Month: July, 2016
https://www.rt.com/usa/354053-shooting-austin-texas-casualties/
At least one person has been killed, and four injured in Austin, Texas after two separate shootings in the downtown area of the city, emergency services and police stated.
A woman was pronounced dead at the scene and two women and one man were taken to University Medical Center Brackenridge, Captain Rick Rutledge of the Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services told AP.
A fourth person was also injured but declined the option of having medical treatment, officials confirmed.
Police Chief Brian Manley confirmed that the deceased is the woman in her 30s.
Manley also said that two incidents were ‘unrelated,’ and there was no active shooter present.
“It was a very chaotic scene,” Manley said. “A lot of people running in different directions with all the gunshots coming out.”
According to Manley, the suspect may be among those transported to hospitals.
“We have multiple individuals, witnesses, that we are currently interviewing,” Manley said. “We had one individual who was initially noted as a person of interest, however that person’s status at this point is undetermined.”
Multiple units have headed to 208 East 6th Street , the Austin-Travis County EMS said, as cited by KXAN news.
Austin police subsequently reported that separate shootings had taken place in the same area. However both incidents are now under control.
“We just literarily saw three people being shot in downtown Austin,†one local resident wrote on Instagram, after posting a video that showed the aftermath of the attack.
worker |
July 31, 2016 |
8:05 pm | Analysis, Bernie Sanders, DPRK, Hillary Clinton, political struggle, Russia |
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The Problem With Blaming Putin for DNC Hack That Exposed Bernie Was Cheated
http://sputniknews.com/analysis/20160730/1043793317/putin-trump-bernie-hillary-wikileaks.html
A popular internet meme asks how the Democrats can accuse alleged Russian hackers of subverting American democracy when the DNC leaks expose that the primary elections were a fraud.
© REUTERS/ Alkis Konstantinidis
The most recent Gallup poll, conducted from July 18-25, found that 58% of voters had an unfavorable opinion of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton with only 37% of voters saying they support either candidate – historically negative figures worse than ever reported for any candidate for the US presidency and a glaring red flag for American democracy.It begs the question of how in a Democratic society can a candidate opposed by more than 50% of the public can oppose the candidate – either one – who will ultimately take office as a representative of the people. This inexplicable reality faced by American voters, millions of whom according to a separate poll by Public Policy Polling (PPP) would choose a giant meteor crashing into earth rather than selecting either of the candidates, in fact has an explanation as was learned by the DNC leaks.
Donald Trump called it on May 4, 2016 when he posted on Twitter that “I would rather run against Crooked Hillary Clinton than Bernie Sanders and that will happen because the books are cooked against Bernie!” The candidate whose selling point is actually that he knows the rigged system better than anybody else because he used to be a part of it, turned out not so surprisingly to be correct.
​On the eve of the Democratic National Convention whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks brought the proof to the party exposing a nebulous web of connections between top Democratic operatives, leading mainstream media ‘journalists,’ and Hillary Clinton’s campaign who together conspired to push anti-Bernie narratives on the public and to launder money towards the former Secretary of State’s campaign whose millionaire and billionaire donor class struggled to keep pace with Bernie’s small-dollar fundraising machine.
One email between operatives even stooped so low as to have a Democratic operative go out into the field to ask what Bernie Sanders “believes” – whether he was Jewish or an atheist – in order to mar the candidate in the eyes of the political staffers’ “Southern Baptist peeps.”
Other emails included pushing the narrative that Bernie supporters turned violent in the wake of the Nevada Democratic Convention, itself subject to claims of impropriety by Democratic Party officials, even though Sanders supporters did not engage in physical conflict or “throw chairs” as was first reported by top Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston. The DNC asked that this narrative be pushed “without attribution” – that the fiction not be traced back to Party officials.
The emails also expose a steady pattern of reporters routing through the DNC before their own editors, Democratic Party officials being able to pre-select the questions that would be asked of Clinton or her surrogates, and fundamentally altering the manner in which the mainstream media covered the race.
The fix was in. An American election was stolen. The people are left to choose between two candidates who hardly rate higher than arsenic poisoning in the public opinion. That is why the narrative that Putin somehow attempted to rig the American election is so cartoonish – it was already rigged.
“I think pointing the finger to Russians is just a way to distract people from the central issue which is that the DNC was using a rigged game to prevent the popular guy from actually getting the election,” said Arvin Vohra in an interview with RT.
He’s right. Unfortunately, that strategy has been adopted full hog by the mainstream media from the first time that the words were uttered from the lips of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook who concocted a conspiracy theory out of whole-cloth that is now the election’s lead narrative.
When asked about allegations that Russia was behind the DNC email leaks, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov blasted the reporter saying “I don’t want to use four-letter words.” Many Americans probably feel the same way, but those folks will never be given a chance to vote for their candidate – and at least now they know why.
Russia Defeats Terrorism… While America Hails a Freak Show
© REUTERS/ Hosam Katan
http://sputniknews.com/columnists/20160730/1043780522/us-freak-show-russia-defeats-terrorism.html
A curious thing in the Western media this weekend is how little coverage is being given to a momentous victory unfolding in Syria. The Syrian Arab Army and Russian forces are about to close the final chapter in the five-year war – and the Western media don’t seem to want to know about it.
Indeed, far more media coverage is given to Hillary Clinton’s nomination as the Democrat’s presidential candidate. While Clinton was declaring to her party’s convention how she would wipe out Islamist terrorists in the Middle East, the Syrian army and its Russian allies were actually getting on with that very job.
© AFP 2016/ GEORGE OURFALIAN
Syria’s northern city of Aleppo – which was the country’s biggest city before the onset of the war in 2011 – is about to be fully retaken by the Syrian army, supported by Russian air power. Humanitarian corridors have been created to allow civilians and surrendering fighters to escape before the final assault begins on anti-government militias holed up in the east of the city.The militants are an amalgam of illegally armed groups, including the proscribed terrorist brigades affiliated to al-Qaeda. Western governments and media engage in cynical word games by referring to some of the fighters as “moderates†and “rebelsâ€.
For example, a CNN report states: “Syrian and Russian forces are to open humanitarian corridors for people to flee the besieged city of Aleppo, officials in both countries said Thursday, the day after Syria’s army announced it had encircled the city and cut off rebel [sic] supply routes.â€Note how the nice-sounding word “rebel†is invoked as a way of sanitizing the fact that the city has been besieged by extremists, who have seen fit to chop off the heads of their victims, including 10-year-old boys.
What Syrian and Russian forces are about to achieve in the recapture of Aleppo is nothing short of a historic victory. It is not just the symbolism of regaining Syria’s second city, which has the strategic significance of government-controlled Damascus. With its proximity to the Turkish border, Aleppo has been a bastion for illicit flow of weapons and mercenaries that has fueled the entire Syrian conflict.
The United States and its NATO allies, Britain and France, have worked with their regional partners Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to use Aleppo as the staging post for their covert, dirty war of regime change against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The death-cult mercenaries for this foreign conspiracy of regime change in Syria have come from all over the world, from some 100 countries, including Western and Arab states, as well as from Russia’s Caucuses.
In many ways, Aleppo represents the last stand for the regime-change forces. When Aleppo finally falls in the coming weeks, it will spell the end of Syria’s torturous conflict which was imposed on the country by the US and its allies for the purpose of regime change under the guise of a “pro-democracy†uprising.
What an indictment that is of Washington’s criminality and that of its rogue state cronies. Some 400,000 people killed over the past five years and nearly half the population of 23 million turned into refugees. The refugee crisis and blowback terrorism that Europe is confronted with are also repercussions from this foreign criminal conspiracy to subvert Syria.
The victory against state-sponsored terrorism on Syria is a tribute to the tenacity and courage of the Syrian people, their government and their army.
© Sputnik/ Alexei Druzhinin
And in that victory Russia has played a formidable, heroic role. President Assad has acknowledged the vital role of Russia’s military intervention in saving his nation from the fate that other nations have succumbed to, including Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – all victims of US-led regime-change machinations.When Russian President Vladimir Putin resolved to send in his military forces to salvage Syria at the end of September 2015, the turnaround was immediate and crucial.
The industrial-scale oil smuggling routes run by the jihadist networks in eastern Syria were smashed by Russian air power. That cut off major financial support to the jihadists which the Turkish state had facilitated. That, in turn, left the terrorist center at Raqqa to wither from isolation.The retaking of ancient Palmyra in the center of Syria with its world-class archaeological heritage was also another momentous victory for the Syrian army and its Russian ally. The holding of a classical music concert by Russian artists among the Romanesque ruins recaptured from terrorists was not merely smart public relations. It spoke eloquently of what the Syrian war was all about.
A conflict between a sovereign nation supported by Russia against barbaric killers mobilized by lawless foreign powers.
The battle now underway for Aleppo is one more – perhaps the final – historic stage in Syria’s struggle against regime-change forces. Russia and President Putin can proudly take pride of place in this historic victory.
No wonder then that Western media would rather ignore what is happening in Syria. For years, they have spun a torrent of lies and fabrications, claiming that “rebels†were fighting for democracy against a “tyrannical regimeâ€.Now as Syrian and Russian forces bear down on these “rebel†remnants the truth is hardly deniable. They are being seen for what they are: a network of terrorist mercenaries deployed by the United States and its allies, who are facing ultimate defeat.
And so in order to avoid the moment of ghastly truth, and their own complicity in state-sponsored terrorism, the Western media by necessity have to pan away from Syria and the battle of Aleppo.
They turn to a new narrative for distraction – the “wonderful†nomination of Hillary Clinton as the first woman to run for the US presidency.
Typical of the inane subject-changing maneuver are glowing quotes from Clinton on how she will lead America and the world in defeating jihadist terrorism.
This is the same Clinton who as US Secretary of State (2009-2013) orchestrated the covert war for regime change in Syria, with the despicable deployment of terrorist mercenaries guided by the American Central Intelligence Agency.That is, the very war that Russia is now helping to finally put an end to, along with extinguishing the US-sponsored “moderate†terror groups. Washington and Clinton in particular may start wars, but evidently it is Russia that finishes them.
Yet, amazingly, listening to Clinton regale her supporters at the Democrat convention this week one cannot but be in awe of the astronomical cognitive dissonance. A warmonger posing as a champion for world peace and law and order?
This breath-taking, absurd deception is only made possible because of the way Western media operate to change the narrative, distort perspectives and obliterate the facts.
But the incontrovertible fact is that Russia and Syria are winning a historic war against Western-backed terrorist aggression. Aleppo is the clarion call for this victory.
The Western media can’t handle that. Instead, they are obliged to try to shift the focus. And to whom do they turn for light relief? Why, one of the culprit architects of the criminal war on Syria – Hillary Clinton – and her promises to defend America from Russia and terrorists.
American politics and media deception – what a freak show.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
worker |
July 31, 2016 |
7:53 pm | Analysis, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, political struggle |
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Mainstream McCarthyism: Greenwald Blasts Media’s Anti-Russian Trump Attacks
© AFP 2016/ MANDEL NGAN
http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160801/1043815965/trump-putin-mccarthyism-media-hillary.html
In a rush to demonize Trump by any means necessary, America’s corporate media outlets have made the world a less safe place, revived one of the most disturbing moments in US history, and completely ignored the fact that the primary election was rigged against Bernie Sanders.
In an interview with Slate Magazine, Glenn Greenwald let a rip on the mainstream media’s coverage of the rise of Donald Trump and feckless attempts to discredit the Republican standard-bearer by associating him with Moscow and flat out accusing him of being a Russian agent, Manchurian candidate, or a Putin puppet.”The US media is essentially 100% united vehemently against Trump and are preventing him from being elected president,” said Greenwald. “I don’t have an actual problem with that because I share the premises on which it is based about why he poses such extreme dangers.”
What concerns Greenwald is the rampant fabrications and false narratives spun against Trump solely in the name of impacting the presidential “horse race” which he views as akin to the death of journalism.
He said that as a journalist he is not “willing to go along with any claim, no matter how fact-free, no matter how irrational no matter how dangerous it could be in order to bring Trump down.”
“So, literally, the lead story in the New York Times today suggests, and other people have similarly suggested it, that Trump was literally putting in a request to Putin for the Russians to cyberattack the FBI, the United States government, or get Hillary Clinton’s emails,” said Greenwald. “That is such unmitigated bulls—. It was an offhand, trolling comment designed to make some kind of snide reference to the need to find Hillary’s emails.”
© REUTERS/ Center for Disease Control
“Nobody who listened to Trump could think that was genuinely a treasonous request for the Russians to go and cyberattack the US government,” continued Greenwald.
Greenwald went further in laying out the case why the attacks against Trump are merely a 21st century derivative of McCarthyism. “Look at the Russia stuff; the history of linking your political opponents to Russia is a really dangerous and ugly one in the US. That’s basically how, for a decade, the right demonized the left, but also liberals. This is the rhetoric that has been resurrected in order to demonize Trump, and I do find it disturbing,” explained Greenwald.
“What has he said about Russia? The platform change that he wanted said that he didn’t think the US should be funding factions in the Ukraine in order to defense themselves against Russia because he didn’t think that we had a vital interest in Russia’s neighborhood… that’s been a standard liberal view for decades,” exclaimed the journalist.
​The narrative of linking Trump to Putin and Russia first took off when, in the wake of the DNC email leaks exposing that Hillary Clinton’s campaign coordinated with the Democratic Party and the mainstream media to rig the 2016 Democratic Primary election against Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook took to the news to say that Russia was behind the leak and it was an attempt by Vladimir Putin to subvert America’s democratic processes.
Perhaps conveniently, with the media equally implicated in the WikiLeaks dump, news outlets have ran with the narrative whole hog with headlines such as “Donald Trump Invites Putin to Invade Melania’s Hometown†that would even give a Cold War era propagandist pause.
Are US Nukes at NATO’s Incirlik Air Base in Turkey Safe?
http://sputniknews.com/military/20160801/1043815343/incirlik-nato-turkey-purge-coup.html
One of the biggest questions in the wake of the July 15 failed coup of the Erdogan regime in Turkey is whether American Hydrogen bombs stored at Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base will remain safe or could they potentially fall in the hands of terrorist organizations.
The Incirlik Air Base, in southeast Turkey, houses NATO’s largest nuclear-weapons storage facility. In the wake of the coup, Turkish officials cut off power to the facility and local authorities denied movement on to or off of the base forcing the troops stationed at Incirlik to rely on backup generators.
© AFP 2016/ ARIS MESSINIS
US Air Force planes stationed there were prohibited from taking off or landing due to the heightened security level in the country and Turkish police rushed in to arrest the base commander, General Bekir Ercan Van, and nine other Turksih officers at Incirlik for allegedly supporting the coup.
In the days that followed, American flights have resumed albeit with significant delays from the base, but the base has become a point of contention for Turkish nationalists with over 5,000 nationalists charging towards the base on Thursday chanting “death to the US” and demanding that the “Yankees go home” or that the Incirlik base be shuttered immediately.
Then on Saturday, over 7,000 armed Turkish security forces joined by heavy vehicles surrounded the Incirlik Air Base restricting any access to or away from the facility. Turkey’s European Affairs Minister said that it was a “general security check” that yielded nothing, Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported that Adana police received a tip of a second coup attempt, and the limited Western media coverage spun a narrative that security forces were there to disperse protesters although video suggests the demonstrators arrived after, not before, the blockade.
Tension around the facility has been followed by unrest throughout the country with mass anti-American and anti-NATO protests and with a massive fire near another major base in Izmir with Turkey’s T24 news reporting that officials suspected “anti-US sabotage.”
The anger towards the United States with a particular focus on the Incirlik Air Base in the recent week is palpable,  but if Turkish officials are worried about the situation unravelling to the point where a loose nuke situation could unfold, they are hardly doing anything to calm the public.
On Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that arch-nemesis Fethullah Gulen was “only a pawn” used by some more powerful mastermind which appears to be a direct reference to the United States in light of other recent comments. Earlier this week, Erdogan suggested that there was a “superior intelligence behind [the coup]” and told the US CENTCOM commander that the US is “revealing yourselves, you are giving yourselves away” by taking a critical stance on the post-coup attempt purge.
© REUTERS/ Alkis Konstantinidis
This has also been in keeping with accusations hurled by the country’s Labor Minister, Prime Minister, a leading pro-Erdogan Islamist newspaper, and most recently an Erdogan loyalist prosecutor who contends that the Fethullah Terrorist Organization (FETO) was supported by the FBI and the CIA.
Although recent security concerns at Incirlik Air Base prompted a major upgrade to the perimeter fence that surrounds the nuclear-weapons storage area, the base is only 60 miles (96km) from the Syrian border and a rash of terrorist incidents led the Pentagon to issue an “ordered departure” of all the family members of US troops at Incirlik who were asked to leave immediately.
© AP Photo/ Lefteris Pitarakis
The base holds anywhere between 50 and 90 B-61 hydrogen bombs each with a yield of 170 kilotons or more than ten times the destructive force of the Hiroshima bomb that killed 140,000 people in 1945 – weapons with the collective destructive capacity to exterminate millions even if improperly used resting at a base that was deemed prior to the failed coup to be too unsafe for US troops’ family members.
Security analysts estimate that within a matter of hours a terrorist with the right training could open up a nuclear weapon to disperse a radioactive cloud effectively converting a warhead into a dirty bomb and within a matter of minutes a prospective terrorist could breach the security perimeter while a well-organized group of militants would likely be successful in an attempt to besiege the facility if Turkish security forces decided against intervening.
worker |
July 30, 2016 |
8:40 pm | Analysis, Palestinian struggle for equality, political struggle |
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https://www.rt.com/usa/354018-hedy-epstein-fbi-file/
The FBI has released files revealing Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein was under government surveillance for her activism work. Epstein, who died in May at the age of 91, caught the FBI’s attention due to her support for Palestinian causes.
The files were released in response to a Freedom of Information request by writer Waqas Mirza.
Documents reveal the FBI was monitoring Epstein’s work with the International Solidarity Movement and the group’s trip to Israel in 2003.
Epstein was born in Germany and lost much of her family to the Holocaust. She was sent to England at the age of 14 as part of the Kindertransport program in 1939. After the war, she worked for the allies as a researcher in the Nuremberg Medical Trials in Germany, before moving to the US in 1948.
She became active in human rights causes, including racial discrimination, housing issues, immigration policy and anti-war movements. Her FBI file details some of her work for housing integration and against discrimination in the 1970s.
Epstein became interested in the Palestinian cause after the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982. She went on to found the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee and ran the Jewish Voice for Peace in St Louis. She traveled to the West Bank many times and dedicated her efforts to ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
She was detained and strip and cavity searched at Tel Aviv’s airport in 2004, which she later described as having left her feeling “very angry and traumatized.â€
Even at the age of 87, Epstein continued to make headlines after she tried to penetrate the Gaza blockade on the Freedom Flotilla, Audacity of Hope.
Epstein was arrested in 2014, at the age of 90, for “failure to disperse†after protesting Missouri Governor Jay Nixon’s decision to use the national guard against Black Lives Matter protestors in Ferguson.
READ MORE: Ferguson: Dozens arrested, reporters detained, assembly rights restricted
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