Popular news outlet Russia Today, funded by the Russian Federation, was sent a letter from the Royal Bank of Scotland to close their account
Apparently, the Royal Bank of Scotland does not like Russia Today.
Their subsidiary, NatWest bank, through which popular Russian funded news website Russia Today does their banking, sent Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor-in-chief, a letter today saying they were no longer interested in doing business with RT. Simonyan broke the news earlier today through her twitter account, and RT gave a more thorough explanation soon afterwards. Simonyan also shared excerpts from related letters through her facebook account showing solidarity from Steven Hedley, Senior Assistant Secretary General of the Trade Union of Transport Workers (RMT) regarding the brash decision of the bank.
Director of Studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris, John Laughland told RT reporters that the British government owns 75% of the Royal Bank of Scotland and feels there is obvious political inspiration behind the move.
“My suspicion is that it’s part of a coordinated and Europe-wide policy of harassment against organizations that are associated with Russia. We must understand this policy of harassment and hostility within the context of the decision taken about six months ago at a European Union summit, at which it was decided on the EU-level to combat ‘Russian propaganda and disinformation’ as it’s being called. The EU has even established a special unit specifically designed to combat so-called Russian disinformation and, particularly RT, which more than any other news outlet has irritated people in the West because it has a very muscular editorial policy..”
Boris Johnson, the United Kingdom’s new Foreign Secretary, was heard speaking to a Tory Party conference with words along the lines that, although Britain was leaving the EU, it “wouldn’t abandon being in the forefront of sanctions against Russia.”
A copy of the NatWest letter found on RT’s site is below:
Нам закрыли счета в Британии. Все счета. 'Решение пересмотру не подлежит'. Да здравствует свобода слова!
A North Dakota judge who oversaw the charges against Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman for participating in a riot at the DAPL protests threw out the case.
The veteran journalist has been reporting on issues surrounding threatening American democracy for decades and has been no stranger to being arrested at demonstrations. However, as a journalist covering the protest of the Dakota Access Pipe Line construction in North Dakota the past two months, she was simply doing her job. Yet when police arrested a large array of protesters at the Native American land of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, they charged Goodman with “participating in a riot”. Today, however, the judge overseeing the case threw it out on grounds that it had no merit.
Goodman was not the only investigative reporter on the scene who had been arrested while covering the protest against the DAPL in North Dakota over the past month. Just a few days ago, a young documentary filmmaker Deia Schlosberg was arrested while filming demonstrators who shut down the tar sands pipelines in Wallhala, ND. Schlosberg is now facing three federal charges carrying a maximum sentence of 45 years in prison — just for doing her job.
The Ecuadorian Embassy in London has finally been pressured to silence one of the biggest whistleblower and media activists of our time.
In a tweet that got over 36k retweets early this morning, Wikileaks announced that CEO Julian Assange had his internet access revoked by a ‘state party’. Wikileaks later tweeted it was in fact Ecuador who had cut off his internet after the release of Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs transcripts on Saturday.
Assange, who has been in refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for over four years now after Sweden issued a warrant for his arrest alleging sexual assault, has not spoken publicly regarding this recent development and it’s likely we won’t hear from him anytime soon. However, his Wikileaks operatives are carrying out what they call “appropriate contingency plans” and should not be faltered or deterred from Wikileaks’ planned weekly releases, said to continue until well past the election on November 8th.
Julian Assange's internet link has been intentionally severed by a state party. We have activated the appropriate contingency plans.
Rumors quickly spread over the internet that Assange might have died, due to a series of tweets from the Wikileaks account late Sunday evening which included coded messages using sha256sum encryption, but a twitter account claiming to be the infamous hacker collective Anonymous explained to the public that these messages were not “dead man’s keys”.
pre-commitment 1: John Kerry 4bb96075acadc3d80b5ac872874c3037a386f4f595fe99e687439aabd0219809
If this is the case, then what is the link between Goldman Sachs, Hillary Clinton and Ecuador? As it turns out, two years ago Ecuador decided to liquidate a substantial amount of gold bars worth $600 million through Goldman Sachs. The deal reportedly included a buy back within three years (2017) at the current cost of gold. The Ecuadorian central bank said they did this because keeping gold bars around in vaults required money for maintenance, saying
“These interventions in the gold market represent the beginning of a new and permanent strategy of active participation by the bank, through purchases, sales and financial operations, that will contribute to the creation of new financial investment opportunities.”
On the popular social media website Reddit.com, users of the subreddit r/Wikileaks have started a thread regarding the situation with a whole host of theories about the whereabouts and constitution of the infamous whistleblower, but nothing too substantial as of yet aside from reports that Assange “is fine” from those close to the embassy in London. A user from another subreddit supporting Donald Trump posted photos of the embassy and said there was higher than usual mail delivery on Monday, claiming to have spoken to neighbors about the activity and even snapping a few photos of government vehicles outside the embassy.
Meanwhile, the Ecuadorian government released a statement claiming that they are still protecting Assange and giving him asylum, “Ecuador will continue to protect Julian Assange and uphold the political asylum granted to him in 2012.”
The small country of Ecuador rests on quite the lucrative oil reserve at a whopping 846 million barrels of heavy crude oil right under their feet. Unfortunately, in order to dig up the oil, Ecuador would have to go through its extremely biodiverse and vibrant rain forest, one which is protected by various environmental advocacy groups. Ecuador’s oil reserves are basically untouchable for the time being and make the country have a hard time using it as collateral for their economy these days. This could be a good case for United States interventionists like Hillary Clinton to want to control Ecuador, considering it’s one of the few sovereign countries in the world who uses the U.S. dollar as its main currency.
Schlosberg is yet another journalist to be deprived of her right to freedom of the press at the now infamous Dakota Access Pipeline location in Walhalla, North Dakota where thousands of activists have been demonstrating.
On October 11, 2016, Schlosberg was arrested while filming protesters of the TransCanada Keystone Pipeline in Walhalla, North Dakota. She was charged with conspiracy to theft of property, conspiracy to theft of services and conspiracy to tampering with or damaging a public service, which altogether carry a maximum of 45 years in prison.
Within two days, film director Josh Fox wrote an open letter to US President Barack Obama calling for her release, saying, “The actions of the North Dakota Police force are not just a violation of the climate, but a violation of the constitution.” The letter was co-signed by thirty celebrities, including Neil Young, Mark Ruffalo, Daryl Hannah, Frances Fisher, and Alex Ebert of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Fox also wrote that the young filmmaker had been held without access to a lawyer for 48 hours and had her footage taken by police as “evidence” in the fabricated case.
This event happened around the time that famed actress Shailene Woodley was also arrested, but a scarier event is the warrant out for the arrest of journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!. While Goodman isn’t a stranger to arrests during protests, the question surrounding the arrest of journalists remains clear: isn’t arresting a reporter who is simply recording an event as it unfolds the very definition of fascism? Ultimately, the objective is to shut down the reporting of the event, to suppress the reports of what really happened in order to control the information being consumed by the public. They did this in Nazi Germany in the 1940s and all throughout Eastern Europe in the first two thirds of the 20th century when communism got hold of the region.
Such actions by law enforcement come at a time when journalists all over are having trouble retaining their rights in order to do their job due to the strong influence wealthy politicians and corporations have over local police departments. The DAPL constructio, for example, not only has local law enforcement on their side, but private paramilitary police as well who have used attack dogs and pepper spray to deter protesters from stopping the pipeline from being built.
A Saudi attack on a Yemen funeral was found to be funded by the United States amid growing concern about U.S. contributions to Saudi Arabia
The Obama administration, in its last few months of office, has been criticized by both human rights activists and members of the United Nations for supporting the Saudi military airstrike campaign (otherwise known as “war”) against the country of Yemen. The reasoning for the military support, the U.S. claims, is due to the rise of Iran-aligned Houthi rebels, who recently fired missiles at a U.S. warship, the USS Mason, off the coast of Yemen on the 9th and 12th of October this past week. In response to the funeral attack, the Houthi rebels fired again at the warship on Saturday.
The funeral attack was reportedly due to false information given to the Saudi-led coalition who performed the attack. They’ve also been accused of not following the proper procedure for rules of engagement in military combat, as outlined by the United Nations, which seems to be a problem the coalition has. Just over a year ago, the same Saudi-led coalition accidentally attacked another funeral killing 20 people.
A senior Houthi official, Mohammed Atbukhaiti, explained that the figures reported by the United Nations (roughly 150 dead from the funeral attack) showed how the coalition is “disorganized and reckless” and treats “the lives of the Yemeni people in a careless and disrespectful manner. This has not been the first incident where the Sandi-led coalition has targeted civil gatherings, killing and injuring large numbers of civilians,” he said.
Meanwhile, not only is the U.S. sending money to Saudi Arabia every year for anti-terrorism efforts and nation building, but the middle eastern country owns about $117 billion of American debt, ranking #13 on the list of countries storing their money in U.S. treasuries, which they had threatened to sell off in April this year, which would have tanked the U.S. securities market, though it appears to be an empty threat as it would also do irreparable harm to Saudi Arabia’s market as well.
Yemen is widely known as the Middle East’s poorest country, ranking 140 out of 182 countries on the UNDP Human Development Index in 2009, with an estimated 42% of the population living in poverty and 20% of the population being malnourished and starving. Under a president Hillary Clinton, Yemen may see an even higher poverty rate as tensions continue to rise between the four countries involved in the conflict. It was Clinton, as Secretary of State under Obama’s first term in office, who got the world to stop buying oil from Iran in response to their non-compliance with UN weapons inspections just a few years ago. This caused Iran’s economy to implode after a decade-long trend of decreasing poverty since oil exports are the country’s chief source of income. When Iran finally agreed to allow weapons inspectors in (who found nothing), Clinton said she wasn’t satisfied and threatened more oil sanctions, despite the effect these sanctions had on Iran’s economy.
The construction of an oil pipeline across North Dakota’s Native American tribal land of Lake Oahe “will not go forward at this time”, according to a press release from the Department of Justice, Department of the Army and Department of Interior.
In a joint statement between the Department of Justice, Department of the Army and Department of Interior on Friday, the three offices of the United States government intervened in the Dakota Access pipeline fiasco. One federal judge had already failed to appeased the community, only upholding the decision to construct. However, the federal government said that it needs to evaluate “previous decisions” regarding the construction and that, in the meantime, all construction will be halted.
This hails as a victory for the scores of protesters who visited the site to show their support of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe of North Dakota, whose lawsuit against the Corps of Engineers is responsible for today’s decision to halt construction. The tribe says that the Corps of Engineers failed to adequately consult it before granting permits that allowed construction of the pipeline that began earlier this summer about a half mile north of the tribe’s reservation in North Dakota. What’s more is that the pipeline could actually hurt the drinking water supply, yet the Dakota Access company said that it followed standard procedure and no harm has been intended.
The statement from the federal government explains that the three departments fully intend to include all Native American tribes in discussions regarding changes to the country’s infrastructure moving forward:
“This case has highlighted the need for a serious discussion on whether there should be nationwide reform with respect to considering tribes’ views on these types of infrastructure projects. Therefore, this fall, we will invite tribes to formal, government-to-government consultations on two questions: (1) within the existing statutory framework, what should the federal government do to better ensure meaningful tribal input into infrastructure-related reviews and decisions and the protection of tribal lands, resources, and treaty rights; and (2) should new legislation be proposed to Congress to alter that statutory framework and promote those goals.”
One of the main issues regarding constructions like Dakota Access is that the corporations responsible for the constructions are using the often slow legal process to their advantage, continuing construction while lawsuits are in play, until ordered by a judge to cease construction either temporarily or permanently. This gives the corporation an advantage, where so much construction could have already taken place. At the same time, it doesn’t change the fact that there is a moral question at hand that is being ignored by corporate greed.
From white noise machines to isolated black outs and more, reporter and activist Melissa Dykes reviews all the madness of the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia this summer
People have long suspected the Democratic Party of being corrupt and not really “of the people”, but reporter/activist Melissa Dykes didn’t expect to see the length to which the Democratic establishment would go to suppress supporters of Bernie Sanders. Of course, the DNC emails had been leaked by Wikileaks the Friday prior to the convention, but to see the suppression in action was something else altogether. As Dykes points out in her video, it’s almost surreal to see the extent to which the establishment insisted on shutting down democracy at their own convention.
Watch the video below from Dykes’ Youtube channel Truth Stream Media:
Complaints about funding Sanders’ new organization with billionaire money led to key staffers quitting before the much anticipated launch this week
Early this morning, multiple mainstream media sources reported that digital director Kenneth Pennington and at least four others from a team of 15 had quit the new Our Revolution organization led by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. The main reason given by an unnamed staffer was that Jeff Weaver, the top aid to the Sanders presidential campaign, was not heeding to the cries of the younger generation within the campaign to stay away from billionaire and corporate money. Weaver is said to have caused quite the dissent by younger staffers throughout the presidential campaign as well by acting dismissive and curt for months. Jane Sanders had reportedly asked Weaver to take on a greater role in Our Revolution last Friday, which began the turmoil the organization is now seeing.
The unnamed staffer told Politico that they had joined Our Revolution with a promise from Bernie and Jane Sanders, and executive director Shannon Jackson, that Jeff Weaver would not be in charge of the organization.
Staffer Claire Sandberg, who had been the digital organizing director of the campaign as well as being the organizing director of the Our Revolution organization, said her entire department of four left:
“A majority of the staff quit as a result of Jeff joining. It’s about both the fundraising and the spending: Jeff would like to take big money from rich people including billionaires and spend it on ads. That’s the opposite of what this campaign and this movement are supposed to be about and after being very firm and raising alarm the staff felt that we had no choice but to quit.”
The taking of billionaire and corporate money is arguably the worst move the organization could make due to the fact that Sanders’ entire presidential campaign was built on small donor contributions and condemning corporate contributions to Hillary’s campaign via super PACs with the help of the controversial Citizens United law.
If you look up election fraud in any search engine, you’ll see numerous articles from mainstream media regarding voter fraud instead, making it difficult for the general public to understand the difference.
Election rigging, as I’ve stated in a previous article, is as old as democracy itself. Today, a major part of the problem with discussing the issue is the confusion the general public in the distinction between voter fraud and election fraud, and the mainstream media really doesn’t help.
From the New York Times to Politico to even PBS, the first results you see in Google for “election fraud” related queries are all from mainstream news sources referring primarily to “voter fraud” in the current 2016 presidential election and how it’s “rare” — and I’m inclined to agree. That’s because voter fraud isn’t primarily how the elections are being rigged. And the reason why it happens so rarely is because it’s easy to catch, so people don’t do it. But before we get into this in depth, let’s first go over the difference between voter fraud and election fraud.
The distinction is easily missed because voter fraud is a type of election fraud. Election fraud encompasses quite a few acts of election rigging. For example, voter suppression can be election fraud, such as the case of the 120,000 voters mysteriously purged from Brooklyn, NY this year, to which the New York Board of Elections said was “an accident”. Diane Haslett-Rudiano, the Board of Elections’ chief clerk, was suspended without pay for the supposed mishap, but the voters who couldn’t vote were not satisfied because it was such an obvious disenfranchisement stunt that it really should have been investigated as election fraud. Another form of voter suppression that caused disenfranchisement within the Democratic party this year was switching people’s party affiliation to independent or republican, some cases even involving forged signatures on the registration application. Again, this is a form of election fraud, but is not voter fraud, yet mainstream news continues to use the terms interchangeably.
Voter fraud is when votes are faked. An example would be, as Fox News’ Eric Shawn pointed out, absentee ballots being filled out by the same person on behalf of multiple people. In Shawn’s report, he actually spoke to people whose votes had been robbed and they explained on camera that it’s not their handwriting and that they did not fill out the ballots — this isn’t voter fraud, it’s . He also reported on vote bribery and unauthorized proxy voting. (see video below)
The most shocking form of election fraud also is not voter fraud: voting software that is rigged for a predetermined winner, otherwise known as electronic election fraud. And it’s become a major method of rigging both primaries and general elections.
In my interview with Ohio election fraud lawyer Cliff Arnebeck, he explained that there was a 25-33% difference between the exit polls and the machine totals. To make matters worse, the data that he and Bob Fitrakis, another lawyer from Ohio, had requested from the exit poll takers hasn’t yet been delivered. With only a couple months left before the general election, it’ll be surprising if their RICO lawsuit actually comes through in time.
What’s worse, however, is the latest anti-trump campaign that we’ve seen from Democrats all the way through the White House, with President Obama stating that election rigging is a conspiracy theory, an obvious attempt to discredit Trump as a kook. The fact that there’s a 100-page report proving all the forms of election fraud that happened this primary season shows that even the POTUS will lie to the press on behalf of his party, ultimately becoming a propagandist himself. This was in retaliation for Trump’s statements made recently that Democrats would exploit “weak identification laws” in order to rig the general election for Hillary Clinton. This may actually be true, considering all the evidence we have of a rigged primary, but it isn’t even the real issue we should be talking about, which is electronic election fraud.
I used to have a love/hate relationship with the mainstream media’s coverage of election fraud, but it’s recently turned to only hate. The Washington Post, for example, can give us an important piece about election fraud that is well written — that’s only 150 words long. Really, guys? A RICO lawsuit in the works regarding electronic election fraud and you can only come up with 150 words about it? They then bury it deep within the site, don’t promote the article, and focus more energy on writing articles about how voter fraud rarely happens and Trump needs to shut up about it. It also doesn’t promote an article like the one I’m writing here today to help readers understand the difference between the terms. I’m not even sure the outlet knows or cares, and what we’re left with is a fundamental lack of understanding that while voter fraud itself is rare, election fraud is running rampant and has been for quite some time. Our elections, based on the evidence we have since the 2000 Presidential Election, are getting increasingly worse in terms of election fraud.
Perhaps the worst aspect about this confusion is the fact that people keep saying election fraud doesn’t happen and then point to studies proving voter fraud is rare. This fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between election fraud and voter fraud is what continues the propaganda we hear from the Democratic party, who pushes for lax laws regarding voter identification at every turn. Lax laws, they argue, are to reduce racist voter suppression, but for some odd reason they never seem to want to talk about all the other forms of election fraud for which there is so much evidence of. At the end of the day, both the Republican and Democratic parties seem to engage in extremely dirty, dishonest politics in order to win, win, win, and all it does is allow criminals to become decision makers on behalf of the rest of us.
Zachary Paul
Zachary Paul is an independent investigative journalist living in New York City.
U.S. Justice Department’s Sally Yates announced today that it plans to end its use of private prisons after DOJ officials concluded such facilities are less safe and effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.
Sally Yates, the Deputy Attorney General, gave the announcement earlier today through a memo that tells officials to decline to renew expired private prison contracts, or to reduce the overall scope of the contracts. Yates wrote that the ultimate goal here is ending the use of private prisons for good. Reports the Guardian,
“They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” Yates wrote in her memo to Tom Kane, acting director of the federal prisons bureau, which had been published on the DOJ’s website earlier today before Yates tweeted that the “time has come” to “end the DOJ’s use of private prisons” from her twitter account.
The time has come to reduce & ultimately end DOJ’s use of private prisons. Read my memo to BOP Acting Director: https://t.co/AOt4EOaKfy
This announcement comes as an answer to the cries of millions of citizens around the United States whose families have been torn apart by long prison sentences for non-violent crimes, a result of the profit motive behind privatized prisons in America. The subject had been a topic of debate throughout the Democratic primary and a point of contention with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who had helped to build up the private prison industry through her advocation of the bill that allowed the line between federal and private prison management in the 1990s.
Private prisons make a profit by offering a monthly cost to the government to hold each prisoner in their facilities. That cost comes out of a budget established by the DOJ that taxpayers pay into every year. Yates explained that the amount being paid to private facilities is simply too much for what society gets in return. It’s been argued for decades that people do not get rehabilitated in prison and often end their sentence only to receive another after being released as a more hardened criminal.
