American Autos Built in Mexico Have Surprise in Trunk

If you recently bought a new car manufactured in a Mexican auto plant, you might want to perform a routine examination of your vehicle, like checking the spare tire – especially if it’s a Ford Fusion.

While law-enforcement authorities in Ohio and at the Drug Enforcement Agency announced this week the discovery of more than $1 million of marijuana hidden within bogus spare tires of new cars transported by rail, a WND investigation suggests the incident may be just the tip of the iceberg.

More than 400 pounds of marijuana was found packed inside of new Ford cars that were made in Mexico and shipped to Northeast Ohio.

The discovery was made when a service employee for a Ford dealership in Portage County, Ohio, noticed a suspicious package in the trunk of a brand new Ford Fusion during a routine inspection. The car had just been taken off the transport carrier. The package was pressed marijuana, placed in the vehicle to look like a spare tire.

Authorities found the car had been shipped by train from Mexico to the rail yard in Ohio. At the rail yard they found five more loads of marijuana in five other new Ford Fusions. Later, they found nine more packages in new Fusions already shipped to other Ohio locations and one in Pennsylvania. (Read more from “American Autos Built in Mexico Have Surprise in Trunk” HERE)

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Mattis Directly Intervened to Save Transgender Surgeries for Military Personnel

On July 13, as the House debated an amendment to the 2018 Pentagon budget bill that would have barred the military from funding servicemembers’ gender reassignment surgeries, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis privately intervened, calling the amendment’s Republican sponsor and asking her to withdraw it from consideration, CNN reports . . .

Of the 200 amendments to the $696 billion National Defense Authorization Act that were being debated in the House, the transgender amendment — offered by conservative Rep. Vicky Hartzler of Missouri — was one of the more contentious, CNN notes.

Hartzler had offered and withdrawn a more expansive amendment in June, one that would have reversed an Obama-era policy allowing transgender service members to serve openly. Hartzler told CNN she withdrew the original amendment to defer action until Mattis had established his stance on transgender troops. But this month, after Mattis gave the military another six months to study the issue, Hartzler filed the new amendment.

“I can confirm that Secretary Mattis spoke with Rep. Hartzler yesterday,” Department of Defense spokesperson Johnny Michael told Task & Purpose in a statement. “However, the Secretary regularly engages with members of Congress to discuss issues of importance to the department and I cannot speak to the specific contents of their conversation.” (Read more from “Mattis Directly Intervened to Save Transgender Surgeries for Military Personnel” HERE)

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Homosexual Seattle Mayor Says He Won’t Resign Following Sexual Abuse Allegations

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray said he will not resign from office following calls from city leadership to do so.

Murray made the announcement Monday, stating “We do not need the sort of abrupt and destabilizing transition that a resignation would create.”

Calls for the city’s first openly gay mayor’s resignation came after four men, one of them his foster son, claimed Murray sexually abused them as teenagers in the 1980s.

Four city councilmembers issued a statement of their own, following Murray’s announcement Monday afternoon.

(Read more from “Homosexual Seattle Mayor Says He Won’t Resign Following Sexual Abuse Allegations” HERE)

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Child Sex Trafficking in the US Is Exploding, Govt Admits They Aren’t Stopping It

A recent report on the number of sexually exploited children in Florida gives insight into a horrific world that is often ignored by the media, and that rarely holds millionaires, politicians and even local officials accountable for their involvement.

A report from the Florida legislature’s Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability concluded that the state’s Department of Children and Family (DCF) and its lead agencies “have not resolved issues related to serving commercially sexually exploited children.”

The report found that in 2016, 356 verified commercially sexually exploited child victims were identified, as opposed to 264 identified in 2015. It noted that many of the victims who were identified earlier were, “both children in child welfare dependency and those living in the community with family—have since been re-victimized, involved with the criminal justice system, or only attended school intermittently.”

During 2016, DCF’s Florida Abuse Hotline received 2,013 reports alleging the CSE of children, which is a 57% increase over the 2015 reports. Child protective investigators investigated 1,386 (or 69%) of those reports. Counties with the highest number of CSE reports include Miami-Dade (248), Broward (232), Orange (150), and Hillsborough (144). DCF hotline staff did not refer cases for investigation if the allegation did not rise to the level of reasonable (74%), there were no means to locate the victim (11%), or the alleged perpetrator was not the child’s caregiver (8%). Of the reports that were referred for investigation, most came from DJJ, the Department of Corrections, or criminal justice personnel (20%) and law enforcement (15%).

In 2016, the National Human Trafficking Hotline received reports of 7,572 human trafficking cases, which was a substantial increase from 5,544 cases in 2015 and 5,042 cases in 2014. Florida ranked third on the list with 550 cases, behind Texas with 670 cases and California with 1,323 cases.

Out of the 7,572 human trafficking cases reported in the United States in 2016, the majority or 5,551 were “sex trafficking” cases, and 2,387 of the reported victims were minors.

The report on child sex trafficking in Florida suggested that the increase in victims was due to the process DCF and the Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) use to “select children to screen as well as the screening tool itself may limit accurate identification of CSE child victims.”

The report also noted that 62 percent of the children who were labeled as commercially sexually exported remained “in the community and are referred to voluntary, local services.” As a result, “no data is readily available on whether the children use these services.”

The Free Thought Project has provided extensive coverage of the sex trafficking epidemic in the U.S., especially in relation to minors who become victims after they are kidnapped from their homes and placed in foster care.

In April, two pastors who were foster care advocates were arrested for running a child sex ring in Ohio. The pastors, who had influence on their county’s Child Service’s Board of Trustees, were charged with “recruiting, enticing and transporting people the men knew were under 18 to engage in sex acts for pay.” The trafficking was ongoing for at least three years, and initially began with a 14-year-old girl.

In June, a lawsuit was filed in the case of a 5-year-old girl who was given to the leader of a child sex ring in Arizona. She was taken from her mother who was battling an addiction with substance abuse, and she was put in the custody of a pedophile who sexually abused her, tortured her, and ultimately left her fighting for her life.

The recent report from Florida is another reminder that child sex trafficking is a horrific element of the human trafficking epidemic that has been ongoing and increasing in the United States. While government involvement has always been an element, it has yet to put a stop to the increasing number of children who are subjected to life-altering abuse on a daily basis. (For more from the author of “Child Sex Trafficking in the US Is Exploding, Govt Admits They Aren’t Stopping It” please click HERE)

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Cop Named Mohamed Shoots, Kills Unarmed Woman Who Called 911

The Minneapolis cop who shot and killed a 40-year-old woman after she called 9-1-1 to report a possible crime near her home was identified Monday as the precinct’s first Somali-American officer — Mohamed Noor.

Noor has only been a police officer for two years and has already been sued for alleged unprofessional behavior. The May 2017 lawsuit also involved a female and accusations of brutality . . .

Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a native of Sydney, Australia, was a veterinarian and a yoga instructor who recently got engaged to longtime boyfriend Don Damond. She and her fiancé lived in the 5000 block of Washburn.

Her fiance was out of town on business Saturday when she heard a commotion in the alley, then picked up the phone to call 9-1-1 to report a possible sexual assault in progress. She ended up being shot dead by one of the two responding officers . . .

KSTP, citing a source with direct knowledge of the shooting, reported that Noor was sitting in the passenger seat of the squad car at the time of the shooting and “shot across his partner” at Damond, who approached the officers’ car in her pajamas and began talking to the officer in the driver’s seat. (Read more from “Cop Named Mohamed Shoots, Kills Unarmed Woman Who Called 911” HERE)

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House Rejects Amendment Prohibiting DOD Funds for Gender Transition

The House rejected an attempt Thursday to prevent the Pentagon from paying for gender transition treatment.

A total of 24 Republicans joined Democrats in defeating GOP Rep. Vicky Hartzler’s amendment by 209-214, which recently passed through the Rules Committee.

Those Republicans include Reps. Justin Amash, Mike Coffman, Barbara Comstock, Darrell Issa and Frank LoBiondo, among others.

The amendment would have prohibited the Pentagon from paying for gender transition treatments like hormone therapy.

Pro-LGBT military organizations applauded the vote and called the amendment a “horrifying, vicious attack on service members.” (Read more from “House Rejects Amendment Prohibiting DOD Funds for Gender Transition” HERE)

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CONFIRMED: Another “Suicide” Connected With DNC Emails, Alleged Russian Hackers

A Republican donor and operative from Chicago’s North Shore who said he had tried to obtain Hillary Clinton’s missing emails from Russian hackers killed himself in a Minnesota hotel room days after talking to The Wall Street Journal about his efforts, public records show.

In mid-May, in a room at a Rochester hotel used almost exclusively by Mayo Clinic patients and relatives, Peter W. Smith, 81, left a carefully prepared file of documents, including a statement police called a suicide note in which he said he was in ill health and a life insurance policy was expiring.

Days earlier, the financier from suburban Lake Forest gave an interview to the Journal about his quest, and it began publishing stories about his efforts in late June. The Journal also reported it had seen emails written by Smith showing his team considered retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then a top adviser to Republican Donald Trump’s campaign, an ally. Flynn briefly was President Trump’s national security adviser and resigned after it was determined he had failed to disclose contacts with Russia.

At the time, the newspaper reported Smith’s May 14 death came about 10 days after he granted the interview. Mystery shrouded how and where he had died . . .

In the note recovered by police, Smith apologized to authorities and said that “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER” was involved in his death. He wrote that he was taking his own life because of a “RECENT BAD TURN IN HEALTH SINCE JANUARY, 2017” and timing related “TO LIFE INSURANCE OF $5 MILLION EXPIRING.”

(Read more from “CONFIRMED: Another “Suicide” Connected With DNC Emails, Alleged Russian Hackers” HERE)

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Nude Images, Videos of Congresswoman and Husband Shared by Former Staffer

Two former Capitol Hill staffers were indicted this week in connection with the alleged sharing of “private, nude images and videos” swiped from a congresswoman’s cellphone.

The congresswoman is Virgin Islands Del. Stacey Plaskett, her office confirmed Thursday evening. The footage depicts Plaskett, identified in court documents as “Delegate S.P.,” and her husband.

In March 2016, Plaskett entrusted her iPhone and its password to staffer Juan McCullum, who, the indictment alleges, copied the nude images and videos after offering to take the phone to an Apple store for repairs.

McCullum allegedly also created a Facebook account, uploaded the visual content, and then friended people in Plaskett’s district.

McCullum was indicted Tuesday by a grand jury on two counts of cyberstalking, the U.S. attorney’s office in the nation’s capital announced Thursday afternoon. (Read more from “Nude Images, Videos of Congresswoman and Husband Shared by Former Staffer” HERE)

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The World Is Now $217,000,000,000,000 in Debt and the Global Elite Like It That Way

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and through the mechanism of government debt virtually the entire planet has become the servants of the global money changers. Politicians love to borrow money, but over time government debt slowly but surely impoverishes a nation. As the elite get governments around the globe in increasing amounts of debt, those governments must raise taxes in order to keep servicing those debts. In the end, it is all about taking money from us and transferring it into government pockets, and then taking money from government pockets and transferring it into the hands of the elite. It is a game that has been going on for generations, and it is time for humanity to say that enough is enough.

According to the Institute of International Finance, global debt has now reached a new all-time record high of 217 trillion dollars…

Global debt levels have surged to a record $217 trillion in the first quarter of the year. This is 327 percent of the world’s annual economic output (GDP), reports the Institute of International Finance (IIF).

The surging debt was driven by emerging economies, which have increased borrowing by $3 trillion to $56 trillion. This amounts to 218 percent of their combined economic output, five percentage points greater year on year.

Never before in human history has our world been so saturated with debt.

And what all of this debt does is that it funnels wealth to the very top of the global wealth pyramid. In other words, it makes global wealth inequality far worse because this system is designed to make the rich even richer and the poor even poorer.

Every year the gap between the wealthy and the poor grows, and it has gotten to the point that eight men have as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people on this planet combined…

Eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity, according to a new report published by Oxfam today to mark the annual meeting of political and business leaders in Davos.

This didn’t happen by accident. Sadly, most people don’t even understand that this is literally what our system was designed to do.

Today, more than 99 percent of the population of the planet lives in a country that has a central bank. And debt-based central banking is designed to get national governments trapped in endless debt spirals from which they can never possibly escape.

For example, just consider the Federal Reserve. During the four decades before the Federal Reserve was created, our country enjoyed the best period of economic growth in U.S. history. But since the Fed was established in 1913, the value of the U.S. dollar has fallen by approximately 98 percent and the size of our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.

It isn’t an accident that we are 20 trillion dollars in debt. The truth is that the debt-based Federal Reserve is doing exactly what it was originally designed to do. And no matter what politicians will tell you, we will never have a permanent solution to our debt problem until we get rid of the Federal Reserve.

In 2017, interest on the national debt will be nearly half a trillion dollars.

That means that close to 500 billion of our tax dollars will go out the door before our government spends a single penny on the military, on roads, on health care or on anything else.

And we continue to pile up debt at a rate of more than 100 million dollars an hour. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government will add more than a trillion dollars to the national debt once again in 2018…

Unless current laws are changed, federal individual income tax collections will increase by 9.5 percent in fiscal 2018, which begins on Oct. 1, according to data released today by the Congressional Budget Office.

At the same time, however, the federal debt will increase by more than $1 trillion.

We shouldn’t be doing this, but we just can’t seem to stop.

Let me try to put this into perspective. If you could somehow borrow a million dollars today and obligate your children to pay it off for you, would you do it?

Maybe if you really hate your children you would, but most loving parents would never do such a thing.

But that is precisely what we are doing on a national level.

Thomas Jefferson was strongly against government debt because he believed that it was a way for one generation to steal from another generation. And he actually wished that he could have added another amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would have banned government borrowing…

“I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.”

And the really big secret that none of us are supposed to know is that governments don’t actually have to borrow money.

But if we start saying that too loudly the people that are making trillions of dollars from the current system are going to get very, very upset with us.

Today, we are living in the terminal phase of the biggest debt bubble in the history of the planet. Every debt bubble eventually ends tragically, and this one will too.

Bill Gross recently noted that “our highly levered financial system is like a truckload of nitro glycerin on a bumpy road”. One wrong move and the whole thing could blow sky high.

When everything comes crashing down and a great crisis happens, we are going to have a choice.

We could try to rebuild the fundamentally flawed old system, or we could scrap it and start over with something much better.

My hope is that we will finally learn our lesson and discard the debt-based central banking model for good.

The reason why I am writing about this so much ahead of time is so that people will actually understand why the coming crisis is happening as it unfolds.

If we can get everyone to understand how we are being systematically robbed and cheated, perhaps people will finally get mad enough to do something about it. (For more from the author of “The World Is Now $217,000,000,000,000 in Debt and the Global Elite Like It That Way” please click HERE)

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CNN Hires Top Al-Qaeda Propagandist for Documentary, Fails Miserably Trying to Cover It Up

Bilal Abdul Kareem, of On the Ground News, was contracted by CNN to film a documentary called Undercover in Syria. Kareem is a self-proclaimed media activist living in rebel-held Syria and is considered “one of the top English-language propagandists for al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate Jabat al-Nusra,” according to an Alternet exposé on Abdul Kareem and his connections to terrorism and CNN.

On June 16 Abdul Kareem went public with his intimate connection to CNN, and its documentary Undercover in Syria. He relayed his frustration with the network, having essentially whitewashed him out of his credit for a documentary he had a large hand in creating for CNN, which won a prestigious Peabody Award.

Abdul Kareem explained how CNN contracted him and his online news outlet, On the Ground News, to film the award-winning documentary.

“This was with CNN and their correspondent Clarissa Ward, which I have big-time respect for, big-time respect as a journalist, as a person,” Abdul Kareem said.

This Undercover in Syria, you can Google it — it won the prestigious Peabody Award, and it won the prestigious Overseas Press Club Award, which are basically the highest awards in journalism for international reporting. Now, [CNN] barely mentioned my name! I’m telling you, somehow CNN must have forgotten that I was the one that filmed it, I guess they forgot that.

Contrary to Abdul Kareem’s statement that “CNN must have forgotten,” the reality is likely much closer to the fact that they intentionally minimized the credit Abdul Kareem received, due to his connections to terrorism – thus becoming a mere footnote in the Peabody Awards press release.

While the Peabody organization praised CNN host Clarissa Ward for “[going] undercover into northern Syria to document Russian influence on the fighting and to navigate the ongoing devastation,” Abdul Kareem was only given credit in small print, despite him being responsible for filming and providing CNN with the documentary footage of Syria.

CNN President Jeff Zucker delivered a keynote address at an April 17 ceremony where the network had won the Overseas Press Club Award for the Undercover in Syria documentary. In a press release, the network celebrated the access Ward had been granted to Islamist insurgent-held eastern Aleppo, but failed to credit Abdul Kareem for being the facilitator of these events, or even mention his name.

While Abdul Kareem denies involvement with terrorist organizations, the Saudi news outlet Al Arabiya reported on June 7 that Abdul Kareem officially joined Jabat al-Nusra in 2012.

Abdul Kareem took to Facebook to dispute the allegation in a video response. “I am not, nor have I ever been, nor do I need to be a part of al-Qaeda. I don’t have any need for that,” he said.

According to a report from Alternet:

However, one of Abdul Kareem’s closest colleagues has also been accused of membership in Syria’s al-Qaeda franchise. Akif Razaq, an employee of Abdul Kareem’s online media group, On the Ground News, was recently stripped of British citizenship for his alleged involvement with al-Nusra. A notice presented by British authorities to Razaq’s family in Birmingham accused him of being “aligned with an al-Qaeda-aligned group” and declared that he “presents a risk to the national security of the United Kingdom.”During Abdul Kareem’s Facebook video response to the Al Arabiya report, he was seated beside Razap. Razaq has also co-hosted On the Ground News segments with him.While Abdul Kareem insisted there was “no proof” of his membership in the Salafi-jihadist organization, rebels inside Syria tell a different story…Last December, AlterNet’s Grayzone Project exposed Bilal Abdul Kareem’s involvement with some of Syria’s most notorious jihadist figures and his open propagation of their sectarian ideology. Most prominent among the clerics granted a friendly audience by Abdul Kareem was Abdullah al-Muhaysini, the Saudi Arabian hate preacher and warlord praised by Abdul Kareem as “probably the most loved cleric in the Syrian territories today.”Muhaysini is indeed popular among the Al Qaeda-allied rebels of Syria, and holds considerable sway over the entire region of Idlib. He has appeared in refugee camps to recruit child soldiers, raised millions of dollars for jihadist offensives and granted his blessing to the mass executions of captured Syrian soldiers on the grounds that the captives were kuffar, or blasphemers. The cleric’s goal, like that of ISIS, has been to establish an exclusively Sunni state purged of Shia, Druze and Christian citizens of Syria, and run according to a strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Others, such as Abdullah Abu Azzam, an activist affiliated with the rebel group Kataib Thawar al-Sham, using a pseudonym to protect his identity due to threat of retaliation from al-Nusra, have come forward to proclaim that Abdul Kareem was not only a propagandist for al-Nusra, but well known as a member of the group.

In an interview with Alternet, done over WhatsApp, Abdullah Abu Azzam said that rebel fighters/jihadis “refer to Abdul Kareem as the “American mujahid” (mujahid is Arabic for jihadist).”

Abu Azzam said that Abdul Kareem had even made a series of YouTube videos for the official account of Jaish al-Fatah, the jihadi coalition led by al-Nusra — al-Qaeda’s affiliate army in Syria. He intimated that Abdul Kareem directly worked with the late public relations director for Jaish al-Fateh, Ammar Abu al-Majid, using the alias, Abu Osama.

Additionally, Abu Azzam claimed that he had knowledge of Abdul Kareem collaborating directly with Salafi cleric Abdul Razzaq al-Mahdi, one of the ideological leaders of the Islamist jihadis in Syria. In fact, Al-Mahdi, one of the most popular guests on Abdul Kareem’s videos, was a co-founder of Syrian al-Qaeda’s most recent rebranding as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. He later defected to the competing Salafist militia Ahrar al-Sham.

Alternet attempted to get answers from CNN regarding their hiring of a reputed terrorist by contacting the senior press manager for CNN International, along with CNN’s Middle East press officer and public relations coordinator — requesting comment on Abdul Kareem’s relationship to the network. “We asked for details about Abdul Kareem’s contractual obligations with CNN and whether the network felt his well-documented relationship with al-Qaeda compromised the reporting it carried out in Syria,” according to Alternet.

Let’s just say the silence from CNN is deafening, as they refused to respond or comment. Please share this story to help others understand how news is often manufactured to propagandize the public into accepting a false reality and to convince the public into accepting global militarism as the norm. (For more from the author of “CNN Hires Top Al-Qaeda Propagandist for Documentary, Fails Miserably Trying to Cover It Up” please click HERE)

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