Indian government: pregnant women should shun meat, eggs and lustful thoughts of sex

Source: Indian government: pregnant women should shun meat, eggs and lustful thoughts of sex | World news | The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com

Associated Press

20 June 2017

Mother and Child Care leaflet also recommends expectant mothers ‘detach themselves from desire, anger, attachment’

Indian Wombs for Rent
The belly of a pregnant surrogate mother from Mumbai. Eggs from Europeans, semen from wealthy Westerners and embryos planted in desperate women’s bodies. The Indian baby factories have become a growing multi-billion dollar industry. Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/Getty Images

 India’s government is advising pregnant women to avoid all meat, eggs and lustful thoughts.

Doctors say the advice is preposterous, and even dangerous, considering India’s already poor record with maternal health. Women are often the last to eat or receive health care in traditionally patriarchal Indian households.

Malnutrition and anaemia, or iron deficiency, are key factors behind India having one of the world’s highest rates of maternal mortality, with 174 of every 100,000 pregnancies resulting in the mother’s death in 2015. That’s better than five years earlier, when the maternal mortality rate was 205 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, but still far worse than China’s 27 per 100,000 or the United States’ 14 per 100,000, according to Unicef.

“The government is doling out unscientific and irrational advice, instead of ensuring that poor pregnant women get to eat a nutritious, high-protein diet,” said gynaecologist Arun Gadre, who is based in the western Indian city of Pune but works in rural areas.

The government booklet, titled Mother and Child Care, smacked of religious dogma and ignored widely accepted medical evidence that pregnant women benefit from eating protein-rich meats and can safely engage in sex, doctors said.

It says pregnant women should also shun “impure thoughts” and look at pictures of beautiful babies to benefit the foetus.

“Pregnant women should detach themselves from desire, anger, attachment, hatred and lust,” reads the booklet, released last week by the Central Council for Research in Yoga and Naturopathy, a part of the government’s ministry that promotes traditional and alternative medicine.

“Pregnant women should detach themselves from desire, anger, attachment, hatred and lust.”

Mother and Child Care booklet

The traditional medicine minister defended the booklet as containing “wisdom accumulated over many centuries” and said it did not advise specifically against sex, only against all thoughts of desire or lust.

“The booklet puts together relevant facts culled out from clinical practice in the fields of yoga and naturopathy,” Minister Shripad Naik said.

It is the latest push for vegetarianism by prime minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government, which already advocates avoiding beef and strictly limits the transportation and slaughter of cows, which are considered sacred by Hindus.

But the latest homily to pregnant women has outraged the medical community.

Continue:

Indian government: pregnant women should shun meat, eggs and lustful thoughts of sex | World news | The Guardian

Grenfell Tower disaster parallels in House of Cards, 1993 (7 min)

Grenfell Tower: Theresa May’s Katrina Moment

Source: Grenfell Tower: Theresa May’s Katrina Moment

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by Patrick Cockburn

June 19, 2017

It is a dangerous moment for any government when the public suspects that it is incapable of preventing a great disaster like the Grenfell Tower fire. Angry people see the state as failing in its basic duty to keep them safe. Politicians in power, in such circumstances, are embarrassingly keen to show that there is a firm hand on the tiller, calmly coping with a crisis for which they are not to blame. Above all else, they need to dissuade people from imagining that a calamity is a symptom that something is rotten in the state of Britain.

Whatever the real culpability, it is vital to play for time in the expectation that the news agenda will ultimately move on. The old PR adage holds that the accused should first say “no story” or, in other words, deny all guilt until the media has lost interest and they can safely say “old story”.

This ploy is usually effective but is difficult in the present case. The mistakes that led to the inferno in Kensington are so blatant, undeniable and easy to establish that the Government looks evasive as it pretends that long enquiries are necessary to establish what went wrong.

It is already known that the cladding that encased the tower was inflammable and led to the building igniting like a torch within 15 minutes. It is likewise established that this material is banned in buildings of any height in the US because it poses a fire risk and that it was chosen in preference to fire-resistant cladding because it was cheaper. A sprinkler system, which would have suppressed the original blaze before it spread, was never installed because it would have cost a small amount of money. The Government is quoted, in words that it may come to regret, as saying that “it is the responsibility of the fire industry, rather than the Government, to market fire-sprinkling systems effectively”.

What I find so shocking and disgusting is the way in which the Government has deregulated the building industry with the excuse that it is “cutting red tape”, while at the same time it is strangling the weakest, poorest and most vulnerable people with “red tape” in order to deprive them of meagre benefits they receive from the state. Compare the enthusiasm of successive governments to increase regulations for claimants in the name of austerity with their laggard performance when it comes to protecting the public.

Just as ministers were trying to explain their snail-like progress in putting in place basic rules to stop tower blocks burning down, I spoke to a charity worker about the hideous maze of regulations facing those in most need. People with mental health problems must fill in labyrinthine forms, something which, by the nature of their disability, they cannot do. Once upon a time, an experienced social worker would have helped them, but their numbers have been slashed. The charity worker, who wanted to stay anonymous, said that often the red tape was so complicated that “mental patients give up in despair and do without the benefits which should be theirs by right”.

It is not only the mentally ill who fall victim to these regulatory booby traps. Another example is families who are about to be evicted and become homeless. The charity worker said: “I always tell them that they must stay in the house until the bailiffs begin to break the door down. This is because, if they leave even a few hours before the bailiffs arrive, the council may deem them to be ‘intentionally’ homeless and refuse to do anything for them.”

The Government is clearly frightened that the burned bodies in Grenfell Towers will be seen as martyrs who died because of austerity, deregulation and outsourcing. It is not as if Theresa May does not know about social wrongs and her speeches often contain eloquent descriptions of the miseries facing the mentally ill. But her proposals smell of political opportunism, primarily geared to attracting media attention and usually ending up as an expression of good intentions with nothing concrete happening.

Despite all May’s supposed concern for the mentally ill, something she presents as a sort of signature policy, her accomplishments are small. Criminalisation of mental illness has continued relentlessly and the number of beds available to mental patients is now 17,000. This is well below the number of mentally ill people who are in prison – 21,000, a quarter of the prison population.

Most of these miseries are suffered in silence by deprived people unable to defend themselves. Injustices may evoke concern, but there is little pressure for action because most people are not affected. This is very different from the Grenfell Tower disaster, visually overwhelming even as a burned-out hulk, as were the shattered towers of the World Trade Centre on 9/11. Everything about the disaster conveys a sense of total failure in which the whole political system is implicated.

Natural and man-made disasters have frequently been the last nail in the coffin of governments that were already tottering. There was the Tangshan earthquake in China in 1976, which helped determine who would rule the country after Mao Zedong. The Rex Cinema fire in Abadan in Iran in 1978 was blamed on the Shah and helped end his reign. The failure of President Bashar al-Assad to do anything for the two or three million Syrians who fled to the cities to escape the four-year-long drought in 2006-10 helped to cause the uprising the following year.

But commentators are probably right in seeing the closest parallel to the burning of the Grenfell Tower as being the devastating floods in New Orleans 12 years ago when Hurricane Katrina sent a 9m-high surge of water into the city on 29 August 2005 that led to the death of 1,464 people. The disaster had been repeatedly predicted by experts, but nothing effective was done so the levees and flood walls were too low or too weak or had been built out of clay that rapidly disintegrated under the impact of the rising water. The victims were mostly poor African Americans without the influence to get adequate flood defences.

As New Orleans was being engulfed, President George W Bush was on an extended holiday at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he remained for several days. He finally flew back to Washington on 31 August, his plane making a detour over the stricken city. It was a picture of him looking distant and disengaged as he viewed the wreckage of New Orleans that destroyed his reputation forever.

It is curious that Theresa May should make much the same mistake as Bush by not meeting survivors in Kensington while appearing cold and uninterested. Even the photo editors have turned against her and mostly chose to contrast her chilly appearance with a cuddly looking Jeremy Corbyn comforting a victim. She appears to be somebody who cannot handle pressure, which makes it look particularly odd of her and her advisers to have sought to win re-election as the unshakeable national leader. Corbyn, on the contrary, seems to thrive on crisis and adversity.

More articles by:Patrick Cockburn

Patrick Cockburn is the author of  The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution.

‘Dirty Duterte’ on the ropes as ISIS, US Special Forces crash the Philippines

Is Duterte a dead man walking?

Source: ‘Dirty Duterte’ on the ropes as ISIS, US Special Forces crash the Philippines — RT Op-Edge

RT Op-Edge

Robert Bridge

18 Jun, 2017

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte © Erik De Castro / Reuters

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has found himself in a perilous situation, as Islamic State-linked militants continue a siege in the country’s south, while US Special Forces have arrived to lend ‘technical support.’ What could possibly go wrong?

Just last month, Rodrigo ‘Dirty’ Duterte appeared to be riding high on the tiger of geopolitics with surprising authority. He had just served notice to the United States that, although he considered Donald Trump a “friend,” he would be realigning his foreign policy trajectory towards Russia and China. This punch to American pride came after he had requested more than once that US soldiers stationed in the Philippines pack up their gear and go home.

In other words, Duterte, failing to understand that the US superpower plays for keeps, was seeking to terminate US-Philippines relations with an amicable separation, as opposed to a full-blown bitter divorce.

“I have nothing against America, [President Donald] Trump is my friend. But my foreign policy has shifted. I want to deal with China and Russia. Because in the Western world, it’s double talk,” he said, before going into full-blown dirty Duterte mode as he twisted the rubber knife, as it were. “You (the United States) treat me as if I am your colony still? You must be kidding! We are an independent country. I want my country treated with dignity,” he railed.

https://giphy.com/embed/634FtuMeVLyO4via GIPHY

At this point, you could almost hear US fighter jets revving up their engines in the distance.

What is so unsettling about Duterte’s patriotic rant is that similar sentiments have been expressed many times before by other proud leaders, many of whom– together with their countries – went on to meet a tragic end, courtesy of the US military. Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi come to mind.

These two leaders made the deadly mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time (i.e. sovereign leaders of their sovereign states) as Uncle Sam – playing judge, jury, and executioner – unilaterally condemned them and their people to senseless death and destruction. But I digress.

On May 23, Rodrigo Duterte was tossed like a rag doll from the tiger and left scampering for cover. Islamic State-linked militants mounted a siege in Marawi, a Muslim-dominant city on the southern island of Mindanao, forcing Duterte to declare martial law. A heavy footnote here is that Mindanao is where over 100 US Marines and Special Forces have been on rotational duty for many years.

So how have these US military assets been occupying themselves all these years? Certainly not by knitting quilts. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a US official was quoted by Reuters as saying US military support included a P-3 Orion surveillance plane that provides “aerial surveillance and targeting, electronic eavesdropping, communications assistance.” How the ragtag band of jihadis managed to mount their siege without prior warning from all this flashy surveillance technology is a question worth considering.

Read more

Duterte claims ‘never approached’ US for help in battle against Islamist militants (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

More perplexing, however, is that Duterte – a day after the US Embassy in Manila confirmed the presence of US troops in Marawi – said he never asked for such assistance. “I never approached any American to say ‘Help us,’” Duterte told a press conference, according to Rappler, a Philippines news site. Or is Duterte simply too proud to admit he needs US assistance in this emergency? The US Embassy in Manila said the Duterte government had asked for assistance.

Meanwhile, the jihadist incursion of Marawi also forced Duterte – aside from declaring martial law – to cut short a trip to Moscow, as well as a meeting with President Putin. How’s that for coincidence theory? But was any of this really unexpected?

The impetuous Philippines leader, in his haste to announce independence from American suzerainty, seems to have seriously underestimated recent US power moves in the South China Sea. This was no trivial pawn move on the global chessboard, but rather an entirely new concept of American strategy known in think-tank circles as the ‘Asia Pivot.’ If Duterte somehow thought the Philippines, with its strategic proximity to China, did not figure into the game, he was sadly mistaken. Does any of this sound familiar?

Another ISIS crisis to be ‘solved’

Who could fail to see the parallels between the situation in the Philippines with that of Syria, where the US military, initially prevented from carrying out any sort of military action, eventually got the green light thanks to the arrival of a little-known, ultra-violent terrorist group called ‘Islamic State’ [IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL]. Now the United States believes it has acquired some sort of moral authority for carrying out what amounts to the illicit invasion of yet another sovereign state.

However, that is just the beginning of the strangeness. Many have questioned how IS, bereft of any sort of sophisticated fighting apparatus – not least of all an air force – could have continuously evaded the mighty US military, even as the terrorist convoys traveled across wide-open desert in broad daylight between Iraq and Syria.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky, writing in Global Research, forwarded the question so many people have been asking: “Why has the US Air Force not been able to wipe out the Islamic State, which at the outset was largely equipped with conventional small arms not to mention state of the art Toyota pickup trucks…The Syro-Arabian Desert is open territory. With state of the art jet fighter aircraft (F15, F22 Raptor, F16), it would have been – from a military standpoint – a piece of cake, a rapid and expedient surgical operation, which would have decimated the Islamic State convoys in a matter of hours.

Instead, what we have witnessed is an ongoing drawn out six months of relentless air raids and bombings, and the terrorist enemy is apparently still intact,” Chossudovsky concluded.

For anybody who doubts the veracity of that assertion, a declassified US document, obtained by government watchdog Judicial Watch, shows that US policymakers actually encouraged the growth of Islamic extremist groups as a way to “isolate the Syrian regime.”

The heavily redacted document notes, among other disturbing revelations, “the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”

Earlier on, the document describes those “supporting powers” as “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey.”

These highly disturbing factors, compounded by the US military’s tendency to strike pro-government Syrian forces, either “accidentally” or deliberately, suggest that the US-led Western forces would rather take their chances with the vilest terrorist forces on the planet than work with the popularly supported leader of a sovereign state, Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Back to the Philippines. Although Duterte pledged to remove the IS-linked Maute group from Marawi by June 12, that deadline has come and gone, and despite the purported assistance of the global superpower. In fact, the situation on the ground is becoming nothing short of horrific.

Zia Alonto Adiong, the Governor of Lanao del Sur province, said scores of bodies are lying in an area that saw heavy gunfire.

“Dead bodies, at least 100, scattered around the encounter area,” Adiong told reporters, according to Reuters. He added the unsavory detail that locals trapped in the middle of the fighting have resorted to “eating cardboard boxes” out of hunger.

Clearly, President Rodrigo Duterte – like Syrian President Assad – is facing the ultimate challenge to his presidency. And considering his past pledge to realign Philippine foreign policy away from Washington and towards Moscow and Beijing, the question is an obvious one: Are those US Marines and Special Forces in the Philippines, which, as in Syria, appeared without invitation, there to help the Duterte government, or do they have other ideas in mind, which will only become painfully apparent when it’s too late for the Philippines leader?

As is the case with Syrian President Assad, time will tell what is in store for President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. My personal hunch is nothing good.

@Robert_Bridge

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

It’s high time for a new, multipolar world order

Source: It’s high time fora new, multipolar world order | Environment | Al Jazeera

http://www.aljazeera.com

By Lorenzo Marsili

Lorenzo Marsili is a writer, politic activist, and the founder of international NGO European Alternatives.

June 16, 2017

Pax Americana is over, but empowered cities and a reformed EU can take the lead for a better global governance model.

We have the opportunity of taking a step towards renewed, more enlightened global cooperation, writes Marsili [AP]

 

While the new US administration was busy reining in support for international trade and freedom of movement, China’s president, speaking at the annual Davos forum in the Swiss Alps, performed a stunning defence of globalisation. While Donald Trump was withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, France’s newly elected President Emmanuel Macron was trolling him by demanding to “make the planet great again” – now an official website – and China’s leadership, meeting with the EU institutions, was reaffirming its commitment to leading the fight against climate change.

While we should take China’s new global role with a pinch of salt, one thing should be clear to all: global governance is in shambles. The recent failure of the G7 meeting in Taormina, Sicily, with the lack of agreement on measures to tackle climate change and the refugee crisis, is only the latest event to signal a breakdown of international cooperation. The unipolar world order of American hegemony is over.

This is not necessarily bad news: the so-called Pax Americana has been anything but peaceful, ushering in an endless string of wars that have inflamed the Middle East. But the risk of moving from a unipolar to an anarchic world system is real. A system where powers vie for influence – in Eastern Europe or in the South China Sea – in a zero-sum game of opposed national interests always one step away from catastrophe.

This is worrying, because today’s world requires cooperative global governance as never before. The list of new global challenges goes well beyond fighting climate change, as if that were not already enough: just take wealth distribution and economic globalisation. Brando Milanovic’s “elephant graph” (pdf) may be the reference chart for the decline of Western middle classes, but it also shows something else: the stunning rise of the wealthiest one percent globally. Excessive concentration of wealth creates distortions and inefficiencies, as even the International Monetary Fund now admits. Short of expropriation, the solution is progressive taxation – and here is the problem.

Multinational corporations are increasingly able to play one state against the other to drive a fiscal bargain all but unimaginable for small and medium enterprises. Well beyond Apple’s infamous 0.005 percent Irish tax rate, the scandal stretches to a majority of the largest corporations – from the furniture of Ikea to the toothpaste of Procter&Gamble. Only international cooperation can put a break to such practice. Yet, progress is stalling, at both European Union and global level, with the G7 failing spectacularly to take a position on the issue despite pressure from the Italian hosts.

The cooperative, transnational experiment of the European Union represents a powerful blueprint for a new multipolar world order, one where proud nations are no longer pitted one against the other but work through consensus and the rule of law to reach mutually beneficial solutions.

The list of crises that go well beyond the remit and reach of any nation-state keeps on growing. The refugee crisis is here to stay, fuelled by ongoing warfare and the nefarious effects of global warming, such as droughts, increasing in intensity in the most vulnerable African economies. Or, again, the need to regulate internet surveillance and data privacy, something Angela Merkel is hoping to raise at the upcoming Hamburg G20 summit in July. The list could be extended at length.

We need to reconstruct a global governance for this century or risk letting go of our capacity to govern some of the most important challenges of our time. 

One part of the answer comes from cities. Cities are taking an increasingly central role all across the world. Often, as the in the US experience of the sanctuary cities that offer protection to undocumented migrants, they go directly against central government policy. And cities are now creating elaborate networks that could turn into effective agents of transnational governance.

On June 10, Barcelona hosted a global summit, fearless cities, bringing together mayors from across the world to commit to joint initiatives to tackle precisely the global challenges that national leadership seems increasingly unable to address.

Actions on climate, for instance, with reinforced cooperation over the implementation of ambitious environmental standards are more than just rhetoric: New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has just signed an executive order committing the city to the Paris agreement. Actions on refugees, with initiatives such as Solidarity Cities creating a pan-European network of municipal governments for the integration of migrants and refugees, are also taking place. Such initiatives need to be fostered, for cities matter enormously: More than half the world’s population and over 70 percent of Europeans live in urban areas, while the top 100 cities produce just under half the world’s GDP. They deserve political and economic recognition from national governments, constructing a space for global cooperation below the level of the nation state.

And then there is the level above. And here the cooperative, transnational experiment of the European Union represents a powerful blueprint for a new multipolar world order, one where proud nations are no longer pitted one against the other, but work through consensus and the rule of law to reach mutually beneficial solutions.

Emmanuel Macron has just won a landslide victory in France’s legislative elections. He has a clear mandate to be in the driving seat of a comprehensive reform of the European Union – something he has repeatedly advocated. After the upcoming German elections in September, there are signs that the traditional Franco-German engine will gear up for further integration of of the Eurozone, the EU’s core.There is a risk. We should not forget that the policy mix supported by Angela Merkel’s Germany over the long years of European crisis – rebranded “austerity” – has brought Europe to the brink of collapse. Nor should we be fooled by Macron’s youthful personality, when he seems to be supporting the same market-friendly economic policies that have led to the crisis in the first place.

Without a serious policy rethink – such as a comprehensive New Deal to put the continent back to work and a profound democratisation of EU institutions – Europe’s path towards greater integration risks becoming a fast-track to disintegration. This would be a shame for Europe as much as for the world.

Yes, we run the risk of stumbling towards a chaotic world of nationalism and conflict. But today’s crisis of global governance also offers the chance to move beyond a system that never truly worked in the first place. Crafting a new global role for cities and reforming Europe are the heart of this challenge.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

How Serious Was Russia’s “Probing” of U.S. Election Systems?

 

Source: How Serious Was Russia’s “Probing” of U.S. Election Systems?

http://www.blacklistednews.com

Source: Washington’s Blog

June 14, 2017

 

NSA contractor Reality Winner allegedly leaked documents showing that Russia probed U.S. election systems days before the 2016 presidential election.

How big a crisis is this?

Washington’s Blog asked Bill Binney, the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”).

Binney told us:

If you think about this article [the story by the Intercept], and assume it’s true, then hacking a few days before the election is a little late if they really wanted to influence the voting.

To me, this sounds more like fishing for information to find out as much as they could about the democratic party much like the Chinese did hacking the OPM [U.S. Office of Personnel Management] files. I’m sure the Chinese found more use for the data they got then the Russians did on the Democratic party because Hillary did not win.

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi agrees:

The Intercept article cites an unnamed intelligence official who “cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.” To that I would add, “even if it is all true as described.”

And I would also make some additional observations about what the report and Intercept article are suggesting. First and foremost would be the questions of scale and timing.

There is no evidence that the Russians, or whoever carried out the probes, were able to tamper with either the actual voting process or the tabulation of votes. Indeed, the NSA report dismisses any such possibility. Second, corrupting an election in a country as large as the United States with an electoral system that is largely decentralized would require much more than a probe of 122 local officials starting a week before the balloting. So there was clearly no intention to disrupt the election or to tilt it in a certain direction based on the evidence provided by the NSA report.

I would also note that there is no proof provided in the report to support the assertion that the GRU, Russian military-intelligence service, carried out the probes. Would a highly-sophisticated intelligence service behave so transparently in an operation that would certainly be regarded as highly sensitive? I think not. Cut-outs would have been used to misdirect anyone looking to determine the hand behind the hacks.

All of which is not to say the Russian government didn’t do it or order it done, but it seems to me that the revelations provided in the NSA report do not go very far beyond the kind of random probings that are part and parcel of foreign-intelligence operations as carried out by any sophisticated service. Did someone in Moscow think it might be useful to have some kind of idea of how to meddle with U.S. election technology if that type of info might prove useful down the road? Quite possibly. It should be noted that the U.S. National Security Agency illegally collects vast quantities of information on ordinary Americans but that does not necessarily imply intent to use it in a malicious way. It is a desirable capability and intelligence agencies are always working to expand their reach.

So was Russian intelligence probing U.S. electoral systems? Quite plausibly yes, and it should be a matter of concern for every American as it suggests a vulnerability in the electronics behind how we vote. But did Russia actually interfere with the election or seek to use the probing to elect a particular candidate? The answer is clearly no. The article and the document it is based on should serve as a wake-up call to those who are complacent about the security of our technologies. But on a political level, we are back to square one, with often hysterical allegations surfaced as part of the media and political storm we now refer to as Russiagate.

(And even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security apparently probed U.S. election systems without permission in 2016.)

Indeed, it might be a little bit hypocritical for U.S. politicians to rail about Russian interference with our election when:

• The Washington Post says the U.S. tried to change other countries’ governments 72 times during the cold war

• The Los Angeles Times notes that the U.S. has interfered in other countries’ elections as many as 81 times

• This includes recent elections

• And as Time magazine notes, this includes the U.S. swaying Russia’s election of its top leader

Those who live in glass houses should probably not be throwing stones.

Jeff Rense and Gerald Celente – The Great American Political FREAK Show