It’s heart-wrenching when Pakistani children get hurt, no? Or is it only heart-wrenching when Pakistani children get hurt by the Taliban? What of Pakistani children who get hurt as a result of the actions of your military or your CIA? What of the Pakistani children who get hurt because of your country’s involvement here?
The U.S. and Iranian nuclear negotiating teams met for one on one talks for one hour this evening, Iranian and American officials confirmed to Al-Monitor, in an exchange American officials described as “useful.”
In horrific, never-before-seen undercover video footage leaked to PETA, training instructors hired by the military are seen breaking and cutting off the limbs of live goats with tree trimmers, stabbing the animals, and pulling out their internal organs. After PETA filed a complaint about this disturbing video footage, which shows goats moaning and kicking as they are stabbed and cut into (signs that they had not received adequate anesthesia), the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued an official warning to the training provider for violating the federal Animal Welfare Act and Congress called for an investigation.
“It’s across all banks. Our summonses say the banks have broken their contracts, and each summons is looking for €1m apiece in costs and damages. Everybody in the country with a mortgage should be taking a case against their banks.”
This tool has turned into a “machine unto itself,” claims Vali Nasr, who served in the State Department during Obama’s first term and is now dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “It becomes a rote habit,” he says, “operated by a bureaucracy that is always looking to close that last loophole. Pressure becomes the end, not the means.”
New research shows that Alliance Boots, the high street chemist and pharmaceutical giant, has avoided more than £1 billion in tax since it went private six years ago through taking on excessive debts, profit shifting and corporate restructuring. This report, Alliance Boots & The Tax Gap, published by War on Want, Unite the Union and Change 2 Win, exposes the full scale of Boots’ tax avoidance for the first time.
Most people, let alone journalists, would be far too embarrassed to admit they harbor such subservient, obsequious sentiments. It’s one thing to accord some deference or presumption of good will to political officials, but the desire to demonstrate some minimal human dignity, by itself, would preclude most people from publicly confessing that they have willingly sacrificed all of their independent judgment and autonomy to the superior, secret decrees of those who wield the greatest power.
It was announced today that the Red Cross will be distributing its first emergency food parcel programme in the UK since World War II. The charity is gearing up to provide food for 500,000 starving Britons this winter, as the UK government announces the British economy is back on track.
Until the profit motive is removed – until the news is no longer treated as a glossily-packaged product – this ‘Malala Syndrome’, along with the myriad other ills in our media that arise from the same poisoned spring, will continue to confuse and mislead viewers/readers, making it more likely that they will come to false conclusions about the world, thereby greatly harming democracy, which depends on a well-informed populace for its survival.
The last days of empire are carnivals of folly. We are in the midst of our own, plunging forward as our leaders court willful economic and environmental self-destruction. Sumer and Rome went down like this. So did the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Men and women of stunning mediocrity and depravity led the monarchies of Europe and Russia on the eve of World War I. And America has, in its own decline, offered up its share of weaklings, dolts and morons to steer it to destruction.
The real target of the US-led campaign in Syria is the Syrian nation and not merely the government in Damascus. The government could matter less. The US and Israeli objectives in Syria are to crush Syria as a nation-state, even if their own insurgent allies or Syrian National Coalition clients win and form the government in Damascus.
‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’
‘National security is the first duty of government. We will remain a first-rate military power.’
