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Showing posts with label suicide bombers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label suicide bombers. Show all posts

Thursday, May 3, 2018

Some of my tweets from April 22 - May 3




























































































Posted by MariaS at 19:51 0 comments
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Sunday, February 11, 2018

America is the proud supplier of WMDs to "rebels" in Syria AKA jihadi headchoppers and suicide bombers


A more cancerous nation has never been known to exist on planet earth.  Final death count attributed to Hitler is minuscule compared to the millions killed by the USA in the span of the last few decades.

From ZeroHedge
How Al-Qaeda Ended Up With Anti-Aircraft Missiles: Here Is The Congressional Authorization

After the terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a rebrand of Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate, claimed responsibility for the dramatic downing of a Russian Su-25 fighter jet over Idlib in northwest Syria on Saturday - the first Russian plane downed in Syria since 2015 - a number of analysts have published articles asking the obvious million dollar question: where did al-Qaeda get the portable anti-aircraft missile system used in the attack?

Once such article in Al Monitor speculates on the following: "The three immediate questions that arose from the attack were how the downing was made possible, how the militants acquired the arms and whether there was a bigger-level player behind the attack."

And Al Monitor seems to answer its own question in the following when listing the array of allied groups now operating under the leadership of al-Qaeda (HTS) - among them groups previously "vetted" and approved to receive advanced weaponry by the CIA (specifically the TOW anti-tank missile):

    Dozens of miles of Idlib province are contested among an array of groups, including the terrorist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a rebrand of Jabhat al-Nusra, which was affiliated with al-Qaeda; the Free Syrian Army; and its affiliate Jaish al-Nasr, which is considered a “moderate opposition group" that received weapons from the United States. Minutes after the downing of the Su-25, Alaa al-Hamwi, the military commander of Jaish al-Nasr’s aid defense battalion, claimed responsibility for the attack. Alaa argued that Jaish al-Nasr’s command supplied weapons to protect against the Russian air assault.

    Later, however, HTS claimed responsibility for downing the plane.

Though US intelligence and defense officials have long denied that so-called "vetted" groups in Syria were recipients of anti-aircraft systems, rumors to the contrary have been persistent for years. The latest denial came immediately on the heels of Saturday's Russian jet shoot down, which resulted in the death of the pilot on the ground as he came under fire by jihadists. Pentagon spokesman Maj. Adrian J.T. Rankine-Galloway told Russia's TASS: "The United States have not provided any of its allied forces in Syria with anti-aircraft weapons."

The Pentagon spokesman further said, according to RT, that the US-led coalition is currently not engaged in any operations in the area where the jet was downed Saturday, indicating the coalition's combat efforts are "geographically orientated on the current fight with Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS, ISIL) in eastern Syria." Yet the statement clearly avoided any reference to past US programs to arm so-called "moderates" - whether through the secretive CIA program or DoD program. And this is to say nothing of allies like Saudi Arabia who worked closely with US intelligence for years in supplying weapons to anti-Assad militants.

But does anyone remember this? ...from The Wall Street Journal all the way back in February of 2014, headlined Saudis Agree to Provide Syrian Rebels With Mobile Antiaircraft Missiles - U.S. Also Giving Fighters Millions of Dollars for Salaries.........
Posted by MariaS at 23:38 0 comments
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Saturday, February 3, 2018

Eye on Turkey for month January 2018


Turkey slams US verdict convicting banker in Iran sanctions case

Turkish officials have denounced a verdict handed down by a US jury that found a Turkish banker guilty of evading sanctions on Iran that were imposed by Washington.

Mehmet Hakan Atilla and eight others were accused of moving billions of dollars' worth of Iranian money through American banks, disguised as food and gold sales.

The case angered Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ministers, some of whom accused US court officials of having ties to Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish, US-based religious leader blamed for the July 2016 coup attempt.........

US & Israel target Iran, Pakistan and other Muslim countries for their resources – Erdogan

 Turkey’s leader has accused the US and Israel of meddling in the affairs of Iran and Pakistan, as well as those of other Muslim countries, and are driven by the desire to grab their natural resources.

“We cannot accept that some countries — foremost the US, Israel — to interfere [sic!] in the internal affairs of Iran and Pakistan,” Erdogan told reporters in Istanbul on Friday, AFP reports. On Tuesday President Donald Trump tweeted support for the protests “against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime” which erupted last week.....

Macron tells Erdogan: No chance of Turkey joining EU

French President Emmanuel Macron has told his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that there is no chance of progress towards Turkey joining the European Union at present.

At a joint news conference in Paris, Mr Macron said there were differences over human rights since Turkey's purges following a failed coup in 2016.

Mr Erdogan said Turkey was tired of constantly imploring to join the EU.

He lashed out at a journalist who asked about claims Turkey sent arms to Syria.....


Syria - Erdogan (Again) Switches Sides - Delivers New Supplies For Terrorist Attacks

Turkey, in line with U.S. services, decided to block the current Syrian advance in south-east Idleb. Yesterday an ad-hoc alliance of jihadi "rebels" launched a counteroffensive to stop the Syrian army from cutting off a big chunk of "rebel" held territory in east-Idleb.


Erdogan vows to ‘drown’ US-backed Syrian Border Force before it’s born,
 labels unit ‘terrorist army'
 The Turkish president has called US-backed Syrian Border Force using Kurdish fighters a “terrorist army,” vowing to “drown” it before it’s complete. He also added that military preparations against Kurdish-held Afrin are ready.

“Our duty is to drown this terrorist force before it is born,” the Turkish leader said on Monday, as cited by AP.

The 30,000-srtrong army of “traitors” that Washington seeks to create will point their guns against US troops at the first threat, Erdogan warned....


Turkey Notifies NATO Of Imminent Massive Invasion Of Syria To Fight Kurds

Turkey is poised for an imminent massive ground invasion of Northern Syria to quash Kurdish militia groups currently holding Afrin near the Turkish border. Multiple regional outlets have reported a build-up of forces that could constitute the largest external intervening force thus far in the entirety of the Syrian war.

According to Middle East based Al-Sura News, Turkey's military build-up currently underway includes special forces troops, Army units, Turkish-backed Syrian Rebels and Turkey's air force. The Kurdish YPG/J (People's Protection Units) has held Afrin since the Syrian government withdrew from the area in 2012, which constitutes the western-most part of the self-declared Rojava autonomous Kurdish zone....


Turkish attack on Syrian Kurds marks major escalation in Middle East

Late Wednesday night, the Turkish army launched an intensive artillery attack on Syrian Kurds in Afrin, a multi-ethnic region in northwestern Syria controlled by the US-backed Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its militia, the People’s Protection Units (YPG).

This attack, announced long ago by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with the words “we can come unexpectedly overnight,” currently takes the form of a massive artillery bombardment. However, Ankara’s threats show that they are preparing to launch an outright military occupation that could provoke war with Syria and a direct clash with US forces.

The initial step for a Turkish invasion of Afrin came hours after a meeting of Turkey’s National Security Council (NSC) chaired by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Ankara. In a statement issued after the meeting, it warned that “Necessary steps would be taken immediately and resolutely to defeat any threat against Turkey from western Syria in the first stage.” In a comment aimed at the Kurdish groups, it added, “The establishment of a terror corridor and the formation of a terrorist army across the border will not be allowed.”...

Turkey shells Afrin as it awaits removal of Russian military observers

Turkey bombs Syrian-Kurd enclave amid reports Moscow was cutting deal with Ankara to remove observers and allow invasion...




Turkey launches operation against Kurdish militia in Syria

Turkish President Erdogan says Turkey has begun 'de-facto ground operation' in Afrin and that Manbij will be next
Turkey on Saturday launched a new air and ground operation to oust Kurdish militia from a northern Syrian enclave, defying US warnings that the action risked destabilising the area.

Turkey had in recent days sent dozens of military vehicles to the border area and readied pro-Ankara Syria rebels in preparation for the operation against the People's Protection Units (YPG) militia, which Turkey deems to be a terrorist organisation.....

Turkey could widen Syria offensive after Erdogan vows to attack ‘wherever there are terrorists’

 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has hinted yet again that the campaign against Kurdish militia in Syria could spread beyond the north-western enclave of Afrin.

“Just as the terrorists in Jarabulus and Al-Bab weren’t able to escape elimination, the terrorists in Afrin and Manbij won’t be able to escape the bitter end awaiting them, either,” Erdogan said during a regional party congress speech in the heartland town of Corum.......

Ankara uses Afrin campaign to showcase Turkish-made weapons

 On Jan. 21, a day after Turkey launched Operation Olive Branch against Afrin in northern Syria, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim briefed media representatives about the campaign, putting special emphasis on one issue. The operation, he said, was being carried out with weapons and ammunition that were up to 75% Turkish made.

Turkey urges US to withdraw from Syria's Manbij

Turkey has called on the United States to withdraw its military personnel from northern Syria's Manbij region after announcing Ankara's plan to push Syrian Kurdish fighters from the area, according to local media....

Turkey's Afrin offensive enters second week

The United Nations is worried about civilians in Syria's northwestern region of Afrin.

The Turkish offensive in the Kurdish-held border town has entered its second week....
Posted by MariaS at 15:37 0 comments
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Thursday, June 1, 2017

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.........
Posted by MariaS at 19:23 0 comments
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Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Two recent terror attacks in non-Muslim lands ... one is mourned by the West's MSM much more than the other.



Do you know which one got more media attention? 

Those who don't have the answer, are of course being dishonest. While the Anglo-world talked non-stop about the UK attack (and  Russia did too, btw), the one in Russia was either down-played or outright pooh-poohed.
This is the state of our world now.  Russia and Russians are to be treated as pariahs and those stalwarts who insist on peace and unity between all nations and are voicing their concerns about the horrendous treatment meted out to Russia, are to be ridiculed and name-called.

This one from UK's BBC about the attack in the UK on March 22. 
Total humans killed = 4.  Total terrorists killed = 1. 
Total injured = 20 humans



This one from UK's BBC about the attack in St. Petersberg's metro, Russia. 
Total humans killed = 14 +/- suicide bomber.
Total injured =  45 humans



Below, from RT (Russia Today TV network) on the terrorism attack in St. Petersburg's metro, April 3



AND, while UK's BBC thought it fit to disparage Russia's government and hint at the Russian government's hand in the metro attack,  RT carried on and on covering the London attack and showing full sympathy and empathy with the humans of UK.


Hence, I surmise Russians have red blood like many of us.  The Brits have blue blood just like many of the Russia haters. 
Humans have red blood, I am told.
Posted by MariaS at 19:29 0 comments
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Monday, August 22, 2016

News, Views and Opinions from the Alternative Media ... week ending Aug 21


Jason Ditz at Antiwar
US Has Nearly 30,000 Defense Contractors in Afghanistan
Over Three Times as Many Contractors as Soldiers Remain
While the Obama Administration has presented its (already-stalled) drawdown in Afghanistan as “ending” the war and bringing the number of US forces down in the country to very small levels, they rarely discuss the substantial number of American defense contractors still in the country.
While the US officially has just 9,000 troops in Afghanistan, they also have some 29,000 contractors stationed around the country. Two-thirds of the contractors are said to be foreign nationals, with the Pentagon saying they are mostly involved in logistics and maintenance for the ongoing war.
The US has long used large numbers of contractors as a way to have more boots on the ground than the officially publicized figures. This has tended to be rough parity between the two forces, however. At the peak of the Afghan War, the US had 88,000 troops and 117,000 contractors....

From ZeroHedge
Soros Hack Reveals Plot Behind Europe's Refugee Crisis;
Media Manipulation; Cash For "Social Justice"
In the two days since the Soros Open Society Foundation hack by the DCLeaks collective, several notable revelations have emerged among the data dump of over 2,500 documents exposing the internal strategy of the organization, which expose some of Soros' tactics to influence and benefit from Europe's refugee crisis, the opportunistic funding and influence of media organizations, providing cash for assorted "pro-democracy" groups including the infamous La Raza, Soros' funding of various "social justice" organizations while paying to track unfavorable media coverage including that of Pamela Geller.

One particular leaked memo, profiled earlier by the Daily Caller, argues that Europe’s refugee crisis should be accepted as a “new normal,” and that the refugee crisis means “new opportunities” for Soros’ organization to influence immigration policies on a global scale. OSF program officer Anna Crowley and program specialist Katin Rosin co-authored the May 12 memo, titled “Migration Governance and Enforcement Portfolio Review.”

The nine-page review makes three key points: OSF has been successful at influencing global immigration policy; Europe’s refugee crisis presents “new opportunities” for the organization to influence global immigration policy; and the refugee crisis is the “new normal.”

As the authors write in the introduction, one of the purposes of the review “consider the effectiveness of the approaches we have used to achieve change at the international level.” A section of the review titled “Our Work” describes how America’s least transparent think tank has worked with “leaders in the field” to “shape migration policymaking and influence regional and global processes affecting the way migration is governed and enforced.”

This may be of particular interest to Germans, the majority of whom are displeased with Merkel's "open door" policies in the aftermath of the recent terrorist attacks on German soil....

...More importantly, the memo explains how Europe’s refugee crisis is opening doors for Soros’ organization to further influence global immigration policy....

...They also explain that the current crisis provides “new opportunities” for influencing immigration policy on a global scale....

...The review states, “The refugee crisis is opening new opportunities” for “coordination and collaboration” with other wealthy donors....

...One memo, which is an overview of the "Ukraine Media Project"  exposes how Soros influences media coverage of events in Ukraine...

Yemen


From AntiMedia  ... Source:MintPress
Native Americans Successfully Block Oil Pipeline Construction — Media Silent

 Lakota Sioux protesters blockading the planned route of a $3.8 billion, four-state oil pipeline won a short-term victory on Wednesday, when the project’s developer, Energy Transfer Partners of Dallas, agreed to halt construction near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota for at least a week.

“The decision was made at this time to have the pipeline company workers pull out, for the safety of everybody,” Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirschmeier told journalists. “They’ll stop until we can get this resolved.”.....

Ramzy Baroud at Antiwar
War To ‘Stop’ War: Libya’s ‘Operation Odyssey Lightning’

The Obama Doctrine Is Ravaging the Middle East
Everyone seems to have a theory on how to obliterate ISIS, or “Daesh”. However, two points are rarely raised: one, concerning the origins of the group and the second, on whether there are genuine intentions to defeat it, in the first place.

We must boldly address the first to unravel the enigma behind the rise and growth of “Daesh” – otherwise, how else can the group be dismantled. ....

....Now that the Americans have launched yet another aerial war against Libya, purportedly to target “Daesh” positions there, the discussion is being carefully geared towards how far the US must go to defeat the militant group?

In fact, “can airstrikes alone win a war without ‘boots on the ground’?” has morphed, somehow, to become the crux of the matter, which has engaged a large number of intellectuals on both sides of the debate. ....

From BusinessInsider
Yemen's ex-president: We are ready to work with Russia

 A newly-formed governing council in Yemen could work with Russia to "fight terrorism" by allowing Moscow use of the war-torn country's military bases, Yemen's former president said on Sunday.

Ali Abdullah Saleh, a former counter-terrorism ally of the U.S. who was toppled by mass protests in 2011, told state-owned channel Russia 24 that Yemen was ready to grant Moscow access to air and naval bases.

"In the fight against terrorism we reach out and offer all facilities. Our airports, our ports... We are ready to provide this to the Russian Federation," Saleh said in an interview in Sanaa.

The ex-strongman may lack the clout to implement such an offer. But officials from the party he heads now run a political council that controls much of the country along with the Houthi movement allied to Iran. ....

From KurdishQuestion
Mourners in Gaziantep Shout "Murderer Erdogan!" 

Members of the Justice and Development (AKP) Party government were protested and expelled today from the funeral of 42 people that were massacred in Gaziantep by a suspected Islamic State suicide bombing yesterday.

Participants chanted the slogan ‘Murderer Erdoğan’ and expelled the AKP Mayor and parliamentarians from the funeral.

The corpses of 50 of the 51 people (29 children) who lost their lives in the bomb attack on a Kurdish wedding in the Beybahçe neighbourhood of Gaziantep’s Şahinbey district were brought to Yeşilkent cemetery morgue. ....

Somalia



From TelSur
Honduras Is a Giant Graveyard for Human Rights Defenders 

Honduras has become one of the most hostile and dangerous countries for human rights defenders.

Honduras has seen at least eight human rights activists killed in 2016, making it one the most dangerous countries in the world for human rights defenders, the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) warned Friday....
....In March Goldman Environmental Prize winner Berta Caceres, an Indigenous rights and land defender who tirelessly campaigned against a widely unpopular dam, was assassinated in her home, prompting international outrage. According to Global Witness, at least 109 environmental defenders were killed in Honduras between 2010 and 2015.....

Alex Christoforou at TheDuran
Leaked memo proves George Soros ruled Ukraine in 2014, 
minutes from “Breakfast with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt”
The power and control that George Soros held over Ukraine after the Maidan is beyond belief.

This is too funny!
From ZeroHedge
The Fed Launches A Facebook Page... And 
The Result Is Not What It Had Expected
While it is not exactly clear what public relations goals the privately-owned Fed (recall Bernanke's Former Advisor: "People Would Be Stunned To Know The Extent To Which The Fed Is Privately Owned") hoped to achieve by launching its first Facebook page last Thursday, the resultant outpouring of less than euphoric public reactions suggest this latest PR effort may have been waster at best, and at worst backfired at a magnitude that matches JPM's infamous #AskJPM twitter gaffe.

Here are some examples of the public responses to the Fed's original posting: they all share a certain uniformity...

Lee Fang at RonPaulInstitute
US Defense Contractors Tell Investors Russian Threat Is Great for Business

The escalating anti-Russian rhetoric in the US presidential campaign comes in the midst of a major push by military contractors to position Moscow as a potent enemy that must be countered with a drastic increase in military spending by NATO countries.

Weapon makers have told investors that they are relying on tensions with Russia to fuel new business in the wake of Russian’s annexation of Crimea and modest increases in its military budget.

In particular, the arms industry — both directly and through its arsenal of hired-gun, think-tank experts and lobbyists – is actively pressuring NATO member nations to hike defense spending in line with the NATO goal for member states to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense.

Retired Army Gen. Richard Cody, a vice president at L-3 Communications, the seventh largest US defense contractor, explained to shareholders in December that the industry was faced with a historic opportunity. Following the end of the Cold War, Cody said, peace had “pretty much broken out all over the world,” with Russia in decline and NATO nations celebrating. “The Wall came down,” he said, and “all defense budgets went south.”....

From WarNewsToday
Update for Sunday, August 14, 2016

Maybe it's hot where you are, but Iraq and much of the Middle East are broiling in unprecedented heat. Baghdad has topped 109 Fahrenheit every day since June 19. Consider how many displaced people lack shelter. Climate change is devastating agriculture in the region -- which by the way was a contributing cause to the dissolution of Syrian society. One has to wonder whether the region, including Iraq, can sustain its current population in coming years.

Peshmerga continue to capture villages near Mosul.

In disturbing news, the fire that killed 13 babies in Yarmuk hospital is now said to have been arson, contrary to earlier reports that it was caused by an electrical fault.......
Syria



From Sott.net  Source: Alexander Mercouris of TheDuran
Here's what you need to know about 'The Great Battle of Aleppo'

The fighting in Aleppo, which the rebels call 'The Great Battle of Aleppo', is not in stalemate. The rebel counter-offensive has stalled leading to a battle of attrition the rebels cannot afford.

The recent fighting in and around southern Aleppo has attracted an enormous amount of attention, with those fascinated by military affairs now familiar with places like the apartment building complex 1070, the cement factory, Al-Ramousseh roundabout, the "artillery base" (actually a complex of military schools and technical colleges) etc. Scholars of the fighting in Stalingrad in 1942 will be very familiar with this sort of thing.

Whenever battles like the one currently being fought in and around Aleppo are discussed it is essential however to keep in mind the big picture and to focus too much on the fighting for particular strongpoints.

Briefly, by the middle of last year the rebels controlled roughly a quarter of Aleppo, had captured the thermal plant cutting off electricity to most of the city, and had cut the city off from the rest of the government controlled areas of the country by cutting the roads leading to it.

A series of government offensives, which began in the autumn of last year, and which relied heavily on Russian air support, gradually reopened the roads. Progress was slow because the Syrian army lacks manpower. Also the offensives had to repel repeated rebel counter-attacks and were interrupted by ceasefires negotiated by the US and the Russians. ...

...As for the claim that the seizure by the rebels of their narrow corridor means that the government controlled areas of Aleppo are cut off from resupply, that is simply untrue.

With the government in control of all of the main roads leading to Aleppo - including the Castello road where the Syrian army's best units continue to be concentrated - the Syrian government can still send supplies by road to the city, and is in fact doing so. ...
Posted by MariaS at 00:29 0 comments
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Wednesday, July 6, 2016

On the jihadi car and suicide bombings in the bazaars of Karrada, Baghdad, on July 3

Update: July 7
Death toll mounts to 292

Latest reports give Dead Count as 250+   Injured as 220+

From the muted response from world media on the car bombs + suicide bombings at two locations in Baghdad,(the first location had the heavy toll) we can clearly surmise that the people of this planet have become immune to death and destruction in the war-torn countries of not only Iraq but also Syria and Afghanistan.  As for the deaths of Africans, whether by suicide bombings or missiles from the Western overlords, nobody in the West cares to lift even a single eyebrow.  Libya is seeing several severe incidents, almost on a daily basis.  So also Yemen, Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, CAR, Mali and where else?  There must be other nations where the USA+gang have their boots firmly entrenched bringing chaos and death to the natives, but most of us are not aware of those killing fields ... at this date in time.

Sajad Jiyad at his blog
The flames that consumed hope

I’m frequently asked to write security assessments of Baghdad, to gauge what the risks are and what the associated political fallout could be. Only 10 days ago I was asked for my thoughts on Baghdad security: would a Daesh bombing campaign continue after Fallujah was liberated (yes because Daesh has always used them to project strength), how likely would an attack occur around Eid (very likely as Daesh targets crowded areas and especially increases attacks in Ramadhan), can they penetrate inner Baghdad areas such as Karrada (yes because these bombings are planned and have assistance to get them through checkpoints), and would there be a breakout of violence in response to such an attack (unlikely as there is a war being fought but...

On Saturday evening, I was with friends in the western end of the Karrada area, near the Babylon Hotel, watching the Germany-Italy football match. It was a very warm night and we were sat outside in a popular restaurant cheering for Italy to win but expecting Germany to. At around midnight the match was forced into extra time and then a penalty shootout. Around me every one was watching nervously as the game reached its conclusion. At 12.50am it was the Germans who came out victorious and we all felt sorry for the Italians who never seem to do well at penalty kicks. As we were still discussing the result we suddenly felt the shockwave of a bomb and the loud sound of an explosion accompanying it, meaning it was nearby. Living in Baghdad means you learn to differentiate between a car bomb, a truck bomb, a Grad or Katyusha rocket, a mortar, a grenade, an improvised landmine or IED, a missile, or just a plain sound bomb. This sounded like it was a car bomb, not big enough for any more than that, perhaps 2-3 kilometres away, likely to kill 10 people and not out of the ordinary for a city that has seen hundreds of such incidents over the past decade. We all reached for our phones to see the initial reports on social media and within 5 minutes we saw messages that it was in Karrada, next to Hadi Center mall. We all said it would be bad because we knew how crowded that area gets at night. Next we got images of a raging fire and then we saw fire trucks and ambulances speeding past us down the Karrada Dakhil road towards the explosion site. The mood changed and nobody was talking about the football anymore, and then phones started ringing, with wives, mothers, sisters, daughters calling their family members to ask that they go back home. Suddenly the restaurant started to thin out, and by 2am I was pretty much the last one there (unthinkable on a usual night). I drove down Karrada Dakhil, and could see the orange glow from the flames in the night sky and the screams of sirens and people running. Panic was the overwhelming feeling that gripped this area and with more emergency vehicles cramming into the road I decided to move away and turned onto Karrada Kharij and back home. On Facebook and Twitter the photos posted were showing the mall engulfed in flames. The death toll began to creep past 15 and this started to look like a worse attack than I expected. At 4am I went to sleep thinking the situation would settle by late morning and we would get a death toll in the mid 30s.

That’s what happens in Iraq, deaths become just statistics and the frequency of attacks means the shock doesn’t register as it would elsewhere or that you have enough time to feel sad or grieve. I was near the Karrada area on 2 May 2015 when a twin bombing killed Ammar al-Shahbander, a friend of so many Iraqis and foreigners alike and one of the most energetic and optimistic people you could meet in Baghdad. He was killed, along with 16 others, very close to Hadi mall and .........


....Ahmad was one of a new generation of well-educated Iraqis who hoped to turn the country around. He worked at the Agriculture Commission which coordinated with several ministries to improve Iraq’s agriculture sector. Ahmad was always writing about ways to enhance modern farming, to increase crop yields, to better manage water resources, to sustainably develop livestock, and every weekend would spend a day at some farm or factory in the provinces where work was taking place to do just that. He wrote a paper last year for us at Bayan Center on sustainable development of agriculture and was working on a paper on food security and crop yields. He was Abu Yusif to his friends and was an optimist who had an infectious energy, totally convinced that our country’s future would be better than its past.....

....The Hadi mall was designed, as the vast majority of buildings in Iraq, with no fire safety in mind. There were no emergency exits, the door to the roof was welded shut to prevent the entry of burglars and no sprinklers were in place to assist with putting out fires. There may have been some fire extinguishers but I doubt it. The only way in and out of the building was through the single front entrance. ....

From BBC dated July 5
Iraq sees worst bombing since invasion  with 250 deaths
The death toll from Sunday's suicide bombing in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, has risen to 250, the Iraqi government says, making it the deadliest such attack since the 2003 US-led invasion.

A lorry packed with explosives was detonated in the Karrada district while families were shopping for the holiday marking the end of Ramadan.

From BBC dated July 4
Iraq suicide bomb attack: Deaths in Baghdad rise to 165
The number of people killed in Sunday's suicide bomb attack in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, has risen to 165, interior ministry officials say.

The government has declared three days of mourning after the huge blast, which also injured 225 people.

....A lorry packed with explosives was detonated in the Karrada district while families were shopping for the holiday marking the end of Ramadan.
It is believed to be the deadliest single bomb attack in Iraq since 2007.

Rescuers said whole families had been killed. Many people were badly burned.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was greeted by angry crowds when he visited the mainly Shia Muslim area in the hours after the bombing.

His office said Mr Abadi understood the reaction of residents and would increase security by banning "magic wand" fake bomb detectors and improving vehicle inspections at roads into the city.

The fake bomb detectors, some based on cheap devices for finding golf balls, were sold in large numbers to Iraq by fraudsters.

One British businessman, who was jailed for 10 years, sold more than 6,000 devices to Iraq for up to $40,000 (£30,000) each.

The UK banned their export to Iraq in 2010 and several other fraudsters received prison sentences. Despite warnings that the devices were useless, the Iraqi security forces continued to use them.

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Monday, July 4, 2016

News, Views and Opinions, all from the Alternative Media ... week ending July 3


Geraldine Malone at VICE
Citing Trudeau’s Plan to Legalize,
Judge Refuses to Give Convicted Marijuana Trafficker Jail Time

To say that Seamus John Neary, a convicted marijuana trafficker, was relieved to find out he'd be spending the next two years going to school instead of going to jail, is an understatement.

The former University of Saskatchewan football linebacker's future had been in the hands of a judge with court precedent and the former Conservative government's justice policies signalled there was a significant chance he'd end up behind bars.

But on Thursday afternoon in Saskatoon, Queen's Bench Justice Shawn Smith cited the change in federal power and impending marijuana legislation as a reason to let the 25-year-old walk out of court without cuffs.

"It's a weird feeling. I'm grateful that it's coming to an end," Neary told VICE....

Oh look ... over and above the 3 jihadis responsible for the deaths of 40+ innocent people at the Istanbul airport, there are 6 more names to take into consideration. Will they be arrested?  Will they lose their positions? Will they feel the twinge of even a minor little pang of guilt? 
From the Saker blog
Akhmed Chataev: An inconvenient “fighter against Russia”

....May it please the High Court,
We, the members of the Independent International Human Rights Group, are petitioning the Bulgarian government to release a Chechen refugee, the father of four children, Akhmed Chataev, who is being persecuted by Russia for his political beliefs. According to available information, Akhmed Chataev had his hand cut off in a Russian concentration camp, where he was also tortured with electricity which was applied to the stump.
Given all the facts of the case, Akhmed Chataev was given the status of refugee in Austria in 2003, and is therefore under the protection of the Austrian state.
In 2010, Akhmed Chataev was arrested in Ukraine and was threatened with extradition to Russia, but the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg used Rule 39 to instruct Ukraine’s government that, due to his Austrian refugee status he could not be extradited to Russia....

...Given all the facts of the case, we petition the Appeals Court of the Republic of Bulgaria to free Akhmed Chataev.
Respectfully, the members of the Independent International Human Rights Group

Viktoria Pupko–President, Anna Politkovskaya Foundation, USA
Mairbek Taramov–Director, Chechen Human Rights Center, Sweden
Nadezhda Banchik–journalist, member of Amnesty International USA
Said-Emin Ibragimov–President, World and Human Rights International Association, France
David Kudykov–journalist and writer, PEN-Club, UK
Maio Plado–human rights movement activist, Estonia....


From Dissident Voice. Source Alessandro Bianchi
“China will react if provoked again: you risk the war”
Interview with Andre Vltchek
The AntiDiplomatico (Italy) interviews philosopher, Andre Vltchek: “Russia and China are forming an incredible defensive wall to protect humanity from Western terrorism.”

Andre Vltchek has become renowned in Italy for being the co-author, along with Noam Chomsky, of the famous book Western Terrorism (Ponte alle Grazie).....

....AB: Will the growing US expansionism come to a breaking point and collision with China?

AV: Yes, it will. I have no doubt about it. China is one of the greatest cultures on Earth, and it is one of those countries that suffered immensely from colonialist horrors and humiliation. Chinese people are indignant. Indignant! For decades, despite everything, they tried to make peace with the West. They are, in fact, the most peaceful big nation on Earth and what do they get in return? They get insults, provocations and intimidation.

The Western public should learn and remember one essential thing about China: no matter what European and North American propaganda barks about the People’s Republic, China is much more “democratic” than the West. It is democratic in its own way. For thousands of years, it developed its own political system. Its rulers, no matter who they are, are given a conditional right to govern by the people. In the past, but even now it is called a “Heavenly Mandate”. If the rulers fail to respect the will of the people, they get deposed. And the Communist Party of China is greatly respectful of the desires of the majority of the Chinese people. When they want liberal reforms, they are delivered. When they want more Communism and an epic fight against corruption, like now, China’s government immediately reacts. It is powerful and democratic, although a very specific and complex arrangement.

And now, the Chinese people are outraged and they are sending clear signals to Beijing: “do not succumb to the West.” “If you do, our nation will suffer immensely, and the rest of the world will turn to ashes.”

Do understand: Chinese people are brilliant; the West cannot fool them. And they are thoroughly sick of Western imperialism. This time, if confronted and provoked, the Chinese government would yield to the pressure from its people: it would be forced to give orders to fight – to defend its motherland!....

Mark Chapman at Off-Guardian
Putin is Weaponizing Popularity: Newsweek is not Amused
“The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.” – André Breton

How appropriate, to say nothing of au courant,  to kick off this post with a quote from André Breton; a French poet, writer, and author of “The Surrealist Manifesto”, he is best remembered as the founder of Surrealism.  And oh, Mama; surreal is what we have for you today. Yes, having weaponized everything from refugees to referendums, Putin has finally rolled out his magnum opus: he has weaponized his own popularity. Except it is somehow a secret.  What a good thing that we have Newsweek to brief us on how that works, because at the outset I confess I am puzzled as to how secret popularity could function as a weapon.

I hate to give away right at the beginning how numbingly idiotic the piece is, but I am afraid most of you would guess as soon as you learned that the primary source upon which Newsweek relied for its breathtaking Kremlin insights was that old ‘Kremlin insider’ himself – Gleb Pavlovsky.

Epiphany Number One: the overriding reason the west has Russia so wrong is that it keeps tapping the same sources for instruction and inspiration – Fiona Hill, Clifford Gaddy, Gleb Pavlovsky, Yulia Latynina, Stanislav Belkovsky, Edward Lucas, Julia Ioffe, Miriam Elder, Garry Kasparov, the late and mostly unlamented Boris Nemtsov…a phalanx of sycophancy that always tells it what it wants to hear. Thou, O Queen, art fairest still. Gleb Pavlovsky affects to know everything that goes on in Russia as if it were all unfolding to his own plan, and nobody ever seems to notice when he is catastrophically wrong or that he has been predicting Putin’s collapse for a decade. Here he is, running his mouth in The Guardian, four years ago: “[Putin] thinks man is a sinful being and it is pointless to try to improve him. He believes the Bolsheviks who tried to create fair people were simply idiots, and we wasted a lot money and energy on it … So Putin’s model is that you need to be bigger and better capitalists than the western capitalists. And more consolidated as a state: there must be a full, maximum unity of state and business.”

For Pavlovsky, United Russia’s collapse in the polls in December was obvious. “It was nothing more than a telephone ....

Yves Engler at CounterPunch
“Canadian” Corporate Capitalism

Twenty-first century “Canadian” corporate capitalism is quite the racket.

Built with public subsidies, a Montréal firm can shift its ‘head office’ to a tax haven and workforce abroad, but Ottawa will continue to use its diplomatic, economic and military might to advance the company’s reactionary international interests.

As part of its coverage of the Panama Papers, the Toronto Star recently reported that Gildan Activewear paid only a 2.8% tax rate on more than $1.3 billion US in declared income the last five years and it’s unclear if any of the apparel company’s measly $38 million in tax was paid in Canada.

After benefiting from government subsidies and financial backing from Quebec’s Fonds de solidarité labour investment fund, Gildan opened a subsidiary in Barbados sixteen years ago to sidestep Canadian tax. The firm took advantage of a tax treaty that permits companies to repatriate profits from the small Caribbean nation, which has a 1.5% corporate tax rate, without being taxed in Canada.

Concurrently, “free” trade agreements have enabled Gildan to shift its (unionized) Canadian and US production to Honduras, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic and Haiti where it’s pursued an aggressive anti-union “sweatshop” policies. Without a high-profile brand name (until recently) Gildan has focused on producing T-shirts and socks at the lowest cost possible. Any increase in the dismally low wages it pays in these countries is a threat to their ultra-low-cost production model, which competes with even lower wage jurisdictions in Cambodia and Bangladesh.

Despite Gildan moving its production to low-wage jurisdictions and its headquarters to a tax haven, Ottawa has continued to advance the company’s interests. In 2004 Ottawa helped overthrow Haiti’s elected government and backed a military coup in Honduras five years later partly to protect Gildan’s ultra-low-wage production model.

At the start of 2003 Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government .........
James Risen talks to Abby Martin


Fred Reed at Unz Review
Jewish Decline and the Rise of China: In the US

Years ago, when I was tech writer for weird magazines such as Signal and for other more-normal techish pubs, Jews littered the intellectual landscape. They were all over high-end research, such as Bell Labs. The big names were often Jewish, Einstein, von Neumann, Feynman, Gell-Mann, Minsky. The staff list for the Manhattan Project read like a Yeshiva yearbook. The same happened in the arts. Bernstein, Landowska, Rubinstein, Stoppard (“Maidens in search of Godhead…and vice versa.”)

Jews were smart, most people figured, not necessarily liking it. I wondered why without great interest. Genetic determinists of course cooked up evolutionary explanations involving undiscovered genes acted upon by unquantifiable selective pressures to produce assumed results not correlatable with the pressures. Business as usual.

Later I began to notice without thinking about it that the Jewish names were growing thin on the ground. These were not systematic observations. But Asian names were becoming prominent almost everywhere. The Feinsteins seemed to be in recession, if only anecdotally.

Something odd was happening, I barely noticed.....

Peter Van Buren at AntiWar
Teen Sues US Over Cavity Drug Search for Which She Was Billed $575
Ashley Cervantes, a then 18-year-old American citizen, was stopped at the Mexico border and, for some unspecified reason, perhaps related to her being young and of Hispanic ethnicity, accused by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) of smuggling drugs.

What Drugs?
A search of her person and belongings proved fruitless, which often is a strong indicator that there are no drugs. The process involved being locked into a detention room for several hours, handcuffed to a chair, while several dogs were brought in to sniff at her. A request to call her mother was denied.

But bullying is the best law enforcement tactic, so they gave her a body cavity search, which means a CBP agent put on some rubber gloves and shoved a finger up her vagina and butt. She was also made to squat pantless so female investigators could visually inspect her privates. Still no drugs.

So Customs and Border Protection took her to a local hospital against her will, in handcuffs. No warrant, no consent. Instead, a Customs and Border Protection agent signed a “Treatment Authorization Request” as she was considered an alleged “potential internal carrier of foreign substance.” That form requested an X-ray....
David Bacon at TheNation
Why Are Mexican Teachers Being Jailed for Protesting Education Reform?
They’re peacefully resisting US-style neoliberal measures intended to crush the unions—a backbone of Mexico’s social-justice movements.
Update: On Sunday, June 19, federal police in Oaxaca fired on teachers and supporters in the Mixteca town of Nochixtlán, killing at least four and wounding 30 more.  Another was killed in Hacienda Blanca, near Oaxaca City, according to the press service AIPIN, which also reported that people were refused care at the hospital in Nochixtlán.  The federal government continues to refuse to talk with the CNTE.

On Sunday night, June 12, as Ruben Nuñez, head of Oaxaca’s teachers union, was leaving a meeting in Mexico City, his car was overtaken and stopped by several large king-cab pickup trucks. Heavily armed men in civilian clothes exited and pulled him, another teacher, and a taxi driver from their cab, and then drove them at high speed to the airport. Nuñez was immediately flown over a thousand miles north to Hermosillo, Sonora, and dumped into a high-security federal lockup.

Just hours earlier, unidentified armed agents did the same thing in Oaxaca itself, taking prisoner Francisco Villalobos, the union’s second-highest officer, and flying him to the Hermosillo prison as well. Villalobos was charged with having stolen textbooks a year ago. Nuñez’s charges are still unknown.

Both joined Aciel Sibaja, who’s been sitting in the same penitentiary since April 14. Sibaja’s crime? Accepting dues given voluntarily by teachers across Oaxaca. Sección 22, the state teachers union, has had to collect dues in cash since last July, when state authorities froze not only the union’s bank accounts but even the personal ones of its officers. Sibaja was responsible for keeping track of the money teachers paid voluntarily, which the government called “funds from illicit sources.” ......

Clarice Palmer at AntiMedia
An amendment added to Congress’ annual intelligence  spending bill may help the public gain a better idea of the U.S. government’s relationship with Hollywood.

According to VICE News, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC), included an amendment to S. 3017 that would require the Director of National Intelligence to submit reports detailing the relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agencies and Hollywood. It would also require 15 other agencies to disclose the nature of their relationships with the film industry. These reports would have to be presented annually to congressional oversight committees.

Between 2006 and 2011, VICE reported, the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA) had a role in at least 22 of the U.S. entertainment industry’s projects. Some of the productions listed by VICE included the films Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, television shows like Top Chef and Covert Affairs, and documentaries such as the History channel’s Air America and the BBC’s The Secret War on Terror. The book, The Devil’s Light, also had the help of the CIA.

Some of the most controversial findings regarding the relationship between OPA officials and Hollywood insiders were tied to the blockbuster, Zero Dark Thirty.

According to the redacted and previously classified December 2012 CIA report released by Judicial Watch, the CIA granted “‘secret level’ access to the makers of the movie Zero Dark Thirty.” According to VICE, “filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal showered CIA officers involved in the operation with gifts and received unprecedented access, which included the disclosure of classified information to Bigelow and Boal by CIA director Leon Panetta.”.....

The ongoing  Labor Protests in France


Aron Lund at JoshuaLandis' SyriaComment
“Why the Islamic State Is Losing, and Why It Still Hopes to Win”
The Sunni extremist group known as Islamic State (IS, also known by an earlier acronym, ISIS) is taking a terrible beating. In the past few days, it has lost territory in both Syria and Iraq. Syrian Kurds have attacked it east of Aleppo and north of Raqqa City, while it is battling Sunni Arab rivals north of Aleppo. The Syrian army of President Bashar al-Assad is pressing into the Raqqa Governorate and taking ground in the deserts east of Palmyra. In Iraq, other Kurdish groups have struck east of Mosul, while an alliance of Shia militias and the Iraqi army is moving into its stronghold in Fallujah. Further afield, the jihadis are being purged from the Libyan city of Sirte.

Islamic State’s self-styled caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is nowhere to be seen or heard as his fighters face attacks on all fronts. According to the U.S.-led anti-Islamic State coalition, the jihadi group has now lost half of the area it controlled in Iraq at its peak in late 2014 and a fifth of its territory in Syria. Revenues from oil and other assets are reportedly down by a third and a U.S. government official recently claimed the coalition has “cut off entirely their revenue that’s coming from the outside.” The coalition also says that the total number of Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria has dropped from a peak of around 31,000 in December 2014 to between 19,000 and 25,000 today, and the influx of foreign jihadis has allegedly been reduced by three-quarters....

Gabriel Hetland at TheNation
How Severe Is Venezuela’s Crisis?

It’s deep but not cataclysmic, and mainstream US media have consistently exaggerated the extent of it.

According to The New York Times, Venezuela is “a country that is in a state of total collapse,” with shuttered government offices, widespread hunger, and failing hospitals that resemble “hell on earth.” There is reportedly “often little traffic in Caracas simply because so few people, either for lack of money or work, are going out.” The Washington Post, which has repeatedly called for foreign intervention against Venezuela, describes the country using similar, at times identical, language of “collapse,” “catastrophe,” “complete disaster,” and “failed state.” A recent Post article describes a “McDonald’s, empty of customers because runaway inflation means a Happy Meal costs nearly a third of an average monthly wage.” NPR reports “Venezuela is Running Out of Beer Amid Severe Economic Crisis”. When Coca-Cola announced plans to halt production due to a lack of sugar, Forbes dubbed Venezuela “the Country With No Coke.” The Wall Street Journal reports on fears that people will “die of hunger.”

Is Venezuela descending into a nightmarish scenario, as these stories suggest? To answer this question I’ve spent the last three weeks talking to dozens of people—rich and poor, Chavista and opposition, urban and rural—across Venezuela. My investigation leaves little doubt that Venezuela is in the midst of a severe crisis, characterized by triple-digit inflation, scarcities of basic goods, widespread changes in food-consumption patterns, and mounting social and political discontent. Yet mainstream media have consistently misrepresented and significantly exaggerated the severity of the crisis. It’s real and should by no means be minimized, but Venezuela is not in a state of cataclysmic collapse.

Accounts suggesting otherwise are not only inaccurate but also dangerous, insofar as they prepare the ground for ....

....When I asked Gimenez why she continues to support the government, she replied, “Because it’s not a lie that 3 million senior-age Venezuelans are receiving a pension that’s worth minimum wage. When Chávez got to power, not even 300,000 seniors received a pension, and the pension wasn’t even a fifth of the minimum wage. It’s not a lie that schools opened to all children with a meal every day.… It’s not a lie that they opened more opportunities for studying at the university level. And it’s not a lie that education at all levels is free, totally free. Oh, but this education has errors, we don’t doubt it. It’s part of a [process in] construction.… It’s not a lie that healthcare, with all the problems we have right now with the dollar, and the import of medicines…that they’ve provided a space for healthcare in all of our communities. It’s not a lie that our citizens with disabilities, who were rendered totally invisible before, they didn’t have machines to treat their disabilities, now we have physical therapy centers, and today [people with disabilities] are prioritized in terms of jobs, and for many things. It’s not a lie, and I’ve lived it, that people in our rural zones lived in straw houses with mud roofs…and now there are real houses in our rural zones, and not just in our rural zones, but in the urban zones, the million and some houses that have been constructed are a reality.… There’s still much to do, but this is a reality…. And it’s not a lie that in any street corner you go to, people will talk to you about politics, about what’s happening, about the international situation, if they participated or not, if the communal council stole the money or didn’t steal the money. There’s a political participation that can’t be hidden.” ....

From TodayInIraqAndAfghanistan blog
Update for Sunday, July 3, 2016

As usual, reported casualty tolls and other details differ, but according to the Washington Post account, which seems the most recent and complete I can find, 83 people have died in a car bomb attack on the Karada shopping district in Baghdad. IS claimed responsibility on the attack in a Shiite neighborhood, saying Shiites were the target because of their faith. Prime Minister Abadi visited the scene and was met by an angry mob. There are conflicting reports as to whether a second explosion in eastern Baghdad, which killed 5 people, was a terrorist attack or an accident.

The corporate media in the U.S. usually ignore bombings in Baghdad, but this one got some attention, with coverage from the New York Times, CBS, and CNN among others.

Hundreds of families have fled from fighting around Sharqat in Salahuddin province. More than 350,000 people are said to remain trapped in the city.....

From CaribFlame
Israeli Firm Helping S. Arabia in Yemen War

Newly-leaked documents have uncovered close ties between the Israeli and Saudi regimes in the latter’s war against Yemen.

Based on the documents, the Saudi defense minister has recently written a letter to the commander of border guards in the southern parts of the kingdom decreeing that security in the region should be handled by an Israeli company. The Israeli company has been mandated to deal with cross border retaliatory attacks carried out by Yemen’s Ansarullah, al-Waght news website reported.

A report by Yemeni Najm al-Thaqeb website revealed that, following the failure of Saudi-backed forces in their attack on Yemen and after it became apparent that some Saudi frontier regions might fall into Yemeni forces and Ansarullah fighters’ hands, the Saudi regime contracted an Israeli company known as Al Majal Group to oversee security in the Southern region. The Israeli company has already obtained 45 million US dollars to plant landmines and put barriers in the border region.

This is not the first time that Saudi Arabia is using services of the Israeli top security company.

Since 2010, the Israeli Al Majal Group has taken charge of security during the mandatory Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajj. It was under the watch of the Israeli security company that over 4,000 Muslim pilgrims were killed during last year’s Hajj following a deadly stampede in Mina, the worst in history....

Marisa Franco and Carlos Garcia at TheNation
The Deportation Machine Obama Built for President Trump
When Barack Obama took office after his 2008 election, he inherited a budding deportation apparatus with its roots in the imagination of the “War on Terror” reactionaries who created the Office of Homeland Security in 2001 (later the Department of Homeland Security). When he leaves office he will leave behind to his successor the most sophisticated and well-funded human-expulsion machine in the history of the country.

In his first two years, newly appointed Director of the Office of Homeland Security Tom Ridge expanded the purview of his department to include an immigration enforcement plan that sought to achieve a “100% removal rate” of the undocumented population in the United States by seeing to the drafting of a document that came to shape the next 15 years, “ENDGAME Office of Detention and Removal Strategic Plan.” At the time, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (later broken up into the Citizenship and Immigration Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection) had approximately 26,000 agents and $4.9 billion. It was an enormous leap from when ICE was previously housed within Department of Justice but nothing like what it grew to be today.

Instead of reversing that architecture and disavowing that plan, President Obama turbocharged it. ....

From 21stCenturyWire
‘Major Defence Partner’: American Military Industrial Complex Infects India
Is a new theatre of conflict about to open?

India has been recognised as a ‘Major Defense Partner‘ of the United States, which is essentially a euphemism for the fact that it has been granted approval for access to the American military industrial complex.

A senior Whitehouse official said:

“India now enjoys access to defense technologies that is on a par with US treaty allies. That is a very unique status. India is the only other country that enjoys that status outside US formal treaty allies.”

“In reality, less than one per cent of all exports requests are denied to India. They are not denied because of India. They are denied because of global U.S. licensing policies. We do not share certain technologies with anybody in the world,”

This means that India does have access to 99% of everything that American military corporations have to offer.....

From CaribFlame
US Imperialism Threatens Peace in Central America: Nicaragua

Nicaraguan President Ortega says more collaboration needed to thwart US intervention in the region

Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua said Central America is living at a time of interventionist and imperialist policies from the US, which threatens peace in the region.

Ortega was unable to attend the presidential summit of the Central American Integration System (SICA) in Roatan, Honduras, where he was named the organization´s president. But through his adviser for international affairs, Denis Moncada, he delivered a strongly-worded message to his counterparts in SICA, which seeks to coordinate economic and political development in the region.

 “In Central America, our SICA lives in difficult times, similar to those lived throughout the continent. Times in which understanding is difficult. Times when other voices, that are not their own, intend to prevail at the expense of the interests of our people,” said Ortega.

Imperialist forces in the US, Ortega said, has set its sights on Brazil, Paraguay, and crucially at the moment, Venezuela....

Ellen Brown at GlobalResearch
n April, Pennsylvania became the 24th state to legalize I medical cannabis, a form of the plant popularly known as marijuana. That makes nearly half of US states. A major barrier to broader legalization has been the federal law under which all cannabis – even the very useful form known as industrial hemp – is classed as a Schedule I controlled substance that cannot legally be grown in the US. But that classification could change soon. In a letter sent to federal lawmakers in April, the US Drug Enforcement Administration said it plans to release a decision on rescheduling marijuana in the first half of 2016.

The presidential candidates are generally in favor of relaxing the law. In November 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a bill that would repeal all federal penalties for possessing and growing the plant, allowing states to establish their own marijuana laws. Hillary Clinton would not go that far but would drop cannabis from a Schedule I drug (a deadly dangerous drug with no medical use and high potential for abuse) to Schedule II (a deadly dangerous drug with medical use and high potential for abuse). Republican candidate Donald Trump says we are losing badly in the war on drugs, and that to win that war all drugs need to be legalized.

But it is Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein who has been called “weed’s biggest fan.” Speaking from the perspective of a physician and public health advocate,Stein notes that hundreds of thousands of patients suffering from chronic pain and cancers are benefiting from the availability of medical marijuana under state laws. State economies are benefiting as well. She cites Colorado, where retail marijuana stores first opened in January 2014. Since then, Colorado’s crime rates and traffic fatalities have dropped; and tax revenue, economic output from retail marijuana sales, and jobs have increased.

Among other arguments for changing federal law is that the marijuana business currently lacks access to banking facilities. Most banks, fearful of FDIC sanctions, won’t work with the $6.7 billion marijuana industry, leaving 70% of cannabis companies without bank accounts. That means billions of dollars are sitting around in cash, encouraging tax evasion and inviting theft, ....
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