Iceland's Pirate Party poised for victory

One of Europe’s most radical political parties is expected to gain its first taste of power after Iceland’s ruling coalition and opposition agreed to hold early elections caused by the Panama Papers scandal in October.
The Pirate party, whose platform includes direct democracy, greater government transparency, a new national constitution and asylum for US whistleblower Edward Snowden, will field candidates in every constituency and has been at or near the top of every opinion poll for over a year.

Speaking of Snowden...

Edward Snowden has received over $200,000 in speaking fees in the past year while living in exile in Russia, according to a new report. Several of those speaking fees were paid for by public colleges subsidized with taxpayer funds.
Snowden hasn’t left Russia since 2013, when he fled there after leaking up to 1.7 million documents taken from an NSA server he had access to as a contractor. Despite his exile, Snowden has repeatedly made “public” appearances digitally at all kinds of events, from San Diego’s Comic-Con to a European music festival. Unsurprisingly, colleges have been particularly fertile ground for appearances. According to Yahoo News, three of Snowden’s speaking appearances since September, 2015, were held at public colleges, namely the University of Iowa, the University of Arizona, and the University of Colorado.

Gary Johnson moving up in polls

For example, in Virginia Johnson went from 10 percent support last month to 12 percent in this new August poll, which was conducted from August 4-10. When Johnson and the Green Party's Jill Stein are added to the presidential question, they shave three percentage points from Hillary Clinton (46 percent to 43) and two from Donald Trump (33 percent to 31).
In the wild west state of Colorado, Johnson hits the magic 15 (which he must get nationally in at least five polls to get into the presidential debates), up from 13 percent last month. In that state, the addition of Johnson and Stein to the mix cuts five points off Clinton (46 percent to 41) and three off Trump (32 to 29).
Both states show Clinton, obviously, far ahead of her Republican opponent, whose support in both states fell since July.
Johnson is also up from July in Florida, going from 7 percent to 9. And in North Carolina as well, the same jump from 7 to 9. None of those state polls give the slightest bit of encouragement to Trump and the Republicans.

Corbyn victory #1

A close ally to Jeremy Corbyn is now in pole position to become the mayor of Liverpool which, as a result, extends the Labour leader's reach to a major British city.
Steve Rotheram, who has been Corbyn's parliamentary aide since he took as over Labour leader, beat sitting mayor Joe Anderson to become the Labour candidate for the 2017 Liverpool city mayoral election.

Corbyn victory #2

Jeremy Corbyn pulled off yet another remarkable victory in his bid to retain the Labour Party leadership on Thursday evening.
The Labour branch based in the north-west constituency of Barrow-in-Furness, where around 8,000 people are employed to develop submarines for the Trident nuclear deterrent programme, officially backed anti-Trident campaigner Corbyn for the Labour Party leadership.

Corbyn victory #3???

Jeremy Corbyn is the firm favourite to succeed Theresa May as Prime Minister should she ever step down or be voted out.
Corbyn has odds of 5/1 from William Hill and 9/2 from Ladbrokes to eventually take over from May as the leader of the UK, well ahead of Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Corbyn's own Labour leadership rival Owen Smith.

Americans going to fight in Syria

More than half the men and women who have left the United States to join the conflict in Iraq and Syria may actually be battling against the Islamic State terror group instead of fighting for it.
That conclusion is based on a new report by the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), as well as on court records and information previously shared by intelligence and law enforcement officials.
"That pathway is fairly well-trodden. The scale of it surprised us a little bit," said ISD Policy and Research Manager Henry Tuck, who co-authored “Shooting in the Right Direction: Anti-ISIS Foreign Fighters in Syria & Iraq.” ISIS is an acronym for Islamic State.
The report, released Tuesday, looked at the nationalities and motivations of foreign fighters who traveled to the region through the end of 2015 specifically to fight IS or other known terror groups. It found 114 of these fighters were from the U.S.
That figure alone would represent a sizeable chunk — almost 46 percent — of the approximately 250 Americans who, according to U.S. law enforcement officials and the intelligence community, have sought to take part in the overall conflict.

Tech companies collude against Trump

Over the past year, Apple twice refused to publish a satirical Clinton Emailgate game, “Capitol HillAwry,” claiming it was “offensive” and “mean spirited” even though the game’s developer, John Matze, cited in communications with Apple that the game fits the standards of Apple’s own satire policy. Apple has, however, approved dozens of games poking fun at Donald Trump—including a game called “Dump Trump,” which depicts the GOP nominee as a giant turd.
On July 25, Breitbart exposed this blatant double standard and favoritism toward Clinton. A few days after the article was released, Apple caved and published Capitol HillAwry, 15 months after Matze’s first attempt to go live...
Apple isn’t the only corporation doing Clinton’s bidding. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said Clinton made a deal with Google and that the tech giant is “directly engaged” in her campaign. It’s been widely reported Clinton hired Eric Schmidt—chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google—to set up a tech company called The Groundwork. Assange claims this was to ensure Clinton had the “engineering talent to win the election.” He also pointed out that many members of Clinton’s staff have worked for Google, and some of her former employees now work at Google.
So it should come as no surprise that there have been multiple reports accusing Google of manipulating searches to bury negative stories about Clinton. SourceFed details how Google alters its auto-complete functions to paint Clinton in a positive light.
For example, when you type “Hillary Clinton cri” into other engines like Yahoo! or Bing, the most popular autofills are “Hillary Clinton criminal charges” but in Google it’s “Hillary Clinton crime reform.” Google denies they changed their algorithm to help Clinton, and insists the company does not favor any candidate. They also claim their algorithms don’t show predicted queries that are offensive or disparaging.
But Google has gotten into hot water on multiple occasions for connecting Trump to Adolf Hitler. In June, when users searched “when Hitler was born” it generated the expected information on Hitler but also an image of Trump. In July, searches for Trump’s book, Crippled America, returned images of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kempf. Google has since fixed both—but again, why do these issues always conveniently disparage Trump and help Clinton?
Twitter is another culprit. The company has gotten a lot of slack for banning conservatives and Trump supporters such as Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos and, most recently, rapper Azealia Banks after she came out in support of Trump. Twitter has provided vague answers as to why conservative voices have been banned while they’ve allowed other users to call for the killing of cops.
Just yesterday, Buzzfeed revealed that the social media giant’s top executive personally protected the President from seeing critical messages last year. “In 2015, then-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to filter out abusive and hateful replies to President Barack Obama.”