Apparently, there were several officers working undercover among the demonstrators, identifying certain people for later arrests. ● Police arrested 13 out of a crowd of about 200 demonstrators Saturday outside the Fullerton, California, police station. The protest was directed against the January 13 not guilty verdicts in favor of two former Fullerton officers, Manuel Ramos and Jay Cicinelli, charged with killing 37-year-old Kelly Thomas, a homeless, mentally ill man, in the course of a savage, video recorded beating.

Kevin Carson: Hero Cops? - On The Worship of Authority
William N. Grigg: Getting Beat to Death by Police Thugs

The best democracy money can buy. Foreign campaign donations are illegal under the Federal Election Campaign Act. Everyone who received money from this Rabbi in Israel needs to be removed from office right now and banned from public life if not tossed in jail. ● FBI investigation puts Republican congressman with assistant of influential Rabbi Pinto; assistant now facing embezzlement charges. An FBI investigation into Republican Congressman Michael Grimm’s campaign finances ties him to Israeli Rabbi Pinto through donations of more than half a million dollars, and has also led to suspicions of senior Israeli police officers accepting bribes from Pinto. The affair came to light due to an FBI wiretap agreed to by Pinto as part of a settlement with the bureau, after Pinto filed a blackmail complaint resulting the rabbi having to testify against Grimm, the New York Republican Congressman and former FBI agent. Grimm was under investigation by the FBI for illegal donations to his 2010 election campaign. Some of the donations reportedly came from sources affiliated with Pinto.

Gilad Atzmon: The Rabbi And The Congressman

The world’s 85 wealthiest people have as much money as the 3.5 billion poorest people on the planet – half the Earth’s population. | That’s according to Oxfam’s latest report on the risks of the widening gap between the super-rich and the poor. The report, titled “Working for the Few,” was released Monday, and was compiled by Oxfam – an international organization looking for solutions against poverty and injustice. The document focuses on the extent of global economic inequality caused by rapidly increasing wealth of the richest people that poses the threat to the “human progress.” A total of 210 people became billionaires last year, joining the existing 1,426 billionaires with a combined net worth of $5.4 trillion.

Magda Fahsi ■ Dieudonné has popularized a gesture, the “quenelle,” meaning “We’re fed up,” but Jewish groups say it’s a Nazi salute in reverse. | It all started when Interior Minister Manuel Valls sent a circular – a non-binding recommendation – earlier this month to all prefects (regional police chiefs) setting out the legal remedies that exist to ban performances by Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala – better known as Dieudonné – a Franco-African humorist very popular among young people and who is starting a national tour with his latest show. But many accuse him – and his shows – of being anti-Semitic. “No one should be able to use this show for provocation and to promote openly anti-Semitic ideas,” President Francois Hollande told a meeting of senior government officials in Paris last Tuesday. “I am calling on all representatives of the state, particularly its prefects, to be on alert and inflexible.” As a result, several French cities banned Dieudonné’s performances: Marseille, Bordeaux, Tours, and Nantes, with this latest city being the opening venue of the comedian’s tour Jan. 10. The humorist nevertheless sought to reverse the prohibition through Nantes’s administrative court. The 6,000 people who bought tickets, as well as many others, eagerly awaited the decision. The court declared that prohibiting the show represented a “serious infringement of the freedom of expression, and given the absence of a motive that would have justified it,” the infringement was illegal. But the battle was not over. Valls immediately appealed to the Council of State, the highest court for public administration. And in what was undeniably the fastest decision in its history, the court announced that due to the “threat to public order” and “clear abuses of values and principles in the Declaration of Human Rights,” it considered it justified to ban the show.

Gilad Atzmon: Jewish Money, Sport and Elementary Freedoms
Diana Johnstone: The Bête Noire of the French Establishment

Edward Snowden has made some dangerous enemies. As the American intelligence community struggles to contain the public damage done by the former National Security Agency contractor’s revelations of mass domestic spying, intelligence operators have continued to seethe in very personal terms against the 30-year-old whistle-blower. “In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.” “I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single-handedly the greatest traitor in American history.”

Bill Van Auken: Apologists for NSA redouble witch-hunt of Edward Snowden ● The response of the US political establishment to President Obama’s adamant defense of illegal spying by the National Security Agency demonstrates that there is no constituency for the defense of democratic and constitutional rights within the US ruling elite. In comments to the press immediately after the speech, as well as in appearances on the Sunday morning television interview programs, leading congressional Democrats and Republicans, as well as former intelligence officials, were unanimous in supporting both Obama’s speech and the NSA’s operations. [...] Obama’s lying remarks, which included an attack on Snowden, were a green light for the most right-wing sections of the ruling establishment to go on the offensive, braying for the whistle-blower’s blood. The US president’s response consisted of meaningless rhetoric about “privacy” and vague proposals for “oversight,” accompanied by a full-throated defense of the police state operations carried out by the NSA and other US intelligence agencies within the United States and around the world. Three so-called critics of NSA spying, Democratic senators Mark Udall, Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, issued a joint statement hailing Obama’s speech as “a major milestone in our longstanding efforts to reform the National Security Agency’s bulk collection program,” as though the cosmetic gestures towards civil liberties represented genuine concessions.

You can learn a lot about a person from their medical records– what’s that STD test all about? Mental health issues? Hiding a health problem from an employer? Terminated pregnancy? Had a medical issue that might expose your sexuality when you don’t wish to do so? Work for the military or government and trying to keep a health issue off their radar by using a private medical provider?

Gilad Atzmon ■ The Guardian reported this weekend that the “West Bromwich Albion's sponsor, Zoopla, has told the club to drop Nicolas Anelka over his quenelle gesture or risk their lucrative shirt deal being scrapped.” Zoopla, a property website company, owned by the Jewish businessman Alex Chesterman, said Anelka must be dropped for Monday's Premier League home game against Everton and has told the club it will want its name removed from the team's shirts immediately if he plays. The Jewish owned company “is understood to have been left stunned by the decision to keep Anelka in the team while the FA investigation continues.” I guess that the message here is clear. Jewish money, philanthropy and endorsement come with a price tag. The beneficiary is expected to subscribe to Jewish politics and interests while being extremely attentive to Jewish sensitivities. Yet I am slightly perplexed. How anyone can interpret Anelka’s anti- establishment quenelle as an ‘anti-Semitic gesture’ is beyond me. Was the goalkeeper a Jew? Maybe the goal frame reminded Anelka of a synagogue or the Israeli Knesset. One may suggest then that, by hitting the net, Anelka symbolically brought destruction on the Jewish people and their state. These question are indeed fascinating. But even before the FA comes up with its final verdict, we can already agree that it doesn’t take much to offend our Jewish paymasters.

President Obama said Friday, in his first major speech on electronic surveillance, that "the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security." Obama placed restrictions on access to domestic phone records collected by the National Security Agency, but the changes he announced will allow it to continue -- or expand -- the collection of personal data from billions of people around the world, Americans and foreign citizens alike.

In recent weeks Russia has stepped up supplies of military gear to Syria, including armoured vehicles, drones and guided bombs, boosting President Bashar al-Assad just as rebel infighting has weakened the insurgency against him, sources with knowledge of the deliveries say. Moscow, which is trying to raise its diplomatic and economic influence in the Middle East, has been a major provider of conventional weapons to Syria, giving Assad crucial support during the three-year civil war and blocking wider Western attempts to punish him with sanctions for the use of force against civilians. The new Russian supplies come at a critically fluid stage of the conflict, with peace talks scheduled for next week in Switzerland, the factious opposition losing ground, and Western support for the rebellion growing increasingly wary of the role played by foreign militants. Syria has even said some countries formally opposed to Assad have begun discussing security cooperation with his government.