Ramstein Air Base is a United States Air Force base is southwestern Germany. It is also headquarter of NATO Allied Air Command. Former US colonel and diplomat Ann Wright took an active part in this year’s protest week Stop Air Base Ramstein. In a recent interview, she said:

The issue of what goes on in Ramstein, being a coordinating center for the assassination of peoples in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Niger, Yemen,… all coming through Germany, should make the German Government think.

One present estimate is that 7,715-11,067 people, of which 252-345 children, have been killed in US drone strikes and other covert actions in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. But the German government pretends to not know what is going on, even when a German citizen is killed in a drone attack in Pakistan.

“It is simply murder,” says Björn Schiffbauer, of the Institute for International Law at the University of Cologne. He argues that Air Force personnel used in the drone attacks could be prosecuted as war criminals by German prosecutors in the city of Zweibrücken, who have authority for the region.

But that has not happened, according to an article in Spiegel.

Also other European countries are involved. A proposed site in Italy would “act as a back-up system to the Ramstein site to avoid single point of failure.” Swedish and Norwegian satelite stations are believed to assist.

For more information about the protests and to sign a petition (in German), see Stopp Air Base Ramstein.

Peter van Buren wrote yesterday:

This weekend I joined a number of people for an online vigil in support of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange. Some have asked why I did it: after all, Assange is at best an imperfect figure. But supporting Assange transcends just him, because the battle over his prosecution is about something greater: the future of free speech and a free press. Even if you think Assange doesn’t matter, those things do.

Read about the support for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks from Suzie Dawson, Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges, Craig Murray, Ray McGovern, William Binney, Cian Westmoreland and others. If you want to help Accoun support whistleblowers, you are welcome to contact us.

The Australian-born journalist Julian Assange faces the risk of lengthy imprisonment, or even the death, for revealing the truth. See TheRealNews on YouTube and a letter to President Lenin Moreno of Ecuador, which you can also sign.

Over two years ago, the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that Assange should be allowed to go free and even has right to compensation.

See the article in The Guardian and a YouTube video comparing Telegram and Signal.

Secret agents are allowed to carry out criminal activity in the UK, the government has acknowledged.

Read on Reprieve about the secret order on crimes by MI5 and on the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office, where released documents are published.

Read about Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, honorary President of the Italian Supreme Court, on the web page of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

The Intercept recently wrote about how UK spies hacked a European ally and got away with it. However, the UK’s sigint agency GCHQ were obviously not hacking Belgacom on their own. Information is also available that the Swedish sigint agency FRA participated in similar type of activity. Both GCHQ and FRA are believed to participate in what is sometimes called the “European bazaar“, said to be run by the NSA in the USA to spy on EU citizens.

According to Swedish Television’s Uppdrag Granskning (link to content in Swedish), it appears that FRA participates in Quantum, which means NSA’s secret hacking programs, at least in April 2013. Note the timing with the Belgacom hack. In the summer of 2013 European investigators were looking into this unprecedented breach of Belgium’s telecommunications infrastructure. Ryan Gallagher writes more on his blog about how the NSA’s goal was to transition activities, that may be illegal in the UK, to the Swedish partner.

Changing of European laws to allow mass surveillance “for our security” has obviously also opened the door for critical infrastructure to be undermined.

Illustration by Carlos Latuff, available on Wikimedia Commons

In 1989, Christer Pettersson was first convicted and later acquitted by a higher court for the murder of Olof Palme. Now a former Swedish policeman claims evidence was forged by the police in the case against Christer Pettersson (links to texts in Swedish). And a key witness who tried to save Palme’s life claims she was later contacted by a man in military uniform, telling her that some things should not be made known. These are only the latest indications of many, all pointing to that Swedish authorities have probably been working to cover-up the murder by framing someone innocent, rather than solving it. In has been known for many years that a group of leading policemen hated Palme and were right-wing extremists. Some policemen involved in the so-called “baseball gang” have made a career, despite (or because of) suspicions that they have been involved in serious crime.

Watch Democracy Now report on the new setting of the doomsday clock and how Trump’s Nuclear Policy “Puts Us on Path Toward Nuclear War”, according to Beatrice Fihn of ICAN.

On the web page of ICAN, you can also see how your government is doing regarding the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and which parliamentarians support it.

The Independent is one of the newspapers reporting about a new book by Ronen Bergman, which tells the stories on state-sponsored killings. The Washington Post writes that:

Toward the end of the book, Bergman hints at the tantalizing possibility that then-prime minister Ariel Sharon authorized the killing of Arafat, who died in 2004 of a “mysterious intestinal disease.” Even if he knew what happened, Bergman writes, he wouldn’t be able to write the truth because “the military censor in Israel forbids me from discussing this subject.”