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Assange hacking charge limits free speech defense: legal experts

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is seen as he leaves a police station in London
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is seen as he leaves a police station in London, Britain April 11, 2019. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls

April 11, 2019

By Jan Wolfe and Nathan Layne

(Reuters) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has portrayed himself as a champion of a free press, but the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision to charge him with conspiring to hack government computers limits his ability to mount a vigorous free speech defense, some legal experts said.

The charge unsealed in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia on Thursday said that in 2010 Assange agreed to help Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst then known as Bradley Manning, crack a password to a U.S. government network.

At the time, Manning had already given WikiLeaks classified information about U.S. war activities in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Guantanamo Bay detainees, prosecutors said. The scheme would have allowed Manning to log in to the network anonymously and avoid detection, the indictment said.

Robert Chesney, a professor of national security law at the University of Texas, said that the case did not implicate free speech rights because it turned on the idea that Assange tried to hack a password.

“The charge is extremely narrow and that’s by design,” said Chesney.

U.S. prosecutors could still add charges against Assange, legal experts said.

The indictment, which was made secretly last year and released on Thursday, does not charge Assange for publishing classified material. WikiLeaks released the classified war information on its website in 2010 and 2011.

There is no mention in the indictment of WikiLeaks’ publication of emails damaging to 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton that U.S. intelligence agencies have said were stolen by Russia in a bid to boost Republican Donald Trump’s candidacy.

British police carried Assange out of Ecuador’s embassy in London on Thursday after his seven-year asylum there was revoked. The U.S. Department of Justice said Assange, 47, was arrested under an extradition treaty between the United States and Britain.

Barry Pollack, a lawyer for Assange, suggested in a statement that the indictment could chill press freedom, saying journalists should be “deeply troubled” by the “unprecedented” charges.

“While the indictment against Julian Assange disclosed today charges a conspiracy to commit computer crimes, the factual allegations against Mr. Assange boil down to encouraging a source to provide him information and taking efforts to protect the identity of that source,” Pollack said. 

Assange has long said WikiLeaks is a journalistic endeavor protected by freedom of the press laws. In 2017, a U.K. tribunal recognized WikiLeaks as a “media organization.”

The Justice Department debated for years whether prosecuting Assange and WikiLeaks would encroach on First Amendment protections, according to former officials.

The department under President Barack Obama made a conscious decision not to bring charges against Assange on the grounds that WikiLeaks’ activities were too similar to what conventional journalists do, the former officials said.

The charge against Assange of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion minimized concerns that freedom of the press would be undermined and made it more difficult for him to argue that his free speech rights were at stake, some legal experts said.

“A lot of the broader legal and policy implications have been alleviated by how narrowly tailored this indictment is,” said Bradley Moss, a national security lawyer in Washington who represents whistleblowers and journalists.

Free speech advocates had worried that Assange would be prosecuted for publishing classified information he obtained from Manning in violation of the Espionage Act.

It is not unusual for journalists to publish classified material they obtain from sources and such a prosecution against Assange would have raised concerns that reporters could face similar charges, according to Steve Vladeck, a professor of national security law at the University of Texas.

Assange is likely to argue that the conspiracy charge was a pretext and the government really is prosecuting him for the publication of classified documents, lawyers not involved in the case said.

David Miller, a former federal prosecutor in New York and Virginia, said Assange’s defense would likely face “an uphill battle” assuming the government’s proof of communications and contacts with Manning is strong.

Prosecutors will emphasize that cracking a password is far outside the realm of what respectable journalists do, Chesney at the University of Texas said.

“All of this turns on the idea that Assange tries to hack a password,” Chesney said. “That’s not journalism, that’s theft.”

Manning was convicted by court martial in 2013 of espionage and other offenses for furnishing more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to WikiLeaks. Obama, in his last days in office, commuted the final 28 years of Manning’s 35-year sentence.

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe and Nathan Layne; additional reporting by Mark Hosenball and Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Grant McCool)

Source: OANN

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Iraq unearths mass grave of Kurds killed by Saddam

Iraqi members of the Civil Defense and officials cover the bones from an unearthed mass grave of Kurds in west of the city of Samawa
Iraqi members of the Civil Defense and officials cover the bones from an unearthed mass grave of Kurds in west of the city of Samawa, Iraq April 14, 2019. REUTERS/Essam al-Sudani

April 14, 2019

SAMAWA, Iraq (Reuters) – Iraq must never forget Saddam Hussein’s crimes or allow his party to return, President Barham Salih said on Sunday after attending the unearthing of a mass grave of Kurds killed by the former leader’s forces three decades ago.

The grave, found in the desert about 170 km (106 miles) west of the city of Samawa, contained the remains of dozens of Kurds made to “disappear” by Saddam’s forces, Salih’s office said.

They were among up to 180,000 people who may have been killed during Saddam’s “Anfal” campaign that targeted Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s when chemical gas was used, villages were razed and thousands of Kurds were forced into camps.

“He killed them because they did not accept the continuation of this regime, because they wanted to live a free and dignified life,” Salih, a Kurd, told a news conference at the grave site.

“He brought them to Samawa to bury them but our people in Samawa embraced them,” Salih added. Iraq’s southern provinces are predominantly inhabited by Shi’ite Arabs, who also suffered oppression and mass killings under Saddam, a Sunni Arab.

“The new Iraq must never forget these crimes that were committed against Iraqi people from all groups,” he said.

(Writing by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Susan Fenton)

Source: OANN

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Was This Nude Photo Edited? Debating Kourtney Kardashian’s New Instagram Pic

DCNF Video Team | Contributor

What can be said about Kourtney Kardashian’s nude post on Instagram, Democratic New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker’s tweets about coffee and 2020 presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke’s odd joke?

David Hookstead and Katrina Haydon, with special guest Guillaume Pierre-Louis, take on topics like these in this podcast episode.

Check out who had the best take.

In typical Hookstead fashion, David opens the conversation with comments on Women’s History Month competing with March Madness saying, “Women can find a different month or I guess 15-20 minutes to tell us what they’ve done.”

Haydon responds, “you mean like carrying the human race?” (RELATED: Bar Hopping With Liberals On Election Night)

Watch some of The Daily Caller News Foundation’s other videos and subscribe to our YouTube channel to make sure you never miss out.

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Check out the most recent videos by TheDCNF:

Is Thanksgiving Racist?

Super Bowl Or See Michelle Obama Speak?

Do You Really Need An ID To Purchase Cereal?

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Source: The Daily Caller

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Fast track: Indonesia, Malaysia rail projects may give China more deals

Worker stands in front of Jakarta-Bandung High Speed Railway exhibition hall at Walini tunnel construction site in West Bandung regency
A worker stands in front of Jakarta-Bandung High Speed Railway exhibition hall at Walini tunnel construction site in West Bandung regency, West Java province, Indonesia, February 21, 2019. REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan

April 23, 2019

By Fanny Potkin and Tabita Diela

WALLINI, Indonesia (Reuters) – In a rural part of Indonesia’s Java island, two orange-clad workers confer in Mandarin over plans to lay tracks on a stretch of a $6 billion high-speed rail project between the capital Jakarta and the textile hub of Bandung.

Both are employees of the state-owned China Railway Engineering Corp (CREC), and have previously worked on a rail project in Uganda, another part of Beijing’s sweeping multi-billion dollar “Belt and Road” initiative (BRI) to connect China with Asia, Europe and beyond.

Delayed for nearly three years over land ownership issues, construction on the 142 km (88-mile) Indonesian line finally kicked into high gear in 2018.

When China hosts its second summit of nations that are part of BRI this week, Beijing is likely to showcase the Indonesian project along with its recent success in getting Malaysia’s East Coast Railway Link (ECRL) back on track after months of negotiations.

Analysts say the two projects will be held up as China’s answers to criticism about high debt and the lack of transparency in the BRI and its attempt to refocus the program on sustainable financing, green growth, and high quality.

China’s foreign ministry said last week Beijing would “work together with all parties to benefit people across the world by jointly promoting the high-quality development of BRI in line with the national conditions of each country”.

The BRI is a key policy of Chinese President Xi Jinping but has been controversial in many Western capitals, particularly Washington, which views it as a means to spread Chinese influence abroad and saddle countries with unsustainable debt through nontransparent projects.

According to a draft communique seen by Reuters, participants at this week’s summit will agree to project financing that respects global debt goals and promotes green growth.

“This bucks the trend of recent negative headlines around the BRI and challenges facing projects in several countries,” said Peter Mumford at the Eurasia Group consultancy.

But in Malaysia, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed agreed to put the 668-km ECRL back on track only after cutting the cost of the project from $16 billion to $10.7 billion.

“The risk for China is that other countries, having seen Mahathir’s success, now try to adopt similar tough re-negotiating tactics on BRI projects, which could slow progress elsewhere,” said Mumford.

To be sure, there is no sign of any of the BRI countries attempting to re-negotiate deals signed with Beijing. Analysts say China is likely to use its willingness to work with partner nations and make projects feasible to seek more business.

“GOLD-PLATED”

Bankers familiar with the deal say the Indonesian project is being constructed under “gold-plated terms”.

Of the total $6 billion cost, China’s Development Bank will provide a $4.5 billion loan at 2 percent interest, according a project prospectus seen by Reuters. The remaining 25 percent of the project cost will be funded by equity provided by the consortium.

The loan will have no sovereign guarantees, which are among the most controversial parts of Belt and Road projects, as they shift risk onto the governments of partner countries.

Beijing lobbied hard against Tokyo in 2015 to win the Indonesian project as a way to showcase its high-speed rail expertise to international customers.

“China wanted to deliberately show that its fast train was better than Japan … we asked for the lowest rate possible and they gave 2 percent,” Rini Soemarno, Indonesia’s minister for state-owned enterprises, told reporters earlier this year.

The railway’s financial terms came under debate during April’s presidential election between Indonesian President Joko Widodo and challenger Prabowo Subianto, who pledged to review the project if he pulled off a victory.

While the results are still to be officially confirmed, sample vote counts by independent pollsters show Widodo to be headed for a second term.

At the project site, there seem to be no doubts that it will be completed. Deep in Indonesia’s tea country, workers are directing drilling machines into a hillside, displacing red earth to carve out two tunnels that will lead to the station of Wallini, a tea plantation near Bandung.

Chinese workers there told Reuters they had been at the site for a year and expected to stay until the project’s completion in 2021. Four new satellite towns will be built by the train consortium along the route.

Widodo’s government is currently offering up to $91 billion in infrastructure projects to Chinese companies, according to Luhut Pandjaitan, the coordinating minister for maritime affairs, who said Chinese officials have toured regional governments in search of projects to fund.

Two top officials told Reuters Widodo intends to lead a delegation to the Belt and Road forum, where some of those projects are expected to be signed.

One of the officials, Indonesia’s investment board chief, Thomas Lembong, told Reuters he expected this week’s summit to be a turning point, a “Belt and Road 2.0” with China more willing to negotiate.

“The Chinese leadership will do whatever it takes to make Belt and Road a success, even if that means making it more professionalised, transparent, and more cooperative,” he said.

THE SINGAPORE LINK

The revival of the Malaysian project is likely to give China hope of securing another train project: the high speed rail (HSR) between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, which was postponed by Mahathir after he initially threatened to cancel it.

“China will likely take heart from the ECRL outcome and focus their efforts on ensuring that the Kuala Lumpur-Singapore HSR remains on track,” Harrison Cheng, an analyst at Control Risks, told Reuters.

Beijing had been intent on being awarded the project to prove that its rail expertise could win over rivals in a first-world country like Singapore, with its diplomats describing it as a “must win at all costs project”.

Apart from CREC, consortiums from Japan, South Korea, Europe, Singapore and Malaysia are also in the race, if the project is revived.

A source in the Singaporean government said Malaysia would have to pay significant penalties to cancel the project altogether.

Mahathir as well as Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong will take part in this week’s Belt and Road summit, which could see China make a renewed push for the project.

(Reporting by Fanny Potkin and Tabita Diela in JAKARTA and WALLINI; Additional reporting by Gayatri Suroyo and Cindy Silviana in JAKARTA, Sumeet Chatterjee in HONG KONG, Brenda Goh in SHANGHAI, Joseph Sipalan and Liz Lee in Kuala Lumpur, and Joe Brock and John Geddie in SINGAPORE, Editing by Ed Davies and Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Source: OANN

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Bernie Sanders seen in unearthed 1986 video recalling excitement over Castro’s revolution in Cuba

Unearthed video footage showed 2020 hopeful Bernie Sanders recalling his excitement surrounding the Cuban revolution in the 1950s.

"I remember, for some reason or another, being very excited when [former Cuban dictator] Fidel Castro made the revolution in Cuba," he said, while speaking at the University of Vermont in 1986.

"I was a kid ... and it just seemed right and appropriate that poor people were rising up against rather ugly rich people."

During that speech, Sanders said he almost had to "puke" when he saw former President John F. Kennedy push his opponent at the time, former President Richard Nixon, to be tougher on Cuba. "For the first time in my adult life, what I was seeing is the Democrats and Republicans ... clearly that there really wasn't a whole lot of difference between the two," he said.

CHER QUESTIONS BERNIE SANDERS FOR SAYING BOSTON BOMBER DESERVES RIGHT TO VOTE

The video, which surfaced in February, was just the latest in a series that showed Sanders, I-Vt., a self-described "democratic socialist," praising socialist societies.

Sanders' other comments have included praising bread lines and Soviet public transportation; defending Castro as someone in Cuba who "he educated their kids, gave their kids health care, totally transformed the society"; and mocking criticism of the Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

“It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing,” he said in an old video clip.

“In other countries, people don’t line up for food, rich people get the food and poor people starve to death.”

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Sanders has taken the lead among most 2020 hopefuls — often trailing only former Vice President Joe Biden in polls — and became somewhat of an icon for the progressive insurgency within the Democrats.

In 2016, he was able to push a number of big-government policies while placing second in the battle for the presidential nomination. Those policies included free college tuition and a single-payer health care system, ideas that many critics have associated with socialist governments.

Source: Fox News Politics

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White House to Congress: top Trump immigration aide won’t testify

White House adviser Miller departs with U.S. President Trump on travel to Michigan from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland
White House adviser Stephen Miller walks across the tarmac to board Air Force One as he departs Washington with U.S. President Donald Trump for travel to Grand Rapids, Michigan from Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., March 28, 2019. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

April 25, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House is refusing to allow President Donald Trump’s top immigration aide to testify to Congress about the administration’s immigration policies, its latest salvo against oversight efforts by Democratic lawmakers.

In a letter on Wednesday to the House of Representatives Oversight Committee, the White House declined a request for Stephen Miller to testify about Trump immigration initiatives, including the policy of separating migrant children from their parents and his threat to send illegal immigrants to so-called sanctuary cities.

“In accordance with longstanding precedent, we respectfully decline the invitation to make Mr. Miller available for testimony before the committee,” the White House counsel said in the letter, first posted online by CNN.

The refusal is part of a wider pushback by the Republican president against legal requests from the Democratic-led House, which is conducting multiple investigations of his administration, including his tax returns, White House security clearances and possible obstruction of justice by Trump.

U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings, the Democratic chairman of the Oversight Committee, on Wednesday accused Trump of a “unprecedented, and growing pattern of obstruction” after he ordered federal employees not to comply with congressional investigations.

Cummings on April 17 invited Miller to testify voluntarily about why the administration decided to separate immigrant children from their parents at the border.

Cummings also called for an explanation of “transferring asylum seekers to sanctuary cities as a form of illegal retribution against your political adversaries, and firing top administration officials who refuse orders to violate the law.”

Trump has said he is considering sending immigrants in the country illegally to jurisdictions that have adopted some form of “sanctuary city” policies in which they refuse to use their resources to help federal agents enforce deportations.

Miller, a former Senate aide, has helped shape some of Trump’s most controversial immigration policies, from the first Muslim ban shortly after he took office in 2017 to last year’s child separation policy, both of which were rejected by courts.

The oversight panel could exercise its power to subpoena him, although the White House could invoke executive privilege to protect Miller’s discussions with Trump.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Roberta Rampton; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Source: OANN

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Common Sense on “Measles Outbreak” Hysteria

Before the current measles hysteria gets even further out of hand, a little common sense could help us think more carefully before rushing to take action that won’t work and will actually do harm.

Refusing unwanted medical treatment is a basic human right that all civilized nations have sworn to uphold, with the sole possible exception of a dire and imminent threat to the public health, which a few localized measles outbreaks, numbering no more than a few dozens or hundreds of cases, decidedly are not.

Are the Measles Outbreaks Really an Emergency?

All of these outbreaks are typical of those that have occurred ever since the vaccine was introduced, and others just like them will undoubtedly continue to occur even if the drug industry’s well-funded campaign succeeds in vaccinating everybody. Yet the Washington State Health Department has declared a public health emergency on the basis of them; several other states are considering doing the same; and the news media have enthusiastically joined in, with editorials and Op-Eds in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and other major outlets, as well as talk shows on NPR and other radio stations, all well-meaning but repeating the same alarmist fears and exaggerations as if they were settled truths, and citing these modest outbreaks as ample justification for eliminating personal-belief exemptions from the states that still honor them.  A clear violation of the First Amendment, the latest and most ominous example is Congressional pressure on Facebook and other social media to censor postings that dare raise doubts or questions about vaccines or their mandates.

On the other hand, these politicians and journalists have done nothing more than simply taking on faith the information that prominent doctors and public health authorities are feeding them.  Unfortunately, what they’re being told is not only bad ethics, but also bad science, based on assumptions that are flatly contradicted by current research, and violate basic human rights and moral values that we still profess to hold dear.


Panic & article after article about measles but have you heard about the number of mumps cases of migrants at Texas detention centers that are greater than all the measles cases nationwide? Have you heard about serious infections traced back to vaccinations in 3 states? Why not?

The Bottom-Line Assumptions

Often assumed to be self-evident without even having to be stated, much less proved, their bottom-line assumptions are really two postulates that depend on each other to support them — namely:

  1. that these small outbreaks of measles and other infectious diseases that we vaccinate against are initiated and propagated by unvaccinated individuals;
  2. and that vaccines are not only miraculously safe, but also uniformly effective in rendering people immune to these diseases without having to contract them, so that only the unvaccinated are still susceptible and thus capable of transmitting them to others.

But you can’t have it both ways.  For if these postulates were really true, if the immunity conferred by the measles vaccine were truly comparable to the absolute, lifelong immunity that results from coming down with and recovering from the actual disease, then the unvaccinated would pose no threat to anyone but themselves, based on a free choice of their own making, such that those taking the vaccine would have nothing to worry about. Conversely, if vaccinated individuals are indeed at risk of acquiring the disease from the unvaccinated, then the vaccine is clearly ineffective to that extent, and whatever it does offer cannot be a genuine or reliably effective immunity.

In any case, there’s plenty of good scientific evidence that both of these assumptions are just plain false.  The vast majority of cases of measles, mumps, and other vaccine-preventable diseases in both past and recent outbreaks, typically between 75 and 95%, have been in vaccinated individuals, while a recent study of measles in China, where over 99% of the population are vaccinated by the same sort of strict government mandate being advocated here, nevertheless reported over 700 localized outbreaks in a single year, totaling almost 26,000 cases. Much the same is true of recent mumps outbreaks in the United States, where typically 95-100% of the cases have been vaccinated.

Counterfeit Immunity

So even if all non-medical exemptions were eliminated and virtually everyone were vaccinated, as the proposed new laws would require, similar outbreaks would undoubtedly continue to occur.  In other words, the so-called immunity conferred by vaccines is a trick, a counterfeit of the real thing; and “herd immunity,” the stated goal of the mandates, customarily tied to a vaccination rate of 95% or more in the case of measles, is a chimera of wishful thinking that vaccination simply cannot achieve, in contrast to the natural disease, regarding which public health experts have long known that large-scale outbreaks no longer occur when at least 80% of the population have already contracted and recovered from it. That, and only that, is herd immunity: to expect a vaccine to achieve an even higher level, with no outbreaks at all, is pure fantasy, and the polar opposite of hard science.

Moreover, scientists have also demonstrated that individuals receiving vaccines made from live viruses, like measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, rotavirus, oral polio, and some versions of influenza, regularly “shed” them and are thus contagious for many weeks afterward. 

Regarding the resurgence of whooping cough in recent years, for example, numerous studies have shown that the increasingly large and frequent outbreaks of the disease are likewise being spread by vaccinated individuals, even though the bacterium is no longer alive, in part through natural selection for vaccine-resistant strains, as has been documented in the case of other non-living vaccines (HiB, pneumococcus, and possibly injectable polio) as well.

In short, the entire rationale of vaccinating as many people as possible, and the bullying and resentment of parents who choose not to vaccinate that always accompanies it, is not only cruel and misplaced, but helps to create and propagate the very diseases that the vaccines were designed to eradicate.

Rather than simply accepting the fact that vaccines have at best a partial and limited efficacy, we are allowing the CDC and the drug industry to play on our fears to the extent of inflating these small, localized outbreaks of measles into the dreaded semblance of a looming public-health emergency, posing a serious threat to society, justifying forced vaccination of everyone, even against their will if necessary, and thereby nullifying our co-authorship of and continuing allegiance to the Nuremberg Code of Human Rights and the Helsinki Declaration governing Biomedical Research, both of which insist upon the right of every patient and every experimental subject to give informed consent to all medical and surgical procedures, and explicitly forbid administering them by force.

Although one could imagine a genuine public health emergency that might justify and even require temporarily waiving such rights, such as a large-scale bioterrorist attack or the rapid dissemination of a deadly plague, that is precisely what these small, localized outbreaks of ordinary childhood diseases are not.  The truth is that there is no emergency, that we vaccinate purely as a matter of long-term health policy, and that most of the diseases that we vaccinate against were:

  1. already rapidly declining, thanks to improvements in sanitation, water quality, and other aspects of public health (pertussis, diphtheria, tetanus);
  2. ordinary diseases of childhood that most people contracted and recovered from without complications or sequelae (measles, mumps, rubella, flu, rotavirus, chickenpox);
  3. or caused by mutant strains of organisms that are part of our normal flora and only occasionally cause invasive disease (HiB, pneumococcus).

Measles is indeed a perfect test case of the vaccination concept, as the most highly contagious of them all, with an attack rate approaching 100% in susceptible individuals; and the measles vaccine has in fact reduced the annual incidence of the disease in the United States from about 400,000 cases to less than 10,000, surely a historic achievement, no matter how it was done or why it was thought necessary.  But inasmuch as these small, localized outbreaks are still occurring, and will undoubtedly continue do so in the future, no matter what we do, the CDC surely owes us a more convincing explanation than the impossible dream of “herd immunity” for why they don’t simply declare victory and let it go at that.

Science is Far From Being Settled

So for all of these reasons, contrary to what we’re being told, the science is far from being settled when it comes to vaccine effectiveness.  Even that much would be enough to deflate the myth that vaccine mandates are necessary.  But it’s not the only reason, or even the most important one.  Vaccine safety is even further from being settled, to put it mildly, and for very good reasons.  In the first place, many studies have shown that children who come down with and recover from acute febrile infections like measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, and influenza are much less likely to develop chronic autoimmune diseases and cancer later in life than those merely vaccinated against them.

Still other studies link the risk of death, hospitalization, and other serious adverse reactions not so much to any particular vaccine or vaccines, but rather to the total number of vaccines given, both simultaneously at the same visit, and cumulatively over the patient’s lifetime. In other words, these worst outcomes cannot be simply written off as idiosyncratic aberrations of certain hypersensitive individuals, but rather appear to be built into something about the nature of the vaccination process itself.

These findings are already more than sufficient to question if not discredit the almost universal reverence accorded to the concept of vaccination, not to mention the blank check that allows and even incentivizes the drug industry to develop, market, and ultimately mandate more and more vaccines, based on the assumption that vaccines are safe and effective across the board, that they save vast sums of money from not having to care for patients suffering with these diseases, and that it is therefore OK and even desirable to pile on as many doses of as many different vaccines as the traffic will bear, often for no better reason than that we have the technical capacity to make them.

It is the same assumption that allows and even blesses the drug industry to conduct its own safety studies without genuine placebo controls of unvaccinated individuals; that limits adverse effects to those appearing within a few hours or days of the shot, thus automatically excluding the chronic diseases from consideration; that gives the lead investigator unlimited authority to determine whether a reported adverse reaction is or is not vaccine-related, according to criteria that are never specified; and that allows the CDC to insist that vaccines are uniformly safe and effective without conducting independent studies of its own, even though Congress has legislated and the Supreme Court has upheld that they are “unavoidably unsafe,” in order to shield the manufacturers from liability for the deaths and injuries they cause, a free ride granted to no other industry.

In short, these assumptions are not science, but merely scientism, a reverent, quasi-religious faith characterized by dogmatism in the name of science, which stifles the critical thinking, questioning, and doubting of allegedly settled truths that real science requires, and helps explain why the news media refrain from reporting deaths or injuries from vaccines without having to be told, and why most physicians offer up their own children for the same vaccinations they administer to their patients.  The late Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics, sums it up admirably:

“[In science] we must leave room for doubt, or there is no progress and no learning.

There is no learning without having to pose a question, and a question requires doubt.

Before you begin an experiment, you must not know the answer, [or] there is no need to gather any evidence; and to judge the evidence, you must take all of it, not just the parts you like.  That’s a responsibility that scientists feel toward each other, a kind of morality.”

Which brings me to my final point, that if vaccination and vaccines were indeed safe and effective across the board, then the thousands upon thousands of parents who sincerely believe that their children were maimed or killed by them and must live with that existential reality every day of their lives must be either lying, ignorant, or stupid, and thus perhaps even deserve to have their stories ignored and dismissed out of hand by the medical community, the news media, and the public at large.  Yet their suffering, whatever may have caused it, surely cries out at the very least for caution, restraint, and simple compassion for the viewpoint of those whose lived experience is so tragically different from that of everyone else privileged enough to be ignorant of or somehow unmoved by their loss.

As a family physician who has cared for many of these children over the years, I can say with complete assurance that the vast majority of their parents are by no means ignorant or credulous “anti-vaxxers” or hostile to science.  Quite the contrary, in fact: they are often well-educated, have devoted their lives to unraveling the mystery about what really happened to their kids, and ask no more than that vaccines be made as safe as possible, based on careful investigation by independent scientists unaffiliated with the drug industry. After more than fifty years in the trenches, I can also attest that the instinctive, practical sense of caring parents is often a far more accurate and trustworthy guide to the truth about what caused the specific tragedies that they have had to endure than any preformed, generic pronouncement that pre-empts any need to consider the details of their actual, lived experience.

Finally, the widespread and indeed almost universal reverence accorded to vaccination, based on the catechism that vaccines are not only safe and effective, but also among the supreme achievements of modern medicine, has impelled me to write with a sense of urgency and foreboding at this critical moment in our history, when the time-honored rights of patients to refuse unwanted medical treatment and to make such decisions on behalf of their children are being challenged as never before.  I will feel well rewarded if my words, my reasoning, and the commingled sadness, fear, and outrage I have long felt about this subject will promote a healthy debate and elicit more of the rigorous scientific work that still remains to be done.

Given the legitimate doubts and fears surrounding their use, the simplest and wisest solution would be to make the vaccines optional, that is, available to all those who want them, once fully apprised of their risks, so that exemptions will no longer be required.  For if vaccines  and vaccination are truly as safe and effective as the CDC and the industry have been insisting, it shouldn’t be that difficult for them to convince the public to the extent of wanting to give them to their children, without needing mandates to impose them by force.

Until that happens, the most pressing issue before us is to preserve the frail remnant of personal liberty embodied in the few remaining exemptions that most citizens in our democracy have long been rightly proud of, and that the influential and well-funded drug industry has always been eager to take away.  My fervent hope and heartfelt plea is that good common sense will prevail and the American people will be sufficiently aroused to not let that happen.

The viewpoints expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Infowars.


David Knight explains why Sen. Paul is correct to fight for liberty over a false sense of security.

Source: InfoWars

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Tiger woods celebrates after winning the 2019 Masters
FILE PHOTO: Golf – Masters – Augusta National Golf Club – Augusta, Georgia, U.S. – April 14, 2019 – Tiger Woods of the U.S. celebrates on the 18th hole after winning the 2019 Masters. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

April 26, 2019

Tiger Woods is sending a message that he thinks he still has enough left, emotionally and physically, to win three more major championships to tie Jack Nicklaus’ record 18 titles.

Speaking to GolfTV in his first sit-down interview since the Masters, Woods said he has taken some time off since his victory at Augusta National, which still doesn’t feel real.

“Honestly, it’s hard to believe,” Woods said. “I was texting one of my good friends last night … that I couldn’t believe that I won the tournament. That it really hasn’t sunk in. I haven’t started doing anything. I’ve just been laying there. And every now and again, I’ll look over there on the couch and there’s the jacket.”

That’s the fifth green jacket for the 43-year-old Woods, who hadn’t won a major tournament since the 2008 U.S. Open. Along the way, four back surgeries, a divorce and other personal issues derailed him.

He said he has been spending time with his children – daughter Sam, 11, and son Charlie, 10 – who weren’t born when their father was the most dominant golfer on the planet.

“They never knew golf to be a good thing in my life and only the only thing they remember is that it brought this incredible amount of pain to their dad and they don’t want to ever want to see their dad in pain,” Woods said. “And so to now have them see this side of it, the side that I’ve experienced for so many years of my life, but I had a battle to get back to this point, it feels good.”

He said he hopes – maybe expects — they’ll see this side again.

And no one will take Woods for granted at the PGA Championship at Bethpage Black Course on Long Island, N.Y., which starts May 16.

Woods said he’ll be ready for a course he already conquered once in a major: the 2002 U.S. Open.

“I’m doing all the visual stuff, but I haven’t put in the physical work yet. But it’s probably coming this weekend,” he said.

Before Woods encountered health and personal problems, it was expected that topping Nicklaus’ major mark was “when” and not “if.” Then the certainty went away, but Woods thought he still had a chance.

“I always thought it was possible, if I had everything go my way. It took him an entire career to get to 18, so now that I’ve had another extension to my career – one that I didn’t think I had a couple of years ago – if I do things correctly and everything falls my way, yeah, it’s a possibility. I’m never going to say it’s not.

“Now I just need to have a lot of things go my way, and who’s to say that it will or will not happen? That’s what the future holds, I don’t know. The only thing I can promise you is this: that I will be prepared.”

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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Maria Butina, the Russian woman who was accused of being a secret agent for the Russian government, was sentenced to 18 months in prison Friday by a federal judge in Washington after pleading guilty last year to a conspiracy charge.

Butina, who has already served nine months behind bars, will get credit for time served and can possibly get credit for good behavior, the judge said. She will be removed from the U.S. promptly on completion of her time, the judge added, and returned to Russia.

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

An emotional and apologetic Butina said in court Friday she is “truly sorry” and regrets not registering as a foreign agent.

“I feel ashamed and embarrassed,” she said, adding that her “reputation is ruined.”

Butina has been jailed since her arrest in July 2018. She entered the court Friday wearing a dark green prison jumpsuit and spoke in clear English, with a slight Russian accent.

“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.

Butina’s lawyer, Robert Driscoll, said after the sentencing they had hoped for a “better outcome,” but expressed a desire for Butina to be released to her family by the fall.

Prosecutors had claimed Butina used her contacts with the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast to develop relationships with U.S. politicians and gather information for Russia.

Prosecutors also have said that Butina’s boyfriend, conservative political operative Paul Erickson, identified in court papers as “U.S. Person 1,” helped her establish ties with the NRA.

WHO IS MARIA BUTINA, THE RUSSIAN WOMAN ACCUSED OF SPYING ON US?

In their filings, prosecutors claim federal agents found Butina had contact information for people suspected of being employed by Russia’s Federal Security Services, or FSB, the successor intelligence agency to the KGB. Inside her home, they found notes referring to a potential job offer from the FSB, according to the documents.

Investigators recovered several emails and Twitter direct message conversations in which Butina referred to the need to keep her work secret and, in one instance, said it should be “incognito.” Prosecutors said Butina had contact with Russian intelligence officials and that the FBI photographed her dining with a diplomat suspected of being a Russian intelligence agent.

Fox News’ Jason Donner, Bill Mears, Greg Norman and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News Politics

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An official Sri Lankan police Twitter account was deleted after it misidentified an American human rights activist as a suspect in the country’s Easter Sunday terrorist attacks.

On Thursday, police posted the names and photos of six people that they said were at-large suspects in the bombings that killed more than 250 people.

However, one of the names on the list was Muslim U.S. activist Amara Majeed, who quickly tweeted that she had been falsely identified.

“I have this morning been FALSELY identified by the Sri Lankan government as one of the ISIS terrorists that committed the Easter attacks in Sri Lanka. What a thing to wake up to!” she wrote.

SRI LANKA AUTHORITIES SAY EASTER ATTACK LEADER KILLED IN ONE OF NINE HOTEL BOMBINGS

She wrote in a follow-up tweet that the claim was “obviously completely false” and asked social media users to “please stop implicating and associating me with these horrific attacks.”

“And next time, be more diligent about releasing such information that has the potential to deeply violate someone’s family and community,” she continued.

Later, she wrote an update saying police apologized for wrongly mistaking her as a suspect.

Police said in a statement: “However, although one of the released images was identified as one Abdul Cader Fathima Khadhiya in the information provided by the CID, the CID has now informed that a) the individual whose image was labeled as Abdul Cader Fathima Khadiya is not in fact Abdul Cader Fathima Khadiya b) the individual pictured is not wanted for questioning c) Abdul Cader Fathima is the correct name of the suspect wanted by the CID.”

On Friday, the account, @SriLankaPolice2 was deleted with no explanation. Police did not release more information regarding the mistake.

Majeed, who founded “The Hijab Project” when she was 16 years old, told the Baltimore Sun that it was hurtful to be linked to the attacks.

“Sri Lanka is my motherland,” the Brown University student said. “It’s very painful to be associated with [the bombings].”

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Mohamed Zahran, the suspected leader of the attacks which targeted six hotels and churches, killed himself in a suicide bombing at the Shangri-La hotel. Police also said they had arrested the second-in-command of the group, called National Towheed Jamaat. Catholic churches in Sri Lanka canceled all Sunday Masses until further notice over concerns that they remain a top target of Islamic State-linked extremists.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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Source: InfoWars

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FILE PHOTO: Sri Lankan Special Task Force soldiers stand guard in front of a mosque as a Muslim man walks past him during the Friday prayers at a mosque, days after a string of suicide bomb attacks on Easter Sunday, in Colombo
FILE PHOTO: Sri Lankan Special Task Force soldiers stand guard in front of a mosque as a Muslim man walks past him during the Friday prayers at a mosque, five days after a string of suicide bomb attacks on Catholic churches and luxury hotels across the island on Easter Sunday, in Colombo, Sri Lanka April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte/File Photo

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

KATTANKUDY, Sri Lanka (Reuters) – Mohamed Hashim Mohamed Zahran was 12 years old when he began his studies at the Jamiathul Falah Arabic College. He was a nobody, with no claim to scholarship other than ambition.

Zahran and his four brothers and sisters squeezed into a two-room house with their parents in a small seaside town in eastern Sri Lanka; their father was a poor man who sold packets of food on the street and had a reputation for being a petty thief.

“His father didn’t do much,” recalled the school’s vice principal, S.M. Aliyar, laughing out loud.

The boy surprised the school with his sharp mind. For three years, Zahran practiced memorizing the Koran. Next came his studies in Islamic law. But the more he learned, the more Zahran argued that his teachers were too liberal in their reading of the holy book.

“He was against our teaching and the way we interpreted the Koran – he wanted his radical Islam,” said Aliyar. “So we kicked him out.”

Aliyar, now 73 with a long white beard, remembers the day Zahran left in 2005. “His father came and asked, ‘Where can he go?’.”

The school would hear again of Mohamed Zahran. And the world now knows his name. The Sri Lankan government has identified him as the ringleader of a group that carried out a series of Easter Sunday suicide bombings in the country on April 21.

The blasts killed more than 250 people in churches and luxury hotels, one of the deadliest-ever such attacks in South Asia. There were nine suicide bombers who blew apart men, women and children as they sat to pray or ate breakfast.

Most of the attackers were well-educated and from wealthy families, with some having been abroad to study, according to Sri Lankan officials.

That description does not, however, fit their alleged leader, a man said to be in his early 30s, who authorities say died in the slaughter. Zahran was different.

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

Sri Lanka’s national leadership has come under heavy criticism for failing to heed warnings from Indian intelligence services – at least three in April alone – that an attack was pending. But Zahran’s path from provincial troublemaker to alleged jihadist mastermind was marked by years of missed or ignored signals that the man with a thick beard and paunch was dangerous.

His increasingly militant brand of Islam was allowed to grow inside a marginalized minority community – barely 10 percent of the country’s roughly 20 million people are Muslim – against a backdrop of a dysfunctional developing nation.

The top official at the nation’s defense ministry resigned on Thursday, saying that some institutions under his charge had failed.

For much of his adult life, Zahran, 33, courted controversy inside the Muslim community itself.

In the internet age, that problem did not stay local. Zahran released online videos calling for jihad and threatening bloodshed.

After the blasts, Islamic State claimed credit and posted a video of Zahran, clutching an assault rifle, standing before the group’s black flag and pledging allegiance to its leader.

The precise relationship between Zahran and Islamic State is not yet known. An official with India’s security services, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that during a raid on a suspected Islamic State cell by the National Investigation Agency earlier this year officers found copies of Zahran’s videos. The operation was in the state of Tamil Nadu, just across a thin strait of ocean from Sri Lanka.

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

Back in 2005, Zahran was looking to make his way in the world. His hometown of Kattankudy is some seven hours’ drive from Colombo on the other side of the island nation, past the countless palm trees, roadside Buddha statues, cashew hawkers and an occasional lumbering elephant in the bush. It is a town of about 40,000 people, a dot on the eastern coast with no clear future for an impoverished young man who’d just been expelled.

Zahran joined a mosque in 2006, the Dharul Athar, and gained a place on its management committee. But within three years they’d had a falling out.

“He wanted to speak more independently, without taking advice from elders,” said the mosque’s imam, or spiritual leader, M.T.M. Fawaz.

Also, the young man was more conservative, Fawaz said, objecting, for instance, to women wearing bangles or earrings.

“The rest of us come together as community leaders but Zahran wanted to speak for himself,” said Fawaz, a man with broad shoulders lounging with a group of friends in a back office of the mosque after evening prayers. “He was a black sheep who broke free.”

Mohamed Yusuf Mohamed Thaufeek, a friend who met Zahran at school and later became an adherent of his, said the problems revolved around Zahran’s habit of misquoting Islamic scriptures.

The mosque’s committee banned him from preaching for three months in 2009. Zahran stormed off.

“We treated him like a spoiled child, a very narrow-minded person who was always causing some trouble,” said the head of the committee, Mohamed Ismail Mohamed Naushad, a timber supplier who shook his head at the memory.

Now on his own, Zahran began to collect a group of followers who met in what Fawaz described as “a hut”.

At about that time, Zahran, then 23, married a young girl from a small town outside the capital of Colombo and brought his bride back to Kattankudy, according to his sister, Mathaniya.

“I didn’t have much of a connection with her – she was 14,” she said.

Despite being “a bit rough-edged”, Zahran was a skilled speaker and others his age were drawn to his speeches and Koranic lessons, said Thaufeek. He traveled the countryside at times, giving his version of religious instruction as he went.

Also, Zahran had found a popular target: the town’s Sufi population, who practice a form of Islam often described a mystical, but which to conservatives is heresy.

Tensions in the area went back some years. In 2004, there was a grenade attack on a Sufi mosque and in 2006 several homes of Sufis were set afire. Announcements boomed from surrounding mosques at the time calling for a Sufi spiritual leader to be killed, said Sahlan Khalil Rahman, secretary of a trust that oversees a group of Sufi mosques.

He blamed followers of the fundamentalist Wahhabi strain of Islam that some locals say became more popular after funding from Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Wahhabism, flowed to mosques in Kattankudy.

It was, Rahman said, an effort “to convert Sufis into Wahhabis through this terrorism”. Rahman handed over a photograph album showing charred homes, bullet holes sprayed across an office wall and a shrine’s casket upended.

ONLINE RADICAL

It was an ideal backdrop for Zahran’s bellicose delivery and apparent sense of religious destiny.

He began holding rallies, bellowing insults through loudspeakers that reverberated inside the Sufis’ house of worship as they tried to pray.

In 2012, Zahran started a mosque of his own. The Sufis were alarmed and, Rahman said, passed on complaints to both local law enforcement and eventually national government offices. No action was taken.

The then-officer in charge of Kattankudy police, Ariyabandhu Wedagedara, said in a telephone interview that he couldn’t arrest people simply because of theological differences.

     “The problem at the time was between followers of different Islamic sects – Zahran was not a major troublemaker, but he and followers of other sects, including the Sufis, were at loggerheads,” Wedagedara said.

Zahran found another megaphone: the internet. His Facebook page was taken down after the bombings, but Muslims in the area said his video clips had previously achieved notoriety.

His speeches went from denouncing Sufis to “kafirs”, or non-believers, in general. Zahran’s sister, Mathaniya, said in an interview that she thought “his ideas became more radical from listening to Islamic State views on the Internet”.

In one undated video, Zahran, in a white tunic and standing in front of an image of flames, boomed in a loud voice: “You will not have time to pick up the remains of blown-up bodies. We’ll keep sending those insulting Allah to hell.”

“HARD TO TAKE”

Zahran spoke in Tamil, making his words available to young Muslims clicking on their cellphones in Kattankudy and other towns like it during a period when, in both 2014 and 2018, reports and images spread of Sinhalese Buddhists rioting against Muslims in Sri Lanka.

In 2017, Zahran’s confrontations boiled over. At a rally near a Sufi community, his followers came wielding swords. At least one man was hacked and hospitalized. The police arrested several people connected to Zahran, including his father and one of his brothers. Zahran slipped away from public view.

That December, the mosque Zahran founded released a public notice disowning him. Thaufeek, his friend from school, is now the head. He counted the places that Zahran had been driven away from – his school, the Dharul Athar mosque and then, “we ourselves kicked him out, which would have been hard for him to take”.

The next year, a group of Buddha statues was vandalized in the town of Mawanella, about five hours drive from Kattankudy. There, in the lush mountains of Sri Lanka’s interior, Zahran had taken up temporary residence.

“He was preaching to kill people,” said A.G.M. Anees, who has served as an imam at a small mosque in the area for a decade. “This is not Islam, this is violence.”

Zahran went into hiding once more.

On the Thursday morning before the Easter Sunday bombings, Zahran’s sister-in-law knocked on the door of a neighbor who did seamstress work near Kattankudy. She handed over a parcel of fabric and asked for it to be sewn into a tunic by the end of the day.

“She said she was going on a family trip,” said the neighbor, M.H. Sithi Nazlya.

Zahran’s sister says that her parents turned off their cellphones on the Friday. On Sunday, when she visited their home, they were gone.

She does not know if Zahran arranged for them to be taken somewhere safe. Or why he would have carried out the bombing.

But now in Kattankudy, and in many other places, people are talking about Mohamed Hashim Mohamed Zahran.

(Reporting by Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam; Additional reporting by Sanjeev Miglani, Shihar Aneez and Alasdair Pal; Editing by John Chalmers and Alex Richardson)

Source: OANN

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