Leid Stories – Benjamin Netanyahu Trolls Africa for Big-Money Deals and Old ‘Friendships’; Obama, Biden Hit the Road (at Taxpayer Expense) for Hillary – 07.05.16

Starting with Uganda—where, 40 years ago, his older brother Yonatan was killed in an Israeli Defense Forces-led commando raid on the airport at Entebbe to free hostages being held by pro-Palestinian hijackers–Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday began a foray into East Africa that also will include scheduled trips to Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia and include summit meetings with leaders from South Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia.

Netanyahu said that his trip to the region, the first in 30 years by an Israeli prime minister, is meant to indicate a renewed interest in forging bilateral economic and strategic ties with old friends. But new fears and suspicions abound in the African world about Israel’s ramped-up foreign-policy push on the continent. Abayomi Azikiwe, editor in chief of Pan-African Newswire, discusses Netanyahu’s historic visit to East Africa.

Both President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are hitting the road this week as pitchmen for Hillary Clinton. Obama makes his debut today at a rally in Charlotte, N.C.; Biden goes a-stumping Friday in Scranton, Pa., his hometown.

Leid Stories explains says that it isn’t so much a testament of Clinton’s clout and firepower that the Top Two are campaigning for her, but yet another indication of her political vulnerability as a distrusted candidate who will be the party’s nominee later this month.

This Can’t Be Happening – 12.30.15

“This Can’t Be Happening!” Guest Bret Grote, attorney with the Abolition Law Project in Pennsylvania, talks about a federal court hearing in Scranton, PA, where he and another lawyer, Robert Boyle, argued on behalf of their client, prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, for an injunction ordering the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to stop withholding treatment for his active case of Hepatitis-C — a potentially fatal disease that has already damaged his liver and brought on a case of adult diabetes as well as a horrific and debilitating skin disease. A ruling on that injunction is expected in weeks. If it goes in Mumia’s favor and he treatment is ordered, it could have a wide impact, not just on the estimated 10,000 state prisoners known to have the disease, but also nationwide, where Hepatitis-C is epidemic in the nation’s prisons.

This Can’t Be Happening – 12.23.15

Host Dave Lindorff and his guest, Dr. Jess Guh, the newest member of the ThisCantBeHappening.net online news collective, talk about Mumia Abu-Jamal’s court battle in federal court in Scranton to force the state’s prison system to provide him with treatment for his active and potentially fatal case of Hepatitis C. Dr. Guh, a primary car physician from Seattle who has been investigating the shoddy standard of health care in the nation’s prisons, and who has gone over somd 100 pages of Mumia’s medical record, says that what Pennsylvania and many other states are doing to prisoners in their control is nothing short of malpractice and neglece on a massive scale.