BBC world news editor: Houla massacre coverage based on opposition propaganda

from WSWS

As quietly as possible, BBC world news editor Jon Williams has admitted that the coverage of last month’s Houla massacre in Syria by the world’s media and his own employers was a compendium of lies.

Datelined 16:23, June 7, Williams chose a personal blog to make a series of fairly frank statements explaining that there was no evidence whatsoever to identify either the Syrian Army or Alawite militias as the perpetrators of the May 25 massacre of 100 people.

By implication, Williams also suggests strongly that such allegations are the product of the propaganda department of the Sunni insurgents seeking to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.

[read the rest, here]

Kidnapping by Mexican police caught on video

(What’s been happening in Mexico under the 6 year rule of the unelected president is simply state sponsored murder, death squads killing off opposition to their neoliberal regime. Rarely is it reported on in the press, but here is a glimpse into the state of affairs of our neighbor to the south)

Associated Press

There it was on video: Five heavily armed policemen barge into a hotel in western Mexico before dawn and march out with three handcuffed men in underwear.

But police weren’t making an arrest. Prosecutors say they apparently were taking orders from criminals. Just hours after the three were seized, they were found asphyxiated and beaten to death.

[read the rest, here]

Medicare for All Now: The US Supreme Court Should Rule with the People

by Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese,  Global Research

Six years after Massachusetts enacted the state version of Obama’s health law, the people of Massachusetts are not happy.  According to a June 11th poll in Massachusetts, 78% of patients say the cost of care in Massachusetts is a serious problem and 63% say it has gotten worse in the last five years.  Patients report longer waits, higher premiums, higher co-pays and are less satisfied with health care. The number of bankruptcies due to medical illness and costs has continued to increase in Massachusetts too.

Despite what the corporate media report, Romney-Care, on which Obama-Care is modeled, is not working.  

Americans want the Supreme Court to find the Obama law unconstitutional. More than two-thirds of Americans hope the Supreme Court will overturn some or all of the 2010 health care law, according to a June 7th New York Times-CBS poll. A mere 24% said they hoped the court “would keep the entire health care law in place.” Forty-one percent of those surveyed said the court should strike down the entire law, and another 27% said the justices should overturn only the individual mandate, the requirement that people purchase private insurance if they are not insured or pay a fine.

Overturning the entire law may have less of an impact now that three of the nation’s largest insurers, UnitedHealth, Aetna and Humana, say they will continue popular provisions such as allowing young adults under 26 to gain coverage under their parents’ plans and covering preventive care.

And overturning the law may provide an opportunity to push for a real solution to the ongoing health care crisis, to finally create a national universal and publicly-financed health insurance such as improved Medicare for All.

[read the rest, here]

Mexico’s 30-day Lesson in Democracy

from Information Clearinghouse

Peña Nieto is a candidate invented by Mexico’s media duopoly (Televisa and TV Azteca), along with other media outlets, to win the presidential elections this July 1

On June 10, at 11:30 in the morning, Mexico City’s Zócalo Plaza began to fill with people wearing creative outfits and carrying posters and signs. Yo Soy 132 academics, Yo Soy 132 artists, the “free journalists 132” and everyday citizens — retirees, children, mothers and entire families — arrived from every corner of the huge plaza.
They all came for the same reasons. They want to change their country; they want an authentic democracy; they don’t accept a presidential candidate shoved down their throats by the mainstream media; and, above all, they will not tolerate another president taking power for six years on the basis of electoral fraud. But if there is one concern that most unites them, it is that they are against the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Enrique Peña Nieto and all that he represents to them: corruption, repression and regressive politics.
It was the second “Anti-Peña Nieto” march in Mexico City. The first was called for over social networks on May 19, and it brought some 45,000 people onto the streets. This time, the Yo Soy 132 participants — who on June 5 officially declared themselves anti-party, anti-Peña Nieto, and anti-neoliberal — called for another march this past Sunday. In total, 300,000 people marched over the course of four hours between the Zócalo and the Angel of Independence. At the same time, people in states all across Mexico and abroad marched against Peña Nieto.
“This day is historic,” said José Gil Olmos, a Mexican reporter for the weekly publication Proceso. “Never before in Mexico’s history has a rally of this caliber taken place against a presidential candidate, much less 20 days before the elections.”

[read the rest, here]

U.S. provides communications aid for Syria opponents (terrorists)

(The Syrian “opposition supported by the Obama administration is chasing the Christian minority out of the areas they control.)

Raw Story

The United States on Thursday acknowledged providing communications equipment and other forms of assistance to members of the “peaceful opposition” in Syria.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the aid is part of “non-lethal” assistance to Syrians living under President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and part of a global effort to support Internet freedom.

Nuland declined to elaborate on the aid, but a source familiar with the effort said it includes things such as anonymizing software, and satellite phones with GPS capabilities “to document the location of atrocities.”

[read the rest, here]

State Department Admits Clinton Lied About Russia Suppying Syria with Attack Helicopters

Associated Press

The US state department has acknowledged that Russian helicopters it claimed had been sent recently to the Syrian regime were, in fact, refurbished ones already owned by Damascus.

Secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, claimed on Tuesday that “the latest information we have that there are attack helicopters on the way from Russia to Syria“.

[read the rest, here]