Ignoring international aid groups warnings that an attack on the Yemeni city of Hodeida, which is held by Houthi rebels, could exacerbate hunger in an impoverished and war-torn nation already on the brink of famine, Saudi-led U.S.-backed coalition forces continued a sweeping assault on the Red Sea port city Saturday, reportedly seizing control of an airport.

Since the fighting started earlier this week, thousands of Hodeidas 600,000 civilians have evacuated and hundreds of people have been killed. The port city is the main conduit through which about 70 percent of international aid reaches Yemenis, many of whom are battling starvation and outbreaks of infectious diseases such as cholera.

The Norwegian Refugee Councils office in Yemen told Reuters that humanitarian agencies cannot currently access areas south of the city where people are most likely to have been injured, affected, and displaced, leaving us without a clear picture of needs.

The lack of humanitarian assistance, following suspension of aid programs and with limited NGO staff on the ground while a military offensive is ongoing, will have severe consequences on a region already facing restrictions on the import and internal transportation of vital supplies, including medicines, food, and fuel, Frederic Pelat, head of Mdecins Sans Frontires mission in Yemen, warned Thursday. Yemenis living in the northern parts of the country depend on vital supplies that pass through Hodeidas port.

The port of #Hodeida is an essential lifeline for the country: more than 70% of all food, essential medicines and healthcare supplies are brought in through this port. #Yemen@DrTedros pic.twitte...

...

The Saudi embassy in the United States pointed the finger at Doctors Without Borders after the US-backed Saudi coalition bombed the medical humanitarian groups newly constructed cholera treatment center in Yemen.

The Saudi government circulated a misleading fax from a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) employee, to try to absolve itself of responsibility for the airstrike. I contacted MSF for clarification, and the organization said the fax is being misrepresented, and strongly condemned the unacceptable attack on a medical facility.

On June 11, the US-backed Saudi coalition waging war on Yemen bombed a cholera treatment center in the northwestern town of Abs. This medical facility, which had just been built, was operated by MSF, and was clearly marked on the roof with the logos of MSF and the Red Crescent.

The Saudi coalition has repeatedly targeted civilian infrastructure in its three-year war on Yemen, with more than one-third of its thousands of air raids hitting civilian sites. This has devastated the health system in the poorest country in the Middle East, unleashing the worst humanitarian catastrophe on Earth and the largest cholera outbreak in recorded history, with more than 1 million cases of the easily preventable disease in 2017 alone.

Early on June 13, the embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Washington, DC tweeted a photo of a fax from MSFs administrator of communication and liaison in Djibouti. This document is dated June 11, and the Saudi embassy claimed it showed MSF clearly admit that the unfortunate facility incident was due to their failure to update their coordinates per standard procedures.

MSF told me this claim is false. The organization clarified that it gave the Saudi coalition the GPS coordinates for its cholera treatment center at least 12 times in writing, and the coalition acknowledged receipt of these coordinates in writing at least nine times.

Sen.@ChrisMurphyCT attached a copy and an unofficial translation of a facsimile from MSF in which they clearly admit that the unfortunate facility incident was due to their failure to update...

The persecution of Julian Assange must end. Or it will end in tragedy.

The Australian government and prime minister Malcolm Turnbull have a historic opportunity to decide which it will be.

They can remain silent, for which history will be unforgiving. Or they can act in the interests of justice and humanity and bring this remarkable Australian citizen home.

Assange does not ask for special treatment. The government has clear diplomatic and moral obligations to protect Australian citizens abroad from gross injustice: in Julians case, from a gross miscarriage of justice and the extreme dangers that await him should he walk out of the Ecuadorean embassy in London unprotected.

We know from the Chelsea Manning case what he can expect if a U.S. extradition warrant is successful a United Nations Special Rapporteur called it torture.

I know Julian Assange well; I regard him as a close friend, a person of extraordinary resilience and courage. I have watched a tsunami of lies and smears engulf him, endlessly, vindictively, perfidiously; and I know why they smear him.

In 2008, a plan to destroy both WikiLeaks and Assange was laid out in a top secret document dated March 8, 2008. The authors were the Cyber Counter-intelligence Assessments Branch of the U.S. Defence Department. They described in detail how important it was to destroy the feeling of trust that is WikiLeaks center of gravity.

This would be achieved, they wrote, with threats of exposure [and] criminal prosecution and an unrelenting assault on his reputation. The aim was to silence and criminalize WikiLeaks and its editor and publisher. It was as if they planned a war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech.

Their main weapon would be a personal smear. Their shock troops would be enlisted in the media those who are meant to keep the record straight and tell us the truth.

The irony is that no one told these journalists what to do. I call them Vichy journalists after the Vichy government that served and enabled the German occupation of wartime France.

Last October, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Sarah Ferguson interviewed Hillary Clinton, over whom she fawned as the icon for your generation.

This was the same Clinton who threatened to obliterate totally Iran and, who, as U.S. Secretary of State in 2011, was one of the instigators of the invasion and destruction of Libya as...

For the first time, light from plant growth may let humans see almost at a glance how greedily the planets vegetation sucks carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

US-based researchers have confirmed that they can detect the same glow invisible to the human eye from trees, grasslands, crops, mangroves, marches and desert plants as the green things put chlorophyll to work and photosynthesise leaves, flowers, fruits and roots from atmospheric carbon.

The pay-off is simple: an easier and potentially more accurate way of calculating the global carbon budget and assessing the climate cost of human exploitation of fossil fuels.

But the same information will help biologists and geoscientists advance what is sometimes called earth system science: how carbon-based lifeforms make their living from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide in a continuous trafficking that has fuelled 3bn years of evolution.

And at the heart of the study is a new realisation that images from an orbiting satellite deliver better information in a reliable fashion.

Researchers have exploited data from orbiting earth observation satellites to measure the diminishing thickness of the polar ice caps and their dwindling extent, as human-induced global warming warms the oceans and raises the sea levels.

They have helped measure the response of different kinds of forest to global warming, and changes to ocean chemistry as ever greater levels of greenhouse gas enter the atmosphere, as humans burn ever more fossil fuels.

But one satellite, launched specifically to answer questions about the traffic between living things and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, has delivered information with even greater precision that anyone expected.

Researchers from the University of New Hampshire report in the journal Global Change Biology that years of observation of solar-induced fluorescence a glow from plants that no human could expect to see, but an instrument can detect have confirmed that there is a direct relationship between gross primary productivity and the amount of fluorescence registered by the eye in the sky.

No exceptions...

Source: The Free Thought Project | by John Vibes

While the annoying cultural cliche suggests that our years in school should be the best times of our lives, for many of us it is actually a traumatizing experience that has lifelong consequences for our mental health. After graduation, many of us are left to work through issues such as anxiety, depression, low-self esteem, dependence on authority, need for external validation and a long list of mental health problems that can lead to drug and alcohol abuse, antisocial behavior, or worse.

Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for people over the age of 15, and the third-leading cause for those over 10. According to statistics from the CDC, over the past 10 years, the suicide rate for White children and teens between the ages of 10 and 17 was up 70 percent, and up 77 percent among African-American children. Since mental health is such a serious problem among teens, it is time to start examining the place where they spend the vast majority of their time.

Peter Gray of Psychology Today and The Foundation for Economic Education has pointed out that suicide rates among teens actually increase during the school year, citing numerous studies.

During extensive research on the subject, Gray found this correlation in data that was recorded of children's emergency psychiatric visits at Connecticut Children's Mental Center in Hartford. The data shows an obvious decline in teenage psychiatric visits during the summer months, which is somewhat of a statistical anomaly considering the fact that students have more time to themselves during the summer, and emergency visits, in general, rise drastically during the summer, according to the CDC.
...

Source: Covert Geopolitics

Despite tremendous hardship which the Venezuelan people are having to face, despite the sanctions and intimidation from abroad, President Nicols Maduro has won a second six-year term.

Two weeks ago, at the Venezuelan embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where I addressed several leaders of East African left-wing opposition, an acting Charge d' Affaires, Jose Avila Torres, declared: "People of Venezuela are now facing similar situation as the Syrian people."

True. Both nations, Venezuela and Syria, are separated by a tremendous geographical distance, but they are united by the same fate, same determination and courage.

During the Spanish Civil War, Czech anti-fascist fighters, volunteers in the International Brigades, used to say: "In Madrid we are fighting for Prague". Madrid fell to Franco's fascists in October 1939. Prague had been occupied by German troops several months earlier, in March 1939. It was the blindness and cowardice of the European leaders, as well as the support which the murderous fascist hordes received from populations of all corners of the continent, which led to one of the greatest tragedies in modern history a tragedy which only ended on May 9, 1945, when the Soviet troops liberated Prague, defeating Nazi Germany and de facto saving the world.

More than 70 years later, the world is facing another calamity. The West, mentally unfit to peacefully end its several centuries long murderous reign over the planet a reign that has already taken several hundreds of millions of human lives is flexing its muscle and madly snapping in all directions, provoking, antagonizing and even directly attacking countries as far apart as North Korea (DPRK), China, Iran, Russia, Syria and Venezuela.

What is happening now is not called fascism or Nazism, but it clearly is precisely that, as the barbaric rule is based on a profound spite for non-Western human lives, on fanatical right-wing dogmas which are stinking of exceptionalism, and on the unbridled desire to control the world.

...

http://strangesounds.org/2018/05/after-kenya-now-uganda-giant-cracks-destroy-over-300-houses-and-prompt-evacuation-of-dozens-of-residents-in-uganda-in-the-east-african-rift-videos-and-pictures.html

This 2011 video is called Primates- What is a Primate?

From the German Primate Center:

Primates in peril

June 17, 2018

Primates are fascinating. They are intelligent, live in complex societies and are a vital part of the ecosystem. Lemurs, lorises, galagos, tarsiers, monkeys and apes are our closest biological relatives and just like them, humans are also primates. However, while the human population spread to all corners of the earth, many of our closest relatives are under serious threat. An international team of leading primate researchers, including Christian Roos of the German Primate Center (DPZ) Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, has analyzed and evaluated the situation of many endangered non-human primate species in Brazil, Madagascar, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in a review article published today. In their study, the researchers investigated the influence of human activities on wild primate populations.

Primates live in tropical and subtropical areas and are mainly found in regions of Africa, South America, Madag...

Much has been written about the unchecked influx of migrants into Europe recently. As the EU promotes the warm, fuzzy, "inclusive" policies that are overwhelming countries with immigrants, some of those countries are bluntly starting to say, "no more." At the same time, other countries seem to be quietly preparing for...something... without being quite so forthcoming about the event for which they are readying themselves. Millions of refugees and asylum seekers, primarily from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Somalia are flowing into Europe, largely unchecked. This is because of a welcoming "open door" policy promoted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel back in 2015. Despite the backlash from Europeans, Merkel says she has "no regrets." But some overwhelmed countries have decided that enough is enough. They cite the refugees' refusal to assimilate, increasing crime statistics (particularly against women), and no-go zones in which the migrants have banded together and created areas in which Europeans are not welcome. The European Union is so displeased about this that they've taken 3 of their member countries to court for refusing to "share the burden of hosting migrants." I don't have a crystal ball, but I wonder if we could see this disagreement becoming a catalyst for the dissolution of the European Union.

http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2018/06/17/565221/Yemen-Saudi-Hudaydah-UAE

Green olivine gemstones are falling from the sky in Hawaii as the erupting Kilauea vent is now send gemstones up 12,000 feet with the ash and when it comes down, you can find a bowl full if you look for 30 minutes. A ferocious line of wind and waterspouts in china dropped octopus, shrimp, starfish from the sky miles inland. Kilimanjaro glacier grows after massive record breaking rain season in Eastern Africa. Sources

Europe, whether you think of it as the EU or as a collection of sovereign states, faces the most massive demographic challenge in its long history. On the one hand, the population of native Europeans (white, post-Christian) is declining, most obviously in Germany, Italy and Spain. On the other, millions of would-be immigrants from Africa and the Middle East are knocking at the door, determined to get in. They may die in the attempt. The water around their sunken boats may turn the Mediterranean red with blood. But they will not stop coming. Torn between their instinct for self-preservation and their need for cheap labour, the peoples of Europe have formed into two camps. The first, small, but socially liberal, insists that all those who wish to come here should be welcomed and then woven into the rotting fabric of our society. The second, much larger and increasingly angry, is rising up, demanding that the shutters be brought down and the drawbridges raised. Governments, as ever, are resolutely two-faced on the issue. They don't want to be seen as aloof or uncaring, or racist. But they can also see what is going on and what their voters think about it. Having no solution to offer, they prefer to believe that other countries, preferably with borders far removed from their own, should bear the brunt of the burden.

For decades, the American people have been repeatedly told by their government and corporate-run media that acts of war ordered by their president have been largely motivated by the need to counter acts of aggression or oppression by "evil dictators." We were told we had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator. We had to bomb Libya because Muammar Gaddafi was an evil dictator, bent on unleashing a "bloodbath" on his own people. Today, of course, we are told that we should support insurgents in Syria because Bashar al-Assad is an evil dictator, and we must repeatedly rattle our sabers at North Korea's Kim Jong-un and Russia's Vladimir Putin because they, too, are evil dictators. This is part of the larger, usually unquestioned mainstream corporate media narrative that the US leads the "Western democracies" in a global struggle to combat terrorism and totalitarianism and promote democracy. I set out to answer a simple question: Is it true? Does the US government actually oppose dictatorships and champion democracy around the world, as we are repeatedly told?

Residents of Damboa in Borno - the Nigerian state hardest hit by the Boko Haraam insurgency - reported that 31 people were killed in blasts on Saturday evening.

VALENCIA, SpainShips in the Aquarius aid convoy docked Sunday at the Spanish port of Valencia, ending a weeklong ordeal for hundreds of people who were rescued from the Mediterranean Sea only to become pawns in Europes fight over immigration.

The Italian coast guard vessel Dattilo was the first of the three boats bearing the 630 migrants to touch land just before 7 a.m. Sunday. The 270 migrants on board soon began to disembark after medical staff had made a preliminary inspection.

The rescue ship Aquarius came in four hours later with another 106 migrants. Aid workers awaiting their arrival clapped and cheered as the first migrants walked down the gangway. Another Italian navy ship, the Orione, came in shortly after 1 p.m.

The Aquarius, operated by the aid groups SOS Mediterranee Sea and Doctors Without Borders, was stuck off the coast of Sicily on June 9 when Italys new populist government refused it permission to dock and demanded that Malta do so. Malta also refused.

After days of bickering and food and water running low on the ship, Spain stepped in and granted the rescue boat entry. The 1,500-kilometer (930-mile) journey across the Mediterranean from Sicily to Valencia took nearly a week.

David Noguera, the head of Doctors Without Borders in Spain, said he was glad Spain allowed the migrants in but hes worried that more European nations will close their ports to those rescued at sea in the future.

I have mixed feelings, Noguera told The Associated Press as the first boat arrived. I am happy that the journey (for the Aquarius migrants) is over a journey that was too long and I am worried for the situation in the Mediterranean and the closing of European ports.

The migrants were met by emergency workers, health officials, Red Cross volunteers and psychologists at the citys marina. Each were assigned to a translator and authorities worked to determine their identities before they were sent to welcome centers. The first migrant was a 29-year-old man from South Sudan.

Valencia emergency official Jorge Suarez said some of the migrants were in a state of shock.

They are very shaken, Suarez said. Put yourself in their position, you get off a ship and the first people who greet you are wearing masks.

He said an examination of the 130 migrants from the Dattilo did not reveal any serious health problems but many passengers showed signs of exposure to high temperatures at sea.

Spanish authorities are examining the migrants on a case-by-case basis to see who may qualify for asylum.

Due to their ordeal, the migrants from the Aquarius have been granted special authorization to remain in Spain for 45 days before they must begin resolving their legal situation....

Ignoring international aid groups warnings that an attack on the Yemeni city of Hodeida, which is held by Houthi rebels, could exacerbate hunger in an impoverished and war-torn nation already on the brink of famine, Saudi-led U.S.-backed coalition forces continued a sweeping assault on the Red Sea port city Saturday, reportedly seizing control of an airport.

Since the fighting started earlier this week, thousands of Hodeidas 600,000 civilians have evacuated and hundreds of people have been killed. The port city is the main conduit through which about 70 percent of international aid reaches Yemenis, many of whom are battling starvation and outbreaks of infectious diseases such as cholera.

The Norwegian Refugee Councils office in Yemen told Reuters that humanitarian agencies cannot currently access areas south of the city where people are most likely to have been injured, affected, and displaced, leaving us without a clear picture of needs.

The lack of humanitarian assistance, following suspension of aid programs and with limited NGO staff on the ground while a military offensive is ongoing, will have severe consequences on a region already facing restrictions on the import and internal transportation of vital supplies, including medicines, food, and fuel, Frederic Pelat, head of Mdecins Sans Frontires mission in Yemen, warned Thursday. Yemenis living in the northern parts of the country depend on vital supplies that pass through Hodeidas port.

With the intensification of fighting around #Hodeida, I am deeply concerned about the impact it will have on the lives, health and welfare of the 1.6 million people living in the city and its environs, and on the people of #Yemen more broadly- @DrTedr......

The complicity of Western governments in the ocean of suffering being wrought in Yemen exposes them as agents of Saudi brutality. After three years of relentless conflict, it has been estimated that out of a population of 27.4 million, 22.2 million people in Yemen are in need of humanitarian assistance, 17 million are food insecure, 14.8 million lack basic healthcare, 4.5 million children are suffering malnourishment, while 2.9 million people are internally displaced. As for dead and injured, the toll stands at almost 10,000 and 50,000 respectively. As a result of the conflict, the country is also facing the "largest documented cholera epidemic of modern times." And this epidemic can only have been intensified by the Saudi bombing of a cholera treatment center in the west of the country, causing the French NGO Mdecins Sans Frontires to halt their work at the facility.

French police are abusing and illegally detaining migrant children who attempt to cross the border from Italy, UK-based humanitarian group Oxfam said. Many intercepted minors have even been left unable to contact their families. Some 16,500 refugees and migrants are stuck near the small Italian town of Ventimiglia, 7km from the French border, Oxfam's new report, 'Nowhere but out,' calculates. One quarter of these people are children, mostly from Sudan, Eritrea and Afghanistan. The majority of these minors are between 15 and 17, but some are much younger, the group claims. Comment: This is tricky since it has been shown time and again that some migrants claim to be much younger than they really are. Since French authorities tightened border controls with Italy back in 2015, it has been hard for asylum seekers to enter the country. Hundreds of them are forced to "sleep rough under a [motorway] flyover" with no access to drinkable water, shelter or heating on the French-Italian border.

Source: Humans Are Free | by Julie Alexander

People are concerned that the world would dissolve into anarchy and chaos. People would become angry and violent and go on the rampage, once they find out they have been controlled and manipulated and used as slaves to the system for so long.

Once they find out about Agenda 21, the depopulation agenda. How we have been subjected to toxic poisons in our food by the use of GMOs, how we have been sprayed with toxic chemicals through geo-engineering and how fluoride has been added to our water and can cause dementia and how vaccinations are causing autism and have also been used as sterilization programmes amongst other things and how 5G can cause DNA damage, infertility and also impairs cardiovascular functions.

All of the above also reduce our immune systems and can increase our risk of cancer.

Once they find out about "Secret Space Programmes" and the technology that has been hidden from us for decades. How...

By Amanda Froelich Truth Theory

There is no denying that hardship, which is an inevitability of life, propels change. Oftentimes, that change is necessary. Perhaps it is the loss of a loved one, a sudden career change, or a chronic sickness. While it may, at first, perceived to be bad, the development can also be a blessing. This was the case for UFC fighter Justin Wren, who overcame depression to change the lives of hundreds of pygmy people in the Congo.

Wren began his career as an all-American champion in wrestling. Later, he started entering local fights to stay in shape while taking college courses. Eventually, this led to a successful MMA career. At one point, his professional record was 10-1 and he was picked to be on The Ultimate Fighter. It seemed as if he was on top of the world. But, the truth of it was he was battling depression and was addicted to painkillers.

I was a drug addictI was diagnosed with clinical depression and my life just sucked for a long time even though on the outside things were going great. In that time, I had become a national champion in wrestling a couple times and started fighting professionally, and the drug addiction and depression just got worse every time after I would fight, Wren told InnoTechToday.

Wren continued to fight but his personal life began to fall apart. When he wasnt battling thoughts of suicide, he was numbing himself in drug dens. Fortunately, his low point led him to religion. Finding purpose helped him get sober, and thats when the fight of his life really began. And so my life really changed I could skate over it, but, God help me, I started wanting to do something bigger with my life, said Wren.

The 63 fighter turned his life around. Hoping to discern his p...

Research from the University of Colorado Boulder recently published in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity recently proposed a vaccine against depression, containing a bacteria first identified in the African country of Uganda called Mycobacterium vaccae.

Image credit: trekearth

Mycobacterium vaccae was first discovered in Uganda, in the 1990s near the shores of Lake Kyoga. It belongs to the very same genus of bacteria that causes tuberculosis, with the genus originally identified in Austria.

The articles promoting this vaccine against depression are quite convincing to even the people who favor naturopathy, because it is branded as a probiotic solution to depression.

Recently, researchers have been claiming that brain inflammation could be identified as a cause of depression. Its difficult to debate the legitimacy of this theory. Since inflammation is generally the root of many medical problems, it sounds probable that inflammation could be a factor in depression. In any case, this is what they are saying about the vaccine against depression.

Researchers in this study injected a heat-killed preparation of the bacterium into rats. According to New Atlas, An immunization pattern was administered, with three injections across three weeks.

Eight days after the last dose of the bacteria, the rats had increased levels of an anti-inflammatory protein known as interleukin-4 in the hippocampus region of their brains.

Donald Trump allegedly complained to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that after the 2015 nuclear deal, Iranians think they can do anything they want. Presumably Trump was referring to Irans geopolitical reach in the Middle East, where it had gathered up allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

It is likely that Trumps violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the deal signed between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, was intended to set the stage for a push to contain Iran.

The push against Iran would involve again subjecting it to severe economic sanctions, in hopes of bankrupting it and depriving it of the means with which to continue to play a role in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Boycotts on oil states are not usually effective, since they can usually find a way to sell their oil lucratively nevertheless and use the proceeds to cushion the countrys elect.

One corner of the attempt at rollback involves Iraq. When a reconstruction conference took place last February in Kuwait, the Trump administration refused to make any contribution at all to rebuilding the country that the U.S. destroyed. At the same time, the U.S. encouraged Iraq to take aid from Saudi Arabia as a quid pro quo for moving away from Iran.

The continued tone-deafness in Washington about Middle East politics, after all these years of being deeply immersed in it, is baffling. The Shiite majority in Iraq isnt necessarily opposed to better relations with Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. People are more pragmatic than the clash of civilizations or Sunni-Shiite conflict theses might lead one to expect.

But that the Shiite-majority government of Iraq would turn its back on Iran in favor of an alignment with Saudi Arabia (which does not like Shiites very much) is a daft proposition.

Another sign of Iran Derangement Syndrome in Washington was the unrealistic hopes expressed by right-wing pundits that the Iraqi parliamentary election would signal a turn of Iraq away from Iran. The biggest vote-getters were followers of the hard line Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who had quixotically allied with the small Communist movement.

Al-Sadr is known for resenting Iranian domination of Iraqi Shiism. His father, an Iraqi Arab, had been a contender for the position of chief Iraqi Shiite authority or clerical Exemplar in Najaf before he was assassinated by the Saddam Hussein regime in 1998. His fathers rival, who rose to the top, is Ali Sistani, from a town near Mashhad in eastern Iran, who came to Iraq in 1952. Not only is Sistani the leading religious authority for Iraqi Shiites but Irans clerical Leader, Ali Khamenei, also has influence.

Al-Sadr, however, has...

A group of between a dozen and twenty asylum seekers armed with various weapons launched an attack on police officers attempting to move a 20-year-old Liberian to another facility. The incident took place at an asylum shelter in the city of Gttingen in Lower Saxony earlier this week when officers attempted to remove the 20-year-old and he refused to co-operate, Die Welt reports. According to a spokesman for the city government, the asylum seeker had been causing trouble among other residents of the shelter including intimidating others and disturbing them by making a lot of noise.

At a graduation ceremony for the US Naval War College (barf), US Secretary of Defense James Mattis asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin "aims to diminish the appeal of the western democratic model and attempts to undermine America's moral authority," and that "his actions are designed not to challenge our arms at this point but to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals." This would be the same James Mattis who's been overseeing the war crimes committed by America's armed forces during their illegal occupation of Syria. This would be the same United States of America that was born of the genocide of indigenous tribes and the labor of African slaves, which slaughtered millions in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Libya and Syria for no legitimate reason, which is partnered with Ukrainian Nazis, jihadist factions in Syria and Iranian terror cultists, which supports 73 percent of the world's dictators, which interferes constantly in the electoral processes of other countries as a matter of policy, which stages coups around the world, which has encircled the globe with military bases, whose FBI still targets black civil rights activists for persecution to this very day, which routinely enters into undeclared wars of aggression against noncompliant governments to advance plutocratic interests, which remains the only country ever to use nuclear weapons on human beings after doing so completely needlessly in Japan, and which is functionally a corporatist oligarchy with no meaningful "democratic model" in place at all.

In a 5-4 decision released June 11, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Ohio law that provides for the removal of infrequent voters from the states election rolls.

On the surface, the courts majority opinion in Husted v. A. Phillip Randolph Institute is a highly technical analysis of whether Ohios so-called Supplemental Process law runs afoul of the federal National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002. The courts decision, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by the courts other Republican appointees, concluded that it did not.

According to Alito, the Ohio law, which dates back to 1994 but in recent years has been more strictly enforced, is simply meant to keep the States voting lists up to date by removing the names of those who have moved out of the district where they are registered.

Heres how the Supplemental Process works: Voters who have failed to cast a ballot for two consecutive years (the equivalent of one federal election cycle) are mailed a pre-addressed, postage prepaid card asking them to verify that they still reside at the same address. Those who do not return the card and fail to vote in any election for four more years are presumed to have moved and are removed from the rolls.

As Alito and the courts Republican majority view voting rights, there is no textual inconsistency between the Ohio law and the right to vote, as protected by various federal statutes and the Constitution. All that a resident need do to avoid disenfranchisement is return the postcard sent by the state or vote within an overall six-year period.

Alitos reasoning seems at first clear enough, and on its face apolitical. Justice Stephen Breyers dissenting opinion, joined by the courts four Democratic appointees, is based largely on differing statutory interpretations.

But, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in a separate dissent, Alitos majority opinion is in reality an exercise of disenfranchisement that entirely ignores the history of voter suppression in America and will disproportionately affect minority, homeless, low-income, and disabled voterswho, not coincidentally, tend to vote Democratic.

Our democracy rests on the ability of all individuals, regardless of race, income, or status, to exercise their right to vote, Sotomayor wrote, stressing that while most states have a variety of processes in place to maintain the accuracy of their voting lists, only Ohio presently triggers voting-roll purges based solely on an individuals failure to vote in a single election cycle.

As one instance of the Supplemental Process racially disproportionate impact, Sotomayor cited figures compiled by the NAACP...

This story was originally published by Undark and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.  In January, I stood in a ditch in the middle of nowhere in South Africa, and the summer sun beat down as I stared at a heap of grape soda-colored rocks. Bob Gastaldo, the paleontologist whose research team I had been following []

A dream team' of scientists scaled Mount Lico and found a wealth of new speciesStanding in a pit in the red soil of a mountaintop forest in northern Mozambique, Dr Simon Willcock was dirty but very excited. Undisturbed forest is incredibly rare, he said. That is why we scaled a 125-metre-tall cliff with a pickaxe. Willcock, from Bangor University in Wales, knew of no other rainforest in Africa that scientists can confidently say has not been disturbed by humans. It's a [...]

For three years, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have conducted a murderous campaign to reinstall a pliable regime in the desperately poor country of Yemen. This campaign is based on a lie intended to gain American support: that the two authoritarian monarchies are responding to Iranian aggression. Now the UAE is preparing a military offensive that could split Yemen apart and create mass starvation.

French newspaper Le Figaro is quoting unnamed French military sources as saying that French special forces have been deployed to Yemen. The troops are said to be present with Emirati troops on the ground. They did not specify where in Yemen. Frances Defense Ministry is not commenting specifically on the special forces report, but did deny that any French troops are present in Hodeidah port. They also insisted that the French military is not part of the Saudi-led coalition attacking Yemen.

Kim Kardashian West, coming off her recent success in getting President Trump to pardon a grandmother serving a life sentence, has taken to Twitter to ask California Gov. Jerry Brown to give San Quentin death row inmate Kevin Cooper the DNA tests he has been denied, tests that could prove his innocence.

Cooper has been imprisoned for 34 years for a savage crime he insists he did not committhe 1983 slaughter of chiropractors and Arabian horse breeders Doug and Peggy Ryen, both 47, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica, and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes. Christopher was a friend of Joshua Ryen, 8 years old at the time, who was attacked and left for dead.

Though Cooper has lost all his appeals, in 2009 five judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals asserted he was framed by the San Bernardino, Calif., Sheriffs Department. The judges were joined by six colleagues in asking for a hearing to prove his innocence. Coopers attorneys continue to gather new evidence that he did not commit the crime.

What separates execution and exoneration in the case are modern DNA tests that Coopers attorneys claim could prove he was framed. They are being fought by the San Bernardino district attorneys office and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who say enough DNA testing has been done and no more is needed. The tests could be ordered by the governor, but he has made no public move to do so. Brown has been sitting on Coopers clemency petition, which details numerous examples of law enforcement misconduct in the case, for almost two and a half years.

Following a recent New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof about Cooper, California Sens. Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein urged Brown to let the tests proceed. The tests could clear Cooper or confirm his guilt and could possibly identify the actual killers, initially described by the sole eyewitness, Joshua Ryen, as three white men. Cooper is African-American.

Coopers attorneys have focused attention for years on a white man who was implicated in the murders by his girlfriend, who called deputies after he came home the night of the murders wearing bloody coveralls, which she handed over to a deputy sheriff. She told the deputy her boyfriend was a convicted murderer of a 17-year-old girl and he had been out of prison less than a year. She also reported that the tan T-shirt he was wearing the day of the murders exactly matched a bloody shirt that was found and his missing hatchet resembled the bloody hatchet found near the crime scene.

No one from the sheriffs homicide division ever called her, as she requested, or picked up the covera...

Instead of corporate media basically ignoring the UN report, there should be screaming headlines. Philip Alston is the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. He traveled to the United States last December to some of our most destitute communities such as Skid Row in LA, poor African American areas in the Alabama, impoverished coal communities in West Virginia and to Puerto Rico. He issued his report on June 1, 2018. It should be front page news.

Three US senators have demanded that the Pentagon immediately reveals the full extent of US military support to the Saudi-led coalition that just launched an attack on Yemens key port city of Hudaydah, which has [...]

The post Senators Call On Pentagon To Fully Disclose Its Role In Saudi-Led War In Yemen appeared first on Your News Wire.

French special forces are reportedly present on the ground in Yemen supporting the Saudi-led military operation in the port city of Hudaydah A report in Le Figaro newspaper on Saturday cited two military sources but provided no further [...]

The post French Forces On The Ground In Yemen appeared first on Your News Wire.

A teacher in Switzerland has made headlines after wearing a full face veil and reading passages from the Koran out loud during a lesson on Islam, local media reports. The stunt was apparently aimed at promoting diversity. "She [the teacher] came into class completely veiled without warning and started reading lines from [the] Koran out loud", students from a vocational school in the Swiss capital told local 20 Minuten newspaper. Though nobody is said to have left the class, the extraordinary move raised a few eyebrows. Some of the students claimed later that "it did not belong in a classroom," the news outlet reports. The video released by 20 Minuten claims to show the teacher in question wearing a niqab - a Muslim face-covering veil - reading passages from the Koran. Some of the words are bleeped out. The teacher, however, is not a Muslim and reportedly bought the niqab during a vacation in Egypt.

Earlier this week while most of the world was transfixed on the World Cup, the Trump/Kim handshake, or a multitude of other sundry events, Julius Malema, aka the Hitler of South Africa, was busy telling white people in his country that hes not going wage genocide against them. Yet. In an interview with TRT World News published this []

Three US senators have called on the Pentagon to immediately reveal the extent of US military support to the Saudi-led Arab coalition that launched an attack on Hodeidah, a key port city and last humanitarian lifeline in Yemen. "We call on you to immediately disclose the full extent of the US military role in the Saudi-led war against Yemen's Houthis, including the use of special operations forces; disclose any role that the Pentagon is currently performing, has been asked to perform, or is considering performing regarding an attack on the port of Hodeida," says the letter sent to Defense Secretary James Mattis on Friday, and signed by Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) Sanders, Lee and Murphy also asked Mattis to "issue a public declaration opposing this impending assault," and restate the Trump administration's position that Saudi Arabia and other participants in the conflict "should accept an immediate ceasefire and move toward a political settlement."

Alongside their throttlehold over which reporters can visit what parts of Yemen, and thus what story they can tell, Saudi and Emirati investments in public relations, lobbying, think-tanks, and political consultants are shaping the narrative about their war there. Headline writers, pundits, Wikipedia, news correspondents, and even some so-called experts frame the asymmetric conflict as a proxy war. Sunnis nations led by Saudi Arabia are battling Shi`a Iran and its regional proxies, the story goes; the worlds worst man-made humanitarian disaster thus appears as un-named collateral damage.

French special forces are present on the ground in Yemen with forces from the United Arab Emirates, French newspaper Le Figaro reported on Saturday, citing two military sources.

The judge appointed by Barack Obama who put Paul Manafort in jail this week previously cleared Hillary Clinton of responsibility for the deaths of four American servicemen in Benghazi, Libya in 2012. Manafort was put in jail for allegedly engaging in witness tampering, but most people see the jailing as a fraud to divert public attention away from the IG report that slammed James Comey and bolstered President Donald Trumps arguments against the corrupt Deep State.

A Swedish call at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire in the Yemen port of Hodeidah was derailed during a closed session Friday. The US and Britain both expressed opposition to the measure, designed to prevent Saudi-led forces attacking a port responsible for feeding 8.4 million civilians. Britain insisted on the meeting being a closed session, meaning specific comments during the hearing, and the reiteration from UN officials of the humanitarian crisis threatening to kill millions, would not be done for the public to see.