Somalia Truck Bomb Attack Rocks Capital During Rush Hour, At Least 90 Dead

At least 90 people are reported dead and 125 more wounded after a massive car bomb was detonated at a busy intersection in the Somali capital of Mogadishu on Saturday.

The apparent suicide attack happened during rush hour traffic at about 8am, according to early reports, and authorities are cautioning that the death toll is expected to rise as area hospitals continue to fill.

Among the dead are 17 Somali police officers, CNN reports, while most have been described as university students on their way to classes.

It's the deadliest attack in Mogadishu since the 2017 twin truck bombings that killed more than 500 people and leveled a hotel.

Though initial reports put the death toll at 78 or more, Reuters has cited local sources who say it's actually more than 90 killed.

Rescuers carried bodies past the twisted wreckage of a vehicle and a minibus taxi smeared with blood. A report by the international organization, which did not want to be named, said the death toll was more than 90.

A Somali MP also tweeted that he had been told the death toll stands at more than 90, including 17 police officers. — Reuters

Specifically Saturday's car bomb went off on a busy street outside a tax collection center. The truck reportedly barreled into a security checkpoint manned by over a dozen police, killing scores of both civilians and security forces. Details are as yet uncertain, but local eyewitness say gunfire erupted just before or after the blast. "Dozens of injured people were screaming for help but the police immediately opened fire and I rushed back to my house," 55-year-old Sabdow Ali told Reuters.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/somalia-suicide-truck-bomb-rocks-capital-during-rush-hour-least-90-dead

Twitter Caught Censoring President Trump’s Account — Deleting Several Tweets from His Homepage

For years now the tech giants have been censoring top conservative voices on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google and other platforms.

The tech giants face no consequences for their actions so they continue to silence conservative, pro-Trump voices.

On Friday Twitter was caught censoring President Trump’s Twitter account.

President Trump tweeted out this tweet last night at 8:57 PM.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/12/exclusive-twitter-caught-censoring-president-trumps-account-deleting-several-tweets-from-his-homepage/

When words are not enough: BRAWLS break out in Serbian & Montenegrin parliaments amid debates over church property law (VIDEOS)

Lawmakers in Serbia and Montenegro punched and shoved each other as two separate fights broke out in the nations’ parliaments over the adoption of a law on the ownership of property by churches.

In Serbia, the trouble started when the leader of the opposition Dveri party, Bosko Obradovic, and fellow lawmaker Ivan Kostic came to the floor while holding two politically-charged banners. One read “Serbia, why are you silent?” and the other – “Vucic and Milo – the twin brothers,” which was an attack on Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and his Montenegrin counterpart, Milo Djukanovic.

Several offended lawmakers tried to rip the banners from their hands. A fierce scuffle ensued, with more MPs joining the brawl.

The legislation sparked protests by Serbian Orthodox Church supporters, who are afraid it would be stripped of historical churches. The authorities denied that this would happen.

https://www.rt.com/news/477014-serbia-montenegro-parliament-fight/

Progressive professor: To address climate change, we must 'seriously question' private property ownership

He calls for co-op apartments, government housing, and a Green New Deal

To combat California wildfires allegedly caused by climate change, a writer at the progressive magazine The Nation is calling upon Americans to rethink the "seriously question the ideal of private homeownership."

"Yes, climate change intensifies the fires—but the ways in which we plan and develop our cities makes them even more destructive," writes Kian Goh, an assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA.

Aspirations of homeownership are "reinforcing" California wildfire conditions

The writer says that Americans' "aspirations of home ownership" and "belief in the importance of private property" could be "reinforcing" the conditions that result in wildfires.

"Our ideas about what success, comfort, home, and family should look like are so ingrained, it's hard for us to see how they could be reinforcing the very conditions that put us at such grave risk," he wrote.

Goh added that to "engage with these challenges, we need to do more than upgrade the powerlines or stage a public takeover of the utility companies." Here comes the kicker: "We need to rethink the ideologies that govern how we plan and build our homes."

What "ideologies" is Goh referencing? Economic freedom, obviously.

Rental housing, government programs, and co-op apartments

Goh's alternative to homeownership reads like a list of bad left-wing public policy ideas and economic fantasies. He writes:

There are other options, in theory: Rental housing serves many cities around the world well, although we should be wary about perpetuating the power of landlords in this country without delinking ownership from wealth creation. There has been resurgent interest in government-planned and -built public housing, including recent legislation proposed by Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders that would shore up and invigorate the federal system. The Green New Deal invokes prior eras of government intervention, lending itself to revitalized thinking about the social value of public goods. There is also the potential for new or reconstituted forms of cooperative housing. In New York City, cooperative apartment buildings have long been a norm.

He's not the first progressive whose public policy proposals to tackle climate change go well beyond the fields of science and energy.

As TheBlaze has reported, in an op-ed published last month, climate activist Greta Thunberg called for overhauling everything, including "colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression" to mitigating the rise in global temperatures.

Similarly, to curb fires in southern California, Goh maintains that humans need "another kind of escape route—away from our ideologies of ownership and property…"

https://www.theblaze.com/progressive-magazine-we-need-to-seriously-question-owning-private-property-to-tackle-climate-change

“This is the Biggest Single Development in the Durham Investigation to Date” Joe diGenova on Admiral Rogers Assisting Durham

Former US Attorney Joe diGenova warned the Deep State for years now that their day of reckoning was coming. This past week he claimed that the biggest single development in the Durham Investigation to date occurred when it was uncovered that former NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers was assisting in the investigation.

diGenova was on the radio as posted by the America First Blog when he shared the following:

This is the biggest single development in the Durham Investigation to date. We were told according to public reports that Admiral Rogers met several times with John Durham and that we now know that Admiral Rogers, who is the central figure in uncovering the illegal electronic spying done by the Obama Administration, prior to the Carter Page FISA warrant. The spying that went on from 2012 to 2016, involving FBI contractors illegally accessing NSA data.

Mr. Rogers discovered that, reported it to the FISA Court, all of that spying was stopped and has led to this crescendo of illegal activity by Comey, Clapper and Brennan. It led into the so-called ‘Crossfire Hurricane investigation to cover up that previous spying that had been going on.

Rogers has an electronic trail of all the spying that went on over 5 years. He has personal notes, ala James Comey, only this time they are not self-serving notes, they are the truth.

Mike Rogers I have described as the Rosetta Stone of this investigation. This is the single most important development in this. I have been suggesting for a long time that ultimately Rogers would be the key to any criminal investigation. That is coming true. What we now know will happen is I can be fairly comfortable in suggesting there will be a substantial criminal conspiracy indictment involving a lot of people with the electronic spying that was done.”

diGenova went on to call out Rep. Devin Nunez for his courage in bringing much of this to light.

Nunez and Mike Rogers should both get the Medal of Freedom from President Trump. They are heroes, American heroes.

diGenova also thinks that the FISA Court is not doing enough. He said their efforts are “too little too late”.

We reported in April 2018 that:

On April 26, 2017, an unsealed FISA Court Ruling unveiled a number of criminal activities that Barack Obama’s FBI and DOJ participated in during his time in office. The report to date received little attention. Now interest is brewing due to the recent actions of Congress and the report that is expected to be released in the upcoming weeks.

The FISA Court Ruling shows widespread abuse of the FISA mandate. According to the report, Obama’s FBI and DOJ performed searches on Americans that were against their 4th Amendment rights. This went on for years. One paragraph in the report states that 85% of the Section 704 and 705(b) FISA searches made during this time were non-compliant with applicable laws and therefore criminal.

This heavily redacted report also stated that James Clapper’s NSA had an “institutional lack of candor”. When this report came out there was little mention in the MSM and the FISA Court did little to nothing to bring the culprits in front of the court and hold them accountable.

Jeff Session’s DOJ did nothing. The FISA Courts did nothing. Now it’s up to AG Barr and US Attorney Durham to finally bring justice to the illegal actions taken by the Democrats and the Obama cabal who had no respect for the rule of law.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/12/this-is-the-biggest-single-development-in-the-durham-investigation-to-date-joe-digenova-on-admiral-rogers-assisting-durham/

US military contractors sued for funding terrorism in Afghanistan with ‘protection’ payments to Taliban

Bribes paid by international military contractors in Afghanistan were used by the Taliban to fund attacks on companies that didn’t make the payments, according to a lawsuit filed by families of those injured or killed as a result.

“Large corporations that had lucrative businesses in Afghanistan” paid off the Taliban through a series of subcontractors, bribing the Afghan militants in order to save money on security, according to a lawsuit filed on Friday in federal court by the families of 143 US soldiers and contractors injured and killed during the longest war in American history. The 288-page civil suit alleges the Taliban then used the money to finance acts of terrorism against companies that didn’t bribe them, detailing the grisly circumstances that led to the deaths and injuries of the victims.

Those protection payments aided and abetted terrorism by directly funding an Al-Qaida-backed Taliban insurgency that killed and injured thousands of Americans.

An employee of the US Embassy in Kabul referred to the payments as “organized crime,” according to the suit, which seeks unspecified relief for their families under the Anti-Terrorism Act.

Anywhere between 20 and 40 percent of the funding for major projects like the Kajaki Dam and a portion of the Ring Road went into the pockets of Afghan militants between 2009 and 2017, the lawsuit alleges. Contractors used Pentagon cash to hire sub-contractors, who hired their own sub-contractors and so on, until some of the money – amounting to millions of dollars, if not more – ended up in the hands of the Taliban.

Some government estimates show the Taliban strength in 2019 greater than at any time over the past 18 years of war that claimed the lives of more than 38,000 Afghan civilians, 2,400 US soldiers, and over $2 trillion in taxpayer funds.

Two defendants, DAI Global and Louis Berger Group, received approximately half the total contracts in Afghanistan distributed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2007 to 2009 – about $1 billion. DAI stands accused of paying off the Taliban from 2006 to 2012 while executing contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the areas they controlled.

“Standard practice in such circumstances was to pay protection money in order to discourage the Taliban from attacking their projects,” the suit claims. Louis Berger allegedly categorized the Taliban recipients of its payments as “moderate,” because they weren’t actively destroying the corporation’s work.

Other American contractors being sued are Black & Veatch Special Projects Corp., Centerra Group LLC, and Janus Global Operations LLC. British contractor G4S PLC and South African MTN Group are also on the list of defendants. None of the companies responded to requests for comment from the Wall Street Journal, the first outlet to report the lawsuit, except a Black & Veatch spokesman who claimed the contractor had followed US government instructions and was “proud” of its work in Afghanistan.

https://www.rt.com/news/476988-contractors-bribes-afghanistan-terrorism-lawsuit/