19 September 2020
In a major escalation of the anti-China campaign ahead of the election, the Trump administration announced on Friday that it was following through on its executive orders of August 6 and banning the social media apps TikTok and WeChat from being downloaded from US app stores on Sunday.
September 19, 2020
Stephen F Cohen, the renowned American scholar on Russia and leading authority on US-Russian relations, has died of lung cancer at the age of 81.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times – this is how Charles Dickens opened his story of regime change in Paris during the French revolution. Also for Alexei Navalny (lead image) and his roommate in Tomsk on the evening of August 19, Maria Pevchikh of London.
September 18, 2020
The Navalny Affair currently roiling relations between Russia and
Germany would have all the elements of a cracking spy picture, if only
the writers could get the story bugs out.
As it stands, we the audience are asked to accept with credulity a plot that makes little sense, and whose third act reveal is yet to be revealed. Whether that’s just part of the mystery or because “there is no there there” remains to be seen.
John Helmer is a journalist, author, broadcaster, former political advisor to government, and principal behind the news website, Dances with Bears. Among Helmer’s many books is the political memoir, ‘The Man Who Knows Too Much About Russia’, and his latest, the two-plus year chronicle of the Skripal case, ‘Skripal in Prison’.
His recent article, ‘GERMANS NOW CLAIM GOD POISONED NAVALNY – THAT’S THE GOD OUT OF THE MACHINE’ presents the disquieting “facts” behind the “official” Navalny narrative.
John Helmer in the first half.And it goes without saying, Canada supports democracy in principle and in fact wherever it takes root. After all it is a democratic nation, one of the World’s oldest, and a famous champion of human rights and the “rule of law”. So, it’s difficult to reconcile Canada supporting countries whose leaders, (and would-be leaders) were not elected but seized power through violence, (or failed to do so, but not for the lack of trying).
Joe Emersberger is a Canada-based writer whose work focuses on media lies, distortion, and confabulation. His articles appear at VenezuelAnalysis, CounterPunch, and The Canary, among other places, and his recent piece, ‘Reuters (Unsurprisingly) Looks Away as Ecuador Tries to Outlaw Opposition Parties’ appears at Fair.org.
Joe Emersberger and disappearing democracy in Latin America in the second half.And; CFUV Radio broadcaster and host of Plant Powered Radio, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour with the Left Coast Events Bulletin of some of the good things to be gotten up to in and around our town in the coming week.
But first, John Helmer and finding a final act for “The Navalny Ultimatum”.
Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Thursday between 11-Noon Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca. He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/
The gloves were off on Tuesday as the US Government explicitly argued that all journalists are liable to prosecution under the Espionage Act (1917) for publishing classified information, citing the Rosen case.
Counsel for the US government also argued that the famous Pentagon Papers supreme court judgement on the New York Times only referred to pre-publication injunction and specifically did not preclude prosecution under the Espionage Act. The US Government even surmised in court that such an Espionage Act prosecution of the New York Times may have been successful.
As I wrote last week, Kevin Zeese died unexpectedly in his sleep, likely from a heart attack, early in the morning on September 6. He had not shown signs of illness and was working until the end.
Many of you know Kevin from Popular Resistance, from his writing and podcast Clearing the FOG. He had a deep knowledge of history and the issues. He often spoke of his time working for Ralph Nader in 2004 when he wrote policy briefs as a “PhD in public policy.” Kevin understood how political power works.
The wildfires burning through the US West Coast, the largest on record in California and poised to become the largest in the history of the United States, have already killed 33 people and threaten to displace hundreds of thousands.
Just one of these fires, the August Complex in California, has consumed more than 875,000 acres. Until yesterday afternoon, the entire city of Portland was on alert for a mass evacuation as local and state officials warned of a “mass fatality event” if the fires reached Oregon’s largest city.
What’s going on regarding Alexey Navalny repeats the great 2018 poisoning by novichok of the Skripals in Britain hoax.
Whatever caused their illness, from which they recovered, had nothing to do with exposure to a deadly nerve agent, Russia falsely blamed for what it had nothing to do with.
When it comes to fabrications in warfare, it was the ancient Greeks who invented the Trojan Horse. They also invented ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός – he has come down to us from the Latin, deus ex machina, meaning the god out of the machine. He’s the culprit or the cause which resolves the inexplicable ending of a story by a device which drops out of the heavens, or rises through a trapdoor on stage.
Aristotle didn’t think much of it because it’s too plainly unbelievable. The deus ex machina, he thought, was the invention of the incompetent for an audience of simpletons.
A small number of very rich men are quite sure they know what is best for the future of the world and have enough wealth and influence to believe they can make it happen. They can be called oligarchs, but the term is inadequate. They are a special category, the shapers of the Global Governance destined to replace bourgeois democracy.
I can name two: one who is famous, notorious even, but very old, and another who is a generation younger, not yet so well known or so rich but probably even more influential.
On Monday Julian Assange was driven to the Old Bailey to continue his fight against extradition to the United States, where the Trump administration has launched the most dangerous attack on press freedom in at least a generation by indicting him for publishing US government documents.
Amid coverage of the proceedings, Assange’s critics have inevitably commented on his appearance, rumours of his behaviour while isolated in the Ecuadorian embassy, and other salacious details.
It’s 19 years today since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on the US mainland, in New York City and Washington, D.C., and I’m shocked to discover that one-third of my life has elapsed since the attacks took place. I was 38 years old when 9/11 happened, and now I’m 57. Even more shocking is the realization that my son, who is 20 now, was just one year old at the time.
The 9/11 attacks on New York City, and prisoners at Guantánamo on the day that the prison opened, exactly four months later, on January 11, 2002.
Attorney Steven Donziger has been under house arrest since August 6 of last year. He is charged with contempt of court for refusing to turn over his cell phone and computer to Chevron as ordered by a federal judge. The order is still being appealed on constitutional grounds, one reason Donziger refused to obey it.
Public prosecutors declined to take on this case, so the judge had a private firm (which had Chevron as a client) act as prosecutors.
A massive blaze has largely destroyed the Moria migrant camp. Located on the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos/Lesvos, the camp was the largest within the European Union. According to social media accounts, the fire broke out some time before midnight Tuesday.
Around 13,000 men, women and children have been left without accommodation, food, and drink. The detainees held there were forced to flee for their lives as multiple fires spread. No fatalities have been reported, but people are suffering from injuries due to smoke exposure.
Let’s be honest about America’s wars and the men (overwhelmingly) and women who have fought them.
Most of the wars that the US has launched or fought in, dating back to at least the War of 1812, were not just or necessary, could have been avoided, and wasted precious lives and national wealth, often while slaughtering the people of weaker nations.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an alliance in name alone. Recent events notwithstanding, the brewing conflict over territorial waters in the Eastern Mediterranean indicates that the military union between mostly Western countries is faltering.
The current Turkish-Greek tension is only one facet of a much larger conflict involving, aside from the two Mediterranean countries, Israel, Egypt, Cyprus, France, Libya, and other Mediterranean and European countries.
This morning we went straight in to the evidence of Clive Stafford Smith, a dual national British/American lawyer licensed to practice in the UK. He had founded Reprieve in 1999 originally to oppose the death penalty, but after 2001 it had branched out into torture, illicit detention and extraordinary rendition cases in relation to the “war on terror”.
Clive Stafford Smith testified that the publication by Wikileaks of the cables had been of great utility to litigation in Pakistan against illegal drone strikes.
A new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project has found that at least 37 million people have been displaced as a result of America’s so-called “war on terror” since 9/11, a conservative estimate of a number that may actually be somewhere between 48 million to 59 million.
That number, “at least 37 million”, happens by pure coincidence to be the exact same number of Americans reported to suffer from food insecurity because their government spends their wealth and resources killing and displacing people overseas.
Welcome back to Gorilla Radio’s continuing efforts, NOT broadcast live from CFUV Radio in the basement of the Student Union Building at the University of Victoria, but emanating live-to-tape via Skype from our home-based … "studios".
Listen. Hear.Shipely's first book, ‘Ottawa and Empire: Canada and the Military Coup in Honduras’ taught us more about ourselves than we hoped to learn, and the same is promised of his second title, ‘Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination.’ His recent article, ‘The stunning misinformation and whitewashing of racism behind Canada’s Heritage Minutes’ currently challenges our childhood indoctrination from the pages of The Canada Files website.
Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Thursday between 11-Noon Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca. He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/
When I first met Julian Assange more than ten years ago, I asked him why he had started WikiLeaks. He replied: "Transparency and accountability are moral issues that must be the essence of public life and journalism."
I had never heard a publisher or an editor invoke morality in this way. Assange believes that journalists are the agents of people, not power: that we, the people, have a right to know about the darkest secrets of those who claim to act in our name.
