WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s legal team spent the second morning of a major extradition hearing focusing a magistrate court judge’s attention on United States torture and war crimes that Assange helped to expose.Defense attorney Mark Summers called Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights attorney who has represented prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, to the witness stand. He was asked about human rights cases he pursued, which were bolstered by revelations in documents WikiLeaks published.For example, Stafford Smith told Judge Vanessa Baraitser that U.S. State Department cables helped those impacted by U.S. drone killings in Pakistan. It contributed to “court findings that US…

As rioters and demonstrators continually take to the streets in major U.S. cities as if it’s their literal job now (okay, it probably IS for plenty), ordinary working schmucks like me can’t help but wonder: How on earth do they find the time? What a life of leisure these people must have, with the luxury of apparently sleeping during the day and being able to go out every night and raise hell for the "cause." I certainly couldn’t afford to do it, and you probably couldn’t either. I mean, looting may put a flatscreen or three on the table now and then, but…

Black Lives Matter is Not Marxist This is an actual statement from the President of the United States in a recent interview with his fellow far-right white nationalist Laura Ingraham of Fatherland (FOX) News: “Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization…The first time I ever heard of Black Lives Matter, I said, ‘That’s a terrible name.’ It’s so discriminatory. It’s bad for Black people. It’s bad for everybody.” How viciously absurd. Black Lives Matter is not “an organization” any more than ANTIFA is “an organization.” As Wikipedia reports, “Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized movement advocating for non-violent civil disobedience in protest…

Proposed legislation to remove Confederate monuments across the U.S. was introduced by Illinois Democratic Representative Bobby Rush on Thursday. Confederate monuments became the targets of protests against systemic racism and police brutality in the wake of the May death of George Floyd, a Black man who died while in the custody of Minneapolis police officers. Demonstrators defaced and attempted to destroy the statues because of their connection with the American Civil War. Some lawmakers removed the monuments from public spaces in an effort to prevent further damage. In a Thursday statement, Rush cited the 2017 Unite the Right rally in…

NATO Defense Ministers (Lorenzo Guerini, Pd representing Italy) gathered by videoconference on June17/18, and made a series of “decisions to strengthen the Alliance’s deterrence.” However, nobody in Italy talks about it, neither the media (including social media) nor the political world, where an absolute multipartisan silence reigns over all this. Yet these decisions, basically dictated by Washington and signed by Minister Guerini for Italy, not only trace the guidelines of our military policy, but also our foreign policy. First of all – announces Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg – “NATO is preparing for a possible second wave of Covid-19,” against which…