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Sunday, September 30, 2018

Turkey news for the month of September


Bad news ... Erdogan is still alive !!

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/09/turkey-erdogan-denounces-dollar-acting-wild-wolves-180902112548821.html
Turkey's Erdogan denounces dollar; US acting like 'wild wolves'
Turkish president announces negotiations with Russia are ongoing to sideline 'damaging' US dollar in global trade.
 Turkey will pursue non-dollar transactions in trade and investment with other countries, its president said on Sunday, adding recent US sanctions showed Washington was behaving like "wild wolves".
Negotiations between Turkey and Russia are under way on not using American dollars in bilateral trade, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a business forum during a visit to Kyrgyzstan....

 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-turkey/erdogan-says-turkeys-ceasefire-calls-in-idlib-yielded-results-idUSKCN1LX0S8
 Erdogan says Turkey's ceasefire calls in Idlib yielded results
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - President Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey’s calls for a ceasefire in Syria’s rebel-held Idlib region were bearing fruit after days of relative calm but more work needed to be done, Hurriyet newspaper reported on Monday...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-currency-erdogan-economy/erdogan-says-turkey-not-to-blame-from-economy-problems-idUSKCN1LT1D2
President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday that problems in the economy were not caused by Turkey and the country will continue on its path stronger if it stands tall. 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-currency-erdogan/turkey-to-freeze-new-government-projects-erdogan-says-idUSKCN1LU11I
Turkey is freezing new government investment projects, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday, to rein in spending and stem double-digit inflation after a 15-year construction boom fueled by debt. 

https://www.dw.com/en/turkeys-erdogan-hopes-to-turn-over-new-page-with-germany-in-state-visit/a-45653111 
Turkey's Erdogan hopes to 'turn over new page' with Germany in state visit
After years of strained ties, Erdogan has said he wants to reset relations with Berlin during a pomp and circumstance-filled visit to Germany. But German and Turkish politicians aren't convinced it will lead to a change.

 



https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/world/europe/erdogan-turkey-germany-cooperation.htmlTurkey’s Erdogan Changes His Tune, Seeking Support and Cooperation in Germany
BERLIN — A year ago, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey told Germans of Turkish origin not to vote for Chancellor Angela Merkel, branding her governing coalition “enemies of Turkey.”
On Thursday, Mr. Erdogan arrived in Berlin for a three-day state visit, complete with military honors, a state banquet and a lunch with Ms. Merkel...


https://dailycaller.com/2018/09/26/erdogan-claims-lacks-power-brunson/
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey recently claimed that releasing imprisoned American pastor Andrew Brunson is not within his power.
“This is a judiciary matter,” Erdogan said in an interview with Reuters at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday. “Brunson has been detained on terrorism charges … On Oct. 12 there will be another hearing and we don’t know what the court will decide and politicians will have no say on the verdict.” Erdogan maintained that “as the president, I don’t have the right to order his release. Our judiciary is independent. Let’s wait and see what the court will decide.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/world/europe/turkey-erdogan-saturday-mothers.htmlTurkey Clamps Down on a Group Erdogan Once Championed: Grieving Mothers
 ISTANBUL — In a narrow side street of Istanbul the riot police, with gas masks pushed up on their heads, advanced on a small band of demonstrators marching in silence.
The police were there to stop a collection of aging mothers and their relatives, who were protesting the disappearances and extrajudicial killings decades ago of their family members, mostly activists from Turkey’s Kurdish minority.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-turkey/turkeys-erdogan-vows-to-impose-secure-zones-east-of-euphrates-in-syria-media-idUSKCN1M40DX 
Turkey's Erdogan vows to impose secure zones east of Euphrates in Syria
 ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey will take action east of the Euphrates river in Syria and impose secure zones as it has done in the northwest of the country, President Tayyip Erdogan said in comments broadcast on Turkish media on Monday.

 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45692666 
Turkey's Erdogan opens mosque in German city of Cologne

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ended a visit to Germany by opening one of Europe's largest mosques.
He said the mosque in Cologne stood as a symbol of peace and thanked the German government for pressing ahead with its construction despite protests...

 

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Some of my tweets Sep 20 - 25














































































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Tuesday, September 25, 2018

The Empire has lost control


Chris Hedges is at the forefront tolling the bell on the imminent demise of a warmongering nation that has taken on more than it can chew and everything it has put in its mouth has been poisonous.  Empires fall, we all know that, but a great empire like the USA had so much potential if only it had not committed itself to doing the will of the 1% and only the 1%.

Brian Bethune at Macleans
Why the American empire has lost control—and its failure is imminent


Pretending the world isn’t bleak feeds the mania for unreal hope that exists within American culture, argues Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges—Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, ordained Presbyterian minister, ferocious anti-corporate activist and prolific author—has long occupied an isolated spot among American public intellectuals, as much a moral crusader as a political critic. But as American, and Western, politics continue to decay and xenophobic nativism continues to rise, Hedges, 61, seems less and less an outlier, his critique of contemporary America more acceptable to his countrymen. And that’s without walking back any of his analysis. If Hedges was worried nine years ago in Empire of Illusion that his nation—like all republics before it—would fail to survive the acquisition of an empire, he’s now convinced it won’t. The title of his newest book, America: The Farewell Tour, says it all. In powerfully reported chapters—including “Decay” (deindustrialization), “Heroin” (the opioid epidemic), “Sadism” (the pornography-industrial complex), and “Hate” (racism)—Hedges talks to the most oppressed and dispossessed citizens of an empire he thinks has not much more than a decade of life left. 

Q: A very bleak and wide-ranging report. The Farewell Tour is, in its way, the antithesis of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.

A: That book is the modern version of Candide. I mean it is completely unplugged from reality. Pinker, who has spent his life in academic gardens like Harvard, just doesn’t understand what societies look like when they break down. I’ve been there. I’m not an academic. I was primarily a war correspondent for 28 years. Pinker doesn’t get the dark side of human nature and how technology has, in degenerated societies, accelerated the power to commit wholesale slaughter. People love his book. It’s what they want to hear. But it’s not real......

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Friday, September 21, 2018

On the Sabra and Shatila Massacre ... from the Israeli State Archives


My good God!!  What kind of monsters were these deluded Christians? Were  they under Israeli hypnotism? What kind of power did the Israelis wield over these murderers?  Is this Christianity?  Hell, NO !!!  These murderers acted not unlike how the Evangelical nutballs are behaving now in the USA.

Seth Anziska at The New York Review of Books
Sabra and Shatila: New Revelations
 
Historians try not to audibly gasp in the reading rooms of official archives, but there are times when the written record retains a capacity to shock. In 2012, while working at the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem, I came across highly classified material from Israel’s 1982 War in Lebanon that had just been opened to researchers. This access was in line with the thirty-year rule of declassification governing the release of documents in Israel. Sifting through Foreign Ministry files, I stumbled upon the minutes of a September 17 meeting between Israeli and American officials that took place in the midst of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

The startling verbatim exchange between Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and US diplomat Morris Draper clearly demonstrated how the slaughter of civilians in the Palestinian refugee camps of south Beirut was prolonged by Draper’s acquiescence in the face of Sharon’s deceptive claim of “terrorists” remaining behind. This made the US unwittingly complicit in the notorious three-day massacre carried out by militiamen linked to the Phalange, a right-wing political party of Lebanese Maronite Christians that was allied with Israel.

Not long after publishing these findings, I was approached by William Quandt, a leading American expert on the Middle East who served on the National Security Council with responsibility for Arab-Israeli affairs under President Jimmy Carter. Quandt had been an expert consultant for the defense in the 1983–1984 lawsuit of Ariel Sharon v. Time Magazine, in which Sharon sued Time for libel over its coverage of his role in the massacre. In the course of preparing for the case, which was eventually settled out of court, the New York-based law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore obtained classified material from the secret appendix of the official Israeli report into the massacre, known as the Kahan Commission. Large sections of the Hebrew original were translated into English by the law firm, and have been authenticated by several experts, including Israeli sources. Quandt was given a copy of those documents and passed them along to me for my own research....
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Thursday, September 20, 2018

Some of my tweets, Sep 14 - 19
































































































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Long wars make more billionaires ...


it's not about winning.  It's all about how many bombs, missiles, downed aircraft, how much destroyed infrastructure the manipulators of wars can "accomplish" ... and longer the wars, the more the expenditure.  More the expenditure, more the money in the manipulators' pockets. Who cares about millions of Earthlings reduced to dust, eh? As long as there's money to burn in the coffers of the 1%ters, all good and dandy.  Capiche?


Peter Koenig
The United States of America – The Real Reason Why They Are Never Winning Their Wars

 This essay is inspired by Professor James Petras’s article, describing that the US never wins wars despite trillions of investments in her war budget and obvious military superiority.
Professor Petras is of course right, the United States is currently engaged in seven bloody wars around the globe (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya) and has not been winning one, including WWII. The question is: Why is that?

To these wars, you may want to add the totally destructive and human rights adverse war that literally slaughters unarmed civilians, including thousands of children, in an open-air prison, Gaza, the US proxy war on Palestine, carried out by Israel; plus, warmongering on Iran, Venezuela and North Korea. Let alone the new style wars – the trade wars with China, Europe, and to some extent, Mexico and Canada, as well as the war of sanctions, starting with Russia and reaching around the world – the fiefdom of economic wars also illegal by any book of international economics.

Other wars and conflicts, that were never intended to be won, include the dismantlement of Yugoslavia by the Clinton / NATO wars of the 1990s, the so-called Balkanization of Yugoslavia, ‘Balkanization’, a term now used for other empire-led partitions in the world, à la “divide to conquer”. Many of the former Yugoslav Republics are still not at peace internally and among each other. President Tito, a Maoist socialist leader was able to keep the country peacefully together and make out of Yugoslavia one of the most prosperous countries in Europe in the seventies and 1980s. How could this be allowed, socioeconomic wellbeing in a socialist country? – Never. It had to be destroyed. At the same time NATO forces advanced their bases closer to Moscow. But no war was won. Conflicts are still ongoing, “justifying” the presence of NATO, for European and US “national security”.   

Then, let’s not forget the various Central American conflicts, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, the 8-year Iraq – Iran war – and many more, have created havoc and disorder, and foremost killed millions of people and weakened the countries affected. They put the population into misery and constant fear – and they keep requiring weapons to maintain internal hostilities, warfare and terror to this day.
 
All of these wars are totally unlawful and prohibited by any international standards of law. But...
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Friday, September 14, 2018

Some of my tweets Sep 9 - 13














































































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