“Mueller begins, on Page 1, with this assertion: ‘The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.’ Maybe so, but Mueller, who is not averse to editorializing and contextualizing elsewhere in the report, gives readers no historical background or context for this large generalization. In particular, was the interference — or ‘meddling,’ as media accounts characterize it — more or less ‘sweeping and systematic’ than was Washington’s military intervention in the Russian civil war in 1918 or its very intrusive campaign to re-elect Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996 — or, on the other side…

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“Harvard University political scientist Joseph Nye cites the precedent set by the 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement that sought to limit behavior on the high seas that might lead to escalation and war. Says Nye, ‘Skeptics object that such an arrangement is impossible, owing to the differences between American and Russian values. But even greater ideological differences did not prevent agreements related to prudence during the Cold War.'”

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Wesibrot and Sachs, two noted economists, co-authored a just-released report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research estimating that U.S. Sanctions on Venezuela are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

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“The Treaty seeks to regulate the $100 billion global arms trade, requiring governments to assess the risk of violations of international human rights and humanitarian law before they authorize an arms deal, to not transfer arms where they are likely to end up in the hands of terrorists and organized criminal groups.”

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The defendants are Elizabeth McAlister (the widow of Phil Berrigan), Martha Hennessy, granddaughter of Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day, Stephen Kelly S.J., Clare Grady, Patrick O’Neill, Mark Colville, and Carmen Trotta.

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“Clearly, Facebook is preparing for battle and hiring a government insider to lead it. But let’s remember that in the early 1900s, AT&T was also proficient at playing inside baseball. AT&T settled an early antitrust investigation with the Department of Justice but it was a settlement that pulled the wool over regulators’ eyes. It allowed AT&T to continue consolidating and monopolizing the market, at the expense of the American public. It would take another 60 or so years for our government to intervene and eventually break-up the AT&T monopoly.”

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The group reports the study “finds that economic sanctions implemented by the Trump administration since August 2017 have caused tens of thousands of deaths and are rapidly worsening the humanitarian crisis.”

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As Cockburn points out: “The net result has been a tide of refugees fleeing north, most famously exemplified by the ‘caravan’ used by Donald Trump to galvanize support prior to November’s congressional elections and his subsequent fraudulent ‘border crisis.'”

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“At my last meeting this year with Assange, the energy I recall at our first encounter in January 2011 was undiminished. He made coffee, glancing up at surveillance cameras in the tiny kitchen and every other room in the embassy that recorded his every movement.

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CNN “As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, Biden stated that Saddam Hussein had a sizable arsenal of chemical weapons as well as biological weapons, including anthrax, and that ‘he may have a strain’ of smallpox, despite UN inspectors reporting that Iraq no longer appeared to have any weaponized chemical or biological agents. And even though the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported as far back as 1997 that there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had any ongoing nuclear program, Biden insisted that Saddam was ‘seeking nuclear weapons.'”

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