U.S Government Shuts Down

The US federal government is partially shutting down after the Congress failed to fund its work amid a Republican drive to defund the Obamacare healthcare program. President Obama addressed to US troops to boost their confidence amid the crisis.

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The Congress left the government without funding as competing spending measures bounced back and forth between the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Democratic-led Senate late into Monday night. 

The partial shutdown will leave some essential government functions, including national security and public safety, intact. It’s not clear how long the situation will continue, with lawmakers expected to take a further vote in a matter of hours. 

If the shutdown persists, it will affect an estimated 800,000 of public workers, who will be forced into unpaid leave as the government would be unable to fund their employment. National parks and most federal offices are closed, as is almost all of NASA, except for Mission Control in Houston.

The shutdown also affects the Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo, going as far as shutting off the zoo’s popular ‘panda cam’. The website of the US Department of Agriculture went blank on Tuesday, leaving only a warning that it’s not available due to the lapse in federal government funding.

The crisis would initially cost the US economy at least $300 million a day in lost economic output, says Bloomberg citing IHS Inc., a Massachusetts-based economic forecast company. 

President Barack Obama assumed his role as commander-in-chief to address US troops around the world. He said the Congress had failed American soldiers in causing the government shutdown. He pledged that the White House will do everything possible to keep those troops currently on active duty to receive all they need in order to perform that duty.

The budgetary breakdown raised fresh concerns about whether lawmakers can meet a crucial mid-October deadline to raise the government’s $16.7 trillion debt ceiling. 

Gerald Celente, publisher of the Trends journal, says the current crisis is “more theatrics than anything else,” as was the case with previous cases of US political gridlocks.

“Go back to 2011. What we kept hearing about was ‘going over the fiscal cliff!’ They talked about it so much that Standard & Poor’s downgraded the US credit worthiness. And then we had sequestering. And next month we are going to have the debt ceiling,” he told RT. “It’s the Washington drama queens doing what they always do – behave in a manner that is unbecoming of professionals and adults.”

Political commentator Brian Fox also dismissed the shutdown, telling RT that it would have no long-term consequences on the real big issues.

“The government has been shut down 17 times, I believe, since 1977. We can look back now and see the same sort of political opportunism and grandstanding every time with different variations,” he said.

The partial shutdown on Tuesday is the first for the US government in 17 years. It comes after Congress missed the Monday midnight deadline for passing a federal budget.

As a condition for keeping the government funded, Republicans were demanding a one-year delay in making millions of people buy health insurance under the Obama administration’s 2010 healthcare law. The attack on White House’s key political measure was spearheaded by the Republican conservatives from the Tea Party, culminating a three-year growth of polarization in America.

The Senate twice rejected the proposed provisions, while Obama said he would veto the House-backed legislation.

The Congress deadlock has driven the legislature’s approval rating down to a record low 10 percent, according to a new CNN/ORC International Poll. President Obama’s approval is down to 44 percent. 

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll on who is responsible for the crisis, most Americans, 44 percent, believe it’s everyone involved. Another 25 percent blame Republicans, while 14 percent blame Obama and 5 percent blame Democrats in Congress. 

As the shutdown loomed Monday, visitors to popular parks made their frustration with elected officials clear.

"There is no good thing going to come out of it," Chris Fahl, a tourist, told AP as he was touring the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Park in Kentucky. "Taxpayers are just going to be more overburdened."

"They should be willing to compromise, both sides, and it discourages me that they don't seem to be able to do that," said Emily Enfinger, a visitor to the Statue of Liberty. "They're not doing their job as far as I'm concerned."

The crisis appears to be strangely captivating for some foreigners. 

"We can't imagine not having a national health system," said Marlena Knight, an Australian native visiting Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. "I just can't believe that this country can shut down over something like a national health system. Totally bizarre, as an Australian, but fascinating."

Article Source:  RT News

UK Government Shock Defeat on Syria War Vote.

British MPs reject military intervention in Syria

UK government motion on Syria intervention has been rejected by a 285 to 272 margin after British lawmakers rejected an opposition Labour amendment calling for more information about the deployment of chemical weapons in Syria.

The Labour amendment was defeated Thursday by 332 votes to 220, with a government majority of 112. “A number of Tories in the no lobby with Labour,” wrote Labour MP Jon Trickett. 

British Prime Minister David Cameron has asserted that such action would put a halt to human rights atrocities in Syria, while Labour party MPs said they required more evidence of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s guilt to intervene in the Middle Eastern nation’s two-year civil war.

MPs on both side of the aisle expressed doubt over British involvement in Syria during a six hour debate in the House of Commons. Cameron called back lawmakers from their summer vacation to determine whether Britain would join US-led military action in Syria, if the US decides to do so in the coming days. 

Cameron, while advocating for limited attacks against the Assad government, admitted he was not “100% certain” that Assad was behind a recent chemical attack, but that it was “highly likely”.

Cameron admitted it was clear the British Parliament did not want action and said he “will act accordingly.”

One MP shouted “resign” as Cameron pledged he would not order an attack.

The vote came just before US President Barack Obama was scheduled to meet with congressional lawmakers and other key leaders to brief them on possible military action in Syria. White House deputy spokesman Josh earnest told reporters Thursday that the US was prepared to “go it alone” in Syria to protect American “core national security interests.” 

“The president of the United States is elected with the duty to protect the national security interests of America,” he said. “The decisions he makes about our foreign policy is with our national security interests front and center.”

Doug Brandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told The Guardian that “caution has grown” within the Obama administration over as recent developments have progressed.  

“I think they’ve found over the last couple of days both a lack of support at home, both among the American people and Congress, and then the look internationally and suddenly they don’t feel quite so surrounded by friends,” he said.

Source: RT News

UK ordered Guardian to destroy hard drives in effort to stop Snowden revelations

UK authorities reportedly raided the Guardian’s office in London to destroy hard drives in an effort to stop future publications of leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger revealed in a Monday article posted on the British newspaper's website that intelligence officials from the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) told him that he would either have to hand over all the classified documents or have the newspaper’s hard drives destroyed.

After more talks, two "security experts" from GCHQ - the British version of the National Security Agency - visited the Guardian’s London offices.

Rusbridger wrote that the government officials then watched as computers, which contained classified information passed on by Snowden, were physically destroyed in one of the newspaper building’s basements.

"We can call off the black helicopters," Rusbridger said one of the officials joked.

Another source familiar with the event confirmed to Reuters that Guardian employees destroyed the computers as UK officials observed.

During negotiations with the government, Rusbridger said that the newspaper could not fulfill its journalistic duty if it satisfied the authorities’ requests.

But GCHQ reportedly responded by telling the Guardian that it had already sparked the debate, which was enough.
"You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more," Reuters quoted the unnamed official as saying.

In the article, Rusbridger explained that because of existing “international collaborations” between journalists, it was still possible to report the story and "take advantage of the most permissive legal environments."

“I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations...Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that [reporter Glenn] Greenwald lived in Brazil?” wrote Rusbridger.

“The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents.”

Rusbridger pointed out that the whole incident felt like a “pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age.”

The news comes after Sunday’s international incident during which David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was held at Heathrow airport under the UK Terrorism Act for the maximum time allowed before pressing charges. Greenwald was the reporter who exclusively broke the Snowden story. 

The editor promised that the Guardian will “continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won’t do it in London. The seizure of Miranda’s laptop, phones, hard drives and camera will similarly have no effect on Greenwald’s work.”

Another US security source told Reuters that Miranda’s detention was meant to send a message to those who received Snowden’s classified documents, about how serious the UK is in closing all the leaks in relation to the whistleblower’s revelations.
Greenwald, who first published secrets leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, responded by promising to release more documents. He added that the UK would be “sorry” for detaining his partner for nine hours.

Snowden, who has been granted asylum by Russia, gave Greenwald up to 20,000 documents with details about the US National Security Agency and the UK’s GCHQ surveillance operations.

‘US is the intellectual author behind detention of Miranda’
Lawyer Eva Golinger told RT that the UK has violated all concepts of freedom of the press. “We are talking about a media outlet. Journalists and their spouses and partners being detained and interrogated. So clearly there has been a decision made that everything related to Edward Snowden must be captured no matter what, violating anyone’s right under any country’s laws.”

Golinger believes that government's pressure on journalists could inspire some to cover the topic of government surveillance even more, instead of discouraging them to do so.

“The more principled the people reporting are, the more they will continue to pursue that work in the face of threat. Such cheap threats and intimidation give people even more reasons to continue doing what they are doing because it shows that those in power are clearly frightened of the information that is being put out,” she explained.

“At the same time it could certainly intimidate other journalists and create the environment of self-censorship, where many would be unwilling to take the risks that are involved with national security reporting, particularly when it comes to the US.”

Golinger argued that US is the “intellectual author behind the detainment of Miranda.”

“We are talking about a search and capture that is going on for Edward Snowden and it is the US that is leading that effort. It is not the UK or other European nations, they are merely abiding by the wishes of the US…What I believe is that Washington has simply put out a request to all of its allies that anyone related to Edward Snowden must be detained if they come into your territory and the UK abided by that and did their duty.”

Source : RT News