It is time the world realized that the West’s politicians are mere political stooges placed as nominees for elections by a handful of global corporates and a transnational ruling class who use them to invisibly rule the world. ● ‘Direct investment’ has been redefined and it is this direct directive by corporates that has forced Western political leaders to advocate military interventions of the immoral and unethical nature we see unfolding before us. All these compilations of war crimes, abuses etc are nothing but a sham to give a touch of ‘we did justice’ to the injustice taking place. The fact is military interventions are happening primarily for the economic interests of not the country invading by the corporate lobbyists who are waiting to land and plunder invaded nations. It is not foreign invasion it is corporate invasion that is taking place and national leaders/governments are getting eliminated for standing in the way of that quest.

No matter which government conducts mass surveillance, they also do it to crush dissent, and then give a false rationale for why they’re doing it.

A French court has overturned a ban on a show by controversial comic Dieudonné M'bala M'bala due to be performed on Thursday night. | The show in the city of Nantes will open Dieudonne's tour. He has seven convictions for [so-called] "anti-Semitic hate speech" and was recently recorded making anti-Semitic remarks about a Jewish journalist. Interior Minister Manuel Valls has said he will appeal to the Council of State, France's highest administrative court.

Diana Johnstone: The Bête Noire of the French Establishment ■ The goal of national police boss Manuel Valls is clear, but the powers that be are groping for the method. The dismissive cliché heard repeatedly is that “nobody laughs at Dieudonné any more”. In reality, the opposite is true. And that is the problem. On his recent tour of French cities, videos show large, packed theaters roaring with laughter at their favorite humorist. He has popularized a simple gesture, which he calls the “quenelle”. It is being imitated by young people all over France. It simply and obviously means, we are fed up. To invent a pretext for destroying Dieudonné, the leading Jewish organizations CRIF and LICRA, (which enjoys special privileges under French law) have come up with a fantasy to brand Dieudonné and his followers as “Nazis”. The quenelle is all too obviously a vulgar gesture roughly meaning “up yours”, with one hand placed at the top of the other arm pointing down to signify “how far up” this is to be. But for the CRIF and LICRA, the quenelle is “a Nazi salute in reverse”. (You can never be too “vigilant” when looking for the hidden Hitler.)

Gilad Atzmon on Dieudonné and the Quenelle
Dieudonné threatens to sue over French ban for antisemitism

Statement by WikiLeaks Publisher Julian Assange concerning Sweden’s extradition of WikiLeaks consultant Gottfrid "Anakata" Svartholm Warg:

"It is time someone says it like it is: Gottfrid Svartholm Warg is a political prisoner and Sweden has fallen off the map of decent nations in its treatment of him. Gottfrid has always been ideologically driven to inform the world; he worked tirelessly to help WikiLeaks expose the slaughter of civilians in Iraq by a US helicopter gunship and was responsible for an important part of our infrastructure. There are thousands of alleged cyber criminals, but instead of dealing with these cases, we see vast resources diverted yet again by the Swedish state into smashing Gottfrid. These attempts include the first trial of Gottfrid after US pressure (extensively documented in US embassy cables here released by WikiLeaks), his subsequent rendering from Cambodia by the Swedish intelligence service SAPO, his months of incommunicado detention in Sweden, and now his irregular extradition to Denmark - for a charge he was just acquitted of. What is going on is obvious to anyone who cares to look; Gottfrid is being treated differently from everyone else because the Swedish state perceives him to have mocked its security complex and the United States. But within the insular, conformist world of Stockholm what has happened to Gottfrid is so demeaning to Swedish prestige, that like Sweden’s CIA rendition program, it is literally unspeakable. This Swedish social and political phenomenon has been so bad, for so long, that even the Spanish have a popular saying: ’Stop playing the Swede’—stop pretending that you don’t know what is going on. Instead of detailing the breakdown of the rule of law in Gottfrid’s case, Sweden’s national broadcaster takes pleasure in fantasies of Gottfrid’s future suffering: joking at length on air about the years of prison rape Gottfrid might have ahead of him."

Security Remains a Huge Struggle for Disarmament Effort ● Details are still scant on what damage was done, but the Syrian government has confirmed that two different chemical arms storage sites have sustained rebel attack. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which is overseeing the destruction of Syria’s chemical arsenal, also confirmed the attack, but at a closed door meeting where the details were also kept a closely guarded secret. The OPCW and Syria have been careful to keep details of the disarmament process limited, specifically over fears that further details might give the rebels ideas of where things are and what to attack. The OPCW missed the December 31 deadline for moving all chemical materials from Syria, but the most dangerous chemicals have already departed on ships, so the biggest threats were likely already gone before the rebel hits.

The untold story of Eisenhower's Rhine Meadows Death Camps - A Deliberate Policy of Extermination of the Surrendered German forces by the Allies in post war Germany (Rheinwiesenlager). Full documentary, plus additional background information, and a memorial for the victims. A German language film, translated to English, re-edited, narrated, and published by Justice for Germans.
Part 1 The 'Rheinwiesenlager' German language documentary translated into English, with additional information and interviews (50 minutes)
Part 2 Deanna Spingola reads a chapter from her book dealing with the subject of these camps and provides additional background information regarding the perpetrators and their policies (30 minutes)
Part 3 A Memorial March for the victims of these camps held in Remagen, Germany in 2011, also translated / narrated in English (10 minutes)

Breathless predictions that the Islamic Republic will soon be at the brink of nuclear capability, or – worse – acquire an actual nuclear bomb, are not new. For more than quarter of a century Western officials have claimed repeatedly that Iran is close to joining the nuclear club. Such a result is always declared "unacceptable" and a possible reason for military action, with "all options on the table" to prevent upsetting the Mideast strategic balance dominated by the US and Israel. And yet, those predictions have time and again come and gone. This chronicle of past predictions lends historical perspective to today’s rhetoric about Iran.

More than 10,000 African migrants demonstrated outside Israel's parliament on Wednesday, extending protests into a fourth consecutive day in a quest for recognition as refugees and freedom to work legally without fear of incarceration. ● Their presence in a Jewish state that took in survivors of the Nazi Holocaust of World War Two has stoked an emotional political debate over whether they should be allowed to stay as a humane gesture. "I want to say to them that they should not fear us, we are human beings too," a tall, slim 25-year-old man from Eritrea, who gave his name only as Mulugieta, told Reuters. Some 60,000 migrants, largely from Eritrea and Sudan, have entered Israel without authorisation across a once-porous border with Egypt since 2006. Many hope for asylum and say they cannot return home without risking their lives.

Abby Martin Breaks the Set on Google's Terrifying Robots, Lobotomizing Veterans, Blood Diamonds & Corporate Global Espionage. ● On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin remarks on Google's acquisition of Boston Dynamics, a company with ties to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that makes terrifying robots for military purposes. Abby then talks about a new Wall Street Journal report that highlights the Veteran's Administration's role in performing forced lobotomies on mentally ill veterans during the late 40s and 50s and highlights other dark human experimentation stains in America's past. Abby then speaks with Alan Martin, Director of Research at Partnership Africa Canada about conflict diamonds, the role of companies like DeBeers in propagating these conflicts and whether enough is being done to stop the trade of conflict minerals. BTS wraps up the show with an exclusive interview with Nafeez Ahmed, investigative journalist for the Guardian about a stunning new report from the Center for Corporate Policy, that says 1 out of every 4 activist may be a corporate spy. They go on to discuss the corporate industry's role in subverting democracy and contributing to climate change.

Bill Van Auken ■ A decade after the US military waged two barbaric sieges of Fallujah, the Iraqi city is once again facing a bloody armed conflict. The army of Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki has massed artillery and tanks on Fallujah’s outskirts and has already bombed and shelled civilian neighborhoods, inflicting an unknown number of casualties. Thousands have fled the city in fear for their lives, and the United Nations has warned that the cut-off of water, food and fuel is creating a humanitarian catastrophe. Maliki has vowed to launch a full-scale assault on the city unless its inhabitants succeed in persuading armed insurgents to surrender. In April and again in November-December of 2004, Fallujah was turned into a killing field by the US occupation. From the air it was pummeled by AC-130 Specter gunships, F-16 fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters. On the ground, a force of over 10,000 US troops backed by tanks and artillery was assembled to attack the city. Bombs, missiles and white phosphorous shells—chemical weapons banned under the Geneva conventions—were unleashed against the population. Hospitals and ambulances were targeted.

Stephen Lendman: The Third Battle of Fallujah ■ On August 31, 2010, Obama displayed criminal contempt. He's done it many times. He declared an end to America's combat mission in Iraq, saying: "Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility." Ignored was America's genocidal legacy. Iraq was ravaged and destroyed. Pre-1990 Iraq no longer exists. Charnel house conditions replaced it. So did plunder on the grandest of grand scales, millions of internal and external refugees, ongoing violence, dozens of daily deaths, a plague of preventable diseases, ecocide, and overall conditions too horrific to ignore.

In recent years, the vandalization of olive trees and other fruit trees has become one of the symbols of the occupation. ● The human rights organization Yesh Din today publishes updated data highlighting the failure of the Samaria & Judea (SJ) District Police to investigate incidents involving the cutting down, torching, vandalization, and theft of olive trees and other fruits trees belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank. The data are published against the background of the current olive harvest, and after numerous incidents of the vandalization of trees have been reported throughout the West Bank in recent weeks. The updated figures show that the Israel Police has overwhelmingly failed to investigate the incidents and prosecute offenders.

Permission To Narrate: More Zionist than the Zionists
Stephen Lendman: Criminal Unaccountability