September 18: Julian Assange Hearing Report
By Defend Wikileaks. New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager took to stand to testify about using WikiLeaks documents in his work. Hager published Other People’s Wars, New Zealand in Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terror, and said that WikiLeaks-released military and diplomatic files “greatly increased my understanding of the conduct of the war. It would have been impossible to write the book without these confidential and leaked sources.” In his written testimony, Hager explained, “It is in general impossible to research and write about war to a useful standard without access to sources that the authorities... -more-Day 12: Julian Assange Hearing
By Craig Murray. Yet another shocking example of abuse of court procedure unfolded on Wednesday. James Lewis QC for the prosecution had been permitted gratuitously to read to two previous witnesses with zero connection to this claim, an extract from a book by Luke Harding and David Leigh in which Harding claims that at a dinner at El Moro Restaurant Julian Assange had stated he did not care if US informants were killed, because they were traitors who deserved what was coming to them. This morning giving evidence was John Goetz, now Chief Investigations Editor of NDR (German public TV), then of Der Spiegel. -more-Labor Must Make Defense Of Black Lives Its Own Imperative
By King Downing and Frances Madeson, Black Agenda Report. Black trade unionists across the U.S. are calling on the labor movement to defend Black Lives Matter protesters and to fight racism in their own ranks. The attacks by police and increasingly violent armed racist militias evoke the memory of many such violent incidents against Black people in earlier periods, from slavery to segregation to the civil rights era. For Labor Day 2020, Truthout reached out to Christopher Silvera, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 808 in Long Island City, NY; Elise Bryant, executive director of Labor Heritage Foundation and president of the Communication Workers of America’s Coalition... -more-For the Planet, There Is No “Lesser Evil”
By Nathaniel Flakin, Left Voice. By now, most people in the United States recognize that the climate crisis poses the greatest threat to humanity and nature. Faced with a president who continually dismisses the dangers of global warming and has taken numerous measures to expand fossil fuel production, many progressives and even some on the Left have declared the need to vote for Biden as the “lesser evil” in November. Noam Chomsky went so far as to label the Republicans “the most dangerous organization in human history” because of Trump’s aggressive pro-fossil fuel agenda. -more-New Fossil Fuel Projects Meet Indigenous Resistance
By Randall Hyman, Truthout. New Mexico - The spicy pungency of sagebrush filled the air in Greater Chaco, New Mexico, in late July this summer as I watched towering, rain-laden clouds gather across the endless horizon — a reminder that the midsummer monsoon season would soon turn the dirt roads that snake across the Navajo Nation reservation into quagmires. Locals are accustomed to these storms, but this region is now also being pummeled by two other tempests — the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hit the Navajo Nation hard, especially due to many residents’ difficulty in accessing clean water, and also the tumult of... -more-Kafka On Acid: The Trial Of Julian Assange
By Felicity Ruby, Arena Online. Julian Assange needs to wake before dawn to get from Belmarsh Prison to the Old Bailey courthouse, where his extradition hearing resumed on 7 September, for four weeks. He gets dressed for court only to be strip-searched before being placed in a ventilated coffin Serco van for a 90-minute trip across London in peak-hour traffic. After waiting handcuffed in the holding cells, he is placed in a glass box at the back of the courtroom. Then he is forced back into the Serco van to be strip-searched back at Belmarsh to face another night alone in his cell. -more-
The Super-Rich Are Raking In Billions
By David Cay Johnson, DC Report. If you are in the 99% here is how well you are faring under Trump policies compared to the 1%: for each dollar of increased income that you earned in 2018, each One-Percenter got $88 more income. Huge as that ratio is, it’s small change compared to the super-rich, the 0.01% of Americans with incomes of $10 million and up. That ratio is $1 for you and $2,215 for each super-rich American household. Let’s call them the Platinum-Premiere-Point-Zero-One-Percenters The slice of American income pie going to the poor shrank under Trump by the same amount that it grew for the super-rich. Ponder that. -more-Mainstream US Reporters Silent About Being Spied On
By Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone. A Spanish security firm apparently contracted by US intelligence to carry out a campaign of black operations against Julian Assange and his associates spied on several US reporters including Ellen Nakashima, the top national security reporter of the Washington Post, and Lowell Bergman, a New York Times and PBS veteran. To date, Nakashima and her employers at the Washington Post have said nothing about the flagrant assault on their constitutional rights by UC Global, the security company in charge of Ecuadorian embassy in London, which seemingly operated under the watch of the... -more-Venezuela: The 2016-2020 National Assembly – Part Of The Plan
By Pasqualina Curcio, Resumen English. It’s hard to decide which of all the actions of the Venezuelan opposition representatives was the most shameful. Was it Ramos Allup giving the legitimate elected President Nicolas Madura a 6-month deadline to leave office while removing the portraits of Simon Bolivar and of Comandante Chavez from the Federal Capitol? Or Julio Borges spreading letters throughout the world in which he called for an increase in the economic blockade against the Venezuelan people while he labeled us a plague in the region? -more-Venezuela Foils CIA Terror Plot; Pompeo On Regime Change Tour
By Alan Macleod, Mintpress News. Venezuela’s government has announced it has foiled a potential terror attack, arresting a former CIA operative while he was on a stakeout near the country’s largest oil refining facility. Matthew John Heath was arrested with three other Venezuelans outside the Amuay and Cardon refineries in Falcon state in the west of the country, reportedly carrying a submachine gun, a grenade launcher, four blocks of C4 explosives, a satellite phone, and stacks of U.S. dollars. He has been charged with terrorism and weapons trafficking. -more-New Report: Private Health Insurers Overpay Hospitals
By the Rand Corporation. Prices paid to hospitals nationally during 2018 by privately insured patients averaged 247% of what Medicare would have paid, with wide variation in prices among states, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Some states (Arkansas, Michigan, and Rhode Island) had relative prices under 200% of Medicare, while other states (Florida, Tennessee, Alaska, West Virginia, and South Carolina) had relative prices that were above 325% of Medicare. The study notes a steady increase in hospital prices, rising to the 2018 average level from an average of 224% of Medicare costs in 2016 and 230% of Medicare costs in 2017. -more-‘Extreme Option: Overthrow Allende’
By Peter Kornbluh, Portside. Washington, DC - On September 15, 1970, during a twenty-minute meeting in the Oval Office between 3:25 pm and 3:45 pm, President Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to foment a military coup in Chile. According to handwritten notes taken by CIA Director Richard Helms, Nixon issued explicit instructions to prevent the newly elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, from being inaugurated in November—or to create conditions to overthrow him if he did assume the presidency. “1 in 10 chance, perhaps, but save Chile.” -more-As an independent media source free of advertising, we rely on your support.
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