Review finds executions taking up to 20 minutes longer since EU boycott of lethal drugs leads states to employ other methods. ● US death penalty states face a deepening crisis in their struggle to procure medical drugs for use in lethal injections, with new evidence that the increasingly random methods being used are subjecting condemned prisoners to prolonged and possibly excruciating deaths. A Guardian survey of death sentences carried out over the past three years by Texas – the most prolific of all execution states – has found that the procedure now takes on average twice as long as under previous protocols. A study of Texas department of criminal justice records and eyewitness media reports mainly from the Associated Press shows a notable lengthening of the death process following the switch in July 2012 from the conventional three-drug cocktail to a single drug, pentobarbital. Ten executions prior to the change took on average 10 minutes to complete, ranging from nine to 11 minutes between the administration of the lethal injection and the declaration of death. The next 23 executions using only pentobarbital took on average 20 minutes, with the full range between 12 to 30 minutes. Suzanne Basso is scheduled next Wednesday to become the 510th prisoner to be executed by Texas in the modern era. Texas has eight executions set between next week and 29 May. A spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice declined to comment.

Americans Are Starting to Wake Up from their Fear-Induced Haze [It's a bit late for that now, I'm afraid...] The Founding Fathers valued privacy over safety. Indeed, the Revolutionary War was largely started to stop the use of spying by the British. Background here. In other words, the Founding Fathers gave up their safe life with little freedom to strive for real freedom. The American people got spooked after 9/11, even though 9/11 was entirely foreseeable … and even the chair of the 9/11 Commission said that the attack was preventable. But we are now remembering that liberty is more important than some mythical concept of 100% guaranteed safety.

The Syrian army has carried out large-scale military operations against foreign-backed terrorist groups in several areas across the violence-stricken country. ● Syrian army forces managed to kill many Takfiri militants in the suburbs of the country’s northwestern city of Idlib, destroying their weapons and ammunition, Syria’s official news agency SANA reported on Thursday. Meanwhile, a number of extremist militants were killed in the countryside of Aleppo in northwestern Syria. Army units also destroyed terrorist hideouts in the area. The Syrian forces launched similar mop-up operations in the cities of Dara’a, Homs and Dayr al-Zawr. According to the report, scores of foreign-backed militants, including Saudi and Tunisian nationals, were killed in the army operations in the eastern city of Dayr al-Zawr.

linternaute.com: Syrie: ultime séance de pourparlers à Genève avant une pause
Al-Manar News: Syrian Army Launches Large Scale Operations against Armed Mercenaries
Franklin Lamb: Long Odds to Save Their Country: The Syrian Team in Geneva

Actress Confirms Commitment to Apartheid and Ethnic Cleansing by Resigning as Ambassador for Goodwill and Peace in Favor of Company that Illegally Confiscates Land of Indigenous Peoples while posing as Ec0-Friendly Company. || Yesterday, Scarlett Johansson announced that she is ending her relationship with a humanitarian group after being criticized over her support for an Soda Stream, an Israeli company that operates illegally in the West Bank on confiscated lands of the indigenous populations. A statement released by Johansson’s spokesman Wednesday said the 29-year-old actress has “a fundamental difference of opinion” with Oxfam International because the humanitarian group opposes all trade from Israeli settlements, saying they are illegal and deny Palestinian rights. Earlier this month, “The Avengers” and “Her” actress signed on as the first global brand ambassador of SodaStream International Ltd., and she’s set to appear in an ad for the at-home soda maker during the Super Bowl on Feb. 2. SodaStream has come under fire from pro-Indigenous peoples activists for maintaining a large factory in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, a territory captured by Israel in 1967 and claimed by the indigenous peoples. In response to the criticism, Johansson said last week she was a “supporter of economic cooperation and social interaction between a democratic Israel and Palestine.”

Philip Weiss ■ Scarlett Johansson is getting some backup for her controversial decision to represent SodaStream, a product made in a Jewish colony in the occupied Palestinian territories. And not just from rightwinger Mike Huckabee. NY City Comptroller Scott Stringer, a liberal Democrat, came to her side last night: Proud of environmentalist/humanitarian Scarlett Johansson for standing strong against those seeking to undermine a two-state solution. Stringer was quickly echoed by the soul of J Street, the liberal Zionist lobby group, Rabbi Andy Bachman of Beth Elohim in Brooklyn. [...] Liberal Zionists just don’t want to criticize Johansson. Americans for Peace Now, which supports a boycott of settlement goods, has been silent on Johansson’s SodaStream connection.

Xymphora: I forgot this very good Weiss on Sodastream ■ It happens that the stolen land Sodastream is using is land World Jewry intends to un-steal through legitimizing the stealing process in the current bogus 'negotiations' with Abbas. Thus, the Sodastream issue cuts directly to the deep fraud behind lite Zionism, a fraud generally called the 'two-state solution' (a term no doubt derived from the 'final solution'). Despite what the lite Zionists would like you to think, there are no Good Jews.

An emaciated man whose boat washed up on a remote Pacific atoll this week claims he survived 16 months adrift on the Pacific, floating more than 12,500 kilometers (8,000 miles) from Mexico, a researcher said Friday. ● The man, with long beard and hair, was discovered Thursday when his 24-foot fibreglass boat with propellerless engines floated onto the reef at Ebon Atoll and he was spotted by two locals. "His condition isn't good, but he's getting better," Ola Fjeldstad, a Norwegian anthropology student doing research on Ebon, told Agence France Presse by telephone. Fjeldstad said the man, dressed only in a pair of ragged underpants, claims he left Mexico for El Salvador in September 2012 with a companion, who died at sea several months ago. Details of his survival are sketchy, Fjeldstad added, as the man only speaks Spanish, but he said his name was Jose Ivan. "The boat is really scratched up and looks like it has been in the water for a long time," said the researcher. "He has a long beard and hair." Ivan indicated to Fjeldstad that he survived by eating turtles, birds and fish and drinking turtle blood when there was no rain.

The Guardian: Man claims to have survived 16 months adrift in Pacific

Amid a very low voter turnout, Egypt’s election committee claims 98.1 percent approval of a new, military-backed constitution in the first referendum since the US-backed Army ousted the nation's first freely-elected president. Egypt's High Election Commission announced Saturday that only 38.6 percent of the country's more than 53 million eligible voters took part in the two-day poll.

Kevin Barrett: Jewish Al-Sisi Runs Egypt; Now an Israeli-Occupied Territory
henrymakow.com: Al-Sisi is a Crypto Jew. Coup is disguised Zionist Occupation

truthjihad.com: Phony unanimity proves Egypt’s “constitution” a sham ■ That 98% figure says it all. Whenever 98% of voters supposedly vote for anything, you know the “election” is a sham. Fake unanimity is the hallmark of dictatorships. People like Stalin, Mao, and al-Sisi are always “elected” by near-unanimous “landslides.” Full article

Abu Dharr: Who exactly is General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi? ■ Born to a Moroccan Jewish mother, his maternal uncle was a member of David Ben Gurion’s political party. How did this Sephardi sleeper stay within the loop without being exposed for so long and rising to the top spot in the military? [...] But who is this al-Sisi? At least one American news report wants us to believe he is an “Islamist” — but a moderate one! There are murmurs and rumors in Egypt about al-Sisi’s mother. Who is she? And the available answers are that she is a Moroccan Jewess. In normal circumstances there would be nothing wrong with being Moroccan or Jewish. But we are not dealing with normal circumstances. Someone whose mother is Moroccan and Jewish and then becomes Egypt’s Minister of Defense, and now the ultimate authority, raises serious questions. Add to that the favorable press he is receiving in Israel and we have exclamation marks hugging question marks all over our mind and psyche. This coup leader, illegitimate ruler, and arbitrary chief executive and commander for the last two months, and before that the Defense Minister — who is he? This Mr. al-Sisi has been complicit with the Israelis in killing innocent people in the Sinai Peninsula. Our source in Egypt who is very active politically and very well versed on Egyptian matters investigated al-Sisi’s family lineage. And what he came up with is that there is reason to believe that al-Sisi is a crypto-Muslim.

The partial sale of DONG Energy to Goldman Sachs took a shocking turn this morning after Annette Vilhelmsen, the head of government coalition party Socialistisk Folkeparti (SF), announced that she would step down as head of the party and the party would leave the government coalition. ● Vilhelmsen called a meeting this morning after she was unable to obtain a consensus in her party on agreeing to the government’s pending DONG/ Goldman Sachs agreement, which is set to be decided on in parliament later today. “It’s been a dramatic 24 hours. I must admit that there has been disagreement in the party, at a national level and in the parliament group,” Vilhelmsen said at the press conference at Christiansborg. “I couldn’t gather the party.”