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The Icelandic government is reconsidering its national refugee quota after a social media campaign resulted in over 11,000 Icelanders offering up a room in their homes to refugees. As Europe struggles to cope with unprecedented levels of those seeking shelter, residents of the sparsely populated Nordic island country resorted to direct action to pressure their leaders. Iceland was recently awarded the title of “most peaceful country” in the Global Peace Index, with Syria ranking the least peaceful. With a population of 330,000 — less than many European cities — the country’s government had previously stated it could only take in 50 people this year. Taking matters into their own hands, over 16,000 Icelanders joined a Facebook page created on Sunday to pressurize the Icelandic government into accepting more refugees. In addition to offering rooms in homes, people have pledged financial support with air fares, language teaching, clothing, food, and toys, and the page has been inundated with messages of gratitude from Syrians, some of whom are writing from refugee camps. As a result of the outpouring of support, Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson announced that a committee is being formed to re-assess the country’s current policy.

Undoubtedly, thousands of people across the globe are equally horrified. Inspired by Iceland’s example, social media campaigns have sprung up and united those who are dismayed by the pitiful humanitarian response to the crisis. As distressing images and stories of the hurdles and barriers faced at every turn by those seeking sanctuary saturate the European press, similar schemes have snowballed throughout Europe. In Britain, more and more people are condemning the government’s shameful response to the crisis — a response particularly ironic considering most refugees are fleeing conflicts that the U.K.’s imperialist interventions have directly contributed to. .BottomResponsiveBanner { width: 300px; height: 250px; } @media (min-width:420px) { .BottomResponsiveBanner { width: 336px; height: 280px; } } @media (min-width:1300px) { .BottomResponsiveBanner { width: 728px; height: 90px; } } Not prepared to sit back, groups like Citizens UK are pressuring U.K. leaders to step up to the plate. More than 250,000 Brits have signed a petition calling for Britain to take its fair share of Syrian refugees. Ireland’s ”Pledge a Bed” campaign was overwhelmed with thousands of offers of spare rooms within hours of its launch while hundreds of Germans have offered to share their homes on the Refugees Welcome website.

Swiftly following suit and not to be outdone, offers of support haven’t stopped at Europe’s shores. A U.S. group called Open Homes, Open Hearts US – for Syrian refugees launched earlier this week. With no easy answers and no end in sight, the political firestorm will continue, as will the global outrage at the humanitarian tragedy. The only thing clear is that if the West were prepared to accept more refugees, desperate families wouldn’t be forced to rely on smugglers or to climb into perilous boats and refrigeration lorries.

Could the people at the Most Expensive Prison on Earth be pinching pennies?

Attorneys for the last 114 captives at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, say they have been increasingly providing their clients with everything from T-shirts and socks and shoes to shampoo and vitamins to fill a long-term, unexplained need at the war on terror prison.Lawyers who have visited the prison as recently as this month say the captives’ U.S. military issue uniforms are faded, torn or tattered and their shoes have holes. In other instances, detainees tell their lawyers, personal hygiene supplies are cheap and simply don’t do the job. A case-in-point: When attorney Ramzi Kassem met detainee Shaker Aamer to share the news that the long-held Saudi prisoner was approved for transfer to Britain after Oct. 24, the captive was brought to their meeting in prison-issue canvas shoes held together by duct tape.

“Stuff’s just not getting replaced,” said attorney George Clarke who in late September spent about $300 on slip-on canvas shoes, plastic sandals, T-shirts and towels for his two detainee clients — both approved for repatriation, if the political situation improves in Yemen. “They say the stuff they get is crap. Or they’re not getting it.”Recently, he said, the detention center staff has been more accepting of contributions from the attorneys, suggesting prison commanders are confronted with a cash crunch or have realized they can pass along costs of basics to the private sector.

An October 7, 2015 hearing before the US Senate Committee on Armed Forces (SASC) titled, “Iranian Influence in Iraq and the Case of Camp Liberty,” served as a reaffirmation of America’s commitment to back the terrorist organization Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK) and specifically 2,400 members of the organization being harbored on a former US military base in Iraq.

Providing testimony was former US Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, former US Marine Corps Commandant and former Supreme Allied Commander Europe General James Jones, USMC (Ret.), and Colonel Wesley Martin, US Army (Ret.). All three witnesses made passionate pleas before a room full of nodding senators for America to continue backing not only MEK terrorists currently harbored on a former US military base in Iraq, but to back groups like MEK inside of Iran itself to threaten the very survival of the government in Tehran. In the opening remarks by Lieberman, he stated: It was not only right and just that we took them off the foreign terrorist organization list, but the truth is now that we ought to be supportive of them and others in opposition to the government in Iran more than we have been.

Lieberman would also state (emphasis added): Here’s my point Mr. Chairman, we ought to compartmentalize that agreement also, that nuclear agreement. We ought to put it over there, and not let it stop us from confronting what they’re doing in Syria. Continuing the sanctions for human rights violations in Iran in support of terrorism. And here’s the point I want to make about the National Council of Resistance of Iran and other democratic opposition groups that are Iranian – we ought to be supporting them.  This regime in Tehran is hopeless. It’s not going to change. There’s no evidence … every piece of evidence says the contrary. So I hope we can find a way, we used to do this not so long ago, supporting opposition groups in Iran. They deserve our support, and actually they would constitute a form of pressure on the government in Tehran that would unsettle them as much as anything else we could do because it would threaten the survival of the regime which from every objective indicator I can see is a very unpopular regime in Iran.  The United States, unrepentant regarding the arc of chaos, mass murder, terrorism, civilizational destruction it has created stretching from Libya to Syria, now seeks openly to extend it further into Iran using precisely the same tactics – the use of terrorist proxies – to dismantle and destroy Iranian society.

eportedly, representatives of ISIL — with help from the Turkish intelligence services — have established an extensive network in Antalya for the recruitment of individuals who have arrived in Turkey from the post-Soviet States, to enable their participation in the Syrian conflict and possible transfer to Russia.

In March 2014 the head of the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT), Mr. H. Fidan, coordinated the transfer of a large ISIL unit headed by Mahdi al-Kharati, a Libyan national [1]. The fighters were taken by sea from Libya to Syria through the Barsai crossing on the Turkish-Syrian border. Since late December 2015, with the assistance of the Turkish intelligence services, arrangements have been made for an air route for moving ISIL fighters from Syria through Turkey to Yemen using Turkish military air transport. An alternative means of transporting fighters is by sea to the Yemeni port of Aden.

It is well known that wounded ISIL fighters are being provided with places to rest and receive treatment in areas of Turkey bordering Syria. At least 700 fighters were recuperating in Gaziantep in 2014. Reportedly, beginning in 2015, Turkish intelligence services assisted in the removal from Antalya to Eskişehir of what was termed a “Tatar Village”, which houses ethnic Tatar fighters and accomplices of the terrorist group Jabhat al-Nusrah who are natives of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and Mordovia. Some of them are dual Russian-Turkish nationals.

US-led coalition warplanes have inflicted a missile strike on a camp of Syrian regular troops in the Deir ez Zor province, killing three soldiers. Damascus has slammed the incident as an “act of aggression.” This is the first time coalition planes have hit Syrian troops.

The Syrian government has confirmed that there are three casualties and 13 personnel injured, as well as a number of military vehicles destroyed. The coalition jets fired nine missiles at an army camp in the Deir ez Zor province, which remains mostly under the control of Islamic State. The incident is the first of its kind since the coalition started to bomb Syrian territory more than a year ago.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry has filed an official protest with the UN Security Council regarding the US-led coalition’s airstrikes on Syrian troops, Syria’s SANA official news agency reported Monday.“Syria strongly condemns the act of aggression by the US-led coalition that contradicts the UN Charter on goals and principles. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has sent letters to the UN Secretary General and the UN Security Council,” SANA quoted the foreign ministry as saying.The US-led coalition denies its planes carried out the airstrike on the Saeqa military camp, claiming the only airstrikes in the area were delivered some 55km away from the place.“We’ve seen those Syrian reports but we did not conduct any strikes in that part of Deir Ezzor yesterday. So we see no evidence,” coalition spokesman Colonel Steve Warren said.

An email hacked from the private Gmail account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, is raising new questions about when President Barack Obama found out about Clinton’s private email server. In a March 7, 2015 interview with CBS News’ senior White House correspondent Bill Plante, Obama said he hadn’t been aware of Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state until “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”

On Tuesday, WikiLeaks’ highlighted a March 7, 2015 email found in its archives of Podesta’s emails, writing: “Clinton campaign panics after Obama misleads public over Clinton emails.”

In the original email sent shortly after the CBS interview aired, Josh Schwerin, spokesperson for Hillary For America, Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, alerted Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s director of communications, about Obama’s statements. Schwerin wrote: “Jen you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news.” The email also includes a link to a March 7, 2015 tweet from Katherine Miller, a political editor at Buzzfeed. “I have some questions here,” she wrote about Obama’s statement.

Another leaked email has emerged showing Democratic National Committee boss and former CNN contributor Donna Brazile sharing a debate question in advance with the Hillary Clinton campaign -- despite Brazile's persistent claims to the contrary. CNN announced in a statement soon after the email became public Monday that Brazile had tendered her resignation and the network accepted it on Oct. 14, days after the controversy over Brazile tipping off the Clinton campaign initially broke. According to documents released Monday by WikiLeaks, Brazile sent Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri an email titled, “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash,” the night before the March 6 CNN primary debate in Flint, Mich.  “Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the ppl of Flint,” Brazile wrote.

The following night, Lee-Anne Walters, a mom whose twin boys stopped growing and whose daughter lost her hair during the Flint water contamination crisis, posed a question to both Clinton, the eventual Democratic presidential nominee, and her primary opponent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. 

After my family, the city of Flint and the children in D.C. were poisoned by lead, will you make a personal promise to me right now that, as president, in your first 100 days in office, you will make it a requirement that all public water systems must remove all lead service lines throughout the entire United States, and notification made to the — the citizens that have said service lines?” Walters asked. Clinton responded with a lengthy answer that moderator Anderson Cooper had to twice interrupt in an attempt to keep to the agreed-upon time limit. Clinton’s remarks drew applause from the crowd, though she wound up ultimately losing the state’s primary to Sanders two days later.  The apparent email tip-off was included in the latest trove of messages hacked from Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account and posted by WikiLeaks. Brazile had been under fire over an earlier email chain appearing to show her tipping off the campaign before a town hall event later that same month. That exchange began with Brazile sending Palmieri the text of a question about the death penalty in an email with the subject line: “From time to time I get the questions in advance.” After Palmieri responded, Brazile wrote back: “I’ll send a few more.” Roland Martin asked the death penalty question verbatim the next night during a CNN town hall.  Brazile's role as a CNN contributor was suspended when she took over as interim DNC head in July, but on Oct. 14, in light of the email revelations, CNN said it accepted her full resignation.

The problem is that widows do not make appealing brides, say the women themselves and nongovernmental organizations that assist them.“Maybe a young woman with only one or two kids can marry again,” Ms. Khalaf said with a sigh; she has six children. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Widows are not a new social problem in Iraq, of course. The war with Iran in the 1980s left tens of thousands of women widowed. Each new calamity that followed created more: the 1991 war with the United States, the failed Shiite uprising that followed, the repressions against Kurds.

And the numbers of widows in Iraq, or as American aid programs prefer to call them, “female heads of households,” increased substantially after the invasion in 2003 and in the years of violence that followed.The Iraqi Ministry of Planning estimates that about 9 percent of the country’s women, or about 900,000, are widows. A separate government agency, the Ministry of Women, issued a statement in June putting the figure at one million.Other groups also have estimated the number of women widowed during the nearly nine-year war, which is drawing to an official close with the last American soldiers scheduled to leave in December.

A United Nations report estimated that at the peak of the sectarian violence in 2006, nearly 100 women were widowed each day. The Ministry of Social Affairs pays widow’s benefits to 86,000 women, most of whom, it says, lost their husbands in the latest war.This figure corresponds with conservative estimates of 103,000 to 113,000 Iraqi deaths in the war, according to a nonprofit group that tallies casualties, Iraq Body Count. The count includes the estimated 10,000 Iraqi soldiers who died in the initial American-led invasion and 10,125 police officers and soldiers who died afterward in fighting with insurgents, along with those killed in sectarian violence.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who died Saturday aged 85, was widely reviled in Lebanon for his role in the invasion of the country in 1982 as well as the massacres at the Beirut-based Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.Sharon was commonly dubbed the “Butcher of Beirut” for his association with some of the worst atrocities during Lebanon’s 1975-1990 Civil War.He was a part of the Israeli military since the country’s creation, as a member of the Jewish Haganah paramilitaries in the 1947-48 war that led to the “Nakba,” displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. He rose through the ranks with his belligerent military strategies, leading a brigade in the 1956 Suez War, and engineering the capture of the Sinai Peninsula 11 years later during the Six Day War.However, it was in his political career that he will be most controversially remembered.

As Defense Minister he spearheaded the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, set up to root out Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization and form a peace accord with the Beirut government. The invasion morphed into a long occupation, and inadvertently helped to confirm Hezbollah’s status as the resistance party.In 1982, Israel’s ally Bashir Gemayel was assassinated by Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party member Habib Chartouni. Gemaye’s Kataeb fighters looked to the Palestinians to avenge the death and launched an attack of the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, which were under Israeli control.Hundreds of Palestinians, including many women and children, were brutally killed.It was a massacre that Sharon was personally implicated in. A U.N. investigation the next year concluded that Israel was responsible for the attacks, and the Israeli-run Kahan Commission the same year determined that Sharon was personally accountable.The Kahan report’s findings said that Sharon bore responsibility "for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge" and "not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed."

The conclusions led many to dub Sharon the “Butcher of Beirut” and forced him to resign from the defense post but he refused to leave Cabinet, remaining minister without portfolio.His bellicose reputation continued into his tenure as prime minister.In 2000, he walked brazenly into the Temple Mount complex which houses the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa mosque, some of the holiest sites in Islam. The inflammatory move was widely attributed as sparking the Second Palestinian Intifada.He was also associated with the widespread expansion of illegal outposts in the West Bank. As Housing Minister in the 1990s, he oversaw the biggest settlement drive in 20 years. However, despite his uncompromising attitude, in 2004 he signed into law a plan to re-house all settlers in the Gaza Strip.

The planned wave of jihadist terrorism against the Sochi Winter Olympics (Feb. 7-23) is likely to be more extensive than was earlier considered, and with broader ramifications. It also has a strong linkage back into the jihadist groups functioning in Syria with the support of the U.S. and some of its regional allies.

In a gripping interview with Blaze Books in connection with his most-recent title, “Disinformation“, the highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence officer to ever defect, Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa provided his insights on a wide array of topics, from Putin’s Russia to the disinformation campaign to rebrand Pope Pius XII to “Hitler’s Pope” to the links between Leftism and anti-Semitism to the Boston bombing, and all things in-between.

by MAJOR GENERAL SMEDLEY D. BUTLER, USMC - Retired TWO-TIME Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient FULL TEXT ON LINE FREE

GET THE NEW PAPERBACK EDITION including two bonus titles.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Monday demanded the United States explain abuses allegedly committed at Guantanamo prison, especially its practice of force-feeding inmates on hunger strike. “The information we have indicates that there was a general and systematic violation of human rights” in Guantanamo, said Rodrigo Escobar Gil, one of the Washington-based body’s seven commissioners. The allegations of forced feeding of Guantanamo prisoners on hunger strike constituted “cruel and inhumane treatment,” he added. “We want to know … what research is being done about it” and “what steps have been taken to meet the demands of the prisoners,” the commissioner said. At its peak, some 106 out of 164 detainees were on hunger strike in protest against the legal limbo in which detainees are held at the prison, which is on a US naval base on the southeastern tip of Cuba. According to US authorities, who say that the strike ended in late September after more than six months, up to 46 of the detainees were force-fed through nasal tubes at some point in the protest. The government has argued in US court that the practice, called enteral feeding, “is used only when medically necessary to protect life and health.”

The IACHR said Monday it wanted unfettered access to the prison camp to investigate. “We have reports of torture and degrading treatment. But all our requests for visits without conditions have been denied. We want to know when they are going to allow visits without pre-conditions,” Escobar Gil added. The commissioner also requested the IACHR report on “the remaining obstacles to the transfer of prisoners to other countries,” noting US President Barack Obama has promised to shut the camp. But the US deputy representative to the commission, Lawrence Gumbiner, said his team could not answer issues raised at the hearing because the 17-day US government shutdown in October left them inadequate time to prepare. “We respectfully propose to the commission to answer in writing in 30 days,” Gumbiner said, generating a buzz of surprise.