Scandals

Schiebel Camcopter S-100 at the ILA 2006. Picture: Stahlkocher. License: CC-BY-SA-3.0

A German company recently sought drone pilots: training would take place in the U.S. and Ukraine, with deployment in Iraq and other crisis regions

"We are urgently looking for at least 3/5 helicopter pilots and 4/6 aircraft mechanics, preferably with military experience, starting immediately and as soon as possible", heaped a few weeks ago on the Facebook page of a German military service provider. Applicants were retrained to fly a helicopter drone: According to the job advertisement, pilots of the reconnaissance drone, which delivers razor-sharp images, are to spend two months at "Boeing" to be trained in the USA and then to fly a "Practical training month in Ukraine" go through. A German military service provider with drones in the crisis country Ukraine?

The U.S. government insists that the sender and recipient data of letters and parcels be transmitted electronically before they arrive in the U.S

Klaus-Dieter Matschke, a former official of the Federal Office for the Protection of Intercepted Mail, warns against plans by the U.S. to electronically transmit information about the senders and recipients of letters and parcels four hours before they arrive in America. Reported by stern.de and refers to a non-official report of the German government, which is also available to Telepolis. The report states that "it has become apparent that the U.S. is considering a change in past practice. Under the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), U.S. Customs is seeking equal treatment for mail and express items."

The demanded equal treatment has meant that all postal data, including that of letters, has been electronically recorded and transmitted in advance to U.S. customs (undermining postal secrecy). The next meeting of the World Postal Congress will be held in July and August this year. Then the topic of advance transmission of all kinds of letter data came on the agenda.

Convoy of Islamist militias connected with Turkey to Akcakale. Image: Orhan Erkılıc/Voice of America. Public domain.

Commentary: How Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin gave Turkish leader Erdogan his Syrian refugee ghettos as a gift

The most salient feature of imperialist power politics in the ara of the New Right is its propagandistic brutalization. The usual butchery in the wake of geopolitical conflicts is no longer bothered about "interventions" somehow through higher, "democratic" or to legitimize human rights goals, as was common in past decades after the collapse of real existing socialism in the West.

Influential Iraq war advocate and Defense Policy Board chairman is under fire for possible mixing of political and business interests

Richard Perle, the chairman of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, strongly entrenched in the conservative scene and one of the most vocal war supporters around the Bush administration, has been criticized for the article Lunch With The Chairman, published on 10.3. published in the New Yorker, angrily. Author Seymour Hersh, Perle told CNN last Sunday, was, "the closest connection that American journalism has with a terrorist".

Hersh did not actually attack Perle, who had served as a policy adviser on the Bush campaign team but had not then taken up a government post, particularly hard. In mid-2001, just in time, he accepted an offer from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to become chairman of the Defense Policy Board.