react so hysterically to covid?
3 January 2021 — Sebastian Rushworth
Over the last few months, I’ve sought to demonstrate that covid is nowhere near as bad as it is portrayed by the mainstream media. I’ve written about how the mortality rate is below 0,2%, meaning that for most people the risk of dying if you get infected is less than one in 500 (and less than one in 3,000 if you’re below 70 years of age). I’ve also written about how the disease preferentially strikes people who are anyway very close to the end of life, so the amount of lifetime lost when someone dies of the disease is usually small. And I’ve noted that 2020 will likely turn out to have been a very average year in terms of overall mortality, in spite of the supposedly deadly pandemic that is currently raging.
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US risks confrontation with Russia
27 December, 2020 — Indian Punchline

Russia’s RS-28 Sarmat liquid-fueled superheavy intercontinental ballistic missile developed by the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau (File photo) The Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov remarked last week that Moscow expects nothing good in relations with a “deeply hostile” US under the incoming administration of Joe Biden. He further said in an interview with the Interfax published Wednesday, “We are heading from bad to worse. The next US president has been left with a bad legacy and it will take a long time for him to sort this out.”
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The Future Will Only Contain What We Put into It Now: The Fifty-Third Newsletter (2020)
31 December 2020 — Tricontinental
Image in homage of Bolivian people’s resistance by Tings Chak (China)Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Towards the end of November, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres addressed the German Bundestag to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the United Nations (UN). At the heart of the UN is its Charter, the treaty that binds nations together in a global project, which has now been ratified by all 193 member nations of the UN. It is well worth reiterating the four main goals of the UN Charter, since most of these have slipped from public consciousness:
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What is left to say?
30 December 2020 — Dr Malcolm Kendrick
Essay of the Year!
I have not written much about COVID19 recently. What can be said? In my opinion the world has simply gone bonkers. The best description can be found in Dante’s Inferno, written many hundreds of years ago.
In it, Dante describes the outcasts, who took no side in the rebellion of angels. They live in the vestibule. Not in heaven, not in hell, forever unclassified. They reside on the shores of the Acheron. Naked and futile, they race around through a hellish mist in eternal pursuit of an elusive, wavering banner, symbolic of their pursuit of ever-shifting self-interest.
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Black Agenda Radio for Week of December 28, 2020
28 December 2020 — Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
South African Police More Lethal Than US Cops / Capitalism + Covid-19 = Mass Death in US / Corporate Baseball’s “Feeble” Gesture to Negro LeaguesSouth African Police More Lethal Than US Cops
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
“South African police kill between two and three times as many people as US police do, per capita,” said Paul Clarke, a doctoral candidate in African and American Studies who has done extensive research on labor, policing and privatization in South Africa. However, “it’s difficult to tell” if the Black majority regime kills more of its citizens than its apartheid predecessor, “because so many killings by police were covered up” during white rule, said Clarke. South Africa is also the biggest incarcerator on the continent.
(more…)
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The dreaded lurgi strikes By William Bowles
24 December 2020 — Investigating Imperialism
Stop the world I want to get off! – Anthony Newly
Update 3: 24 December 2020
Officially Covid
24 December 2020
So I’m now officially Covid Positive. After my trauma of taking a shower on Monday, yesterday, I got transported to my local hospital’s A&E department to get checked out where I discovered that it wasn’t a heart attack but this bloody Virus wot done it!
I had a wonderful doctor take care of me, bloods done, x-ray, the works and an hour so later, the result; covid positive and pneumonia in one lung. So five days of penicillin and it should be over. And I was discharged, well kind of. I waited, in vain, for six hours for transport that never came, so finally, getting toward midnight, I walked out and caught a cab home (I live 10 minutes away).
So why all the scare tactics? It’s got to the point where people glance at you suspiciously on the street if you get ‘too close’. An atmosphere of paranoia pervades this (formerly) green and pleasant land (was it ever?), to be replaced by a very unpleasant sense of fear and alienation.
Yet, when you phone up the Covid-19 ‘hotline’, 119, the first thing you hear is a recorded message telling you that for the great majority, the Virus is not dangerous (a rerun of CMO of England Chris Whitty’s May message). No wonder people are confused and hence scared, they don’t know what to believe! The upshot of this, is that many no longer believe ANYTHING, or alternately believe EVERYTHING they’re told. An extremely dangerous and volatile situation.
And as I go into 10 days of enforced isolation (quarantine), vast swathes of the country is being locked down! It’s as if the government really does want destroy millions of working peoples’ lives. But is this what it’s about? The so-called Great Reset?
I don’t think so. Our gangster government, loaded with incompetent crooks, that have, so far, handed out at least £100 BILLION of our money to the aforementioned crooks (half the annual NHS budget), has not slowed up (see this and this) but it goes far deeper than even the billions siphoned off the public account reveal.
When this, the latest disaster created by neoliberal capitalism took off, back in January 2020, the Tory government admitted 18, yes 18 million people into the UK (I didn’t believe the number either) and as the government had no idea who was carrying the virus, nor where they went, it was inevitable that the disease would explode, effectively at random wherever it found itself, and then spread, especially when winter arrived and all respiratory diseases have a field day. So, new mutation, or simply Winter? Or no effective track and trace. Well it’s too late for that anyway.
But this was the entire purpose of admitting so many millions, they called it ’herd immunity’ and just how big a disaster called ‘herd immunity’ was/is, is now readily apparent. But try finding big mouth corporate/state media investigating the disaster of herd immunity (any more than the disaster of multi-billion pound contracts handed out in exchange for crap). It’s yet another important news event going completely unreported. Instead, the capitalist press would rather frighten the living daylights out of everybody with fake news (eg the ‘new’ covid mutation or is it simply Winter or maybe it’s that removing Lockdowns allows the Virus to spread once more?) Who knows? ‘News’ is no longer News, it’s entered the realm of total fantasy.
So now, having initiated the destruction of most small businesses (the backbone of every high street in the country), the destruction of millions of jobs, the latest lockdown will finish off what’s left! And having further immiserated the working class and thrust an additional 800,000 children into Victorian penury, aside from the 1% (who are not touched and don’t give a fuck anyway), what does anybody in this miserable fucking dump have to look forward to in 2021?
This is why the scaremongering campaign; it’s to cover up the government’s criminal conduct and everything I wrote in my first two essays (here and here) on the Virus of Capitalism have come to pass!
Disaster Capitalism
There is NO 2nd, or 3rd, or 4th, Wave. What there is, is the Virus held in check by lockdowns, only to reemerge when the lockdown is lifted because we don’t know WHERE the Virus is and hence can’t block it. And we see the same pattern in the rest of the ‘advanced’ world. And in the meantime, they mutate. There are at least 6 variations of SARS-COV-2 doing the rounds.
Why do you think Wuhan as the single source (at the time) of the Virus was locked down and immediately? But in order for the Chinese govt to lockdown 11 million people, meant that not only had they to feed 11 million people every day, they had to have a health system that could respond without falling apart. Can you imagine this useless, corrupt and incompetent government, feeding 8 million Londoners EVERY day, let alone an NHS short of 20,000 doctors, 40,000 nurses and with only 50% of the hospital beds it had a decade ago.
So, as far as the UK govt is concerned, ‘Herd Immunity’ was an unqualified success. They’ve managed to make sure that wherever you live, you’ll NEVER escape the Virus. So it will be endless lockdowns until they’ve sold enough vaccines to claim that the unfortunate Virus has been beaten into submission. Until the next capitalist created disaster. But don’t worry corporate capitalism will have a ‘solution’ for that one as well.
And in the meantime, secret talks with mostly giant US corporations about the dismembering of the NHS, selling off the profitable chunks and have the state, sorry, the public, foot the bill for whatever’s left over.
It also explains the corporate/state desire for a Vaccine; it’s not to protect our health but to protect the vast profits that Big Pharma is making out of this crisis. If our (and other govts) were so sure of a vaccine, why has Big Pharma been legally indemnified against lawsuits? And it has the further advantage to the state of binding the population to the corporate-security state (eg ‘health passports).
Update 2: 21 December 2020
Well still waiting for my test result (and still waiting for my GP to call me), apparently now the wait is 6 days. Meanwhile, I’m under no misapprehension about the fact that I caught the virus (I dont need a test to tell me).
So, got my smell and taste back this morning, took a shower but after getting out of the shower, I didn’t have the energy to make it to my bedroom! Instead I had to lay down on the floor instead. So this is the second stage of the virus, stealing my oxygen! So, not sure where this is heading as elsewise I feel okay. So I phoned the 111 number, told them what had happened and they suggested that I phone my GP who shouldn’t take more than 3 days to contact me! And am still waiting…
I’m now convinced I had a heart attack yesterday (21/12/20), I just didn’t recognise it for what it was, the bloody Virus threw me and my GP didn’t believe me, I think she thought I was faking it.
Update 1: 20 December 2020
I lost my sense of taste and smell on Thursday morning and I’m not feeling particularly bright today, though no other symptoms as yet. Is it the Virus? Well hopefully it’s nothing worse than the flu (though I haven’t had the flu in 45 years!), and hopefully, the RT-PCR test is being administered correctly and I’ll find out, hopefully by Monday whether I’ve been struck down or not.
Talking of tests, my local testing station, ‘managed’ by G4S, was a bit of a rinky-dink setup. You get ‘guided’ to a cubical (in fact, I was left standing until someone directed me to a completely open-sided cubical, so no privacy then). On the wall, is quite a complicated diagram in 12 or so stages, from preparing yourself, the test, and then getting it all packed up. The entire process came across as amateurish and half-baked, but then again, the government has given all the cash to their corrupt business cronies, so this is what we get.
Today, Sunday, I still don’t have a high temperature or a cough but I can’t say I’m feeling particularly bright. Apparently, there’s a new variant of the virus doing the rounds that is meant to be extremely infectious. Food tastes awful. Friends have recommended the following: Cloves and Lemongrass infused in boiling water and the steam inhaled. We’ll see.
As to updating the site, well I think I’ll give it a raincheck for a few days and see how this infection goes.


