Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
The Marijuana Lifer Project's Cheri Sicard joins Mnar Muhawesh on 'Behind the Headline' to explain how some people continue to serve lifetime sentences for nonviolent marijuana-related offenses even as marijuana legalization sweeps the country.
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The linked-to PDF contains a lot of hard-to-find information. Here's the table of contents.
Department of Defense
Contractor and Troop Levels in
Iraq and Afghanistan: 2007 - 2016
Congressional Research Service
Contents
Introduction .................................................. 1
The Role of Contractors in Military Operations ................ 1
U.S. Armed Forces and Contractor Personnel in Afghanistan ..... 3
U.S. Armed Forces and Contractor Personnel in Iraq ............ 5
Tables
Table 1
U.S. Armed Forces and Contractor Personnel in Afghanistan ..... 3
Table 2
U.S. Armed Forces and Private Security Contractor Personnel
in Afghanistan ................................................ 4
Table 3
U.S. Armed Forces and Contractor Personnel in Iraq ............ 5
Table 4
U.S. Armed Forces and Private Security Contractors in Iraq .... 7
Table 5
DOD Contract Obligations in Iraq and Afghanistan Theaters
of Operation .................................................. 9
Contacts
Author Contact Information .................................... 10
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"We told them the wealth would "trickle down"!
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The sprawling suit also demands information on leaks regarding the FBI's probe into the Clinton Foundation and an alleged data connection between Trump Tower and a Russian bank. The link was reported by Slate but was later widely debunked by security experts.
The James Madison Project and Mensch say they filed FOIA requests to the various agencies last month but have received no response.
The litigation joins a separate FOIA lawsuit from Vice journalist Jason Leopold and Ryan Shapiro, a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, seeking CIA, FBI, ODNI and DHS records pertaining to investigations into Russia's interference in the election.
Leopold and Shapiro also asked the intelligence agencies for copies of communications to or from the Electoral College and any records that mention or refer to some electors' push for briefings on investigations into ties between Trump, his campaign or his associates and Russia
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It's rare for any journalist in the corporate media to admit that the United States provides any kind of support to terrorists in Syria, but that's what happened on a recent episode of Ben Swann's "Reality Check."
"The Free Syrian Army and the so-called Syrian rebels, who have now lost control of Eastern Aleppo, are not freedom fighters," Swann reported on Tuesday. "They are, in fact, aligned with terror organizations."
The United States and its allies in the Middle East have sought to overthrow the government of Syrian leader Bashar Assad for at least a decade, and support for so-called "moderate" rebels has been an important part of that plan.
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Her comments come just weeks after a Canadian journalist who spent years in Syria also denounced the mainstream media's questionable sources. After eight months filming a documentary in Syria, a Bolivian actress and filmmaker is contradicting the mainstream media's narrative as she argues that the Syrian government has not, in fact, shot at militants leaving Aleppo.
Carla Ortiz, who is filming a documentary on the lives of the people caught in the conflict, said she witnessed the evacuation efforts herself, including that of civilian families as well as of militants. In a video from the upcoming film, titled "Voice of Syria," she documents the peaceful evacuation process from Eastern Aleppo, effectively debunking mainstream media narratives claiming the opposite.
"I was right there in six different front lines, and I talked to the people when they were getting in the buses...at the shelters, and actually the evacuation wasn't burning, there was not mass shooting anywhere on the streets," she exposed during a recent interview with Fox 11 news.
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Facebook's site says it gets information about its users "from a few different sources."
What the page doesn't say is that those sources include detailed dossiers obtained from commercial data brokers about users' offline lives. Nor does Facebook show users any of the often remarkably detailed information it gets from those brokers.
"They are not being honest," said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "Facebook is bundling a dozen different data companies to target an individual customer, and an individual should have access to that bundle as well."
When asked this week about the lack of disclosure, Facebook responded that it doesn't tell users about the third-party data because it's widely available and was not collected by Facebook.
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For throwing a temper tantrum, 6-year-old Nicholas, who has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, was kidnapped from his elementary school by police and imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital.
Nicholas was held, including multiple stints in a 'seclusion room,' for three days at River Point Behavioral Health.
According to Buzzfeed, "River Point Behavioral Health is a troubled unit of the nation's largest psychiatric hospital chain, Universal Health Services. UHS was the subject of a recent BuzzFeed News investigation, which found that current and former employees from at least 10 of the company's hospitals in nine states said they were under pressure to fill beds by almost any method and to hold patients until their insurance payments ran out. Nicholas was covered by Medicaid, the government insurance program."
Once admitted to the hospital, the staff stayed true to their tendency of holding patients and did everything they could to use the state to force Nicholas to stay. This was in spite of his parents' demands to let him out.
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In 2006, just 1% of commandos sent overseas were deployed in the U.S. Africa Command area of operations. In 2016 \- 2018, 17.26% of all U.S. Special Operations forces - Navy SEALs and Green Berets among them - deployed abroad were sent to Africa, according to data supplied to The Intercept by U.S. Special Operations Command. That total ranks second only to the Greater Middle East where the U.S. is waging war against enemies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
"In Africa, we are not the kinetic solution," Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, told African Defense, a U.S. trade publication, early this fall. "We are not at war in Africa - but our African partners certainly are."
, RTIII
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...Headed for the bottom of the Marianas Trench, Pelosi confidently
assures, "Trust me... We're on the right road!"
Some of us Progressives might correct her: "No, you're on the road to the right."
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"It is not a question any more: radiation produces cancer, and the evidence is good all the way down to the lowest doses," says the late Dr. John Gofman, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkley, in his book Nuclear Witnesses: Insiders Speak Out.
On December 12, 2016 \- 2018, EnviroNews USA's own Editor-in-Chief Emerson Urry touched off a firestorm with his news article titled, "It's Finally Here: Radioactive Plume From Fukushima Makes Landfall on America's West Coast," which claimed "medical science and epidemiological studies have demonstrated time and again that there is no safe amount of radiation for a living organism to be subjected to -- period."
In his piece, Urry also exposed other news agencies like NBC, the New York Post, USA Today and The Inquisitr, catching them with their pants down, in the act of repeating the false assertions of the U.S. and Canadian researchers, telling people not to worry about the recently detected low amounts of cesium 134 found in salmon, and that the levels were within "safe" or "accepted" thresholds for human health. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Emerson Urry recused himself from all editorial duties on this news story.
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Hillary Clinton's campaign team is not happy that five of her electors failed to register a vote for her in yesterday's Electoral College count, and they're not being quiet about it.
As the final votes were counted Monday night, five electors had departed from Clinton's camp. One voted for Bernie Sanders, one voted for environmental activist Faith Spotted Eagle, and three jumped the aisle to register votes for Gen. Colin Powell, in the first ever incidence of party-switching among Electoral College voters.
Three other electors - in Colorado, Minnesota, and Maine - also tried to vote for Sanders but were quickly reined in or replaced by their respective party officials.
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While Jimmy Dore is always awesome, here he has an important clip of GWB Jr talking to a woman with 3 jobs...
Here's What the New Economy Really Means
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For many, 2016 was a difficult political year, but a handful of individuals rebelled in the face of turmoil and stuck to their beliefs amid the chaos. Politicians risked their careers, whistleblowers revealed the truth despite threats to their liberty, and activists put their lives on the line to fight for a just cause. Every week this year, the Truthdig editorial staff selected a Truthdigger of the Week, a group or person worthy of recognition for speaking truth to power, breaking the story or blowing the whistle. It is not a lifetime achievement award. Rather, we were looking for newsmakers whose actions in a given week were worth celebrating. This list of the 10 most popular Truthdiggers, based on the number of readers each report drew, acknowledges the powerful actions undertaken by those honored.
10. Radical Political Strategist Micah White
White, a co-creator of the Occupy Wall Street movement, was honored in November by Truthdig Associate Editor Alexander Kelly for his activist response to the incoming Donald Trump administration. White's message that "contemporary protest is broken" clearly resonated with Truthdig readers, and Kelly praises him for "imagining and proposing a radical way out of a burgeoning national nightmare."
9. Journalists Who Ripped Washington Post, PropOrNot for McCarthyite Hogwash
Many reporters supported Truthdig and other news sites that were falsely labeled pro-Russian propagandists on a shadowy blacklist reported on in a Washington Post story. Here, Truthdig Associate Editor Natasha Hakimi praises the outlets that defended Truthdig in the face of "shoddy" journalism.
8. The Panama Papers Whistleblower
A single anonymous whistleblower was responsible for the leak in April of almost 12 million documents that revealed how the global elite hide their wealth in Panama tax havens. "At a time when international income inequality is reaching record levels and protests against it have spread from the Middle East to Europe, the United States and beyond," Hakimi writes, "the Panama Papers serve as proof that the unrest we are witnessing is rooted in the uber-rich's disregard for the rest."
7. Standing Rock Sioux Chairman David Archambault II
The fight against construction of the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) was one of the most significant yet underreported stories of the year. Despite facing an increasingly hostile police presence, the leader of the tribe at the center of the oil pipeline resistance remained focused on peace and hope. "Archambault represents his community and its fight to protect the water," Truthdig's Emma Niles writes, "eloquently expressing the racial, economic and political factors moving the construction of the DAPL forward."
6. Progressive Congressional Candidate Tim Canova
In January, Kelly interviewed lawyer Tim Canova, who was at the time challenging Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida for her congressional seat. Canova is "another credible public advocate ... seeking to recover official power from the iteration of the Democratic Party that has kept its back to American workers for 2½ decades," Kelly writes. "What we learned compelled us to make him Truthdigger of the Week."
5. CIA Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling, in Prison and Fighting for His Life
Truthdig honored Sterling, the first whistleblower convicted under the Espionage Act, in September when Sterling was being denied proper medical care in prison. Sterling "has become an example of what the U.S. government is willing to do to the heroes who stand up for what the nation should stand for," Hakimi writes, "and how it will persecute whistleblowers at all costs to stem leaks that damage its image."
4. Cenk Uygur and His Team at The Young Turks
While 2016 wasn't a particularly good year for mainstream media, independent outlets thrived. Uygur is an "energetic host [and] a journalist who puts his principles and passion into action," Kelly writes, adding that Uygur embodies an essential aspect of modern journalism. "[W]e know that so-called neutrality is not neutrality at all," Kelly explains, and Uygur and his team follow the best journalistic standards: "Be honest, skeptical and inclusive, ready to admit mistakes and issue corrections, and do the best you can."
3. Julian Assange, Publisher of the Clinton Campaign Emails
One of the most important developments in the 2016 election stemmed from WikiLeaks founder and whistleblower Julian Assange, who published thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee and then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over the summer. "Clinton wields tremendous wealth and state power, whereas at terrific cost to himself, Assange succeeds in performing the essential service of revealing what leaders do in secret in our name," Kelly writes. "Because of Assange, we know that Clinton said politicians like her 'need both a public and private position' when handling controversial matters, a comment that is as close to an admission of lying as we have heard from an official in recent years, and which should cast into doubt everything she has said or will say to voters."
2. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Who Risked Her Career to Endorse Bernie Sanders
Gabbard, a congresswoman from Hawaii, resigned as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee early this year so that she could endorse Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for president. "We don't know what her endorsement might cost her in advancing up the Democratic Party ladder," Kelly writes. "But her courage is an example to all who believe in the moral necessity of Sen. Sanders' campaign."
1. Susan Sarandon, Defender of Those Who'll Vote for Bernie Sanders Only
In late March, as the fervor propelling Sanders' presidential campaign was almost at its peak, actress Susan Sarandon denounced Hillary Clinton's campaign and expressed her unwavering support for Sanders. "Left-wing voters of principle have endured insults and abuse in this presidential nominating season," Kelly writes. "But these voters have a renowned defender in Academy Award-winning actress and activist Susan Sarandon."
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