World News

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>https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/northern-virginia/4-gun-control-measures-approved-in-virginia-senate-committee/2199487/

>https://abcnews.go.com/US/weapons-ban-virginia-capitol-planned-gun-rights-rally/story?id=68354594

>https://www.nationalreview.com/news/antifa-group-to-march-with-pro-gun-protesters-at-virginia-rally/

>https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/01/17/virginia-gun-rally-3-more-suspected-neo-nazis-base-arrested/4499733002/

>Caracas, September 25, 2019 (venezuelanalysis.com) - Self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaido and the Venezuelan opposition have been given US $52 million by the Trump administration.

>According to a Tuesday statement from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the funding will be destined for independent media, civil society, the health sector and the opposition-controlled National Assembly.

>In addition, USAID administrator Mark Green announced on Wednesday that the US will commit $36 million in aid to Venezuela, as part of a relief program led by the United Nations. It is not clear at the present time whether this sum is part of the $52 million or an additional disbursement.

>The Trump administration had previously diverted over $40 million in aid destined for Central America to fund the Venezuelan opposition. According to a USAID memo seen by the LA Times, the money was destined for salaries, airfare, training, propaganda, among other budget items.

>Guaido proclaimed himself president in January and has since led several attempts to oust the Maduro government, including a failed military putsch on April 30.

>The new aid package dovetails with a fresh round of US sanctions against Venezuela’s oil sector.

>Documents published by WikiLeaks on Saturday confirm that there is significant dissent within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the global chemical weapons watchdog, over the doctoring of a public report on the alleged April 7, 2018 chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, which reportedly killed 49 people and wounded as many as 650.

>The latest round of revelations makes clear that the US-led regime-change operation in Syria, which began in 2011, has been based on a pack of lies. The role of WikiLeaks in exposing these lies demonstrates why the US government has been pursuing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange so ferociously, along with Washington's partners in crime such as Britain and Australia.

>Relying on video that showed alleged victims of the attack in a hospital gasping for air and foaming at the mouth, the Trump administration and its European allies launched missile strikes against Syria just one week later. The US-led attack was an act of war that threatened to spark a wider conflict with Russia and Iran, both of which have military forces deployed in the country to back the Assad government in the eight-year regime-change war fueled by the CIA.

>Relying on Islamist terrorist groups as “moderate rebel” proxies, including Al Qaeda and its affiliates, the US and its European allies have overseen a war that has resulted in the deaths of 570,000 people and displaced more than 12 million. The years of carnage have been aimed at overthrowing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and installing a pliant Western puppet regime in order to neutralize the influence of Iran and Russia in the oil-rich Middle East. Claims of chemical weapons attacks and the use of “barrel bombs” by Syria’s military have been repeatedly used throughout the war in an effort to justify Western military action and call for the removal of Assad.

>A memo sent to Fernando Arias, the director-general of the OPCW, on March 14, 2019 by a member of the FFM who had been sent to Douma to analyze the ballistics of two cylinders which were the purported source of the toxic gas, noted that there were about 20 inspectors who had expressed concerns over the final report published at the beginning of that month.

>The author of the memo notes that members of the FFM felt that the report “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to Douma,” and that only one OPCW inspector who had been in Syria, a paramedic, was ultimately involved in the production of the final report. He notes that his investigation into the provenance of the cylinders, one which was found lying on a bed and another on an apartment rooftop, was excluded from the final report released in March.

>WikiLeaks also published the first draft of the interim FFM report, which noted that the investigators were “unable to provide satisfactory explanations for the relatively moderate damage to the cylinders allegedly dropped from an unknown height, compared to the destruction caused to the rebar-reinforced roofs.” This fact--that the evidence did not point to the cylinders being dropped from Assad’s aircraft--was excluded from the final report.

>An email exchange with the FFM’s team leader, Sami Barrek, from July 2018 showed that concerns had been raised by an investigator over the exclusion from the final report of the fact that only low levels of chlorinated organic chemicals (COCs) had been recovered at the scene, and that no determination had been made on how the cylinders arrived at the locations where they had been discovered. Despite repeated interventions by investigators, the level of COCs was excluded from the final report, allowing for the inference that a chlorine gas attack had been confirmed.

>Another email sent by a dissenting investigator to OPCW Director of Strategy and Policy Veronika Stromsíková on May 20 raised concerns over the organization’s false declaration that veteran OPCW inspector and ballistics expert Ian Henderson, who had produced an engineering assessment, was not part of the FFM in Douma. The claim came after his report casting doubt on the possibility of the cylinders being dropped from the air was leaked to the press. Henderson had found, after inspecting the cylinders, that there was a “higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed… rather than being delivered from aircraft.”

>For the first time since the end of the Third Reich, a state premier was elected on Wednesday with the votes of a far right, fascist party

>The chancellor’s pathological centrism has helped make her party morally blind.

>The outgoing state premier, Bodo Ramelow, from the leftwing Die Linke party, had emerged as the candidate with the strongest support in last October’s elections and had been widely expected to be sworn in to form a minority government in the third round of voting.

>Instead it was Kemmerich, whose party had barely sneaked into parliament on 5% of the vote, who won the secret ballot by a single vote.

>In a tweet sent on Wednesday afternoon, Ramelow drew attention to the fact that it was in Thuringia that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party had first entered the German parliament and thus paved its path to power, 90 years ago almost to the week.

>Otter attacks a family, is promptly dealt with.

>The swarms are massive; one of the largest in Kenya is about 37 miles long and 25 miles wide. For reference, that could cover more than half of Long Island. The swarms, which are dense enough at times to block out the sun, are the worst to hit Ethiopia and Somalia in 25 years, and the worst in Kenya in 70 years.

>Desert locusts eat all the vegetation they encounter, and the finger-length insects consume an amount equal to their body weight each day. Each square kilometer of swarm can include 40 to 80 million locusts and eat as much food as 35,000 people, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

>Even before this outbreak, nearly 20 million people faced high levels of food insecurity across the east African region long challenged by periodic droughts and floods. Some analysts have blamed the locust outbreak on climate change, though a direct link is difficult to establish.

>“We know that cyclones are the originators of swarms – and in the past 10 years there’s been an increase in the frequency of cyclones in the Indian Ocean,” said Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), earlier this month.

>Religious minorities in China being persecuted. Daughter helps her father win his freedom.