The Digger

"Christian right “fundamentalists” linked to the Trump administration and Steve Bannon are among a dozen American groups that have poured at least $50 million of “dark money” into Europe over the last decade, according to a new analysis by  openDemocracy . Between them, these groups have backed ‘armies’ of ultra-conservative lawyers and political activists, as well as ‘family values’ campaigns against LGBT rights, sex education and abortion – and a number appear to have increasing links with Europe’s far right. They are spending money on a scale “not previously imagined,” according to lawmakers and human rights advocates, who have called our findings “shocking.” Reacting to openDemocracy’s findings, a cross-party group of more than 40 MEPs has called on the EU’s transparency tsar Frans Timmermans to look into the influence of “US Christian fundamentalists… with the greatest urgency” ahead of May’s European Parliament elections. . ." https://truthout.org/articles/trump-

"Becoming radicalized in a small town by yourself, seemingly in the “middle of nowhere,” can often be one of the most difficult experiences you may ever encounter. But even harder than the feeling of being adrift can be the desperation of not knowing how to go about attempting to make the leap from being just an individual with a set of ideas to someone that is part of a movement and specifically, a group of people who are organized in a set area, acting in concert, with that movement." https://popularresistance.org/get-up-and-get-going-how-to-form-a-group/

This is a long one, which I'm just starting to read. The link I'm giving (to part 4) has links to the first three parts. The titles of the four parts are  A Four-Part Interview With Michael Hudson About His Forthcoming Book The Collapse of Antiquity (Part 1) Mixed Economies Today, Compared To Those Of Antiquity (Part 2) The Inherent Financial Instability in Western Civilization’s DNA (Part 3) A New “Reality Economics” Curriculum Is Needed (Part 4) https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/the-delphic-oracle-was-their-davos-a-four-part-interview-with-michael-hudson-a-new-reality-economics-curriculum-is-needed-part-4.html

6 April 2019 Rapes, murders, beatings, stabbings, mutilations and arson are rampant. Pleas for help, scrawled in blood, stain the walls from prisoners held in solitary confinement. Fifteen suicides have been recorded in the last 15 months. This is not the description of a torture chamber in el-Sisi’s Egypt or Bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia. Nor is it about the abuse of detainees at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay or a CIA black site. These are the  nightmare conditions  in the Alabama state-run prison system, described in a Justice Department report released this week. They constitute a gross violation of the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. More than 2,000 photos of abuse in one Alabama prison given to the media by the Southern Poverty Law Center in advance of the report’s release depict the gruesome reality of the conditions detailed in hundreds of interviews with prisoners and their families conduc

April 4, 2019 On 23 February, Oluwole Ilesanmi, a Christian street preacher, was approached by two uniformed police officers outside an underground station in north London. Donned with an earpiece microphone and a bible, Ilesanmi had been proselytizing to people as they passed on the sidewalk. In a video of the exchange, which has since gone viral, one of the officers says that if he doesn’t stop what he’s doing and leave, he’ll be arrested. Ilesanmi quickly declares his intention to continue preaching, and—within seconds—the officer makes good on his promise: he’s stripped of his bible, handcuffed and dragged away. When questioned by a bystander filming the arrest, the officer reportedly said that Ilesanmi was being detained for  Islamophobia . This, presumably, was a reference to his attempt, moments earlier, to convert a Muslim. The arrest and subsequent release of a street preacher for a speech crime is not the only sign there’s something rotten in the state of England. Three

WikiLeaks has quoted a “high-level” Ecuadorian government source as saying that Julian Assange could be imminently expelled from Ecuador’s London embassy and that Quito has an agreement with the UK to arrest him. Scene outside London embassy at 4:30 am Friday morning.  (Ruptly/YouTube screenshot) By Joe Lauria Special to Consortium News W ikiLeaks warned Thursday that its founder “will be expelled within ‘hours to days'” from Ecuador’s London embassy and that Ecuador has an agreement with Britain to have him arrested. President Lenin Moreno will use the pretext of a scandal engulfing his presidency to oust Assange, a “high level source” in the Ecuador government told WikiLeaks.  WikiLeaks ✔ @wikileaks BREAKING: A high level source within the Ecuadorian state has told @ WikiLeaks that Julian Assange will be expelled within "hours to days" using the # INAPapers offshore scandal as a pretext--and that it already has an agreement

Published on  April 1, 2019   The crowd outside the auditorium was growing larger and louder. Controversy had arisen over the “Panel on Religious Extremism in the Middle East” that I had organized at my University. A petition to cancel the event in the wake of the horrific New Zealand massacre had been circulated among the student body during the previous week, forcing my co-organizers and me to defend ourselves against accusations of Islamophobia. Months of work had gone into the event, and I had even managed to secure funding for the speakers, on the condition that the event went ahead. At that moment, it looked like I was going to fail. The Students for Democratic Society were protesting and they spooked the president of College Republicans who was now considering cancelling it. Finally, one of our panellists—an Imam—managed to persuade the College Republican president to go ahead.   Despite the constant heckling during the speakers’ remarks and the Q&A session that followe