World News

>The Syrian Ambassador to Russia, Riyad Haddad, said on Thursday that the United States of America controls all the Syrian oil fields in the northeastern part of the country.

>“The Americans today are already in the northeastern part of the country, controlling all the oil fields there and stealing our oil resources. If we can liberate this region from the American occupation, this will revive our economy.”

>Canadian police have made a series of arrests in northern British Columbia as they enforced a court injunction to remove activists who have been blocking the construction of a controversial natural gas pipeline on Indigenous territory.

>“It’s a whole damn army up there,” Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief Woos told CBC News as word of the arrests spread. “They’ve got guns on, they’ve got tactical gear on. They look like they’re ready for war.”

>Police previously raided the Gitimd’en checkpoint in January 2019, arresting 14 activists.

>Documents from that raid uncovered by the Guardian suggested that officers were prepared to use lethal force against activists, prompting fierce debate over police tactics. The RCMP have denied they were prepared to shoot protesters.

>According to Ricochet, the RCMP expanded its "exclusion zone" Saturday, taking control of most of the territory of the Gidimt'en, one of the five clans of the Wet'suwet'en.

>"The exclusion zone has been created by the RCMP to force Wet'suwet'en land defenders off our land," the Unist'ot'en Camp said in a statement. "It is a colonial and criminalizing tool to illegally and arbitrarily extend RCMP authority onto our lands. The massive exclusion zone, completely under RCMP authoritarian discretion, falls outside the injunction area. Chiefs and Wet'suwet'en people are illegally being denied access to their own territories."

>While protesters have rightly condemned the RCMP actions, they (and the corporate media) have largely overlooked the role of a major player in this whole debacle: Wall Street titan Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., better known as KKR.

>On December 26, 2019 KKR announced the signing of a “definitive agreement” to acquire – along with Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) – a 65 percent equity interest in the Coastal GasLink Pipeline Project from TC Energy.

>Only days later, on December 31, a B.C. Supreme Court judge extended an injunction to stop Wet’suwet’en members from blocking access to Coastal GasLink’s work camp. The injunction will reportedly be operative until the pipeline project is completed.

>A major anti-pipeline struggle continues in Canada, where protests have broken out across the country in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en land defenders whose sovereign land in northern British Columbia was raided last week and over the weekend by Canadian police. Dozens were arrested in the days-long raid of unceded indigenous territories, where hereditary chiefs have been in a protracted battle to protect their land from the construction of TransCanada’s 400-mile, $4.7 billion Coastal GasLink pipeline. The raids took place about 700 miles north of Vancouver and sparked outrage across the country. In Ontario, a Mohawk solidarity protest has shut down the Canadian National Railway for days, halting travel for tens of thousands of passengers. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for a quick resolution to the protests on Wednesday. In New York, protesters on Wednesday gathered for a sit-in outside the United Nations headquarters in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en land defenders.

>The Trump administration on Thursday finalized a rule to strip away environmental protections for streams, wetlands and groundwater, handing a victory to farmers, fossil fuel producers and real estate developers who said Obama-era rules had shackled them with onerous and unnecessary burdens.

>A huge strike swept France on Thursday as millions of workers revolted against pension attacks from president Emmanuel Macron.

>It is set to be the most significant wave of workers’ action since 1995 when protracted strikes broke a right-wing government’s assault on pensions.
>A teacher said “The pension reforms are one blow too many. We're fighting not to lose hundreds of euros of pension a month—after more than 40 years in a job.

>Hundreds of demonstrations took place, beginning at 10am in some areas. The CGT union federation said 1.5 million people marched nationwide. Even the interior ministry said over 800,000 took part.

>In several places they were met with tear gas.
>In Paris 6,000 police officers were deployed against protests and the authorities issued a decree forbidding protesters from gathering on the Champs-Elysées or at police stations.
>Riot police began searching pedestrians' bags before dawn, and shops on a planned protest route were ordered to close.

>In many areas the Yellow Vests, who have been fighting Macron for a year, joined the action. There is a massive feeling that life is hard and public services are declining. A poll last month in the newspaper Liberation found 89 percent of French people felt the country was experiencing a “social crisis”.

>It’s crucial to bring together all the sections of strikers and protesters, and to stop the union leaders choking off the action before it wins.

>The mass strikes and protests are giving hope to the whole of Europe. They show that the bitterness in society can be torn away from the right and the racists and directed towards the left.

>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.”

>Indigenous Australians cannot be deported even if they do not hold an Australian Citizenship.
>Australia was declared Terra nullius on British Arrival. There has never been a treaty between the Aboriginal tribes of Australia and the Crown, nor the Australian government.
>steal the land, then deport you for being a foreigner.
>very British thing to do

>tl;dr you can't beat off, our fairy tales said so!

>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.