July, 2023 - All View News

Intervention in Niger would mean ‘declaration of war’ – neighbors

Burkina Faso and Mali have denounced ECOWAS sanctions against the junta in Niamey

In the first-ever joint communique on Monday, the military governments in Mali and Burkina Faso warned the West and other African states against intervening in the neighboring Niger. Bamako and Ouagadougou would consider any such move as an attack on their own countries, they said.

“Any military intervention against Niger would amount to a declaration of war against Burkina Faso and Mali,” said point four of the joint communique, which a Burkinabe military spokesman deliberately repeated three times during a state television broadcast.

In case of such an intervention, the two countries would withdraw from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and “adopt self-defense measures in support of the armed forces and the people of Niger,” according to the statement.

A military intervention against Niger “could destabilize the entire region, as had the unilateral NATO intervention in Libya, which was at the root of the expansion of the terrorism in the Sahel and West Africa,” the two governments said.

France currently has 1,500 troops and a drone base in Niger, while the US has 1,100 troops and two drone bases, according to Financial Times.

Nigerien soldiers, led by General Abdourahamane Tchiani, ousted President Mohamed Bazoum last Wednesday. The African Union denounced the coup on Friday and gave the junta in Niamey 15 days to stand down or face “punitive measures.” ECOWAS issued its own ultimatum on Sunday, at the emergency meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, saying that it would “take all measures necessary to restore constitutional order in the Republic of Niger,” including the use of force, if Bazoum is not restored within a week.

Mali and Burkina Faso condemned the sanctions ECOWAS announced on Saturday as “illegal, illegitimate and inhumane.” They also expressed “fraternal solidarity” with the Nigerien people, “who have decided to take their destiny into their own hands and to assume before history the fullness of their sovereignty,” according to their joint communique.

The military governments of the two former French colonies have sought to sever their ties to Paris and rebuild their statehood with Russian assistance. Moscow has denounced the coup in Niger as an “anti-constitutional act,” however, and the Russian Foreign Ministry called on all parties to refrain from using force.

On Sunday, General Tchiani’s government announced it would suspend the export of uranium and gold to France, to the accolades of some of the local population.

“We have uranium, diamonds, gold, oil, and we live like slaves? We don’t need the French to keep us safe,” one pro-government demonstrator told the local news portal Wazobia Reporters.

Niger is the world’s seventh-largest producer of uranium, accounting for 4% of the global output. A French company controls about two thirds of the country’s output.

US Treasury sanctions Bosnian Serb leaders for ‘inflammatory legislation’

The law would allow Republika Srpska, part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to ignore the country’s Constitutional Court.

Is the U.S. Government Evil?

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

The U.S. Government claims to be enforcing peace throughout the world but engages in far more invasions and coups than any other country in all of history ever has. The U.S. Congressional Research Service’s list of U.S. invasions (including increases in existing invasions) lists and briefly describes 297 such invasions after WW II (i.e., during 1945-2022, a 77-year period), and is titled “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2022”. That 297 U.S. invasions in the past 77 years is more than all of the pre-1945 instances put together during 1798-1945 — which was twice as long a period, 147-years. And none of those 297 invasions after 1944 was defensive. 244 of the 297 occurred after the Soviet Union ended in 1991 and prior to Russia’s invading Ukraine in 2022. Why should there have been any U.S. invasions at all during that period? The Cold War was over — on Russia’s side but not on America’s. But there were 244 U.S. invasions during 1991 to 2022. During that entire 32-year span (and even going all the way back to the end of WW II in 1945, 78 years ago) there was no U.S. declaration of war and therefore no Constitutional legality for the invasion — not for any of America’s post-WW-II invasions). All of the 297 U.S. invasions after 1944 were unConstitutional (without an official congressional declaration of war). Most of them were purely aggressions (some in order to help a foreign tyrant suppress his own population). After the Soviet Union ended in 1991, the U.S. Government just went wild, internationally, and greatly stepped-up the frequency of its invasions. America’s Founders had insisted that there be no “standing army” in this nation. Until President Truman established the ‘Defense’ Department and CIA in 1947, there wasn’t any standing army in the U.S. That change, by him, created America’s military-industrial complex, which now controls the country, on behalf of U.S. billionaires, who control and profit from the ‘Defense’ firms (weapons manufacturers), the news-media (to promote their invasions), the lobbying firms, and the extraction firms (such as ExxonMobil).

U.S. history before 1945 was a mixed bag, but America since then has been by far the world’s biggest mass-murderer.

Right now, the U.S. declares that it must police the peace throughout the world — no longer ONLY in Europe and the Atlantic but also in the Pacific and Asia. But police it against whom? It names Russia, China, and Iran, as its chief “foreign adversaries.” On 26 June 2023, I headlined “Pending U.S. Congressional Resolutions to Initiate WW III” and summarized three of them. All are expected to pass, and each is virtually hidden in the nation’s ‘news’-media — as-if the public wouldn’t even care about them. One of them is a bill to secretly institute martial law over the ‘news’-media, under the cover of protecting children from being influenced by “foreign adversaries” — which it identifies specifically as being China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela, but allows other countries to be added to that list. Another is specfiically for war against Russia and it commits the U.S. never to accept anything less than Russia’s defeat in America’s war against Russia that is being waged in the battlefields of Ukraine with Ukrainian soldiers — it would commit the U.S. to send U.S. troops there if Ukraine’s can’t win it with U.S. and other donated weapons. A third resolves that the U.S. will go directly to war against Russia and will demand all of NATO to join it if Russia uses a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine (though Ukraine isn’t a NATO member). In addition, America’s Secretary of State reversed the Administration’s policy and said that if Ukraine wants to invade Russia, then that would be Ukraine’s right, and America would not object.

On July 21st, the retired Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar headlined “Storm clouds gathering in the Black Sea”, and reported that the U.S. has plans to strangulate Russia’s shipping and cripple Russia’s access to the seas.

On July 31st, I headlined “Lying Blinken Visits Australia for Peace With China by Arming Taiwan to Break Away From China” and reported on the U.S. Government’s preparations to invade China on the basis of lies.

These are some of the ways that America is policing the world in order to ‘preserve’ the ‘peace’.

Is its Government evil? You decide.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

US and Ukraine discussing security guarantees – State Department

A deputy assistant secretary will conduct virtual talks later this week

Washington and Kiev are about to start virtual talks about the security guarantees the G7 pledged to Ukraine at the NATO summit in Lithuania, the State Department confirmed on Monday.

“Those talks are going to kick off this week,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters at the daily briefing, describing them as the “outgrowth of the statement that the G7 released on the margins of the last NATO summit in Vilnius.”

The question arose because an aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, Andrey Ermak, told journalists about the upcoming talks on Sunday. Ermak said that Ukraine expected the guarantees to ensure its “ability to win” the conflict with Russia.

Miller, however, claimed that the guarantees offered in Vilnius were about “long-term commitments to Ukraine’s security.” This is a process “separate and apart from the security assistance that we regularly provide now,” he told reporters, and is intended to help Ukraine “establish a long-term military that can serve as a deterrent.”

The US and its allies have poured over $100 billion worth of weapons, equipment, and ammunition into Ukraine since hostilities with Russia escalated in February 2022, while insisting they are not a party to the conflict. Moscow has warned the West that such deliveries are legitimate targets for the Russian military and risk making them de facto combatants.

The G7 ‘security guarantees’ were supposed to be Ukraine’s consolation prize for not getting an invitation to join NATO, something Zelensky has repeatedly voiced disappointment over. Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov said at the time that he wanted to see “details and prices” of the proposal before judging its merits.

According to Miller, the US-Ukraine talks later this week are supposed to address the details of the “security commitments.” The State Department spokesman specified that the talks would be held “virtually, at the deputy assistant secretary level.” He also noted that they would not involve Victoria Nuland, who was previously assistant secretary in charge of the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, but was promoted last week to acting deputy secretary.

Nuland was a key player in the 2014 US-backed coup in Kiev, which brought Ukrainian nationalists to power and triggered the current conflict. In May, she revealed US plans to begin discussions about Ukraine’s “long-term future” concurrently with Kiev’s military offensive, which Washington had helped plan “for some 4-5 months.”

Twitter accused of bullying anti-hate campaigners

A social media monitoring group says legal threats sent by X Corp are an attempt to “silence criticism”.

French prison population hits all-time high

Overcrowding under the “zero-crime” policy has become such a problem that thousands of inmates don’t even have proper beds

France has more people in prison than ever before – 74,513 – according to official statistics released by the Justice Ministry on Monday. The country has broken its own inmate records six times – nearly every month – since the end of 2022.

The figure represents an increase of 2,446 since last year, and 15,818 since the summer of 2020, after about 10,000 prisoners were released because of the Covid-19 outbreak in order to alleviate the prison system’s notorious overcrowding. France surpassed 73,000 inmates for the first time last April.

The occupancy rate for the entire prison system stands at 122.8%, and rises to 146.3% for those facilities housing pre-trial detainees and inmates with short sentences. As a result, 2,478 inmates don’t even have proper beds to sleep in and must use mattresses on the floor.

The country’s prisons are so overstuffed that the European Court of Human Rights condemned the system in 2020 for “structural” overcrowding, ordering it to pay 32 inmates damages of up to €25,000 ($27,500) for “serious breaches of fundamental rights.”

While Paris responded with a pledge to add a total of 15,000 more prison beds by 2027, the court reprimanded it again earlier this month. Weeks later, the French parliament issued a report stressing the “urgent need” for a prison regulation mechanism.

The situation has only gotten worse after violent riots engulfed the country last month following the police shooting of a teenager of North African descent during a traffic stop in Nanterre. The government’s demand for a “firm,” “rapid,” and “systematic” response saw over 742 protesters sentenced to prison terms and 600 incarcerated, according to the report.

Some 45,000 police officers were deployed to quell the unrest, which caused €650 million ($721 million) worth of damage, according to insurance association France Assureurs. Over 4,000 people were detained as a result, with 1,200 of those being minors.

Prisoner advocacy group Observatoire International des Prisons warned that overcrowding would likely worsen as the authorities have upped the ante with a “zero-crime” policy for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

The group last year called for the decriminalization of some misdemeanors, including driving without a license and drug use, as well as reducing the use of pre-trial detention and devising alternatives to incarceration for other crimes as possible ways to reduce overcrowding, insisting that merely building more prison beds only exacerbated the problem.

However, France has gone the opposite direction in recent years, criminalizing “cyber harassment” and even schoolyard bullying.

Biden spoke at 20 of son’s foreign business meetings – media

Ukrainian energy firm Burisma hired Hunter Biden to help woo clients and fend off oversight from Kiev, a former business partner has testified

Hunter Biden was hired by a Ukrainian energy company to add value to “the brand,” and called his father, President Joe Biden, during key meetings to impress the company’s clients, Hunter’s former business associate reportedly told a congressional hearing on Monday.

Hunter Biden joined the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma in 2014, while his father was vice president of the US. According to invoices found on his laptop in 2020, he received a salary of $83,333 per month until his father left office in 2017, and up to $50,000 until his resignation in 2019, despite having no experience in the energy sector.

Testifying to the Republican-led House Oversight Committee on Monday, Hunter’s former business partner, Devon Archer, told lawmakers that Burisma hired the younger Biden to boost its “brand” with potential clients, according to Fox News reporter Chad Pergram.

Hunter and Joe Biden would talk on speakerphone during Burisma’s meetings with Chinese, French, and Russian businesspeople, Archer reportedly told the committee. Archer explained that demonstrating Burisma’s connections to Washington was vital for the company’s survival, and that it “would have gone under if not for ‘the brand’,” Pergram paraphrased.

Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky pressured Hunter to “get help from DC” regarding a corruption investigation by Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin in 2015, Archer reportedly testified, adding that Hunter obliged and called an unknown contact in Washington during one meeting.

Shokin was removed from office in 2016. In a 2018 interview, Joe Biden boasted that while on a trip to Kiev in 2015, he threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees from then-Ukrainian president Pyotr Poroshenko unless Shokin was fired. “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired,” Biden said.

President Biden has repeatedly claimed that he had no involvement in his son’s business dealings, despite files from Hunter’s laptop suggesting that a host of clients paid the younger Biden for access to his father. Archer’s testimony further contradicts the president’s denial, but Democrats present at the hearing insisted that the 20 phone calls were perfectly innocent.

“It was all casual conversation, niceties, the weather, ‘What’s going on’?” New York Representative Dan Goldman told reporters after the hearing, adding that “there wasn’t a single conversation about any of the business dealings that Hunter had.”

Zlochevsky told an FBI informant in 2016 that he was “coerced” into making a $10 million bribe to Hunter and Joe Biden, and that he had multiple recordings to back up his claims, according to an FBI document obtained by the Oversight Committee and released by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley earlier this month.

President Biden has described the bribery allegations as “a bunch of malarkey,” asking the New York Post “where’s the money?”

Month: July 2023