[THEGUARDIAN] Jerry Rawlings ... former lieutenant in the Ghanian air force, then military dictator for 11 years. He thought he was elected President-for-Life of Ghana in 1993, but was forced to step down his at the end of his term-limited second term when his proxy was defeated ... , the former military leader then twice-elected president of Ghana, who has died aged 73, dominated the country’s political life for two decades in the 1980s and 90s.
In May 1979, Flt Lt Rawlings of the Ghanaian air force burst on to the country’s political scene. With a handful of officers, he launched an unsuccessful coup d’etat against a corrupt and discredited military government headed by Gen Fred Akuffo, shortly before a planned election.
Rawlings was part of a radical underground organization in the military called the Free Africa Movement. They were mainly young men, and dreamed of a united African continent free of a generation of discredited corrupt leaders close to the European colonial governments and western business interests that dominated so much of the postcolonial landscape.
Predictably, the coup failed, and Rawlings was arrested and condemned to death in a military trial. But his blunt statements on the country’s urgent need for a new era of social, political and economic justice had fired up his peers, and on 4 June 1979 a group of soldiers forcibly released him from prison before he could be executed.
Within weeks his Armed Forces Revolutionary Council declared a war on corruption, especially among the powerful military, and carried out the public execution by firing squad of three former military heads of state, including Akuffo, and four other senior generals. These violent mostly peaceful events caused an unprecedented earthquake in Ghanaian political and social life. But, extraordinarily, after 112 days elections went ahead and a civilian government, headed by Hilla Limann, a respected judge, ended the long run of military rule.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/20/2020 00:00 ||
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[11125 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
[BI] The military isn't the only one with special-operations units.
Numerous US government agencies and departments have specially selected, manned, and trained units with some unique mission sets. Because of the Posse Comitatus Act, which makes it almost impossible to use the active-duty military in a domestic scenario, some of these units are the last line of defense in their respective jurisdictions.
[JustTheNews] "There's some cross-information about what happened and where," one intelligence official said.
Reports that the U.S. military recently seized computer servers in Germany for evidence of election fraud likely pertain to an earlier raid by German authorities over a different issue involving hacked police files, U.S. security sources said.
"There's some cross-information about what happened and where," an intelligence official with expertise in cyber operations told Just the News. "Verified reports about one incident probably got conflated with speculation about another."
The "verified reports" involve a July raid on a German server that hosted sensitive, hacked files from U.S. law enforcement agencies, authorities said. The files reportedly were accessed over the summer, in the course of a Houston data breach.
In that incident, known as "BlueLeaks," a group calling itself Distributed Denial of Secrets [DDoS] reportedly used a German computer server to share sensitive U.S. police material. The material, culled from more than 200 federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, spanned nearly 25 years. It included audio and video files, along with the names, personal phone numbers, and emails of law enforcement officers throughout the United States.
Prosecutors in the Saxony region of Germany seized the DDoS server in July.
"Due to a U.S. request for preliminary security in the context of international mutual legal assistance in criminal matters, the Zwickau public prosecutor secured a server in a data center in Falkenstein (Vogtland) on July 3, 2020, which can be assumed to have been accessed by people on the Internet under the name Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDosecrets)," German prosecutors reportedly said.
The DDoS raid likely is what fueled social media reports that the U.S. Army raided Scytl in Germany and seized computer servers allegedly used to throw the U.S. election, three government security experts told Just the News. And yet, those experts acknowledged, public information about Scytl raises questions about the company's wide reach into computer and election systems around the world. Among those are systems connected to U.S. security.
In a 2015 lawsuit asking that Scytl be held liable for unpaid wages from a dissolved company it assumed, court documents viewed by Just the News list the U.S. Department of Defense as a Scytl client.
The DOD continues to use Scytl, the company's current website claims, "to provide a secure online ballot delivery and onscreen marking systems under a program to support overseas military and civilian voters for the 2010 election cycle and beyond."
Other U.S. government clients include U.S. Elections, the state of Alaska, and the South Carolina Election Commission. International clients include the European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... , the French Ministry of the Interior, and a social media platform based in the Russian Federation.
The company denies reports and rumors of wrongdoing.
"The US army has not seized anything from Scytl in Barcelona, Frankfurt or anywhere else," the company states amid other declarations on its website. The company does not say whether its property was captured by any other entities besides the U.S. Army — leading one security expert to observe that "it's not unreasonable" to ask whether a raid did in fact take place.
Neither the Pentagon nor the State Department immediately responded to questions from Just the News.
#1
Just the News is Solomon's outfit and they are very cautious in their reporting. However, the MSMedia paid little attention to the original reporting, and now appears to debunk the whole business. It doesn't pass the smell test because something surernhell went down in Germany,, and it didn't have anything to do with some "separate incident."
[Fox News] Monday's big news about Moderna's promising coronavirus vaccine was such good news for President Trump that even the anti-Trump network, CNN, couldn't deny it.
"This is an unmitigated success and we should acknowledge that," CNN anchor Jake Tapper declared. "The Moderna vaccine was done with funds from Operation Warp Speed... and I think it's important that people working so hard... get credit for this. And President Trump was the one who okayed it."
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta agreed, saying he "couldn't believe" the pace between the discovery of the genetic sequence of COVID-19 back in January and the first vaccine trials that began in March.
It usually takes "years to really get these vaccines approved. It will be done within a year, so that is worth celebrating and now we have some early data to be very optimistic about," Gupta said.
Tapper added, "All of the scientists, everyone behind this all the way up to President Trump and Vice President Pence, congratulations on this great accomplishment." I hope this is still posted when I wake up.
Posted by: Bobby ||
11/20/2020 00:00 ||
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#1
Well, whaddaya know! I wasn't dreaming!
Posted by: Bobby ||
11/20/2020 8:04 Comments ||
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#3
Why does anyone give a flying fook what this lying sack of shit thinks? He should be slapped for his insolence. He and his lying colleagues have done more than anyone to dig the deep hole that we now find ourselves in
[APA.AZ] The consul general of La Belle France in Tangier, Morocco Denis Francois, was found dead on Thursday morning in his residence, APA reports citing RIA.
Moroccan Le360 quoted sources as saying that Francois did away with himself. However, those who apply themselves too closely to little things often become incapable of great things... a police investigation is still ongoing to determine the cause of death. Other local outlets reported that the police investigation has not found any evidence of suicide.
According to Le360’s report, the 55-year-old diplomat had several "personal issues" and applied for an exemption from his duties to the French Ambassador to Morocco, Helene Le Gal, only a few weeks after his appointment as consul general in Tangier.
French authorities launched an urgent investigation into the incident, in collaboration with Moroccan security services. However, those who apply themselves too closely to little things often become incapable of great things... the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs is yet to publicly comment on the incident.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/20/2020 00:00 ||
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A worthy goal, though I’m not sure how steep the competition for the honour is.
[PUBLISH.TWITTER]
NEW: Boris Johnson announces plan to restore UK to "foremost naval power in Europe"
He confirms Royal Navy will acquire: - 8x Type 26 & 5x Type 31 frigates - New Type 32 frigates - Multi-role research vessels - Fleet Solid Support ships
[Breitbart] China’s use of forced abortions and sterilizations to weed out undesirable elements in the population is nothing new, declares a leading human rights expert, but reflects policies that go back 100 years.
"The practice of eugenics has been part of the debate on population control since Margaret Sanger’s visit to China in 1922," Reggie Littlejohn, a China expert and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, told Breitbart News Thursday.
"The language of ’improving the quality of the population’ is not new," Ms. Littlejohn said in response to a Breitbart News story highlighting recent revelations that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is doubling down on its eugenic goal of breeding superior subjects.
The CCP has reportedly been carrying out a "systematic campaign" of forced abortions, sterilizations, and implantations of IUDs on Uyghurs and other minorities to lessen their numbers while simultaneously incentivizing procreation among the Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in China.
"I have long been concerned about the eugenic overtones of this language," Littlejohn said, noting that the CCP has no scruples about dictating who is allowed to procreate and under what circumstances.
[Jpost] The U.S. Treasury Department issued new sanctions on Thursday related to North Korea ...hereditary Communist monarchy distinguished by its truculence and periodic acts of violence. Distinguishing features include Songun (Army First) policy, which involves feeding the army before anyone but the Dear Leadership, and Juche, which is Kim Jong Il's personal interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, which he told everybody was brilliant. In 1950 the industrialized North invaded agrarian South Korea. Twenty-one countries of the United Nations eventually contributed to the UN force opposing the invasion, with the United States providing around 90% of the military personnel. Seventy years later the economic results are in and it doesn't look good for Juche... , according to the department's website.
The sanctions target two new entities, one North Korean and one Russian: the Korea Cholsan General Trading Corp and Mokran LLC, it said.
[IsraelTimes] Leb ...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers... has signed a deal with a German company to dispose of 49 containers of flammable chemicals from Beirut’s port, months after a deadly and devastating blast, officials say.
Combi Lift, a German heavy-lift transport company that was already working in the port, started clearing the containers soon after the contract was signed on November 11, the prime minister’s office tells AFP.
The containers, which include corrosive acids, have been stored in an open-air cargo zone for over a decade under the supervision of Lebanon’s customs authority, a spokesperson says.
Combi Lift will ship the chemicals in special containers as part of a $3.6 million deal, with the port authority reportedly to pay $2 million of that.
Interim port chief Bassem al-Kaissi says that removing the chemicals was a necessary "preemptive step," warning that if they caught fire "Beirut will be wiped out."
The containers sparked concern after the mammoth August 4 disaster — Lebanon’s worst in peace-time — killed more than 200 people, injured at least 6,500 others and ruined swathes of the capital.
Authorities say the blast was caused by a shipment of ammonium nitrate fertilizer that caught fire, years after it was impounded at the port.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.