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French riot police (CRS) are alleged to have begun deploying assault rifles with live ammunition for the first time during the ninth weekend of protest in a row by the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement. French officers were caught on video brandishing what appeared to be Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifles on the streets of the French capital near the Arc de Triomphe on Saturday, the Daily Mail reports. Several users on Twitter posted other pictures of officers armed with rifles, with one user claiming he had counted at least a dozen armed officers at around 3 p.m. near...

Live coverage of the run up to tonight's BREXIT vote in Parliament.

"I don't think the media has been very fair to the gilets jaunes" Yellow Vests Protester Michael Bonjour In Bourges, France 1/12/2019 "I've been to several of the protests in Paris and the things I've seen...police officers hitting people who weren't doing anything wrong four or five times, sometimes over the head. Horrible injuries, with people (gilets jaunes) covered in blood" Yellow Vests Protester Michael Bonjour In Bourges France 1/12/2019 On Saturday Yellow Vests protesters expressed their dissatisfaction with media coverage of their protest. Both government and "private" media are seen as giving a one sided picture of things with...

BRUSSELS are likely to buckle to Britain’s key Brexit demands, due to uproar among EU countries over fears of an economic decline in the case of a no deal departure. The EU27 will give in to Prime Minister Theresa May’s demands to make the Irish border backstop a legally temporary measure. The key British demand is the only obstacle holding up Mrs May’s deal from passing in Parliament. The DUP and dozens of Brexiteers have vowed to vote down the deal this month unless changes are made to the backstop.

BRUSSELS has warned the remaining 27 European Union countries that they must urgently explain how their airline licenses comply with the bloc’s rules on ownership or face losing their rights to fly after Brexit. In a letter sent last week, Violeta Bulc, the EU commissioner responsible for transport, revealed not every national government had set out detailed plans on how airlines would meet “ownership and control requirements in all possible scenarios” of Brexit.

French riot police are now using semi-automatic weapons with live ammunition against Yellow Vest protestors as Macron's law and order crisis spirals

Germany's defense minister has revealed a controversial European joint army is "already taking shape"- thanks to her French allies. Germany and France are now the "driving forces" in European defense and they would stand together in the face of any land assault, said Ursula von der Leyen.

Good Morning. The third attempt to form a new Swedish government since last September's General Election is underway this week..... The British Prime Minister Theresa May making her final pitch for her controversial Brexit plan considered a sellout to the European Union by those who campaigned for a total separation from the EU when Brexit was approved in the June 2016 referendum..... The leading political party in the polls in France right now, the National Rally led by Marine Le Pen, held a national convention over the weekend to roll out its list of candidates for the European Parliament elections...

BOULOGNE-SUR-MER, France — There is disquiet along the cold, foggy quays of this major French fishing port facing Britain. Captain after captain, returning to Boulogne-sur-Mer in squat fishing boats with the day’s haul of crab and sole, has the same story: Their boats are being broken into. The suspected culprits, according to the fishermen and local officials? Smugglers, and their migrant clients, who are intent on reaching Britain and are looking for vessels to cross the forbidding waters of the English Channel. A few of the stolen boats have even been taken to sea. Since the start of Europe’s migration...

More than 84,000 people took part in the protests in Paris, Marseille, Bordeaux, Lyon, Strasbourg, and other French cities on Saturday. Clashes eventually erupted at the iconic Champs Ulysses and Arc de Triomphe, with police using tear gas and water cannons to calm the angry crowds, RT reports. In Paris alone, 156 people were arrested during the standoff, with most of them put in custody, the law enforcers said. In Nimes, protesters attempted to storm City Hall and police deployed tear gas against them. Clashes were also reported in Bourges in central France, where the local authorities said that 5,000...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said on Saturday he will force a vote soon on a resolution to disapprove the Trump administration's decision to relax sanctions on three Russian companies connected to oligarch Oleg Deripaska…{snip} ...The U.S. Treasury announced on Dec. 20 that it would lift sanctions imposed in April on the core businesses of Deripaska, including aluminum giant Rusal its parent En+ and power firm EuroSibEnergo, watering down the toughest penalties imposed since Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea. After lobbying by European governments that followed the imposition of sanctions, Washington postponed enforcement of the sanctions...

Lucky France. The yellow vest protests are showing no signs of letting up. In fact, France is revving up for a new round from les gilets jaunes, so it's going to get ugly once again. Ahead of that, the tax-protesting revolutionaries, who lit the bonfire last November over the French government's scheme to raise fuel taxes in the name of "going green," have not only forced the unpopular government of President Emmanuel Macron to delay its much loathed fuel tax, but taken the battle to a related quality-of-life front that hurts them a lot: speed cameras. Those Orwellian devices that...

The police said ha that 50-thousand protested last week, but this week they say the number was up to 84-thousand. The media locally is admitting that today's protests were predominately peaceful in France. The Interior Minister for the government of President Emmanuel Macron Christophe Castaner heaped praise on the police, working long hours without being fully compensated for their overtime, receiving one-time partial payments in the hundreds of dollars for thousands of dollars worth of work in the last two months of 2018. Some eight thousand protesters estimated in Paris. Other statistics included 6700 for the protest called in the...

Germany’s defence minister has confirmed that “a united EU military is becoming a reality,” after her ally and Chancellor Angela Merkel backed Emmanuel Macron’s call for a “real European army.” “Europe’s army is already taking shape,” Ursula von der Leyen wrote in an opinion piece for Handelsblatt on Thursday. “Germany and France are the driving forces in defense,” Ms von der Leyen boasted, adding that “We’re moving even further ahead with our close partner France” after the two countries agreed to sign a “new Elysèe Treaty” which, amongst other efforts to, in effect, merge aspects of the two countries, includes...

Good Morning. Our top Newsdump story comes with President Trump's announcement of a more secure future for some foreigners working in the United States. The President says the H1B visas will be reformed and streamlined offering the foreign workers who are in this country on them a pathway to citizenship..... Civil litigation is affected by the situation as well including the wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of LaVoy Finicum, the Oregon Standoff protest spokesman gunned down by an Oregon State trooper in an FBI led operation.... The Act 9 of the Yellow Vests protest underway in France today........

(LATEST INFORMATION AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST) And here we are early in the morning in the USA, already a winter's morning in France with a late sunrise and as the day progresses we will see what kind of protest activity will emerge. A week of intense government propaganda with government media and "private" media of the big coroporations aligned with the regime, if you will, of banker turned politician Emmanuel Macron........

Pictures shared on social media show fire engines swarmed the area with reports a number of people have been injured MULTIPLE people are reported to have been injured after a massive explosion rocked Paris this morning. Police confirmed a blast had taken place on Saturday morning on Rue de Treviso the 9th district of the French capital. The cause of the explosion is not yet known, however there are reports that it was due to a gas leak in a bakery.

After plans were laid for a Yellow Vests protest in Boruges, France, a city of some 66-thousand about a 150 miles from Paris, the prefect of the area called Cher has announced a protest ban for tomorrow. Catherine Ferrier told BFM-TV this morning that she is signing a decree to ban demonstrations in the historic city center and will only allow protest on the periphery of the city. Metro stations are being closed in Paris and an exclusion zone including part of the Champs-Elysees, the Palace de la Concorde, the Elysee Palace and the Ministry of the Interior is established...

As we enter the Friday-Saturday news window when things happen to avoid publicity about them one wonders what might be next in the dispute between President Trump and Democrats over funding a barrier on the southern border.... The Battle of Brexit. Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn on the attack ahead of next Tuesday's expected vote rejecting Prime Minister Theresa May's proposal for withdrawal from the European Union..... To France where a cabinet minister in the government of President Emmanuel Macron says she is looking into foreign power giving support to the Yellow Vests protests..... US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo talking...

Many Yellow Vests, whose protests grew from an objection to a “green” tax on fuel — now abandoned — which was seen as falling disproportionately on the non-metropolitan working class, see the country’s thousands of speed cameras as part of a “racket” designed to generate extra revenue for the state rather than preserving life, especially since the speed limit was dropped to 50 miles per hour on many roads in 2018. They did indeed raise over a billion euros in fines in 2017, according to the Court of Auditors, and were expected to raise significantly more in 2019.