South Africa farm seizures - The proposal was announced by Cyril Ramaphosa:

Express UK, “South Africa farm seizures BEGIN: Chaos as first expropriation of white-owned farms starts”, 20 Aug 2018:

SOUTH AFRICA’s government has begun seizing land from white farmers, targeting two game farms in the northern province of Limpopo after talks with the owners to buy the properties collapsed.

Johannesburg-based newspaper City Press reported owners Akkerland Boerdery wanted 200 million rand (£16.7m) for the land, but that the country’s government were willing to offer them just a tenth of that at 20 million rand (£1.67m).

A letter sent to the owners earlier this year had said: “Notice is hereby given that a terrain inspection will be held on the farms on April 5, 2018 at 10am in order to conduct an audit of the assets and a handover of the farm’s keys to the state.”

Akkerland Boerdery immediately took out an urgent injunction to prevent eviction until a court had ruled on the issue, but the Department of Rural Development and Land Affairs has refused the application.

Annelie Crosby, spokeswoman for the agricultural industry association AgriSA, told City Press: “What makes the Akkerland case unique is that they apparently were not given the opportunity to first dispute the claim in court, as the law requires.”

ANC spokesman ZiZi Kodwa refused to reveal details of the farms being targeted and has attempted to cal investor fears, adding the proposed seizures were “tied to addressing the injustices of the past”.

He told City Press: “Over time I think the markets as well as investors will appreciate that what we are doing is creating policy certainty and creating the conditions for future investment.”

Tensions among South Africa’s white farming community has been escalating since the election of Cyril Ramaphosa as President earlier the year, who committed his African National Congress (ANC) to land expropriation.

Last week, ANC chairman Gwede Mantashe sparked panic among the farming community when he said: “You shouldn’t own more than 25,000 acres of land.

“Therefore if you own more it should be taken without compensation.”

“People who are privileged never give away privilege as a matter of a gift.

“And that is why we say, to give you the tools, revisit the constitution so that you have a legal tool to do it.”

A record number of white South African farmers have put their land up for sale amid fears the ruling party is considering confiscating properties bigger than 25,000 acres.

The government was accused of drawing up a list of almost 200 farms it allegedly wants to seize from white farmers, with AfriForum, a civil rights group representing the white Afrikaner minority, adding the document was being circulated by ministers as the ruling powers prepare to implement the policy.

Econintersect.com, “How China’s Mobile Ecosystems Are Making Banks Obsolete”, 24 Aug 2018:

by Ellen Brown, Web of Debt

Giant Chinese tech companies have bypassed credit cards and banks to create their own low-cost digital payment systems.

The US credit card system siphons off excessive amounts of money from merchants, who must raise their prices to cover this charge. In a typical $100 credit card purchase, only $97.25 goes to the seller. The rest goes to banks and processors. But who can compete with Visa and MasterCard?

It seems China’s new mobile payment ecosystems can. According to a May 2018 article in Bloomberg titled “Why China’s Payment Apps Give U.S. Bankers Nightmares”:

The future of consumer payments may not be designed in New York or London but in China. There, money flows mainly through a pair of digital ecosystems that blend social media, commerce and banking - all run by two of the world’s most valuable companies. That contrasts with the U.S., where numerous firms feast on fees from handling and processing payments. Western bankers and credit-card executives who travel to China keep returning with the same anxiety: Payments can happen cheaply and easily without them.

The nightmare for the US financial industry is that a major technology company - whether one from China or a US giant such as Amazon or Facebook - might replicate the success of the Chinese mobile payment systems, cutting banks out.

According to John Engen, writing in American Banker in May 2018, China processed a whopping $12.8 trillion in mobile payments in the first ten months of 2017. Today even China’s street merchants don’t want cash. Payment for everything is with a phone and a QR code (a type of barcode). More than 90 percent of Chinese mobile payments are run through Alipay and WeChat Pay, rival platforms backed by the country’s two largest internet conglomerates, Alibaba and Tencent Holdings. Alibaba is the Amazon of China, while Tencent Holdings is the owner of WeChat, a messaging and social-media app with more than a billion users.

Alibaba created Alipay in 2004 to let millions of potential customers who lacked credit and debit cards shop on its giant online marketplace. Alipay is free for smaller users of its platform. As total monthly transactions rise, so does the charge; but even at its maximum, it’s less than half what PayPal charges - around 1.2 percent. Tencent Holdings similarly introduced its payments function in 2005 in order to keep users inside its messaging system longer. The American equivalent would be Amazon and Facebook serving as the major conduits for US payments.

WeChat and Alibaba have grown into full-blown digital ecosystems - around-the-clock hubs for managing the details of daily life. WeChat users can schedule doctor appointments, order food, hail rides and much more through “mini-apps” on the core app. Alipay calls itself a “global lifestyle super-app” and has similar functions. Both have flourished by making mobile payments cheap and easy to use. Consumers can pay for everything with their mobile apps and can make person-to-person payments. Everyone has a unique QR code, and transfers are free. Users don’t need to sign into a bank or payments app when transacting. They simply press the “pay” button on the ecosystem’s main app and their unique QR code appears for the merchant to scan. Engen writes:

A growing number of retailers, including McDonald’s and Starbucks, have self-scanning devices near the cash register to read QR codes. The process takes seconds, moving customers along so quickly that anyone using cash gets eye-rolls for slowing things down.

Merchants that lack a point-of-sale device can simply post a piece of paper with their QR code near the register for customers to point their phones’ cameras at and execute payments in reverse.

A system built on QR codes might not be as secure as the near-field communication technology used by ApplePay and other apps in the U.S. market. But it’s cheaper for merchants, who don’t have to buy a piece of technology to accept a payment.

The mobile payment systems are a boon to merchants and their customers, but local bankers complain that they are slowly being driven out of business. Alipay and WeChat have become a duopoly that is impossible to fight. Engen writes that banks are often reduced to “dumb pipes” - silent funders whose accounts are used to top up customers’ digital wallets. The bank bears the compliance and other account-related expenses, and it does not get the fees and branding opportunities typical of cards and other bank-run options. The bank is seen as a place to deposit money and link it to WeChat or Alipay. Bankers are being “disintermediated” - cut out of the loop as middlemen.

If Amazon, Facebook or one of their Chinese counterparts duplicated the success of China’s mobile ecosystems in the US, they could take $43 billion in merchant fees from credit card companies, processors and banks, along with about $3 billion in bank fees for checking accounts. In addition, there is the potential loss of money market deposits, which are also migrating to the mobile ecosystem duopoly in China. In 2017, Alipay’s affiliate Yu’e Bao surpassed JPMorgan Chase’s government market fund as the world’s largest money market fund, with more than $200 billion in assets. Engen quotes one financial services leader who observes, “The speed of migration to their wealth-management and money-market funds has been tremendous. That’s bad news for traditional banks, where deposits are the foundation of the business.”

An Amazon-style mobile ecosystem could challenge not only the payments system but the lending business of banks. Amazon is already making small-business loans, finding ways to cut into banks’ swipe-fee revenue and competing against prepaid card issuers; and it evidently has broader ambitions. Checking accounts, small business credit cards and even mortgages appear to be in the company’s sites.

In an October 2017 article titled “The Future of Banks Is Probably Not Banks,” tech innovator Andy O’Sullivan observed that Amazon has a relatively new service called “Amazon Cash,” where consumers can use a barcode to load cash into their Amazon accounts through physical retailers. The service is intended for consumers who don’t have bankcards, but O’Sullivan notes that it raises some interesting possibilities. Amazon could do a deal with retailers to allow consumers to use their Amazon accounts in stores, or it could offer credit to buy particular items. No bank would be involved, just a tech giant that already has a relationship with the consumer offering him additional services. Phone payment systems are already training customers not to need bankcards, which means not to need banks.

Taking those concepts even further, Amazon (or eBay or Craigslist) could set up a digital credit system that bypassed bank-created money altogether. Users could sell goods and services online for credits, which they could then spend online for other goods and services. The credits of this online ecosystem would constitute its own user-generated currency. Credits could trade in a digital credit clearing system similar to the digital community currencies used worldwide, systems in which “money” is effectively generated by users themselves.

Like community currencies, an Amazon-style credit clearing system would be independent of both banks and government; but Amazon itself is a private for-profit megalithic system. Like its Wall Street counterparts, it has a shady reputation, having been variously charged with worker exploitation, unfair trade practices, environmental degradation, and extracting outsized profits from trades. However, both President Trump for the Republicans and Senator Elizabeth Warren for the Democrats are now threatening to turn Amazon, Facebook and other tech giants into public utilities. This opens some interesting theoretical possibilities. We could one day have a national non-profit digital ecosystem operated as a cooperative, a public utility in which profits returned to the users in the form of reduced prices. Users could create their own money by “monetizing” their own credit, in a community currency system in which the “community” is the nation or even the world.

New Observer, ““Refugee Ex-Sex Slave Kurd Flees Germany, Spots Former ISIL Captor as Fellow ‘Refugee”, 18 Aug 2018:

A Kurdish girl who was kept as a sex slave by ISIL in Syria—and who then fled to Germany where she was given asylum—has fled back to Syria after spotting one of her ISIS captors in Germany where he was living as a “refugee” on European taxpayer largesse.

According to an AFP report in the France 24 news service, Ashwaq Haji, 19, was a Yazidi “ex-sex slave” in northern Iraq before fleeing to claim asylum in Germany.

Now however, she says that she has “fled” back to Iraq after running into one of her former captors in a supermarket in Germany where he was also living as a “refugee.”

Haji says she was kidnapped by ISIL when they seized swathes of Iraq in the summer of 2014. She says she was held from August 3 until October 22 of 2014, when she managed to escape from the home of an Iraqi jihadist using the name Abu Humam who had bought her for $100, she told AFP in the Yazidi shrine of Lalish, north of Mosul.

Under a German government program for Iraqi refugees, Ashwaq, her mother and a younger brother were resettled in 2015 in Schwaebisch Gmuend, a town near Stuttgart.

Her refuge in Germany, where she took language lessons, was cut short on February 21 when a man called out her name in a supermarket and started talking to her in German.

“He told me he was Abu Humam. I told him I didn’t know him, and then he started talking to me in Arabic,” she said.

“He told me: ‘Don’t lie, I know very well that you’re Ashwaq’,” she said, adding that he gave her home address and other details of her life in Germany.

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Ancient Origins, “When Your Ancestral Forefather Is a Mummy: 19 Descendants of 5,300-Year-Old Ötzi the Iceman Identified In Austria”, 4 July 2017:

Those who are lucky enough to have well-kept family records may be able to trace their history back several generations. Some can even track family connections going back a few centuries. But what if you were told that you are a descendant of a Stone Age man that was brutally murdered around 5,300 years ago? Such is the case for 19 males in Austria, who are known through DNA testing to be descendants of the famous Ötzi the Iceman mummy.

The well-preserved remains of Ötzi were found by German tourists in the Ötztal Alps on the border between Austria and Italy in 1991. Scientists thought the body, which showed evidence of head trauma, belonged to a fallen soldier from WWI but they were shocked when tests revealed that the mummy dates back to 3,300 BC. His body is in remarkable condition, considering its age, and still contains intact blood cells. Scientists were even able to determine the exact nature of his stomach contents, revealing that his last meal was deer with herb bread, wheat bran, roots and fruit.

- 5,300-Year-Old Otzi the Iceman Yields Oldest Known Human Blood
- Otzi’s non-human DNA: Opportunistic pathogen discovered in ancient Iceman
- Scientists discover new tattoos on 5,300-year-old Otzi the Iceman mummy

The mummy of Otzi, as it was found.

A DNA analysis revealed very precise details about Otzi’s health condition at the time of his death. He was at high risk of atherosclerosis, was lactose intolerant and is the earliest known human with Lyme disease.  But one of the more surprising findings of the analysis is that Ötzi has 19 known descendants that are still alive today.  Scientists could track the descendants based on a specific genetic mutation present in his DNA.

“There are parts of the human DNA, which are generally inherited unchanged. In men, this lies on the Y chromosomes and in females on the mitochondria. Eventual changes arise due to mutations, which are then inherited further,” said Walther Parson, the forensic scientist who carried out the study. “This is the reason why we can categorize people with the same people into so-called haplogroups.”

- Stomach Troubles for the Iceman: How Otzi Continues to Provide Information About the Past 
- Were the tattoos of Ötzi the iceman therapeutic?
- Otzi Speaks: Scientists Reconstruct Voice of 5,300-Year-Old Iceman

Observer, “Mueller Finally Starts to Target Trump’s Israel Ties”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump.

Our media has followed the Justice Department’s investigation of President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia closely for more than a year, with each revelation getting granular analysis amid endless television coverage. No news here is too small to avoid hours of talking-head pontification. Yet, it appears that a significant aspect of the inquiry, one that calls the conventional narrative of the case into question, has been missing from public view—until now.

A genuine bombshell dropped yesterday, seemingly out of nowhere. It came in an interview with Simona Mangiante, the wife of George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign foreign policy advisor who pled guilty last October to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian agents—especially Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious Maltese professor with suspicious Kremlin ties—during the president’s election campaign. As expected, Mangiante explained that her husband, whom she married just three months ago, is innocent of what he admitted he did, and in no way was working for Russian intelligence.

“George had nothing to do with Russia,” she explained, seemingly in an effort to convince the White House that Papadopoulos lacks any dirt on the president’s Kremlin connections that could assist Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation of Team Trump. However, what Mangiante said next was the real shocker: her husband “pled guilty because [Mueller’s prosecutors] threatened to charge him with being an Israeli agent.”

Wait, what?

According to his wife, who insists that George Papadopoulos has nothing to do with Russia, he was facing criminal charges of being a spy for Israel. An attentive reader of her interview will note that Mangiante at no point denied that this accusation.

The notion is hardly implausible. Before joining the Trump campaign in early March 2016, Papadopoulos was a self-styled energy consultant who was known for taking strongly pro-Israeli positions in print. To boot, during the 2016 campaign, he met with an Israeli settler leader and assured him that Donald Trump, if elected president, would take a favorable view of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Then there’s the backstory to Papadopoulos’ infamous May 10, 2016 meeting at an upscale London wine bar with Alexander Downer, the Australian high commissioner (i.e. ambassador) to Britain. At that hard-drinking affair, the young Trump staffer informed Downer that Russia possessed derogatory information about Hillary Clinton—a claim the Australian diplomat found so troubling that he shared it with Australian security officials, who passed it on to their American partners, thus officially beginning the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s Kremlin ties.

That fateful boozy chat was set up by an unnamed Israeli diplomat. This fact, namely that “the meeting came about through a series of connections involving an Israeli diplomat who introduced Papadopoulos to an Australian counterpart,” was reported at the end of last year, “sourced from four current and former American and foreign officials.” This revelation has not been rebutted, nor has it received the attention it deserves. Given that a high percentage of Israeli diplomats serving abroad are spies, this story needs further investigation.

Moreover, there are strange Israeli footprints all over the Trump-Russia story. Quite a few of the shady figures close to the president and his business affairs are American Jews of Soviet heritage who possess connections to Israel. Felix Sater and Michael Cohen are only the best-known of this dubious crew. Those men are also connected to Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish community center on Long Island that is part of the worldwide Chabad movement—which reportedly possesses close links to Putin and his Kremlin. The recent BBC report that Cohen accepted at least $400,000 from the Ukrainian government to set up a substantive meeting with President Trump last year included the tantalizing detail that this dirty deal ran through attendees of Chabad of Port Washington.

Then there’s the explosive New York Times report just two weeks ago about a hush-hush meeting in Trump Tower on August 3, 2016—less than two months after the other hush-hush meeting there with Kremlin operatives—between Team Trump and George Nader, who reportedly offered Donald Trump, Jr. help with getting his father elected. According to the Times, Nader proffered unofficial (and probably illegal) foreign aid to the Republican nominee’s campaign, including from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

That day, Nader brought with him Joel Zamel, an Israeli expert in several things that were of interest to Team Trump, including social media manipulation. Zamel is known to possess a close relationship with a bunch of former Israeli intelligence officials, and Nader reportedly paid him a large sum, perhaps as much as $2 million, after Trump’s election as compensation for Zamel’s shadowy social media assistance to the president-elect’s campaign in (both men also visited the White House).

Zamel is best known as the founder of Wikistrat, a private intelligence firm that was founded in 2010, ostensibly as a “crowdsourced” geopolitical analysis outfit. Although it’s based in Washington, D.C., as The Daily Beast recently uncovered, “Wikistrat is, for all intents and purposes, an Israeli firm; and that the company’s work was not just limited to analysis. It also engaged in intelligence collection.” For this reason, Wikistrat is under investigation by Team Mueller, whose investigators have interviewed Zamel, while FBI agents have traveled to Israel to dig deeper. Several prominent Wikistrat staffers formerly worked for Israeli intelligence—and some experienced espionage professionals in our nation’s capital wonder if they still do.

Israeli espionage against the United States is a perennially touchy subject in Washington. This issue is admitted frankly in counterintelligence circles—and nowhere else. Israel constitutes a unique case. Although it’s a close ally and intelligence partner of ours—the relationship between the National Security Agency and the Israel Defense Force’s Unit 8200, its Israeli equivalent, is exceptionally close—Israel also spies on America aggressively. Year in and year out, Israel ranks in the Big Four counterintelligence threats to the United States, alongside Russia, China and Cuba. It’s not politic to mention this in polite society, however, so the counterspies know a lot about Israel’s spying on us, keeping mum outside their esoteric realm.

Indeed, some counterintelligence pros in Washington have a rather different take on the Mueller inquiry than most Americans do. While Moscow’s secret role in subverting our election in 2016 is plain to see and is now denied only by the willfully obtuse or congenitally dishonest, detecting a direct Kremlin hand on the Trump campaign is trickier. Trump’s links to Moscow are visible but remain somewhat obscure.

His ties to Israel, however, are much plainer to see. Based on the available evidence to date, Team Trump’s 2016 links to shadowy Israelis appear just as troubling as those to dodgy Russians—indeed, in some cases they are the very same people. As a veteran counterspy in our Intelligence Community whom I’ve known for years recently asked me with a wry smile, “What if the real secret of the Trump campaign isn’t that it’s a Kremlin operation, rather an Israeli operation masquerading as a Russian one?”

That’s a provocative question, but it merits consideration beyond counterintelligence circles. After all, Putin and his retinue have ample reason to feel let down by Trump. His greasy obsequiousness to Moscow aside, the president’s policies towards Russia have hardly pleased the Kremlin. Sanctions on Russia remain in effect, NATO’s military posture near Russia’s borders is more robust than a couple years ago, and Ukraine is now getting the anti-tank missiles that the previous White House denied it. Unlike so many of Trump’s assertions, his claim that he’s tougher on Moscow than President Barack Obama happens to be true from any policy perspective.

But not so with Israel. Unlike Obama, Trump has gone whole-hog for the Israeli right-wing, boosting Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, who openly despised Obama, at every opportunity. The recent move of our embassy to Jerusalem, long desired by the Israeli Right, is merely the most prominent of Trump’s gifts to his pal Bibi and his ruling Likud party. Sending a right-wing American Jew who has compared his more liberal co-religionists to Nazi collaborators to serve as our ambassador sent a clear message to Israel, as did the Trump administration’s recent inability to say anything negative about the IDF’s shooting last month of more than a thousand Palestinians at the Gaza border fence, killing 60 of them. Instead, the White House blocked a United Nations resolution condemning that Israeli deed, serving as a tacit endorsement of using automatic weapons for crowd control.

Few of America’s friends around the world are happy with the Trump administration, given its habit of gleefully trashing our longstanding alliances and declaring trade wars on our allies. Israel stands as a significant exception, however, and it’s no wonder that Mueller and his investigators are trying to get to the bottom of what certain Israelis were doing in 2016 in secret to boost the Trump campaign. That answer may eventually prove just as important as Mueller’s inquiry into the Kremlin and its clandestine attack on our democracy two years ago.

John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst. Originally posted 06/05/18, but still relevant.

(((Frame Games))) disclosing: The IHRA’s efforts to impose a universal definition of anti-Semitism

Strategy for imposing a universally criminalizing definition of anti-Semitism:

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New Observer, “Italy: Support for Salvini Rockets as African Invasion Drops over 95%—and Trickling to Complete Halt”, 11 August 2018:

Italy’s Lega leader Matteo Salvini is now that country’s most popular politician as news emerged that his anti-invasion policies have brought the African invasion down by more than 95 percent—and seems set to halt completely within a short while.

News of Salvini’s boost in popularity—to over 30 percent of the electorate—and the success of his anti-invasion policies have been deliberately suppressed by the controlled English-speaking media, but the Italian press has reported extensively on the developments.

The Libero Quotidiano newspaper, for example, reported that when Salvini started his role in the government, his priorities were twofold: firstly to show that his work as minister of the Interior would have immediate effect, and secondly, to curb the growth of his coalition partner party, the Five Star Movement.

“In both these things, Salvini has been successful,” the Libero Quotidiano said.

To prove this, the paper continued, all that needs to be done is to compare the official data on the African invasion landings between 2017 under the previous government’s Interior Minister Marco Minniti , and those of the 70 days which Salvini has held that post.

According to these figures, 23,526 Africans invaded Italy in June 2017. A year later, the first month with Salvini at the helm, the numbers had already dropped to 3,147.

In July 2017, the figures show, 11,461 Africans invaded Italy, and a year later, the second month of Salvini’s rule, just 1,969 made it ashore.

As of the first week of August, the paper continued, to “complete the first 70 days of Minister Salvini,” there have been just 344 Africans brought ashore in Italy, as opposed to the 3,920 who invaded Italy during the same period the previous year.

“With the declining landing, support for the Lega has grown at exponential levels,” the Libero Quotidiano continued.

“In 70 days, Salvini has raised his support levels from 17.6 percent to over 31 percent, taking away half of Forza Italia’s and a quarter of Brothers of Italy party support.”