The Digger

5 Jun, 2019    When, eight years late, the European Arrest Warrant request for Assange was finally put before a Swedish court, the  court refused  to issue it. Readers of this blog are amongst the very few people who have  had the chance to learn  the information that the original European Arrest Warrant for Julian Assange from Sweden was not issued by any court but by a prosecutor; that this was upheld in the UK Supreme Court despite the Court’s open acknowledgement that this was not what the UK Parliament had intended by the phrase that the warrant must come from a “judicial authority”; and that the law had been changed immediately thereafter so it could not be done again. Consequently in seeking a new European Arrest Warrant against Assange, Swedish prosecutors had finally, eight years on, to ask a court for the warrant. And the court looked at the case and declined, saying that the move would be disproportionate. It therefore remains the case tha...

Video sharing platform enforces new rules against “extremist content” YouTube has just announced they have changed their “community standards” to combat “extremist content” on their platform. This is just the latest step in the war against free speech online. This move comes as no surprise – the press have been laying the groundwork for this for weeks, even months. Three weeks ago  Buzzfeed  reported that YouTube’s monetised chat was  “pushing creators to more extreme content” , and just yesterday it was reported that YouTube’s recommend algorithm was  “sexualising children”. You cannot move for stories about  how bad YouTube is . Given that, it comes as no surprise that the mainstream media are celebrating this latest “purge”. The Guardian  reported: YouTube bans videos promoting Nazi ideology Whilst the  Financial Times  went with: YouTube to ban supremacist videos Both these headlines are wildly inaccurate, deliberat...

"In 2011, as the Great Recession hit public coffers, Wisconsin’s Republican governor Scott Walker addressed a purported budget crisis by attacking public workers. Walker’s signature bill, Act 10, struck down public-sector unions’ ability to automatically collect dues and limited bargaining to wages capped at inflation. Teachers could no longer negotiate class sizes. Nurses were forced to accept mandatory overtime. Unions lost money and members. Similar anti-union legislation quickly spread across the United States. These state-level offensives culminated in a national policy shift in the summer of 2018, when the Supreme Court’s  Janus  ruling made it illegal for public-sector unions to automatically gather dues from employees. Critics wrung their hands and pronounced it a nail in the coffin for public unions. What started as a Wisconsin union problem has now become a national one. Yet today, teacher militancy sweeps the nation. Teachers from West Virginia’s fifty-five count...

4 June 2019 The historian David Garrow made his reputation with his 1986 biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,  Bearing the Cross , which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. As the title suggests, Garrow provided a mostly admiring depiction of the civil rights leader as a heroic figure and political martyr. It is all the more shameful that Garrow has lent his reputation and standing to a political smear campaign, writing a diatribe against Dr. King published Thursday in the right-wing British magazine  Standpoint . The article bears the headline, “The troubling legacy of Martin Luther King,” along with the subhead, “Newly-revealed FBI documents portray the great civil rights leader as a sexual libertine who ‘laughed’ as a forcible rape took place.”  Standpoint  is a right-wing publication financed by corporate contributors (including British American Tobacco), whose launch in 2008 was hailed by the  National Review,  the ultra-right magazine fou...

If Tehran blocks the Strait of Hormuz it could send the price of oil soaring and cause a global recession June 05, 2019  Unlike Deep Purple’s legendary ‘Smoke on the Water’ – “We all came out to Montreux, on the Lake Geneva shoreline”, the 67th  Bilderberg group meetings  produced no fire and no smoke at the luxurious Fairmont Le Montreux Palace Hotel. The  130 elite guests  had a jolly good – and theoretically quiet – time at the self-billed “informal discussion forum concerning major issues”. As usual, at least two-thirds were European decision-makers, with the rest coming from North America. The fact that a few major players in this Atlanticist Valhalla are closely associated with or directly interfering with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel – the central bank of central banks – is of course just a minor detail. The major issue discussed this year was “A Stable Strategic Order”, a lofty endeavor that can be interpreted either as...

So it appears we managed to survive another terrifying Quds Day in Berlin. It was certainly touch and go there for a while, what with the media issuing hysterical warnings about the hordes of  “Hamas and Hezbollah supporters, neo-Nazis, and conspiracy theorists”  that were going to materialize out of the ether, goose-step down the Kurfürstendamm, and reenact Kristallnacht, or something. The city was braced for  an all-out Perso-Palestinian Quds Day Pogrom, which is always a threat on Quds Day in Berlin, but the hysteria level this year was elevated, due to the  Anti-Semitism Pandemic  that mysteriously erupted in 2016 for no apparent reason whatsoever. OK, what, you’re probably asking, is Quds Day? It’s an annual event initiated by Iran to show support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism. It takes place on the last Friday of Ramadan, in opposition to Israel’s Jerusalem Day, the national holiday commemorating Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem in...

June 4th, 2019 A Swedish court has blocked prosecutors’ request for a European Arrest Warrant forcing an interview with Assange in London, and  Politico  reports there will be no indictment of Assange on Vault 7. Special to Consortium News I mprisoned  WikiLeaks  publisher Julian Assange scored two legal victories on Monday when a Swedish court refused prosecutors’ request to have Assange arrested and extradited from Britain to Sweden, while the U.S. Justice Dept. said it would not prosecute Assange for the publication of the CIA Vault 7 files, according to a report in  Politico.  The Uppsala District Court   rejected  a request for a European Arrest Warrant for Assange based on a  reopened  2010 investigation into sexual assault allegations that has been twice dropped before. Without the warrant Assange cannot be extradited to Sweden to be questioned.  Eva-Marie Persson, Sweden’s deputy director of public prosecu...