source: consortiumnews.com

Robert Parry, editor and publisher of Consortiumnews.com, died peacefully Saturday evening. In this tribute, his son Nat Parry describes Robert’s unwavering commitment to independent journalism.

Robert Parry, 1949-2018

By Nat Parry

It is with a heavy heart that we inform Consortiumnews readers that Editor Robert Parry has passed away. As regular readers know, Robert (or Bob, as he was known to friends and family) suffered a stroke in December, which – despite h

is own speculation that it may have been brought on by the stress of covering Washington politics – was the result of undiagnosed pancreatic cancer that he had been unknowingly living with for the past 4-5 years.

He unfortunately suffered two more debilitating strokes in recent weeks and after the last one, was moved to hospice care on Tuesday. He passed away peacefully Saturday evening. He was 68.consortiumnews.com Continue reading “In Memoriam – Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews”

Published on RT.COM: 20 Nov, 2017 19:58

Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, says the company will “engineer” specific algorithms for RT and Sputnik to make their articles less prominent on the search engine’s news delivery services.
“We are working on detecting and de-ranking those kinds of sites – it’s basically RT and Sputnik,” Schmidt said during a Q & A session at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada on Saturday, when asked about whether Google facilitates “Russian propaganda.”

Schmidt appearance begins at 1:07:00 mark, relevant question at 1:33:00

“We are well of aware of it, and we are trying to engineer the systems to prevent that [the content being delivered to wide audiences]. But we don’t want to ban the sites – that’s not how we operate.”

Continue reading “Google will ‘de-rank’ RT articles to make them harder to find”

October 11 2017     Although the U.S. news media’s fancies itself the world’s “gold standard,” it operates with stunning hypocrisy and huge blind spots, none bigger than its fawning coverage of Israel that ignores critics like Miko Peled, notes Rick Sterling.

By Rick Sterling on Consortium News

Despite the U.S. media’s extensive coverage of Israel, what Miko Peled says is seldom heard by Americans, although he was born in Jerusalem and comes from a famous Israeli family. Peled’s grandfather was one of the signers of the Israeli founding documents. His father was a soldier in the war which led to the creation of Israel and later a senior army general during the 1967 war. And one of Peled’s nieces was killed in a suicide bombing attack.

However, in contrast to what one might expect, Miko Peled is a voice of sharp criticism of Israel and Israeli policies. He does not mince his words. Israel is a “settler colonial state” and Israel does NOT have a “right to exist” as an apartheid state with preferential treatment based on ethnicity [……………]

continue on consortiumnews.com

Miko Peled spoke in Lafayette, California, in an event sponsored by Mt Diablo Peace & Justice Center (MDPJC) with co-sponsorship by Jewish Voice for Peace and others.  A video of this Lafayette presentation is on Vimeo  (Oktober, 6 2017).

Exclusive: The revelation that North Korea hacked into South Korea’s military secrets and found U.S. plans for a preemptive “decapitation” of Pyongyang’s leadership explains its rush to build a nuclear deterrent.

By Nicolas J S Davies

The Western media has been awash in speculation as to why, about a year ago, North Korea’s “crazy” leadership suddenly launched a crash program to vastly improve its ballistic missile capabilities. That question has now been answered.

Near the ceasefire line between North and South Korea, President Barack Obama uses binoculars to view the DMZ from Camp Bonifas, March 25, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In September 2016, North Korean cyber-defense forces hacked into South Korean military computers and downloaded 235 gigabytes of documents. The BBC has revealed that the documents included detailed U.S. plans to assassinate North Korea’s president, Kim Jong Un, and launch an all-out war on North Korea. The BBC’s main source for this story is Rhee Cheol-Hee, a member of the Defense Committee of the South Korean National Assembly […………………….]

Read the story on consortiumnews

[………] Here’s the bottom line: The United States has been planning to assassinate Kim Jong Un and to launch an all-out war on North Korea. There. You’ve heard it. Now, can you still be manipulated into believing that Kim Jong Un is simply “crazy” and North Korea is the gravest threat to world peace?

Or do you now understand that the United States is the real threat to peace in Korea, just as it was in Iraq, Libya and many other countries where the leaders were deemed “crazy” and U.S. officials (and the Western mainstream media) promoted war as the only “rational” alternative?

[Note FPSN: As quality journalism has no access to the Main Stream Media anymore, we assume it a duty to re-publish their articles on our Free Press Support Networks website.]

By Jonathan Cook

Published before, on:
CounterPunch , 27 June 2017
Global Research, June 28, 2017

Featured image: An area allegedly hit by the “sarin gas” attack in Khan Sheikhoun (Photo from Zaman al-Wasl)

Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the man who exposed the Mai Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and the US military’s abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2004, is probably the most influential journalist of the modern era, with the possible exception of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the pair who exposed Watergate.

For decades, Hersh has drawn on his extensive contacts within the US security establishment to bring us the story behind the official story, to disclose facts that have often proved deeply discomfiting to those in power and exploded the self-serving, fairy-tale narratives the public were expected to passively accept as news. His stature among journalists was such that, in a sea of corporate media misinformation, he enjoyed a small island of freedom at the elite, but influential, outlet of the New Yorker.

Paradoxically, over the past decade, as social media has created a more democratic platform for information dissemination, the corporate media has grown ever more fearful of a truly independent figure like Hersh. The potential reach of his stories could now be enormously magnified by social media. As a result, he has been increasingly marginalised and his work denigrated. By denying him the credibility of a “respectable” mainstream platform, he can be dismissed for the first time in his career as a crank and charlatan. A purveyor of fake news. Continue reading “Hersh’s New Syria Revelations Buried From View”

On April 6, United States President Donald Trump authorized an early morning Tomahawk missile strike on Shayrat Air Base in central Syria in retaliation for what he said was a deadly nerve agent attack carried out by the Syrian government two days earlier in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun. Trump issued the order despite having been warned by the U.S. intelligence community that it had found no evidence that the Syrians had used a chemical weapon.

The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack,  including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all U.S., allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region. Continue reading “Trump‘s Red Line”

If official human rights reports  get removed from publication, it’s our duty to get them back in the public as much as possible.

For that reason I copied it here.

An article of Richard Falk, one of the investigators/authors of the march 15 2017 UN report, that was immediately removed after pressure and treat from Israel and the US. Continue reading “UN Sponsored Report On Israel’s Responsibility For Apartheid In Relation To The Palestinian People”

The ESCWA report by Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley, entitled: 

Israel Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid  ,   has been removed from the UN ECSWA website.

It is available in pdf here

Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) head Rima Khalaf  was forced to resign for refusing to retract the damning report, calling Israel an apartheid state, an indisputable fact – written by Israel Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid  ,   has been removed from the UN ECSWA website.distinguished academics Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley.

They proved their accusation “beyond a reasonable doubt” – based on definitions of apartheid by the International Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (the Apartheid Convention) and Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Israel is guilty as charged. Continue reading “Israel commits the Crime of Apartheid – UN Agency Head was forced to resign for publishing the conclusion of the investigation”