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Image from southafricatoday  On June 7th, 2018, the Constitutional Court in South Africa, overruled a lower court's decision that parts of South Africa's gun laws were unconstitutional. The laws were absolute, and did not allow for appeal or legitimate reasons for delay, such as hospitalization or death. From citizen.co.za: Section 24 of the Act requires that any person who seeks to renew a licence must do so 90 days before its expiry date. Section 28 stipulates that if a firearm licence has been cancelled‚ the firearm must be disposed of or forfeited to the state. A 60-day timeframe was...

Ron Dellums, who served as Oakland's 48th mayor and served 13 terms as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, has died, his nephew said. Ben Bartlett, Dellums' nephew and a Berkeley city councilman, told KTVU on Monday that Dellums died of cancer in Washington, D.C. on Sunday evening. He was 82.

This means a major terrorist force was in the final stages of preparation for a catastrophic attack in Toronto. They were thwarted by two flukes, not by our security services. The article “Did we just dodge 9/11 2.0?” responded to revelations appearing in a July 27, 2018 CBC News report. Below is the sentence from that report describing the haul taken from the Danforth shooter’s brother’s home: “Durham Region Police later obtained a search warrant and found 33 firearms, ammunition and more than 40 kilograms of the potentially lethal drug carfentanil.”

The U.S. ambassador to Germany urged Berlin on Tuesday to stop Iran withdrawing large sums of cash from bank accounts in Germany to offset the effect of new U.S. sanctions imposed after Washington withdrew from a 2015 nuclear deal. Richard Grenell, a longtime critic of the accord, told the mass-circulation daily Bild that the U.S. government was extremely concerned about Tehran’s plans to transfer hundreds of millions of euros in cash to Iran. “We encourage the highest levels of the German government to intervene and stop the plan,” Grenell said. […] Bild first reported on Monday that German authorities were...

Deep in your heart you knew there are tax-payer’s money wasted somewhere in the whole Russian spy drama. Why did the Obama administration and the Russian government wanted to get rid of them so fast? We may never know. However we can prove that USAID funded the agro- and eco-tourism project in 2004 run by the company 4Vlast for which Anya Chapman and Vasily Kushchenko worked at the time. As you know from the previous research Chapman was the London contact person for the 4Vlast firm, Kushchenko was running their tourism firm and worked for the 4 Vlast Mrs. World...

Investigative journalist Jenny Moore was found dead in her room at the Radisson Country Inn & Suites in Washington D.C. on Monday. She had been investigating claims of alleged involvement of former President William J. Clinton in sex trafficking. Four weeks before her death, Moore had provided information from interviews with the alleged victim to the Department of Homeland Security and allegations against Clinton.

Trump met Erdogan at a Nato meeting early in June. Their discussions were very friendly, and after they ended, Trump thought they had made a deal: Trump would ask Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to release a Turkish citizen, Ebru Ozkan, arrested because of alleged terrorist links to Hamas, and then Turkey would release pastor Andrew Brunson, who was arrested in Turkey on October 2016 on charges of espionage, which the US considers are bogus charges. So on July 14, Trump called Netanyahu and requested that Ozkan be released, and she was released the next day. But Brunson was not...

Smoking a joint can get you disqualified for a security clearance but vote for a Communist and you too could become the Director of the CIA. John Brennan voted for Communist Gus Hall in 1976 and was himself a Communist sympathizer. This is the adoring portrait from The Intelligencer in 2016: In 1976, future CIA director John Brennan was a college student disgusted by Watergate and the “system” that produced it. As the young Brennan surveyed the political landscape, only one candidate seemed to be speaking the truth about the need for real change (and/or the dictatorship of the proletariat)...

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly asked President Trump to nominate Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick this week; urging the Commander-in-Chief to put forward Merrick Garland to replace outgoing Justice Anthony Kennedy. According to the Hill, Schumer made the request in private; asking Trump to advance Garland after his nomination process stalled in 2016. “A person familiar with the conversation said on Thursday that Schumer told Trump in a phone call that lasted less than five minutes on Tuesday that the move would help unify the country,” writes the Hill. The Democratic leader penned an editorial in the New York...

Exporting companies are using Chinese ships, planes, and trucks to transport dead Americans across the world for research purposes, according to a Thursday report from Reuters. A Hong Kong flagged cargo ship departed South Carolina in July carrying 6,000 pounds of human remains valued at $67,204. The container’s temperature was set to 5 degrees Fahrenheit to prevent the parts from spoiling. Relatives of the dead, meanwhile, did not realize their loved ones’ remains were being dismembered and sent to Europe and elsewhere, the report notes. Body brokers like Oregon-based MedCure rely on lax regulations to export heads, shoulders, knees and...

Has a trade war started? The stock market doesn’t suggest that a full-scale trade fight between China and the U.S. has erupted, but a tweet from Ray Dalio, founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, implies otherwise. Friday afternoon, Dalio tweeted: “Today is the first day of the war with China.” Today is the first day of the war with China. — Ray Dalio (@RayDalio) July 6, 2018 The tweet from the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, which manages some $160 billion, comes after the U.S. slapped levies on $34 billion of 25% on China’s exports at midnight, and...

On Tuesday August 18th, I had the opportunity to talk to, be interviewed by and brief, the person described as the “main guy”, the “central investigator”, “the guy who coordinates all investigative aspects” behind the John Durham investigation. His name is William Aldenberg, and before getting to the substance of the conversation some background context is needed. On June 7, 2018, an indictment against Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director James Wolfe was unsealed. Approximately six weeks later, July 21, 2018, the DOJ mysteriously declassified and publicly released the Carter Page FISA application. That’s when I noticed the first two documents...

MP Materials, which runs the sole operating rare earths mine in the United States, is an unusual victim in the year-long tit-for-tat trade war between the two largest economies on the planet, as the conflict looks set to open up a new battlefront over technology. The operator of the Mountain Pass mine in California said it will kick-start its own processing operation by the end of 2020, after China last week more than doubled an import duty on concentrates to 25 per cent effective June 1. MP exports pellets – ground-up ores that contain oxides of rare earth elements –...

U.S. regulators Friday approved the first treatment for smallpox — a deadly disease that was wiped out four decades ago — in case the virus is used in a terror attack. Smallpox, which is highly contagious, was eradicated worldwide by 1980 after a huge vaccination campaign. But people born since then haven’t been vaccinated, and small samples of the smallpox virus were saved for research purposes, leaving the possibility it could be used as a biological weapon. Maker SIGA Technologies of New York has already delivered 2 million treatments that will be stockpiled by the government, which partially paid for...

A former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) employee has pleaded guilty to charges related to the leaking of classified information to two journalists, the Justice Department (DOJ) said. Henry Kyle Frese, 31, pleaded guilty on Thursday to the willful transmission of top-secret national defense information to journalists. He faces up to 10 years in prison. Frese was arrested when he arrived to work at a DIA facility in Virginia in October last year where he worked as a counterterrorism analyst. The 31-year-old—who held top-secret government security clearance—was accused of helping the journalists research information on a classified United States government computer...

Hope. Change. Jihad. Iyman Faris, 49, was sentenced in 2003 for aiding and abetting al-Qaida by scoping out the iconic New York bridge as a part of a plot to cut through the cables supporting the structure. He had met with Osam bin Laden in Afghanistan and worked with 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Faris is set to be released on Dec. 23, 2020, but a court filing last year in a U.S. District Court argued that Faris lied on immigration papers and that his terrorist affiliations demonstrated a lack of commitment to the Constitution.

Police and a Prince William County magistrate have opened an investigation into New York Times reporter Stephanie Saul for breaking and entering in the apartment of a Corey Stewart campaign staffer in Woodbridge, Virginia.Stewart U.S. Senate campaign staffer Brian Landrum and a house guest have filed a police report after the house guest witnessed Stephanie Saul inside Landrum’s apartment Wednesday July 18 at 2:15 PM. Brian Landrum was at work and he was not in the apartment at the time.The eyewitness was able to identify New York Times reporter Stephanie Saul as the intruder. Saul, who won the Pulitzer Prize...

Investigation into New York Times reporter Stephanie Saul for breaking and entering in the apartment of a Corey Stewart campaign staffer in Woodbridge, Virginia. Stewart U.S. Senate campaign staffer Brian Landrum and a house guest have filed a police report after the house guest witnessed Stephanie Saul inside Landrum’s apartment Wednesday July 18 at 2:15 PM. Brian Landrum was at work and he was not in the apartment at the time. The eyewitness was able to identify New York Times reporter Stephanie Saul as the intruder.

On Tuesday, Virginia’s general assembly celebrated 400 years since a legislative body was formed by the colonists of old Jamestown. As a member of the House of Delegates, I was given a front-row seat at the festivities. Unfortunately, the celebration, which was intended to be a nonpartisan reflection on our commonwealth’s complicated history, was tarnished by the presence of President Donald Trump, a man whose views are antithetical to the values that the event sought to celebrate: democracy, representation, and the ability of immigrants to seek refuge and self-governance in a new land.

The woman who helped fund Nxivm and the group's leader Keith Raniere with her family fortune has been arrested and is set to be indicted on federal charges Tuesday afternoon. Clare Bronfman, the heir to a multi-billion dollar liquor fortune, is accused of racketeering conspiracy in the new superseding indictment in the case. That indictment also accuses Nancy Salzman, her daughter Lauren and Nxivm bookkeeper Kathy Russell of the same offenses. This brings the total number of members arrested to six, with leader Keith Raniere and his right-hand woman Allison Mack having already been indicted back in May.