French police have launched a raid on the home of anti-Zionist comedian, Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, as well as his offices, seizing his personal documents and other belongings. ● The French government accuses the controversial comedian of what it describes as promotion of anti-Semitism, and it is mounting pressure against him through judicial measures. The government has already banned M’bala M’bala’s public gatherings and the raids on Tuesday were sanctioned as, what the government claims, part of a broader investigation into suspected fraud by Dieudonné. He has been also convicted for a series of hate speeches, for which authorities are now seeking to compel Dieudonné to pay tens of thousands of euros in outstanding fines. They have accused him of suspected money-laundering and misuse of corporate assets.

InPublishing: Press Freedom Under Threat From “Soft” Censorship: Report ■ “Unlike jailings, closures and other direct attacks on press freedom, soft censorship is far more subtle and rarely generates the same level of international outrage as direct attacks on the press,” Mr Peyrègne explained. “The jailing of a journalist is guaranteed to draw attention. But a tax case? If a government uses tax laws, or withholds advertising, or carries out similar measures in response to criticism, it does not generate the same level of condemnation.”

France becomes a Zionist Sock Puppet - Shades of Vichy France reemerging in the 21rst century

Russian President Vladimir Putin has criticized the West for meddling in Ukraine's internal affairs, saying Moscow will not scrap its aid deal with Kiev even if the opposition comes to power. | “In response to your question whether we would review our loan and energy agreements if opposition comes to power, I say: No, we won’t,” Putin said in a joint press conference with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, following an EU-Russia summit at the EU Headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday. [He also] criticized the trips of European and US officials to Ukraine to support anti-government protests.

Reuters: Ukraine expects $2 billion tranche of Russian aid soon: acting PM
Russia Today: Putin: Russia ready to support Ukraine, regardless of govt - Video

The EU needs to start protecting its own citizens from the American global spying initiatives and quit being “hypocritical” when it comes to reforming its own data protection system, said the EU’s Justice Commissioner. Viviane Reding, a vocal critic of American cyber surveillance, lashed out against EU member states’ reaction in wake of Edward Snowden revelations, urging the bloc to protect citizens’ private information and seek more legal assurances from Washington. “There's been a lot of hypocrisy in the debate,” Reding said at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels on Tuesday. “If the EU wants to be credible in its efforts to rebuild trust, if it wants to act as an example for other continents, it also has to get its own house in order.” “The EU itself should also look carefully at some of its [data protection] laws. Neither the Commission, the Council, nor the European Parliament can be proud of the Data Retention Directive.”

The head of GCHQ, the secret eavesdropping agency that has come under scrutiny following leaks by former US analyst Edward Snowden, is to stand down. ● Iain Lobban, 53, will leave the agency later this year after serving nearly six years as director, the Foreign Office said. It denied that his departure was related to revelations contained in Snowden's leaked documents that GCHQ was one of the main players in mass telecommunications surveillance.

PressTV: Head of British spy agency GCHQ relieved from job
The Guardian: Huge swath of GCHQ mass surveillance is illegal, says top lawyer

A snakebite victim who was treated at a North Carolina hospital came away with more than just fang marks when he received an $89,227 bill for an 18-hour stay. ● Eric Ferguson, 54, from Mooresville, N.C., got the staggering bill for anti-venom medicine and a short visit at Lake Norman Regional Center, according to the Charlotte Observer, after a snake bit him in the foot while he was taking out the garbage. According to his bill, the hospital charged a whopping $81,000 for a four-vial dose of the medication. For comparison, Ferguson and his wife found the same vials online for retail prices as low as $750.

Awareness of the dangers that Jewish Supremacism pose to the existence and freedom of people of all races and walks of life is slowly spreading—and is nowhere more in evidence than in the growing popularity of the French-Algerian comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, the man behind the ‘quenelle’ salute. A new article in the Independent newspaper about Dieudonné, which carries with it the usual snide attack style of the Jewish-Supremacist influenced media, serves to highlight the point. According to the article, written after a journalist attended a sold-out stand-up show by Dieudonné, “Howls of gleeful fury greet Dieudonné’s every reference to a French politician, or to his alleged ‘persecution’ by the French establishment” and “Louder howls and boos greet every reference to a Jew or to a Jewish organisation.” The article goes on to quote Dieudonné as playfully making his political points: “What the f*** are all you lot doing here?” he asks. “The media and the politicians and the thinkers have ordered you not to come. You must all be crazy anti-semites, assassins and wicked sorcerers. I almost didn’t turn up myself.”

DavidDuke.com: How Jewish Supremacists View Gentiles: The Official List of “Humans”
Gilad Atzmon: Holocaust Day – The Time Is Ripe For A Jewish Apology
Gilad Atzmon: Can British M.P.'s Withstand the Zionist Lobby?
MintPressNews: Comedian’s Free-Speech Struggle Accentuates Rifts In French Society

Stopping overpopulation is one way the dangers of climate change can be mitigated, according to two of the most prominent believers in global warming. Former Vice President Al Gore and Microsoft founder Bill Gates said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that contraception is a key in controlling the proliferation of unusual weather they say is endangering the world. "Depressing the rate of child mortality, educating girls, empowering women and making fertility management ubiquitously available … is crucial to the future shape of human civilization," said Gore.

Press freedom is Europe is facing a widespread and growing threat by “soft” censorship that includes governments’ use of financial power to pressure news media, punish critical reporting and reward favourable coverage, says WAN-IFRA. || While Europe’s press is not generally threatened by the jailing of journalists or the closure of media outlets, “soft” censorship is a more subtle but significant new danger, according to new reports released yesterday by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA). The reports demonstrate how the governments in two European countries – Serbia and Hungary – use their financial power to pressure media outlets, punish critical reporting and reward favourable coverage. Economic pressures are especially devastating in times of economic instability and lead to unbalanced reporting and to self-censorship among media professionals, and thus constitute a real threat to press freedom, the reports found. “Unlike jailings, closures and other direct attacks on press freedom, soft censorship is far more subtle and rarely generates the same level of international outrage as direct attacks on the press,” Mr Peyrègne explained. “The jailing of a journalist is guaranteed to draw attention. But a tax case? If a government uses tax laws, or withholds advertising, or carries out similar measures in response to criticism, it does not generate the same level of condemnation.”

The Karzai government has repeatedly taken the US military to task for killing large numbers of civilians in the occupation, but they may just be the tip of the iceberg, as Afghan officials say a case is being made suggesting the US has also engaged in “insurgent-style” attacks which were blamed on the Taliban. The officials didn’t discuss the evidence in much detail, but the belief is that many of the attacks were timed to undermine the Karzai government, or in some cases to immediately follow up civilian deaths with a story to distract attention. There is a fairly substantial list of “suspected” incidents, and incredibly enough it even includes the recent attack on a Kabul restaurant in the diplomatic district, though officials conceded there was no concrete evidence of that one yet, and its inclusion is based on timing.

Most Americans are unimpressed with President Barack Obama's efforts to restore trust in government in the wake of disclosures about secret surveillance programs that swept up the phone records of hundreds of millions in the United States. And Americans are increasingly placing personal privacy ahead of being kept safe from terrorists, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll. More than 60 percent of respondents said they value privacy over anti-terror protections. That's up slightly from 58 percent in a similar poll in August conducted by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Bill Van Auken ■ The former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden appeared Sunday night in his first extended television interview. Citing published statements by unnamed US intelligence and military operatives calling for his assassination, he warned that he faces “significant threats” to his life and that US “government officials want to kill me.” The interview, broadcast by the German television network ARD, was largely blacked out by the US media. The New York Times carried not a word of what Snowden said, while the cable and broadcast news programs treated the interview with near total silence. The American media’s reaction stood in stark contrast to that of both broadcast and print media in Germany, where the interview conducted with Snowden in Russia was treated as a major political event. The interview itself was preceded by a segment dedicated to Snowden on Germany’s most popular news talk show, with commentary delivered before a sizable live television audience. Those who spoke out in Snowden’s defense received enthusiastic applause, while the defenders of Washington’s spying operations, including a right-wing German journalist and a former US ambassador to Germany, were treated coolly or with outright derision.

WSWS: US officials “want to kill me,” warns Edward Snowden

One slide from the NSA cache points to the data that could
be gleaned from uploading a photo from your phone to a
social network. (Image via The New York Times)

New information made public by Edward Snowden reveals that the governments of the United States and United Kingdom are trawling data from cellphone “apps” to accumulate dossiers on the “political alignments” of millions of smartphone users worldwide. ● According to a 2012 internal UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) document, the National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ have been accumulating and storing hundreds of millions of user “cookies” —the digital footprints left on a cellphone or computer each time a user visits a web site—in order to accumulate detailed personal information about users’ private lives. ● This confirms that the main purpose of the programs is not to protect the population from “terrorism,” but to facilitate the state repression of working class opposition to widening social inequality and social counterrevolution. The programs do not primarily target “terrorists,” but workers, intellectuals, and students. ● The collection of data regarding the “political alignment” of cellphone users also suggests that the governments of the US and UK are keeping lists of those whose “political alignments” are of concern to the government. Previous revelations have shown how the NSA and GCHQ “flag” certain “suspects” for additional surveillance: the most recent revelation indicates that suspects are “flagged” at least in part based on their “political alignment.” ● The legal rationale behind this process points to a growing movement to criminalize political thought in the US and UK.

The Guardian: Angry Birds and 'leaky' phone apps targeted by NSA and GCHQ for user data
NBC News: Snowden docs reveal British spies snooped on YouTube and Facebook

About 49 percent of black men are arrested for non-traffic offenses by the time they turn twenty-three, according to a new study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. That’s compared with 45 percent of Hispanic men and 38 percent of white men who reported arrests by the same age. | The study notes that an early arrest, “even if it results in an acquittal,” often haunts the arrestee for the rest of their lives. The authors explain:

There is substantial research showing that arrested youth are not only more likely to experience immediate negative consequences such as contact with the justice system, school failure and dropout, and family difficulties, but these problems are likely to reverberate long down the life course in terms of additional arrests, job instability, lower wages, longer bouts with unemployment, more relationship troubles, and long-term health problems including premature death.

The authors analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997—a Department of Labor survey consisting of interviews with about 7,000 American youths from 1997 to 2008.

'Don't Surrender to Kerry' Campaign Kicks Off. ● Israeli settlers group the Yesha Council has kicked off its official “Don’t Surrender to Kerry” campaign, urging Israelis and their political leadership not to reach any deal on Palestinian statehood. The campaign includes media spots, banners, and organized public protests against peace talks, saying that reaching a deal amounts to “surrendering Israel’s security and national interests to John Kerry.”

Jim W. Dean: Zionists design myth of Jewish genome to usurp Palestine ■ On December 14, 2012, Dr. Eran Elhaik turned almost two generations of Jewish genome research upside down. But he went even further. The young Israeli-Ameican geneticist has charged former researchers with academic fraud, and he has the research to back it up. How could those those eminent Jewish scientist before him have been so wrong? Easy says Dr. Elhaik, “First these researchers decided what conclusions they wanted to find, and then they set off to find evidence to support it.” I was not bashing Jewish scientists. What Elhaik has described is a slam dunk fraud. But why? Why would Jews who take such pride in the academic achievement risk exposing themselves to a group deception which was bound to be discovered later? Dr. Elhaik does not delve into the quicksand of the politics, but I will gladly do so. They perpetrated the fraud solely to support the bogus biblical claim to Palestine which was anchored in their being a separate people. This distinguished them from all others because they claimed a land title in their blood. They bet the farm on this DNA proof of purchase, a God given bar coded passport to the Palestine. Dr. Ehaik just erased the bar code. It was just stamped on anyway, because it was never in the blood.

Window to Palestine: New Genome Study Destroys Zionist Claims to Palestine
Gilad Atzmon: Jews Are Not a Race But Jewish Identity is Racist

In various parts of the world, enhanced or engineered geothermal systems are being created by pumping cold water into hot dry rocks at 4-5 kilometers depths. The heated water is pumped up again as hot water or steam from production wells. In recent decades, considerable effort has been invested in Europe, Australia, the United States, and Japan, with uneven, and typically poor, results. In 2009 a borehole drilled at Krafla, northeast Iceland, as part of the Icelandic Deep Drilling Project (IDDP), unexpectedly penetrated into magma (molten rock) at only 2,100 meters depth, with a temperature of 900-1,000 C. The borehole, IDDP-1, was the first in a series of wells being drilled by the IDDP in Iceland in the search for high-temperature geothermal resources.

Michael Booth: Television in Denmark is rubbish, Finnish men like a drink – and Sweden is not exactly a model of democracy. Why, asks one expert, does everybody think the Nordic region is a utopia? ■ Whether it is Denmark's happiness, its restaurants, or TV dramas; Sweden's gender equality, crime novels and retail giants; Finland's schools; Norway's oil wealth and weird songs about foxes; or Iceland's bounce-back from the financial abyss, we have an insatiable appetite for positive Nordic news stories. After decades dreaming of life among olive trees and vineyards, these days for some reason, we Brits are now projecting our need for the existence of an earthly paradise northwards.

White House officials are setting the scene for a confrontational state of the union address on Tuesday night, claiming that President Barack Obama is preparing to “bypass” Congress with executive action on divisive issues "such as economic inequality" [Obama is no champion of the poor.]. ● Key policy objectives, such as increasing the national minimum wage or lowering the cost of access to higher education, are almost impossible to achieve without bipartisan legislation. Republicans view the mounting State of the Union rhetoric as largely about political jockeying, ahead of the midterm elections. “It sounds vaguely like a threat and it's certainly a kind of arrogance,” said Senator Rand Paul, who is increasingly seen as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, in an interview on CNN.

The following are psychological operations (PSYOP) leaflets dropped over Afghanistan and Iraq during Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. The leaflets are taken from a booklet released commercially by Giovanni Carmine and Christoph Büchel in 2006. The leaflets are written in Arabic, Dari and Pashto. Accurate translations are welcome.

Peter Hart: Erasing Obama's Record on the Afghan War

Ukraine threatened to impose a state of emergency on Monday after demonstrators occupied the justice ministry and protests demanding the president's resignation spread despite a power-sharing offer. ● Opposition leaders said an olive branch proposal from President Viktor Yanukovych was not enough to end the ex-Soviet country's worst crisis since independence and demanded snap elections this year. The protests began more than two months ago over Yanukovych's rejection of a pact with the European Union under Russian pressure. But they have now turned into an all-out bid to oust him from power. Protesters have already attempted to blockade 14 of the 25 regional administrations, including in southern and eastern parts of the nation of 46 million that predominantly speak Russian and share an historical allegiance to Moscow.

France24: Ukraine warns of possible state of emergency - Video
Russia Today: Ukraine Justice Ministry seized by rioters

In an interview broadcast Sunday night by the German public television network ARD, Edward Snowden warned that there were “significant threats” to his life. US “government officials want to kill me.” ● The former contractor for the National Security Agency, who has exposed dozens of illegal NSA surveillance and spying programs, was speaking from Moscow, where he has been granted temporary political asylum. “These people, and they are government officials, have said they would love to put a bullet in my head or poison me when I come out of the supermarket, and then watch as I die in the shower,” he told ARD’s Hubert Seipel, who said the interview took place last Thursday. Snowden was referring to the scenario detailed by an unnamed military officer who spoke to the Buzzfeed web site last week. “I think if we had the chance, we would end it very quickly,” the officer said. “Just casually walking on the streets of Moscow… he is casually poked by a passerby… He goes home very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the shower.” An unnamed NSA analyst was quoted by Buzzfeed as follows: “In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself.”

Snowden-Interview: TRANSCRIPT
ARD/tagesschau.de: "USA betreiben Wirtschaftsspionage" - Video
Reuters: Snowden says 'significant threats' to his life
Bill Van Auken: Defend Edward Snowden!

An "independent" federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security Agency’s program to collect bulk phone call records has provided only “minimal” benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down. The findings are laid out in a 238-page report, scheduled for release by Thursday and obtained by The New York Times, that represent the first major public statement by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which Congress made an independent agency in 2007 and only recently became fully operational.

The Guardian: US withholding Fisa court orders on NSA bulk collection of Americans' data

Eric London: Report confirms illegality of NSA bulk-collection programs ■ The make-up and history of the panel are indications of the panel’s true character. PCLOB was formed in 2004 by Congress as a hollow response to the public opposition engendered by the anti-democratic measures of the Bush administration. But despite the government’s repeated violations of civil liberties over the past decade, the panel had not held hearings on any substantive matter until November 2013. Its five members—whose only “powers” are to make recommendations to the president—are hand picked by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The current members represent the pinnacles of the political establishment: they were respectively appointed from the Department of Justice, the federal judiciary, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Chamber of Commerce. The content of the report makes clear that the authors are motivated not by a genuine desire to defend democratic rights, but rather by a desire to limit the damage that has been done by the Snowden revelations.

New video footage has emerged on the Internet showing atrocities committed by foreign-backed Takfiri militants who are fighting against the Syrian government. ● The video, which was posted online on Sunday, shows several bodies that reportedly belong to the civilians who were executed by militants from the al-Qaeda-linked group of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The corpses were found in the western suburb of Aleppo. According to a rival militant group, which shot the video, the victims had been killed by the al-Qaeda-affiliated group over the past few days and buried under the rocks. Another shocking footage posted online in December 2013 which showed militants who had cut off the head of a government soldier in Aleppo. Numerous videos have surfaced over the past two years from Syria showing the militants committing acts of violence against both captured civilian supporters of the government and army troops. Last May, a gruesome video showed a foreign-backed militant in Syria cutting out the heart of a Syrian soldier and biting into it.

Notorious Serbian-Swedish gangster Milo 'Mille' Markovic has been found dead with four bullet wounds to his head in Stockholm. The 52-year-old was shot dead while sitting in a car outside his home in Ulvsunda, in the western part of the Swedish capital, just after 6pm last night, the engine still running. Markovic was unofficially credited as one of the sources for the controversial 2010 biography about the King of Sweden in which the monarch was accused of attending strip clubs and having extramarital affairs. 'It sounded like fireworks,' a witness told Aftonbladet. 'Then I saw two men in dark clothing from afar.' 'They were standing by a car where the sound of fireworks came from. One of them said "he is dead".' Markovic gained fame as the owner of 'porn club' Prive and is said to have been one of the main sources for The Reluctant Monarch, a biography of King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.