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Sunday, June 25, 2017

Some of last week's news and events





































A Peaceful Empire emerges Centre Stage looking down on the dying one


The oldest civilization of planet Earth comes into its own.  Long overdue.

Matthew Jamison at StrategicCulture
The Chinese Century

The 21st century is experiencing a massive power shift towards East Asia. In particular the magnificent rising super-power of China will undoubtedly be the number one economic power on the planet during the 21st century. In many ways we are living through the Chinese century just as the 20th Century was the American century. China and the Chinese people are one of the most remarkable civilizations ever to emerge in human history. They have had to put up with and endure a great deal from invading external powers yet have always emerged the stronger for it. Sadly they do not get enough credit for what they have achieved. China is without question the greatest country in Asia and one of the greatest on the planet today. Chinese civilization has endured for 5000 years and China as a single, unified state has been in existence for at least 2000 years demonstrating a remarkable resilience, pragmatism, wisdom and adaptability.

The Chinese people are supremely civilized, cultured, hard working, dynamic and a peaceful people. They are also a very clam and enlightened people. In the space of 30 years or so the Chinese people have transformed themselves into the second largest, perhaps even now first largest, economy on the planet. This is due to the hard work, enterprise, resilience and strength of the Chinese people and the strategic vision, discipline and purposeful, decisive leadership of their Government and system of consultative democracy and a socialist-market economy along with a strong sense of national unity and an open mind to be willing to learn from others. As the political, economic, and social systems of Trump's America and Theresa May's Britain are floundering in chaos, confusion and anger the resolute and stable China powers ahead.

Unlike some in the United States and Britain whose hallmark is arrogance and aggression, the Chinese people are supremely humble and confident within themselves, which is always the hallmark of greatness. A Leader like Donald Trump could never emerge in China. Trump is the complete antithesis of everything the Chinese are about.

Sadly, through prejudice, ignorance and jealousy/envy there are so many myths propagated about China which are complete rubbish primarily by arrogant and insecure elements in the United States and their lap dogs in Britain. India and Japan cannot cope with the fact that it will be China who will be the greatest Asian economic superpower and that China is leaving them far behind economically and diplomatically. Some in America, not everyone, but some right wing Republicans such as John Bolton, also cannot accept the fact that China and the Chinese system is proving itself far superior to the American/Western model of free market, individualistic capitalism and "electoral democracy" while some in Britain primarily to be found in Mrs. May's Home Office/MI5 want nothing more than to undermine the brilliant work of George Osborne in bringing Britain and China closer together.......

What did the late Joan Rivers have in common with Nancy Pelosi?

Answer: Making plastic surgeons richer.

 

Glimpse into the lives of some of the Mosul jihadis after their dead bodies are torn apart by dogs


No sympathy, none!!
Fitting isn't it that these low-downs can't stand dogs but now the dogs will be shitting them out in mushy stinking mess after digesting their body parts.

From BBC
The secret lives of young IS fighters 

Mohammed is giddy with excitement as he films the discovery of three IS fighters on his mobile phone.

“Shoot him,” he shouts, gesturing at one of them.

His nervousness gives him away as the unit’s cook. He’s unarmed, but his fellow soldiers from the Iraqi police special forces - known as the Emergency Response Division - are armed to the teeth and are not taking any chances.

Two of the IS fighters are clearly dead. One, most likely a boy, is buried under the rubble of concrete bunker. His small, blackened hand sticks out from mangled remains. Nearby, an older fighter lies in the grass. His eyes are open, but part of his head is missing. He died in the same airstrike that took out the bunker.

But it is the third man, lying in the shadows, further ahead on the path alongside the River Tigris, who has the soldiers worried.....

Difference between the Rich and the Poor in good old RAH-RAH-USA-USA


A Senate Committee should be called upon to probe Trump's act of war on April 6, 2017


Let's see which part of the pretend Left wants to open that can of worms from which will spring all the Left's favorite "Love Israel, fuck all else" Americans.
 
Ray McGovern at ConsortiumNews
Intel Behind Trump’s Syria Attack Questioned

Legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh is challenging the Trump administration’s version of events surrounding the April 4 “chemical weapons attack” on the northern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun – though Hersh had to find a publisher in Germany to get his information out.

In the Sunday edition of Die Welt, Hersh reports that his national security sources offered a distinctly different account, revealing President Trump rashly deciding to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles against a Syrian airbase on April 6 despite the absence of intelligence supporting his conclusion that the Syrian military was guilty.

Hersh draws on the kind of inside sources from whom he has earned longstanding trust to dispute that there ever was a “chemical weapons attack” and to assert that Trump was told that no evidence existed against the Syrian government but ordered “his generals” to “retaliate” anyway.

Marine General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former Marine General, now Defense Secretary James “Mad-Dog” Mattis ordered the attacks apparently knowing that the reason given was what one of Hersh’s sources called a “fairy tale.”

They then left it to Trump’s national security adviser Army General H. R. McMaster to further the deceit with the help of a compliant mainstream media, which broke from its current tradition of distrusting whatever Trump says in favor of its older tradition of favoring “regime change” in Syria and trusting pretty much whatever the “rebels” claim.

According to Hersh’s sources, the normal “deconfliction” process was followed before the April 4 strike. In such procedures, U.S. and Russian officers supply one another with advance details of airstrikes, such as target coordinates, to avoid accidental confrontations among the warplanes crisscrossing Syria......

The case of the murdered by police Philando Castile = Gross Miscarriage of Justice


what else can you expect from the dying Empire?  Everything evil is being spewed by the to-be-corpse-soon United States of America.

 From Salon
The Philando Castile jury ...
was stacked with pro-gun, pro-cop, middle-aged white people
The jury was well-stacked against a just verdict for Castile
Dashcam footage of the exact moment Philando Castile was murdered by Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez was released late Tuesday. The video proves two things: Castile could not have been more compliant, and Yanez responded to that compliance with violence and seven rounds of gunfire. There is no ambiguity in the footage or the audio, no doubt that Yanez was unqualified to be carrying that gun, no question he was a far greater danger to Minnesota’s citizens than the man he killed. To watch that scene and not believe Philando Castile was murdered is to believe black life has no inherent right to exist......

No sympathy for Qatar for its present woes, not from me ....


moreover, I can't help wishing a similar fate for Saudi Arabia, Israel and the USA.
If you think the USA can never be ostracized, never say "never" ... stranger things are happening all over our world these days. 


Yvonne Ridley at MiddleEastMonitor
Qatar is giving Saudi and the UAE a masterclass in international diplomacy

When it comes to international diplomacy, Saudi Arabia and its friends in the Gulf have the grace of a ballerina wearing hobnailed boots. Weighed down by their own sense of self-importance, these petulant male-dominated regimes are used to getting their own way and few will stand up to them. Even their friends in the West, fuelled by greed and super arms deals, are too afraid to rein in the corrupt overlords who rule their people with a rod of iron.

Acting as a mediator, Kuwait has now presented Qatar with a list of demands from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt after all four cut ties with the tiny state on 5 June. One of the demands is for Qatar to shut down Al-Jazeera. To those of us with long memories, this will come as no surprise, because Saudi Arabia simply cannot tolerate criticism and it has a track record of attacking unfavourable media exposure.

In 1980, for example, the government in Riyadh threatened governments, politicians and TV corporations across the globe if they dared to broadcast a TV docudrama, Death of a Princess. The Saudis tried to intimidate Britain with economic sanctions, including the withholding of oil supplies, and recalled their ambassador from London. In the US, oil-rich companies threatened to withdraw sponsorship and advertising from TV stations if the programme was broadcast. A Middle East state attempting to gag the world? Yes, that is exactly what Saudi Arabia was doing.

As it turned out, the broadcast did go ahead and revealed details of the 1977 execution of Princess Mishaal Bint Fahd Bin Mohammed, a granddaughter of the then Saudi king’s elder brother. She was executed in public for adultery, as was her alleged lover Khalid Mahallal.

The Saudi government was outraged. More than a decade later, in 1996, the BBC was forced to close down its Arabic section following pressure from Riyadh when the Saudis again sought to suppress a documentary exposing more executions in the country. Around 250 journalists lost their jobs......

Wanna know why the Powers-that-be want to suppress our use of the Internet?



How USA time and again inflicts utter horror on smaller indefensible nations


Carla Stea at GlobalResearch
The Social and Economic Achievements of North Korea
The DPRK Confronts Barbaric Actions by UN Security Council
 

“My conscience leaves me no other choice than to break the betrayal of my own silences…I know that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.”  The Reverend Martin Luther King, Recipient of the Nobel Peace prize.

“The United Nations which was created to prevent the scourge of war has become an instrument of war.”  Former U.S Attorney General Ramsey Clark

Introduction

Washington, D.C.  White House tape recordings, April 25, 1971

President Nixon: “How many did we kill in Laos?”

National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger: “In the Laotian thing, we killed about ten, fifteen thousand”

President Nixon: “See the attack in the North Vietnam that we have in mind..power plants, whatever’s left, POL (Petroleum) the docks..and I think we ought to take the dikes out. Will that drown people?”

Kissinger: “About two hundred thousand people.”

Nixon: “I’d rather use the nuclear bomb.  Have you got that Henry?”

Kissinger: “That, I think, would just be too much.”

Nixon: “The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?  I just want you to think big for Christ sakes.”

May 2, 1972

Nixon: “America is not defeated.  We must not lose in Vietnam…The surgical operation theory is all right, but I want that place bombed to SMITHEREENS  If we draw the sword, we’re going to bomb those bastards all over the place.  Let it fly, let it fly.”

Former President Jimmy Carter: “More than any other nation in the world, the US has been involved in armed conflict and has used war as a means of resolving disputes…I listed 10 or 15 wars and I could have listed 10 or 15 more.  The rest of the world, almost unanimously, looks at America as the No. 1 warmonger.  That we revert to armed conflict almost at the drop of a hat.”  (April 10, 2014).

Upon my return, on May 25, 2017 from the DPRK I was appalled by the totalitarian mind-set revealed by the fifteen members of the UN Security Council who supported the new Chapter VII  Resolution 2356, increasing the strangling sanctions against the DPRK, a heroic , progressive, admirable people desperately trying to defend themselves from any repetition of the barbaric slaughter inflicted upon their nation, with the criminal collusion of the UN Security Council, during the first Korean War, 1950-1953.  The unanimous support for the new sanctions by all 15 Security Council members is shameful.  All fifteen members of the Security Council, including the United States, know, categorically, that the DPRK will not attack another country unless they are attacked first, or provoked intolerably.

The United Nations is, once again, demonstrating that it is an annex of the US Pentagon.  It had seemed, with the Russian-Chinese veto of Chapter VII Resolutions against Syria, in recent years, that the UN had some dignity as an independent organization.   On June 2, the UN Security Council revealed that each and every member is under the thumb of the U.S., and willing to unleash a barbaric and criminal attack against a tiny Asian country that is a successful example of a socialist system, and still enduring, despite the criminal sanctions that have so far been inflicted upon that noble people by a racist society that still seeks to impose its will throughout the Eurasian continent.  As General MacArthur said, “the Pacific Ocean is an Anglo-Saxon lake.”..........

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Deplorable Israel's dirty diapers



Living in a nightmare


A "must read" .... you won't be disappointed.

Paul Haeder at DissidentVoice
Police State/Corporate State: The Devil is in the Details
Living in a stop and frisk nightmare, fifty years of Rip Van Winkle bedtime

Police state, corporate state, denuded duncery state — a blistery bunch of 80 percenters lost in a carnival of debt, malignant food, maladjusted education and the folly of a full-throttle powerfully propagandist media like a proverbial copper girdle wire around our collective consciousness. That So Called Liberal (sic) Press (sic) playing triple dirges for the death of any emaciated version of democracy with a capital D for dollar.

Feeding frenzy of the old and new rich class, and a lot of wannabe’s lusting after lotto, You Tube fame, anything from the comfort of plasma 72 inch Big Brother.

Isaac Asimov’s I Robot, going on 70 years soon, and that’s the way of the Zionist drone hucksters, those lovely glassy-eyed Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Dell types, and the entire class of probiotic Kombucha libertarians who have no interest in climate change, clean oceans, the growth in poverty, wars, pestilence, resource theft, toxins, on-the-spectrum child birth rates skyrocketing, art, revolution, real human to human relationships, nature, other species, blue skies, discourse, food sanity, clean water, education.

Read this from NewsSpeak, err, Newsweek rag:........

You are getting very sleepy, very sleepy


Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

The end of the Democrat Party of the USA

 

American Arrogance

 
The bully  is not falling fast enough.  How many more will perish before USA is brought down for good.

Diana Johnstone at CounterPunch
Nuclear Weapons Ban? What Needs to be Banned Is U.S. Arrogance

In a context of almost total indifference, marked by outright hostility, representatives of over a hundred of the world’s least powerful countries are currently opening another three-week session of United Nations talks aimed at achieving a legally binding ban on nuclear weapons.  Very few people even know this is happening.

Ban nuclear weapons?  Ho hum… Let’s change the subject.

Let’s talk about Russian hacking instead, or the rights of trans-sexuals to use the toilet of their choice, or even about something really important: climate change.

But wait a minute. The damage to human society, and to “the planet”, from the projected rise of a few degrees of global temperature, while commonly described as apocalyptic, would be minor compared to the results of all-out nuclear war.  More to the point, the degree of human responsibility in climate change is more disputed among serious scientists than the public is aware, due to the role of such contributing factors as solar variations.  But the degree of human responsibility for nuclear weapons is unquestionably total.  The nuclear war peril is manmade, and some of the men who made it can even be named, such as James Byrnes, Harry Truman and General Lester Groves.  The United States government consciously and deliberately created this danger to human life on earth. Faced with the United States’ demonstrated capacity and moral readiness to wipe out whole cities with their devices, other countries built their own deadly devices as deterrents.  Those deterrents have never been used, which lulls the public into believing the danger is past........

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Saudi Arabia .... the root of the deadly plague known as Wahhabism


Are more people waking up to the extremism of the cavemen?  The Saudi cavemen have been spreading their poison for going on decades now.  Even in Canada we have madrasa-like schools for Wahhabi followers where the female teachers including tiny tots are seen wearing burqas.
Writing about it to the Ministry of Education in Ottawa, about a decade ago, got me no response. 


Juan Cole at TruthDig
Why Saudi Extremism Is an Argument for Electric Cars, Wind and Solar Energy 

Saudi Arabia has gotten too big for its britches, and the oil-producing Middle East is turning even more unstable.  Not to mention that global warming is getting worse and worse because of burning fossil fuels like petroleum.

And it is your fault.  If you are an American, your country imports 1.1 million barrels of petroleum every day from Saudi Arabia.  Every time you fill up at the pump, you are enriching the Saudi elite and making the world more unstable.

In the European Union, Statoil and Saudi Arabia account for 20% of imports of petroleum.

The obvious solution to this problem, of instability, extremism and climate change emanating from Riyadh, is electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels.  They should be adopted as quickly as humanly possible.....

....Saudi Arabia is denying that it has blockaded Qatar, since it says it is allowing goods and people in and out.  How kind.  90 percent of Qatar’s food came overland through Saudi Arabia, so cutting off that lifeline is certainly a blockade.  Qatar can fly in or ship in food, but at a premium, and many guest workers may not be able to afford it at those prices.  The Saudis are trying to cripple the Qatari civilian economy, which is a war crime.

Now it and its allies are pressuring the United States to close down al-Udeid air base, from which most sorties against ISIL and the Taliban are flown.  This is rich, since back in the 1990s when the US leased a Saudi air base to fly sorties over Iraq, radical Saudis like Usama Bin Laden claimed that this lease was a form of American military occupation of the Muslim holy land.  Bin Laden gave this US presence as one of the reasons for his strike at New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.  ........

Things coming to a nice hot boil in the Wahhabi caves of the Middle East


I am loving this rift between the Wahhabis.  May they all go to hell where they belong.

From BusinessInsider
Qatar's border with Saudi Arabia has become deserted after diplomatic rift
Qatar's normally bustling desert border with Saudi Arabia was deserted on Monday, with a few dozen frustrated travelers bemoaning a rift between Gulf powers that has frozen movement across Qatar's only land border.

A week after the frontier was shut by the Saudis who accuse Qatar of fomenting regional instability, soldiers in an armored pick-up truck looked out over a barbed-wire fence at sprawling empty dustland separating Qatar from Saudi Arabia.

Indian migrants who work at the border in green uniforms lay on inspection platforms sheltering from the sun.

Normally, thousands of passengers and hundreds of trucks from Saudi Arabia pass through the crossing each day, bringing fruit and vegetables, as well as construction materials for projects that include stadiums for the 2022 World Cup.

Qatar is the world's richest country per capita, with just 2.7 million residents and income from the world's biggest exports of liquefied natural gas. Nearly 90 percent of its population are foreign guest workers, mostly from South Asia or poorer countries in the Middle East. .........



From ZeroHedge
UAE Ambassador Urges Trump To Move CENTCOM Air Base Out Of Qatar
With the naval and economic blockade of Qatar extending into the second week, while Qatar's banks and money exchanges are fast running out of dollars, today the wealthy Gulf state defied and accused the Saudi-led alliance of engaging in an "illegal siege" designed to apply political pressure, while rebuffing the Saudi "offer" of food and aid.

Qatar “completely rejects linking its name with false allegations on financing of terrorism or even claiming its failure to fight terrorism,” the statement cited the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as saying. The bloc’s actions are “aimed at putting the State of Qatar, its citizens and residents under pressure to achieve political purposes.” The economic crisis that has ensued after Saudi Arabia and fellow states severed ties with Qatar "can’t be described as merely a boycott" Qatar said in a statement on Wednesday and reported by Bloomberg, and responded to the Saudi offer that the country has enough food and medical supplies.

The terse response signals that the world’s biggest exporter of LNG is prepared for a lengthy dispute with its neighbors after both sides stepped up efforts to win support from the U.S. over the past week.

Meanwhile, in a striking development, the U.A.E.’s ambassador in Washington, Yousef Al Otaiba, urged the Trump administration should consider moving its air base out of Qatar, the Associated Press reported, a decision which while unlikely, would leave Qatar without a significant insurance policy in the crisis.

As a reminder, Qatar is home to Al Udeid Air Base, CENTCOM’s forward headquarters in the Middle East and a crucial hub for the U.S. air campaign against ISIS. Home to 11,000 U.S. and coalition service members and up to 120 aircraft — including the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing’s legendary combat airpower and, as of 2016, B-52s dropping bombs on suspected jihadists — the base is home to a $60 million Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) that oversees U.S. airpower in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and 18 other nations throughout the region......

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

On various issues in the political world the past two weeks


































How Jihad spread from Afghanistan to other parts of our world

And, this is only part of the story where the USA looms over everything rotten.

Andre Vltchek at DissidentVoice
U.S. “Jihadi Express”: Indonesia, Afghanistan, Syria, Philippines

It was late at night but the new Terminal 3 at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport outside Jakarta was still bustling with families and friends waiting for their loved ones returning from abroad.

My friend Noor Huda Ismail was just arriving from Singapore, and I decided to pick him up and discuss ‘certain issues’ with him in the car, on the way to the capital. Lately he and I were busy, awfully busy, and a one-hour journey seemed to be the most appropriate setting for the exchange of at least some essential ideas and information.

Huda could easily pass for the most knowledgeable Indonesian “expert on terrorism”; a Muslim man who grew up and was educated in the madrasahs that have produced some of the most notorious jihadi cadres in the country. Later he became the man who managed to ‘get away’ from the extremism, to study, and to finally become a respected filmmaker and a thinker.

For years, both of us have been studying a complex web produced by Western imperialism – a web, which has literally destroyed entire countries, while locking other ones ‘behind bars’, in virtual neo-colonialist slavery. All this done in the name of ‘freedom’ and democracy, naturally, and often using various religions as tools, even as weapons.......

........ Huda could easily pass for the most knowledgeable Indonesian “expert on terrorism”; a Muslim man who grew up and was educated in the madrasahs that have produced some of the most notorious jihadi cadres in the country. Later he became the man who managed to ‘get away’ from the extremism, to study, and to finally become a respected filmmaker and a thinker.

For years, both of us have been studying a complex web produced by Western imperialism – a web, which has literally destroyed entire countries, while locking other ones ‘behind bars’, in virtual neo-colonialist slavery. All this done in the name of ‘freedom’ and democracy, naturally, and often using various religions as tools, even as weapons.

Inside the car we managed to quickly ‘compare notes’. Huda filled me in on his groundbreaking film Jihad Selfie, while I informed him about my political revolutionary novel Aurora, and my big work in progress, a book about Afghanistan. I also mentioned my future ‘Afghan’ film, a dark love story, a drama about betrayal, collaboration and the virtual collapse of one family; a film which I’m preparing to produce and direct sometime during the next year.

“Afghanistan,” he says, “that’s where the roots of so many things lie… You recall that in the 80’s, the U.S. was using some local, Indonesian, jihadi cadres, sending them to Afghanistan…”

I knew about it; I knew something, but not everything. The fact that both Indonesian and Malaysian citizens went to fight against the Soviet Union, Karmal, and then Mohammad Najibullah’s government in Afghanistan, was something that I have never yet addressed in my books or films. Now I suddenly felt that it was important, extremely important, to address this fact.

“Huda,” I asked, as we were slowly progressing through perpetual traffic jam of Jakarta, “how many Indonesian men went to fight in Afghanistan, after the 1979 Soviet intervention?”.........

"Anti-Shariah Law" marches across the USA met with protests from the ill-informed Left snowflakes


There are forces at work to get the snowflakes to believe that Shariah Law is okey-dokey.  Sad that the lefties are so badly misinformed about Shariah and all the evil deeds that it entails.  Are these idiots okay with genital mutilation, honor killing, killing of LGBTetc folks, beheading for insulting Muslim kings and sheikhs, cutting of hands for stealing, divorcing of spouses even without their knowledge, putting women in cages known as burqas, death to those who blasphemy their prophet,etc,etc,etc,?   You won't see these lefty idiots marching against US wars that kill Muslims in their millions.... that is absolutely and totally ok with these highly ignorant nuts.


Serbia to sue NATO for the depleted uranium NATO sprinkles here, there, everywhere


Yes, go after the monstrous entity!

From GlobalResearch
Serbia to Sue NATO for 1999 Bombings Using Depleted Uranium Ammunition
Serbia has formed an international legal team to file charges against NATO for using depleted uranium munitions during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.

The legal team, proposed by the Serbian Royal Academy of Scientists and Artists, will bring together the best lawyers from Serbia and also from Germany, France, Italy, Russia, China, Britain and Turkey.

In March 1999, NATO launched a series of airstrikes against Federal Yugoslavia.

The aerial campaign and also NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo were not authorized by the UN Security Council and, therefore, violated international law.

In an interview with Radio Sputnik, Vice President of the International Association of Russian-Speaking Lawyers, Mikhail Ioffe, said that Serbia should have filed the lawsuits immediately after the 1999 bombings.

    “From a legal standpoint, they should have brought the charges when the damage [caused by the airstrikes] was there for everyone to see, not now that its traces are no longer evident. Still, the damage they caused to the people’s health is hard to miss,” Ioffe said.

He described the idea of suing NATO for the 1999 airstrikes as “viable.”

Mikhail Ioffe also mentioned a number of legal problems that would prove hard to resolve.

    “The question is whether the US will respond to these charges or not. The other countries could likewise want to shirk responsibility for what they did. The biggest hurdle is that [the 1999 bombings] have not been recognized as an international aggression by any authoritative international body,” the lawyer stated.

    “The UN refused to authorize them, neither did they term the actions by the US and its coalition partners as an act of aggression. I guess this could be a matter for some backdoor diplomatic bargaining Serbia could benefit from,” Mikhail Ioffe concluded.

NATO launched air strikes in Serbia on March 24, 1999, without the backing of the UN Security Council......

Megyn Kelly talks to Putin





Thursday, June 1, 2017

Turkey for month of May ... the Erdogan madness continues


The Turkish People Have Never Been More "Miserable"

Over the last year, as Turkey's 'sultan-for-life' Recep Tayyip Erdogan has increased his dictatorial powers, so the nation's "misery" has increased to record highs. Soaring inflation (amid a collapsing currency) and stubbornly high unemployment have combined with government crackdowns to see increasingly active protests in the streets.

As Die Welt notes, inflation accelerated to 11.9 percent in April, the highest since October 2008. The rate was well above the expectations of the experts. In particular, the cost of clothing, food, alcohol and transport rose dramatically - in other words, the expenses that the population is experiencing on a daily basis. High percentages cost 22 percent more than a year ago. New taxes on alcoholic beverages have hit the consumer prices. Clothing rose by more than nine percent compared to the previous month. The inflation figures are not the only indicator of economic misery. The unemployment rate has recently risen to 13 percent, the highest since 2010. The infamous misery index, which adds inflation and unemployment, is at its highest level since 2005 at almost 25 percent.

This so-called misery index signals the mood of the population......

107 more judges, prosecutors dismissed from profession in Turkey

Turkey’s top judicial body, the Supreme Council of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK), has dismissed 107 more judges and prosecutors over alleged ties to the Gülen movement, which is accused by the government of masterminding a failed coup attempt on July 15.

The decision for the expulsion of the judges and prosecutors was made at the HSYK general assembly on Friday....

At least 32 teachers who were earlier dismissed
from their posts were taken into custody as part of an investigation into the Gulen movement, which the government accuses of masterminding the July 15 coup attempt, on Friday.

Kayseri police raided homes of the teachers in question who are accused of having used ByLock, a smartphone app that Turkish authorities claim to be the top communication tool among Gulen followers.

Turkey has already detained more than 120,000 people over alleged or real ties to the movement.

Turkish justice minister talks FETÖ with US counterpart

Minister asks FETÖ leader Gülen be placed under provisional arrest, and for evidentiary documents to be submitted in court
Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag on Monday met with U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in D.C and reiterated Ankara's request for the extradition of accused Fetullah Terrorist Organization (FETÖ) ringleader, Fetullah Gülen.
During the 45-minute meeting, Bozdag asked Sessions to submit in court the evidence Turkey has handed over to U.S. authorities in support of the extradition, and place Gülen under provisional arrest, according to Turkish Justice Ministry sources....

Erdogan urges Muslims to visit Al-Aqsa 
to protect the mosque's Islamic identity
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed Turkey's support for the Palestinian fight against the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, calling on Turks to visit the Al-Aqsa Mosque often to protect the Muslim identity of the Holy place.

Speaking at the Al-Quds Forum in Istanbul, Erdogan said Turkey places great importance on Palestinians' justified resistance and it will not let Israeli attempts change the status quo at the Al-Aqsa mosque.

"As a Muslim community, we need to visit the Al-Aqsa Mosque often, each day that Jerusalem is under occupation is an insult to us."

The president added that the international community remains silent on Israel's treatment of Palestinians. "They feel they are immune to any punishment for their crimes, but the international community needs to stand up against them.".......




EU raises human rights in talks with Turkey's Erdogan

Senior European Union officials on Thursday pressed President Tayyip Erdogan over Turkey's human rights record while he pushed Brussels to deliver on promises of visa-free travel to Europe for Turks.

Erdogan's visit to Brussels, where he was also due to attend a NATO summit, comes at a time of strain in EU-Turkey relations.

The EU has expressed concern over Turkey's sacking and jailing of tens of thousands of soldiers, police, teachers and civil servants since a failed military coup last July. It has also criticized a revamping of Turkey's constitution - backed by a referendum - that greatly expands Erdogan's powers.

Turkey says its crackdown is targeting supporters of a exiled Muslim cleric it blames for the coup attempt. It has also accused the EU of frustrating Ankara's decades-old bid to join the bloc. Talks are now effectively frozen and Erdogan has suggested Turkey might walk away from the EU....



McCain, Feinstein tell Turkey to hold guards accountable after DC brawl

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) are demanding the Turkish government take responsibility for a brawl involving protesters in Washington, D.C., this week.

“The actions of your staff violate the constitutional protections of freedom of the press and freedom of assembly enjoyed by all Americans,” they wrote in a letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday.

“Your staff’s blatant violation of these rights on American soil is an affront to those freedoms, and reflects poorly on your government,” the pair added.

“We cannot turn a blind eye to these actions at home, and we urge you to hold accountable those members of your staff who violently attacked peaceful protestors in our nation’s capital.”.......

27 dismissed academics detained 
over alleged coup involvement
Turkish police detained a total of twenty-seven academics who were previously expelled from the Izmir-based 9 Eylül University through government decrees, Turkish media reports said on Tuesday.

The academics are reportedly accused of having links to Turkey’s Gülen group, using a smart phone application known as ByLock, having a bank account at the now-closed Gülen-linked bank, Bank Asya, and being members of Gülen-linked foundations.....

'Where has grandad gone?': The crushing of Turkish journalists
Turkey's government has hit opposition media with mass arrests and shutdowns. For the family of one journalist, it has destroyed their lives
A police raid at dawn. Then being bundled into a police van and treated like a criminal. Turkish journalists and their families have become all too familiar with this scenario.

On 12 May, Oguz Guven, the web manager at the secular Cumhuriyet newspaper, tweeted out "I am being detained" at 7.15am as policemen took him away from his Istanbul home. 

Guven was then formally arrested on 15 May, for a Twitter post and headline on the newspaper's website that was changed 55 seconds after publication.

The headline was about the death of a chief prosecutor in a road accident. Guven was charged with "conducting propaganda for a terrorist organisation".........

Helicopter crash kills 13 soldiers in Turkey's southeast
 

Turkey's army said initial findings show the crash of the helicopter was an accident
Thirteen soldiers were killed on Wednesday when a helicopter crashed in southeast Turkey after hitting a high-voltage power line, the army said.

The AS532 Cougar helicopter crashed shortly after taking off from a base in Sirnak province bordering Iraq, killing all 13 onboard, it said in a statement.

"Our hero comrades in the helicopter fell as martyrs," the army said....

Some of the sane voices on the cause of the Manchester suicide bombing ...


the elephant in the room is the disastrous foreign policy of the West. Just imagine that if even a mere 5% of the money it takes to finance these wars had been spent on USA's infrastructure and its citizens, how different for the better everything would have been.

Daniel McAdams at RonPaulInstitute
Manchester Bomber Was Product of West's Libya/Syria Intervention
Here's what the media and politicians don't want you to know about the Manchester, UK, suicide attack: Salman Abedi, the 22 year old who killed nearly two dozen concert-goers in Manchester, UK, was the product of the US and UK overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya and "regime change" policy in Syria. He was a radicalized Libyan whose family fled Gaddafi's secular Libya, and later he trained to be an armed "rebel" in Syria, fighting for the US and UK "regime change" policy toward the secular Assad government.

The suicide attacker was the direct product of US and UK interventions in the greater Middle East.

According to the London Telegraph, Abedi, a son of Libyan immigrants living in a radicalized Muslim neighborhood in Manchester had returned to Libya several times after the overthrow of Muamar Gaddafi, most recently just weeks ago. After the US/UK and allied "liberation" of Libya, all manner of previously outlawed and fiercely suppressed radical jihadist groups suddenly found they had free rein to operate in Libya. This is the Libya that Abedi returned to and where he likely prepared for his suicide attack on pop concert attendees. Before the US-led attack on Libya in 2011, there was no al-Qaeda, ISIS, or any other related terrorist organization operating (at least with impunity) on Libyan soil. ....

Gareth Davies from DailyMail
Rebels 'Went to Libya With MI5 Blessing' Amid Abedi Probe

Rebels living in England have claimed the UK Government waived travel bans to let them fight Colonel Gaddafi in Libya as investigators probe the Manchester bomber's visits to Tripoli.

Fighters which included Libyan exiles and British-Libyan residents have described how MI5 operated an open door policy for those willing to travel to North Africa to topple the dictator.

It comes as Home Secretary Amber Rudd admitted Salman Abedi, who killed 22 and injured at least 119 people when he blew himself up at Manchester Arena, was known to counter-terror authorities.

Those who travelled to Libya to fight alongside Islamic rebel groups have described how, even though they were subject to counter-terror orders banning them from leaving their homes because they posed a security threat, they were allowed to travel to the hostile warzone.

When they returned to the UK, having spent months alongside groups thought by British intelligence to have links with Al-Qaeda, rebels were said to have been allowed back into the country without hesitation. ......

Raúl Ilargi Meijer at TheAutomaticEarth
There are times when you have to talk about things 
when it appears most inopportune to do so, because they’re the only times people might listen. Times when people will argue that ‘this is not the right moment’, while in reality it’s the only moment.

A solid 99% of people will have been filled, and rightly so of course, with a mixture of disgust, disbelief and infinite sadness when hearing of yet another attack on civilians in Europe, this one in Manchester. An equally solid 99% will have failed to recognize that while the event was unique for the city of Manchester, it was by no means unique for the world, not even at the time it happened.

Though the footage of parents desperately trying to find their children, and the news that one of the dead was just 8 years old, touches everyone in more or less the same place in our hearts, by far most of us miss out on the next logical step. In a wider perspective, it is easy to see that parents crying for missing children, and children killed in infancy, is what connects Manchester, and the UK, and Europe, to parents in Syria, Libya, Iraq.

What’s different between these places is not the suffering or the outrage, the mourning or the despair, what’s different is only the location on the map. That and the frequency with which terror is unleashed upon a given population. But just because it happens all the time in other places doesn’t make it more normal or acceptable.

It’s the exact same thing, the exact same experience, and still a vast majority of people don’t, choose not to, feel it as such. Which is curious when you think about it. In the aftermath of a terror attack, the mother of a missing, maimed or murdered child undergoes the same heartbreak no matter where they are in the world ....

...Imagine that our papers and TV channels would tell us, preferably repeatedly, in their reports in the wake of an attack like the one in Manchester how eerily similar the emotions must be to those felt in Aleppo, Homs and many other cities. That would change our perception enormously. But the media choose not to make the connection, and the people apparently are not capable of doing it themselves. .....

John Pilger at ConsortiumNews
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/31/libyas-link-to-manchesters-tragedy/
Libya’s Link to Manchester’s Tragedy
The unsayable in Britain’s general election campaign is this: The causes of the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people were murdered by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of British foreign policy.
Critical questions – such as why the security service MI5 maintained terrorist “assets” in Manchester and why the government did not warn the public of the threat in their midst – remain unanswered, deflected by the promise of an internal “review.”

The alleged suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, was part of an extremist group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, that thrived in Manchester and was cultivated and used by MI5 for more than 20 years. The LIFG is proscribed by Britain as a terrorist organization, which seeks a “hardline Islamic state” in Libya and “is part of the wider global Islamist extremist movement, as inspired by al-Qaida.”

The “smoking gun” is that when Prime Minister Theresa May was Home Secretary, LIFG jihadists were allowed to travel unhindered across Europe and encouraged to engage in “battle”: first to remove Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, then to join al-Qaida affiliated groups in Syria.

Last year, the FBI reportedly placed Abedi on a “terrorist watch list” and warned MI5 that his group was looking for a “political target” in Britain. Why wasn’t he apprehended and the network around him prevented from planning and executing the atrocity on May 22?

These questions arise because of an FBI leak that demolished the “lone wolf” spin in the wake of the May 22 attack – thus, the panicky, uncharacteristic outrage directed at Washington from London and Donald Trump’s apology.

The Manchester atrocity lifts the rock of British foreign policy to reveal its Faustian alliance with extreme Islam, especially the sect known as Wahhabism or Salafism, whose principal custodian and banker is the oil kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Britain’s biggest weapons customer.

This imperial marriage reaches back to the Second World War and the early days of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The aim of British policy was to stop pan-Arabism: Arab states developing a modern secularism, asserting their independence from the imperial West and controlling their resources. The creation of a rapacious Israel was meant to expedite this. Pan-Arabism has since been crushed; the goal now is division and conquest.

The ‘Manchester Boys’                                                  

In 2011, according to Middle East Eye, the LIFG in Manchester were known as the “Manchester boys.” Implacably opposed to Muammar Gaddafi, they were considered high risk and a number were under Home Office control orders – house arrest – when anti-Gaddafi demonstrations broke out in Libya, a country forged from myriad tribal enmities.

Suddenly the control orders were lifted. “I was allowed to go, no questions asked,” said one LIFG member. MI5 returned their passports and counter-terrorism police at Heathrow airport were told to let them board their flights.........